The awakening, p.60
The Awakening, page 60
part #1 of Eve Series
scratchpad, which was sitting on the podium in front of him. “Now, I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want creatures like EmmaLynn Kingpin
destroying this beautiful planet.”
A holographic image of the Earth was displayed from his scratchpad,
rotating majestically. The words “Save Our Planet” wrapped themselves
around the globe, complete with a pink heart. Eve swallowed the revolting
lump in her throat, and out of the corner of her eye she could see JJ’s face contort into an ugly, loathsome glower. JJ then pulled out her scratchpad and began tapping at the monitor.
“Now, while her peers are focused on their rigorous studies, EmmaLynn
Kingpin chooses to center her attention on reproduction,” Travis added, sending Eve into a state of sickness. Again the cartoonish representation
flashed across the back wall, and the speaker cast a wicked grin in Eve’s direction.
“You see, chimeras aren’t mentally developed enough to understand the
complexities of human intimacy. Instead, they breed whenever the urge
presents itself. They’re like animals in that sense, and EmmaLynn Kingpin is no different. She’s a victim of her own raging sex drive.”
Just as the caricature was about to do God knows what, though it was clearly
suggestive, the figure froze. Eve and her classmates glanced back at Travis as
the image flickered once and then disappeared completely. Travis tapped at his
scratchpad, which seemed to be disagreeing with him, and smiled at the class.
“It looks like there’s been some sort of malfunction. I can fix it.”
He ran his fingers along the monitor, but still nothing happened. The
classroom filled with the sound of whispering, but Eve found herself more
interested in JJ, whose face was glued to her computer, her hands racing back and forth across the monitor.
A new sentence was projected across the front of the classroom:
THERE HAS BEEN A //GLITCH\ IN THE SYSTEM.
The murmurings in the classroom intensified, and Travis became sweaty and
nervous. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on here,” he stammered.
An intense moan sounded in the lecture hall, the noise so loud that it surely
could be heard all the way down the corridor. And with it, a holographic image
appeared from Travis’s scratchpad, life-sized and centered in the middle of the
room: it was two women, both extremely well-endowed and completely naked,
engaged in the most graphic act of cunnilingus that one could imagine.
The classroom erupted into gasps, shouts, and roaring laughter, but still the
pleasured groaning of the pornography was much louder than the resulting
reaction. Travis’s face turned ghostly white, and he stared at Gupta in horror.
“I swear, I have no idea how this is happening!”
Suddenly, another hologram appeared beside the existing one: a man and a
woman, screwing in the most obviously inauthentic manner, the woman’s
breasts jiggling with each thrust, the man donning a victorious smirk. Beside them appeared another couple, and then another, and then a threesome, until the
entire front of the room was filled with so much porn that Travis struggled to
find a place to stand that didn’t leave him in the middle of some act of sucking,
licking, or penetration. He stared in horror at the class.
“THIS ISN’T MINE!” he cried. “I SWEAR, IT ISN’T MINE!”
JJ laughed to herself, and for a moment Eve tore her eyes from the vulgar
scene and instead watched the hacker at work. An instant later, all of the holograms disappeared, and the back wall of the room lit up with a screen shot
of Travis’s scratchpad. A small cursor toggled through various files until it pulled up a tiny folder that read, in all caps: TRAVIS’S PORN— KEEP OUT.
The image was maximized, and then maximized again until the letters filled the
entire wall. Travis glared at the classroom, his face changing from white to red.
“WHO’S DOING THIS?”
Again the wall went blank, but only for a moment. A video immediately
appeared, this one of poor quality and obviously homemade, and within
seconds it was clear that the star of the film was none other than Travis Braverman himself.
The boy looked awkward, his body sweaty and his face distorted into an
expression of either lust or constipation—it was hard to tell, but judging by the
uncomfortable female floundering beneath him, Eve settled on the former. A
series of muffled grunts were uttered by both parties, and after a few
intolerable seconds, Travis let out a long, relieved groan and flopped down onto the girl.
“Three minutes?” the girl griped, her voice stifled by his doughy body.
“Really, Travis?”
The class was in hysterics. Gupta waved his arms frantically as he tried and
failed to control his students, and Eve just remained in her seat, staring in shock at JJ’s self-satisfied grin. With her chin held high, the hacker stood from
her seat, casually strolled toward Eve’s desk, and gazed down at her wide-eyed
classmate.
“Oh, don’t give me that look,” she scoffed.
Without another word, she plopped a small box onto Eve’s desk and left the
lecture hall, leaving behind the pandemonium she had created.
Eve looked down at the box in front of her. She slowly removed the lid, and
in an instant her eyes grew large once again. Inside was a brand new scratchpad
cube—sleek, lightweight, fitting easily into the palm of her hand. Attached was
a handwritten note, and she quickly unfolded it:
Here’s one thing I know how to fix. Still working on everything else.
Eve activated the computer, watching with admiration as the jet-black
paneling unfolded into a large, thin screen. She could tell that JJ had made it by hand, as Eve’s initials, EJK, were engraved along the bottom of the monitor, and as the screen brightened, she noticed that the desktop itself was empty aside
from a single folder, titled: In Case You Change Your Mind.
Eve clicked on the file and found a long list of documents: combat
strategies, weapon schematics, and surveillance footage, all revolving around
the Interlopers.
Class ended early, thanks largely to JJ, and Eve was soon headed for Hand-
to-Hand Combat. She forced Number One and Number Two to wait outside the
athletics arena. “Don’t tell me you’re going to follow me into the locker room,”
she teased. “Want to help me change my clothes, too?”
Though her jibes were innocent, they were laced with rancor. She tried to
deny it—to tell herself that everything was fine, that the day was almost over and thus her cares were few—but truthfully, she was dreading this class most of all. With trepidation, Eve dashed down the corridor, hoping to slip into the
locker room unnoticed, but her attempts were in vain, as she knew they would
be. Waiting for her beside the gymnasium doors was Jason.
He stared at her, his arms crossed and brow furrowed. Eve stopped for a
moment, glancing involuntarily in his direction before refocusing her attention
on the locker room. With a deep breath, she continued on past him.
“Eve!” he barked. She ignored him.
“EVE!” He hurried toward her. “I’m talking to you!”
She stopped in front of the locker room and immediately let out a loud sigh.
Reluctantly, she turned around. Jason stood directly behind her, his gaze sharp
and his jaw clenched with a transparent bitterness she had never seen in him before.
“What do you want, Jason?” she asked.
“What do I want?” he repeated, his words lathered with offense. “Are you serious?” He threw his hands into the air. “You’ve been ignoring me for almost a week now. What the hell has gotten into you?”
Eve picked at her cuticles. “You’re angry.”
“Yeah, great observation, Eve. I’m angry.”
She looked over his shoulder at the gym. “We’re going to be late for class
—”
“You don’t get to do this,” he spat. “You don’t get to just walk away without
having the decency to let me say what I have to say.”
“Fine. Say your piece.”
“What happened that day…” He paused and leaned in closer to her. “That
was bullshit. You got scared and you bailed.”
“You’re right. I was scared.” She stared at him, her eyes brimming with both irritation and sadness. “You almost died because of me, Jason. I can’t let you pay the price for the cross I bear.”
“That’s my decision. Not yours.”
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“By pushing me away?” He glared at her. “I’m a big boy, Eve. I can take care
of myself.”
Eve stared emptily at the floor, trying her best to think of something,
anything to say, but she came up with nothing. She looked up at Jason, and again her thoughts became a convoluted mess, so warped with swirling
emotions that she loathed the idea of even trying to sort through them. Jason stared at her, and suddenly his angry brow became softer, as if weakened by the
look in her eye—the look that spoke whatever words she was failing to say.
“Look, I need to know,” he said at last, quietly. “When you said it’s over…”
He paused. “Were you talking about us?”
“I…” she started, and for a second she thought that she might cry. She closed
her eyes. “I don’t know.”
“I meant what I said that day, Eve. You and me—that’s what I care about. We
don’t have to fight if you don’t want to. We can forget about the Interlopers.
But I don’t want to lose you.”
Her lips parted, but again she didn’t speak. She looked back at Jason; his face
was a deep shade of red, and she wondered if perhaps he was stifling the same
swell of emotion that she was. Slowly he backed away.
“Promise me you’ll think about it, okay?”
And with that, he disappeared into his locker room. Eve exhaled deeply, her
breath wavering in a way that made her hope to God that no one heard it, and
then she, too, ran into her fortunately empty locker room.
After taking a moment to still her nerves, Eve quickly changed into her
uniform and headed out to the football field. Ramsey started class with laps, and though Eve relished the thought of releasing her stress through a
formidable workout, the sight of Jason in her peripheral vision left her feeling
hollow and overwrought. Though they were clearly at the head of the pack,
they didn’t sprint together—Jason trailed behind her the slightest bit for the entirety of their run. Perhaps he was making an effort to give her space, or perhaps he was simply too angry to share the path with her, but still she could
feel his gaze, and that alone both pained and comforted her.
“KINGSTON!”
Eve flinched; Ramsey was pacing at the opposite end of the track as he often
did. He crooked a finger at her, and she quickly trekked across the field to his side. When she arrived, his eyes were pointed at his clipboard, and he rustled
through a series of wrinkled pages.
“Your times are good, Kingston. Looks like I won’t be failing you after all.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
They stood together in silence, Ramsey’s gaze still pointed down at his
work. Eve fidgeted in place and anxiously shoved her hands into her pockets.
“Is that all, Captain?”
“Of course that’s not all. You think I’d interrupt your run to tell you ’bout your goddamn grade?”
Eve waited for him to continue, but he remained unusually quiet. She took a
quick peek at the clipboard in front of him and noticed that the paper he was staring at so intently was completely blank.
“You know, I took you for a lot of things, Kingston: A fighter. A warrior. A
hell-raiser. But a quitter?” He growled to himself. “That one caught me by surprise.”
“It’s complicated, Captain.”
“It’s always complicated, soldier.” He finally dropped his clipboard to the ground. “But you muscle through it, ’cause you have to. ’Cause it’s your job.”
“With all due respect, it’s not my job, Captain.”
“Who else is gonna do it then?” Ramsey countered. “The patrolmen? Furst?
Hell, what about Lionel-shitstain-Vandeveld? Want him to do it?” He spat on the turf. “No one else is gonna do it. No one else can do it. But you can—and that makes it your job. I know you know that.”
Ramsey stopped abruptly; his clipboard, lying in the grass, trembled as if suddenly stirred to life. Eve felt it too—the shaking of the ground like an earthquake—and then she heard the distant boom and the hum of faraway
screams.
She turned and stared in shock at the sight that met her from across campus.
A massive cloud of grey and black smoke had erupted into the sky, billowing
high above the buildings and spreading through the air. Then a series of
shrieks sounded from afar, and her blood ran cold: one Interloper, two, ten, countless more were circling the distant destruction, their wings beating as they soared through the smoke and disappeared among the campus buildings.
Another rumble shook the field, this one followed by a thundering
explosion, louder and much closer. Eve stumbled over the quaking ground and
watched as the Billington gates were engulfed in roaring flames. A stampede of
students poured from the nightmarish scene, their faces white with terror and
streaked with ash, but Eve was transfixed by the swarm of Interlopers who
followed them—the aliens who, one by one, dove down past the wreckage and
plucked the students from the ground with their razor-edged talons.
The third eruption was a shock—a wall of fire tore through the football field
bleachers, the explosion itself so powerful that Eve could feel the heat right down to her bones, as if it were only inches away. As she stared at the cloud of
smoke and flames, a single body—a man in the same black uniform as hers—
torpedoed through the air, propelled skyward by the force of the explosion. In
an instant, Eve channeled her gift and raised her hands, catching her classmate
with her melt and quickly lowering him to the ground.
Eve frantically surveyed the scene before her. The field was now packed
with students, some in combat uniforms and others emerging from God knows
where, all scattering in different directions. Nearby, an Interloper plunged to the ground and ripped a student from the field, lifting him high into the air until they both vanished from sight. Eve looked up at the sky, and her jaw fell
open in disbelief: everywhere she looked, the clouds were spotted with flecks
of grey. Aliens dipped and weaved above their heads, a swarm like she’d never
seen, never imagined. It wasn’t real—it couldn’t be real—and yet despite how inconceivable it was, she couldn’t deny the truth: the Interlopers had lowered their cloak of secrecy. For the first time ever, they were waging a very public
attack.
Three Interlopers parted from the others and dove toward the field. Their
sights were set on Eve, the ultimate prize in this chaos, but just as they neared
her, she thrust them back into the sky, sending their bodies jetting past the clouds and fading into the distance. She spun in place and scanned the field. She
was looking for only one person, but all she could see were waves of frenzied
students scampering in every direction, tripping over rubble as they forced
their way past one another.
Then, just when the task seemed utterly impossible, she spotted him: Jason
was at the opposite end of the track, ramming his fists into the face of a bloodied Interloper. With a hateful glower, he melted the creature against the burning bleachers, watching as it thrashed within the flames. Then quickly,
Jason turned toward the field, his face and chest streaked with ash, his eyes bulging as he frantically searched for something or someone.
His gaze fell on Eve, and their eyes locked; with a shared sense of relief, they immediately ran across the field, fighting their way through the crowd until they met in the center and wildly threw their arms around one another.
Eve buried her face in the side of his neck, gripping him tightly, and then reluctantly pulled away and looked into his eyes.
“What’s happening?”
“This is it,” he panted, still holding her close. “They’re coming for you.
They’re coming for everyone.”
They swiftly broke apart as a monster headed in their direction—though this
one was in the form of a cleft-chinned football player, his face white with fear,
an Interloper right on his heels. Lionel grabbed Jason’s arms and swerved
around him, ducking behind the chimera as if to shield himself.
“What the hell?” Jason barked.
There was no time for explanations; the Interloper was right in front of him,
swinging his talons, and so Jason kicked at the creature’s chest and then his knee, forcing him to the ground. As the alien fought to regain his balance, Jason tore his arms from Lionel’s grip and stomped on the back of the
