The Wanderer (Book 2): Stranded

by Giancioppo, Danny

  “Sam…” I tried again, achingly lifting my head up. My body was almost back in place. I just barely met my eyes– now eye– with his. Then, mine went white. “I’m going… I’m going to kill you.”

  I released all the pain, all the pressure, all the pent up everything from not only the past few minutes, but the previous several weeks. I exploded in a massive ball of cosmic energy. It sent Sam skyrocketing off, and the tower just came apart like sand beneath me.

  I collapsed through the rubble as I fell what I think was about twenty stories to the ground, and did my damndest to stay awake. I was breathing heavy through my nose, and tried to communicate with my suit as best I could.

  “Suit… Ox… if you’re still there, I could use s-some armor,” I muttered in pained breath, my eye fluttering closed from exhaustion.

  You know when you get that feeling of pins and needles in your foot, or arm, or something like that? I got that, throughout the entirety of my body, all at once, for about ten seconds. The suit was… coming out of me. Out of my skin. There was no button on the chestplate anymore either; it was just solid platings of blue and gold.

  And where my left eye used to be? The suit calibrated itself inside my head so that I could still gauge what was on my left. It’s hard to explain, because I still couldn’t see it, per say. It was more like I could just sense what was there. Like that side of the visor was now on double-time, and it was feeding my brain with all the information I needed to know about what was on my left.

  “Great. Now… w-where is he?” I muttered, struggling once again to stand. My upper half still felt like it was on fire, but I had to soldier through it. The suit took a moment to try and locate him, but without the chestplate, he wasn’t as easily able to find.

  He wasn’t dead, I was confident in that. Hit hard, surely, but not dead. Not yet.

  I took a deep breath, and lifted off the ground slowly. As the dust of the building’s collapse settled, I could see small pockets of people gazing at me, and from what I could tell, at least in that moment, they weren’t afraid. Not of me. They looked… hopeful. Frightened for their lives, yes, but seeing me… for the first time in a while, it was different.

  “Sam!” I shouted, the suit resonating my cry like a blast of thunder through the city. Didn’t know it could do that. “Sam, it’s time to end this!” I continued. “Let’s see who the hero is, after all.” I had to egg him on, and I knew that would do it.

  I heard the crack of the sound barrier, and just like that, he appeared in front of me again. He was burnt, now on more than just the sides of his head. His whole right side was either deep red, or black. His shirt was all but burned away as well. I have no idea how his pants were still as intact as they were.

  He looked on me with bewildered eyes, as though he couldn’t comprehend what he was staring at.

  “How…?” he said.

  “The suit has always been a part of me, ever since it first latched on. You think just because you brought it closer, it would stop protecting me?” I said.

  “Where’s the chestplate?” he asked. “You can just bring it in and out whenever you please now?”

  “Looks like it,” I said. He smirked, and seemed to gain some kind of new sense of bravado.

  “Why don’t you reel it in, fight me fair?” he suggested. “You always liked a fair fight, after all.”

  “We’re not children anymore, Sam. This isn’t a game,” I shut down, making him grimace. “Look around you, does this remind you of our childhood, at all? Does this look like wrestling in a basement? Or even fighting in a cafeteria?” Sam gazed around at the destruction, and then back to me. His eyes twinkled for a moment, like Sam was making a brief appearance once again.

  “No…” he admitted.

  “No,” I agreed. “Stop treating this like it is.” I paused, and shook my head. I brought the visor up. “Sam… it’s still not too late to come back from this. You’re not too far gone. I can see you fighting to beat these demons, so please, just stop this, and come with me. I can help you. You don’t have to fight alone.”

  “I… killed people” he whispered. “I don’t… I don’t know what to do.”

  “That’s…That’s okay,” I said, floating ever so closer. “We’ll figure it out, you and I. I know you don’t want to hurt me, Sam– you don’t want to hurt anyone; you’re sick. I…I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Sam glanced down, and he too noticed the people staring up at us, though now they looked up in fear. In the distance, the sirens of police, firefighters, and ambulances roared, racing to save the very people he wanted us to protect. He slowly rose his head, and stared at me, tears welling in his bloodshot eyes.

  “No… It is too late,” Sam said. “I…I can’t stop now.”

  “Sam!” I gasped. The tears were starting to hit me now, I’ll admit it. “Come on…!”

  “One of us is coming out of this a hero: you, or me,” he insisted. “But… they don’t have to watch it happen.”

  He raised his hand slowly, and turned his palm up at the sky. I opened my eyes wide, unsure what he was doing, but certain that it meant only bad things.

  “Sam, no–!” I shouted, unable to even finish the word before he did… what he did.

  His eyes glowed yellow– I guess eye-glowing was another human addition to Wanderer power influxes, not so much my own thing– and suddenly, I could feel everything stop.

  Sam had stopped time again. His eyes were still glowing a goldish-yellow, so I could only imagine this was a more heightened, stable form of his power. I glanced down, and the people were still. The rubble was still, the dust was still. The rain was even stuck in place. Everything just… stopped.

  And then, just like that, Sam lunged at me again, and punched me across the face, sending me soaring through the frozen sky.

  16

  The Protector

  Flying through the sky was one thing. Flying through the sky after being punched was another. But flying through the sky after being punched while moving through a single frame in time? That was a new one.

  Similar to when I carried the Gredace into space, everything felt more weighted and pressurized, like it was trying to refuse any shift in movement. Like moving through gelatin, I suppose.

  I steadied myself, and tried to cut through the thickness of everything, while still getting a grip on where Sam was. He bolted at my left side, and tackled me through the skies. We went soaring across the city, and for a brief moment, time slipped back into place. I could hear for just a second the sound of the air blasting back together, the rain pouring, wind howling, and all the sirens and screams coming back from beneath us. Then it paused again, life rearing back into silence.

  We were headed right over a highway, stacked with cars all trying to leave. I pushed Sam off of me, and plummeted down toward them. Regaining my balance was harder to do in a single frame of time, so I was getting dangerously close to the people. Too close, and I might’ve messed up their everything with the fallout after time’s resumption.

  Luckily, I caught myself, stopped a few yards above everyone. Immediately after, Sam caught up to me, he moving much more fluidly than I could, and I had to quickly swing at him, sending him off to the side of the highway, and fly over to him.

  I tried to grab him with my gravity manipulation, but he collapsed toward the ground at an alarming rate. I suppose that made sense, gravity being more hard to fight against when it was locked in a single frame itself.

  Still, he fought against it, and blasted back at me with his hands, making those same matter-induced impacts, only now I could see them. They were like frozen bubbles of air. I guess when he was using them before, he was really just pausing that small area of time in between us. Now he was doing the opposite.

  All the same, I shot through them, and landed my feet down on his chest, sending him into the ground. Time slipped back in again, and more explosions could be heard of the air replacing itself. The impact Sam and I had made with the ground
made a massive one, and sent me soaring back up into the downpouring skies.

  After a few seconds, time was still again, and Sam more slowly came back up to face me. I could still see tears singeing down his face, past his gold-glowing eyes.

  “You can’t keep this up forever,” I said. “It’s tiring you out.”

  “I don’t care,” he persisted. “I can’t let them see me like this. They already want you to win…”

  “Sam… you will lose,” I said. He scowled again.

  “Shut up!” he yelled, bursting toward me. He took me by surprise, and came at me quite fast, so I went with him full force. He sent us careening into the nearby bay, and we fell into a section of the water.

  Again, it was a lot like moving through a more solid gelatin. There was just an indent in the ocean where we were falling, but the water wasn’t able to fill back up the space the air would soon make. There wasn’t even a splash made.

  I grabbed him by the shoulders, and tossed him further into the ocean, slowly getting a better grasp on the weightedness, and catching up to speed with Sam. I swung at him hard, sending him farther and deeper in with every landed hit.

  He was blocking some swings, but he was flying backward all the same. He had yet to steady himself. Suddenly though, time slipped back in, and we got engulfed in water. It sounded like a battalion of torpedoes went off around us, and we were now weighted instead by the ocean, which slowed us both down quite a bit.

  We struggled underwater for a few seconds grabbing at one another’s arms, when he uppercut me, and I careened out of the water. Then he paused time again. His eyes were glowing more and more with each attempt to freeze it. Even Malek had said he couldn’t control the laws of time entirely; there was no way Sam would be able to do it. Still, he had a better grip than Malek ever did. That seemed… impossible.

  “You’ve always had everything!” Sam shouted, clearly back to his more wild-self again. “Powers you didn’t deserve, a girl you loved by your side! Friends to adore you! A whole world calling out your name!” He was unraveling; talking about things that had nothing to do with anything.

  “You had a family! A family I tried my damndest to be a part of!” I shouted, trying to fly away from him. He was hot on my tail, though. “Our friends were always there for you! Even when you and I fought! And the world never called out my name in wonder! They called it out in fear!”

  “Then it looks like I’ve finally got some of what you have!” Sam yelled, grabbing onto my foot, and yanking me down toward the earth.

  We landed in a street, and he repeatedly slammed me into cars and road, cars and road, cars and road. The pockets of air we were making only grew larger and larger by the second.

  He let go of me, and tried to leap away to get some distance before bringing time back around. I reacted too fast though, and shot off in the other direction.

  The explosion was pretty major, and there was a good amount of people nearby who dove down in terror. Before they could even look up, Sam froze time again.

  “You were supposed to be my best friend!” Sam yelled. “You were supposed to support me, protect me! But you’re turning your back on me, just like everybody else!”

  “I tried to protect you!” I shouted back. “I kept Bell off your back, I kept the public off your back, I kept our friends from thinking you were dangerous! You changed that, not me!”

  I took off, and tried to find a place less populated to fight. Almost all the streets had somebody though, and I didn’t want to risk going into or on top of any buildings. One was already too much on my conscience.

  We kept playing this game of red light green light with time for… well I would say an hour or so, but I guess for only forty or fifty seconds, tops. It felt like an hour though, that’s the important part.

  At one point, I managed to make a larger gap than usual between us, and I went up into the clouds to try and catch my breath. Weighted time was really taxing to fight in, so I could only imagine what it was doing to Sam; it was killing me. I had to keep moving though, or I’d pass out.

  As I soared around, rather quickly at that, I noticed something hiding in the clouds nearby. It was a helicopter. A black helicopter. Inscribed with three letters: U.S.B.

  “Oh no…” I muttered. That was Alannah and Bentley, probably even Bell, too. They were making their escape to wherever their hidden base safeplace was. I couldn’t stick around here.

  Just as I was trying to readjust, Sam caught up to me. In the moment, he wasn’t focused on the helicopter, but rather still only me. So, I suppose I’m to blame for what came next.

  “Sam, wait!” I warned, holding my hands out defensively. I even retracted the suit so he could see my face. See that I meant it. He paused, and stared me down hesitantly.

  He glanced over my shoulder, at the helicopter, and then quickly back to me.

  “Please, Sam, don’t,” I begged. “She’s in there! You don’t want to hurt her; you said that! Please, you don’t.”

  His face grew cold, and he extended out his arm toward the helicopter.

  “SAM STOP!” I cried out, feeling unable to move. My energy was lost, but my fear was getting to me. I couldn’t afford to lose a single one of them. Not like this. “Sam please… don’t…!”

  He took a few moments to concentrate, and then his eyes poured out yellow flames of light. His hand opened.

  He disintegrated the back of the helicopter, and slowly took out more and more, moving his power toward the front. My eye burst white, pouring out my own cosmic flames.

  “NO!”

  I was in front of him instantly, and I reared back, and punched him as hard as I could. His eyes flickered closed, and time resumed, but as he went careening into the distance, his hand still reached out.

  I darted my gaze back, and saw the helicopter drop like a stone.

  I shot as fast as I could to the chopper– which, by then, wasn’t very fast– where I could hear Alannah screaming in horror. It plummeted faster to the ground due to Sam and I’s pockets of air being burst, sending it hurtling. I reached for the underside of it, and tried to hold on to it as best I could without immediately stopping the momentum, likely killing them all. Not to mention, I felt so weak my grip was hardly doing a thing.

  The top rotor was also spinning them around wildly, so it was increasingly difficult to stay in place. Still, I pushed with everything I had left in me, and got underneath the helicopter, trying to stabilize it and bring it to a stop as we soared into the top of another nearby building.

  With a crash, I fell through the ceiling, and landed a few floors down from the roof. So far as I knew, I’d managed to keep the helicopter up there. I didn’t even bother to look at myself, where if I had I’d have noticed the broken collar bone, as well as the torn open leg and feet. Instead, I just tripped several times trying to get up, and eventually was able to float back up, and over to the vehicle.

  Everyone stayed strapped into their seats, and the pilot was out cold, if not dead. Bentley and Bell were both inside, and both groaning heavily; at the very least, they were severely concussed.

  I saw Alannah, and she wasn’t moving either. Her head was cut up, and she had blood running down her left arm. All the breath I had left rushed out of my body, and I could hear my heart in my ears.

  “Alannah…!? Alannah!”

  Just like that, lightning struck around us, and thunder boomed from the skies. I hardly even noticed.

  I grabbed her seat, and ripped it out of the helicopter with one hand, bringing it out onto a clear section of the roof. I unstrapped her, and laid her down on her back. I grabbed the medical supplies from inside the helicopter and wrapped up whatever I could, as fast as I could. Every movement was killing me– I even fell a few times in the process– but it didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered.

  “Come on Ana, come on…!” I muttered. “You’ve gotta be here for me, girl, you’ve got to!” I felt like each word was harder to say than the last. Each letter was being
replaced by heavy breaths and tears. I couldn’t even tell if the blood around her was hers or my own.

  I leant my head down at her chest, and listened for a heartbeat. It was soft, and slow. It was there, but it was dying. She was dying.

  “Come on Alannah!” I shouted, doing chest compressions on her fading heart. “Alannah come on, I love you! You’re the love of my life! Do you hear me!? We’ve got to get married! W-We have to have a life together! You and me! You have to s-stay! I can’t…!” I dipped my head down, tears streaming down my face. “I…I can’t lose you too!”

  Every compression, somewhat harder than the last. Every push, another gust of wind, or another bolt of lightning flung to the ground; another explosive boom of thunder overhead. The skies were almost hurling rain out like waves from the ocean.

  “Alannah…” Sam gasped as he landed behind me. He sounded like himself again. He sounded afraid. Heartbroken. “J-Jason, I’m…I’m sorry, I–!” he said.

  I turned, and walked toward him. He just stood there, staring right past me at a bloody Alannah, unconscious on the roof. The rain fell between us like a blockade, trying in every way to keep us apart. It didn’t.

  I reared back, and punched him right in the face. He only fell to the ground, still staring at Alannah. I sluggishly pulled him back up, and cracked my fist across his face again. After the third or fourth hit, he glanced back to me, and tried to block my attacks. We fought slowly, sloppily, like we were only men, and yet now every movement seemed to hurt more than anything else.

  “She’s…She’s dying…!” Sam stammered through my punches, trying to hold me off. “Alannah’s dying– J-Jason!” He pressed his bloody hand up against my face, trying to push me away.

  “Shut up!” I screamed, throwing him back onto the ground. Blood dripped down the side of my head. His chest, arms, and legs were covered in his own. The rain only sloshed it along our bodies.

  “Jason, p-please!” he shouted. “You’re just going to…to let her die!?”

  I grabbed him by the throat. He scratched at my face, tried to smack my arm away, but I stood still, staring him right in his crazed, terrified eyes.