Surviving ELE (ELE Series #4) (18 page)

He holds his hands out. “They already told me. I don’t have to like it, but I know that you have to do this alone. We’ll wait here. But if you aren’t back before nightfall, we’re coming after you.”

“Thank you,” I tell him. I look over at Erik, Morgan, and Audrey. “Thank you all again. I hope this will work.”

“We do too,” Morgan says honestly. “Oh and Willow?”

I look at him. “Your secret is safe with us.” He reaches out and takes my hand, giving it a squeeze of reassurance.

I know he means my secret, as to how I got my powers, is safe. I believe him. With our goodbye’s said, Tony and I leave the camp with only a pistol each and a needle filled mostly with red corn syrup in our possession.

The sun is at its highest point in the sky, which tells me that it’s either noon or somewhere shortly after. I hold Tony’s hand as we run towards the mountain. There’s no time to dilly-dally. My family, friends, and everyone I intimately care about are being held hostage in that mountain. Thoughts of Sabby crying for me cause knots to form in my stomach. I bend forward slightly as we run, to make them go away. If I have any chance of doing this and doing this right, I can’t be thinking of my little brother.

“There are going to be a lot of Reapers inside,” I tell him. A chill runs up my spine as I think about the sick, twisted, vision I had not too long ago, about them making their home in the charred remains of our old shelter.

“How do you think Zack got inside with everyone?” he asks.

“I don’t know. When we get to the tree line I plan on making us invisible, but we have to be ready for the attack,” I tell him.

He nods his head. He’s breathing heavily, but he’s still keeping up with me. I can’t use my full strength to propel us as fast as we could go. I need to save it for when we get there. I notice the trees thinning out. The snow has begun falling again, blurring our vision up ahead. I squeeze his hand and we stop before making it to the clearing.

He places his hand on my cheek. “No matter what happens, I want you to know that I love you.” Snowflakes coat his hair.

“I love you too,” I whisper.
So badly it hurts.

He pulls me into his arms and kisses me passionately. I lean into him and let this horrible world fade away for a second. I need this moment to get me through what’s coming next.

He’s stronger than he knows
, I think to myself as I open my eyes. He curls a strand of my hair around his finger before kissing me again, softer this time. I can’t let anything bad happen to him; he means too much to me.

The pressure is on as we turn towards the mountain. I grab his hand again and turn us invisible. We jog at Tony’s pace towards the shelter, which feels like a snail’s pace compared to earlier.

Every nerve ending in my body is on heightened alert as we approach the shelter’s doors. I anticipate seeing a thousand red eyes staring at us, but I see nothing. The stench of charred remains hits both of us as we reach the entrance. Tony nearly gags. I, having experienced it before in a vision, knew what to expect. I rub his back with my free hand. He rights himself quickly, trying desperately to hold onto his strong-persona image. His strength may be gone but he’s still one of the brightest crayons in the box.

We take a moment to listen before we enter. I can hear some type of strange noise in the distance, but I’m not sure what it is. A high-pitch beeping accompanies the noises. It hurts my head at first, but then after a few seconds the pain disappears.

Before we walk in, Tony looks at me strangely. “Your eyes are silver and purple,” he whispers.

I raise an eyebrow at him but respond since I don’t know exactly what to say. I focus on keeping us invisible as we walk into the darkened hallway. The strange noises increase the further we walk, but the beeping sound never returns.

Nausea rolls around in my stomach and I wonder if Tony is as nervous as I am. In this moment, I’m not sure if I’m more scared of the Reapers or Zack. I would probably have to go with the Reapers due to their sheer numbers.

Only a few steps from the common area, the noise grows loud enough for me to recognize it. The sound of wailing cries echo out from the cavernous room. My heart sinks. I’m too late! Is it already past two? “He’s hurting them!” I cry out and start running towards the opening to the room.

Tony grabs my hand and pulls me back. “No! It could be a trick,” he says. “There are too many voices for this to be your friends and family. Plus, he said to meet him in his father’s lab. Is the lab close by?”

I shake my head, hoping he’s right. He pulls his pistol out of his back pocket. I pull mine out too. We remain invisible as we quietly approach the common area.

“What the?” Tony says as we walk into the room.

My breath whooshes out of me as I take in the sight. Reapers are lying everywhere, covering the floor. Some are curled into the fetal position and some are hunched over on top of the charred remains of the tables. Others are lying flat on their faces. The howling and moans are almost too much to endure. They writhe about in horrible pain...deep, unadulterated, excruciating pain.

I have to drop my invisibility and focus everything within me to block out their feelings. The air of emotions in this room is so thick that it attempts to suffocate me.

“He must have his father’s device,” Tony says.

I can’t open my mouth or speak; I’m focusing too hard to keep them out. Tony senses my struggle and grabs my elbow, pulling me through the room. We have to step over the Reapers, who try, but fail miserably, at grabbing ahold of our feet. They are too weak to grasp anything within their hands. I nearly trip over a man who is crying so loudly that it reverberates in my ears. Tony steadies me and keeps moving me forward.

We reach the hallway with the bank of elevators. The metal doors are black from fire. Continuing down the hallway, we have to walk over a few more Reapers. Thankfully, we run into less and less as we walk. I start being able to regain my bearings again. “Do you know where you’re going?” I ask him when I finally find my voice.

He stops and looks at me. “No. I just knew I had to get you away from there. Your eyes were swirling with silver and black. I knew that whatever was happening to you was pretty bad.”

“It was hard to block out all of their emotions. There were simply just too many of them,” I tell him even though he is quite aware of their numbers. There had to be over a hundred of them in that room alone.

“Do you know how to get to the lab?” he asks me.

I nod my head. “Yes.” I grab his hand and we melt through the floor slowly. Tony looks at me with wonder before we fall to the ground on the level below. We land in the middle of a walk-in freezer. I start shivering as I help Tony to his feet. I find it strange that this freezer still has power going to
it. I figured after the fire happened that the power would be gone for good. Especially since the residents are now Reapers to say the least. The fridge itself seems to be spared from fire damage. We walk through the refrigerator doors and out into a large food pantry that was spared as well. I haven’t gone this way before, but I still have a good sense of our general location. This must be on the same level as the indoor crop fields.

“You ready to go again?” I ask him.

He smiles. “Let’s do this.” I can tell he’s enjoying Connor’s gift.

We start moving through the floor a little faster than I intended this time. We land on top of a storage crate. Tony moves towards the end of the crate to jump down, but he freezes when he reaches the edge. “We have company,” he tells me.

I move to his side and peer down over his shoulder. Three of Zack’s goons are standing there with their guns pointed towards us. More of his men, dressed in black, are running our way. “Smart move,” I say aloud. Zack knew I’d eventually have to come this way so he littered it with men.

“Surrender your weapons,” a large man with yellow eyes yells up to us.

Tony looks at me and I give him the look that says we had better cooperate. I hand him my pistol and he pulls his out. Then he removes the magazines from both of them and drops the pistols and the magazines separately to the ground beneath us.

One of the other men grabs the pistols quickly, leaving the magazines on the floor. “Get down here,” the man demands.

Tony hops down first. The men don’t flinch; they just keep their guns trained on us. Tony holds his arms up to me and I allow myself to drop into them. Even without super-human strength, Tony is built. He catches me with ease and holds me close to him before settling me down on the ground, keeping his arm secured around me, not daring to let go.

“Move,” the man says, nudging Tony with his gun.

Surrounded by trigger-happy soldiers, we start walking in the direction of the late Dr. Hastings’s lab. We wind down a few hallways and I notice that this area of the shelter was untouched by the fire. I wonder how much of it actually burned. Was it just enough to get everyone to run outside? Was anyone hurt in the fire?

The normally locked doors are wide open, but two armed men guard the entrance. They eye us suspiciously as we walk past. Only a few more steps until I find my family and friends. Will they be okay? My heart leaps in anticipation. They have to be.

“Willow!” Zack says in an overzealous voice. He meets me at the entrance to the lab. His smile grins from ear to ear as he looks me over from head to toe. He seems pleased when he sees that I followed his orders and brought Tony and only Tony with me.

“Zack,” I say with as much disgust as I can muster, which is a whole heck of a lot. I try to move past him to see if my family is inside but someone blocks me with a gun to the forehead.

“It’s okay, you can let her through,” Zack tells the soldier. He puts his hand on the lower part of my back. I try to arch forward to get away from his touch.

At the same time, Tony tries to remove Zack’s hand, but someone with too much strength for their own good hits him in the shoulder with the butt of their gun, sending Tony to his knees.

I whip around when the goon tries to hit him again. “Stop!” I yell. Using my mind, I rip the gun out of his hand and throw it behind him. It clips the man on the side of his head on the way down; then it lands with a thud on the concrete floor.

He nurses the wound on his head and shoots me an angry glare.

Zack laughs behind me. “Stop showing off, sugar.” He grabs my arm and pulls me forcefully towards the lab. I glance back at Tony before Zack pulls me into the room.

“Sabby! Dad!” I see them first and run to their side. They are sitting on the ground, their hands tied behind their backs. They look dazed as they lean up against the wall. I see Alec, Marya, Connor, and Claire sitting across from them, leaning up against the island counter. Everyone looks drugged and disoriented. At least I don’t see the weird collars on their necks. “What did you do to them?” I spin around and point all of my anger at Zack.

He smiles and holds his hands up in the air. “Nothing permanent! Don’t worry. I just convinced them to sit very, very still and to shut up. That little Sebastian has a lot to say.”

I look back at my little baby brother. I want to strangle Zack for messing with him. “He’s just a baby!” I yell at Zack.

“Like I said, I only convinced them. I didn’t hurt them...Yet. That’s up to you, sugar. You can play by the rules and have a happy ever after... Or you can be difficult.” He weighs the options with his hands bent at the elbow next to his sides. He cocks his head and gives me a sidelong look, waiting for my deliberation.

“There is no happy ever after,” I say under my breath. If there were, my baby brother and everyone else I love would not be in this room. My mom would not be dead. I look back at Zack and any thoughts of whether it would be wrong to take a life go out the window as I stare into this monster’s hazel eyes. “Fine. What do you want, Zack?”

He cocks his eyebrow. “Did you not read my letter?”

I roll my eyes. “Yes, I did. I’ve told you though that I don’t know how I got these powers.”

He advances forward until he’s all up in my business. “Yes, and you lied!” I can feel little droplets of spit hit my face as he yells at me, but I don’t take a step back. I refuse to show any weakness.

“It won’t work anyway, Zack. Your blood is already tainted. You’ve been immunized. Look, I will turn myself in here and now and you can let my friends and family leave this place safely,” I tell him.

He laughs in my face. “Ha! I’m not going to deal with you for the rest of my life. I can be a clean slate too. Just like your precious Tony.”

I eye him suspiciously. “Do you seriously want me to try and Reap your powers out of you?” I try to give him my most malicious smile before taking an intimidating step towards him. I find pleasure in the fact that he takes a step back.

“No. You don’t think my father created these powers without an antidote to remove them, do you?” He grabs a syringe with clear fluid in it. He looks to one of the men in the room, who is holding a gun. “If she tries to compel me or use any of her other gifts on me, kill them all.” Zack turns his attention to me and gives me an, ‘I know better than you,’ grin.

I roll my eyes. “So there
is
a way to make us all normal again,” I say.