“What the fuck is going on…” I muttered under my breath, mostly to myself. “I wish I knew.” Randy replied. Randy was 6’2” about 190 pounds, with deep blue eyes. He had long brown hair with a pretty decent beard. He looked the part of a lumberjack. His fondness for the outdoors, matched with the red and black flannel shirt he wore, only reinforced that mental image. It contrasted with my black t-shirt from a local punk band and ripped jeans. He had about 30 pounds on me, but I was the same height as him, and had bright green eyes. James was the smallest of the three of us, only 5’9” and weighing 140 pounds, but he was the athletic one. He made up for his smaller stature by being the best sprinter in our little group, having ran track back in high school. We all attended the same college out in Dillon, Montana. Randy and I were on scholarships while the other took loans out to attend. Randy was from out-of-state, he was pretty vague on the details but we eventually found out he was from Utah, we all had bets on the city but he never let it slip which one.
We sat in silence for a good while, Randy and myself exhausted from our impromptu trail run, James was still unconscious. Randy changed the makeshift bandages on his arms after his wounds started bleeding through, sacrificing another t-shirt to get it done. After another 30 minutes I spoke up. “So… What do we do now?” I asked him.
Randy didn’t reply for a solid minute, and the silence hung in the air. “I- I don’t know, Ken; but we can’t move until James wakes up. If we get caught carrying him by Patrick or Tim… I don’t think we’ll get lucky enough to get away again.” he sighed, laying down on the rocky floor of the overhang, staring at the ceiling, “If this happened everywhere, and it turns people as crazy as them, the city won’t be safe at all.” I grunted in agreement. We were silent for a moment, I stared down at the creek, the water emitting a blue shimmer, my eyes followed it as it drifted and dispersed into the air, melding with the clear shimmer. As I watched it I noticed that the colorless shimmer also went into the water, the same with the dirt and sand around the creek, which in turn emitted a dusty brown color. The stone emitted the same dusty brown. I looked down at my hands, palms upward. The shimmer seemed to sink into my palms, but nothing was drifting off of them. Looking over at Randy I saw the same.
“Randy,” I asked him, “Do you see that shimmer over everything? Like air over hot asphalt?” He looked up at me, very confused. “Uh… No?” he said, “Did you sneak a hit before you hit that pipe?” I slowly shook my head. “You know I don’t like mixing stuff,” I replied, “isn’t as fun that way.” We both fell silent again. Randy was looking out into the trees, me watching the shimmer around us. I told him about the white space, about how the ‘void’ said I was granted sight, about the pain I felt after. “But when it said it, it sounded like MORE than just a word, it was like it was heavier?” I explained.
I could see the gears turning behind Randy’s eyes, seriously considering what I said. “If I wouldn’t have seen what happened, I’d think you were fucking with me,” he maintained, “I feel different, somehow, since it happened. Like a part of myself, deep deep down, is awake. It’s hard to describe. It’s almost like my arm fell asleep, but much more subtle, and all over.” I thought about it for a moment, doing a little bit of introspection, like going through my body with a fine-toothed comb. I could feel it too, almost exactly how he described it. It felt like a very gentle electrical shock, if there is such a thing as gentle electrocution. I looked over at him, taking my eyes off the randomly shifting waves drawing themselves into my skin. “I can feel that too, it reminds me of touching a 9-volt to my tongue, just a lot more subdued.” I told him, and he nodded in agreement. “Yeah that’s it,” he confirmed, “What does it mean though?”
“No clue. Maybe what you saw was a solar flare, and that's the radiation we feel?”
“If it was we’d have probably died of radiation poisoning by now. But that deer did look mutated, can that happen overnight?”
“Probably not, mutations from radiation happen over generations, not instantaneously. It’d take years for the effects of it to show up, if it didn’t just give it cancer and kill it.”
“Man, I think I skipped too much biology,” he muttered, “Well, I bet class will be cancelled on Monday.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. Not that i’d really feel like going after all of this shit.”
We both sighed, the humor bringing a little levity to the situation. Randy crawled over to his pack, pulling out one of his pre-rolled joints, sticking it into his mouth before patting his pockets. “Ah shit,” he sighed, looking over at me, “You got a light?” I looked down, reaching into my own pocket, and pulling out… Nothing. I looked over at him in apology, “Nope...I think I left yours back at the camp.” Randy muttered some obscenities, putting the joint back into the cigarette pack he got it from, sighing. He settled down at the opening of the overhang.
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I spent some time thinking about the events that happened, the more I thought about it, the more confused I was. What was I able to see? And why did we feel different? I closed my eyes, feeling that buzzing in my body. Different things give off different colors, which makes sense, I guess? Blue for water, brown for dirt and rock, red for fire. Each of them took in the clear shimmer, and let off their respective colors. Did it always work like that? Or did the explosion Randy mentioned change something. I mean, it had to have changed something, our friends didn’t try to chew our faces off before it, and Randy said they changed right after. They put off a black shimmer too, something that none of the three of us do, meaning they were different than we are, which would explain the whole face-eating thing, I guess? I remembered how the black energy surrounding Patrick condensed on his broken arm right before it snapped back into place. Not only that, instead of it coming from all over his body, it shifted to just the arm… Can I interact with my own? I felt a little silly, sitting cross-legged in a cave, staring intently at my open hand, trying to make the feeling in my body expand out onto my palm. It was subtle, but I could feel a slight shift. After a couple minutes of doing it, the buzzing in my palm was much more noticeable than that which spread throughout the rest of my body.
I took a deep breath, and began flexing the same mental muscle which moved and concentrated the feeling in my body, willing the feeling out into the air. The results were rather unimpressive. My palm did actually begin to shimmer a bit, but other than that, nothing happened. Once it was expelled from my hand, it dissipated into the air, melding with the clear energy that suffused the air. The buzzing inside my body also noticeably lessened afterwards too, but if I paid enough attention I could feel the density of the feeling returning, just very slowly. It didn’t make me tired, it just made me feel less. I repeated the same process again, noticing that it took slightly less time now that I knew how to shift it around. This time, instead of just pushing it out, I attempted to push it out and hold it above my hand.
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This was actually incredibly difficult compared to just pushing it out, or gathering it in my body. I guessed it was just because it wanted to diffuse into the air, and I was trying to prevent that, while also adding more to it. Once I had a noticeably denser blob of the stuff above my hand, I tried to shape it. I managed to turn it from a blob into a slightly rounder blob over a couple minutes, before my concentration flickered and I lost hold of it. I sighed in frustration, standing up to stretch after sitting in the same position for a while. I noticed I was a little mentally fatigued after keeping my focus locked into the task for a while.
Randy looked up from the creekbed. “I know, boring right?” He said, laughing a little. I shook my head, “It’s not that, I think I figured something out about that buzzing feeling.” I replied, “I managed to move it around and increase it in my hand a bit.”
I explained what I saw when I first encountered Patrick, how the dark energy around him seemed to condense and move locations.
“Sooo, like magic?” Randy asked, grinning at me.
“I mean, how else do you explain his arm snapping back, or the burst of color, or even our friends suddenly deciding we’d make a good entrée?” I countered, shaking my head. “Just try it for yourself. You can feel it condense, it takes a few minutes though. I’ll keep an eye out on the woods while you do it.” Randy chuckled as he scooted back into the crevice, sitting with his legs crossed and hand out, closing his eyes and concentrating.
While Randy set out to try and prove me wrong, I watched the shifting patterns of energy. I now knew that it wasn’t just in my head, I could interact with it, so calling it a shimmer just didn’t seem to fit. If it really was magic, then maybe it was mana? I was never really into the fantasy games growing up, but the description seemed to fit. Unlike a video game, I didn’t have a handy bar that told me how much I had. It also seemed like there was more than one type, and that different materials put off the different types of mana. My musings were interrupted by two things: firstly Randy shot up, cackling maniacally. “You’re right, Ken!” He exclaimed, “I felt it! I actually felt it!” The clamor of his excited shouting also made James stir. He let out a groan, struggling to sit up. Randy and I rushed over to his side, almosting running each other over in the process.
“James!” We exclaimed at the same time, interrupting each other, “Are you ok-” “Do you feel alright?!” James let out another pained groan, looking up at us blearily. When he noticed me, he was instantly awake “Woah, Ken, you’re alive! I thought you were a goner.” I laughed in response, “Damn James, I should be saying that about you, they carved you up like a turkey, huh?” I teased. He glanced down at his arms, wincing slightly. “Yeah, Tim needs to trim his nails. What happened while I was out?”
“Randy saved my ass. Knocked Patrick over the head with a tree branch, right before he took my nose off, and we booked it back here. Didn’t see Tim though.” I replied, glancing over at Randy. He was staring down at the ground, lost in thought.
“You okay Randy?” James asked. Randy looked up, remembering we were there. “Ah, yeah man. This is all kinda hitting me now. I mean, fuck, Tim and Patrick tried to kill us.”
We all fell silent, the gravity of the situation sinking in. I shuffled on my feet a little, unsure of what to say. It was James that spoke up first, “I bet it wasn’t just Tim and Pat, I bet a lot of people got the life sucked out of them. Like husks of the people they were.”
“Husk is a name for them if anything.” Randy stated, “I don’t like the idea of calling them people if we’re gonna have to fuck some of them up. Even if they were our friends, I don’t think they are any more.” He glanced at the sky, the sun halfway through it’s daily journey. “We should probably try to make it back to the car, think you can hike a bit, James?”
“Yeah I think I can pull it off, I don’t like the idea of sleeping out in the woods with those things.”
“Not to mention the mutant deer.” I added grimly.
“Yea- Wait, what mutant deer?”
“We thought it was a solar flare, and some radiation at first,” explained Randy, “ but Ken can see a sort of energy coming out of stuff, saw Patrick use it to fix the arm you broke. He thinks it’s mana like from a video game, which I’m inclined to agree with considering we aren’t bleeding from our eyes, or have extra arms.”
I explained my encounter in the white space, and the voice which granted me Sight. I then told them about the different colors the different materials emitted, and my observations watching Husk-Patrick fix his broken arm.
“Do you feel that sorta buzzing feeling in your body, James?” Randy inquired.
He closed his eyes for a moment then looked back at him. “Yeah I think so, it's really subtle though. If you guys didn’t feel it too I’d think it was my imagination.”
“I’m still not sure what we can do with it, honestly, it takes a while to get enough condensed to make a blob, let alone anything else.” I added.
Another half-hour was spent after catching James up on everything that happened. Randy changed James’ bandages for him again, since it was faster than him trying to accomplish it with one arm. I offered to carry James’ pack for him due to the injuries, which he graciously accepted, recognizing that we needed to be able to move faster due to the threat of our friends-turned-Husk in the woods around us. Not to mention any mutated animals that may exist in the area.
After a brief debate it was decided not to test our luck retrieving our tents and other supplies from our now abandoned campsite. We agreed that the material possessions weren’t worth the risk of running into Patrick or Tim. We ended up taking a longer way back to where we parked our van, well, Randy’s van. The hike was rather uneventful, we did not encounter Husk-Tim or Husk-Patrick, nor any mutated animals except for the birds we saw fluttering from tree to tree. Fortunately, they left us alone, probably preferring the plants as food.
The only thing out of the ordinary was the flora. Plants in the area seemed to triple in size overnight, large flowers bloomed on many of the plants in pretty much every color imaginable, each emitting a slightly unique shade of color. Even the trees we’re gigantic compared to before, some growing oversized fruits we caught glimpses of through the canopy as we hiked. It took us an extra hour due to our rounded path, James’ injuries, and navigating the underbrush. We made it to the van an hour before sunset, loaded up what remained of our gear, and piled in.
“Well, where to, boys? Back to campus?” inquired James, having called shotgun as we broke the tree-line.
“That doesn’t feel very safe, all things considered,” cautioned Randy as he cranked the car, the engine fortunately turning over and starting up without complaint, “We should all just crash at my place.” Randy lived by himself off campus, earning enough cash as a bartender at the only bar in town to rent out a studio.
“Sounds like a plan, you know how to get back from here or should I pull up my G...P…- Ah, Fuck!”, I hissed, “I left my phone back at the campsite… Does anyone have theirs?”
“Nope.”
“Nuh-uh.”
…
“Well fuck. Road-signs it is.” I groaned.