Stones: Experiment (Stones #3) (21 page)

He crouches and hides behind a boulder at the edge of the clearing, moving forward on his belly to get a peek at the transports that have landed in the clearing.

When he sees them, a hundred meters away across an open field, their small size surprises him. For all the howling and destruction he has witnessed, each one is barely twenty meters long. Five of them, black attack-helis, stand end-to-end in a line at the center of the clearing, side doors still shut, quad rotors spinning slowly.

Matt scans across their hulls.

What they lack in size, they make up for in armaments. Each carries four EM cannons, one in the front, one in the back and one on each side. Each canon rises above the roof of the transport on articulated arms, able to spread destruction in any direction.

To Matt’s surprise, a group a men and women from the camp are gathered in a tight group halfway between him and the attack-helis. He recognizes the tall man with the beard, the one who opposed Eva in leading the people to the city. Others in the group look familiar from the flash of images Matt saw in his mind.

Images of death.

The man with the beard now stands facing the group, his back to the mechanized black dragons, his arms raised.

“Do not fear.” His voice booms over the low vibrations that shake the ground. “No need to run, no need to hide. Those who have gone back to the city will find only
Abomination
. It will infect their souls, make them weak. They are lost. But we are still strong.”

The tall man turns to face the attack ships. He raises a black crossbow, the same kind Matt saw in the tent. Loading an arrow, he points it at the nearest ship, less than 30 meters away.

“Leave us,” he says, talking to the ship as if it were alive. “You were born in
Abomination
, and your name is altogether
Abomination
.” The air whistles as the arrow flies at the black ship.

With a quiet sizzle, the arrow vaporizes on impact with the carbonite hull of the transport. Gray dust dribbles like drops of rain to the ground.

Each time he blinks his eyes, Matt catches glimpses of what’s going to happen to the people in the clearing, like random frames of a movie.

Nausea radiates from his belly. He tries to push back the blackness that pours through him.

Don’t shut your eyes.

Matt forces his eyes to stay open, afraid of what he might see. As a diversion, he takes a clean white T-shirt and pants out of his backpack, slips off the burnt rags that cling to his body, and slips on the new clothes. The white fabric stands out in stark relief next to his blue skin.

Finally, his eyelids heavy, he gives in to the urge and lets them close.

It begins almost immediately. Images of people in the field near the attack-helis. They are spread out, running in confusion to the safety of the trees, their eyes wide with terror, screams rising from their throats. A network of jagged white lines bursts from twenty EM lasers along the line of ships. The lightning rips through the fleeing crowd, piercing backs and exploding out through chests, leaving smoldering piles of flesh and bone on the grass.

With effort, Matt lifts his eyelids.

The group is still standing in front of the black hulks. A blanket of silence lies over the field. Faint lines of vapor rise from the open barrels of the EM lasers.

It’s going to happen.

Without further thought, Matt jumps to his feet, backpack in hand, and runs out from behind the boulder onto the field, heading for the front of the group.

The tall man still has his back to the crowd and is yelling epithets at the ships, arms waving in the air, like a defiant grasshopper throwing challenges at a sleeping lion. He stoops and loads another arrow into his crossbow.

Matt stops a few meters away and turns to face the crowd, dropping his backpack to the ground. Hundreds of pairs of eyes move their focus from the tall man to Matt. With dark blue skin, a white shirt and white pants, Matt thinks he looks like a Martian who has wandered too close to the sun.

“Leave now. Run for the City.” Matt throws his arms back at the black monsters that stand in silence behind him. “In a few minutes, they’ll kill you, all of you.”

At the sound of Matt’s voice, the tall man abruptly turns and faces him, bringing his crossbow up to point directly at Matt’s chest.

The man’s hoarse voice rises to a crescendo. “Look at him. His blue skin shouts
Abomination
. He is the one that brought these black beasts to our camp. And now he wants us to leave.” Spit bursts from the man’s lips. “The sooner he is dead, the better.

The man takes a step closer to Matt, crossbow cocked and pointed.

The thought of touching his sternum and withdrawing the blue skin armor crosses Matt’s mind. His fingers momentarily hover over his chest. But then he looks at the arrow tip only a few meters away and withdraws his hand.

“Please,” Matt says. “Listen to me. They’ve come to kill you. They’re calibrating the instruments now, scanning the crowd, locking in on each of you. You’ve only got seconds to live. Leave now, while you still can.” He drops to his knees and brings his hands out in front, his voice dropping until it’s barely audible. “I’ll do my best to protect you. Please trust me. I’ve seen it.”

“You’ve seen it?” The tall man bursts into a loud laugh. “So you really
do
think you’re a prophet?”

The low-frequency sounds coming from the black ships go quiet. A deathly silence floats across the field.

A dozen people back away and peel off from the crowd, turning to run, disappearing into the trees.

Good,
Matt thinks.
At least a few are getting away.

“Let them go back to the city,” the man says. “Like a dog to its vomit.”

Matt faces the man. “I’m afraid you’re going to die.” He grips his Stone and begins to slowly breathe, reaching out to the present moment until he holds it in his grasp, ready to stop time.

“No,” the man says. “
You’re
going to die.” He stretches out his arms so the crossbow is two meters from Matt.

A faint popping sound, like pulling apart two pieces of cloth charged with static electricity, comes from the black ships.

Matt turns his head in time to see the tips of the EM lasers light up with a blue glow.

Time stops as his mind grips the present.

Matt casts his gaze across the field. As far as he can see, the air is milky white. A black dart from the man’s crossbow hovers in midair two feet from Matt’s chest. A massive network of barbed bolts of lightning from twenty EM laser cannons hangs suspended above the ground.

One finger of lightning has already penetrated the man’s chest. A black bulge of burnt flesh protrudes from his back like a mini Mt. Fuji. The only expression on his face is a clenched jaw and half-shut eyes staring at the spot where Matt had been standing.

Matt walks back and forth across the front of the group, not sure of what to do. The instant he releases his grip on time, the man and the group will be annihilated. Nausea rises in his stomach, but he does his best to push it back and simply deal with the reality facing him at that moment.

He moves to the side, contemplating his next move, out of the line of fire of the lasers.

Something rolls on the ground against his heel, a sphere made of metal and glass, a light green glow emanating from within. A bubble of light springs out of it and falls to the ground, completely enveloping his body. Instinctively, he tries to jump away. But it’s impossible to move beyond the bubble. It’s holding him in place.

His grip on the present is slipping away. Fear pierces the calm as he stares at the jagged fingers of lightning only nanoseconds away from ripping bodies and splitting bones.

“The funny thing is, the moment you let go,
you
become the murderer.”

Matt turns in the direction of the familiar deep voice.

Ryzaard stares back at him.

In desperation, Matt throws himself against the white bubble, but it refuses to give way. Each time he touches it with a hand or shoulder, it responds with an intense shock that surges through his blue skin, throwing him back. He wills his Stone to shoot kernels of high energy at the inside of the bubble, hoping to break through, but it absorbs all his attempts with little more than a ripple.

Ryzaard stands calmly, gazing down, arms folded across his chest.

“You’re running out of time and energy, Matt. You know you can’t keep this up forever. At some point, you’ll have to
let go
.”

Matt stares through the bubble at hundreds of men and women, their deaths only seconds away, entirely in his hands, yet slipping out of his control. The image of the Woman, one of the Allehonen, plays before his eyes.

Dropping to his knees, Matt brings his hands together. Words gush through his mind. His lips struggle to keep up.

I know you can hear me. I know you can help. I can’t hold on much longer. It’s my fault the attack-ships came. Don’t let them die because of me.

He recalls the vision of the Woman facing an onrushing army alone. In his mind, he sees the warrior on a horse charging her, sword in hand. The warrior leans forward and lowers the blade, catching the Woman just under her chin. Her body falls to the dust, the severed head landing and rolling a few meters away.

No. Don’t let them die.

Matt puts both palms squarely against the inside of the white bubble and tries to push his hands through. The blue skin reacts, spreading searing pain evenly across his body from his eyeballs to the tips of his toes. He can’t control the convulsions and shaking. The muscles in his chest seize up.

Still, he pushes through and beyond the pain.

“Don’t worry,” Ryzaard says. “It won’t last much longer. Why don’t you just relax and enjoy the show.”

“Let these people go. They’re innocent. You don’t need to kill them.” One of Matt’s hands breaks through to the outside. “Take me.” Jolts of pain surge through his spine, radiating out into his arms and legs. Something warm and sticky begins to run on his skin. His other hand breaks through the white bubble. He looks at his shirt and pants.

“Don’t worry, I
will
take you. And them.”

The white fabric of Matt’s T-shirt turns red everywhere it touches his skin. Blood drips from his chin and elbows. A crimson rain falls to the ground.

Gritting his teeth, Matt looks up through the white bubble at the clear blue sky above. His last grip on the present is slipping away, like water through a sieve. In a few seconds it will be gone.

He calls out to the Woman.

Why won’t you help?

Time snaps into place, and Matt falls back into the center of the bubble. His eyes fall on the tall man a few meters away.

The sound of thunder explodes in Matt’s ears. Strings of lightning shoot across his line of vision. The tall man’s chest implodes as a mass of bone and pulp explodes out his back. The look of defiance never leaves his face as he collapses to the ground.

Matt looks on, helpless, as the initial blast of the EM laser cuts down the first five rows of the crowd. Their bodies fall in smoking piles to the ground, causing the group behind them to glance wildly around in bewilderment as they try to make sense of the flash of light. A second blast comes ten seconds later and another hundred torsos rupture and split, spilling gore on the green field of grass.

Matt watches in horror, unable to close his eyes, yelling at the top of his lungs, but hearing no sound.

Ten rows back, the crowd finally grasps the direction the blasts are coming from and becomes a confused mass of arms and legs fleeing to the edge of the forest away from the attack-helis. EM lasers rake the field with bursts of fire, opening great holes in the diminishing horde. Bodies lie on the ground, reminding Matt of a haunting black and white photograph he once saw of the mangled bodies of Holocaust victims, cut down by machine gun fire and strewn on a barren field after the end of the great war in the middle of the twentieth century.

It plays out in front of his eyes exactly as he saw it in his mind only moments before.

After thirty seconds, all that remains on the field are two people, a man and woman, running together, almost to the trees. Two fingers of light leap across the field. One rips through the man, tearing his body in two like a zipper down his spine. The other slams into the trunk of an old cedar, shattering it, just as the woman enters the trees.

She stumbles and disappears into the shadows without looking back.

Matt slumps to the ground and closes his eyes, the afterimage of the final scene burnt into his retinas.

“It didn’t have to be this way.” Ryzaard walks forward, standing over Matt. “How many more of your friends will be killed because of your refusal to submit?” Ryzaard’s mouth droops with a half-smile. “Fortunately, the answer is zero.”

Opening his eyes, Matt looks up at Ryzaard in his tweed jacket. He thinks of the Allehonen and how easy it would have been for the Woman to help. To make everything right. An image of the Woman forms in his mind.

Why didn’t you come?

Trying to cast the thought out of his mind, he focuses on his breath, erasing the remnants of pain that still swim across his skin. After a long silence, his eyes open, and he looks squarely at the sphere of glass and metal on the ground near his feet.

“A new weapon?” Forcing his aching body to move, Matt kicks the sphere, but it’s as still and hard as though bolted to the ground. At the moment of contact with his shoe, a jolt runs through his body. He tries hard to conceal the pain. “So you’ve got five Stones now? Two more than last time. Life must be good.” Pointing with his own Stone, Matt shoots an energy pellet at the sphere at point blank range.

Nothing happens.

Ryzaard stares over Matt’s head in silence.

From out of the corner of his eye, Matt catches movement at the outer fringe of the field. He recognizes Jessica’s clothes but tries not to focus on her.

“I know she’s there, in the trees. Your beloved.” Ryzaard takes a step back and drops his gaze to the sphere, focusing on it with unusual attention. “Doesn’t matter. It’s over for you.”