Hayes tried to stand. He watched the screaming faces rush before him. Watched as the fire licked adjacent roofs or crept down into bushes and small lawns. He saw there was something moving in one of the homes, ambling back and forth and covered in flames. It fell from sight and he did not see it again.
He realized he felt something in the back of his head. Something cold and intense like a drill being pushed into his brainpan. Sensations washed over him, lurid terror and wild fear, eating into him and seizing up his heart.
“Oh, God,” he murmured to himself. “Not now. Please. Not now.”
But there was no stopping it. The attack was coming. He fell to his hands and knees and waited for it to pass.
Yet it did not pass. It grew and it grew, swallowing him and pulling him down and drowning him. Soft blue lights began flashing at the edges of his sight, just as when he’d seen that strange vision in the trolley tunnel. He took a deep breath and wondered if vomiting would clear it, but as he did he realized that the pain was lessening, but the sensations were not going away. He could still feel the people around him, yet it did not pain him at all.
He opened his eyes and stood and looked out at them and, astonished, held them clearly in his mind. Sensations flooded through him, the echoes of many thoughts and desperate hopes and wild fears, but they did not pain him or wound him as they always had. It was so clear, so focused. It was as though he had been blind, but now for the first time he could see the world clearly and without pain, and he looked out on what surrounded him.
A chorus. A wailing chorus of fear and terror, and his soul was the reed that caught their scream and sang out, loud and high and clear, begging for someone to listen.
He looked at the building behind him and knew immediately someone was inside. In the lower back room, hiding in the bathroom. More than one person, probably.
Several nearby firemen began to load up to head out, and Hayes ran to one and grabbed him and shouted, “There’s someone in that building!”
The fireman looked at Hayes, then at the building. “What? No, we evacuated that an hour ago!”
“You’re wrong! There’s someone in the back!”
“In the back? How the hell do you know? Get your goddamn hand off me.”
“I’m telling you there’s a mother and daughter there!”
The fireman shoved him back and brandished a leather-gloved fist. “Get the hell off me or I swear to God…”
Hayes steeled himself and reached out to him, desperately listening to the growing echoes from within the man. It had never come so fast before, and so easily, and soon he heard…
“Janey says you need to listen,” he said suddenly.
The fireman stopped and stared at him. “What?”
“Janey says you need to listen to me. To help. Or else it will have all been for nothing, all of it. Will you help me, then?”
The fireman’s mouth dropped open. He gaped for a moment, then said, “How in the hell do you know?”
“Will you help me?” said Hayes again.
The fireman’s face grew pale. Shaken, he nodded, and followed Hayes into the building.
Hayes led the fireman down into the basement, standing aside sometimes to let the man hack away at the doors that barred their progress. When they reached the bathroom in the basement they had to turn aside and cover their faces, as the ceilings were filled with thick rolls of black smoke, yet they saw a mother and her little girl lying on the sooty floor like dolls thrown aside. The fireman stuck his head in and looked at them for as long as he could, then looked at Hayes and said, “Well, I’ll be goddamned.” Then he went to the front door and called for help.
Four more firemen trooped in. Hayes withdrew to the street and watched. He could feel it when the firemen grasped their limp arms and dragged them out, the little girl pale as the moon, the mother drooling and unconscious. Hayes watched as the firemen laid them out on the cement and began to tend to them.
Then the fireman he had spoken to approached him slowly. “How did you do that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Hayes said honestly.
“How did you know they were in there?”
“I don’t know. I just did.”
“Can… can you find any more?”
Hayes turned and looked at the buildings up and down the street. “I think so. If I get close.”
“Well. We’ll follow you if we can.”
Hayes took a thick leather coat from them and began the haphazard process of sprinting up and down any alleys he could, frantically trying to listen for anyone trapped inside. He would know when they were close, as they lit up in his mind as they always had, but so much faster and brighter than he had ever felt it before. For a while there was nothing as he dodged and ducked among the flaming pathways, but then he skidded to a halt before a small ramshackle tenement, looking up at it. Then he ran back to the firemen, calling, “In here, in here! There’s one in here!”
They came and broke the side door down. Inside was a man trapped in his stairwell, his leg broken in two places and his ankle crushed below a mound of fallen wood. When they found him he looked up, gaping like a fish and scrabbling at his leg. He was curiously bald, his hair having slowly withered in the heat, and his face glistened with the promise of blisters. The crew chief levered the boards up and they pulled his foot out, twisted and wet and red. Then they hauled him away, and he howled whenever his foot touched cement, tears running down his red face.
The firemen stared at Hayes. “Jesus,” one said softly. “What the hell are you?”
“Enough of that,” said the crew chief. “He can find more. Can’t he?”
Still breathing hard, Hayes nodded.
“Then go to it, I guess,” said the chief.
Hayes sprinted through the network of streets, the fire crew shining in his mind and distant screams ringing in his ears. He led the crew through a maze of ruined streets and tumbling rookeries to three vagrants trapped in a cellar, having crept in in the middle of the night to find a warm place to sleep. The fire crew hooked the truck’s hoses up to the hydrants, and the hose chuckled and whistled as the water barreled through it until finally it shot a towering spray onto the alley. It blew the boards back and the fire died instantly, and Hayes and the crew pulled the drunken vagrants out and led them staggering out to safety.
Hayes wiped sweat from his face before running back into the streets. There were more, many more. He felt them, when he looked. Felt their terror beating wild, hovering in the fire when they were near like will-o’-the-wisps in boggy mists. Minute after minute he returned to the gathering fire crews, telling them where he had found another and how they were trapped. Then he realized more people were following him. Not fire crews, but normal people. Normal people listening to his voice and following his commands.
He was surveying the fire from a corner when he felt it start to leave him. His veil of awareness slowly began to recede, and the souls that had burned so brightly in the night now dimmed to become murky haze. Soon he knew he would be blind and broken and fumbling again, shortsighted and lost, and he cried out, “No! No, not now! Please, don’t!” But it did not stop. It was leaving him.
He climbed back up to the top of the fire truck and began desperately shouting orders. He pointed up one street and told them where survivors were hidden, and pointed down another and told them where the fires were spreading fast. He told them who was hurt and where and how long they had. And each time the crews emerged from the rubble with a black-streaked refugee he waited for them to be laid upon the sidewalk before turning around and sprinting back into the fire.
And the crowd watched him. They watched this strange, sooty little man bellowing hoarse commands and ordering them this way and that. They watched him climb up onto a car roof and summon some strange authority around himself like a cloak and then shout directions to teams far down the street. And for some reason they began to believe that he wielded some power over the fire, as if he could control the fire itself. Like he could merely point at a burning home and the flames would wither and die and not return. And how could they believe otherwise? Battle-scarred and tattered and grim as the fiercest warrior, how could this little man be anything less than the commander of all things within his sight?