The Reach

by Nate Kenyon

  Sarah turned on the lawn and faced the street. There were black cars out there, and vans too. The van doors slid open and men in military attack gear jumped out.

  Somewhere overhead, Jess heard the chattering thump of a helicopter. She started to move down the steps, hesitated. This was going to get nasty. If Sarah was distracted, they were both dead. She knew that with absolute certainty. It had all gone too far for anything else.

  I don’t think they’re going to just let us walk away. But there is another way out.

  Her own words, spoken just minutes ago. More true right now than ever before.

  It’s time to let it all loose, don’t hold back.

  McDwyer looked out over the scene as they came in low over the brush. A few moments ago they had swooped past a series of abandoned buildings, and he thought about landing there and planning a better approach through the ground cover, but decided it would take too long.

  Now he was glad he did. He swore as the Sikorsky swooped toward the street. A smoking hole where the doors of the facility should be, windows blown out, and where was the girl? There. On the lawn. This was far worse than he’d feared. She was loose, and nobody had been able to get close enough to her for a clean shot with the drug to dial her down. So much for the ground troops. He spotted several of them, crouched behind cars parked sideways outside the gate. What the fuck were they waiting for anyway?

  Then he saw the man jittering on the steps as if he’d caught hold of a live wire, smoke pouring from his head of white hair. Oh, Jesus. What was Berger doing this close? He should have known better…

  The situation had just gone from very bad to full-scale disaster. They would not be able to hold off the authorities for long now, even with all the pull they had on the inside. They had to move fast to control the damage, and Berger was way beyond giving orders. It was his turn. Operation Kill-Switch was under way.

  McDwyer checked his weapon, shouted at his men to be ready for touchdown.

  More black cars squealed to a stop outside the gates, followed by black vans. Men in full combat gear poured out of them.

  Then the impossible happened. One of the black cars suddenly flung itself upward, as if ripped from the ground and tossed by a giant hand.

  The helicopter swerved in a violent, adrenaline-pumping sideways dive. McDwyer felt a frozen moment of terror as he watched the car’s rear tire slip just inches past the windshield. The pilot shouted and fought with the controls, and for a moment McDwyer thought they were all done. Punch your time cards, gentlemen. But then the chopper righted itself, the skids hit asphalt, and he felt his teeth click together as the car landed somewhere nearby with a bone-rattling crash.

  He had the door already open before the pilot cut the engine, and he had grabbed his weapon case and was out and moving just before the world exploded.

  Sarah stood on the front walk as the sky over her head turned black. Blood soaked through the bandage on her shoulder. But the pain was nothing now; she let it go with the rest, with the glorious, burning energy searing through her body. The air rippled as she seemed to swell in size, as she spread her arms out to the wind. Blue streaks leapt from her fingers to meet the clouds, touched her face, her hair, formed a halo around her head. She gasped, threw her hands higher, eyes rolling backward into her skull.

  Out by the gates a car went flipping end over end through the air, narrowly missing die helicopter, which landed hard in the street.

  One of die remaining cars exploded. A ball of yellow flame shot skyward. A van went next, the fireball erupting from the rear gas tank. And then die helicopter, with its rotors still turning lazily in die wind, seemed to puff once and stutter before die tanks went up and it disappeared into a blinding flash of white-yellow heat.

  Debris tinkled across pavement, chunks of steaming metal thudding and tumbling across die grass. A piece of someone’s hand, two fingers attached and twitching, landed next to Sarah’s left foot. Across die street, half of a rotor blade buried itself three feet deep into die side of an abandoned row house, the metal end that protruded still smoking.

  A man ran screaming across the lawn, his hair on fire. Others within the attack squad who had survived the blasts had gathered their wits about them enough to organize themselves, and the chatter of weapons joined the dull whoosh and crackle of the burning vehicles.

  Sarah turned in the direction of the gunfire. The air rippled like a colorless wave passing through, and a crack zigzagged its way across the front lawn toward die guardhouse. The ground opened up and swallowed it with a shriek and a tearing of wood and metal, buckling die gates and melting the asphalt and concrete curb into a gooey mess that looked like a giant stripe of warm chocolate.

  The crack continued to snake across the sidewalk, and the front axle of the remaining van fell with a thunk into the gap. The van teetered for a moment on the edge of the wide, black mouth, back end swinging up toward die sky, and then it tipped over die edge and fell with the crunch of shattered glass.

  Three men with guns were exposed, still crouching behind where the van used to be. With a grunt of satisfaction she picked them up and hurled them thirty feet backward, right past the quivering rotor blade, through a clapboard wall, and into the room behind it.

  The blast from the exploding helicopter felt like a giant hand pressed firmly into McDwyer’s back. The air whooshed from his lungs as the hand gave a violent shove. He was airborne for perhaps ten feet, but kept his wits about him long enough to tuck and roll into the impact with the ground.

  Still, stars exploded across his vision with the collision and he lay sprawled for a moment, stunned. The explosions had done something to his hearing. Everything sounded as if it were underwater.

  When he got to his feet he was bleeding from badly scraped palms and a gash on his forehead.

  He licked his lips and tasted blood. Nothing broken. He glanced over at the front steps of the Wasserman Facility. The girl stood there among the smoking ruins. A mini cyclone swirled about her head, blue lightning flashes rippling through black clouds.

  The air temperature had plummeted to something approaching midwinter. And yet the fires still burned, and the heat coming off anything the girl’s mind had touched was like the blast from a furnace.

  He thought back to his years of training, clamped down hard, prayed to God for strength. He had never been so scared of anything in his life. All the reports he had read about her were nothing compared to this. She’s some kind of demon.

  When he felt the ground shake under his feet and the earth cracked open across the lawn, swallowing everything in its path, he turned and scrabbled across the road to the large, black suitcase that had come to rest near the curb.

  He had to get to higher ground, get himself under cover, and find a place to take the shot. A small commercial building was located about a hundred yards down die street. He ducked and ran, moving behind parked cars and darting between open spaces. He heard men screaming, another explosion, things shattering.

  The first floor of the building was a pizza parlor, or it had been at one time. Now it looked like a crack den. Two black women and a man with piercings through his nose and the tattoo of a dragon wrapped around his neck huddled against the back wall as he kicked through the door. “You stay away!” the man shouted. He was shivering and he held out a gun. “I called the fucking cops. It’s World War Three out there. Who are they? Arabs? Are they gonna kill us? Why’s it so goddamned cold?”

  “Tell me where the stairs are, right now,” McDwyer said, ignoring the gun. “And get the fuck out of sight.”

  The man hesitated a moment; then he must have seen something in McDwyer’s eyes and lowered the gun. He led him to a door in the back room. McDwyer slipped quickly up the steps, past three landings and more closed doors, until he reached the roof.

  Outside he quickly surveyed the scene: tar and crushed stone flat surface, three-foot-high walls all around. He had no time for testing, had to put things together fast and clean, take the
shot, and get out. It was a good spot, plenty of room and the right distance. He could set up on the flat top of a steel vent cover and kneel on the surface of the roof to get her in his sights, all the while keeping himself almost completely concealed.

  He set down his case, flipped the latches, and lifted the lid, then set out assembling the unit in thirty seconds flat. The “Light Fifty,” or M82A1A, was a .50-caliber, semiautomatic, air-cooled rifle with a Unertl 10-power scope. He would use M2 Browning Machine Gun cartridges in this case.

  This was too far away to risk a dart shot, and it was too late for that anyway. They had done extensive research into the type of weapon that would be necessary to take the girl down. These rounds were large enough to kill an elephant. They should do the job nicely.

  Jess Chambers watched the man from the helicopter as he ran down the street. At first she thought he was running away from them, but then she saw him kick open the door of what looked like some kind of restaurant.

  He’s carrying something nasty in that case. The noise had grown deafening all around her now, shrieks both human and inhuman, and particles of ice and dirt whipped at her face. But she did not take her eyes away from that building.

  When she saw the wink of something peeking over the rooftop a couple of minutes later, she knew.

  She screamed a warning into the wind.

  The scope picked up everything, made it just as nice and clean and sharp as a fine sunny day at the beach. The air around her was thick with swirling dust and smoke, but McDwyer was used to conditions of blowing sand in 120-degree heat, and it didn’t shake him now.

  One shot, one kill. The sniper’s motto. With the Light Fifty, he could punch a hole through a person’s head from a thousand meters away. How far is her range? he wondered. Could she reach him here?

  Enough of this nonsense. He was babbling inside his own mind. He settled her face in his sights, took a deep breath, and let it out in a slow hiss.

  His hands were shaking. Why wouldn’t they be still? He blinked and saw a little girl he’d never met. But this was no ordinary girl he was looking at. He had a job to do. Come on, you son of a bitch.

  A woman was shouting and gesturing from the front steps, pointing. Inside the eye of that flat, cold scope, Sarah turned to look his way.

  Predator to predator, like two lions crouched in the brush. This time, that split-second difference went the other way.

  Jess shouted Sarah’s name again. There, over there. He’s got a gun. At first the girl didn’t seem to hear her, and then her eyes rolled and tried to focus. She glanced at the rooftop where Jess was pointing, and instantly a huge ripple of pure energy went tearing away from her, flattening everything in its path like the blast wave from a bomb, vaporizing the last remaining men where they crouched and hid, parked cars and light posts tossed into the air and tumbling like windblown leaves, as if something immense and invisible had gone lumbering down the street.

  A bullet screamed past Sarah’s face and her head snapped back; the bullet ricocheted off the wall of the Wasserman Facility, leaving a six-inch-deep crater in the brick. She moaned. Blood began to ooze from a furrow on the left side of her scalp. The thing that had wormed its way into Jess’s mind clenched violently.

  Jess caught another flash of muzzle fire from the roof, and a chunk of steps disintegrated at her feet.

  And then the invisible lumbering beast reached the building.

  Windows exploded inward as immense pressure came to bear against the walls. For a moment, the structure held, and then with a screech and horrible grinding roar, the lower floors gave way.

  It was like a wrecking ball hitting a house of matchsticks. Bits of brick and wood exploded out the back, peppering the surrounding areas with white-hot shrapnel. The top two floors collapsed down into themselves, and a cloud of brick and concrete dust billowed outward and swirled in the wind.

  Sarah screamed. She screamed again, as the strange blue fire licked up and down her body and the storm reached a fever pitch.

  Jess felt the gathering pressure in her lungs, inside her head, as if she had been grabbed in a vise grip. She took a step forward, then two. Had she been wrong all this time? Was it too late, had they pushed it too far?

  You’re hurting me. Please. When we first met you asked for my help. Let me give it to you now. Let me make it better.

  At first she didn’t even realize she hadn’t spoken aloud. But Sarah seemed to hear her. When she looked back on it later it was one of the many things she would puzzle over in wonder, but now she didn’t think about any of that. She managed to get down the steps without falling and stood a few feet away.

  Sarah was trembling. Blood ran freely down her face. Her eyes glittered blue fire in the deepening dusk. I can’t stop. Lt’s too hard.

  That’s the easy way out. Lt’s all over now, they’re all gone. You did it. Sarah, did I ever lie to you? Can’t you trust me now?

  Lt hurts! Sarah opened her mouth and let out a soundless scream. She threw her head back and the blue fire swarmed over her. Oh, it hurts….

  And Jess Chambers, who had come awake many nights sweating and full of blood and the screech of tires, did not hesitate now. She knew that many of the wounded did not get this chance.

  She reached out with both hands and grasped Sarah’s arms just above the elbows.

  The strength of it hit her like a train coming down a long straight track. Every muscle in her body lit up and clenched at once, and she found herself unable to move, unable to breathe, as the blue fire ran down and through her like a lightning rod, as sparks jumped from her toes into the ground. A million frozen images flashed through her mind, her life passing in one constant stream of light and dark, neurons firing like a billion stars in the great deep darkness of space.

  She tried to cry out, tried to give life to the mindless scream; but nothing came, she saw nothing finally but blackness, and the only sound she heard at the end was the thunderous, throbbing beat of a heart.

  —38—

  She did not know exactly how long she lay there, but it couldn’t have been as long as it might have seemed, because she woke to the sound of sirens.

  She found herself lying stretched full-length on the ground. The spot where she had been standing before was bare and scorched.

  The sirens were growing rapidly louder. She sat up, spat out the taste of iron and stale sweat. Her body ached, trembled like a newborn’s. She smelled earth and burned flesh, and smoke from the swiftly growing fire that licked around the edges of the Wasserman Facility and spread through the dry brush in back.

  How she had survived it she didn’t know; how could she possibly have survived the sort of jolt she had taken? But the black clouds above her head had broken up and the sky was lighter now. The wind that had come out of nowhere was slackening.

  It had ended, far more swiftly than it began.

  Sarah lay ten feet away in the grass. Unable to find the strength to stand, Jess crawled to her side. The girl lay on her back, her eyes open and glassy. There was a lot of blood, too much blood. Sudden panic filled Jess’s lungs and made her feel as if she were drowning. No. Not now, not after all that. I won’t let you die. The scalp wound looked ugly, but it wasn’t deep. She ripped open Sarah’s top, found the dark, puckered bullet hole high in her shoulder. The bandage had slid off entirely.

  Blood oozed up through the hole, more slowly now. She tore a piece of bloody cloth and pressed her palm to it to stop the bleeding.

  “You’re all right,” she said. Her throat felt burned and raw as a wound. She gathered the girl’s head into her lap, stroked Sarah’s hair. A tiny spark like static electricity jumped under her hand, while she kept her other palm hard against the gunshot hole. “I told you, I’m going to keep you safe. You hear? You’re going to he just fine.”

  Sarah gave a great, shuddering sigh. She blinked. “It—hurts,” she said.

  “I know. We’ll make it better soon.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to�
�I didn’t mean it.”

  “Don’t you worry about that. Don’t you worry. What they’ve done to you, they deserve it.”

  Tears blurred her vision, turned light into rainbows of color. The hospital had begun to burn faster now. Thicker, black smoke lifted from the roof and drifted lazily in the suddenly calm air.

  A few other children emerged from their hiding places. They gathered silently to stare down at the strange couple in the grass like respectful mourners. For a moment this all felt like a dream, and then Jess looked and saw what was left of the man lying at the foot of the steps, hair smoking and skin black and cracked, saw the door blown from its hinges and the darkness inside, and she felt like screaming. She looked down the street at the bodies and the twisted wreckage of cars, and most of all the huge, gaping hole where the sniper’s building had been.

  It was desolation, destruction. It was Armageddon. She blinked, seeing everything through a broken prism of light. She could not make it all go away. It was too late for that.

  The sirens were very close now. Any moment they would be here.

  Sarah coughed and her lips stopped moving. For a moment the air crackled and spat; then the feeling dispersed like smoke from a dying fire, and everything was calm. Jess closed her eyes against the stink of the burn, the shattered remains of what had been left behind.

  She waited for somebody to come.

  EPILOGUE

  Here are the smoking ruins, the scars, and the drift and the silence of what used to be. The Wasserman Facility left deserted among the scrub brush and the wilds of greater Boston. Fingers of burnt wooden limbs point jaggedly to the sky, as overhead a triangle of geese flap southward for winter. Soon the remains will be lightly coated with a fine snow, the first of the season sprinkled like a handful of dirt on the lid of a coffin before it is tucked away and forgotten.