Burn

Our eyes met the moment I turned to look. Like magnets, our gazes snapped together, our bodies rotated on the same axis, spinning around to reclaim their path towards each other.

Perhaps I had been on that path this entire time, wandering as I loved to do on hazy nights in the city, under the glowing stars and street lamps. The path to this moment, through a maze of purposelessness.

There weren’t many people out so late, after all—which was one of the main reasons for my old habit. I loved being able to just breathe for once, alone and free. The crisp night air always tasted sweeter in a sleeping city.

Tonight was different, from the start. Everything seemed crisper, clearer, bracing like a vivid dream peeking past a haze of sleep. I wandered as usual, but I felt an inexplicable suspense gnawing on my gut, building and building—

And then I saw her.

A slender figure in a black trench coat, hood up, leaning over a railing beside the river, lighting a cigarette. I didn’t stop at first—best not to attract attention so late at night, a lesson I had learned the hard way—and breezed past as casually as I could.

But less than a step more, the suspense fluttering in my stomach morphed into an odd combination of foreboding and excitement, and I whirled around, knowing this was the moment the night had been building up to. She had moved in the same instant: I could see her hair settle back into place as our eyes met.

Or at least I assumed they met. Technically her hood shadowed her face at first, so I couldn’t be certain until a few moments passed and she brought her lighter up to her lips to light her cigarette. The flare of the fire gave me a brief glimpse of her face: a smirk in red lips and white teeth, piercing blue eyes locked onto mine.

A shudder ran through me, and something in my stomach began to burn. I couldn’t describe what exactly I felt, but it was intense and like nothing I’d ever felt before, like flames running down the length of my veins and eating up all the oxygen in them.

We stayed locked in that staredown for the longest three minutes of my life, her eyes never straying even as she smoked, blowing clouds in my general direction. Everything was still, except for her, and I tracked her every move with my peripheral vision.

At last, she threw her cigarette butt to the ground, a long, boot-clad leg shifting to stomp it out; I unwittingly broke eye contact to follow the movement.

In the blink of an eye, she was in pursuit, and I was running for my life.

The tiny warning signs had compounded into a quiet dread—black leather gloves, boots slick with a dark fluid, something red oozing from the nearby alleyway, the look in her eyes—and I felt the danger before I knew of it. The moment the threat became real, my body was already reacting.

The payoff for wandering every night was that I knew the city rather well and was already mapping out a route to the police station. Of course, I had to assume that my pursuer also knew the city well enough, so it was really a question of who was quicker. 

At the very least, I was fairly certain she didn’t have a gun, considering the blood had seemed fresh and I hadn’t heard a shot beforehand. Her weapon would probably be a knife, then, so as long as I could keep some distance from her…

A glance back told me she was gaining on me.

I cursed under my breath. I’d never been particularly athletic, and it was coming back to bite me. Her expression told me she’d realized my disadvantage as well, pace seeming to quicken just slightly; I needed to figure something out soon or hope for a major boost of adrenaline if I wanted to survive.

If I couldn’t outrun her, then I had to lose her. There was an old abandoned building near a bridge we were coming up on—the doors most likely wouldn’t be locked since places like it never stayed securely bolted for long. Pouring my remaining energy into a desperate sprint, I gained a few feet before throwing myself into the building, scanning wildly for anything that could blockade the door. I decided that a desk pressed next to a wall nearby would have to suffice and lunged for it, straining to push it in front of the door just in time for it to shake with the weight of a body slamming into it.

That wouldn’t hold for very long.

Taking a breath and turning on my heel, I dove deeper into the interior of the building.

As I wove somewhat blindly through the halls, focusing on moving forward and never back, I fished my phone out from my pockets, finally remembering that I had it on my person. The line rang twice before a responder picked up, and I managed a clipped summary of my situation, including my location, as I continued to run, short on breath. I shoved my phone back in my pocket without hanging up, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to stay on line even if I didn’t get away.

The building wasn’t disorganized or complex, but it didn’t help that I had never been inside it. A loud crash sounded in the distance, and I could only assume she had gotten into the building. I cursed under my breath and picked up my pace a bit. 

Based on the distance of the crash and the building’s size as it seemed from the outside, I was probably over halfway to the back end. So far I had kept as straight a path as possible, which may or may not have been a good decision. Since she was faster than me, it was possible she might be able to circumvent my route and make it to a back exit before me—but that would only be possible if she happened to know this building well.

And that, of course, was fairly plausible, considering the fact that her hobby of murder would require nice, isolated places such as this one.

If that were the case, then it would be better to turn around and follow the way I came back to the entrance. But that assumed she wasn’t simply following me down the central path. I sighed aloud. This was a train of thought I didn’t have the time to get mired in, being one that essentially came down to a coin toss.

I was already past halfway, so I decided to just keep on course.

That soon proved to be a poor decision as footsteps sounded somewhere in front of me, moving at an almost impressively quick pace. Certain I couldn’t outrun her and breathing out a string of curses, I barged into the nearest door to me, finding myself at the foot of a staircase. Up was not exactly the direction I wanted to go, but I had little other choice. Hopefully she would waste a little time combing through the other rooms I could have hidden in, and I could slip out from the fire escape in the meanwhile.

Exiting from the second floor—opening and closing the door as quietly as possible—I immediately began searching for a window. When I spotted one at the end of the hall, I approached it as quickly and quietly as I could.

The sound of the door to the stairwell opening told me I shouldn’t have bothered, and I was immediately scrabbling at the window, wrenching it open and rushing to get out. I barrelled forward to the railing, which proved to be the best decision, as she attempted a swing at me before working on getting out the window herself.

Without really thinking about it, I ran for the edge of the platform and, disregarding the ladder down, jumped off to the ground, landing awkwardly and rolling an ankle but managing to stay on my feet. 

I tried to recover without taking too long, but she had already come down after me and I barely reacted in time to dodge the knife being swung at me. It caught the cloth of my jacket, slicing through the fabric easily, but I had no time to dwell on it because she was still advancing, seemingly unsurprised I had evaded her swing. 

I could only resume my retreat, adrenaline thrumming through my veins as my instincts worked overtime and my body pushed to keep up with them in order to avoid her fluid attacks. Some hysterical part of my brain remembered middle school dodgeball, and I didn’t even bother pushing the thought away because it wasn’t an unreasonable analogy.

Like sidestepping a ball thrown by one of the more competitive kids, I swung to the side to dodge a thrust of her knife.

But then in a move some of the more wily kids had used, she feinted a swing from the right before transitioning into one from the left, and I tripped myself up trying to keep up, falling to the ground.

Damn.

The hysterical part of my brain lamented getting “out,” while the rest of it blared with the stunned certainty that I was about to die. 

In the meantime, my survival instincts continued to scrabble for some means by which to escape, my hands grappling at the dirty ground and moving of their own accord to fling whatever loose dirt I could grab into her eyes.  And surprisingly, it was effective, halting her advance as she tried to clear her vision. 

I froze in shock but snapped out of it at the sound of sirens coming from the street behind me. Shaking my head to clear it, I turned over, getting painfully to my feet before beginning to hurry towards the blue lights in the distance. Distantly, I heard another set of footsteps behind me, headed in the opposite direction, and something—I don’t know exactly what—made me stop and turn back around.

Perhaps I wanted to watch her go. Perhaps I wanted to know that she was gone and that I would be okay, that I had survived.

Or maybe I just wanted to see her one more time.

Whatever the case, she had turned back as well. Her sharp blue eyes caught on mine, and over her shoulder she smirked at me, teeth seeming to glint in the darkness like a blade’s edge.

Then she turned away, and I watched as she disappeared into the shadows.

For some reason, the sight felt like a loss. Like watching a candle blow out on a dark night, leaving me all alone in the cold. She had set me ablaze, and I could never go back to the way I was.

Because now I knew how good it felt to burn.