TO KILL A GOD: CHAPTER ONE

TO KILL A GOD

Chapter 1

So It Begins

I enter the pitch black room with my arms stretched straight out, being careful not to run into anything. As long as he's been down here i don't know what to expect, booby traps maybe, or just a hoarders mess. I realize that im about to involuntarily break another mans seven year isolation streak just to ask for his help in a revenge murder, so i spend a couple of seconds going over what i should say. You see, i planned all of this out perfectly over the years, ever since I heard his story on the news, 'M.I.T Student Burns Down State-Of-The-Art Lab Conducting Unsupervised Experimentation After Hours: No Body Found.'

I spent thousands of dollars retrieving public records, paying hackers to pull not-so-public records, and even hacking M.I.T's security footage. What i found were useless police reports, some documents about his past experimentation and a video of a sparkling silhouette running out of the fire that burned down the lab. This peaked my interest and i began researching his case obsessively.

His name was Demarcus O'reilly. He was presumed dead considering the fire he caused was hot enough to melt the steel beams in the lab he had occupied. His project remained active despite the fire, which prompted big companies to buy his research and try to recreate his work. What he was studying was microscopic diamond particles that he programmed to refract light in geometrical patterns. From what i found, it seems like his research plateaued and he was beginning to face quite a bit of backlash from the other scientists, so he decided to use other measures to get his work done. He began skipping out on sleep and working after hours so he didn't have someone looking over his shoulder, in doing so, he also stopped following several safety protocols. After experimenting with thousands of different geometrical formations he ultimately deemed that the reason for his failure was due to the experiments needs exceeding a humans capacity for accuracy and speed. Demarcus then roped in a gifted programmer named Allen Welsh to help him automate the particles. They snuck to the lab together four times, but the last time Demarcus went alone and Allen trailed hours after. That night the state of the art M.I.T lab was burned to ashes, both of them were presumed dead but only traces of Allen's DNA was found.

I then scoured the internet looking for sightings of a sparkling man, i found many articles about the LGBTQ+ community, the met gala, but nothing pertaining to Demarcus. I only struck gold when a fire with a similar heat signature burned down several acres of forestation in Alaska. I flew there within an hour of being informed and interviewed everyone who had a role in what happened. An old man who seemed to be a bit of a drinker was yelling words of prayer as they rolled his gurney passed me, i followed them to his room and when the coast was clear i went in for an interview.

The old man cried and grabbed on to my jacket. He begged me to pray for him because he was convinced 'the angel' that burned down his local pub was sent by the almighty to right his many, many wrongs. After i convinced him i was a priest and assured him that his sins were forgiven, it wasnt hard to make him cough up details on what he saw.

The old man left the bar to have a smoke. He describes it being so dark outside that he couldn't even see his hand in front of his face. He remembers taking out a cigarette and placing it into his mouth before he sparked his lighter. The first spark ignited but quickly went out. He then says he heard a voice beg him not to do it again, but he proceeded to reignite the flame anyway. As he litt his cigarette he recalls seeing a man running out of the forest toward him, then the man erupted in a bright light and before he knew it everything was up in flames.

That interaction was seven years ago, and every year since then i go back to that small town in Alaska. For a person with a 'light problem' this was the perfect hide out, a small town that experiences two whole months of pitch black night. So for those two months every year i was here searching for him, hoping something promising would catch my hook, but it never did. So, i decided to take matters into my own hands.