by Alex Fedyr
Xamic’s hair was still dripping wet, the drops falling across his torso and legs. His back was to her as he raged and kicked at the shelves. She flicked the lighter open and tossed it at him.
His body went up in flames. The fire gave a quiet whoosh and flew towards the ceiling, devouring him entirely before slowing to a steady, ferocious burn.
Blinded by the sudden light, it took a moment for Kalei’s eyes to adjust. She shielded her eyes and blinked several times, and when her vision returned, she lowered her hand to find Xamic in the center of the room, his body writhing in the flames, his clothes reduced to scraps that were already falling away in the hot blaze. He turned and glared at her with lidless eyes, his mouth fixed in a silent scream.
But he was not dying. Even as the flames consumed his flesh, it regenerated and returned, caught in an endless cycle between exposed muscle and fresh skin, muscle, skin, muscle, skin...
Kalei walked toward him. She plunged her hand into the flames and closed it around his neck. He had so much darkness now. She couldn’t believe he was capable of holding so much. Now that Terin’s had combined with Xamic’s, it was a force to behold. But it was still finite, still limited, and at the moment, it was spread throughout his entire body, actively battling the insatiable flames. Only a paltry amount remained to protect his heart.
Xamic weakly grabbed her arm in his own, trying to pull her off even as he stared at her with wide, boiling eyes. But in this moment, Kalei was stronger.
As she reached her darkness forward, Kalei thought about Terin, she thought about Fenn, she thought about two little girls who died, and a little boy who was scared for his life.
She closed her darkness around his heart and crushed it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Revelations
The man opened his eyes and blinked a couple of times as the grey ceiling took shape above him. He became aware of smoke crawling across its surface, consuming the stone sky until all that remained was a black cloud. He watched the smoke swirl and spin, nearly hypnotized by the undulating motion.
Am I alive? ...
He slowly rolled over and pushed himself up off the floor. The room was a disaster. Metal shelves lay askew, some resting on top of each other in a pile of twisted metal, none of them erect, their contents skewed about the floor around them: cans of vegetables, kitchen supplies, even a scattered first aid kit. A grotesque form, perhaps a body, lay burning atop a pile of boxes, the fire spreading to the other items in the room. To the right of the body – kneeling before it on her hands and knees— was Kalei.
Her face was contorted in pain, tears streamed silently from her eyes. He started to get up – he needed to say something to her – but he stopped himself. There was something moving on her neck, just visible above her black jacket. He thought it must have been a shadow, but then he realized her sleeve had caught fire, sending up dark smoke as it ate through the material at her elbow. Instead of putting it out, Kalei reached up and violently ripped the jacket from her body, tearing her arms from the sleeve and throwing the garment at the opposite wall.
She sat there in her tank top, fists clenched on her knees as she gasped for breath. Starting at her neck and spreading down to the rest of her body, he could see black figures dancing and writhing across her skin. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but they looked like... swirls. Lines twisted in on themselves until they formed a swirl at one end. And there were dozens, swimming across her body like so many tortured fish in a pond.
He was confused. None of this made any sense. He must be dreaming...
Kalei stood up and walked away from him, disappearing into the billowing smoke.
He watched the spot where she had vanished, losing himself again in the roiling clouds. He started to cough, then realized he needed to get out before the smoke suffocated him.
Perhaps I am alive.
He groped his way across the floor, up the stairs, and along the hall, the smoke blocking out most of the light from the ceiling bulbs. Eventually, he crawled out into the alley behind the restaurant and lay there, coughing and catching his breath. Then he heard screams from the street, followed by gunshots, shouts, and the sound of a car alarm. He scrambled to his feet and ran toward the commotion.
Out in the street, it was complete chaos. Several men in business suits were running as a group of men and women in tracksuits were chasing them down. Standing on a car, a woman with an assault rifle sprayed everything she could see with bullets. A child was hunkered down behind a newsstand. Behind a car, a teen was holding a bleeding knee and screaming at someone to stop.
So many people were dying and killing everywhere.
And in the middle of the madness, he saw Kalei calmly walk up behind the woman on the car and place a hand on her exposed ankle. The woman collapsed.
He blinked. Kalei was no longer beside the car. She was across the street, the joggers falling to the ground around her. He rubbed his eyes. There was no way – that’s more than a hundred feet. He told himself it must have been a trick of the light. Smoke was billowing just as thickly out here, and only one streetlight still lit the road while its siblings were dark and damaged.
As the last jogger finished his fall to the ground, the sound of gunshots ripped through the air again, and he saw Kalei flinch as dozens of bullets ripped through her, flesh and gore exploding out the back of her body. Her clothes became shredded, the abandoned mail truck behind her covered in blood. He started to run forward, he wanted to cry out, but then a terrible pain ripped through his chest, bringing him to his knees. His breath labored, he forced his head up to see what had happened to Kalei, expecting to see her fall. But she stood tall. In the dim light of the lone lamp, he couldn’t see a mark on her.
She faced her attackers, a half dozen young men and women who looked like they had just been let out of high school, and she fixed them with a cold stare as they continued to rain bullets into her lean form. The girl in the middle, a regular Barbie, began to shout incoherently. The men and women on either side seemed to be saying something in return, but he couldn’t make out the words over the gunfire. And still Kalei stood there, oblivious to the bullets tearing through her.
Then, the street went quiet.
The man on the right began to curse and hit his gun, his friends continued to pull their triggers, but the guns only made empty clicks. Out of ammo. Kalei didn’t react to the silence; she was like a grim statue, fixed to the pavement. The young woman in the middle blanched, the others stared at Kalei, their eyes growing wider with every passing second, until the group finally broke and ran.
A heavy hush fell over the street as the footsteps faded. All he could hear was the sound of the teenage boy’s whimpering. Kalei stepped into an alley opposite of where he stood and was soon lost in the shadow.
Fenn pitched forward, horrified by what he had seen. That couldn’t have been... Kalei... what happened? What are you!
His black-nailed hands reached up, trying to contain the tears that fell from his eyes.
He sat there for ages, trying to wrap his head around what he had seen, trying to understand the ripping pain he felt in his heart and in his body. After a while, his open palms closed into fists and he stood up and punched the brick wall. He felt pain shoot through his arm, and he thought he heard a knuckle crack, but the fresh, physical pain gave him a moment of clarity.
He decided he didn’t care what Kalei had become. Estranged, Untouched, Monster, whatever she was; that was his wife.
He was going to find her, and discover what she had become.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Epilogue
Kalei returned to Solitary. Behind her, the city was quiet. At her hand, the errant Estranged were all disabled until the Wardens could pick them up. The Untouched? Dead, turned, locked within their houses. Terror and shock were all that remained in the city.
Solitary confinement was empty now. All of its former occupants had vacated when Xamic’s seeds had triggered. Much the same
had happened in Tech Town, Downtown, in the city itself. At Xamic’s command, the entire city of Celan had erupted.
Whatever Tusic, or SWORDE, or anyone had believed the device to be, in the end, it was just a decoy. He had other ways to send his signal. As Walker was causing intermittent blackouts to the ear cameras as part of his updates, Xamic was wandering the city with a different device. A signal jammer, which specifically targeted SWORDE’s ear cameras. Who could have distinguished Xamic’s blackouts from Walker’s?
This was how he had managed to visit almost every Estranged in the city and plant his seed. Just a little pocket of darkness, tucked away into the victim’s mind, ready to alter their brain chemistry and drive them to a voracious frenzy when Xamic remotely released his signal. He could do things like that. He was the genius of the darkness. He was its inventor. And he was dead.
As Xamic’s killer, Kalei had now inherited not only his power, but his knowledge and his memories, as jumbled as they were with the memories of his victims.
But now things were different from anything Xamic had anticipated. Now, the darkness no longer sat within her like water in a glass. It was her. It infused her skin, her eyes, her hands, her heart. It couldn’t be contained or moved; there was too much, there was nowhere to move it. From the feel of it, Kalei fully expected to look down and find that her skin had turned full black, but instead, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, the darkness revealed itself sparingly, dancing across her skin in the form of living swirls.
But the swirls were a mere decoration, an icing to cover the mayhem underneath. Hundreds and thousands of dead memories pressed in against her mind, victims from both that day and days departed. Terin’s victims, Xamic’s victims— they would not stop. They would not tire. They wanted to be heard; they needed to be remembered.
Somewhere inside the chaos sat Kalei, more broken and desolate than she ever thought possible. Fenn was dead, at her own hands. She couldn’t bear the blood on her hands. So she let go of Kalei, content to let that poor, ravaged soul be buried by the others. It was too damaged to be recovered.
As she walked through solitary, she grabbed a new remote off the counter. She sat down within one of the small circles on the floor, and she raised the glass. Her eyes fixed on the far wall and her swirls danced and flexed across her skin like so many companions. She began to lose herself in the steady ebb and flow of countless memories, each one fighting for dominance.
Then one memory slowly pushed itself to the surface. It was Terin’s; he was talking to a new recruit. He told the boy, “You know you touched her. But what you don’t know is whether or not you killed her. Look inside yourself. If you find her memories, you know she is dead. But if you cannot... the chances are, she is still alive, living as an Estranged.”
Kalei stirred from her desolation. She heard what Terin was telling her. If Fenn’s memories were among those thousands, then all really was lost. But if not...
She closed her eyes. For better or worse, she had to find him. If not here, in her memories, then out there, among the Estranged. But the search had to start here, with these tormented souls. Kalei took a deep breath and plunged into their world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
About the Author
Is that it? Is that the end of Kalei Distrad?
Maybe.
Find out more by getting in touch with Alex Fedyr through your favorite websites:
Website: http://alexfedyr.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexFedyr
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexfedyr
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/AlexFedyr