Intentional Dissonance by pleasefindthis, Iain S. Thomas Page B

numb nuts?” asks Edward as he slams his good arm into Deformed’s face, crushing his skull in the process. The smaller guard tries to back away but Edward is on him in an instant, sharp splinters of wood in his hand and ripping apart the frail human body; the smaller, quieter guard is quiet forever. Jon appears from under the covers of one of the bunks.
    “How the hell did you manage to make them think I was you?” asks Edward, breathless and covered in blood.
    “Easy. It’s the ability, the gift I told you about. I just imagined killing myself where you were standing. They thought I’d hung myself, and then removed your collar for you, thinking it was a noose around my neck,” says Jon, picking up Deformed’s gun from his remains. He’s more than a little taken aback by the sheer brutality of Edward’s attack. Blood drips from his leaves.
    “You’re quite a vicious guy, Edward,” says Jon, surveying the carnage.
    “We need to get going, there’s bound to be more of them,” says Edward, ignoring whatever Jon just said. As if on cue, an alarm begins to sound, no doubt triggered by the lack of a pulse in the two now very dead guards lying in front of them.
    “Come on!” roars Edward, yanking Jon forward out of the cell and into the filthy white industrial corridors. They have no way of knowing where to go or how to get out but both feel that this uncertainty is better than whatever’s going to happen to them back in that cell. Jon can hear the doctor’s voice down one of the corridors marching, with friends, towards them at speed.
    Jon stays put.
    “Come on,” says Edward and Jon doesn’t move.
    “Maybe it’d be better if I stayed.”
    “You’re a moron.”
    “Fair enough.”
    Jon has a brief moment where he really and truly considers staying there, of going along with everything because fuck it, maybe the world is a better place with a delusion of happiness. It’s at least better than a delusion of sadness. The thought quickly fades when he remembers how he, how the world got here. Edward grabs Jon’s arm and pulls him forward.
    They quicken their pace away from the voice, further into the building until shadows from a second patrol pass along the wall in front of them; Jon and Edward turn quickly, finding a locked cell door. Jon shoots the lock out using Deformed’s gun, hoping against hope that the cell will hide them until the search party passes. They spill into the cell and slam the door behind them. Jon drops the gun and it falls to the floor, where a man wrapped in a single piece of dark fabric from head to toe picks it up and looks at it like he’s never seen one before in his life. An eye patch covers one eye. He says nothing. Jon and Edward say nothing. All three of them are just staring at each other and at least two of them are breathing heavily.
    “He’s a silencer,” says Edward.
    “I thought those were only myths,” says Jon.
    “I was a myth once,” says Edward. Jon looks at him. The silencer looks at him. He reminds Jon of one of the characters from The Black Kracken comic books he used to read as a kid. The silencer raises the gun and takes aim at Jon’s face.
    “No,” says Jon, right before the trigger is pulled. The bullet flies past Jon’s face, into the head of the guard opening the door behind them. The silencer puts the gun into his belt and calmly walks over the body of the dead guard. Jon and Edward look at each other and shrug as they follow the man in black down the corridor.
    “Maybe he knows a way out,” says Edward.
    “Even if he doesn’t, I think things will go better from our perspective, with him involved,” says Jon.
    They round the corner and walk straight into the mess hall, filled with armed guards, who have been forced to abandon their lunch because of the alarm. Jon isn’t sure because his face is covered in black cloth but he senses, something about his eye maybe, that the man in black is smiling. Jon has no idea what the guards did to