Firestorm

I wondered if this was how the dinosaurs had felt, watching that bright meteor streak toward the ground.

Chapter Two

I spent some time in lockup lying on a clean hospital bed, humming popular songs, and trying to imagine what the new Wardens seal should look like. I was currently going with a shiny circular motif, with the new motto of We're So Screwed ru

Bored with mental graphic design, I got up and wandered around, taking stock. The infirmary was mysteriously intact. Crisp, clean, no sign of struggles. Maybe it had been empty. Dji

Which would have been removing any humans who might pose a genuine threat to them later. I wondered if it had been David's bunch, acting under the red-eyed influence of the Earth. Or if it had been Ashan's little merry band, coming after Wardens just on general principles.

Either one would have been horrific, in these close quarters. I didn't want to imagine it, but the images kept springing up when I closed my eyes.

Eventually, not even fevered imagination could hold off exhaustion, and I surrendered to a need to be horizontal. I pulled a waffle-weave cotton blanket up over my aching body and wished—again—for a shower. I was too tired even to take off my shoes, much less undress, although these clothes needed to be burned, not just laundered. I stank to high heaven, and was ruining a perfectly good bed, but as soon as I closed my eyes, all those concerns slid away like oil off Teflon.

I was asleep so fast, I had no time to realize it was happening, falling into a soft-edged darkness that wrapped warm around me, falling without fear and without limit…

… and then, without any sense of transition, I was sitting in a nice, comfortable living room with a fire roaring in the hearth. Curled up like a cat on a soft cotton-covered sofa, my head against the pillowed armrest, covered with the same blanket I'd been using in the infirmary.

"Hey, kid," said a low voice. I blinked and focused across the room.

"Jonathan?" I asked, and slowly sat up. "Am I—? Aren't you—?"

"Dead?" the mack daddy of the Dji

"Aren't you? Dead?" I asked.

"Yeah, well. Kinda."

I blinked again and sipped the beer. Seemed like the thing to do. Jonathan looked exactly the same as he had last time I'd seen him: human, tall and lean and whipcord-strong. Ta

I put my bottle down on the polished wooden coffee table after shoving aside issues of magazines in languages that I didn't recognize to make room for it. "You're dead," I repeated. "So why are you in my dream?"

He raised the bill of his olive drab ball cap with one finger. "Good question. Morbid, isn't it?"

"What?"

"Dreaming about dead people. Creepy. You ever see a therapist about that?"

"I'm not—" Even in dreams, I couldn't win an argument with him. Even when he was dead. "What are you doing here?"

Jonathan took off his cap, tossed it toward a coat-tree (and missed), and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He met my stare. That was a frightening thing. Dream or not, he had the exact same eyes—dark, lightless, limitless, filled with an infinity of things I could never understand in my short human lifetime. Stars were born and died in those eyes. "I think the real question is, what are you doing here? This is the end of the world, kiddo. Or the begi

I clutched the blanket closer. "I—don't understand."

"Yeah, didn't figure you would. But I thought I'd give it a shot." He took another swig of beer, but those inhuman eyes never left me. "Take a look outside."

I rose, dragging the blanket with me wrapped around my shoulders like a bulky shawl. Not that I wanted to get up from that obscenely comfortable couch, but this was a dream, and I was going to do just what he wanted me to do. No real will of my own. My hand reached out for the drapery pull, and I yanked, and the heavy maroon curtains slid back, revealing…

A big field of nodding yellow flowers. Blue sky. A few clouds drifting lazily over the horizon.

I turned to look at him, a question on my face.

"Keep looking," he said. "Little more to the picture than meets the eye."

I narrowed my eyes, and it was like going up in to the aetheric, only I never left my body; the horizon zoomed toward me, clarifying itself as it came. What looked like a shadowy mountain range resolved into something else entirely.

Death.

I was looking at the skeletal remains of a city. Whatever skyline shape had once made it memorable was gone, so I didn't know if I was looking at Paris or New York or Dallas; it was a twisted bare mass of metal now, corroding and twisting together, being beaten down by the gentle, remorseless rain and wind. That was how the planet triumphed, in the end. With patience. With stillness.

Without mercy.

"You're getting there," he said. "Closer."

And he was closer, too—across the room and standing right behind me. His hands closed on my upper arms, holding me in place against him. I didn't want to see, but it came to me anyway.

Bones. So many bones, sinking deeper into the hungry ground. Flesh liquefying and returning to the soil, bones taking longer to flake away into bleached splinters.

Bones were all that was left of humanity, I knew that. I could sense that. Nothing remained. Not a city untouched, not a family huddled in a cave, waiting out the disaster. We'd been completely, utterly removed from the Earth.

"You see?" Jonathan's voice rasped, soft as velvet against my ear. I could feel the warm whisper of his breath stirring my hair. "It's like bowling. When the match is over, you have to return the rented shoes. Sorry, kid. Game over."

Six billion lives, snuffed out. I wanted to fall to my knees, but Jonathan was holding me up. There was a certain lazy cruelty in the way his fingers dug into my skin.

"Don't go all weak on me now," he scolded me. "Bones and dust. That the way you want it?"

"No," I said, and firmed up my knees and spine. Weak? I wasn't weak, and I wouldn't let him see me that way. "So you tell me, how do I stop it?"

"What makes you think it's your job to stop anything?"

I shook free of his hands and whirled to face him. My fists clenched at my sides. "Because you brought me here!"

His face smoothed out, became as rigid and emotionless as a leather mask. Those eyes, God, those eyes. Fury and power and anguish, all together.

"I didn't bring you here," he said. "You think you're Miss Special Destiny of the year?"

"No," I shot back, furious. "And I don't damn well want to be, any more than you wanted to be—whatever the hell you are. But sometimes there isn't a choice. Right?"

"Careful. You might accidentally make some sense. Ruin your reputation."