The Rising(30)

Alex rushed to his parents, his mother first because she seemed, incredibly, to still be clinging to life.

“Mom … Mom!”

Sam tried to make sense of what was happening, what she was seeing. She felt light-headed, almost like she was going to pass out. The living room started to spin softly around her. She reached down and groped for a nearby table to steady herself.

Alex rose from a crouch by his mother’s side. “You guys aren’t real cops.”

No response.

“I’m calling the real cops,” he resumed, moving for the phone.

Alex picked up the receiver. No dial tone. Dead. Set it back down as Sam watched, remembering how her own phone had stopped working. Neat trick, sure. But how had this guy managed to make the bodies of Alex’s parents appear again out of nowhere? And what had happened to the message scrawled in blood?

“Who are you?” Alex asked, a few graceful strides placing him closer to the man, with only the coffee table separating them.

“We already told you that.”

“No, you didn’t. You’re not my family.”

“In a manner of speaking, we are. We have our orders. You must come with us, Alex.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“Try me, bitch,” Alex said, looking just as he did before laying into a rival player with a bone-crunching tackle from his safety position.

The man looked toward Sam while the eyes of the other fake cops, or whatever they were, remained fixed forward, resolutely emotionless. Sam realized the corrosive smell of something almost hot enough to burn had grown stronger. And now one of the fake cops had frozen in place, a hand stretched out before him as if he’d been reaching for something, his eyes dark and lifeless.

“This is for your own good,” the lead cop was saying. “You don’t belong here, with them.”

“With who? What the hell are you talking about?”

And then Sam realized Alex had positioned himself just over where he’d laid the tire iron down atop the coffee table.

“We’ve been looking for you a long time. Eighteen years. Your entire life. You belong with us.”

“Us as in who? You’re not cops and I want to know who you are and what you’re doing here. Why’d you hurt my parents?”

“You must come with us, Alex.”

“That sounded like an order.”

“You have no choice.”

“Yes, I do.”

And then Alex was in motion, like this was football, playing a game. The tire iron was resting on the coffee table and then it was in his hand, coming up overhead as he launched himself airborne over the table, bringing the tire iron downward at the same time.

Thwack!

The tire iron struck home, mashing what should’ve been flesh and skull. Only, the sound and feeling were more like metal on metal, steel on steel. The head he’d struck whipsawed to the side, canting as if on a piston. Alex glimpsed a huge dent, a divot dug into the spot where skin and blood should have been. The head snapped back, the depression remaining in place like a car dent.

“Alex!”

Sam’s scream alerted him to the second fake cop just in time. She’d sliced between them to ward off his attack and ended up being shoved violently sideways straight toward a wall, the impact rattling her enough to tear her feet from under her. She noticed plumes of smoke wafting out of the motionless cop’s ears, wisps of it rising out of his skull, as if his hair was on fire, hand still extended as if he’d seized up while directing traffic.

Alex, meanwhile, brought the tire iron straight down atop the head of the second man, not so much caving it inward as splitting it in two right down the middle. It cracked more like an eggshell than a skull, spitting wires like spaghetti in all directions, its eyes still trying to focus on him even though they’d ended up facing opposite directions away from their target with the tire iron itself still wedged into place.

The initial figure was coming at him again and a third figure had emerged from another part of the room holding an odd-looking object that resembled a miniature staple gun. Alex went into football mode, launching himself into a perfect tackle that propelled the third man backward with enough force to crash him through the plaster of the wall. Alex lurched back upright in time to block a blow uncorked by the figure with the impossibly dented face. The man tried to pull his arm from Alex’s grasp, tugging hard.

Alex tugged harder.

And the arm broke off from the shoulder in his grasp, spitting more thick, spaghetti-like strands of wire that clung to both the severed limb and the joint itself. Alex gazed in shock at the arm he was holding, and the now one-armed figure who’d just seemed to realize he was missing it.

A crackling sounded and he swung to find the figure pulling itself from the wall through which he’d slammed it, managing a single step forward when Sam lunged and stuck her taser square against its temple. A staticky sound burst from the device on contact and then it flew into the air as a shock from the impact rode up Samantha’s arm and drove her backward. But smoke, gray and noxious, was pouring out of the man’s nostrils, mouth, and eyeballs, followed by a shower of sparks Alex could only liken to a transformer blowing in an electrical storm.

He swung back around just as the now-one-armed man came at him again, realizing at the very last moment he might not have the tire iron to wield anymore, but he did have something else: The figure’s severed arm.