Page 1 of Burn (Two Wheeled Psychos #2)

Fire.

I’ve always had an obsession, ever since I was a little boy growing up in the slums of Philadelphia.

The fire trucks were always careening down the narrow streets, heading to something burning or someone dying.

You could consider it constant chaos just outside the old windows with their peeling lead paint and cracked glass.

I would sit on the edge of my bed, listening to the sirens wailing and watching the flashing lights flickering on my shabby walls.

Images of what I imagined was happening would fill my head and make kaleidoscopes of colors behind my eyelids when I would close them and push on them with my thumbs.

Scenes of destruction, people crying, and bodies burning would plague me in the solitude of my prison, quarantined off from the rest of the world by the abusive, alcoholic, heroin shooting cunt of a mother that never wanted me in the first place.

The noises from the world beyond our shitty apartment were my only company, and I dreamed every night of the day that I would be able to experience them for myself.

I wanted to hear the sounds of life, breathe the smog filled air, smell the bakeries and cheesesteak delis, and feel the sidewalks under my feet.

I just never knew it would happen before I was a grown man.

I never in all my daydreams imagined that the fire I was so enthralled with would be my salvation, and turn me into what I am today.

It was a quiet night, and I was ten years old.

The sounds of mom’s latest fuck boy drilling her into the bed on the other side of the wall from my room were silent.

It was so peaceful that I could hear the rats behind the plaster, scurrying around, looking for food, starving as I was.

The only thing I could smell was the acidic odor of her black tar burning in the old metal spoon she kept in her bra like a fucking treasure.

Why she heated it before shoving it in her veins was weird and beyond me, but whatever.

She was fucking weird, at least she became that way after the drugs fried her last living brain cell.

As I drifted off to sleep, my stomach grumbling from days without anything in it except my own spit, the serenity of the night was broken.

The scent in my nostrils of sizzling heroin turned deeper, hotter, and thicker.

It was smoke.

Black smoke wafted in under my closed door, then sucked itself back out, like a snake’s tongue flicking in and out of its mouth, tasting the air.

My old bed creaked as I climbed off it, my little bare feet feeling the unusual warmth of the wooden floor under them as I slowly walked to the door and reached out for the knob.

It was hot to the touch, and it burned my hand, yet I still tried to turn it, finding it locked, as always.

All those fantasies of people burning alive, and that’s how I’m going to die.

“Well, come on and take me!”

I screamed at the smoke as it puffed in and out at my toes, heating the knob more, creaking against the door.

The screeching of the sirens pulling up outside were nothing compared to the sounds of the fire trying to bust down my door.

It hissed and screamed as the wood turned black and bowed inwards.

I backed away from it on instinct, but it did nothing to protect me when the barrier broke away and the flames flew in.

“No!”

The one pained and panicked word from me was all I got out before the large man in a yellow suit with a mask on his face burst into the room and grabbed me.

With a shattering of the lead glass, he busted out the window behind me with an axe and threw us from the empty hole in the wall to the hard sidewalk below as he shouted to me.

“I’ve got you little man.”

The fire licked me that night, it tasted me, and in the process, it passed its evil to me. I haven’t been the same since.