“Shut up,” he whispered.
I smiled. “You think I suck at being a Trent? Sorry, bro, but that’s you.”
Jillian kicked in the door in the same second that Beau whipped out his infamous switchblade—and Terrence lifted his head up, his eyes aglow with Wendy’s power.
My hair stood on end as I felt the warning sign of electricity. I knew it far too well, from when my father had been about to blow his stack on one of his disappointing children. No…
A massive bolt of lightning struck the earth outside the storeroom, lit up the night, and then plunged us into complete darkness. Sparks flew out of every outlet, dancing across the iridescent puddles on the floor.
It was as if the world stopped turning, and I was in a glass bottle—all the events around me were happening at once, outside of time.
One tiny spark across the room blew from an outlet, and then tumbled a little longer and farther than the others. It gasped to life as a tiny greenish yellow flame in a pool of chemicals.
The flame raced across the floor towards several overturned, leaking barrels.
I raised my hand and shouted, but the words were lost in the roar of the wind that had picked up because of Terrence.
Jillian stopped running towards us, instead looking at the flame. She turned back towards me, her eyes wide, and screamed at the rest of them to smother the fire.
They obeyed—which meant that when the barrels exploded, they were all standing next to them.
A hand on my collar yanked me upwards from where I’d been lying on the cement floor.
My vision swam with yellow spot and lines, but I could make out Beau’s furious face and robot eyes easily enough. He was missing a shirt, and half of the hair on his head had burned away, leaving an ugly reddish patch.
He threw me down on the snow-covered parking lot, next to a man’s leg. I recognized the patch on the knee.
It was Reuben’s.
Beau’s boot came towards my face. I caught it and twisted his leg, pushing him over easily. I pushed myself to my feet.
I didn’t even know if I was newly-deafened, or if my brain had broken beyond repair in the explosion. I didn’t know where emergency services were. I didn’t know what would happen to anyone or anything.
All I knew was that my wife and team had probably just died in an explosion, and I had nothing left to lose.
And I knew how to fight. The training had finally sunk in.
He was saying something. I didn’t care. Superheroes didn’t care about the lies and pomps of criminals. Of murderers.
He swung towards my face and I ducked, bobbing out of the way and landing a right hook on his jaw. Before he could recover, I raced around and landed a kick on his spine’s sweet spot, the place that would send pain into all of his limbs. Reid had taught me how to do it.
Reid had probably been blasted to pieces.
I locked Beau’s arms behind his back and slammed him into the side of a helicopter, then pulled him back to do it again. He wriggled loose, but I doubled down on the submission hold, dislocating his shoulder.
Marco had taught me how to dislocate shoulders months ago. We’d clasped hands afterwards, a cool-kid victory gesture he’d once done only with Gregory Johnson.
Marco was probably burned to death while I’d been stunned on the floor.
Beau roared and pushed against me, but I held fast as I whipped out my baton and began to strike his vulnerable spots. Neck, face, knees, injury—all were nothing compared to blunt force. And I had a lot of force I needed to get out.
Jillian had once assigned me to be the bad guy during one of Ember’s training sessions. I’d come up behind Ember and grabbed her hair, then pulled her into my grasp like a potential rapist might have. She’d defeated me handily, slamming her elbows, feet, and fist into multiple soft targets on my body. I’d been equally impressed and intimidated.
The last memory of Jillian I had was her face as she realized how it was all going to end.
And Ember…
Wait.
Ember hadn’t been near the barrels.
There was a decent chance my sister-in-arms was still alive. I’d been mad at her about something earlier, but that was in the past. Now I needed to find her and save her, even if she was the only one left to save.
I beat Beau over the head with my baton a few more times, then limped back towards the burning building. My body was just overall sore, but I was largely uninjured.
A man’s hand stuck out from beneath wreckage and debris that was so complicated and tangled that I couldn’t see who it was. Still, I touched the hand, and energy spiraled downwards into him. His fingers twitched.
The fires were blessedly isolated, burning high but in localized spots. This allowed me to maneuver through the huge storeroom relatively unimpeded, though thick smoke made me cough often, sometimes so hard I had to kneel until the fit passed.
I saw Reid first.
He’d been impaled through the spine by a piece of jagged metal, and his mouth was leaking dark blood. He didn’t register that I was there, if the glazed stillness in his eyes was any indication. But all the same, my power surged into my hands, and I pulled him off the spike as I healed him.
He cried out and fell into my arms, where he heaved for several seconds and spat out blood. I held him while he recovered from his absurdly-near-death experience.
When he’d calmed himself, he straightened and wiped his eyes. “Are we the only ones who lived?”
I blinked several times, remembering Reuben’s leg in the parking lot. “I don’t know. I’m looking for the others.”
We parted ways and began to comb through the ruins. I started in the corner of the room and mentally mapped out little rows in which I’d search up and down, like a one-man search party.
I found Abby next. Or rather, what was left of her.
Abby had resumed human form before she’d died. Her tiny body had stood no chance against such a blast. Her corpse was remarkably intact, but I could feel the broken bones and mashed-up insides.
I laid her remains next to Edward’s body, which was also in human form. Half of him was by the door to the hallway, and the other half was scattered nearby. Putting him back together was a messy job. I arranged them look as if they were sleeping next to each other.
In a way, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to inform Edward that his Sweet Pea had died, or tell Abby that her Eddy was dead. Perhaps I’d be judged for such a sentiment, but it was true.
After I’d closed Edward’s eyes, I stood up and stared around, peering through the smoke. Here, at zero hour, it was amazingly easy to not feel anything while I looked around for the bits and pieces of the people I loved most.
My textbooks would’ve said I was in shock. I probably was.
Yet, my feet moved and I shoved aside item after item, never stopping. The room was growing hotter, but there were still people left to rescue. I was an automaton in the service to my team. Long ago, I would’ve sneered at the concept of being a brainless fighting machine, but now?
Now I understood.
After a few minutes, telepathy brushed my mind: Help me.
I followed the meek call to a pile of smoldering boxes, which I threw aside. Ember was curled up, her skin peeling off, but alive. I kneeled down and cradled her in my arms while her skin regrew and—lord, have mercy—swallowed up the bones in her fingers that had been exposed by the burns.
She sobbed without restraint as I held her with her head to my chest. I cried with her. There was no more anger in me, no frustration with silly relationship squabbles or questionable choices about getting rid of her powers. All of that had melted away into nothing, leaving just her and me to weep in each other’s arms. Ember was my friend, and what a friend she was. She was unbearably precious to me.
A simple picture took form in my head of Reid.
“Let’s go find him,” I said softly. “He’s just fine.”
She tried to stand, but her legs were t
rembling too hard to support her weight.
I sturdied myself, then picked her up and carried her over to Reid. He was holding something in his tunic, something about twelve inches long and bloody at one end.
I stopped in my tracks, not feeling the weight of the person in my arms anymore.
He looked up, his sad gray eyes conveying what his mouth would not: he’d found a part of my wife. And this time, it was really her that had been harmed.
The emotionlessness somehow became more so.
He laid Jillian’s limp forearm on the ground, and I carefully passed Ember to him. He sat down with her on his lap, and closed his eyes, his own tears falling. They were together now, and nothing would ever tear them apart again. They probably didn’t even remember why they’d broken up.
Marco and Reuben were next to each other near the storeroom door—I’d been in too deep of a brain fog before to see them. Marco was badly burned, but breathing because Reuben had taken the brunt of the blast for him.
Reuben’s leg had indeed been blown off an inch above his knee, and though I could heal the most shocking wounds, I now knew from my experience with the Burlington team that I could not regrow limbs. Reuben would be a wounded warrior for the rest of his life.
I touched their foreheads, then looked around, pleading to God that the only reason I hadn’t found Jillian was because she was under something, not because she was in a thousand pieces all around me.
Ember raised a shaking finger and pointed out the storeroom door.
My eyes followed, and I finally saw the painfully obvious clue: there was a bloody trail leading out into the parking lot.
At the end lay my wife, alone and face-down in the snow.
I was beside her in the space of a breath, turning her over, healing energy seeping into every cell of her body. Emotion finally flooded into the cavity in my chest, warm and life-giving.
I was amazed.
She’d followed me. Even with her left arm blown off and gushing blood. Even with half of her face essentially gone. Even with burns on every inch of exposed skin that had eaten down to the muscle in some spots. She’d been willing to fight for me even as the life was leaving her body.
I kissed her face over and over and over, brushing aside her wildly-blowing hair, the hair that I had loved from the second I’d first laid eyes on her.
“…Benjamin?” Her tiny voice was as welcome to my ears as a drop of water to a man dying of thirst.
“Jillian,” I whispered. “My Jillian. I’m here.”
She opened her eyes and stared up at me, her eyes growing large with terror. “Benjamin, we need to get inside.” For all of her fear, her words were small.
“It’s over, sweetheart. It’s all over.”
“Twister!”
I jerked my head up. Above us, swirling in an all-too-familiar funnel, was the beginnings of an enormous tornado. I whipped around and looked for the obvious culprit.
Terrence had been the first person I’d healed. He was partially pinned under wreckage, his eyes glowing and flickering oddly, and he was staring at us with an inhuman hate in his eyes.
Jillian jumped up, her teeth chattering. “Everyone, get under cover!”
In the corner of my eye, I saw a man limp into the corporate parking garage. His metal hands glinted in the glow of the fires.
“Let’s go,” I said, pulling Jillian towards the garage.
We hurried into the solid concrete structure, where the snow had only blown in six feet across the floor before petering out into nothing. It was windy in the garage, but not terribly so.
Jillian leaned heavily against a support pillar. “I feel so weird,” she said, gasping. “I know my arm’s gone, but my brain doesn’t know, does that make sense? It keeps telling me that something’s wrong with my arm, but there is no arm. My arm’s gone, Benjamin!”
I pulled her into a fierce hug, but my eyes searched endlessly for Beau. He was here, and he was hiding. Jillian was maimed. The tigers were dead. The world was ending. And if I didn’t find my brother and get back the JM-104 that I’d literally given him myself, this cycle would keep going.
Forever.
The tornado touched down.
It was as if a freight train were barreling down through the industrial zone of Baltimore, Maryland. Roofs were ripped off, flinging shingles and plywood everywhere, even into the interior of the garage. Bits of furniture and household items from a local neighborhood crashed against the concrete.
Siding began to strip off the Bell lab. I hoped the survivors had gone into the basement. There was nothing we could do now.
The helicopters in the parking lot began to tumble. One somersaulted into the side of the parking garage, just feet from us.
Jillian regained control of her breathing and led me into an alcove designated for Eliza McCurtis-Bell’s car. We huddled in the corner, our teeth chattering—but we were perfectly safe in the tucked-away stone structure. I could hear the wind, but only a light, sucking breeze touched us there.
She stared at her stump, a tear slipping down her cheek. “My arm. My arm is gone. I’ll never fight again.”
“As soon as we get the JM-104 away from Beau, we’re getting out of here. We can get you a prosthetic. We’ll do something. Your life isn’t over. And now nobody will ever give you trouble about leaving service.”
Jillian waved her stump back and forth, then bit her lip. “Beau has it? You’re sure?”
“Yeah. I gave it to him. It’s a long story.”
“Okay. I hear him above us. Let’s surprise him, jump him, and destroy the can. He’s injured, right? I smelled his blood in the snow by the helicopter.”
“Up the stairwell,” I said, pointing to our only avenue of approach, since I doubted the elevator was in operation.
Jillian and I dashed across the floor, dodging bits of detritus in the air, and ran up the steps. I didn’t bother trying to disguise my footfalls; they were utterly drowned out by the roar of the artificial storm. The tornado was already much farther away than before, but the wind was still raging.
We crouched low on the second flight of stairs, and Jillian slowly peeked up, her hand on her knife, then came back down. “He’s on the far end of the garage, facing away. You’re going to have to charge him. I’ll be there as fast as I can, and then we’ll take him out together.”
Her lips brushed mine. I kissed her, caressing her cheek, then nodded. “See you there.”
And then I’d shoved Beau up against the concrete wall. His freaky eyes were large with shock, and his mouth was open.
Holy smokes, I’d actually surprised him. That was a first.
“Round two,” I growled. I tossed him to the ground and threw myself on him. “Where’s the JM-104, Beau?” I shouted, grabbing a fistful of his hair. “Give it to me!”
Jillian sprinted up to us and took over.
She lifted Beau up by his neck. He gurgled, but couldn’t break her grip. She didn’t look away from Beau as she said, “Benjamin, I see the can in his pocket.”
Can, out. Switchblade, taken. I handed them to Jillian. With those necessities out of the way, I backed up a few steps to watch whatever was going to happen next.
She tossed him to the ground. “I can hear the sirens,” she said loudly, now that we were closer to the wind. “And you’ve got a choice, Beau. Are you going to go quietly, or do I have to kick your ass again? The choice is yours.”
Beau spat at her feet and scrambled backwards on his toes. “There’s nothing you can do to me, you redneck whore. No matter where I go, I’ll get out. I have friends everywhere. I can slip by any security system, hack any computer, break through any firewall. The world is digital, and I run it.”
“That’s not an answer.” She sounded bored.
“Fine. I’m going to fight you, and everyone like you, until the day I die. I’m going to make that little redhead beg for death. I’m going to make her boyfriend watch. Your pipsqueak buddy is going to join his little sisters in h
ell, and then I’m going to make you regret ever looking at my brother and—”
Jillian flipped open the switchblade, kicked him backwards so his neck was exposed, and sliced his throat open.
Then she flicked the blade closed and handed it to me.
Soon after Jillian had dispatched my brother, the storm had all but evaporated, clearing up as soon as suddenly as it had come on. We quickly found out why: Terrence was dead. His head was simply gone, and the space on the floor where it had been was black and smoldering, as if a giant with a serious grudge against the guy had aimed a humongous magnifying glass at him.
When I’d pointed to the scorch mark with a quizzical quirk of my eyebrows, Marco had shrugged and given me a wide-eyed little, “I dunno.”
He’d craned his neck and peered around us into the parking lot. “Where’s Beau?”
I shrugged and smiled. “I dunno.”
As I’d hoped, the others had hidden in the basement during the worst of the tornado, and they were safe and sound when we arrived back, if subdued to the point of catatonia.
Reid and Ember were sitting together on a broken generator. They were holding hands, and she was resting her head on his shoulder. They made no sign that they could hear the sirens in the distance. Instead, they both stared out at nothing, rarely blinking.
Reuben was kneeling next to the remains of Edward and Abby, pulling a tarp over them. He’d already crafted himself a fake leg from his power. As I watched, he crossed himself and began to pray quietly.
I left him alone to pay his last respects to his beloved teammate and her star-crossed lover. The poor man would have to go home to his wife as an amputee, and then would have to inform Lark and Berenice of Abby’s passing. I did not envy him.
Jillian and I joined Reid, Ember, and Marco, who was now sitting on the floor by the generator with his arms around his knees. He was slightly more animated than Reid and Ember; he, at least, greeted us with a half-hearted wave.
She pulled out the JM-104 and held it up. “This is it, everyone. This is what it’s all been about. Dean assured me that this can is the last bit of the stuff in existence. What’s our move?”
Mercury Page 31
