“Stop!”
Old Guy paused and blew a smoke ring into the wispy clouds we’d created together. “She was Jason’s weakness. He was hers. They were…no good together.”
As Mom fought for her life in this Godforsaken cave, I got the urge to defend her life choices. “They were good together at least once.”
He chuckled. The pole torch flickered out. He pointed it toward the ground, and I winged a fireball at it. Direct hit. My aim had improved. Once the flames picked up, he put it back over his shoulder and continued smoking. “Maybe, but instead of having just your mother as leverage against him, now they’ve got you, too.”
Great. Another thing to worry about. I puffed the cigarette and let it relax my nerves. When Mom recovered, both of us could defend ourselves. “Who’s they?”
“They.” He laughed. “They are anyone not in this cave. Everyone who knows about what you can do.”
That was disheartening. “You know about Moses?”
“You don’t say.” He let out a healthy cough. “Moses, my servant, is dead. Pooling blood and broken neck gave it away.”
That wasn’t my point, and he knew it. “He was their leverage on you, wasn’t he?”
“Just a friend” was all he said. That, and a word or two about seeing the Promised Land.
Now, I felt bad for making fun of him and calling him Old Guy’s son. Turned out they had a relationship deeper than boss-henchman. “How’d you meet?”
Old Man huffed again. “How friends meet.”
“Coffee shop? Dating app? Roleplaying game with inappropriate avatars…”
He chucked the used cigarette butt onto the ground. His bloodshot eyes narrowed and focused on me. “Jason sent Frank to me.”
He name-dropped him again: my father, Jason Champion. Luciana Champion. That would take some getting used to.
I wondered, him? My father sent Moses to Old Guy and not us? Why? To find Mom? To fight whatever was coming after us? She would’ve come if he directly approached her. At least, I thought she would.
He answered for me. “She’s the one who walked away from him, not the other way around. I trained them both.”
“Trained them?” I tossed away my cigarette. “You call kidnapping training?”
He motioned to Mom. “Whatever works. You’re alive and your abilities work, don’t they?”
Drugging people and dragging them across the northeast United States wasn’t training. Only a psychopath would think of captivity and torture as instruction tools. But I was trapped. I crossed my arms and watched him smoke as I practiced being a human flamethrower. Hey, I wondered to myself, could I set my whole body on fire? Not sure I wanted to give it a shot.
Pleased with himself, he leaned against his transport’s chassis and finished. After he tossed the wrinkled butt on the ground, he popped the trunk open and handed me several packages the size of my palm. “Eat these,” he said as I stomped out my cigarette. “You need your strength.”
My right glove melted the plastic wrapping. They were the color of mud and had the texture of wet bread. I bit into one without questioning what exactly “it” was. The first one tasted like an explosion of fruit — peaches, grapes, apples, bananas, mangoes, and a few other sweet tastes I couldn’t distinguish. The second one tasted like steak, mashed potatoes, and gravy, and the third like a Caesar salad with croutons. Forget the other stuff. How had the manufacturer copied the taste of croutons? These were amazing!
Clearly, I had eaten these out of order, but I was full.
Just then, several thunder-like cracks struck hard and shook the cave’s foundation. Pebbles and dust dropped from overhead. What was that, a battering ram? Tank? Before I could ask, Old Guy handed me a black leather suitcase from his trunk. “Change out of that relic and put this on. There’s not much time.”
Quicker than I was used to moving, I stripped out of the bodysuit I’d been wearing. Its white pads stuck to my skin, and I almost had to peel the thing off. Inside the suitcase was a new bodysuit — sleek and the exterior was milk white. I failed to see how this would be stealth, but I slipped into it anyway. Once I zipped the thing up at the neck, it shrank to my body’s contours and turned transparent. Although there was no visible padding, the thing was as comfortable as my robe at home. “So, we’re going to fight them?”
There was an extra suit in the suitcase beneath mine, and since Old Guy didn’t respond to me or ask for it, I put it on Mom. The incessant pounding outside the cave continued, so I rushed. Mom lightly moaned when I undressed her and forced her limbs the way I needed them to go. It was like dressing a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound sleeping baby. By the time I was done, Mom’s eyes fluttered open and she eased to a sitting position. “Hey,” she weakly said.
“Hey. Can you stand? We kind of need you.”
She wiggled her feet and bounced her legs. “I think so. What’s going on?”
With my help, she got to a standing position before another blast hit the cave. This one made all of us struggle to keep our balance. She was in no condition to fight, which meant we’d have to run. “Which way is out, Peters?”
He pointed toward the front of the transport. “Twenty yards that way. The back axle is broken. You’ll have to get out the hard way.”
You’ll not we’ll? “What are you going to be doing?” I asked him.
He pointed to his prized vehicle. “Moving that. You’ll need it.”
I put my arm around Mom, and she leaned on me for support. Behind us, Old Guy pushed the transport. The shattered axle scraped the rock surface as it rolled forward. The only thing louder than the grating were the blasts, which tightened in frequency and strength. Old Guy’s torch in my free hand lit the way, and when we reached the cave’s end, it was nothing like what we expected — a large mound of rocks.
“How are we supposed to get through?” I asked[XW62]. Thinking back to my internal flame, I said, “How hot do I have to burn to get through rock?”
“If you could,” Old Guy said, “you’d kill yourself and everything around you.”
That couldn’t have been the plan, right? Mom was in on it. Sure, she was. From the look on her face and what I could tell, she’d figured it out. “How do I find him?” she asked.
“You can’t,” he replied. “Moses was the only way.”
He rounded the side of the transport and poked beneath the chassis until he heard two metallic snaps. I sniffed the strong scent of fluid. Old Guy had popped the combustion engine’s fuel and oil lines.
“Give me thirty seconds,” he said while snatching the torch from my hand. I used my left fist to light our way. “Hit the lines and overheat the battery. They’ll blow and trigger the self-destruct.”
Make the transport explode in this small space? “Are you insane? We won’t survive that!”
He coughed for a minute. “The second part…” He stopped to spit on the ground. “The second part of your job is to survive. Rhapsody can do the rest.”
In her condition? She could hardly stand. “Why can’t I wait until they come in and blow it then — take out a few of them in the process?”
“Listen. This isn’t the time to improvise,” he said. “Not here. Not now.”
He and Mom approached one another. They exchanged looks I could not decipher besides deciding what they weren’t. Not love or sentiment and barely like. In the absence of those, I think there was a shared level of respect between them — enough to shake hands. This relationship had to be complicated, because I didn’t see myself giving the man who had kidnapped me and said my daughter shouldn’t exist a good second of my attention.
“Goodbye,” she whispered as Old Guy limped away. “Thank you.”
I counted backward from thirty, and with each second, I watched the torch grow smaller and smaller in the distance. The last thunderous blast blew inward so far that pebbles and dust clouds pelted the transport’s bumper and taillights. After brushing the debris away from our masks, we glanced at one another.
“There’
s no way this guy buys us fifteen more seconds,” I thought out loud. I conjured a pair of fireballs and lengthened them into foot-high columns. All I had to do was flip my palms and shoot into the hood and the fluid-soaked rock foundation. “You trust him?”
“No.” Mom held up her hand. “But you don’t live almost two hundred years and not know what you’re talking about.”
The afternoon sun shone [XW63]into the cave. Only the suit’s visor with automatic brown tint helped me see through the dust clouds. The eye shields zoomed in to the front of the cave. They’d brought about twenty people, and they had no weapons. How had they gotten inside without explosives? Red outlined their bodies,[XW64] and the reading on the side of my heads-up display was 13.5 kRad. Whatever kRads were, I assumed that’s why Mom’s mouth gaped. I called her name three or four times, and she did not answer. The hand keeping me from acting, however, had not moved.
Ten more seconds.
Old Guy yelled and attacked them. I had no idea he could move so fast. He dropped a group of them until one overcame him and forced him to his knees. He cried out a shortened, “Now!” when they yanked the heliodor from his neck. He disintegrated into a pile of bones and dust.
Fire engulfed my hands and arms and then my shoulders as I shot it forward. Orange and yellow flames licked up the fuel. No explosion yet. I clenched my teeth together until they hurt, focused on getting hotter, and anticipated the thing exploding like a balloon blown up past its capacity. I closed my eyes. Sweat dribbled down my face. A strong pair of hands wrapped around my arms. He or she was too late.
Nothing could stop me.
The next thing I knew, I was lying [XW65]on my back, sore and out of breath. Medical diagnoses flashed on my display, but the stabbing and white flashes in my eyes and my ringing ears made it difficult to read. Mild concussion. Thanks. I didn’t need a computer to tell me that. To my left, amidst the transport’s flaming wreckage, [XW66]was a blackened skeleton with no hands. Its charred fingers were still on my left arm! I shrieked and shook, wiggled, and slapped my forearm until the rattling things fell.
Oh God!
I was a murderer.
I never meant to kill anyone.
What had he done to deserve death?
Besides getting too close to me?
Would everyone close to me die?
I rolled my head in the other direction. More melting transport parts and scattered fires. Mom was to my right, propped up against the wall and unconscious. At least she wasn’t dead, too. Old Guy’s — Peters’ — suicidal plan had half worked. Past Mom was sunlight. We had an escape route. The explosion had done what he said it would and opened a passageway to freedom though neither of us was in the condition to use it. Two of the ones he hadn’t crawled our way. No flames from my body. Must be the concussion.
Too far to reach Mom, I stretched my arm in her direction and hoped our communication systems were connected. “Mom.” My weak voice resounded inside my head. Was I even talking? “Get up, Mom.”
She was breathing. The suit outlined her body in green. She was alive but unresponsive.
My muscles hurt and weighed me down. I called her again with more strength this time. She gasped and coughed. Everything her mentor had said came back to me. Of course, she was a weakness. Like it or not, I cared what happened to her. I hated that Old Guy was right, and now that he was gone, he wouldn’t even have the satisfaction of knowing I was wrong.
Without warning, the two men approaching us stopped. One had black hair and a goatee, and the other had short brown hair. Assuming a fighting position, they jumped past us to fight whatever or whoever it was I couldn’t see. The rock foundation at my back shook. Who had the advantage? All I saw was a silent movie of flailing limbs and exchanged blows. There were two teleporters. One per side, good guy and bad, I assumed, and I was thankful the mask blocked most of the rotten egg smell given off. I couldn’t tell anything about the other two fighters[XW67]. Too much darkness, and my concussed haze didn’t help. Mom was a couple yards away. She might as well have been ten thousand.
I blinked and found myself lying across her legs. Specks of green dust floated around me. Good teleporter or bad teleporter had put us together. We were packages. It was easier to move two things when they were close together. And, let’s face it, we were things. None of them would see us as people: a mother and a daughter. Mom and I were two super beings, and if what Old Guy said was true, someone wanted to control us and use what we could do. With both of us, anything was possible.
Mom grunted. “Were you always this heavy?”
I almost shifted before I realized she was joking. “Now you have a sense of humor?”
The fighting continued, but the other guys, the ones we’d been warned about, were bringing reinforcements. A new group of men appeared at the makeshift entrance to the cave. I rolled to my side and forced myself to my hands and knees. “Can you move?”
“No,” she mouthed. “Stay still.”
Her hand was iron on my shoulder. Besides breathing and shifting to keep numbness from creeping into my legs, I did as she said. We were supposed to sit here and let the superhuman battle decide our fate? Did we have a choice? Neither of us was in the condition to protest. Natalee once had boys get in a fight over her, and when it was over, she did not go out with either of them. From her perspective, it wasn’t her fault, and she felt no obligation to reward “savage behavior.” Wasn’t that what we were doing by lying here?
We had to do something!
My voice was weak and raspy. I rubbed my gloved fingers. Could’ve been the concussion fooling my eyes or I conjured up a spark of flame. I repeated the action, and, as luck would have it, a tennis-ball-sized fireball popped into my palm. I flung it sidearm at the teleporters and tagged one of them. His covered face focused on me for a split second. The glare from behind the black material stirred fear in me, like an evil presence aware it could do whatever it wanted to me, and I couldn’t overcome its will. He returned to the fight. In the darkness, the blow by blow and the winning side were impossible to track.
One of the transporters caught the other off guard and made his hand disappear and reappear into the chest of the other guy who dropped dead. My stomach tensed. No good guy I’d ever seen would kill so mercilessly.
The killer knelt and grabbed me by the throat with his bloodied hand. Thus far, I envisioned myself dying any number of ways — from a fatal infection, alone, on the bathroom floor. Maybe in a hospital bed from complications or even at Old Guy’s hand — but not like this.
Before he had an opportunity to do anything, a man snapped his neck and dropped him to the ground.
He shouted, “How long?” to no one in particular. He was cloaked head to toe in black body armor, and all I could tell about the man who had presumably rescued me was that he had a British accent, his voice didn’t carry the wear of age, and he wasn’t tall or overly muscular.
“Wait!” I yelled at him and pointed at her limp body. “Her, too.”
He followed my finger downward to where my mother lay. “No time.”
My abilities made me a force. “Then leave me. I’ll save her myself.”
Or so I thought. He lifted me like I was nothing and flew — flew — me through the opening the explosion had created and into broad daylight. He and I floated two stories above the ground. With all the strength I had, I beat my fists into his chest and squirmed to get free. I might as well have been punching concrete. He might not have been a jacked-up bodybuilder, but he was solid. “How do you feel?” he asked.
What was this, a therapy session in the sky? Pissed off. Worried about Mom. What did this fool think? Who was he? How did he think I felt being kidnapped again? A flock of birds flapped in formation near us, and I hoped not to get crapped on. “Go back and get her!”
Suddenly, my insides boiled. I slapped at my stomach to stop it and screamed in agony. I was melting alive.
His next words to me were “They might’ve pinged you. Hold on t
ight and keep breathing.”
We shot straight up into the air. Miles into the sky. I must have blacked out from the quick change in altitude, because the next thing I knew, we were hovering among the clouds. Apparently, my suit was insufficient to accommodate this kind of altitude. Its breathing apparatus wasn’t helping much. I could tell from the burning in my lungs and my lightheadedness.
“We’re out of range now,” he told me. “Breathe.”
Not a problem. My chattering teeth and shivering upper torso made anything else impossible. We soared across the sky for several minutes according to my mask’s display, and the whipping drag winds assaulted my ears. This high-tech suit needed a soundproof setting. Did it have one? I whispered “soundproof,” and the pressure on the sides of my head relaxed.
Once I did that, the man held me tighter and thrust us forward through the clouds. An exhilarating experience if not for the lack of sound and the fact I kept entering and exiting consciousness.
The landing was gradual, like a bird finding its footing after gliding, not abrupt like the takeoff. I knelt and flexed my aching leg and arm joints. The incessant pounding was bearable — I could think past it — but focus was an issue. My unaffected pilot circled me while I groaned and stretched. It occurred to me that he might have been talking, so I gave my suit the command to return sound. My ears popped, and I could hear again.
“Where’s my mother?” I slurred.
His lips moved, but his voice was difficult to make out. Was he whispering? I think he said “accelerator” and “infirmary.” Situated around us were tall brick buildings, like a military-looking complex with no soldiers. Behind it was a mountain range — the Appalachians? We weren’t far enough west for it to be anything else, meaning we could be anywhere along the upper East Coast. He took me by the arm and led me to a white rectangular building with metal walls that, from the outside, looked like a warehouse.
A handprint on a biometric pad later, we were inside of it. The security system recognized him by name — Liam Thomas. Beneath the lights, I got a good look at him. Liam couldn’t be more than five feet ten inches and two hundred pounds. From the sleekness of his caramel skin, he was young, nineteen or twenty, with a thin beard and brown eyes. Cute but unremarkable besides his arms — man, those chiseled arms — and a tiny, bluish moon-shaped scar on his right hand near his thumb.
The Nuclear Winter Page 12
