Chapter 36: Making a Mess of Things
Citizen Bernard thought he was having a heart attack, or a panic attack, or some kind of attack that involved a general, overwhelming sense of alarm. In reality, his heart was working quite fine, cheerfully pumping away at a million miles per hour.
He had been trying to track the progress of, now, a dozen different groups of people that he had seen emerge, but at some point the thermal imaging malfunctioned. At first, he rebooted the program, but the large blotches of rather hot activity remained. He checked the screens, the connections, everything he could think of.
Machine error was all that occurred to him. When he finally checked the camera feeds near those locations, his body slammed into a real panic. There were fires: lots of them. Those people are running rampant and setting fires, a tiny, fearful voice spoke in his mind. He checked the monitors again. Now there were hundreds of heat signatures spilling into the streets, and he couldn't even tell which ones were the perpetrators and which ones were panicking Citizens or investigating Inquisitors.
"What the hell is going on there?!" a tiny voice screamed through the receiver. Bernard jumped at the shouting and remembered that he was on the line with Inquisitor Levine.
Hand shaking, he gingerly picked up the phone and spoke in a trembling voice. "Ah, sir?"
"What?"
"They, ah… they appear to be, ah… setting fires, sir…"
No response came, and Bernard jumped again as a loud, percussive noise clattered through the earpiece. Trembling violently, he waited, still holding the phone, in what almost appeared as a calm manner. Finally, with no further responses, Bernard was satisfied that the Inquisitor had likely hurled his telephone and ran from the room, so he gently set the receiver into its cradle.
The panicking Citizen tapped a few keys and zoomed the images out, looking over a map of upper-Haven that was showing more and more large blobs of heinous infrared activity.
It's not my fault, he repeated in his head over and over.
Uprising Page 81