The Cycle

Chapter Four

When the black claws of death reaches out, and then proceeds to claw out the white force of life; even if that life is aged; why should it be a celebration of life? What pleasantness lies at the end, when the light leaves one’s eye, and allows darkness to take hold? Who  brought up the notion; that a life passes peacefully into the afterlife? Who has ever truly died and then resurrected, and then given a true account of the experience?

The end should never have existed, it should never have being.

Mabel didn’t want to die. Yet it appeared her end was near. Malik’s pores gave off a pungent heat. It turned the leather seats, and metal shrapnel, which were mangled around him, into goo. She struggled to free herself; strained pulled, pushed against all that restrained her, yet her strength failed her.

Breathing became labored; blood flow was reversed and pooled in her brain. Her eyes throbbed from the increased pressure behind it, and it made her vision blurred.

“Your end is here,” said Malik, and it struck a cord.

She heard the pained moans from Nzene, as he awoke from his forced slumber. Was he like Malik? Could he also transform into something outworldly?

Her heart tanked even further, when she heard the screech of rubber tires against asphalt, and saw a single SUV pull up some meters away. She searched for the second, but she didn’t see it.

The doors open and she glanced the blacks suit of Malik personal guard. They would come for their master, and in turn, come for her. Terrible; terrible things awaited her, if Malik, given the unearthly revelation of his nature, sank his claws in her.

But from darkness comes light, and her dismay was shortlived, for the black vehicle flamed up in a fiery explosion, which sent shrapnel’s zipping through the air, and the vehicle were reduced to cinders in seconds and it took the guards with it: ashes in a flame they became. The events continued to pile up, for the flame which had reduced the vehicle to a charred and burnt out thing, was blue. And all she had witnessed in the past hour gave birth to a thought: an unearthly force had sparked the flames to life.

The flickers of blue fire made a thrall out of her, but the disembodied voice of Malik broke the trance when he roared a terrible ‘no’, for he had witnessed yet another loss on his part. He trashed about. It was wild like a caged animal, and his clawed hands fumbly ripped leather and foam to shreds.

I am going to die.

Yet it wasn’t so.

“Close your eyes,” said a voice she didn’t recognize at first.

Then she twisted her neck, and saw it was Abel. He crouched in the foreboding puddle with an unnatural ease of expression across his face. As though the thought, that the overturned vehicle, which could go up in flames at any given moment didn’t bother him. In all that, he spotted several lines of bloodied cuts across his face and arms.

It became clear that though he had overpowered the guards in the alley, he didn’t emerge unscathed.

Malik’s trashing seized, then he said to Abel, “You filthy thing,” and though very little now stood between him and breaking free from the overturned vehicle, it seemed his greater priority was to issue dreadful threats, “your end will be most painful.”

Abel ignored him, then repeated, “close your eyes.”

She obeyed; and in the same second a flash of heat washed over her, and her heart constricted then skipped a beat, because she thought that the gas fumes had ignited. Her eyes sprang open, and was greeted by a flare of white light, which blinded her straight into darkness.