by Jalex Hansen
She felt her mind loose itself and catapult across the miles and oceans to a city she didn’t recognize at first. Then she saw the Capitol building. Washington D.C. then.
In a blink she was in an office building. A young man was behind the desk his hand resting over a phone. She could feel his distress, his fear, she noticed with a start that he had the Lux Mark on his wrist. She could see it gleaming at the edge of his shirt sleeve, his hand extended ready to make a call. His voice was deep even though it broke with strain, and somewhat familiar.
“You can’t do this,” he was saying. “I won’t let you. You’re crazy. I went along with what you wanted; I was willing to do that. I thought you wanted me for protection. I didn’t know you wanted me to help you kill thousands, millions of people.”
Angine stood by the door and Lissa felt his cold eyes in the marrow of her bones. She swore that he was looking right at her.
He held a woman, a young woman, in front of him, her glossy brown hair wrapped around his fist, her eyes wild and rolling in terror. “I don’t need your protection, Connor,” he said. “But I do need your power. When you and I join with the others there will be no stopping us.”
“That’s what I’m doing now. Stopping you.” He picked up the phone and began to dial.
Angine reached behind him and brought out an oily black gun with a gaping hungry muzzle. He rested it against the side of the woman’s head.
“Connor!” she cried.
He hesitated with the phone in his hand undecided. Lissa could hear it ringing. “You won’t do it,” he said calmly. “You won’t hurt her. You need her.”
“I don’t need her. I don’t even want her. I was using her, to get to you. She has outlived her usefulness,” Angine said.
And he pulled the trigger.
Three hundred miles off the coast of California a small fissure opened in the ocean floor. Lissa could not feel the water that surrounded her vision, she should not have been able to see at this black and murky depth, the zone of creatures with sightless eyes and jagged teeth, of worms that thrived in the super heated vents where magma kissed the inner flesh of ocean bottom, but the light allowed her to sense the waves of energy traveling through the mantle, building to an unsupportable pressure. It gave her the curse of remote sight, so that she watched as the fissure widened and deepened, so that a new line of energy changed direction and traveled underneath the sea bed through the crust of the Earth toward the continent of North America.
In the deeper regions of the earth underneath Chicago, and Phoenix, off the coasts of New York City and Miami, sister faults began to open and radiate as though they had specific targets. She felt it happen as they traveled through the field that nets all living things.
Almost simultaneously, the pressure erupted and danced through the great tectonic plates. They began to rub and catch against one another until they too were overcome by the energy and slid past each other shaking the land like a tumbler of ice.
It took only minutes for the cities to fall, for the great buildings to collapse. Minutes for nature to destroy what man had spent centuries building. The streets split and tilted at crazy angles sliding human beings into the dark earth and sometimes closing over them.
Small fragments of lives made their way to her. A little girl alone in a street that had heaved and buckled around her, calling for her mother who had been swallowed by the earth, a homeless man who stood frozen while a power line came down and wrapped itself around him, a death snake kissing him into oblivion, a teenage girl about her age dragging her friend through the street, leaving a trail of blood. “Daddy! Daddy!” she wailed. “Help us! Won’t somebody help us!”
Even now, while the earth still rumbled and the concrete giants toppled and fell, crushing whatever lay beneath them; survivors were stumbling from the rubble mourning their dead in high keening wails, searching for the lost. The fires followed behind eating up those that did not run or had nowhere to run to.
Again Lissa was yanked upward and away tumbling in lightening flashes over the broken spine of America. Everywhere she saw the same as her mind’s eye passed over, death destruction, flames. A million, ten million dreams laid waste, and obliterated.
Lissa saw the President watching helplessly from the Oval Office as each city fell, as America was laid to waste. The best military minds stood behind him shocked and uncertain. Some knelt and prayed. Outside the window those that were not barricaded in their homes stood on the White House lawn holding vigil.
Gathering his courage, he stepped out to give the address to the nation, to what was left of it. Lissa’s tormented vision followed. The press room was dead silent, the reporters unsure what to ask. That was fine; the President did not know what to say.
He stood at the podium with his head bowed and then looked up into the camera. “My fellow Americans,” he began and couldn’t suppress the chill, the icy premonition that that was the last time he would speak those words. “We are the greatest country on Earth and we will not be broken even by the greatest tragedy. In this hour of our darkest despair when we cannot see where the light will come from, I urge you to stay strong.”
The President did not even feel the bullet at first, but Lissa felt as though it passed through her own body. It caught him from behind traveling up under his ribs to lodge in his heart. The last thing he saw as she looked out of his eyes, his darkening mind, was that tattered symbol of justice and triumph, sewn by a small timid woman that did not know her own importance. He thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and his final prayer was that all of those that died for what it stood for would not be forgotten.
Connor sat in the dark holding Joanne in his arms. He could hear the screams in the streets, the alarms, the sound of hundreds of jets streaking from the Capitol out to the destroyed regions of his broken country. He stroked her hair and wished that tears could come. At last, he closed his eyes. There was nothing left.
Underneath the streets, Hikari huddled in the dark, a small faint light shone on her wrist faltering with her heartbeat, snuffed by grief. Jason clung to her arm and she could feel his whole body shaking. He was too frightened to cry. The dust was choking her and she could hear the others, some of them at least calling for help, calling for one another, reaching out in the blackness. Yerik lay in her lap. She could feel the warmth of his blood on her legs. She kept one hand over his heart counting the beats, One... two... three... still alive.
She closed her eyes and waited for what would come next.
Lissa could feel herself pulled away, carrying their ache and desolation with her, a heavy shadow.
In the dark Angine smiled at her, and prepared to step into power.
Lissa came up with a scream in her throat choking on the smoke and the smell of burning flesh. She screamed and screamed, pushing at the hands that held her. “Stop! No, no, no!” The sand that she lay on rippled and heaved, dissipated the energy of her body, the small earthquake she had become.
Slowly the desert surrounded her again, the stars and sand remote and indifferent.
Aaron and Gideon were on either side of her, holding her, bracing her, as the energy leapt and arced back into the earth from whence it had come.
Shaking in the depth of her soul she tried to find her breath, her words, her center.
She looked up into Gideon’s eyes. “It’s happened,” she said. “We’re too late.”
To be continued
Available 09.06.11
Lux 1.2
Call to Arms
As America falls and everything they know and love is destroyed, the survivors began to build an army to fight against the corrupt government of Senator Angine.
For information on upcoming installments and an in depth view of the world of Lux visit:
luxtheseries.com
ooks on Archive.
