US (Formerly The After Effect - Book 2)

4 - Scramble

Shock.

Shock is where I stand. As someone who was born and raised here in the Unites States of America and who has spent their entire life ruled under a male president, the voice of a woman was entirely unexpected. Stating herself as the top dog unhinged my jaw and caused it to collapse onto the floor. I've never even heard of her before. Willow Thompson.

What the hell does that mean? The others are dead?

Her steady, crisp voice repeats the same message over again, and I can only imagine it will continue to do so.

I'm too astonished to give Jada a high-five for successfully locating the woman's voice, too relieved to hear it to speak a single word. My eyes flash to Travis's, whose befuddled expression proves he's equally confused as me. He however, finds his voice to talk.

"That was it," he confirms.

His response initiates a boatload of spouting off from people about all sorts of things. The revolutionaries aren't familiar with our system, so they are completely clueless about half of the things Mrs. Thompson said, but their curiosity is quite extensive and expressive to say the least. Their bodies close in on Travis and I, many of them firing questions left and right at us.

"Do you know which white house she was talking about?"

"What stars does she mean?"

"What if she doesn't accept outsiders?"

I sense Travis's sweat seeping through his shirt as he keeps me pressed against him like armor. His breath is starting to transform into panting, his muscles tensing at all of the shouting and questions questions questions.

They're minimizing the distance like an angry mob and it's getting me worked up.

"Just back up," I say amongst the chatter, but my words blend right in with the air. "A little help?" I telepathically plead to Stella.

Travis's clutch on my arm tightens as the blathering continues.

"When are we leaving?"

"Who's going to lead us?"

"How are we going to survive out there?"

Travis tries to but in. "We're figuring it out," he says, but his voice is vacuumed up by the ones around him.

I search for Jada and find her on the outer wall of the pack, gawking at me with a blank face as though she's torn between helping and getting the answers her people want--or she wants.

"What about food!" someone shouts.

"How cold is it out there?"

"ENOUGH!" I belt, silencing the overactive voice boxes of the revolutionaries. Travis's grip gradually loosens on my forearm when the yelling ceases. The rate of my breathing simmers down also. Only for a very brief moment do we meet eyes, and in that moment, we seesaw back and forth on who will speak out about the issues at hand.

The people shut up for me, but Travis can be scary as hell if he wanted to be. If he shouted, people probably would have peed themselves so fast they wouldn't know what to do. Plus, he has to be the leader. The Five think so and so do I.

Time for the official recognition. All it will take are a few solid answers and everyone will dub him as the leader. Simple as that.

I give him a short nod of encouragement and he proceeds with his speech. "I know. I know. You're all freaking out. You're nervous. The shitty space food is running out. It's getting cold, and you don't really know where the hell you are or where you're going because you've never stepped foot on Earth before. I never said this was going to easy. It would have been a hell of a lot easier if Brink hadn't screwed up the landing, but we can't change that now. We have about a three-hundred mile hike ahead of us, which will surely take us over a week to complete. Even those of us who originate from Earth don't know what to expect. It's a different world out there now."