I enjoyed writing The Protest, about Fang's fans,but felt pretty concerned about the characters, considering what happens later in the series. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how they could possibly survive. And of course, I like the chance to tie up loose ends Patterson left lying around.
So here it is: the first chapter. This is the first longer fic I've done in this fandom. This gets off to a slow start, but some canon characters will appear later on.
Stacia was on TV during the protests, and then she was on TV again when a reporter interviewed her. The reporters liked to focus more on Brynn. People liked Brynn. It was odd. Usually Stacia, the cheerleader, was the one who got all the attention, while quiet, bookish Brynn faded into the background. Stacia didn't mind giving up the spotlight for a little while.
They kept a scrapbook of the Flock. Stacia cut out pictures from the newspaper when the Flock visited Congress. She and Brynn watched the opening ceremony for the Lerner School for Gifted Children.
"Do you think the lizard girl is there?" Brynn asked from the comfort of the couch.
"Probably. She'd have to be."
They thought about the lizard girl a lot, but they never heard anything about her again. Stacia really hoped she was okay.
They even followed the fairly boring trials of the Itex scientists who were arrested. Marian Janssen, the Director, was the most dramatic. She looked all dirty and messy in the news pictures. Some scientists, like Jeb Batchelder, testified against her.
The height of the craze was when Stacia's grandparents took her and Brynn to the CSM airshow in Tallahassee. They saw the Flock flying in person.
After that, things kind of . . . changed. People started posting crazy things, and then vanished from the blog comment section. Omar was one of them. There were rumors about something called a Doomsday group, and the possibility of having wings of their own.
When they heard about Omar going missing, Brynn's mom banned her from the blog. She said it was becoming a bad influence and anyway the Flock was out of control and no one was parenting them. Stacia's grandparents didn't pay as much attention, so Stacia kept reading the blog and sharing updates with Brynn.
The Flock had changed. There were rumors that they'd had split up before, but most people thought it was probably a tactical thing, all part of the plan. This didn't seem like part of a plan. Fang pointedly avoided the subject in his posts, even when people asked about it in the comments.
But he posted that he was looking for kids with powers. And then pictures and videos started to appear, and there was Fang with strangers. 'Fang's gang.' There was a girl who looked like Max, with short, pink-streaked hair, but she wasn't Max. News articles still popped up about the Flock, but Fang was gone and in his place was a kid named Dylan.
It was clear to Stacia and plenty of others what had happened. Fang and Max had broken up.
But Brynn wasn't allowed on the blog anymore, and Stacia kept up with it less and less. Maybe she was outgrowing it.
On January 1, her family headed north to go skiing in Colorado. Just Stacia, Grandma and Grandpa. They offered to take Brynn, but her parents already had plans.
On January 9, sometime between midnight and morning, a meteor broke up in Earth's atmosphere.
Stacia woke up to find her grandparents watching TV, sitting close. Her grandmother twined a rosary through her fingers again and again, drawing the beads tight.
East coast, west coast, both flooded by massive waves. Stacia's heart turned loose and jello-like and she grabbed for her phone.
Brynn did not answer her cell. Or her house phone. A pleasant robotic voice said, "The number you have called is not in service at this time."
The TV played footage of meteorites tracing glowing paths against the sky. When Stacia looked out the window, she saw the sky shimmering. The clear blue from yesterday was gone.
"Is the world ending?" Stacia asked at some point. She'd always thought the end of the world meant Jesus coming back. But the world still existed. There was no triumphant trumpet-call signalling a final end. There was no end. The world dragged on and on, dying but not yet dead, never dead.
They turned to the internet on Grandpa's laptop, and saw news of bombings. Some news sites had already shut down as their servers lost power. Whole countries went dark.
One of the surviving servers was the host of Fang's blog. From the days of the Itex protests and that one infamous post where Fang explained the By-Half Plan, the site had kept a survivalist side as well as an environmental one. Kids talking about what to do in case of a zombie invasion, or whitecoat invasion, or what have you.
Well, now it had happened. And Fang's blog became a hub of kids and even adults trading information.
Fang wasn't posting anymore. He hadn't posted since before the Event. He'd lost his connection to the Internet, like so many others—or, more likely, he was just dead.
Switzerland, of all places, apparently had the entire population living in fallout shelters. Getting to Switzerland, however, was a bit of a tall order.
Freak weather kept Stacia's family isolated in the hotel. Guests and workers bailed, heading out on a crazed quest to get to their loved ones—and as time went on, the quest for food became more pressing. One worker came back inside with his face bloodied and eyes blackened, to tell news of groups serving the One Light. Just kids, barely teenagers, but armed with guns and shooting whoever they saw in a sadistic counting game. And something about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse?
A few people in the hotel were sick. Grandma and Grandpa and Stacia decided to lay low, rarely leaving their room, living mainly off breakfast bars and bottled water. They rationed it carefully. The weather had gone nuts, avalanches all over the ski course, but they figured they could wait it out. The hotel was still pretty safe.
Then Grandma got sick.
Grandpa went out to try to get medicine and supplies.
"Take care of your grandma," he told Stacia. "I'll be back soon."
But he didn't come back. That day or the next.
Stacia went downstairs to look for him and possibly some more food. The hotel manager was no longer answering his door. Someone cried in one of the hotel rooms, gut-wrenching screaming sobs, and when Stacia knocked, the person howled for her to go away.
In the lobby, the glass windows had been smashed. Drifts of snow covered the floor and the air was freezing. She heard guns firing off in the distance a few times, and she knew the gangs were around again.
She checked the hotel restaurant, but it was locked up tight. They would find no food there.
Grandma was coughing constantly now and was too weak to even get up.
And Stacia wasn't feeling great either. Red bumps swelled on her skin. One day, when she was trying to open some of their last crackers, one of the bumps burst. It didn't heal.
At some point she crawled into bed with Grandma, who didn't respond. She closed her eyes tightly. Sleep offered her a way out of the now-gnawing hunger.
Some time later, she opened her eyes blearily and saw a figure leaning over her, in a gas mask. She hurt all over, aching all the way down to her bones.
A green-gloved hand sank a needle into her arm, and she lost consciousness.
