Chapter VIII (Part II END)

A few minutes after the news, the professor dismissed us, though not long before the whole school had canceled all classes for the day, and the four of us made our way to Jet's in lack of a better option. My mind was a mess of nerves to the point where the thirty foot trek out the classroom may as well have been a trip to another planet.

We had scarcely made out of the door of the classroom before Jess was firing questions at the boys. I was alone in my spaced reaction to the events. Jess and the boys were angry.

"How did you know of the attacks first?" she demanded, her tone accusatory.

Jet shrugged indifference. Alex ignored her.

She steamed, "You can't go off being all mysterious about this anymore. This is affecting everyone now." We continued down the hall, her continuing to rant, Jet flickering between bored, confused, and aggravated, Alex cold and distracted. I stuck initially to being simply shaken, but curiosity took hold of me as well. She was certainly right that whatever the boys were caught up in was spreading into the wide world at a quickening pace.

I had told Jess almost everything, but not everything I knew. To be fair, most of what I knew of Jet and Alex's history was fairly recent knowledge from a single conversation with Alex.

Alex had explained to me that Jet, Mania, and he had all known each other as children. More than knew either, they were friends, close friends. Alex's father, was a researcher at Cross. Not just any research scientist, he was generally credited with discovering Stutter, and was accorded, initially, a lot of power and responsibility in hopes that Stutter could be put into application.

Of course, Stutter ended up being a catastrophic failure; a drug that had fantastic, almost supernatural effects on the body and mind, but when metabolized, broke down into toxins quickly killing any and every test subject. This I knew without Alex's aid.

Despite nearly two decades of failed efforts to transform Stutter into something applicable, Cross forged onwards with research, until Alex's father suddenly not only refused to continue the research but destroyed all of the accumulated data on Stutter. Apparently, he alone knew the trick to combining the precursors of Stutter, and his refusal to cooperate along with his destruction of most of the data on the project were potentially a multi-decade setback.

It was a week after his father's refusal that a wide-eyed ten year old Alex found himself frozen in the doorway of his parent's bedroom. Before him, and above his recently decapitated mother and father, crouched his friend, an eleven year old Mania, kitchen knife in hand, smeared in blood, fingers to toes.

Alex screamed and fled with Mania in pursuit, gaining distance as she slipped with blood-slick bare feet on the downstairs kitchen tiles, running till he could feel his heart ready to explode in his chest, eventually making it to Jet's. Mania was seconds, not minutes, behind and before he could explain much of anything to Jet, she arrived, panting and furious.

Alex didn't give me much to work with concerning what happened next. I'll do my best to recall it as he did to me.

Jet and Mania trained together religiously, both fascinated by combat. Jet's excuse was being the prodigy in a long line of competitive fighters and martial artists. For Mania, it was apparently different. She was naturally gifted without much training. Strong. Quick. For her, it was more about expressing that which lay otherwise dormant and unused. As children, compared to Jet, she was always stronger, faster, but she lacked his stamina and technique, and was typically the loser whenever the two sparred.

Not on that day.

The two fought with Jet becoming horrifically cut and slashed almost immediately. Alex had managed to break off and alert the police with his phone only to return as one of his best friends was in the motion of slitting the throat of his other. He screamed her name, her real name, Charisma, and she spun to look at the boy with whom she used to laugh and play, and now wanted to kill.

Her once cute face now bore a sick grin, porcelain white teeth in full display between thin ruby lips drawn languidly back. She claimed that she was not Charisma and that her name was Bia. She didn't respond when asked why she was hurting them, why she killed his parents, but she did let Jet out from trapped underneath her. She sat frozen, covered in fresh blood, some hers, most of it Jet's, for only a few moments before three police officers tore through the front door, shouts flooding Jet's demolished living room.

Their threats and shouts to disarm unfortunately did the officers little good. Mania, Bia, stood facing the men, slick with red, knife gripped firm in hand. Tires screeched outside in the driveway. The first shot tore through Mania's left shoulder sending the young girl to the floor screaming. The officers inched closer, encircling the wounded girl. A mistake.

She was up in a flicker, the knife claiming the weapon arm of the officer who fired, before finding the throats of the other two. Three bodies hit the carpet floor with a soft thud, two coughing garbled wheezes, one screeching in agony.

Despite his injuries, Jet was quick to spring into action as well, prying the gun from the amputated arm and spinning to fire at young Mania as she turned away from the three men. Four shots rang out, all four missing their mark. Behind Mania, framed in the doorway, and now silently slumping towards the same carpeted floor were Jet's panic-stricken mother and father.

Mania kicked the weapon away from the horrified Jet, and bent down to restrain him from rushing to the side of his wounded, dying parents. Sirens blazed in the distance, each second drawing nearer. She spoke tranquilly, her fury gone, transformed back into the girl they knew, "I'll be leaving for a long time. I'll miss you."

"And what exactly is the point of that," Jess harped. I had absolutely no idea what they were arguing about. I could have sworn Jet mentioned something about a nap.

Jet yawned as he spoke, "Need rest if we're going looking for Mania."

"Why? Even if she didn't do it, why would she help? This sort of thing sounds like something she'd probably enjoy."

Jet grinned at Jess, "Because she's being called out."