Looking back, I could say that I would have died, or at least been shot, in that moment if it wasn't for one thing. Or rather, one being. Qwerty was there, and even as I screamed at the sight of Bobby being shot and slumping to the ground, the TONI was already up and reacting. His tiny body collided with the back of my head with enough force to shove it forward and down a bit, just as another bullet tore through the spot where my face had been an instant earlier.
Hitting the floor of the van, I grabbed Qwerty and painted both of us orange while we stayed down. Two more shots hit the van, but the people who had provided it for us had made sure it was armored. Still, it wasn't exactly fun to hear the shots slamming against the metal. Especially when I knew Bobby was on the ground right outside.
It was that thought that made me start to push myself up once more, a snarl of rage escaping me. I wasn't thinking about how dangerous it was. I wasn't thinking about a plan or about what else might be out there. The only thing on my mind was that the man across the parking lot had hurt Bobby. Maybe even killed him. Images of the blood blossoming on Bobby's shirt, of him slumping out of sight, of what his body might look like as it lay on the ground, all filled my head. It took away every coherent thought I had. The only thing on my mind in that moment was the fact that I was going to find that sniper and hurt him.
In the background, I could hear Paige’s voice. It was coming through my earbud as she connected to my phone, saying something about how she was pinned down in the store and wanting to know if we were hit. She sounded frantic, but I couldn't respond. My mouth wouldn't form the words.I was too far gone in my rage.
Instead, I shoved the driver's side door open and dropped out to the pavement before falling onto my side to look under the van. I was terrified about what I was about to see.
Bobby was there. He had pulled himself under the van for some sort of cover. He wasn't moving very much, his face looking pallid. Even as I looked that way, several quick bullets ricocheted off the ground near inches from where he had managed to pull himself. The van was covering him, but the sniper was still trying to get a shot underneath it. He was already down, and they were trying to follow up by killing him. They were actively trying to kill Bobby.
If I had been angry before, it was nothing compared to the blinding rage that flooded my mind in that moment. I wanted nothing more than to throw myself on top of that fucking sniper, rip the gun out of his hands, and beat him with it until he wasn't moving anymore. I had heard of seeing red from anger, of course. But this was one of my first experiences with that. I completely forgot about everything else. The only thing on my mind was making that son of a bitch pay for hurting and trying to kill Bobby.
To that end, I activated every bit of paint I had under my clothes. Purple, green, and orange, I was using all my enhancements across basically my entire body. Paige’s voice was still going off in my ear and I was saying something, but I wasn't even sure what. The words just came as I pushed myself up. Something about them hurting Bobby. Paige kept saying something, her voice growing more worried and frantic while the sound of more gunshots echoed through the connection. But those weren't coming from this sniper. There was another one keeping her pinned down in the gas station.
She was yelling something about not going out there, sounding more afraid than I had heard her before. Still, I wasn't listening. The words just rolled off my back as I threw myself into a running start around the side of the van. The sniper who had been trying to hit Bobby underneath the car adjusted his aim, but not quickly enough. One shot rebounded off the front bumper and another whistled just past my left shoulder as I sprinted faster than the man anticipated. Coming around the front of the hood, I activated blue paint on my shoes and launched myself up and forward. It was another move the sniper hadn't seen coming, as two more shots passed through where I would've been if I hadn't jumped.
He adjusted his aim again after that, of course. And I probably would've taken a couple hits. Who knows how much they would've hurt even with the orange paint. But I didn't have to find out. The man suddenly recoiled before he could shoot as something small bounced off his SWAT-like helmet. It was Qwerty’s toy car. He had thrown himself into the air and tossed the thing that way to distract the man. It gave me an opening.
Later, Paige would say something about me retaining enough sense not to use my active paint where the bad guys could see. But, to be honest, I didn't do that intentionally. I was just so angry I wasn't thinking about anything. As I hit the ground, I used another burst of blue paint on my shoes to throw myself forward.
In that moment, I saw the sniper turn his aim just a bit until he was pointing it dead center at my forehead. It was too late… for him. I collided with the man at top speed, crashing into him with enough force to knock him onto his back and send the man sliding across the dirt with me on top of him. He kept holding his gun until I ripped it out of his hands with my enhanced strength while we were still sliding. A hard toss with one hand sent it sailing out of the way just as the back of his helmet crashed into an old broken tire that had been left in this field.
He said something then, but it wasn't to me. He was saying some sort of code, probably about how he was being attacked. I didn't care. With one hand, I ripped his helmet off so I could see his surprisingly beautiful face. The guy looked like he was only a few years older than I was. But I didn't care about that either. I pulled back my fist and punched him in that somewhat flushed face. His head was knocked backwards and down into the ground while he tried to grab a knife from a sheath on his side. I let him get it, then grabbed his wrist with my other hand, activated a full set of purple paint under my clothes, and ripped the weapon from his grasp. I wasn’t being gentle or careful, and I heard at least one of his fingers and possibly his wrist break from the force, drawing a yelp of pain from the man.
The blade went sailing away too before I punched him in the face again. And again, then a fourth time. I saw blood from his nose but it didn't matter. I was punching him even more. Over and over again. I didn't see his face. I saw Bobby standing there at the window. I saw the blood appear on his chest. I saw him pale on the ground. I saw him laying helpless under the van while this piece of shit kept trying to shoot him again.
I was in the backseat of the car, lying there helpless and terrified while Bobby tried to tell me things would be okay. I saw the old man behind him with the gun. My mouth opened to scream a warning, but it wasn't enough. More blood appeared on Bobby's chest as he was shot. He fell down. He'd already been shot before, back inside the house as he was carrying me through it, but this was worse. He fell down, he wasn't supposed to fall down.
Bobby! Bobby, you're not supposed to fall down!
That old man was there. He was the one who shot Bobby. He was standing right there, saying something about his son-in-law, but all I could do was say Bobby's name over and over, feeling the soul-crushing pain of seeing him collapse.
Bobby saved me. I was on the patio, on the back patio by the pool. There were bad guys there. They killed Anthony and his family. They killed Anthony! Anthony!
Anthony was my best friend. We did everything together, everything. I kept getting him in trouble and he helped get me out of it. We went on adventures in our backyards, which, if you put them together, equaled miles and miles of grounds to explore. We went to the movies, we went on vacation, we would've gone to school together but his parents always homeschooled him. I didn't even know why, they were just private. It made me want to be homeschooled, just so I could be like him, but my parents wanted me to have more interaction with other people.
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I saw his face, I heard his voice, I saw a hundred, a thousand tiny interactions spread over the years I had known him. We were in my backyard while he doubled over laughing at something I had said while I stood there grinning. He was on the back of a sled I had set up at the top of a steep snowy hill, talking about how dangerous this was while I assured him I knew what I was doing. We flew down that hill and ended up crashing into a snowbank. It was terrifying, but also one of the best times of my life, because I was there with my friend. It didn't matter what we were doing, if Anthony was there, it was always amazing. We could finish each other's sentences. We could always make each other happy, no matter what was going on.
I saw everything. I saw every little interaction I'd had with my best friend. I saw our arguments, seldom as they might've been, and which always ended with a campout. That was our rule. We could argue, but when we were done, we had a campout in one of our backyards and cooked s'mores before sleeping in the tent. We told stupid, silly, sometimes scary stories. I was actually the one who told the silly ones, while Anthony told the scary ones. That might've been strange, considering I was the one who always talked him into doing stupid, dangerous stuff. But Anthony liked scary stories, because they were stories.
He hated pickles and onions on his burgers, but he always got them anyway, because I like having extra, so I took his pickles and onions, and he took my lettuce. He liked having big clumps of lettuce on his burgers, especially if it crunched properly. He loved it when it crunched. He liked to make his first bite of a burger extra crunchy.
I was standing on the rear-most train car, the caboose, while we were taking a trip somewhere in Europe. We were out on the little balcony, watching the mountains pass by. I was pretty sure you weren't even supposed to be out here, but between who I was and who my family were, I was able to get there anyway. Anthony was beside me, his hand on my arm while we gaped at the beautiful scenery. I couldn't even remember where we were going in that moment, but there we were. Anthony's hand tightened on my arm, as he spoke up. “What do you think would happen if we fell off?”
He wasn't being paranoid or saying that just to worry about something. Anthony liked to make up stories like this, using his imagination to pretend something dire had happened and we had to find a way to escape or survive.
Leaning out a bit, a look down at the tracks, then turned back to my friend and shrugged. “We'd be in the middle of nowhere. We’d have to hike along the tracks and find the nearest town.”
His head bobbed quickly. “It's probably miles and miles and miles. We have to camp outside and hide from wild animals. I bet we’d have to pick berries and maybe even catch fish. Do you think we could catch fish in that stream over there?” He pointed off into the distance.
“Of course we could,” I claimed, despite having absolutely no idea. What I lacked in knowledge I made up for with persistence and confidence. “We'd catch fish and walk by the tracks until we found someone.”
“What if it was a bad someone?” he asked with a nervous smile at his own imagination. “What if it was a killer who lives out here because the cops are looking for him?”
Straightening up proudly, I gave a firm nod. “Well, then we'd just have to catch him, wouldn't we? He’d try to chase us, but we'd lead him into a trap and capture him. Then there’d be all these news stories about how two kids got lost in the wilderness but caught a psycho murderer. We’d be heroes.”
Anthony swallowed a little, but met my gaze as he pointed out, “It would be pretty dangerous. He'd try to hurt us, even kill us.”
My head shook as I reached out to grab my friend's hand and squeezed it. “Don't worry, Anthony. I won't let the psycho murderer hurt you.”
Anthony started to smile back, saying something else. Then, with a crack of explosive thunder, he was kneeling by his pool, at his birthday party. His mother was already dead right there, everyone was dead. I was staring at them from the patio doorway as Anthony begged for his life, pleaded for his mom to come back. He was sobbing, I was sobbing, and none of them cared. The man with the gun said it wasn't personal and shot him. He shot Anthony. He shot my friend!
Bobby was there. Bobby saved me. He picked me up and shot the bad guys. He carried me through the house and all the way up to the sedan. He dropped me in the car and then the old man, my grandfather, it was my grandfather, he showed up and shot Bobby. He was going to take me away, but my dad came. My dad saved me. He was Silversmith. I saw him as Silversmith, but without the helmet, as he cut my grandfather's head off. He killed my grandfather to save me, and to save Bobby. I was there, crying into his arms while he told me everything would be okay.
I was in my room, talking to Paige, the young Paige. We were trying to help each other get better, trying to deal with what happened to Anthony. The deep, dark pit of despair I had fallen into was a little bit better because of her. She was still here. She remembered Anthony, and she could help. We could help each other. We would always be there for each other.
But then Kent came. He erased my memory. I saw him reaching for me and I wanted him to stop, but he wouldn't. My parents thought it was the right thing to do. They let him take my memories away. They let him erase Anthony even more than that bullet had. The bad guys might have killed Anthony, but my parents and Kent erased him. They took him away from me. And, even if they didn't know it, they took Paige away too. The one person who could have really helped me get past what happened, and they erased her. They took Paige away at the same time that they took Anthony.
And it wasn't just bad for me. I was the only one who knew about Paige besides her father. I was the one who could've helped her. Not only with what happened with her dad, but with her own grief. Anthony was her friend too. The two of us were her only friends and my grandfather’s men took Anthony away before my parents took me away. They ripped me away from her when she needed me. For the past five years, she had needed me and I wasn't there. We needed each other but my family stopped that. They erased us from each other. They didn't mean to. They didn't know. They had no idea exactly how much they were taking away, how much they were hurting both of us.
But even if they didn't know, they still did it. They erased Paige from my mind. They erased Anthony. That one they meant to do, thinking they were helping. But they weren't. They made everything worse. For the past five years I had known I was missing something, some part of me had been grieving for Anthony and even my lost relationship with Paige, but I had no idea what it was. I couldn't grieve properly because they erased the memory. They didn't erase the grief, they just stopped me from being able to cope with it and move on.
I remembered. I remembered all of it. I knew Anthony as well as I ever had. I remembered everything we had done together, everything we had done with Paige. I remembered meeting her. I remembered all of it, every last bit. I remembered my life with them. I remembered telling Paige my deepest, most fearful secret, about how I wasn’t sure if I was always a girl every moment of every day, that sometimes I felt more like a boy, and how confusing and scary it was. I remembered hours upon hours of talking to her about whether it made me a freak. She was there, she talked me through it. After all, she had the unique perspective of being a Biolem. I remembered all of that.
And I remembered losing it. I remembered it being ripped away. My understanding of myself and what I was or could have been was so tied up in my memories with Paige that when I’d lost those memories, I lost… the others as well.
Now I remembered. I remembered the grief as it exploded back into full strength. I remembered the pain in my knuckles, the sound of someone shouting in my ear while pulling me backward.
Wait, no, that wasn't a memory. It was happening right now. Paige was there, pulling me off the sniper. He was laying there bloody and groaning painfully. I had started hitting him and didn't stop. I had pummeled his face, his chest, smacked his arms and hands when he tried to stop me. I definitely broke more than just his finger and wrist. Through all of that, I had just kept hitting him. I wasn't even seeing him at that point. I just saw everything that had been taken away from me, everything I had lost, and I kept punching over and over again.
Paige pulled me off of him, saying something about how she had already taken care of the other guy. I was hugging her. I grabbed the girl tightly and held on, babbling about how I remembered everything. It took her a second, but she seemed to realize what I was saying and returned the embrace tightly.
We sat there like that on the ground, hugging each other as hard as we could stand. Only one thing made me pull back in that moment, one thing made me twist my head to look over at the van, where I could still see the man lying under it. “Bobby!” I shouted, my present words seeming to mix with all the times I had shouted his name throughout the memories that had poured back into my mind.
“We have to save Bobby!”