Feel Again

by Fallon Sousa

  Feel Again

  By Fallon Sousa

  Published by Fallon Sousa at Smashwords

  Copyright 2013 Fallon Sousa

  Chapter One

  It was a cold, bleak, December night in New York City, Christmas Eve, in fact. Yet, without any falter in their enthusiasm based on the weather, Maggie and Arthur Davidson were preparing for the holidays just as they did each year. Earlier that day, Maggie had gone to the grocery store and bought everything they had needed. She had picked up the turkey, the wine, and side dishes of cranberries, green beans, and her famous honey bread, which she planned to drown in melted butter, despite warnings from her doctor that she needed to watch her weight.

  Their four-year-old son, Lionel, who was supposed to be asleep, appeared suddenly just as Maggie and Arthur were dragging boxes of Christmas decorations up from the basement.

  “Why aren’t you asleep, Sweetie Pie?” Maggie asked her son. “You know that tomorrow is Christmas. Santa won’t bring you any presents unless you go to bed early like a good boy.” Maggie, a pudgy blonde woman of thirty-two, was still happy about Christmas, and happy to see her son, but she was just a little bit annoyed that he did not want to go to bed.

  “But, I don’t wanna,” he said, tears building up in his eyes and snot running down his little button nose. His mother could sense a tantrum coming on. She realized that it would not be easy to get Lionel to go to bed, especially not when he was just so excited that it would be Christmas the next day.

  “Come on, honey, just go to bed,” she told her son again, sensing for some strange reason that he needed to sleep and that he would be much safer upstairs. Just then, her husband, Arthur, entered the room.

  “What’s the matter, Mags?” he asked. “Is our little pookie bear too wound up about the holidays to go to sleep? Did you tell him that Santa Claus only gives presents to the good little boys and girls?”

  “Yes, I did already tell him that,” Maggie said, her patience slowly running out with every word that she spoke. She just had a feeling that Lionel belonged upstairs. Then, she got an idea.

  “Well, Lionel,” she began. “What if Mr. Santa Claus gives you an extra present tomorrow for going upstairs to your room and sleeping in, oh, let’s say...the next ten minutes. How about that?” Maggie was smirking now, beginning to believe that her idea for getting her son to bed was working. Perhaps her parenting skills were finally improving. It had only taken her four years to get there.

  “Okay, Mommy,” the boy said sincerely, his tears fianlly beginning to dry up from his big blue eyes, and his cute little pre-Christmas smile returning to his small round face. “I’ll get to bed in one minute, Mommy.”

  Good boy, Lionel,” she said, smiling, just as Lionel ran up the stairs to his room, his tiny feet pounding much harder than one would expect of a forty-pound toddler.

  Maggie turned to her husband. “See, Arthur, I think I am finally getting better at this,” she said, laughing.

  Arthur laughed right back at her. “You sure are,” he said, “You sure are.”

  “Now,” Maggie began. “Why don’t we get started on those Christmas decorations?” She asked him, hinting that there might be a little something more to her plan.

  “That’s a great idea,” Arthur replied, not quite catching on to his wife’s full intentions. He got up and walked across the living room to where a cardboard box was lying by the door to the basement, just as he had left it earlier. They got out the Christmas tree, and, together, they picked up each ornament from the box and began placing them on the rough, broccoli-colored branches.

  “Oh, Arthur, look at this one,” Maggie said, holding up a porcelain angel. It was entirely white except for the tiny little decals around the angel’s wings, which consisted of tiny red and green dots, placed symmetrically along the curve of each delicate little wing.

  “Oh my God,” I’d forgotten about that one. It was my grandmother’s, right?” he asked, a puzzled expression forming on his tan face; his green eyes done unjustice by the furrowing of his eyebrows. Maggie loved him so much. She hoped that he knew that.

  “And, what about this one, Mags?” he chuckled, waving an ornament shaped like a beer bottle in front of her face. “I’ve had this since college.”

  “Arthur, throw that old thing away!” Maggie replied teasingly. When she saw her husband’s face fall, she returned with much lighter remark. “I was just kidding, honey,” she added. “I know you love that thing.”

  “You know I do.” Arthur was actually pretty serious when he said this.

  “Besides,” Maggie added, smirking flirtatiously, “I have my own secret box of trinkets from when I was in college.”

  “You do not,” he said, almost as if he weren’t so sure. Just to check, he looked over at his wife to check her expression and study it for clues as to whether or not she was hiding anything from him in regards to her life before they had met. Her face, especially when she burst out laughing at his stare, told him that she was not. He was right. He smiled.

  “Arthur, honey, can we just, well, I don’t know, uh, finish this tree so we can find something better to do?” She winked at him this time.

  Finally catching on to her sentiment, Arthur responded to Maggie’s subtle proposal. “Sounds great,” he said. “And I mean that when I say it.” She laughed, and they went back to decorating the Christmas tree. It was going to be a great holiday. Or so they thought. As Maggie, her brown eyes glistening in the light of the shiny holiday decorations, placed the last of her favorite blue snowflake ornaments on their sweet-smelling pine, her husband, whom their son had taken after when it came to his stubbornness, reached for the golden star topper. He was determined to put it on the tree by himself, despite the fact that he was only five foot six, and the tree was nine feet tall at the very least.

  He climbed a worn-out blue ladder that had been sitting against the living room wall for this very purpose.

  “Watch out,” Maggie said. “You could fall and break your leg or something.”

  “I’ll be fine,” He replied. “Don’t you worry about me.” He truly believed that he could do anything. Well, just about anything, that was. He began to climb the ladder slowly, just in case, though he would never even dream of admitting so, his wife was right about the dangers of a combination of the ladder and himself. Just then, they heard a subtle knock at the door.

  “I wonder who that is,” Maggie stated curiously, her eyebrows raising ever so slightly in response to the knock. The Davidsons were not expecting to receive any visitors until the following day, which, of course, happened to be Christmas. Maggie, her curiosity beginning to get the best of her, even if she was normally suspicious of any such occurence, particularly so late at night, began walking towards the heavy wooden door, which was painted the same shade of red as the holly berries on the wreath that hung from it.

  “Ah, darling, don’t bother,” Arthur replied, not feeling very up to having visitors of any kind, especially after the frank suggestions his wife had previously made about what the two of them might do when they were finished decorating their Christmas tree.

  “We’re done with visitors today,” he contined. “They’re probably just carolers, and haven’t we heard enough music for today?” he questioned earnestly.

  “We sure have heard plenty of music today,” Maggie added. And, to be quite honest, it was true. That very morning, before the clock had even struck seven, the couple had enjoyed an array of holiday tunes that had streamed from their beat-up old radio as they had cleaned their home and lit cinnamon-scented candles.

  There was another knock at the door. “Should I get that after all?” Maggie asked, sounding disappointed at the thought of her night being interrupted by guests, even if it was often customary for guest
s to appear at various homes unannounced at that particular time of the year.

  “Of course not,” said Arhtur, laughing as he put his arms around Maggie’s broad waist, and pulled her closer to him, silencing her with a kiss.

  Little did they know it was to be their last, for just at that moment, the door barged completely open, and, with what they then saw, their embrace ended. Maggie, who was not at all the type of person to expect the worst from any situation, let out a scream as she was stabbed through the chest with a strange device that more or less resembled a fencing sword, only made of a surprisingly sharp, clear rubber material unlike anything known to earth. The last thing she saw, as deep red blood poured from her wound and onto the recently polished floor, was something that she would never have dreamed of seeing in her worst nightmares; a robber.

  At the sound of her scream, Arthur suddenly dropped the gold star on the ground, shattering it to pieces. He did not even have time to react to the loss of his beloved wife and soulmate; his Maggie. Nothing could have ever prepared him for the sight that now presented itself before his very eyes. He had never imagined in his entire life that anyone would ever want to rob him. After all, he was not a rich man, but a simple carpenter; the husband of a school-teacher.

  Pieces of the broken star were now sticking straight into the leg of the eerie and strange man who was standing next to Arthur, holding the same weapon an arm’s length from his head. The man then penetrated deep into Arthur’s left eyeball with the sword, its unusual chemistry more powerful than anything known to Earth and to mankind. His life force drained from the socket, as the strange sword had penetrated his brain. Blood spilled over the floor and spattered the walls at high velocity. Both Arthur and Maggie were dead on contact with the wounds which this foreigner bestowed upon them.

  Chapter Two

  Once they had assuredly reached their demise, the strange man, who was, in fact, quite pleased with himself in that he had just killed his targets without any sort of mercy for their fates as he granted them, took on his true form, which was even more frightening than the one which he had presented to the Davidsons as he murdered them in cold blood. In his flexible, clear armor, his electric white skin could have blended with the falling snow outside. His orange hair contrasted with that of his five-year-old daughter, whose wavy mane was a deep shade of royal purple. However, they, as all others who shared their genetic material, shared the same bright yellow eyes. Others from their home bore irises of other hues, many of which were equivocally eccentric and generally bizarre.

  He was from an extraterrestrial planet called Zebda, where the primate beings were unable to feel emotions in such a way that the humans of Earth did. For centuries, the Zebdians had been desperate to acquire the Earthlings’ ability to perceive emotions, particulaly the human emotion of love, which they knew to be the most powerful emotion of all that had ever existed.

  “My young daughter,” he said, turning to the child, “Come with me, and test the antidote for coldness on this young foreigner.” He and his people had devised a plan to later extract this antidote; this cure, from the boy someday, when the time was right.

  It was then, as he approached the stairs, that he noticed how his daughter had been watching the boy all this time. Having left his bed some time ago, he had unknowingly seen his parents killed, as these strangers had now come to realize. The tiny child was standing at the bottom of the stairs, his fragile hands clenching on to the cherry banister with all of his might, as if his life depended on it. It seemed as if the boy was under the illusionary assumption that the strange and ruthless man did not have the power to obliterate the young boy just as he had done to his mother and his father.

  But, out of complete and utter fear of these strange monsters that now stood before him, the young boy, Lionel, the son of those just annilhated, had not spoken as of late. The boy ran up to his room, running quickly and ineptly with his inherent fright.

  And, so, the foreigner and his daughter, whose was of nearly equal age to the boy, Lionel, and who also seemed to hold an unusual and rather curious interest in the young boy, went up and followed him to his tidy bedroom. They found the boy, who was still quite drowsy, as he had been asleep already when the commotion started, lying in a little oaken bed, a glass of water on his matching nightstand, and every single dirty sock placed in a mesh folding hamper the color of the sun.

  “Stand back, please, young one,” he said to his daughter, while retreving his most prized needle, which held the cure for such apathy with which all Zebdians were plagued. He then injected the little boy in his right arm with the black ink-like fluid that had taken years for Zebdian scientists to develop in response to their people’s desperation to find a means of understanding humans more fully, even if it meant acquiring their weaknesses, coupled with their equally potent desire for the ability to love the spouses with which they bore their offspring, as many Zebdians were known to kill each other after their mates became incapable of bearing any additional young, which he had in fact done, though he waited to obliterate his partner until after a year after she first failed to bear him another child, though, as she had been helpful to his political cause, the primary justification which he held for destroying her had been because she could not keep herself away from the stoic interests of much younger and even much more handsome, though, in fact, far less powerful, army men.

  “If this works on the boy, it may work on us,” The man said somewhat indirectly to his daughter, but mostly to himself, as she was likely too young to comprehend some of the more complex evils of Zebda despite the future which she was destined to have as per her birthright as the eldest of his offspring.

  “If it kills him, we will know not to use it,” He added with typical Zebdian social bluntness and obscurity. The strange man, like all others on Zebda, his home planet, was quite matter-of-fact and did not care about the young boy’s safety at all. For that matter, he really only cared about his own, and, it was not so much that he cared for his own safety, as the entire species to which he belonged were conceived with the incapability to express care in regards to any matter. Therefore, the true motive behind his reasoning was more so that he wanted his own safety. On Zebda, selfish want was not considered a true emotion, and it so happened to be all that the Zebdians ever knew, yet, it was exactly that. They knew it, but they could not feel it.

  As the last of the pitch-black fluid flowed into Lionel’s young veins, he looked up, not knowing at all what to expect from these extraterrestrials. He then saw the unusual prettiness of the strange girl standing beside this evil being.

  He looked into her yellow eyes, and they lit up. Right then, the minute she saw him looking at her, something was awoken in her and Lionel felt it too. Then, just as quickly as it had come, the young girl turned away and was resurrected from this state. Again, at once, her father’s coldness returned, and the light left her eyes. The strange man’s eyes then began to spin, and it put Lionel into a hypnotic trance so that he would forget all that he had seen.

  The man and his daughter, wishing to return home to their own planet, willed themselves there, and, within moments, they were encased in a bright, neon green light, which surrounded their pale and slender bodies in the same way that a corpse would be encased in the coffin that separated its nonexistence with that of the living world. Back on their home planet of Zebda, the man and his daughter entered their center, called a Haklar, and the man returned to his throne, as he was the Armpha; the leader; of Zebda.

  The Haklar was composed completely of a single element; the same element which somposed the swords that Zebdians often used to murder those who stood in the way of their own personal successes. Through their studie of Earth’s sciences, they had come to know that the element, called Yalmax by Zebdians, had a molecular mass of twenty-seven and was composed entirely of a peculiar mass of neutrons.

  “Armpha, Blekrin,” a young scientist-soldier named Wumlok called out to the strange man. “Have you had any success on plan
et Earth in regards to our latest experiment?” He seemed as if he really wanted to know the answer to that question immediately.

  “Yes, Wumlok, indeed I have found much great success in the matter of the Umblof Project. I suspect that, within the next decade or two, we will be capable of extracting the anitdote for apathy from our host, who happens to be a young boy about the age of my Samakri. I believe, though I may stand corrected, that the boy’s name is Lionel. He is of a place in the United States portion of Earth, called New York City.”

  “Perfect, Armpha Blekrin,” Wumlok replied. He seemed very much pleased, if that was at all possible for a Zebdian, with Blekrin’s progress on the Umblof Project. “I can hardly wait to bask in our success some time in the very near future,” he continued.

  Chapter Three

  Eighteen-year-old Lionel Davidson had not been many things in his young life, but he had for sure always been an outcast. His past was hazy to him, but he remembered the gist of how it had been. He had been a carefree boy, playing and laughing and loving his parents, for most of his early life. He recalled faintly a time when his parents had taken him on a family vacation to DisneyLand, although he could not remember it all that well. The only thing he could still recall with clarity was a strawberry-flavored cotton candy that he had gotten from a small food booth at the theme park. He also remembered that he had to wait in line for a very long time in order to get the cotton candy. He could still smell its fruity sweetness, taste its goodness, and feel the sugar melting on his little tongue as his parents made a futile attempt at telling him that cotton candy was not a healthy thing to eat, especially when one was a growing little boy.

  All of this happiness, however faint it might be to him now, had come to a sudden end shortly after Lionel, named after his Zodiac sign of Leo, made his fourth year. Sometime right before Christmas, he had gone off to bed and woke up waiting for his Chistmas presents, only to find the NYPD hovering over the mutilated bodies of his parents instead. They had tried to keep him away from the crime scene, but to no avail. Besides, despite not remembering very much, amidst the haziness surrounding the event was a strange feeling that Lionel had seen his parents’ bodies before that instance.