“They’re coming—” Emily said, but was interrupted when the windows on either side of the room exploded inward as two Orange Men entered in a storm of broken glass and splintered wood.
The intruders hit the floor in unison like commandos breeching an enemy’s stronghold, then completed their tactical roll forward and came up with their all-white, pulsating pistols at the ready.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
Emily woke from her near catatonic state and reacted on instinct. She shot off the couch as the Orange Men aimed at Jim and Duane, then ran and took a defensive position in front of her friends.
She brought both of her hands up with palms out, just as the Orange Men fired their weapons. Beams of red fire spewed from their guns, but never made it to their targets. Emily caught the energy streams in her hands, then channeled them inside her body like she’d done long ago when her abductors’ ship opened fire on her. She redirected the pulsating energy and sent it back toward the intruders’ guns. They continued firing and she continued to catch and return the energy, creating a nonstop feedback loop.
Just then, Baby Julius came alive inside her. She connected her thoughts to his and he responded, combining his energy with hers.
Together, they intensified the feedback loop at an exponential rate. The beam grew brighter and changed color from red to a brilliant pink before an electrical buzzing noise filled the room. It grew louder and louder with each passing second, until the Orange Men’s weapons suddenly exploded, melting their gun hands off. They doubled over in pain as the feedback loop instantly stopped.
Outside the room, there was more glass breaking and other commotion going on in the front of the house. More intruders, she realized, knowing Derek was also in trouble and probably fighting for his life.
Her friend Jim must have realized it, too, because an instant later he said, “Duane, go help Derek. Now!” He was using his commanding, authoritative voice. The same voice she remembered from the Fourth Street Shootout when he took out the gang members trying to kill them both.
Jim stepped forward and pushed past her, pulling a sleek black pistol from a hidden holster inside the beltline of his pants.
Emily watched him pump three rounds into Orange Man 1’s chest, dropping him to the floor. Jim turned to the other assailant, but before he could open fire, the second Orange Man tackled him with a flying leap across the room. They crashed to the floor in a tangle of limbs, then rolled around in a violent scuffle. Jim’s weapon went flying in the process and landed near Emily’s feet.
While Orange Man 2 groped at Jim’s chest from above with his stump, Emily dropped to her knees and grabbed the handgun. She spun to the left and brought it up, aiming it at Orange Man’s face. She wanted to pull the trigger to save Jim, but hesitated because her hands were shaking. She couldn’t keep them still.
She was about to close her eyes and fire blindly, but Julius took control of her mind. Somehow, his thoughts took control of both her mind and her body, calming her nerves and steadying her aim.
Emily lined up the sights and pulled the trigger over and over until the gun stopped shooting. Each one of the rounds she fired found its mark, sending sprays of blood and tissue spurting from the man’s cheeks and forehead. He toppled over with his chest covering Jim’s face.
She dropped the gun, thinking the threat was over. But two more Orange Men shot through the broken windows and landed on their feet. They surrounded Jim in a heartbeat, flanking him on both sides with their weapons drawn.
A telepathic flash came from one of the attackers, even though he wasn’t looking at Emily. She hadn’t reached out for the readings on them, but it came anyway. She could read his thoughts and intentions. He and the other Orange Man were going to kill Jim and the rest of her friends before they completed their ‘extraction.’
“Mom! We have to go. Jump. Mom. Before it’s too late!” her baby said in a violent rush of thought.
“No, honey. We can’t. We need to stay and help our friends,” Emily sent back, planning to use her powers to help everyone.
Julius ignored her wishes and started the jump tingle anyway.
“No, Julius! Not now!” she screamed, before sending a wave of calming energy signals inward, hoping she could stop the jump. She wrapped Julius in a shield of soothing light and waited a few seconds to see if he would back down, but the jump tingle kept building.
“Run,” Jim ordered in his calm voice, but Emily stood firm. She could feel the jump tingle moving up her spine quickly thanks to Julius pushing the process forward at an accelerated pace.
Since she knew her son wasn’t going to stop the jump, she needed to come up with a new plan.
Then it came to her—she’d wait until time slowed down right before the jump, then run to Jim’s defense and push him out of the way. That way, when time resumed at normal speed, the Orange Men would shoot each other. She also needed to dash to the kitchen and help Duane and Derek, making whatever changes she could in the few seconds she would have.
“Go, Emily. Now!” Jim yelled at her, whirling around and striking one of the men holding guns on him. The man’s jaw snapped to the side, turning his gun in the process. It was pointing at Emily when the beam fired.
She was so focused on Julius and the jump process that she wasn’t ready for the beam from the intruder’s gun. She couldn’t get her hands up in time to catch it before it struck her in the chest. All of its painful energy entered her body and made its way down to Julius.
She could feel a stab of pain hit Julius, then his consciousness disappeared in an instant. So did the jump tingle.
“No! Julius! No!” she cried through the anguish suffocating her body. She reached for his consciousness with her mind, but it wasn’t there.
Emily groaned in despair, feeling desperately empty inside. She worried that the energy had just killed her son. Her heart wanted to cry out for him again, but she couldn’t find the strength. The beam that was still covering her body was draining every speck of energy.
A moment later, intense dizziness began spinning wildly in her mind as her chest swelled with a heavy sadness. Her legs buckled, dropping her to the floor on her knees. She toppled forward like a dead oak tree in the forest.
All her thoughts were of Julius before her consciousness dimmed and disconnected. She closed her eyes and blacked out.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
Nora forced her eyes open and felt the gentle brush of her eyelashes against the skin on her left bicep. Her head was pounding, making her groan like she’d woken up with a five-alarm hangover. The kind of lethargic, reverberating pain you’d feel after staying up all night doing tequila shots with the boys after they’d won the league’s bowling championship. She managed to find the strength to turn her head, moving it away from the crook of her arm.
As more of her senses came alive, she realized she was lying horizontal on something cold, stiff, and very smooth. She turned her head and took a peek beneath her, but all she saw was black. There was plenty of ambient light in the room, but she couldn’t see anything in the surface below. Not a hint of a reflection or any type of surface pattern or definition.
When she brought her eyes forward again, she felt a draft across her body. She glanced down and found that she wasn’t wearing any clothes!
What?
Naked?
How the hell?
Was she dreaming?
Before she could take another breath, every inch of her body began thumping in unison with the throbs of a razor-sharp headache in her skull. She felt like she’d been run over by a cement truck, plus her mouth was beyond dry. She tried to swallow but couldn’t, nor could she open her lips. It was like someone had glued them together.
Before Nora could raise her fingers to pry them apart, she heard a distinctive sizzle for about a second, then the cracks of static energy that sputtered for a few moments before a sudden pop. She snapped her head around to see what it was, but what she saw didn’t make any sense.
> A pair of orange-colored, muscular legs were hanging out of the shiny, silver-colored wall. They were bent in an awkward position and dangling backward from the mid-thigh on down. But that wasn’t all. A face and one arm were also protruding from the wall, about two feet to the left of the legs. Her eyes were telling her someone had been embedded into the wall, but her mind had a hard time believing it.
Just then, her short-term memory came alive as the facts lined up in her brain. The body parts buried in the wall belonged to the Orange Man. The same intruder who’d grabbed Emily in their front yard.
His hand was open and so were his eyes, but they were blank, each focused in a different direction from the other. She knew that exact look from her years as a trauma nurse—his eye muscles had let go and fallen random into death.
She pictured the rest of his body inside the wall and figured he must have been twisted like the lines on a barber’s pole before he was fused inside the material of the wall. It was the only way to explain the weird angle of his legs in relation to his face and arm.
Directly below his outstretched arm was a metallic briefcase sitting on the all-black floor with a thin trail of smoke drifting up from it. Its top was sitting open and she could see inside from her position, but nothing was there.
The case must have short circuited, which would explain the sizzling and cracking noises she’d heard when she first woke up. She took a second to run through the events in her mind, letting her logic sift through the facts about the encounter in her front yard.
The case wasn’t empty before, that much she was sure of. Even with only a glimpse of it while she was running, Nora remembered its shimmering surface was buzzing with energy in the moments before she knocked Emily free from the man’s grip.
After careful consideration, only one explanation presented itself. When she’d flown into Orange Man at full speed, the force of the impact and their combined weight must have thrown him off balance and into the wall upon arrival.
Made sense. She was several inches taller and weighed almost twice as much as Emily. If Orange Man’s technology was calibrated for Em’s size and mass, then Nora’s unexpected tackle may have sent him off course on his way here.
Wherever here was, she thought, letting her eyes take a full scan of the surroundings. This must have been where the Orange Man was taking Emily with his technology—some storage room.
The room had rectangular containers in two of its corners, neatly piled high in eight stacks of eight. Except for her, the briefcase, and Orange Man hanging lifeless from the wall, that was all she could see. Three of the four walls in the room were the same silver-colored metal, each of them brushed and polished like fine silverware.
The other wall—the one to her left—was more of a white translucent color. Like what you’d expect in a Japanese geisha house. It must have been the source of the light illuminating the room because she didn’t see any lights in the ceiling or on the walls.
A rush of movement caught her eye at the right end of the white wall. It was outside the room and looked to be the silhouette of a person. It was moving from right to left and in a hurry based on the rapid speed of movement.
Nora’s eyes followed the shadow until it came upon another shadow moving much slower and in the opposite direction. The two shadows met in the middle and stopped. While they did, the center of the white wall changed, showing the outline of a vertical, orange-colored rectangle, like a door. The orange color was outlined in black and flashing, like it was trying to tell her something.
For a moment, she worried the two of them were going to come into the storage room, but they didn’t. They took off together, heading to the right with speed. When they did, the wall returned to its all-white color.
Must be an automatic door, she decided, seeing two more shadows run the length of the corridor outside from left to right. Something was happening, causing whoever was outside to all run in the same direction. Like they were in some kind of panic.
She turned her eyes back to Orange Man’s dead eyes. “Must be looking for him,” she mumbled, wondering how badly she’d messed up their plans to grab Emily. With the technology in his case offline, maybe they couldn’t track him.
Every fiber in her being was screaming at her to get up and run, then find a way out and get back to Duane and her kids.
She stood up and realized her headache had eased quite a lot while she was focused on the activity in the hallway. It was still there, though the intensity had dropped from a level of nine to what she would describe to a doctor as a two on the pain scale.
Nora moved toward the white wall, taking a path to where the door had appeared when the shadows met outside, but stopped when a new thought came unbidden into her mind.
“Need a weapon. And clothes,” she muttered, spinning to her left and looking at the stacks of boxes sitting in the corner closest to her. Maybe there was something she could use inside the containers.
She went to the first pile of eight and pulled at the corrugated box sitting atop the rest. It was heavier than she expected, but she was able to work it free and pull it down from above her shoulders. She used her legs to ease it down and put it on the floor without dropping it or hurting her back.
The top of the box had four release clasps, one in each corner. She pried each of them up and yanked them back to free the lid, then wrapped her fingers around the edges of the contoured plastic to remove it. She set it aside and took a peek inside to inspect the inventory.
A thick, cloth-like membrane covered the contents. She removed it and found it to be one large piece of material that had been folded over at least a dozen times before it was placed into the box. Under it were rows of tall, thin vials, each with a glass lid and something orange inside.
Nora ran a quick count and found sixteen rows of sixteen. Each vial was about the diameter of a test tube. At the intersecting point between each vial was a blue packing spacer. They were pre-formed with four concave corners to perfectly cradle the glass tubes with no slack.
Now that the cloth membrane was gone, Nora could feel a waft of coolness rising up from the box, making her wonder if the jars contained food or something else that needed to be refrigerated. The room she was in was warm and comfortable, so the cold had to be coming from the box itself.
She put her hand inside and touched her fingers to one of the vials. It was cold, as she expected. But how? The plastic container wasn’t cold around the outside, so that left only two choices—something underneath or the blue spacers.
Her hand went to one of the spacers, expecting it to be cold to the touch. But it wasn’t. It was room temperature. She used her thumb and two fingers to pry the spacer up and out of the box. It took a bit of force, but she was able to work it free and take a closer look at it.
About halfway down on the inside of each of the concave sections was a horizontal white strip about an inch wide and half as tall. She touched the tip of her index finger to it but quickly yanked it back when she felt a searing sting of cold upon contact. She wrapped her finger inside the palm of her other hand to contain the pain and warm her skin.
She took a minute to let the pain in her finger subside while admiring the container’s marvelous design. Anyone could handle the contents without harm or even gloves as long as they kept away from the white chill strips hiding along the inside of the blue spacers.
They’d been strategically placed where a person’s fingers wouldn’t accidentally touch them, yet they’d make wide contact across the midpoint of the vials. With that design, the refrigeration would spread effectively and evenly across the glass.
The technology was both impressive and dangerous, unlike anything she’d ever seen. And based on the level of pain inflicted to her finger, she figured prolonged contact with a white strip would most certainly cause skin damage. Possibly even frostbite.
She had no idea what was powering the cooling strips and frankly didn’t want to know. Likewise for the orange substance stored in the tube
s. With the twisted Orange Man hanging from the wall a few feet behind her, she figured it had something to do with him. Or his briefcase. Probably both.
She looked inside four more containers and found the same items—cloth membranes covering blue spacers and vials of orange stuff.
It was time to try the boxes in the other corner. Maybe they’d been stacked fifteen feet apart from the others for a reason.
Nora went to the closest stack and started again with the container sitting on top. Like before, it was very heavy and featured four clasps on its lid. She unfastened them and looked inside.
“That’s better,” she said, seeing a completely different set of items. No cloth membrane or vials this time. Just a mishmash of metal parts: screws with strange octagon-shaped heads and four-sided shafts, shiny metal plates that turned transparent at the point where she touched them, an assortment of square-shafted nuts and bolts, washers with a square hole in the center, and screwdrivers with a curved tip that came to a point.
The container and its contents reminded her of the junk drawer in Duane’s garage, the one place where her mechanically-inclined husband tossed all the leftover parts when he was done making something. However, the mishmash of items she was looking at wasn’t like anything she’d seen before. They felt familiar, yet all of it looked foreign in design. Well, all of it except the black electrical tape and ball of twine she found sitting in the back, right corner of the container.
She dug around some more, pushing the items around to see what else was hiding inside. All she found was more of the same weird-looking hardware.
Just then, a change in light from the white wall caught her attention. More shadows were outside, again heading with speed from left to right.
Nora decided it was time to get moving. She grabbed one of the thin metal plates, the twine, and the weird-looking screwdriver, then scurried back to the other corner and snatched the unfolded cloth membrane from the floor. She used the sharp edge of the thin metal plate to saw and cut a rudimentary hole in the center of the cloth, then brought it up and draped it over her head like a canopy. She stuck her face through the opening and let the material drop down around her body before fastening a makeshift belt with several wraps of the twine.
Glassford Girl: Boxed Set (Complete Series) (Time Jumper Series) Page 53
