by Hill, Travis
“I think she just told you to go fuck yourself, Dougie!” the man on her left cackled.
Doug’s frown deepened and he looked to his right. Derry stepped forward and drove her foot out and up as hard as she could. Without her ability, she was no match for three men at once, but she hoped that they were juiced and would accidentally kill her. It had taken her weeks to get her ability under control with Brian and Garret’s guidance. She was hopeful one or all of the men were still struggling with theirs.
Doug opened his mouth to tell Gale to shut the hell up when he saw the girl move in his peripheral vision. Instead of trying to run by him, she stepped forward as if to give herself up. His mouth curled into a smile until her right foot kicked out. His surprise that the girl was attacking him, going for his family jewels, broke his concentration on keeping her mind from focusing enough to control her ability. Derry felt her mind able to call to it, control it, for a fraction of a section. She put everything she had into the kick an instant before she felt herself become empty inside when Doug realized he’d slipped and filled her mind with white noise again.
The force of her kick, enhanced by the momentary use of her ability, crushed Doug’s testicles, driving them up into his bladder, lifting the man off the ground almost almost twenty centimeters. Derry’s tibia and fibula shattered upon impact, along with the bones in the top of her foot, her ability having been cut off before she could use it to brace her leg. The searing, white-hot agony threatened to send her into a pain blackout. Douglas’s concentration was now on his ruptured testicles, and Derry felt her mind spin back up to full speed, her neurons in perfect sync with her thoughts, her wishes, her desires.
The scream of pain that erupted from her throat, backed by her ability, instantly shattered the eardrums of all three men. The men on either side of her clutched their ears, their screams taking over when hers died out. Derry fell to the floor, her shattered leg useless. She knew it would heal, but she knew she would have to survive long enough to worry about it.
The man on her left crashed face-first into the wall as he tried to run out of the house. He fell to the floor and began to kick at the wall, his screams beginning to sound like a broken alarm clock. The man on her right had stopped screaming, and was trying to climb over the window ledge to the outside porch.
Derry looked around, noticing every window had blown outward. A loud yelp focused her attention on the man trying to climb through the window again. Blood poured down the wall from where he’d cut himself on a jagged shard of glass. Derry focused a solid wall of air and pushed it at the man as hard as she could.
He rocketed out of the house, his renewed screams joined by frightened shouts from the men waiting outside as they watched him careen over their heads. She looked back at the other man. He’d risen from the floor and was almost through the doorway when she cut him in half with the kicked-in door, blood, organs, and splinters spraying the men standing just outside.
The air around her erupted in gunfire, bullets ripping through the manufactured home’s thin walls as if they were made of paper. She wrapped herself in a cocoon of dense air, praying to no god in particular that the pain in her leg wouldn’t interfere with her concentration. The men quickly slowed down their rate of fire, and soon only one of them fired at a time until another took over.
She had no idea what they were up to until the odor of smoke filled her nostrils. Panic began to overtake her once again. Panic at being trapped in a burning house, unable to run with a shattered leg, at least ten, probably twenty men waiting outside, all armed with guns, and more than likely a few were juiced.
“You fucking cunt!” the leader screamed as the guns fell silent and the crackle of flames took over. “Gale was my fucking brother!”
Your brother was an asshole, Derry thought, trying to not giggle, desperate to hold on to her sanity, her mind going into shock because of the pain from her leg. It was too much to try and keep her body shielded, her pain suppressed, and her mind clear enough to think her way out of the situation. I’m going to die, she though. At least they can’t rape me.
The flames were voracious, hungrily eating everything in the house. Derry could feel the temperature rise to lethal levels. It took everything she could muster to keep the temperature within her cocoon of air tolerable, while at the same time forcing what little oxygen remained to pass through the barrier while filtering out the toxins from the burning wood and plastic. She was afraid to move, knowing the pain in her leg would blast through her mental barrier, knowing if that happened, she’d die in seconds from the smoke and the heat.
Tears began to roll down her face, making it halfway down her cheeks before turning to steam. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. She wanted to hate Brian and Garret for unleashing the hell she found herself in. Derry wanted to hate herself for not being more careful, for being too confident that her abilities would get her out of any jam, just like they had countless times since she’d fled Austin. She supposed it was inevitable that with the seemingly countless variations of abilities that had manifested within the first few weeks after the New Year’s Day reveal, eventually she’d run into someone that could dampen or even completely cut her off from her ability.
Time seemed to slow down, then speed up. It took everything she had left in her to keep the deadly fire from killing her. At some point the roof had collapsed around her, pre-fab panels of compressed wood falling where Douglas had been rolling around on the ground, one hand clutching his crotch, the other scrabbling at his left ear as if trying to remove whatever blocked the world of sound that he could no longer hear. Derry was sure Douglas was no longer alive, the man’s two legs unmoving, the rest of his body covered in burning debris.
She felt her shoulders burning and renewed her concentration on keeping herself protected. Her leg began to burn, and she couldn’t tell if it was from the fire raging around her, or from the fragments of bone grinding into each other and the surrounding muscle. The smell of burning hair pulled her mind away from her leg. Her hip began to burn, making her yelp and her body jerk, sending new waves of pain through her leg. Derry knew she wouldn’t last more than another minute, unable to keep her mind focused enough to shield herself completely.
The sound of gunfire began again, the men firing blindly into the remains of the burning home, hoping to kill the witch that had murdered three of their own, if she wasn’t already dead. They were terrified of a woman that could overpower Douglas and two other juicers. The shooting wound down less than a minute after the last wall of the manufactured home collapse inward.
*
Frank, turned away from the burning rubble to find his little brother. He was sure that Gale hadn’t survived whatever the girl had done to him. His brother’s body had been moving far too fast to survive anything it would eventually collide with. He had only taken two steps before a groaning noise made him turn back toward the house. Inside, he felt as cold as the ice that was quickly forming around the blackened remains.
“Oh sh—” was all he got out of his mouth before shards of ice and burnt splinters exploded outward from the house.
The ground buckled under his feet at the same moment a wave of scorched air slammed into his chest, knocking him over onto his back. Frank’s world went white for a few seconds when the back of his head rebounded off the hard-packed earth. When he came to, his entire body felt wet. He wondered if it was from the melting ice, or blood, or whatever the witch had done. He almost blacked out when he raised his head to look down the length of his body, and did black out when his skull rebounded off the ground.
He woke to shadows, his stomach recoiling when he tried to turn his head to the side. It was dark outside, getting colder. As cold as his body felt. Frank panicked for a moment, thinking the girl had frozen him. He counted to three and tried to roll onto his side, but something held him down. He clamped his jaw shut as tight as he could and raised his head, fighting off the waves of pain from the concussion. Maybe it’s a skull fracture, he
thought, almost laughing. The laughter died in his throat when he noticed milky white roots covering most of his body, bloody tatters of clothing and skin only visible in small patches.
He did panic this time, willing his entire body to get up and run. He could feel his arms and legs, but he couldn’t make them move. They felt rooted to the ground. He tried to thrash about, unable to move anything but his head, each whip of it bringing on a fresh explosion of pain. Frank finally realized that it wasn’t dark outside. He was in someone’s shadow. He stopped trying to free himself from the roots and looked to his left. The girl sat next to him, rubbing her right leg up and down in a rhythmic motion, her torso rocking slightly in time to some silent beat he couldn’t hear.
“Let me go,” Frank demanded of the blurry specter.
The girl looked up from her leg and offered him a gentle smile. He realized his demand had sounded like a child’s whine. He opened his mouth again to beg her to let him go, but she put a finger over her lips, motioning him to be quiet. Frank laid his head back down, and immediately felt something crawling around both of his ears. He tried to lift his head, but it wouldn’t budge. The creepy-crawly feeling moved from his ears to his neck, and up the sides of his face. Within seconds after the roots touched him, his skin would grow cold, almost numb. He opened his mouth again to scream, but two thick roots entered his mouth, a third one forcing his jaw shut around them.
The girl went back to rubbing her ankle, singing softly in a beautiful voice that made him begin to cry. Frank’s mind filled with regrets, from forcing his cousin Melinda to touch him down there when they were teenagers, to the eleven women he’d taken as his own wives since the end of the world. He cried for what felt like hours, his body growing colder with each passing minute. Soon the numbing cold turned into a piercing, sharp pain everywhere a root touched his skin. He whimpered, the roots in his mouth keeping him from doing anything else.
“I could have killed you as quickly as I killed your brother,” the girl said, looking up from her ankle when she heard Frank’s whimper of pain.
She didn’t look angry. She looked like a monster from a horror movie. The girl hovered her face over his, the late evening sunlight highlighting every inch of it perfectly for his eyes. He tried to scream, but could only cry. The girl’s face looked as if it had melted off, one of her eyes a milky white, her skull a red and white mass of peeling skin.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said, the words lisping slightly from her ruined lips, her voice soothing him. “It will when I fix it, but it doesn’t hurt right now.”
Frank tried to cringe and pull away when her hand came down to caress his face, but the only muscles left under his control were the ones around his eyes. Her palm was hot, sweaty, and smelled like a mix of barbecued meat and burning hair. It was a sickly-sweet smell that made his mind wander for a moment, reminding him that he was hungry.
“I’m going to sit with you until you are once again one with the Earth,” the girl told him. “Then I’m going to go find the rest of your men and kill them. I’ve decided to at least make sure your death is more useful than your life.”
Frank’s tears spilled from the corners of his eyes. He was afraid to die, afraid of what this girl was going to do to him. Was already doing to him. The pain from the cold inched into a fierce agony, originating from everywhere at once.
“It isn’t anything like what you’ve done to those women,” the girl said, her face hovering over his again. “But I know I hurts. It’s going to hurt for a long time. Much longer than you’ll want it to. The soil needs your life, your nutrients, but it needs to be fed slowly, steadily, so that none is washed away, so that all will be absorbed.”
She turned away. Frank rolled his eyes to follow her, afraid she was going to torture him even more on top of whatever she was already doing to him. It looked like she had gone back to rubbing her ankle. He tried to focus his eyes on her, but soon the pain from the roots made his eyelids flutter and the muscles controlling his eyes spasm. The pain never stopped, only grew more intense as time crawled by.
By the second sunrise, Frank Nelson was completely insane, unable to scream, unable to do anything except live in his dark, miserable world of torment. When he died three days later, Derry crawled away from what was left of his body to the small shed that had survived the fire.
CHAPTER 14
Brewster, Kansas - April 19, 2046
Garret watched the woman as she changed the sheets on the bed. He stood just outside of the second-floor room, fascinated that there were still human beings living a normal life. He had a moment of doubt, wondering if he’d stepped into a weird holo where the whole town acted normal on the surface, but had some terrible secret or ritual planned for unwary travelers.
The fact that he’d stumbled across Brewster, Kansas, and it hadn’t been looted, ransacked, or burned to the ground was creepy enough. An American Traveler motel on Old Highway 24 that was still open made him suspect that it was a trick. Garret was suspicious of how the little burg seemed to be the only place left in the country to have more than one building that hadn’t been burned down, blown out, or completely disintegrated, leaving only a foundation.
When he shifted from one foot to another, his duffel scraped against his tablet bags, the noise interrupting the woman’s concentration. She turned, a new fitted sheet bunching up at the corner of the mattress when she let it go. Garret studied her face, noting the way her short, curly, gray hair contrasted with the darkness of her skin. Her eyes were wary, her face a mix of suspicion and fear. The hard line of her lips barely curled enough to begin a smile.
“Your room will be ready in a few minutes, sir,” she said, her lips becoming a straight line again as she turned back to the bed.
Garret stared at the woman, still unable to believe that he was watching a motel maid change the sheets on his room’s bed. He was somehow sure he was being manipulated, and if the juicer screwing with his mind dropped the illusion, he’d be standing in the middle of yet another burned-out town.
She felt his stare on her back and tensed, becoming as still as a statue. Garret’s guard went up. He glanced around, then down to the parking lot below, then back at the woman again. She’d grabbed the fitted sheet from the bed and had it clutched to her chest. She tried to back further into the room, away from Garret, but the bed caught the back of her knees, and she sat down hard on the mattress. When he stepped forward into the doorway, the woman’s right hand reached into her apron pocket then immediately went behind her back.
“Hey,” he said, his hands out in front of him, “calm down. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just a bit in shock that everything is still so normal here.” She stared at him as if he were insane. “Right. I suppose I don’t know what’s been going on here. But where I’ve just come from, things are pretty bad. Worse than whatever might be going on around here, at least.”
“Maybe for you,” the woman said. She immediately dropped her eyes to her knees, her right hand still behind her back.
“Listen,” Garret said, sitting down in the room’s only chair. The woman glanced back up at him. “I’m sorry. I’ve just seen so much destruction. I didn’t mean… I’m sorry.” When she didn’t say anything, he asked, “Is it bad around here?” The woman nodded, then shook her head. “Is that a yes, or no, or…?”
“It depends on who you are,” she said, looking down at her knees again.
“You mean who is juiced and who isn’t?” She nodded. “Most places are burned-out wrecks these days. How is it this place still seems like Down Home, America?”
“It’s a small town. There are a few families who run things. Probably been that way for forever. They keep things running and the trouble away from us.”
Garret frowned. “No offense, but that sounds about a million percent more organized and helpful than the rest of the world outside of this anomaly. What’s the catch?” When she refused to answer, he prodded her again. “Come on, I’m from Texas. I don’t hold a stake i
n anything here. I’m just passing through, looking for a place that doesn’t smell like rotting corpses and roasting meat. I’d appreciate knowing something like ‘they were a bunch of juiced family members robbing unwary travelers of their souls in the middle of the night.’”
The housekeeper couldn’t help but smile at Garret’s goofy impersonation of a horror holo narrator. Her right hand was still behind her back, and it made Garret nervous. He wasn’t afraid of a lone woman, though he’d learned many times since the reveal that women were just as hard, just as cold as men, especially when they wielded enhanced abilities. He was more afraid she might have some sort of alert device, and the instant she pressed it, fifty juiced townsfolk would be waiting below the balcony for him.
“The families are okay, for the most part,” she said. “Though about half of them don’t seem to approve of black folk.”
“That seems like a common thread anywhere you go,” Garret muttered.
“It’s not so bad out here,” she said. “It isn’t like it was in back in Dothan. Mostly. When the madness started happening, the surrounding farmers and ranchers got together and had lots of meetings. A few folks died, the juicing and grabbing for power and all.” She gave Garret a sideways glance, but he nodded for her to go on, letting her know he knew all about men and power, being one of them himself. “But since a lot of families have been around for generations, they worked it out. Outsiders didn’t get a say, but we didn’t get raped or murdered.”
“Or lynched,” Garret said, anger flowing through his voice as he remembered the dozens of small towns he’d passed through or skirted around, from Lampasas, just outside of Austin, northwest along the panhandle and into Oklahoma, then Kansas. The devastation was indescribable for the most part, entire cities laid to waste. The worst moments of his solitary traveling were the little townships and burgs along the way that had kept some sort of normalcy, other than the ethnic cleansing of anyone that wasn’t of the dominant race.