Admit it. Allow yourself to admit it. Maybe it’s what you need. Maybe it’s why you’re so fucked up, and your only friend is me. Ever think of that?
“Goddamn it shut the fuck up!” I scream, making the guy in my grasp freak out even more. He starts punching and kicking at me, throwing himself against my body in his drug-induced panic being fueled by my own psychosis in front of him.
“You’re crazy man.” The druggie says, hitting me square in the face mask, making it pull away from my skin, letting in the toxic fumes around us.
My eyes weep and my skin instantly feels like it’s peeling away from my skull. The heat is insane, and the chemicals burn more than the fire. I take a deep breath in through my mouthpiece trying to center myself and adjust my mask back on my face, grabbing the motherfucker by his twisted hair, and dragging him to the door, screaming at him and the one in my head at the same time to knock it the fuck off.
“I just need to do this. Then I can worry about her and all the fucked-up feelings I have that I don’t know what to do with!” I scream louder and louder as the fucker fights me.
He’s thrashing and pulling back on me, his body being used as a weapon to drag me back away from the area that the fire has left and into the blazing room he was in. I’m trying to bring him out and he’s yanking me back. My feet are slipping on the floor that’s all wet and slick now, and it’s a game of tug of war inside an inferno.
If he wins you’re not getting out of here. You know what you have to do.
“I know. I know!”
The lab in the kitchen is howling, with the flames reappearing from under the surface of the water that shimmers like an oil slick. The chemicals are mixing with it, and it’s becoming volatile. It’s going to…
The explosion rocks the whole house blowing me off my feet, and throwing me across the room. Flames engulf me and knock back my brothers as the containers of mixed drugs blow apart one by one.
I’m being covered in shrapnel as I land in a heap in the corner, my fingers still entwined in locks of hair that flew with me, but there’s no body attached to it. I’m on the floor in the corner panting and wheezing, trying to find my bearing with a scalp hanging off my gloved hand.
“Fucking hell.” I call out, looking through the new disaster for my brothers.
The house shakes around me and a loud screeching sound fills my ear. The smell of gas invades my mask, choking me, making it hard to breathe even with the respirator in my mouth. My nose fills with the scented smell of the natural gas additive and I know that this is it. I’m going to finally be taken out by one of these fucking fires that I underestimated, that I lethimunderestimate.
It's the feeling of my life leaving that makes me yank off my mask and scream into the blazing inferno around me.
“Phoenix. I love you!”
It’s like nothing I’ve ever done before, admitting to myself that I have real and true feelings for someone. I don’t love, I only hate, but even the hate is muted in me. My little psychopathic heart and head don’t know how to feel emotions. But here and now, as I try to climb off the floor, knowing I’m not going to make it, I can feel the love, and I know that it’s too late for me.
Now that I’ve felt it, it’s going to kill me, just like everything else in my life that I used to love before I forgot how to. Like my father when I was a baby before he left, and mother before she raped me over and over again then killed herself with her own drugs and sexual debauchery.
This is it. I’m going to die the moment I allow myself to say the words that I’ve been afraid to since she spoke them to me. It’s like karma coming around and yanking from me the only happiness that I’ve felt in so long. But I deserve that don’t I? For all the lives I’ve taken, for all the bad things I’ve done. I’m a killer and I don’t deserve to love even though now I really want to.
It's a life I could never have imagined, now flashing before my eyes. A home, a woman, children, and a fucking white picket fence. They should all be mine now that I have the most important part, the woman who loves me for me, for who I am, but fuck it, that bitch karma has me now.
“I love you Phoenix. I’m sorry.” I weep as I get to my knees, shaking off the burn of the chemicals and the heat of the flames.
“Fuck man, come on!” Marcus screams at me through the dense smoke, his hand smacking me in the face mask. “Let’s go!”
Blindly I reach out for him. My head is swimming from the impact on the wall and floor and the chemicals are fucking with my mentation. Falling forward he catches me, propping me up on my feet, and I can feel him smacking my face mask.
“What?”
“You’re off, that’s why you can’t breathe buddy. Come on, suck in through your mouth.” He yells to me in the darkness of all the smoke. “Can you walk? You flew pretty far.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Good.” He says, not waiting for me to get my bearings.
He takes my hand in his and yanks me hard, almost pulling me back off my feet, but I somehow stay up and follow him out. He’s using the length of hose that travels through the building as a safety rope, following it with his hand to keep us in the right direction to the front door.
There’s not much else that can be done. The gas shouldn’t be on, it should have been turned off before we even came in, but unfortunately the first responding station must have missed that. Now it’s too far gone, and we need to get out before it blows again which can be any second.
The darkness lightens a little as we make our way through what I am assuming is the living room and the front door comes into view. Daylight streams in, battling the smoke for the darkness.
People are in a hustle outside, running around, trying to pull the trucks back, but it’s too late.
