Then the ceiling exploded.
9:15 AM
It all happened too quickly for Allison to absorb it all at once. Jessica Mason came from out of nowhere. One minute Allison was trying to talk to her, the next, Zack was yelling, “Allie, look out!”
With those words Allison felt him shove her toward the walkway. Allison stumbled forward, falling to the carpet, as the world erupted around her. It was as if hell itself opened above them. The air was sucked out of her lungs as a burning wind blew her to the ground.
Burning debris fell on her back, and Allison rolled away, out from under it. She scrambled away until she could think clearly enough to realize that she wasn’t on fire herself. Then she looked back the way she had come.
There was nothing back there but a solid wall of smoke, roiling toward her. Behind it, all she could see were flickering orange highlights that hissed and spat at her.
“Zack!” Her voice was hoarse, and sucking in the smoke made her gag. “Zack!” She yelled between coughs.
Only the spitting flames responded to her. The smoke stung her eyes, blurring her vision. She pushed herself to her knees and looked around, but everything had turned an even gray. The walkway filled with opaque smoke. Allison began to feel dizzy.
Air, I need air or I’m going to drop right here.
She felt out next to her with her teek, locking it into the near-insubstantial matter of the window. Then she pushed it away from her.
She heard a crack as the window freed itself of its frame, and smoke began pouring out the hole in the walkway. She could breathe a little now. Allison blew out another window and started standing up.
“Zack!” Her eyes still watered. She kept telling herself that he was on the other side of that conflagration and couldn’t hear her.
With the two windows open, the air cleared around her, enough so that breathing didn’t cause her chest to ache. She tried to teek a third window, and felt a dull, dead sphere of interference.
She almost thought it was Zack, but it was coming from the wrong side of the walkway. It was suddenly difficult for her to breathe for reasons that had nothing to do with the smoke. She turned, shaking, and faced the direction of the interference.
Jessica had to be stopped, and Allison knew of only one way to stop her. She dove trough the smoke at the interference. Even though she couldn’t see through the smoke, she was able to aim at the center of her teek’s dead zone. Then she passed the threshold, and her teek was blind to her—
And she knew that Jessica’s pyrokinesis would be just as dead, as long as they were this close to each other.
Allison slammed into Jessica’s mid-section in a flying tackle. Jessica hadn’t been expecting it. She folded over and fell to the ground in a heap under Allison. Allison scrambled for Jessica’s hands, to pin her—
“Bitch,” Jessica hissed at her through soot-blackened lips. Allison felt nails rake her face. She managed to grab hold of one hand in the tangle of limbs, but Jessica pounded and clawed at her with her other hand.
“Stop it.” The smoke blurred Allison’s eyes as she fought for control.
She may have stopped Jessica from burning anything more, but she was sprawled on top of someone older than her and as big as Macy.
“Stop it,” Allison pleaded, “Before anyone else is hurt—”
Allison felt the breath forced from her lungs as Jessica slammed a knee up into her kidney. The pain sucked all the strength from her limbs and Allison fell on her side.
Jessica rolled over, on top of her, wrapping her hands around Allison’s neck. “But I want people hurt,” Jessica said as she began to squeeze.
Allison struggled madly against her, bucking, kicking, clawing at Jessica’s face. But, like Chuck, Jessica was just too heavy for her to move. It felt as everything was beginning to spin, and weirdly, the world began to lighten—
The smoke cleared. Beyond Jessica’s face, Allison could see the sky through the glass ceiling of the walkway. With the lack of air, it almost felt as if she was falling up into it. She knew she could give up, and things would be so much easier.
Even as the thought crossed her mind, Allison remembered her own voice saying, “… even if people die.”
She had promised Macy. Giving up wasn’t an option anymore, if it ever had been. With that thought, she balled her hand into a fist and brought it up to Jessica’s chin as hard as she could. The impact felt as if it broke her thumb. It did break Jessica’s grip on her neck, allowing Allison to suck in deep greedy gasps of the clearing air.
Jessica’s head snapped back, and one hand went to her face. She wiped blood away from hurt lip, her expression darkening, when the windows around them began shattering.
Allison watched in horror as blood erupted from Jessica’s chest and mouth. It seemed that Jessica was already falling on top of her before she heard the first echoes of the gunshots.
Oh God, that’s what Zack meant. They were driving us, here to the walkway, nothing more than an exposed glass tube that the snipers can shoot us through. The smoke had been our only cover.
Allison’s thoughts spun in chaotic spirals as guns continued firing, and glass sprayed across the interior of the walkway. Being flat on the ground had been the only thing that had saved her.
Jessica had been hit two or three times, and blood leaked everywhere, coating Allison. Worst of all, Jessica still moved.
She reached up and put a hand on Allison’s face. Allison winced, but it wasn’t an attack. As gunshots played out above them, Jessica stared into Allison’s eyes. She coughed a few times, spitting blood from her mouth and nose…
“Your turn I guess,” Jessica said.
Then she closed her eyes and rested her head against Allison’s chest. Allison watched as her breathing came to a shuddering halt.
Allison realized that, until that point, she had never truly hated anything before.
She stayed there as the smoke continued clearing, and as the gunfire came to a halt. She stayed there, immobile, understanding what Jessica had felt. Prometheus had rained so much destruction on so many lives that even Jessica’s lashing out seemed only justice.
A team of men entered the opposite end of the walkway, emerging from the direction that Jessica had come. Leading the team was a man in a suit. His hair was slate gray, and he wore a bald eagle pin in his tie. He looked unmoved by the carnage in front of him. He spoke into a little phone and Allison could hear him say, “Stand down, we’re securing the area. Get some teams out to handle the other security breaches.”
Agent Fred Jackson, ASI…
THIRTY ONE
NAVARRO COUNTY, TX: Wednesday November 3, 1999
9:20 AM
When she saw Fred Jackson, Allison realized that she could feel out with her teek. The interference from Jessica was gone now. Jessica was gone now. The evaporation of the interference brought her death home to Allison more than the body lying on top of her.
“Watch your approach,” Fred told the people behind him. “The snipers may not have cleaned the area. If you see a movement, shoot.”
They didn’t see her, or they didn’t realize she was alive. She must look dead, covered with blood, soot and glass, and with Jessica’s corpse covering her. Allison froze every muscle, trying not to breathe.
These evil bastards wanted to kill her now. Even this precious talent of hers was expendable if it threatened their little project. It wasn’t Stone’s metaphysical Change. It wasn’t the kids or the extraordinary things they could do. All that was important was Prometheus. All that was important was the damn organization, to hell with anything that threatened it. It was a cancer; Prometheus had no goals, no purpose beyond perpetuating itself.
The destruction it caused, the people it killed, those weren’t even a side issue. Allison realized that Fred would gladly kill every kid in the complex to save Prometheus. The inherent contradiction wouldn’t even occur to him.
The guards closed on her, Fred in the lead. She had to do somethin
g. She couldn’t hold her breath forever.
Remembering a line of quarters breaking the sound barrier, she felt out with her teek, and grabbed the fragments of safety glass the bullets had scattered on the carpet. Hundreds of solid little cubes embedded themselves into the ectoplasmic clay of her teek.
The group spread through the walkway. Fred was ahead of all of them and almost upon her. Two others guarded the entrance they’d come in. The remaining one followed a distance behind Fred, looking everywhere Fred wasn’t.
The glass rose, tilting to form a fragmentary wall between Fred and Allison. For a moment the glass hung there like a beaded curtain as she tried to reorient her teek to point down the walkway. It gave Fred time to react.
“Shit,” he said, firing his gun. Allison felt a bullet slam into Jessica’s body. In response, every ounce of energy she had in her command pressed those glass cubes down the walkway.
The sound of the glass striking every surface was like a short burst of rain, or a brief sizzling, like a hamburger on a grill. The effects of the glass tearing through the walkway were horrible.
Fred fell backwards, scores of bloody holes torn into his face and body. The guard behind him dropped his gun and fell to his knees, clutching a spurting wound in his neck. The guards by the door slid to the ground, blood pooling around them. The wounds were worse than what Jessica had suffered, it appeared as if the glass had shattered— no, exploded— when it had hit.
Allison gasped and pushed Jessica off of her. Then she scrambled back, without standing up. She kept low, all the way back to the Ward building. Back into the smoke, and cover. The floor here was damp, which meant that somewhere the sprinklers were working.
She didn’t have much time to think about it, because armed guards appeared at the other end of the walkway. She could see them duck around the corner, looking up toward her. She backed further into the smoke, hoping to be invisible.
She found herself hoping that one of them would break cover so she’d have a shot at them, and she hated herself for the thought.
One of them rushed into the walkway, holding up a riot shield for cover. He took a station in front of one of the two wounded guards in the rear. Then they began removing the guard under cover. They were too far away for her to do anything effective, and teeking something like a quarter or a piece of glass wouldn’t be effective against one of those shields.
They had her trapped against the fire behind her, and they knew it. They could swarm the walkway and overwhelm her in a few minutes. What could she do?
She looked out at them. A trio of guards were now huddling behind the Plexiglas shields, vaguely inhuman behind gas masks. It was a war zone. Most of the glass had been blown out of the walkway, making it look like some half-blasted bridge in an old war movie—
Bridge.
There was no way her teek was strong enough.
However, they had reached the third guard, the one with the neck wound, and there were a half-dozen of them in there, behind their shields. By the time they were in range for her to do something directly, it would be too late.
Allison wrapped her teek around the superstructure of the walkway, the end nearest her. Like the Jeep Cherokee, the metal offered her solid purchase for her teek, but actually forcing energy through her teek into something so massive— it was like tearing out hunks of her own brain. It wasn’t only that she was trying to move tons of material, but she was trying to feel the resulting vibration.
She thought it would be impossible with her mind rubbed raw by all that had happened. However, in the midst of the effort-induced migraine, she felt the shift. Even though it was less than a millimeter, the fact that the object was so large, and occupied all her mental awareness, made it noticeable.
At the greatest deformation she pushed with all her ability, and let it rebound back.
The guards in the walkway had reached Fred. She was aware of them even though her eyes were closed. Everything in the walkway floated through the awareness of her teek. She felt her body curl into a ball.
She reversed the force of her teek at the point of greatest rebound. And repeated. And repeated. It was much slower than the machine they had tested her on, but somehow she fell into the pattern, the rhythm became as natural as her pulse. In fact, her pulse conspired with her to match itself to the natural frequency of the walkway. Her heart, the dagger throbs in her skull, and the vibration of the walkway, all in time with each other.
She was dimly aware of movement in the walkway, the guards pulling Fred Jackson out of harm’s way. The vibration was becoming noticeable. First it was audible as a screeching of twisted metal. Then the movement of the structure reached a point where the guards could notice it. The guards stopped their advance.
It got easier for Allison the larger the vibrations’ amplitude. The sound was now like someone repeatedly swinging a rusty door open and closed, open and closed. The walkway’s movement was now measurable in centimeters, not millimeters. Allison’s mind was so full of the walkway that it felt her entire world was moving up and down in time to her pulse.
The walkway’s sounds became louder, more insistent. She could hear the guards curse, and with her teek sense she could feel the mass of their bodies retreat back from where they’d come.
Allison still strained with the effort. It felt as if she was methodically slamming a hammer into her skull. The pain of it had become so regular and intense that it was numbing.
As the guards retreated, Allison slowly opened her eyes. She was on her side on the ground, sweat stinging her eyes as she stared past her knees. Seeing the walkway almost broke her concentration, even though she knew what to expect.
The walkway had been a gently arching rectangular tube connecting the second floors of both buildings. Now that arch deformed up and down, more than six inches in the center, enough to see that something was wrong, enough to make the walkway look alive. The floor of the walkway sank and rose like the ocean.
Some of the guards sent wild shots toward her, but she still had the smoke back here for cover. She couldn’t stop now, or break her concentration.
For a long time— it felt like hours when it could have been only minutes— it seemed that the walkway was too well-engineered. It would sway and buck that six inches, but no more— no matter how much of her teek she pumped into it. There was something in the design that was absorbing the shock she was putting into it.
Allison closed her eyes again and felt with her teek as she pushed on the walkway. In a weird way she could sense the forces inside the metal framework. It seemed as if the stresses inside the material changed the texture inside it, slightly, enough to feel it with her metal fingers.
She found what she was looking for. A pair of struts inside the wall, almost directly below her. They were solid, but stressed a dozen times more than anything in the walkway. Every time her teek pulsed the walkway, the struts sucked up the excess like a pair of shock absorbers.
It took her a moment to think of how she could have any hope of dealing with it. After a few moments, she shifted the focus of her teek to the structure immediately above and connected to one of the struts. Only one.
She opened her eyes again. It took a few moments for an asymmetry to develop in the shaking of the walkway, a rolling side-to-side motion that was lesser than the up-down motion, but growing in amplitude.
With her teek, she could sense the asymmetry develop in the stresses felt by the struts below her. They were no longer equal. The one below her teeking effort was actually now under much less stress than the one next to it. Allison could feel similar effects all over the walkway. The deformation was multiplying stresses all over.
The structure sounded as if it was in pain. The ripples in the floor had grown in amplitude. The center of the bridge now deformed over a foot at its greatest extension, but now when the right side was raised a foot, the left was lowered by the same amount.
Allison could feel the walkway twisting itself apart just like the Tacoma Nar
rows Bridge, bucking and moaning as if it was caught in an invisible hurricane. What remaining glass there was in the walkway’s windows began to rupture as their frames twisted out of true.
The guards stopped taking pot-shots at her.
Then, like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, something gave way as the floor twisted. The left side of the span deformed downward, and with an explosive mechanical snap the floor kept going downward. Gravity peeled it away as if the floor of the walkway was shed skin.
The floor had been an integral part of the structure, and without it, the skeletal framework around the walkway began folding in on itself, tearing away from Allison’s building and collapsing into the courtyard below.
When she let go of her teek, Allison passed out from exhaustion.
9:40 AM
“Am I dead?” Allison asks the empty halls of Euclid Heights High.
“No,” comes an all too familiar voice. “I am.”
She turns toward Chuck. Her face is burning with anger. “I thought I was rid of you.”
“Not that easy, sweetcakes.” He shrugs. “I just thought you’d like to know.”
“Know what?” Allison asks.
Chuck waves his hand at the school around them. Allison looks, and it takes her a moment to realize that the school isn’t abandoned. Kids are going to and fro, pushing past both of them, going to classes. The windows are open on a sun-filled sky.
“You did it,” Chuck says.
“Did what?”
◆◆◆
Allison regained consciousness believing that Chuck was kissing her. She pushed someone away and coughed up a few hacking breaths before she opened her eyes and saw Zack.
“What—” She tried to talk, but she had to keep coughing up gobs of sooty-tasting phlegm. Even as she rolled over and coughed her throat raw, she could feel her face flushing.
“Thank god,” Zack said. His Bostonian accent seemed even thicker now. He didn’t look good. He was covered with soot, his leather jacket was charred in places, and there was a nasty red burn on his right cheek. “I thought I lost you for a moment.”
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