"Hit him again, would you?" I said.
"Hey." Revik raised his head. "Loyalty, wife. Does the word mean nothing to you?"
"You seriously need to think about your priorities right now, husband." I had trouble holding onto my train of thought when he pressed against me again. “Seriously,” I murmured. “...Or I’ll have Jorag hit you with the dart gun the next time the traffic gets backed up.”
Revik chuckled softly, probably so he wouldn’t wake Jon.
My adoptive brother lay half-sprawled in the lap of Wreg, who continued to frown at both of us from Revik's other side. I understood why Wreg was annoyed. I knew how exhausted Jon was, and how little sleep he'd gotten in the past two weeks.
Unlike me, Jon’s powers of denial and self-delusion weren't quite as well-honed. He'd pretty much been a wreck since we reached the first population center outside the airport.
"You won't wake him," Revik said into my ear. "Wreg knocked him out."
"Boyfriend therapy?" I said with a smile, glad again for the excuse to look away from the window and now away from Revik, too, whose eyes still glowed at me in the near-dark. I gazed down at my crashed-out brother's tense-looking face. "Do you do that to me, too? When I'm being a pain in the ass?"
Revik rolled his eyes. "Jon isn't Elaerian, wife. We may not know what he is, exactly...but we know he isn't that. Besides, according to his overprotective boyfriend, he hasn't slept in four days..."
"I'm right here, you know," Wreg grumbled. "Not like you'd notice."
Revik chuckled, but didn’t look at him. "...Anyway, we might need Jon later, so we can't afford to let him make himself sick."
"So you ordered it, then?" I smiled up at him.
"Let's just say I approved the recommendation."
"Still sitting right here," Wreg muttered.
Shaking my head, I smiled again, but a part of me remembered it wasn't all that funny.
None of us had gotten much sleep during those days we spent in Shadow's construct. I'd spent most of my time staring at Revik's aleimi, making sure Shadow and his infiltrators weren't getting anywhere near it. Whoever this Shadow guy ended up being, he...or they...knew Revik a little too well, in my opinion.
Pushing that out of my mind, too, I grimaced.
Revik slid his arm tighter around me. I hadn't realized I was cold until I found myself burrowing deeper into his jacket. I didn't know for sure if he'd continued listening to my thoughts until he spoke in a low voice.
"Allie," he said. "We've got people working to figure out who Shadow is...there's no point falling for their scare tactics."
I nodded, shifting my back around to burrow deeper into his coat. I studiously ignored the flare I felt off his light in response, much less the physical reaction that accompanied it. For his part, he seemed to be dialing it down a bit, too. I felt him actively controlling his light, or at least shielding more of it from where I could feel it.
I pretended not to notice that, either.
"So Jon really didn't sleep the whole trip?" I said, speaking to Wreg as much as Revik that time. "That's impressive...even for him."
From the other side of Revik, Wreg grunted.
I glanced over in time to see the ex-rebel give me a wan attempt at a smile. He was stroking Jon's hair in his lap, but I felt the worry in his light, along with sparks of something that reminded me a little too much of what I'd just been feeling on Revik.
Great. Him, too.
Revik hadn’t been entirely kidding when he’d been teasing Wreg. Clearly, Wreg’s issue was sexual in some way, too, and clearly, it was aimed at Jon.
I had to admit, I could sometimes understand why a lot of humans thought all seers were nymphomaniacs who didn’t have normal emotions like other people.
"You guys have seen way too many wars," I muttered, closing my eyes briefly as I leaned into Revik. I felt Revik's fingers tighten, but Wreg only grunted.
“Ain’t that the truth,” he exhaled.
Wreg, my brother's new boyfriend, or whatever they were to one another, was a good guy. He really was...I knew that...but truthfully, I was still adjusting to their relationship. The Chinese-looking seer was muscular, handsome, covered in tattoos and had stunning, obsidian-black eyes, but he’d once worked under Menlim, too, just like my husband. I didn't worry about Wreg's loyalty, per se; Wreg was like the most loyal guy on the planet.
He was a pretty intense guy, though. He’d also been targeted by Shadow and the Dreng, who’d used the image of Menlim to mess with his head, just like they had with Revik.
I tried to push the thought from my mind, yet again.
"He really didn't sleep?" I said. "Not at all? Is that your fault, brother Wreg?"
Wreg gave me another look, his lips quirked, but the humor didn't reach his eyes. Instead he shrugged, glancing back down at Jon.
I found myself looking back out the windows, almost in spite of myself.
The first few legs of the drive hadn’t been too bad. The private airport was pretty deserted, although trying to land had still been chaotic, given the lack of Air Traffic Control and the nearby Albany International Airport. A lot of wealthier and more connected people still seemed to be attempting to flee from the latter, given the chatter over the radio fielded by our pilots, so they had to be damned careful on the approach. We ran into a squad of military planes near D.C., too. Luckily, they had no seers on board, at least none backing the cockpit directly. As a result, Wreg had been able to push them into thinking we were one of them.
"We're nearing the rendezvous point," Revik told me in a murmur, kissing my temple as he continued massaging my neck.
I nodded, looking outside again, without pulling away from where I rested inside his coat. I told myself I had to look, so I'd have some idea of what we were in for, especially since I was our one and only telekinetic seer. Revik would participate in any fighting that went down, but when it came to the manipulation stuff, I was pretty much on my own.
"Training starts as soon as we get back," he reminded me, softer again.
"I know," I said, barely pausing before I added, unnecessarily, since we'd already talked about this. "...None of them can get near Jon."
Revik held me tighter, rubbing my shoulder. "No one will touch him," he assured me.
I was worried, though. I couldn't help it.
The gas station at the end of the private airport’s access road was where it started.
It was where we’d seen the first signs of what we were in for, anyway. Balidor had warned us before we actually saw it, of course. He'd seen things degenerate even in the 36 hours since he and his team first arrived in Albany.
Somehow, I still hadn't been prepared for it.
Maybe I was too fried from everything that happened in Argentina, or maybe it was just too up close and personal. Either way, I cried out in horrified shock when I saw my first act of real violence in this New America.
For me, it was a guy in his thirties, wearing jeans and a polo shirt like some soccer dad from the suburbs, slamming a crowbar into the face of a woman wearing khaki pants and a silk blouse. Crying out again in shock, I watched him hit her two more times in the back of the head, saw her skull crack and a spray of blood and brains that hit his polo shirt.
He slammed her at least once more in the face before he tore the gas hose out of her dead, twitching fingers and started trying to use it to fill up a gas can he'd fashioned out of what looked like a used oil barrel.
He’d loaded the back of his pick-up truck with at least five more of those barrels already, so apparently this guy fancied himself some kind of survivalist.
Fires had burned in the field behind the gas station itself.
I saw five or six shadowy forms in the station's office, pulling things off racks and fighting over the cash register like a pack of wild dogs. Even then, a part of me couldn't help thinking how ludicrous it was, fighting over currency that had already been on its way out, even before this whole mess.
The mai
n carnage happened over the gas itself, of course, even apart from polo-shirt guy. The attendant lay facedown in a long splatter of what had to be his own blood. I didn’t see the puddle growing any bigger, so mercifully, his heart had probably stopped already. Two pumps over from the soccer dad, three other men fought with their bare hands over another pump.
I also saw a petite, Asian woman in a business suit holding a semi-automatic handgun on three more people, two men and a woman, while she filled her Mustang's tank up using the third pump.
All I could think was, it had only been 72 hours.
Not even four days had passed since Shadow unleashed his deadly virus on the world. I was watching the only civilization I'd ever known crumble to dust around me.
We hadn’t even started running out of things yet, not for real.
We found out later, from Maygar, I think, that our arrival at Shadow's house had been the trigger for his ‘Final Solution.’ When we crossed the gates, entering the main construct of the house, a Barrier impulse had been sent to agents carrying samples of the disease in over twenty different urban centers around the globe. It didn’t include New York, but it did include just about every other major metropolitan area in the world. In the United States, that meant Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Seattle. In the rest of the world, it was as if they took the top fifteen or so cities by population and systematically wiped them out, starting with Shanghai, Istanbul, Karachi, Mumbai and Moscow, and working down from there.
The list kept growing, too, and faster than it likely would have spread organically, which told us that a second wave of attacks had likely followed the first.
This time, instead of isolating the agent to a single building, like they had in San Francisco, they dumped the contaminant directly into the water supply.
After that, everything moved really fast.
Oh, and according to the media, I’d done this.
Supposedly, I’d claimed responsibility for the attacks before we'd even managed to find air transport back to North America. Clearly, Shadow had no trouble extending our enemies list to include pretty much anyone in the human race left alive. Images of us in San Francisco hit the feeds. One of the news crews must have employed flyers with cameras that we somehow missed. Either that, or the Lao Hu had gone out of their way to get images of me and Revik specifically for release to the feed networks.
The images did what the headlines and fake claims of responsibility hadn't accomplished on their own. Namely, a massive backlash against seers began almost at once, even with C2-77 tearing through communities and infecting everyone in sight. Pretty much anyone in a position to care anymore thought Revik and I were behind the spread of the disease.
Of course, not everyone thought we'd acted alone.
In fact, from what Balidor said, the main points of contention now seemed to be around who we'd been working with among the humans, and where we’d gotten our funding. The United States blamed China, at least behind closed doors. They seemed to think Revik and I had been hired or manipulated into working for the Chinese military. United States intel somehow obtained evidence of the Lao Hu involvement in San Francisco, which, to them anyway, strongly indicated we'd been backed by the Chinese.
As a result of all this back and forth of accusations and intel, as well as conflicting reports around what was actually occurring in the different cities, just about every military in the civilized world now stood at the brink of nuclear war. We had a number of our top infiltrators, led by Yumi, working to directly hack the White House construct and the minds of key decision-makers, including the President, in an attempt to dial back the hostilities.
So yeah, the United States government blamed China.
Supposedly England was moving towards that opinion, too. Japan hadn't needed much of a nudge to join the group looking closer at Beijing. Neither had India, for that matter, or France, or the Russians.
Most people blamed us, though. Meaning me and Revik.
I wasn't sure how much luck Yumi's team was having, trying to pacify world leaders in the midst of this nightmare. Balidor also informed me that we weren't the only players involved. The Lao Hu were in the mix, although they seemed to be trying to prevent things from going nuclear, too. Balidor saw evidence of another group of seers sharing that Barrier space, as well––seers with a decidedly different agenda than the Adhipan or the Lao Hu. Whoever they were, they seemed to be deliberately riling up the bigwigs on the subject of seers and Asia.
Clearly, someone wanted Beijing in D.C.'s sights.
Meanwhile, I still had my dreams, the same ones I'd been having since Revik first took me out of San Francisco. A good percentage of those centered around overreacting superpowers and big, blinding flashes of light.
Some of those featured Beijing.
Some featured other places, like D.C. itself...and New York.
Since running into that first gas station on that airport access road, the view out our windows had gotten progressively worse. The highway itself had been relatively clear at first, apart from a number of cars that appeared to have been run off the road. Well, and a shooting we witnessed on the shoulder. Given that electricity remained out in most places, mostly all we saw were fires in that penetrating dark, at least until we'd gotten to where actual towns abutted the highway. After we passed through the first major road blocks, mostly by flashing miraged military IDs at confused and frightened human soldiers, we found ourselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic filled with increasingly desperate humans, most of whom seemed to be trying to make their way to the same place we were, namely, the quarantine zone of New York City.
Of the others, most probably hoped to reach one of the remaining open coastal ports.
Wreg had told me that boat captains of all kinds were advertising 'quarantine cruises' from points up and down both American coasts. Most charged somewhere in the neighborhood of a million bucks per seat, and promised to ferry their charges out onto the open ocean, presumably to wait out the worst of the outbreak. Half of those ships were probably tug boats and commercial or private fishing vessels, not luxury liners.
For those who had the money, (or could steal it, my mind supplied helpfully), I could see how that might seem like a viable option. Even small boats usually had some kind of freshwater conversion system on board. In theory, they could catch the majority of the food they needed. That, coupled with vitamin supplements and seaweed, would probably allow most of them to last a few months, minimum, providing the weather held.
So yeah, in a situation with few options, I could almost see how that one might appeal. Their biggest risk would be of the captain dumping them off at sea in the hopes of repeating the trick a few more times...or maybe a few dozen more.
Or that someone would bring the disease on board, knowingly or not.
In any case, I understood why Balidor opted for the fully-armored, organic-plated Humvees once we reached more trafficked areas. Bands of looters, many already looking sick themselves, traveled between cars and bashed windows with baseball bats. Revik, Wreg, Jorag and I did what we could to push some of them into a less violent state of mind, but there were simply too many of them. Being in their minds at all was a kind of hell all of its own.
I kept trying, anyway, at least until it became so many the whole thing felt futile.
Even then, I couldn't help but intervene when it happened near enough for me to see it.
I stopped a young guy from dragging a pregnant woman through a broken windshield that he and his pals smashed with pipes. I managed to keep him from killing her right there, but I doubt I prevented her and her family from catching the disease when they all got exposed to the open air outside the reinforced glass.
The fires got more numerous, too. They also got bigger.
Once we got off the freeway about eighty miles north of the city and began traveling back roads, we were thrust into the middle of that burning landscape. People smashed storefront windows as we drove by, pulling out everything from crates of
alcohol to microwave ovens and even a washing machine and dryer set. We saw families loading up pick-up trucks with aluminum siding, multi-tiered bakery cakes, porn sims, computers, jewelry...socks. Wreg watched most of this with a look of blank incredulity on his face, pausing on the guy carrying a set of golf clubs long enough to let out a surprised laugh.
"Now what do you suppose he thinks he's going to do with those?" he said.
"Weapons?" Revik joked.
I knew they were whistling in the dark, but I couldn't make myself do it with them.
People's priorities were pretty much all over the place, though. We saw parents risking the lives of...so far, at least...healthy-looking children, all to get a new set of tires, a side of beef and all the beer they could drink. Those acquisitions were on the practical side, really, compared to the people raiding appliance stores, given that the power grid was already flashing on and off all over the state, and soon to be down altogether, possibly permanently. Even that made more sense than the ones breaking into cash registers, though, at least to me.
As if he'd heard some portion of my thoughts, Wreg gave me a wry smile.
"Humans," he said, as if that explained everything.
I raised an eyebrow at him, only to glance down and find him stroking Jon's hair. Under normal circumstances, I might have given him crap for his blatant hypocrisy, but when I saw the grief etched into his features, I only reached past Revik to clasp one of his tattooed arms. Wreg spared me a glance and a smile, even as he held Jon protectively in his lap.
"I don't like this," Wreg muttered, aiming his words at both me and Revik that time. "What do you think of Adhipan's plan, laoban?"
Revik smiled, gripping my hand tighter. "I know why you don't like it."
"It's not only that," Wreg muttered.
"Submarines have been around for over 150 years, Wreg."
"And they've been sinking for that long too, laoban," the older seer grumbled back, running a hand through his shoulder-length black hair. "Might as well lock ourselves inside a iron casket with inner tubes strapped to our waists and hope we float to that fucking island..."
Allie's War Season Three Page 80