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Chapter 148 – Still Crazy after All These YearsAlex was so glad to get to sit down and eat something. It felt like she’d been flying from one crisis to another for hours.
After she had zapped all the crazies at the medical compound, she’d been needed at five different farmsteads, two of them with Jill. It looked to her like Jill was the difference between a bunch of National Guardsmen getting hurt or killed, and National Guard troops successfully completing their missions. Even if that usually meant the farm family got killed, which Alex didn’t like at all. Jill said a few farms she’d been to only had one adult left after he or she had killed everyone else. And Jill said the hogs had drunk the water, and were just as dangerous as the people. Eww.
After the farmsteads, she’d had to fly across the lake and help out in the town. While crazy people could barricade themselves inside places like the town hall so the Army would just about have to blow up a chunk of the building to get at them, the crazy people couldn’t stop Alex from going silvery and squeezing in through a vent or a chimney or some ductwork. So she’d had four buildings she had to zoom into and zap a crazy person or two and then unlock or unblock some doors.
And then she still hadn’t been done, because some of the people who lived south and west of the town were on wells and hadn’t drunk the water out of the lake and weren’t crazy, but were being besieged by crazy people. She had just barely saved the sheriff and his pregnant wife and a couple of their friends right after some insanos set fire to the sheriff’s house. Fortunately, she could go silvery and puddle through a roaring fire with two or three people along for the ride. And it wasn’t like a regular house fire was anything as bad as the white-hot fire from a Mark 77 going off inside a cave.
Now she was sitting with Jill and Hank and a couple of the National Guard people who were treating Jill like she was Wonder Woman. Alex figured Jill had done plenty of Orphan stuff over the last several hours and impressed the heck out of the forces she was working with.
Riley walked over and hastily said, “At ease, everyone” before the whole table jumped to their feet and saluted. “Terawatt, Valentine, Marshall, I need all of you for a short teleconference with the general.” He glanced at the plates with the three MREs that Alex was devouring and said, “You can bring everything with you.”
Alex took another big bite of ham steak and used her TK to grab everything else.
Riley walked them out of the mess tent and over to an APC that had a satellite dish sitting on its roof and two men standing guard outside. He told the guards, “This won’t take long. If anyone wants to speak to one of us, just have them wait. If it’s Colonel Fanshaw or General Hickerson, you may tell him we’re talking to the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Yes, sir!”
Riley closed the door behind them after they clambered in. He said, “Let me get the general …”
Willow’s AutoTuned voice came on first. “Hi! Is everybody okay! Is the hate plague all stopped?”
Then Jack spoke up from what sounded like a different connection. “What she said. Any problems?”
Riley started off. “We’re all fine, sir. Unfortunately, most of the people and animals have already been affected, and those animals are probably not safe to eat now, so there’s going to be a quarantine and some ugly toxic waste abatement issues. The HWAAA needs to intervene. We’re going to have a roughly nine square mile area that will probably be a designated EPA Superfund site until they can study enough water and soil samples to figure out exactly what is contaminated and what isn’t. According to the EPA people I talked to, they figure that standard sampling techniques will cut that down to the lake, less than a quarter of the marsh, the municipal water connections, and every farm bordering the lake. But that’s still a lot of area.”
Jack asked, “What about the townspeople?”
Lieutenant Marshall replied, “Well, sir, it looks like we were two days too late here. About forty percent of the town had been murdered by the time we got here. Of the remaining sixty percent, we had about seventy percent of the farmers and townies already affected, about twenty percent safe or with minimal effects, and about ten percent who have early symptoms, but should recover with some limited neurological damage which the CDC doctors think can be handled by giving the patients rehabilitation like they just had a stroke. Of that seventy percent who already demonstrated the primary symptoms, about a hundred twenty are alive and restrained, and an estimated five to ten are unaccounted for, although infrared sweeps of the quarantine area should locate all of them in the next few hours.”
Alex just cringed. Hundreds of people dead. Even if most of them were totally insane and homicidal maniacs, that was just grim. And a hundred twenty people who were insane, brain-damaged, homicidal berserkers who would have to be locked up in solitary confinement for the rest of their lives? That was mega-grim. Even worse, people were acting like this was a good outcome. Okay, anything was better than another Beirut, but this was not a good outcome!
Jack asked, “And how did the farmstead invasions go?”
Riley looked at Jill, who answered, “Just as badly as we expected, sir. The IBI and the National Guard forces were prepared for ‘angry farmer being evicted from his land’. They were not prepared for ‘insane heavily-armed terrorist ready to do anything to kill other people’. My group started off by losing the command car to a booby-trapped bridge and a creek bed full of berserker hogs.”
Eww. Alex tended to think of pigs as cute little pink piglets or maybe those cute pot-bellied pigs she saw on the news sometimes. But berserker hogs? That was probably like getting hit with a stampede of angry wild boars.
Jill went on, “Half the farms had already been wiped out, even if there were still dangerous animals running loose. The other half of the farms were a single surviving family member trying to kill everyone, or else an entire family trying to kill everyone else.”
Jack told her, “I’d like a complete after-action report so I can show it around. And Lieutenant Marshall?”
“Well, general, I had some serious trouble getting Colonel Fanshaw and the other agencies to work together, and Fanshaw kept undermining everyone else’s work. On top of that, he did a lousy job setting up the security for the compound, so we almost lost the entire site. Terawatt got there just in the nick of time.”
Riley added, “General Hickerson doesn’t want to hear about Fanshaw being a problem. The scuttlebutt is Fanshaw saved Hickerson’s life some years ago, and so he’s still Hickerson’s fair-haired boy no matter how many times everyone else complains.”
Jack mused, “Hmm, I think we can cope with that problem. So Tera, what took you so long?”
Alex griped, “That first rescue I rushed off to? It was a Collective trap. They locked me in a solid box inside a trailer-sized fuel-air bomb, and then Maggie Walsh wanted to have a little long-distance chat with me.”
Jack said several really bad words. Then he worried, “But you’re okay?”
She scowled. “Yeah, but I was sweating for a while until I got her talking. Jack, she doesn’t want to rule the world, but she’s mega-serious about cutting down the world population to something that someone else can rule so she can save everybody else with all the stuff she’s invented that she hasn’t released.”
Jack admitted, “I kind of thought that might be what was going on, after B-b-b-burny and the Jets came up with data about those ‘cures’ her universities wanted to make money on but she disappeared on them.”
Willow complained, “Jack! I don’t wanna be an Elton John song!”
Alex was pretty sure Jack was smirking a whole bunch. Especially when he asked her, “No? You’d prefer Vanilla Ice?”
“Jack!” Willow squawked even louder. “Honestly …”
“Now, Burn, not in front of the children,” he smirked some more. That was totally a smirk, even over a radio. “So Tera, how’d you get out of Dr. Loveless’s deathtrap?”
Dr. Loveless?
Riley and Jill saw she was totally confused, so Riley quickly wrote on a notepad ‘Wild Wild West’. Oh. She knew what that was. And at the same time, Jill wrote ‘James West arch-enemy’. That pretty much made sense. Sort of. She was really glad everyone else was mega-smart.
So she ignored Jack’s weird ref and just explained about talking with Maggie, and cutting her way out without Maggie realizing it, and then ruining the fuel-air ratio so the fuel wouldn’t explode from a spark, and then getting out really fast.
Jack said, “Way smarter than what I would’ve tried. So what did Wacky Maggie let slip that she didn’t want to tell you?”
Alex spent a few seconds collecting her thoughts. “She had at least two better ways to kill those silicates, maybe more, and she was kind of disgusted that we used radioactive strontium instead of something smarter. She sounded like she thought it was obvious what a smart scientist would use on the things. Maybe it was only obvious to her. But I think she’s got at least one way of controlling or stopping everything she’s unleashed, so we need to figure out what she’s got up her sleeve. And it was pretty clear she read some reports out of Petrie’s Island, so they probably have someone in the SIS or even higher up. She knew some inside SRI stuff like that Jack calls me ‘Tera’, but lots of people have heard him do that. And she knew some stuff out of military reports on the Korean thing that had to be from South Korea or the U.S. But I don’t think she let those slip. I think she told me that stuff on purpose. And she didn’t once push the Khan thing. I figure that means something, but I don’t know what.”
Jack calmly said, “It probably means she knows we already know, and she’s not overplaying her hand.”
Oh, crud. Did that mean Jack knew there was a spy inside the SRI or just outside the SRI and reading their reports, and Jack was making sure the spy got fed just the intel Jack wanted? Was this some sort of ‘he knows she knows he knows she knows’ thing like spy agencies used to do with the KGB?
Jack just went on. “So … Tera … what did Maggie learn that you didn’t want her to know?”
Oh, crud. She hadn’t thought about that. She didn’t know what Maggie might have figured out, so she went through everything she could remembered she said or did.
At the end, Jack stated, “Maggie knew too much about Danielle Atron.”
Riley immediately winced.
Oh, crud, surely not … Alex asked, “You mean … Danielle’s joined Maggie’s part of the Collective?”
Willow spoke up. “Yeah, and it sounds like they’re not exactly BFFs.”
Riley added, “I’ll take that part as a plus.”
Jill asked, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance they’ll kill each other?”
Jack said, “If anyone starts a pool, I’ve got fifty on Wacky Maggie.”
“Jack!” Willow fussed.
Alex noticed that it looked like Jill and Hank were both trying not to laugh.
Jack just went on like he hadn’t just been a big smarty-pants again. “All right, if we have a possibility of Atron working for the Collective, then we have to prepare for powered Orphans someday in the near future. I’ll talk to Big Cheese about getting more antidote from our favorite industrial biochemists, and I’ll have Walter acquire more tranq guns.”
Alex said, “You don’t have to inject it. You can hit ’em with a water balloon.”
Jack snorted in amusement. “You mean we could take ’em down with Super Soakers?”
That sounded pretty funny, but it was a good idea. Alex agreed, “Yeah. Or even hitting ’em with another dose of the GC-161 so their powers change, and maybe get way worse.”
Lieutenant Marshall sounded excited at the idea. “Yes! That’s a really effective approach, particularly if Atron constructs her own anti-antidote serum! Remember what happened to Cready.”
Jill asked, “Cready? You mean Victor Cready?”
Jack said, “Oh, yeah, Captain Sucky-Powers. He had Tera’s shapeshifter power but couldn’t go normal. Atron hit him with another dose of the mutagen, and he turned into a blobby ball of fire that couldn’t go out, only he had no fire protection powers.”
Alex softly added, “He was in agony from being on fire. All the time. And it never stopped, but he was a silvery blob, so he never died from it, either. He was like that for four solid days.”
Jill winced. “I can see why he was willing to do whatever Atron ordered.”
Jack went back to his original topic. “So we prepare for Maggie’s big ‘super-powered Orphan surprise party’. I want Finn back in Davenport overseeing the Umbrella mess, but I want Marshall and Captain Valentine stationed here for a few more days, just to make sure everyone else really does have this under control. Marshall? I want you working with the EPA, because I want to know if this crap will just break down after enough exposure to the elements.”
“I want to know that, too, sir,” Lieutenant Marshall said, nodding.
“Okay, so Tera, your tPhone is still working, right?”
“Right.”
“Then … go west, young man. Well, west-southwest. Burn will have a compass heading for you, and then a GPS beacon to the Blackbird. We’ve got it at Offutt Air Force Base over in Cornhusker Country. It shouldn’t take you much more than an hour to fly over there, and then under an hour to get home.”
Alex groaned a little, because that meant she was going to have to do the ‘school on not enough sleep’ thing again. She just said, “Gotcha.”
Riley gently smiled at her. “You can finish your dinner first.”
* * *
But the rest of the night turned out not to be too bad. Alex finished up her meals, and Jill got Alex a quart of chocolate ice cream wrapped up in an insulated bag. So Alex flew mostly-west toward the Nebraska air force base, and got there in under an hour and a half. She plopped herself down in the Blackbird and went normal and pulled out her ice cream, which even had a big spoon with it thanks to Jill, so she ate some pretty good chocolate ice cream for ten minutes until the Blackbird was ready for takeoff. It had her home in under forty minutes. So it was only one in the morning her time when she flew into the garage. That wasn’t too bad.
Her mom was still up, even if she was in pajamas and a nightrobe, and looking worried, and making herself a mug of warm milk, which totally wasn’t Alex’s favorite.
Her mom was looking pretty worried, so Alex said, “It’s okay, Mom, I’m home, and not a scratch on me.” She just wasn’t going to tell her mom about getting caught in a Maggie Walsh deathtrap.
Her mom sat at the kitchen table with her mug of warmed-up milk and took a sip. “What about the town? The news said there was a quarantine, and someone was calling it an Orphan attack, and someone else was calling it a ‘hate plague’.”
Alex grimaced. And she really wondered if Jack was feeding ideas to the DHS public relations people. “It was that Minnesota thing. The badguys crashed their plane and died, but all the poison leaked out right into a small farming town’s water supply. Everyone who drank the water went crazy and turned into a homicidal monster, and animals like hogs that drank the water turned into killing machines.”
“Oh, no.”
Alex just kept going. “And a bunch of National Guard people got killed, along with a bunch of townspeople. And we still have about a hundred twenty insane killers who will never get better, and a bunch of people who basically are gonna have to go through stroke rehabilitation for who knows how long. And even the people who didn’t get poisoned are gonna have to leave their homes and land for who knows how long, and this may turn into a huge EPA Superfund problem.”
Her mom stared into her milk for a long time and finally asked, “Can George and the lab fix this?”
Alex admitted, “I really hope so. I mean, I can get them secret samples of the stuff so they can study it, and I know you can denature the prion with this stuff Grover and Bill Lee dreamed up that’s mainly papain.”
Her mom’s jaw dropped open. “You can destroy this toxin with meat tenderizer? That sounds crazy.”
Alex tried to explain. “It’s not just meat tenderizer, but it’s really close. Meat tenderizer breaks down proteins. This stuff is a prion — that’s just a protein that folded wrong — with a piece of antibody that acts like a guided missile to get the ‘payload’ to the right spots in the brain. So if you mess up the prion, it doesn’t replicate and it doesn’t damage the places in your brain.”
Her mom put a hand on the back of Alex’s hand. “Honey, you really are a lot smarter than me.”
Alex blushed. “No! It’s not that I’m a big brain like Annie, it’s just that now I listen when Annie and Dad talk about stuff, and I’m studying really hard in chem class, and I’m doing all the extra reading Mr. Hooper suggests. And every time stuff like this comes up, I look a bunch of stuff up on Wikipedia so I know what they’re talking about. And Willow’s really super-smart so I listen to her, too.”
Her mom softly said, “I hear everything George and Annie say, too, you know. I just don’t understand it. I really think you’re a lot smarter than me.”
Alex insisted, “But, Mom, you have a Master’s degree and everything!”
Her mom disagreed. “Alex, getting a Master’s degree isn’t really that much harder than getting an undergrad degree in whatever subject it is. It just means being more determined, and more willing to sit and read stuff and write papers. I’m not a super-genius like George. Or Annie. But I think you are.”
“Mom!” Alex squeaked. She could feel her entire face burning red.
Her mom kept going. “You can have a Master’s degree, too. Or a Ph.D. You just don’t have to get one in biochemistry. I was thinking you could get a graduate degree in something you really care about, like journalism, or photography. Or criminal justice or law or international politics, which might be what Terawatt cares more about. Or even computer science, since you seem to understand a lot more of what Willow talks about than I do.”
“I …”
Her mom pressed, “Alex, you’re smart. You just have to stop comparing yourself to the ten smartest people on the planet, and then telling yourself you’re dumb because you come in below number eleven. Now I don’t think you’re the twelfth smartest person on the planet, but then I don’t think Annie is, either. Or George. And the people you’re dealing with — Willow and Samantha Carter and Margaret K. Walsh and your friend Hermione in England — may very well be in that top ten, or near it. You let yourself get convinced that you couldn’t compete scholastically with Annie, and it really hurt your grades for years. I blame myself. I should have seen it, and I should have done a lot more to help you. You’re doing much better in school now, and I have to face the fact that it isn’t thanks to me. It’s because of people in another universe, who I didn’t even want you to go meet. That makes me feel like the worst parent in the world. And now I can’t keep you safe, or anything. All I can do is get Shar to go to sleep, and get George to go to bed. But I saw your SAT scores. You’re well up in the top one percent of brains for all high school seniors nationally. That means you’re not only in the top one percent of brains for the whole country, you’re in the top one percent of brains for the people who were smart enough to want to go to college.”
Alex couldn’t stop blushing. Her mom kissed her on the top of her head like she was still a little kid, even though she was still wearing her Terawatt wig.
She told herself that she wasn’t all that smart. But she kept thinking about two things. Jack had said, “Way smarter than what I would have tried.” And Margaret Walsh had looked right at her and said, “I didn’t think of that.”
Maybe she wasn’t so dumb after all …
* * *
Alex was awakened the next morning by a girl and a plushie hugging her tightly. Well, a girl holding a plushie.
Shar sniffled, “I was really scared when you were trapped in the box and the mean lady was talking at you. Aunt Barb hadda sing me to sleep.”
Alex hugged Shar back and murmured, “She’s a really great mom, isn’t she?”
“Yeah! Even if she made me eat my vegetables before I could leave the dinner table. I ate my corn and my salad! It was just those stupid carrots. Bleah!”
Alex smiled. “Maybe we should find some secret ‘make carrots taste good’ recipes, maybe with something that’ll make ’em taste sweet, and we’ll sneak ’em into the dinner menu when Mom isn’t looking.”
Shar nodded excitedly. Then she worried, “What if there aren’t any ‘make icky carrots taste good’ recipes?”
Alex told her, “Then we’ll ask some super-geniuses how to make carrots taste good, and we’ll invent our own recipe.”
Shar grinned. “Yeah! ’Cause we know lots of super genius types. Auntie Willow and Uncle George and Annie. And Auntie Willow says Uncle Jack is way smarter than he pretends. And Aunt Hanna says her mom is super-smart, too. And Maria says her big sister says you’re like the smartest person in the whole high school, and I already knew you were smart ’cause you know way more about boys than Annie or Auntie Willow or even Sophie. Auntie Willow says you’re even smart about being smart, because you don’t rub it in everyone’s faces and make ’em all hate you like lots of smart kids in high school.”
After last night, Alex wasn’t going to say she was a dummy. But she did say, “It’s just being nice and not wanting to hurt people’s feelings. You can get really good grades without running around yelling ‘I’m smart and you’re a stupidhead!’ you know.”
Shar scowled. “Well, Petey really is a great big stupidhead. He’s the biggest stupidhead in the history of stupid.”
Alex softly asked, “And do you think maybe he knows that, and he feels bad about it, and he’s not smart enough to know how to cope with it, so that’s why he does mean stuff?”
Shar shrugged. “Well … maybe. Sometimes I think I oughta —” But Alex didn’t get to hear what Shar ought to do, because the alarm clock went off, and Shar suddenly said, “I gotta pee!” And she darted out of the room, still hanging onto Piki the Pikachu. When Alex asked about it at breakfast, she just got a huge shrug and an ‘I don’t remember’.
Alex dropped Shar off and went on to her school. She just reminded herself that being nice to someone who’s being really mean to you is really, really hard. Alex totally stunk at it until that thing at summer camp with Kelly and the bear, when she found out what was up with Kelly and why Kelly was so mean to people. Okay, she still wasn’t so great at it. She had no idea how Mahatma Gandhi did it.
The more Alex thought about it, the more she figured she’d been able to act nicer to people like Kelly and Libby just because she had her superpowers as a safety net. A safety net the size of a circus tent.
School was pretty much the same as usual. American Lit class was going to be a headache for her really soon, though. She knew she’d rather read some fun Mark Twain stuff, but she needed to write about symbolism to make Ms. Walters happy, and she didn’t want to read Herman Melville stuff even if everyone said it was chock full of symbolism. And most of the guys were making rude weenie jokes about having a novel called ‘Moby Dick’ which was supposed to be really long and really boring. Ugh.
And who on earth thought Moby Dick was a good name for a whale, and why would anyone give a whale a name? That was just weird.
Since the news and the internet were full of stuff about Ogden’s Marsh and the evil Orphan plot, all of Team Terawatt knew Alex had been saving Iowa last night. So most of them wanted to check that she was okay and see if she needed to go nap in her car for an hour. Ray and Nicole and Robyn all checked before school started. Louis didn’t check until lunchtime, when it was too late to do much about it. That was still better than if he’d waited until chem class at the end of the day.
* * *
Alex waited until she drove Shar home and they were inside the house, before she called Willow on the tPhone.
“Hi, Tera! What’s the what?”
Willow’s bubbly voice made her feel better about lit class already. She just knew Willow would have an answer. “Hi! I got a couple things we need to talk about. Like when can A.L. Mack meet up with CEO Rosenberg again?”
“You know the FBI gave me an emergency necklace in case I get attacked or kidnapped? I feel like the old lady in those old commercials. You know. Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up! I took it apart just in case, and it’s got a GPS unit in it, but it doesn’t turn on until I press the Fantasti-Flare, which is really thoughtful of ’em, so I have privacy right up until I really don’t want it.”
“Umm, I hadn’t heard about that. I guess I’m not doing a good job of keeping up with my friends.”
“No!” Willow insisted. “You’re doing great! I’m the bad friend here. I didn’t even know Maggie Walsh grabbed you and shoved you in a deathtrap until you said so on the call last night, and I should’ve been monitoring everybody every single second for the whole op, I mean I’ve got more than enough computing power if I just have a link to your comm base. You could’ve got really badly hurt! You could’ve died! You could’ve got humiliated on the internet!”
Alex just told her, “I’m pretty sure Maggie wasn’t interested in televising our chat.”
Willow firmly said, “Well, I would’ve, if it was me. I mean, I would’ve recorded it and made sure it made me look good and made the other person look really bad, and then … zoom! All over the internet!”
Alex didn’t think Willow had the right outlook to be a supervillain, but she didn’t say so. If your big plan was to make someone else look stupid on the internet, that pretty much just made you a ’net troll. Or maybe part of Anonymous.
She said, “We need to set up some more meets, and we need to do some fun stuff we’re not getting to do these days, and then I can invite you over for dinner, and then that’ll lead to a couple more fun things, and then you can come to Shar’s birthday party.”
Willow giggled. “You think Shar would mind if I brought my boyfriend?”
Alex laughed, and then asked, “So how are things going with the ’rents?”
Willow said, “Actually, pretty good. Dad was in the U.S. for only five days, but in between Seattle and San Diego, he made them plan out a stop in San Francisco and he took me out to dinner and made me tell him all about my major professor and my course of study and stuff. It was really a lot like when I was fifteen and I was taking those college courses in the middle of high school and he was worrying about the college people taking advantage of me. Apparently, I’m still ‘precocious but naïve’. And he was pretty nice about Jack, even if Jack isn’t Jewish and Dad’s a rabbi. I don’t think Dad worries as much about that or Jack’s age as he does about the whole ‘unsupervised agent of the military-industrial complex’ thing.”
Alex pointed out, “Well, Jack really is a pretty-much unsupervised agent of the military-industrial complex, if you want to get picky about it. But so am I. And so are you now. And so are Hermione and Ron and Harry. And so is Batman, and he even runs a big chunk of the military-industrial complex.”
Willow went on, “Mom’s a lot more pro-Terawatt ever since the Umbrella thing. Apparently Mom’s had it in for the Spencer family for a long time. They’ve got lots of family history going back to being mean to Native Americans in the 1800s and profiteering in the Civil War and being robber barons and even owning some land in the South before slaves got freed, and then strikebreakers and stuff in the early 1900s, and just a load of stuff that nobody rich complained about back then but now nobody likes. She spoke at a big Native American protest around the Spencer Building about five years ago, and she was pretty freaked just knowing what they had in that building five years later.”
Alex just grinned. She suggested, “Maybe I could drive up this weekend and we could do something fun? It can’t be Friday night, because we’ve got a super-important b-ball game.”
Willow gushed, “Yeah, I looked at the seeds for your division, and big-time congrats on that!”
Yeah, Alex had been totally swamped with ‘hate plague’ stuff for a little while, so she had nearly missed the seedings, even though they made the front of the sports section of the paper, because their high school basketball team had only made it to the state playoffs for their division a couple of times ever, and they certainly hadn’t gone into the playoffs with just one loss and one of the four top seeds like Ray’s team just did, which meant they had a bye for Wednesday’s game and they were definitely in the Friday night game. The state playoffs were 5 rounds, where the fifth round was the championship game for their whole division, and they were automatically in the second round already!
Willow said, “Okay, so drive up Saturday morning in time for lunch, and bring your bike so we can go bike riding, and then we’ll go out for dinner, and it’ll be a ton of fun.”
Alex smiled. “You’re on. As long as nobody has another Code Walsh then.”
Willow just said, “Well, I’ll tell Jack, and you just bring your tPhone and your earjack, and if something comes up, you can go silvery and zoom over to Travis AFB and fly Air SRI from there.”
* * *
Surprisingly, things even worked out for a change. On Friday night, the basketball team won by eleven and moved on to the third round, and Ray even had a triple double because the opposing team had their really good defensive guard on Jackson, and they were double-teaming Heyward whenever it was time to go for rebounds. Ray said he figured that meant that the next game he would be the target. Alex thought that would be dumb of the other teams, because when you got to the final eight teams, there probably weren’t any teams that only had one scoring threat.
Then Alex drove up to Willow’s house on Saturday morning, even though Shar was really cranky about getting left behind again. Willow had a big lunch ready, although Willow didn’t eat that much because they were going for a long bike ride. Willow was wearing a workout outfit that had to be a present from Jack, because it had the Air Force Academy emblem on the crop top and the bike shorts. Alex had a cycling outfit, too, although she had also had a fanny pack around her waist, so she had four energy bars, a big bottle of water, and a little emergency bike repair kit for just-in-case stuff.
Alex got some pictures, too, because Willow in her skimpy outfit on her bike looked great, and Jack would so love those pics. And Ray would like the pictures of Alex the Cyclist.
Judging by the wolf whistles and catcalls they got, a lot of really rude guys liked how they looked. And there were a couple of pretty smarmy guys who were trying the cool pick-up lines from their bicycles. And seriously, was there a girl anywhere in the entire country that ‘hey baby are you from Mars … because that ass is out of this world!’ actually worked on?
Alex asked, “Is it like this every time you go biking around here?”
Willow shrugged. “Depends on how hard I kick their butts in a sprint. There are some awesome bennies to being what I am.”
Alex noticed. Because Willow could go pretty fast for a really long time. It wasn’t like Willow was breaking the speed limits for cars or anything, but she was definitely putting in some Tour de Feminin times.
Alex had to cheat some of the time. Whenever she got really tired, she would use her TK to push the bike so her legs could take it easy. That was mega-great on this one long incline where she and Willow just crushed these guys who were being big horndogs and thinking they were super-cyclists, too. Well, really, maybe only a quarter of the group of guys was being smarmy jerkheads, but the other three-fourths weren’t making them stop with the pick-up lines and the rude suggestions. But zooming up an incline was way easier if you had more push from behind you than you and the bike together weighed.
So Alex and Willow laughed about the rude guys and stuff all the way back to Willow’s house. Alex would totally have been dead if she’d had to bike that fast for two hours with no TK assistance, including up that incline. Willow was all sweaty and tired, but not exhausted.
Willow should really have figured out years and years ago that she was the most awesome athlete in her entire town, on top of being the school genius.
Alex just stretched out on the floor and ate more energy bars and drank two Diet Cokes while Willow showered and changed. Her legs were mega-tired. It could have been worse. If they’d gone running, Alex wouldn’t have been able to use her TK anywhere near as much.
Willow came out in nice, clean clothes and looked at Alex lying on the floor in the den. She winced. “I sort of totally over-did it, didn’t I? You should’ve said I was being a bad host! Jack always says when I’m running him into the ground, even if he’s really snarky and funny about it.”
Alex got to her feet and said, “Oh, I’m okay. Just tired and my legs feel kind of rubbery. Lemme shower and put my regular stuff back on, and I’ll be fine.”
Willow worried, “You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure!” After all, if her legs gave out, she could float around in mid-air.
And once Alex was clean and dry and changed, she emerged from the bedroom to … the smell of baking cookies?
Yep, Willow was in full-blown apology-cookie-baking mode. And these were chocolate cookies with lots of chocolate chips. And they smelled amazing. There were four baking sheets baking away, although Willow had to switch the upper and lower baking sheets in each oven mid-way through the baking process. Alex did it with her TK, which was really way easier and faster than messing around with hotpads.
The hard part was waiting for them to cool off enough on Willow’s cooling racks that you could eat them without burning your mouth on the still-molten chocolate chips inside. That, and getting Willow to stop apologizing. Alex handled both problems by getting Willow to show her some stuff on the TV. Willow had Netflix and DirecTV and a ton of stuff, so Alex got to see what that old TV show ‘Wild, Wild West’ really was. Willow explained it as one of the ideas that spun off from the James Bond craze of the Sixties, only this was James Bond In The Wild West. It was fun, and campy, and a little weird, too. And Robert Conrad used to be really cute.
Willow was still worried about Alex’s legs, so while they watched something called “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” Willow ordered a couple of pizzas to be delivered, instead of taking her out to a little Thai place she knew.
“So Willow, I forgot to ask the other day, but why is Moby Dick named Moby Dick in the first place, and do I have to read it to get enough symbolism for my teacher, because I’d totally rather read Mark Twain or something?”
Willow gushed, “Ooh, I read about this! Back in the whaling days that Melville wrote about, there really were whales with names. They were the whales no one could catch, and lots of times you couldn’t catch ’em because they would just kill everyone in the whaling boats, and maybe even wreck the big whaling ship, too. Whaling was way more dangerous than you’d think. The idea of Moby Dick probably came from Mocha Dick and also the Essex Whaling Disaster, which actually ended up with a sperm whale sinking the Essex and the crew had to try to get away in their little boats, and I think three survived on a deserted island and the ones at sea ended up doing the Donner Party thing, so majorly of the icky there. But there were plenty of famous whales back then, and they all had names like Mocha Dick.”
“Mocha Dick? Really?”
Willow nodded eagerly. “I am totally not making this up. Scout’s honor. Mocha was the name of the island it hung around. It’s off southern Chile.”
Alex rolled her eyes. “You weren’t a Boy Scout.”
Willow smiled. “I wasn’t a Girl Scout, either, but this is really true. Mocha Dick was supposed to be huge, and really old, and white as wool, and really uber-tough if you went after him. He was finally killed in the 1830s, but he supposedly had hundreds of fights with whalers over a couple of decades, and he had harpoons sticking out of him, and he sank plenty of ships, and whalers talked about him like he was some sort of demon. And he wasn’t the only white whale, or the only whale that attacked whalers, or the only whale that whalers gave a name to, and a lot of the names were like Place-name Regular-first-name, like New Zealand Jack and Timor Tom, and the rest were names like Morquan and Don Miguel. And you have to figure no whale was gonna get a name without being one bad mamma-jamma that wasn’t getting caught.”
Alex admitted, “Wow, maybe I wanna read that book now.”
Willow said, “Well, some small parts of it are pretty cool, but some parts are really boring. Melville really served on a whaling ship for like a year and a half, and he wanted to write a book that told people what whaling really was, so there’s a ton of kind of tedious stuff about whaling, and turning a whale into gross stuff to get taken back and sold, and all about that. And there’s lots of stuff with guys just talking in between times. And you already know what happens.”
Alex grinned. “Call me Ishmael.”
Willow countered with “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” She smiled. “Melville deliberately used the messenger’s admonishment out of Job.”
Alex scowled. “Okay, maybe I should read ‘Moby Dick’, but I’d rather write my paper on ‘Huck Finn’. But I can’t write a paper unless it’s chock full of stuff about the symbolism of the works, because my teacher’s like that.”
Willow bubbled, “Oh, but ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ is loaded with symbolism! Mainly about the Mississippi. It represents a lot of stuff to a lot of different people, but you could write about the river.”
“Ooh, that’s really good.” But Alex was wondering if maybe she needed to read ‘Moby Dick’ along with all the other stuff they were reading.
The pizza was really good, even if Willow ordered some weird stuff. Well, not weird for California, but not Pizza Hut-ish. The pizza with salsa and cilantro and black beans was really good, and the pizza with spicy peanut sauce instead of tomato sauce and other Thai food on it was … just okay. She didn’t think she’d order it for herself, although maybe it would be a lot better with the Thai chicken strips on it that Willow asked them not to put on.
And when Alex drove home, she found that Willow was right, and her legs were still pretty tired, and not all that great to drive on. Which was why everybody ought to have TK. Except crooks. And mean people. She used her TK to lift her feet up a little, and she used her TK to operate the brake pedal and the gas pedal. Well, she waited until she wasn’t in traffic to try it out and experiment a bit until she really had it down, and then she drove all the way back to Paradise Valley with her feet off the pedals. She still wasn’t totally confident on how precise she was with her TK on something new like this, so she put her feet back down to drive through the regular city traffic back to her house.
* * *
On Sunday, she spent half an hour after church going through recipes on the internet, and she found several that were the ‘my kids hated carrots until I tried this recipe’ stuff. And she also found a page that talked about how to pick carrots at your local farmer’s market so they were extra sweet and tasty.
She just wasn’t going to tell Shar about the person who said ‘what the bleep is bleeping wrong with you, if they don’t bleeping want to eat any bleeping carrots, just find some other bleep bleep-bleep bleeper-bleeping veggies for them!’ And they didn’t actually say ‘bleep’.
So, before Jo Lupo drove up, Alex made a big deal about ‘tricking’ her folks into going outside for a while and then making the sautéed carrots with Shar at the stove. It was really fun pretending they were doing something sneaky that her mom wouldn’t want, even though it was just sautéing sliced carrots in real butter and adding some brown sugar so everything got caramelized, and then sprinkling a little cinnamon on top. But Alex figured Shar would like them a lot more if she thought they weren’t supposed to be making them with the brown sugar.
Martial arts practice went great, even if Alex’s legs were still achy from yesterday. And dinner went great with Jo, even if Shar couldn’t stop with the evil giggle sounds when everyone talked about how good the carrots tasted. And Shar ate two servings. Alex had a couple of normal-sized servings, and then finished off the little bit left in the serving bowl when everyone was all done. And she totally didn’t lick the bottom of the serving bowl like her mom told her dad to make him laugh.
At bedtime, Alex hugged Shar and Piki goodnight and tucked them in. Shar whispered, “Piki says it was way more fun pretending we were being sneaky and they didn’t know we put sugar in the carrots. Can we do that with cauliflower or something?”
Alex kissed her on the forehead and said, “Sure! I don’t think sugar would work on cauliflower, but I bet something would. Maybe cheddar cheese sauce. We’ll figure something out and trick Mom again.” Shar giggled into her pillow.
Alex wasn’t surprised that Shar knew they hadn’t really tricked anybody. Shar’s TK was still fairly limited, but Shar was getting better at using it and her telepathy on people. Apparently, Petey Johnson was having a string of really bad luck, since every time he decided to go torment Shar or one of her friends, either Shar was standing where there was a teacher just around the corner within hearing distance, or else he never made it over to them due to some little accident, like stepping on his untied shoelace and falling on his face.
Alex had had a lot of little chats with Shar about misusing her powers, but these were still pretty minor considering some of the things Shar had thought up that she wasn’t doing. Between her pyrokinesis and her TK and her telepathy and her precognition, she could have been a lot naughtier and gotten away with it easily. No one would have even known about any of it if Shar hadn’t told Alex what she did and then asked if Alex thought she was a bad person for doing it.
And it wasn’t like Alex had never misused her powers for the same kind of thing, and Alex was supposed to be the mature, responsible adult. Oh, yeah, and Alex had done that thing to Kelly’s pen not that long ago. Shar wasn’t even nine yet. Eight-year-olds weren’t supposed to have themselves so under control that they never, ever slipped up and lost their temper or got really upset or any of the things adults still did all the time. It wasn’t fair!
And Alex had suggested the shoelace thing to Marsha not that long ago. She felt like a giant hypocrite. She wondered how anybody, even that little jerkhead Petey Johnson, could want to be mean to a cutiepie like Shar.
Okay, who was she kidding? She knew exactly how Shar could do stuff that might make someone get mad at her.
Interlude XXVIIIHe looked at the report from the Secret Service. Sweat ran down the middle of his back. Two men had tried to assassinate him yesterday in his own house, and had just had the bad luck that the maid walked into the master bedroom with some last-minute laundry when she was supposed to have left early. They had killed her, the bastards. Marla had been with him and his wife for over fifteen years. She was like family. How was he going to tell her husband that Marla was dead because she decided to spend a little extra time catching up on his wife’s laundry before she went home?
And the men had taken cyanide when cornered by security. He was pretty sure what that meant, even if the Secret Service didn’t. On the other hand, the Secret Service men had gone straight to the FBI’s CTU and gotten the assassins ID’ed as two former Shop ‘agents’ who hadn’t turned themselves in. Sometimes, he really regretted letting Inspector Erskine stay in charge of that division of the CTU. He liked it when Erskine’s team was doing a great job tracking down terrorists. He didn’t like it right now, when they might end up getting a little too close to some of his secrets. He didn’t have a handle on Erskine, either. The guy was squeaky clean. Even the guy’s parents and daughter were squeaky clean. And the daughter had married one of Erskine’s FBI protégées, so even the guy’s in-laws were squeaky clean!
He knew that McNamara had interviewed all 27 of the rogue Shop men, and had needed to ‘retire’ 13 of them. The 14 remaining agents hadn’t fared that well. Counting the 2 on the NID’s X-37, plus the 2 killed in the firefight at the Sonora base, plus the 4 who had taken cyanide there, they were down to 6, 2 of whom had died in his house. And McNamara was a carbonized smear on a torched runway.
He had a pretty good idea what was going on. McNamara had probably set up a ‘deadman’s switch’ in case he was assassinated by the people behind The Shop. All the surviving Shop men were probably told to go take out the powers behind The Shop and maybe even the NID as payback. That meant that there were still four ex-Shop killers out there who were probably targeting him or one of the others right now.
He picked up his phone and selected a number he had on speed dial. “This is Senator Robert Kinsey. I want to speak to the President. Tell him I need Terawatt or Action Girl as a full-time bodyguard as of yesterday. And I won’t take no for an answer.”
He’d worry about notifying the other leaders of the group once he was confident that his own security was addressed. And if some of them met with unfortunate circumstances in the next few hours, he’d have even more power.
* * *
Maggie Walsh stared at the spreadsheets. She detested the thousand and one bureaucratic details of running an organization, but her father had asked her to address this particular problem for him.
Thousand and one? It was more like a million and one. Or aleph null and one. She snorted at her obscure little jape. At least there were people here who could comprehend a comment like that.
She knew they needed to ensure a higher success rate than the North Koreans had managed, but not too high. After all, there were other objectives to be met. If their intelligence was accurate — and it had better be, or they had even worse problems than she thought — then they knew within about two percent the number of people who were eagerly volunteering to get turned into supervillains. Naturally, they saw themselves as superheroes. Still, it wasn’t just terrorists who took that point of view. Virtually everyone who wasn’t specifically committing super-powered robberies saw themselves as a superhero, even if their goal was unleashing a zombie apocalypse. She didn’t see herself as heroic, just pragmatic. Someone had to do the unpleasant tasks that were necessary but undesirable. Like this one.
She sighed to herself and looked over the results again. Operations research was straightforward and fairly obvious, but reliable in cases like this. It looked like she was going to have to ask Danielle for roughly eight liters of stock GC-161. And she would have to make sure their man in Pakistan knew not to take any of it.
Maggie really had hoped she wouldn’t have to deal with Danielle again this week. She had enough headaches, given the African project and the European project. The former had run into unexpected difficulties, presumably due to the political instability in the search regions. The European project had turned into a political issue as Orphans who had grown up in an assortment of countries had their own agendas for selecting the target area. Her father had needed to make a decision by fiat. Paris it was. She thought that was clearly a better choice than most of the suggested cities.
And she still had no idea what the remaining members of the America bloc were up to in the Great Basin Desert. Unfortunately, her bloc had lost its mole, thanks to the Davenport fiasco and probably a contribution from the India bloc’s mole.
* * *
Buffy Summers waved at the cameras as she skated off the ice. She had really missed ice skating and ice dancing. There was something just magical about flying across an ice rink. There was something amazing about spinning until you felt it in your fingers and toes.
And thanks to a prod from Terawatt, Buffy was skating again. She was tweeting about it first before heading over to the mall, so she was pulling in tons of fans, a lot of whom were filming her in action. That meant she needed to dress the part and pay a lot of attention to her makeup, but she was good with that. And she loved her new ice dancing dress with the cutouts and the semi-sheer half-skirt that trailed out behind her like a swallow’s tail.
Some of the pro and top amateur skaters used the rink, too, so the rink manager kept a special set of lockers in the back where someone with a little pull could keep their personal ice skates. She had three pairs, plus some emergency clothing, in a little locker that had only cost her an autographed poster of her in one of her cheerleader outfits, doing a backflip. And the skating had given her a lot of new poster material.
Also, Freddie had been really interested when she came home in her sexy little skating outfit, so it was all good.
She was going to make this work for her. She was going to stay under the radar and not out herself as an Orphan, and she was going to help him whip those damn Patriots next year, and when he won the Superbowl he would ask her to marry him, and it was all going to work out. Or else.
* * *
Dr. Samantha Milicevic Finn looked up when she heard the noise outside. The children she was teaching about safe drinking water and getting regular medical check-ups all looked up, too. Unfortunately, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, children needed to learn these things. And even if they didn’t die from malnutrition or diseases which were nearly eradicated in most of the world, they were still likely to die horribly at the hands of armed fiends posing as ‘soldiers’. Even though she was a doctor with Doctors Without Borders, she wore a loaded .45 on her hip at all times.
When she was performing surgery, she kept her .45 with her in a sealed plastic bag for a maximum of antisepsis and simultaneous protection. It was that kind of country.
One of the security men popped his head in. In excellent French, he said, “It is all right. One of the guards over-reacted when he saw a large vehicle driving toward us. It is just the documentary filmmakers again.”
Her Swahili and Kikongo were much better than her French, but she was learning rapidly. She had a gift for languages. She had a gift for a lot of things. Being an Orphan tended to cause that. She was lucky that she had found Riley. Who else would put up with her doing these kinds of jobs, no matter how desperately they needed to be done? And who else would be fine with her turning out to be an Orphan? She wondered whether Ms. Valentine and Lieutenant Lupo would ever be able to find Mister Right, given what they did and what they were.
And she hoped Frank would handle the filmmakers this time. There were too many Steve Irwin wannabes in Africa, and too many of them would probably come to a horrible end in places like this. Granted, this was a middle-aged couple who had been making nature documentaries for quite a long time, so that they had a longstanding reputation and even a knighthood. Unfortunately, the couple didn’t have enough sense not to bring their two teenaged daughters into a country where the incidence of violent rape was off the charts. The younger daughter was still at that awkward age where glasses and braces were winning the war against the good parts of puberty, but the older daughter was already a very attractive blonde who had probably been spotted by hundreds of men around here. Hundreds of heavily armed men for whom rape was an acceptable pastime. Samantha worried about those girls.
She finished her lesson and sent the children off to get quick check-ups. Given that there was free, nutritious food waiting as soon as the check-up was done, she was confident every one of the children would sit through whatever the doctors wanted. These children were right on the cusp of moving into dehydration, starvation, and a very painful death. It sickened her that there were ‘soldiers’ interrupting the United Nations efforts to import food and clean water, just to make money or get a little fatter.
Sometimes she wished that she could just grab the camp sat phone, call Riley, and ask him to fly in with Terawatt and his other superheroes to stomp most of these sociopathic so-called soldiers into the ground.
She stopped daydreaming. She had two surgeries to perform this afternoon, and then she needed to make sure all of these children got home well before dark. She wanted to be back inside the Doctors Without Borders compound before the night predators came out: both human and non-human.
Amazingly, the male doctors wondered why she slept with a loaded automatic under her pillow.
* * *
Richard sighed. Winshire County was supposed to be a quiet place. But things were getting progressively less and less quiet. And more and more dodgy. It wasn’t every day that you saw a dangerous bull just walk into a pond and drown itself.
And if you believed that was really what happened, then you deserved everything that was probably going to happen to you in the near future.
He needed to talk Bernard into contacting the brigadier.