The kind tenderness in his daughter’s voice melted Jin’s heart, and as he released his daughter from his hug to look at her, he felt a few tears slide down his cheek.
“Why are you crying, Daddy?” Katie asked.
“I’m just so happy to see you,” Jin replied.
At this point, Jin heard footsteps coming from somewhere to his right. He turned toward the sound and found his ten-year-old son Alex walking toward them.
“Alex?” Jin asked. “Is that you?”
“Hi, Dad,” Alex replied, smiling.
Jin dropped to one knee and held out his right arm, still holding Katie in his left. Just like his sister, Alex ran forward, and Jin scooped him up. He held both his children tightly, fresh tears spilling from his eyes, and kissed them both on the head. Katie giggled and Alex gently pushed away from his father, giggling nonetheless.
“Oh, kids,” Jin said. “You don’t know how much I’ve missed you. I’ve thought about you every day for the past five years.”
Katie hugged her father tightly around his neck.
“It’s okay, Daddy, we’re here now.”
That about tore Jin’s heart out, and Katie reached up to wipe her father’s tears away.
Whatever Jin had expected to feel, it wasn’t what he did feel. The instant Katie’s fingers touched his skin, a blast of searing heat vaporized Jin’s tears and burned his skin. Instinctively, Jin snapped his left hand up to his face and accidentally dropped his daughter in the process.
“Katie,” he gasped. “What was that?”
“I…I don’t know, Daddy,” she said, her voice quavering with fear as she stared at her hands.
A strange scent filled the air, and Jin sniffed at it, curious.
“Katie, Alex, do you two smell that?” he asked.
They both nodded.
“What is it, Dad?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know exactly. It smells like something burning but…”
Jin took another few sniffs of the air, and then it hit him.
“That smells like burning flesh!”
His children looked up at him in surprise and fear, and Jin looked at his daughter to see white curls of smoke coming off of her hands.
“Alex, back away,” Jin said quickly as he moved towards his daughter.
Alex did as he was told, and Jin crouched by his little girl.
“Katie, give me your hands.”
Katie did so. The volume of smoke continued to increase, and then Katie doubled forward in pain.
“Oh, Daddy,” Katie groaned as she clutched her stomach. “Daddy, it burns!”
Jin was in a state of complete shock. What was happening? Then before he could do anything, Katie let loose with a bloodcurdling scream and burst into flame. In the same instant, a blast of force threw Jin backward through the air.
“NO!” he screamed as he flew away from his burning child.
He could still hear his daughter screaming and when he landed, he scrambled back to his feet and rushed forward to try and put her out, pulling off his coat as he ran. Yet when he was ten feet from her, Katie suddenly gave an unearthly wail, and the flames that had engulfed her erupted outward to fill the entire area. Jin backed away, arms held over his face, and called out to Alex.
“Alex, where are you?”
“I’m here!” Alex shouted from somewhere far behind Jin.
Jin turned to face him, and, satisfied with how far away he was, shouted back. “Stay right there, don’t move an inch!”
Alex nodded, and Jin turned back to the hellish inferno that had consumed his daughter.
Not pausing to think, Jin barreled forward into the thick of the inferno. Tongues of flame flashed in front of him, but they couldn’t slow his progress.
“Katie!” Jin bellowed. “Don’t worry, Katie, I’m coming for you!”
As soon as those words had left his mouth, something shot out of the flames and tackled Jin, pinning him to the floor. Jin tried to throw it off, but it was too strong. He looked at it, and saw that the entity that pinned him was completely made of fire. Its shape was vaguely humanoid, and when it spoke, its voice was a high, cold hiss.
“The dead shall stay dead,” it said. “You have no power, nor right, to change their fate.”
Jin snarled and kicked the flame entity off of him. Not wasting any time, Jin hurled himself back to his feet and drew his sword, blade flashing in the dancing light of the flames.
“Ah, defiance,” the entity said, a smile twisting its reptilian features. “Should you try to change the fates of the dead, you will only succeed in sharing it.”
Jin growled, and with a mighty roar he lashed out with his sword and chopped the monster’s head off.
Instantly, the flames that had been surrounding Jin disappeared, leaving no trace of their existence.
And Katie was nowhere to be found.
“Katie!” Jin called out to the darkness. “Katie, where are you?”
But there was no answer. No voice raised in response. Just the dead, hollow silence of the shadow world Jin was trapped in.
“Dad,” Alex called out to his father, clutching his throat. “Dad, I’m scared.”
“Don’t worry, Alex,” Jin reassured him. “I’ll find her.”
“No, Dad. It’s not that.”
Jin turned to his son and walked over to him. Kneeling down, Jin placed his hands on his son’s shoulders.
“What’s wrong, Alex?” Jin asked, doubly concerned because of what had just happened to his daughter.
“This.”
Alex lowered his hands to reveal a long cut across his neck.
“Oh, God,” Jin gasped, instantly tearing one of the sleeves of his son’s shirt off to try and bandage the wound.
When Jin did that, however, the cut doubled in width and depth, bleeding profusely. Upon closer inspection, Jin could see that the cut had exposed his son’s windpipe and was slowly getting worse. Blood seeped down the front of Alex’s shirt, and Jin’s whole body began shaking. He moved his hands from his son’s shoulders to cheeks and pressed his forehead to his son’s.
“I love you, Alex, don’t you ever forget that,” Jin said, his eyes streaming again.
“I know, Dad,” Alex said softly. “I love you too.”
Jin nodded, and a strangled sob escaped him.
“It’s time to let me go, Dad.”
Jin shook his head in refusal.
“No,” he sobbed. “I can’t let you go, Alex, I can’t.”
“You have to, Dad. Be strong for me.”
Jin sobbed again and began trembling beyond control.
“Goodbye, Dad,” Alex said softly.
Next instant, Alex’s body separated from his head and fell to the floor. A few moments later, both head and body slowly disappeared. Jin could only stare at the now empty space between his hands in shock.
Again.
He’d lost both of his children again!
Jin’s fingers curled into tight fists, and his teeth ground together, fury tightly coiling his muscles.
No more.
Jin jumped to his feet and whirled around, preparing to bellow his fury to whoever had taken his children from him again. When he turned around, however, he saw someone that he hadn’t seen in twenty-two years.
Frank Herman, the loan shark who had killed his parents.
And the first person Jin had ever killed.
“You!” Jin gasped, forgetting his fury entirely. “You’re dead. I…I killed you.”
“Really?” Frank asked. “Well, if that’s true, then how am I here?”
Jin’s lip curled like a burning leaf, eloquently expressing his silent fury.
“It’s because you’ve kept me alive, Jin Sakai. You’ve kept me alive in here.”
Frank tapped his temple, and Jin’s eyes widened slightly in both shock and fury. There was a moment’s pause, and then Jin rushed forward and slashed at Frank with his sword. But the second before steel met flesh, Frank Herman disappeared.
Jin whirled around in confusion and found Frank standing behind him, not a single mark on his freshly pressed white suit.
“I’ve never really been dead, Jin, at least not to you,” Frank continued. “To you, I’m just as alive today as I was the day I killed your parents. I always have been.”
“And I always will be.”
Jin whirled around in the direction of this new voice and found, to his complete disbelief, that Martin James Dorigan was standing behind him.
“Even if you managed to kill me, I’d never really die. You’d never let me! Killing me would never bring your children back and so, every day, for the rest of your life, you’d think of me…and what I took from you.”
Jin opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a strangled, hissing growl.
“I saw it, Jin. When we cornered Frank all those years ago, and you killed him, I saw in your eyes that his face would haunt you forever.”
Dorigan looked over Jin’s shoulder at Frank and chuckled.
“And so it has.”
Jin growled, and then slowly that growl became a roar as Jin charged Dorigan. Jin raised his sword, but Dorigan stood firm with a grin on his face. Jin swung his sword at Dorigan but the second his blade made contact with Dorigan’s body, he knew something was wrong. It felt as though he were trying to cut through Jell-O or molasses. Confused and frightened, Jin withdrew his sword and stepped away from Dorigan, who grinned.
“Your sword won’t work here, Jin,” he said. “You don’t have what it takes to kill us.”
Jin snarled and raised his sword to attack again, but this time the balance of the sword changed. He immediately snapped his gaze to his sword to find that the blade was melting before his eyes.
“Jesus!” he cried, dropping his sword in surprise.
Frank burst out laughing at Jin’s display, and furious at the mocking sound, Jin drew one of his Desert Eagles and spun around, leveling the gun at Frank’s face. When he tried to pull the trigger however, nothing happened. The trigger didn’t even move. Jin tried again, but to no avail. Taking the gun in both hands, he tried to force the gun to fire by squeezing the trigger with all of his might but the trigger still remain immovable. Jin stared incredulously at his gun, and this time it was Dorigan who started laughing.
“You really don’t get it, do you, Jin?” he said amidst his gales of laughter. “You really don’t get it!”
Jin snarled viciously and hurled his gun at Dorigan, but the second before he would have released the gun, he felt nothing but air in his hand. He looked at his hand and saw that his gun had vanished.
“You should’ve listened to him, Jin,” Frank said, smiling. “You don’t have what it takes to kill us. You can’t kill us!”
Jin ignored him and instead thrust his fist into Dorigan’s chest. The instant Jin’s fist made contact, however, all of his prodigious strength was immediately and completely drained from his arm. Jin gasped in shock, and he could feel that more and more of his strength was being drained from the rest of his body. He slumped against Dorigan as the strength left his legs, and a deathly chill overtook his entire body. He was falling again, all his limbs feeling and acting like spaghetti, and Frank and Dorigan began to tower over him.
“You can’t kill us, Jin,” Frank and Dorigan said in unison. “You will never be able to kill us.”
Jin tried to scream as the feeling of drowning returned, but he found that he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even breathe! The ground gave way beneath him and he began falling again as the darkness consumed his world.
Chronicles of the Apocalypse
--<(0)>--
Part 1: Revenge, Everything is Nothing
Chapter 10: Leah & Will
Jin’s eyes opened slowly.
When some semblance of awareness returned to him, he jumped up. The nightmare! He’d been falling, he couldn’t breathe! Jin began to take massive gulps of air and looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was.
The room he was in was unfamiliar and small. There was a small window to his right, looking across the alley to the building next door. On Jin’s left was a closet with a full-body mirror not too far away from it. All the walls and carpet were a uniform cream color and Jin himself was sitting on a queen-sized bed. Jin moved to get out of bed but hissed in pain when he tried to move his left arm. He looked down to see that a towel had been wrapped around his upper arm and had two strips of wood duct taped to it.
A splint? Jin thought.
That’s when the memory of what had happened with Victor Malakai returned. His wife was alive. The mace broke his left arm and sent him flying out the window. Jin clapped his right hand to his forehead and sat back down on the bed, feeling suddenly dizzy. The events of the previous night flooded back to him in an indiscernible rush. As soon as something clicked, two more things un-clicked. His wife was alive, that much was certain. And (was he thinking straight?) it had been her that had told Dorigan to kill their children! Jin’s mind couldn’t even begin to wrap around the implications that thought held and he slid his hand over his face, heaving a sigh. What had happened to his world?
A door opened from somewhere outside the room Jin was in and someone entered the space beyond. Judging by the pitch and volume of the voice, it was a woman. She was humming gently to herself and the slight crinkling sound suggested she was carrying a paper bag. Jin got up from the bed and walked toward the bedroom door. Very carefully, he eased it open and looked around.
Indeed, there was a woman there, and as Jin gazed at her, he found himself thoroughly shocked at his thoughts.
She’s beautiful.
Tall and slender, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt that perfectly outlined her curves, Jin was struck most by the way she moved and carried herself. Most of the women Jin had met in his life had seemed light, delicate, and frail. They seemed to go out of their way to make it seem like they were floating. Not this woman. She was gentle and graceful to be sure, but at the same time she held herself with a strength and firmness that Jin had only seen in those who know they can’t be messed with. This woman was a fighter, and her body language dared people to challenge that. Something stirred deep within Jin’s heart, and he found himself grinning on the inside. A person’s body language doesn’t lie, and he could rarely pass up a challenge.
Jin eased the door open the rest of the way and stepped out into the main part of the apartment. The woman heard the slight creaking of the door and looked up to see Jin standing in the doorway. Time in Jin’s world stopped. Her hair seemed to be made of fire, as it had been dyed a vibrant red and caught the sunlight filtering through the window in just the perfect way.
Yet what froze Jin in place were her eyes.
They were keen and sharp, like a hawk’s, but they also held an underlying gentleness in them that her brown irises only magnified. Then she spoke, and Jin had to snap himself out of his trance to listen.
“Hey, you’re finally awake,” she said, sounding relieved.
“How long was I unconscious?” Jin asked, pressing his right hand to his forehead in an effort to banish his remaining grogginess.
“Quite a while,” the woman answered. “About four days. I’m Leah, by the way. Leah Lawson.”
“Jin Sakai,” Jin responded.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
Even as Leah moved to finish unloading her groceries, Jin couldn’t take his eyes off of her. But then something else clicked to life inside his head.
“Hey,” he asked. “You didn’t happen to grab a sword, did you?”
“Yeah, we did,” Leah replied. “It’s over there on the table to your right.”
Jin looked to his right, and sure enough, his sword lay on the table, reflecting the light of the sun. His coat had also been slung over one of the chairs. Reaching for his coat, Jin picked it up and slid his sword back into its sheath, still hidden inside his coat.
“So, Jin Sakai,” Leah said, leaning back against her
kitchen counter and turning to face Jin. “You want to tell me what happened to your arm?”
Jin gave a small smile as he set his coat back over the chair. He’d expected her to ask that.
“Not really. It’s not a big deal anyway.”
“Really?” Leah fired back. “Because I’d love to know how a man can crash-land onto the roof of an apartment building with a broken arm and call it ‘no big deal’.”
“Simple really,” Jin replied lazily, looking out the window and shrugging. “I’ve had a lot worse.”
“Define worse.”
Poor girl, Jin thought. She fell right into it.
“Car crash,” Jin said, lowering his voice. “Killed my wife and my two kids.”
Jin had to hide his self-satisfied grin as Leah’s jaw dropped in horror and her hands snapped up to cover her mouth.
“Oh God,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I never should’ve…”
Jin waved it off. “Don’t worry about it, it was a long time ago.”
Leah lowered her hands a little and a somewhat awkward silence hung in the air. Fortunately, Jin’s stomach gave an astonishingly loud growl, and he realized that he was famished.
“I take it you’re hungry?” Leah asked with grin.
Jin returned the grin.
“Just a little.”
Leah chuckled and began to dig through her grocery bags and place the items she named on the counter.
“Let’s see. There’s cornflakes, don’t think you’d find those very appealing. A few apples…bananas…pancakes…waffles... there’s peanut butter, though I wouldn’t suggest eating that by itself.”
As Leah continued to rattle off various breakfast options and place the items on the counter, Jin chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“What are you going to have?”
“Me? Waffles probably.”
“Then that’s what I’ll have,” Jin said.
“You sure?”
Jin chuckled again. “I’m not a very picky eater.”
“Suit yourself,” Leah shrugged as she turned to prepare the waffles.
“I intend to,” Jin responded, grinning.
Chronicles of the Apocalypse: Revenge, Everything is Nothing Page 10
