The Chase

You can find the prequel here.

Lungs on fire, the boy ran through the dark, listening to the men and dogs just yards behind him. His legs, iron, flapped about uselessly beneath him, yet he carried on. He screamed into the night, cursed those who had done the same to him, and became one with He.

I stood there. Tears welling up in my eyes. The girl... what had she done to my mother? The one who used to protect me? Nurture me? She burned my one of a kind Monopoly game, she damned me. I felt myself slipping out of my nature. I felt the burns of that Monopoly kit. She had melted off my skin, thrown it away, and mixed it with my internal organs. That made me an empty shell, with no shell. What was I? And then she burned the wood. My soul, what soul? I had no soul.

I felt the rage building up inside of me, it burned. Yet I enjoyed it so. I lifted my arms to the sky, as if to praise the Lord himself, balled my hands into fists, and extended my middle fingers. I am no longer a child, not even human. Without a soul, without a shell, with no functioning components?

The sound of tire on gravel began down the driveway. I felt my back become illuminated by the high beams of a car, and heard the sirens wail. I turned slowly. There were at least three police cars below me, just yards away. I stood still, letting the lights illuminate my patient robe, my mangled wrists and the pipes from the bed attached from the handcuffs dangling from my limbs.

A police officer stepped out of the passenger seat of the first car. I recognized him. He was the man who had driven my real father away the night he had started a fight with my mother. He gazed at me with sadness, and spoke into his microphone, "Hey bud, I need you to listen to me." I took a step forward, and the man in the driver's seat got out and put his hand to his belt. The officer I knew, whose name had slipped my mind, glanced at him. The second officer took his hand off of his belt, where there most likely was a taser gun.

The officer spoke through the microphone once more, "Listen, Gage, we need you to come with us. What you did..." He trailed off, glancing toward the window I was previously staring at. He continued, "What you did, or why you did it, I don't know. But you're going to have to come with us. Please don't make this difficult, please."

"Gage?" I called out. "Gage... isn't here right now."

"Pardon?" The man said.

"Gage is gone. He's dead."

The man blinked, and turned to his partner, in question. I seized the opportunity, sprinting toward the back of the garage. I was not fast enough, for I made it about 17 yards past the garage, before I felt multiple stinging sensations in my back. I immediately envisioned back to the night where this all started, the girl, when she began to slap at my back.

The girl! I thought, and looked up to the window long enough to see my mother, sitting there with her, both of them grinning with that of lunacy. It didn't last, though, for my head began to burn, and I became unconscious.

I woke with a jolt of pain. Sat up, and instantly regretted it. The tasers, still in my back, were stabbing into my back. I rose, vision blurred, and a flash of orange darted across my eyes. It was morning. There was dew on the grass, and I could hear a dog barking in the distance. I looked down at my hands, which were so cold, that they even looked blue. I rubbed them together quickly, and swiveled my head, gathering my surroundings.

The first thing I saw was my patient robe, about 20 yards away, torn to shreds and skidded. I reached to my back, and pulled out the tasers. Each one hurt to the touch, but I knew I had to. After pulling at least three tasers out of my back, I noticed that the cords were still attached to the projectiles of the tasers, and I followed them.

Following the tasers, the grass became turn a hue of red that I recognized, and became darker, and darker so that it looked as if somebody had come and dropped a red bucket of paint over the area. I rounded the corner of the garage, and vomited the contents of my stomach onto the ground. There laid a large pile of various body parts, legs, arms, torsos, and even genitals. On top of that pile, was the head of the officer I had known, and attached to it, via a large splinter of wood through his head, was a note.

I wobbled a few steps forward, dared not to pluck the note off the man's head, but read it anyhow off of his forehead. This is what the note read,

Be GRATeFULL!, FOuR WE CAMe WiLe U SLePT! :) - DAMIeN

The note was soaked in blood, and below the writing, was a drawn symbol, one that looked like a circle with lines separating it into four parts. I touched my hand to it, and it burned to the touch, but then began to feel cool. I turned, and glanced at the contents of my stomach, and then stared.

Among my vomit, there were partially-digested phalanges. I glanced back at the pile of body parts, and noticed that all of the fingers and toes were missing off of the arms and legs. I cringed, dropped to my knees, and dry-heaved at the ground until it felt like my stomach itself was going to be regurgitated.

It wasn't my stomach.