The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 2 (The Fallocaust Series) (56 page)

He didn’t know what he had created in that lab, just like Leo didn’t, just like Elish didn’t. Silas would soon see just what he was dealing with, the entire world would see. Because I was only getting stronger and I was only going to get smarter. I was growing up, leaving my teenage attitude behind. I was learning control, I was learning patience, and I was learning quickly.

I was the Reaper and he was the Ghost, and his soul was long overdue for collection.

“We’ll see, Silas,” I whispered to him. “We’ll see.”

Chapter 60

Perish

              It had been a long journey, a long and painful journey… but it was almost over, it was almost done. Though it had been one of the hardest things Perish had ever done, he had endured; he had succeeded.

He had opened up the boy’s brain; he had seen the physical organic object that held in its synapses and blood cells everything that made Killian, Killian. With gentle and steady hands he had cut through the soft tissue and had implanted in the boy not only his own brain tissue but the device he had shown Killian the previous day. A small device he had called a spider wire.

What Sky had done to Killian had almost killed him, but this time the end did justify the means. Sky’s memories got appeased with their pain and torture and Perish was able to do what he had wanted to do all along.

Perish had kept his promise. Though the promise didn’t mean that no man would ever harm Killian again, it meant that the boy was now given the tools to fight back against his abusers.

Killian will now be in control; he will now take back his power.

You will be my beautiful personification of perfection.

Perish leaned his back up against the operating table. His eyes were closed and his breathing laboured, with the sounds of the beeping machines filling up the heavy air around him. It had been a long surgery and he was exhausted. Usually when he was performing this surgery he had Sid’s help but it was only him in this underground lab. He had to be the surgeon, the nurse, and the assistant.

But it had always been up to him and only him. Even before the Fallocaust it seemed that he was the sane one trying to keep everything together. What an act of irony that in the end it was he who was the insane one.

If only they could have seen him at his prime... if only Killian could have seen him.

Perish opened his eyes; his chest heavy and his face still flushed though he had wiped the sweat off of him. He turned to see Killian’s pale fingers, his arm hanging off of the operating table just enough for him to see his black fingernails, now surrounded by grey, blotchy skin.

He reached up and brushed his hand over the fingers, soft and slender digits that could turn a devil into an angel with its caring touch. This boy had tamed the worst of them with these very fingers, fingers that Perish had held just the previous evening.

Is it strange that out of all of them… he is the only one I will miss? Over two hundred years and it all came down to this boy.
Perish sighed and ran his hand down his face, ignoring the wetness gathering at the corner of his eyes.

I have fulfilled the end of our bargain – you got your torment but I got to save him and make him whole again.

‘Yes, you did it, brother.’

He knew it wasn’t really Sky. The voice that had been trying to control him for months now was only misfiring synapses and random brain cells but it still sounded like Sky. Even though his brother had become a monster he was still his twin; he was still a part of him.

When you died you took half of me with you, Sky.

Perish stayed sitting on the laboratory floor, catching his breath and trying to unwind his mind after the twenty hour surgery. Finally, when he could no longer stand his own thoughts tormenting him, he rose to his feet and turned to Killian.

The young man was laying naked on the operating table; his skin grey and the colour of death. He still showed all the marks that Sky had made Perish put on him, disfiguring scars and large patches of radiation burns; ones that seeped into the skin leaving open craters in his flesh. He was hooked up to many different machines. All of them monitoring some aspect of his body, giving him fluids or filling him with as much morphine as his slender body could take.

Though that wasn’t the most disturbing thing to be found on the boy. Killian’s head now held a long and angry incision, one that started at his ears and wrapped around the back of his head, all held together by over fifty surgical staples. Underneath his head was dried blood and the remnants of gauze, dirty medical equipment, and the leftover wires that Perish had snipped off of the device he had implanted in him.

But Killian didn’t die; he had survived the surgery… and that in itself deserved celebrating.

He needed the boy alive for what he was going to ask of him next.

‘He’ll understand one day.’

The scientist closed his eyes, those words seemed to haunt him more than it comforted him.

“I know,” Perish said out loud. He drew a hand down and brushed Killian’s remaining hair back with a sad smile. He was sad that he wouldn’t be able to see him one more time with that golden, fragrant smelling hair; the poor boy had pulled almost all of it out.

“Please never forget me, Killian.”

Perish leaned down and kissed Killian’s cheek, glancing up at the heart monitor to make sure his heartbeat was strong. He rested one more hand on his chest before turning and leaving the operating room.

As soon as he stepped into the main area of the laboratory he took in a deep breath of air, trying desperately to clear the melancholy weighing heavy on his emotions. Usually when he was feeling sad about what he was going to have to do he looked at that boy’s sapphire eyes. Or gave Killian a reason to talk to him just to hear his voice. But now there was no one to break up the anxious storm gathering in his chest and heart. He was alone now with not even his brother’s sporadic and sometimes violent memories to keep him company.

I had always been alone. Even your voice is false, Sky. I know it’s not really you. If it had been you, you would’ve never demanded Killian’s blood in exchange for that information.

Perish crossed the white tile floors, walking past the rows of filled shelves, and found the small, narrow hallway that immediately sparked memories in Sky’s O.L.S. One of his last memories was taking Silas down this hallway, the two of them fueled with their hatred and love for each other. They had destroyed each other many times over before they had finally reached this room, that destruction was evident on Silas most of all.

Perish took a right at the hallway and entered into a large room. The floor was white tile and the walls as well, except for a metal door embedded in the left hand side of the room. Beside the door was a small control panel with two rows of white buttons and several switches.

So this is where it all ends. I made it this far. I got Killian here alive even though Sky did a good job trying to stop that from happening

Perish flicked one of the switches on the control panel and opened the door. His eyes swept the small room, covered from floor to ceiling in shiny, reflective metal. He ignored the smell of radiation and left it open to air out.

How silly, well, I don’t want to be locked in there with it smelling this way. Too bad all the air fresheners are long past giving off pleasant smells.

Time passed with the scientist quietly working inside the small laboratory room. There was too much to get done and the flow of time was still the same enemy it had always been. The more he looked around on his laptop the more things he realized he had to get in order. There were emails full of files and research to send off to Sid and Mantis, and an immortal’s life full of memories he wanted to keep preserved before he stepped into that room.

Killian obviously has no email address. I will make one for him.
There are so many things I want him to have.

And with that boy a constant imagine in his mind, Perish found himself wandering into the operating room.

As if to show himself just how his efforts hadn’t been in vain, he reached out and put a hand on Killian’s chest. Immediately he felt the sharp burning needle pricks come to his fingers. He clenched Killian’s chest hard and forced a surge of sestic radiation into the boy’s warm body.

The static needles jabbed at him like a thousand soldiers wielding spears, but he focused all of his energy into his hands and bit through the pain.

Then, when Perish was satisfied, he withdrew his hand and looked at the boy’s chest.

If he was still a normal arian his chest would’ve had a half inch deep imprint of Perish’s hand. It would be red, swelling, and in an hour a fluid-filled blister would form… but the boy’s body held nothing but sickly grey skin, and deep blue veins that coated his chest like a rat’s nest of fishing line.

My solemn goodbye.
Perish walked out of the surgery room and grabbed several boxes he had. He turned a left at the hallway that led to the white room he had previously been in and walked to a single metal door that opened to a flight of stairs. He walked down them two by two until he got to the bottom, another hallway in front of him, though this one was much like the tunnel sewers they had seen in Kreig.

Perish squinted as his eyes adjusted to night vision and sprinted down the sewers, taking twists and turns that only Sky’s memories remembered, until he got to a second metal door.

This door was reinforced and seven inches thick, a fireproof door that could withstand the white flames of hell that rode behind the condensed radiation like a chariot. He threw the box in and left it propped open with a L shaped rusted pipe. Then, without another glance, he ran back; the large cylinder tunnel filling with the sounds of his boots on the smooth brick.

He didn’t like feeling rushed, but at any time –

“Perish?”

Perish stopped. He felt a quiver of anticipation in his chest and for a moment he felt himself stuck in limbo. A brief period in time that offered, in its fleeting moments, a chance to call all of this off.

“Perry?”

Perry…

Though the nickname had been Perish’s for centuries now, just hearing Killian’s weak and confused voice call it immediately made tears spring to his eyes. All of a sudden the reality of what he was doing and what he was going to do came crashing down on him.

With a stifled sob he leaned a hand against the metal door frame for support and brought the sleeve of his lab coat up to his face. He cried into it briefly; his chest filled with pain and his throat dry and tight. His mind seemed to fill with fears, and in the dark corners he felt small fleeting surges of doubt. But he had already come this far, there was no turning back.

What would I go back to? Reaver will never trust me again. Silas will hunt me like a dog and then encase me in concrete for the next two hundred years. No, this had to be done, I made this decision long ago and I told myself over and over that I would go through with it.

I am ready.

So Perish closed the metal door behind him and took in a deep breath. After taking another moment to gather himself and his nerves, he made his way into the operating room.

Killian was sitting up, his sapphire eyes glassy and staring forward. He turned to look at Perish and his face lightened.

“Perry… you’ve been crying.”

Like a trigger being pressed, Perish’s eyes started to well again. He put a hand to his face and nodded before trying his best to smile.

Always other people first. Oh, my sweet heart, promise me you will never change.

Please never change.

“I know, sweety, I have.” Perish walked towards him and, still holding his weighted smile. He brushed back Killian’s hair and removed the breathing tubes he had in the boy’s nose.

“How do you feel?” He reached a hand out and stroked the thick red incision in the back of Killian’s head, when the boy flinched he cooled his touch. “Can you walk?”

Killian started to shift off of the bed, and as he did Perish gently extracted the tubes sticking into his arms. When he was free of medical equipment Perish took a step back, waiting for the boy to answer him.

Killian was very much in a daze. He looked around the surgery room as if he didn’t know where he was and furrowed his brow. Perish took this moment of confusion to dress him in his cloth pants. He gently put them onto the boy and lifted him off of the hospital bed to tie the laces around his waist.

“What happened?” Killian murmured. Perish put a lab coat on him and held out his hand.

The boy took it and stepped off of the hospital bed.

“I made you better, love,” Perish said with a smile. “That’s what happened.”

Though the boy saw right through the smile. The lines in his furrowed brow deepened, and he continued to look around the operating room, before his vision fell down to the bloody surgical tools.

“What did you do to me?” Killian’s voice raised an octave. His face twisted in a nervous fear that Perish immediately tried to quell with a shush.

“It’s okay, Killian. I… I won’t tell you now, love. I don’t want to upset you. But I wrote it down, alright? Can you listen carefully as we walk?”

Killian nodded, and started walking without Perish’s help towards the long hallway.