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Chapter 51 – Flank AttackAlex ended up falling asleep before eight that night, so she slept way over twelve hours before she woke up. She looked at the sun coming in the window. She looked at her alarm clock, which some nice parent had thoughtfully turned off.
“Nine thirty? Holy crud.” She was starving, too. She fished a protein bar out of her gym bag and ate it on the way down to the kitchen. Then she fixed herself a four-egg omelet with onions, green and red peppers, fresh mushrooms, some leftover broccoli, too, bacon bits, and a bunch of shredded Mexican cheese. After she ate that and cleaned up in the kitchen, she realized something freaky.
She was bored. She had planned on two weeks of just vegging out, and she hadn’t even made it through one day. She hadn’t even made it through the morning! She called Robyn, and she called Gloria, and then she called Ray and talked for almost an hour. While she was chatting with Ray, she got out the slow cooker and set it up for beef stew.
She went off to Robyn’s house and hung out there, and ate lunch there, even if Robyn had to sneak her a few extra sandwiches while Robyn’s mom wasn’t looking. Then she went over to Gloria’s shop and waitressed for the rest of the afternoon and early evening.
The big business from the news guys was down. Word was out that Terawatt had turned up in the Midwestern states, and then in Europe. So no one was expecting that the next big Terawatt appearance had to be in Paradise Valley. But it might be, so there were still some cameramen and photographers hanging around town being hopeful. But all the big-name newscasters had left.
Gloria told her, “The extra profits were great, but the hours were killing me. You have no idea how many doughnuts I was making! I mean, I was having to come in two or three hours earlier, and then stay late to prep dough for the next morning.”
Alex told her, “I could’ve helped, especially with school out. And Nicole could’ve helped you with the baking part.”
Gloria gave her a one-armed hug. “You girls helped me a lot as it was. And Louis got my accounting software all set up, and he’s teaching me how to use it. All it’s costing me is a few doughnuts each time he comes by, and I probably would have ended up putting them out as seconds for the next day, anyway.”
Alex got home after her mom, but since Alex already had the stew going, her mom was doing dusting and vacuuming in the entryway and front hall. Alex was pretty sure she could do better on the beef stew if she put the peas and carrots and potatoes in later, so they didn’t get so overcooked, but her dad really liked it. Her mom thought they should try a lot of slow cooker recipes over the summer, so they’d have a list of good ones to go with once school started up in the fall.
So Alex said, “Umm, speaking of fall, how would you feel about having an exchange student? From maybe … Finland?”
Her folks looked at each other and did that ‘old married people’ thing they did sometimes where they pretty much had a whole conversation without talking out loud. Finally, her dad asked, “Finland? Isn’t that where the stuff started for your last … picture-taking?”
Her mom just asked, “What superpowers does she have?”
Crud, she just could not trick her parents. She completely stunk as a spy. She ducked her head. “Yeah, that’s her. Hanna. She has no one anymore. Her mom was killed when she was two. She spent fourteen years in the middle of nowhere above the Arctic Circle with no one but the guy she thought was her dad, who actually wasn’t, and I can’t tell you more about him than that, but he’s dead now, too. And she grew up learning to hunt and stuff. She’s really smart, but she doesn’t know anything. Well, she knows stuff out of an old encyclopedia, and that’s it. She’d never even seen a plane for real until like a month ago. And she got shot, and we had to go rescue her, and Jack’s people are probably done operating on her, but she needs to meet real people and see what a real family is — I mean, a terrific family with great parents, not a dead mom and a psycho fake dad that Lieutenant Lupo’s afraid maybe molested Hanna — and she needs to go to a real school and learn how to live like a normal person.”
She looked up. Her parents looked horrified. Her dad said, “If she needs our help, we’ll help.”
Her mom said, “That poor child! Sure we’ll help. But … she won’t blast the house apart or anything, will she?”
Alex said, “She’s stronger and faster and quicker and tougher than a sixteen-year-old girl ought to be, but that’s it. And she’s ‘fight an Army Ranger’ strong and quick, not ‘rip doors off hinges’ strong and quick, or ‘throw cars at a superheroine’ strong and quick.”
Her dad said, “Well, as long as you can keep her off the school sports teams, all that sounds manageable.”
Alex carefully said, “Well … There is one thing … She’s … jumpy.”
“Jumpy?” both of them asked.
Alex nodded. “I think her whole life was hunting wild animals and having her ‘dad’ sneak up on her and attack her to train her to be a spy. So if someone taps her on the shoulder when she doesn’t know they’re there, she might slam you into a choke-hold or a joint lock or something. Jack thinks they can un-teach that before school starts, but if they can’t, maybe she’s not ready for public school.”
Her dad asked, “And would she be the third member of your superteam?”
Alex shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t know.” Then she perked up. “Oh! I forgot! I found Hermione Granger, too!”
“Your Hermione from the other dimension?” her mom checked.
“Yeah! And, get this: she’s a secret data analyst for MI-6. She gave a really smart presentation at the meeting I can’t tell you about. And Terawatt flew in and told the conference people she wanted Hermione as her liaison for European super-problems.”
Her dad smiled and said, “That Terawatt sure gets around. Is she really going to poke her nose into E.U. business?”
Alex wrinkled her nose at him. “Only if they ask her to. But I’m not just going to help Americans. People all over the world need my help.”
Her mom asked, “Will Colonel O’Neill help you if you want to play superhero in, say, Russia?”
She nodded. “From what I heard, Jack’s already had to go into Russia and the Ukraine and a couple other former-USSR places, and stop super-powered badness. And it sounds like Jack and Riley and Graham are some of the only guys who have gone in to save the day, and still survived. But I don’t know the details, and some of this is just spy-biz gossip I overheard.”
Her dad said, “Colonel O’Neill sounds like a very powerful man. And he seemed really concerned about you when you were sick from that counteragent.”
Her stomach did a sickening flop just thinking about that stuff. She insisted, “I’m never drinking anything green ever again.”
After dinner, she didn’t have to clean up, so she went straight to her room and checked her phone, and Terawatt’s phone, and the tablet. She had messages on all three. And it was all good news.
Jack sent her a message that Hanna got five hours of arthroscopic surgery under ridiculously heavy anesthesia, and she was doing fine, and she might not even have a visible scar where the bullet went in her, because Janet’s colleague did some really sweet plastic surgery on the entry wound. She sent a message back that if Hanna could keep from attacking people, her folks would let Hanna come for at least the first term of school.
Willow sent her a message that Jack was flying her out to West Virginia on the Cessna so she could meet Charlie and Grover and Cindy and ‘the guys’ — which apparently included Lieutenant Lupo — and Jack’s hackers. Willow had already figured out that Roswell was a secondary base for the SRI, and this military base in West Virginia was their main base. It was once an Army base, and then it kind of died down except for using it as a training site, and then the West Virginia governor wanted to lease it as a concentration camp during World War II, and the Defense Department had bought more land and made a really nice runway and hangar. So the SRI was one of four groups using the base now, as far as she could find out from peeking past some firewalls she wasn’t supposed to peek through. And Jack had a little bungalow for Willow to stay in, and she was going to take some really sexy lingerie and some sexy black high heels, and see if she could get Jack to cave on his ‘no more sex until later’ deal. And Willow really liked Libby, who knew a ton of useful girl-stuff, and she was remotely fixing Libby’s computer, which was really okay except it had too many unnecessary apps running in the background and some malware that Libby’s brother probably got on it from a Russian porn site.
Jo sent her an email that said Janet had checked while Hanna was under, and Hanna had NOT been molested by her fake father. Jo kind of wondered what was up with a guy who went and hid in northern Finland with a girl for fourteen years and never wanted to take care of those ‘guy urges’. Alex wrote back and said she sort of hoped Erik Heller was madly in love with Johanna Zadek and never got over it. Okay, she sort of figured it wasn’t anything that warm and fuzzy. He was probably just totally focused on a psycho urge to train Hanna so she could kill Marissa Weigler someday. Or maybe he was totally focused on training Hanna so one day Johanna’s daughter could be safe from Marissa Weigler.
And even captainmal and jackryanrules sent her a message. The police hadn’t investigated harder on the death of Professor Howard Royer Locke, because he was a member of the Boston Locke family and the Lockes didn’t want the embarrassment. It seemed that Locke had raided his personal and family bank accounts and then killed himself, so the family was figuring he was being blackmailed and he paid off the blackmailer, and then he did what he had to in order to protect the family name. Alex privately wondered if that blackmailer had the last name Walsh.
Oh, but there was more. Lots more. On her tablet were four possible computer courses Willow grabbed and already downloaded for her, and Willow’s note with the courses said that all four were worth college credit, and all she had to do was go through the material already on the tablet, and do the assignments on her own, and then at the end take a supervised test at any ‘recognized testing center’ which included an on-line studies center at Alex’s mom’s college. Alex decided to start with the “Introduction to Computers” one from Penn State, which sounded really easy, because she already knew a little about computers and a lot about the internet, and she could already use pretty much every program in their home copy of Microsoft Office. And after dealing with Willow and the European hackers, she was up with telecommunications and ‘social and ethical issues for the internet’. Maybe the “Intro to Computer Programming Using the C Language” one would be next, even if Willow said some stuff about C being hard, because the course had a really low number in Purdue’s CIT catalog, and it was supposed to be about ‘structured programming principles’, which she totally needed to learn if she was ever going to be any good at real computer stuff. And maybe she’d learn a lot of C, too. She wondered if Willow would be impressed. She figured Willow could do all four of those courses at the same time, and finish all of them in under a month, but she thought she probably would need the whole summer to do just those two courses. The third one, “Introduction to Object Oriented Programming” sounded pretty hard, even if it used C Sharp, which Willow said would make sense after she learned C. But it would teach more of the whole ‘programming principles’ thing, too. The fourth course was called “A conceptual and technological survey of information technology architectures” which sounded way complicated. She thought she’d talk to Willow about that before she got lost in it.
Nicole wanted her to go over to a thing tomorrow where they were planning a demonstration against a meatpacking plant that sounded really gross. Alex said sure, if she could bring her cameras.
Ray wanted her to come over for dinner tomorrow night and then go to a movie with him. She wrote back and said sure, as long as it wasn’t a movie about spies. If it was a movie about spies hunting each other, she was going to be frustrated. Maybe even grouchy.
Robyn just wanted to chat about the music they’d been listening to at her house, and who couldn’t sing or play guitar all that well but was really cute anyway. Alex Skyped her and they talked for like half an hour. Robyn was a great friend, but they sure didn’t have the same taste in guys.
By the time Alex got off her phones and computer, it was midnight. She wondered what old people like her folks did with their time when they were teenagers.
* * *
When she got up the next morning, she made sure to do lots of practice in martial arts, because she wasn’t going to let Terawatt missions interfere with Terawatt learning stuff for later missions. Besides, she knew Jo was dying to spar with her, so she needed to get good enough that she could spar with Jo. Well, other than just blasting her with lightning bolts.
Then it was the whole summer deal. Showering, eating and starting something in the slow cooker at the same time, talking on the phone, going off with Nicole …
Okay, the thing with the meat packing plant maybe wasn’t a regular Alex thing. The plant had a huge fence around it, and guards keeping protesters out, and Nicole’s friend Tony said the plant just barely passed the last several inspections and it was overdue on the next inspection. She wondered if maybe A.L. Mack needed to stick her nose in. She interviewed Tony, and Nicole’s friend Bob who said he had tried to get hired so he could look around inside, but the owners were sticking with laborers from Mexico who maybe didn’t really have green cards.
So how would ace photographer A.L. Mack tell people she got in and out? She left Nicole’s ‘plan the demonstration’ meeting, which sounded mainly like a lot of people being angry and trying to talk each other into doing something dumb, like demonstrating right outside a plant that had armed security guards with really mean guard dogs.
Alex went silvery and flew around a building, so she could sneak up to a good vantage point. From the top of a nearby light industrial plant, she could get telephoto shots into the yard, where a truck stuffed with skuzzy-looking cattle got backed up and unloaded into a mega-crowded pen. Could a person hide in that truck with the cattle? That would be kind of risky. You could get stepped on or crushed between cows. And your shoes would be really ruined by the time you could get out of the truck. But maybe you could hide between the cows to get past the security guards at that truck gate, and climb out while the truck drove over to the pens, and run across the yard into the shadows over there and get into the slaughterhouse. Getting back out would be tricky, too. Maybe she could claim she rode out lying flat on the top of one of those refrigerated meat trucks that took the products away to stores.
Alex texted Willow for information on the Atron Meatpacking Plant and any inspections over the last five years. She was pretty much inclined to assume anything with the name Atron had to be evil, but not everyone in the Atron family was Danielle Atron. Thank heavens.
And that was when Alex realized she had no idea what good meatpacking looked like, and how it was different from bad meatpacking, and how you could even tell the difference by looking. Because she’d look really stupid if she spent all this time getting pictures, and they turned out to be icky but still completely normal pictures of a good meatpacking plant.
She went back to Nicole’s meeting, which really needed someone who knew about time management, because mainly people were taking turns saying the same thing over and over again: the plant was evil and needed to be closed down. She told Nicole she was interested, and to keep her informed. She figured she could be ready by the time the demonstration got scheduled, because at the rate they were going, the meeting was gonna last about a week and they still wouldn’t have anything done by the end of the meeting.
As she drove over to Gloria’s she got a phone call from Willow on her Terawatt phone. But she had the cute earpiece thing from Jack in her right ear, and it was already synched to the Terawatt phone, so all she had to do was touch the little button right over her eardrum. “Tera here.”
“Hey, it’s Burn. I got news. The Atron packing plant failed the last inspection and had to pay a big penalty, and was scheduled for another inspection this year, but it got canceled due to budget cutbacks. Before that, they just barely scraped by the previous two times. It’s not exactly a model plant, and it’s kinda been going downhill since Donald Roger Atron Jr. retired and turned it over to Don The Third.”
Alex scowled to herself. Did like ninety percent of the Atrons have the initials DRA? That was just dumb. She said, “Can you find out the lists of violations from those inspections? And can you get me some kind of video on doing packing plant inspections the right way? Someone might want to sneak into the plant and take pictures of blatant violations.”
“Eww, that’s gonna be super-yucky. Have you ever read ‘The Jungle’ by Sinclair Lewis? It’s got a big section on how horrible the meat packing plants were back in those days, and it’s gross enough to be a horror movie. It’s not anything about jungles. It’s pretty horrible.”
Alex said, “I’m not even sure I can watch a video about what to look for when you do the inspection, and not barf. If I can’t look at that stuff, I sure can’t go look at it happening for real.”
Willow said, “In full sensurround, with smell-o-vision, too.”
Alex choked, “Oh, yuck, I didn’t think about that.”
“Maybe you should go with a filter mask so you can screen out the smell.”
Alex winced. “If it’s that bad, it needs to get closed down.”
Willow said, “It’ll be pretty awful even if it’s perfect. They kill the cattle, cut ’em open for later slaughtering, inspect ’em for yuckiness, slice ’em up with machines, cut that stuff for meat to go to groceries, and pack that into trucks. It’s pretty horrible.”
Alex thought. She’d just seen a guy get his chest blown out by a sniper bullet, and a girl with peritonitis and a sewed-together hole in her gut. How could a dead cow compare to those things? “Maybe I can manage.”
But she wondered. How much was she changing, if she was becoming the kind of person who could look in a slaughterhouse and not be sick? She didn’t want to lose the person she’d been all her life. She kind of liked that Alex. That Alex was the kind of person who cared about someone they’d never even met, who maybe might be running for her life across northern Europe. What if being a superheroine gradually wore that Alex away? Could she live with herself if it did? Could she stop superheroing if she felt like it was changing her in bad ways, but people needed her help?
She stewed about that stuff for a long time.
While she was working at Gloria’s, she asked Gloria about the Atron packing plant. Gloria rolled her eyes. “Don Junior wasn’t exactly Mister Wonderful, but he at least kept his nose clean. Donny Three? He was a few years ahead of me in school, and he thought his cousin Danielle Atron was a great role model. And we all know how that worked out.”
Alex said, “I’m thinking about sneaking in the plant and taking pictures.”
Gloria stared at her for several seconds before she said, “Well, if anyone can get in there without getting caught, it’d be you.”
She admitted, “I’d kind of like for A.L. Mack to be able to get in there and get pictures and get back out. Not anyone else we know.”
Gloria asked, “What are you gonna do if you find stuff?”
Alex said, “Take the pictures to the TV station. And turn ’em over to the video editors, and show ’em to Maria McClellan so she can go investigate that place, because people eat that meat. I mean, people like me eat that meat.”
Gloria sadly said, “And it’ll put a lot of people out of work, too. And probably make the price of decent beef jump all over the area.”
Alex groaned. “Great. Make me the bad guy.”
Gloria said, “No, you’re not the bad guy. Donny Three is. It’s just … a lot of people get hurt by things like this. Remember how the chemical plant almost closed and put a big chunk of the town out of work?”
Alex winced a little. “Yeah. But that was an Atron’s fault, too.” She stopped for a second and said, “Let me make a phone call.”
She went out to her car and called Willow on her Terawatt phone. She explained everything she knew about the plant, and asked Willow what to do. And Willow asked her some questions, and then came up with a plan. Alex sighed, “Thanks. I knew knowing a super-genius would pay off someday.”
Willow blew her a raspberry and went back to other stuff.
She came back in, told Gloria her new plan, and then just waitressed for a few hours, until it was time to drive over to Ray’s house for dinner. Ray’s mom watched her eat and just smiled, like Alex was eating that much because she loved the cooking. Even Ray didn’t tell her that Alex ate like that all the time. And the movie was a wacky animated comedy, so that was great. No Hollywood actors who didn’t know how to shoot a gun, no idiot directors who didn’t know what an explosion really looked like, and no pathetically incompetent ‘heroines’ standing helplessly off to the side. But William Shatner as an over-acting opossum? Oh, gosh, that was so funny!
Then Ray wanted to neck for a while, and she wasn’t all grouchy about annoying movies, so she ended up missing her curfew by like half an hour. And her mom was pretty unhappy about that. She apologized over and over, but she wasn’t going to lie and say she had Terawatt business when she didn’t. But she did get her mom derailed by telling her about the meatpacking plant thing.
* * *
Friday, when she woke up, she was pretty much back on schedule. It was eight thirty, and her dad was long gone for work, but her mom was working away in the home office instead of researching more stuff in the college library. And there was already a chicken and vegetables thing in the slow cooker. So she checked her phones and stuff while she ate breakfast.
Ooh! Jack sent her an email that Hanna was doing well, and already wanted to get up and get some exercise. Janet was going to teach her how to use a computer. Jack said he thought Janet was going to take Hanna in for the summer. He thought Janet would fold in no time and want to adopt Hanna. Alex wrote back and told him she thought that was great, and if Hanna couldn’t come to Paradise Valley, Alex was expecting to get to go back to West Virginia and see her.
Alex Skyped with Nicole about the meatpacking plant demonstration, which was still getting argued about because different people wanted to do it on different days, but it looked like it would be next week, probably Tuesday. She Skyped with Robyn, who was hoping she was going to get a summer job at the grocery store down near her house. She Skyped with Louis, who wanted to see how ‘rummy night’ things were going, and to thank her for putting in a good word with Marsha, who was going to go out for an afternoon picnic with him on Saturday. She chatted with Ray, mainly talking about the movie they saw and what else was going to be playing this summer.
Willow had several messages for her. Three different Hollywood producers — one a big name, one a newcomer, and one a sleazebag who made cheesy junk — were already talking up ‘superheroine’ movies they wanted to make this summer, now that people were interested in Terawatt. Terawatt was using her Facebook page to get people to encourage the big name and warn off the sleazebag. Willow thought it would help, because Terawatt now had more people following her on Twitter and Facebook than Kim Kardashian, which Alex wasn’t sure was a great thing, but Terawatt was number three on Twitter and number four on Facebook, behind some pop stars but ahead of the President of the United States. Which was insane. Alex was really glad she had her own ‘social media director’ who could post a lot to the Terawatt Facebook and Twitter pages without getting found out. But there wasn’t really any way Terawatt could sue any of those guys if they made a movie that was basically ‘Terawatt flies around and rescues people’ even if it was the sleaziest thing ever. And apparently, there were three different websites with names like TerawattTheMovie that Louis and his dad had already bought up, so that was a good thing to know.
Also, Willow had two videos on meatpacking inspections, and some old photos of what the plant looked like twenty years ago when Don Atron Jr. ran it. The pictures were sort of gross, what with cow carcasses hanging on meathooks, but the place looked clean and like she figured a packing plant was supposed to nowadays. And it turned out there were guys who worked at a meatpacking plant whose job was to look at cows and the carcasses and give ’em a big okay before they went on to get turned in chuck roasts.
So Alex went and peeked at Terawatt’s tweets, and wow, it sounded like Terawatt was really flying around the world saving people. Terawatt tweeted from Europe like fifteen times in two days, and said really nice things about Germany and Berlin and Finland, and even said she wished she had the time to take a vacation there someday. People seemed to really like that, and it looked like Terawatt’s European numbers were climbing from that. Maybe she needed to send Willow some pictures while she was Terawatt, just so Willow had images to post, too.
And on YouTube, one of the recent comics and anime conventions in California had like fifty or sixty Terawatt cosplayers, even though Terawatt wasn’t a comic book or an anime. There were a few women who really looked a lot like they could be Terawatt, even if Alex could spot subtle details they had wrong on the hair or the uniform or the mask or the boots. That fat guy with all the body hair and the huge beer belly in that Terawatt outfit? No. Just … no. That was mega-icky.
Terawatt had an email from Cindy about Hanna, and how Hanna really needed female friends and just plain friends, and there weren’t that many teenagers on the base the SRI used, even if there were Army groups and Air Force people there, too. And Hanna spoke maybe ten languages, which was really amazing. Cindy brought Hanna her copy of ‘The Princess Bride’ but Hanna had no idea what movies were, or why parts of the movie were funny, or even why parts of it were surprising. She said Colonel O’Neill wanted to show Hanna ‘The Wizard of Oz’ which Cindy thought would really confuse Hanna. Alex wrote her back, warning her that Jack would probably think it was funny to tell Hanna that green witches and flying monkeys were real.
Alex spent the rest of the morning reading the first unit in the first on-line computer course, and taking the little computer quiz at the end. And working on her martial arts for breaks. The computer course was way easier.
After a good lunch with her mom, she had something new from Willow. Willow had found who had the blueprints for the Atron Meatpacking Plant, and how Alex could get a copy for only a few dollars in copying charges. So Alex drove over to the City Hall and did that before she went and worked at Gloria’s.
On Saturday, she had a really great workout with Staff Sergeant Meadows. He even told her some cool things he’d found out about Germany when he was stationed there. Jack didn’t show up, but on her way home, her Terawatt phone went off, and she used her new earjack to answer it. It was Jack and Willow together, on speakerphone, and Jack made Willow laugh a lot while they were chatting. He really was way too naughty to be an important Air Force colonel.
On Sunday, after church, when she Skyped Robyn and Nicole, she found out the big news. Louis took Marsha off to Atron Park for a nice picnic and they had a great time, but then when they were walking back to Louis’s car they had to stop and wait while this truck went by, and it was these guys who were going over to repaint the statue of Daniel Robert Atron that was in the park, which the Atron Foundation did every few years. Only a dog ran in front of the truck, and when the driver slammed on the brakes the guys in the back fell over and accidentally knocked the big paint pots full of silver paint out of the truck. And the paint pots were already pressurized, and they exploded when they hit the street right in front of Louis and Marsha, and they ended up covered in silver paint from head to toe on their fronts. Louis rushed Marsha home, but Nicole said she still had some silver in her hair and on her hands when Nicole saw her last night, and her dress was ruined. And Louis had a lot more silver paint still stuck on him, since he had to drive all the way home after he dropped Marsha off so more of it dried before he could start cleaning himself up. And Marsha’s dad wasn’t sure whether to yell at Louis or feel sorry for him, because it seemed like everything was going wrong for him.
Could things get any weirder for Louis? Because this was totally not his fault at all, and he still ended up with a ruined date and all messed up and Marsha’s dad not happy with him. She called Louis and talked to him, and he said the worst part was that after two dates that both went really well up until the end, he still hadn’t even had a chance at kissing Marsha goodbye.
* * *
On Tuesday morning, she got out her sturdiest shoes and her sturdiest work pants and a sturdy shirt she didn’t like. She had made a canvas ‘harness’ that went over her shoulders and around her chest that she could clip her GoPro onto, and she was going to need that. She was also going to need the demonstration going on as a distraction, so she could sneak into the meatpacking plant. It was going to be tricky to make it look like a real human was doing it all, even with the harness. And she brought a thirty-foot length of heavy rope, coiled into something she could clip on the side of the harness.
And she ate a big breakfast that was mostly oatmeal and cereal, because she didn’t want to feel like urping if she watched cows or pigs getting hacked up and she had meat in her stomach.
She drove over and waited until the demonstration was in full swing, and Maria McClellan was there getting it on film, and the guards were mostly over keeping an eye on the demonstrators and news people. She had called Maria the day before and explained what was up, and what she was hoping to do. Then it was just a matter of pulling it off.
She timed it so she could catch a cattle truck pulling away at a four-way stop just a block or two away from the plant gate. With the GoPro running, she ran at her best speed across the sidewalk and jumped onto the wooden siding of the truck, then clambered up it and into the crowded back of the truck where the cattle were crammed together. She went silvery and squeezed in between some cattle, holding her GoPro in mid-air so she could record how crowded the truck was.
The security guards stopped the truck at the gate and checked it over, but didn’t see a blob of silver floating in between two cows in the middle of the truck. So she waited until the truck slowed to back up to the pens, and she flew up to the wooden siding and over, with the GoPro bumping in front of her like she was climbing out and jumping off on the shaded side. Then she went normal and ran around the corner of the building, letting the GoPro catch glimpses of her arms and legs as she ran.
She clipped the camera back on her harness, and she clambered up a drainpipe to the roof so she could get shots down into the stock pens. There was one guy doing what they called the ‘ante-mortem’ inspections of the livestock, and kind of rushing through it. Then she ducked over to one of the skylights. They were supposed to be closed and sealed all the time, but this one was open because of the heat, which she knew was a huge code violation, because insects could get in. She hung the rope down the skylight and made it look like she was climbing down it, when she was really floating. The big room had cooling systems and refrigerator rooms and everything, but this was summer, and the workers were sweating miserably in the warmer areas. The roof was peaked, with struts down the middle, and she walked along them, using her telekinesis so she didn’t fall. But the place was not nearly as clean as it was in those old pictures, and there was supposed to be ‘humane slaughter’ but that definitely wasn’t it. Yuck. She got several minutes of shots there. There was a lot of just not mega-clean stuff going on, and the workers were being rushed around too much for anyone to do all the clean-up they were supposed to do according to the stuff from Willow. And the guys doing the on-site animal inspections were so swamped it was a wonder they spotted anything wrong, or maybe they just didn’t care.
She clipped the GoPro back to her harness, pretended to tightrope her way across the struts to her rope, and pretended to climb the rope back out of the building. Then she tied up the rope at her hip and headed off to the other end of the plant, where she climbed down the brickwork onto the roof of one of the refrigerator trucks that was being loaded. She stretched out flat on the roof and went silvery so no one would notice. Then the truck was driven out through a different gate and away. She had the GoPro turned off by then, so she waited until it went under a railroad bridge and she flew up into the I-beams. She had to wait about ten minutes before the area was deserted enough to puddle her way back down and sneak back to the demonstration.
Maria excitedly asked, “Did you get the footage already?”
Alex showed her what she had on the GoPro. Some of it was pretty gross. And Alex showed her some of the pictures from Willow that showed what the place used to look like.
Maria winced at a couple of the shots, and said, “Wow. You really shouldn’t be doing this stuff. It’s dangerous. You’re not a superhero.”
Alex just said, “I’ll meet you at the station, and after they download our stuff, I’ll ride with you and your cameraman out to the place.”
Maria asked, “Will they talk to us?”
Alex said, “I hope so. I went through a friend of a friend. And I’m gonna change shoes first.”
Maria looked over toward the plant and said, “Good idea.”
Alex changed shoes and pants and shirt before she went into the station with Maria, and she washed her hands a bunch once they got inside. That place was just … eww. And once Mark’s officemate Chuck got their footage downloaded and Maria’s cameraman Dwayne picked up a portable videoplayer from the station equipment, Alex rode out in the van to one of several Atron houses still in the nice section of Paradise Valley.
Alex had done some ahead-of-time work on this, but she was still surprised at how easy it was to get in and meet with Donald Atron Jr., and his wife Edie.
Edie said, “Marie Clemens’ daughter Elizabeth called me up and asked us to meet with you, because she was so concerned about the family name. She’s such a good girl.”
Alex managed not to say, “Oh, do you know a different Libby Clemens from the one I know?” Because that wouldn’t be nice at all. Instead, she said, “That’s good, because we’d like to protect your good name if we can.”
And then Maria showed them the footage Alex had taken, and got their reactions. They were horrified. Apparently, Edie Atron had never seen the inside of a meatpacking plant, and Don Atron Jr. hadn’t seen the inside since he had turned the management over to his son Donny.
Alex gently said, “Did he tell you the plant dodged the last inspection because of budget cuts? And it failed the one before? And it just barely scraped through the two times before that?”
Edie asked, “How did you know that, young lady?”
Alex fibbed a little. “I looked it up. All USDA federal inspections and California state inspections are recorded, and they’re all on-line now.”
Don Jr. shook his head unhappily. “Where are all the American workers we used to have?”
Maria said, “Your son overworked all of them until they quit, and then he replaced them with cheap, unskilled labor. He’s been undermining your hard work for years now, just for a quick profit.”
Alex said, “But you still own the plant, and the land, and the equipment. I looked it up. You can make an announcement that in light of information uncovered in a KPVC investigation, you are resuming management, and cleaning the plant up, and fixing all the violations.”
Don looked at Edie and sighed. “I was hoping I was done with all that, but I guess I’ll have to …”
It was kind of sad, and Alex felt bad for making them miserable, but it needed to be done. And there were plenty of guys who the Atrons could hire to be the plant manager, so Don could go back to retirement eventually.
Edie pointed at the image on the screen of the videoplayer. “Young lady, did you really climb down a rope from the skylight and walk on a tiny beam way over a concrete floor filled with dangerous machinery?”
Alex said, “I was careful. And it needed to be done.”
Maria said, “This isn’t the first daredevil stunt Alex has pulled. We need to rein her in a bit before she gets hurt.”
Both older people tsked at her a lot. Okay, if you looked at everything she filmed and you didn’t know what she could really do, it did kind of look like she was taking a lot of risks.
Maria even arranged to hold the video footage and the big, splashy report until the next day’s news, so Don and Edie had time to make the announcement and get started on stuff. Alex thought that was really nice of her, because the station would definitely run with the story on the evening news, if Maria wanted.