Blackout (19 page)

FORTY-TWO

THE TWENTY-SIX LAMBDAS WERE LOADED
onto a green camouflage bus, along with a handful of soldiers. Behind and in front of them were at least two Humvees that Jack could see, but he could identify a total of seven engines, so there had to be something else in the convoy.

Captain Rowley had told them that commercial flights had been halted weeks ago, and every major airport was acting as a makeshift military airfield. Dugway was fifty miles from Salt Lake International, across a mostly empty strip of road. Even the towns on the highway were dark as they passed, and rumor spread around the bus that whole cities were being evacuated. Jack didn’t know how much of that was true, but it was eerie to pass the shadows of McDonald’s and gas stations—places that never closed but were now empty and dark.

Aubrey was holding his hand but talking to Laura. It turned out that she wasn’t from Utah at all, but from Colorado, and had been camping down in southern Utah when the dam had been destroyed. She was trying to run, to get far away from more terrorist activity, but ended up right in the middle of it.

“I was hitchhiking,” she said. “I don’t remember much. My friends wanted to go east, back to Denver, but I wanted to go farther into Utah—to someplace no terrorist would ever care about.”

Jack raised his eyebrows. She was a tiny, gorgeous girl. Hitchhiking was asking to be murdered.

“Don’t forget,” she said with a smile. “I can handle myself in a fight. Anyway, we drove west—the trucker who picked me up said he was going to some place called Huntington. We didn’t make it a hundred miles—we fell into a stupid canyon. Terrorists knocked out a bridge. I survived—” She looked a little embarrassed, maybe guilty. “I can survive a hundred-foot fall, I guess. But he didn’t. Rescue teams found me at the bottom of the canyon.”

Aubrey nodded and placed her free hand over Laura’s. “That’s actually not that far from where we’re from. Huntington’s kind of right over the mountain.”

“I guess that’s how we all ended up in the same place.”

Aubrey and Laura started chatting about their abilities, and Jack leaned his head on the window and stared outside.

Somewhere, very high up, was a bird. At first he thought it was a plane, but he couldn’t get a good look at it. It disappeared high over the top of the bus before he could focus in on it.

There was a glare from low morning sun, and Jack tried to unlock the window to get an unblocked view.

“They’re locked,” someone across the aisle said. “I already tried mine.”

Jack glanced over to see who it was—a kid who could somehow control electricity—and when Jack looked back out the window there was no sign of whatever it was.

“Keep it closed anyway,” someone else said. “It’s too cold out there.”

He craned his neck, trying to find the bird. Something about it didn’t seem right.

Jack sat back in his seat, and started listening to the conversations in the bus. He wasn’t sure if that was dishonest or not. Everyone knew what he could do. He didn’t even feel sneaky. He was getting better with his powers all the time, and he could focus on one conversation at a time and ignore the others.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” a girl was saying several rows ahead of him. “I’m fifteen years old. I shouldn’t be in the army.”

“You’re a freaking monster,” a guy responded. “You can take care of yourself.”

She didn’t seem to be offended at being called a “monster,” and Jack immediately knew who he was listening to. A girl named Krezi—a powerful Lambda 5D, like Laura—who could shoot some kind of laser or fire or something from her hands.

“I know I can take care of myself,” Krezi said. “But that’s not the point. Should every person who can fight be forced into the army?”

“They gave you the option,” the guy answered. “You didn’t have to come.” From the tone of his voice, they’d had this conversation before.

“Yeah, some option. We could come and fight or we could stay locked up in Dugway indefinitely. In case you haven’t noticed, even though we’re all helping the army now, they haven’t taken these bombs off our ankles. They don’t trust us. They’re just using us because they don’t have a lot of options.”

“But isn’t that the whole point? Do you think that they’d risk a fifteen-year-old girl if they had any better ideas? We’re at war.”

“I can shoot energy from my hands,” she said. “Is that really superior to a Green Beret shooting bullets from his gun? Do they need me so bad?”

“But you don’t look like a Green Beret. That’s the whole point. You’re—”

Jack stopped listening. He’d heard all the arguments before. He’d had them himself.

He looked out the window again. The Great Salt Lake spread out in the distance like a giant blue blanket. The lake was dead, like the Dead Sea. He’d heard it was so salty that nothing could live in it—no fish, just algae and brine shrimp that made the lake stink.

There was that bird again, flying toward them.

It wasn’t a bird.

It was a—something—and it was carrying a person.

“Hey,” Jack shouted, nearly tripping over Aubrey as he pushed his way out into the aisle and toward the soldiers at the front of the bus. “There’s something out there. There’s something—someone—flying.”

Everyone jumped to the windows, blocking his view for a moment.

“It’s coming right at us,” he said.

There was a sudden chatter from a machine gun, behind them, and then the radio squawked. The soldier on the other end was frantic. “Unidentified bogey coming in from the south.”

A second gun started, right in front of the bus—it was the .50 cal machine gun on the roof of the Humvee ahead of them.

They were the terrorists. They had to be.

And then suddenly the bus slammed to the side, rising up for a moment on two wheels, and then crashing back to the pavement. The driver tried to regain control and swerved sharply.

There was a huge dent in the ceiling, and a hand—a claw?—was tearing through the roof of the bus.

The soldiers barked at everyone to get to the floor, and then Jack was nearly knocked down by the shattering pops of their M4s.

He clamped his hands over his ears, but it didn’t do any good. It was so loud he felt like he could barely move.

Someone in the bus—the girl he’d heard before—began firing blasts of white-hot light up through the roof.

The bus slowed and turned sharply, and then Jack picked out the
whump-whump-whump
of flat tires.

Jack tried to get up enough to see Aubrey, but she was out of sight—she must have been hiding down between the seats. Good.

The ceiling was perforated with holes, and he didn’t see any sign of the thing that had been on the roof.

And then, as if pulled by some unseen force, the three soldiers at the front of the bus slammed into the windshield. It shattered into a million pieces, and they tumbled out onto the road. The driver tried to stop the bus, but it rolled right over the men.

The radio was filled with shouts—frantic, desperate calls for help and barked orders.

The driver was yanked from his chair, his seat belt shearing, and he flew to the pavement. Jack jumped forward, mashing his foot on the brakes and trying to get control of the wheel.

Ahead of him, the two Humvees were stopped, dealing with their own attacks. Someone—a small person dressed all in black—was climbing on the roof of one, trying to open the gun hatch. Another was crouched in the street, throwing something—or shooting something?—at the other Humvee.

There was a sudden
whoosh
and rush of air, and someone swooped into the bus through the missing windshield. He was dressed in black, like the others, and Jack could see his face—he couldn’t have been any older than Jack. He raised his hands, but was immediately thrown back onto the pavement by Krezi’s bolts of energy and a blast of lightning from the kid.

With a screech, the clawed thing on the roof began tearing through the sheet metal again. It only took a quick swipe for the already-damaged roof to give way, and the Lambda collapsed into the bus.

He looked like Nate, back at the dance. His skin wasn’t skin—it was something else, some kind of metal or stone. His hands were three-fingered hooks.

And he was where Aubrey had been only moments before.

Jack searched for a gun, but there was nothing—they’d all been thrown out with the soldiers.

Laura tackled the beast, smashing him down to the floor with an enormous crash. The guy tried to speak, but his voice was an inhuman rumble. People were shouting for Laura to get out of the way so they could shoot him, but Laura didn’t listen. She threw a punch into his face, connecting with a sickening crunch. Before she could throw another, the thing launched her into the ceiling. Her body tangled against the jagged hole.

The monster stood, and was instantly hit by Krezi’s energy blasts. He stumbled backward, but the attacks only seemed to push him, not hurt him.

He took a step forward, and fell flat on his face.

Aubrey. It must have been her—she’d tripped him.

A soldier shouted at Jack, and he turned to see a whole team of Green Berets in front of the bus.

“Open the door,” one called. Jack searched for a moment before seeing the bent lever. By the time he got it open, the soldiers were spreading out around the bus. Someone stepped inside and started grabbing kids, pulling them from their seats and ordering them onto the street.

The monster was getting up again, but the blasts were targeted on his head now, and he was trying to shield himself with his arms.

Someone grabbed Jack, and pulled him from the driver’s seat.

On the street, it was harder to see what was going on inside the bus. He hoped Aubrey was keeping hidden. The whole convoy was devastated, every vehicle either damaged or burning, and the street was filled with soldiers who were trying to tend to the injured, or beat back the remaining enemies.

The bus shuddered, rocking back and forth, and then a hole erupted from the back. The monster fell out onto the pavement and began running in slow bounds off the road and into the brush.

The soldiers gathered the Lambdas from the bus and formed a defensive perimeter. Within minutes aircraft appeared, flying low over the demolished collection of vehicles. Jack could hear them overhead for quite a while, but they’d missed all the action. There was nothing for them to attack.

Cesar Carbajal was dead. He was the only Lambda to die. And though the soldiers didn’t make an announcement, Jack could hear every word they whispered to one another. Cesar hadn’t been killed by the terrorists—he’d taken a bullet. Sure, it was the terrorists’ fault that the battle started in the first place, but it still felt like a punch in the gut. This war—this thing they’d agreed to do—was deadly. Cesar had no way to defend himself; his power was all mental. He wasn’t even trained for combat.

Aubrey sat across from Jack on the pavement, her knees tucked up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs.

“This isn’t like what they talked about,” she said. “It isn’t like the girl at the school.”

“I know,” Jack answered.

“So many,” she said, gesturing weakly to a row of bodies lined up a few car lengths outside the perimeter.

Jack glanced over at the dead bodies. Eight teenagers. Just like him, except driven by—what? He’d never heard any demands from the terrorists. Did they just want to watch the world burn?

Aubrey spoke, her voice barely above a whisper. “In training they said the terrorists worked in groups of three or four. They didn’t talk about big attacks like this. They didn’t talk about battles. The terrorists never come out and fight the army.”

“They must have known who we are—what we’re going to do. They wanted to stop us.”

Jack crossed over to sit next to Aubrey and put his arm around her waist.

“I didn’t think it would be like this,” she said. “I mean, so many . . .”

Jack couldn’t see where the other bodies were being collected, but he heard the radios talking about more of them—the soldiers killed in the attack. There were three, and several more wounded.

This didn’t seem like any terrorist act he’d heard of. Granted, not a lot of details were ever given, but they never seemed like suicide attacks. Had they just underestimated the army? Were they unprepared?

Aubrey laid her head on his shoulder.

From the distant skies, Jack could hear the thumping of helicopter blades.

FORTY-THREE

THE HELICOPTERS EVACUATED THE LAMBDAS
to the airport, where a variety of aircraft was waiting. Aubrey stared into the dim morning light around them, wondering what other dangers were lurking in the shadows, what monsters she was getting ready to fight.

They’d all started like she had. She’d been a normal girl until she got the virus. It hadn’t taken long before she shoplifted her first thing—a box of medicine that she couldn’t afford. It hadn’t seemed evil. It was for her dad, not her, and she knew the pharmacy could take the loss—it was owned by one of the wealthiest families in town. Still, she’d cried that night, all night, afraid that she’d be found out.

It got easier after that. She needed supplies for school—notebooks and pens and a new backpack—and then she needed school clothes. Nicole was helping by that point, telling Aubrey what to choose—which outfits were in style and which colors complemented Aubrey’s skin and hair. It had been so easy to steal—a sweater from here, a pair of jeans from there. They were big companies with plenty of money; Aubrey knew that a pair of jeans didn’t cost one hundred and fifty dollars to make—it was just a greedy corporation that could get away with huge prices. If they missed one or two pairs, then what difference did it make?

Aubrey couldn’t make a direct connection between shoplifting and terrorism—that was crazy—but there had to be some path, some series of bad choices. Like when Nicole had dared Aubrey to steal the principal’s car, and Aubrey had faked an ankle sprain to get out of it. What if she hadn’t? Stealing jeans was one thing, but stealing a car? And what about the parties she’d been to, the party where Jeff Savage brought ecstasy and Aubrey could have stolen all of it. Selling that would have paid their rent for months.

She wasn’t a terrorist, but what was she? A criminal? A thief who just wasn’t stealing anything at the moment?

She’d be better, she promised herself, though it felt hollow. How could she truly be better when she didn’t have any reason not to be? There was nothing here to steal, nothing to gain.

When the helicopter touched down at the Salt Lake airport after a short flight, Captain Rowley directed them to a waiting truck. Another of the Lambda teams was in tow, an officer leading them. The other groups—including Nicole—were being sent elsewhere. Everyone had a different flight to catch.

Aubrey’s team and the second group loaded into the truck, which took them to a small commuter plane guarded by four soldiers in full combat gear. The plane was only sparsely filled—ten soldiers were relaxing, their packs and weapons in the seats next to them. When they saw Captain Rowley, they stood as much as they could in the cramped plane and saluted.

“Men,” the captain said. “These are our Lambdas. They’ll be joining us for the next couple of missions.”

The men nodded as though they knew what was going on. Aubrey recognized a few of them from the mission at the school. None of them seemed thrilled at the prospect of working with kids, and one of them openly grimaced at Aubrey and Laura—two small high school girls.

The Lambdas made their way to the back of the plane, to where seats were still open.

In a moment the captain and the other team leader were in the small first-class cabin, looking over some paperwork. The aircraft began to taxi without any announcement from the cockpit. Aubrey had only ever flown twice—on a school choir trip that she’d gotten a scholarship for—and this all felt new and weird. She missed having a flight attendant to explain what was going on.

“So you’re supposed to save the country?” one of the soldiers asked, turning in his seat.

None of the teens answered.

“I asked you a question, Lambda,” he said, smiling but grim. “Don’t forget that we outrank you.”

“That air force puke up front outranks you,” another one said. “The guy who refueled the plane outranks you.”

“I’m nineteen,” Laura said defensively. “I could join—”

The first man, a broad-shouldered guy with a square face and a scar along his chin, cut her off. “You could join, but you didn’t. You haven’t even made it through basic boot camp. You probably can’t do a push-up.”

“She can do a push-up,” Aubrey said. “She can do more push-ups than all of you combined.”

“Is that your superpower?” the second man said. “You’re Push-Up Girl?”

Aubrey wanted to say that Laura could break any of them in half, but she held her tongue.

“How about you, kid?” the square-faced soldier asked Jack.

“Just trying to help out.”

“Are you the one who is about as useful as my binoculars?”

Jack opened his mouth to answer, but the soldier laughed and smacked another man with the back of his hand. “They tell us we’re getting help and they send us a kid who can do everything that our equipment already does.”

“What about you, honey?” the other man asked Aubrey.

“She rolled her eyes!” the first laughed. “It’s going to be
great
working with kids.”

A voice from farther forward called back, “Shut up, guys.”

“I just was asking the nice young lady what amazing miracle she can perform.”

But before he could finish his sentence, Aubrey disappeared, and stood from her seat. His laugh faded a little into confusion as she climbed forward in the accelerating plane and took the man’s Beretta M9 from his gear. She removed the magazine, and then pulled the slide from the frame, just as she’d done a hundred times when target shooting in the hills of Mount Pleasant.

She reappeared in front of him, and dropped the three pieces of the gun in his lap.

“What the hell?” he shouted, grabbing at the gun. “What’s wrong with you, freak?”

“Don’t call me ‘honey.’”

“Hey,” someone called back, pointing angrily at Aubrey. “You do not touch weapons. That’s part of the deal.”

The exchange got the attention of Captain Rowley up front, who was hurrying awkwardly down the aisle as the plane bounced through the air.

“What’s going on?”

The square-faced man jabbed a finger at Aubrey. “She stripped McKinney’s sidearm. She was just suddenly here, with the thing taken apart.”

Aubrey was fully expecting the captain to tell his men to shut up and knock off their attitudes, but instead he barked at her.

“Is that true?”

“Well—”

“Yes or no, soldier.”

She was getting mad. “You told me I’m not a soldier.”

“You’re a Lambda,” he scolded, nearly shouting. “When you raised your hand a week ago and agreed to join the war effort, that put you in the army, and it put you under my command. You will respect these men and the orders they give you.”

Jack touched her arm and she shook him off.

The captain turned to face the other Lambdas. “You’re not here to put on a show, and we’re not here to baby you. If that’s what you expected, then you should have stayed in Dugway. There’s a war on, and if you can’t handle a little ribbing from your fellow soldiers then we can’t use you in this unit.”

He finally turned to the soldiers. “As for you, keep your mouths shut and your minds on our mission. We’re flying into hostile territory, and you can use that time to review our planning session. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir,” was the chanted reply.

He turned back to the Lambdas. “Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”