AN: Hello again and happy Friday, I hope the week has treated everyone well. Also, please enjoy the chapter and feel free to tell me what you think of it by leaving a review.
***26***
Do I have you with me now, or not?
I couldn't go anywhere now even if I wanted to.
It sounded more sombre about that than I was expecting.
I didn't have too long to dwell on that before I rounded the corner and came to the front of the store. The sliding door was off its track and lay shattered on the ground. I couldn't have been but a few seconds behind the other dreamer but the store already looked like a tornado had hit it. I took a hasty step into the disheveled building. Glass crunched under my feet, a small yelp of surprise came from behind the counter, followed by a fresh waft of tempting fear.
I walked past the cowering employees hiding place. As much as I would have liked to ignore it I tried my best to focus on the deep hum coming from wherever Connor had run off to. The only other option was giving into that dark corner of my mind that wanted to dive behind the counter and finnish the poor cashier off.
I didn't have to look very far or very hard to find the other dreamer slamming against a locked bathroom door in the back of the shop. It didn't turn to acknowledge me, but it knew I was there regardless. It's right leg was emaciated like the rest of it and covered in silvery scar tissue. It's been far too long since it had gotten a proper meal or any rest. I should help it.
No, you stop that right now!
Shaking a few more dark thoughts way I went down the hall, jerked the thing out from the middle of a lunge and sent it flying into a far wall with a familiar strength.
It scurried back to its feet, each thuggish limb scuttling like an insect's. It leveled itself and opened its dry and ragged mouth to let out a low moan that fused with the one radiating from the bathroom door. It was a call for unity, and invitation to hunt as a pack. Whatever was behind that door wasn't one to go down easily. We had to work together…
I shook those ideas away once again. I would figure out the situation with Connor when I got the chance, in the meantime I wasn't about to let this thing murder an old lady and a couple of kids. I didn't have much to cling to in the way of moral high ground, but this is where I drew the line.
I squared up with my back to the bathroom door.
The other dreamer coiled against the far wall.
Something terrible and tempting called from the bathroom.
The dreamer moved first, faster than lighting it was in the air and aiming at the door. With my swarm arm I swatted it to the ground. The tile cracked where it's boney body landed with a thud; a leg jutted out in a wild flail and swept me off my feet. I was on the ground with it like I had been every other time I'd brawled with one of the things. This time was different, I'd already seen the madness that this thing thrived on. That was part of my own psychosis now.
Its dried hands dug into any flesh it grabbed hold of, each deep cut healed as the thing moved to a new hand hold. It's crumblin face reached my own and it let loose a rumbling moan that demanded obedience. We were a pack now, hunting as one. It wondered if I could not see that.
Chipped nails slashed at my face and eyes, like it was trying to dig itself into me. The sunglasses I had worn went clattering across the chipped tile, I grabbed the papery skin of its bald head with the arm of swarm. For half a second I saw myself back in Chicago, with the swarm turned against me and being used to pull the muscle from my bone. I shook the memory away, the Walrider was still here, though I felt the dreamer above me tugging at the demon that it had once stolen from me.
The swarm ripped through the soiled and tattered rags that were still tied over the things grown over eye sockets. The moan grew to shake the walls and mix into the ever present hum that radiated from the bathroom door. It stopped tearing at my eyes and frantically swatted at the swarm. I took the chance and used my free arm to throw the thing to the side. Fueled by what was becoming blind anger I found myself hunched over the things tattered body. I grabbed it by the shoulder and thrashed it into the wall. It went limp like a rag doll, I swung it onto the ground.
Each motion drew me a little closer to a breaking point. This thing had gone around murdering who knows how many people. I felt its memories of tearing through the hospital a couple days ago. How many were dead from just that? And then there was the time between the massacre at the Zeichner facility and now. How long had it had to kill its way across the country with no real reason in mind?
It wasn't like when I murdered someone.
I stuttered a bit in my thrashing with thing around.
No. I didn't murder there was a reason for what I did.
The walls around me had been bashed in too far to be any more of a use so I slammed the limp dreamer into the cracked ground instead.
I wasn't like this thing. I never would be. No, that was impossible.
I had left a man dead in his own home after ripping into the center of his mind and eating him alive.
I threw the full weight of the swarm into my next throw of the dreamer.
I loved every second of it, almost as much as I loved watching Murkoff workers desperately tried to run when they saw me coming, only to fail because I had destroyed their legs.
Bones in the dreamers shoulder cracked and ripped loose from the joints that held them.
This thing was a monster.
I flung it into one of the few remaining shelves.
That thing had been a man once.
There was no more moaning from its broken body. Nothin crossed its decrepit mind, for the first time in what felt like far too long of a time there was no third set of thoughts running through my mind. No sense of being where I wasn't, of knowing what it knew.
There was nothing left in the store but the hum from the bathroom, the buzzing of static and my own heavy breathing.
That thing had been a man before Murkoff got to it.
So were you, you know.
I shrugged off the thought, the presence from the next room was getting stronger. I pulled the full force of swarm closer to me, no need to let it whip about the store now.
The bathroom door squeaked open on miss-aligned hinges.
"It's gone!" a little tear streaked Connor stood in the doorway.
Behind him sat a sobbing Garret who was curled up against his unmoving grandmother.
The air rippled around the little boy in the doorway, something gray slithered this way and that around his tiny frame.
Stronger now that it had ever been before, the urge to lunge at the little boy screamed at me to move.
I held my ground. I wasn't a monster. I wasn't a monster and I wasn't going to do that…
"Well, it's been a long time since we last met."
Some wavering voice came from the hum that hang in the air. It wasn't the Walrider, that was for sure.
The trace of gray swelled into the silhouette of a person behind connor, who was still muttering about "it" being gone.
One wayward twitch and I would be ready to take a swing at damn near anything that came at me. To relieve some tension I took to my oldest trick: mouthing off.
"Ok asshole, I don't know what dark corner you crawled out of but I'm not in the mood right now, so get out of the kid before this gets ugly."
Are you trying to get yourself killed?! The walrider screamed from inside my head.
At this point? Probably.
Whatever bullshit Murkoff had managed to conjure laughed in my face.
"You've stooped low since we last talked." the voice came from nowhere once again
"I get it, you're not talking to me, but come on; I'm right here. Talking like someone's not even in the room is rude you know."
I don't even know why I try with you anymore.
The shadow behind Connor flickered a bit, not unlike the walrider would do with the swarm when it was annoyed. The swarm itself twisted into the ghostly shape of a man with no features and hovered slightly to my right.
"Balthophed. It's been a long time." The static voice that I so often heard from inside my own head came into the room. For some odd reason my skin crawled at the sound of it.
"So I wasn't mistaken. You are still slumming it here on the mortal plane." The thin gray shadow glided over the murmuring child it had been behind. "It looks like you've gotten some new tricks since we've last talked."
The wave of sweet grief that flowed into the air followed the ghostly figure, though a hundred little emotions ranging from a savory fear to zesty confusion still swirled up from Connor and the room behind him.
I bit my tongue. No, I'm dealing with the walriders little ghost friend and the getting the hell out. That was it.
"...don't even think about Balthophed. It will end badly for you."
"Is that a threat?"
A gray tendril snaked its way up from the incorporeal figure. Slowly, like it were some scientific probe the little thing reached towards me.
Enough of this. I had to move, to do anything. The temptation in the air was getting to be too much and if I waited much longer I would do something regrettable. The gray thread wasn't but a couple of inches away when I whipped the swarm that wasn't forming the walriders body around in a wave that enveloped the gray man before me. The invisible force that carried the little beads of metal twisted around the demon, it's gray form became lost in the fuzzy black of nanobots. The shape of a man ripped apart like a tissue in a tornado. I let the swarm rage in the air until there was nothing left to resist it. The black in the air floated back into the cloud that had surrounded me a moment earlier.
"That was supposed to be a threat. Right?" I spoke to the figure of the walrider that now sat motionless in the air.
Before it had the chance to reply a gray layer of something unknown rippled across the interior of the store. I looked back at Connor who stood in the the center of a slightly darker ring. A suffocating madness, something that demanded I ripped into the source of this power, twisted its way into the room. I held my ground, the broken shelves and shriveled body of the dead dreamer were flung to the far walls with an invisible force. Mirrors and bottles cracked, lights flicked and popped, raining down hissing sparks. Garret screamed between sobs from the back.
You idiot! That was a bluff! I was bluffing!
The unseeable force whipped over me, peeling the swarm away in the fearsome gail.
"You want to kill me too?" Connon choked out between sobs. Another compression wave racked through the store.
"No, Connor. It's fine. Everything's fine. Uh-" I did my best to hold firm. Weather or not I was fighting the urge to lunge or run away I didn't know.
The little boy screamed, the walrider retreated back into my head, and I went flying across the room.