The Evolution Trigger (Evolution Trigger Trilogy Book 1)

by C. S. Won

  Adam thumped the table with his fist, the fruit bowl rattling from the impact. “I am a victim! Look at me! How can you say something like that when I look like this?”

  “What will placate you, then? Revenge for supposed slights? Is that what you desire, to fulfill your eye-for-an-eye fantasy?”

  “Yes! I want you to feel what I felt back in the fire. I want you to experience that pain, that exact suffering that I went through. I want you to know what it’s like to feel your skin burning right off of you. I want you to understand what it’s like to be attacked by a force you have no hope of fighting.”

  “And the chief? What was his crime? What was Madeline’s?”

  “Despite what you may think, the chief never gave me the respect that I deserved. None of you did. They all kissed your ass. They raised you as their champion despite the good work that I put in. I was ignored, cast off to the side. Merit and achievement meant nothing to these people; they wanted to cheer on the man with the dazzling smile and friendly disposition.” He raised his glowing hand. “And so, I killed the chief for his refusal of acknowledgement. I actually planned to burn that entire station down, along with everyone else in it, but those plans were obviously thwarted by the police. And as for Madeline? Well, with her, I’m simply taking what is rightfully mine. She was never supposed to be with you in the first place, you goddamn chink.”

  Jae shook his head. “Where is all this coming from? What is the source of all this anger and resentment?”

  “Does it matter? It won’t change anything.” Adam picked up a plastic apple from the bowl of fake fruit and rolled it around his palm, slowly, until it ignited into a ball of flame. Wicks of fire crackled in between his fingers, shadows rising up around them. “Do you want to know how the chief died?” Adam threw the burning apple up in the air, catching it over-handed. “Painfully, squealing like the fat pig that he is. I’ve never seen someone burn so bright.”

  With a flick of his wrist the apple flew through the air, striking Jae on his chest. He stumbled back, grunting loudly, sparks dancing off his shirt. The apple bounced away from him and made its way toward a corner of the living room, resting against the wall. Jae looked at his shirt and saw a trail of smoke rising up from the black smudge left behind by the apple, wincing in pain when he dabbed at the mark with his fingers.

  Another flaming apple struck him, this time grazing against his arm and leaving a red skid mark in its wake. Jae clutched at his arm, his bicep tingling in pain, and watched the apple roll away and up against the couch, spreading its flames to the fabric. If I don’t end this quickly, then this whole place is going to go down.

  Jae scrambled away into the dining room, crouching to make himself smaller. Adam gave chase, following not too far behind, cradling the bowl of fruit underneath his stump, a wild look on his face. Jae clutched one end of the circular oak dining table and threw it onto its side, raising it as a shield and huddling behind it for protection. Adam released a capering howl, as if delighted by the challenge set before him, and dug into his bowl of ammunition. Burning fruit whistled through the air and thumped against the table one after the other, rattling off like a marching drumbeat. Some were thrown so hard they cracked the table. When the thumping stopped, Jae peered over the rim and saw Adam cast aside his empty bowl, searching for something else to throw. Adam picked up a vase, dumping the flowers out, and coated it with fire. He overthrew it, the vase whizzing past Jae and crashing against the wall behind him. Cursing, Adam spun around, looking for something else to use as a weapon.

  Knowing that he needed to go on the offensive, Jae used the table as a ram and charged. Adam turned to face the attack but didn’t even have the time to register an expression, the table throwing him back in a series of tumbling rolls. He bellowed out in pain, coming to a stop when he smacked against the wall with a loud crack, pink spit dripping from his lip. Shaking his head, he scrambled back to his feet, baring his teeth at Jae like a snarling dog driven mad by a tormenter’s hateful blows. He swiped his hand against the wall, trying to catch his balance, but the action kindled the plaster and set it ablaze. The birth was violent, flames springing up from seemingly nowhere, roaring upon conception. Heat bathed the room.

  “What are you doing?” Jae asked. “Madeline is still here! Don’t burn the house down!”

  Adam looked at his hand, then at the wall, and then he smiled. He ran up to the closest window, glowing hand out front. Lightning flashed, basking his face ivory white. Adam clutched the curtains in his hand. Fire exploded, seething and angry, a great belch of red flames erupting and consuming the drapery.

  “Stop!” Jae yelled.

  Releasing his grip, Adam began to run around the living room, baptizing whatever he pleased in fire—the TV, the lamp, the coffee table, whatever was left untouched. Before Jae knew it, fire surrounded him. Nearly every inch of the living room was awash in flames. He raised the table to shield his eyes, the roar of the blaze deafening to his ears. Adam, standing near the middle of the room, gestured at the fire around them, raising his arm to showcase his work. Ash and spirits of fire shifted past him. “You have no one to blame but yourself for this. This is merely the consequences of your actions. For when you tried to kill me at the apartment!”

  Jae threw the table aside, which shattered upon impact, and charged at Adam, gathering him up in his arms and lifting him up in the air by the collar of his shirt. Jae dumped him onto the floor, wood splinters coughing upon impact. Adam choked out a hacking grunt, teeth stained red with blood, eyes going wide in pain and shock. Moving fast, Jae maneuvered himself on top of Adam, and wrapped one hand around his throat and the other around his wrist, applying only the slightest bit of pressure. Adam reacted immediately, struggling with great effort, bloodied teeth mashed together, body writhing as he tried to wriggle free from Jae’s iron grip. His glowing hand flailed about like a poisonous snake snared by the nape of its neck, desperately trying to attack its assailant to no avail.

  Jae looked at that evil hand, glowing red hot like the devil’s ass. It amazed him, that a man with only one hand could inflict so much damage and suffering. What was Adam’s body count at now? Over a dozen? Jae grimaced hard. One death was one too many, and it was his fault that he hadn’t stopped Adam when he had the chance. How many deaths could he have prevented if he acted sooner? How many tragedies could he have averted? I could have stopped all this. I could have saved the chief. I could have . . . he shook his head, a frown setting on his lips. No more, not after today.

  With just a slight tweak he felt the wrist bones go soft, a squishy pop pinging through the room. Adam screamed, tremors running through his body. The glow in his hand began to ebb away, the light fading like a descending sun, but it didn’t feel enough. Jae wanted more. Driven by the chief’s murder and by the grieving faces of his companions, his soul clamored for greater retribution. It yearned to mete out further punishment for the man who took so much from so many, even as he lied screaming a crying mess. Jae didn’t hear his pain; rather, all he heard was the clarion call of revenge, and he was more than happy to indulge in all its selfish desires. Reaching over, he enveloped Adam’s hand with his, clutching it like a cone. He broke all of Adam’s fingers at once, pulling them to directions they weren’t supposed to go. There was a chorus of cracks and snaps, and Adam screamed louder than before.

  Jae allowed a brief moment to awe at how easily he was picking apart Adam’s body. He expended no effort to snap bones into pieces. Adam’s wrist was dangling at an odd angle. A mottled, purple bruise marked the point where his bone was snapped in two. His fingers looked no better, bent in crooked twists and crumpled in four or five different directions. Once so formidable and scary, with his glowing hand and scarred, angry face, he looked so feeble now, as he whimpered pained little sounds through a puckered mouth. Jae stood up away from him. Like a wilted flower, Adam turned inward, curling up into a ball and stroking at his broken bones with his stump, mewling at his destroyed hand. The scene was jar
ring to witness, and Jae felt a tinge of remorse for what he’d done, wondering if he had gone too far.

  The fire hissed in his ears, reminding him of the danger that was still present. Flames swept around them in wavy flashes like dancers gyrating to a song, rising to the beat. A layer of smoke, black and murky and thick, had settled across the ceiling, nearly touching the top of Jae’s head. The house groaned and shuddered, the foundation breaking down. Time was running short. He had to get out of here, but what to do with Adam? Leave him, or take him too?

  He clenched his fists. Despite every voice in his head telling him to leave Adam here to die, he resisted the urge, standing firm against the dark desires that clouded his mind. Despite all the atrocities and sins Adam had committed, it would have gone against all his principles to leave this man, no matter how evil or deranged he was, at the mercy at the fire he created. He couldn’t do it, even as every fiber in his body screamed at him to do so. If Adam was to face judgment, then let it be before a court of law, not here—broken, bloodied, and abandoned.

  “Damn it.” Crouching, Jae shuffled his arms underneath Adam and scooped him up. Adam looked up, face twisted in pain.

  “What are you doing?” He asked.

  “Getting you out of here,” Jae said.

  Adam swung his stump, striking Jae across the face. Jae fell back, stunned, and he dropped Adam back to the ground.

  “Finish the job! Kill me!” Adam said.

  Jae looked at him, incredulous.

  “What are you waiting for? Get on with it!”

  Jae rubbed his nose, which throbbed in pain. “I won’t. I’m going to save you.”

  “Bullshit.” Adam groaned and tried to roll over onto his back. “I saw the rage in your eyes and smelled the anger on your breath. You wanted me dead.” He glared at Jae with bloodshot eyes. “Why did you stop? Did you lose the courage to finish the job? Or did you want to play the fucking hero again by saving the bad guy? What a joke. So rather than killing me, you leave me broken and twisted, instead. What a tremendous show of mercy and honor from our great hero.” He spat out a glob of blood. “Fuck you. You better kill me right here and right now, or I swear to God I’ll keep coming after you. This . . .” He gestured at the fire around them. “. . . will never end as long as I live. You think the police will be able to hold me down?”

  Jae’s patience was wearing thin. “I’m not a murderer. It’s not my job to play judge, jury, and executioner. The state will decide what to do with you. It was never my intent to kill you. Yes, for a moment my anger did get the best of me, but you attacked me first and then tried to burn my house down. I’m not going to apologize for defending myself. Do I need to remind you that Madeline is still here? I did what I had to in order to put an end to this, to make sure no one got hurt. I was never going to kill you.” He sighed. “You can scream in my ear all you want when I’m carrying you out of here. I’m not leaving you here to die, that much I’m sure of.”

  “Even after what I did to the chief? Even after what . . .” Adam stopped, choking back his words. Blood dribbled from his lips in a loose strand, and he caught it in a clumsily with his broken arm. He propped himself up on his stump and wiped the snot from his nose, sucking back the whimpers pressing through his teeth. He looked at the ground, defeated. “Kill me; please, just kill me. I can’t live like this anymore. It’s too much.”

  Jae hesitated. He wants to die. “This doesn’t have to end with anyone else dying. We’ll work something out once we’re all safe.”

  “It’s too late for that—for me, for you, for everyone. I fucked up so much . . . so, so much.”

  That’s an understatement. Jae knelt next to him. “I know I should try and say something encouraging here, but with this fire raging all around us, I can’t concentrate enough to say anything of merit. I just want to get the hell out of here—you, me, Madeline. Once we’re out, we’ll—”

  “I killed your mother.”

  Perhaps it was the cackling fire and the rumbling of the storm that muddled Adam’s words. Perhaps Jae had temporarily lost his focus and imagined what he had heard. No one would have blamed him for it; after all, in the midst of all this chaos, with the smoke curdling over their heads and the fire seeping in closer, it would have been easy to misinterpret things. It was merely his mind playing tricks on him, picking up random noises in the decaying environment and compiling them in a way to make it seem as though he had heard the equivalency of blasphemy. Jae was sure of it.

  But then Adam spoke again.

  “I didn’t mean to kill her. I was just trying to scare your family away.” Adam shook his head, a smile slowly forming on his lips. “It seemed like a good idea at the time—start a little fire and scare your family into moving out. Genius, right? I figured if I did that then I could finally have Madeline all to myself. I wouldn’t have to compete with you anymore.” A chuckle pressed through his lips. “But things didn’t go according to plan, did they? The fire spread a lot faster than I thought it would, much faster, and as a result your mother was killed. I knew I should have done something to stop it, but I was so scared that I just took off running into the night, fearful of what I had just done.” He looked at Jae with a crazed look on his face. “I only set the fire just so I could force your family to move away. I didn’t mean to kill anyone. I swear. I was just a kid; I didn’t know any better. It was an accident, only an accident. I just wanted to scare you, nothing more . . .”

  Over the years Jae often wondered how that fire could have started. He tortured himself with the question, reliving the moment over and over again just so he could trace his steps back to see how things began. But every plausible scenario he could think of never made any sense. How was it possible that a blaze could just magically appear, spawning from seemingly nowhere, in the middle of the night? How could something like that occur? Was it just some freak occurrence? A tangling of wires no one was aware of? A stove light unwittingly left on? Or was it something far more nefarious, something he had never even thought of? He looked at Adam lying prone on the ground—a sad sort of smile on his face, blood dried pink on his lips, mangled hand off to the side.

  Suddenly, everything began to make sense.

  Jae lifted Adam off the ground, clutching a handful of his shirt into his fist, and held him high up in the air. Adam looked at him, still smiling, as if he was finally happy that his wish to die had finally come to pass. Jae stared back and in that ruined, flecked visage, all he could see was his mother trapped underneath a mound of burning debris. He saw the fire crawling up her skin, hair going up in a searing, bright flash, and her cheeks wet with tears as she told him that she loved him.

  The first punch knocked most of Adam’s teeth out, chips of white splattering out of his mouth in a spray of blood and saliva. The second punch broke his nose, bending it sideways, pushing it so far past where it was supposed to be that it was almost underneath his eye. The third punch broke his jaw, blood trickling out of his mouth in long, stringy goops, and left his face hanging disjointed and slack. The fourth punch nearly caved his face in, tearing through flesh, muscle, and bone, turning his skull soft and spongy.

  Jae dropped him to the floor, a cloud of ash and fire kicking up into the air. Adam issued a breathy sigh upon impact, body trembling slightly before lying motionless. Blood smeared the entirety of Jae’s right hand. His knuckles were kissed in a dark maroon shade, drops of blood falling on the floor. He wasn’t sure if Adam was dead or alive; in the swirl of smoke and fire, it was difficult to tell, but judging by his face drowning in a pool of his own blood, most likely dead.

  A wave of nausea washed over him. He fell to his knees, nearly hacking up his breakfast, wheezing at the ground, chest tight and hot. The blinding anger that had overwhelmed him dissipated, and in its wake, Jae was left shell-shocked and weak. Irrational fear took over him and right behind it, a heavy regret, compelling him to look away from Adam’s body. He couldn’t bear the thought of what he had done, wouldn’t dare see it.
He couldn’t even look at his own bloodied hand, and he tried to rub the blood off on his shirt, hoping that would make things better.

  The house shuddered with a tortured groan. He had to go, had to keep moving. He couldn’t stop to contemplate what he had just done. Madeline was in the other room, still in danger. He had to push the sickness in his stomach aside and stay focused, long enough to get Madeline out of here before they both burned.

  He pushed himself off the floor and made his way toward the bedroom, hand sliding against the wall to keep steady. The light from the bedroom grew brighter and brighter, like a beacon in the fog, showing him the way through the smoke. He pushed the door aside and stumbled in. The encroaching flames had already painted one side of the room in a red and glittery flare, and up above a gloom of smoke settled comfortably against the ceiling. The smoke was ever expanding in size and volume, threatening to encase the entire room. He fanned his face and coughed into his hand, trying to get his bearings together.

  “Madeline! I’m here! Where are you?”

  No reply came. He felt strange, unable to think straight, not even sure if what he was experiencing was real or some vivid dream. Never in a million years did he ever think he’d find himself in this position—locked in a deadly duel with Adam Erste, his house burning down around him, and Madeline held prisoner somewhere inside the home. He thought himself crazy, wondered if he was trapped in some sort of lucid hallucination.

  “Can you hear me, Madeline? Tell me where—”

  He saw her lying on the bed, hands folded across her stomach. A smile tugged on his lips and he ran to her.

  “Thank God! Mad, are you okay? Did Adam do—” He placed a hand underneath her head, but there was no reaction.

  “Madeline?”

  He slid his hand toward the back of her neck, and felt something rough and flaky against his fingers, something akin to sandpaper. Pushing her head back just slightly, he saw a red and black ring circling her throat. The flesh had burned and peeled to reveal the sinewy muscles underneath, Madeline’s skin twisted in a way that left little doubt as to what could have happened.