My head pounded as I came to. My first instinct was to put my hand to where the pain was radiating from, but I realized as soon as I tried that my hands were bound. Through blurry vision, I tried to look around and figure out just where the hell I was, and what was going.

“What…” I moaned, my head throbbing. “What…is…”

“Boss!” came a surprised voice from somewhere around me. “She’s coming to!”

I blinked hard and then again and again, a little more of the blurry film lifting with each open and close of my eyes. I could soon make out three figures around me, and despite just how disoriented I was, I knew who they were.

“There she is, boss,” said one of the men. “She’s coming back to the world of the living.”

“Just shut your goddamn mouth,” said one of the men whose voice I recognized right away as the scarred man. “I don’t need a fucking play-by-play.”

I looked around and saw that I was in a filthy room in a basement somewhere. The air was cold, and the smell of something astringent, like paint thinner, assaulted my senses.

“Where the hell am I?” I asked, feeling more cognizant by the second.

“You’re down in the belly of the whale,” said the scarred man. “Right at the scene of our latest little project.”

My eyes were clear and, sure enough, the men gathered around me, sinister expressions on all of their faces. I glanced down and saw that I was seated in a cheap metal office chair, my hands and feet bound to it. Packed onto the shelves that lined the walls were cans of some kind of cleaning supply, all of them marked with the symbol indicating that they were very, very flammable.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “Tell me right now.”

The men raised their eyebrows.

“Wow,” said the one on the right. “She’s a bossy little thing. Don’t you see what kind of predicament you’re in, sweetheart?”

“Yeah,” said the other man. “You’re not exactly in a position to be demanding answers for shit.”

The scarred man raised his hand. “Now, now,” he said. “She might be as screwed as it gets, but that doesn’t mean we can’t at least let her know what kind of shit she’s in.”

“Tell me now,” I said.

“Here’s the deal, kiddo,” said the scarred man. “You’re in the basement of that business you and your lantern-jawed fucking boyfriend were checking out. I know you two’ve gotten up to some detective work, and if it does your little ego any good, you two were right on the money.”

“Is that so?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. “See, the boys and I got hired by this upstart distribution company to scare the shit out of some local business, clients of our boss’s biggest competitor. So, our job was to let them know that it was in their best interests to, ah, have a change of heart about their contracts.”

“And if they didn’t go along with it?” I asked. “You’d just torch them?”

“You got it,” he said. “Starting fires is what we do best, and the best thing about them is that they send quite the fucking message.”

“You assholes are sick,” I said. “People could die!”

“People are going to die,” he said. “Namely, you. See, we’ve been making this joint a personal project of ours. You’ve noticed all this shit on the shelves, I’m sure? Well, this all goes up like the Fourth of July when a match touches it. If all goes according to plan, this place is gonna be nothing more than a smoking crater when we’re done.”

“But…the school next door,” I said. “The fire’s not going to be self-contained. It’ll jump right over.”

“That’s what we’re hoping for,” said the man. “There’s more cleaner over there, and once the fire hops next door, that school won’t last more than an hour before it’s a damn charred corpse.”

My stomach tightened. It wasn’t school hours, sure, but I knew that all sorts of evening clubs took place over there around this time. There were almost certainly kids over there, and if they got stuck in the building when it went up…

Just the thought was enough to make me want to leap out of my chair and tear these fuckers a new one.

“But why?” I demanded. “Why burn the school?”

“Because these fires are our business cards,” said the scarred man. “Once we take out these buildings and get away with it, we’ll have quite the little fucking addition to our resumes.”

“Every goddamn gang in this city will want our services once we’ve shown what we can do,” said the man on the right. “We’ll be the top firestarters in New York.”

I grit my teeth and stared at the men with hateful eyes.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” I said. “Once Ethan—”

“You don’t get it, kiddo,” said the scarred man. “Your little buddy coming here is exactly what we’re hoping for. Once he shows, he’ll go up just as surely as you will. We’ll be taking out the only two people who know both our game and our faces. Easy as fucking pie.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but the scarred man held up his hand.

“No more talk,” he said. “You’re screwed, Ethan’s screwed, and we win—that’s the end of that. Only thing left is to get this little fire started.”

He gestured to the ground, where long line of some kind of power led to the flammable material.

“Gunpowder,” he said. “It’ll do very nicely.”

He turned to his men and nodded toward one of the doors.

“Let’s get this going and get the fuck out of here,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

The men sounded their agreement as the scarred man pulled out a pack of matches. He struck one of them and let it drop to the ground. It landed on the line of gunpowder, and it caught fire instantly.

“Let’s move, boys,” he said. “Don’t want to be here when this goes up, am I right? Listen, cutie pie—I know this looks painful, but if it’s any consolation, you’ll be dead as soon as this fire sucks all the air out of the room. Not a bad way to go, actually.”

The other men laughed. The scarred men led them out of the room in a hurry, the door locking with a “clank” behind them.

Horror gripped me as soon as I was alone. I watched as the flame raced down the line of gunpowder and reached the combustibles. As soon as the fire reached the materials, the entire wall went up in an orange and blue “whoosh.” I could feel the heat on my skin instantly, that familiar feeling of smoke in my lungs returning as the air filled with haze.

Was this it? I looked around for any way to escape, but I saw nothing that could help me. Desperation and panic gripped me as I struggled against the chair, and whatever traces of hope faded as the flames grew brighter and hotter.