"And they warred against just about everybody, as the LORD commanded; and they slew all the men and boys and ugly girls."
Neon Numbers 31:7 (Unified Standard Edition)
- - -
Hitomi jumped up, grabbing Mr. Pipe in one hand and her bags in the other, dragging them down into the pit at the front of the bus next to the door, yelling behind her: "Get off the bus! Something's wrong! I see people running!"
The soldier and bus driver both looked at her in shock for a moment, and Hitomi turned around and smacked the button that would open the doors.
She yelled again: "COME ON!"
Hitomi was looking right into Nurse Murata's eyes, who nodded at her, lining up right behind her to jump off the bus's front steps.
The soldier's radio crackled and she heard a voice spring over the line: "Escort #2! This is Escort #2! Multiple fires and explosions! We hear gunshots! Evacuating! REPEAT! Recommend immediate evac of convoy!"
"PASSENGERS! STAND! DEPART THE BUS IMMEDIATELY!" the soldier yelled, pushing past Hitomi and standing in the aisle. Escort #2 was the bus that had left before them. Were they under attack?
Hitomi stepped off the bus and went spinning, slamming into the side of a nearby car as another person pelted past her, yelling something in English she couldn't make out, checking her shoulder hard.
Crap.
They were in a low indentation in the highway, surrounded on all sides by concrete barriers. They would all have to move back eastwards if they wanted to get off the highway itself.
Hitomi banged on the car's window next to her, terrifying the man and woman - oh, and their kids - inside. She pointed wildly to the distance and then back at her bus as it disgorged its confused and worried passengers.
The driver's eyes bugged out when two soldiers with full machine guns stepped out of the bus, and he rolled down his window: "What's happening!?"
"I don't know! But there's a fire ahead! Smoke! Gunshots! The cars are all too close!" she spat out in rapid fire.
"Shit!"
He unbuckled and jumped from his own car, scrambling to the back doors of his sedan and working on getting his kids out while the wife helped. Around them more people noticed what was happening and started getting out of their cars, looking around, asking questions.
"Go! GO GO GO!" one of her soldiers yelled, and the entire group of Japanese citizens began streaming between cars, lightly jogging eastwards, climbing up and out of the depression in the road so they could get off the highway.
KRA-KOOOM!
An explosion rocked the distance and the fog lit up in red and orange.
"Jesus!" someone yelled - the dad of the family she had just warned. He had stopped at stared at the fireball disappearing into the fog. Visibility was already terrible and now the grey, low hanging clouds were lit with an eerie orange glow.
"DAVID!" his wife screamed for his attention, and, recovering, he quickly grabbed some things out of the car and followed his family as they started running up the highway between carfulls of confused Americans.
Hitomi, for her part, had stopped to listen even as more people came running. She could hear it too: a constant popping noise coming from the distance, off to the left - she was facing west. It sounded like the same suppressed crack-crack of gunshots she had heard the night everything had gone insane: Day Zero.
She grimaced, but Nurse Murata - Keiko, since they were travel buddies now - grabbed her shoulder and got her attention.
"Let's GO, Hitomi!" she said over the loud rushes of fire and explosions.
They ran, fast, weaving through cars and banging hoods as they went. Most people got the idea and began fleeing.
Then Hitomi saw it. In the windshield in front of her the reflection of the fog behind her took on an orange glow and she realized a chain reaction of exploding cars was spreading - not too fast, like a movie - but fast enough to easily kill anyone who dithered and stayed too long behind.
They were packed in like sardines and there was no place for the cars to go. Or their gas tanks.
Behind her, maybe two hundred feet back, a car caught fire. It only took a few seconds for its neighbors to catch light as well. They burned furiously and then, like pressure cookers, exploded with whooshes and rushes. The licks of flame splashed down on other cars, speeding the chain reaction on.
But Hitomi and Keiko had already crested the last underpass and climbed up and above the highway, off to the side. They could see a stretch of maybe four or five hundred feet before everything disappeared in the smokey orange fog.
WHOOSH-BOOM.
There went their bus.
The windows exploded in a symphony of half-melted shards, and Keiko stared uncomprehendingly. "How is this happening?"
Hitomi didn't know. Obviously something crazy was happening further up the road. Now would be a good time for rain, she thought.
A drop of water smacked into her nose just as she made her unspoken wish, and sure enough the churning black clouds above began sprinkling a drizzle of rain into the flashfire below them.
"Oh wow," said Keiko, looking around critically as spots of water began darkening the concrete around them.
"Thank goodness," offered Hitomi, as she looked around for a place to put down her things. She spotted, ironically, a bus shelter/waiting station on the side street they had climbed up to, up and away from the highway itself. She pointed it out to Keiko and they made a quick dash over, setting their things on a bench under the canopy of the bus stop.
The rain quickly intensified, causing the cascade of fires to fail in their reaction speed, and the wave of crawling fire gradually sputtered out over the next few minutes as they watched. Hitomi was calmed by the soothing sheets of the sudden downpour, but felt something niggling in the back of her mind.
As quickly as the rain had come it began slacking off and the mugginess around them increased as the heat of the day quickly began evaporating the rainfall off the heated pavement.
The fog and smoke had already dissipated, they could see a few smoldering cars further away at the edge of the highway, but it looked like there was no longer any immediate danger from the fire.
"It looks like we got separated from everyone," Keiko said, pulling out her medical kit from her own duffel bag. "I might be able to help down there if anyone is hurt."
Hitomi internally applauded Nurse Murata's instinctual duty of care, and smiled softly, holding Mr. Pipe in her lap protectively. "Yeah, I'll go too, in case you need backup. But... we don't know what caused the fire, right?"
"Right, I mean, it could've been a car accident, right?"
It hit Hitomi like a ton of bricks.
"No! Oh my god, in all the confusion: the soldier's radio! It said gunfire!"
Keiko gasped, "I didn't hear that! Are you sure? Could you have misheard?"
"No! I heard it clearly: it was Bus #2, the group right before us, they were further ahead but also stuck in the traffic and they said there was a fire, and gunshots!"
"But could it have just been the cars themselves exploding?"
Hitomi wasn't sure. "I dunno... it just, I thought I heard it too, in the distance, over there."
She pointed southwest, to the left side of the highway where they could see a tall blue, glass building in the distance.
It was quiet now, relatively at least, there were more people finding their way up from the highway or coming around from various office buildings to see what had happened, and they wouldn't be alone in the bus stop for long. For some reason that made Hitomi uncomfortable, so she stood, demonstrating her willingness to follow along with Keiko's desire to check for wounded.
Hitomi was worried about her duffelbag and laptop, but, really, was now the time? They were just... things. People could be hurt. She left them stuffed under the bench.
It wasn't like Day Zero, she told herself. Everyone wasn't out to kill her. It may have felt like it, but that family that escaped in front of her from their car - they were real, they mattered, even if they were strangers. If it were Hitomi that were hurt, she would hope someone like Keiko would be there too.
OK. Fine. Let's do this.
They walked among the ruins of cars on the highway, passing the remains of their bus, which had only partially burnt up. It's windows had exploded from the heat, and there was a seared chunk missing from the roof. Maybe half the seats were charred closest to the gas tank.
The smell was awful. Burnt rubber, burnt leather, acrid smoke. There was a sharp tang, of oxidized metal, probably, leaving an aftertaste in her mouth and nose.
They trudged carefully further. They passed a corpse, lying face down between two tightly packed cars, partially wedged between the car doors. They must've panicked when they got stuck and the flames caught up to them.
Hitomi couldn't tell whether it had been a man or a woman, and walked around an entire car length to avoid it.
Up ahead, above the next rise, they could see the end of the flame-driven damage. There was an enormous gas tanker, charred and partially drooping in slags of melted steel, that had rocked itself up and over several cars, crushing them as it had exploded.
No doubt that was the vehicle that started everything.
They heard voices ahead, and picked up the pace.
Soon they came across a small group of people all standing around a woman laying on the ground. Hitomi gagged, turning away. The poor woman had a large piece of scrap metal buried in the left side of her abdomen. A distraught man was putting direct pressure on the area around it, begging the people around him for help.
Nurse Murata jumped into action, and Hitomi yelled out in English, "She's a nurse, she can help!"
"Oh thank god!" the man said, his hands slick with dark red blood.
Keiko dropped to his side and said, "Keep hands there. No move. OK?"
Her broken English snapped the man out of his daze, and he said, "Thank you!" Then he started talking to his wife, trying to keep her calm. The woman's eyes fluttered open and closed.
"Awake!" Nurse Murata commanded, and then turned to talk to Hitomi, saying: "You have to keep her awake, she's in shock. There's a lot of blood loss here."
Hitomi translated for the husband, and the crowd around them started asking her if there was anything they could do to help. She noted that she could actually tell that some were genuine, and some just wanted to be let off the "moral hook" as it were.
She asked if anyone had contacted emergency services, and they had, and sure enough they could hear distant sirens. But the roads were blocked.
"Can't move her. Can't leave her," Keiko said, packing the wound's edges with gauze; then she pulled out a needle and injected it into the woman's arm with a practiced grab. "Morphine," she said in English.
Someone in the crowd muttered something and Hitomi's ears perked up: "What did you say?"
She turned towards the guy, who looked nervous - his gaze was looking around past the confines of the highway and sweeping around, darting back and forth.
"Uh, um, I thought, before the tanker went, I thought there were shots. Gunshots."
Shit.
"Are you sure?" she asked, trying to calm herself. The rest of the crowd were looking at him like he was crazy.
"Y-yeah. Yeah, pretty sure. I mean, I think the panic started before the fire, I mean, I mean yeah," he stuttered on. He was a bit chubby, with thin hair, despite being only in his 30's, she guessed.
"I didn't hear gunshots," said another guy, looking around, unsure.
Hitomi stood up from her crouch next to Keiko, hefting her pipe.
The nervous fellow stared at her: "Uh... what's the pipe for?"
She tossed it over a shoulder and strode forward, towards the burnt cars further west, saying: "Self defense."
The other guy whistled, "Damn, girl." He jogged to catch up, "What're you looking for?"
"I don't know, just checking it out," Hitomi said, moving past the last line of burnt cars and noticing that a few cars ahead looked like there were still people in them.
"HEY!" she yelled, moving towards a car ahead with a man in the driver's seat.
She came up next to his passenger door: "Hey!" she yelled, then jumped back.
The driver's side window was shattered and there was a clear hole in the man's temple.
He'd been shot.
She looked around, wildly, the man next to her said, "Hey, what's wro-"
ZIIIIP-CRACK.
There was just a moment of sharp whistling wind and then a reverberating crack from the south, up in the air, almost, and the man next to Hitomi dropped to the ground, shot in the chest. He gurgled for a moment and then stilled.
Hitomi turned around and ran, screaming, "GUN! GUNNNN!", a bullet tore up the car door next to her, and she kept moving, desperate to get back to her Nurse Murata - who had done so much to help her - she yelled again, and the crowd turned to look at her, confused, unable to hear what she said clearly, but then some saw the dead man behind her.
Panicked screams.
The nervous man had been right to be worried, and he dropped to the ground next as another sniper shot took him out by the neck. He flopped to the ground, crushing a woman next to him in place. She tried to drag herself up but then collapsed as a bullet took her in the chest, then another.
Hitomi weaved left, and a not-her Hitomi ran forwards instead, flickering out of existence as a bullet took off her jaw.
Her power had activated. Shit. Shit shit shit.
RUN!
"Get DOWN!" she screamed, and the woman then another body dropped. Then another.
The sniper was toying with her, killing off the group who had gathered one by one in front of her.
Pissed because he had missed her? Just killing everyone else off to torture her?
She pumped her legs - it had only been fifteen seconds - she was so close to Keiko, was was still trying to help the lady who had been struck by the debris.
Zip. Zip. Zip. CRA-CRA-CRACK. Several bullets slammed into the impalement victim, killing her and her husband as large holes appeared in his chest and her breast.
Keiko jumped back, looking at Hitomi, mouthing something to her. Hitomi was ten feet away.
GET THERE!
Zip. Zip. Zip-zip-zip-zip. CRA-CRACK. CRA-CRA-CRA-CRACK.
How was he shooting so fast!?
Hitomi tried to throw herself in front of the bullets, willing her pipe to intercept them with her powers.
CLANG!
The world slowed. A hundred Hitomi images flickered into life around her. Dodging, weaving, ducking, spinning, twirling, jumping, flailing. Her pipe rotated in every possible axis. A hundred possibilities appeared in a split moment, and then collapsed into reality.
CLANG, CLANG. CLANG CLANG!
Her right arm was on fire.
Her wrist felt broken.
She had deflected every shot. There was a glint in the distance, a reflection of light, from the large blue glass building next to the highway. There was a broken window on the fifth floor.
Got you.
Hitomi turned around to grab Keiko's hand and pull her out of there. As long as she kept her pipe up she could...
Zip. CRACK.
It missed her, passing over her shoulder, splitting the hairs under her left ear.
Right into Keiko's chest.