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Chapter 103 – Playing DefenseAlex looked up into his huge grin and guessed, “It’s something pretty good, right?”
He nodded. “Yeah! You know how I’ve been working on my vertical leap and defensive drills all summer?”
“Sure.” After all, he’d talked about them a lot. And he was way better at defense than Jackson, who acted like he didn’t have to play defense because he was Mister Shotmaster. Even if Alex thought Ray was a better shooter than Jackson, partly because Ray knew when not to take a shot and just pass the ball.
He beamed. “So when we did drills and trials today, my vertical leap was thirty-two inches!”
She ventured, “Okay, that’s good, I guess, but weren’t you nearly that high like a week ago?”
He grinned. “No, a week ago I was jumping twenty-six and a half inches. I went up five and a half inches in one day! And my sprints are faster! I shaved like three tenths of a second off my forty-yard dash time!”
She was pretty sure that running three tenths of a second faster on forty yards wasn’t that huge a deal, but it sounded like Ray had gotten some strength and speed from the GC-161. She hoped he didn’t get tons of strength and speed, because then he’d have to quit the basketball team.
He grinned. “I beat Jackson in a sprint! He was so pissed! The coach chewed him out for slacking off all off-season.”
Alex asked, “But hasn’t he been slacking off? Like a ton? I mean, he practices shooting, but he doesn’t work on anything else, does he?”
Ray complained, “I’ve been telling him all year he needed to work on something besides dribbling and shooting … So anyway, I did better than usual on the reflex drills! The tip drills and the defensive drills and the ball-stealing drills and all that. This is great!”
Wondering if she should worry, Alex asked, “You’re not gonna look too good on the court, are you?”
“Nah,” he downplayed it. “A thirty-two-inch vertical isn’t that hot. It’s serious college basketball skill level, but it’s not like I’m suddenly Michael Jordan. He had a vertical leap of forty-three inches. Forty-three! That’s insane! I’m just killin’ it with my jumpshot now, because I’m getting more height, which equals more hangtime. And Tony looked really good in drills. When we get Heyward back from the football team, we’re gonna rock.”
Still not completely reassured, Alex said, “I guess this is okay, even if you’re playing with an advantage, but we need to see if you’ve got normal biochemistry or not, because if not, you’re never going to pass another medical exam.”
Ray frowned. “Oh, crap. I didn’t think about that.”
Alex hugged him and said, “Look, maybe it’ll be okay. Let’s just wait until Dad gets home, and he’ll check you out, and we’ll cross our fingers.”
He kissed her. “Okay, but don’t tell Marsha, or she’ll worry stuff into another disaster. Louis is already talking about not letting her go to any more of our football games.”
Alex frowned. “I’m kind of hoping Marsha can get that under control. And I’m hoping her biochemistry isn’t too weird now, or we’ll need to figure out how to handle doctor stuff for her, too.”
So Alex sort-of-studied with Ray beside her in the living room, even if there was a lot more snuggling and kissing than she’d be doing if she was studying by herself. And maybe there was a lot less getting homework done. But it was a lot more fun.
When Alex’s mom got home with Shar, Alex and Ray sort of slid apart a few inches and stared at their homework. Shar jumped on the couch and squeezed in between them before asking, “So, can Ray fly and stuff? I can do fire and Alex can do lightning, so maybe Ray could have laser beams?”
Alex’s mom said, “Shar, I don’t think it works that way.” She stepped into the kitchen. “Ooh, the roast smells delicious!”
Alex told everyone, “I put some extra stuff in around the roast so Shar doesn’t have to eat a hundred roasted carrots.” Shar made a ‘yuck’ face with her tongue stuck out.
Ray protested, “Hey, I like Alex’s roasted carrots.”
Shar frowned. “Blech. I’ll let you have all of mine.”
Alex smiled. “Okay, but you’ll never get Bugs Bunny superpowers if you don’t eat your carrots.”
Shar nudged her with both hands. “Bugs Bunny doesn’t have superpowers.”
“Sure he does!” Alex insisted. “He can tunnel under the ground at hundreds of miles an hour. He can pull giant wooden hammers out of nowhere whenever he wants to. He can do amazing stuff with explosives. He’s a master of disguise …”
Shar interrupted, “That’s just ’cause Elmer Fudd’s so stupid. If Bugs Bunny put on a blonde wig and a padded bra in front of me, I wouldn’t be fooled.”
Ray laughed so hard he started coughing. When Shar looked at him in puzzlement, he just pointed at Alex and laughed some more.
Shar finally got it. “Oh.” She stuck out her tongue at Ray. Then she looked at Alex and said, “Maybe Elmer’s not that stupid after all. I was totally fooled when I saw you.”
Ray managed to get himself under control. “That’s okay, everyone in the world’s fooled by Terawatt. Except Jack.”
Shar grinned. “I like Uncle Jack. And he’s funny. And he’s nice to Auntie Willow, and Aunt Barb said a lot of people were mean to Auntie Willow for years and years. If anybody’s ever mean to her again, POW! Firebending!” She hopped off the couch and did a series of little punches and kicks, along with sound effects. “Pow! Boom! Blam! Kapow!”
Alex smiled. “I think we need to work on your form. When you punch and kick, it’s really important you hit as fast as you can and then you pull back as fast as you can so the badguy doesn’t grab your ankle or your wrist or something. I saw a great big guy try to punch Lieutenant Lupo, and she just did a little guide parry so he missed hitting her, and he didn’t get his arm back fast enough, so she used a kung fu move to grab his arm and punch the pee out of him and pull him over on his face. And he was probably twice her weight. When you’re small, like you and me, you have to have really good form before you try anything for real, because big guys have more reach, and more muscle, and more weight, and if they just jump on you it’s not any fun.”
Ray smirked. “I’ll remind you that you said that someday.”
She gave him a TK shove on the arm for being a smarty-pants. But she kept looking at Shar and didn’t move her hands, so only Ray knew he’d gotten a shove.
After dinner, her dad took another blood sample from Ray, and a cheek scraping, and a little poke in the arm with a kind of big-looking needle that he said was for a muscle tissue biopsy. Then he disappeared into the garage lab for over two hours. That was enough time for Alex to get all her missed homework assignments done, help Shar with her hair after bathtime, and watch some TV with Shar and Ray. Shar tried a few times to get her way, but no one else wanted to watch “The Iron Giant” one more time.
Her dad asked her and Ray to go back to the garage with him for a private consultation, which didn’t sound good to Alex. But she went. She was getting better at doing the harder thing, instead of taking the easy way out.
Her dad looked at several sheets of printouts and notes. “Well, Ray, it looks like you were very lucky. Your DNA changed very little, so it’s not noticeable unless someone has a prior sample to use for comparisons. And I think I’m the only such person. Your blood chemistry looks well within the limits for ‘normal’, too, so I think you’re okay on visits to the doctor. It looks like the GC-161 did more or less what it’s actually supposed to do. Based on the biopsy, it looks like your muscle tissue is slightly denser, with more fast-twitch fibers. So I’m guessing you’re about ten percent stronger and about ten percent quicker. That’s not going to be particularly noticeable unless you have someone who’s been charting your performance over the last several months.”
Ray said, “Just me, but I can lose that stuff.”
Her dad told him, “Bring it over here, and we’ll run it through the paper shredder and then burn it.”
Ray asked, “Okay, but can I still play basketball? Even if I’ve got an advantage?”
Her dad thought it over. “I think you have to keep playing. We don’t want to do anything suspicious, and a sudden improvement in performance, followed by a quick retirement, is likely to make people think you were caught using an illegal performance enhancer. You can also expect that you’re going to get more buff over the next several days or weeks, so you need to make an effort to work out as an excuse for the improvements in your muscle tone and muscle bulk.” He scratched his chin in thought and added, “You may also get a slight improvement in the toughness of your skin, which might make you a little more bruise-resistant.”
Ray shrugged. “I don’t get a ton of bruises anyway. Well, at least they don’t show so much, like they do on Alex.”
“So that’s it?” Alex asked. “He’s a little bit stronger and quicker, and he isn’t glowing yellow, and he doesn’t have to give up basketball?”
Her dad thought out loud, “Well, he may have to eat more than usual after he exercises, but hopefully it won’t be anything like the increase in calories you need when you’re using your powers.”
Ray smiled. “You know, that sounds pretty great.”
Alex asked her dad, “How come Louis didn’t get powers, too? I mean, this is the second time he got exposed to the GC-161 in that creek, right?”
Her dad frowned. “I was thinking about that, too. I’d like to get some DNA samples from him. I’m not a geneticist, but right now I’m working under the hypothesis that we’re looking at some sort of control gene that regulates the whole ‘powers or no powers’ issue, on top of the genetic changes that go with the various powers we’ve seen. So there’s a big genetic on-off switch, in addition to the various changes we see. And if you don’t have the right version of that control gene, then there’s never the ‘switch on’ signal, so you can’t ever get any powers.”
Alex nodded. “I guess that kind of makes sense. I mean, having a gene that makes your eyes green or brown or blue sort of makes sense. But having just one gene that gives you superpowers, and maybe TK or lightning bolts or shapeshifting or the whole turning-blue-and-benchpressing-Mazdas deal? That didn’t make any sense to me.”
Ray added, “So maybe it even makes sense that your dad got lightning powers and your mom got the TK and you got both.”
Her dad told her, “Well, this probably does need to be studied by a reputable geneticist, but I don’t think we have enough active GC-161 cases to do a proper study, and I don’t want to let anyone else find out about us.”
Alex grimaced. “And the only big-name geneticists I know about are all connected in one way or another with Maggie Walsh, who might as well just go change her name to Professor Evil as far as I’m concerned.”
Her father smiled a little. “I don’t think every geneticist in the world is automatically a mad scientist. Your Colonel O’Neill probably has a few responsible scientists on his staff right now.”
“Well, yeah, there’s Dr. Lee, and Lieutenant Marshall’s pretty cool, and I know Jack has more guys than that, I just don’t know ’em.”
Her dad stroked his chin slowly. “I wish I had more people who’d been exposed to GC-161 — not that I want to dose anybody, because I found out how awful that is — but we really wanted GC-161 to be an ideal biochemical modification agent, and Ray looks like he’s getting exactly what we were hoping for. If we knew which people could get the right effects, we could help so many people out there …”
Alex pursed her lips and admitted, “We think there are a bunch of people in town who got exposed to it, maybe at really low levels or just not getting the big, showy powers, and are just walking around thinking they’re normal.”
Her dad carefully said, “Alex, if there’s something I need to know …”
She tried to stall. “I don’t think so, but there’s someone who has really low-level TK and that’s why Louis and Ray were checking in the creek.”
Her dad stopped and thought for a few seconds. “This isn’t that thing from months ago where Louis and his date fell in the creek and he got in trouble with her father, is it? Wasn’t that Marsha?”
Alex winced and looked at Ray. Ray just looked at her. He muttered, “Maybe Louis was right not to tell anyone else, if your dad figured it out that fast.”
Her dad asked, “Has Marsha told her parents yet?” And he gave her a look.
She tried not to wince. But she knew he’d been really, really hurt that his daughters hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him something desperately important about Alex. And about the bad people at the plant, like Danielle and Lars and Danielle’s ‘security chief’ Vince. And Alex knew that maybe, if she had come to her dad in the first few weeks, or the first year, she could have saved herself a lot of trouble and her dad could have gotten Danielle Atron stopped a lot sooner.
Either that, or Danielle would have murdered Alex’s dad the way she did Hunter’s dad. Danielle might have chopped Alex up for evil experiments and murdered Alex’s whole family to keep everything quiet. Alex was never going to really know for sure.
Still, Alex should have trusted her dad enough to give him the 4-1-1. Annie totally should have, since she even understood the biochemistry, which Alex totally didn’t get back in seventh grade. And if Alex had been able to tell her dad about the super-strength from that curry, he could have taken samples and helped her test her powers safely, and she might even have a way of getting super-strength when she needed it now, which more than once in the past year could have made the difference between people getting rescued and people dying. It could have meant the difference between getting killed and saving the day if Azure Crush had fought smarter or if Danielle hadn’t been an arrogant jerkhead.
Sometimes she thought she needed to be a better daughter. And a better superheroine.
Ray looked at her expression and said, “Yeah, maybe we need to help her tell her folks. Even if that means her dad’s gonna blow a fuse when he realizes the reason his birthday cake ended up landing on his head was his daughter’s superpowers.”
Alex winced a little. “Oh. Right. At least Marsha’s got a boyfriend who isn’t gonna flip out when he realizes he got blasted with silver paint, and stung by hornets, and knocked into wet concrete, and dumped in a fishpond, and about fifty other things, all because his girlfriend had powers she didn’t know about.”
Her dad looked worried as he asked, “All those things happened to Louis?”
She nodded. “Yeah, and just since their first date, which was a disaster, too, because that was when they fell down the hill into the creek.” She remembered all the times when she wondered how Louis ended up with a life like in a sitcom, and she figured she should have guessed what was going on like about three months ago. Maybe even sooner. Willow would have figured it out probably by Louis and Marsha’s third date.
She totally needed to notice more stuff going on around her, even if it was in the middle of a battle, and she totally needed to start figuring out how to be a master detective. She wondered if that Batman guy would give her some pointers.
Ooh, that was a good idea. If he thought she owed him, he’d stop trying to pay her back with stuff she shouldn’t be getting.
She wrote the email and had Willow send it off to Mister Paine right away.
* * *
Alex was back at school on Friday. When people asked about her meeting, she gave them the cover story Jack and Willow had put together. That she had met with Alexandra Avakian from the National Geographic, and Ms. Avakian had looked at her portfolio and taken her out into northwest Virginia to see if Alex had an eye for the kinds of things Ms. Avakian liked to shoot. And Alex thought she was really nice and amazingly talented, even if it might be weird being two photographers both named Alexandra, even if Ms. Avakian didn’t go by ‘Alex’.
Alex didn’t go to the football game Friday night, since it was an away game and it was a really long drive. Louis and Marsha told their folks they were driving off to the game, but Alex was pretty sure they were really going somewhere they could be alone for hours and hours. Alex wasn’t quite ready to go that far with Ray, even if he was the nicest guy in the world and she trusted him totally.
But before she even got home from school, Willow and Jack were calling on the tPhone. Jack said, “Tera, we need you in Washington, D.C. at two pm on Sunday. You and I have to be already through clearance at the White House by a quarter of, so you can meet the PotUS. The Blackbird’s going to be at Camp Atron at eight AM your time, and you’ll just have to miss Lieutenant Lupo’s first kung fu lesson in the Mack back yard. I made her promise not to break anyone.”
She sighed a little, because she really wanted to take that kung fu lesson. “Gotcha. Terawatt will be there. Do I need anything besides the earjack?”
“Probably not. I’ll provide food. We’ll have company at lunch, because some people want to meet you. So practice not picking your nose and all that other stuff I keep forgetting. Then we’ll get over to the White House and spend a stupid amount of time going through security, you know, just in case there are two Terawatts who fly and hurl lightning bolts, and one of them might be carrying a neutron bomb in her hair.”
Willow giggled. “It’s the evil twin thing! I saw a TV show just last week that was doing the evil twin thing.”
Jack snarked, “A TV show? Wow, that’s really cutting it down to a manageable number. Because sooner or later, pretty much every TV show does an evil twin thing, unless it’s a reality show.”
“Oh, yeah, Mister Smarty-Pants? Let’s see you name … umm … twenty,” Willow snorted.
“Twenty? Easy,” Jack insisted. “I’ll start off by tossing in every single soap opera in the world as one, because they’ve all done it. Now let’s see if I can come up with nineteen more without getting anywhere near any modern shows … Gunsmoke. The Twilight Zone. Dynasty. Hawaii Five-O. WKRP in Cincinnati. Mission Impossible. Hogan’s Heroes. Route 66. Starsky and Hutch …”
“Okay, okay, you win!” Willow complained. “You watch way too much TV!”
Alex could hear the smirk over the connection. “And I didn’t even get to modern TV, movies, cartoons, video games, anime …”
Willow said to Alex, “Never bet against Jack on TV trivia. Or movies. Or comic books. Or cartoons.”
Alex asked, “How do you know he’s telling the truth on everything he listed?”
Willow gasped. “Oh, no! Never question him on this stuff! He’ll do Netflix and make you sit and watch the whole show just to prove he’s right! One time I had to watch a two-part Hawaii Five-O, and then admit I was of the wrong and he was right. And he sings made-up words to the theme song, too!”
Jack teased, “And then there was the terrible penalty afterward.”
Alex wasn’t sure she wanted to ask, but Jack never got dirty on a conference call, so she went ahead and asked, “What penalty?”
Willow pouted. “I had to make three chocolate zucchini cakes for him and Charlie. If I’d won I was gonna make a chocolate cream pie and he’d have to stand still while I hit him in the face with it.”
Jack cut in, “Her chocolate cream pies are pretty darn tasty, too.”
Alex admitted, “I was kinda worried the penalties might be TMI type stuff.”
Smirking, Jack said, “Well, someone wanted penalties like that, but Charlie was home so I said she’d have to behave herself.”
Willow added unhappily, “Plus his ribs and his butt were all bruised.”
* * *
On Sunday morning, Alex went silvery and flew to Camp Atron. Maybe she wasn’t as stressed out as she was when she was worrying about needing to rescue people, or maybe she was just lucky, but she landed perfectly on the SR-71’s canopy on her first try, and the Blackbird was airborne seconds later. She hoped that was a good omen.
A little over an hour later, they actually landed at an air force base, instead of Alex bailing out like usual. She didn’t know they were at Andrews Air Force Base, which was pretty famous, until they landed and the pilot told her.
A truck and a Humvee drove up. The truck was to take the pilot to wherever he was supposed to go while he waited for her to get back, and the Humvee was Sergeant Scott driving her over to meet with Jack. And whoever Jack had along. Alex figured from the way Jack said what he said that it wasn’t just going to be Jack’s Team One, or Hanna and Janet.
Sergeant Scott smiled at her. “Hi, Terawatt. Do you want to sit in back, or up front?”
There wasn’t anyone else in there, so she asked, “Can I sit up front with you?”
“Sure.”
So she settled in and let him drive. For a few seconds. “Who are we gonna see for lunch?”
“Above my paygrade. All I know is where to take you.”
She frowned. “You mean you don’t get any lunch? I wanted to ask you about your daughter and stuff.”
He gave her a huge grin. “Katie is just fine, even if the Terawatt costume she wore for Halloween got worn so many times it tore and we need a new one.”
She thought about Shar and said, “Try a long-sleeved white leotard, black tights under it, white kneesocks over that, white shoes, white gloves, and a Lone Ranger-type mask. Someone you bought things for not too long ago went trick-or-treating like that.”
He smiled. “I sure wish I could tell my Katie I’ve met Terawatt, but you’re Top Secret. The colonel’s trying real hard to protect you in every way he can think of.”
Alex felt kind of sad at that, but she also knew how much danger someone’s whole family could be in, if an elementary school kid blabbed in front of the wrong person about what her daddy did, and who her daddy worked with. She just said, “Some day, maybe Terawatt will pay Katie a little visit. If it’s okay with you. And the colonel.”
He stopped in front a building and said, “Thank you, ma’am. You’re supposed to go right in that door where the Air Force SFs are standing. That’s ‘Security Forces’ in case you’re interested. They’ll escort you to the meeting. The colonel said he’s got enough food for you and Azure Crush combined.”
She gave him a smile. “Maybe you can drive me back to the Blackbird after everything, and tell me something else about Katie.”
She popped open the door and flew over to where the two SFs were standing. They acted like they saw flying superheroines five times a day.
One said, “Follow us, ma’am.”
The other said, “And ma’am, if you could continue flying, we can hopefully avoid some of the hassles with interior security.”
She saw what they meant when they got to a desk where a mean-looking corporal was sitting at the front of a long hall, with armed guards on either side. The corporal had a fancy placard on his desk that said ‘Corporal K. Simpkins’.
One SF stiffly said, “Corporal Simpkins! Reporting with Terawatt as ordered!”
The other snapped, “Corporal! Ready to transfer to your responsibility, as ordered!”
The corporal rudely complained, “And how am I supposed to know this is really Terawatt, private?”
The second SF cleared his throat slightly and pointed at her. She folded her arms and floated another two feet higher into the air. She asked, “What else do I need to do as evidence, corporal? Electrocute your privates?”
Eww, that came out wrong. Mega-wrong. Jack would probably think it was hysterical.
At least two of the four guards were snickering and trying really hard not to do it out loud.
She tried again. “Pardon me, that came out wrong. I meant a demonstration of my powers by tossing lightning around, which would be hazardous to your guards in these confines.”
The corporal looked sort of surprised. He still stubbornly said, “I have to make sure you are who you say you are, and if it takes all day, that’s just what it’ll have to be.”
Oh, great, another guy who had to throw his weight around. Well, she’d learned what to do after the thing with the C-4. She pulled out her tPhone and selected a number. “Colonel O’Neill? A stubborn corporal is keeping me from getting to the meeting. He doesn’t believe I’m Terawatt. Would you please bring General Hammond or perhaps the Joint Chiefs of Staff and deal with this? Then I think I’ll tell the President about Corporal Simpkins when I see him at two.”
She slid the phone back into its pocket and gave him a sweet smile. “You wanted proof of my identity, right?” The corporal looked a lot more surprised. She said, “It’s not nice to bully people just because you have a position of authority.”
Corporal Simpkins just told her, “Perhaps we can come to some sort of … umm … compromise. If you could just step into the room here and into our scanner so we can verify you’re really Terawatt, we could get all of this done in a couple of seconds.”
Why would they have a scanner there, unless it was checking for weapons and stuff? And how would they be able to tell from a metal-detector scan that it was her, and not any girl in a costume? Or did they have some kind of really high-tech scanner? If they did, it wasn’t like they’d have another scan to compare against. Maybe it was like those TSA scanners that let you see what someone looked like under their clothes, so they could see who she really was. That would be bad.
One of the corporal’s guards pointed at a door right behind the desk. “Just there, ma’am.”
She really didn’t like that corporal guy, but she was willing to meet him halfway if it would make things go smoother. Assuming it would make things go smoother.
She drifted down to the floor and stepped past the corporal. He put out a hand and said, “Ladies first.”
Okay, he had been anything but polite a second ago. So what was up with that? If it turned out he just wanted to stare at her butt, she was going to be really disgusted.
But what if that wasn’t it?
She stepped into the room, but she was looking for a trap. Right ahead of her was a fancy thing that looked like a cylindrical futuristic shower without the showerhead or shower curtain. The guy in the lab coat turned … and whipped out a tranquilizer dart gun.
But she’d been shot at before. She went silvery as she shot straight up to the ceiling.
The guy fired at her, but she pushed the dart down toward the floor. It went under her.
She could see ahead and behind while she was silvery, so she spotted one of the new guards and the corporal both pulling guns out. She let loose with a massive blast of lightning behind her.
Labcoat Guy dropped the empty dart gun and stomped on a big red button on the floor. Big vacuum cleaner things popped out of the ceiling and a box on the floor. She vividly remembered getting sucked up into something like that by Danielle Atron’s mercenaries, and it hadn’t been fun. Plus, she’d been trapped once she got sucked into the thing. So it wasn’t like she’d never thought about this ever again.
She went normal. She dropped to the floor. As she dropped, she used all of her TK to rip the lab coat off the guy and stuff it into the suction tube over her head.
The guy stumbled and lost his lab coat. Underneath, he was wearing a Tactical Load-Bearing Vest like Riley sometimes wore, and this one was covered in weapons and stuff. Crud.
The overhead suction tube was blocked, but the one between her feet was pulling in air like crazy. And there were loud treads right behind her.
Corporal Simpkins was sprinting at her to tackle her to the floor. If she went silvery, she’d get pulled into the suction tube. If she stayed normal, she’d have to deal with whatever groundfighting moves he had planned.
She stayed normal. She dropped onto her back as she grabbed his wrist, then she used all of her TK and all of the strength in her legs to toss him. With the TK lifting him, she still had to kick maybe thirty pounds of him, but she managed to kick him across the room and right into Former Labcoat Guy.
She glanced into the hallway. One guard was out cold. The other was on his face with the two SFs on top of him. She fired another lightning blast at Former Labcoat Guy, and he shuddered helplessly before falling onto his face.
But Corporal Simpkins was up once again. The impact with his teammates, or with the floor, had torn off his wig, so she could see the top of his head was covered in metal mesh. He just had a ton of makeup or plastic covering the mesh. Was his face like that, too? Was his whole body like that? Was that an anti-lightning protection so he could fight her, or was that what he really looked like? Either way, ick.
He pulled out a huge taser and sparked it. “Let’s dance, super-bitch.”
He quickly lunged at her with the thing, and she let him jab her in the stomach with the taser. She just grabbed the button with her TK so he couldn’t fire the thing. She seized his moment of complete surprise to punch him in the jaw with as much TK as she could spare covering her fist.
His head rocked back, and he staggered from the blow, but he didn’t fall down. He didn’t even say ‘Ow’! She was beginning to think that the metal mesh was more than just painted on his skin. At least she managed to yank the taser out of his hand. But he didn’t seem to be hurt.
One of the SFs behind her yelled, “Clear!” She went silvery and jetted off to the side, flying twenty feet sideways and up to the ceiling. The SF opened fire with his handgun. It was really loud. The SF put a three-round burst right into Simpkins’ chest.
Simpkins ignored it and pulled out something like a small caulk gun with a spike at the end. Then he sprinted at Alex.
The SF fired off three rounds at Simpkins’ head. Alex could see that two of the shots hit. Both tore fake skin off Simpkins’ face, revealing more metal underneath. He pretty much ignored the impacts.
Was this guy a freaking T800 out of the movies? And how was she ever going to stop him?
* * *
Jack strode out of the meeting room with Finn at his side and General Hammond only a few yards behind him. He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew damn well that Hammond had given the security guards very specific instructions about Terawatt, and being obstructive assholes wasn’t any part of it.
Terawatt was striding toward him, looking okay.
No, she didn’t look okay. There was something wrong. He’d seen her enough that he could tell she wasn’t moving quite right. In fact …
He slid his hand into a pocket. He gave it the old ‘casual Jack O’Neill’ routine. “Hey, Terawatt, has my IT given you today’s password?”
She said, “No colonel, Mister Tang has n–…”
He pulled out his Taser and fired it.
—
A/N: Alexandra Avakian’s name was used without permission. She is an amazing photographer, and you should go look up her work. I recommend starting with her work for National Geographic and her photographic memoir Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World.