In that curiously peaceful, silent moment, Roger Larson was certain that he was dead. All his baffled brain registered was the sensation of weightlessly floating. Floating on clouds.
He had to be dead.
He rested on his back, limbs akimbo, head tilted to one side. He saw nothing, and assumed nonchalantly that his eyes were closed; he heard nothing save for his own reassuringly steady heartbeat - not dead, then - and an internal ringing that was simultaneously faraway and within his head; he smelled nothing save for a bitter aroma he could not place. His throat tickled and his eyes itched; he felt no urgency to resolve the irritations.
In his state of spacey tranquillity Roger's mind wandered to fitful, dreamlike memories of the constricting barrier that separated the children of the - what was the name? The phase? No, the FAYZ; that was it - and the outside world. An image came to him that made his heart swell with affection; the isolated memory a short, sturdily-build Hispanic boy with gentle, mature eyes. He recalled painting the walls of a houseboat with the help of a child he recognised with tenderness and paternal protectiveness; he recollected that a lack of art supplies had failed to present a problem, as Roger had discovered his appropriate yet questionably useful power to turn water into technicolour sludge that behaved in remarkably similar ways to paint. The Artful Roger had been his name, a play on words from a book he had read in class once, before the bedlam that was the FAYZ had ensued. While he drifted, a distant part of Roger's subconscious, a softly-spoken psychological murmur, noted that the features surrounding his current condition were bizarre. He clenched his right hand, and found that his bed of tepid, wispy clouds was wet and gritty.
Smoke. Roger smelled smoke.
Like a rudely awakened child, he started to sluggishly piece together reality broken shard by broken shard. The clouds on which he lay and the clouds that fogged his mind began to drift away on the winds of intrusive actuality. Gradually, his perception of his current state smoothed from dazed indifference to self-aware uneasiness.
His relaxed state caved for bewilderment and anxiety. He was lying in water, partially upright. His still-tensed fist held dirt and shale. The tintinnabulation that plagued his ears subsided in exchange for a rumbling crackle and a monotonous undertone of water lapping at Roger's still-submerged legs, and a primitive part of his brain cried fire.
Roger opened his eyes and saw Hell. His vision was a muzzy, warping smear of steely dark grey and vivid amber that gradually focused to reveal the world ablaze. A lake reflecting a macabre scene of ash and flames. Smouldering husks of what were once houseboats, tents, and sailboats. Human shapes of various sizes floating in the water, the nearest of which maybe ten feet from the shore on which he lay.
Justin. The name came to Roger in a revelation of panic and fragmented memories of sickly green light, exploding boats, and a child on fire. He made a rapid and terrified attempt to stand, a frantic grasp to the hope that he could reach the boy that he treated as a brother and find him miraculously alive.
A wrenching, stabbing sensation lanced across his diaphragm and left arm. Roger screamed in extraordinary pain and fell back as the world teetered and his muscles locked. He vomited bile and lake water. He gritted his teeth against the involuntary spasms that wracked his haggard, traumatised body. He looked down, sobbing and trembling, to examine his apparent injuries; the bone just below his left elbow was swollen and dented, mostly likely broken. On the same arm, his index and middle finger were mangled. There was a pinkish-crimson stain on his already-ratty shirt, he trembled wildly as pulled the material back to reveal a three-inch splinter of boat hull jutting out of the soft, meaty space between his prominent ribcage and hips. A bray of shock and terror rolled in Roger's dry, scratching throat, and he clamped his useful hand over the wound to try and stem the bleeding. Then, in a last-ditch attempt at attaining salvation, Roger howled for someone to save him. At first, he begged for specific people: Sam, Dekka, Brianna, Edilio; but, eventually, he only sobbed for the final name. Every few syllables were punctuated with a hacking cough or dissolved into a moan of pain, but despair fuelled him to persevere until he was physically unable to speak; Roger's voice rasped into a hoarse whisper with every word. He eventually succumbed to the knowledge that his pleas for mercy had gone unheard. His squalls had shunted the shrapnel imbedded in his waist, and Roger's functioning hand was slick and tacky with blood. He tipped onto his side and retched in response to the agony, but there was nothing in his reeling, shrivelled stomach left to regurgitate.
Despite the absence of help, Roger waited for any latecomers who may had overheard him. Inch by racking inch, he dragged himself to the relative shelter of a tree that had somehow been spared from the carnage and slumped painfully against its roots. His head span and his entire body quaked in agony and shock. He tipped his face to the branches and made no effort to hold back his tortured, doomed wails.
If his excruciating wounds did not kill him - if he did not bleed to death or he somehow evaded infection - imminent starvation would be his end. Whatever - whoever - had caused the inferno could return to insure that nobody had survived. A few scattered, starving coyotes may have outlasted Brianna's canine killing spree and would take advantage of him as an easy meal. Roger's half-delirious mind skittered over the relentless alternate threats: Drake, scavengers, disease, hypothermia, dehydration, smoke inhalation, heatstroke, gangrene, wayward Zekes, even something as simple as a trigger-happy child. Roger was helpless, unarmed, and wasting away with every fluttery, feeble heartbeat and mournful, forlorn dry sob.
Justin was dead. Roger had failed him, failed to reach him in time and now the jumbled memory of the child's burning body was seared into his eyelids. It was all his fault, and now he was condemned to die alone, the wake of mass destruction and murder. He had lived through a massacre only to seep away minute by minute, hour by hour, in total isolation.
He was without the two people he loved most in the FAYZ. The child he had treated as his adoptive brother was dead. The boy he had fallen in love with was God knows where, maybe dead himself. Maybe he had wept for Roger in his last moments, as Roger had done for him. If Roger's beloved was alive, the thing - the demon - that had obliterated the lake's population would see to his demise as it would to every child snared in the FAYZ.
Soon, there would be nothing left.
Roger was going to die.