Torched

by John Brosnan

Genres: Humor & Satire; Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

First, you feel uncomfortably hot. But it's no use turning up the air conditioning or reaching for a long, cool drink. Whatever you do, the temperature inside you keeps rising. And rising. Soon you're in agony beyond your wildest nightmares as your whole body is engulfed in searing, unbearable heat. You go mad briefly with the pain. Then, with luck, you black out. If your luck holds, you're dead soon after. Very dead. But your involuntary cremation continues. Your blood boils in your veins for a few seconds - before it bursts them. As your tortured corpse dries out from the horror-heat inside it, your skin blisters, pops, bursts - and then flares into scorching flame fueled by your own melding body-fat. Clouds of choking, greasy smoke join the searing blaze consuming what's left of you. You have become your own funeral pyre...

Release date: July 31, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 176

Sample

Al Andrade took a seat in the Palm Court of New York’s Plaza Hotel without the slightest thought of getting laid.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Not much else had been on his mind since he hit town on Thursday to attend the International Rail Transport Exposition.

With the devotion of a man who’d put in ten years solid service as Amtrak’s Passenger Service Manager in Stockton, Cal., he’d made the rounds of the convention stands, filled his pocket with business cards and handed out dozens of his own. He’d attended seminars where Basil Enderby from British Rail talked about Revised Ticketing Procedures for Combined Rail/Boat Traffic, and Dr Henrich Lemkow explain what happened to Enderby’s passengers when they transshipped at Stuttgart.

But most of the time he thought about getting laid.

Not just a casual poke. He could get that back in Stockton any time from Helen, his secretary of eight years, or from the waitress in his local bar whom he’d dated casually ever since his divorce two years earlier. Hell, there was always snatch if you listened long enough to their synopses of office politics and didn’t flinch when they ordered a double Chivas Regal and Coke.

But it wasn’t New York snatch.

That was different. Had to be different, Al reasoned, if only because everything in New York was the most sophisticated, the most elegant, State of the Art. He couldn’t shake the memory of Manny Levine, rep for the local Honeywell office, drooling, dammit, as he described how he’d called up from his New York hotel room for a girl.

‘Just picked up the phone. Easy as that. And half an hour later, there was this knock on the door. Jane Fonda! I’m tellin’ you, Al. Only younger. And bigger tits. She came in and looked me up and down and she said – and this is the absolute truth – she said, “Well, I think I’m going to enjoy this.”’

Then there had been the details. Deliberate. Graphic. Manny didn’t make it in computer sales by being inexact. For weeks after, Al could almost feel that warm, wet, all-enveloping …

‘Tea for you, sir?’

Andrade felt the blush rising out of his collar, as if his fantasies had been audible to everyone in the crowded Palm Court. But the waiter standing over him hadn’t even looked down.

‘Oh, yeah. Tea. Sure.’

‘We’re featuring Earl Grey today, sir. A delicate large-leaved tea scented with Jasmine and Oil of Bergamot.’ He gabbled it out, for the hundredth time that afternoon.

‘That’s fine.’

‘Milk or lemon?’

‘Lemon, I guess.

‘Selection of cakes or a pastry from the cart?’

‘Uh, well …’

But he was gone. The cart arrived a few moments later, and Al took a large prune Danish, more to look inconspicuous than because he felt hungry. Struggling to dissect it with the tiny fork, he put this experiment down as yet another bad idea.

He’d booked into the Plaza because that was where Manny had his big night. But he’d never had the courage to pick up the phone and use the number Manny had so carefully written for him on the back of his business card. And no matter where he went in New York, he could feel the tab mounting up on his American Express card.

After the crowds of midtown Manhattan, the Palm Court had looked pleasant – a leafy, half-shadowed open restaurant, a cut above the average hotel coffee shop. His feet were killing him after the long cross-town walk to save cabfare, and he didn’t feel like facing the stifling mid-afternoon stuffiness of his room or the accusing telephone jeering at his cowardice from the night table.

A low barrier and a fence of greenery divides the Palm Court from the Plaza’s eastern entrance. But anyone on his way through from Fifth to the main lobby could glance in. From the moment he sat down at the little table and realized he was the only man in the place, Al felt as conspicuous as the bouncer at a drag ball.

And a glance at the menu didn’t help. This whim was going to cost him better than $25.

All around him, groups of women gabbled and chattered in a clinking of cups that all but drowned the tinkle of the pianist who valiantly kept up a non-stop Jerome Kern medley from somewhere on the far side of the central fountain. Al recognized ‘All The Things You Are’, and felt the years rest their weight on his shoulders like a sodden overcoat. His ex-wife made him watch the movie in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang that. What was it called? Jazz Time? No …

He was still trying to remember the film’s name when the girl next to him dropped her cup.

It didn’t drop far. Maybe a couple of inches into her saucer. But the noise was enough to attract his attention. He looked at her for the first time.

She was gorgeous.

Not more than twenty-five or twenty-six, and dressed in a neat dark blue linen suit and a white blouse, like some French schoolgirl. There was nothing schoolgirlish, though, about the breasts that pouted under the ruffles of the blouse, or the ankles he glimpsed beneath the table.

She looked flushed. But Al took that for the hot red make-up he’d got used to after the first day or two in New York. The dark blusher along the cheekbones emphasized the planes of her face, and brought out the flash of her dark eyes under the tight pulled-back hair.

None of this registered at once. What Al Andrade did see instantly was the expression on her face.

She was terrified.

He opened his mouth to speak without even thinking about it.

‘You OK, miss?’

She had been looking over his shoulder. He tried to follow her gaze, but saw only the queue of three or four people waiting for tables. When he looked back, she was staring directly at him.

‘Are you staying here?’ Her voice was soft, educated, tight with fear.

‘Here? In the Plaza, you mean? Yes. Yes, sure.’

‘What room?’

‘It’s …’ He almost reached for the key, stopped himself and with an effort of will concentrated on picturing the door. ‘Uh, 1117.’

‘Go up. I’ll see you there in a few minutes.’

Al looked blank. His heart pounded. This wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be happening.

‘Please!’ The quick smile made a stab at coquetry. ‘You won’t be sorry. I promise you.’

He was in the elevator, watching the numbers flick towards 8 before he stopped trembling.

Had he lucked out? Incredibly? Accidentally? And for free?

In the room, Al pulled down the shade on the view of the Plaza’s airshaft that was all his expense account could run to. Hurriedly he cleaned his teeth, and rubbed on a stinging slap of Brut after-shave.

Then he looked at his drawn forty-eight-year-old face in the mirror and told himself to stop taking himself for a sucker. That girl was no hooker turning a quick trick; and what would any straight girl with those looks want with …

The phone rang. Al watched it shrill for six rings. Was she calling from downstairs to mock him? Maybe it was the House Detective. If they had such things in real hotels, not just in cheap Hollywood private eye movies. Had someone heard them talking? New York had the Sullivan laws against handguns. Maybe getting laid was illegal …

The phone stopped ringing abruptly. In the silence that followed, he hardly heard the soft knock on his door.

The dim light of the hallway deepened her flush. She looked even more feverish than she had downstairs. She walked past him, silent, and watched as he closed the door. Only then did she seem to relax.

Al cleared his throat. ‘Say, you look awful.’

Dumb, dumb.

‘Could you use a drink? I’ll ring down.’

‘No.’

She sat down on the bed, hunched forward, elbows on knees, face in hands. When she looked up, she was more composed. ‘No, don’t bother. What’s your name?’

‘Andrade … Uh, Al. Listen, it’s no trouble to get that drink.’

‘Al, I need to … keep out of the way for an hour or two. Can I stay here?’

‘Sure. Of course. As long as you like.’ A vestigial caution made him regret it even as he said it. If this was a shake-down, he had left himself no means of escape.

‘Only … well, I’m here for this convention. I should catch the evening session.’ Without his eyes registering the time, he stared at his watch.

She stood up and matter-of-factly kicked off her shoes.

‘I don’t expect you to do it for nothing.’ She turned her back. ‘Will you unbutton me, please.’

His hand trembled too much to more than fumble at the tiny cloth-covered black buttons. But he loosened enough of them to open the back of the dress, and reveal her naked back. It was flushed too, he noticed, the skin mottled over the shoulder-blades.

She wriggled the dress down to her ankles, hooked thumbs into the waist of her pantyhose and skinned them off along with the coffee lace briefs he could see drawn tight across her ass under the nylon.

Without turning, she crawled across the wide bed, tits swaying, the pale cheeks of her ass jiggling in the gloom. Collapsing on her back, she rested one forearm across her eyes and lay waiting, one knee bent, eyes closed.

Al’s fingers refused to function. He undid his tie, but his fingers were as recalcitrant with his own shirt buttons as they had been with those on her dress. Giving up on the shirt, he fumbled open the buckle on his belt. The jut of his erection caught the elastic of his underpants as he struggled to haul off underwear, socks and loafers with the ease she had shown. They came to rest as a tangled rope around his ankles.

On the bed, the girl moaned.

Now he understood the flush, the humid look around her eyes. A nympho! Couldn’t wait for it. Needed it, like dope. Anyone would do. Any casual pick-up. Contempt replaced his awe, and contempt fuelled his lust.

In blue socks and half-unbuttoned drip-dry white-on-white shirt, Al scrabbled his way across the bed and threw himself on her.

She didn’t struggle. Her body was limp, though it seemed to shudder as he ran his hands over it.

Tits. Glorious. Young and full. Tight. Nipples puckered to nubbins. The body slim, but ripe at the hips and thighs. His fingers prised her open, felt the heat, the wetness.

Grabbing her knees, Al thrust them almost level with her head and, kneeling, felt his penis slide deep into her.

Two strokes, and he was on the brink of orgasm. He looked down into the flushed, blind, beautiful face a few inches below his.

The eyes opened. He had time to see they weren’t black but a deep, deep evening blue, before she gaped at him. And screamed.

Instinctively his hand went to her mouth. The scream became a muffled gasp, almost a choke.

Even through the tunnel vision of arousal, he could see something was wrong. The girl looked … sick. No, more than sick.

In the corner of his eye he caught a movement. With the window shade drawn, the room was in half-darkness, but something was throwing a shadow on the ceiling above him.

His shadow.

Her mouth was still tight closed almost as if she was getting ready to throw up. And as he watched, her whole face began to … glow. Like a candle-lit pumpkin on a Halloween window-sill.

His nostrils caught the wisp of some disgusting stench. Al remembered as a kid throwing the stiff corpse of a dead cat onto a backyard fire and smelling that same throat-closing stink.

He lifted his hand in disbelief from the girl’s mouth. Her lips sagged open.

A curl of vapour wisped from the pink cavity, like the last thread of smoke from an extinguished cigarette.

At the same moment he felt the thighs pressed against his own become feverishly hot. And warmth played over his shrinking erection as if he stood only a few feet from an open blaze.

The girl coughed – a last, racking death rattle that turned to a long exhaling sigh.

And flame gushed out between her teeth into his screaming, incredulous face.

The place stank.

Three hours earlier it had been the premises of a small publisher. Two levels of warehousing, filled with books, and two floors of offices above. Old and rickety, held up mostly by the identical buildings on either side, and stuffed with paper, chemicals and its own accumulated dusts, the place had burned as if that was what it was built to do.

Richard Grierson left his car at the corner, by the police barricade, and walked the length of Dock Road, avoiding the litter of hoses and the occasional needle spray of water jetting from a poor join. The moon was down, and it was two hours to dawn.

The Thames that crawled along blackly behind this row of converted harbourside warehouses on London’s South Bank, betrayed its existence neither in sight nor sound. Just another of London’s ghosts.

Further down Dock Road, the blue flash of a rotating police Rover’s lamp and a knot of people huddled around the open door of an ambulance showed that law and order had already been imposed on the chaos of the fire. A tall, thin, balding man seemed to be the centre of attention; draped in a blanket, and clutching a mug of tea, he spoke animatedly to the three blue-uniformed policemen who ringed him. One took notes.

Grierson ignored the group. There’d be time later to talk about the fire. First, he needed to reacquaint himself with his adversary, introduce himself personally to this newest incarnation of his ancient ancestral enemy.

With the river so close, there’d been no problem putting it out. Water, black with ash, still rivered through the wide goods entrance on the ground floor, guarded now only by the few remaining inches of the wooden doors, hanging drunkenly on heat-twisted hinges.

Hands in the pockets of his raincoat, head tucked well into his scarf, Grierson stepped into an environment as familiar to him as the bedroom he’d left an hour before.

With practised skill, he closed his nostrils to the smell of the burned building, breathing shallowly through a mouth that would, he knew, carry its reminders of smoke and soot and accelerated decay for the rest of the day.

Breathing like that was just another survival characteristic for a fire insurance investigator. It went with the pair of black wellington boots that never stayed in the closet long enough to get cleaned, and so still bore on their soiled soles and insteps the accumulated mud and ash of a dozen sites like this one.

It went with the ability to wake alert from a deep sleep made deeper by Valium, haul on heavy clothing against the London winter night, brew and drink a mug of scalding tea, climb into the ancient Daimler and drive ten miles through the wet empty streets without really waking up until you turned into the street roped off by police and criss-crossed with the fat worms of firehoses.

It went with being able to forget what it was like when the street you turned into was your street, with all its familiar landmarks – Morelli’s fruit shop on the corner, the bus shelter with the graffiti halfway down the block and the house turned to a black decayed tooth in the neat suburban smile of Macmillan Crescent your house …

Grierson kicked savagely at a black hump of debris. It disintegrated into a blizzard of white paper; pages of a book, each eaten by fire around the edges, so that the text was vignetted neatly by black edging, like the invitation to a state funeral.

One wool-gloved hand awkwardly picked up a page, and held it at an angle to the light from the street lamp just outside.

‘… came to a horrible sight. The body of a white man was staked out on the ground and disembowelled. There yet remained the embers of the smouldering fire that consumed him. If the Indians are hurried for time, and cannot stay to witness the prolonged torture of their victim, it is their custom to pinion the captive and place hot coals on his vitals.

The horror and fright this gave us women …’

Grierson crumpled the paper and dropped it back on the heap. Once the irony of that quote in this setting would have surprised, even amused him. But he hadn’t been surprised or amused for years now.

A London Fire Service man crunched down from the floor above and stared curiously at his shape in the darkness of the first floor.

‘Can’t come in here, sir.’

Grierson lifted his face to the light.

‘Oh, Mr Grierson. This one of yours, is it? I didn’t think Ipswich and Midland handled this kind of property.’

Grierson looked out through the door, towards the policemen grouped round the balding man.

‘That the owner?’

‘Tall chap. Yes.’

‘Find anything up there?’

‘Shouldn’t go up till I have a word with the Superintendent, sir.’

Grierson headed for the stairs. ‘How many?’

‘Looks like two. But you can’t…’

Not much remained of the stair risers, but the concrete and metal structure was firm enough. Keeping close to the wall, Grierson climbed to the first floor. A few seconds later, the Brigade man joined him.

‘Over here,’ he said resignedly, leading him to the furthest corner of the gutted building.

Two featureless lumps three feet long lay on the floor. Only an expert would immediately have identified them as human corpses.

Humanity had disappeared with the first searing touch of the flames. The limbs were grotesquely distorted. The hands, feet and other extremities had been burned off. So had the scalps. It was impossible to tell if they . . .