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Chapter 36 – Invisible DangersThe phone was ringing. It wasn’t her phone, and it was loud. And it was right by the bed. She managed to roll over and grab it. “Huh?”
Jack’s voice blared through the line. “Hey, Annie, up and at ’em! I would’ve sounded reveille, but the hotel guys took away my trumpet. So get a move on. Breakfast in my suite in thirty.” He pretended to sound worried. “Please! Please get here before Grover’s mom shows up! I need chaperones!”
She managed not to giggle, even if he was pretty funny. On the other hand, she could see Deborah showing up at Jack’s room in the middle of the night in a raincoat and heels, and nothing else. She shuddered briefly. That was so icky she needed a shower. And a brain rinse.
She showered as fast as she could, not bothering to wash her hair since it was going to be under a wig cap all day anyway. She dried off and put her hair up. She put on another dumpy ‘Annie’ outfit, this one a blouse and skirt and suit jacket in blah earth tones that didn’t quite go together so the whole thing just looked a little off. She did her makeup like yesterday, added the ugly wig and mega-ugly glasses, and she was ready.
She pocketed her phone and ‘taser’, and made sure her gym bag was ready to go. Then she hurried up to Jack’s suite.
Jack had all kinds of breakfast stuff all over the ‘kitchenette’ counter. Riley and Stewart were already eating at the big table, while Jack was sitting with a cup of coffee like he had already eaten. Oh, a dirty plate in the sink. So he had already eaten.
She grabbed some eggs, some bacon, some hash browns, and a cinnamon roll. Then she sat down and ate up.
While she ate, Jack spoke. “Okay, team, let’s get this out of the way before Grover and his girls get up here. I want to clear the school today. My best guess is they’ve been camping out in the boiler room or something like that. We have four IR viewers, one for each of us, and we have Grover. I’d like to try and get him to help out, just for recon, not for anything seriously hazardous. But we need to go in armed and armored. Tac vests, Tasers, automatics, and my special surprises …”
Jack opened up a green metal box. Inside were five canisters, each a little bigger than a soda can. Riley grinned.
Jack said, “Yep, tear gas. Nasty under normal circumstances. Should be extra fun if you’re starkers.” He opened another metal box, and she saw three gas masks with hoods.
“Three?” she checked.
He looked at her. “Three. If we run into trouble, you take Grover out of the way, and get back to the SUV.”
Oh, right. Because her Terawatt bag was going to be sitting in the back of the SUV.
She quietly said, “Yes, sir.”
Riley asked, “Sir, what if they have heavier weaponry? Shotguns, rifles, semi-automatics, maybe some illegal gear?”
Jack frowned. “Then we pull out the P-90’s and things get … unpleasant.”
She had a feeling that meant ‘guys get dead’. She knew that if the creeps had heavy weapons and were in some place hard to get to, like a basement boiler room, it would be up to Terawatt to save the day, or else a lot of people could get really badly hurt, or even killed. And she didn’t want anyone to get killed, not even psychos who beat two cheerleaders to death probably because they came in and caught the guys holding pipes or clubs in the air, or maybe they ran into the naked invisible guys by accident.
Those guys were creeps, but that didn’t mean she was in favor of killing them.
She was nearly done with her second plate of food when Grover and Cindy and Deborah showed up. Grover and Cindy were necking pretty seriously when Jack opened the door. Alex would have been a little concerned about Grover not looking out for invisible intruders, except Stewart had the IR viewers up and running, and he took a quick peek down the hall.
Jack made sure Cindy and Deborah ate a good breakfast, and he had a big vanilla milkshake and a glass of orange juice for Grover. Then he explained that the high school was closed for the day, and there would be policemen and the school superintendent waiting for them outside the school at eight. It took him almost twenty minutes to talk Deborah into letting Grover go with them.
Stewart, Riley, and Jack changed into what looked to her like the soldier fighting outfits Sam liked. Jack called them BDUs, which Alex was pretty sure was the same thing Sam called them. The guys strapped on web belts and sidearms and tac vests, then loaded up with guns and ammo and Tasers and tear gas and stuff. She and Grover got tac vests and orders to stay behind the trained soldiers.
They drove over in the SUV and the panel truck that the ‘parapsychologists’ would have been using if they weren’t in the hospital. Cindy and Deborah were stuck in their hotel room with Deborah complaining about not being able to get into that mini-bar.
They pulled up in a small parking area behind the school. It looked like the place where a truck would unload food for the cafeteria. There were three police cars, a police SWAT van, and two ordinary cars: one for Principal Baxter, and one for someone who was growling at Principal Baxter like a boss would. So maybe it was the superintendent of schools.
Jack flashed his Homeland Security ID and told the SWAT guys that Captain Finn and Sergeant Scott were Army Rangers with experience in dealing with super-powered opponents. That impressed them. Then Jack used a blueprint of the school and laid out the plan. “All right. We’re going to move in five armed teams. Miss Farrell and Mister Dunn have experience in spotting these invisibles, and Mister Dunn is the only one of us who can see them without special gear. That is why they will be on teams Alpha and Bravo. These targets may have heavy weaponry, so if you see a weapon floating in mid-air, treat it as a life-threatening situation. We will move through the cafeteria and eating area with bounding overwatch, and once we have cleared them, we’ll have teams Alpha and Bravo stand guard to prevent infiltration, while we move east to clear the gym and locker rooms. After that, teams Charlie through Echo will move north to clear the admin offices and classroom block B, while Alpha and Bravo move to watch access down the west hallway. Once we’ve cleared this block, we move west down the main hall, checking every classroom and the library as we go, with Team Bravo having the overwatch position at all times. Once we have cleared the aboveground school areas, we’ll concentrate on the underground areas. We will barricade the outside access doors to the underground areas, and move through the primary access point here.” He pointed at the door down to the boiler room and the HVAC systems and the other stuff.
He said, “They have to move about naked to stay invisible, which means they may want to stay in warm conditions as much as they can. We expect they have an encampment in the boiler room, which may be difficult to enter without making ourselves vulnerable. If that happens, we will go with teargas in any high-danger space. Naked plus teargas generally equals ‘oww’.” Several policemen laughed. “Are there any questions?”
Well, there were some questions, mainly about chain of command and having to take orders from ‘Miss Farrell’ and ‘Mister Dunn’. But then they grouped up and prepared to move out.
She had one SWAT guy and two regular policemen. Both regular guys also had armored vests and riot shotguns. She told them, “Don’t let the dumpy outfit and undercover look fool you. I’ve been trained by the best.” She just didn’t tell them it was only five days of training. Still, telling them she was trained but just undercover made them look at her with a lot more respect. She went on, “Our team’s job is simple. If our targets approach with weapons, we’ll be able to see the weapons, even if we can’t see the people. And you can aim for the weapon, which they’ll be holding. If our targets approach without a weapon, I’ll be able to see them coming using the IR viewer, and we’ll only have to deal with one or two unarmed naked teenagers. Got it?”
They moved out, team by team. She even knew what bounding overwatch was, thanks to Sam, so she knew when to go and when to stop. She let Team Echo with Riley clear the doorway, and Team Bravo with Grover do the long-range checking, since he could see invisible guys a lot better than the little IR viewers. Since they had five teams, she even checked under the tables and in the freezer and pantry, while other teams watched ahead of them.
They moved fast, since there was nothing to spot. Her team and Grover’s team took up positions watching the west hallway and the area going to the admin offices and some other classrooms. It only took the other three teams about twelve minutes to run through the gym and the storage areas and the locker rooms, and make sure they were all clear, too.
Then she moved her team up to their next position, while Grover’s team watched down the west hall and the other teams moved quickly through the admin areas. After that, her team moved forward and watched the south hallway, while Grover’s team kept an eye on the doors to the underground rooms, and the other teams cleared all the classrooms down the hallway. Then the other teams cleared the south hallway rooms.
After that, it was time for the downstairs. Grover’s team went right behind Team Echo, and Teams Charlie and Delta went next, with her team watching everyone’s backs. There were lots of pipes and ducts, but no invisible threats. And when they got to the boiler room, Grover’s team had to move back because the room was so warm Grover had trouble seeing people clearly.
But there was no one in the boiler room, either. Just a nest. Jack told her, “Nothing interesting. Sleeping bags, camping equipment, Carl the janitor’s stolen hotplate and coffeepot, some grocery bags of food that are probably swiped, too, that kind of stuff. However, there are boxes of shotgun shells, and boxes of ammo, but no weapons.”
She frowned. Did that mean those jerks were running around town naked but with shotguns and rifles?
They moved back to the post behind the school and made sure every entrance to the school was securely locked. She didn’t say anything, but she was wondering what they would do next. Were they going to check out the houses of the invisible jerks? Were they going to blanket the area around the school? Were they going to go check out the supermarket those grocery bags came from? She figured Jack had a plan, and if she asked out loud, it would just make her look unprofessional. Which, frankly, she was, but she didn’t want any of the policemen to know that.
The SWAT team leader stepped over to Jack. “Colonel, we’ve got a situation we need to move to, if you can cut us loose now. It’s a hostage crisis in a bank robbery just six blocks west of here. The officers on site report that the bank robbers have a minimum of eighteen hostages that they can see from the windows, and an unknown number more. But the robbers are … Hang on.” He listened to a report coming over his earjack before he winced. “Officers on site report that the robbers are wearing high-tech stealth suits or something, because they’ve spotted the weapons but …” He sighed. “The robbers themselves appear to be invisible.”
“Great,” Jack muttered out loud.
The SWAT leader touched his earpiece again and groaned, “The bank robbers are demanding a billion dollars, a helicopter to O’Hare Airport, and a jet plane to Brazil.” He looked at Jack and asked, “Are these guys nuts?”
Jack said, “Actually, they may be.” He looked at Alex and said, “Care to fill in the nice officers, Farrell?”
She stepped forward. “These aren’t the first people to get dosed with a mutagenic biochemical, so we know that sometimes someone exposed to one of these problem chemicals gets hit with something else mutagenic or at least reactive with the original chemical, and they have peculiar drug interactions. So they may have been taking something like anabolic steroids before they got dosed, and they may literally be insane right now.”
One of the SWAT members groaned and said, “Man, where’s a superhero when you need one?”
Jack grinned. “You mean, like that superheroine in California?”
“Yeah.”
Jack smirked. “It’s a good thing we’re here, then. Because we can help on that issue, too.”
The SWAT member pointed at Riley and asked, “So you brought your own superhero to fight supervillains?”
Alex managed not to giggle. Jack just gave the guy a huge grin but said, “Captain Finn is an Army Ranger. That makes him a superhero automatically. Now how about you get going to that hostage situation, and we’ll provide some assistance in our usual, subtle manner.”
They walked over to the SUV and the truck. Grover nervously asked, “You’re not expecting me to be a superhero on this, are you? Because these guys will be able to see me coming.”
Jack said, “Nope.” He even popped his ‘p’ just to bug Grover. “I expect you to sit in that truck and not move your butt out of there unless Stewart sets the thing on fire. Got me?”
Grover looked around and quietly asked, “You’ve got that Terawatt woman on speed-dial or something, don’t you?”
Jack gave him a big grin. “Or something.”
Alex hopped in the back seat of the SUV and waited until Jack started it up before she asked, “How do you want to do this? Because I’d rather not have everyone know it’s me.”
Jack said, “Go ahead and change. Then I’ll be the last car out of this lot, so you can ooze out a rear window and follow overhead. I’ll pretend you’re in the SUV doing C&C with our bosses.”
Alex just said, “Okay.” Because it sounded like he had a good plan, and she knew from Sam what ‘C&C’ was. She puddled into the gym bag in the back, changed into her Terawatt uniform, and waited until Jack moved the car. True to his word, he was behind all the police cars, so when he opened a rear window about two inches, she puddled out of it and flew down to the ground.
As soon as all the cars moved around the corner, she flew up to the roof of the school and watched as the police cars hurried over to the hostage sitch. She flew up to about six hundred feet in the air and followed. Then, when the police cars pulled up in a big blockade around the bank, along with the five police cars already there, she flew in a fast semicircle so she came in from the other direction.
She dropped down in front of the SWAT leader and Jack. Then she stayed about a foot off the ground and moved into her superheroine pose, with her fists on her hips. In her Terawatt voice she said, “I understand that you’re in need of super-powered assistance, officer.”
All the policemen turned and stared at Jack, who just gave them a big, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin.