Absolute Power (Book 1): Origins (6 page)

The voice of the pilot came over the headset, “Approaching the safe zone.  I'm being told that radiation levels are increasing, and they're planning to evac in fifteen minutes.”

“Chuck,” Robert said all of the sudden, “You ever get that picture in front of the Enterprise?”

Chuck's brow furrowed until he remembered the ships.  “Yeah,” he answered.  “But the other one.”

The helicopter landed with a thud, and Robert was out of his seat before anyone could stop him.

It was the middle of nowhere.  The desert stretched out in every direction, and the sun was hot, but not as hot as where Robert was headed.  Even from a mile away it was easy to tell where Caroline was.  Ahead of him, a ball of energy one hundred yards in diameter glowed and crackled.  The sky around it bit and snapped with electricity.  It was the first time Robert had seen a plasma storm.  Heat was radiating from the center, causing massive updrafts that threw dirt into the air.  Despite the blinding sand and searing heat Robert ran to his sister.  He wasn't sure if he would die before he got there, but he hoped that his power could resist hers.

Porter swore under his breath as Robert narrowly escaped his grasp.  He quickly grabbed radios off the two nearest soldiers.  He shoved one of them into Chuck's hand.

“Channel seven,” he told him.  “I need you to use your ability and tell me if this is going to go south.”

“How is that going to help?” Chuck asked.  “We won't get clear in time.”

“All I need is a couple seconds warning,” Porter said grimly.

Chuck knew what he meant and yelled after him, “Porter.  Porter, they're just kids.”  He switched the channel on the radio and yelled some more. “Porter, if you do something to those kids, God help me I'll find a way to kill your indestructible ass.”

Porter ignored him and charged into the dust storm.

It was like walking into an explosion that never stopped.  Pieces of Robert’s clothes caught fire burning him.  He had to take his shirt off, then his pants and finally, he walked naked into the epicenter.  The heat must have been several hundred degrees, but somehow it had no effect on him.  Beads of sweat evaporated before they could begin.  The closer he got, the brighter it was and soon he had his hand over his eyes looking out through a gap between his fingers.  Then he saw her, sitting on the ground and tucked into a ball.  She looked up as he got closer.  Robert collapsed to his knees in front of her, struggling for air as the wind whipped the oxygen away.

“I keep crying, but the tears burn away,” Caroline said softly.  She was eight years old now, with olive-brown skin like their father but the sharp features of their mother.

The energy that she was emitting was beginning to push Robert physically backwards.  He planted his hands on the ground to keep from sliding away.

“What happened, Caroline?”  Robert asked.

“I'm so sorry,” she cried.  “You told me how your powers worked.  You told me what it was like to control them in your mind.  That you just had to know that it was possible, and you could make energy.  And if you knew that and believed it then you could make your mind do it.  I kept thinking about it.  All the time.  I couldn't stop thinking…”  Caroline broke down into an uncontrollable sob.  “We were all on the plane, mom, dad...  And it made sense.  You just had to know, like learning to swim.  I killed them, Robert.  I killed them.”

Robert struggled to get closer to his sister.  He just wanted to hold her, but he could barely get within arm’s length.

“It's not your fault,” Robert said.  “It was an accident, a terrible accident, but it wasn't your fault.”

Caroline looked at him slowly and said, “Did you know mom was pregnant?  It was there, alive, and then it turned to ash like the rest.”

“Caroline, listen to me,” Robert shouted.  “We have to get you to stop before any more people get hurt.”

“I don't think we should be allowed to live,” Caroline said more to herself.  “Our human side changed our powers to something beyond even mom's.  It's why it killed her, and maybe it'll kill us and everyone else we love.  We should die.”

Porter came through the storm crawling on his hands and knees.  The wind had carried Caroline's words, and he knew that she had become suicidal.  Which meant bad things.

“Robert,” he called out from behind.  “We have to stop this now; before it gets worse.”

“Caroline,” Robert tried to get his sister’s attention.

“There are other people's lives on the line here,” Porter yelled.  “If you can't get through to her we'll have to act.”

Robert didn't turn around or acknowledge Porter.  Instead, he continued to struggle to reach his sister.

“Colonel Porter,” the voice of a telepath came into his head.  “Captain Darren here has a message, uh, direct verbiage.  First, taking a radio into a plasma storm was a stupid idea.  Second, be on your toes, something is about to happen.”

With that, Porter pulled from his reserves of strength and stood, forcing himself forward.  He had to reach the girl and stop her.  His weapon had melted along with the radio so it would have to be with his own hands.  His feet slipped and skidded back, but he kept putting one foot in front of the other.  As he came up on Robert, he thought to push the boy away, but didn't have the energy.  Porter was surprised that Robert had lasted this long as he fought to grab his sister.  Robert's fingers reached out and strained.  The tips brushed Caroline's arm, and she looked at him.

“I forgive you,” Robert said to his sister.

Chuck watched the storm growing and thrashing.  It was obvious to everyone in the safe zone that things were not going to end well.  It was clearer to Chuck, whose head was ringing like a fire alarm.  Someone was about to do something very bad.  His survival instinct hoped it was Porter, but he didn't like the idea of the girl dying.

Suddenly, the ground shook and the dust cloud lit up with bolts of energy.  A sound, like something sizzling, filled the air to an almost painful level.  The wind hit them with enough force to throw Chuck to the ground.  As he recovered, he saw a flash of light at ground zero.  Air rushed back in to fill the space created by a vacuum, sucking everything towards it.  Chuck groped to hold onto anything and then the implosion collapsed the plasma storm on itself.

Porter had been thrown over a mile from the blast.  When he woke he immediately headed back to where Robert and his sister had been.  He found Robert and Caroline still alive.  Robert was holding his sister tight, smothering her energy output with his own.  Her powers had been negated.  They had blown each other out in the same way you fight a forest fire with dynamite.

Robert should be dead, but there he was alive, and Porter knew he'd chosen the right student.

Anne Marie Godfrey looked out the window of her father’s beat up Range Rover.  She watched as the last signs of Kenya shrank in the distance.  Geert scrutinized her from the rearview mirror.  His skin was brown and leathery from his years spent on the continent.  In many ways, his exterior matched his interior.  Sitting in the passenger seat, his wife, Mosi squeezed his thigh, so he spoke up.

“It won’t be forever, Anne Marie,” he said in his thick Dutch accent.

When he was young, the company he worked for had sent him to the Congo to build a bridge, and he never went home.  He had moved around a lot, mostly through central Africa until finally settling down in Kenya where he met Mosi.  Anne Marie was his pride and joy, but sometimes shame was a stronger drive.

“I know,” Anne Marie replied in her typical stoic manner.  She kept her eyes on the scenery.

It was hard to read her sometimes, and even harder to comfort her.  Geert knew that she would have preferred to stay in Kenya; that was where her friends were.  Somewhere in there, she had to be sad, or angry or afraid.  Or maybe Geert was projecting his guilt.

“You know I did not like my job,” Geert said to his daughter.  “I did a lot of things I regret.  Bad things.”

Anne Marie finally looked at him.  “What did you do?”  She asked.

Geert hesitated to answer, and Mosi filled in for him, “That isn’t important.  What is done, is done.  Now we make things better.”

“Okay,” Anne Marie said.

“Are you angry with me?”  Geert asked.  “I understand if you are.”

“I’m not sure,” she replied.  “But Papa, I still love you.”

The trip through Southern Uganda was long, but not as much as the second leg north.  They stopped in Kumi, where her father met up with a man.  His name was Martin, and he smiled a lot.  With him, he had several cases that they struggled to strap onto the roof of the Range Rover.  Anne Marie watched the two men heaving and swearing; Geert in Dutch and Martin in French.  When the cases were finally secure, Mosi moved to the back seat with Anne Marie.  Martin took the passenger seat and the job as navigator.

“The roads ahead are… carié,” Martin explained.  “Dangerous and rough.  It will take much longer to travel.  But we must be there before sundown.”

It wasn’t an exaggeration.  Geert pushed the Range Rover through ruts, rocks and mud.  It felt as if the bouncing and jarring would rattle the teeth from their skulls.  Keeping in her seat and holding on tight became exhausting, and Anne Marie’s eyelids sagged.  Her mother wrapped an arm around her, using her body to soften the bumps.  Miraculously, Anne Marie faded into sleep.

She woke as Mosi slipped out from under her.

“Are we there?”  Anne Marie mumbled half asleep.

“Yes,” Mosi replied.  “Now close your eyes, it is late.  Your Papa will unpack for you.”  She draped a coat over Anne Marie and gently pushed her down across the car seat.

The second time Anne Marie woke, it was dark and getting cold.  Her father was standing outside holding the door open.

“Hurry, get your coat,” he said and put out his hand to help her out of the car.

The moon was smothered in clouds.  The only light came from the car, and that blinked out when the door shut.  Geert held his daughter's hand and led her into the darkness.  Someone clicked their tongue softly to indicate their position.  They found Martin crouched near some bushes.

“Follow close or you’ll get lost,” Martin said in a hushed voice.

They pushed their way through the shrubs, going deeper and deeper into the abyss, until finally they came to a stop.  Anne Marie had a sense that they’d reached a clearing.  None of them moved or made a sound, but waited.

It started as a soft sound, like sand spilling onto the ground.  Then it grew into a rhythmic beat.  When it arrived, Anne Marie felt a gentle wind and heard the sound of shuffling and fabric.  In her imagination, she’d thought it was some sort of an animal herd migrating past them.  She turned to her father, just making out his face in the low light.  He nodded for her to go forward, and he stood with her.  Anne Marie cautiously stepped out into the open.  Something brushed past her and another stepped around.  As they came closer, she saw now something she couldn’t understand.  Hundreds of children were walking along a dirt road in the black and silence.  Their dark brown faces and sunken eyes spoke only of sadness.

“The invisible children,” Geert said.  “Every night they leave their homes to sleep on the city streets.”

“Why?”  Anne Marie asked.

“So that the Lord’s Resistance Army can’t conscript them and turn them into child soldiers,” Geert replied.

Anne Marie put out a hand, gently touching the arm of a boy as he passed.  A little girl reached up and touched her, and then another after her.  She lost count of how many of them reached out from the gloom.

“We will get as many of them as possible, to come to our camp,” Geert said.  “We will give them a place to sleep and food.”

Martin stepped forward speaking to the children in Swahili and French.  Geert repeated the same thing in English, “We have free food and beds.”

There weren’t many who were willing to trust them; just over a hundred.  Martin led the line of children back toward the camp.  Anne Marie walked with him while her father brought up the rear.

“We did very good tonight,” Martin said to Anne Marie.  She looked at him questioningly.  “They don’t trust adults, having you with us was a big help.”

Anne Marie let a slight smile play on her lips.  She was beginning to understand why this was so important to her father.

Martin stopped suddenly.  For the longest time, he said and did nothing.  There was a rustle of leaves nearby and without seeing anything he knew what was happening.

“Run,” Martin shouted.  “LRA.  Run.”  He spun and grabbed Anne Marie by the shoulders.  “Run.”

A rattle of machine gunfire sent the children screaming.  All the voices of the night were calling out in fear.  A bullet pierced Martin’s chest spraying blood in Anne Marie’s face.  She was afraid, but not panicked.  Anne Marie thought about her mother, somewhere out there.  Then she put that out of her mind, because the boy standing next to her was frozen in place.  With a hard shove from Anne Marie, he started moving.  She pushed and grabbed anyone she could as she ran from the gunfire.  But the LRA had them surrounded; the shooting started from both sides.  The children stopped, unsure where to go.  Working her way through the crowd, Anne Marie felt a sudden urge to find her father.