The most shocking change of all, though, was the noise.
The thundering sound of automatic weapons echoed through the darkness. Bright flashes from the muzzles of gun tore through the veil of night. The rotors of helicopters thumped overhead.
They had appeared behind a rock outcropping in the middle of the desert. Piles of stones ranging from man-size down to pebbles were heaped up into something not large enough to be called a hill.
Connor and the others crouched behind their rocks, trying to wrap their heads around what they had teleported into.
Spark’s eyes took on a wild look. His hand went right to his ear and started fiddling with it. It was Spark’s sense of near-panic that helped Connor figure out what must have happened: the government had found the Legion. There was another battle between soldiers and Enforcers going on, just like the one at Area 51. He peeked around the rocks and took in the scene.
A full scale military operation was in progress. There were helicopters, armored vehicles, and soldiers in huge numbers. They were all aimed in toward the mountainside. Connor couldn’t see the cave mouth from his perspective; it was obscured by M-4 Bradley fighting vehicles and other heavy ordinance, but he recognized the area of the mountainside around it. All the government’s fire was being directed inward at the same place from which he and Spark had escaped.
No wonder his friend was panicking. The last time Spark had been in a fire fight, he had dropped that lightning bolt on the soldier.
Connor took a deep breath and resolved not to be responsible for Spark having to do that again.
Turning to Mr. Moses and Anna, Connor said, “The government has obviously found the Legion. This is a lot like our escape from Area 51, except way bigger. Not like we had much of a plan to start with, but we’re going to have to rethink it now. We obviously can’t just walk in and ask for the prisoners.”
He halfway expected Mr. Moses to say “I told you so,” but that didn’t happen. The older man simply nodded and said, “No one take any foolish risks here. I don’t want anyone getting killed. No one is shooting our way because they haven’t seen us. Let’s keep it that way.”
Connor lifted just half his head up above the rocks to look at the battle again. The government soldiers were not the only ones fighting. Rocks of various sizes were flying outward from the mountain; Pitch was obviously hard at work doing his usual thing.
There was a surprising effect where one stone the size of a medicine ball was arcing in toward a group of soldiers and suddenly ten stones were falling down. He remembered the girl called Heaps, who helped with breakfast by multiplying the amount of food. She must have been involved in the fight.
Connor wondered what the other Enforcers were up to. This was what they trained for. A group of half-trained martial artists, though, was way better for intimidating other people than for modern combat.
From behind him, Connor heard Anna speak.
“Connor, now is the time for you to become comfortable with your Gift. You have to go through this. You’re the one with indestructible skin. Go in and get the prisoners!”
He turned around and stared at her.
“Have you seen what it’s like out there? Gunfire doesn’t even cover it. Explosions, missiles, cannon fire, and bombs are going off out there! That’s not some practical application test; it’s World War Three!”
“But you can get through it! You’re immune to it.”
“Easy for you to say, you’re not the–”
He was cut off in mid-sentence by a shrieking sound of metal being twisted and destroyed. Connor peeked over their rock outcropping to see one of the government’s helicopters losing its struggle to stay in the air, as a massive boulder fell away from it.
“Looks like Pitch or one of the other TK’s hit a helicopter with a rock!”
Anna joined him in peeking over the side of the rock. A crunching, crumpling sound that was painful to the ears reached them as the chopper hit the earth, followed by screaming from that general direction that didn’t stop.
“The pilot!” Anna shouted. “He’s hurt bad!”
Connor looked at her and gave a big nod, but he didn’t know what else to say. Listening to the man scream was terrible.
“God, please help him,” Anna prayed. “Please help him.”
Connor bowed his head and silently joined in the prayer, just in time to hear Anna speak again.
“I’m going out there to get him.”
At the same time, Mr. Moses and Connor both shouted, “What?”
She said, “What if the gas in his helicopter catches fire?”
At that moment, several thumps from the area of the crashed helicopter caught Connor’s attention, and he peeked back over the edge of the rocks. Pitch, or some other Legion TK, was throwing more rocks at the downed helicopter. They landed closer and closer. The pilot’s screams went on.
“That does it,” Anna said. “I’m bringing him back here.”
Before Connor could even start his protest, she winked out of existence right in front of him. With his mouth hanging open, he turned to look at Mr. Moses. He looked frightened.
“Lord, please help Anna,” were the first words out of his mouth. “Please keep her safe.”
Once again, Connor had barely bowed his head to join the praying when Anna reappeared behind the rocks, laying the wounded soldier on the ground. He winced as she put a rock under his head to prop him up.
The look on the man’s face was equal parts fear and pain. His eyes darted from one of them to the next, lingering on Mr. Moses. Identifying him as the oldest man present, he looked at him when he spoke.
“Are you taking me prisoner? Are you going to kill me?”
Mr. Moses shook his head. He had to yell to be heard over the sound of the war.
“Of course not. We’re not with the Legion,” he said.
“Don’t try to lie to me!” the soldier replied. “I saw how I was brought here!”
“I’m not like them!” Anna shot angrily back. “We’re different. We’re trying to figure out how to use these gifts for good. I brought you here because I could hear you screaming, and the Legion was still dropping new rocks on your chopper trying to kill you.”
Through gritted teeth, the soldier said, “Wait, now there are two groups of freaks?”
Anna gave him a very dirty look, and he winced.
“Um, people with abnormal abilities. Not freaks.”
Anna got busy ripping up some of the soldier’s shirt to make a bandage for his legs. Both of them had been pretty badly wounded in the crash. The soldier’s face kept contorting into different expressions of pain, and Connor wished either Mr. Moses or Anna would pray for him, so he could join in.
It took him a few seconds after thinking it to realize that he could probably do it just as well as either of them.
“Lord, please help this guy. He’s hurt Lord, he needs your help.”
“You’re Christians?” the pilot asked.
Connor replied, “Yeah. Kind of. Getting that way, I guess. I was just an ordinary guy on the street when the government took me to their facility to study my supposed gift. I fell in with the Legion for a while, but I didn’t like what they wanted to do or how they acted. Now Mr. Moses is teaching some of us about how these Gifts are from God, and we need to learn how to use them for good, not for power.”
The soldier reached up and took Connor’s hand.
He said, “Thank you, God.”
Connor felt a big, silly grin growing across his face. It was like he had found a friend in the unlikeliest place of all.
Beyond their sheltering rocks, the battle between the Legion and the government raged. But in their cover, the soldier told Connor and his friends about what happened.
He began, “The Legion raided our facility to escape with some of the test subjects.”
Spark interrupted to say, “I know, I was there.”
The soldier looked at him with suspicion, but Connor quickly interjected
.
“He’s one of the good guys.”
The pilot shrugged and tried to use his arms to adjust his position a little bit.
“My legs hurt so bad,” he whispered.
Mr. Moses said, “Just rest. We can hear everything later.”
While they recognized the good sense of that statement, Connor, Anna, and Spark couldn’t help staring at the soldier with eager curiosity written all over their faces, so he went on.
“While they were inside the facility, before the big fight started, their leader talked about their plan. He said they were going to steal a C-130, but we had microphones wired up in that whole place, and we heard every word, so we had people go out and plant GPS trackers on every C-130. The fre… I mean, the Legion smashed the base radar on the way out, but it didn’t matter. We tracked them here. Then the brass sent us to shut them down.”
Connor said, “Spark and I were both there. We were prisoners in the facility when the Legion came to break us out. We left them after they brought us here to the headquarters, though. They’re too violent and too bent on running the government themselves. I don’t really know; I’m just getting used to all this. But Anna thinks… well, there’s an evil influence with the Legion.”
The soldier winced. He gritted his teeth and squeezed his fists.
Then he said, “I’ll buy that. The Legion people were really violent in their escape from the facility. That crazy rock-throwing guy who took out my chopper was there, and he killed a lot of people by dropping tanks and stuff on them. A friend of mine got hurt fairly seriously by a lightning strike, too.”
There was no delay at all. It was as if he had been waiting for the moment. Spark physically shoved Connor out of the way to get to the soldier and dropped to his knees beside him.
“He’s alive? The guy who got stuck by lightning is alive?”
The soldier pulled his head back slightly, taken aback at the sudden interruption.
He said, “Yeah, the doctor said that only like 30 percent of lightning strike victims actually die from it. He’s in the hospital recovering.”
Spark sobbed and fell face first down into the desert dirt. All any of them could hear was the same three words over and over.
“Thank you God! Thank you God! Thank you God!”
Spark got up off the ground and wiped his now-dirty eyes.
He said, “Do you remember, Mr. Moses? We prayed for God to fix what I had done.”
Wiping his own tear away, the older man just nodded.
Spark looked up, in the time-honored way of humans who know God is above them even while they know he’s right nearby.
“I’m yours, God. Thank you. Thank you for saving me from what I did. I’m yours forever.”
At that moment, another helicopter fell from the sky and exploded not far from their cover. The roar left all of them deafened for a time. Once they could hear again, there were no screams at all from the chopper. It was gone, and its occupants with it.
Anna said, “Connor, please. We can’t just sit here and do nothing. They’re killing each other. This is awful. You’re the only one who can survive out there.”
He didn’t speak right away. He tried to think. He tried to imagine what if they were right. He had definitely been shot in the convenience store, and it had definitely had no effect.
But if everyone was wrong, and he couldn’t do it, he’d get shredded out there. The explosions and screams and chaos of combat hurt his ears.
He looked at Anna.
She looked back at him with desperation in her eyes. Why did she care so much about letting those people free?
He said, “You can’t teleport any closer than this?”
Anna glared at him.
Connor said, “Look, if there’s no other way, maybe I can try this, but I don’t want to. I’m afraid to die. Can’t you just take us right to the Dungeon?”
Anna looked like she wanted to yell at him. Her hands were balled up into fists at her side. But she bit her lip until she could speak as calmly as was possible into the middle of a war zone.
“You told me about prisoner control,” she began. “You told me how they make people unable to use their Gifts. They psych them out, get them into a place where they’re not trusting God. They get your mind fixed on your weakness, on an area where you’re afraid. They get you to think about something you don’t trust God for, where your relationship with Him is broken.”
Connor nodded, not sure where she was going with this.
Anna continued, “My mother is a missionary. My father is a pastor. Everyone in my family is so Christian, and so good, and so perfect. They all do everything for God and always do it right and set such a high bar… I can never meet it! All my life they’ve judged me and expected more of me, and they’re so disappointed that I’m just enrolled in regular college and not a bible college or seminary. I can never be as good as them, and I hate it!”
Connor was about to interrupt by pointing out the obvious, but Anna shouted and cut him off.
“You don’t understand! That girl in there. The one with red hair. The Healer.”
She stared at Connor, tears in her eyes.
“She’s my sister!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Connor’s mouth opened. He wanted to say something in reply, but he couldn’t imagine what it would be. He and Mr. Moses and Spark all traded astonished looks before Anna told them the rest.
She said, “The government took Renee and me together. When they heard about my teleporting incident and started to investigate, they heard things about Renee’s healing in church. They came to our house and took both of us off to Area 51. When I escaped, she was left behind. And when you came, Connor, I hoped… I wanted to believe that she stayed there of her own free will. Then it wouldn’t be my fault for leaving her.”
“I heard your description of her, Connor. Red hair like mine, but lighter. Amazingly calm, even in the middle of a crisis. Perfectly collected, always saying the right thing. That’s already Renee for sure, without even knowing about the healing, which she’s been doing for years, by the way. How am I ever supposed to measure up to that?”
“My home church always calls her when someone’s sick. And my mother risked her life to bring Bibles into North Korea. And my father runs a huge church and leads new people to God almost every day and meanwhile I’m just an ordinary girl hoping to get a date for the college homecoming game and dance. They’re all so disappointed in me. They’re always looking down at me.”
“I can’t go in there, Connor. I can’t go right into their cell. The very moment I look at Renee, one of their prisoner control people will see how my family makes me feel, and they’ll keep me there. I won’t be able to teleport back out because I’m all messed up about God and my family. If I expose myself to that prisoner control business, I’ll never get back out.”
Connor stared at her. He felt terrible that because of his fear, she’d had to spill all that out. He felt terrible to see a girl crying because he’d asked her a question. Even though the consequences were smaller, this almost felt worse than the time he had let Spark down.
It was one more bad decision in a long chain of them.
Well, there was one decision that looked pretty obvious right about then.
“OK. I’m going.”
***
The barest beginnings of dawn were coloring the eastern sky as Connor took a moment to psych himself up. Sure, maybe he could survive being shot but if he could avoid putting that to the test, he would. Better if he could get across the battlefield to the Legion’s cave without ever attracting a single bullet.
He looked at Anna one last time, wanting her face to be the last thing he saw if he died. Then he prayed. Then he peeked around the rocks, saw that the coast was clear, and ran for the first available cover: one of the downed choppers.
The sprint to the wreckage of the helicopter was easy. No one was looking in their direction. No one was shooting at him; all the gunfire was d
irected inward toward the Legion’s base.
But that changed just as he was about to slide in to hide behind the chopper. Apparently, one of the soldiers spotted him. Even more shots were added to the already-earsplitting sound of guns being fired, and little explosions of dust kicked up behind him and to the side just as he reached the cover. Bullets began to impact the helicopter.
Connor panted, got his breathing under control, and crawled to the other edge of the chopper – the one farthest away from the sound of bullets. He poked the top of his head just far enough past the edge to see out. He could see a group of soldiers directing their gunfire at the place where he’d dived behind the helicopter but for the moment, no one was shooting directly at him.
He prayed and then sprinted forward toward a massive boulder sitting on top of an M-4 Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicle. Obviously, Pitch or one of the other Legion enforcers had gotten a piece of it. The soldiers spotted him with only a yard to go and started firing at him again. Connor screamed in fright at the sound of bullets hitting the M-4 so near to him and threw himself forward face first into the dirt to get covered behind it.
Half sobbing from fear and half gulping in air from his exhausting sprint, he stammered out the same words over and over again.
“I want to live. Please, God, I want to live.”
He could hear the soldiers calling for help, aiming more rifles at him. The sound of gunfire got louder. Connor listened to it for a while. He was scared to move but also scared that if he didn’t move the soldiers would creep up on his position.
Finally, he once again crawled to the other end of the Bradley, keeping as low as possible. He repeated the trick from the helicopter wreckage: peeking out and seeing that they were shooting at the wrong end.
Sons of Thunder Page 13
