Dark Origins and Unlikely Heroes

Untitled Part 5

5

The three unlikely strangers crept slower and slower into the town, not wanting to accidentally hit or make anything else explode.

The afternoon sun was giving way to the early evening, quickly drawing day one to a close. None of them wanted to be around when the sun finally did set, meaning now, they only had a few hours to get the photos and get the hell out of town.

Up ahead was a woman wearing torn denim Capri pants, where a pink thong was visible, green tank top barely covering her flesh now hanging from her tall, lanky fame. She was grabbing her throat and coughing as she struggled to get air.

"Ro," Coach said carefully. "That ain't normal."

The reporter agreed, bringing her camera to her eye to snap a few photos as a burst of green liquid burst from the woman's mouth, burning everything in its' path along the way, including the poor woman's teeth, tongue and the roof of her mouth slowly being severed from the rest of her body.

"Jesus!" Ellis cried.

Coach leaned forward, seeing something the other two hadn't just yet.

"Ro, can you zoom in on that goo?" he asked, pointing at the substance that looked as if it was boiling under the hot Southern sunshine.

"It's eating the cement!" she said shakily. "And the paint off that car!"

"The metal, too," Ellis added, now seeing what the older man had.

"Let's get the hell out of here!" Ro begged, not wanting to see anyone else who had been exposed to the manmade virus.

"Let's go," Coach agreed as the woman turned towards them next. "Drive, Ellis. She doesn't want help. She wants even."

The young mechanic nodded and backed away quickly, did a beautiful one-eighty without breaking and drove the way they came as fast as they could, wanting to put in as much distance between the three of them and whatever the hell was out there.

"In there," Coach told Ellis, pointing at the abandoned military base.

"Why?" Rochelle asked him.

"We might need some supplies. Like...fire. And lots of it. We'll take twenty minutes, find what we can and get the hell out of here, alright?" he asked them.

"And then go where, Coach?" Ellis asked him.

"We're gonna go storm the castle," he said angrily, almost defiantly, his usual laid back demeanor gone, replaced now with the fire that had led so many of his students to their own personal victories.

Ellis nodded as he pulled the truck into the parking lot, getting as close to the entrance as he could.

"Get in back, get a heavy tool," he suggested, hopping out of the truck.

He'd hand Coach a twenty pound sledgehammer used to demolish walls for renovating homes, Rochelle a battery-powered nail gun capable of sending heavy iron nails flying if need be, with a supply of just a hundred and gave himself a forty-eight inch titanium pipe wrench.

When he let out a small chuckle, the other two were confused until he held up a few fireworks Keith had left in the box leftover from a wedding they'd gone to a few months before. He stuffed them into his pockets, found a lighter and hopped down from the truck to follow one of the best men he knew into even more of the unknown.

In New York, Cain's wife, Evelyn, or Evie, to her friends, walked into her home, sighing a little when he saw her husband's SUV in the driveway. She loved him, of course, but she seemed to be liking the silence more than anything lately.