The first hint of his consciousness returning was a screaming pain in the left side of his head and a numb feeling on his cheek.
Slowly he began to remember how he'd gotten in his situation, what had happened to him. The events leading up to the present were blurry at first but gradually became clear as he woke up and began to think clearly again. The memory of his face getting smacked with something heavy, a large, metallic weapon of some sort.
And the pain, well that was returning, too.
The light that flooded in was bright, white. His vision blurred, but as it came back into focus, the bright lights became clear and he saw them. The lights were artificial and seemed to be electrically powered. Michael wondered how that could be seeing as the power had gone out.
He blinked, his eyes watering from the pain of his injury as well as from the light, and looked around at where he was. It was all too bright, and very uncomfortable. He was on an old tiled floor, somewhere. It was hard and his neck and back ached in a slow, cold way that contrasted in a perfect way with the sharp, hot pain in his head.
"Urgh." He groaned helplessly, trying to get his memory to work. To work out why he was on a tiled floor in this place and what the fuck he'd just gone through. The room he was in seemed familiar but he wasn't quite able to make it out yet.
Slowly, his memory was starting to return, like it was trickling in through a small gap in his brain, and the fog was lifting as he began to piece it together. The memories came back in fragments and the first one was the intruder he'd had. It wasn't anything to worry about. She had run out of his home, that was it.
Then, the second piece came in and the memories of what he'd gone through started to form. The memories came flooding back and the puzzle pieces began to fall into place. He had chased the woman and found her with a companion in the local school. And then...he remembered.
Michael blinked, trying to adjust to the bright light, and he tried to see what he was surrounded with, what he was seeing.
There were walls and floor around him and some type of light. He tried to think, and he realised that there was something wrong here, but what? What was it that had happened that had led to this situation? He tried to remember more.
He was in somewhere he hadn't been for years. Locker room? The boys locker room at Drayton Secondary School. The smell of stale sweat, mouldy shoes, body odour and, more faintly, cheap cleaning fluids assaulted him. That was right, the memories were starting to come together and make sense.
"Ah fuck," he muttered to himself.
"Awake, then?"
He hadn't heard the voice that had spoken. He'd heard something else, something he didn't recognize. But he turned to look at the speaker. The speaker was standing over him.
He saw her for the first time. A tall woman with short-cropped, blonde hair and blue eyes. Her face, which was set with an expression of hard, unforgiving hardness, had a sharp nose that had a slightly upturned tip, and a chin with a small dimple on it. She was dressed all in black and, he saw as she moved and stepped closer to him, was wearing combat boots and black jeans.
"You were the one that broke into my house." He stated.
"Yeah."
"Who the fuck are you?" he asked her.
She paused a moment.
"I think the question should be 'what the fuck are you?'" she answered him back.
He blinked again.
"What do you mean, what am I?" Michael asked with complete incredulity. He moved as if to sit up, but two things dissuaded him. Firstly, he was still wobbly from the assault, and secondly, the blonde girl poked his chin with a metal bat as if to say, "Don't move."
He decided to follow that silent advice.
The woman sighed, rolling her eyes in an exasperated way that he remembered so well from when he was at school with girls. The kind of attitude they had that said you were just too stupid to understand what was really happening, or that you just couldn't understand the reality that you lived in.
Michael thought that he'd put that part of his life well behind him. But nope, it looked like this was it for him; this is where the next stage of his life would be spent. Trapped with three women that wanted him dead, apparently, in an empty locker room.
He decided he was done being nice and getting kicked around, even though his mind felt as though it had been smashed with a brick.
Michael spoke, a little louder and with some anger. "Why am I here? Who are you?"
"Come on, Sarah, he's obviously one of us," a new voice spoke up, coming from the far end of the locker room. He couldn't see where the voice came from, and he didn't trust the blonde he was in a staring contest with enough to look away. So he stayed silent.
He guessed the blonde was maybe twenty years old, and in other circumstances, Michael would have considered her hot. Other circumstances like she hadn't almost killed him already.
The blonde, who he guessed was called Sarah, replied to the other voice, "He might be human, Katie, but he's definitely not one of us."
"What does that even mean?!" He interjected.
They both ignored him.
"Is that a bad thing?" Katie's voice replied. It came from somewhere to his left and he decided to chance looking. His head didn't feel quite right when he tried, like his neck didn't have quite the right degree of mobility, and it felt like his head weighed more than normal.
When his head stopped moving, and the world had stopped swaying with it, Michael was staring into the face of another woman, a pretty, brunette woman who had the most angelic features of any girl he had ever met, even though they were all currently framed in an expression of deep worry. He figured that Katie must have been the one who had waited outside while Sarah had broken into his home.
She had an obviously curvy body and her clothes, the same as the blonde's, were black, tight and sported various weapons and gear. It seemed that Sarah was the only one of the two women with the metal baseball bat, though.
As Katie had walked over, Michael considered this an opportunity to try and talk to someone who didn't seem to want to introduce his brains to the outside world.
"I guess you two broke into my home this morning? Well, not you, the blonde did, but you waited outside."
"Yeah, we did."
"What the hell, Katie!" the blonde shouted, moving her hands from side to side and pointing in exasperation. "I thought we agreed that you wouldn't tell him anything!"
"We didn't though!" she shot back, "We never talked about that at all, you're the one that wants to be a dick."
Sarah stood still, a little slack jawed.
"You know," Michael started. He stopped as Sarah pointed her metal bat towards him and he was struck by just how heavy it looked.
"Shut up." She snapped.
"No." he said back to her, trying not to let his voice quiver.
"You'll do as your fucking told." The blonde snarled, moving closer, bat poised to swing. The end looked well worn.
Katie grabbed her by the shoulder.
"Sarah!" She said, the shock evident in her voice. "That's enough!"
"Whatever," Sarah muttered as she moved to lean on one of the locker bays that were stacked high in the long room, taking some of her weight off the metal baseball bat and trying not to let the hurt in her arm from swinging the bat earlier show in her posture.
It gave Michael some comfort to know that the crazy-eyed blonde with the equally-crazy temperament and baseball bat had given him some space, so he took the opportunity to sit himself up and pull himself so he was propped up by the locker opposite where Sarah was now standing. Not wanting to escalate things, he waited for one of the girls to speak. He figured that Katie was probably the same age as Sarah. Nineteen, maybe twenty.
He looked her up and down, subtly, trying to figure out anything he could about her without making it seem like he was staring at her. Which was quite difficult. The girl was gorgeous. And it was even harder not to look because, for whatever reason, her face seemed to glow. Not in an unnatural, horror-movie kind of way, more like she'd been photoshopped to be brighter than everyone and everything around her. He figured it was a trick of the light.
It was a lot of things that made Katie beautiful though, it was the shape of her eyes, the fullness of her lips, the way her eyebrows were so delicately shaped. Her long, brown hair that reached all the way down past her shoulders and framed her face in such a lovely, soft manner, giving her an aura of gentleness. Her brown eyes that looked like they had a lot to tell him. She had such a warm and inviting look on her face.
He shook the thoughts of how nice Katie looked from his mind.
Focus, Michael.
"What's going on here, then? You two," he pointed between Sarah and Katie. "broke into my house, tried to loot me, right?"
"Obviously." Sarah replied.
"Yes, we did." Katie replied, giving her friend a sharp glance that seemed to convey a sense of "You don't need to be a dick about this." But it seemed to go right over Sarah's head. Or she was just being an asshole on purpose. Katie continued, "We saw you raiding houses the other day, and we thought you might have some useful things." She sounded almost apologetic.
"But you didn't," continued the blonde, sarcastically.
"Sorry to disappoint," said Michael, equally sarcastically. "So you were following me?"
"Well," Katie responded, "Sarah was. Part of her changing makes things like that... a lot easier."
Sarah shot Katie an angry look and repeated the sentiment she'd had earlier, "We said we wouldn't tell him anything!"
Katie's shoulders slumped a little, "Sorry. I didn't mean to tell him anything. But we need to know who we're up against if we want to know how to deal with them. You said he might be a danger, and so I figured that maybe we can talk about things first before you do anything rash, like beating him to death. Besides, we might have things we can trade, and this can be resolved without bloodshed. Or it would have, had you not bashed him in the skull as soon as we got in the school." The words spilled out in an almost embarrassed manner. She wasn't meeting Sarah's eyes as she said it, which gave the whole thing an air of childlike apology, but he couldn't deny there was a truth in it, and Sarah knew it. Sarah rolled her eyes at the mention of Michael's head.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
"Whatever, let's get down to it." She snapped her fingers at him. "You, what are your abilities?"
"I'm not sure what you mean?" Michael said, completely honestly.
Sarah rolled her eyes, and Michael found himself involuntarily flinching at the bat even though it was down by Sarah's side.
"I'll rephrase, dumbass. You got the powers that we all got when the sky ripped apart, or did you miss the last three days?" Her words had an air of exasperation in them. Katie looked away, and it seemed like she'd rather be talking to Michael than have Sarah speaking to him like that, but there wasn't much she could do.
"The last few days have been pretty confusing," he admitted.
"You must know what abilities you've developed," said Sarah.
"Abilities?"
"Yes, the magic!" she exclaimed. She pointed to herself and her friend. "Katie here is some kind of holy warrior. Her body has changed and her mind, well that's not important."
Michael wondered why Sarah didn't say what Katie's mental change was.
Sarah continued, "And me, well..."
"What about you?" Michael asked.
Instead of saying anything more, the icy blonde opened the locker that was next to her, and stepped into the shadow that the door cast. To Michael's surprise, she seemed to merge with it, the shadows swallowing her whole.
"I can use shadows, in the right conditions," came the blonde's voice, now coming from inside the locker itself.
Michael's jaw fell slack, as the impossible image burned into his brain. She'd gone into a fucking shadow? Like that? What? The questions seemed to run on repeat, and Michael knew his brain had gone blank. If he strained, he could just about make out her silhouette, but only just, and it didn't seem to be very substantial or clear.
"Holy fuck," Michael whispered under his breath. His jaw went a little slacker still, before his mind came back and his face regained composure, a few more expletives following, although he kept those ones in his head. His mind felt blank, empty. What was he meant to think of what had happened, other than it being some kind of illusion or magic?
As Michael looked on with eyes that couldn't believe, the shadow that Sarah was seemed to change, it began to shrink back into the darkness that was her normal form and, in an instant, she had become human again.
The whole process took only a second and had Michael thinking he was crazy, but as soon as it finished and Sarah stepped out from inside of the locker again, he had to blink several times just to make sure what he was seeing was actually what he was seeing.
"It's more impressive at night," Sarah continued as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and Michael noted that Sarah was deliberately putting on a tone like she wasn't trying to impress, but Michael could see the tell-tale signs of pride on the girl's face as she stepped back from the lockers.
Nonetheless, MIchael stared dumbfounded for a few seconds. He couldn't believe what he was seeing, couldn't even comprehend the possibility that what he saw could have happened.
"That's impossible." He finally said after a while, his voice low and incredulous.
"We have our powers and you have yours," Sarah said. "You'd best just show us what they are."
Michael nodded slowly. "Uh, I really don't know." He thought back, and wondered whether he could claim the weird black hand that threw the dead body of Mrs. O'Brien across her kitchen yesterday as a superpower. He wasn't sure that was even him. He debated telling the two girls about all of it, but wasn't sure whether he could trust them. The death-goddess, the monsters in the fissures in the Earth, the strange sounds that seemed to follow him. "Well, I hear voices..." he said without thinking.
The two girls stared at him for a few seconds, before one burst into sarcastic laughter.
"Oh my God!" said Sarah, "He's not only useless. He's insane as well." Katie just rolled her eyes at that.
"No," said Michael. "It's like they are calling out to me from the darkness." The girls continued staring, Katie a little softer now. She seemed a bit worried about what he was saying. Sarah continued looking like she was having the worst day of her life.
"Like what? The monsters that came through?" asked Katie.
"No, not really. They speak in some kind of language. And sometimes, they speak to me and I get it."
"You speak their language?" Katie said. "Or, you know, understand it?"
Michael nodded. "They've said words I can understand, a few of them, yeah. But they have been calling me, from somewhere, in some way, and I don't understand what it is. It feels... wrong. So I don't think about it too much"
Katie looked at him quizically. She didn't seem to know what to do, or where to look, she seemed more uncomfortable now than she had been earlier.
"What's going on? I'm so fucking confused."
"I don't have time for this." The blonde snapped and grabbed Michael, forcing him to stand by pressing her bat to his chest, but she did it gently.
"Wait, wait, I have no powers, no abilities. I got a visit from a strange woman, and I hear the voices, and -" He shut himself up, worried that the two girls were looking to beat him up again and leave him to the creatures outside.
"What strange woman?" asked Katie.
"Uh," he looked around. He wanted to run, to fight back. To stop this girl with the metal baseball bat from putting him back to sleep, or whatever it was she had in store. But she was standing in front of the door and there wasn't any other exit that he could see, other than the large, grimy window at the far end of the locker room that looked over the playing fields, but that would take him a good twenty seconds to reach. He could try and fight her, but Michael didn't fancy his chances. "On the first day. A deathly pale woman that I guess wasn't really a woman at all came to me along with the monsters... and then, and then," he struggled to remember the exact order of the events. "She then spoke to me through the television..."
He saw the look of exasperation on the face of Sarah as he mentioned the woman. He figured that he was in trouble. She'd probably heard the stories of the other women that the other survivors had told about how they'd seen her too.
"You are crazy, and that means you're dangerous." She muttered. Her bat pressed harder against him.
"Sarah! That's enough." Katie yelled. She turned back to Michael. "Look, whatever your power is, you'd best tell us now or she might not let you leave this place."
"What do you mean, whatever power it is?" he asked.
She sighed. "I mean that there's no point lying. If you have some sort of magical power or a superhuman ability, we need to know about it." She looked like she wanted to add something to her words. But instead she stayed silent.
"I'm not lying," he protested, holding his arms out to the sides, in surrender, his back pressed against the lockers behind him, and the blonde in his face. "I'm telling the truth. There's nothing."
"That's bullshit," said Sarah. "There's no such thing as nothing in this world. Either you've got magic powers, or you haven't got any, and you just got the voices and the insanity. Which seeing as you look pretty sane to me, seems awfully suspicious, don't you think? So just admit to having magic. Everyone else has, it seems like. No need to lie about it."
The blonde, who was already starting to look a bit angry, was now starting to get really pissed. He could see her face start to flush.
Michael decided he needed to do something to placate her.
"What do you want from me?" He pleaded. "I'm not lying to you."
The girl glared at him, and it felt like he was going to have another bat-shaped concussion soon if he couldn't think of something quick.
He held up a hand as if to calm her. "Wait," he pleaded.
"Fuck waiting. What's it to be?" She snapped.
"I'll tell you everything," Michael blurted out. He'd told himself he wouldn't, that it'd just make her hit him again, but it seemed better to try and talk than get whacked around the head.
"OK," said Katie, tilting her head curiously, "Why don't you start from the beginning?"
Michael felt dizzy, which he put down to anxiety, but before he could begin, he was pre-empted by Sarah once again.
"Nah, I've decided his time's up..." she said, her voice dripping with disdain, as she brought her baseball bat down, intending to use the blunt end of her weapon as a bludgeon on the helpless, unarmed and unarmored man who was pressed up against a wall and clearly couldn't move out of the way.
Michael closed his eyes and tried to move but the locker he was against prevented that. There was a sound like the universe breaking and snapping in reverse.
And he opened his eyes again and looked up to see her staring at him with wide-eyed surprise.
Sarah was standing still, the baseball bat stuck in mid-swing, the blonde girl's eyes locked onto it. He followed her gaze, his head swivelling around.
The end of her bat had a hand wrapped around it, a black hand that looked like it had been cut out of some sort of gaseous oil, glistening with an inky sheen, but also seemed to be as hard as iron, as the bat had stopped dead, no sign that the girl had managed to force her bat through its grip.
The hand was connected to a shadowy, featureless arm which dissipated into a black cloud halfway along it. Michael looked at the hand, looked back to Sarah, looked to Katie who had both of her hands over her mouth. Then, as he stared back at Sarah and the bat in the strange black hand's grip, the arm that was wrapped around it started to pull, to bend, and the bat, much to Michael's shock, bent along with it. The bat bent to almost a ninety degree angle. Michael saw the strain in the metal as it groaned.
There was a sudden sound of cracking as the bat was broken, and Sarah, not knowing how to react, simply let go. She let out an involuntary squeal as her bat broke and then she started swearing, but it came out as more of a squeak than anything.
Michael just watched the whole scene with fascination as Sarah stared dumbly, watching the arm hold up its bat. It looked for a moment, to him, like it had done what it wanted to do, and that the strange black hand would vanish, like the thing that had attacked Mrs O'Brien had done.
It remained there for a while longer, looking like some sort of magician's prop that someone had forgotten to activate, before evaporating into nothingness.
"Fuck!" said Sarah. She was obviously shocked, but Michael saw her mental shield come back online as her face quickly regained composure. She glared a dagger at him and picked up her now ruined baseball bat, and then threw it, as if she had just noticed that it was completely ruined.
"Uh," Katie spoke. "That was something... different."
"I fucking told you he had something!" snapped Sarah. Michael saw the glare in her eye, but this time it seemed more of an impressed, surprised look rather than an angry or spiteful one. It seemed like the fact he could summon some kind of black magic hand had piqued her curiosity more than her rage.
"What did I just see?" she said, turning her attention from Katie to him, a strange smile creeping onto her lips.
"I'm... not really sure, actually."
The two girls exchanged glances. Michael couldn't figure out how to read either of them. Katie's expression looked more worried, whilst Sarah had an air of... not acceptance, more of curiosity, mixed in with that strange, impressed smile. They were both obviously taken aback by his abilities.
"I told you," he said. "I don't have any powers... that wasn't me doing that to your baseball bat..." Michael tried to keep the slight edge of guilt out of his voice, but he couldn't quite manage it, as the words came out in an almost whimper.
He knew he had done that. Whatever the thing had been, it came out of him, somehow, or had something to do with him. It wasn't just a coincidence. But how could he explain it?
"It doesn't look like it, to me." said the blonde.
"I don't really understand how you did that." Katie admitted, with a sigh, her hands still held over her mouth in disbelief.
"Uh... well... neither do I." He looked away and tried to gather his thoughts, not quite believing that this was his reality now.
"So, what, it was some sort of instinct? An automatic defence?"
"Yeah, that was probably what it was." said Michael, latching onto her words with relief.
"I thought I was the one that could use shadows, but I don't know what the hell that was," Sarah muttered. Michael heard the impressed tone of her voice, but it was laced with jealousy, which seemed like a dangerous combination to Michael.
"You really had no control of that?"
"I swear," Michael admitted.
Michael was sure she wouldn't accept that. But it was the truth. Sort of.
The two beauties stood for a moment before Sarah said, "We should kick him out. I don't like this at all Katie." As much as Michael resented the sentiment, there was an honesty in her voice now that he could tell wasn't a front. She was scared.
"Sarah, we can't do that," Katie said. She gave Michael an appraising glance. He felt naked. He looked at Katie's angelic face, and he wondered what was going through her head right then. She'd seemed pretty determined before, and it was obvious that the girls were not friends with him, but were instead simply in the same location and sharing an interest. They were scared and alone and didn't trust him.
"What are we supposed to do?" said the blonde girl. "We can't just take him on with us! He doesn't know how to use whatever the fuck it was he used on my bat! What if he kills us?"
"Look, it's pretty obvious you don't want to take me anywhere," he said to Katie. "And you know what? That's fine with me, honestly."
"What the fuck?" she replied.
Michael held up his hands in a gesture of defeat.
"It's obvious you both want nothing to do with me. So let me leave and you never need see me again. I have somewhere I need to be anyway."
She scoffed. "Really? It's the end of the world and you've got somewhere to be... you've got to be kidding me."
"Well, believe me if you like, or don't," Michael said, "But the death goddess lady," he continued, thinking he needed a better name for her, "She told me I had to go and find some kind of tower."
Michael was shocked when suddenly Katie gasped and took a step back. Sarah just stared, her expression somewhere between annoyed and exasperated. The two women had clearly reacted in very different ways to that information.
"Some kind of what?" said the brunette angel.
"Katie, it's just another reason to get rid of this crazy, creepy fucker." Sarah said, still staring Michael down. She sounded to him like she was trying to convince herself as much as the brunette.
Katie said nothing, but Michael could tell by the look in her eye that they knew something about the Tower the death-goddess had sent him visions of.
After a few moments that seemed to stretch on far too long, Katie said, ever so softly yet with deliberation in her voice...
"Michael, it's time you met someone. We have another person here that is going to be interested in talking with you."
And then she turned on her heels, motioning for him to follow.