The Last Revenant (Book 1): The Crash (44 page)

I hit the ground without any recollection of where I was. Or when. Globs of earth fell onto my chest and patted my head with hollow
thuds
that barely made it past the ringing in my ears. The endless gray sky stared back down at me with small specks of ash that drifted down and covered me like snow. It was peaceful in its own way. Once the ringing stopped, it was just me and the world. Nothing else. Just quiet.

Time was flowing again.

I blinked the dirt from my eyes and glanced down to see the clearing that I had been in when it had all started. The buses still surrounded me, but the flames were gone. Everyone inside was out of sight, either unconscious or dead. Abel was gone. Emma was gone. Olivia lay still on the hood of the truck with a hole in her body.  A thin lining of ash covered everything. 

I strained to get up, but I couldn't move. Something was off. Something was wrong. Every time I tried to get a hand underneath me to bear some weight, the reassurance never came. I winced and craned my head to look down at my body to see it cut, bloody and bruised, but nothing that I saw explained it—until I saw
it.

My arm, or where it was supposed to be, was nothing. There was nothing except for upset dirt and the gray clumps of ash collecting in the spots in-between. The surface along my elbow was pink and raw of exposed deep tissue, with bits of white where the bone poked through the flesh in a mangled mess. I tried to flex the muscles that I felt to be there, but nothing happened. I urged my fingers to bend. I willed my hand to tense. I began to cry as I realized I was trying to move an unseen wrist. I still felt it. I still felt all of it, but everything below the elbow was gone.

I leaned up in panic and watched in a newfound horror as the remainder of my arm was dragged across the ground behind me. I lifted my arm up to see my forearm split in half, barely holding on to the rest of me by a shred of ribbons and thread. I couldn't believe what I had become. I couldn't believe Emma had punished me like this.

Then the pain hit me.

The entire limb resonated with an agony so profound that it caused me to scream until it drew darkness around my eyes. I couldn't stop yelling. Every square inch of my arm blistered in unyielding strength as if it were all still there and connected, but it wasn't. I could see that it wasn't. The contrasting concepts tensed the invisible muscles until pain flared and burned through misplaced veins on the edge of a supernova.

Everything grew heavy at once and I fell back down to the ground. The air seemed thinner. The edges of my vision blurred with shapes moving just outside. But one of them was real. I turned to look at a small figure as it walked along the nearest bus. It ran its hand along the length of yellow paint until it stopped at the opening of a door. It was quiet and graceful, a silent killer, a hunter stocking its prey.

Juno.

No...

I reached out for the monster, completely helpless. Her black orbs for eyes glistened in response and she grinned to reveal the points of her teeth. She walked up into the bus, and my head fell back down. I couldn't hold on anymore.

*

A gentle bit of crying stirred me awake. They were short sobs, muffled by something in its wake, but they had made it to my ears. I forced my eyes open only to see white, then blinked past the layer of ash that had collected on the tops of my eyelashes. I willed my body to sit up, the pain somehow gone. In its place, only numbness. I couldn't dare myself to look at what was left of my arm in fear that it would all come rushing back. I had to go on.

I managed to stand up and put one foot in front of the other. I kept a hand around my broken limb to try and keep it still. I could still feel the vibrations, every movement shaking the loose attachment like a stick on a string. I didn't look.

Instead, I looked down at Olivia as I passed her body. She was covered in a thin line of ash, the center of which had soaked up an increasingly deeper shade of red. I couldn't see if she was breathing or not. Everything around me was covered in the dusting and it continued to drift down and accumulate. Like the season's first snowfall, it was peaceful. Quiet. But the crying came back. Just like what I had felt and heard outside of the school, the sobbing urged me to find its source.

I shuffled towards the nearest bus, one foot in front of the other, each step longer and infinitely harder than I could remember. I reached through the doorway and grabbed the railing to pull myself up and inside. The air immediately grew thicker. No matter how much it was just the smell, I couldn't get rid of the taste of pennies in my mouth.

I walked into the isle and stopped. I couldn't feel my arm anymore. I couldn't feel anything. In the place of my body was just emptiness. My blood ran cold and I wanted to throw up, but the functions wouldn't work. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, yet I knew it to be true. Juno was responsible.
Emma
was responsible.

In front of me, and the entire length of the bus, everything was covered in blood. Where twenty-five seats on either side could have been crammed with three human beings each, their bodies had all been turned to a thick, dripping paste. There was no discernible sign from where one person could have begun and the other ended. The gore covered every surface. I was standing inside of a failed organ, a lifeless vein with body matter strewn out into an unrecognizable mess.

Amanda looked up at me from the floor, tears dripping down from eyes of red. She was completely covered head to toe with a slippery red coating that looked like gelatin. Martha, or what was left of her, lay across her lap like a broken doll. Her pale eyes were open in a dead stare. Her body was mostly intact, except for where it wasn't. Her ribcage had been burst open like a pair of cellar doors and the insides mangled. Her granddaughter had been forced to witness hell and live through the aftermath.

I dropped down in front of the little girl, knee deep in blood, and pulled her close to me.  I pressed her face against my chest to feel warmth as she continued to sob. I pressed her body closer. She didn't need to look. She didn't need to see anymore. I peered over her shoulder in a daze while she continued to cry.

I was surrounded by death and dismemberment. Juno had been the tool to inflict the damage, but I knew that Emma was responsible. Knox was responsible for all of it. This was what she was capable of. Whether the others were meant to die or not, Emma had driven me to this moment.  I had used her to try and save them, and now I was facing the consequences. I understood now that no amount of pain and suffering would get me to stop, except for the pain and suffering of others. She wanted me to learn. She wanted me to feel it all. It was all for me.

I knelt in a pool of a hundred people that I had tried to save and held on to an eleven year old girl that had lost everything she had ever cared for. She had seen countless bodies disemboweled and liquefied in front of her own eyes only to witness her grandmother die in silent agony, the suffering of a body struggling to survive yet ultimately and catastrophically failing. The idea that I was responsible for all of it, her future and the shortening of all others, crashed into my being until only one thought remained, and I understood. I knew what it meant.

And I smiled.