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. I don’t know what I’m even doing with this t thing...but nothing isn’t the right answer right now. Its heavy weight holding my hands steady. I can feel them shaking as I pull it up toward Micah. All at once I only see him and the gun in my hands. I pull back the hammer and as I pull the trigger I stop breathing. It flies to the right and catches in his 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. 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. 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 say, breathing heavy.

“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. “If I had to guess, I’d say Micah, whether he knew or not overloaded me with Radical-9. If 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 are going to die. There’s no miscalculation. 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.

“What do you mean finish this now?” Iris looks at me, concerned.

I lean closer to her, “I need you to listen to me, okay? I...misspoke. I don’t want to hide anything from you. This is going to be my end—but I can take him out.”

“What?! Don’t even start with this,” she says.

I rest my hand on hers, “He has to go, or we’re all doomed. Sadly, it’s as simple as that. I...I wish I had more time with you.”

She looks at me, then to Micah, “You...you have to? There’s no other way?”

“If...If I go here my body will level this side of the country. I...I can’t let that happen to you—any of you. You guys need the gun to stop Jack—you can’t waste all of the bullets on us two.”

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.

“Fuck, that’s one down,” I say, turning back to Iris. “Please, you have to stop Jack,” I’m holding her now. “I...I have to go.”

“I love you,” She says, watching me stand.

If I look back I’ll stop and pull her in my arms and Sarah will be a goner. I pull the electricity from the broken streetlights, 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. 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 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.”

“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.

Micah 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.

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.

SARAH

The automatons have approached our ground zero. Andy is picking several up at a time and throwing them backward onto their cybernetic brethren. Micah doesn’t look happy in the slightest when he bares his fangs at me. My life flashes before my eyes as he begins to pounce toward me. Gavin appears out of nowhere as a white aura envelops him. Things move like a slide show—one instant they’re running at each other, another Gavin tackles Micah head on, and then a final where they’re both gone.

“Gavin?!” I call out, and behind me I see Iris crying.

Andy taps my side. “Hey, go get her to safety, I’ll fend them off.” He pulls the car off of the ground and lobs it at the approaching wave. It catches a good number of them before exploding.

I nod and run over toward Iris. She looks up at me and wipes her face, “He’s...they’re both...he saved us.” In a terrible chill I understand what she means, and I look back toward Andy, launching an automaton that had gotten too close like a baseball. “It’s not fair…” Iris says.

“It really isn’t…” I say.

“I loved him, he…he didn’t deserve this.”

“Hey! We’re not going to be able to hold out here much longer, we’re going to need to move!” I hear Andy yell back.

I turn to face him just in time to see him be knocked back by an Automaton missing half of his body, as if it were ripped straight off. Andy falls back against the curb. “Andy!” I call out.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

A loud sound erupts through the crowd, pulling my attention. An armored police van complete with a turret on top barreling towards the automatons. The turret lets loose a flurry of bullets and shrapnel onto the crowd, I see the automatons get loaded up and fall to the ground. The turret stops shooting and the van swerves around, angling the back of the van towards us. The doors open up, and a familiar face waves us inside. Standing in the back of the van in a full black set of police gear is Jen.

“Come on! We need you guys in here and now!” She calls, waving her arms. I look to Iris and we both nod, climbing inside.

“Hey, Andy’s over there by that curb,” I say.

“See him. We’re going now.” She nods.

The van pulls out and through some more automatons before stopping by Andy. He groans and reaches for a deep cut on his leg. We both help him into the van. Jen shuts the door.

“Just how did you know to come?” I ask her.

“Driver can answer your questions,” she says. “I have to get back to the turret.” She smiles, “It’s good to see you though.” She climbs up through the hatch. We’re standing in the back of the van, the entire back save for the hatch upwards is barren except also for some duffel bags set to the side. They look to be full to the brim.

“I...called her,” Andy says, out of breath. “Back at the Calgary.”

That makes the driver of the van...

“Jake,” Andy says, still heaving, but easing. Jake sits at the wheel, a little sickly but otherwise fine. “It’s been quite the year, hasn’t it?” He says, his eyes unmoving from the road.

“Listen, we’d be screwed without your save right now, but what the hell is wrong with you?” I ask. “I don’t know your history, but you seemed pretty insistent on John getting the guilty verdict back there.”

Jake chuckles, “Straight to the point. Spitting image of Jen.” He breathes deeply, “It’s a long story. We’ve got time, if you’re interested in hearing it—about an hour til where we gotta go. Or we could continue in silence and you can still hate my guts. One or the other.”

“I want to hear how you lived,” Andy speaks up. “Tender subject, I’m more than sure, but we’re all a bit tender right now.”

He grins, an ironic sort of look that only in this situation seems right. “Andrew Cress. Y’know, I used to think you were the asshole back then. I hated the way you treated Jen—it always got under my skin, but when you were hooked up to that game and I saw that she still cared about you like that I just had to help. Apparently you wised up inside that game—I didn’t find that out until recently,” he shrugs. “We went to check out the place the game was made—the Republic Plaza over in Denver. Place was a right mess.”

“Gavin’s body...blew up Denver,” Iris shutters.

Jake eyes her from the rear view mirror.

“An even longer story,” Andy hand-waves.

“Right.” He returns to the road. “My father was the Colorado chief-of-police. Districts there weren’t as organized as they were now since we didn’t so much have a leader after Valhart back in 2013.”

“That’s where you got shot,” Andy says.

“It wasn’t fatal—my father was trained to impair, and he did one hell of a job—all the police in Colorado did. They were contracted by the same guy who made the game—Elysium.”

“That’s our Jack,” Andy says, sighing.

“I passed out from blood loss, and when I woke I was strapped in a hospital bed with all kinds of stuff being pumped into me—I couldn’t tell you what was or when. That’s when I met Micah—he came to me personally. I think he was the one who ordered the hit. He told me there about everything—Radical-9, Elysium, You. I’ve come to learn from Jen that not all the things he said about you were true. That was when I figured out that was how they were keeping me alive—they were constantly pumping all these top secret drugs into my body that supposedly cured all the shit that was wrong with my body.”

“Radical-9?”

“I don’t think so,” Jake says, “Not after the way he worded it. It seemed like he planned to inject me with that stuff after, but that never came to be. He did say I had to work with him to save Jen—he pulled a lot of strings and forged a lot of documents. Then one day I was a DA. I never looked at a single book to be a lawyer and there I was. It all felt like a dream. I felt like those times in the hospital bed were when I was really awake, and when I was out there doing that job it was like some nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. It got to a point where that was what my life became—pumping the drugs into my system, taking me out for a trial, bringing me back to the bed for more drugs, more trial, so on and so forth.”

“How’d you end up on John’s case?”

“That...is the exception. I chose...I chose that one. I saw your name there, and instantly my mind was instantly thrown back to 2022. I remembered all those things I thought about you—about how you made her feel. My best friend wanted her brother back, but you had done everything to make that an impossibility...and I hated you for it. And to see her defending you so easily, I hated that she kept falling for that same trap. I hated myself most of all, though, for letting it all happen. I’m sure the drugs didn’t help those feelings, but they were mine to begin with. I became the asshole I hated.”

“And after the trial, when you ran out?”

“I was in a dark place. Everything I believed was false, and I felt like I couldn’t trust anything…like when I found out my father was a part of the police scandal. After that I completely shut everybody out, and I know that it was wrong.”

“What happened next, how did you cope with having that happen again? And apologize for my sounding like a therapist, but I’m genuinely curious.” Andy asks.

“I did what I should’ve done the first time, I listened to Jen. She followed me after the trial, I…I was contemplating suicide. Everything felt wrong and I couldn’t process it all. She talked me out of it, saying I shouldn’t waste the life I’d been so very lucky to hold on to considering my condition, and I knew she was right.”

“And how does this lead to you nabbing a police vehicle?” Iris asks.

“We returned to Aurora, Jen’s idea, actually. She knew I still kept my dad’s old shit like his key cards and whatnot from after he was imprisoned, she suggested we sneak some stuff from his office in order to help you guys.”

“And what, did he keep this entire van in his office?” I ask.

He laughs. “No, no. When we arrived in Aurora the place was batshit insane. I guess some teenage kids got into some trouble with the curfew and they started rioting. It dragged in the police…what was left, and some of the townspeople sympathetic to the teens’ cause and it was this whole big mess.”

“Jesus…” I say.

“We used the opportunity presented to us and that was when Jen got the call from Andy, saying to head to California. She armed those duffel bags we have in the bag with guns and ammo and I got us our ride using my dad’s keys.”

“Yeah, thank you so much,” Iris says.

Jake turns the wheel and we’re battering through the automatons and driving away from them.

“Wait,” Andy says, now thinking clearer, “Gavin...” His eyes go wide. “Micah...”

I nod, pulling him close, and then Iris closer so we’re all huddled together. “He’s free from pain. You have to keep that thought close to your heart.”

Andy doesn’t say anything, only holds my arm tight. For the first time I block out his thoughts. Those are private, and best left to him.

“Okay, we’re long clear of the automatons, I’m going to ring Jen to come back down,” Jake says, turning onto what I see to be a long stretch of grass.

“Not really into obeying the driving laws, are you?” I ask.

“What laws? I’m sure that we’re the majority of actual people even here in San Diego right now. Plus, it’s a good shortcut.”

“True, I guess then keep on going.”

Jake nods and bends down to a small walkie-talkie at his side. With a free hand he presses the button down, “Hey, you coming down? I think we’re clear.” He looks over back to us. Up above I can see the hatch opening and Jen climbs through it and lands on the floor. She walks over and squeezes her brother tight.

“God you look like a mess.”

“I am a mess,” he says, holding her tight, letting the tears flow.

She rubs his back, “It’s okay, I heard from above.” She takes a deep breath. “Remember when we were just getting out of that stupid game when we learned what happened to Mom? You talked to me that entire night so I wouldn’t think about it as much—and I’m sure you thought about it even more.” She looks up at him, “Lindsey was lucky to have you, and I know that she loved you as much as you did her. Gavin wouldn’t have been as close if it weren’t for you, too. I don’t think any of us could have connected with him the way you did.”

Andy only holds her tight.

“He and I didn’t talk much alone—a personality difference thing, but the times we did he spoke highly of you. He admired you, Andy.”

He nods, slowly. “I...I’m gonna miss them.”

“Me too. Jay’s keeping an eye on them up there,” she says. “They’re free from pain, just like Sarah said.” She looks to me. “You are quite the strong girl.”

“I’m just waiting to crash after we save John,” I smile nervously.”

“I didn’t really get to say hi to you the way I should have,” she says, walking to me and giving me a close hug.”

“Uh, wha-?”

“I had suspicions, but it wasn’t until I called Andy that I fully realized. If Jack really was your father, then that would make us half-sisters.”

My eyes go wide, “W-What? Really?”

She nods, “I always told our mom that she should adopt another girl so I had someone to play soccer with,” she grins, pointing to Andy and herself. “But I think the world already knew what I asked for before I ever did.”

This has me crying now. It’s a stupid thing, but I’ve been so far from family for so long—not knowing if my mom would still care if I walked back through that door. I cry in her arms—the half-sister I never knew about, but that’s when it comes clear to me, “You...you all are a part of my family. This has been a crazy sad time, but through it all I think of you all as my family.” I turn to Iris, “Come back into this stupid group hug, sister.”

She starts crying too, and we’re there in a moment of tears.

“Guys,” Jake says, calling our attention. “Hallmark moment, I know, but I think we’re here.”

I turn to look out the front and see a long stretch of land out in front of us, a few miles across it I see the broken remains of the Statue of Liberty. This is it. The van continues down the stretch, we’re getting closer and closer to John…to Jack. It looks like it is several miles long with water on both sides, it’s barely wide enough for the van to drive alongside it. As we near the center a chill starts to form around us, even inside the van. I look to Andy who looks back at me. “If Micah was causing too much stress on the world…imagine what Jack is doing,” he says.

“Sarah, you know that if we do what Jay asked us to do, we have to fully commit to it. You can’t let your feelings deter you from what you need to do,” Iris says, her voice a bit strained.

“Right, that’s definitely something that I’ve been thinking about.”

“We’re putting him out of the misery that Jack is causing him,” Andy says.