Chapter 11

Beyond Measure

Ronald sat silently in the car, his expression vacant, his mind repeatedly playing out what they did just four hours ago. Well, what he did–all Ronald did was grab some thirty to thirty-five pieces of clothing and undergarments and run like hell. Ethan, on the other hand, took down four trained soldiers, managed to scoop up a lot of toiletries, and set the entire mart on fire–all so quickly that Ronald still didn't believe it.

Throughout their entire escape, Ronald merely listened to the sound of Ethan’s voice and his instructions–duck, sprint, wait, run, walk, prowl, go prone. Somehow, some way, they managed to get out, eventually hijacking two cars and driving the distance toward the nearest highway exit up the mountain alone, taking a third car from one of the many laying strewn on the street.

The radio in the car played some eighties rock, the windows both rolled down, wind whipping. Even now, Ronald's heart beat–it beat fast, strong, and deadly. He'd only now recalled that he was supposed to be a 'lookout'--and though he did very little in terms of doing things, he still went in–into the military-occupied building–and robbed them right under their noses.

“... you said you were a psychiatrist,” Ronald said as they began nearing the lodge and the end of their journey.

“I am,” Ethan replied. “I’d show you my credentials but we’d have to go back to the city. And I don’t think that’s a smart idea.”

“That wasn’t the work of a psychiatrist.”

“The fewer questions you ask, the better off you’ll be,” Ethan said, and though it didn’t come out in a harsh or even a warning tone, Ronald felt the chills. He was a spry, extravagant, blend-into-anyplace sort of a person. His natural, goofball attitude had a disarming property, something he picked up back when he was a kid to deal with the bullies. But none of that mattered, not here anyway. For the first time in years, he let go of the rancid breath within him.

“Tara was right, that night,” Ronald said. “You are a creep.”

“Wow, that was really uncalled for.”

"When I was growing up," Ronald said. "There was this Russian grandma that lived like two houses down from me. One time, when the local spit-of-a-mother bully was chasing me, she helped and hid me. While there, I ate so much sugar I got sick, so she sat me down in front of a TV and played me some Russian cartoons while she called my mom to come pick me up. I couldn't understand shit, of course, but there was this one character that I instantly fell in love with. He was slick, cool, a chick on each arm, taking no nonsense from anyone."

“And I remind you of that dude?”

“In another universe, maybe,” Ethan chuckled at the remark. “But you two are similar in one way: I really wish I could be more like either of you.”

“... yeah, but being the coolest is a burden.”

“Wow, your patients must have despised your guts.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Ethan said, slowing down the car as they were less than five minutes away from the lodge. “You’re a shadow, Ronald. You have the makings of a dependent personality disorder but you still hold onto just enough individuality to push it down. That’s why you defer to Tara, despite being her senior. You felt comfortable, probably even lucky, that she took charge. You don’t want to be like me, because that would mean facing the fact you never tried being ‘the guy’ not because of some lame excuse that you give yourself, but because it terrified you. The possibility that no matter how hard you try, you’d never quite make it.”

“...”

"You're still a kid," Ethan added somewhat softly. "And even if you weren't, people's emotions, thoughts, desires, and all their ticks are in constant flux. We are ever-changing and ever-adapting. So, stop saying that you want to be like me. Observe me, mimic me, and from there, figure out your own style. Just do it on your own time. I used to get paid two-hundred-and-fifty per hour for this kind of crap, you know?"

“Right.” Ronald nodded absentmindedly.

“Alright. Grab the clothes, I’ll grab the rest. Don’t mention anything about the gun. I don’t want there to be the remotest chance Layla might fancy a stupid idea.”

“What do I tell Tara when she asks how it went?”

“What do you mean?”

“Should I just say we grabbed stuff and ran, or…?”

“You know what you should tell her?”

“Oh no, here it comes.”

"Tell her I jumped above the mart, started pissing on it and, halfway through, my piss became fire, like in that movie, you know? The one with the burnin' skull and Cage goin' nuts?"

“Ghost Rider?”

"That's the one. Right, my piss burnt down the mart, and the only thing that the fire didn't get was the clothes we got and the toothpaste and soaps and shampoos and other miscellaneous shit."

“... why do I even bother?”

“I don’t know.”

Ethan stopped the car some thirty feet from the lodge where Tara and Layla were waiting. Ronald came out first and went to the back as Ethan stepped out and walked up to the confused girls whose first question was quite obvious.

“Whose car is this?” Tara asked.

“Mine broke down and a generous man lent me his spare,” Ethan said, eyeballing Tara. The latter merely shrugged, playing along.

“What a nice man.”

“He really was.”

“If only the world was full of them.”

“Don’t push it. Ey, kiddo. You missed me?” Ethan grabbed Layla and lifted her up as the girl nuzzled herself quickly into his chest.

“The most,” the young girl mumbled.

"Well, that's impossible. No way you missed me more than I missed you."

“I did so!”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Ah-uh!”

While Tara watched the two strange siblings engage in their odd little dynamic, she wondered just who Ethan was, in truth. There was a lot to the man, she realised. Some she could see, and some that were still hidden from her. If one observed him in isolation, he was simply a doting brother who spoiled his younger sister rotten. But that same man killed another in cold blood without flinching and seemed generally unperturbed by anything.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

She went over to the new car and helped Ronald unload all the things they managed to bring. It wasn’t as much as she thought, but there was a likely story behind it, and while Ethan took Layla on a walk, Ronald relayed everything that happened, and precisely why they didn’t bring as much as they had hoped.

“So, he must have been military at some point,” Tara concluded by the end with a frown.

“I dunno,” Ronald shrugged, taking a sip of beer. The two had retired into the lodge, sitting on the couches, with Tara sipping some orange juice and Ronald beer. “But I’m telling you–it was like the kind of shit you see in the movies. Like, like Tom Cruise kinda shit.”

“But he’s only thirty-two,” Tara said, her frown deepening. “Would he even have the time to get a degree in psychiatry in addition to living out a lustrous military career?”

“We could always ask him.”

“He’ll give us a non-starter as an answer,” Tara said. “He always does that when he doesn’t want to lie. Or, well, he’ll lie outright.”

“... don’t go digging, Tara,” Ronald warned. “He may be a charmer, but he’ll shove a knife through your throat without hesitation.”

“I know that,” she scoffed. “I don’t want to dig. But we’ve effectively enslaved ourselves to this man. Don’t we have the right to know at least parts of the truth?”

“What truth?” Ronald quizzed.

“Oh, come on! Don’t act so dumb!” Tara exclaimed. “He knew that the alien thing would come! Nobody just up and leaves the city two days prior to mankind's greatest catastrophe with a truckful of supplies to last months by sheer coincidence. And he knew how to access the magic!”

“...”

“Are you really that terrified of asking?”

“You haven’t seen what I did, Tara.”

“What? Your little action movie? Fuck that. I saw him kill Rick in the blink of an eye and then move on as though nothing happened. I know well enough that he’s a monster. But now, so are we.”

“Are you, really?” Tara yelped out in horror as Ronald’s face turned white; both swiftly looked to the kitchen where they saw Ethan casually chopping something. “You are quite tame for monsters, then.”

“E-Ethan…” Tara mumbled. “W-when… when did you get in here?”

“Oh, just now. But don’t worry–I could hear you from well outside,” he chuckled gently. “So I’m all caught up with this interesting discussion. Well, go on. You know that I’m a monster and you feel like you deserve the answers. Is there anything more you’d like to add?”

“... n-no…” Tara stuttered.

“What about you, kiss-ass?”

“... no,” Ronald replied, though seeming far less terrified than Tara.

“There once was a man whose solitary job was to receive dead bodies of clearly fit women in their late teens to early twenties and find out why they died. Coincidentally, a vast majority of those deaths were ruled as suicides. Tragic, but it happens. Especially recently. Young people are overwhelmed, besieged by the responsibilities they never signed up for, destined for a fucked up world they had no hand in making, and depressed to all hell and back. So, they end their suffering.

"But it was still strange. All the girls coming to this man were beautiful. Gorgeous. The kind you would see on the walkways, given the right luck. And they all seemed to die from a drug overdose or alcohol poisoning. Every last one of them. There's cosmic coincidence in some things, but people push it. Twice, thrice, this happening would be strange but believable. But eighteen cases? It turned out that the man was doing something called 'laundering deaths'--most of them were accidental. A wrong sort of push during a fight, too high of drug dosage in the drink, your standard-set creep behaviour where a creep had a lot of money to make it go away. But none of them were suicides. Tell me, who are the monsters in that story? Just the creeps who murdered? Everyone involved in covering it up? Or no one 'cause the girls should have known better?"

“... everyone.” Tara said.

"And that's why you don't deserve the truth," Ethan came out with a plate of sliced apples and set it down on the table as he sat on Tara's couch. "You are still ingrained with idealism, this black-and-white sense of right and wrong. It's on the tip of your tongue–this sort of righteous, almost Biblical anger. You think you'll eventually have the tools to fix it, and that you will be able to reason with others."

“So, it’s the girls’ fault?” Tara spoke nearly through her teeth at that point, causing Ethan to sight gently.

"I have a baby sister," Ethan said. "One I adore more than anything else in the world. Do you really think of me as someone who'd think that?"

“...”

“What I’m getting at,” he said, grabbing a slice. “Is that you can’t categorise the world into monsters and heroes and victims. That’s not how it works. Especially now. Ronald told you what I did at the mart, did he not? Don’t I come off as a monster in that story? I gunned down what were likely just innocent soldiers doing their jobs, set a mart on fire that had quite a few extra supplies that some people might have needed, and I will likely do something like that again in the future. I spent my entire life trying to help people, trying to fix them, and in the course of that I’ve learned that everyone is something different in another story.

“I had this teenage girl as a patient–she was overweight, struggling with her image, bordering depression. She was bullied, and that bullying led to binge eating, which led to more weight gain, and more bullying. A vicious, though familiar, cycle. Within the first session, I realised that most of her issues stemmed from her mother and their relationship. Her mom used to pimp her out at beauty pageants, but as the girl started gaining weight, that went to shitter. So, come hither image issues–I recall her telling me that her mom used to call her fat when she was nine years old. So, after a few sessions, and after it became evident that the girl’s home life was the contributing factor to her mental state, I called CPS. They did their investigation and the girl was eventually moved to live with her father. In that girl’s story, I was a hero–she told me as much. But to her mother, I was a monster who ripped her away from her baby. She told me as much.”

“...”

“But I was neither,” Ethan added. “I was just a guy doing my job. And especially now, with the world about to completely redo its law and order with the advent of magic, everything will change. You can’t dream of being a saviour, Tara. You can’t think that if only you get stronger, you will be able to fix things. The world can’t be fixed–not in that way, anyway.”

“In what way can it be fixed, then?” she asked, seemingly having calmed down quite a bit. “By locking ourselves up in the mountains and pretending everything’s great?”

“Man, you were holding that one back, eh?” Ethan chuckled lightly before responding. “It’s actually quite simple: become a godlike being nobody can say no to.”

“H-huh?”

"If you want to build the world you think would be perfect, just beat the ever-living shit out of everyone who tells you otherwise. But to do that, you'll need strength. Far, far, far, far more strength than any one individual person can have. You'll need an army."

“... and that’s what you’ll be doing,” Tara exclaimed softly in realisation. “Is that why you picked us up that night?”

“Truth be told, you were supposed to be a trial run to see if I had the chops for it,” Ethan shrugged. “But I’m growing fond of you two shitters. You have a kiss-ass over here who fancies himself a chameleon and thinks he can navigate any social situation if he only puts on the stupidest grin known to man, and then there’s you, a motherload of wearing your heart on your sleeves. You are deeply angry, Tara, and while that anger can be a form of consummate fuel pushing you forward, it will inevitably eat you up and spit you into a meat grinder. You’re both kids–if the world was right, you would have had your twenties to figure out who you were and how to coexist with every other monkey flaunting themselves to the world. But that luxury is gone. So, let me be your teacher.”

“Let me guess–you want us to become emotionally detached from things, like you?” Tara pushed. “Just divorce ourselves from it all?”

“Girl, imma kick you in the balls,” Ethan said. “Could you stop shoving words into my mouth?”

“...”

“When in the heaven’s fuck did I ever say you ought to become ‘emotionally detached from crap’ or whatever? And if you say you inferred it, stop inferring things from what I say. There’s no hidden meaning in my words. This isn’t a therapy session where I’m trying to guide you to self-reflection. I’m telling you outright: stop treating everything as a case of emotional injustice. People will die. They will commit acts worthy of execution. Shit, you’ll probably start doing it too, if you want to live.

"So, cool it with this righteous anger born of some high-moralist boner you have. You ain't a saviour, you ain't some gospel of love and justice, you're just a kid who thinks she's better than everyone else. Newsflash: you're not. Shit, now I'm pissed off. You know how much it takes for me to get pissed off? Damn, you're talented. Maybe I should have scooped up some meds for high blood pressure," Ethan continued to mumble as he got up off the couch and walked toward the lodge's doors. "No wonder every old fart used to hate me when I was a kid. Shit, I musta been fuckin' insufferable…"

“... good going,” Ronald said.

"Shut up," Tara replied, taking a slice of apple, her frown mellowing out as she leaned back into the couch. She hated it–how easily he read her. It was as though he had a direct feed of her thoughts and could tap into it any time he wanted. It was infuriating… but, parts of her felt almost jubilant. He understood her–he disparaged everything she was, yes, but he correctly identified what that everything was, unlike everyone else in her life. Though he said that there was no hidden meaning in his words, that was likely just a cover to steer Ronald away from the simple truth–Tara was no moralist, that much she knew. She never had been. He realised that but never said it. While putting her on blast, he also protected her.

She sighed and closed her eyes. Perhaps, of all the psychotic jackals she could have ended up under, Ethan was the least evil of them all. She let her thoughts take her on a journey down memory lane for a little while, escaping the reality of her new life. She was now a soldier, and her life would never be as it was before. But in some ways, she felt, it was much better that way.