The Push Chronicles (Book 3): Incorruptible (20 page)

Reaper, though, had the reflexes of a god.  I didn't even see the flinch before his arm was moving.  I also didn't see the reptilian figure that had been rushing to my side before Reaper had even contemplated ending this drama.

I didn't feel the rebar rip straight through my breastbone and pierce my heart.  Primarily because it didn't.  I had been thrown a good ten feet away by Medusa as she charged me, her serpentine reflexes outmatching my own, almost a match for Reaper's.  Almost.

'Almost' was enough to save my life.

It wasn't enough to keep the inch-thick piece of steel to rip through my best friend, tearing through phantasmal skin and scales, muscle, bone, and straight into the real woman underneath.  Even if it hadn't pierced a lung and clipped the heart, the shock of the thunderclap-like impact was fatal on its own, even for a Pushed.

Medusa was dead before she hit the ground.

That's when I snapped and everything turned a shade of red.

Chapter 23 Between

"I appear to have broken one of your friends," the grinning demon said.  "Trust me, it -"

No finesse anymore.  No thought of my well-being.  It was all rage and grief and murder as I flung myself at Reaper as he had drifted down, no doubt to get a better look at the woman he had just killed.  A small piece of rational thought in me pleaded that being reckless now just made Medusa's sacrifice worthless, but I didn't care.

It was the first leading punch to the solar plexus that broke my knuckles and cut off Reaper's gloating.  He buckled just a bit, bowing his head enough to be an easy target, so I took advantage, slamming a left hand right into the bridge of both Reaper's and Schuller's noses.  Both erupted with blood as they broke.  As I threw another relentless strike at the now-reeling Reaper, I was only dimly aware of the rush of people to the edge of the hole we had fallen down.  They only now were taking in the bloody tableau Reaper had painted.

It was Hexagon's cry of anguish that broke through some of that red haze as one last uppercut sent Reaper crashing onto his back.  I knew that I had broken more than a few bones in both of my hands, but I didn't care.  Reaper seemed down and I was still too awash in emotion to make sure of that fact.  Instead, I ran to the bleeding corpse of my best friend as Hex landed down on the other side of Meds' body, making the leap in one effortless bound.

No intelligible words wanted to come out as the white-clad giant cradled his lover to him.  If there had even been a chance she was alive, her utter stillness washed that away.  The wound was even more horrific than I had thought.  I knew I was crying but otherwise I felt frozen in place.  Medusa was always the one to assure us that we would make it through fine.  'We're superheroes, right?' ... that was what she would always say.  That she was the first one of us, the first of my friends, to die ...

Hex ... Henry ... had no words either, falling to his knees, choking with sobs.  I found myself putting my arms around his shoulders and joining in his grief.  Through all of this, Rational Irene was shrieking, trying to grab my attention, yelling that this wasn't over yet.

Quentin bowled the lot of us, our bloody burden included, over, his wiry strength enough to save Hex and myself from the steel girder a resurgent Reaper hurled in our direction.

"Dammit, we'll have a great funeral later," Quentin muttered as he clambered to his feet, "but we can't afford to have more."

"Come on, give those people some cover!" Extinguisher shouted from above and over the com.  "Hit him hard and don't stop until he drops."  There was a pause.  "Hell, if you hit him after he drops, I won't say a thing."  Those of us still in fighting shape washed down over the edge of the pit as I slowly got to my feet.

Reaper, for his part, seemed to be in heaven, despite the blood running down from his nose.

"Yes, yes, come on, you little idiots," he roared.  "Let's have some fun!  You can't stop me, not this time."

Mind's Eye replied by dropping a chunk of concrete on Reaper's head, followed by a concentrated blast of cold from Ex's hands as he spiraled down towards the murder scene.  It was a momentary distraction, but it let me get my head back in the game, at least enough to assess our position while Quentin and I moved in on Reaper's side.

I didn't see most of the Crusaders among the standing, though from the constantly swirling breeze I had to assume Twister was somewhere.  It would be smart of me to not count on Tank or Polymer, at least not until I had gotten an update over the com.  Alma was still in her prison, if Reaper was to be believed, and he had no reason to lie.  He would have gladly claimed another victim.

Epic, well, I didn't see him and, as far as I knew, he was still lying in his bed of rubble.  Part of me wanted to break away, to get him on his feet and try to bring back at least the godlike asshole we had before on our side at the Battle of Washington.  A far larger part of me wanted to get my hands on Reaper and snap his neck, murder be damned.

Voltage crashed down as a literal lightning bolt, coursing down Reaper's form with minimal effect, just before Quentin and I hit him.  I went high, hoping to get my hands on his meaty neck, while Quentin went low to take him off-balance before he starting flying again.  At worst, if he took off or teleported, I would be going with him.

Initially, it seemed like a good plan as we both plowed into him, pushing through Reaper's shell and impacting squarely with poor Gerald inside.  The puzzle finally solved in my head as Reaper staggered a step but recovered instantly.

I had hurt Reaper before through Schuller just as I usually breached most Pushed with super toughness.  That was still possible but the real trick was Gerald Schuller wasn't unconscious but he wasn't quite awake either.  Up close to his head like this, I could see through Reaper's red orbs the half-lidded ones on Gerald's face.  With the rapid eye flutters and moving lips, he was in some sort of semi-conscious stupor and that was the source of the problem.

Gerald was awake enough for Reaper to manifest himself but dead to sensation.  I could only assume it was yet another brilliant military idea.  Maybe they had some fail-safe in place that would put Gerald fully under and blink Reaper out of existence.  Fat lot of good it would do us though in the here and now.

The end result was that Quentin and I could break that body, but no real pain transferred from that drugged form to the outer shell of Reaper.  Because at the heart of that thing was an innocent man, our morality was a deterrent.  Even if we were willing to take that final step, our very natures would fight us the whole way, making us hesitant and sloppy.  In a way, Reaper was like a far more dangerous form of the vampires we had fought before.  At least those were corpses we could fight with disregard.

Before I could secure a grip around Reaper's neck or Quentin could take him off his feet, Reaper laughed and spun once in place, though I doubt anyone but I or Quentin noticed at the speed he whirled.  I couldn't hold on; I didn't have the reflexes to react.  The pure acceleration of his spinning body threw us both off him like deadweight.  I hit the exterior wall hard and flat on my back, falling into a heap on the floor.  All the wind was knocked out of me and my body refused to respond to my commands.  A moment of fear made me wonder if the impact had broken my back outright, but no, it was just the shock of the hit.

The effect was the same though.  I was a sitting duck as I weakly tried to move.  The coms were filled with so much cross-talk I thought I would go deaf, but the salient fact I pulled out was that Reaper was about to smash me like a bug.

"Away for her, blackguard, knave, foul beast!"  The challenge was punctuated by a series of rapid-fire twangs as Archer's crossbow fired repeatedly, seemingly without end.  I looked up to see the almost comical site of Reaper collecting bolts in his side and back like a pincushion.  The wounds were bloodless, having only barely penetrated Reaper's shell, but the fact they penetrated at all seemed to enrage the monster, who spun towards the source of his annoyance.

"Very well, little man, you've earned my attention," Reaper said as he floated with deliberate slowness at the brave bowman, standing motionless on the edge of the stairs between floors, the only motion being the mechanical loading and firing of his crossbow.  "Want to die like a hero?  I can help you with that."

My lungs started to work but my arms and legs were still rubber.  As Reaper was about to pounce, I got to my feet, only for my knees to waver, sending me staggering once more against the wall.  I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn't turn away.  Archer, well, he didn't back down.  Points for effort as he aimed what would probably be his last arrow right for Reaper's head.

Hexagon intervened, like a six-armed guardian angel.  I didn't see where he had leaped from, but the result was the important thing, crashing down like a jackhammer between the two.  Reaper actually seemed a bit surprised.  Hex, though, was pure fury.

"No one else!"  He punctuated that with a shattering punch, followed immediately by another.  And another.  And another.  Then two more, just for good measure.  Each blow was punctuated by a sharp retort as tremendous power met invulnerable flesh.  Reaper staggered back from the machine-gun onslaught.

"Never again!"  Hex seemed to collect himself as he shouted and unleashed one last blow, striking with all six fists nearly simultaneously.  The shockwave from the unnatural crash almost deafened me, louder than any explosion or gunfire I had ever heard before.  Reaper flew back as if shot out of a cannon and shattered through the remains of one interior wall to come to rest cratered in one of the exterior walls.

I seemed to be coming back to myself, ignoring the damage reports my nervous system was trying to warn me about, though that last peal of thunder had sent my inner ear for a loop.  As I tried to keep my balance through the ringing in my ears, the entire world seemed to be bleaching out and things started to move in slow motion.

From above, Twister finally came back into view, but he wasn't alone, carrying a confused but living Alma Gutierrez in his arms.  The crystalline woman seemed no worse for the wear and, to my surprise, Epic was back up, alongside him.  There was some of that lost light in Eric's eyes.  Had seeing another murder at Reaper's hands stoked some fire in him?  I couldn't be sure.

The thing was that Epic, Twister, everyone and everything I saw was moving in slow motion now.  So was I, even if my brain seemed to be going at full speed.  This wasn't Epic's doing, like before.  Something else was going on.

Slower and slower.  Like a film run at quarter speed, Extinguisher called out something I couldn't understand through the slurring of sound.  Alma stood on her feet and nodded some assent.  I tried to move but I was just as slowed as everyone else, if not more so.  The thing was that they didn't seem to notice.

Even slower.  Epic and Voltage both turned to Alma and unleashed all of their energetic fury into the faceted woman.  Even the energy they unleashed seemed sluggish as it lurched through the air, then danced, focused, and rebounded through the infinite panes of crystal that was Alma's body.  Reaper leisurely flew out of his crater, barely scratched, just as the burning column of combined energies erupted out of Alma at a pace best described as a leisurely stroll.

Stop.

Everything stopped except for my thoughts.  Had the grief, the pain, the stress finally snapped my brain and I was in some crazy delusion?  Maybe.  Maybe not, because at that moment of thought, I felt hands grab me and yank me back a step.

It was only a single physical foot at most, but it seemed to break my body of its paralysis.  Shaken, I could see now that the world around me hadn't exactly stopped.  No, not stopped, but so slowed down that even the energy pulsing at the speed of light was barely moving at all.  How was I able to move and who had grabbed me?  It was ... impossible.

"Impossible, you have to be thinking," Ian Mackenzie's grandfatherly voice echoed behind me.  "I only conjecture that because that is the exact thing I thought when it happened to me."

I spun on my heels, hands up and ready to fight.  I didn't know how Mackenzie had survived or how he was doing this (though I had my immediate suspicions on both) but I wouldn't hesitate to end whatever his scheme was in a moment.

"Oh please, not that," he said, "I've had enough of that.  Besides, you've done more than enough with those fists as it is."

Ian Mackenzie, the first Natural I had met outside myself, former FBI agent in charge of investigating the Whiteout, and, most recently, terrorist organizer, stood before my eyes.  While still recognizable as the man I had known, there had been vast changes wrought upon him.  His red-gray hair was gone and his entire scalp seemed like one piece of blackened flesh.  His entire form was gaunt, still dressed in the same Atlanta Police commander's uniform he had been disguised in when we last clashed.  Even the caved-in backpack that had once contained a miniature reality-altering device, much like what Eric had used to create the Whiteout in the first place, was still on his back.

Most importantly, Ian Mackenzie was almost monochrome to my eyes.  Only shades of black and white, with a translucent appearance.  I would have guessed he was a ghost of some kind, but I wasn't quite ready to take that leap in to the afterlife quite yet.  Wisps of white energy, the same kind of energy that permeated Epic and produced by the reality machine, wafted off of him like smoke.

I lowered my fists.  He was probably right.  I had done enough to him already.

"Welcome to the in-between, Dr. Roman."  He gestured grandly as he walked a circle around me. The hanging dust in the air, fragments of debris blown away by the frozen elemental tempest just a few yards away, it all passed through his form as if they were incompatible entities.

"In-between?"  It only took a moment to catch on.  "In between seconds.  We're experiencing time so slowly it's practically stopped."

The throbbing in my head and the curdling in my stomach told me even more.  Somehow, Ian Mackenzie had slid from being immune to the Whiteout like me to being a Pushed.  A powerful one at that.  I focused my stare and saw the real Ian Mackenzie, prematurely aged a decade or more, in the midst of the ghostly form.

"Well, at this moment, anyway."  Ian rubbed his temples.  "You have to apologize, no, wait, you have to excuse me, that's it, if I seem ... disjointed."  He cackled, but quieted himself just as quickly.  "I have been here, in one sense or another, for, well, I have no clue how long it's been for you.  For me, it has been far, far too long."