Plague

sidewalk.
    His furious counterattack may have stopped or even killed some of the bugs—he couldn’t be sure in the darkness—but the swarm never hesitated. Up and over they rolled, like a wave.
    Shaking, he stood his ground and raised trembling hands. If he couldn’t smash them maybe he could just hold them back.
    The nearest bug slammed into an invisible wall of telekinetic power. Its legs motored madly, tearing gouges in the blacktop, kicking the smashed cars, but unable to advance.
    “Yeah, try that!” Caine yelled.
    A second, a third, a fourth creature, all pressed against the barrier, all relentlessly scrambling, pushing, determined. And all the while, Caine stood alone in the middle of the street.
    But for how long? he wondered. The bugs didn’t seem to be tiring. In fact they were scrabbling over one another in a mad tangle of legs and massive silvery carapaces and scythe-mandibles and always the gnashing mouths and glowing ruby eyes.
    He faltered, seeing those eyes, and suddenly the wall of bugs surged a foot closer.
    He redoubled his focus. But he was feeling something he’d never felt before when using his power: a physical push back, as if he was holding them back with his muscles as well as his telekinetic ability.
    Without thinking, he had set his feet in a strong stance, and he could feel the weight on his calves and thighs, even more on his arms. He wasn’t just projecting power as he always had, he was pushing back, at the limit of his powers, being pressed by thousands of pounds of thrust from dozens and dozens of stabbing legs.
    They were just twenty feet away. Piling high against the invisible barrier. With a terrible shock he realized they were climbing over one another in a deliberate effort to get over the top of the invisible wall of energy.
    Then, a far worse shock: some of the creatures had come around Golding Street and were rushing him from behind.
    He switched his pose, one hand for the mass of bugs, one for the onrushing attack. But it would not do. He couldn’t hold them.
    “Should have stayed on the island,” he told himself. He had gambled and lost.
    The two invisible walls were closing in. He was holding back tons of pushing, questing monsters and he couldn’t do it, could not. He just did not have the power. And once he broke, they would be on him before he could blink.
    “Hey! Jerkwad!”
    He glanced toward the sound. Standing, arms akimbo, atop the flat roof of a two-story apartment building, was Brianna.
    “Come to gloat?” he managed.
    “See the front door of that house?”
    “What?”
    “That’s where we’re going.”
    “No time!”
    “No time,” Brianna mocked. “Please. Just go limp.”
    “Go limp?”
    “Yeah: limp. And oh, by the way: it’s going to hurt.”
    He never saw her move but he felt the linebacker impact as she hit him at blazing speed.
    Caine went flying. His shirt was ripped from his back. He spun crazily and fell hard onto the lawn. The bug armies crashed together like two waves behind him. Like the Red Sea closing behind Moses.
    Caine tried to stand, but already there were hands on his back pushing him, propelling him forward at insane speed. He hit the doorjamb on his way through. The bugs swarmed toward the door but it had already been slammed, locked, and barricaded with a chair.
    Brianna stood in the middle of the room, examining her fingernails with theatrical calm.
    “The whole superspeed thing comes in helpful at times,” she said.
    “I think you broke my back,” Caine said. He felt sharp pain in his ribs. But it was very much better than the alternative.
    The door exploded inward and a tangle of bug legs appeared.
    “I can hold them, but I can’t kill them all,” Caine shouted.
    “Yeah. They’re hard to kill. You got a plan?”
    Caine bit savagely at his thumb, worrying the cuticle. They were surrounded. The very walls were being battered. The windows were all smashed. They couldn’t fit through the door but they would soon make it wide enough.
    They stood, Caine and Brianna, in the kitchen, the center of the house, as far as possible from the windows, but now the bugs had their mandibles shoved in through the doors and windows, questing, slicing the air, their ropelike tongues lashing madly.
    The entire house was like a drum pounded by dozens of drumsticks.
    “You know, I’m kind of disappointed,” Brianna said. “Situation like this? Sam would come up with a plan.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight
59 MINUTES

    SAM HAD