City on Fire

The fire was hot enough to melt the skin off your bones at thirty feet. Heat radiated off of the buckling steel supports of skyscrapers and turned the streets between the high buildings into a convection oven. The inferno turned the air toxic. Anyone too close would set their lungs ablaze just by breathing. Most tried to run, though to where, it’s impossible to say. Some were trapped on the roads as the asphalt melted underneath them, their sloughing skin melted into the black tar. Some made it to The Lake. They thought that would save them, until the water of The Lake boiled them alive.

Some may have escaped the crucible by fleeing into the Ramble but it’s not likely. Not with heat like this. Those that managed to submerge themselves in the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reservoir may have been spared.

Aisling observed the fire from her floor-to-ceiling windows. Her right hand shook and she tried to stifle the tremor. The flames had raged up the Upper West Side and were overtaking Harlem, faster than anyone could have imagined. It was spreading too fast. Impossible to fathom.

Her phone buzzed on the table beside her. It was her mom, again. Seventeen missed calls. It was okay, she would call her back later. How could she even explain? She would call back once she had time to get her thoughts in order. Her mom would be so mad.

She should just enjoy watching the view from her forty-first story windows for the moment. She paid enough money for this view, after all. What would she tell her mom? Oh, her mom was going to be mad, indeed.

She would need to charge her phone though, it would die soon. And then she wouldn’t be able to call back. And the power was out, which would make that impossible. Who knew when it would come back on? She’d managed to tune the radio in her kitchen to the emergency broadcast band where they’d given the general evacuation order, effective immediately. But Aisling hadn’t evacuated. Where would she go? She didn’t really have a lot of friends.

“Damnit Aisling, just go anywhere!” She could hear her mom shouting, “just get out of the city! You should never have been there in the first place!” Maybe. If only mom could see her now. It would have to be worse on the streets, though, even her mom would see that. The emergency band had since gone dead, after warning of risks to the city’s gas lines and cascading failures of safety measures and essential utilities. She would have to wait it out. She’d call her mom back soon.

She brought her left hand up and sipped her drink. Aisling didn’t drink, except when she really needed one. That’s why she hadn’t thrown all the booze out when she gave it up. You never know when you might really need it, to calm your nerves if nothing else. And nerves need calming when the world burns.

She’d even garnished it with a piece of leftover bacon from her fridge, which she knew she had to eat up since the power was out.

Her phone buzzed again. The flames neared Yorkville. Maybe she should pick up. Her mom would worry. She’d just finish her drink first.

The air outside was blisteringly hot, even at this distance. Aisling stripped down to her undergarments. Sweat streamed off her forehead and arms.

There was something out there, beyond the immolation, beyond the flames that danced high in the blazing air of the city night. Like the light from the fire flickered off the hidden sides of great, black, stony mountains, somewhere far away, beyond the city, yet towering over it. Their enormity pierced the clouds of smoke and the distant sky. They reached over and behind the moon. There were chasms in between the mammoth peaks. She imagined them delving down beneath the blaze into cold, dark, ageless, places.

The change in air pressure from temperatures above a thousand degrees weakened the windows, and the glass exploded, driving shards like bullets into Aisling’s body. Blood dripped from skin slashed to ribbons and steamed when it hit the ground. Aisling sipped her drink, hot now, it tasted like iron. She could watch the mountains forever, out there behind the sky. They were so beautiful. Her skin started to bubble and peel.

Death when it came was swift. Not her body melting from the heat, but from the explosion. Emergency services had warned about cascading failures in the gas lines throughout the city. The fire raged through the conduits, and emerged in Aisling’s building with the force of a ton and a half of TNT. The building turned to ash and rubble awash in the storm. Aisling died wishing she could see the black mountains, just one last time.