My eyes stung as the purple light invaded my senses. But despite how much it hurt… I felt oddly drawn to them. As if whatever was emitting the glow was just begging me to look. But that was obviously a bad idea, so I forced myself to stare ahead, at the rows of blindfolded kids tied to their seats. There was also a person at the front of the room, where the teacher would’ve stood whilst giving a lecture.
They wearing a large, dark cloak and had bone-like fingers that were constantly twitching, forming consecutive obscure symbols. On top of that, they were chanting in a voice that was deep, fast, and gravelly, devoid of any emotion at all. Obviously the mastermind behind the whole ritual-thing.
I was on an adrenaline high, so I did the best thing I could think of at the moment. I clocked the person straight in the jaw. They slumped over and their hood came off, revealing a pale, borderline emaciated woman with symbols and scars etched throughout her face. I’d always told myself that I was gonna be that guy who’d never hit a woman in his life, but fuck it.
I turned around to face the kids. A few of them seemed aware of what was going on, but most of them seemed completely out of it. For whatever reason, I thought that taking off their blind-folds was gonna be a good idea. But that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. I ran to the kid nearest me and ripped off the thin piece of cloth wrapped around his head.
For the first few seconds, his terrified eyes were on me. And then they drifted to the front of the room, fixating on the glow. In an instant, his eyes turned black and his teeth grew sharp and large. He launched his head towards me, biting my forearm in the process. I reeled from the pain but managed to kick him off before he could go for a follow-up mouthful.
But the possessed kid was relentless, as if his life had suddenly been reduced to serving a singular goal - to inflict as much carnage as possible. With his mouth agape, he scrammed towards me again, only to be knocked out by a single flick to the forehead by Kaz.
“Smart move,” he said, shaking his head. “At least they aren’t nearly as strong as the fully-transformed ones I came across earlier. Looks like you interrupted the process.”
“Did you kill him?” I asked, concerned at the prospect.”
“90% chance I didn’t. But what the fuck are you doing? I told you the plan! No detours!”
I gestured around the room. “We gotta save ‘em.”
“How?” Kaz asked. “You wanna march ‘em all out into the hallways single-file and just walk ‘em out? What’re you gonna do if we come across another creature, or another freak? You think I'm gonna be able to protect them all!”
“I’m not asking you to, I’m just…” I sighed in frustration because I knew he was right.
Am I just selfish? I thought. I know there’s no way we can save all of them. So why the hell am I forcing it? Why am I risking our only shot at getting out of here? Just to make myself feel better?
It was a rather annoying predicament. People always die, don’t they? Not everything can be helped. But then there was something to consider. Could we really allow the kids to become possessed? Or… was it better to commit the unthinkable right then and there? Maybe it wasn’t so unthinkable, given the circumstances. But were there really fates worse than death?
“I’m leaving in ten seconds,” Kaz said. “I’ll help you out, but not if it’s going to get me killed in the process.”
There was no time to balance the ethics here. Guess you can't save everybody, I thought. I got up, preparing to leave, when I heard something that stopped me in my tracks.
“…Cop dude? Is that you?”
That kid.
I’d forgotten about him. The kid I'd encountered earlier. I turned, seeing him tied up in the back of the room. There were tears streaming down his face and his nostrils were spewing snot. An unsightly child, no doubt about it.
“Oh, come on,” Kaz said. “Don’t tell me you know him.”
I took a deep exhale. “Barely.””
But barely was enough. Maybe I couldn’t save them all. But I could at least save one. I darted to the back of the room, untied the kid, and began dragging him towards the door, still averting my eyes from the glow.
“Hopefully that wasn’t a mistake,” Kaz said, preparing to step out of the room.
But before I could offer any words of reassurance, I could feel my feet sink into the floor. And then a pounding headache.
Oh, great.
The woman I’d knocked out moments prior was standing back up, her eyes glowing a menacing violet.
“You interrupted me? What’s wrong with you?”
She extended a finger, and I was inexplicably launched into a wall. Kaz tried rushing her, but was buried into the ceiling.
“Shit!” he grunted out. “A fucking esper?”
“Esper?” she laughed. “You’ve got it all wrong.”
She formed a fist, and I could see Kaz’s torso being punctured by a seemingly invisible force. Another one of his hearts began floating out of the wound, before being crushed in the air.
“Damn it!” He shouted.
“Espers don’t exist,” the woman continued. “I’m controlling entities beyond your comprehension. Beings that have been in this room all along, waiting for my command. Your brains have filtered them out in an attempt to keep you sane. Good for you.”
All of a sudden, I could feel an invisible hand that was simultaneously rough and slimy firmly grasping my neck, beginning to choke the life out of me. The woman then pointed at Kaz.
“I’ll have to deal with this one later. His will seems rather hard to break. One of the strong. But you…” she turned to me. “You’re nothing. The most glory you can hope to gleam out of this world is existing as a disposable soldier in the Messiah’s legion. Just accept it.”
I felt my body get cranked to the side. I knew what was coming, so I closed my eyes. She simply laughed at this.
“Pathetic.”
I could feel another hand forcing my eyelids open, exposing me to whatever obscure force was waiting in front of me.
And as expected, I couldn't begin to understand what I was looking at. The strange purple overwhelmed my field of vision, but it wasn’t only an external stimulus. The light seeped deep into my senses, and into what I assumed to be my soul itself. I could feel it gnawing away at my lucidity. My humanity. My own sense of self. The light in front of me began to morph, showing me scenes of an utterly inconceivable nature. Maybe it was another planet. Another realm. Another level of consciousness entirely. Beings that didn’t coincide with the current plane of existence. Colors that I’d never seen before, nearly tearing my brain apart at the very implication of their existence. Eventually, an otherworldly appendage reached out to me, beckoning for me to follow.
At the moment, I really did want to. It was something that seemed utterly out of my control. However… I was still clinging onto my own reality, forcing a motivating mantra to reverberate throughout my mind. Three simple words:
THE STRONG SURVIVE
I’m not entirely sure what I was doing at that moment. Perhaps my will was functioning implicitly, without my brain really understanding what was happening. In any case, the enigmatic beings in front of me began dissolving back into the uniform light, and I was gaining back some control of my own consciousness. And that’s when I told myself something that broke me out completely.
Whatever’s in front of me… it’s just a damn light.
When I came back to my senses, blood was dripping from my nose, and my head was pounding something fierce. But… I was alive. And I was still myself. At that moment, I couldn’t myself from letting out a boastful laugh.
“Fuck you! I fucking did it!”
The woman’s face contorted into a furious glare.
“You can die instead then!”
It was a fatal mistake. In her rage, she’d focused all of her attention on me, leaving Kaz to his own devices. As he dropped down from the ceiling, he punched her head clean off, immediately grunting in pain afterwards.
“Two hearts gone… what a shitty day.”
I expected him to be pissed at my rash decision when he turned to face me. But while he certainly wasn’t happy about what had transpired, I could also sense a hint of something else in his eyes. Now, I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it might’ve been admiration.
“Grab that damn kid and let’s get out of here.”
For a moment, I was still hung up on the idea of saving the rest of them. But I tossed that aside when spider-like legs spurted out of the woman’s severed neck and began crawling back to her body. We ran the hell out of there.
Now that I knew I was more or less capable of withstanding the purple light, I was also confident in traversing through the smoke and right out the exit.
This is gonna work! I thought.
“Can I take my blindfold off now?” The kid asked me we ran. I’d completely forgotten about it.
“Oh shit… yeah, take it off.”
He did so, but nearly screamed when he caught a glimpse of the bloodied Kaz. I covered his mouth before he could attract any unwanted attention.
“That’s Kaz,” I told him. “Don’t worry about it."
We descended down the stairwell at the opposite end of the floor, hoping not to run into “Brando” again, or any other of Trent’s insane messengers. We were about forty feet away from the exit when we heard gunshots coming from the corridor up to the left of us.
“Shit,” Kaz said. “Is that bad news?”
From what I’d seen, none of the messengers needed guns, and I assumed it wouldn’t have been one of the creatures. By that logic, it must’ve been a friendly. Probably. But the question was… what were they firing at?
We moved up a bit more, before a figure stumbled into our vision. A familiar one.
“Dex?”
He turned his head, eyes widening in surprise upon seeing me.
“Pete? You’re still alive? Nice. Just gimme a second.”
He darted back down the corridor at a speed that took me by surprise. He was like a blur. A few moments later, and after hearing what sounded like an intense struggle, he walked back out, accompanied by two more people.
One was a woman with strawberry-blonde hair tied back into a pony-tail wearing a torn up jacket, khakis and boots. One of her arms was mechanical, and portions of her neck also appeared to be robotic. Kaz seemed to recognize her.
“Cecile?” he said, smiling. “They roped you into this as well, huh?”
He turned to me. “Another Holy Solider. Class zero. Pretty tough. Also the only one I don’t mind looking at.”
She nodded, bent over in exhaustion while stretching out her bloody robot-fingers. “Yeah. Real happy to be here," she looked up. "What the fuck happened to you? And where’s that asshole Calhoun?”
I didn’t say anything.
The last person was rather unassuming. A middle-aged man of average build tinkering around with a small, spherical device in his hands. He glanced up at us.
“I’m Joel. Good to meet you.”
And then he immediately went back to doing whatever he was before. Sure, it was strange behavior, but in the context of everything else that had happened… not so much.
I was glad to see Dex, but it begged the question… how did he survive?
“What happened-“
He stepped forward, seemingly sensing what I was about to ask.
“They forced me to stare at the purple thing. Nearly got me as well. Then she saved me,” he gestured towards Cecile. “But…” he continued, holding up his rifle. “As you can see, I’m a bit wacky now.”
I didn’t notice it at first. His arm and the gun had become fused together, connecting at the right elbow in a disturbing amalgamation of metal, plastic and flesh.
“I was too late,” Cecile chimed in. “They got the transformation started.”
I walked up towards him, seeing abnormally large veins running up the right side of his neck to his chin. One of his irises had also turned into a dark red.
“Yeah, it’s pretty freaky. Whatever this is.”
I must not have been hiding my shock too well, because he chuckled.
“If you’re feeling bad for me right now, I’ll knock you out. I survived, didn’t I? I’m stronger now as well.”
I knew he wasn’t the type to fish for sympathy. No matter how distraught he was about his current situation, he wasn’t going to show it, nor did he want anybody else to dwell on it. So I obliged him.
“How do you reload that thing?” I asked.
“Don’t need to,” he replied, holding it up. “It’s weird. I can still feel my hand inside of this thing. The trigger’s in there as well. Every time I pull it, it shoots. No jams. No need to reload. Insane rate of fire. Not quite sure what the bullets are made out of, though. I’m thinking they may be bone fragments.”
“Well, that’s… something.” I stammered out.
“We can continue this little reunion outside,” Kaz spoke up. He turned to face Cecile. “Judas is inbound, you know?”
“I figured,” she responded. “But we can’t leave.”
Kaz raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
“They’ve set up the dome. We’re trapped.”
Kaz was silent for a moment, before staring at the ground.
“Shit!” He spat in frustration.
“The dome? Like what, made out of glass or something? Just break through it!” I said, confused at their sudden complacency with the situation.
Cecile sighed. “Look, the state has a lot of shit that you would never understand. Now, I don’t know what this dome is made out of, but I can guarantee that none of us could even crack it. Except for Judas, that is.”
“They’re containing the whole area until he shows up,” Kaz added. “We’re basically sitting ducks now.”
“But they know you guys are in here, don’t they?”
Kaz chuckled. “What’s a few expendable soldiers to the fate of the world at large? They always do this shit. Finding excuses and covering shit up. You ever wonder what happened to that airplane that went missing a few years ago? Judas is what happened. But... whatever. Nothing we can do about it.”
He was angry at first, but at that moment, he sounded more or less resigned to his fate.
“That’s just like you, Kaz,” Cecile said. “Giving up so quickly,” she tapped Joel on the shoulder. “How’s that thing coming along?” She asked him.
“Yeah, yeah, progress is being made. Give it about twenty or thirty.” He responded.
Cecile turned back to face us. “We found him lurking around in the halls. Thought he was a teacher at first, but he wasn’t freaking out or anything. Said he came here to ‘pick something up’. Wouldn’t elaborate. Not sure where he came from, or what he’s all about. All I care about is that he can apparently get us out."
“Get us out?” the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Kaz asked.
“It means what it means,” Joel said. “You say this Judas guy’s gonna come and muck everything up. You also say there’s an unbreakable barrier outside. That the government’s gone and left you for dead.”
He looked up for the first time in a while, grinning. “How surprising. In that case, we just gotta find another way. But don’t worry about those logistics. Just keep me alive a bit longer, yeah?”
Kaz hardly reacted to the proposition. I didn’t blame him. The whole thing sounded wonky at best. But again… stranger things. I should’ve stopped being surprised.
“Well…” Kaz finally said, after a few moments of contemplation. “We got nothing better to do, I guess. Let’s find somewhere to hide.”
“No can do,” Cecile said. “Apparently, we need to be outside when this happens. The doors to the football field are still open. That’s where we’re heading next.”
Kaz let out a sigh and a chuckle at the same time. “Nothing’s easy today, huh?”
“Nothing’s ever easy. Should’ve stayed in school, I guess,” Cecile said. “By the way, who’s the fucking kid?”
I looked over at him. It looked like he was about to shit himself as he hugged the lockers while simultaneously trembling.
“Oh… a straggler. But… I’m not just gonna leave him here.” I responded.
Cecile rolled her eyes, before walking up to him.
“You got a name, kid?”
“…Ha... Harris…” He stammered out.
“Well, Harris. Are you strong?”
“P…probably not.”
Cecile just shook her head, laughing. “You remind me of my little brother. He’s also a pussy. But… I’ll get you outta here alive,” she raised a fist and pointed it towards him. “But you’ll have to promise me something as well. You may not be strong. But you’re gonna have to try. Don’t be an easy target, alright?”
Still shaking, Harris lifted his fist and connected it with hers.
“Yeah, she got too strong for her own good and gives terrible advice now.” Kaz whispered to me.
Afterwards, Cecile began heading towards the field entrance. The rest of us followed behind her, with Harris and Joel squished in between us, the latter still fiddling with the device.
“Here,” Dex said, placing his pistol in my hand. “You’re looking a bit empty there. Not sure how much that’ll help, though.”
I was a bit concerned about that as well. Still, it felt better having some kind of weapon in my hands. In retrospect, I should've picked up the bounty hunter's gun. Firing it once likely would've dislocated my arm, though. We made it to the field without much problem. We ran into a few creatures along the way, but they were taken care of rather easily.
Once out on the field, we looked up, seeing the octagonal-patterned barrier above and around us. It was rather hard to see through, but a few things were for sure. It’d become dark outside, and there were helicopters and vehicles surrounding the place. The area still within the barrier but beyond the field was also littered with corpses, both human and creature alike.
But our biggest problem was standing right in front of us. An extremely tall man, probably eclipsing eight feet. His hair was long and red, seemingly floating atop his over-sized shoulders. The top half of his head was covered by black cloth, obscuring his eyes. The rest of his body seemed to be covered in black bandages, wrapped tight so that his hulking physique bulged through. He was also holding a long, thin sword that emanated the same red glow as his hair.
“I have to say,” he began speaking, in a calm but explicitly hostile tone. “That’s a tough barrier you’ve set up here. You’re trying to keep us in, are you?”
He lifted his sword, pointing it directly at us. “A pointless effort. The Messiah’s gonna burn this world down and create a superior one from the ashes-“
Kaz let out a bored grunt, interrupting the sword-man’s spiel. “Holy fuck, you people are lame. What’s the point of any of this?”
“Idiot,” Cecile said under her breath. “Should’ve kept him talking. Buy us some time.”
The sword-man let out a patronizing laugh. “Lucky I’m the one you’re dealing with. Unlike those savages, I don’t get offended so easy. But you lot must be confident. Better for me. Come and give me some stimulation before you die."
---
Credits
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