Disclaimer

The following is one of many installments for a story designed specifically for my blog.  While it does step out of my usual genre, there are some things still not suitable for a younger audience.  Violent/Graphic descriptions, strong language and sexual situations may be found through different sections.  Each entry will tell a small portion of the story during different times and may not directly follow the one prior to it.  

This story follows the direct interactions, as well as the deteriorating thoughts of a young man who is struggling not only with the relationships he has with those around him, but with the relationship he has with himself as well.

Finally, all work is strictly fiction and does not reflect the views of the author.  Any resemblance to actual person(s) is only a coincidence.

If this isn’t your cup of tea, then avoid these excerpts and hopefully I’ll see you around my other posts and webseries!

———

His breath rattled wetly in his chest, and he ran with his left hand clutched against it. What had at first been thought to be one broken finger turned out to be two, his ring and pinkie finger of said hand, and the pain was tremendous.  As his feet pounded sometimes on the concrete, others on the grass or sun-baked dirt, his abdominal wound grew ever deeper.

He was a mess.

Blood coated him neck to knees from two different applications.  From a distance, his jeans looked as if he had spilled oil into his lap, but closer inspection gave way to the sickening truth.  His own life was oozing from the grievous wound which lurked, hidden, beneath a layer of duct tape and behind his chainmail shirt.

His eyes, much like the rest of his hardened features, had also begun their own metamorphosis.  Just as his skin had grown haggard and his hair stark white, his eyes, too, began to change color.  One eye had grown red, while the other, blue.  To peer into his eyes for too long was to invite the madness that lay behind them.

There still remained an aura of misperception about him.  Even when he ran completely in the open, people continued to turn the other way.  Nobody spoke twice of the bleeding madman that ran past, nor did they remember having seen him after he was gone.  The other was fully in control, bending the will of those around him just enough so that he was even less important.

It was nearly over and he was God damned for what he had become.  Tears fell openly from the corners of his eyes as mourned for the death of Scott Vali.

He stumbled from time to time when he missed the cadence of his feetsteps, careening drunkenly about as he fought to regain his balance.  Each was more difficult than the last and there was soon going to be a moment when he found himself floundering at the feet of those around him, helpless and quietly expiring.

When the pressure on his chest had grown too heavy for him to bear, only then did he finally stop.  He could feel the rough texture of brick against his back.  Or maybe it was stone?  He didn’t turn to look, it didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered.  He was too tired to continue.  It was over.

It was then that he realized that there was something in his right hand.  He had been holding his left hand against him using the wrist of his other, which, in turn, allowed him to keep hold of the small rectangular object therein.  It was a smartphone, the same one he had been trying to take from Tommy, and it was the last chance he would have for this to be over.

Using the thumb and forefinger of his left hand to hold it, he searched through the contacts until he found who he wanted.  One tap of the finger and the phone was dialing.   It only took one ring for him to connect to the very frantic person on the other end.

“Tommy?!”  Why the hell haven’t you been answering my calls,” Misty shrieked through the receiver.  Her voice was thick, as if she had been crying recently, and her words gushed in panic.

“Misty,” he croaked.  His breath was short and he wheezed at the end of the single word he had spoken.

“Tommy,” she asked, suddenly confused.

“Misty!”  He spat her name at the phone.  He wanted to say more, but for some reason his mouth couldn’t articulate the words that should follow.  His mind jumbled the letters together, shook them up and poured them over his tonsils, choking him with their nonsensical patterns.

“Glarglearglearg,”  he spewed as his vision began to darken.

“Who is this,” she asked fearfully.  “Where’s my Tommy?!”  Her voice rose in volume until she was whining the last syllable.  He knew that he should answer her question, but she had asked two of him and he was sure of neither.

It was a shame, because it seemed important to her that she have the answer to each of them.  Quietly, even as she continued to speak from the receiver, he pressed the ‘End’ button and set the phone down on the ground beside him.

He was so tired.  His hands fell to his sides and there was a dull pain in his left which reminded him of something important.  Pain?  He wasn’t sure if even that was the answer, for it was becoming nothing more than a nagging sensation in the back of his mind.

“You’re not giving up on me now, are you,” a small voice asked from somewhere nearby.

He smiled weakly as he recognized it, but for some reason he couldn’t place a name or face to it.

“I can’t go on,” he sighed.  “I’m sooo tired.”

“We have to finish this,” the other insisted.  “Misty has to die.”

“You mean the scared girl on the phone?  But she sounded so nice,” he argued.  He was becoming more childlike by the minute, reverting to something that the other couldn’t keep a hold on.

The other screamed in frustration, but it was as a frail and pitiful sound compared to what it once was.

“Who are you,” Scott asked curiously.  He tried to look around, but he couldn’t lift his head from his chest.  Like his hands, it had grown too heavy for him to control.  He could only watch as the ground between his legs seemed to rush away from him, growing farther and farther away with each word that he spoke.

“You already know the answer to that,”  the other finally conceded.

“I do,” he asked softly.  His lips barely moved as the words passed over them, and even as the last word exited his mouth were his eyes slowly closing.

“I am the evil inside of you, manifested by your dreams and brought to life by your secret desires.  And you aren’t the first.  I have come to many others before you, such as James Holmes.  I have shared lives with Adam Lanza and Wesley Neal Higden.  My words have influence the likes of Robert A. Hawkins and Seung-Hui Cho.  

And now I have had Scot Vali.  People will speak of your actions for months to come, some in secret, others more openly.  Most will forget over time, but there will be one person who won’t be able to let go.  What has been done today will haunt them in their dreams.  It will chase them through their nightmares and it will open a door through which I will be able to once again enter.  

I am, and forever will be, the Omega, and I will feast upon the souls of millions before my time has come.”

Scott didn’t hear the last of the other’s words.  At six forty-seven in the evening, he silently passed away while leaning against the exterior to Dewie’s Drugstore, where he had once met with one of the most beautiful girls in his class and fantasized of smashing her face in with his bare hands.

~fin~