“Always a pleasure to see you, Lourdes,” Okoya said. “Release me, and—"
“And what?” Lourdes took a step closer. “You’ll crown me Queen for a Day?”
Okoya pulled against his bonds one more time. “Everything that was Dillon’s will now be yours.”
“I don’t need you for that,” said Lourdes. “I know what I’m capable of. If I want the world on a silver platter, I’ll put it there myself.”
“Then why are you here?”
“This is why.” Lourdes squeezed her hands into tight fists, and pushed forth a single nerve impulse. Instantly Okoya began to gasp for air as his heart seized in his chest.
“How does it feel to have our powers turned against you?”
“If you kill this body,” gasped Okoya, “it will free me to jump into another. There are hundreds of people on that road; I could be any one of them, and you’ll never know when I’m coming.”
Lourdes squeezed her fists tighter, but knew Okoya was telling the truth. She released the hold on his heart, and the color returned to Okoya’s face as he pulled in deep, wheezing breaths.
“You don’t know how to kill me,” Okoya sneered, “and it’s a waste of your time to try.”
Maybe so, but as long as he was in that body, he could feel every measure of its pain. Lourdes brought her fist back, and smashed it heavily across his jaw, and then again, and then again, making sure every punishing blow had the full force of her anger. But no matter how many times she struck him, it made her feel no better. In the end, Okoya’s face was bruised and swollen, but his evil spirit would not break.
“I gave you what you wanted,” he said through swollen lips. “You should be grateful.”
She turned and strode off. She did not go back to Winston, nor did she go to see the flood. Instead she headed off in the opposite direction. Okoya had put a hunger in her that could never be satisfied again. She hated Okoya for putting it there, she hated Dillon for having brought them here in the first place, and she hated Michael, for the love he had killed in her.
Her knees felt shaky, her legs weak, but her fury gave her strength to walk away from all of this and not look back.
22. Turbulence
A body-bruising slap of cold, and a tumbling loss of control—Dillon had finally given his will over to the will of the water. He felt himself whipped against boulders in the churning currents and his senses began to leave him. Then, in the midst of the maelstrom, Dillon felt a calm numbness begin to surround him like a bubble of peace within the flood, and all Dillon could hear was the heavy beat of his own heart. So this is death, Dillon thought, as he began to feel himself slip out of consciousness.
Meanwhile, on the ridge above, the remaining followers, spectators, and a half dozen airborne news crews watched as Dillon and “the chosen ones” were taken under by the torrent. At first, the followers on the ridge didn’t know what to make of it, but as the water continued to pass, wails of anguish began to fill the air as they realized that this was not the glorious event they had been promised; and their minds began the long, arduous task of reconciling what they had just witnessed.
Somewhere in that reconciliation, they would come to accept that Dillon Cole had tricked them all; that he was just another false prophet, and in the end brought nothing but death and destruction. For all those who stood on that rim, for all those who saw Black Canyon fill with white water, there would be many sleepless nights, but in the end, the dead would be buried, and the living would return to the lives they had led before being touched by Dillon. . . and in so doing, set the world back on its balance.
This is what Dillon had wanted—and it all would have come to pass, had Dillon’s power not been stronger than even he could comprehend.
The water surged down the canyon at 200 miles per hour. By the time the canyon widened, the wave was crashing toward the hotels at Laughlin—at 175 miles per hour. In Laughlin, those unlucky enough to be stranded there caught sight of the white foam of the water-wall in the distance as it crashed toward them—at 150 miles per hour. Several news helicopters, barely able to keep up with the surge at first, found themselves easily matching the pace of the flood’s leading edge, clocking their speed at 100 miles per hour, just ten miles out of Laughlin.
There was a figure caught in the telephoto crossbars of one cameraman’s lens. He was riding the crest of the flood’s leading edge, lying on his back. By all rights, he should have been churned down into the water’s killing depths—yet somehow, was not. Instead he was surrounded by an island of calm water amid the chaos. His eyes were closed, so there was no way of telling if he was dead, or merely unconscious.
It was five miles out of Laughlin that the rushing water inexplicably slowed to below the highway speed limit.
Michael’s powers were not hell-bent on self-preservation.
The moment Michael and Tory fell into the powerful updraft, they were dragged skyward, and as Dillon tumbled beneath the waves during the first moments of the flood, Michael and Tory were tumbled up by the wind.
At a height of ten thousand feet, the dust-filled shaft of wind burst apart, spreading out like a mushroom cloud. Michael and Tory continued to cling to one another as they rode the shock wave of wind, no longer knowing up from down. Michael knew his skill was not one of precision, but of broad strokes. Storms and cloud sculptures were a far cry from controlled flight. The air was now too thin to fill their lungs, and unforgivingly cold. Michael tried to move his fingers and found that he couldn’t even feel them.
“What happens now?” Tory cried into Michael’s ear.
Michael knew he didn’t have to say it, because she already knew.
“Whatever happens, I won’t let you go.”
And in that instant, as he held Tory’s shivering body, he knew he had finally found in his soul the faintest glimmer of love.
But it was too late to change the course of the wind.
Gripping cold.
Breaking clouds.
A long, frozen fall.
And then nothing.
The sudden sense of Michael and Tory’s death snapped Dillon to consciousness. He opened his eyes, and thought the blinding light that shone on his face was the spirit of God, until a helicopter cut across it, and he realized it was only the sun shining through the breaking clouds. He was alert enough to realize that he was alive, and to know that he was floating in strangely serene water. Yet why did he hear it churning all around him?
A moment more, and it all came back to him— everything until the moment he had lost consciousness.
Now his body no longer felt the battering it had received from the water. He had already healed himself—although his lungs still felt heavy from the submerged breaths he had drawn.
While still underwater, he must have unknowingly created an oasis of calm around himself like a reflex. That bubble of calm water had lifted him to the surface and carried him along, acting as a buffer between him and the raging torrent.
But there was something more going on here—he could feel it, like a chill that wound up his spine. Only it was longer than his spine—much longer.
The feeling stretched out the length of his body and beyond; shooting hundreds of miles to the south through the soles of his feet, and hundreds of miles to the north through the top of his head. Then he realized that the churning water—still bubbling and brewing, was no longer consuming the landscape before it. The hotel towers of Laughlin stood only a mile or two away, but drew no closer. The entire flood was in fact standing still—treading itself like the waters of a washing machine. Dillon then felt himself moving again, and he once more sensed that cold strand shoot through him like a thousand-mile vein. Then, in a moment, he understood exactly what was happening.