|
|
Chapter 81 – AfterswarmAlex woke up when her phone rang. It wasn’t her tPhone, either. It was her regular phone, playing Ray’s ringtone.
Ugh. It was a quarter of eight, and Ray was probably driving to work. And she’d only been asleep for about four and a half hours, tops.
But it was Ray, and he wanted to talk. She could take a nap later. And she was hungry again. Ray wanted to make sure she was okay, and he wanted to talk to her before eight, because the last time they were chatting during his work hours, he got chewed out by his boss, even though he was doing his work and just using an earjack to talk with her.
She tried to sound really reassuring. “Oh, I’m fine. No bumps, no bruises, nothing.” She fixed half a dozen English muffins with butter and grape jelly while she talked.
He worried, “But the news … They said these things could kill you just by touching you. And they wiped out an island near England. And they had pictures of you fighting the things in Rome, and there were dead soldiers all over the place.”
She told him, “Yeah, it was a busy day. Ireland, Rome, and Tokyo. And I got home at like three this morning.”
“Wow! It sounds like you flew around the world!”
She said, “I pretty much did. In an SR-71 Blackbird. Which is the coolest thing ever! I mean, imagine flying more than three times the speed of sound, and flying so high you’re pretty much in outer space.”
He insisted, “You’ve got a really hard job. You deserve some awesome perks.”
Since it sounded like Ray hadn’t gotten a big update from Willow, Alex checked with Acid Burn as soon as she finished eating. Only when she Skyped Willow, Willow was in a way-too-teeny robe and not in her computer room or her bedroom. And that robe was showing a ton of cleavage, and was really slinky like black satin. “Willow? You’re not home?”
“Umm, maybe I didn’t mention it, but I wanted to drop in on Jack and Charlie and see how things were going, and I sort of didn’t tell Jack early enough for him to get housing arranged for me, so I’m at their house, and Jack kind of got banged up last night …”
“Oh, fer cryin’ out loud, Will! Just tell her!” Well, that was definitely Jack.
Willow turned the laptop so Alex could see Jack was lying in a queen-sized bed, propped up with a ton of pillows, and with his ribs all wrapped up with elastic bandages. And he had a lot more muscles than she’d thought. But the bedsheet was only up to his waist, and he didn’t have anything on above the sheet except those bandages! Okay, it wasn’t as bad as if he was in swimtrunks on the beach, but still, he probably didn’t have anything on under the sheet, either.
She was going to pretend Willow had something on under that robe, and Jack had pajama pants on under that sheet. Because the alternative was majorly ick.
Jack gave her a smirk and a little wave. “Hi, Alex.”
“Jack! You’re not supposed to get hurt! You’re supposed to be the guy who saves everyone else!”
He grinned. “Well, this time it was Hanna who did the save. Pro Tip: never let Hanna tackle you full-speed and full-strength, unless you want to be broken in half. Janet said if I hadn’t been wearing my tac vest, the impact might have broken half my ribs. That kid hits like a freight train.”
Willow pouted. “And he has bruises on his back and his butt, and one on the back of his head he didn’t want to tell me about, and it’s really not fair when Charlie’s off on this project thing today with Hanna and Cindy and some other kids, so we have the place to ourselves, and I was really hoping to —”
Jack yelled out an interruption, “Willow! TMI!”
“Oops, sorry, I said I was gonna work on that, and it was just slipping right out anyway,” Willow muttered.
Jack grimaced. “So my ribs are bruised, but I’m still alive and not a boneless blob, so I’m counting it as a big win. Oh, and we didn’t tell Janet that Hanna’s rescue move knocked me down the hall but left her right where two silicates almost got her. So let’s keep that under our hats.”
Willow smiled. “And Jack picked up two new cooperators! They’re cops in New York City, but one’s a marshal from Taos, New Mexico.”
Jack smirked. “Yep. Sam McCloud. Or ‘Sam McCowboy’ as I think we’ll call him. Or ‘McClod’ or maybe ‘McCowpie’. He goes out of his way to play the harmless, folksy country boy. But he figured out right away that Hanna’s got superpowers. And when they had a silicate on the loose and a jammed tranq rifle, he had the guts to lure it into the front seat of his squad car and trap it there for long enough to get the jam cleared and kill it. It ruined the car, but apparently the marshal specializes in wrecking cars and equipment and rooms in the process of always getting his man.”
“ ‘We always get our man’ is the Canadian Mounties, Jack,” Willow pointed out.
“Oh, I think it applies here, too.” Jack added, “And we got lucky. All the labs had university cooperators who were going to replicate their experiment, which would have been extremely bad. Of the bad, as someone we know likes to say.” Willow blushed and stuck out her tongue at him. “DHS investigators found the ones for the New Yorkers and shut them down in plenty of time. Hermione found the European professors and stopped them, and Miller’s Japanese buddy Colonel Wasabi got the Japanese scientists. Then General Hammond made a big speech at the U.N. a few hours ago, so every country on Earth is rushing around making sure their cancer researchers don’t create more problems than they solve. And the Chinese contacted Hammond’s boss: they wouldn’t say what went wrong over there, but they were willing to admit — off the record, naturally — that it wasn’t silicates or blobs. Or giant spiders the size of Tibet.”
Willow excitedly added, “Oh! And Colonel Watanabe said really nice things about you and Graham’s team to the press, and Graham thinks the colonel might be willing to be one of our cooperators, too.”
Alex said, “I’d like to get Hermione’s friends Ron and Harry onboard, too, if it’s okay.”
Willow checked, “These are the guys who have the doubles in the magical universe?”
Alex nodded. “Right. Here, they’re Harry Potter, SIS, and Lord Ronald Wellesley, one of the grandsons of the current Duke of Wellington.”
Jack pretended to sound really impressed. “Wow, why don’t you just draft the queen mum while you’re at it?”
Alex pretended she was ignoring him. “And one of the victims from the Petrie’s Island thing? The only victim who survived? Dr. Brian Stanley. We should get him. He’s really smart, and he’s really tough. He lost a hand to a silicate, and I think they had to chop his hand off to save him, and a couple hours later, he’s up and running things and being all smart-alecky. He’d be a great asset, and I think he’d really hit it off with Jack.”
Jack casually asked, “Did you ever find out how the SIS got wind of the problem early enough to send in a team, lose it, then send in a backup team?”
Alex tried not to blush. After all Hermione hadn’t said not to tell anyone. “An SIS cooperator overheard Dr. Stanley explaining the problem to Dr. West, and called it in just in case.”
Willow looked over at Jack, who guessed, “Probably the brunette who tagged along with them for no reason. People always overlook the bubbly girlfriend who’s just along for the ride.”
Sometimes Jack’s brain was just scary. And Alex had no idea where he’d picked this stuff up. She figured if she asked him, he’d just smirk at her and tell her it was need-to-know.
Jack said, “Oh, and I asked your dad to check your uniform and you for any signs of radiation exposure, so make sure he gets that done, and if you have any symptoms at all, you get over to your doctor at Camp Atron ASAP. Got it?”
“Okay,” she murmured uncomfortably.
Willow asked, “Anything else? Because his meds are going to kick in any minute now, and he’ll be pain-free for a couple hours, and I think it’s an excellent time to take care of this little problem I’ve been waiting to have taken care of …”
“Will! Can we not talk about this in front of the children?” Jack complained.
Willow reached over and disconnected, but not fast enough that Alex didn’t see Willow was stripping off her teeny robe and she didn’t have anything on underneath.
Alex was pretty sure she didn’t cringe. Much.
After that, she had to call her dad, who said, “Jack called me while you were still asleep. It was pretty obvious you’re not showing the classic early-onset symptoms of high doses, like nausea, vomiting, or bleeding. After all, you’re still eating like a whole herd of horses.”
“Dad!”
But he kept going. “I still pulled the Geiger counter off the storage shelf in the garage and checked your uniform, and your wig, and you, too, and there weren’t any signs of contamination. How are you feeling? Headache? Lethargy? Fatigue? Weakness? Diarrhea?”
Ick. “Dad! I mean, I feel fine.”
He said, “Okay, but call me if you feel funny. And I’m going to see if I can come up with a chemical that acts like a dosimeter so I can paint a stripe on the inside of your leotard, just for the next time.”
Then she put her phone on speakerphone and had a chat with Robyn and Nicole while doing exercises and her morning martial arts workout. She was adding something new, starting today. She’d gotten the idea from when she carried that woman out of that lab in Tokyo. All she had to do was go grab her dad’s old free weights out of the attic. Her dad had two dumbbells, and a great big barbell she didn’t need. She just took the dumbbells and all the 25 pound weights and the 10 pound weights and some 5 pound weights, too. It took her two trips to get as much weight as she wanted, because she was carrying it all with her telekinesis while she chatted on the phone call. But then she did arm exercises with the dumbbells while she picked up as much weight as she could telekinetically.
When she checked after the phone call, she figured out that she had managed to lift 215 pounds at one time on her best telekinesis lift. So she was going to do this every day and see if she could get stronger. Because if she put on more muscle, she’d be heavier, and then she would need to be able to lift more with her telekinesis just to keep up.
As long as she didn’t end up looking like those female bodybuilders in those competitions on TV, because some of those women looked pretty much like guys from the neck down. And it wasn’t like any of them could lift as much as Hanna.
And after she Skyped with Hanna and Cindy and Grover, she called Hermione, who promptly answered, “Hello, Terawatt.”
Alex made sure her voice was right, and she said, “Miss Granger. I just wanted to check in with you and make sure that the island and Rome were okay.”
Hermione replied, “It looks like both are clear. However, Colonel Leonetti is continuing to be a huge pain in the bum, so I would really appreciate it if you could call Mister Hendriks and give the colonel a rather scathing review, so the EU Terawatt Liaison Office can find a better representative for Italy.”
Alex smiled to herself. “I would be happy to, if you would give Colonel O’Neill some contact numbers: Harry and Ron, their friend Mike, and Dr. Brian Stanley. I’d like to have all of them ready and willing to contact me or the SRI if another Terawatt Code Red pops up anywhere.”
There was a long pause before Hermione carefully said, “And if Harry was known to be a cooperator for the Americans, he might become ineligible for the Double Oh series. Hmm … That sounds quite promising.”
Alex smiled to herself. It sounded like Hermione had already figured out just how to get Harry to agree to join Team Terawatt, and then how to leak the news in a way that would make the SIS ‘old guys’ get nervous about using him as a Double Oh.
Hermione added, “Oh, one other thing. We found some notes in Dr. Phillips’ journals. It appears he got the macro-molecules for his anti-cancer cells from some secret source. So far, all we have are some initials.”
Alex cringed. “Please don’t tell me the initials are MKW.”
That was greeted by a deathly silence. Finally, Hermione admitted, “The initials are MKW. How did you know?”
Alex grimaced. “Margaret K. Walsh. Dr. Maggie Walsh, now America’s Most Wanted. She’s been behind more Terawatt situations than anyone except Danielle Atron. She may have just passed Atron as my biggest problem. She’s certainly a bigger problem for the people of this planet.”
Hermione complained, “I should have known that one! I was still going through names of European and Asian research centers.”
So then Alex needed to contact Jack and give him the bad news. Okay, she knew what Jack and Willow were doing, so she just emailed him instead of Skyping him and seeing stuff she totally didn’t want to see.
And then Terawatt had to make a personal phone call to Aart Hendriks — and it was at his home when he wanted to go to bed, too, so Alex felt sort of mean — to complain about what a jerkhead Colonel Leonetti was. Not that Alex used the word ‘jerkhead’, because she wanted to sound really professional and superheroic. No, she stressed that the colonel treated her like a useless little girl and ignored her advice, as well as that of Hermione Granger, and as a result, most of his platoon was killed, and Rome was nearly infested with silicates. Then she warned Mr. Hendriks that she would not work with the Italians again until the colonel had been moved out of the liaison office, and someone less offensive and less obstructive was put in that position.
Alex figured that went okay, because Mr. Hendrix even said he would do what he could. But Alex knew there was no way she was going to let Italy get destroyed just because Colonel Stupidetti hadn’t been removed from his liaison post. She hoped Mr. Hendrix didn’t know she was bluffing.
So then she finally got around to washing her uniform and re-packing her gym bag with more energy bars. And some really great mom-type had already done both for her! Plus, the new energy bars were chocolate raspberry, which sounded awesome.
And when she did some websurfing while she got a few units done on her programming course, stuff about the silicates was all over the internet. She hadn’t realized someone was filming her from some distant Rome building. They probably used a tripod and a telephoto lens, but that was definitely her flying around looking like a super-powered person. And there were some long-distance images of her in Tokyo, too.
Oh, great, the team could get photographed like this the very next time they were out on an op.
She sent Jack and Willow a note that Action Girl needed to start wearing some kind of mask to protect her identity, and she needed to wear her hair totally different. Long at home when she was just Hanna, and in some kind of bun or braid or twist when she was Action Girl. With expert makeup at home and none as Action Girl, so she’d look totally diff.
Alex was pretty sure Hanna wouldn’t want to have to change into a superheroine costume, too.
When she went downstairs to thank her mom for putting the uniform in the washing machine, she found out the silicates made the front page of the local paper, too. Her mom said, “And it was all over last night’s news and the morning news programs. You’d think the Today Show had hired you as a co-host the way they talked about you. Oh, and that creepy guy CBS This Morning always brings out to say that Terawatt’s a dangerous vigilante? They brought out someone else instead.”
Alex smiled. “Yeah, Professor Perelman’s a real jerkhead. Who’d they have this time?”
Her mom said, “It was some officer from the Department of Homeland Security. Davis, or Davies. But he was really cute. And he said really nice things about you, and that the DHS wanted federal laws in place to help superheroes and to cope with supervillains. He pointed out that Danielle Atron walked out of a high security prison like it was made of Kleenex, and she kidnapped her cellmate and mutilated her as a side activity because she wasn’t worried about someone screaming for help.”
Alex teased, “So the main thing you got out of this was the DHS has some really cute officers?”
Her mom blushed a little, but admitted, “Well, that Colonel O’Neill of yours is pretty cute, and those guys Finn and Miller? Pretty hot stuff.”
Alex wasn’t sure she wanted to be having this talk with her mom. She still mentioned, “Yeah. And they have some other pretty hot teammates. Most of the Berlin conference guys thought Lieutenant Lupo was too sexy for her shirt. And she speaks really fluent Spanish, so I think the Spanish diplomats pretty much did whatever she asked.”
Her mom smiled mischievously. “Well, we just won’t expose your father to that.”
Alex knew she wanted her parents to treat her like an adult, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be having talks like this with her mom. At least this wasn’t those TMI talks like with Willow. That would be mega-icky.
Her mom went on, “And how is it that you got the best hacker in the world, and she’s a gorgeous twenty-something, instead of a fat forty-year-old guy with acne and a neckbeard and Cheetos dust all down his shirt? Because the computer science students that I’ve seen at the university are not that attractive.”
Alex just shrugged. “I think there’s something important there, but I don’t know what. Because every one of my teammates in that other dimension was just amazingly pretty. I felt like the ugly duckling.”
Her mom smiled warmly. “Remember: the ugly duckling turned out to be the most gorgeous bird after all.”
Alex said, “Okay, so I felt like the ugly stepsister. I was so not ‘the fairest in the land.’ And they were all smarter than me, too. I kind of had an inferiority complex or something.”
Her mom told her, “In case you hadn’t noticed, half the internet thinks Terawatt is the hottest woman on the planet.”
Alex pointed out, “Well, that’s the fake boobs. And the blonde hair.”
Her mom insisted, “I don’t think so. There are lots of fake blondes with fake ‘boobs’ out there, and they’re willing to wear a lot less clothing, and they’re not getting the attention Terawatt is. And that’s your legs in those pictures. And your body — not counting the breast padding — and your face. And Terawatt’s hair color isn’t that far off your real hair. You’re a very pretty young woman with a lot going for her.”
She hugged her mom, but she knew moms all over the world said that, no matter what their daughter looked like. There were probably girls who looked like the wolfman but their mom still told them ‘you’re a very pretty young woman with a lot going for you.’
After lunch, she washed her old Terawatt wig and brushed out the new one that Jack’s people had sent her mom. So now Alex had two entire Terawatt uniforms, including the plastic ‘makeup’ stuff, and Jack’s team had a spare uniform for her. Maybe two. That was good, and bad. Now she also had to worry about hiding all this stuff.
Oh, wait, she had an idea on that.
She sent Willow an email asking her to send the two Kitty Pryde costumes, and any other costumes Willow had made in Alex’s size. Because if Alex had a closet in the guest bedroom that was partly full of cosplay costumes, and Terawatt was just one of the costumes, then that would look pretty normal. After all, it looked like hundreds of young women had Terawatt costumes now. And the costume stores on the internet all had Terawatt costumes for this Halloween. They were right on the front page, along with the Black Widow costumes and the ‘naughty nurse’ costumes and the Slave Leia costumes and the Lara Croft costumes, and whatever else was probably the top sellers. Maybe Spiderwoman and Black Cat and ‘sexy vampire’. Like vampires were really sexy. Ugh.
She was definitely not going out as Terawatt on Halloween. Maybe Kitty Pryde, Agent of SHIELD, but definitely no way on the Terawatt.
And did she need to talk to Louis about the Terawatt costumes on all the internet costume websites? Probably.
She grabbed her regular phone. “Hi, Louis? It’s Alex.”
“Alex! Great to hear from you.” It sounded like he was on speakerphone, with Aerosmith playing in the background. And there was a kind of continuous whooshing sound, too. “What can I do for you?”
Marsha chimed in, “Hi, Alex! What’s up?”
Alex asked, “Are you guys in the car? Is it safe to talk on the phone like that?”
Louis laughed and said, “Marsha’s taking a turn driving. We’re going up the coast to another con, and checking out another couple state parks along the way.”
Marsha complained, “Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm were totally on the up-and-up, but there were a few other places that were pretty sleazy about Tera-gear.”
Tera-gear? That was almost as bad as the Teramom and Teradad. Why did everyone have to turn everything into Tera-something?
Louis said, “I talked with a couple of people at Disneyland, but if they decide to license Terawatt shirts from us, we’re really going to have to ramp up production. Dad’s working on a plan to cope with that kind of jump in production if we need it.”
Marsha added, “And after San Diego Comic Con, we may have to have a U-Haul trailer full of boxes of Terawatt merch just to keep up with demand.”
Louis chipped in, “Fortunately, Dad was able to overnight a dozen boxes to us in San Diego, because the Terawatt appearances really jacked up the demand.”
And Marsha said, “It’s too bad I can’t cosplay as Terawatt, because we really ought to have a Terawatt at our booth.”
Alex insisted, “You so could! All you’d need is the right wig, and some falsies. Pretty much all the Terawatts at Comic Con had wigs and boob padding.”
Louis told her, “I already found a couple websites with a page on how to put together a Terawatt costume. And Marsha would look amazing as Terawatt. I just haven’t convinced her. Yet. But never let it be said that Louis Otto Driscoll knows the meaning of the word ‘defeat’!”
Marsha teased, “Ooh, that doesn’t sound promising for your SAT verbal score.”
“I’ll have you know my SAT scores are just fine,” Louis insisted. “Even if they’re not as high as Alex’s.”
“What?” Alex squeaked. “My scores? Why would you know about my scores?”
Louis scoffed, “Oh, please, like Ray doesn’t brag about you constantly.”
So then Alex got really embarrassed, and it was like ten or twenty minutes before she got back to the whole ‘licensed Terawatt costumes on costume websites’ thing. Which Louis’s dad was already on top of, naturally. Although there wasn’t anything they could do about the website that was basically ‘how to take your Terawatt costume and make it really slutty’. Eww.
Alex took a peek at the SexUpYourTerawattCostume webpage. Ick. And some of the ideas were so dumb. Why would anybody want to take a perfectly good white leotard and cut a big circular window right in between your breasts?
Oh. And she had an email back from Willow. The two Kitty Pryde costumes would be on their way when Willow got back home, along with a Mayday Parker Spidergirl costume Willow had been working on for Alex but hadn’t had ready for Comic Con. And there was more …
Crud. There was a note from Jack underneath Willow’s message. ‘Don’t forget, I need the two standard SRI auxiliary personnel forms, plus a full after-mission report that covers Petrie’s Island, Rome, Tokyo, and also whatever you talked about in private with Hermione and her two buddies.’ Rats. Sometimes it would be handy if Jack would stop being so intuitive. But just some of the time, like when it wasn’t so great for her … but not on missions, or when figuring stuff out, or when doing really great stuff for Willow, or when he was being a good dad, or when he was making sure Hanna and Grover had good lives, or …
Okay, maybe he did need to keep being intuitive and stuff.
She got out her tablet to do her auxiliary personnel forms, and she did her report on her laptop where she could really type. There was so much stuff to cover that it took her almost two hours to write everything up, even doing the speed essay writing thing. And then she needed over half an hour to re-read it and edit it to fix all the really stupid mistakes and misspelled words and spastic grammar. And her stupid software had been extra ‘helpful’ and every time she wrote ‘Wellesley’ it had changed it to ‘weasel’. Crud.
And would the Queen get mad at her if she got Lord Ronald Wellesley on her team?
After she sent off the stuff to Jack, she spent another hour reading time management stuff and working on her Gantt chart for the yearbook. The more she worked on it, the more she figured they just needed to get the headshots and senior ‘action’ pictures done early, and then they’d have tons of time for everything except the dozen or so things happening near and after the turn-in deadline for the printers. Without the ‘problem editors’ in the mix this year, it ought to be pretty fun.
That night, she didn’t do anything. She just lounged around the house and watched reruns of The Fuzzy Family with her dad, like she was twelve again. He even let her snuggle up against him with his arm around her. And she went to bed early. After she had a really big ice cream sundae.
Her dad had an ice cream sundae with her, so it wasn’t like she was being a pig. At least, that was what she told her mom when her mom walked in on them. And her dad said he was just having a sundae ‘to be supportive of Alex’s food requirements’. Her mom called it ‘aiding and abetting’.
* * *
Alex woke up early enough Friday morning to chat with Ray while he drove to work. Then she started her new routine. Exercises, weightlifting with and without her telekinesis, and her martial arts workout, all while chatting with Robyn and Nicole, or chatting with Hanna and Cindy. Hanna didn’t mind if Alex Skyped with her while practicing her martial arts, but Cindy thought it was a little weird. Alex kept her chat with Willow to phones only, because Willow still had her laptop in Jack’s bedroom, and can you say ‘TMI’ a hundred times in a row?
And after she got another whole unit done in her programming course, she and her mom spent an hour going through slow cooker recipes and figuring out what they were going to make for the next two weeks, which led to grocery shopping and eating lunch out with her mom, which was tons of fun even if she couldn’t eat as much as she wanted to at the restaurant. Her mom gave her the ‘mom look’ and the ‘eyeball roll’ when they got in the car after their nice sit-down lunch and Alex asked if they could drive through the nearby Carl’s Jr. so she could get a guacamole bacon six dollar burger with their chili cheese fries and a large Diet Coke. And her mom thought it was crazy to get a jillion calories worth of food and a diet soft drink. It wasn’t her fault she liked Diet Coke!
On Saturday, she did her weekly flight to Camp Atron for martial arts training, even if she had to do the new security thing because of that psychic illusionist badguy: flying in and landing at the security gate and giving them a password. But Jack didn’t show up to take her to lunch. She figured he was way too busy with work and Willow and Charlie, back at his base in West Virginia.
But she did get a call from Jack and Willow on the tPhone in mid-afternoon. She switched to her Terawatt voice and said, “Terawatt here. What’s the crisis?”
Willow giggled and then said, “Hi! Jack and I were talking about you and college, and we figured it out!”
Jack spoke next. “Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC. Number one or two photojournalism program in the country, depending on who you ask. You’ve got grades and SATs more than good enough to get in, without any help from us. But they have faculty from a bunch of the local hotspots: National Geographic, the Washington Post, museums, you name it. There are several of them who are already DHS ‘cooperative individuals’. And the faculty work as individual mentors and help the students craft individualized programs. So we read one in and use him —”
“Or her,” Willow insisted.
Jack continued, “— or it as your smokescreen. Any time you need to dash off, she says that she’s sent you off on a personalized mentoring project or whatever they call it, and you have an excuse to be gone from classes for a day or two. Or five. And we have tons of people in the DC area who are already read into DHS secrets. We can get one of them to take on a sexy college girl for renting a room from them, and we can set up appropriately secure ingress and egress for you. Maybe even the same sort of thing you have now at your house.”
Willow bubbled, “And then we could see each other any time I’m on the East Coast!”
Jack pointed out, “And we’ll be sure to fly Terawatt to Cali pretty regularly for one thing or another, even if it’s just having you fly across the La-la-land skyscape so people continue to think Tera’s still on the Left Coast.”
Willow added, “And anyway, Graham and Jo want you around for helping with Team Two ops.”
Alex checked, “So you’re definitely going to have Team One out of West Virginia and Team Two out of Roswell?”
Jack said, “We have enough ops going on that I think we need to. I’ve got Team Four pretty much permanently stationed in Eastern Europe and Team Five in Siberia, even if Gates complains all the time about the cold, mainly in Russian phrases he doesn’t think I know. And right now we’re rebuilding Team Three as part of an international team near Chernobyl, because they have ongoing freakiness there.”
Willow grinned. “Jack keeps getting memos from higher-ups and people in other agencies telling him the teams over there are great for diplomacy, or horrible for DHS strategies, or good for international defense, or bad for national defense, or whatever. But they’re all different, and they all want him to do what they say right away if not yesterday, and they all conflict.”
Jack smirked. “So I just send ’em up the line and let Hammond’s boss tell ’em what they can do with their memo. I think it usually involves printing it on posterboard, folding it seven ways, and then shoving it where the sun doesn’t shine.”
Alex clenched her teeth until she was sure she wouldn’t giggle. Jack was so naughty!
Jack admitted, “I really wanted to get Teams Four and Five in to help you with Rome and Tokyo, but Siberia keeps flaring up. The forest of mutated critters is bad enough, but now they’re having trouble with this radioactive lake, too.”
“Wait a minute!” Alex squawked. “A radioactive lake? How does that happen?”
Jack casually explained, “Oh, the usual, you know, years and years of really stupid guys dumping radiation experiments into the nearest lake instead of proper disposal techniques. The Russians in the ’50s and ’60s were so wacky they make Maggie Walsh look like an actuary. But they’ve got a radioactive lake, and now they have radioactive things in the lake, and the radioactive things are now trying to slither out onto the land for a little exploration and chowtime. And they can’t nuke the lake, because radiation is why the things are there in the first place, and it’s not a natural lake.”
Not a natural lake? “What, you mean there’s a dam at one end of the lake?” Alex asked in mounting horror.
Jack nodded. “Yep. And it’s a big earth dam that needs restoration, but the things in the lake are making that a problem, and if the dam goes, there are towns downstream. So the whole thing’s one golden retriever short of a Dean Koontz novel waiting to happen. We’re having big discussions with the Russians right now about the problem. I think they need to set up a large-scale pumping and filtration system to empty the whole damn lake and extract the radioactive chemicals, then they can kill off everything still moving in it, then they can do a couple years of hazardous waste abatement across the entire lakebed. But the Russians don’t want to put three hundred million bucks into fixing one lake, when they’ve got major financial problems and major hazardous waste problems all over the country as it is. You should see the headaches they’ve got up around Novaya Zemlya, and they’re pretty much just avoiding the area instead of cleaning up stuff their navy dumped all over the seabed.”
Alex didn’t even know where that was, but it sure sounded Russian. She asked, “Why not ask Paradise Valley Chemical to go do a cheap study and see if there’s a cost-effective way of handling it?”
Willow gasped, “I know! Better yet, tell them to make it a contest! Any company anywhere in the world who’s interested in showing off their hazardous waste abatement chops can put in a proposal and then use the lake as a free testbed for their new methods. That way, the Russians don’t have to spend billions of rubles to fix a problem they shouldn’t have had to start with, and the whole world finds out who’s really the top bananas in hazardous waste abatement. And the HWAAA can help!”
Jack said, “I’ll talk it over with Hammond on Monday. Assuming Willow lets me out of the bed. But I wanna know how Corcoran College sounds for Alex.”
Alex had to think it over. She was already thinking about them or the Rochester Institute of Technology, even if Rochester would be freezing cold all winter long. Western Kentucky University made a big deal about all their William Randolph Hearst national photojournalism championship winners, but Alex was already a professional photographer, so she wasn’t even eligible to put her work in that contest. And Corcoran would be pretty close to Jack’s base, and to Annie’s college, and to the Pentagon in case Terawatt needed to make any appearances for General Hammond. And California would only be an hour or so away by SR-71. “Okay, I’m in.”
Jack smirked. “Eggggcellent. Once school starts up this fall, your principal and teachers are going to get a chat with some people from Corcoran, who are going to tell them that they really want you to attend, and several different professional reporters and photographers are fighting over who’s going to be your mentor, and so they’re going to fly you to Washington D.C. on really short notice several times over the course of the year when said big names are available, to meet with them to see who’s going to be the most compatible mentor for you.”
Oh! Jack was so sneaky! “So now I have a reason to take off at a moment’s notice and be gone for a day or two!”
Jack agreed, “Right. Although I’ll try to schedule all world crises for Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, so you have time to get back home and get your homework done before Monday morning.”
Willow jumped in. “And that reminds me! The Pulitzer people try to keep their stuff a big super-secret deal, but KPVC put you up for two of the photojournalism prizes because of the Terawatt thing. And the prizes will be picked in February and March, but they won’t announce ’em until the beginning of May. So I’ll peek through their firewall and let you know in March if you won.”
Alex said, “I’m not going to win. I’m only a kid. They’ll pick some big-name photographer who has some really artsy photo of a kid crying with some super-dramatic stuff going on in the background.”
Willow pouted. “Well, if they don’t pick you, they’re a bunch of doodyheads.”
“Wow, that’s really telling ’em,” Jack teased. “I’ll bet they’re already crying to mommy that you were mean to them.”
“Oh, stop it … you doodyhead,” Willow rebutted.
“No, you’re the doodyhead.”
“No, you are … oh no, no tickling! You know I’m super ticklish there! Stop!” And Willow started squealing in a way that was totally not an ‘I hate this a ton’ noise. Alex figured she needed to hang up before even ickier noises started heading over the phone line.
Oh, and she’d better tell her folks that she knew where she was going to college. And she’d better get an application in like … tonight. Fortunately, she already had copies of the applications for all the top photojournalism schools Jack had found, and she already had a lot of the really hard stuff done for the applications, like raw and edited video or still photography for your ‘portfolio’ was pretty much set for her, because she had her original footage of the various Terawatt battles, plus the raw footage of the meatpacking plant exposé, and she also had the final edited versions of all of them that Willow had downloaded for her. And she already had a bunch of references lined up, mainly with KPVC and the local paper, because Alex Mack sure couldn’t use Terawatt references. And she already had copies of her school transcripts and her new SAT scores.
Really, all she had to do was put her stuff down on the forms and attach some big files she already had ready to go, and then write an essay about why she wanted to be a photojournalist, and do another essay about how she became the photojournalism type person she already was.
Well, that, and not think about Jack and Willow and tickle-sex.