Read The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story for Free Online

him.
    Charisma. Or laziness. Whatever.
    The sun was rising over the playa before the dancers finally extinguished their torches and put away their props. They seemed cool and refreshed despite hours of exertion.
    One of them, a gray-haired man who looked like beef jerky stretched over a skeleton, looked at Adam and the rest of them as if noticing him for the first time.
    “You and your friends talk a lot of shit,” he said. He was smiling.
    Marc bristled at that. “We want to change the world, dude,” he said. “Takes more than just playing with matches and dancing around.”
    Marc had been a jock in high school. He wore his hair long and talked about peace and love now, but at heart, he still wanted to solve every problem by giving it a wedgie and slamming it into a locker somewhere.
    “Takes more than just talking, too,” the old man said. He kept looking at Adam, even though he was answering Marc.
    “That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it?” Adam said. “We’re trying to find new ways. Better ways.”
    “New ways aren’t always better,” the old man said. “That’s why we dance with the fire. To re-connect. To get back into the true power. We summon the flame through us, to strengthen us, to transform us, body and soul.”
    “We’re looking for more than just a spiritual transformation,” Julius said. “We want real change.”
    “Do you?” The old man looked right at Josh when he said this. “Most of you little bastards are just here to see the naked girls.”
    “That’s just a fringe benefit,” Josh said, and everyone laughed.
    The old man didn’t stop smiling, but his eyes grew strangely cold.
    “You’re nothing,” he said. “You’re just like the rest. This world has a death wish. It has gone too far. Overgrown. Choked with weeds and covered in trash. You all know this, but you’re too fat and happy to do anything about it. You’ll watch it all strangle slowly.”
    With every second, as he spoke, as the sun rose over the makeshift city, he seemed to change. When he was dancing in the dark, he seemed huge and vital. Now he looked like a tree that had somehow survived a forest fire, blackened and twisted.
    Josh felt uneasy. Maybe the high was wearing off.
    He stood up to go back to their campsite. But Adam rose, too.
    “You talk like you’ve got a better idea,” he said to the old man.
    “You talk about the world burning? It’s not burning nearly quickly enough. It is time for a purifying fire,” the old man said. “And I can show you the way.”
    Josh really wanted to leave. But his feet seemed stuck in the sand. He could feel the same hesitation from his friends. They would do what Adam did. As always.
    Josh desperately wanted Adam to walk away, right now.
    Adam said, “All right then. Show me.”
    The old man walked back toward his camp, waving them along. Adam went with him. So did Marc, and Julius, and a couple others. Josh was the last to follow. But he followed.
    A day later, the makeshift campsites were taken down. The Man was nothing but ashes on the playa, the bigger chunks carefully swept up and carted away. RVs and cars and trucks started their engines and drove back to civilization.
    But one SUV stayed where it was. A tow truck, kept on hand by the festival organizers, dragged it out to the highway, where it was impounded by the county sheriff. Nobody ever came back to claim it.
    Josh and five of his friends never made it back to school, either. The old man had showed them, just like he promised.
     
    
     
    “We all know how to do it now,” Josh told Zach and Cade. “They left us after they taught us how.”
    “You can do the same thing as the others?” Zach asked.
    “Oh yeah,” Josh said. “I could even teach you, if you wanted.”
    “Pass,” Zach said.
    Josh thought that was funny. “Yeah. It’s sort of a one-time-only trick.”
    “So why do it at all?”
    “Adam said we could show people, we could make a difference, that we’d make them