He stopped, steeling himself against that direction. Angered and frustrated, he turned toward his padlock-covered door and started tearing at his face to get the congealed blood off of it. He unwrapped it in a continuous strand around his body, like his father unwrapping a meal covered in shrink-wrap. He tried to think of those meals now; badly breaded fried chicken. Steak and mashed potatoes. Or something. Or anything. Anything to get his mind off that window and what lay behind it.
Because Alexander ‘Xander’ Drew could pretend that he was a normal fifteen year old kid, just like any other person living in Coral Beach, Maine. He could fool himself into believing that he didn’t know where he was when he woke up (and did so every day) because in truth he wanted to wake up to anything but these four walls again for the 5,567th day in a row. He could even make believe that the layer of blood that he was now tucking away was normal for him, and that it didn’t really matter. He could convince himself of all these things... but for all his strengths, he could not bring himself to look out his bedroom window.
Past the moldy-green curtains, past the tall evergreen that his father had planted between his house and hers in an attempt to keep them from spying on one another late at night, that they’d climbed instead and where he told her he loved her. Past the high picket fence that he’d hopped over and past the shit-coloured shingles on one side of her house, opposite the off-white that reflected the new morning light on every other side. That was where he didn’t want to look.
That was Sara Johnson’s bedroom window.
Sara Johnson. The angel of light that had filled even the darkest corners of his soul with hope. That was how he had described her back when she was alive and when he thought he had a soul. When he thought he was alive and mortal. Before he had killed her. Ten days ago, two men had ripped his world apart from one end to the other: Abner Jenkins and Adam Genblade, otherwise known as Alpha and Genblade. Two people that looked as though they’d been born out of Shelly or Stevenson’s minds, with their garishly filed smiles and eyes that pumped hatred into you like fuel into a tank. Then again, he couldn’t say much anymore. His own face, his real face, was something much worse.
Adam and Alpha had revealed to him the truth about what he was, about what he was made for. He was a killer. A soulless, guiltless killer designed to jump start humanity’s evolution by slaughtering the weak to bring about a new age. He’d been rescued at a young age and had grown up here, in a quiet place in Maine that was barely able to classify itself as a city, but was more like a not-so-small small town. Something had set him off a month back and his real face, the Black Womb, had emerged for the first time and killed everything he’d ever loved. It had killed her, taken her light away. In her place, the Womb had embedded itself, filling his heart with black and pain and blood.
He stopped walking seven inches from his door. He closed his eyes tight and made one last wish for it all to just go away, sighing a desperate prayer for it to work this time. When he opened his eyes again, it hadn’t worked. Of course it hadn’t worked. Sara wouldn’t be shimming up the storm drain or scuffing her knees as she got in through the window to wake him up. He wouldn’t have the chance to say, “You spend all your time on your knees anyway” as he often had, much to her chagrin. They wouldn’t sneak downstairs and steal his mother’s waffles again, and she wouldn’t tell him that she loved him.
Not that they’d ever done any of those things anyway, but in the time since her death he’d allowed his mind to wander, imagining conversations that could very well have happened if he’d had the courage to start them while she’d been alive.
He gave her one more minute to come in, then unlocked his door with a rusted squeak, turned the handle, and walked out into the light.
Xander stared up at the bus stop in front of him, its metal dented and bent from years of beatings from the harsh Maine winters and the diligence of bored, destructive teenagers. It rattled against its pole as the wind around it picked up, sending a steady and constant rapping sound squealing through the air.
His dark auburn hair baying against the wind, Xander watched the sign fight against its bolts but never really get anywhere.
Lately, he felt much the same way.
His hands were buried deep inside his jeans pockets even though he didn’t feel the chill of the breeze. He did not feel it, but he was aware of it. He gave the spearmint gum in his mouth another chew before shifting it back to its place between his cheek and his teeth, still just looking up at the sign and squinting against the rising sun behind it.
The imprint of the sunbeams stayed on his retinas for a moment, an anamorphous blob in the centre of his vision. He heard the mumble of distant speech and clicking heels, but when he turned to see who it was, the purple and yellow blob was still there and blocked his line of sight.
“Xander!” called a familiar voice, one so sweet that it almost left the taste of sugar on your lips when you heard it.
He could now clearly identify
