Edilio had stopped and now stood, legs apart, rifle steady, taking aim.
BLAM!
And Dekka saw the bullet clip Gaia’s ear. Blood sprayed.
The monster cried in pain, and Dekka shouted in fierce joy.
“Yeah! Yeah!”
But Gaia was not seriously hurt. And now down came Gaia, dropping too quickly toward the ground. Gaia had used her own mirroring of Dekka’s power to restore gravity.
Dekka strained, focused with all her might, but Gaia was too strong. Bleeding and howling in rage Gaia touched down and leveled a shocking telekinetic blast at the moving van, which knocked the three segments apart, exposing the remaining shooters. They broke and ran.
Gaia stretched out a hand, raised a car from the pavement, and used it almost like a bowling ball: rolled it down the road and crushed three of the runners. There was no time for screams. They were bugs squashed on the highway.
Edilio still stood, firing, defenseless, almost daring Gaia to kill him.
“Jack! Orc!” Edilio shouted over the sound of his own gun.
A wooden telephone pole, thirty feet long, trailing telephone lines, flew like a javelin. Gaia ducked and the blunt end missed her, but as the pole flew, it dropped and caught her shoulder, slamming her hard around.
She pushed the pole away and it rattled onto the road, rolled a few feet, and stopped.
Edilio still kept up his fire, but now Gaia hit him with an invisible fist and knocked him a hundred yards off the road into the dark.
“No!” Dekka roared, and went for Gaia with nothing but her fists as weapons.
Gaia grabbed her face in one hand and laughed as Dekka punched air.
“You’re the one with the power over gravity, aren’t you? I could almost do without you,” Gaia said. Blood still spurted from her ear. Almost absentmindedly, Gaia reached her free hand to touch it and stop the flow. “So don’t annoy me.” She twisted Dekka’s face and sent her sprawling.
Suddenly Gaia was a blur. Picking herself up Dekka saw a boy simply explode from the force of a blow he’d never seen coming. A girl, screaming, was tripped and then thrown with a sickening crunch into a wrecked car. The last of Edilio’s shooters.
Gaia paused then, blurring back into sight, and held a hand against the bullet wound on her ear. The chunk taken out of her arm had already stopped bleeding.
From out of the darkness at the side of the road, Edilio fired again.
BLAM! BLAM!
Gaia snarled and swept a telekinetic fist like a haymaker punch and the firing stopped.
“Edilio!” Dekka cried.
“Ah, so that was Edilio,” Gaia said. “I’ve heard of him. I should have killed him, but I thought he might be a mutant.” Gaia did not blur out again; she was clearly focused on healing herself.
Dekka looked around for a weapon, anything. “Jack! Jack!” she cried, but no answer came.
She saw Caine, still carrying a human leg, coming down the road, uncertain.
“Caine!” Dekka cried, her voice ragged. “Help us!”
Caine looked like a different person. A zombie version of himself. He dropped the leg and looked down at his hands as if they were not his.
All firing had stopped. Gaia stood alone, triumphant.
Then from the shadow stepped a living slag heap.
Gaia did a double take. “What are you?”