Lyle had to watch as Ezra was engulfed by one creature. He saw one of the Wormheads split open, blood and viscera pooling to the ground, followed by teeth tumbling down below from deeper within it, until some of them stuck to the new flaps. Grabbing onto the arm of Ezra and throwing him towards the darkness.
He was dead. He had to be. How couldn’t he be? He didn’t even make a sound when he got brutalised. Dead as can be. So then why was Lyle not disappearing down the stairs, but walking towards that inconspicuous door in hopes of finding something to help a corpse?
“Stupid. So stupid. You’re an idiot, Lyle, a damn idiot. How are you planning to recover a corpse? What for? You wanna fucking eat him? That would be the only fucking use for him now.” He talked to himself through gritted teeth, mind and body acting as opposites.
It was senseless. No matter how much he tried to rip himself away from it, his body forced him to look for something, anything, he could put together.
He quickly scoured the little janitor’s closet. Trash bags, a fire extinguisher, and a plethora of cleaning agents that had their names dully written on sticky notes, instinctively grabbing bleach and ammonia, looking at both of the gallon-jugs, then at the trash bags.
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The flour dust explosion Ezra used to get him out of the cafeteria was enormous in its power, so in Lyle’s mind, any other reactions in a similar vein could be just as ridiculous.
“Yeah, Lyle, store some chlorine gas in your handy trash bag. Great idea, you fucking brainiac. Geneva Convention? More like suggestion, am I right?” He berated himself further, stepping outside quickly. His chemical acquisitions happily sloshing around in their confinement, almost eager to be used.
As he stepped outside, some of the mucus left behind by the Wormhead caught the eye of Lyle. His mind always did this to him. The world around him could be cast aflame, smoke could tar his lungs, monsters manifest, and he still would be more interested in how things around him worked. What would happen if he mixed the mucus into one jug? Would it help? Make it worse? Most of the time he wouldn’t act towards finding it out, already preoccupied by the next thing that had caught his interest. It had blessed him with a surface knowledge of countless things. Things that had aided him in staying alive, and to that extent, he hoped that it could help him in saving Ezra, despite him insisting that he was dead, and would be running into his own death.
His father always told him one thing:
‘It takes a smart man to do great things, but a naïve one to do good things.’
Lyle always insisted that doing great is better than doing good. A logical conclusion to come to, was it not?
It was the first time it occurred to him that it was never about that. The first time in his life that Lyle really asked himself what kind of man he was.