Kinetics: In Search of Willow (28 page)

"But she obviously..."

"A ploy. She's not going help us."
Harry growled. "It's just a lie to get us into her confidence.
She's just going to use us and then drop us as soon as
possible."

"How do you..." I started, but Harry
flicked his hand dismissively.

"I can just tell." Harry stared in the
direction Laura had disappeared and muttered under his
breath.

"I don't think it's a ploy, Harry." I
too looked in the direction that Harry stared. "The possible
benefits of a third person..."

"Eugene." Harry's eyes glinted with
something I couldn't decipher. I stopped talking and stared right
back at him into those glinting eyes. "No matter what emotional
appeals she's made to you..."

"It's not an emotional appeal," I bit
out.

"Then why? Why should we endanger
ourselves and this mission on the pining of a lonely girl unable to
deal with reality?"

"I do and then again I don't want her
to go with us," I said to him, holding up my hand to prevent him
from interrupting. "I can't explain it, Harry, but how would you
feel if you were totally alone in a world you couldn't
understand?"

"I don't think that..." he started to
argue but he stopped when his eyes flicked over my shoulder. "Oh
sh..." he pushed me behind a set of trashcans.

"What? What?" I tried to peer around
the trashcans to see what Harry had seen.

"Oh shit." I said. Walking down the
road with a small entourage was my brother, Jacob. He was looking
left and right with a slow movement of his head. He was looking for
something.

"Did he find us?" I gasped
out.

"I dunno." He whispered. "Stay
down."

They passed us, Jacob never saw us and
only when his whole entourage had disappeared behind some shacks
did I let myself relax.

"Why are you hiding?" Laura's voice
startled me, and I jumped up.

"We were, uh…" I looked to Harry who
was slowly rising to his feet.

"We can't stay here long." Harry said
to me. "What do we need to know about this place?"

I looked at Laura. "Is there somewhere
we can sit out of sight for a bit?"

Laura looked between us and then
nodded. She took us through a maze of buildings and shacks until we
got to one that she opened the door to.

"Home sweet home," she said
bitterly.

The furnishings of the tiny home were
few and far between. There was a tiny table with a wilted flower in
a cup resting on it with a basin with water in it up against the
wall, and a stack of blankets next to it. The small window on the
back wall revealed a joke of a yard with a couple shoddy tents set
up next to an unlit fire pit.

"How do you live like this?" I
said.

"Can you really call it living?" Laura
said, and pulled the blankets out.

"We don't have chairs, so you'll have
to sit on these." She shook the dirt loose and laid it out flat on
the ground. She sat on a corner of it, and with only a shared
glance, we joined her.

"You know it's funny. You're not the
first person to just 'pass through' town." She said.

"Oh?" I asked.

"Yeah, Willow… she was here about two
or three weeks ago. Some old guy was showing her around the place.
I didn't get to talk to her though. I didn't believe it at first
that she was here. Too much of a goody-two-shoes to be in a place
like this."

I frowned at her but chose not to say
anything about that.

"What was this old guy showing her?"
Harry asked instead.

"I'm not sure." She
replied.

Harry didn't have time to get out his
next question because the door opened and a guy stepped in. Harry
stood up abruptly.

"Logan!" Laura stood and greeted the
guy. "Uhm, Logan these are my friends. Eugene and…"

"Oliver." Harry said.

She frowned at his name, but shrugged.
"Guys, this is my brother, Logan."

"Friends?" Logan said with a smile. "I
knew if you just tried you would make some friends. Did they have
to be boys?" He said the last in a fake whisper, but turned to us
and smiled while he did it.

"Logan, please." Laura blushed and
looked at us with a smile.

"Whatever," he laughed, and reached
over to pat us each on the shoulders.

Harry, still standing, finally sat
back down and I was relieved to see him relax a little. For the
next hour Laura and Logan talked to us about this place. They had
been shipped here by the InfoCon after Laura's outburst at school.
It had apparently been her third incident in a year, and by InfoCon
rules, that was enough to punish her, condemning her and her family
to this hellish town.

A couple times Laura and Logan's
parents came in and out of the little shack, but for the most part
they stayed outside in the tents and around the fire pit. It was
their day off from work. The non-kinetics in town, mostly the
parents of first-generation Kinetics, worked at the tall building
on the far edge of town. Laura didn't say much about it, just that
they went six days out of the week for some kind work that they
weren't supposed to share with anyone outside of the tall
building.

Most of the kids and some of the
adults here were capable of many powers. They could only redeem
their way out of Hooverville if they could become a productive
member of the tiny society. A few had been given a clean slate by
the InfoCon, and yet others had disappeared without
warning.

After we were sure that Jacob and his
people were gone we stepped outside to get some "air" as Harry
called it, but really he wanted to talk about our next
move.

"We need to get out of here without
Laura following us and before any of the Alliance finds us. I can't
imagine the trouble she'll get us into if she tries and they catch
us."

"I guess."

"I know you feel for her, and I do
too, but there are more important things than this. You want to
save Willow, don't you?"

"Of course."

"Then don't endanger yourself by
letting this girl sway you into pitying her. Yes the environment
here is bad. It's fucking deplorable, but there is a reason she is
here. She's unstable. The nightmares she caused at school… who
knows what she could do to people."

"I understand what you mean
but..."

Harry pushed me aside just as a
hand-painted street sign next to us exploded like a miniature bomb
from a direct jolt of brilliant electricity. In the distance I
could hear a scream, and before I knew how to respond to the abrupt
violence, the slight wooden frame of Laura's shack was being
encompassed by flames. The dark rain clouds above our heads gave no
relief as distant lightning echoed in the depths of the
clouds.

I got up to my feet the quickest and
dragged Harry into a safe place behind another shack. I heard
another scream and a few indistinguishable shouts--voices I didn't
recognize and a few I did sent warning signals off in my
head.

I looked out from behind the shack and
saw Logan facing off with someone I didn't recognize. The guy had a
bright red armband on his jacket. Where had I seen that armband
before? The guy pushed Logan over and as electricity danced off his
fingers he pointed in the direction where Harry and I were
hiding.

"Who is it?" Harry gasped.

"I don't—oh." I had started to say,
and then they appeared. Napoli and Joe. They flanked the unknown
man and carried on what I could easily tell was a silent telepathic
conversation. The unknown man pointed at us again and both Napoli
and Joe headed toward us. Napoli was feeding off the power of the
other man and was spouting electric bolts that flickered off his
hands.

He saw me and I ducked behind the shed
just in time for the small building to explode in front of me.
Harry pushed me out of the way just in time for the splinters of
wood and concrete to pelt my back.

I only had a second to recover before
Joe was right next to me and grabbing the nape of my neck. He
pulled me back and I fell to the ground. Harry also fell but rolled
away right to the feet of Hoodie. Hoodie grunted as he shoved his
hands out, and water from a bucket followed the movement, slamming
into Joe's chest. He had another one to follow and it collided with
a bolt of electricity that was heading right toward me. The water
and electricity exploded and water rained down around
us.

I pushed myself to my feet and grabbed
Harry's arm, dragging him away from our two attackers and Hoodie.
We ran past the burning house. I did my best to ignore the fearful
sweat that ran down my back and threatened to turn me
cold.

Harry tugged on my shirt and pulled me
in the direction of a ditch and we rolled through the mud into the
nook. Hoodie wasn't far behind. Hoodie put his hands into the part
of a drainage pipe that stuck into the ground.

Surprisingly a small trickle of water
was beginning to gather at our feet--artillery that Hoodie could
use to defend us. In a rare moment of frustration I suddenly wished
I could use my powers. He was stuck defending and Harry and I were
helpless.

"How did they find us here?" Harry
gasped.

Harry's question kicked through the
fog entering my brain and I could only shake my head and take in
deep breaths. What little there was of the shack was burning to the
ground right in front of us.

I heard a shout and saw Laura's mother
running with a bucket of water toward one of the tents that had
caught fire. She never reached the tent. Out of nowhere a spear of
electricity pierced the flames surrounding the house and hit her in
the chest. She fell to the ground and I felt my blood run
cold.

Her blank eyes stared upwards and the
bucket of water pooled around her like clear blood. Her chest was
charred and no life-giving breath moved it. She was
dead.

"No!" I heard a Laura's dad scream,
and he ran to his wife. In seconds he joined his wife on the ground
with a fatal electric burn on his chest. Two innocent people were
dead. The realization was tearing its way through my brain like a
blunted saw.

Lightning flashed in the sky, mocking
the burning house and the two dead people at its base, their pale
faces gaining no life from the flames ravaging their home. I tasted
blood and realized belatedly that my cheek was bleeding from a cut.
It seemed trivial in the face of what had just happened.

"What?" Harry started to say and then
a great web of trees began to grow around the fire. Hoodie crawled
out of the ditch and ran in between a couple shacks across the
street. Logan stood in the middle of the street and stared down an
Alliance officer. He had his hands out, and as his fingers jerked,
the trees and ropelike roots erupted from the ground.

Three men I didn't recognize ran
through the wreckage. They stood in front of Napoli and the
electrokinesis Kinetic. One of the men, also an electrokinetic,
started a fight with the other one. Artificial lightning crackled
all around us as they ran at each other.

I heard Harry gasp at something behind
me. I didn't have time to see what had shocked him because a truck
pulled up beside us blocking the view. Laura was in the driver's
seat. Blood was gushing out of a cut along her scalp but she didn't
seem to care.

"Get in!" she yelled, her voice
cracking.

I took one look back at the
destruction behind us before Harry grabbed my arm and pulled me
from the ditch into the waiting truck. All around us the flora was
coming alive and overtaking the street as if in fast forward
motion. Hundreds of years of growth were choking the entire area in
seconds. Who was doing this I wasn't sure. All I knew was that the
Alliance Kinetics were becoming entangled in it and suffocated
along with the flames by the unforgiving growth. Logan stood in the
center of it all raising his hands higher and higher, orchestrating
the trees in a hostile takeover.

Just as Harry slammed the door on the
truck behind us, one of the Alliance officers came up behind Logan
and grabbed him around the neck. Logan struggled in his grasp, but
he was losing. The trees shot up faster than before, blocking our
view.

In moments we were driving away, down
the country road, and behind us the smoke piling out of the forest
was all too quickly replaced by trees the size of large
buildings.

"What was— How was that happening to
the forest?" I gasped, staring at Laura across the truck
cab.

"Logan," she whispered through a
waterfall of tears making tracks across her cheeks. "He's dead. He
sacrificed himself for me."

"How do you know he's dead?" Harry
asked.

Laura unsteadily tapped her head. "I
can't feel him anymore!"

Harry looked shaken and sat back in
his seat. I looked back once more at the tall trees in the distance
and shuddered when the rain began to fall.