The Riser Saga

by Becca C. Smith

  “I’m not going to do anything. Just get me to Nancy’s so I can get away from you.” I stared out the window trying to ignore her.

  “I’m not the freak in this situation, you know.” Jill wasn’t letting go. It was like now that we were alone she could let out all of her frustration on me. “You’re the one who intruded in a life you had no right to. You don’t belong with the rich, you belong with your own kind.” Jill sounded like she believed the hate she was spouting.

  I was tempted to destroy her world and tell her about her dad, or worse let him die naturally by disconnecting him from Turner’s control, but as annoying and cruel as Jill was, I just couldn’t do that to another human being. No matter how tempting.

  “Why should you care? What possible difference in your life could it make to have someone who doesn’t have any money go to your school? Really? Are you that bigoted?” I sighed, already exhausted from this conversation.

  “I am not a bigot.” Jill seemed horrified by the notion, which was weird because she so obviously was.

  “What would you call it then? Let me quote: You don’t belong with the rich, you belong with your own kind. How is that not being a bigot?” I stared at her profile as she kept here eyes on the airspace in front of her. I had hit a nerve.

  “I hate you,” Jill seethed and said nothing more.

  Good. Now I could concentrate on… uuuggh… what? How my grandpa was planning on finishing me off? My argument with Jill felt like a vacation compared to what was in store for me.

  And then out of the blue Jill said, “I’m sorry I made you cry the other day, when I brought up your mom.”

  “You have reached your destination,” the GPS announced.

  I turned to Jill as if my ears had played tricks on me. Was that an apology? She stared straight ahead as if she hadn’t said anything, but I could tell there was actually some emotion there.

  “Look, Jill…” I started.

  “Don’t,” Jill stopped me. “I just need you to be my enemy right now.” She still couldn’t look at me. “It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”

  And as weird of a statement as that was, I actually got it. She needed something stable in her life and I guess her hatred for me was it. Maybe that could change in time. I could only hope. It would make the last year of high school a whole lot easier, but then again I might not make it past the next couple of hours so I simply nodded.

  Jill landed the hover-car and opened my door from her side.

  “Get out,” Jill said quietly.

  I exited the car and before I could turn around she had shut the door and lifted off.

  So much for Jill Forester.

  Almost within seconds a steel box of a hover-truck landed in front of me. It was solid silver like a bar of tin with spinning fans. I couldn’t even see where the driver would sit, the metal was so continuous. Where were the windows?

  “What the…?” I said and my heart sank. This was Turner’s “ride.”

  Two heavy doors swung open and a man dressed in an all white three-piece suit was there with a large grin. “Chelsan, come in.” He looked like he was in his mid-twenties so he either was in his mid-twenties or he was middle class and had been Turner’s slave for centuries. His hair was short and perfectly in place along with everything else about him. He could have been a doll with his aquiline features and perfectly constructed body.

  The inside of the hover-box was as white and sterile as the guy who greeted me. It was devoid of anything except two benches built into the walls facing each other. I sat down on one of them and the spongy white surface wasn’t any kind of material I could recognize. I felt way out of my depth in this situation, which was exactly the way Turner wanted me to feel, I guessed. I gritted my teeth in frustration because I was letting it work. I was letting him win even on the smallest of levels and that was unacceptable.

  The man in white shut the doors and sat across from me with that same annoying grin. “All set here. Let’s go.” He seemed to be talking to the air in front of him.

  But the hover fans churned in response and we were off. Away from my friends. Away from safety.

  What was this place? It was like a quarantine facility… Oh.

  It was a quarantine facility, and I was the thing that needed to be quarantined. Nothing dead in this spotlessly clean metal box. No swirling black holes here. It was amazing how comforting they had become to me since meeting my grandpa. Something I used to consider a curse ended up being the one thing I could depend on.

  “Where are we going?” I asked fruitlessly.

  “We’ll know when we get there.” The man in white said with a smile.

  Can we get a little more vague? Probably, so I kept my mouth shut and took deep calming breaths. As we whizzed over Los Angeles I leaned my head back against the wall of the truck and closed my eyes. I knew there was no way I could even guess where we were going, but since I was stuck here in this sterile box I thought I could try something. I concentrated on the ground below us and sought out any and every black hole I could find. Mostly bugs, ants and houseplants. Okay, that means we’re still in the burbs. That was helpful. The longer we drove the black holes turned into larger animals, opossums, coyotes, lots more bugs of every variety imaginable (blek), birds, heading over a forest, but which one and where? It was impossible to tell there were so many now because of Population Control’s laws. It didn’t matter, there were enough animals I could use in my arsenal if I had to. Of course, that was assuming we were going to land sometime soon! Where were we going?! So frustrating!

  I was so zoned into all the black swirling chasms, I nearly jumped when they all turned into at least five square miles of giant dead oaks. No dead animal or insect or any kind of corpse that I could sense. Just the blackened roots of lifeless trees.

  The hover-truck landed in the center of the dead forest. I couldn’t for the life of me remember any place like this. You’d think we’d have learned about places like these in geography class or something, but it must be just another one of Turner’s secrets he kept from the people.

  The man in white opened the doors of the truck and smiled at me. “Out, please.”

  I stood up and jumped outside of the metal box.

  Burnt, charred earth greeted me like an apocalypse. It made me a little dizzy with the swirling holes of the dead trees and the blackened ground beneath me. The only proof that there had been any kind of life here was me.

  “This way, please.” The man in white was a startling contrast to the darkness of the land.

  I followed him around the hover-truck and I gasped.

  Turner stood in front of an army of hundreds of soldiers with nothing but scorched earth for miles. It was a surreal moment to see so many men dressed in full army gear, holding automatic weapons, all pointed at me. Turner had a smug look on his face. He was only about twenty feet away, which was way too close for my taste. And way too close for those guns to be aimed in my direction. Who did he think I was? Some kind of living bomb? I wish I were at this point. Maybe I could take him down with me. I just hoped Jason would have enough time to get the holo-footage on the air and hopefully save my butt. It didn’t look good at this point in time.

  The driver of the hover-truck was one of Turner’s soldiers and he exited the vehicle with his own gun raised stepping into line with his fellow combatants.

  “Did you enjoy your adventures in my wife’s head last night?” Turner had an edge of fury to his voice.

  “Yes,” I said. A part of me wanted to goad him on. It was like playing Russian Roulette. I felt like I had nothing to lose. If he was going to kill me, there was nothing I could do about it.

  “Tell me what you saw?” He took a step closer and something in his eyes warned me that something was off.

  “No.” I kept my answers as brief as possible and noticed that the less I said the more agitated he grew. I had seen this kind of behavior before. He was stalling. But for what? I needed to find out more. “You brought
a firing squad?”

  “Possibly, that depends on you. Nothing dead for miles. I wasn’t sure how far your reach was, so I made sure five square miles was free of any corpses for you to surprise me with.” The look on Turner’s face was infuriating. He was so proud of himself.

  Interesting.

  He had no idea I could control dead plant-life.

  The dead roots might just become my best friends.

  I wasn’t sure what I could do with them, but it was starting to look like I’d have to figure it out soon.

  “Why am I here?” I asked, trying to fish out the truth from him.

  “Why indeed,” Turner said, smirking.

  He was definitely stalling. It was driving me bonkers and it was starting to scare me.

  The man in white walked over to Turner and whispered something in his ear.

  Turner smiled as wide as I’d ever seen.

  My heart sank. Something just went his way and anything that went his way was never good.

  With a sparkling glint in his eyes, he turned to me. “You, my dear, are no longer useful to me.”

  Hundreds of guns clicked and clacked in readiness to mow me down.

  My whole body shuddered.

  I was really going to die if I didn’t do something right now.

  Now it was my turn to stall.

  “Can’t you tell me what just happened?” I asked desperately.

  Turner laughed at my horror, reveling in it like I was a swimming pool of retribution. “It will give me great pleasure in telling you how you were duped before I kill you.”

  Duped?

  “You thought you were this special creature that I had an ounce of interest in? I’ve wanted you dead since you were born. Your mother was very clever in marrying the one man I couldn’t track. Bruce Lenton one of my first experiments in tracking devices. It was a complete failure and ended up making him and anyone in a two-mile radius of him disappear entirely from the map. Franklin knew about Bruce and must have told your mother before she killed my son. My only tiny bit of satisfaction was knowing that Bruce was a violent man and I hoped that he beat that murderer regularly,” he seethed.

  Sudden realization brought tears to my eyes. Mom didn’t marry Bruce to punish herself, she did it to save me. That day I killed him it wasn’t disappointment or judgment in her eyes, it was fear that Turner would find us. A love even deeper than I could ever imagine surged through me. Everything Mom did was about saving me.

  “When my scientists finally discovered how to find Bruce they were very surprised to find that he was, in fact, dead, and yet living. It wasn’t hard to figure out that one of you was keeping him that way. It was a surprise to find out that you had this power innately, but nothing special.” He was gloating now.

  While he was rubbing in his superiority, I took the time to connect to every tree root I could underneath him and his army.

  “I can do everything you can do with Vodun and Wicca, but what I can’t do is solve complex formulas and theorems,” he said as if revealing something wicked.

  What? I can’t do that either.

  Ryan.

  It wasn’t me he wanted. It was Ryan.

  Duped was an understatement.

  I should have realized it when I saw how Roberta was salivating all over him.

  The parking lot of the Population Control Headquarters was way too public to kidnap Ryan. Turner had to come up with this elaborate ruse just to separate us, knowing I’d never let him take Ryan without a fight.

  “Ryan,” I whispered in shock.

  “He’s ours now, I just got word. He should have been ours years ago, but he was more clever than we gave him credit for. He can’t replace our Franklin, but it’s a start. And we won’t have history repeating itself by having his whore take him away from us again.” Turner was simply beside himself with happiness. “It’s over now. You lost.”

  He motioned his men to take aim and suddenly all the guns were pointed at me.

  “Wait!” I yelped. (Yes, I would actually categorize what came out of my mouth as a yelp; I sounded like a thirteen-year-old boy in puberty.) “I’m about to die anyway, just tell me he’ll be okay.” I felt the roots of the trees beneath them like they were an extension of my own limbs, but I needed to trick Turner into giving me some clue as to where Ryan was being held.

  Turner actually sighed as if I was an annoying fly he couldn’t swat. “Of course he’s fine. He’ll be treated like a King as he should be. He’s ours now.”

  Ours. Roberta’s and his. Replacing Franklin.

  Ryan was at their house. I knew it from the depths of my soul. I’d find him there.

  “One more thing,” I said with confidence this time.

  “You’re stalling now.” Turner’s eyes narrowed with sinister glee. “This will be the last thing that comes out of your mouth, so make it good,” he almost cackled with triumph.

  “It’s not just corpses I can bring back, Gramps.”

  BOOM!

  The ground shook as hundreds of thick gnarled roots burst through the ground beneath Turner and his boys. I made them wrap around their bodies like vises. The guns clattered to the dirt as I squeezed the black roots around the soldiers until they couldn’t move an inch.

  I had fallen from the force of the dead trees bursting through the soil, but stood up and brushed myself off.

  I walked up to Turner whose face was fuming from betrayal and anger, but his body was ensnared like the others so he couldn’t touch me.

  I smiled. “I guess you don’t know everything about my powers, now do you?”

  His eyes flashed with the same curiosity they did in Principal Weatherby’s office. I surprised him. Again.

  I whirled around to see the man in white standing by the hover-truck, terror in his eyes. His hands went up in supplication before any words had come out of my mouth.

  “Please, don’t kill me,” he uttered in panic.

  “I didn’t kill him, why would I kill you?” It was taking most of my energy to keep the roots strong and in place, but I tried to sound as strong as possible. “Get the keys.”

  The man in white practically jumped at the command and hurried over to the ensnared driver, grabbing the keys from his pocket. He ran over to me and handed me the keys. Just to be safe I exerted more of my energy and brought up dead roots to capture him, too. He squealed in fright, and proceeded to whimper once the cage of limbs was in place.

  I turned one last time to Turner. “I’m going to get Ryan.”

  “Good luck with that,” he said with such a condescending attitude that I wanted to squeeze the life out of him with one of the roots. It was the second time I had the chance to kill him. It would mean the safety of the people I loved and mine as well. So easy. Thirty seconds ago he was going to kill me. His soldiers had been about to mow me down with bullets. Why couldn’t I do it? No one would blame me. They’d probably congratulate me.

  But I couldn’t.

  I just couldn’t.

  It would be the worse mistake of my life. I might regret it later with every fiber of my soul, but right now, I couldn’t do it. My grandparents were the only tie I had left with my father and even though that meant nothing to them, it meant something to me. It made me nauseous to admit that, but a part of me wanted Turner and Roberta alive. A very small part, but still. I wasn’t ready. Honestly, I hoped I never would be.

  But in this case, for Ryan’s sake, I did need to bluff.

  “Oh, I won’t kill you, dear Grandfather, but Grandma is expendable. No one knows she exists anyway the way you keep her ugly cat face out of the media. You killed my mother, I’m killing your wife. Even Steven.” And then I grinned in the most vicious way I could contort my face.

  It must have worked because Turner looked downright terrified. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Really? Remember, I am your granddaughter.” And I turned and walked to the hover-truck before he could figure out I was deceiving him.

  “NO! I’LL GIVE YOU A
NYTHING! ANYTHING! I PROMISE I’LL NEVER TRY AND HURT YOU AGAIN!” Turner screamed and his voice was laced with anguish.

  I whirled around before I entered the truck. “We’ll see.” I threw back his own words in his face and he roared like a caged lion.

  I was about to vomit as I sat in the driver’s seat. Thank goodness there was auto pilot. I turned on the holo-GPS, gave it Nancy’s address and whizzed away from the scene. I knew my connection with the tree roots would end as soon as I hit the four-mile mark, but at least they’d stay in place. I hoped it would take a while for the soldiers to break out of the crusty old branches, but I didn’t want to delude myself. At least it bought me some time.