Chapter 4 - Trust Me

"Right, I'll be back in a minute, we're running low on fire wood". At the time Claire thought those were the last words she would ever hear her father say. He grabs his big red coat hanging by the front door and makes his way towards the shed on the edge of their property.

"Claire, dinner's nearly ready, come set the table". Claire looks over towards her mother, Sara, who is gesturing to the cutlery drawer in the kitchen.

As Claire begins to walk over something catches her eye. A glint of red shines through the curtains beside the front door, and she assumes its her father, as does Sara.

"Honey, come on, its just your father"

"Mom, something doesn't feel right, Dad couldn't have got the firewood this quickly, I'm going to check"

"You are not young lady. Cutlery now. and if it's that much of a concern I'll take a look"

Claire relents to her mother, what else could it be than her father, other than the 2 surrounding houses there's no one for miles.

Claire begins setting the table, and looks over at her Mother who hasn't moved from the curtains for almost a minute now.

"Mom."

No answer, Sara is still frozen looking out the window.

"MOM!"

"Shit!. Honey it heard you, get to the basement now!"

"Mom, what are you talking about, like you said its just Da.....d"

Claire had found herself at the same window as her Mother staring out at something impossible, something that hadn't been in existence for almost 7 years. A "Super". What was he doing here. And who was this man with flames covering the surface of his body.

Then it hit her. He was here for her. Unbeknownst to her Mom and Dad, a couple weeks prior, Claire had discovered some interesting abilities, of which she kept to herself.

After all how can you tell your family about being a "Super", when "Supers" are criminals, the worst of the worst. Villains.

Claire takes another look out the window and all she can see is a spectre inside the bundle of flames on her porch, as if the man stood on the porch was a human candle.

"Mom, get back, I can do this"

"Do what honey, we're going, that's The Goddamn Man on Fire"

Claire's brain takes a second to catch up with this new information. How can the man behind the incident be on her front porch. How can the man who murdered 40000 people be outside her house in the middle of nowhere.

Claire begins to panic, in this moment, she really believed she was going to die. Sara saw the look of fear in her daughter's eyes soon turn to rage, and the ever familiar red hue she had seen in her husbands eyes, begin to encircle the edges of her daughter's eyes.

"Honey, look at me. Do you have something to tell me?"

Claire looks at her mother in disbelief, does she know? How can she know?

"Claire, it's ok"

Sara looks at Claire, and starts moving her arms in a pattern unlike any she had seen before, and before her eyes, the floorboards began to vanish.

"Like I said before. Into the basement."

In a state of disbelief, Claire moves towards the hole, still not quite processing what has happened. She's about the step through, when she hears a resounding *CRASH*. She snaps back to reality, and runs over to the window to see her father fighting The Man on Fire, and looking like he's losing. Does he have powers too?

Sara rips Claire away from the window.

"I promise to tell you more soon, but we need to get to the basement, we need to get out of here. Your father knows what to do when he's finished, but he needs us to do our part too."

They both jump down through the hole Sara had made in the floor, and Claire is ushered over to the locked cabinet in the corner of the basement.

Sara starts moving her hands again, this time in a different pattern, and the lock falls away. Is it magic? Sara starts looking through the cabinet, until she gets to a little metal box.

She pulls out two small bracelets, and a small device with a screen. She sets the device to one side in the cabinet, and passes Claire one of the bracelets.

"Claire, listen to me now, when this latches around your wrist, you're going to be transported somewhere else. That device in the cabinet will let your father know where we are. I don't know where you're going, and I don't know where I'm going. You just have to do it, and trust me."

Claire and her Mom look one another in the eyes, and you could see their deep trust in one another, and they both clasped their bracelets, and in that dark basement, there was a bright flash, and they were gone. Or so Sara had hoped.

Sara finds herself in one of her husbands former hideouts, hidden from reality, and hanging from the wall is an identical device to the one she left behind in her basement. She quickly activates it, to see if Claire got away, and to her horror, the device that's focussed in on their house in the forest shows one too many life signals on the screen.

Claire is stood on her own in the basement as the flash dies down, and she is returned to darkness.

She looks down at her wrist for the bracelet, and it hasn't caught. She goes to latch it once more, and finds she can't. It's broken. She's stuck here.

Claire moves towards the stairs to get out of the basement, her only way out now is the front door. The fear begins to set in, and she doesn't think she can do this. She takes a deep breath, and pushes open the door at the top of the stairs.

What greets her is the worst thing she could possibly imagine. It's The Man on Fire.