The machete came down upon us, making a loud banging noise as it hit the wooden crate.
The machete ripped the box apart as wooden splinters started to fly out into the air. All that was left of the crate was a lump of wooden fragments, if you could even call it that. The figure stayed there looking at the artistic disaster he had just created, before finally gripping the handle of his machete and picking it up. There was no one. No blood. No bodies. Only the shattered pieces from the once intact crate.
Only Debris remained.
The figure began moving towards the other side of the room.
I let out an internal sigh.
The machete had not touched us. In the split moment between the arm coming down and the blade arriving I had pushed whatever remaining bit of will I had left and told the universe in the most unreasonable way I possibly could, to change the trajectory. That it needed to be slightly, just barely, just enough, bit off.
Shockingly so, the universe actually listened to my unreasonable request.
The power to manifest a minor inconsistency was, as it surprisingly turned out, extremely useful when a masked figure had a machete raised directly above your head. I stashed that information in my head for later use.
I turned to my right where John was. He was already looking back at me. The room was too dim to read his expression with any precision, but I could see enough. His shoulders had ever so slightly dropped. His breathing started to slow down in pace. The suffocating pressure that had filled the room since the figure entered, finally started thinning out as the figure moved further away from us.
John waited until the figure had crossed the door frame of the room before he leaned close and dropped his voice to one of barely a whisper.
"We need to get out of here. Now."
"What if he comes back?" I whispered back.
"He will come back. That's exactly the problem." John's voice was dangerously patient in the way that meant he was trying hard not to lash out. "When he does, he'll have already cleared the rest of this floor. There won't be anywhere left for us to hide."
I opened my mouth.
Then closed it.
I wanted to argue. Some part of me wanted to deny his claim. Say that he would eventually lose interest and move to another floor. But the argument fell apart before it reached my tongue, somewhere underneath the part of me that wanted to feel safe, was the part of me that had been watching this building all night and knew exactly how it operated.
The figure did not lose interest.
The figure did not move on.
I exhaled slowly through my nostrils.
"Alright." I said as low as I could possibly manage. "How do we get out?"
"We first need some sort of distraction, a way to keep him away from us as we run outside."
"Agreed. What do we use?"
John looked at me without answering for a few seconds. He just looked straight at me. The silence stretched long enough to become its own kind of answer.
"No." I said flatly.
A small, muffled sound barely above a squeak escaped him, it might have been a laugh under different circumstances.
"Your power." He said. "We will use your power."
I nodded slowly in understanding.
We both got up from our hiding spot and tiptoed toward the door frame that the figure had just walked through a minute ago.
I tried using my power on the ceiling, intending for it to collapse and create a good enough distraction for us to leave.
Closing my eyes I focused, pulling the same quiet certainty up from wherever it came inside of my chest, shaping it the same way I had with the locks and the machete.
Suddenly a sharp pain arrived.
It started behind my eyes; a sharp and almost immediate pressure came with little to no warning. The pain quickly spread throughout my entire head; my vision turning into a blur.
"Noah." John's voice was low but urgent. "What's wrong?"
"My head." I managed through my gritted teeth. "I can't— the power isn't— it's not working."
At that moment I couldn't think, my head felt heavy. The room had started to distort, I felt like passing out. But now was not the time, I needed to get out of here, so after a few deep breaths I stood back up.
I looked around the room from where I was crouched before. The figure was still on the far side, moving between the last few crates that it hadn't cleared yet. It was a matter of seconds before he turned back.
My eyes landed on a rusted metal tray lying on its side against the base of the counter to our left. Small, and light enough to throw.
It wasn't a power. It wasn't clever. But I had to make do.
I reached out and picked it up as quietly as I could, then looked at John and pointed down the hallway on the opposite side of the room. His head followed my finger, looked at the corridor I was pointing at, and gave me a single nod.
I pulled my arm back readying for a pitch and threw the tray as hard as I could toward the far end of the room, away from the corridor.
The clatter the tray made when it hit the floor was enormous in the silence of the corridor. The figure's head snapped towards the sound instantly, already moving in that direction before the tray had stopped spinning.
"Now." John whispered his voice barely above a breath.
We moved.
We were fast, skirting the edge of the room along the wall, we used the remaining crates as cover for the first stretch of the run before breaking into a full sprint once we hit the exit of the corridor. My head screamed at me with every step I took, the headache turning sharp each time my feet hit the ground. The pain was not enough to keep me from escaping this place.
The corridor was long and dark and contained a damp odor. Doors streaked on both sides, most of them hanging open onto even more empty rooms. At the far end, we could now see a similar sight. It was another 'EMERGENCY EXIT'.
Behind us the figure had already found the tray.
Quickly finding us after.
The footsteps that entered the corridor behind us were not measured anymore. Whatever patience the figure had exercised throughout that floor had vanished the moment his eyes set on us. The figure was moving fast now, covering the distance between us with a speed that was humanly impossible, or at least back in my old world.
"Don't stop." John said, not looking back.
We hit the stairwell door and went through it.
This stairwell was narrower than the first, the railing only built on one side, the steps worn with time from years of use. The light coming up from below was better here, we could actually see the end of the stairwell. This brought a newly rekindled hope in the hearts of me and John as we quickened our step.
John was first, and I just a step behind, the figure entering the stairwell somewhere above us and filling the shaft with footsteps that echoed in a way that made it impossible to judge exactly how close it was.
The ground floor landing appeared below us.
We broke into a full-on sprint; John shouldered through the exit door and spilled out into a wide empty corridor that looked like the lobby of this place. Pale moonlight came through a row of high windows along the entrance wall. Debris spread out on the floor. A collapsed section of ceiling in the middle of the hallway that we immediately ran around without slowing our pace.
Then suddenly the building shook once more.
This time was worse than the last. The whole structure lurched sideways and the ceiling above us cracked down the center and a section of wall to our left simply fell outward into whatever was beyond it. I grabbed the nearest wall to stay upright and looked back at the stairwell door behind us. The door shook due to the tremors but eventually closed shut, which meant that the figure behind us was dealing with the same thing we were.
Then I heard it.
From somewhere below the floor. A sound that was familiar, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. The floor beneath my feet shuddered with each impact, the rhythm of it growing quicker until the wall at the far end of the corridor simply ceased to exist.
It came through in an explosion of concrete dust, a shape so large it filled the corridor from floor to ceiling almost entirely. I stared in shock as I could now fully see the creature that had shut our previous route of escape. John quickly pointed towards a gap in the collapsed wall to our left. I already knew what he had meant to say as I was already making my way to where he had pointed.
The bull-like creature hit the place we had just been standing in and kept moving, its momentum carrying it through the opposite wall without slowing, the building kept groaning as the creature made more holes on its walls.
The gap it had left in the wall was ragged and open and through it was the outside.
We didn't discuss it. We just gave each other a look before stepping through.
A whoosh of cold air hit my face immediately, the wind felt refreshing, it felt much different from the stale air inside the building. I almost stopped just to feel the wind. Almost.
We cleared the gap and landed on uneven ground, soil and tall grass covered the surroundings, I straightened up and looked around and there was nothing. In every direction, as far as the eye could see, there was only forest. Massive, dense, trees littered everywhere, we were surrounded by them. No road. No structure. No sign that anything other than the building existed beyond the tree line.
Behind us the building let out a long arduous sound.
Then the whole building came down.
It wasn't all at once. It started by the upper levels. Each level dropping into the ones below them in a way that raised a wall of dust and debris that rolled outward across the ground towards us. We stumbled forward away from it; I turned and watched it go and felt something unknot in my chest that had been pulled tight since the moment I had opened my eyes in that cage.
We were out.
We were actually out.
I turned to say something to John.
The machete passed close enough to my ear that I felt the air tremble.
It didn't hit me.
The sound it made when it hit John was something I would not like to describe. I will only say that he was standing one moment and then the next he was laying on the ground, the grass beneath him began to turn a dark crimson almost immediately, spreading outward into a small puddle of blood.
I stood in complete shock for a moment, my brain not being able to process what had just happened.
John's eyes were open. They were hollow. His body went limp. A machete protruded from his skull, blood flowing from it eventually making its way to the ground.
The crimson kept spreading through the blades of grass around his head, slow and patient, like it had nowhere to be.
I don't know how long I stood there. I know it wasn't long. But it felt like something that would take a long time to finish feeling.
Then my legs started moving.
I ran.
I ran into the forest, the branches clawed at my sides and the headache that had been sitting behind my eyes throbbed with every step, something that occupied space inside my skull and pushed outward against the edges of it. My legs had nothing left in them. I could feel that clearly now, the burn from the stairs and the corridors and the floors of that damned building. Until I could no longer feel my legs
And yet I ran.
The figure came through the tree line behind me with the ease of something moving through its natural environment, the distance between us started to close faster and faster until he was a couple of feet away from me.
My left foot caught on something, a root or a stone, and I face planted before I had time to put my hands out properly. I hit the ground hard, rolled, tried to push myself upright, and found that my legs were not moving.
I got halfway up.
Then the figure was there.
It loomed over me, the same way it had stood over every kid in that building. With that same domineering patience. That same absence of hurry. It looked down at my disheveled self; his mask gave nothing away.
He reached down and closed his hand around my left arm.
"Get your hands off me."
My voice came out louder than I expected. Loud enough that it echoed through the forest. I clawed at the figure's hand with my free arm. I Kicked and drove my foot into him. I twisted and made myself as difficult as I possibly could, which made no difference at all. Many before me had already tried and yet no one succeeded.
His grip tightened.
I kept fighting. Kept clawing. Kept yelling.
The grip tightened further.
Crack!
And then a sound resounded, it came from my left arm and the pain that followed was unlike anything I have ever felt before. It did not build. It came flooding in, white and absolute, my thoughts became a jumbled mess as the searing pain reach my brain.
My vision blurred.
I screamed at the top of my lungs.
The figure raised its free hand. Most likely to finish the job
And then I saw it. It was vibrant and radiant.
It came like a shooting star upon the stary night, a single concentrated point of radiance moving fast between the dark shapes of the sky, covering the distance between there and here in the space of a breath. I saw it through the narrowing tunnel of my vision, bright and purposeful, approaching without slowing.
That was the last thing I saw before I passed out.