Chapter 155: The Scream [20]

Standing between her and Jason, positioned as an immovable barrier with one hand extended to block whatever attack had been heading toward her, was the person she’d most wanted to see in the entire world.

Ryan had arrived.

He’d caught Jason’s attack somehow—intercepted it with a speed and strength that matched or exceeded the enhanced strikes of Jason.

Rachel’s vision blurred as tears of relief filled her eyes. She wanted to speak, to say his name, to thank him or warn him or ask how he was even here when Jason had claimed he was trapped and surrounded and defeated. But her throat was too tight, her lungs too empty, her entire body too overwhelmed by the sudden reversal from certain death to impossible salvation.

He’d caught Jason’s attack somehow—intercepted it with a speed and raw strength that not only matched but seemed to exceed the enhanced strikes that Jason’s transformed body could deliver. Ryan’s hand was wrapped around Jason’s fist, holding it motionless in midair with such absolute control that the violent momentum Jason had built up simply ceased to exist. It was like watching a charging bull stopped dead by an invisible wall, all that kinetic energy absorbed and nullified by Ryan’s iron grip.

Rachel’s vision blurred as tears of overwhelming relief filled her green eyes, distorting the scene before her into a watercolor painting of shadowy figures and flickering firelight. The tears came unbidden, unstoppable—born not from pain or fear but from the sudden, crushing weight of emotions she’d been holding back through sheer willpower alone. Relief. Gratitude. Disbelief. Joy. All of it crashed through her psychological defenses at once, leaving her trembling and struggling to process the reversal of fortune.

She wanted desperately to speak, to call out Ryan’s name, to thank him for the impossible rescue or warn him about Jason’s enhanced capabilities or ask how he was even here when Jason had claimed with such smug certainty that Ryan was trapped and surrounded and defeated, doomed to be captured by the alien collectors. But her throat had constricted too tightly, muscles seizing around her windpipe as if an invisible hand was choking her. Her lungs felt emptied of air, each attempted breath pulling in nothing but smoke and ash that made her want to cough but couldn’t.

So instead of words, Rachel simply stared at Ryan’s back.

He looked exhausted—Rachel could see that much even from behind. There was a slight tremor running through his frame that spoke of depleted energy reserves pushed far beyond safe limits. His clothes were torn in multiple places, revealing glimpses of skin that was bruised and bloodied. Ash and worse things coated him from head to toe, making him look like he’d crawled through hell itself to get here.

But despite that exhaustion, despite whatever he’d endured to escape the trap Jason had put him in, Ryan stood there.

The others assembled around the camping van were equally shocked by Ryan’s sudden appearance. They’d all heard Jason’s confident declaration that Ryan was captured, surrounded by infected, doomed to extraction and death. Seeing him here, alive and apparently strong enough to stop Jason in his tracks, felt like witnessing a resurrection.

“You took your time…” Sydney’s voice drifted from inside the van, rough with pain but carrying a note of profound relief beneath the sarcasm. Even through the agony of Jason’s sonic assault still reverberating through her skull, she managed to inject her characteristic dry humor into the moment.

“Sorry,” Ryan said quietly, his voice carrying clearly despite its low volume. There was genuine regret in that single word—an acknowledgment that his delay had cost them all dearly, that people had suffered because he hadn’t arrived sooner. His hand maintained its iron grip on Jason’s fist, not allowing even a millimeter of movement as he spoke.

“Oh, so you really managed to escape.” Jason’s voice carried surprise poorly masked by his attempt to maintain his mocking, confident tone. Though he was keeping his smile—that terrible, wrong expression that used his face but belonged to something else entirely—it was clear he was genuinely shocked. Angry, too, beneath the alien calm. He couldn’t comprehend how Ryan had escaped from what should have been an inescapable situation. “How very… unexpected.”

Ryan didn’t reply to the implicit question. His grey eyes—usually warm despite their colorlessness—stared at Jason with an expression so cold and devoid of emotion that it seemed to leach the warmth from the air itself. Those eyes, normally reflecting concern or determination or even humor, now held nothing. They were empty windows looking into a void, flat and dull as slate under winter clouds.

The look sent an involuntary chill racing down Jason’s spine for reasons he couldn’t immediately identify. It wasn’t fear exactly—the silver stone’s influence had dulled most of his human emotional responses, including the capacity for genuine terror. But there was something in that gaze, something that triggered an instinctive warning deep in whatever remained of Jason’s original consciousness.

What was that emotion radiating from Ryan like cold radiation? Or more accurately, what was that complete absence of emotion? Was it Jason himself recognizing something deeply wrong, some fragment of his former self screaming a warning that was being drowned out by the alien stone’s influence? Or was it the Screamer’s consciousness within him, sensing danger from a predator it didn’t fully understand?

Jason couldn’t tell anymore where he ended and the stone began. The boundaries had become too blurred, identities merging and separating like oil mixing with water—never quite fully integrating but no longer distinct either.

“Cindy, take Christopher back,” Ryan said then. He glanced toward Christopher’s crumpled form on the ground, unconscious from the pain of Jason’s enhanced scream and the accumulated trauma of the battle. “Get him into the van.”

Cindy nodded immediately, not wasting time with questions or objections. She moved quickly despite her own exhaustion, grabbing Christopher under his arms and beginning to drag his substantial weight toward the camping van.

“Rachel, take the wheel and get the camping van away from here,” Ryan continued, his orders coming in that same quiet, absolute tone. He still hadn’t looked away from Jason, maintaining eye contact with an intensity that suggested he couldn’t afford to break his concentration even for a moment.

“What about you?” Rachel asked, worry immediately flooding her voice despite the exhaustion that made speaking difficult. She forced herself to her feet with trembling legs, using Daisy’s shoulder for support as she stood. “You’re not… you can’t stay here alone…”

Something seemed fundamentally strange about Ryan—some quality she couldn’t quite identify but which set off alarm bells in the back of her mind. He looked wrong somehow, though she couldn’t articulate exactly how or why. The way he held himself, perhaps. The absolute emptiness in his eyes. The sense that she was looking at someone who had pushed themselves so far beyond normal limits that they’d crossed into territory from which there might be no return.

“I will join you soon,” Ryan said, and there was finality in those words that suggested further argument would be futile. “Take her too.” He added after a brief pause, his eyes finally shifting to look past Rachel and Daisy toward something—or someone—behind them.

Both women turned simultaneously, following Ryan’s gaze, and gasped in synchronized surprise at what they saw.

Wanda stood there, silent and motionless as a statue. Her presence was so unexpected, so utterly inexplicable given the circumstances, that for a moment Rachel’s exhausted brain simply refused to process what her eyes were telling her.

“W…Wanda, what are you doing here?” Rachel asked, her voice cracking with confusion and concern. Nothing about this situation made sense. Wanda should have been at the Municipal Office with the other evacuees, safely away from the infected hordes and the Screamer’s attacks. What was she doing here at their burning house? How had she gotten here? And what had happened to leave her in this state?

Wanda didn’t reply. She didn’t even seem to register that Rachel had spoken to her. Her blank gaze remained fixed on Ryan for a long moment, something unreadable passing across her empty features, some combination of emotions too complex to name. Then, without a word, she turned mechanically and walked toward the camping van.

Rachel watched her climb into the vehicle, questions multiplying in her mind but finding no answers.

“Wanda is here as well? Perfect!” Jason’s voice cut through Rachel’s troubled thoughts, his tone carrying dark satisfaction and cruel amusement. That terrible smile widened further across his face, stretching his features into something that barely resembled human expression anymore. “You really are stupid, Ryan. If you had escaped the trap, you should have run as far and as fast as your enhanced legs could carry you. Fled Jackson Township entirely. Instead you came back here, walking right back into danger. And you even brought Wanda with you!” He laughed—a sound that held multiple tones simultaneously, like a choir singing slightly out of sync. “Did you think you were being heroic? All you’ve done is deliver the other one I needed alive besides you!”

“You have gone too far already,” Ryan muttered, his voice so low it was almost subliminal, vibrating at frequencies that seemed to bypass the ears and resonate directly in the bones of everyone listening.

His words carried several layers of meaning, multiple interpretations stacking on top of each other like geological strata.

Jason had gone too far in what he had done—betraying his friends, killing or transforming Jasmine, setting traps that endangered everyone, aligning himself with the alien forces that sought to harvest the Dullahan virus and destroy humanity in the process.

But Jason had also gone too far in what he had become. The transformation wrought by the Screamer’s silver stone had progressed beyond any hope of reversal. Every cell in his body had been altered, restructured according to alien architectural principles that prioritized function over humanity. His entire physiology was barely holding together, the integration between human biology and alien technology creating fundamental incompatibilities that his body struggled to reconcile. He was clearly too weak to properly control the stone of the Screamer, his human frame insufficient to safely channel the power it represented.

Regardless of the reasons or the mechanics, Ryan couldn’t forgive him.

Couldn’t accept what Jason had chosen to become.

Couldn’t allow him to continue threatening the people Ryan had sworn to protect.

“What’s that expression supposed to mean?” Jason narrowed his eyes, studying Ryan’s empty grey gaze with growing unease. “Do you actually think you can beat me? Have you forgotten that I possess the Screamer’s power now? That I’m no longer the weak, ordinary Jason you used to know?”

But Ryan answered not with words but with action. His grip on Jason’s captured fist suddenly hardened, fingers tightening with crushing force that seemed to exceed human possibility. The sound that followed was sickeningly clear despite the ambient noise of burning buildings and distant infected—the distinctive crack of bone breaking under immense pressure.

Not just one bone, but multiple fractures occurring simultaneously as Ryan’s iron grip crushed the delicate structures of Jason’s fingers and hand. The metacarpals snapped first, then the carpals, the grinding of bone against bone creating a sound like gravel being ground beneath a millstone.

Jason’s eyes widened with shock and the beginnings of pain as his enhanced body’s damage tolerance reached its limit. He reacted with impressive speed despite the surprise, immediately attempting to pull away and extract his trapped hand from Ryan’s grip before more damage could be inflicted.

But he couldn’t. Ryan’s grip was absolute—fingers locked around Jason’s fist like bands of steel welded shut. No amount of pulling or twisting could break that hold. Jason might as well have been trying to pull his hand free from a block of concrete that had solidified around it.

Realizing that escape through withdrawal was impossible, Jason immediately shifted tactics. His free leg snapped upward in a devastating kick, moving with the enhanced speed and strength that the silver stone granted him. The strike cut through the air with an audible whistle, creating a wake of disturbed ash and smoke as it traveled.

An ordinary human receiving such a kick would experience catastrophic damage—shattered ribs at minimum, punctured lungs possibly, maybe even instant death if the kick connected with the throat or temple. The force behind it was sufficient to crack concrete or dent steel. Even most Enhanced Infected couldn’t withstand such an attack without serious injury.

But Ryan simply raised his right hand with casual, almost contemptuous ease and caught Jason’s ankle mid-strike. The impact that should have sent him flying or broken his arm was absorbed completely, all that momentum vanishing as Ryan’s fingers closed around the joint with the same iron grip he maintained on Jason’s fist.

Now Jason was truly trapped—both a hand and a foot held immobile, his mobility completely compromised, his body suspended in an awkward position that prevented him from generating any real force for another attack.

Then, pulling his head back in a smooth motion, Ryan drove his forehead forward in a devastating headbutt.

The impact was brutal and precise, Ryan’s skull connecting with Jason’s face with a crack that echoed across the ruined house like a gunshot. The force of the blow was tremendous—not just the strength behind it, but the perfect technique that channeled all of Ryan’s enhanced power through the hardest part of his skull into the most vulnerable parts of Jason’s face.

“Haghhh!” The sound that tore from Jason’s throat was pure agony, a strangled groan that combined human pain with something alien and wrong. His head snapped backward from the impact, neck bending at an angle that looked close to breaking, and then Ryan released him.

Without both hands maintaining their grip, Jason was sent skidding backward across the ash-covered ground like a stone skipped across water. He tumbled and rolled, unable to control his trajectory, limbs flailing as he tried and failed to arrest his momentum. He finally came to a stop ten or fifteen feet away, sprawled on his back amidst debris and burned wood.

For a moment he lay there, stunned and disoriented. Then sensation began to return in waves. Sharp, throbbing pain radiated from his forehead where a massive bump was already forming, the skin split and bleeding profusely. Blood ran down his face in streams, hot and thick, blurring his vision and filling his mouth with the taste of copper and salt.

His crushed hand hung at his side, fingers bent at wrong angles, bones grinding sickeningly against each other with every slight movement. The pain from that injury was different—deeper, more fundamental, a message from nerve endings screaming that catastrophic structural damage had occurred.

Jason pushed himself upright with his good hand, breathing hard, his alien-enhanced healing factor already beginning to work on repairing the damage. The silver stone in his chest pulsed erratically, energy flowing through him in waves as it attempted to knit bone and tissue back together.

But even with accelerated healing, recovery would take time. And based on the cold, empty expression still fixed on Ryan’s face, time was not something Jason was going to be given.

Ryan then raised his left hand holding it up so that the palm faced Jason directly. The moment his arm reached full extension, the tattoo marking etched into his skin began to glow with an ethereal dark green light that seemed to pulse with barely contained power.

The Time Freeze tattoo.

The symbol appeared in full clarity—geometric patterns interwoven with symbols that looked simultaneously ancient and alien.

Jason’s eyes widened with sudden, visceral terror as recognition slammed into his consciousness like a physical blow. In the chaos and violence of the confrontation, in his confidence born from the Screamer’s power coursing through his transformed body, he’d nearly forgotten about Ryan’s most devastating ability—the one advantage that made him virtually unbeatable in single combat.

He didn’t know about it in the radio station but he learnt it recently thanks to a certain someone.

The Time Freeze.

That cheat-level ability that could stop time itself within a localized area, freezing everything except Ryan in a bubble of suspended temporal flow. If Ryan activated it right now—if he unleashed that reality-warping power—Jason would be completely helpless. Frozen mid-breath, mid-thought, unable to defend himself or counter-attack or do anything except wait as a sitting target while Ryan positioned himself for a killing blow.

He would be dead before time resumed. It would be over in an instant from any external observer’s perspective, but for Ryan, he’d have all the time in the world to line up the perfect strike, to find the exact angle and force required to shatter the silver stone in Jason’s chest or sever his head or inflict whatever fatal injury would end this permanently.

Panic flooded through Jason’s system—genuine fear cutting through the alien stone’s emotional dampening like a hot knife through butter. His survival instincts, whether human or alien or some hybrid combination of both, screamed at him to act, to do something, to prevent the activation that would seal his doom.

He drew in a massive breath, chest expanding as his lungs filled to capacity, the silver stone flaring brilliantly as he channeled power through it. He was about to unleash the most powerful Scream he could manage—a sonic assault so devastating it would shatter windows for blocks, rupture eardrums, potentially even kill anyone caught in its direct path. He had to force Ryan to abandon the Time Freeze activation, had to disrupt his concentration, had to create enough chaos and pain that maintaining focus on that delicate temporal manipulation would become impossible.

But then he stopped, breath caught in his throat, vocal cords tensed but producing no sound.

Because Ryan didn’t activate the Time Freeze.

The tattoo continued glowing for another moment, building toward the threshold where reality would bend to Ryan’s will. Then the glow began to fade as he lowered his hand. The light dimmed gradually, receding back into the inked patterns until only faint traces remained visible, and finally those too disappeared, leaving only the dark tattoo markings on Ryan’s skin.

He had no intention of using it.

Jason stared in confusion and disbelief, his mind struggling to process what he was witnessing. Why would Ryan reveal his most powerful weapon, let Jason see it and prepare for it, only to not use it? What possible strategic advantage could there be in showing your trump card and then deliberately choosing not to play it?

“You abandoned everything,” Ryan said then. “Abandoned your humanity, abandoned your friends, sold yourself to the Screamer and allowed it to transform you into this…” He gestured vaguely at Jason’s altered form, the silver stone pulsing in his chest, the wrongness that permeated every cell of his being. “Because you wanted to become better than me, Jason.”

Then Ryan tilted his head slightly to the side in a gesture that was disturbingly intimidating, narrowing his cold grey eyes until they resembled chips of slate examined through winter fog. The movement was small but somehow deeply unsettling, suggesting something broken in the mechanism that controlled his expressions, some disconnect between intention and execution that made him look almost inhuman.

“Then come and fight,” Ryan said. “Show me what you’ve gained by giving up everything that made you human. Prove that your betrayal was worth the price you paid.”

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