Parking Lot…
Immediately After
Chloe Sullivan stood alone in the crowded parking lot in the cool September dark and looked quietly down at her hands.
They were visibly shaking.
She was entirely unhurt.
She had bravely walked straight out of the smoky Torch office with her heavy bag, her expensive laptop, and absolutely all of her fragile limbs completely intact.
Coach Arnold had frantically fled in the massive confusion of the screaming alarm…
he would be found hiding in the gym a bit later, she quickly learned, having apparently completely lost control of his own terrifying fire abilities and requiring a very, very unpleasant medical response.
She was definitely not hurt.
But the roaring fire had completely stopped.
She obsessively kept coming right back to that impossible detail.
The hungry fire had absolutely been spreading…
she had closely watched it, she deeply knew exactly what fire did, she had carefully taken an extensive fire safety class back in seventh grade and completely retained the information simply because she retained absolutely everything.
The metal filing cabinet was fiercely burning.
The cork pinboard was rapidly burning.
The aggressive pattern of the fiery spread was exactly what her fire safety class had strictly told her to always expect.
And then had come the blast.
Absolutely not a water sprinkler.
Definitely not a chemical fire extinguisher.
A massive, concussive shockwave of totally solid air that had violently erupted directly from beneath the wooden door, violently displacing all the available oxygen and instantly snuffing the roaring flames in a single instant, exactly like blowing out a tiny birthday candle.
The exact same invisible, highly localized explosion of pure force that had effortlessly lifted a heavy grown man totally off his feet and violently hurled him straight backward into a hard row of desks.
Directly from the direction of the closed door.
There had absolutely been no one waiting outside the door.
She had carefully checked…
right after a terrified Walt scrambled rapidly away, right after the loud alarm had aggressively shrieked to life, right before she quickly evacuated.
She had looked cautiously directly into the dark corridor.
The red fire alarm box exactly twenty feet straight down the long hall had its thick glass totally shattered, the tiny lever violently pulled completely down.
But the long hallway was entirely, completely empty.
Chloe deliberately added a massive second index card to her complex mental Wall of Weird.
Right next to the one that boldly read ANONYMOUS BENEFACTOR…
TECHNICAL SOPHISTICATION / WHY THE TORCH?
she mentally wrote:
Incident 2: Torch Fire.
Hostile metahuman instantly neutralized by highly invisible concussive shockwave originating directly from the outer corridor.
Massive fire simultaneously extinguished via instant, total oxygen starvation.
Fire alarm violently triggered remotely.
No visible physical agent.
Method: Totally Unknown.
Result: Lethal threat completely eliminated.
I survived.
She stared intently at the two glowing cards deep in her mind.
Someone was definitely watching them.
Not creepily watching.
staying far back, staying entirely, perfectly invisible, but actively acting with terrifying, massive power and absolute precision exactly when the fraying rope was completely about to snap.
She looked slowly across the chaotic parking lot.
The massive cluster of evacuated, shivering students was aggressively assembling right near the main entrance…
worried teachers loudly taking roll, anxious students milling nervously around with their glowing phones.
She scanned the large crowd completely automatically, mentally cataloguing every single face.
Clark.
Pete.
Two gossiping girls directly from her AP English class.
The gruff janitor, Mr. Hendricks, looking incredibly, professionally annoyed.
Coach Sanders from the confused track team.
Alex Carter, standing quietly exactly at the far edge of the large group, his hands stuffed casually in his pockets, looking calmly at absolutely nothing in particular.
Not looking at the bright red fire trucks.
Not looking at the thick black smoke.
Just patiently waiting.
He had definitely been inside the school building entirely after hours.
On the exact day when the Torch had miraculously caught fire.
Directly after she had aggressively published a controversial article that completely exposed a massive school conspiracy.
Directly after the highly sophisticated anonymous tip.
After the abandoned foundry.
After the impossible bridge rescue.
After the warm pie and the casual kitchen conversation and the incredibly, highly precise question entirely about buried meteor rocks and hot sauna temperatures that had smoothly pointed her, she now deeply realized, exactly where she desperately needed to look.
Chloe Sullivan was a very good journalist.
She made a very firm mental note.
The School Gymnasium…
One Hour Later
The fire absolutely had not listened to him.
That was the terrifying thing that kept aggressively repeating on a loop directly in Walt’s head while the cautious paramedics slowly assessed him and the skeptical police asked their highly careful, probing questions about exactly what had actually happened down in the dark locker room.
The fire had absolutely always listened to him completely before…
it was entirely his, it came directly from him, it did exactly what he deeply wanted.
He had six full days of flawless evidence to absolutely support this.
He could easily start it.
He could smoothly stop it.
He could beautifully shape it.
He was completely in total control.
Until he suddenly was not.
It had aggressively started right when he was violently thrown straight backward directly into the hard desks.
The massive, invisible force…
a literal wall of completely solid air that had brutally hit him exactly like a steel battering ram…
had completely broken his deep mental concentration.
And then the shrieking fire alarm right down the long hall had violently shattered and loudly gone off.
When his vital concentration brutally broke, the wild fire completely stopped taking his direction.
It had violently become something else entirely.
Something highly dangerous that only lived entirely by its own chaotic rules.
He had somehow gotten safely outside.
He had blindly made it directly to the dark gym loading dock and sat heavily down on the cold concrete and tried very, very hard to safely contain exactly what was burning deeply inside his shaking hands. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping dot com.
And mostly, he had miraculously managed it.
Mostly.
The massive, smoking black burn marks permanently scorched into the concrete loading dock told a significantly different, darker story.
“Coach Arnold.” The police officer’s deep voice was highly patient and strictly, professionally calm.
“Can you please tell me directly in your own words exactly what happened this evening?”
Walt looked blankly down at the smoking burn marks.
He thought deeply about the stubborn girl, and the wild fire, and the completely impossible invisible concussive blast that had brutally hurled him straight across the small room and instantly snuffed his massive flames in a single instant.
Snuffed completely by something he had absolutely not done and absolutely did not understand.
Something impossibly, terrifyingly powerful and incredibly precise.
Someone watching.
He thought heavily about exactly what would happen when Chloe Sullivan’s damning article inevitably ran.
When the angry school board completely found the glaring statistical anomalies.
When the glowing sauna was thoroughly investigated.
“I don’t know,” Walt said hollowly.
He quietly said it exactly three more times over the next long hour, and each single time he genuinely meant a slightly, totally different thing.
The School Parking Lot
The volatile meteor freak absolutely always showed completely in the end.
Alex stood totally still at the far edge of the crowded parking lot and calmly, methodically tracked Walt Arnold’s highly unstable energy signature.
Walt had completely lost control.
He could physically feel it easily from all the way out here…
the massive signature brutally stuttering and wildly flaring exactly like a downed, sparking high-voltage power line in a massive thunderstorm.
The greedy fire would rapidly consume itself.
Or Walt completely would.
Either dark way, the final outcome would absolutely be the exact same.
Clark suddenly arrived at some point during the chaotic mess…
appearing quietly from the dark direction of the distant farm with the slightly-too-fast, rigid gait of someone who had just run a highly significant distance at a massive, moderate-but-heavily-concealed speed.
He moved smoothly directly through the thick crowd straight toward Chloe, quickly found her, and immediately made absolutely sure she was completely unhurt.
His devastated expression when he saw the thick black smoke aggressively coming directly from the Torch office was the exact, heartbroken expression of a good boy whose beloved secondary family was violently on fire.
Alex watched quietly as Clark gently checked on Chloe.
Watched as Pete quickly showed up, completely breathless and highly confused.
Watched the tight three of them securely cluster entirely together.
He absolutely did not move toward them.
The messy Walt situation finally resolved itself exactly forty minutes later…
absolutely not dramatically, absolutely not with a massive, cinematic fireball.
It quietly resolved itself the exact grim way most things actually did, with the highly slow, brutal physical failure of something frail that had simply gotten far too hot for far too long.
Walt Arnold, hiding deep in the dark gymnasium, totally lost control of the roaring fire completely.
It violently turned entirely inward.
The glowing sauna had generously given it to him, and his own failing human body had tragically just become the highly flammable fuel.
Alex physically felt it violently happen…
a massive, sudden internal explosion of raw pyrokinetic energy, and then the bright signature rapidly collapsing, violently contracting, completely burning itself totally out straight from the deep inside.
He waited exactly another full hour.
Then, he smoothly, completely slipped safely away from the loud parking lot crowd right while Clark was earnestly giving a polite, completely fabricated statement directly to a nodding police deputy.