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The Devil’s fire wasn’t red. It was white. Or, what Matt remembered as white. Or, maybe, it was some other color - memory was a fickle thing, a nemesis more than a friend. He thought of it as the color of sunlight diffusing through the city’s haze, turning the streets into evanescent mirages, where only the shadows remained stark and black and real. He carried the pale fire, always kindled, within his chest - ready to blaze and incinerate. When it roared, it brought him clarity.
The plasterboard cracked and peeled, attempting to mould itself around the shape of the man’s face. His face was a different shape now than when he walked into this basement dwelling, with the intentions to ransack it. From the snippets of threats that Matt had overheard, this was not the man’s first visit here. Nor were these the first threats that he made to the huddled woman in the corner, crouched over her skinny teenage son.
It was his first encounter with the Devil, though.
Matt couldn’t remember ever having met this particular specimen of the scavenger class before. Not that it meant much – they all stank the same, they all rooted through the same garbage and bared their teeth. But this guy had the delusions of fight about him; thought that this train was heading any way other than along its predestined tracks. No one, who met the Devil in the last eighteen months, thought that for long.
This one wasn’t thinking that now either.
The Devil slammed the man’s mashed-up nose and split lips against the wall again, listening for the cereal crackling of cartilage and the splash of bloody spit. The man flopped his arm up in an instinctual attempt to brace and push back against the Devil’s grip, but he was shit out of luck. That arm already had a fracture in it, which was now displaced, judging by the grinding sound reaching Matt’s ears.
The man yelped. Or, maybe, it was more of a startled squeak, squeezed out from his breathless lungs. The Devil was finding that English was insufficient to describe all the nuances of pain he evoked. Perhaps he needed to brush up on his Latin as a supplement.
Matt lightened his grip, allowing the man to lurch out and hop on one leg as he dragged his second limb and its shattered knee towards the door.
“Please, he took all our money, and the silver,” came the threadbare voice from the corner.
Matt tilted his head. Silver. Silver wasn’t worth squat. There couldn’t have been much money either.
He grabbed the escaping quarry by the scruff again.
“’O! I don’t ha’e othin’!”
The woman’s voice grew stronger in her indignation, bolstered by the Devil's favour. “He came here before! He took it then!”
The Devil yanked the thug backwards onto his mangled leg, and the man went down with a howl, curling up on his side and twitching.
“Care to comment?” he moved around, towards where he could hear the bubbles of blood forming and growing and bursting out of the man’s mouth with each hyperventilation.
“I don’t ha’e it! I don’t ha’e it! Ay took it!” The bubbles melded into a wheeze and a foaming cough, rattling itself from between the broken ribs prickling at his lungs.
Matt crouched down and crossed his arms over the thick padding of his armour. “Be specific. Who took it?”
“’e Gate Kee’ers! Ay can get ‘e outta ‘ere!”
“Get you out of New York?” This wasn’t the first time he heard such stories. The martial law, established in the wake of the Snap, transformed the island into a prison, ‘for the sake of economic management’. Escape was expensive.
“You took the money so you could get out. This family could’ve used it to get out. Now they can’t. Neither will you.” Matt rose to his feet.
“’o! ‘lease!!! Don’t kill ‘e! ‘lease!”
“The Devil doesn’t kill. God does.” He sank his boot into the man’s stomach.
The thug became dead weight half-way up the steps out of the basement and onto the street. The Devil dragged him through the mud, past the burned-out hulks of cars and broken-glass shop-fronts. The man still breathed, for Matt did not lie. He had no-one left to lie to, except himself, and that was not a comfort he permitted.
Matt left him in the middle of an intersection, gave him over to the chance of being found and healed. A chance that was no higher than winning against the Devil.
He walked, his boots squelching in the sludge made from the remains of his people. His ravaged and scared city creaked in the silence around him, punctured by the far-away popping sounds of gun-fire. The day would soon alight, but it no longer chased the Devil into hiding. He was now simply one among the many predators evading the arm of the law that was stretched thin to invisibility, or simply didn’t care. But, in the name of the nemesis that was his memory, he was still careful in his choice of prey.
He walked and carried the pale fire, always kindled, within his chest - ready to incinerate grief and compassion and doubt. When it roared, it brought him clarity. It brought him relief.