FIENDS

LOGAN:

'My name is Logan. I am seventeen years old-'

That was it. That was all I could remember.

'Pathetic.'

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes as I bumped up against the train window, my breath fogging on the glass. The train tracks ran high over a lake with trees leaning over crystal clear water as if they were Narcissus trying to see their reflection in its depths. The longer I stared down into the water the more my stomach began to swim. It was quite the drop.

The scratchy material of the chair tickled and irritated the back of my neck as I brushed my hair in front of the skin to shield it. My head felt as if it were full of cotton wool as my eyes ached in my head.

The table in front of me was sticky with whatever had been spilled on top of it last and I grimaced, going to take my arms off it when I noticed the tattoo on the inside of my wrist. It was no more than three centimeters in diameter; a series of lines ranging in thickness across my skin with numbers written underneath.

'Just how long have I been asleep? And who gets a bar-code tattooed on their arm, what type of hipster was I?'

The more I tried to remember things about myself, who my family were, where I was from, where I went to school, the more I seemed to forget. It was as if someone had poked a hole in my mind as each and every one of my memories seeped out, like the air leaving through a leak in a blow-up swimming pool.

My eyes scanned the passengers sitting in front of me as I appeared to be the only one going through this dilemma. A little girl in a pink pixie costume ran up and down the carriage, laughing with a wand in her hand as she was chased by her mother behind her with dark circles deep under her eyes. A man sat at a table to the left of me with a small dog on his lap, who immediately started to growl upon noticing that I was awake.

I stuck my tongue out at the creature but the man cradled him away from me, shooting a glare. I rolled my eyes, turning back to the window as I watched the world move beneath us.

My stomach growled and I searched through my pockets for some kind of food, a candy bar, anything but I came up with nothing. I was unsure how much longer the train journey was supposed to go on for, but it appeared like I wasn’t going to be able to so much as leave the station given that I could find no cash on me either.

As the people sitting in the aisles around me sat up straighter in their seats, I leaned around my chair to see if I can find who or what it was that they spotted. My stomach filled with dread as a cop walked down the carriage, staring intently at each passenger until they began to squirm. His eyes lighted on me, and the bar-code printed across my wrist, as he stopped in front of my chair.

His uniform was a bit too bright blue for it to be comfortable, but my eyes were more so on the baton and gun at his hip. A badge was pinned to his breast pocket, but I couldn’t read exactly what department he was from. His eyes were deep-set in a dark face, a mustache bristling across his upper lip. Under his scrutiny, I could feel my body heating up as I sunk back into my seat away from him.

“Where are you heading, kid?”

“What’s it to you?”

He frowned down at me. “Don’t make this difficult.”

“I’m not exactly going to make it easy on you.”

The cop sighed. “You’re under arrest. Everything you say from now on can and will be used against you in a court of law.” My heart pounded in my chest, but I kept my face clear of all emotion as he settled into the chair in front of me on the other side of the table.

Before I could yank them away, the officer pulled out a set of cuffs and clamped them over my wrists. I hissed as the metal was a tad too tight, biting into my flesh, but I doubted that the cop either noticed or cared as he sat back comfortably, wistfully staring out the window as he wished to be anywhere else with anyone else.

Frankly, I couldn’t blame him.

I ignored the stares of the passengers around me as I tried to think through the events in my head. I was just arrested on a train, going who knows where with no memory of who I am or what I had done to attract the attention of the police.

“Why exactly am I under arrest?”

The cop grunted, nodding at the bar code on the inside of my wrist. “It’s a gang tag. We’ve been tracking down a gang with that same mark who have been carrying out a series of B and Es. ‘Nough questions.”

'But I’ve only asked one, you asshole.'

The man had an entire weight class on me, but I had my height. I was going nowhere with him, that much I was certain of. I had no memories of what I had done or even if anything he was telling me was true, so he could kiss this arrest goodbye.

Adrenaline pumped through my veins as the lighting in the carriage dimmed as we pulled into the station. Before the train had fully stopped, the cop had grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet, pushing me out of the carriage in front of him. The grip he kept on my shoulder was bruising as the other passengers parted before me like the red sea as if they couldn’t get far enough away from a surely hardened criminal.

People at the station stared at the pair of us as we stomped past, but I glared at them until they averted their eyes. My body felt as if my skin was about to melt off my bones as my own heat was overwhelming. The officer hissed, dropping his hand from me as he cursed in pain.

I sped up my pace, trying to put some distance between us but he only jogged to close it, not letting me get further away than two or three feet. My eyes scanned the roadside in front of me once we left the station, looking for an escape root, but the cop whistled down a taxi and bundled me into it as if I were a kid. He made sure only to touch my clothes in fear of getting burned again.

'What the hell is going on?'

His voice low, the officer whispered the address to the driver. He reached across me and buckled my seat belt however much I shrank back into my seat. I rested my head against the cool glass of the window in an attempt to cool down as my skin was now boiling to the touch, sweat beading on my forehead. My hair stuck to the back of my neck as I felt as if I was ready to suffocate.

The cabbie pulled up at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. I fiddled with the car door handle as the cop paid the driver, but they were locked. I was soon dragged out by my shirt onto the grass bank and the cab drove away as if there was nothing quite amiss.

'Why did the cop have to wave down a cab instead of having a car waiting at the station? Why did he not call for back up? Where exactly is he taking me?'

'So much professionalism is being shown right now, I’m spellbound.'

Before we walked any further, the officer removed the cuffs and bound my hands behind my back instead of in front. Keeping a hand between my shoulder blades, despite my shirt now being soaked with sweat, the officer pushed me away from the road and into the forest. The world was quiet, no cars passing in the road behind us, no people anywhere to be seen, as I was pushed deeper and deeper into the undergrowth.

My heartbeat quickened as it registered that I was not being led to a station, but instead, I was pushed into a clearing, tripping and falling over a stray tree root as I tumbled to the ground. The side of my face stung as it slapped into the ground, my hands bound and unable to break my fall. I clambered to my feet, filth clinging to my cheek as my head whipped around taking in my surroundings.

The clearing that the cop had quite literally pushed me into had a camper van at the other end. There was a peace sign with peeling paint decorated on the side amidst the grime, grungy yellow curtains falling across the inside of the window. A neglected barbecue and a canister of gas stood beside the steps inside, an outhouse a couple of meters away.

In hopes that someone inside the van could hear me, I started screaming. “Help! Help! This bastard’s trying to kill me!” I rammed my shoulder up against the door, but the cop dragged me back by my shoulder. His screams of agony fell on deaf ears as I stumbled backwards a couple of steps, wrenching myself from his grasp.

I twisted my hands around behind me, the cuffs hot as an iron poked into a fire, as I summoned all the strength I had and broke myself free. I wrenched the metal from my wrists, wincing as it bent and crumple beneath my grasp before falling to the forest floor. Sighing, I rubbed at the red marks burning across my wrists, happy to be free of my restraints at last.

Sparks flew across my fingertips, flames now spreading out from my feet as the fire burned into the trees surrounding the clearing. The air around us was charged with energy, the sound of wood crackling and burning around us all I could hear.

The officer yelled as I turned my attention upon him, stumbling backward a few steps until he tripped over the leg of the barbecue and tumbled through the ground. I watched as the sparks cracking between my fingers turned to flames as they traveled up my hands and my arms. They felt more like a warm comfort than as if they were searing into my skin and I was surprised to notice that they didn’t burn me at all.

Amid this nightmare I had begun to make a list of all that I now knew about myself;

'1. My name is Logan.

2. I am seventeen years old.

3. I am a fugitive.

4. Unlike most humans, I’m not flammable.'

Whilst the third one was nothing to celebrate, the last one felt like my proudest moment thus far in the hour I was aware of my own existence. Hey, I had woken up on a train in the middle of nowhere with no memories. I had to allow myself to feel proud of myself for something, or else I was going to go on a pitiful tirade of self-pity that would surely nauseate any human life around me.

My attention returned to the officer who started shuffling away from me once he noticed that he had not been forgotten. Flames of my own creation bent around me as if they were moths and I was the only source of light to be seen.

The officer fumbled and pulled a gun out of his pocket, a bullet whizzing past my head within seconds. He could only push himself back so far until he had pushed himself up against the side of the camper van, staring up at me in sheer terror.

“Who the hell are you?” I snarled down at him, like a fiend surrounded by the fires of hell.

“The real question is, what the hell are you?”

I jumped at the unfamiliar voice behind me, unaware that I was being snuck up on. Before I could turn around to catch sight of this stranger, something slammed into the back of my head and I tumbled to the ground.

The fire dissipated from my body as if I had been doused in cold water, my vision swimming before me and fading. The last thing I saw in my eyeline were a pair of white trainers caked with dirt before I succumbed to the abyss.