“Don’t ‘hello’ me. Where’s my beer?” Mr. Shaffer demanded, his voice wobbly with drunkenness.
“Your… beer?” Alex asked, his eyebrows raising.
“Yes, my beer. Where is it? I had a rough day at work, and I’m down to my last few bottles. Now, where is it?” Mr. Shaffer nearly shouted.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you go buy some?” Alex asked, annoyed.
“Don’t talk back to me. Go get me some beer!” Mr. Shaffer was shouting now.
“Father, I am too young to get alcohol. We already went over this. It’s against the law,” Alex explained, exasperated.
“Then break the law, I don’t care. Just get it to me, ungrateful brat.” Mr. Shaffer gulped down the last of the alcohol and slammed it against the wall. Bits of glass and droplets of the strong liquid scattered throughout the hallway. Alex flinched.
“Dad, you’re drunk and you look exhausted. Why don’t you go lie down?” Alex said fearfully.
Mr. Shaffer glared at him menacingly. “Fine then!” he shouted. “Disobey me. I’ll show you where that gets you.” Mr. Shaffer grabbed Alex’s wrist and pulled him toward the fireplace. The burning coals cracked and sizzled from the heat. Alex squirmed when he realized what his father was going to do but couldn’t escape his grip. Alex’s eyes widened in horror as his father shoved him forward, hands first, into the fire.
Alex shook the memory away. He bolted upright and barreled toward Jensen. Jensen merely smiled at Alex’s charge. He pointed his hand and sent a fireball at Alex. Jensen then turned to face Nicole again, thinking that he had dealt with the boy.
At the last second, Alex pulled his sword from its sheath, and flew above the fireball. He continued his path toward Jensen with his sword raised.
Jensen was surprised but not caught off guard. He grabbed Alex’s shirt and tossed him against a vent on the roof.
“Alex!” Nicole shouted as Jensen threw him into the metal. The metal bent inward from the sudden impact, and Alex tumbled to the ground, dazed, winded, and unable to move. Nicole was done with all of this. She just wanted to go home. Why couldn’t these idiots leave them alone? Without realizing what she was doing, she held her hand out toward the fiery man. Her palm faced the sky. A small ball of yellow light swirled in her hand until it began to take shape. When the light disappeared, in her hand lay a gun. She wasn’t thinking about what she was doing when she pointed the barrel at Jensen. She wasn’t aware of what she was about to do. It was as though her emotions had taken control.
Before anyone could react, she squeezed the trigger. A loud band rang out through the sky, followed by a quick bright light. Her hand opened again, and she let go of the gun. The gun hovered as it began to change back into a yellow ball of swirling light. The light disappeared into her palm, and only when her hand was back at her side and Jensen hit the ground did she realize what she had done.
Jensen lay sprawled on the ground. He clutched his leg as blood trickled down. Everyone had stopped fighting. All were staring at Jensen and Nicole. When Jenna recovered from the shock, she floated down and rushed to her brother’s side. Jenna got down on her knees and ripped the bottom of her white shirt. She wrapped the cloth around her brother’s leg as the fire on the roof around them disappeared.
Her brother groaned as she tightened the knot. She glared at Nicole, who was still astonished by her action. Jenna pointed a threatening finger at Nicole.
“You will pay for this!” Jenna growled as a tornado of fire spun up from their legs and slowly engulfed them. When the fire disappeared, the siblings had disappeared along with it. Evidence of their presence scattered across the roof.
Alex pushed himself off the ground after what seemed to be hours of silence. He walked to his gathered friends, his hands stinging with immense pain. He had seen it all, along with everyone else.
“How did you do that?” Alex asked.
“I…I have no idea,” Nicole replied.
Jack appeared next to David, wiping perspiration that had gathered from the heat off his forehead.
“Did you see that?” Alex asked Jack.
“Indeed, I did,” Jack replied.
“Do you know how she did that?”
“No, not yet. We shouldn’t stay here for too long. I’m sure you would like to go check on your friend Ethan, correct?”
“Yeah, we should get going.” Alex turned to Mark. “Can you walk, or do you need help?”
Mark’s clothes were scorched black, and his hair was a mess, but otherwise he looked fine. His skin hadn’t burned and other than his clothes he looked perfectly healthy.
“I’m fine. That fireball just took the wind out of me is all. I just want to get out of these clothes,” Mark said as he touched the bottom of his shirt and some cracked pieces of brittle fell off. Jack looked at him with surprise but said nothing.
David’s arm was slightly burnt but only on the very top layers of his skin and there was a large bruise around Nicole’s neck. They were all too tired to fly and by now it was too dark to see where they were going anyway, so they all took the elevator down to the street.
The front door of the building led out onto the beach and the group walked along the sand in a sleepless daze, the exhaustion of the fight now catching up with them. Jack walked ahead of the group of teenagers with his gaze fixed on the sand. Alex ran ahead and slowed to a walk once he reached Jack’s side.
“How are you holding up?” Alex asked.
“Holding up?” Jack turned to Alex questioningly.
“About Darrien,” Alex replied softly.
“It’s a part of life; death. It happens. No matter how much we don’t want it to. My time to weep for his death has passed. He was an old man. He lived a long and full life. Now, we must focus on the present,” Jack said somberly.
“Are we going to attend his funeral?”
“No. By the time they have it prepared we will have been long gone.”
“What are they doing?” Brooke asked before Alex could inquire where they would be. She pointed a few hundred yards ahead of them toward the docks where people were loading crates, furniture, and other things onto ships.
“They are preparing. The barrier around this island will lift in five days,” Jack answered.
After this they were all silent. The exhaustion that clouded their minds prevented them from seeing what that meant for them.
FORTY-SEVEN
When they arrived back at the bookstore, most of the crowd had dispersed. The people who had been extinguishing the fire at Darrien’s place were cleaning up the burnt rubble that littered the streets. Ethan and his mother sat on the back of a floating boat painted white with a purple stripe. Ethan’s mother had her arm around him; his head was leaning against her shoulder, his eyes closed. He was stroking Argent’s fur, as the cat purred on his lap. A few men and women in dark purple jackets with a white cross on the back were attending to Ethan and his mother’s wounds.
Alex walked over with the others close behind him. Argent saw him coming and leapt down from Ethan’s lap and walked over to Alex.
“Let’s see if we can heal those wounds of yours,” said Jack who guided David and Alex to two women in jackets and explained to them what happened to Alex’s hands and David’s arm.
The women looked at the wounds and pulled a wrap of bandages out from behind the ambulance.
“Those are quite the burns there,” one woman commented as she examined Alex’s fingers. “What’d you do, throw your hands in the fire?”
“Something like that,” Alex replied with a tired smile. The woman smiled back and held her hands a few inches above his. A white light emanated from them for a few minutes. As she did this, Alex could feel the pain in his hands fade away to a throb. Alex looked over and saw the other woman doing the same thing over David’s arm. When she pulled away, Alex’s hands looked clean, and
any trace of the burns was gone.
“They may look healed, but you will have to wear some bandages around them for a while to keep them from getting infected and risk the chance of the burns coming back,” the woman said as she wrapped the bandages around his hands. Once she finished and tied the bandages, a yellowish white light flashed off them as they shrunk to fit his hands perfectly, almost like a pair of gloves, before returning to their original color.
“Why’d it do that?” Alex asked as he flexed his hands.
“It makes it so they won’t come off until you are fully healed, and the risk of infection no longer poses a threat.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Alex said before she smiled and walked away.
David’s arm was still being bandaged, so Alex looked around for the others. Mark, Brooke, and Nicole were sitting down on the curb, waiting to go back to the hotel. Jack was standing behind the floating boat talking to Ethan’s mother. Alex walked over and pulled himself up next to Ethan. They sat there in silence, listening to Jack and his mother talk. Alex looked at Ethan’s face, wondering if he could discern what he was thinking, but the light from the streetlamps didn’t reach them.
“We’re going to leave,” Ethan finally said, shock evident in his voice.
“Leave where?” Alex asked.
“We’re going to leave the island and move to the mainland. Mom is going to open up another bookstore somewhere in the U.S. She says she wants to go to the state of Washington. Apparently, I have an uncle up there. The only other family we’ve got.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Next week, when the barrier lifts. Mom booked a hotel for us to stay in until then.” Ethan’s voice cracked at the end and he lapsed into silence.
“The stars are so bright tonight. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many in the city before.”
Alex looked at Ethan only to find his neck craned upward, his gaze fixed on the sky. Alex looked up and was astonished to see so many stars, blinking through the black. Alex and Ethan sat there until Ethan’s mom told him they had to go. Without another word, Ethan slid off the boat and walked beside his mother down the street.
“I think we should go as well,” Jack said. Alex agreed and the two of them walked over to the curb where his friends were sitting. They were all leaning against one another, Nicole and David slowly dozing off. Jack and Alex shook them awake, and they all walked down the two blocks to the hotel.
When they woke up the next day, they had slept well through the morning and well into the afternoon. They each took turns in the bathroom to take a shower, if you could call that trickle of water a shower, then headed out to get some food in a numb, trance-like state. As they were walking through the lobby, the man behind the desk called Jack over.
“Are you Mr. Pandemonium?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Jack replied.
“Yesterday morning a man asked me to give this to you. I meant to give it to you the other day, but I didn’t see you come in.” The man held out a large manila folder with Jack’s name spread across it in fine black ink. Jack took the envelope and thanked the man before walking outside. The teens stood on the top steps and watched as Jack opened the folder.
“Who’s it from?” Nicole asked.
“It doesn’t say.” Jack reached inside and pulled out a small slip of paper. It read; Somehow, I have a feeling this will be the last time we will ever hear from one another. I do not understand why. It is only a feeling. Inside this envelope are six tickets to board The Andrea on the first day the barrier lifts. I hope you arrive at your destination safely and without much trouble. It has been a pleasure, my dear friend.
Darrien
When Jack finished reading the letter, he looked at the five teens with a sad smile. “Thanks to Darrien, we will be on the first passenger ship out of here as soon as we can.”
Jack reached inside the envelope and pulled out six white tickets with gold lettering and designs on the edges. “We all will.”
Alex smiled as a spark of joy broke through the depressing haze brought on by last night’s events. They were finally leaving this island, and his friends would be reunited with their families once again. But his life would never be the same. Alex’s life wasn’t something you would call normal, anymore. It was far from it.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I want to thank my mother and father. Mom, who listened to my never-ending rants and offered advice when I needed it, also helping to write countless emails. Jesan, who encouraged me to create this, and has given me invaluable advice on the creation of this story, and without whom I never would have thought to turn this idea into a book. Both helped me find and provide for services I needed to make this book real and have sacrificed so much of their time to help me. They have done so much for me, and none of this would be possible without them.
Thank you Paul Kocak, an amazing editor who made this book so much better and was patient with me the entire way; taking me in as his client despite my clear inexperience, encouraging me when I had my doubts.
Rachel Jenks, thank you for taking the time to meet with me and providing me much-needed and much-appreciated information about how to do all this when I had no idea what I was doing.
I want to thank my friends (you know who you are) for always being so excited about this creation of mine and giving me hope and support. It meant more to me than you know.
All of you played a part in the creation of this book, and I am so thankful for all that you have done!
Finally, I thank God for giving me the resources, the connections, and the ability to make this thing happen.
The Abnormals: Book One Page 34