The room is in darkness. There are missed calls on my phone. Dad. I just want everything to go away so I won't hurt anyone. I don't want there to be even a remote chance I could hurt someone.
I wish Mom was here. But then, if she was, I'd have to push her away too.
She would get hurt, like everyone else. These powers help people but I can't shake the feeling that they were given to the wrong person. They should have gone to somebody more put together, more in control, who can handle the responsibility.
Not me.
This was a mistake. It has to have been. I wish I could go to a clerk somewhere and get this all clarified.
"Surely an error was made, please take these powers and give them to someone who doesn't get little children killed."
I see that creature's fangs and wonder if there's more out there. The police have said that they can't make heads or tails of it and can't trace where it came from. Is it another alien, like Mom?
Or something that's been here all along?
Part of me knows I should be doing what I can to look into it, to figure out what's going on. But I would probably screw that up too. They're better off without me lumbering around, making a mess of that process too.
When I sleep there's no escape. The visions of what happened haunt me and my brain invents new, horrible scenarios that result in more death and destruction. It is as taxing to sleep as the hours I'm awake are a torment.
Taylor, God bless her, puts on a happy face. She's excessively cheerful, apparently believing that I'm not responding to her usual tough love. But that isn't working either.
I try not to be rude. I tell her "I'm okay" and try to be convincing when I tell her I've "moved on" and that the stuff on TV and online "doesn't bother me."
But we both know I'm lying.
They are right. I was the wrong person. I'll keep helping because there's nobody else who can, but I know in my heart that somebody – anybody – else could do a better job.
I know that I am far from "Xtra." I am less than. Way less than.
Chapter 83
Peeta Carmichael has had an obsession with visiting the Lincoln Memorial for longer than she can even remember. It has been one of the foremost thoughts in her mind for most of her life. As a child she read everything she could get her hands on about the legendary structure.
She reveres the man it celebrates, what he stood for, and she feels the tragedy of his tragic murder as if it just happened.
Her parents could never afford to take her there. It was a pipe dream, something far wealthier people than her did. Washington, D.C. was thousands of miles east of her meager surroundings. Her parents struggled to keep the lights on. Traipsing across the country to visit statues was just something silly little girls dreamt about.
But today, finally, she is here.
Peeta is much older. There are crow's feet at the edges of her eyes now. There are grey streaks in her formerly jet-black hair. But she is here, nonetheless.
And Madelyn, her fourteen-year-old daughter, could not care less.
"Are we done?" Madelyn asks, rolling her eyes in that way every teenager has perfected.
"Are you crazy?" Peeta replies, looking at one of the stone columns at the front corner of the Memorial. "We haven't even gone in yet."
She gestures to the iconic steps leading to the gigantic statue of Abraham Lincoln.
How is she not excited? Peeta wonders.
Her daughter's life has been a lot easier than Peeta's growing up. Sure, there were some bumps along the way. The divorce has been rough and going to visit her father on the weekend is not the consistency she would prefer for her girl's teenage years, but they're fumbling their way through it all together.
Traveling to Washington, seeing the sights – she should appreciate it more. Thinking back to her childhood and the luxuries she could never dream of, Peeta reassures herself. Madelyn's going to be dragged kicking and screaming to enlightenment.
She'll thank me for it later.
Peeta reaches for her daughter's hand and pulls her gently.
"Come on."
I missed out. You won't.
###
Madden Blanc hovers in the sky hundreds of feet above the Lincoln Memorial. The advanced engine in his suit keeps him locked in one spot without any effort. His arms are crossed as he surveys the scene below him.
Tourists flock to this monument to an inferior man. Blanc doesn't begrudge Lincoln's elevated spot in history, but he is disgusted by the banality of his murder. The great man, felled by a simple bullet to his brain. Lincoln had opened himself to such a simplistic attack, not foreseeing the hate and animosity around him. He had given his assassin an opening by openly attending the play at Ford's Theater.
Blanc feels he is superior to Lincoln. History would certainly reflect that, he thought. Blanc considers all the variables, all the outcomes – unlike Lincoln. He knows better than The Overseers, and certainly more than Carla Logan.
He is a titan of industry, a financial mastermind, the most advanced technologist. She is a simple black girl, who let a few setbacks destroy her world. She had been given genetic gifts and instead of using them to make the world bow to her she was engaged in futility, doing "good."
It repulses him.
Madden Blanc believes he will succeed where others had failed. He will break Carla Logan right here, in front of Lincoln and the world. Then he would be revered, openly, for the man he has been all along. The rightful one, the alpha, the apex predator.
###
"Is it her?" The man asks, looking up at the shiny grey-green armor in the clear sky.
"No," replies another. "It's green. Probably some kind of viral marketing or something."
There was a collective sigh. Many of the tourists had come to Washington hoping to see The Xtra. Sightings of her had been infrequent over the last few days and she hadn't spoken to anyone for more than a word or two, but she was still something far out of the ordinary of their humdrum lives.
Even the ones who had started to question whether there was any point to her – remember how that little boy died? – they still wanted to see the superpowered woman.
People begin to gather at the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial steps to snap photos of the thing hovering in the sky. Anything weird or out of the ordinary is worth posting online anyway. Someone would see it, someone would like it, someone would share it. That always feels like it means something. Maybe.
The figure floats down closer to the ground and people can now see the details of the green armor.
A robot, maybe? Some wonder.
"Looks like some idiot," one man offers up loudly though nobody asked.
They all stand there watching, looking with morbid curiosity to see what's next.
Blanc puts an arm out and the liquid metal begins to shimmy and squirm again. This time, it pools into a clump where his fist is and then hardens into a shape that looks like a miniature cannon.
He points his arm down, directly pointing to the crowd.
A few people step away, cautiously. The majority of them remain frozen in place, insisting on seeing this "show" or whatever it is, letting the crowd make a group decision rather than listening to their common sense and relying on their instincts.
Blanc is not surprised by this but it quickly encapsulates what he hates about the "normal" man and woman. Their inability to strategize, theorize, game plan for anything but the immediate moment. Their love of spectacle and big bright lights and noises.
He hates them and the way they have fawned over The Xtra.
Aiming to the left and right of the main cluster of tourists he fires his weapon.
Gigantic electric bolts leap out of the cannon and hurl themselves dozens of feet through the air. People can feel the hairs on their arms stand up as static electricity bounces around everything.
The bolts smack into those who were moving away from the crowd and instantly burns away at their flesh. A second later the intense heat sc
orches through their bones and skulls. Soon all that is let is charred piles of dust.
Instant death.
The screaming immediately follows as the tourists realize they are under attack.
Blanc fires more bolts to the north and south of the crowd, herding them in. He lowers himself until he is just a couple of feet above them.
From this vantage point they can see his face and his wicked smile. Some of them recognize him. The rich guy, from TV. Most are too afraid to make the connection. They just know that they can smell the burnt bodies of people who were right next to them moments ago.
Now the group dynamic has shifted. They all want to run away, get as far from the carnage as possible. But it is too late. He has them where he wants them to be.
Blanc smiles as he watches the realization dawn on their faces.
Idiots. Simple-minded idiots.
He has been above them for so long, but at a distance. This is different. He can see their spirit being crushed, not through a video screen, but in person.
He likes it. He enjoys it. This fills a need he had been unaware of this far into his life. Mentally he again kicks himself for waiting so long for this, for subsuming himself to The Overseers instead of taking his rightful place above it all.
Today is the first day, he thinks. The first day of a new world.
"Take out your cameras," he says. Speakers on the exterior of the suit amplify his voice. It adds a cold, metallic filter that distorts his original tone. He likes it. He can see that its dispassionate inhumanity makes them even more frightened.
His voice bounces off the Memorial. Where once great speeches appealed to the better angels of human nature, they now demand submission and obedience.
The tourists comply. Some had already been recording, indulging in the modern human obsession with documenting everything in existence.
Blanc watches these subservient creatures as they follow his order. Man, woman, young, old. They all do as he says.
As it should be.
"Good," he says. Blanc slightly lowers his arm, but it still points down, at the crowd.
"Make sure you get all of this and send it out online right now. Right away."
The crowd presses the buttons on their devices necessary to comply with his request. He again grins. They are putty in his hands. Clay to be molded into a shrine honoring him.
I'm going to have so much fun after this is done.
His mind turns to lewd thoughts, of pain and suffering from all corners as he runs roughshod over millions of lives, now all in total thrall to him. He nearly salivates thinking about the possibility that Earth could just be a stepping stone.
Thanks to The Overseers he knows there is more to the universe. They would be next. Then others.
It will just take one act. Today.
"If The Xtra doesn't come here, right now, today, I will kill everyone here. Everyone."
The tourists are too afraid to gasp and cry. They are frozen still in fear. They transmit the demand across the world, knowing that the response to their message – that they have delivered – will determine if they get to live.
They have no control over whether they will live or die. This man does.
Right now, he is God.
Chapter 84
I'm in that spot between awake and sleep when I feel Taylor trying to shake me. My body barely moves because she's just not strong enough to lift me anymore. But she is loud and is bellowing in my ear.
"Get up! Get up!" she screams. Her tone is bloodcurdling.
I turn and look at her.
"What?"
"You have to get up. He's going to kill them. At the Lincoln Memorial. He incinerated them and he's going to do more. Carla! You have to get up."
I roll out of the bed. As my feet hit the ground I get that feeling again, the same one I keep getting now. Somebody will get hurt. Somebody will die. Because of what I do, because of a mistake I make.
Taylor keeps pulling at my arm. She grabs my clothes and throws them at me. I feel like I'm sleepwalking.
I'll go do this thing and get right back into bed.
Away from everyone. So I won't have any more blood on my hands.
Unless it's another reptile man, how bad could it be?
Chapter 85
Madden Blanc lifts his arm, re-aiming the cannon at the end. He lazily fires a few bolts and the stones at the Memorial's base crack under the intensity of the energy. What has been in place for decades is undone in seconds. This is not lost on Blanc.
He can see the opportunity standing before him. He just needs to drop one more piece of the puzzle into place and it will be complete.
He is impatient.
Where is she?
On the inside of his helmet he can not only see what is in front of him, but he is also receiving video transmissions. He is on nearly every television network. They are either broadcasting live footage of him hovering above the scene or showing his attack, over and over.
Some of the reports have begun to confirm who he is, and that has led to more shock and surprise. "Business leader," "famed CEO," "genius," and other related descriptors shoot around as they try to come to grips with what is happening.
For Blanc, the tone is amusing. What he is doing right now is just a more open version of what he has been doing for a long time. They just chose to assume he was a benevolent figure before.
He thinks of all the people he had displaced, killed, or simply left unemployed. The waves of human suffering he had built his empire on. Just because the destruction had occurred away from the cameras it had been "okay."
But now, because he had killed "innocents" at Lincoln's feet, it was supposedly different and worse? He didn't try to understand it. This was beneath him.
Where is she?
Time to really emphasize his threat.
He looks down at the crowd again. There. A pretty teenage girl. She would become today's lesson. He is teaching the world about its new commander, its new Emperor. In the grand scheme, she is nothing.
"You," he says, pointing at her. His voice is so loud, piercing the terrified quiet below. It feels like the only sound in Washington. "Step here." He beckons to her in a slow, cruel fashion, enjoying every second of fear it instills.
###
Madelyn Carmichael makes a tentative step forward after the man in green singles her out.
She is still holding her mother Peeta's hand. They haven't let go of each other since this madness began. Neither one even realizes it. It is instinct. Mother and child, a bond immediately renewed when danger emerges. There is no longer parental disappointment at teenage disinterest. No longer teenage resentment for an overbearing parent. Just mother and child.
Peeta pulls back on her girl. She's not going to have this happen.
"No," she says, intending the message for both her girl and the terrorist in the sky above them. "No. She's not coming any closer. Not an inch."
Peeta uses her other hand and places it in front of her girl. She steps forward now, putting her body in front of Madelyn's. The teenager sucks in her breath in reaction to her mother's motion.
"Mom," she barely squeaks out. Peeta squeezes her hand in response. No words are necessary.
I won't let you go. He can't have you. This is not negotiable.
"It wasn't a request," Blanc booms. "I told her what to do. And she'll do it. This is how things are now."
With his other hand, the arm cannon, Blanc fires at them. It is a smaller blast than before, just a few inches wide. It lands at Peeta's feet and she can feel the electrical charge warm her legs. She can feel the little pieces of debris that have been kicked up slap against her. Little pebbles.
There is a small plume of smoke at the impact point. She can smell it. The odor echoes the dead next to her. She knows what can happen if she disobeys Blanc. It isn't.
She does not move.
"I am not playing," Blanc says. "I am not here to play games with you – none of you. You are ants.
Insignificant. Meaningless. I am here for the Xtra. To break her. To break all of you. And your little brat will do as I say."
"Mom, I –" Madelyn begins to speak.
"No," Peeta says, cutting her off. She squeezes her hand again to make the point clear. She has drawn a line in the sand she will not cross. This little girl has been her entire world since the minute she was born. All the annoyances and conflicts of teenage life fade away. She is her little girl, her reason for existing, and she isn't going to give her up to anybody.
Blanc laughs. The speakers continue to distort the sound and it makes it even more cruel than the original. It is almost otherworldly. Or from hell. It is bone-chilling in its indifference.
"Last chance," he says. He points to the spot in front of him where he wants Madelyn to go. "Last time. Move it."
Peeta responds by simultaneously taking a step forward and pushing Madelyn further back, out of harm's way. She makes it clear to Blanc that complying is off the table.
"You're tough and scary," she says, her voice quivering with so much emotion that the words can barely come out.
"I'm nobody. I'm just a mom. But this little girl, my Madelyn, is everything. She is my entire heart. My entire soul. You can't have her. Just because you demand it. Because you have power and you murder, and you demand it. You can't have her."
Blanc laughs again, louder than last time. He is nearly in hysterics watching the situation below him unfold. He is loving it.
"We can stand up," Peeta continues. "We have to stand up. I've seen The Xtra. She's a kid, really, just a bit older than my girl. A young woman. But she stands up for what's right. I've seen her, time and time again, helping people. Regular people."
"She could use those powers of her to make billions of dollars. She could be like you and threaten and kill and hurt people, to get power. But she doesn't. I'm standing up for my girl like Xtra stands up for the rest of us. You can't have my girl."
Blanc steadies his arm.
"Stupid," he replies.
The Xtra- Volume One Page 19
