“Dave!” the doc shouted. “What are you doing?”
“Dave!” someone else shouted. Bill maybe.
“Dave!” another voice called out.
I didn’t care. I ignored them. I kept on walking. The ground stilled, but the flames grew ahead of me. I saw through to an island of intact, non-burning road where several people huddled unharmed, surrounded by the flames.
I can rescue them, I thought.
In truth, the horror of what I was seeing was turning me completely loopy.
I am Dave, I thought. I pee the magic stuff. It churns away inside me and I am unharmed. I mix. I create. These flames are my flames. I am invincible!
I raised a hand, stepping closer, feeling waves of heat flowing over me.
“Dave!” someone shrieked. It sounded like Molly. I dreamed it was Molly.
I stepped closer still and my hand touched the flames.
“Ow!!!!”
Now it was my turn to scream. The pain was intense, blistering and burning and way too much for me to handle.
I jumped back, holding up blackened fingers. No, you’re not some kind of superman, you fool. It hurt so much I felt pinpricks stabbing all over my body, in all my veins. My blood was hot, scalding. Spots were bursting in my eyes.
I screamed, I turned, and then I just ran. Away from the heat. Away from everything. From everyone. Not thinking, really.
I was way beyond thought.
*****
I ran for what seemed like ages. It felt like I was running in slow motion. I recall hearing another explosion behind me, feeling the shaking of the ground again, but I didn’t look back. Perhaps I thought I was running but was really just jogging very slowly. I had been through an ordeal, after all, and was hardly what you’d call fit.
I recall faces in the dark, people I passed as I stumbled down the road. Restaurants and cars with people stood in doorways and looking down the road in fear and awe, their faces pink and blue and green, reflecting the eerie light of the unnatural flames.
My jog slowed to a trot, then a walk.
My hand stung. I held it up like a dead limb.
“Ow…” I moaned.
It was a constant moan, I think, rising and falling with the pain.
“Are you alright, mate?” I remember someone saying.
I simply shook my head and passed them.
I took every turn I came across, getting lost, trying to get lost. I found myself walking in unlit backstreets, then across a busy high street. I hardly had the sense to stop for passing cars which swerved and beeped at me. I ignored them all.
Eventually, I reached a waterway—a canal, I think. I descended the steps and sat on the water’s edge, my feet and legs hanging over and getting wet in the icy waters. I leaned over and put my hand in the water. It was cold, freezing. It soothed my hand. I held it in there for as long as I could. I looked up at the bright full moon. A trail of blue-green smoke crossed its path in the sky, rising up from the catastrophe I had caused, the weird colours illuminated by its creamy light.
I wondered how I could possibly live after this.
*****
I soon grew cold, shaking terribly. I stood up, gently placed my burnt hand in a hoodie pocket, and walked back up the steps. I found that there was some kind of a park nearby. Trees, grass, a hill, and a single-storey building I could vaguely make out to one side. A cafe perhaps. I stumbled across the empty street towards it.
The doors of the building were locked shut, padlocked. I walked round its edge in the park, all the way round, my good hand stroking the brickwork, desperate to find a way in, desperate to get in from the cold. When I realised there was no way in, I stood for a moment, staring at the wall. I looked up again at the clear sky, the moon and the stars. I looked all around me at the silent and empty park. A ghostly, wintry mist hugged the ground, drowning the bottom of the tree trunks. Would the dead rise here? Were they watching me?
I was truly bonkers.
Really, I must have been, for without batting an eyelid, I proceeded to pull down my tracky bottoms and pants and wee straight onto that wall.
Smoke was rising, moonbeams of green and yellow and purple cutting through the smelly fog. It was like some perverted witching hour. I suddenly found that I was groaning and crying, totally powerless in the face of my own bursting bladder. I was like some kind of demented, hairless werewolf driven crazy by his own cursed cock. Bricks fell and smashed and I turned this way and that, hardly knowing what the bloody hell I was doing.
When I was spent, I walked towards the hole I had made. My foot stepped through but my head knocked straight onto a section of hard wall still intact above. I felt a sharp thump of pain rattling my head. It was quickly replaced with darkness as I fell unconscious to the ground.
*****
I awoke warm, my head leaning on something soft, my seat shaking slightly, rustling me left and right. There was a sound, the hum of an engine and the feel of motion underneath. I opened my eyes and saw a dark window, streetlights and cars passing outside. I was in a car.
But my head was groggy, full of dark sooty clouds. With much stiffness, I turned my neck to face forwards. I was sat behind a driver, though I couldn’t see who it was.
“Awake now, are you?” someone said to my left. An American voice, throaty.
I forced my head towards it and saw Frank sat on the passenger seat next to me.
“Well that was some stunt you pulled there,” he said, smiling at me but in a distinctly unfriendly way.
I tried to sit up but couldn’t. I pushed hard and felt a sharp pain as my burnt hand was squeezed by several straps which were keeping me tightly fastened to the chair. I yelped in pain.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m not taking any more chances with you now. Hell, it was always the plan to move you over at some point. Perhaps not this early, but it’ll have to do.”
“What?” I tried to say. “Where?”
I was in a terrible state and I knew it. My head felt like several stones had been inserted into it, making talking near impossible.
“I know it was you who started the fire,” said Frank, pulling out his smartphone and showing me the screen.
A green dot pulsated in the centre, surrounded by several moving lines which I soon understood to be roads. It was a map, a live map, showing my position.
“You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?”
The GPS tracking thing that Daryl had injected me with. I’d forgotten about that. So it had been Frank’s idea. And of course the bastard could track me the whole time via that chip in my arm.
“Lucky for you, actually,” said Frank, putting the phone back into his jacket pocket. “I’m not sure you would have survived the night if we hadn’t picked you up. Quite a mess you made of that cafe too.”
He tutted to himself. Then he took out something else, what looked like a pen, from his jacket.
“Now, we have a long journey ahead of us. And you know what? I’ve had quite enough of your nonsense.”
There was a glint in his eyes and a snarl quivering on his lips as he leaned over and shoved the pen thingy into my neck. I felt a sharp sting and heard a little hiss and couldn’t help but catch a strong whiff of his nasty, expensive-smelling cologne.
Then everything went black again, the last conscious moment I ever spent in England.
THE END (of the middle bit…)
Final Word from Dave
Well, there you have it.
London.
Quite a dark time to be fair. I’m not such a hero, see. I hope you appreciate my honesty though. I think I was right in feeling somewhat wronged. Well, a bit wronged anyway. However you look at it, Solar Ray was definitely not for me. Whilst I can eat pretty much all the junk I’m given, the same cannot be said for shit. I mean, unlike Frank, I can take a certain amount of it, but I won’t eat it. Not for anyone.
Next? Well, obviously I was being driven away in a car again, but unlike the last time whe
n Daryl was whisking me to London, things were rather more serious now. That nutter Frank was in charge, and so we reach the truly crazy part of my tale: America. Omega Central. All of those mind-boggling events that changed the world. I won’t spoil it by revealing anything here. Read the final part of my story for that.
If you dare.
Just kidding. It’s funny in parts and, I fully accept, completely unbelievable, even by the standards set so far. Also brutal as hell. Some heavy shit went down there, for sure. The truth hurts.
Ah well, at least you know I lived to tell the tale. Sort of.
Peace out for now!
Dave Smith
A note from the publisher: Book Three, Rocket Fuel Pee: Omega Meltdown, is available to order on Amazon right now. You can use this easy link to find it: https://books2read.com/omegameltdown
NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR
Hi there and thanks so much for reading!
So I thought it would be nice to include a few notes on the background and writing of this book, the same as I did for Man of Ruin. Just a quick request first though. If you enjoyed Curse of the Potency, please consider leaving a review on Amazon to let other readers know what you thought. It only takes a few minutes, can be as short or detailed as you like, and it makes a massive difference. The Rocket Fuel Pee books are my first published novels and I am very much in need of whatever help I can get. Here is the link to do so now: https://books2read.com/curseofpotency
On to my notes.
The middle of anything is easily muddled. You’ve got a destination in mind, but it’s not the FINAL destination. You’ve only got to travel a part of the way, or it wouldn’t be the middle, right? There are great opportunities, yes. And it’s all got to be handled with the care of a magician.
Well, whilst I wouldn’t say I got muddled with this book, I definitely found structuring the tale a challenge. The relatively smooth journey you hopefully enjoyed reading this book was the result of a great deal of hard work revising and restructuring, more than I’ve ever done for any book before. I had many scenes I wanted to include and things I knew Dave needed to experience before he burned the Solar Ray offices to the ground, and I wrote these with glee. At the same time I had to keep in mind what needed to happen in the final book, building up the story in readiness for that. I believe it’s very important to give the reader time to “breathe”, especially with the kinds of bonkers stuff that features in these books (especially in the final book, which really does take things to another level). Perhaps that explains why Dave’s relationship with women ended up being a theme in this book. This was not planned, yet when I finally finished the edit, most of the key scenes revolved around Dave and Molly (in some form or another). And of course there is the sequence with Julia. It may sound funny, but for a good few weeks of this year I was obsessed with questions like of “What prompts Dave to go out on his bender?” and “When does he go Vegan?“ and “Should Molly get back together with Daryl?” For a time I doubted I was on the right track. What with the Christmas party, relationship issues, and various office-based meetings, it began to feel like I was writing episodes for a soap opera, rather than the zany dark comedy sci-fi(ish) series I had dreamed of penning. Thankfully of course it turned out to be far from a soap opera, and is in many ways the darkest book of the trilogy.
It must be said that I drew on a certain amount of personal experience for this book, certainly more than the first book. The office environment and the feeling of being an outsider are definitely things I have experienced in my life, as is the cheesy Christmas party and the lack of success with women. I have also experimented with the Vegan diet and I’ve had to modulate my diet carefully since my early twenties in order to reduce the potency of uric acid in my blood (I am a hereditary sufferer of gout). But I want to make it very clear that I am not Dave. Whilst we do share certain personality attributes, and in many ways wrote this book together, we are otherwise two very different people.
Anyway, it’s time to wrap up these rather meandering notes. I hope you are enjoying this series and share my strange enthusiasm for it. I am very excited to publish the final installment soon. Book Three of Rocket Fuel Pee, Omega Meltdown, takes things quite a few steps further than they’ve gone so far, ramping up the sci-fi element of the story considerably. It is available to order on Amazon right now, and you can use this easy link to find it: https://books2read.com/omegameltdown
Finally, if you are interested in my work, want to find out more about me, be kept informed about future releases, and receive free stories and content, you might want to sign up to my readers group newsletter. You can do this on my website here: https://oliverfranksauthor.com/
Enough waffle - bye for now and have a great day!
Oliver
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