Zero Power (Book 2): Trying To Survive

by Lockwood, Max

  Clara felt better with the nice words. Cooper would have said them if she'd asked, but she knew he was biased. Even if she had made the shot and the woman died, accident or no, Cooper might have gotten mad, but she was sure now he wouldn’t have condemned her. If anything, he would have tried to absolve her of the crime, and she hadn't told him about it because that wasn’t what she'd needed right then. Getting the words from Felicia made a big difference.

  She accepted a pair of gloves and pulled them on, and allowed Felicia to put her to work.

  The first thing she noticed, was that the hospital was much emptier than it was before the plane crash. It was certainly a big difference from what it had been like since she had been there last. Even though her visit then had been brief and she hadn't exactly looked around. There had still been some noise then, but it had gone considerably down. She frowned, the seemingly sudden drop in numbers worrying her.

  "Hey, Felicia? Did you guys manage to heal most people?" she asked, tentative, almost hopeful.

  Felicia glanced around, almost like she was just seeing herself how much the numbers had dwindled. "Well, we did manage to heal a few, but in the end, at least a hundred people died."

  Clara winced at how blandly the other woman dropped the number. This late after the crash, there wouldn’t be too many more people coming in with critical injuries. If there were others that hadn't been rescued from the crash, then they would have died already. She hadn't passed by the crash site and had deliberately made sure to avoid crossing that route as she moved around town. But she assumed even the few volunteers she'd seen out there last time, would have gone by then. There wouldn’t be much in the wreckage left to salvage.

  "I'm sorry you had to deal with that," she said honestly.

  But Felicia just shrugged. "I'm used to death and despair by now."

  She bit her lip. "I admit I'm finding it hard to adjust."

  Felicia just shot her a curious look at the comment but didn’t try to get her to continue. After a moment of silence, she told Felicia about her recent expedition and how downhill the town had become. She and Cooper hadn't had the time to talk about that, either, and it felt good to have someone other than the police know what she'd seen out there. Someone she could talk to honestly.

  "I swear they didn’t look sane, certainly not the ones that I saw. It was such a big surprise, but I was more afraid than anything so I didn’t really think much of it. It's just… We've held on this long. Their town is around our size, if not smaller, so I don’t know why they haven't held on as long as we have."

  Could their situation really have been so much more horrible than Clara's hometown, and any of the other places they had come into contact with? Granted, Clara only knew of two, and neither had been dealing well when she visited, but she hadn't seen anything so bad. Mass hysteria came to mind. She hadn't seen far enough to tell if they'd had any big accidents like in her town, but she didn’t think so.

  "Expect more of that in the near future," Felicia said, her voice solemn. "No one wants to admit it, but it's going to be happening all over the place."

  Clara didn’t have to say that she was expecting it now. It was exactly what had her so worried.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Clara finished up at the hospital and walked alone across the square.

  She could have taken a different route, but she was curious now, morbidly so. Her feet moved in the direction without her thinking. She didn’t do more than make a cursory look around the area. Scavengers would have been all over the place, all those people the police were worried about breaking into stores and stealing. They would have looked into the cars not destroyed by the plane, might have made their way through the broken plane. Clara could only imagine what they had seen in there. The rescuers would have gone inside to see if there were any survivors in the plane, and she imagined not a lot of the passengers had survived, so it must have been full of corpses.

  Clara shuddered and turned her back to it to walk away. She hadn't gotten too close to the plane. Since the day she watched it come down on them as they waited in traffic. She hadn't considered what the people inside would have been feeling. She at least had the option of getting away. The people in that plane didn’t have that when it nosedived suddenly without warning. She pushed the thought out of her mind as bile rose in her throat.

  She had stayed at the hospital a lot longer than she'd thought and it was starting to get dark. She had a jacket, but she still felt the bite of the cold and she wrapped her arms around herself to hold back a shiver. Or it could have just been the atmosphere of the area. Maybe it was just all in her head, remembering the screams she heard that day and imagining what it would have been like to be in the falling plane and not inside a car on the ground.

  She cursed in her mind, hunching her shoulders as her body shivered in the evening air. This was why she disliked going to the hospital. Her thoughts turned morbid and disturbing and she couldn’t help herself from thinking about herself dying in the plenty of times she had come close since the day of the crash.

  It wasn’t just the cold that had her shivering, though. It was late, and she was by herself. There didn’t seem to be any people around as she walked, only instead of making her feel better, it only made her panic. When she thought about it, the last time she had been out alone was the time she went out on patrol. Even then, it was still light out and she didn’t stay out or alone for long.

  She found she was more nervous now that she didn’t have a weapon to defend herself with. She had gone to the station with the gun and left it with someone before heading out to do her task. She wasn’t sure she would have carried the weapon to the hospital, anyway, but somehow just knowing it was gone had her heart squeezing in anxiety.

  But, she decided that it was for the best. Because it was, even though she couldn’t remember right then. She didn’t want any more accidents to occur because of it, and was having a gun really all that useful when she didn’t know how to use it?

  Then Clara heard voices, and she stopped in her tracks, her heart beating harder in her chest. It wasn’t dark yet, it was still twilight but it would be full dark soon. She pushed her anxiety aside so she could hear beyond the rush of blood in her ears. She listened closely to get an idea of how close the voices were, and if they were hostile. She was surprised when she recognized Tessa's voice right away.

  Her fear washed away, shock taking its place. What was her sister doing outside again? But even the shock died because it wasn’t so surprising for Tessa to be outside now, she'd been out once before, with a much bigger crowd than Clara could hear now. Still, it wasn’t something she expected. Not with how unhinged Tessa had looked just yesterday,

  What was her sister even doing outside? It couldn’t be the same as what she was doing the last time Clara found her outside, could it? For one, the voices she heard were a lot fewer than last time, and Tessa wasn’t speaking too loudly, just enough that Clara could hear from a distance. Why had she been allowed to leave home in the first place? Or did no one realize she had even left?

  Still, what was her sister thinking?

  Feeling exasperated, she ran towards Tessa's voice. She wasn’t far away, just around a building and out of sight from where Clara had been standing. She was surrounded by people that looked at her with expressions of almost awe on their faces, mixed with concentration. She didn’t hear the words Tessa was speaking, but she really didn’t need to.

  "Tessa!"

  At the call of her voice, the small group turned to see her approach. Tessa scowled while the others just looked on curiously, crossing her arms defiantly across her chest.

  "Stop whatever sermon you're conducting," she told her sister once she was close enough, taking hold of her arm. "It's late, Tess. You should be at home."

  She didn’t need to get into more trouble with the police after they'd just released her. She was pretty sure whoever met them would just give them a warning and tell them to go off, but Tessa was confronta
tional when she wasn’t allowed to do whatever she wanted. She didn’t do things just because people told her to if she didn’t feel like it.

  But her sister didn’t seem to realize she was doing something wrong, or she didn’t care. She just sneered and looked away. Clara sighed, feeling annoyed, and tightened her hand around her sister's arm. She shooed away Tessa's followers. Being in a large group attracted way more attention.

  "You should all go back to your homes. There's still a curfew and there should be patrols coming around soon. No one needs to be caught out at night."

  She didn’t mention that they could meet patrols just as easily as it could be people with nefarious purposes. They hesitated a moment, but then slunk away, throwing glances back at her and Tessa as they left.

  "I'll see you all soon," Tessa called out to them as they left, "and remember what I said!"

  Clara held her tongue until they were gone. She was curious about what her sister had to say this time, but at the moment it didn’t matter. What did, was Tessa's fast turnaround. After the last time she saw her, she hadn't believed her sister could possibly just walk outside and act so level-headed around people she didn’t know.

  Once they were alone, Clara told her off.

  "What the hell, Tess? You're supposed to stay at home! I don’t know why you suddenly have any interest in the outside world, but repeating your behaviors doesn't help anybody. I don’t mind you leaving the house, Cooper is at home so he can look after Viola, but don’t be out at night. And don’t do whatever it is you're doing. It's dangerous."

  Tessa just stood still through her rant, watching her with unreadable eyes. She looked a lot better than she had just yesterday. Her hair was almost tamed, and she had cleaned her face. It didn’t hide her pasty skin or the dark bags under her eyes, but she didn’t look as crazed as when Clara got home the previous day.

  When Clara didn’t continue, she arched her eyebrows. "Oh, are you done?"

  Clara gritted her teeth at the sarcastic words.

  "Do you know the meaning of dangerous, Tess?" she bit out harshly. "Anything could happen to you out here! You don’t know as much as you think you do because you're always locked up inside. I'm the one always outside, experiencing what goes on around the world, not just seeing it in 'visions,'" she hissed venomously. Tessa looked unmoved. "Don't you get it? You could get hurt, or get killed, or get into all sorts of trouble when you leave the house. You need to go back, now."

  Her sister needed to understand. She thought she knew, but she really didn’t. Even Clara couldn’t claim that she knew; she was just going by what she had experienced. Tessa didn’t seem to be talking her warning seriously, though. If anything, she looked almost amused. Clara fisted her hands on her hips and glared at Tessa, who just snorted and waved a dismissive hand her way.

  "Stop being patronizing, Clara—you're younger than me, and you don’t understand the world as much. Not to mention how naïve and self-centered you tend to be. You can pretend all you want, but you really don’t know nearly as much as you seem to think you do.

  Clara gaped at her sister for a moment, before narrowing her eyes. How dare Tessa just wave away everything she had experienced like it was nothing. Nearly getting killed, watching people die. Seeing the state people out in the world were in while her sister stayed at home and drowned in her nightmares. Did she think reality was somehow so much better than what she saw, that what Clara had witnessed so far was so insignificant?

  She was furious, and she grabbed Tessa's arm, trying to march her away. They needed to get home, and it was still a bit of a distance away. If they were going to have a shouting match, it wasn’t going to be out in the streets. Tessa had been getting out of hand for too long, and Clara planned on setting her straight as soon as they had some privacy.

  "You're hurting me," Tessa hissed, tugging back, refusing to be moved.

  But Clara wasn’t paying attention to her. Even her anger had died down, almost as immediately as it had risen up. She was distracted when she saw a figure standing ahead of them in the road. It wasn’t full dark, but it was dark enough that she couldn’t tell who it was in front of them. Her hand clenched involuntarily, loosening a little at Tessa's resulting hiss of complaint. But a bad feeling had begun to grow in Clara's chest, and she stuck close to her sister.

  As the figure approached them, the feeling grew worse, especially once she realized the figure was holding something—it was the woman she shot at, and she had a knife.

  She never thought she would have to meet this woman again, after all the grief this one person had caused her. And certainly, she never would have thought it would be like this. The woman looked like she had been looking for her, and Clara wondered if it was a coincidence that she was here. It wasn’t so far from where they had met the first time, but she couldn’t possibly just have been hanging around, hoping Clara would show up.

  Clara was reminded of the last time she had seen that face. She had on the same angry, almost crazed expression on her face. The woman advanced on Clara and she stood in front of Tessa to protect her, her eyes tracking the knife before looking up to meet the other woman's eyes, holding her arms up and out, not sure what she planned on doing, but knowing she had to do something.

  "You're making a mistake," she said slowly, trying to reason with the woman. "We're out in the streets. We both just got out of trial a couple of days ago; we don’t need any more problems with the police and patrols could come by any minute. Please just go home, and we'll do the same, we don’t have to see each other again."

  The woman didn’t seem to hear her at all, though. Tessa stuck close to her back so there was nowhere for her to go, and the woman moved steadily closer.

  "I can't believe they just let you off after you attacked me," she muttered, sounding bitter and angry. "Not only that, I even get punished for it. Like I asked you to shoot me!"

  Dammit, Clara didn’t even know the woman's name. Maybe it could have helped somehow to get through to her, but no one had mentioned it and she hadn't bothered to ask.

  "I was just trying to do the right thing," Clara said insistently. It was like the woman forgot she had been doing something wrong, something against the law. Maybe the shooting had been a little overkill, but Clara hadn't meant to do it.

  But her statement only seemed to make the woman angrier. She was still a short distance away, but Clara noticed when her stance shifted as she began to chase them. Her eyes opened wide as she whirled around, grabbing for her sister.

  "Tess, run!"

  Her sister didn’t seem to hear her, eyes locked on the woman over Clara's shoulder. Clara pulled her away, trying to make her keep up as she took off in a fast sprint.

  Tessa surprised her yet again. Though she set a punishing pace, Tessa kept up with her, only stumbling a couple of times. Clara had no idea where she got the strength in her frail body. There was no time to be awed, though. She could hear the woman still coming after them, shouting obscenities at their backs. But, thankfully, she didn’t seem to be able to go too fast. She didn’t stop or fall far behind them, but she didn’t get too close either.

  Clara ran to the police station. There wasn’t any other place she could think to run to, considering home had been in the other direction, blocked by the woman. It was late, but she could only pray that there were still people there that would help them. There were no other people outside, and she didn’t know if that was a good thing or bad. She didn’t want witnesses to this, but maybe there was someone that would have lent them help?

  Right. Why would anyone interfere with this?

  In the times they currently lived in, everyone was too busy looking out for themselves. The few people that would have done it anyway had other people to look after, so why would they risk themselves to help out a stranger? So, she just kept running and praying for a miracle. If worse came to worst, she'd have to shield her sister and face this woman so Tessa could at least get away. She could barely think clearly, the urgency keepin
g her feet moving even as her breath came shorter and the muscles in her legs ached.

  When they were close enough that she could make out the building in the distance, she picked up speed and started calling out.

  "Somebody, help us!" her voice was hoarse from the running, but she forced it out, forced it louder. "Someone, please!"

  The front doors of the station weren’t left open this late, as they were for most of the day. She slowed at the front of the station, and then came to a stop, again pushing Tessa behind her as she turned to face the woman. She wanted to scream at her sister to go inside, but words were beyond her, getting stuck in her throat when she wanted to let more out. She made a distressed sound in the back of her throat, sounding like a sob, standing her ground even as her body tried to shake apart.

  The woman hadn't fallen too far behind, and now that they were no longer moving, she was coming up fast. Clara felt the scream growing in her throat, and she let it out, loud, shrill, and desperate. It didn’t slow her down, if anything, her obvious terror had the woman cackling as she closed the distance between them and raised the knife high.

  In the time it took the officers to answer the door, the woman almost caught up, knife ready to kill. One second, Clara was seeing that crazed face coming at her, ready to stab her. In the next, someone had jumped in front of her, and she could hear some voices coming from inside and behind her, getting closer. Clara stumbled back, heart beating hard in her chest as the officers restrained and arrested her.

  It was all over in a moment, and Clara watched as the woman screamed and struggled as they dragged her away. She wondered if any of the officers had gotten hurt in the scuffle. A hard shiver worked its way through her body, and she wrapped her arms hard around herself to ward off any more.

  She turned to see her sister standing just behind her. Tessa's eyes were gleaming in the dark, and Clara felt another shiver coming on as she shuffled back a step from her sister.