They Call Me Daring

Chapter 13

"I don't know what happened." I said the moment we were out of the church, back in the cold night air and the darkness, back where I could think clearly.
    "I think I do." Meg said absently, her eyes skirting my face.
    "Well?" I said after a while of walking, when she still hadn't spoken.
    "I think..." She began slowly, as if tasting every word before speaking it. "I think that you're about half way through the transformation..."
    "But all that's left is my eyes-" I started, but she shook her head.
    "No, you're almost completely through the physical transformation. I don't think any amount of courage can stop that."
    "Oh." I bit my lip, looking at the ground. Did she mean all physical transformations? "So do you think that... you know, in a couple of months, my immune system will shut down and..." I shivered at the thought. White hair and red eyes and superhuman reflexes? Those I could deal with. Even the fear of light was bearable. But if my skin started to rot off... It takes a strong man to keep his sanity while his own body decomposes before his very eyes.
    "I don't know." She shrugged. "There's no way to tell. We don't understand it. And there's no way we can ask the doctor about it without raising suspicions." She added, and I closed my mouth. "I mean, what would we ask him? 'Doctor,'" She dropped her voice and and stood up straight with her shoulders back, and it took me a second to realize she was mocking me. "'If an infected person didn't lose their mind but underwent all the physical transformations of the Disease, would they still rot?'"
    "I don't talk like that." I mumbled, and I could feel myself blushing beneath my mask, because that had been exactly my plan.
    We walked in silence for a while, when finally I got up the nerve to ask the question that had been bugging me. "Do you really think I can... you know, not turn into a bloodthirsty monster? I fall into these spells every now and then, and I don't even realize it while it's happening, but until something jerks me out of it, I...." I shook my head unable to find words, and Meg simply watched me while she waited.
    "It wasn't me, Meg." I managed at last. "Everything was intense, vivid and bright and loud... and hungry," I added, remembering the overwhelming stench of blood, which now seemed sickening. "But it wasn't me."
    "I think it's only going to get worse, Liam." She said sadly, looking up at the sky, the stars twinkling overhead like a million knowing eyes. "It's late, and, unlike you, I need to sleep at night," She stopped, and I realized we were outside my gate. It seemed like we had only left the church a minute ago!
    "Night." I mumbled, turning to the gate and wondering how I was going to get into the house without the key.
    "And Liam," Meg said behind me. I felt her fingers burrow into my clenched fist, seeming to small and frail. "We'll find a way. You can fight back, I know it. Somehow, we'll find a way to extinguish that monster that's trying to steal you," She clenched her fingers in my hand, and I looked straight ahead, hearing her breath in my ear, as she leaned forward and whispered, "I promise."
    I turned around when I heard the sound of rapidly fading footsteps, and caught the flash of bright red hair whipping around the corner, and then there was silence.
    I sighed, placing my hands behind my neck and facing the dead city. The wind howled through the skeletal structures and the empty concrete buildings, lonely and lost, like the screams of a thousand victims from a decade before. Cold and lost and empty, the city and the zombies had something in common, I thought grimly, turning back to the seven foot gate, and the surrounding rock wall.
    I bit my lip, craning back my head to look at the very top of the wall, then I backed up to the opposite side of the street, until my back was pressed against a cold brick wall, the dried clay rough and catching on my sweatshirt.
    I took a deep breath and tried to channel the darkness in my heart. Humans naturally feared what they couldn't control... Maybe part of the infection was being able to control it.
    I kicked off hard and felt my feet fly across the pavement, barely touching the ground, sending my body hurtling forward, lithe and powerful as a panther. The sluggishness I had felt in the daylight was gone, replaced by a feeling of comfort and power and sureness. Nothing could hurt me.
    I owned the night.
    My feet left the ground a meter before the wall, and I found myself flying through the air, up and over the wall, the night air whistling across my paper bag mask, and then the grass on the other side was flying towards me, and I tucked into a tight ball and rolled comfortably to a stop, popping up on my feet and strolling casually to the door. Which was bolted shut.
    I sighed and sat back on my heels looking up in exasperation at my open window two stories up. I sprinted towards the wall.
    Twenty seconds later I was clambering through the window into my bed room. I Dad couldn't play back footage on the cameras downstairs. If he could, I would have an awful lot of explaining to do.
     I sat on my bed, barely breathing, much less panting, and after a moment I whipped the bag off my head and looking anxiously into the mirror. A second later, I breathed a sigh of relief. White hair is somewhat explainable, red eyes... not so much. But I wouldn't have to worry about that yet.
    I slipped through my door, and slunk down the hall to the bathroom. I undressed and took a quick shower, the cold water soothing, numbing my skin in it's cold embrace. I scrubbed deep into my skin with soap, until I could feel the pain, harsh and stabbing. I scrubbed hard at the wound in my wrist, the infected, unhealthy skin and the scar forming, as if I could drive the disease out my force.
    Needless to say, it didn't work.
    I dried off and tip-toed back to my room, dressed in an old T-shirt and pajama bottoms, and savored the darkness. I left the window open so a breeze fluttered the curtains every now and then, and so I could hear Dad, Clark, and Jess arriving home at around eleven.
    At one point somebody cracked open my door, and through half-closed eye-lids I could make out a dark silhouette craning in through the doorway, and I tried to steady out my breathing. Whoever it was turned away after a moment, and closed the door behind them, sending the room back into darkness once more.
    I lay awake in bed for hours, unable to sleep, wide awake, every nerve in my body alert. The distant howls of zombies floated in through the open window, but I didn't want to close it. The eery sound was programmed to strike fear into deep into the human heart, as piercing as a knife through flesh. The sound kept me on edge, tense and terrified... It kept me human.
    Once I found myself drifting from myself, and I noticed the howling becoming more comforting- I pinched myself on the bare arm, so hard the skin broke and a thin line of blood bubbled up, jerking me back to the human mindset.
    I was mortified I would fall asleep and wake up as a half-rotten creature... Even though I knew the transformation couldn't possibly happen the quickly. Every morning, when I woke up, something was different. Something had been taken away from me, something that made me me.
    First my tan, then my brown hair, then my human sized teeth- But those were only the physical attributes. Those didn't matter so much. But I could almost feel the human essence of my brain being slowly eaten away by the poison as the infection sluggishly spread.
    Liam Trackerson would never have been able to jump the seven foot wall, or climb a two story building with no handholds. Liam Trackerson was afraid of the dark... Not the other way around. The disease loomed over me every second, a dark monstrous presence, threatening every second to take me over completely, and erase all that I was, and had ever been.
    How long could I fight back? It seemed impossible, fighting against yourself. It was a battle of the mind... Only one sided. I had to convince myself to stay human... But how?
    I was being pulled away from that so strongly, though. The infection was an unstoppable riptide, slowly dragging me away as hard as I tried to stop it...
    Then again, I wasn't really trying.
    It hit me then, lying there in bed. I wasn't fighting back, not really. I was still accepting my fate, I wasn't contradicting it. I had no reason to hold on to who I was... I couldn't fight back when half of me was pulling me in the other direction.
    I needed a reason to hold on, to fight back with everything I had. Except I didn't really have one.
    The death of my mother had left my entire family in grieving... But I can't say I had never been able to move on live the rest of them seemed to. Like me, my mother had always been quite, soft-spoken and clinically cynical. She had understood my bleak outlook on life and all the stupid things that people do, and had done all she could to make me see the good things, the things that we live for. To see the things that make fighting back worth it.
    And then the memories began to whirl, fourteen years worth of emotion all tumbling through my consciousness like a clothes dryer on steroids.
    I saw so many people, so many faces, half of them identity-less and forgotten, all of them looking at me with that same disappointed frown. I grew up in the shadow of Clark, the prodigal son of Edward Trackerson. Everyone had always expected me to be like him, just as fabulous and heartless and cold and great-at-everything-I-could-never-do. And then when I came in and was just me, just average, unimpressive, forgettable me, they had been disappointed.
    Clark had done this to me. Why did he have to be so good-at-everything, so charismatic and perfect and.... everything I wasn't.
    I shook my head. Time to stope blaming everyone else for my problems. Sure, the world was pretty screwed up, and so were a lot of people in it, but I needed to stop finding excuses.
    Besides, who says I was average and unimpressive anyways? Like Meg had said, I had always just accepted what other people thought... I had never dared to challenge anything.
    I pushed the bad memories of Clark away. Siblings would be siblings, and there was nothing you could do about that.
    And then I saw Clark's face all those times he had asked me if I was feeling alright, commenting on my paleness... The genuine concern that had showed on his face when he realized something wasn't quite right with me. Granted, so far he hadn't figured it out, but you had to give him credit for actually worrying... Like he might have been mildly upset if something happened to me...
    That was a new feeling.
    I didn't even bother to try and think of a good moment with Jess. He was so young, he took his cues from everyone else, which had taught him to pick on Liam. But maybe I could change that... Maybe I could try to be a better older brother too.
    Dad... That was a hard one. For some reason, he had expected me to be like Clark, like him, bold and sure of myself, confident and positive. And he had been disappointed when I turned out... Me.
    Or... I frowned, rolling over into a more comfortable position. Another memory, one that had long been buried under years of disappointed head shakes and disapproving sighs.
    I watched ten-year-old Liam sitting outside on a relatively sunny day, out on the porch, with my father, who looked pretty much the same as he did now. I remembered, clearer than any other memory, his very words, though I couldn't recall how he had come into them.
    "You remind me so much of your mother."
    Dad had always shut out any mention of Mom. I think it hurt him too much... Never in seven years had I ever seen him stop and look at her picture in the hall, though I knew me and Clark did all the time. Her side of the bed was always kept neat and made, and it was an unspoken rule that no one ever sat in her chair in the living room. On the day of her death (also Jess's birthday) and her birthday, me, Clark and Jess would usually try to visit her gravesite... But Dad had never come with us.
    He was afraid, I realized with a start. I think part of him still wanted to believe she was just away on a quick errand... Not gone forever. And I think looking at me reminded him too much of her.
    The more I thought about it, the more I realized how true it was. I thought about how the few hugs he'd given me had always been shaky, uncertain, as if he was afraid to touch me, lest I shatter and blow away on the wind.
    I made up my mind to talk to him. To tell him he needed stop being afraid- he couldn't waste the rest of his life living in a half-lie. Now that I understood the value of life, I was much more sensitive about what people did with the time that was given to them. I needed to talk to him, to drive home the fact that I was not Clark Trackerson, nor would I ever be, and the fact that he missed my mother shouldn't make him afraid of me.
    I would finally take control of my life.
    And at that thought, Meg's face flashed behind my eyes, red hair pulled back in a simple ponytail from an almost round face, brown eyes huge and full of life. I had had crushes before, all on girls who were way out of my league... But, now that I thought of it, Meg wasn't in anybody's league.
    She was one of the most singularly free-spirited people I'd ever met, even though I'd only known her a few days. She was her own person, she didn't care what other people thought, and she wasn't going to let anybody tell her how to live her life.
    And then, with somewhat of a chill, I remembered how her hand had gripped mine, strong and smooth and warm. And how she had whispered to lightly in my ear, so intimate and there...
    That was something more than a crush.
    And suddenly I was seized by something stronger than the poison, the infection, the monster trying to pull me away. It was as if an anchor had suddenly caught, something so deep and sturdy no amount of tugging and pulling could ever drag me away from it.
    The desire to live.
    A determination, fiercer than anything I had felt before, filled me right to the brim, boiling with a fire that I felt all the way in to my heart, where it burned brighter than any light.
    No way was I going to leave all this behind without a fight. I had a world to impress, to prove to them that Liam Trackerson was not average, a father to shake back into reality, a brother to make up with, and another brother who maybe I had misjudged... And Meg.
    And none of that was I willing to leave behind. If I was going down, I was getting pulled away kicking and screaming, because nothing would ever convince me to let go, not when I had this to hand on to.
    Nothing.
    I sat up abruptly, pouncing across the room in one leap, flipping on the light before I could change my mind. Harsh electric light blasted instantly to fill the room, and I closed my eyes and blinked, going against every instinct in my body, fighting hard against the urge to cower in the only dark space beneath my bed.
    My entire body was shaking, my eyes watering uncontrollably. With a trembling hand I reach up and wiped away the salty tears from my face, trying to take deep breaths. If anybody normal had been in the room at the time they would have thought I was a crazy.
    And that was totally legit.
    The pain burned my skin like a thousand... knives? Bees? Flames? All of them at once? The pain was unbearable, and yet I gritted my teeth and fought to stand still and motionless, breathing steadily but shakily. It stung every molecule in my ivory skin, smarted over my eyes so I could barely see, sending short spikes of pain up and down my spine until I realized my hands were clenched so tightly in fists they had broken the skin.
    And then I opened my eyes.
    I shook my head and blinked a couple of times as my breathing steadied and became normal, the smarting on my skin toning down until it was only a dull throb in the back of my head. Because I had just questioned the light.
    Why should I be afraid of light? What difference did it make if a human and an infected human stood in the light? It was just some stupid old legend that the light should hurt that much. It was so over-exaggerated, that when you actually got infected, you believed it.
    It was all in your head.
    Well, most of it, I thought, as I dismissed the dull throbbing all over my body, like a normal sunburn. I fought to drive away the stories and things that had been told to me, and focus on the truth. I held on to reality, letting all the lies wash away, held on to the fact that I wasn't in that much pain.   
    I squared my jaw and began to pull down my pajama pants, then my old T-shirt. Then I turned on my lamp, and angled it to shine directly on my bed. I found a tiny portable lamp and set it on my dresser, again, aimed at my bed. I discovered an iPod, which I set to shin constantly at max brightness, and a reading light as well.
    Then, in nothing but my boxers, I flopped down on top of the covers, the windows still opening and producing a cool breeze ever now and then, my entire body throbbing with that dull ache from the light. But it was still a dull ache, and as I drifted off, I constantly kept that bit of reality at my fingertips, lying sprawled half-naked on my bed with every light source I possessed glaring at me.
    It was almost a good pain, like disinfectant in a wound. Pain that stung and burned, but you could feel it cleansing you, so it was all okay.
    Pain that kept away the monster.
    Pain that kept me alive.