"Behind the Façade" by Nicholas Finsbury

If, God forbid, you decided to venture to the deepest level of The Academy's basement you would find a locked door. On that door is a rather large sign saying something like "keep out" or "quarantine". I'm afraid I don't know exactly what it says because it was put up after I got here, so I haven't seen that side of the door.

Nobody actually crosses that threshold except in exceptional circumstances. Food is delivered by a conveyor belt that goes through a flap in the door and across the floor. But if you had to enter then you would be met by two doors. I think there are two, I'm sure I heard them constructing the second room a while ago, but the wall must be very thick.

So we turn our focus to the first door. It is made of metal, much like a door you might find to a solitary confinement cell. I presume the outside is rusted, as the inside certainly is, and I long crack shoots across the glass porthole in the door and splinters off like a lightning strike. The porthole is the only source of light, as any lamps placed inside the room seem to blow their bulbs after the first use.

Inside the room, other than a broken ceiling lamp, there is little furniture. There is a toilet and a chair, both hewn from the cold stone the walls are made from. There is a gap in the wall in one of the corners where it borders the ceiling, where water will cascade from once a day in case the prisoner here desires a wash, and then the water drains from several holes in the floor. In the opposite corner there is a pit, the edges of which are raised slightly above the floor. In the pit is a layer of water in which the inhabitant of this cell sleeps.

By this point I am sure you have many questions. How do I know so much about this secret basement? I'm sure you've figured out that I am the one who lives there. Why do I have to live like this? It's because of my power, my curse. I am death incarnate - anything I come into physical contact with perishes and decays. That is the cause of the broken window and the rusted door and the faulty light. That is why I have to sleep in a stone pit filled with water as any bed and mattress would decay after my first night.

So I sit here, in this cage, day after day. I have nothing to do in here - books fall apart and televisions stop working. I have one piece if clothing, which is a dressing gown made of a synthetic plastic fibre designed to not degrade over time. My only company is the only member of this infernal Academy that is already dead, and the visitor who is sat outside right now, writing down every word that I dictate to you. I can see the fear in his eyes every time my face darts across the porthole.

The reason that man is outside is because he wishes to chronicle how every student here, including me, arrived here. That is, to say, how we got our powers and brought them to the attention of the teachers here. I can tell he doesn't enjoy it down here, so I shall put him out of his misery, so to speak.

I grew up in the town of Elm Grove in Wisconsin. It was recently voted the nicest neighbourhood in America, but the problem with surveys like that one is they never delve deep enough to find out anything of true value or substance. These people are quite content with the mask, they would prefer to avoid seeing the true face that needs to hide itself.

I had an unhappy family life. My father left not long after I was born and I think my mother blamed me for it, like he couldn't handle the responsibility so he just just left.

My step-father was worse. I was around three years old when he came into the picture. My mother drank a lot by this point and met him at a bar one night. He was a portly, balding man with perpetual stubble and a drinking problem worse than my mother's. He was a delivery man as well, and every time he got chastised for his drinking at work he took it out on my mother. At least he waited until I was ten to start beating me.

Then there were the kids at school. Every school has kids who bully and kids who get bullied, it's like a food chain with me at the bottom. Even before the hormones and the teen angst kicked in you had all of the popular kids fighting to get to the top by showing their dominance, and usually I was the one that got it in the neck. Or the stomach or face or wherever else they chose to punch or kick or throw stuff at. After a while I lost track of which bruises I got at home and which were from school.

Nobody really cared though. I could talk to teachers but if they did anything to stop it then they would be acknowledging there was a problem and then the school would lose its prestige. It was easier for me to get pummelled day in day out than for them to lose their reputation.

So I suffered. No one to turn to, no one who cared. My existence was miserable; an endless torrent of pain and suffering. It was at my lowest point, towards the end of middle school, that I discovered my saviour - my aptitude for science.

Of course I had done it further down the school, but I needed to throw myself into something completely if I was to refrain from doing something stupid. That something was science.

I loved biology and chemistry especially, and they seemed to love me back as I excelled in them. My biology teacher was not as nice as my chemistry teacher, however, as she was a sour old bag who seemed to delight in sucking the pleasure out of everything, like a vampire that fed on fun.

So chemistry was my first choice, thanks to my teachers. It's an amazing subject, studying how a simple combination of the elements in the periodic table can make everything we see around us, and what we can accomplish in the field of scientific advancement using those same elements is truly magnificent.

Maybe my curiosity got the better of me, or maybe I was forced to do it by my circumstances. Whatever the cause, I saw the application of my scientific knowledge as a tool that I could use to improve my situation.

I began to search the internet, trying as hard as I could to find some sort of formula or compound that would help me. I wasn't successful. At least to begin with. The internet that we use only makes up around 5% of the actual internet. The rest is the 'dark web'.

I'm not just a one-trick pony. I did my research and I found my way into those murky depths. That's where I found exactly what I was looking for.

During the Cold War, the American military started a program called MK Ultra. They wanted to create super-soldiers, by imbuing them with some sort of psychic ability. But there was a subproject, with most of the details unknown to the general public, and even a great deal of the military and government. The people responsible don't want you to know because it's the only one of their experiments that actually worked.

Apparently they created a formula, a steroid concoction, that boosted the metabolism to a point no human could reach without years of muscle building. That was how I was going to improve my situation.

I built up the trust of my chemistry teacher so he would let me stay behind after class one night to 'finish some homework' and then I would lock up after I was done. I used that time to take what I could get from the store cupboard, whatever I needed that I couldn't find at a pharmacy.

I spent that evening mixing everything I needed together, following the recipe I had found exactly to the letter. By the time I was done I had a vial of a silvery grey liquid that never seemed to stop moving no matter how long I left it to settle, as though it was living mercury.

I took the vial home and stashed it in my sock drawer. After all that work I was still reluctant to drink it, constantly mulling over the possible consequences in my mind, unsure of what would happen if I had made the slightest error with it. The military would have had expensive scientific equipment and all I could use was the rudimentary equipment available at a regular middle school, with my fifteen year old schoolboy brain compared to men smart enough to be employed as military scientists.

I decided to leave it for the moment and went downstairs to get something to eat. Apparently, stealing school science supplies was hungry work. I couldn't have picked a worse moment, as the moment I reached the bottom of the stairs my step-father stumbled through the door in a drunken stupor.

That morning he had been fired - he finally hit his three strikes of drink driving offences and the company thought his behaviour would reflect badly upon them. He left at 10am and went straight to the bar, not getting back to our home until 8pm. He needed to take his anger out on something, and his step-punching bag was right where he wanted him.

"What're you looking at?" he slurred. I chose not to reply in case I provoked him, but he didn't need provocation.

"Hey! I'm talking to you, you pathetic little runt. I said what're you looking at and I expect a reply."

He grabbed my face with his left hand, still holding a bottle in his right, and pulled me close to him. I could smell the alcohol on him, it was difficult not to, like he'd drowned in a distillery.

"N-n-nothing..." I managed to force between my teeth as his fat hands were clamped around my jaw.

"You're pathetic, you know that? All this time you could have stood up to me, fought back. Hell, I couldn't blame you. But you just take it. Nobody else is fighting your battles. You need to start getting even."

At that point he took off his belt and proceeded to hit me. When I slipped down the stairs he kept kicking me in the ribs, stamping on my side. Once he was satisfied that he'd taught me my lesson he left, as though nothing had happened.

It was what he said that night that got me here. The only way he could have played more of a part in my current condition is if he had forced me to drink my night's labours himself.

I ran upstairs, tears streaming down my face, every part of my body aching from the beating. My hands shaking, I rooted through my sock drawer to find the vial. I uncorked it, a sulphurous smell of rot and death hit me almost as hard as my step-father, but that didn't discourage me. I downed the fluid, felt the thick, metallic liquid burn as I swallowed.

Initially, nothing happened. I sat on my bed, shaking in anger at how I had failed. And then the pain began. A burning pain in my insides hit me with as much force as a freight train. There was no warning, nothing to precede me being knocked back in shock and agony. I had taken my fair share of beatings before but nothing could prepare me for this.

When I woke up I knew something had changed. I ached all over, my outside a dull pain from the bruises, my insides still burning as the last embers of whatever I had drank died down. But there was something else.

I stood up and put my hand on my bedside table. Except it wasn't my bedside table, it was the marble countertop in our kitchen. How did I get into the kitchen? And why was I so cold? Ah, that's right, I was naked. Wait, why the hell was I naked? Then there was the smell.

I had so many unanswered questions that I decided to sit down and figure things out. It was two o'clock in the morning so I figured nobody else was up, which meant I could grab a kitchen towel to cover my dignity and sit at the kitchen table with no consequences.

As I was doing this I noticed a smell. It smelt like the serum I had ingested, but I didn't know where it was coming from. As I went to wrap the towel around me and realised it had disintegrated, the last remnants of it rotting away on the floor, I realised what the smell was.

Above me was a hole - the hole I had fallen through. It must have rotted away when I was lying on it, and that explained why I was naked - my clothes had done the same. I was quite calm at first, not really realising what was happening, but then it hit me.

I had either followed the recipe wrong or used the wrong recipe, because whatever I drank now made everything I touched rot. I could never touch anything ever again.

I ran to the sink and threw up. The shock of knowing what I knew forced everything out of me, but there was very little that came up. Maybe the serum had done the same to my insides. What if it was slowly killing me from the inside?

I ran upstairs into the bathroom. The tile floor seemed to survive touching touching me, but I left rotting footprints in the carpet behind me, hissing and seething at my touch.

Inspecting myself in the mirror, I could see something was different. I was skinny to start with, but my skin was now stretched taut across my bones. It was cold to the touch and had a pallid colour. My fingers, rib-cage, even my skull were clearly visible under the layer of tight skin. My eyes were bloodshot and yellowish, with tiny pupils inside the deep brown iris. My black hair looked longer than yesterday, parted in the middle so that it draped down to my chin at the front. My finger nails, too, looked longer, and had yellowed overnight to match my eyes.

I was disgusted by what I saw. It wasn't me. It couldn't be me. An empty shell of the person I once was looked back at me in the mirror through his sunken, dead eyes.

There was a knock at the door. A loud, angry knock, followed by my step-father yelling "What the Hell are you doing in there?"

I was frightened. I took this monstrous, chemical cocktail to stop me from being afraid, but now I had another reason to fear him. If he touched me I would kill him. Even after all that he'd done I didn't know if I was prepared to kill a man.

"I just needed the toilet," I replied, my voice audibly shaking. It was huskier than I remember as well, possibly a result of the serum.

"Not at this time of night. Get out here right now."

I was naked and everything I touched died - can you see my predicament here?

I looked around trying desperately to find something that wouldn't decompose. My best bet was the toilet, it was plastic so I figured it might last a while. It would take too long to wrench it off on its own though, so I had to use my newfound power on the screws keeping it attached in order to weaken them.

I held the lid over my manhood and opened the door. I felt like my heart should have been racing but it wasn't. I can only imagine what my step-father was thinking when he saw this bedraggled-looking teenager leaving the bathroom, but the look of contempt on his face gave me a pretty good idea.

"Jesus. What in the name of the everloving Christ is going on here?"

What was I meant to say? I just stood there, looking gormless. His face changed, showing a countenance of pure anger, and then he hit me.

This time it felt different. He backhanded me to the face, but it didn't sting. My skin felt numbed to the pain somehow. There was something else different as well - that was the only hit.

I stood up, covering my face with my hands, but I lowered them when I saw I was no longer threatened. My aggressor was the one on the floor this time, clutching his hand. He turned to look at me with the same expression that he must have seen on my face hundreds of times.

I could see his hand had blackened and withered. The rot had set in and it was spreading down his arm, his face now contorting with pain. At first I felt powerful, but once the reality of the situation hit me, once I realised that this man, no matter how evil, was going to die because of me, I began to drown in guilt and remorse. He was going to die - I had killed him and there was nothing I could do.

I panicked. I needed to get out of there. I ran as fast as I could down the stairs and into the garage. There was a tarp in there covering our car and I hoped it would be synthetic enough to survive me, so I grabbed it and wrapped it around myself before fleeing out of the front door.

I knew an old couple down our street whose lawn I trimmed for some extra pocket money, and their house was empty as it was going to be fumigated in a couple of days, so I thought that would be a good place to hide out. Their kitchen tiles weren't ruined when I stood on them, so it was there that I stayed. The only problem was that they brought the fumigation forward by a day or two for some reason, and since that didn't coincide with when I mowed their lawn I wasn't told.

I woke up, who knows what time or even what day it was, amidst a cloud of noxious gas. Strangely, it didn't hurt. I wasn't coughing and I didn't feel like it threatened me. So I stayed in the kitchen and went back to sleep.

When I awoke again the gas had gone, but now there was another issue. It was at this point that I learnt exactly what my powers were. It seems that death is like energy - it cannot be destroyed, it is simply transmuted into something else. Most people must be content with having their deaths, but mine is not like that. My death is what fuels my power, by rights the serum should have killed me but instead it transfers the power of my death into the things I touch. However, if I get closer to dying, such as that which might be achieved by living in a house being fumigated, then the aura of death around me extends and spreads to things other than what I am touching. Apparently you cannot kill that which is already dead inside.

All of that was explained by the fact that the ceiling above me was mouldy and rotting, a crack slowly spreading across it. I was killing the house and I needed to get out.

I got up and ran out of the back door, hiding in some bushes at the bottom of the garden. As I sat there amidst the decaying shrubbery I saw the house split and crack, slowly crumbling. The creaking of timber sounded like a groan, expressing the house's reluctance to die. This was just another casualty to add to the list alongside my dead step-father.

I now had nowhere to go. I couldn't hand myself in to the police out of fear of killing them. My life was over, but it could never end.

As the house in front of me tore itself apart, I saw an opportunity. There was a door to a basement in the floor, and nobody would think to look down there after the whole house had crumbled. It was the perfect spot for me, so that's where I spent the next few days.

I was sleeping one night, the only thing I could do to pass the time in my hovel, when there was a knock. An actual knock, from a person, at the door down to the basement. I got my shower curtain and wrapped it around myself like a toga, something I had learnt to do in the boring expanses of emptiness between sleeping.

The knock came again, accompanied by a voice alerting me "We're going to come in now."

The door opened, spreading unwanted light through my quarters, so I scurried into a darker area of the basement so that these intruders could not see me.

"We know what you're capable of," came the voice again. "We're not going to hurt you, we just want to talk about what we've seen."

I was scared, not of this man, but of what I could do to him. I was tired of killing, tired of death, and I'd only had this power for a few days.

As I saw shoes descend the stairs into the basement I heard muttering from upstairs, the chattering of several voices. The only thing I could really make out was a boy saying, "if you wanted someone to glow in the dark you brought the wrong guy, that's Joaquín, not me."

I had no idea what these people were talking about, but I didn't want anything to do with it. The man went into the furthest corner of the basement looking for me, so I used my opportunity to run up the stairs and hope I could get away from whoever was outside.

I'd been in the darkness for too long, and the light stung my eyes as I left my dingy hovel. Once my eyes adjusted I saw five teenagers. One girl, three boys, and, well, it's difficult to describe. The girl and two of the boys were in some sort of Lycra bodysuits (the girl in blue and white, one boy in blue and black, and the other in gold and silver) and the third boy was wearing some sort of reinforced metal suit with what looked like a road sign on the front. The fifth member of their strange group was, for all intents and purposes, an anthropomorphised tree.

"Hi," said the boy in the blue and black outfit with a weird grin on his face, while his companions stood there, taken aback by the skeletal figure in the shower curtain toga.

I started to back away from them, not wanting to cause any trouble with these people. The man in the basement emerged and was surprisingly unshaken.

"I know all about you Nick, we're not here to hurt you. We only want to help, to take you to a place where you can't hurt anyone else."

I don't know why, but I ran. It might have been the youthful faces of the people I could put in danger just by being close to them, or maybe I'd got cabin fever from being alone in the basement with nothing but my thoughts. Either way, I turned and ran.

In an instant something had coiled around my legs and pulled back to yank me to the floor, I turned over to see the tree-creature pulling on the vine around my legs before his face contorted in pain as the rot set in. It was spreading up the vine towards his arm, causing him great pain. The man reached into his boot and pulled out a knife that he sliced the vine off with before the tree-creature was killed.

I tried to scramble to my feet, and is I did so I saw the girl in the group touch a fire hydrant, which seemed to frost over. Then the one in metal kicked it and the whole thing shattered, water spraying into the air. He pulled the sign from his chest and held it over the spray, struggling against the flow to angle it towards me.

As the cold spray hit me full force in the chest it knocked me over and my toga flew off. I tried to stand again, but the water stopped me, and then the boy in gold stepped towards the water. He touched the sign and the water with different hands and somehow they... swapped. The water started to become metal, moving towards me on the floor, and the sign cascaded to the ground and settled as a puddle.

The metal grew around my legs and up to my waist, and then I started to see flashes. Not hallucinations - cameras. People in the surrounding houses were taking pictures of everything that was happening.

"Rodney! Sort it out!" the voice of the man boomed out. The boy in blue, who I then knew to be Rodney, let out some sort of electric pulse. All of the street lamps sparked and then the flashing stopped.

I had rusted the metal around my legs while all this was happening and broke free, running away while they were distracted. The boy in metal was arguing with the one in gold about his sign, and the team didn't really seem like they knew what they were doing.

I spotted a manhole cover - my way out. There was no way I could lift it, but I didn't need to. I stood on it for a couple of seconds and dropped into the sewer below, the rancid water breaking my fall. I started running and then I heard a splash in the water behind me.

Turning for an instant I saw that it was the girl that had dropped down to follow me. She shouted at me to stop running and that she only wanted to help, but I didn't stop. At least until she made me.

I felt the water around my feet turn cold. It didn't seem important to me at the time, but then my feet stopped moving. I looked down and saw that she had frozen the sewer water, trapping me as she did so. I was stuck, naked in a sewer.

"Don't touch me!" I warned her as she walked towards me.

"It's okay, we know what you can do so you don't need to worry about hurting us."

"But the tree thing?"

"Ah, that's Adam, he's just not the brightest but he's still a great addition to the team. We're hoping that you will be too. All of us needed help when we first found out about our abilities, but it gets better."

"Okay. Just get me away from here and take me somewhere I can't hurt people."

That's exactly what they did. They had a synthetic plastic cover for me, it looked a bit like a sleeping bag but I couldn't destroy it. They transported me in that to a boat, which took me to an island, where I was interned in my current prison.

That's how I got here. I haven't killed anyone since my arrival, but it's so lonely. I occasionally feel like I'm being watched though, which is rather unsettling when I'm far below anyone who knows of my existence.

Nevertheless, I am one of the ACES. I may never see a single ray of sunshine, but I have somewhere I belong. And that's all that I need.