by Alexa Dare
“If we get to the children, we can make this stop.” A man dressed in an over-filled camo T-shirt with I Love Hunting scrawled in yellow across the bulge of his belly gripped a rifle.
“The shifts in nature may be too great for them to fix.” Nora angled into a fight-ready stance.
The crowd hemmed her in.
Fear coated like scorched coffee in her mouth. “But we have a chance.” These fanatics intended to use her or kill her. Maybe both when they learned of the death of their leader at her hands.
“Those young’uns caused this,” said a bearded man wielding a hunting knife and stepping forward.
“Greed for power brought this about,” Nora said.
A heat spike in the forest off to the right warned the group. They herded her, with prods of gun barrels, to move from the surge of heat.
Tree trunks smoked and their wood split with loud pops to release flames to sweep over the copse of trees.
“Not natural,” the knife waving man said.
A ponytailed woman tugged her tight blond hair even more tightly over her scalp. “We have to put a stop to this.”
“Nowhere to go,” another spoke up from the back.
One lamented, “Ain’t no place safe”
Nora’s grasp as to where her son went was far beyond a normal mother’s instinct. “My son’s headed away from here. Did anyone see him?”
“Nope.” A man wearing a camouflaged cap grunted.
“He’s one of them,” a woman clutching a rifle asked, “isn’t he?”
“I heard he makes people sick.” Another older fellow twisted the end of a long beard into a spiral.
“Disease and plagues shall spread.” Coarse, straight waist-length gray hair whipped around a petite militia woman’s wrinkled face as she stretched her arms wide.
“Fire and flood shall destroy those that dwell upon the earth.” Ponytail joined in the volley of voices.
“That’s not right,” Mister I Love Hunting said. “Never again by flood.”
“Fire shall scourge the evil,” the bulky woman shouted. “The ground shall quake, and we will cringe in fear. Wind shall rip away all sins, while the rains shall fall from the heavens to purify all the land.”
“I have to stop my son before there’s a worse disaster. Let me pass.” Nora held out her hands. She’d tossed aside her gloves when she brought Brody back to the land of the living. “Get out of my way.”
The group edged back but refused to scatter.
“Yates said we was to find you,” someone called out.
“You found me,” Nora said. “Now move.”
A rifle barrel poked her upper chest.
Nora gripped the metal, jammed with gun oil stink and gunpowder odor, and pressed the tip into her flesh. “Go ahead. Shoot me. Because that’s what it’s going to take to keep me from finding my son.”
The bearded man holding the rifle slid his gaze aside and lowered the gun.
“Why were you told to find me?” she asked.
“He said you would lead us to the other side.” The gray-haired woman motioned toward the ominous black sky.
Nora hiked her eyebrows.
“To the far side of chaos.” The scrawny woman, with long strings of gray hair lashing about her head, spoke about the oddness as if sharing a recipe at a quilting circle.
Icy rain sliced the over-heated area. The burning trees sizzled. In seconds, slush covered the ground. The cold chill of the sleet soaked Nora’s khakis and sunk deep into Nora’s bones. A tight band crimped Nora’s scalp and sent a lemony tartness over her tongue to stress the unreal quality of the out-of-control elements and the woman’s answer.
The group’s chatter shot out like the boom of gunshots.
“Can’t go into the tunnels because of the quakes.”
“Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run.”
“The Nora lady’s right. We gotta stop those kids in their tracks.”
“To set these strange disasters right, we need them.”
“Freaks of nature.”
“That makes me one as well.” Nora faced them as if she might stop their hearts with a glare.
Most of their gazes cut away.
“We capture them,” she said, “and we hold the key to harnessing the elements for our gain.”
“You didn’t hold on to them before,” said the haggard old woman.
“We let her go, and she’s gone. She’ll not come back.”
The group members hunched against the heavy rain yet hunkered around her. None came within Nora’s reach, and most held weapons at the ready should she make a sudden move.
“All our electric power is out,” a bearded man said, “but it looks like they’ve got lights across the way and in the valley.”
“Where’s Doc Halverson?” Nora asked. “He can explain how we became this way. We were altered and changed. They did this to us mothers and our babies, without our knowing.”
“Not natural,” said Ponytail.
“Against nature.” A heavy-set man shared body odor with the flap of his arms.
“We are what they made us.” Nora backed as far as possible from the fumes. “This was not our fault, natural or not.”
“Fault don’t make no never mind.” The beard twisting man worried the tail end of his long, bushy facial hair.
“Someone’s coming,” I Love Hunting called out. “As far as I’m concerned, if they ain’t carrying a side of beef or a ham hock, they can keep on trekking.”
A figure in a hoody sweatshirt, head lowered, hiked from the area she sensed her son had gone.
Her newfound sense of knowing her son’s location shared that Vincent was much farther away and moving the other way. Toward the others.
“We don’t have time to waste,” Yates’ second in command stepped through the thorny brush.
“Roderick, we thought you’d perished,” Love Hunting slapped the slimmer man’s shoulder.
Nora fisted her hands and widened her stance. “The last I saw of you, you were shooting into the trees and running away with your tail tucked.”
“You rounded her up,” Roderick said. “Good job. Where’s Yates’ remains? We should, at least, give him a decent burial.”
“She killed Yates,” a woman shrieked.
Nora shoved drenched tresses from her eyes and faced the accusing gazes. Anger twisted the group’s faces into ugly masks. Lifting her arms, she readied to fight, but a hit rammed the back of her head. Jarring sharp pain engulfed her skull, and she dropped to her knees. A boot jabbed her ribs and knocked her to the ground. Hurt speared through her lower chest. A second kick banged into her shoulder.
Nora rolled away from the vicious boots and shoes. The kickers moved in closer. She grabbed the first two wrists that came into view.
Two bodies dropped.
The thrill of stopping people’s hearts in a mere brush of skin-to-skin flushed warm in her cheeks. Nora crawled over the bodies, shoved off the corpses, and got to her feet. She snarled. “You claim that I’m your only hope, and yet you attack me.”
“You killed Yates,” said Love Hunting, “and now Bobby Joe and Chuck just fell dead.”
“You attacked me. What did you honestly expect from a freak?”
Flaming coin-sized pieces of hail, stinking of sulfur, fell from the orange glow of the clouds. The group rushed beneath the branches of a giant red oak as the burning orbs drummed against the upper branches and sizzled leaves.
“The upheaval of the elements will continue,” Nora yelled. “And spread, unless we bring in those kids. The children and I are linked. I can help you find them.”
“You murdered our leader,” Beard Twister yelled. “He was a great man.”
“If I did, where’s the body?” Readying to fight, Nora held out her hands. “If Yates is dead, the corpse didn’t get up and walk away.”
“She’s right.” Ponytail glanced about. “There’s no body.”
“I saw Yates fall after she touched him.” Roderick
glared.
Of course, Yates had been dead when he hit the ground, then her son dazed her somehow, so that she’d lost time. Perhaps Vincent had been able to drag Yates' body away. No mystery to fathom. Just facts to digest.
After years of being his only parent and support, her only child betrayed her.
“Yates probably went after his kid. Yates told us that entire nations will drop to their knees if he desired them to.”
“He wants our country to regain its rightful place in the world.” Love Hunting hugged his belly bulk. “The feds must be dealt with first to show them we own the power.”
At the back of Nora’s skull, warm wetness pouring from her scalp wound mixed with the cold drench of rain.
The hail stopped, and a shower slapped at then through angling gusts.
“You killed our men,” yelled the old woman.
“A whole lot more of us,” Nora said, “will die if we don’t get our hands on those children.”
“You know where they’re headed?” Roderick asked.
“Yes,” Nora said. After all that happened in the last seventy-two hours, why did such an awareness surprise them?
“How could you know?” The ponytailed woman looked out from small, piggish eyes.
Pain ricocheted through her head as if her skull was about to rip apart. No control collar meant the usual pain after using her power returned with a vengeance. Coppery tinge drilling her inner cheeks, she gripped her head. Her knees banged against the ground.
“Is she having some kind of fit?” someone asked.
Hands reached toward her.
“Don’t touch me.” Nora shrugged the grabs away.
A roar of wind bellowed.
“Tornado is headed this way,” Roderick yelled over the boom of the wind. “Those with gloves, lift her up. Don’t touch her skin.”
Nora turned from the grasping, gloved hands and sucked in ash-filled breaths. Teeth clenched, she clutched her temples. As long as I and those like me lived, we will be hunted and used as weapons. To stop the ruin, the lives of the Children of the Elements, her son’s as well, would have to end.
Chapter 4
Dead in the muddy water, running out of air, and trapped in a leaky vehicle underwater. Par for the course for Brody’s rapid, never-ending descent into horror.
A mulish ache filled his chest.
His hands shook as he pressed three tiny nub-buttons on the bottom of a small screen attached to the dash.
With flickers of white blinks, the system activated. Within seconds, he sorted through the Am-Sub’s menus on the mini screen raised out of the dash control panel. A deeper level of menus, not offered before the reboot of the systems, appeared as he searched for the steps to restart the vehicle and get this sunken sardine can out of there.
A couple of hours before midnight, the few readouts on the dash provided dim lights where the vehicle lodged deep below the Holston River surface. The state of the art vehicle, if his efforts failed, might serve as their underwater tomb.
“More lights please. I don’t like the dark.” Darcy Lynn, from farther back in the stuffy cabin, said. “Make her stop.”
“Hannah,” Abe, with his eyes closed, said, “whatever are you doing to the kid now, stop.”
“I’m not touching her. I’m keeping the books we found dry.” A crinkle of paper stressed her words.
“Not Hannah. Her.” The little girl’s voice rose to a whiny shrill. “Miss Nora. She’s on her way.”
Hannah gasped. “Brody, she’s right. I sense the Nora lady too.”
“She’s coming all right.” Abe’s simple whisper held a heap of sinister. “And not only Nora.”
“What now?” Warning belches stuffing his throat, and the hurt in Brody’s chest kicked up a notch.
“Vincent can’t help being so mean.” Said Darcy Lynn. “Oh, oh. Junior’s close, but far away. He’s as still as can be though.”
“You can all sense where they are?” A grasp of the contrast between their talents and his so-called enhanced state sledged him over the head.
“If that Nora woman or her son finds us, they’ll kill us or use us until we’re all dried up,” Hannah said.
Darcy Lynn sent a tiny waft of a breeze through the stuffy cabin. “The water’s raining in worse. Let’s get away.”
“First, we’ve got to pick up Junior,” said Hannah.
“You couldn’t sense one another’s presence before.” Brody found a bank of parallel menus three levels down. He jabbed a nub.
The blue backup lights, though dim, glowed to life.
“Yay.” Darcy Lynn clapped.
“Could the collars have caused the changes, caused things to go bad?” Abe’s closed eyes looked like skeletal orbs in the faint glow.
“Possibly.” Making sense of all this was like finding meaning in his brother’s death. A ten-pound weight enclosed his heart and squeezed.
“The water was cold, now it’s getting hot. Ouch,” Darcy Lynn yelped.
“Sorry.” Abe, eyes closed, turned his face aside.
“Let’s move toward the front.” Hannah asked, “What did the manual say?”
“There’s a way to equalize the pressure, but I don’t like it. If we apply the sealant paste, the gasket would reseal, but there has to be a balance of pressure.”
“Where’s the sealant stuff stored?” asked Hannah.
“Sealant’s in the lower rear-facing quadrant.” Brody slipped two menus deeper in the Am-Sub’s computer system. Once he reached the correct level, he paged across options. His fingers refused to move fast enough.
“Huh?” said Darcy Lynn.
“Under the right seat at the back of the bus.” Hannah sighed. “Right, Brody?”
“Correct. Sorry. I was quoting the manual.” Brody shrugged.
“Amazing how you could absorb all that stuff,” Hannah said. “What if being enhanced isn’t so bad after all?”
“What’s enhanced mean?” Darcy Lynn scooted close beside Brody.
“I think like you were given your wind play,” Brody said, “but they did something to us when we were older.”
“Your brother was scary,” said Darcy Lynn.
“I’ll get the gunk you need.” Steam rose from the water leaking down the rear window. “Abe, it’s a wonder you didn’t boil us alive.”
“Not on purpose.” Abe swiped his brow.
“How about steamed rice instead of boiled?” asked Brody.
Hannah snorted. “Dweeb.”
“Hannah, you should find some hot and cold packs under the seat in front of you.” This way-out-there plan had to work. Brody asked, “Can you freeze them and bring them to Abe?”
“You guys are all the same. Do this. Do that.” Hannah stomped and slammed cabinet doors.
“She’s kind of cute when she gets all worked up.” Brody laughed and aimed his thumb over his shoulder.
“If you’re into mad and pouty.” Abe grunted.
“Sh-uuuu-t up.” Sharp shivers shook the girl’s lower jaw. “B-b-both of you.”
“Abe, there’s two small tanks under the dash. One tank is red and the other’s green,” Brody drew on his odd know-how taken from the info he derived from the foreign-language depicted manuals. “Not that the color matters when you can’t see them. Work them free of their holding brackets and pass them to me, one at a time.”
“You sound like a human to-do list.” Abe fiddled with the under-the-dash area.
“Or a real-life how-to manual.” Hannah returned to the front. She held what looked like three family-sized toothpaste tubes. “Here’s the sealant.”
“I carried the freezy things.” Darcy Lynn grinned an eerie, blue-tinged smile.
“Great.” Brody knee-walked back from the screen.
“I’ll freeze them, okay. What else? Because I’m just Hop-to-It Hannah. Why not make a list for me while you are at it?”
The space around the thirteen-year-old girl standing behind the driver’s seat grew cold. Hints of
flower-shampoo chill wafted around the inside of the vehicle . She gripped the freeze packs and hugged them to her upper belly. “If either of you dare call me the Ice Princess, I’ll toss these at your heads.”
“More like the Ice Maid.” Brody smiled.
“He means M-A-I-D, as in cleaning the bathroom, not short for M-A-I-D-E-N.” Abe reached farther beneath the control panel.
“You two are so on my list,” said Hannah.
“What list is that?” Brody eyed the dashboard readouts.
“My you are in-deep-water-if-you-don’t-get-us-out-of-here list,” said Hannah. “We have the sealant. Now what?”
“If you can cool Abe down, he might gain more control so he can help us out.” Brody forced visual blips of buffet sugared donut holes from his mind. “After that, we’re going to have to address the breach.”
“There’s no sandy beach down here.” Darcy Lynn edged close as if seeking comfort in Brody’s nearness.
Staring at the readouts, he inhaled in short sips. “We’ve got minimal oxygen flow from the tanks. Should we allow the Am-Sub’s system computer to do its job, all the oxygen will need to be flushed from the cabin so that the system can reset, then adjust the pressure.”
“Oxygen like the green tank Miss Nora made me use?” Darcy Lynn stomped.
Hannah ground out a sigh. “I’ll explain later.”
“Everyone says that. Later never comes.” The little girl groaned. “Whatever is going to happen, is bad, isn’t it?”
Brody pivoted on his knee. “You know how you feel when you cough so hard you can’t catch a breath? For a few minutes, we can’t suck in air, then oxygen will flood the cabin from the tanks, really fast.”
Hannah placed the cold packs against both sides of Abe’s neck. Abe yelped and his upper lids stretched upward.
“Man, that’s gotta hurt.” Sympathy shivers prickled the nape of Brody’s neck.
“You said you wanted to cool him down.” Hannah screwed her mouth to one side. “So we either drown, get boiled to death, or smother.”
“The air flush only lasts for a few seconds, and we’ve got an oxygen tank.”
“You can’t just use the glue stuff?” Abe’s thin, higher-pitched voice shook along with the shivers racing through his arms. “We could all push against the window.”