Pulling out my cellphone, I considered calling my father and telling him about all this. If nothing else, his being a cop would come in handy for once. That girl, Jane, needed to get back on her meds. Something stopped me from doing that, though. Perhaps it was the memory of her beating up a half-dozen grown men and saving my life. Hell, she’d saved Christine’s life as well and even if I thought she was crazy I couldn’t betray her after that.
Some things were confusing about her story, though. Things not easily explained by her just being some crazy girl who had a fixation on me. Taking down those men shouldn’t have been possible. She’d moved like a kung-fu master and displayed strength far beyond any normal girl her size. There were also those other voices which had spoken while I was on the ground, recovering from being shot.
Who were they? Were they part of some sort of weird cult? It was too insane to contemplate and I decided I needed to talk to somebody about it. Pulling out my cellphone, I called Anna and tried to think of how I would explain all this. I also thought about Christine and my mind unconsciously wandered to thinking about her naked.
Dammit.
Stop that.
Then I started thinking about Anna the same way.
Crap.
Being a teenager sucked sometimes.
The elevator doors opened up to a dimly-lit, empty parking lot as I hit the speed dial for Anna’s phone and walked out among the cars. The hospital had buses heading out to the local bus station and from there, I could catch a ride back to New Detroit.
“Come on, pick up,” I muttered, listening to Anna’s phone ring.
Seconds later, I heard Anna pick up the phone. “Robbie, is that you?”
“Yes, it is.” I was about to tell her all about what was going on when she started to babble.
“Oh, God, I saw the riot on TV! How did it turn out so bad?”
“Riot?” I asked, stunned Anna believed that garbage. “Butterfly started the fight. Whatever they’re saying is a lie.”
“Oh,” Anna said, pausing. “I’m sorry, it’s just so hard to find out what’s really going on. Not even the Internet is giving straight answers since there was a blackout in the area.”
I closed my eyes, clenching my teeth. “Damn Monarch.”
“Your father is furious.”
“What?” I asked, blinking. “You talked to my father?”
“Well, when I saw the riot, err … protest, I contacted him and let him know—”
I closed my eyes, struggling not to say something I would regret. “I see.”
“I’m sorry, did I screw up?” I could hear the concern in her voice.
She had. A pretty big screw-up as my father was going to rake me over the coals. I was still seven months from my eighteenth birthday and getting out from under his thumb. My father would do everything in his power to keep me from Christine and H.O.P.E. from now on. Worse, he could probably do that now that he knew I’d been lying about what I’d been doing with her this entire time.
“No, not at all,” I lied to her. “I’ll talk to him about this tonight and make him see reason.”
“Are you okay?” Anna asked. “I tried calling you when they started airing it but I couldn’t get through.”
“I’m fine,” I said, thinking about telling her about Jane. “Christine and I got away without anything happening to us.”
I was surprised to find myself lying to her again. I should have told her about Jane and her crazy story, but I couldn’t. Not just because if I did, it would be all over the school and probably in my father’s ear. I really cared for Anna, but I had to admit it, now, she was a blabbermouth. I needed someone who could keep secrets.
Somehow that felt wrong.
“You need to come back and tell me all about it,” Anna said. “Do you need me to pick you up? I can drive down.”
I looked around the empty parking lot with no one present. “No, it’s fine. I don’t want you spending three or four hours trying to get down here. I’m going to catch a bus and ride it back. I’ll give you a call as soon as I get back.”
“You better,” Anna said. “I love you.”
I blinked, unsure how to respond to that. “Uh—”
“See you soon!” Anna said, thankfully sparing me from having to formulate a response.
“See you soon,” I said, hearing the call end.
I thought about lying to my girlfriend then about Jane. She was a strange girl and I couldn’t help but think there was something more to her than what she claimed. I’d never met anyone who suffered mental illness before, but there was something about her calm, measured responses and answers to my questions which made me think she couldn’t be crazy. But what did that mean? She couldn’t be telling the truth. Was it some sort of prank? A plan by Monarch? No, that last bit was ridiculous. I wasn’t a conspiracy theorist, any more than I was some sort of teenage version of Stalin or Genghis Khan.
I didn’t get a chance to think further on the subject as I noticed the parking lot garage doors starting to lower and the lights turning off one by one. It plunged the empty garage into darkness and I was suddenly aware how vulnerable I was.
A second later, a single light appeared right above me. It was like a spotlight shining down and made me feel like I was on stage. That was when I saw a single figure approaching from the darkness and wondered, again, if this was some sort of put-upon.
“Who are you?” I said, taking a step back. “Jane?”
I looked around the parking garage and heard someone trying to open one of the doors beside us but failing. I also noted the elevator lights were off. Whoever was doing this had done their absolute best to make sure there were no avenues of escape.
“No, not Jane,” a thick raspy male voice spoke. “Though I wonder how you know that name.”
The figure stepped forward into the edge of the light and I saw a raggedy dressed man with a thick, dark-green trench coat, ripped jeans, and a t-shirt covered in a dozen holes. He had a thick, white scraggly beard, burn marks across his face, and bald patches on his scalp. Two fingers were missing from his left hand and there was a tattoo of a scorpion with its tail wrapped around an eye on his neck.
“My name is Solomon,” the man said. “I have followed you through hell and back. I was there when we dropped the Space Elevator in Rio, when we leveled Station Omega onto Moscow, and unleashed the New Plague upon those citizens who had traded their humanity for bread. I slew my own brother when he joined the jackbooted thugs of Monarch in exchange for his daughter’s life. I thought you were the messiah, Scorpion, the one who would redeem the world, but all you did, all we did, was ruin it.”
Solomon reached into his coat and proceeded to pull out a strange-looking curved sword. The entire thing reminded me of Highlander but it was real rather than a movie from the Eighties. I could only stare, open-mouthed, at the surreal situation unfolding before me.
“Listen, I’m not the Scorpion,” I said, continuing to step back and raising my hands. “I’m no one.”
I tried to comprehend just what was going on around me, but failed miserably. This was just nuts. It was crazy enough that I’d barely escaped a riot triggered by an unknown assassin, but now I was dealing with people who claimed to be from the future. I must’ve been going absolutely insane.
“Everyone is no one until they become someone,” Solomon said, raising his sword as it started to spark and glow. It was like something out of a science-fiction movie, which I suppose could describe everything going on. “And you must die for your sins-to-come.”
Solomon swung his sword at me as I ran away. The deranged lunatic continued swinging as I managed to stay just ahead of him. He then stopped and raised his sword before gesturing with it in front of him.
The cars in front of me exploded.
“Holy—” I was cut off by the concussive wave which threw me to the ground. Any disbelief I had about the reality of what was going on vanished in an instant.
“I brought this weapon fro
m the future, Scorpion,” Solomon said, coming up behind me. “Promised myself I would kill you with it rather than use some primitive piece of junk from this era that birthed you. And I must say, it was worth it.”
He then stopped and smiled, raising the sword’s tip to meet my eye line. “Now, do you have any final wo—”
Solomon didn’t get to finish his statement because three gunshots rang out and he stood there, motionless, before falling forward. A half-dozen feet away, I saw Jane was holding her pistol and looking down at the figure before her. Apparently, even if Solomon had a bunch of Matrix-esque moves, they weren’t enough to stop bullets.
“I’m sorry,” Jane said, though I couldn’t say whether it was to me or the man she’d just killed.
Solomon proceeded to get up, an impossibility for a man who’d just been shot three times. I thought he might have been wearing a bulletproof vest but was quickly debased of that notion. Turning his back to me, I saw three bloody wounds on his back. It was official, I was losing my mind. I was losing my mind, or I was dealing with honest-to-God superheroes … or supervillains. I wasn’t sure which was worse to be honest.
“I knew it, Jane. You’ve lost the path,” Solomon said, his voice strained from a mixture of exhaustion and pain.
“My reasons are my own,” Jane replied, tossing her gun on the ground.
Solomon lifted his sword then casually tossed it to one side. Apparently, for whatever reason, he wanted to fight her man-to-woman. “I do not wish to fight you. The Scorpion must die, though.”
“Then that’s too bad,” Jane said, her voice low and determined.
Jane and Solomon attacked one another, both charging headfirst without a single fear. It was amazing seeing them move faster than normal human beings, an old man and a teenage girl, striking at each other like lightning. Each of them blocked the other’s blows before Solomon leapt into the air and spin-kicked at Jane’s head, only for her to grab him by the leg. Jane proceeded to smash him against the side of a nearby car, which she did with immense force, denting the vehicle. Jane then slammed her foot on his neck and a cracking noise abruptly followed.
Solomon stopped moving.
I could only stare, repeatedly saying, “This isn’t happening.”
“Suck it up,” Jane said, looking over her shoulder. “We’ve only got a few minutes before the authorities arrive.”
“You killed him!” I said, looking up at her. “You’re a murderer.”
I felt stupid saying the words as soon as they left my lips, but I couldn’t help but feel it was the truth, nonetheless. I’d never seen anybody killed before and now I was witness to a man being gunned down in front of me before he was beaten to death. The fact it had been done by a girl who looked like she’d escaped from a video game didn’t help my confusion.
“I just saved your life!” Jane snapped. “Have you not gotten it through your head this is real yet?”
I prepared to curse her and call her out for her actions before looking down at Solomon. The dead man had come after me, just like Jane, but what he’d done wasn’t something which could be easily explained away.
“My God, this is real, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t that what I just said?” Jane snapped, rolling her eyes.
“I … I…” I didn’t know what to think.
“I can’t believe you grow up to be the most feared man in history,” Jane muttered, shaking her head.
“I am not the Scorpion!” I said, practically hysterical. “You’ve got the wrong guy!”
I mean, the Scorpion, really? It sounded like something out of a movie. Was I in The Terminator now, except I was Skynet? Were the X-Men about to come around the corner to start blasting me? Hell, it might as well be the case since I saw Jane pull off moves I’d only seen with special effects before. Solomon looked way too old to have done half of the things he did, too.
Jane took a deep breath, leaning down to pick up Solomon’s sword before sticking it into the back of her satchel. “You can keep saying that. Won’t make it any more true.”
“Then it must be some other Robert Stone.” I exclaimed, trying to calm down and failing. “Not me. I can’t be the one you’re looking for.”
“As mission lead, I was the only one who knew your name,” Jane explained while bending down and searching her victim’s body. “I was hoping maybe Solomon believed me when I told them I killed you, but I doubted it. Which is why I came here, hoping to confront him when he attacked you.”
I slowly began to piece together exactly what she said. “Wait … you used me as bait?”
After failing to find what she was looking for, Jane stood away from Solomon’s side. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. Did I fail to mention that?”
Jane had a bored look on her face, which I took to mean she was joking. I hoped.
“Now come on! We have to go!” Jane growled and grabbed my arm, physically dragging me toward the garage doors.
Jane pulled out Solomon’s sword with one hand and put three slashes through the door in the time it would take me just to draw the sword. Multiple slashes appeared large enough for both of us with the edges melted away. Jane jumped through, then I reluctantly followed, and we found ourselves on the busy streets of Chicago.
A running blue smart car was right in front of the hole with its door wide open.
“Get in!” Jane said.
I did a double take, trying to deal with the fact my life had turned into an action movie. “Is this your car? Did you plan for this?”
“I liberated it,” Jane said.
“You stole it?” I said, appalled.
Jane rolled her eyes and got into the front seat. “We’ll ditch the car at the city limits. Don’t worry about hospital security. I disabled the cameras before coming down to face Solomon. They won’t have a record of your face or mine.”
“This is insane,” I whispered.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
CHAPTER SIX
“This is insane,” I said again, staring out the window as we drove across the highway back to New Detroit.
“You know, I’m getting real tired of you saying that,” Jane muttered, sitting in the driver’s seat.
“I’m getting tired of saying it,” I muttered.
“Then stop,” Jane replied.
Talkative my white-haired savior was not. “Fine, I’ll just watch the grass pass by.”
“You do that.”
The country had changed a lot in the past five years with the gas shortages. Most cars were electric now and only able to be charged at special stations, the vast majority of which were owned by Heydiladae Power, a subsidiary of Butterfly. It wasn’t just Butterfly corporate logos on everything, though, as I saw billboards for its rivals Green Foods Inc. and MexiCal Industries. It seemed just about everything belonged to one of those three, though, as the days of hundreds of competing corporations were long gone.
The effects of this were a mixture of the blatant and subtle. Most cars didn’t travel across the highways anymore with the majority of interstate transit done by commercial haulers. Most of the smaller towns had either been abandoned in the wake of the Great Economic Crisis or bailed out by one of the megacorporations to become little more than depots for their efforts. It made travel almost eerie as whole regions had been reclaimed by nature while the cities grew more overcrowded and polluted every day. The corporations had a solution for that too, with their new archologies and corporate-run planned communities. I was sorry to admit my father and I lived in one of the first.
Christine speculated that, within the next ten years, ninety percent of all businesses in the country and half of them in the world would be controlled by twelve supercorporations. But now I faced a bigger problem than the country being choked to death by a corporatocracy. I was going to become a monster.
“So you’ve been saying for the past few hours,” Jane muttered, fiddling with the radio. “Don’t you have anything which isn’t complete crap in this era?”
“I suppose you all listen to dubstep and techno in the future.”
“Nope,” Jane said, pausing on a song by Patsy Cline. “Awesome. This will do.”
I stared over at her. “You’re kidding.”
“What? You don’t like country?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Your loss.”
I shook my head. “Okay, I accept you’re from the future, but you’ve got to understand this is still a pretty big deal for me. I … just can’t imagine becoming the kind of monster you’re claiming I am.”
“You’re not a monster,” Jane said, surprising me. “Yet. Events have already been changed by my interference. You might not turn into the Scorpion now.”
“But if that future’s changed, then are you even able to go home?” I asked, instantly thinking about that consequence of her actions.
Jane paused, looking up. “Going home was never an option. Even if I were somehow able to build a time machine in this era, which I have no idea how to do as I’m not an engineer, one can only ever travel into the past, as the future is always in flux.”
“So this was a one-way trip for all of you?” I asked, surprised. I wasn’t sure if I’d have ever been able do something like that. I could never leave behind my friends, family, school, and life even if I didn’t know where I was going with any of it.
Still, a part of me was fascinated by the story she was telling me. I wasn’t one hundred percent convinced she was a time traveler from the future, but all the crazy movie-fighting and people trying to kill me was evidence in that direction. There was also something about Jane, some ineffable quality, which made me believe her. I didn’t have a sister, but if I did then I imagined she’d be like Jane. Well, if my hypothetical sister was raised by timber wolves and bitten by a radioactive spider.
Jane nodded. “I wouldn’t worry about it. There wasn’t much of anything in the future worth returning to.”
“How bad was it?” I asked, my mouth dry.
“Bad,” Jane said.
“And it was my fault?” I asked, barely able to choke out the words.
Predestiny Page 4
