THIRTY-NINE
“Shit.”
Kenji presses his eyes shut like he can’t believe this is happening. “Shit shit shit.” He shifts Warner against his shoulders, wavers between being sensitive and being a soldier and says, “Adam, man, I’m sorry, but we really have to get out of here—”
Adam gets up, blinking back what I can only imagine are a thousand thoughts, memories, worries, hypotheses, and I call his name but it’s like he can’t even hear it. He’s confused, disoriented, and I’m wondering how this man could possibly be his father when Adam told me his dad was dead.
Now is not the time for these conversations.
Something explodes in the distance and the impact rattles the ground, the windows, the doors of this house, and Adam seems to snap back to reality. He jumps forward, grabs my arm, and we’re bolting out the door.
Kenji is in the lead, somehow managing to run despite the weight of Warner’s body, limp, hanging over his shoulder, and he’s shouting at us to stay close behind. I’m spinning, analyzing the chaos around us. The sounds of gunshots are too close too close too close.
“Where are Ian and Emory?” I ask Adam. “Did you get them out?”
“A couple of our guys were fighting not too far from here and managed to commandeer one of the tanks—I got them to carry those two back to Point,” he tells me, shouting so I can hear him. “It was the safest transport possible.”
I’m nodding, gasping for air as we fly through the streets and I’m trying to focus on the sounds around us, trying to figure out who’s winning, trying to figure out if our numbers have been decimated. We round the corner.
You’d think it’d be a massacre.
50 of our people are fighting against 500 of Anderson’s soldiers, who are unloading round after round, shooting at anything that could possibly be a target. Castle and the others are holding their ground, bloody and wounded but fighting back as best they can. Our men and women are armed and storming forward to match the shots of the opposition; others are fighting the only way they know how: one man has his hands to the ground, freezing the earth beneath the soldiers’ feet, causing them to lose balance; another man is darting through the soldiers with such speed he’s nothing but a blur, confusing the men and knocking them down and stealing their guns. I look up and see a woman hiding in a tree, throwing what must be knives or arrows in such rapid succession that the soldiers don’t have a moment to react before they’re hit from above.
Then there’s Castle in the middle of it all, his hands outstretched over his head, collecting a whirlwind of particles, debris, scattered strips of steel and broken branches with nothing more than the coercion of his fingertips. The others have formed a human wall around him, protecting him as he forms a cyclone of such magnitude that even I can see he’s straining to maintain control of it.
Then
he lets go.
The soldiers are shouting, screaming, running back and ducking for cover but most are too slow to escape the reach of so much destruction and they’re down, impaled by shards of glass and stone and wood and broken metal but I know this defense won’t last for long.
Someone has to tell Castle.
Someone has to tell him to go, to get out of here, that Anderson is down and that we have 2 of our hostages and Warner in tow. He has to get our men and women back to Omega Point before the soldiers get smart and someone throws a bomb big enough to destroy everything. Our numbers won’t hold up for much longer and this is the perfect opportunity for them to get safe.
I tell Adam and Kenji what I’m thinking.
“But how?” Kenji shouts above the chaos. “How can we get to him? If we run through there we’re dead! We need some kind of distraction—”
“What?” I yell back.
“A distraction!” he shouts. “We need something to throw off the soldiers long enough for one of us to grab Castle and give him the green light—we don’t have much time—”
Adam is already trying to grab me, he’s already trying to stop me, he’s already begging me not to do what he thinks I’m going to do and I tell him it’s okay. I tell him not to worry. I tell him to get the others to safety and promise him I’m going to be just fine but he reaches for me, he’s pleading with his eyes and I’m so tempted to stay here, right next to him, but I break away. I finally know what I need to do; I’m finally ready to help; I’m finally kind of a little bit sure that maybe this time I might be able to control it and I have to try.
So I stumble back.
I close my eyes.
I let go.
I fall to my knees and press my palm to the ground and feel the power coursing through me, feel it curdling in my blood and mixing with the anger, the passion, the fire inside of me and I think of every time my parents called me a monster, a horrible terrifying mistake and I think of all the nights I sobbed myself to sleep and see all the faces that wanted me dead and then it’s like a slide show of images reeling through my mind, men and women and children, innocent protesters run over in the streets; I see guns and bombs, fire and devastation, so much suffering suffering suffering and I steel myself. I flex my fist. I pull back my arm and
I
s h a t t e r
what’s left of this earth.