The Last Revenant (Book 1): The Crash (40 page)

It wasn't until the entire bus shuddered and I hit my head on something hard that I finally looked around me again. At first I thought that someone had crashed into our transport with their own, but a quick glance at the driver seat proved otherwise. I grabbed the side of a seat and held on for dear life as Grey steered the massive tube away from the square, accelerating at the last moment to bash through another barricade that melted past the windows like flowing butter.

I stood up in the isle and tried to keep my balance as random pot-shots
dinged
off the chassis, but I didn't pay them much attention. The surrounding fire quickly died off to be replaced by the sound of the noisy diesel engine struggling to keep up with Grey's demands. I took a few shaky steps forward to see the tattered remains of our group in broken down seats, all of them breathless and wounded in some way. I didn't care about the specifics. Those would come later. I just wanted to see them all alive.

“Everyone okay?” Olivia asked from the front.

A small jaded chorus of mumbles was her only response.

I took a quick tally and became bewildered to come up with nine passengers, including myself. I took a recount and it didn't even occur to me until the third time that Grey had been an addition. We had come in with nine people and we would be coming out with the same, but the number wouldn't possibly be able to tell the whole story. All would be injured. Some would be disfigured and one—Conner—would be left behind entirely.

I watched as Badger applied a makeshift dressing onto Nick's arm, then shifted my focus back onto Olivia as she stood up near the driver's seat. I forced my way past everyone that had made it through hell and then some, getting close enough to listen in on their conversation.

Olivia grabbed a pole and leaned into it as the bus shook. A small trickle of blood ran down her arm from an unseen wound to stain the chrome plating. She didn't seem to notice. “Why are you helping? How'd you even find us?”

Grey didn't even look at her. He kept his eyes on the road and it took me a moment to remember that he was every bit of a Knight as she was, if not more. I had learned through Knox's memories that he had fought for her, but something had happened to force him to kill the woman that he had once sworn to protect. I caught the movement of his hands as they tensed on the steering wheel and it dawned on me that he didn't belong to any one side. He was independent of anyone else's influence. If that meant loving Emma, killing her, then saving my life once in Arrino and then again in Maryville, then so be it.

He nodded at something that only he could see. “School's up ahead. They got a few more buses. We can split up and take 'em easy, but they need to be hotwired. I suggest you figure out who's doing what so that we can spend as little time in this shithole as possible.” He gave himself a chance to look at her with a little urgency to his voice, though not overtly condescending. “Then—if you want—we can talk.”

Maryville Elementary
came into view faster than I thought it should have, although it would have been impossible to get there alive on foot while getting shot at. The long, yellow boons were exactly what we had been looking for. Parked in the middle of an empty lot, it looked too easy. I half expected them to be loaded to the brim with explosives set to go off as a final
fuck you.

I clenched a fresh magazine in my hand and pondered how it could have possibly stayed surprisingly cool to the touch despite what we had all just gone through. Olivia had given it to me and assigned me to security detail while the people who actually knew what they were doing would get the rest of our much needed vehicles up and running. It felt strange, as if an older sibling knew I had just gotten my driver's license and instead of giving me something in my grasp, handed me the keys to a military jet with the oh so helpful advice of, 'Here. Go crazy.' I was supposed to be on security, yet I was sure I couldn't even secure myself, much less eight other people and four buses screaming to get shot at.

Tough luck, I guess.

I stuffed the mag away along with my worries and walked down the aisle as soon as the bus came to a stop. I shuffled past Jeremy as he carefully dabbed at Isabel's face with the bandana I had given her and wrapped her hands in a torn up shirt, even excusing myself and apologizing when I almost bumped into him. It was amazing what you had time for when strangers weren't shooting you.

I jumped off the bus without paying Grey any attention. There were so many things that I wanted to ask him, but I was too scared to hear the answers. He had been right, anyway. There would be time for that later.

I quickly forgot what I was supposed to be doing once I took a few steps onto the freshly-minted concrete. Small, muffled voices came out from the new buses as Olivia kept a keen eye on the men inside. The sky had appeared to grow suddenly dark while specks of lit embers floated past like silent fireflies. Behind us, the wall of fire that had once seemed incredibly far away, was now unbelievably close. The sight of an illuminating glow and an endless supply of smoke spread out enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like I was sucking on the wrong end of a cigarette, but that wasn't what had gotten my attention.

The grounds around us were otherwise clean, fully bullet-hole free and seemed deathly quiet compared to the square—except for a faint sobbing noise that I couldn't place down for the life of me. I looked back at the bus, though I knew it wasn't coming from there. The sounds had to be coming from a crying kid. I half expected to see one everyone I turned, though the only one I found was Nick. It didn't surprise me to understand that he cursed instead of showing his emotions in any other way.

He stopped in front of me and let his rifle hang to the side, lifting his bandaged arm up for me to see as if saying, 'See? I told you.' “Can you fuckin' believe this shit?”

I looked at his arm, but the sound was still there.
Somebody
was crying. Or I was crazy. “Do you hear that?”

He gave himself a moment to shatter the rest of my sanity. “Hear what?”

I glanced back towards the school. It was coming from inside. I looked around to make sure that Olivia was still busy and then prodded him on the shoulder with my knuckles. “I'll be right back.” Then before I almost forgot: “Don't leave without me.”

“Where the hell are you going?”

I have no idea.

I tried the back door first, and surprisingly enough, it opened. I stepped inside with my rifle up at the ready and suddenly wished I had been smart enough to bring a flashlight. The interior of the school looked dark and cold, the lack of any functional lighting not helping the matter. It couldn't have been past the early afternoon, but the increased amount of smoke obscuring the sun from any adjacent windows led to a darkness that quickly began playing tricks on me. I would turn a corner and brush my finger up against the trigger of my gun only to back off a split second later once I recognized I had been looking at a particular mean spirited shadow.

I forced myself to take a deep breath and readjusted my grip. I had just survived my first real firefight and it still hadn't quite dawned on me that I was still standing. Although I couldn't name any of them, I knew that a severe chemical imbalance in my body would be to blame for me seeing and hearing things that didn't quite exist. It didn't stop me from continuing forward.

The subtle sound of someone crying in the dark persisted, and it pulled me forward by an undertow. I began to feel it on the surface of my scalp as an unreachable itch more than anything else. I used it to orient my body like a compass. I couldn't explain it, yet I didn't want it to be explainable. For something so hidden and small to lose its peculiar mystique would be to lose its mysterious influence. After all, who was I to find something normal in the dark?

I stopped at the start of another hallway and turned to face the looming darkness while it stared back with impunity. The sound had stopped, but the feeling was still there, now stronger than ever. I took tentative steps into the black with my gun low and pointed at the ground. If the feelings were real, then they belonged to someone, and the last thing I needed to do was shoot their owner by accident.

I delved deeper into the unknown and could barely see my own gun in front of me. Small, metal lockers lined the expanse on either side with occasional opening for a door, but other than that there was nothing. Just silence. Darkness. And then a label to the emotion.

Sadness.

I stopped on the front of my heels and listened in the dark. The source was close. I could start to make out the intricacies in the web.

Vulnerability.

And all of a sudden I was back in Arrino. I was in the school. I was in the classroom and I was looking at Ellie before I knew who she was, what she had gone through, and I recognized the last feeling because it was too familiar, because I had felt it before.

It was despair.

A shape in the dark screamed at my side and threw me into the lockers. The pain in my hip flared like no other and my vision faded even further than it had to. I lost the grip on my gun in sudden panic and felt it tumble through the air until it landed on the floor, the sound echoing down the hall. I tried to reach out into nothingness when something solid hit me in the gut and I doubled over. I could hear the metallic slide of a pistol being primed to fire in front of my face and I dove at the source.

A round went off over my head and for a split second I saw everything. The light had bounced across the floor and the lockers, and I remembered where I was. I wasn't just reacting anymore. I was thinking, fighting someone in an abandoned school because they were trying to kill me. And they were winning.

It had to have been a man. I couldn't see his face, but he was taller, wider, and stronger than me. He picked me up by the waist as if I was nothing and transplanted my back into the opposite lockers with a hearty war cry. The blow knocked the air out of me in an instant. I began to feel dizzy and my ears were ringing. I wouldn't be able to do anything except die after being disoriented like that. At that moment, all I wanted was the man to get as far away from me as possible.

I built on the thought and held my hand out in a last ditch effort to push on the air in front of me. I could feel a weak pressure wave glance across the side of his body and he spun through the air until he hit a pair of lockers with the side of his face. The sound was unmistakable. So was the grip of his gun.

I kicked his pistol across the floor and then fumbled in the dark until my fingers curled around the familiar shape of a grip. I pointed it towards the sound of a painful groan and completely missed my chance as soon as it went quiet. Something knocked my legs out from underneath me and the back of my head hit the floor, the pain in my hip never too far off.

I tried to bring the gun up, but the man was already on top of me. He got his hand around my own and shoved a finger underneath the trigger, screaming out in pain no matter how hard I tried to shoot him. I struggled to push as hard as I could. Another hand got underneath my jaw and started choking me. I reached up to push against his face, but he stayed put. I could feel the whiskers on the side of his mouth, the breathes of hot air as he panted in frustration to squeeze the life out of me, the wetness of his lips.

Someone hit the release on the pistol and the magazine slipped out to hit me in the face. I could barely feel it. I couldn't breathe. My entire face felt like it was blowing up like a balloon to swell into a hallway three million degrees above normal. I could barely make out the warmth of blood running down my wrist until I realized it wasn't mine. I had been cutting up his finger while he continued to keep the gun from firing. Which meant it was still there. I quickly torqued my wrist as hard as I could to hear a sharp
snap
in front of my face, and the gun was free.

I pulled the trigger.

The man shuddered. The sound had almost been muffled by his flesh, but a minute explosion has sent a piece of lead into his gut. The grip around my throat instantly loosened and I had just enough energy left to push him off of me before curling into a ball and coughing my lungs out. My neck continued to feel incredibly constricted as if I was sucking through a bent straw. It stung to wheeze uncontrollably, but the air made it through. I could breathe. I was alive.

I let my cheek lay flush against the cold tiled floor and relished the sensation of it seeping the warmth away from my skin. It felt familiar, though for some reason I couldn't remember where I had done it last. I stared into nothing for a few moments, until the sound of someone else trying to breathe and grunting out in pain reminded me I wasn't alone. I forced myself up to my feet when I really didn't want to, and I found my rifle. I found the magazine that had fallen out of the pistol and loaded it back in with a smack, knocking the slide back to load a fresh bullet towards the barrel.

I followed the sounds of pain and I got closer. I knelt on his chest and he moaned in protest.

“Please...” he begged with a wet rasp.

Whoever I had shot didn't sound good. I had no idea who they were. As far as I knew, I could have just shot Zach in the middle of a darkened, empty hallway, but it wouldn't have fit. Ever. He would have never guarded the door to a classroom filled with a dozen teenage girls held hostage, just as helpless as the ones in Arrino had been. I didn't have to look inside to know. I didn't have to hear one of the girls brave enough to slowly turn the door knob at my side and squeeze through the doorway to peer into nothingness.