Free Afterlife by Merrie Destefano Page B

that hung over all of us. There were too many guards in front of the house. Who was guarding the back?
    â€œJacques! Andre!” I shouted. “Around to the back, hurry!”
    â€œIt’s too late,” she said. A mocking grin broke through the kiss that still lingered on her lips.
    Just then we all heard a sizzling crackle and I smelled the characteristic odor of liquid light. It was the smell of ash and fire and brimstone. A blast cracked through the upstairs windows and splattered out onto the lawn, a shower of glass and fire that fell all around us.
    â€œGet inside!” I yelled to the rest of the guards. “Upstairs, to Isabelle’s room!”
    The woman who had pretended to be Sadie grabbed my arm, a grip almost supernaturally strong. She pulled me back toward her.
    â€œWhere is the dog?” she demanded, her voice hard as a knife.
    I suddenly realized that she held a weapon in her other hand, something I had never seen before. I wrenched my arm free, but she struck me with a lightning kick to the groin. I knew then that she was dangerously different, some sort of genetically enhanced creature that could move faster than I could even think.
    â€œWhat dog?” I asked as I struggled to catch my breath.
    â€œEllen and the dog,” she answered. Then she danced backward, just out of reach when one of the remaining guards lunged toward her. “Where are they? What did you do with the research?”
    â€œI don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    She punched a button on the cylinder she held, but I never could have anticipated what happened next.
    Her eyelids fluttered and her body began to crumple to the ground. I grabbed her around the waist and tried to force her to stay, although I knew it was impossible. She was getting ready to jump, to download into another body, probably to an unknown safe house, one of the few that existed apart from Fresh Start.
    She sagged in my arms, only a moment or two of life left.
    â€œConsider this a warning,” she breathed. “Next time we won’t be so—gentle.”
    Then she died.
    I dropped her body on the ground and ran toward the house, hoping that I wasn’t already too late.
    Â 
    People huddled in self-protective swarms downstairs, some crying, a few screaming. But none of them made a move toward the stairs or the room on the second floor that held their children. The room that had just exploded.
    I pushed my way through the ineffectual human mass that stood in my way, cursing them as I passed.
    I dashed up the stairs, taking three at a time, only a heartbeat behind the guards I had ordered inside a moment ago. Smoke trickled down the stairs, a smell of ash, of singed hair.
    It was the smell of death.
    The door to Isabelle’s room was shattered, but I didn’t know if the guards had broken it on their way in or if someone else had done it, some savage intruder.
    I jumped over cracked boards—the shards of wood that had once been the door to my niece’s bedroom—and then stopped, overwhelmed by what I saw.
    Bodies lay strewn around the room, children immortally frozen in positions of fear. Arms and legs pummeling air, they had all been running for their lives when the burning light caught up with them. Like a macabre game invented in the pit of hell.
    Tag, you’re dead.
    The smell of charred flesh hung in the room, oily and thick, and remnants of the liquid light still licked the corners of the room, sizzling and crackling and hissing. It sounded like the laughter of demons, a horde from hell that had just stolen everything we loved.
    I saw Russ and Pete rise from the ashes. They struggled to stand, then fell, wobbled on weak legs, collapsed and tried to get up again.
    Then I realized that whoever had done this had intended to kill the children. The blast was set high enough for them, but low enough to let the adults survive.
    â€œConsider this a warning.”
    I scanned the room