The Rising(31)

He used it like a baseball bat, slamming it into the already dented face on that side and then the other. Beating him senseless with it as hot bits of plastic and metal that smelled of burned rubber broke off and flew through the air like fireflies.

Still, Alex didn’t stop until nothing in the skull was remotely recognizable, quite fitting, since whatever these things were clearly wasn’t human at all. The rage spilled out of him, his mind-set the one he brought to the football field, filled with bone-crunching collisions.

They had hurt his parents. They deserved to die, whatever they were.

He was vaguely conscious of Samantha stirring against the wall down which she’d slumped. The burned-metal scent filled the air and he thought he heard cracking and popping as the things he was killing fizzled and stilled. He realized the single lamp was flickering, creating a strobe effect that allowed him to glimpse the remnants of his handiwork in broken splotches.

“It would seem I underestimated you, Alex,” a new voice called from the shadows.





31

THE ASH MAN

ALEX WHIRLED TOWARD THE fallen bodies of his parents, severed arm still in hand, to find a man standing centered between his mom and dad.

“They were just drones, hastily assembled and clearly unfit for this mission,” the man continued, turning his gaze onto the motionless, still standing cop figure with smoke bleeding out of his ears and skull.

He was tall and gaunt to the point of being almost skeletal, his clothes hanging over his body like an ill-fitting curtain. He reminded Alex of the equally tall man from the hospital, to the point where they could have been the same man. At first glance the figure’s skin seemed albino white, almost translucent. But now, up closer, in the flickering light shed by the lamp, it looked more gray, as if the man had rubbed ash all over his skin.

“If you leave with me peacefully now, your parents can live,” the ash man continued. His voice had an odd twang to it, almost a harmonic echo. Sounded like it was coming from somewhere else, a broadcast of sorts, and the ash man was just mouthing the words. “Come with me, and the young woman can call an ambulance to help them. Choose, Alex, choose.”

“Get away from them,” Alex said, straightening himself in line with the man, who cut a dark, eerie figure across the room.

“That wasn’t one of the choices.”

“Who are you?” Alex demanded.

“The better question, my boy, is who are you? I’m sure you’ve been asking yourself that since the hospital.”

“You killed my doctor!”

“Because it needed to be done. Because he knew.”

“Knew what?”

“About you.”

“What about me?”

The ash man’s eyes cast Sam a sidelong glance before returning to Alex. “This is not something to be discussed here.”

Alex sidestepped to plant himself between the ash man and Sam, brandishing the severed arm amid the broken pieces of what the ash man had called drones.

“You don’t need that,” the ash man told him. “I’m unarmed and have no intention of harming you.”

“Guess your drones didn’t get the message.”

“They wouldn’t have hurt you. Their orders were specific.”

Alex cast his gaze downward, his father lying utterly still but his mother’s chest still rising and falling in rapid heaves. “They hurt my parents.”

“As mandated by their mission parameters. But you’re in no danger. You see, you have something we want, something that belongs to us.”

“Know something? I think you’ve got the wrong kid, because I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”

“Yes, you do; you just don’t realize it.”

Alex studied the ash man closer. He seemed almost spectral in form, more liquid than solid, the way he stood there as if the air moved through instead of around him. His head came to a peak at the top, where hair shaded with the same grayish tint rode his scalp, so even and still that it seemed painted on.

“Where’d you come from?”

“I was here all along, Alex. You just couldn’t see me, like you couldn’t see your parents when you first got home. You only saw what we wanted you to—for your own good, to prevent exactly what ended up happening. We’ve been looking for you for a very long time. This night never should have been necessary, we should never have needed to come for you. But now we must live with the consequences and accept them.”

“Good idea,” Alex said, pointing backward with his free hand toward the fizzling, hissing, and crackling assemblage of clumps that had been whole just minutes before.

“This shouldn’t have been necessary,” the man repeated.

“You said that already.”

The ash man’s gray eyes fluttered. “There is a price for disobedience. Disobedience is what has brought us to this point. It will not be tolerated.”

With that, he stooped down on his long stilt-like legs and slid his hand along Li Chin’s shoulder then upward, pressing a thumb into his temple like he was pressing a postage stamp into place. Li writhed, spasmed, shook, his feet twitching and pulsing.

“No!” Alex screamed, hurdling into motion just as the man’s other thumb found his mother’s temple.

The severed arm was in motion before he’d had time to form the thought: read and react, just like on the football field, and that’s what Alex did, unleashing a vicious overhead blow that should have fractured the ash man’s skull on contact.