Category : Books-Fiction

Sub Category : Fantasy

Dorian was paralyzed in the middle of a field. The field. His first battle. Towers of proud oak outlined the bustling amphitheater. Showtime. The shrouded sun grinned ominously down at him, watching the unjustified violence rage below. Not unjustified, necessary. Beautiful. Remember why, Dorian. The sky was charcoal-grey-not a splotch of color in sight-as if the heavens were being infected by the bombardment of death smoking out of cracked-open bodies; shining sinew, twitching muscle, cooled flesh. 

   He stumbled forward, managing to remain upright despite the nausea-vertigo cocktail snaking around his stomach. His helmet strap had loosened. He tightened it with his index finger and thumb. The world filtered through his eyes like a dream, which was wrong, he knew, but the effort of pulling himself out of the daze didn’t seem worth the impending panic. Red-brown grass plastered to the Earth, as dead as the bodies it cradled. A rushing-living-weight crashed into his arm then sped off. He regained his balance. The handgun hanging from his soot-painted hands dangled closer to the ground by the second. It was getting heavier somehow despite not taking a single shot. What a burden-honor-it was to carry. An explosion to his right shook the ground, sent light splotches dancing in his vision and shrapnel into his tender skin. He was drip-dropping crimson blood onto fallen soldiers. He walked on.


    The floating neon clouds littering his eyes distorted his view, but not enough that he didn’t catch the wave of platinum hair contrasting the black-grey-red.The girl it was attached to turned his way, her face censored by one of the sluggishly floating stars. She was clothed in a black tank top, muddied blue jeans, and combat boots. No military camo; a supporter or monster. Shoot. He aimed the muzzle of his gun, choked on the heart clogging his throat, and remembered.


    He was nine when his mother sat him down at the mahogany kitchen table with four equally-sized, wood-framed photographs lined up before him, perfectly spaced and aligned. They were portraits of men donned in military apparel. His father; eyes hard and chest decorated with various metals, his older brother, Shane; mouth set in a determined line, at the end of the lineup, the twins, Braxton and Lando. They were all proud and cold and ruthless in their photos, everything Dorian was meant to be. He hadn’t seen the photo of Lando before. He watched his mother across the table--silky black hair, flawless dark skin, eyes the color of a sun-kissed forest. She was beautiful, but the only beauty she craved was that of a bloodied battle.


    His brown eyes were round and pleading as they peered over the row of photographs. She read him like an open book.


    “Trainee, ask your question,” she ordered monotonously. Dorian straightened his posture and puffed out his chest, staring blankly ahead. 


    “Trainee Steif reports as ordered, ma’am. I was just wondering if Lando’s picture being added means he graduated basic training.” 

Tila Steif nodded in response to this. 

      “He graduated five days ago.”

Dorian bit back his grin. Good, Lando made it into the army; he won’t be recycled. Now Dorian just had to worry about himself. His mother elegantly folded her hands on the table; her posture-as usual-was perfect. She smiled grimly at him and began, 

    “You’re the last of my trainees, Dorian, and the others have been no less than exemplary in their training. Am I wrong in my observation that you’ve been struggling to meet requirements?”

   Last of her trainees. Dorian felt a sweat break out on his brow at the statement. Why did she say that? Is she trying to bring up Sam without saying her name? Does she know? Is she trying to get me to confess? He pushed the paranoid thoughts away. If she had known, he surely would’ve been recycled by now.

    He replied, “Respectfully, ma’am, I passed all of my physical fitness tests--”

   “This isn’t about your physical training. Your scores on the morality test last week are a cause for concern. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say your heart isn’t in this war,” She hesitated, presumably to assess his reaction, “Do you like monsters, trainee? Do you want the enemy to win?”

   “No, ma’am,” he answered reflexively. 

   “If a human supporter aims their weapon at you, what do you do?”

   “Shoot first, ma’am.”

   “And if they’re unarmed?”

   “I shoot, ma’am” 

   His mother nodded once in approval and hollered, “Bring our guest in!” to someone Dorian couldn’t see. He kept his expression blank despite the rising unease. At the corner of his eye he saw a soldier walk into the room with an unfamiliar man in tow. The soldier was clothed in standard combat uniform; a bit downgraded, he heard, from what was worn before the disasters, but retaining the traditional camo. The new man’s arms were bound in heavy looking chains and his mouth was gagged. Tears left clean tracks down his bloodied, swollen face. He’d been beat. 

    

    His mother held out a freshly shined handgun, not a speck of dirt or imperfection tarnishing the silver weapon.

    “Shoot him.” apathetic ice sliding from her throat. The soldier-while keeping a firm hold on the man’s trembling shoulder-unraveled a plastic sheet that seemed to manifest from thin air. He laid it on the ground. A less than gentle nudge to the bicep and the man was forced to step onto the opaque material. Dorian took the gun. He could feel his eyes bulging right out of his head.


     And the world spun and spun and spun.


    “Why?” A sob; a plea.

    His mother nodded again to the soldier and he wholeheartedly-maybe eagerly-accepted the cue, ripped the gag away. Two needles protruded from the man’s gums as he gasped. They ‘clicked’ back into his skull, the non-pointed canines they overlapped replacing the inhuman little knives.

    “A vampire,” Dorian breathed. He’d never seen a D.B.S. descendant...or any D.B. descendant for that matter.

    “This,” his mother hissed, “Is worse than a supporter. It’s a cannibal; a demon. If you can’t shoot it, how will you ever shoot a human traitor? Supporters don’t have fangs, Dorian, but it’s still our duty to kill them. Dorian was shaking as badly as the vampire now. He couldn’t suck in enough air.

    “Left face,” his mother ordered. Orders-orders-orders-shoot-duty-kill.

    He rigidly slid his feet to the left and clicked his heels together, formation perfected from years and decades and lifetimes of training. Now facing the vampire, Dorian aimed the trembling gun at it’s-his-it’s chest.

   

     The vampire’s expression shattered. It begged, “Please, I don’t hurt people! Please, don’t!” Crystal blue eyes and a mole beside the bridge of his nose. Dorian rested his index finger on the trigger and a thousand years passed as he turned to marble. 


    The gun was snatched from his weak hands and his mother aimed with zero hesitation; bang. The squealing rumble made his ears ring. The vampire crumbled to the red, red plastic sheet. A burst of fiery pain slashed his cheek and the slap drew his eyes up to his mother. 

     She knelt down in front of him; said, “Your father’s job is to lead his men. Mine is to make his soldiers. I may have given birth to you, but i’m not your mother. I’m your instructor and you will follow every order I give you, because that’s your job.”

    “Yes, ma’am.”


     Dorian snapped back to the here and now. In the seconds it’d taken to recall the educational-though horrific at the time-memory, the girl with platinum hair had noticed the gun trained on her and aimed at him in return. The only greeting in this hell.

     He panicked and remembered his mother’s lovely face after killing a monster, the vampire’s pleas, the shaking of his hands. Duty.


    He squeezed the trigger.

    

    Time drip-dropped and slowed to a trepidatious crawl. Relativity had sprung a leak. 

    The slender, tightly coiled body sagged to the ground in slow motion; waterfall hair, sack of bricks. The spray of red-black-oil-fountain blood painted the suspended air then dropped to the ground. White water stained crimson.


     Dorian stumbled over lazily strewn bodies and abandoned guns glimmering beneath a sheen of fluid. He wanted so badly to spew his insides onto the ground and fall-fall-fall in the puddle like everybody else, like the girl, like Shane had long ago. 

     He was a blind moth closing in on a beautiful-lethal flame with only the heat kissing his face as a guide. Except the flame was flesh and bone and blowing away in the deceased breeze. 

    Limp fingers were crushed beneath his combat boots with a step, a wrist with another, then a leg and foot-head-stomach-breast. But he’d long since lost the habit of muttering an instinctual apology. He knew every faceless soldier or supporter or monster crushed beneath his heel was either dead or close to it. Casualties, a voice in his head cooed. It sounded suspiciously like his mother. 

     

     The dizzying stench of decomposition and gun powder filtered through his nose in labored breaths as he robotically walked on, coming to a stop a mere two feet from the girl.

  

   The girl with a bullet lodged in her chest. The girl he’d shot. 


    He kneeled down and rested his arms on stiff knees; looked into crystalline blue eyes. She was pale with prominent cheekbones and thin lips. The first person he’d ever killed was beautiful. Supporters aren’t people, Dorian. A whisper, a shout. He swallowed a lump of acidic bile clogging his throat. 

    He didn’t feel the movement of his hand reaching out and touching her throat-watching his own action with numb curiosity-but he did feel the weak, fading pulse jump against his fingertips. She’s not dead, not yet. Give it a second, a minute, and she’ll be gone. His dark fingers contrasted the fair skin of her neck. Her eyelids slipped shut and fluttered open lethargically as she watched him. The bloody mass of chest stuttered in it’s lethally slow inflations and she coughed. He was caught in a hypnotic trance by her defiant, unwavering gaze that screamed a thousand words she couldn’t physically produce. 


    A wet sounding snort-gasp, a minute shudder, and, with a tragic finality, the hissing of released air like a hole popped in a balloon. She was dead. His mother would’ve been so proud. His father would’ve nodded his wordless approval. Dorian felt as dead as the girl.


    Why am I doing this? Why did I do this? She was alive-alive-alive and now she’s just a thing without a person to fill it. Hollow. She used to smile and laugh and cry and had a mother that probably didn’t hurt her.

    No, mother had to do that. This girl wasn’t right in the head; she was a supporter! A traitor! She defended things that kill and maim without an ounce of guilt. She may as well have been a killer herself. Yeah, she deserved to die. She did. Maybe I even did her a favor, putting her out of her misery in a war she didn’t stand a chance in. There has to be a reason mother trained me for this. She wouldn’t make me kill an innocent.

    The rationalizing didn’t fill the hole in his chest. Maybe he was the one with a bullet in him.


    Dorian’s fingers jerked away from the still-warm throat when a sharp current of pain zipped through him, abrupt and intense, catapulting him backwards onto the clearing floor. His body spasmed in reaction to the foreign onslaught of agony. The current caressed the top layer of his skin and burrowed deeper, deeper, until it was slicing muscle, blood, bone. Every inch of him was swallowed in fire, and his icy-hot-pulsating head was the epicenter. He lost control of his body and fingers that weren’t his ripped at his hair and dug crescent moon meat hooks into the tender skin.

     Images too fast to catch assaulted his thoughts; a warm smile complimented by dimples, an ash-white house with a blue-tiled roof, scales-and-fangs-and-fire-claws-gun-pain-gone. He saw things he’d never seen and faces he’d never known, but there was an alien familiarity to them, as if he knew them from a dream. In another life that he couldn’t recall. Writhing on the ground beside a cooling body-the body; her, her, me, her-he helplessly screamed into his mind, through the strange movies behind his eyes and the frying of his nerves and the cloudy chaos of his memory-who am I where am I what’s happening-as everything went white. The aching back, that he wasn’t sure was his, arched; spine bending in to escape the licking flames. His head pounded. Sanity spiderweb-cracked. And pain-pain-pain he burned he froze his cells sang their wailing siren songs.


    Then, suddenly, the pain receded just as quickly as it had appeared. It was over. He couldn’t help but wonder if he’d imagined the whole terrible thing, or if he had died and was now just a ghost planted on the muddied ground. Nothing more than an insane phantom denying it’s expiration. He laid frozen on the ebbing tide of soil and grass for a moment before unclenching shaky fingers that came away from his scalp caked in fresh blood and strands of black hair. Standing up on rubbery legs, he rested his face in his hands. What was that? Fighting the new wave of fatigue, he allowed his hands to fall to his sides like heavy weights. He didn’t bother brushing away the clumps of damp grass smeared over his uniform. The sky dimmed; twilight asserted itself. The battle was nearly asleep now, only the occasional scream of gunfire littering the field. 

    He realized with no more than an apathetic thought that whatever that current was, it could have killed him. He wanted to be shocked by the carelessness in that realization. He wanted to. He wished a ball of lead disappointment hadn’t dropped in his stomach. He was so empty, except for that damn lead tumor weighing his soul.


    With a final, remorseful glance at the body sprawled behind him, he turned away and walked, walked, walked. He walked. And wasn’t that just fucking typical? He wanted to laugh and cry and scream, “Walking Dorian, always walking!” but he didn’t. He just kept going on the endless treadmill. A dangerous part of him was so jealous of the girl with the platinum hair. Why didn’t he just hesitate? Just for a second? Just like he did so many years ago with the vampire? If he had, the lead would’ve been lifted and he would’ve floated away, free for the first time since he was born. DammitDammitFuck. His mother never liked swearing. His lips had never danced with such vulgar and “unprofessional” words. He wanted so many things. He walked.


    Movement caught his eye and his gaze drifted up, revealing a girl standing not three feet in front of him; all big, blue eyes and fiery attitude. He froze, commanded his legs to thaw, and fled in the opposite direction. The girl he’d killed only a few moments ago had just looked him in the eye with all the hatred of a victim seeing their murderer.