Chapter 2 – Descend to Consume
November 23, 1986 Mark Cohen was passed out on his couch in his parent's bed room. He shot up only a few hours earlier, and was just beginning to feel the itch for another hit. He managed to stay personally convinced that he wasn't addicted and could stop at any time. The fire detector was going off, it's obnoxious beeping just barely penetrating Mark's drug haze. His muddled mind wrote it off as an alarm clock, thinking that it would just go away after a few minutes, but the sound did not recede. It wasn't until breathing in a lung full of smoke that Mark returned to the land of the conscious, and with a cough rolled off the couch.
The smoke filled the room, and Mark barely understood what was happening. He had just enough lucidity to grab his precious camera bag and start crawling for the door. As he breathed in the smoke and it ran through his system it burned away the drug. Thinking with more clarity than he had in months he had the random thought that maybe it wasn't the camera that made the bag precious, but the stash and supplies that were kept in its interior pocket.
He reached the stairs and was met by a wall of flame; it was crawling towards him like a monster, hugging the stair treads as it descended. To Mark it seemed as if the wrath of God had started to descend, with the fires of hell coming to gather him up in their warm embrace and carry him off to his millennium of torture. He gave a whimper as the fires approached towards him, they were close enough to lick his track-riddled forearms. The smell of burning flesh wafted to his nose, startling him so he crawled back wards, his eyes never left the monstrous being that came closer and closer to him every second.
With barely a look around he backed up into the bath room, moving by instinct alone as random phrases of his child hood flickered through his mind. Stop. Drop. Roll. Stay close to the ground. Know the exits. Have escape routes. Change the batteries every six months. Have a safe meeting spot. He crawled into the bath tub and turned on the water. Shivering under the freezing cold water, the heat of the fire played upon his skin, the sensation reminding him of right after shooting up.
The fire surrounded him, and he stayed curled up under the cold water, shivering while he felt his skin become tight across his bones. The fire crept closer and closer, and the last thought he had before he let go for the fires to consume him was to wonder if Joan of Arc had felt the same way before her death.
a/n: whats better: short chaptersmore often, or longer chapters less often? Give me feed back.