April 10, 2032
The Creator walked through the concentration camps at the front of the Peak City with his hands behind his back. Everything was held still in time. A line of refugees with their hands and feet shackled to chains were frozen in a walking stance with their front or back foot still in the air. The Nazi guard who was screaming at them from behind had his mouth open with the spittle held in mid-air. He walked past the group that was being lead through a pathway between fences that divided the various ghettoes in the area. He approached one of the fences and raised his hands towards it. The device around his wrist glowed and the metal of the fence turned to rust before disintegrating to ash. He moved forward through the ghetto and a ray of red light flashed in his right eye. He blinked it rapidly and realized that it had come from a sniper fitted with a laser sight which had been aimed in his direction. He looked up at the recon of the many recons that were held frozen in pace and dotted all around the concentration camp. He raised his hand towards him and the recon moved in a rewind motion turning and walking to the other side of the watch tower before the Creator stopped him with his device.
He observed the starving people with blue cross armbands that barely stuck to their bony arms and the hopelessness in their eyes. A group of them were eating dry pieces of bread dipping it in mucky water and their hands were held in mid-air with some of the breads dipped inside the water or inside their yellow-teethed mouths. Many of them just stared in the distance with empty eyes while others who were too weak to move were laid down on the ground waiting for death. The Creator felt no pity for them. He never felt pity for any human.
He continued his way forward by disintegrating another fence. He looked above at the late afternoon sun which was encased inside a V formed by an unmoving school of birds in flight. He approached a yard where Nazi soldiers were lined up in front of Jews consisting of men, women and children tied against wooden beams with their eyes widened in fearful anticipation and mouths either open in screams or closed in hopelessness. The soldiers had rifles in their hands from which bullets had already been fired and were frozen in a pattern in front of the Jews. The Creator walked through them, fast forward or rewinding the bullets to remove them from his way. He noticed how one of the bullets was stuck halfway through a woman's skull with her eyes moving upwards. He fast forwarded the bullet into her skull saving her from some of the piercing pain she would feel when it would penetrate. I'm feeling generous today, he thought.
He approached a facility that was at the center of the concentration camps. He raised his hand towards the door which slide open. This was where the gas chambers were where the Jews, criminals, blacks and homosexuals were executed by trapping them in a room and administering in a deadly gas to kill them. A gassing procedure was already taking place and the Creator stood in front of the glass where a group of Nazi soldiers and man dressed in white lab clothes stood. He looked through the glass at the room which was covered in a sickly, green yellow gas. The prisoners inside were grabbing at their throats as they struggled to breathe. Their bodies were frozen in convulsions, their mouths drooling and few of them were vomiting.
He ventured deeper into the facility and found more people dressed in white lab clothes frozen in walking stance in the corridors while others were conducting all sorts of experiments in the rooms of which the convicts were part of. The Creator did not care for what was happening in the facility. It was not what he was for.
He approached a door with a warning sign at the front saying Zutritt verbotenDO NOT ENTER in front of which two guards stood alert. He raised his hands and the doors slid open and the guards rewound away from the door. He entered inside and found himself in a long corridor which led to another set of guarded sliding doors which led to elevators. He slid open the doors and faced an empty elevator shaft. He raised his hands and rewound time so that the elevator would rise to the open sliding doors. There were two people inside the lift and he rewound time making them exit the elevator.
He lowered the elevator which covered a great distance underground. They have certainly taken extreme security measures to ensure that the Red Army cannot sabotage the chamber, thought the Creator to himself. He opened the doors and found himself in a huge underground bunker. The place was teeming with people in lab coats held into place like mannequins observing the chamber at the center of the room.
The chamber consisted huge control panels at the bottom with screens that displayed data and information which the researchers were observing intently and writing in their notepads. At the very top of this was the chamber of which the glass sliding doors were white with frost. The respawner was frozen inside to the extent that he could not move and yet he retained his consciousness. There were thick metal spears that were dug into each part of his towering body that were electrically charged preventing him from making any movements. His bald head glistened in the frozen chamber.
The Creator approached the chamber looking at the respawner inside and smiled. He was about to conduct an experiment and the anticipation of the results always made him happy. He enjoyed the excitement that he felt when he was about to investigate he did not know. These moments were rare now since there was not a lot he did not know. An anomaly had entered this world for the first time since the New World Order. He could easily remove the glitch but he had to know what it did before he acted against it. He wanted to know how he had entered the system. He would know the moment he let out the respawner. He would know the powers and limits of the anomaly when he faced him. Creator raised his hands to the glass door and it broke apart. He took a piece of the glass and aimed it at the towering Evan's heart. Or maybe I'm just feeling generous, he thought.
"Welcome back, Evans," he said and thrust the blade forward.
Michael was on his way to Elena's cabin with the pendant in his hand that he had bought from the vendor at A4 alongside the customs office. That's when he noticed a Nazi guard staring at him. The guard had been giving him the same suspicious look for a week with his finger on the trigger of his rifle. Michael looked away from his gaze and hurried forward. What's up with that guy?
Michael had moved out of Chuck's cabin and had found a cheap place at B1 of which he had heard from one of the miners. Things had been awkward between him and Chuck at work with them ignoring each other. He did not like it but there was no way he was going to be friends with someone who did not respect Elena. He owed her his life. Any enemies of her were his enemies as well.
As he was heading to the clinic, red lightning flashed from above followed by the booming sound of thunder. He stared at it with fixation wondering what was happening along with the people nearby looked up in frozen, fearful silence. He had heard of red lightning before but the sight of it had been bizarre. It was not normal. All around people were running away from the peak in panic. It was followed by deafening sounds and Michael saw debris and chunks of rocks were falling from the mountain. He could hear painful screams along with the deafening sounds of the bullets' impacts. Elena! Michael ran towards the clinic as fast as he could.
Red light flashed through the window and Elena almost dropped the thermometer in her hand. It was followed by the sound of thunder and bullets. She had been checking up on a mother and ran towards the window.
"What was that?" asked the mother, Laila.
Elena could see the peak of mountain E and watched in awe as rubble from the top fell in a landslide.
"What's going on?" asked Laila in a shrill voice. She got up and joined Elena at the window.
"I'm really scared mommy," said her daughter Sidra clutching onto a teddy bear. She slowly walked towards her mother.
"My God!" exclaimed Laila in a shrill voice. "We had better get out of here!"
Elena spotted something else among the falling landslide. It looked like a person who was sliding down. And what was that in his hand? It was huge. That's when the Nazis from the watch towers starting shooting at the person and Elena knew it was the respawner. At the same time, the respawner started firing wildly back at the outposts. He held a huge minigun in his hand that was half the size of his towering body. It was the same one which had killed her mother…
A whole series of the erratically-fired bullets headed straight for their clinic. Elena and Laila watched, frozen in horror, unable to comprehend the situation. One of the bullets burst straight through the clinic's window. Elena felt the scorching heat of it burn into her skin as it shot past her barely grazing her. She fell to the ground grabbing her shoulder while screaming in pain.
But her screams were drowned out by the screams of someone else. Elena looked up through clenched eyes and saw Sidra on her knees crying. She was reaching out with her hands towards something and yet she kept resisting. Elena's eyes shot open when she saw the corpse. It was as if someone had put a bomb inside Laila's body and it had detonated. Blood and chunks of Laila's body were spread all over the room. Sidra was screaming and kneeling before her mother's lower body which had been kept intact. Her teddy bear was on the ground and the brown fur was soaking her mother's blood, slowly turning red.
Instinct kicked in and Elena ran forward and picked up Sidra who started thrashing and screaming.
"My mother! Please, help her!" pleaded Sidra thrashing her body.
"We have to go now," said Elena grabbing her stuff and heading for the exit.
"You're a healer! Please, please, you can heal anything."
Elena closed her eyes. It was like a painful déjà vu for her. She remembered how she had been in a similar position when her mother had died. She still heard her screams of pain in her nightmares when she lay hidden in the corner of the basement of their house. She had urged her mother to stay with her then but she had insisted on going up to check if the respawner had gone. She wished she had tried harder, she wished she gone with her mother. Maybe dying with her would have been better than living like this and being a curse to everyone around her. But she was only a kid back then, scared out of her wits to do anything other than lay cowering and pray. And now she saw the same pain in the eyes of this little girl as she cried and screamed for her mother.
Elena heard more cries of horror intermixed with the sounds of destruction as she ran outside. Her shoulder still stung and she could still feel the burning pain. But the sight of the other destroyed cabins made her forget the pain. No, no, no. No! She ran to the nearest cabin and saw that the whole roof had fallen into the structure. It was the cabin where Amanda had been. As she came closer, she saw a wheelchair standing upright right beside the debris. That was Kenneth's wheelchair, she thought. But where is h-? She let out a cry of horror when she saw his brown shoes peeking out from the debris. They were still attached to feet…
"No, no, no! Amanda! Amanda!" she screamed as she approached the cabin. She put down Elena, who fell to her knees, and tried to lift the fallen debris away. It was too heavy for her but she still tried. She knew it was impossible but she could not accept that Amanda had died. She was crying as she thought of all those times when Amanda had helped her to get over Chuck. Elena had found her annoying because her ideals did not match hers but she cried for her now. She was one of the only people who had cared. Another victim had fallen for her curse.
She felt a hand on her shoulder from behind and realized it was her Uncle Joey. He had a hard, wrinkled face with silvery hair though he was either wearing a wig or had dyed his hair black. He was wearing a Nazi uniform, the one he always wore when he was here on missions in disguise. He never told her what exactly was the work he did. He lifted her up but she fought back. No, she could not leave Amanda behind.Maybe she's still alive underneath.
"Uncle Joey, you have to help me!" she screamed. "There are people there."
"We don't have time," Joey protested. "We can't help them, Elena. You know that. C'mon-" But Elena refused and continued fighting back.
Then her gaze turned to the other cabin where a whole section of the wall had torn down. She saw blood splattered on the windows which made her vomit. Diamond had been assigned to the cabin and to her relief the door open steadily. She watched as Diamond crawled and pushed open the door. There was a look of great pain on her face and she was straining hard. Then she stopped suddenly and lay there, face-down, with the door wide-open. Elena ran up to her and screamed as she saw that Diamond's lower body had been chopped off. There was a large red stump in place from which blood gushed down and dripped down to the ground. She traced the red trail of blood from her body and saw chunks of Diamond's lower body realizing that the bullet had completely destroyed it.
Diamond had been the hardest worker in the clinic. She was the one Elena depended on the most because she always got the job done. She had been a nurse at the hospital where her dad had worked as well. Diamond was a single mother of two children: one of whom worked at the mines while the other worked in the farm. Her eyes watered at the thought of what her children would react to this horrifying sight that was their mother. No, no, this was all too much to bear. Why do people near me always die?! She did not know what to do. The lightning and sounds of destruction had not stopped and she wished they would envelop her. She could not handle all this. She felt the hands on her shoulder and Joey's voice filtered through her screaming.
"Elena!" he yelled. "Elena! We have to get out of here! Elena! They're dead, they're gone. You can't do anything for them!"
But Elena refused. No, she was not going to leave this place. This was her life, these people who had died here were her life. She was not going to turn her back to them like all this was insignificant.
Then she looked around to the Sidra. The little girl was still crying kneeling on the dusty ground. She looked around at the lightning and destruction and jolted at the sounds of thunder and explosions. The people in the clinic were dead.
Except Sidra.
She could not let her die either.
She got up to her feet and wiped away the tears. She ran up to Sidra and lifted her in arms squeezing her into her body so that she would not have to see the horror around them.
"We have to get to the exits at A1," he yelled. "My truck is at a garage in Denver. We can escape from there."
Elena nodded and followed her uncle as he led them down the roads which were packed with people fleeing towards the destroyed city. The place that the people of the city despised the most was now the safest area in the zone. Sidra was still crying for her mother with Elena trying her best to comfort her. She felt terrible for leaving all those dead bodies behind at the clinic. She felt she needed to do something. Even if it was piling their gory remains and giving them a funeral. Something. She should have done something. Said a few words maybe? It wasn't right leaving like this but she knew she had no choice.
They crossed the bridge between C2 and B2 as she followed Joey through alleys and reached the courtyard. She saw people and soldiers alike injured or dead on the ground. Elena wanted to blur them out and run for her life which made her feel terrible. She was a healer. These people needed her. That's when Elena noticed that the people were running away from the mountain exits rather than towards and she knew that the respawner was cutting them off the exits. She could hear explosion after explosion along with the respawner's lightning. People were dying. And she was powerless to do anything. Before she could move a single muscle, a red blinding light flashed before her eyes.
She quickly grabbed the little girl and hid behind nearby barrels. She peeped from the side and saw her mother's murderer grinning.