Allison

by Strand, Jeff

  “Excuse me?”

  “The pregnant lady seems to be going into labor.”

  “Handle it.”

  “Understood, sir. But, uh, more information on how we should handle it would be appreciated.”

  “Handle it. I don’t have time for this.”

  The man set the walkie-talkie back down, looking panicked.

  Maggie squeezed her eyes shut and cried out in pain.

  It looked like she’d wet her pants. Cody hadn’t expected her to pee herself to make it look like her water had broken, but he appreciated the extra effort.

  She opened her eyes and looked over at him. “It’s really happening.”

  Oh, shit.

  That wasn’t good.

  “We need to get her to a hospital!” Cody said.

  The man who’d spoken with Winlaw shook his head. Even in the bad light, Cody could see that he’d gone completely pale. “She’s not going anywhere.”

  “She’s having a baby!”

  “I know that! Her timing sucks! There’s nothing we can do!”

  Maggie cried out again.

  Then, outside the cabin, Cody heard even more screams.

  26

  Allison let out a shriek and waved both of her hands in the air, as if she was trying to part the Red Sea.

  The crowd of men did not part, but three or four of them in the front let out shrieks of their own as their arms twisted around. Though she couldn’t hear the cracking sounds over all of the other noise, she was confident that they were quite loud.

  She stopped running.

  She waved her hands again, trying to imagine a wave of energy flowing through them to the legs of her closest attackers. One of the men’s legs bent upwards, like he was trying to kick himself in the face. He bellowed in pain and fell forward, landing hard on that very leg, sending a spurt of blood flying from his knee.

  The men on either side of him suffered very similar fates. One hit the ground with such a strong impact that if they’d been on concrete instead of dirt, she believed that his face would have burst open like a water balloon. Even on this softer surface, plenty of blood was gushing from his nose as he lifted his head to scream.

  And now some of the men behind them tripped over their fallen comrades. Others stopped, because they hadn’t expected the men in front to start screaming before they even reached their target.

  Allison shrieked again, the better to harness all of the chaos she felt inside, and slashed at the air. She was a vicious lioness, clawing at her prey.

  Bones were breaking all over the place. Fingers, wrists, arms, shoulders.

  She kept slashing. Ribs, hips, legs, feet.

  Men kept dropping to the ground, clutching their broken limbs.

  She’d warned them. Nobody could say she hadn’t warned them.

  She kept shrieking, even though her throat was already beginning to hurt, and waved even more frantically. One man’s jaw snapped down, splitting his cheeks. Another had a bone burst through the side of his neck. Another had both of his legs snap at once, down at the shins, like he was doing some sort of crazy dance move.

  Allison took a few steps back.

  How many men were on the ground already? Ten? Eleven? Not quite half, but she’d made a serious dent in their ranks. And the ones who remained upright seemed to be very unsure of themselves.

  A dart flew past her, almost hitting her in the neck.

  Oh, hell no.

  Who was holding it? It was a guy off to the side, not far away, and he probably would have hit her for sure if he’d been able to more calmly take aim. Presumably it was a tranquilizer dart. She couldn’t have that.

  She swung her fist at him, as if trying to punch him from a distance.

  His forehead burst open. It was as if she’d bashed him with an iron mallet as hard as she possibly could. He fell onto his back and did not make another attempt to fire at her with the tranquilizer gun.

  Was he the only one who had one of those?

  Unlikely.

  She scanned the bloody crowd. Yep, there was another guy pointing one at her. She swiped her hand, and his aim changed, causing him to shoot the guy in front of him. That wasn’t Allison’s intention, but it worked well enough, she supposed. He still had the gun, though. She squeezed her fist, and his entire arm turned red. He dropped the gun.

  Allison continued waving her arms, conducting her symphony of carnage.

  Winlaw sat by the window of his cabin, watching the encounter outside.

  This was going, very, very badly.

  She was more powerful than he could ever have imagined, and he no longer wanted anything to do with her. He’d assumed that he could control her. He couldn’t control somebody who was out there slaughtering two-dozen men without even touching them.

  He wasn’t sure if he should order them to retreat, and try to salvage a small portion of his workforce, or just tell them to kill her.

  Better to have them kill her.

  “What the hell is going on out there?” asked one of the guards.

  “Who gives a shit?” asked his partner, pointing to Maggie. “I didn’t sign up for this! We can’t just stand here and watch while she has a baby on the floor!”

  “No, you can’t!” said Cody. “Cut her feet free!”

  “We can’t do that.”

  “You think she’s going to run away while she’s giving birth? Cut her goddamn feet free! What’s the matter with you?”

  The guard stood there for a moment, frozen in indecision. Then he cut the duct tape binding Maggie’s feet.

  If Maggie had been faking her labor pains, as originally planned, this would be the moment where she took surprise action against their captors. Instead, she spread her legs and continued to cry out in pain.

  Allison flung one of the men into the air. He didn’t get a lot of height, seven or eight feet, but he crashed down upon two of the other men who’d still been standing.

  With even more practice, Allison might one day be able to lift an entire group of twenty-five men high into the air. Release them and let them all splatter to the ground. Problem solved.

  One man got close enough to grab her arm.

  She grabbed the arm that had grabbed her arm.

  Then she tugged on it.

  Her mind did most of the work, but his entire arm tore off at the shoulder. She tossed it away instead of beating him with it.

  She wondered if she could do that again with his other arm.

  Yep, she could.

  The armless man wasn’t dead yet, but he would be soon enough, so she had to turn her attention to other problems. Another man jabbed at her with his needle, and she flinched with fear at the near-miss. His eyeballs burst. Not what she’d meant to make happen.

  A couple of men near the back turned and ran. Allison didn’t blame them. And if they’d run away as soon as the grisly events in the Angela Wood Campground began, she might have let them go. But in her own self-interest, and that of Cody, she had to make sure they weren’t running off to get a machine gun or something, and therefore they needed to die.

  Could she break their backs from this distance?

  She made a gesture that approximated what she’d do if they were right in front of her and she was trying to snap their spinal columns with her bare hands. It didn’t work. A guy closer to her did suddenly lurch forward with a huge red splotch on the front of his shirt, like the moment right before the chest-burster made its appearance in Alien.

  She tried again.

  Their backs didn’t break, at least not as far as she could tell, but one’s legs broke and the other’s neck snapped. It was weird that she made the same gesture with both hands and yet one impacted a man’s legs and the other impacted a man’s neck, but she was still new to wholesale slaughter.

  Most of the men were lying on the ground. Not many of them were dead—they were mostly just broken and mangled and not much of a problem for her at the moment.

  She stepped over one, and he
immediately slammed a hypodermic needle into her leg.

  It didn’t sting, though. As far as she could tell, the needle broke off on her jeans instead of puncturing her calf. She punched down. He gasped for breath as his hands went to his broken windpipe.

  One guy, not learning the lesson of everybody around him, let out some sort of battle cry and rushed at her, a hypodermic needle held mightily above his head. She broke his arm, then flung him into the air, where he landed upon the most mangled of the corpses.

  Only six or seven men were left.

  After breaking a neck, they were easier to count. Six left.

  “Take her panties off!” Cody said.

  The guard hesitated.

  “She can’t have a baby through her underwear! Jesus Christ! Cut me free! I’ll take care of it!”

  “Not a chance,” the guard informed him.

  “Then handle it! Get some warm water! Get a towel!”

  “We weren’t prepared for this!”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t have brought a pregnant woman out to a cabin! This is on you!”

  “I’m not hearing as many screams outside,” said the other guard. “I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t worry about what’s happening outside,” Cody told him. “Worry about what’s happening right here in front of you. You assholes get to be honorary obstetricians, so you’d better rise to the occasion!”

  The first guard reached under Maggie’s dressed and pulled off her panties.

  “It’s coming!” Maggie wailed, clenching her fists so tightly that Cody was confident she would have smashed his bones into powder if he were holding her hand and telling her to breathe.

  The guard looked. “Oh, shit, it really is!”

  Winlaw was repeatedly giving the order to kill, yet nobody was paying attention to the walkie-talkies. He could open the door and shout it out, but as of the last couple of minutes he was not very keen on giving away his location. He should have stayed back at his office. How could he have possibly known that twenty-five men wouldn’t be enough?

  He did have a very solid answer about whether it was telekinesis or military training, not that it mattered anymore.

  He’d just have to wait here and hope that her rampage did not involve going cabin to cabin seeking new victims.

  Only four men remained upright, and one of them was limping pretty bad, while another had a dangling arm with no fewer than three visible bones protruding through his shirt. None of them were currently trying to attack her.

  “Please,” one of them said. “Enough.”

  Allison broke his neck.

  “You’re a fucking monster,” another said.

  “I gave you a warning. I stood right over there and gave a great big speech offering you the chance to bail. I mean, yeah, I would’ve been dubious, too, but it was twenty-five of you against one woman. If your boss was that scared of me, shouldn’t you have realized that this wasn’t a great place to be?”

  “I surrender,” said the one who’d said please and enough.

  “I don’t accept your surrender,” Allison told him. “I don’t want any prisoners, and I don’t want anybody around to vow vengeance against me.”

  She broke his shoulder, then recalibrated and broke his neck.

  “You’ll rot in hell for this,” the man who’d called her a monster said.

  She broke his neck as well.

  She didn’t like being a cold-blooded killer. She’d been left with no choice. If Winlaw had brought a hundred men here, she would have killed all hundred of them. If he’d brought two, there’d only be two fatalities. This was on him.

  She slammed the two remaining men into each other as hard as she could. They didn’t fall, so she did it a few more times, until they dropped to the ground.

  Allison knew that she was going to have a very hard time coping with what she’d done once she was removed from the immediacy of the situation. Warning or not, she’d murdered a hell of a lot of people in a brutal manner, and she’d be having nightmares about this for the rest of her life. The whole cliché of seeing it every time she closed her eyes might be entirely accurate. This was going to haunt her.

  Especially the next part.

  Because she couldn’t have the men who were still alive going to the hospital and speaking about what had happened. Describing her. Taking away her ability to run away from this forever.

  She cracked her knuckles, and violently waved her hands back and forth.

  Bones shattered. Blood sprayed into the air as the men came apart. Limbs separated from bodies. Heads were torn off by her invisible hands.

  The moans of agony grew quieter.

  Soon the men were silent enough that she could hear the bones breaking. Maybe even hear the flow of blood, though that may have been her imagination.

  She kept going, covering the entire area in front of her, until the bodies weren’t simply dead, they were unrecognizable. It was going to take a lot of time and effort to sort out the individual people who were in this pile of gore.

  Finally, it was time to quit. All she could hear was a ringing in her ears.

  No. There were more cries of pain. A woman. Coming from one of the cabins near the back.

  She ran toward it.

  The door to a different cabin opened. A man stepped out.

  Though she’d made up her own mental picture, it occurred to her that she didn’t actually know what Winlaw looked like. She was almost positive this was him, though.

  She tried to break his neck.

  He was too far away.

  He pointed a gun at her.

  Allison desperately tried to break his arm before he could squeeze the trigger.

  He fired.

  Allison fell.

  27

  “Cut my hands free, for God’s sake!” Cody shouted. “If you’re not going to help, let me do it! I’ve delivered babies before! You want the death of a preemie on your conscience?”

  The first guard, who’d slammed his hand over his mouth and gagged a few times but hadn’t actually thrown up, shook his head.

  “You’re going to let the baby be born on a filthy floor? Let me help!”

  “Let him help,” said the second guard, who looked queasy.

  “I’ll cut your hands loose but not your feet,” said the first guard. “Try anything and this knife goes into your face.”

  Cody decided not to try anything.

  Allison sat up.

  She couldn’t feel anything, but he’d hit her right beneath the collarbone and it was bad.

  Winlaw hadn’t lowered the gun.

  Allison had never been so frightened or angry in her life. After all of this, it ended with her getting shot, and the certain execution of Cody. And now the pain was starting—it had just taken a moment to kick in.

  Pain. Fear. Anger.

  She stared right at Winlaw and swiped at him.

  His entire face tore off.

  He dropped the gun.

  She swiped again.

  Because he was wearing a shirt, she couldn’t see exactly what happened to his chest, but the shirt immediately turned red and parts began to spew out from the bottom. She could only identify his intestines for certain.

  Winlaw dropped to his knees. He tried to cross his arms over his stomach to keep everything inside, but that wasn’t working at all, and his face was within reach and maybe he should try to pick it up, no, that was stupid, but it was getting all dirty, could you graft somebody’s face back on, was he going to die, yes, he was going to die, he hoped Olivia got her revenge on Daxton, he hoped she made him suffer, oh God his face hurt, he wasn’t going to be able to keep his balance much longer, maybe it was time to just give up and die, yeah, death sounded good, good-bye...

  The cabin door opened.

  Thick wounds appeared across both guards’ necks, like a ghost had slashed their throats.

  Allison stepped into the cabin. She’d been shot and looked like a scary crazy woman, but Cody had never bee
n more relieved to see anybody in his life.

  Allison looked at Maggie. “Is she—?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you handle it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. I’m going to get some duct tape for my bullet hole. I’ll be back.”

  Maggie leaned against the wall, holding her baby. Cody had decided not to cut the umbilical cord with a germ-laden knife, so it was a pretty nasty sight, but as far as he could tell, the baby was healthy.

  “I’m going to find Allison,” Cody told her. “She’s been gone too long.”

  “No, I’m here,” said Allison, stepping into the cabin. Her wound had indeed been duct-taped up. “Just a little slow and woozy.”

  Maggie’s eyes went wide with fright. “Please, please, please don’t hurt me,” she begged.

  Allison crouched down next to her. “You don’t deserve to live.”

  Maggie held up her newborn. “But she’s innocent.”

  “And that is why I’m going to have mercy on you. You get to live. And you are going to do what it takes to be the best fucking mother on the planet. Mother of the Year. I’ll check up on you. Consider me your homicidal child protection services. Because this kid is the only reason you’re not on the pile of corpses with the rest of them, and I reserve the right to change my mind any fucking time I want. Whatever Winlaw was going to do to you, I’ll do much worse. Are we totally clear on this?”

  Maggie vigorously nodded.

  Allison turned to Cody. “It’s a bad mess out there. However gruesome you think it is, double that image in your mind. Triple it. Really all I need from you is to keep your mouth shut. You were never here. You were never kidnapped. Whatever conclusion is drawn when people analyze the splatter out there, they won’t guess correctly. Everybody who could tie me to this is dead. I didn’t even use my own phone to talk to them. Maybe I can salvage my old life, even keep my job as long as I don’t get laid off, but I’m going to disappear for a while.”