by Baron Sord
I pulled heat into my body like it was refreshing. There was so much of it circulating around me, I didn’t have to touch anything. More than enough conducted through the scorching hot gases trapped inside the building.
That was a first.
Usually, I needed to touch solids or liquids for fast heat conduction. Not here in this inferno. Made sense. I was basically inside a pressure cooker. Consequently, my internal sensation of sizzling immediately intensified to the point of mild discomfort. How long would it take to start itching painfully?
Time would tell.
Closing my eyes briefly revealed the now-familiar mental image of a turbulent and colorful temperature gradient — aka my TGV. In this case, it revealed the heat flow from the swirling gases nearest me as that heat transferred into my body. The movement had a psychedelic tie-dyed quality that was almost too much to look at.
I opened my eyes.
Then I made the mistake of opening my mouth to inhale.
A coughing spasm tore through me.
I had become so at ease being engulfed by all manner of extreme heat, I had forgotten how deadly the fumes could be, not to mention the carbon monoxide. Despite my seeming invulnerability, I still depended on oxygen to breathe like a normal human. If the chemical toxins in the air from the burning boxes didn’t kill me, the CO (carbon monoxide) might.
Okay, maybe coming in here was a bad idea. And maybe I’d been trying to get a reaction out of Lady Liberty by doing something brave and dangerous.
Could you blame me?
We were perfect for each other. Okay, maybe that was a stretch, but I did like her for who she was, not just her looks.
Why couldn’t she see that?
I didn’t have time to ponder it further because I was coughing too hard. I dropped to the floor, trying to suck clean air as I crawled frantically away from the flames. Good thing the other half of the building’s U wasn’t burning. I might be able to get some fresh air there.
While I crawled, I continued pulling as much heat into my body as I could. Less fire burning in the warehouse and consuming the oxygen meant more breathable air for me.
CRASH!
Overhead, a huge section of ceiling fell in, knocking down a big mass of burning cardboard boxes and shelving onto my back. The mass hit me like bricks and pinned me on my stomach. Fortunately, I was built tougher than bricks. I shrugged everything off while pulling in more heat and crawling forward.
As expected, my clothes had burned completely away.
Doug! LL thought in my head. Where are you?! Are you okay?!
I thought, I’m fine. Are you on the roof?
Yes! I’m looking for you, you stupid idiot!
You better get out of here. The rest of the roof might come down and you with it. There’s no air in here. Best to stay out.
What about you?
I’ll be fine. I’m crawling toward fresh air now.
It didn’t take long to get clear of the flames. I sucked experimentally on the air inches above ground. It smelled slightly cleaner, so I pulled in a little more, but not a whole lungful. I didn’t want to start another coughing spasm and lose what little clean air I’d gained.
Please hurry, LL thought. I don’t know how you can take all that heat.
Can’t you?
I mean, somewhat. But this is too much. Even for me. I need to get off the roof. Look for me outside.
That was interesting. I had assumed she would be equally immune to fire like I was. She was strong and resilient, so why wouldn’t everything else transfer over the same? I guess impossible green eclipse beams worked in mysterious ways. Or UFO beams. Or whatever had given us our powers.
More interestingly, I had assumed LL wouldn’t care what happened to me. Had I gotten that reaction I had hoped for? Possibly.
I thought, Are you off the warehouse roof yet? Are you somewhere safe?
Yes, she thought. The other building. When you come out, make sure your mask is on.
It’s gone.
What do you mean?
It burned off with my clothes.
Oh, right.
Why? What’s the problem?
There’s a news truck out here. They’re recording the fire.
Shit! Did they record us on the roof earlier?
I don’t know. Maybe?
Okay, I’ll worry about it later. I need to focus on the fire.
I took another shallow breath from near the floor. Not much cleaner than the last. I needed to get away from the smoke. I continued crawling. When I was out of he fire, I stood and trotted around to the far end of the U where there were offices. My diaphragm hitched spasmodically as my lungs tried to gulp up air. Not yet. Too close to the smoke.
I found a small office with a window. Went in, closed the door, opened the window.
Finally.
Fresh air.
I stuck my head outside and breathed deeply until my lungs felt clear of fumes and the coughing stopped. Then I hyper-ventilated a few times before gulping the biggest volume of air I could. Walked out of the office (leaving the window open but closing the door behind me) and proceeded calmly (to preserve my air) back to the flaming portion of the building’s U.
There, I siphoned more heat from the intensely hot gases into my body. The rate at which my efforts diminished the flames was dramatic. Wherever I walked, they quickly died out. The fire pyramid at work. As always: go science!
After a few trips back and forth to the office to replenish my air — this would’ve been much easier with a firefighter’s SCBA rig (Self Contained Breathing Apparatus) — I had transferred at least a third of the fire’s heat into me, where I was containing it.
Holding that much heat energy meant my skin was itching like crazy, but I could deal. For now. I was also glowing brightly orange from head to toe. When I closed my eyes to briefly check my internal heat map with my TGV, I was bright orange from head to toe. There was no place to shift the heat to relieve the itching even if I wanted to.
I wasn’t sure how much more total heat I could hold before I had to dump some of it somewhere other than here.
Yet another problem to solve.
A new issue to present itself was my eyes. They kept tearing up from the toxic smoke, so I was constantly squinting to minimize the amount of smoke getting to them. One fringe benefit of my excess heat — I simply couldn’t contain all of it, and some was leaking out — was that the heat loss created a natural convection current that wafted upward around my body. The slight updraft helped clear the smoke from my eyes to a degree, which reduced my tearing slightly. Emphasis on slightly, but I’d take what I could get. Too bad it didn’t bring fresh oxygen with it. I still had to make trips to the office for that.
Next time: get an SCBA.
Yeah, right. Those things cost $5,000 each. Not gonna happen, especially not with THE BANK BREAKER constantly stealing every dollar from me that he could.
On top of all the issues from the fire, my stomach was rumbling and I was getting extremely thirsty. It happened any time I used my super-powers, and in direct correlation to how much I used them.
For now food and water would have to wait.
At some point, I noticed mist from the hoses outside drifting through one of the openings in the roof. When the mist landed on me, it steamed off my skin in white clouds.
Now I was the fire.
Well, half of it.
About half of the initial blaze remained.
Hey, that was progress.
Doug? LL thought. You still okay in there?
Yeah! Kinda busy!
I went back to the little office for more air. Here where it was dark, my glow — now bright yellow — made me a walking spotlight. Well, technically a diffuser, because I was projecting bright light evenly in every direction.
How much more heat could I hold before I had to dump some? This was far and away the most I’d ever absorbed. Now my skin definitely felt like it wanted to tear itself open from the itching en
ergy. I could climb out the window and shoot fire into the sky to release the excess, or shoot it out one of the holes in the roof, but I had plans for all this heat after the fire was out.
For several more minutes, between extracting more heat from the fire, I continued my trips to and from the office for air. Working while holding my breath was making me light headed and I consciously moved slowly to avoid passing out.
Despite these issues, I extinguished the entire fire 10 or 15 minutes later.
I still held all the heat.
My body glowed white hot.
I surveyed the burned out warehouse. It looked like a volcano had erupted inside. A gray wasteland of ash piles, wet where the hoses had soaked it, dry where they hadn’t.
My diffuse white glow gave the place an eerie gray cast. For all the destruction that had occurred, it was surprisingly beautiful. The dripping water sounds reminded me of a forest after a rainstorm.
Very soothing.
Sadly, with all the toxins in the air, it was still difficult to breathe. I fast-walked back to the office and gulped more air from the window. Went back into the gray wasteland to keep an eye for any flare ups. Quickly realized my eyes weren’t the best tool for the job.
My feet were.
I walked slowly past row after row of shelves, many of which were melted and buckled. Some had collapsed into unrecognizable blobs. I stopped periodically with my bare feet in the ash piles to extract heat. When I did, I closed my eyes to focus on my colorful TGV. It clearly revealed the hot spots in the ash piles and everything touching them, including the metal shelves and the floor.
As always, I only saw the objects from which I was extracting heat in a limited radius. Because the air around me had cooled to ambient temperatures, which generally showed up black in my TGV, all I saw now were the objects on the ground in a radius of 15 or 20 feet around me. Everything beyond that faded to blues and purples, eventually disappearing into blacks. Kind of like working in rainbow torchlight.
I had to wonder, did room-temperature air show up as black in my TGV because of the relatively poor conduction of air compared to solids, at least as far as my powers were concerned? I didn’t know, but it was a question worth exploring further when I had the time.
While calmly cooling one hot ash pile after another, I considered my escape plan. LL had said there were news trucks outside. That meant cameras. I was naked and didn’t want them recording me without a mask.
I could jump out one of the holes in the roof, but with my white hot glow, I would be 10x brighter than a full moon, if not brighter, and moving much faster, which attracted more attention, which I did not want.
Doug! LL called out mentally. Everything okay in there?! Did you put the fire out?!
Yeah! I thought. It’s out! I’m still checking for hot spots! I need to cool them before I come out so they don’t flare up!
Okay! Don’t take too long!
Whatever that meant.
It would take however long it took.
Interestingly, despite the extracted heat I was storing, which had to put my surface temperature at thousands of degrees F and climbing (I admit, that was a guess), I had no trouble discerning temperatures outside of me by touch. With my shoes burned away, it was easy to feel where the floor or ash piles were warm or cool. If I wanted, I could’ve done this without my TGV. But, using both modalities, it was easy to find every last hot spot and cool them to ambient temp.
When I finished, there was no chance of further flare ups.
The firefighters outside would likely watch like hawks until well into tomorrow because they had no idea what I’d done, but watching was all they’d be doing.
Of that I was sure.
The only question left for me was, how long could I hold this mother-load of heat? It felt like 50x the volume of energy I’d absorbed at the Rancho Jamacha brushfire, or at any time at Heph’s hangar.
The itching sensation now bordered on extremely painful. Like an all-over blistering sunburn combined with drinking a thousand cups of coffee. No, caffeine wasn’t the right analogy. I was buzzing like a walking jackhammer set to the highest setting. Even my bones were shaking. It was excruciating, really.
I needed to dump this heat quick.
Where was the nearest pool?
Ha!
Who was I kidding?
I was putting this precious heat to the test outside.
I was going to try flying.
Rather than rocket dramatically up through one of the holes in the warehouse ceiling like a white hot night sun — a feat the news camera operators outside would surely record — I stepped out the small office window I’d been using to get fresh air, and did so like a normal person.
Not nearly as badass as flying into the sky on a pillar of fire, but I could work up to that with practice. The last thing I wanted was to fumble a dramatic entrance — or in this case exit — in front of the news crews.
Could you imagine if I attempted it, slowly lifting off and rising through a hole in the roof, then announcing myself to camera, “Hey, everybody! It’s me, Wildfire!” Then suddenly I lose control and shoot out of there in a buck-wild spiral that sent me crashing into the nearest non-burned building, which I then set ablaze? While the news crews recorded my bungling fumble?
Yeah, no.
I’d make a dramatic entrance (or exit) next time.
Or the tenth time.
After I learned how to fly with a minimal degree of mastery.
—: Chapter 22 :—
Outside the warehouse, I made sure no one was pointing any cameras at me. Then I noticed something unnerving.
Although most of this industrial park was wall-to-wall asphalt, concrete, stucco, and steel, there were a few trees scattered here and there.
I stood beside one now.
It was a spindly thing, maybe 20 feet tall with a 6-inch trunk.
The trunk was starting to smoke.
I was standing inches away.
Suddenly, a hand-size patch of bark burst into flame.
My goal had been to make less work for the firefighters, not more. Apparently, I was leaking heat at an alarming rate because I carried more than I could safely contain. I hated to think what my surface temperature was specifically, other than “damn hot.”
I blew on the burning tree.
Useless.
The heat from my face only made things worse. I waved air at the flames with my hands.
Not working.
My only option was to drain some of my heat, then extract some from the tree. Pointing one hand along the side of the building, I shot a few quick 3-inch diameter 20-foot blasts at the asphalt. Hopefully nobody noticed. Then I did my best to transfer as much heat as I could away from my hand and into my body.
Straining, I managed to visibly cool my hand to a dull red. Still hot, but not white hot. I slapped my red palm onto the trunk and extracted heat. In my TGV, it took a single second to cool the burning portion of the trunk to match the ambient blue-green of the rest of it.
I yanked my hand away and opened my eyes.
The fire was out.
I moved away quickly, jogging toward the rear of the warehouse. Jumped over a pair fences, crossed another street here in the industrial area, then ran between more buildings to a cinderblock wall that overlooked an expressway. Two lanes going in each direction. Several cars drove by. Somebody was going to notice me eventually. I was a walking human lighthouse.
Wave at the lighthouse, kids!
I waited behind the fence until the expressway was empty, then jumped it. Noticed a four-way intersection with stoplights to my left. The signs read San Luis Ray Mission Expressway and… Airport Road.
There was an airport out here?
Heck yeah.
Talk about luck.
I jogged across the expressway to investigate.
A number of random businesses fronted the small airport, blocking it from view from the expressway. The airstrip was tiny. Looked like G
eneral Aviation only, which meant public use with minimal-to-no scheduled service. It was obviously shut down for the night. The airport itself was a collection of small one-story buildings. It had a few hangars off to the side, but they were all small, capable of holding at most one or two single-engine planes apiece.
The two-dozen or so planes parked outside in the open air along the edge of the taxiway were single- and double-engine Cessnas and Pipers. I didn’t even see an obvious control tower. This place was small time.
Perfect.
It meant I could try flying without burning anything important.
I jogged out to the empty runway like I owned the place. Then I thought better of it. I wasn’t sure what an explosive heat release might do to the tarmac. I didn’t want to ruin the runway for the pilots, so I went back to the taxiway. What were a few new volcanic potholes on a General Aviation taxiway? That was sarcasm.
Once I found a suitable area at the far end in the corner where the tarmac was cracked already in several places and growing weeds, I stopped.
Looked around to make sure nobody was watching.
Hopefully, my heat brightness was obscuring my face from any security cameras in the vicinity. If there were any, hopefully nobody bothered checking tonight’s footage.
I started concentrating on releasing heat from my feet.
Slowly at first.
Then more and more.
Flames flickered out from my feet and blasted across the asphalt. Was I achieving liftoff? Even minimally?
I wasn’t sure.
I released more energy while trying to gauge how much remained in my tank. Too bad I didn’t have an actual fuel gauge. I’d have to go by feel. Based on the painful itchiness of my skin, I had plenty left.
I opened the throttle slowly.
Metaphorically, of course. This process was entirely mental.
The explosion of heat from my feet increased and got slowly louder, now a low flickering, crackling roar. I felt the distinct sensation of upward lift, but I wasn’t off the ground yet.
I had a moment to wonder again where the thrust was coming from. I wasn’t moving air like a jet turbine. Meaning, I wasn’t a series of spinning fans that sucked in huge volumes of air before compressing it, injecting fuel, and igniting it then blasting everything out the back in the form of thrust. My body didn’t have any sort of throughput flow path, unless you counted my GI tract, which clearly wouldn’t work as a turbine because it was too convoluted of a pathway. That said, I could imagine Arnold asking if Shartman used his farts to fly, or did diarrhea work better?
