Rouge (3 page)

Perhaps it was the shock
that had made her immune to the suffering. She might already be dead, and this
was just her ghost watching her husband and her apartment burn. Or maybe it was
only a dream and soon she would wake up, wrapped in his strong arms, seeing his
smiling face rather than one mutated with torture.

“This isn’t real,” she
muttered, grabbing fistfuls of her hair tightly. “I’m dreaming…”

Afraid to look at the bed
again where Leo lay, Liz backed up against the wall. Her heel crunched down on
something sharp and hard and she screamed and fell down beside a broken, black
stone. Leo’s stone.

There was nothing in it.

Everything was loud. The
fire was destroying the apartment, and Liz tore her attention from the rock,
realizing with a jolt of her stomach that she was sitting in a building about
to crumple in on her. Gritting her teeth, Liz shot a quick glance at the still
body of her husband drowning in flames, feeling as though her heart had just
been wrenched out of her chest, and ran to the door of the bedroom.

The fire had consumed the
apartment. Never before had she seen a blaze devour anything so quickly. How
long had she been frozen in horror for? How long had these flames licked at her
own body and not burned her?
There’s no time to worry about that now.
Her
rational voice was back.
Get out.
 

Before she could make it to
the front door, one of the rafters collapsed with a thundering crash, blocking
her way out. Sparks hissed at her, leaping at her body and then disappearing
within seconds. She hyperventilated and stared wildly around, searching for an
exit.
The window,
she thought and dived for the living room wall,
throwing it open and ducking under the frame into the alleyway between her
building and the next. She wobbled on a crate before jumping onto the concrete
and sprinting to the street.

An alarm was wailing. As she
came to the front of the building, she saw others running out of their homes.
They shouted and scattered like ants, on their phones calling the fire
department and the police. No one had seen her.

Not knowing what else to do,
Liz began to run. She forgot about her car and her keys, about her clothes and
her apartment and ran away, away from her life with Leo. Tears streamed from
her face as she sprinted through the cold, deserted suburbs of New York. It
wasn’t until she had turned down a small alleyway into a dead end with only a
bin full of old unmentionables that she realized she was naked, but still
burning up. She fell on the concrete, curling up beside a dustbin and crying
silently. The image of Leo’s body danced in her mind. Liz opened her eyes and
looked down beside her where a broken bottle lay, a flash of red catching her
eyes. She frowned through her blurred vision and picked up the bottle
carefully. Her reflection gazed back at her, only it was hardly her reflection at
all.

Liz’s hair glowed, blood-red
and ablaze like the fire that had just taken her husband’s life. She threw the
bottle down in fright and stared at her skin. Orange vines snaked around her
arms, her legs and her entire body, as though she were infested with oversized
worms. It looked just like lava, coursing through the veins beneath her skin.
Not a single burn marked her, and only the tiny slice the homeless man’s
fingernails had made in the ER remained as proof she was still human.

What the hell is wrong
with me?

Liz gazed once again at her
reflection in the glass bottle and saw that it was real, that she wasn’t
dreaming. That her hair had turned red on its own and her skin glowed like the
sun. That Leo was really dead. That he had burned in a fire that took her
apartment and her life with it. That she was left broken and alone in a dark
alley, just like the discarded bottle.

That she was immune to fire.

Joshua Harrison pulled down the oven
door precariously and jumped back as a waft of black smoke blew directly into
his face. Spluttering, he flapped the dish towel around without any real
knowledge of what to do next, and hurriedly switched off the oven.

Of course it was burnt.
Could he ever make a meal without it over-cooking, missing ingredients or
altogether tasting like dog vomit?

“I’m doomed to starve
alone,” he informed the empty kitchen and stared at the scorched and greasy
oven. “I can’t even cook myself a ready-made lasagna.”

Joshua lived near the
Chelsea Markets, yet despite the wide range of fresh organic foods and
delicacies only a few blocks away from his apartment building, Joshua never
shopped there. He hated the stuffy atmosphere and bustling people. Sometimes it
became too hot for him to handle. Not only that, but he and his best friend and
partner Leo were rarely home long enough to stock up the fridge.

“I knew I should have stayed
at Leo’s tonight,” he said as he poured himself a tall glass of water and fetched
ice cubes from the freezer – about the only thing he could prepare for himself.
Maybe he was just tired. The taxi only dropped him off an hour and a half ago
from the airport after a six hour flight from Guatemala City, and the day
before that they had flown in a rickety old airplane over the Caribbean from
Manzanillo in Cuba. Leo laughed at him the entire flight back, especially when
Joshua threw up on his own arm.

Joshua and Leo thought it
would be a good idea to buy the shack on the beach front outside La
Marca
del Portillo because it was only a half-hour drive by
jeep into the mountains. From there, they hiked up and down every day, looking
for rock particles and anything else they could find. Joshua loved geology –
more passionately than Leo, in his opinion – but Leo was more at home living in
nature. Joshua preferred the comfort of his apartment, equipped with stiff,
boxy couches and pristine clean carpets. He was urban and Leo was rural.

Joshua opened his
refrigerator and pulled out a cold salad he had bought from the airport that
afternoon. At least he wouldn’t starve completely. Deep in thought over their
most recent find, Joshua took his salad down the hall to his office where he
would settle down for an hour and look over his notes before bed so that he
could sleep on their findings. Like a teenager cramming for a test, Joshua
always fell asleep with knowledge bursting inside his mind so that in the
morning, his thoughts had sorted themselves and he awoke fresh.

With his hand on the cool
frame, Joshua chewed on a piece of tomato and stepped into his office. That was
when a pounding sound came from his front door.

“Oh come on,” he moaned and
hurried back to the kitchen. “It’s two in the morning! Who the hell is-”

Joshua threw open the door
and felt the bowl of salad slip out of his hands. Cold pieces of cucumber and
dressing-soaked lettuce went splat on the marble floor.

There stood Liz, wrapped in
a knee-length coat that looked like a homeless-man’s best friend and completely
covered in ash. Her face was red and puffy and tears streamed down her cheeks.
She was on the verge of hysteria.

But none of those things
came close to what shocked Joshua into complete speechlessness. It was Liz’s
striking red hair that made his mouth drop open.

“Joshua,” Liz spluttered and
fell into his arms, retching sobs against his pale blue work shirt. Joshua held
her against him and dragged her into the living room where they collapsed on
the couch. Liz curled her legs up into his lap and the coat fell open,
revealing her completely naked body beneath it.

“Liz!” he gasped, covering
her with the coat. “Why are you… what happened?”

“L-Leo – and – fire – and –
it – I –” Liz’s words were completely incomprehensible, so Joshua held her
close and listened to her cry. They lay there in each other’s arms for so long
that he began to nod off.

“Joshua?”

He blinked a few times and
tilted his head down where he met her eyes filled with tears.

“Yeah?”

“Leo’s dead.”

Joshua stared into Liz’s swollen
face, completely void of emotion, and found he couldn’t move. She sat up
slowly, her hand against his chest, her chin shaking in her effort to stop from
sobbing again. And Joshua just sat there, her words echoing in his mind,
praying that he’d already fallen asleep and this was just a horrible,
post-flight nightmare.

“
Wh
-what?”

“It was a f-fire,” she
sobbed, wrapping the coat tighter around her. It reeked of fish and stale beer.
“I’d just gotten home… we were making love and… this rock that Leo had, it… I
don’t know how it happened but a fire started and… it-it-it…”

Liz collapsed against him
again, her shoulders heaving. Joshua didn’t have the heart to move. He also
didn’t want to believe what she’d just told him. He had no proof after all.
What if she was just drunk, or they’d had a fight and she was too embarrassed
to admit it?

“Liz, if there was a fire,
we should call the police or something-”

“They already came,” she
muttered against his chest. “I ran away, I couldn’t face it. Joshua.” Liz met
his eyes again and there he saw it. The real pain, the horror of what she’d
seen. “I watched him die. And it didn’t touch me.”

“What didn’t?”

Clenching her teeth, Liz
ground out two words that made Joshua’s blood chill.

“The fire.”

He shook his head. “Liz, that’s
impossible.”

“Then how am I here? How is
it that my husband’s
body
is now lying in a pile of rubble and ash, and
I’m naked on your couch? Look-” she ripped the sleeve of her coat up and bared
her arm before him. The skin was pale with smudges of charcoal. But what made
his blood run cold was the faint glow of orange pulsing inside her veins. It
looked remarkably like lava under her skin. “I don’t know
wh
-what’s
happening to me Joshua.”

Never had he seen Liz so
hysterical and angry and traumatized, and it shocked him almost as much as her
strange appearance and the news she’d brought him. So he did the only thing he
could think of doing; he pulled her to him once again, wrapped his arms around
her and held her tight. That way, she couldn’t see the tears that were spilling
from his eyes.

And so it began.

The grief that consumed him
was endless and agonizing. Every waking morning and dark, endless night Joshua
felt it eat away inside him. Leo was everything to him. Family and a friend. A
work partner. Someone who shared his passion, his life. Joshua wasn’t the type
to make friends, and any relative of his lived either overseas, or in a world
where Joshua didn’t exist to them. Leo and Liz were all that he had, and now
they were torn apart.

But Joshua stayed sane, for
Liz. After the fire, she wouldn’t go back to the apartment. She couldn’t even
bring herself to call the police because she didn’t want to have to explain why
she ran away from the apartment completely naked, especially when the very
mention of Leo made her freeze up and start to cry. She told Joshua – as best
she could – what had happened, and then she never spoke of it again.

Joshua, however, needed
answers. This stone that Liz suspected somehow caused the fire was a mystery to
him. When he and Leo discovered it in the mountains, what first drew their
attention to it was that it looked and felt completely out of place. Secondly,
it was far hotter in temperature than the mountain itself. Yet when they took
samples back to the shack, the stone became as dull and lifeless as any other
geological substance, and no warmer than a standard cup of tea.

As Joshua dove deeper into
his research, he decided not to include Liz and study in secret. She needed
time to grieve and keep the tragic fire out of her mind.

But Liz was restless,
especially after she quit working at the hospital. They started looking at
places to move away to so they could forget it all. It wasn’t like Joshua to
spontaneously get up and leave his life in New York. In fact, he almost dreaded
it. He hadn’t lived anywhere but this apartment on Hudson Street since he
finished college three years ago and moved away from home. It was where he felt
comfortable and safe. But he would do it for Liz. He would do anything for Liz.

As February bled into March
and winter slowly subsided into beautiful spring, Joshua put his geologist
skills to work with the volcanic substance. He tested its temperature – which
varied depending on the actual temperature of the surrounding environment – and
the particles that coated it. After the fire, Joshua found himself too afraid
to crack the stone open, but became intensely curious as to what was inside. No
inclusions were found around the stone that might suggest its age. Joshua had
never come across such a unique substance before. It was so artificially made
that it did not appear real, and yet there were traces of igneous rock
crystallized on the surface through the solidification of magma.

Despite the unique
properties of the stone, none of his research could even begin to explain how
Liz was suddenly immune to fire, nor how the blaze in their apartment began.
Joshua set up a lab in the spare room upstairs where he tried to figure out a
formula based on his and Leo’s minimal research on the substance. He suspected
that the answer to his question lay inside the stone itself, and so often he
caught himself with a chisel in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other,
ready to split it in half. Several things stopped him; one, being the memory of
Liz’s demolished apartment where his best friend was killed. There, he found
Leo’s sample of the stone lying severed open beside the bed, completely hollow,
as though whatever was inside it had simply leeched out and crawled somewhere
else. The other was the memory of Leo himself. Joshua wasn’t sure he wanted to
open such a rare substance without his friend by his side, a tattered notebook
in hand and glasses slipping sideways off his uneven nose. Joshua just couldn’t
bring himself to do it alone.