Catharsis (Book 3): Catastrophe

by Campbell, D. Andrew

  I do find some large holes, though. Not on my body, but all through my clothing and what remains of my armor. My skin is unblemished. It is covered in something sticky that I can only begin to theorize about, but at least it's all in one piece. That is more than what can be said for my clothing.

  Continuing my examination of my body, I find more of the odd stickiness coating me and fewer bits of clothing than I would have liked. In some places it feels like the sticky substance might be the only thing holding some of my clothes together. I'm not sure what happened after that outspoken thug unleashed his metal-jacketed fury upon me, but from the condition of my clothing I can only assume it involved some type of chocolate syrup and razor blade tornado that shredded whatever I was wearing and coated me in its aftermath. Something sure did a number on me, and for the life of me I can't remember what it was.

  I don't like that. It's been a long time since I've had a period of my life that I can't recall with perfect clarity. I might not like every side effect of whatever's been happening but the eerily perfect memorization and recall of every experience I’ve had since it started is one of the good ones. Now that’s missing. I have nothing in my memory banks after being shot in the parking lot, and that happened at night. But if I was just blinded by sunlight a moment ago, then I've lost more than...

  My thought trails off as I realize I have no idea how much time I've lost. Six hours? Twelve hours? A day? More than a day? That could be morning daybreak I felt, and maybe I've only been unconscious for a couple of hours. Or I could have been out for days. I have no idea, and that’s unsettling.

  Blinking behind my makeshift mask, I realize I don't even know where "here" is. I'm awake, and it's daytime, and for some reason I have a ratty blanket wrapped around my head.

  Where'd the blanket come from? I wonder. Where exactly am I currently sitting?

  Both are fascinating questions.

  Out of frustration, I dig hard into my subconscious and try to pull up an idea of where I am or how long I've been out or what's happened to me.

  To my astonishment, I resist myself!

  Images start to flash up to me, but before I can make any sense of them, they stop. They stop so suddenly and so completely that their abrupt absence gives me a bout of vertigo so intense I have to brace both hands on the floor as the room spins for a second.

  The Darkness just flashed its little hand out and slammed the lid shut on those memories. Snapped them off. Much like I can feel it when the Darkness surges up inside of me to help fuel me and propel me forward in the night, it flowed through me just now and did just the opposite. It stopped me. It prevented me from remembering whatever happened.

  Why? Why would it do that?

  Then it hits me. The Darkness always acts to protect me. It wants to keep me whole. To keep me sane and moving forward. It looks out for me.

  If it is preventing me from knowing what I did, then it must have a good reason. It doesn't want me to get hurt. And something hurt me during that time I was out. It hurt me badly, and it's best I don't know what it is at the moment.

  Ok, I think in response. I can accept that. How about we just start small?

  Where am I right now?

  Images ease into view of a work shed located in the back of some house's abandoned garden filled with tools and supplies. There was a chain on the door, but I busted that when I entered. The blanket currently wrapped around my head was at one point swaddling some old lawn mower engine parts that the owner had probably been working on. The building is small; it's barely larger than my original closet back in the warehouse, but it is also located far away from people and sounds and painful stimuli. I found a place to hole up and heal.

  I ask the Darkness how long it's been since the parking lot. Have long have I been disconnected from reality. Again, slowly, I feed myself the answer but with very little support to go with it. I get the impression that it is the middle of the next day, and that is good enough for me.

  A little over twelve hours. That's good. Not as bad as I had feared it might be.

  What am I supposed to do now? With as much as my clothes are shredded, and as much as the daylight is burning my eyes, I have no desire to leave this sanctuary and venture past the relative safety of its doors.

  Hoping that I might be able to contact Ren for assistance, I begin to feel around my neck for any remains of the communication system he had wired into my armored helmet. Before my fingers can even report back to me what they find, the Darkness speaks up and lets me know first. It's gone. All gone. I'm on my own out here.

  Well, if I can't contact Ren for help, and I can't leave this place for fear of what might happen to me in the grip of the unbridled stimuli that await me in the wilds of the city, then I'm really only left with one other option: curl up here and wait for the passage of time. So that's what I do.

  I wait. I go back over everything that happened to me last night up until the fateful moment in the parking lot, I examine the different courses of what did happen and also what could have happened had different choices been made.

  The questions that arise tickle at me, and I wonder what must have happened to me over the last several hours that I don't want myself to know about. How bad was last night?

  More importantly...how bad was I?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  No longer having the ability to fall asleep like normal people makes the daylight hours last forever. The wait is nearly unbearable as I do my best to keep myself sane until dusk arrives and brings with it a dampening of the stimuli lurking just outside the door.

  Once the sun finally settles behind the trees across the large yard and the shadows assert their dominance of the world, I feel brave enough to unwrap the old blanket from around my head.

  Fortunately with the fading light of dusk my vision stabilizes; I am now able to see perfectly around me and take in the surroundings that my memory had only hinted at.

  Unfortunately, one of my suspicions that had been creeping up on me for the past few hours is also proven true. What I had suspected was chocolate syrup covering me is most definitely not the cocoa-based treat I had hoped it would be. It is blood. A lot of blood. Covering almost every bit of my body. Although it had felt like chocolate at first touch, I had quickly realized that I couldn't smell anything like that through the old blanket. For there to be this much of a substance like that, I would definitely smell it.

  All I had been smelling over the past few hours was dirt, old engine parts, work grease and blood. A strong, enticing aroma of blood. I had tried to convince myself that it was just my imagination, but now that the blanket is no longer shielding my eyes and trapping my senses, the evidence is overwhelming: somebody died last night, and I was in the middle of it. From the co-mingling of different scents rising up from my clothing, I would guess quite a few different somebodies became deceased while in my presence last night.

  Well, that's disturbing, I think and pick at the remnants of my maroon-hued clothing. I certainly hadn't set out with that intention.

  Out of curiosity, I pull my shredded shirt up to my nose and inhale deeply pulling the scent into me and filtering what I can from what it tells me.

  That small patch of clothing alone has the blood of four different people on it. It's not a perfect recounting of what happened last night, but it's a start. Moving to a different patch of blood on my ripped pants leg, I repeat the process and once again categorize what it tells me. I do this again and again with different sections of my clothing until I stop registering new scents.

  Sitting back against the shed's wall, I process what I just learned: I have the blood of eighteen people on me. Eighteen individuals who I most likely killed.

  What did I do last night?

  Plus, those eighteen competing blood stains aren't the most disturbing thing I learned. Only fourteen of the blood sources were male. Four of them were distinctly female. Young females at that.

  Four girls died last night, too.

  Was I just
too late to save them, or was I responsible for their deaths? Pushing that horrible idea from my mind, I focus on a more uplifting alternative: maybe I did save them, and this blood is just a splash from some non-lethal wounds?

  That idea is certainly better than my original assumption.

  "So many questions," I mumble out loud to the empty toolshed. "I need Ren more than ever."

  Shaking my head in a futile attempt to clear the nagging thoughts tugging at me, I stand up and roll out my muscles in preparation for the long run back to the warehouse.

  "So let's get home to him, then, shall we?" I say and head over to the shed's clumsily barricaded door and quickly clear the debris. Apparently in my haste to rest last night, I had thrown a random pile of tools in front of it to prevent it from swinging back open on its own. Crude but effective.

  Without turning back to look at or bothering to clean up the mess I have left in the small shed that has provided me sanctuary, I leave a patch of blood-smeared ground and a wadded up blanket behind me. Those are now someone else's problem. I have somewhere I need to be.

  The evening's dusky shadows embrace me as I step out onto the wide open lawn, and I try my best to orient myself and find a direction.

  I don't recognize anything around me, but something deep in me pulls me to the right and I turn and begin jogging.

  East, I realize. I'm running east. Ok. Why not?

  The Darkness might not want me knowing what happened last night, but at least it can still help guide me home.

  As my light jog becomes a run and then increases into a sprint over the course of a couple miles, I realize that I have more energy than I've had in a long time. Whatever went down last night may have been awful, but at least it left me satiated and full of power. There's enough adrenaline flowing through me right now to keep me running like this for a few hours.

  As the first few street signs and landmarks become familiar, I realize that might be more helpful than I had anticipated. I'm farther out into the suburbs than I've ever been. I only recognize the names of the towns I pass from maps I've studied with Ren.

  What all did I do last night? I wonder again, and then hope that whatever the answer is it won’t haunt me forever.

  But it does. And there’s no coming back from it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ren stands up behind his wall of computers and faces me as I push open the large, rolling garage door of our warehouse. His voice is a mix of surprise, relief and a hint of something else. Something that seems out of place. It’s slight and hidden, but it prickles the back of my neck when I hear it.

  Then he steps away from his computers and waves me over and the flood of relief and happiness that exudes from his body overwhelms me. Whatever was there before is gone now, and really I don't have the patience to dig into it right now.

  Sliding the door down behind me and smiling at the quiet hiss of the hydraulics as they kick in and make the descent nearly silent, I step away and make my way over to his electronic nest.

  "I am, buddy," I tell him with a smile. "I am." Then after a short pause as I continue to stumble towards him, I say, "although I'm not exactly sure how."

  Ren meets me halfway across the cavernous space, and grabs my arm in his strong hands and guides me the rest of the way aiming for our black, leather reclining chair.

  "What do you mean?" He asks as we move slowly together across the gray cement. "You mean you don't know how you were able to survive another life-threatening series of events that should have killed you? I'm beginning to think you should just accept that as second nature by now."

  He stops talking as we walk, and the tone of his voice drops several levels before he continues. "Although last night was not good, Cat. What were you thinking? You know I'll always support you, or at least try to, but what you did..." His voice trails off and he just shakes his head.

  The relief I had sensed in him earlier fades a bit as a flurry of new emotions surface and vie for attention. Fear, horror and anger are among the strongest, and that combination bothers me. On many levels.

  As Ren eases me into the comforts of my chair, I finally get up the nerve to ask the question I've been dreading. "What did I do last night, Ren?" I ask while doing my best to keep my voice from quavering. My voice hasn't had a reason to quaver in over a year, but his reaction to whatever happened coupled with my inability to remember any of it is really disturbing me. "I meant what I said a moment ago. I honestly don't know how I survived. For the first time since all this started happening to me, I have a blank spot in my memory. I'm not used to that."

  Pulling over his ergonomically-designed office chair next to me and sitting down in it, Ren stares at my face for almost a minute before replying. I watch his guarded expression as he stares at me, and for the first time since I've known him I have trouble reading his thoughts. He has calmed down considerably since my arrival a few minutes ago, and with that calmness his emotions have also settled. He breathes and stares at me, and I watch as his eyes flicker over my body and take in my shredded blood-soaked clothes. Much like his computers, he is processing everything at once. And so quickly.

  When he does finally speak, it is slowly and with little intonation to his words. I can tell he is carefully crafting each phrase before mentally releasing it.

  "So you were there? At the parking lot. And you 'blacked out'? You remember nothing? Is that what you're saying?" He doesn't say anything more; he just waits for my reaction and response.

  I'm not sure what he's doing, but it certainly isn't putting me at ease.

  Refusing to meet his eyes and the unspoken accusation that I'm sure rests in them, I close my own eyes and lay back against the soft cushion of my chair.

  "Yes, I was there, Ren. Or at least I'm pretty sure I was there,” I tell him and then pause and consider what to say before continuing. “You are correct about how much I remember, though I wouldn't say I exactly 'blacked out'. I don’t know what happened to me, but I do know I have no clue what happened in that parking lot after I was shot."

  Without even opening my eyes, I can feel his stare. Something happened last night that has him disturbed, and I was in the middle of it. I really want to know what I did.

  "I got shot,” I say and push the conversation forward. “Point blank. I should be dead. I was ripped open by that gun, and I fell inside myself and gave up control. I did something bad. Or, at least, I think I did. The Darkness won't let me remember. It keeps blocking me every time I try to pull a memory up."

  "The Darkness," he repeats my words. "Is blocking you? Since when can it do that? Since when is the Darkness something that controls you instead of the other way around?"

  With that question I realize how much I've been holding back from my friend. My only friend and ally. I haven't been telling him what's happening in me for fear of how he'd react. For fear of what it meant about me. But I need to. I need to tell someone.

  "Since Leyna," I sigh and feel a weight lift from my soul as I tell him about the unspoken side of my existence. My quiet passenger that rides inside of me and waits for the most critical times to exert itself. And how I've become addicted to its help. How it’s been easier to let it do the dirty work instead of myself. The more I let it take control, the easier that passing of responsibility has become.

  After listening to me speak for several minutes, he lets the soft echoes of my voice fade around us before he speaks up. "And last night? The Darkness took over? And now it’s preventing you from accessing your own memory of the event? Is that right?"

  His skepticism hurts, but I can't deny its validity. He has a right to doubt me. What I'm saying sounds crazy. No, it is crazy. And I wouldn't believe it myself if I wasn't experiencing it firsthand.

  "Pretty much," I say, listening to how pitiful my own voice sounds. There is no strength to it. I'm beaten, and I don't even know what beat me. "When I felt those bullets rip through me, I offered myself up as sacrifice to the Darkness. If it would save me and get me through and
keep me alive, then I would let it do what it wanted."

  I heave a weighty sigh before continuing. "Well, it upheld its end of the bargain," I say and finally open my eyes to look at my accuser, or at least that is how it feels. But Ren's eyes are shut and his head is back against his chair gently resting against it. He's listening to me, but no longer watching me. "And I guess I did, too," I finally say.

  "I wish you would have told me about this, Cat," he says without opening his eyes or moving his head. “I really do. It might have changed things. Decisions were being made based on the information you were giving me."

  Shaking his head slightly, he finally opens his eyes and spins in his chair to face back towards his wall of computers. "But we can't change that now. We'll just have to live with the consequences, I guess. Maybe everyone is different, huh?"

  "What?" I ask him. "What are you talking about? What decisions? What consequences?" I know it’s been a confusing night so far, but even without that confusion his words wouldn't be making sense.

  "So you have no idea what happened after you got shot? Is that right?" He asks without reacting to my questions. "Then I have some bad news for you, my dear. There's a very good reason your darker side doesn't want you keeping tabs on what it was up to while you were 'out'. Come on over," he tells me and waves towards me with his left hand.

  "And grab a chair," he tells me in a somber voice. "And maybe your stomach. This will be tough to watch."

  As I sit down next to him in one of our spare chairs, he brings up a video feed that I recognize. It is from the small camera that he had mounted in the mask. It's what allows him to know what is going on at all times while I'm in the field. We've used the playback a few times to study what went wrong during confrontations in the past so that I can improve and avoid future complications.

  As the video plays, I see my view of the two armed men in the parking lot as I'm standing behind my bike, and then Ren's voice kicks in over the feed, "Three," he says. "Two...One," and I realize I am watching him get ready to send the audio feedback that gave me time to pull my guns.