Ashes (30 page)

“So we're gonna run? We're gonna let the world burn because a few a-holes say so?”

“Emery, I've lost so much already. My sister, my family, everything.”

“And I haven't? Look, there won't be a place to run to if they get their way, Adam. If we turn away now, then everything will be lost. We have to go back and do something. We have to stop it!”

“No. This is the future they wanted. Let hell sort them out. We must keep moving. We watch the streets, the news. When it happens, we'll be ready.”

“It'll be too late,”
Emery
said, her breath fogging the chilled window. She studied his breathing, a slow chore. He was in immeasurable pain, but she was so concerned for the rest of the world. The ruins she knew might become familiar if evil men burned these woods and the cities like them. Tore families apart and fulfilled their twisted plots while those they created with power fell in line.

Was her heart actually beating? Arson was gone. If Adam was telling the truth, he was dead. But he was so strong. He had saved her once. He had saved her. As the frightened shakes overwhelmed her body, the fear of losing everything she held dear, she swore to herself that it wasn't real.

“Emery, do you feel that?”

“Feel what?”

Adam's head fell back on the seat rest, his eyes spinning until at last they shut. His mouth lay open and void. His hands, stained with blood, went limp.
His face, his arms.

“Adam! Wake up! Adam!” It didn't matter how many times she screamed his name. He was lost in some other place. She checked his pulse and put her ear to his mouth. But he wasn't breathing.

41

 

ARSON WONDERED IF HIS veins were ice, if they were frozen the way he knew some men's hearts were. The door behind him had almost stopped swinging completely before Arson recognized what lay in front of him. His eyes were lost in a daze or some kind of bitter fog. Somehow this place smelled like ash. What he stared at he wanted removed. But there was this longing deep inside him, an unknown wish for reality and this place to collide so he could understand it all, if such a thing were even possible. There was no removing these things— mysteries, prophecies, or the darkness between. And that scared him.

He moved toward the table. It just lay there, like a riddle, desperate to be solved. The spying walls crept closer.

There was a body on the table, one that wouldn't move. A leg dangled at the foot of the steel bed, while he imagined the other leg crunched and with the heel cradled with the corpse's genitals. Pale blue flesh reflected all the darkest lights of the room. A sheet covered the naked body. It was odd gazing at things that should have life but didn't. All the vigor and hope a human shell like this one must have once possessed was traded now for mysteries left undiscovered.

Another footstep brought him closer. It was a terrible thing knowing there was no going back.
A terrible, haunting thing to learn the truth.
Arson was certain—dead certain—that whatever rested in this room would not bring him peace. Perhaps it was the manner in which the walls hugged every corner the way the dark hugs the earth, or maybe it was the unfiltered cold cutting through his eyes, his ears, even his throat. And the fact that this
never-world
, this nightmare prison, allowed him such indecent luxuries was mind-bending. The sickness of fear ate away at him bit by bit. There were no words to describe it, no sentiment to embody it.

Strange how a four-wall reality could twist the heart of a boy, make him think dangerous
thoughts,
bring out the worst in him, or the worst that memories could offer. Was this just a memory, or was it real? He still didn't perceive it perfectly. He didn't know anymore. It felt real. He stepped closer. It smelled real. It was the way teenage flesh stunk after the assault his fiery rage unleashed on Mandy's beach. The horrible, black taste he couldn't remove for hours.

With his next blink, he saw a crimson line slide down the rib of the body and stain the cover. Suddenly his eyes weren't fixed on the corpse's curly hair spread over the head of the steel bed or the melted fingertips this young girl no longer had.
Only stubs with little knuckle and far too much blood.
Just then, a second stream of red bled down, dripping onto the gray floor. Every drip sounded like gunshots, and these red bullets could tear right through him. Deep breath, and then he reached for the covering. Flung it across the room. As it spiraled in the air it carried dust and memory he fought to reject. But it came.

Faces. Blurred.

A frenzy of souls crowded around this table. How this girl panicked for her very life, or the life inside her.

Back to the moment, Arson dropped his gaze and saw it. The emptiness at the belly of this girl, whom birth made a victim.
A haunting birth.
Some unholy thing that ruined her.
What was it?

Did he know, or did he just wish he didn't?

Arson swallowed hard.
Thought that drop
of saliva would stay stuck in his throat forever. How he wanted to claw his way out of this room before he saw any more. It was too much to handle. He didn't want it.

“Who are you?” he whispered, but something told him he already knew.

It wasn't the flaps of skin from her belly that seemed like they were clawed at or the thick, red-black goo that painted the canvas of her womb that terrified him most. It was the emptiness at the center of her, where life should've been. One. Left. Emptiness.

“It. Was. You,” the dead girl whimpered demonically. Her voice chilled him. Arson jumped back. No—he wanted to, but he couldn't move. He was terrified. “It. Was. You,” she slurred a second time.
Only her lips.
Those eyes of hers, now stained white, were piercing, mucus mirrors Arson dared not reflect.

“It was gonna…make me better. But you killed me. Stephen, you killed me. Arson.”

The last word, his name, seemed to burn
its
way out from her mouth. Her lips were crusted and blue. A drop of red slipped down her mouth and singed the floor as it fell.
Different than before.

“Mom?” he finally could say. What was it pumping through him? Guilt? Rage? Hate? Sorrow?

The head now moved. It nodded slowly, but still he dared not look into her eyes.

“Mur…der…er,” his mother whispered.

Arson nearly tripped backward. The tangled mess at his feet was an umbilical cord. His. Blood wrapped, and leading into one of the corners.

More whispering.
A lullaby, a prayer maybe.
It was Grandma's voice.

“Grandma,” Arson said, hushed. “It's you.”

Her face was covered by the dark. All he could make out were her outdated apron, those slippers she used to wear to bed, and that red cord he now knew she possessed.

And her voice.

“I pray the Lord my soul to keep…” she sang, every other
second
a piece of her white hair creeping out of the shadows. She was rocking something to sleep. The more she rocked, the more Arson saw of her. The wrinkles, her ivory knuckles, and a soothing voice that kept repeating the word
murderer
in a soft, still voice.

“Be fearful, Arson…” the corpse on the table—his mother—broke in.

The thing in Grandma's arms no longer moved. It was hushed. Asleep, he imagined. Or worse, he feared.

An intruder tore through. How he got there didn't make sense. The figure simply appeared out of the strange black of the room and his presence began to form color and flesh and clothes. A hand reached for Grandma's throat. Stayed there, a comfortable grip capable of ending life. Grandma's spine smacked hard against the wall, enough to snap, he was sure. Then she let go of the life in her hands, dropping the child to the gray floor, dead, covered with dust and blood.

“Murder,”
Grandma
hissed when she could breathe for a second. “Funny, isn't it?” she continued. “One moment,” she struggled, “the world makes sense…you're safe, hmm.” Was it laughter at the back of her weak throat, her lungs cradling an ounce of painful happiness, or was it fear too that manipulated her laughter? “And then…murder, panic…end.”

“Mur…” his mother chanted.

“…
der
-er,” Grandma concluded.

They repeated it over and over again.

“Mur-der-er, mur-der-er, mur-der-er…”
An endless chorus.
Arson remained terrified at the sight of the child he knew he had once been. It lay before him, confused. This dark painting was becoming clearer to Arson; he recognized the horrible strokes and the merciless brushes disguised for creativity.
Such cruel instruments of torment.

Still Arson did not know who it was that harmed Grandma. Still he longed to know and end it. Arson ran toward the wall where they warred, but he passed through them, like they weren't there at all, or like he wasn't.

“I won't let it happen!” he screamed, fighting the reality of her death. “I can save you, Grandma. I can save you.”

No
, she indicated, before her eyes went black. The man walked away from his destruction but not before dipping his fingertips in the
blood-stained
floor. With the blood he wrote words on the wall.

“Be fearful of the thoughts of men. Be wary of the traps of the end.”

Arson said the words back to himself several times and his heart sank at the weight of it.

“What is all this?” he panted. “What am I seeing? Who is that!
”

The red letters dragged across the wall as the man's fingers tapped the same melody Grandma sang when she tried to rock the child to sleep.

“Who are you!
”

“Be fearful of the thoughts of men, son,” his mother slurred, her last words before she stopped moving. Arson rushed to her side.

“Please, God, please. Not now. Stay with me. Please stay.” He swore, bashing his hands on the steel table. Unknowingly, the table singed when he hit it, melting slightly, forming the shape of his knuckles. It didn't seem to matter.

His mother, this beaten, ruined corpse, ceased all movement. He ran his fingers through her hair, stroked her cheek with his face and his tears. “I don't want it to end like this. I'm sorry. I swear I wish I were never born. I wish I could take it all back.”

And then her eyes found him. She didn't move, didn't speak, but those haunting white eyes poured into his, and he could see new things.

A hospital hallway enveloped them. Salvation Hospital was disturbed by the screams of this young girl. He knew they were not the screams of a child wrecked by a firecracker but rather the screams of the mother he'd lost at birth. Her voice cracked the air as she reached for a hand in the chaos. “Isaac, promise to love him,” he heard her say.

In the here and now, Arson grabbed the corpse head with both hands, unable to let it go. He was watching his own birth. He'd seen this chaos before in part but never this clearly. It was as if he were living it, breathing the same air the souls in that hallway breathed, fearing the same thing they feared.

“Isaac,” she gasped. Arson watched her struggle and claw at Isaac's hand, hoping he could bring her some kind of solace.

And then he saw perfectly through her eyes. In that moment he was her—her mind, her soul, her everything. And he saw the man. Isaac. The one he knew as Dr. Carraway.

 
“There's so much blood,” Arson cried, watching it all unfold. “No more. No more!” A fire boiled in the young girl's veins. Red dripped from her ribs. Her hands were hot with the unrelenting glow of fire. Ash stained her mouth and bled out her eyes as two souls stared on. Arson felt rage unlike anything he'd ever felt before. Hatred. And more than anything, a feeling of no control.
A sensation of losing his grip completely to the madness.
But there was no fire to deliver him. And there was no angel of death to remove him from this cathedral of torment. Only the past he could not change. He shut his eyes finally as the cry of a child pierced through.

“My voice. My cries. My fault.”

He wanted to write a new history. He wanted to fix it.
All of it.
The heat boiling in his blood, the fear of losing everything: his mother, Grandma, Emery. His mind. He cried out. He screamed and screamed until his throat nearly collapsed. And through it all, the man he had never called Father continued to stain the wall red with words Arson began to understand. All this time he could see things he had never experienced, never dreamed, never lived. They were not his dreams, but the dreams were linked by blood. The realities must have blended together.

“I wanted to save you…to save all of you…”

 
His hands, once dried and lifeless, came alive in the quiet darkness. He, kneeling in dust and ashes, sensed the distant, abandoned fire swell once more.

He stared at the man writing on the wall.
His father, Isaac Gable.
A villain in this nightmare.
Arson had a thirst to end his life.