The Next Chronicle (Book 1): Next (11 page)

If they were hurt, it was her fault.

“Hang on, guys,” she said, and moved forward again.

Kit lowered herself to her hands and knees for the last ten feet. It wasn't that she was overwhelmed, but rather a tactical decision. She wouldn't be of any help to anyone if the killer took her head off from a distance. She crawled toward the fence's edge beneath the massive bushes, trying not to let the scrub beneath her crackle as she moved across it.

She leaned against the post and drew her gun, eyes scanning the scene for threats. There wasn't anyone standing that she could see. No one on any of the rooftops ahead.

There were no sounds other than muffled groans from beneath a pile of former building. The voice was weak and strained, but she thought it belonged to Archer. Lurching to her feet, Kit rushed forward. Though her quick scan of the area led her to believe the killer had fled, it was possible she was wrong. He might be lying in wait, holding back for an easy shot at her.

The possibility hovered in the back of her mind, but Kit ignored it. Whoever was alive beneath the rubble might not stay that way for long without help.

Reaching the wide spread of shattered masonry and twisted steel, Kit holstered her weapon and set to work. Bricks flew backward as she threw them like pebbles, the speed of her work kicking up dust. Larger pieces took longer, if only to assure she wasn't harming any survivors. After less than a minute she had hollowed out a depression in the rubble eighteen inches deep and nearly six feet on a side.

Before her lay a section of wall made of metal and stone. It was from the top section of the building's facade, where the huge square of brick and granite making up the base gave way to the triangular beams and siding made of steel. From beneath one edge of the piece, a hand jutted out.

Kit grappled the huge slab, gripping the sharp edges tight enough to hurt even her fingers through bulletproof skin. She pulled carefully, slowly increasing pressure with her legs first. There was a slight shift before the slab stopped moving. The strain rippled across her shoulders and down her back.

She reached deep, clawing for every drop of energy and funneling it into her muscles and bones. Her sight went dim, the color draining from the world. The crunch of stone beneath her boots faded. She no longer felt the breeze across her skin. Even her perception of time slowed, a sure sign she had drained her enhanced speed all the way down to human normal.

Strength flooded through her, raw vital force filling her muscles like an ocean before freezing into rock-hard ice. The section of wall moved, then, first slowly but with increasing speed. Kit rocked it up and forward until the thing rested upright against her. With a shout of effort, she hauled the thing up, muscles bulging through her skin with the sharpness of cut stone, the veins like steel cable.

With a last mighty shove, Kit pivoted and threw the slab as hard as she could. At over a ton and well beyond even her most optimistic recorded abilities, the distance it traveled was not far.
Any
distance was impressive. Two of the fingers on her left hand broke under the strain, a stress fracture snaking across the top of her right foot. Her senses dulled, Kit barely registered the pain on top of the burning in the rest of her body, which itself was ignored when she saw what lay in front of her.

Towney could only be recognized by his clothes. The entirety of his body was covered in blood, darkening his suit so completely that it oozed red. Towney's face was gone, a horror crushed in by the brick still centered corner-first in it. In her time Kit had seen dead men, but never one killed so horribly.

“Kit,” a weak voice said.

At first she thought it was Towney; the voice came from the general region of the dead man's head. The natural result of the split-second assumption was a frightened squeak and a jump. Despite the incredible joy Kit would have felt to find Towney alive, human nature and biology hardwired
the switch to what-the-fuck
mode when confronted with the possibility that a
very
dead man was speaking to her.

Then she saw the hand twitch and realized it didn't belong to Towney, that Archer was trapped beneath him. Which should have been obvious, as Towney's hands were still held in front of him as if to ward off his oncoming death, now broken and flat against his chest.

Kit hurriedly hauled the body off of Archer, pulling another hard drag of the
Surge into her muscles. Even with the boost, it was hard. Harder than it had any right to be. There was no gentle reverence in moving Towney. The effort was enough that Kit only had the strength to pull it away by the legs, leaving a long streak of blood across the debris in its wake.

Archer gasped as the weight was moved from his chest. He, too, was soaked in crimson from head to toe, though he was in better shape than Kit expected. She stepped forward to help him up, then thought better of it. Though Towney had obviously absorbed most of the trauma, Archer still might be seriously injured. Even if the entire weight of the slab hadn't been on him, it was likely moving him was a bad idea.

Kit pulled out her phone and called for help, then slumped to the ground to lean against the rubble. Beside her, Archer groaned and coughed, trying to talk. His voice was distant and muffled, the words making sense individually, but only as isolated bits of data. Kit couldn't comprehend the whole.

A detached part of her recognized shock taking over. While most of her was withdrawn and numb, that nagging voice (which sounded a little like her mother) sardonically noted that she had never reacted this way before. Through dozens of operations on four continents, killing a handful of men along the way, Kit held up.

The difference, the voice noted, might be in context. She had killed men in defense of her own life, making her responsible for their deaths. Here, now, she faced the death of someone she was responsible for.

Sirens began to wail in the distance.

Kit sat impassively as the paramedics checked her over. She had begun leveling off by the time the ambulances arrived, not quite normal but at least on the beginning of the upswing in the right direction. Had she been capable of standing and laying on the stretcher, she would have gladly done so and accepted the ride to the hospital.

Unfortunately, every muscle in her body decided to lock up at once. It came in a flash of pain fading to mere discomfort in a few seconds. Even this would have been manageable for the paramedics had she been any other patient. A non-Next woman of her size would have been easy enough for the two men to pick up and place on the stretcher. Kit, thanks to the incredible density of her bones and muscles, weighed nearly twice the average for her height.

In the end they examined her where she sat and waited for help before trying to move her again.

She watched as police and firefighters appeared, answering their questions as best she could. Her responses were distracted at best, as most of her attention was on Archer. The firemen carefully stabilized the rubble around him before beginning the painstaking work of removing him from the shallow bowl he lay in.

A few minutes later a new ambulance arrived. This one was different; the truck was black with bright florescent green stripes, with a hugely extended back end. It was emblazoned with the OSA emblem. A team of people exited when the monstrous truck stopped. Two of them moved toward Towney's body and got into a loud discussion with the police about its disposition. The other three approached Kit.

One of them was Deakins.

The huge woman knelt beside Kit and wrapped thick arms around her. Without any effort at all, Deakins lifted, carrying Kit up the folding stairs at the back of the truck and into the rear compartment.

Someone put a needle in her arm, one she realized must have been specially designed for people with the sort of damage resistance her skin enjoyed. Everything went fuzzy for a while after that. She remembered someone screaming and thought it might be her, but there was no pain.

When Kit came back around, she was lying flat. Someone had unbent her limbs. A pleasantly numb sensation drifted through her, though the effect was solely physical. She tried to push herself into a sitting position with her elbow, which was when she discovered her total inability to move.

The first stirrings of panic began to well up in her when one of the rear doors opened to reveal Deakins. The other woman climbed in, closing the door behind her.

“
Damn,” Deakins said. “Those eggheads really know their business.”

Kit's brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”

Deakins reached into a cabinet and produced a small vial. “This is some stuff straight out of our lab. No idea what it is, exactly, but Nunez called me while we were on the way and said we should use it on you. Gave me a dosage and said it would knock you stupid for fifteen minutes and keep you from moving for another hour after that. That's some precision shit, you ask me.”

“
How is Archer? Is he...” Kit trailed off.

Deakins smiled tightly. “He's okay, actually. Couple bruised ribs, but he came out basically without a scratch. Towney took the brunt of it, and that big hunk of metal you pulled off him got hung up on all the debris, so not all of the weight was on him. He was lucky.”

Kit felt her eyes well up. “Towney wasn't.”

Deakins sighed, putting a hand over Kit's. “No, he wasn't. And that's exactly how you need to look at this. Archer is going to blame himself. He always does when we lose someone. He's been at this for a while, though. He'll keep on.”

Deakins leaned forward to catch Kit's eyes. “This was not your fault. I'm not just telling you that to make you feel better, either. I got the full rundown from Archer. If this fucker saw you coming or sensed you in some way, you had no way to know it. You were trying to help the kid he took, plain and simple.”

“
But Towney died, Deakins,” Kit said.

The huge woman nodded. “He did. And that's sad. He was a good man. Towney also knew what he was getting into. You have to remember, girl, we aren't cops. We might do the occasional bit of investigating when things get really weird, but that isn't our job. We hunt down and catch some of the most dangerous people to ever live. That's why our department has so many laws in place specifically so we can protect the world from the people we capture. That's why we have the leeway we do. Because on a daily basis, we face situations people literally couldn't have imagined when you were a kid.”

Deakins sat back, crossing her arms. “Towney knew that. Oh, I know he was scared. Hell, I can lift a motorcycle over my head, and I nearly piss myself when I'm in danger. He
chose
this job. He's seen agents die. He did it because he didn't like people abusing their powers and hurting other people. Me, I'm sad he died. But I'll be damned if I let that stop me from finding the asshole who killed him.”

Kit stayed silent for a long time. Eventually the truck took her for medical treatment, though not at any public hospital. There was a fully-staffed clinic and
surgery back at the facility, where she could be taken care of by doctors with the knowledge, experience, and equipment to do the job right. Sometime during the ride, the tide of Kit's sadness receded enough to uncover her anger, which burst to life with a quiet but intense power. She would find the killer and stop him.

No matter what.

Ray Elliot was bored, bordering on pissed.

Years had passed. His sense of time made him aware of every passing second, and the frustration was compounded by the knowledge that he shouldn't be lucid and awake inside his own unconscious body. It had something to do with his unique ability, he decided, cold comfort though the idea was.

Though he had approached the memory of Rick's death with trepidation, the first viewing hadn't been as wrenching as he had expected. Certainly the sense of dread had been there, but there was no accompanying release of his power. The pressure continued to build, though Ray began to worry less as the energy increased without ever reaching a critical point.

In the intervening years, Ray watched that memory many times. Not from any grim fascination with Rick's death or a maudlin need to punish himself for what came after. Ray simply decided that should he ever truly wake, he would need to be ready for people to talk with him about it. To hear news reports. In short, he needed callouses when it came to the tragedy in Fairmont.

The rest of his time was spent trying to figure out his own powers. Though he had been conscious for a relatively short period of time after the disaster, it had been long enough to learn of the first wave of Next developing abilities of their own. The idea of one man wielding so much power disturbed him, in no small part because that man
was
him, but it was also fascinating.

Ray was extremely limited in what he could accomplish in his unconscious state, but he had nothing else to do with his time. Days became weeks and then months as he dove into the strange ocean of power inside him.

The first and most obvious aspect to tackle was the growing reservoir of the energy itself. The pressure made him aware of its existence. Over time, and with enough focus, Ray began to understand it. The energy streaming into him built slowly. From the tests he had undergone just after Fairmont, he knew this was from the absorption of molecular bonds. The mechanics of it he understood.

He wanted control.

Over time, understanding evolved into that control. The growing battery of power ceased to be an object of fear. The more he experimented, the more certain he became that the first disastrous release of energy was a result of his powers erupting for the first time.

New and interesting things happened as time passed. Because Ray had nothing to distract him, he noted every change as it occurred. It was as if his reservoir had channels in it at certain levels, which was how he visualized it. When the level reached one channel, his body—which he was growing more aware of over time—grew stronger. As the level increased more and the next pipe leading away was filled, his awareness began to expand. For the first time in a decade, Ray heard the voices around him, people speaking in the real world.

When he hit the next level, things got
very
interesting.

At first he thought his eyes had opened. The room around him blinked into view. It was familiar; he remembered lying down in one like it as the doctors put him into his long sleep. After a moment of shock he realized he, or rather his body, was not actually awake. The world was painted in a monochrome of greens, wavering in patterns like television static. The people in the room existed as blank voids, empty silhouettes among the emerald waves of energy.

It was a short step to two realizations. The first was that this sight was not tied to his eyes. Easy enough to figure out, since his lids were shut. The position he first saw the room from was due to the way his brain was wired to process visual input. With practice, Ray learned to move away from himself. The forays were brief at first, staying close to his body, but over time he flitted further and for longer periods. This was how he learned the layout of the facility, down to the last broom closet.

The second realization was the nature of
what
he was seeing. The people in his isolated room were human, a fact he learned by process of elimination. The cells he looked into (and sometimes flew completely through) held people not defined by the lack of any shade of green, but rather from an abundance of it that made them glow.

He was seeing the energy that made the Next what they were.

It just so happened that as Kit Singh climbed a ladder against the side of an abandoned building, Ray was floating in a green sky over the city of Louisville, several miles away. When the killer inside lashed out with his wave of telekinetic fury, Ray not only saw the attack as a nuclear blast of brightness in the distance, he felt it as a physical force.

Incorporeal, curious, and with a sense of purpose, Ray's consciousness streaked across the evening sky.