The streets around the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center and Memorial Gardens were laid gravely still and devoid of life, adorned only by the occasional blustering paper scrap after the mass shepherding by the Omegas of every Alpha and Beta away from the same mile-radius.
Cars were abandoned in packed traffic jams, some doors still hanging open as the final dredges of the demanding, squealing, screaming throng of bitter parents, reporters, and onlookers were pushed behind distant police lines. Even the towering sentinels of Aegis had retreated once the last overzealous news chopper had been snatched out of the air, with only a few remaining at the outskirts of the landscape just close enough to ensure the deal was carried out as dictated. Abby Lindon clutched an arm around her daughter, while Rebecca Reynolds and David Hart looked on from beside them.
“FURTHER BACK,” Gail Paradise spat into a megaphone jerry-rigged to the rooftop’s speaker system, bellowing out her orders as she stood like a self-appointed queen near the edge of the complex’s roof, her combat boots planted in a flower bed atop some freshly crushed white lilies recently potted in honor of a family of deceased miniature citizens.
Behind her stood Sonja, oblivious to the managerial adjustments that had taken place down below in the auditorium, with a sneer carved into her lips and a grenade launcher propped against her shoulder, squared at the sky.
“This all went much smoother than I expected,” Sonja cracked to Gail, blinking a drop out sweat out of the corner of her eye and leaving it to trickle down the smeared black liner below her lids.
“You’re telling me,” Gail chuckled knowingly. “How much longer we got on that clock?”
“Five minutes ‘til Garza’s bird sets down.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Melody King stood stock-still above the highway on the opposite end of the site, wringing her knuckles against her palm until her titanic digits were beginning to turn the raw pink of battered animal carcasses. Her honeyed tresses billowed in the breeze from on high, momentarily drifting across her face and blotting out her vision of the distant pair of terrorists that had positioned themselves near the central helipad where, Abby had informed them all, a VTOL would arrive to collect the Beta boxes and transport them to an unknown location until every Beta citizen was wiped from the digital records and every empty school was flattened under Omega boots. It wasn’t ideal, but the matriarchal Lindon understood it as a temporary solution until Kayla returned into the stratosphere to bring everyone to justice in the length of a coffee break. Melody, too, was comforted by this.
Or, at least she had been for the past few minutes, until a twinge abruptly began to unfold inside her, gradually blooming larger, even by the standards of the one-hundred-sixty-two-foot girl.
Something had changed.
The duress weighed on the height-gifted Omega’s chest, pulling at the strings of her gargantuan heart and threatening to unplug them. It couldn’t be explained, and she knew it wasn’t just worry for the wellbeing of everyone inside. After all, time was their only weakness now; they held every other advantage ranging from physical might to the element of surprise, yet the churning sensation winding through her gut hadn’t ceased. Her fists shifted up the length of her taut abdomen until they were lodged under her chin, and she became aware that her feet were dragging her softly over the insignificant dips of the rocky terrain beneath the overpass.
The impulse to stop briefly alleviated her pulse of a few beats, but the motion continued. She was walking closer. Going expressly against what the Omegas had been ordered to avoid in the interest of preserving those innocents. Still the balls of her feet propelled the girl forward at a stately pace, hardly bludgeoning the ground under every megaton stride, as though her motions were guided not by the volition of her toned muscles but an intangible force, like a warming gale improbably strong enough to budge someone as sturdy as Melody.
“Mellie?”
The nickname echoed fully in the Omega’s ear, yet it registered as coming from somewhere on the horizon, as though Claire had called out from across the city in a hushed whisper that had nonetheless been carried by this same guiding wind. Melody continued to march softly toward the Convention Center, her prayerful fingers still clasped and her trenchant amber eyes locked to the pair of miniature monsters poised on the rooftop. Her heartrate had since settled down to normal again.
“Melody!”
The yell was louder, more insistent now, and clearly not from over the sprawling urban ecosystem but in fact a few paces behind on the hill. Melody felt the rumble of the ground emanating through the rubber soles of her shoes as Claire pounded urgently after her. Those bronzed fingers reached up and wrapped over the eldest King’s shoulder, clammy and trembling in ways Melody knew she ought to have been if it weren’t for the spectral compulsion at her back nudging her forward.
“Everyone’s clear. It’s time to move back. We… don’t want to… upset them…” Claire uttered, her lips now just a few feet away from Melody’s ear as she stood on her tiptoes to deliver the message. Her own dark locks batted in the wind and crossed over the golden tangle of Melody’s.
The blonde leviathan paused briefly in her fated tread, not even opening her lips to respond yet. Instead she gently laid a hand over Claire’s and lifted the clenched fingers away as easily as though brushing away a fallen tree branch.
“What are you doing?” Claire whispered, reaching out again, this time toward Melody’s arm. “Please, Mellie. Come with me. I know you’re scared for them too. But we c-can’t j-”
“I have to,” the Omega said at last, each word a murmured hymn just as natural as the ethereally magnetic pull she was experiencing toward the epicenter of the carnage. There was clearly no further rebuttal intended.
Briefly compelled by the confidence of her friend’s answer in spite of the monumental risk, Claire shook her head and latched a fist back around the young woman’s arm, clutching the bulging limb into her chest and giving it a tug like a fearful child attempting to guide its mother back to the known world.
“No. I can’t let you,” Claire said resolutely. She clasped her palm to the mountainous tricep, already fully aware of how fruitless this would be if Melody didn’t physically comply.
“Trust me,” the colossal guardian requested, remaining perfectly motionless as her friend yanked on her arm with enough potential energy to level a skyscraper into smoke. As unmoved as Claire had predicted. At last Melody reached over with her other arm, tenderly grabbed hold of the Junior Enforcer’s jacket by the scruff, and removed her friend’s resistance by briefly levitating her off the ground with a single hand. Her eyes flashed peacefully as she gazed beyond Claire’s shoulder.
“I TOLD YOU TO BACK OFF,” Gail roared impatiently from afar through the crackling bullhorn, her eyes now locked and narrowed to the looming titan headed her way.
“Stop!” Claire croaked, abandoning the defensive line upon having her muscular deficit demonstrated, but refusing to give up with so many at stake. Her voice cracked as another gust of wind whistled through her brunette tresses and Melody resumed her self-assured gait, turning her back on Claire once again. For a moment she considered pouncing forth and tackling her prodigious friend to the ground, ramming her through eighty feet of concrete street if necessary to halt the progression.
“Claire.” Her mother’s voice rang out from behind, instantly nixing this possibility. “Come back.”
“W-What? Mom, Mellie’s… w-what if they-”
“I know. I know. Just come back,” the city’s stewardess lullabied, extending her arms and ushering her daughter back into them. The same lucid dreamy glaze Claire had seen in Melody’s eyes was even thicker in her parent’s. “It’ll be all right.”
“But… h-how can you…”
“Just trust her,” Abby said as she invited the trembling Omega back into her embrace. “Or if you can’t, then trust me.”
“The tall one’s not fucking off,” Sonja observed, clamping her teeth down on a toothpick she’d been idly chewing before spitting it into the trampled soil of the flower beds below. Her thumb nudged provocatively against the trigger.
“I can see that,” Gail said as she allowed the megaphone to fold comfortably back into her other hand.
“So… what now? I’m guessing we don’t just gas the kiddies over that, or we’re out of chips to play.”
“Correct.” The murderous Paradise sister seethed with the mechanism’s trigger grasped in her other fist, hardly taking notice of her accomplice now as she locked eyes above with the steadily advancing Melody, who wore a neutral expression of ashen calm with her lips pulled tight and her cold scrutiny unbroken.
“Do I get to know what you’re thinking here, or are you just playing commander of the fucking world again?”
“Shut up with the twenty questions,” Gail ordered coolly. “I hope you’ve already got the safety off. You can handle just one measly Omega, can’t you?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing,” Mona huffed pitifully as dashed back into the auditorium and filed quickly down toward center stage where Taylor was bloodily clinging to consciousness, still with the remains of her arm ensnared in the manual failsafe override, and Ben seated on her shoe. “I tried every elevator in this hallway. All of them open but won’t go up or down. Stairways are locked. I think they might be barricaded too. I… could try the other wing, but-”
“Waste… of time,” Taylor breathed in a labored sequence, groggily chewing her lower lip as she did her best to focus on the girl’s words instead of the throbbing pain threatening to seep out of every pore like liquid metal. “If did it to… those… did it to… all.”
“I thought so…” Mona sighed, crouching down before Taylor and peering anxiously into her foggy eyes, flinching at an accidental glance inside the maintenance hatch where the young woman’s limb had been minced into a grisly spectacle beyond human-shaped recognition. It was a marvel the sacrificial former accessory to this whole mess hadn’t passed out already. “H-How are… I mean, is there anything w-we can-”
“Don’t… worry about… me,” Taylor gulped, nodding in the direction of a half-empty painkiller bottle from the first aid kit resting on top of the copper hub, the powder-white contents of which she’d ingested in a single swallow before a fearful Ben had begged her to leave the rest. “Have to… get to roof. Have to… tell… Omegas. C-Can’t…”
“What?”
“The trigger for that… machine is burned out now,” Ben explained, patting a reassuring palm on his friend’s enormous quivering ankle. “So the only way to set it off is releasing the failsafe, or if the other one’s heart stops.”
“W-What? But… I thought she had the b-bar!”
“Separate… valve…” Taylor drooled. “Can’t… reach… now.”
“But the only two left are up on the roof,” Ben continued. “Meaning…”
“The Omegas can just grab them,” Mona finished shakily, nodding as she wiped a quaking knuckle over her forehead to smudge away the sweat and caked blood. “And… this will be all over.”
“Yes,” Ben said, hardly daring to believe it himself that the end of this living nightmare was miraculously in view. “But they don’t know that. And all the cell phones in here got cooked when we blew the lights. They w-won’t work. The only way to let them know is getting up there with them.”
“There must be something else,” Mona cried, huddling her knees into her chest for support as she leaned against the control hub and rifled through the first aid kit for anything of further use. She stood up and dragged a cloth over Taylor’s sheet-toned forehead, soaking it with ice-cold moisture, then returned to the ground, scooping Ben up and bringing him up to the level of Taylor’s face. “Aren’t there any other ways up there other than the stairs and elevators? There… there has to be!”
“Is,” Taylor sputtered, clenching her eyes shut, throat gurgling as muscular control was neglected in favor of constructing a mental barrier to the limb-ripping agony. “Not… Alpha…”
“What do you mean?”
Taylor’s lips peeled apart again, a dusty rattle crawling out of her esophagus in response, and shut again. She coughed, punctuated with the burble of thickness in her throat.
“W-What?”
“A Beta elevator,” Ben said for her, deciphering it first.
Taylor emphatically nodded her head once then slumped her chin back down against her chest, lapping stickily at her lower lip.
“A B-Beta elevator? There was one just outside the hall, but… w-well, I mean… d-do you think you’ll make it?” Mona repeated with a shudder, stooping down lower to the carpet, her trembling fingers sliding nearer to Ben. “N-Not that I doubt you… a-at all, after what we just d-did, but…”
“No, I’m with you there,” the young Beta shrugged, his eyes sinking to the crimson-splattered carpet along with his spirits. “I-”
“Shut the… fuck up…” Taylor snorted quietly, forcing one eye back open and training its steely gaze back to Ben. “Can… make it.”
“They told the Omegas to move back. No one will see me in time. They won’t even kill me. T-That one… Gail… she’ll just kick me off the edge and let gravity do the rest,” Ben responded bitterly. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Show… prove… them…”
“What?”
“Prove… them… wrong…” Taylor fired back with newfound gusto, spitting a thick wad of blood-tinged saliva into the ground between her shoes. She wobbled in her stance, clearly on the verge of hobbling to the ground, but she held firm, even before a paranoid Mona threw her hands under Taylor’s shoulders for support. “You… already proved… me…”
“I…” Ben gulped, suddenly rooted to Mona’s palm as a sublime spark trickled through his fingertips and into his bloodstream, familiar just as well as ancient in the way of a ghostly visage of a long-forgotten friend appearing by surprise in a dream with a smile of mysterious promise. His heart was thumping faster than ever, but his frame stood tall, or at least as tall as possible at his three-inch stature.
“If y-you don’t think you can make it, w-we’ll find something else… we h-have to…” Mona pleaded, her hand trembling beneath him. “I won’t m-make you go t-”
“No one’s making me. No one alive, anyway,” Ben reported solemnly, brushing off the look of immediate confusion glossed over Mona’s horrified countenance and the tranquil curve easing into the crook of Taylor’s withered lips. “Take me to the elevator.”