Sucking his teeth, he motioned for her to come, and the reply she gave him frustrated him more. “From our intel, I thought her suit had high enough tech to have filtration systems. Will it affect the transfer?”
“Do you mind a delay if it does?” She handed him a yellow bedpan. “Sir, with all due respect, I believe my job description is ‘Claire Allen, Chief of Staff to State Representative Ramsey Mateo’ not ‘Nurse Practitioner-slash-Phlebotomist.’ Have you ever catheterized someone? I haven’t. You’re welcome to try.”
He placed his hand over hers on the bedpan and forcefully suggested she accommodate me. Following a brief exchange, she stood at my midsection, unfastened my suit, and lowered it down over my hips. I still couldn’t pull my own clothes down to go, so she unstrapped my right hand. Maneuvering stuff into the right place required some effort before I could go. Having someone watch me urinate wasn’t a new level of embarrassing. I’d passed that space long ago.
“Lucy, you’re going to have to listen and quickly follow my directions. Can you do that?”
Claire’s tone had changed from screaming-cat annoying to a softer, commanding tone. Her ice-blue eyes focused on me. She expected a response.
“Yeah.”
Her stare grew colder. I’d violated some unwritten rule. It was at that point I realized she was communicating to me through her thoughts, and I should do the same. Mateo was off in the distance but within earshot. “Pee. I’m going to drop the bedpan to get his attention,”[XW84] she said to me. “Grab my white beryl necklace when I bend down and toss it as far as you can away from me. Hit Mateo with fire. Unstrap yourself and we’ll improv the rest. Got it?”
I didn’t understand. The chick who wanted me dead was on my side? There was no time to do anything but agree. Do what she said and die, or do nothing, stay put, and die. I nodded and readied myself to move.
Claire did as she said. The sound of sloshing pee and the clattering bedpan got Mateo’s attention. He cursed at her and called her all sorts of names. When she knelt within my reach, I grabbed her necklace, yanked hard until it came off, and whipped it into the distance. Power roared through my system. I conjured fire and shot a long stream which hit Mateo in the chest. He crumbled to the floor, smoldering, screaming, and frantically patting his skin.
I unstrapped myself and yanked the blood transfer needle from my arm. Once I rearranged my clothes, I sidestepped the yellow puddle at my feet and Claire put her back to me. “No!” she yelled.
Taking her cues, I put my forearm at her neck and did my best to drag her to the elevator. The exchange, clumsy and, I imagined, fake looking, didn’t matter. Mateo writhed on the floor, yelping like an injured puppy, while Liam lay motionless on the transfer table. I wasn’t checking where I was pulling her, but she purposefully flailed her legs in the correct direction. “Turn me around.” When I did it, she placed her hand on the biometric board and gave a code word to override its lockdown command.
Slowly, the elevator door opened. Once we were inside it, she dropped the façade. “Sorry for the act. I had to retain cover as long as possible,” she said. “Torch the place.”
She wasn’t commanding me to burn an empty room but to extinguish two lives on purpose. This was the moment: where I had to decide to preserve life or take it on purpose. Easy to think that when faced with a life-or-death situation that you would kill or be killed.
The application itself was much different.
Her voice tensed. “We don’t have time, Lucy. Do it.”
They had a sample of my blood. Who knew whether Mateo could create more super beings without the moral challenge I had in front of me? He was contemplating power or no power, not life or death or right or wrong. There was no blinking with his decisions. I wasn’t a person. I was a factor in a dangerous equation he was trying to multiply.
Claire impatiently mashed the button. “Lucy! When they come after you, and they will, they will not hesitate or show mercy. You’ll — ”
“All right! I get it, lady.”
Wouldn’t a superhuman population in a wasteland be a worse consequence, and a more righteous result, than two measly murders?
I closed my eyes and attempted to steady my shaking fingers. “C’mon,” I encouraged myself. The tingling in my wrist rose to my fingertips and spurted out in flaming streams. The fire caught onto Square One’s surroundings and wildly spread. They’d have time to escape, right? At least that was what I planned to tell myself.
When the doors closed [XW85]and the elevator began to move, Claire unzipped her dress and squirmed her way out of it. Underneath, she wore a white sheath covering her thighs, chest, and back. With a few coordinated hand movements, the suit crawled like an ant swarm all over the rest of her body, all except her face. Coolest outfit I’d ever seen.
She caught me eyeing it. “Our newest technology. I’ll get you one. Good job back there.”
Nothing about what I’d done should be congratulated.
“You fly, right?”
Fly? The look on my face drew a look of disappointment. Why? I should be able to fly because Mom could?
“I need a two-person extraction,” she said to no one in particular. Claire patted the elevator panels and examined the ceiling. “Twitchy comms… We might have to do this the hard way.”
Considering all that had gone on, I was afraid to ask about the hard way, so I didn’t.
“No time to test them. I hadn’t been down here… Nothing above ground is made of this alloy.” She smiled and used her fingers to rearrange her hair. “No worries, Lucy. We’ve got this.”
“Who are you talking to?” I asked.
The smile continued. This must be bad.
“Call me Claire. I kept my cover so long — I’m used to the name. I kind of like it.”
“Who are you?”
Claire drew an imaginary circle in the air above her head. “Burn a hole. This size. Puncture through to the other side. Keep it shallow — don’t damage the elevator. Use your eyes.”
I cleared my throat and focused the energy inside of me. Soon, thin orange lasers came out of my eyes. From my viewpoint, it was trippy. My eyesight was the same; however, it [XW86]required intense concentration. The slightest wiggle would send my targeting off course. I held my breath until the mission was done and a chunk of jagged metal thudded at our feet.
Claire measured the distance and jumped through the hole. The shift in weight shook the compartment. She lowered her arm through the hole and opened her hand. I was supposed to allow her to help me. This woman said I was a liability, and she thought I didn’t deserve to live. One thing was clear to me — until Mom and Nat were in the clear — I was my own best chance at survival.
There were rails around the interior of the elevator, and if was a professional basketball player, I could have leapt up to the hole and pulled myself through alone. Since I wasn’t, I let her help me. The strength in her arm was outstanding, like that of a professional weightlifter. Claire curled me as if I were a hand weight. I gained my footing at the top of the elevator. A mile of darkness stretched above us. The pulleys and winches raised us into the uncertainty. Eventually, it would end, and we’d be crushed. I guessed that wasn’t the plan. “Why are we up here?”
“Extraction team can’t see us,” she yelled over the constant whirring and clicking.
I raised my hand like I was in class and lit it up. “Now, they can.”
“At this distance? You’d have to explode. We need to get closer fast. I need you to fly.”
I was puzzled. “What’s the rush? We’ll get there when we get there.”
“You don’t smell the smoke?”
Come to think of it, I hadn’t until she mentioned it. All I could detect was the sharp scent of electricity on the wires. I inhaled deep and caught the scent of burning. In retrospect, setting Square One on fire didn’t appear to be the best idea,[XW87] considering Claire’s insistence that the elevator may shut down at any time. She had me risk both our lives ov
er drops of my blood? I should’ve gone back and destroyed the collection bag. Since I didn’t, this mile-long tunnel could become our coffin. My anxiety hit a new level.
She pulled close to me and said, “What are you waiting for? Fly us out of here!”
I blended curse words together and turned my back to her. “What don’t you get? Does it look like I can fly? I’ll say out loud: I can’t fly! I can’t fly. I. Can’t. Fly.”
Claire placed a hand on my shaking shoulders. “You can. The torque of your flames. Concentrate it into thrust from your feet and lift at your chest. And, you can fly.”
Her statement brought tears to my eyes. School. Social life. Overall health. Even in super-heroism, I was a failure. Fine, I could fly. In theory. Not so much. I didn’t want to try and fail at that, too. Here, failure meant death. “There has to be another way!”
The elevator braked. On instinct, we held our arms out to the side to steady ourselves. Beneath us, the bottom level was cooking. The smoke trickling through the open spaces was worsening. Above us somewhere was ground level. Climbing it was an option until I remembered how terrible I was at the endurance challenges at school, and that was before the cancer struck. Claire’s strength wouldn’t be enough to get us to the surface with me clinging to her back. I fought back sobs. Of all the ways I could’ve died in the last two weeks, this was it — suffocated or burned alive atop an elevator?
Claire handed me one of two small syringes full of green fluid from a pocket in her suit beneath her left armpit. “Last resort. Stick this in your jugular.”
My eyes bulged. I wanted to make sure I understood her correctly — I should inject this into my neck willingly?
She demonstrated. For a second, her eyes flashed the color of the fluid. Then, she hissed through her gritted teeth and leapt into the darkness. I listened for her landing and heard nothing. Her body did not plummet back to the elevator, so she must’ve made it to the surface. The stuff she injected herself with was some kind of an energy boost. What could I do if I took it?
I’d soon find out. The elevator shook beneath my feet. I had every confidence in two things. One, it was not going to drop, and two, either Liam or Mateo had climbed up to reach us.
Against my better judgment, I looked down. Sure enough, Liam had torn a hole through the elevator floor and pulled himself through it. With his strength, he’d be next to me in seconds. Setting aside my hatred of all things related to injections, I plunged the needle into my neck.
The reaction was instant and terrible. Pain seared every single body part, and I screamed. My powers kicked into overdrive. I burst into flame and, unlike when it usually happened, I experienced every degree of heat. The next thing I knew, I focused my eyes downward and saw the elevator in the distance. I was flying, but there was no controlling what was happening.
As I reached the surface, I wanted to steer myself through the hole Claire had created but couldn’t. Everything was on instinctual autopilot.
I burned through the shaft, the building’s levels, and ended up landing on the roof. Thankfully, I flamed out. Unfortunately, I’d burned through every stitch of clothing I had. Whoever found me would be getting quite a peep show. I rested my head on the rough, ridged roof material and tried to keep awake. Not like a completely naked Panamanian girl could defend herself from an attacker. There had to be injuries involved in that display and staying conscious was important.
At least I’d peed.
Two different footstep sets, one heavy and the other heavier, landed on the roof. I managed an “ugh” before a blanket covered my shoulders and was fastened above my breasts and at my navel. In the cold November night, I had the feeling that the blanket was not to keep me warm but to keep me from spontaneously combusting. The hot flutter in my stomach let me know heating up again was a definite possibility, and I had no idea what I had injected myself with. The drug’s cost was heavy. I was starving, thirsty, in pain, and I couldn’t cool off. Tired of fighting, I let my legs go limp and gave in to the agony.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The extraction was a blur. I remembered things happening at night and being nude under a fire-dampening blanket for much of it. People moved quickly, and there was the stench of rotten eggs. A teleporter. Nothing else explained how I was simmering on a roof one minute and strapped into the seat of a loud, flying transport the next. Claire wasn’t around. Nobody paid me much attention once the immediate threat of combustion passed. I was freezing, and the blanket wasn’t doing anything to warm me, so I unhooked it and let it fall at my feet.
Seconds after I’d been sitting there, legs and arms crossed, a skinny Chinese man with black buzzed hair took notice. “You’re shivering,” he shouted with a noticeable accent. He lifted the blanket and swaddled me in it. “Doesn’t do much for warmth, but it’s fireproof. Ironic, I know.”
The rough material was like sandpaper on my skin, and activating my abilities would’ve warmed me up, but i[XW88]gniting a fire in an enclosed place was dangerous. “Protective for me or for you?”
“Both,” he chuckled. “Nobody wants another explosion.”
That explosion was me.
Details regarding how everything went down were a little fuzzy other than my body going supernova inside a secret complex. Frostbite was the least of my concern. “Where’s Claire?”
“Recovering. Same as you.”
Good. She made it out, too, but I doubted she was in her birthday suit like I was. My limbs were gelatin, and the only thing keeping me upright was the safety harness strapped around my shoulders and waist.
The transport’s rhythmic rumble lulled me to sleep while my co-traveler rambled on and on about my fantastic display of radioactive heat and the amount of damage it’d caused.
I blinked my eyes and found myself lying on a twin mattress almost as comfortable as my own. Come to think of it, more comfortable. This mattress had a heating element, and the gray blanket on top of me was the perfect blend of fibers. Thankful it wasn’t the color white, I buried my face into the soft pillow and went back to sleep. Whatever the world’s challenges were, they could wait another couple of hours or so.
Eventually, after resting, I returned to feeling like a regular human being. That term had been relative to me since my diagnosis — regular, normal, stable, ordinary, average. Here, I meant I was tired of being tired and couldn’t sleep anymore without some certainty as to what was going on. I’d lost any sense of time passing. Had it been days? Weeks? The wall across from where I lay was bare. So was the one at my head and the one at my back.
The corner, however, was a different story.
There was a man, a handsome black man, sitting in the corner and nodding off. He wore gray clothes, and a bodysuit showed beneath it at his wrists and neck. I’d seen holovision stars less beautiful than him. His skin was a medium dark shade as if it had been blended and refined in a mixing bowl. There was a strength in him beyond his build. I felt it — like lightning weighing down the air and crackling each time he breathed. It surrounded him like a cloud no one else but me could see. He had power, and I respected it.
Slowly, I brought myself to a sitting position and used the wall to support my back. Clearing my throat did not wake him. A pretend coughing fit didn’t work, either. Finally, I loudly said, “Excuse me,” and it roused him enough for his eyes to open. When he looked at me, my heart stopped. His eyes… Had I seen him before? My mind said no, but he sparked something deep in my soul. I didn’t want to believe the truth about him that gnawed at me, so I waited.
“Hi.”
His throaty baritone shouldn’t have startled me by its rich quality, but it did. “Hi.”
He shifted his sitting position to face me. “I’m sure you have a lot of questions, so let me answer the first one. No, I did not dress you.”
A sense of humor like mine. Interesting. More, please. “Who did?”
He rested his ankle on his knee and pulled it toward him. After a deep exhale, he told me the answer
I’d been waiting to hear. “Your mother. She’s better.”
A piece of good news — a life preserver to keep me afloat through the fluid concept of what I had considered reality. “She’s here? She’s safe?”
“A long time ago, I guess you could call him a mentor told me that safe means you have more power than whoever threatens you.”
“Old Guy? Peters?”
His eyes lit up. “Ransom, actually. You knew him?”
“I did. He died saving my life — our lives.”
His mentor had fully lived, and he was grateful for the sacrifice he’d paid to save us. It was in the way he bowed his head and didn’t talk for a moment after stating “Mine, too.” They had shared a complicated history that Mom didn’t tell me about, but she dropped enough clues for me to use my imagination. Old Guy Peters had not been a hold-your-hand kind of teacher but a push-you-off-the-cliff-and-you’d-better-figure-it-out-on-the-way-down guy. For whatever guidance he provided, anyone who encountered him was grateful for it in the end.
“And am I safe? Are we?”
He presented me with basic facts, and they spelled out simple truths I had to accept. I had power. Radioactive, science-defying, wonderful, dangerous, fantastic, terribly awful abilities. And I couldn’t control them. In my estimation, that made me dangerous and a deterrent for an attack. Like an unpinned grenade a millisecond from detonating or a nuclear bomb; yes, that’s how he described it, an atomic bomb inches from the ground. In my defense, these abilities didn’t come with a manual or a safety switch. Whether I mastered them or not, people would die because of me. Liam and Mateo didn’t know all I was capable of any more than I did.
Being the Nuclear Winter was particularly useful in that case.
He described the scene I’d left behind at the military compound, called it “a firestorm.” I used to love rainstorms. The texture of warm, humid rain wetting my clothes and sticking to my body—it was perfect. What he described were dozens of fire pillars and dirty soot clouds thick enough to block the moon. The transports had difficulty taking off in it, he explained, and they flew blind for miles until the horizon cleared. That sounded like a disaster film.
The Nuclear Winter Page 16