The call awakened Dr. Larssen at 2:45 a.m. He fumbled in the dark, found his phone on the carpet by the bed, picked it up. "Yes?"
It was the junior member of Padilla's defense team. Larssen listened as the man's frantic voice buzzed faintly from the receiver.
"He is?" The doctor sat up, switched on the bedside lamp. "What happened exactly?"
The cell was a charred wreck. Painting and prisoner had incinerated in a fury of light. Like a bomb, except a great hiss had sounded instead of a concussion. The whole cell block smelled of acrid smoke, like chlorine. The most likely explanation was that one or more guards had taken it upon themselves to slip some sort of flare-ignited combustible into the cell. An investigation was underway. The doctor could expect a visit very soon from the police.
Larssen slipped out of bed, put on his green bathrobe, and made a cup of instant coffee. He did not touch his notes, for the police would want to see them. The media would certainly have a field day, once they found out.
THE END
Cold Fire by Thomas Canfield
To possess Cold Fire was to possess power, was to drink deeply and long from the same goblet as the gods partook. To capture it one must travel to the Valley of the Missing Tenth - which filled out the measure of the universe and made it whole, as some were wont to argue. Or, as others declared, subverted that wholeness, undermined it, leaving the world crippled and compromised, vulnerable. Within the Valley’s confines, desolate and dark, Cold Fire abided, to what purpose and what end none could testify. But its hypnotic allure drew hundreds in its wake, ignited violent passions, peeled away the thin veneer of civilization and exposed the savage within. To acquire Cold Fire required only daring and skill, only a willingness to hazard all.
A flicker of light appeared off to Delaney’s left. All three men stopped. Delaney slipped into a crouch, rested his hand upon the earth. He could detect nothing. He stared off down the far reaches of the valley. The wind rustled the thin, dry stalks of kirrel grass, making a sound of longing and regret.
“Jimmy?” Stonecipher’s eyes were filled with apprehension.
“Quiet!”
“But I think that . . .”
“Quiet I said!”
The breeze died away. Silence settled in around the men, a silence that was fitful and unsettled, incomplete in some essential element. Nothing defined the Valley so accurately as this – a sense of incompleteness. Neither stone nor fire nor water fully assumed the character they bore in the real world. Cold Fire was not fire but an approximation of fire, an interpretation. There was nothing it resembled so much, nothing it bore so great an affinity to. But to call it fire was to do so by default, to do so in the knowledge that the word and the thing did not match, did not correspond one with the other with any degree of exactitude or fidelity.
A thin tendril of fire sprang up, raced along the ground and disappeared again. Stonecipher took a step back.
“Stand where you are, god damn it,” Delaney demanded.
“That almost touched me,” Stonecipher protested. “It was less than a meter away. It’s dangerous when it gets that close.”
“It’s dangerous whether it’s near or far. Don’t kid yourself. But if we don’t get close, we can forget ever capturing any.”
A flicker of light kindled in a bed of dry moss, exuded a cold, malignant gleam. A tiny tongue of flame licked at the air and drew back.
“C’mon,” Delaney hissed, growing impatient. “Enough of your games. Show yourself.” Delaney hunched forward, hand outstretched, as though to coax the fire into the open.
A blue-white globule of flame bubbled up out of the cauldron of the earth. It stitched a line across the bare rock, knit itself around a tussock of kirrel grass. It leapt from one tussock to the next, boxed Stonecipher in on three sides. Stonecipher could only stare at it, mesmerized.
“Unbelievable!” Ruskin exclaimed. “It penetrates stone like it was so much straw.” Spindles of molten rock were visible in the ground now, boring down into the soil.
Stonecipher lurched to the side, attempted to climb over the fire. The flames flickered higher, burned with angry intensity, a thread of brilliant, undulating white at their core. Stonecipher staggered back. The fire had encircled him.
“Get it away from me! Drive it back!” Stonecipher batted at the air, eyes wide and filled with panic.
“Easy,” Delaney urged. “Don’t antagonize it. Settle down and stay calm. We’ll think of something.”
“Think of something?!” Stonecipher’s expression was stricken. “You don’t need to think. Drive it away! Extinguish it!”
Delaney and Ruskin looked at one another. Cold Fire could not be extinguished, of course. That was a misnomer, a misconception, borrowed from the properties of real fire. But drive it away – that was possible. It would be difficult now that the fire had established itself. It would be dangerous and exhausting. But it could be done.
“What should we do?” Ruskin’s voice was hollow and devoid of intonation.
“We don’t need to do anything.” Delaney stared into the fire, into the blisteringly cold core that lay at its center. His eyes glittered with exultation. “This is the best chance we’ll have to capture a sample. Maybe the only chance. If one man dies, what does it matter?”
Ruskin cast a quick look at Stonecipher, glanced away again. Delaney began to assemble the device which would siphon off a portion of the fire.
“What are you waiting for?” Stonecipher said, bewildered. “What’s the delay?” Neither Ruskin nor Delaney answered. “Hey!” Stonecipher called. “Get me out of here!”
“Shorten up on the coil. Draw it as tight as you are able.” Delaney checked the digital readout. “Careful now. Get this right. We’ll only have the one chance.”
“Delaney!”
“Sorry, Stony.” Delaney skirted the edge of the fire. “The only way we could be certain the fire wouldn’t slip away again was to offer it a target. That’s the only way to fix it in one place.” A tendril of flame reached out, brushed Stonecipher’s leg.
“You don’t want to do this.” Stonecipher’s eyes were enormous. “You do not want to do this. Only a monster would even consider it. Listen to me! I’m not bait. I’m your friend.”
“Not anymore.” Delaney shrugged. “Not out here, you aren’t. Out here there isn’t any such thing.”
“Ruskin, talk to him. Don’t let him do this!” Ruskin would not look at Stonecipher. The muscles of his jaw worked convulsively. “You’re as bad as he is if you don’t do something. You’re worse!”
“Enough,” Delaney said. “Ruskin, step out of the way. Do it now.”
“You won’t get away with this,” Stonecipher cried. “Do you hear? I swear, you won’t just walk away.”
Delaney triggered the device and a powerful magnetic field washed over the area. The flames surged upwards. Stonecipher made a violent gesture, twisted first in one direction then in the other. A bolt of blue-white fire shot up his spine. Stonecipher quivered and shook. The bone structure of his cheeks and jaw pulsed with light. A thin, high note of anguish escaped his throat.
Delaney shut out the sound, annihilated the very memory of the man he had once known as Stony. All of his attention was devoted to siphoning off a tiny portion of the fire, capturing it in special glass ampules. His eyes glittered, seemed of the same substance, the same volatile nature, as the fire.
Ruskin slumped at his side, his face filled with misery. His movements were tentative and erratic. He jostled one of the ampules and it slipped to the ground and shattered. The Cold Fire melted away into the earth.
“Fool!” Delaney snapped. “Do you mean to get us both killed? If you can’t control your nerves, go stand over there. Only so help me god, stay out of my way.” Ruskin staggered off into the night, into the darkness, where Stonecipher’s agony would not pursue him.
At long last the fire began to subside, leaching away into the earth with the same disconcerting stealth with which it had co
me. The night shadows lengthened and deepened. Stonecipher’s cries ceased.
Delaney stared at Stonecipher, or at what remained of Stonecipher. He had been transformed. His arms were drawn in tight against his body, fists clenched, head thrust forward in a rictus of agony. Tiny, glittering pinpricks of fire raced through the blackened shell of his skin. He appeared ready to crumble in to ash. Delaney could not tell whether the fire had burned through him completely and left only an empty husk. Or whether Stonecipher was still alive.
Ruskin crept out of the shadows. He approached within a few feet of Stonecipher. “Stony, can you hear me?” he whispered. “Say something. If you can’t speak, nod.” Nothing, no response. Yet Stonecipher’s eyes exuded a cold, malignant venom that caused Ruskin to squirm and look away. “He must be dead,” Ruskin suggested.
“The son of a bitch is alive!” Delaney sealed the final glass ampule of fire.
“How can you tell?”
“Because he’s too angry to die. Look at him.”
Ruskin examined Stonecipher with horror. The grisly spectacle made him feel nauseous. Nothing, no living creature, could have survived such a conflagration. The earth still smoldered and steamed, emitted a pungent scent of burnt peat. “I think that you’re wrong. He has to be dead.”
“We better hope that he’s dead.” Delaney held up an ampule, watched the fire shift and surge within. “With Cold Fire you can’t ever be certain. It can take a very long time to die.” Delaney packed the ampule into a cocoon of insulation, locked it in a carrying case. He stood up. “All right, we got what we came for. Time to get out of here.”
“Shouldn’t we do something about Stony?” Ruskin’s expression was stricken. “I mean, we don’t want to leave him here like this.”
“I told you, stay the hell away from him. If he’s dead, he’s dead. If he’s alive there isn’t anything we can do to help him.”
“Yeah, but to leave him . . .” Ruskin stretched out a hand, almost brushed Stonecipher’s shoulder. “That isn’t right.”
The kirrel grass rustled in sudden agitation. Stonecipher’s legs crumpled beneath him, his mouth opened in a long, silent cry of agony. A bolt of fire erupted from the ground, engulfed Ruskin in a curtain of flame.
Ruskin reeled backwards. He tore off his shirt, flung it away. The flames raced over his bare torso. Wave upon wave of blistering cold washed over him. He collapsed to the earth, turned beseeching eyes up at Delaney.
“Nothing doing.” Delaney’s mouth was a thin, angry line. “You’re on your own. I warned you to stay away from him!”
Delaney grabbed the carrying case, began the long climb back up out of the Valley. He moved deliberately and with an economy of effort.
Already the Valley had exacted a toll upon him. A man could not long endure in such a place. The same sense of incompleteness which infected everything else gradually infiltrated his mind. His thoughts became muddled and indecisive. The underpinnings of his personality began to disintegrate. Delaney had seen men who tarried too long in the Valley, had seen what it had done to them.
After what might have been mere hours, or might have been all of eternity, Delaney reached the wormhole which would lead him to safety. He stopped and set down the carrying case. His joints were stiff. His shoulders ached. The cold had crept through his body and settled deep in his bones.
He examined the case, discovered a thin thread of fire stitched along one seam. One of the ampules must have leaked or been breached. Delaney looked again at the outlines of the wormhole. Daylight was bleeding through from the other side. Another hundred meters or so and he would be safe. But he could only manage it if he left the case behind.
He stood where he was, gripped by indecision. Everything around him seemed hollow and false. The stone was not stone, the air was not air. And the fire, the fire was as cold and bitter and stinging as snake venom – and as deadly.
Delaney started to walk away from the case, toward the wormhole. He traveled perhaps a dozen paces then turned and walked back. He picked up the case, his face expressionless. He shuffled forward again, every step pure agony. He made it almost to the lip of the wormhole, was almost free, when the case burst into flame. The fire engulfed Delaney, inscribed a beacon against the sky which all might see - and from which all might take warning.
In this one respect, in this little matter of squaring accounts, the Valley was not lacking or incomplete. It settled every grievance outstanding. It kept its own tally and paid in its own finely calibrated fashion. Cold Fire served no master and submitted to no man. Not even one as cold and calculating and ruthless as itself.
THE END
An End for Some by Jason Lairamore
The sky was blue and a cool breeze blew in the morning air. It was a nice day to work and make some money. I’d already changed into some bibs, some boots, and a cut off tee.
My grandpa, Pa, was on his knees off his back porch looking at an inset square of concrete. Beside him was a new, bright-red, hand pump.
“I’m looking for work,” I said. He hauled his gangly self up and squared up proper to face me, his six feet three to my five feet eleven.
“What’s the first thing I taught you about work, Jerol?” he asked. Pa was the go-to guy when I needed a job. He was always doing something. He’d been retired over ten years and still worked every day on one project or another.
“Set a price,” I said. I needed money. School had just let out and I wanted new traps. Dad’s old ones were bout rusted through.
“Close,” he said. “I got four hours of easy labor. Going to reopen the well house. Pays three dollars an hour.”
“I’ll take it,” I said and stuck my hand out.
“Done.” Pa didn’t take my hand. He put on his work gloves.
“Could have got five dollars an hour out of me easy, boy.” He shook his head. “Know your worth, Jerol. That’s the first thing to know when setting out to work. You’re fourteen years old. Don’t sell your time cheap when you know you deserve more.”
He met my eye and held it. “Know you're worth your salt. Understand?”
“Yes, Sir.”
He handed me a shovel and set me to digging a shallow lateral line down the hill to the garden. I got to it. Easy job.
My grandma, Nan, came out on the porch a while later. I was at least a hundred feet away and still digging the line. Pa was up taking a drink of sweet tea. It’d got hot today.
I waved, but Nan wasn’t looking. She talked to Pa. I stuck the shovel back in the dirt and heard Pa’s Mason jar break.
Pa stared at Nan.
“What’s going on?” I called.
“Jerol, you need to get home,” Pa yelled.
That didn’t sound good. I shouldered the shovel and walked back to the house.
“Go, Jerol. Hurry,” he said. I looked at Nan. She looked like she’d been crying, but it was hard to tell. She kept looking at the ground.
Eight year old Tom and six year old Ellie, a couple of cousins living with Nan and Pa, stood on the other side of the screen door that led out back. I nodded at them. Nan went inside, taking them with her.
“Go Jerol,” Pa said again.
“What is it?” Pa never sent me home in the middle of a job, nor did he act scared. I’d never seen Pa scared.
He looked at me for a long time, his face an open eyed question mark that made my stomach ache.
“It’s best your Dad tell you,” he finally said.
I rode my bike as fast as I could back home, my mind awhirl with what could have made Pa’s eye’s go so wide, so hopeless. I almost stopped to wretch, but I managed to hold it in. I didn’t know what it was about Pa’s face, but it made me sick.
And there was the empty-eyed, open-mouthed silence of little Ellie and Tom. Ellie never shut up talking about my little sister, Kyla. She thought Kyla was the best thing ever. And Tom was always hitting me up to go fishing or trapping. But, they’d been ghostly quiet behind the screen door until Nan had ushered them a
way.
I got home, tossed the bike, and ran inside. Dad was home taking advantage of some built up sick time from the factory. He’d never been sick that I could remember. He was sitting on the couch, staring at the TV, which was nothing but static. The radio on the mantle was on scan. It kept cycling through the dial without hitting a station. Our emergency generator chugged out back.
“Dad?” He looked over at me, held my eye for a second then broke into tears like he was a baby who’d lost his sippy cup. I froze. Dad crying? Maybe at a cheesy movie when the dog died, but just out of the blue … no way.
“What’s going on?” I asked. The continuous sound of static bugged me. “Where’s Mom and Kyla?”
Dad blew out a big breath and stood. He was pale like the time he’d rolled the tractor and broken his arm. He closed off one nostril with a finger and blew snot right onto the carpet. I took a step back.
“Son, I’m sorry,” he said.
Kyla must have heard me talking, because she burst into the living room and ran to me like the time I’d been gone to church camp for a week. Her chubby cheeks were red and her eyes were wide. She was a ten year old, curly-headed, wild-child sprinting through the house straight toward me. I braced myself so she wouldn’t knock me down.
“Jer, did you hear? Did you hear?” she asked as she squeezed me and trembled. I couldn’t tell if she was excited or scared.
“What’s going on?” I asked again, holding her to my chest. Dad’s eyes were down, looking at the carpet where he’d just blown his nose. Mom had bought that carpet only a month ago. She’d used our tax money.
“It’s all over,” he said, voice flat, still not looking at me. Mom came around the corner. She hadn’t been crying. I could tell. Her makeup still looked normal. She was pale too though and her eyes were kind of bugged out.
“Milt,” she said. “Uncle Jack is on the CB. He’s got a plan. Pa’s on there too, and your brother Merro and few of the other cousins. They want your input.”
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