Blaze of Chaos

by C. J. Strange

  “You want to give it another half hour here, then go check the other muster point?” asks Alfie, and out of my peripheral I see him roll his head across his bare shoulders to look at me. It’s a bit like suddenly being noticed by a wolf, one you’re not sure has been properly tamed.

  “Good call,” I answer, quietly and without looking up. My tone sounds noticeably more dejected than his does. “For all we know, that’s where everybody’s been gathering.”

  Alfie snickers with no restraint. I haven’t tore my eyes from my mobile phone since we’ve been stationary and I’ve been able to get a Net connection from one of the nearby flats. My focus has been honed on my scanning software. But Alfie’s frigid reaction to my optimism is jarring enough to earn my attention. I finally raise my head, my jaw in my lap, my eyes wide with horror.

  “Really, muppet?” he sneers, ignoring my reaction to his devil-may-care attitude. Perhaps it was folly of me to expect even Alfie to show compassion in regards to our comrades being murdered in front of us. From what I’ve been told, and what I’ve witnessed, empathy has never been his M.O. “Have a laugh. There’s probably nobody else left. I mean, we might run into everybody who weren’t down there when it all kicked off, but…”

  “Most of us were down there. The usual crowd, anyway.”

  “Yeah,” snorts Alfie, “but we had two teams active. Cap’s and Penny’s. They’ll probably be around in a minute to pick us up.”

  I stare at him. “No,” I say, very carefully. “The second team got back just after nine-thirty. Cap’s team are the only ones who were technically still active at the time we were attacked.”

  I may not have any telepathy-based Magick, but it’s almost as if I can see the realization hit him. It travels across his person in a very visible mask of confusion, then comprehension, then aching despair. Then, the freckled lines of his face harden, and he wrestles with a noise that's not quite a snarl.

  “Well, there are probably survivors out there somewhere. They’re probably too shook up to get to the muster points. We’ll have to go find them, muppet.”

  I return my attention to my mobile, no words of judgment or amusement anywhere near my mouth. His one-eighty doesn’t surprise me; I know exactly why it occurred.

  Penny Starling had returned home with that first active team.

  And you would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to not know exactly how Alfie feels for Penny.

  “You done pissing about with that poxy thing?” asks Alfie, nudging my shoulder hard enough that I rock sideways. I presume he means my phone. I shake my head, but he’s stubborn and I know he’ll require more detail. Especially if he’s anxious to get out and search.

  “Almost, I’m sorry,” I mumble apologetically. “There’s a coded message that just went out… might just be drug drop-offs again, but it might be something we actually care about. Mind if I look?”

  “Ugh, sure, whatever. But hurry it up. I’m going in two minutes, with or without you.”

  I bite my lip and knuckle down on my task. My mobile is a lot slower than both my main desktop and my laptop, but I doubt either of those exist anymore. I hope neither of those exist anymore. If anyone who wanted to harm Anomalies were to retrieve those from the wreckage…

  My eyes glass over, blur, and refocus. I have to finish this now, or abandon it entirely. I can’t lose Alfie. He’s distressed, not thinking clearly. The damage our resident lunatic could do if left to act unchecked-not just to himself, to the Anomaly community as a whole-could be catastrophic. Irreversible. At all costs, I must stick to his side like glue. It’s what Penny would want.

  But he isn’t going to wait around on me and one of my hunches. Not if Penny could be out there, and he feels he can find her. Alfie’s always been a hothead, and he does want he wants, with or without the blessing of the rest of the brigade. I doubt he gives a damn what I think is best.

  The legwork to decode the signal isn’t what’s taking forever; the beacon itself is extremely poorly-protected. What’s slowing me down is the bandwidth of the Net I’ve piggybacked onto, which—considering I'm technically committing theft, burglary, and fraud all at the same time—I don't feel all that comfortable complaining about.

  “It’s nothing official, or Sovereignty-watermarked…”

  “No. Really, Holmes? Color me fucking surprised.”

  One of the other techs may have snapped back at him, said something snarky. Even if I occasionally do think of something along those lines, I don’t think I’d ever have the guts to say it aloud, not to Alfie. Not with how temperamental he is. I like my knees to remain where nature intended them.

  Besides, something else has my attention now, like a cat with a moth. I’m staring at the screen of my mobile. My mouth is hanging open again, I know, but I don’t have the mind to close it.

  Oh my gif…

  “Muppet? You even listening?” Alfie shoves me again with one hot hand, wrenching me from my stupor. “I said, is it anything worth us taking a butcher’s? Or we getting out of this dump?” I tilt my head up in time to catch the hilarious expression he pulls, but he’s not looking at me; he’s looking up and over my shoulder. “That pervy old biddy in that flat up there’s staring at me through her curtains again.”

  It doesn’t matter that he isn’t one-hundred percent focused on me. I know my next words will have his attention solely on me. And once I say them, I know he’ll be willing to wait the time it takes for me to fully download the beacon’s message.

  “I think Penny might be alive.”

  3 Penny’s Defense

  “You can seriously go back inside and rest, mate, I’m fine.”

  “I already told you, lass, same difference. I don’t need any rest.”

  I huff and roll my eyes, but in fairness, he knows his body better than me. He also knows as well as I do that I'm only taking the piss. “You’re such a pain in my arse, Daddy. Why don’t you ever let me be the man in our relationship?”

  He chuckles with the same level of playfulness. “Because I’m worried I’ll enjoy it too much.”

  The volume of his voice grates on what I like to call my rogue-sense (Oliver and a couple of the lads found a smuggled version of an American roleplaying board game that I swear, I must be addicted to), because Duncan hasn’t quite mastered the art of whispering like a normal human being. Then again, I’m overly sensitive to this sort of thing, being involved in so many active missions with B.L.A.Z.E. Even ten decibels can mean the difference between life and death when you’re somewhere you don’t want to be found.

  “You might,” I reply. It’s nice to partake in our usual flirty banter for a minute, without paying attention to the weight of our entire world resting on my shoulders. “But that’s not a bad thing. I think you’d look proper sexy in those 1950s hair curler things.”

  “If you can get them to stay in my hair, I’ll wear them for you, lass. If that’s what it takes to get your motor going.”

  A scraping noise at the mouth of the alleyway causes my head to whip up. I catch Duncan make the same movement out of the corner of my eye, behind me. Although there’s nothing notably suspect, I hear the noise again, and a plastic shopping bag twirls across the uneven concrete and rushes behind a trio of overflowing dustbins.

  I’m jumpy, but given what we’ve all just been through, I don’t feel any need to apologize for it.

  “I think I’ll do another perimeter check, if you’re all set here.”

  “Dee-Dog.” I wince. “I love you, but please. Volume.”

  He nods, no offense taken, and gets his trainers underneath him. I blink and he’s no longer on top of the camper van beside me; he’s standing down on the broken paving slabs by the driver’s side door, the drawstrings of his leather jacket fluttering as if caught on a breeze.

  It’s beautiful when he does that.

  “Take it easy,” I tell him, and he responds with no more than a slight curl of his lips before disappearing.

  Drawing my knees up to my che
st, I leave the wooden baseball bat wedged securely under one foot, and take the time to stretch out the muscles of my arms and shoulders. It’s going to be a long, anxious night of waiting. A crunching sound, not unlike that of a shoe scraping over gravel, stops me mid trapezius pull.

  The bloody hell was that?

  Adrenaline always hits me the same way. My body naturally wants to freeze; over time, I’ve trained it to fight. My stomach breeds butterflies and releases them into my chest cavity, and my cheeks generate enough heat to give even Alfie a run for his money. Keeping my head from spinning off my shoulders is a definite must.

  There’s a possibility the noise was Duncan, but there’s a greater possibility it wasn’t. The Bashing Squad tends to ask questions long after they, well, bash. If they even ask questions at all. And I have no intention of being caught with my trousers down by anyone, especially those tossers.

  I rest my bat across my shoulders and swiftly clamber down the side of my camper one-handed. I remain pressed against the bodywork as I ease my way around it. Slowly—very, very slowly.

  “Dee-Dog?” I breathe out, so gently I can’t even hear my own voice. It doesn’t matter, I'm not the one who needs to. With his hypersensitive, superhuman senses primed, Duncan could no doubt pick up on my utterance from three or four streets away.

  My fingers curl around the back end of the van, and I chance a quick peek.

  My heart jumps into my throat, catching my scream.

  There’s somebody standing there.

  It’s completely reflexive, the way my hand—which had been curled around the grip of my bat—whips the weapon out from behind me, swinging it around in a wide underarm arc. The collision course is set for the stranger’s jaw, though at the last minute, I veer off to the side.

  The ‘stranger’ anticipates my exact reaction. He too has drawn back, both hands held up in a defensive pose. It only takes a fraction of a second for me to absorb all of him: red hair, a single nostril piercing, and a familiar splatter of monochromatic inkwork across that pale, freckled torso.

  “Alfie!” I cry.

  “Fuck me—Penny!”

  My now smiling lips part to respond to my friend’s outburst, as shocked and elated to see him as he is to see me, but he’s gone again. It takes me a good three or four seconds to understand the sequence of events, and to realize exactly why a large, angry Scotsman is pinning my childhood friend against the wall of the alley with one forearm across his throat.

  “Duncan, stop! It’s Alfie!”

  “Aye, I know,” comes my muscle’s careless grunt of a reply. “I just really wanted to hurt him.”

  On that note, Duncan releases the much smaller Anomaly, who hits the concrete on his half-inched Chuck Taylors and stumbles before shoving the other man away. On any other occasion, I may have scowled and rolled my eyes, but the full force of my jubilation at seeing Alfie Savage alive and well still hasn't worn off. My stomach is twisted up in kinks and knots as I wordlessly cross the tarmac and wrench the irritating bastard into a hug. My bat topples loudly to the ground, disarming me. I don’t give a single flying fuck.

  He smells of freshly-burnt timber and fireplace smoke. Even smarting from what we’ve all just been through, his personal scent is one that sets my senses alight in the most heartwarming way imaginable. My hands grasp at his bare skin, clutching him tighter to me, afraid to let him go.

  “Bloody hell, Alfie…”

  “I knew it, I fucking knew it!”

  Behind me, Duncan clears his throat. “Nae wanting to cut short this lovely wee reunion, kiddos, but we got a second one back here.”

  His comment catches me by surprise. Alfie and I unravel from each other, and I twist my body to figure out what Duncan means. The quiet, sheepish figure standing behind him, wrapped in a button-up shirt with what appears to be his hoodie bundled in front of his bare legs, is immediately recognizable.

  In fact, we were sitting side-by-side playing chess while he deconstructed brigade weaponry not three hours ago.

  “Oliver.”

  I’m winded. The air has been knocked out of my lungs, completely. I’m beyond grateful that Oliver takes the initiative to approach me, because at this point, I’m not sure I can move if anything short of Branch 9 themselves show up. His skinny arms encircle my waist and I return the gesture in kind, pressing my head into the side of his. He barely stands two inches taller than me, and his thin frame shakes as I squeeze it close.

  “Hello, you,” he mumbles.

  “Oh my god, how the hell did you get out?”

  Oliver laughs awkwardly and draws away a bit. I acknowledge the hint and release him from my death grip. “Well, actually, I guess I sort of owe that to Alfie. He was doing a sweep of the Switchboard and apparently I was the only one still in there. What happened to you?”

  “Same, but substitute hotshot over there for the speed-freak.” A small but powerful sensation of relief flutters over me upon seeing these two faces specifically, and I allow my lips to curl. “So, what. Does this mean we’re both officially damsels in distress now? Are we going to lose our independency cards?”

  “I hope not,” he says, mirroring my amusement despite the tremble to his voice. “Mine took me a bloody age and a half to earn.”

  “Fuck me, the women are talking again,” drawls Alfie, and while perhaps he was hoping Duncan might respond with a manly chortle of laughter, he instead receives an inhumanly-strong cuff on the shoulder that sends him stumbling into the side of my camper.

  “So, did you pick up on the beacon?” I ask Oliver, deciding to ignore the boys’ mucking about for actual adult discussion. “Is that how you found us?”

  Even as I’m speaking, I notice how his face is dropping. Word by word, the glee evaporates from his eyes and they begin to widen impossibly.

  Before I can ask why, he’s scrambling for the door to my van.

  “Oli—?”

  “Your—the beacon! It’s—we have to—the, the encryption—!”

  Oh, bollocks.

  “What about it?” My footsteps pound up the short set of steps behind him, heading for the front of the van where Oliver knows I’ll have hooked up the emergency transmission kit. Graciously, neither Alfie nor Duncan questions or obstructs us from dealing with our emergency, and remain outside the van, where they’ll be more useful keeping a vigilant watch than breathing down our necks.

  The sudden look of sheer panic that has overtaken Oliver’s face is proper concerning me. He’s a sweet and naive kid, and despite his maturity most people think he’s a lot younger than he is. But even with his usual knack for over- or under-emoting to any given situation, I can tell something legitimately bad has happened.

  Or at least… could be about to happen.

  4 Penny’s “Rest”

  “Oliver? You able to communicate with me on this at all, mate?” I ask. Every one of my tired nerves is alight anew with an unwelcome sense of danger and dread. But I strive to be patient, I fight to be patient. Oliver’s slender fingers are dancing across the old wired keyboard, so fast I can barely keep up with what he’s inputting. It’s probably all code I wouldn’t understand anyway.

  The atmosphere in the van is so thick, so palpable, I could probably cut it with my pocket knife. Each second on the dash’s LED display drags by at a speed that I swear is slowing down. After a full minute passes, I finally clear my throat softly and speak up again.

  “Oliver? Talking to you as your lieutenant now, is everything all right?”

  Blessedly, my friend finally snaps out of his trance. He types for several more sluggish seconds, before giving Enter a determined jab with his right middle finger and sitting back in the passenger’s seat.

  “Sorry,” he says anxiously. “I—the beacon. The encryption, the security protocols, they were…” His voice trails off, and he blushes and averts his gaze. “It’s nothing offensive, Penny, I swear! It’s just, there are some things you’re really good at, you know? And, well, technical engineeri
ng and computer code—”

  I smile with what I hope is a sense of self-deprecating grace. “I’m rubbish. I know, I get it. But it’s all fixed?”

  “Now, yeah. As long as nobody’s already picked up on it.”

  An uneasy silence passes between us as we both imagine that, before I decide to speak up again. “Let’s tell the lads. We should probably pull shifts on watch and decide how long we want to stay and where we want to go from here.”

  I can’t tell if my declaration has brought Oliver comfort, or made it worse. He’s never been one for change as long as I’ve known him, big or small. This has to be destroying his delicate nervous system.

  “One step at a time, right?” I add as a hasty afterthought. Poor boy. Managing his emotional state is a job I’m more than used to and perfectly happy to undertake. “Remember what I always tell you,” I say, drawing from a famous quote that’s origin has been lost over the years, “if the wankers can’t love you when you’re at your worst, why the fuck should they have you at your best?”

  Oliver nods rigidly. “Right.”

  “Right then. You fit to head out?”

  Another nod, this one more controlled, and Oliver finally allows our streams of sight to cross for the first time. He’s not a huge stickler for eye contact. “Yeah. It’s just been a really long night. Alfie’s not the easiest person to survive armageddon with.”

  “He can be a bit intense, eh?”

  “Let’s just say there’s reasons why I’ve avoided him this long.”

  “That might not be an option for you much longer, I’m afraid.”

  Oliver doesn't respond verbally, but I can tell he's clenching his teeth behind his closed mouth.

  I take the cue and pat the back of his chair. “All right, well, let’s get outside before those two kill each other.”

  By the time Oliver and I drop down from the van’s side door, Duncan is whooshing to a stop, sending scraps of litter blowing into one grungy brick wall. Alfie scowls, of course, and pretends to wipe dust off of his bare arms and stomach.