Sweat drenches me within seconds. My muscles burn as I descend into the chasm. I spit bile, blink sweat and tears. The more I slide, the more I have to fight the numbness in my hands, my quivering arms. They’ll quit working soon. I have to slide faster.
Blood and chunks of flesh smear the girder, streak the steel in vertical lines. Jack’s palms must be ripped to shreds. How is he still holding on? Will his fingers be intact by the time he reaches the ground?
Ten floors to go. I’m close.
Cars fly past in swarms of light and color. Engines roar. Wind beats against my back like a sledgehammer. I press the beam to my chest even though it rips my dress, tears skin. Pain surges from bruises and fractured ribs—the morphine must have worn off. I need more. So much more.
“Eight … seven … six,” I scream, “five … four … three … two…”
Gravity sucks me into a cosmic vacuum where the landscape moves at an incalculable speed. The wall becomes a blank sheet of matter. Industrial lights merge into a spooling constellation.
“Let go,” Jack shouts. “I’ll catch you.”
Chaos concedes to darkness—maybe I passed out. Arms replace air in a neck-jerking blow. Then, I’m on my feet, supported by Jack’s battered frame and fleshless hands.
“I have you,” he whispers. His lips ease against my cheekbone. “I have you.”
Purebloods engulf us in a mob of red lipstick and pinstriped suits. They swarm from the fighter jet wreckage, scream questions until they’re blue in the face. Don’t they see Jack’s injuries—blood paints a target on his shoulder, flesh hangs from his wrists like corn husks? Why won’t they offer help?
Jack cups his hands over my ears to dull their voices’ brunt. I relax against his chest, and the pain gnawing at my every physical fiber fades. No more shaking or watching reruns of memories I’d like to drown in the sea. He gives clarity—if only I could fix him like he so often fixes me.
Guns fire when Scavs emerge from the residential building. They charge into the masses, break apart the protective barricade of bodies with bullets and punches. They won’t stop, will they? Not until Jack and I are dead. Maybe it’d be better if we had jumped off the skyscraper instead of postponing the inevitable because…
I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
****
Charleston is a bastion, a dig-in-your-heels-and-hang-on kind of city. It has stood, fallen, and been rebuilt after hurricanes. It has modified itself but remained largely unchanged. It is delicate, rugged, and strong. A survivor, that stands even when it’s lost everything.
That completes its mission no matter the cost.
“When we arrive at Homeland Security, we’ll have to move fast. I should have access to the plane, well, unless my clearance was revoked.” Jack increases altitude and merges the stolen car with aerial traffic. “We’ll have to park on the lower deck and travel the rest of the way on foot. The landing pad is surrounded by an energy grid that prevents privately owned aircrafts from…”
“Timeout.” I slump against the dashboard, hide from city lights and traffic. My eyelids dip—no, I have to keep them open because if I drift asleep, I’ll lose the adrenaline keeping me intact.
“You’re supposed to say something when you call a timeout. That’s how it works. It’s not a mute button.” Jack drums his fingers on the steering wheel and twitches like a terrier during a thunderstorm.
“We’ll get through this, you know?” He fakes a smile and then places a hand on my thigh.
We won’t make it out of the City alive.
Our hovercraft circles over Homeland Security and approaches the lower flight deck, a limited stretch of runway lined with aeronautical lights. I grip Jack’s wrist as the vehicle lands.
“When the engine cuts off, exit the car and run.” He looks at me with dilated pupils. Breath leaves his mouth in short huffs—he knows what I won’t say, the facts of our situation. We move forward because we can’t move back. We stomp into death without another choice. “The motion detectors will send a signal to security. We’ll have a maximum of six minutes before the Scavs reach the roof.”
Six minutes until we join the list of casualties.
Six minutes to fight like hell.
Then, when our hourglass runs out of sand, the sea will calm to let us inside its wild embrace. We’ll paddle through foam, dive beneath the turquoise surface, and reach out our hands to Jon and Sybil. All of this will end. The Purebloods will complete their invasion. Nothing’ll matter anymore.
“Countdown starts now.” Jack cuts off the engine, and together, we lurch out the doors, onto the illuminated tarmac. He leads me in a sprint across the runway and up a metal staircase.
“How much time do we have left?” I wheeze and rub the sting of wind from my face. A burning sensation slices through my calves—it’ll go away soon, once a Scav fires a bullet into my skull.
“Doesn’t matter.” Jack wraps an arm around me when the plane comes into view—a serrated fighter jet. He squeezes tight as if to say goodbye and then opens the cockpit’s pilot hatch. “Get inside.”
“You want me to fly the plane?” I crawl into the chair and fasten my restraints.
“It functions on autopilot. You won’t have to do a thing. Trust me.” He plops into the passenger seat, flips several switches, and keys something into the navigation system. “Once we’ve passed through the dome, type the Command Center’s coordinates into the controls. You remember them, right?”
“Of course.” Because Colonel Buchanan made me write them five thousand times in a notebook and pinpoint them on a map. “How much time do we have left?”
Jack glances at his wristwatch. “Three minutes.” He smiles when the machine rumbles to life and its turbines spin to takeoff speed. “Don’t pull any levers. You might disengage the vertical stabilizer or activate the gun system.”
There is an escape, and we’ve found it. Tomorrow, we will wake up in a makeshift military base, have cups of stale coffee and eat powder eggs with refugees who haven’t showered in weeks. Colonel Buchanan will boss Jack and me around while Tally tells him to screw off. Life will be normal.
We’ll be home.
“I love you.” Jack flips one last switch and then climbs out of the plane. He stands outside as both hatches lower and lock. Wait, why isn’t he leaving with me? What’s happening?
“No, Jack!” I bang the door until my knuckles bleed. Tears pour from me, and my chest aches with a new pain. This isn’t right. We’re supposed to stay together.
“The Vestige needs a contact in the City. I have to stay,” he shouts as the plane’s turbines spin faster and batter him with a torrent of air. “You can do this, Julie.”
“Get inside,” I scream. “You’re not leaving me, Jack. You’re not.” Pain twists my stomach, makes me groan. I slam my fists against the digital control panel—maybe the hatches will unlock.
“I’ll find a radio and make contact.” Jack places his hand on the window closest to me. His transmuted voice sinks through the thick glass. “I have to stay. You have to go. No one is going to see the truth unless we make them. No one is going to fight for our world unless we inspire them. You and me … we are the Vestige.”
“They’ll kill you.” I lean my forehead against the hatch and breathe condensation onto the barrier. “You can’t die. Jon died. Everyone died. Not you. Please don’t let them take you, too.”
“We’ll get through this, I swear.” Jack wipes his tears and moves away from the jet. Idiot. Jerk. I won’t watch strangers lower his body into a grave. I won’t be the girl crying oven his open casket. If he dies, most of me will die with him—why should I attend my own funeral?
“Damn it.” I sob as the plane’s engine hisses to a climax and the tires roll forward. There has to be a way to stop this thing. Somehow.
Energy ruptures through the jet. Speed pins me to the chair. Vibrations turn to weightlessness. Then, I’m in the sky. Clouds spool across the windshield and reveal
the landscape below in flashes—skyscrapers, hovercrafts, bustle that moves through the streets like molten lava in the depths of a volcano.
A power outage drains the City of its glow. The electric lights turn off in quadrants, piece by piece until only a conjoining strand of illumination is left flickering.
Drawn across the metropolitan hub in resonating, scintillating writing is the letter ‘V’.
The Vestige has made their presence known to the Feds.
They’ve declared war.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.”
Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Vibrations morph into a roar, then a piercing squeal. Suction smashes me against the chair. I gasp for air and grip armrests as the jet angles upward, shoots into a dark swirl. The rumbles will liquefy my insides if they don’t subside—I have to disengage the autopilot, but I can’t move my limbs. What’s happening? Aircrafts don’t inhabit the atmosphere.
“Dear God,” I mumble on repeat, “help me.”
Pain stabs through my head like a needle, and pressure slams against my sternum. I open my mouth in a silent scream. I squeeze my eyes shut as fire licks the windshield and curls up the nose. And then, all at once, the stress ends in an abrupt lift of pressure. Silence replaces the industrial howl.
I open my eyes.
A black void filled with billions of stars surrounds the jet. Constellations swirl and move around me, preceded by the faint chime of spectral light filtering through the great beyond, connecting the celestial sketches in an intricate pattern of rays and effervescence.
Tears float to the ceiling. Up, not down. Glassy beads instead of wet splats. I choke on the sheer horror that comes from being thrown into nothingness, and I sob when exhaustion ripples through me as a tingling ache. I cannot move three feet in any direction without having the eyes sucked from my skull, air vacuumed from my lungs. There isn’t another soul within a hundred mile radius. Alone—that’s what I am now, totally and morbidly alone.
The plane rotates until Earth comes into view. Sunlight ignites the sphere with color. I’ve seen so little of the world and now, I see it all at once—every ocean, mountain, continent, all vulnerable and small compared to the infinite universe. It’s different from how I imagined. Instead of the green and blue globe that plagued my textbooks, the planet is various shades of brown. The ocean is still blue, but the land masses have lost the chloroplast vitality of vegetation.
I savor recirculated air—what if the oxygen runs out? Why did the autopilot bring me into space? Holy crap, I’m in space … like an astronaut … but I don’t have a spacesuit. Jack is going to get an earful when I get back to Earth. How do I get back?
Domes appear on the planet’s coffee-colored surface like fungus bulbs, adorning each continent with a civilizational fragment. Those in sunlight shimmer green while those in darkness flicker with city lights.
Severance isn’t the last pocket of humanity.
There are more of us.
We were preserved by those who sought to destroy our race.
I shield my eyes when dawn sizzles over the horizon and saturates North America with the warmth of daybreak. Severance ignites with a florescent blue haze. Home. A cobalt flame.
The jet’s autopilot must be programmed to transport me to one of the other colonies.
“What is this, Star Wars?” I swing my weightless arms forward and key the Vestige’s coordinates into the digital control panel. The screen floods with satellite images, maps, and pixel flight routes. It sorts through the database of information before reprogramming the autopilot.
“Okay. Going home.” I tighten my safety restraints when gravity latches hold of the plane. It happens all at once—North America increases in size, flames sweep across the windshield, and vibrations pound me like a sledgehammer. I blink away the stars until cotton-ball clouds fill the atmosphere.
Turbines reactivate and send the jet soaring over radioactive ruins of a crumbled city. Craters dot and char the landscape. Dust fogs the air, parts in sporadic gasps of clarity. Dilapidated rooftops, congested intersections, an old Walmart, and a vacant Starbucks—welcome to post-apocalypse America, where the things that once meant much no longer matter.
Severance looms is the distance like a distant mirage and swallows me when the jet pierces its magnetic barrier. Trees and overgrown fields replace monochrome rubble. Cars trickle up and down interstates, zigzag through mazes of country roads.
I’ve seen the truth, all of it, every wrinkle and crack.
****
Adults and teenagers rush from their stations in front of a deserted grocery store and pry open the plane’s hatch with a crowbar. They aim their rifles at me, the Pureblood lookalike.
“Don’t shoot.” I slide from the cockpit with my arms raised but stumble when my feet meet the pavement. I’d melt into a puddle if a kid’s AR-15 wasn’t around to act as a rail.
“At ease, soldiers. She’s one of us.” Abram emerges from the committee dressed in camouflage pants and a bulletproof vest—normal, Vestige clothes. He pulls me into a tight hug. “You look like you’ve been to hell and back, Stryker.”
“Yeah … hell sucked.” I squeeze his cocoa shoulders and rest my cheek against his armored chest. He smells like smoke and whiskey, those bottles of shampoo hotels leave in their bathrooms.
He smells like home.
“Tally will know how to mend those lacerations … and that crazy hairdo.” Abram supports me as we waddle to the store’s entrance. He tilts his head to make eye contact with the recruits. “You know the drill. Disassemble the plane’s navigation system. Be thorough. If the Scavs locate us, we’re all dead.”
“Julie Stryker.” Colonel Buchanan strides from the temporary Command Center, followed by a posse of older men. He dons a smile and gives me a bone-crushing handshake. “Welcome back.”
The acidic stench of body odor and spoiled milk makes me cough when I follow Colonel Buchanan into the store. Garbage clutters the linoleum floor—food wrappers, empty bottles, used medical supplies. I shuffle through a pile of bloody newspaper—who the heck bled all over the New York Times?
Refugees and recruits dwell within rooms made of empty shelves. Lanterns illuminate their austere, sunken faces. They perch on tepid iceboxes like ravens, curl up in beds made of rags and tattered cushions. Comfort exists in denial, so they chose the truth, to live in a makeshift compound where the air reeks of morning breath and beef stew, and people are no longer enslaved to lies.
I smear the sweat from my face and move through a warren of stopgap aisles. Lottery-ticket dispensers stack the check-out counters to create a work platform of sorts, artillery covers every available shelf—a few years ago, this was a civil place, but was is as significant as the dead.
Colonel Buchanan crushes a cockroach with the heel of his boot, leaving a pool of legs and exoskeleton fragments in its place. “I’ll have Tally fetch some decent clothes. We need to scrub the City off you before someone mistakes you as a Pureblood and puts a bullet between your eyes.”
They’d kill me because my lips still bear a faint trace of red, because I might be an alien? No, the Vestige’s goal isn’t to smite the Pureblood race. We fight for our freedom, our world. We seek revival, not to hurt those who’ve hurt us. If we become like them when they became like us, we lose our right to a fresh start. We will abdicate our place on this planet.
Jed and Margo are proof that ignorance is two-sided.
“Something happened on my way here.” I grab Colonel Buchanan’s arm to still his eager legs. “There are more colonies like Severance. I saw them. We’re not all that’s left of humanity.”
“Are you sure?” When I nod, he mutters a paragraph of mind-blowing profanity and slumps against a shelf. “More humans … and more aliens.”
“More world.” I flinch when Levi plo
ps next to me and rubs his wet nose against my thigh. “Good to see you, too.” I hug his thick neck and bury my face in his fur.
“Ugh, that stupid dog got away from me.” Tally jogs from the maze of corridors. “I was trying to chain him up in the storeroom and…” She pauses when I rise to my feet. Her cheeks flush. “Oh, it’s you … you’re back.”
“My cover was blown.”
“Thank you, God.” She throws her arms around me in a chokehold embrace and laughs. Her collarbone stabs my neck. “You have no idea what these freaking idiots have put me through. Are you okay? Where’s Jack? Nash is going to piss himself when he sees you.”
“Calm yourself, Lieutenant.” Colonel Buchanan pries me from Tally’s grasp and clears his throat. “The Vestige has been hard at work. We’ve recruited and sent out messengers to surrounding cities and towns to meet with influential people in secret and deliver the truth. We’ve opened Command Centers in four other locations. Mind you, it’s been a quiet operation. With only two weeks until the virus releases, we can’t jeopardize our efforts by revealing ourselves to the Feds.”
Home—the word has gained a new meaning. It doesn’t refer to a place of comfort or safety, a building with central heating and clean sheets. It isn’t a paradise of sameness—nothing is the same anymore, not my house on Rainbow Row or the people who filled it. Home is this, the snarky soldier who now considers me a friend and the filth that strips away my hold on the past. Home is with Jack and the Vestige. Home is where I can be the most honest version of myself.
“I’ll take Stryker to the medical ward now, that is, if you’re finished gabbing.”
Colonel Buchanan glares at her. “Yeah. You do that.”
Tally leads me to the medical ward, which was once an employee break room. The on-call nurse wraps my ribcage and sliced knees. I’m given a set of clothes, a bowl of soup, and a spare bed in the guest bunkroom. I change. I eat. I try to sleep but every time I close my eyes, I have nightmares. After being alone with my thoughts for a good amount of time, I tie on sneakers and shuffle through the store, down empty produce aisles that stink of rot.
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