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Chapter 63 – Interim ReportsAlex woke up the next morning feeling really hungry. She’d had a lot of the curry last night (and not gotten super-strength from it, either), then had a big late-night snack after the eleven o’clock news did a pretty yucky story on ‘The Downingtown Ooze’ and the suspected death toll.
She went and ate a big breakfast while she was still in her jammies. Then she went and showered and took her time doing her hair. She got dressed and put her Terawatt uniform in the washing machine. Then she had a second breakfast. She really needed to not skip meals when she was using her powers a lot, because two big breakfasts an hour apart? Pig-out time. Mega-pig-out time. When she was done, her mom came out of the home office and looked over everything and told her to go to the grocery store before she could phone and Skype and IM anyone.
And it was kind of a big grocery list. Had she really eaten ALL the eggs and milk? And all the bread and bacon and ham? And all the grape jelly? She only had four English muffins with jelly. Oh, wait, she had another four with her second breakfast. And maybe she liked a lot of jelly on her bread when it was grape jelly. They just needed bigger jars of grape jelly, that was all. The good grape jelly, not that icky super-cheap fake grape jelly.
She took both her phones with her. And her earjack, which she had remembered to charge last night. So she got started on important Terawatt business while she was driving around. Sort of.
“Hi, Ray, it’s me!”
He asked, “Are you home?”
She said, “I’m grocery shopping, since Mom says I ate everything in the kitchen except the table and chairs.”
He asked, “So, did you see the news last night? That Terawatt’s pretty awesome. I wouldn’t mind meeting her someday.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah, sure, like Terawatt’s got time for teenagers. But I’m doing better than last week, so we can go out tonight if you want.”
“Sure! I’ll pick you up at … Oh, shoot, I’ve gotta go see what times the movies are playing. But figure on eating first, and we’ll go have a late-night snack after the movie’s over.”
She said, “Sounds great!” She thought for a second and added, “Still, it would be nice to go to a movie and not have to sit through a quarter of an hour of ads and trailers first.”
“A quarter of an hour? Remember the one we saw last month? I kept peeking at my watch. They had thirty-three minutes of ads and trailers first. And then it was a two and a half hour movie. And we had to get there twenty minutes early to get good seats. And we were in line outside for over an hour first. That’s like all day. My dad was all ‘I thought you would be home earlier’ and ‘in my day we only needed two hours to watch a movie’.”
“Yeah!” she agreed. Man, she had just about starved to death in the middle of that thing. She’d needed to sneak out to the snack bar for another tub of popcorn and more soda. And a big bag of Twizzlers. And she ate most of the Twizzlers before she was back in her seat.
It was probably pretty cruddy of her to get something like Twizzlers that Ray didn’t like. Next time, she’d get something he liked, too, like the M&Ms. And next time she wouldn’t start eating before she even got her change back.
After she talked so long with Ray that she was already at her mom’s favorite grocery store, she called Robyn and Nicole at the same time. So she chatted with them while she shopped. And not only were they doing fun stuff and had fun stories about weird customers where they were doing summer jobs, but Nicole had some really good advice about shopping for meat in a store.
Boy, you wouldn’t think you could take pictures inside a dirty meatpacking plant, and then be okay about buying ground round and t-bone steaks, but she was getting hungry just thinking about what her mom might cook up with that stuff. Or maybe her dad would grill the steaks with his secret steak-grilling sauce. Which wasn’t really a secret, but he had made a big deal out of it when she was little to get Annie to eat the stuff he grilled.
So then she called Louis to find out how things were going in the ongoing quest for a date with Marsha that wasn’t a total disaster. And so Louis had this story about going over to Marsha’s for dinner, and ending up helping her dad pour some concrete for a patio in back, even if her dad gave Louis the ‘stay clean’ tasks. So that worked great, and he had a nice dinner with them, and afterward Marsha took him out in the back yard, and they started kissing, and Marsha’s dog Terrence got out of the house somehow and jumped up on them and knocked the both of them over into the still-wet cement. So they had to wash cement off the dog, and wash cement off themselves, and get Marsha’s dad to smooth out the mess in the concrete, and it was a giant mess. Marsha’s dad had just shaken his head and said, “Louis, I figured you’d write your initials in the corner, but I didn’t think you’d try for an imprint of your face.” And it took forever to get all the concrete stuff out of the dog’s fur.
How sad was it that Louis was counting this as a successful date with Marsha?
And why was it that Alex knew the difference between concrete and cement, but it sounded like Louis didn’t?
By the time Louis finished the story, which was really funny the way Louis told it but she would have been in tears if it had happened to her, she was pulling into her driveway. She had to carry groceries inside the normal way, but once everything was on the kitchen table, she put it all away using her telekinesis. She really did have some pretty useful powers, even if she didn’t have super-strength or super-speed or some other powers that would be pretty awesome.
She tried not to think about the whole ‘Selina’s universe’ deal, what with more powerful superheroes meaning insanely powerful supervillains. Her supervillains were bad enough. She felt bad for that Cready guy, but Jo Baker? Danielle Atron? Maggie Walsh and everything she was responsible for, like that blob, and maybe in part the giant spiders? And what other damage had Marissa Weigler done? Ugh.
By the time she got off the phone with Louis, she was thinking about an early lunch. She popped a large ‘meat lovers’ pizza from the grocery store right into the oven and went to get her tablet, too. Then she sat and Skyped while she waited for delicious, hot pizza.
Willow was happy to see her, but Willow was always like that to everyone. “Hi! You’re back already? Are you okay?”
She smiled. “Sure. They were done with me. You know Jack had a plane ready to take me home.”
Willow cautiously said, “Right, but you know there was another blob-thing?”
Alex said, “Well, yeah, Riley said so, but he said it was all locked up down in the secret underground lab.”
Willow nodded but said, “Yeah, but they needed to go kill it so the DHS guys could search the labs for information. Oh! And Grover pulled a hard drive for me! I can’t wait to look at it.”
Alex scowled. “They should’ve kept me around for that.”
Willow said, “See? That’s what I said. But Jack said they were good. He said Riley and some DHS people went down there with guys who had liquid nitrogen dewars in backpacks with tricky sprayers Grover put together, and some guys who had those big tank herbicide sprayers on their backs, but they were loaded with bleach concentrate, and they herded it right into a freezer and turned it into a blob-sicle. And Jack said they were still getting the big blob off the street and interviewing city councilmen … okay, the way he said it, they were probably interrogating those guys.”
Alex complained, “Just as long as we’re done with The Summer of the Giant Creepy Monsters. Did you see that huge thing? And Riley was hunting it with a bottle of bleach and a fire extinguisher. Ugh.”
Willow said, “So they think Maggie Walsh was behind this mess, too, but I’m not finding any signs of her yet, but maybe I need to look through all the footage on stuff like the local stores. I asked Jack, since most of that kind of security cam stuff isn’t accessible over the net. I mean, a couple franchise operators had stuff that was accessible for their national corporations, but I don’t see Maggie Walsh as a Dairy Queen kind of lady.”
Alex said, “I met Jack’s boss. General George S. Hammond.”
Willow said, “Ooh! He came out to the base a few days ago. I think he’s sorta worrying about all the stuff Jack’s doing. Jack’s got a team that’s on standby right now outside Chernobyl with some Russian Army guys, and he’s got a team in Siberia because the Russians were freaking about a repeat of some top-secret thing Jack can’t tell me about, but it was a toxic waste dump and I intercepted some stuff from the Russian intelligence operatives and the British MI-6 guys who dashed to the rescu, too, and some Chinese army forces, and it was animals that got exposed to this stuff and mutated into uber-creepiness, and most of the people got totally overrun and wiped out, but Jack’s team just lost one guy.”
Alex suddenly remembered Jack giving her that smart-aleck line about being ready to deal with a pack of werewolves, and she shuddered. Maybe he had been doing that Jack thing where he makes a joke that only makes sense to the people who already know about it. Mutated Siberian animals? That could have been mega-bad.
Willow said, “So, with Jack stationing like two DHS teams in Russia and one in Eastern Europe, and then sticking some guys in and around Desert Rock, Arizona just in case, and putting his top team with some super-powered woman that nobody even knows whether she’s really a good guy or not, I figure the Pentagon’s got to be getting twitchy. But George Hammond’s got a good, solid rep. Family man, married for years and years until his wife died of cancer, has his grandkids living near him so he can spend time with them, no black ops in his file, Air Force pilot and got a couple medals from it, been doing the serious Air Force command thing for decades, supposed to be near retirement, but I don’t think overseeing the SRI is a ‘going into retirement’ kind of job.”
Alex asked, “Can we trust him?”
Willow said, “I don’t know. I’m trusting Jack on this. He’s really good at reading people, which is something I’m totally sucky at, I mean, look at who I was with the trusting at Red Tree Software. Big mistake. So we’re still hunting for Walsh and Atron, and Jack’s guys are going through CIA personnel databases to see if they can find any more Marissa VEEGLER problems.”
“Veegler?”
Willow smiled. “Yeah, that’s what Hanna still calls her. I think Charlie’s got a thing for Hanna. He talks about her every time I Skype with him. And it’s not like I’m Miss Great-Judge-Of-Character here, so all I do is let it go, and I don’t want to be ratting him out to his dad, even if I’m pretty sure Jack’s already figured it out. But Hanna likes Charlie, too. I’m just not sure if I should say anything to either of them, because what if they make with the smoochies and Hanna goes all Assassin’s Creed on him and hurts him, or even snaps his neck? Hanna’s great, but sometimes she just clicks over to ‘CIA trained killer’ mode, and it’s kind of scary. If she ever got scared about stuff, I’d say that it scares her, too.”
So after she chatted with Willow about other stuff, like whether Willow thought she could learn C, which Willow totally thought she could, Alex called Jack on her Terawatt phone, which Willow was now calling the tPhone.
“Hey, Tera, can you hang on a sec? I’d like to put you on speakerphone. You don’t mind, do you?”
So she switched to her Terawatt voice and said, “No, Colonel, I don’t mind. Who else is on the call?”
The sound changed, and Alex could hear background noises, too, so she figured it was on speakerphone now. Jack said, “General Hammond’s still out here overseeing the whole DHS umbrella thing we like to do. I’ve got Major Finn and Lieutenant Lupo, who you’ve met, and you know Space Ghost.”
“Colonel, I thought we agreed you were not going to give him the codename Space Ghost.”
Grover piped up. “Hey, as long as he doesn’t make me carry a little monkey around, I don’t care. Besides, Space Ghost was cool. And I really don’t like ‘Clear’ for a codename. Although ‘Klar’ sounds pretty good. And it’s spelled with a ‘K’ so it looks cool on paper.”
Alex didn’t even know what that was, but she took a guess on spelling since she knew it started with a ‘k’, and she typed it into a translator program on her tablet, and it came up with ‘clear’. In German. She guessed, “Did Action Girl suggest that?”
Jack said, “Naturally. I’m just not sure the DHS is going to be happy with codenames in foreign languages.”
General Hammond said, “I think we have much bigger issues than what codenames we use. Like what the Sam Hill is going on around here, and whether more of these ‘blobs’ are going to be turning up in the near future.”
Alex said, “I agree. I thought Danielle Atron was going to be the extent of my problems, and now I’m looking at a woman who’s been doing heinous biological and chemical experiments for almost two decades.”
Jack said, “Well, she just moved herself from ‘Terawatt and Action Girl want to have words with her’ up to ‘America’s Most Wanted’.”
General Hammond said, “We do need to track down Dr. Walsh. But we also need to find out what the CIA was doing besides Project Galinka, and Colonel O’Neill has pointed us toward an NIH project Dr. Walsh had her fingers in, and frankly a terrorist group on American soil that builds billion-dollar secret labs to release monsters is a much more salient DHS issue than a lot of the stock counter-terrorism efforts.”
Jack said, “I agree. If Major Finn hadn’t tracked this down when he did, a hundred-ton blob might be eating downtown Philly right now, which would give a whole new meaning to the term ‘Philadelphia cream cheese’.”
Someone snorted with laughter, even as the general growled, “Colonel!”
“Sorry, sir.” Not that Jack sounded sorry.
Lieutenant Lupo’s voice said, “Oh, and Terawatt? Thanks for saving our hides.”
Alex asked, “Aren’t you still on crutches or something?”
Jo said, “Yeah, but the colonel needed someone willing to just sit around and make sure no one tries walking off with a chunk of blob monster while we cut it and transport it to a special CBW disposal furnace.”
Alex wondered, “What are you using to cut it up with?”
Jack said, “The world’s biggest hacksaw,” even as Jo said, “We had to rig up a sort of bandsaw with eighty feet of diamond-coated titanium wire. It works great, even if we have to run both ends of it through a recirculating stream of bleach to keep it from flinging bits of potentially live blob all over the street. Then we douse the slices with liquid nitrogen to keep them frigid.”
Jack said, “And I’m numbering these chunks with the spray paint I usually use for defacing boxcars, just to make sure nothing goes missing in transit.”
General Hammond said, “Colonel, I find your complete lack of trust on this extremely reassuring.”
Alex said, “It’s been my experience that the colonel is a very good judge of character. If he’s feeling untrusting, I would recommend that you check out every one of the workers involved in the project.”
Jack said, “I still can’t figure out why that Wacky Maggie thought dumping a chunk of blob around here was a good idea, unless she knows something about its strengths and weaknesses that we don’t. Because even if she runs as far as San Diego, sooner or later it would eat its way there and be pretty much unstoppable by then.”
The general said, “Maybe she was counting on us having to drop a few nukes on a major American city to stop it before it ever made its way near her.”
Jack said, “I just think the ‘why’ on this is important, sir. Walsh isn’t stupid. Whatever she’s doing, she’s doing it for a reason that makes really good sense to her.”
General Hammond stiffly said, “Terrorists all over the world have a reason that makes really good sense. To them. It’s just insane to everyone else.”
Jack said, “Yes, sir, but I just don’t think Walsh has the terrorist mindset. I’ve actually talked to her twice. Okay, the second time was mostly listening to her rant like a mad scientist in an old black-and-white Universal film, but she was calm again before she was escorted out of the building. She was just mad about not getting to play with the new toys. Where ‘new toys’ means ‘human beings showing drastic effects from biochemicals’ and ‘play with’ means ‘hack up and do experiments that would make Nazis cringe’.”
Alex said, “Walsh is smart. Incredibly smart. I don’t think anyone has ever said ‘no, we don’t want your research work here’ to her before.”
Jack said, “Well, she’s been doing really disturbing work for at least seventeen years, so it’s not like she just decided last month to go off the deep end because I said ‘you’re not hired’. I mean, she probably put a bullet in her major prof’s head! We need to find out what happened to her parents. Wouldn’t surprise me if round about age twelve or thirteen, she suddenly turned into an orphan.”
General Hammond said, “Well, we will put the entire weight of the DHS and the FBI behind this, now that Dr. Walsh needs to be considered as a domestic terrorist. And Terawatt, I want you to know that Colonel O’Neill has my full support, even if he sometimes is somewhat … irregular in his activities.”
Alex smiled to herself and said, “I’ve noticed that. Like enlisting an unidentified superheroine to help his primary team. Let me say that while I know I have done some tasks for Colonel O’Neill that would have been a problem for his team to carry out, he has done just as much for me. I am very happy with the arrangement, and I trust him. Anyone else brought in to replace him would have to earn my trust over time, and I’m not sure we can afford that.”
“I’ll bear that in mind, ma’am,” the general drawled.
“Hey, Tera, thanks for the big rec, but I gotta get Lieutenant Lupo sitting down again with her leg properly elevated, before Doc Fraiser finds out I’ve got one of her injured out here.”
Alex hung up and immediately grabbed her tablet so she could Skype Hanna.
“Alex! Hello!”
“Hi, Hanna! How are you doing?”
“I am all right. Colonel Jack has me running a punishment detail every morning, and studying about following orders and ‘chain of command’ every afternoon. The study and writing the paper is much worse than the run.”
Alex smiled. “I’m sure Jack knows that. After all, you ran for like forty miles with a bullet in your guts.”
Hanna nodded. “I have to run with a pack on my back. It has weights in it.”
Alex said, “Well, Grover messed up and nearly got himself killed, so figure you’re going to have company on those runs for the next few weeks.”
Hanna looked worried. “Grover could not possibly carry that much weight and run.”
Alex said, “I figure they’ll try to put just the right amount of weight in your pack so Grover can run with you when he has no pack.”
Hanna gave her a feral grin. “I like tests.”
Alex said, “Try not to run Grover so hard he hurts himself. He won’t heal up as fast as you do.”
Hanna nodded. “I will take very good care of him. Cindy would be very mad at me if I didn’t. And I am counting on her ‘lessons’. She says the next ones will be on doing mascara properly and correct skirt lengths. And Colonel Jack showed me ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and Charlie has four of the Oz books that I am reading. It was wonderful, and Cindy explained how Oz is like adapting old fairy tales to the world of 1900. I like fairy tales. Charlie explained how movies before Technicolor were all in black and white, so the transformation from black-and-white to color was like real magic to moviegoers of the time. And Colonel Jack said it is much more impressive if I see it in a real movie theater on a big screen.”
“Did Jack try to tell you flying monkeys were real?”
Hanna laughed. “Yes! He even said there were flying squirrels and flying snakes and flying fish!”
Alex winced. “Umm, Hanna, go look them up on Wikipedia or something, because those really are real. None of them really fly, but they sort of glide, especially the flying squirrel. And I think there’s a flying fox, too, but I think that’s a bat with a funny name.” Science lessons to the rescue, once again. She hadn’t really believed other-Sam and other-Willow a hundred percent on that, but it seemed like she got some mileage out of science lessons several times a month these days.
So then Hanna showed Alex some pictures of makeup lessons, with Cindy doing a makeover for her and Hanna trying it herself. Most of the Hanna ones were like ten-year-old girls getting into mommy’s makeup. Alex remembered going through that phase, before her mom let her buy some makeup of her own and she learned how to do eye makeup without overdoing it so much she looked like Bozo the Clown. And her big sister Annie had been useless on that stuff, so Alex ended up learning it from her friends and being the one who taught Annie. But most of the pictures of the makeover done by Cindy were amazing. With just enough foundation to hide those freckles, and just enough eyebrow pencil to make her now-tweezed brows stand out, and a nude lip-color, and a very light shade of taupe or gray eye-makeup along with mascara and not too much eye-crayon, Hanna was movie-starlet beautiful. If Hanna came to Paradise Valley looking like that, half the boys in school would be goners. Alex made sure to tell Hanna which pictures had her eyes looking the prettiest, so Hanna would know what makeup styles to practice on.
It suddenly occurred to Alex that if Hanna came to Paradise Valley as an exchange student in the fall, Alex knew exactly who should be the Homecoming Queen. Hanna would be incredibly beautiful, and it would be something she would never, ever forget.
After pizza and Skyping, she went to work on the on-line course because she only had like one and a half units left to do. After a mid-afternoon snack of the rest of the pizza, she finished up her homework assignments, and read all the directions for taking a final test to get a grade and college credit for the course. She managed to talk her mom into checking with the on-line course office at the college, and her mom went ahead and signed her up to take the exam. Tomorrow afternoon.
Tomorrow afternoon?! Oh, crud! Was she ready? She went and made notes on the last two chapters, and looked through the notes she already wrote down, and checked over all her homework assignments, and everything. She hardly came down for dinner she was studying so hard.
Okay, she came down, ate two big plates of food, and then vanished back into her room for more studying. And a late-night snack around eleven.
* * *
The next morning, before she even left for martial arts lessons, there was a call from Willow for her on her tPhone and Willow was trying to Skype with her, too. It turned out Alex’s mom thought she was panicking about the test and wanted Willow to talk to her. And that really helped. Because Willow knew all this stuff cold, and hearing Willow tell her she could do it just made her feel like she could breathe for the first time since yesterday afternoon.
Then martial arts lessons went great, with Sergeant Meadows getting her to use her telekinesis more for blocking and punching and kicking and breaking holds. He even showed her a trick she’d have to try on Jo someday, where she did kicks and strikes with her telekinesis right against her skin a few times, and then the next time she did a kick, she invisibly extended her telekinesis a yard out past her foot which would catch pretty much anybody by surprise.
So she was a lot calmer when she drove out to the testing center at the college that afternoon, even if she was also worried about where she was going to park, and stuff like that. She had a hand-drawn map from her mom, but it turned out not to be a very good drawing that was missing a key building, so she had to ask a couple of guys for directions, and she was nearly late to the testing center appointment.
Then the test took like two hours, and it was all on a computer. Even the essay stuff, which was in Microsoft Word so she could use the spellchecker and the grammar checker and all that jazz. The only annoying thing was she was really, really sure that Word got the whole its/it’s thing wrong twice on her stuff and she had to change it manually. She was pretty sure Word was better with commas than she was, so she followed its advice on that stuff.
But she was really sure she did well on the test, because it was just as easy as the homework, and half the stuff was really just like the homework problems except with little things changed. Boy, if she hadn’t done all the homework she would have been doomed on that test.
Maybe she really would try that second course with learning C and programming techniques. She figured if she really got stuck, she could always ask Willow for help. And Willow probably had some kind of ‘writing C code in a fancy environment that gives you lots of help on C keywords and stuff’ program, too.
So she was able to breathe again afterward, and she ate a huge dinner and had a great date with Ray, who was the best boyfriend ever, even if they didn’t have exactly the same taste in movies.
* * *
The next morning, even before breakfast, she called Ray and thanked him for taking her out, and told him how much she enjoyed herself. It was a good movie, even if it was a little too ‘chick flick’ for Ray. But it was funny, too, so it was good. And they talked about going out in a few evenings, and maybe her going to his house tonight after dinner.
And church was nice and peaceful and everything, even with her tPhone hidden under her dress just in case of emergencies. She was glad it didn’t go off, because she liked church and she liked singing hymns, even if she couldn’t sing as well as the ladies in the church choir.
So she spent a really normal day, for a change. Church in the morning, helping her dad in the yard for a few hours after lunch, fixing dinner with her mom, and then spending a few hours with Ray over at his house before she had to go home and get some sleep.
As she put on her pajamas and slipped into the bed, she wondered if superheroes in other universes ever got ‘a day off’.