The Blood of Families
A sequel to a sequel to a sequel to ‘Human Nature’
The shattered glass crunched under the diminutive man’s two toned brown and white leather shoes.
He held his paisley silk scarf to his mouth and nose to deaden the thick, all encompassing stench that surrounded him.
There was so much blood, he thought to himself. Too much for the amount of bodies strewn across what, up until very recently, was a happy and bustling town square. The putrefying corpses decomposition had been speeded up in the oppressive late summer heat.
The man took off his white, panama hat and wiped sweat from his brow as he surveyed the devastation.
“That idiot woman, again” he muttered to himself.
He walked forward, the noise of the crunching glass under feet the only sound that could be heard in the heavy silence.
As he walked he took handfuls of a shiny, powdered dust that seemed to change colours as it reflected and refracted the scene around it, and scattered it far and wide as he walked.
The silence was broken by a piercing scream. A primal scream of sheer terror and panic.
The man’s head instantly snapped in the direction of the screams, which had now given way into sobs, and with eyes filled with steely determination he sprinted in it’s direction.
Moments later he spotted the prey he’d been hunting.
A small girl held an older woman to the ground, with an impossible strength. She had one knee wedged into the older woman’s small of her back, and she pinned her hands behind her with one hand, whilst holding the woman’s dark hair in a pony tail with the other, to force her to look up.
Just in front of them hovered a large red ballon, that seemed too be giggling as it shook before of the pair.
However, the balloon was far more interested in the baby lying on the ground in front of the woman and the girl. The baby screamed, adding it’s shrieks to the cacophony of the woman sobbing and the girl’s laughter, as the balloon moved closer and closer to it.
“No, please, just let him live! Just let him live!” begged the woman, clearly the mother of the baby.
“Nooooooooooooo!’ cried the short man as he sprinted towards them. His guttural cry had so much force it seemed to shear through all reality. Time, space and matter quivered and distorted as if it was in the heat haze of the man’s anger and indignation.
Causing the quartet of girl, woman, baby and balloon to all momentarily freeze in the positions.
As he ran the man reached into his inside brown jacket pocket, and pulled out a small device cobbled together from technologies spanning thousands of years and a myriad of planets. He pointed it at the balloon and it started pulse and bubble.
The girls’s eyes widened in utter horror. Her face twisted in terror and she screamed a high pitched, nearly inaudible cry.
The balloon rippled and convulsed, and then exploded in an eruption of thick, red blood.
The girl let out an animalistic snarl, and leaped off the woman and into the air, fingers stretched out as if talons, as she leaped towards the small man to attack him.
With lightning speed and precision the little man’s other hand darted into his jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of the powder and threw it at the girl as she leaped through the air.
And she froze there in mid leap.
The older woman didn’t stop to look back as she darted up and scooped up her baby to run away.
“How did you find me?’ asked the girl as she hung frozen in the air, hands and fingers still extended to attack.
“I heard the screams” said the man.
The man walked around the frozen form of the girl, and considered. “How did you get out?” he asked.
The girl just smirked.
“You shouldn’t even be here,” said the girl. “Aren’t you people all supposed to keep in their own lanes? Don’t your people believe in keeping an ordered multiverse? Don’t you know that if you mix all the potential realities together they’ll just be chaos and disaster?”
“We’re working on fixing all that damage, now” said the man. “Let me guess,” he continued, “It’s the woman, isn’t it? She’s the one who let you out.”
The girl couldn’t contain herself and started to laugh.
“She was SO easy!” she said. “She was so desperate to show how good she was. How evolved and merciful she was.”
“She’s just so very weak.” he said.
He had met with rouge versions of himself before, but nothing ever like this. At least the Valeyard had some purpose and direction, he thought to himself. At least the Valeyard had an I.Q. high enough to have a conversation with. This idiot incarnation was the perfect storm of a deep seated neediness, to desperately require constant affirmation from all around her, even if no one was there. Mixed with the simply idiotic inability to think through any of her actions, causing chaos like this wherever she went.
“It was genuinely so hard not to laugh in her face as she waffled on about mercy. I wonder, did she think about the mercy for all my victims she gave me?” said the girl.
“Well, thankfully there’s still a few of us to clean up her mess. This one was relatively easy, you see, you’re not real.” said the man with a sad smile and twinkle.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your prison…your mirror…it was outside of time, outside of space. It was fiction, and letting you out infected all around it with fiction. You probably remember a whole host of faux Doctors coming to visit you.’
The man threw more of the dust around, and as he did the bloody carnage started to fade.
“This is crushed silica from the time/space vortex. It’ll absorb this reality as potential time.” As he spoke the girl could see the outlines of people walking to and fro, throughout the town, as they faded back into existence.
“It seemed to me, judging from the decomposition of the dead you’ve been free for three days. Is that right?”
“You know it is.” said the girl.
“And she REALLY just left you here? In a busy population centre? Unrepentant, unreformed? And armed with deadly little red friend.”
“She did,” the girl grinned, “She REALLY did.”
“Unbelievable.”
The girl faded from view and was replaced by the busy, happy town square on a warm Summer’s day.
The man saw the older woman from earlier walk in his direction pushing a baby carriage, cooing and smiling at the infant within.
The man raised his hat to her and wished her a good day, as he entered his blue box, discreetly parked in a side alley.
A wheezing, groaning noise could be momentarily heard as the box tore tiny a hole in the fabric of reality and vanished through it – off towards more thrilling adventures in time and space.