“Hello! It’s good to see you’re finally awake.” I walked into the separate room set up for the patients we stole from the ICU. The older teenage boy was moved to his own home, so it was just Victor’s kid and the confused redheaded lady. Jade had done pretty good at her job, but the woman still looked like she just woke up from a coma… I mean… She kind of did, just woke up from a drug-induced coma. She just had brain surgery or something, just as ridiculous.
Even though she looked her worst, she was still attractive. I asked her. “Did Jade tell you anything about what’s happened?” She looked over at me angrily as she. “Something about the flood hitting and being far worse than what was predicted. Which doesn’t explain why I woke up here instead of the hospital.” I didn’t care if anyone found out about powers now, and didn’t plan on sugarcoating what was actually happening.
“The end of the world just happened, and now there are people with powers and zombies roaming around.” Floating a chunk of bone, I pull out a cabinet full of medical supplies that needed to be moved down here. Her eyebrow raised as she wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth or lying. “My power kind of works as a power sensor, and you are going to gain power eventually, but also you’d have died in the hospital as the power would go out and they’d be too focused on living themselves to worry about people in the ICU.”
Her angry expression didn’t fade. “How do you know?” Confused, I ask. “Know what?” She answered. “How did you know they would let me die?” I quip back. “Because the nurses are all shit. You see this girl sleeping beside you? They let her sit in her pee because they didn’t answer her call for help for hours. That was when they were being paid to stick around in a well-lit building. Just know I saw the writing on the wall and took you out; otherwise, you’d be dead by now.”
I wasn’t sure, but if zombies were a thing for everywhere I visited, that was a far more likely outcome. The hospital could very well be a zombie nest now, no, it was more than likely converted now, and I needed to go there and kill as many as I could before they had the time and energy to start spreading and looking for other people to infect.
She asked another question. “Are you retarded?” I look her in the eyes as I speak clearly. “No.” Squinting to judge my intelligence, she asked again. “Do you have any more proof than they’d definitely let you die, and I didn’t kidnap you?” She spoke the last part like a dopey idiot would, most likely mocking me. I thought about it. “I could bring you a zombie corpse, but you’d just say that it’s fake… I got this core, most people who have powers can feel a connection with it when they touch it, if you want to try that.” Follow current novels on novel✦fire.net
I pull out the core and hand it to her. The second her body comes in contact with the core, her body stiffens as she seizes up. I’m surprised, as I wasn’t expecting the core to start to degrade as she consumed it automatically. That shouldn’t be a thing that’s possible, but here it is happening. I couldn’t help but mutter. “I had plans for that.” As I watched it turn to dust.
She looked healthier, radiant even as the bags under her eyes disappeared and the clamminess of her skin went away. She breathed in before her eyes went wide at what had just happened. A flower pot full of flowers began to grow as her eyes snapped over to them. She turned back to me and spoke. “Alright… I believe you.”
Jade, having watched this entire thing, pouted. “No fair! I want my powers right now, too!” I couldn’t help but laugh at the situation. I guess that’s one way to prove I’m not lying.
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A man lay in bed as if the end of the world hadn’t happened yet. To be fair, the flood hadn’t struck Las Vegas yet and would only later that day. They still had power, at least until the wave struck. He scratched his stomach while not even realizing how lucky he was. His place of residence in California would soon be permanently underwater. He’d have died without knowing what killed him.
One minute he’d be woken up by water that was seeping in through his walls, the next the building would be flooded and he’d drown to death. Now he wouldn’t get more than a few feet of water, almost drivable, as Nevada was far enough away from the coast or the initial wave to only catch the edge of it. It would also get a few weeks of rain before the flooding stopped and drained away.
The hail was also mitigated in that area; the watermelon-sized chunks were only the size of baseballs, still big enough to kill but significantly less lethal if you were paying attention. People hiding under benches or cars could survive, while people in Pennsylvania would die if they were outside when the hail struck. Either way, the man woke up, lit a cigarette from the several packs his brother told him to buy, and spanked his girlfriend on the ass. Not so hard as to wake her up, but still enough to draw a moan from her.
He looked at his phone and saw the hundred-odd missed messages as his eyes started to go wide. He got fifty from his sister, asking him if he was okay. Texas was the safest out of all the areas, so she’d be the most fine. Several calls from people in California that abruptly stopped around twelve O’clock last night. Ninety-five percent of California’s citizens in coastal cities were dead, which was where he lived.
He didn’t know how bad it was yet, he wouldn’t know until the Hoover Dam was submerged and stopped giving out power, how bad the damage truly was. Out of all his contacts, the only ones he could still reach were his friends from Nevada and Texas; California was unreachable, and so was the East Coast. He felt worried for a moment. What did it all mean?
He took a quick piss before showering, thankfully his brother made him buy all that stuff with the money he made betting for him. At least he was more prepared than… Did his brother know? He said something big was going to happen, but this was crazy. He always thought his brother wouldn’t stick with that boring job he had, that it was a cover for what he actually did. Was he right?
Either way, he was happy. For the next few hours, he’d treat himself to a quick meal at the mom-and-pop shop down the corner before the news would come in and explain how bad things really were. Half of the US population is dead, with that number rising, and all of its infrastructure destroyed, possibly quadrillions of dollars in damages that will never be recovered at under a few feet of water.