Annihilation: Love Conquers All (6 page)

Mr. Graham completed entering the tests for the remaining students while Sergeant Garcia watched. “Bert, why don’t you go home and get some rest,” Sergeant Garcia said. “I believe you when you say that you had nothing to do with this. After all, you’re the one that reported it. I also sense that those two assistants are also being honest, so that means something impossible happened here. The department of security may let little things slide, but not impossible ones. This could get messy. Advanced placement tests are taken very seriously, and this irregularity must be investigated.”

Mr. Graham nodded and remembered how bored he was with his job when he started that evening. Well, he certainly was not going to be bored now. He even wished for that boredom to return. What he suspected was that he would not make thirty-three years as a test administrator if, as Sergeant Garcia suspected, this was going to be a mess.

T
ag began working his way back home, making sure he avoided all the cameras and people he encountered. In the parks he moved through, he could smell the grass that the auto mowers had trimmed. The trees moving in the gentle breeze and the insects flying through the night lights made the night feel peaceful and calmed him after the stress of taking Leila’s test. He decided that the city at street level, which he seldom saw from his floater, had its own beauty. The parks that lined the thoroughfares and the buildings with their crystal windows reflecting light in all directions added to the serenity of the street-level sidewalks. The streetlights cast eerie shadows as they shone through the trees. It was slow going because most of the cameras overlapped their coverage, and he had to move during the time that one swung away while the other was moving toward him. He would occasionally walk beside another person because the shadow was there. This gave him time to enjoy the walk back to his home. As time passed, there were fewer people out. It was completely dark now and most people did not walk the streets at night. He was making good time, and if things continued moving smoothly he should make it home by daylight. He had already passed the spot where he had exited the floater and only had another six miles to go. It was eerily quiet at street level, and though he could see thousands of floaters flying far overhead their drone could barely be heard. Their lights made the sky look like thousands of swarming fireflies. He had passed several of the giant buildings a few blocks back and saw hundreds of floaters lifting off the top floors. “Must be a shift change,” he thought.

“I hope my luck holds out. I’m not familiar with this area,” he worried. The first four miles had been easy because he had walked it going to his school, but he was unfamiliar with the route he was taking now, and it made him nervous and he wasn’t sure why. He normally flew high over this area on a public floater so the details at ground level just weren’t familiar. He moved through a small park, stepped around a swing set, and then moved to the sidewalk that ran along the wall of another building. Then he felt it. Someone was watching him, and they were not alone. There were five of them. He looked out from the wall into the park parallel to the sidewalk, but it was too dark to see very far into it. He couldn’t see them but he knew that they were there, and they were moving quickly to surround him. “This gift is strange,” he thought. “I can still see the shadows and avoid the surveillance cameras but I know that I’m being watched, and with that many watching me there’s no way for me to escape them undetected.” He thought about running, but then the cameras would see him. He had to decide quickly; the camera covering the sidewalk was swinging back.

He had entered a part of the city that was dangerous. Though the Directorate kept tight controls over Earth’s population, some people living in poverty resorted to crime to support themselves. He passed one of the tall buildings in which a large percentage of its occupants were on government assistance and low income. He suspected that one person watching him would not be very unusual, but five had to mean trouble. If they were coming after him he couldn’t expect any help. With the advent of floaters there was very little surface traffic at night anymore, and this late there was none. The moon had not risen high, so the only light came from the lamps scattered along the sidewalk. He sensed that other than those five there was no one else close by, and the five were completing their plan to smoothly surround him. It surprised him that anyone would even attempt to commit a crime with all the surveillance cameras, but he suspected that it would be over and done before anyone monitoring the cameras could react. His thought about running away from the building he had been walking next to was now unrealistic, and he knew that if he did the cameras would see him. If he didn’t run and he was stopped by these five following him, then the cameras would see him. He was going to be seen; there was no avoiding it, and he decided that he would rather be in a lighted area and have the building at his back than be totally surrounded on all sides in the dark. So he stopped, sat down, placed his back against the crystal glass of the building behind him, and lowered his head so the cameras couldn’t see his face. The shadows disappeared, so he knew the camera was now recording him. That’s when he saw them approaching.

They were moving as a unit and he could see that they had done this sort of thing before. One of them went to the left and one went to the right about ten feet on either side of him. They pulled out guns and held them against their legs so they wouldn’t be easily seen by the camera; then they faced away from him. The other three moved towards him from the front, and they were holding knives. Fear coursed through his body and he could feel his heart rate go up. He knew that the cameras recording this would take another nine seconds before he was in a blank space in their coverage. He had to wait until that moment to try and escape. “I can’t let them record my face,” he thought.

“What do you want?” Tag asked. “I’m not carrying any credits or anything else of value you would want.” He kept his head down, looking at the pavement in front of him. He watched them move closer and spread out to block any escape.

“I hope you don’t mind if we determine that for ourselves,” the man to the left said. “Your clothes look pretty good to me.” He was tall and moved smoothly for his size. The two men on each side of the center man moved to his left and right, holding their knives out. They wore clothes that were old, and their shoes had worn spots on them. One had a pockmarked face that also bore a scar that ran the length of his left cheek. His right hand had scars and looked like it had been burned.

“You can make this easy on yourself or we can do it the hard way,” the one on his left said.

Tag noticed that they all had on hoods but didn’t wear anything to hide their faces from him. The hoods would hide their faces from the camera but not from him.

“I think it’s going to be the hard way even if I wanted it easier,” Tag said to the man on the left. “You’re letting me see your faces, so I think there’s no way you’re going to let me walk away from here. Is there anything I can do to leave safely?” Tag asked while looking at the ground, because he still had four seconds until the camera’s blind spot returned.

The man said, “We have a smart one here, boys. I guess if you let us cut out your eyes so you couldn’t identify us later, we might consider it.” The man cocked his head to the side and then said, “But I don’t think you’ll just stand there and let us do that, would you?” He then looked at the one on his left and nodded.

At that moment Tag saw he was back in the blind spot of the camera again, just as the man on his left lunged forward to cut his throat. Everything suddenly turned to super slow motion. Tag could see in his mind where the attacker’s thrust was going to be, and the attacker’s movements seemed to happen very, very slowly. He stood up, moving at what felt like normal speed, smoothly stepped inside the thrust, placed his hand where the man’s hand was going to be, and grabbed his wrist as it arrived. Then, while turning the man’s arm, Tag slammed his fist into the man’s elbow, breaking it, which caused him to drop his knife. Tag immediately started a roll to his right to avoid the slash of the second attacker, which was aimed at his back. As he started his roll he saw the first attacker’s knife falling slowly by his head toward the pavement, and he reached up and grabbed it with his right hand. In the middle of his roll he raised the knife up into the path of the second attacker’s slash, causing the attacker to cut his own wrist, severing his tendons and ligaments, which caused him also to drop his knife. Tag picked up the second knife with his left hand as he came out of his roll. As he straightened up, he immediately saw a psychic shadow the thickness of a pencil running from his right hand toward the gunman in front of him. The gunman had started to lift his gun to shoot, and Tag threw the knife in his right hand at the shadow, connecting him with the gunman. The knife flew through the pencil-shaped shadow at normal speed and entered the gunman’s right eye socket as he crouched to take aim. The gunman stood there for just a moment before he slowly fell forward.

As the knife left his hand toward the first gunman, Tag sensed that the other gunman behind him was taking aim, so he followed his throwing motion and did a side roll as a bullet slowly went through the space his head had just occupied. As he rolled he saw another pencil-thin shadow under him, and he threw the second knife between his legs. He noticed during his roll that there was a bird flying overhead that appeared to be almost stationary. He thought that time must have somehow slowed down for him. He was moving at what felt like normal speed, but everything else was moving very, very slowly. The knife he threw at the second gunman also flew along that pencil-thin shadow and struck the second gunman in the heart. The gunman fell backwards, his second shot going wild. Tag came out of his second roll, stepped in front of the first attacker, grabbed the arm that was broken, and swung the man viciously face-first into the wall of the building; he then pivoted toward the attacker, who was still holding his cut wrist, and kicked him between his legs. As the attacker bent forward Tag slammed his knee into the attacker’s face so hard that the attacker came off the ground and flipped backward so fast that he hit his head on the concrete with a sickening sound. Then Tag sat down next to the wall and lowered his head. The camera was coming back and the psychic shadows were disappearing.

The big man in the center had not even moved during the few moments that the other four had been killed. He stood there, stunned, and thought, “This isn’t possible; no one can move that fast. This boy killed four men in less than five seconds. He moved faster than my eyes could follow. I was supposed to keep him from running and now here I am, surrounded by four dead men. And these men were good, very good.” They scared him; two of them were former soldiers that were proud of how vicious they were. “Now what do I do?” he wondered. He stood there, afraid to run and afraid to attack, which was fine with Tag, because the blind spot wouldn’t be back for another ten seconds.

Tag’s heart was beating wildly and he was amazed at what happened. He didn’t even have a chance to think about what was happening during the attack; his body seemed to react without conscious thought. “What now?” Tag asked. “Do we continue this, or are you going to let me go?”

The big man noticed that the boy never raised his head when he spoke. As a matter of fact, while all this happened he did not get a good look at the boy’s face; he was moving too fast for him to see. The big man had a lot of experience. He was a former naval marine who had seen more than his share of hand-to-hand training. But he had never seen anything close to this. He may not have seen the boy’s face, but he was certain the boy had seen his. He stood there and struggled with what to do. “What do you suggest?” he asked in a shaky voice.

“Just turn your back, count to three, then go your way,” Tag said. “Just four more seconds,” Tag thought.

Tag knew that the big man was scared about being identified and was not going to go away easily. The big man thought for a moment and then said, “Okay, we’ll do it your way,” and slowly turned around. “Perfect,” Tag thought; he was in the blind spot once more and was immediately moving behind the big man as he turned. It was then a simple task to move through the psychic shadows so he wouldn’t be seen.

The big man slowly turned, started to leave, and then turned to see if the young boy would assure him that he would not identify him. The boy was gone. “Where did he go? Where is he?” he wondered. He turned and looked everywhere, but the boy was nowhere to be seen. He felt a chill in the deepest part of his soul and then he felt fear. He turned and ran. He knew that now his family might be at risk if he was identified.

Only twenty seconds had passed from the moment the first attacker moved to when the big man ran away. That was too short a time for the security team to arrive, but they did land there only two minutes after the big man had started to run away. One of the Directorate surveillance monitors had received a warning from the cameras’ sensors that gunshots were fired and a crime was being committed. The Directorate camera monitor took over manual control of the area cameras just as the big man left the scene. The monitor followed the big man until he lost sight of him when he went through a doorway that was recessed in a wall of a tall habitation building where thousands of families worked and lived. He switched to the cameras inside the building, but there was a shift change taking place and there were hundreds of people moving through the corridors. Even setting the cameras to find only the people who were his approximate size proved fruitless. There were just too many people, and he could have moved out of the corridor without being seen. “They must have planned this so that they could use the shift change to escape,” the monitor thought. The monitor then started looking for the other person that was sitting against the wall, but he was nowhere to be found. “How can that happen?” he wondered.