“We’ve been hit!” Robert yelled back as he tried to regain control of the ambulance.
But it was too late. Landscape rushed at him faster than his mind could comprehend. The needled boughs of an immense pine tree loomed just a few hundred feet ahead.
Without a second to spare, he jerked the steering wheel of his ambulance to the left, barely avoiding a head-on collision into the trunk of the pine. Instead, the passenger side bumper met with the trunk and exploded against it. Wood splintered as the tree sagged and drooped, dangerously canopying the ambulance.
Beneath its bowed trunk and the covering of innumerable green spines and barbs, the front half of the ambulance was buried. He found himself pinned beneath a mangled mess of metal. His right leg, in particular, was trapped below a collapsed and crumpled dashboard.
Dazed and dizzied, he touched his fingertips lightly against his forehead and immediately inspected them. Wet and bright red, his hand revealed a bleeding wound in the vicinity of his hairline. He had been slammed headlong into the steering wheel. His head had also ricocheted off of the safety glass of the driver’s side window. Had he not employed his seatbelt, he would have certainly gone straight through the windshield.
Pain radiated from his pinioned right leg. But he was too thankful to be alive to focus on the pain. Immense gratitude for his life was abruptly interrupted however, as something in his peripheral vision caught his attention.
He turned his head, slowly, to the left to look out the driver’s side window of his ambulance. To his surprise, the black van that had sideswiped him drawing the accident had pulled off the road parallel to his rig but just slightly farther down the road. More curiously, there was activity at the rear of the instigating vehicle. He lowered the window to get a clearer view.
Not taking his eyes off the mysterious and perplexing van, he called to his partner Joe.
“Joe! You all right back there?”
Robert waited for an answer.
“Hey Joe, this is not the time to mess around! Something’s going on here. I’m not sure what,” Robert mumbled more to himself. “Hey, you okay?”
When Joe did not respond, Robert attempted to turn in his seat but was immediately met with a blistering ache that smarted and throbbed, white hot and intense. He was forced to train his gaze to the rear-view mirror. When he did, he saw that his partner was slumped over their patient, motionless.
“Joe!” Robert called out, emotion cracking his voice.
With his leg wedged beneath the battered control panel of the ambulance, Robert was incapable of helping his partner, his friend. Helplessness was an alien feeling to him. His life had been shaped by helping others, his career precipitated as a result of his unique ability to act and react wisely and swiftly when others could not.
Despite his knowledge and training, he sat, unable to attend to Joe, or free himself, and in need of help. Exasperated by his predicament, Robert gripped his head in his hands and gently squeezed his temples before raking his fingers through his thick, brown hair. Movement around the black van distracted his frustration at once, however.
The rear doors of the van swung open and out of the back, two figures emerged. Though obscured by hammering, wind-driven rain, Robert was able to discern that the pair differed dramatically in size but were both decidedly male. The smaller of the two was bespectacled and gave the impression of instructing the larger, gesturing animatedly with his hands as his lips moved. The smaller man’s face was hardened, serious. The larger man moved immediately, as if on command.
Something about the nature of their interaction unnerved Robert though, and alarmed him. An indescribable feeling of terror settled upon him. He could not pinpoint exactly why. He was reluctant to take his eyes off of the man with the glasses and his apparent subordinate.
After several seconds of spirited signaling, the smaller man of the pair seemed to have impressed whatever point it was he sought to make. The more imposing of the duo began looking at the ambulance, at Robert.
As the larger man came toward him, Robert gasped as he realized it was hardly a man at all. Advancing was a creature more bizarre looking than the one on the gurney in the patient compartment of his ambulance. He nimbly moved toward Robert’s disabled vehicle. Robert was surprised by how agile the being was considering its lack of discernible facial features.
The closer it progressed, the more horrific the image became. Nearly transparent skin did little to sheathe the expansive, vivid entanglement of veins and capillary networks that webbed its malformed head. Lidless eyes shrouded in a thick, milky film darted from left to right, seemingly unfocused, searching. A defined nose was absent from its facial construct but two asymmetrical holes appeared to serve the purpose of nasal openings. Lips were also missing from the abomination, though a line gave the impression that a mouth may reside beyond it. Robert pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and rubbed vigorously. The logical voice in his brain dictated that what he was witnessing was a concussive effect, a hallucination. He had just been in a car accident. His memory of it was clear. He had hit his head more than once.
With his eyes still pressed shut, he reasoned that the horrifying image progressing in his direction must be a product of a trauma to his brain.
Slowly, he opened his eyes.
The blasphemous image was gone. Robert nearly laughed out loud, relieved. But relief was a luxury he could not afford himself as two men remained in the rear of the vehicle, one with mortal injuries, and his partner whose injuries had not yet been assessed. He breathed deeply to calm himself and formulate a plan of action. He needed to release himself from the tethering of the safety harness in order to unpin his leg enough to reach for the radio transponder and call for help. With the press of a button, another ambulance would be en route with the assistance of the police department and fire department. He just needed to free himself.
Suddenly, he saw that his partner’s Swiss Army Knife lay behind the passenger seat.
He twisted his torso rearward. Squirming and wriggling sent an intense flare of pain from his ankle that continued up his leg to his hip. The slightest movement had a similar impact. But the actions, no matter how excruciatingly painful, were necessary. He needed to get the Swiss Army Knife.
Deciding against prolonging the pain, he turned in one swift motion. A wail of agony sounded from him, a voice that belonged to him but sounded foreign to his ears, as he finally succeeded in rotating to the rear section of the ambulance. As he did so, he was met with a pair of cloudy black eyes.
The monstrously deformed atrocity was in the patient compartment of his vehicle. It appeared to be looking at him, though its filmy eyes refused to focus. The line of its mouth turned up at each corner revealing small, pointed, bud-like teeth. The creature’s expression became even more offensive, more hideous as it appeared to smile demonically at him. Dizzied by what resembled a six-foot fetus leering at him, Robert felt an inherent need to scream, to flee. But sound escaped his lips.
His mind struggled to process what his eyes beheld, the impossible arrangement of virtually absent features. With his heart knocking violently against his ribcage, Robert felt an innate fear the likes of which he had never felt before. His survival, the most primitive aspect of his humanity, took precedence over all else in the presence of the faceless man.
“No!” Robert heard himself screaming over and over again.
Seemingly unperturbed by Robert’s cries, the ungodly fiend calmly turned from him and busied himself in the rear of the rig.
With impossibly webbed fingers, the beast dexterously detached every line from the colossal patient. Then, effortlessly the faceless man tossed Joseph McCauley to the floor of the patient compartment. A sickly thud indicated that his partner had suffered grave injuries from the collision with the black van, and he was powerless to break his fall in any way.
The passenger side of the ambulance was puckered, the door a chaotic mess of contorted metal. Safety glass littered the seats. Robert
frantically surveyed his every escape option. They were limited at best for one whose leg was not pinned down by a mangled dashboard, nonexistent for one in his predicament.
Flooded with fright, he recognized that Death loomed on his doorstep quite literally. A faceless Grim Reaper, devoid of his razor-sharp sickle, stood armed with a countenance created in hell and waited to claim him and drag him into the fiery depths from which he came.
As his pulse thundered in his ears, Robert guessed that if the ghastly fiend were able to cast his partner aside with ease, as if he were as weighted as a ragdoll, then the creature must possess superior strength, supernatural even. His heart rate accelerated dangerously at his last thought.
His head began to spin as sheer panic muddled and confused any coherent thoughts from evolving within his brain. Robert did not want to die at the hands of the faceless freak. He needed to free himself, immediately.
Rain lashed against his face through his open window as a gust blew and volleyed fine, needle-like barbs of icy precipitation across the ambulance. The imploded passenger-side window created a perfect cross-breeze for the sleet. He felt its moisture but not the sting of its coldness. Fear and shock dominated such sensations. Survival instincts prevailed.
Without allowing the scream that desperately desired to be released from the depths of his being to escape, Robert struggled against the agonizing pain emanating from his trapped leg. He wrestled and thrashed against the destroyed dashboard that imprisoned his limb. An animalistic instinct urged him on, enabled him to ignore the unfathomable pain in his leg.
As Robert fought to free himself from the wrecked console, he felt compelled to keep his gaze trained on the miscreation in the patient compartment. He looked on with equal parts horror and astonishment at how adroit the webbed digits on each hand worked. Expertly and rapidly, the featureless monster had detached and detangled the multitude of electrodes, tubes and probes that functioned to keep the near-dead leviathan on the gurney alive. The faceless devil had unbuckled the patient and was attempting to lift him.
Robert’s mouth hung ajar as he gaped in wonderment. Though he and his partner, Joe, struggled to place their patient on the gurney and in the ambulance, the faceless abomination hoisted him up with ease and draped him across his malformed shoulder. His featureless face attempted a smile once again, this one more malevolent and hideous than the last, before turning and walking toward the black van.
The sight of the deformed being moving effortlessly across the street with the gargantuan patient slung diagonally across him, nearly dragging along the wet pavement, was illogical, bizarre.
The rational voice in his head argued against what he was seeing, what he had seen, that all of it had to be a nightmare, a delusion. Logic dictated that monsters did not roam the earth and abscond with arbitrary patients from ambulances. Therefore, none of what had transpired could be true. Such occurrences simply did not happen.
Certain that his visions were mere fallacies of an injured brain once again, he felt a brief sense of giddiness despite watching the creature disappear into the rear of the black van across the street.
He gripped his head in his hands and laughed aloud, a frantic, crazed sound. He was overwrought, strained beyond acceptable parameters. Yet oddly his stress was tinged with relief, his mind comforted by assurances that what he was seeing was an illusion. But instinct balked at rationale.
His respite ended abruptly when the creature reappeared. And he was not alone. The small man with the glasses accompanied him and gestured animatedly again. Only this time, he pointed to the ambulance, he pointed to Robert.
The creature nodded and the small man climbed into the driver’s seat of the black van. The abomination followed.
He saw the faceless man emerge from the concealment of the black van once again and advance. In his misshapen hand, he held a bottle with a rag dangling from its opening. The container held a liquid of some sort. Robert squinted, strained his eyes to discern its contents.
The featureless beast reached his other hand into his front pants pocket and retrieved a lighter. He pushed a crude-looking thumb to the lighter then pulled it back, rolling a metal flint wheel. A bright, yellow flame appeared.
He watched in horror as the faceless atrocity placed the flame to the rag dangling from the fluid-filled bottle before hurling it toward his rig. It spiraled through the air with laser-point precision, careened through his open window and shattered against the dashboard.
Robert released a sound from his body, a hoarse, primal scream of sorts before a bright light more radiant than a thousand suns, burst before his eyes. The light consumed him, blinded him temporarily with its magnificence, before his body became enveloped in flames. He experienced the purest of pain, unbearable, overwhelming pain, before the world fell silent and darkened forever.
Chapter 2
“One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it,” Melissa’s art teacher began. “At least that’s what the famous artist Vincent van Gogh was quoted as saying.”
Mr. Clancy, Melissa’s advanced placement art instructor was known for his dynamic lectures infused with passion and enthusiasm. His lessons were often laced with pithy quotations from artists, authors, politicians and religious leaders that were inspirational, motivating. Melissa did not find his current choice to be consistent with his usual selection.
Tall, dark and handsome and in his mid-thirties, Mr. Clancy was the object of just about all of his mostly female class’s affection. But his appearance had little to do with Melissa’s decision to switch to his section during the start of the January semester. She chose his class because he challenged his students, demanded nothing short of excellence from each student.
Mr. Clancy’s class, complete with lengthy assignments, projects and field trips was a brilliant distraction from the profound unhappiness she had felt during the months leading up to the switch.
“As you can see when examining van Gogh’s pieces like Starry Night Over the Rhone and Wheatfield with Crows, loneliness is evident. In Wheatfields, the sky appears angry; the landscape is vast and sad. The overall tone of the piece is one of extreme desolation, of solitude,” Mr. Clancy continued.
Typically, Melissa enjoyed her teacher’s interpretations of various pieces. His current lecture was touching upon a very exposed nerve, however, and beginning to upset her.
“In Starry Night Over the Rhone, we see distant, almost intangible heavens as the backdrop of the piece. Two lovers walk along clutching each other as lights in the distance are reflected off the water. To me, it is a haunting image, very melancholy, very forlorn,” he persisted.
Melissa felt immobilized by a kindred sense of understanding of the late Mr. Vincent van Gogh. His work echoed her sentiments: sadness, loneliness, despair. But her distant, intangible heavens were unlike his; they were neither stars nor the anticipation of a realm of paradise beyond Earth. It was Gabriel.
Gabriel James was the distant, intangible light she longed for. They had not been together long and many had considered her incessant pining ridiculous, unnecessary. But she could not change her feelings; she would if it were in her power to do so. She had fallen for him, hard and fast. And he seemed to share her feelings. He had been willing to die for her, had risked his life for her safety. She had always thought that love and devotion such as the kind he exampled was much like the Loch Ness monster in that everyone had heard of it, but no one had actually encountered it. Her feelings for him had developed just as unexpectedly as his arrival to Harbingers Falls.
Though sudden and confusing at times, their mutual affection was love; she was certain of it. Their love was rare, the subject of romantic films and novels. The fact that he was the product of altered genetic material by the deranged geneticist Dr. Franklin Terzini was an issue she had struggled with initially but overcame quickly. After all, he was not what he was created to be: an emotionless experiment sent to transform humanity. His physical perfection was
as much a success on his creator’s part as it was an attribute she enjoyed. Thankfully, he was much more than his exquisite appearance. Emotions had evolved in him, emotions he claimed she was responsible for awakening, and kindness transcended his looks. Each of his unique and magnificent qualities made accepting his absence that much harder. Their love story, the likes of which authors penned about and Hollywood producers sought scripts for, ended far too soon. Parting with Gabriel had felt more like a horror film.
Far away in an unknown corner of the planet, Gabriel sequestered himself just before Thanksgiving. Melissa had been left to either answer, or deflect innumerable questions surrounding his abrupt departure. But the countless inquiries had proved far easier to cope with by comparison. Her broken heart posed a greater challenge.
For weeks following Gabriel’s parting, Melissa had had no communication with him. The silence had been agonizing, unbearable. It brought about a rebuttal to the many philosophical quotations concerning silence Melissa had read about and subscribed to throughout her high school years, the beauty of it; the necessity of it. She found no solace in silence. It did not nourish her or refresh her. The beauty of nature was not revealed in silence. To the contrary, silence revealed the austerity of the world around her. The winter air felt colder. Barren trees had pierced navy skies with sharp and blackened branches more markedly. She had felt stripped; drained and depleted.
Winter had been a dark and dreary time for Melissa. Gabriel had gone. Her life felt empty, meaningless. She disappeared deeper into the obscurity of high school, vanished. When Gabriel finally did contact her and they began correspondence, it was at irregular intervals, unpredictable, unreliable. She alternated between feeling profoundly saddened by his absence and profoundly angered by it. She willed herself to stop caring, but could not; her heart failed to cooperate.
Like a great funeral shroud, sadness eclipsed Melissa’s life, enveloped her in darkness. Conversations with Gabriel were few and kept her hanging on, kept her from moving on.
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