The face is wrong. The eyes are a dull brown, not the piercing blue I’ve studied in photographs. The features are softer, weaker. This is not Ezekiel. This is a stranger.
The man smiles. It’s a gentle, pitying smile, the kind you’d give a slow child.
“Antonio,” he says, his voice calm, almost melodic. “He said you would come. He said you would be so focused, so sure of your own victory you would ignore every little red flag dancing in your wake.”
The blood in my veins turns to ice.
“Where is he?” I snarl, the words tearing from my throat, my gun now pointed directly at his face. My men shift uneasily, their weapons still trained on the impostor.
The man’s smile never wavers. His eyes are serene, accepting. A true believer.
“Our Prophet is everywhere and nowhere,” he says. “But he wanted me to give you a message. He said you should really have learned not to be so gullible.”
His hand moves as he speaks, revealing not a weapon but a small, black plastic device. A simple remote. His thumb rests on a single, large red button.
Time seems to fracture. Everything happens in a horrifying, crystal-clear slow motion.
Marco shouts, “Down,” and lunges toward me, not to shoot, but to shield me.
The man’s thumb depresses the button.
There is no sound at first. Not a bang. Instead it is a deep, subsonic vibration that comes up through the soles of my boots and into my teeth. The very air in the room seems to contract, to suck inwards towards the man in the centre.
Then the world explodes.
The man, the chair, the tapestries, they don’t just blow apart. They unmake. It’s like the literal sun explodes in front of me in a blinding, white-hot sphere of pure fury.
The light consumes everything, scorching my retinas, followed by a wall of force that hits me like the fist of God.
It picks me up and throws me backward as if I weigh nothing. A deafening roar that is less a noise and more a physical assault hammers into my ears, my skull, my bones.
I am flying through the air, back out into the corridor, and then the world is a chaos of fire and screaming metal.
I hit the ground with a jarring impact that drives the air from my lungs. Debris rains down, chunks of concrete, twisted pipes, things that were once my men.
Fire blooms like a terrible, hungry beast, rushing out of the room and down the corridor, chasing the oxygen, consuming it.
Heat. An unbearable, searing heat washes over me. It licks at my exposed skin, and it’s not a kiss, it’s a brand. My clothes smoulder. The air is ripped from my lungs, replaced by a superheated blast that scorches my throat, my trachea. I can smell it—the acrid stink of cordite, the sweet, ghastly smell of cooking meat, and the unmistakable scent of my own hair burning.
I am on fire.
My left arm, my back, my face, they are alight. The pain is a distant throb, a warning siren heard from miles away, its approach inevitable and terrifying.
Through the ringing in my ears, I hear the screams. Not of fear but of pure, unadulterated agony. The screams of my men, the best money can buy, caught in a conflagration they could never have anticipated.
They are burning alive.
Iam burning alive.
The first thing is the smell. It’s a sterile, chemical stench that claws at the back of my throat, a sharp-edged cleanliness that feels like an insult. Antiseptic, bleach, the faint, sweet-metallic tang of blood. It’s a hospital. I don’t need to open my eyes to know that. My body knows it too, but my body is a distant, pain-wrecked country I can’t quite map out.
A dull, throbbing burn blankets me, a constant, humming distress signal from every single nerve ending. But there are sharper places. My face feels tight, impossibly stiff, like a mask of clay that has baked and cracked in the sun. My arms, my back, each breath is a conscious, grinding effort, the skin pulling and screaming with the slightest expansion of my ribs.
I try to swallow, but my throat is a ragged desert. A sound escapes me, a low, guttural croak that is nothing close to human speech.
“Ah, you’re awake,” a female voice says, far too fucking cheerful, far too fucking calm. “Don’t try to move. I’ll get the doctor.”
I hear her quick footsteps retreat. I fight against the leaden weight of my eyelids, prying the left one open. The right refuses, feeling like a swollen, pulsing mass.
