The old man veered to the right, slinging Daniel and Lisa around in the car like rag dolls and skidding across the blood-wet ground. Daniel looked up to see that an entrance to the 10 freeway was about one mile straight ahead, and they were making a run for it.
Even if they reached it, they were far from safe, so Daniel grabbed Morgan’s notebook off the rear floorboard and began skimming through it quickly for the mysterious symbol that he didn’t recognize.
“Look out!” Lisa screamed, and their vehicle was violently smashed into from behind.
Daniel had been hurtled onto the floorboard, then wrenched himself back up on the seat. But he stayed low, continuing to thumb madly through Morgan’s pages.
Come on, come on, where is it? Is it in here . . . ?
They hit the on-ramp and Daniel looked up as they approached the top. The westbound lane had plenty of cars in it all right, but they were abandoned, just like the cars in town had been.
How strange
, the thought occurred to him.
During the riots,
everyone was consumed with escaping from town, but now it’s
like everyone has gone home and holed themselves up in basements
or whatever. Guess they know there’s really nowhere to
run. Nowhere to go that the raining blood won’t soak you . . .
There was a tap from behind, but this time they managed to avoid a major collision, even though Payton and Alex never slowed down. They were darting in and around the stationary cars, barely missing most of them.
Payton was behind the wheel this time, a vicious, predatory expression painting his features.
So this is what it feels like to be hunted by the Thresher . . .
Daniel mused and felt a momentary pride that they weren’t dead yet. Few made it this long.
He snapped back to the moment.
Focus, Daniel! Focus!
The notebook fell out of his hands and onto the floorboard again, but this time Daniel froze before picking it up. The page it had fallen open to bore the symbol he was looking for.
“I got it!”
“What’s it say?” Lisa shouted without raising her head over the top of her seat.
“ ‘ . . . body, breath, or life,’ ” he replied. “So . . . we have ‘unconfined movement’ . . . and now ‘life.’ ”
He saw Lisa peek over her seat at him, her dark hair now soaked with blood and matted down to her scalp, her eyes big and unable to look away from the car right behind them. “What do you think it means?” she asked urgently.
“Not sure,” he replied in the voice she often referred to as
maddeningly detached
when he was going into scientist mode. “What’s another word for ‘unconfined movement’?”
“Freedom, maybe?” she offered.
“No, I think in this context maybe it’s more like leaking, or spilling . . .” he replied, feeling another jolt from behind as the old man tossed them back and forth. He surmised that they had to be doing speeds well above a hundred miles an hour. “What happens when something gets spilled or leaks out?”
Lisa nervously pulled at her wet, stringy hair, still watching the Mustang. “I don’t know, it runs over?”
Daniel stopped in mid-thought. “It
flows
,” he said. His thoughts turned back to the passage on the Stone and the order the symbols were in. “Dominion Stone . . . life . . . flow . . .” He looked outside, at the otherworldly storm that was making visibility on the freeway increasingly hard . . .
And he had it.
Knowing exactly what to do, he peeked over the top of the seat at the passengers in the Mustang. It wasn’t easy to make them out through the gushing drops of red falling from the sky, but he was pretty sure that neither of them were wearing seat belts.
He ducked back down and whispered silently so that only he could hear, “If either of you survive this . . . please forgive me.”
Daniel reached through the gap between the two seats up front and grabbed the old man by the arm. “Slam on the brakes! Now!” he shouted, squeezing the man’s arm firmly.
“What? Are you crazy?” Lisa replied.
The old man grunted a similar-sounding question.
“I know what I’m doing!” Daniel snapped back. “Just DO IT! Do it NOW!!”
The old man frowned but jammed his foot down on the brake pedal as Lisa and Daniel both braced themselves.
It worked. Almost too well. Payton obviously hadn’t been prepared for it, and the Mustang slammed even harder into the Camaro, with Daniel getting wedged once again in his seat. This time he was so far down he couldn’t get out.
But soon the car came to a screeching, grinding halt, and he opened the side door and squeezed out into the pouring red rain.
Please, God, let them be alive . . .
Alex was on the ground some thirty feet in front of the Camaro. Payton seemed to have used his unique agility to gain some kind of foothold and jump onto the roof of the Camaro, but then fallen onto his back. Neither of them were moving.
Daniel reached inside the car and grabbed a fragment of the Dominion Stone from the floorboard and then ran toward Alex.
Whether it was her blood on the paved freeway or the kind falling from the fiery clouds above, he couldn’t tell, but she was most definitely unconscious. Yet when he was ten paces out, she stumbled to her feet, her eyes were still blissfully shut. Daniel stopped in his tracks, unnerved by the sight of her moving like a marionette, and knowing that Oblivion was holding her strings. Her right arm came up slowly, grasping for him, but Daniel was moving too fast.
He ducked under her arm and slammed the Dominion Stone fragment into the black crusty scars covering her abdomen. He scrubbed at the scabs until a spot of raw, pinkish flesh appeared, along with a fresh oozing of blood, and he thrust the Stone fragment into it fully.
The Ring on Alex’s right middle finger glowed, casting a diffuse white glow in a four-foot circle around where she stood. The rain stained it red.
Alex blinked awake. A scream burst forth from her mouth, the kind of agonizing, howling scream that could only pass beyond lips that had been forcibly held closed for days, perhaps weeks. She collapsed in a heap on the ground, shriveling practically into nothingness and trying to drift off into death’s cold arms.
Lisa screamed in the distance.
Alex jolted awake and, like Daniel, looked up just in time to see Payton standing atop the Camaro, his sword twirling in his hand and preparing to strike at Lisa, who stood outside her side door just below him.
Alex stuck a hand out in his direction. “No,” she whispered.
Payton nearly dropped his sword from whatever emotion she’d shot at him, then staggered backward onto one knee, seemingly unable to get his bearings.
Daniel seized their one opportunity. “Lisa, touch his blood with one of the Stones!” he shouted. “The symbols say
blood
flow
! Touch his blood with a fragment of the Dominion Stone, and Oblivion will lose his hold!”
Lisa’s eyes searched the car and spotted a three-inch shard of glass resting on the dash; it was all that remained of the windshield. She grabbed it and jumped up onto the hood, where she reached down and slashed a deep cut right into Payton’s left cheek.
The old man had already retrieved a piece of the Dominion Stone, and he tossed it to her. She dropped the glass with one hand, caught the Stone fragment in the other, and mashed the Stone into his wound as hard as she could.
Payton started at the pain in his face, then blinked several times as if waking up from a long sleep.
Alex fainted into Daniel’s arms. He scooped her up as best he could and realized how hot her skin was. Under the battered frame, she boiled with fever. The scabs covering her stomach and right upper arm were black and crusty. The soles of her feet were covered in red sores and blisters, most of which were open and oozing pus. Her leg muscles twitched now and again, a sign of exhaustion and overuse.
Daniel carried her slowly back to the car, doing his best not to let his weary legs slip out from under him in the blood pooling on the freeway in the rain.
When he got back to the car, no one spoke. Payton was still lying on the roof of the car, grasping his sword with one hand like it was a safety blanket, his only root to reality. He appeared coherent, watching the actions of everyone else, but the pained, bitter look in his eyes was thousands of miles away.
With the Camaro wrecked beyond use, the old man had found an old station wagon with the keys still in it and a mostly filled tank of gas. Daniel placed Alex carefully in the backseat of the car, where the old man got to work dressing her wounds with some supplies from Daniel’s backpack. She stirred awake at his ministrations and clutched her stomach in agony. She stifled powerful emotions that forced tears streaming down her cheeks, crying out in great heaving sobs of anguish.
Daniel planted himself in the driver’s seat and leaned back. Out of breath and drenched in blood and his own sweat, he was pretty sure he never wanted to get up again.
“Y
OU REALLY THINK YOU
changed, after you were given a new body?” asked Grant’s duplicate.
“Yes,” Grant replied without hesitation. “I care about people! I care about everybody. I risked my life to save them.”
“Certainly true,” his reflection admitted. “But in the end, you could not prevent them from suffering the terrible fate that is now upon them. Many have already been lost. Do you even know why you saved their lives again and again?”
Grant paused, not sure what his companion was expecting to hear. “It was the right thing to do.”
“And why does doing the right thing concern you?”
Grant had no answer. He remained silent for so long that the mirror man finally spoke again.
“Let me put it another way. Your sister, Julie Saunders, is dead.”
“My fault . . . She tried to warn me . . . I led her to her death.”
“Yes,” the double said. “Perhaps that responsibility does lie at your feet. Or perhaps it’s because of the actions of others. Either way, can you accept that there is nothing you could have done to save her, in the end?”
“Never!” Grant cried with conviction. “With all the power I had, I could’ve . . . I should have—I could’ve stopped the bullet or pushed her out of the way, or—”
“No, no, no,” the other man interrupted. “You misunderstand my question. Even if you had saved Julie’s life from Devlin’s bullet, you could not have stopped the disease that was ravaging her muscular system from ultimately degenerating her quality of life until she was dead. Understand this, it is crucial: In the end, her fate would have been exactly the same. So I ask again: Can you accept that even you could not have prevented her from dying? Whether it occurred on the same day that you died or twenty years after?”
“No,” Grant admitted. “What was any of it for, if not to help people avoid pain and suffering?”
“An admirable goal, if ultimately futile . . . Still, I’d like to believe that you changed, but the evidence is simply too damning. See for yourself . . .”
A new scene materialized in the blackness before Grant’s eyes, and this one he knew all too well. He relived it in his thoughts and nightmares often.
A broken window in a high-rise penthouse.
Grant, kneeling on the ground by the window, Alex nearby. Cradled in his arms was Hannah, the life draining out of her from a bullet wound to the neck.
“Don’t let them take . . .” Hannah said groggily, fading fast, “your soul . . .”
He cried out her name at the same moment that she stopped breathing. He held her in his arms, unwilling to let her go, even at Alex’s attempts to snap him back to manifest . . .
In the blackness, the Grant of the here and now watched his own visage change in the 3-D image, becoming dark, vengeful, full of rage. The whole room began to shake as if an earthquake were happening, but it was no earthquake. It was his wrath made reality.
The scene faded. “No need to relive the whole thing,” Grant’s doppelganger said. “You know what came next. The skies turned dark, fire threatened to fall from the sky, and the lives of everyone in Los Angeles were nearly extinguished. All because of your inability to control your rage.”
Grant said nothing. A series of scenes flickered to life in the darkness, coming faster and faster now, some so quick that he only caught glimpses of them.
He saw himself standing in Substation Lambda Alpha, beneath Los Angeles, facing down his grandfather with an explosive eruption of anger . . .
He ran into a street in the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem, his breathing fast, looking like he was ready to detonate, when the walls surrounding the Old City flew up into the sky and burst into powder . . .
He was storming into the attic hideout of the Upholders of the Crown in London. He marched inside, dictated demands to the four Brits, and threatened them to within an inch of their lives if they didn’t obey . . .
He was inside the same attic sometime later, sitting on the couch, all focus on his teammate Nora. Her body left the ground and was pinned up against the far wall as she struggled to loosen an invisible hand around her throat . . .
Devlin was leading him into the heart of the round cavern known as the Hollow, toward the gaping, howling hole at its center, and Grant was following him blindly, ignoring the pleas of his sister to stop, to turn back . . . Moments later, her blood splattered on his face, his eyes turned red, and he was shoved in the back by Devlin into the hole . . .
The images dissipated, and Grant’s double walked slowly around and stepped in front of him. “Tell me again about how you’ve changed.”
The old man did his best on Alex, and she’d fallen into a feverish sleep. The others, near collapse from exhaustion, had sat in stunned silence until Lisa finally suggested that perhaps they should move someplace that wasn’t so exposed. Who knew what Oblivion would do now that Payton and Alex had been freed? Payton mumbled something about knowing a place, and so he hot-wired a broken-down sedan that was abandoned nearby, and Daniel joined him, taking the driver’s seat. The old man followed in the station wagon, carrying Alex, who was unconscious, and Lisa, who tended to her.