You can read early chapters on my [P].[A].[T].[R].[E].[O].[N].
Link: [email protected]/Arson09
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The next morning:
"Fourteen," Boyd thought as he counted the number of dead from the previous night's debacle.
He was currently in the clinic, and as he walked down the line of beds occupied by the previous night's survivors, he stopped at the second-to-last one.
It was his son, Ellis, and his girl, Fatima, was sitting beside him.
Ellis had survived the night by the skin of his teeth, only due to Fatima's quick thinking. By making a makeshift closed space around the Colony House talisman, they were able to survive.
Ellis lay on the bed, his back against the wall. He had suffered some minor injuries and dislocated his shoulder.
Kristi, the third-year medical student—the only doctor available in Fromville—was beside him, holding his hand.
"Okay, here we go, right," Kristi muttered as she lifted up Ellis's hand.
"Ah... Okay," Ellis spoke through his pain.
"Nice and slow. It's gonna hurt a bit. Breathe, breathe," Kristi said as she applied pressure little by little.
"Ahhh! AHhh!" Ellis cried out. Boyd visibly flinched seeing his boy in pain.
And then—cluck—the bone shifted back into its position.
"Relax. Good, good, good. It's done. Okay, see? Good as new," Kristi spoke with a smile. "I am just gonna put a sling on here."
"Can I help with anything?" Fatima asked, looking toward Kristi.
"Make sure he doesn't get out of bed," Kristi replied. Then, looking at Ellis, she added, "I don't want you going anywhere until I can give you a solid once-over."
"Hey," Boyd spoke for the first time, making his presence known. Kristi, who hadn't seen him due to her back being turned toward him, looked back.
"How are you doing, son? Heard you had a rough go of it last night," Boyd spoke as he approached.
To answer his question, Ellis looked to his side where the last patient lay. "Better than him."
"Sheriff Stevens," Fatima acknowledged Boyd. Then, as if remembering something sad, her face fell. "I'm sorry about Father Khatri."
"Oh, I appreciate that," Boyd added.
Then Fatima looked toward the last patient. "Is he gonna wake up?" She asked Krishti.
Krishti's smile fell at those words. She looked between the group. "I don't know. I can't get a reading through a suit of armor."
Yes, the last patient was Tony Stark himself. Iron Man had fallen in battle.
"What happened to him?" Ellis asked, looking at his father.
"I don't know. One moment he was there... up in the sky. The next, he fell down. He killed twelve of them before he went down," Boyd seemed to think for a moment. "Sara's brother had a theory about this place. He believed this nightmare town is a reactive entity." He looked at the Iron Man armor that encased the billionaire. "If one push too hard... it pushes back."
The group fell in silence, until Boyd himself broke it.
"I have called a meeting. Everyone who can come, will be here today," Boyd spoke, looking toward Kristi, who did not seem thrilled with the idea of more people moving in while she still had her hands full with what they had.
But before she could voice her worry, Boyd spoke. "Don't worry, everyone except your patients will be gone by nightfall." He seemed to think for a minute, then added, "I just wanna... I just wanna Share something with the group. Something Stark shared with me and Khatri."
"What is it?" Ellis asked.
"There is a lot of things. Half of the them I don't understand myself. I will tell everyone at the same time; it will be less of a hassle," Boyd simply spoke.
"Okay," Ellis nodded as he looked at Fatima beside him.
"You need anything?" Boyd asked, looking at Kristi.
Kristi stood up from beside the bedside. "Yeah. We are a little shorthanded. I could use some help getting this place a bit more secure. It's gonna be a full house tonight given what happened."
Her worry came from the exact reason why what had happened, happened.
Kevin had opened the window of the Colony House bathroom. Thinking he was welcoming the love of his life, only for Jasmine to tear his lips apart and eat his heart while he breathed his last breath.
The more people inside a closed space, the more the chances of somebody slipping up. Of somebody ending up like Kevin.
" Yeah... yeah.. I gotta go, I'll give you a hand securing the windows after the meeting," Boyd spoke as he left the room.
15 minutes later:
The clinic's main room was completely packed and was humming with murmurs.
From Donna and the survivors of Colony House sitting on the left side near the clinic beds, to the people of the town on the right opposite the main door.
There was no strict partition between them, as some like Jim Matthews and Jade Herrera could be seen beside Donna.
And Jim's daughter, Julie, who lived in Colony House until yesterday, could be seen sitting beside her mother, Tabitha, hugging her for dear life.
Jim was an amusement park engineer before he ended up in Fromville alongside his wife, Tabitha, and their children, Julie and Ethan.
He had been fiercely protective of his family, even more so than before. Jim was a family man, and he had one job: protect his own. But as he looked across the room where his daughter sat beside Tabitha, he knew he had failed.
He had been so highly focused on finding a logical, engineering-based way to escape the town that he had overlooked the natural danger of Colony House—its population—and Julie had paid the price.
But no more; Julie was going to stay with them from now on.
Beside him sat Jade Herrera. He was a software developer who had sold his company for an obscene amount of money before he ended up in Fromville.
He was brilliant; there was no doubt about it. Some of the residents might call him arrogant and even abrasive, but he knew his worth.
Yet even he would agree his brilliance paled in comparison to one other: Tony Stark, the latest prisoner of Fromville.
He had arrived in Fromville on the exact same day as the Matthews family, after his late friend had crashed his BMW into the Matthews' RV.
Right now, both Jim and Jade sat beside Donna, hoping she would agree with their request.
"We wanna build a tower, Donna," Jim spoke, looking at the leader of Colony House. "And we wanna put it on the roof of Colony House. We think if we could get it high enough, we could broadcast a signal that anyone else in the area could hear."
"And what area is that exactly?" Donna asked, her arms crossed, clearly skeptical of the idea.
Jim gulped and looked at Jade, who simply nodded. "Look, whatever this place is, wherever this place is, radio signals work in ways that we can't... and we already got a strong indication that this could work."
Jade leaned forward beside him. "Well, we got a little static." Even he was a little skeptical of this approach.
Jim moved to the edge of his seat. "Colony House is the highest point on the highest hill. If we build a tower and put it up there, we could broadcast a signal that could get over any interference the forest may provide," he explained thoroughly.
"Sure," Donna sighed out.
Seeing Donna agree to their proposal this quickly, Jim and Jade exchanged a glance.
"You're okay with us building this?" Jim asked with a little surprise.
That finally ticked Donna's already short temper off. "You know how many people died in that house last night?" She paused, then added, "Fourteen. Those things killed fourteen of my people. There are pieces of them lying all over the hill. And I don't think the others are coming back anytime soon... so you might as well use the house for something."
There was a brief silence among those who had heard Donna's outburst, until it was broken from the other side of the room.
"WE SHOULD CUT HIM OPEN," Dale announched.
Dale, a resident of Colony House and the one who had first shouted about the creatures being inside, stood up. From his demeanor, it was clear he had drunk a little too much potato alcohol before the meeting.
"Cut whom?" Jade asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Who else? The Iron Man," Dale exclaimed, pointing at the sleeping figure in the suit of armor. "You all saw what it did. A suit of armor in the sky... killing... actually killing those creatures. We have never even managed to hurt one of them before yesterday. We need that armor,"
Dale paused, looking at Tony. "Right now, all he is, is a liability. We need to remove the suit and place it on someone capable. I volunteer," he said, stepping forward, his chest puffing.
"And… how exactly do you plan on removing it?" Jade asked, leaning back in his chair.
"Well, an axe does the job," Dale burped. "But you're the engineer. You tell me."
Jade sighed as he stood up. "It's not Lego, which you can build from pieces... you absolute buffoon."
"What did you just call me?" Dale huffed, looking at Jade, who was still staring at the multi-million-dollar suit of armor.
"The telemetry required to keep a human stable in flight while calculating ballistic trajectories in real-time? It's a flawless piece of programming. It makes my software look like a high school coding project, and I fucking hate it," Jade concluded, looking back just in time to see Dale charging toward him, his face the personification of spurned pride.
Jade simply took a step away from Dale's trajectory, who was, unfortunately, now facing Donna.
Donna, wasting no time, swatted the incoming Dale across the face so hard that he fell two beds over with a heavy thud, going unconscious from the strike.
"Besides... even if we somehow manage to remove the armor and put it back together, it's probably got a localized biometric lock tied directly to Stark's central nervous system. That's a dead end," Jade added as he sat down.
Just then, Sheriff Boyd entered the room.
" Alright, hey! Hey! Everybody look at me. Settle down. Settle. Down," he said, looking around the room. Though, as he noticed the slumped figure of Dale, he asked, "What the hell happened to him?"
"He fell," the room replied collectively.
"You know what, never mind. I don't care." Boyd sighed.
"Why did you call us here, Boyd?" Donna asked, massaging the arm she had just hit Dale with.
"Ahem…Before Stark fell, he shared something with me and Khatri Look, I know how it sounds, alright? I know. But it's fundamental. It's about what this place... what this whole nightmare really is," Boyd spoke.
" Oh, for Christ's sake, Boyd. Don't tell me you dragged us all here because some high-and-mighty tech prick had a 'theory.' Every single person who drives past that goddamn fallen tree has a theory, and you know what they usually get us? More graves to dig," Donna said, standing up.
"That's the thing, Donna. It wasn't a theory, Stark was looking for us. He was looking for this place. He said a friend of his asked him to track down the Matthews family after they vanished," Boyd said, looking between Tabitha and Jim. "He knew what this place was before he even got here."
"What? Someone we know?" Jim spoke out loud, looking toward Tabitha, who simply shook her head, as confused as him.
"So let's start from the beginning... with Cursed Energy," Boyd began, and explained everything he understood from the two-hour rant of the genius billionaire.
Just as Boyd reached the end of his explanation, on the last bed, where Tony lay, it jerked in its position.
The sound didn't go unnoticed by the group. Ethan, Jim's nine-year-old son, who was sitting nearest to the armor, moved toward it.
The Iron Man armor jerked once more, then came to life, firing through the repulsors and jumping to its feet, throwing Ethan backward just as Tabitha caught him.
"Disassemble," came the voice from the suit as it slowly fell apart.
A hyperventilating Tony Stark collapsed forward out of the opening chassis, hitting the floor hard on one knee.
"Stark!" Boyd shouted as he moved toward him.
"I talked with him," Tony breathed out.
" Talked with whom?" Boyd asked kneeling beside him.
The group made their way around the kneeling billionaire.
"Ethan... he came in my dream. He was wearing a weird suit, but it was him," Stark explained. "We don't have much time. We have to assemble them... call everyone to one place, Sheriff!"