by Dan Kemp
The sky had grown dark, and lightning lashed out from the heavens, sparking a fire which took hold in the trees. The villagers stepped back in terror, their eyes cast upward. Lightning struck again, its powerful blast killing a handful of men standing nearby. With an easy jerk, Martin tore through his binds.
Martin was so overwhelmed by his rage that he didn’t even take note when fountains of flame sprang forth from his hands. He laughed and he howled as men fell, shrieking, to burn on the dusty ground. He killed them all, every last man, woman, and child.
When they were all dead, the spell over him broke and he regained his clarity. The forest was aflame, and contorted corpses littered the charred earth all around. And there, in the middle of it all, lay his mother, a single gaping wound in her chest.
Dark blood oozed from her breast, so Martin pressed a hand to it. She gasped in pain, and when she coughed and sputtered, blood flicked onto his face. Her eyes were vacant and searching the air above her.
"Mother," he said, settling in beside her. She found him then, her gaze resting on his face. Martin cradled her in his arms, brushing her dirty hair back from her face.
"I'm sorry," he said, tears falling from his cheeks.
She lifted a trembling hand to his chin. She struggled to speak, choking and gasping for air. His mother's eyes fluttered and went briefly out of focus before finding him again. "I love you," she finally managed to say.
His mother died then, there on that cliff, just as a mournful, misty rain began to fall. And as far as Martin was concerned, whatever bit of him had ever truly been human had died there as well.
***
His memory of the time that followed was mostly hazy. All he could remember was wandering. He crossed a vast expanse of desert and went days at a time without eating or drinking. He was alone, but for the ever-present roar in the back of his mind which had never quite left him since that day.
It took a great deal of time for Martin to learn to quiet it, but eventually he was able to push it into the farthest reaches of his consciousness, where it still continued in a quieter murmur. This was at least tolerable, but it continued to be a source of frustration for him. The sudden discovery of his unusual abilities didn’t come as a particular surprise. He had always known he was special, and now he knew exactly how.
Deep within him, he could sense the spirit of the earth, its natural cycles and stresses demanding his attention, much as the millions of minute processes of his body wore on his mind.
As the weeks and months passed, he wallowed in self-pity, wandering across empty landscape after empty landscape without another human in sight, and little other life besides. Yet he never felt truly alone. With the growing awareness of his own self came the distinct sense of an other. This was not any other human, those who in all their multitudes spread across the earth were no more than a faint flicker in the back of his consciousness. This one was powerful, an equal. This one drew upon the same sources of power as he did.
This, Martin could only surmise, must be his father. And though he had never met him, was unsure if he ever would, he hated him. He hated him for what he had done to his mother, and for how that act had created for Martin himself an existence that brought him only misery.
He hated him because he somehow knew the man didn’t even know of his own existence and suspected that, if he did, he wouldn’t care. And perhaps most of all, he hated him because he was Martin's equal, something he knew implicitly. The man was a threat.
At some point, he emerged from the desert and stumbled across another village. The people there watched him arrive—thin, haggard, and stumbling—first in terror and then in concern. Though he had learned his body did not truly require much sustenance, it had been weeks since he had eaten anything and he looked much the worse for it. Still, he looked worse than he felt.
The villagers took him in, and he stayed with them for a time. It was the chief of the village, and his kind young daughter, who cared for him. In his wallowing misery he found he enjoyed the attention, particularly the pretty young woman doting on his wounds, bringing him fruit, and dampening his brow. He exaggerated his infirm condition long after he felt back to full strength, and even consciously stopped his wounds from healing so she would continue to care for them. Eventually he did leave their home, building his own hut from reeds and wood. Still, he spent a great deal of time with the chief and, especially, his daughter.
These people spoke a strange and different language than his, but he found it took him very little time to become proficient with their words. Their lifestyle was wholly unfamiliar as well. Whereas the men of his tribe had hunted and the women gathered, the folk here had mastered the art of planting seeds in the ground so that food would grow regularly. The few types of animals who roamed here at the edge of the desert were mostly unfit for eating.
Before too long, Martin began to think himself at home once again. For a short time he almost felt the pain of his losses, and the ever-present rage that seemed to bubble within him, fade away. He wasn't truly happy, not like he had once been, but he was content.
Martin even found a partner in the kind young girl who had cared for him when he arrived. She was beautiful and affectionate, far more than he felt he deserved. It seemed to Martin that she loved him, and though he had some fondness for her in his own way, he never truly loved her back. And then, three years after he'd arrived in the village, he learned she was pregnant.
She gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. For a short time he shared in the joyous optimism the event roused in those around him. But this too was not meant to last for long. Martin had long since known that he was not like other men, and he had learned much about himself during his time wandering the desert. Wounds that should have killed him would heal in minutes. The weather would react to his emotions, and he could channel the energy of the earth through his body in the form of fire, water, ice, and lightning. He could shift and shape the very land with his thoughts.
Now, living among mankind once again, he learned of another skill. Everyone around him aged, their bodies constantly in a slow state of decay. The signs, though subtle, were unmistakable. He saw them even in his own mate, but Martin himself had not changed physically in years. Not a single new wrinkle, stretch mark, or scar. These powers could only have come from his father, whoever and wherever he was.
So Martin began to ask himself: would his own children be like him? If they were, was this a blessing, to have someone else who was different, like him? Or would they be just another threat against him? Martin was obsessed with this conundrum, unable to decide what he believed, or even what he preferred.
These questions plagued him for the next several years. Martin knew he should take pleasure in the trivialities of their youth, to smile at their first words or cry at their first steps as their mother did. Yet, as he did much of the time, he felt nothing at all.
So when the children were approaching their fifth birthday, Martin found he could no longer go without knowing. Their mother was gone, with some other women of the village, and not likely to return for several hours. Martin sat, deep in thought, at the door of his hut. The twins ran in circles, laughing and shouting as they chased one another.
"Come inside," he said to them. After some insistence, they did as he asked. Martin sifted through a pile of his few possessions, mostly skins and tools.
"What is it, father?" his son asked.
Martin found what he was looking for, a sharpened bone dagger, and without hesitation he drove it into his son's gut. The boy's eyes went wide and his mouth fell open, but he was silent. His daughter though, let out an ear-piercing shriek and ran from the hut. When Martin slid the dagger out dark red blood spurted from the wound, hitting the ground in one big gout followed by a steady stream running down over his son’s belly. The blood didn't stop, and the boy put his hands to the wound as if that could somehow halt its flow. His face went pale and he staggered, then fell. A crimson pool spread around his body, which soon was st
ill.
All the while, Martin watched. It seemed his children were not like him after all. There was shouting approaching outside, he noticed now, so Martin turned and ran. He left unseen from the village, and by the time his son's body was found, he was long gone.
What followed were some of Martin’s darkest days, his ever-present rage mixed with a dangerous lack of purpose. He wandered aimlessly from place to place, at times inconspicuous and at others wreaking violent havoc purely based on his whims. On occasion he would summon dangerous beasts, much like the fossil he’d found as a child, and watch them tear a village apart for his own amusement.
Eventually, Martin became bored, and from that time forward all of his thought was on his father. He could always sense him, somewhere out there in the wide world, but it took him many years before he ever found him. When he finally did, there was no mistaking him. That voice in the back of his mind which seemed to represent the man grew louder and louder until he first laid eyes on him.
Martin didn’t approach him, nor attack him. He simply watched him, following the man's trail for years at a time. He lived a strange life, moving from place to place before settling in for a while, only to move on a few years later. He was, for the most part, alone.
Then, Martin began to test him. He was certain the man shared his own inability to suffer harm, but he was unsure how far this would go. An arrow or sword to the chest wouldn’t suffice, but could more extraordinary means kill him?
The answer, he soon found to his disappointment, was no.
His father had been living for a few years in a quiet coastal town in the shadow of a great mountain. Humanity had come a long way in his time, no longer living in small scattered tribes but in large cities and towns. To Martin, all of this made little difference. Ordinary men, fragile and transient as they were, held little interest to him.
One day, having seen enough of his father's current life, he took control of the mountain. Martin could sense a great power within it, dormant but alive and simmering. He drew on that strength, molded it and let it multiply within him until it could barely be contained. Then, the mountain erupted.
Molten fire and ash spewed into the sky, raining down on the quiet town. From afar Martin watched, in awe of his own power, as the people died. Some ran, screaming, in a futile attempt at outrunning the surging lava. Others had seemingly no warning as they were overtaken, their homes buried in seconds. And, incredibly, it seemed to be over as quickly as it had begun.
The volcano still boiled over, vast plumes of smoke rising high into the air and lava trickling down its sides. The town itself had fallen silent. Martin sat on a grassy hillside above as day turned to night and day again several times over. It was just when he had begun to think he had actually won, and how easy that would have been, when he saw him. There was his father, an unrecognizable dark splotch in the distance—but it could be no one else—clawing his way out of the ash. His contracted form lay there motionless for a while and then, as if nothing had ever happened, he stood and walked away.
As ever, Martin followed him unseen. The man went about his various lives, and again and again Martin laid waste to them. Whether by storm, disease, or fire, he brought tragedy onto the man who had brought it onto him. Yet if he was aware of Martin's existence, if the continuous stream of misfortune affected him as Martin so wished it would, he showed no signs of it. Sometimes he would manage to slip away, but it would never take Martin very long to track him down once again.
So it was that Martin finally revealed himself to him. His father had escaped across the ocean for a while, but he caught up with him nonetheless. When Martin found him, bound to a burning stake one night in a quiet New England town, he had to laugh to himself. Even without his involvement, the man could not avoid disaster. Martin killed all the townsfolk, left their town in flames. His father freed himself from the stake, his burned flesh healing over before Martin's eyes.
"Hello, father," Martin said, his heart racing and his breath short.
There was brief confusion in the man's eyes, then understanding. He knew, so he must know what Martin wanted from him.
Of course, their fight was futile. Both men, left broken and defeated, crawled away to recover and to fight once again. The man fled, and Martin tracked him down. He was more elusive now that he knew he was being hunted, but Martin found him all the same. And though both men knew the fight would end no differently, they would fight again and again.
He wondered how he could truly hurt a man who couldn’t be harmed. What did he want more than anything? To Martin, that was clear. In all the time he had hunted him, the man had sought out a quiet, ordinary life. Perhaps a family. He seemingly had no interest in the extraordinary powers he held. But there was one thing he wanted even more than peace for himself. He could not resist helping mankind. Martin had seen him step in to defend beggars being beaten and women being raped. He had seen him give money to the poor and food to the starving.
This was his weakness. He cared too much about mankind, who deserved none of his pity. So it was this, after thousands of years, that finally allowed him to understand the man, and how to defeat him for good. Martin decided he would orchestrate a global catastrophe, one so terrible that his father would have no choice but to try to stop him. Not in private this time, but in front of the world. Everyone would see who he was. Some would hate him, others would worship him, but everyone would know his name. And there was nothing his father dreaded more than that.
Jess
Jess awoke, lying on the hard asphalt. The screaming all around her sounded distant through her muffled, ringing ears. She staggered to her feet, brushing the dust from her eyes and finding wet blood at her eyebrow. As she stood, her head reeled and she nearly fell back to the ground. She patted at her chest and stomach, examining her body. Though blood still trickled down from her forehead, she was in one piece.
In front of her there was now a gaping chasm where the gates had once stood. Piles of rubble lay smoking next to the fallen metal doors, which were twisted and bent. As she took a few hesitant steps, her vision and hearing began to clear, but her head still ached terribly.
Her foot hit something hard and she barely stayed on her feet. It was a man's leg she had tripped over, heavy and lifeless. The top half of his body was hidden beneath a massive chunk of metal, and a pool of dark red seeped out from beneath it. It was only then that Jess noticed all the others.
The roadway at the base of the wall was littered with bodies. Some lay still on the ground, like they could be sleeping if not for their open eyes and distant, empty gazes. Others writhed and moaned, hands clutched to a shattered leg or the remnant of a dismembered arm. Several, like her, had gotten to their feet and were staring around in confusion and awe.
Her clarity seemed to suddenly return. Jess scrambled over the big hunk of metal toward a woman lying motionless on her back. Jess slid to her knees beside the woman and pressed her fingers to her neck. There was no pulse. Jess did the only thing that came to mind from her training years ago, climbing atop her and beginning chest compressions. The woman's ribs gave way with a sickening crunch and Jess felt like she might vomit, but she kept going.
Someone grabbed her arm from behind.
"Hey," said a harsh, male voice. "If she's got no pulse, you're wasting your time." The man pulled her off the dead woman, and Jess’s protests didn’t make their way out of her mouth.
The man was older, with thinning salt and pepper hair and a stethoscope slung around his neck. His eyes flickered briefly up to her forehead, then back down. "You're fine. Come on," he said, and then he was gone. Jess turned and followed him.
She found him kneeling at the side of a young man who cradled one deformed wrist in his other hand. Two jagged ends of bone protruded through the skin. His face was red and sweaty, but he didn’t make a sound.
"Thank God, doc," the young man said. Jess dropped to her knees beside him. The doctor glanced at her.
"We help who we ca
n, quickly. People we can actually save," he said to Jess, feeling the pulses in the man's hand. "This is going to hurt real bad, but it’ll save your hand," he said to the man before looking back to Jess. "Pull his arm that way."
Jess did as he asked, pulling the man's elbow away as the doctor snapped the wrist back into place. The young man let out only a soft yelp, then fell unconscious, his head lolling back against the asphalt.
"He's fine," the doctor said, apparently seeing the terror on her face. Then he was up and moving on, and Jess followed. All around, people were calling for the doctor's attention. A small crowd had gathered nearby, and the man pushed his way through to the injured person on the ground. It was a young woman, one Jess recognized.
Oh no.
Meredith lay on her back, her blonde hair matted with blood. Her blue eyes were wide and staring up into the sky, no recognition on her face as Jess put a hand to her cheek. She gasped, her chest rising heavily in fits and starts and a faint whistling sound escaping her throat. The doctor pressed his stethoscope to Meredith's ribs, once on each side. As he did, he dug through the small bag that hung at his hip.
