by Ramy Vance
Alex wasn’t certain she could, but her hand was moving before she realized it, forced by curiosity. She pulled the shroud back.
A younger Roy stared up at Alex, the side of his face blown off, his jaw hanging loose from his cheekbone. His skull was fractured, blood pooling into his dirty hair. “Oh, my God!” Alex leaned over and threw up, unable to keep her horror in her stomach.
Roy knelt next to his dead body. He held the head up and looked into his own eyes. “Yeah, this one wasn’t fun.” He pulled out his pistol, and before Alex could say anything, shot the soldiers, causing them to burst into white smoke.
Alex screamed and backed away from Roy. “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”
Roy shook his head as he pressed the gun to the younger version of his head. “No, I’m not. He’s trying to mess with my head. Apparently, he thought this would be enough to rattle me. He doesn’t know I know what’s going on, or he hasn’t gone through my memories enough to know this isn’t the first time I’ve seen my dead body. Ain’t gonna rattle me.”
Roy pulled the trigger.
The jungle started to pull apart at the edges as if an earthquake were shaking everything loose.
Alex stared at Roy, looking from his dead face to his living one, which was much more disturbed than he was letting on. “What happened?”
Roy holstered his gun and stood up, watching the jungle around him shrivel, the leaves of the trees falling down en masse, the roots tearing up the earth. “It’s not important, and it’s not a conversation to have sober. That means you still have another six years before you’re going to hear about it unless you get lucky and Vardis finds a useful memory.”
Roy turned his attention to Alex, his eyes as focused and as determined as when he had pulled the trigger on himself. “He’s going to come after you too. That’s why this is all taking so long. He’s looking for ways to break us. Crack the mind and the body follows—oldest rule in the book. Wherever he takes us, remember that it’s not real. Whatever he shows you, it’s a lie, even if you think it’s happened before. He’ll distort it, and you won’t even realize it. Don’t trust anything but me.”
Alex swallowed as she thought of the prospects. “You trust me too, right?”
Roy smiled, and it was a sad sight. “Of course, I trust you. Now get ready.”
Chapter Eight
Alex and Roy woke up in a car.
They were in the backseat, buckled up next to each other. There was a child sitting between them, strapped into a car seat.
There were two people in the front seats, but Alex couldn’t see who they were. She had a strong feeling she knew the people in the front seats and she’d been in this car before, but she couldn’t remember when.
Then the woman driving the car looked back as she made cooing sounds to the child in the car seat. It was Claire, Alex’s mom.
Alex tried to catch her mother’s attention, but Claire was only focused on the baby. “Mom?” she asked quietly.
Roy seemed to still be getting his bearings. He looked much less comfortable than when he was in his own memories but not nearly as bad as when the psychic attack had first started.
Alex, on the other hand, was extremely disoriented at being in a scene she couldn’t remember. This had happened long ago, and she’d been only a child. It was like watching a surreal television show starring her parents. Further, the child in the car seat was not blind. She could see it in the way the child tracked her mother’s movements.
George, who was sitting next to Claire, rapped on the dashboard with his knuckles and said, “Don’t forget, we have to go to the grocery store before we head home.”
Claire turned back to the road, and the emotional climate in the car chilled. “You don’t have to remind me of every errand we have to run as soon as we get out of the house,” she barked.
Alex jumped at the sound of her mother’s voice. She’d never heard Claire take that tone. It obviously frightened the child in the car seat as well. The child had tensed up when Claire spoke.
The car was quiet for a second, then George exploded. The air in the car turned red. Alex couldn’t understand most of the words her father was saying, but she felt them deep in her chest, a sickening gripping around the inside of her throat, falling with the weight of a thousand hammers.
It was getting hotter. Alex could feel sweat beading on her forehead. She wanted to leave, to get out of the car, to be anywhere but where she was at the moment. She tried to open the door, but it was child-locked from the inside.
The child was uncomfortable as well. Alex could now see it wasn’t a baby. The kid was at least five, maybe even seven.
Roy had the window down as far as it would go and was trying to catch his breath. “It’s not real, Alex.”
In the front of the car, Claire faced George, her face contorting as fire leaped from her eyes. What came out of her mouth was as hot as dragon fire and ten times louder than George’s tirade had been.
The words hung in the air as if they were blades repurposed for the guillotine. Some of the words did not remain stationary, though. They flew between Claire and George, slicing their faces.
Blood streamed down her parents’ faces. It was pooling on their seats.
Some of the blades flew into the back. Alex covered her head, trying to shield herself as the child cried and cried, blades occasionally nicking them. “Cover your damn face!” Alex shouted at the child.
She covered her mouth. She had no idea why she had shouted at the kid. None of this was the kid’s fault. None of it. But she still contributed to the heat in the car, the stifling heat that was making her head swim.
Roy had the right idea. Alex cracked her window and stuck her head out, breathing in the fresh, cool air. Outside, it was night. The stars shone above, and a cool breeze ran through the neighborhood.
Something tugged her shirt. When she looked inside, it was the crying child. Remaining in the car was the last thing Alex wanted to do. There was the screaming of her parents and the wailing of the child, plus Roy’s pathetic whimpering. The car was hell.
But the kid shouldn’t be crying. Alex knew that. On a deep level, she knew it was wrong that the child was upset, and if the adults in the front of the car wouldn’t deal with it, Alex would.
Alex rolled her window down farther but sat back. She grabbed the child’s hand and tried to comfort her, but nothing came out of her mouth, just a stifled groan.
At that noise, Claire and George turned and screamed at the child, shrill screeches that tore through Alex’s eardrums. She and the child covered their ears, trying to block the sound.
“Why don’t you just shut up?”
Claire and George were silent now, their jaws hanging open, nearly touching their chests. Their eyes were hollow, and the muscles of their faces were as slack as loose rope.
Alex didn’t know who had given the command, but she was glad someone had because it was finally silent.
There were two bright lights outside the window on the left. Alex only halfway noticed since she was so relieved the noise had stopped, but then metal crunched and the world went topsy-turvy. She noticed glass hanging above her head as the car tumbled through the air.
It hit the ground once and continued to roll, finally stopping on its side and spinning.
Alex coughed up blood as she tried to unbuckle her seatbelt. Roy was also trying to get out of his restraints. He had a gash across his forehead and was coughing up blood.
The blood from the front seat was now pooling in the back. Alex saw it dripping down the walls of the car. She had to get out or she was going to drown, but she was trapped. She was going to die in this car, choking on the blood of her parents.
“It’s not real,” Roy muttered. “You’re not a child. You’re a dragonrider.”
At those words, Alex let out a mighty telekinetic blast that tore the door off the car, then reached down to help Roy get out. She’d noticed the child wasn’t in the car anymore. “Where is she?�
�� Alex shouted.
Roy grabbed Alex by the shoulder and tried to pull her away from the wreck. “We need to get out of here. You don’t need to see this.”
Alex pushed Roy’s hand away and followed a trail of glass and blood to wailing.
The child was cradled in Claire’s and George’s arms, its face covered in glass, blood pouring from its eyes as it thrashed and cried.
George was trying to calm the child, whispering, “It’s okay, Alex. It’s going to be okay,” as Claire stood and started pacing, chewing on her fingernails.
Alex touched the sides of her face, the scars in her skin that her parents had always told her were from a cat scratch. “I wasn’t born blind?”
Roy stormed over to Alex and stood between her and the vision of her parents. “It’s not real! Vardis is messing with your head!”
A psychic blast ripped out from Alex, sending Roy back a few steps. “What do you mean, it’s not real! Your vision happened! You said so yourself. Just because this isn’t real, it doesn’t mean this didn’t happen!”
Alex turned back to her parents, rage seething out of her in flashes of telekinesis. They’re the reason I spent my entire life in the dark. Because of their selfish fighting.
Claire looked up at Alex’s approach, but there was something off in her face. It didn’t quite look human. The forehead was huge, bulging out, and her body was unusually muscled. It was enough to stop Alex in her tracks. “Mom?” she asked.
Claire stretched out her arms toward Alex as if begging for a hug, then her jaw fell open as her head lolled back, a sound coming from her mouth like that of a mewling cat and a dying goat. The inhuman sound conveyed no meaning, only dread.
When Alex looked at George and the younger version of herself, she saw the same thing. George and the child were whining too, the combined sounds like a war siren going off.
The child flopped onto the concrete, lifting herself up by her arms, blood pooling under her eyes as she shook violently. “They hated you, Alex! That’s why they fought. They never wanted you. You took everything from them. They were happy before you.”
Two bones shot out of the child’s feet, bending backward as the child pushed herself up with her chubby arms. She was foaming at the mouth and making uneven motions toward Alex like a cat that had had stilts forced onto its paws. “When you came, they lost everything, and then you went and lost your eyes. Do you know what their lives were like, caring for their pathetic, blind freak of a daughter?”
Alex lashed the creature with a psychic blast, but it did nothing. “You’re a liar!”
The child’s head tilted to the side as her face melted down to the skull. Vardis’ skull. “Me? Lie? Never!”
The baby Vardis stood on its bony legs as flesh and blood oozed over them, the chubby arms of the child stretching as Vardis’ head burst out of the child’s shoulder. The creature leaned on its front arms in the fashion of a gorilla, pus and blood oozing from the wounds in its face.
A telekinetic blast hit Alex and she slammed into the wreckage of the car, stumbling to her feet as another one came at her. She barely threw a weak shield up in time to protect her before she fell again. “They don’t love me.”
Roy ran over to Alex and scooped her up in his arms before taking cover behind the car. He darted out and took three shots at the creature shuffling toward them.
The bullets ripped through the baby creature, but it only paused for a moment, then continued its slow, jerky movements.
Roy shook Alex hard. “You need to get it together. I can’t do as much damage in your head as I can in mine, even less when you’re in this state. He’s messing with your mind. This isn’t real. It’s not true, not in the way he’s showing it.”
Alex shook her head as she fought back tears. “I don’t know what’s true. I don’t know.”
“Alex, if you don’t sort this out, Vardis is going to win. I need you.”
Alex covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t hear Roy. She couldn’t hear anything. She couldn’t see anything. “Oh, my God, I can’t see! Roy, I can’t see.”
Roy popped out and fired again. “What do you mean, you can’t see?”
Tears rolled down Alex’s face as she held her hand out in front of her. She was back in the blackness, or maybe she’d never left. “I’m blind.”
Then the ground fell out from under them as the air filled with the wailing of the creature in the darkness.
Chapter Nine
Time is meaningless without context. A minute does not matter without the seconds preceding it. There is an environment in which time must exist. Darkness is not that environment, nor is silence.
It was here that Alex found herself. She wasn’t aware of how long she’d been here or how long it had taken her to go gibbering into madness, but somewhere long ago, she had forgotten who she was. She sat in the darkness, ruminating on her life. At times she stood and tried to find her way back, but she did not know what to return to.
The descent was gradual. If she had been aware, she would have tried to hold onto sanity longer, but unfortunately, she clung to the wrong thing.
The last thing Alex saw was her parents screaming as the chubby abomination Vardis had created limped toward her.
Alex could see now that it had been a trap, but she couldn’t figure out how to escape it. The more she thought, the more disgusted she was with her parents. With their voices in the car. With the way they had stood mute and dumb around her, too covered in their own shit to have the wherewithal to have called an ambulance.
She probably wouldn’t have lost her sight if they had.
She descended into the darkness. Reaching a depth she had never seen before.
At the bottom of this darkness was a fire that cast no light. Alex only knew it was there because of the heat. She found it one night, and she huddled next to it, shivering since the fire was not enough to fight the cold wind that cut through her body like the blades her parents had shouted at each other.
Near the fire, Alex screamed. She screamed for someone to save her, but she could not remember any names. By the time she thought to call for help, she hardly remembered her own.
Near primordial in her existence, she hunched over the flames and forgot how to speak, only able to remember language as a rudimentary instrument that did not give her the tools necessary to convey what existed within her.
Yet even in the darkness, something began to change. She did not need words for it, nor did she need her eyes.
As the flames flickered, she whispered to herself, guttural sounds that could have come from an animal. She knew they were not the sounds of a human, much like she knew the mud and gunk that clung to her skin wasn’t hers. Nor was this an extended period of time without food. If it was, a person would have died.
This deduction brought forth the next.
People didn’t live forever, but she could not be dead. Her last memory was watching herself with serious but not deadly injuries. But there was more: vague outlines that shimmered like constellations in the night sky. Then there came the first inkling of light. Hardly noticeable, pulsing as if it had a heartbeat.
Alex turned from the black flames, resting her back against them, staring up at these skeletons of memories. She thought long and deep in the place with no words and overlaid muscle and flesh on the bones floating above her.
She had lived in the darkness most of her life. There she had built worlds and carved her memories of what she’d heard into neat, precise instruments. She listened to each one.
As she recalled to her mother’s voice on her fifth birthday as her father helped her cut a cake, she trickled the images of her mother and father that she had from after she received her eye implants. She imagined what they would look like, talking to each other.
Then she forced herself to remember the crash. Compared the faces. One set looked weaker than the other, the faces shifting and changing, the voices contorting.
Above, the sky brightened.
Whatever this place was, Alex realized she was not a prisoner, or not in the sense that someone could keep her here. She’d been keeping herself here.
“Where are you?”
Alex turned to the flames warming her body. Then, for reasons she could not understand, she flung her arm into the fire.
The pain was immediate and then vanished. Alex looked down at her hand. It wasn’t made of flesh. It was bionic.
If you’re ever in a dream, pinch yourself to wake up.
Someone had told her that at some time. A long time ago.
“Roy, where are you?”
Alex stood and walked away from the flames, following the faint light cast by the fleshed-out constellations above. As she wandered away from the fire, the world around her got brighter.
The feeling inside Alex, nameless and hateful, grew stronger, but it was not directed at her parents. That had been a lie. She couldn’t prove it, but she knew it was. No, this feeling was directed at whoever had told her the lie.
Vardis had planted a seed, and it had taken root for too long. Alex didn’t know how much time she’d lost, but she was going to find him and make him pay.
There was another reason Alex needed to find Vardis. She wasn’t sure about it, but it was more important than cramming his stupid face up his ass, and it was far beyond her as a person. She’d find it when she did.
“Roy, where the hell are you!”
Alex reached into what was left of the darkness and tore it apart, ripping it as if it were a silk veil. Then there was light.
She could see Roy.
The man was old, older than Alex had assumed he was. His hair and beard were gray, and he had a cane. He was leaning against a pile of red mud.
As Alex stepped into the light, she started to be able to make sense of the world around her.