#silas loch

It was heavier than he thought it would be. With slender fingers wrapped around the grip, clenched so tight that his knuckles turned bone white, Silas thought his arm would snap from the strain of carrying it the whole way to the little house tucked away in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t remember if it had been this heavy when Jacob had given it to him. Or if the four pounds of carefully molded steel had gotten denser with every step. The clip was full, every bullet loaded with a single purpose.

Malloy Donnelly. He lived alone in an old house a few miles outside of the city. It was small, surrounded by woods on all sides and Silas hadn’t seen another house in at least half a mile. He was thirty two years old. He was a groundskeeper at an all-boy Catholic School. He had a criminal record that Silas hadn’t cared about when Tracker mentioned it but now he wished he’d let the mutant tell him. It might be easier if he could focus on all the horrible things Malloy had done. Convictions might have carried more weight than speculation, facts more meaningful than hearsay. Silas knew it wouldn’t matter. There was only one fact that mattered: Malloy hurt Asri. And even that didn’t make the gun any easier to carry.

He hurt Asri. Silas told himself over and over, as if it would make his feet move faster through the brush and soft dirt. He had memorized the pattern of the bruise on the Egyptian man’s dark skin. The angry way fingers splayed out around his forearm, springing from an invisible palm that had probably twisted and bent Asri into place. He had counted every cut and scrape and mark on his face. He had stayed awake all night, watching the rise and fall of Asri’s chest, anger boiling in him with very tired breath. This was a decision he made the second he had a name to go match to the intentions of a fucked up set of teeth on Asri’s shoulder. Decision turned to plan and turned to vivid fantasy. Until all that Silas could think about were the remains of a featureless face and a stranger’s blood on white walls.

His vision was searing hot, a fire burning in his pale blue eyes. His body vibrated with an energy and focus that Silas hadn’t felt in so long. It had purpose and that purpose waited for him behind a towering door, painted a deep shade of red that flaked off and drifted to a pile at his feed when he laid his empty hand against the aging wood. He could feel his heart beat in the pads of his fingers as they pressed against the cracks and lines; against the smooth surface of a warm trigger. He could feel it in his stomach too. A nauseous rhythm tapped out through rushing bile and bubbling nerves.

Silas wasn’t backing down.

The lock was easy enough to pick. Ancient tumblers that moved into place with more ease than any modern lock would have been. Cloaked in invisibility, the only part of Silas that made him useful, he slipped unnoticed through the house, letting instincts carry him from room to room in search of his target. The living room was bare, decorated only by holes in the walls and dirt on the tile floors, furnished with nothing but a low table and a collection of used needles. Silas wanted to slip his hand into his pocket and dive into the collection of pills he hadn’t taken. But if he took his finger off the trigger, he might not find the nerve to put it back when the time came. The hallway was the same as the living room, littered with dirt and trash with fist sized holes in the plaster, framed by a rectangular block of white that hadn’t yet faded in the sunlight. Silas wondered what pictures had once been there, but it didn’t interest him half as much as the faint sound of a sleeping man’s heavy breathing.

The creak of the doorknob made Silas’s heart beat faster, the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. In the stilted silence captured between four bare, white walls the grinding metal on metal of rusty hinges may as well have been a car slamming full speed into a brick wall. Eyes rimmed in red, shot towards the frail looking man buried in dingy yellow sheets. Malloy didn’t move, except for the peaceful rise and fall of his chest. Seeing him sleep so soundly at four in the morning, Silas felt his fingers wrap more tightly around the pistol’s grip, index finger pressing harder than he meant do into the trigger.

Malloy Donnally. The name was in his head and it felt like a bomb exploding between his ears. He was disgusting; a weak, pathetic fuck that no one would miss. Silas held onto that, reminded himself of it when he took one step closer to the bed. And again to prompt another. The world would be a better place without this sack of shit. But Silas didn’t care about the world. Asri had been in so much pain and Malloy got to go home and crawl into bed as though nothing had even happened.

The mattress sank beneath a phantom weight as Silas climbed into bed. Malloy’s face, despite the scabs and scars and wrinkles, looked serene. As if his dreams were filled with all of the sweet things he loved. Things, Silas knew, that would make a real man’s skin crawl. He didn’t wake up when the invisible mutant settled over him, one knee planted on either side of his stomach. His body looked even weaker up close. Malnourished in way, probably deprived of everything except the addiction he fueled with dirty needles in his living room floor. If Silas were to through the sheets back, he could probably count every single one of Malloy’s ribs, watch his heart beat against them. It didn’t seem possible that this pile of skin stretched so tautly over bone could have overpowered the most dangerous man Silas had ever known. But somehow he had.

Somehow this filthy creature had bruised and broken and—

His arms were steady as he moved the gun into place, level with his heart that threatened to bore a hole through his chest. It pointed down at the man’s closed eyes and slightly parted lips. His elbows locked, arms straight, no longer trembling but still pulsing with every hurried beat of his heart. There was fire in his veins and Silas was high on anger and adrenaline despite having a clearer head than he had in six years. His body ached and if it was from the energy that crystalized in his blood or the lack of narcotics flowing through it, he couldn’t know. But he liked it.

“Wake up,” he muttered, surprised by the stern, calm tone in his own voice. Determination and a thirst for revenge had settled over him, masking the fear, the panic. “Wake up, you disgusting fuck.” This time the heel of his foot dug harshly into the sleeping man’s ribs. Eyes shot open, one green and one brown but both rimmed with red veins that splintered through the murky yellow that should have been white. They stared up at him, running along the barrel of the gun, painted with a mixture of confusion and terror. But he didn’t move.

For a moment, Silas thought about saying something. Offering a brief explanation of why he was going to die today, a rundown of poor decisions that had sealed his fate. The teenager stared into two half lidded eyes, searching for words that might have told Malloy Donnally that someone was going to have to clean up the wreckage of his body all because he had touched, hurt, broken someone who belonged to Silas. But from the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of movement and his finger was faster than his mouth.

The recoil of the first shot made his arms shake, locked elbows buckle. It knocked him off balance and almost sent him staggering back between Malloy’s now limp, lifeless legs. The sound of the first round was nothing compared to the booming thunder that followed the second. Or the third. It echoed off the walls and reverberated inside his skull. But his finger squeezed the trigger again.

And again.

And again until finally there was nothing but the clicking sound of an empty round that Silas could barely hear over the ringing in his ears. Until his hands shook too badly to hold the weapon that was now ten pounds lighter, as if it would float to the ceiling when he let it go instead of falling with a heavy thud on Malloy’s chest. There was nothing left. Nothing that even resembled the scarred, gaunt features that bad been there seconds ago. No more cold mix-matched eyes. Everything that Malloy Donnelly had ever been, had been reduced to a dark puddle on his pillow, pieces of bone on the wall, and a splattered mess that covered Silas’s hands.

The adrenaline was one too. Everything that had kept him going had turned to lead in his veins. Frozen in place, wide eyes were locked on the gore and carnage. His hands were warm, held in front of him as if he carried something fragile rather than a sticky coat of another man’s—not, not man. Another thing’s blood. He had expected holes. Clean, in and out like swiss cheese. One through his cheek and another through his forehead. Silas hadn’t prepared himself for a body that ended in a mangled mess above his neck. He hadn’t noticed the warmth on his face until his tongue swept across his dried cracked lips. But as soon as something sharp and metallic invaded his pallet, Silas knew what it was.

“He deserved it,” he told himself, stumbling off the bed. His voice sounded half a mile away, hoarse and barely recognizable. “He deserved it,” he repeated as he fell to his knees. He hadn’t been dizzy until he tried to move, forcing his legs to cooperate when all they wanted to do was stay. His stomach clenched violently when he saw the hand prints he left behind on the carpet after he pushed himself back to his feet. It was empty, but still rolling with acid as an invisible mutant forced himself into a run.

Everything he touched turned red. The door he slammed open, the wall that his own momentum threw him against, the chair he caught himself on when his feet tangled beneath him and slipped on the kitchen tile. Behind him, there was a trail that matched the pattern of his sneakers. It followed him out of the back door and through the grass, still damp from a morning fog. It chased him into a wooded, overgrown back yard. And when his feet refused to carry him any further, Silas threw his arms around a tree to keep from falling. Red smeared into the dried bark and dead leaves.

The taste of acid mixed with blood on his tongue when Silas doubled over, pouring the contents of his hollow stomach onto the ground. It burned its way up through his throat like all the fire and rage that flowed on the backs of blood cells was now leaving his body. Abandoning him when he still needed it. The way everything abandoned him, eventually. Everything except Asri.

His back pressed against the tree. Bark snagged against his tatted and freshly stained t-shirt, tearing holes in the fabric and probably more tiny holes in his skin, even though he couldn’t feel it. When he wiped away the vomit from his lips, he only managed to smear more blood from the back of his hand across his face. Silas wasn’t sure how long he sat there, sinking into the damp earth, before his hand slipped into his pocket. His nose still burned but his arms had finally stopped trembling. His eyes still stung and the blood on his fingertips hadn’t quite drued, but his ears weren’t ringing anymore. Fingers closed around a cellphone stacked on top of a flimsy tin cigarette case. Jacob’s number was easy to find in Asri’s cellphone and with the device wedged between his shoulder and his cheek, Silas ran his finger over the metal case. The ringing in his ear sounded oddly distorted against the sound of gunfire still rolling in his skull.

There were four pills tucked inside next to a few loose cigarettes. Stark white against the blood still clinging to the tips of his fingers. He left a tiny smudge on the first one he touched. It seemed to seep in, setting into the very chemicals that made his body ache to consume, as he held it between his thumb and index finger, mind racing as he watched more red seep in—poisoning his poison.

“Asri?” The voice in his ear was louder than he expected. Silas hadn’t heard Jacob answer and he wasn’t sure how long ago the ringing had stopped. Eyes locked on the pill, they followed it to the ground when Silas released his hold. The pad of his thumb pushed it deep into the soft, malleable ground. “Hello?”

Silas wondered if this was her first time.

Her clothes, with the scent of fresh laundry still clinging to the fabric not entirely covered up from the grime of spending a night in a train station, had been easy enough to get her out of. It only took the promise of another warm body to curl up next to and a roof to sleep under and a warm, sympathetic smile. Silas was as good at faking that as he was at picking out someone who needed it the most. “If you fall asleep here, they’re going to call the cops,” he had told her, sliding into the small corner booth across from her. Her legs were stretched out on her side, a cup of coffee untouched in the table before her, “Just a heads up.” Now, two pairs of jeans (one ragged and the other straight off a department store hanger) and two threadbare t-shirts (one made to look that way, the other worn down and coated with more grit and grime than actual fabric) laid in a pile in the corner; abandoned like the cigarette butts and empty glass bottles that littered the cement floor of the abandoned building.

“Silas,” his name sounded like a wisp of smoke when it escaped her lips followed by a humming sound that resonated deep inside her plumb chest. His fingers pointed like talons, dragging sharp lines down her back, as he tried to remember her name. Ellen or Elane. Alana maybe. He could feel the muscles in her thighs contracting, their grip around his slender waist tightening as her back arched against the cold ground. Her touch was soft against his cheek, bright green eyes rimmed with smeared liner staring up at him. Tiny patters ran like latticework up and down and across her forearm, otherwise perfect porcelain skin marred by these now permanent, little cries for attention. He pressed his lips to a cluster of scars. Alana’s skin still tasted like a fresh spring rain—none of the muck of the city had soiled her yet.

It was intoxicating. It was what Silas had imagined that Grace might taste like and the thought made his mouth water. His teeth dug into the girl’s wrist, adding a cluster of furious red dots to the design she had already etched into her flesh. Is this what Grace’s voice would sound like, sighing his name? Would her legs feel as smooth hitched around his hips? The thought of her, all clean and white and pure, in place of the nameless runaway beneath him seemed so appealing. It was a fantasy he could let himself get lost in and in the moments before climax, Ellen’s harsh, raspy voice was gone, replaced by Grace’s soft tone and gentle words. “F-fuck,” she groaned almost in unison with the sharp sigh that fell from his own lips. Her hips pushed against him, sharp hip bones grinding against him as her legs twitched like an earthquake had rocked her entire body.

There was hardly a minute between them, spared for the sake of the illusion of intimacy, when Silas wrapped his arms around the girl’s healthy figure. Whether it had been the sex or the bottom-of-the-stash pill cocktail he’d popped between her pretty pink lips that knocked her out, Silas would never know. Or care to find out. And despite his silent promise to protect her, Silas felt small lying next to her on the hard concrete. The clash of healthy white against the sickly green hue of his skin looked even more striking bathed in the yellow light of some street lamp that pooled in through the window he’d kicked out himself less than a week ago.

Her hips were wider than his, and her jeans were too lose ass to bother taking. Her t-shirt, however, was cleaner than his and maybe more sturdy. It hung loose on his perpetually emaciated frame, but at least it wasn’t ripped. Silas sat cross legged with the girl’s purse in his lap. There were a dozen unanswered texts from “MOM” and a dozen more missed calls from “HOME.” Silas imagined frantic parents scouring the entire city hunting for her, turning over every rock and searching in every hole. The click of the home screen unlocking rattled against the bare walls and for a moment, he held his breath waiting for the little runaway beside him to wake up.

“Where are you?”

“Please call us.”

“Ellie, please. We just want you to come home.”

Silas wondered if his own mother was sober enough tonight to know how to use her phone. It took him a minute to find the keys, pecking out a message key by key before he hit send. “I’m sorry. I’ll be home in the morning. I love you.”

Ellie had dressed the part well, but lacked the authenticity. His skin had been made into warm leather; hers was still as delicate as silk. His hair was a matted mess of grime and sweat; hers was a sea of perfectly died strands of gold, mixed with a red as colorful as her obvious rebellious streak. Her eyes were black from smeared make up; his from blood vessels busted by the fist of the angry man who owned the trashed apartment that protected them. Silas pressed his lips against the girl’s cheek, an almost affectionate gesture despite the state he was leaving her in. Beside her he left the phone, hoping her mother’s call would wake her up soon after he’d gone.