Skitter

Judging distances wasn’t a great strength of mine.  How many blocks, how far did I have to run to reach my dad?  Five miles? Six?  I was a practiced runner, but the streets here weren’t all in the best shape.  Some were flooded, others strewn with debris, still more suffering in both departments.  There were areas that were blocked off.

And I had less than thirty minutes.

Plague 12.4

The thin metal wire pressed hard against the deep tissue of my gloved fingers as I climbed the fence, while my toes scrabbled for a hold on the metal hinge that divided one section of fence from another.  Precious long seconds, maybe a minute or two and I knew I’d have to get by the fence on the far side as well.  I wobbled on top of the fence and then hopped down with a splash.  I was running again the second I had my feet under me.

> >

The sound seemed to come a second later, like the sonic boom following a jet.  I’d halfway expected a boom, but it sounded more like a heavy impact, as loud and powerful as a bullet the size of the moon striking the city, followed by the sound of trillions of glass shards simultaneously falling like rain across the cityscape.  There was a cloud to the east, where the beaches were, reaching up to the cloud level, like some pale wall.

The moment I was sure it was over, I was on my feet, running around the back to the kitchen door.  I tore off my mask as I made my way there, and some bugs helped guide my hand to the latch as I reached through the broken window of the kitchen door and opened it.  I tore at the straps connecting my armor to my back as I ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, pulled the zipper down as I ran down the hallway.  Getting my arms free of the sleeves, I tied the inside-out arms around my waist.  It wasn’t nearly enough to seriously hide my costumed identity, but I wasn’t about to delay for another second.

Plague 12.5