Michael Grant - Hero

A man fell on Simone, a big man, his weight so still, so inert she knew he must be dead. She felt his blood trickling down on the back of her neck. She smelled the stink of his voided bowels.

The machine gun, reloaded, started up again, sweeping the field, punching holes into the still-living and the already-dead. Simone felt the impact as bullets struck the dead man over her. Bullets that would have struck her, would have torn holes through her, but for the shelter the dead man provided.

Her terrified, panicky brain told her she was wounded, too, that the sudden blow to her back, the blow that had knocked her down, had come from the machine gun. But she felt no pain and suspected she’d simply been knocked down by another victim. Some person whose name she would never know had taken the bullet with her name on it.

The machine gun stopped again. Sudden silence. Then the sound of a woman weeping and seconds later a cry for mercy and two rounds of assault rifle fire and the cry stopped abruptly. Simone opened one eye narrowly, a sideways view that revealed men in black walking like wraiths through the steam rising from bloody corpses, shooting everyone, living or dead, two rounds in the head.

Bang! Bang!

If she waited, she would die.

She tried to move, but the dead man’s weight was too great to free herself from. She had a sudden flash of the last Lord of the Rings movie, of King Théoden lying broken on the battlefield, trapped beneath his dead horse, saying, My body is broken.

Bang! Bang!

Helpless. She was helpless, and for a moment despair offered her an easy way out. Simply wait for death. Just lie there beneath a dead man and wait for the bang . . . bang . She would only hear the first shot. Maybe not even that. And all the fear and fury would be gone.

But despair had not won out yet; rather, the temptation of surrender poured fuel on the fire of her anger. How dare they do this? How dare they simply murder people this way? Her father might already be dead. Why? It wasn’t her fault or her father’s or the fault of any of these people, these poor, massacred people.

She struggled again to free herself and this time drew the attention of a man in black, who looked at her from a hundred feet away and said, “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll get to you.”

Nonchalant. Like mass murder was a daily affair for him. Like her life was nothing.

She felt a sick, acid bile in her throat, felt her whole body tingling, still wracked by pain, but this was something else, something different. Rage filled her, rage and impotence, a burning sense of injustice and of her own weakness.

Then the dead man rolled aside.

He had rolled aside because suddenly Simone was on her hands and knees and had shrugged him off. Impossible just seconds earlier; the man weighed twice what she did. Impossible!

The man in black who’d noticed her yelled over his shoulder, “Live one here!” He came striding toward her, fast, weapon at his shoulder, leveled on her.

At nearly point-blank range, he fired!

Simone saw him fire. Saw the muzzle flash. Heard the loud popping noises.

Saw it and heard it . . . from about fifty feet in the air.

“Shit!” the killer yelled, and raised his weapon to aim up at her. He fired and missed again, because now Simone was higher still, and moving through the air with no more difficulty than a trout in a mountain stream.

Tracer bullets from a half dozen guns chased her through the sky, like something from an old World War II movie where she was the brave fighter pilot. She was not fast enough to outrun bullets, but she was too fast for them to be able to keep sight of her in the deepening darkness.

The army truck switched on a small spotlight. Its beam swept around the sky, searching, but too slowly, like someone trying to spear a cockroach with a chopstick—it followed her but had no chance of catching up and keeping her illuminated.

Simone found she had only to think of moving, and she did. No time yet to ask what had happened to her, and no need to ask how: even in her frazzled, freaked-out state, she knew it was the rock. Dozens of particles no bigger than a grain of sand had pierced her. Had they been larger they might still have been moving at twenty-eight thousand miles an hour and blown right through her, like gamma rays, but small particles traveling through air are slowed by friction. So the rock had not simply blown through her; it had stayed within her. Like buckshot.

Simone’s overriding thought was that she needed to find her father. He might not be her favorite human being, but however he treated the poor fools who took his loans, he’d always been good to her. And whatever else might happen, he was her father.

Below she saw a bizarre scene, a sort of drone camera pan over a battlefield, except that this was not a battle but cold-blooded massacre. A hundred or more bodies lay in twisted poses, holes dripping urine and stomach contents and blood. The black-clad killers were still finishing off the wounded.

Bang! Bang!

But now a more mundane fear shivered through her, the fear of falling. She was in the air.

In the air!

Visions of Road Runner cartoons flashed, and she imagined being Wile E. Coyote as he looks down to see he’s run past the edge of the cliff. But Simone did not fall. She had no idea how she was doing this . . . And then Simone looked down at her legs. The jeans were gone, and her legs . . . She stifled a scream. Her legs were covered with what looked like iridescent scales, like a trout—but no, that wasn’t right, either. Because these scales did not lie flat; they moved. They beat like tiny hummingbird wings. And it wasn’t just her legs. Her entire body was covered, every square inch of it, with hundreds, no, thousands of tiny, iridescent bee wings. She raised a hand and looked in fascination at the furiously buzzing things all down the back of her hand, though not on her palms. She touched her face—no wings there, or on her throat, but her head, her shoulders, her sides were all winged, like some weird insectoid bedazzling.

And she was no longer the color of a white girl who lived in the shadow of tall buildings: beneath the iridescent wings was flesh the color of faded Smurf toy left too long in the sun.

I can fly!

The rock. There was no doubt about that. Nor was there any doubt that the government had feared just this sort of thing and had tried to solve the problem with bullets.

Simone veered away as the searchlight’s shaft swept nearby. She didn’t have to do anything to fly, just think, go there , or go that way , or, faster!

Her duty was to find her father, but the killing field below was dark, and all she saw were twisted bodies and armed men. She spotted a column of vehicles approaching, headlights moving slowly, led by an earth mover, along with two heavy dump trucks and three black SUVs.

Coming to bury the dead!

If she reduced altitude far enough to search faces, she would be shot, and while she could fly and had become significantly stronger, she had no reason to imagine that she could survive being shot.

Simone knew she would feel sadness, terrible sadness, and soon, but right now was all about staying alive. In the distance she heard the air-punching sound of military helicopters and suspected that she would be their main target.

Her mother. That’s what she needed to do: get to her mother. Then she could cry for her dead father.

THE PHONE INthe suite rang at 1:20 in the morning. Shade was the only one awake, and picked up the receiver from the set in the dining room where she’d been sitting in the dark, looking out at the flash and sparkle of the Las Vegas Strip at night, and thinking.