* * * * *
I was face-down in water. Ice water. I sat up, coughed up a burning lungful of river, and rolled to a crouch behind a large shelter of rock. A strange pressure was mounting around the biceps of my left arm, an oncoming something that I wasn't truly feeling yet. I dared a look down, and saw the two blackened holes in the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
A fine veil of smoke snaked from them both.
The pressure began to grow, becoming heat or something like it, dull but angry and picking up momentum with every rapid heartbeat. I swallowed hard and plunged my arm into the river. Big mistake.
The cold water burned like bleach on my naked nerves, gouging into the void that had been blasted out by the electric current. Chunks, I realized. Chunks were missing. Missing from the meat of my arm. Dribbling around loose somewhere inside my sleeve.
Any of the noises I should've made at that moment were held in by the tide of vomit that jumped up my throat. I fought it down, yanked my arm out of the water, and pressed myself against the boulder, biting my lips together until I tasted blood.
Something moved out of the corner of my eye. Ghi. He was standing yards away, half golden in the glow of the flaming wreckage, staring with dumb astonishment. At me, at himself, at everything. It was hard to tell, because his eyes were completely white.
"What did I do ...?" He staggered toward me, and I ducked, motioning fearfully at him to back off, as if he were some kind of monster. And he was. Crackling fingers of white light were darting across the water at his feet, raking over his shoulders and through his hair. He froze, groaning when he noticed the light sizzling over his own hands.
But even that moment―stark as it was with the explosion, my arm blown all to hell, and Ghi lighting up like something straight out of Poltergeist― provided no pause at all. Headlights washed over the trees. I heard gravel crunching under tires, rolling to a halt. Somewhere, Corin hissed at Ghi to get down, and he did. He also stopped glowing, for what it was worth.
Car doors slamming. The back hatches of the U-Hauls rolling up. But no voices. No other noises. Just the sounds of rushing water, and of fire. The ragged roar of the bus and all the fuel burning away, filling the base of the gorge with a throat-stinging haze of thick black smoke and brightly lit ash.
Our ears strained; our feet and tendons were at the ready. I didn't dare move, didn't dare look. And the only thing I could see without moving, the only thing that wasn't part of the landscape, was Ghi, his back pressed to a rock about fifteen yards to my left. He watched me with round, vocal eyes, begging me not to cough, or gasp, or scream.
More tires. Thumps. Raking, metallic sounds. The blast of gunfire and the ricochet of bullets. And then Jackson, shouting a wordless, cowboy battle cry.
Ghi closed his eyes and breathed deeply.
"Fuck," he said. He tilted sideways to take a look, and I did, too.
At some point between the bus's descent from the bridge and its explosive death, the sky had taken on a violet tint. Dawn was on its way. And out there in the first charcoal hints of daylight, visible only between swirling blankets of smoke, at least thirty Hollows were swarming out of the two parked U-Hauls.
They were frightening to see in their number, with their overall silence, swift movements, and slightly disheveled but normal clothes. But they weren't the strangest thing I saw on the riverbank. No, that title goes to the fleet of ambulances that had followed them down the mountainside.
Just five run-of-the-mill ambulances, driving along the riverbank as if they were out testing the terrain. Bullets and Hollows bounced off of them as they plowed along, and it dawned on me that I was about to see a bunch of innocent, terrorized paramedics get ripped apart. It never occurred to me that these ambulances had arrived far earlier than any emergency responders should have been able to. However, it did occur to me that gravel wasn't the only thing I heard crunching. The ambulances were running over the Hollows at any given opportunity. And as far as I knew, running over people―even murderous, death-infested people―was not something ambulances normally did.
I remembered Jackson's war cry and spotted him in less than a second. He was charging toward the bank―much to my extreme horror―with Jesse, who was trying to position all of his height behind Jackson's bulk in case of gunfire. Whatever heroic deed they intended to do, they didn't do it. They both stopped in their tracks when the ambulance doors started opening. You would have, too, believe me.
What I saw then―what I thought I saw―were identical people wearing identical black body armor. And identical black masks. It was immediately obvious that these folks were not your friendly neighborhood paramedics. There were perhaps eight of them to each ambulance, and each and every one of them was armed with one of the following:
A flame-thrower.
Or a pair of machetes.
Things got very ugly, very fast. The Hollows descended upon the armed newcomers with savage disorder. Gunshots and lightning-fast metallic flashes followed, along with the whir of blades and blasts of flame. But there were no words, no shouts. Only inhuman squeals, sharp gasps, and the incessant spray of something dark and thick, something like silty mud.
They were getting closer. I panicked, fighting with myself about which way to run. Downriver, I spotted Khan's unmistakably huge silhouette, standing upright amidst molten bus parts, outlined by a massive column of flames. He staggered sideways, paused to spit something out―a tooth, I believe―then lurched for the bank. The pair of Hollows who rushed to confront him simultaneously ignited. They screamed madly but did not veer off-target.
Ghi was no longer anywhere to be seen. I moved just in time to catch a blur of Corin, sprinting onto the bank and bringing a great deal of river along with him in the form of a great, cresting wave.
Okay. More of a smallish cresting wave. Had the Hollows constructed a sand castle by the river, he may have knocked it down. It did make them back up for a second. I'll give him that.
Jackson paused to stare at him.
"You do something then!" Corin shouted, his voice cracking.
Jackson opened his mouth, almost certainly to say something cocky, at which point Jesse swung him into point-blank gunfire. Judging by what Jackson then shouted about Jesse's mother, I'd guess a bullet or two got him near the groin.
Vessel, Book I: The Advent Page 45
