Finding Roger

I flew across town and landed on the sidewalk of McCracken's Road. It was a rather well kept and tidy area. I always liked seeing things being well ordered.

But this was no time to pay attention to things other than the task at hand. I am looking for Roger as he is still missing. I walked down the path that he was reported to have taken.

My super senses activated and I saw the unseen and heard the unheard. The world morphed into unknowable shapes and colours before me. My mind was able to process and bring order to this chaos. The buildings reassembled before my eyes but the colours were different and the sounds were filtered until I stopped hearing the heartbeats and blood flowing in the capillaries of random civilians passing by and the voices in all the nearby buildings within three miles ranging from conversations to people having sex of varying degrees until only the inaudible frequencies that should aid my investigation remained.

I raised my head and took a deep breath through my nose. My sense of smell was as potent as my sight and hearing. Beatrice was nice enough to sneak into Roger's home after school and take his watch for me to sniff and then track that scent like a humanoid bloodhound.

But no canine nose matched the nose of a Powerpuff woman or her offspring.

It took one sniff for me to recognise the smell of Roger. I walked down the path, breathing through my nose and flaring my nostrils. I couldn't help but smile a little bit at how silly I felt until the severity of the situation smacked that grin off my face and set me down the path to seriousness.

After about half an hour of walking and sniffing and listening and watching, I finally found myself standing in front of a building. My eyes focused and the walls before me vanished and I saw inside the building; further focusing opened up more walls and ceilings until I saw what lay beyond the rooftop.

My eyes widened as I witnessed something in the shape of a man and I immediately knew that it was Roger. I zoomed in with my super vision despite the smell telling me that it was definitely him, and these were all corroborated by my focus on the man with my own eyes.

With one swift push from my powerful legs, I leapt to the rooftop and used my flight to nudge myself forward until I landed myself near Roger.

I knelt next to him. He lay on his front as his back was baked by the sun, his head propped to the side and the left part of his face was already suffering sunburns from the heating summer while the rest of his head was covered by the hood from his grey hoodie.

I couldn't help but feel sad. I never really knew Roger all that well, but he was one of those really nice guys who helped me in maths sometimes. My eyes watered as I soaked in the tragedy of the situation and my thoughts wandered towards his family and friends.

Poor Roger. I will see to it that this crime does not go unpunished. I grabbed my mobile phone from my right jean pocket and immediately began to dial the local constabulary. My fingers lightly tapped as my hands shook with nervousness and social anxiety but I brushed it all away as I placed the phone against my ear.

I made an anonymous call to report a body at the top of a twelve story block of flats near McCracken's Road and then I stood up and got to work. I used all of my senses to scan the area.

Infrared wasn't very useful as Roger was blended with the environment's background heat, his dead body baked by the sun matched the floor's heat as well.

I read on the news about how my mother used her senses to solve crimes. She wasn't really the detective type however, so most of the things she solved were quite obvious. Auntie Blossom usually saw things where none may find them and that's why she was so useful in court.

I was much more patient and attentive to detail than mom and this gave me all of the fuel that I needed for the task before me. It only took two minutes until one of my visual spectrums saw traces of something blue on Roger's cheek.

I took a closer look and bent down to use my fingers to pry back bits of his hood. The blue marks looked like fingers but they didn't make a full hand print. Perhaps the killer wore finger-less gloves which I found odd. Why would someone wear gloves exposing fingers and giving investigators all of the fingerprints needed?

I knelt next to Roger again and took a closer look at him in the colour spectrum. The blue marks were gone but he looked as if he had been aged by about a century. It was a detail that I had missed earlier due to the shock of finding him dead. Now that my mind was wrapped around that grim fact, I could see all of the wrinkles and the white hair as I pulled back his hoodie.

I looked in my super vision once more and saw more of the blue finger marks on his neck, having choked the life out of him.

My investigation was concluded for now and so I jumped off of the building and then flew home as fast as I could before my mom would get home and make sure that I never hear the end of it if she found out that I didn't get home straight away from school.

I looked at my laptop and there was my cousin Beatrice with her red hair and big pink eyes which were scanning her screen and not paying me much heed at the moment.

"From what you told me, Betty, it sounds like we might be dealing with something that kills by touch," Beatrice said.

"I gathered as much, do you think it drains the life force out of people? Roger didn't look a hundred when I saw him three days ago," I said without exaggerating a thing.

"The coroner's report matches those of a dozen victims within this week. These types of killings are spread all over Townsville, but the last few have happened in the McCracken's Road area. The majority of similar killings actually occurred in Citiesville some months ago," Beatrice informed me.

I absorbed the information and contemplated upon it until Beatrice caught my attention with another thing.

"Betty, this might be a connection. There was also a superhero in Citiesville who was found dead with no physical damage to his body other than looking severely dehydrated. The only difference being that he wasn't aged rapidly like Roger. This superhero was known as 'The Train' and he was able to run through any obstacle at incredible speeds. A CCTV camera captured something blue running through a thick brick wall and vanishing soon after The Train's reported time of death. You mentioned blue finger looking marks on Roger, right?"

"Yeah, but something doesn't really match the pattern here... How comes Roger aged while The Train didn't?"

"Maybe because he's a train and Roger isn't?" Beatrice humorously remarked.

"So you're telling me that a train got killed by Sonic the Hedgehog?"

We both began to laugh and I mentally slapped myself because I realised that we were joking about tragic incidents here.

"Sorry," I whispered.

"For what?" Beatrice asked.

"Nothing. I just thought we shouldn't really be joking at the fact that someone died."

"I doubt they care, Betty. The dead don't care."

I silently sighed but the chuckle fit came back to me at the image of Sonic just running through brick walls and slamming into an unstoppable train.

"I'll be seeing you in hell, Beatrice," I joked.

"Make sure you save a seat for me," she smiled and suddenly I heard my mom come home through the front door..

"Is that the devil?" Beatrice asked with half of her lips curled into a cheeky smile.

"Mom's home," I said as a rebellious and unwavering smile plastered across my face at her sense of humour and refused to back down when I pushed for a more serious facial expression. Beatrice and I exchanged our goodbyes before I closed the laptop and made my way downstairs.

"Hey, sweetheart, how was school?" she asked.

"It was good. One of the students went missing though," I said.

"I know, I am so sorry to hear that. The DNA results identified and confirmed him as Roger Daniels. He... was your friend, right?" mom said with softness and compassion in her usually assertive voice. She always spoke to me with tenderness as opposed to how she interacted with others.

"Sort of. I didn't know him that well, but he did help me in maths when I needed it. I can't imagine what his family are going through," I said and fought back some emerging emotions of my own, striving to keep my voice from shaking. The memories of that aged face staring blankly ahead has returned to haunt me and threatened to ravage my dreams tonight.

Buttercup reached out with both hands and touched my face, her hands squished my cheeks as she sought to comfort me.

"Don't worry, baby. I'll look after you," she said and then embraced me in her strong arms with the most maternal and gentlest of hugs.

And so my dreams were indeed ravaged by the face of Roger Daniels later that night. I was hopelessly paralysed and could do nothing but helplessly observe as a pair of black gloved hands with blue fingers sapped the life out of his screaming face from the shrouds of the darkest shadows.

"YOU COULD HAVE STOPPED ALL OF THIS!" his voice wailed with a haunting echo as the quality of his speech degraded with rapidly advancing age.

My dream shifted to many more people and I tried to scream but there was only silence as I watched those same blue fingers sap them of their lives. Ever growing shadows spread like the evilest of cancers until the sickness choked all that was good and pure.

The monstrosity gorged itself until all of Townsville was filled with dead husks and all of the bright light and colourful beauty was blighted by the crawling darkness. When the half-living creature had its fill, its hunger demanded more and so it moved onto the next city to keep its half-life from ceasing altogether. A parasite looking to usurp from a host, a vampire looking to feed, a disease looking to spread.

And so my eyes frantically shot wide open to the bright sunlight of the morning and my mind has uttered the name of the monster that it has christened.

'Half-Life.'