"Where's daddy?" she asked, wondering why her daddy hadn't rescued her.
"He's been burned. In the fire."
Then the paramedics were there, checking her over and rushing her into the ambulance and away, to the burns unit of the local hospital. Most of her hair was scorched away, and the back of her neck and entire back seared by flame to a black, charcoal cinder. When the firewall had leapt at her, she turned to run...
Pippa blinked, now, remembering the following months of pain, the skin-grafts, the agony. Tears developed at the corners of her eyes, for here and now the smell of frying flesh reminded her of her own, all those years ago, when she'd been nothing but an innocent little girl. She discovered, much later, her father had fallen asleep, in bed, with a cigarette. The happy glowing little cig had burned down to its filter, a long and delicately balanced cylinder of ash, a mocking middle finger of grey which gradually crumbled, and ignited the duvet. In seconds her father's legs had been consumed, and he had run from the house screaming, setting fire to the stairs and landing in his fast, self-preservation exit - thus condemning Pippa to a fire-ensnared tomb. If it hadn't been for the bravery of the firemen, she'd be dead...
"Bastard."
The word ejected from a snarl of lips, and even now Pippa felt the old scars on her back itching, and she thought of her father, and she hated her father. She remembered the thick yellow cream, remembered vividly the many skin-graft operations continuing for a further six years, simply to return her to a semblance of normality. She remembered school, and her torture at school: kids were evil little bastards at the best of times, she knew, and even now she shivered, remembering the other kids chasing her with matches and lighters, making dolls of her and burning them in the classroom and playground. She'd wept, oh how she had wept and begged to be left alone. But the bullying continued, merciless, endless. Her parents couldn't stop it, her teachers couldn't stop it, because bullies were clever, cunning, they knew when to strike in those tiny moments when nobody else was around, nobody else there to witness the pain. The worst - Emelda, a big butch lass with legs like girders and a spotted face like a burst melon, with facial lumps and frizzy hair like bad candyfloss - Emelda, yeah, Emelda had taken particular delight in torturing Pippa, chasing her on long winter mornings across frosted fields, throwing lit matches at her in class, singing "Burn the witch, burn the witch,
burn the witch!"
This went on for years. For long, agonizing
years.
Years of subtle fear, of checking the coast was clear before leaving school and before joining the dinner queue; always the last to enter the classroom, just after the teacher, much to the amusement and general hilarity of Emelda and her group of mocking cronies. Pippa the Prick, they called her. Pippa
takes
Prick. Pippa the Witch. Pippa the Bitch, Pippa the Walking Corpse,
fucking burnt bitch, you should have died in that fire with your mum and dad, you should be a blackened stick-corpse stinking like fried pigmeat, lying in a mass grave for the burned, all curled up together like burnt bacon and your fingers like black twisted twigs.
They caught her by the local shops. Ironically, her dad had sent her to buy cigarettes and matches, and she stood, arms limp, matches in one hand, as the girls formed a semicircle cutting off her escape and Emelda, with her frizzy mass of back-combed curly hair, snarled words filled with poison and hatred and Pippa did not understand, did not understand this
hate.
What had she done? She said it, finally plucked up the courage to say the words which burned in her breast.
"Why, Emelda? What did I do to you? Why do you hate me?"
"You fucking burnt witch, we want you to die, we hate you, hate your stupid little bitch face and stupid little burnt-stick arms and legs."
There was no reason. Something
clicked
inside Pippa.
She smiled, even as Emelda slapped her a stinging blow across the face, making skin smart with an imprint of fat, red, crooked fingers, making blood trickle from a split lip and Pippa's eyes turned triumphant in a cold, analysing, grey glow.
"Burn the witch?" she whispered, understanding flooding her, and she struck the match and threw it into Emelda's frizzy hair in one swift movement. Emelda's hair was a monstrosity of curled hair filled with
hairspray.
Flammable. Her head went up like an inferno, curls crisping and Emelda screaming like... like a live
pig
on a spit.
Pippa smiled as Emelda rolled around on the floor, screaming, trying desperately to put out her blazing hair. None of her friends helped. They backed away, like the cowards they were, and faded into the shadows for eternity.
Pippa stood, watching Emelda squirm, head tilted to one side, eyes bright, screams now gone as her lips melted, her skin melted, but the eyes were there, would always be there, watching her, haunting her...
Now, Pippa blinked.
Now, her own eyes were bright. She rubbed at them savagely, and rolled her shoulders, feeling the scar tissue stretch. She'd stopped moving, was frozen to the spot, nostrils twitching at the scent of burnt flesh. She heard sobbing, distant, muffled, and padded forward between huge stacks of industrial containers... unsure of what she might find. Emerging from between teetering stacks she found the containers arranged in a large square, and within the square was set up an emergency field hospital with perhaps fifty benches. Each bench contained a burn victim; men, women, even children; most had entire bodies scorched, skin blackened, arms stretching out with crooked fingers, faces contorted in hot fire agony and painted by patches of colour, raw pink, angry red, charcoal black. Pippa gasped. Amongst these many victims ran three nurses, tall, slender, with peroxide-blonde hair and cherry-red lips. They did not complain, they simply hurried about, administering jabs and offering support with soothing voices and calming smiles.
Pippa moved forward, and one of the nurses turned. "You! Help, over here!
Please!"
Pippa slung her D5 across her back and hurried towards the nurse. With a fire-dry throat, eyes wide as she took in the flame-carnage, she croaked, "What do you want me to do?"
"Here, inject them with this."
"Painkillers?"
"Yes."
Pippa moved amongst the wounded, the scarred, the burnt, the desecrated. Bacon lips pleaded for help, whimpered in agony, screamed and croaked with fear, but it was the eyes, the eyes were the worst, the pleading in deep, watery depths. Pippa came upon a young girl, six years old, her back savagely burnt, her limbs moving in exaggerated slowness as if she swam through the air, as if trying to crawl away from the pain, the
burning
, which had ravaged her.
It's me,
thought Pippa, tears streaming down her own face.
It's me!
"Help me," said the little girl, and Pippa gave her an injection but could see that it did little to relieve the pain. "Please, please help me." She was weeping, the burnt husk of her body shaking as sobs wracked her skeletal, pork-crisp frame.
Pippa gave her a second injection, and the girl slumped forward. Pippa felt a nurse's hand on her shoulder. Cherry-red lips tickled her ear. "You'll have to kill that one, pretty. She's beyond our help."
No,
Pippa wanted to scream, she's not beyond help, I can help her, I can save her and she was back there, in the fire with the flames ravaging over her and she was back there, watching Emelda squirming on the floor trying vainly, and with slow weakening struggles, to put out the fire in her own hair as the skin on her face melted like hot wax and the whole merged and blended until Pippa screamed, long and harsh, and jabbed the hypodermic, delivering a sweet injection of euthanasia.
"Well done," said the nurse. She pointed. "Now the next."
Pippa moved on, killing the burnt husks, the damaged beings, one by one by one until she reached the end of the row. Then she turned, and came down the next row, delivering her injections of mercy and crisped body after burnt husk slumped to the benches, sighing, expiring, and Pippa was crying, sobbing, weeping openly as she murdered and murdered but this was right, wasn't it? This was the right thing to do, because these people were dying, dying slow horrible deaths under slaughter of the flame and she had the power of
life and death
in her hands, she had the power of...
God.
Pippa finished at the last row, and the final body slumped, dead, to the cool flat bench. Weeping, Pippa looked up, and felt suddenly that something was wrong. The three peroxide nurses were stood together, on the other side of the space, huddled together, watching her with suspicious eyes.
"We should call you the Goddess of Mercy," said one, voice deeply sardonic.
"You are a Killer, that's for sure," said the second.
"A Bringer of Death," said the third.
"I was helping them!" shouted Pippa, "I was putting them out of their misery!"
"Are you happy to be alive, fucker?" snarled the first nurse, peroxide curls bobbing.
"Maybe somebody should have put
you
out of your misery."
"If that fireman hadn't arrived, you would have been toast."
"Roast pork Pippa."
"Cooked toddler-girl."
"Fried female eunuch."
"Burn the witch," said the first nurse. They started to move, walking slowly through the aisles, spreading out, and Pippa became aware of movement, from around the space, as between the containers emerged more nurses, hundreds of nurses with their smart, tight, white uniforms, their bulges of generous belly and bosom, their peroxide-blonde hair and cherry-red lips only now,
now
they didn't look so pretty with their curled claws and blackened teeth stumps and glittering, feral eyes which set them apart, a million miles apart, from the human...
"Burn the witch," they chanted, crooked croaks rising in volume as they swarmed towards her like a plague, "burn the witch, burn the witch,
burn the witch!"
Pippa screamed, covering her ears, then dragged her D5 shotgun from her back and blasted a nurse from her feet. She accelerated backwards, a flailing rag doll, a hole through her midriff showing burnt and blackened intestines. The nurses opened mouths, and flames curled from pink eel tongues, flames burned in their eyes and every single nurse was on fire, on fire
within
and Pippa tried to back away between the benches but there was no escape, no retreat, nowhere to run that the burning nurses could not follow. They had her cornered, a rat in a corner, a fish in a net, a six-year-old girl in a burning room with no help, no rescue, no love, simply waiting to die.
"I don't want to die," sobbed the six-year-old Pippa.
As she waited for the flames to come.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CRASH & BURN
"Wait!" hissed Pippa. "No. I won't let it end like this. I won't die like this. I won't fucking
kill
like this!" Tears streamed down her ashen face, and she threw her weapon to the ground. "I will not fight you," she said, voice a hoarse whisper.
The nurses surged up to her, their breath fire, flames curling from lips, and their hands touched Pippa, caressed her, stroked her hair and body and she gave herself to them, no longer caring, and she knew, deep in her soul, she should never have burned Emelda, it was wrong, it was evil, and now she stayed her hand, did not toss the match into Emelda's hair, instead taking the beating and crawling home, weeping, for revenge could never be the right way.
Pippa breathed, deeply. She opened her eyes. Stared into the burning, glowing orbs of the nurses.
"
I will not fight you,"
she growled. "
Do your worst."
She closed her eyes, and waited for death, but opened them again as she felt the nurses retreating. The benches were gone, leaving a large cool space, and in the middle of the area something glittered on the matt floor. Pippa walked forward, and knelt, and picked up the single match.
She smiled.
And felt a great weight lift from her heart.
Everything was noise and chaos. An eternal tumbling of worlds, planets clashing, smashing, colliding, a roaring and twisting and bashing of steel, stone, concrete, all rushing and clashing together in a madness. She threw up her hands as the insanity took her, and was pulverised by the chaos, battered and bashed, torn, pulled down in a rabid violence which left her totally stunned.
Gradually, the roaring subsided. It was an avalanche in reverse, starting fast and gradually decelerating through smashes and cracks, until only occasional concussive
booms
detonated the silence. Then there were more cracks, and bangs, and the trickling of dust which seemed to go on for a long, long time, so long she wondered if her breathing space might fill with dust and fine debris; suffocate her with a liquid solid.
And then... silence.
A period of time passed, but she was concussed, battered from a very great height. She had no idea how long had passed, only that time
had
passed. She felt as if she meandered in and out of consciousness, although she could not be sure. She could taste blood, which ran down her throat, lubricating her dryness; and for this she was thankful, yet at the same time worried. It was not good to drink blood. If the bleeding continued, she would obviously... die.