One Last Strike

“We have all the time in the world,” Harris says. 

He looks down at his hands, at how his fingers still tremble and pulse, as if he still sees the power he unleashed only moments ago from those very palms. His mouth is slightly gaped and his bottom lip shimmers with the redness of a split lip. Besides that small cut, he’s completely untouched. Even his hair remains styled and pushed back, the gel only giving way to a few strands of hair that curl just above his right eye. 

Kinser watches him. Her stomach turns. There are bodies scattered across the warehouse, their limbs contorted in unnatural and disturbing ways, their inner organs spilling onto the concrete floor. A girl about her age is curled into a ball in the far right corner of the building, hiding her face. There is a dent that caves her skull inwards. It’s in the shape of a hand; four indents curving into an arc, and a final, shorter puncture that represents a thumb. Harris’s thumb. 

As if he heard her thoughts, he looks up and meets her gaze, the explosion is still simmering behind him. The backdrop of destruction casts a villainous glow behind his approaching figure. 

Kinser’s breath catches in her throat. 

“Kinny,” he says, stretching one hand out into the space between them, “we won. We have it all. All the time we could ever want.” 

She glances upwards to the large clock looming over them. Its face is completely shattered, the hands frozen as they both strike the 12. A new day that will never dusk. 

Her knees get weak, and before she knows it she’s on the ground, the dust of the floor kicking up around her as her body meets the surface. Harris rushes forward. As his hands meet her skin, she feels like she’s been branded, a heat spreading from his skin so deeply into hers that she feels like it’ll be imprinted on her bones. She screams.

“I’m sorry, sorry,” he says, his face indicating that he doesn’t quite understand the problem. Again, he reaches for her. She flinches away. “What’s wrong?” 

“Your hands,” she tells him, her voice hoarse. “They’re still hot.” She looks down at the spot on her arm where his fingers wrapped around her bicep and it’s already swollen, a purple-red wound starting to blister underneath her skin. 

Tears are falling down her cheeks and she can’t tell whether it’s because she’s in pain or because her only life goal is completed, done, and she already regrets it. She wishes her plans had never come to fruition. She wishes those clock hands were still ticking, ticking, ticking, and that Harris was still just the boy who had a crush on her in science class. 

Instead, he’s the boy who burns. He destroys, seethes, then lets the world dampen whatever blaze he created.

And it’s all because of her. 

“I’m sorry, I know it hurts,” Harris breathes, plunging his hands into the stream of an emergency eyewash station behind her. Steam blossoms up from his palms as a loud sizzling sound harmonizes with the crackle from the larger fire in front of them. Kinser diverts her eyes from Harris’ body to take in the wreckage fully, but as soon as she sees the charred remains of three warehouse workers, she cowers away, once again looking to her burn. 

Harris returns to her, his hands no longer hot, and gently coaxes energy into her wound. It pulses a few times but then flattens and dissipates into only a small mark. 

Kinser doesn’t look at him, but she can tell that he’s waiting for her to ask when he figured out how to heal. She does wonder but she doesn’t ask. The satisfaction he would get from explaining how he came to understand his gifts would be too rewarding for him. He deserves nothing, not even a small ego boost. 

“Kinny--”

“Stop.”

“But don’t you see what I did?” He grips her chin and forces her to look at him. His eyes dart between both of hers, searching for a reward that he will never receive. 

“What you did?” she remarks, slapping his hand away. Her legs are shaky but she manages to stand, fighting the urge to cross her arms and curl in on herself in despair at the sight that is now fully visible at her full height. Vomit fights up her throat but she swallows it back. Her eyes land on an older man whose eyes are still open, unblinking, pleading with her. 

Pleading with her to save him.

She retches onto the floor. She heaves until nothing but acid burns through her body. Harris is crouched about six feet away from her, his hands covering his face. 

As if he has the right to be upset. 

“I did this for us,” he says. 

Kinser wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and shakes her head as she walks as quickly as she can to the back door. She knows he will stop her. She could run as fast as she’d ever run and he would catch up with her in three strides. 

He catches her shoulder only moments after she turned her back to him, and she feels sick at herself when she’s relieved that she can no longer see the dead bodies at her new position further from the wreckage. 

“Listen to me,” he pleads, hands cradling both of her cheeks. “We have forever now. We can control time, Kinser.” He laughs, incredulous. “We can move it forward, pause it, turn it back. We have the most power anyone in this universe has ever had.” 

Kinser pushes him back. Although she knows it would feel like a light breeze to him, he humors her and takes a step backwards. “We never needed that,” she answers.

“What do you mean? Of course we needed it.” He gestures to the carnage behind him. “Eternity itself belongs to us.” 

“It wasn’t supposed to belong to anyone!” Kinser cries. “Eternity is not something to be owned.” 

Harris shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “I thought this was what you wanted.” Genuine confusion and sorrow colors his features. “I did this for you.”

“You did this because of me,” Kinser argues. “You did this with me, but for yourself.” She backs up, slow step by slow step. 

Harris looks smaller than she’s ever seen him, his shoulders bending forward and his frame shrinking with each breath. His ego has deflated almost, and the pride that painted his cheeks sinks from his features, leaving them a paler kind of gray. “I did this with you, for you,” he says, his voice cracking. “You figured out how to access my powers but I never wanted to do anything that wasn’t to save you.” 

“I never asked you to save me.” 

“I thought that was why this was happening!” Harris explodes, the air around them crackling with unreleased fire. “To save you! To go back to before the accident!”

Kinser’s head starts throbbing at the mere mention of her accident. That day left her scarred both physically and mentally, and any reminder of her permanent scars and debilitating, chronic disease almost sends her spiraling. 

Harris starts to approach her again, slowly. Tears spring to her eyes. Although she can feel the cold of the outside air now, can feel how close she is to being able to escape this god-forsaken warehouse, she knows she has nowhere to go. No one is as powerful as Harris-- no authority or higher power can stop him, his powers, and now, the time that he controls. 

She has been trapped by a monster of her own making. 

And that monster is pleading, desperate, reaching for her hand again. “All that I did was for you,” he says. “I know that what happened back there was horrible. I will think about that for the rest of my life. But it was necessary for all the good we’re about to do.” 

Kinser wants to believe him. She wants nothing more than to be blissfully ignorant to the realization that her boyfriend, the love of her life, is power hungry and ruthless. He cut down anyone that was within a mile radius of him and his goal-- the clock. And not only did he kill them, but he played with them. Tortured them. Let them hide, then taunted them until they came out, only to be met with their terrible, drawn-out demise.

“I won’t hurt you. I’m trying to help. Come out, come out. I want to talk.” 

No. Harris was not trying to help. He was trying to win. And as soon as victory was within his sight, he wanted to make the battle of his life last as long as possible. 

And now, no clock will ever strike again.