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“You’re a killer. Killers lose their rights.”
“Hah!” Gaia laughed. “Of course humans don’t kill. You haven’t slaughtered other species for food. Or wiped them out just for sport. You don’t eat other creatures. Don’t be ridiculous. What if I told you that you could join me, Sam? That you don’t have to die.”
She moved closer. Her movements were sensual, self-aware, calculated to mesmerize him.
“Look at me. I’m a human, too, aren’t I? This is human.” She gestured at her body.
“You’ve already killed whatever was human there,” Sam said, but he was still talking and he was still moving backward.
“It will be human flesh you burn.”
“It will be you, the gaiaphage, I kill.”
“Do you think you’ll kill me, Sam? I don’t think you expect to. You came here to be killed.”
“If necessary,” he said dully.
“Let’s see if it’s necessary.” Her hand came up, but Sam wasn’t so mesmerized he was unready. He dodged left and the invisible punch only grazed him.
He fired with one hand, still moving fast to his left. But Gaia had learned. She tracked his movement and the beam missed.
He swept the beam of light horizontally and she rose easily above it. Her invisible counterpunch didn’t miss this time. It knocked him twenty feet away. His lungs were empty and wouldn’t draw air, but he couldn’t let her stop him, not this way, not in a way that left him crippled again.
Win or die.
He rolled in the dirt as she laughed.
“I don’t have to kill you, Sam. You do have to kill me.”
He fired even as he rolled, and the result was a weird laser show of twisting green beams that singed Gaia’s hair and otherwise did nothing.
“We’re too far from town,” Gaia taunted. “Surely you want your last battle to be witnessed and admired. Besides, I don’t want my kindling to burn down to nothing. Come on, Sam, let’s go into town. I’ve never seen the place. I go to exterminate. Don’t you want to see?”
Sam jumped up, fired, but she dropped hard right, dodged around his beam, and with effortless power lifted one of the burning logs from the truck and threw it at him. It was a staggering display of power. The log weighed tons.
No time to get out of the way. He fired with both hands and burned through the fire-weakened log. Two massive, separate torches blew past him, burning his skin and crisping his hair.
WHUMPF!
The log sections crashed behind him on the road, showering him with sparks that stuck to his shirt and hair. The smoke billowed around him.
He choked and blasted randomly, blindly, all around him. Her cry of pain was the sound of hope. But he couldn’t see what damage he had done.
Suddenly she was on him, bursting through the smoke, not with Caine’s telekinetic power but with Jack’s brute strength. Her hand grabbed his arm; he didn’t resist, which would have cost him that arm, but leaped straight into her. Her own pull overbalanced her and she fell back.
With no other easy choice, he punched her in the face.
She pushed him off her and he flew through the air. He had time to see the burning logs and Gaia lying on her back, and then he hit the truck’s cab, hard, bounced off, and lay winded on the ground.
Gaia was on him in seconds, leaning over him. “Come on, Sam, you can do better than that.” Her hand closed on his throat. He could feel the immense power behind that grip. “No death for you. No, you’re going to come along and watch.”
She lifted him more easily than she’d have lifted a baby. There was a length of chain on the bumper of the truck. It was red-hot. He heard and smelled the flesh of her hands burning as she wrapped it around him, heard her cry out in pain but accept it just so she could hurt him. He screamed in agony as she laid the red-hot steel against him, as it burned through his clothing and seared his flesh.
“No glorious death for you, Sam.”
He felt himself floating along above the ground, and then he fell down a long, dark tunnel.
When he regained consciousness, he first felt the burns from the chain. Then the weight and strength of it, holding his arms tight against his body. He could move his hands, he could still fire his killing light, but he could not aim.
