Flashbulb Memory

A warm feeling soaked into the hair at the back of my head. I knew instantly it was blood, with no need to double-check it. That was the only thought I could form; everything else was a blur, no escape plan, no comprehension of the situation I was buried in.

At least I didn’t faint this time, maybe because I was no longer hungry, but a full stomach didn’t change the fact that I might die again. I have died before; the glaring difference was that my first death was a quick, unfortunate accident, while the current situation immersed me in malice and bloodlust, awakening a memory I had struggled to keep sealed, the incident that only occurred a day ago. The death of a creature that was more intimate to me than I would have liked.

Its dying scream once again reverberated in my mindscape; it was like our connection persisted even after its death. I could no longer keep my excuse that the creature was only a monster that deserved to be killed; my newfound understanding clawed its way out of the pit of my subconscious, taking over my waking being.

At this moment, I became the creature that was burning up in the fire, helpless and only wishing for a chance of survival despite the merciless reality.

How much of it was memory and how much imagination, I had no way of knowing. So much of memory is just imagination, filling in the gaps, that the distinction between the two is flimsier than what we intuitively understand.

No matter how much pain the creature felt, it was in the past, and there was never anything I could have done that would both ease its pain and secure my survival. These thoughts were all futile, but they still went on, a reflection of the desperate desire to ditch my incapacitated body for an escape hatch in my mind.

An intense splat interrupted my mental spiral and pulled me back to the present moment. Before I could process the identity of the sound, droplets of the familiar warm liquid painted my face, the same as the puddle under my head. My eyes took a moment to register that the light had returned, courtesy of a portable lantern.

The brightness revealed the mysterious figures around me to be muscular men with plain appearances, so unassuming that one could find people who looked like them on any street. Their expressions were a mix of horror and confusion, and those emotions weren’t directed at me, but at the person who was holding the portable lantern.

They were staring at Zeroc.

I caught in my peripheral vision the pile of jumbled remains of a mugger under Zeroc’s boots. Only this sight was enough to make me gag in disgust; the foul smell of the alley became relevant to my olfactory sense again, amplified by the atrocity before me. I wouldn’t mourn the death of someone who attacked me, and I didn’t want to, but he was still a human being who had been crushed completely into a barely recognizable lump of bone and meat.

No wonder the other attackers all froze; they must have known both emotionally through their fear and rationally through witnessing the display of power that any mistake would mean instant death.

One of them could no longer withstand the tension and turned tail to flee for his life. In a flash, Zeroc caught up with him. With a casual slam that barely warranted his strength, Zeroc sent the retreating man crashing into the wall. After an anticlimactic crack, the person slid onto the ground, limp as a puppet that had its strings violently severed.

The last two perpetrators took this as their cue to escape in the opposite direction, no doubt a frantic shot at freedom. It was clear how this would end. The mangled corpses had almost compelled me to beg for mercy, yet I remained silent and trembling.

Maybe I was paralyzed with terror; maybe I was desensitized by the extraordinary violence; or maybe I wasn’t yet ready to forgive the pain inflicted on me. It didn’t matter because I had a feeling that Zeroc wouldn’t stop even if I pleaded for it. The smirk, incongruous with his action, gave me hints as to his mental state; this outcome must have been something he fervently waited for.

I swore I heard him chuckle under his breath, watching his prey sprint for their lives. Then, in an almost comical twist, a single sentence slipped out of his mouth, spoken in a refreshed tone. “Justice feels good, doesn’t it?”

It was like he was thinking out loud, as he didn’t give me time to reply to him. He launched himself through the straight lane, leaping over me gracefully, and in the blink of an eye, smashed one of the retreating robbers onto the rocky ground. This time with an even greater force; I could hear a loud crack of stone, the earth seemed to shake, jolted upon the impact, a protest to the display of violence. It should not be possible, but I saw chunks of debris bursting in all directions; perhaps I was hallucinating under all the stress.

The last perpetrator, who had the coin pouch, nearly reached the opening leading to the main street, despite my best efforts to keep myself from guessing his mental state. I could surmise his celebration of arriving at the finish line, a self-soothing delusion that a safe haven was steps away. He slowed down, not that his top speed would give him a better chance of survival.

Zeroc let him cross the threshold out of the suffocating pathway, and once the robber landed his foot on the other side, Zeroc sprang into action, this time grabbing his target’s neck, using it as a handgrip to lift the whole body. The final robber dropped the coin pouch. He struggled and clawed at Zeroc’s face.

Under the calm of the night, each of Zeroc’s words was clear as if he were speaking directly into my ear, so his earlier remark might really have been for himself. “If you resist anymore, I will have to knock you out. Who knows? Your skull might shatter instantly.”

The warning was spoken not in the tone of a threat, but as advice for a friend. The robber stopped fighting back, surrendering to his fate, or he had passed out from the pressure on his neck. No, he was conscious, because I could hear him whimpering like a disease-laden dog.

This whole sequence of violence had shocked me to my core, but it was too quick for me to process. With a contrived peace returning to the unassuming back street, the lanterns looking down decided that the cadaver left by the dead would be blended into the dingy background. I was more drawn in by the sudden movements I spotted just out of my field of vision. As I turned my head to get a better look, withstanding the pain each shift of my head caused, nothing else was with us.

The return of calmness had alerted me that my heart was pumping quickly as if it were racing against an upcoming deadline. I wondered how long it had been doing that. It was a relief that I could remain conscious; after all, there was no reason to faint, no reason to feel guilty of anything. 

Regardless, I was glad that I had not linked myself to those bad guys. Bad guys. That was all they were, evil people preying on the weak. They didn’t have families, no lovers, never been an infant who was abandoned by society, or worse, loved by a mother. They only existed in the moment of this robbery up until their death.

Amidst the thoughts that flashed by my mind, I could still hear the death cry, not of the nameless thugs scattering near me, but of the shapeshifter who died in the fire, whose screams were not deceptive tactics to garner sympathy, because those screams were out of its heart.

Zeroc hurled the body of the unconscious robber onto his shoulder and strolled casually to me, carefully avoiding the obstacles in the way. He reached his hand out, the bloodstains and bruises on full display. Without hesitation, I took his hand with a firm grasp, not shaking even a bit, because Zeroc was not scary at all, not when compared to the cacophony inside my head.