~On Monday evening my daughter Judy went missing-- She has shoulder-length blonde hair, green eyes, she's five feet tall, and was last seen wearing a navy blue sweater and school uniform. I would appreciate everyone's co-operation in finding her and...~
~H-hello. Jennifer went missing in July. She is in our prayers, and I hope that people will keep her face in mind when they're out and about and that they would contact the authorities if...~
~Thank you for having me, Johnson. Yes, my twins were gone for five years, and we're... thankful to have them back last Tuesday.
You mentioned to reporters that they weren't the same--
Well yea, they couldn't be, after whatever they've been through. There's no telling where they've been or who had them or what-- what happened to them... I'm sorry-give me a minute.
That's fine, we'll be back after this break.~
~Sometimes I wish they had never come back at all--~
~Our Jimmy is so happy to be home-- even if he can't say it. Isn't that right Jimmy? Aw, look at that face.~
Today Wesley was returning. He was receiving these transmissions via one of his attributes. He was being updated by the high-powered satellite messages flying around: he had been gone for fifty years, he had been returned to the same city which he was taken from, and he was certainly not the only one who had been taken.
Children go missing every day. Some return within hours, or days, with minor personality changes. Some return after months, unable to speak or see. Some don't return at all, most people think. Wesley returned, but no one was looking for him anymore, and he had changed so much that he didn't want them to find him.
He had not aged more than a year, wherever he had been held, it was not the same rate of time as the Earth. That being said, he did not look like the ten year old boy he had been, other than his height and general build. His eyes could have been mistaken for any typical human's, but upon closer observation in a puddle one day he noticed that his eyeballs were concave. They were like literal pools, blue and deep and hollow.
An attribute which was much harder to conceal were his nostrils. He had six of them now. And instead of two centered horizontally upon his face, they were vertical slits arranged horizontally across his cheeks. He couldn't get close to a newspaper stand for updates without wearing a very large scarf. This proved difficult because it was summer in the south.
While he could conceal the following attribute, it caused him to get stares nonetheless. It effected his walk, and his overall demeanor. Long trench-coats and scarves gave him enough of an ominous appearance, but as he walked, it was stilted. Interestingly enough, this was caused but legs which were like stilts: no joints, no feet, only nubs at the base of each of his three legs. He maneuvered as a tripod upon these surreal appendages.
Needless to say, these are just some of the reasons why he didn't want anyone to find him, even if they were looking after fifty years. After about forty-eight hours of coming to terms with this solitary truth, he made a decision. As many people know, children can be very altruistic, at least compared to people over twenty. While he began to give up on finding his old home (demolished for a freeway), and found no help from the local drunks in the woods which he took refuge in, he started to acquire some information.
He didn't bother with new of sports or fashion or stocks, because as mentioned before, children can be very altruistic. They wish to help, especially when they cannot help their own situation. Take families overwhelmed with poverty for instance, the children will accept this fate, and attempt to help their elders to cope with this lifestyle. Typically the children don't know anything better than what they've been granted by fate, and even if they do, they wield such flexible minds that they accept their place in life.
Wesley accepted his fate. He accepted the lack of food, and the solitude, and the surviving .What he did not accept was that the papers and radio were riddled with stories, new and old, of children going missing. On top of that, these children were returning changed, even if they were in one piece.
On the edge of the woods was a school, perhaps an elementary from the looks of it, and he would use those concave optics to spectate the school yard. According to the statistics, over 30% of the children in the US were victims of abduction and return. He could gather as much from the five students in the playground. These children were typically the victims of bullying, and Wesley summed it up to fear.
One child never blinked. One child did not have fingernails, merely skin-covered nubs. One child shivered continuously, although they did not appear cold (wearing typical school uniform of shorts and t-shirt. Another child's face had seemed to go through premature puberty, a firm jawline, larger nose, while her eyes remained child-like and bright. The final child was ridiculed the most: not only could he not speak, but his ears were nothing more than two hanging tubes. His parents made attempts to hide them under hats it seemed.
There were other odd-acting children, but much more normal than these five. He really felt for them, of course. He was one of them. He loved them, probably more than their parents did at this point. He knew his own parents had given up-- it was just a matter of time before their parents would give up in the same way.
This surreal theater was unbearable to him. With the inability to find this own family, rejoin society, or stand by uncaring, Wesley was forced to take action. An image of The Punisher had come to mind while he mused over what he could do proactively: everything was taken from him, and was threatened to be like this forever-- unless he went in, guns blazing, to destroy them.
Well, Wesley didn't have guns, but he did have something in his arsenal: nothing to lose.
Today was the day that he would return to the very site of his abduction, which, since the free-way was inserted, put him smack-dab in the middle of it. Just before exit 45, he retraced trees and roads which led to where his home once was. This was the only logical thing to him, return to the location, and remember the day that this all happened:
He was asleep in bed, his sister crying in the baby's room and his parents mumbling about why they had another child.
"Wes is already a handful, did you see what his teacher wrote down about him in class?"
"I still don't think that he would steal jewelry from the lost and found, and besides, what's the most expensive thing that he could have gotten?-- I think he did it for your birthday anyway."
"I don't care! He was so bad! I just... I think we should see the doctor soon-- hold off on any newcomers for a few."
Wesley had willed himself to sleep, trying not to cry over spilled milk as it were. Part of him swearing to be a good boy. Part of him wishing he were never born.
In his mind, he returned to this setting-- eyes staring up at glow in the dark stars on his ceiling. Eyes wide and straining for light. Head spinning just before he passed out.
The rest was jittery recollection: he entered a spinning tunnel, and sat there for a while. Other children were there. Other children were crying or sleeping or trying to get out of the infinitely-long tunnel. He just sat, trying to remain calm. A doorway approached this group, and they were exited into a wide room with a conical center-- a drain in the middle. Something approached them-- and then he was flushed.
Now here he was, standing in the middle of the busy freeway in the darkness. Part of him wished he was never born. Part of him wanted to be so good. And then part of him was gone.
His coat and scarf lay in the road-- police cars approaching to investigate.
He was back in the tunnel when the hitch in his plan became apparent-- he didn't have one.
Unaffected children sat all around him, panicked, and nearly hyperventilating with thumbs in their mouths. Some caught his eye, and began to panic more-- he was no longer concealed beneath the coats and scarves and clothes.
His concave eyes, his mutated nostrils, his tripedal legs. His narrow torso, his lack of any physical attributes from the neck down other than the trunk of his form. His black hair comforted a girl. The color of his eyes made her quiet. His smile made her smile. She must have been four, before any sort of self-awareness had developed. She must have been deaf-- not taking cues from the children around her to scream or run into nothingness.
He made a plan, and he planned it for her. Her name was Judy, he thought. And in his thoughts she would remain, as he marched toward nothingness and blackness, so far that the children were now behind him, and he was in the front of the line of sorts.
After an eternity of baby-sitting, they were in the drainage room. With more than enough awareness of the situation, much more than the first time he was in this room, he waited and forced himself to remain aware.
A humming threatened to remove him from the moment-- around him children passed out, or cried, or went into a catatonic state.
He witnessed this-- as unrecognizable beings moved toward him and the children, he had watched.
Clouds of bacterium, heavy with moisture and laden with condensation and algae descended upon the first two children in the vicinity, himself and a small red-headed boy who was limp on the floor. While the clouds began to engulf the smaller boy, Wesley could only watch.
Pain seared, ached within his form, his already mutated form beginning to blister and recoil instinctively, as the child on the floor next to him limply transformed into one with grey hair, and too-skinny lips. This child was pushed toward the drain, and while Wesley was still shrouded in clouds, Judy was brought forward.
These clouds of unintelligible shadows were beginning to modify him more-- his blisters turning into bark-like skin. His eyes sinking into nothingness until he was blind. For reasons that he was unaware of, his consciousness was keeping him there. He was there long enough to keep one cloud's attention, the undulating mossy texture burning through to his genome.
Judy was catatonic, eyes wide to the ceiling before him. The cloud had yet to begin on her nearly lifeless form.
Wesley would not stand around waiting for some kind of chance-- he was in the midst of one right now.
Judy wore overalls, and with a spindly nub, feeling around, he hooked a strap of them.
The clouds, seemingly blind to these actions, had to probe the air for a grasp on this Judy. All the while, Wesley was forcing her toward the dip in the floor, toward the dip of the drainage cone before them.
Gravity took over, and her form fell from his grasp, sliding down to the darkened tunnel of a drain.
With some peripheral attribute, he knew she was gone, but safe. She was to be returned, unscathed.
He, on the other hand, was trapped between two clouds, and a barrage of mutations was overcoming him. The concept of humanity was hard to grasp now. The idea of family, breeding, or aerobic respiration was becoming alien to him. Perhaps he was losing consciousness-- because in all of the blackness, all he could sense was falling.
As he fell, he dreamed. Dreams of sunlight and water and rain giving him fuel to live. He imagined separating from himself to become something more. He imagined becoming part of the sky-- perhaps a cumulus.
He was still now, and on the ground. Back to square one. He had no memory of the past years. His first instinct was to catch up-- radio waves and newspaper scraps letting him know that it had been fifty years since he was abducted. He knew his parents weren't looking for him, and he was glad-- he wasn't the same.
What shocked him to know was that there were more and more children being abducted every day, and returning... different. Blind or bald or deaf... But different-- uncanny to the children that they once were-- filling their parents with resentment and confusion.
He came up with a plan-- if he couldn't live in the sun, he would prevent anyone else from living this nightmare.
He had nothing to lose.
~Reports of a young man being hit by a car and disappearing have been debunked-- updates at five.~
~Today we learn that the man standing in the street was actually not a man at all-- it seems that it was really two young children, a little girl and a little boy.~
~We're so glad to have Judy back, she hasn't been better. All she keeps talking about is playing with toys and how much she loves us. We're really grateful--~
~Census reports record an all-time low for birthrates, more on this tonight.~
48 years earlier.
~We hope that Wesley is in a better place. We lay his memory down to rest today, after finding his bike on the highway. We love him.
He was always so helpful. It was always so sweet-- if he couldn't find a way to help with something immediately, he made sure that it never happened again. Like when his father and I got into a car accident from someone texting, he held our phones while we drove.
He was a wonderful boy.~
No comments:
Post a Comment