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Chapter 157 – March MadnessAlex moved forward as Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson stepped forward to shake her hand. She looked around at the group. “I already know everyone except the sergeant-major and the captain.”
Then, once the introductions were done, she asked, “General O’Neill, could you give me a sound-bite sitrep?”
Jack knew full well she had heard the whole briefing, because it had been his idea for her to hide on the chopper and then duck away and fly over to the group like she had just flown in from somewhere distant. So he just said, “Up to sixty-one hostiles. Nine-year-olds who look like sixteen-year-old aliens, courtesy of Walsh. Telepathy and mental domination and some degree of telekinesis. A few hours ago, their mentor tried to blow them up, the Brits rushed in a fast reaction force as soon as they heard the boom, and the hostiles may have wiped all of them out.”
She nodded, like that was enough of a briefing for her. Then she asked, “How many of you are going to ride in that Land Rover?”
The captain said, “We can fit six rather tightly inside, with one weapons expert riding on the roof in the sling up there, and two outside guards riding in the back slings where they’re protected by the mass of the Rover but can easily lean out to deal with hostiles in front of the vehicle. We can’t go at our top speed this way, but we can make a decent speed on a flat road like this one.”
The brigadier said, “We need to move to the Grange and see how many hostiles are still threats, and we need to repeatedly concentrate on mission objectives, so we can figure out if we’re being mentally controlled.”
“Right, sir.” She kept it stiff and formal.
Jack smirked at her a little. “So let’s saddle up.”
Naturally, Hanna went right for the sling on top of the car. Having her on the top of your vehicle with an M203 was like having one of those special mounted machine guns with an operator standing so he was half out of the top of a personnel carrier.
The captain got behind the wheel, while the two senior officers and Riley and Harry and Ron squeezed into what looked to Alex like a five-person vehicle. Ron was squeezed into the rear area which wasn’t a seat at all. Mike and the sergeant-major took the two web-seats on the outside, so they were standing on special spots on the rear bumper. Alex really hoped they didn’t crash into anything or roll over, because it looked really unsafe to her. She flew a dozen feet above Hanna, so if anything went wrong, Terawatt could go silvery, dive down to pull Hanna into her morph, and fly off to safety.
The captain made sure everyone was hooked into their comm system, and he carefully drove over to the road. Then he began driving at what looked like maybe thirty miles an hour on the nice, safe road that curved around the little hill before straightening out and pointing at Midwich.
Alex heard the brigadier over the comms. “Brathwaite-Thomson to base. Do you read?”
“Reading you now, five by five.”
“Code Crescent Alpha Seven. It is time to pay the obstetrician’s bill starting … now.”
“Yes, sir. Payment plan?”
“Make it every ten months.”
“Every ten months. Roger that.”
Alex had a few ideas about what that meant, but she really wished she could just talk with Jack about it without using the comms, which everyone would be listening in on.
About eight minutes later by Alex’s tPhone, they were pulling into Midwich. There was no sign of anyone. No cars moving, no people walking, not even a stray cat or dog running around.
Alex lifted another sixty feet, so she could get a better view. Uh-oh. “Terawatt to team. Fast reaction force up ahead. None of them are moving.”
The Land Rover had to drive over a slight rise to see into the main part of the town. It pulled up a hundred feet short of what looked like a dozen dead soldiers around two unmoving military vehicles.
The brigadier barked into his comms again. “This is Aragorn. We have reached Mordor. Reset clock.”
Alex figured if he had to do the clock thing already, he wasn’t talking about months. He was really talking about minutes. She glanced at her tPhone and made a mental note of the time. She was going to assume that if the brigadier didn’t make his weird Lord of the Rings call-in within the next ten minutes, something very bad was going to happen.
Mike and Moody unhooked from their ‘seats’. Action Girl slipped out of her sling and leapt off the roof to land well past the front of the Land Rover. She kept her M203 pointed at the downed soldiers just in case they were yet another threat.
Everyone piled out of the Land Rover except the captain and the brigadier.
Hanna sniffed a couple times as she advanced toward the downed men. “A.G. to team. A lot of rounds fired, and a lot of blood. A medic might help.”
Riley glanced at Jack and got a tiny nod. He rushed up to the bodies and started checking for breathing or a pulse. After a few moments, he touched his earjack. “No survivors. It looks like they all shot each other.”
They moved forward along the lane, with the Land Rover following them. Alex could tell when they got near the town square. The body count went up.
There were people dead in the shops and buildings around the pond in the middle of the square. There were people who looked like they had killed each other. There were people who looked like they had killed themselves. There were a couple of people who looked like they had been trampled by a stampede, and two people who looked like they had been mauled to death by dogs. One of them was still holding a dog leash.
Alex decided she didn’t want to have to go through all the houses in the town.
She floated forward, looking for more threats. Sergeant-Major Moody moved with her. She drifted toward the other side of the town square …
“Terawatt! O’Neill to Terawatt! Focus!”
“Brigadier to Moody, stop right there! Look at what you’re doing!”
Alex blinked and looked around. She had just drifted out over the pond. Moody had walked along behind her and to the side. He was up to his waist in water. If she hadn’t been flying, she would probably be over her head in the pond and still breathing like she was in the air. And Moody had been about to walk into deeper water.
She floated up another several feet, and realized there were bodies in the water. Lots of them. If you could telepathically make someone think they were walking along a road when they were walking into water over their head, you could kill anyone you wanted, anytime you felt like it.
And apparently, there were still children with powers, and they knew Alex’s force was there, and they maybe knew that Alex was the most powerful threat. She tried not to shiver at the thought.
Moody turned and trudged out of the water, not complaining about being all wet and cold.
Alex flew back over near Jack. She tried not to sound scared when she whispered, “I thought I was on the road. I … Jack, they could make me do anything.”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, they could make any of us do anything. We need to stick together and monitor each other’s actions.” He touched his earjack and spoke over the comms, “O’Neill to Brigadier. We now know there are hostiles alive, and probably no civilian survivors. I recommend we retreat.”
Alex realized that if they just got out of the village and the brigadier didn’t put in another report to his base, the problem might get handled in a really icky way. Assuming they could fly a plane really high overhead and drop a bunch of bombs. Or maybe they would launch a cruise missile. Or … Okay, there were a few really icky options.
“Brigadier to O’Neill. I promised these people we would help them, and I’ve failed them. I need to see who’s left alive in the Midwich Grange. It is our primary mission objective.”
Alex thought that sounded like a bad plan now. If Jack said he was turning around and walking out of town, she was going to go with him, and she was going to make Harry and Ron come, too. Somehow.
“O’Neill to Brigadier. Mission objective was to eval Grange as intact unit. Is that still necessary?”
“Brigadier. Absolutely.”
Alex thought about it some more, and it on second thought, it sounded like a really good idea. They needed to know how many of the ‘children’ were running around loose. They could do that.
“O’Neill to SRI. We will assist. Stick close to unit. No cowboy maneuvers … and you know who I’m talking to.”
“Yes, sir,” said Hanna.
Jack pointed out where he wanted everyone. The captain and the brigadier were still in the Land Rover, but Mike and Moody were trotting out in front of it with Riley and Hanna behind them and to their outsides like wingmen. Jack was moving along one side of the Land Rover with Ron, while Harry had the other side. Alex was just a few feet above the roof of the vehicle, and she was silvery so she could see behind her, too.
She was of two minds about this whole deal. Part of her was saying she needed to follow Jack and stick to the mission objective, because they were already worried about getting mentally pushed into doing non-mission objective stuff. Part of her was saying they all needed to get out of the village, but that could be some kind of mental domination thing to make her do the wrong stuff. She really didn’t know what to do.
Well, that was why she was listening to Jack. He was always right.
It was a pretty grisly trip up to the Midwich Grange. The town was full of dead people who had killed each other or killed themselves.
Just as they got to the drive up to the grange, Alex could hear a noise like … lots of hooves. Like … She went another thirty feet straight up. “STAMPEDE!”
It looked like every cow and bull and pig from every farm in the area was charging down the road right at them. And she totally remembered what Jill had said about the farm animals in Ogden’s Marsh.
Mike and Moody dropped to one knee and began firing single shots at the lead animals.
Hanna and Riley both stepped a little forward and off to the side, so they could fire, too. They both stayed standing up. Jack clambered onto the hood of the Land Rover and put a grenade into the middle of the stampede. Harry and Ron scrambled onto the roof of the vehicle, so they could shoot at the animals without risking hitting any of the team in front of them.
Alex flew forward until she was right above Mike. She hurled lightning from both hands and hit the front stampeders. Well, the ones who hadn’t already fallen down and been trampled. She dropped two, then two more, then another pair. She kept blasting, while every soldier kept shooting. And when some of the stampeders started spreading out to get around the fallen animals, she also used her TK to trip a bunch of them, one at a time.
She had to throw a lot more lightning, because the front of the stampede was still moving forward pretty fast, and it looked like Mike and Moody might get run over, which would be bad. Mega-bad. But they were still on one knee, standing their ground and firing at the front of the stampede. And the front of the stampede was less than two hundred feet away.
Alex had seen Westerns where the stampede would turn away from the loud noises or get turned in a curve if you could get the guys on one side to move away from you. And she’d seen an old African movie where the hunters shot the animals right in front of them and made a wedge the stampeding animals went around, leaving the hunters untouched. But these animals didn’t seem to have watched those movies. Alex figured they were under mental control and couldn’t turn to the side or avoid anything already down.
A hundred feet away and closing fast.
She kept blasting away, and the last animals dropped just thirty feet before they would’ve run over Mike and Moody. She had been thinking that maybe she needed to swoop down, pull them into her morph, and puddle back until she could hide under the Land Rover where it would be safe.
“Finn to team. It looks like they don’t want us to visit their grange hall.”
“Brigadier to Finn. Then it’s too bad for them that we’re on the march. Let’s detour around this blockade. Baker and Moody, you’re still on point. Terawatt, please maintain overwatch.”
“Roger that, sir.”
Alex heard the brigadier over the comms. “This is Pevensie. We are moving toward Narnia. Reset clock.”
Ten more minutes. A lot of really bad stuff could happen in ten minutes. She tried not to think of any examples. Instead, she just kept checking that everyone was staying on the mission objective, and there wasn’t anyone or anything attacking them.
The grange hall looked okay, except one part of the roof looked like a small explosion had gone off right underneath it. Alex wondered if that meant the children had managed to move the bomb away before it went off. She wondered how many children might be undamaged and really angry and feeling totally threatened.
“Terawatt to team. Blast damage through roof. Far left side. Looks like a directed charge to me.”
“Brigadier to Terawatt. That’s not likely. We need to get in there and investigate.”
“O’Neill to team. Maintain visual so we don’t get separated.”
Alex flew into the building just over Mike and Sergeant-Major Moody. They seemed to have a pretty good idea where they were going, and she let them lead. She was silvery, so she could keep an eye on everyone. They moved down the hall past stairs, past a dining hall, past a large open room, to a room that seemed to be set up like a schoolroom complete with school desks. And it was a disaster area.
At the front of the room, where all the desks were facing, was a big screen for showing movies on. But in the center of the room, where the projector would have been, was just a burned, destroyed floor with metal fragments jammed into it. And a hole punched right through the ceiling and the roof over it.
The eight desks closest to the possibly-projector were destroyed, and the eight bodies that had been in the desks were crushed and burned. There were also the totally-destroyed remains of someone who would have been bigger than the children. Maybe that Gordon guy who was planning on blowing up the children. Maybe he had a bomb inside a movie projector.
There was a weird doughnut shape around the circular blast zone. It looked like the children had managed at the last second to slap a telekinetic cylinder around the bomb, and the cylinder had walls about eight feet thick. Everyone and everything within the doughnut-shape had been damaged, but not as drastically as the stuff in the blast zone at the center of the doughnut. She counted seventeen badly damaged desks, and arranged on the floor were seventeen badly damaged ‘children’.
The boys and girls looked like Hanna in a Halloween costume. They were all dressed in school uniforms. Their skin — where it wasn’t burned or bleeding — was a weird silver tint. They were all unconscious and just barely breathing, so Alex couldn’t see their eyes.
She had to turn to look for Jack. She must have gone normal somewhere along the line, even if she couldn’t remember going normal instead of staying silvery, like she’d planned.
There was only one other person from her team in the room.
And then she wasn’t in the room anymore.
She was in a nightmare.
* * *
Jack didn’t like it. Maybe they were sticking together, but the brigadier was making some suspect decisions. Maybe Edward was being telepathically coerced.
Maybe Jack was being telepathically coerced, because he had gone along with a stupid plan.
He blinked, and for the merest fraction of a second, he could have sworn that he and Mike were standing by themselves in a small dining hall. And then …
* * *
Jack was in his house. Not the house at the West Virginia base. His old house. The house he had shared with Sarah and Charlie and their dog Buddy and Sarah’s two cats. He was in the den, facing …
It was his old gunsafe with the combination dial.
Charlie snuck in. Ten-year-old Charlie, who wanted to be an Air Force pilot like daddy when he grew up. Ten-year-old Charlie, who was always getting into everything.
Jack tried to move. He tried to speak. He tried to yell. He couldn’t move a muscle.
Charlie fiddled with the dial on the gunsafe. “What did Daddy say? Oh! People use combinations like birthdays so they can remember.” He tried Daddy’s birthday. He tried Mommy’s birthday. He tried his own birthday …
The gunsafe made a clacking sound. He turned the handle, and it opened for him.
Jack struggled as hard as he could. He had to stop it. He had to! He couldn’t move. He couldn’t yell. He couldn’t even whisper. All he could do was watch in mounting horror as Charlie got out Jack’s snub-nosed revolver.
Charlie pointed it at the wall. “Pow! Pow!”
The door swung open, and in rushed …
It wasn’t Sarah.
Oh, God, it was Willow.
No please, not Willow!
Jack strained until it felt like his heart would explode, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t stop anything.
Willow ran over. “Charlie! Put that away! When your father gets home …” She grabbed the barrel of the gun and tried to pull it out of Charlie’s hand.
The gun fired. Right into Willow’s waist.
Jack screamed silently. Everything went black.
He was back in his house. Not the house at the West Virginia base. His old house. The house he had shared with Sarah and Charlie and their dog Buddy and Sarah’s two cats. He was in the den, facing …
It was his old gunsafe with the combination dial.
Charlie snuck in …
* * *
Alex was in her living room, back in her home.
And Danielle Atron was right there.
Alex flashed into action … and couldn’t move. She couldn’t go silvery. She couldn’t move anything telekinetically. She couldn’t fire off any lightning. She was helpless.
Danielle laughed maniacally. “Stupid, stupid, little Alex Mack. Did you really think I wouldn’t work it out eventually? Did you really think I’d let you get away with it?”
Alex strained as hard as she could. She couldn’t even breathe.
With a sneer, Danielle said, “First, I’m going to kill your parents right in front of you. Then I’m going to kill that stupid boyfriend of yours. Then your little niece. Then every one of your friends. Then I’m going to rip you apart, bit by bit, until it eventually kills you. Then I’m going to hunt down everyone you worked with in the SRI, and kill them, too, and then …”
Shar burst into the room, and there was already a corona of fire around her. She screamed at Danielle.
The entire house exploded in a massive fireball …
* * *
Ron blinked.
It couldn’t be. He grabbed the bars on the door, and he knew. He was in Drake’s old mansion, locked in the wine cellar again. And any second …
The sound of Hermione’s scream was like a knife in his heart. He tried everything he could think of, but he couldn’t get free. He couldn’t save Hermione. He couldn’t stop the screams of agony as Riddle’s bitch tortured Hermione for information.
He begged, but no one listened.
The screams got worse and worse …
* * *
Harry gasped as he realized where he was.
He was in the secret lair, deep under the castle. He was facing Riddle’s teenaged clone. Ginny was unconscious on the rock floor. And to his right was the salt-water pond.
The huge grayish-white log in the pond … wasn’t a log.
The clone blew a weird little whistle, and the ‘log’ stirred itself. It slowly moved toward him, leisurely pushing itself forward with an immense tail.
The clone held Harry’s revolver and pointed it at Ginny’s unmoving head. “Don’t try anything funny, Potter. Or else the little redhead gets very dead and then gets eaten.”
Harry’s heart froze in his chest as the thing lumbered out of the water towards him.
“Never seen a salt-water crocodile before? Not surprising. They’re not exactly common around here. They like it warmer. Like the Philippines.”
It was twenty-five feet of vicious scales and teeth, and Harry wanted more than anything to be out of there.
But he wasn’t going to leave Ron’s little sister. And he couldn’t let Riddle’s clone run loose.
The crocodile opened its mouth …
* * *
Riley gasped. It was his worst nightmare. His Samantha, trapped and at the mercy of dozens and dozens of the so-called ‘soldiers’ in central Africa.
He tried to rush to her rescue, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t yell. He couldn’t breathe.
All he could so was stand there, frozen like a statue, and watch his Sam fight and get beaten mercilessly by the overwhelming numbers. And then they were staking her to the ground.
They were tearing at her clothes.
They were …
He screamed in agony as he couldn’t even look away …
* * *
Brigadier Edward Brathwaite-Thomson might have been too old to be out in the field officially, but he knew his duty. He was going to achieve this mission objective, and he was going to do what it took to give some measure of peace to Gordon and Angela, Bernard, Richard and Janet … Everyone he had failed.
He and his adjutant had moved at the back of the team, even if he should have had someone like Colonel Finn on their six. He had his revolver in one hand, and — just in case when dealing with psychic powers like mental domination — he had a grenade in his left hand. With the pin already pulled.
They were moving down a long hall. It seemed difficult to make the walk, like they were moving through treacle, or walking up a steep hill. He suspected that meant someone was trying to keep him from making any progress.
He blinked, and he was no longer with the team. He and Captain McGinnis were all alone. He was no longer in the hall. He was in a small room set up as a dorm, with six sets of bunkbeds. He knew there were supposed to be three such rooms for the boys and three more for the girls, but they were all upstairs.
He knew he had been separated and led here.
And then he was elsewhere.
He was in a war zone. That war. That battle. He was a raw lieutenant. Everyone was going to die because of the mistake he had just made, and he couldn’t stop it. He strained as hard as he could to shout a warning …
* * *
Hanna looked up at the hands holding her as they ran through the snow. She was so tiny compared to the adults on either side of her. It was her mother! And her father. This was wonderful!
An angry woman screamed from behind them, and the air was filled with the sound of an automatic firing.
Her mother was falling to the ground, with red blood blossoming on her front, and her father was scooping her up and running as fast as he could …
* * *
Jack was in his house again. Not the house at the West Virginia base. His old house. He was in the den, facing his old gunsafe with the combination dial.
Charlie snuck in. Jack strained as hard as he could. He tried to speak. He tried to yell. He couldn’t move a muscle.
Charlie opened the gunsafe and took out Jack’s snub-nosed revolver. Jack struggled as hard as he could. He had to stop it. He had to! He couldn’t move. He couldn’t yell. He couldn’t even whisper.
The door swung open.
Oh, please God, please don’t do this!
Willow rushed in …
* * *
Alex was in her high school cafeteria. Danielle Atron was right there.
Alex instantly reacted … and couldn’t move. She couldn’t go silvery. She couldn’t move anything telekinetically. She couldn’t fire off any lightning. She was helpless.
She couldn’t protect all her friends, and her boyfriend Ray, and everyone else trapped there. Her parents were there. Shar was there. Willow was there.
Danielle laughed maniacally. “Stupid, stupid, little Alex Mack. Did you really think I wouldn’t work it out eventually? Did you really think I’d let you get away with it? No, I’m going to kill everyone you care about, and then I’ll kill you ever so slowly …”
Alex strained as hard as she could. She couldn’t even breathe.
Suddenly there was a corona of fire around Shar. She screamed at Danielle.
The entire school exploded in a terrifying fireball …
* * *
Ron shook the bars on the door as Hermione screamed in agony upstairs …
* * *
Harry held his breath desperately. The crocodile had his legs in its jaws, and it was spinning sickeningly under the water while he slowly drowned …
* * *
Edward Brathwaite-Thomson couldn’t stop the slaughter. He couldn’t …
He couldn’t stop the pain radiating from his chest down his right arm. His chest felt like an elephant was sitting on it.
It felt like … like the last coronary he’d suffered. He fell to the floor as his heart stopped beating properly.
In a matter of seconds, his hands opened limply.
The grenade rolled away, the spoon lazily flipping into the air.
* * *
Hanna heard the automatic firing behind her, and she saw her mother fall down. She wasn’t frightened. She was furious. If only she could do something. If only she wasn’t two and helpless and …
A grenade went off, with that distinctive sound she’d heard plenty of times before. And it was close. And …
And there was a momentary flicker in reality. She wasn’t a two-year-old running through the snow to escape from Marissa Weigler. She was nearly seventeen, and she was heavily armed. She was standing in a small dorm room with Ronald Wellesley and three of the ‘children’. She moved at her top speed and swung her M203, pulling the trigger before her mind was taken over again.
* * *
Riley sobbed as Sam was pulled down yet again.
Reality flickered.
He opened fire with the M203 in his arms.
He didn’t hit anyone.
But one bullet seared past one of the three children in the room, and the ‘child’ flinched.
A gestalt mind is a powerful thing. It provides far more computing power. Far more consultation. Instant evaluation and decision-making. So many features.
It’s also a weakness. If everyone in the gestalt is closely linked, then everyone experiences everything.
The entire gestalt flinched.
Reality flickered again, only this time Riley was pointing his weapon in the right direction. He couldn’t make his finger relax, anymore than he could make his body relax. He fired until the magazine was empty.
He sank to his knees sobbing.
The Potter kid on Riley’s other side fell over, gasping for air.
Reality flickered all around Alex. She was in her living room, and then she heard a grenade explode, and for a fraction of a second she was in the schoolroom, surrounded by dead and dying ‘children’.
She was back in her living room facing Danielle Atron.
M203s were firing, and suddenly she was back in the schoolroom. Dead and dying children were on the floor. She was still in the air. Sergeant-Major Moody was off to her right side and frozen in horror. Three children were standing in front of her, looking furiously at her and the soldier.
She was back in her living room.
An M203 was firing once more, and then she was back in the schoolroom. She unleashed a desperate blast of lightning. Reality flickered around her.
She was still in the schoolroom. Three children who had been standing in front of her were now down. The sergeant-major was keeling over. She didn’t have time to check the children. She had people to save.
She darted over to the sergeant-major and pulled him into her morph. Then she puddled as fast as she could back out of the schoolroom to try and find her friends.
Jack couldn’t process everything fast enough.
Willow and Charlie in his house.
A grenade went off somewhere. Him and Mike at the grange, with three of those creepy ‘children’ over against the side wall.
Willow and Charlie in his house.
Rifle fire. Him and Mike and three hostiles.
Willow and Charlie in his house.
Extended fire as someone emptied a magazine. Him and Mike and three hostiles.
He pulled the trigger.
Willow and Charlie in his house.
Him and Mike and three hostiles, only the hostiles were diving for safety with their hands over their heads.
And Hanna was sprinting into the room and actually aiming, which seemed to be more than he could manage. She made sure the three hostiles weren’t going to get back up.
His legs gave out on him, and he sank to his knees.
Hanna reported, “Sir, we have no control over our perimeter and we can’t trust what we’re seeing. We have to evac immediately. I brought Wellesley with me. The brigadier and his adjutant are dead, but they got three with a grenade.”
A big silver puddle rushed into the room, and Alex spoke from it. “I’ve got Moody, Riley, and Harry. We need to get to the car. Fast.”
He nodded weakly. “Make it so, Number One.”
The puddle darted out the door. Hanna picked up the Wellesley kid and slung him over her shoulder before running out.
Jack tried to force himself to his feet, but his body just wasn’t interested. He looked over, and Mike wasn’t doing any better. He wondered how many minutes they had been trapped inside their own brains, being tortured until they were ready to shoot anything in front of them, or maybe themselves. He wondered if this was what the children had done to the entire town and the fast reaction force. He wondered if the throbbing pain in his forehead was going to stop anytime soon.
He really hated psychic powers.
Alex flew back in, yanked him and Mike into her morph, and puddled at forty or fifty miles an hour back to the Land Rover. She didn’t let him out of her morph until she had him in a seat inside the vehicle.
He looked around. Six of them were crammed into a five-person Land Rover, like before. Only this time, Finn was behind the wheel and the sergeant-major was in the shotgun seat. Somehow, the Wellesley kid ended up crammed in the back again. Hanna was on top, strapping herself in, judging by the thumps and bumps.
Jack said, “We need to move it.” He checked his watch, which he had put on a timer after the brigadier’s call. “We have one minute and forty-seven seconds, plus lag time.”
Finn stepped on the gas and shifted into gear. He pointed out, “And we have no idea if we’re going to get telepathically attacked while driving, so they can just steer us into a brick wall.”
Finn headed out at a reasonable speed. Jack hoped it was fast enough. Finn would have already estimated the distance they needed to go in order to get clear of whatever blast zone this might become, and he would be going at the lowest speed that would do the job, just in case he got mentally redirected into a house or something.
Jack needed to call Willow. He needed to make sure she was okay, even though he knew it was stupid. He needed to tell her he couldn’t live without her. He needed to tell her none of the decisions she wanted them to make were as important as the two of them being together.
He needed her to go through that goddamn gun safety course as soon as she could.