Reaper's Legacy

^{CHAPTER SIX} FLEETER

As the Jeep slewed across the road and mounted the pavement, Jack grabbed Sparky’s and Jenna’s arms and pulled them backwards, just waiting for the next burst of gunfire.

Brakes squealed as the other two vehicles skidded to a halt. Someone shouted. Someone else screamed.

Jenna tripped and went down. Jack could have let her go, but he chose to hold on and fall with her. Sparky stood beside them, Jenna’s knife suddenly in his hand.

The Jeep struck a building at the corner of the crossroads, and Jack cringed as he saw someone thrown through the already-shattered windscreen, blood spattering behind them. They slid across the crumpled bonnet and came to rest against the wall, motionless.

“Too late to run,” Jack said. Something passed across his field of vision and he blinked rapidly.

The crashed Jeep’s rear doors opened and three Choppers jumped out, guns at the ready, eyes wide and alert.

Jack searched inside. He delved into that sparkling constellation of potential Nomad had seeded within him, looking desperately for something that might help them. He grasped one idea he had used already and made the weapons hot, but the Choppers wore heavy gloves. He threw an image at one of them that they were breathing insects. Perhaps it was the Choppers’ fear, or his own panic, but it was ineffective.

As Jack stood and helped Jenna to her feet, the three Choppers rushed forward and aimed their guns.

“Don’t move!” one of them said, his voice incredibly high. There was blood splashed on his face.

“Just shoot them!” a second soldier said. Her head flipped back and her throat opened from ear to ear, her only scream a bubbling cry.

“Stop it!” the first soldier said. His gun was shaking as he aimed at Sparky, his comrade bleeding out on the ground beside him.

Something moved again. A blur, a smudge on reality. Jack blinked.

The soldier’s gun vanished from his hands and then appeared again, barrel pressed against his forehead, held by a tall, stocky woman in a short dress.

“Where the hell did she come from?” Jenna asked.

“Out of thin air,” Sparky said. “Let’s hope she’s on our side, eh?”

“Drop it!” the woman said, but the third soldier spun, bringing his own weapon to bear on the newly arrived woman.

She grinned, flitted out of view again, and the third soldier’s head snapped back before the gunshot even sounded.

“Shit,” Jenna said, turning away.

The other two Jeeps’ doors sprung open and Choppers emerged, a dozen of them fanning out around their vehicles and quickly closing on the scene of slaughter.

“Shift!” Sparky said needlessly, and he grabbed Jenna’s hand as the three of them darted for cover.

But Jack was watching, trying to perceive what was happening, and at the same time a particular star began to shine in his mind’s eye. There she is, he thought, flooded with certainty that he would be able to follow the woman in the dress.

The last survivor from the crashed Jeep was pulling his sidearm, eyes on Jack, hatred on his face.

The woman had not reappeared, but from behind the vehicle came a startled cry, and then several guns started firing at once.

Sparky and Jenna reached a shop doorway and slid across the pavement until they were protected from the field of fire.

Jack breathed deeply. When Sparky turned to look at him, he smiled.

“J—!” Sparky shouted, and Jack let the power flood through him, scorching his veins, setting every nerve on fire with the thrilling potential of something he had never done before.

The world ground to a halt.

Jack caught his breath as every sense retreated to nothing. Sounds faded until all he heard was his own beating heart, and blood pulsing through his ears. The air was motionless. Smoke hung like Christmas decorations above the crashed Jeep’s front end. Blood dripped from the dead soldier on its bonnet, each drop barely moving, exclamations on the air.

Sparky reached for Jack, mouth hanging open and bearing his unuttered name. Jenna was suspended halfway through a fall to the ground, hair streaming behind her, hand held out to arrest the impact, her eyes on Sparky.

Jack looked around at the Choppers, all similarly frozen—

But not quite. “Not quite still,” Jack said. His voice did not echo, as if he’d spoken in an insulated chamber rather than in this bloodied London street. The Chopper pulling a gun on him was shifting slightly, his shoulder raising, hand tugging the pistol from its holster, movements as imperceptible as a minute hand on a clock. And Sparky’s mouth opened wider, wider, as he shouted his friend’s name in terror.

“Oh!” a surprised voice said. “Well. I thought I was the only one.”

The woman in the dress appeared from behind the crashed Jeep and strolled casually across to the standing soldier. She stepped over one of the bodies without looking down, though Jack had seen her shoot the terrified man in the face.

“Who…?” Jack said.

“Name’s Fleeter,” she said. She watched Jack curiously as she moved the soldier’s hand aside and pulled the pistol from his belt. Then she smiled, and it made her look manic. “I wasn’t told you could do this.” She stepped back and aimed the gun at the man’s head.

“Wait!” Jack said, his word cut off by the gunshot.

“Why?” the woman asked, all innocence. As she walked towards Jack, he saw the most terrible thing.

The bullet struck the Chopper’s face in slow motion. It impacted his skin, entered just below his left eye socket, and sent a ripple of imminent destruction through the man’s face.

Jack turned away, not wishing to see any more.

“So,” the woman said, circling Jack so that she could see his face. “You want to help me with the rest of them?”

“No!” Jack said. “Who are you? What are you?”

“Reaper sent me to keep an eye on you. Make sure you didn’t get into trouble.”

She had already turned and was walking towards the other soldiers, her wide hips swaying the short skirt. She wasn’t pretty, but she was striking. In Jack’s eyes right now she was also monstrous, and he was desperate to prevent her continuing the slaughter.

Whatever these Choppers might do, they were still people, each with families and individual stories to tell.

“Why would he worry about me?”

The woman who had called herself Fleeter shrugged. “I just do as he tells me.”

“Just following orders, eh? That’s what these Choppers do. Hey. Hey!” She was approaching more of the soldiers and raising the stolen pistol.

Fleeter turned and looked over her shoulder, eyebrows raised in surprise. “What?”

“Don’t,” Jack said.

She pulled the trigger. The sound was a crushing impact and then an extended, deafening roar, like a train bursting from a tunnel and then receding. He saw the bullet leave the gun and strike a woman in the eye.

“Don’t!” he shouted. He ran at Fleeter and she stepped aside, tripping him up. As Jack struck the ground his anger grew, and the pain from knees and elbows fed it. He delved deep and stood again, turning to the woman, sending a thought, spasming her thigh muscles so that she groaned and stumbled, dropping the gun and hitting the road.

“I said don’t,” Jack said. The gunshot’s roar was a grumbling echo, fading, fading. “Now you can help me get my friends away from here.”

“Can’t,” Fleeter said through gritted teeth.

“Why not?”

“I don’t move people. I just speed myself up.” She looked up at him, still trying to massage the cramps from her muscles. “Like you.”

“You’re nothing like me,” Jack said. As he went to Sparky and Jenna he could feel the flow of time all around, moving like random currents in thick soup. I’ll carry them, he thought. Away from danger, hide somewhere, and then—

Something slipped. Everything fluttered and blinked, and then noise and chaos burst around him—gunshots, shouting, someone screaming one name over and over again: “Peter! Peter! Peter!”

“—ack!” Sparky finished shouting, and his eyes went wide.

“What the bloody hell?” Jenna asked. “How did you get from there to—?”

Jack fell into the doorway with them, overcome with sensory input after that brief respite. Everything felt wrong—the air, the noise, the feel of concrete pavement against his hands. He looked around quickly for Fleeter, but saw only the crashed Jeep and the Choppers now advancing quickly from behind it.

“They’ll kill us,” Jack said, because it was inevitable. They’d seen their comrades ambushed and murdered, and here were the kids they’d likely been looking for all across London. Shoot now, ask questions later.

The Choppers fell one after another, legs kicked from beneath them. They hit the ground hard as if shoved from above by a massive weight. Bones broke.

With a clap of displaced air, Fleeter appeared before them. She looked angry.

“Well, come on then,” she said. “Or I will have to finish them off.” She limped along the street without looking back, and Jack grabbed his friends’ hands.

“Come on!” he said, ignoring their questioning looks. “No time to lose.” He and his friends followed the woman along the street.

Moments later the shooting began. Bullets ripped into parked cars and across storefronts, ricochets sparking from the road, and Fleeter led them between two buildings, protected from the shooting but nowhere near safe. She skidded to a halt and looked back, angry.

“You’ll get me killed!” she said to Jack, and her fear was obvious. Desperate to use her ability to flit away, she had also been tasked with protecting Jack. By my father, Jack thought. But now was not the time to dwell on what that might mean.

“If you’ll trust me, we’ll be safe,” Jack said.

They heard cautious footsteps and whispered orders, the crackling of radios, and in moments the Choppers would storm the alley. There would be no demands to raise hands, give in, kneel down. Only bullets.

“Safe here?” Fleeter said, gesturing around at the alley.

“There,” Jack said. He pointed at a door alcove, where two red-painted fire doors were locked shut.

“Yeah,” Sparky said. Jack could have hugged his friend for remembering, and Sparky’s confidence seemed to change something in Fleeter.

“You can do other stuff,” she said, surprised.

Sparky and Jenna were already in the alcove, squatting, nowhere near out of sight but ready for Jack to save them. He joined his friends there, already floating through his cosmos of fledgling abilities, reaching for one blazing star he already knew.

“They’re brothers and fathers, daughters and mothers,” he said softly. Fleeter seemed to vibrate, shimmering as though seen through a heavy heat-haze as she struggled with doubt—disappear into her own slowed-down time and continue with her cold-blooded slaughter; or trust Jack?

As Jack held his friends’ hands and breathed deeply, Fleeter joined them, pressing one warm hand to the back of his neck. It was sticky with blood, and when she whispered to him, her voice was heavy with the threat of more.

“This goes wrong, I’ll only save myself,” she said.

“Clear!” a voice shouted, and Jack and the others turned slowly to look along the alley.

Two Choppers stood just beyond the entrance, one crouched down and aiming a machine gun, the other peering around the wall. We’re in plain sight but a world away, Jack thought. The woman with the machine gun swung the weapon back and forth to cover the alley, its barrel drifting past the alcove where they squatted and back again. The barrel did not waver.

“Okay, quick and careful,” a voice said. Two more Choppers entered the alley and started moving along, guns always at the ready. Jack saw their wide, scared eyes. He could almost smell their fear.

Sparky and Jenna both squeezed his hands at the same time, and he squeezed back. He felt Fleeter’s blood-sticky hand resting on the back of his neck, and close to his ear she breathed a quick, sharp laugh.

We’re not here, he thought, the alcove is empty, no one hiding here, red doors, red doors…

The Choppers passed them, one stepping a foot away from Jenna’s right leg. Jack knew that though he could convince the soldiers that the alcove was empty, if they stepped on one of them, the game was over.

He tried not to think too much about what he was doing. He was aware that he was shaking—and that his friends were holding his hands tightly, unable to help but keen to show they were there—and he could feel the immensity of the power he was tapping into. In his mind’s eye he orbited the giant star of this ability, drawing dregs away for himself and all the while wondering what would happen if he plummeted inside.

“Wait!” a Chopper shouted, and Jack swayed where he knelt, his vision clearing, expecting to see a machine-gun barrel swinging his way and lining up on his face.

Something yowled along the alley and a shape scampered up a wall, leaping from sill to sill, back and forth across the alley as it gained height.

“Bloody cat!” a woman’s voice said. “Scared the crap out of me, almost shot—”

“Quiet!” someone hissed. “They might be nearby.”

The Choppers advanced, leaving two of their number at the alley’s entrance facing outward. Their fear was obvious, and Jack tried to put himself in their shoes—hunting strange people with powers they could not understand, and some of whom only wanted every Chopper dead. It was a war like no other. But Jack could not stretch to feeling sorry for them. Not after everything he’d heard about what they did.

And not now that they had his mother and sister.

He glanced up and back at Fleeter, and in her eyes he saw a glimpse of what he had been feeling. She looked down at him and raised her eyebrows. But he shook his head and relaxed down again, concentrating, knowing that soon they would be able to get away.

Murder could not be the answer. The more fighting and deaths, the harder it would be to set aside arms and rein in powers when the time came. The fighting had begun because people had changed, and it would only stop if everyone was able to change some more.

They waited there for ten more minutes, until the Choppers realised that they’d lost their quarry and ran back along the alley. The soldiers bickered and swore at each other, and a couple of them laughed. Jack knew they were venting, and perhaps also relieved that they’d lost their targets. Their comrades lying dead back at the crossroads were testament to what another contact might bring.

Fleeter moved away from Jack, and as he relaxed and breathed himself back to normal, she disappeared in a blur, air smashing in to fill the void where she had been standing.

“Who the hell is she?” Sparky asked.

“Fleeter. Reaper sent her to watch over us.”

“Your father?” Jenna said. “Why?”

Jack shrugged. “Don’t know. She might be watching us now, though. She can take herself out of phase with everyone else. Speed up, so that everything’s slowed down. She’ll be to the end of the street and back again while we can blink.”

“And now you can do it too,” Sparky said.

“Yeah.” Jack nodded, looked at his friends, and released their hands. They did not comment or back away, but he could still sense that strange distance between them. It made him incredibly sad.

“So what’s it like?” Sparky asked. Jack was so grateful to his friend for even asking, but before he could respond Fleeter was back. With a clap! she appeared before them, litter and dust swirling from the displaced air.

“They’re gathering their dead and leaving,” she said. She was a stern woman, her features seemingly sculpted rather than grown, and Jack could not help wondering who and what she had been. The short dress seemed incongruous on this woman; this killer.

“So now what?” Jenna asked.

Fleeter raised her eyebrows, looking at Jenna and Sparky properly for the first time. Then she stared at Jack again, and he could see confusion bubbling beneath her outward confidence.

“Now you take me to Reaper,” Jack said.

“What?” Fleeter said.

“Reaper. My father. You take us to him.” Jack stood, remaining close to his friends. “I’m sure he’ll want to see me. He sent you to watch over me, after all.”

Fleeter started glancing away, as if unable to hold Jack’s gaze. She’s scared of me, he thought. And though that idea did not sit comfortably with him—he had no desire to instil fear in anyone—he also knew that it might help.

“Thanks for saving us,” Jenna said. “They’d have probably killed us and taken Jack.”

“Probably,” Fleeter said. “He’s special. You’re not.”

“Everyone’s special,” Jenna said.

“I’m not,” Sparky said, trying to joke. But no one smiled.

“We’ve seen horrible things since we came into the city,” Jenna went on. “The stuff the Choppers do to Irregulars, and sometimes people like you. People who call themselves Superior. And we’ve seen what you do to the Choppers, too.”

“They deserve it!” Fleeter said.

“After what they did to my father, I shouldn’t argue,” Jenna said. She nodded at Fleeter’s questioning glance. “This reaches way beyond what’s left of London.”

“I don’t care about anything beyond,” Fleeter said. “That no longer exists.” She moved away from them all slightly, standing close to the alley entrance and leaning to look out along the street.

“Then you’re blinkered and stupid,” Jenna said. “You must know this can’t all go on forever.”

“The more they send, the more we kill,” Fleeter said.

“And what about the illness killing people even now?” Jenna asked.

“We’ll find a cure.”

“No,” Jenna said. “There won’t be a cure. Not from in here, at least. What were you? A solicitor? A reporter? Checkout girl?”

“What I was before doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does!” Jenna said. “You might be able to skip here and there without anyone seeing, and…and slit people’s throats before them even knowing. But you’re no doctor or scientist. No one will cure what’s killing people like you until London is exposed, and outside help comes in.”

“People like me?” Fleeter asked, and for a moment she seemed furious. But then she calmed as quickly as she had become enraged, and looked down at her feet.

“Are you sick?” Jenna asked softly.

“No. Not yet. But…”

“But?” Jack asked.

“There are those amongst the Superiors who believe it’s a blight introduced by Miller and his people. To kill us all. Finally turn London toxic for good.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Jack said. They all remained silent for a while, and in the distance they heard motors retreating into the city.

“No,” Jenna said. “No surprise at all. But it’s dooming something wonderful to an early end.”

“Reaper won’t let it happen,” Fleeter said.

“Reaper used to be my father,” Jack said. “He worked in an office, liked banana sandwiches, watched motor-racing on a Sunday afternoon. He went running lots, and my mother never really understood that. He said it was a better mid-life crisis than having an affair. He collected Star Wars figures. Didn’t like milk in his coffee. I saw him crying once when we were watching ET.”

Fleeter went to speak, but said nothing. She shook her head.

“Reaper can’t save you all,” Jack said. “But I’m beginning to think I can. Now take us to him.”

Fleeter turned her back on them. For a moment Jack thought she was going to wink out of existence again and leave them all behind, and he knew he would not follow. But then she walked slowly, cautiously out into the street.

Jack and his friends started to follow.