Hysteria

by Gordon, Christopher

  “Why?” McKenzie says.

  Her hands reach around his throat. “I can’t stop myself,”

  McKenzie feels his skin burn with the most intense flush. Crush like. On a scale of zero being the ugly wicked witch of the west and ten being beauty queen pageant winner. This feels like eleven.

  “I feel it too,” he says and raises himself onto his elbows. Breathes out into the palm of his hand. Sniffs. He’s Smelled worse. Shrugs. Pulls her close and kisses her lips. Soft. Then hard.

  Madison pulls away gasping. Wipes her lips.

  “It wasn’t that bad was it?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Don’t be,” McKenzie says. “My mistake.”

  “No,” she says.

  Not a mistake? Then she feels something between them too?

  “I am sorry,” she says again. And digs her fingers into his throat. “I must kill you.”

  Even before he can digest the seriousness in her words, he feels his knees draw up beneath Madison.

  “I’m sorry too,” he says.

  The look of confusion in her eyes evaporates like a swirling storm cloud burning away under the sun of a new day. Her fist swings put to his face. Driving hard across his cheekbone.

  McKenzie feels her fist crack his nose as his feet flick out. His legs push up and out. Making deep sudden impact with her chest. A kick that he somehow knows will break every bone in her body. A kick to move a planet out of orbit. Hurtling into the sun.

  On the end of McKenzie’s kick, Madison flies up towards the ceiling. Up through the shattered glass and out into the dawn sky.

  McKenzie fights the feeling nausea rising up his throat. In his heart, he knows no one can survive that. He knows he’s just killed her. He retches on his knees.

  Chapter Thirty Two: Smashing The Glass Ceiling

  Madison feels herself tumble up through the glass ceiling and out into the dawn sky. Instantly her hands shoot out and grab at the metal support structure of the glass cube. She swings her legs above her head and twists like a cat. Her feet hit the sidewalk as she Lands in a crouch some hundred feet or further down Fifth Avenue.

  She looks at the gashes and tears in her hands, arms and legs. The bones in her feet seem cracked and splintered as they stick up through the skin. She stands and steps forward. Hobbling like a circus clown walking on stilts. Every step feels like she is stamping on needles.

  Her metallic green spider friends seem to know their business. Scurrying over and under her skin. Their tiny pinchers pulling bone fragments and ruptured tissue together. Knitting a framework for optimal use.

  She fights back a sudden wave of nausea and as if in response, she feels her tiny friends busy at work inside her stomach. Her stomach churns with the evaporating adrenalin in her system. The first signs of shock encroach on her nervous system. She imagines her metallic friends hit by a tsunami of stomach fluid. Clinging on to each other with their tiny pinchers as her body unleashes a great storm upon them. An avenging storm.

  Somehow, she knows they don’t panic. All weather drones tirelessly working all the hours to keep her alive. But why?

  Each step seems less painful. Until walking seems always natural. Within a minute, she can maintain a steady jog and within five minutes, she enters a full sprint.

  She tries to ask herself where she is running but no answer comes to mind. Soon she sees the Empire State building. She slows. The place where it all began. Or at least the only place in her memories that she can call her own. Everything else before seems so hazy. Like a dream. Like someone else’s memories.

  A sharp blast of air hits her. Like a rhinoceros declaring war in her ears.

  She turns to sea truck almost upon her.

  Without trying, she feels herself twist, bend, and throw herself backwards onto the sidewalk.

  The traffic seems to appear from nowhere. She tells herself this is a normal day for everyone else. For normal people. People hurting to achieve their hopes and dreams. People whose nightmares vanish as they wake. Not people whose nightmares become more real in the waking hours.

  She tries to tell herself Dawn brings a new day and the same routines. Traffic. Heavy and noisy. A cop car rolls by.

  She can’t stop herself turning away sharply and looking down. Looking anywhere but keeping her eyes shielded.

  They seem not to notice.

  She walks on.

  It occurs to her she was running from someone. This source code. This enemy of hers. What did he say his name was? McKenzie? She looks over her shoulder.

  Another cop car approaches. Or is it the same one?

  It slows. Stops. A window winds down. Are they calling her?

  Should she stay? Or run?

  A door opens. A cop steps out.

  She runs. Hard and fast pushing her way into the crowds crossing the street. Safety in numbers. She slows.

  Behind her, she hears a siren cut through the noise of the traffic.

  But it’s ahead of her she senses danger. Someone in the crowd? She scans their faces. No one seems to look at her twice.

  But there’s someone ahead. She recognizes him. The face imprinted in her mind. Put there by Tyler. What is the name that goes with the face? Damien? That’s it.

  Damien walks towards her.

  She could kill him. She knows she is more powerful than him. At least stronger. Faster. Harder. But every cell in her body echoes one word. RUN.

  She feels a hand on her shoulder.

  Instinctively she drops her shoulder and twists. Grabs at the hands and bends the fingers back beyond the point of natural flexibility. Beyond the point of endurance. Into the red zone of pain and further still. All the way until she feels them snap under grip. All in the smallest fraction of a second.

  The cop whose hand she broke screams out and falls to his knees. She looks behind as the cop draws his weapon out of its holster.

  She runs. Hard. Fast. Not looking behind. Knowing only, her metallic friends are speeding through her blood steam. Latching onto oxygen and feeding her heart and organs and muscles. Giving her the power. She sprints into the middle of the fifth avenue traffic flow. Speeding towards her from uptown.

  Gunshots.

  Has she been hit? She can’t tell. But her shoulder stings as if torn clean off.

  A yellow cab races towards her. Its fender is inches from her knees. She closes her eyes and feels herself jump.

  As her knees lift up over the windshield passing beneath her she feels the yellow cab lights brushing her toes.

  Her feet reach down and hammer against the top of the cab’s trunk. And she pushes off again. Leaping into the street. Hitting the tarmac in a sprint. Ready for the next car.

  A bus approaches. The driver seems too shocked to even consider hitting the brakes as she runs directly at him.

  The driver turns the wheel.

  She leaps. Springing forward with both arms out. Catches the passengers’ stare up at her as her feet spring off the windshield. Snapping the windshield wiper with her thrusting feet as she flips over the front of the bus and hits the roof.

  The brakes squeal. The rear of the Bus jerks wildly to the right.

  Madison loses her grips. Her momentum flings her off the roof into the path of the traffic.

  She feels her head graze the tarmac as she looks up at the speeding fire truck.

  Chapter Thirty Three: Fifth Avenue Mayhem

  McKenzie walks down Fifth Avenue.

  Madison seems long gone. Just him and the occasional yellow cab to enjoy the sunrise.

  He feels his shoulder ache as if dislocated. In the shop windows, he sees his reflection glowing with blue lightning at the point his broken collarbone pierces his skin.

  His eyes seem red with tears as he grits his teeth. And yet these metallic demons inside his body seem busy fixing him. Thousands of the creatures scurrying across his shoulders. Pulling the collarbone back into its normal position. Locking the two halves together and knitting them in place.r />
  He can feel them in his brain. Releasing the same endorphins, he feels after a base jump. The pain lessens.

  Dawning on his consciousness after five minutes is how quickly the traffic becomes heavy.

  Unusually noisy. Horns blasting like gunfire ahead of him. Brakes slamming. Fenders bending. A fire hydrant bursts skywards with a jet of water like a great waterfall across Fifth Avenue. Cars seem to skid across the lanes. Some kind of pile up ahead. But what’s causing it?

  The he sees her. Madison running against the traffic. Leaping cars, bikes, trucks, and buses. Running towards him. But why? After trying so hard to get away from him. Unless she’s not running towards him but away from someone else?

  She’s running towards him across the roof of a bus. She leaps. Hits the tarmac, runs, and leaps again.

  A fire truck skids and its ladder whips out to full stretch and spins around. Someone is running up the rungs of the ladder towards the top of the elevated end. Madison.

  Two police helicopters rise up from behind the empire state building and swoop down over the fire truck. The doors of the helicopters slide back to reveal cops in heavy armor and masks. S.W.A.T. teams aiming their weapons at Madison. Seems they’re taking no chances after seeing what Madison is capable of.

  Each copter lowers two ropes. It seems they’re going to attempt to abseil down onto the revolving fire truck ladder.

  McKenzie needs to make a decision now. Get the girl so he can bait Del Amitri. Or walk away and try to pick up the pieces of his life.

  The fire truck neither stops nor slows. Something seems to interfere with the brakes. The ladder continues to elevate. Sparks of green lightning like fingers crawling down the ladder into the fire truck cabin. As if the fire crew can’t seem to gain control of it. Two fire crew start to climb as the ladder extends some two hundred feet at a forty five degree angle. And it seems Madison can’t control her own source code.

  If McKenzie can’t stop her now. If he can’t get to her and hand her over to Damien before the whole of the city’s police force reach her then what chance has he of baiting Del Amitri? None. And as the fire truck hurtles down Fifth Avenue, she’s slipping further and further out of Mackenzie’s reach.

  McKenzie finds himself walking quicker. Within a few seconds, his pace is almost a jog. Quicker still within a second or two until he finds himself running. As if some power within him compels him to be close to Madison. The source code compulsively attracted to the anti-code. Opposites attracting and repelling at the same time. Pulled towards her and certain death.

  He runs faster with every step. His speed matching and then exceeding the speeding fire truck. He catches the trail gate and leaps onto the back k of the fire truck. He climbs.

  The ladder veers wildly on its boom from left to right. The basket platform on the elevated end of the ladder swings back across swiping traffic lights and smashing shop windows as two fire fighters climb higher towards Madison.

  “Stay away, please,” she shouts back at them.

  They climb closer.

  “You’ll be safe with us, kid,” the lead fire fighter says and reaches up to her.

  “Help me please,” she shouts.

  “Take my hand,” the fire fighter shouts.

  She reaches out as green lightning spirals down her arms. She snatches her hands away.

  “I’m your only chance,” the fire fighter says. “We got to get off this thing or we’ll both die. You got to trust me.”

  He takes another step up the next rung and hugs Madison to his chest.

  She bursts into tears and hugs the fire fighter.

  He tries to pull her down the ladder and the green lightning snakes off her arms and across her fingers. Leaping across to the fire fighter’s throat. Wrapping around his neck and squeezing tight. Swaying before his eyes like a mesmerized cobra.

  “Run,” she says and her words seem to break the spell upon the cobra of lightning. It snaps at the fire fighter’s eyes and he screams. The fire fighter falls backwards and tumbles down the ladder. He crashes into his colleague and knocks them both off the fire truck and onto the sidewalk.

  The ladder comes swinging around d towards McKenzie.

  With no room to duck down he throws himself at the boom and grabs at the side struts of the ladder.

  It flings him against a Diner window. Smashing him backwards through the glass.

  Inside the diner, a customer giving a waitress a hard time over an overdue refill turns towards McKenzie.

  The waitress seems mesmerized as she pours coffee into her customer’s lap.

  McKenzie’s face slides across the breakfast bar knocking coffee cups into the laps of customers.

  “Refill for you, sir?” McKenzie shouts.

  A S.W.A.T. officer glides down on his rope.

  McKenzie feels the boom jerking him out of the shop. He grabs a coffee pot by the handle as he clings to the boom.

  The boom whips him out of the shop. It slams McKenzie into the S.WA.T guy who loses his grip on the rope and crashes into the sidewalk below.

  Another S.W.A.T officer descends onto McKenzie. His boots kicking McKenzie in the back. One hand on McKenzie’s shoulder he tries to drag McKenzie off the boom.

  McKenzie throws the coffee pot at the S.WA.T guy and splashes him with the scalding hot liquid.

  The S.WA.T guy loses his grip on the rope and falls back onto the fire truck.

  McKenzie pulls himself onto the ladder and climbs towards Madison.

  She runs to the top of the ladder and climbs onto the platform. “Stay away,” she shouts.

  He climbs after her. Reaches the platform and hauls himself up and lets himself fall into the platform bucket.

  Madison backs away.

  “Madison, I’m not going to hurt you,” McKenzie says.

  “Who is Madison?” she says and swings her legs over the side of the platform.

  McKenzie realizes why she ran all the way up the fire truck boom to this point.

  “I can help you be free of Hysteria,” he says and lunges across the platform at her.

  Madison throws herself off the platform.

  McKenzie can’t let the chance of catching Del Amitri slip through his fingers. HE throws himself over the edge of the platform and dives after her. One hand grabs her ankle as his other hand snatches at the edge of the platform.

  “Let me die,” Madison screams.

  “Not until you help me find your father,” he shouts.

  Madison dangles beneath the fire truck’s platform. Boom. She looks up. “Who?”

  “Your father killed my parents,” he says. “And you’re going to help me find him.”

  She seems confused. “I don’t have a father,” she says. “Do I?”

  McKenzie’s grip on her leg begins to weaken

  “You need to take my hand,” he says. “On three I’m going to let go of your ankle and you need to reach up and grab my hand.”

  “You’ll help me remember who I am?”

  He nods. “Together we can find a way out of this,” he says.

  She reaches up and grabs his wrist.

  He lets go of her ankle and wraps his fingers tight around her wrist. He hauls her up to the edge of the platform. Grateful for all those sessions building up his wiry frame for the strength to base jump. But secretly knowing he could never normally lift Madison the way he just did. His body is no longer his body. Something beyond strange is happening to him.

  The platform swings violently left to right. Colliding with the faces of buildings. Smashing windows. The platform bounces off a skyscraper and jerks aside.

  Madison falls against McKenzie and knocks him to the floor. Her lips brush his. For a moment, he feels an electric shock zip across his lips.

  She smiles. “You can let me go now.”

  A large dark shadow engulfs them from above.

  McKenzie rolls Madison off him.

  “Smooth operator,” she says. “Treat all your girls like that?”

>   “Look,” he shouts and points up.

  A hail of bullets rains down on the platform. Two ropes dangle down form a SWAT helicopter. Maybe fifty feet above. Two S.W.A.T. glide down.

  “Grab a rope,” McKenzie shouts. “Quick tie it tot eh platform.”

  The SWAT team plummets towards the platform. Thirty feet below them.

  McKenzie ties one rope end to the platform.

  The platform jerks to the left and pulls the helicopter to one side. Forcing the S.W.A.T team to descend at a forty five degree angle.

  Madison ties the end of one rope to the platform.

  The platform swings to the right and the rope jerks away from Madison. She throws herself after it and finds herself dangling from the abseil rope, swinging out of the platform and across the street.

  The S.W.A.T team is ten feet above her.

  The fire truck bursts through a set of red traffic lights causing a pile up. It tears down Fifth Avenue. Seems nothing can stop it.

  The S.W.A.T. team dangling on the rope above Madison kicks out at her. She swings her body towards the set of red lights and hooks the rope around it. Swings herself off the end of the rope. Twists through the air.

  The helicopter veers towards the lights. Falters in its flight path. Stutters and collapses. Plummeting to the sidewalk.

  The platform swings around and Madison lands in the platform.

  The helicopter explodes on impact and a cloud of fire hurls the rotor blades through the air. Ricocheting off the sides of buildings. Slicing windows, treetops, shop awnings and everything that lays in its path as it chases the fire truck down Fifth Avenue.

  Pedestrians in the path of the rotor blades throw themselves into the traffic. The rotor blades slice a yellow cab in half and bounce up towards the platform.

  “Jump,” McKenzie shouts and grabs Madison. He throws them both off the platform towards another pair of abseil ropes from the second SWAT chopper.

  The rotor blades slice the fire truck platform clean off the boom.

  McKenzie and Madison scramble up the abseil ropes towards the SWAT chopper.

  The rotor blades balance up at the second SWAT helicopter towards McKenzie and Madison dangling off the ropes.