THE VILLAIN IN MIDDLESTOWN

Max Johnson awoke the next morning to bright sunlight pouring all around him. He was half convinced that he was alive, until he pinched himself and felt himself respond to the stimulus.

He tried to sit up, but doing so hurt his chest so bad that he fell back.

Slowly and even more carefully, he sat up, managing the pains before running his arm around his chest and back, holding in the pain and feeling for any broken bones or swellings. Finding none, he decided the pain was most probably not serious and would heal eventually.

Had it been a haemorrhage, he would probably not have woken up.

Silently, he cursed his luck. He was in dire need of painkillers, but that was the one thing he had not scavenged with all the things he took from that house.

His eyes scanned the room around him, observing with his military eye, and then he remembered the guy he had found the previous night… What had his name even been? He tried to remember. Kevin Santa… Sanctus… Santorini.

He saw the man lying asleep, and turned to the other side to see the large pile of ash that was the zombie that had attacked them the previous night, and then it all came flooding into his mind.

For the moment, he was tempted to avoid the man. It was not that he was not great company, as he had chucked beer can after beer can at him to get him to talk, but that was where it all ended. Long after that, Max had been convinced that the man was suffering from madness, and had only survived the zombies by some extreme, continuous stroke of luck.

Who on earth sat so still when being attacked by a zombie, and not just a zombie, but one twice the size of anything they had come across?

For somebody he had just met, he was truly impressed by the way he tried and fought to free him from the zombie's grasp after it caught him, so that even though the thing held him, it was distracted by all Kevin was doing to attack him. And when it finally decided that it could not have one until it was done with the other, he tossed the one aside and went towards the other.

It was then that Max saw one of the strangest things he ever had in his twenty-six years of life. Of course he had seen just right about enough just that day, shooting and blowing up wave after wave of zombies with his gun and ammunition, but none measured up to what he saw then.

When the zombie threw him at the wall, the pain that had pulsed through his body was so intense he shed tears, and when he painstakingly raised his head to see what was happening to his newly found friend, he saw how aggressively the thing attacked him, punching and biting and hitting.

In horror, Max had shut his eyes and turned away, realising that they were both doomed. No one could have survived that kind of attack, no ordinary human at all.

Until he looked again and saw Kevin sitting there before the zombie, alive and seemingly well, but idle, looking straight in front of him.

“Attack, Kevin. Stand up. Run. Aim for his head when you shoot.” Max had yelled his instructions from where he lay in panic, afraid that Kevin was sitting there without moving in shock and thumping his curled fist on the floor as loudly as he could.

He yelled even louder, but Kevin did not seem to have heard a thing he said. If anything, he only sat still as he watched the zombie, remaining untouched by it.

Nothing measured up to the thrill he felt later on when Kevin picked up his chainsaw at long last, leaped high into the air, and brought it down upon the zombie's head, sawing at the head very aggressively, unbothered by the chilling sound it made. Throughout his life, he had not seen so many sights as inspiring or thrilling, shooting the adrenaline through his body.

His excitement filled him to the guts. It felt to him like providing the assist to a teammate's goal, and he was too excited to care, especially not when he had seen the zombie killed in the most heroic way.

He had also not cared when Kevin asked him if he had seen some blue glow, and was only slightly bothered when he became quiet after it, seemingly focused on something he was thinking about.

It was as he lay down to sleep that he began to process all he had seen.

How had the zombie not touched Kevin Santorini?

Such an intense attack, and he had made it out without even as much as a scratch, only talking about some glow.

Max remembered staring at the other man's profile from where he lay while pretending to be asleep. He watched in silence as he searched his bag and took out a cigarette to smoke, uttering the words ‘The scavenging vulture’ while turning to look at him.

He still watched as Kevin smoked the cigarette, before taking a burning piece of wood and going to throw it on the dead zombie, watching it burn. Max watched him from where he lay, thinking that Kevin Santorini was leading the list of the weirdest people he had ever come across.

But the game changer, the thing that made him fear the man, was when after minutes of him standing idly, one of the beer cans he had thrown away and which lay near Kevin began to float in midair.

Max covered his mouth in silence, remembering the Special Secret Forces report he had been shown before he began the mission that ended for him when he was left behind by the rest of his squad.

There was no doubt for him. With the way Kevin had escaped being mauled and swallowed by a zombie, and made an empty beer can levitate in the air without any sort of sorcery or illusions, without being aware that he was being watched—

There was no doubt that Kevin Santorini was the Allfather, the man they had all come to combat, the villain in Middlestown.