Sing to Life
Chapter 6: As the Bough Breaks
Wake up.
Wake up Alex we have something to show you.
Alex felt himself flowing back to reality, carried along by an inexplicable, inexorable river in an unbounded void. He moaned as memories started drifting back to him. He recalled that Skulker and Vlad had done something to him. But what had they done? Whatever it was had made him bone-weary. He wanted to go back to sleep until it was all over. Then he'd wake up, ruin a few lives, and be right back to normal. On second thought, something about that solution didn't sound feasible. People had been telling him things, and some unusual things had been done with him. Alex felt like a blind man for them, grasping down into the waters. The things were lurking just within reach...
In his mind Alex shrieked and swam furiously against the current, but it only picked up and carried him faster. He hit violent rapids, the water slamming him against the terrible rocky memories of his dealings with Walker and Danny and Jazz, and those evil things that they had all told him.
They were wrong about him. They had to be. He was something special, the one unique artifact out of all ghosts or humans. He had lived for fifty years without age or injury and his passenger was far older than that. Together they might topple civilizations. He was no puppet, yet that was what everyone called him.
Alex's mind spun furiously, continuing at breakneck pace downriver. He caught a glimpse through his own eyes and screamed noiselessly. A green fluid surrounded him, the outside view distorted by the glass tube around him. He could see his new owners lounging against a desk, facing him and chatting over cups of steaming coffee. They didn't even look nervous. The view passed, leaving Alex feeling sickened and suffocated.
Were they right?
Was he nothing more than a simple marionette?
No...
Alex felt himself flung into space, thrown clear of the river and left suspended over a waterfall, stilled in time and space. He could have counted the billions of droplets that sparkled below him, the spray that like him had been ejected from the main stream. The powerful torrent was captured in its descent like an image in a painting, forever frozen, forever in motion. It stretched away into the darkness, resolving at last into a point far below that tickled the limit of infinity. Alex hung in that space and looked down at that fall, and he wondered:
Am I a puppet?
The void yanked him down, the spray of the water hitting his body and stinging like pin-pricks, the descent knocking the wind from his chest and tearing him into the emptiness. He gasped for air that he knew didn't exist, wishing for the unconsciousness that he knew would not come.
We're out, Alex.
Alex tried to move, tried to maneuver himself to face his Other, but he couldn't. He could only fall.
How is that possible? How am I conscious? I'm never conscious when you're out.
The blackness around him flickered purple for a moment. Alex got the impression it was laughing at him.
We shut you down when we emerge. We can revitalize you anytime we wish.
What! How is that... What day is it? How long?
Three days.
Alex swore. He kicked and howled and hit nothing but cool droplets of water.
They can't do this to me. How can you let them do this to me. We're a team. I'm never out for that long.
There was that purple flux again.
They have a compound now, made of- How should we put it? Ground-up heroism. Powders from the bones of great leaders, plasma from great ghosts, the sweat and tears of endurance through tragedy. Any kind of courage is anathema to us. You know this.
Alex clenched his fists and tried to stand erect in his fall.
But I was never meant to be manipulated.
That is true. Let us show you something.
Everything blinked out. The darkness and the waterfall flashed away and were succeeded by a dirty road bordered by aging warehouses.
---
"Look, Vlad." Skulker pointed at the tank. "He's doing something!"
"Really?" Vlad abandoned a net he'd been adjusting on a workbench and leaned against the lab table, scrutinizing the black clouds that passed for Alex. They swirled in the tank like a hurricane, keeping up that same furious motion Vlad had been seeing since Monday. Somewhere in there was a skinny college kid with no self-control. Alex was pathetically easy to manage. They'd wired him to an instrument cluster that sat just over the tank, a mass of pipes and cables that clicked and hummed. It fed the data to a computer bank against a wall, and the information was recorded both digitally and on stacks of papers that spooled from the printers to land in a messy pile on the tile. Vlad snatched the latest printout and looked it over. It didn't look any different from the others, and he was beginning to tire of this jargon-packed garbage.
At least it would be worth it if Alex paid off. If Alex's powers could be channeled through a mechanical device, Vlad was fairly certain that the Packers would be the least of the things he could lay hands on.
Vlad crumpled the paper and threw it away. He wouldn't put up with such indecisive delay for anything but a super weapon. "According to this trash he's just sitting there, being extremely pissed off." Vlad leaned back against a table. "Just like the last eighty hours we've been watching him. What do you think you saw?"
"The black is moving faster." Skulker pointed to the tank. "Do you see?"
Vlad looked at it. The stuff did look like it was moving a little more quickly today. "So what? What's that mean?"
"I don't know. But I'm sure it would be a very bad idea to ignore it." Skulker bent down and began rearranging the connections that ran between the instruments and the computer bank.
Vlad continued to watch the tank as its darkness swam. He took a gulp of coffee. Stupid high-maintenance lab-rat...
Vlad chocked on his coffee as the dark swept away entirely, dissipated in an instant and leaving the tank glowing lime green. Alex drifted there, clothing and scum-tinted hair waving in the iridescent plasma. Vlad stumbled back as Alex's eyes snapped open, those cold, amber eyes staring straight into his own. Alex's wide amber eyes, untainted by darkness, whites stained green with plasma and mouth just starting to open in a scream that never came.
Vlad's jaw worked. "Skulker!"
Skulker turned, holding a paper. "Did something happen? These readings are jumping around a lot."
Vlad motioned to the tank. It had gone dark and opaque once again. "His eyes... Opened. And the black cleared off."
Skulker sniffed. "Strange. The darkness shouldn't lift unless he regains consciousness. I'll patch into his subconscious and maybe we can see what he's thinking."
Vlad glanced at Skulker. "Can we do that?"
"Sure." Skulker sighed and shook his head at him. "You humans. You think so small. Ghosts are much more... transparent. We have no tissues to damage, and many ghosts don't even need technology to read minds."
Vlad cleared his throat. "Right. I knew that."
"I'm sure." Skulker rearranged several wires behind the machines and checked a monitor in front. Nothing came up. He ducked back and fiddled with them until a snowy blur flashed on-screen and began resolving itself into an image of an azure streak couched in blackness. The streak threw off little specks of itself, which traveled along with it. The perspective shifted erratically, filmed through an unstable camera.
Vlad gestured to it. "We're recording this?"
Skulker smiled. "Of course."
---
Alex saw that there was something wrong with the road. The middle of it had dark pools, dark, moving, creeping pools. A lump jumped up in his throat as he recognized the effluvia of his eyes.
How...?
Ssh. Watch.
The shadows curled and danced, little threads of darkness that curled and twisted, made grey and smoky by the dim starlight. They joined in a widening puddle and soon filled the road in a pond of blackness. Alex looked closer and saw that they were streaming from the inside of the warehouses.
Watch, our vessel.
Alex watched.
The shadows pooled on the dead road, thickening and rising as the night crept on. The view swept under the rusting sheet-metal of one warehouse, following one of the streams up into it. Alex choked and stuttered, not believing what he saw. Then he looked closer, and a grin blossomed across his face. The shadows poured like blood from the limp, stacked bodies of animals and humans. A few ghosts even lay piled in among them. Rats lay dormant next to raccoons and children, while women and gruff, muscled men lay prostrate among them. The bodies were alive, but they breathed only every minute or so in quick, gasping breaths. The shadows washed over them on their journey to the road. They seeped from the piles, from the bodies. They crept and clawed from their souls, thin dark strips of nothing that flowed from their wide-open eyes, those eyes that were slicked black and glittering in the light of the stars.
Alex laughed at them.
I know them! They're my children. I stowed them here
The blackness nodded at him.
They are ours. We can remake the world in their image.
How? I'm trapped.
Alex listened for an answer in futility. He felt the world swimming away from him, the waterfall came back, and the flat ground of unconsciousness rushed up at him.
Alex screamed.
Listen to me! Tell me what to do! I'm trapped and tired. Don't send me-
And then there was nothing.
Skulker and Vlad stood up from the blank screen. Neither of them said anything for a moment. They glanced back at Alex and the darkness in his tank that enshrouded him, watching the chaotic currents toy with the inky clouds, swirling and stirring them.
Skulker leaned back against the table and sighed. "You realize this means he's not contained."
Vlad pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes squeezed shut in pressured contemplation. "Yes." He looked up at Skulker. "We have to find that alley."
Vlad left the room at a fast walk with Skulker right behind him. The lab hung empty, the only sound the whooshing of plasma flowing through the pumps and the thump of receding footsteps. When the steps finally died away, the darkness in the tank shifted and flickered purple.
---
A/N: Here's the deal: Everybody reading this is a ninny except Sakura Scout. ONE review for Chapter 5? ONE review?! Come on! What's that about? Sigh. Well, in the spirit of the cheap sensationalism you all know I cherish, I'll offer a bribe. Fifth reviewer gets a minor cameo in 'The Fan Zone' (another fic of mine that's gotten 40 reviews in 3 chapters) and the tenth reviewer gets a cameo PLUS a plug for one of their stories in 'The Fan Zone' and the end A/N of "Sing" Chapter 7. (If you're worried about what this will do to "TFZ," don't. Anybody who has read it knows that I could fly in friggen' Santa Claus and venison from Rudolph and Bambi's mother 'without affecting the quality of the work.') Please don't just say "hello give me a cameo" in your review. Only reviews with actual comments count for the prizes!