Jane watched him flinch, and she instinctively reached out to squeeze his hand. William then seemed to calm, the tension in his face softening.
My God, she thought. How is this happening to us?
Even though she was still angry with William and harbored a real worry that even he wasn’t truly in control of himself, she did believe him. That he wanted to stop this.
She looked back to Lily and Ryan, who were both now looking out the windows. Just two kids. Handling this as an adult was one thing. But children? She could only imagine what it would be like to be a hormonal teenager and wake up one day to realize you could make people kill each other with a flick of your wrist. Or what about Lily? Close your eyes and give people diseases. How can a child even comprehend that? And somewhere, out there in the smoke, was someone who was burning the very world around him.
And let us not forget yourself, dear doctor. Who ruined the city you love with wind and rain? How many people died in those hurricanes you summoned? How many homes and businesses were destroyed when you had the dreams of storms?
She knew it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t William’s fault. They were only instruments in the hands of what—aliens? She couldn’t even say the word. It was all too ludicrous. You are a woman of science, of facts and proven theories.
Yet you summoned hurricane winds to batter a warehouse. You brought down the rain to drown a building. You parted the waters from the storm so you could walk through. And before all that, you had psychic communications with a man in another room, blocking repeated attempts by an outside force to control him. You could see his astral projections, for God’s sake, while you were locked in some room miles beneath the earth. What bit of science explains any of that?
“It doesn’t,” she whispered.
It all paled in comparison to knowing each time she’s had the horrific dreams of the storms, that she was, in fact, bringing them. That they weren’t dreams; it was William connecting with her unknowingly from afar, triggering whatever weapon was inside her. She distinctly recalled his confused and frightened look in the dreams.
She looked back at him. It sure would be easier to hate the unwilling commander of all their destructive abilities if he weren’t a genuinely honest guy who happens to look like Prince Harry.
When he jerked, wrenching his face towards her, she actually gasped in surprise. William thrashed to the other side, his eyes squinted and his hands clutching the armrests. He began to shake.
“William!” She took his face in her hands, only to have him pull away. His teeth were chattering.
“Jane, what’s happening?” Ryan cried out.
“What’s going on back there?” Quincy yelled from the cockpit.
Jane took a deep breath. She closed her eyes, trying to recall the sensation of when William had come to her repeatedly in their government cells.
She felt it immediately, a pathway. She saw him.
William was in flames.
He struggled to move, as if he wanted to go further into the fire. But his arms, his wrists, his legs, all were enveloped in long, slick stretches of tar. The substance then split, climbing up his back and wrapping around his throat.
A moving mass sprang from the corner of her eye, shooting out and immediately enveloping her in writhing wall of shining black scales.
As it closed in around her, she wanted to scream. Pure rage emitted from the twisting and thrashing, a wrath so pervasive that she choked, unable to breathe.
Just a glimpse of William then, a fragment of his face, trying to get through. She could see his fingers, then a hand. She grasped it with both her hands. At the moment they touched, it was if a million flashbulbs went off before her eyes.
They gasped for air. Jane tried to get her bearings as William nearly fell out of his chair.
“What happened?” Quincy said, standing with Ryan and Lily in the aisle.
“It was waiting,” he said with a delirious look in his eyes. “You came for me.”
“Are you alright? What was that?” Jane demanded.
“Oh God,” he said, covering his eyes. “It had me from the second I entered. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t get away. It took me… all over the world. I saw their eyes, and the disasters started. Over and over and over… I couldn’t stop it.”
“I saw you… in flames. That… thing… had you.”
“I couldn’t get away… but I could divert. Just for a moment. I found him, the man in the flames. But he’s afraid.”
“Of course he is. He’s surrounded by fire,” Jane said.
“No,” William said. “He’s afraid of me.”
TWENTY
The smoke was relentless. Outside the window of the Gulfstream, it looked to Kate like the entire world was burning. The footage from television didn’t do the fires justice; everything below the plane was gray and ash.
Across from her sat an armed soldier, who, uncomfortably, kept a fairly constant gaze upon her. If she were to swivel around, she would see the same arrangement was made for her mother, Stella, even Roxy.
“What do you think I’m going to do? Flip someone over my shoulder? Maybe a karate chop?” Roxy had complained when they’d boarded the plane six hours prior, and she was forced to sit in her own section under the watch of the soldier.
Stella had lectured everyone intensely about the freedoms of the press and pointed out that journalists in the United States cannot be taken prisoners of the government. She’d been shown her seat at the back of the plane.
Kate had raised her own hell on the flight, demanding to speak with her staff, even invoking the name of the president. Mark Wolve had just given her an aggravated look, ordering the soldiers to keep them silent as he drew a curtain separating him and his staff from the rest of them.
Only her mother had said nothing, sitting, folding her hands in her lap, and looking out the window. Four soldiers were stationed around her.
Kate wanted to stand and tear the curtain open, demanding to know where they were going. But she knew if she dared make a move, that soldier would be on her in a heartbeat. Even when she did turn around to check on her family, he cleared his throat as a warning.
She thought about praying, something she hadn’t done in perhaps a decade or more. She’d prayed at her dad’s funeral, hadn’t she?
Dad. Would you be ashamed of me? Would you understand I did what I thought I had to do to protect the nation? Or would you frown that I had put country before family—
The curtain abruptly parted, and Mark stepped through, carrying a laptop. All the soldiers snapped to attention. “Corporal Rice, your seat.”
“Yes sir, General Wolve, sir.” As the corporal went to stand in the back of the plane, Mark sat down, opening up the laptop.
“General, what is Blue?”
The man continued to look at his laptop. “That doesn’t matter right now—”
“My nephew said to ask about Blue. And I have. And no one seems to want to answer that question.”
“You have to understand something, Senator. I am no longer here to answer all your questions anymore.”
“Must have been a heavy hit to the ego to cover up those four stars under that black suit.”
He slowly looked up. “When the lightning first arrived last year, and the SSA updated the director of the FBI, he thought it best to contact my boss at the Pentagon. I was quietly transferred over to make sure that what happened fifteen years ago didn’t happen again.”
“Yes, things are much better this time.”
He turned the laptop, displaying a flashing red stripe stretched across CNN’s homepage, the banner reading, “WORLD UNDER SIEGE.”