All is still, now, save for the fire sidling across the hall’s borders.

In Geoul’s bent arm lies the head of his mother. Her face is contorted in fear, and her essence is dripping down to his elbow.

There is a woman in front of him. She is poised like a warrior; her footing wide-set and her arms spread loose. She had looked just like his mother a moment ago, but that visage was now warped, by cruelty and frustrated confusion, into something different. 

The subject of her confusion is obvious; that moment ago, she had made to stab Geoul with a kitchen-knife. Now, just where she’d hoped to introduce the knife above Geoul’s heart, her hand was disappearing into a fine mist, following the knife.

The mist had both matched the silver of the knife and the carmel hue of the not-mother’s skin. 

Past it, Geoul had seen in this moment that there was an arm rising from the severed head in similar misty fashion– the things having wisped away right before contacting it. 

The arm’s skin was pale, and its form skinny, like Angosin’s.

With little more hesitation, Geoul rolled his shoulder to right-hook the woman in the temple.

He feels his knuckles contact painfully with bone and hard cartilage, not ceasing even under the pressure of his follow-through. The punch is nothing like a teenager’s should be, meeting an adult’s frame.

The woman is sent sideways into the TV, knocking it off its stand but not joining it on the floor.

She’s caught herself and is standing hunched, but standing all the same.

Geoul is still holding the head. When he’d first seen the knife disappear into mist, he’d thought it had been the head itself that had saved him.

That it had been his mother, the same which the woman in front of him could not be if she tried.

Just looking at the disembodied face, its horrified expression slowly loosening and its eyes unfocused and her hair matting with blood in spots– it was too much. It couldn’t really be her, it wasn’t her. If there was one false copy, there could be another.

The hallway is on fire. Her room might be on fire.

Geoul breaks for the flame-bronzed hallway just as the not-mother slips a hand beneath the fallen television.

Angosin watches as the crazed woman, screaming as she lunges, cracks Geoul across the back of his head with the TV’s wooden stand.

Barely stunned at all, Geoul whips around and grabs her wrist and twists; the stand falls from her grip as she digs into his face with her free set of nails, worming her thumb in to excavate his eye.

Before she can do any such thing, however, Geoul thrusts a palm under her abdomen, still holding her arm as he hoists her above him and turns to the hall.

Grunting hard and following through yet again, Geoul brings her body in a downward swing to the crackling floor. Fire biting at her and too winded to scream, all the she-demon can do is writhe as Geoul bounds past her into the hallway.

She recovers slowly, a sick smile forming on her face as she pictures that of Geoul, as he finds the other half of his mother. The last bits of denial draining from his mind to make way for dry, stinging reality. The despair that one, in a perfect world would never feel when looking upon their maternal parent. 

And, better yet, she would be there to share the moment with him. She rummages in her pockets as she comes to a knee, edging away from the flames, and retrieves a nigh-invisible length of steel wire. This’d be around his bucking neck, soon enough, as she whispers dark nothings straight into his ear.

“No,” Angosin says, poking a finger into her spine. “You’re done.”

Many miles away, an Italian mountain-climber is being particularly dare-devilish, and looking straight into the blinding, burning pit of Mount Vesuvius. He looks away for but a moment to let his eyes cool, as it is like looking into the sun if the sun were much closer; when he looks back, he swears he could see something like a person falling towards the magma, and hear the sound of someone screaming over its rocky churn.

Angosin steps through and past the empty space that now took the woman’s place. Before he need step further past the rising flames, however, Geoul emerges from the hall’s other end.

His shoulders are slumped and droplets glimmer on his cheeks. Whether they are tears or beads of sweat, Angosin can’t tell. Geoul wipes them away all the same, walking even as he begins to cough from deep in his chest. 

Geoul steps out from the hallway, keeping his eyes away from the TV-room’s floor.

The fire in his mother’s bedroom had grown a great deal in very little time; the fire department would be as much use as an ambulance now.

Where that other woman had gone, he didn’t care. All his exhausted mind could produce was a thankfulness for not having to see her.

What was he to do now? It was getting hard to breathe.

Through his closed eyes, a light shines. It is not orange, like that to his rear and right. It is instead white, or some light shade of yellow.

Opening his eyes, Geoul sees Angosin by the door. He is holding it open and looking at him blankly. For a moment, what could be a smirk flashes across the boy’s face.

Far away, Scott is catching his breath in an apartment building, just a few floors from the top.

He is in a corner-section of the floor, one apparently intended just for its one window. 

Down a narrow wall-to-handrail length of carpet from him are the same three men he’d been staring down for the good part of a minute now.

Reading their body language– the looks they gave each other, those they gave him, and the heaving of their own chests– Scott deduced that they were equal parts annoyed, bored and outright pissed. One other thing he deduced, though, he found multitudes more troublesome.

Someone else had entered the building. It was either the police, or this doom-carrying “pizza man” that old– person– had mentioned.

“Pizza” had to be code for something. What kind of threat could a pizza guy be?

Scott’s moment of thought was cut short as one of the men began making their way down the path, his eyes set on Scott’s broken visor.

This was the one he’d most expected to come down to him. During their earlier meeting, he’d come off overwhelmingly as the most aggressive of the bunch. Even past that, his entire body, from his buzz-shaved head to his wide angry eyes to his massive gang-sign tattoos, screamed “I’m a dangerous sociopath, send me to jail”.

The man did something that Scott had only half expected, when he’d raised his hand-cannon; he’d closed his eyes, and entered a full sprint towards him.

Scott felt himself smile as he fired straight at the man’s face, heedless of his lids’ position.

The light would go right through them– that was the strength of light he’d built them to emit, even just using their lower setting.

All the berserker could manage was one wild, discombobulated swing as he again contorted in tear-moistened pain; the strike missed, and Scott responded with a hammer-fist to the guy’s flailing wrist.

This sent the bat sailing out of his hand, and infused Scott’s actions with confidence. Now, he sought to send the man himself to the same depths his weapon now descended, with no stairwell present to catch him.

Scott twisted around the flailing, yelling convict to find a weak spot from which to lift and push, and found one.

His side was unguarded; a quick bodycheck and a hip-toss is all he’d need.

This was exactly what Scott delivered, up until the hip-toss.

Tackling a blind man was an easy feat, especially when fronted with plated armor, and laid the target right up against the rails. Scott grabbed his legs and heaved!

But, it seemed that, uh

He wasn’t exactly

Strong enough

As he’d been executing, and failing, this whole maneuver, another one of the thugs had been briskly advancing, finally letting their cigar drop from their teeth as they lined up a home-runner perpendicular to Scott’s neck.

They swung and struck before Scott could block, his arms both being occupied even as his adam’s apple was moved more than a couple inches back into his throat.

He was put straight into a painful daze, his eyes refusing to open as he cringed hard Banging into the wall right behind him didn’t help. Fucking stupid plan.

He tried firing his palm-light again– he wouldn’t have to aim much, just fire– but his arm was quickly grappled and folded across his chest. This guy, whichever one he was, was as strong as he’d expect an adult to be.

This whole stupid project of his had been built around that one mistake. That fucking age gap. What had he been thinking?

Scott remembered the look his dad had given him as he rode off. He wondered what he and his mother would think.

Fuck.

A grand distance away, Jordan was marveling at how far he and his companions had made it through the snow. Their tracks were barely visible at all, in this light, and amongst all this white.

The hills of the stuff were blocking any view of the town they might have had, and he smiled at the thought that it would be the same vice-versa.

They’d reached the treeline. Despite being carried on a chick’s back, and the fact he’d likely not have many friends to brag to in the near future, Jordan felt like a fucking man. A man of legend, the kind a person reads about in comic-books.

The sight of Rudy shoving himself through the thick snow on wheels edged Jordan’s optimism on even further. If Rudy could do that as an old fucking man, imagine what he , as a young adult, could accomplish despite his mangled walkers.

A distance behind him, he could hear Zain snort. Even when his friend had been alive, Jordan hadn’t heard that often