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What Fire Cannot Burn
By John Ridley Warner Books
Copyright © 2006 John Ridley
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-446-61203-0
Chapter One
I'm alive for a reason. I don't mean that with the cheap, feel-good populist existentialism daytime TV talk show hosts love to hand out: You're alive because even though you eat too much fast food and can't point to your own state capital on a map, we're all really unique and individual and speciablah, blah, blah. I mean: in the world we live, with what I do, there's a reason I've remained among the living. A reason I've survived.
Actually, a couple of reasons depending on what kind of survival you're talking about.
Regarding my physical endurance, science is my guardian angel. Science by way of an O'Dwyer VLe. An all-electronic handgun that can fire a four-shot burst in just 1/500 of a second. Ordnance that is designed, specifically, to deal with the problem.
Funny. Kinda. It's that easy to turn the struggle for persistence into catchphrases. "The problem." "After San Francisco." "Freak hunting."
Too bad it's not as easy to solve the problem as it is to label it.
Nothing's ever easy.
Not in this world.
This world is hard, it's bleak, it's unsure, it is filled with risk. It's fat with weak sisters who look for obvious morals, comfortable politics, and clutch themselves hoping that hope alone will deliver them soft resolutions to hard situations.
Sorry.
And the world's got people like me. People who do, rather than subsist because of the deeds of others.
And people who do what I do; we're good as dead.
Accepting that, accepting my mortality: It's the other reason I survive.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Fire Cannot Burn by John Ridley Copyright ©2006 by John Ridley. Excerpted by permission.
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