Fall of the ULTRAs (The Last Hero Book 6)

by Matt Blake

  He tightened his grip.

  For a split second, I did feel weaker.

  But then I didn’t let that fear take hold of me.

  Instead, for the first real time, I believed.

  I was Kyle Peters.

  I was strong.

  Just as I had that thought, the grip loosened from around my neck.

  Theoretically, if we talk physics, I should’ve dropped down to whatever fate lay below me.

  Instead, I stayed hovering on the spot.

  Alternate Kyle narrowed his eyes. “What…”

  I smiled at him.

  Then he lifted his hands, and a load of crafts appeared behind him.

  I looked at each and every one of them. For a second, I felt that fear again, right in the pit of my stomach.

  But as those crafts surrounded me, as Alternate Kyle hovered opposite me, and as the light beamed behind him, I just exhaled, and reminded myself I didn’t have to be afraid.

  “That’s the difference between you and me,” I said. I could feel the tingling sensation filling my body. Only this time, it was stronger than it had ever been.

  He narrowed his eyes. Then he pointed right at me. “Get him.”

  The crafts came flying toward me, firing, slicing with their tentacles.

  I didn’t even have to jump around and dodge them.

  I just lifted a hand and moved it in front of me.

  I felt that tingling energy, and I had it under control now. I watched as those crafts disintegrated, one by one, until there was nothing left in this enormous room but me and my future self.

  “You aren’t my future self,” I said.

  He tried to fire some ice at me, but I stopped it.

  And then when he tried again, I paralyzed him right there in the air.

  I floated toward him, my heart racing at three hundred beats per minute. I looked down at my chest, and I saw a light. My power. It was right on the surface now. It was on the verge of exploding.

  But I had it. For now, I had it.

  “You were right about one thing,” I said, as I hovered closer to Alternate Kyle. “I’m not supposed to make it past this point. And that’s why you shouldn’t be here, right now.”

  I saw the fear in his eyes. Almost like he was understanding what I was saying, after all this time.

  I smiled at him then, and I felt a tear roll down my cheek. “But you were wrong when you said I wasn’t strong enough. Because I am strong enough. I don’t need Glacies to be strong. I don’t need Hielo to be strong. And as much as you think ULTRAs will lead to the downfall of man, you don’t get to make that decision. Not now.”

  The burning energy seared out of my skin. I was completely covered in light now. I knew it was close.

  I grabbed Alternate Kyle by his arms.

  Then I floated both of us right toward that huge ball of energy, burning so bright that I knew that even if I looked away from it, I’d never be able to see again.

  Alternate Kyle tried to shake free. He tried to fight back.

  But my powers were too strong.

  They were stronger than he was.

  I was stronger than he was.

  We got right to the edge of the ball of energy, then, and all I could see was light. But I could feel that I was heading in the right direction.

  I was sad that I’d never look back and see Earth again.

  I was sad that I’d never have a chance to say a proper goodbye to Ellicia, Avi, Dad, and everyone else—all of my friends.

  I was sad about a lot of things.

  But most of all, I felt strong.

  I was Kyle Peters, and I was saving the planet.

  “Goodbye,” I whispered, as I held my future self up to the ball of energy.

  I felt him struggle violently for a few seconds. Then I heard cracks and explosions and saw electricity.

  I knew I didn’t have long.

  Tears streamed down my cheeks. My bottom lip shook. Every instinct in my body told me to back away.

  But I knew that I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t, because this was how it was meant to be.

  I couldn’t allow Alternate—or Future—Kyle to come back.

  And that meant this was the moment I made my greatest sacrifice.

  I saw Ellicia in my mind. Her dark hair. Her cheeky smile. I saw us holding hands for the first time, going on our first date. I saw the late nights we’d spend just lying next to each other, listening to one another breathe.

  I saw Dad, then. The times he’d picked me up when I was low. The amount of belief he’d given myself. And the smile on his face when Cassie was returned to him—the smile on my face, Damon’s face, Avi’s face, Ellicia’s face—as we all came back together.

  And then I saw Mom and Damon, holding out a hand, waiting for me.

  “I’m ready now,” I muttered, as the burning light singed my body. The energy inside me was at bursting point, ready to go off like a nuclear bomb.

  Mom smiled.

  Damon waved a hand at me, beckoning me to follow.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  I saw myself in my mind’s eye. This time, I wasn’t wearing my Glacies gear. I wasn’t hiding behind any other identity.

  I was just me. Kyle Peters.

  And in that instant, I felt so proud.

  “I’m ready.”

  I clenched my teeth together.

  Held my breath.

  Then I closed my eyes and I let the energy inside me released stronger than ever before.

  For a second, I felt burning. I felt sheer, total agony.

  And then I felt calm and peace as my body exploded with light.

  “I’m ready…” I screamed.

  And then, after the explosion of light, there was silence.

  49

  Stone held on to Ellicia, but he could feel himself getting weaker and weaker.

  The sky had turned completely black. Not even the lightning was enough to spark up any light anymore. All around him, he watched as the city was torn up, and he knew this building they were standing on could be next.

  The only thing he could see?

  The humans, traveling up that green light, toward whatever fate and future lay ahead.

  He clenched his grip on Ellicia, but in all truth, he was worried for many reasons. He could taste the metallic tang of blood on his lips. His head was aching from all the pressure he’d applied over the last couple of hours. His entire body, which was still covered in stone, was shaking now.

  He didn’t want to let go, but he knew that he was getting weaker. He was amazed he’d been able to hold onto his powers for this long as it was. All of the others had long ago lost use of their abilities. Perhaps he was even stronger than he thought.

  There was another more primary worry for him right now though, and that was Ellicia herself. She had turned completely purple. Blood was dripping from the corners of her eyes and her lips. Her heart was still beating, and she was breathing. But seeing her like this just wasn’t fair.

  He’d made a promise to Kyle to hold onto her.

  But if he saw her like this… surely he’d let her go, too?

  He looked to his left and saw Roadrunner, Daniel, and Cassie both staring at him. They looked at him like they knew what he was thinking. Daniel didn’t want Stone to let go for anything. Cassie, she had been more sympathetic.

  “I can’t keep holding on,” Stone said, shaking his head. “I can’t keep—”

  A bang.

  He fell to the left.

  Ellicia slipped from his grip.

  He jumped up and grabbed her by the ankle before she could disappear into the sky.

  It took him a few seconds to realize what’d happened. The building had snapped in two. They were drifting, all of them toward the sky. Except… no. The roof of the building beneath Stone’s feet was cracking away. He was being weighed down back toward the earth, just as the rest of his fellow ULTRAs were.

  If he didn’t let go of Ellicia, he was g
oing to tear her leg off.

  He shook his head, then. He looked up at the light, the way the humans were moving so peacefully up in, and he wondered whether that fate for Ellicia would really be so bad after all.

  “I can’t hold on,” he said.

  “You keep holding on,” Daniel said.

  Stone tried to grip harder, but then he realized something was happening.

  The stone was receding on his body.

  He was being replaced by muscle. Human muscle.

  His powers were fading.

  He looked at Daniel, at Cassie, and he shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s over.”

  “No!” Daniel shouted.

  He tried to run at Stone, but then he fell when a chunk of the building cracked away.

  Stone was on his own now. He was still holding on to Ellicia. But his grip was loosening. He knew it was time to let go.

  “I’m sorry, Ellicia,” he muttered. “And… and Kyle. Kid, wherever you are, I’m sorry. But I tried. I tried…”

  He closed his eyes.

  Then he let go.

  He waited for Ellicia to go floating off peacefully into the sky.

  But she didn’t.

  Instead, she fell back down onto Stone and knocked him onto his back.

  And then the piece of rubble Stone was floating on fell too.

  He felt himself falling through the sky, hurtling back to Earth. In that blink of a moment, he saw the green lights fading too, and the humans tumbling slowly back down. The dark sky broke. Everything cleared.

  And something else, too.

  Stone was hovering.

  He was using his powers, stone covering his body, and he was hovering just above the ground.

  He looked at Ellicia, who was in his arms now. Her cheeks were pale, but she wasn’t purple anymore, and not being purple was damned something.

  He stood together with the rest of the Resistance and looked up at the sky. The sun broke through the clouds. Sure, the city was just rubble. But rubble was better than nothing.

  All around, he could see people on their backs. They were waking up, coughing, looking around with confusion. It would be confusing, probably for a long time. Rebuilding wasn’t gonna be easy. There were gonna be hurdles.

  But they’d overcome them. Because their resilience was unmatched.

  “Is that…” Cassie said.

  Stone felt his stomach sink. It was bittersweet, in a way, as they looked up into the sky at that bright white light. It was like a star, only much bigger, and twinkling away. It was right where the darkness of the mothership had been not long ago. It was the brightest, lightest thing he’d ever looked at.

  He put a hand on Cassie’s back, pulled her in close. “I think it is,” he said. “I think… I think your brother did it.”

  They all came together, then. Roadrunner. Daniel. Cassie. Stone. They held one another. All of them cried. Even Stone cried, dammit.

  “Thanks, kid,” Stone muttered, as he stood there, Ellicia in his arms. “Thank you.”

  They would go on to help the rest of the people around them. They’d get people to safety, help rebuild this city, help rebuild the world.

  But for now, they stood together, and they felt like Kyle was with them all along.

  They saw dust falling from the sky. Light specks of dust. And as it fell, it felt like they were being sprinkled with just a fraction of his powers.

  But as they stood there, together, they looked up at that star and they knew exactly what they were looking at.

  The ultimate sacrifice.

  A legendary act of bravery.

  Kyle Peters.

  Not Glacies. Not anything else.

  Kyle Peters.

  ULTRA.

  Hero.

  50

  Five years later

  Ellicia looked out of the window of her sixteenth story office in London, UK, and wished today was done with already.

  It was a pleasant early summer’s day. “Pleasant” being a very British way to describe the weather, particularly the summer, which wasn’t ever anything to sing about. But today was particularly nice. The sun simmered against the River Thames. Big Ben looked beautiful—albeit nowhere near as big as she’d imagined before she first visited London. The reconstructed London Eye Ferris wheel stood taller and prouder than it ever had before. Really, today was quite the picture.

  But Ellicia couldn’t wait to get home.

  She heard the tapping of keys, and smelled the fumes from the coffee machines. When she glanced away from the window, Karen—one of her better friends at work—smiled at her. “I’m off, Ellicia.” She leaned over, hugged her. “You have a safe trip home and I’ll see you in a few weeks, yeah?”

  Ellicia hugged her back and smiled. “Can’t wait to have you and the girls over stateside.”

  “Yeah, well I can’t wait to sample some of those nightclubs you’ve been telling me all about.”

  Ellicia rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Me, the big nightclub fan.”

  “You aren’t convincing anyone. See you soon, hun.”

  They hugged again, then Karen disappeared and Ellicia suddenly felt very alone at Hogan’s Law Firm. She’d been working here for two years now. It wasn’t anything special. She’d had an internship after finishing college and decided to move over to the UK for a clean break.

  A clean break from what?

  Well. From everything.

  Five years ago, the world was a very different place.

  She scanned down through her emails, glazing over right away as she deleted spam email after spam email. Her mind wandered back to that day five years ago. The day when the mothership had shot those green beams down to Earth, and begun to drag every human away from the surface and to… well, no one knew where to, exactly. Perhaps one day, that place would be discovered. But not now. There was a time and a place for everything, as some of her English friends said.

  She didn’t remember an awful load from the day itself. Mostly just waking up, seeing the destruction, then the struggle in the days that followed. The estimated cost of damage globally was unprecedented, on a completely different scale to everything that had happened before. As country after country struggled with poverty and famine, it would’ve been very easy for the world to tear itself apart as it waited to repair itself.

  But it didn’t.

  Instead, humanity realized that it was much, much stronger than it had ever realized. Humanity showed patience—a patience that got it through the toughest of times, and saw it rise out of the other end a much more united, solid front.

  Of course, the ULTRAs helped with the rebuilding. But they were just there to do just that—help.

  Humanity led the forefront of the rebuilding process.

  How in Kyle’s image that was, after all.

  She got up from her desk when she’d finished—a stretch of time that dragged on way longer than she could’ve imagined—then said her goodbyes to the rest of her colleagues before heading straight for an Uber to London Heathrow. She waited even longer in the airport, and after some struggles where she thought she wasn’t going to make her plane on time, she was soon boarding the 17:59 to New York JFK, where she arrived at nine p.m. local time eight hours later.

  When she got to the airport, her heart picked up as she looked around, passing by all the unfamiliar faces. She was struck right away by just how television-like the American accent was, and how much less performance-oriented Britain was. Not a criticism either way, just an observation. If anything, her year in Britain had made her more subdued.

  She searched for a long time for the person picking her up. It wasn’t going to be her parents. They were living over in Michigan now, where she’d fly in two weeks after spending some time back where she considered “home”. They were heading to New York a week today. She hadn’t told them she was heading back a week early, because they’d have just shown up without invite, then.

  She wanted a little time alone here, to reflect.
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  She wanted time with friends.

  That’s when she saw him.

  “Ellicia!”

  He was taller, and a lot slimmer, credit to him. He had a new turban—jet green—and he was waving at her, that big grin on his face.

  Ellicia walked up to him and hugged him, beaming from cheek to cheek. “Avi,” she said.

  “How you doing, girl?”

  “‘Girl?’ Is that another one of those tags you learned from a book?”

  Avi’s face shifted. “Well. I guess I…”

  Ellicia punched Avi playfully. “I’m just joking. It’s good to see you, Avi.”

  He smiled again, looking much more relaxed now. “You too. Girl.”

  They reminisced about the last three years of their lives as they made their way to Avi’s car. Avi was still single, but insisted that his conquest to find love was “stronger than ever.” Avi asked whether Ellicia was single, to which she queried whether he was hitting on her, and everything got a bit awkward for a while then.

  And that awkwardness led to something else. The inevitable question.

  “Why haven’t you been to New York in three years, then?”

  Ellicia lowered her head. She didn’t know what to say. Not really. After all, what was her real reason? Fear? Sadness? Something else?

  In the end, she decided just to let the first thing that came into her head out, trusting its honesty. “I guess… I guess coming back here meant accepting that he was gone. Because whenever I’m here… I dunno. I guess I see sights and hear things that just remind me too much.”

  Avi kept his hands on the wheel as they maneuvered their way through the New York traffic, heading in the direction of Staten Island. He spoke about his job as a game designer, how much he loved it, how much of a blast it was. The lights of Manhattan lit up the night sky bringing so many memories of young love. How long would it have lasted if things had been different? Would they still be together, to this day?

  “I get that,” Avi said. “Really. I mean. I lost Damon. I lost Kyle. And I lost… I guess I lost you too. So I feel it.”

  Ellicia felt guilty then. It was a guilt that led her to reach her hand onto the back of Avi’s and hold onto it. “Well, I’m here now, Avi.”