by Tess McKenna
“They were right behind us!”
The other two sprint out of the fog, panting and covered in snow, and the boys pull them into the van.
“Climb in!” Lazz says to me, extending his hand.
“Where’s Nate?” the dark-skinned boy asks.
Two of Bruce’s men charge through the fog, knives in their hands. The boys jump out and start fighting them as the passengers in the van shout. I look into the fog for the flying boy to come running out, but I see nothing. Then I notice that the wind that was so strong and loud before is gone. Someone shouts from within the fog.
“Hey! Stop!” Lazz shouts as I run back into the mist.
As I run, I feel a fire burning inside me that seems to melt away the raw, icy air howling by me. I sense my eyes warm and glowing, and I know that my powers—my nuclear powers—are taking over.
It’s just a matter of time now, the voice says.
But there’s someone out there who’s in trouble… he needs my help.
Not your help.
“Shut up,” I say to myself, and I let the monster take control.
I see shadows amid the fog and hear the “umph” of fists against flesh. I stop running and stand completely still. Energy grows in my fists, and I step toward the sound. From the fog, eight men in black stand around the flying boy, who is braced up against one of them. Bruce, back on his feet with a fresh, bleeding cut on his head, holds a small knife under the flyer’s chin.
“Where’s the girl?” Bruce growls.
The boy says nothing but stares back at Bruce with an unbreakable face. Bruce steps back and hands the knife to none other than New-bee.
“Kill him.”
“Go ahead and try,” I say.
I step out of the fog and make myself visible to all of them. I must be glowing gold or covered in blood because the expression on each of their faces is that of complete and utter awe. More likely covered in blood. Even the flying boy, his face smeared with blood, stares at me with eyes wide.
The muscles in my hand tighten, and a burst of sparkling, white-and-gold energy shoots out of them. I pull back at the last second so the blast is not as strong as it can be, but I still knock four of the hunting crew to the ground. They are upon me within seconds, but I dodge back into the fog. We are back to cat-and-mouse, but this time they are hunting a dragon.
They come from all directions and all with different weapons—except guns—thank you, silver squad. Each time one falls, the nuclear energy gets stronger and stronger. One of them is able to punch my left side where the first bullet wound is. I groan and sink to the ground.
Don’t think about the pain… don’t think about it… I say to myself. My assailant kicks me again on my left side. I reach up and blast him away with a burst of gold and white energy.
Someone is crawling toward me, and I turn myself toward him with a photon of energy ready in my hand. The flyer emerges from the fog, crawling on his hands and knees. We lock eyes.
Strike him! The voice says.
The energy tingles on the tips of my fingers and through my arm. In his crystal blue eyes, I see fear, anticipation, and a plea. My stomach turns, and my entire body feels heavy with the weight of something beyond my physical body.
Strike!
I hold myself back. The energy resentfully fades from my hand.
One of Bruce’s men comes out from the mist. This one is a woman, and she comes at us with a shard from the sunken car. The energy returns to my hand, and I shoot it at her. I hit her shoulder, not enough to stop her. Then a huge gust of wind takes her off her feet and pushes her back into the mist.
I turn back to the flyer and see his hand raised toward the mist where the woman was. Our eyes meet again. He stares at me, and I can’t tell if he’s scared of me or just waiting for the next attack. My eyes are locked on his, until a dark figure forms in the fog behind him.
Bruce steps out from the fog with his knife in hand. My heart skips a beat, and I feel a hole inside my chest where I imagine him stabbing the knife into me. The flyer throws a decent-sized piece of ice at Bruce, hitting him in the face. Bruce glares down at him then stomps on the boy’s ankle. The boy hollers in pain.
I rise to my feet to start to attack Bruce, but he deflects my shot and retaliates with a kick to my knee and punches the bullet wound in my side. I gasp and fall to the ground. My breathing is barely a cough, and I struggle to stand back up. Meanwhile, Bruce has lifted the boy into the air above his head. The boy kicks Bruce’s head, and Bruce drops him. There’s a cracking sound as the flyer hits the ground, landing on his already-injured foot, and he cries out again.
“Nate!” a voice calls from far away.
I push myself back to my feet and keep fighting Bruce. Then New-bee appears, and I can feel the nuclear power consuming me. I shouldn’t be conscious right now—I should be in more pain—my body should’ve given up by now. But I’m not in control anymore. I’m locked on autopilot.
The nuclear power attacks, and I can do nothing to stop myself. However, New-bee fights back with some inhuman capabilities. Within the twenty-two months I had been gone, he must have participated in one of their experiments. I should’ve known. Unfortunately for him, my powers are practically unmatchable at this point.
I shoot a large blast at Bruce and connect. He falls to the ground, unconscious. Now only New-bee and I are left standing. I reach both hands out and shoot a nuclear blast at him that has the ability to kill him—I realize that too late. The nuclear energy is already separating from my fingertips.
No, I say to myself. I use the power I can control to create a force field in front of him, but the blast itself is so strong that it still sends him flying backward. He lands next to Bruce and doesn’t move.
I fall to my knees and exhale. From my knees I sink down further and lay on the snowy ground somewhere between the two bridges and surrounded by several unconscious and wounded bodies. I look up at the sky and feel it coming. As fast as it came, all the nuclear energy vanishes, and I’m left with the pure exhaustion and pain of my body.
“Nate! Nate!” the voice calls again. It’s coming closer.
“Here!” someone shouts from right behind me. My skin jumps it’s so close.
I turn and see the flyer crawling toward me. His foot drags behind him, yet he comes closer still and props himself up next to me. He digs into his pocket and pulls out a syringe.
“No—” I say. I bat him away, but just moving my left arm hurts my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m a doctor, so just trust me.”
Trust you—an eighteen-year-old doctor? I think to myself. Wait… doctor? He brings the syringe closer to my body, and I scream.
“No, no! It’s okay. This is a tranquilizer that will—oomph!” he says. I punch him in the face before he can finish.
“Nate! Where are you?!”
I try to wrestle him away, but he’s too strong. He punches my injured shoulder and pins my arm to the ground. I scream again.
“I’m sorry. I promise you’ll be okay soon,” he says.
“Naaaaate!”
I feel the syringe in my arm, and a cold liquid starts to spread through my arm. My vision starts to blur, or maybe it’s the fog. I groan again as the cool liquid passes over my shoulder.
“It’s okay…” I hear. “It’s okay… okay… okay… okay… o…
I close my eyes, but before I fall asleep, I notice something warm and soft brush my hand and hold onto my fingers.
III: Hospital Blues and Grays
Monday, March 10, 7:53 p.m.
First person
There’s a strange feeling, like a comfort too good to be true or a dream that leaves me on cloud nine, and I don’t want to wake up. There’s a strange smell too—artificial, clean, and toothpaste-like. But there’s noise too, and it’s the noise that disturbs my slumber.
Muffled voices asking for a scalpel, Tranquilizer-X45, and more blood. A machine beeps like a metronome in the backgro
und. The voices are sharp and loud, and they come from all around me. Something beyond this comfort is wrong. I have to see what it is.
My eyes peel open, but all I see is a yellow-brown light in the middle of a black background. I blink, and light blue circles fade into view, creating a bubble-like wall on my peripherals.
“Keep it steady,” a voice says, coming from the blue ball to my left. “Tweezers.”
I blink again, and the blue balls take on more shape and color. Could they be faces wrapped in blue?
Another noise disrupts me, and it disrupts the blue faces, too. Then there’s shouting.
“We’re doing what we were told,” the blue face to my left says.
The noise shouts again.
“She’s not going to make it if we move her,” the other blue face says.
More shouting.
Black dots sparkle in my vision, and soon the blue faces are gone.
“… said we have to save her because…”
“We’re losing her…”
My eyes are open. I’m in a dark, silver-plated room with no windows and one door that is always locked. Somewhere there are heavy footsteps with the sharp click of steel-toed shoes, and I know that they are coming.
Everything is blurry, not that I can’t see, but that I know this is just a memory… a vision from two years ago.
I look down and I’m strapped to a cold, hard table holding me in a standing position. Cold metal braces my ankles, my legs just above the knees, my waist, my biceps, my wrists, my forehead. I hear the high-pitched buzzing of a drill, and someone screaming. Someone else shouts my name, telling me not to close my eyes…
I wake up screaming, but I’m all alone. The room is not gray but white, and the table is soft against my back. The beeping metronome replaces the sound of the drill, faster and louder than before. I try to sit up, but a stabbing pain hits my left shoulder. I cry out.
A door swings open and crashes against the wall of the room.
“Emergency in room twenty twenty-four! Patient has regained consciousness, and primary wound has re-opened,” a person dressed in a light-blue garbage bag suit says. He sprints through the door with an army of light-blue clones behind him.
I glance at the source of the pain and see a glittering red liquid soaking through pale bandages around my left shoulder. The liquid trickles past the bandages and drips onto the white, cushioned table.
“Get back-up, now!” the blue man says.
I feel sick. I close my eyes and feel my body sinking into the table.
I scream again and again as the drill digs deeper into my kneecap. There was supposed to be Novocain. Maybe they did give me a shot of it before they started, but it wasn’t enough. This is my punishment for fighting back.
The drill stops. They move to my other knee, and the drill starts again. I scream louder than before. Will I be able to walk after this? I feel the nuclear energy inside me building like a fire sprayed with gasoline. It burns where the drill digs deeper into my bones.
“The sternum, too,” a voice says. The voice is low and cold—his voice.
“But sir, the cells in the bone marrow of her knees will metabolize and take over in just twelve hours,” another voice says.
“Make it six,” he says.
The drill starts again, piercing the bone right above my heart. A piercing noise escapes my lips, and it’s louder than the drill. If only the drill could pierce my heart, this could all be over faster.
The nuclear energy rages through my body. It tries to escape through my fingers, but the radiation handcuffs force it back inside my body. The handcuffs emit radiation against my skin trapping the nuclear energy in my bloodstream and burning the skin that hits the metal. I want to die.
“It’s done.”
The drill stops, and everything is silent except for the roaring of the nuclear monster trapped inside me. The metal bracing my forehead releases, and I turn my head to the side. The doctors clean and collect their equipment then exit the room. The door locks.
I lay on the cold table and don’t move. My violated, tortured body swallows the pain as the nuclear monster bonds with the new, mutated cells in my bloodstream. At least ten hours they’ll keep me here. But they can’t keep me here forever.
My eyes bat open, and I’m staring at a white, tiled ceiling. No more gray. Sunlight shines into the room from somewhere; it must be a nice day outside.
The strange feeling of surreal comfort returns, as well as the smell of toothpaste. I blink a few more times, and more strange things appear. I see a large metal contraption to my left with a screen that shows a moving, green, jagged line. It beeps a low and monotonous tone, like a metronome.
Wait, I think to myself. Is that…
I look down at my arm and see some sort of large, black bandage strapped around it with a long, black cord connecting to the machine. I feel small tubes under my nose and around my cheeks, and there’s something odd around my right calf and foot—
Hospital bed… why am I in a hospital bed? Where am I? I think to myself.
I look around the room and see a boy sitting in a chair at the opposite end of the room. He’s maybe a couple years younger than me; has thick, dirty-blonde hair; pale skin; and pink lips. His face is soft and innocent with big blue eyes and freckles. He wears a gray shirt and dark blue jeans tailored to give more definition to his skinny legs. He is engrossed in a sports magazine in his hands and flips the thin pages without looking away.
Who is he? Something about him is oddly familiar… the flyer! No, he’s too young. Did the flyer and the silver squad take me here?
I lay still and study the boy. If he or the silver squad wanted to hurt me or turn me in to the police, they would have done it already. They also would not have left a fifteen year old to watch me.
His crystal blue eyes move to the next page then flicker up and look at me. The boy gasps, his eyes as large as on owl’s, and then he vanishes as fast as lightning. I stare at the empty chair as the magazine falls to the floor.
What the hell? I think to myself.
The boy reappears, just as fast as he had vanished, with his back against the door and his eyes locked at me. Then he vanishes again, just like that. I wait, but he doesn’t come back.
Is there something wrong with me? Is my face contorted or half gone? I glance around the room again. Hospital. They can find me in a hospital, and if not them, then the police or the FBI surely can. If this is a real hospital, I’m a dead man. I have to get out of here.
I try to sit up, but my head and body immediately ache, and my muscles quiver. I sit up anyway, and the white sheets fall to my legs. I see my torso wrapped tightly in a long, pinkish bandage; my left shoulder, too. Is that where… the bullet wounds…
Without warning, the teleporting boy flashes back into the room with a taller blonde girl holding his arm. The girl is so familiar—her long, blonde hair and big, blue eyes. She stares at me in a sort of awe.
“You’re alive—I mean—you’re awake,” she says.
“Where am I?” I ask.
The two glance at each other then back at me.
“It’s okay. You’re safe,” the girl says.
Was she one of Bruce’s hunters—is that how I recognize her? The boy could be one of the experimental children—ECs, we called ourselves—just waiting to tell them when I wake up.
“Cliff, go get Dr. Reins,” the blonde girl whispers to the boy. He teleports away.
Wait… my head is spinning. Doctor?!
I pull away the tubes from my face and the black bandage from my arm and swing my legs around to the side of the bed, throwing the sheets to the floor. The monotonous beeping is louder and faster.
“Whoa, don’t move!” she says to me. I ignore her and frantically come to my feet. My eyes blackout momentarily, and I almost fall.
“Hey! Just stay where you are. Everything is okay. No one is going to hurt you.”
I stumble, pushing the metal contraption to the ground
and causing an even more obnoxious alarm to sound.
“I have to get out of here,” I say.
“Shit,” the girl says. She moves next to me and tries to push me back toward the bed.
“Just calm down. You’re okay,” she says. I push her away from me, and she trips over the metal contraption and falls to the ground.
A deafening buzzer rings through the room. It sounds like the alarm of a sinking ship, but perhaps that sinking ship is me. I clasp my hands over my ears and fall to the ground next to the blonde girl.
The door swings open, and ten people dressed in light blue lab coats pour into the room. They run toward us, grab my arms, and pull me back to my feet.
“Let me go!” I shout.
“Miss Mencken, are you alright?” one of the blue nurses asks the blonde. The blonde girl nods and pulls herself back up.
I try to fight off the nurses, but then the sunlight from the window hits me. The nurses in blue brace me against the wall, sunlight from the window shining against my face, and they extend my arm out against the wall. I cry out as if someone is going to help me, but I know better.
A woman in light blue grabs a box and pulls out a sharp, long needle. I struggle and scream, but the sunlight drains all my strength. The woman steps toward my outstretched arm as more nurses help pin me against the wall. The woman jabs the needle into my arm and injects the fluid into my bloodstream. I hold back a scream.
The woman pulls the needle out, and I feel dizzy and defeated. I still try to fight back as my vision blurs, and all I see is white.
I wake up with a jolt. I look around and see that I’m in the same white room but without any machines, tubes, or beeping. A small table sits next to my bed with a vase of yellow daffodils on it. Outside the window, the sun is setting behind the skyscrapers of Cleveland. The door in front of me is shut, and the chair where the blonde boy once sat is empty.
Is this real or a nightmare? I’m panting and shivering, and the last thing I remember is the nurse jabbing that giant needle into my brachial artery. I wiggle my toes and crack the knuckles of my fingers. Everything feels real. I must be okay. I’m awake.