Robison Wells - Blackout

He looked at Jack.

“As for why we have you, it’s because you and Parsons seem to be ideally suited to work together—complementary powers. I don’t know how your brain works, but you’re better than any sensor package.”

As he spoke, Rowley gestured broadly with his hands. “Our team will be focused on special reconnaissance and Parsons, you’re going to be our primary asset. Cooper, you’re tasked with keeping track of anything and everything that she does. And Hansen, for now you’re the bodyguard. That may change, because you have a lot of potential.”

Laura nodded. It was fine, for now.

“What does special reconnaissance mean?” Aubrey asked.

“It means that we’re not a combat team, at least not primarily. It means that we—you—sneak in wherever we’re going and find what we’re looking for. It’ll be a lot like the mission at the school—you gather information and relay that to us so we can make decisions about what action to take.”

Laura finally spoke up, unable to control her curiosity any longer. “So, where are we going?”

The captain clapped his hands together. “We’re getting on a plane. And we’re doing it this morning.”

THE TWENTY-SIX LAMBDAS WERE LOADEDonto a green camouflage bus, along with a handful of soldiers. Behind and in front of them were at least two Humvees that Jack could see, but he could identify a total of seven engines, so there had to be something else in the convoy.

Captain Rowley had told them that commercial flights had been halted weeks ago, and every major airport was acting as a makeshift military airfield. Dugway was fifty miles from Salt Lake International, across a mostly empty strip of road. Even the towns on the highway were dark as they passed, and rumor spread around the bus that whole cities were being evacuated. Jack didn’t know how much of that was true, but it was eerie to pass the shadows of McDonald’s and gas stations—places that never closed but were now empty and dark.

Aubrey was holding his hand but talking to Laura. It turned out that she wasn’t from Utah at all, but from Colorado, and had been camping down in southern Utah when the dam had been destroyed. She was trying to run, to get far away from more terrorist activity, but ended up right in the middle of it.

“I was hitchhiking,” she said. “I don’t remember much. My friends wanted to go east, back to Denver, but I wanted to go farther into Utah—to someplace no terrorist would ever care about.”

Jack raised his eyebrows. She was a tiny, gorgeous girl. Hitchhiking was asking to be murdered.

“Don’t forget,” she said with a smile. “I can handle myself in a fight. Anyway, we drove west—the trucker who picked me up said he was going to some place called Huntington. We didn’t make it a hundred miles—we fell into a stupid canyon. Terrorists knocked out a bridge. I survived—” She looked a little embarrassed, maybe guilty. “I can survive a hundred-foot fall, I guess. But he didn’t. Rescue teams found me at the bottom of the canyon.”

Aubrey nodded and placed her free hand over Laura’s. “That’s actually not that far from where we’re from. Huntington’s kind of right over the mountain.”

“I guess that’s how we all ended up in the same place.”

Aubrey and Laura started chatting about their abilities, and Jack leaned his head on the window and stared outside.

Somewhere, very high up, was a bird. At first he thought it was a plane, but he couldn’t get a good look at it. It disappeared high over the top of the bus before he could focus in on it.

There was a glare from low morning sun, and Jack tried to unlock the window to get an unblocked view.

“They’re locked,” someone across the aisle said. “I already tried mine.”

Jack glanced over to see who it was—a kid who could somehow control electricity—and when Jack looked back out the window there was no sign of whatever it was.

“Keep it closed anyway,” someone else said. “It’s too cold out there.”

He craned his neck, trying to find the bird. Something about it didn’t seem right.

Jack sat back in his seat, and started listening to the conversations in the bus. He wasn’t sure if that was dishonest or not. Everyone knew what he could do. He didn’t even feel sneaky. He was getting better with his powers all the time, and he could focus on one conversation at a time and ignore the others.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” a girl was saying several rows ahead of him. “I’m fifteen years old. I shouldn’t be in the army.”

“You’re a freaking monster,” a guy responded. “You can take care of yourself.”

She didn’t seem to be offended at being called a “monster,” and Jack immediately knew who he was listening to. A girl named Krezi—a powerful Lambda 5D, like Laura—who could shoot some kind of laser or fire or something from her hands.

“I know I can take care of myself,” Krezi said. “But that’s not the point. Should every person who can fight be forced into the army?”

“They gave you the option,” the guy answered. “You didn’t have to come.” From the tone of his voice, they’d had this conversation before.

“Yeah, some option. We could come and fight or we could stay locked up in Dugway indefinitely. In case you haven’t noticed, even though we’re all helping the army now, they haven’t taken these bombs off our ankles. They don’t trust us. They’re just using us because they don’t have a lot of options.”

“But isn’t that the whole point? Do you think that they’d risk a fifteen-year-old girl if they had any better ideas? We’re at war.”

“I can shoot energy from my hands,” she said. “Is that really superior to a Green Beret shooting bullets from his gun? Do they need me so bad?”

“But you don’t look like a Green Beret. That’s the whole point. You’re—”

Jack stopped listening. He’d heard all the arguments before. He’d had them himself.

He looked out the window again. The Great Salt Lake spread out in the distance like a giant blue blanket. The lake was dead, like the Dead Sea. He’d heard it was so salty that nothing could live in it—no fish, just algae and brine shrimp that made the lake stink.

There was that bird again, flying toward them.

It wasn’t a bird.

It was a—something—and it was carrying a person.

“Hey,” Jack shouted, nearly tripping over Aubrey as he pushed his way out into the aisle and toward the soldiers at the front of the bus. “There’s something out there. There’s something—someone—flying.”

Everyone jumped to the windows, blocking his view for a moment.

“It’s coming right at us,” he said.

There was a sudden chatter from a machine gun, behind them, and then the radio squawked. The soldier on the other end was frantic. “Unidentified bogey coming in from the south.”

A second gun started, right in front of the bus—it was the .50 cal machine gun on the roof of the Humvee ahead of them.

They were the terrorists. They had to be.

And then suddenly the bus slammed to the side, rising up for a moment on two wheels, and then crashing back to the pavement. The driver tried to regain control and swerved sharply.

There was a huge dent in the ceiling, and a hand—a claw?—was tearing through the roof of the bus.

The soldiers barked at everyone to get to the floor, and then Jack was nearly knocked down by the shattering pops of their M4s.

He clamped his hands over his ears, but it didn’t do any good. It was so loud he felt like he could barely move.

Someone in the bus—the girl he’d heard before—began firing blasts of white-hot light up through the roof.