The Flame Game

by R. J. Blain

  “No save you from wolf. Wolf eat you? Give rabies.”

  “I can defend myself from a wolf, I’m sure.”

  “He could, too.”

  My husband regarded Morrison’s body with a frown. “Huh. You’re right. I’m being stupid, aren’t I?”

  “Wolf sad and cute, easy to fall prey to. Poor hus-band. We teach wolf no eat us. No lie to help wolf? CDC get mad about wolf killings.”

  “Shit. Right. I’ll make sure the wolf isn’t put down for killing him. I was about to, anyway.”

  “With what? Fist?”

  “No. My gun. At point blank range. I punched him because I wanted to. He pissed me off.”

  “Okay.” I approached and sniffed the wolf, who was in a dire need of a bath. “Call. Request tanker. Much napalm. This area? This area bad.”

  “I’m not sure how burning it to the ground will help.”

  “Much rot, no scav-en-gers. Frozen until spring. More infection.”

  My husband retrieved his phone and called someone, explaining how Morrison had somehow located them and had attempted to recruit him. With a smug smile in place, he reported that the local wildlife, quite rabid, had taken offense to Morrison.

  “No hurt my puppy,” I warned, flattening my ears.

  “My wife, apparently, is very fond of the rabid wolf and wishes to rehabilitate him. I’m not brave enough to tell the cranky and pregnant cindercorn she can’t turn our home into a zoo. Right now, her new pet wolf is chewing on some of Sunny’s bones and behaving himself. Yes, we’re feeding a wild, rabid animal. What? He’s hungry, and I’d rather not get eaten by a hungry, rabid wolf. That he handled a rather bad problem with grace tells me he should be rewarded with more bones. He’s pretty bad off, though. Bailey thinks this whole place needs to be napalmed. The towns are abandoned and there are dead animals everywhere.”

  The wolf finished with his bone and stretched out in the snow, resting his muzzle on my husband’s foot.

  I worried the wolf was yet another victim of transformatives, as I couldn’t imagine a wild animal behaving in such a way, especially not while rabid.

  Either way, we’d find out soon enough.

  Quinn kept the sick wolf on a tight leash, and I worried the animal cooperated because my husband kept feeding him. As I expected I would need to help light a massive fire, I remained a cindercorn. Our pets slept in the SUV, which we kept running with a window slightly cracked open so they got fresh air.

  “Sleepy puppers, sleepy kitten, Quinn,” I said, lifting a hoof to point at the rental. “Good puppers, good kitten.”

  Quinn stared down at the wolf, who had polished off our entire supply of food for Sunny and was working on Blizzard’s. “I know I asked for something to feed him, but I hope they’re anticipating how much a starved wolf can eat. He’s really well behaved, though.”

  “Trained or transformative?”

  “I think trained.” Quinn sat, clucked his tongue, and held out his hand. “Shake.”

  The wolf immediately lifted his paw and placed it on my husband’s hand.

  “Oh, knows trick!”

  “He failed the sentience test.”

  “You tested?”

  “Yes. I gave verbal instructions to do something, and he just stared at me in confusion. But he knows shake and some other commands. So, he’s probably trained.”

  “Why nice for us, not nice for Morrison?”

  “No idea. Good taste in people, better sense for assholes.”

  I eyed the wolf with interest. “Make police dog! With Sunny. I have two police dogs. He already do good work. Kill bad guy. I hire. Pay in bones, love, meat, and more love.”

  My husband opened his mouth, his brows furrowed, and he closed his mouth, his teeth clacking together.

  “Idea good, yes?”

  “I’ll pitch the commissioner if he can be cured of rabies, but I’m not promising anything more than that.”

  The first of the CDC’s vans rolled up, and the wolf whined, grabbing the rest of his meal in his paws and pulling it closer. I took the leash in my teeth so Quinn could handle the reps.

  A cranky Professor Yale emerged from the front passenger seat, and Alan came out of the back.

  My husband chuckled. “No hand shaking. I’m surely rabid now. Honestly, if you’re here, you’re infected. There are dead animals everywhere, and the wolf’s pretty sick.”

  Alan crouched near the animal, careful to stay out of biting range, and turned his meter on. Within a minute, it squealed an alarm. “Yep. It’s the bad strain. Concentration is moderate. Is the animal already frothing?”

  “There was froth, yes. He’s had some trouble chewing, but he’s been able to obey basic commands. He knows a few tricks. He’s generally wobbly, but he can move like he means it.” Quinn pointed at Morrison’s body. In the time it’d taken the CDC to arrive, snow had dusted his corpse. “I punched him in the nose because he pissed me off, but the wolf got the kill. I’ll verify with an angel, but he wanted to purge as many non-vanilla humans as possible, and he wanted Bailey for something. Unfortunately, after hearing about his desire to use rabies for population control purposes, I lost my temper and socked him. The wolf went after him then. Bailey wants him for a police dog. I believe she may think the wolf was protecting me.”

  “Did good job, very good wolf. Just a little rabid.”

  Yale lifted a hand and rubbed his forehead. “I’m too old for this, Bailey.”

  “Me rabid with time. Much excited, yes?”

  “No. The last thing anyone needs is to deal with a rabid cindercorn. I would rather force feed you napalm and set you loose in my living room.”

  “Much napalm needed to burn entire lake.”

  “We wouldn’t be burning the lake. We’d put a barrier between the shoreline and the water and protect as much of the water from the ash as possible. We don’t want to completely destroy the environment. But yes, we’re going to napalm the entire area.”

  “How much area?”

  “Three miles around the shore. The CDC has already begun making certain there is no human life to evacuate. While you’re burning that, we will be doing a neutralizer test using the next three miles of terrain; there are still some living animals after the three mile mark. If the test works, we’ll do mass treatments of wildlife. But this section is to be razed.”

  “Sad,” I said, turning my head to stare at some of the lumps beneath the snow. “Why they all die in big mass?”

  “We’re not sure. We’re going to grab a few of the bodies for autopsy, and we’ll do a full test on your wolf before we begin full treatments. I played ball when your husband mentioned you were wanting to adopt yet another rabid animal, so we’ll test treatments for late-stage rabies patients on him. That does not guarantee his survival, but that’s the goal. If the test treatment goes well, he’ll be our first proof of concept.”

  I could live with that. “Okay. Accept. But CDC pay bill because not option, and CDC make care good. Like wolf. Wolf pet if no release to wild?”

  Quinn once again held his hand out to the wolf. “Shake.”

  The wolf sighed but stopped guarding his meal to shake with my husband.

  With a smug smile, my husband raised a brow at Professor Yale.

  “Right. The wolf has been trained to shake. Please tell me you’ve done the sentience test.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be a sentient, not like Bailey’s gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys. How are they doing?” my husband asked.

  “We lost five of them so far, and it looks like we’ll lose a few more. They have funeral rituals for their dead, and after much confusion, the lab attendants let them handle their burials. They use cairns. So, they’re definitely sentient, they have a culture, and they’re multilingual. We think they have the ability to understand any form of spoken language, although they can’t communicate in anything other than their language. In good news, that means you’ll have an easy time housing them. After they built their cairns, they allowed the tec
hnicians to dispose of the bodies, but we’re trying to figure out how to handle communicating with them. It’s a challenge. We think the first generation of them was transformative victims, and they had children—these are their children. Or their children. Or their children’s children. We’re not really sure.”

  “Poor gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys.”

  “Yeah. We’ll probably get them separated into family units and building a community habitat for them once we figure out their family structure. They have one, so we now have a real mess on our hands, as we have laws we have to follow regarding newly discovered sentients. Since you’re housing them, that’ll help simplify some things down the road.”

  “We need very big house, Sam. Very big. Two wolf, one husky, ocelot, many gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys, three gorgons, a cindercorn, a gorgon-incubus doohickey, gorgon fosters, two gorgon-incubus-cindercorn doohickeys. Many beings, one building. Where we find that near work?” I heaved a sigh. “Hard. Not sure CDC check big enough.”

  “You’re still getting some compensation for this and the Vegas jobs, Bailey. You’re on vacation, and you’re on contract still for six months, so you get your hazard pays and so on. I just have to talk to the locals to figure out what that compensation is,” Professor Yale informed me.

  “Oh. Maybe enough money for big house.”

  “And since you’re solving a major problem with the new sentients, the CDC can probably help with your housing problems. At the very least you’ll get a real estate agent who will be compensated by the CDC, which will lower the final bill.” Yale heaved a sigh. “And I can’t authorize putting the wolf down even if I wanted to at this point. This is not an excessively aggressive animal.”

  “I think he reacted to the situation. Bailey’s idea of making him a police wolf might be a good one. It looks like he has the right base instinct, but he’ll need a lot of work.”

  “And since the idea of giving her a wolf is to give her extra protection and you protection, he did exactly right, because the last thing any of us needed was an actual fight between two chiefs.”

  “He wanted to talk, and that cost him.”

  “Insane,” I added.

  We regarded the corpse with disgust.

  “Yes, I’ll buy into that. Still. The wolf killed him?”

  “Is what I said. Wolf steal kill!”

  Professor Yale shrugged. “It’s for the best. The wolf wouldn’t deal with guilt. You two? You two would need therapy.”

  “Like hell I would. He wanted to use my wife!” Sam crossed his arms over his chest and grumbled curses. “My pregnant wife. Guilt would not have been an issue.”

  “Yes, but your wife would have had enough guilt for both of you.” Yale pressed both of his hands to his cheeks. “Oh, no! My husband killed someone for me. He will be burdened. Everything is my fault. Woe is me.”

  The bastard of an old man even managed to do a damned good impression of me at my worst. I flattened my ears. “Eat you, Yale!”

  He laughed in my face, and with zero fear, he rubbed my brow, careful to avoid my steaming nose. “You wouldn’t. You’d miss me.”

  “Hate it true,” I complained.

  “Now, come along. We have a new blend of napalm for you to try. It’s even stronger than your absolute favorite. I’ve been told to gas you up and let you loose. Apparently, if you’re shit-faced drunk, you won’t feel as bad about setting a major fire. We also want to test how badly you dehydrate. We’re not going to let you suffer, though. We have hangover medication for you, and we brought enough to give it to you before you transform and after, too.”

  “It’s your lucky day, Bailey. Looks like you get that bender you wanted. View it as celebrating your successful adoption spree. Yale, did you find any other living animals in the burn zone?”

  “There’s limited wildlife still alive, but they’re on the verge of death. We’ll set up a drop zone for her while we’re setting up the first barrier. If she can herd out anything before we start pumping the napalm, we’ll save what we can. Don’t get your hopes up, Bailey. We scanned on our way in, and just about everything here is sick and dying. Your wolf probably came out of the zone we’ll be hosing down with neutralizer.”

  “Okay. Will look. Help as can. Make rest burn.”

  Yale led me to one of the tankers, and at our approach, one of the workers, who wore a gas mask, brought a sparkling bucket over. To my delight, he pulled a bottle of hot sauce out of his utility belt, opened it, and dumped it on top before giving it a stir.

  “Spicy!” I pranced in place, bobbing my head.

  “The capsaicin is a legitimate ingredient, but we were told cindercorns appreciate when the capsaicin comes in hot sauce format. This blend uses capsaicin as a catalyst ingredient. We’ll pump a tanker of the napalm into the zone, and then we’ll layer capsaicin onto it. Within sixty seconds, the batch is ready, and it’ll last for three hours before it begins to degrade and lose general potency. The ignition point is three thousand degrees.”

  “F or C?”

  “F.”

  I turned my head and snorted blue flame. “I can do that.”

  “And we haven’t even gassed you up yet. That’s impressive, Chief Quinn.”

  “Mr. Chief Quinn’s fault. Him and his tiny terrors. Tiny terrors make me run very hot. Very hot. So hot.” To prove how hot, I rolled into the nearest snowbank I could find and burrowed into it. My coat steamed, and I surged back to my hooves and snorted more blue flame for them to admire.

  “Really?” my husband asked. “It’s my fault, Mrs. Chief Quinn, who conspired with my relatives to make sure we had twins? I promise you, I would not have asked for twins. I would have gone for healthy, personally. You’re the one who wanted twins for Christmas.”

  I dove towards my husband, thumped onto the ground, and slid his way, wiggling across the ground before coming to a halt on my back nearby, pawing at him with a hoof, taking care to keep from hurting him. “I in-no-cent cindercorn.”

  “You had one little snack earlier. That is not an excuse to be waving your hooves in the air. If you want to wave your hooves in the air, go eat your treat.”

  Whinnying my laughter, I got up and went to the bucket, taking a tentative bite to test it.

  It burned in the best ways possible, and I abandoned my manners to get the sparkling gel into my stomach. I licked the bucket clean. Before I had a chance to whine over my treat being gone, the tech grabbed it, refilled it, and dumped another large-sized bottle of hot sauce into the mixture before stirring.

  He made me wait a full minute before giving it to me, and I almost choked in my hurry to eat it before it got taken away from me.

  “They’re not going to take your treat away, my beautiful. It makes no sense for them to stop gassing up the only real cindercorn present when they need you to light fires for them. Take your time,” my husband chided. “While you do that, I’m going to go give our new wolf a neutralizer bath and see about feeding him some more.”

  Alan pointed at one of the vans parked nearby. “They can help you with that. I’ll keep an eye on her and make sure she’s running hot enough to light the napalm. We’re on a timer with this blend, and I’d rather not lose two tankers of capsaicin along with our napalm. The snow will help, though. We’re going to use it to replicate the napalm, and we’ll use lake water as needed to make sure we have full coverage.”

  “This very big fire.”

  “Our active burn zone will be approximately seventy thousand acres. Some zones are wider than others. We’re trying to limit it to the areas with complete loss of wildlife.” The tech went to the tanker and returned with a map, which he showed me. It featured Long Lake in the middle with the burn zone colored red while the neutralizer zone was colored blue. The blue zone went beyond my expectations from Professor Yale’s descriptions of what would burn and what would be salvaged.

  “Bigger than thought?”

  “We’ve had as many personnel checking around the area as we can, and we’
re redrawing the burn and neutralizer zones accordingly. The burn zone has grown substantially, and I expect we’ll be adding another five thousand acres along the northern shore, which was hit particularly hard,” the tech explained. “You’re going to have your work cut out for you, and we’re prepared to make a gap in the shield if you need more fuel to keep lighting the napalm. You’ll need to encourage the burn spread, so you’ll have to do a pattern from barrier to barrier to make sure everything gets lit. We think once you get a quarter of it lit, firestorms will begin igniting and help your efforts. We have a few practitioners on hand who will be attempting to encourage the development of fire twisters within the shield.”

  “Oh. That cool. Sad we must burn so much, but very cool. Hot. Very hot. Yes, much hot.”

  The tech chuckled. “This won’t be too bad. After you’re done and we’ve extinguished the burn zone, we have a bunch of trainee firefighters who’ll get in some practice, and once they’re done practicing, the novice practitioners will get to do cleanup. They’ll start mass replanting in the spring, and within a year, nobody’ll know this place was reduced to ash.”

  “Much cool!”

  Yale checked my bucket, which I’d emptied of napalm again. “Drunk yet?”

  I thought about it before shaking my head. “Hot. Run much. Make barrier, eat while pumping. Make super drunk, super hot cindercorn!”

  “Oh boy,” Yale muttered. “May somebody forgive me this, but give the cindercorn what she wants. Get the tone going. Maybe the sound will scare the little surviving wildlife away. Have fun, Bailey, but try not to have too much fun.”

  “I have all the fun. You have the magic orange medicine.” I trotted to the rental to check on my pets, who played in the back seat. Somehow, the ocelot battled wolf and husky and managed to stay on top, ruling over her furry friends with an iron paw. “Make sure rental safe. No burn rental or puppers or kitten.”

  “Your pets will be safe,” Yale promised.

  I consumed so much napalm I wanted to die, but the blessed bender never came. I wanted to wade into the lake and mourn for my non-existent bender, but the barrier blocked me from reaching the water. Whining over my foul luck won me exactly nothing, and I plodded along the shoreline in search of anything living, but I found nothing.