The Burner

A Warmth Chronicles Story

Bradley watched the Sweet Salvation leave the emcampment with Conner. The music stopped at the gate. A few of his people waved from the fence line.

He'd sent the request because Dr. Patel insisted. The Nurse, a glorified Burner, had earned a reputation in the encampments. No one told him to expect more burners. They did actually know what they were doing. The Sumner encampment was safer, for now.

He knew this settlement the way he knew his own heartbeat. Every sightline. Every weak point in the fence line. He'd been law enforcement in this county for nineteen years before the warmth arrived in that meteor shower.

Every road. These people. Disputes over property lines that didn't matter anymore. He knew which families had composted their grief and which were still drowning in it.

He built this place, brick by human brick, out of what the warmth had left behind.

He wasn't entirely sure, what he was any longer.

Bradley was on the north fence, 2am, alone. He'd rearranged the rotation schedule to engineer more solo shifts without anyone noticing his subtle glow.

It pulled. Someone or something. A fish hook to his gut. Strong. A pull of heat, like a compass needle. Forty yards northeast, beyond the tree line. Multiple signatures. Moving slow. Burned Ones in a loose formation, not a horde. Manageable.

He caught them at the gap in the old drainage ditch before they reached the fence. Three of them. He was quiet. Efficient. Bradley didn't think about how he'd known before the motion sensors triggered.

He filed the report at 0230. Threat neutralized. North perimeter, coordinates logged. He listed the method. Did not list the forewarning. Did not list the eleven seconds he'd stood at the fence with his eyes closed, feeling Sumner's edges the way a man feels the walls of a dark room with his hands.

The encampment was quiet when he came back through. Generator hum. Occasional cough from the medical tent. His people. Every face a name he knew. Every name a weight he carried.

He stopped behind the supply depot, in the narrow corridor between the corrugated wall and the reinforced chain-link. His private geography. Somewhere no one had reason to walk at 0300.

He looked at his hands.

They glowed.

Not the way Ignacia Torres glowed. She stepped out of that truck and lit up like a furnace door swinging open. His was quieter. Deep under the skin.

He'd been monitoring it for eleven days. Documenting it the way he documented everything, methodically. Without sentiment. The discipline of a man who understood that information was either a weapon or a vulnerability.

He pressed his palms together. Focused on cold. Sumner in January. Frost climbing the chain-link at night. Breath fogging at 0400. The glow dimmed. Steadied.

He released it. Slow.

It came back.

He did it again.

Again.

The control was…

“Captain Ashford.”

He turned.

Wendy Rollins. Supply coordinator. Forty-three. Bad knee from a fence breach back in September. One of his reliable people.

She stood at the mouth of the corridor with a supply manifest in her hand and an expression he couldn't read in the low light.

He didn't move. Didn't hide his hands. That window had closed.

“Wendy.”

She looked at his hands. The shadows around him ran slightly warmer than they should. Her mouth pressed into a line.

“How long.” Not quite a question.

“Eleven days.”

She absorbed that. He watched her recalibrate, run the same inventory he'd been running for eleven days. The briefings he'd led on thermal conversion. The protocols he'd established. The word he'd used at the gate when that truck arrived, flat and certain as a door slamming. The word that meant not us, not here, not ever.

“You should have…” she started.

“I know.”

“The protocol…”

“I wrote the damn protocol, Wendy.”

Silence.

She looked past him, at the fence line, at the dark beyond it. “Three Burned Ones, north perimeter, 0200,” she said. “Report says threat neutralized.”

“It was.”

“Sensors didn't trigger until 0203.”

He said nothing.

She looked at his hands again. The fading glow. Nineteen years of law enforcement and eleven days of something different, standing in a corridor at 0300.

She folded the manifest.

“I came out here because I heard movement,” she said. “Turned out to be nothing.” She met his eyes. “You should get some sleep, Captain. You're on the 0600 briefing.”

She walked away.

Bradley Ashford stood alone in the corridor. He pressed his palms together once more. Held the cold. Held the dark. Held Sumner in his hands the way he always had.

The warmth held back.

Waiting.

Bradley told himself that he was in control.

He almost believed it.

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Written for Bradley Ramsey Pandamonium Prompts.

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My Creativity is fueled by tea. Lots of tea.