I Am Number Four (27 page)

I stand, the glowing knife still in my hand. The soldier pulls some sort of lever on the side of the cannon as though to reload it. I sprint towards it. When I’m close enough, I aim for its heart and hurl the knife as hard as I can. It fires a second shot. A torpedo of orange raging its way, the certainty of a white death coming mine. They cross in midair without touching. Just when I expect that second shot to hit, to bring upon that death, something else happens instead.

My knife strikes first.

The world vanishes. The shadows fade and the cold and the dark return as though they had never left. A vertiginous transition. I take a step backwards and fall. My eyes adjust to the dearth of light. I fix them on the dark figure of the soldier hovering over me. The cannon blast didn’t travel with us. The glowing knife did, the blade sunk deeply into its heart, the handle pulsating orange beneath the moonlight overhead. The soldier staggers, and then the knife is sucked in deeper and disappears. It grunts. Spurts of black blood pump from the open wound. Its eyes go blank, then roll back into its head. It falls to the ground, lies motionless, and then explodes into a cloud of ash that covers my shoes. A
soldier. I’ve killed my first. May it not be the last.

Something about being in the alternate realm has weakened me. I place my hand on a nearby tree to steady myself and catch my breath, only the tree is no longer there. I look around. All the trees surrounding us have collapsed into heaps of ash just as they did in the other realm, just as the Mogadorians do when they die.

I hear the roar of the beast and I look up to see how much of the school is left standing. But instead of the school there is something else, fifteen feet away, standing tall with a sword in one hand and a similar-looking cannon in the other. The cannon is aimed right at my heart, a cannon that has already been charged, glowing with power. Another soldier. I don’t think I have the strength to fight this one as I did the last.

There is nothing I can throw, and the gap between us is too great to charge before it fires. And then its arm twitches and the sound of a gunshot rings through the air. My body instinctively jerks, expecting the cannon to rip me in half. But I am fine, unharmed. I look up confused, and there, in the soldier’s forehead, is a hole the size of a quarter spurting its hideous blood. Then it drops and disintegrates.

“That’s for my dad,” I hear behind me. I turn. Sam, holding a silver pistol in his right hand. I smile at him. He lowers the gun. “They passed right through the
center of town,” he says. “I knew it was them as soon as I saw the trailer.”

I try to catch my breath, staring in awe at Sam’s figure. Just moments before, in the first soldier’s blast, he was a decaying corpse sprung from hell to take me away. And now he just saved me.

“You okay?” he asks.

I nod. “Where did you just come from?”

“I followed them in my dad’s truck after they passed my house. I pulled in fifteen minutes ago and got swarmed by the ones that were already here. So I left and parked in a field a mile away and walked through the woods.”

The second set of lights we had seen from the window of the school came from Sam’s truck. I open my mouth to respond but a clap of thunder shakes the sky. Another storm begins to brew, and relief courses through me that Six is still alive. A bolt of lightning cuts the sky and clouds begin rushing in from all directions, being pulled together into one giant mass. An even greater darkness falls, followed by a rain so heavy that I have to squint to see Sam five feet away from me. The school is blotted out. But then a great bolt of lightning strikes and everything brightens for a split second, and I see that the beast has been hit. An agonizing roar follows.

“I have to get to the school!” I yell. “Mark and Sarah are somewhere inside.”

“If you’re going, then I’m going,” he yells back over the rumble of the storm.

We take no more than five steps before the wind comes howling, pushing us back, torrential rain stinging our faces. We’re soaked, shivering and cold. But if I’m shivering then I know I’m alive. Sam drops to a knee, then lies on his stomach to keep from being blown backwards. I do the same. Through squinted eyes I look into the clouds—heavy, dark, ominous—swirling in small concentric circles and, in the center, the center I’m trying mightily to reach, a face begins to form.

It’s an old, weathered face, bearded, tranquil looking as though it sleeps. A face that looks older than Earth itself. The clouds begin to lower, slowly nearing the surface and consuming everything, everything darkening, a dark so deep and impenetrable that it’s hard to imagine that somewhere, anywhere, a sun still exists. Another roar, a roar of anger and doom. I try to stand but am quickly knocked back down, the wind too great. The face. It’s coming alive. An awakening. The eyes opening, the face upturned into a grimace. Is this Six’s creation? The face becomes the look of rage itself, a look of revenge. Coming down fast. Everything seems to hang in the balance. And then the mouth opens, hungry, its lips curling to show teeth and its eyes squinted in what can only be described as pure
malice. A complete and utter wrath.

And then the face touches down and a sonic blast shakes the ground, an explosion reaching out over the school, everything illuminated in red, orange, and yellow. I’m thrust backwards. Trees break in half. The ground rumbles. I land with a thud, branches and mud falling atop me. My ears ring as they’ve never rung before. A boom so loud that it must have been heard fifty miles away. And then the rain stops, and everything falls silent.

I lie in the mud, listening to the beat of my heart. The clouds clear away, revealing a hanging moon. Not a single gust of wind. I look around but don’t see Sam. I yell for him but get no response. I yearn to hear something, anything, another roar, Henri’s shotgun, but there is nothing.

I pull myself up off the forest floor, wipe away the mud and the twigs as best as I can. I exit the woods for the second time. The stars have reappeared, a million of them twinkling high in the night sky. Is it over? Have we won? Or is it just a lull in the action? The school, I think. I have to get to the school. I take one step forward, and that’s when I hear it.

Another roar, coming from within the woods behind me.

Sound returns. Three successive gunshots ring through the night, echoing so that I have no idea from
which direction they have come. I hope with everything inside of me that they are from Henri’s shotgun, that he is still alive, still fighting.

The ground begins to shake. The beast is on the run, coming for me, no mistaking it now, trees broken and uprooted behind me. They don’t seem to slow it down at all. Is this one even bigger than the other? I don’t care to find out. I take off running for the school, but then realize that’s the absolute worst place I can go. Sarah and Mark are still there, still hiding. Or at least I hope they are.

Everything returns to the way it was before the storm, the shadows following, looming. Scouts. Soldiers. I veer to the right and sprint along the tree-lined path that leads to the football field, the beast hot on my trail. Can I really expect to outrun it? If I can make it to the woods beyond the field, maybe I can. I know those woods, the woods that lead to our house. Within them I’ll have the home-field advantage. I look around and see the figures of the Mogadorians in the schoolyard. There are too many of them. We’re greatly outnumbered. Did we ever really believe we could win?

A dagger flies by me, a flash of red missing my face by mere inches. It sticks into the trunk of a tree beside me and the tree ignites in flame. Another roar. The beast is keeping pace. Which of us has the greater endurance? I enter the stadium, sprint straight across the fifty-yard
line and pass through the visiting team’s side. Another knife whizzes by, a blue one this time. The woods are near, and when I finally sprint into them a smile forms on my face. I’ve led it away from the others. If everyone else is safe then I’ve done my job. Just when a sense of triumph blooms within me, the third dagger strikes.

I cry out, fall face-first into the mud. I can feel the dagger between my shoulder blades. A pain so sharp that it paralyzes me. I try to reach to pull it free but it is up too high. It feels as though it’s moving, digging itself deeper, the pain spreading as if I’ve been poisoned. On my stomach, in agony. I can’t pull it free with telekinesis, my powers somehow failing me. I begin dragging myself forward. One of the soldiers—or maybe it’s a scout; I can’t tell which—places a foot on my back, reaches down, and pulls the knife free. I grunt. The knife is gone but the pain stays. It takes its foot off of me but I can still feel its presence, and I wrestle myself onto my back to face it.

Another soldier, standing tall and smiling with hatred. The same look as the one before, the same type of sword. The dagger that was in my back twists in its grip. That is what I felt, the blade turning while imbedded in my flesh. I lift a hand towards the soldier to move it but I know it’s in vain. I can’t focus, everything blurry. The soldier raises its sword in the air. The blade tastes death, starts glowing in the night sky behind it.
I’m gone,
I think.
Nothing I can do.
I look into its eyes. Ten years on the run and this is how easily it ends, how quietly. But behind it lurks something else. Something far more menacing than a million soldiers with a million swords. Teeth every bit as long as the soldier is tall, teeth glowing white in a mouth too small to hold them. The beast with its evil eyes hovering over us.

A sharp intake of breath catches in my throat, and my eyes open wide in terror. It’ll take us both out, I think. The soldier is oblivious. It tenses and grimaces at me and starts to bring the sword down to split me in two. But it is too slow and the beast strikes first, its jaws clamping down like a bear trap. The bite doesn’t stop until the beast’s teeth come together, the soldier’s body cut cleanly in half just below the hips, leaving nothing behind but two stumps still standing. The beast chews twice and swallows. The soldier’s legs fall hollowly to the ground, one dropping to the right, the other to the left, and quickly disintegrate.

It takes every ounce of strength I have to reach out and grab the dagger that has fallen at my feet. I tuck it into the waistband of my jeans, and begin crawling away. I feel the beast hovering over me, feel its breath upon the nape of my neck. The smell of death and rotting meat. I enter a small clearing. I expect the beast’s wrath to fall any second, expect its teeth and claws to rip me to shreds. I pull myself forward until I can go no
more, my back against an oak tree.

The beast stands in the very center of the clearing, thirty feet away from me. I look at it fully for the first time. A looming figure, hazy in the dark and the cold of the night. Taller and bigger than the beast at the school, forty feet, standing upright on two hind legs. Thick, gray skin stretched tightly over slabs of bulging muscle. No neck, its head sloped so that its lower jaw protrudes farther out than its upper. A set of fangs points towards the sky, another set points to the ground, dripping blood and drool. Long, thick arms hang a foot or two above the ground even while the beast stands straight, giving it the appearance of slightly leaning forward. Yellow eyes. Round disks at the sides of its head that pulsate with the beating of its heart, the only sign that it has any sort of heart at all.

It leans forward and brings its left hand to the ground. A hand, complete with stubby short fingers with claws like a raptor, claws meant to rip apart anything they touch. It sniffs at me, and roars. An ear-splitting roar that would have pushed me backwards if I weren’t already against a tree. Its mouth opens, showing what must be fifty other teeth, each one every bit as sharp as the next. Its free hand thrusts away from its side and splits in half every tree that it strikes, ten, fifteen of them.

No more running. No more fighting. Blood from the knife wound runs down my back; my hands and legs
are both shaking. The dagger is still tucked into the waistband of my jeans, but what’s the point in grabbing it? What faith is there in a four-inch blade against a forty-foot beast? It would be the equivalent of a splinter. It’ll only make it angrier. My only hope is to bleed to death before I am killed and eaten.

I close my eyes and accept death. My lights are off. I don’t want to see what is about to happen. I hear movement behind me. I open my eyes. One of the Mogadorians must be moving in for a closer look, I think at first, but I know immediately that I am wrong. There is something familiar about the loping gait, something I recognize in the sound of his breathing. And then he enters the clearing.

Bernie Kosar.

I smile, but the smile quickly fades. If I am doomed, there is no point in him dying too.
No, Bernie Kosar. You can’t be here. You need to leave and you need to run like the wind, get as far away as you can. Pretend you’ve just finished our early-morning jog to school and that it’s time to return home.

He looks at me as he walks up.
I am here,
he seems to say.
I am here and I will stand with you.

“No,” I say aloud.

He stops long enough to give my hand a reassuring lick. He looks up at me with his big, brown eyes.
Get away, John,
I hear in my mind.
Crawl if you have to
crawl, but get away now.
The blood loss has made me delusional. Bernie seems to be communicating with me. Is Bernie Kosar even here, or am I imagining that as well?

He stands in front of me as though in protection. He begins to growl, low at first, but it grows to a growl every bit as ferocious as the beast’s own roar. The beast fixates on Bernie Kosar. A staredown. Bernie Kosar’s hair is raised down the center of his back, his tan ears pinned to his head. His loyalty, his bravery very nearly make me weep. He’s a hundred times smaller than the beast yet he stands tall, vowing to fight. One quick strike from the beast and all is done.

I reach my hand out to Bernie Kosar. I wish I could stand and grab him and get away. His growls are so fierce that his whole body shakes, tremors coursing through him.