The Savages

Chpater 6: Rebel

Past

Destruction was his middle name ever since the age of two months, when he finally discovered his hidden talent for burning things. He remembered the day Teemu came home to find him sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet, a ball of flames flickering in his hand like a slow moving jazz dancer. Everything around the house was torched totally black, including the diary Teemu was meant to be keeping on all nine of his brothers. He was grounded for two weeks, but it never taught him any lessons.

When he was a full year old, he burnt Six Flags in New Orleans down to the ground in a fury of flames. The tall thick supports from the roller coaster had groaned as the steel twisted and fell, smashing to the ground with a thunderous bang that ripped up the surrounding concrete, sending debris flying through the air. The scene afterward was eerie, like he was stuck inside a horror film - dirty, scorched footpaths littered with rubbish, a mismatched swing ride with panels missing from the top and sides, exposing the thin metal slats beneath as though they had been torn out, and a gigantic upturned clown head thrown to the slime-covered ground, its painted red lips pulled up into an abnormal smile, its wide blue eyes staring into nothingness.

The only member of his family who successfully located his whereabouts was Clarence. Rebel had been sitting inside one of the rollercoaster's cars when the warlock found him, his shaky blackened hands covering his face. He remembered the taste of ash clogging his dry mouth and the smoke filling his lungs, the haunted screams of ghosts bursting through his ear drums. They were the ghosts of people who died during Hurricane Katrina, the same tornado that had ruthlessly ripped through the park and permanently shut it down ten years ago.

"What happened?" Ricky Clarence asked him, sitting down on the front of the green car. It wasn't the type of question Rebel had been expecting, like why are you here or why didn't you come back home? It was a straight-out question that showed Clarence might have understood him better than he was able to understand himself.

Rebel slowly lowered his hands to the front of the car, gripping the chipped black safety bar humans would hold on to while riding the rollercoaster. It was designed to come down over their waists as a protective mechanism to prevent them falling out, but the one Rebel tried to pull forward gave a screechy grunt, only budging half an inch.

Clarence gazed down at the blue zig zags on the front of the car, the heads striking into one another. His eyes were dull, the distance in them growing with each minute passing between them. Nothing about him screamed happy like it usually did. It were as though a ghost had replaced the body he lived in, turning him into a despondent, debilitate shell.

"I could ask you the same thing," Rebel murmured, folding his arms across his chest as a chilly wind began to kick up. "Why is it you look depressed?"

His tongue slid out from between his natural lips, adding moisture to them. Rebel noticed the small charm he was turning in his fingers, glinting silver in the fall of evening. The sun had lowered itself behind the skyscrapers, transforming the clouds into fat bursts of golden pink. A flock of robins flew above the merigold horizon dividing the periwinkle sky from the dark earth, their peanut brown bodies and red bellies blending in flawlessly as if the sky was a canvas and they were paintings.

"This isn't about me, kid," Clarence chided, considering Rebel through the tangled mess of blonde curls shading his unusual eyes. Some sections closer to his hairline were darker than the rest, only visible now due to correct lighting. Stephen and Shannon more or less looked the same as him, save a few minor differences. "You're the one who incinerated an abandoned theme park to the ground for no apparent reason. Unless you have a feasible explanation for what you did, I will be telling Teemu not to go lightly on you as he does the others."