Chương 46: 40: When the Devil Drives

The trailer park south of the city had been around longer than the city itself, longer than most of us had been alive, even. Once merely a form of temporary housing back when the whole area had just been a truck stop with a few extra features, it had expanded greatly throughout the city's initial construction period. Over a decade of gentrification and corporate meddling had seen prices skyrocket and many of the growing town's original residents relocating to the rapidly-bloating mass of mobile homes.

With the skies finally clear of the abnormal mist and other magical weather phenomena, the sheer devastation the invading monsters had brought was obvious. Half of the city's buildings were simply gone, reduced to less than rubble by monster attacks, magical fires, the military's bombardment and the occasional atomic blast, or swallowed by the ominous black bulk of the enemy's iron fortress. Nowhere was this devastation more extensive than the trailer park itself.

A thick strip of barren land cutting through the southernmost part of the suburbs, what had once been nearly two square miles of trailers and dried shrubs had mostly been reduced to still-smoking, slagged heaps and empty lots covered in ash. The near-total lack of fire prevention had finally caught up with those living here, though more than half of the ruined vehicles had been destroyed in their doomed attempts to flee the city.

A good quarter of the trailers were still there, though, hundreds of tiny, people-shaped dots scurrying among them like an army of ants harried by a kind with a magnifying glass. Or, in this particular case, several flights of magical monsters. Imps with their smaller fireballs and higher maneuverability made up the majority of the attackers, while a loose cordon of skeletal archers had formed around the trailer park and was shooting at stragglers attempting to flee the ongoing bombardment.

From so high above the ground, the invaders' coordination and methodical approach to the extermination of us humans was obvious even to someone with my non-existent tactical skills. It would have brought a new wave of rage at the horrendous sight... if a tenday of violent struggle hadn't saturated my emotional responses and left me with a constant, ever-simmering anger. Three flickers in time and space found me flying at ground level at a couple of times the speed of sound and still accelerating.

Skeletal archers and sword-wights found themselves on the receiving end of a human sized and shaped artillery shell scything through their ranks. Thirty seconds saw me circling the trailer park three times, hundreds of enemies simply bursting apart like bugs upon a wind shield. Then a narrow, invisible force field an inch wide and a mile long swept above the trailer park several times. Any of the imps intercepted by the field got the equivalent of a weak punch from me, narrowed down to a fingernail-sized surface...

and were violently torn apart. Everything else was left entirely undisturbed by the selective application of kinetic force, eliminating collateral damage as well as signs by which to track and avoid the sweeping beam. The majority of the attackers dealt with, I flew down into an area as wrecked by the invasion as it was familiar. The worst was still to come... xxxx xxxx"Little May? Is that really you?"

As soon as I'd touched down, I'd been mobbed by the very reason I hadn't even considered getting to the trailer park before; neighbors.

"Yes, granny Flores," I told the wrinkled, stout, heavily-armed woman crawling out of a half-wrecked trailer.

"It really is me." I paused out of reach with a not-insignificant level of apprehension not because of the rusty shotgun aimed in my general direction but because old Flores was a very touchy-feely person... and her breath stank of weed more often than not.

"Why, look at ya all grown up!" she crooned as she craned her neck up at me and I cringed.

"And you're one of them superheroes now!"

"... what superheroes?" I dared to ask, bracing for the grey-haired woman's reply.

"Why, the saviors of our city from them monsters!" she shouted, gesticulating wildly. It was a miracle her shotgun didn't go off in someone's face. Then again, given its state of disrepair, maybe it had jammed?

"We were done for down here, surrounded by them Reds, till you swooped down from the sky and gave them the ol' one-two!"

"I did not give the undead the ol' one-two," I denied over her cheerful commentary. Mostly because boxing, like any other sport, was a terrible way of fighting off actual enemies. Then what ms. Flores had actually said registered and I asked.

"How did you see me flying down, though?" Because I hadn't; with the new powers being the equivalent of teleportation I hadn't needed to cross the intervening distance.

"I saw it on the telly," the old woman whispered as if revealing some big secret.

"Mighty useful the old box, no?" It probably was, to her. The rest of us had to settle with non-functional appliances due to the damage to the city's power grid, not to mention magic still scrambling most signals. Or maybe granny Flores was just stoned; no way to tell with her.

"... so I told the others you'd be coming, I did. Coming to save us all!"

"I see..." well, Verity had sent me here to save people from monsters.

"How many of them are you?"

"A whole lot!" she replied with a cackle and I stifled a wince as I gave our smoking, mud and soot coated surroundings another look. If she kept shouting she'd definitely draw all the surrounding monsters in.

"... there's me kids, and old Sarah's nephew's family, ol' Billy and his five cousins, Lara and the midgets at her daycare, Mr and Mrs Smith... no, they vanished the day before yesterday..." Apparently it was a long list, and the old woman went through most of it as we navigated through slagged trailers, empty fields of ash, and the occasional crater.

The majority of the people she mentioned had left, or tried to escape and were blown up, or vanished in ones and twos every night, or developed combat powers and joined a resistance cell. Many still remained in the trailer park, at least according to the old woman, though my enhanced senses didn't pick up any. In fact, the only thing they could pick except for the fires and ruins were multiple odd cold spots following in our wake.

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"Granny Flores, are you sure this is the way?" I finally interrupted her musings as we approached the largest abandoned field yet.

"I can't see anybody around."

"Well, if you could see them the enemy would have killed them all long ago, aint it?" she cackled smugly then raised her shotgun and rapped at what looked like empty air.

"You need to be more perceptive and open-minded, dear. Honestly, youth these days." And at those words the whole field seemed to ripple. When my sight settled, the ripples affecting my enhanced senses as well, the field was no longer empty. A brunette woman a few years older than me stood next to an ancient television set with those bulky CRT screens who'd stopped being produced before I was even born.

Three dozen kids under the age of ten had their attention fixed on the screen, their eyes watching avidly the bold colors and rapid-paced action of a nineties superhero cartoon, not at all bothered by the desolation of their surroundings or the harried but fond looks the brunette was throwing at them.

Deeper into the field a dozen camping kitchenettes had been set up between a pair of bulky old barbecue grills where several men and women more than three times my age busied themselves with the making of a quick and dirty meal (emphasis on dirty). More still were huddling around an ancient-looking chessboard, their entire focus on the game at hand as much as any of the kids were transfixed by the old television.

All in all, almost a hundred people and half as many pets had gathered in the empty lot behind a magical screen so seamless my awareness could hardly pick it up after I'd been let through.

"Wennefer," the only person near my age greeted me frostily, most of her attention on the kids and the flickering old television. Now that I was actually looking, I could see that the television was not really working. It was not plugged into anything, its internals were completely unpowered, yet its screen still showed that old cartoon. Powers at work.

"Lara," I greeted the older girl in turn and her round face twisted in distaste. Back when we'd both been in middle school she'd been an aspiring socialite, me the little shit that refused to show anyone any deference. I'd never even learned her surname before she'd advanced into high school and we'd never seen each other.

"The illusion is your doing, I take it?"

"That's right," was her sharp response.

"We've had to hide out here. Security through obscurity." Two dark brown eyes fixed me like iron nails.

"High time central command sent someone to bail us out."

"Central command?"

"I call them like I see them," she shot back.

"The fuck is the world coming to, a city's worth of people depending on a ten year old." She looked at the oblivious kids once more, her fists clenching at her sides.

"I'm fairly sure Verity's only seven." Though no telling just how many times seven, if my suspicions were correct.

"You people ready to move?"

"No, not that it matters." Lara sighed, then sat down on a chair that hadn't been there a second before. Still wasn't, as far as my senses were concerned.

"We'll all be dead in an hour without help," she added, her eyes shifting from the kids to where granny Flores was convincing the chess watchers to start packing through judicious applications of kicks to their backsides.

"That is... a suspiciously specific hypothesis," I told her, scanning our surroundings as more cold spots approached.

"It's not a hypothesis," Lara shot back then the air twisted and the kids vanished behind another illusion, television set and everything. A split-second later, the closest cold spot transformed into a translucent, ghost-like individual that tried to stab me in the back. xxxx xxxx The ghostly blade slammed tip-first on my back and a screech like nails on a blackboard cut through the night. It ignored my super-suit as if it weren't there then was stopped cold by the Proximakinesis field that held me aloft.

A wave of cold radiated out from the point of impact, then seeped into every living thing nearby. To me it did less than a shallow scratch, but every blade of grass within two dozen feet died and blackened in a split-second. I punched out at the apparition but my arm met about as much resistance as trying to punch through a cloud of mist and the hostile spirit did not even budge.

Half a dozen more hot spots transformed into hostiles, their auras of cold adding to the pressure, an invisible fist trying to choke out all life. The grass was dying in a wider and wider radius, yellow-green leaves growing blown and brittle in moments, then black as if burned, then falling down to ash. The few pet animals that had survived the apocalypse so far started barking, hissing and whining as they tried to move away from the encroaching life-draining foe.

Almost a dozen shadows mobbed me, panes, blasts and fields of force from me dispersing them momentarily but causing no lasting damage. Ghostly daggers, spikes and wickedly clawed, twisted hands slipped through my full-body costume like bad smell through a grate. They scraped against skin and the cold seeped deeper into my limbs, slightly stiffening muscles and ligaments and adding an invisible weight that didn't feel physical at all.

An old man screamed across the field, such a howl of agony and despair it would fit a gutted and dying individual. A shadow hovered over him, not touching, merely glaring with eerily glowing eyes as the old man became paler and paler. Then the shadow exploded into flames as an area force adjustment multiplied the impacts of air molecules around it. The shadow screeched and recoiled, letting the man go while it slowly reformed its seared body.

"Get the hell out of here," I told any civilian that would listen, then focused my attention on the attacking shadows. There was not enough to spare for anyone else. The shadow that had made the old man scream and scramble away on his hands and knees reformed before me, fixing my eyes with its empty, dead glare. It didn't seem to be doing anything, until a pressure like a nail being hammered into my thoughts gave me a supernaturally bad headache.

A mini-thunderbolt from one of the trailer survivors caught the shadow in the throat, briefly setting it on fire before dispersing it completely. Unfortunately, there were a great many more cold spots, each one manifesting into an ancient soldier with ghostly arms and armor from Earth's distant history. Most of the newcomers were looking at the survivors with crimson eyes full of both malice and hunger, but all of them adjusted their courses and converged on me.

A dozen gave me their now patented glare, their presence adding more nails hammered into my thoughts. Unlike the now fleeing civilians, I did not falter, scream in agony or run away in abject terror, the weight and solidity of my thoughts, my identity and my will grinding the enemy immaterial attack to a halt. My limbs felt like they were made of lead, every step was as if through some ghostly marshland that wanted to suck me in and moment by moment more shadows arrived. Which made this a target-rich environment...