Page 12 of Slow Burn

Like flesh cooking.

A feathery curl of smoke threaded through his chest hair, and the first pinpricks of pain flared red along his sides, his flanks, his arms, his back. He plucked at the robe fretfully, but it seemed stuck somehow-glued—Sharon Rose’s little joke? If she’d dared, he’d—

The pain sliced into his chest, nerves shrieking. He fought for breath, still thinking clearly about heart attacks and survival rates. He tumbled and caught himself against the wall. More smoke, greasy dark, puffed from his sleeve as his arm exploded in agony.

He saw the fire without believing it, white glowing tongues licking along his skin, searing it black, eating deep into raw muscle. He slapped in panic at his chest, his groin, the smoke burned greasy in his lungs and he coughed and got enough air to scream, a thin sound, hardly anything at all, really. Like a girl’s.

He bashed face-first into the wall and hardly felt the impact, left smears of blood and skin and black crust. Pieces of his robe flared and melted on his skin like patches of fur, and he clawed at them with his fingers but the skin was soft and rotten and slick, and his fingers sank deep into it and it sloughed away, still burning. Muscles worked gray beneath, burning black. When he pulled his hands away in horror, his fingernails came off and stuck like guitar picks in the ruin of his chest, and he glimpsed ivory bone where his fingers should have been.

Sharon Rose.It was his one coherent thought. The girl could call for help, do something, doanything.He screamed for her, but couldn’t hear himself, couldn’t really see anything except shadows—thick pressure in his chest, and he couldn’t get air. He lurched toward a shadow he thought might have been the girl but his legs faded and suddenly he was lying down and that was all right, the pain was not as bad, distant, going away.

Everything would be all right. Surely, everything would be all right now. He couldn’t possibly die like this, so horribly.

The last sound he heard was the cheerful sizzle of bacon.

Chapter Four

Martin Grady

Office of Environmental Hazards (OEH)

The air-conditioning was either broken or off-more benefits of government cutbacks, Martin Grady thought, and pulled at his damp collar in frustration. He stalked to the door, yanked it open, and yelled down the hall for a portable fan. There was a scurry of movement in the Secure File area. Beth stuck her head around the corner and nodded, too quickly. Her broad pleasant face had a stunned frightened look. He wondered what she’d been doing. Too much to believe she’d actually been filing.

Martin closed the door just as one of the geeks sitting at the conference table behind him finished up with, “And the frogs are dying all along the river.”

“Who the hell gives a shit about frogs?” Martin asked. He couldn’t even summon up the energy for a good snarl. The frog deaths were number seventeen on today’s agenda, and one through sixteen hadn’t been particularly riveting, either. In a Pavlovian response, the geek cringed anyway. “Okay, point taken. We have frogs dying. What’s killing them?”

“But—the problems may be—”

“What my colleague is trying to say is that two events may be related.” That was Jill Westfield, certainly no geek. She sat like a knockoff of Marlene Dietrich, legs crossed, skirt tightly wrapped around her tanned legs, showing enough thigh to invite dreams but no touches. Blond waved hair, perfect skin, round red lips. The only thing she was missing was a cigarette holder. Martin sat down in his chair and stared at her gloomily.

“Which two?”

“Numbers seventeen and eighteen. What we’re talking about here is not just pollution, but chemical reactions among various pollutants. The frogs especially are vulnerable to high chemical concentrations. There are also indications that fish are becoming scarce, too, especially bottom-feeders like catfish. I think we’re talking about a widespread infiltration.”

Martin opened his file and flipped past red-stamped pages. He pulled his coffee toward him and sipped; it tasted gritty, rather oily. Government coffee.

“A water problem.”

“Potentially. You’ll notice that the men who’ve been affected—”

“Christ, what a term,” one of the geeks muttered. The geek nest at that end of the table leaned away from him; one of them even shrugged in Martin’s direction, meaning,geeks. What can you do?

“The men who’ve beenaffected—” Jill leaned on the word, a hard set to those ruby lips. Her blouse gaped to show a blush of lace-topped bra. “—have all been middle-aged, overweight, borderline alcoholic. Liver biopsies have all turned up traces of dioxin and dichlorhyradine. Dichlorhyradine has also turned up in the analysis of tap water in these cities, in microscopic amounts.”

“You’re saying you think it’s the tap water,” Martin said. His gaze strayed toward his coffee cup, and he shoved it an inch of two farther away with an outstretched fingertip. She shrugged. “Jesus Christ, Jill, do you understand what you’re saying?”

“I’m saying—” Dr. Westfield shrugged and lit a thin cigarette; she blew smoke toward the stained yellowed ceiling. “I’m saying the frogs are dying, Marty. You figure it out.”

The geeks all nodded.

Of all of them, Martin thought, he was the only one who was scared. It was his name on the big door, after all. And his ticket to Washington.

The Dallas Morning News, December 14, 1994, page 26A. (shorts)

ONE DEAD IN HOTEL FIRE

An unidentified man is dead after what firefighters describe as an intense fire in the Adolphus Hotel. The fire was contained in one room of the hotel and apparently involved only the area of the bed, leading to speculation that the victim fell asleep while smoking.

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