A “Chronicles” Story, by Brian C. Mahon
(Author’s Note: This is the first of a series of short stories originally written in the early ‘00’s which were heavily influenced by comic books and Cartoon Network’s Toonami gold. The song that started this one was Stabbing Westward’s “Shame”.)
Several windows open on the monitor. Blue-screened, rolling texts. Zeroes and ones scripting in another. A pair of bony, tight-skinned hands clatter down in machine-like precision. The figure casting the shadow over the screen doesn’t move, his mind is locked on the windows. His fingers are his magic-makers.
A light brightens the room, then fades with the shut of a door. Thin-soled footsteps scuffle their way closer to the computer, and a pair of lips leans beside the shadow-makers face.
“Have we made any progress yet?”
“Almost there. Go away. Almost there.”
“How much longer can I expect it to take?”
“Another half hour. I think I’ve got it, but there…” A twitch of the head to the upper right corner. A small window with a programmed bot screening all incoming signals. “They got an automatic tracker. Good. But bad.”
“Ah-huh. Well. I’ll be back in thirty minutes then, alright?”
“Whatever. Go away.”
The light breaks into the room again, briefly as before, and in the 4’x15’ hole in the wall, the figure before the monitor starts to rock silently before the monitor, humming to himself “Flight of the Valkyries.” Beneath his breath, to the keyboard alone, he seeps, “Almost there…”
Elsewhere, several hundred miles westward, in a small café sits Samuel, a mocha Frappuccino cupped in both hands. Across from him, legs crossed and pointed away from him, is Anne, his high school and, thus far, college girlfriend, leaned up against the side of the windowsill. He stares into the chocolate slush with empty eyes and a befuddled, but otherwise curiously humorous twist of an expression. She darts another look at him, frowns, and looks again down the length of the I, avoiding all of the eight eyes facing her direction. Samuel shrugs again and sighs into his mocha. He stirs the straw sullenly and, finally, breaks the ice.
“Look, I said I’m sorry already. Can we just leave it at that? I’m sorry, I had to run, and there’s nothing I could’ve changed about it.”
She shrugs and turns her hips slightly towards him. Blue, knee length canvas skirt, a gray long-sleeve top, and a pair of clear, blunt eyes that could either delight him or run him through with a gaze. Leaning in, she looks into his eyes and purses her lips.
“You promised me, Sam. Promised. Mr. ‘I always keep my word!’ here. I’m not that angry that you stood me up or whatever, but you kept saying all week long how we were going to go out last night for once, and you just duck out on me without a reason!”
“I told you, I got a call from the lab, and they needed me to come in to figure out what was wrong with some of the equipment.”
“And it took you three hours! Why didn’t you call me?”
“’Cause, you know me, I keep thinking I’ll be done in five minutes, then another five minutes, ‘nother five, so on, so forth, and next thing I know it’s already midnight! I just didn’t know!”
“Whatever. Come on, it’s almost one, I need to get back to the office.”
Samuel rattles the silvery Fossil watch and checks the time. 12:53, in fact.
“Alright, yeah. Let’s get goin’ then.”
He stands, sliding the chair in a painful scratch against the tile of the I. He winces, and grabs his coat from the back of the seat. Outside, the Indiana winds shear gusts of snow across the left flank of his car at, what he guesses to be, twenty miles per hour. Or knots. He’d forgotten what the difference was between a knot and miles-per-hour, though it doesn’t seem to matter by this point. Twenty is twenty, and that means whatever side of his face is in its path will be frozen by the time he gets to shutting the car door on the squalor.
“Bah.. ready?” Anne was giving the white-washed scene the same grim look he had. She only nods and tucks her hands into her overcoat pockets, then follows his dash into the cold.
“Goood Chrrist! This some cold shit!” Samuel slips off the rise of the sidewalk and runs a hand quickly over the hood of the Toyota Celica, knocking snow off in his stride. Key in hand, he jams it into the door, turns, unlocks, opens for Anne who closes it as he runs around the front of the sleek black car. His glasses are poor defenses against the snow flying at him, and, as he throws his door open and jumps in, he decides to make it known how poor of a defense his glasses are. Growling, Samuel pulls the ski cap off and curses, followed with, “I swear! You’d think that having a pair of lenses directly in front of your freakin’ eyes would keep the snow out, but no! They direct them in, like ‘Come on in guys, pupil’s this way.’!” While wiping the glasses with the bottom of the cotton sweatshirt peaking from beneath his jacket, Samuel feels a kiss on his cheek. Anne smiles with as much sympathy as one can muster after a rant over snow and glasses. She pats his head and places the keys into the ignition for him.
“Honey?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to be late.”
“Oh, right, right, sorry.”
The rear-wheel drive car struggles initially in finding enough traction to pull him up the small incline of the parking lot. He closes his eyes and eases off the gas. In his mind, he pictures the front of the hood, as if he were to pop it open, and imagines placing his hands on it. He steps lightly on the gas pedal.
“Are you praying there or what?”
Samuel ignores the comment, trying to concentrate. In his mind, his hands are on the hood. In reality, he exerts some pressure on the steering wheel. He feels his inner energies reacting, pushing on the front grill of the car. He slips his left hand away from the wheel and opens his eyes. Behind the backs of his retinas, he sees himself pushing on the car. Samuel in the driver’s seat shifts and turns to make sure no one’s coming, and, with a combined jolt of the gas and imagined thrust of his arms, the car finds its momentum and pulls out of the spot, reverses right, and he pulls around to the street exit. So, she’ll be late. Oh well. It was another chance, at least, to practice projected telekinesis in a nice domestic scene. Things like that gave a nice normalcy to life. Being twenty-three wasn’t so bad. Being a college senior a few weeks shy of Christmas vacation wasn’t bad either. But, having to pretend as though he could care less about the demonic attacks and “alien” sightings across the globe, now that was tough. Besides survivors and other operatives, no one has seen the truth behind those attacks, no one goes to sleep with images of a butcher’s worst nightmares playing in the back of their mind. Not to mention being forced to dodge an all-too-mobile media while on the job, as well as pretending that its take on the NSA’s “incompetence” means nothing to him? He still hasn’t gotten used to any aspect of his change, his “emergence”. Even after a year and nine months since it all started. His parents know his secret. They had to. He wanted them to. The idea of being capable of crafting a portal from his house just outside campus in South Bend, Indiana back to Fort Lauderdale just to grab some of mom’s ribs, now, that was worth changing their whole outlook on him. Anne doesn’t know. Looking at her now, as she watches the other cars snailing their way with him down US-23, he still can’t figure a way to tell her the truth. Maybe she’ll never know, and that’ll be fine by him, at least.
“Ah well.”
“Huh?” She moves her green eyes toward him. “’Ah well’ what?”
“Eh? Oh, nothing, nothing. Just thinking is all.”
“About what?”
“Err… shit, about how I’m gonna cut this guy off if he doesn’t let me in that lane. We’re just about at the clinic.”
She nods and continues watching the cars, now tapping the inside of her window. Anxious is the word. Samuel couldn’t remember it earlier. She looks anxious.
He takes to the left turn lane and pulls out into the intersection, cycling his attention between the oncoming traffic and the green light above. This was the end of her first week as an intern at the local veterinarian’s office, and, due to it being a Saturday, she would be one of two people there to clean, feed, and watch over the patients.
A Chevy Astro goes by, the light above goes yellow, and Samuel decides to use the moment and get them out of the way of the soon-in-coming cross-traffic. Of course, the ice on the road delays this idea, and it takes them an embarrassing pair of minutes to make the left turn across two lanes. A fifty-meter drive from there, a right turn, and he pulls in front of the modestly built, beige colored office. Shifting it to park, he looks at her.
“Gonna get another ride from Cindy?”
“Probably. I’ll want to swing by the apartment anyway to wash up, change clothes. I’ll call you when I get in, ok?”
“Sounds good.”
And she gives him a hug around the neck, and a short, but sweetly felt, peck on the lips.
“Alright, see you later tonight!”
“’Til later, hon.”
He stayed until he saw her make it into the office doorway and wave goodbye. Satisfied, he pulled back out to the street that had taken so long for him to claim. Quarrel and snow notwithstanding, it had been a rather calm day. The night before had him in a firefight with some spell-flinging ogres, or trolls, whatever they were. Normalcy and tranquility, no matter the form, was always a good and much appreciated thing.
“Well?”
“I got it. Right here. Right here, I got it. Is that all?”
The figure before the monitor doesn’t turn around, doesn’t look up to the executive officer of Lancelus Weapons Developers’ secret ops branch. Derek Coleman, said executive, takes the screen print-out away from the gentle fingertips.
“Good work, Randall. That’s all we need of you for today. You can go home if you want.”
“Not yet. I want to stay here. I want to see how the operation goes.”
“You know where the control room is.”
“Yes.” He starts to rock in his seat again, humming Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King”.
“And you’re sure this address is correct? That this Samuel Hidalgo is the creature working for the NSA?”
The humming pauses. “Double-checked. Matched school absences to fight records in their databanks. Fits. To the T.” Humming continues.
“Alright. Again, good job. Maybe if we can stop this freak, we can put matters back into human hands, hands we can trust. Maybe with more luck, those hands will be carrying our weapons. That, Randall, is only a bonus as far as I’m concerned.”
“I don’t care. I only want to see how long it lasts.”
Derek can feel his fist tightening at the implication, but he lets it go. People like Randall, he always told himself, had to sneer at the world; they’ve nothing else going for them, unless being the tools for people like Derek suddenly became a good thing.
Randall, from his chair, sees the disapproving frown on his supervisor’s face. He gives a largely over-expressive shrug and starts clicking open and close all sorts of programs that he knew Derek could never wrap his militant little mind around. People like Derek, Randall knew, had to feel superior over people like him. People like Randall could wipe out Derek’s bank account within the next five minutes, even with him watching. At least for the next twenty-one days, when Y2K hits.
Back in the southeast room of his modest three-room house (a gift from the NSA to allow him both privacy and anonymity), Samuel sits, blankly spinning from side to side in his chair while blasting Rammstein’s “Engel” from his computer speakers. Every now and then he leans over to type something to a friend of his through Instant Messenger, a war-time buddy of his, in a manner of speaking, Daniel. Samuel became acquainted with him in some role-playing chatroom a couple years before, and now, both having forsaken that past time, moved on, warring against computer-driven enemies online.
ChiefJema: Yo man, got time for a short tour?
XxHadesxX: Aight. Give me a few, I need food.
The idea of food now presented to Samuel elicits not hunger but thirst. He slaps his thighs and moves downstairs for a moment, feeling the need for a mug of beer before the game. As he opens the fridge to a sparse array of fruit juices and deli meats, the phone rings. He takes a bottle of his finest beer out and twists it open, raising a hand to the cordless phone and beckoning it forth. It rises out of the base and swiftly finds its way into his waiting palm.
“Hello?”
“Hey you, I’ll be over your place in about ten minutes.”
“Oh? Oh, ok,” he sputtered. “ Um, alright.”
“What’s with the ‘oh, oh’’s? You sound disappointed!”
“Eh? Oh, it’s nothing, nothing. So you’ll be over in a few?”
“Yup. See you soon, sweets!”
“Bye!”
Soon as he hangs up, he sets the receiver down on the counter, draws a long sip of beer and sighs. “Well, there goes warring for the night.” And he stalks back to his room, turning off the kitchen light behind him.
ChiefJema: Sorry man, I gotta take that back. The girlfriend’s gonna be here in a couple minutes, we’ll probably head out for dinner.
XxHadesxX: No worries. I got “More Human Than Human” blasting. I’ll get enough revenge for the two of us.
ChiefJema: Awesome. Slay ’em all!
XxHadesxX: Indeed..
Typing up an away message, Samuel pushes himself away from his desk, grabs his hat from the top of the cabinets hanging over the 17” monitor, and removes himself to the main room, leaving his beer behind. There he throws himself onto the leather, three-seated couch, and grabs the TV remote control from his glass coffee table. Indeed, the NSA wanted his furnishings to be accommodating enough to keep their newest, prized agent happy.
He flipped the TV on, scanned through the dial to see what sort of new garbage the main networks had. Normally, TV had nothing of interest for him. There were only a few channels Samuel ever watched, and the all-the-time, no-matter-what cable news stations comprised half of them. The media seemed to be just as effective at warning him of Demonhood strikes as the NSA was. Sometimes even more effective, as they had more people stationed across the States and the world than the Agency. All it took was one local news station to get a call, and what was once being televised to a town suddenly becomes national news.
But there’s nothing. Some money report that doesn’t concern Samuel at all. He changes the channel again, and again, flipping through the cable stations relentlessly. It’s all that damn multi-tasking on the computer that shattered his attention span, he’s sure of it. For fun, he sets the remote down and starts trying to flip the channels rapidly with the Power. Focusing on the channel down button, he closes an eye and starts jabbing at the air swiftly with his right hand. He manages to succeed but also winds up increasing the volume with every feigned press. That and it seemed two of every three actually connected, given the choppy stream of changing programs.
Ding-dong.
No time to correct his accuracy tonight, it seems. He lazily rolls of the couch and skims around the edge of the coffee table to get the door. Anne, of course.
“Phat. Snow’s died off out there, huh?”
She walks inside and shudders, shutting the door behind her with a platform heel. He helps her with her coat and hangs it on the hat rack off to the side. And, to his surprise, she throws her arms around him, kisses him fully on his lips, then trails her mouth to the side of his neck, and up to his ear, whispering, “Ignore any lab calls tonight, and you get a special treat.”
“Wh-hmm…” Samuel slides his hands down her back, and, snickering, pinches her buttocks. “I’ll be damned! You are real!”
“Ass!” Laughing, she pushes him away and brushes past him, sneaking a slap on Samuel’s rear in the process. She sits down on the couch, reclining against the armrest furthest from him, and stares at him dead in the eyes. Her chin is tucked down, looking up towards him with a seriousness drawn on her face, turned barely by a small raise in the corner of her lips. She motions him over with a finger.
“Uh, no, seriously, what’s gotten into you?” He casually starts moving forward. “Before you seemed pretty upset still, and now this?”
A small, many-folded piece of paper is slipped from the right pocket of her pants.
“I found one of your little letters from when we started going out. Here. Take a look.” She flicks it at him, and he catches it, now standing before her. He looks at the date, scans the first few lines.
“Ohhh, oh. This one. Heh, jeez, I still wonder what’d gotten into me when I wrote this.” He hands it back to her and sits down. Anne lays her head against his shoulder and drops a hand in his lap.
“Yeah, that one, doofus, and it was probably thinking of getting into something else. Now, dinner first, or dessert?” A mischievous smile plays across her face, and she bites on her lower lip as she gives his thigh a pinch.
“Oooh, you’re baad! Just one sec, let me go get the icing, hm?”
“Good.” She nods in most solemn agreement. “And be quick!”
Samuel takes a bow and makes a crisp turn-about, clicking the heels of his sneakers. Lively steps skip down the plush navy blue carpet, to change to soft paddings against linoleum in the kitchen. Again, he opens the fridge and scans its insides. No whipped cream. He checks the inside of the door. Still none.
“Bah!” Shrugging, he kicks the door closed and walks over to the white-paneled cupboard by the sink. Through the small pane of glass over the faucets, he can see the sky had finally matured to its dull violet, the same color of nightmare worlds he’d seen in dreams. Well, rather, those skies were always brown. Or black, starless. Though they never had the sort of imperious looking pink clouds that floated by in such slow regale that tonight did.
“Sweeets?”
“Huh?” He shakes his head and recollects himself. “Be there in a sec!” Samuel shuffles to his right to grab the measuring cup from the cupboard, seeing how his fledgling apple seedling needs water. It is as he’s reaching above, looking into the dark chambers of dish and glassware, that he sees in the corner of his eye a quick shadow dart past the low shrubbery that lines the neighbor’s white picket fence. Too big for a dog, he thinks while leaning over the sink. But I’m not getting any feeling from it. Eh, probably just jumpy from last night.
And it passes, crossing his mind no more than that. The sound of a helicopter grows louder, but Samuel pays it no mind. He pours out a quarter cup of water and runs it around the perimeter of the sapling’s pot. The lights in the kitchen flicker and dim. Samuel frowns. He moves towards the main room in cautious steps, glancing up at the kitchen lights, then to the studio lamp by the TV as soon as he crosses the room’s threshold. His mouth opens to say something to Anne, and that’s when the power cuts.
“The fuck is this?” Samuel turns about and looks out the kitchen’s window, sees the illuminated side of the beige brick neighbor’s house. They shared the same power line, as did the rest of the street. “Anne? Stand up.”
The young, college student side of him is outraged, the agent still in training is rapidly trying to discern what the source of the outage could be. He counts to himself, “Five… four… three… two… one…” The generator within the basement kicks in, bringing life back to the house. An NSA installment, thank God.
Hairs on the back of his neck and arms rise, he feels his tendons tightening, ready to spring. His breath shortens. Every instinct tells him that now is a good time to leave, to get her out of there. Looking to Anne, he squeezes her shoulders and runs over to the front door, flicks down the light switch, turning the room dark.
“Sam, what the hell is going on?” In the leftover glow from the kitchen, she appears dark, tall and rightly annoyed, but as featureless as a shade.
“Shh! Just, quiet. Let me listen.”
His arm around her shoulders, Samuel pulls her down with him to a crouch. He drops to his elbows and whisks a hand beneath the seat of the couch, feeling, feeling, and finding. Withdrawn is a 9mm Beretta.
“Samuel!”
At that moment, the front window splinters apart in thousands of shards. Above their heads, Anne and Samuel feel the sharp gusts of air from automatic gunfire. Rapid succession of sound like a rubber mallet beating a pillow. Silencers, Samuel figures.
###
In a room surrounded on three sides with computers, TVs, maps displayed on monitors and technicians chatting over headphones, Derek Coleman paces in satisfaction due to his communications officer’s latest news: “Sir, the team has just penetrated the target’s house.”
“Good.”
###
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Points of entry. Front window, door, garage to his right — open, doorless frame behind them, shit. Samuel always locked the kitchen door, but if this is some damned military operation against him, a cheap deadbolt isn’t going to keep them out. Anyone could come in through there and have a gun on his head while the soldiers in front kept a suppressive fire.
Thuk!
A bullet tears a hole through the back of the seat, right past Samuel’s temple. Anne is screaming, her nails gripping into and nearly drawing blood from his resilient skin.
“Anne! Listen to me, Anne!” She inclines her head towards him, shivering, crying, barely able to see him through her tears. He grabs her shoulder and shoves her down flat against the ground, unable to deal with calming her down at the moment. “Stay down, hear?!!” With that, he throws his left arm high and a translucently gold shield appears, a 2’x4’ defense. Samuel hops to a more erect crouch, pulls the shield in front of him, and takes a shooter’s stance behind it, finally clearing his vision of the couch. Three men in the front window, one standing in the door, a helicopter spotlight pans the driveway.
All four open immediate fire on Samuel as soon as they finally get a view of him. Bullets create fading craters across the face of his shield but are incapable of piercing through. Anne sees it, her screaming dies on her tongue. Samuel feels like he’s the subject of a jackhammer, the impacts from the relentless automatic fire rattling his forearm with every hit. He brings the Beretta up to his line of sight, raising the barrel to the ceiling. Two of the three in the window roll around the sides for cover, the middle one ducks only.
Then something crashes onto linoleum behind him.
“FUCK!” Samuel bares his teeth and stands to his full height, pumping a few scattered rounds towards the window, keeping himself covered with the shield. He misses, but they aren’t his concern. He runs into the open archway to the kitchen, drops the pistol to the carpet, and lobs a quickly formed energy grenade in front of the oven, where two operatives in full body tactical armor stand with automatic pistols. As he throws the grenade, he spins around on a heel to face the front side again. Guns are raised. The explosion from the kitchen knocks his feet out from under him. Falling, he brings his shield arm in front of his face and falls flat on his chest just in time to let a spray of bullets fly overhead. An automatic pistol clatters by his face from behind, and he glances quickly over his shoulder to check the situation from the kitchen: soldiers down. His left hand and arm are sweating from the shield’s heat, his right hand has a corpse’s grip on the Beretta. Sounds of glass being ground into carpet returns his eyes to the front. Samuel sweeps his gun from by his waist along the carpet fibers, lodging it to a point just below a slightly raised shield’s edge and shoots the one in the doorway three times up his uncovered leg. The soldier drops, clutching his thigh. The hollow points effectively cripple him for life.
Two more pop into the front entrance’s frame. The three in the window have entered the house already. Anne is still on her stomach just ten feet away from him. On the other side of her is the hallway that leads to the garage. It’s the only means of escape.
He pushes himself up to his knees with a single, strong thrust, raising his arms simultaneously to spray the foreground with cutting beams of raw energy. The power resonates down his forearms to his palms, building into orbs which then explode palm-wide rays that gut through the inside of the front wall, through the brick, and he stands, dashes the ten feet to Anne, dropping again to slide on his knees to her, while having cut through the north face of his house and halving anyone having been standing tall before him.
Samuel grabs her. “Anne! C’mon, we gotta get out of here!”
She tries to wrench out of his grip, but his hands are vices. Samuel is no longer pretending with her; being three-times stronger than he was before the emergence makes him more than she can break free from. He doesn’t wait for her to answer him. Pulling her up, he sees a floodlight scan again the front lawn, which illuminates a pair of black vans parked outside. Dragging her to her feet and throwing his arm around her waist, he fires from the palm of his right hand four charged blasts to the vans, then turns and hurries to the garage door.
He can feel her beating on his arm. He can’t blame her. Not everyday you learn your long-time boyfriend is that guy you see on CNN now and then impaling otherwordly creatures. He lied to her, countless times.
Putting his hand on the brass, tarnished knob, he looks into her eyes. Fearful, obviously fearful, blood-shot, confused, angry, and wanting to hate him. He can’t tell if it’s want or the real thing. Unwilling to take the chance of putting her in harm’s way, he pushes her against the hall, out of sight from the garage’s interior, and opens the door slightly. His fingers creep slowly through the crack and flick a switch on. The overhead light flickers to life, and he kicks the door open, a gold flash erupting to produce a full-body front shield. The garage, small, cramped with the Celica parked within, shows no one. Overhead mirrored panels placed around the attic entrance and light confirm the lack of danger.
Inside the blue, white-topped cooler to the right of the single step leading to the garage is a .357 Magnum that Samuel thought would be nice to keep around. He glances at the cooler and turns for Anne, grabbing her by the wrist again and pulling her toward the car. He opens the door and ushers her inside. She doesn’t question, she doesn’t resist. He hopes she’s not so much trying to accept it all at once, at least realizing that this is the situation and it must be dealt with. With a raise of an upturned hand, he mentally forces the cooler lid to open, the gun to rise from within and fly toward his hand. Taking wide strides around the back of the car, he gestures with his other hand that the lock open, and, physically this time, grabs the handle and hops into the ashen bucket seat.
Above the steering wheel, from behind the visor, falls the remote garage door opener. Samuel runs his thumb pensively over the button, then looks to Anne. Her face is devoid of all expression and emotion, blank eyes staring into the glove compartment. He places a warm hand on her icy arm.
“Look, honey, we’re going to get out of here. I know you’re scared, but I don’t know what the fuck’s going on myself. There’s a lot, a lot of things I never told you. Now isn’t the time though. Just stick with me tonight, just one more night, ok?”
He watches her. Her teeth clench and grind, the muscles of her ivory-skinned jaws tightening. His improved reflexes catch it in time, but he refuses; Anne crosses his left cheek with a stinging, full-handed slap. The fast recoil drags her nails along his cheek and raise red lines in his skin. Tears trickle all-too-slowly down, but her eyes are now fierce.
“You lied and you lied and now you’re going to get me killed!”
He would’ve loved to reply, but she was right. No use in arguing the truth. “Cover your ears, Anne.” He kicks the engine to life, jams his seatbelt into its buckle, and turns with Magnum in hand to stare out the Celica’s back window. The hammer’s pulled back, and a slug goes screaming through the glass, through the garage door. Anne yells “Shit!”, and Samuel drops the gun into the cup-holder between them. The First thrusts his hand out again, a gold glow fills the car and tints the darker corners of the garage.
From the video-feed broadcasted from the helicopter, Mr. Coleman and Randall see the beige-paneled garage door violently tear apart from its inside, and a black car squeal out into the street, rear-ending one of their squad vans, and racing out. Of team one, five were dead, one injured, one on the radio. Teams two and three are now in pursuit. Team two is following in the van, three in the helicopter. Teams four and five had just rolled out to meet the others, while their eye in the sky feeds Mr. Coleman and squad leaders directions on their target. Derek Coleman grinds his left fist while watching the moving blips on the screen. With luck, four and five will cut off the mutant’s escape route. Then he’ll be trapped and destroyed. Derek takes a shuddering, deep breath, and sighs it out. He continues squeezing his fist uneasily. Meanwhile, Randall dips a fingertip into a cold cup of black coffee, lifts his finger to let a droplet return to its mother mocha, then returns said finger to lazily stir it around.
Several rounds bite through the air and puncture through the front grill of the pursuing van. Samuel hands Anne the Uzi pistol and takes a quick scan of the road: the Thunderbird in front them pulled aside, the left lane was clear now too. Gritting teeth, he tugs sharply on the wheel, spinning the front wheels left. The roads are still iced over, and though at first the Goodyears bite into the street, immediately they relinquish into an uncontrolled spin, the Celica pulling two hundred seventy degrees into oncoming traffic. The van’s brake lights flash on and off, it making ridiculous jumps down the right lane before veering left to pull behind and ram their prey. Samuel jams his foot uselessly on the gas, gasps at seeing headlights turning about in the sideview mirror, and orders, “Anne! Glove compartment, under maps, grab the GPS device!”
His right hand is cast into the space between their two seats, fingers outstretching, a yellow wall flashing over the rear bumper.
“What? This?”
As the source for the shield, it’s him that feels the van crash against the barrier, shoving his ribs roughly into the bottom of the wheel.
“No, keep looking, it’s in there!” He croaks through the pain.
She’s focused on finding the tracker and is completely unaware of the other magics that Samuel is using. Which, by his account, the less she sees, the better.
The sliding door of the van kicks open, and four soldiers jump out, two armed with M-16 assault rifles, one carrying a long, shotgun looking weapon with a flame lit at its front.
“Oh shit…”
“I found it!”
“Hit the goddamn red button!” Just as soon as he yells that, fire spews over the top edge of his shield and coats the roof of the car. The open back window allows some of the flame in, heating them unnaturally in the dead winter, and causing various newspapers tucked behind the back seat to catch.
The other device in Anne’s hand rings. She’s shrieking, Samuel’s eyes widen and light with embers of power. His patience with the situation is ending.
Kicking his door open, Samuel rolls out into a crouch. A sky blue-and-white early 80’s Bronco, replete with rust, frantically maneuvers to avoid the First. Samuel backhands it with a gold-covered fist to knock it away from nicking him. Bullets deafen him and bounce off his chest. Snow and gunfire cover the full-front shield. The fire-wielder bears around, the two gunners in front of him taking single strides backwards to get out of the way. But Samuel remembers there being four — where the hell did he go?
He switches to thinking of his left hand as the shield’s source, freeing up his thoughts to allow his right to become his offense. The flame-wielder’s hand twitches; Samuel jumps immediately from his crouch. Fire consumes the ground where he once stood, follows Samuel’s path. But when the toes of the First’s shoes hit the trunk of the car, a dagger shaped projectile flies from his open hand and pierces coldly through the soldier’s head, above the right eyebrow and out near the base of the skull, leaving a razor cut into the concrete.
Before the others can react, he’s swung his right arm around, an ethereal blade shattering sound as it forms mid-arc: it slices through the barrels of the M-16’s, the bare tip narrowly missing the necks of the now-dodging soldiers. Leaping off, he brings his left knee up and swings about, placing his right shin across the closer foe’s lower jaw in a hard kick. The soldier falls, Samuel with him, and the First touches ground with a knee lodged in the man’s nose. From there he lurches forward, taking a lineman’s stance, and pushes off with a sudden thrust of his inhumanly powerful legs. The third man lets his useless rifle hang limply from his finger. His eyes tremble staring into the charging lights of Samuel’s. They don’t see for much longer; a tackle and a right hook later, he’s knocked out cold.
Samuel turns to the van and places a foot on its bumper, presses down and feels the front shocks compressing. The driver, he notices now, is talking on a radio. A red light is flashing on the dashboard, and coming around the side, is the fourth man; he wields a camera. Samuel turns his attention to the driver after firing a small explosive into the camera lens. The flashing light reflects off a black case and off a small antenna. He leans forward to peer further in. Movement from the driver.
“Damnit,” he mutters and kicks away from the vehicle not a second before it hits reverse and squeals steam from too many unused RPM grinding into the ice.
It starts to pull away, but Samuel doesn’t notice, something else has come to mind. “Anne!” He runs around to the passenger side of his car and throws the door open, glances around frantically. The seat is empty. Glove-compartment is hanging open, GPS and cell phone gone, as well as the Uzi. The Magnum is still tucked in the small slip between his seat and the gearshift.
Then a familiar voice calls his name and shudders the night.
He pulls his head out of the car and swivels his neck back and forth in search of her. But something flashes against the woods pushed twenty meters back from the road’s shoulder. Blue, red, white. It illuminates a stiff, female form standing before a tree. He runs toward her, still the colors and the lights carrying no meaning for him. Then a different voice from behind barks in a Midwestern accent,
“Stop right there! Don’t take another step!”
Samuel spins on a heel and stares wide-eyed at the state trooper approaching him. “Good Christ, those guys’re gone,” whispered beneath his breath. He could stay and explain it, or he could run. Three downed soldiers in full tactical assault gear, one bleeding from the skull, and Anne likely holding an illegally converted fully automatic pistol. Sure, the NSA could make the whole incident disappear, but his cover would be blown. The local newspaper would get a hold of this, so would the local news station. Broadcast further, questions would be asked, he’d be locked away. And how could he explain nightly disappearances from his cell whenever another Demonhood attack occurred? How would the NSA deal with it?
He shrugs plaintively at the officer and runs.
“Hold it right there or I start firin’!”
Samuel shuts his eyes for a moment to imagine a shield appearing to cover his backside, and, in opening them, the shield appears. He sees Anne talking on the phone. Or trying to. Now close enough to put a hand on her arm, he notices that she’s crying again, unable to talk really. He takes the phone from her hand and pulls her into the tree line, sprinting now, with yells coming from behind.
Raising the phone to his lips, Samuel sputters, “Rick? Colonel?”
“Jesus, Sam! What the hell is going on over there?”
A shot is fired from behind, bites into the bark of a nearby tree.
“I don’t fucking know Rick! Got my coordinates from the GPS?”
“Yes, we do. We’re watching you.”
“Good, send over a goddamn cleaning crew over here, now! I got a fuckin’ hit-squad on my ass and the local cops!” A loud, rhythmic lapping is heard above, and the trees above wave the tips of leafless limbs in tune to the beat of the helicopter blades above. “They got a helicopter dogging me, Rick, I need you guys to intercept whatever it’s sending!” On the other end of the line, Richard Bonnefeld snaps his fingers to a young female agent, telling her to get their men stationed out there to intercept transmissions. He returns to addressing Samuel.
“Sam, we’re getting Edward’s team on it right now, just hang tight, and don’t do anything to jeopardize the situation, ok?”
“Fuck that, I got local law shooting at me!” Said as the bottom of Anne’s right platform heel clutches at a tall root, tripping her and nearly toppling him as well. Still holding onto her, Samuel’s reflexes shoot his right hand down to catch himself before hitting the snow-covered floor. The phone is crushed between his palm and a jagged, fist-sized rock.
Hearing the crunch of the plastic case, he slides his foot beneath him and pushes up, throwing the phone hastily aside. He takes Anne by the arm and below the armpit and lifts her up, quickly running his eyes over and along her to check for injuries; even in the dark, his eyes are adept.
“You ok?”
She nods. But there’s no time. Over her shoulder, he can see the beam of the trooper’s flashlight, he’s running for them. Further behind him, through the barren bodies of the trees, two pairs of headlights turn and create shadows in the small woods. Samuel can hear a grumbled, “The hell is that?” Cursing, he ducks his shoulder down and pulls her arm around his neck, wraps a hand about her waist, and lifts her up and over his shoulder like she weighed no more than a 40lb. bag. But being more in the range of 140 and 5’10”, she is surprised in how easily Samuel bounds off carrying her.
Machine-gun fire follows an authoritative and accented “This is county jurisdiction, get out of here!” Without looking, Samuel knows that the hit team’s reinforcements had arrived. His legs keep pumping, taking him deeper into the woods. Greedy fingers of branches and twigs catch his shirt and pants, slap against the lenses of his glasses, and poke into his stomach. The trees and underbrush grow thicker with every few strides, and soon he finds himself running less and hard-footed stomping more. Carrying her becomes more burdensome as the lower tree limbs close the gaps between each other, forcing him to sidestep them uncomfortably. At one crossing, the many fingered limbs hooked beneath his shirt and clawed at the skin of his belly. He stepped backwards into the solid spiked tip of another, and in his rush, caught himself in the lower spine such that the suddenness and surprise make the pain increase. Crying “Damnit!”, he lowers Anne back down and snaps the six-inch-thick branch off with a palm strike at its middle.
Twigs and brush snap and rustle from behind. Samuel casts his eyes in their direction and sees eight or nine shadowed figures approaching. He must’ve been too hindered, Samuel hadn’t realized they’d gotten so close. “Anne, go! Go!”
A dark-tinted red dot sweeps across the sides of trees in front of him, followed by interrupted shots. Samuel, watching Anne’s progress, pauses now and then in his advance to turn around and unleash rapid-fire daggers in the direction of his pursuers; but no cries of pain every accompany. He continues running.
Rubbing his palms together, Samuel creates a small, white orb and throws it out in front of him. It speeds ahead, lighting everything it passes by. Hopping onto a fallen log and leaping off that through a clear spot, Samuel lands at Anne’s heels, who turns in fright at the sound. A weak, reassuring smile is on his lips. Wordlessly, he points at the ball of light which he has commanded to a stop. It sits hovering in the center of a clearing, probably fifty feet or so on all sides. His smile widens and for once he sees some relief in her eyes. Though, the joy dies on his face, his eyes settling in a cold glare. The clearing may look like a way out to her, and it was, to her. For him it would be the final stand to end this.
The footsteps are coming closer, and a bullet grazes by him, cutting the skin of his right tricep. It forces a growl from him, but he wasn’t its mark. Anne staggers forward with an agonized cry, and he can see drops fly from above her left scapula.
“Oh God, Jesus no!” His feet cast him forward faster and he catches her before she can fall over. The bullet cleaved through part of connective muscle between the neck and shoulder.
From behind: “Sir, we hit one!”
From Anne is a whimper. They can’t stay there. He leads her on the final ten meters to the clearing, trying to push her along, but not so hard to aggravate the pain. Just eight more meters.
He turns and throws a baseball sized explosive orb.
Five more meters.
The helicopter’s spotlight is centered on the clearing.
One more meter…
A pair of ropes roll down from above.
In the clearing, Samuel skids to a halt, looks up and towards the pursuing teams. Rustling comes from another direction now, several figures bearing laser scopes coming now into the open. Samuel holds onto Anne tightly, erecting a shield around them just as the eight who had been following them emerge.
Kissing her softly on the edge of her lips, he whispers in her ear, “Whatever happens with us after this, even though I’ve lied too much, I did it because I didn’t want you to worry, to be bothered with this.” Gunfire splashes and ripples against the defense field. He puts a glowing hand over her wound, a warm light bathing it. “I just want you to know that two things were always the truth and will never change: I love you, and I never wanted you to be hurt.”
Removing his hand, he steps back, widening the shield around them with his movement. “Maybe I’ll see you later…”
A golden light erupts from below her feet. Yellow and amber bands of light play across the swirling colors of a portal — the portal that she falls through.
In the Office of Paranormal Defense, Richard Bonnefeld drops his cup of coffee in surprise, splattering his neatly polished brown loafers with an exclamation of “Holy shit on a stick!” Falling from six-feet high, through some sun-colored horizontal portal is a girl, bleeding. She has in her tightly closed hand one of their GPS units. The screen above him suddenly shows the red blip that was once Samuel to be missing entirely from the region.
Richard doesn’t need a second glance. He didn’t think Samuel was capable of it; she couldn’t be his Anne. It doesn’t matter for the moment. He bellows to the men in the conference room next door, “Get me some medical staff here, NOW! We got injured!”
Back at Lancelus’ operations room, Derek sits beside Randall and points at the monitor. “What do you suppose that sudden static was, Randall? Since we’ve had none whatsoever?”
The computer technician moans in a high-pitched, ratty voice and takes a sip of his coffee. “Probably the observation team’s signal got hacked. NSA’s watching now.”
###
“Colonel!” An excited youth in a blue button-down shirt rushes around the two paramedics and into the conference room. “We’re getting a transmission from our boys out in Indiana. They’re broadcasting some ambush on Samuel!”
“Good. We’ll see what he can do with his back against the wall.”
###
In the clearing, seventeen armed men have the First surrounded. They carry an assortment of automatic weapons armed with grenade launchers, flamethrowers, and smaller arms. Samuel bares his teeth to them and hunches down into a predatory attack stance.
“Assholes can’t leave me alone. Assault me at my house, shoot at my fiancé! You’re all gonna die, hear me? You’re all DEAD!”
Yelling, roaring, Samuel draws his arms up and in while the all-encompassing shield widens, growing thicker and opaque. What sounds like two muffled rifle shots rings in the clearing; signs of Samuel’s dual blades being drawn by invisible forces over his forearms. He sweeps the blades out, and the field around him shoots radially with them, surges like a tidal wave in 360 degrees to burn and ravage all those standing on the ground. As the wave travels, he slides a foot back and leaps toward the first set of men to follow him. The ones standing in the front have their body armor burnt through, two of whom lie still, one man still twitching with his hands clasped to his face. The four behind them have lesser injuries, as the forefront had absorbed the blast for them. One’s arm appears to have third-degree burns, the skin bubbling, red, raw. The other three raise their weapons. Too slow.
Samuel drives his right blade through the jaw of one, above the chinstrap, and slices right, cutting his skull in half. From behind, he feels four slugs slam into his shield; folding hands together, he swings his whole body around, using both energy swords as a single weapon. The soldier doesn’t have time to reload magazines before finding his sternum and upper ribs cut cleanly through. He wheezes and is kicked hard in the lower abdomen, knocking him over and down. One more left in the first group. Dirt flies up from around Samuel, and he looks to the sky while also launching an energy blast from a blade-tip into the last man standing.
An M-60 hangs from an open door and is firing wildly at Samuel. He snorts derisively, standing unconcerned as the metallic projectiles create harmless flashes against his defense. His attention returns to the ground troops again. The others were farther away when he tried the all-area attack, suffered less burns. Only one of them seems to have caught the full effect and appeared dead. The others are either limping or shaking wildly in their boots. Samuel smirks and raises a blade-point at them. Waves appearing at a foot’s radius from the tip hum and accelerate to the weapon, hum and accelerate, faster and faster. The men stand and watch in curiosity; their shivering denotes fear as well. The waves continue, five hundred repetitions a minute, then a second, then, a stop.
A white, radiant smooth orb hangs a centimeter from the point. It’s no larger than a softball. He curls his arm in, the orb follows. He slowly lowers his arm, and it follows. Samuel clenches his fist, and it flies.
It’s not a fast flight, but quick enough that the men can’t make for much distance by the time it impacts against the patch of earth that was at the middle of their line. It absorbs into the ground and seems to disappear. For only a fraction of a second though. A soundless explosion lights, quakes the ground, covers the whole clearing and an equal area of the forest behind the men, reaches up for the helicopter, and engulfs Samuel. It’s brilliant white light scars and burns everything in its path, and in its void, Samuel thinks he hears voices screaming. But they’re so faint, he cannot be sure.
Dirt and branch and shrub and gear spray everywhere, the shockwave having extended far beyond the initial blast radius. Standing in the middle of a ten-foot-wide sphere of tranquility and protection is Samuel, blades by his sides in wait for the scene to settle. His flaring eyes break through the dusty haze, narrowing at the light from above. The helicopter still hovers.
No time to concentrate or focus. Nor was there any need. Samuel bends down, trains his eyes on the front spotlight. The energies of the blades throb in anger. He jumps high and forces the Power to guide him higher, fifty feet high, one hundred feet high, flying higher than the helicopter can ascend. The gunner on board swings the gun around and starts feeding a belt through. As before, the effort is futile and only drives the avenging Samuel into greater frenzy. At the cockpit’s belly, he drives a blade through the floor and between the pilot’s feet, then wrenches the blade upward to create a gash through the aircraft’s nose. Sliding it out, he pushes away from the aircraft, spreads the fingers of his left hand, summoning small explosives between fingertips. With a smile to the gunner, he lobs them through the open doorway and speeds away.
The torso of the helicopter explodes. Blades and the engine of the main rotor fall desperately to the ground. The nose and tail separate in the blast. Samuel’s eyes close before the two main pieces crash. His body is rocked upward from the resultant explosions. He doesn’t bother to scan the area for survivors. Rage quietly leaves him with every exhalation, opening Samuel’s mind to cope now with shock and horror. Not once had he thought about the right or wrong of killing them, or of merciful slaying. No. Not for a moment.
He descends slowly to the treetops.
Whatever food was left in his stomach now punches at his innards to be let up and out. Cupping a hand over his mouth, he summons a portal leading to the Office. His feet, then knees, then the rest of him drifts disconsolately through. Within the Pentagon, the same feet, knees, and rest slide down from a tear in reality, lowering him in the corner of the observation room, where he had sent his dear Anne, where he now slumps over and falls to a knee. Every limb and organ in his body feels weakened, emptied almost, as if the blood had evaporated and left him still animate. Artificial light grants him some bare scrap of energy to be regained, but now he feels it, he unleashed all that he had upon them. They who never stood a chance against a creature like him.
Those assembled, Colonel Nero, Agent Bonnefeld, Agents Spiers and Carlson, look at him. The Colonel and Richard, who had worked with Samuel since he started, are blanched, wordless. Samuel sends his weary eyes to look at the screens above. Nothing but static. He has no idea that they had seen the whole fight. Or slaughter.
They continue staring at him.
Samuel, through a weak voice, chisels at the silence.
“Where’s… where’s Anne?”
Richard returns the blow to the quiet.
“You never told us you could fly. Or be that powerful, or the teleport. It’s some six-hundred ten miles from where you’re at!”
“Where’s Anne?”
The Colonel answers.
“Sent to the first-floor infirmary for examination. She was wounded when you sent her here.”
“I’m going there.”
###
Shrugging idly, Randall slurps the rest of his coffee and stands up, exiting the operations center and making a left into the hallway, at the end of which elevators will take him to the ground floor and then home. He wanted to tell Mr. Coleman I told you so, were he, for one, not so apathetic to it, and two, not walking out of a room where the man was punching through various monitors and control panels. Probably not the best time, no.
###
Lying on her side, in a bed, Anne stares out the window at the gray, bleak skies of Washington, D.C. The Pentagon, the nurse told her. Samuel is sitting on a chair that she intentionally has her back turned toward. She isn’t angry right now; it’s impossible to be. She is shellshocked. All the information absorbed, all the fright and pain of the day. Being shot. Knowing that she’s been lied to for years. There’s only one method, tried and true for her: she turns numb. She’ll not look at him, speak to him. Just lie there and let her mind sort through the information, analyze, reanalyze, and weep over.
Samuel, after sitting by her bed, staring at her back for half an hour, steps out of the patient’s room and into the admissions area. A nurse behind a desk takes sporadic glances at a computer screen. Agent Bonnefeld sits on the other side of the glass observation wall that looked in on the two lovers. Seeing Samuel finally step out of there, Richard mutters a “Samuel, one second,” so as to catch the First’s attention.
“Hm?”
“All of us are really concerned why you didn’t tell us you could do all that. Why is it we never saw you fly or teleport or any of that? We had that helicopter’s video feed hacked.”
“Because.” The word sounds hollow and lifeless to the elder agent’s ears. “You’re as human as they were.” And Samuel takes a few slow paces forward. Another thought occurs to him, and he says over his slumped shoulder, “And, thing is, they were trying to kill me knowing even less about me than you guys.”
He ambled out of the Pentagon and off the property to wander about the D.C. area. Somewhere, there must be a bar that can take in a man like him and, for three dollars a shot, offer him a shred of penance.
