CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Things Go to Hell”
Tuesday evening.
Otto took Steve for a walk on the hotel grounds, cleaning up after the big dog with a plastic bag. They returned to Otto’s ground-floor room, which opened onto the patio and pool area. Otto and Steve lay on the bed. Otto turned on the television using the remote and found a news channel.
Scenes of chaos: Fire trucks and police vehicles surrounding a smoking loft. Anxious residents huddling behind police barriers wrapped in blankets. Otto turned up the sound.
“The fire appears to have started on the top floor, home of Volt Media founder and COB Lewis Stark. It is unknown whether Stark was in the loft when the fire broke out. Fire fighters have not been able to get in there. Stark recently revealed he suffered from a heart defect and voluntarily gave up his position as CEO.”
As Otto watched a wall collapsed sending up a nuclear cloud. Pumper trucks plumed arcs of water onto the blazing building. Otto changed the channel. A giant transsexual dressed as Marilyn Monroe vogued across the America’s Got Talent stage as Piers Morgan’s buzzer sounded.
Click.
BMX boys doing double flips in a stadium.
Click.
A man pulling a prehistoric fish out of a river.
Otto turned the television off but remained staring at it, back against the headboard. Steve slowly rolled over on his back like a doomed freighter and stuck his paws in the air.
Otto had a bad feeling about what he had just seen, an atavistic sixth sense from the time man crawled on four legs. The fire didn’t feel like a terrorist operation. There were no threats, no demands, no videos boasting of their great success.
Otto had been fascinated with spontaneous human combustion since reading a Jack Kirby comic when he was twelve years old. It was one of those recurring urban legends with just enough documentation to keep it alive.
Otto differed from other true believers in one respect.
He had seen it.
***