by Gary Sapp
possibility of her being hit by projectiles or even someone bold enough to try and physically confront her. The crowd that was in such a jovial celebratory mood minutes ago was now coming into slow but steady recognition of who just who she really was.
Is this how my role in all of this ends? Have the flames been telling me tall tales? Is it written for me to exit the game with a simple whimper and not a bang?
The officers pulled her to her feet. She faintly heard one of the officers read her rights to her. She exhaled deeply and began to march with them towards her unexpected destiny.
It was over.
It was finally all over.
And then she saw it.
An older model car bent the curve without slowing, its wheels straightened with lighting quickness and it began to cut and angel towards where she, the officers and dozens upon dozens were loitering.
Her mind told her to run but her body was slow to react and her cuffed partners were struggling to move themselves away from the car’s deadly path.
And just before the car plowed into them—she was struck first at the terrible irony that she, the Oracle, the leader of Pandora was going to be killed by the selfless act of one of her own suicide agents.
If this was her last moment then Serena Tennyson was surprised by what she saw as she heard the screams of the first pedestrians run into and over—and that horrid sound that metal makes as it eats up human flesh.
She didn’t see her life flash before her.
She failed to see silhouettes of her dead parents…or even the flames that she’d grown to trust and love rise in front of her.
In her final moments Serena Tennyson saw a vision of Thomas Pepper.
And he was dying as well.
Thomas
He questioned any man who could sleep through the remainder of the night the way that he had done so.
Lucy was still dead. She was very much so. He’d returned to her hotel room just as quickly as he’d abandoned it and found it on the bed where he’d left it. Her body had begun to rid itself of its body fluids. With all of the dead bodies on this floor between here and the elevator a horde of flies had flown in and were buzzing about. Thomas Pepper was thankful that he had wrapped the majority of Lucy’s corpse securely before he’d left. It is a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. He sat on the bed for a second and noted that the air right here didn’t smell any better either. The scent of blood and torn flesh and marrow pushed away the scent of anything else.
Thomas took the time to shroud Lucy’s remains with the sheet and blanket from the bed to protect her from the pest. Satisfied, he got to his feet, stretching out the soreness from all of last night’s tribulations of combat, running and sleeping on the couch in the next room. Instinct kicked in next: He pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket and exhaled in jubilation when he noticed that he had service once more. Internet access was limited, but he shrugged it off, not upset with the lack of access of that particular luxury at this moment. He didn’t need to see what was going on outside of this room to take a wild educated guess. In his mind’s eye Thomas could picture hundreds upon hundreds of first responders pouring into the city. Atlanta had suffered through a series of events in a short span of time that this country had never seen before even during wartime: Every event from 411, Deliverance, Rapture to Scar and a moderately severe earthquake had hit this area—
Thomas walked to the bedroom window and saw a series of trees bending in the wake of a strong and prevalent wind gust.
Meteorologists were calling it the Storm of the Century.
If I believed in God then that means I believe in Satan—and that would mean that I believed that the latter was farting on us when we are already hurting the most.
He turned away from the window and found his way back to the bed without realizing that he had moved at all. He shooed a dozen flies away. He looked at the temporary coffin that he’d made for his former lover. He did not cry. There were no tears left to spare. Perhaps he’d grown dispassionate to this world while he slept. Perhaps all the fleeing he’d done from threat after threat and unseen danger to immediate harm over the past night—over the past weeks had robbed him of emotion.
It had already robbed him of so very much.
He used the remote and switched on the TV. Two CNN reporters that he’d seen around and about over the years were on the screen in a live shot street level in an area he couldn’t immediately place. They looked fatigued themselves, though experience told him they’d probably been on the air a less than a couple of hours. He recognized the somber look that was weighing their eyelids down. People outside of his business were quick to criticize the media for over dramatization of high profile events. They blamed the media itself for making themselves part of the very stories that they actually covered. He knew these professionals. And Thomas Pepper could more than appreciate the inhumanity that they’d seen overnight. They had every right to be spooked.
The first shot their director showed the viewing audience was a panoramic view of different parts of the city. Atlanta looked like a warzone. What was particularly effective—what one professional could appreciate coming from another in his field—was the network’s use of file tape of what these neighborhoods and sectors and streets looked like in the days before the Zero Hour and all the subsequent events including the earthquake occurred. Thomas saw several buildings leveled. And yet, what was particularly disturbing is that he could quickly know that it was a House in Chains’ suicide bombers that had done the damage and not mother-nature. Atlanta residents…young and old, rich and poor, black and white, innocent and guilty who had entered churches, schools, gymnasiums and other places of supposed shelter and died a horrid death.
Another camera crew had focused a street side shot on the near south side. One reporter walked down a long alley where she scooped up one empty shell casing after the other after the other after the other and put them up screen level so that Thomas and everyone else could see all of them.
And then Thomas Pepper saw something he would not soon forget.
A female reporter saw something just out of camera range that caught her attention. The camera angle switched to the number 3 which was just above her left shoulder. Thomas knew this was one of a director’s favorites as to allow the viewing audience to see what the journalist did almost simultaneously. It was a more than effective tool to give viewers the most intimate viewing experience that technology and human instinct could provide.
So Thomas Pepper and everyone else across the country saw what the reporter saw that had drawn her attention almost the same moment she did.
There was one arm hanging out of a dumpster. A stranger helped the reporter lift the heavy lid and all of the viewers saw the connecting body and nearly a dozen more dead people twisted in every direction in that dumpster as well.
The cameraman turned his camera away but not before the audio technician picked up the unmistakable sound of the reporter cursing and throwing up in the streets.
The feed switched to a BREAKING NEWS shot and it proved to Thomas Pepper without any doubt that things could and had gotten considerably worse. Fire seemed to be engulfing the Westside of the city off of I20. Thomas’ first guess was that this was the result of the lethal combination of a fire from a suicide bombing and these wicked winds thrusting the flames into the heavy wooded areas out there.
And then he heard these same strong winds shaking this foundation at the core.
And then he smelled a burning sensation that was nearly overwhelming.
Although ignoring it was nearly impossibly, Thomas concentrated on what was being shown on the TV now. CNN had switched to some of the telecast from of its sister stations all across the country. He saw hundreds of dead bodies lying on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Triage centers were being overrun and overwhelmed in Harlem and Miami. Displaced refugees from all around the Beltway were camped out outside the gates of the White House in Washington, D.C. Reports of casualties, looting and suic
ide bombing during the night was being filtering in from Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Houston and countless others. The still photography shots were pouring in from all. The professional shots were telling; the amateur pictures mostly taken on cell phones were far worse: Men of color had been lynched and hung naked from trees in Montgomery. Four white school teachers had been raped and killed by the very students they thought they were protecting in a school house in St Louis. White Supremacist had torched a Mexican restaurant with the owner, every worker and several dozen patrons who had barricaded themselves inside in Glendale. And then he saw the frightening image of residents in Detroit waking up hundreds of yet to be unidentified naked white men and women hung to wooden X’s with their throats cut.
Thomas Pepper didn’t remember going to his knees and throwing up but there he was. He stabilized his weight as best as he could be squeezing Lucy Burgess foot. She didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t look up…he didn’t need to… he heard could hear the last report as CNN had returned to a local feed once again.
The APD—or what was left of the civil servants who had begun calling themselves Protect and Serve—were confirming the rumored reports that the FBI had discovered the remains of the Circle, the Board, high level Peacekeepers and several civilians inside the dining room of a mansion here in