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Chapter 38 – Sitting UpAlex woke up Monday morning when the alarm went off. After the thing last week with her folks hearing her singing the lyrics in that Pink song, she had switched the alarm back to ‘loud horrible noise’ instead of playing music.
She was still styling her hair when her Terawatt phone went off. A quick glance told her it was Willow. That probably wasn’t good.
“Terawatt here,” she said in her superheroine voice. Boy, she had watched the news about Terawatt over the weekend, and she totally came off like a pompous dorky person. Still, she couldn’t let Terawatt sound like Alex.
Willow’s AutoTuned voice said, “I just got a hit off the state crime website. Jo Baker just went missing from that prison. After breakfast, she was supposed to go to the laundry to work, and no one could find her.”
Alex groaned. “Don’t tell me. She just ‘vanished’.”
Willow said, “I kind of doubt it’s going invisible. That wouldn’t get you out past a bunch of locked doors and over prison fences. And anyway, she didn’t have powers before, right?”
“Right,” Alex sighed. But she knew Jo pretty much had a one-track mind. If Jo escaped from jail, she would be going after little Alex Mack again. And Jo knew Alex would go to school, while she didn’t know any other places Alex might show up. Great. Another confrontation with Jo at school, only this time Jo would probably do more than threaten her with a knife.
She said, “Thanks for the news.”
Willow said, “I’ll keep an eye out for anything else that might be her. The local police already have a squad car at her dad’s place, and they’re going to have two cars outside the school all day.”
Alex so didn’t want to have to deal with Jo today, too. She had two missed days of school to cope with, and she’d spent the whole weekend catching up on homework and getting ready for the two tests she missed. Being a superhero was totally harder than you’d think.
And then, while she was eating breakfast and starting to pack a lunch that was going to be two roast pork sandwiches with her mom’s gravy instead of mayo, her Terawatt phone went off again.
This time, it was Jack’s secret number. Uh-oh. “Terawatt here.”
Her mom and dad stopped what they were doing and turned to watch her.
Jack said, “Bad news, Tera. You’ll want to hear about this. Joelle Harriet Baker escaped police custody this morning.”
How would he know she would care about that? Oh, right. He knew about Alex. And he’d probably pulled everything even remotely related to Alex so he could see if his new superheroine was a juvenile delinquent or something. So he’d probably found out all about poor little Alex Mack being attacked on school grounds by a big hulking bully with an illegal knife.
She maintained her Terawatt voice. “My team just alerted me. Do you have any new information?”
He said, “Only that her cellmate was found in a closet with a fractured skull. And naked. The report says it looks like someone hit her in the back of the head with something like a brick or a homemade mace.”
Oh, that so didn’t sound good. “Is it possible that Baker is also a victim and will be found injured elsewhere in the prison?”
He said, “Nope. They’ve been doing a full search. The only suspicious thing they found was Baker had a crushed plastic soda bottle hidden under her mattress. They’re testing the bottle for drugs.”
She groaned out loud. “Get someone who can test that bottle for GC-161.”
“Crap.”
She said, “Yeah, that’s what I’d say, but my … authority figures are standing right here.”
He snorted, which she figured was better than laughing out loud. Then he said, “Better tell your pet hacker she needs to check the police reports for anything that might be GC-161 superpowers.”
She didn’t even get out the front door before her Terawatt phone buzzed in her pants pocket. It was Jack again. “Tera, bad news. The prison authorities got some prints off that crushed soda bottle. Nothing but Baker’s prints all over the barrel, but they got a partial off the underside, where it hadn’t been completely wiped clean. You’ll never guess whose print it matches.”
“Danielle R. Atron,” she guessed.
“Correct! Don Pardo, tell her what she’s won!”
She didn’t even know who Don Pardo was, but from Jack’s lame ‘game show announcer’ voice, she was guessing he was a game show guy. She said, “So that makes the odds pretty darn high it was GC-161 in that bottle.”
Jack said, “Yup. And it turns out Baker was visited by her new attorney Friday. Even though the court is saying she doesn’t have a new attorney, she still has the old one. But someone showed up with faked papers saying she was Baker’s new attorney, and met with Baker for about ten minutes. Said female lawyer had an expensive power suit, big ugly glasses, too much makeup, and gray hair which could easily be a wig. And she gave her name as Nora Dallienet. Which anybody with a brain ought to be able to tell is an anagram of ‘Danielle Atron’. I swear, that woman has balls the size of weather balloons.”
She slowly said, “And if Danielle Atron is going to all the trouble of giving Jo Baker superpowers …”
Jack continued, “… then she’s targeting Alex Mack again. And maybe the whole Mack family. And anyone else she associates with Alex Mack and the GC-161 disaster. Like Raymond Alvarado or Louis Driscoll. Or police officer David Watt.”
She said, “Then I may need to be calling in that favor I just racked up a couple days ago.”
He said, “On it already. Call me when you feel like chatting. Over and out.”
She hung up and shoved her Terawatt phone back in her pants pocket. She wanted to have it handy. She wanted to have a lot of stuff handy.
Her mom said, “Danielle Atron?”
Her dad said, “Again?”
She grimaced. “Danielle Atron apparently went into a jail where Alex Mack’s enemy Jo Baker is awaiting trial, and gave Jo GC-161 superpowers. No one knows what powers they are. But the only reason Danielle would do something like that is so she could do something massively evil. Like go after us again. Jo’s definitely gonna go after me. But what’s the point, unless Danielle is sure I’m Terawatt.”
Her dad said, “Or she’s sure A.L. Mack knows who Terawatt really is.”
She slapped herself on the forehead. “I didn’t even think about that!”
Her mom said, “Either one is bad. And we know what she did the last time.”
Alex said, “I know you said you hated Sam’s ideas, but I think we have to be prepared, starting right now.”
Her dad said, “I’ve got everything ready. Your formulation is in the garage secure area.”
Her mom said, “I’ll be carrying ours. Do you need to get something to Raymond?”
She nodded unhappily. “Yeah. But he’s really not big on this.”
Her dad said, “Neither are we. I still think it’s a bad idea, but if Danielle backs us into a corner like last time, I want to have a better option than just hoping Ray and Hunter show up in the nick of time and bust us out of a locked room.”
She hugged both of them hard and said, “Please be safe. I love you.”
They both hugged her. “We love you, too, honey.”
“We love you, and we want you to be safe, too. Okay?”
“Okay.” She had to sniff a couple times as she walked out to her car with her gym bag and her backpack.
As she was getting into her car, her dad reminded her, “And don’t forget. Two hours.”
On the way in to school, she called Willow on the Terawatt phone and filled her in on Jack’s information.
Willow said, “That’s good. I mean, it’s all bad, but it’s good that Jack found out and wants to tell you and wants to help you.”
Alex said, “Just do what you do, because Jack probably has the best government IT guys outside of the NSA, plus anything he can get out of the NSA and the NSC and the CIA, and you’re still way ahead of them.”
Alex could practically hear the smile as Willow said, “Flattery will get you nowhere.”
Alex said, “It’s not flattery if it’s all true.”
When she got to school, she went straight to Ray, who was talking with Louis and Jackson and some of his other guys. She said, “Something important just came up this morning.”
Ray asked, “How important? Is it …?”
She just nodded and took his hand, then led him off to a private spot. She explained everything and said, “You need to hide this on you somewhere, and keep it hidden until we have this thing wrapped up. I don’t want you to end up like …”
“Like Hunter’s dad?” he asked.
She nodded unhappily. He took the small plastic bottle from her and tucked it into one of his pants pockets. He moaned, “I hate this. I mean, this could go so wrong in so many different ways …”
She squeezed his hands and said, “I know. But the alternative is way worse.” She kissed him and led him off to homeroom.
She had been through tense times before. She had been through years of tenseness. But before, she had always been worried about herself. Okay, there had been plenty of times when she was afraid for Annie, or for people she didn’t even know. Like that time when Danielle made people think she had captured the Mystery Kid and had him prisoner in the plant, and Alex broke into the plant to try and rescue someone she’d never even seen before. Naturally, it was all a trick and Danielle didn’t have a real person prisoner, and was just setting up a big trap to catch Alex. And then there were the times when Alex had risked letting someone find out about her powers to save someone who was hurt or sick or in trouble. But now she was worrying about her mom and dad and boyfriend. She was worrying about what Danielle Atron was going to do, and what Jo was going to do, and what powers Jo would have, and all that stuff.
How did Jack do this job all the time and not go crazy? She knew that Sam and Buffy and Willow and Selina were pretty much ‘on duty’ every second, but she hadn’t really realized just how nerve-wracking it would be. She was pretty sure she’d go bonkers if she had to live like this for months, or years.
It was all she could do to concentrate on class stuff. She had her homework to turn in, and when Mrs. Finnegan noticed that she wasn’t really concentrating on class, she lied, “Umm, I sort of picked up some kind of bug when I was at Kent State, or on the airplane going there, or coming back. I’ve just felt kind of yucky for a couple days.”
“Aren’t you worried about spreading it to your classmates?”
She said, “Umm, I’m not sneezing or coughing or anything. And I missed two whole days of school, and I have two tests to make up, and all this homework to turn in, and I can’t afford to miss any more school.” Well, that wasn’t totally a lie, it just wasn’t being a hundred percent honest.
But then she had to focus on classes more, and try not to worry about armies of GC-161 enhanced supervillains attacking the school, or the chemical plant, or her house, or the whole darn town.
How were you supposed to take a make-up quiz when you were worrying about the safety of your family? But she had to take her make-up history quiz while Mr. Porter talked about new stuff to the rest of the class, which would have been incredibly distracting if she wasn’t already so distracted it was a wonder her head wasn’t spinning until it unscrewed and went flying across the room. Which she really, really hoped wasn’t a possible side-effect of taking GC-161.
She had studied the stuff the quiz was over, but her brain just didn’t want to remember it. so it took her longer than it should have to get through the quiz and turn it in and get back to taking notes. And then it was super hard to concentrate on what he was saying instead of worrying about what might be looming over the horizon at any second. And she still had a Spanish quiz to get through, which her brain did not want to do.
She turned in all her trig homework and managed to at least look like she was paying attention, and she could do the exercises Mrs. McGurty had them work on in class, but that was really because she had already read this section, not because she was listening to the teacher like she really needed to be doing. Oh, man, Spanish class was going to be a disaster.
And then she got to go eat lunch. She sat with her friends in the caff and wolfed down her two sandwiches, because worrying was hard work. She wondered how come Jack didn’t have ulcers the size of elephants.
She was just finishing her carton of milk, when there was a ginormous crash from outside. She looked out the windows of the cafeteria, and she saw a car in the parking lot flipping over and smashing into a police car. She heard a handgun and a police shotgun going off. She ran to the window and saw someone grab the other police car by the frame on the side and flip it over. It didn’t just tip over, it flipped over and went maybe four or five feet off the ground before crashing into a couple student cars.
Jo Baker had arrived.