FicWad

Two Figures stand perched side by side a top a tall building as they have just witnessed the meeting of the two terrified children on the roof of the smaller hospital building just a block away. One of them is a younger, taller and athletic young man with long black hair tied in a pony tail and has a half inch wide scar that goes diagonally from above his right eye and ends on the left side of his chin. He also has scars on the knuckles of each of his hands and a look on his face of vindication that seeps through the smile on his face. The other is an elderly man, whose eyes seem like they have been carrying a lot of strain, yet he sports a smile that time has not eroded. They are both dressed in medium sized cloaks with their hoods down, the younger in gray, while the other in white.

"There they are, master! What we have traveled so far to find," the younger one proclaims as he motions towards the roof the freighted Maureen is standing on as if he could simply leap over to her.

His sensei places his hand in front of his anxious student and stoically says "Wait, now is not the time."

Defiant aggravation grows on the young man's face as he retorts, "We have traveled so far and sacrificed so much for this moment and we do nothing?"

"The rings have chosen their new masters, interfering would only make matters worse", the calm teacher replies.

The pupil takes a hard glance at the girl in the distance and then mutters something in a strange tongue under his breathe.

"And we also must refrain from speaking our own language as to not arouse suspicion of our origin. Come, there is much to be done," the older one reminds as he motions his student away from the edge.

The next morning inside the confines of the of the west precinct of the New Spaniel Police Department, hunched over his desk with a stack of photos from the alley he visited last night, Joe Smitherson looks very pale and his right hand is placed perpendicular to his brow to block the light from the window to try and calm his throbbing head.

"Mornin, Sunshine," a voice says rather obnoxiously loud.

The ringing in his hung-overed head causes him to grimace as he mutters back in an almost grunting manner the same. He doesn't even turn around to recognize that it is his partner, standing right behind him, looking over his shoulder.

"I take it you had another late night with your buddy bourbon. I thought you said you were going sober," John inquires as he begins to look at the pictures of the mangled bodies," So, what's on the menu for today?"

"They're the victims in the case we were assigned to last night, while you were out playing daddy," Joe replies in a resentful voice.

"Jeez, what has gotten your panties in a bunch?" John answers with a surprised look on his face.

"I'm sorry. So, how is Maureen?" Joe apologizes.

"She's fine at least physically. She seems pretty emotionally shaken up. We still don't know what the hell happened to her as she hasn't felt like talking," John answers as his sarcasm is replaced with concern, "I thought she grew out of this routine years ago."

He looks down at his friend, expecting some kind of response, but he appears to be too wrapped up in the photos in front him. He exhales frustratingly yet subtly and says, " So, are there any leads to this tragedy?"

"Just a couple of neighbors reporting weird noises," Joe replies as he starts separating the images, placing each across his desk, " And our only surviving vic just disappeared from Thomas General last night."

"Did their security cameras pick upany weird activity the hospital?" Johns wonders.

"No, the power outage forced them to be down all night even when the power came back up again around ten and the staff doesn't remember him even leaving his room," he responds.

"Did forensics find any trace of a weapon in the alley?" his partner asks.

" No, and we're still waiting in the autopsies," he answers, still not taking his eyes off the photos.

"What in God's name could do something like this? Ya know it wouldn't surprise me at all if those sneaks at S.L.A.P. Corp. might have something to do with all those weird genetic experiments they have been doing there," John wonders.

"I guess we can put the tooth fairy and big foot to our list of suspects as well. You got to stop reading all those tabloids Helen brings home," Joe growls.

Several miles beneath the city lays a large complex that is so immense that some say it rivals the city itself. The inside houses one of the largest privately owned organizations in the world, which is called the Special Laboratories for Armaments and other Products Corporation or S.L.A.P Corp for short.

In a hallway made up entirely of dark gray faux-marble tiles at the perpendicular cross-section with another hallway, a small bell sound chimes and one of two sets of gray elevators doors pulls apart from each other to reveal a black haired man with thin framed glasses, a black business suit with matching tie and a white shirt with a steamer trunk brief in his left hand. He walks out of the elevator, which closes right behind him, and slowly walks as the sound of his loafers echo down the empty hallway. He continues to until he arrives to a white frosted glass with a wooden frame and the words "CEO Gerald Walker" stenciled in a highly stylized font. He twists the French door knob and walks in. The walls and floor of the office match the hall outside, but is much wider. In fact, the office is much wider than most studio apartments with a built-in speaker system that currently softly playing a composition by J.S. Bach, but it is hard to tell as the volume has been turned way down. There is an assortment of leather couches on each side of the room with a large cherry wood desk near the back of the room. Behind the desk, there also is a large burgundy office chair turned around with its back to him, facing a large one hundred gallon fish tank with an assortment of tropical fish inside.

A voice from the chair announces, "Mr. Lerner, I take it you are here to report the two class nine energy emissions registered last night."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Walker, it's just that," Lerner sheepishly replies, but is cut off.

"I know a class nine has the potential to be as destructive as ten nuclear warheads, " his boss interrupts, still with his back turned, " I sent out a security team to investigate both incidents: the one that caused the black out and the one recorded some hours later. It's probably some device that Thomas created that back fired and disrupted our sensors."

"But, sir, our sensors were tested several times last night before and after the blackout to be fully operational. There is also reason to believe that the emissions could be biologically based," Lerner nervously answers. His employer, a skinny gray haired man in his fifties, turnsaround with a look of concern on his face, an almost fearful look as if a ghostly apparition appeared before him.

"What?" he asks, sounding choked.

"The signatures are very similar to that of several psychics that we have been studying," his employee answers, trying to sound more sure of himself, while opening his brief case and grabbing a small stack of papers.

He hands his employer the papers, causing him to mouths the words "Dear God" as he looks over them. His face grows a little pale as he says, "So, you are saying that there could be a class nine entity walking amongst the people of New Spaniel."

"That's the other part, sir, the two signatures appear to be distinct from each other," Lerner replies.

Walker takes a long swig from a small blue tinted polygonal glass in his hand and says, " I think we'll need a bigger security squad."

Maureen awakens in her hospital bed with the events of the night before ringing in her head. As the cobwebs subside, a stench begins to flood her nose, an odor that has recently become all too familiar, the smell of flesh. Though not uncommon in a hospital, this smell is extra carrion-like. To try and find out the cause, she lifts up he white sheets to reveal her legs, moves them over the side to dangle while she sits up and then hops to the floor. As soon as her feet hit the ground, the room becomes completely black, so dark that she can't even see the bed next to her. Her feet suddenly feel warm as a liquid begins to flow underneath her, realizing that the smell is coming from the visceral liquid. As she hears the blood gushing into the room, she panics and tries to run into an unknown safety, but her sudden movement causes her legs to slip underneath her and the wet, unforgiving floor slaps her face, stunning her. The liquid saturates her hospital gown, making her feel as if someone is lying on her back. She desperately forces her body upward, but she slips on to her back as a splashing sound echoes around her as if she was in a much larger room. Her mind begins to race as she tries to piece together what exactly is happening. She should have fallen back into her bed and even tries to reach for it, but there is nothing there. She somehow regains some kind of balance on her feet as she tries to trudge through this sea of blood that is now up to her waste with the sloshing of liquid dizzying her mind further. She exhaustingly moves forward to try and find an exit to this bizarre scene, but only finds more open space. Soon, the crimson substance levels have reached a point where she has to swim to continue moving, but the weight of her over saturated clothes quickly sucks the energy out of her fatigued body, like a spider sucking the life out of a fly caught in its web. Now, the blood has gotten so deep that her feet can't even touch the ground. Unable to swim forward any more, she tries to tread water, but her arms quickly feel the strain, as the soreness is almost unbearable. In desperation, she lets out a blood-curdling scream, which is oddly answered back with multiple other screams, that sound disturbingly familiar, but so numerous that she can't identify them individually. Her arms begin to give out as she can feel her body beginning to sink, but deep in her mind she knows there has to be some kind of salvation even as her head is drifting deeper and deeper beneath the surface, that all she has to do is endure and survive. She can taste the blood as it and the lack of oxygen tear away at her already disoriented mind as they suffocates her lungs. With one last gasp of strength, she cringes her eyes and pushes herself up to try and reach the surface. As she pushes upward, she opens her eyes to reveal herself to be sitting up in her bed at home in a cold, hard sweat.

For the rest of the night, sleep does not come easy. Her head is pounding and she also has this nauseating feeling that she always gets whenever she is woken up suddenly. It also doesn't help that whenever her mind would drift into dreamland, the voices from the dream would enter her ears and she would have to start all over again. So, when the morning finally arrives, she is anything but refreshed.

Her mother eventually comes into her room to awaken her as she usually does. She says something to her, but she is too mired by her recent trauma and too overwhelmed by exhaustion to really understand what she is saying. She just limply shakes her head in affirmation as she walks to the bathroom. After that, her morning is pretty much routine, not that, she remembers any of it. All that she can remember by the end of the day is the bus rides to and from school and the lunch period. What she finds so striking, in between the times her eyes shut, is that no one seems the least bit concerned about her, despite the fact she looks so distant and pale. Her mother told her that Tommy had left several messages on the answering machine and have even talked to her mother about the situation the day of the mugging. Still, he just sits next to her on the bus ride home like he had a badge of honor on his chest and seems more interested in talking about the sitcom he watched the night before and not even asks a single question about her well being. He does ask her if she wanted to go out later this evening and allow him to introduce her to a couple of his friends, but she replies that another time would be better. When she finally arrives home, she slowly, limply marches up the stairs and collapses on her bed.

She is awakened a sudden chill. As the disorientation of sleep subsides, she looks around herself to realize that she is standing at the edge of the very same rooftop from the night before. The sudden awareness of her surroundings causes her to lose her balance, forcing her to fall off.

Ungodly terror surges throughout her body as she careens down towards the empty streets below. She tries to scream, but she can't even hear her own voice over the rushing wind that forces her arms to flap helplessly behind her. She tightly cringes her eyes, as she braces for her destination, whatever it may be: heaven or hell. She just wants something, may it be an ending or a beginning, something good, concrete and away from this bizarre purgatory that she is trapped in. For one split second, her clinched eyes relax as she accepts the path fate has put in front of her. At that same moment in time, a blinding white surrounds her as she hears a noise that sounds like a gunshot and feels an unknown force vault her in the air. Her body flops upward as a leaf does when it is being blown around by the wind. She soon realizes with pure concentration, that she can control her new found upward mobility and finally learns to fly parallel to the earth far beneath her. Her terror has been replaced by an uncontrollable sense of freedom as she speeds across the night's sky as she opens her eyes to see a world of clouds. The feeling from the dream she had not too long ago begin to flow through her body as she flies upward as playfully as a small child. She finally looks at her arm and notices that it is tightly covered in white cloth, so tight it reveals the muscle tone underneath. She looks at the rest of her body to see that she is dressed entirely in the same cloth except for the strangely familiar golden triangle with a lightning bolt emblem in the center of his chest. On her head, she can feel the cowl as her left hand feels the crown-like shape on the upper half of her face and finally realizes the message that her subconscious was trying to tell her in that very same dream, that her world was about to change. She also begins to sense something, a presence she felt on the roof of the hospital the night before, filled with uncontrollable rage that cascades down upon her, from deep in the bowels of the city. The veracity of the rage is so potent that she can taste and smell the blood.

She awakens, lying in her bed in her blackened room, wondering when these weird hallucinations are going to end. The tapping of her mother's slippers can be heard from the hallway and is followed by the usual opening of her door as she sits up in greet her.

"Maureen, its time to," her mother says as her head slowly turns to her, but, when she finally looks at her, a look of total shock stretches her face as she finishes, "What in God's name are you wearing?"

Maureen freezes as her eyes and mouth widen as she lifts up her left hand to see the white fabric covering it. She bolts out of the bedroom past her stunned mother into the hallway, where she enters the bathroom a millisecond before Jacky can enter with such speed that she looked like a blur to the naked eye, slamming the door in her sister's face. As she stands in front of the mirror, she can see that she is still dressed from head to toe in the white costume.

As their chronicle continues.................