Afire : Part One: AFIRE, #1

By Rustin Forrester

Ignoring the rumors, you'd think Jake Chalmers was a perfectly normal boy. Did he really conjure from nothing the details the police needed to solve a monstrous crime? Or was his family involved, and the young Jake let slip something he was supposed to keep secret? There are plenty of stories whispered about Jake Chalmers, and if you asked him, they were all lies - yet lies that led to an uncomfortable truth. Jake was special, and he could do something - at least, until he promised to stop.

 

Now, dreading going under the knife for an operation, the Doctors promised Jake he would be fine. Yet he wakes up to a world gone awry and in the midst of a pandemic, and his family, already broken before... is gone. People are scared, and Jake learns that his small town has borne a heavy toll. Yet something worse is happening, something that cannot be explained - something that cannot be stopped. Some called it spontaneous combustion, others called it the blues - the way their eyes shined just before. What does it have to do with the virus? Is it connected? Were the conspiracy theories right?

 

In Afire: Part One, society's death throes force Jake to make a choice no child should be dealt; to be safe, or stand up for the ones he loves - that is, if he can find them in a world now...playing the blues..with the mad and the missing.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rustin Forrester
• Release date: Dec 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393341536

Rustin Forrester

The Author lives in the Southern Hemisphere, on an island they never wish to leave. Once a scientist in training, they were doubly blindsided - first, by Crohn's Disease, followed by Ankylosing Spondylytis. Beginning to spin tales during states of flaring, bedridden yet riding their imagination, poor as it may be, whilst watching clouds through the window of the hospital, or the home he shares with his wife and daughter, who constantly spoil him by simply existing.

Book preview

Chapter One

I AM NOT TRYING TO sound like some suave and professional person desperate to appear humble when I say I am far from the best journalist. A good one knows how to get the truth by asking just the right question. The great ones, though...the great ones know which questions, subtle or sharp, give up a truth hidden when answered, and more so when not.

For the most part, journalists sift and scrape through the pile, searching, and if it’s a hell on the eyes making out the shimmer of truth, a rough diamond, here and there, strewn about the rubble, it’s harder still shovelling through a shoal of diamonds, stopping to squint and catch not only real truths, but which of all the pile you set aside that matters the most. And needs seeing – even at the cost of forgetting all the rest.

Yet that’s not so easy. At least for me. So, after I sift, scrape and shovel, I’ll hold in my hand a whole bunch, and fire questions at it, like a glassmaker blowing, evenly, until it’s one hot piece of glass I go shine a light through, squinting as I make out the shadows it makes upon the walls of my small-time, small-town journalists’ cubicle. Sometimes, I even see something. Sometimes, what I do see really is there.

The truth of the pandemic, when I first came back to the office, was a question that blanked my mind, syncing with the blinking cursor troubling my screen. I’d surprised myself, asking a question much like a great journalist would, for possibly the one and only time. And it is simply this: what will you remember, and what will you forget?

In truth, it doesn’t seem like much, does it? For the Vaccine has done its job - I leave others to tell of that story, other than to say that most of the population have taken it, despite the rumors, and we all are feeling the sudden surge of time after so long circling slowly in lockdown, like planes forever winding about the airport, waiting for permission to land (and some of us were close to running out of fuel, I’ll admit). It was cold and hard but an overall pleasant tide, fresh and unforgiving, pulling us out and pushing us back onto the rails of our former lives. And in the rush of it, did any of you ask what you would remember? Or what you would forget? Now we can go outside without a reason (or a mask – for now), or if for no other reason than to blink at the sky you’d only seen through windows for a while - or shake the hand of a friend or, more amazingly, someone not only you’ve never met before, but likely to never meet again, since it’s been almost a year since you’ve done so. I did it twice this morning. Who were they? No fucking idea. And isn’t that fine? Why, yes, it is...

I should admit the above verbal spillage I’ve let loose would be read and red lined by my Editor. I can picture her throwing her usual frown my way, her famous pen twirling through and on her fingertips like a graceful boxer, patiently prancing before the snake-like strike, as her eyes flitted over my copy; she’d tell me my weakness as a writer, strange as it sounds, was (and still is) words. The first time she said that to me I was confused, and unsure it wasn’t some joke played on all the new writers, fresh from college and under the impression they know how to write; like sending the new apprentice to the hardware store for a left-handed screwdriver. My look of confusion was greeted with a small smile, and the explanation that I’d get it eventually, but not before I understood. Which, as you might imagine, didn’t help much.

There will be no redlining now. At least, not by her. One of the last few (thousand) to die before the Vaccine shielded us from the continual stabbing from the shadows the Virus seemed to enjoy, disappearing for a week, raising our hopes that maybe, just maybe, it had tired itself out, before being found somewhere slightly out of our sight, somewhere we weren’t looking. Her replacement (poor choice as it is) has the final say - and that would be me, folks. You may have a thought yourself by the end but, I think you’ll agree, these strange new times allow us all some flexibility, some room in which to trip over our own amused steps as we dance just outside the dark prison that we’ve all been locked in for so long.

And so, what will you remember, and what will you forget?

I could (though won’t) ask my sister this - locked in her house, my nephew and niece orbiting in an out and between her legs like angry moons, sobbing after going through the phone of my brother-in-law (you know where this is going), yelling at me that all those work calls seemed to still come, though the office was closed. What could she do? She was locked up. Yet locked up and SAFE. Where could she have gone? Into the middle of the city to my apartment, where the night air was constantly soured by silence being scoured by sirens. Most problems do have simple solutions, yet only once you’ve ignored the consequences of solving them.

I talked to her this morning - she took my niece and nephew to the park and called me to say that rushing to make sure they’d had sunscreen on, she’d forgotten about herself, and so expecting to get sunburnt. She was happy about it. I didn’t mention that phone call, since she seemed so happy just to be outside, not locked up (SAFE), where even wandering around in your own mind came with the risk of bumping into someone else. Does she remember, or has she already forgotten, strange as it sounds, against the backdrop of everything else? What’s one tear trembling on the cheek of the drowned?

Leaving aside my personal stories, I could ask the man of the family across the way, in the apartment building on the next block over, that I saw through the window each day, though I don’t know whether they saw me (that sounds creepy, but how many of us in the cities did that - just stare out the window?). He would watch his children play at some game I couldn’t name, nor he I suspect - most likely it was made up by themselves. Will he remember the game, now that I see him leaving for work each morning, waving over his shoulder as he tumbles down the steps? He seems the corporate type - he’s not just bringing the bacon home, I tell myself as I watch him, but rolling the pig in. And the pigs, my friend, are back aplenty. Maybe he remembers - maybe he tells himself that it’s all for them as he watches them shrink back in the smudged mirrors of the taxi. Or maybe he forgets. And what about his children? Will they remember Dad being home, all that time, ever present to wrestle and jump on? Or will they forget as well, now everything is returning to normal? Maybe they will remember - be it sadly, or fondly. Or both. At least for a while.

Will I forget? Right now, I don’t think I will, but famous last words and all, dear reader. Will I remember that girl, whose name I still don’t know, who before all of this was the arch-nemesis of my uninterrupted slumber, keeping me up with her singing late at night? I don’t know. I do know the sound of the silence, after the ambulance took her away, after we all heard her choking that she couldn’t breathe. I still don’t know who called the ambulance - maybe it was the man across the hall, the one who looked so like a serial killer that everyone avoided, who smelled like his apartment had no shower. Maybe I’ll forget thinking all of that, now that my first memory of him that comes to mind is the fact that he was the only one to open his door to my knocking, and offer me powdered milk, shrugging and mumbling something about hope, or humanity, and said I should come back anytime if I needed anything else. Maybe I’ll remember feeling like a clown, walking away from his smiles with my powdered prize in a cup. Maybe I’ll just forget why I never talked to him before to make myself feel better.

As I said, I get the final call on my own copy - I know I’m droning on. Yet we’ve been bombarded for months on end with dread and doom from every angle. Now, as the world creeps back into all our lives, I can only ask the same question, again and again, and hope for an answer worth hoping for: What will we remember? What will we forget?

"YOU’VE NOTHING TO WORRY about, Jake. Working yourself into a fit about it all isn’t going to help anybody. Especially you. You won’t remember a thing."

A fit? Jake asked. What did Mom tell this guy?

The truth, I expect. I’m more worried about the nurses finding out about your lack of experience, Shakey-Jake.

The Doctor seemed to smile after the voice in his head went silent – as if he’d heard. In truth, Jake was worrying - the twelve-year-old (almost thirteen!) thought the Doctor sounded so sure of himself that, by saying it repeatedly, Jake thought the Doctor just might be trying to convince himself he wouldn’t screw the whole thing up. The result of this thought was that what little confidence Jake had managed to build himself, one deep breath at a time, lying in the hospital bed all morning, was being eroded as quickly as it could be built. He thought of the sandcastles he’d built as a kid. Specifically, the memory of the tide rolling in, and washing hours upon hours in the sun away, leaving only a cold blob of sand, his buckets threatening to swim away, and skin screaming from the sunburn almost as a loudly as he expected his mother to when she saw him, red and ruined.

The world, The Doctor, who was young, smooth-faced and, according to his mother, that Doctor the Nurses jumped over each other to work with, crossed his arms over Jakes chart, cradling it against his chest, and rocked back and forth on his feet. "The world, Jake, is more likely to end. In fact, I’ve a special friend coming up from the city - an anaesthetist, just for you. He’s even doing it pro-bono. Do you