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| Scene Title | I've Seen Fire |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | While helping the Safe Zone Cooperative start a new garden, Jim Clark experiences a vision. |
| Date | August 16, 2018 |
Closing her eyes and tilting her chin up to the rain, Sue’s smile grows and she lets her head tilt to the side, eyes opening as she looks at Jim, then Peyton. “It means a lot to see people coming out to help, who aren’t already in deep.” In deep like she and Niki are. “Maybe there’s something to be said for second chances,” she blinks a look over to Dequan, indirectly referencing his comment about reliving history. “Maybe with a little love and care, we can all build something better.”
Sue is looking at the same clouds that Jim is, looking at the rain coming down over the city, but she doesn’t see what Jim sees. To him, the wispy clouds drifting upward on a rising wind look more like waves. Or, with the streaks of darker, stormy gray in them…
The night is lit by an orange glow, hellish in its size and impossible in its intensity.
Trees stand in dark quality, like matchsticks that splinter out into a thousand branches overhead. Through the forest, the crashing sound of something moving washes over Jim like a tidal wave. At first it's rats, then possums, then deer coming bounding out of the forest. Animals flee in droves from the strong wind-driven flames. Smoke and ash blankets the ground, caking into Jim's hair, and the glow is like staring into the mouth of Hell itself, burning back against a world that forgot it existed.
As the smoke blows over him, Jim feels his chest tighten as he lurches to the side and the world shifts with surreal quality, and he is tossed aside by the wake of a larger boat nearly that capsizes his small rowboat. The forest isn't around him anymore, but rather water as black as ink, reflecting the sky-scouring wall of fire with rippling quality. The children on the boat are screaming, crying out in panic, some still coughing from the smoke. As the rowboat steadies, Jim watches the tugboat that nearly plowed into them continue to roar ahead down the river.
As Jim turns to the south, the flames blowing in from the west are impossibly high. It is a wall of flames that contains the crumbling, black silhouettes of buildings. As he rows away from the pier, he can see people stranded at the end of the docks screaming for help. There wasn't enough room.
There wasn't enough room.
Those trapped at the pier dive into the water, frantically swimming away from the flames. The sky is choked black with smoke, and as Jim turns to the east his vision swims and he feels light-headed, tipping as if to fall over the side of the boat.
Except that Jim never hits water. Instead it feels as though he collides with a brittle surface of fire-baked leaves and ash, crashes through that permeable barrier and free-falls into smoky darkness, surrounded by the lapping tongues of heat and flame and the crackling sound of—
They almost look like flames…