The Push Chronicles (Book 1): Indomitable (16 page)

Though whatever animated the duplicates was unnatural, each one of them had a department store mannequin at its core, meaning they could be quite dangerous.  As I caught the first one’s wild swing, I found they were strong too.  I could already feel a bruise forming from where I blocked the punch.

I grabbed onto the fiberglass arm and spun the whole mannequin person around as a shield, blocking two more swings.  Its chest cracked and the duplicate outer image reacted as if she were being pummeled.  The answer had to start with me, unfortunately.  I was the only one who, theoretically, had any chance to affect either of them, not to mention I had at least partial immunity to most of their powers.

The two strikers backed off and moved to flank as the last mannequin rushed for a tackle, followed closely by the real duplicator herself.  Under her superhuman skin, she was an older lady with angry eyes, still wearing a department store uniform and smock.  I surprised myself as I easily hefted the cracked mannequin over my head and threw it straight at the oncoming duplicate.  It ducked its head undeterred but the throw was enough of a distraction for me to meet the charge head on with a straight hard punch to the nose.

I felt another knuckle break as the fiberglass head shattered apart, causing the duplicate to flicker out of existence.  All of the remaining mannequin people and their creator wailed in distress.  The final spark of an idea fired off as I knocked the Pushcrook aside with the now-broken mannequin in front of me.  Schuller was the key.

Until now, I had known it but not fully realized it.  Schuller just needed his medicine; he was apparently a kind, stable individual when properly treated.  I just had to get my hands on the right drugs.  I needed Mind’s Eye.

If anyone could get the information in the middle of this mess, she could.  Assuming she wasn’t dead already.  I shoved that thought out of my brain.  If any of my friends were alive, I had to hope that they all were alive.

That would leave Eric.  If it came down to it, I suppose I would just have to deal with him personally.  Either with words or, I dreaded the possibility, with force.  I caught out of the corner of my eye the cement mixer exploding in a blast of white light as Eric flew straight into it.  A moment later, another shattering impact, and he was flying back out, arcing away on the receiving end of a tremendous blow.  As I suspected, the fight was still on.

That is right when the first event since the Push Battle had begun happened that gave me some hope.  Covering the entire Mall’s borders, starting at ground level, a tremendous ice barrier began to rise up.  I was surprised.  It was far beyond anything I had seen Extinguisher do before, but it was working, foot by foot.  At its base, the ice, strangely, started to turn into solid stone.  If that was Medusa, again, the resourcefulness and breadth of power the Atlanta Five had was stunning.

I caught myself entranced for a moment, which was a moment too long, as I found myself blasted hard in the back by a jet of pressurized water.  I imagined it was what being hit by a police water cannon was like.  I was thrown off of my feet and tumbled hard in the grass, bruised and soaked to the bone.

Even through the detachment the mental acceleration gave me, I was starting to seethe with frustration.  Every time I was about to make head way in stopping this pointless conflict, some crazed Pushcrook would try to kill me.  I was on my feet again in a split-second.  I didn’t even register much about the merwoman who had blasted me with water outside of calculating the angle at which I would drive my knee into the side of her head.  I immediately put calculation into action, dropping my current antagonist, and keep running.  I needed Mind’s Eye and the rest of my friends.

I might be the only one who had a shot at stopping Epic and Schuller, but they were the only ones who could help me do it.

Chapter 18 Unity

The icy barrier was now almost ten feet tall, with the irregular wave of the following transformation a few feet behind it, when the sound of helicopter blades thudded overhead.  I cast a glance up as I sprang off of the back of a rather helpful Hell’s Angel-turned-motorcycle centaur who called himself Burnt Rubber.  Capitol Police helicopters were now circling in.  With that kind of swift response, they had to have been on hand already.  The military couldn’t be far behind.

“This is the Capitol Police Department,” came the amplified command from the police overhead.  “Cease all hostilities and prepare to surrender yourselves to the proper authorities.  Failure to comply will be met with appropriate force.”  I could see officers in riot armor ready stubby guns, probably gas launchers, as they took aim from the hovering choppers.  “You have ten seconds to comply.”

“Stupid pigs,” the biker shouted as he skidded around.  “I’ll spread the word, Indomitable!” he shouted behind him as he roared back into the bulk of the brawling masses.

As for myself, I ran for the nascent ice-stone barrier’s origin.  Maybe it had something to do with my resistance to this new reality, but I was having minor successes in changing the minds of the Pushed I could get to listen to me.  Unfortunately, it was far too little to change the tide, especially with the main event of Flynn versus Schuller still in progress.

At the count of six, someone took umbrage with the police interference and threw a volley of sizzling flares into the sky.  The cascade of fireworks exploded into a hail of white-hot shards that sliced through one chopper while the others spread out.  I ducked past a man that was telekinetically throwing knives everywhere and rolled under a still-intact metal picnic table, just dodging the rain of fiery wreckage from above.  Understandably, the remaining police opened fire, launching gas-spewing canisters into the melee below.  Things were spiraling quickly now.

I made a break from my makeshift shelter towards what seemed to be a motley line of the Pushed protecting someone or something.  I was only lucky that, at the moment, this area hadn’t been a target for the police’s initial volley of tear gas.  When I saw Hexagon among them, I was pretty sure I was in the right place.  He tossed aside a bull-headed giant with a heave of all six arms and broke into a smile as he caught sight of me.

“Give the lady some room!” he bellowed down the protective formation.  “Heya, Indy.”  Hexagon’s greeting was meant to be nonchalant, but there was a hint of fear in his voice I had never heard before.  He turned sideways to let me slide past him.  I tried to favor him with a reassuring smile but that was all I could spare.  I had to keep moving.  The sound of another titanic collision behind me spurred me on.

The small corner of the Mall Hexagon and his allies had been guarding was the source of the barrier shielding the rest of Washington.  Extinguisher was at the wall itself, his hands plunged into the base of the barrier.  The air around him hummed with the sound of cracking ice; his own temperature had become so cold the air was flash-freezing.  All of his focus was on generating the wall.

Right next to him, Medusa was standing and staring at the wall, here almost entirely stone, along with all of her snake heads.  There was a shimmer in the air between her gaze and the wall; my eyes twitched at the sight of the weird energy.  I could tell from the twitch of muscles and drawn faces that they could not keep this up for much longer.

Mind’s Eye, meanwhile, was in the same floating meditative position I had seen her in earlier today, blind eyes closed.  The Human Tank served as a final layer of protection for his preoccupied friends.  The teen shouted with joy when he saw me trot up.

“O-M-G we’re so glad to see that you’re okay well maybe not okay but alive and all of that and we did what you said and there’s other heroes doing the same but a lot of them just keep on fighting but we’re making headway and Mind’s Eye is trying to network as many people as possible so maybe you can try to talk sense to them all at once or something?” Tank explained in one mighty breath.

With my mind still riding the bleeding edge as it was, for the first time, I fully understood an entire sentence of his.  I nodded slowly as I took in the first deep breath I had managed in minutes.

“I can try, but there’s something else we need to try to do at the same time,” I said.  “We need to stop Epic and whoever it is that is heading up the Pushcrooks.”  Tank started to rev his treads, tearing up the grass.  I stepped in front of him and raised my hands.  “Whoa whoa whoa!”

“But we can’t stop them sitting here, can we?  That Reaper is one scary dude, did you know he first appeared yesterday and wiped out a whole small town in Georgia right near us but I didn’t find out about it in the news till today so there wasn’t anything to do about it after the fact and then all of this happened anyway.”

I wondered what had made the upstanding new man that Gerald Schuller stop taking his medication and turn into this Reaper.  I knew the answer, of course.  The Whiteout needed an arch-villain for the hero of the piece to tussle with, so it crafted one out of his personal boogieman.

“Look, I know how we can stop them, but I need help.”  I glanced at Mind’s Eye.  “She can still hear me, right?”  Tank nodded rapidly then seemed to start at the sight of something.  Before even my rapid reflexes could react, he had roared around in a rough semi-circle behind me.  As I spun to follow, the teenage cyborg had erected some kind of translucent energy field in a dome around all of us as another shockwave sent a rush of tear gas through the area with gale force.

“Mind’s Eye, I know you’re busy, but listen.  Reaper’s mentally ill.”  I stood close to her, talking rapidly as I kept an eye on Tank.  I had no idea how long he could maintain that field.  I hadn’t even known he could do that.  “I think we can stop this fighting if we can get him his medicine.  The problem is I have no idea what that medicine is.  Can you mind-read him or something to find out?”

“His mind,” she replied, her voice distant and ghostly, “is as sealed to me as yours or Epic’s.  However, I will extend my mind to Duane.  Perhaps he can find out.”  Sweat began to bead on the mentalist’s brow as she pushed her mind even harder.  The Human Tank looked back at the two of us.

“I can make stuff! There’s all sorts of neat cyber gadgets in my tank, like blasters and rockets and force fields, but there’s also a super-space-age medical computer thing.”  He paused a moment as a compartment in the rear of his lower chassis opened with a mental command.  “I, uh, dunno how to work it exactly, but I know it can make medicine because I had it make aspirin and Bactine and burn ointment and stuff when I was helping folks in Atlanta!”

As he talked, the protective barrier holding back the ever-thickening gas started to flicker.  Looking embarrassed, Tank suddenly swiveled back and refocused his concentration.  I doubted the gas would have much effect on him and maybe not much on Medusa, but the rest of us would be quite vulnerable and we all needed our concentration right now.

It was a long moment before Mind’s Eye opened her mouth again.  In that time, no more than a minute, tear gas had been exchanged for barrages of rubber bullets and several flying Pushed began to go after the police choppers.  It would be a miracle if the officers made it out in one piece.  My calm was fraying as I clenched my hands in frustration.  People were dying right in my sight and I was powerless to stop it, even after all the gifts this new reality had given me.

“Brooks has three things that he feels are vital to report, Indomitable,” she said.  I couldn’t help but let my frustration show as I frowned.  What was it with the need for exposition when the world was falling down around us, I asked myself.

“First, Agent Choi is stable and has insisted on helping with the investigation.  Second, with my evidence and their work, our two allies feel that another FBI agent was responsible for the bombing and for the train attack.  An Ian Mackenzie.  Unusually, I could not sense his presence with my powers, only his absence, in tracking that absence we discovered his involvement.”

While I was glad to know all of this information, the flickering shield around us and the sight of another chopper being ripped apart by two flying powerhouses playing wishbone with the landing skids made me hope she would hurry and finish.

“Lastly, Rachel has the data on Gerald Schuller’s condition.  It is being forwarded to my phone as we speak.”  She produced a top-of-the-line smartphone from her pocket and held it out to me.

I tapped at it and opened the email that pinged into the inbox.  I glanced from the medical files to the medical computer and back.  I was a research physiologist and therapist, not a pharmacologist.  I glanced around and realized that there was no one else who could help.  Like it or not, I had to try, using all the tools my friends had provided.

I set the phone on the end of Tank’s back end and cracked my knuckles.  The first thing I had to hope for was that it had only been since Schuller’s parole that he was off his medication.  There should still be enough in his system that an injectable dose should help with his psychotic episode.  If not, well, we didn’t exactly have a week for the drugs to build back up in his system.

The second thing I had to hope for was that I was operating this strange almost-alien interface correctly, something made harder by the fact that, well, it wasn’t entirely real to me.  It took all of my willpower to force myself to accept it as even partially real.  What should have been solid keys felt like fragile soap bubbles that slid and popped under my fingers.  Sweat poured down my brow as I kept working at the formula.

Finally, I felt it was ready and hit the ‘Synthesize’ key.  There was a whirring, chugging sound and a single cylinder of fluid, encased in some kind of futuristic air-hypo, fell into a hopper.   Fortunately, it was real enough for me to hold without effort.  Unfortunately, that was when, unnoticed by me in my feverish workings, the fleet of military Apache attack helicopters made their presence known with a volley of air-to-ground missiles launched at the wall.  The first sign I had that things had escalated was looking up to see tons of ice and stone start to tumble down onto us.

I wanted to trust that the combined powers of my friends here would protect me and this one vital syringe, but I couldn’t risk that trust.  Too much was at stake.  I snatched the hypo, tucked it close to my chest, and ran.  I felt guilty as I felt my legs pumping as they never had before; part of me wanted to stay, do or die, by their side.

I had to keep telling myself that there was a greater good that needed to be done.  It made perfect rational sense, which made it no easier for my heart to accept.  I just prayed they were alright as I threw myself away from the outer fringes of the avalanche of rubble.  Scrambling to my feet, the approaching doom of a fleet of Army helicopters beat a fierce wind over my head.  Ahead, I could see the violent ripple of white and red energies sending out shockwaves, throwing enemy and ally alike away from the two clashing godlings.  I pushed on.

I found myself pushing with all the strength I had against the steady beat of gusting winds as Epic and Reaper beat on each other with blows too fast for my eyes to follow.  My hand was raised to shield my eyes from the dust and debris and through that veiled sight I was sickened by the sight of the two men, completely untouched, sitting in the center of their unnatural shells, while the dead and dying were tossed about them.  I couldn’t tell at that moment which one was the crazier one.

I couldn’t tell you how I managed to keep my footing; any other Pushed that had been here had been tossed aside by the constant blasts of energy and gusts of air.  It must have been another factor in my refusal to accept this blood-soaked reality.  Neither of the combatants seemed to notice my approach.

Epic floated back a space, then unleashed a sudden charge at his full mind-blowing speed straight at Schuller.  I threw myself to the ground to brace against the oncoming impact, but was surprised when I felt nothing.  I stole a peek up from my prone position to see a swirling red portal winking out of existence.  Reaper closed his hands together and smirked.  He was the first to realize that no one was going to win a straight battle.  The question was what did he do to Eric?  A more important question was what was he about to do to me?

I was close enough now that I could see through the shell of black and red more clearly.  Gerald Schuller, the real man, looked panicked, frightened, screaming.  I couldn’t hear him, but I imagined his lips were curled into a cry for help.  Reaper, though, only had malice on his lips as he floated closer.

“Oh, the things I am going to do to your pretty face now that we’re alone,” the lunatic said as he licked his lips.  Unlike the other Pushed, he had no double voice.  It was only Reaper.  Schuller was silenced behind a wall of unreality.  "I was told there was only two things stopping me from freedom.  One is gone and the second should only take a few moments to deal with.”

A sliver of my mind started to contemplate this new information, but the rest of it was busy shutting down the rapidly growing fear in my brain and forcing my body to action.  If there was one advantage to the long-winded speech the Whiteout seemed to engender in the Pushed, it was the chance to get the jump on them.

“Epic was as powerful as I am, but he was blinded by the restraints he –“

I shut him up by driving my right hand as far into his gut as I could manage.  Even as tired and desperate as I was, my mind continued to guide my body with sublime agility and harmonized strength as all my muscles fired in tune.  Hitting his unreal stomach sent a backlash of force ripping back down my arm, just as when I hit Eric, but I ignored the pain as I carried through, regretfully crashing into the real Schuller’s body.  Both man and god doubled over from the sudden attack.