Playing with Fire (Book 1 of the FIRE Trilogy)

by Devika Fernando

  * * *

  For the first time, there was a coming to, a feeling of being somebody, of having a body and a life.

  Blackness vanished when she lifted heavy lids, the infinitesimal movement enough to lure the pain back. Gradually, there was vision, limited to a blur of washed-out, distant colors at first, blues and greens and blacks and browns like so many dollops of paint on a canvas. She braced the pain and blinked until her sight became clearer.

  Felicia was lying on grass, though it felt more like a bed of nails and glass shards against her irritated skin. Above her was a bluish-greyish sky, cloudless and so far away that she couldn’t imagine she had ever flown up there. If she stared straight forward and focused hard, there was a soothingly solid structure, walls made of stone or bricks, or was it blackened concrete and wood?

  With better vision came the sense of smell. It made her want to retch, but only dry heaving and excruciatingly painful breaths were possible, her newly discovered mouth gaping to fight for oxygen and to vomit a stream of screams, soundless and not lessening the pain. Around her, the stench of flesh and bones and skin and hair and nails and intestines, boiled and burned, charred but not yet ashes, permeated the air.

  She had to get away from here, or she would die—if she hadn’t already died and this was her purgatory of an afterlife.

  All of her protested and the pain reached a record height that she hoped bitterly was its climax, but she did make a move to get away. Movement brought more awareness and more terror. Before she knew it, she had propped herself up from a lying position—as uncomfortable and awkward as if she had been hurled down from a great height or fallen from the sky right onto the ground, sprawled out spread-eagled at unhealthy angles—into a crouch. Keeping herself half-steady with one hand on the ground, fingers digging into the soil for a hold on life itself, she lifted the other hand closer to her tearful eyes.

  A scream so huge it should have torn her apart broke loose, and this time she was sure it was audible because her whole being vibrated with its tremors.

  What had once been her hand was no more than brittle sticks attached to a string of sinew or two, off-white bone poking through the remnants of black parched skin and oozing reddish slime. She was… not human. A monster. A bog mummy. Meat roasted over a bonfire and forgotten, so that it burned beyond crisp to remnants barely there.

  How could she still feel like herself? How could any soul or spirit or mind or living energy or matter reside in an absurdity this horrible? It was impossible. She was dead. She had to be. She wanted to be.

  So, she closed her eyes and sank to the ground, for once welcoming the onslaught of pain because it might push her over the edge and closer to death.