Alex Zandra

I forget how long I’ve been down here. Or up there, for that matter.

Every chuckle tastes like copper and tin. A rare treat. I was just remembering you asking me where I run to those times I cut contact and go missing for hours. Sorry, days, you're right. Sometimes it’s days. Can you blame me, though? Everyone's going to be mad anyway, might as well make the most of my vacations. We don't really get those anymore, do we.

Well, now you know. I'll have to find a new place to escape to. Unless, of course, you can keep a secret.

There are voices. Do you hear them? They know almost everything, but they don't know about this place. I still haven't figured it out, the rhyme and reason of what's within their influence and what's without. They'll tell me to pore over hundreds of instruments of destruction, they'll have me spend hours retrofitting an old favorite for some inscrutable reason when what I have on hand would do the job just fine, they'll know every statistic of my combat record down to the millisecond... but I take one fifteen minute ride into town and it's like I never existed. Silence. Pure silence, at long last. Until they find me again.

You ever tried slumming it? With actual people? The way we used to, before we became what we are? It's great, if you can stomach what it takes to get there. What it takes to make the glow go away for a while.

Turns out there's a certain amount of punishment you can put your body through that will take everything you've got just to keep you alive. That's the sweet spot: the moment we start feeling like a person again. Play it right, and that moment can last forever. Or at least a set list if the DJ's halfway decent at keeping the dance floor moving.

Funny how some things are so hard to remember, and others so impossible to forget. I'm not sure if it was the light show or the bass track that did it tonight, but for an instant I was back there. You remember when. The moment that asshole's pipe dream came crashing down around us. Everything around us falling, taking us with it, fast enough to catch on fire. A dance floor hot enough to give us a run for our money. A beat drop hard enough to leave a crater.

You'll have to tell me if I left a hole in the wall up there. I don't mind paying for it. Either way I guess I'm not showing my face in that club again.

We keep ending up in these situations, don't we? Me pushing hard enough until something breaks, and you calmly reaching down to pick up the pieces. Keeping what's left of me safe. Until the next time I do it.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it. But there's no contract. There's no obligation. Just the voices, and your hand around mine as you pull me up. You don't have to be there next time.

Fine, fine, I’ll get up. I know, no time to smell the roses. Back to the grind.

Hah.

This afterlife sucks, man.

They say the light makes you forget. But your body remembers. It keeps track. And the light knows.

The sucking emptiness of grief. The stabbing electricity of pain. The consuming fire of anger. All fuel for the furnace.

What turned your heart to ice, they ask? What made you cold, what made you seal it all away? Don’t you know that’s how it festers, poisoning everything it touches? Or worse?

It’s either that or burn it, until there’s nothing left. But that’s a pipe dream. There’s more. I know; I’ve tried.

There’s always more.

There are voices in the back of my head. Not always, but often.

Not like the voices of all the commanding officers who tried to get me to follow orders, or even just stand up straight. Those are distant memories, if you could even call them that. The timbre and pitch have faded, leaving only echoes without faces.

Not like the voices of the gods who tried to sway me, and the one who did. They spoke to me in ideas more than words; it was my brain that put syllables to the symbols. Symbols that burned themselves deeper than the skin, deeper than anyone can see. But I know where they are. I know what they mean. I know what power they hold.

Not like the voices of my second half, always there but never present, always close but not a way I can touch, or hold. Just a part of me that speaks in intent, using words I've used myself. Not quite a sibling. Not a parent—what we both desperately need, what we've always needed from the day we were born. If you can even call it that.

There are voices in the back of my head. They discuss among themselves. They speak of places I've been, things I've seen, things I've done. Things I have yet to do. Things they are certain I can do, or die trying. Like I have in the past.

Sometimes they laugh. Not at me, or with me. They just laugh. Maybe one day they'll fill me in on the joke.

They don't always speak. But when they do, I listen. Because one voice among them reverberates deeper and louder than the others. The voice I listen to above all else.

A voice that isn't mine.

The voice that drives me to action. The voice that speaks the language my muscles understand. The voice that focuses the heat in my body and my soul into a singular pinpoint of fire. Because that's what it wants.

It wants me to burn.

It wants me to burn to cinders every living and unliving thing that ever preyed on someone else.

It wants me to fill their mouths with flames. It wants me to crush their bodies into motes of dust. It wants me to take every bit of lightning coursing through my nerves and give them the last light show they'll ever see. It wants me to turn them into grotesque monuments to all their sins and shatter it for everyone to see. It fills my head with visions of death and ways to inflict them and makes me see red and sets me loose. It tells me to burn.

So I burn. And they all, every last one of them, burn along in turn.

Why fight it?

It's what I wanted to do anyway.