Chương 67: The Scream

Alex was asleep when it started, deep in the good dreamless sleep of a body that had earned it, and the scream tore him straight up out of it. It was a girl's scream, and it was pure terror, the kind of sound that skips past thought entirely and goes straight to the oldest part of the brain, and Alex was on his feet before he was fully awake. His first thought, his only thought, was monsters. Something had come over the wall.

Something was in the camp, and it had found one of the children out in the dark, and every part of him that had spent a month becoming a weapon was already moving toward the sound. He came out of his tent at a dead sprint with nothing in his hands, no glaive, no armor, because there was no time for any of it and his hands were enough. The rune lights lit the path in patches, pale and steady-, the ones he'd made, and he ran between the tents following the scream, and his mind ran ahead of him, laying out the fight.

Something fast, then, to have gotten in past the wall and the watch. Something that had a child, because the scream was young. He would have to hit it hard and hit it first and get whoever it was clear, and he ran through the dark building the fight in his head the way he built every fight, and every piece of it was wrong, because he was braced for teeth and claws and the oily dark of a corrupted thing, and that was not what was waiting for him.

He came around the last corner ready to throw his whole body at a monster. There was no monster. There was a man, and a girl on the ground beneath him, and Alex's mind hit the scene at a full run and could not stop in time, could not make the pieces be what he'd braced for. The man had his pants down, trying to take off his next layer of garment.

The girl's clothes were torn, and she was small, and she was fighting, overpowered and pinned and fighting anyway, and the man was doing the thing that Alex understood in his body before his mind could shape a word for it, the animal thing, the thing a person did when they had stopped being a person. Something went white behind Alex's eyes, and it did not feel like losing control. It felt like the opposite. It felt like every scattered thing in him snapping into a single hard line. He did not think it through.

There was no weighing, no pause, no version of the next second where he considered options and chose one. But he was not out of control, and it was not an accident, and he would be clear about that with himself later, even when he was clear about nothing else. In the half-instant between seeing and moving, some part of him decided, fast and total and without a word, that the man on that girl was going to die, and that Alex was going to be the one to do it, and that it was going to happen now.

The rage came up from somewhere older than the tutorial, from a hallway in a high school and a friend who wasn't in the world anymore, and it did not cloud him. It aimed at him. He crossed the distance in a single stride, and his hand came down to tear the man off her and end him in the same motion, one act, get him off the girl and kill him, and he put into it exactly what he'd have put into a killing blow because that was what it was. His body was not the body he'd had in high school.

It was a body that turned itself toward metal under pressure, that ground level-fifteen bosses into ash, that carried strength no human frame was built to hold, and it delivered the force he asked of it. His hand closed on the side of the man's head, and the force went where he sent it, and the man was dead before the motion finished, dead instantly, dropped away from the girl in the space of a heartbeat. It was over so fast it hadn't looked like violence yet. Just a movement, and then a body. Alex stood there.

The girl scrambled backward across the dirt, and then Jeremy was there, a crack of white light, Alex hadn't heard him coming and didn't know how he'd known, and his brother-in-law put himself between the girl and everything else, got his arms around her, turned her away from the body and the blood and Alex both, lifting her with the fast sure gentleness of a father. She was being taken care of. Somebody had her.

Alex registered that in some far-off way, and it did not reach the part of him that was standing over what he'd done, alone now in the pool of light, looking down. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. For a moment there was no sound at all. The scream had stopped.

The camp hadn't woken yet, not fully, the paths still empty, and Alex stood in a small circle of steady light with a body at his feet and the whole world gone silent around him, and in that silence he looked at his hand. It was red. His whole hand, red to the wrist and up the forearm, wet and dark in the light, and there was more of it on the ground, and Alex looked at it and could not make it belong to him. He turned it over.

He watched the blood run in the lines of his own palm and could not connect it to the last ten seconds, could not make it hold together, a man had been alive and now was not and the difference was on Alex's hand and he had done it, he had chosen it and done it in less time than it took to think the word, and standing here now in the quiet with it dripping off his fingers he could not find the certainty he'd had a heartbeat ago. The line had been so clear when he crossed it.

Now he was on the other side of it in the silence, and it was just blood, and a body, and his hand. Then he saw the face. The body had fallen with its head turned up toward the rune light, slack now, empty, and Alex looked at it, and the bottom dropped out of everything, because he knew it. Carl. It was Carl. The nice one.

The man who'd let a pack of children beat him with sticks three nights ago and laughed about it, who'd said good to actually meet you and drifted off to his tent, who Alex had liked, who was good with the kids, who everyone liked. Carl was the man on the ground with Alex's handprint driven through his skull. Carl had been the thing trying to….

Both of those were true at once, and Alex's mind could not hold them in the same place, the man from the dirt and the man on this girl, and it kept trying to make them two different people, and they would not come apart. His hands started to shake. He didn't notice at first.

He was staring at the face, at the impossible doubled fact of it, and somewhere below his own awareness his hands had begun to tremble, both of them, the red one and the clean one, a fine deep shaking that started in his fingers and would not stop when he told it to. He looked down at them. He watched his own hands shake and did not recognize them, the blood drying dark on the one, and he could not get his mind to hold still long enough to understand any single piece of it. The camp was waking now.

They came the way people come toward a scream, out of tents, along the lit paths, drawn to the trouble and dreading it, and they arrived into the circle of light one and two at a time, and Alex watched each of them go through the same sequence. A woman he half-knew, one of the newer arrivals, stopped at the edge of the light with her hand over her mouth. An older man from the Evanston group came up behind her and went still.

A father Alex recognized, a man whose son had been in the swarm of children Carl played with, looked at the body and said Carl's name out loud, quiet and disbelieving, the way you say a name you can't attach to what you're seeing. And then, one by one, Alex watched their eyes do the thing he would remember longer than anything else about the night. They moved from the body to his hand.

To the red on it, to the arm painted to the elbow, to the enormous man standing over a well-liked corpse with blood to his wrist and his hands shaking and no words in his mouth. And something in each of them quietly closed. He watched the horror find a place to land, and the place it landed was not only Carl. It was him. They were right to be horrified. He knew that even then, even shaking, even lost. A man was dead by his hand in the middle of their home, and they had every reason.

But he watched the fear settle on him specifically, the fear of the thing that could do that, that had done it in a heartbeat and stood here dripping, and he had nothing to give them, no explanation that would fit in the space a scream had left, so he said nothing, and the silence made it worse. A small voice cut through it, thin, and holding itself together by force.

"I'm okay." The girl. She'd stopped in Jeremy's arms at the edge of the light and turned back, and she was looking at Alex, and her voice shook as badly as his hands, s but she pushed the words out anyway, for him, because she could see what the crowd was doing and she would not let it stand.

"He didn't. I'm okay." She swallowed, steadied herself, and made herself say it loud enough to carry.

"You came on time." Then Jeremy moved her away, like lightning, ensuring no one saw her face. You came in time. It should have helped. It would help later, it would be the one clean thing in the whole terrible night, that she was alive and unharmed and had said so with her own voice. But right now Alex stood over Carl's body with his hands shaking and a ring of frightened faces around him and could not feel the relief of it.

He could not feel anything except the blood going tacky on his skin, and the doubled face on the ground, and the simple,, unbearable fact that he had decided to kill a man and done it in less time than it took to breathe even if he had been deserving of it, it had still been so easy, and that easy was the thing they had all just seen.

He looked at his shaking red hand in the light he had made, under the lights that held the dark back from his home, and could not make it stop, and did not try to speak, because there was nothing, nothing at all, that he could have said.