A Vision of Fire

He pulled on his trousers and eased out of Caitlin’s room. Her apartment was chilly and dim, with the kind of hopeless illumination from streetlights through sheer curtains that made it seem like the night itself was drained, tired. Ben stumbled through the unfamiliar terrain, located his bag, and placed his tablet on the now-familiar dining table. Luckily he had only put the computer to sleep instead of shutting it down, so it was a quick jump to Google Hangouts. While signaling Ignacio for a video chat, Ben used the brief delay to turn on a program that would record the face-to-face call. He quickly pulled his earphones from his bag as well, to prevent sounds from traveling down the hall. Shivering, he threw a nearby afghan over his bare shoulders.

As the call connected, Ben jacked in. Machine-gun fire exploded in his ears and he jerked backward, his stomach in his throat. It took him a moment to realize that it was from the earphones, not the room.

Ignacio appeared on-screen but the camera angle was skewed, only showing part of his face and someone’s living room. Gray smoke was spreading across afternoon sunlight. Ignacio was shouting in Urdu over his shoulder, “Get away from the window!” Someone shouted something back that Ben didn’t quite catch. He would play it back later, enhance the sound.

When Ignacio finally brought the camera to his face, Ben saw that one lens of his glasses was gone and the other fractured. The young man’s typically well-groomed hair was wild and matted on one side with blood. There was a red sheen on his scalp that indicated the wound was fresh and still flowing.

“Jesus Christ,” Ben exclaimed. “Where—”

“Raghunath Bazaar,” Ignacio yelled over the pounding of intermittent gunfire. “I don’t know who showed up first, Indian soldiers or Pakistani, but they’re all freaking insane, Ben. They’re shooting civilians at random.”

There was a loud pop outside the room and Ignacio dropped from the bottom of the screen. Ben heard shouts from the left and right sides, different voices, angry voices. There were more pops, then silence. Were they hit? Or had they just taken cover?

Ben watched anxiously as pictures fell from the wall across the room. Then the shock of a grenade blew into his ears. He recoiled and his hands flew up to yank the headphones from his ears. After a second, catching his breath, he replaced them.

“Ignacio, are you safe?” he shouted.

After a troubling delay, Ignacio called, “Yes.” He repositioned himself on the screen. “I’m across the street from the fighting, up the stairs. It’s all across the street. Ben, you have to tell the assembly this is happening! It’s like we’re in bloody Afghanistan. No rule of law here. None.”

“Where are the rest of the peacekeepers?”

“The main body is about ten miles away. Ten of us were making a routine tour when a bomb went off.”

“Hold on,” Ben said.

“I’m not going anywhere, trust me.”

Ben texted Ambassador Pawar. Within a minute he had added the diplomat to the video chat. Ignacio’s camera angled steeply as he stood up, keeping it in his hand. There was a glimpse of the silks of a sari, a woman pulling at his arm.

“Ignacio, I’ve got Ambassador Ganak Pawar, can you see him?”

“Yes.” Ignacio coughed. “I’m told we have to go, the smoke in the room is getting thicker.”

“Mr. de Viana, can you get to a safe place?” said the ambassador.

“The woman who lives here says they are going out the back, to the main road, where people are forming caravans.”

Ignacio’s camera swerved again and Ben heard a woman shout in Urdu, “The floor, the floor!” The camera dipped; Ignacio must have kneeled for cover again. A window came into view, showing the pockmarked onion domes of temples and shattered rooftops. Then the lens dropped to the retail shacks in front of the temples and the wide street. They looked as though they’d been toppled by an earthquake — splintered, crushed by stone from an adjacent structure. Ben counted five bodies, wide, dark stains of their blood on the street, and others who were still crouched, wounded and screaming, in the doorway of a cinema. Six soldiers ran through the area, guns at their hips, ready to fire in an instant. One of them jerked to a stop, spun around, and shot his gun at second-floor windows above a shop.

“Pakistani and Indian soldiers both came in,” Ignacio said. “Now they’re shooting at each other.”

Ben glanced at the ambassador’s face in the corner of his screen; it was frozen with horror.

Out Ignacio’s window, a pedestrian suddenly broke and ran for an alley but shrank in terror halfway, cowering next to a food stand as a soldier’s gunfire shredded bowls of nuts and dried fruits just above his head. A bilious yellow cloud of spices flew into the air. Ben jolted as another bomb exploded in his ears. A section of a temple roof shattered before his eyes, blasting fragments and black smoke. The explosion had come from the inside. Terrorists, most likely — local instigators blowing up their own home so they could kill outsiders.