Light of Darkness

by Lonnie Davidson

  I’ve heard of this guy—ex-heavyweight champion Mack Jones, a.k.a Mack Truck. Mack’s haymaker could supposedly take someone’s head off. Come to think of it, that’s why he was barred from boxing; he killed his last opponent with a punch using unnecessary force. “What’s he doing here?”

  “People are trying to see if they can get a higher score than him on the strength test,” he replies, not once averting his eyes from the champ.

  A publicity stunt to get back in the good graces of his fans? There’s a sign that says, “See if you can beat the champ. Just five dollars.”

  “This is just a cash grab. No one can hit harder than him.”

  “You can,” says a woman next to me. When I turn to look at her, there are only men in this part of the crowd.

  “I must be hearing things. I couldn’t hit harder than him if I dreamt it,” I say, laughing.

  I turn to leave when someone grabs my shoulder, stopping me. “Don’t leave, little man.” I look down to see a huge, callused hand. “Dreams can come true kid, even impossible ones. So, let’s see what you got.”

  The cat reaches behind me and bats at his hand. I turn to him—Mack Truck. Gosh, this guy is humungous. I’m like a dwarf in comparison. He’s like that classic monstrous, muscle-bound henchman you see in every movie—the one that gives the hero more trouble than they expected. He smiles at me. You can tell a few of his teeth are fake. And I’m sure he was good-looking at one point before his career, but his face is hard and swollen now. His smile is a little creepy.

  “No, thanks. I’ve got an injury, and I don’t want to make it worse.” As I turn to leave, the crowd moves in my way, blocking the exit.

  “The crowd has spoken. Might as well try,” Mack points out.

  I sigh and look at the cat. “Should I try?” It looks at me, then to the game. I turn to face the giant of a man. Every time I look at him, I can’t help but be surprised at his stature. He must stand at least six feet, five inches. “Okay, I’ll bite,” I say with a gulp.

  “All right. My next challenger!” The crowd goes wild.

  “That’ll be five dollars, kid.” I give this sleazy-looking guy in a suit my five dollars, and he puts it in a lockbox. Then I walk up to the game with Mack. The speed bag is twisted and bent from his last hit.

  “All right,” he says, cracking his knuckles, “let’s see if you can beat this.” Mack throws a stiff jab, and the bag bangs loudly against the game. The digital reader on the wall above the game puts his punch at a total of one hundred and fifty. “That wasn’t half my strength,” Mack says, wiping dust from his hand.

  I walk up to the bag and look at it. With a slow inhale, I clench my fist. The crowd starts laughing before I even have a chance to fail. “What’s so funny?”

  “You gonna do it with a cat on your shoulder, little man?”

  I forgot it was there. “All right, off you go.” It hops off and stands just behind me. “Okay, go time.”

  “Don’t just hit it with all your strength, Kyle. That would be a bad idea,” says that woman’s voice I heard earlier. “Try to remember the sound his fist made against the bag, the amount of power he used.” I glance around, but there’s not a woman in earshot. Why am I hearing voices? I might be going crazy, but advice is advice.

  Standing before the game, I hear the sound of the bag as it hit the machine, the wave of energy that came off Mack as he hit it. I put my right foot forward and gear up my left fist. With a quick jab, the bag slams into the game. It doesn’t make as much noise as Mack’s hit. The crowd is silent as they watch the digital reader steadily rise. It finally stops, reading, “151.” From the crowd comes a synchronized sound of awe.

  “Well, little man, that was pretty good.” Mack pushes me aside, stepping up to the game. “But now that the warm-up round is over, it’s time to get serious.” He eases into an orthodox boxing stance. Every muscle in his right arm tightens as he pulls his fist back. With a loud bang, the digital reader jumps from zero to 275. The crowd goes wild, whooping and hollering. “I know heavy weights that can’t even get that high, and I highly doubt you could do it, kid.” He stands next to me as I look at the meter. “Scared, little man? Why don’t you just go running home to your mommy so she can change your diaper?”

  Looks like I hit a nerve. Probably the first time he’s been beaten. I step in front of the game and get back into a southpaw stance. With a steadying breath, the nervous energy I feel melts away. A chill runs through my bones and muscles, making them ache more than they already did. I step forward and throw a left cross. My punch on the bag is soft, but it bangs louder than Mack’s against the game. I look up to the reader. 276.

  Mack looks at the meter in shock, then to the sleazy guy, who appears to be his manager. Lastly, he looks at me. His already hard features harden more. “No way...there is no way a little guy like you could have even thought of doing that. No matter. I assure you that this next hit will be so awesome, it will make you cry.” His massive arm pulls back, and his whole body increases in size as it fills with brute strength. He swings a mean right hook. The bag hits the game so hard that it lifts the whole thing off the ground. The meter rises to five hundred. He stretches his arm, looking back at me, laughing. “It’s been a while, but I still got it. Look at that score. Beautiful, isn’t it? Now I want to see you try and beat that, little man.”

  Trash talk from a trash boxer, I think to myself.

  At least I thought I said it to myself.

  He grabs me by the collar and lifts me off the ground. “What was that, little man?”

  Quickly, his manager gets between us. “Mack, put the kid down. It’s just a little trash talk between competitors. Plus, you don’t want to look any worse than you already do with the crowd, right?”

  Mack and I look at the crowd. Some of them are in shock, others a little disgusted. He lets go of me. “Go on, take your swing.”

  I take my place, pissed to high heaven.

  “Calm yourself, Kyle,” the woman says sternly. At some point, the ache in my muscles turned to pain without me noticing. My hands are shaking now. “Just take your anger out on the game and show him what a Ross is capable of.” Her voice is calm, but I hear anger in her intonation.

  Mack is talking to someone in the crowd and laughing. I clench my fist. The pain subsides as my skin starts to crawl, especially around my left arm. I focus on the bag. Pushing myself forward and pouring all the hate and anger I feel into my fist, I connect with the bag.

  The sounds of metal twisting and rocks crumbling fill the air as a cloud of dust engulfs the crowd. When the dust cloud clears, I see the damage. The game is mashed up like shredded aluminum, and the wall behind it is caved in.

  “Did I do that?” The skin on my left arm burns. Thick black smoke covers it, shifting like fire. The cat jumps onto my shoulder, startling me. “Oh, it’s just—”

  “We need to go. Now,” says the woman’s voice, which I now realize is somehow coming from the cat. The dust cloud begins to clear from the rest of the room, and there’s no way I’ll be able to explain what happened to the game and wall. “Leave while the dust is still thick,” she orders. I don’t have time to wonder how I’ve managed to befriend a talking cat. Instead, I squeeze my way through the crowd, covering my arm until I’m at the exit.

  “What the hell was that? And where’s the kid?” Mack yells. I turn back and see his bald head moving from left to right, looking for me in the crowd. Everyone else is looking at the meter. “What’s everyone looking at?” he asks. Someone points at the meter. It reads “ERROR.”

  Mack spins, then says, “Holy hell!”

  Smiling, I run away from the arcade. That’s when I hear him yell, “Oh my God, look at the wall!”

  Far from the arcade, I duck off into one of the service hallways. I lean up against the wall and try to catch my breath, but it’s hard. The smoke on my arm is so heavy. The cat jumps off me and sits in front of me. We stare at one another.

  “So you can you
talk?” It stretches, and meows at me. “Yeah, whatever.” I look at my arm once again, and the smoke is gone, but my skin is still crawling. “I think it’s time to go.” I get up and walk out of the hallway. The cat stays close behind as I look for the girls.

  “Kyle!” I look up to see Page and the others on the floor above me. “Stay there. We’ll be down in a few seconds.”

  Seconds go by, and I’m having a hard time staying still. Every time I stop moving, the crawling on my skin intensifies. It’s starting to make me nauseous. It’s going to take them longer than a few seconds to get to me—most likely five or so minutes to get to the escalator. I don’t know if I can make it that long. This feeling is driving me nuts.

  “You want to get rid of that feeling?” It’s the female voice again. I look to the cat, which is curled up on the bench in front of me. It blinks. “Well, do you?”

  I stand there for a second trying to bear the feeling. It intensifies to the point that I’m on the verge of a panic attack. “Yes,” I say, frustrated.

  “Okay, take a deep breath and concentrate. Compartmentalize your anxiety. Your discomfort is already strongest in your arm, so concentrate it there. Try to envision it.”

  They always say not to listen to the voices in your head—or potentially talking animals—but I think this is a good time break that rule. With a few deep breaths, the anxious energy throughout my body dims and moves into my arm. My skin heats, and my muscles freeze. Out of nowhere, the pulsing black smoke from before reappears along my arm.

  “Excellent, Kyle. Now, hold on to it. Just for a few seconds.”

  “I can’t…”

  “Yes, you can. Just breathe.”

  I suck in some air and exhale slowly. The pain, along with all the smoke on my arm moves to my hand. It’s extremely heavy. “Okay, Kyle. Take everything in your hand and release it.”

  Within the palm of my hand, a ball of black energy forms. Let it go. The ball explodes, shooting upward in a massive torrent. The force of it knocks me off my feet. Dust and debris fall on me as I sit up, out of breath.

  “Good work, Kyle.”

  “Who or what are you, where are you, and why do you keep talking to me?” I ask. I look at the cat again, feeling crazy. It stares back, but that’s it.

  “Just breathe. You will learn in time.”

  The crawling sensation disappears, along with the smoke. I hear rapid footfalls growing near. The girls come running, dragging tons of bags with them. Airca runs up to me and proceeds to coddle me. “Kyle, are you okay? What was that just now?”

  “We saw a black light come from here and go through the roof,” Page explains.

  “Nothing happened. I just…I need to get home.”

  “All right, let’s go,” Rica says, helping me up. “What’s wrong with your hand?” she asks, taking it into her own. My knuckles are white from clenching so hard and lightly burned.

  “I had a freak accident with a game at the arcade, but I’m fine.”

  As we start to walk, a loud bang comes from behind us. We turn to see a huge rock on the floor. “Where’d that come from?” I ask under my breath. In unison, we all look up. The ceiling is starting to crack around the hole my torrent of energy created. A piece starts to come loose. “Run!” I demand, as a large piece comes crashing down above us.

  The piece slams to the ground as we run like our lives depend on it—which they probably do. We’re just ahead of the collapsing ceiling, but it’s gaining fast. With a loud snap, the crack in the ceiling pulls ahead of us and decides to split. The ceiling ahead is about to fall. Airca is in the front, with Page and Rica following. They haven’t noticed yet. I can’t let them get hurt.

  Picking up speed, I get in between Rica and Page. A burst of heat from within sets my muscles ablaze. With all my strength, I push the two to either side of me, sending them sliding across the floor under the second-floor balcony, debris just missing them. I grab Airca by her waist, pulling her out of the way of the falling piece of ceiling she didn’t see coming.

  “Holy shit!” she screams as the debris lands right in front of us. Without stopping, I throw her across the way, toward the area where I pushed Rica. She hits the ground a little hard, but that’s better than being flattened like I’m about to be. “Kyle!” she screams as Rica helps her up. I look up to see a huge piece of stone and rebar coming at me. It’s unavoidable.

  Suddenly, time slows. “Kyle, destroy it!” It’s that woman’s voice again. “Focus all that you can into your fist and destroy it.” I just stand there, looking at the ton of rock and metal falling in slow-motion. I think about seeing my mom and dad again. “Don’t do that. Don’t accept death. Think of Serena and your friends there. Do you really want them to be as sad as you were when your mother and father died?”

  “No, I don’t.” Taking in a deep breath, I feel the heat begin to grow and churn within me. My skin crawls, the sensation becoming familiar. The heat rushes into my left arm, and the black smoke appears. I get into a stance, ready to punch the falling boulder. Time quickens, and in less than a second, the rock is only three feet above me.

  “Now!” she screams.

  I yell at the top of my lungs as I swing the hardest uppercut I’ve ever thought of throwing. As my fist connects with the falling ceiling, the heat within my arm vanishes, and everything goes black.

  I open my eyes to the sun shining down on me through the newly fashioned skylight. A huge pile of dust and rubble cover me as I lie here on the ground and try to wrap my head around what just happened. I try to sit up, but as I start to move, my vision darkens. I lie back down, and the cat walks onto my chest and takes a seat.

  “Good work, little brother,” the woman’s voice says, and this time, I’m sure it’s coming from the cat.

  “I knew you could talk,” I say. “Wait, did you say…brother?” My eyes grow heavy, and I struggle to stay awake. The feeling is all too familiar.

  Man, I just woke up.

  I awake with a gasp, floating in cold darkness rather than lying under a pile rock on the mall floor. With a roar, white light explodes into existence in front of me. In an instant, it engulfs the whole of the darkness. “Hello again, Shadow,” says a voice radiating from all around me.

  I recognize it as the voice I heard when I woke up this morning. I try to block my eyes, but can’t move. “What? What’s going on?”

  The light changes from pure white to a golden shine, and warmth overtakes me. Not heat, but a sense of comfort, like being hugged. “Before you can walk the path of your own fate, you must be pushed in the right direction.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Good luck.” A force pushes me back, and I go flying away back into the frigid darkness.

  I come to, face-down on the hard ground, my head throbbing and my senses a blur. When my ears stop ringing, I notice the chatter and movement all around me. So much commotion—probably the paramedics and mall security. I get my hands under me and push myself up to my knees. My head spins, and I roll over onto my butt. My hand lands on someone’s foot.

  “Hey, watch it,” the guy says as he kicks it away.

  When did paramedics start kicking the wounded? My vision clears up, and I quickly realize that I’m not in the mall anymore. “Where am I?”

  This place is dimly lit, smells of water, mold, and sewage. There are a lot of people here, dressed in black, standing around me, but none of them are paramedics. They step over me like I’m nothing but a speck of mold covering the walls. I wonder what could be going on for so many people to gather in such a nasty place? Better question: How did I get here, and where is here?

  I gear myself up to stand when a pair of long legs steps over me, blocking the only space I have to move. I follow the length of them, up black tights, an exposed, well-toned midriff, and a tight, black-and-pink muscle shirt to a beautiful face. A young woman with golden-brown skin, long, curly black hair, and gold eyes looks down at me. “Ca—can I help you?” I ask her.

  She sh
ifts her head to the side, her expression curious. “Not many on New Birth can do that.”

  “Do what? Lie on the ground?”

  She smiles, then squats down on top of me. “An astral form. You must be pretty strong.” A few people glance over when she says that, but then they go back to doing whatever they were doing.

  “Astral form?” I look at my hands; they are solid. In most of the movies that I’ve seen, astral forms are transparent, since an astral form is just someone’s spirit in a different location than their physical body. “If I were in astral form, wouldn’t I be transparent?”

  “Usually, but you have no shadow, meaning you’re in the astral plane,” she explains, looking behind my head.

  I hold my hand out to the closest source of light. I’m not casting a shadow. “Well, what do you know? As cool as this is, I would like to get off this floor. I think the mold is starting to grow on me.” She chuckles a bit, showing off her perfect smile. I hold out my hand to her, and that smile turns to confusion as she stares at it. “Well, can you give me a hand? I have no room to move.” Hesitantly, she extends her hand and takes hold of mine. Her confusion turns into something like shock, but she stands and pulls me to my feet. “Thanks.”

  I wipe my hands down my shirt, then soft hands cup my face. I look up at her, and she steps back, looking at me in astonishment.

  “What? Is there something wrong?”

  “You’re tangible; that takes a large amount of power in itself. The crazy thing is that you’re doing it without thinking about it.” She looks me up and down, as if sizing me up. “I’m impressed.” She coils a lock of hair around her finger. “So, what’s your name?”

  “My name’s Kyle,” I answer, holding out my hand.

  Firmly, she takes hold of my hand again and pulls me in close. She’s about two inches taller than me, so she lowers her gaze to look me in the eye. “My name’s Valene. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she says, still with that nice smile. I can’t help but smile back as I stare into her face—mainly at her lips.