Good. I had time to catch my breath. I peeled back my mask, inhaled deep, and pushed myself to stand. Ouch. Whatever didn’t hurt or wasn’t numb was sore — even my eyes. I’d burnt through the suit’s gloves and boots, down to the tan padding, and the layer of silver mesh armor’s serrated edges pierced my knuckles and calves. Hobbling forward on aching ankle and knee joints, I doubted I could walk farther. Suppose I could? This place was a complex puzzle inside of a maze, and where would I go? Senator Mateo wanted me for my powers, but the crystals he wanted were on the West Coast. Unless…
“This is Tactician Anderson. ID number 124534113902. I am fourteen-point-five clicks northwest. ETA five minutes. Does anyone copy? Over.”
The woman’s hostility shook me. Was it a two-way display? Could she see me? Beneath the designer eyeglasses, her perfectly-shaped eyebrows pointed downward toward her nose in criticism. I didn’t want to answer. She was the most beautifully angry African-American woman I’d ever laid eyes on. Still, Tactician Anderson’s three-dimensional appearance and rushed vocal delivery weren’t the things that intimidated me about her. No, it was the information she continued rattling off and whether I could trust her. Anderson repeated herself, claiming she was two clicks closer. However long a click was. I responded, “Yeah. Yes. I’m here.”
“Who are you? You sound like you’re twelve, and this is supposed to be a secure channel. Over.”
Should I use a fake name? “I-it’s secure. I’m Lucy…Champion.”
I’d paused in using my father’s last name. Mom had taught me about taking a man’s last name, and it indicated protection. Never in my life had I felt so out of control[XW121], on my own, and unprotected. Yet, I was a Champion. Didn’t feel much like a real Champion or a Sandoval. Too late to pull it back now. I’d put it out there.
Anderson covered her shock by asking me to repeat myself and asked how old I was. I gave her my full birthdate. My birthplace? Told her that, too. Then, she wanted me to reveal my mother’s name. I said nothing. Her holographic eyes scanned my face. She knew my mother — not Elayna Guerrero[XW122] — Rhapsody Lowe. I didn’t press her for details though the tremble in her voice made me think she took it personally. “You’re alone,” she said.
“Far as I know. I’m not sure. Can you — ”
“No, I’m telling you. I’ve tried all the compound’s satellite and cellular channels, tracking, even the analogs, and you’re the only answer. No biometrics are on my scans but yours. Over.”
What’s the big deal? Nobody answered. I could’ve been one of a million things: bad Wi-Fi signal, spotty connection, destroyed tower…
“It’s just us, Lucy, and I’ve just arrived. I need you to come to me. Can you do it? Over.”
Was everyone dead? Anderson sounded that way. Silence. Her face had frozen beyond an occasional blink and facial movement. Finally, she spoke. “Your prototype suit gives off a traceable signal. I’ll walk you through the steps to shut it off.”
I followed her directions and did as she said. Without it, my parents may think I’d been killed, too, but the enemy’s ability to track me may make it true. I’d had basic training with Kendel, and Anderson didn’t seem at all impressed although I may have played the melt-the-door-off-the-hinges episode too cool. Plus, I didn’t know how to get through the compound to the entrance where Anderson had parked her transport. I’d have to sneak my way through.
Anderson directed me to do the opposite. “Get here fast. Kill anything in your path. Over.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A clear directive. Destroy. Murder. Stain my soul with blood. How many rosaries do I say, confessionals do I go to, and candles do I light for considering that? These people weren’t innocents. They were murderers. But maybe they were weekend killers, and during the weekdays, they had families, loved ones. Perhaps, they had no one. Did I care? The right answer for now was no, but was it wrong in the eyes of God? Would I spend eternity thinking about the lives I was about to take?
Anderson had walked me through the plan. Blast the dock walls, around the northwest perimeter, and to the front corridor. Then what? She didn’t say. Here was the kicker — keeping my kRad level down to keep the compound from becoming a nuclear disaster site.
Concussive blasts not fiery burns.
Right.
She and I needed help in the worst way. My parents were on the other side of the US. How fast could they get here without the wormhole? The crimson, rippled opening had closed a while ago, and the Forecaster was certainly dead from holding it open. This suicide mission was not one of a trillion ways I’d ever pictured myself dying.
Should God look down at me and see me erasing human lives with a flick of my wrists, what would He think? There’s a teenage superpowered soldier doing My work! Little girl murder dog on the loose! I wiggled my dirty, bleeding fingers and toes and cleared my throat a little. Crazy. The whole thing was nuts, and, according to Anderson, the only way to — what was it we were supposed to be doing once we found one another? She wouldn’t say. Hopefully, it involved lots of fleeing in the opposite direction.
I paced through the corridor which was clear of conscious hostiles. I didn’t have the stomach to eliminate them. Until I stepped too close to one of them and his fingers aggressively scraped at my naked toes. His flesh and muscle melted from his wrist down like hot butter dissolving on a stove. Consciously, I hadn’t tried to maim him. But something dark, nasty, and primal had taken over my mind.
What had I done?
I wanted to apologize. Didn’t he deserve an apology? Did superhumans have a code of ethics, a set of laws, a border or demarcation line between what they would and would not do? Maiming had to be high on that list, right in front of death. I’d crossed — something I couldn’t uncross — but, I didn’t hate it. Part of me died with the hand. That was wrong. No, no more maiming. Wait, but what if I had to destroy a hand to save my life? Ugh. I puffed out my chest, pushed it off, and forged ahead in the darkness. “What’s next?” I asked her.
She told me to pace one hundred steps forward and blow a hole in the bay door with force. Heat had less thrust. Had she accounted for that? She assured me she had and rattled off the math behind her figures. Okay, I didn’t understand it, but I got it. She had the figures to back it up. All I had to do now was to do it. Pretty simple. I stopped at ninety-eight steps, fired up my hands, and shoved a heat stream into the open blackness. The metal opening gave with a boom. Shards flew back in my direction, and a piece the size of a man’s fist struck my head. I pulled my mask back to clear the cobwebs and silence my ringing ears.
I must’ve blacked out for a minute. No amount of blinking or wishing wiped the haze away. My fingers wandered to the blazing gash in my forehead and stopped short. A steady blood stream flowed down my face. Popped my jaw, blinked my eyes…nothing helped. With a deep breath, I pressed my right palm against the wound. Oh God. I used to think nothing felt worse than chemo or chemo recovery which was true until just now. My painful moans echoed in my head. Was Anderson on line with me, or had the connection dropped? “Hello?”
“Why do you sound like that? Proceed on the route. You haven’t moved in minutes. Over.”
“Debris,” I managed to say. “Caught debris.”
She sighed. Yes, I admitted to her, I’d screwed up and shorted the distance prior to blowing up the opening. Everyone makes mistakes, I explained in words broken up by wincing, and perhaps she made approximate calculations. Sprinkled with several curse words, she rattled off the formulas she’d used and said her math was always, always perfect and that I should trust her to help save my life. Whatever. I didn’t have energy to argue or debate with a well-educated stranger. According to her, there was a voice-activated analgesic inside my suit, which I used. The medicine was powerful, quick acting, and it allowed me to think. Next, I had to get to the control hub or what she called the central corridor. From there, I’d head northeast down the main hallway to the entrance, access the biometric panel, and let
Anderson in.
My pathway was sparsely lit. I squinted my right eye, and the crusted blood made it difficult to reopen it. In my left eye, a strange thing happened. Although it was pitch-black, I saw everything outlined in white like an X-ray. My body was a skeleton, and so were the walking people in front of me. They had heavy Ordnance, and the random way they moved — they couldn’t see! I could walk past them without being noticed. My right side was compromised because of my still-healing eye. I didn’t feel safe,[XW123] and using my powers would give me away. They were prepared, trained to kill me.
I had to be ready to do the same.
Slow steps. I rolled my feet. The first guy passed by close enough to lean in and kiss me on the cheek. I paused and waited until he was too far gone to shoot me. Two more guarding the access to the central corridor. I ripped a piece of armor from the sleeve of my suit and tossed it behind me. The soldiers charged in search of the sound’s source. Once they passed me, I broke into as close to a full sprint as I could, placed my palm on the biometric panel, jumped through, and closed the door behind me. I used my powers to weld the metal shut.
I was in the central corridor, and now, I didn’t have far to go to meet Anderson. “Anderson,” I said, my voice spiking with excitement over my victory, “I’m in the central corridor.” She didn’t answer me. The Wi-Fi connection must be spotty again. “I said — ”
I circled around mid-sentence. Five skeletons trained heavy Ordnance on me. Unsure of what to do, I remained still. They shot me anyway.
I awoke, lying flat and fastened to a table by the wrists, waist, and ankles. Stun shots. They’d stripped me down to my clothes. The bodysuit meant what, comfort? I couldn’t have a little comfort and not basically be dressed for an exercise class before they murdered me? Except, they couldn’t murder me. Not before I did whatever they wanted me to do or Anderson rescued me first. Liam stuck the bend in my right arm with an input tube like the kind the doctors attached to my old Broviac catheter for chemo meds. The intravenous bag had opaque liquid in it clearly not for my benefit — not anesthesia or vitamin boosts. The wound above my right eye had been cleaned and treated. The dressing felt like a pie crust baked onto to my face.
“What’s that?” I croaked.
He told me that it was a concentrated adrenal accelerant to activate my powers, so, in a few minutes, they wouldn’t have to ask me to do anything. That stuff would make my body shoot out radiation like an out-of-control firecracker. My target was the largest, golden, football-shaped stone I’d ever seen. The thing had to be longer and wider than two of me set head to foot and weigh as much as two transports. Though the ceiling lights were bright enough to be halogen, the stone was dull and cloudy. My father, or someone, had supported the thing in a massive chamber.
Practically bouncing on his heels with excitement, Liam waved at it and said, “Largest chunk of heliodor on the planet, a provenance…makes sense he’d keep it close… it’s a Fountain of Youth — the proverbial seed of an immortality tree which you are going to plant.”
The stream of consciousness rambling had a point. The senator had sent up a huge smokescreen. This was the jewel, and not the ones in the mountains, he wanted me to activate. In the cabin, my mother had told me the powers one got from them were benign, but the longevity and invulnerability were not. With this on his side, Mateo could reshape the planet how he pleased and construct an invulnerable army to rule it.
“Over my dead body,” I mumbled.
Liam smiled. His teeth were perfect from flush pink gums to bleached white caps. “The accelerant will send your bodily systems into failure,” he said, tapping the bag with his fingers. “You will die.”
His attempt at being menacing made me laugh. Terminal cancer kind of made [XW124]one immune to death threats. I’ve contemplated dying and the transition of death to the Great Beyond so much that philosophies about it were starting to make sense. They always did from a certain perspective. I supposed admitting and accepting it was another deal.
Liam reached into the waistband of his black dress slacks and produced a silver handgun with an off-white handgrip. I’d seen these before in movies before the conversion to holograms took place.
“Ordnance gives a clean shot. No gunpowder on the hands and minimal kickback on kill setting.” He brandished the weapon over my face so that I could get a good look at its workmanship. Liam backed away and unloaded a shot. A terrible jolt ripped through and exited my left thigh. My adrenaline spiked, and my powers surged beyond my control. I fought it as best I could. The second I thought of closing my eye, the irresistible urge to release energy overtook my mind and raised my lids. A bright flood of yellow energy erupted from my eyes, burning the dressing on my face, destroyed the ceiling directly overhead, tunneled through layers of earth, and blasted into the open sky. Anything in its way was likely to be vaporized.
Liam tilted me downward, and the streams sliced through electric wiring and steel until I faced the crystal. Then, the yellowish-red fire struck the crystal’s center. I screamed until my chest and throat ached. The stench of livewires and burning metal hung in the air like a rain cloud too stubborn to open its arms. No one was coming to help me, and even if they could, at this point, I might have been too explosive to stop. Darting my eyes to avoid the crystal would’ve worked, but Liam had thought of that. He’d rolled me so close that the thing’s dimensions were too wide and long for me not to look at it. So far, the center of the jewel where I’d struck it glowed like the sun — its heat warmed my naked feet.
He’d donned protective shielding over his face and slid close to the provenance. Liam turned his head to me, and I knew there was a perfect grin meant for me under the blast shielding. Heliodor shards, splinters, and dust spurted from one of the two holes I’d created in the stone and landed between slabs of ceiling, charred rebar, and cooked aluminum tubing. The moment he’d been waiting for. Liam knelt outside my sight range and reached into the debris piles, instantly jerking back. Aside from the accelerant burning my insides worse than the aftermath of a chemo treatment, the room temperature was like that of a warm, summer day to me. For him, it had to be like roasting inside of a nuclear reactor. His gloves caught fire as he hurriedly gathered all the fragments he could find and dropped them into a bag. Wasn’t much, but he’d have a dozen superhumans to start with. No way was I going to die for this.
At that time, I felt a rhythmic chopping overhead. A transport with rotating blades, too slow to have a fusion engine, flew low enough for me to notice movement inside the dark cabin. He’d brought reinforcements. Had I gone with my first thought, I’d have shot it out of the sky. First thing was first, and that was to protect the provenance heliodor until my reinforcements arrived. Whatever the men in the transport had prepared for me, I thought I could handle it with ease. So far, that had been the case.
Rather than stop my abilities altogether, I needed them to defend myself, so I focused on allowing them to flow throughout my body. The table, its restraints, the needle in my arm, and the remainder of my bodysuit and clothes burned away. Being naked was the least of my concerns. The light I gave off and its brilliance was blinding, even to me — I couldn’t stand the sight of myself. So, I looked ahead and stepped through the molten pools I’d created. Liam batted away the flames on his body and backed away from me on his hands and feet. How did I appear to him? He shot his pistol at me, and the bullets evaporated before striking me. Right after I sent a direct volley in his chest was when I heard a sound of rushing liquid.
I didn’t have time to dodge. Ice-cold white foam poured down on me. The temperature drop consumed all the energy I was giving off and reduced it to sizzling steam with the thick, strong scent of chemicals. While my heart rapidly beat, and I still felt the jitters from the adrenaline spike, I had no powers to show for it. The wound in my left thigh throbbed with my heartbeat, but the coldness seemed to help keep me from bleeding out. Any hope of gathering more crystal shards had been drowned in whatever they’d used t
o suppress my abilities, but he had enough. The chopping grew more distant. The transport was searching for a place to land.
I wiped my stinging eyes clear of the stuff, which was rapidly solidifying, and all I saw was a haze of whiteness. Liam was in front of me and reloading his weapon. I heard it click, snap, and shift into place. I deeply inhaled. The explosion of his next two shots coincided with pain shooting through my ribs beneath my breasts. The rounds punctured my chest, and it was impossible to breathe.
A few more seconds and I’d be with all the relatives my mother said I’d never get a chance to meet, including her mother, Ruby, whom she’d almost named me after. Thank God she hadn’t. And my grandfather, George, who I reminded her of. Mom wanted to save me from choosing this life, saving the world, but it seems that, in the end, I didn’t have a choice to begin with. Maybe I never had. I’d never put myself intentionally in harm’s way. I just wanted a chance to meet my father.
Loss. Kendel was right. I’d be losing so much in death.
I braced myself for the last shot and heard it but experienced no additional pain. The blast sounded different, electric, not gunpowder. I blinked and, while nothing was clear with regular vision, I could see the yellow X-ray like I had before. From the shape of the skeleton and the small set of bones in its stomach, it was a pregnant woman. No, two pregnant women, side by side[XW125]. Three. Four. They were multiplying, or I was hallucinating. Altogether, there were nine, all armed and on my side. One of them put a finger to her teeth and closed her mouth. I shuddered from the cold and the lack of oxygen. The foam helped more than it hurt, but it wasn’t permanent. Pink streaks oozed from my chest and leg. I’d bleed out soon.
The Nuclear Winter Page 22