By: Inuki **Ookami**

 

2

Off, were they off? Were what off? Were the lights off? How should he know? How did he even know that there were lights? What if it was just darkness? What if there was no light? Wait, he was in an alley now. Why would there be lights in an alley? Now Kaleb was only about three or four feet tall. All around him was darkness, surrounding him, pressing in on him, closing in on him. Tears poured down the child's face, and behind him he could hear the beating of footsteps. It was chasing him. He clutched his palm tightly, holding the silver object firmly. He was breathing heavily, and he knew he would be caught, he was not nearly fast enough. He ran out of the alley, and down a dim street, it had a dark blue tint to it, but scared him just as much as the alley. Strange, creepy, deformed faces of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk leered out of him, and he turned and fled. He ran across the road, and all he could see were the flooding white-yellow head lights of a huge truck. He dived out of the way just in time, and found himself lucky he wasn't wounded, or even worse, he could have been dead. The footsteps were still chasing him, and this time he turned and faced them. The footsteps stopped, and two or three, he wasn't sure how many, figures stood in front of him. Suddenly there was a very bright flash of light.

The child blinked. There lay the figures he knew only by the sound of their harsh footsteps and the darkness that they lay in, dead. He was quite certain that they were dead. Whoever they were he did not know, why they wanted the thing he had he did not know. What the thing he had he did not know either. There were far too many unanswered questions, and he ached to leave. His hand was hot, he opened the palm to find the silver thing, glimmering in the darkness. It was warm. He had probably heated up the metal with his body heat from his hand. He pocketed the thing, and turned and ran. That was his earliest memory. The strange people chasing him, the dark alley, the blue street, the bright flash, and the silver thing. None of it added up, nothing made any sense. There was no possible explanation for it, than that it had all just been a dream. Yet, it seemed far too vivid to be a dream, perhaps the memories were untrue, implanted in his brain? But for what purpose did it serve? How could someone do that? And finally, there was the undeniable evidence that it was true- he had that very silver item. It was a small, long silver chain necklace, and at the bottom hung a small silver pendant, or rather a shaped piece of metal. It was the shape of a dragon.

That was his earliest memory, Kaleb's mind was so clouded over. His past- what was it? He needed to explore his memory, but it was like he was unable to do it, to be free like that, unless he was in that one science room, and it didn't always seem to work. In fact, that horrid Mitsuhiro had disrupted the class while he was deep in thought, thinking, remembering, then the boy made a huge business, and the memory seemed to grow to it's climax, and just as it was about to finish, the boy stormed out of the door, and Kaleb finally lost all attempts at concentration on the images. When he tried to go back once more, later on he found that he was unable to do so. He agreed with Mitsuhiro that the whole science course was a waste of time for the pilots, but he wasn't going to waste time arguing, not when he could be getting more of the memories. He tried to write them down once, but couldn't. They had started when he first entered this class, this very year. Never had it happened when he was thirteen, or twelve, or- well, he hadn't been in the school before that, because the school age minimum for beginners was twelve. Even when he was eleven he wasn't going to school, he was in the adoption center, the people there were nice, but thought he had been abused because he was so quite. They thought that he had been beaten, but all he seemed to be was pale for the first week or two there. When they found him on the street he could only remember living on the streets for a week. Those streets were much warmer, much nicer than the black alleys and blue streets he remembered so vividly in the memories. He didn't know anything about his past when they asked, so they examined his brain to see if he had any head injuries, but they checked and didn't see anything abnormal. They were thinking of making him take a lie-detector-test, but decided that it wasn't needed in the end, but if they had they may have found some extremely alarming evidence, something that not even Kaleb knew he knew, something that he himself didn't know he could do. Whatever those memories were, and why he couldn't remember them, there was something very important within them, a very particular thing, an it. He was trying to remember it, to discover it, to find it.

Go to Chapter 3 of Crossroads of Life
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