‘Well I think we’ve found our address, but look…’ Rosedale pointed at a small, single storey concrete house. A group of around fifty people stood jeering. Shouting and heckling as a man, dressed in a gray tattered t-shirt, held a semi-filled glass bottle with a soaking, hanging rag wrapped round it.
Maddie ran forward. Sprinted down the partly laid tarmac road, followed by Cooper, with Rosedale fractionally in front. Recognizing the bottle for what it was. A crude incendiary bomb. She shouted, ‘He’s going to light it! Quick!’
‘Move…! Move!’ Cooper pushed through the crowd, barging the congregated group out of the way to get to the front. He could see Rosedale and Maddie doing the same, but he was nearer, almost within touching distance of the man.
He heard Maddie shout. ‘Drop it! Now!’
Instruction ignored.
The home-made petrol bomb was lit, aimed and thrown. Perfect shot. It shattered on impact and engulfed the front door along with the wooden roof in a fireball of flames. A loud cacophony of applause rose up along with the heat of the fire and the fervour of the people. Cooper grabbed one of the perpetrators, disarmed him and pulled him quickly down. He stopped the man from reaching for yet another makeshift firebomb, as the now-angry crowd began to close in.
From the corner of his eye Cooper could see Rosedale taking on three other men with ease, they being no match for the skilful, highly trained, CIA veteran. And Maddie, helping to hold off the rest of the crowd – a mix of women, men and a scattering of young children – although vocal, seemed hesitant to fully take them on.
Cooper stared at the crowd… Wired.
‘Can someone tell me what the hell is going on…? Ce qui se passe?’
A sinewy, dark skinned man stepped forward, the whites of his eyes distinctly yellow with vessels of red marbling through them. Pulled down the sleeve of his pinstripe blue suit monogrammed in gold with the letters, NRC. He looked first at Rosedale, a hint of ridicule in his eyes, then at Maddie and finally Cooper, who he directed his speech towards.
‘This has nothing to do with you. I think you better leave.’
Cooper stood his ground. Observed the authority this man seemed to carry within the group. ‘We need to try to get this fire under control.’
A small smile spread across the man’s face, which turned into a mocking grin. ‘This fire is under control. There’s nothing to be done here, and, as I said before, this has nothing to do with you.’
Before Cooper could answer, Maddie shouted. ‘There’s people inside!’
Both Rosedale and Cooper spun round. And Cooper was just able to make out, through the curtain of fire, the figures of two people at the tiny window of the house.
Glancing at the wooden front door, he saw it was still engulfed in flames.
‘Maddie, you stay and make sure nobody moves, and Rosedale, go round the other side, see if there’s another exit.’
He turned to the crowd, looking at no-one in particular. ‘Somebody, I need your jacket. Anyone…? Come on!’
The group stood motionless. Staring blankly.
‘Come on! I need a jacket… Anything!… What’s wrong with you?’
An expanse of faces gazing ahead as if they saw as one. As if what was in front of them was not the billowing, burning inferno of flames, but a vision of calm and tranquillity.
The man in the well-tailored suit spoke in a quiet of cool. ‘You would do well to leave now.’
The helpless cries of those inside cloaked the man’s words as Cooper noticed a threadbare drape hanging in the cemented rectangle window of the house opposite. He charged across the road, into the building.
Storming into the one room home, Cooper automatically smiled at the two startled children clad in sagging nappies, playing happily on the soiled mattress on the floor. An old lady scowled and stood up from her chair. Speaking in Lingala she launched into a tirade, and raged and hit Cooper hard with a rusting soup bowl, as he dragged and pulled down her drape, before apologizing and running back out to the burning house across the road.
Cooper could see Rosedale, who’d come from around the back of the building. He shook his head. ‘Nothing there, Thomas. There’s no way out.’
Cooper acknowledged the information with a small nod, but he was now entirely focussed on the burning door. There wasn’t time to go and find water to soak the drape in, though by his reckoning the drape could only give about five seconds of protection before it caught alight.
The one thing they had on their side was if the house he’d just been in was similar to this one, it was just one single concrete room. And with concrete’s inherent material properties, its built-in resistance to fire and slow rate of heat transfer, the majority of the internal section would be fire free. Smoke and the falling burning roof would be his biggest hazards.
‘Rosedale, I’ll go inside and get them, you and Maddie be ready to take over when I come out.’
Noticing the right hand side of the door was almost burnt through, Cooper covered his face and arms with the drape. Charged towards the weakened side. Shoulder first.
The force he used had the desired effect. Part of the door crashed in. Sent him falling forward, head first into the room.
Immediately abandoning the burning drape, he was greeted by a dense cloud of black smoke. An opaque, thick haze. Obscuring vision. Burning eyes. He covered his mouth with his t-shirt. Sucked onto the material. Tried to keep the strangling smoke from drying out his mouth, to stop it filling and cutting and spreading into his lungs like linguoid ripples on sand.
Crouching down, Cooper crawled on his hands and knees, where the air was less hazardous and easier to see through. A few feet in front of him he could just make out the two people lying unconscious on the floor, wedged next to a large piece of burning debris from the fallen roof.
He kicked the blazing timber away. Instinctively felt for a pulse. Faint but still there. Carefully he pulled the man up, shocked to feel how light he was. Even more shocked to realize that he, like the woman, were somewhere in their eighties.
It was easy for Cooper to hike them both up. Propelling the man with ease over his right shoulder before squatting down to scoop up the old lady.
Rushing out the door, Cooper was met by Rosedale. Helped by Maddie. They grabbed hold of the couple, turning them onto the floor and banging out what little flames were present on their clothes.
Maddie turned to the crowd. ‘Quickly! We need help…! Please!’
Again, her plea was met with no response, not even mild curiosity.
Coughing hoarsely, and bent over with his hands on his knees, Cooper quickly glanced up at Maddie. ‘We need to get them to the medical center ourselves. Rosedale, you take the old man, I’ll carry the woman. Maddie, stay close, and watch our backs.’
As the three of them moved off carrying the elderly couple, the well-dressed man in the blue pinstriped suit, complete with the gold monogrammed initials, stepped forward.
‘You don’t know what you’ve just done.’