FEBRUARY 28th, 2022

I couldn’t see anything as the world turned to darkness. It felt like I was placed into the world’s detention center until whatever god existed high up above found fit what to do with me. My head shifted and the helmet that had been on my head for so long fell to the floor. The plastic cover had cracked in two and lay in pieces below me. Light rushed into my eyes and blinded me as my eyelids remembered how to filter once again. I sat there for five minutes before I could open them fully and not cringe away at the sight.

They settled onto the cream walls of the hospital room I was in. I didn’t recognize it, but I think deep down I knew that I had been brought to one sooner or later. My body would have needed to be kept alive during my time in Elysium.

I opened my mouth and my tongue felt like rough sandpaper—I began to choke on the dryness of it all. I steadied myself and was able to re-salivate my mouth. I took slow, deep breaths until I stabilized again. I knew I needed to stand up and make it back to my house—back to my family. I needed to show them I was okay—that I was alive. I tried to move my legs and felt a foreign weight—they felt ten thousand pounds heavier.

My muscles haven’t been used in over a week.

I was able to swivel them off the side of the bed and placed them on the ground. The blood started to rush through my body and my heart was beating twice as fast. It started running my mind in double time and I was double-seeing and I couldn’t stop until it all crashed back the other way and I felt everything slow down. My vision went black for a second, but I just stayed still. It felt like forever until I put my weight on my legs and felt like I could stand on them. My heartbeat was pounding in my ears, but I had to do it.

I opened my eyes and saw an older man with cloudy-gray hair and a white pinstripe suit dash past my room, stop, and then return.

“J-Jay,” I mustered out.

He smiled as he saw me, “You son...” he thought on his choice of words, “You actually did it! I was so scared he got to you and that was it. But the server went down shortly after—oh if only I could have seen how angry he must have been realizing what had happened.”

“I saved them...” I said. “I don’t know how I did it, but I saved them.” I looked back up to him, “The other players—they’re back at home...or the hospital like me.”

“I managed to get Lindsey out of there. I hope I didn’t scare you,” he said.

“You did at first, but when I heard you...” I pointed to my head, “here, I knew she was okay.”

“You’re developing telepathy. That’s great. Great.” He was fizzing with joy. “That was the first ability Jack started to come into. The first thing that we realized was wrong about him.”

“Well, I don’t have any real practical use for it right now, but...” I held for a second and stabilized myself against the wall. Jay stepped in and helped me back up, I pushed him off. “No, wait...”

“What is it?”

“I...I have this feeling. Where’s Jen?” I asked,

“I dropped her off back at the house when she left. She should be sleeping.”

“Oh god...” I said, my heart leaped into my throat. “Jay we have to go there now.”

“Why? What’s…?”

He stopped and looked at me. “You...”

I nodded to him and he helped me lean on his shoulder. “Come on, we’re going right away.”

“I’ll handle any staff we come across. We’ll handle the legal shit later.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“Are you sure of what you sent to me just now?”

I nodded my head slowly.

“Then yes, I am sure.”

We made it through the hospital without encountering any of the staff. It goes to show how well things were doing in Aurora—even in the more well off towns if the medical staff were mostly voluntary.

Jay helped me down the steps and I saw a bright red car parked in the street. He opened the passenger side door and helped me inside. He turned the key into the ignition and drove off at a breakneck pace.

“So, what’s next? You wanted to find the rest of the people that were in that list?”

“I’m meeting up with an old friend next,” Jay said, his eyes focused on the road.

“Old friend have a name?” I asked.

“Gavin Daniels,” Jay said.

I looked at him, confused. “Didn’t that list say he was in Ohio? And you kept in contact with one of the children all this time?”

“Didn’t I tell you it was a long story?” He said.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Yeah, we got time, don’t we?”

He chuckled. “Not for that story. I don’t know if there’s enough time in the world to tell that one.”

I readjusted myself in the seat and recognized the street we were turning onto. We were about five minutes away from my home. Surely I couldn’t call his bluff and have him tell a cliff notes version? No, there was probably a good reason it needed all the details as possible.

Jay slowed the car to a stop right in front of my house and turned off the car. “Here, let me go inside and check the circumstances out—hope you had a false alarm,” Jay said.

“No! Come back and take me with you!” I called after him.

He didn’t, and went in by himself. “Agh, damn it.” I said. I unbuckled myself and slowly moved the car door open. My legs felt like jelly as I pushed them onto the street—my feet falling right into the cold slush of the winter night. My feet were freezing—all of me was freezing as I was only wearing the patient scrubs, but that wasn’t going to stop me from...from…

No. I pushed the thought further from my mind as I took one step after another—the familiar feeling of dread and a million pounds resting on my back as I made it to my front door. As soon as I saw Jen’s crying face in the doorway I felt my heart sink.

I saw a figure hung in my bedroom. For the slightest of seconds I thought somehow Jen could have been that figure—I didn’t understand the hows or the whys, but it was what first came to me. I never even thought of…

“Mom...” we both said in unison. Mine in confusion, hers in sorrow.

I fell back into the snowbank and sat there in disbelief. “No,” I shook my head.

“Oh no, Elena,” I heard from Jay’s mind upstairs.

My world crashed. Jen ran to me and fell into my arms, crying, now of realization that her brother was okay and alive...but terrified that her mother was neither of those things.

I remember crying. I did it a lot—it was about the only thing I could remember about the whole event. It felt like a dream—like I would wake up and all of a sudden the events of the past week would cease to exist, but it was the dream that I had woken up from where my mother was still alive. The dream that I could fix things. The dream where I still had a life to go back to.

My life was a whirlwind. I had Jen and she was an anchor—the most important anchor to me in that time, but what good is an anchor when you’re struck up in a category five hurricane? What good was an anchor when the ground no longer existed?

I had to find the answer to those questions. They weren’t going to be given out to me as freebies or a consolation for the death of my mother. I had to pick up where she left off and find some way to raise the two of us. I had to do so much.

It wasn’t until I felt a hand on my shoulder and saw the tears of the older man—the man who had known my mother longer than I had been alive—that was a feeling I got from those tears—that suddenly I had another anchor. A much heavier, stable anchor. I remembered what he had said about helping us out back in Elysium, and in that face there I could tell he was telling the truth. If this was the ability that I was granted from my experience with Radical-9, then I wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world. The ability to understand that certainty deep in my heart meant all the power to me in the world.

“What do we do now, Andy?” Jen asked amidst her tears.

Mine had started to dry as I looked at Jay’s. “The only thing that we can do,” I held her close. “We find the others.”

I loved that she instantly understood what I meant by others. She nodded and held me tighter. “Don’t go again...please.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“I...I want to put a rightful end to this place,” Jen said.

“What do you mean by that?” Jay asked.

“Can you like...make it burn?” Jen asked.

I looked at her confused. She shook her head. “I don’t want her body to be like that anymore. It’s...still in pain up there. I just want her to be at peace. Returned to the earth.”

“I can take care of that,” Jay said, wiping his eyes. “You both shouldn’t have to do something like that. Just wait in the car, okay?”

“Is this breaking the law? It has to be,” Jen said.

“Yes, but it doesn’t really matter at this point,” Jay said. “With something regarding this—they’d see it no different as what happened in Denver.”

“I mean...we’d be considered criminals,” Jen said, hesitating. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea.”

“We’re already criminals in the eye of the law,” Jay said. “And not for anything we did. Jack’s got his hold in the police force around here, remember?” He’d be able to pin literally anything on us and make it stick.”

Jen thought on it, and then looked up to Jay. “Okay, then I want the whole thing to burn. That sounds bad, I know, but I just want them to be at ease.”

“I understand,” Jay said.

“C’mere, I’ll take you to the car and tell you what happened after you left.” I said. “Also, you’ll need to help me up.”

“Anytime,” she said. “So long as you help me in equal measure.”

“You got it.”

~...~

We took off as the blaze started behind us. I was in the passenger seat and Jen sat in back. Jay was driving as fast as he could to this supposed meeting spot with this Gavin Daniels. We were on the road for ten minutes before I told him to slow.

“What?”

“Your friend, can he wait fifteen minutes?”

“I...I think? Why?”

“Take a right here,” I said. “Castle Rock is nearby, isn’t it?”

“You’re looking for her?” Jay asked.

“I told her that she could find company in our merry band of freedom fighters,” I said, attempting a joke. It came out terse and sad.

“Of course. I can’t dare imagine what sort of condition she must have woken up in.”

“How much did you know?”

“Enough.”

“Well, she only told me so you’ll have to play mum.”

He did not reply.

“Just like that” I said.

We turned off the exit to Castle Rock and were headed our way to where...I felt that Lindsey was. I think more than ever we all needed another friendly face around us.

I think more than ever we all needed to heal. And we’d meet this new friend of Jay’s. I’d see if he wants to join the cause and then you best be ready Jack Adata.

Because we’re coming for you.