Dreamer

Sunday, March 18th, 2029

SARAH

I can move again, Andy’s Telekinesis has certainly been a godsend right now. Iris stands to go help Gavin out, he’s been hit pretty bad. I’m running in the opposite direction, back to the car. I duck inside and grab the pistol from the floor of the crumpled up glorified tin can. Reaching into my pocket, I grab the clip of ammunition and lock it into the gun.

I never thought I’d be using one of these, but it is as they say, “When in Rome…shoot a wolf-man.”

I turn around and raise the gun, as soon as I get the scrambling Micah in my sights everything seems to slow down. All of the noise save for my own breath is tuned out. Any pain I feel is ebbed away and the only thing that matters is this bullet and where I put it. I line up the shot and cock it back. In one more swift motion I’m pulling the trigger and the bullet flies a little to the right, but shoots right through Micah’s chest.

The recoil of the gun sends waves of pain shooting up my arm, and I grit my teeth as I see Micah flip his head back and shout in pain. Maybe…is this a new ability of mine? To hone in on these key moments?

I’m brought back into reality as Micah’s shouts send shockwaves across the street and send us all off of our feet. Andy’s focus leaves his Telekinesis and Micah drops to the ground, a weird sort of energy pulsating around him. Gavin was right, this…thing now threatens the very existence of our world by just being here, and we need to stop him.

Micah stands back up, he’s about an entire person’s height taller than I am. He looks straight to me with a pure blackness in his eyes.

And he’s charging right for me.

GAVIN

Iris helps me to my feet, everything in my body is aching. I see Sarah had ducked down nearby the passenger side of the car. “Are you doing okay?”

“I’m still kicking,” I joke, and play off a smile.

“Just what is that stuff?” She asks, pointing to my chest.

I look down and see the colorful liquid draining down the front of my body in ironically beautiful streaks.

If I had to guess, I’d say Micah, whether it be knowingly or unknowingly, overdosed me with Radical-9. If he did know, which it seemed to be he did, then he must’ve thought that I’d just keel over from having too much in my system. The fact that I’m here seems to suggest that he miscalculated, and I have a chance to finish this now.

You’re going to die.

The thought crosses my mind once and only once, but I don’t need it to repeat itself because I know now the gravity of my situation. Micah didn’t have the confidence that he’d win here, there was some doubt in his mind. So he meant to guarantee that even if he goes down today, he’ll be taking me with him.

Once this goes through my system I won’t have long to live, Micah’s body is already beginning to feel the effects of the overexposure, and Jack before him had his own body decay because of his selfish desire for power. And now I’m next. I look at Iris, she’s looking at me with a concerned look.

“What, what is it?” She asks.

“Promise me…that you’ll have a good future.”

“What?”

“Promise me-”

A gunshot rings out, A look of pain passes by on Micah’s face, and then a terrible shriek sounds out, knocking us all down from the sheer ferocity of it. Andy loses his grip on Micah and he too falls to the ground. His body seems to be exerting some sort of light and energy. He looks towards Sarah who is holding the smoking gun. He begins chasing after her, she is frozen in her place.

“Gavin, what are we going to-” Iris begins.

“I love you,” I say, interrupting her, and then I’m off, chasing after Micah.

I don’t have to look back to know she looks absolutely shocked and putting two and two together of what I’m doing. I raise my arms up, drawing the electricity from the streetlight, but then I feel a source of power dwelling within me. I feel a sense to grab more than the streetlight’s power, an urge to just yank up all of the electricity in the damn city.

And so I do.

I use Micah’s mistake to my advantage and will every single watt within the extent of my reach and pull it towards me. The streetlights around us shatter and the cars around, even the ZX Hybrid begin smoking. Micah slows his run to a halt as he turns around and sees me coming at him like a bullet made out of electricity.

It coats my arms and wraps around like a glove. I’m throwing myself at Micah, all of my energy directed into one word in my mind. Jump. The second I make contact we’re both gone, floating in the dimension between dimensions. All of the bubbles of the other timelines float past us as we float in nothingness and around nothingness. I go to punch him with my right hand, still covered in electricity and plasma, but he catches my hand. I try again with my left, but he catches it too. I can see by the look on his terrible face that it isn’t the most most joyous feeling grabbing onto pure energy.

He pushes onto me, and I push back onto him, it is like a perfect rhythm that cannot be disturbed. And yet it was. I didn’t seem to notice it, I was so intent on what was in front of me to not even notice what was going on just out of my field of view. He’d let go of my left hand so he could send his feral claw right through my abdomen. I don’t feel it really, the pain. I just feel his clawed hand there, as if it were meant to be in this exact spot since the day it was formed. We sit in a sort of silence, him staring at me and I at him until he breaks it finally.

“It seems…that you lose.”

“I count winning as seeing you burn alive, and I’m going to do just that,” I say.

“Hero. My hero.”

I see Megan in my mind’s eye. All those years ago she told me that I was her hero. Back then I didn’t understand, I didn’t want to understand. I couldn’t believe that I could be worth anything to anybody. Now I know different. I’ve got friends out there worth fighting for, worth dying for. He gives me a dirty sort of look. The electricity around my arms begins to move, to travel to the base of my hand and combine into a whole lance of pure energy. I hold it in my hands as Micah’s eyes grow wide. He tries and tries to separate his hand from my abdomen, but he is stuck.

I lift the lance upward and then bring it down. It pierces his body. I can feel the blood swelling up in my mouth from his strike. I let him feel the pain that he’s caused me, us, everyone.

The lance goes into his shoulder and all of the way down. I pull it out and this time stab it through his stomach. He begins choking up blood and the same multicolored liquid that is stained on the front of my body. I take it out and stab him once, twice, three times in the chest, and on the third time his claw is dislodged from me. My blood pours freely into the void.

Micah’s body is glowing and bleeding and I watch him with cold content when he begins falling to pieces. He explodes into a tiny ball of light, some bubbles of light flying off of the side of it that fall into the void.

“Congratulations, enjoy your life of solitude, asshole.”

I turn my head and see the bubble I’d entered from, I coast my way there and fall on through. It’s all over.

I feel a weird sensation as if I’m floating, and then I look down to the liquid on my chest, the liquid Radical-9. It begins glowing brightly and it floats towards the abyss.

I’m on the road, I must’ve rolled in. Iris, Sarah and Andy hold out the front lines against the automatons. I cannot find my voice, I catch Iris’ gaze when she looks over, I look into her face and close my eyes.

Her screams are what open them again, and she runs over to me, grabbing my hand, kneeling beside me.

“No, this isn’t happening,” she says.

I can’t speak, I can only lift my hand and bring it to her face. She holds it there as I look down and smile. I feel my arm go limp and numb, and I see the lights at my chest intensifying and then all goes dark, and then I feel like I’m floating once more.