by Peter Telep
The despers applaud loudly.
Their leader, or high priest, is way taller than me, with a Phantom of the Opera face burned terribly on one side. No eye. No ear. Despite that, he’s got over a dozen piercings and wears a homemade crown featuring sirks linked together by pieces of heavy wire.
He raises his voice even louder: “Tonight, we will lead our distinguished guests to freedom!”
The despers cheer.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“It means that while we wait for our appointed day, yours has come. And it’s going to be beautiful.”
As he’s talking to me, the guy next to him leans in and licks my neck.
Aw, gross...
“Brothers and sisters, are we ready?”
“YES!”
“The First Ones will never control us! The withering is our salvation!”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The older despers force us onto the fiery altar.
A single metal beam supports the burning globe, and beneath it lie piles of skulls and bones that I assume belong to their other “distinguished guests.”
With gooseflesh spreading across my back, I jump into my persona and project myself back to the museum’s entrance.
I rush outside.
The shooting’s stopped. Everyone’s gone.
But their bikes are still here.
And wait, there’s Julie’s persona standing near a desper lying across the stairs. “Where are they?” she asks.
Just then… distant screams. I pull back into my body—
To discover Brave and Mama Grren charging into the basement—
Along with thirty personas... the rumms!
The despers holler and shriek as the grren release their personas and advance on the crowd.
Skinny bodies are torn to pieces and fly through the air.
Gunfire booms and echoes as the older despers search for targets. At the same time, personas rush them, and in one group, I spot Meeka and Steffanie.
I dive to the floor and start crawling toward Julie, who’s already on her hands and knees.
We meet up at the pile of bones, with the searing heat just above us.
Louder gunfire booms from the stairwell door.
It’s Tommy, rifle at his shoulder.
His aim is ridiculous. The older despers jerk and collapse.
He spots us. Waves us over. And we’re on our feet.
I’ve never run so fast.
We meet up at the door as, behind us, more despers rush toward the back exit—
Because Brave and Mama Grren, along with their packs, continue to slash and bite and chomp.
“Let’s go!” Tommy shouts. “We’ve set up an ambush out back.”
We pound up the stairs and double-time across the foyer, ducking beneath the entrance. Whew, we’re finally outside.
Rumms hurry from around the rear of the building and begin mounting their bikes.
Brave and Mama Grren join the group—and not a moment too soon because the gusts are much stronger now, the sand blowing hard in our faces.
Tommy waits for Val to mount her bike before issuing the signal. The group takes off down the stairs, standing on their pedals and carefully riding out each bump.
Julie and I ride ahead of Tommy, gripping our handlebars and keeping our lines tight and straight. As we hit the first set of stairs, a gunshot makes me flinch.
I turn back.
And the world shifts into slow motion, like everything’s happening on a screen and not real.
Please don’t let it be real.
But it is. Val crashes to the ground.
I hit the brakes.
“Keep going!” Tommy orders me. “I got her!”
But Julie’s already stopped and climbed off her bike.
Two more rounds chip into the stairs at our feet.
“I told you to move out!” Tommy shouts.
“No, we’re not leaving you!” Julie screams. She rushes up to Val and helps Tommy slide her away from her bike.
Meanwhile, I’m probing the ruins for the sniper. He’s up there, somewhere, but nearly impossible to spot with all the wind and sand.
Tommy pulls down Val’s scarf and lifts her goggles. “How we doing, Val? Can you sit up?”
She jolts. “It’s my wreath... he knew where to shoot me.”
“Come on,” Julie says. “Let’s get her down to the bottom.”
“I got this,” Tommy snaps.
He scoops Val into his arms as though she’s light as a feather. He starts jogging down the stairs—
As the sniper fires again.
Sparks leap at Tommy’s boots.
We mount our bikes and follow, reaching Tommy at the bottom. He lowers Val onto the ground beside a wrecked car providing a little cover from the wind.
“Aw, hell, we forgot her medical bag,” he says. “It’s still on her bike. Come on. Clock’s ticking. She’s bleeding out.”
Julie and I head off on foot. “Stay low,” I tell her.
“Uh, yeah, you think?”
There’s movement at my side. It’s Brave. He gives me a wide-eyed look like, “Climb on!”
So I grab his ears and hitch a ride. We race past Julie, who’s paused to climb aboard Mama Grren.
The sniper fires, but the grren are too quick, darting left and right, and we’re hanging on for dear life.
As we reach the bikes, I bail off, and Brave leaps away, heading toward mounds of rubble near the entrance.
He’s found his prey.
Mama Grren springs up to join him. She makes a cheetah look slow. They disappear behind the mounds.
And then... a scream.
I clench my teeth. Yes. We got the lunatic who shot Val.
Julie and I race down the stairs with the remaining bikes. We come around the car—
To find Tommy sitting cross-legged with Val’s head in his lap. His scarf is lowered, his goggles raised to his forehead to expose tear-filled eyes. He just shakes his head.
Meeka and Steffanie roll up—
And they see why we’ve been delayed.
They call to Val, throw down their bikes, and drop to their knees around Tommy.
“Did she jump in her persona?” Meeka asks. “Did she give anyone her breath?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “We were up there.”
“Tommy, did she jump?” Steffanie demands.
He shakes his head. “She just smiled... and then she was gone.”
Meeka bites her lip and starts crying.
I bow my head. This was all my fault. If didn’t go inside the building. If I wasn’t such a curious loser.
I endangered the entire group. I got her killed. Me.
I lean back on the car. I’m ready to give up. It’s not worth it. More people are dying. Hollis said they’re dying for me, not because of me.
But he’s wrong. She didn’t die for me.
I’ll tell the rumms to go back, and we’ll find the engine on our own.
A violent gust tears through the street, lifting the car’s rear end a few inches from the ground.
“All right, everyone!” Tommy shouts. “We’ll leave her inside the car. Let’s move out!”
He’s a Marine again. With a mission. He’s turned off the pain. But that’s just a Band-Aid. Val made him feel special in this horrible place, and this is killing him. I wish we had time for something more. A memorial service. Something. But all we can do is leave her. And it’s just awful.
I already know what Keane would say.
But no. He can’t be right. There has to be more.
I lift my goggles, brush the tears from my eyes, and then slam onto my bike.
It really hits me about half way down the road.
I’m bawling so hard I can barely see. At least my scarf and goggles hide it. The terrible guilt makes me want to torture myself—
So I’m back at the Palladium with those women carrying babies and trying to get in the elevator with us... back
with the rest of those families in the dining hall... back with Ms. Martha bleeding on the floor... back with Hollis’s men sacrificing themselves to save us… and back with the man himself giving me his immortal in the city park. Eventually I focus on poor Val, lying dead in Tommy’s arms.
How can I not feel responsible? It’s too easy to blame my parents and Solomon. Tommy would say I need to “put on my man pants” and own up to what I’ve done.
I curse and pull back so hard on the handlebars that I’m about to pop a wheelie.
Tommy pedals next to me and hollers, “Got no time to stop again. Rolling to point four. I’ll tell ‘em.”
As he moves up the line, Brave and Mama Grren trot on either side of me. We’re “last wheel” as they call it in a pace line, and the grren seem comfortable here.
The gap widens between me and Julie, but I don’t bother catching up. I’m actually slowing down.
And feeling even more sorry for myself.
Julie glances over her shoulder, sees the gap, and then drifts back to me. “What’re you doing?”
“Sorry.”
“Keep up.” She’s firm. Harsh even.
I need that. Someone to kick me in the butt. I pedal harder and remain close.
The grren hiss as though they approve.
We make a sharp right turn, head down another street, and then head left, weaving through another obstacle course of mangled stone and metal.
Black spikes sprout from some piles. As we get closer, I realize they’re pieces of trees, charred and hurtled at high speed into the ruins.
A sudden gust whips broken glass into the air, the pieces pelting us like hail from the back. I lean in close to my bars as the grren snarl and shake their heads.
The street opens up again, and Tommy soft pedals along the line to return. “They’ve got a shortcut. We need to take it, otherwise we won’t beat the storm!”
I nod as he tucks in behind me.
My nose runs and my eyes sting, but I owe it to everyone to keep going. I’ll beat myself up later.
Steffanie and Meeka lead us through the business district.
Here we find the ruins of the tallest buildings, the ones we could see from the Palladium. They rise from both sides of the street. The pattern of destruction is obvious. Skyscrapers exploded in half and plunged into each other like rows of dominoes falling in the same direction.
Streets between grew clogged with fiery wreckage.
A few signs on buildings feature names I don’t recognize. Many include a wreath of vines with six thorns jutting from the outside of the circle and six jutting toward the inside. The image reminds me of a tribal tattoo or something religious. This might be the universal symbol for the wreath.
A huge stone version once hung over the next intersection, suspended between skyscrapers. As they fell, the wreath broke into pieces, leaving behind an archway about twenty feet across.
We ride beneath it, and the group surges forward. I groan and fight to keep up. The ruins become less recognizable. No more buildings. Not even the foundations.
As wider cracks form in the road, we’re forced to veer around them. The mountains of debris are all but gone now, but there’s still a lot of wreckage. It’s just more spread out.
Ahead lies a steep hill that seems strangely misplaced. We struggle up the rise, and as we reach the crest—
I can’t believe my eyes.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
I don’t know much about nuclear weapons or radioactive fallout—only what I’ve seen in movies, games, and on the SyFy channel.
Nukes destroy everything.
Radiation will either kill you or give you super powers.
Radioactive materials have a half-life telling you how fast they weaken.
Fallout is bad. You breathe it in and get cancer.
Honestly, I’m afraid to learn more, but I think Steffanie and Meeka are about to school us. So here it is:
They’ve taken us back to the beginning.
Where it all started.
Lying before us... in all of its breathtaking horror... is a crater ten times larger than a football stadium and about two hundred feet deep.
It’s like some giant meteor crashed into the city—
But it wasn’t a meteor.
It was some nutjob from the Monkshood holding a cup, a pen, or a flower.
And this is the ground where he stood.
Ground zero.
Out in the distance, dust devils spin across the vast and open spaces like dancers in a mosh pit.
I’m not sure if this crater is more radioactive than the rest of the city, but either way it scares the hell out of me.
To my surprise, the girls take us into the pit, but instead of going straight down, we ride parallel to the edge because the crater’s walls are too steep.
Apparently we’re following a shortcut used by rumms, nomads, and others for the past few years.
My wheels spin out on softer sand or thump over pieces of pipe and concrete dug up by the blast.
I wonder how Keane’s feeling. He said he doesn’t care about contamination anymore, but oh, that’s a lie. He must be riding off the edge of his saddle and holding his breath.
As usual, Julie’s a Terminator on the bike, standing tall with her elbows extended as we hit rough ground. She can’t be bargained with or reasoned with... and she will not stop pedaling until we reach the engine.
Despite their usual agility, the grren jog like they’re on ice, searching for good footing. They scurry ahead of us, only to slow down and fall behind. Loose sand is not their friend.
I can’t see how Tommy’s doing, but I hear him muttering to himself behind his scarf: “All right. Easy now. Watch that rut up there. Good. Now cut it, cut it, okay. Slide easy now. Slide easy. Oorah.”
The tension in my shoulders weakens as we finally rumble off the wall and onto the very bottom—
The heart of the apocalypse.
And now we’re back up to speed, racing in a jagged line across a worn path in the sand.
What’s left of twilight vanishes.
And it seems even darker down here.
One by one the rumms switch on their bike lights, and we join them. Our shadows dance, and the towering crater walls seem to close in on us...
By the time we reach the other end, the wind threatens to level us. And no, the storm isn’t even here yet. This is just the beginning.
Once again, the crater wall is too steep to take in a straight line, so we begin at about a thirty-degree angle, following another path that’s been beaten down and hardened over time.
We keep on going, battered by the wind as blue bolts of lighting slash across the sky.
But that’s not the sky. It’s the wall of sand now taller than any skyscraper on Earth.
In fact, it’s like all the sandstorms on all the planets in the universe got together for a convention right here—and we’re the free swag.
So we pedal even harder to get up this crater wall.
The grren roar. Pissed off. Hating this.
“Just another twenty feet!” Tommy shouts.
I haven’t even looked up for a while. And when I do, I see he’s right. Almost there.
I make a final run for it, digging in deep. I hold my breath. Push harder. My bike slips. I catch it, drag it sideways... and finally... I clear the top.
“Regroup, regroup!” Meeka orders.
It’s hard to see each other without our lights. The sand’s growing thicker by the second.
I push ahead to find Keane and Julie waiting in line. I tug down my scarf. “You good?”
“Yeah,” she says.
Keane lowers his scarf. “We lost Val?”
I swallow. Hard. “I’ll tell you later.”
“Rolling!” Steffanie shouts. “Rolling!”
There’s no true road because it’s been buried by the blast wave, so it’s up to the girls to pick our line.
We’re challenged by a long section of crum
bling stone and girders mangled like they were made of aluminum foil.
After that, the course gets less technical as we ride farther away from ground zero. A few walls reappear, and a sooty smell has me crinkling my nose. It’s like when the barbecue coals get cold. It can’t be from the bomb. That happened too long ago. Or can it?
Now I’m hit with another scent: pumpkin spice. Mirage.
Where’s that coming from?
We struggle along another rise. Larger structures pop up from the valley—a few walls here and there, along with a dome-shaped building partially caved in.
Meeka comes back and rolls beside me. “That’s Verbena. Temple’s at the far end. We’re almost there.”
As she’s talking, I notice something over her shoulder:
A bluish-black cloud forming on the southeast side of the city. It’s heading our way much faster than the sandstorm.
“Look!”
She does. And then she curses and pedals away, racing up the line to alert the others.
I can barely steer my bike—
Because I realize what’s happening.
And there’s nowhere to hide.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The following question requires advanced critical thinking skills to solve a real life situation. Example:
A violent sandstorm passes through a river valley.
The storm disturbs over one million mawzz who reside on the foliage there. What happens next?
a) The mawzz put on the Weather Channel
b) The mawzz whine about it on Facebook because their feelings have been hurt
c) The mawzz jump into their flying personas and hunt a group of rumms, two grren, and one old man fleeing on bikes
d) All of the above are true
e) There are no gods, only death
That’s right, the correct answer is E because life is just a meaningless string of standardized test questions... and then you die.
Okay, that’s really dark. But right now I’m losing it.
First I tell you that Keane’s wrong, and then I’m saying he’s right and showing you how tests have traumatized me in school. Either way, I doubt we’ll reach Verbena in time.