It was like some terrible parody of a rock concert laser show. Bright beams of light melted runs in the road surface, then reached the moving van and sliced it neatly into three uneven pieces.
Dekka heard an unearthly scream and saw people bolting from the van. Blinding light followed them as they ran.
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?”
“Orc.”
“You’re not human,” Gaia said dismissively. “I don’t even need to kill you. Run away.”
“No.”
Gaia cocked her head, curious, as she chewed her food. “Aren’t you afraid?”
Orc shook his massive head. “The Lord is my shepherd.”
Gaia walked right up to him, peering carefully at his gravel skin and taking special interest in the patch of human skin that remained on his face. “Interesting effect. I don’t quite see how you happened.”
Orc swung a ham-sized fist at her.
Gaia sidestepped with Brianna’s speed. She dodged Orc’s next three blows as well.
“Not at all the usual mutation,” Gaia said, fascinated. “You could join me; I doubt Nemesis could use you.”
Orc was panting from the effort of missing Gaia.
“No,” Orc gasped.
“Mmmm. Well, then, I guess I’d better kill you, just to be safe.”
“That’s gunfire!” Brianna yelled.
Lana said, “Brianna, no! You’re not done healing.”
“What, this?” Brianna pointed at her disfigured face. “Pff. Just a flesh wound.” She winked with her good eye. “Where’s my stuff?”
Lana nodded toward a pile in the corner: the familiar modified runner’s backpack with the sawed-off shotgun and machete.
“Kick ass, Breeze,” Lana said, but she was talking to air.
Down the hall in a second. Down the steps in less. Through the lobby. And now she could really turn on the speed as she blew down the hill, tripped, and went tumbling head over heels.
Brianna did not get up with super-speed. She stood slowly. Both knees were bleeding, as were the palms of her hands.
Brianna touched her swollen eyes.
“Depth perception, Breeze,” she chided herself. “Depth perception.”
She slowed through town, doing no more than sixty miles an hour down Ocean Boulevard past a darkening sea that was just swallowing the sun. She hung a hard right on San Pablo, blew through the town plaza, slowing just enough to hear the fierce cheers of “Breeeeze!” from shooters positioned in windows and on rooftops. She gave them a jaunty wave.