Fire and Thunder

by Bowen Greenwood

  He knew exactly where Hope had to be.

  ***

  Connor paid the cab driver and walked onto the Star of Fortune’s parking lot. The decrepit building had looked bad enough the last time he had seen it. Now, the smoking ruin of a coffee shop added to the apocalyptic ambiance. His bike, he hoped, still rested on its kick stand in the parking structure. Part of him wanted to go make sure it was still OK. He had come for people, though, not for possessions. Whatever danger his Harley might be in, Anna and the other young women were more valuable.

  Resolutely, he turned away from the garage and walked toward the abandoned casino.

  He felt surprisingly guilty opening the front door. It was abandoned, after all. Surely the owners wouldn’t want random people walking in and out of their building, incurring all kinds of insurance liability.

  The owners, it turned out, were the least of his worries. No sooner had he walked inside than he saw Maven Flake and a team of three AAA agents checking their weapons and getting ready to head up the stairs. To his surprise, Terri Jackson was with them.

  Connor stepped backward, hoping to escape before they saw him, but that was not to be. Flake herself caught sight of him. She whirled to face him at once.

  “Your six!” she called to her agents. Six was short for six o’clock, military parlance for “behind you.” The AAA personnel all spun to face him. Connor watched M-4 carbines come up to rest against shoulders, giving him a perfect view straight down the barrels. It was a sight to terrify a normal man. Connor, of course, wasn’t normal when it came to guns. His bullet-hole-riddled leather jacket proved that. If the agents had any sense, they’d take that as a warning.

  He dropped into a loose guard stance, brought his fists up to cover his face, and said, “We don’t have to do this. Just let me through.”

  Flake sneered at him. “I think not. I’ve got the rest of them corralled upstairs. Adding you to today’s catch is just icing on the cake.”

  ***

  Months after the earth-shattering brawl that had driven them out of business, the double doors leading into the restaurant in the Star of Fortune, known as Evening in the Stars, still rested where Pitch had thrown them. One hung by a single hinge, leaning at a crazy angle, half open. Fault lines and fissures traced spider webs through the elegant logo etched there.

  The other glass door lay on the floor, cracked in half, torn off its hinges months ago and never moved. Around it, shattered glass from the rest of the fight presented a hopeless jigsaw puzzle where every piece was the same color and none of them fit together.

  Some glass tables still stood on their legs. Others rested on sides, upside down, or at angles where an incomplete number of legs remained to hold them up. The same state described the glass thrones that served as chairs.

  Everywhere, shattered glass, scattered silverware, and the dust of months of neglect gave the scene a feel of desolation. The gaping hole where half the floor was gone stood as a testimonial to the moment when Hope discovered that her power did have combat applications after all.

  In the center of all that chaos, just at the edge of the hole, the detritus had been swept away. A few of the tables with all four legs had been assembled into a workspace. A motorcycle-sized bundle of metal and wires sat on one of them, a digital readout glowing red.

  Hope stood beside it. Her smile smoldered like dawn on the ocean. Her wide eyes glistened with unshed tears. The rough work clothes she wore couldn’t even begin to hide her beauty or her obvious joy at seeing him.

  Drake ran to her, roughly plowing over broken furniture, veering dangerously near the hole in the floor that led to nothingness.

  She threw her arms wide and hurried to meet him, those tears spilling out of her eyes as she moved.

  They embraced too tightly for words. They clung to one another with all the strength their arms would deliver.

  “Hope! Oh Hope! You’re alive!”

  Her only response was, somehow, to embrace him even tighter.

  She spoke only after long minutes of weeping in his arms.

  “When I heard the fire door outside, I was afraid. I thought Sebastian was here.”

  “He’s in Vegas right now, but not here.”

  “I expected he would be. But I never thought you would be with him, Drake. You’re not supposed to be here — not anywhere near Vegas. What are you doing?”

  “Sebastian brought me.”

  Anger and hurt flashed across her face. Quickly, he added, “I haven’t gone on a mission with him since…since that night. I hate him. The only reason I came this time is because he promised me revenge against Pitch.”

  The look on her face transformed at once. She nodded understandingly.

  “I didn’t think of that. Figuring out Spooky’s power is harder than you’d think.”

  “What do you mean, Hope? Figuring out Spooky’s power?”

  “That’s the key to what I plan to do here, Drake. I needed Spooky to bring Sebastian. After all that time you and I spent trying to study and analyze gifts, one thing I did learn was how to trigger her so she gets a flash of knowing the truth. Put someone she cares about in danger of harm. That’s when Spooky’s power goes off strongest. If someone she’s close to might be hurt, she’s almost certain to Know something. I needed that.”

  “Why, Hope?”

  “To bring them here, of course. Pitch. Sebastian. Spooky. Kila. When I started making concrete plans and steps toward killing them, I figured Spooky’s power would warn her, and she’d bring them here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The same thing Sebastian promised you, Drake. But I can actually deliver. Revenge against Pitch. Revenge on all of them who tore us apart. I’m going to keep my promise. I’m going to murder every last one of them.”

  Chapter 22

  “Pitch took me out to the desert, just like Sebastian said. He was using his telekinesis to hold me perfectly still. By then the hysteria I felt in the restaurant had cooled down, and then froze ice cold. I stopped screaming and flailing and just stared at Pitch, picturing him dead. His power gripped me as hard as anything physical I’ve ever felt. I wondered if he meant to kill me just by squeezing me to death. He finally got me out to an empty patch of desert between Vegas and Area 51. We were on a cliff overlooking a canyon. He stopped the pickup and moved me to the edge of the cliff with his mind. He learned his lesson from the floor of Evening in the Stars. He never let me touch the bed of the truck, and he never let me touch the ground once we reached that cliff.

  “He walked up to the edge and looked off. He sighed. He fidgeted. He looked off into the distance. And I realized he didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to kill me. And I began to hope I might see the dawn still alive.”

  Drake asked, “He didn’t let you go, did he?”

  “No, but he got so busy thinking and talking to himself that his mental grip weakened. He wasn’t holding me up as high. Finally, I slipped down far enough to touch the ground. I turned the top layer of sandstone into water. He slipped and fell when the surface he’d been standing on suddenly went liquid. That broke his concentration. I pounced on him. We fought. If you catch Pitch off guard, he has a harder time with telekinesis, so he didn’t have much success just trying to throw me off. But he’s a pretty good fighter. He managed to keep my hands away from physical contact with him, so I couldn’t just turn him to stone.

  “We fought harder than I’ve ever fought before or since. But he’s bigger, stronger. As long as he kept my hands away from his body, winning stayed just out of reach. And then I almost got him. I got my legs under him and pushed him up and over. He got his legs up for a wrestling move to stop me from pinning him, but I didn’t even try. I just grabbed for his face.

  “He screamed and panicked. Instinct took over. Every muscle in his body all of a sudden went into panic mode, and he rolled. I slipped off him and fell — over the edge of the cliff.”

  Drake pulled her close and wrapped her in an embrace. “Oh,
Hope…”

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Drake. It was awful. Horrifying. The fall… Well, pain fails to describe it. The whole English language fails. And the fall was only the beginning. I lay there for days. I tried to cry for help now and then, but my throat wasn’t working well enough to do more than croak.”

  Tears gathered in her eyes, and Hope shook with suppressed sobs, remembering it. Drake squeezed her tighter.

  “I don’t know who found me. Some hiker I guess. I wound up in a hospital in Vegas, good as new. I have a few vague memories of the helicopter flight out of there.

  “I don’t know if it’s a hallucination or what, but I have a clear mental picture of the face of the girl who found me.

  “All I really know is a week later I walked out of the hospital. And I set my mind firmly on keeping my promise. What I swore at the end of the fight in Evening in the Stars, I meant a hundred times more after I had laid in the desert with half a dozen broken bones for days. The people who did that to me are going to pay. It took me months to put together the design, but when you can make any substance you want, a lot of this gets easier.”

  He replied, “I remember you talking about it. The ability to create plutonium wipes out the hardest part of making an atomic bomb.”

  “It’s not just the plutonium. A lot of the structure of the device requires rare materials. But they’re not rare to me.

  “And now, Drake, you and I can have our revenge. Sebastian and Pitch and the rest of them die in fire today.”

  Drake felt a twist of shame in his guts as she talked about vengeance. He experienced the same thing, like a hot place on his skin that covered his whole chest, that wouldn’t go away unless he saw Pitch suffer.

  Terri’s words earlier today came back to him hard. “That desire for revenge eats you up, Drake. It crumples you up from the inside out. If you ever get what you want, it’ll only make things worse, not better.”

  Now he looked at Hope, the beautiful bookworm he had fallen in love with. Once, she had sworn she would never follow Sebastian because he was too violent. Now, toxic delight dripped from her voice when she spoke about murdering him and his friends.

  Terri was right. The desire for revenge changed a person and not for the better. All of his anger at Pitch only led to the same dark place where Hope now wandered lost.

  “We’re together again now, Hope. None of that matters anymore.”

  She embraced him again. “I’m glad you’re here, Drake. You deserve this moment as much as I do. They hurt you as much as me. Today, they all pay.”

  “Do we really care about that anymore, Hope? I’m holding you in my arms like I always wanted. You and me. No Legion anymore. No Sebastian. You can make us all the money we need. We can go somewhere no one will ever find.”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. Just like we always wanted to do. We’ll go somewhere in the South Pacific and put this entire Legion stuff behind us. Right after I blow Sebastian away.”

  Drake sighed. He touched the gleaming tangle of metal, wires, dials, and readouts.

  “This is really it?”

  “Exactly. One genuine, Grade A violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. I don’t know where Sebastian is hiding, but you said he was here in Vegas. That’s close enough. He dies today.”

  “I remembered what you said when we were thinking about ways to turn your power into a weapon.”

  She grinned. “Yeah. I thought of that liquefying trick later, after that conversation. Way more useful in a fight. And it’s not just floors, either. Imagine a palm-heel strike right to the nose. Oops, melted your head.”

  “Hope!”

  She smiled at him. “Hey, you saw I didn’t do it that way to Pitch. But I could. Touch a person and turn them into water. Or stone, or gold, or whatever.”

  Drake felt hot tears gather in the corners of his eyes. The girl who had come into the Legion with him would never have talked like this.

  “Let’s leave the bomb behind, Hope. Let’s just go. Right now. There’s still money in that bank account you made for us. Let’s leave the bomb behind. Leave Sebastian behind. Let’s just go.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she looked askance at him.

  “You can’t really want to let them get away with it. After what they did to you and me?”

  “It’s not about whether they get away with something, Hope. All I care about right now is you.”

  “Then push the start button on that timer for me.” She smiled as she said it, as if she were offering him a prize. “Let’s do this together, Drake. Blow Sebastian and his friends to kingdom come, then get on the first plane going somewhere tropical.”

  “Can’t we leave without setting off the bomb?”

  She stared. “Drake, what’s wrong? I don’t understand you.”

  “I don’t want to murder them, Hope.”

  “Drake, you know better than that. It’s not murder. They’re guilty. Sebastian ordered me killed. Right there, that’s conspiracy to commit murder. Guilty. The sentence is death. It’s not murder to kill him.”

  “Hope, it’s an atomic bomb!”

  “Just a small one.”

  “Just a small one? You can’t set off a nuclear weapon just to kill one person. There’s a million people in this town, and killing them is murder, no matter whether killing Sebastian is.”

  She sighed and turned away from him.

  “It’s not like I like that part, but it’s the price of justice.”

  “Hope, isn’t that too high a price? You can’t want to vaporize a million people just because we got hurt.”

  “It’s not just about you and me!”

  Her shouted reply caught Drake off guard, and he took a step back. At once, he felt acutely conscious of the hole in the floor not far behind him and stepped forward again.

  “You know what Sebastian’s capable of, Drake. If we let him go on, he’ll be using people with powers to try to overthrow the government. Who knows how many people will die in that war? Before I almost died, I wanted to save the Legion from his crazy plans. I failed then, but I won’t fail again. One bomb today, and that’s over. Sebastian’s over. The threat of the Legion is over. And yes, I pay that bloody terrorist back for what he did to you and me. Help me, Drake. We can stop Sebastian before he starts a war. It’s justice for him. Help me.”

  She stood facing him. Dusty tan work clothes, hair tied off in a sloppy bun to keep it out of her eyes as she worked, scrapes on her knuckles and fingers from working a wrench; but her beauty radiated right through all of that. Staring at her, Drake remembered what it had felt like when he had first seen her: the desperate hope that she would want to spend time with him as much as he wanted to spend time with her. He remembered how it felt when she did — she did!

  His voice cracked when he spoke: “I can’t, Hope.”

  Her lips pressed together tightly, and she made an angry noise in her throat.

  “I can’t help you become a mass murderer, Hope. I love you too much to do that.”

  She turned away from him. He saw her fists squeeze shut by her sides and when she whirled back to face him, the anger in her eyes burned him.

  “Then go. Get out of here. I don’t want you in Vegas when this bomb goes off, Drake. Just leave. Get out.”

  That moment, forever and half a year ago, when she had said she liked him too, had felt better than anything had ever felt in his life. This moment when she sent him away — when she told him to just get out — burned like someone hit him across the chest with a blazing two-by-four.

  “Hope, please—”

  “Leave, Drake. If you don’t want to be a part of doing this, don’t. But at least don’t die. This bomb is going off. Get out of town now.”

  “Hope, this is wrong. I’m not going to just walk away and let you do something I know you’ll regret forever.”

  “Stay and help me set off the bomb or walk away. It’s your choice. But Sebastian dies today, Drake. That’s not changin
g. There’s nothing you can say that’ll change my mind.”

  Drake felt as if he were wobbling under tons of sadness. Hope started out so good. When he fell in love with her, she radiated light.

  He shook his head, tried to speak, and stopped when he almost choked up.

  For a moment, he just breathed: deep, shallow, and ragged. Then he took a step.

  Then another.

  He moved his feet again.

  “There may not be anything I can say, Hope. But there’s something I can do.”

  He took one more step and placed his body between her and the switch for her bomb.

  Chapter 23

  Drake could barely hold her gaze as Hope stared at him. Anger and impatience flashed in her eyes.

  “Oh come on, Drake.”

  “I’m not kidding. I know this isn’t you, Hope. I know you’re better than this. I won’t let you do it.”

  “What? You’re going to fight me? Me?”

  “I don’t want to, Hope. I won’t strike at you. But I won’t let you activate this bomb, either.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Drake. You were with me the last time I fought. You know how my power can affect combat.”

  “I won’t step aside and let you become a mass murderer.”

  She stuck out her arm, trying to reach past him to grab for the detonator.

  Without him even meaning to, Drake’s forearm swept out in a block, knocking hers aside.

  The thin layer of muscle and skin on their forearms clashed, and both of them felt the impact in their bones.

  With that one strike, everything became real. Drake felt his skin go cold. Fighting Hope…

  She tried again with her other hand to grab for the bomb’s controls, and again Drake blocked it.

  When he finished moving his arm, he stood with his feet spread a bit wide, one behind the other, his fists clenched and covering his face — a guard stance.

  Hope shuffled back and raised her own fists.

  “You asked for this, Drake. I didn’t want to do it.”