Live Wire (Blue-Eyed Bomb #1)

by Amber Lynn Natusch

  Nothing about it looked normal.

  “Fuck me,” I uttered, staring out at the veil of chaos before us. The one we were flying right into. “We need to change our course or something…make an emergency landing!”

  “I can’t,” the pilot said, fumbling with his control panel. “The steering mechanism is gone.”

  “Can you do it manually? Override it somehow?” Nico shouted, shooting out of his seat to join Alek. TS was not far behind. I, however, sat glued to my seat, gripping the armrest while singing at the top of my lungs. Fear was not an emotion that generally let the darkness rise inside me, but I hoped the calming effect music had on my anger would help soothe my growing terror. If we remained on our course, we would surely crash.

  And none of us, PC or otherwise, would survive that.

  “You need to bring us down slowly,” Alek directed, his voice steady but holding an edge of fear.

  “I’m trying,” the captain shouted.

  “Move,” Nico barked, shoving him out of his seat. “Tell me what to do.”

  The captain directed my brother, who seemed more able to force the equipment into submission, but even he was struggling. Alek’s hands were soon covering Nico’s, the two of them working together to try and guide the plane toward the ground in a controlled manner. At first it seemed as if the plan was working. We were descending at a rapid but controlled pace. But then I saw that curtain of black begin to swirl. Its mesmerizing movement practically called to me, pulling me up out of my seat.

  What peace it bred within me.

  How it pacified my powers.

  “We can’t escape it,” I whispered. TS spun to look at me, seeing something in my expression that clearly disturbed him.

  “Get this plane on the ground now!” he shouted to my brothers, who still struggled with the manual controls.

  “We’re fucking trying,” Nico ground out.

  “Phira,” TS called to me, fighting to stand in the cockpit door and block my view, but the plane’s erratic movements made that nearly impossible. I could still spot the storm of doom through the windshield.

  “Do you feel that, Alek?” I asked, making my way toward the front of the jet. “Can you feel the magic?”

  “I feel like I’m trying to control a 50-ton jackhammer right now, Phira.”

  “We can’t escape it,” I repeated. “There's no escaping it…”

  Just as those words left my mouth, we hit a pocket of quiet in the air, having presumably flown low enough to avoid the storm for a moment. Nico, seeing his window of opportunity, dropped the nose of the plane and flew it straight down, ignoring the captain’s orders to stop.

  “We need to get it on the ground,” he said, his determination admirable. “Almost there…”

  “You have to pull the nose up,” the captain shouted, grabbing my brother’s hands. Surprisingly Nico submitted, letting him take over. For the moment, we were out of the storm's reach.

  But I knew that wouldn’t last.

  Whatever thrall I had been under abated, and the fear of death crept back in. For so long I’d thought that was what I wanted—what would be easier for everyone close to me. Facing that inevitability, however, made me reconsider that wish.

  “Everyone in their seats. Now!” the captain ordered. Within seconds, we were all sitting and buckled in tight.

  The air was rough again, as if the storm had redirected its path to follow us down. We shook violently in our seats, and I gripped the armrest like it was my lifeline. Perhaps it was. Then I felt a hand atop mine, holding me as tightly as I held the leather-wrapped metal in the palm of my hand.

  “Sing for me, Phira,” TS said as softly as he could and still be heard.

  I closed my eyes and did just that. I sang a song that I remembered from my brief childhood; an Irish dirge that was as beautiful as it was haunting. I sang it with a fervor that I had never known. And as I hit the highest note the tune boasted, our jet crashed into the ground.

  ***

  I felt the flames all around me, licking at my flesh.

  Badly wounded but able to move, I hobbled through the wreckage, trying to find the others.

  “Alek! Nico! TS!” I screamed, unable to see far beyond me. Between the smoke and the punishing wind from the storm, the visibility was abysmal.

  “Phira!” a male shouted, his call almost overpowered by the violent gusts that threatened to knock me off my unsteady feet. “Phira!”

  “I’m here!” I cried. “Over here!”

  Moments later, a dark silhouette emerged from the smoke and dust swirling around me. TS grabbed me by my shoulders and bent down, his face close to mine. He looked me over as best he could in the scant light.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, coughing on the thick smoke surrounding us. “Where are the boys?”

  “I cannot locate them…”

  I tried to swallow past the lump in my throat and failed.

  “We have to, TS. We have to find them now.”

  “I’ve looked through the wreckage. I only found one body.”

  “The captain?”

  He nodded.

  “We have to get out of here, Phira. We need to find shelter and call for help. We will find them after that.”

  He grabbed my hand and started to run toward what appeared to be a building in the distance. It felt impossible to make any headway against the tornado-like winds assailing us. For every step I took forward, I was pulled back another two.

  An especially strong gust of wind yanked me away from TS and my hand from his grip.

  “TS!” I shouted, scrambling along the ground toward him. But it was no use. I watched as he tried to get to me, but the erratic nature of the wind seemed to only push him further away. Panicked now, I tried to stand and gain some traction against the blunt force gales the storm threw my way while I watched my chaperone slowly disappear into the darkness, swallowed up whole. “NO!” I screamed, pushing myself harder.

  “Phira!” he roared, suddenly launching himself back into my field of vision. His eyes blazed an eerie icy blue that cut through the tunnel of grey that consumed me. He reached his hand for me, his fingertips only inches from my own. “Take my hand!”

  I extended my arm toward him, awaiting our contact, but it never came. Instead, I felt a cold, wispy tendril of air wrap around my waist and yank me backward. Soon after I found myself engulfed in the twister, my body swirling inside of it, colliding with the debris it had collected. In that moment, I knew I would die. My brothers were missing. TS was gone. I was the only one left to save myself, and I had no fucking clue how to do that. Even if I had known how to unleash my power, it wasn't going to remedy the situation I found myself in.

  I couldn’t nuke a tornado.

  So I closed my eyes and let the lack of oxygen take me. I wasn’t one for prayer, not really believing in a higher power, but I said one anyway. I prayed that TS and my brothers were all right. I prayed that they would find my body and take me home. And I prayed that my parents would forgive them for what had happened to me. I didn't bother praying that they would one day forgive me. Their forgiveness hardly mattered if I was dead.

  And soon, I would be.

  Chapter 4

  The light of the afterlife shone down on me so brightly that I could barely stand the intensity of it. I covered my eyes with my forearm, trying to block it out, but my effort was in vain. It could not be denied.

  My peripheral vision was impaired by something I could not recognize, giving me tunnel vision. All I could see was the light. I wondered if I was supposed to do something—say something—or if someone was going to come guide me to my final destination. So I lay on the ground and waited.

  A moment or two passed before I realized that I could still feel the ground beneath me. Can the dead feel? I wondered. It seemed a valid question. I uncovered my eyes, shutting them to keep out the blinding light, and I moved my hands along the ground, searching for something familiar. My fin
gers wrapped around something strong and cylindrical sticking straight out of the ground. I turned my head to see what it was and found my hand encircling a stalk of corn.

  “What the hell?” I mumbled to myself.

  Before I could ponder things much further, the ground I was pressed partially into started to rumble. It was subtle at first, just a slight thrum, but it grew to a reverberation, and then a quaking. My teeth rattled as I tried to push myself up, but my body protested and I collapsed back onto the dirt beneath me. A sound now accompanied the shaking—a sickening, motorized sound.

  This was not what I expected the afterlife to be like.

  With adrenaline pumping through me, my basic instincts begging me to get up, I pushed through the agonizing pain and forced myself to stand.

  “Being dead shouldn’t hurt so much,” I groused, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. I wanted to run but had no idea which direction to go. And a broken ankle sure is hard to run on.

  With little time to waste, I settled on a plan and hobbled off to my right, thinking I was headed away from the god-awful sound. Every step was agony, the tears running down my face a testament to that. The stalks were oppressive and hard to navigate. It was impossible to know if my circumstances were improving or not.

  All the while, the sound kept coming.

  Finally, I thought I could see a break in the towering forest of grain, and I poured on as much speed as my body would allow. I could feel the breeze behind me, a swirling of air that niggled at the back of my mind.

  Run, was the only message I heard loud and clear—so I did.

  Screaming, I staggered into a clearing in the field. It looked like a corn stalk graveyard. I collapsed to the ground for the second time, writhing in pain. And the noise grew louder still.

  Just when I thought I was about to pass out, a massive piece of machinery cut through what was left of the cornfield near me and came to a screeching halt. I saw a silhouette jump down from the metal monstrosity and rush toward me, his form blocking out for a split second what I had determined to be the sun.

  “Shit,” I said, panting. “I’m not dead.”

  “Are you trying to get dead?” he asked, the bass of his voice surprisingly loud. “Because lying in a cornfield during harvest time is a damn fine way of accomplishing that.”

  “Just to be clear,” I started, grimacing in pain. “I’m really not dead, right?”

  His head cocked to the side, his dark outline now bent at a strange angle.

  “No. You look pretty alive to me.”

  “And this isn’t heaven?”

  “No. It’s Iowa.”

  Iowa…

  The word echoed off the walls of my head for a moment until he spoke again, distracting me.

  “You’re hurt,” he pointed out, bending down beside me. “Let me see that.” He took my right ankle into his hand and I gasped at the pressure. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He looked up at me with earnest brown eyes peeking out from under his shaggy black hair.

  “It’s okay,” I said, wiping the sweat of pain from my brow.

  “I know it’s not really my business, but seeing as how you’re lying injured in the middle of my property, I’d kinda like to know how it is you came to be here.”

  I opened my mouth to answer him, then closed it.

  How did I get there?

  “I don’t know,” I whispered, feeling sheepish.

  His warm eyes narrowed while he assessed the rest of me.

  “These bruises,” he said, pointing to my arms and face. “Any idea how those got there?” His voice now held a tone—an edge—that I couldn’t decipher, but something about it told me he wasn’t happy. I wondered what I’d done to make him angry.

  “No,” I said, leaning back away from him.

  He pulled his hand back, his gaze softening.

  “My name’s Gabe, and I have no intention of hurting you. You don’t have to worry about that. I promise,” he said. “It’s just—”

  He cut himself without finishing.

  “It’s just what?” I asked softly.

  “It’s just that it looks an awful lot like someone beat you up and dumped you here, knowing that I’d be coming through with the combine real soon.”

  It took a second for my hazy mind to clear enough for his words to register.

  “Oh,” was all I managed to get out.

  “Yeah. ‘Oh’ is right.”

  “You think someone tried to kill me?”

  “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck,” he said, as though that was supposed to explain something.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Now I get you back to the house and take you to the hospital.” Before I could reply, he scooped me up in his arms and started off across the field. “Got any idea how long you’ve been lying out there?” he asked, looking down me.

  “No.”

  “I bet whoever did this dumped you there right around the time the storm hit. Nobody would have noticed. Only a crazy person would have gone out in that.” Storm… “I’ll have to call Sheriff Houston too. He’ll need to know about this.” He paused for a moment, stopping in the middle of the mowed-down field to stare at me. “You don’t look familiar to me. You from around here?”

  “From Iowa?” I asked. His brow furrowed.

  “From Huskers Grove?”

  “I…I don’t—”

  “What’s your name?” he pressed, his dark eyes looking right into mine.

  I heard his question. I understood what he was asking me. But try as hard as I might, I could not answer.

  “I don’t know.”

  He exhaled hard.

  “Well shit.”

  ***

  He took the rickety wooden porch steps two at a time, quickly arriving on the weathered platform that stretched along both the front and side of the home. It was quaint, if in need of a little TLC. He threw the screen door open and walked into a small living area directly attached to the kitchen in the back. He placed me down gently in an old wingback chair and disappeared into another room. I could hear him rummaging around while muttering to himself. Seconds later he appeared with some bandages and a brown bottle.

  “We need to stop some of this bleeding before we leave,” he explained, ripping open the tiny paper packages of sterile gauze. He pressed one to my right forearm, where I had a rather large gash on the underside. Somehow I hadn't noticed. Maybe the throbbing in my ankle had superseded that pain. “Hold that for me, would ya?” I put my hand over the gauze and held it in place while he taped it down. He looked at my neck, his eyes dropping slowly down to my chest. I leaned back in my chair. “There’s a cut…on your sternum. Right there,” he said, pointing just above my right breast. “Can I check it out? Is that okay?”

  I nodded.

  A sharp, stinging pain shot through me as he put some god-awful liquid on it. I craned my neck down to watch it bubble.

  “That hurts,” I said softly.

  “Yeah. Peroxide always does, but it’s cheap and it does the trick. They’ll do a better job at the hospital, but I feel better patching you up a bit before we go. It's going to take a while to get there and it’s a small place. No clue how long we might have to wait once we get checked in.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “I’m going to slip your boot off. Your ankle is so swollen that I’m afraid your circulation is going to get cut off soon.” Without waiting for my reply, he unlaced my combat boot and dropped it to the floor. Then he made a sharp whistling sound between his teeth. “Might be broken. Might just be a real bad sprain,” he observed, turning it over in his hands. “Only one way to find out. You’re gonna need an x-ray.”

  He stood up and turned toward the entrance to the adjoining room.

  “Mom! I have to head to the hospital—and don't worry. It's not for me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “How far away is it?”

  “Forty minutes or so. Not too long. I�
�d give you something for the pain, but it might be best to wait until we get there. I don’t want to mess with mixing medications.”

  “I’m not sure about this,” I said, hesitating. The words had left my mouth before I even realized it. And I had no idea why.

  He sighed heavily, running his hand through his jet-black hair.

  “Listen, I understand that you’re spooked and you don’t want to tell me what happened to you. Maybe you’re worried someone will find out you were in the hospital. I get it. Really. But one way or another, you need to have that ankle examined and I sure as hell am not the person to do it.”

  I fidgeted with the hem of my tattered shirt, softly humming an unfamiliar tune. Something made me anxious. Something I didn’t understand. All I knew was I didn’t want to leave.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you,” I started, pausing to collect my thoughts. “It’s that I can’t. I don’t have the answers you want, but I sure as hell wish I did. I don’t know my name. I don’t know how I ended up here or in the state I’m in.” I felt the tears stinging the backs of my eyes as I spoke, and I fought hard to keep them at bay—but I failed. “I woke up in the middle of your cornfield thinking I was dead. Then the ground started shaking and I heard that gargantuan machine of death and tried to find a way out of its path.” I was nearly shouting at this point, the reality of my situation now fully settling in. “I’m hurt. I'm scared. And I don’t know what in the hell is going on. The last thing I want to do right now is go have a bunch of strangers poke around at me and ask questions that they won’t believe my answers to.”

  His gaze softened and he crouched down beside me, taking my hand in his.

  “I’m sorry. I do believe you. You’ve got a nasty bump on the side of your head here. You probably have temporary amnesia or something, but that's all the more reason to go to the hospital. You could have a concussion or a brain bleed or God knows what else. I can’t have you dying on my living room chair while we argue about this. I’ve already got enough to try and explain to the sheriff.”