Henri cocks the shotgun. “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” he says, and before I can respond, the entire wall along the stage is smashed in by the fist of a beast. It draws back and punches again, smashing the stage to smithereens and exposing the night sky. The impact pushes both Henri and me backwards.
“Run!” Henri yells, and he immediately unloads every shell in the shotgun into the beast. They have no effect upon it. The beast leans forward and roars so loudly that I feel my clothes flutter. A hand reaches out and grabs hold of me, turning me invisible. The beast charges ahead, moving straight for Henri, and I’m gripped with terror at what it might do.
“No!” I scream. “To Henri, get to Henri!” I twist under Six’s grip, finally grabbing hold of her and pushing her away. I become visible; she stays hidden. The beast surges towards Henri, who stands firm and watches it come. Out of bullets. Out of options. “Get to him!” I scream again. “Get to him, Six!”
“Go to the woods!” she yells back.
All I can do is watch. The beast must stand thirty feet tall, maybe forty, towering over Henri. It roars, pure wrath in its eyes. Its muscled and bulging fist rushes high in the air, so high that it breaks straight through the rafters and the roof of the school gymnasium. And then it falls, speeding down with such swiftness that it becomes a blur, like the blades of a spinning fan. I cry out in horror, knowing that Henri is about to be crushed. I can’t look away, Henri seeming tiny standing there with the shotgun limply at his side. When the fist of the beast is a split second from him, Henri disappears. The fist crashes through the gymnasium floor, the wood splintering, the impact sending me crashing into the stands twenty feet away. The beast turns to me, blocking from view the place where Henri had just stood.
“Henri!” I yell. The beast roars so that any response that might have come is drowned out. It takes one step towards me. To the woods, Six had said. Go to the woods. I stand and run as fast as I can to the back of the gym, where the beast had just broken through. I turn to see if the beast is following. It is not. Perhaps Six has done something to divert its attention. All I know is that I’m on my own now, alone.
I leap over the pile of rubble and sprint away from the school, running as hard as I can for the woods. The shadows swarm around me, following like villainous wraiths. I know that I can outrun them. The beast roars and I hear another wall crumble. I reach the trees and the swarming shadows seem to have disappeared. I stop and listen. The trees sway under a light breeze. There is a wind here! I’ve escaped whatever dome the Mogadorians have created. Something warm collects at the waistband of my pants. The cut I suffered at Mark James’s has reopened on my back.
The school’s silhouette is faint from where I stand. The entire gymnasium is gone, a pile of brick. The beast’s shadow stands tall in the rubble of the cafeteria. Why hasn’t it run after me? And where is the second beast we all heard? The beast’s fist falls again, another room demolished. Mark and Sarah are there somewhere. I told them to go back and I realize how foolish it was. I didn’t anticipate the beast destroying the school if it knew I wasn’t there. I have to do something to get the beast away. I take a deep breath to gather my strength, and as soon as I take that first step, something hard hits me in the back of the head. I fall face-first into the mud. I touch where I’ve been hit and my hand is covered in blood, drips of it falling from my fingertips. I turn around and see nothing at first, and then it steps out of the shadows and grins.
A soldier. This is what they look like. Taller than the scouts—seven, maybe eight feet tall—its muscles bulging beneath a black ragged cloak. Large, raised veins traverse the length of each arm. Black boots. Nothing covering its head, and its hair falling to its shoulders. The same pale, waxy skin as the scouts. A grin of self-assurance, of finality. In one of its hands is a sword. Long and shimmering, made of some kind of metal I’ve never seen here on Earth or in my visions of Lorien, and it appears to be pulsing, as if it is somehow alive.
I begin to crawl away, the blood dripping down my neck. The beast at the school lets out another roar, and I reach for the low branches of a nearby tree and pull myself up. The soldier is ten feet away. I grip both hands into fists. It motions the sword nonchalantly towards me, and something comes out of its tip, something that looks like a small dagger. I watch the dagger twist in an arc, leaving a slight trail behind it like smoke from a plane. The light casts a spell that I can’t look away from.
A flash of bright light devours everything, the world dimming away into a soundless void. No walls. No sound. No floor or ceiling. Very slowly the shapes of things return, the trees standing like ancient effigies whispering of the world that once was in some alternate realm where only shadows reside.
I reach out to feel the nearest tree, the only touch of gray in an otherwise white world. My hand goes through it and for a moment the tree shimmers as if it were liquid. I take a deep breath. When I exhale the pain returns to the gash on the back of my head and the tears down my arms and body from the James house fire. A sound of dripping water comes from somewhere. Slowly, the soldier takes form, twenty or thirty feet away. Giantlike. We take each other in. Its sword glowing more brightly in this new world. Its eyes narrow and my hands again clench into fists. I’ve lifted objects far heavier than it; I’ve split trees and I’ve caused destruction. Surely I can match its strength with my own. I push everything that I feel into the core of my being, everything that I am and everything that I will be, until I feels as though I’m about to burst.
“Yahhhh!” I yell, and I thrust my arms forward. The brute force leaves my body, raging towards the soldier. At the same time it sweeps the sword across its body as though swatting a fly. The power deflects into the trees, which dance for a brief moment like the grain in a wheat field waving in a light wind, and then they become still. It laughs at me, a deep, guttural laugh meant to taunt. Its red eyes begin to glow, swirling as though lava filled. It lifts its free hand and I tense myself against the unknown. And without my knowing what has happened, my throat is in its grip, the gap that had separated us closed in the blink of an eye. It lifts me, one handed, breathing with its mouth open so that I can smell the sour stench of its breath, the smell of decay. I thrash, try to pry its fingers from around my throat, but they are like iron.
And then it throws me.
I land on my back forty feet away. I stand and it charges, swinging the sword at my head, which I duck and counter by pushing it as hard as I can. It stumbles back but stays standing. I try to lift it with telekinesis but nothing happens. In this alternate world my powers are dimmed, almost ineffectual. The Mogadorian has the advantage here.
It smiles at my futility and raises the sword with both hands. The sword comes alive, turning from shimmering silver into ice blue. Blue flames lick across the blade. A sword that glows with power, just as Six had talked about. It swings the sword in my direction and another dagger comes flying off the tip, straight at me. This I can do, I think. All the hours in the backyard with Henri preparing for this very thing. Always the knives, more or less the same as a dagger. Did Henri know they would use them? Certainly, though in my flashbacks of the invasion I had never seen them. But I had never seen these creatures, either. They were different on Lorien, not quite as sinister looking. On the day of the invasion they looked sickly and starved. Is it Earth’s fault for this convalescence, have the resources here caused them to grow stronger and healthier?
The dagger literally screams as it rages towards me. It grows and becomes consumed in flames. Just when I am about to deflect it, it explodes into a ball of fire, and the flames jump to me. I’m trapped within it, consumed in a perfect sphere of fire. Anyone else would burn, but not me, and somehow it causes my strength to return. I’m able to breathe. Without the soldier knowing it, it has made me stronger. Now it’s my turn to smile at its own futility.
“Is this all you’ve got?” I yell.
Its face turns into rage. It defiantly reaches one hand over its shoulder and returns with a cannonlike gun that begins conforming to its body, the gun wrapping around its forearm. Its arm and the gun becoming one and the same. I pull the knife from my back pocket, the knife that I grabbed from home before returning to school. Small, ineffectual, but better than nothing. I open the blade and charge. The ball of fire charges with me. The soldier squares its body and brings down its sword with force. I deflect it with the pocketknife but the weight of the sword snaps the blade in two. I drop the remaining pieces and swing as hard as I can. My fist slams into the soldier’s gut. It doubles over but comes right back up and swings the sword again. I duck beneath the blade at the last second. It singes the hair on top of my head. Right behind the sword comes the cannon. No time to react. It hits me in my shoulder and I grunt and fall backwards. The soldier regroups and points the cannon in the air. I’m confounded at first. The gray from the trees is being pulled away and sucked into the gun. Then I understand. The gun. It needs to be charged before it can be fired, needs to steal Earth’s essence in order to be used. The gray in the trees isn’t shadows; the gray is the life of the trees at its most elemental level. And now those lives are being stolen, consumed by the Mogadorians. A race of aliens that depleted their planet’s resources in the quest for advancement, now doing the same thing here. That is the reason they attacked Lorien. The same reason they will attack Earth. One by one the trees fall and crumble into heaps of ash. The gun glows brighter and brighter, so bright that it hurts the eyes to look at. No time to spare.
I charge. It keeps the gun pointed at the sky and swings the sword. I duck and plow straight into it. Its body tenses and it writhes in agony. The fire surrounding me burns it where it stands. But I’ve left myself open. It swings the blade feebly, not enough to cut me, but there is nothing I can do to prevent its fall. It hits me and my body is hurled backwards fifty feet as though I’ve been struck by a bolt of lightning. I lie there, my body shaking with postelectrocution tremors. I lift my head. Thirty piles of ash from the fallen trees surround us. How many times will that allow him to fire? A slight wind kicks up and the ash begins filtering across the empty space between us. The moon returns. This world to which it has brought me is beginning to fail. It knows it. The gun is ready. I wrestle myself up from the ground. Sitting a couple feet away, still glowing, is one of the daggers it fired at me. I pick it up.
It lowers the cannon and aims. The white surrounding us is beginning to dim, color returning. And then the cannon fires, a bright flash of light containing the ghoulish forms of everyone I have ever known—Henri, Sam, Bernie Kosar, Sarah—all of them dead in this alternate realm and the light so bright that they are all I can see, trying to take me with them, raging forward in a ball of energy growing as it nears. I try to deflect the blast but it’s too strong. The white makes it as far as the fiery enclosure, and when the two touch an explosion erupts and the power sends me backwards. I land with a thud. I take inventory. I am unharmed. The ball of fire has extinguished. Somehow it has absorbed the blast, has saved me from what I am certain would have been death. Surely that is how the cannon works, the death of one thing for the death of another. The power of mind control, manipulation that plays on fear, possible through the destruction of the elements of the world. The scouts have learned to do this weakly with their minds. The soldiers rely on weapons that produce a much greater effect.
