Страница 60 из 67
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 ca
Right behind the sword comes the ca
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 begi
It lowers the ca
I stand, the glowing knife still in my hand. The soldier pulls some sort of lever on the side of the ca
My knife strikes first.
The world vanishes. The shadows fade and the cold and the dark return as though they had never left. A vertiginous transition. I take a step backwards and fall. My eyes adjust to the dearth of light. I fix them on the dark figure of the soldier hovering over me. The ca
May it not be the last.
Something about being in the alternate realm has weakened me. I place my hand on a nearby tree to steady myself and catch my breath, only the tree is no longer there. I look around. All the trees surrounding us have collapsed into heaps of ash just as they did in the other realm, just as the Mogadorians do when they die.
I hear the roar of the beast and I look up to see how much of the school is left standing. But instead of the school there is something else, fifteen feet away, standing tall with a sword in one hand and a similar-looking ca
There is nothing I can throw, and the gap between us is too great to charge before it fires. And then its arm twitches and the sound of a gunshot rings through the air. My body instinctively jerks, expecting the ca
“That’s for my dad,” I hear behind me. I turn. Sam, holding a silver pistol in his right hand. I smile at him.
He lowers the gun. “They passed right through the center of town,” he says. “I knew it was them as soon as I saw the trailer.”
I try to catch my breath, staring in awe at Sam’s figure. Just moments before, in the first soldier’s blast, he was a decaying corpse sprung from hell to take me away. And now he just saved me.
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod. “Where did you just come from?”
“I followed them in my dad’s truck after they passed my house. I pulled in fifteen minutes ago and got swarmed by the ones that were already here. So I left and parked in a field a mile away and walked through the woods.”
The second set of lights we had seen from the window of the school came from Sam’s truck. I open my mouth to respond but a clap of thunder shakes the sky. Another storm begins to brew, and relief courses through me that Six is still alive. A bolt of lightning cuts the sky and clouds begin rushing in from all directions, being pulled together into one giant mass. An even greater darkness falls, followed by a rain so heavy that I have to squint to see Sam five feet away from me. The school is blotted out. But then a great bolt of lightning strikes and everything brightens for a split second, and I see that the beast has been hit. An agonizing roar follows.