We proceeded cautiously through the impromptu passage that Dawn was creating. There were a few Twisted whose heads or limbs poked into view, surfaced by the rumbling Earth, but no more than I could handle.
I looked over. Dawn had her eyes shut in deep concentration. Her lips were moving, though I couldn’t make out the words, and her bared arms were tense, corded muscle defining her skin. She thrust her arms out and drew them together. Behind us, the “gates” were slowly drawing closed. I could see the faint dots of Stephen and the rest of the rear guard in the mirror.
Given the sheer mass involved, I was expecting a bone-rumbling boom, but all we were treated to was the noiseless churning of the earth back into a unified wall. Dawn let out a sharp breath and opened her eyes.
“Holy shit,” I opined. Ellen and Ethan nodded in agreement from the back.
Dawn gave a faint smile. “It comes with a cost. But I should be fine to get us back in after a few hours.“ She frowned as she saw me casually clench a fist while eyeing the rear-view mirror, and a speedy Variant approaching us from behind dropped. “Not too shabby yourself, Renault.”
I snorted. “Taking care of one here or there is no problem, but I can’t do something like that,” I replied, jerking my chin behind me. “Picture a game of dodgeball, except I throw balls while they all run in and try to eat me alive.”
“Well when you put it that way,” Dawn let out a wry chuckle.
We fell into a steady rhythm for the drive. Ethan and Ellen would occasionally joke in the backseat, but for the most part the trip passed in silence. There were no Twisted around, but we didn’t expect anything; their typical behaviour patterns would have driven them to throng around the nearest human. And there was no chance of human presence in this direction; we knew because we’d painstakingly confirmed it with drone expeditions over the last three months.
Vancouver HZ was all alone. The nearest similar bastion of humanity was a six hour drive away in what was previously Portland, Oregon.
Ethan corrected my course a few times as we drove. He carried a map in one hand, a compass in the other, and wore a frown on his face. Without working cell towers—or even an electricity grid—we were past the age of phone-based navigation. I had no idea how the Outage may have affected the satellites, but when we tried switching on a dedicated Garmin GPS, we got nothing.
The traditional way of reading maps was also out, as roads were a thing of the past. They were a mix of ruptured asphalt from explosions and corruption where Twisted blood had been spilled, and overgrown stretches where nature was swiftly reclaiming what was hers after months of neglect. My driving was a mix of on-road, off-road, and so off-road I was swerving to avoid the dead stumps of post-Reckoning trees.
No, despite our Engineering Unit recreating wonders in recent months, we had to go old-school when it came to navigation. A compass for direction, the speedometer for distance, and some old-fashioned math to tell us where we were.
“Stop here,” Ethan said suddenly, and I pulled up next to a dilapidated brown grain silo. It sat adjacent to one of those stereotypical red barns, and beyond it . . .
Fields. Fields as far as the eye could see. Fields that weren’t blackened with corruption, that could possibly allow Vancouver HZ to become sustainable.
I heard a hollow beep as Ethan fiddled with a stopwatch. “Twenty-two minutes,” he said to Dawn.
She nodded. “Distance?” she asked me.
I checked the odometer. “Approximately sixteen kilometres.”
She heaved a sigh. “It’ll be tough, but it’s doable. I’d say it’s the work of about two months, every day, for me to be able to extend the walls to enclose this area. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Ellen, can you confirm the soil’s fertility?”
Ellen nodded in response, and we followed her to the closest field.
While it was very unlikely we’d see Twisted, I remained vigilant. Of course, there were probably more than a few who had abandoned a life of fruitlessly railing against Vancouver HZ’s walls to head our way, but Ethan had a plan for that. To my eternal regret, he happened to clue me into his plan of “just drive around them,” and “don’t tell Ellen,” but I was sure there was more to it than that. I trusted Ethan.
“I can trust you, right?” I said to Ethan, who treated me to an odd look in response.
Ellen had dropped to her knees by the soil. Dawn’s intel had been correct; there were blades of grass cropping up all over the place, a stark contrast to the semi-barren state of the land we saw on the drive. Ellen rustled around in her pockets and pulled out one of those plastic daily pill containers which was filled with seeds.
And then we got to see Vancouver’s most valuable Outer at work.
Ellen’s ability was life. Or at least, that’s what I called it. Whenever she tried to explain it, she’d start mumbling something about mitosis and telomeres and a bunch of mumbo jumbo that I forgot precisely twelve minutes after turning in my final biology exam in high school. Essentially, though, she could grow things. Anything. I had seen her grow trees, lost limbs, and literally bring other Outers back from the brink of death.
She was absolutely critical to our current plantations, which she visited once a week to accelerate the crop growth. It was the only reason such a small volume of land could actually feed a few thousand people, of course supplemented by our dwindling supply of non-perishables. She was also particularly valuable in the lab. Beyond being a scientist by training, her power apparently allowed her to accelerate the experiments she ran on Twisted cells.
I watched with fascination as a small frill of green sprung out of the soil and grew to dangle gently in the breeze. It didn’t look like much—there were no flashing lights nor a chorus of angels—but when Ellen grabbed and pulled, a gorgeous-looking carrot like something you’d see in a pre-Reckoning commercial came out of the ground.
“And you’re sure this won’t give me cancer?” I asked skeptically, taking the carrot and sniffing it. It smelled like . . . a carrot. And dirt.
She loftily ignored me and passed me a small vial of soil. “There are six more sample seeds to try, to make sure this field can handle whatever we throw at it. I also want to repeat the tests and collect soil samples at a few different locations in the field.”
“That makes sense,” Ethan nodded, arms folded over his chest.
Ellen moved to drop another seed next to the unearthed carrot when her fingers paused.
“Is there a problem?” I asked with concern.
“Umm,” Ellen said, looking up and shifting her gaze to each of us in turn. “This might go faster if the three of you weren’t just looking at me.”
Dawn snorted. “Let’s give her some space.” She headed off to the side and gestured for me to follow. Ethan headed back to the car, likely to get started on the report. Watching him leave, I clenched my fist.
He let out an undignified yelp and scrambled to catch the carrot and soil sample which had abruptly appeared at his eye-level. “Goddamn arrogant Outers,” he muttered loud enough to be heard by everyone.
“Careful, you’re outnumbered!” I shot back.
“I hope this works,” Dawn sighed. “This will be such a help. If we can secure a stable and plentiful food supply and launch a multi-child policy, then maybe we can finally tell people the truth behind spontaneous Twisting.”
The truth, huh? I kept quiet as I considered the implications.
In the first few months following The Reckoning—that initial explosion of Twisted across the globe—scientists had quickly managed to isolate the problem. Some marker had entered into the genetic code of the Twisted, something that made them poised to transform at any moment. It was attributed to The Blip, and it made people panic. Somehow, someone had messed with their DNA, and no one knew why.
But that wasn’t all.
The scariest thing was that scientists found that nearly everyone on Earth exhibited these markers. They hadn’t cracked the code yet on how they were triggered, but their findings were clear
Everyone but the Outers was a Twisted in the making.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
It wasn’t if, but when.
Some, like Jared, firmly believed in killing anyone who wasn’t an Outer. I—and thankfully a majority of Vancouver’s Outers—belonged in Dawn’s camp, and hoped to either solve this problem or control it in less genocidal ways. After all, in a population of thousands, spontaneous Twistings still only happened once every few days. It was manageable. It rarely got out of hand.
“There will be fallout,” I replied.
“I know,” Dawn said, closing her eyes. “That’s the missing piece that I just can’t figure out. Vancouver HZ is a group, but not a community. And that sense of community is the only way the population would be able to overcome this bombshell.”
I nodded. They were the same thoughts I had on occasion. “And you’re hoping food is the place we can start.”
“Food is the universal binder,” Dawn replied simply. “It’s brought people together—to share stories around the campfire, talk around the dinner table—since the dawn of time.”
I shrugged. “I don’t have any better ideas. I hope it works too; I’m absolutely sick of Nature Valley.”
“I know! I’ve eaten so much of the stuff I swear I’m half-sawdust by now.”
We lapsed into a comfortable silence, and instead of looking over Ellen’s shoulder, we watched her from afar. I don’t know that it would have been all that different for me, but it clearly made a difference for Ellen as she was able to run her tests across several different plots of the field before the sun had reached its zenith.
She ran to us, her eyes blazing with hope and excitement, and we piled into the car. It was time to take the results back to the lab.
Most of the ride back passed in boredom. We did see a group of Twisted shuffling towards us as expected, but the car was far faster, so I deployed Ethan’s killer plan and drove a wide circle around them. Ethan eyed them through the rear window as we passed them by. We were perhaps five minutes away from the walls when the plan fell apart.
“Wait, something’s not right,” Ellen muttered. “Are those . . . more Twisted?”
I turned to look and indeed, more Twisted were approaching from ahead of us, both on the right and the left. The group we drove by had turned and began to spread out, almost as if attempting to encircle us.
“Hold on, slow down a bit,” Dawn said squinting. “I think there’s an actual . . . wall of Twisted ahead of us.”
I bit my lip as I eased off the gas. “Should I try to charge through them?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Dawn snapped. “A collision would fold our car in half, and the Twisted would get right back up again.”
“I know, but I’m out of ideas here!”
“Let’s exit the car for now; I’ll see what’s going on.”
“Can’t you just do it while we drive?”
“I could manipulate the earth, sure, but that tells us nothing. This behaviour is . . . erratic. We need to investigate what’s behind this; there could be serious implications for Vancouver HZ.”
“You’re the boss,” I said simply and pulled us to a stop.
Dawn quickly hopped out of the vehicle and we followed suit. She hopped up on top of the car and squinted at the approaching Twisted, spinning in a slow circle.
“How is this possible?” Ethan asked. “The Twisted should all have been collected at the gate. They’re supposed to throng around the nearest humans, after all. And we would have spotted another community like Vancouver HZ in our scouting missions.”
“There’s a lot we still don’t know about them,” Ellen replied. “What if we were wrong about their basic behavioural patterns?”
“Well, they’re definitely encircling us,” Dawn muttered grimly, hopping down from the car. “There are dozens both ahead and behind us. They look like they’re purposefully flanking us. Let’s get back in and drive back to Vancouver. I’ll fold the land as we go to keep them away from us.
She was just opening the passenger seat when a slender onyx hand erupted out of the ground and clawed her. “What the hell?” Dawn screamed, clapping a hand to her side. Her face contorted in fury and she thrust a hand down, fingers spread. In response to her power, the Twisted’s hand disappeared so quickly that I could have imagined it, if it weren’t for the blood leaking through Dawn’s fingers.
Ellen looked like she was at a loss for words, a silence echoed by the rest of us. It was one thing for the Twisted to be encircling us, but another entirely for one to be buried underground, lying in ambush. What in the world was going on?
“Um . . . ah, maybe—” Ellen began.
“Hold on.” Dawn seemed to realize something. She groaned, and her visage became several shades paler as blood sluiced over her hand. I could see her biceps knotting as she shaped the Earth. The ground underneath my feet trembled in a minor earthquake, but there were no other visible changes.
“There are dozens of them,” she whispered. “Like land mines, waiting to erupt from beneath the car and kill us all in one go. If we hadn’t stopped when we did . . . ”
Oh God. “Where are—”
“Everywhere,” she interrupted. “I can’t seem to bury them deeper. I can sense them with my power, but that’s it. The nearest one is twenty feet in that direction, lying in wait.” She pointed.
Eyes fixated on the blood leaking and pooling on the ground, Ellen hurried over to Dawn and put her own palm over the wound. Dawn grunted and bared her teeth. I’d never been healed by Ellen, but the process looked painful.
“There,” she said, removing her hand. The bleeding had stopped completely; in fact, new pale skin showed in the tears of Dawn’s shirt. “I sealed the wounds and regenerated some of the blood you lost. I can make up for the energy consumed in the healing process, but not the taint of the Twisted rampaging through your system. As an Outer, you won’t turn Twisted, but your powers will be weakened for a time; that’s why you couldn’t use them earlier.”
“How long?” Dawn asked from between gritted teeth, eyeing the Twisted staggering towards us.
“The taint can only be cleared with time, your body—or I guess more accurately your *power—*needs to fight it off, like a virus. But it’ll be faster. It was a big wound, but minimal exposure to Twisted fluids . . .” Ellen chewed on her bottom lip. “Maybe half an hour?”
“That’s a half-hour we don’t have,” Dawn grunted. She made a clawing motion at a patch of ground, which responded with a half-hearted churn. It was definitely a far cry from the feats of terrashaping I had witnessed before. “Chris, can you start picking them off?”
“Almost,” I said nervously, spinning around to assess the encirclement. “They’re just out of range. If I start now, I’d be wasting what has just become very limited ammunition. Soon—”
“No, no!” Ellen screamed. Her knees hit the ground behind me.
I spun around at the sound of her voice. Was it another Twisted waiting in ambush? But reality played cruel jokes on humans, especially these days after the Outage. Dawn was the only one who had suffered a blow from the Twisted, and she was already healing well. No Twisted blood had aerosolized. We had done everything right.
And yet the one non-Outer of our party, the only person who could possibly Twist, was spontaneously Twisting.
Ethan had dropped to the ground and was writhing in pain. Telltale fissures had already started to break open on the exposed skin of his face and arms, pulsing with a wan orange glow. We had all seen spontaneous Twisting before; there was no mistaking the symptoms.
“Chris,” Dawn snapped, and I looked up at her prompting. A new flock of Twisted had crested the hilltop and came towards us, painting the sky black and orange.
It wasn’t several dozen encircling us. It was several hundred.
I felt a rush of hopelessness flow through me. It was all over. Dawn was weakened. Ethan was Twisting. Ellen had no combat ability. And somehow, against all reason, hundreds of Twisted had appeared where they shouldn’t have and surrounded us. Several dozen may have been close, but I still felt like I could do it. But ten times that number? Impossible. We were dead.
“Nine o’clock, 100 feet,” came a horse whisper from behind me.
What?
“90 feet now,” that same horse voice said crossly.
I looked over to my left, and indeed a Twisted faster than its buddies was heading towards us. It had just cleared my 100-foot range. I clenched a fist and it dropped, a fresh nail embedded into its core.
“Six o’clock, 90 feet; ten o’clock, 100 feet—actually, it’s easier if I just show you.”
With that, Ethan’s hand clapped onto my leg, and suddenly I could see.
There were around twenty Twisted that were approaching my range, some moving in slow, shuffling steps while others managed something close to a human sprint. Each of them was outlined in my mind’s eye in a luminous glow. Even their cores were faintly highlighted. It was as if I was suddenly looking down at our entrapment with a bird’s eye view and some AI was painting the enemies.
No. Not some AI. Ethan. He was still on the ground, his teeth bared in a rictus snarl of pain. But the cracks in his skin were already closing up, and the whites of his eyes were clear of any onyx encroachment. Most importantly, I could feel it. The power flowing from his hand to my leg, granting me vision. Even as I stared at him, I could see all of the Twisted around me.
I looked at him in amazement. “You didn’t Twist . . . you awakened . . . to become an Outer.”
“Thank God,” Ellen croaked, tears of joy leaking from her eyes. She rushed down and flung her arms around her brother. “This changes everything.” Dawn nodded in agreement.
I assessed the mental picture that Ethan was somehow sending me. Yes, this did change everything. Not just for humanity, but for us right now.
You have to aim when throwing a ball at a target. There would be a noticeable and understandable delay even before you wind up to throw. Aim. Wind up. Fire. Maybe some were faster while some were slower, but these inviolable principles were still behind every baseball pitch, every frisbee toss, every basketball shot. They were also the fundamental underpinnings to my teleportation ability.
But what if you could see everything, know everything? As if all of your targets were directly in front of you? What if your eyes didn’t have to transmit distance to your brain; the information was already there?
What if you didn’t have to aim, and could use that time winding up your next throw?
I began rapid-fire clenching my fists, and the Twisted dropped like felled wheat. I didn’t forget about the ones buried in ambush—in fact, Ethan’s ability highlighted them as well. Each of them swiftly got a nail to the core. What was a respectable pistol became a fully-automatic machine gun. It was as if the restrictions behind my ability had somehow been lifted, and I became a true god of death to the Twisted.
Pop. Pop. Pop. My firing speed could be measured in nails per second. The Twisted were becoming more numerous as the thickest groupings began to arrive within my range, but none cleared 90 feet, save for when toppling over in death.
I became like an assembly line. My left hand grasped a handful of nails from my pouch. I would pick one out with my right hand and teleport it. A Twisted would fall. Rinse and repeat. At some point I had run out of nails, and Ellen had loaded pebbles into my hand. Relative to nails, pebbles were soft, but it didn’t matter.
A Twisted’s core was softer.
I felt a sense of exhaustion creep up on me, but it was buried under a bubbling excitement. Yes, I could kill a Twisted here or there, or maybe a few. But not like Frank, or Dawn, or Jared. This . . . I was unleashing wide-scale destruction, equal to any of the executives. Was this what it felt like to be strong?
Swathes of onyx corpses painted the ground around us. My rate of fire was slowing down, too; the Twisted mob seemed to finally be thinning. I could feel my thoughts growing languid as time seemed to stretch and slow.
But everything was okay. It was all going to be fine. We were going to live!
Before I knew it, the last Twisted had died. Ethan’s abilities showed a landscape bereft of anymore of the monsters. I felt his hand slip off my leg. A smile stretched across my face as I toppled to the ground and passed out from sheer exhaustion.