Final Empire (38 page)

Chapter Thirty-Three

Lying face down on the tarmac
, bleeding from a loosened tooth I’d just given him, Kenneth burst into gales of laughter.

“You didn’t think I’d come here alone, did you buddy?”

He rolled to his back, drying his eyes with the heels of his palms. He tried to sit up but his body refused to cooperate. He fell back, sprawled out with his arms flung above his head.

He was out, but for how long I didn’t know. And we had no way to contain him.

A shriek bellowed out from the tarmac on an adjacent mountain top. I slid my helmet back on and adjusted the visor, magnifying the oculars for better clarity. He snapped into focus, and I recognized the kid instantly: Trey Lucas McLemore, the lanky ginger with the ability to control plant life. He’d commanded tendrils of seaweed – towering lengths of Pacific giant kelp, from the looks of it – to drag the cryogenics chamber from the underside of the TT-100. It had happened so suddenly I’d first thought it was a giant squid, but now I was positive.

The kelp rose again, from every side of the tarmac, crawling towards us like two-hundred foot anacondas stalking their prey.

McGarrity re-materialized his sword and began hacking and slashing, cutting away the vegetation that seemed to double with each passing moment.

Brynja blinked into her newly designed purple armor and electrified cloak. She vaulted over the seaweed, leaped from the tarmac and dove into the Pacific, likely in search of what remained of the cryogenics unit. I couldn’t tell how badly it had been damaged when it went down, but any repair at this point seemed like a long shot.

I could hear shrieking. The piercing sound of Trey McLemore on the opposite hoverpad, commanding ocean life to overtake our mountain top. McGarrity gamely fought off the tendrils but he was losing a lot of blood; without pressure on the wound it was draining him; his tanned face was turning ash white and his mop of blond hair had soaked through with perspiration, and was plastered to his forehead. He was fading fast.

McLemore continued to shriek, and then he screamed. His pitch had raised to a blood-curdling falsetto, and I feared what would come next. I immediately pictured a hailstorm of great whites that would come flopping onto the tarmac, taking chunks out of our extremities like some unwatchable horror film. But the scream wasn’t a command. It was a cry of agony, followed by a death rattle.

I glanced to the mountain where he stood, and he was gone. Lucas was now overhead, being carried in Melvin’s powerful jaws, dragon wings flapping in loud whooshing strokes. The kid was dangling from the manticore’s mouth, held in place by the eight-inch incisors that had pierced his jugular. He gurgled some more. Blood dripped as he convulsed. And then I heard a pop. It was like a celery stalk being snapped in two, and Melvin released his grip. Lemore’s corpse cartwheeled in mid-air before skipping off the side of the mountain, bouncing into the surf.

The killer seaweed fell limp.

McGarrity dropped to his knees, sword vanishing. He clasped his bicep. He had only a few minutes of consciousness left in him, if I had to guess. I ripped the shirt from his back and fastened a tourniquet around his damaged arm, yanking it tight to stem the blood flow. It was a half-measure at best but it would have to suffice.

“Matt! Are you all right down there?” I could hear Gavin’s voice clearly in my com.

“We can’t see you over the piles of seaweed!” Peyton added.

The TT-100 was hovering out over the ocean, parallel to the tarmac, likely waiting for Brynja to surface. She was still underwater and I didn’t know for how long. Three minutes, maybe five? I hadn’t been counting.

“We’re fine…well, not McGarrity, he’s lost a lot of blood.”

“And where is Kenneth?” Karin asked.

I scanned the tarmac, which was now almost completely buried beneath mossy green tendrils, in some places several feet deep. “Shit, I don’t know,” I admitted, frantically tearing the weeds away. “If he suffocates under this crap Brynja is dead…”

Then, as I frantically searched, I heard a rumble. It was a low, echoing roar that was rolling in from the south side of the tarmac. A tidal wave. And behind it was a woman, walking shoulder-deep in the surf. She was tall enough to reach the ocean floor.

Kayleigh Botha stalked through the ocean
, her greasy yellow hair matted against the sides of her skeletal face. Her sunken black eyes looked like craters. She’d been a hundred feet tall when she stomped through South Africa, crushing homes and businesses and low-rise buildings underfoot, but now she had to be twice that size, at least.

As the ocean floor sloped upward she rose from the water until the surf was hitting her naked body mid-chest. A crane-sized arm lunged out and hammered the tarmac, snapping the end off. Rock and metal splashed into the ocean and the platform quaked, knocking me on my ass.

Blinded by the glare of the sun or the sting of the salt water (or both, I wasn’t sure) her aim was wildly off-target on her first attempted swing. Botha’s next shot was far more precise. Her fist came down again and the shadow loomed overhead. I wasn’t fast enough to move. I buried my head in my hands and squinted, and felt a wave of heat rising around me. McGarrity, somehow, had summoned the strength to encase us in a glowing orb of light, and Botha continued to slam it like a hammer onto a nail. With each successive strike we were pounded further into the tarmac. It wasn’t the solid barrier of light he’d created in the Liwa Desert; as he faded, heavy lids fluttering shut, the barrier became translucent, fizzling out like a dying roadside flare.

The TT-100 circled around overhead, and through the faltering dome I could see the side door sliding open. Gavin and Peyton opened fire on the giant, pocking her face with a hailstorm of lead. She squinted and tiny plumes of red burst from her cheeks and forehead. It forced her to turn away and it had diverted her attention, but the scale was simply in her favor. At her size it was like being pelted in the face with handfuls of pebbles. Annoying, sure, but not enough to drop her.

Even Melvin failed in his attack. He’d nimbly landed on her neck, his venomous scorpion tail arcing over his back, burying into her flesh. Botha’s skin instantly reddened, but again, the size was the difference. To her it was a mosquito bite, nothing more. She swatted him away, sending him crashing to the surf.

“I’m coming down to get you! She’s distracted, this is our only chance!” I heard Karin scream through my com.

“No!” I shouted back. “I can’t find Kenneth, and Brynja is still out there. If we just give her a minute to…”

And I’m sure I said something else. I can’t remember what. I was fixated on the small projectile that slammed into Botha’s jaw, and burst from the top of her cranium. It was a bullet. A rapid-fire shot that sent her bloodshot eyes lolling back in their dark sockets, streams of inky blood pouring from her nostrils. Like a building collapse she toppled backwards. The blast of water hit the tarmac with so much force that McGarrity and I nearly washed away. Oddly, it was the bog of dense seaweed left behind from Trey’s attack that had created enough traction, allowing us to stay grounded.

Brynja was suddenly at our sides, scooping us back to our feet. Her armor and black cloak were absent of any viscera or brain matter, but she’d been the bullet I saw sailing through Botha’s head.

She nodded as if she’d just read my mind.

“No cryogenics chamber?” I panted, peeling off my helmet.

She shook her head, eyes falling shut.

“All right,” I groaned. “Anyone have a suggestion? I’m pretty open to ideas at this point.”

McGarrity opened his mouth to say something, but words didn’t spill out. Only blood. We glanced down to see a glowing blue blade protruding from his stomach.

Up until that moment,
Sergei Taktarov battling Dwayne ‘Sledge’ Lewis at the original Arena Mode tournament in Manhattan had been considered the greatest battle between two superhumans in recorded history (at least according to the keyboard warriors). Brynja Guðmundsdóttir battling Kenneth Livitski would have surely eclipsed that battle had anyone thought to record it. I missed a lot of it, to be honest. I was cradling McGarrity’s blood soaked body on the mossy tarmac, realizing that there was nothing I could do to save him. I administered CPR and bandaged his wound but I wasn’t qualified to do anything else.

Overhead, the only two architects the planet had ever seen battled for what felt like an eternity. They clashed with blunt weapons forged from pure energy, and then graduated to blades. There wasn’t even that much technique involved; they hacked like mad butchers, taking chunks of flesh from each other, sometimes not even bothering to slip or parry or dodge, and at times severing a limb. They’d simply grow them back a moment after the appendage had been lost. Were they even able to kill each other? At this level, was it even possible?

When they’d exhausted their arsenals of weapons they began creating organic creatures. Brynja’s newly-minted manticore battled Kenneth’s towering three-hundred foot cthulhu until they tore each other to bloody pieces, seemingly killing each other in unison. Their enormous carcasses stained the ocean red for as far as I could see.

The battle strayed farther and farther from Fortress 18 until they were outlines against the setting sun, silhouettes slamming each other with tidal waves and lightning and other natural disasters.

And then I heard Brynja’s voice in my head. I didn’t know if it was my brain tumor (which is a distinct possibility) or if it was her authentic voice, communicating telepathically. Though as the battle of two titans raged over the open ocean, the voice was even and calm, almost disturbingly so.

“Mox, I can’t believe what you’ve done for me. You risked everything and everyone to try and keep me alive, and it’s something I’ll carry with me forever. But I don’t belong here, and my time has passed. It was over at Arena Mode.”

“No, wait…what are you saying? Are you giving up?”

“Never. I’m moving on.”

“How? Wait, don’t do this – there’s always a way…”

“All I ever wanted was a purpose; to know what I was, and how I fit in. Now you’ve given me the greatest gift I’ve ever received. And I know who I am.”

“Who…” I swallowed back a tear. “Who are you?”

“I’m the girl who gets to die saving the world. And I get to go out knowing I’m loved.”

“YOU ARE,” I shouted out loud, not in my head. “You’re loved and needed and you don’t need to do this! We can fight this together, until—”

The shockwave blinded me, knocking me backwards. My inner ear spun and something popped inside my head.

I woke in a hospital bed in Manhattan.
It had been a week. My blackouts were getting longer and my memory was worsening. The last several weeks felt more like a boggy dream, or a series of dreams and nightmares that had collided with one another, crushed into a broken kaleidoscope.

I heard a snore. Peyton was curled into a tight ball on a chair in the corner of the room, suddenly jarred awake when I sat up. She was a light sleeper; it could have been just a creak in my bed.

“Baby!” she rushed to my side, landing on my chest with way too much force. I parted the curtain of pink hair that was draped across my face and drew back. “You’re up!” She shouted.

“I’m am indeed,” I whispered. My throat was sandpaper.

“You need water,” she said quickly. “I’ll get water.” She helped me sip from a plastic cup and began to regale me with the tale of what had happened after I’d passed out.

“I could see it from the jet,” she began, eyes already shrink wrapped in tears. “Brynja and Kenneth had fought to a stalemate, I guess, and then this big thing…I don’t know what it was – a spiky ball on the end of a stick?”

“A mace?” I said hoarsely, taking another sip.

“Yes!” she said, a tear suddenly streaking her face. She wiped it away and continued her story undaunted. “So this mace appears and she swings it, and boom – it was like the Death Star exploding!”

I nodded gingerly. “Wow, good use of a reference.”

“Thanks. So this wave of energy comes shooting out of her and Kenneth. It was like this big crazy blast, like…like when Sauron’s eye in Lord of the—”

“Don’t push it.”

“Okay, so then they disappear. It’s over. Done. They just blinked out of existence. We passed overhead with the TT-100, but there was nothing.”

Holy shit. She did it. It was what she’d wanted and she’d completed her journey. And she’d left something behind: me, and Peyton, and Gavin, and a world that may not even know that they owe her their freedom – maybe their lives. I smiled bitterly, overcome with sadness at the loss, and selfishly wishing I’d had just one more minute with her. What would I have said? I had no idea. I guess that’s where the beauty lies in our stupid, mundane, seemingly trivial interactions. Each one could be the last – your last time to say ‘I love you’ or ‘you mean so much to me’, or to just hug them like you’ve never hugged them before. For no other reason than it just feels right.

Peyton wiped away a pair of rolling tears and sniffed the rest away, straightening her posture. “So,” she said with a bit of eagerness, “there’s plenty to keep you occupied while you’re nursing your injuries.” She motioned to the table at my side. It hurt just to turn and look at it.

I took another sip of water.

“First,” she began, “Steve wants a blurb for his new book, so when you’re ready to type—”

I spat the mouthful of liquid out onto my blanket. “What the…Steve?” I blinked twice. I almost pinched myself to check if it was a dream. “Steve fucking McGarrity? But the blade…in his gut? And the…bleeding?”

“He heals quick,” she shrugged. “At least that’s what he said – some sort of healing factor thingy? The blade missed every major organ and passed through clean, so that probably helped a bunch, too.”

“Wow.” I didn’t know what else to say.

She raised a finger, rolling her eyes up and to the left as if to search her internal hard drive. “Oh, he
also
told me to tell you to stop being a ‘cockwomble’, and get your ‘lazy old ass’ out of bed soon. I don’t think cockwomble is a real word but I haven’t looked it up yet…”

She then showed me the piles of cards and chocolates and flowers I’d been inundated with, including a scratched, battle-scarred key to the city. “The mayor said you’d left this in her office?”

Damn, she couldn’t even spring for a new one?

After a quick call to Gavin and my sister and my niece and nephew, Peyton and I drifted off to sleep together; she laid gingerly beside me, careful not to press against any of my seven broken bones. I was back at square one with my tumor, but that could wait. I just wanted to enjoy a victory for once, and bask a little, and enjoy
right
now,
not what I’d have to deal with in the future. I smelled Peyton’s hair and kissed her forehead, and she let out a little, ‘Mmm,’ that was my favorite sound in the world.

But as with all humans, that blissful feeling of being in the present moment floated away, and my mind drifted back to Brynja. I realized that as much as I was saddened, I envied her. She was leaving something behind: a legacy that she fought for and created, and that would outlive her for generations. Sure, I had technology I’d rebranded and loads of money I’d pass down, but nothing I’d actually forged myself. As much as I didn’t want to leave Peyton alone in this world, I didn’t want to pass through the Pearly Gates – if such a place existed – leaving behind only Cameron Frost’s leftover bank account.

I sighed.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Peyton asked.

“Nothing,” I fibbed. “Just…it’s been a crazy couple of months, that’s all. Hell, it’s been a crazy
day,
and I just woke up.” I snorted, and my ribs caught fire when I laughed.

“Well are you ready for one more crazy tidbit…if your elderly heart can take the excitement?”

Like an idiot I laughed again, and clutched my ribs in pain. “Okay, hit me…”

She smiled and rubbed her stomach with both hands. “No, you’ve suffered enough today. I think the news can wait. Let’s just enjoy things for a little while longer…while it’s just the two of us.”