The Man of Fire (AWARD-WINNING SCIENCE FICTION!!! ... award pending)

Vaughn pulled off his UV goggles, exiting onto the empty street. He looked at the Commerce Pass in his hand. Clenched tight. White knuckles. The Barrows was no place to walk near dusk.

Rusted complexes stretched up like crooked stilts through blankets of pollution. Too many eyes on this side of Boston-Manhattan. He sensed their presence in the boarded shanties and steel sewer grates, where the Stargazer orphans made their homes. Strange folk, those star worshipers … forever preaching of immortality and the fated war that would raise them to the stars.

Walking with purpose now, Vaughn passed a venting complex. He cringed at the chug-rumble of engines pumping wastes from the undercity. The tall hollow pillars had gone a cracked and mottled brown. They stretched half as high as the buildings, beveled at their tops, issuing flatus hot and orange into the sky.

It smells of death , he thought, starvation; decay. Won’t be long until Namerica splashes itself in the same cologne. There were too many people, too many needs. Even with settlements on the Moon and Mars, and Colonytech Industries fighting for the development rights to Europa, ships couldn’t be built fast enough to relieve the world of her human weight. Subterranea had been carved below the bedrock of Namerica for fifty years now, populated by thieves and criminals next to the impoverished and infirm. One look around downtown was all he needed to know it hadn’t been enough. Not by half.

Electricity and water had dropped to half rations. Flushing a toilet before five uses was punishable by imprisonment. It wouldn’t be long before all of them were sitting in darkness, feeling the lice crawl through their beards. By then, Subterranea would seem a dream.

And so what crime is it to seek a little relief? he wondered. I’m a veteran. I bled for this country. Let me save my marriage before the generators go down forever. A few sweet nights with Cheyenne. Is that so much to ask?  

Vaughn halted at an intersection, unsure of whether to go straight or turn. The street signs were rusted beyond any hope of reading. 

The fat man in the night parlor hadn’t spoken of an intersection. What Vaughn had been doing there last night, he could understand no more than what he was doing here now. There were drives in him. Whispers made of ash that burned with playful cinders. He had no choice but to obey. 

For as long as Vaughn could remember the Fire had plagued him, putting space between the grins and nods expected of him by society. He paused too long before responding, never staring at the man or woman speaking, but within them. Sometimes he could see the black steam of their secrets, a dark ink traveling their veins. Everyone had secrets.

Me, most of all...

Straight, he finally decided. The fat man had spoken only of one street. ‘Exit on Tunnel Six and walk until you see the lights.’ With a last look at the bleeding sunset, Vaughn pocketed the UV goggles and walked on.

Ten minutes later a man in a hooded cloak levered himself from a manhole and moved to block Vaughn’s path. “You must be lost, lad.”

Vaughn halted, noting the way the man limped, the momentary imbalance. “I know where I’m going.”

“None of us knows where we’re going. To Hell, some say. To space, say others.” The man peeled down his hood. Blisters the size of coins tattooed his baldness. A few wisps of hair hung over his sooty face. “That’s a Commerce Pass in your hand.”

Vaughn looked down and frowned. What could he expect, holding it out in the open ? He waited for the words to come, hoping his delay betokened more menace than fear. “It’s coded. You know that.”

The cutthroat grinned a shelf of rotten teeth. “Aye, that’s what m’knife is for. Won’t be murder. A man can live without a hand. Even a well-bathed babe like you.”

Vaughn looked past the man to the flickering lights of the Willow Room, pulsing pink and yellow and blue and green, painting the rusted steel in the distance. Almost there. Stay calm. No fire. NO FIRE…

The cutthroat followed Vaughn’s gaze and grunted. “So that’s it. Put a little slick on the root? I’ll tell you what… you buy me and m’boys something to eat, and I’ll let you keep that hand. You caught me in a generous mood.”

Vaughn nodded. “A sandwich, then.” It would do no good to fight when the thief might have help in the shadows. “How many boys do you have?”

The cutthroat shrugged and smiled. “Thirty or so.”

Vaughn felt the Fire scrape its claws along his ribs. Tickling the bone. It was always playful in the beginning, teasing him along. “Well,” he reach into his back pocket, “I have another pass I keep for emergencies.”

“Easy now.” The man slid his right foot behind him. A striking stance, Vaughn noted, though he grimaced to put weight on the limb. “Keep that hand where I can—”

Vaughn raised his arm and twisted it between his fingers, stopping the man mid-speech. The Commerce Pass flickered in the sunset. “I can see you need it more than I do.”

Indignation swept the cutthroat’s face. “I don’t need scrap from you.”

“I thought you wanted my hand. Now you don’t need scrap? Tell me, is every thief in this pisshole as indecisive?”

The man was reaching into his coat, when Vaughn threw the hard plastic pass like a frisbee. “Fetch, boy.”

The man didn’t hesitate, twisting and trying to snatch. He missed. Of course he did. And when he gave his back and his bad knee failed, Vaughn pulled an iron rod from a dump heap and swung it into the back of his skull. 

The Fire came like smoke, gushing from his center, pouring up and out until the pupils of Vaughn’s eyes seemed to flame. Vaughn could feel it beneath his arms and legs, wearing his body like a skin. The knuckles of his hand went white around the pipe, lifting, higher…

“Please,” the man dragged himself, one knee bent in a way that nature had never intended. Several scalp blisters had popped. Puss and blood lathered his neck. “I didn’t have a knife. I was bluffing. I’m starving! Please! PL—”

“—ease.” Cheyenne’s looking at him. The same self-hating frown she exposes only after the lights are off. But this is her real face, the secret she hides from the world. “I just want to be close to you.”

When she scoots near Vaughn, he scoots away, almost falling from the bed. “It’s not you.”

“Then who is it?” She crosses her arms. “My mother told me you were cold. I wouldn’t believe her. The things you whispered when we were young. It had been years since we’d seen each other, but I remembered. I remembered, Vaughn. Do you? I sometimes think you lost more than your spleen in the war.”

This holds more truth than she knows. The pressure breaks old wounds he has hidden from himself. He can feel their seep, their fester. Things rotten and born of violation. Things men must learn to sit and dine with if they mean to survive a war. In a flash, he sees the pulse rays evaporating the faces of those entrenched beside him, the mud and ash sucking at limbs strewn like scraps across a field, screaming boys trying to pack their entrails back inside their bellies. And him above it all, untouched, always ducking before the rays can touch him, always firing before the enemy can, chosen by Death to survive … at the price of lasting memories.

“You’re doing it again.” She shakes her head, helpless.

“Doing what?”

“Looking off into nothing. But it’s not nothing, is it? It’s a very big something. We can beat it, darling.” She claws at her blouse with desperation, climbing to her knees, climbing on top of him. The buttons pop and hit him in the face, the threads snapping. It sounds like a string of fireworks, and then her breasts are in his face, rubbing against his stubble. He can hear her crying, but cannot move to cradle her. He’s frozen. His lips are cold as stone.

“Please,” she rolls over, breasts heaving, and tilts her eyes up through the darkness.

But he is looking off again….

Vaughn saw Cheyenne's face transposed above the bleeding face below him and dropped the pipe on the ground, disgusted with himself.  

The cutthroat curled into a ball, whimpering as his crooked leg dragged along the asphalt. “Please … Please.” You’d think it was the only word he knew.

Vaughn bent down and picked up the second Commerce Pass, holding it for the man to see. “It’s just a business card.” He shook his head, angry, but more at himself for being goaded. “How does that make you feel? Losing your leg for a business card...”

He stood and made for the lights flashing in the dusk, praying for the Fire to leave.

*

By the time he entered the lobby, he was nauseous. While in control, the Fire strengthened him. But when it crawled back to its secret place it left that strength in ashes. Vaughn leaned against the door, studying the dark velvet interior, modeled in the fashion of a 1930s bordello.

“If you’re police, the first one’s free,” said a woman behind the counter. She was small and pale and marvelous, all lips and bangs and blue-shadowed lids. Vaughn could see intelligence behind the artificial green glow of eyes, and an unimpressed languor that could only mean she was a killer. He’d become familiarized with such realities in war, the new recruits boasting and chest thumping, whilst the seasoned infantry looked on with hooded eyes. “Are you police?” she asked again.

Vaughn hesitated, wondering how long war would remain his only measurement of the world. Finally, he shook his head. “A veteran.”

“Veteran’s don’t get a discount.” Her eyes fell to his hands. “Are you going to be trouble?”

Vaughn looked down, saw blood across his knuckles and more sprayed across his coat. Be cool. Be confident. He summoned a smile. “I only respond to trouble.”

“Our willows are pliable. They’re trained to survive.” She leaned on the counter, a black rubber corset squeezing the globes of her breasts. “What’s your pleasure, soldier?”

“Fire.” Vaughn said at once. “Heat. I have a demon in me. I was told you knew how to deal with such pests.”

“A demon?” She looked at his knuckles again. “I have just the girl. But she’s expensive.”

“I have money.”

“Not enough.”

“Try me.”

When she named the price, Vaughn swayed with disbelief. “No whore can be that much.”

“She’s not a whore.” The woman offered a cryptic smile. “She’s a Shifter.”

*

Vaughn told himself he could eat carbohydrate rations instead of the fatty-acid lemon paste he’d grown so fond of; that he could benefit from more exercise on his own two legs, than from the overpriced ride on the Tunnel Worm. And if the seat of his jumper should fray, why he’d just have to mend it. Cheyenne would understand. She would support it. He was here for her, after all. For their love; their union.

The woman led him down a long, cushioned hall the crimson of an inflamed esophagus. His eyes ticked along the doors, hearing the purrs and yelps of paying customers. On his left came a door of clear plastic. A flabby man was strapped with his hands above him. Obscenities had been scrawled in red lipstick across his belly and legs. Even redder were the diagonal welts from the bamboo switch still clutched in his courtesan’s hand. His man breasts were clamped with mousetraps. As Vaughn watched, the woman lifted another toward his crotch and—

Vaughn clamped his jaw and turned away as the snap echoed down the hall. “This is monstrous…”

“It’s a business,” the woman said, ahead of him. “Some men like degradation. Doubly so when it’s witnessed by strangers. The Willow Room holds no judgment. We bend to the wishes of our clients, however bold the request.”

“However bold?”

“Yes.” She stopped at a black lacquered door. A porthole of particle-charged fog glass distorted her reflection. “I know what you are, soldier. Death clings to the men who wield it. There are more of your kind than you know.”

“My kind?”

She smiled, turning, her green retinal implants glowing stronger in the semidarkness. “The struggle is made nobler in isolation, is it not? We cannot bear to think that others struggle beside us. Where there is strength in numbers during conquest, there is only weakness in affliction. A leper may be an oracle on his own. Yet, an island of lepers is a plague.”

Vaughn shifted uncomfortably, ticking his eyes at the Commerce Pass still clutched in his hand. It would be worthless plastic until the next fund distribution. He thought of demanding a refund, of marching briskly into the night and living the rest of his married life as an impotent statue, forever staring from his cold side of the bed.

But when the fog glass cleared he saw her, black hair, a round button nose, high cheeks that tapered into a jawline fit for royalty. She can’t be a whore. She’s too beautiful.

She smiled shyly through the glass.

“Prepare yourself,” the woman said. “You’ve never seen anything like her.”

*

It was slow and tedious, without love or warmth. He felt himself holding back, trying to be proper, to be all the things expected. He brushed her cheek with the affect of a paralytic masseur, his fingers rigid splints of ice; cupped her buttock like a butcher probing for a choice cut of meat.

I sometimes think you lost more than your spleen in the war. It seemed he could hear Cheyenne’s voice, all the loneliness and abject commitment chaining her to the sinking boulder of his apathy.

Then the Fire came.

Sparks at first, licking the center of his solar plexus, awkward in its exploration; but then, finding the tinder, whumping outward in a bell of hot blue flame, his hands dug deeper into her hips, pressing through the tissue until he felt the firm angles of her pelvis. He squeezed her skeleton with the same iron grip that had ensured his prowess on the battlefield, where a compression rifle must be held through even the most terrible of rolls.

Her eyes flashed from silver to black, going round and wide and frightened. “No…” she tried to back away, but he was holding her bones.

“Yes…” The Fire answered.

What am I doing? I have to stop.

She twisted to cry for help, but the Fire struck her through his palm. Not the fist, never the fist, for knuckles could break, while a palm could be used without temperance. 

“We’ve barely begun,” the Fire whispered. “Now sit!”

He swept her knees out from under her, slamming her body down with all his weight. Her head slapped the marble with a sound that was as solid as it was wet—a sound that alarmed him. But he was too far inside, watching behind the flames. He dare not reach out, lest he be consumed.

And so he watched.

As the fire carved her beauty to disfigurement.

*

The woman did not seem alarmed when Vaughn stepped into the plush pink hall with blood lathered up to his elbows.

“You’ll need a shower,” she said matter-of-factly. “And clean clothes.”

A shudder of self-disgust ran through him. To hear a human voice was almost too much to bear. No matter how hard he tried, he could not keep her eyes. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Of course you did. Now … about those clothes.”

Her apparent disregard for his crime almost made him feel normal again. It was how it had been in the bunkers, returning with carnage on your uniform. The men would flick pieces of brain matter from their chevrons, or plot to bake it into an enemy’s eggs. “My Commerce Pass is nearly empty. I need … we need food before the next disbursement.”

“We?” The woman’s green eyes flashed as she turned to regard him. “Are you a man of vows?”

The shame came in a black stampede, wrenching his heart with chains. “I … yes. I have to go.”

He made to push past her, but she stopped him with a firmly outstretched arm; palm first, Vaughn was proud to note. “You misunderstand me. The clothes are included in the price, as is the shower. Now, if you would be so kind as to follow me.”

He spoke as they walked, eyes down, not wanting to see into another clear door; to know what might be happening in the rooms of an enterprise that responded to murder with such stoicism. “I don’t understand what came over me. I killed her. I—”

“You did no such thing.” She dialed a code into a keypad. The ornate bamboo sheet slid back. “She’s a Shifter.”

There was that word again.

Vaughn hovered in the doorway of the steam room, thinking of Cheyenne, what this would do to her. “I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Few men can. It's a fact as old as dust. Think of the Willow Room as a dungeon of exploration. We tear all the limits away. It’s expensive, yes. But also safe.”

He turned on her, trembling. “Safe? I heard her skull crack. I pulled her face off with my—”

And then she stepped into the hallway, silver eyes smiling. The Shifter, he thought, as she slipped from her robe, small breasts trembling with each step. Her hair was no longer black, but auburn and full of curls. She was taller, too. He was sure. But it was her.

There … on her hip. I can still see streaks of blood.

“Hello again,” she whispered, brushing his shoulder as she passed into the steam beyond the doorway. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

*

 He ran home, clean and fresh and trembling. He had no money, and had to sneak onto the Tunnel Worm when one of the monitors turned away. And there, in the stink of human infestation, pressed shoulder to shoulder with the grumbling dispossessed, Vaughn gripped the handrail and smiled.

I cannot feel the fire or the cold. I am … warm. 

*

Cheyenne was already in bed by the time he rode the lift to their Econoflat. The room was small. He could smell that she’d been drinking. I can’t blame her. I’ve driven her to this.

He stood over her bed, a shadow with compassionate eyes. Then he watched his hand reach out to stroke her. She was so soft. A feather of woven bone and muscle. “Are you asleep?”

“Of course not. I can’t sleep when you’re gone.” She rolled over, blinking, her eyes bloodshot and watery. “Where were you? You never stay out late.”

“Therapy, of a sort.” He didn't like lying to her. “I saw a woman about my problem.”

He could see the pain in her eyes. “A woman. Late at night? Therapy? Do you expect me to bel—”

But he cut off her words with a kiss, long and deep and full of everything absent. She stiffened her back, driving her heels into the mattress and bucking her pelvis up. He scooped a hand under her thigh to scoot her closer. 

Then pulled away, staring into her, through her, seeing no secrets, only light. “I love you.” The words came as an admission, a thing left too long imprisoned, swollen and urgent and alive. “I love you more than anything.”

She laughed through her tears, lacing her hands around his neck and pulling him close. “I love you too. Oh God, Vaughn … I love you too.”

The night was filled with moans and urgings, laughter and gasps, and in the morning, when the sun rose through the UV-refracted window to find Cheyenne curled against his shoulder, Vaughn felt perfectly content.

*

He wasn’t healed--not yet; knew in his bones that one day their molten contents would spill forth. But he was better. There were fewer pauses in his speech. He looked at people instead of into them. And Cheyenne had never been happier. She invited guests to dine with them once the funds had been redistributed. She didn’t grudge him for the price of therapy. She insisted on it. So every four months he set out on the Tunnel Worm to The Barrows.

The Shifter smiled every time he came to her. She never asked questions, but somehow knew what mood would be needed to draw the Fire from its nest. Sometimes she insulted him or his manhood. Other times she whined like an insufferable brat. Then came the days she simply looked at him with the demureness of a broken slave. Each time the fire snatched its bate, sheathing his skin and crushing or gnashing or snapping her pretty little fingers like sticks of chalk.

Then he would walk through the glowing pink throat of the hallway and into the mist room, lifting his hands to let the sterile jets massage his body. He felt as a gladiator returning triumphant from the pit. Sometimes the Shifter would shower with him, changing into a man for the sake of his modesty. She told him of her world, a place near a cluster of small planets known as the Hydra’s Tail. How she’d come here she would not say. But she sometimes spoke of beasts called dream hounds, of men with metal teeth that looked human but consumed energy to survive. She spoke of war often.

“This world is a pawn in a game much larger,” she said one night, after toweling the bloody water from her hair. “They are being driven like horses. The Stargazers might have the way of it. It’s not dead light beyond the sky. Those are the charges of battle. And they knock at Earth’s door.”

He paused, staring at her. “War?”

A solemn nod. “You will see.”

And so he did.

*

The Announcement played through the night. He kissed Cheyenne and rubbed the swell of her womb, where his unborn son lie coiled and waiting to meet him. In pulled the buses and rusted trains, repurposed to deliver soldiers to the wide stretches of desert that had been converted to warrior camps. At the foot of the landing, he waved to his wife and promised to come home alive.

As always, the Fire kept him breathing. The demon that had haunted him all of his adult life seemed to know which patch of desert would be unharmed when the plasma nets vaulted through the air like membranous wings, widening before they closed upon the land to melt everything they touched. He had his share of scrapes and spills, and burnt his left hand trying to save an infantryman that had suffered an incendiary dart. The dream of the man’s screaming haunted Vaughn for weeks, the way his eyes and ears and fingernails had broken through with sudden flame, as the toxin searched for the weak points in his body.

He settled himself with memories of Cheyenne, and thought all too often of the Shifter’s words as he gazed into the smoky atmosphere. It’s not dead light beyond the sky. Those are the charges of battle. And they knock at Earth’s door

The Stargazers had their rebellion, though it was short and bloody. Neither side won, unless dying could count as victory. By the end, the desert crusts were so thick with blood and soot that they became known as the Crimson Pans. Bodies had to be vaporized by the tens of thousands. It took four months to fish the corpses from the dunes. On the fifth month at his post-battle station, Vaughn walked into the sunset to admire the glitter of stones across the scorched and glassy pack. It was not until a soldier came to mutter beside him that he realized he was staring at miles of human fillings.

It was a year before his return.

Gray had come into his temples and half the stubble he shaved each morning now came in white. He was nervous to meet his son, and even more so to see what childrearing had done to Cheyenne. He’d heard of women growing depressed, even suicidal, after birthing a living creature. But Cheyenne was all smiles and tears. She covered him in kisses on the crowded landing, to the hoots and heckles of the poor and wounded.

“Look at the soldier and his whore!” 

Vaughn pulled away, bristling, searching for the voice, feeling the twinge of heat, the slow eruption… No, not here. You’re home. Unharmed. 493,000 are dead. Cruelty has a human heart. And there's no heart crueler than one bereft. These men are searching for faces that will never come home. 

They took the Tunnel Worm, Cheyenne chatting without end. Her voice came in and out in waves, while he stared through the blur of rusted walls beneath the city.

I wonder how she is. I wonder what she’s doing. I—

Cheyenne pulled his collar, her bottom lip pinched between her teeth. “What are you doing?”

He knew her fear and reassured her with a smile, pulling her close and staring beyond her shoulder. “I was thinking of how lucky I am.”

That worked.

For a time.

*

His son cried more than a broken siren, keeping him up all hours of the night. Separate rooms, let alone nurseries, were luxuries of the grotesquely rich. Instead, Vaughn sat awake with his hands vised to his ears, staring at the twisting, turning shape in its crib against the wall. He will grow up to hate me. Unless he has the Fire. Then he will kill me. Me and Cheyenne, both.

The fear paralyzed him.

Could it be a disease, passed genetically? Perhaps some great grandfather of his line had tortured men to keep his married life a happy one. The thoughts began to drive him mad, putting space between his responses, forcing him to stare off into nothing and contemplate the nature of his doom.

Cheyenne tried to be happy as the weeks went on, but he could see the falsity in her smile. The way she turned away to weep, lowering her face as if to whisper to their son.

Then came the night when he could no longer stand to watch his child be condemned. He pulled his compression rifle from the hydraulic storage panel and aimed it at the sleeping shape. You can't be doomed to this. This madness. It would be sweeter. Quicker. A flash fire, instead of a smolder that will choke your life with smoke. You'll not love, but for the joy of killing. You will not grin, but for the sight of blood. This is a mercy. A mercy…

His hands were trembling so badly he could hear the clatter of the shoulder strap against the stock.

And then a hand was on his shoulder, the whimpering words, “Please, Vaughn…”

Cheyenne was white as a ghost when he turned, her eyes streaked and swollen. He could not bear to look at them. He walked away, straightbacked and silent, put the rifle back, and slipped into the night.

*

The Tunnel Worm was full of thieves and scoundrels. A cutpurse tried to filch his Commerce Pass, suffering a broken wrist for his crime; for the added insult of drawing a laser blade with his good hand, Vaughn slammed the man’s face into a pole so many times he began to choke on his own teeth. When the Worm reached Tunnel Six, Vaughn stepped over the trembling body, and made his way into the street.

The Barrows were lined with trashfires. New graffitos had erupted everywhere. THE STARS AWAIT US and THE REVOLUTION HAS JUST BEGUN and SCIENCE IS BLIND. The men and women and children that lined the streets watched him as rats will watch a passing snake.

They are afraid of me, he realized. There was a time I could hide it. One war is too many … but two?

He didn’t want to think about what he’d done, about his son laying there with a pulsecharge of compressed matter hovering inches from his skull. Do baby’s dream? Does mine dream of madness?

Had he pulled the trigger, the blast would have likely taken out the floor, the sub wall, and the support girders beneath. He could have dislodged the entire room. At least, the three of us would be together. A family. 

On he pressed, trembling, searching for the lights of the Willow Room.

*

“No.”

Vaughn froze before the storefront, its windows shattered and empty and cold. What felt like a shelf of rock displaced suddenly in his chest. His ribs were crumbling. He fell to his knees, kicking at what was left of the broken glass.

“NOOOOOOOO!”

Crawling now, like an animal, thinking of Cheyenne, of his son, of all he stood to lose. Thinking of the war and his need for it, his hunger. 

You’re a soldier. 

He stopped. Closed his eyes. Slow deep breaths.

Soldiers fight.

Vaughn staggered to his feet. Wiped the tears from his eyes... 

And slowly made his way back toward the crowds, feeling flames lick his steel interior, and wondering which of the street rats would serve to cast the demon from his heart.       

    

[Note from the author: We all have intimacy issues. There are those that want too much of it, and those revolted by it. Amy, the angel I keep in chains, is a touchy, feely girl. She loves to cuddle, to stroke my chest, to run her fingers through my hair. It's alright if you're vomiting. I get it. But the Gordian Knot known as Carson Standifer grew up with a stiff peck from mother and a father that was, quite literally, a ghost. My mom raised me after my father died. I inherited her form of demonstrative love. I do things to show I care. I do not type out loving messages in the pressure of tickling fingers. One can easily see the conflict. Well, this story came from that. A granule of life experience that layers of imaginative clam mucous have transformed into the pearl below these words. So go on. Enjoy it! Bore a hole in it and wear it around your neck!]