Gifted

Chapter Sixteen

Mina

I sit up and stretch, yawning. I glance at the clock on the table and start: It’s noon, already. I slide out of bed and stand up, stretching until my back pops. Oh yeah.

I go and stand in front of the big full-sized mirror hanging on the wall by the door. A girl with dark blue-green eyes, a long mane of messy brown hair, and a sleepy expression on her face stares back at me.

“Nice to see you, Mina,” I say.

“At half-past noon,” I add.

I focus on my hair, and it turns a rich red. Then I frown at my eyebrows, which need some plucking again. The unwanted hairs shrink back into my skin, tickling slightly as they go. That done, I turn my eyes a shocking pink, just for the hell of it. And I’m ready to go.

After throwing on a change on clothes, I run outside and slide into the driver's seat of Diana's car, thinking of heading to the mall for a couple hours. I start backing down the driveway--

"Mina! Hey, Mina!"

It's Jake. I stop, put the car in "park," and roll down the window.

"What?"

“You read the news today?” he says shortly, coming up to the window.

“No... I just got up a while ago. It’s Saturday, you know,” I point out.

He waves that aside. “A town over in England—called Norrington—was completely obliterated last night at around eleven o’clock,” he says.

A stab of pity goes through me. “What happened? A nuclear accident or something?”

“That’s just it...no one knows,” he says. “Norrington doesn’t have a power plant, and there was no metrological activity in the area last night, so it wasn’t an asteroid or something, either--there's no impact crater or anything, for that matter, but anyway. Everyone in that town, hundreds, no, thousands, of people...just gone. The town is gone, Mina. Just a big bunch of nothing. Here...I went online and printed these off. One’s a picture of the normal town, like their tourist photo or something. The other is how it looked this morning when the sun came up. See this for yourself...”

I stare at the two pictures, my brain refusing to believe. It’s impossible.

Impossible.

In the first one, the tourist photo, I see a panoramic shot of what must be the town of Norrington, captured overhead, so everything is visible: There’s a long winding main street lined with shops and eateries, and a small park lounges by the lower east side of the road. The school, with its large playground and massive classroom building, lies off of the main street. I guess it supports all grades, as I don’t see what looks like a separate high school in town. There are multiple office buildings, and a town hall. A gym.

People are captured in the photo, little colored dots with stick arms and stick legs: they walk around, oblivious to the fact they’re being filmed from above.

The next photo makes my stomach turn over. It’s just...so creepy.

The picture is shot from someone on the ground; it’s grainy and rather blurry, but there’s no mistaking what it shows. What it doesn’t show.

I glance back up at the first picture, of regular Norrington, and then back at the second, my stomach tingling with unease. What could have caused this horrible disaster?

The first photo shows the town, laid out in all its small-townish glory.

The second picture is a barren wasteland.

Dry, hard-packed earth for miles around. Ground that, until hours before, bore the weight of buildings, of streets and roads, of people. Deep pits where foundations and basements once laid buried, now violently uprooted. The park is gone, the lake a drained hole in the ground. It’s all gone. It’s like a giant alien spaceship came down from the sky and beamed the whole town up in the middle of the night.

All that’s left, the only object verifying that this was truly once the site of a town and not simply a random field after a huge drought, is the entrance sign at the side of what remains of the main road (which now dead-ends at each end of where it once entered the town at either side)—though how the little sign escaped the terrible destruction, I don’t know.

In faded, peeling letters of blue and gold, it proclaims its message proudly:

“Welcome to Norrington! Enjoy your stay!”