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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.

Escher slowed the jeep to a halt a few hundred yards away from the ruined fortress. “Get out,” he ordered as he stepped from the vehicle.

I did so, feeling the dry grass crunch beneath my feet.

“Duck,” Escher said softly.

“Wha—?”

Lux kicked my legs out from under me. I heard a gunshot. He fell with me to the ground, and the two of us lay on our backs, staring up at the sun.

“Snipers,” Lux groaned.

I could see maybe twelve or fifteen of them from various perches and positions around a small bunker that stood only a few feet up from the ground and led down into it. Across from it was the military base—or hospital, I suspected—that Escher had described. The ivy had stitched over the scars that bore witness to the destruction he’d caused here.

Escher dropped to one knee but didn’t lay flat like Lux and I. A black beetle crawled across my hand; I shook it off. Then the Red King began walking steadily toward his birthplace.

One shot, and then two more. The sniper blasts were loud; loud even compared to the thousands of gunshots I’d been subjected to in the past weeks. Each bullet impacted the ground somewhere near Escher, never seeming to come into contact with him—as if the snipers were impossibly inept shots, and I knew that wasn’t the case. Escher was making them miss.

Escher walked steadily toward the bunker in the center of the compound as we stumbled, crawled, and ran clumsily in the grass behind him.

When we were about 100 yards away, we heard a megaphone shrilly ordering us to stop and negotiate. It was Whisper’s voice, but all the power was gone from it. It didn’t feed directly into my brain like a sexy murmur; it was just a woman’s angry voice.

“You are not God,” her voice shouted. “You were a marine. You arrived here after you took a bullet to the head. You are hallucinating. You are a regular person. Your name is not Escher. Everyone you kill is a person like yourself, a fully realized human being that you are robbing of life.”

She repeated this three, four times, each time her voice grew louder, more frenzied.

When Escher was within a hundred yards of the ruined compound, the rapid fire of assault rifles sounded. The Red King responded by running; the space around him warped as did so, each bullet bending its course into the air behind him. He dodged, weaved, and rolled—leaping ten feet forward and bouncing five back as a rocket detonated one second too late, where he would have been, half the time on his hands rolling or flipping one way or another.

A bullet hit the ground so close to my ear that the small explosion of dirt rained onto my face. A shock ran through me. I sprinted up from my position on the ground and bolted across the battlefield.

I spied a bunker leading underground at the edge of the compound, and decided it was good cover. I ran toward it, legs pumping and arms flailing, then slid to a halt as I reached its safety, colliding with it and scrambling clumsily down the steps. At the end of the stairway, perhaps twenty feet down, was a concrete wall.

I heard Whisper’s voice above, shouting out orders and regrouping.

Escher stood his ground just outside the bunker, letting loose round after round on anyone who dared aim at Lux, who was scrambling as fast as he could to join me. At last Escher dove into the bunker as well.

Lux whipped the headphones from his head. The familiarly horrific feeling washed over me. I started to black out as I heard chainsaws perform delicate mating rituals and my eyes began to ache inside of my skull. Vomit and bile rose in the back of my throat.

Lux tossed the headphones out to the front of the bunker, holding onto the end plug connecting them to whatever infernal device in his backpack caused the ruckus. The distance between myself and the headphones brought small relief. The bullets stopped coming.

A grenade bounced against the wall and clattered down the steps. Instantly, Escher was on it, grabbing it while it was still bouncing.

As he did so, I made my move. I was already on the ground, on my knees from the crippling sounds. Escher’s boot was right there in front of me. He was bending down to pick up the live grenade and throw it back.

The syringe! I snatched it from his boot and slipped it into my pant pocket, praying the lunatic was too distracted to notice.

He held onto the grenade for a moment, squeezing it like he was testing a piece of fruit. When he threw it back, it exploded in midair, the shrapnel shredding the men who were pressed up against the walls outside the stairway, waiting to make their entrance. The explosion went up and outwards, over our heads and through theirs.

“The door, Escher!” Lux said, as if he needed to remind him. “It’s not going to open.”

I stared back at the concrete wall at the bottom of the staircase. This was a door?

And then, there was a new Voice, one I’d hoped I’d never hear again. “Escher, I’ve finally got you. Don’t you understand, Escher?” Little Brother’s voice said, impossibly loud, coming from a speaker somewhere nearby. Never here in person.

Little Brother continued. “Escher, you’re insane. You need to seek treatment. We can take you in safely. Look, I have proof, Escher. Proof. I have your face, now. I do apologize for the delay, or we would have been properly prepared for your arrival. I’m looking at the logs right here. Your name is Eli Hutchens. You were rescued in December of 2048 during the battle for Detroit. You are just sick, Escher—mentally. You need psychiatric treatment. A bullet passed through your frontal lobe. This is no alternate universe, Escher. I'm sorry, but this is real life. This is the only life that exists. This is life. You’re not in purgatory, and you’re not on the path to enlightenment. You’re right here. You’re here with me, and your name is Eli.”

Escher faced the doorway. He didn’t respond. Instead he dug his fingertips into grooves in the worn, pitted cement that formed the wall that was keeping him from his destiny.

And then, he lifted.

Every vein in his arm grew fat, pumped high-octane, threatended to burst. Veins in his head popped out like poorly soldered circuitry.

And he lifted.

He closed his eyes; he took a deep breath. Then another, still lifting. The veins receded; the muscles stopped straining. He relaxed, but he was still lifting.

The gate began to creak and move, to moan and crawl up over his head as simply as if he were lifting a garage door. Dust and plaster rained down on him as he pulled the hefty block up into its frame. The gears ticked as it lifted, and when it had reached its apex, it locked with a click.

Inside, I saw my worst fear: a nuclear warhead, the size of a school bus, sitting in perfect condition, encapsulated in this cement chamber for five decades. We were reopening the pyramids of the Lost Pharaohs. Lux and I ducked into the chamber, and the stale air and dust encased my nostrils.

“Now,” Escher said, “to launch.”

He reached into his boot, but his hand came up empty. Immediately, he looked at me. Stadium lights to my dying candles. “Give it to me,” he said. “We don’t have time. Just give it to me. I can’t do this without recursion. This will require a great bend in reality.

“Look, Escher,” I said, backing up as he began walking toward me, “I am a part of you, right? I’m your paranoia, your fear. There must be a reason I took the blood from you. I know what you want to do. There must be another way. I’ve been running my whole life. I can’t be the guy that runs away while you kill millions of people.”

Lux was checking outside the blast doors to see who was coming. A bullet blasted into the chamber, the sound amplified impossibly by the acoustics. The sound of this particular gun was becoming familiar.

A disheveled woman in a black dress with a white cat in one hand and a tremendous silver revolver in the other walked down the steps.

“Escher,” I pleaded, “Escher, please don’t kill these people.”

“Frightened Boy, they killed Erika. Didn’t you love her? I saw it in your eyes. Doesn’t she deserve vengeance?”

Maybe. Maybe she did. Shit. But killing all these people can’t be right, she wouldn’t want that.

Of course, she doesn’t want anything. She’s dead now.

Whisper raised her revolver at Escher, but then she seemed to think better of it. She saw the syringe in my hand and pointed the gun at me instead.

I couldn’t pay attention to her right now, though. I was trying to save the world.

Whisper said to me, “If that thing launches while we are in here, we will all be incinerated, you included. You’ll be dead, Frightened Boy…and so will Escher.”

She was probably right. Didn’t feel much like living, anyway.

Little Brother’s voice came over the loudspeaker again. There must have been a microphone on Whisper’s person, and now he was a part of our conversation.

“Frightened Boy, you have freedom now.” His fat voice breathed laboriously over the speaker. “The people of Banlo Bay have freedom. Escher wants them to die. He thinks they are part of his mind, but we know that’s not true, don’t we? Something like that is just—not possible. What we have, Frightened Boy, is freedom. We have freedom to go to work, freedom to live what lives the world has afforded us. We have stability, and a chance at a family. You, Clark Horton, are free. I can allow you to return to your old life like nothing happened. Leave this Escher mess for me to clean up. We owe you one. We owe you a chance to be free again.”

I’d never been free—I’d just been running loose. Little Brother took everything that mattered from me. This was liberation.

Whisper aimed her revolver at my hand.

Escher pointed a finger at the cat in her arm; it attacked reached up and swiped a claw across Whisper’s face. She struggled with it, firing her gun into the air and hitting nothing.

For Erika. I’d destroy the world for Erika. Destroy the world because it wasn’t really there.

When Escher met me halfway, I thrust the syringe into his arm, my thumb on the plunger. “I’m not doing this because I’m in your head,” I said. “I’m doing this because I’m a human being, and that matters. Do not fuck this up.”

Escher shook his head. He didn’t have an answer for me.

I pushed the plunger down into Escher’s arm. The blood coursed through him. Old Escher met New Escher, causing his recursion.

Whisper shrieked, hurled the cat from her, and shot it.

“Run!” Escher told me. “I’ve listened. Run far.”

I didn’t know what to say or what to do. Escher began glowing with a soft, radiant aura. He took on a broken, jagged appearance with sharp edges and angles. The Red King stepped over to the missile controls and pressed his hands against them. He didn’t touch a button but just rested there. I started backing out toward the exit.

Lights turned on. Fires started lighting in the room; the missile was launching.

I did what he said. I ran up the steps and across what was left of the stunned Co-Intel-Pro ops, and ran into the field where Little Brother’s men had parked their helicopters.

Smoke rose from the bunker. Sirens blared. Steel plates creaked together as they opened up, and the grass above the bunker began to move.

The roar was eternal. I shielded my eyes and ears.

Whisper and Escher were still in the chamber together, burning to nothingness.

The missile launched up out of the silo on a course for Banlo Bay. I could see it rise and rise, higher and higher, heading steadily toward the place I knew the city was, even though it was too far to see. A part of me saw Escher in the missile, in Epoch—in his attempt to simplify the pattern by destroying some of the variation, some of the chaos which ran rampant in his reality.

But the bomb didn’t fall to the ground. Instead, it exploded in the air—miles over the city.

I looked away as the bomb exploded. I’d heard it could make you blind.

The burst of wind was warm and smelled like chemicals. It felt like the entire field had been overturned and was flying at me, and there was grass cutting at my face. I clutched my head between my arms and looked at the ground beneath me. Five minutes later, when everything was still, I could see the blast cloud. It looked impossible, like the moon exploded in the sky.