The Unstoppable (Chapter Four)

The Unstoppable

Chapter Four: How I Got the Snot Blown Out of Me... Twice.

I became everything.

As the blast overtook me, it didn't seem to destroy me but to scatter me. Suddenly I was everywhere, and seemed to be a part of everything. I could see from a thousand different angles and positions. I saw scattered desks, the two strange hunters, the debris from the blast all from nearly every possible vantage point.

I had become...slime.

I could see myself, too. I was a bland, flesh-toned ooze now. I seemed to be dripping from the ceiling, too disoriented to pull together, too overstimulated by the overwhelming rush of information flooding my mind.

My new friends didn't seem to have expected this. Wonder Woman simply stood with her mouth agape. "Dekken" stood with his right hand gripping his left wrist like a weapon. Light tendrils of smoke were rising from his left hand as they stood there. He looked like he wanted to try again, but wasn't sure where to aim.

I didn't much know myself what to do next, so I simply remained. I watched with my countless eyes, heard with an endless supply of ears, every bit of my body feeding me information. And I did not move. I found that while my newly viscous body was no longer a solid, it was not exactly a liquid either. It was something in between, infinitely malleable yet capable of movement and action.

So I had a novel idea, why not move?

The second I tried, the scattered bits and pieces of my body began to come together, reforming into one larger blob. I couldn't exactly seem to remember what was going on. I knew that I had once had a different, more solid shape. And I knew the two lifeforms behind me might want to hurt me. And I knew I could move really fast!

I could still see them behind me, as I zoomed away. Still dumbfounded by my sudden transformation. If I'd had a mouth or lungs at the time, I might have laughed at the sight of it.

"Andre!" the woman shouted after a moment. "He's getting away!"

Dekken swore and took aim again. I laughed silently in my head. That won't do you any good, I thought to myself, highly amused. The elevator, I would head to the elevator shaft. Flying down an elevator shaft sure sounded like fun!

However, as the euphoria coursed through my body, I began to feel strangely heavier, and I soon realized I couldn't move quite as fast. Bones suddenly popped up here and there, impeding my progress even further. A heart started beating somewhere inside me, making my whole gooshy body quiver.

Soon I couldn't see behind me, or feel anything but the worn carpet in my hands.

Dekken was standing quite close when I returned to human form. A disgusted look crossed his face as my limbs and head became distinct again. The man had lost his glasses at some point, leaving his narrow features exposed. Dekken raised his left hand to strike. I panicked and lightning shuddered down my arm.

He backed away quickly, taking aim from several feet off. I scrambled to my feet, surprised to find my clothes intact, although my hat and shoes were gone. A high pitched hum filled the air and Dekken's hand began to turn red-hot. I jabbed my finger into the elevator button, fear making little arcs of lightning dance from my fingertips.

The door opened, just as a second blast of energy flew my way. To my horror, there was no elevator inside, just an empty shaft. I jumped anyways, grabbing onto the pulley rope as I fell. The blast wave roared in from above, taking out the elevator doors (which tried to close with a "ding" after my leap) and the wall behind them.

And the rope onto which I clung. Debris rained down on me as I used all the momentum I could muster to grab onto a slender ladder lining the wall. Exhausted and weary, I began to climb back up.

It was time for this to end.

When I reached the area of destruction and climbed out into the elevator lobby, there was not a soul in sight. This struck me as odd, I'd expected to be attacked before I even made it this far. As I glanced around, I soon saw Dekken, out in the maze of cubicles, seemingly resting. He looked like he even had a can of pop in his hand. He waved to me from his seat.

"My turn!" A voice chirped from just a few feet away. The woman, whose name I still didn't know, was suddenly before me.

With a massive rocket launcher nearly as long as her leg.

Before she took aim, a small tornado began to form around me. It pulled me out through the hole where the elevator doors had been, out towards the world waiting below. Only when I was hovering over open air just outside the skyscraper, with the streets of Chicago bustling beneath me did she fire. Once I was helpless.

Doing my best to control and channel my fear, I focused a dart of lightning on the pathway the rocket would take to reach me. However, spinning in circles like crazy, all I could do was stab out over and over again and hope for the best. In the end, it detonated before it even left the building, ten feet between each of us.

The resulting explosion swatted me out of the air like a fly. I went flying right into another building looming not far away, crashing to the unpleasant sound of shattered glass. Another office building, this one untainted by an absurd battle.

"Who are these people?" I growled to myself as I dusted myself off. I was bleeding a little bit from a myriad of little cuts and scrapes, and my left arm was singed, but I was otherwise surprisingly unharmed.

They were still going to come for me, I knew that. I stood at the gaping hole in the office building, wondering how long it would take some sort of authorities to reach us. I wondered when I would be safe again, and when all the confusion would stop and the world wouldn't feel like it was moving beneath my feet, with or without me.

And mostly, I wanted a drink of water. I found a half-empty water cooler and greedily gulped most of it down, filling my little paper cup again and again, last of all dousing my tattered, singed body.

But no, I wasn't really tattered or singed. Just my clothes. I felt great, not an ache or pain to be found. I slowly sauntered back to the window. I'd given up on running. My only hope, it seemed, was to fight it out and hope for the best. I was hardly even afraid anymore.

When they did come, it was not the way I expected at all. Instead of just blasting their way in from the other building the way they'd done before, they snuck. They came at me from the level below and took the stairs. I never even saw them make a move until they got fairly close.

They stood about twenty feet off, obviously afraid to get too close. Dekken raised his palm, ready to fight again. The woman seemed to have lost her rocket launcher. She flashed me a tight-lipped smile. "You should have taken that cup of coffee," she smirked, sounding smug.

"You should have let me go." I raised my own hand, ready to take aim myself. All it took was a little fear, right? And I had enough of that coursing through my veins now. My heart thudded heavy in my chest, and I felt as if I were looking death itself in the face.

The expression on the woman's face didn't change, but she began to back up, looking as if she were about to take off running.

"Dekken, get him!" she cried to her silent attack dog. "Kill him now! I want this to be over with. Kill him!" She was losing composure now, as aware as I was that this couldn't drag on forever.

I turned nimbly and ran away, knowing if he fired now I would get knocked out the window at best and disintegrated at worst. When dying some manner of painful death is your best case scenario, it's never a bad idea to rethink your strategy.

Dekken fired anyways. He even managed to adjust his aim on the fly, and would have killed me handily but for the fact that his hand got slammed upward at the last possible second, sending an onslaught of fire into the ceiling.

Bits of detritus rained everywhere as I tried to make my way deeper into the building. I soon found myself running down a long hallway of cubicles with nowhere to go. I glanced back to see Dekken standing at the the other end of the low hallway, taking aim once more.

Desperate now, I raised my hand again and channeled all my terror into a bolt of lightning that leapt from my palm with a low crackling. It soared like an arrow from a bow straight towards the immense death ray erupting from across the room.

BA-BOOOOOOM!

Before I knew what was happening, a massive explosion plucked me right off the floor and hurled me through a wall. I flew through the drywall into another room, and then another. The second one was tile. It crumbled before me, launching me into one last room, this one unoccupied. I landed upside down, crashing on top of an ornate oak office desk, transforming the heavy wood into splinters.

Three walls. I flew through three in all.

Coughing up blood, I simply lay there, sputtering. Too afraid to move. Could I possibly be all right? I felt as though I should be dead, but I was hardly even in pain. Maybe that's what death is like, no pain...just an overwhelming flood of peace...

After a few minutes of just staring at the ceiling, watching the great clouds of dust shook up by our battle, I decided to try moving.

It was obvious right away that my left arm was broken. After all, it had taken the brunt of my final crashing, pinned beneath my body. Other than that, however, I was surprisingly fine.

Once again.

Miraculously unharmed, that was the phrase wasn't it?

As the fallout from the explosion began to settle, I could see that Mr. Andre Dekken hadn't fared much better than I had. It looked as if the entire floor had been blown out. When I stepped through the holes (too closely shaped like my body for comfort) I'd left behind, I found the initial area where we'd started was all but unrecognizable, stripped by the blast of anything resembling an office. It was down to support pillars and char.

As I glanced around, I wandered what had become of the two who had given me so much trouble. Cradling my broken arm, I walked towards the place where he'd been standing. All the windows were blown to bits, so I couldn't tell his exact exit point, but across the street I could see a telltale hole pockmarking the glass of yet another office building.

The fool'd been launched clear across the street.

I took a deep breath, whistling.

As I stood there taking stock, wondering why the police hadn't shown up yet, the woman stumbled out of hiding. How she'd survived, I had no clue. Maybe she could heal too. She grabbed me by the collar, hardly able to stand. Exhausted and disheveled, she looked truly spent. I still didn't know her name.

Katrina Berlix

The name popped into my head as easily as if I'd fished it out with my fingers.

"What? How do you know my name? How many powers do you have?" I hadn't realized I'd spoken the words aloud.

"Look what you did to poor Andre," she said, glancing out the window. "You win this one. They won't be able to hold the authorities back any longer." She glanced around. "You seem pretty indestructible, but if you're not...you'd better get out of here. I'm amazed the roof hasn't already come down on us."

Katrina started to walk away, but I grabbed her by the shoulder. "Wait." I turned her around, forcing her to look me in the eye. "Why were you trying to kill me?"

"Simple...because you wouldn't talk. If you won't talk, we have to kill you. Thought you were a member of the Seed. There's no such thing as neutrality in our world. 'Everybody's gotta serve somebody' right? Want some free advice? A reward for defeating us? Steer clear of Chicago. Get out of town now. If FBI or local PD doesn't pick you up, the Agency is going to, and you don't want that, trust me."

I didn't know what to say. What sort of world had I woken up to?

She flashed me a sad, defeated smile. "See you in another life. Take care of yourself."

With that, she ran for the edge of the building and leaped out into the open air. The wind seemed to prop her up somehow. She flew straight for the building where her partner now lay, presumably dead.

And I'd done that, hadn't I?

As I watched her fly away, I jumped suddenly when two hands grabbed me roughly from behind. Without a word they began to drag me towards what had once been a window.

"Quite the fireworks show you and your buddy just put on," a gristly voice snarled, vaguely familiar. The man from the diner. I couldn't remember his name. Had he given me a name? Not so friendly now.

One arm behind my back, the other twisted above my head. I yelped when he grabbed my broken arm. "Careful!" I cried, "My arm's broken!"

"No it ain't," he growled. Don't be stupid." And it wasn't. It hurt slightly from being twisted up, but there was none of the white-hot pain that comes from getting a broken limb shoved around.

"That's-that's impossible!" I stuttered as I tried to resist. I lost my footing and stumbled, my efforts nearly rewarded with a dislocated shoulder. None of my powers seemed to be working. I couldn't summon lightning, no matter how hard I tried, despite my fears.

"Why are you doing this?!" I cried in panic, resisting even harder. He had led me to the drop-off, and was beginning to tip me over the edge. The world below was waiting for me, a miniaturized sprawl of cars and pedestrians. Forty stories of air between me and the waiting ground below.

More than half my body was leaning over the edge when he spoke. "Ever seen one of those nature videos," the man from the diner rasped. "Where all the baby ducks jump out of a tree to learn how to fly? This is kind of like that."

As I plummeted, the air ripping at my hair and clothes, I heard the man cry out. "Quit being such a baby! I know you can fly!"