THE OVERWOODS [[Midnight's Notebooks]]

--ovw--XV--ovw--

I stared at the ground far below me for a moment longer, then turned to enter the building's top floor.

I was in the air, spinning with previously-mastered trajectory towards the rooftop door when my cell phone rang. I tucked my body, rotated forward, and met the ground with my feet to answer.

"Hey!" I said in my most cheery tone. "You've reached Midnight on this absolutely beautiful Saturday night. Can I help you?"

"Chris." James's voice.

"Yes, hi."

"Belinda wants to take you off the assignment."

"What?"

"She just thinks you're unsafe."

"I can literally jump from a sewer and onto a plane. I think I'm good."

"Sit this one out, Chris. You can help others."

"I'm helping others by letting someone evil run loose? I'm sick of these people, James. It's disgusting. Something or someone is going to stop them; it may as well be me."

James said nothing for a moment.

"I'm staying on this case," I said.

"Tell you what," he replied. "Tomorrow morning, after you do your church thing, or whatever it is that you Catholics like to do-"

"Don't categorize me."

"Oh, sorry. Should I have said Protestant?"

"What are we doing tomorrow?"

He laughed because it was SO funny. "Srazhenye." He sounded affable. Amused, entertained. "Let's see who goes down. If you win, you get to stay- work the murder case."

"The same murder case."

"Yes. If you win, you get to investigate further. If you lose, you're off the case."

Srazhenye- or SRA as we called it in the agency- was a physical fight between two or more parties in a simulated environment, typically done in one of the training rooms or gyms. Very common training, and mandatory. Twice a week if you had to do work that may involve combat. I'd been in plenty of them; I lost, mostly.

"Who am I up against?"

"You and Webb," said James, "versus Klein and Shafer."

Web?

"WHO ON EARTH IS WEB?"

"Webb," James repeated. "You know, Webb. Elijah Webb? Webb with the double 'B.' Like, the Ice Queen Princess?"

Ice. Queen. PRINCESS.

ICE QUEEN PRINCESS?!?!?!

"Chris?" said James. "Are you still there?"

ELIJAH?!?!?!

"You mean ELYZA. COBB!" I replied. "COBB! THE GIRL WHO ALMOST CHOPPED YOUR HEAD OFF!"

That was the year prior.

"Oh," said James. "Yes, her."

I paused. I don't think he even really remembered; he was SO HIGH when that happened.

I also don't think I ever saw anyone so badly injured laugh so hard when I took the pain away.

ORBI

PLOSIONSSSS

I guessed, perhaps, that the blackening of the skin under my eyes was really funny to him. Or the literal grayness of my irises when they lost color.

"You're aware that I hate fighting," I said.

"That's why I'm making you do it," James said. He made a swallowing noise; probably a pill or something. "And before you speak, I read your mind and yes- this is your only way of staying on this case."

I took a deep breath. I cleared my throat, closing my eyes for just a moment. I opened them, and there were no monsters before me.

"Great," I said.

"11 AM tomorrow. Coliseum. Don't be late."

--ovw--

I stared at my phone with the happiest expression on my face long after James disconnected.

Just kidding.

A yell tore out of my body of its own volition when I threw the phone at the wall beside me and sat down. I wondered what Marie would have told me. She fought one of the mutated-experiment-creations of the US, during Nightingale, thinking that she had to.

It was a test and she was wrong. You weren't supposed to fight them. And maybe, I would have made the same mistake myself. If they didn't end her life in front of me for one wrong move.

She was one of the last to die in the three-month experiment. She only made one wrong move.

Inertia demands that I keep going, for her.

I got up, brushed the gray-and-white specks of dust off my black jeans and picked up the cell phone. Not even a crack, but I guessed that was how technology was when it was made by the Union of Stars. I walked down the sixty flights of creaky wooden stairs while watching footage of previous SRAs, uploaded to the agency's server for all agents to see. Whatever I was going to do in the Coliseum, it was going to be for the fourteen-year-old victim, the one whose name I didn't know; the one I never met.

--ovw--

Malcolm greeted me at the border between Vicinity Five and the Port. It was Sunday, 1 AM, and he brought Skittles and Crayon- our Siberian husky and Alaskan Malamute. I gave Malc a hug and gave the dogs even bigger hugs and let Crayon lick my face. I was a dog person.

"Shouldn't you be sleeping?" I said.

Malcolm raised his eyebrows at me. "Shouldn't you be home?" he replied.

"Emergency meeting," I said. "James called. Like always."

The Port streets were empty and silent, save for the subtle sound of waves on nearby shores. Amber-colored lights and fireflies flickered above us as I smelled the salt from the ocean.

"Kaylee and her brother dropped by earlier with Bollito Misto," said Malcolm. "And pot roast. Said you told 'em to say 'I love you' for ya."

"I can confirm," I said.

He smiled. "I love you, too, little buddy."

"You sure I shouldn't get you a bigger house if I can?"

"Hey." He put his hands up in front of him. "It's your money."

"How long did you wait for me? I mean, you didn't know how long until I was coming home. Or if I was even coming home today at all."

"Doesn't matter."

We walked in silence for a few moments, Skittles panting and wagging her fluffy curled tail. Then Crayon stood motionless. He turned to face one of the alleyways beside the street; he started growling.

"What's wrong, Crayon?" I said. Crayon was the very perceptive one, and the very protective one. His white fur looked like it was bristling. "Is someone there?"

Crayon kept growling.

My tone shifted from its usual silvery and mellow to something else.

"Stay here," I said to Malcolm.

"Chris, what's going on?"

I spoke in a hushed tone, but a furious one. "Just stay here. Where the light is." I surveyed the area around us. Nothing conspicuous. "Stay here, don't make any sound."

Silence. Nothing except the waves.

"Malcolm," I said. "Take the dogs, right now, and go home."

"I'm not leaving you here."

"You have to." I looked at him. "Do it, now."

I heard what sounded like a footstep. I knew whoever it was tried to conceal its sound; I knew what feet on the ground sounded like, or on staircases or on a trampoline or on a ledge- walking or jumping or running. Or trying to remain undetected. Or failing to do so. Slowly, I walked toward my approximation of where the sound came from, and reached into my pocket; I needed the earpiece.

The alley was dark when I wrapped my hand around the earpiece. But the moment I pressed it into my ear, I didn't need it anymore.

--ovw--

There was a yell behind me. It was harrowed, agonized- an older adult male's yell; a sound generated by a voice that was strong, and gravelly.

Malcolm.

I whipped around with two throwing knives already in my left hand. The attacker wore all-black; not one inch of bare skin was exposed, completely eliminating my initial objective of finding a concrete and clear physical trait, to identify them later if not now.

The attacker was maybe 5'8, 5'9. Possibly male, possibly female- I had no way to really know. Average build.

Malcolm was on the ground and injured; there was a small pool of what looked like blood where he was on the street, his face contorted. The dogs- I wasn't ready for the dogs. Skittles and Crayon weren't moving.

Darts.

There were darts on them- I immediately prayed they were sedatives only, and not poison. I'd been shot with poison darts before and lived. Maybe they would be okay.

The attacker had a gun pointed at me; I recognized it at once- a projectile electric stunner. Two things perplexed me at that moment.

One: They weren't trying to kill me.

Two: How did they get one?

These fancy non-lethal guns were, as far as I knew, only accessible in mainland US, nowhere else. I'd seen them only because of previous assignments that required me to take trips to the Union of Stars' main headquarters or other mainland US locations; I had never seen one in the Overwoods.

That only scared me more- if they were a US agent or some kind of operative, for whoever, were they attempting to kidnap people for experiments? Specific people? Telepaths? Previously experimented-on telepaths? None of these things were unheard of.

That chain of thought was all I needed. If I wasn't going to kill this person, I was going to make sure someone else would.

They were standing over what to me looked like Skittles' dead body. I lunged at them, and I mean I lunged at them. It took a split second for me to position my feet, figure out the line and distance, push off for maximum flight.

I collided hard and fast into our masked attacker's body, and then we were flying, through and beyond walls, and posts and columns and shelves and alleys and billboard commercials and broken glass windows- until I slammed them onto a blue building, one beside one of the most abandoned-looking convenience stores; a building made of layers and layers of steel and tempered glass.

I flicked backwards twice into three backward whips, taking my earpiece off and also taking the tiny little can of flash spray- a really sweet gift from Scott which temporarily blinded almost all kinds of assaulters (especially the large human ones)- from my jeans pocket in the process. I still didn't necessarily want to hurt the attacker beyond whatever was necessary. That was my sweet, kind, marshmallow side.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
I also had an SRA to be a part of.

"Do I say, 'it's nice to see you again?'" I said in what James called my "signature" calm-when-attacking voice. "Or do you say it to me? You wrote me a love letter, right?"

And this time, I wanted a fight. I wasn't going to let this monster leave the scene easily. I wasn't going to let them leave the scene, period.

I took two steps and a half, pushed off the ground, and spun fast in a diagonal with my left leg raised and poised near my face. The masked whoever-they-were attempted to minimize any impact from the attack by shielding with their arms. My leg came down from the spin on their torso, smashing the black generator they landed on. I was hoping they'd talk. Or groan. But all I heard was breathing, and an almost inaudible grunt of pain. Still no information.

"This isn't fun for either of us," I said. "Or am I wrong?"

I had to do this with speed- to go back to Malcolm and the dogs- and decided to engage quickly and make our fight a short one.

I soon learned something: this attacker wasn't planning to stay or to fight.

I wasn't a killer. Yet I wanted this man or woman or non-binary individual, whoever it was, to pay. I felt ready for a war; a war between two individuals taking place inside yet another dilapidated, abandoned building, on the large, re-expanded island full of actual trash and wreckage and drugs and evidence of years and centuries of actual human-caused destruction.

But the man or woman who attacked us that day had other plans.

The one time I wanted a fight, and the other party wasn't interested.

I took a red, rusty, and blotchy piece of bent metal from a pile of disorganized scrap next to us. The attacker was still on the ground, recovering the air knocked out of their lungs.

"If I'm who you want to mess with," I said, "then leave the rest of the world out of it. You do what miserable, low-down, pathetic cowards do." There was a burning in the damaged ligaments in my left hand. There was an acrimony and venom in my voice that even I didn't hear often. "You could have just gone for me!"
In my most recent fifty cases counting from that day and going back that year, and with all of the target takedowns and predator takedowns included in them (both the professional ones as well as my secret personal ones), this one in particular was to end up as, arguably, one of the shortest fights.

I took just the tiny little split in that moment, the small break in those seemingly diminutive yet gigantic milliseconds, to glance down at my left hand and at the permanent scar on my metacarpals.

I'm not seeing any bones tonight…
The ugliest part of my left hand was possibly the fifth digit, right at the base of it where I broke it myself to avoid a larger injury and also the subsequent annihilation that would've come with it.

Happy place

Happy happy

Happy place happy place happy happy happy

The number of times the average person would've been murdered but I didn't die is something I can no longer count. Even as I write this I sometimes lose track of the number of times I saved my own life and realized it only days or even years after.

ORBI

PLOSIONSSSS

Happy place

The attacker got up, ran toward me, and attempted a relatively slow hook towards me with their own left hand, one curled into a completely fabric-covered and black fist.

I blinked once.
So untrained.
I parried, side-stepped, and kneed the attacker into a roundhouse into a right elbow.
He or she or they answered back with four swift jabs to my face; the first three blocked expertly but the fourth one smacking into the cartilage of my nose and smashing, rocking, and crashing hard like a brick wall straight into my nasal cavity; I heard a crackle and immediately tasted blood as it spilled over my lips and down my chin.

I spit, my blood and saliva combined and the mixture a very beautiful color with great consistency. I spit again, this time at the attacker's perfectly opaque mask.

They clicked on a large, blinking, shiny silver canister that they took from a pocket.

It took only a moment: I was in a cloud of what felt like poison, only a hundred times worse than Belinda's second-hand smoke, and I didn't have a mask on me. I was on my knees and choking and coughing and vomiting the French fries that I'd ordered earlier at Crisanto Pacifico.

I saw moving little spots of yellow, and purple, and dancing spirals of red- all while I watched with blurred vision while the attacker pulled out a handgun and clicked a bullet in place.

I had one flashback.

But this one saved my life, like some others did in the past, too. The child inside of me protected the eighteen-year-old me; saved my life.

Another instance of when the child version of me who was still alive inside of me saved the now-adult me. It had happened before; even as I write these words now, it still happens, albeit much, much more rarely than it used to- because he had to kick in and save me a lot back then; sometimes, from external threats of murder and human-forced-death or abuser-forced-injuries; sometimes, from myself.

The child inside me saw the handgun as the frying pan; the stick; the whip; the shoe; slipper; book; bible; thumbtacks. All the things I was physically attacked with if I did not cooperate as a young child.

Which, often, I didn't. So, you know exactly what happened; I got hurt.

I would still refuse. To be exploited; to be used; whenever and whatever chance that I could. The tolerance I had for physical smashing and the subsequent gaslighting was frankly beyond human. Especially at eight.

When the mist cleared- which it did eventually- I was still alive, and a seemingly handwritten note on thin, wet, silver-red sheet of strange paper-like material left on the ground in front of me told me, ostensibly, why that was.

I looked at it. I blinked at it. I blinked again, and again. I read it again, and again, and again, and again.

And again.

BULL. FREAKING. SHIT.

Why I was, in fact, still alive.

According to one specific individual.

Apparently.

I was still coughing; both my eyes started producing blackish, and grayish, and colloidal and bloody and thick tears like aggravated little waterfalls, and I had to wipe them a trillion million billion times to make out the words each time that I coughed again.

I read the words, and I didn't believe it.

Memories of the fight, post-gas-cylinder, resurfaced in my head; resurfaced slowly.

Why is this feeling more than familiar

I pressed my fingers to the skin around left eye. I tucked long, wispy locks of blood-coated black hair behind my equally bloody ear.

That's not WHY I'm still alive, you FREAKING NARCISSIST.

I shut my eyes; I took one slow, deep breath.

I remembered Caleb Davenport's words.
"Chris, I think you're in danger."

I shook out my right hand where I held the note. It fell to the floor, and I picked it up again.

I remembered the Lowdown.

I remembered Nightingale.

I vomited again, and that time I wasn't sure if it was the poison from the spray from the canister anymore, or just another result of an ugly memory combined with another poison stuck forcefully by needle into my system.

"Do you dream about it?"

His words, they played in my head.

Over, and over.

His voice. I liked his voice. Not too different from mine albeit an octave lower and several decibels louder, and resonating exactly where and how it should be; resonating where it counts; resonating in the way that counts. I liked his voice because I liked the person it was associated to.

I could breathe and sleep just a little better knowing that while I would have nightmares, the most protective of men was the older brother of the girl I would sacrifice my own life for.

I still woke up in clean, cool places, at that point sometimes with Caleb in the same room as me, trying to rip off restraints and syringes which were no longer actually there; trying to push off hands which were no longer actually on the skin of my body.

But in my dreams, I sometimes still felt them.

"Do you dream about it?"

I never wanted him to find out. It was not his job to carry any of my memories. Why he wanted to lighten the extremely heavy weight I carried on my shoulders; on my tiny, narrow, bony shoulders daily- that was beyond me.

"Do you dream about it?"

He got his answer.

"Do you dream about it? She does."

Yes. Yes, I do. And then, I break.
And then I cry.

And then I hate the entire world, even though the default of my heart is to love everyone.

I also remembered the orange glow, of the Davenport's incredibly beautiful dining room's fireplace; the light bouncing off of Caleb Davenport's glasses-
"Hey. Am I right? Chris, you're not in danger, are you?"

The ink was red; a bloodlike color. Some sort of mix between dark red, and amber; a touch of silicate onyx. I always made sure to note these small details carefully, since I never knew when I would need to use painsteal again and hence lose my color vision.

Lose color vision, AGAIN.

People got hurt all the time.

Because some walking masses of garbage shaped like people are narcissistic, sick, twisted, and abusive.

So, of course, I got hurt all the time.

A part of me, somewhere inside me, was so tired of it.

I fixated on the words on the paper while the world spun around me.

"IF YOUR TEAM COMES FOR ME

I'LL BREAK MORE THAN HIS BONES

DAVENPORT WILL DIE

-M M

PS

I LET YOU LIVE TO HAVE YOU

AGAIN"

--ovw--

I wasn't sure how long it took for me to make my way back to Malcolm. I was afraid. Afraid to see how badly he was hurt; afraid to see if Skittles and Crayon... if they were still here, still with us.

There was blood streaming through an open cut on the left side of my face; it only irritated me because it got in my eye. I hopped back toward the general direction of where Malcolm and I were walking, the note in a plastic evidence bag, sealed twice with security tape, in Caleb's jacket pocket- but I wasn't going to give it to anyone. As for Caleb's jacket, I was going to have to wash it at home, wear something else for the SRA.

The SRA.

Me and ELYZA ELIJAH ICE PRINCESS WEBB (BECAUSE APPARENTLY THAT IS HER NAME NOW, THANK YOU JAMEZO MONSTRO METHYLO ACIDO ESTERO BENZO CARBOXYLICO), versus Wyatt Shafer and Belinda Klein.

I remembered her blowing the poisonous second-hand smoke straight into my face. Not caring. Not caring on multiple occasions.

But it's fine.

Sometimes, I didn't care either.

The SRA.

It's fine; it's just a jacket.

I can wear anything else for the SRA. It's a fight, anyway. And it's only a jacket.

The SRA…

Just a jacket-

I laughed, some kind of insane, anarchic, completely devoid-of-human-emotion-kind of insane laugh.

It's only a jacket

No punctuation marks; no mind; no coherent thoughts; no positive thoughts; no thoughts apart from the whirring hurricane of pain and flashes of ugly memories.

ORBI

PLOSIONSSSS

Stop thinking stop thinking stop thinking stop thinking

SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!

"Holy…" I stumbled; I stumbled; and I stumbled. And I stumbled again, smashing my head on a spiked concrete fence that seemed to materialize from out of nowhere. I walked backward a few half-steps. "Actual." I fumbled for the next word I spoke. "Bull." I covered my face in my hands, realizing Caleb was going to see how amazingly I messed up his jacket; his gift of a piece of clothing; a gesture of kindness from a human to a very damaged human. "Shit."

I repeated myself, to no one.

"SHIT!"

I attempted, arguably, one of my absolutely most terrible roundoffs ever onto a fallen streetlamp. One of my feet missed it slightly, but I still connected with it- just good enough to have some kind of amount of rebound off it.

But I was dizzy, lightheaded, I didn't quite get my trajectory right and ended up smashing through a glass door of some building somewhere and tumbled to the floor in a heap, a heap made of pain and fear and awful, horrible memories, a heap that was bleeding and still coughing. I was moving as fast as I humanly possibly could, when finding my bearings was almost impossible. I was in so much pain that I didn't even notice it was raining until I was there, a bleeding heap on the floor, looking outside and up at the sky. I didn't assess the damage; I ignored the pain and got up and ran. I kept going for about two blocks until the stitch in my side was almost unbearable. It wasn't pain that I could ignore- but I kept moving.

I turned a corner. Malcolm used his coat to wrap around the injury- I couldn't see it; it was somewhere on his left arm, and his face was still twisted by pain, and there was blood on the coat. I immediately went to Skittles. I didn't want to do what I was about to do. I put the skin of my palms and fingers Skittles' fur, on her side. I lightly pressed both of my hands on the floofy floof, and waited for seconds, and then a minute, and then another minute. And I felt nothing.
I can never describe that moment to you. Really, I never can. I might try ten trillion times, and still never get it right, not once.
ORR
BIPP
PLOZIONSSSS

Nothing.
I feel something I do I do I do I do I do
I feel something YES I DO
No; no I didn't. I was lying to myself. Because I felt nothing.

That was when I began to cry, not from the toxic gas but because, yet again, I had lost another part of me; I had lost, yet again, some of the little that I still had left. I wasn't someone who ever had very much. What little I had, I treasured.

I quickly did the same with Crayon.

"Come on," I said, my voice despairing and small and broken and more raspy than it ever had been before. I felt nothing. I wiped tears and dirt and blood off my cheeks, and tried again. "I know you're in there," I said. "I know you are!" I waited another minute. I breathed whatever my lungs would allow me, choked and squeezed as they were by the poison. "You're still in there."

I started coughing hard. I felt something like thunder, but couldn't hear it. I didn't know what I was anymore. I didn't know where I was anymore. I knew where I was, but I didn't. I felt pain and yet nothing existed.

"You're still in there," I repeated. "You have to be. You're still here." My vision was going purple and gray and black at the edges; I thought positive thoughts, such as "the glass is half full." I swallowed hard, my hands still on Crayon's white fur, and cleared my throat. "COME ON!"

"Chris," Malcolm said.

I turned to look at him.

He looked back at me, and written on his face were all the words I didn't need to hear; I didn't want to hear.

I couldn't.

I covered my face with both my hands and sobbed, but I could only allow myself this indulgence for a minute. I took my phone and called an emergency service. I approached Malcolm.

"Chris," he said sternly. "Don't do this."

"I am going to do it."

"No," he said. "No, you're not!"

"Yes, I am." I coughed again, cleared my throat, and sniffed. I blinked a few times. I took his hand in both of mine, and like the usual it took only a few seconds. The pain was beyond description of words that I knew.

Fractures. I knew it instantly. Open fractures.

I knew the feeling exactly. It happened during the experiment, and it happened before the experiment, too.

In a world full of poison, of immorality: if you are stranded in a place where the only things around are evil, what do you do?

You run to the arms of the lesser evil.

You try to survive. With whatever is actually available to you.

I gritted my imperfect teeth as blood poured from the wound on my face. "Help's coming, dad." I had to breathe as deeply as I could, as calmly, slowly, and deeply as I could; this is what you do when you are in extreme pain, from a severe injury.

"Chris, let me go."

He shifted his hand, the one I was holding, only slightly. But the pain that even that small movement caused was like a flash of pure white lightning, I cried out, and if possible started to sob louder than when I knew Crayon and Skittles were gone.

"Son, let go!"

"Just don't move," I said. My eyes started to lose their color, and turned gray, the blood vessels below my eyes turning a very visible black, like black paint hurled at a wall and dripping downward. It happened whenever I took the suffering from someone and it was a lot of effort and a lot of pain. I looked up at the rain, at the sky, at the clouds that seemed to have come from nowhere. Good thing I sealed the note, said a voice in my mind.

Did I even give a shit anymore?

Maybe, I should have fought the monster; the hideous thing. Maybe Marie and I should have done it together.

Maybe from the experiment, Kaylee should have been the only survivor.