Ability (Omnibus) (22 page)

She pushed herself gently away from him, looking up into his strange gray eyes. Donella blinked twice at that, remembering his eyes a dark green, almost brown the afternoon before. She reached up and wiped away a gob of congealing blood from over his left eye.

“I’ve seen some of them use whatever power they have,” she said, “but never anything like what you did.”

“Yeah,” Garret said, his eyebrows dipping into a frown. “I’ve never done anything like this. I mean, I’ve had to take care of some people before, but I’ve never wiped out this many at once. And never with this kind of power.” His frown turned down to her. “Do you feel anything?”

“A little sick,” she answered.

“No, I mean, anything in your head?”

“Nothing. Maybe the pill you gave me expired.”

“Hmmm. Not likely. But it seems a little suspicious that I suddenly became Shiva and you suddenly don’t feel the white noise in your head. Are you doing the exercise?” She shook her head, having forgotten about the mental trick he’d taught her when he’d unleashed hell on the crowd in the parking lot. “Normally it would be buzzing so loudly that you’d feel compelled to release the pressure you felt in it.”

“Like, get a drill and make some holes?”

“No,” he said with a laugh. “Usually the manifestation of an ability. I was ready when mine came, but I’d…” Garret trailed off. “But most others, theirs usually gets channeled when their brains spin up. It’s probably more dangerous the first day or two after juicing than at any other time. I watched a girl freeze her own arm off, not realizing what she was doing. Right before she died, she told me that she didn’t even know it was happening until it was too late.”

Donella didn’t ask how the girl died, didn’t want to know. A part of her was terrified of Garret, of his ability to lay waste in such a devastating manner. She’d watched him walk through the mass of townsfolk, murdering each of them in a different fashion. More frightening was his seemingly casual attitude about having killed more than thirty humans in less than three minutes. It was as if his eyes immediately blanked out the blood, the bodies, the bits of flesh, the shards of concrete and iron.

Another part of her felt some kind of link with the young man. He wasn’t the first traveler to offer to help her run away from Brewster, and he wasn’t the first to treat her with kindness, like she was a human being instead of a
norm
, a maid, a woman. A black woman.

The link wasn’t physical, but it felt like a rope was somehow tied around her, around her mind, and whenever he moved away from her, she felt almost compelled to follow, as if the rope had become taut. Whenever he approached her, she felt the rope begin to coil around her.

“What do we do now?” she asked, feeling the link grow stronger as she stepped forward and put her arms around his neck.

Garret smiled down at her. “First, we should probably check room one-oh-six and make sure the bed has been made and there are clean towels. Then I guess we should go find this Valin Radek asshole and make him tell us where Yvonne is. Then maybe alert the rest of the citizens of Brewster that their kinfolk had a bit of an accident when they tried to attack the new mayor of their fair little burg.”

CHAPTER 15

North Santa Fe, New Mexico - April 16, 2046

Brian reached over and pulled the sheet up to Michelle’s chin. He leaned over and kissed her one last time before pulling the sheet over her head. He cried for a few minutes, letting his rage and his sadness do battle within him. When he was done, he walked to the window and pulled the heavy curtain back just enough to look outside. The parking lot of the old tourist motel was a wasteland of shattered windows, crumbled concrete, blackened vehicles that still smoldered, and what looked like a lake of blood.

He gritted his teeth. He hadn’t wanted it to end like this. He wanted to tell Derry that he was sorry, he should have listened to her. Derry was long gone, heading to Chicago if she hadn’t paid him back with a lie. Brian thought about Garret immediately after. None of them knew where he had gone, or if he had survived the upheaval in Austin. There were no phone or net communications to try and get in touch with either of them.

A scraping noise made his heart race. He peeled back the curtain an inch again to see if he could see any threats. Brian had no idea how many of them had been waiting for him and Michelle, but it had to have been at least a hundred. He’d shielded Michelle as best as he could but it hadn’t been enough. Brian looked over at the bed and saw that the lower half of the sheet had soaked completely through with blood. All the surgery modules in the world couldn’t have helped Michelle. She’d been torn almost in half. Her scream had made him look back for just a second, long enough for one of the men to get a shot at him with an old rifle. The bullet had entered the meat of his bicep, the pain intense, almost blinding.

The man that shot him ended up like the rest, dead and staring up at the sky. Just like Michelle. Just like probably three quarters of the world. Brian glanced out the window one more time. He let the curtain fall back in place as he made up his mind. He walked back to the bed, kissing her forehead through the sheet one more time before backing up to the door. Brian let his ability channel heat into Michelle’s body. Within seconds her corpse began to smoke, a few seconds later it was on fire. A minute later, nothing but ashes were left in the massive hole that had formed in the melted the plastiform mattress that all cheap old motels seemed to have.

Brian Carter counted to ten and opened the door. He stepped out into the new world, ready to kill the first person that crossed his path.

Epilogue

Fruitland Park, Florida - January 17, 2046

“You better listen up, you fucking monkeys,” Tommy shouted at the crowd cowering below him. “Ya’ll are going to take a branding, or you’ll hang from the overpass.”

The crowd of men, women, and children bucked and surged at the threat of being branded. A teenage boy broke from the group and attempted to run. The boy’s mother screamed at him, a dozen hands holding her back from chasing after her son. She wailed and collapsed seconds later when her youngest was flung into the air, the boom of multiple guns muting the screams of the crowd in the pit. The boy’s body was flung into the air again, this time almost ten meters above their heads, and held there for over a minute while the men surrounding the pit had more target practice.

“That’s the shit that will get you dead!” Tommy screamed at the mass of humans below him.

“Goddammit, Tommy,” Dale Stoner called out to him from his post on the wall, “you can’t teach stupid niggers anything. Ain’t you learned that by now?”

“I can teach ‘em how to bend you over and cornhole you, you fucking faggot,” Tommy raged back at his best friend from high school.

The eruption of laughter all around the pit made the prisoners collapse together into a tight knot. Jamarcus Burke clutched his sister with one hand around her bicep, his other arm wrapped around his mother. Uncle James kept his back to them, hoping to shield them from whatever was coming.

“It’ll be all right,” Jamarcus chanted into his sister’s ear, over and over, hoping his words were true, knowing that he was lying to her.

Leesburg, Florida - January 3, 2046

Jamarcus knew everything was not all right within two days after the new year. Reports on the news and on the net came in haphazardly, shaky holo and video being uploaded wherever there was still power and access. At first Jamarcus couldn’t believe it. He’d spent an entire day watching videos from across the world on his H-Vis, stunned at what he was seeing. He’d been hearing about the drug and the big surprise that was supposed to happen on New Year’s Day, but basketball season had consumed his focus. The Yellow Jackets were on top of the 12A conference with only one loss.

Dazed that he’d been missing out on everything that wasn’t basketball, Algebra, and Cindy Mellon’s chest, he sidelined the news in his H-Vis and searched for “Ability.” Ten minutes later, after rooting through dozens of pages of links that led literally nowhere, entire nodes having gone dark from the upheaval that was only getting worse as the days went on, he found a legitimate download of the formula and the video. He waited a few minutes while he passed both files through security filters, not wanting to take the chance on another scamware infection.

The only item he didn’t have was a bottle of Parson’s CleanTastic. The recipe gave him three alternatives, but two them weren’t available on the east coast, the other a product he’d never heard of. Jamarcus had nearly been tackled by his mother when he’d walked out the door to head to the Publix. She’d cried and demanded that he stay home, that it was too dangerous to go anywhere. He reassured her that he would be back within ten minutes.

He’d missed the mark by almost six hours, a wild evening of being chased, hiding, and being chased again by two different trucks, both full of drunken rednecks, one or more of them capable of some of the things he’d seen in the news videos. He’d never been so scared in his life as when the second truck would drive by his hiding spot, one of the men in the bed of the truck lashing out with some kind of electrical weapon at random spots along the street, his absolute fear the only thing that kept him from obeying the voice in his head that commanded him to reveal himself by walking to the middle of the street.

He hoped his adventure had been worth it as he cooked up a batch of the drug. Two hours after taking a dose, he wondered if he’d screwed up during the cooking process. He didn’t feel anything, but according to the panicked news reports, and the various uploaded holos, he was supposed to be hallucinating. A few discussions that he’d found buried in the noise that was devouring the net assured anyone reading it that the drug was not psychedelic, and had no effects of any kind other than preparing the mind for the module. Jamarcus shrugged, queued up the holo for his H-Vis, and watched it.

Within a few minutes, he knew he’d screwed up somewhere during the cook. Within a few hours, he’d already written the whole affair off as a waste of time, almost his life if the men in the trucks had been able to catch him. As the days went by, and the situation across the world became more chaotic, he hid out in the small house with his mother, sister Kendra, and Uncle James. He discussed with his uncle the possibility of running if things got bad in Leesburg, but Uncle James always asked him where the hell he thought they were going run to.

Within a week, most of Lake County had become a war zone. Jamarcus wondered if it was racial violence, or if it was mainly humans being shitty once they’d acquired some new form of power to make others cower or bow down. Uncle James wouldn’t let him leave the house to find out. His uncle would leave every evening, meeting up with some of the other neighborhood men along North Oakland, and they would disappear into the darkness. He’d sneak back into the house around dawn, loaded with food, cigarettes, weapons, and once with a large bag of marijuana.

Leesburg, Florida - January 16, 2046

The men in trucks rolled slowly down North Oakland Street, bellowing through a loudspeaker mounted in the bed of the lead truck for all persons of “African or Orangutan descent” to report to the curb immediately for inspection. Shots rang out as some of the neighbors refused to walk to their certain doom without a fight. Jamarcus wanted to join in, but his uncle held him back, told him to watch and see why it was a bad idea.

A gout of flame erupted from a young white girl’s hand, coating a house halfway down the block. Jamarcus stared, unbelieving, at what he’d just seen, even though he’d spent hours running and hiding from others with similar abilities, as well as watching holo after holo of similar displays.

A motorcycle parked in Dave Treadwell’s driveway lifted off the ground and rocketed through Dave’s front door, followed by four men, all of them hooting and hollering as they ran in through the smashed door frame. Two minutes later Dave, his wife Arna, and their two young boys were marched out of the house.

When one of the captors began to grope Arna’s chest, Dave snapped, attacking the man. Before he could get a second punch in, he flew backwards, landing awkwardly near the front porch. He tried to rise to his feet, but only made it to his knees before the man he’d punched approached and froze him solid. Arna and the boys screamed and tried to run to him, but the man pulled out a pistol and shot Dave’s frozen chest, shattering his body into thousands of fragments.

Jamarcus’ fear threatened to overwhelm him. The truck moved at a crawl down the street, some residents coming out of their houses in compliance, a lot more either pretending to not be home, or pretending to be heroes by shooting at the aggressors. He watched at least four of the street’s residents fall after being hit by stray bullets, none of them moving once they’d hit the ground. A few others were murdered in one gruesome fashion after another, the whites laughing as if they were throwing the world’s greatest party.

“217, you have thirty seconds to comply,” the loudspeaker blared as the truck rolled slowly by Jamarcus’ house.

Uncle James looked through the front window. “Two of ‘em coming.”

“What do we do?” Jamarcus asked, the panic threatening to consume him.

“You got any magic powers?” his uncle asked. Jamarcus shook his head. “Then we’re gonna do what they say, and pray to the Lord God that whatever happens, we won’t suffer.”