Free Fires Rising by Michael Laimo Page B

inside the Church of St Peter, he took a long, deep breath. He tasted the faint odor of incense from masses past, which under normal circumstances always brought a small sense of comfort, of solace.
    Today, however, feelings of darker ruin prevailed.
    He couldn't help but be wholly concerned with the convincing images of devastation he'd seen in his mind's eye; it had been no dream, no simple musing or imaginative reverie. The homeless man had touched him, delivering into him a message that was clear-cut and tangible, undeniable. He'd been able to smell the charred remains of the visual's destructive nature, feel the heated wind upon his skin as the distant flames raged and burned, hear the tortuous roar of the army as they gathered before it like bats in a cave at dusk.
    Homeless men…thousands of them…
    He'd never experienced anything even remotely like it. It had been as though a snippet of a motion picture had played out on the surface of his mind, revealing to him a record of something that had occurred in the past. And yet, he knew this could not be. Two homeless men, one delivering his message intuitively, the other conveying his own—and confirming the first's—through speech. Not only was it impossible to ignore, but he knew it would continue to haunt him until he was able to unearth some form of rationale in it.
    He stood up and grimaced as his bones cracked like tiny firecrackers. He walked around the altar to the rectory entrance, noticing suddenly how unusually hot it was in the church. The door to the rectory, eight feet tall, was fitted well into the rear wall, its grain a perfect match to the sides around it, making it appear invisible beneath the church's dim lighting. A recessed brass hinge acted as a doorknob; he gripped it, turned it to the left, and pushed inward. The door moved, hinges squeaking like mice as he crossed the threshold.
    From the darkness behind, something cold and bone-dry touched the back of his neck.
    He shuddered as wrinkles of gooseflesh triggered every hair on his torso to stand on end. A rancid odor arose in his nostrils, like that of human waste, and he nearly slipped down on the floor as he whipped a hand around to swat away the terrible sensation against his skin.
    Slowly, he turned around. Saw only the door as it slowly closed and sealed out the disconcerting calm of the church.
    He stood still and silent for a few moments, listening to the blood rushing in his head, his heartbeat filling his ears. He took a few deep breaths to help ease his heaving lungs, then moved away, turning only as he entered the rectory's meeting room.
    Must be the anxiety of the move catching up with me. I saw the exterior of the church in shambles, and now the reality of the situation has set in, bringing about in me a surge of tenseness and discomfort. There is nothing to be afraid of, nothing out of the ordinary. It is my sensitized nerves playing games with me, aggravating my senses, and nothing more.  
    But as he entered the rectory, he realized that things were without question far from ordinary.
    Typically alive at this time of day, the rectory's meeting room lay in bitter emptiness, a no-man's land devoid of life. The card table and counters had been wiped cleaned, a customary task carried out before the priests set to bed around ten, still four and a half hours from now. The television was a black hole beneath the pallid splay of the end-table lamp; the room's lone window, looking out past a set of iron bars into a small alley, lay clouded and corpselike beneath its partially drawn shade. The kitchen, which should have been tossing its hearty aromas into the air (thank goodness for Father Keene, Holy Innocents' resident chef), looked oddly barren with no pots or pans stewing atop its surface.
    Heart running, Pilazzo looked around suspiciously. He called out, "Hello?"
    No answer.
    Leading away from the kitchen alongside the gas oven was the rectory's lifeline: a twenty-five foot hallway that