Elementals

12

Jude

The main of the town is a single road, short buildings on each side. Spanning around it is flat desert land, and the residential and school district of the town is further away. It's windy, and about a third of the windows are boarded up. It's also a sunny day with a bright, cloudless sky.

There aren't many people here; the few are leaving or holing themselves up indoors. It doesn't look apocalyptic or even like there's a hurricane coming. It's just empty, quiet, and aside from the wind, serene.

Lana is sitting on a curb. She's staring out at nothing, but her hand is moving, twisting around at her side. The wind appears to follow whatever commands she's giving, changing directions constantly and bringing specks of dust into my eyes so I'm forced to squint.

I watch her; she hasn't noticed me yet. Her hand keeps twisting until it suddenly stops. A finger goes up, twirling. I notice that the dust begins to fly in circles, and some boards are ripped out of windows and go barreling into the whirlwind. A dust devil appears in the middle of the street out of nowhere, and with a push of her hand, it goes east. It's small and short but strong, and it doesn't falter, even though she's not spinning her finger anymore. It just keeps going east.

Toward the town.

"Lana!"

She shoots to her feet, surprised. "Jude? What are you doing here?"

"What are you doing here?"

She walks away from the curb to stand in the middle of the street, like I am. We're facing each other like cowboys in old westerns, and she regards me with an expression I can't place.

She shakes her head. "Go away, okay?" she says quietly. "Just leave me alone."

"This town didn't do anything to you," I say, equally soft. "You have to stop."

Lana stares at me for a long time, and then the wind speeds up as her eyes narrow. With a simple flick of her hand, there's a new dust devil next to her, and it goes to follow the other one into town.

My eyes go wide. "Why did you do that?" I panic. "Stop it!"

"Do you know why I had my accident?" she asks tonelessly.

The dust at her feet has started to spin. I force myself to pretend I don't see it and meet her steely gaze instead. "Taylor never showed me the file," I say, "but he said it was a dark night. Visibility was low. There was fog."

"Yeah." She shrugs. "There was fog, sure. But I had damn good vision and even better headlights. Visibility isn't the reason I crashed."

My clenched hands loosen as I stare at her. The girl who jokingly called herself an idiot to make me feel better is hidden behind a stony, resigned expression that terrifies me when I realize the truth.

"You did it to yourself," I whisper.

Her mouth twitches. "My Mom had just died of cancer," she says flatly. "And my cheating father, who I hadn't seen in four years, was too busy with his new wife and his new life to pick up the phone when I called to tell him the news. I thought I'd go for a ride to clear my head, and as I drove, miserable and alone, I couldn't help but think...what was the point of it all?" She shrugs again. "So I drove into a ditch."

Her feet start to lift off the ground, and the wind around her picks up speed. "When I woke up at Jansen's," she continues, "when I discovered that I was able to do this, I took it as a sign that my life meant something. I thought that I had something to offer to the world, that I was special. But it turns out, I'm only here because some creep needed a body to experiment on. So I ask, once again..."

She looks at her closed hands and shakes her head. "What is the point of it all?"

Her hands open, and suddenly we're in the middle of a windstorm. She shoots up several feet and hovers in the air as a massive dust devil, nearing the size of an F1, begins to circulate behind her. The storefront windows shatter, and parked cars begin to move.

"Lana," I beg, "please stop!"

"And the best part?" she says, ignoring my plea. "I haven't even gotten my memories back yet, and I'm already losing my fucking mind. How funny is that?"

"It's not funny," I exclaim. "It's not funny! Lana, please—"

But she's ignoring me. She's looking right at me, unflinching as the air around her tumbles into catastrophe, and she's ignoring me. I keep screaming at her to stop. The circulation behind her is a dirty brown-gray, and she makes no move to end it or even look at it. My voice grows hoarse and my frustration climbs, and I can't believe it, I can't believe she's doing this.

I shoot up a hand. A vine bursts through the road, cracking the concrete in the process, and wraps around her leg. I use it to pull her down. In a matter of a second, she falls out of the air and lands with a sharp thud and a scream as her ankle bends the wrong way. The windstorm and the dust devil both collapse.

My hands fly up to my mouth to stifle a gasp; I'm horrified by how violently I pulled her down. Lana's staring at me, bewildered and shiny-eyed.

"Oh my God." I reach out to help her, my voice shaky. "I'm sorry, I'm so—"

"Get away from me!" she screams.

A blast of air knocks me off my feet. My fight or flight triggers, and I shoot out another vine before she can attack me again, and in doing so, it prompts her to attack back. We're throwing air and Earth at each other, damaging the town in the process. The concrete buckles as plants burst through, and the storefronts shake in the the wind. Both of us are screaming. I don't know what I'm saying, if I'm just making animalistic noises or if I'm begging her to stop, and I'm in too much of a frenzy to listen to what she's screaming back.

The pressure of the twisting wind is hurting my ears. I'm knocked off my feet again, and for a moment, there's a pause where we're both on the ground, in the middle of prepping our next attack, and that's when we freeze.

Lana and I are once again on opposite ends of the road. Our hands are outstretched and ready to keep fighting. She's crying, and so am I. We stare at each other, faces full of desperation and anger and sadness, and slowly lower our hands.

She sniffs, mouth flattening into a line. "I'm sorry," she chokes out. "I shouldn't have taken my anger out on the town, and I shouldn't have kept attacking you. I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry I pulled you down like that," I say, wiping my eyes. "And that I kept attacking you, too."

She only laughs and rubs her bruising ankle. I get up, and by the time I've walked to her, I've made a little flower crown in my hands.

"And for what it's worth," I say quietly, putting it on her head, "I think your life means something."

She smiles and fixes it so it's not lopsided. We sit there in silence, breathing heard. If the main of the town wasn't fully empty before, I'm sure it's cleared out by now. Anyone who saw us is no doubt losing their mind.

"He was right," Lana whispers, looking around. "We are monsters."

I follow her gaze. Not a single window has survived. The road, and the sidewalks, will need to be ripped off and poured anew. I wipe my face again, feeling hollow and miserable.

"Holy shit."

We whirl around to see Taylor slam a car door closed—a car that I'm certain wasn't here during the fiasco. It's only just shown up.

He looks from the vines to the settled dust that coats the town to us, and he blinks. "What the fuck are you doing?"