Riser (Teen Horror/Science Fiction) (Book #1 in The Riser Saga) ((Volume 1)) (10 page)

All eyes, including the firemen, policemen and paramedics turned to the largest man I had ever seen. I recognized him right away, the Mayor of Los Angeles, Norman Bradfield. Everything about Mayor Bradfield was round: tummy, face (including the three chins he was sporting) arms, legs, fingers, toes, everything! He had a kind and warm face on the holo-tv. He always reminded me of Mel and that made him great in my book, but in person he had a slyness to his gait. He was a shark, I could tell right away.

Everyone moved aside as he walked toward me. All the reporters made room for his eminence. It was like they all sensed a photo opportunity within their grasp and they drooled in anticipation.

“Leave this poor girl alone,” his voice boomed. At least, this, I agreed with. “She just lost her mother!”

Okay. True, but the way he said it made my skin crawl. He had absolutely no
real
emotion behind his words. He said them for affect only, no true sympathy or care about me and how I might feel. I had seen Jill pull the same kind of manipulative tactics all the time on teachers and other students; a fakeness I had developed a kind of radar for over the last few years. And this guy made Jill look like an amateur.

To prove my point, the Mayor actually leaned in close to me and gave the cameras the cheesiest, most over-the-top look of concern he could possibly manipulate his tubby face to make. I wanted to vomit again, this time on his perfectly shined shoes.

“Now, now. From the looks of it, this girl was the only one who survived this terrible tragedy.” Mayor Bradfield’s voice was so loud it carried all the way to the furthest reporter.

“She says it was green smoke.”

“She said there was no tornado.”

I watched the Mayor’s face very carefully to see what his reaction would be, and I wasn’t disappointed. There was a brief second of what could only be described as panic. I knew something was going on here, and my mom died before she could tell me everything. She was so focused on letting me know all her secrets (and my own) that she didn’t even think I’d want to know how she died in the first place. It was vital that I found out. What if this was a new kind of bio-terrorism, or some kind of natural disaster created by Mother Nature to control the population? What I
did
know for sure was that it wasn’t a tornado. I was less than half a mile away. I would have felt it, heard it, seen it, something!

“This girl is obviously confused.” Mayor Bradfield recovered with a smile that stretched so far across his face I didn’t think he could speak. I was wrong. He must practice. “Were you knocked out in the tornado?” He placed his hand on my shoulder as if to comfort me, but he was squeezing quite a bit of pressure on me to the point of… ow!

I removed his hand with an exerted shove, which caused a slight gasp from the swarm of press. “I was just over that hill and there WASN’T A TORNADO!”

I could barely hear anything from the uproar I just caused. The Mayor put his hand back on my shoulder with so much force I was paralyzed where I stood.

“You see! She wasn’t even here! How would she have seen…” He leaned down to me so only I could see his face. His eyes were raging at me. “What did you say you saw?”

With every chubby finger clamped down on my shoulder in a vise of warning, I spoke quietly. “Green smoke.”

Mayor Bradfield turned to the press with his glorious fake grin on his blobish face. “Aaah, yes,
green smoke
. She was probably seeing the tail end of that tornado!”

I cringed and I could tell from the reporters’ reaction that they ate up every word he said. It was so frustrating not having proof. But who was going to believe a trailer girl over the Mayor of Los Angeles? That’s when I had a flash of petty brilliance.

I concentrated as intently as I could, though it was difficult with the Mayor’s hand now a permanent clamp on my shoulder.

It was enough. I had been doing this one the longest….

…Bruce walked out of the tangled metal that used to be our trailer.

It was like a lion’s roar when the press saw him. This was more excitement than anything so far. Here in front of them was a true witness to what really happened. And lucky for me, I controlled every word that came out of his mouth. I was tempted to bring a few others back too, but that would be too much to take on. Bruce would do just fine.

In all the upheaval Mayor Bradfield’s grip loosened and I tugged away from him to run into Bruce’s open arms. “Daddy! You’re alive!” I made sure my voice carried out to the cameras and press.

It was complete and utter chaos. Camera flashes, screaming voices, and the Mayor like an island in a sea of madness, staring daggers at me.

“Sir, sir, was it a tornado?”

“Did you see anything?”

Bruce stepped forward with his arm wrapped around me. Everyone was silently anticipating what he would say. “I didn’t see a tornado. All I saw was green smoke.”

Take that Mr. Mayor.

Between the Mayor and I, we were making the Media’s day. They acted like they hadn’t seen this much excitement in years. And the more I thought about it, the more I remembered a lot of
natural disasters
like these, but they always seemed so straightforward to me, now it made me wonder.

Mayor Bradfield used the bulk of his body to maneuver himself in the spotlight once more. He pulled out a holo-tape. My heart leapt with anticipation. Holo-tapes were small devices that projected holographic images from a satellite. We’d be able to see
exactly
what happened, like a security camera from space. “Let’s see the truth for ourselves, shall we?”

He activated the device and a holographic image of the trailer park appeared in front of the watching audience. It was just like before I left it to read under the tree. My eyes welled up with tears when I saw my mother in her garden, not a care in the world, not realizing she was about to die. And then…

A tornado. An actual tornado touched down in the center of the park. It ripped through the trailers like they were made of paper, smashing them to obliteration. Bodies were flown around and torn apart in a terrifying spectacle of torture and destruction. Just as suddenly the tornado dissipated into nothingness, gone as quickly as it came. The holo-tape ended with an image of me running to my mother’s side in the garden and soon after the cavalry arriving. There was no green smoke. There was nothing of what my mother let me see.

And then I noticed something…

The garden in the holo-tape was still ruined and destroyed. I looked behind me at the vibrant, gorgeous garden I had fixed for my mother and then again at the satellite feed. They didn’t match.

This was much bigger than a simple tornado. I decided in that moment to shut my mouth. If the Mayor could manipulate a holo-tape then there were bigger players at work here. This had conspiracy written all over it and I intended to figure out what was going on.

“I must have just missed seeing it touch down,” I said and then I made Bruce wobble a bit as if he had hit his head a little too hard.

Mayor Bradfield turned to me again so the press couldn’t see. “Right decision.” Then he whirled around, open arms, open face and with, crinkled-in-concern-eyebrows, motioned to two paramedics. “Help these two out, would you? They’ve been through quite an ordeal.” After posing for one more picture with us, the Mayor started toward the middle of the park. “Come. Let’s see the horrendous damage this tragedy has caused.”

And the swarm was off, following the Mayor like ants chasing after food.

The paramedics gave us a once over and moved on to their hover-gurneys, lugging the bodies to their vehicles.

That’s when I felt a tapping on my shoulder. I turned around and came face to face with…

…Jason Keroff.

Gulp.

He was even more gorgeous in person, but standing in my mother’s garden with
zombie
Bruce sitting amongst the flowers I didn’t feel anything for my childhood crush. Jason leaned in to me and whispered in my ear. “You’re in danger. Take this.”

I felt something slip into my hand, it felt like a square piece of metal. “That’s my contact info. Call me. Landline only. No cell.”

And he was gone. Off to join the rest of the journalists.

After all these years of being infatuated with this man, seeing him only reminded me how much of a fantasy it really was. My mom was real and the most important person in my life and now she was gone forever. It made meeting Jason hollow and uneventful. I wanted to cry, but I knew that it would immediately become a photo op for the media so I held it in and waited for them to leave.

I didn’t have to wait long. With a bigger than life wave to the cameras, Mayor Bradfield entered his hover-limo and whizzed away to wherever Mayors go. The paramedics loaded the last corpse in their hover-trucks and with barely a minute passing, press, paramedics, police and firemen were gone, like they never came. I was completely alone with a drooling Bruce. I rolled my eyes and decided to do a little investigating of my own.

“Hey! Chelsan!” I turned around and nearly burst into tears when I saw Nancy running toward me. Her clothes were dirty and she looked pretty scuffed up. Seeing her made my heart swell with emotion. I didn’t realize how much I needed a friendly face until I saw her coming straight toward me. Before I could move to embrace her, she tackled me to the ground in the biggest bear hug I had ever experienced. “Chelsan! You’re alive! They’ve completely closed off the park for miles, but I crawled through the back fence and seriously, I was like a ninja, I stayed as low to the ground as possible, I’m a complete mess, but I got here...” She was rambling and I loved every second of it.

“Nancy, I can’t breathe.” Her hug had turned into squeezing every last breath out of my lungs.

“Oh, sorry. I’m just so relieved to see you alive! They said on the news there were no survivors when the tornado hit. They did a life scan and everything! How did they miss you?!”

“I wasn’t in the park, I was reading under the willow.” Uh, oh. If they did a life scan and someone was really paying attention they’d know that Bruce was
really
dead. I couldn’t focus on that, yet. If Jason thought I was in trouble then I’d have to keep that piece of information on my “potential danger” list. Now that I knew Vice President Geoffrey Turner was my grandfather and what he was capable of doing to his own family, I had to be on my toes. Mom warned me he’d be after me and now Jason Keroff was cautioning me, too. I needed to be prepared for anything.

“I’ve always hated that tree! All the bees! But I’m completely grateful for it now!” And then she noticed Bruce. “Oh Bruce! I’m so glad you made it, too!” She turned to me. “So lucky.” Her face suddenly went from relief to horror. “Your mom?” Nancy said it so cautiously and carefully it took away some of the pain I felt when she mentioned her.

I simply shook my head and Nancy hugged me again. “I’m so sorry, Chelsan.”

I pulled away from her and made a decision in my head. I needed help and Nancy had more than proven she was someone I could trust explicitly. “Look Nancy. It’s time we had that talk.”

Nancy’s eyes widened, but she nodded as if she knew exactly what I was talking about. She glanced over at Bruce with a knowing jerk of the head.

“That’s a part of the talk. Nancy, Bruce is dead. Really dead, like eleven years dead.”

Nancy looked over at Bruce with curiosity. “The frogs were dead, too, right?” I could tell she was already making calculations in her head.

“Yes. I can bring back anything that’s died. Like this garden: it was smashed and destroyed when I got here, but it was my mom’s and I couldn’t let…” I choked. Thinking it and actually saying it out loud became much harder than I thought. I needed to keep my head clear for my mother’s sake. She had warned me that my life was in danger and if I fell apart now, I didn’t think I could ever recover. I wouldn’t care if I lived or died if I let my grief overwhelm me, and my mom wouldn’t have wanted that. It’s why she showed me what she did. To protect me somehow. To warn me. And it was up to me to figure all of this out.

Nancy hugged me once more. Despite me telling her that I was a defect that essentially made zombies, even plant zombies, she still wanted to be my friend. She pulled away and looked at Bruce. “So, nothing’s going on upstairs? Or is he really alive?”