The other two Choppers braked, turned, and powered back along the street.
Kill them! she thought, but Reaper was slowly bending over as if winded. Had he caught a bullet? She didn’t know.
The helicopter opened up again and Shade screamed. He appeared from a shadow Lucy-Anne had not been aware of and stumbled across the street, both hands pressed to his guts, blinded by pain. Agony gave him form.
“Shade!” Reaper shouted, but the shadow man seemed not to hear. He staggered directly into the flaming pool of fuel, and his scream turned into a shriek.
Lucy-Anne dashed across to Jack. He was bleeding and holding one hand to his wounded eye. “Do something!” she shouted at Reaper, looking up at the helicopter cruising slowly towards them back along the street. Fire leapt from its machine guns. Bullets ricocheted.
“Lucy-Anne, got to get back…got to…” Jack said. He reached for her, staggered forwards, and she held out her hands for him.
From her right, the roar of motorcycles again. The rattle of small-arms fire.
Ahead of her, Jenna was kneeling by Sparky.
Along the street, Shade was screaming, stumbling, aflame, trying to reel in his spilling guts.
Now, she thought. Now is when Nomad—
Something smacked her in the face, knocked her head sideways.
As she tried to breathe and gargled only blood, she saw what she knew must come.
“No!” Jack shouted. “No, Lucy-Anne, no!” He couldn’t quite understand what he had seen, how her face could have changed shape so quickly. She was still Lucy-Anne, but no longer the girl he had known. The cool, logical part of him knew that she had been shot. But the pure emotional part of him that drove to the fore in this time of confusion and bullets, burning and blood, could not readily accept the truth.
She stumbled to the left, one hand coming up towards her face but never quite touching. Her pale skin was raw now, and her spiky hair was dulled by the colour contrast of her blood. Her eyes started to roll up in her head.
The rush of fury was terrifying. Jack’s heart thudded in his chest, the heaviest impact, and his skin came alight, tempering his thoughts and sharpening his senses until he could see like a hawk, hear like a hound. What happened next was pure instinct, and yet he felt totally in control. For the first time ever, Jack and his new abilities worked completely in harmony. They flowed together, and were one.
As easy as breathing, he turned and pushed a heat wave along the street that peeled paint, melted glass, and ignited gas in fuel tanks. The two motorcycles erupted, enveloping their riders in flames, swerving and striking parked vehicles. Several cars and vans also exploded, and glass and twisted car body parts flew in a deadly flock across the road. One rider screamed, but not for long.
The helicopter pilot pulled up and tipped the aircraft away from the chaotic street. But not soon enough. Jack’s shout caught it and brought it down, and it struck a roof and thrashed onto its side.
He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. His tumultuous universe settled. He turned away from the crashing helicopter and the burning chaos along the street, and went to hold his friend.
But someone was there before him.
In a blink, everything changed. There was a clap! that reverberated through buildings and ground, and Jack’s first thought was, Everything has been renewed. From the moment before the sound to the moment after, the potential of the future seemed to have shifted hugely, and he felt a moment of consuming elation that he had not experienced since before Doomsday. He could not explain it. And he did not try. So much was beyond explanation.
As Lucy-Anne slumped towards the ground, Nomad ran along the street. She leapt a burning motorcycle and ran at Lucy-Anne, grasped her as she fell, pushed her onto her back, and then she raised a hand above her head, middle and forefingers pointing.
What is she—? Jack thought, and then Nomad brought her fist down and punched a hole in Lucy-Anne’s throat.
“What?” Jack whispered. His voice was a calm breath amongst the burning and crashing and the breaking of things.
Lucy-Anne arched her back and shuddered. Nomad raised her hand again, splashing blood across the road, blood also dripping from her hand. Lucy-Anne’s blood.
Yet again, Jack’s instinct took over.
And here she comes, Nomad, another movement in the chaotic street and yet the focus of everything. Flames lean away from her. She is the centre. She runs and jumps a burning motorcycle and her feet barely seems to touch the ground, and then she knocks Lucy-Anne down.
Lucy-Anne draws in a breath to scream, but blood floods into her lungs.
She tries to punch at Nomad, but her limbs do not obey her commands.
Pain rings in, but it is the ice-cool pain of trauma and shock. Her chest is heavy. She cannot breathe past whatever has happened to her face.
And then Nomad punches straightened fingers down at her throat, and Lucy-Anne feels the hot, painful rush of air into her lungs once more.
He saw Lucy-Anne shudder as a breath flooded in, and somewhere inside, somehow, he sensed the relief bleeding through her shock and pain. Other, more destructive powers reined in, and his skin tingled from his ears to the tips of his toes.
Nomad looked at him and almost smiled. Jack wondered what would have happened had he unleashed any of those powers. She looked weak and was bleeding from her nose and the corners of her eyes, yet she was still strange, almost alien, and removed from what was happening.
“Jack,” a voice said. Jack frowned, but could not take his eyes off Nomad and Lucy-Anne. Maybe she’s dead anyway, he thought, but he saw his friend moving as she struggled against the pain coursing in. She’d been shot in the face.
“Jack!”
Jack turned, and Reaper was behind him. “Not out of danger yet,” the man who had been his father said. “And I…” He touched his throat, as if to signal what was wrong. Behind him stood Haru, blinking rapidly, seeming exhausted. For the first time Reaper looked weak, uncertain, as if something had been stripped away and he had been lessened. Was he scared? Jack wasn’t sure about that. But he did see something in his father’s eyes that gave him a moment of satisfaction in this terrible time—respect.
“Sparky?” Jack called. The boy was sitting against a shop front across the street now, Jenna beside him. He raised a hand and waved. Bloody but alive, Jack thought, and that was as good as he could hope for right now.
Fires crackled, glass broke, metal buckled. The street was a symphony of destruction. The helicopter was settling into the sagging roof of a jeweller’s, lying on its side with rotors snapped off, fuel gushing down the shop’s facade. Two Choppers had climbed from the wreck and were trying to crawl across the rooftop to an adjoining property.
Jack’s heart sank, so quickly and deeply that sour sickness rose in his throat. I’ve done it again. He could see a burning corpse tangled with the wreckage of a motorcycle, and the stench was terrible. He looked at the climbing, scrambling Choppers and wondered who they were. There must have been more in the helicopter, dead or dying.
“I’ve done it again,” he said aloud.
“She’s…” Hayden said. He was climbing from the restaurant window, pale and shaking. “She’s…”
“Fleeter?” Jack asked. Hayden nodded.
There was no sign of the evolved humans, creatures, monsters. Survival was their sharpest instinct.
It was becoming Jack’s as well. Now that everything had gone bad, and people were dying, and he was killing again, survival was all that mattered. And Hayden was key to that.