Simon

On the final morning she would do so, my mother called my name through my tightly closed bedroom door, her light and musical voice reaching me even deep in the throes of beloved sleep.

“Simon,” She called. “It’s time for school. The bathroom is free for once, I’d advise you to take advantage of this opportunity.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled, mostly to myself, into the feathery depths of my pillow. “I’ll be up in a couple of minutes.”

Amazingly enough, she heard me, even through the door.

“Not in a couple of minutes, right now. I’m not going to have you use me as an excuse for why you didn’t go to school. Your father would skin me alive if he found out I let you be late.”

I sat up, snatching a pair of shorts from the floor to pull up over my naked lower half and strode to my closet. I knew she was aware that I was really and truly up now, but still I felt the need to call out to her, although I made it a deep grumble. A second later the door opened and she smirked at me.

“Wakey wakey, sunshine.” She smiled at me, then wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. Jesus, Sy. Clean the room when you get home this afternoon, ok?”

“I could just open a window,” I offered helpfully.

“And kill our neighbors?” Her eyes widened in mock-horror. “Why Simon, I’m surprised at you. You. Shower. Now. You’re not skipping breakfast today either.”

I groaned in defeat and snatched a change of clothes from my closet. Dark blue jeans and a cotton shirt with “Fcuk” on the front. Perfect for the little town of Samson. It was one “fcuked” up place, alright. I turned to head to the bathroom, then turned back and got a different shirt. Mr. Wheelan, the high school’s principal, would crap a brick if I walked through the door with it on. With that cheerful mental image, I sauntered past my triumphantly smirking mother and made my way to the bathroom.

2

“Mom always has to drag you out of bed for school, Simon. Why don’t you go to bed earlier, or you know, set the alarm they got you for Christmas?” My sister, Morgan, was eating a heaping bowl of raisin bran crunch, kicking her feet under the table, and gazing at me superiorly with wide green eyes. In the way that only seven year olds could be, she was adorable and infuriating at the same time, like nature itself had conspired to create a defense mechanism to prevent older brothers from killing their younger siblings.

“Why don’t you stick your finger in a power socket and die,” I said sweetly. If my father had been there that would have earned me a smack to the back of my head, but he was at work, working for the local newspaper as their new editor in chief. My relief was short-lived. Stars flew before my eyes and the skin on the back of my head was suddenly warm as Mom stood in for Dad and walloped me.

“Ouch,” I said, rubbing my head where she’d hit me. “Anyone get the number of the truck that hit me? You must take lessons in karate or something.”

“Mom-fu,” she said, plopping down a bowl of cinnamon toast crunch and a half-gallon of milk in front of me. “Black belt.”

“Oooh, scary.”

“Eat your food, smartass.”

3

Half an hour later, my Mom was dropping me off in front of the school, and smiling such a hopeful smile to me I couldn’t help but to return it. As she drove off in the bright blue Neon, however, the hopefulness died in the face of the thought of a day at Samson High School.

Samson, like any small town, had its own little cluster of schools, so that the same kids were together pretty much all of their school careers barring extreme circumstances. Samson had six or seven thousand people living in it, and four or five hundred of them were students at SHS. All of whom had known each other pretty much from the womb. Me and my family had moved to Samson fourteen months before. I was still either a non-entity or a target depending on the person. I was willing to accept that some of that could be due to my general policy of avoiding strangers.

I was across the miniature front parking lot, and halfway over the paved path between the school’s main doors and the parking lot, before I realized that I recognized the lone figure standing by the doors with her back to me. Suddenly my day brightened and I quickened my pace to close the distance between us.

“Hi,” I said, smiling my best smile for Samantha Dickenson, and hoping I didn’t look too goofy. Sam wasn’t my whole world, not entirely, but she was a continent or two.

“Hi Simon,” she said politely. I wasn’t offended; we didn’t speak often and I hadn’t any great delusions that we were anything as grand as friends.

“Do you have any good classes this semester?” It was the first day of our junior year at SHS.

“Some, I guess. Got Algebra and History, those should be fun. Uh, do you have any ones you like?” Her green eyes were tight, and her false smile began to falter.

“Oh yeah, I got Evolutionary Bio, and American Lit,” I said, hoping my voice sounded cool and not nerdy. “I’ve gotta go get my books put in my locker, see you.”

“Bye,” she said, sounding almost relieved to be freed. I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder at her as I walked up to the school’s front doors.

As I walked through the school’s main entrance, I smiled to myself lightly, marking even that short awkward conversation with Sam a victory. When I’d first come to Samson I’d been full of fear, almost paralyzed by it, because I was new and different in a place where there is a very clear negative position on the new and different.

They have no idea just how different I am now, I thought.

“But the first one to push me is going to find out,” I said aloud to myself, going so far as to whistle to myself. I resisted the mighty urge to skip. This was going to be a very good year.

Five minutes later I’d arrived at my locker, after a quick glance at the tiny sheet of paper telling me what floor it was on and what number to look for. I looked around, up and down the hall, and as usual no one was paying the slightest bit of attention to me. I held my hand out to grab the door handle and stopped two inches from it. I stared hard at the handle, focusing and yet breathing slowly like I’d practiced all summer, and mentally willed the door to open.

With a seemingly deafening groan of metal on metal the handle popped open and the door swung open into my hand. I looked around again, to see if anyone had seen me, but as no one was screaming or running I guessed that I’d gotten away with it. I smiled hugely as I put my books away, and I could hear people muttering words like freak and geek as they passed but I didn’t care. I had a real superpower, like in the comics, and I wasn’t dreaming. I knew that I couldn’t just use my powers in front of the whole school, I’d seen enough sci-fi movies to know what happened after that, and had no interest in becoming a science project in some government facility.

The first few classes were a blur, my secret elation entertaining me far more than the teachers, and I didn’t even bother getting anything to eat for lunch hour. In fact, my whole day went perfectly, until Evolutionary Biology.

I loved the class and subject; even before I’d proven to be one of the evolutionary jump-starts I’d been reading about since I was six, I’d believed wholeheartedly in evolution versus any kind of creationism. To me, this was the sixty minutes I’d been looking forward to all day. Unfortunately, I was seated in front of Randal Cunningham.

Randal Cunningham, all six feet and three inches of him, was a year younger than me but already acknowledged as the school jock, asshole supreme, and stud extraordinaire by most of my class and the seniors. He played on the varsity basketball and football teams and was the star player on both. I, on the other hand, was five foot seven and had all the coordination of a drunken mule. We were natural enemies. When I realized that I was sitting directly in front of him in Evolutionary Biology I had a silent chuckle at the universe’s sense of humor. My good humor continued right up until Randal leaned forward and whispered in my ear.

“Hey, I saw you talking to Sam this morning.” Of course, I thought to myself. I only said a handful of sentences to her, all of less than ten seconds, and of course those would be the exact ten seconds in which Randal would see me.

“Yeah? What of it,” I said, trying to sound brave and failing, even to my own ears.

“What of it is that I had a little talk with her at lunch,” he said, exhaling on the back of my neck. As much as I hated Randal, and that was quite a bit, I hated his breath more. His breath smelled like he’d been eating the contents of baby diapers for at least a week. I could feel my stomach clench just from the smell and repressed the urge to gag.

“We were just talking, Randal, we’re friends.”

This drew a low, sinister chuckle from Randal. “Friends? I guess you don’t know her as well as I do,” he said. “We both know you like her.”

My ears burned. Like her? I adored her, worshipped the ground she walked on, truth be told. But she was never supposed to know that. “N-no…”

“I figured you’d deny it, little Simon. So I guess you don’t care what she said at lunch,” he teased. I shuddered, picturing his big, gorilla-like face twisted into a sneer.

“No, I don’t. What she said is between you and her,” I muttered.

“Ah, I can tell you’re in denial. I’ll do you a favor, just between us buds, and tell you anyway. She told me she’d never be friends with or date a nigger.” He said the last word loud enough for the students on either side of him to hear. They didn’t gasp in horror at the word, or come to my defense; they started snickering under their breath.

My vision swam. The students closest to me yelled in disgust as their pens exploded all over themselves and their desks. The room temperature spiked. Despite the windows being closed, my notebook flew from my desk as if caught in a great wind, landing on the floor with a hollow thud. I didn’t try to retrieve it; I didn’t look around at the students’ ruined clothes. I stood up, as calmly as I could, and walked towards the classroom door. The teacher, Mr. Banning, called after me half-heartedly, before trying to calm down two of the girls who’d been covered in ink. I forced them from my mind as I tried to calm down.

Once, over the summer, I’d lost my temper with my parents and my power had broken two windows in my bedroom before I’d reined it in. In the process, I’d burned a hole in the comforter I’d been lying on, and very nearly set the house on fire. I’d had to tell my parents that I’d been playing with a ball that bounced out of control. I’d had to pay to get the windows fixed, but it was infinitely better than them finding out the truth. My power was tied to my emotions. I’d figured that out for myself even before I’d started reading the books that theorized as much. Anger, it seemed, was associated with heat.

Standing in the middle of the hallway at school, I had to get control and fast, before something blew up. There was no one in the hall with me, so there was no one to see the errant paper scraps floating in the air as if caught in a breeze. As I watched in horror the white paper began to blacken with heat. I began to draw the power and anger back into myself, gaining ground over my anger bit by bit.

All this, I said, because he said one goddamned word.

No, it wasn’t the word so much; I’d heard it my whole life, from ignorant white people everywhere, who took one look at my dark brown skin and golden brown hair, and saw a scrawny black kid. My father, who was black, and my white mother had had hundreds of talks with me about people not accepting my mixed heritage. That’s what hurt; the idea that someone I liked so much could think of me as less than a human being just because of the color of my skin.

Just as I got a hold of the anger, I heard the door open behind me. I knew the chances that it was Mr. Banning come to check on me. The deep, moronic chuckle and the sudden rising hairs on the back of my neck were all I needed to realize just how horrible a turn my day was about to take.

“What’s wrong, dawg? You don’t like to hear the truth, do you? You going to cry?” Randal’s voice was thick with his dark amusement. “Or maybe you’re going to step up and be a man. Is that it, ­boy?”

The rage rose so fast I didn’t even have a chance to stop it. In the heartbeat between me spinning around and glaring at Randal, I realized I didn’t even want to, much to my horror. The paper scraps leapt into the air again, and I saw them burst into flames, flaring brightly before they transformed into ash.

“Randal. Shut. The. Hell. Up!” The power flared so strongly I could see it as a faint glowing wave that passed between me and Randal, the air between us rippling like the surface of a lake in the wake of a large fish. Randal was thrown backwards off his feet, flew through the doorway and into a student who had still been sitting at his desk, spilling the shocked kid onto the floor. Randal kept going, smacking into an empty desk and flipped over it, landing with his arms outstretched as he landed with his full weight on them. There was a sickening wet snap as his forearms shattered. For a second there was only silence. Then Randal began screaming in high, piercing, girlish wails of agony. From the hallway I could see him holding his arms up, the way they bent at unnatural angles, and the way he cradled them to his chest made me want to throw up. I was still standing there, shocked, speechless, when someone finally took notice of me.

“It was him! He did it, somehow!” The voice was joined by others, and the chorus of horrified voices broke my paralysis. I did the only thing I could think to do.

I turned and ran.

4

My parents and I lived ten miles from school, on the outskirts of Samson, Michigan. When they’d first told me we were moving to Samson—they didn’t ask if I wanted to, or inform me of why—I’d had the typical response of any kid raised in the Detroit suburbs. Which is to say, abject horror. I knew without asking if there were any malls or not. Hell, I couldn’t even get DSL internet, I discovered a week after we moved in. And then I’d started school at SHS. That’s when I learned the true meaning of the word nightmare. And now I’d probably killed the town’s equivalent of the white Christ.

My lungs burned, my legs ached, and my eyes were drowning in the sweat that flowed down over my forehead and into my vision. A half hour ago I’d been just another unhappy kid, one of millions across America. Now I was facing a lynch mob worst case scenario, and a few years in jail at best. Three miles to go.

I was on the main road that led to the cluster of four or five houses that made up my rudimentary neighborhood. There wasn’t much between me and home but the acres of wood on either side of the dirt road. Suddenly I heard the rumble of an engine approaching. An engine I recognized. It was the sheriff, undoubtedly on his way to my house to question my parents. If he picked me up without them knowing, all the better.

I didn’t think about what I was going to do before I did it. I stopped, turned, and launched myself headlong into the thick stand of trees that deepened into darker shadows less than thirty feet away. I was covered in cuts and burrs and sweat five minutes later, leaning against a tree missing leaves from the half of the branches above me. The engine I’d heard had passed me a minute ago, headed towards my house. Maybe it hadn’t been the sheriff, I’d had time to consider since, maybe it had been a car like the sheriff’s. I realized even then that I couldn’t have possibly risked it. Stories of “strange fruit” hanging from trees and parties where mobs hung black men without trials were fresh in my mind as was the confident belief that Samson was just the kind of small, sheep-fucking town where things like that still happened.

And so I waited. Caught my breath. Wiped a few dozen gallons of sweat out of my eyes.

“I wish I’d never even fucking heard of that word,” I panted, to the woods around me. The woods responded with the sound of hungry buzzing mosquitoes and the chirps of unidentifiable bird songs. When my body recovered as much as it was going to, I took a stumbling step through the underbrush towards my house, praying that when I got there the sheriff had come and gone, if it had indeed been the sheriff.

5

I was just emerging from the line of trees, onto the McCreary’s backyard lawn, when the thought of my sister came to me. How would Morgan have handled it? She was Seven, but in a lot of real ways she handled things better than I did, and I was sure that if she had my power and had been called a slur she would have found some way to make Randy feel about three inches tall.

Fifty feet from where the McCreary’s yard ended, stood my house. At once all thoughts of my imminent lynching disappeared. All I could think of was my mother’s face, and my father’s wide, shit-eating grin. I didn’t believe in God, but I thanked whatever powers that might be that I’d made it home.

I thanked them a second time when I saw the driveway empty except for the family Neon. I sprinted across the bright green grass and halfway up my porch steps before I realized that something was wrong.

The front door was standing wide open, which would never have happened if either of my parents were home, and they would never have left my sister home alone. I realized that I’d kept moving even as I took all of that in, because I crossed the threshold into the house before I managed to slow to a stop. My eyes were momentarily blinded by darkness as they adjusted to the deep shadows inside the house. As they began to adjust, I realized I didn’t want to see what was around me. On the floor, five feet ahead, half way in the living room and half in the kitchen, lay a body. I stepped closer, and saw that I recognized the shoes on the body. My mother’s.

She lay on her back, her arms spread out as if she’d been in the middle of praising God when she died. There was no doubt as to whether or not she was dead. Above her neck, her skull had been torn apart, spraying blood all over. Even that wasn’t the worst part of her death. Her skull was empty, as if it had been hollowed out. My stomach threatened to turn itself inside out, and tears sprang to my eyes. I fell to my knees beside her, unable to think beyond the empty space where her beautiful face had been. I might have sat there forever if not for the hushed wavering cry of pain that came from the basement steps on the other side of the kitchen.

I froze. My spine flexed with the sudden thrill of terror that ran through me. The air was frigid; it was only after I saw the actual fog of misted breath drifting before my eyes that I realized that yet another aspect of my power was manifesting. Looking again in the direction of the basement hallway, I noticed something else, something my brain hadn’t wanted to register.

Another body, much larger and darker than my mother, lay on the floor across the doorway. My father was soaking in an ocean of blood; I only had to look once to see that he was at least as bad as my mother.

“Oh Daddy, no,” I said, my first words since entering the house. My voice sounded alien to me, as if someone else was speaking. The squeal of pain came again, louder than before, more insistent, and it was punctuated with a tiny shriek. I heard hollow, emotionless laughter drift up afterwards, as if a dead thing had clawed its way up out of the ground in my basement. I rose to my feet and ran towards the door, stepping over my father and becoming as quiet as I could.

My sister’s voice was twisted in quiet agony somewhere below. There was a dim light coming around the wall from the larger main room of the basement. I could see a dark pool of something at the bottom of the stairs, and I knew with a horrifying certainty what it would be. I crept down slowly. There was no way to avoid stepping in the thick, viscous fluid on the basement floor. Suppressing a shudder I stepped around the corner, and stopped, my heart in my throat as the sound of voices crawled around in the darkness.

“We were very lucky, Demeter. We found a whole family of latents.” The voice sounded like it was being forced from between two blocks of stone.

“Good choice, brother, on bringing us here. This area is rich with latent psychics. These were all especially powerful. Will we share this one’s mind? She is still SO alive, even after a taste. And her brain, brother, her brain will taste so sweet.” The second voice was the voice that had been laughing earlier. My blood had frozen in my veins.

“Patience, brother. There’s one more we have to find. When we find her brother, then we can kill them and move on. Remember the rules.”

They were going to kill my sister. My baby sister. Fury began to build again, and with it came the rising heat. This time I welcomed it.

In the middle of the room two figures cloaked in black that I didn’t recognize stood together, their eyes glowing faintly with a ghostly purple light, and suspended between them hung my sister’s limp form. I gasped, and Morgan’s head snapped up at the sound. Looking into her face something soft and undeniably young wanted to turn and run from the nightmare I saw there. She had no eyes. Where they had been two empty ragged holes stared at me. She opened her mouth and inarticulate inhuman screams erupted from her, and I knew she knew I was there.

The rage that had blossomed in me before rose again, and with it came a wave of power, even stronger than before. The air boiled. A brilliant blue light formed in the air and rushed towards the two male figures suspending Morgan off the ground. They staggered, their thin forms looking no stronger than a sickly cancer patient, and then their gazes fixed me with naked hunger. I saw then that these men were not surprised by my power. I could actually see them mark me for what I was. One of them slapped a thin long fingered palm against Morgan’s forehead, and her screams instantly cut off, a thick gurgling sound left in their place. Even that stopped quickly and then there was only silence in the basement. Then the hand on Morgan’s slack face flexed and I could hear the bones beneath crunch and shatter as her skull collapsed and her skin made a sound like paper shredding. Something gray and glistening was left exposed and whatever strength had let me come down into the basement broke, and I turned and ran. At the top of the stairs I slammed the door, sobbing with great heaving convulsions, and I braced myself against the door. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed that the monsters in the basement would die. I hated them, I wanted them to burn. Burn in a lake of fire, like the bible-thumpers were always screaming about. I realized I was screaming about burning and fire and seconds later realized that the fire I was envisioning had come, was all around me, and that from below I could hear the agonized screams of the things being burned alive.

I stumbled away from the door, through the kitchen, and managed to limp out of the front door. I tried to navigate my way down the porch steps and ended up tumbling down the steps and landing on my back in the hard-packed dirt. From there I watched as the fire spread and ate the house. I couldn’t think of it as my home; that would have made me think of my father, mother, and little Morgan, all being eaten in the wild and indifferent fire.

6

The house took a long time to burn. It was night. The sun had gone down, and stars stretched overhead. I’d fallen asleep, I realized hazily. I sat up slowly, when a deep, angry groan emerged from within the charred ruins of the house. I was fully upright before I realized I’d even been trying to stand. A shadow detached itself from the deeper darkness and began to approach the door. A single, insane purple ball of ghostly fire glared at me from inside the house.

“Oh Jesus,” I breathed. “Oh Jesus! Fuck me.”

As if in answer, the shadow screamed, a hungry, imbalanced roar of pain and need. There was no doubt that this was a survivor of the fire. I was overcome by a terror unlike anything I’d felt before, even watching my sister being murdered before my eyes. There was nothing else to do, nothing I could do for my family, nothing else I could do for myself. I turned and ran, shrieking at the top of my lungs, pursued by the echoing roar.

7

I don’t know how long I ran. The days and nights blurred together, and I know that however long I’d run I hadn’t slept more than fifteen minutes at a time since I’d started. Every time I’d get any deeper than that, that same hungry scream would shake the air around me, and my legs would start me stumbling away again as if they didn’t have time to wait for my instructions. I don’t know how many towns I passed through, as I was mainly trying to stick to the woods. I ate what I could wherever I could. I couldn’t stop, I knew that. There was nowhere I could hide, I could almost feel the thing’s disturbing touch slithering around inside my head, tasting my thoughts.

My shoes had exploded and fallen off my feet, and soon my socks had gotten enough holes in them that I figured I’d be just as well off going barefoot. My clothes were stiff with dirt and old sweat, and I knew I reeked to no end, but I didn’t pass a stream or creek. Going into town to find a public bathroom would have attracted small-town cops looking to bust an undesirable and keep him off the streets, which would have led to a connection to Samson, and I would have quickly ended up back there.

The sound of people approaching pierced the veil of fog around my mind, and I dropped into a crouch, searching my surroundings. It was dark, and I was on the border between the deep woods and a neglected field that while it wasn’t a regular hangout for locals still managed to see some occasional use. I felt my nose wrinkle as I picked out a pair of what had been white panties by the ambient moonlight.

“Ugh,” I said, picturing some girl actually fucking out in the dirt. I looked around, and after only a few seconds I could see the shapes of three people crossing the field in my direction. They hadn’t seen me yet; I was about to merge with the shadows around me and try to get away before they did when I heard the now familiar sound of the thing hunting me.

I had little idea how many times I’d heard that sound. It didn’t matter. It affected me the same way it had the first time I’d heard it. My stomach dropped and my blood froze. The people farther out in the field froze too. I could hear their exclamations of surprise, then fear. I was on the east side of the field, the town proper was to the west, and between stood the three interlopers. I could tell one of them was a woman, she was shorter than the other two and her hair lifted in a sudden breeze, revealing her gender. I was just watching them, trying to guess how close the thing could be behind me, when I sensed it entering the clearing.

That was the only way to describe it. I didn’t hear anything, or see anything, I just knew that we were not alone. It wasn’t a conscious, the decision to group myself and the three strangers together, but it was the right one. I only had to look for a few more seconds before the lanky black figure of my hunter materialized from the waist high grass, south of us.

Even in the moonlight I could see that the thing that stood across the clearing was the same as the thing that had killed my family. It was naked now, its skin pale as death wherever it wasn’t charred and blackened, and its face was an open ruin, half of the skin had been burned away, revealing the bleached skull beneath it. One empty eye socket glared out at the world with dull malice. The other blazed with lavender life. I knew that if I were fool enough to stand before it I would recognize the depth of the hunger.

The idea of me being in that much personal danger snapped me out of the temporary paralysis. I ran towards the people, screaming to them, telling them to run. At the same moment the thing from my house began running, sprinting faster than I’d ever seen a human run, fast enough to tell me that I’d never reach even one closest to me before it did. I reached into myself and grabbed hold of the power inside me and lashed out, sending a wave of force speeding towards the hunter.

He—it was impossible to continue calling the hunter an it when I was now close enough to see the evidence of undeniable maleness—staggered and then flew off his feet, landing in the dirt more than three body lengths away. I gathered the power again, it was easier now that I was becoming more accustomed to using more of it at a time, preparing to lash out again when it inevitably got up again. He wasn’t on the ground more than a handful of seconds before he bounced to his feet and came at me, suddenly more interested in me than the three terrified witnesses, who with quiet shrieks fled the clearing back towards a world that made more sense than the one they’d found themselves in. I had a terrible second when I lost my mental grip on the power and thought I wouldn’t be able to use it. Then it flared and erupted from the space in front of my eyes, the same bright light that I’d come to associate with feats of telekinetic strength, a beam of light that hit and punched through the midsection of the approaching predator.

It was only when the sound stopped that I realized that the monster had been roaring his deep insane howl of hunger since the moment it broke into a run. I stumbled, my vision blurry, as I staggered towards the mewling, twisted form before me. It wasn’t full of the menace that had killed my family. It was just a hungry thing now, and it no longer had the strength to fight me. The power rose in me, flaring brighter than it ever had before, and looking down at the creature the visions of flame came to me. I seized on that vision, I pictured the flames, the heat, and envisioned them devouring the thing before me. There was a moment where my gaze met the defeated, agonized gaze of the thing beneath me, and I could see the hunger that gnawed at its mind like a ravenous hound even then. I knew with a sudden certainty that the flames that blossomed across its flesh weren’t punishment but mercy.

When there was nothing left but ashes, I turned to the spot I’d last seen the three people. They were gone, and it didn’t look like anyone else was coming anytime soon. I stumbled away on bare feet towards the tree line. I slid into the darkness beneath the tree boughs, but only made it past the first tree before my legs gave out. I hit the dirt with a grunt, bracing myself on my hands. I felt my left palm open on an unseen sharp edge, but couldn’t find the energy to care. I had never been so tired, I wouldn’t have imagined it was possible for a person to be so exhausted and go on living. I scooted backwards until I felt my back touch the rough bark of a tree. There, in the shadows, I finally began to let myself drift. I had a brief vision of my mother’s face, smiling, and then blessed darkness.