combustion
It's seven past midnight and the hell fire explosion doesn't hit you until three and a half seconds after it's gone off, hello, bang. The most obvious thing you could say is, yeah, their sweet hatched plan back-fired, everything going crooked, blind. You could really run with that idea and get places (maybe ten miles up Shit Creek without a paddle, or just the five). Connor's lost sight and sound and the ground under his feet, tumbled back about five steps into a warmed wall, the air around him ten shades too crispy as well as crackly, burning his eyelids a touch and the bent expression on his lips, the ends of his fingers. He teeters, black nails clawing for control, scraping up the divider instead of down, up for: can I get a fucking break here.
Moments like this...
Where the fuck is Murphy?
Seven, six, five, four, the roar, the wail (somewhere fire's whooshing up oxygen in an angry, addicted kind of way you see on these streets and in these very rooms), the metaphorical train coming for his face quiets by the little, just enough for him to crack open his jaw (snap and grind), taste that ash, you could light a cigarette by this heat, and do something with it.
"Murph." Acid way down his lungs.
And Murphy fucking told him he had a bad feeling. This was a trap, is a trap, trapped, can't get out, got to find a way, air's burning, got to find Murphy, got to move.
"Fuck!"
Several feet ahead of him Murphy is no longer, no longer a point, safety or surety or just something to keep his eyes on and reach for. The furthest he can see, black smoke from there to here, electrical sizzle, knock-you-down whiffs, is three feet before his nose. The one day they don't go in like bank robbers and he needs the mask. Overall, Connor's a little blackened but not fried, which is all he can say about himself. He practically hiccups the way his throat seizes up.
"Mur--" cough, knees playing the weak card and buckling toward the wall. He starts pacing himself and breathing giant gulps of breath in through his mouth. Hasn't moved yet, not a wary foot.
The flashlight beam startles him, whole headlights theory. Then he remembers it was dark in here, and dark out there, and this building is condemned, boarded up from top to where they slunk in around the back. A certain bunch of drug moving bad guys and a Boston born kid called Joey coming in from the City of Angels to cause trouble. They were supposed to be in here fixing some deal with other bad guys. Not a gift package bomb a delicate shade of flowering white to red to orange to get the fuck out.
"Swell," Murph says, waving the flashlight, a tired gesture. "I'm overdone."
Relief.