I ran to the opposite of the Loft, toward the front of the house, coming to stand between the air mattresses – one was empty, the other with Flavia sleeping soundlessly. Jolene and Johan were still sleeping in Katie’s bed, since Tirza decided she was going to sleep with me and the other girls. Tirza had finally given over to her real feelings, which she’d been shyly expressing every night since. The others had allowed her to put me to sleep with sweet kisses and warm touches. It was a peace offering, a strange one, but one nonetheless.
I stared out the window nearest to Katie’s bed.
Behind me, I heard Ramona waking the girls with hushed tones, on Katie’s bed Jolene stirred and turned over, rolling out of Johan’s grasp.
I saw them. They were passed the front lawn on the other side of the driveway, gathered in the street. There seemed to be an entire fleet of black sedans, SUV’s and other very wicked looking tactical vehicles with huge .50 cal. guns mounted atop a few. Others appeared to have high velocity, water cannons, providing less lethal options for suppressing a large group of people. From all the way back to the sidewalk, stepping noiselessly down the entire pathway to the main entry of the house, were scores of those floating, infrared lights. Only now, I could make out what they were attached to – goggles. They were the battery light indicators of night vision goggles and these high-powered glasses were being worn by dark, uniformed figures booted and armed to the teeth. Every now and again one of the figures would touch something at his throat and that strange, low-pitched squeal would sound. It was the engaging squawk of their communicators I had heard earlier, and it could only mean one thing…
Northern Intercontinental Alliance Shock-Troopers!
And they were coming to kill my family!
I dropped to my knees and shook Katie’s bed. “You guys, wake-up, hurry!” I was whispering, but my voice was harsh with intensity.
Jolene rolled over to me about to say something.
“Don’t make a sound!” I warned bringing my forefinger to my lips.
She froze.
“Wake up my brother and sister, tell them to get on their shoes, their backpacks and get their guns. We got to leave now!” I left her trembling in my wake as I quickly re-crossed the large room. The other girls were standing now, side by side, nervous, hands wringing, teeth biting nails. I could hear Jolene was following my orders. “Get your shit, ladies, the fucken NIA is on our god damned doorstep!” I rasped and quickly began to throw on my shoes.
I saw Tirza reach for her clothes, ones she had laid out to change into in the morning.
“Teezee, forget your clothes. We don’t have the time. Just get on your shoes and backpack and arm yourself. This could get nasty quick!”
She nodded like a doe, caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.
“Hurry!” I demanded and they were suddenly blurs of motion.
Three seconds after, I heard, and then felt, a concussion from below. BLAMM! Something big had just exploded toward the front of the house. It made us all stop and stare at each other for a second. Then, a massive billow of flame and smoke erupted up along that side of the house. We were suddenly bathed in its’ furious light.
“Come one, hurry!” I yelled, no longer attempting quiet.
I had just flipped the safety off my .50 cal. Desert Eagle with my thumb when the staccato racket of gunfire sounded in my ears, which made me pause again.
It had come from inside the house!
Frantically, I retraced how we’d arranged who would sleep where, after we’d finished cleaning up the kitchen following dinner. All of us big kids were to sleep in the Loft. My mom and the two little ones were to sleep in the Master Suite she shared with my step-dad, and he was supposed to keep a loose “watch” from the TV room, where he had undoubtedly fell asleep hours earlier. Comprehension hit me like a thunderbolt.
“Daaaaaad! Noooooo! Daaaaaad, wake-up! Wake-up! Wake-up!” I screamed like a frantic old lady, on and on, never stopping.
And… just like I didn’t realize it was me yelling for my step-dad, neither did I realize I was no longer in the same place. I was streaking across the Loft for the door, unhearing, as, at least three of the girls, yelled for me to wait.
I would later come to understand that in the flush of pure emotional impetus, my Mutation – the one making me denser – would increase the effect by itself, exponential to the emotions being felt. Since this one was a matter of life or death, you can imagine what it did to my person. Therefore, when I hit the door of the Loft, I did so with such force; I went through it and found myself atop the landing of the stairs leading down to the second floor, standing in a pile of wood chips and splinters.
I didn’t take the time to assess what I had done. I barely took notice. I swept down the stairs, so fast, it’s amazing I didn’t fall. I cracked each step as I barreled down to the second floor.
My mother had flung open the door of the Master Suite. My two little siblings – standing on either side – were clutching a leg of her pajama bottoms. I had made it two-thirds down the nineteen steps leading up to the Loft.
I was about to call out to her, to scream at her to go back into her bedroom, but was distracted by a bright, halogen light. It was fastened beneath some sort of black object, tapering at one end and held tight against the flexing shoulder of one of the same dark figures I’d seen in the front yard. He had just attained the landing of the extra-wide staircase coming up from the first floor, the angle of his body sweeping from his left to right.
For a moment, I could tell, he didn’t see my mom, standing there in the doorway.
In that split second, although to me it seemed a lifetime, I realized my mom had something in her hand. It was dark, metallic – ballistic. She saw the trooper at the same time he saw her, but she had seen his light long before he was able to shine it upon her. She had the jump on him.
I can remember this with such detail, because, as I said before, everything was moving at a snail’s pace.
I saw her right hand began to raise, her right leg beginning to take a half-step forward, bending at the knee, her left hand coming up to cup the bottom of her right, like she’d been taught. After my biological father had threatened to break into our old house and beat the shit out of her, she’d bought some protection. She was remembering her training. She was shifting into a shooters’ stance. It was then I understood, it was her six-round, .38 Special she held in her hands. My mind exploded.
I shrieked, “NOOOOOO!!!!”
The light under the sub-machine gun of the trooper blinded her for no more than a millisecond.
She fired.
Her bullet took him in his Kevlar helmet, but not where it could do any damage. It hit him right where the hinge of his goggles met the metal of his domed head-covering and ricocheted harmlessly into the wall, dividing the hallway from Flavia’s room. His goggles were ripped to one side. It took him a second and a half to refocus his eyes. He was no longer peering through the concave, magnified display. He was gazing with his own eyes and it took his brain just that little amount of time to adjust.
It wasn’t a long duration of time by any means, but it was long enough to raise the hand cannon I was carrying and sight down the length of the barrel.
Though we had both been trained shooters, for me it was a periodic thing, an exciting adventure I went on every once and a while. For him, it was a way of life, he trained with his weapon every god damned day…!
…And because of it, he was faster.
I had merely applied pressure to the trigger of my gun, when the mussel of his Heckler and Koch MP6 blazed with yellow flashes, faster than my eyes could register. I came flying down the stairs, almost certain I was airborne at one point, but the sight before is burned into the very center of my psyche – I can’t fucking escape it! Though, I have been trying to do just that for more years than I care to remember.
Lucia, to me, had always been the most beatific child I had ever had the pleasure to know, and trust me I known a
nd cared for many, many children in my lifetime, but, to this day, I say Lucia held the cake. She was downright and disgustingly adorable with her squarish head and light brown, super-fine straight hair, her rose colored lips and full cheeks. I have long wondered what she would’ve looked like if she matured. Her body having grown into womanhood, but I can never seem to finish the thought. I am plagued the events of my past and my mind won’t let me. I know now, I am a bad person. I’ve done horrible things and have been a business man in the most debased sort of businesses. I know, in my heart, the very day I changed. I know the instant when I decided to either be fucked by the world or to fuck it myself. It was that day. It was because of what happened…
His second, third and fifth bullets took Lucia, right in the head. It popped like a melon.
His first took my mother’s knee cap, exploding it so badly, it severed her leg.
His fourth, sixth and seventh bullets hit Martín in the shoulder and chest. My wild, fun-loving little brother was shredded to pieces as my cherubic, precious baby sister was reduced to hamburger.
As my youngest siblings were thrown back by the violence of his bullets, my mother merely began to fall. He unloaded his clip into her body as I fired; the tremendous punch of my .50 caliber round took him in the shoulder and cleaved his arm clean from his body.
That is where I don’t remember much and things get a little foggy.
I remember I was still running, but I don’t recall throwing my gun aside.
I know for a fact, I collided with something bigger and bulkier than me, but I have no details to convey. I have an impression, though it is vague, of smashing through the double-paned, sliding glass doors leading onto the second floor balcony, pushing. I can almost remember there was something with a descent amount of bulk before me.
The next thing I can unearth, from this age-old mind, is hitting the cast-iron railing surrounding to outermost edges of the balcony. I know they bent, because I can still hear the metal screeching as it stretched and snapped and twisted. I can see all of it as plain as day. I have a cloudy notion, I’ve been carrying someone in my grasp the entire time. When I hit the railing, he was between me and the metal. My legs were pinning his in place, but his upper body had only one option where it could go. The problem was, it could go places the lower portions couldn’t.
I heard a thunderous snap, and the man in the uniform simply bent into the shape of a backward “L” before my eyes. His spine was ruined by the velocity I had unleashed upon him, combined with the increased mass within my body.
I felt something tickling me along my entire left side and, for the life of me, couldn’t figure out why someone would be fucking tickling me at a time like this.
I was wrong.
I swiveled at the waist and saw another trooper coming through the shattered sliding glass door, the muzzle of his sub-machine gun dancing with light. It hardly registered in my mind, because I was more focused on the tactical, Kevlar helmet he was wearing. I kept wondering why it was getting bigger, as if it were growing like some fantastically exotic organism.
And why was he still tickling my stomach?
The last word had just left my awareness when I realized the helmet was gone and so was the trooper. Where’d he go? I asked myself, confused and, for what seemed like a few seconds, I stood there. Until I saw a boot at my feet and looked down to stare at it.
It was the trooper or most of him. His head was missing and so was the helmet. Where had it gone? There was blood everywhere, huge swaths it drenching the balcony, the outer wall of the house – me!
“Estefan, we have to leave!” screamed Flavia, pulling my arm, forcing herself to gaze into my eyes and not the bloodbath around us. She was yanking me for all she was worth. “Come one, there are more of them coming!” She was frenzied, her face was puffy from weeping. Her nails were biting into my arm, but I felt no pain.
I stepped over the feet of the dead trooper and back into the house, running past the balustrades surrounding the stairs, leading down to the first floor. Yet, I had only taken one step the railings when my entire back was riddled with pinpricks, three, maybe four, times as many as before, but I didn’t dare turn this time. Rather, I pulled Flavia closer to me, effectively shielding her from the barrage of bullets pelting the center-mass of my body. Ahead, down the main hallway of the second floor, I could the others running in the same direction my step-sister had been urging. The passage was nothing but bobbing heads, disappearing one of the other around the left turning hall, leading toward Johan’s bedroom.
“YOU MOTHERFUKCERS ARE KILLING MY FAMILY!”
It was so loud. It stopped me cold. I moved my head in the direction of the monstrous bellow, and found Katie standing on the third step from the bottom of staircase… or at least, it looked like my cousin, and yet, it did not.
She was still wearing the loose-fitting tank top and matching, butt-hugging shorts she had worn to bed. Her feet were encased in her best pair of sneakers. Her backpack was still slung over both shoulders. In her right hand, she still clutched the 9mm Glock 23 I had given her to protect herself, but that’s where the resemblance stopped.
It was her eyes that were different now. Gone was the pearly-white surrounding the hazel irises I had loved to look into for most of my life. They were bright, illuminant, so much so, it was painful to gaze upon. There seemed to be no eyeballs in the sockets. Instead, there was some roiling, seething quagmire of searing magma made of the purest white I had ever seen. But that was not all, her lips had changed as well. No longer were they thin or pink, rather, they were swollen and beat-red, glowing as if flame burned beneath the skin. The inside of her mouth swam with fire as well. She was awesome to look upon, but fierce and gruesome as well. Her face was a mask of pure, unadulterated hatred – a cast upon that lovely visage I was shocked to see for the first time. The muscles in her neck strained with tension, her jaw rigid with fury.
I saw the harsh lights the troopers had attached under the barrels of their weapons train on my beloved Katie, knowing they had seen her and were aiming at her.
“Nooooo!” I screamed as I heard the first gun fire, then I heard another… and another.
No, not my Katie…! was all I could think as I felt despair suck the life out of my heart and waited for her to be shredded right before my eyes…
…But that didn’t happen…
I watched her mouth began to move and the thundering voice I had heard moments before wailed, “FUUUUCK YOUUUUUU…!” With the elongation of the last word she uttered, came the fire.
This wasn’t the sort of fire you’d see in the fireplace or at a campground. This wasn’t a raging industrial fire, infused with chemicals, dancing with human-like form. This wasn’t a jet fuel fire or a rockets’ fire either. This was greater, more intense and infinitely more powerful. The only way I can rightfully describe it to you is to write, it was the stuff at the very center of a star.
Yes, this is what I saw that morning - the stuff of stars.
~~~~~~~~~~~~♦~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ Chapter 70 ~
(Summer – 2018)
Rampage
It came from her mouth as a band – a band of pure energy, the exact width of the circumference of her mouth, giving off an audible thrum as it flashed passed me and burst into the troopers now filling up the stairs.
“God help us,” mumbled Flavia, crushing her body to mine, hanging onto me for dear life.
Wherever the beam touched, whatever it touched froze, for a split second, and then seemed to swell at an ever increasing rate. Until seams, then cracks, then rents of light began to alter it, distort it, turning it almost ghost-like, and then… it exploded. The balustrade, some of the floor, most of the stairs, the wall and every single trooper there, detonated with such force, the blast tossed Flavia and I half way down the hall. We landed adjacent to the bathroom door, some thirty feet from where had been moments earlier!
I never knew what became of those first few bullets they had sho
t at Katie. Maybe they had melted in mid-flight…
Flavia came down hard on me, expelling the air in my body violently, and I saw stars for a three heartbeats. She was dead weight upon me. I knew the concussion had knocked her out cold. I twisted and writhed on the floor, trying to get my step-sister off me as quickly as possible without hurting her. Katie strode up to us and pulled Flavia up, holding her under both armpits. Other than appearing pissed off, she looked no different than she had when she had put her head down on one of pillows to go to sleep a few hours earlier.
“There are still more of those fucking bastards out there. We have to leave,” she said harshly. My cousin was furious.
I million thoughts were speeding through my mind. I wanted to ask her how she had done what she had done, but I didn’t want to make her any madder at the moment. So, I pushed them aside. I took Flavia from her and with my newfound density came a degree of added strength. It was quite easy to swing her around. I cradled her to my chest, backpack and all – she had lost her handgun. I followed Katie down the hall until it widened, three doors facing us, right to left was the door to my parents’ living area, the door to the Multimedia and Theater room and the door to the Rumpus room, where Martín and Lucia played. It was a room especially for them, full with safe toys and games, and ultra- thick carpeting to help cushion falls and such.
The thought they’d never play in their Rumpus room again, staggered me so horribly, I nearly dropped Flavia. I couldn’t help the tears. They came of their own accord. I was helpless against them. They fell. I walked on with my step-sister in my arms.
Katie didn’t stop though. She quickly turned left with the hall and ran toward the Guest bedroom, the room that had once been mine. I followed. The door was open. Johan and Ramona were peering out, both of their faces anxious, frightened. Both visibly shuddered with relief at the sight of us. They waved us to hurry and we picked up the pace.
“What the fuck was that explosion?” demanded Ramona, then her eyes met Katie’s and my girlfriend stepped back like she’d been prodded with a Taser. “Holy shit!” was all she said after.
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