A/N: Waning: There is a very disturbing scene near the end and once you get the hint of what is about to happen you may skip it if you feel nessisary. Don't forget to vote!
***
"Let me get this straight, you guys decided to put it to a vote?" Nick asked with his arms crossed to the rest of the group. While Nick was 'cooling off', they filled him in on their arguments and final decisions. "I say they can die in hel.l"
"A little bit eccentric don't you think?" Joana hissed.
"I think we should get this over with," Lance added. "It's nearly six in the afternoon".
"Ok then, who all thinks that we shouldn't work for Nexus to finish developing the project?" Eric asked as if he wasn't sure of the words he was saying. It seems that everyone took a deep breath before responding.
The first hand to go up was Lance's, then Nick's. They almost looked ashamed of their answers, but then grew more confident and really stood behind them. Joana gave them both a disgusted look, but what she didn't expect was to see was Eric's hand slowly rise into the air. A glare of pure hatred flared from her and she then laughed in angry bursts of rage.
"You three-legged imbeciles!" she shouted to everyone. "All these innocent people are going to lose their jobs, their hard earned jobs, because of you, all three of you!" She pointed at all of them as she stormed out of the room.
Nick, Lance, and Eric stood there in the room not saying a word to each other. That was, until Nick give into a dumb impulse, causing Eric to sigh and Lance to straight up leave the room. He poked his head up, confused.
"Dick jokes are only funny when guys say it, right?"
****
~ Skylar ~
On the road again, I took another glance at the GPS.
Mindo, Ecuador.
Noah always wanted to travel to South America. I shook him from my head knowing I need to finish this all the more now. His image has been haunting my dreams and there has been nothing I could do about it. Sometimes I see him in the distance, watching me, but when I give him a second glance, he was gone with the wind. Grieving is not an option. Emotion has subdued. I can't let his death distract me for completing the mission.
Noah joined me on my crazy quest and died because of it. I need to finish what he died trying to help me do: set this insane world straight. My dad was innocent and it, again, was up to me to prove it.
But first I needed a way to get to South America. Now that the entire world is a third world country, I can't just buy a plane ticket anymore. Luckily, Dad had plenty of boating friends before he got all lost in his work. One guy, Pedro, was smoking rich and had an entire collection of them. He used to be head of boat races and other water-related, competitive sports. His was nicknamed 'serpent' because he always has a finger dipped in every water event taking place.
The only thing was, he owned several homes among the U.S., but he lived in south Mexico in some rich city I remember not being able to pronounce. I have no idea how it's going to take but I set my GPS for the Texas border and hoped I could wing it from there.
I took several pit stops at gas stations for food and continued back on the road. On one of them, I saw an old weapons store I took a look around and saw that nothing was more advanced than my energy pistol or the shotgun that I took a liking to. Half the store was missing its stock anyway.
One thing that did catch my eye was a cross-shot bow and arrow. It was an electronic one that retracts and is much sturdier than my old one. It would make sense that something as expensive and useful as that would still be here; no one knew how to use it. Good thing for me of course. Everything else here would make so much noise and any type of silencer was long gone from here.
I searched the back and behind the counter and saw a set of arrows along with a quiver. This quiver had a wide opening and a smaller bottom with a fabric strap instead of string while the arrows were made of a polished black plastic and had metal tips topped with fancy designs. There was a truck load of arrows in that shop. It was then I realized that this was a part archery store and there was an archery range out in the back.
I collected every arrow and filled the quiver as much as possible while bagging the rest. On my way out, I grabbed a pulse grenade that seemed to have been hiding out under the counter.
Pulse grenades are one of the newest types of warfare before the fall. When detonated, they release multiple energy waves that blind you and will act as a taser, sending electricity through your body that will immobilize you for a long periods of time. It's incredibly painful too. I found four magnetic grenades also and made my way back to the truck.
Once I unloaded the arrows into the truck, I stashed the grenades in my glove compartment.
Getting creative, I saw matches and other flammable materials. At this moment, I had over a hundred arrows. The twenty I already had added onto the entire inventory of this store made me want to experiment a little. Some arrows were a plastic material, so I took a couple of the ones that were wooden and laid them out in front of me on a craftsman table I saw in a room behind the counter.
I gathered tree resin and rosin and left over charcoal that I kept from my encounter with the bear. There was a pot that used to hold random little things like screws and other knickknacks that are easy to lose track of along with half a bottle of water. I grabbed two uniform shirts that I saw were left in a little storage closet, a container of gasoline, and a lighter.
I cut off the metal tips and rounded the arrow's head, sharpening it just a little bit for obvious aerodynamics. After I continued through about five of so arrows, I made natural glue out of the tree resin, the charcoal that I had to grind down in the pot. The pot had water inside and I chucked that over a fire I got started. I dipped the arrow heads into the pot of newly made tree glue and ripped up the shirts into strips. I wrapped those strips around the heads of those arrows and they stuck tightly, looking like they would stay for a long time.
I was careful not to use too much of the shirts in case this worked, and gathered them up to take them outside to the archery range to test them out.
I grabbed one arrow and set it up on my bow, but instead of firing it at one of the distant red and white circled targets, I took out one of the matches. These matches are kind of like lighters, but instead of burning your thumb or striking a box five times to get a fire going, all you have to do is put pressure on the soft rubber on the front. Fire will emit out of the little exhaust tube at the top.
Designs of that little tube vary to match the design on the face of the lighter. Some look like a busy city with the tallest building set in the middle, being where the fire emits from, and others would have a silver dragon with its mouth open looking at the sky and when you turn it on, fire discharges out of its mouth. People have gotten more and more creative with lighter designs before the fall now that I think of it.
The one I currently had possession of was skull and ribbon themed with a black skull that sat at the top. When you turn the lighter on, fire passes through the skull, lighting up the eyes and mouth. A candle-shaped flame flaps back and forth on top of the head. The fire did sway side to side, but fire from the lighters are practically wind-proof because they are made with special chemicals that make them much hotter than normal lighters and will, for the most part, stay perfectly still.
The strength of the flame also depends on the amount of pressure applied to the rubber button. The flame rose as my thumb dug deeper into the button. The flame reached max size, which was bigger than the actual lighter now and held it under the head of the arrow. All of the cloth from the shirt lit on fire instantly. The glue was already hardened, but I assumed that if I left the fire sitting on it long enough it may melt off. I decided to test the theory anyway and saw that since I mixed it with grinded charcoal, it was far more resistant to the fire and charcoal was a natural burner so it not only did the glue not melt, but it held onto the fire, making the glue and the fire last longer.
Being a scientist's daughter finally paid off.
I gave myself a mental pat on the back as I set the flaming arrow into my new bow and pulled back the string. This new bow made shooting a lot easier, but I adjusted it so it would gave me more resistance for a longer distance shot.
I shot the arrow at the target and watched the fireball soar into the middle of the hundred yard target. You couldn't tell if I hit the exact center because when the arrow connected, the entire target went up in flames that seemed to be unfazed by the breeze passing by. I always knew how to shoot an arrow against the wind current so it didn't faze me or my shot either.
For the first time since the farmhouse, I smiled at my intuitive victory as I redid the fire arrow process for almost all of the wooden arrows I still had from the village. I made a habit of retrieving my arrows from the bodies of the people I shot so some of them were a bit bloody. I had ten wooden arrows left because I ran out of cloth, but I now had thirty-seven fire arrows that were doused in hydro-gasoline. It was just like regular gasoline, but odorless and was dark, murky orange in color so you can tell it different from water or orange soda.
Before I loaded everything up in my truck, I dipped the top half of the tail end of the arrows into the orange gas. It was to make sure I don't mix them up with the regular ones. I didn't want to dip the entire end because I didn't want it to affect my drawback by stiffening up the feathers and I packed my quiver with ten fire arrows along with others.
I tossed everything into the backseat of my truck which was now looking a little crammed. Thank god Noah terribly packed that sack we brought to the wooden house, because all of our supplies were still here and our stay there ended soon before I would notice we were missing our toothbrushes and all the little electronics. So it was rather he just brought all the food and forgot everything else or he purposely packed light for that bridge stunt we barely pulled off.
Remembering that was my uncle that taught me that trick, cringe-worthy memories surfaced. Unlike my scientist dad, my uncle was completely redneck through and through. Well, not completely because the accent was kind of soft and the off speech patterns were barely noticeable.
Too bad there was so much more to him than meets the eye.
****
"Come on, it's not that hard, honey," Uncle Rico said, retraining a brewing temper and adding sass to the word 'honey'. "Just point"--he mimicked pointing a long gun before portending to fire--"and shoot."
We were at his outhouse near the out skirts of New York were it was mostly forest and jungle. For the fourth time today, he was showing me how to fire, reload, and clean a rifle.
I was seven.
It's not that it was like child torture or anything, but it was the way we bonded at first because I thought guns were cool and he had collection after collection of weapons. Again, I was seven.
He figured that he would start me off with the classics like a rifle before he would introduce me to anything automated in any sense. The hard part for me wasn't shooting the gun, but the set up was confusing. Even when I get it, the moment I got out of the position, I forget how to redo it. My uncle would try to hide his frustration as much as possible, but he had a creative way of expressing it.
"You almost got it!" he screamed. He was obviously very upset, so he would yell at me...with words of encouragement. He would let off steam by yelling and screaming, yes, but merely change the words if he's not intending to hurt the person. For a grumpy person, he had a decent impulse control in what he says, for the most part. "You're catching on so, so fast!!" he fumed, but clearly lying in the process.
A month later when I finally got a hold of it, he practically celebrated. Noah never got the hang of it, but was able to land judo slam moves like a boss. From there, Noah stemmed out in martial arts, and I excelled in archery and other firearms. Noah was far lazier than I was about all this exercise and training things because he was all wrapped up in relationships and technology. He adapted a good deal of dad's smarts, but never really exercised that either. I'm glad that at one point Noah grew up and put his brain to good use.
When I was fifteen, uncle finally introduced me to high powered weaponry. This was the secret side of me that no one really knew about. I didn't make my love for hunting a secret or anything, but that was never my go to line when trying to impress a guy. While some girls were out watching movies, I was perfecting my firing stance and gun reassembly time. Madison and Avery knew all about my little hobbies and labeled me 'the tough one' out of the three of us, leaving Avery as 'the smart one' and Maddy 'the sexy one'.
He gave me a twin-century gun for my birthday and taught me the go around on how to use it. My dad never approved of guns and had no idea that's what his brother was really doing with us when we begged to go over to his house almost every weekend, again, mostly me.
The reason why it was called a twin-century was because it was a revolving, double barrel, automatic gun. At the front is where the main section leads into two different barrels that spin when fired. It could fire up to two hundred and seventy rounds a minute.
I was more than overjoyed, I was practically bouncing all around the room. Hugging him and kissing his forehead, nose and cheeks like they were going to leave sometime soon. I could see the happiness painted all over his face while watching me gawk and stare at the gun as if to remind myself it was real.
"You know I would just run with this right now, but your front door is slow as hell." I laughed. Everyone has an electronic door that once you push on the outer edge, it clicks open and swings outward electronically and scans to see if more people are passing through because if not, then it will automatically close behind you; kind like an elevator door, but cooler.
He jumped while giggling. "I need to get that fixed it; it closes fine, but it opens at the hyper-speed of a star being born."
We joked around further about how incredibly slow his door opens before I started messing with the gun again.
He was like forty-something and was probably in better shape than my dad, as a matter of fact, he was sort of a body builder in his day, but not even he could stand that kind of diet. When it came to dietary restrictions, my dad too was a little bit lenient. Another thing they had in common was their eyes.
Everyone had those winter frost eyes but me! Uncle got it better though, the inner circle was soft cyan blue while the outside was the traditional ice crystal blue to go with his brown hair. He loved to wear tank tops and sweat shirts on a regular basis, but whenever he was leaving the house it would always be a tight button down shirt with the last button being right in the middle of his chest.
The two brothers were always very competitive in their many head to head battles and I just assumed that over-compensating was one of them. From the way he was looking at me, he seemed to be quite drunk. He wasn't some terrible alcoholic but he be easily mistaken for one. He always had a beer in his hand and seemed to be able to handle his liquor but a couple times he would push it too far and was unrecognizable when really drunk even though I've never really been there when it happens.
He looked to have had a few extra when he was showing me how the gun operated. He wasn't tipsy or anything, but I took care not to let him really handle the gun much and let me do all the shooting. I did have a brief, humorous thought of him shooting a neighbor's house, but I figured I wouldn't egg that on.
It was a good sign when he suggested that we shouldn't put in the ammunition before starting anything and I mentally loosened up. We were in his living room and Noah was off over someone's house or in juvenile detention; I don't keep up anymore. He was lucky that he was smart because his record would destroy the rest of his life. I held the gun in my arms like I was ready to shoot, but I had no idea what all the switches and twisty things were so I listened to his directions.
I gave him a moment when he mixed up how to empty the clip with how to fire the gun; which would be the obvious padlock trigger --that just means you can use multiple trigger functions to rapid fire, semi, three round bursts, etc. You could also connect the gun to Bluetooth to activate its many functions, including the previous, with your phone or tablet--. He recovered and apologized while laughing at his mistake.
"Sorry, ok, the malloy twist function will release after you pull--he shifted to the other side of me and put my hand on a lever--this release bar."
"Then the clip will slide out this side and out of the gun ready to be reloaded." I finished for him. He looked at me, impressed.
"Are you sure you don't know how to use the gun?" he questioned with a smile on his face. Uncle Rico never had any kids of his own because he never settled down with anyone, so Noah and I were like his children in a way.
"I may have looked the gun up once or twice..." I smiled broadly as I began to chuckle softly to myself.
"You, Skylar, amaze me," he said in a feather-like tone. "You pick this all up so fast...make the revolver spin slowly without pulling the trigger." he asked of me.
"But you never--"
"Try and figure it out, go ahead." he smirked in a curious way, wondering if I could do it, but clearly having faith. I took a moment to think about it. So there are two revolvers, meaning they have to spin around some sort of axis and they have to be locked in place by some kind of...
"I'll give you a hint," he offered after a couple seconds. "There are--"
The two revolving barrels slowly began to spin before he could get anything out and his mouth dropped. To show off, I made it spin quicker by intensifying the pressure on the felcline gauge and then released all the pressure off of it and let gravity swing the bottom one until it came to a stop. I was now able to manually spin the barrels with my hand and he busted out laughing. "You're absolutely brilliant."
"I try to be." I joked, feeling more self-confident than ever in my life.
"Now this trigger was designed different than a regular padlock trigger called a push trigger. Instead of having to set it..." He walked behind me, putting his arms over mine and his hands over my hands. I felt his stomach shift on my back as he showed me how the push trigger can lock into one type of format by pushing a little bar above the trigger forward for its settings.
He pulled on the trigger causing my first finger to pull the trigger. "Bang." he moaned as if lost in thought of something else. There was movement in his waist as I assumed he was now about to go sit down somewhere when I felt something poke me.
"Okay I think we--"
"What's wrong?" he asked as he pulled my hair over to the right and kissed my neck. I tried to give resistance, but then he wrapped his arm around my other side, drawing me in closer. His arms were huge and I was in shape myself, but come on.
"What the hell!? You're drunk!" I shouted as I tried to slip underneath his grasp but his arm was locked in place. His other arm came around my lower stomach as he pressed closer on my back.
"You're smart...and so beautiful...you've always been so beautiful..." He moaned in between tongue and teeth kisses on my neck, that's going to leave a hell of a bruise tomorrow, though I was worried a little more worried about other things than a hickey. I gave him a violent jerk, hoping that would send a message, but he continued.
"Get the hell off me!" I shouted as I plowed my foot onto his toes.
"Arrgh!!" he growled, quickly looking down at his foot. "And so...strong." he added to the list as he pulled me in tighter, practically squeezing me. I figured my last option was to scream, though I was going to do that either way. The only problem was, he felt me gather breath and when the sound came, a thick, muscled hand blocked the entire lower portion of my face.
The 'poke' I was feeling earlier became more like a stab in my lower back. He wasn't much taller than me because I was pretty tall for a fifteen year old and until today, that was a good thing.
"There's no need to scream...I now you're just playing hard to get...and you know I like that." The hand that wasn't covering my mouth was traveling upward from my stomach.
That was it.
I went for his foot again, but he quickly shifted his to overlap mine locking his with mine, stopping all my leg movement unless I want to trip and fall. Wait a minute.
I purposely lost my footing, hoping to throw him off on the sudden drop of weight. His hands were so wrapped around me; he was practically lifting me up off the ground.
"You're just full of surprises," he said softly as he turned me around to face him. "Well of course you are."
What. The. Fuck.
He slammed his face into mine tongue first and grabbed my left breast, squeezing and pushing up on me to get a better grip. I really, really struggled. I tried to throw kicks and fists, but he just took them and seemed only to get more aroused from it. He kissed harder, gripped tighter. I was ultimately powerless against this hulk.
"Ahh don't give up," he urged once my strength gave out. "That was what was special about you."
"Are you insane?!!?" I screamed with everything I could. "Get the fuck off me!!"
"That's the spirit!" he shouted. "Yeah!"
He wasn't saying 'yeah' when I landed a powerful kick in his groin. I put absolutely everything into that kick and he instantly doubled over. He caught himself on the side of a table with one arm. He roared whiling trying to get one last glimpse at me as I ran past him. I had to jump over the large left over pieces from the gun I must have dropped and never noticed because of my drunk uncle.
I ran for the front door and pushed the outside edge for it too open. It clicked like my jeep door would normally do, but this door was taking ages to open. I completely forgot that he never got the chance to fix it and now it just may get me killed. I stood at the very entrance of where it was opening, but that was the part that took the longest. I could just get my head out when a hand grabbed my left leg.
I screamed as I tried to kick him off me.
"Come here!" he shouted while he was regaining his footing. First, he grabbed my hand, then got much better grip on my shoulder length hair and yanked me toward him and slammed the door shut. "I'll give you something to scream about!"
I could smell the alcohol firing bullets at me as he threw me in the opposite direction of the door. "I know this is what you want."
"What?!" I cried as he grabbed both my shoulders. My hulky, forty-year-old uncle slammed my face into the glass table, putting huge cracks into it as I then could feel a thick liquid run down the side of my eye. Any other fluid was the intense crying I couldn't stop myself from doing. "Please!" I sobbed.
"Oh, don't worry, it will all be ok."