Frightened Boy

Chapter Twenty-Three - Metamorphosis

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Hello readers! It's me again, Scott Kelly, the author of Frightened Boy.I'm here to beg for votes one last time. Why are votes important? They let potential investors know I can attract readers. Please, vote on all the chapters. A vote translates directly into money and success for me. Vote on every individual chapter of the book - I know it takes a while, but each vote counts toward my total, and that total decides my rank on Wattpad.

Thank you, seriously. And, sorry about Erika. I miss her too. Please enjoy the conclusion of Frightened Boy.

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23. Metamorphosis

At last, Escher leaned his head back and closed his eyes. I’d call it "sleep," but I’m not sure that was something Escher did.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Escher’s story. I was real. I had a history and a free will. I didn’t think I’d ever change my mind about that, no matter how much proof Escher seemed to have. I wasn’t a figment of anyone’s imagination.

Lux and I looked at each other, and while I’m no good at picking sentiment up out of other’s eyes, I think we were in agreement: We couldn’t let Escher destroy Banlo Bay. There had to be some morality, some right and wrong in this world, and surely killing millions of people qualified as “wrong,” even if it killed Little Brother in the process.

Even if it means killing Little Brother? Killing Whisper? Avenging Erika.

Okay, maybe. I don’t know. Shit, I don’t know.

*

I woke up with the sunlight beaming into my eyes.

As I squinted past the fire in my pupils, I saw Lux’s form standing over me, offering me a hand up. “You should never sleep facing east,” he said. His hand felt warm, and the simple advice was comforting.

“What’s the situation today?” I asked, groggily rubbing the palms of my hands against my eyes, clearing the colorful spots from my vision.

“West. Today, we head west. Epoch is west.”

“How do you know?” Lux asked.

“We’ll get there today. I know because we aren’t really going to it. It’s coming to us.”

*

We rode in the bumpy jeep for hours, until the sun crossed over our heads and raced ahead of us to the west. Sometime into the afternoon, we spotted our first helicopter. It hovered nearly out of view just to the south, a black vulture circling slowly as we sped toward the first place Escher could remember. I pointed them out to Lux, but neither man cared. They’d deal with them when they had to.

Finally, after hours of driving along broken highways, Escher turned off onto a set of city streets hairy with green stalks and finally into a path only marked by the width of the gap in the trees that walled it.

Now the helicopter was joined by its flock, and they sped ahead of us and out of sight.

The channel of trees opened up into a spacious set of hills that rolled out untamed for miles. Dotted on one of the hills was a set of stone structures that stretched defiantly up away from the hungry earth. The place was ruined, destroyed, and ancient like the castles of antiquity I’d see on television as a child. It was burned to the ground so that only the stone structures still stood; the roofs mostly gone.

“This is where I came into this world,” Escher announced.

When we could make out the details of the old military compound, we saw the helicopters had landed just ahead of us, a couple hundred yards. Men were stepping out of them, in formation, around the center of the base, forming a perimeter around the ruins. Even from 200 yards away, I could see the black and white uniforms of the Co-Intel-Pro soldiers.