Jesse got a shoulder into one of the cement blocks and power-walked it off the side of the road. He returned and did the same to a second block. Honking vehicles crowded into the new space, but Jesse used his body to block them. He waved the van around. When it nosed through the opening, Jesse turned toward the fifteen-foot-tall metal gate and searched for a handhold.
A quick check confirmed what Scott had hoped. Electronically powered. An instant later, Scott was inside the wiring, manipulating the circuits. He returned to himself as the gate began retracting.
“Everyone in the van!” he called.
He was preparing to follow his own order when something shot overhead and slammed into one of the guard towers. The explosion threw Scott to the ground as pieces of metal pelted his suit. The guard tower leaned to one side, black smoke billowing out. The gate shuddered to a stop.
Great, had to be the control tower.
Probably the aim. Scott craned his neck around to where the shot had come from. Soviet tanks. Four of them crunching over the tops of vehicles in the highway like Bigfoots at a monster truck rally. Drivers and passengers pitched from their cars as the tanks trundled forward in formation.
A second shell blew past, just missing the van and punching a hole through the metal gate.
“Let’s go!” Scott called, jumping into the van’s back. The driver and Reginald were already inside. Jesse jogged up, but instead of joining them, slammed the doors closed. The van rocked as he shoved it forward.
“Jesse!” Scott shouted.
The driver stomped the gas. Scott gauged the upcoming opening in the gate. Was it even large enough? Metal shrieked as the van wedged halfway through. Scott felt the tires beneath them catch and then scream in place. The noxious fumes of burning rubber wafted into the cargo space.
Stuck.
The hollow thud of a tank firing again.
Scott squeezed his eyes closed as the van rocked. In the next moment, the tires caught road. The van inched forward. With a final effort, it screamed clear, veering side to side until the driver wrested it under control. They straightened onto a blissfully open road, away from the Russian border, away from the firing tanks, away from a potential imminent nuclear strike.
“Up here,” Scott said. “Pull over.”
Reginald turned his head. “This might be our last chance to get clear.”
“We have a teammate back there,” Scott said. He thought of the incoming missiles. “And, look, I believe in Janis.”
You’re not alone.
Reginald nodded and gave the order to the driver.
Oakwood
38 seconds to impact
You’re not alone.
The whispered voice brought Janis back. She was falling, limbs flailing, wind slamming into her tumbling form. As helpless as a mortal.
Mortal? A part of her stiffened. You are no mortal.
In a light-filled burst of power and fury, her fall reversed. She speared heavenward, becoming energy itself. Blissfulness and violence hummed through her cells. The shield she had begun earlier took shape in her growing perception. It fluttered at the edges, small and pathetic.
That wouldn’t have stopped a weather balloon, she thought in a voice not quite her own.
Her energy conjoined with the matrices of time and space. So clear now, so undeniable. The shield expanded, as though growing itself. Upward and outward it stretched, miles per second.
It’s happening! she thought.
And she became the shield. A living, growing entity, pulsing with vitality. Agonizing and beautiful to experience. Like childbirth, she imagined. From her new vantage, Janis perceived the incoming missiles. A clutch descending from the east. A storm rising from the west.
It would be close. She just needed to push … push … push!
The coppery taste of blood fell into her throat. Dizzying lights swam along the edges of her perception.
She gritted her teeth. Can’t…!
I can, a voice said. Release me.
Janis recognized the voice. It was the other part of herself. The unlimited, raw power part she had walled off in the beginning. The part the circuit breakers were meant to contain until Janis could grow her capacity, could handle the full expression of her abilities.
With the circuit breakers gone, nothing separated them any longer.
But this other part of her had matured, Janis realized. No longer a wild child, she commanded the presence of a grown woman. One who embodied pure power, who understood the responsibilities.
This I learned from you, the voice said. But you limit me now. You must release me.
Janis felt the telekinetic shield straining at its edges, arriving at another threshold. More vessels burst in her nose. She coughed blood into her face shield. How long before the vessels in her brain gave?
Release me, the voice repeated.
The seconds to impact were ticking down, Janis realized. But she also knew that to release her powers was to sacrifice them.
Isn’t that what you want? the voice asked.
It was and it wasn’t. She had once feared succumbing to her powers, losing her identity, who she thought of as Janis Graystone. But now she understood that she had already become her powers.
And to lose them was to lose herself.
Please, the voice insisted. It is a worthy sacrifice.
Janis vacillated in that fragile space between heaven and Earth, divinity and mortality, life and death. For to surrender her powers was to die—and not only in the philosophical sense of identity. Her plummet through the atmosphere would burn her to dust.
The missiles were near enough now for Janis to feel their shuddering motion, to see their spears of lethal light. In seconds, they would puncture a shield that lacked the strength to contain them.
Janis braced for impact. Then relented.
Save them, she said.
The vast ocean of energy withdrew from Janis at once, collapsing her to a point. A pea spit naked from its pod. Cast out, cast downward. Janis squinted through her blood-flecked visor up at the colorful undulations of time and space, a medium she had once occupied, once controlled.
So wondrous … so …
She hadn’t the words.
A maternal force caressed her tear-streaked cheek.
As the first missiles struck the shield, images flashed: her first out-of-body experience, rediscovering Scott, their night on the swing set, their mission at the Leonards’ house, their dizzying kiss at the school dance, finding the command-and-control center together, becoming Champions, their training, their missions, their vacation in Murder Creek, their battles against the Scale.
The inordinate love she felt for him…
All leaving her.
Janis’s view became lost to streams of smoke as the arms and legs of her suit began burning away. The plastic of her face shield bubbled over next, then shattered in a soundless cry.
49
Somewhere in the Pacific
The wine missed Khoggi’s mouth and went spilling down the front of his white shirt. It was his third glass, but he was not drunk. If anything, he was more sober than he had ever been in his life.
He dropped his legs from where he had propped them on the desk, wiped his mouth, and stared at the computer screen.
“No.”
The red blips, the ones that represented missiles, were disappearing.
“No,” he repeated.
He tapped the screen, as if to restore them to life. Then he lifted the telephone and called the satellite station. He had people there monitoring military channels around the world.
“What’s going on?” he demanded of the man who answered.
“Reports of explosions along the east coast of the United States.”
Hope took flame in Khoggi as he understood the missiles had not disappeared, but detonated. He grinned, imagining the first in what would become a world-wide field of giant mushroom clouds.
“Nuclear explosions?” he asked excitedly.
“No, sir. These are emanating from hundreds of miles up. Too distant to hear, little more than flashes. The population believes them to be fireworks. It is their day of independence.”
Khoggi stood so abruptly that his chair clattered off behind him.
“No reports of strikes?”
“No, sir.”
“What happened to the missiles?”
“I believe the explosions are them, sir.”
Khoggi slammed down the phone and leaned over his computer. The screen was tranquil. The red blips gone. A numb realization took growing hold. The Final War, the one that was to have eliminated the world’s great powers, elevating him to a supreme throne, had ended.
Just like that.
Khoggi’s throat began to constrict. He panted, then wheezed for air. A pain, like someone balling up his blood vessels, gored his left breast. He clamped a fist to the spot and ground his teeth.
The group he had helped fund in hopes of controlling…
Khoggi pushed himself from the desk and staggered in a circle. Beyond the glass walls, his white city glinted madly. The back of a hand caught the wine bottle. It toppled and shattered over his diamond-studded tile floor.
A moment later he followed, splashing face first into the crimson spill.
50
Fort Meade, Maryland
The war room shook with applause and loud whoops as confirmation came in. The missiles had detonated prematurely, their deadly payloads burning off in the upper atmosphere.
Kilmer joined the raucous celebration, pumping hands, clapping backs, receiving bear hugs from agents he hardly knew, many with tears in their eyes.
“How in the hell did it happen?” a nearby agent asked.
“Faulty missile,” another one answered. “Blew early, setting off a daisy chain of explosions. Took out the whole fleet. In both directions.”
“Not sure I believed in a higher power before,” a burly agent said, “but that?” He giggled deliriously as he clasped Kilmer around the back and lifted him in a circle before setting him on the floor again.
Kilmer laughed, too. And he couldn’t tell a soul in the room the truth. His kids, his Champions, had been that higher power tonight. Indeed, they had done the impossible.
“We’re getting new information,” a deputy agent shouted from the front of the room, waving a printout.
The room shushed.
“The Soviet Union’s Central Committee has removed General Dementyev from power,” the deputy said. “Defense Minister Aksakov has assumed his position, and he’s on the phone with President Reagan. He’s ready to concede the Cold War, and he’s already talking disarmament. He wants to assure that nothing like what happened tonight ever happens again.”
Tears burned in Kilmer’s eyes as the celebrating in the war room resumed with even greater abandon. When someone pressed a foaming bottle of champagne into his hand, Kilmer took a long drink before passing it to the next agent. Wiping his mouth, he looked up at the giant wall monitor, no longer flashing with warning messages, and smiled broadly.
Damned if his kids hadn’t done it.
51
Oakwood
Minutes earlier, the heavens had been flashing with what looked like dry lightning, the effect strobing over Tyler’s and Erin’s upturned faces. The last time Tyler had witnessed anything like it was in Missouri, when Janis had stopped the hijacked missile. Had she pulled it off again?
His earpiece buzzed with a call from Minion, who had remained behind at the bunker. “Just heard from … from Kilmer.” She was panting so heavily, Tyler could hardly understand her. “The missiles … the missiles are gone. Janis … Janis, she took them out. She … she … They’re gone!”
“Thank God,” Tyler breathed.
Erin, who had received the message as well, seized him from behind, latched her lips to his neck, and squeezed him back and forth. But Tyler’s gaze remained on the skies. Janis still hadn’t returned.
Now, something flickered in the darkness. A finger of orange flame.
“There,” he said, pointing.
Erin released him and craned her neck back.
“I don’t know…,” she said after a moment. “I think it’s debris entering the atmosphere.”
“It’s her,” he insisted, “but she’s falling, not flying. We need to arrest her descent, steer her this way.”
The look Erin leveled at him was hardened by realism. She’ll burn up before she gets here, it said.
The thought had occurred to Tyler as well, enveloping him in a numb layer of denial. But Erin must have seen something desperate in his eyes because she relented with a quick nod. “I’m on it.”
The temperature dropped suddenly. Leaves rustled, and the large oak trees around the Grove began to sway. As the wind whipped through Tyler’s clothes, he crouched and squinted toward Erin. Side-cut bangs blew across her face, batting an upraised arm.
Far away, the orange flame flickered.
“I have her!” Erin shouted above the storm.
Tyler watched the flame grow larger. And now he could hear it, like paper tearing. He left Erin’s side and struggled through the wind to the middle of the field. He adjusted his position, scrambling this way and that, gauging Janis’s fall to Earth.
And then she was right above him. Tyler threw his arms out and caught her behind her back and legs. Softened by the relentless upblast of wind, the impact still drove Tyler to his knees.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”
He peered down, terrified he would find only charred remains, a smaller, more delicate version of his father.
But Janis wasn’t even hot. She was ice cold. And wet.
The flames had fallen from orange to an alcohol-blue, rippling over the plasma-like substance that coated her. Tyler took his hand from behind her knees and wiped the clear plasma from her sleeping face. He ran his hand over hair slicked dark and flat to her scalp, like a newborn’s. She was without clothes, too. Tyler shifted his grip while he removed his flannel shirt and wrapped it around her body.
“Janis,” he whispered, giving her a gentle shake.
“Is she all right?” Erin walked up behind them, the storm she had conjured dying off in whispered breaths.
Tyler cradled Janis against him. He had only seen her this still and pale once before.
“Janis,” he said more urgently.
52
Sumy, Ukraine
The rising sun was washing out the eastern horizon by the time the van pulled into the airport in the northeast Ukrainian city. The driver took a service road to where the Champions jet was docked, rolling to a stop on the tarmac.
Scott climbed from the back of the van, then turned to ensure Jesse made it out all right. The big man had caught a shell while overturning the Soviet tanks. Though he stepped with a limp now, he appeared no worse for the wear. Scott wished he could be saying the same for Shockwave. He was dreading sharing the news with Minion, but as team leader, it would be his job.
They met Reginald around the side of the van, where the three of them bid farewell to the driver. Nazar was all smiles as he clutched their hands in both of his. Not only for the small fortune he had received in payment, but because they had received the good news en route: crisis averted.
Which meant Janis had done it.
For the last two hours, Scott had been trying to tap into her emotional body, to see that she was all right. But save for a brief starburst, he had felt nothing. And that scared the hell out of him.
“Bless you,” Nazar called out his window as he drove away. “Bless you all!”
Someone clapped his shoulder. He turned to find Reginald’s smiling blue eyes.
“Did good. Twenty-four missiles instead of twenty-four hundred. Who’s to say Janis could’ve handled that many.”
“Yeah,” Scott replied, unable to celebrate what had turned out to be a successful hack until he knew that Janis was safe. He jerked his head toward the humm
ing jet. “Ready to head home?”
“Best suggestion I’ve heard all day,” Reginald said.
Jesse, whose Champions suit was scorched and scarred, grunted in agreement.
Scott filed in behind the others and climbed into the cabin. While his teammates buckled in, he edged his way to the cockpit, where he found the two agents who had flown them in.
“Any more info?” Scott asked anxiously.
“We did get a message,” the pilot said. “Still trying to make sense of it, though.”
“Who’s it from? The bunker?”
“Doesn’t say.”
Scott pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose and peered at the small screen the pilot was tapping with a finger. Scott read the series of numbers until they resolved into something sensible: coordinates and accounts.
He weighed the message and who had likely sent it against his need to see Janis. Everything fell toward the latter, of course, but as long as he wore the suit, he needed to act like a Champion. Lowering his broken arm from his chest, he set his jaw.
“Can we return east instead of west?” he asked. “We’re going to need to make a couple of stops.”
53
The sun had begun to set on his Pacific island nation when Khoggi stirred. A member of his staff had found him on his office floor, marinating in his celebratory wine, and alerted the physician. His malady: an intense panic attack. His heart was stable, it turned out. A change of clothes and an injection-administered sedative later, and he had fallen into a restorative sleep.
Now that he was awake, it was time to get his plan back on track.
Khoggi threw his pajama-clad legs over the side of his vast bed and pivoted to a wheelchair that had been placed beside it. His head swam; his limbs trembled. But he had work to do.
“You shouldn’t be up!”
He turned to find Margaret striding into his room through the far door.
XGeneration 7: Dead Hand (XGeneration Series) Page 26