Rachel was almost at the edge of the rooftop when she let out a sudden shriek. Cody watched in horror as a cloud-shaped dart of blue mist shot towards her and scooped Rachel off the ground, making her look like a feather caught in the wind.
Rachel hovered in the air, caught within the Exterminators’ grip.
The blue mist slowly wrapped itself around her.
“Rachel!”
Cody gritted his teeth and fought to get back onto the roof. But his arms were sluggish and heavy. Despite the urgency, he had to be careful or his fingers would slip on the icy ledge and then he’d be no help to anyone.
“Rachel!” he yelled. “Hang on. I’m coming.”
Cody pushed the upper half of his body over the ledge. He was almost there when he heard a high-pitched scream. He looked up and saw the blue mist shoot Rachel through the air like she was an arrow from a bow. She flew over Cody’s head and he looked over his shoulder only to see his daughter plummeting over the side of the Robert E. Lee building.
“RACHEL!”
Cody’s body fell backwards. But somehow his fingers maintained their grip on the ledge.
Rachel dropped to the street at a frightening speed. Everything else in the world stopped for Cody in that moment.
“No!” he yelled.
Cody watched as the shield lit up around his daughter’s body, just seconds before impact. She crashed into the black snow with a soft thud. To Cody’s immense relief, Rachel bounced back to her feet as if she’d done no more than jump off a doorstep.
“Thank God,” Cody said.
From his vantage point, Cody saw a sea of light drifting towards Rachel. It was coming from all sides, slowly working its way towards her. There were a few scattered streaks of white mist buzzing around Cody’s head too. He refused to look at them, concentrating only on Rachel, as well as maintaining his grip on the roof.
Had the Exterminators tried to kill Rachel? Cody didn’t understand. He thought they wanted to take her back alive. Maybe they did. Maybe the Exterminators knew she’d come to no harm and what just happened was their way of showing her who was boss this time around.
“Bastards,” Cody said.
From below, Rachel looked up at her dad. Their eyes met but from such a distance, Cody couldn’t understand what message she was trying to communicate, if any. He saw Rachel glancing at the pack of light drifting towards her. She looked up at Cody again and then ran towards the car park.
“Rachel!” Cody yelled. “Where are you going?”
But whether she heard him or not, she didn’t stop.
Cody’s arms were getting heavier by the second. He knew he had to get back on the roof while he still could. The white light that had hovered around him was now floating towards the car park.
The roar of a car engine caught Cody’s ears.
He looked to his right just in time to see a black SUV skidding out of the car park and onto the road. The car jerked back and forth as the tires struggled to grip the surface. With the colored mist closing in fast, the SUV took off at a ferocious speed.
“Rachel,” Cody said. “What are you doing?”
With a grunt, he pulled himself back onto the roof. One slip and Cody was a goner. Fortunately his gloved fingers had a solid grip this time and he hauled himself over the edge.
His body landed on the rooftop with a crashing thud. Cody lifted his head and looked around to see if there was any malicious light on his tail. There wasn’t. He picked himself up and ran full speed towards the door that led to the stairs. But he was barely halfway there when his worn down boots lost their grip on the snow. This time his hands couldn’t help him. Cody’s body flipped backwards. It was a clumsy, brutal somersault and when he crashed to the ground it was his head that took the brunt of the fall.
Cody lay on his back and stared up at the gates. Now he was the one that was floating – floating towards the three suns in the black sky. There was no noise, almost. But Cody could still hear one thing as the lights went out in his mind – it was the faint mechanical hum of a car in the distance.
8
Rachel barely had enough strength left to control the car.
The shield was fizzling out around her. It was hissing and spitting like an angry snake, almost as if it was crying out in distress.
Her mind, which should have been focused on controlling the car, was still thinking about her dad. She’d left him back there clinging onto the edge of the building. How could she have done that? She’d driven off and after everything he’d done for Rachel, what must he have thought of her?
Still, she’d done the right thing.
She hadn’t run off for her own sake. When she’d noticed that small cloud of white mist drifting towards her dad, she knew he was in trouble. Deep trouble. Rachel also knew that there was only one way to help him. The light would follow her if she took off in a hurry. All the light. If she hadn’t done it the mist would have planted another hallucination in her dad’s mind. And that would have been his last.
As long as they were chasing her, it would buy him time. Time to get back on the roof. Time to run downstairs and find the others.
Besides, she was no good to them. All those early morning training sessions, the long months of preparation – it had been for nothing in the end. Whatever power she had taken from the Exterminators, it was nothing compared to what they still had left over. She couldn’t compete with them, not in a million years.
She wasn’t strong enough.
The car skidded to the right.
Rachel felt herself losing control of the SUV. It felt like she was playing a video game with a faulty controller – a game in which the rules were quickly getting lost in the fog of her mind. Her reactions were sluggish. The battle with the Exterminators had taken everything out of her and even as the car raced through the darkness she could feel the drowsiness taking over her body.
Sleep. More than anything, she wanted to close her eyes and sleep.
But she fought through it. Rachel pulled the car to the left, skidding onto West Martin Street. It continued straight and then cut another left onto North Zarzamora Street. The car swerved back and forth. No matter how hard she fought, it was slipping away from her.
Must sleep.
Rachel decided to switch to manual even though she didn’t really know how to drive a car properly. She grabbed the wheel and jerked it, while reaching for the brake with her foot. Thank God she was tall for her age.
But manual wasn’t much better than her own unique form of automatic. Either way, she had to concentrate and she didn’t have it left in her.
The car was out of control.
Rachel slammed the brake down as best she could, pulling the wheel left and forcing the SUV off road.
It sped into the car park of a small hair salon.
As Rachel slammed the brakes hard, the SUV did a spinning dance across the icy car park. Rachel shrieked as one side of the vehicle lifted up off the ground, tipping over so that it came crashing down on the driver’s side. The SUV kept sliding across the car park and there was a crunching noise as it hit the front of the hair salon. An airbag exploded out of the steering wheel and almost smothered Rachel.
Everything went quiet after that.
Rachel was still conscious in the driver’s seat. Her body felt stiff and a little sore from the impact but apart from that she was fine. There was a strange smell in her nostrils – it was as if she could smell the burning heat of the metal that had been ground away by the surface of the road.
She started thinking about the car crashes that she’d seen in the movies. About how those cars always exploded not long after the crash.
Get up. Get out.
Rachel tried to sit up. A jolt of hot pain shot up and down her body but she ignored it and kept moving. She was lucky that her dad had drilled the importance of fastening her seatbelt into her at an early age. He’d played those crash test dummy safety videos to her where the dummies went flying through the windshield.
With that in mind, it could have been much worse. She didn’t feel like anything was broken but what did she know?
Rachel grabbed the handle of the passenger side door. It was the only way she was getting out of the car now that the driver’s side was flat to the ground. After a brief struggle with the metal handle, she pushed the door open and climbed out through the passenger side. Then she jumped down onto the snowy surface and immediately felt the cold wrap its claws around her throat.
She staggered off, putting some distance between herself and the SUV. It hadn’t exploded yet so maybe it wasn’t going to.
Rachel ran onto the middle of the road and glanced towards downtown. The city was drowning in a deep sea of smoke and noise and light. Whatever had chased her to the car park was nowhere to be seen now. From what she could tell, it looked like the Exterminators were destroying the city first, not to mention everything human that still lived and breathed there.
Rachel doubted they’d forget about her. She’d be next.
But what about her dad? Had they forgotten about him? Or had they gone back to find him on that rooftop ledge?
She would have to go back and find out. Even though she couldn’t beat the Exterminators, she wouldn’t leave the only family she had to suffer alone. She had to try. She had to do something. And her dad – why had she been so horrible to him before about the things he’d said to her on the roof that day? Turns out he was only saying what everyone else, including Rachel, had been too afraid to say.
She couldn’t win. And he’d been right.
Rachel walked forward and her legs turned to jelly. She dropped onto the road, landing on her knees. After a brief dizzy spell, she fell onto her chest and felt herself sinking into a deep sleep. She knew that it was dangerous in cold temperatures like these, but nonetheless it was such an inviting thought.
Stop. Go to sleep.
Black snow clung to her lips. It tasted cold and salty.
She lay there for a while, staring into space and waiting for sleep to come. Wondering if she was dying. Wondering what would happen to her dad and the others.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
She looked straight ahead and there was something on the road. It was moving. Coming closer.
Rachel lifted her head off the ground.
A large vehicle rolled to a stop about twenty feet away. A pair of bright, narrow headlights pointed at Rachel – it was a fierce glow that came towards her, like being caught in the path of two giant spotlights.
The school bus.
Rachel dropped her head back onto the black snow. She didn’t have the energy to run from Mackenzie or to fight him. But she didn’t have to look at him. She had that at least. Rachel kept her eyes closed, listening to the bus door hiss as it opened. Her ears followed the sound of footsteps crunching over the snow towards her. She kept her face buried in the snow. No matter what, Rachel wouldn’t give Mackenzie the satisfaction of seeing the defeat in her eyes.
The last thing she felt before blacking out was the sensation of being carried. It felt like falling.
Rachel opened her eyes.
The sound of distant thunder had awoken her.
The first thing she remembered was the school bus and it made her sit up straight. Where was she? She was in a sleeping bag but it wasn’t hers. Looking around, she saw a massive hall lit by hundreds of candles. Her mind scrambled to make sense of her surroundings.
She was in a church – a big one.
Rachel glanced towards the roof and realized she was lying under a dome-like structure, located at the head of the church. This was the altar and it was easily the prettiest altar she’d ever seen in her life. The walls were made up of a simple grayish-white stone. There was a lavish looking shrine to her left with a cluster of meticulously crafted angels all looking up at Jesus.
To her right was a huge archway that separated the altar from the rest of the church. Behind that was a long aisle that led to the back of the building – or the front for all Rachel knew – with a stack of wooden pews located on either side. There were more statues and a vast array of breathtaking stained glass windows down there. The woodwork and the stonework displays scattered throughout were equally as beautiful.
She heard hushed voices at the back.
Looking over that way, Rachel saw a group of about twenty children gathered around the last two rows of pews. Their heads were leaning close to one another, as if they were in the middle of a serious discussion. She saw some of their lips moving but the voices were muted and the words out of reach. The children were dressed in a variety of plain winter clothing – thick padded jackets, parkas, scarves and beanie hats – all of which looked several sizes too big for them.
Rachel blinked hard several times and her brow furrowed in concentration. Who were they? Had Mackenzie rounded up more innocent kids to hand over to the Exterminators?
She pressed a hand against her temple. It felt tender.
The children noticed that Rachel was sitting up straight on the altar. Their hushed meeting stopped and they shifted in their seats, looking over at her with wide-eyed, curious expressions. A few of the shorter kids got to their feet, as if to try and get a better view. Their breath was a fine mist as they stared at Rachel. They looked at one another. There were some muffled whispers and then one of the children – a lanky boy of about fourteen, stood up and hurried through a large door behind them.
None of the remaining kids spoke or tried to approach Rachel.
Rachel sat in silence, listening to a plethora of crashing, shaking and shattering noises from downtown. How long had she been sleeping anyway?
Her thoughts inevitably returned to her dad. Was he still alive? She couldn’t bear the thought that something bad had happened to him.
Panic spilled back into her thoughts. She should never have run off like that.
The door swung open at the back of the hall. The lanky boy stepped through the doorway and using his back to keep the door open, stepped aside as if someone else was coming up behind him.
A set of slow footsteps approached.
Rachel’s heart was racing. She sat up straight, fearing the worst.
But it wasn’t Mackenzie who walked into the church. It was an old lady that stepped through the open doorway, shuffling past the lanky boy without a word and moving slowly into the main hall.
There was a tray of food in her hands.
Rachel looked on, both curious and fearful. She couldn’t tell how old the woman was. She could never tell that sort of thing with old people because well, they all looked the same age to her – they looked old. Maybe the woman was about seventy. Not much older than that probably. She was a heavyset figure with dark wrinkled skin. Might have been Mexican or something like that. She walked towards Rachel slowly, wincing with every other step. A bright red coat, which was buttoned up tightly, was wrapped around her ample frame. She looked at Rachel and her eyes were kind, tucked in behind a pair of cat eye, thick-rimmed glasses. Her hair was white and curly, the sort of haircut that Rachel knew only as a ‘granny perm.’
The lanky boy helped the woman step onto the altar. The boy didn’t go with her though. He looked curious enough, but there was a hesitancy about him that suggested he was a little afraid to get too close to Rachel.
“Hello Rachel,” the old woman said, approaching with the tray in her hands. “My name is Anna. The children call me Grandma Anna.”
She offered the tray to Rachel. Rachel got up and took it off the old woman to save her having to bend down. She sat back down on the sleeping bag. There was a bowl of soggy looking fruit in the center of the tray and next to that, a tall glass of water and a plate of shortbread biscuits.
“We don’t have much to offer I’m afraid,” Grandma Anna said. “But it’ll do you good. Make you strong again.”
She encouraged Rachel with a smile.
“Eat,” she said. “It’s very important that you do.”
Rachel lifted up the bowl of fruit
and dipped the plastic spoon inside. Tinned peaches – what else? She took in a mouthful and then dropped the spoon back into the bowl. The familiar sweet sugary taste revived her. She picked up the spoon and ate some more, wiping a dribble of peach juice off her chin.
The old woman looked pleased.
“That’s good,” Grandma Anna said. “You’re quite alright with us my dear. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
The other children had quietly crept forward down the aisle. Now they were sitting in the pews nearest the altar, like eager worshippers who’d arrived in church early to grab the best seats.
“Where am I?” Rachel said.
“You’re in a safe place,” Grandma Anna said. “The safest place of all one might say. This is the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower. Have you ever been here before?”
Rachel shook her head. “Are we still in San Antonio?”
Grandma Anna nodded.
“Thank God this place was unspoiled,” she said, looking up at the statue of Jesus and the angels on the altar. “You know, I like to think it’s no coincidence that the few children left in this city can take shelter under this roof. Including you my dear. God isn’t done with us yet Rachel MacLeod. I truly believe that and with any luck, so will you.”
The children watched Rachel with riveted, unblinking expressions. With so many eyes on her, Rachel tried not to dribble any more fruit juice down the front of her mouth while she ate.
Grandma Anna pointed to the glass of water on the tray.
“Drink too,” she said. “I’m afraid we don’t have much time. You have to recover from this quickly Rachel and I believe, thanks to your gifts and youth, that you will. The city can’t bear this assault for much longer. We have to act.”
Rachel shook her head. “I’m so tired.”
“I’m not surprised you’re tired dear child,” Grandma Anna said. “Nobody has given more than you in this fight Rachel. None of us here can even begin to imagine what you’ve been going through these past few months. What it’s like to be you. To have what you have.”
Mega Post-Apocalyptic Double Bill Page 81