Cross Fire (29 page)
In fact, I was thinking seriously about writing another book, this one focusing on Kyle Craig and the Mastermind case. Not only had Kyle been the toughest challenge of my career, he’d also been a friend of mine — once. I felt as if I had a story to tell, and it would be a powerful one.
Meanwhile, there were sunflowers to plant and movies to see. Boxing lessons to catch up on in the basement, baseball games, trips to the Smithsonian. Long dinners to linger over until after dark, with good conversations or games of Go Fish. There was my new wife to lavish with all the love I could give.
And, of course, a new life to start together.
IF ONLY THINGS could have stayed that way — the endless summer.
It was just after Fourth of July weekend when I got that call from MPD, the call that everyone over there swore they wouldn’t make, no matter what the circumstances.
A detective in Austin, Texas, had been calling around looking for me. He was dealing with a multiple down there, a baffling and grisly one. But it wasn’t just the murders. The case was starting to show a striking similarity to one of my own — something I thought I’d put to bed years ago.
Even so, I made the appropriate referral to a detective I’d worked with in Dallas and stood my ground. I wasn’t a cop right now. Not until September.
But then the next call came about two weeks later. This one was from a detective in San Francisco by the name of
Boxer. She had a strange one on her hands, and her case sounded familiar, too, a lot like the murders committed by a madman known as “Mr. Smith.” I had caught Smith and watched him die. At least, I thought I had.
But that’s a story for another day.
IN A WORLD WHERE FREEDOM HAS ALL BUT DISAPPEARED…
WHERE MUSIC, READING, AND CREATIVITY OF ANY KIND ARE STRICTLY PROHIBITED…
WHERE EVEN CHILDREN ARE KIDNAPPED AND IMPRISONED BY THE GOVERNMENT…
THERE IS ONLY ONE HOPE LEFT.
HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED, to the best of my shattered ability to recall it.
I do remember that I couldn’t have been more lost and alone as I wandered the streets of this gray, crowded, and forsaken city.
Where is my sister? Where are the others from the Resistance?
I kept thinking, or maybe muttering the words like some homeless madman.
The New Order has already disfigured this once beautiful city beyond recognition. It seems like a decaying corpse swelling with mindless maggots. The suffocatingly low sky, the featureless buildings — even the faces of the nervously rushing people flooding around me — are as colorless and lifeless as the concrete under my feet.
I know the general populace has been efficiently brainwashed
by the New Order, but these citizens seem a little
too
hushed, a little
too
urgent, a little
too
riveted to the scraps of propaganda clutched in their hands like prayer books.
Suddenly, my eyes spot a word in bold letters on the paper:
EXECUTION
.
And then the huge video displays hanging above the boulevard light up, and everything becomes clear to me. Every pedestrian stops and stands stock-still, and every head turns upward as if there has suddenly been an eclipse.
On the video screens, a hooded prisoner — small-framed, frail-looking — is kneeling on a starkly lit stage.
“Wisteria Allgood,” blares a bone-chilling voice, “do you wish to confess to the use of the dark arts for the wicked purpose of undermining all that is good and proper in our society?”
This can’t be happening. My heart is a big lump in my throat.
Wisty?
Did that voice really just say
Wisteria Allgood?
My sister’s on an executioner’s scaffold?
I grab a slack-jawed adult by his dismally gray overcoat lapels. “Where is this execution happening? Tell me right now!”
“The Courtyard of Justice.” He blinks at me irritably, as if I’ve woken him from a deep sleep. “Where else?”
“Courtyard of Justice? Where’s
that?
” I demand of the man, throwing my hands around his neck, nearly losing control of my own strength. I swear, I’m ready to throw this adult against a wall if I have to.
“Under the victory arch — down there,” he gasps. He points at a boulevard that runs off to my left. “Let me go! I’ll call the police!”
I shove him and take off running toward a massive ceremonial arch maybe a half mile away.
“You! Wait!” he yells after me.
“Don’t I know your face from somewhere?”
He does. Oh yes. And so would everyone else, if they took the time to notice that there was a wanted criminal running loose in their midst.
But his fellow citizens’ eyes remain glued to the screen. They’ve got an insatiable appetite for malicious gossip of any kind and, of course, an equal taste for senseless death and destruction.
Even when the falsely condemned are kids. Just kids.
I can hear a distant roar now. The sound of hunger — for “justice,” for blood.
I forge ahead into the pathetic herd of lemmings.
I’m not going to let them take my sister from me.
Not without a fight to the death anyway.
I round a corner, and then, across the top of the crowd, I see…
Is that my sister, Wisty, up on the stage?
She’s hooded, dressed all in black, but standing now. Proudly. Brave as ever.
A man — if you would call him that — is on the stage with her. He’s leaning on a crooked stick, his wickedly sharp black suit hanging strangely motionless in the wind that’s begun to howl through the civic square. His angular face is glowing with smug self-satisfaction, as if he’s just devoured a potful of whipping cream.
I know him; I despise him.
The One Who Is The One.
Quite possibly the most evil individual in the history of humanity.
Are there minutes or seconds left before this hideous execution? I have no way of knowing.
I knock people aside as I barrel through the thickening, or should I say
sickening,
throng. I can see a line of wellarmed soldiers holding everyone back from the platform. If I can knock one of them down and snatch away a gun…
I look up at the stage just in time to see The One raise his knobby black stick and shake it menacingly at my sister. He has a look of absolute triumph.
“No!”
I yell, but I’m unheard in the roaring crowd. They all know what’s about to happen. I know, too. I just don’t see how I can possibly stop it. There has to be a way.
“Nooo!”
I scream.
“You can’t do this! This is cold-blooded murder!”
There’s a flash — not of light but somehow of
blackness
— and she’s gone. Wisty. My sister. My best friend in the world.
My little sister is dead.
IF I’M STILL DRAWING air, it’s not because I care about living.
The last person in the Allgood family that I knew for certain to be alive, the person who knew me better than anyone else in the world, the person who looked up to me in everything, is
gone.
What an incredible waste of an incredible life.
Wisty died while I watched, and I could do nothing to help her.
The One just vaporized my sister… and that monster, without any hint of conscience, doesn’t even seem to have broken a sweat. He throws his arms in the air like he’s just scored a goal, like he’s mocking the pointlessness of human existence. I go weak in the knees. I feel as if I might throw up as I hear a deafening roar of approval sweep down the
concrete canyon of this city — a place that now seems despicable and evil and beyond repair.
The One has just achieved his biggest public relations triumph
ever.
He basks in the adoration — but his usual impatience and anger soon erupt.
“Silence!”
His command sweeps across the city, obliterating every other noise.
But I’m unmoved. Still shell-shocked. Numb everywhere, including in places that I didn’t know existed.
“My good citizens,” he thunders, without aid of a microphone, “this is a truly magnificent occasion. What you have just witnessed is the obliteration of the last significant threat to our stewardship of the Overworld! Wisteria Allgood, a leader of the Resistance, has just been removed from this dimension. Forever.”
He raises his arms again, and a new gust of wind brings a thin layer of ash and the horrible smell of burnt hair across the crowd. These “good citizens” begin cheering again.
I’d collapse to my knees, but I’m surrounded on all sides. Then, suddenly, there is space for me to move. The cheering turns to screaming and the crowd is surging — moving backward — and I see a fiery explosion erupting not fifty yards from where I stand.
I
know
that fire.
“Oh yeah!”
I shout as the mere sight of it makes my heart almost burst with joy.
“Oh yeah, oh YEAH!”
That’s my sister! Wisty’s alive! She’s just set herself on fire, and that, believe it or not, is a good thing.
AS SURE AS I am Wisteria Rose Allgood, I have only one thought:
I’m gonna
burn
everything and everyone around me. Burn it all down.
I’ll start with the death-drenched stage, move on to this ridiculously pompous plaza, then hit the whole cold city of stone — this disastrous nightmare of a world. Even if I fry myself to ash in the process, I am going to obliterate all of this, all of them.
The One Who Is The One just killed my friend Margo up on that stage from hell. I recognized her even with a hood over her head. Her purple sneakers and black-and-purple cargo pants were the giveaway. The silver streaks and stars on the sneakers were the final clue. Margo, the last punk
rocker on Earth. Margo, the most fearless and dedicated person I’ve ever known. Margo, my dear friend.
Don’t ask me why that monster in the black silk suit was pretending she was me. All I know is that
I’m going to burn that evil madman to cinders.
So I turn myself into a human torch, just as I have in the past. Only this time I abandon all caution. Suddenly ten-, twenty-, thirty-foot tongues of flame are coursing around me, ripping upward in the formerly cool afternoon air.
The crowd backs away, screaming, and I can’t help myself: I smile. I nearly laugh out loud.
And I’m about to turn the heat up another notch — to send jets of fire everywhere around me, to burn brighter and hotter than ever before — when my breath catches in my throat.
I feel
him.
I feel his wretched, diseased mind. I feel his eyes somehow locking on to me.
A thousand soldiers turn my way in unison, and now it’s The One who’s smiling. He’s starting to laugh. And he’s laughing at me.
I wince as the air rushes out of me.
How can he have so much power?
I have no choice but to run, at least to try to escape his wrath.
I throw myself into the panicked human tide, my small frame deftly ducking elbows and shoulders. But The One is too close. I can feel his icy gusts chasing me, reaching out with cold, bony finger–like wisps, grazing my face, my neck, sending a chill so cold it hurts everywhere at once.
I’m starting to think how ironic it is that a firegirl might die in a deep freeze when suddenly I’m smothered by warmth. Somebody grabs me, lifts me up, and nearly squeezes all the breath out of me.