Dopecentury XXIX --- A Cold Fire
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
It started down by the water. A close approach of the moon, a king tide. The water climbed up and over the seawall, streamed down the crest of the street, found a gutter that it gorged with trash mixed with grease and oil, until the gutter could take no more and the water backed and pooled. The pool gained depth and the surface rose until it inundated a nearby storage building that was stocked with all manner of chemicals. The water swept out the supports under some of the racks, the barrels on those racks above crashed and split on the concrete floor. The chemicals mixed with the seawater. The resulting admixture ignited.
The fire burned cold, an unnatural bright banana yellow color that swept along the surface of the water, grabbed onto the walls of the building and slowly consumed them. The walls liquefied and melted into a viscous pool of thick crimson sludge. The building collapsed The icy yellow fire fed on the crimson liquid fuel it had cooked up for itself, and spread. Soon the block was burning. Then the whole of the waterfront neighborhood.
Fire crews and hazmat crews arrived in their flashing and screaming cubic trucks. They pumped water onto the fire, but crimson liquid sludge floated on top of it and spread even further. They sprayed chemically-advanced foams, but the fire consumed that stuff and turned it into more fuel. The crews closest to the burning inhaled the acrid blue smoke produced and it liquefied their lungs. They coughed up crimson sludge, and it too fed the flames. Their boots melted in the sludge of their burning lung material.
From further up in the city, the waterfront glowed yellow and thick smoke lifted up into the atmosphere in a column of turquoise and azure. The wind off the water blew the smoke up toward the city. Citizens caught it in their lungs and coughed up sludge and melted the asphalt and the concrete.
People panicked and fled. The population flowed out of the city like a liquid descending — the smallest lanes feeding tributaries that fed the major routes out of the city. Everyone moving away from the column of blue smoke that erected itself above the horizon.
The emergency crews gave up the waterfront, which glowed with its bright yellow color like a sun rising off the ocean. It was realized that the fire was liquefying most materials into fuel, but not all. Metals, plastics, rubbers and even composite stone like brick and concrete were all consumed and liquefied. But, strangely, materials derived from plant matter — paper, wood, cotton, and rayon (if there had been enough of it for anyone to notice) — were left alone, apparently unconsumable by the strange cold fire. Across the waterfront, the buildings of brick and steel melted and disappeared into the sludge and the glowed with the yellow fire. But standing tall above the flowing glowing sludge were the skeletal timber frames of houses and buildings so constructed. Asphalt shingles were completely burned off the roofs, but sloping boards were left behind like shadows.
Most of these structures only remained standing long enough for the flow of sludge to press up against them, and then lacking nails and fasteners that had been consumed by the yellow fire, they would collapse in a tumble of sticks and boards. Soon there were heaps of wood floating all over the former neighborhood that was otherwise a smoking liquid ruin of sludge.
A barricade was called for. Back from the edge of the slowly rising liquid pool of ruin, heavy equipment cleared the street, grinding up the pavement and digging down to raw earth and bedrock. Lumber was brought in by the palette from lumber yards hundreds of miles around and stacked up. Arranged into a wall that grew linearly from where the lowest areas where the sludge was rising fastest — but still held off at something of a distance — up the gently rising hill. Trees were felled in the parks and dragged to the barricade. Fabric warehouses were raided and forklift loaded down with bolts of cotton and wool were dropped in among the tree logs, or stuffed into gaps in the barricade.
The burning sludge rose and butted up against the barricade. The wall of wood and cotton and wool (and rayon) cut across the city, slicing the waterfront neighborhood out of the city. Soon there was nothing left of the neighborhood but a yellow glowing pool of sludge, pressing up against a knotted-up border of lumber and trees and fabric.
The fire diminished, but smoldered for more than a year. Most residents returned. The acrid smoke drifted off the burning sludge in blue mists. When the wind — carefully monitored — blew the mist inland, neighborhoods would be evacuated. And when the winds changed to blow the deadly mists out to see, the neighborhoods would fill up with people again.
An economic opportunity was realized, and a huge garbage tip was constructed out of the pool of sludge. The city accepted payment from other municipalities to take their non-organic waste and dump it into the pool of sludge, where it would liquefy and burn away.
The city prospered on this income and provided services for all residents. The city expanded (on the other side, away from the waterfront) and the residents grew fat and wealthy, even if they occasionally misread the weather and liquefied a lung.