"Fire! Fire!" -Dante ÜÜ ÜÜ ŚÄŻŪŻ ÜßÜÜŽŽž ÜŻß ÜŻß ÜßÜÜŽŽž ŽŪŽÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄæ ³ ŻŪŻ ŻŻ Ž ŽŽ ŽŽ ŻŻ Ž ŽŪŽ ³ ³ ŻŪŻ Üž ßŪ ßŪ Üž ŽŪŽ Fear and Loathing ex Inferno ³ ³ ŻŪŻ ÜŻß ŽŽ ŽŽ ÜŻß ŽŪŽ ³ ĄÄŻŪŻ ÜŻŻŻÜÜÜŻŻÜŻŻÜ ÜŻŻÜ ÜŻŻŻÜÜÜŻŻ ŽŪŽÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄŁ ßß ßß Volume I, File IV [010695] Writer: Anomalous Really, now, the evening had bad juju from the beginning. I think we all felt it. Nothing ominous in the Shakespearean way, actually, like horses chewing their fucking legs off, or snakes hiding in the ground and crazy shit like that.. But.. It was just ominous, that's all. I can't even fucking remember what we were doing at first, but I do know that we went to Blockbuster to get some movies. I also remember that as I write this, the fucking movies are due. But we searched Blockbuster for a good half hour before we found anything. Sirens we chose first, because Elle MacPherson takes her clothes off in it. The other one was called... I dunno, Mobsters, or some shit like that, and it had Christian Slater in it and Richard Greico. We wanted to get Faces of Death but they didn't carry that series. I think we drove around for a while before we decided that we wanted to eat.. and we went to a pizza place called Papa John's.. they have these really kickass breadsticks, you know. I mean, they are so fucking good that for a week during Christmas vacation I had nothing to eat but these breadsticks. They're that good. And they also come with this "Special Garlic Sauce," which is really something along the lines of a psychotic Crisco-Garlic mixture. That fucking garlic sauce was probably what fucked the whole evening up, because it made everyone feel like shit. We were all sitting around, talking about how we wanted to puke... and then, Leo, my chihauhau, came up stuck his head in the "Special Garlic Containers" and drank it like it was fucking Kool-Aid. I mean, he just swilled that shit down. And we all just sat there talking about how now we wanted to puke even more. That's when we decided to leave the house. It was 12:30, probably, and the night was still young and we all wanted to do something. "Something," when Justin's involved, usually means fire, destruction, and pestilence, plus equal parts gasoline and firecrackers. That night, though, we didn't have any firecrackers. So here I am, getting in the car with this fucking "Special Garlic Buzz", my head spinning and shit... I had told them,"Look, we're not going anywhere in my car. I hate it and it's a piece of shit." Somehow, that's where we ended up anyway, sitting in that fucking car. You know what? That fucking car is tilted. I noticed that in the parking garage yesterday. See, parking garage floors are slanted perpindicularly from the parking spaces, so the bottom of the car should be parallel with the ground. But my car, damn that piece of shit, it's fucking even. Goddamit. I hate that fucking car. So we were sitting in the car, and we drove down the street to get some gas in one of those red plastic gas canisters, with the yellow spouts. That was mine. I think Justin put Exxon Premium in it, $2.00 worth. Nirvana was in the stereo, "Bleach." We found this little shack at a baseball field. It was one of those wooden shacks that the scorers sit in when a game was going on, but since it was 1:00 in the morning, there wasn't a game going on and there wasn't anyone in it. We had gone to the field to look for bottles, to make firebombs with, but, hey, there was this convenient fire hazard sitting there and we burned it down. No, actually, I don't know if it burned down, per se, but when we left, it was quite a healthy little campfire. So it's probably charcoal briquettes by now. I think when we were driving off, Kurt Cobain was howling out a song called "Blew." Nirvana is some great fire music. I have absolutely no grasp of the amount of time that passed at this point. We drove around for an absolutely indeterminate amount of time. The occupants of my car were in a quandry. They wanted to burn down something important, apparently, but they didn't want to kill anyone. A truly paradoxical situation to me. I had asked them if it would make them juice their pants if someone can running out of a house with their fucking head on fire.. they said something, but I can't remember what. Justin was suggesting knocking on doors to see who was home, and then burning down the ones that didn't have anyone in it. We pointed out to him that this was hardly practical at 1:30 in the morning. It was around this time when we stumbled across a house. It seemed to call to us... Anyway... It was the only edifice within 1000 fucking yards. Isolated. Off on the other side of the road was a railroad... hmmm... what the fuck is that called? It was a whole bunch of tracks and shit, and a bunch of diesel engines, and they were hooking up cars to make a train. That was on the far side of the street. The road hooked down towards this bridge, and it was completely pitch black, with no street lights. It was perfect. We stopped and looked at the house for a minute. I mean, there had to be something amiss here. There was no way for a house to be that perfect. But it was. Andre had filled a forty bottle... it was that malt liquor with the bull on it... with gasoline, and there was a roll of newspaper sticking out of it that served as a wick (and had probably served as a funnel, as well). Sicophants that we are, we made sure we through a rock through the window before we gave the house last rites, so any occupants had time to turn on the lights and scare us off. Strangely enough, the caution was unwarranted as the house had one of those notices that means the house is condemned on the door. It said it was a class something-or-other misdemeanor to enter it. Well, like I said, we didn't plan to enter it, we just wanted to torch it. So, Andre or Justin or whoever it was threw the bottle through the window and suddenly this house was on fire. We all laughed like loons and drove off... But we came back, and decided it wasn't burning good enough, and we all went up and looked at the house. It was then that we noticed it had the notice on the door. It was then that we also noticed all the junk and shit on the floor. So Justin threw gas on the side of the building, which caught fire immediately, and ran in weird patterns in the yard trailing the gas until the whole fucking yard was burning like a motherfucker. And he didn't stop there, either. He ran towards the us, still trailing the gas, and leapt into the car... the fire was right there, practically blistering my paint... and I threw the car into 4 different (and incorrect gears) before I finally got it into drive and left. As we drove by, I saw that the ceiling of the house was afire, it would be mere moments before the second floor caught. That was when Andre started howling something at the trains... I don't remember what he said, but it was something pretty weird. As we rounded the curve past the house, we saw this guy walking along the road in a jogger's suit... then he saw the fire and broke into a sprint towards it. We proceeded to drive around for yet another indeterminate period of time, during which we debated the merits of either going home or "getting" a car. They were as fickle about cars as shoppers. Not that one, it wasn't expensive enough... not this one, it's too bright around here. It seemed like forever until they finally found one they wanted. It was brand new... still had the dealer's plates on it, for Christ's sake. It was mint green, I believe. It's black now. Justin and Andre were going to "get" it... I was in the car, with Shane. They had this big ass rock, probably about 5 pounds, and they kept trying to break the passenger window with it. They tried 3 or 4 times before they finally broke it, and I was getting really antsy. I just had a bad feeling. I kept seeing that jogger with no head, just one of those flashing blue police bubbles on his shoulders. This is where everything just fritzed out. They dumped gasoline in the window, on the car, everywhere, and Andre lit it with a rolled up piece of paper. Then, I don't know what happened but in a span of about 2 seconds the street around them was on fire... me and Shane kept screaming,"Come on! Shit! Come on!" We just fucking freaked out... but Justin's legs were on fire, so I guess he had a problem "Coming on." There was gasoline flying everywhere, I guess, because 2 other cars suddenly went up in flame. The whole street was on fire, too, all the way across. To make matters worse, a fucking car stopped at the stop sign not twenty feet from all that shit... and it was like fucking daytime with all that fire. Multitudes of expletives were howled at this point, including, "Holy Fuck, he's on FIRE!!" from myself, and "Fucking shit!" from Shane, and I think something like "AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaAAAAAHH!!" from Justin... I don't even know. But I do remember he tried to stop, drop, and roll, which was roughly as effective as Reaganomics but much more visually stimulating, not meaning anything bad about Reagan, I love him like my own fucking dad... Shane's amazingly verbose and moving account of this moment later was as follows: "I just kept thinking of that song by REM... 'Everybody Hurts'." I remember watching them try to beat the flames off... it was almost like some kind of fucking trance, me and Shane sitting in the car... I don't know if I said anything. Justin, amazingly enough, had the presence of mind to bend down and untie his shoes (which were on fire), kick them off, pull his pants off. This was in the middle of an enormous conflagration in the street, and meanwhile yet another vehicle had driven by the stop sign twenty feet from the action. And suddenly, it was over. Justin had the pants off, and the shoes, and the fire on his person was out... he and Andre sprinted to the car, realized that they had left Justin's wallet in the street, went back to get it, and then we were off... the whole mess flaming behind. I was yelling at Justin... "You alright, man?! You alright?!" "Fuck NO!.. I'm fucking BURNED!!" There was this smell, too. Oh, fuck, the smell. My car still smells... It was kind of like bacon, but also smelled like burnt hair. Oh, shit, it reeked. The car rocketed (well, not rocketed, exactly... ricketed, maybe) through the streets... Justin's leg was sticking out of the window, and this, this is what got me, it was making this whistling, sizzly noise. That was the most fucked up ass noise I've ever heard in my life. And, get this, as we drove over the bridge overlooking the house we burned, Justin was howling for us to look at all the fucking firetrucks... that's the real kicker. He's got this fucking 3rd degree burn on his leg, and he wants to see the fucking house. I just asked him what he was thinking when he was on fire. He says that he was thinking that he needed to take his pants off. That kind of shows you his clarity of thinking. Fuck, I don't know. When we got back to the house, he limped back in and got in the tub, and we ran cold water over his legs and hands. That was kind of weird, too, because we were all sitting there watching him in the tub. We kept asking, "You alright, man, you alright?", but he was just sitting there in agony. Also, my mom was in the room right next to the bathroom, sleeping, so I was all trying to get them to be quiet. It was kind of hard, though, because there was this burnt bacony smell and that burnt hair smell, and we were all kind of feeling that "Special Garlic Puke" coming up on us. Justin's hair was singed on the top and sides, his eyelashes were singed, and all this skin and shit was falling out in the fucking tub. He kept saying how much it hurt and shit. Then we called Ask-A-Nurse. This bitch that worked there, she was probably a janitor or something, she just started fucking with me. "Ask-A-Nurse." "Yeah, a friend of mine is burned." "What's your name, sir?" I answered. Stupid of me. "And who is the call regarding?" "Uh.. huh.. Look, I just wanna know some stuff about burns, what do you need his name for?" "Sir, we need the person's name..." I muted the phone... to Andre and Shane: "What the fuck am I supposed to tell her...? I can't give her his fucking name." Unmuted... "Look, I just have some questions. Are you gonna answer them or not?" "I can't answer them without a..." "Fuck this shit..." It got really fucked up then, because we kept calling around trying to find out if Justin would die if we didn't take him to the emergency room, and it was like the Fucking Quest for the Holy Grail because no one would give us straight answers. Finally, Shane and Andre went into my room and started playing FIFA Soccer on the Sega Genesis and shit. I didn't know what to do. Justin had picked up the phone and was talking to different emergency room motherfuckers who were all fucking him around. Shane and Andre used their own unique coping techniques by playing Sega like fiends, and I was shitting my pants hoping my mother wouldn't come into the bathroom and see Justin on the phone with his leg looking like a hunk of roasted chicken. I think sometime around 3:30 Justin found this nurse that would tell him about burns, told her some story about spilling lighter fluid on his leg and not having money for an emergency room visit, something like that. I was sitting on the toilet, freaked out of my fucking mind. Oh, yeah, and a little bit before, Shane and Andre had left to go get bandages and anti- septics. I had forgotten about that. See, Justin was talking to the nurse, and the other two came back with peroxide, Bactine, and a fuckload of bandages. They said that they got all the shit at Eckerds, and that the stupidass bitch that was behind the counter wouldn't help them, so they took their shit and left. It was just a criminal night, apparently. Probably about 4:00, Justin's lips started turning blue from sitting in the cold water for so long, and we had to yell at him and shit before he'd get out. I told him if he didn't get out, we really would have to go to the hospital for fucking hypothermia as well as burns. His forehead was real clammy and shit... fucking scary. He wouldn't let us bandage him up, either. We tried. Several times. He just yelled about how much it hurt and all this other shit, and finally ended up on the couch with a bowl of ice water for his hands and cold towels draped over his legs. This is where I started to get kinda pissed. There was no way we could be there when my mom woke up that morning. I mean, if she saw his leg, we were fucked because there wasn't any way to hide it. We couldn't stay there. But every time I asked what we were going to do, the whole fucking issue was dropped. So I ended up staying up the remainder of the morning while everyone else slept. I just called Justin. He says that he stayed home from school today to go to the doctor... told his parents that he was making a bonfire at the lake and caught his pants on fire. Kinda makes all our efforts worthless, I think. I mean, I stole him anti-biotics, Eric stole him pain killers, we'd been fucking bandaging him up all the time and shit. He was through the worst of it... I mean, what can the goddamned doctor do that we can't? Besides, can that fucking doctor make a firebomb? (\___ ___ ___/) ŚÄ\___ ___/ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄæ ³ \\__\ /__// TNH BBS. [2112] WHQ. NUP: Woodstock. 817.346.3370. ³ ³ \__\ /__/ SysOp: Mephistopheles CoSysOps: Delirium, Sputnik. ³ ĄÄÄÄÄ\_____/ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄŁ [2112] Productions, All Rights Reserved.