PYROGEIST

By Trent Roman

Tyrell Simmons loved the heat. He loved the feel of warmth on his flesh, loved the way it would sluice off his skin in waves of sweat and steam. A series of girlfriends and coworkers had complained in the past about his tendency to turn up the interior heating to levels they were uncomfortable with, but which Tyrell had always found a tad bit chilly. He had a lifetime membership with a health club here in Chasm City, and though he did use their other facilities to keep himself in good enough shape to carry out his job, he readily admitted that most of his time was spent in the steam rooms and hot tubs. His idea of a perfect vacation invariably involved some kind of desert; he’d been out to Death Valley several times during his time off from the station, and dreamed of eventually stashing away enough money to afford trips aboard, to the Gobi or the Kalahari or the mother of them all, the Sahara. Even if he hadn’t been born with a smooth shade of onyx skin, he expected that his flesh would have blackened by now from the blistering temperatures he had exposed it to these last twenty-eight years.

Perhaps that was why he, alone amongst all his brothers-in-arms, could see their Adversary. Perhaps it was why he alone could truly wage their war.

A final kick was all that was needed to break down the door in front of him, already weakened by successive blows from his axe and the warping effects of the heat. Hefting his axe, Tyrell walked through the doorway. The corridor beyond was wreathed in flames, and Tyrell nodded to himself. He was getting closer.

Many of his coworkers hated the heat, hated the fire. They talked about it in the way one would take about a wild and rabid beast, killing without finesse. Tyrell had never joined in this kind of talk, and indeed didn’t understand how they could do this job day in and day out if they didn’t get the same thrill from the flames that he did. He supposed that because they were firefighters, they had to hold their prey in contempt if they were to continue to hunt it. But Tyrell knew that all of civilization would have been impossible without that promethean spark. He saw his job more like a dance, albeit with a dangerous partner; weaving strands of life and death in an intricate fabric of necessity.

Through the tinted faceplate of his breath-mask, he saw a sudden burst of flame cross the intersection at the end of the corridor. Explosion… or something else? This was an apartment complex in a lower-middle class neighborhood, certainly containing plenty of fire hazards and domestic paraphernalia which could explode if exposed to sufficient heat, let alone the taste of the flames themselves. But Tyrell trusted his instincts, honed over the years since he had joined the band of brothers working out of Station 24. He felt strongly that he had just spotted his ultimate quarry. He took a deep breath of the canned air from the oxygen tanks on his back and moved deeper into the inferno.

Tyrell felt confident that there was nobody left inside this portion of the building. His first priority was always the protection of non-combatants, fulfilling the oath he’d sworn the first time he pinned his Chasm City Fire Department badge to his chest. But people ran away from fire, and this was where the conflagration had started. If anybody had been trapped in here by the spreading inferno, Tyrell knew that He would have already found them by now.

He reached the intersection and cautiously placed one boot into the cross-corridor. The ceiling above him was awash in waves of flames, but Tyrell’s experienced eye judged it would hold long enough for his purpose. The floor felt solid under his foot, and Tyrell decided that it was safe to proceed. The greatest danger in a burning building, he knew, was very rarely the fire itself. Most charred corpses he’d come upon in his career had been subjected to the caress of the flames only after they had died, either of asphyxia or from structural collapse.

Through the burning corridor he proceeded, axe at the ready, stalking his prey. The first time he had seen Him was in a five-story, two-body blaze in a condominium very similar to this one, if slightly more well-off. Though the subsequent investigation had not turned up any cause for the fire other than ruling out arson – more to allay the fears of the public than from actual evidence – Tyrell knew better. After becoming separated from his squadmates, he had come upon the remarkable sight of Him dancing His merry dance inside one of the rooms, anything He touched bursting into flames.

At first he had thought it was some poor civilian who had somehow caught fire from head to toe, becoming a human torch. It was when he had attempted to smother the Entity to put out the flames that he realized there was nothing solid behind that sheet of fire. Spiteful, charcoal-black eyes had stared out at him reproachfully before the illusion of human form had collapsed into independent tendrils of flames, escaping through the cracks and holes it had burned into the walls of the room. Since then he’d encountered the Adversary a number of times. Not all fires were set by Him, of course, not even a majority; though Tyrell thought that sometimes large fires would summon Him, drawn to the blaze much like Tyrell and his brothers were, albeit for evidently different reasons. But enough fires in this city went unsolved that Tyrell suspected the Entity often took a more pro-active approach to His feeding habits.

Something crackled beneath him, and Tyrell looked down. He’d stepped on the remnants of a cardboard box holding what seemed to be personal effects. One of the residents had apparently decided to pack up some valuables when the alarm first rang out, only to wisely abandon them when the true extent of the inferno became apparent. He looked back up, and suddenly he saw Him. Vaguely humanoid in appearance, His unsubstantial body was made up entirely of fire, and He was continuously shifting in hues from red to orange to yellow. Tiny licks of flame detached themselves from Him, either to light upon a welcoming surface or to sputter and die. Though his back was turned to Tyrell, the vaguely translucent nature of the Entity was such that he could see the black pits of His eyes and mouth through His head. Most of His other features were indistinct: no nose or ears to speak of, bald unless one considered the crown of flames wreathing his head to be His equivalent of hair, fingers continuously forming and rejoining with the whole at the end of his arms.

Tyrell had never been a deep thinker, nor was he a particularly religious man. The exact nature of the Entity escaped him, and he did not dwell on the ramifications of His existence. Whether demonical or human in origin, Tyrell knew only that there was a ghost in the flame, a pyrogeist, and that it hungered for consumption of the living and their possessions with an undeniable and malignant sentience. If fire could be used to both create and destroy, He was the avatar of the latter aspect, no glowing ember of progress but a creature of cinders and ashes.

Wrapping his gloved fingers tightly around the haft of his axe, Tyrell charged forward as fast as his heavy suit and equipment would allow him. His Adversary either heard or sensed him coming and inverted Himself for a moment before reshaping His body so that the skull-like mask of his visage now faced Tyrell. His mouth opened wider and He screamed His war cry, a sound like roaring flames, cracking wood and splintering bone. He brought his arms together and with a thunderclap released a column of fire in Tyrell’s direction. Tyrell, who had seen this particular ploy before, slammed himself against the wall to his side. His flame-retardant suit protected him from both the fire already burning within the wall and the Entity’s pyrokinetic blast.

Every firefighter knew that there were many types of fires, requiring different methods to control and extinguish. For some fires, water was ineffective if not outright dangerous, and Tyrell had discovered early in his encounters with the Entity that it was such a fire. Smothering, usually so reliable, was also of limited use against a creature that could reform itself at will. There was, however, an old adage about fighting fire with fire, and while typically not recommended for fires of the non-figurative variety, Tyrell had found it was the only true weapon against his Adversary. He thought it made sense: if the Entity represented the destructive facet of the flame, then it was right that His opposite should be able to defeat Him.

Tyrell closed his eyes for a moment, mustering his love of warmth and flame, marshalling the burning spirit within him, allowing himself to soak in the heat of the surrounding inferno through the skein of his uniform and into his pores. When he felt the conflagration within him reach a critical point, he exhaled with his entire body. His axe, made of hardened plastic and guaranteed to neither heat nor melt nor burn, burst into rippling blue flames. Tyrell opened his eyes again, watching through his sooty faceplate as the Entity began backing away from him. He could move with incredible speed when He wanted to; Tyrell had witnessed Him doing so in the past. But He was drawn to the flame, baleful blue light reflecting in the pitchy hollows of His eyes.

Tyrell charged again, gaining quickly on his transfixed Adversary. Once he reached the Entity’s height, he brought down his axe in a chopping gesture, aiming for the darkened center of His being. The pyrogeist seemed to suddenly collapse, a pillar of fire falling to the floor, as though having consumed whatever axis sustained it, and the weapon whizzed through the empty, superheated air of the apartment complex. This was not unexpected: while the promethean aspect of fire sparked creativity, this Entity knew only how to destroy; His repertoire of tricks was limited.

Tyrell spun in place, head down to track the motion of the rippling sheet of flames beneath him, axe held straight out from his extended arm like an extension of his body, blue flames writhing in anticipation. When the fiery shroud ceased to move and began to coalesce, springing into the air even as He reassumed His mockery of human form, Tyrell was ready. The axe cleaved through his Adversary transversely, encountering no resistance from the unsubstantial Entity. There was a soundless flare from where the two fires had met, and Tyrell was momentarily blinded despite his dark-tinted faceplate. When he could see again, he saw the few remaining tendrils of the preternatural inferno slipping away down the corridor and through the walls in various directions, defeated and fleeing.

Tyrell nodded to himself in satisfaction. If past experience was any guide, it would take a while for the Entity to regroup His strength in order to manifest fully again. Someday, Tyrell hoped to be able to banish the pyrogeist permanently, but for the instant he was content to savor his victory, relishing in the heat of the blaze around him as though it was a celebratory bonfire.

The moment passed, and Tyrell began making his way back towards the front of building to rejoin with his brothers-in-arms.