Entanglement

by Drue M Scott

  “What are the chances we can get Brennan back?” Mikale’s shaking became more visible to Mathieu. Both of them postured as though the twilight air blowing up off the pacific was to blame.

  “Don’t let fear control your emotions right now.” Trying to be stern without sounding so, Mathieu turned to face outward. The mountainous terrain to their sides and water below them looked dreamlike. It was an image from a postcard. The sun was setting, and a light fog had begun to roll in over the banks farthest from the city. If the coming horrors didn’t taint it so much, it would have all been peaceful and awe inspiring. “We will need to keep our wits about us.”

  He thinks we are all going to die, Mikale. Stewart blankly stated as though the fact of the matter had already been decided. Don’t write our epitaph so soon, my friend. Mikale returned taking a step closer to Mathieu and putting his arm around the other man’s shoulder. “I think love will find a way.”

  “I hope so,” Mathieu whispered turning his head towards Mikale. “I do truly hope so.” Pausing to inhale deeply and appreciate the briskness of the air that entered his lungs, Mathieu wrapped his arm around Mikale completing the hug his friend had started. “I know that we have not known each other long,” squeezing tightly, “in a physical sense of time, but I know you genuinely, and the sufferings you have endured,” kissing Mikale’s neck gently, he continued, “If there were a god that heard prayers, mine would be that you are reunited with Jason this night.”

  Interrupting their moment, a loud crack of thunder shook the air around them. Reflexively parting from one another, startled, Mikale quickly tried the fresh tears he had shed; the two men stiffened their muscles and prepared for the coming fight. Dropping from seemingly nowhere, Brennan slammed hard down upon the sidewalk’s edge. Blood bubbled up from his mouth, but he still drew breath. For how much longer, neither Mathieu nor Mikale knew. He had been noticeably beaten, physically and emotionally, and the wounds were clearly visible and obviously grave. Despite his efforts to speak, no words made it past his lips. His chest was bare and jeans tattered; he was nearly naked and shaking uncontrollably from pain, fear, and the chill in the air.

  “Fucking hell, Brennan!” Speedily rushing over and kneeling beside his friend, his love, Mikale lifted the injured man’s head from the hard concrete and into his lap. The weight of it showed unmistakably that Brennan had no strength of his own remaining.

  Spinning in circles knowing Jacob had to be near, Mathieu shouted out. “Show yourself, you sadistic fuck!”

  “You mean like this?” Jacob appeared instantly in front of Mathieu and grabbed him by the shoulders. Lifting him above his head, Jacob reveled in the rippling of his muscles and tightness of his abs. His admiration of his own body only slightly delayed throwing the other man as though he weighed nothing. Slamming down hard upon the windshield of a passing car, chaos erupted. Pedestrians began screaming and running, cars screeched to a halt, some crashing over onto the sidewalk and hitting those fleeing the commotion, and the suspended section of the bridge they stood upon began to sway in time with Jacob’s pulsing life-force.

  Mathieu knew bones had splintered as blood spewed up into his mouth. His anger, though, overrode the desire to whimper in pain. Rolling himself from the grey Honda Accord and stumbling to his feet from its hood, he cocked his head to each side listening to his bones grind in protest. “We are here as you requested.” Trying to ignore the screaming lady behind the wheel of the car he just shattered the windshield of, Mathieu stepped back onto the sidewalk. Straightening his plain black t-shirt and brushing off the slivers of broken glass from his shoulders and arms, he tried with all that he was to not show the pain Jacob had inflicted. “Why call us here only to kill us?” He coughed tasting the blood in his mouth, but refused to indicate its sourness. “You could have done that back at the hospital.”

  “Yes, I could have,” Jacob grinned menacingly, “but where’s the fun in that?” Grabbing hold of Mathieu again, he pulled his bleeding adversary close to his face. “I am my maker’s creation after all.” Licking the length of Mathieu’s face pausing to lap up what blood was present, Jacob snarled. “I want the world to see this.”

  “So, you had no intention of ever letting Mikale see Jason again?” Mathieu knew the answer but was attempting to find anything he could to buy time for Brennan and Mikale. “What grievances have you with either of them?”

  “What grievance does a hurricane have with a bird caught in its winds? The sun would no sooner ponder your question than incinerate you.” Jacob, bending Mathieu’s head to one side, bit down slightly on the tender flesh revealed. “Do the gods need grievances in order to act on their desires?” Not breaking the skin, he sucked, as if he wished to leave a lover’s hickey on the tender flesh of his adversary. The taste of Mathieu’s sweat was pure joy.

  Nothing seemed quite right. Jacob had a mastery they had yet seen from him, and his discourse was elevated from what they had heard. He was evolving. Letting go, he dropped the weakening man to his knees. The many cars honking, and people screaming and arguing over what was happening began to test his thinly veiled calm.

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” The pain in the loudness of his voice brought immediate silence. “You are here to witness the end of any who could ever oppose me.” Using his energy Jacob pulled his enemies to him and levitated them several feet from the cold metal and concrete structure that suspended them high above the frigid waters below. “These three cry for their lost loves.” Stripping the two that still had shirts, Jacob snickered. “Two harbor hate, but neither will act upon it.” Cracking ribs with unseen pressure, he continued to laugh as he spoke. “All three hide their love for another, and yet none will act upon it.” Stepping inward to stand forefront of the hovering men, Jacob rested a hand upon Brennan’s waist. From thin air, precision cuts opened across each of his victim’s bare chests. “I, on the other hand, have no fear in admitting I love my hate.” Each laceration connected to spell out a single word on each man’s torso. “WE ARE WEAK.” Jacob laughed hysterically, “I will treasure it.” He grabbed his crotch through his faded blue jeans now stained with blood and dirt. “I will grow it.” Rolling his head counterclockwise, he relished each snap his bones made. “I WILL act on it.” Throwing his arms forward, he sent the men soaring across the road to the other side of the bridge. “There is nothing any of you can do to stop me.” Rolling his fingers with his palms faced outward he curled them into a fist wringing them tightly as he drew them inward and palms up. All the people present ran in fear as sparks of lightning-blue energy burst from his fists and struck the cars nearest him. The pavement beneath him and the supports around him shook from a force greater than any earthquake ever had. “Come, let me taste your souls.”

  Silent screams from the first chosen to die reached out to the heavens, but there was nothing there to answer their calls. Only Jacob’s hate could be sensed. Pulling life-forces from the petrified travelers, Jacob laughed uproariously. Dead shells, that were once whole souls, fell to ash upon the six-lane bridge. Each exponential increase in frictional energy grew his size and destabilized his power. The strength of his instability caused his physical form to waver in and out of focus. “I will be respected.” Shouting as he consumed more souls from the screaming humans attempting to flee, Jacob cursed the whole of existence around him. With a snap of his finger, a line of cars to his left exploded. Turning to his right and snapping once more, another line of cars erupted into flames. Hundreds of people were now trapped within his prison of death. “I will be feared.” Snatching up more souls and leaving the bodies to blow away as dust, Jacob lifted both hands into the air. “I WILL BE LOVED!”

  “Fuck You!” Lucas, running Jacob threw with a make-shift stake whittled down to a point on one end and clad with a rope handle on the other, clapped back sarcastically as blood from the wound he inflicted splashed in his face. “FUCK! YOU!”

  Twisting around abruptly and knocking Lucas away from him, Jacob coughed. Gore spilling
up over his lips, he released a begrudging shout of pain and disgust. “So, this was your plan?” Turning his anger and power towards Lucas, he spat enraged words with blood. “Stab me with a fucking stake?” Pulling the old branch from his sternum and watching as liquid red ran as a faucet from his chest, Jacob sighed in disappointment. “I’m not a fucking vampire, you idiots.” Sealing the wound over, he wiped the area with the back of his fingers as though brushing away lint. “So, you teamed up with the man you hated.” Jacob smirked peering over at Mathieu and then again to Lucas. “Second only to me, of course.” Laughing he spit the last remnants of blood from his mouth. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “We will.” Mikale shouted running at him. Blood from the carved word in chest chased the lines of his abdomen.

  “Are you going to kiss me to death?” Jacob sneered.

  Jumping into Jacobs arms, Mikale planted a Taser to his neck. “Now Stewart!” Phasing out of Mikale and intermeshing into Jacob, Stewart fused himself within their enemy. It was a plan they had meant for Devin, a plan to disrupt their foes energy long enough for Stewart to migrate over. It was a last-ditch effort to secure the safety of Jason and Brennan and expel the evil life-force from within. But no one had planned on Jacob as the biggest threat. No one knew if there was anything within him to expel, any portion of a soul worth saving. The desired recipient of their idea was laid upon the concrete twenty feet away with the bleeding word, “weak” carved into his battered body.

  “Not so fast, fucker.” Jacob shoved Mikale back hard enough that he fell to the concrete next to Brennan’s limp and dying body across the several lanes of panicked Californians and fire-consumed cars. Screaming to the darkening sky above, Jacob let out a blast of energy that forced Stewart from him, but it forced out something more than he intended. A sudden jolt of weakness reverberated through his being. Shaking it off as quickly as he could, Jacob turned his attention back to Mathieu who now ran to be near Lucas. “I am not so easily overcome.” Dragging his hands across the orange horizon he swept up all the cars within his fiery borders and crashed them together in front of himself. Only 50 souls remained within the blazing arena he had created, and some of them struggled with the idea of freeing themselves by jumping.

  Helicopter news crews circled them broadcasting the entire confrontation to every station across the country. Firefighters doused the flames on either side of the turmoil, but nothing could wash the fire away. Crumbling the supports and the concrete beneath them, Jacob dropped both sides of the bridge into the water below. All that remained was the battleground he had laid before them. The mid-section of the bridge remained elevated only by the suspension cables that now struggled with their supports missing and the weight expected to be held by them. Swinging his arms outward to the flying news crews above, he catapulted clumps of distorted metal. Unable to move from its path, all but one of the news crew’s helicopters erupted into flames and plummeted to the deep waters below in a hail of fire and debris. Immediately retreating to what they assumed was a safe distance, the only remaining news crew in the air relied on their camera’s zoom lens.

  Stewart’s pulsing energy, now free of Mikale and Jacob, swirled around it’s once host in time with a separate entity; a distinct life-force, it was vastly different, but familiar at the same time. Intertwining with each other and bouncing off each other, the two beings sparked white and shades of reflected sun from the twilight sky. Mikale’s eyes widen in shock. The outburst of energy, both visible and invisible, was uneven as though two sides of a magnet were trying to force themselves together.

  “Brennan.” Pulling his friend to his lap as he lifted himself to a seated position, Mikale cried. They weren’t tears of sorrow or of fear that ran down his face. The awe of what he witnessed forced his eyes to water in a blending of everything he felt. His own life-force waned in a way he knew would not hold on for much longer, but the knowledge his love was dying broke him to the core. Crying out to the universe, he begged for his life to be forfeit in order to save the man he cradled. “PLEASE, take my…”

  Brennan soaked up what Mikale offered absorbing the love and the energy his friend freely gave. As a reflex, his own entity absorbed all that he could without killing Mikale. Above them, the swirling aurora burst in shades of purple and green, with blue and white fading off from their edges. The energy wildly radiating out from it sent pulses of pure power in all directions. Both men drank them in as thirsty travelers in a desert. Dust around them formed a tornado of motion intermingling with the vacuum that began to pull all towards it. The remaining fire from Jacob’s show of force danced away from the cars they engulfed and churned into the growing sphere of light and power. “Mikale?” Brennan spoke, but it was Jason’s voice Mikale heard. “We have to end this.” Shakily lifting himself from the lap of his lover, his friend, Brennan stumbled towards Jacob who stood in dumbfounded awe of the growing energy before him. A lightning flash from the swirling chaos of energy, bolted in a direct path to Brennan and lit up the surrounding area in a bright purple haze. Brennan arched his back as the powerful light engulfed him. The entirety of the moment was less than a second, but the experience passed like slow motion. Energy radiated from Brennan outward in violent tentacles wrapping themselves around Jacob.

  “Noooo!” Mikale, reaching out weakened by the offering of his own life-force, screamed as loud as his taxed physical existence would allow.

  Leaping forward to stop Brennan, Mathieu cried out. “Wait!”

  Snatching up Mathieu in a ring of energy, before Brennan could fully consume him, Jacob threw his hand to the side throwing his enemy from the bridge. Bouncing hard upon the concrete before tumbling over the railing, Mathieu felt the ribs that had not yet been broken, snap. Jacob, satisfied with the death blow he was certain he had inflicted, turned his attention back to Brennan. “Come, come, little one, did I not tell you how you would meet your end?” Jacob opened his arms to welcome Brennan fully into him. “See what I’ve become?” He laughed in spite of the pain being exacted upon his physical existence. “I will take all of you in.” Coughing up blood, he began screaming. “I will consume the world.”

  In time with Jacob’s declaration of madness, Lucas rushed over to grab hold of Mathieu before his friend plummeted over the railing. “Hold on, Mattie.” Tears raced down his face, and pain scorched his every muscle, but Lucas was not going to let go. “I’ve got you.” Though his fingers were weak and arms screamed in agony, Lucas meant what he said. “You’ve got to hold on.” The weakening metal of the single guardrail that remained began to bend under the two men’s weight. Each second was leading to the inevitable outcome that one or both of them were going to fall. “Goddamnit!” Lucas screamed as he tried in agonizing pain to resituate the grip he had on Mathieu’s wrist. Suddenly, the moment froze; his fingers were just shy of reconnecting with his best friend’s bleeding skin as he had tried to quickly find a better grip.

  Oxygen evaporated into the swirling rush of energy building in the middle of the bridge. Though each person present was consumed by their own nightmare, no one was outside the effects the spherical light caused. Stewart’s essence, once strong and pronounced, was no longer present. He was now whatever the ball of bouncing erratic light was. Sound dropped away as suddenly as the air had gone vacant of oxygen. The bridge no longer crumbled, the screams were no longer heard, and the waves beneath them did not move. Everything gave way to the building sphere of raw power.

  Jacob was embracing Brennan; Lucas was grasping toward Mathieu in desperation, and Mikale was sprawled upon bloodied asphalt fighting to remain present under the pain of his injuries. The world stood still. Cracks of lightning fired off from the whirling ball of light intermittently shadowed everything around them. Growing in size, it moved in sporadic jolts and random directions. Nothing escaped its force and wonder. The rippling effect on reality appeared as water floating around a great orb of undulant light. Formless, it had devoured the air, the fire, all sound, and held
time within its grasp. Everything is energy, and it drew everything into itself. Jacob could sense his own power draining rapidly into it but could do nothing to stop it. Mikale could feel pulses of life being thrust into him from it, and yet, could not move. The two-letter word “WE” cut into his chest began to bleed in reverse. Lucas could see that his efforts to catch Mathieu from falling were being aided, but from where, he did not know. With a thunderous clap of light and returning sound, the formless became form. Bathed in glowing light and draped in long flowing strands of purple silk, Kyna filtered into existence before them. Her long, red hair flowed in a breeze that was not present, her eyes were brighter than the brightest emeralds, her lips soft and pink, and each long, flowing strand of royal purple silk strategically covered her nudity. She was the beauty she had always been and whatever strength she now had, she was the balance to the otherwise downward spiral that Devin had created and Jacob was feeding. Time returned.

  “You will not hurt another soul.” Brennan, still latched onto Jacob, forced all of himself, Jason, and Devin into the power-hungry maniac, disappearing completely within him. All three of them sunk into Jacob’s being. “I may have played this game before, but tonight, we will play this game no more.” Their voices, as a trio of echoing tenors, radiated throughout Jacob.

  “Fuck you all.” Jacob screamed in pain and anger. “I will kill you all.” Wringing his hands together, a flash of the increasingly volatile energy within him shattered the last structures keeping the suspension lines from dropping the weight of the bridge. The small portion of the remaining road and sidewalk that kept them from plunging into the water below, was now crumbling into the sea. Pieces fell revealing the understructure as metal began to buckle and give way.