The remaining miles down old Columbia road were uneventful. There were two burnt out cars and a large stretch of scorched woods around the radio station that had burned uncontrolled before the rains put it out. The radio station tower was a melted mess, resembling a candle left in the sun too long. I hazarded a guess that it was struck by lightning, viciously and repeatedly.

The Plainview Pentecostal Church was located at the junction of old Columbia road and highway 21. It had an artesian well that flowed on the edge of the property and into a ditch, making it a perfect spot for refugees.

I could hear the people before I saw them and loosened up Mr. Hatchet just in case. The gravel parking lot of the church was filled with dozens of people, little clusters huddled together, covered in depressing blue auras. Families that had been displaced by the event, burned out of their homes and seeking shelter in the edifice where they had invested their faith and cash. There was the smell of barbecue in the air and I could see portable tables and chairs lined up near the building itself.

I fully intended to pass them by and leave them in the hands of their uncaring God.

“Hey, Mister! Hey!”

I let Sparky keep walking.

“Hey Mister! Please, please stop!”

A kid, no, a young man maybe 15 or 16 ran up to me and grabbed at my pants.

“Mister, you need to help us. My sister is burnt real bad and needs to get to the hospital.”

“What makes you think the hospital is a better place than right here?”

Stumbling, his aura swirled with fearful yellows. “They have doctors,” he blurted. “She’s burnt all over, please! You have an extra horse. I’ll hold her in the saddle.”

My monkey brain flung shit all over the inside of my skull. ‘You can’t help everyone, so help yourself first. Trust no one!’ he screeched, then pulled out a picture book and crayons, showing me getting bogged down with every problem between here and my goal.

I should have spurred Sparky and Miguel into a gallop right there, leaving this boy and his sister and all these people and all their problems behind me. I wasn’t raised Catholic, but I carry enough guilt to join the congregation. I shoved the monkey back in his cage. ‘You’ll regret it!’ He howled, flipping me off.

I’ll regret it no matter what, I thought to myself.

The reason I didn’t keep on riding was because while I was arguing with the monkey brain, I remembered how I had healed myself earlier. I had no reason to believe that I could do the same for this girl, but my gut told me that I should try. My instincts hadn’t lead me astray with these powers so far. My sense of decency told me that I had an obligation to help others. My monkey brain laughed and drew a picture of me being burned at the stake.

I’m pretty sure the monkey brain is right on this one.

“I’ll have a look at your sister,” I said.

“Are you a doctor?”

“Maybe,” I prevaricated, guiding the horses into the churchyard. “What’s your name?”

“Adam Campbell.” He said, looking up at me with face smeared with dirt and soot. “She’s all I got left.”

The melancholy auras around me flickered with greens and yellows as I rode up to the doors of the church. “Who’s in charge here?” I asked Adam.

“Reverend McDanial, I guess,” he said, bouncing on his feet with nervous energy. “He’s inside with the rest.”

I tied up the horses and looked around, picking out one of the older men sitting at a table with a group of grizzled fellows. “Keep an eye on my horses.” I said, pointing at him, then followed Adam inside the church.

The interior of the church was suffused with light from the stained glass windows, filled with the smell of old smoke and the sickly-sweet scent of burnt flesh. If you enjoy bacon, I don’t advise visiting anyone who’s been badly burned. Cooked human flesh smells a bit sweeter than bacon, just ever so slightly different. It’s a smell you don’t forget. But it’s close enough to ruin your breakfast.

I kicked my hat back, letting it fall and hang by its string around my neck. I may be aggressively agnostic, but I try to respect the religion of others — just as long as they don’t try to ram those beliefs down the throats of other people, that is. Moans and soft prayers filled my ears as Adam lead me further inside the building.

“They put all the injured people in the classrooms,” He explained, hurrying down the dark hallway. “All the real bad people are in the back.”

He darted inside a door and stopped next to a bundle of rags where a nearly naked teenage girl lay groaning on the floor along with two other burned women. She was around my daughters age, maybe fifteen, hair mostly singed off and her face swollen from third degree burns. An angry red brand ran diagonally from her left shoulder to her hip where something had cooked the flesh. Everything was slathered with some sort of glistening gel. Bacon. She smelled like bacon and medicine. My stomach flipped and I could taste breakfast in the back of my throat.

Kneeling beside her, I reached out a hand and touched the tattered brown aura surrounding her. I closed my eyes to block the sight of her burned body and suddenly everything was a smear of colour. My vision didn’t depend on my eyes, but something else entirely. I could ’see’ just fine with my eyes closed. Every living thing was painted in my brain with a palette of pastels, giving me mild vertigo as I tried to process this 360 degree omnivision.

“What’s her name?” I asked Adam, watching his aura flicker with brave yellows, bright orange curiosity, and violet anger.

“Anna. She’s my twin sister.”

His voice was barely audible over the moans and cries of the other injured.

“Anna,” I said, addressing the girl before me. “I need you to help me here. I want you to imagine getting better, okay?”

She grunted something, struggling to breathe.

I don’t know anything about medicine, but I know, instinctively perhaps, that the bright swirling spark near her heart is important. I’m not sure why, but I somehow understand that it’s the centre, the source of life in this brave new world. I crafted a slender thread from my aura and gently pushed it through the sickly brown sheen that clung to her burned body. She tensed and sucked air between her teeth as I guided the thread towards the fluttering spark, arching her back as I forced my way past the cloud of bright motes that swirled around it and into the flickering core of her existence.

Her pain threatened to overwhelm my mind, scalding me with nightmare visions of being trapped a burning room. Somehow, my subconscious managed to push aside the agony, to compartmentalise it into a place where I knew it existed, but it wasn’t mine. I could examine it like a movie, disconnected from it with a detached ego while it played at full volume in the background of my mind. Focusing on what I desired, I pushed amber power down the thread I had inserted into her core, watching as it flowed from the spark and through her veins, vanishing into her extremities. As the spark inside her strengthened, I enlarged the thread and poured in more. The battered brown aura around her became laced with silvery-green filaments as her body began to heal itself.

I watched, disassociated, as the light flowed through and around her body like a fluid, cycling around the heart, through the lungs, out through the nostrils and over the burned skin, altering and rebuilding with each successive breath she took. I could see areas that needed attention, the damaged muscles, fluid in her lungs, a crushed disc in her spine. I began to direct the flow, then hesitated, unsure of myself.

As an mechatronic engineer [1], the foundation of my career is based on one question: What can be automated? I have no idea what I’m doing right now, I’m not a physician. Why should I interfere with an existing automatic process? Unless something is fundamentally wrong with the body, it should know exactly what it needs to be healthy, right? I should trust that it knows exactly what it needs to recover, until proven different. At that point, I can run tests and improve the process.

Holding back my meddling intentions, I continued to supply the energy to the spark at the core of Anna and let her body do all the work, watching in fascination as it began to burn fat, turning it into liquid energy that raced through her veins. I increased the power I was supplying when her body ran out of fat and started burning muscle for more energy. Her aura began to glow bright as I fed it fuel.

Behind me, I heard Adam swear loudly. “She’s glowing!”

Peripherally, I could sense others gathering around as I worked. The monkey brain danced around an image of me tied to a stake, splashing petrol on me as it laughed. Gritting my teeth, I resolved myself to fighting through these people if I had to.

I jerked my eyes open as Anna grabbed my wrist, digging her nails into my flesh. Green-amber light flickered around her like lightning, then vanished into her chest as she sat up.

She stared at me with eyes as wide and blue as the sea. “I felt you,” she whispered. “I felt you inside me.”

The monkey brain stopped its screeching and motioned for me to back away slowly.

The burnt flesh on her body had flaked away, revealing pink, healthy skin underneath. Her face looked like half of it had been sunburnt, but I was confident that it would clear up soon enough and her hair would grow back. Glancing down at the soft place where she clutched my hand, I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “Maybe you should get dressed now?” I suggested, tugging my hand free from her reluctant grasp.

“It’s a miracle!” someone exclaimed. “God has reached down and healed this child!”

I stood and faced the man behind me, his aura filled with swirls of dark green and red. “I felt compelled to… pray for this young lady,” I lied, glancing at the faces gathered around me. I could sense their desperation and resigned myself to doing the right thing, again. I only hope that if there is some sort of omniscient being watching us, that it judges me by my actions and not by my thoughts.

I triaged the wounded, the Reverend McDanial guiding me through the classrooms and helping me select those who were lightly injured first. Four had first and second degree burns that I was able to easily mend, giving the heart-sparks a bit of extra juice and letting it convert fat into healing energy. Six others were badly burned, one worse than Anna. I worked through them, growing weaker as each one sat up and blessed me for the “miracle” while I silently “prayed” for them.

The last was an old man with a spark burning dimly in his head, burned beyond recognition. I had no idea how he was even alive, but the wet rattling in his chest as he fought to breathe was proof that he still clung to his mortal body. I stared at him in dismay, guilt washing over my tired spirit. “I can’t,” I groaned. “I don’t have the strength left to heal him.”

“We’ll pray with you, Brother,” The reverend announced loudly to the crowd which had gathered to watch the free show. He placed a hand on my shoulder and began a sonorous litany to his uncaring God, praying for me to be filled with His strength. More hands were placed on me as others joined in with their own prayers.

Fine. You want to offer a sacrifice, I’ll take it.

I wrapped psychic threads around everyone touching me and tried pulling energy from them. There was a resistance there, some barrier that kept me from draining them. I guess maybe I’m not a vampire after all. Maybe I need to tap into their spark?

One of my threads suddenly filled with energy, the one from the good Reverend himself. It trickled into me, then as if he sensed what I needed, began to pour through the connection.

“Brothers, Sisters,” he cried out. “Give this Angel of the Lord your strength! Give willingly so that he may heal the sick!”

The resistance around the other threads weakened and more energy poured into me, threatening to overwhelm me before I could process and spin it into golden light. A dozen different storms battered my psyche, a chaotic jumble of emotions and thoughts and memories that needed to be filtered before my ego was washed away. I had opened too many channels at once and was drowning in a maelstrom of psychic energy.

Maelstrom.

I pushed the unfiltered energy away, spiralling it around the spark in my head in a vortex of dozen different colours that pulsed in time with my heart. Pushing a tendril through the weak brown shell that clung to his body, I sank it into his head-spark and filled it with amber light. I became a conduit between the healthy and the sick, channeling their energy into his body.

Once the connection was established and the raging torrent directed into the patient, my mind cleared and I realised what I did wrong. I made a mental note that should I ever do something this stupid again, that I should establish the channels at both ends before opening them so the energy could flow through me instead of drowning me.[2]

The old man glowed with a soft greenish light as his burned flesh repaired itself before our eyes. I could see the energy flowing from his spark and through his bloodstream to other locations, sparkling and flashing as it repaired damage to his lungs and liver, revitalised his kidneys and spleen. I sensed that one of my channels was growing weak and released it, prompting an audible gasp of exhaustion as the parishioner grabbed at the wall for support.

The power flowing through the channels weakened and I released them one by one, each man or woman staggering away from me to lean against the wall or flop down to sit on the floor. The Reverend hung on until the very end, his deep voice alternating between supplication and demand as he prayed over me. What had started out as a charred old man was now covered with healthy pink skin, so I released the channel to the reverend and he sank to the floor with a groan.

“I can see!” the old man exclaimed, sitting up and examining his hands like they were something new and delightful. “Praise God, I can see again!”[3]

Footnotes

1. Mechatronics. A pre-apocalypse interdisciplinary branch of engineering that focuses on the integration of mechanical, electronic, and electrical engineering systems, and also includes a combination of robotics, electronics, computer science, telecommunications, systems, control, and product engineering. Such a person with analogous post-apocalypse abilities would hold the title of Grand or Arch Magister.

2. At this point, it should be obvious to the reader that Ascended Carter is an Unfettered with no limitations on their auric manipulation. While he never learned advanced auric manipulation or the techniques of spacial and temporal manipulation before his ascension, it was probably just a matter of time.

3. The current theory is that Basic Auric healing (and healing potions) use mana as a catalyst to encourage the body to produce stem cells and then provides energy to accelerate their growth and the repair of damaged tissues. Ascended Carter never learned the more advanced techniques that could cure genetic or magical diseases.

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