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Chapter 135 – Field StudyRiley was hiding inside the ruins of one of the blue buildings that held the meeting rooms. Well, the ex-meeting rooms, because these sure weren’t usable now.
He whispered into his comms, “Finn to Tera. We’re down to one super-powered opponent but he’s super-strong and can leech powers by touch. Action Girl’s practically knocked out after getting grabbed, and he even took down the sasquatch. I need you to attack without getting within a hundred feet of him, because right now we’re just stalling him.”
There was the distinct pawmp of a grenade launch, and an explosion, followed by an angry yell. The guy was screaming in Korean that he was going to find them and rip their bowels out for the scavengers to eat. Nice and creative, without using too many dirty words. Riley didn’t hear a lot of threats like that. Mostly they were strings of curse-words with some nouns and verbs connecting them.
“Lupo to Finn. That was my last ’nade.”
“Finn to team. Lupo moves back. Carlson and I alternate until Terawatt arrives.”
“Tera here. I’ve got an idea.”
“Finn to team. Hold up. Move into positions to backstop Tera.”
Riley used his periscope and peeked around the frame of the shattered window. Tera swooped in and hovered sixty feet up and a hundred feet back. Suddenly, the purple soldier’s tac vest and web belt went flying off over what was left of the roofs. The guy leapt into the air for Tera … and Tera dropped to the ground before the guy was anywhere near her.
He started slowing down, and he stopped until he was hovering about forty feet up. And Tera was just standing there, staring grimly at him.
Right. She couldn’t lift tons, but she could lift over two hundred pounds. And once the guy was shucked of his gear, he probably only weighed about a hundred and sixty, even including his clothes and his combat boots. Smart girl.
The guy started thrashing and screaming and cursing as he hung in mid-air. It was just as well that Tera didn’t speak Korean, because the guy was getting pretty colorful.
“Finn to Tera. If you can hold him until his power fades, he’ll be back to an unpowered person who needs super-powered opponents to get anything.”
“Tera here. I can hold him like this for a long time. Maybe an hour or two. I’ll let you know when I’m getting stressed.”
But it was only a minute or so before the guy began crying and pleading. In Korean, he begged, “Please, I need more powers, don’t leave me like this!”
Riley watched as the guy finally just sagged helplessly. Once the stolen power faded, the guy’s bullet wounds opened up again, and he began bleeding profusely.
“Finn to Tera. Lower him. I’ve got a medic kit. If he tries to grab me, put a current through him.”
Tera lowered the purple soldier to the ruined concrete, and the guy sagged limply to the ground. Tera used her TK to lay him out flat, and Riley rushed over.
The soldier looked up at him and tried to say something, but purple blood filled his mouth and spilled down one cheek. The soldier’s eyes went glassy, his muscles including his sphincters went limp, and his last breath bubbled up through the mouthful of blood.
Riley stood and stared down at the body. There was nothing he could do for the guy with a lousy field medic kit in the middle of a hot battle zone. Not when the guy needed major thoracic surgery, plus a heart-lung machine and massive blood transfusions of blood types that probably didn’t exist anywhere except in the guy’s body. He sighed unhappily and then tapped his earjack. “Finn to team. Purple super is dead. Valentine? Good shooting.”
He switched back to Tac Four. “Finn to base. Finn to base. All primary supers down. At least three of them are dead. We will require containment protocols for others. Full force has been blunted. Some platoons of infantry still active. Battlefield now clear for heavy assault forces.”
* * *
Within a minute, he could hear the sound of incoming choppers. They swept overhead and took up position just along the border. Tanks and APCs and IFVs came rolling in, and a couple of infantry battalions came rushing in alongside.
Riley clambered up on top of one of the ruined buildings so he could get a decent view of what was happening back at the other side of the border.
Tera flew up into the air and made a report over the comms. “Enemy troops who are still mobile are piling survivors onto the still-working trucks and getting out of here. That includes Ice Lady, Flame Guy, Magnet Girl, and Cat Girl. They’re all still unconscious and being piled onto an open flatbed truck with a bunch of injured or unconscious troops. Do I stop the trucks?”
He sighed. “Finn to Tera. Do not engage anyone who is already across the border.” He really hated international politics, especially in places like Korea.
“Klar to Finn. Are you kidding? They try to kill a ton of important South Korean guys and maybe invade as far as they can, like downtown Seoul, so they can kill Christ knows how many people, and they tried to kill all of you, and they just get to drive home?”
Riley frowned. How do you explain decades of insanity and centuries of bad blood to a teenager in one minute? “Finn to Klar. I doubt it. Most of them can’t pass as normal anymore, and all of them know that North Korea experimented on their own troops to create a battle force. The big cheeses can’t let them live to tell anyone else.”
Tera zoomed in on his position. He could see the horror on her face. “Wait, you know they’re gonna get murdered, and you’re just letting ’em go get killed?”
Jill Valentine scrambled up onto the roof to join him. She explained gently, “Tera, there’s nothing we can do. They’re so heavily indoctrinated that there’s no way we can convince them. To them, we’re the evil, lying enemy. Anything we say or do will be viewed as a trick. There is literally nothing we can do to protect them.”
Tera stared wretchedly at the small force that was rushing away in a few trucks. “Well, that’s mega-cruddy. You’re sure there’s really nothing we can do?”
Jill just shook her head no. Tera’s shoulders slumped miserably.
Riley scrambled down off the roof and said into his comms, “Regroup on my position now. Be sure someone gets Action Girl and Azure Crush over here.”
Lieutenant Lupo walked over carrying Hanna the way you carried a bride over a threshold. Lupo looked like she’d been dipped in mud. Hanna looked bad. He winced inwardly, but he did his best not to show his feelings. He’d seen Hanna dying of peritonitis after being gut-shot, and she didn’t look this weak.
He moved his people over to the side, so the armored cavalry could move through. “Status?”
Tera said, “I’m starving.” She looked around and apologized, “Umm, sorry.”
Sergeant Carlson laughed, and then reported, “Small frag in left thigh, one in my left biceps, but I’m good to go. You can just pull ’em out and bandage me up, right?”
There was no way Riley was doing that if he didn’t absolutely have to. If a piece of shrapnel was blocking a tear in a major artery, yanking it out could make your ‘patient’ bleed to death in no time.
Azure Crush grumbled, “I got the fuck beat out of me, but it’s all just bruises and shit.”
Hanna weakly insisted, “I’m fine … I can move out now. But I need … my grapples.”
Lupo scowled. “She can’t even stand. Or sit. That bastard really effed her up.” He looked at Lupo for a couple seconds before she finally admitted, “It’s just mud. Okay, so I need a shower.”
Riley gave orders. “Tera, see if you can find AG’s grapples, then get to the SUV. Carlson, get in your car and take a load off that leg. Az, ditto. Lupo, drive them both over to Camp Casey and get them looked at, then go shower at your quarters and get everything packed up and over to your Cessna. Make sure the Cessna’s going to be ready to go, then round up Carlson and Az when they’re cleared to go home, and get them to the jet. Valentine, take AG to the SUV. Klar, stick close to her and remember none of these troops know about you, and all of them are on a hair trigger. As soon as I report to the commanders here, I’ll be along and we’ll drive back to our quarters.”
He moved off to give situation reports to the ROK and American commanders, while over his earjack, an exhausted Hanna insisted on spelling out in intense detail where she’d lost both grapples, her machine gun, her sidearm, her tac vest, her combat knife, and pieces of her body armor. It sounded to Riley like the catgirl had spent too much time toying with her prey.
He just knew the colonel would make ‘Cheetah Girls’ jokes when he read the reports. Or maybe ‘Cat People’ cracks. At least Klar had already used the ‘Tigra’ reference, so the colonel wouldn’t pull out his Marvel Comics refs.
* * *
Alex was on her third energy bar and sixth sandwich before Riley got back to the SUV. He looked really tired. And not just because he’d been in a huge firefight. He looked way more tired than when he’d left to go give reports.
She hastily finished chewing, and she swallowed. “Riley, are you okay?”
He smiled, but he looked exhausted. “Yeah. Telling the same thing over and over a hundred times really takes it out of you. And what do I tell them about the giant and the laser blaster? It’s not like either one is going to stay put in a normal prison cell. When I left, they were going with some Pentagon bright boy’s idea for dealing with supers. They were duct taping C-4 around both their necks. If either one tries anything, someone will press a button and blow their head off. Literally.”
“Eww.”
He sighed. “And the laser blaster has two broken legs, a dislocated shoulder, a concussion, and a broken arm. If he hadn’t been in that reinforced chair, he’d probably be worse.”
Alex felt really horrible at that. She hadn’t even thought about that guy when she took down the giantess, except that she was trying to figure out how to knock him out while dealing with all the rest of them. She wasn’t a murderer, but it was just because of dumb luck.
“I don’t want to kill people,” she whimpered.
Riley sighed. “Frankly, neither do I. Sometimes it’s kill one person or let dozens die. At the Umbrella headquarters, it was kill some people who wouldn’t want to still be alive, or let maybe tens of millions of people die a horrific death. This could have been just as bad, because if we hadn’t stopped them like we did, it would have been another major war, and the last time the Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, and half a dozen other countries got dragged into it.”
Jill said, “Tera, what you did to that blaster was probably a lot less than what the purple soldier on his own team did to him. Look at the shape Action Girl’s in right now.”
Hanna weakly lifted her head from the headrest and said, “I feel happy! I want to go for a walk!”
Alex couldn’t help laughing, even though she totally wanted to be upset. “Did Jack and Charlie show you Monty Python movies?”
Hanna closed her eyes and smiled. “They are very funny. King Arthur arguing with the socialist in the commune made me laugh so hard I had to run to the bathroom.” She lifted her arms up above her head. “And I really am feeling better than I was. And my cuts are clotting again.”
“Your cuts?” Riley groaned. “AG, that’s the kind of thing you really need to tell your commanding officer. In case you didn’t notice, the sasquatch died from his injuries when the purple-skinned soldier leeched out his powers. If the laser blaster had had any regeneration or toughness powers that he was depending on, he probably would have died from having his powers leeched off.”
Riley drove off to their duplex. “Now once we get back there, we make sure all the weapons are unloaded. Then I want everyone taking a quick shower and changing into clean clothes. Tera? I want you in uniform, so no one else gets a look at ‘Annie Farrell’. While we take turns showering, we’ll also cook up some more food and eat and take some more food with us on the jet. It’s an eight-hour plane ride home for Tera, plus two more to Iowa, and then another hour to West Virginia.”
Hanna helpfully said, “Do not worry. She only ate six of the sandwiches.”
Alex was still unhappy about nearly killing someone, even if he was a badguy who already killed a bunch of soldiers and was trying to kill her. But Klar wasn’t really upset that he’d killed some enemy soldiers. He told her, “My granddad served in the Korean War. He said that it was the worst thing he’d ever seen in his life, and that he prayed every week in church that there wouldn’t ever be another war like that with young men going and getting killed or maimed. I think … I think he’d be really proud of what we did today.”
“What you did today,” Riley insisted.
Jill said, “The North Koreans are really big on asymmetric warfare, but they’re also big on the economics of war. If they were willing to lose up to two thirds of a million military and paramilitary troops, they had to be ready to kill a hell of a lot more South Koreans than that. Maybe they were planning on this being the next big war, because they probably figure that if they can completely wipe out the enemy, it doesn’t matter how many soldiers they lose.”
Alex shuddered. Those guys were crazy.
Riley said, “And I think we know where they got all those mutagens, so we’ve probably stopped another big Collective effort to start World War III or whatever they’re aiming for. You have to give yourself credit for that, too.”
Jill pointed out, “And what else could you have done? What would anyone else have needed to do?”
Riley admitted, “I was waiting to see if we could really stop their supers, because if we couldn’t I was going to be calling heavy artillery down on our positions, and nobody except maybe that sasquatch could have survived that. You saved a lot of lives today. A LOT of lives. And you did it by killing … no one. You should be feeling really proud of yourself.”
Grover added, “They killed everyone in those choppers and the tanks and the APCs and every ROK guard they found. They would’ve kept on killing people until they got told to retreat. If they ever got told to retreat. And once they were through the DMZ and they spread out all over South Korea, what would anybody have done to stop ’em?”
Riley said, “Those supers could have wiped out everything Camp Casey could throw at them, and then vanished back over the border, and then threatened to unleash entire armies of supers unless South Korea surrendered.”
Hanna murmured, “They do not have armies of supervillains.”
Riley nodded. “Right. But we wouldn’t know that if it wasn’t for that defector. We’d be sitting on the border right this second and driving ourselves crazy worrying about where the next attack would come, and how many supers it would include, and what they would be able to do, and how much damage they would wreak before they retreated. IF they ever retreated.”
Jill chipped in, “This may be the turning point in the armistice here, too. North Korea just lost over two thirds of a million military and paramilitary troops, and they probably spent a lot more money than their economy could afford for those chemicals. This could lead to an assassination with someone less militaristic taking over, or maybe a military coup, or who knows what.”
Riley objected, “I wouldn’t go that far. Nothing’s changed over there, no matter how horrible things got, including the famine years in the 1990’s.”
But even after everything encouraging that Riley and Jill and Grover and Hanna said, Alex still felt horrible. She just kept telling herself it could have been a lot worse. If she hadn’t been along, things would have been bad. If she hadn’t been along but Shar had gone in her place, things would have been horrific.
Alex didn’t like thinking about it, but Jack had told her that the DHS had excavated under The Shop’s research headquarters while looking for underground tunnels that might have survivors in them. They hadn’t found anyone still alive, but they had found some security rooms and prison cells and research labs. And one of the hard drives had data on tests done with Charlene McGee. Willow had looked through the data and figured out that Shar was probably capable of a lot more than just fires hot enough to burn concrete. Willow was pretty sure that if Shar got too carried away, she could create a hotspot hot enough to cause nuclear fusion. Even if it was just a teeny weeny hotspot, that could be so far past bad that Alex didn’t have a word for it. Maybe ultra-mega-uber-super-bad.
They drove back into the garage of the duplex. Riley and Jill unloaded weapons and packed away ammo and cleaned firearms, while Alex and Grover took the first couple of showers. Then Alex started cooking a big lunch and Grover packed everyone’s clothes up, while Riley and then Jill showered. Then Riley took over in the kitchen and made Grover help, while Jill loaded the SUV.
As they were doing that last part, Alex got the really embarrassing job. She used her TK to hold Hanna up so Hanna could shower and get dressed, because Hanna could move her arms and legs again, but she was about as stable as a one-year-old toddler. Alex’s mom said that one-year olds weren’t toddlers yet, they were still ‘wobblers’, which was way funnier when you weren’t holding up a wobbly sixteen-year-old who was stark naked and trying to take a fast shower.
Hanna grinned. “Look at it this way, Alex. It could be worse. You could have to hold onto Grover! Or Major Riley. Or Az’s friend the blonde centerfold who Lieutenant Jo was complaining about.”
“Eww, eww, and extra eww.” Because Didi would probably be totally slutty and creepy about it. “Thanks. Now I won’t have any appetite for lunch.”
Hanna giggled. “I do not think there is anything I can say that would keep you from eating a huge lunch.”
The lunch was sort of ‘everything still in the pantry and freezer’ so it was a weird mix of American food and Korean food and Japanese food and Chinese food and what-Americans-think-is-Chinese food. Alex had some of everything, except that spicy kimchi stuff. Hanna wouldn’t touch it either, even if Riley liked it.
They cleaned up in the kitchen. And Alex used her TK and half a dozen dustcloths to go from room to room, wiping off everything that might have a fingerprint or a loose hair on it. Jill followed her with a special vacuum cleaner with a HEPA filter in it, and then tossed the vacuum cleaner’s bag into the SUV so there was no trace evidence left behind.
Grover had another cooler packed with baggies of ice and bottled water and a bunch of the leftovers, in case people got hungry on the way home.
They drove to the same hangar, and Colonel Park was there with his adjutant. He had a short conversation in Korean with Riley, while Alex got Hanna settled in a seat in the Cessna, and Jill and Grover transferred stuff to the Cessna’s hold. Alex flew out and used her TK to move a bunch of the equipment a lot faster than even Jill could manage.
Everyone climbed into the Cessna, and it taxied toward a runway for them to take off. Riley leaned back and said, “Colonel Park just found out about our State Department hiding a North Korean defector from everyone including the South Koreans who should have gotten the man in the first place, and not telling anyone the relevant information that the defector had. There are going to be some very angry phone calls going back and forth between governments, and I’m glad to be far away from those calls.”
Hanna said, “Could someone get out my computer tablet? I would like to get started on my reports, because it will take me a very long time to write down every mistake I made. I do not wish to admit all of them, but it is important to write a proper report so Mom does not ground me.”
Alex asked, “Did you make any mistakes? Because I didn’t see any.”
Hanna shrugged weakly. “I should have engaged someone other than the cat-girl.”
Riley pointed out, “Maybe not. No one else except you and Tera could have handled her. Probably not even Az. What you should have done was engage her at range.”
“Oh, right,” Hanna nodded. She slipped into a really good imitation of Jack’s speech patterns when he was being a pain: “Ya, sure, you betcha.”
Jill smiled. “I still think the move you made on the sasquatch guy was spectacular.”
Riley grinned. “I look forward to seeing the colonel’s face when he reads that part of your report. He’ll have his legs clenched together so hard he’ll need a crowbar to get them apart.”
Grover asked hopefully, “Can you get video of it?”
* * *
After they were airborne and out of Korean airspace, Jill asked, “Does anybody have any idea how that guy’s white laser beam worked? Because lasers need to be a coherent beam of a single wavelength.”
Alex guessed, “I just figured he was firing off a hundred different lasers side by side in a big bundle, but all the colors blurred together so it looked white.”
Riley ventured, “I don’t know, but it probably wasn’t a real laser. It was probably a burst of some kind of energy and we just assumed it was a laser because it acted like one.”
Grover said, “I thought it was probably some kind of particle beam, and the way it cut through the air caused a bunch of side effects that generated the white light.”
Hanna said, “I figured it did not matter how it worked, as long as it was a serious threat.”
Grover snarked, “Thank you, Miss Practical.”
Hanna stuck her tongue out at him and grinned.
Alex figured that she wouldn’t sound stupid, since Jill was asking questions, too. “Umm, I have a question. So we’ve seen giant whatevers before, and energy casting, but how does it work to be able to suck up someone else’s power set? That makes no sense to me.”
Riley said, “I’m just guessing here, but I think what we saw was a psychic power. He could boost himself to generate energy or to telekinetically make himself appear stronger and tougher, but he probably couldn’t, say, grab the giantess and become a giant himself.”
Alex didn’t know, but she figured Riley’s idea was better than what she came up with, because ‘power leech’ still made no sense to her as a power set even after she’d seen it in action. Okay, most people didn’t think her powers made any sense, because even if you had tons of extra energy, how did you actually cast lightning? How did telekinesis really work in terms of physics? And even if you said ‘okay I’ll give you a pass on the lightning and the TK’ what was the thing she did where she turned into a pile of silvery semi-liquid stuff, and how could that connect with everything else she could do?
* * *
Since Korea was seventeen hours ahead, it was 2 am Monday morning when the Cessna flew past Paradise Valley on its way to Edwards for refueling. Alex dived out at fifteen thousand feet and flew home at maybe four hundred miles an hour until she slowly lost speed from her lack of a really aerodynamic shape.
She darted through the runoff system and into the house. Once again there was a light on in the kitchen with a note taped to the fridge. And there was a fresh box of Gloria’s doughnuts waiting for her on the counter, plus three Bavarian creams in the fridge. She ate an apple fritter, flew upstairs, and changed into peejays before she went and checked on her parents.
“Mom? Dad? I’m home. And I’m fine.”
Both her parents got up and rushed over and hugged her. Her mom started crying. Her dad whispered, “Acid Burn let us know you were fine, but we watched the news, and we were just so worried …”
Her mom whimpered, “Hush, George.” Then she sobbed, “Oh, honey, we were terrified! You were in a war! They had pictures on the eleven o’clock news from a bunch of security cameras that were still working, and it was horrible!”
She hugged them back. “It was pretty bad, but for me it wasn’t being in a war zone. It was just fighting another team of supervillains. It was just really bad for the people down on the ground.”
Her mom worried, “Is everyone else all right?”
And she admitted, “Well, mostly. Jo got covered in mud, and she was pretty embarrassed about it. Riley and Jill and Grover are all fine. Azure Crush went, too, and she got beaten up a lot, but she’s okay. And one of Jack’s sergeants got a couple pieces of shrapnel but he’s fine and walking around and insisting he doesn’t need any time off. And Hanna got, well, mega-exhausted by one of the supervillains, so she’s really tired.”
“Mega-exhausted?” her mom asked suspiciously.
“Totally exhausted,” she insisted. “This badguy who could suck your powers out of your body and then use them himself. He managed to kill one of his own teammates and knock another unconscious doing the power drain thing to them, and he got Hanna, too. And Hanna got beaten up and scratched by a soldier who got turned into a cat-thing. Janet’s probably not gonna be really happy about that. She’ll probably yell at Jack some.”
Her dad frowned. “Well, it sounds like somebody needs to yell at that man.”
Alex defended Jack. “No! Somebody needs to pat him on the back and tell him he did a great job and give him some medals and promote him to general! If he hadn’t figured out what it meant when the North Koreans were buying all those chemicals and stuff, and then figured out what these ‘peace talks’ really were, and then made a big pain of himself getting permission to send us over there, this would’ve been a disaster. Jack maybe stopped a huge war just by using his brain and getting the right people in the right place at the right time.”
Her dad paused for a second before he asked, “Has anyone ever checked whether Jack might be psychic?”
She confessed, “Well, I think Willow made him sit still for long enough to do some testing with Zener cards and stuff, and she said ‘no’. But he sure can be really intuitive when he tries.”
Her mom said, “There are different kinds of intelligence besides the George-and-Annie-and-Alex kind, you know.”
She said, “You mean the Dad-and-Annie kind.”
But her dad insisted, “Who had the highest SAT score ever in the family? Who outsmarted Danielle Atron? Who had a better idea about using chemistry than the super-smart doctors on that island with the silicates? I think she meant the Alex-and-Annie-and-Barb-and-maybe-George-too kind of intelligence.”
Her mom gave her dad a big kiss. Alex felt kind of uncomfortable with the way the conversation was heading, so she told them, “Well, Jack does have a Master’s degree in something.”
Her mom smiled. “Honey, they don’t just let people become colonels because they’re hotties.”
Her dad elbowed her mom. “Gee, you know, he does look a lot like that one doctor in those old soap opera reruns you like to watch when you think no one’s looking.”
Her mom blushed a little. “Stop it George, or the whole house is going to find out who you think is hot.”
He smiled. “Well, everyone knows that. Raquel Welch! Especially in that animal-skin bikini. Or any bikini. Or in that wetsuit. And that babe who played Samantha Garretson back when you made me watch “One Life to Live” with you when we were engaged.”
Her mom looked over at Alex. “Never force your boyfriend to watch what you like, because he’ll find some way to make you not enjoy it anymore. Like telling you how hot he thinks some of the actresses are, even though you’re sitting right next to him.”
Maybe that was more about their engagement than Alex wanted to know. On the other hand, it might make for good teasing material someday.
She got her folks to go back to bed. Then she ate five more doughnuts and headed to her room. She flew in and was just about to climb into her bed when Shar lifted her head and said, “I need a goo’night kiss. And Piki does, too. He was really worried about you, so I had to hold him all afternoon long. And he was really scared when Jo got buried alive inside the mud guy and she couldn’t breathe.”
Whoa. Even Alex didn’t know that part. All she’d heard from Jo was she got muddy. Maybe she needed to ask Jack what happened, because she was sure Jo wouldn’t fib on an after-action report.
She kissed Shar and Piki good night. Then she dived into the bed and conked out.
* * *
“Come on, Alex, get up! Your alarm clock’s buzzing really loud!” Shar even gave Alex a little push on the arm. Then, when Alex still didn’t move, she hit Alex on the head with Piki.
“Hey!”
Shar insisted, “Come on, you gotta get up so you can make me get going and all that stuff.”
Alex groaned and turned off her alarm clock. She felt like crud, and her body totally didn’t want to get up.
Alex got whacked on the head with Piki again, and a giggling pain ran out to the bathroom.
“Ugh.” It was Monday morning. Again. She’d already done Monday morning yesterday. She’d missed Sunday morning, and had an extra Monday instead. Yuck.
She knew it was jet lag. People were not made to fly halfway around the world, adjust to the time there, fight a big battle, fly back home, and have to adjust to the time back home, all in like thirty-six hours, and then not get enough sleep afterward. “Bleh.”
Hanna was probably totally back to normal, and wide awake, and being the hot exchange student at her school and flirting with boys. Alex had a feeling that Hanna’s ‘naïve Swedish teen bombshell’ routine was making guys get in fights with each other just to talk to her and sit next to her at lunch and stuff. She wondered how Charlie O’Neill stood it.
Alex took a shower and made it colder than usual just so she could wake up. And she drank a cup of coffee so she’d stay awake. Because even the Official Riley Finn Timed Catnap Method did not get rid of all your jet lag if you only got about three hours of sleep before you had to get up and go to school.
Fortunately, Shar could tell how tired Alex was, so she was extra-chatty on the way over to elementary school to keep Alex awake. And then Alex rolled her windows all the way up and played Pink as loud as her stereo system would go and sang along, so she didn’t get drowsy on her way to her school. Okay, so maybe she didn’t sing every word in all of the songs, because Pink had a worse potty mouth than Az.
And Alex went back out to her car and took a nap during second period, and Ray came out and woke her up for third period calc class.
At lunch, everyone was talking about the big ‘Terawatt saves the day in Korea’ thing. Well, that and the big basketball game on Wednesday, and the fight Kelly and her date got into at Trish’s party Saturday night when Trish’s sister put the moves on him right in front of Kelly. And what was in that sauce on the hamburger patties the lunch ladies were serving. And whether Miss Greene, one of the history and social studies teachers, was knocked up. And whether the cheerleaders were going to go cheer for the track team this year when they usually didn’t but Donna’s current boyfriend was going to be one of the big stars on the team.
Louis smirked. “Wow, I guess that’ll put Terawatt in her place. She’s in between secret sauce and bad dates.”
Alex said, “I think Terawatt has way better things to do with her time than care what a bunch of stupid teenagers think about her. She’s probably worried about major world events and unstoppable monsters and stuff.”
“And whether that sauce on the meat is an unstoppable monster, because it’s just not natural,” Ray complained.
Nicole took her spoon and stole a little of the sauce off Marsha’s plate. “Hmm … Oh, they totally overcooked the garlic at step one. That’s what that awful taste is. That, and they didn’t cook the flour enough.”
“There’s flour in sauce?” Louis asked. Pretty much the whole table looked at him like ‘duh’.
Ray said, “Even I know that, and my mom chases me out of the kitchen with a wooden spoon when she’s cooking.”
Marsha complained, “Louis’s idea of great cooking is if he puts milk and butter in his Kraft mac and cheese.”
“Hey! I do that all the time!”
Marsha corrected herself. “Okay, your idea of great cooking is if you dump the ground beef and the veggies in with the mac and cheese and stir everything together.”
“Ick.”
“Eww.”
“Bleah!”
Louis defended himself. “There’s nothing wrong with adding cooked ground beef to the mac and cheese. Dad really likes it!”
Marsha added, “And he’s still a way better cook than his dad.”
Alex nodded at that. Louis’s dad’s idea of great cooking was pulling a menu out of their phone drawer before ordering out.
And then, on the news that night, there was lots of stuff about Terawatt in Korea and the battle, but also one of the models who had made the NID’s Top Twenty Terawatt Possibilities held a press conference in Hollywood to announce that yes, she really was Terawatt, and she was looking for A-list movie roles when she wasn’t flying around the world saving the day. Too bad for Miss Liar-liar-pants-on-fire that she held the press conference right about the time the Korea battle was going on, so she totally got caught lying. And then she wasn’t even embarrassed about getting caught lying! She just claimed it was acting. Some people …
* * *
On Tuesday morning, Alex was way more awake, so as soon as she dropped off Shar she hurried over to the grocery store so she could get a copy of Newsweek so she could look at the story on Willow before school started.
And there it was, on the magazine stand. There was a great front cover that was a picture of Willow’s face, and a picture of Clare Tobias’ face, both in three-quarter profile, and dramatically turned toward each other. Underneath, it said “The Faces of the Cupertino Attack.” Alex glanced through the article on Willow and the interview, and they used a bunch of her photos, and they looked really good. They even had a couple of Alex’s pictures of Clare Tobias, too.
And Alex gulped. The front cover of Time was another headshot of Clare, only with the headline “Orphan, Killer, Terrorist/Orphan!”
She grabbed it and hastily checked the index. There was a huge article by one of their staff reporters, Joseph Frady.
Oh, crud. She knew that name. Joseph William Frady was one of the names Willow and Jack’s IT guys had come up with as a possible Orphan.
The big article was titled “The Cult of Orphans” and it was all about the Breslynn Orphanage and the 25-to-31-year-old mid-summer newborn thing, because Frady was an Orphan, too, and he had gotten his email from KOBO, and he was spilling everything he’d found out since then. And he had figured out the link to Umbrella, so the magazine had like four dozen pictures of important people, like U.S. Representative Alan Kort and Iowa state Senator Noah Prescott and Glenn Howard, and each one had a page of coverage with the title “Is So-and-so A Breslynn Orphan?”
She stopped and scanned through the main article. It portrayed the Orphans as all being too smart and too aggressive and too ruthless and too dangerous, and Frady was including himself in there, too.
She smirked as she leafed through the pages. Frady was pretty good, or else he had some inside sources, because he had all the Umbrella Orphans including Glenn Howard and the other Orphans who got Umbrella campaign money. Frady even wondered in print if Glenn Howard was deliberately attacking Terawatt so the Orphans could handicap her. Frady even pegged Clare Tobias and Captain William Kevin Drummond and Samuel Daystrom and Gerard Roger Newsom. He also pegged two of the three White House interns who were probable Orphans, and every other Orphan who had been arrested because of the SRI.
Alex turned the page and cringed. The title of the next page was:
“Is Willow Rosenberg A Breslynn Orphan?”
Oh, crud.
Interlude XXVIMaggie Walsh listened to the supposedly intelligent person delivering a clearly ill-informed point of view on the Korea situation.
“— with four super-powered individuals still alive, and a clear goal in mind, they are likely to take Option C instead of Options A or B, and therefore we should expect —”
She interrupted, “None of the above.”
“What?” Really, he was an idiot. He was raised in China and Hong Kong, and he had even less understanding of the thought processes of the North Koreans than she did. And just last week he had accused her of unleashing projects that she couldn’t control. As if any of her projects were ever out of her control, or all that hard to stop with the right knowledge.
She snapped, “They won’t do any of those things. They completely underestimated the loyalty the generals would have for their troops. They already have one defection, two resignations, and fourteen personal signed protests. That we know of. If they try this again, the generals will attempt a coup. So they’ll do what they always do. They’ll bury it and lie their asses off to their people. That means they’ll kill their four supers and everyone else in that battalion who is still alive. They’ll also kill all the people who are still alive but extremely sick from the treatments. They can’t afford the hospitals and doctors and nurses. And they really can’t afford to have anyone else within North Korea find out just how many of their own people they sacrificed in this one extremely-stupid plan.”
He whined, “And how can you induce all of that?”
She said, “It’s obvious. It’s what I would do in their shoes.”
* * *
Buffy Summers was sitting in Freddie’s lap and playing ‘cute but stupid girlfriend’. She didn’t mind. She really didn’t. She told herself a couple more times, hoping it would sink in.
Freddie had invited some of his teammates and several of his coaches over to look at game films of the latest season. He had his backup quarterback, two of his most dedicated offensive linemen, his favorite receiver, his offensive coordinator, the quarterbacks coach, and the receivers coach. The game film they were focused on was their two games against the New England Patriots. They had lost the regular season game by three, and they had lost the conference championship game by six. So Freddie was kind of fixated on breaking down the opposing defense for next year’s games.
Buffy had gotten everybody drinks and snacks, and was watching the game films, too, while pretending she was just ‘the girlfriend’. It wasn’t her fault she liked football, too. And it wasn’t her fault she knew a lot about it. After all, she’d watched it with her daddy back when she was still ‘daddy’s little princess’ and she’d watched it when she was cheerleading, and she watched games with Freddie whenever she could. He really knew a lot of details about team strategies and individual strengths and weaknesses. He even had his own personal category system for defenders that was basically a breakdown on how they covered receivers, whether it was in man-to-man or zone coverage.
She didn’t know the particular codes they used for their plays — okay, so she had picked up a lot of the codes when they said them out loud at the same time she could see the play on the screen — but she did know the plays. And the Patriot secondary was just lethal. Regardless of the codenames, she could see the receivers were running the standard pass patterns: down and outs, comebacks, deep ins, crosses, slants, hitches, flies … the usual.
It had been harder to sink into the role she had chosen, ever since that goddamn email and the visit from Terawatt. She wasn’t the kind of person who got visits from Terawatt! She was just another Tori Spelling or Kim Kardashian. She was just a bimbo who didn’t get to figure skate anymore, except when she went down to her favorite mall and got out one of the pairs of skates they kept just for her so she could get out on the ice and do some loops and spins and axels and lutzes. God, had she loved figure skating. She had been so good at it, and it had felt so … freeing. Leaping and soaring and spinning and rushing across the ice … it was as close as she was ever going to get to being able to fly.
She kept telling herself. That was all she was. But she’d had it drummed into her thick head that she was a lot more. She was an Orphan. She wasn’t just a girl, she was someone who had been born to be more than a mere human. At least no one in that stupid Time magazine article had pointed a finger at her. She had read through a copy with her heart in her throat, terrified that the very next page would be ‘Is Buffy Summers A Breslynn Orphan?’ but she wasn’t in there. A couple athletes she knew or had met were in there, and that would probably destroy their careers. She knew just how awful each of them had to feel right now. If she wasn’t a coward, she would have sent them all sympathy cards. Or maybe sympathy emails.
She waited and waited, but no one was saying what she wanted them to say about the game films. If she hadn’t gotten that email, maybe she would have just gotten up and left the room and baked more apple turnovers. But Terawatt had told her she was special. Terawatt! How weird was it that someone like Terawatt thought someone like Buffy Summers had potential?
She just wished she knew why Terawatt had stressed the word ‘potential’ when they spoke. Was there some secret meaning in there Buffy was supposed to get?
She gave up and took her life in her hands. Literally. If this ruined things with Freddie, her not-quite-perfect-but-still-good-enough life was over. She put a little extra ‘dumb blonde’ into her voice and asked, “Freddie, when your guys are running those little routes and those medium ones —”
“Five- and ten-yard, baby,” Freddie automatically corrected.
“— and the Patriots guys know when to close on your receivers, what would happen if your guys were suddenly running eight-yard and thirteen-yard routes instead? But just only for the playoff game at the end of the season?”
Freddie looked at her with surprise in his eyes. He got it. He totally got it as soon as she said it. The Patriots defensive secondary men would move toward the receivers at the wrong time, and would end up opening themselves up to getting burned. Repeatedly. What would look like short, horizontal pass plays could suddenly turn into deep routes for massive gains and quick scores.
His backup QB laughed out loud as he got it. His offensive coordinator snorted with amusement. His linemen looked at each other and slapped hands. His QB coach smirked. “That … could work!”
His left guard took another bite of one of her apple turnovers and said, “She’s hot, she bakes like a dream, and she knows football. Hey, Buffy, if this idiot ever dumps you, I’m single!”
She smiled at him and teased, “I’ll let your girlfriend know you said that.”
He just kidded, “Hey, she can’t bake worth shit. I’m willing to trade up.”
Freddie hugged her and said, “She’s taken, thank you very much.”
Maybe she could survive this Orphan thing.
Maybe she could find a way to make it work for her.
* * *
The Imam finished his prayers before he listened carefully to the news. Prayers could not be interrupted for something as unimportant as reports of events that had already happened.
Roughly seven super-powered people had led an attack in the Demilitarized Zone of the Korean Peninsula. They had successfully destroyed security forces, attack helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and even tanks, before their advance was blunted and they were stopped by the American superheroine Terawatt.
He turned toward his favored mullah. The man would go far. There was no question. He was strikingly handsome, and at only thirty was already the finest scholar the Imam had ever met. Plus, he had a memory like an elephant’s and he was a truly dynamic speaker. It was little wonder the Imam had begun turning to him more and more. The Imam wondered if he should arrange something. His second daughter would be of the right age in just another two years, and she was not going to find a finer husband anywhere.
He asked, “What do you think of the news reports?”
His mullah frowned in thought. “I believe it is Allah’s will that we see this now. If the infidels can get seven super-powered beings, then surely we will be given seven times seven.” He even backed up his position with four quotes from the Quran, as was his wont.
The Imam carefully considered the idea. He finally nodded. “Then you may begin.”