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Chapter 58 – RecoveryAlex woke up feeling sore all over. And she looked kind of bruised all over, too. It was pretty icky. She was probably just lucky she wasn’t crushed like a stepped-on grape and eaten alive by giant baby spiders.
She went silvery because she was feeling so achy, and she flew into the bathroom for another long, hot shower that really helped her sore muscles. And two more pain relievers, even if the bottle said not to take too many in one day and she took four yesterday night. It was really a lot easier to deal with bruises when you had so much adrenaline rushing through you that you couldn’t even notice them.
As she carefully dried off after the shower, she looked at herself. Eww. She looked like she had been in a fight. With four hundred other people all hitting her all over. Maybe eighty percent of her skin was big purplish areas and mottled black-and-blue areas. She was so not going out in public like this. Plus, she was sore all over, so lying on her bed a lot sounded like a great idea. If she had any non-bruised areas to lie on, it would sound even better.
Her mom was pretty much freaked when she saw how Alex looked, and she made Alex a big breakfast and even let her eat it in bed, which her mom hadn’t done since she was so horribly sick with the flu, and that was like years ago. Okay, her mom would have let her eat in bed after the anti-antidote thing, but she’d been way too sick to keep anything down until she finally felt good enough to go eat in the kitchen.
The nice doctor that Jack had sworn in for SRI secrets came out and gave her a check-up on Jack’s orders. He told her he was glad she was only bruised, and not deathly ill like the last time he had to come out. Then he told her just to take ordinary pain relievers, and she’d be fine in a matter of days.
So Alex just sat in bed and checked her phones and her tablet. She called Gloria and told her she couldn’t come in and waitress for a few days but if Gloria wanted to check with Robyn and Nicole that was okay by her. She called Ray and Robyn and Nicole and Louis and chatted with all of them, and told them she was kind of beat-up looking so she was going to hang out in the house for a few days. Everyone was great and wanted to come by and see her, so she knew she’d have plenty of company. Ray was working eight-to-five at this big garden store just outside town where they needed guys to haul big bags of dirt and fertilizer and compost and everything else you could think of, and haul heavy stuff out to customers’ cars, and like that. It wasn’t what you would call a fun job, but it paid well. Louis was working crazy hours at his dad’s business now that his dad was trying to corner the market on Terawatt merchandising and sue anybody else who tried to sell Terawatt stuff. His dad was probably going to make him drive over the next several weeks all up and down California, checking all the amusement parks and state parks and national parks and tourist spots, just to see if there were people selling ‘illegal’ Terawatt ‘merch’ — which was what Louis said guys in the biz called merchandise — like Terawatt t-shirts and stuff. Nicole was all busy with the meatpacking plant thing and also the stuff her uncle wanted her to do at his store for the summer. And Robyn was going to try to work at her new job and also squeeze in some time helping Gloria late in the afternoons or early in the evenings. But they all wanted to drop by and visit her, too, which was great.
She even remembered to warn her mom so they could have enough snacks and drinks on hand, because Ray and Louis would eat you out of house and home. Okay, that wasn’t really fair, since she could eat more than Ray could, when she was really hungry. If she was using her powers a lot, she could eat more than Ray and Louis together.
She Skyped with Willow, who was really upset with Jack for letting Alex get all bruised up, even though it wasn’t Jack’s fault. Alex told her Jack tried to make Hanna get out of the cave, but Hanna just stopped and shot at the giant baby spiders, and Jack ran back for her and almost died. So then Willow was mad at Jack for nearly getting himself killed, even if she was totally worried about Jack, too. And Willow had an update on Jo, too. Jo needed about an hour of surgery, and they had to cut open her lower leg and clean up the bone fragments and ‘glue’ everything back together properly and put in a couple of titanium plates, and Jo wasn’t going to be able to run on that leg for weeks, even if she was in a special molded plastic cast that wasn’t as bulky as the usual plaster thing. And Jack had sent Willow a really cute flowering cactus which was low-maintenance and Willow thought that was really important for yards in cities. And her zucchini plants were starting to make tons and tons of tiny zucchinis, and she was going to have to send Alex a bunch because she was going to have way too much this year. Alex told her to send her a couple of chocolate zucchini cakes for starters.
Then Willow had the less great news. Since Willow was Terawatt’s secret ‘media maintainer’ and webmaster — or webmistress, which just sounded dirty for some reason — she was having to deal with lots of jerkiness and lots of questions. Terawatt already had three stalkers. Actual creepy guys who thought Terawatt was in love with them, which made like no sense to Alex, but these guys were just plain crazy. One was in New York, one was in Texas, and one was in Florida. Willow was finding out who they were and if they were also serial killers or something. Then there were people trying to crash the Terawatt sites or troll the forums, and Willow just crushed them like they deserved, and sent them all email messages that she knew who they really were and if they didn’t stop being a-holes she was going to tell everyone on the forums their real names and their real addresses and their real phone numbers and their real email addresses, and then they could just try to explain to their parents why a hundred thousand people were sending them hate mail and driving by to egg their house or smash their car with baseball bats.
Messing with Willow Rosenberg was not a good idea in any universe.
And Willow had a project for Alex. People were asking Terawatt questions. Lots of the questions were just really annoying, like ‘can I have your autograph’ and ‘can I get a picture of you in a bikini’ and ‘where did you get your boobs done’. Willow could handle those. But Willow had a list of questions she wanted Alex to write answers to, and then they’d polish the answers and post them on the biggest Terawatt website.
Alex looked over the questions, and sort of winced at some of them. How do I get superpowers? How do I become a hero? What do I do if I think I have superpowers now? How do I become a supervillain? Why do you do what you do? Don’t you think you should let the police do their jobs? Do you like hurting other people? Do you worry about getting hurt? Do you worry about getting innocent bystanders hurt? Why don’t you just kill the bad guys?
Oh, boy.
Okay, Alex told Willow to find out who asked ‘how do I become a hero’ because those people needed some kind of reward for thinking that way.
Then Alex chatted with Jack for a few minutes, and found out that Hanna was grounded by Janet, and Jo was getting flown back to base once the doctors were sure there wasn’t any infection around the injury. Alex Skyped with Hanna, who was in big trouble with Janet for not doing exactly what Jack said, even if Hanna was still sure she needed to slow down those spiders way more than she needed to get out alive. Then Alex Skyped with Cindy and Grover, who were doing fine, and Cindy was very happy that Jack had used Grover as a researcher (and sneaky thief) instead of a front-line spider fighter.
It was almost lunchtime by the time Alex got off the phone and the computer. Nicole came by and had lunch with her, and winced over all her bruises. Alex got in an hour of reading in her dad’s time management book and two hours of on-line coursework before Robyn dropped by on her way to waitress. And then, after dinner, Gloria dropped by to see how Alex was doing. And she brought doughnuts!
And after Alex and her dad ate all the doughnuts, her dad showed her what he had been working on when she left. There was now a black plastic plate on the wall in the garage. It wasn’t big. It was maybe six inches by six inches. But most of it was a circular hatch you could pop open if you could unlock the little lock with some telekinesis. When she opened it, there was a tube going diagonally down through the wall, into the back of the downspout on the outside of the house. The downspout now went into a pipe that ran underground alongside the driveway and dived down under the curb and the asphalt of the street to cut into the side of the cavity under the runoff grate in front of their house. And that meant she could go from inside the house out to the water runoff system and back without going where anyone could see her. Her dad was a genius! She gave him a huge hug, even if he did eat the last cinnamon twist when she had wanted to eat it.
That night, Alex sat down at her laptop computer to type up some of the answers to the questions people had asked. And she was surprised to realize she knew the answers. The answers were just the things she had been worrying about for years. She wrote an answer to every one of them, and saved the file. In a couple of days she’d re-write the answers so they didn’t look like they were written by a grade-schooler. Then she’d send them to Willow for sprucing up and webifying.
* * *
Alex spent the rest of the week just getting reading and coursework done, and lying around the house feeling bruised. But she still went to Camp Atron on Saturday morning for her martial arts lessons.
Sergeant Meadows looked at her and asked, “Is there anywhere on you that isn’t bruised?”
She said, “My hair.”
He didn’t laugh. He just said, “That’ll teach you not to tackle two-hundred-foot spiders.”
She said, “Actually, it was the five hundred giant babies. They were all the size of a hot tub and hungry.”
He winced. “Spiders don’t freak me out like they do some people, but a tarantula the size of a hill? I’m glad I have a different posting.”
And then he still clobbered her and threw her all over the place even if she was bruised. She ended up using her telekinesis for blocking and flying a lot more than usual. Afterward, she apologized.
He shook his head no. “Don’t sweat it. I need to see some of what you can really do, just so I’ve got a better idea how to try to integrate everything. Today was good. You’ve been working hard, even though you’re clearly not a hundred percent.”
She admitted, “I’ve had more time since the Arizona thing. I can’t really go out of the house looking like I was beaten up by the whole NFL without risking my secret identity.”
Ooh, she should’ve said ‘jeopardizing’ there!
He smiled and said, “Don’t overdo it, and I’ll see you next Saturday.”
She flew off and even took her dad’s new secret tunnel into the house. The plate on the garage wall popped open with a good telekinetic push, and she was inside the house without any chance of a neighbor seeing her. This was so cool!
Crud, she had no idea what she was going to do about secret identity stuff when she went off to college. But Jack would probably have some good ideas. And she should talk to Willow, too.
* * *
By Monday, she was looking a lot better. At least the bruises were mostly going away, and not all turning into the gross greenish-yellow after-bruise things she got sometimes. She got another few full units done in her on-line course, mainly because she already knew how to use Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft PowerPoint. Still, there were some keyboard tricks she made notes on because she hadn’t seen them before. And she got through another chapter in her dad’s time management book. Man, reading that book felt like the total opposite of time management sometimes.
Louis brought Gloria’s doughnut shipment by, when he dropped by around noon. He had been over at Gloria’s working on her accounting software and making sure she was ready to do quarterly taxes. Alex thought it was completely not fair that there was no ‘I gave a superhero a job’ tax break for Gloria, even if she couldn’t figure out how you could work a tax break like that and not spoil every secret identity in the country. Alex let Louis have his pick of the doughnuts, because she didn’t have to share with her dad the Doughnut Vacuum.
Okay, she ate way more doughnuts than her dad did, but he always grabbed the one she wanted to eat next! What was with that?
She would have worried more about not waitressing at Gloria’s, except Robyn kept helping out after her regular job, and Gloria said the out-of-towner business kept dropping off as photographers slowly gave up on catching Terawatt flying around town. Every time Terawatt turned up somewhere else, more newsguys gave up and went home. Gloria was almost back to her normal summer business level, which was pretty much like the rest of the year, since not all that many of the college students came all the way over to her place for doughnuts, because plenty of college students would eat the junky doughnuts at the Donut Hole across the street from a couple of the big college dorms and the civil engineering building.
Alex thought the Donut Hole probably fried their doughnuts in lard that hadn’t been strained in a month. Or something worse. Because their doughnuts were way cheaper than Gloria’s, but they only made a couple of the easy kinds of ring doughnuts, and they didn’t even do a good job on the ones they would make. Their doughnuts were cruddy. Their plain doughnuts tasted yucky, and their regular icing was yucky, and their flavored icing was mega-yucky. Even if Alex was broke, she wouldn’t eat those things. She’d have to be starving to even think about eating them. Blech.
Maybe mega-blech.
Her mom was telling her not to worry about waitressing, because her checks from the TV station and the newspaper were WAY more than she could ever make waitressing, even if she kept getting those enormous tips from those cameramen. But Alex liked waitressing at Gloria’s, and she liked eating free doughnuts there. Her dad said she already made so much as a photographer this year that he couldn’t declare her as a dependent on his taxes anymore. And Louis said she made so much he wanted her filing quarterly taxes pretty soon and investing most of her money in the stock market and stuff. She wasn’t sure she was ready for stuff like that.
Maybe, since she was pretending to be an adult with the whole superheroine thing, she should just start doing the hard adult stuff, like quarterly tax filing, which Louis said wasn’t really that bad since the TV station and the newspaper deducted taxes already and she just had to keep track of what she got paid and what got paid in taxes already. Willow said she did it, and it wasn’t bad at all. But Willow had a fancy computer program to track everything for her, and she just saved a personal copy for herself whenever she sent an electronic copy off to the IRS and the state tax people. Maybe Willow would help her out the first time or two.
It was probably just stupid that paying taxes seemed scary. After all, it wasn’t like doing taxes would ever be as bad as facing, say, a few hundred hungry giant spiders that were bigger than she was.
After Ray got off work, he came and spent the late afternoon and evening with her. He even brought some movies, and they ate dinner with her folks, and he helped her clean up after dinner, too. She gave him a lot of kisses for that. She was really glad her lips weren’t really bruised.
She was still having nightmares about the spiders, but chocolate solved a lot of problems. Like having a nightmare. She just had to buy more ice cream, and more hot fudge sauce, and more Oreos. And some chocolate chips to sprinkle on top, too. She wrote all of those things on the grocery list before she went to back to bed, because she’d completely killed the whole carton of chocolate ice cream and the whole carton of cookie dough ice cream. Maybe it was a good thing she was a GC-161 freak, or she’d be the world’s fattest superheroine by now.
* * *
On Thursday morning, she edited all her website answers and sent them off to Willow to spruce up so they would look like they were written by a smart grown-up, and not some kid who still was in high school and wasn’t even going to be the valedictorian. Then she did her daily phone calls and Skyping. After Ray and Robyn and Nicole and Louis, she started with Hanna and Cindy. But Cindy was all upset about Jack doing something with Grover when Hanna was grounded. So Alex called Jack right away.
She was sort of surprised Jack was in his office. He said, “Tera! Nice to hear from you. It’d be really handy if you were on the East Coast today.”
She said, “If you need to send the Cessna for me …”
He said, “I’ve got it in use right now, and two choppers, too.”
She asked, “What’s up?”
He sounded like he was frowning. “We’ve got three sites to investigate here when I’ve got three teams overseas and people patrolling around the Desert Research Institute just in case, and I’m having to split my forces, which is never a good idea. I’ve got Finn and Grover checking out a possible Walsh sighting near Philly, Miller with Bill Lee checking out a suspicious chemical lab in northern Florida — they’ve got the Cessna — and Sergeant Scott with a new non-com you haven’t met yet, looking into a possible superpowers situation in New York City.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked.
He admitted, “I almost called you at seven ack emma, but Doc Fraiser had a full sitrep from Hanna about Arizona, and she threatened to puncture my hide with barbed needles at my next exam if I didn’t let you heal up fully.”
She said, “I’m healed up enough. I mean, I still have some bruises, but I’m good to go. As long as it’s not more giant spiders.”
He said, “Yeah, I had my fill of those suckers, too. I told Charlie he’s in charge of all spiders in the house for the next month.”
Alex said, “Can you get me to the East Coast quick?”
Jack said, “Let me see if I can call in a few favors. Go ahead and pack, just in case.”
It was easy to do her packing. Her Terawatt uniform and her wig and her boots were all cleaned up and ready to go. She had about two boxes of protein bars in her gym bag, too, along with what she was starting to think of as her ‘go bag’. The valise with the ‘disguise’ stuff, which now had the disguise makeup stuff and a wig-cap tucked into the disguise shoes. One set of summer Alex clothing rolled up with a pair of flip-flops, and four sets of underthings in a plastic bag. Now there was a fold-up travel kit that her mom had bought her that had a small fold-up hair dryer, and a fold-up hairbrush, and a fold-up toothbrush, and small bottles of body wash and shampoo, and everything else she needed for toiletries. Pretty much all she had to do was put her phone and the chargers into the pockets on the tablet computer’s padded pouch, and shove that in her gym bag.
Only a few minutes after she picked out her clothes to wear, Jack called back. “If you can get to Edwards AFB on your own, I’ll have a pilot waiting to fly you out here. Just your gym bag, because you’re gonna be holding it the whole way out.”
“Things’ll be that cramped?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “About enough room to get real stiff and have all your bruises act up.”
She said, “I can be there in under two hours.”
He said, “Yeah, I remember. I’m giving base security a heads-up on you, so just fly onto the base, call me for vectoring into the site, and then hop in the jet and stay silvery. No matter what the pilot asks you to do, just do it and act like you know what’s going on.”
“Roger that,” she said in a ‘Riley Finn’ tone of voice.
He laughed and said, “Good girl. By the time you get to the jet, I’ll have a flight plan for it, and you’ll find out whether you get to go to sunny Florida or stuffy Philadelphia or pushy New York.”
She said, “Okay.”
He said, “I really hope by the time you get to Edwards I can cancel all the ops and let you go back home. I hate sitting in the office while my people are out in potential danger.”
She didn’t know what to say. Jack was the kind of guy who had charged right at a few hundred giant spiders to rescue Hanna. He would be going crazy having Grover out in the field without being there to keep an eye on him. And Jo Lupo was out of action, and Sergeant Scott was off elsewhere chasing down something that might be useless.
She switched into her Terawatt uniform, flew downstairs, and told her mom about the rush off to the East Coast, while she ate three sandwiches to hold her for a while. Then she puddled over to her dad’s secret house exit, popped it open, and puddled down the pipe into the stormwater runoff system. She and her gym bag were flying down I-5 as a silvery aerodynamic shape within minutes, and with any luck she’d find a truck driving way faster than she could fly …
* * *
Jack looked up when he heard the knock. There was only one person who knocked quite like that. “Come on in, doc.”
Janet Fraiser opened the door and came in bearing one of her clipboards. So not a surprise. Charlie had once asked Hanna if Janet carried them around in her house, but Hanna had just given him her usual ‘that makes no sense’ look and dropped it.
Jack gave her a grin and said, “I don’t know how you do it. All this time mothering Hanna, and you still don’t have one gray hair.”
She said, “Miss Clairol.”
Jack smirked. “Oh, come on. Pantene. You’re worth it.”
Janet gave him a stern look and said, “Don’t flirt with your subordinates, or I’ll tell your girlfriend.”
Jack said, “Yeah, she hates it when I flirt with Miller.”
Janet rolled her eyes, but sat down. “Sir, thank you for grounding Hanna. I know she’s dying to get back out in the field, but what you face out there … and her reaction to danger … It scares me.”
Jack nodded. “Scared the crap out of m, too, if you want to know. Nobody should be able to face down a couple hundred hungry tarantulas the size of a VW and just not be afraid.”
Janet said, “It’s part of her. Something in her DNA, maybe the sections that look like someone spliced in some reptile introns. She just isn’t afraid of things she should be afraid of.”
Jack said, “Sometimes I wonder what the hell that Wacky Maggie thought she was doing. It’s not like the Pentagon asked the CIA to try and crank out some little teeny super-soldiers for the next time we’re invaded by Munchkinland.”
Janet frowned. “Sometimes I wonder how many other children Walsh did this to.”
Jack said, “My hackers and Acid Burn came up with an estimate. They found the fertility clinic Johanna Zadek went to. Naturally, somebody burned it down back when Marissa Weigler scrubbed Project Galinka. But Burn assures me it’s the only likely clinic that got torched at the right time. And Terawatt has a convenient connection with the EU now, so they did some investigation through the paper files that were rescued and put in a police records locker back then. It looks like Weigler’s project screwed with forty embryos. Twenty-seven didn’t take or weren’t viable. Of the remaining thirteen, six had miscarriages. That left seven women, which was a small enough number for Weigler’s agents to follow or befriend or seduce or whatever the heck they were doing. You’ll be shocked to hear that after the Johanna Zadek killing, all six other women and their two-year-old kids died in ‘accidents’, mostly hit-and-runs but also an elevator failure and a gas leak.”
Janet thought it over for long seconds. She said, “Hanna wrote me a five page ‘apology’ which was mostly explaining why she did the right thing in her opinion, and why even though she doesn’t want me to be mad at her, she needs me to understand that soldiers have to be prepared to do their job.”
Jack said, “Yeah, I got the same thing in her sitrep. She really has to learn to follow orders … or at least talk her commanding officer into her way of thinking first.”
Janet nodded and then said, “That’s not why I came by. I got the Luke AFB doctors to cut Lieutenant Lupo loose much too soon so we could look after her here. But … you were right. The lieutenant’s healing really fast. Faster than normal.”
Jack said, “It was in her packet. If you just do the math, she healed up after a few injuries faster than she should have been allowed back, or else the West Point docs have suddenly become corrupt assholes. And we know, if anything, they keep the West Point ‘girls’ a little long to avoid any accusations that they’re trying to tank their careers.”
Janet frowned. “So … Lieutenant Lupo has superpowers, too?”
He made a seesawing-back-and-forth motion with his right hand. “Maybe, maybe not. It’s kinda borderline. She’s really strong for a woman her size, and she finished first in her class at West Point. That means she had PT scores that made some top male Army cadets look like pansies. Plus, she kicked ass in the inter-forces martial arts tournaments, although they only let her fight other women in her weight class and the class immediately above hers, and she kicked ass in Special Forces training.”
Janet nervously asked, “Do you think … Is she … like Hanna?”
Jack shook his head no. “Hanna has serious deviations in her DNA. Somebody — somebody like Maggie Walsh or her major prof at the time — really screwed with her genome in some seriously creepy ways. Lupo has regular human DNA. If Hanna had Lupo’s training, she could take Lupo. Miller, too. Maybe even Finn. But she doesn’t, and she’s not going to get it unless she can follow orders and stop preparing to attack anybody who touches her.”
Janet said, “She’s getting a lot better about that. Living with me seems to help. And hanging out with Cindy and Grover and Charlie and Wendy.”
Jack winced a little. “Don’t tell anyone, but if Charlie’s not sweet on that girl, I’ll eat my hat. My overseas cap, not my good hat.”
Janet smiled softly. “She does clean up nicely. And Cindy’s very good as a makeup consultant.”
Jack grumped, “All I need is to have my son hitting on the deadliest teenager on the whole planet.”
Janet gave him a caustic smile. “Like father, like son.”
“Hey! I resemble that remark!”
Alex got to Edwards Air Force Base in under two hours, mainly because there was a semi hauling south down the interstate at definitely over a hundred ten miles an hour. She managed to time it right so she could land on top of the trailer and hitch a ride for over an hour before a CHiPs motorcycle officer pulled the truck over to give that guy a ginormous ticket.
She called Jack as she flew over the gate guards, and she went from silvery to normal as he directed her out onto a remote stretch of tarmac. That was when she saw what Jack had pulled out of his hat.
She stopped in mid-air and stared. “Holy crud!”