West Coast Issue 8

Loren Perez

"Dangerous"

Screams and cries woke me up. My clock read a quarter past four.

Val was gone. I didn't want to get up but my mind questioned what woke me up. Still in bed, I slid up to the blinds and bunched them open. Fires burned in the cafeteria and people were running around outside in the driveway between my dorm building and the complex across the street.

Loren.

"Ms. Lexis?"

Yes. My brother and Drake need your help.

I nodded. Ms. Lexis read my mind and knew my answer. I threw my covers off and ran to my closet, yanking my robe from a hanger. Wrapped, I disappeared out the door.

The early morning was cold. People were running everywhere. Our school was around eight-hundred and it was a chaotic mass of fear. Everyone was up, out of their beds trying to male heads or tales of what happened.

"Help!"

A voice to my right screamed. I looked, my eyes adjusting to the blaze across the street. Under a huge piece of cement was a girl. She was about my age.

"Can you help me?!" Panic from her slanted eyes crippled. "Hello?!"

"Yeah!" I snapped back to the disaster and hurried over to her.

"I can't lift this… but."

I drifted back to my training. Eyes shut, I concentrated on the black bacteria in my veins. When I opened my eyes, everything was darker, blacker.

"What is going on?!" I scared the girl more, blood dripping from the side of her mouth.

"Just trust me." I placed my hand on the huge cement slab. The black hue of my palm stretched its way over the surface of the rock. I struggled for control of the little guys, keeping them from turning the victim underneath to dust.

The chunk dissolved into a black powder, floating away on the currents of heat coming from the cafeteria complex.

"Oh my god!" The girl was in excruciating pain. From the look of it, the slab had crushed her lower organs. Internal bleeding wreaking its course. "Am I going to die?" Tears streamed from her blue eyes.

"Not if I have a say-so." I closed my eyes again. This time, I summoned the beautiful contradiction to the prejudice I had been cursed. "This won't hurt, but the after-effects are unsettling."

The girl was still, her legs probably shattered. She didn't reply. I searched my body for the white bacteria. Once under my control, I opened my eyes. I looked her body over, plotting a mental course for them to heal. The girl's eyes beamed white. The white in my hand exploded and the glow changed my vision to a cloudy white.

I felt her body jolt as bones restructured and popped back into joint on the backs of my little power. The skin closed around her legs and then the insides rumbled. In seconds, the girl was whole.

She rolled over and threw up on the sidewalk. That was the only bad part about my power. The bacteria is always rejected by the body and needs a quick exit.

The girl cried.

"You're better. Get out of here and get help if you can. I need to go." I pushed off the sidewalk.

"I can't thank you enough."

I didn't answer. What can you say to something like that?

I sprinted across the street and into the cafeteria. The heat was unlike anything I have ever felt before. I thought my eyebrows vanished in seconds. I bet they did.

"Loren!"

Drake's voice. I started to cry.

"Drake! Ms. Lexis told me you needed me!" I scanned the open room of burning tables and chairs. Plastic burned the building hot. I couldn't see him.

Across the room, I saw his pitch form come blasting over, through the fiery air. He carried two bodies with him. Drake's black hand grabbed me and ripped me out of the building the way I had come. With the weight to great, we tumbled out into the street.

My arm caught as I rolled, popping my wrist and elbow on the asphalt.

"Aaaahhhh!!" I squealed in pain.

"Loren!" Drake flew over to me, lifting me from the ground.

"I think," wincing in pain, I coughed out the words. "I think its dislocated."

"Can you still heal?" His night blend was still covering his entire body.

"I can try. Why? It won't work for me, you know that."

Drake floated over to one of the people he carried out of the burning building. Britnie Terrance. Her arms were bloody, wrinkled with burns. Up her neck and in various spots, her clothes were singed to the charred skin underneath. She looked dead.

"Oh no!" I looked up into Drake's eyes. "Set me next to her."

Once he set me down, a loud crash from the building pulled our attention. Drake and I looked, seeing a form burst from the roof, wood and metal shattering. The fireball engulfing the person sizzled out as it hit my dorm room, crashing through the wall.

Another form screamed, jumping from the rubble. A girl. Blonde hair and the pitch of the scream labeled her Karinn. She landed on the pavement next to us, holding Val.

"Help them!" Karinn's eyes glared at me. Val wasn't burned, just shaken. "Okay you bastard! Time to pay the piper!"

Karinn Smallwood exploded from the street, ripping through floors of the dorm, at an angle, like paper.

Val looked to Britnie and then looked me in the eye. "Karinn had a lot of coffee."