by Baron Sord
“Do your thing, Doug!” Arnold hollered giddily. To Heph, “Check this shit out. It’s freaking incredible.”
I glanced back and Heph was watching closely, his arms folded over his leather apron. He smiled behind his beard, “I’m waiting! Do something awesome already!”
As I neared the blaze in the drum, the heat hit me. I held up both my hands and started extracting energy, siphoning fire into my body, getting closer to the drum until I stuck my arms down into it. I could only absorb heat as fast as the gasoline in the drum burned, so I waited patiently as the flames whipped me in the face, taking it all in. To increase the total amount of extracted heat, I placed my palms against the hot interior of the drum.
As with the car fire on day one of my super-powers, standing this close to the burn, I had to hold my breath to avoid tasting the toxic fumes. Stepped back a few times to catch a fresh breath. There was a lot more liquid gas in the drum than a car’s gas tank.
I also closed my eyes, partially because of the fumes, but also to concentrate on seeing the colorful temperature gradient in my mind. Call it my “Temperature Gradient Vision” or TGV for short. The gradient showed I was cooling a hemisphere in the ground that had a radius of about 15 feet, in addition to the drum fire.
Internally, my body was a swirling rainbow of heat. For practice, I was trying to keep all of it above my boxers. Didn’t want to burn them away to nothing. Second only to my need to gain control over extracting heat was the ability to contain large volumes for long periods without burning my clothes off. Nobody wanted a naked free-balling superhero flying to their rescue.
Eventually, after the gasoline in the drum burned away to nothing, the fire died out.
Heph laughed, shaking his head in disbelief, “Now that is what I call a YOLO fucking moment, my friend! I should’ve filmed that!”
“No video!” I hollered, still standing next to the smoking drum.
“Now do the thing!” Arnold laughed. “Do the blasting thing!”
“Before I do that…” I started walking toward them. “I want to see how long I can hold all this heat. It’s quite a bit.” I had yet to hold this much heat for more than a few minutes. My goal was to hold it an hour or more.
Both Arnold and Heph backed up a few steps as I approached.
Heph squinched his face up, “Wow, you’re burning, man. I can feel the heat from here.”
“That’s what the ladies tell me,” I grinned. “Arnold, can you feel the heat?”
“No,” Arnold snorted. “I never feel your heat. Ev-ER.”
I laughed at our inside joke.
Heph chuckled. “I’m getting a sunburn standing this close.”
Arnold said, “That’s why we call him Wildfire.”
I said, “Can somebody run a stopwatch or a timer? I want to track exactly how long I can hold onto this.”
Arnold took his phone out and started a timer as we walked over to the shade beside the hangar.
“You’re glowing orange,” Heph marveled once we were in the shadows. “Hard to see under the sun, but I bet you’re really bright at night.”
“That seems to be a thing.” I said.
“Pretty badass,” Heph smiled.
“Yeah.”
As always happened when I held onto excess heat, it now tingled inside my torso where I was containing it. Not painfully, but I felt a pretty good itch. I could tolerate it for a while. Maybe not an hour, but I’d try.
“Hey, Heph,” I said, “while I’m holding onto this heat, can we try something else?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Can you fire up your oxy torch?”
“Sure.”
We walked inside the hangar and Heph twisted open the valves on both the oxygen and acetylene main tanks, followed by the smaller valves on both regulators. The needles on the regulator gauges sprang up to pressure. Heph twisted the acetylene knob on the torch and sparked the tip, producing a sooty orange flame. He dialed it down until the black fumes disappeared, leaving a pure orange flame. Then he twisted the oxygen knob and dialed the resultant hissing jet down to an even blue cone that looked sharp to the touch. It wasn’t, but it would slice through body parts like it was.
“Okay,” Heph said. “Now what?”
“Now you point it at my hand.”
“No fucking way,” he laughed.
“I’m serious,” I said.
Heph said to Arnold, “Is he insane?”
“No, he’s freaking serious,” Arnold emphasized.
Heph said, “Are you sure, Doug? This thing is over 6000 degrees Fahrenheit, man. It’ll ignite steel.”
“I know,” I grinned.
Heph glanced uncertainly at Arnold.
Arnold nodded, “Let him.”
“Don’t worry, Heph,” I said, “I’ll pull my hand away if it gets too hot.”
He didn’t look too sure. “If you say so. It’s your hand.”
While he held the torch, I held my palm up about two feet away from the blue cone, then slowly moved it closer. Within a foot of the cone, I felt my hand getting warm. But not hot. When I got to within two inches, it definitely turned hot, but not intolerable. It was no worse than a hair dryer set on high heat. I could stand it for a minute or two.
I pressed my palm against the flame.
The blue cone flickered out in every direction from the nozzle as the pressurized jet of fire bounced off my palm. The force of the shooting gases was more disconcerting than any sense of immediate pain. I had to keep reminding myself that the pressure didn’t equal burning skin, neither did the itching of containing the heat I was pulling into my hand.
Let me tell you, convincing yourself that a 6000 degree F (3300 C) flame wasn’t destroying your hand took some effort.
“There’s no sparks,” Heph observed. “Whenever I’m cutting steel, there’s sparks and slag coming out the back, but this ain’t doing nothing to your hand, man.”
Arnold said, “Doug, your hand is white hot. It’s almost too bright to look at.”
My hand alone couldn’t contain the intense volume of energy. It felt like my skin wanted to rupture. No problem. I simply closed my eyes and concentrated on channeling the excess heat up my arm to my shoulder. Mentally, I could see the colorful heat drifting, heating up my arm from red to orange then yellow as it traveled from palm to wrist to elbow to shoulder.
At that point, I opened my eyes and pulled my hand away from the torch. Flexed my fist experimentally and said, “I think that’s enough.”
Heph twisted the dials on the torch, cutting off the gas and flame with a pop.
“Now what?” Arnold asked.
“Let’s try some pin-point tests,” I said. “Heph, you have any scrap metal I can cut?”
“Sure.” Heph picked up a 1/4-inch thick chunk of rusty sheet steel from a pile in a bucket and tossed it on his metal work table with a clang. “Have at it.”
I touched my index finger to the metal chunk and concentrated on releasing an even stream of heat. When the metal started to spark, I dragged my finger across the width, cutting a red-hot even line. The two pieces separated on the table and one fell to the floor.
Clink!
“Holy shit,” Heph chuckled. “Wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it.” Using a pair of tongs, he picked up the chunk from the floor. “Nice work. That’s a clean cut. Maybe I oughta put you to work in my shop.” He grinned.
We all laughed.
For the next several hours, I put my fire powers to the test in a range of applications. I never reached my goal of holding heat for an hour because the three of us were having too much fun laughing our asses off while I destroyed things.
We started with Heph setting up a variety of junk metal targets on the runway for me to blast. Blowing up paper piñatas at Las Cerdas Hermanas had been one thing. I needed to gain experience delivering far more fire power than that if I was going to stop criminals in the heat of battle.
I wasn’t thinking of torc
hing people like I had in the rock quarry. More like blowing out tires on moving criminal vehicles, for starters. Were I to do that, I’d need to do it in a way that didn’t go haywire and hurt innocent bystanders. I’d hate to blast fire at a moving car and over do it to the point my flames shot through the tires and cut a hole in the shins of someone standing innocently on the other side.
Like with any deadly weapon, aim and control were critical.
Other useful applications of heat might be cutting through things to save someone’s life. I wouldn’t always be able to tear open smashed vehicles by hand like I had with Cauterized Guy’s SUV. Or there could be other applications not involving cars or trucks where I needed to cut through thick metal or concrete in a building or ship or submarine or who knew what that was too thick to muscle apart.
Every time I blasted one of Heph’s hunks of scrap metal, it would burst dramatically into flames.
Arnold would laugh and Heph would scream, “Yolo, man! Fucking YOLO!”
And of course, they would tell me to do it again and again.
Over the next hour or two, I had to constantly stop to refuel. Turned out, the desert was the best place to get it, and it was simpler than setting yet another oil drum fire. Why waste the free heat when it was all around us here in the hot desert? Whenever I needed more, I’d walk away from the buildings and the asphalt runway and extract heat like I was drilling for oil.
Each time I did, the heat hemisphere — maybe I should call it a freeze hemisphere, or Freeze Sphere —would balloon out beneath me in my mind’s eye as I extracted heat from the ground. Sometimes my Freeze Sphere grew as large 50 yards (45 meters) in diameter. There was no way I could do this in town. I’d be freezing everyone’s water pipes underground. If they or city mains burst, talk about water shortage. And the repair costs? They’d be ridiculous. I could see the headline:
Wildfire Wrecks $5 Million in Public Water Lines, Refuses to Pay.
I couldn’t let that happen.
As the morning wore on, I started to notice a trend.
So did Heph.
He said, “It’s like you’re shooting jellied gasoline, man. Like a flame-thrower. No reason all this metal would flame up like it is. Heat up, sure. But not a continuous flaming burn like it does.” He was right. Every time I hit a metal target, it would burst into flames. “Where’s the jelly coming from, man?”
“I don’t know. Me?” My stomach rumbled. “Anybody hungry?”
Arnold smirked, “Hungry for more destruction.”
We all laughed.
I said, “I’m getting really thirsty too.”
Heph said, “We should stop for lunch.”
Before we did, I fueled myself up in the desert once again. I walked away with my entire torso glowing bright yellow. I told Arnold to run the timer on his phone. This time I was determined to hold the excess heat through lunch, no matter how much it itched or made me want to dance.
Heph whipped up burgers on his grill in the shade between the hangar and another building.
I busied myself pounding water by the gallon. I’d never been this thirsty before. Perhaps it had something to do with using my firepowers? I wasn’t sure how that made sense, but I was damn thirsty.
The beef patties sizzled deliciously.
Arnold sniffed, “You smell that?”
I said, “What, the burgers?”
“No,” he joked. “That’s the smell of victory!”
We all hooted like cavemen.
While we ate, I felt like I could trust Heph, so I shared some crazy stories with him about what Arnold and I had done on our distress calls. Arnold added random commentary that always made me and Heph laugh. Of course, I made no mention of the men I had killed. Heph didn’t need to know about them.
But Heph was all ears and impressed with what Arnold and I were doing. He said, “You guys are saints for helping people like that, man.”
That got a fist bump.
At one point, Arnold observed, “Is it just me, or is Doug’s voice all weird?”
Heph nodded, “I was noticing that too. Like it shimmers. Like a watery echo or something.”
I said, “It could be the heat I’m storing. Maybe it’s affecting how my vocal cords produce sound waves.”
“Like heat waves rippling the air when you speak?” Heph offered.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or it could be because the rest of me is vibrating strangely, so why not my voice box too?”
“Makes sense,” Heph nodded.
“Totally badass,” Arnold said, munching on his second burger. “Doug, you sound like a fricking fire elemental or some shit.”
“Hell yeah,” Heph laughed.
—: Chapter 17 :—
After lunch, we went back to the runway.
Heph set up three life-size scrap metal dummies. They were cut from sheet metal in the shape of human silhouettes. The shape was of a man with his arms at his sides, legs together. Each had a red-and-white bullseye spray-painted to the chest with a stencil. The silhouettes were backed with a simple vertical brace made from square metal tubing that was bolted to the back of the sheet. The vertical brace of each of the three silhouettes was bolted at the bottom to a heavy hunk of scrap metal.
Heph said, “I made these before you came, man. After Arnold clued me in on what we’d be doing.”
I nodded but shot a glance at Arnold, “Gee, Arn, what didn’t you tell Heph?”
Arnold said, “Don’t worry. All I said was we needed human targets we could set on fire without ruining them. Like something Mythbusters would do, but durable. That was it.”
“Yeah,” Heph nodded. “Doug, see if you can knock these over.”
I pushed on one of the silhouettes experimentally. The wide base was heavy, at least 100 pounds worth of welded and bolted scrap metal. When I released it, the target tipped back to center and thumped the asphalt. You’d have to really put your weight into it if you wanted to tip it over. “This’ll work,” I smiled.
We walked back 30 feet from the targets.
“Wait, wait!” Arnold chuckled. “Heph, do you have a pen that writes on metal?”
“Sure, yeah.” He went to his shop and got a fat black metal marker. “This’ll stick to anything. Don’t breathe the fumes. They’re hella toxic.”
“Thanks,” Arnold held up the capped pen and inhaled deeply. “I see pink elephants! Pink elephants!”
Heph and I chuckled while Arnold drew horrible angry faces on the targets. Arnold’s drawing skills were stunted at the first grade level, but he got the point across like a pro.
I said, “Who’s that supposed to be?”
“My boss Gabe from SPAWAR,” Arnold chuckled and handed Heph the capped pen.
“We ready?” I said after we walked back to the safe zone. I still held all the heat I’d collected before lunch. “Hey, Arn? What’s your phone timer say?”
He checked, “52 minutes, 40 seconds.”
I grinned, “It isn’t an hour, but damn close. Everybody ready?”
“Let ’er rip!” Heph laughed.
I held up my arm, palm facing the target. “Okay, here goes…”
“Do it!” Arnold said.
Fa-WHOOSH!
I blasted the first target with a 3-inch diameter spray of concentrated flame that spewed from my hand like a horizontal fire geyser.
Ka-CLANG!
The heavy metal target slammed against the asphalt with a fiery bang. A plume of black smoke curled into the air as the target burned.
“No way!” Arnold gasped. “Do it again!”
Heph laughed, “Talk about packing a punch! Incredible, man!”
I hammered the second target with more fire. It was heavier than the first, and with my 3-inch diameter blast, it required a continuous spray of about 4 seconds duration to tip over.
For the third, I hit it as hard as I could.
FWA-FOOM!
This blast of fire was at least 9 inches in diameter, but the duration was less than
a second.
When my fire geyser punched the target, the metal human went flying, breaking away from the heavy base and spinning end over end, hopping high in the air like a whirling blade of death before clanging to the ground 20 yards away.
Ka-BANG-BANG-BANG!
“Holy shit!” Arnold screamed with laughter, jumping up and down with excitement. “You freaking killed that guy!”
“Fucking YOLO, baby!” Heph cackled. “YO-LOOOO!”
We walked over to inspect the damage.
Heph said, “That ain’t jelly you’re hittin’ it with, man. That’s like a high pressure fire house or something. Look how the sheet metal is dented in the bullseye where you hit it.” He grinned, “You got some cannon on you, man.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled.
“Powaaaah!” Arnold laughed gleefully, clenching his hands into diabolical claws. “More powaaaaaaaah!”
Heph said, “If it isn’t jellied gasoline you’re throwing, what is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But the mass has to be coming from somewhere. The obvious answer is me, but I have no idea how.”
Arnold smirked, “Super powers is how.”
I grinned sarcastically, “That explains everything. I meant in terms of physics. What’s the chemical or atomic mechanism?”
Arnold said, “All I know is, we need to blow more shit up.”
Heph laughed.
I smiled, “I’m out of heat energy. I need to fuel up on heat. And food. I’m hungry again. And fricking thirsty.”
Heph chuckled, “You ate everything in my fridge, man!”
“Play time’s over,” I smiled.
“Awwww!” Arnold whined.
“Thanks again for all this, Heph,” I said.
“No worries,” he shrugged.
“What do I owe you for all the food?”
He waved a hand, “Forget it. You paid for it with the entertainment.” His blond beard stretched into a wide smile and his eyes twinkled. “Call it even, man.”
“Thanks. Now the problem is, going forward, I don’t have a desert handy.” Over lunch, I had explained to Heph the problem with using Freeze Spheres in populated areas with substantial infrastructure at risk of being damaged. “And I can’t set oil drum fires back at Arnold’s house in Bankers Hill.”
