_ Hiiro

  It all happened like something from a dream.

  I saw three puffs of smoke in the air just milliseconds before another three detonations ripped upwards from the ship's deck. It was so fast, so perfectly coordinated, that if I hadn't already been looking that way I'd have missed it. I saw the flash, then I heard the thunder as it battered my car and tore my cigarette from my lips.

  The follow-up shockwaves hit me but this time I was blinking, so I missed them. My car took the brunt of it, rocking on its suspension as the mirrors cracked. If there'd been anything in my stomach the body-blow would have had me puking as my ears rung like a faulty compressor. I opened my eyes.

  Malik was gone. His door was wide open, one of his extinguishers had fallen out and was slowly rolling for the sea. I vacantly wished it the best of luck with that. Then Malik was back at my car, half shoving, half throwing a protesting Celio into the back seat.

  Another trio of detonations gutted Diego's wounded ship. I saw a speck of a man thrown thirty meters into the air, growing larger as he came closer before splattering on the ferrocrete then pulped further by a fleeing truck. The other ship was trying to cast off but they couldn't cut the shore lines faster than bullets could fly. It wasn't just the ships either, the entire dockside was a riot of explosions and noise and sheer anarchy. Men were running, shooting and screaming. Some fell and only a rare few that did got back up.

  More puffs of smoke in the air. Things were zipping past me, some embedding in my car or gouging at its hull, sparks clattering off stone and metal. Malik sagged down for a split second, then pulled himself into the car using his arms more than his legs. His mouth was moving but I couldn't make out the words. He looked mad. He was shouting. Shouting at me.

  Malik grabbed at my shoulder, ruffling my clothes, pulling himself closer to my face still shouting that same nonsense word. It wasn't that I couldn't hear him, I just couldn't understand. It was like all language had lost its meaning. He didn't make any sense. Nothing was making sense. I blinked again and looked around laggardly.

  The third salvo to hammer down on the doomed ship was all incendiaries. White-hot fizzing fire that melted steel and set the salty sea ablaze. A man threw himself from the ship, but the water offered no sanctuary. He burned before he could drown. I was jealous of him in that moment.

  The fire was right. Horrific as it was I felt some misbegotten kinship with it as I stared at the inferno. Some part of me longed to reach out and caress those alkaline flames, to hold them as one might a dying animal and offer it some small comfort. It was living energy made manifest in the simplest form. The fire was unburdened, set free to do as it wanted. There was something rather peaceful about the idea.

  Malik was still pawing at me, shouting his nonsense words as he bled all over my car's interior. That was rather inconsiderate of him. If he was going to make a mess he should do it out there with the rest of them in all that madness; not in here where things were safe and sensible.

  I thought about telling him that, but the words… what was that word he kept using? It was the same one, over and over and over again. I was certain I knew it, but I couldn't make any sense of it. For some reason it felt like I should though. It sounded like-

  "-DRIVE! Dammit man, DRIVE! Get us out of here! DRIVE! Somewhere! Anywhere but here! Get this piece of shit in gear and DRIVE!"

  I could understand him again.

  A cold, numb dread finally penetrated my mind, shattering my surreal serenity. I couldn't tell how long I'd zoned out. Had it even been a full minute? I blinked, a sleepwalker who suddenly found himself in a very real nightmare.

  Men were burning, fleeing, screaming, fighting, and dying. More explosions pounded into the docks, targeting the arms shipment I was parked squarely in the center of. The mercs were fighting off a swarming mass of approaching enemies and those armored titans were being pushed back.

  I slammed the car into gear and floored the accelerator headed for our escape route through the solar grid, passed the neighboring industrial zone and then into the city. The docks were a mess of scattered steel and mangled meat. Warehouses had been ripped open and cast onto the streets, cranes toppled onto trucks and catwalks dropped to form a cluttered maze of destruction.

  The fighting was everywhere, from all sides but above and that's where the bombs were dropping from. I glanced in my rearview to see if anyone was following, but there was only chaos beyond my empty back seat. I slammed on the brakes.

  "What are your doing?! DRIVE!" Malik roared.

  "Where's Celio?" I asked, my voice so unnaturally flat and calm that I sounded like a stranger in my own ears. Malik scanned the backseat and came to the same realization I had.

  "Fuck me running." He breathed.

  Tires squealing, I fishtailed the car away from safety back into the firefight. I couldn't tell who was winning or where the fighting was worse. It was Hell and Yomi and Pandemonium all at once. The mercs were titans among men, mountains of solid wrath in a sea of churning insanity. I saw one take a blast just meters overhead and they stomped out of the smoke covered in metal thorns to keep fighting. Everyone who wasn't wearing several tonnes of armor wasn't nearly as fortunate. The docks were a war zone.

  I spotted something. Two pudgy men hunkering behind a downed merc's armor. Diego was dyed red, firing his pistol blindly over their barricade while Celio held in his brother's spilt guts. There was blood on the ground, too much for anyone to walk away from.

  I swerved around a merc stomping towards the enemy, throwing the car into a long drift that threatened to turn into another rollover but didn't. I dodged a burning truck and flattened a man in unmarked fatigues under my crash bar. I'd overshot Celio by a ways and had to bring the car back around to his position.

  A trail of smoke caught my eye. I had a single instant to wonder if the approaching object reminded me more of a thrown spear or something vaguely phallic. It was long, had a bulbous head and narrow shaft sporting some fins. I didn't have time to make a decision.

  The rocket propelled grenade struck my car's hood square on the side. My engine block never had a prayer, my front axle even less so.

  My whole car veered like some giant toddler had given it a savage kick during a tantrum. We spun out, my head found the cracked driverside window, then the shattered windscreen when we slammed into something unmoving.

  I felt hot water trickling down into my left ear. I tasted blood and a cursory attempt to moisten my lips turned up a chipped tooth. My lap felt warm too and I thought I'd pissed myself but I was just on fire— which was far more comforting in that moment than it had any right to be. Malik was simultaneously struggling with the radio and a fire extinguisher beside me. He doused me with white foam and I heard him speaking.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "Bait Tray has spilled. Spare Trolley, Spare Trolley, you are a Go. I say again, Spare Trolley is a Go." Malik repeated, two fingers on his throat mic.

  My car was dead, the front end completely totaled beyond any hope of salvage. Despite the situation, I was more put off by that fact than anything else. All the hours I'd put into reworking my car, adjusting everything I could until I knew the ins and outs of that car down to the tiniest detail, wasted. All the experimentation, the trial and error that went into teaching myself just what I could or couldn't do, was for nothing. The arms race of protection and destruction was a rigged game and I was sick of being its chump.

  Malik was untangling his carbine from where it'd been wedged and stray shots were pinging off my car's rear armor, but it all felt so pointless. All that time, lost. It reminded me of what Bim had said in the gardens before they too were destroyed to fuel Celio's ambitions. The inherent destructive nature of humanity and just how fragile everything we made really was. It was all about the contrast, knowing the depths of just how bad things could be made it easier to appreciate when things weren't so scat. I think she already knew that but the gravity of our conversation finally dawned on me just then.

  "Because life is a finite resource…" I mumbled, the words slipping from my split lips of their own accord.

  "Yeah, well your's may be running low but I've got plenty left in the tank." Malik retorted breathlessly, checking the chamber of his carbine. "Spare car's coming in now. Once Celio's on it, I'm getting the hell out of here. We've done our part."

  Another nearby explosion rocked my lifeless car and I finally shook myself into action. We'd crashed into one of the warehouses lining the docks— a regular one thankfully, not one being used to store parts of the arms deal. I strained at my stuck seatbelt, burning my way clear of it with a few savage tears of my scorching hands when it failed to yield. Malik was clearing the shattered windscreen with his carbine's muzzle, making a path to crawl out that didn't take us through the escalating firefight behind us. More gunfire was steadily finding the ass end of my car and based off its persistence these shots weren't strays. Malik took the lead, dragging his bloody ass ahead of me as I tried not to get myself too slicked in his mess.

  "What's the plan from here?" I asked, slapping the foam and broken glass off me unto the warehouse floor.

  "I'll go this way," Malik said, pointing left and deeper into the warehouse. "You go that way." This time pointing right, out into the battle raging on the other side of a thin tin wall. "Whoever gets to the Client first keeps him safe and throws his ass in the backup car. Then we sit on his dumbass until we're back at the palace."

  "I like half of that plan." I said, pulling a crushed cigarette from my fire-suppressant soaked pocket. It took some doing, but I got the little bastard lit between my scorching fingers.

  "Tough. That's the job." Malik said.

  Malik tried to take off at a jog but the shrapnel that'd clipped his legs made itself known. He stumbled, probed his bloodied clothes and grabbed fat wads of gauze and bandages from his medical supplies. He fumbled his third wrap sending the roll of gauze tumbling to the rubble strewn floor.

  "Hold still." I said, reaching for his weeping lacerations.

  Malik took a step back, dragging his leg in a weak limp.

  "We don't have time for this." I growled seizing his leg with my offhand.

  "What are you going to do to me?!" He sounded more accusatory than anything else.

  I ignored him, too focused on the steady stream of red gushing down his thigh in time with his beating heart. I was no doctor, but I'd killed enough people to know what an artery looked like when it bled. The other cuts were flesh wounds but the one on his thigh would bleed him dry. He had minutes at best.

  "Sit down, now." I said, again my voice so flat and even that I sounded like a stranger. I'd never known I could speak so calmly, I didn't even sound human. More like a machine.

  A fireball outside illuminated the gloomy warehouse in rich ruby hues as it clawed its way upwards. Malik tried to take another step away but my hand was like iron around his leg. He finally saw what I did.

  "Tourniquet." He mumbled, barely loud enough to be heard over the gunfire. "I have tourniquets."

  He was pale now, digging in his pouches as he landed heavily on his rear. The pink-skinned mercenaries (Caucasians, I'd learned was the proper term for them) always looked pale, but now he was white instead of pink. I pulled a wad of bandages from my own laden pockets and they started smoking as soon as I touched them. My offhand felt lukewarm at best but my right was burning up, the air around it shimmering with heat. I watched the bandage crumble to ashes in my hand for a long second, then I looked to Malik's weeping leg and had a really bad idea.

  "What are you going to do!?" He weakly demanded, as I let the ashes slip from my fingers.

  I had no idea what I was actually going to do or if it would work, but I mustered up that calm stranger inside of me and gave him his script.

  "Just like lighting a cigarette." I mumbled.

  Malik must've thought I'd gone insane, assuming he hadn't thought that already, but he was too weak to fight me. I rubbed my fingers together, allowing the energy inside me to flow just like I would to spark up a smoke, letting the heat build without escaping in a combustive rush. It was like trying to siphon only a little bit of fuel from a pressurized tank on the verge of blowing its top. This killing heat inside of me wanted out, it was a volcano that needed to erupt when all I wanted was one, very hot finger.

  "Just like lighting a cigarette." I repeated, more for myself though Malik grit his teeth and closed his eyes.

  "I'm dead either way." He said, resigned to his fate. "Just get it over with already!"

  I shoved my cauterizing finger into the wound and he screamed a wordless growl of pain between clenched teeth. The scent of burning meat filled my nose and I remembered my doomed visit to the arctic after we'd ran out of food but before we'd ran out of burnables to cook with. My inner fire tried to make its escape but I held it fast, clamping down on it. Flames started jetting up my arm like the tails of a rocket, all the while my finger seared Malik until his leg was medium-well. I tore my finger from the wound, chucks of blackened tissue clinging to my finger until they too were scorched to cinders and fell away as ash.

  As soon as I released him, Malik rolled face down and howled in poorly-muffled agony. I took a few deep breaths that smelled of unhappy memories, trying to suppress the rampaging flames inside of me and largely failing. I was still losing the battle when Malik rolled over and examined his leg.

  "It's still bleeding." He cursed. "Again! Deeper this time."

  "I can't-" I panted, spitting a swath of sparks as I did.

  "Again!" He commanded in a low roar, before stuffing a clump of fabric in his mouth.

  And that was the end of the discussion. The flames were ecstatic for another chance to slip the reins, leaping off my arm at the slightest lapse in focus. I took a breath and held it, smothering myself and the killing heat inside me. I could do this! Just like before but bigger, but not too much bigger. I just had to funnel a full-scale calamity down to a campfire and hold it in my hands. No big deal. Reluctantly, I released my breath.

  "I'm lighting a… Cigar." And I thrust two searing fingers inside of him.

  Malik howled into his gag. The warehouse smelled of bloody meat and acrid smoke and spent gunpowder. I retched dry heaves into my mouth. A trio of gunshots punched through the thin, tin warehouse walls a meter to my left. Malik's eyes rolled in their sockets as his leg bucked in my grasp. The bleeding stopped.

  "It stopped." I could barely believe my eyes.

  "Go. Celio." He whispered, strength failing him.

  I grabbed his rifle from where he'd dropped it and placed it nearby. I barely knew him, but it didn't feel right to leave him there, half insensate and wounded.

  "No dead heroes, right?" I asked, trying to force some cheer into my voice and failing utterly.

  "Not me." Malik said weakly. "Not even one. Go."

  I nodded my understanding. There was nothing left to say. I could see it in his eyes, he believed it. Somehow he actually thought we'd make it out of this, alive if not intact. He nodded back and propped himself into a sit with his carbine across his bloodied lap. There was this look of defiant certainty to him that I struggled to place. At a guess, it looked like he had faith.

  I fumbled a cigarette in my mouth and lit it around the charred meat still clinging to my fingers. I wanted another to take the edge off this whole insane situation, but there wasn't time to dawdle. I spotted a handy passage recently blasted from a nearby wall and charged through to curling smoke, pistol in hand. My respite from the battlefield had hardly been two minutes but the battle was already turning.

  It was still Hell, but I could see that we were winning.