Feel Again (2 page)

It was
then, as he approached the stairs, that he noticed how his daughter
had been watching the boy all this time. Having left his bed some
time ago, he had unknowingly seen his parents killed, as these
strangers had now come to realize. The tiny child was standing at
the bottom of the stairs, his fragile hands clenching on to the
cherry banister with all of his might, as if his life depended on
it. It seemed as if the boy was under the illusionary assumption
that the strange and ruthless man did not have the power to
obliterate the young boy just as he had done to his mother and his
father.

But, out of complete and
utter fear of these strange monsters that now stood before him, the
young boy, Lionel, the son of those just annilhated, had not spoken
as of late. The boy ran up to his room, running quickly and ineptly
with his inherent fright.

And, so, the foreigner and
his daughter, whose was of nearly equal age to the boy, Lionel, and
who also seemed to hold an unusual and rather curious interest in
the young boy, went up and followed him to his tidy bedroom. They
found the boy, who was still quite drowsy, as he had been asleep
already when the commotion started, lying in a little oaken bed, a
glass of water on his matching nightstand, and every single dirty
sock placed in a mesh folding hamper the color of the
sun.

“Stand
back, please, young one,” he said to his daughter, while retreving
his most prized needle, which held the cure for such apathy with
which all Zebdians were plagued. He then injected the little boy in
his right arm with the black ink-like fluid that had taken years
for Zebdian scientists to develop in response to their people’s
desperation to find a means of understanding humans more fully,
even if it meant acquiring their weaknesses, coupled with their
equally potent desire for the ability to love the spouses with
which they bore their offspring, as many Zebdians were known to
kill each other after their mates became incapable of bearing any
additional young, which he had in fact done, though he waited to
obliterate his partner until after a year after she first failed to
bear him another child, though, as she had been helpful to his
political cause, the primary justification which he held for
destroying her had been because she could not keep herself away
from the stoic interests of much younger and even much more
handsome, though, in fact, far less powerful, army men.

“If this works on the boy,
it may work on us,” The man said somewhat indirectly to his
daughter, but mostly to himself, as she was likely too young to
comprehend some of the more complex evils of Zebda despite the
future which she was destined to have as per her birthright as the
eldest of his offspring.

“If it
kills him, we will know not to use it,” He added with typical
Zebdian social bluntness and obscurity. The strange man, like all
others on Zebda, his home planet, was quite matter-of-fact and did
not care about the young boy’s safety at all. For that matter, he
really only cared about his own, and, it was not so much that he
cared for his own safety, as the entire species to which he
belonged were conceived with the incapability to express care in
regards to any matter. Therefore, the true motive behind his
reasoning was more so that he
wanted
his own safety. On Zebda,
selfish want was not considered a true emotion, and it so happened
to be all that the Zebdians ever knew, yet, it was exactly that.
They
knew
it, but
they could not
feel
it.

As the last of the
pitch-black fluid flowed into Lionel’s young veins, he looked up,
not knowing at all what to expect from these extraterrestrials. He
then saw the unusual prettiness of the strange girl standing beside
this evil being.

He looked into her yellow
eyes, and they lit up. Right then, the minute she saw him looking
at her, something was awoken in her and Lionel felt it too. Then,
just as quickly as it had come, the young girl turned away and was
resurrected from this state. Again, at once, her father’s coldness
returned, and the light left her eyes. The strange man’s eyes then
began to spin, and it put Lionel into a hypnotic trance so that he
would forget all that he had seen.

The man and his daughter,
wishing to return home to their own planet, willed themselves
there, and, within moments, they were encased in a bright, neon
green light, which surrounded their pale and slender bodies in the
same way that a corpse would be encased in the coffin that
separated its nonexistence with that of the living world. Back on
their home planet of Zebda, the man and his daughter entered their
center, called a Haklar, and the man returned to his throne, as he
was the Armpha; the leader; of Zebda.

The Haklar was composed
completely of a single element; the same element which somposed the
swords that Zebdians often used to murder those who stood in the
way of their own personal successes. Through their studie of
Earth’s sciences, they had come to know that the element, called
Yalmax by Zebdians, had a molecular mass of twenty-seven and was
composed entirely of a peculiar mass of neutrons.

“Armpha,
Blekrin,” a young scientist-soldier named Wumlok called out to the
strange man. “Have you had any success on planet Earth in regards
to our latest experiment?” He seemed as if he really wanted to know
the answer to that question immediately.

“Yes,
Wumlok, indeed I have found
much
great success in the matter of the Umblof
Project. I suspect that, within the next decade or two, we will be
capable of extracting the anitdote for apathy from our host, who
happens to be a young boy about the age of my Samakri. I believe,
though I may stand corrected, that the boy’s name is Lionel. He is
of a place in the United States portion of Earth, called New York
City.”

“Perfect, Armpha Blekrin,” Wumlok replied. He seemed very
much pleased, if that was at all possible for a Zebdian, with
Blekrin’s progress on the Umblof Project. “I can hardly wait to
bask in our success some time in the
very
near future,” he
continued.

Eighteen-year-old Lionel
Davidson had not been many things in his young life, but he had for
sure always been an outcast. His past was hazy to him, but he
remembered the gist of how it had been. He had been a carefree boy,
playing and laughing and loving his parents, for most of his early
life. He recalled faintly a time when his parents had taken him on
a family vacation to DisneyLand, although he could not remember it
all that well. The only thing he could still recall with clarity
was a strawberry-flavored cotton candy that he had gotten from a
small food booth at the theme park. He also remembered that he had
to wait in line for a very long time in order to get the cotton
candy. He could still smell its fruity sweetness, taste its
goodness, and feel the sugar melting on his little tongue as his
parents made a futile attempt at telling him that cotton candy was
not a healthy thing to eat, especially when one was a growing
little boy.

All of this happiness,
however faint it might be to him now, had come to a sudden end
shortly after Lionel, named after his Zodiac sign of Leo, made his
fourth year. Sometime right before Christmas, he had gone off to
bed and woke up waiting for his Chistmas presents, only to find the
NYPD hovering over the mutilated bodies of his parents instead.
They had tried to keep him away from the crime scene, but to no
avail. Besides, despite not remembering very much, amidst the
haziness surrounding the event was a strange feeling that Lionel
had seen his parents’ bodies before that instance.

The police had ruled the
event of their deaths as a break in gone bad. However, there had
appeared to be nothing stolen from the Davidsons’ quaint little
house. Ever since, he had been bounced back and forth from foster
home to foster home, never finding a real family in any of them. In
fact, many of these surrogate families only tortured and abused,
or, in the very best cases, neglected Lionel.

Of course, he did not find
solace at his school, Sam White High, as he was treated as a
senseless freak by the other students, despite his handsome
appearance, which sported a muscular build, tall stature, and blue
eyes that contrasted nicely with his thick black hair. Lionel
trudged along the gravel parking lot in his ill-fitting sneakers,
with the bottoms of his worn-out jeans all frayed and dirty. A few
feet away, the most popular of all senior girls, Marcy Hellman,
walked over to him, her high heels clicking as she walked, and her
ruffled miniskirt swaying in the wind.

“What are you looking at,
Freako?” she asked, her mouth turning into a snarl at the corners
as she spoke.

“Leave me
alone, Marcy. I’m not bothering you. I never try to bother
anybody.” Lionel was quite tired of such bullies pestering him when
he was just minding his own business, trying to “chill” as the
popular kids would call it, and be left to the slight comfort of
his own thoughts.

“Yeah,”
said Marcy’s stocky blonde boyfriend, Scott, who everyone called
‘Scotch’ after his favorite beverage, which he drank in excess.
“Maybe somebody should have left your parents alone, too,” he
continued, taking a swig from a bottle of scotch that kept on
swinging dangerously from his reddened hand.

Within seconds, Lionel’s
fist pinned Scotch down to the floor, and, as he punched the boy
repeatedly, he could see how Marcy’s blood boiled.

“That’s
for what you said, and for being such a tool,” he said to the
bleeding and bruised Scotch. Marcy helped Scotch up and they walked
away, whispering about Lionel just as everyone else at Sam White
High always did.

Angry, Lionel jumped into
his beat-up black pickup and drove to the rundown apartment
building on the corner of a bad neighborhood, where his current
foster mother, Carla, lived with her cats, a few assorted babies of
her own, and, of course, Lionel. He knew for sure that she did not
love him like a son, but only kept him until his release from the
system as a way to supplement her measly welfare check and take
care of her own children and pets. Lionel barged through the hollow
apartment door, going straight to his tiny six-by-eight bedroom,
without even acknowledging Carla, who happened to be nursing one of
her babies at the time.

Once inside, he glanced at
the peeling flowered wallpaper, hideous orange carpets, and the
pale ceiling which could cave in at any time. He threw his green
backpack onto the unmade bed, and started on his history homework,
but, as usual, gave up after a few minutes. What was the point?
There were only a few more days of high school left, and he had
been accepted into quite a few colleges, but he had planned to
major in science, not history. Besides, he had later declined his
acceptances to all of them because he was not able to find the
means to pay the high tuition rates, and Carla certainly could not
help him out, as she had very little of her own money, and would
not be willing to share any of it. Instead, he fired up his mp3
player, jamming to the heavy metal that blasted from his
headphones.

Lionel had always perferred
the trance-like variety, as he often felt as if he were from
another world altogether. When he listened to music, even if it was
only for a few minutes, he felt as if, in the moment, all of his
troubles had simply melted away. Surely, though, once the last note
of a song fell from his ears and scattered into the darkness of his
broken mind, all of the misery that he had attempted to avoid came
hurling back at him, only it had multiplied at least
three-fold.

People were always making
fun of him for having dead parents, and he always defended them,
yet he never knew who they had been. Just then, Lionel realized
that even music could not keep his mind off of things at this
point. Frustrated, he grabbed his light spring jacket, which, like
his hair, was a deep ebony, from a green moon chair that sat in the
mostly empty corner, appearing just as lonely ad Lionel
was.

Lionel was done with this
life. He had decided to leave this place for good. He did not care
about school. He did not care about Carla, or about Marcy, or about
Scotch. He did not care about anyone else in the entire universe.
For the first time in Lionel's life, the only one he really cared
about was himself. He then craftily wormed himself past his
bedroon, and, after getting through the grimy one-car garage, he
snuck out of the decrepit apartment, walking away from the
unpromising ghetto for what he thought would be forever, and
towards Grand Central Station.

By the time he arrived, it
was getting dark. At this point, Lionel had no idea what he'd been
thinking when he left home. He had failed to think that, as would
be the case, there would be no subway at that time. Lionel found a
place to sit on the ashy ground of the empty station. He had never
been so confused in his life. Just as he was beginning to lose
every bit of hope that he had left, a strange looking girl of about
twenty or so came seemingly out of nowhere. She was dressed
normally, in grey skinny jeans and a black T-shirt. She had a lot
of piercings, though, and her hair was dyed a weird shade of
purple. Her skin was covered in so much makeup that it looked
orange and she was wearing dark sunglasses. Yet, oddly, Lionel felt
drawn to her. He was at a loss for words.