Chapter 55: Chapter 55

The room still smelled like lavender.

Three months. Three whole months, and still the scent lingered—clinging to the bedsheets, the curtains, the stuffed bunny that sat slumped over in the corner like a broken monument.

Lucas Santiago stood at the threshold of his daughter’s room, arms hanging loose at his sides. He hadn’t stepped foot in here since the day he killed them all.

The floor creaked beneath his bare feet, a sound that once meant everything in the world. "Daddy’s coming," Ellie used to squeal. Now it sounded like a funeral hymn.

He walked over to her bed. The covers were exactly as she’d left them—twisted at the bottom, pillow flipped to the cold side. A diary with a glittery purple lock lay on the floor, its corner bent. He didn’t dare touch it.

Instead, he sat. The bed gave way under his weight, gently, quietly, almost like it knew not to make a sound.

They told him it wasn’t his fault.

The men in suits. The ones who came in the black van with the Geiger counters and the grim expressions. The scientists in hazmat suits who quarantined the house and cordoned off the entire street. The woman from the government who told him about the "rare metabolic anomaly."

But it was his body. His blood. His skin.

And it was Ellie’s hair that had started falling out first.

Then Diana’s teeth, loosened and rotting within days.

And the screams. Jesus, the screams.

Lucas had always known something was wrong. Since he was fifteen, he could feel heat in his fingertips. A static buzz under his skin whenever he got angry, or anxious. He learned to manage it, like one learns to live with a limp. He drank. He meditated. He took long showers. He told no one.

Doctors called it anxiety. His mother thought it was the devil.

But no one thought to test for radiation.

He met Diana at college. Fell for her immediately. She was bold and chaotic and sharp, like broken glass under soft light. They got married young, against advice, against reason, and never once regretted it. Ellie came two years later. The love of his life, the miracle he never deserved.

They were everything.

And now they were atoms.

He didn’t bury them. Couldn’t.

The contamination was too severe. The bodies were incinerated by the state. Not even ashes returned. Just a receipt.

"Due to national protocol, the Santiago family has been processed in accordance with Nuclear Biohazard Act §42."

He’d read the line a hundred times. It never made less sense.

Lucas stayed in the house. He had nowhere else to go. His family was gone. His job had let him go—too much liability. The media had a field day. "Man Glows in the Dark—At a Terrible Cost." One tabloid called him "The Atomic Widower." Another just labeled him: Killer Dad.

His neighbors moved out. Rightfully so. The radius of his emissions fluctuated with his emotional state. A doctor came by with a Geiger counter once a week, measuring him like a bomb that hadn’t yet gone off.

Lucas marked it all in a journal.

Day 17: Background radiation minimal. Mood low. No sleep.

Day 24: Burnt the wooden table by accident. Still don’t know how.

Day 31: Saw Ellie in my dream. Her eyes were gone. She said, "You forgot me, Daddy."

Grief wasn’t linear. That’s what they said in therapy, back when they still let him attend sessions virtually. Before the last therapist developed lesions on her arm and had to cut ties for health reasons.

But grief wasn’t anything linear. It was circular. A serpent eating its own tail. A never-ending loop of What Ifs and Why God and Don’t Touch That, Baby, It’s Hot.

Lucas lived in that loop. Drenched in it. He slept on the floor now. Didn’t trust beds. He kept the lights off, afraid of seeing his own reflection glowing faint green in the mirror. Afraid it might smile at him.

One night, he took a scalpel and carved into his forearm.

Smoke, not blood, rose from it—radioactive vapor, misty and silver.

He tried not to scream, didn’t want to alert the neighborhood. But he cried. Not from the pain—but because the deeper he cut, the brighter he glowed.

There was no escape. His body was the coffin. The poison. The crime.

On Day 86, he heard a knock at the door.

No one knocked anymore. Most people were under strict orders to stay 100 meters away.

He opened the door in gloves and a hazmat smock he’d fashioned from leftover quarantine suits.

A boy stood there. No more than sixteen. Pale. Wide-eyed. Holding a camcorder.

"You’re Lucas Santiago, right?"

"I... I’m making a documentary. About you."

"I want to know what it’s like. Living . What it feels like to—" the boy hesitated. "To lose everything."

Lucas didn’t reply. His breath fogged the boy’s camera lens.

"I can wear a suit. I brought one. Triple-layered. I even reinforced the gloves with lead filament. Please."

"Because they keep saying you’re a monster. But monsters don’t cry on rooftops."

The boy gestured to his bag. Pulled out a photo.

A still from security footage. Lucas—sobbing. On the edge of his roof. Two nights after the incineration.

"You were going to jump. But you didn’t."

Lucas looked at the photo. Then at the boy.

"Come in. But not for long."

The boy’s name was Avery.

He visited three times that month. Each time in new layers of makeshift hazmat gear. They talked in short bursts, Lucas always cautious, watching his dosimeter tick faster when he grew too animated.

Avery asked questions—real ones. Not tabloid fodder.

"What was Ellie like?"

"She liked bugs. Wanted to be a zoologist. Called herself Bug Queen."

"What about your wife?"

"She danced when she cooked. Off-beat. Horribly. But she never stopped smiling."

Lucas found himself laughing at memories. Then hating himself for it.

One day Avery asked, "Do you think it was really you? Or something done to you?"

Lucas stared blankly at the boy.

Lucas closed his eyes. "I don’t know where the mutation began. Maybe I was born this way. Maybe it was the factory job. Or the meds. But I touched them every day. I slept next to them. I kissed them goodnight."

He opened his eyes. "And now they’re gone."

Day 103. The nightmares grew worse.

He saw Ellie, walking into the kitchen, skin blistered and translucent.

"Daddy, you lied. You said hugs were safe."

Lucas screamed himself awake.

The house was no longer safe.

On Day 107, he burned through the mattress. Not figuratively—literally. The radioactive heat from his chest melted the springs. The carpet curled inward, scorched in a perfect human outline.

He knew what it meant. The containment was breaking down.

The Department would come soon. They’d lock him up. Or end him.

He walked through the city at night, cloaked in lead-lined fabric, like a glowing ghost. Every streetlamp he passed flickered. Dogs barked in the distance. Concrete wilted beneath his footsteps.

He didn’t know where he was going.

Only that he couldn’t stay.

He reached the lake by dawn. Sat at the edge. Watched birds circle high above, unaware of the death below.

He felt calm. For the first time in weeks.

"I figured you’d come here."

Wearing another patched-together hazmat suit. Holding the camcorder again.

"You shouldn’t be here," Lucas said without turning around.

"You glow like a lighthouse. Wasn’t hard to find."

Lucas chuckled. Then sighed. "You’re going to die if you keep coming back."

"Maybe," Avery said. "But maybe you won’t let that happen."

Lucas finally turned. "Why are you doing this?"

Avery hesitated, then walked closer.

"Because I lost my dad to cancer last year. He worked at the plant. Same one you did. When I saw what happened to your family... it didn’t feel like coincidence."

"What are you saying?"

"I’m saying they knew. The plant. The company. My dad used to say there were ’leaks.’ Used to cough blood. He said it was nothing. Just the air."

Lucas’s eyes widened.

"Ellie’s school was less than five miles from that plant," he whispered.

"They’re covering it up. Framing you as the freak. When really, you’re the evidence."

Lucas collapsed to his knees. Not from grief. From rage.

Avery stepped forward.

"You want to do something about it?"

Lucas looked up, glowing like a furnace.

They called it the Santiago Event.

Not a disaster. Not a tragedy. An "event."

On a chilly October morning, the headquarters of ValenTech Energy exploded from within—no alarms, no survivors. Radiation levels spiked. Cleanup took months.

No one ever found Lucas Santiago.

A man, walking through fire.

Avery’s documentary was released posthumously. He died four months after filming the final interview. His body was riddled with tumors. But the footage survived.

"My Name Was Lucas Santiago." It became a cult classic.

The last scene showed Lucas staring into the camera.

"I wasn’t born to be a monster. But I became one because no one warned me. They buried the truth. Buried my family. Now I bury them. If I’m a weapon... then let me choose my target."

Some say he still roams the earth. A glowing ghost. A silent guardian for those who live in the shadows of industry. A monster made by man—but fueled by grief, justice, and memory.

The world forgot his name.

But the soil remembers.

Because every time it rains near the ruins of ValenTech, the ground steams. The trees shimmer. And if you’re very quiet—you can still hear a girl’s voice whisper through the air: