The gear turned, interlaced with another, and another. His eyes traced the inner workings of the machine to the place where the light shone.
"Won't be long now. Trav, pack the van. Bentley, get the tranq gun."
They'd learned a lot with the early jumps. Chloe had been the first candidate to really excel at Jumping and over the decade since those first tentative steps, had helped Doctor Forgrave perfect his invention... And dramatically expand its use.
A slight buzzing preceded the Jumper, followed by an inward pull of air as if the very spot she would appear was taking a breath. A flash of light bathed the room, and a bestial roar filled the warehouse.
"Shoot her!" he yelled, looking at Bentley who stood frozen. Newbies. God.
The Jumper snapped her head in Bentley's direction and with a growl, lurched back into the void.
Harmon hadn't even finished his curse before a pulling wind and blinding flash lit the room a second time. A fine pink mist exploded out of the area that Bentley had been occupying moments earlier.
"Chloe! Stop!" he shouted. Behind him, a van roared to life, which thankfully took her attention off of him. "Chloe! Don't Jump! You're experiencing a dangerous level of synapse warp. We aren't -"
She blinked out of existence again.
Get the tranq gun.
Harmon lept forward, sliding through the gore that had been the team's newest recruit only a minute ago... wrapping his fingers around the weapon and rolling to face both the space he'd been and the van behind him.
Another distant pull of air confirmed the worst case - she'd targetted the van. Harmon closed his eyes in the half-second before the flash. The van ripped apart as if torn by the hands of God. Chloe's displacement wasn't explosive, but it did turn the entire front of the van into shrapnel. For a split second, it hung there in the air before exploding outward.
Harmon did his best to roll behind a nearby pillar but felt the bite of multiple chunks of metal shred his back. A scream ripped free of his throat, but there was no time to waste - he forced his shredded muscles to raise the rifle and squeeze the trigger.
Chloe turned to look at him in the same moment the dart slammed into her chest. She took a step forward as if preparing to Jump, and then fell.
Harmon raised a shakey hand to the earpiece he wore. "Doc, the clone is down. You've got maybe two hours to get here. Van is gone. Team is dead. I'm in bad shape... but she's down. Send recovery."
Shakily, he pulled a vape out of his breast pocket, remembering the lyrics of an old song.
🎵You've got twelve good minutes of pain before it's useless complaining... time to have a cigarette and wash it all away...🎵
I tried two different takes on this, and in the end, settled on this ending to the story. It didn't end up leading where I thought it would... but I figured I'd roll with it anyhow. It leaves some more questions to be answered but hopefully is satisfying nonetheless.
This was the second part of the story proposed in this post, and was a continuation of @killerwot's story here
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay:
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/cry-person-face-abstract-banner-1682140/