Serial, Stage 4

I stumbled over the rocks and dying undergrowth to keep up with my companion, who ran towards the smoke with a concern I had thought him incapable of. The main, indeed, the only street in town was a boulevard in Hell, with every building from saloon to outhouse a mass of flames. He nodded at the ground, where clumps of hoof prints circled each other before racing off to the West. “Musta come through last night. Dozen maybe.” He spat on the prints and nodded to the fires, having exhausted his meager confabulatory reserves.

The dead horse was still there, but several other corpses had joined it, each now coated in thin layers of dust. Some buildings would soon be only embers, while others roared at the height of their intensity, adding to the already pitiless heat of the morning sun. I yawned and scratched my head, while the empty bank collapsed behind me. I wondered if the teller had ever woken up.

My companion had not once exclaimed what a shame it was, and his usual grunts and rumblings were absent, replaced by a more complete silence. I stood looking at the inn where I had slept the night before last, right next to what had been the train station. My worthless bank notes lay in my pocket, my suitcase still at our campsite and stuffed with contextually inappropriate clothing. An unwieldy embarrassment clogged the back half of my skull, and I lurched to a run towards the flaming inn before me to try and escape it. “Damb! What!?” was the cry that followed me through the front door.

The bar was on fire, the cash register was melting. The shelves behind the bar were on fire and emptied of liquor. The tables were on fire and the corpses sitting at the tables were on fire, and the old player piano in the corner was on fire. The ceiling of the common room was two stories up, but the entire second floor was a sea of billowing smoke, glowing orange and red, groaning and roaring. Everywhere the sound of wood cracking. The poisonous air joined the embarrassment in my skull, and I shook an old man at the nearest table. “Get out! You have to get out!” I coughed and coughed and kept shaking him, though flames danced on his head which lay in a pool of bubbling blood. I might have kept on shaking him, had I not heard a cry from up the stairs at the back of the room.

Past the player piano and up the steps into the smoke, with enough sense to wrap a discarded rag around my face. There was a small child on the steps, indistinct through the tears in my eyes. And then I was carrying her, rushing out of the smoke and back through the room. An ember falling from above lit on my forehead as we raced out the door, and waves of heat chased the poison from my skull. I dropped my burden in the dusted road.

My companion was next to me now, and he shouted, “Ahbrow! Ahbrow!” then slapped me in the face. The burning subsided. I lay on the ground and ran a hand across my forehead to feel a small colony of blisters rising where my right eyebrow should have been. I blinked and looked at him where he stood sporting what must have been his first smile ever, clashing with his mustache, which was like a hairy frown of its own. As my vision cleared, I nearly cried out in horror as the muscles in his cheeks writhed with the pain and effort of this newly discovered expression.