Chapter Seven
By all rights, I should've woken up in a quiet field with a kindly farmer standing over me. He would take me to his house to meet his wife and kids. They'd feed me and give me a place to sleep and eventually decide to adopt me. Reality? Reality never happens as it ought to.
I regained consciousness to the sound of sirens and yelling. Policemen swarmed the site, and paramedics scurried around checking on people. My eyes closed again. My head felt like fire. Someone was talking to me, yelling in my face.
"Can you hear me? Hey, can you hear me? She's unconscious again, someone get an oxygen mask." The mask was forced onto my face. Pure oxygen rushed through my lungs, and my mind snapped back to reality, bright and cold.
"What happened?" My words were muffled and distorted through the mask.
"Shhh, you're all right. We're gonna get you to the hospital." He waved someone over, and they started rolling the stretcher I was on towards an ambulance. I freaked out and started kicking and trying to roll off the stretcher, but all I managed to do was knock off the oxygen mask.
"Wait," I yelled, "just hold on one second," the words sounded strange and unintelligible. The stretcher stopped rolling, and one of the guys reached out to put the oxygen mask back on.
"No, wait. I need to get up," my speech was definitely slurring. The man who had been there when I woke up, rubbed my shoulder soothingly, "There, love." I caught my breath as I noticed the subtle British accent for the first time. "You have a nasty concussion, and your speech is slurring. Just lay still and let us take care of you." I took a deep breath and forced my mouth to form the words, "What are they doing?" I pointed to where there were firemen gathered around a collapsed building, digging and pulling away debris. The paramedic seemed to understand what I said and answered, "There was someone in the apartment when it collapsed. We're hoping that she gets the same miracle that you did." He explained when he saw my confusion, "A massive bar fell right on you but stopped millimeters above you. We still don't know what was keeping it from crushing you. We're also not sure how you got a concussion. Nothing even touched you." I was trying to get up but fell back half unconscious. This seemed to recall the paramedic to the situation at hand.
"Just lay still. We'll get you to the hospital." Last effort, I rolled off the stretcher. The paramedics yelled in surprise and started trying to get me back on. I waved them off, "Leave me alone, I'm okay." And really, my speech was clearing up and my eyesight was getting sharper. The second paramedic with a sharp voice and a decidedly un-British accent started berating me for making it hard on them. I stopped struggling and turned to the British paramedic, "What's your name?" He was a bit taken aback but answered, "Dylan."
"Dylan, will you please ask your friend to back off?" He hesitated. "Right now." He nodded at the other paramedic who moved away muttering. Without him yelling in my ear, my head cleared some.
"Listen, I don't need medical assistance and I don't want medical assistance. I am allowed to refuse to be taken to the hospital, right?"
He hesitated again, "I guess that kind of depends on how old you are. No offense, but I'm not sure that you are quite eighteen."
I feigned surprise, "Of course I'm eighteen. In fact, I turn nineteen in two months." I tried my best to look mature. "You understand that you could have brain damage. We really need to get you checked out."
"Yeah, I get it. But I am officially refusing medical assistance. Don't worry, I'm not gonna sue you or anything."
He shrugged, "Fine then." I carefully pushed myself to an upright position and then started slowly standing up. Dylan offered me a hand and I used it to steady myself. I couldn't remember exactly how I had gotten here, but I knew that this had to be my fault and that I had to help. I took a moment to assess the situation. It was a large two-story apartment complex, but only the two apartments on the end had completely crumbled. The two that directly connected to them were partially wrecked, but it looked like anybody in them could easily have survived. I quizzed Dylan about who had been in the building at the time.
"Nobody was in the top apartment, but there was a girl in the bottom one. Her parents were at work, but she had come home from school."
"School? How old is she?"
"Six." My body went numb. A six-year-old girl was trapped under tons of rubble and could be dead. I dropped to the ground and reached my hand out. I felt through thousands of air molecules. I felt the breath of the bystanders, I felt the jerky breathing of the sobbing woman who must be the mother. I felt the air molecules being dragged through the lungs of the heavily breathing diggers. Forcing my senses beyond them, I felt the slightest motion in the air in the middle of the wreckage.
"She's alive," I breathed. I tried to find out what kind of position she was in, but my grasp on the molecules was weak. I pushed myself up and started stumbling closer. A policeman stepped in front of me and held me back.
"What do you think you're doing? Nobody is allowed past here." I tried to push past him, tried to explain that I was here to help. I wasn't thinking clearly enough to convince him, and he was getting irritated. Dylan showed up and grabbed my arm. He started explaining to the officer, "I'm dreadfully sorry. She's had a nasty concussion and went a bit daft." He pulled me away. A yell came from the building. I jerked around in time to see the entire wreckage shift and fall in. The sobbing mother screamed and the rescue crew stood back in shock. I jerked away and sprinted towards the building, energy pumping through my body. Policemen started running towards me to stop me. With an extra burst of adrenaline, I pushed everybody away from the building. Now that I was close, I could effortlessly feel the breath coming from the girl.
"She's still alive," I yelled. The policemen had regained their feet and they all had their guns pointed at me.
"Stand down. Put your hands above your head, no sudden movements." I didn't have time to try to reason with the law. I threw up a wall of air to keep them away from me and started working on the girl. I could feel a large beam laying on her legs as well as smaller debris covering the rest of her body. I experimentally blasted the beam with a gust of air, but thousands of pounds of other debris lay on top and I couldn't even budge it. This was bigger than anything I had ever done. My thoughts dropped to my lower back and I gently touched the hard patch next to my spine. I knew that I might not physically be able to do this. I wondered if I should just let the rescue team keep working on it. The wreckage started shifting again, and I knew that the girl wasn't gonna survive if I didn't do something now. The memory of being in the car with Paul flashed through my head, and I remembered the feeling of power that had surged through my body, sending me flying. Reaching deep, I tried to summon that power again. A moment of calm surfaced as I focused all my energy on the girl. Then chaos arose as with a single blast, every beam, brick, and piece of drywall stood straight up and fell outwards away from the girl. Lightning shot up my back and I hit the ground like a rag doll, blacking out for the fifth time that day.
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Steve leaned over Natasha's shoulder, "Find anything?"
"I've barely started looking, Rogers. Give me a few seconds, I'll find her." Steve moved back and looked over to Bucky who was sitting on a couch staring at the ground.
"Well, don't take too long." Natasha huffed and looked over at Bucky. "What's so important about this girl exactly?" she murmured, quiet enough so that Bucky couldn't hear.
"I don't know. I think he's using her as a coping mechanism. He remembers everything, and it's crushing him. Finding this girl is a distraction for him."
"Everything?" Her voice dropped even lower, "Even Howard Stark?"
Steve gave a terse nod and whispered, "I've heard him apologize to Howard twice now when he thinks I can't hear him."
Natasha raised her voice to a normal level, "I'm searching security camera footage for anyone close to your description. We should be able to find her in a few minutes."
"That won't work," came from Bucky.
"What?"
"She has some kind of protection system that blocks her from security cameras," he informed them.
"Great. Plan B, then." She started typing. She clicked around and started scanning through news reports of strange occurrences. Both Steve and Bucky gathered around as she sped through videos of reporters.
"Stop. That one." Natasha stopped and rewound to the start of the video. A female reporter was narrating footage of a collapsed apartment building. Policemen were gathered in a semi-circle around a girl with her back to them. Their guns were drawn and they seemed to be pounding on some invisible surface in front of them. The camera zoomed in, getting closer to the girl.
"That's her. That's Cassie," Bucky said. The collapsed building began to shift and move. Something exploded, and debris shot everywhere. The reporter was freaking out as much as the people on the ground who were screaming and running for safety. The cloud of dust settled down, and the news cameras zoomed in on a small girl lying in the middle of a circle of clear space. Paramedics swarmed in, gently and quickly tending to the girl.
"Where did she go?" Natasha rewound the video a few seconds and put it on slow-motion. Through the cloud of dust, they could see a giant beam fall directly on top of Cassie as she crumpled to the ground. Steve winced, "I'm sorry, Buck."
Bucky growled, "You're not getting out of this search that easily. We don't know she's dead, and I have reason to believe that she's alive." Steve and Natasha met eyes and shook their heads. Then Natasha turned back to the computer, "Alright, that was in Virginia, about two hundred miles away. This feed was live about twenty minutes ago, and I have something that can get you there in ten minutes." This time, Steve and Bucky exchanged glances.
"Okay," Steve said, "let's go."
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Paul pushed himself off of the gravel. He cursed as pain shot through his body. He walked back towards the road. A mangled pile of metal marked where his car had slammed into a minivan face on at sixty miles per hour. A pool of blood trickled out of the shattered window of the minivan. Oil from a broken fuel line mixed with the blood, turning it a murky brown.
"It's a good thing that brat threw me out of the car," he muttered.
His phone screen was shattered, but it still turned on. He brushed a few shards of glass off of his hand as he waited. The phone beeped and a red dot appeared on the screen.
"Virginia? The brat covers ground fast. Sorry, kid, you're not getting away that easily." He pushed the phone back into his pocket and pulled a matchbox out. He bent over and looked through the window of the minivan to the broken corpses hanging by their seatbelts.
"No hard feelings," and he dropped the burning match into the puddle of bloody oil. The mound of metal and plastic combusted, and the stench of burning flesh filled the air. As he walked away, Paul patted his pocket where his phone was, "Don't go anywhere, freak. I'm coming to find you."