Fresh Air, Part 82

I woke up a few days after we all ate our hearts. It was weird--Famine's didn't seem to have changed me very much. I was actually glad of that--I had accepted that I was the powerless man I was now. I didn't exactly like it, but I had accepted it, at least. Grief had helped a lot with that. He'd been training me to use my body as a weapon, and the swords I'd made. He said I was a fast learner, and I believed him--I was already better than him at most of the techniques, but I thought it was because my body still remembered how to fight from when I was strong. 


I left the room, Harx following closely behind me. The past couple days had given me time to think, which I needed. I thought almost entirely about Adrienne, about what Stewart had said. I can bring her back, I thought. But did I want that? What if she was happy where she was? What if she was in heaven? I pushed the thought from my mind. I'd cross that bridge when I came to it. 


I found Grief in the entrance way to the rooms. I reached out my hand to shake his. "Thanks, Grief. For everything."


"It was nothing at all, sir," he said. I asked him to give me a portal to the outside world and he obliged. I seemed to be in the same wooded area as before. I hopped on Harx and we flew away, searching for some town on which to test my new powers. Stewart, I knew, had to be stopped. It wasn't so much about the apocalypse, but rather the fact that he was getting more and more evil with every passing day. He'd already killed millions of innocent people, and the only problem was that I wasn't strong enough to stop him anymore, which meant I'd have to work with Zach, and probably Alex too, to take him down. But that would have to wait, too. There was way too much work to do as it was. 


My whole body was sore. It was strange, feeling this sort of soreness. It came from the muscles which had just started to form on my body because of all my training. These were my muscles, not some magical power, not hand-me-downs from my uncle. It hurt getting them, but it was worth it. 


Harx and I stopped in the first town we got to, which turned out to be a small town in Alabama. Hmm, I guess that means hell really is in Alabama. We stopped and I told him to go hide--Griffins are hard to explain. I didn't like the idea of ruining an entire town's crops--There didn't need to be anymore death, but I had a plan in mind. It had been a long time since I'd had anything tasty to eat, and I thought if God wanted me to be pestilence, I was going to have some fun with it. I walked into the first house I saw. 


Inside there were three people, a father, a mother, and a small girl who was probably no more than ten. They were watching television, which depicted the terrors which were probably caused by Stewart, and also some odd disease which turned people orange making its way across Nevada--Zach. I smiled, despite myself. When I walked in the family turned and screamed, not because I was terribly imposing--I was just a normal guy, wearing a plain white T-shirt and jeans. I assumed it was because I had busted in, and perhaps because I was still wearing my swords on my back. It didn't matter. I could see the terror in their eyes and all I wanted to do was to tell them that I wasn't going to hurt them, that they would be okay, but I knew it wouldn't be true--I knew they would probably die along with the rest of the world when Stewart started his apocalypse. Stewart had mentioned Fall Out 3, and despite that being a freaking awesome video game I couldn't bear seeing the world turned into that. But I couldn't lie to myself--I was excited about creating my own nation in our new world. But these people were so small, so normal. I had no powers, but I could have easily killed them with my bear hands. I wouldn't, obviously, but the idea of the human fragility occurred to me, how easy it would be to just silence them all, and yet how persistent we all are--


But I thought also of how we've destroyed this world, how we've made it almost uninhabitable. Maybe it was for the best. I'm sure that's what God was thinking. Anyway I was here, in this house, staring at this normal, seemingly good family. The walls were painted brown and all the lights were off but in the kitchen. It was there that I knew I'd find what I was looking for. I stared the father in the eye. He had green eyes. The mother had blue, and an idle thought occurred to me that, if she were younger, she would have been very beautiful, and if, had she been older, her daughter would have been very beautiful, but this was the only time I'd ever see these people, and because of Stewart it might be the only time they even exist, and this is who they are, who they forever will be, and in a way, they are all beautiful. 


I looked him in the eye. 


Now was the time to act.


"Give me all your fucking Twinkies," I said.




-The Knight