Meta (3 page)

  
The crying stops. Suddenly, the lack of crying or screams is scarier than when they sounded like they were only fifty yards away. I feel all alone in the woods. Why did the crying stop? Who made it stop and how did they do it? I begin to feel sick to my stomach.

  
That's when I see her through a clearing up ahead. A young girl, no older than six, I imagine. She's lying on the ground. Her hands and feet are bound together and a dirty rag is stuffed in her mouth. Even from half a football field away, I can see that her face is slick with tears. She locks eyes with me and I've never seen someone so afraid in my life. Someone has planned something awful for this poor, innocent little girl and I run towards her in the hopes that maybe I can do something to stop it in time.

  
Kneeling down, I begin tearing at the knots. The rope is thick and these are not traditional knots. I can't tell which piece is tied to what and begin just pulling at them at random, desperately hoping some of them, any of them, will begin to loosen up.

  
The little girl's crying has stopped. I think for a moment that maybe she's just all cried out and look up to reassure her. Her eyes are looking past me, I notice, a brief moment before I feel intense, sharp pain in my back and the warmth of my own blood beginning to soak my shirt.

CHAPTER THREE

I can't see who did this. He must have hit a major organ, or artery because the world begins closing itself off to me fast. My vision becomes a tunnel and sounds are now far away, deep down that tunnel. I slump over and feel a moment of temporary relief. At least the knife isn't inside me any more.

  
In another moment, I feel the blood around me. Wet and sticky at the same time. A thought occurs: this much blood cannot be outside my body. Even if someone found me now, even if they stopped the bleeding, there's no way my body could keep functioning with this much blood outside of it. I'm dying and there's nothing that can be done.

  
Derrick. Oh no. Poor Derrick. He'll never forgive himself for this. When Mom and Dad died, he swore he'd look after me. Keep me safe. He's already so close to the edge, so affected by their deaths, that he may never come back from this.

  
I'm sorry Derrick, I apologize as tears begin streaming down my face, pooling together with the growing puddle of blood forming under my body. And that poor, little girl. I failed. I can't hear her cries any more. I'm not sure if it's my losing consciousness, or if that monster used the knife he killed me with on her. I stop even caring about the fact that I'm dying, all that matters in my mind right now, is that I couldn't save her.

  
I gather my last bit of strength and lift my head. It feels like it weighs a thousand pounds, and the rest of me feels paralyzed. Slowly, my dying body begins to cooperate, and I can see past myself. The little girl is no longer there. Maybe she ran. Maybe, somehow I did manage to untie one of those knots, and she took the opportunity to make a break for it. It's almost impossible, but I can hope.

  
Everything is becoming very dark now, but I'm no longer scared. I begin to close my eyes as I see my father standing over me. He looks just as I remember him all those years ago. There's blood in the back of my throat as I say three words before I close my eyes.

  
"I'm sorry, Dad."

  
He smiles at me and says, "it's okay, son. You did good."

CHAPTER FOUR

Crickets are chirping. A gentle early summer breeze blows over my face. For a moment, I forget that I'm dead and just lay there enjoying it. Just for a moment before my memories rush back to me, and I remember what happened. My eyes snap open. Leaves and wilderness. I'm right where I died.

  
"Is this heaven?" I wonder. Maybe I'm a ghost. That makes a lot of sense if ghosts really are souls with unfinished business left on earth. I try to sit up and feel horrific pain in my back. Guess I'm not a ghost.

  
I'm alive. How long was I out for? It feels impossible to tell. Was it a minute or hours? Surely it couldn't have been that long considering how badly I am bleeding. One singular thought occurs to me, regardless of what is happening, I need to get up. Now.

  
I try to sit myself up again and just now feel that my arms are pinned down. They're out to my side and feel impossible to lift. I try to turn my head to look at them, but even this hurts worse than any pain I'd ever felt before. I strain one more time to sit up but again, my arms prevent me from doing so.

  
I concentrate on my right hand. Putting every last ounce of strength that I have left into just trying to pick it up. What is holding me down? Did the man return to shackle me in the middle of the night? Now that I think about it, my right wrist feels cold, almost like it is wrapped in steel. I feel my chest and arm muscles burning as I strain. It feels as though I am going to dislocate my shoulder or tear a muscle. None of that matters though, especially if today is going to be my last day on Earth, anyway.

  
As if a rubber band snaps, my arm frees itself from the ground. It feels like a magnet's switched polarity and now, whatever it is that was holding my arm down, is instead flinging it in the other direction, across my chest and onto my left arm.

  
The last thing I remember is hearing a metallic clang. Like two medieval swords smashing into each other, only a hundred times louder. For a long moment, I feel nothing at all. The pain is gone. It is as if for the first time since I was in the womb, my body feels entirely neutral. Reset back to factory settings. Then it happens.

  
At first, it feels like a mild electric shock. Like when you accidentally put your finger on one of the prongs of an electrical plug as you're shoving it into the wall behind a couch. It takes a moment to realize that it's electricity moving its way up your body. Not a painful feeling, necessarily but entirely unpleasant in its unnaturalness. I stand up.

  
All pain is gone and I now feel better than I ever have in my life. I can feel every cell in my body as though they're waking up for the first time ever. All of my senses are heightened. The woods are alive with seemingly a million different sounds, and I can now differentiate them all. The full moon illuminates the surrounding forest like a spotlight, and I can see through the foliage for miles in either direction. Right about now, I also realize that I am no longer standing, but rather hovering a meter above the grassy earth.

  
Yes, hovering. I let out a brief yelp. My body does that involuntary twitch thing, like when you're starting to fall asleep and dream that you're falling. Once I relax though, my body slowly descends back to solid ground, which I'll admit is very much a relief. That's when I first see them.

  
Metabands. Silver and seamless. The finish is dull and non-reflective. Even under the bright full moon, they're hard to see, but there they are. And they are on my wrists.

  
This is impossible. Maybe I am dead after all. That was a lot simpler of an explanation than why I am now standing, and only a moment ago hovering, in the forest with metabands on my wrists. These shouldn't exist. They haven't existed in a decade. Not functioning ones anyway. There was no possible way on Earth that I could be wearing metabands. And yet I am.

  
The little girl.

  
I'm so busy admiring my new fashion accessory, that I have almost completely forgotten about that poor little girl. Well to be fair, I am also marveling at just how not dead I am, which is also quite a spellbinding of a mystery, although not as unbelievable, considering I am wearing bracelets that had made some nearly immortal.

  
Was she still alive? I still don't know how much time has passed. Have I been out twenty minutes, or have I been asleep for days while the metabands slowly brought me back from the brink of death? And most importantly, how did these find their way around my wrists in the first place?

  
Now isn't the time to ask these questions, though. A terrified young girl was somewhere in this forest with a very dangerous man. At least hopefully she was still here. But which way? That's when I hear a small muffled cry. It sounds as though it came from right beside me. I quickly look to the right, but there is nothing but woods for miles. So I begin to run.

  
Running feels strange. Effortless. I am moving faster than I've ever moved before in my life.
Moving
faster, not just running faster than I've ever ran before. I feel like there's a jet engine strapped to my back. Trees pop up into my path, but I move around them with complete ease. Even though I am running at what must be at least a few hundred miles per hour, it feels as though everything is in slow motion. The entire world had slowed down just to make running at this incredible speed easier for me. My amazement ends when I smash directly into a maple tree.

  
Except I hardly feel it. The tree explodes into a flurry of splinters and saw dust, but I wouldn't have even noticed if I hadn't been looking when it happens. I run through another. And another, delighting in how it sounds like gigantic baseball bats cracking. I stop dodging trees altogether and begin just plowing through them at full speed. That is until I reach the clearing. And them.

  
They're both still at least a mile away from me across a field of tall grass, but I can see them clear as day.

  
Slung across his shoulder is the little girl. Her body is limp. I can't tell if she's dead or just passed out as a result of the overwhelming ordeal she is being put through. The monster turns towards me, almost certainly having heard the echoes of the trees I've just smashed into pieces.

  
I freeze, luckily just far enough away that he cannot see me. If I was a meta now, did that mean I could do anything? Am I invincible like The Governor? I'd certainly gained some type of powers by enabling these bands on my wrists but how can I possibly be sure? Sam Wilkerson thought he was invincible too. He held a pay-per-view TV special where he'd planned to survive inside of a building as it was demolished to clear the way for a new mall. They buried a casket with only an ear inside of it, because that's all they could find.

  
It was too big of a risk to take. I reach into my pocket and pull out my cell phone to dial 911 again.

  
"911. What's your emergency?"

  
"I need help. I called earlier and no one came. I'm in the forest near mile marker forty-two on Old Brooksville Highway and there's a little girl in danger. There's a man with a knife and he's going to kill her. He already sta...”

  
I stop myself from telling her the truth. If I was stabbed last night by this man, how could I explain to her that I'm perfectly fine now? Can't risk it.

  
"Sir, is this a prank call?" she asks.

  
"What? No! Absolutely not! This girl is in danger!"

  
"Sir, we have a unit at the location you reported to us and they have not found anything. This is a serious investigation sir and if you are wasting police resources, you are breaking the law," she tells me.

  
"I'm not lying to you! Look, can't you track my phone or something?" I ask.

  
"If you're just going to turn your phone off again sir, this conversation is pointless."

  
"I didn't! Look, my phone is on right now. You think I'm lying to you and breaking the law? Fine, come and arrest me."

  
I place the phone down on a rock, making sure not to accidentally hang up. This should lead them right to me. Regardless of what happens now, I need to save this little girl. I'm not sure why, or how I was given a second chance but I was. And I need to take it. I run towards the man and his young victim, stopping just a few feet behind him.

  
"Put her down and get away from her!" I yell towards the man.

  
He looks back at me, wide eyed. The sound of my voice makes him jump. He clearly wasn't expecting company out here.

  
He is a pale, thin man. Wiry frame. Thick glasses magnify his eyes to the point where they seem to take up half the real estate on his face. His hair is greasy and slicked to the top of his head in a severe part. The white, old button-down shirt he wears has yellow stains under each arm the color of urine. In his back pocket is the knife he used to stab me in the back, still stained red with my blood.

  
"That's right. I'm not dead. Nice try though," I yell towards him.

  
He looks at me for a long moment. Then at the girl slung over his shoulder. He drops her to the ground, and I'm relieved to hear her cry out when she hits the ground. The pink flower patterned dress she's wearing is caked in dirt and torn, but she's still alive.

  
"Now step away from her..," I begin to say before I notice him reaching into his back pocket. The pocket holding the blood stained butcher knife. I yell to him to stop, but it's no use. He already has the knife held high above his head as he turns towards the little girl. The knife begins its fall, towards the barely conscience little girl's chest, as he put the entire weight of his body behind it.

  
That's when time seems to stop. The man's arm hangs there in the air. I do not even realize that my feet seem to have started moving without my consciously giving them the order to do so. Again, the world slows down around me as I rush through the trees. I feel nothing but anger. Anger at this man, this monster, who derives satisfaction from killing the most innocent. A man who receives pleasure from their torture. This monster who tried as hard as he could tonight to end my life. To crush my brother's world so he would have to bury the third, and last, member of his family.