Blackout b-1

by Robison Wells

  “What about me?” Laura said.

  “You’ll be bodyguard,” Rowley answered. “And you’re backup to pass information to and from the primaries.”

  “Now,” Captain Rowley said, staring at the Lambdas. “You have your genuine I-Don’t-Have-the-Virus bracelets so that no one will question you out there. But if you think those are your tickets to run away or betray us, remember that I have this.” He pulled the ankle-bomb detonator from his pocket and held it up. “I’m sure I won’t need it. But you can never be too careful.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  “I’M SURE I WON’T NEED it,” Aubrey said, mimicking the captain’s voice. “But you can never be too careful.”

  She sat on a bench, eating her lunch—a Subway sandwich she’d bought at the only open shop in sight.

  “You can probably hear me chewing,” she said to Jack. “That’s got to be disgusting. Sorry.”

  She was bored out of her mind. She’d been sitting in the park for hours, patrolling while invisible and sitting visible while resting, and she hadn’t seen a thing. Maybe the Green Berets had spooked the terrorists. Maybe they’d seen the snipers. Maybe they wondered why one teenage girl was wandering around the Seattle Center in the middle of a war, when everyone should have been too paranoid to be outside.

  She took a bite of her sandwich. She felt ravenous—eating always seemed to renew her energy after being invisible—but she was trying to make it last. At least chewing on a sandwich made it look like she was doing something.

  Aubrey glanced up toward the Children’s Museum, but didn’t see any sign of the Green Beret snipers. They were good at what they did, even if they treated her like crap.

  Well, she’d saved their butts at the school. They were good at what they did, but she was good at what she did, too.

  “Hey Jack,” she said, clearing her mouth with a sip of soda. “About yesterday. Well, a lot happened yesterday, but I’m talking about the beginning—about the morning. I’m talking about the kiss—I’m talking about our kiss.”

  She paused. She suddenly didn’t know why she’d brought it up. This was stupid. He had better things to be doing right now.

  She took another bite of sandwich and wiped a glob of mayo from the corner of her mouth. She tried to think how long it had been since she’d seen someone—anyone—out by the Space Needle.

  “Wait,” she said quickly. “Jack. I just realized I’m totally leaving you hanging. I don’t want you to think that anything I have to say about the . . . about the kiss is bad. I’m glad we kissed. I’m not saying, ‘It was a moment of foolishness and we need to pretend it never happened.’ That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m definitely pro-kiss.”

  She wondered if anyone was watching her. If the terrorists had someone on a roof nearby, they’d see her. Then again, if someone was up on a roof, then they’d see the snipers before they’d see her.

  “The thing is,” Aubrey said, “I’m sorry about everything back home. I probably should be saying this to your face—and I’ve wanted to. You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to. But I’m just so sorry that I ditched you for Nicole. It wasn’t right, and it only led to trouble. Every time I tried to do something good I screwed things up even more. I treated you horribly, and I did horrible things. Nicole wasn’t buying stuff for me all the time. I was stealing it. I was stealing just because I could and because I wanted to be pretty like Nicole. Maybe you already guessed that, but I wanted you to hear it from me. Assuming you’re even listening, which I don’t know if you are.”

  She walked to the Space Needle for the tenth time and looked up at the structure. No one was there, doing whatever a terrorist would do.

  “You were always there for me,” she continued. “And I turned my back on you. I betrayed a lifetime of friendship for—”

  There was a pop, and then three more pops. She knew the sound the instant she heard it. Gunshots. She spun in place, trying to look for the shooter, but it was too much of a bowl—the shots echoed off every building.

  “Jack?” she said. “Jack!” She started running for the music museum. Before she got far, she saw Jack running toward her, blood streaming from his head and down his shirt.

  She reappeared as she ran, and Jack altered his course to meet her. He seemed to be running fine, but there was blood everywhere.

  Aubrey threw out her arms to hug him, but when he reached her, he just grabbed her and kept running.

  “They tried to kill us,” he said, panting.

  “Are you okay?”

  “We have to get out of sight—away from the snipers.”

  She tried to look at him as they ran, but her eyes were too blurry to see his wound. He seemed to be bleeding above his right ear, but he was moving too much to be sure.

  “Why?” she shouted.

  “I don’t know.”

  They ran in between two buildings, out of the view of snipers—or at least, she hoped so. It should have been out of the soldiers’ view if they didn’t move. Jack began to stumble, and pulled her behind a Dumpster with him.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, her hands on his head, trying to stave off the bleeding. His blood leaked through her fingers and down her arm, dripping from her elbow onto the pavement.

  “I don’t know,” he panted. “Everything was fine. It was quiet. We were watching, and Rowley was getting routine checks from the snipers. And then all of a sudden he was pulling the detonator from his pocket, priming it.” Jack paused and wiped blood from his eye.

  Aubrey couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. She pulled her sweater up over her head, ignoring the cold, wet Seattle weather in her flimsy military T-shirt. She mashed the sweater against his wound.

  “The detonator?” she asked, panicked. “You mean, like, the ankle detonator?”

  He nodded, and then winced at the movement. “It was all of a sudden. He didn’t say anything—he just heard something on his radio and pulled it out of his pocket. I swear, he was about to push the button.”

  “How did you stop him?”

  “Laura did,” Jack said, leaning his back against the filthy Dumpster. “She hit him and took it—she’s so fast—and I think she broke his arm. That’s when the fighting started.”

  Aubrey peeked around the edge of the Dumpster toward the way they’d come, and then glanced up at the rooftops. She couldn’t see anyone. But she needed Jack’s eyes. She wouldn’t have been able to see a sniper on a rooftop even if her head wasn’t filled with adrenaline.

  “What happened to you?” she asked, turning her attention back to him.

  “McKinney tried to shoot me,” he said. “Right as Laura tackled him. I swear, she saved my life. Twice.”

  “Where is she?”

  She could feel him try to shake his head, but her hands wouldn’t let him. “I don’t know. The captain gave the order to the snipers to take out the Lambdas.”

  “What? Why would he do that?” She felt herself starting to cry, and she pushed the feelings down. “Did you know why? You could hear the radio in his ear, couldn’t you?”

  Jack smiled weakly. “I blocked it out because I was listening to you.”

  “Oh great,” she said, forcing a laugh. “Good job, Aubrey. We have to get out of here.”

  “Uncover my ear,” Jack said. “We’ve got to find Laura.”

  FORTY-SIX

  JACK TRIED TO PUSH EVERYTHING else out of his mind—the throbbing in his own head, his labored breathing, Aubrey’s poorly hidden sobs. He closed his eyes.

  The pain was unbearable, and he kept trying to turn off the sense of touch—turn off the nerves in his own head. But it was an almost overwhelming task. He felt every shred of torn skin, every scrape against his skull, every broken blood vessel. It was excruciating.

  There weren’t any voices, not from the music museum. He could hear one person’s breathing. He didn’t know if it was a soldier or Laura.

  It had to be a soldier. None of the Green Berets would have left Laura alive, not af
ter she attacked them so viciously.

  But if she was dead, they’d have the detonator. Both he and Aubrey would have lost a leg by now.

  He heard the sound of someone on a roof, but he couldn’t pick it out. It was near them—rubber soles on a steel roof. That had to be a sniper, unless Laura was climbing onto roofs now.

  He tried to concentrate even more, but it was nearly useless. Every time he moved his head, trying to locate a sound, the rough rubbing of the bloody sweater distracted him.

  Jack could hardly believe he was still alive. The bullet had come so close. He’d felt every bit of it, as if time had slowed down. He’d felt it rip through his skin, then skid around his skull. He wondered how much farther it would’ve needed to be to the left to have killed him instead of grazing him—a millimeter? Two? He could have been dead right there. No one would have alerted Aubrey, and she’d have been killed by a sniper.

  There was a clatter on a rooftop, the sound of—of a gun? And then quiet. Breathing. Two people had just fought and one of them had beaten the other, and he had no idea who had won.

  “We have to get up,” Jack said, looking in Aubrey’s eyes. He moved the sweater from his head—it was now just a soaked rag, and it was stopping him from finding help.

  “Why?” she asked, plainly terrified.

  “To find Laura. Now.”

  Aubrey stared back at him for a moment, and then nodded. She stood, still hunched so she wouldn’t be seen over the Dumpster. She gave him her hand, and he pulled himself to his feet. He felt dizzy and tired, and he wondered if this was the right choice.

  The breathing on the rooftop moved, quickly now, faster than a Green Beret could move. It had to be her.

  Why was she fighting the snipers? Why weren’t they just getting out of there? Was it rage? Revenge? Did she think they were going to track them all down?

  “You stay here,” Aubrey said. She reached into her small bag and pulled out the light pink bottle of Flowerbomb. It was a ridiculous image—she was wearing jeans and T-shirt, both her hands were smeared in his blood, and yet she was spraying herself with perfume.

  His nose was immediately filled with the aroma of roses and orchids, mixed with the pungent iron scent of blood.

  She smiled at him. “You look terrible.”

  “You look like you just murdered me,” he answered.

  She kissed him quickly, and then vanished.

  She shouldn’t have done that. The smell was on him now, right under his nose. He scrubbed at his face with sticky, red fingers to remove the perfume.

  There was so much blood. He was going to pass out.

  He leaned a shoulder against the Dumpster and tried to focus on the remnants of her perfume that were left trailing in the air behind her. She headed back down between the buildings, and it seemed, though he couldn’t be sure, that she was stopping at the corner.

  There was no more breathing from the roof. He tried to focus on the other roofs, where he knew the rest of the snipers were supposed to be, but it was too big of a plaza and he couldn’t be sure of anything. Sounds bounced back and forth.

  Someone was running, their shoes smacking hard against the pavement. It couldn’t be Aubrey—she didn’t run when she was invisible because it made her so unsteady.

  Jack moved out from the Dumpster and down the alley. He wasn’t walking in a straight line, and he knew that he wasn’t going to catch up with anyone.

  Everything had fallen apart. This morning they’d been part of a team of Green Berets and now they were the enemy. They were terrorists. Laura had killed soldiers—she was defending Jack and Aubrey—and now no one would ever believe them. They were outlaws. They were exactly what Captain Rowley had thought they were when he pulled out that detonator. They were killers. It didn’t matter that Jack and Aubrey didn’t kill—he would have certainly killed Captain Rowley to save Aubrey’s life if he’d been able to do it. The fact that Laura did it instead didn’t make him any less complicit.

  Something was burning as Jack reached the end of the alleyway. He could smell it. And he saw Aubrey’s bloody handprint on the wall where she had paused and waited.

  The running feet were somewhere on the other side of Seattle Center, but they seemed to be coming toward him.

  He shouldn’t be there. Those running feet could be a soldier—someone chasing after them, pounding across the cement to get revenge—and Jack was standing around like an idiot. He didn’t have a gun or even a rock. He was half-conscious.

  And then the source of the footfalls appeared—Laura, running at full speed down toward the Children’s Museum. He wanted to shout, to get her attention, but he didn’t want any more attention for himself.

  Where was Aubrey? There was too much for him to keep track of. Aubrey’s perfume wafted in the breezeless, humid air as she made her way toward the center of the—

  What was that burning?

  Bang!

  Jack watched as Laura, running at full speed, stumbled a few more steps, and then plummeted forward, tumbling head over heels across the pavement. There, at the entrance of the Children’s Museum, was Sergeant Eschler with his pistol.

  Jack ran. He didn’t know why. It made no sense, but the only thing going through his mind was the throb of blood and the terror of seeing his bodyguard get murdered right in front of him.

  Eschler saw him coming, and raised his pistol.

  But the sergeant flew into the glass doors of the building, as though pushed by an enormous gust of wind.

  It wasn’t wind, Jack knew immediately. It was Aubrey. She wasn’t strong, and she’d only caught him off guard. The pistol was still in his hand, though Jack could tell that she was fighting him for it.

  It only took a minute for the man to throw her off him, invisible or not. He swung the gun at empty space and fired.

  “No,” Jack breathed. All he could tell was that she was there, somewhere. Her perfume was all over Eschler and the ground.

  Eschler fired a second time and then a third.

  Jack was racing wildly, knowing that he’d be just as ineffectual as Aubrey had been—worse, because he was visible.

  Eschler turned, leveling the gun.

  And then, as though launching from a cannon, Laura erupted from the ground and shot forward, tackling Eschler and smashing him into the cement wall of the front of the Children’s Museum.

  The red-painted concrete crumbled around the impact, leaving a man-sized gash in the facade of the building. Laura stumbled backward, bleeding from her stomach.

  Aubrey appeared, grabbing Laura as she fell.

  That was three times Laura had saved him today.

  Jack took the soldier’s bag and dumped the contents onto the pavement. With shaking, wet fingers, he picked through the first-aid gear and found a roll of gauze and an Ace bandage.

  “What’s that smell?” Aubrey asked.

  Lying on her back, with glazed eyes, Laura pointed upward. Black smoke was roiling from the Space Needle, about a third of the way up. And at the center of the smoke was a blinding white spot.

  “Oh my . . .” Aubrey didn’t even finish—she just stared.

  They’d failed. Everything had failed. They’d fought the very people that they’d come here to help—or, rather, those people had fought them—and the terrorists got to the target anyway.

  There was no way to stop them, Jack thought as he stared at the brilliant glowing center of the smoke. Laura was the only one who could do anything like that, who could possibly climb to where the damage was being done, and she was lying on the concrete bleeding from her stomach.

  “We have to get out of here,” Jack said, his eyes locking on Aubrey’s. Without another word, she began lifting Laura to her feet, and Jack scrambled to gather as much of the soldier’s gear as he could, throwing the first-aid kit, the flashlight, and the Beretta all into Aubrey’s bag. He pulled one of Laura’s arms over his shoulder, and Aubrey did the same on the other side. They hobbled as quickly as they could toward the alle
yway, trying to put as much distance between them and the Space Needle as possible.

  There was a metallic screech, and Jack hurried his steps. Laura was moving surprisingly well, but she’d always been tough. He hoped that she’d live long enough so they could thank her.

  They moved down the side alley, which spread into a wider road, and a block later they reached a street. Jack didn’t care who was watching. He used the flashlight to smash in the window of a car, and then knelt on the ground to hot-wire it—a skill he’d used a dozen times to start the run-down tractors he worked with in Mount Pleasant. He took the driver’s seat, despite the blood that was still flowing from his head, and Aubrey helped Laura into the back and then sat with her, already applying first aid before Jack put the car into gear.

  He pulled out into the empty street, and watched in his rearview mirror as the Space Needle fell.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  ALEC COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS LUCK, nor could he stop the grin from covering his face.

  Laura, he thought. The stupid little bitch.

  She’d put up quite a fight, but he’d seen the final bullet, seen it hit her in the chest. Laura was tough, but she couldn’t take a bullet so close. He was sure of it.

  His team hadn’t had trouble with the Green Berets. They were so predictable, so ridiculous.

  As soon as Alec had heard that the army was trying to create superpowered military strike forces—teams like his—he’d known they’d be simple to defeat. If anything, adding untrained superpowered teenagers to an army team made it weaker, not stronger.