Arise (Book Three in The Arson Saga) (16 page)

Chapter Twenty

The people on the
lower level were like rats, scurrying across the floor, seeking escape. Arson walked barefoot over bodies that had fainted, some that had tried to drug him.

“Isaac! Where are you? Face me, you coward! Isaac!” The more he spoke that wretched name, the more the rage turned his blood to fire. He wanted to unleash it all. Arson noticed spreadsheets on some of the steel tables, blueprints of other facilities, but he didn’t know if these places existed now, or if they had yet to be constructed.

Soon he reached the end of the Sanctuary. An elevator stood between him and the upper levels, but either a key or an eye scan was required in order to gain access to it. The realization came when a legion of footsteps surrounded him. “I don’t have time for this. My fight is not with you,” he said, back turned. They attacked anyway. With sharpened reflexes, Arson dodged the first swing; but another came, and another. “If you want to live, let me go. My fight is not with you.”

“Yes, it is. You’re one of them!” a man shouted, backing up his words with a slug to the gut.

One of
them
. He couldn’t help but feel that the words were confirmation of what he’d always believed: He had never been one of them—a normal—and he never would be.

“You’ll kill us if we don’t kill you first!”

Arson scoffed at the woman who spewed the claim. Did she even understand what she was saying? “I’m not a murderer. I never asked to be your experiment. Don’t you get it? I’m not a murderer.” He knew the repetition was for his own sake. Without regard, a nurse with a black stick swung at his knee, caused bruising and a stabbing sensation in his thigh. The rats wanted to end him.

“I don’t have to hurt any of you. Just tell me where he is.”

“He’s lying,” the stick witch said, jabbing the wood into his chest. “Dose him before it’s too late.”

A man from the outer rim of the crowd advanced with a needle. “Have it your way,” Arson said with a grunt, grabbing him by the arm. One twist was enough to break the bone. Arson spun the subject around until his face was eye level with the retina scanner; he obtained a successful read, and the elevator doors parted. Arson threw the man into the cesspool of grimaces and accusations and stepped inside. He imagined a wall between them. Blue, red, and black fire instantly appeared as a result. The edges of the flames whipped and danced in an elusive splash of color, forcing his attackers back. When the metal doors shut, Arson selected the level one button, marked “Asylum Main.” There were four floors above the Sanctuary. Isaac had to be on one of them.

Upon arrival, Arson stepped out, ready for anything. The blade stuck to his palm, sweaty, like it was a part of him. He wasn’t sure if his desire for vengeance outweighed his desire for clarity and resolution, but now was not the time to dwell on the repercussions of his actions. Not when he’d lost so much.

He jetted past rooms with patients locked inside as lights started to flash. A robotic voice with distinctly feminine qualities echoed from above. Arson wasn’t able to see a speaker, so pinpointing the voice’s origin proved challenging. The same few sentences played on a loop. “Warning…Warning…Warning. Attention all Salvation personnel. This announcement is a level 5 priority. Subject 219 is trying to escape. Consider the subject a hostile menace and therefore of paramount danger to the patients of this institution and to the public. Contain the threat and ensure minimal collateral damage. Warning: This is not a test. Do not let 219 escape, under any circumstances.” It was only a matter of time before security from this wing realized he didn’t belong.

Still, Arson continued his search. “Isaac!” Every sense was heightened, and every step brought him more in tune with his surroundings.

The panic on level one was rising. The ones who could fathom escape sought it vehemently. Receptionists and nurses fled. Once a few of the orderlies noticed he was among them, they paged their superiors but received no response. Terrified, some passed out. He didn’t have the time or the patience to convince each one that he wasn’t a sinister criminal. So he said nothing and kept on down the hall.

Gasps permeated the air, but like a black glove, the voice of warning returned to the intercom, reestablishing him as a threat. His picture floated across nearly a hundred glass windows. At first glance, they appeared transparent, but in actuality each glass quadrant was a fully functional computer. Directly north of him, an armed security unit raced into position. Out of the corner of his eye, Arson noticed doctors in lab coats—or maybe just sleeper cells like Isaac—abandoning the wing of the asylum completely. How easily they divorced themselves from emotion, all sympathy for the ones they allegedly cared for gone.

“Surrender quietly and without incident,” hollered the leader of the security unit as red points targeted Arson’s chest. “Surrender, or we will open fire.”

Arson smirked. When he didn’t offer a verbal response, the leader took a shot. The bullet turned to ash before it got halfway to its target. “Is Isaac with you?”

“Subject 219. On your knees. Now!” The leader cocked his rifle and aimed again. Arson dropped and slid the blade that was meant for Isaac into his pants pocket without detection.

“You don’t even know me, yet you try to kill me?”

“Do not speak!” came another order. Arson kept his head low but heard more footsteps rushing in.

From their enclosed cells, patients bashed their foreheads and fists against his digital image, begging for release. These trapped souls—criminals, diseased minds, broken links—sought a second chance.

The security unit marched in until he was completely surrounded. Arson’s pulse suddenly spiked. He slammed his bare palms hard against the tiles, causing a tidal wave of dirt and ceramic to suddenly erupt from beneath the armed guards’ feet. The wave of materials evolved into fire shapes that incinerated everything in their path and caused the glass inside every room within a hundred-foot radius to explode. A section of level one caved into the Sanctuary. It was a nightmarish descent for the personnel who were dragged into the dark. Their screams, along with the screams of the others who sought to capture him, echoed like the cries of a newborn. The few who were unharmed scattered toward an exit.

The fire went out ahead of him, and Arson stood. Patients, possessed with a look of raw and unhinged reason, leaped into the halls. A great number of confused men and women fled toward the ones who’d kept them captive. It didn’t make sense. Arson didn’t see how they could cling to the very orchestrators of their personal hells. Stranger still, he observed the patterns of more uncured remnants who seemed even more deranged, setting out on all fours, seeking human prey. The two sides of the same species, clearer now than ever before. Weeks, months, years of exile, of being locked up and mistreated, had created these deformed reflections of humanity.

He freed the patients to initiate retribution but, in doing so, attracted some spite and hatred from them. Why did some attack him? He had not harmed them, did not wish them pain, only wanted to set them free, as
he
had been set free. But some did not want it. Some were too poisoned to understand. “I want to help you,” he tried, as one patient swiftly removed the blade from his pocket and slashed his stomach with it. “I can save you,” he said with tears, but the young man, a few years older than he was, kept waving the weapon at him, moaning like a beast. Arson was nearly certain that no matter what he said, there was only one way it could end. He jumped back and let the fire he had created finish the fight.

After walking down a long, narrow way, he arrived in another section of the asylum, and there he witnessed the leader of Salvation fleeing for his life. “Hoven. Saul H…oven.” That was his name; it finally came. The terrified puppet master raced up a flight of stairs and locked himself in an office. A crowd of violent patients scaled the steps and surrounded his heavenly tower. With their knuckles and faces and spines, they pounded against the many glass windows. From a distance, Arson read the horror in Hoven’s eyes.

In no time, the glass to the office shattered, and bodies began pouring inside. Saul Hoven caught a glimpse of Arson before pulling the trigger twice. The cost of killing one patient was his own life.

Though Hoven was now dead, Arson still needed to find Isaac, to finish it. “Everyone out!” he screamed. “All of you… Leave now!”

The fire consumed all that it touched. Arson started to run, in search of the man who had brought him into this chaos. There were so many questions dying to be answered. By the time he blinked next, he was forced to stop because a rogue bullet pierced his side. Arson identified the sting and shifted his position to see the face of the one who thought he had a chance. “You fight me, even when you know what I’m capable of? Simple human.” Arson flicked his fingers, and the gun became a cube of ice, attaching its particles to flesh. The man’s eyes stuck out the most, especially when the ice began to travel from the mouth of the barrel toward his wrist and up his arm, eventually reaching a fat gullet. Air and blood flow severed instantly.

As the icy grip of death asphyxiated the man, Arson contemplated his phrasing:
Simple human
. They didn’t feel like his thoughts, like his words. Why had he uttered them? Was he that consumed with hate? Before his thoughts could give a suitable verdict, the guard’s eyes rolled back, and his ice-covered body splintered onto the floor.

“No more games. All of you get out! Get out!” A twisting beam of energy shot out of Arson’s chest as he shouted, and he ignored the pain of the bullet still lodged inside of him. The blast he’d sent out tore a hole into the heart of the building and divided the winter clouds. With raised hands, Arson unleashed a violent, fiery deluge. His knuckles cracked and bled. Teeth clenched, hair like long, brown fingers in front of enchanted eyes, he was ready to unleash his power’s potential. He had been created for this moment.

“Isaac!” Arson forced the bullet out of his side. He could feel the bloodstained metal scrape against his bone before it slipped out onto the floor. His wound sealed instantly.

The ground was littered with the bodies of those who had fed this beast for so long, accepted its plan to rob, manipulate, and destroy humanity from within. In their apathy, they would be consumed. The stench of ash and flesh soon lifted into the air.

He scanned every level for Isaac. The fire walked with him. His eyes pulsated like the sun, and the inmate garments he wore were now tattered, black rags. The asylum was hushed, so quiet and empty, the way his dreams used to be, before the madness of his life had taken over. After a long while, he spotted Isaac hastily exiting a lab room. The chamber was not held up by barriers of Sheetrock, however, but instead had been constructed with massive glass display units similar in design to the technology that had plastered his digital image throughout the entire asylum. He noticed the words
Download Complete
flashing in big, bold print prior to one of the displays shutting down.

“You could’ve escaped,” Arson said, chasing after him. The muscles in his left arm twitched, causing the fire at his sides to swoop forth and cut Isaac off, creating a lethal barrier around the frightened shell of a man. “You almost got out. Instead, you’ll die like a weak, pathetic animal.” Arson got up close and turned his fists to ice, striking Isaac until blood drained from his father’s pores.

“Be careful, son. The rage is consuming you.”

“Don’t pretend to understand!”

“I don’t. How could I? I’m just a weak animal. But you’re…like a god.”

Arson was unsure whether the words were authentic or artificial. “Why am I here? Why did you do this to me?”

“Some of us didn’t have a choice.”

“Liar. You manipulated me. Drugged me. You abandoned me! I spent seventeen years waiting for you. I grew up without a father.”

“So did I,” Isaac said sadly. “The sins of the father… I left you because I was confused and scared. Can you really blame me? I didn’t know…what you were. What you’d become. People do stupid things when they’re afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” Arson denied, dragging his knee up into Isaac’s gut.

“Yes, you are. I can see the fear in you.”

“I’ve become powerful.”

“That power comes at a cost. Which part of you is really in control, son?”

“You don’t deserve to call me that.”

“Right. I deserve death.” Isaac stretched his back muscles and opened his arms like Christ. “Then kill me now. Send me to hell. Let the fires consume me. That’ll fix everything.”

Arson considered it. There was no denying that a part of him wanted to kill Isaac. He deserved a miserable, agonizing death. But there was his other side that wanted more.

He reached for Isaac’s jacket, raised him from where he stood, and slammed him against the wall. Drops of sweat seeped into his father’s eyes. “I just wanted to love you. I wanted a family, but you ruined it! I wanna go back. I just wanna go back.”

“Fate had other plans in store for our family, Stephen. I know you are aware of the Source. Adam. He came to you in the coma, didn’t he?”

“What difference does it make?”

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me to kill you.”

Isaac laughed and spit blood. “Sage advice. But tell me, boy, can you really trust
him
?”

“Don’t try and confuse me. You’re the reason I’m here. I hate you!”

“Good. Let it out. I know you’re filled with hate and preconceived notions of the bastard who never loved you. But your mother and I didn’t know what Adam’s blood would do to her body. She was sick, son. Very sick. I couldn’t lose her. We had to try everything.” His dark pupils resembled planets lost in orbit. “The irony… It’s poetic. His blood cured her, completely. But she was already pregnant with you. Your cells bonded with Adam’s code in a scary way. She decided to go through with the birth, even though Henry warned her that…” His voice broke into pieces.

“She could die,” Arson said, tightening his grip. “You loved her. Did you ever love me?”