The Fire Unseen

by Andrew C Jaxson

  Our house was soaked in flame. There would be nothing left. A section of roof tiles collapsed, sending up a plume of smoke punctuated by spark and fire. The extra burst of light allowed me to see the whole picture.

  There were more than twenty cloaked figures standing on our street, although they clung to the shadows so it would be hard to see them if you didn’t know to look.

  As lights came on in houses up and down our street, the figures made their move. Some disappeared into the shadows, and others made their way down either side of our house toward the backyard, their flares still lighting up the house. They were trying to ensure I burned to death.

  The fire bled an inky darkness that snaked along the ground of our yard. I felt it searching. It was looking for me.

  “What the hell is that?” Josh whispered.

  “I don’t know.” My broken rib made it hard to talk. “It came for me last night. And I’ve seen it once before, at the park.”

  “It’s after you.”

  “No kidding.”

  “What about the guys in drag?”

  “I don’t know. They were there when Noah died. They killed him.”

  Josh swore just as one of the tall, cloaked figures made his way to the backyard, darkness curling around his feet like the tail of a cat. He pulled back his hood to get a better look at the destruction, revealing a familiar face. The face I saw when I woke in the hospital after the accident.

  Nathan. The medical intern who treated me. He turned toward us, and his eyes disappeared into dark shadows.

  “She’s over here!” He sprinted towards the fence, the others following close behind. A ball of flame lit up our yard as I grabbed Skye, spun around, and tore through the Johnsons’ side gate, out towards their street. The path here was made of pebbles, and I slipped and stumbled, barely catching Skye as she bounced around in my arms.

  Seeing me struggle, Josh grabbed Skye and threw her over his shoulder as we made it to the front yard. The Johnsons’ fence out front was high, with wrought-iron spikes; we had to use the gate. Josh swore again as he reached the huge barred entrance. There was a lock on the gate, probably to keep the house safe while the Johnsons were away. I cursed their paranoia. We were trapped. I closed my eyes and waited, lungs heaving.

  “Ari, what the hell are you doing? Move!” Josh yelled. He put Skye on the ground while he wrestled with the lock. A ball of flame flickered in the air above my head, lighting the scene like a strobe, freezing each moment in time as it sparked on and off. I turned around.

  Nathan was around the corner of the house now and almost on top of us. Josh grabbed a fallen tree branch, ready to fight.

  The light grew, still flickering off and on. Skye was sprawled flat, knocked out by whatever had grabbed her in her room. In the strobe light, I saw Nathan knock Josh to the ground, his hands around his neck. The light sparked again—Nathan pressed on Josh’s throat. I had to do something.

  There was a spark. A blast. Metal grinding metal. Josh drove his thumb into Nathan’s left eye, spurting jellied mess over his face. Nathan screamed and rolled on the ground, blood dripping off his cheek. I felt sick.

  “Come with me. Quick.”

  I spun around. Hackman stood in the open gate behind me. The lock was now a glowing, molten blob. Josh stood to face us, his hands soaked red. He looked from me, to Hackman, and back again. The cop car was parked out front, headlights blazing through the dark, engine running. We both knew this was not the time to ask questions.

  Josh scooped up Skye, and we both dove inside the car. Hackman slammed his door shut and hit the pedal as more cloaked figures ran into the Johnsons’ yard. The wheels screeched as Hackman floored it. A light exploded on the road ahead, and Hackman swerved to miss it, clipping a parked green van. Lucky I’d put my seatbelt on. The car stalled from the collision, and Hackman tried to restart it, but the engine only coughed.

  I twisted to look out the rear window. The sky was streaked with smoke, and the flames from my house were above the trees now. A dark shadow spread across the ground in front of the Johnsons’ house. Josh was wheezing from Nathan’s choke-hold. The patrol car’s engine coughed again.

  “Come on!” I screamed.

  Nathan’s face appeared at the window. Bloodied and snarling, he stared us down with his right eye, the other shut tight but bleeding badly. Hackman turned the key again, but the engine only hacked like a smoker. The back door ripped open, and Nathan’s arms clawed into Skye’s legs. Screaming, I held her tight, but I wasn’t strong enough. By the time Josh saw, she was gone.

  Nathan had her.

  I tried to leap from the car, but the engine cleared its throat and lurched forward, locking my seatbelt. I couldn’t get it undone.

  “Stop, Hackman!” I screamed. “Stop!”

  He didn’t, and the tyres screamed on the tarmac.

  There was a white flash.

  THIRTEEN

  It was dark. Four arms pinned me down, and over the ringing in my ears, I could just barely hear a man’s voice barking orders to keep me still.

  “Let me go!” I bucked against the restraints on my hands and feet. I couldn’t see anything.

  “Ari, you’re safe. You need to calm down.” A hand pressed gently on my shoulder. I tried to bite it.

  “Take this blindfold off!” If I could just see my surroundings and captors, I would have a chance to escape. “At least let me see you!”

  “You aren’t wearing a blindfold, Ari.” The voice sounded the tiniest bit sympathetic. “You’re blind.”

  I froze. The heat drained out of my body. I lost the will to fight.

  “Only temporarily, we hope,” the voice added.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m sorry, I thought you’d recognise my voice, but I forgot about the hearing loss. Your ears will be fine soon. It’s me, Noah’s father. I apologise for the restraints, but you went off the deep end. You wouldn’t stop screaming, and you were going to hurt yourself or someone else. Not for the first time, either, mind you. At least this time we don’t have to put you in a cell.” He paused. “Do you think if we loosen the restraints you can refrain from thrashing about quite so wildly? There’s a lot of expensive equipment around you that we’d rather like to keep.”

  I paused for a moment, then nodded. The bonds around my wrists and feet were removed. My ribs hurt, but not as badly as they should have. Whatever they’d done, it had helped my injuries.

  “Skye?” I asked.

  “Alive, we think.”

  “Why didn’t you stop? Why didn’t you let me save her?” I spoke in a whisper. I had no energy to yell.

  “We were outnumbered as it was. If I’d stopped, we all would have died. I had to keep us safe. I had to keep you safe. As it was, you had some rather terrible bruising on your brain. Tends to happen when you get knocked unconscious as many times as you have. Fortunately, one of my colleagues is quite talented in medicine of an experimental nature. The bruising is taken care of. It would be a shame to rescue you, only for you to end up a vegetable.”

  “They’ve got her.” The shadow people had taken my little sister, and somehow it was because of me.

  “They do,” Hackman said gently. “But we can get her back.”

  “Josh?”

  “Recovering in another room.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “You will, when you’re both ready. In the meantime, you need to rest. We’re working on a way to get your sister back, and you’ll need to be ready when the time comes.” Hackman placed a hand on my shoulder again. This time I let it stay. “I’m sure you have a lot of questions.” I could hear the smile in his voice. It only made me angry. “But the most important thing to know right now is that you’re safe, and we’re on your side.”

  “Does my mum know where I am?”

  “Honestly, we aren’t sure where she is,” he said. “She wasn’t at work and hasn’t returned to your house. We have people out looking for her, but we think she’s been tak
en too. I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head but was too numb to cry.

  “Do you want some time alone?”

  I nodded. Hackman’s hand left my shoulder, and several pairs of feet shuffled out of the room, followed by a short click as the door shut.

  It’s strange how darkness removes the perception of time. With no way to know if minutes had passed or hours, I couldn’t tell how long it was before coloured blobs congealed in front of my eyes. My vision was returning.

  Slowly, I made out the room around me. The ceiling and walls were formed from rock, but whether the room was natural or etched out by hand was difficult to tell. At least the damp smell made sense now. I was in a cave of some kind. My bed was made of green vinyl, with aluminium struts forming a support base. A few medical-looking machines sat around me, lights blinking. I was tired of waking up in strange, cold rooms like this.

  A fluorescent lamp hung from the ceiling, and the whole place looked military. The most imposing feature was the solid steel door held shut by an enormous metal bar that appeared to lock from the outside. A small glass window sat in the door at head height, but the glass looked pretty thick and it was covered in bars. I was trapped.

  The ringing in my ears finally subsided enough for me to make out beeps from the machines around me and hear conversations taking place outside in the corridor. A dripping sound slipped under the door from somewhere in the hallway. This wasn’t the police station, and it wasn’t a hospital. Maybe it was a mental ward. That would explain an awful lot. Maybe I had cracked. Maybe, since Noah’s accident, I’d been losing my mind, remembering things that weren’t there and hallucinating awful creatures. It was almost comforting to think maybe the whole thing wasn’t real.

  There was a small plastic dome on the ceiling in a corner of the room. A red light blinked inside its dark shell. They were watching me.

  I tried to sit up and managed to slip off the edge of the bed. That’s when I became conscious of my clothing. Gone were my smoke and dust-stained pyjamas, replaced in my sleep by a grey hospital gown that revealed far more of my back half than I was comfortable with. Facing the camera, I re-tied the back, trying to get it as tight as possible so I felt more covered. I wished they’d at least left me my underwear. This vulnerable feeling was not comforting, and neither was the cool draught blowing under the door. I checked myself for damage. Nothing seemed amiss, aside from my vision, which was still obstructed by spotty blobs every time I moved.

  That was three times now that I’d been knocked unconscious. Hackman said they had experimental medicine here. Hopefully they could prevent any brain damage from my impressive number of head injuries.

  Still, I realized that each time I’d awoken in a strange place, Hackman had not been far behind. Almost as if he was watching over me.

  There was a loud thunk. The metal bar over the door slid to the left, and a familiar face entered the room. Rachel.

  “I’m really sorry,” she began at once. “I was hoping to get back to you before … well, before everything happened. Again, I’m sorry. Things were going crazy here, and I couldn’t make it out to you.” The door shut, and the metal bar clanked back into place.

  “You’re a part of this.”

  “We’re all a part of this,” she said, sitting next to me on the bed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sorry.” She smiled. “Cryptic is kind of the way we talk around here. How’s your eyesight? I’ve been hit by one of those ultra-bright flares before too. Hurts like hell.”

  I shrugged. “It’ll be fine, but I’d feel better if I knew what was going on.”

  She smiled. “Fair enough. You up for a walk?”

  Helping me off the bed, she motioned at the camera. The little red light didn’t respond, but someone got the message, and the door unlocked.

  I followed Rachel out into the hall. It was shorter than I expected, only a few doorways that looked identical to mine on each side. Maybe Josh was behind one of them. A musty smell blew down the corridor.

  “It feels like a cave,” I said.

  “It is. We’re about five storeys down right now, in an underground cavern network we call the complex.”

  “I didn’t know there were caves near Ettney.”

  “Not many do. We’re deep inside the national park, about an hour from town. We’ve kept the complex well hidden since we found it over a century ago. Of course, we’ve done some upgrades since then.”

  This has been here a hundred years? I shook my head in disbelief.

  White lights hung from the cavernous ceiling, and cabling was bolted to the walls, probably running power or the security camera feeds. Rachel led me to the end of the corridor and unbolted a second metal door. These people had the place locked up pretty tight.

  As if reading my mind, Rachel continued, “Sorry about all the security. We’ve been on high alert since you were attacked. It’s to keep bad guys out, not to keep you in. Especially if you were their target.”

  Somehow, that managed to make me feel better and worse at the same time. I wanted to ask questions but didn’t know where to begin. The door opened onto a metal stairwell that led down into a larger, dome-shaped cavern. This area was several storeys high, rimmed by a web of steel gangways and stairwells, doors leading off in all directions. Rows and rows of chairs sat in the middle of the cavern, enough to seat a few hundred, and all pointed towards a central podium. There was no one else around, although the faint drone of activity echoed around the dome from somewhere deeper in the complex. This place was huge and well organised.

  As we descended the staircase, I studied the massive image etched into the floor below: two offset triangles forming a six-pointed star, the points arranged in pairs rather than evenly spaced apart. Inside the triangles was another, smaller one, with a circle at the very center.

  “This is the Apex,” Rachel explained. “It’s our main meeting place.”

  “Seriously, who are you people?”

  She smiled. “We call ourselves the Kindred.”

  “That’s ... arch.”

  “I know, it’s kind of dramatic. The powers that be have a taste for theatrics; you should see initiations.”

  We descended eighteen steps to the floor—I counted them in my head, something I had done since I was little. Crossing the floor of the dome, I looked up. From here, I could just make out the ceiling. A few floodlights were stuck up there, and they provided the only source of light in the Apex.

  “So, are you guys a cult or what?”

  Rachel laughed. “No, nothing like that. We’re more like an army.”

  I shivered, although it wasn’t cold. “I didn’t know there was a war.”

  “There’s a war all right, and it’s bigger than you could possibly imagine.” She read my expression. “No, we’re not terrorists, and we’re not crazy either. You’ve seen enough by now to know you shouldn’t take your world at face value. There’s a lot going on beneath the surface.”

  She was right. I had seen so much weird stuff I was ready to believe anything. I nodded. “It’s the duck effect.”

  “What?” she laughed.

  “On the surface, a duck looks really calm when it’s swimming, but underneath, its legs are going full speed. I thought the world was normal, but there’s some pretty insane stuff happening behind the scenes.”

  “That’s one way to put it. You’ve started to see the truth.”

  “Those black things—the guys in robes?”

  “All part of this. Of course, they’re not on our side.”

  “They’re your enemy.”

  “Your enemy now, too.”

  I fell silent, taking this all in. None of this felt real, but it had to be.

  Down here, it was like the colours of the world were still the same, but someone had turned the brightness down. Everything was darker. Two masked and hooded figures stalked across the Apex floor, disappearing through two huge doors on the wall behind the podium.

  Rach
el read my expression. “Don’t worry. Those are good guys. They’re our trainers, heading out for a practice session. Want to take a look?”

  I nodded. Rachel was the first person to give me coherent answers to any of my questions, and I wanted to keep the ball rolling on the transparency front. What I had seen so far was strange, certainly. But that was nothing compared to what was coming.

  FOURTEEN

  The training ground was a huge cavern about the size of a football field. From where I stood at the second-level entrance, it looked like a giant open-plan office, with hundreds of walls joined to form cubicles slightly taller than their occupants: hooded figures who stood in front of various objects.

  Upon our entry, many of them stopped and stared up at us, and even though most of the cubicles were empty, it still felt a lot like I’d just interrupted a busy day at Hell’s head office. The cavern was lit by torches scattered along the periphery, casting giant shadows that swam around the walls, and the figures wore dark hooded outfits like I’d seen before.

  I shrunk close to Rachel, whispering, “Those masks —that’s what the guys at my house were wearing!”

  She shook her head. “Similar outfit, different side. Like I said, these are the good guys. Both sides of this war seem the same if you don’t know what you’re looking for. It takes some getting used to.”