“Fine. I’ll go by myself.”
“If anyone’s interested, I think we’re in,” piped up Carly. Robyn hopped up onto the table at the side of the computer, feeling the warmth generated by the processor. Mika turned to the monitor, effortlessly ignoring Johnny, but discovered that he couldn’t quite focus on the letters.
“Is it me, or are those letters moving?”
“It’s just hard to make out. I’ll put it in an easier font,” Carly offered. She scanned the text, highlighted the sections she thought were key and started to print the pages off. “Ah!”
“Ah? What, ah?” asked Robyn. That had better not be a problematic ah. Not now – not now that time was almost up.
“Just a slight problem.”
“I’m going out.”
“Where are you going, Johnny?”
“To make my mark on the world.”
It won’t matter, Robyn wanted to say. Soon, no-one will notice. It will be erased. But she just looked at him, one eye brow raised.
Self-consciously, he looked down at his ripped and frayed clothing. He grabbed the door handle and wrenched it open, stomping off up the wooden stairs like a stroppy teenager to put some intact clothes on.
“How slight?”
Carly stared at Mika through the reflection of her eyes in the monitor. She could actually have quite fancied him if he hadn’t turned out to be such a sadist. “This thing is coming to pass at sunset in two days tomorrow.”
The significance of that deadline meant nothing to Mika and Robyn, though they both accepted that if Carly had said it was a problem then it was. She knew what they were and what they could do to her if she misled them – she had seen it enough times. Carly was much too scared to lie to them. But, neither of them could smell her fear – only resignation. Bitter-sweet. They looked back at her blankly.
“It means that it’s too late to stop this from happening. But – bright side – you can stop this afterwards.”
“Doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me.” He snatched up the wad of paper from the printer tray and flicked through it. “Let’s see what we have here.”
“I’ll look through the rest of the stuff but I don’t think it’s gonna be much more than what’s there.” Carly clicked on the close button and scrolled through the menu, flinching as the front door slammed.
Mika grinned – what would Johnny do without their guidance and protection? He glanced up at Robyn, looking as sweet and innocent as a little girl, smiling to herself and humming tunelessly. The seriousness of the situation was impacted deeply upon both of them, they just dealt with it differently. Mika was all about action and getting things done, while Robyn… Robyn wasn’t all that different, just seemed like it from the outside.
Johnny stuck to the shadows at first, not wanting to be caught in any lingering rays of sun in the fresh sunset. You could never be too sure if the sun had actually gone down or was still lingering around somewhere. His blackened and blistered skin made him want to avoid even the tiniest risk – a thought he had never imagined. Fingers caked with dried blood itched and he absently cracked his knuckles.
But, sticking to the shadows was not just an effective way of dodging the light but he didn’t want to be seen. Johnny would not come out into the open – not until it was properly dark. No-one should see him, not least because of the state he was in but also because of what he was liable to do. No, nobody could see him – what if they recognised him… got suspicious..?
Pressed close against buildings – the ex-security guard was good at secreting himself, a more useful skill now – he barely noticed the dying din out in the open air. It didn’t matter. He felt detached from the living world; as if he was not a part of it any more. Superior. Yeah, Johnny felt superior, and better than ordinary people. Because he would never again feel the sting of the pain and sadness they fell victim to. Because he would never again have his judgement misted by the all-consuming love humans threw themselves into. Emotions were weaknesses… and Johnny didn’t have any weaknesses.
Except blood.
His deadly, roaring hunger riled up in his stomach, forcing out a quiet, feral snarl. The coppery tang of it filled his nostrils, floating on the cool evening breeze. He glared down at the kerb, spotting a dark red, invisible to the naked eye, rivulet of blood making its way down the edge of the road. He didn’t need to see it to know it was there. Johnny followed the scent, blindly, until it led him to what would become his hunting ground. Hungry. A young girl, probably only 15 or so, lay sobbing on the ground covered in tiny lacerations from shattered glass and bleeding profusely from a head wound. It took Johnny a couple of seconds to realise that she was looking straight at him. So much for staying hidden. Right at him but, also, right through him. Her eyes were glazed over as though she had been there a long time, Johnny found it rather unsettling.
“Help… me,” the girl me whispered through deep, unsteady breaths. “I know… you’re… there… Please.”
Johnny came out of his hiding place, reluctantly, so the girl could see him, his face eerily half-cast in shadow. He crouched down by her side, fighting to hold down his demonic urges, not wanting to scare her further. He smiled slyly, not sure why.
“I was… helping.” The girl coughed and scrunched her face up in pain. “You can’t… help them. They don’t want…” Slowly, painfully, she lifted up one arm and laid a hand on his denim jacket. “I know… what you are”
He looked at her sharply. How did this kid know? She was just an innocent child. No-one that young should be exposed to any of this. And, still, he sub-consciously fought the rising of his true nature.
“Help me…” she pleaded again. “Stop this… hurting.” The girls’ eyes, glassy as marbles, drifted from his face and fixed some imaginary spot in the distance. How long had she been here? It seemed like forever, it felt like an instant – time. Did anyone care enough about her to end her suffering? She was so young, she had her whole future ahead of her, she had so much to live for. Whatever. She’d heard it all before. It didn’t mean anything any more.
This had to be fate. Johnny badly needed some-one to feed off of and, bang, a dying girl turned up offering it up on a plate. This was one gift that he didn’t want to return. It was too good to refuse, and yet… The girl had already lost a lot of blood, what would a little more matter? Otherwise, she would die anyway and it would just go to waste.
“The people running this thing are…” Mika referred back down to his folded over papers. “Your boss, a shaman and Professor Wright.”
Robyn grinned at the name. “Professor Wright? Ironic… some-one called Wright in a world of wrong.”
“Where do I find them? I want to hurt them,” said Mika, matter-of-factly.
Carly thought that he was more frightening when he was acting cool and collected than when he was actually being scary. “You can’t. You can’t hurt them. Well, you can hurt them but you can’t kill them.”
“Are you trying to tell us who we can and can’t kill?”
“No, Robyn, honestly. I’m not. I’m just saying that if you kill them then they won’t be able to tell you how to stop it. That’s all I meant.”
“Oh.”
“They’re doing this to rid the world of any being, human or not, who has or will cause harm to any other being.” Mika turned to the next page and read on with interest. “Only the pure of heart and spirit will survive the conflict between citizens in the days leading up to the Great Event. The members of the public who shall go on to take a place in our New World will be relatively untouched by the anger, or at least, strong enough to resist the pull of changing nature. Those who will not survive this end will ultimately give into their innate ire and fall or be sucked into a fiery world created for them during the Great Event.” Mika sighed and fanned himself, idly, with the papers.
“That’s all great and that,” began Carly, tensing invol
untarily. “But, what exactly is this Great Event thing?” Mika hated being asked questions that began with but nearly as much as he loathed questions he couldn’t answer straight away,; Carly was curious though.
“Hang on.” Mika held his hand up, vaguely remembering something. “If you’re the Information Officer then you should already know this stuff.”
Carly rolled her eyes. Why couldn’t they just get it through their thick skulls that it wasn’t her privilege to know everything. “I’ve already told you all this. I’m supposed to keep it safe. That’s it. It’s not my job to know what’s in it.”
That made sense. “I want to hear about this fiery new world.” Robyn peered over at the papers, but the words seemed to blur as they moved.
“Later,” sighed Mika, wondering if he might have put Robyn in a sulk. That was a distinct possibility, so he tried to appease her. “There are more… immediate things to worry about now. We’ll look at the world of fire when the time comes.” There, that should have done it.
No such luck. “But, what it if it’s too late when the time comes? It might be too late to save anybody.”
“No!” They both turned to regard Carly, sitting stiff and upright in her chair. “You can’t be too late. You’ve already killed God-knows how many people, including my boyfriend and I’ll hold you two personally responsible for whatever happens now.” So maybe she didn’t quite sound as vicious as the others – she didn’t have the I-can-kill-you-in-an-instant advantage – but by God she meant every syllable. Weird how she never used to believe in God before she had ended up here, everything used to have an explanation, but now she was praying to him, realising that there was no explanation for this. “You can’t be too late.”
Robyn wondered, despite herself, if they were not already too late. If they would not be able to reverse it until after that moment, how would they save everyone? And they had less than two days to do this. “46 hours.”
“Excuse me?”
“46 hours until sunset.” Robyn twisted Mika’s wrist so she could see his watch. 11 o’clock. The sun had set only an hour ago, late for the middle of summer, unnatural for this time of year. Something strange was happening with the sun – it should never be setting that late.
Robyn could have sworn that they had more time than 46 hours. It was not wise to argue with Carly who had told her, or the stars who were screaming inside her head. “We have to save the night, Mika.” Every minute counted now.
“We will, baby. We’ll do it.” He felt two pairs of eyes searing into him and dutifully looked back down at his paper. “I promise.”
ELEVEN
Darkness enveloped the city like a dark blue blanket. A medium-sized MPV stood empty and abandoned across the middle of the road. Forgotten. Houses and tower blocks stood tall and impersonal along the streets. Just a few short hours ago, this area had been a hive of activity, now it would be easy to think that that this was an unpopulated area if it weren’t for the occasional light in a window here and there. It was still and practically silent; tranquil was not the word to use though, you couldn’t feel relaxed or at ease here. Tension filled the air, making movement feel thick and difficult – how could anyone stand it?
“Aha!” Robyn said triumphantly. “There. Read that.”
Mika looked for the sentence she was jabbing at and let his eyes skim over the passage. He didn’t see how it would help them, of no real importance in the big picture, but it shed a lot of light on why they were both feeling the way they had been. Why they had both been having nightmares and weird dreams about the end.
Carly stared at him with wide eyes. He looked a little… haunted. And Robyn, well, she seemed concerned. What was in the file that would affect them like this? She looked back at her screen and tried to find the part that seemed to have scared them, finding nothing. “What’s wrong?”
Robyn’s brow furrowed and she looked like any other woman who was puzzling over some problem or other. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
“Does this explain us? Is this why..?”
“Yes.” She took the paper from him and squeezed his hand. “It plays on our inborn instincts. We were always capable of everything we’ve done lately. We always had a tiny fraction of our humanity left.” She said humanity as if it were a dirty word, hating even the possibility.
“You were human once,” Carly reminded them. “Now you’re remembering what it means to be human, feeling a human conscience about what you’ve done. And you hated that so you fought it and regressed to your purest animal impulses.”
“Are you finished with all this psychological shit?” snapped Mika. They weren’t humans or animals, such low creatures; they were higher beings. Had always prided themselves on being above everyone else. They were warriors. How did she dare tell them different?
This was a typical response. Carly was no psychologist, had only taken it for a year at college, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was in denial. Some-one had stood up to him – probably for the first time and had told him something about himself that he didn’t like. Robyn had said nothing to her. She did not need to; the look on her face said everything.
“There are more serious matters at hand here.” Like… everything. It was all more important than how they were feeling but, at the same time, nothing was as important. Emotions had proved to be the downfall, the weak spot, of most humans, but to Robyn and Mika it was their strength.
“It does affect me – it did affect me,” piped up Carly, drawing their attention. “Humanity? I don’t think I’ve got any left. I can’t feel anything any more, not anger or sympathy, not even for those people you’ve killed. That’s why I said those things to you just, because they were true and because I don’t even care what you do to me. I’m just cold inside.”
“We can hurt her and she will bleed,” said Robyn, more to herself than Mika. “But she won’t cry. She won’t scream.” Eyes really were the window to the soul – both girls’ were hard and searching… determined to end this. “Will we survive it?”
The wad of stapled paper lay open on the floor but no-one picked it up.
“Survive what?” asked Carly and Mika in an unprecedented unison.
“The apocalypse.”
The teenaged girl coughed again, not quite sure how she had managed to stay alive for this long in this amount of pain. Why would he not just end this for her? She could see it in his eyes – he wanted her. He needed her. So, why was he refusing to help both of them.
Johnny stood up. Who were Mika and Robyn to tell him that he would need them? He was doing perfectly well without them. He walked to each street corner to check for anyone who might be watching, not quite sure how he had managed to keep his raging hunger under control. If the girl knew what he was then why did he feel like he had to hide his nature? It didn’t make sense, there appeared to be no rhyme nor reason for it, but…
There was no explanation.
He crouched down to her again and trailed his hand through the pool of blood by her head. Those two seemed to be providing the only action in the ghostly stillness in the dark city. Johnny shook his bloodied hand, tiny red droplets flying from his fingers, making it look like it was raining blood in the inches from his arm to the road.
The girl sobbed quietly, shaking a little. Every part of her hurt now. Her glassy eyes disturbingly found his face again. She could see the inner struggle between the man and beast. The beast was winning, obvious by the animalistic hiss he emitted. But she could sense him hesitating. “Don’t… fight… it. You… can’t…” The words stopped coming.
Johnny stared at her, seeing the shuddering rise and fall of her chest, still breathing. Blood kept seeping into the road and he didn’t know how she was hanging on. He hated seeing her suffer this way – she was just a kid, hadn’t done anything to deserve it. He should –
Before his brain had even finishe
d processing that thought, before he knew what he was doing, he had curled his lips back to reveal fangs and his eyes shone with a golden hue of a killer. Ah, fangs were so much better than guns! His innate instincts took over and he unwittingly surrendered to his creature of the night persona. He lowered his face to hers and looked at her, showing no mercy. “Twinkle twinkle little smell. How I’m going straight to-“
Something slammed through his chest and he saw the point of a wooden arrow poke through the place where his heart would have been.
“ –Hell.” And he disintegrated into dust in front of her.
She turned her head to the side, whimpering in pain, and stared up at the rooftop where the arrow must have been shot from. It was empty but for the tiniest shadow of some-one walking away.
“No!” she yelled, gritting her teeth against the fireballs of pain that exploded in her head. “He was… my… only… hope.” Who-ever had taken this chance away, she hoped they were happy now - she would never get the opportunity.
“Apocalypse?”
“Armageddon, end of the world.” She wondered what an apocalypse was like – not one that could be prevented, one that actually happened. “The end of nights.”
“No-one said anything about an apocalypse.” Carly detested this. Just plain being here was bad enough, but now she was learning every doom-laden detail about the current end. “It was gonna come eventually anyway – people are just on a self-destruct mission. I just didn’t think I’d be around to see it.” It was a simplistic view, fair enough, but more problems turned up when you let things get complicated.
“How can you be like that?” asked Mika. “Doesn’t it scare you?”
“No. It really doesn’t.” Strands of blonde hair lay on the thin shirt she was wearing and she picked some of it off, grumbling about it. Why did such petty annoyances seem so glaringly dire when there was an impending apocalypse?