The Felix Chronicles: Five Days in January

by R. T. Lowe

  Number Fourteen laughed with a flick of its tongue, running the tip over her jacket. Then, smiling at Felix, it closed its mouth around her arm, slowly, piercing fabric and flesh.

  Felix screamed in horror and kicked at the ground, scrambling to get to Allison, his fingers clawing and scraping through the crushed stone, tearing off skin and nails. A Numbered One raked its teeth across Felix’s stomach, sinking into the bones in his shoulder like grappling hooks, dragging him through the dirt. It didn’t hurt. He felt numb. The smell of their bodies, of death and rot and decay, filled his nostrils. He stared up at the sky, Allison’s tortured screams drowning his consciousness with molten fury. Thin ribbons of dust swirled up, choking the air with grit. Before his eyes, the gray haze of a winter dawn turned red, the clouds blackened, like oil in a bowl of blood, and then the world grew dark. The ground under Felix dissolved and he felt himself falling, descending to a place without sight or sound, a place where nothing remained except an all-consuming rage.

  ***

  Allison screamed into the ground, fighting to free her arm from Number Fourteen. Through billowing gouts of swirling dust, she could see the monsters darting and jumping around the fallen Felix, then he was gone, submerged beneath their writhing bodies. “Get up!” she cried, dirt creeping into her mouth. “Get up!” The Numbered One sank its teeth into her arm again. She ignored the pain. This was not how it was going to end. “Get up!” she screamed at Felix. “Fight them, Felix! Goddammit fight!”

  A sudden calmness fell over the quarry, blanketing the chaos in a heavy, momentary silence.

  “Get off!” Felix roared.

  Allison’s arm was suddenly free, the smothering pressure of the creature lifted. She tucked her wounded arm against her chest and watched as Number Fourteen soared through the air to Felix, now on his feet, standing tall, an expression on his face that made Allison catch her breath. Felix reached out and gripped the creature by the neck, digging his fingers through its throat, black liquid squirting out and dripping in broken lines down the front of its coat. The monster, shrieking, clawed at Felix’s face for a moment before its arms straightened out, rigid, and snapped off at the elbows, darkening the ground beneath them. Felix brought his other hand to its face, and for an instant it seemed to glow, then fire exploded from his palm, stripping away flesh and bone, erasing its face and skull like wax set to a blow torch. The streaming flames blasted a crater behind the headless creature, spraying Allison and her friends with dirt and gravel.

  She pushed herself to her feet and turned to them, shouting, “Get back!”

  Harper appeared catatonic, incapable of comprehending, and it wasn’t until Caitlin and Lucas forcibly grasped her shoulders and dragged her off that she began to shuffle her feet.

  Felix had scattered the Numbered Ones but now they were back and mounting a coordinated attack, leaping from the nearby equipment and bearing down on him from overhead, converging on him from all sides as if they shared the same mind. They froze in midair the next moment, all five of them suspended and thrashing furiously, letting loose sounds neither human nor animal. Felix gazed up, his head rotating slowly, observing them without haste.

  Then the world turned on itself and distorted in walls of flame, curling and blurring like a film negative dissolving under the heat of a match. Allison shielded her eyes and urged everyone back, pushing them beside one of the barrels. Towering columns of fire tore across the quarry, spinning like cyclones, scorching the earth and igniting the Numbered Ones like kerosene torches, engulfing them in sheets of fire. The creatures fell instantly silent and motionless, their carcasses blackened and smoking, their hands and faces reduced to ash.

  Between the flaming columns, Allison glimpsed a Numbered One stumbling and hopping toward the road, shirtless and charred, one leg hacked off at the thigh. The sound of grinding metal pierced the air as all four silos wrenched themselves free from their concrete foundations, steel beams still attached, and lifted off like rockets, following after the last living creature. The first silo smashed down on it, crumpling the silo like an aluminum can, shaking the ground, the creature vanishing beneath it. The next one pulverized the first, and then the remaining two, in succession, thundered down one atop the other, the concussions from the impacts sending shockwaves that rocked the quarry like an earthquake.

  The cyclones of flame swept over the silos, melting them down until they were amorphous and bubbling from the heat. As if strengthened by the taste of metal, the columns grew, stretching upward, burning holes through the haze, lighting up the sky as brilliant and crimson as a late summer sunset. The ground rumbled and Allison and her friends steadied themselves against the barrel. The conveyors crashed down behind them, sending up plumes of gray that curled high into the air, whipping across the quarry in blinding sprays of dust. The thick clouds overhead began to shift and gather, moving in concert, spinning clockwise to the north and counter-clockwise to the south, the flaming columns reaching higher and higher. Allison looked up at the sky, blazing like a lake of fire, and realized Felix was standing on the precipice of losing control and slipping closer to the edge with every passing second. Back at the Cliff Walk when Felix had thought Allison had fallen to her death, he’d lifted her up clinging to a log, and in the process, he’d raised sea stacks a thousand feet above the ocean floor, some as large as mountain peaks. His demonstration of power had awed Allison. It had also made her wonder where it would end and what might happen if Felix ever unleashed the full force of the power inside him. Now the heavens were at his mercy, bending to his will, and she knew this was Felix unleashed. This was Felix losing control.

  Allison steadied herself, resolved to make a leap of faith, not knowing if Felix could distinguish her from the creatures. With her friends staring up at the sky as if they were witnessing the end of the world, Allison ran for Felix through the corpses and puddles of petroleum like blood. It seemed to her she couldn’t close the distance between them, as if her legs were churning away on a treadmill, running in place. Then finally she jumped over a creature staring up at her with a flat dead gaze and reached out for Felix in the eye of the storm, throwing her arms around his neck. His pale blue eyes were strangely vacant, like pools of ice, reflecting the firestorms spinning toward the road and no-man’s-land beyond. She pressed her lips to his ear and whispered earnestly, “Felix, you can stop now. It’s okay. We’re safe. C’mon Felix. Felix, it’s me—Allison. Come back to me, baby. C’mon, baby, come back—”

  ***

  Green eyes, fierce and familiar. Freckled nose. Hands cupping his face softly.

  He blinked, his mouth tasting of metal and dirt. He put a hand to his cheek and felt a flap of skin hanging limp and bloody, wondering, vaguely, what it meant. Sweat and smoke stung his eyes. The air smelled burnt.

  The face staring back at him smiled worriedly. Allison, he realized. For an instant, he thought he was back at his grandma’s in Cove Rock, Allison drawing him out of his numbness, the psychological armor he’d erected in response to Bill’s hypnotically induced realization of what he’d done the night of his eighteenth birthday. But they were outside now, and Allison’s arm was bleeding, the sleeve of her jacket in tatters. Something had happened.

  “It’s me,” she was saying, raising her chin, narrowing her eyes as if searching for something hidden among the stagnant rain-heavy clouds. “It’s okay now,” she told him. “You saved them.”

  Them, he thought, confused, and then suddenly he remembered.

  Caitlin, Harper and Lucas shuffled toward him, dodging their way through the bodies, tentatively, as though fearing he might incinerate them if they strayed too close.

  A moment of awkward silence and then Lucas spoke, his voice soft and hoarse. “You okay, dude?” he asked, staring at Felix’s wounds, ragged and bleeding, hardly an inch of him left unscathed.

  Harper was breathing too fast. “I’ll call 911,” she managed to say, though she appeared to be on the verge of hyperventilating. She slipped a shak
ing hand into her jacket, fumbling for her phone.

  “Don’t!” Allison said sharply, and held up a warning hand. “He’s fine,” she added, eliciting perplexed looks from them all. Her eyes lowered to her arm, which she cradled, the blood streaking her jacket and jeans, and shook her head wistfully. “Me, on the other hand, I’m gonna need a few stitches. The doctor at urgent care didn’t ask any questions when she looked at my lip. I hope she’s there.”

  Harper, Caitlin and Lucas stared back and forth between them, their faces ashen, their eyes scared and questioning.

  Allison ran her hands up and down her pony tail. “We were planning to tell you guys.” She frowned down at the body of a Numbered One whose face had been cleaved through with a steel bar, sidestepping an expanding pool of blackness. “I guess, well…now you know our little secret.”

  Caitlin raised a trembling arm, extending an accusing finger at Felix. The remaining color had drained from her face, her jaw tense and knotting under the strain. “What are you?” she demanded shakily, eyes frightened. “You killed those things. You…you…burned them. How did you…? What are you? What are—?”

  “Stop it!” Allison snapped, seeing the consternation on Felix’s face.

  Felix said nothing. What are you? he repeated in his head, the revulsion etched across Caitlin’s face numbing his pain. I’m Felix, he wanted to tell them. You know me. You know who I am. Is that who he was though? Was he really that Felix? The kid they lived with, and with whom they studied and partied and laughed and ate every meal? Was that really Felix? Or was he something else now? Was he the Belus? Is that what he’d become? He turned in a slow circle and absorbed the reality of what had become of the quarry: the fire, the destruction, the field of bodies strewn across the scorched earth. He didn’t need his friends to tell him what had happened. He knew. This was the work of the Belus. This is what I’m capable of. How can I tell them I’m just Felix when I’ve done…unspeakable things? How do I explain that? How can I tell them what I am without telling them everything? Without telling them I killed my parents? Caitlin was right to look at him that way. She should be revolted. What if I’m the monster?

  Felix turned and ran, distancing himself from the fear and loathing in Caitlin’s eyes.

  “Hey!” Allison shouted after him. “Felix, come back! Felix! Don’t leave us!”

  Felix was already sprinting ahead past the twisted mountain of smoldering steel, and then down the road, the blood red eyes of the quarry’s silent guardians to his back.

  Chapter 17

  The Watchers

  Bill had canceled his morning appointments at AshCorp. He couldn’t go back. Not now. Not ever. He stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and made his way down the steps of the Stamford Building, following the path next to The Yard.

  He knew they were watching him.

  From the moment Dalton from Internal Security had left his office, he’d felt their eyes on him. He glanced up at the windows of Madras, Siegler and then Jacobs, feeling a cold winter chill on his skin. On a campus designed to support more than twice the current student body (entire floors went unused—and in the case of the Old Campus, entire buildings), there was no place Bill could go where they couldn’t surveil him. The watchers could be anywhere.

  Bill passed under an archway that appeared to be loosely inspired by the Arc de Triomphe and traveled along a path meandering through a grove of tall firs. He couldn’t help but feel annoyed. So many years he’d toiled at AshCorp to put himself in position to learn of Lofton’s plans, and now it was all gone, a thing of the past. He’d known that taking the groundskeeping job at PC would be risky, but his father had insisted it was the only way to keep tabs on ‘the boy’. His protests had been met with his dad’s usual obstinacy, and although he’d sworn to not allow his dad to steamroll him, in the end, he’d relented.

  Now here he was, no longer tapped into AshCorp. Blind. But did that really change anything? he wondered. What had he learned in all those years? Of the tens of thousands of people AshCorp employed, Bill had developed relationships with several hundred, but he’d never met a turncoat or uncovered a ‘smoking gun’. Any activities conducted outside the normal course of AshCorp’s business were handled by men and women who would fall on their swords for Lofton: Drestianites. How many? He didn’t really know, though based on what Felix had told him about the Faceman’s recruiting success (twelve ‘passes’) and the number of years Lofton had likely utilized testers to bolster his ranks, Bill surmised he could have thousands, an army of Sourcerors whose abilities and loyalty to Lofton made them more than formidable, it made them practically invincible. And here he was, just a man, just a normal man, whose only weapon to fight Lofton’s army—if weapon was the right term—was an eighteen-year-old kid whose identity may have been compromised.

  The trail of bodies—the Faceman, the Protectors and the Drestianite at the Cliff Walk—all traced directly back to Felix. Putting some of the pieces together wouldn’t strain Lofton’s intellect or his resources, but was it possible Lofton had assembled the entire puzzle? What exactly, Bill asked himself, did Lofton really know?

  That Felix was a Sourceror?

  Definitely. Permanently retiring the Faceman established that, and if any doubt remained, the events at the Cliff Walk had laid them to rest. The Cliff Walk’s proximity to Felix’s grandmother’s cottage in Cove Rock would not be overlooked or thought a coincidence.

  That Felix was adopted?

  Perhaps. All records of the adoption—official and otherwise—had been destroyed, though there were other records (namely, his adoptive mother’s medical documents) evidencing her inability to conceive a child.

  That Felix’s mom was Elissa Tinshire, the sister of Lofton’s mother?

  Bill had also destroyed Elissa’s records, and Eve—Lofton’s mother—made it clear in her Journal she never told the Ashfields about the younger sister she’d sent away to America as a young girl. Of course there was always the possibility, Bill reminded himself, that Lyndsey (the woman Eve had entrusted to deliver the Journal to Elissa) or someone else knew Eve had a sister.

  That Felix was the Belus?

  No. Bill was quite certain of that. The only people with knowledge of that fact were himself, Felix and Allison. The Journal—the repository of that knowledge—was locked away where no one could access it, but if Lofton believed Felix’s powers were unusual (a definite possibility given Felix’s recent activities), he would stop at nothing to uncover the truth. That was why, Bill thought, Dalton had entered the picture. Lofton’s people had most likely been digging for information on Felix, and in the process, they’d uncovered Bill, an AshCorp consultant—a white collar professional—who also held a menial position at Portland College, the same school Felix attended. That must have set off alarms with AshCorp’s Internal Security and they could only suspect a connection between Felix and himself. Dalton was sent to rattle his cage, which told Bill they’d already looked into his past and hadn’t found any evidence linking him to Felix. Far from being secretive, Internal Security had strode into his office and formally announced he was in their crosshairs. That was fine. They wanted him to panic and act rashly, but he wouldn’t play into their hand. Eventually, however, they would lose patience and the game of cat and mouse would change. They would force him to disclose what he knew about Felix and he had little doubt about the nature of the methods they were willing to employ.

  On the other side of the grove, he changed paths, skirting around a small class of students girded for winter in heavy coats, hats and fingerless gloves as they sketched a statue of Perseus, arm upraised, awaiting the arrival of his winged horse. The walkway expanded and forked, divided by a frost scorched lawn that stretched out in front of the classical mansions along Greek Row. It was quiet in the houses now, the kids still sleeping off their hangovers from the night before. He couldn’t blame them. Yesterday, the world had changed for everyone. He was surprised the students were still on campus and disagreed with t
he administration’s decision to keep the school open after yesterday’s shooting. He appreciated President Taylor’s position that PC’s most powerful response to terrorist threats was to reaffirm its educational mission and to refuse to bow to violence and hate. Those were the kind of lofty words that sounded nice on the school’s website and social media, but in the real world where killers with guns didn’t care much for their victims’ high minded principles, it got you killed. The failed shooting, on the surface, was almost identical to so many others across the country, and Bill didn’t believe PC had been targeted any more than the recent shootings on campuses in Florida, Montana and South Carolina. The shooters in each instance had used automatic rifles and had protected themselves with body armor. They’d acquired their arsenals and their armor online and at their local gun supply shops. It was quick and easy and anyone with a few dollars and a driver license could do it. As for commonalities, the shooters were going after ‘soft targets’, which was really nothing new, the only difference, if there was one, being the frequency, though based on the statistics Bill had studied, the uptick was only marginal. So based on the available information, Bill understood why President Taylor had reached his decision.

  Bill, however, knew Taylor and his administration had formulated its position on a faulty premise. While it was true no one was killed or injured, PC had escaped a tragedy too terrible to even contemplate because there was a guardian angel among them, a fact Taylor, the dean, and the trustees were blind to. Bill found it comical that law enforcement actually believed, and was telling the public, the shooters had both committed suicide. No one, apparently, thought it unusual one had thrown himself through a third floor window and the other had emptied an entire magazine into his own head. The cops were too busy congratulating themselves on their heroism to question the odd circumstances. Felix’s signature was scrawled across the failed massacre in hundred point font, and if not for his intervention, the body count would have been stratospheric. In that case, would the frat boys really be sleeping off hangovers in their Greek Row mansions on a campus still functioning like nothing had happened yesterday? Of course not.