Genre: YA Science Fiction
Word Count: Approx. 84,000
Status: Complete, seeking publication
Sequels: N/A
Word Count: Approx. 84,000
Status: Complete, seeking publication
Sequels: N/A
Synopsis:
Numbed and heartless, 21-year-old Sherman Logan has saved every life but his own. He's damn good at pelting in from between galaxies and rescuing as many people off their dying planets as possible for the Enders Agency, an interstellar first-responders team. Over. And. Over.
When Sherman’s last real friend and comrade goes starborn – or dies on the job – to save a suicidal man and his brave and beautiful daughter Bennette, Sherman falls for her hard. She wakes him from apathy - but waking means feeling the horror of every victim he didn't save. Soon, he discovers, the carnage won't end at his faraway deployments: Armageddon is about to hit right at home.
On Sherman's resident planet, a poltergeist ruler struggles to retake the podium from beyond the grave. It murders current officials and speaks through intercoms by eerily weaving together clips of its old speeches. Just when Sherman and his comrades realize they may be the only ones able to halt the phantom's violent course to resurrection, Ender agents begin to disappear. With Bennette's help, Sherman must confront the dictator-poltergeist and the root of these vanishings before they come for him too and destroy the Enders for good. On top of the uncountable death that haunts his everyday life, he'll have to venture deeper into his crashing universe – and himself – than he could have ever imagined.
But hey, apocalypse doesn't faze him. It’s his job.
Excerpt:
1
The vehicle jumps and knocks my hand off the wheel.
I slam it back. Sarge always says keep on the wheel. Don’t let go of the wheel.
Fuck that. Sarge ain’t here. The grey leather jerks in my grip and I keep my foot hard against the pedal. My eyes are dead ahead as the blizzard pushes us aside before I can jolt the wheel steady. But the bridge is falling apart beneath us; concrete crumbling from our tires into the steel colored ocean below. Hail flashes like daggers off the headlights.
I glance into the overhead mirror at the huddled children in the backseat. Siblings. They always give those to me for some reason.
“Sherm!” The mic attached to my shoulder buzzes.
Instinctively, I look out the driver’s window, expecting to see someone driving next to me. Unc’s two lanes over, looking asleep again. His wrinkly old hand holds the wheel and his eyes droop, but nothing stirs, no emotion when his car jostles past a rough pothole at ninety miles per hour. More concrete railing sinks into the sea far below.
Wasn’t Unc. Of course. I know the voice.
I scrunch up my shoulder and speak into the mic, keeping my eyes on the road as we finally peak at the bridge’s arch and head for the descent. “Talk, Grant.”
Fuzz. Heavy breathing as Grant messes with his shoulder sleeve to speak.
“What’re we gonna do if this thing blows?”
“I’m gonna die. What’re you going to do?”
Always freaks him out. That’s why Unc and I took the lead. Grant’s got the back of our fleet of cars, most of which have no idea where they’re going. But they trust us. What choice do they have?
Sighing, I cock my head back towards the mic.
“Sarge give a time?” I’d turned Sarge on mute as usual.
There’s a minute before Grant replies, and we’re careening down the bridge now. My headlights can’t penetrate the vortex more than ten yards ahead. The entire vehicle starts rattling as I whip the wheel back into place. One of the whelps behind me whimpers.
“Thirty minutes,” comes Grant’s choppy reply.
I give an irritated recoil.
“Till what, Grant? Till we leave or this planet blows the fu –”
BOOM! That thirty yards of road ahead of me? Gone.
“Shit!”
I heave the wheel at fatal speed, and that is it. My last End. The car hurls into midair and performs barrel-rolls. All I see are the digital radio numbers, 98.6, staring pink at me while I swirl through the hurricane/blizzard/apocalypse.
But it’s not my last End. All four tires land at once and I shout for the kids to eject. I ram open the door and roll out before we can rocket into anything deadly. That’s why I never let my cargo wear seatbelts.
I fall upon wet, freezing ground, already crusted with ice. The kids listened. Saved their lives, because I suck in sharp, cold air, jump to my feet, and watch our vehicle crash against a concrete toll booth, the bars lowered between booths to prevent passage. Glass shatters to the ground with the sound of a thousand chandeliers breaking. Other vehicles meet a similar demise. Our entire fleet. Some screech around to halts, leaving angry tire tracks in the road, and others –
I duck. A car flies right over my head.
Its airborne collision into the toll booth pierces my ears. But there are other sounds. Car doors bursting open. Commanding voices marshaling over the panicking ones.
Sometimes, I wish I could panic like them. Wait for a hero better than me to come save them and take them back to the docks on Sector V. But nope. We’re the Ender’s Agency from a solar system you’ve never heard of. We get off our asses and save planets and people and puppies and shit. Grant’s got his Ender contract framed in his dorm and I probably used mine to roll up something better.
I glance around, catching my breath as the hundred or so souls we were able to shepherd stumble out of vehicles. They hang off of each other, some showing courage and others with vomit on their knees. And then my eyes drop to the children assigned to me, the ones without parents. They hold each other tearfully but look up with shaky strength, knowing they must obey me if they’re to survive. There’s an older brother who my eyes hesitate on and the little girl is clutching the paw of a pale, ratty stuffed hare.
“Sherman.” The voice is breathless. I look up, squint against the whipping ice bits. The lankiness of Grant jogs over to me. His real name is Ulysses, but with a crap name like that we just call him Grant. Unc started it. He’s from Earth.
An ear piece is dangling from Grant’s ear but of course my eyes only jump to his missing front tooth. He lost it a few Ends ago, and he’s damn smart, but it makes him look like a hick.
“Where’s the ship?” I say, hoping we can run it from here. Grant pulls out a beeper that’s just audible over the roar of the wind and reads the screen.
“It’s here,” he says. He points a hand past the toll booth but keeps his eyes on the device. “Just past the –”
And there’s Sarge, hollering in Grant’s ear. Even at a warble he makes my blood race.
But when Grant looks up, registering whatever the bastard is saying, I narrow my eyes suspiciously.
“Something on the radar.” Grant takes a step towards the toll booth and I pivot around to watch after him, letting the ice breathe into the back of my neck. The sound of the ocean far behind us bowls against the collapsed bridge; angry waves that rear into the air. “He can’t tell,” says Grant. “It’s either a landslide or…”
Lava.
Planets are huge, tough balls of rock and I’m not saying everything is always completely obliterated but the time we leave it. But if whatever’s going on is enough to wipe out most of their little specks of life, we go. And from what I’ve seen, everything on those planets – including its people – go freaking insane when it’s time. Weather doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing. Quakes wobble the plates, every volcano in existence usually regurgitates something hot. We’ve lost a couple men that way. They definitely feel it before they go.
A large jutting rock stands at the bend in the road just past the toll, its peak invisible in the raging blizzard. The sky is demonic. Brewing with hellish glow past the mountain, Jurassic looking. I step up slowly next to Grant and wait, breathing ice in and out. Not speaking. I shake my wrists at my sides, watch the bend at the mountain…
In just a few seconds, we’ll know whether it’s a landslide or whether oozing lava is going to trap us here. I’m bobbing on my heels now, I need to move…
The rock at the mountain edge illuminates in red.
Grant and I both curse and reel around.
“Let’s go!” I shout, shoving him in the shoulder.
“What the hell are you suggesting?” Grant pants, but all I can think about when he talks is how cold his mouth must be with that gap letting all the wind in. Unc, with his bored, sleepy eyes and ear lobes seeming to droop down to his jaw observes our approach with a little more attention than usual, waiting to heed Sarge’s order.
“Just get in the cars. Everyone.” I turn and skip backwards, yelling at the disoriented people to get back in the vehicles they’d just abandoned. “CARS! NOW!”
And then I fumble out the silver rod at my belt – a standard-issue Forcreator – and rattle it like a can of spray paint. I punch the button.
Like painting the air, a purple ribbon strokes over the space before me with a sound of waving energy. Moisture from the wind presses against the translucent force field. Seconds later, it recedes into the atmosphere, beginning from where I’d first drawn it.
Just testing. Wondering if Unc, Grant and I could use this to shimmy the lava away while we lead the others through like we’ve done on a few caveman-planets. It’d be messy. So I reach for the door handle of someone’s car instead.
That someone rips me back, thrusting with both hands. I stagger, choking on the subzero in shock.
“Did you see that?!” he says.
I glare at the man, processing his insanity. It happens. A lot. You see friends die, your world twisted up into a nightmare overnight, and strangers from outer space land and try to shuttle you to their ship while leaving the planet to expire. The trauma is too much for some people, but they’re dangerous. Stupid people are dangerous. Weak people are lethal.
“You see all those people?!” the man cries again, pointing towards the crashed cars piled up under the toll booth. “I ain’t getting in those again! You’re the devil! You are! They’re probably what started all this!” He’s scaring the others, who listen to him. “YOU DID ALL OF THIS!” He launches for me again but Grant grabs him and forces him back. “THEY DID THIS!” He tries to kick Grant. “THEY PITCHED OUR KIDS RIGHT TO HE–”
I silence him with a bang of my gun.
There’s a gasp, and Grant looks at me as the dead man slinks through his grasp. I hold Grant’s gaze for a challenging moment and holster the gun.
“Let’s go.”
Grant’s heated after that. Not speaking to me. Tense at my side as we swing ourselves into cars and expect our salvaged humans to follow. Unc revs his engine first as a father carries his daughter into the back of Unc’s car and then our mics are raving. I can hear Sarge through Grant’s speaker, he’s so loud.
“GODDAMMIT, I SAID GO THROUGH IT! LOGAN! YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
I smirk and twist the keys in the engine. I like bothering him.
“Where we going, Sherm?” Grant is controlled but bitter. That lava is gaining on us.
Going through would easily kill half of them. It’s moving too fast. So I do what I want.
“My way.”
The wheels spin in place for a whole three seconds before I propel off. I completely forgot about my cargo, but when I flash my eyes to the mirror again, they’re there in the back seat like loyal dogs, the older brother holding his sister and her hugging the bunny. My eyes hang there for a second longer than they should’ve.
The path around the mountain is narrow. Wasn’t even a real path until I made it one. The fleet has to follow single file, and my left wheels even eat up the slope at one point. I unconsciously lean into it to keep from tipping into the ocean. As if my weight will make a difference.
“Dammit, Sherman!” Grant shrills in my mic. “I’m gonna fall! I swear I’m gonna –”
“Shut up,” I spit back at him, clenching my fist harder over the wheel. He’s not falling.
And now we sink or swim.
The path ends in a ledge. Straight into a cove. But I can see the water seethe off rock in places – it’s not deep. A shore on the other side.
I vroom over the edge. White water surges up the windshield. The kids shriek their disagreement. Should’ve bunked with Grant. I stamp the pedal harder, like pumping a heart back to life, and pulse the engine, keeping my wheels spinning in the water to catch any traction – anything. My heart gives a kick when I feel a release beneath us, the water beginning to float us, draw us towards sea. I jack the lever on my right and switch gears, stomping on the pedal.
We move.
The car jostles along, hitting stone in the watery grove, rocking us side to side, but then I hear the scrape and crunch of gravelly shore and we’re free.
“WHOOP!” I yelp, making sure Grant hears loud and clear in the mic.
I see another car plunge behind me and drive right on through.
Just in time too. More blasts rumble up the mountain slope. I do a double-take above me, catch an orange glare off the crystal ice falling on us.
Lava trickle.
I turn my eyes ahead once more as I curve around the mountain to where Sarge is waiting with the ship.
Not a mountain. A volcano. My bad.
As soon as I see the enormous black oval of our ship, Ella May, hovering with a visible, whitish aura beneath it, I realize we have less time than I thought. Meteors of burning rock soar from the volcano and explode off the black wing. Sparks trail off the wing and embers crumble to the ground. Sarge is probably furious. That lava is spreading around the entire base.
This is usually the part where I pound hundreds of backs (on a good day), bark everyone up into the ship. We’re racing, because the sky has been set on fire; burning masses filling the air as the volcano combusts; terrifying rumbles as tons of stone tumble down its side. The very ground feels unstable.
This planet is going down.
Minutes.
I don’t get to board until my boots glow with orange from the lava seeping across the ground, sweat making the clothes stick to my skin as if I’d just submerged in the sea.
And then I blanch.
My cargo.
“KIDS!” I scream to Grant, who’s hopping himself up the final step of the ship. He looks at me fiercely, bewildered, and shakes his head.
My vision locks on the car.
They’re in there.
I curse, pelting off with my head down.
Like advancing death, lava seeps around me, the pungent smell of burning rubber suffocating as cars are swallowed by the goo. Papers and other trash scattered around burst into flame that leaps and sizzles out, and I tear open the car door.
I’m about to cuss them out when the little girl’s helpless sob stops me.
Her brother is unconscious. Must’ve hit his head in the nosedive. Maybe they should have worn seatbelts this time.
“Come on,” I order, trying to keep my voice from being like Sarge. “Get out!” I snag the boy and practically toss him over my shoulder. With this heat, I would do anything for that blizzard again, but the temperature melts the snow before we can even see it in the sky.
“LET’S GO, LET’S GO!” Someone in ship is yelling, and believe me, I’m charging as fast as I can carrying this limp sack of human flesh that could be the reason I become a torch. But then the pats of my feet become clanks and I’m inside, passing the boy to Grant and turning to fling in the girl.
She drops her bunny.
I hit the wall and sit, dropping back my head and breathing with my mouth open. Sweat makes my eye twitch as it drips down.
“LET’S MOVE!” someone shouts, cutting off into another room as the ladder begins to recede. The little girl cries hysterically for that little bunny, its black, innocent eyes looking up sadly at its owner. Lava proceeds to make it glow in unholy light.
I look down at it pitilessly, and with a spurt of fiery energy, ready to leave this world to die, shove the sliding door closed.
Grant, on his knees, swoops down a hand, catches the stuffed bunny, and throws it into the ship before the doors can close. The little girl, choking on tears, falls forward for it.
Still on his knees, Grant looks over and meets my eyes. He breathes hard at me, furious, and holds his gaze there.
I return his glare as the craft begins to rise.
Numbed and heartless, 21-year-old Sherman Logan has saved every life but his own. He's damn good at pelting in from between galaxies and rescuing as many people off their dying planets as possible for the Enders Agency, an interstellar first-responders team. Over. And. Over.
When Sherman’s last real friend and comrade goes starborn – or dies on the job – to save a suicidal man and his brave and beautiful daughter Bennette, Sherman falls for her hard. She wakes him from apathy - but waking means feeling the horror of every victim he didn't save. Soon, he discovers, the carnage won't end at his faraway deployments: Armageddon is about to hit right at home.
On Sherman's resident planet, a poltergeist ruler struggles to retake the podium from beyond the grave. It murders current officials and speaks through intercoms by eerily weaving together clips of its old speeches. Just when Sherman and his comrades realize they may be the only ones able to halt the phantom's violent course to resurrection, Ender agents begin to disappear. With Bennette's help, Sherman must confront the dictator-poltergeist and the root of these vanishings before they come for him too and destroy the Enders for good. On top of the uncountable death that haunts his everyday life, he'll have to venture deeper into his crashing universe – and himself – than he could have ever imagined.
But hey, apocalypse doesn't faze him. It’s his job.
Excerpt:
1
The vehicle jumps and knocks my hand off the wheel.
I slam it back. Sarge always says keep on the wheel. Don’t let go of the wheel.
Fuck that. Sarge ain’t here. The grey leather jerks in my grip and I keep my foot hard against the pedal. My eyes are dead ahead as the blizzard pushes us aside before I can jolt the wheel steady. But the bridge is falling apart beneath us; concrete crumbling from our tires into the steel colored ocean below. Hail flashes like daggers off the headlights.
I glance into the overhead mirror at the huddled children in the backseat. Siblings. They always give those to me for some reason.
“Sherm!” The mic attached to my shoulder buzzes.
Instinctively, I look out the driver’s window, expecting to see someone driving next to me. Unc’s two lanes over, looking asleep again. His wrinkly old hand holds the wheel and his eyes droop, but nothing stirs, no emotion when his car jostles past a rough pothole at ninety miles per hour. More concrete railing sinks into the sea far below.
Wasn’t Unc. Of course. I know the voice.
I scrunch up my shoulder and speak into the mic, keeping my eyes on the road as we finally peak at the bridge’s arch and head for the descent. “Talk, Grant.”
Fuzz. Heavy breathing as Grant messes with his shoulder sleeve to speak.
“What’re we gonna do if this thing blows?”
“I’m gonna die. What’re you going to do?”
Always freaks him out. That’s why Unc and I took the lead. Grant’s got the back of our fleet of cars, most of which have no idea where they’re going. But they trust us. What choice do they have?
Sighing, I cock my head back towards the mic.
“Sarge give a time?” I’d turned Sarge on mute as usual.
There’s a minute before Grant replies, and we’re careening down the bridge now. My headlights can’t penetrate the vortex more than ten yards ahead. The entire vehicle starts rattling as I whip the wheel back into place. One of the whelps behind me whimpers.
“Thirty minutes,” comes Grant’s choppy reply.
I give an irritated recoil.
“Till what, Grant? Till we leave or this planet blows the fu –”
BOOM! That thirty yards of road ahead of me? Gone.
“Shit!”
I heave the wheel at fatal speed, and that is it. My last End. The car hurls into midair and performs barrel-rolls. All I see are the digital radio numbers, 98.6, staring pink at me while I swirl through the hurricane/blizzard/apocalypse.
But it’s not my last End. All four tires land at once and I shout for the kids to eject. I ram open the door and roll out before we can rocket into anything deadly. That’s why I never let my cargo wear seatbelts.
I fall upon wet, freezing ground, already crusted with ice. The kids listened. Saved their lives, because I suck in sharp, cold air, jump to my feet, and watch our vehicle crash against a concrete toll booth, the bars lowered between booths to prevent passage. Glass shatters to the ground with the sound of a thousand chandeliers breaking. Other vehicles meet a similar demise. Our entire fleet. Some screech around to halts, leaving angry tire tracks in the road, and others –
I duck. A car flies right over my head.
Its airborne collision into the toll booth pierces my ears. But there are other sounds. Car doors bursting open. Commanding voices marshaling over the panicking ones.
Sometimes, I wish I could panic like them. Wait for a hero better than me to come save them and take them back to the docks on Sector V. But nope. We’re the Ender’s Agency from a solar system you’ve never heard of. We get off our asses and save planets and people and puppies and shit. Grant’s got his Ender contract framed in his dorm and I probably used mine to roll up something better.
I glance around, catching my breath as the hundred or so souls we were able to shepherd stumble out of vehicles. They hang off of each other, some showing courage and others with vomit on their knees. And then my eyes drop to the children assigned to me, the ones without parents. They hold each other tearfully but look up with shaky strength, knowing they must obey me if they’re to survive. There’s an older brother who my eyes hesitate on and the little girl is clutching the paw of a pale, ratty stuffed hare.
“Sherman.” The voice is breathless. I look up, squint against the whipping ice bits. The lankiness of Grant jogs over to me. His real name is Ulysses, but with a crap name like that we just call him Grant. Unc started it. He’s from Earth.
An ear piece is dangling from Grant’s ear but of course my eyes only jump to his missing front tooth. He lost it a few Ends ago, and he’s damn smart, but it makes him look like a hick.
“Where’s the ship?” I say, hoping we can run it from here. Grant pulls out a beeper that’s just audible over the roar of the wind and reads the screen.
“It’s here,” he says. He points a hand past the toll booth but keeps his eyes on the device. “Just past the –”
And there’s Sarge, hollering in Grant’s ear. Even at a warble he makes my blood race.
But when Grant looks up, registering whatever the bastard is saying, I narrow my eyes suspiciously.
“Something on the radar.” Grant takes a step towards the toll booth and I pivot around to watch after him, letting the ice breathe into the back of my neck. The sound of the ocean far behind us bowls against the collapsed bridge; angry waves that rear into the air. “He can’t tell,” says Grant. “It’s either a landslide or…”
Lava.
Planets are huge, tough balls of rock and I’m not saying everything is always completely obliterated but the time we leave it. But if whatever’s going on is enough to wipe out most of their little specks of life, we go. And from what I’ve seen, everything on those planets – including its people – go freaking insane when it’s time. Weather doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing. Quakes wobble the plates, every volcano in existence usually regurgitates something hot. We’ve lost a couple men that way. They definitely feel it before they go.
A large jutting rock stands at the bend in the road just past the toll, its peak invisible in the raging blizzard. The sky is demonic. Brewing with hellish glow past the mountain, Jurassic looking. I step up slowly next to Grant and wait, breathing ice in and out. Not speaking. I shake my wrists at my sides, watch the bend at the mountain…
In just a few seconds, we’ll know whether it’s a landslide or whether oozing lava is going to trap us here. I’m bobbing on my heels now, I need to move…
The rock at the mountain edge illuminates in red.
Grant and I both curse and reel around.
“Let’s go!” I shout, shoving him in the shoulder.
“What the hell are you suggesting?” Grant pants, but all I can think about when he talks is how cold his mouth must be with that gap letting all the wind in. Unc, with his bored, sleepy eyes and ear lobes seeming to droop down to his jaw observes our approach with a little more attention than usual, waiting to heed Sarge’s order.
“Just get in the cars. Everyone.” I turn and skip backwards, yelling at the disoriented people to get back in the vehicles they’d just abandoned. “CARS! NOW!”
And then I fumble out the silver rod at my belt – a standard-issue Forcreator – and rattle it like a can of spray paint. I punch the button.
Like painting the air, a purple ribbon strokes over the space before me with a sound of waving energy. Moisture from the wind presses against the translucent force field. Seconds later, it recedes into the atmosphere, beginning from where I’d first drawn it.
Just testing. Wondering if Unc, Grant and I could use this to shimmy the lava away while we lead the others through like we’ve done on a few caveman-planets. It’d be messy. So I reach for the door handle of someone’s car instead.
That someone rips me back, thrusting with both hands. I stagger, choking on the subzero in shock.
“Did you see that?!” he says.
I glare at the man, processing his insanity. It happens. A lot. You see friends die, your world twisted up into a nightmare overnight, and strangers from outer space land and try to shuttle you to their ship while leaving the planet to expire. The trauma is too much for some people, but they’re dangerous. Stupid people are dangerous. Weak people are lethal.
“You see all those people?!” the man cries again, pointing towards the crashed cars piled up under the toll booth. “I ain’t getting in those again! You’re the devil! You are! They’re probably what started all this!” He’s scaring the others, who listen to him. “YOU DID ALL OF THIS!” He launches for me again but Grant grabs him and forces him back. “THEY DID THIS!” He tries to kick Grant. “THEY PITCHED OUR KIDS RIGHT TO HE–”
I silence him with a bang of my gun.
There’s a gasp, and Grant looks at me as the dead man slinks through his grasp. I hold Grant’s gaze for a challenging moment and holster the gun.
“Let’s go.”
Grant’s heated after that. Not speaking to me. Tense at my side as we swing ourselves into cars and expect our salvaged humans to follow. Unc revs his engine first as a father carries his daughter into the back of Unc’s car and then our mics are raving. I can hear Sarge through Grant’s speaker, he’s so loud.
“GODDAMMIT, I SAID GO THROUGH IT! LOGAN! YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
I smirk and twist the keys in the engine. I like bothering him.
“Where we going, Sherm?” Grant is controlled but bitter. That lava is gaining on us.
Going through would easily kill half of them. It’s moving too fast. So I do what I want.
“My way.”
The wheels spin in place for a whole three seconds before I propel off. I completely forgot about my cargo, but when I flash my eyes to the mirror again, they’re there in the back seat like loyal dogs, the older brother holding his sister and her hugging the bunny. My eyes hang there for a second longer than they should’ve.
The path around the mountain is narrow. Wasn’t even a real path until I made it one. The fleet has to follow single file, and my left wheels even eat up the slope at one point. I unconsciously lean into it to keep from tipping into the ocean. As if my weight will make a difference.
“Dammit, Sherman!” Grant shrills in my mic. “I’m gonna fall! I swear I’m gonna –”
“Shut up,” I spit back at him, clenching my fist harder over the wheel. He’s not falling.
And now we sink or swim.
The path ends in a ledge. Straight into a cove. But I can see the water seethe off rock in places – it’s not deep. A shore on the other side.
I vroom over the edge. White water surges up the windshield. The kids shriek their disagreement. Should’ve bunked with Grant. I stamp the pedal harder, like pumping a heart back to life, and pulse the engine, keeping my wheels spinning in the water to catch any traction – anything. My heart gives a kick when I feel a release beneath us, the water beginning to float us, draw us towards sea. I jack the lever on my right and switch gears, stomping on the pedal.
We move.
The car jostles along, hitting stone in the watery grove, rocking us side to side, but then I hear the scrape and crunch of gravelly shore and we’re free.
“WHOOP!” I yelp, making sure Grant hears loud and clear in the mic.
I see another car plunge behind me and drive right on through.
Just in time too. More blasts rumble up the mountain slope. I do a double-take above me, catch an orange glare off the crystal ice falling on us.
Lava trickle.
I turn my eyes ahead once more as I curve around the mountain to where Sarge is waiting with the ship.
Not a mountain. A volcano. My bad.
As soon as I see the enormous black oval of our ship, Ella May, hovering with a visible, whitish aura beneath it, I realize we have less time than I thought. Meteors of burning rock soar from the volcano and explode off the black wing. Sparks trail off the wing and embers crumble to the ground. Sarge is probably furious. That lava is spreading around the entire base.
This is usually the part where I pound hundreds of backs (on a good day), bark everyone up into the ship. We’re racing, because the sky has been set on fire; burning masses filling the air as the volcano combusts; terrifying rumbles as tons of stone tumble down its side. The very ground feels unstable.
This planet is going down.
Minutes.
I don’t get to board until my boots glow with orange from the lava seeping across the ground, sweat making the clothes stick to my skin as if I’d just submerged in the sea.
And then I blanch.
My cargo.
“KIDS!” I scream to Grant, who’s hopping himself up the final step of the ship. He looks at me fiercely, bewildered, and shakes his head.
My vision locks on the car.
They’re in there.
I curse, pelting off with my head down.
Like advancing death, lava seeps around me, the pungent smell of burning rubber suffocating as cars are swallowed by the goo. Papers and other trash scattered around burst into flame that leaps and sizzles out, and I tear open the car door.
I’m about to cuss them out when the little girl’s helpless sob stops me.
Her brother is unconscious. Must’ve hit his head in the nosedive. Maybe they should have worn seatbelts this time.
“Come on,” I order, trying to keep my voice from being like Sarge. “Get out!” I snag the boy and practically toss him over my shoulder. With this heat, I would do anything for that blizzard again, but the temperature melts the snow before we can even see it in the sky.
“LET’S GO, LET’S GO!” Someone in ship is yelling, and believe me, I’m charging as fast as I can carrying this limp sack of human flesh that could be the reason I become a torch. But then the pats of my feet become clanks and I’m inside, passing the boy to Grant and turning to fling in the girl.
She drops her bunny.
I hit the wall and sit, dropping back my head and breathing with my mouth open. Sweat makes my eye twitch as it drips down.
“LET’S MOVE!” someone shouts, cutting off into another room as the ladder begins to recede. The little girl cries hysterically for that little bunny, its black, innocent eyes looking up sadly at its owner. Lava proceeds to make it glow in unholy light.
I look down at it pitilessly, and with a spurt of fiery energy, ready to leave this world to die, shove the sliding door closed.
Grant, on his knees, swoops down a hand, catches the stuffed bunny, and throws it into the ship before the doors can close. The little girl, choking on tears, falls forward for it.
Still on his knees, Grant looks over and meets my eyes. He breathes hard at me, furious, and holds his gaze there.
I return his glare as the craft begins to rise.
