He walked as if through hell. Clouds of black smoke covered the sky, rendering the sun a barely visible disk of dark red. Static electricity from dust friction meant the smoke flickered with lightning, which lit up the hills above the ground fire with a blue light, exposing the image indelibly onto Liu Xin’s mind. Smoke issued from shaft openings that dotted the hills, the bottom of each column glowing a savage dark red from the ground fire before gradually blackening farther up the columns that swirled snakelike into the heavens.

The road was bumpy, and the blacktop surface was melted enough that with every few steps it almost peeled the soles off his shoes. Refugees and their vehicles packed the roadway, all of them in masks against the stifling sulfurous air and the snowflake-like ash that fell endlessly and turned their bodies white. Fully-armed soldiers kept order on the crowded road, and a helicopter cut through the smoke overhead, calling through a loudspeaker for no one to panic…. The exodus had begun in the winter and was initially planned to be completed in one year, but a sudden intensification of the ground fire meant they had to proceed more urgently. Chaos reigned. The court had repeatedly delayed Liu Xin’s hearing, but this morning he had been left unguarded in the detention center and had made his way uncertainly outside.

The land around the road was parched and fractured into fissures filled with the same thick dust that billowed around him. A small pond steamed, its surface crammed with floating corpses of fish and frogs. It was the height of summer, but no stitch of green was visible. Grass was withered yellow and buried under dust. The trees were dead as well, and some were even smoking, their charcoal branches reaching toward the evening sky like grotesque hands. Smoke wafted from some of the windows of the empty buildings. He saw an astonishing number of rats, driven from their nests by the fire’s heat, crossing the road in waves.

As he went farther into the hills, the heat became even more palpable, rising up around his ankles, and the air more choked and dirty.

Even through his mask it was hard to breathe. The fire’s heat was not evenly distributed, and he instinctively skirted the most scorching places. It left him few paths. Where the fire was particularly fierce, the buildings had caught flame, and there were periodic crashes as structures collapsed.

He had reached the mine entrances. He walked past a vertical shaft, now more of a chimney, its enormous rig red-hot under the heat and emitting a sharp hiss that made his skin crawl. He had to detour around its surging heat. The separator building was enveloped in smoke, and the piles of coal behind it had been burning for days. They had melted into a single enormous chunk of glowing coal flickering with flames….