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Chapter 72 – Bad News BearsThe general grimaced. “If we had been forced to drop nuclear weapons on Arizona or Philadelphia, it might have meant the end of the United States as a cohesive country. And if we fall apart, how many countries that depend on us would fall apart soon after?”
Jack pointed out, “If we hadn’t gone into Myrhorod or Siberia or those other little funfests and pulled a couple miracles, the Russians would have used nukes. As it was, we only beat their deadline in Myrhorod by a few hours. If Russia had fired an SS-19 into the middle of the Ukraine, it could have started a world war.”
The general thought out loud. “We’ve been discounting the terrorist angle because no one is claiming responsibility for any of these disasters, but what if they’re trying to create a disaster only they can stop, so the world would let them run things to control something a lot worse? Or what if they’re trying to get everyone else to kill each other off, so they can step in afterward and walk off with what’s left?”
Willow winced and asked, “Would there be anything left?”
The general nodded. “Even if every major city on Earth ate a nuke, there would still be a lot of unfired nukes, and there would still be huge areas left relatively undamaged. And this doesn’t sound like a country. The Collective sounds like a small organization capable of protecting themselves against a lot of different types of disasters. If their goal is to create a disaster that they — and only they — can survive, then building their own monsters might be their Plan A.”
Alex felt a little faint as she asked, “Do you think they’ll just pay Danielle Atron for the GC-161 formula and then put it into the water supply or the food supply of some huge population?”
Jack said, “They’d need to be able to stop their GC-161 monsters afterward, and we know that antidote didn’t do the job on Atron.”
Alex objected, “It’s pretty likely that Danielle Atron gave herself superpowers and then used the antidote on herself over and over, until she got the power set she wanted. I mean, getting exactly the powers she wanted on the first try is pretty unlikely.” And other-Sam and other-Willow had talked about that very thing to Alex.
Jack disagreed, “We know some GC-161 cases who need regular doses of antidote, and they didn’t do that.”
The general said, “These people might choose to take the GC-161 themselves.”
Alex winced a little. “That could be bad for them, since it has a lot of side effects, and they could end up like Cready instead of like me.”
“Cready?” the general asked.
Jack explained, “Victor Cready. Silvery shapeshifting, flight, and constantly on fire, sir. He was basically a pile of silvery goo that couldn’t go back to normal and was on fire forever, unable to turn it off or eat or sleep or anything. And he couldn’t stop feeling the pain from the fire. Not what I would call a good power combo.”
Riley added, “And sir, just in case, we have a hundred gallons of GC-161 antidote on order from Paradise Valley Chemical. We already have four gallons on hand here and several gallons on hand at Roswell, and we’re going to be stockpiling in key positions. Plus, we’ve acquired tranquilizer dart rifles and handguns so we can administer that antidote from a distance.”
General Hammond said, “I’m going to be briefing the President in three hours, so I have to get back to D.C. At the same meeting, I’ll be briefing the DHS Secretary and the Joint Chiefs. Without adjutants or executive assistants around. If we’re right, this could make the Cold War look like a panty raid.”
Hanna asked, “What is a ‘panty raid’?” Grover started whispering in her ear again. Alex watched as Hanna’s eyes bulged again. Finally, Hanna whispered back, a little too loudly, “And the girls do not shoot them, or break their necks, or anything?”
General Hammond looked kind of shocked, but Jack looked like he was having to make a real effort not to break into a huge grin.
* * *
After the meeting, they flew home. The Cessna went back to Camp Atron to drop off Alex and Willow, before going on to the Roswell base where Jo and Graham were stationed. Lieutenant Marshall was along on the plane, too, with several big suitcases, so Alex figured he was moving to the Roswell base.
They couldn’t talk out loud about the meeting, but that didn’t stop Willow. Alex was right in the middle of a lesson on C operators, some of which were really weird, when a window popped up on her screen because Willow had hacked her way into Alex’s tablet. Then Willow hacked into Jo’s phone and Graham’s iPad, and they had a silent, four-way text chat for the rest of the trip.
Alex was kind of weirded out by the team’s guesses about The Collective, but Willow was totally freaked. She spent the entire flight using her connection to the sat phone to search on Maggie Walsh’s past, while she was chatting with Alex and Jo and Graham. Jo thought it was ‘business as usual’, since they were going to be facing these threats anyway, and it only helped to know that there might be themes in common. Graham thought that knowing about The Collective was going to give them a big leg up as soon as they got some more intel, and then The Collective was going to get its ass kicked by the might of the SRI plus Terawatt. Willow really felt better hearing Graham and Jo’s take on things, but she was still unhappy when they got off the Cessna.
Alex asked Willow to drive over to her house and meet her there. Alex beat her home by a ton, and had plenty of time to change from her Terawatt uniform to something casual and fix her hair, so she was ordinary Alex when Willow drove up into the driveway. Then Alex plugged Willow’s car charger into their house current while she and Willow went up to Alex’s bedroom to chat. It took maybe an hour to calm Willow down, but Alex didn’t know what else to say. If these creeps were creepy enough to unleash blobs and stuff on the world, and mainland China had to nuke a little piece of itself to save the rest of the country, then things could get really bad. And all they could do was analyze data and be smart and try to save people.
* * *
The next day didn’t start out so terrific, either. After she chatted with Ray and Robyn and Nicole and Louis, she Skyped with Hanna and Cindy. And Hanna had some news. Charlie had taken her out to see a movie, and she had really enjoyed it, and Charlie had kissed her afterward, and she was so excited she could hardly sit still while they Skyped. Okay, she didn’t sit still. She got up and danced around her room while Cindy tried to keep the webcam on her so Alex could watch. Hanna didn’t know any dances, but she was really graceful, and just so happy it didn’t matter.
So Hanna and Cindy had decided that Hanna needed to stay in West Virginia instead of playing ‘exchange student’ at Alex’s school, at least for the first term of school. Cindy was talking about taking Hanna shopping for a special dress in case Charlie asked Hanna to one of the school dances, and Hanna was just so happy, and Cindy was going to teach Hanna how to do a bunch of different dances, starting with a couple ‘in’ dance moves and some classic dances Hanna could incorporate into her style. Alex told them how great the news was.
But once she hung up, she wasn’t feeling happy for Hanna. She was kind of surprised at how grouchy she was that Hanna wasn’t going to come out and be her ‘exchange student’ buddy for a few months. She went downstairs and ate like three things of Ben & Jerry’s. Even the Cherry Garcia that was her mom’s that she was supposed to leave alone. Oops. So then she had to go out and buy a new Cherry Garcia, and apologize to her mom, too.
Even though she was mad about not having Hanna come stay with her, she still Skyped Grover and told him that he needed to make sure Charlie asked Hanna to every dance that year, because Hanna was really looking forward to it, but he needed to not let Cindy know Alex told him to tell Charlie. Hanna would be a lot happier if she thought it was all Charlie’s idea.
Then Terawatt Skyped with Jack for a few minutes. The Chinese really didn’t want to tell anyone what happened, so Jack didn’t know yet, and the Chinese army had a phenomenal number of soldiers stationed all around the blast zones watching in case anything came out, and the Chinese Navy was sailing up and down the river downstream of the blast, warning people to move away from the water and telling people that it would be radioactive and poisonous until further notice. Jack said that most of the people who lived within a mile or two of that river got their water from the river in one way or another, so they had no choice but to steal water from the river or die of thirst, so the problem was going to get a lot worse, and it was going to spread downstream whether the Chinese wanted to admit it or not.
Holy crud, that was horrible. And for all her powers, there was nothing she could do for any of those people. Even as Alex she couldn’t do anything. The Chinese still had a huge news blackout on it and had cut all internet connections, so not even Willow had been able to contact anyone in or near the area. And nobody knew anything except that the Chinese had exploded nuclear bombs in some place way away from where they usually did their nuclear tests. But that meant Alex couldn’t even start a food drive or a clothing drive or anything to help those people, because she couldn’t admit she knew about the disaster. And those people could so use a bottled-water drive right now.
Sometimes, being a superheroine was just mega-cruddy.
So then Alex went downstairs to complain to her mom about stuff she couldn’t tell her mom about, but her mom was fixing final changes on her Master’s thesis and needed ‘alone time’.
So Alex went and sat in her room and did stuff without anybody else. It wasn’t sulking. It wasn’t! But she couldn’t call Ray or Robyn or Louis or Nicole to talk, because they all had work then, and it wasn’t time for Alex to go to Gloria’s store. And maybe Alex was a little worried that if she called Willow to complain about Hanna not coming out for fall term, Willow might be hurt that Alex wasn’t satisfied having Willow nearby. Plus Alex was getting text messages every thirty or forty minutes as Willow ransacked the DHS firewalls and systems and found signs that people had been trying to crack the firewalls and plant little backdoors. Alex knew you could create a backdoor into your system just by opening the wrong piece of email or clicking on the wrong thing on an untrusted website, unless you had stuff running on your machine to prevent that. But that meant Willow was buried in computer stuff and maybe didn’t have time to chat right now either.
So naturally, Alex’s mom came up looking all frowny. “Alex? Would you like to tell me about you and Ray Saturday night?”
“Huh?” She hadn’t done anything with Ray on Saturday night.
“Mrs. Alvarado just called me, and Ray didn’t get his own hotel room.”
Alex explained, “Well, sure, because Willow got a whole hotel suite and said Ray could sleep on our couch, because there was this one huge room that was a living room and a kitchen and a dining room, too, and then the bedrooms were separate rooms off to the sides.”
“And … did Ray sleep on the couch?”
Alex could have lied, but she still felt bad about some of the times she’d lied to her folks in the past. “No. We didn’t do anything, but I let him sleep in my bed. Which was totally king-sized. And we both had pajamas on. And I was wearing my long flannel happy puppies pajamas. And we just cuddled and went to sleep.”
“And Willow was okay with this?”
Oh, crud. Alex was so not telling what Willow had done. She admitted, “You know when you gave me The Other Talk and it was so embarrassing?”
“It was pretty embarrassing for me, too, but I didn’t do it for fun.”
Alex said, “Willow kind of gave me the X-rated version of The Other Talk and by the time she was done, I pretty much didn’t want to have sex until I was forty.”
“Well, good for her,” Alex’s mom said with a smile.
Alex added, “And it wasn’t like I was gonna go do the sex thing with Ray anyway. I mean, I’ve sort of thought about it, but I’m not ready. I mean, parts of me are ready, but other parts are big with the whoa, so I’m not. And Ray’s being so great about it and being patient and everything, when everyone else on the basketball team is like ‘I’m a b-ball superstar so you must have sex with me right now’. And anyway, I really didn’t need to hear about anal sex, which is so eww I can’t believe it.”
Her mom flinched a little, but said, “It’s a good thing if you learn about things before you encounter them and don’t know how to handle them.”
Alex groaned, “No kidding. Like those baby giant spiders.”
Her mom froze. “Like what baby giant spiders? Alex?”
Oh, crud. Alex cringed and asked, “Could we just pretend I didn’t say that?”
“Absolutely not.”
Alex buried her face in her hands. This was going SO swell. “Mom, there are things I can’t talk about, and then there are things you really don’t wanna know. And you really don’t wanna know about the spiders.”
Her mom said, “I thought there was just one.”
Alex gave in. “I’ll tell you about this if you really, really want, but you’ll be sorry. You totally do not want to hear this. This is worse than getting kidnapped by Danielle. It’s worse than that giant blob. It’s bad.”
Her mom thought it over and said, “Tell me.”
Alex tried not to wince as she said, “The giant two-hundred-foot spider? Female. And preggers.”
Her mom paled and slowly asked, “How many babies?”
Alex said, “Tarantulas like that lay a bunch of eggs, put ’em in a spidersilk sac, and then they all hatch at once.”
“How many?”
Alex confessed, “Maybe five hundred, and each of the babies was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.”
Her mom gulped. “And how close were you?”
Alex told the truth. “I was in the back of the cave planting bombs when the egg sac ripped open and they came pouring out. I nearly died about three times. We all nearly died. It was really, really bad. Like ‘scariest horror movie in the world’ bad.”
Her mom was ashen, but still said, “I’m going to have a little chat with that Colonel O’Neill of yours.”
She insisted, “Don’t be mean to him. He’s the only reason we got there in time and kept Arizona from being overrun with giant man-eating tarantulas. And when Hanna stopped running and started shooting at the things so they’d still be in the cave when the bomb went off, Jack ran back to rescue her, even though he knew he couldn’t get out in time and he was either gonna get eaten alive by giant spiders or burned alive by a huge super-napalm bomb. Or both at the same time.”
Her mom just pointed out, “But he’s not dead.”
“I grabbed him and Hanna, and I did the silvery puddle instead of flying out of the cave. And I didn’t know if I could outrun the spiders or survive the heat of the super-napalm blast.”
Her mom said, “But you saved them.”
Alex nodded. “But just barely. I couldn’t outrun the spiders like that, and they would’ve got me if the bomb hadn’t gone off. And I’m not sure I could’ve survived that fire a whole lot longer. It was way hotter than the Fireguy who attacked Libby.”
Her mom frowned. “What was that Hanna thinking?”
Alex admitted, “Mom, Hanna isn’t normal. She was genetically engineered to be a super-soldier, and she has chunks of DNA that aren’t even human. She doesn’t have fear. I think maybe she understands what it is, but she doesn’t have it. There was a swarm of hideous, scary giant monsters coming at her faster than … well, faster than I could puddle with other people, and she just wanted to make sure the swarm didn’t get out of the cave before the bomb went off. She totally wasn’t afraid of being eaten alive by giant monsters, or being burned alive. Jack was, but he had to try to save Hanna instead of running for it. He doesn’t like having ‘kids’ in his ops.”
Her mom finally said, “But you’d be in these ‘ops’ whether he wanted you to or not.”
Alex nodded. “Hanna, too. She was bred to be a soldier, and the guy she thought was her dad raised her to be a killer. She doesn’t know how to step back from these kinds of things. At least Jack found her a really great mom who takes good care of her, and good friends, and a boyfriend, even if Jack probably isn’t too thrilled about that part.”
“Why wouldn’t Jack be happy about that?”
Alex told her, “Because the boy she likes, who likes her back? It’s Jack’s son Charlie, and he knows what Hanna really is, and he doesn’t care.”
Her mom finally said, “The thing with the spiders was a lot worse than you’re telling me, wasn’t it?” Alex nodded unhappily. Her mom gently ran a hand through Alex’s hair and said, “I’m going to call Colonel O’Neill. And if he thinks it was too horrible to tell me, maybe … I’ll let it drop. It’s scary enough just watching you fly off on these adventures and knowing you may never come home.”
Alex thought about all those people in China who were never going to get to say the things they’d been meaning to say. She threw her arms around her mother. “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too, but I’m not too happy with your colonel right now.”
Alex said, “He’s not my colonel. He’s Willow’s colonel.”
“And that’s another thing I want to discuss with that man.”
Alex cringed. “Mom? Please let Willow and Jack handle this on their own. Or at least talk to Willow first.”
Her mom smiled. “That’s an excellent idea, honey!” She trotted off down the stairs.
But the more Alex thought about it, the worse an idea it sounded in her head. Her mom was too old to have Willow telling her about freaky sex acts and stuff like that. If Willow told her mom that she told Alex about that ‘chocolate pop’ thing, Alex knew she was going to die of humiliation.
Maybe Willow would tell her mom about that Psylocke costume and get her mom totally derailed on lecturing Willow about inappropriate clothing choices. And that would probably get Alex a lecture on the skintight Kitty Pryde costumes she had been wearing.
Alex grumbled, “What else can go wrong today?”
And her Terawatt phone went off. Oh, crud.
She stared up at the ceiling and gasped, “I’m really, really sorry I said it, and I’ll never say it again, okay? Don’t make it be something bad!” She was so dumb. Why did she say that? Why did she even think it? That was just like the dumb guy in a bad movie who says ‘hey nothing can go wrong’ or ‘let me go check out the cellar all by myself’ or ‘I’m sure it’s dead now’ or ‘let’s split up so we can cover more ground’ or one of those things that meant irony was about to hit that guy with a sixteen-ton weight.
She answered the phone, making sure she was in her Terawatt voice. “Terawatt here.”
“This is Hermione Granger, of the E.U. Terawatt Liaison Office. I hope you remember me. I think we have a Terawatt Code Red on an island just off the coast of Ireland.”