Light (Gone 6)

“Jack!”

“I’m okay. It’s just . . . my legs. I can’t move my legs.”

Sam saw fear in Jack’s eyes. Jack, who had never wanted the power he was given.

Jack who had never wanted anything but to play with his computers.

“Oh, man,” Jack said.

He seemed to pass out for a moment, but then rallied. “Let me get you out . . .,” he said, and blood was in his mouth now, cutting off speech.

Jack, Computer Jack, as he had long been known, gripped the chains around Sam and pulled with all of his incredible strength.

He coughed blood onto Sam’s chest.

A single link in the chain snapped.

And Jack was gone.

Sam squirmed, trying to work free of the broken chain. He saw Gaia, nothing but a creature poorly outlined in paint and blood, a human-shaped swirl within the smoke, raise high a steel support beam, ready to hurl it with Jack’s strength.

Her arms bent, the beam fell, and she leaped out of the way and ran, as bullets flew, into the church.

Drake screamed. The sound of it, the wind from it, was in Astrid’s face. She bit down as if she was hanging on to life itself by her teeth. She was.

Drake punched her in the side of the head.

She blocked him, softening the blows with one battered hand.

He tried to wrap his whip hand around her throat, but she was too close and he couldn’t pull away, and her teeth were not just holding, they were cutting into flesh, ripping at him like a dog.

He tried to stand up, tried to get leverage, but he couldn’t get distance, and now instead of blocking his blows she gripped his head with both hands and forced her thumbs into his eyes.

Drake bellowed and squirmed and beat at her, and her mind was swimming, the blows were taking a toll, bashing her temple; his whip was trying to lash at her exposed legs, but no, no, she wasn’t going to let go, and her jaw was clenched with all the strength she had and her top teeth and bottom teeth were getting closer, closer, and Drake screamed curses, but he couldn’t get away.

Her thumbs pushed his eyeballs, hard-boiled eggs, dug past them, dug around them, dug fingernails into the space between eyeball and skull.

And she was screaming, too: the words weren’t clear, her mouth was full, and her jaw was clenched painfully, but it sounded just a bit like, “Die! Die!”

All at once, with a shake of her head, his nose ripped off.

Her thumbs were up past the knuckle; she felt the fragile bone cage crack.

Then, in one convulsive move, she pushed him off her. He rolled onto the floor, stood, and she backed away. She spit out the nose.

One of his eyes dangled from a thread.

The other oozed something like jelly from a split in the pupil.

Between them the lizard’s tail whipped madly.

He swung his own whip, lashed the air, but blindly. He caught the chandelier, ripping loose some of the Barbies hung there.

He wasn’t dead. She didn’t have the power to kill him. He would regenerate: he would come for her again.

And then, there was Taylor.

The appearance of the golden-skinned girl, the anomaly-amongst-anomalies, just froze Astrid. It was utterly incongruous.