Clara Reyes of The Crashers: Faster than my bullet
When you move this fast, the world has a habit of slowing down for you. Clara doesn’t give it much of a choice.
The room stretches out like spaghetti as Clara moves through it, pulled taut across the planes of her peripheral vision to break down so that she can see the spaces between everything around her. If she concentrates, she’s sure she could see the atoms, the particles, the math that makes up the building’s skeleton and furnishes the apartments. Fire reaches out for her in lapping tongues but doesn’t make it, too slow, too cold to catch up in the wake she leaves behind her. It races through the fibers of the carpets, up the drapes to the ceiling where it swells to eat the room from the top down. There are eight floors in this walk-up, three units to a floor. The entire building will be engulfed in flames within the next three minutes, and there’s still two units between her and the outside wall where Adam and Norah are waiting.
Kyle said that this was a bad idea, but the day she starts putting stock in what Kyle has to say is the day she packs it all in and heads back to Sacramento. Good ideas are for people who have time to weigh their options.
When she reaches the four inches of plaster and wooden frame between this living room and the next, Clara takes a deep breath. Balls her fists, closes her eyes, and punches through. The excess of kinetic energy she’s been storing for the last twenty-seven seconds shields her from the explosion of splinters and nails as she passes through the wall. Debris gets caught up in her field, a slow-motion detonation of furniture and picture frames that disappears as the fire swallows the space behind her. Through a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, she breathes out the smell of burning plastic as she reaches the exterior wall. The brick shatters on impact and she draws herself in, expecting the height and the fall from six floors up.
Falling, falling, falling, the fire behind her and the black sky above, taking wood and metal and glass with her in shards that glitter when she gets up close like this. She doesn’t close her eyes as the ground catches up with her; she couldn’t if she wanted to, the archaic shiver of fight-or-flight putting her feet underneath her and her hands around her ears. The crunch she expects ends in the hard wet packing sound of skin and bone as she and Adam topple over each other to the ground. When time finally catches up with Clara, she’s pressed into Adam’s chest, his arms around her, holding her tightly.
Even with the scraped cheek and the cut above his eye, on his back in the dirt of the street outside, Adam is smiling.
“You’re a show-off, you know that?”
Catching her breath, Clara just shrugs. “I told you to get out of the way.”
