Fourth Degree Burn by K.J. Emrick & S. J. Wells

Author:K.J. Emrick & S. J. Wells [Emrick, K. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: South Coast Publishing

Chapter Eight

Medically speaking, there’s four different degrees of burn.

A first-degree burn leaves your skin red and painful to the touch. It’s the least harmful kind of burn. A mild sunburn. A friction burn from sliding across the carpet. I know, it’s kind of backward to have the least severe burn called the “first” degree but there it is. I didn’t make the rules.

Second-degree burns are a deep red with blisters. The skin gets swollen and painful. It’s what happens when you splash boiling water on your hands. Or when you get hit by a potato gun. No, seriously. Potato guns are a lot more dangerous than people think. They use flaming hairspray as a propellant. Sometimes, that equals a flaming potato.

With a third-degree burn, the damage is deep. The skin gets charred. Blackened to a crisp. Branding animals leaves behind a third-degree burn. Or getting doused by battery acid. Lightning strikes. And no, I’ve never been struck by lightning, but I’ve seen YouTube videos.

Those are the levels of burn that everyone knows. Turns out there’s at least one level after that. A fourth-degree burn. This one gets you right down to the bone. All the way through the muscle, to the bone. It fries away the nerve endings, which as actually a good thing with a burn that severe. That way, you can’t feel how bad it hurts. This is what happens with victims of house fires. People tangled in live high-voltage power lines. That sort of thing. The only treatment for a fourth-degree burn is amputation of the affected area. That’s how bad it is.

It’s funny the things you think about when you’re driving away from a meeting where you had the living daylights scared out of you. I keep thinking about the heat shimmering in Chen’s eyes. The smoke. The fact that if he wanted to, he could have burned me to a cinder and left me there smoldering in my melted sneakers. The guy scares me, like I’ve been saying. And he’s scared of Gong Gong.

Which means Gong Gong scares me even more.

“Hey, Harry? Can I ask you a question?”

He’s been sitting in the passenger seat next to me, silent, just letting me think. He’s a great guy that way. He knows when I need to talk things through, and he also knows when I need to be quiet and think. Sometimes, a girl just needs to sit with her best guy friend and be alone with her thoughts.

“You may ask me anything, my lady. The day has certainly lent itself to many questions, I would say.”

That’s the truth. The sun has set behind the skyscrapers of downtown, casting the whole city into darkness, and I’m looking forward to a long bath and several hours of uninterrupted sleep. But first, I need to figure something out.

“You heard everything in the restaurant, right?” I tap my steering wheel, parked at a red light, just a couple of blocks away from my apartment. “You heard what Chen said about

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