The Eden Projects (Book I)

Chapter 14. Between the pines.

The trees blurred past their car. The branches of long overgrown trees teased at shedding their cloaks and tugged at the vehicles sides. What had fallen from them blanketed the ground in mottled coverings that slopped along the roadsides. The leaves pressed by the elements against brick and mortar stuck in slimy bands. The trees saw everything. They hid the secrets and dirty lies that humanity had pushed into the streets. Some things however, only darkness could cover. Like the bones, the refuse and rot that stained the graying surfaces like char. It hid the tortured and starving creatures that sought them out to gnaw and gnash the matter to dust with their sopping jaws. Yet, in the gloom, it was all the same. The structures tilting and cracking, seemingly held up by nothing. How they wanted to fall, how their stilts wouldn't let them die. 

They ALL wanted to die. 

The car breezed down the roads with ease, much smaller than the truck, it was less of a boat to maneuver. It shuffled through passing towns in a quiet crawl, skittering over littered pavement. The small group never left lasting impressions on places they passed through. Though many people had. Street signs left less than legible by poorly worded graffiti. The eclectic decor was spattered on cars, walls, and anything flat and porous. Kasper could never sort out how anyone had enough time for art projects when life sucked as much as it did. It was all part of the whole that made up their apocalypse.

You see, the thing that made them a group was their selection of parts. Zak, a nihilist and hedonist by nature saw little value in anything and wanted for everything. His was always a yes when it came to experiences, it didn't matter what it was, they would die in the end so he had a need to taste everything. Archer, was a rationalist. He prioritized reason and found peace in the structure of what was. He dwelled in the obvious and most "logical" way of doing things. He reined in Zak who reined in Kasper. But Kasper... Kasper, was cynical, and however much he wanted to be able to trust someone, anyone. In the end, only he knew. Only he could make sure he was cared for. However much he wanted to "do good" he knew his goodness was driven by a want to belong. His own desire. So he was a cynic. So he was selfish.

Kasper could hear the generator whirring over his head. The wind knocking against the car as they went made him think of the truck. His safe place amongst the bags. Everything about the whispers the breeze wove into him. He missed the noise. The wires to the cars radio were damaged and left them without a peep to bide their time. It was making for a long drive on the maddeningly circuitous route. So he sat, tucked against the door and their piled belongings. His face pressed against the window, watching their surroundings bounce about. He imagined himself running alongside the car, sending his imagined self darting through the brush. One minute he was a bird, and the next he was a ragged creature dogging after them.

...Nothing...

Kasper sighed with relief. The quiet was broken. 

Hearing Adam again made the drive less torturous. The random words and hidden warnings it whispered helped with the rush of emotions that plagued him randomly. Adam. The name suited the thing he was. He welcomed it back with open arms and realized just how reliant he had become on it being there. He needed him. It wasn't until today that he questioned just whose voice it was that he heard. It was his, it wasn't his. One moment it sounded so similar to himself and the next it was a garbled reflection of his father's on muddy water. That voice. That booming, gruff, coarse voice. How it held his mind skating along the rim of reality, bobbing out in the darkness that pumped through his veins. He wanted to understand. Why... He wondered if he was losing his mind. He needed answers. Short of experimentation, he could never have them. So all he had were assumptions of how it worked. 

He knew this much, the more of Adam he used, be it strength, prowess, rage... the less of himself there was. The way his skin changed worked as a meter, a warning for incoming events. It always tainted his fingertips, but, he could make it travel, he could flood his arms, he could calm it away. It wasn't an even split between the two either, some days he felt less human and other days, he felt just that, incredibly human. He wondered what happened if he let that shadow fill him. He wondered if that's what he became when he lost control, did that blackness turn him into something unimaginable? What was he? Why was Zak so unwilling to tell him. Why was Archer so afraid. Why... why...