I awoke to a foggy consciousness, my senses hugging close to my proximity. At first I was aware only of my body, how my left leg throbbed and ached, and the itching pain in my scalp and the sting of sweat and blood in my eyes. My chest and face felt hot and tender from the heat of the blast, and my entire back and ribs were a network of agony.
Colors swam before my eyes with no discernable shapes, all black and grey and red and orange from the fires and aftershocks of explosion. All sounds bar the blood rushing through my ears were muffled by a droning ring that made everything else sound like I had cotton wool in my ears. I could hear screams, the sound of crashing cement and glass, tortured metal, and faintly make out the sound of the fires. There weren’t any sirens, though. The emergency services hadn’t had time to respond yet.
As I tried to clear and focus my senses, I also tried to piece together the last few minutes before the explosion had rocked the ground and leveled three buildings on the college campus.
I remembered noticing him crossing the quad. He’d stood out, because of his unnaturally red hair, and because he was pushing through the crowds of students that had just come out of class. It was then that a man pushed past me and murmured something into the lapel of his smart business jacket.
The Journalism major in me piqued, I pushed through the crowd after the man in the dark grey suit, trying to take in as many details as possible. His dark hair had been cropped short, and under the well-tailored but simple suit he was a well muscled and fit individual. It was then that I noticed the earpiece he wore. It was small, and skin colored, like the ones you see Secret Service people use in movies. It was clichéd enough to be laughable, were it not for what happened next.
I saw the red-haired man look across the quadrangle, and a ferocious scowl disfigured his features. I followed his gaze to see another man dressed in a less well-tailored brown suit also pushing through the crowd toward him. My ‘Suit’ also noticed the red-haired man’s reaction, and mumbled urgently into his lapel again.
“Oh-Two, you’ve been made. Stand down immediately, we do not want a situation with so many uninvolved bodies around. I repeat. Stand down; we don’t want any – Holy shit! “
His exclamation was directed at their quarry, who had just jumped 8 feet straight up, vaulting onto the railing of the second floor walkway of the chemistry wing, and swung onto the cement walkway. People literally fell back out of his way, a ring of empty space opening around him, surrounded by a ring of surprised, fearful voices around that.
My suit swore again and growled urgently into his lapel microphone, and what he said made me double-take to the balcony.
“Fuck! Oh-Five! Exercise extreme caution! Target is deemed a Beta-level thr-“
Once again, my ‘Suit’ cuts off as one of his men, in the group of people that had fallen over on the walkway reached under his left armpit and pulled out a black pistol. The Red-Haired man who could jump 8 feet straight up yelled, and lunged at the man, trying to grab the hand with the weapon. The gun discharged, a shot lancing into the ‘target’s’ left shoulder, and he screamed as something shot into his shoulder and his arm convulsed.
Now hundreds of students were running and screaming, and the other ‘Suits’ and one foolish journalist-to-be were struggling through the crowd to try and converge on the two wrestling on the balcony. I thought I saw a momentary flash of - well, it’s hard to describe…inverted light? Red shadow? – Between the two, and the man in the suit went limp. The red man stood up, and physically threw the gun at another man advancing on him before turning and running the other way.
“All units, man down. We are authorized to fire at will. Be aware that target is partially immune to shock-stunner rounds.”
I lost sight of the red-haired man momentarily as I followed the leader up a flight of stairs onto the walkway, and only just managed to catch sight of one of his comrades’ duck as the fugitive gestured towards him, and a nearby window exploded, and showered him in razor shards. The ‘Suit’ quickly regained his fee, and despite the cuts on his face aimed his pistol, and fired several shots at the fugitive. One hit him in the foot, and he fell badly, his leg convulsed in the same spasms as before.
The Fugitive hobbled to the nearest door, did something to the electronic lock, and labored through.
By that time, I was severely out of breath, my lungs laboring to pull in air. I was sweating extremely heavily, and the muscles in my legs felt like jelly. Unable to follow the athletic man in the smart suit, I leaned against the railing and panted. I’m sure the irony that my life was saved by me being out of shape would amuse my mother greatly, because I am sure, if I had kept up with the men chasing the Para human fugitive, I’d be as dead as so many other people that day.
It was about ten second later that the entire other end of the chemistry wing blossomed in an orange flower of fire and smoke.
It must have been either a divine hand, or the dumbest of luck that I was blown clear of the first explosion, and was far enough away that the others, which I was blissfully unconscious for, didn’t rain more than smoking pebbles on my prone, broken body.
The blast from the explosion that singed my chest and face sent me spinning and tumbling down the stairs, my left leg broke quite badly and my scalp split open when I hit my head.
When I came to, however, and my senses slowly pulled back the veils of shellshock, I realized how lightly I had gotten off. Many of my fellow students had been scorched by the heat of the explosions, or crushed by falling and flying masonry. The Quadrangle had been turned into a charnel house of broken masonry and crushed, charred bodies. The screams and moans of my surviving fellows, whom my own injuries prevented me from helping, still fill my nightmares today.
I don’t know if what I saw before I again passed out was true, and I can only hope it is not, but it still haunts me with the terrifying implications if it was.
As I sunk from shellshock to actual trauma shock, I thought I saw a figure struggle and clamber from the wreckage a good fifty feet away from me. His bloody form was covered in soot and grime, and I thought I could make out a multitude of scars that seemed to shift and whirl under his torn and shredded clothes, but still he managed to pull himself out of the debris. Under the soot and dust and grime, I saw a glimpse of singed red hair, and then, he looked straight at me. His eyes locked onto mine, and as I was held in his stare, I noticed the color of those eyes, as unnatural as his hair. The irises were bright red, like his dirty hair, and the pupils were yellow, like hot embers.
I only hope this last part of my ordeal that day was a hallucination because I shudder to think that the creature that destroyed the campus, the monster that locked that alien gaze on me is still alive and at large in our world. And if he is, I can only hope that those we count as heroes and protectors of the peace can stop him from repeating the catastrophe they failed to on February 11.
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