Chapter Three

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The night was swallowed by chaos. My escape from the Collective was met by the same blind violence. No sense: the air was thick, sight was short, and white noise drowned my thoughts. I weaved through combatants, edging closer to the end of the alleyway. I ignored the blackened raiders, the tingling that gnawed at my patience, the fear that coiled my defences and readied my body to fight.

The humans didn’t notice me. I was just a girl to them. 

In the shadows of our exit a looming figure slayed its attackers with ease. I felt it in my blood, that he was one of us. Ink dawned his skin, his black jeans were ripped, his dark hair whipped heavy with sweat. Sheer reckless aggression fuelled his elegant slaughter.

“What the f—“

His head twisted towards me, “You kept me waiting,” Elek sauntered.

“You broke protocol,” I sneered, marching towards him, ready to unleash a wrath that put the descending war around us to shame.

“I can’t remember the last time you actually followed protocol,” Elek replied, pulling back his dagger through a raider’s throat; blood oozing, luke warm.

We were now feet apart, as I warned, “We need to get out of here.”

He tucked his arm around me, surveying the area and leading us away. His presence was enough to clear a path for us as we hit the cement of the pavement. We were so close to an escape, and my thoughts were so focused on just that, that the excruciating pain that radiated from my shoulder was even more shocking.

I felt the iron, I smelt the rust, the timber, and different threads of oak in the handle of the blade, as it pierced my shoulder.

“Son of a bitch!” I roared, hollowing as I ripped it out, through muscle and flesh.

I tossed it to the floor, turning with a fury that was like bubbling molten. There was no going back, no walking away. A raider with his hood pulled down, watched me in an open stance, waiting for my reaction. Mere seconds passed as I summed up my competition, in my peripheral I saw Elek have more unknowing idiots throw themselves at him. Like they stood a chance.

My blood heats.

I lept towards the raider, my body airborne, ready to tackle and kill. My body was set, and yet I was stopped.

A flash of honey, a brief glimpse. The colour was so familiar that I was sure, without a doubt, of whose eyes watched me – Jack. He wandered through the desolated street, in no more than a stroll. I had to reassess my strategy, and those seconds cost me. I faltered, and my raider had a gun to my head.

I hissed, my fingers were burning, on fire, embers ready to pop.

But I couldn’t kill him, not like that. Because they were watching, and for the moment, I was still the human refugee capable of no more than a few impressive self-defence moves. So that’s exactly what I gave them.

I flicked up my ankle, straight to the groin, his throaty groan confirming that I hit the target and that he wouldn’t be reproducing in the near future. I used my forehead to head-butt the gun from his grip, before I slammed him against the brick wall. His eyes rolled and I knew he was out.

If I had a penny for every time a man had underestimated my strength, well, I wouldn’t be a homeless runner, that’s for sure.

I steadied myself as I watched his body sink to the floor, Elek still caught up in mindless battle. A few breaths, that’s all I needed to myself. I was ready to set off, ready to leave, before a blunt force hit the side of my head. Wavering in and out of consciousness, I felt myself loosing balance.

Again, a dense hit to my head sent me stumbling forward. So violent that I was sure it was the sort of blow that would kill a normal human.

After that, I was out cold, slipping into a silent and black sleep.

 ***

The silence lingers. My nightmares were timid, but panic and worry tore at my sleep. Consciousness clawed to the surface, for now, my dreams must wait.

I woke with a gasp, my back arching, and muscles tense.

Jo-Jo hovered above me, close enough for me to see the flecks of grey in his facial hair. He backed away, acting on instinct.

“It’s just water,” he promised hastily, as I turned my head to see a rusted cup by my side.

He slipped from my vision as I heaved myself into a sitting position. My head was throbbing with an intense pressure, dimmed only by the unusual silence. I took in a cement bunker, no exit besides a stairwell to my right. Jack, and his small cohort of trusted sidekicks line the walls. I sighed as I noticed Elek walking up and down the room, covering it each way in ten strides.

“You are a resilient thing, aren’t you?” Reaves, a dark figure who squat in the corner of the room, called, wearing a daring smirk.

“Resilience is just one of my many extraordinary, God-given traits, Reaves,” I replied, my voice coarse.

“Extraordinary is not the word I would have used.”

“Hey, that is my sister Asshole,” Elek interjected, still pacing.

“Is that supposed to be threatening?” Reaves responded.

“It should be—“

“Gentlemen,” Jack growled, authority bleeding in his tone, “just.chill.out.”

Both of the hot-heads opened their mouths, ready to go another round.

“I have a gun and I am happy to shoot you both, so sit down and shut up,” Jack then threatened, infuriated and perplexed by their constant arguing. Elek and Reaves had been on the better side of enemies since they’d met, ten years ago.

Silence fell over the room again, perspiration mixing with the stale, unstirred air.

The room lay settled for hours, everyone apparently wanting to wait out the night. The bunker was thick, I could only hear a patter of movement above us, it was impossible to tell if it were safe to leave.

 Jack had tossed around power bars to everyone, and as everyone dived in, I asked “What is this place then?”

“A safe house,” Jack had answered, as he made his way back to his corner of the room.

“And how did I get here?”

The last thing I remembered was face-planting into the cement.

“I dragged your lucky ass here,” he said, his southern accent thick. “Usually this place is saved for only my elite team.”

Watching the room of brutes scoff down their food; elite seemed a little elated. These men were loners, those who hid in the outskirts making a living in the dirty work of gangs: no families, no past, and no future.  

 “What happened out there?” I then followed, anxious to find out what had transpired in my lapse of consciousness, and beyond that, what this lot knew about why the raid had been so brutal. Yet, I felt a nervous edge to my voice, I was scared that they already knew too much.

“Good question,” Reaves then shot, staring towards Jack with raised eyebrows.

“I haven’t seen a show like that since the bombs,” Jo-Jo followed, mellow as his mind became occupied by other things.

“I don’t know,” Jack admitted, a sincerity in his eye that almost drew close to guilt.

“Oh, come on, like we’re going to believe that!” Elek spat, torment in his words, as he tossed a coin between his palms.

“Spies in every God-damn state, and no one laid a tip?” Reaves added.

 “Well they were obviously looking for something,” the only other face I knew in the room, Chet, one of Reave’s good buddies, then murmured. He was a trigger-happy red-head, but he was right.

“How’s your shoulder?” Jack then asked, everyone tuned into the conversation.

I adjusted awkwardly, “Its fine, nothing to worry about,” I masked, “just a surface injury.”

I could feel that it was all but healed, my wound would have taken any normal human months to heal from. It was only because of what I was, that I was able to recover so quickly.

A genetic contagion. A mutation. That’s what they labelled it after the first sighting. Masses of the population began inhibiting signs of the new spread abilities, and following the uprising there was no containing it. Across the globe, millions of people were finding themselves with the power of, what we now call, an elemental.

Fire, earth, water, air – the four fundamental elementals, now wielded by humans.

It caused a ferocious pandemonium that collapsed the modern world. Its governments, its armies, its economies – everything was worthless. Humans as we understood them were no longer at the top of the hierarchy. There was a new dominant species that was stronger, faster, and resilient against the old-human, and all of their technologies.

I am one of these Elementals, as is Elek.

In the ten years that have passed since the outbreak, our kind have been forced into the fringes of society. Outcasts who are hunted. Just after the ‘mutation’ was labelled and new protocols, and regimes were enacted to deal with the crisis, our parents left us: my two brothers and myself. We were only children.

The uprising raptured a creases in society that unwound years of democracy and peace. Elementals rose against the genocide that was being threatened against them. Half of the world’s population was wiped out in under a week. Whole nations went dark. Nuclear weapons and terror induced war changed the trajectory of human civilization forever.

The United States of America is one of few inhabitable continents left. Survivors from all corners of the old world exist together, in this anarchy where criminal activity, gang-land mutiny, and murder go by as normal.

The only authority left is the Confederation. A body of people who attempt to capture all remaining Elementals. That’s why I play down my injury, because they all must believe I am one of them.

***

Nearly everyone was asleep. I sat by the opening to the bunker, at the top of the staircase. A ray of blue light shone through, offering me a glimpse of dawn. I could almost smell the frost that was knitted through the morning air.

I heard shuffling, and quiet steps as someone rounded the corner, climbing towards me.

Reaves came to sit opposite me, his feet nearly touching mine. Neither of us said anything for a while. I didn’t think of Reaves as family, I didn’t know what he was to me, but I knew my existence wasn’t balanced without him. He was an intangible part of my view on this world. 

“So how was it after we left?” I asked, my voice not above a whisper.

He ran his hand over his jaw, “You did the impossible. You turned a cold man colder,” he laughed, like there was something sickeningly funny.

“He never got over it,” Reaves continued, “He had us out for three months searching for you. But it was like you disappeared. It took him two years to really look up, he never stopped wondering though. I could always see it in his eyes, thinking about where you were, how you were going.”

He looked at me, and his smirk pulled into a straight line. Maybe he saw my guilt, maybe he didn’t, but his tone changed.

“About three years ago it got better, there was a comm sent out to all of the Collectives, nationwide. It was about a bounty for three teenagers. Two dark haired boys, and I think they called you ‘a blonde vixen’,” he smiled, “said you couldn’t have been older than sixteen and yet you’d blown up a Collective three gas station and hit loose with two grand, and a Texan bounty hunters Mercedes.”

I snorted, before I laughed, remembering that dangerous and ridiculous day. We were incredibly reckless. Reaves laughed with me, both of us laughing with an uninhibited freedom. Like we were unattached from the weight of our lives.

“Jack was never worried that you wouldn’t survive out there,” Reaves continued, “I think he was just scared that after what happened that night, with those men, that maybe they, or he, had stolen your spirit.”

I was thirteen and I was forced to kill that night. Under circumstances that Jack and Reaves will never know. I’d promised myself years before then that I wouldn’t survive like that. It didn’t matter what those men had done they didn’t deserve that death.

“But after that comm, we realised that nothing had changed,” Reaves finished, smiling.

He was wrong. Everything had changed.

“How long are you staying?” he then queried, his forehead creasing.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

Truth.

“Well if you’re going to piss off again, say goodbye to the man for God’s sake.”

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