Static Screams

Anger has always been a universal truth, a shared experience amongst men and messiahs. In the face of injustice, of cruelty, of grief, anger is a bandage. We rely on anger to propel us forward, to keep us anchored, to be the motivation to keep pushing through when everything seems too heavy and hopeless to survive. If sadness is a shackle, anger is a bolt cutter. If hopelessness is a cage, anger is the key.

Anger is a distraction. It’s a tool that breaks the monotony of numbness. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to confusing stimuli. It is a state of being, a survival mechanism, the armor worn in battle against emptiness.

Anger is the only reason I survived this far, and it’s the reason why I pushed through the crushing weight of the loss of Lila. Much like with Ryan, there was no time to grieve before being dealt yet another blow. A few quiet hours of silence under the watchful eyes of Peter was all the reprieve I was given before the ambush of some demon dogs and the kidnapping of one of our own at the hands of a mad scientist.

The sky was slowly beginning to lighten, from the oppressive blackness to a smothering gray. Standing side by side with Scarlett, we looked at the small orange post-it in her hand.

“What does it say?” Peter questioned impatiently from the window behind us. I turned to make my way back through the window as Scarlett scrutinized the sticky note. His face was tinted blue in the early morning’s haze, and his dark brows were furrowed so tightly I worried his face would cave in.

“Looks like she’s taking Logan pack to her lab, wherever the hell that is,” I explained. I stopped short of the window and rubbed my face with exhaustion. “Time to round ‘em up.”

Peter frowned at me before disappearing down the aisle behind him. The store was still incredibly dark, but I could see the outlines of our friends against far wall, and could hear their groans as Peter delivered the news.

I think they thought they were as tired as I was, though I didn’t see how they could be. I knew saying that would be insensitive, though, so I kept it to myself.

I passed back through the window while Scarlett crumpled and smoothed the sticky note in her hands, over and over again, as her shoulders heaved. I doubted she was crying; shaking with rage, perhaps. Or hyperventilating, probably. She seemed to be doing that a lot over the last day or so.

Part of me wanted to go back to her, to comfort her, to find something to say to help my friend after all the support she’s given me. The other, larger part of me didn’t have it in me. She would have to push through, find a way to be okay, because what choice do we have?

It was easy to turn away from her, to gather the few measly items I had in my bag and busy myself with finding a way into the locked break room.

It crossed my mind more than once that it wouldn’t be locked if nobody was in there, as it did not have a lock on the outside. I tapped against the door a few times, then harder, listening for anything on the other side.

Silence.

If someone had been in there, it seemed like they weren’t in there now. The silence was reassuring, comforting. After days of unending noise in my ears - heavy sighs and even heavier sobs, most of which were my own - it was so nice to hear nothing.

I thought a moment about getting Cosmic’s attention and letting her pick the lock, but thinking about her reminded me of Seven, which reminded me of Lila, and my infant nieces, and I just couldn’t do that right now.

I felt an incredible surge of emotion within me and pivoted my thoughts instead to a physical attack upon the door. I punched it, leaving small knuckle-sized indentations across its surface. I threw my shoulder against it, cussing at it, bouncing off of it before launching myself back into it.

Darren had come to my aid, calling my name, but I didn’t hear him. Not really, anyway. I was just trying to release some pent up emotion, and exerting physical force on the wooden door was satisfying an itch that needed to be scratched.

I was so tired, and I was so tired of losing. I had spent so much time losing things, places, people. I had lost so much. Not that I was any different from the others, because we’d all lost more than anyone ever should. It didn’t matter how much or how little, all that mattered was that it fucking hurt, and I was so tired of hurting. So instead I got angry.

I’d never felt this angry before, but the closest comparison I had to it is the anger I felt when I joined Ryan and his family on a beach vacation in between freshman and sophomore year. That was the first and only time I ever saw Ryan cry, whether out of helplessness or his own anger, as his dad hurled insult after insult at him for forgetting to pack his swim trunks, before turning his frustration on his wife. Ryan went after him, I tried to stop Ryan, it was a whole to-do that culminated in an weekend visit to jail for Ryan and and an even longer stay his father. I had the privilege of staying behind to comfort his mother as she called bondsmen and arranged to bail her son out. That was when the anger set in. I wasn’t angry at Ryan, obviously, but I could’ve killed his father with how much rage was in my veins at that moment. How dare he treat his son, my best friend, like that? Or my best friend’s mom, who was like a second mom to me? I could have flattened his face like a pancake with my fists.

It wasn’t until the following Monday, when Ryan hopped into his mom’s minivan with a black eye and a lopsided grin plastered across his face, that I felt my shoulders drop for the first time in days. It was like being able to breathe again after holding my head underwater.

Ryan’s dad was left behind in every sense of the word. Last we’d heard, he died in some drunk tank in Pensacola a few years later. Ryan didn’t seem all that bothered by that. I decided that I didn’t need to be, either.

This was different though. Where Ryan’s father took the brunt of my anger then, there was nobody here that I could be angry with. I had no name to raise my fist against, no worthy cause to fight for. All I had was a growing list of dead friends and compartmentalized grief threatening to spill over.

I began to kick at the door, grunting and yelling as it started to give beneath my foot. The wood splintered away from the hinges before the door fell with a thud.

And I was correct.

Whoever had been alive in there was long gone.

It was anticlimactic, as if the door had missed its cue to wait until I was hit with a healing epiphany before falling away. As if the monster had forgotten to take its place behind the door, ready to spring out and frighten me.

But I suppose nothing about life follows a script, so I wiped the sweat from my forehead. While everyone else scattered to check every corner of the small room, I turned away.

“You’re bleeding,” Scarlett’s flat tone barely broke through my rumination. She took in the doorway of the entrance, backlit by the gray morning sky.

“Huh?” I looked down at my hands, flexing them to examine my knuckles. “Oh.” I clenched my fists, but felt nothing, so I shrugged. “I’m fine.”

She continued to watch me as I brushed past her and pushed my way through the now-unblocked front door. I needed air, needed to breathe, needed to give myself a moment to collect my thoughts. The din of whisper-shouts and rummaging around echoed off the walls of the small store, following me out into the street.

The cold air was a welcome reprieve, a delicious coolness across my hot skin. I could feel the breeze drying my wet cheeks; I must have shed a few tears, and was just beginning to notice how swollen my eyelids felt.

Darren and Scarlett huddled together in intense discussion. I took a deep breath, and another, and one more for good measure.

“Holland?” Cosmic spoke in a quiet, timid voice - a tone none of us ever expected to hear from her. It was the first time she’d spoken in days. Her steps toward me were light and gentle. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I muttered stubbornly. We both knew better, but she was just a kid, and didn’t need to be burdened by more than what she already had to carry. “Are you?”

She looked at me with wide eyes, and her lip trembled. “No,” she whispered. “I’m really not.”

I knew she wasn’t, and it wasn’t fair. I wanted to lash out again, just at the injustice of it all. How unfair that I got so much longer in the normal world than she did, how she’s spent her teenage years in this hell, how the only she had left was completely gone.

But lashing out wouldn’t help her, not at that moment. The poor kid just needed someone to tell her that it was going to be okay, that the world wasn’t falling out from beneath her even though it felt like it was.

I couldn’t give her that reassurance, so I did the next best thing I could think of, which was to pull her close and hug her tightly. I guess I was the closest thing she had left to a brother now, and I guess she just needed to feel like she was still somebody’s sister. So I let her cry into my chest, I gently patted her head, I whispered quiet cliches into her hair while the rest of our group pretended not to notice.

Except for Scarlett, who I could see was growing impatient, if the way she was pacing and tapping her foot was any indication. I knew she was anxious to get to Logan, we all were - but I could only deal with one crisis at a time at that point, so I picked the one that was closest in proximity.

“It’s okay, shh, I’ve got you,” I repeated those words like a mantra while I waited for her crying to subside. She was quiet and still, save for the sniffling and shuddering breaths.

“It helps to get angry,” I offered after a drawn out silence. “At least for a little while.”