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Chapter 158 – The Long MarchAlex wasn’t flying. She was using her TK to hold herself on the roof of the Land Rover next to Hanna. She had no idea how easy it would be for the remaining children to make her fly off in the wrong direction and end up back in the pond or wherever, and if that happened, she would get blown up when the brigadier’s timer ran out.
She still didn’t know what was going to get dropped on Midwich, or how long they had left. But she could tell Riley wasn’t driving as fast as he possibly could, so he had to have a good idea.
Could they drop bombs out of airplanes, if the children could take over the minds of the people in the planes? The RAF had to have planes that could fly high enough that they were invisible from the ground. Or maybe it would be artillery. She didn’t know how far the biggest artillery could fire shells, but she was pretty sure it was like twenty or thirty miles, or even farther if they used rocket-assisted shells. Or maybe it would be something like cruise missiles.
At any rate, by her calculations there were still 21 of those ‘children’ who were serious threats, and they could be pretty much anywhere around Midwich by now.
Why did Maggie Walsh have to be such a nightmare?
Was Ray safe, and her mom and dad, and Shar, and her friends? She was sure they had to be, but the telepathy-dream-thing had been so real.
And then there was the thing Alex was trying really, really hard not to think about. Had she just killed three children? Was Alex Mack now a killer? She wasn’t sure she could live with that.
She tried to focus on the mission. The whole team was still really, really vulnerable. She needed to look where they were going and keep asking herself if this was what they were supposed to be doing.
Alex kept track as Riley drove down the grange road and through the village. He didn’t look like he was doing anything weird, but she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to tell before it was too late. Once he was past the last house and the last obstruction, he picked up the pace a bit more.
They were still a long way away from getting around that curve and being able to hide behind that hill.
Something came searing down from the sky behind them. She was still silvery, so she could see behind her and above her. There were five of them. Five stubby little arrows with fire behind them, pushing them ever faster toward the ground. From here, they looked kind of pretty. She knew they weren’t.
She smacked the roof a couple times, and Riley sped up. A lot.
Not that he could outrun an explosion, no matter how fast the Land Rover could go. She had learned that lesson the hard way back in that spider cave in Arizona.
“Hanna, let go of all your gear.”
“We might need this at any moment.”
“Look behind you.”
Hanna looked behind her. She didn’t turn into a pillar of salt, but she definitely put down her M203 and unhooked her tac vest in a hurry.
The five missiles came down in what looked to Alex like a square that bracketed the town, with one corner of the square probably directly on the grange, plus one right in the village center.
She pulled Hanna into her silvery morph, sliding Hanna out of the web harness as she did so. Then she checked that she could still lift off into the air, and she jetted forward as fast as she could.
The blast wave from the explosions blew outward at unbelievable speed. The Land Rover got punched from behind and knocked over. It rolled over maybe half a dozen times before it came to a halt.
The blast wave smacked her like she was a tennis ball. And it was Andre Agassi with a really big racket. But she was flying forward and already silvery, so it just slammed her forward.
Okay, there were definitely going to be bruises involved.
But once the blast wave faded out, she wheeled around and zoomed back to check on the Land Rover.
She dropped to the ground and went normal, so Hanna could help out.
“O’Neill to Tera. O’Neill to Tera. Come in, please.”
“Terawatt. Action Girl and I are okay.”
“O’Neill. I wasn’t sure you had her, and we just got an E-ticket ride. But we’re in pretty good shape for a bunch of guys who got brain-screwed and then rolled Dad’s car.”
“Terawatt. What about Ron? He wasn’t strapped down or anything!”
“O’Neill. When you took off, we got the hint. We grabbed him and held him across our laps in the back seat.”
“Wellesley here. I’m in one piece, but I more or less got battered at both ends when we rolled.”
The Land Rover did look pretty beaten up. The roof was dented and bent. The sides were dented. There was steam coming out from the engine compartment.
Oh, and it was upside-down in a field.
Alex tugged on the driver’s door. But even with her strength, and all her TK, and all of Riley’s strength, it was still hard to yank the door open. Hanna had a little more success on the shotgun passenger’s door. The windows were all shattered, so Ron was crawling out through a back window. One rear door didn’t want to open at all, but Alex and Hanna together managed to force the other rear door. Jack and Mike and Harry struggled out of the back seat before Harry started pulling weapons out of the upside-down vehicle.
“Calling Base, this is Sergeant-Major Moody. The brigadier and his adjutant didn’t make it. The Land Rover didn’t either. We need a pick-up from the Chinook at …” He consulted a little paper map. “… grid coordinate G-8.”
“Roger that, Moody. Chinook is stable, and will be under way in about three.”
Jack muttered, “I need to get to a sat phone and call Willow. And Charlie.”
Alex gasped in horror. She knew how awful her telepathy-nightmare thing had been. And who had been in it. That told her way too much about what Jack’s nightmare might have been like.
Riley nodded miserably. “I need to call Sam.”
Harry muttered, “I have to call Ginny.”
Ron whispered, “I need to call ’Mione.”
Alex didn’t catch what Mike said, but she definitely heard the sergeant-major say, “I need … to visit a couple cemeteries.”
She managed not to say what she’d already been thinking. That she needed to call every person on her team, starting with Ray and her parents and Shar.
Hanna just stood there and said, “I am fine.” Everyone just sort of gaped at that.
* * *
Alex watched carefully for any sign of anyone who might have survived the bombing, but nothing came their way. It only took a couple of minutes by her tPhone for the Chinook to land near them. There was no point in trying to get the wrecked Land Rover onboard, so they all just climbed in through the sliding side door, and Jack told the pilot to take them back to RAF Northolt.
While Jack sat up at the very front and called the brigadier’s contacts to tell them what happened and what they still needed to do, everyone else just sort of used the huge open space of the Chinook to spread out in groups. The sergeant-major went as far back as he could, and just stared at a wall. Harry and Ron sat next to each other and had a long, quiet conversation with their heads down. Riley unpacked the sat phone from the back of his tac vest and tried to call his wife in Africa. He was pretty freaked when he just couldn’t get her compound’s sat phone at all.
Once they got near RAF Northolt and weren’t way up in the air, Alex’s tPhone was getting cell coverage again, and she immediately called home. No one answered, because it was mid-morning at home, so she flipped it over to look like Alex’s phone, and she called her mom. “Mom? Mom, are you okay? I love you.” She was trying not to sound all weepy, but she wasn’t succeeding.
“Alex? What … Honey, are you all right?”
“I … Umm … Mostly?”
Her mom really freaked at that. “Where are you? What’s happened? Are you hurt?”
She sobbed, “Mom, I’m not really hurt, but … I … I mean …”
Hanna easily pulled the phone out of her hand. “Mrs. Mack, it’s Hanna. We were attacked by psychics. She saw her worst nightmare.” She handed the phone back to Alex.
Alex’s mom gently said, “Alex? Honey? Do you need to come home right away?”
Alex whimpered, “Uh-huh. I need to make sure everyone’s okay, and Shar isn’t getting upset, and Danielle’s not around, and I just need to talk to you some so I know you’re really okay and not tortured by Danielle and not blown up in a giant fireball the size of a city block. And Dad. And Shar. And Ray. And everyone else.”
Her mom gently said, “You can’t call Ray right now. He’s in class. But maybe you could text him that you really need him to call you.”
“Okay.”
“And you tell Jack I’m pretty angry with him about this.”
“Mom, I think Jack’s even worse off than me!”
* * *
Jack disconnected, handed the headset back to the co-pilot, and let his head fall into his hands. He’d let the brigadier down. He should have known that the compulsion that they all had to go check on the grange was a psychic assault. It had just seemed so … logical. So military. So much a part of the official plan that he talked himself into thinking his concerns might be a psychic assault. Or maybe someone made him think that way.
How was he supposed to tell the brigadier’s wife that he’d gotten her husband killed not two days after meeting her? And how could he ever suggest to anyone that maybe the brigadier might have been co-opted by those little … psychics some time in the past? After all, Edward had flat-out told him that the kids had directed their contact to meet with the brigadier more than once. They had probably come up with a plan as soon as they realized what their contact was doing and who he was meeting. A plan? Probably a whole set of plans that had gotten the gestalt-brainwork peer review.
And how was he supposed to tell George and Barb what he’d let happen to their younger daughter?
He could tell Hanna was doing ridiculously okay, but he didn’t know how Finn was holding up after that. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to know what Finn’s worst nightmares were.
He walked back to where Finn was struggling to get his sat phone to hook up to Samantha Finn’s compound’s phone without any luck. The sheer stress showing on Finn’s face told Jack who Finn’s nightmare had been about.
Jack wanted to call Charlie right that second, but Charlie was in school. Jack needed to wait a couple more hours. And anyway, he knew Charlie wasn’t ten anymore. Charlie was going to be seventeen in a week.
The Chinook landed, and they hauled their gear to a waiting vehicle. He watched as Alex flew on ahead, probably to tell Willow he was coming apart at the seams.
He really wished Alex had come over and talked to him about how she was holding up.
* * *
Jack was glad it didn’t take all that long to get back to the hotel. He and Finn and Hanna trooped into the rear entrance and took the service elevator up to their floor, rather than freaking out the front desk again.
He led Finn and Hanna into his rooms first. And there was Alex, sans wig and ‘makeup’ and mask, crying on Willow’s shoulder. Crap.
Willow gave him a nasty glare, which he completely deserved.
Christ, he really needed to talk to that woman. Like in the next twenty seconds, before he went nutso. Not that that was going to work out.
Willow snapped at him, “Did you really make her fight a bunch of psychics who made her live her worst nightmares?”
Hanna jumped in with both feet, like always. “The psychics made us go to the grange — I think — and they made us split up so they could attack us easier — I’m pretty sure of that — and then they attacked each of us with images from our minds.”
Finn contributed miserably, “Our worst nightmares. Mine was … what I’m always afraid will happen to Sam.”
Alex sobbed, “Mine was Danielle Atron catching us all and I couldn’t stop her, and she was going to kill Mom and Dad and Ray and everyone, and then Shar lost her temper and everything blew up in the biggest fireball ever and I couldn’t save anybody!”
Hanna happily exclaimed, “I got to see my real mom! I mean, I was only two. But then I got to shoot at whoever shot her!”
Jack shuddered. If Hanna hadn’t been … who she was … Being trapped in that dream would have been even worse than what Jack went through. He looked at Willow and confessed, “Mine was … losing you.”
Willow clapped her hands over her mouth and began crying. Wow, he’d really handled that one well.
Finn asked, “Alex? Can we talk about our nightmares as a sort of group therapy for a few minutes? I think the general really needs to have a private talk with Willow.”
Alex looked at him, and then at Willow, and then did what she always did. She put other people ahead of her own well-being. She stood up and stepped toward Finn.
Jack hugged Alex and whispered, “You’re the best, kid. Don’t ever let anyone else tell you different. Got that?”
She hugged him back and whispered, “Just take care of Willow, okay?”
Jack let go, stepped over to his fiancée, and scooped her up in his arms. Then he stepped into the bedroom, kicked the door closed, and set her down on the loveseat. He explained, “It was my worst nightmare. Me, unable to stop Charlie getting into the gunsafe, and then you came in and tried to stop him. Not Sarah, but you. And the gun went off by accident, and there was nothing I could do. I saw it, over and over and over. I think if I hadn’t been there with a bunch of superheroes, I would’ve eventually killed myself.”
Willow threw her arms around him and just hugged him mercilessly, which was what he really needed.
To hell with being able to breathe and stuff.
When she finally let go enough that he could talk again, he insisted, “I want you to move in with me the moment we get back. And I want to get married as soon as we can arrange it.”
Willow frowned. “But what about my list? We still have seventy-three items we haven’t worked out!”
Jack said, “I got that figured out. I’m giving in on seventy-two of them, and you’re giving in on the gun safety course. I’ll take you over to the base range myself, and show you everything. It won’t take long, because you never forget anything. You don’t have to learn to shoot a gun and hit anything. I just have to know you’re safe around guns.”
Willow looked at him in shock. “Jack! You can’t just ‘give in’ on important stuff like having kids, or raising them in a faith, or getting married in a church vs. a synagogue, or going vegetarian, or —”
He smoothed the hair back on one side of her face. “Will, you’re more important than any of those choices. I’ll even convert to Judaism if I need it to marry you.”
She really scowled then. “Okay, it doesn’t work like that in Judaism. We’re not a proselytizing religion.” She took a breath and said, “Okay. We’ll have kids, and we’ll raise them Jewish, but you don’t convert, because your faith matters to you. We find a rabbi who will marry us in my parents’ synagogue, and if no rabbi I know will do it, we just say ‘to hell with them’ and get married in Las Vegas. You eat less meat at home, and I eat a little more, and when we go out you can eat whatever you want; Charlie’s a growing boy and needs his nutrients. I agree to be a full-on stepmom to him, even if I still think I’ll screw it up somewhere. I move to your base, but we have to find a new house. My maid of honor is going to be A.L. Mack, and you have Charlie as your best man, and we skip the bridesmaids and groomsmen, and we see if we can figure out an excuse to have Shar as a flower girl. I’ll change my name to Rosenberg-O’Neill but all our children will just be O’Neills. Our first daughter is definitely going to be named Alexandra, and under no circumstances are any of our children going to get your foster mom’s name.”
“Will, I would cut off my own nose before I’d name a kid ‘Rogerina’. I have no idea why you had that one on your list. And I still have no idea what the hell her parents were thinking.”
She added, “And I’ll definitely do the gun safety thing, especially after your nightmare.” She shuddered in horror as she thought about what he must have gone through. “If that part’s not too icky, I’ll even let you teach me how to shoot a handgun.”
He hugged her and said, “And I figured out about the house. Mrs. Murdock’s home. She wants to move to an apartment in the retirement area down the road, and she hasn’t put her house up for sale yet, but she will.”
“Jack! We looked at it. I hate that place. It’s one level, and doesn’t have any more room than your house does. It has an awful floorplan. It’s on that slope, so the back side and deck are twenty feet off the ground. The front yard would need a ton of work before it would be kid-friendly. There’s no way we could fit even your stuff in there, much less all my stuff, and rooms for Charlie and any new O’Neills and any guests, and I want to have room for guests sometimes!”
He grinned. “Exactly. We bulldoze the front yard and redo it. We bulldoze the house, too. Instead of having it over a drop with piers holding up the back side, we build a full-sized basement with room for your office and all your computers and a big room for all your sewing and cosplay stuff, and a storage room, and even a man-cave where I can go hide from everyone, and the gunsafe and my fly-tying jig and the couch you hate can all go in there. Then the ground floor will be a dining room and party room and living room, at least one bathroom, and a kitchen and pantry and laundry room at one end, and maybe a mudroom at that end of the house, and a library and a den we can also use as guestrooms at the other end of the house with maybe their own bathroom in between. Then stairs. We put all the bedrooms and a playroom and several bathrooms upstairs.”
“Well … it would give me the chance to re-design my computer area and get some new hardware and speed up my supercomputer … But we’ll go halfsies on the cost of the house.”
“Deal.” He would have kissed her senseless for a long time, but he had two of his people in the other room who desperately needed to talk to him. And a third one: he was really worried that she didn’t need to talk about it at all.
* * *
Ron rushed into Hermione’s work area. It was a cubicle farm, and Hermione was just one of the meerkats who popped up out of their holes when an intruder came by.
Sure enough, several heads popped up to see who had come into the data analysis area. Hermione’s wasn’t one of them.
The heads stayed up. More heads popped up. Well, he hadn’t changed clothes. And he had a few bruises on his face and blood in his hair. At least he wasn’t still toting around his machine gun and sidearm.
He rushed to Hermione’s cubicle and interrupted her work. “We need to talk. Now.”
She looked at him, and she worried, “Are you okay? Is Harry okay?”
He took her hand and half-led half-dragged her off to the closest conference room he knew of. He shut the door behind them and explained, “We’re still alive and in one piece, but we both got … I don’t know what to call it. General O’Neill called it ‘brain-screwed’. Sergeant-Major Moody called it ‘mind-rape’. We ended up facing a school full of psychic threats, and they made all of us live through our worst nightmares again and again. The brigadier died. O’Neill’s superheroes pulled our arses out of the fire. Again. Harry’s nightmare? It was second year. In that underground lair.”
“Oh, God.”
“Me? It was being trapped in that wine cellar and hearing you screaming and not being able to do anything. I can’t go through that again.”
She looked alarmed. “Ron, what does that mean?”
He took a breath. “I want to get married. Now. Maybe sooner.”
She frowned. “We can’t even be dating!”
He ground his teeth. “To hell with that. We’re getting married as soon as my mother can get the church. I don’t care about my family or SIS rules or anything. We’re getting married. I’ll quit the bloody service if I have to. And you’re damn well going to wear one of the Wellesley engagement rings, even if you told mum they’re too gaudy.”
She smiled. “Sometimes I like it when you get all ‘lord of the manor’.” And she kissed him passionately.
He smiled to himself. That was very definitely a ‘yes’.
* * *
Alex stopped talking and talking. She hadn’t managed to stop crying, but at least Hanna and Riley didn’t seem to mind that too much. And Hanna was hugging her tightly, but not too tightly. It was like ‘big hug from dad’ tightness, and not ‘I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor’ tightness.
Riley patted her on the shoulder. “I think that’s completely normal. And you should be worried about whether or not you killed those hostiles, even if we pretty much carpet-bombed the village afterward. I don’t like killing people, either. I’d be happy if I never needed to kill anyone ever again. But we don’t live in a comic book world, and sometimes we have to kill the badguys just to keep them from hurting or killing others. And some of the time, the badguys give us no choice whatsoever.
“This time, we didn’t have any choice. We didn’t even have any time to think it over. And still, you’re the only one of us who didn’t resort to deadly force. Maybe you killed them. But maybe not. I’m figuring you probably didn’t, because your control over your lightning is pretty darn amazing.”
Hanna said, “The important thing is you reacted to save your team. And I really don’t think an electrical shock would stop them for long. They looked … too much like me.”
Alex really wondered whether Hanna thought of those ‘children’ as her cousins. After all, they were both products of Maggie Walsh. It just seemed really mean to ask it, because it would be like asking if Hanna thought she was related to that giant spider, or that blob monster, or those silicates.
Boy, she had figured Hanna and Shar were the last kids Maggie Walsh would be messing up, and instead now she knew there was an entire town of them. Only Walsh had pretty much done the same thing to every woman in the village that she had done to Hanna’s mom.
She said, “Someone must’ve helped Walsh on this one. You can’t gas an entire village and then do that in vitro fertilization thing to every mom-worthy female in the entire place all by yourself.”
Riley said, “It was probably someone in the British government. Maybe one person with access to the National Health records, and a few higher-ups who got her the funding, and a dozen goons to block the roads and release the gas and do whatever else needed to be done. Plus a few doctors and nurses to do all the work.”
* * *
Jack and Willow walked out of the bedroom, looking distinctly not like they had been making out. But they both looked way happier than a few minutes ago. Jack disagreed, “I’d say about four goons and over a dozen doctors. Blocking the roads all at once is simple for a town like that. Four roads? You just need four trucks. Doing nearly seventy in vitro fertilizations in, say, ten hours? I’d want to go in with two dozen doctors, and two dozen really strong assistants to lug the gear and move the bodies around. The important part would be getting all of that done as soon as humanly possible, and then getting the hell out of town before anyone outside even began to suspect something.”
Willow said, “Well, give me a couple hours with Hermione to go through records, and maybe we can come up with a list of possible doctors, and maybe some possible government conspirators.”
Riley nodded. “Sure, but I really need to try getting Sam again. I can’t get the sat phone at their compound, and it’s not like I can call the neighbors to ask if they can go check on them.”
Jack tossed him a cellphone that was probably one of the SRI tPhones. “Give it a shot.”
Riley dialed and waited. Alex remembered how long it took to connect with sat phones. “Hello?” The raw worry and hope in Riley’s voice made Alex heart ache. “Can I …”
Riley hurriedly flipped it to speakerphone, and a voice came through. A really stressed female voice that sounded sick. “— up. Please don’t hang up. We have an emergency and we can’t call out.”
Riley gasped, “Sam! What’s wrong?”
A voice Alex had never heard before came on. It sounded like a teenaged girl. An American teenaged girl. “We’ve got a huge problem here. Dr. Finn can’t talk too well. She’s got a pneumo-thing so she can’t breathe well, and it’s getting worse. She’s got three bullet-holes in her, and I don’t know if any bullet fragments are still in her. The sat phone got shot up, and she fixed it as much as she could. Everyone else in the whole compound is locked in a big trailer. I got the air conditioning running for it so they won’t die of heat prostration, but I haven’t been able to break the locks to get them out. The whole compound got ambushed before I got here, and I sent Darwin off for help but he hasn’t come back, and I can’t do anything else to help.”
Sam’s stressed voice came back. “Don’t listen to her. She’s a real hero. She came swinging in on a vine like Tarzan, and she chased off a full-grown leopard that was about to use me for dinner when she didn’t even have a stick. And I have no idea how she got the AC working, because getting the generator started is usually a job for the strongest men in the camp, and she’s way too young to be another Orphan.”
“Orphan?” Riley checked.
“Orphan,” Sam insisted. “An Orphan named Karen Ross is leading the group that did this. She shot me because she recognized I’m one, too. So then she killed the witnesses, and her men rounded everyone else up and locked them in the surgery trailer.”
Jack strode over to where Riley was holding the phone. “Sam, this is Jack. We’ll be there as fast as we can manage. Is there a landing strip anywhere near you?”
“Closest one’s maybe twenty kilometers north, but I doubt you can land anything bigger than a Piper Cub there. Do you even know where we are?”
Jack looked over at Willow, who was typing away on her laptop. Willow nodded eagerly and pointed at her screen.
Jack glanced over and went back to the phone. “Your GPS signal on your phone is still working. We’ve got you down to a fifty-foot circle. Is there anyone we can call before we leave?”
Sam groaned. “Hell no. The closest authorities would love it if this compound just happened to burn to the ground with everyone in it, and plenty of the local soldiers would have no qualms about doing it.”
“My mom and dad!” the girl squealed. “Nigel and Marianne Thornberry. Our satellite dish doesn’t pick anything up half the time, but I can give you the number, and you can call them. They’re bound to be within a couple hours drive. Dad will be all British about it, but don’t worry.”
Nigel and Marianne Thornberry? For real? Then this had to be one of their daughters! Wow!
Jack wrote down everything the girl gave him. Alex noticed Willow typing the same information into a window on her laptop.
Hanna whispered, “Alex, why are you so excited?”
Alex whispered back, “They’re the Thornberrys! They’re famous! They’re like Steve Irwin, or David Attenborough. Annie and I have like twenty of their nature documentaries! They have one on cheetahs, and there are cheetah cubs in it, and they even rescued cheetah babies from poachers in it, and the cubs are the cutest things ever! They go all over Africa and Asia and South America, and even in the ocean sometimes, and they’re totally amazing!”
Hanna obviously hadn’t ever heard of them, but there was a ton of stuff Hanna had missed out on. She just whispered, “I would like to get to go all over the world and explore someday.”
Jack leaned over and whispered, “I bet they’re not anywhere near as famous as Terawatt. Now she’s really awesome.”
Alex blushed and pretended she wasn’t totally embarrassed.
Riley carefully said, “Are you going to run out of power if I stay on the line?”
“No, we should be good. The car battery was untouched, and the solar panel on the roof seems to be working, too. I just didn’t have parts to replace the components to dial out. And Riley? If I don’t make it …”
“No! Don’t say it! You’ll hang on, and we’ll get there soon!”
Sam sounded so desperately tired. “Babe, you’re thousands of miles away, and I know Jack has pull, but really …”
Willow got up and said loud enough for Sam to hear, “We’re in London. We can be there in hours.” Jack cleared his throat, and she corrected herself, “I mean they can be there in hours.”
Jack added, “We have gear already. We can be at the Cessna in twenty minutes —”
“Sir, we can’t get through traffic that fast.”
“— and we can be over you in five and a third hours after that, and some of us will be parachuting in on your position. So expect us in under six hours.”
“Sir, we only have one spare parachute in the Cessna right now, because we needed the extra room in the cargo hold.”
Jack nodded. “And that’s good enough for what I have in mind.”
While Riley stayed on the line with Sam, Jack picked up Willow’s cellphone and dialed. “Hey, Mulligan, you and Garrett still hanging around?” He nodded at whatever the DSS guy said. “We need a police escort to Heathrow in the next two minutes. If we can just pile into two cop cars and get driven there, even better.” He nodded again. “Yep, it’s an official international SRI emergency. And since we just saved a huge chunk of England from another Walsh Special, we deserve it.”
As he hung up, Willow looked up from her typing. “I texted Hermione, and she’ll make sure the police are out front and ready.”
Jack took Riley’s keycard, went over to Riley’s room, and came back with Riley’s duffel bag and ‘golf bag’. He looked around the room. “Saddle up, boys and girls. Tera, you just duck into the gun bag until I open it up again.”
Alex did it, but that meant that the next several minutes were really confusing, as Riley hauled her inside the gun bag down halls and down stairs and into cars, and then she got driven around London at high speed with sirens blaring, and then she was being lugged across a flat surface, and then finally the bag got opened up and she saw she was at the Cessna, and already inside it.
She was surprised to find all the weapons were in between the seats, instead of being in the hold. Jack said, “We need to strip ’em and clean ’em before we go into another firefight. We’ve got five hours to kill, and we have to have something to keep Finn from going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs while we wait.”
She didn’t know what to say. “Oh. Okay.”
Riley was busy getting the Cessna’s sat phone dialing into Sam’s sat phone, so hardly anyone was even sitting down and buckled in when the jet took off. Really, Jack was the only one who needed to buckle up, because Riley and Hanna could just grab something and hold themselves in place with one hand.
And then they were in the air, and flying at close to Mach one on their way to Africa.
* * *
Eliza wasn’t too surprised that she hadn’t been able to call her family. Their stupid satellite dish seemed to like to stop working whenever you really needed it. Sometimes she wondered if it was alive, and she needed to try talking to it.
Like Debbie didn’t already think she was crazy.
She just wished she knew if Darwin was okay. And she wished she knew if she’d brought the right medical stuff over to the jeep.
Dr. Finn said, “This is good. All right, I can make a three-way tap with this. Now try not to get antsy. I’m going to take this large-bore needle and stick it into my pneumothorax and try to delay the problem with some aspiration.”
Eliza gulped. “Umm, Dr. Finn, don’t you need local anesthetic to do something like that? And antiseptics? And a sanitary area instead of a dirty jeep?”
Dr. Finn smiled at her. “That’s right. It would be really handy if we had any of that.”
Eliza cringed at the exhausted tone in Dr. Finn’s voice and the way she had to make an effort to talk normally. “I could try looking harder. Maybe there’s stuff that isn’t locked up that I could get …”
Dr. Finn patted her on the shoulder. “This’ll be okay to hold me for a few hours.”
Eliza worried, “Can they really get here that fast? I mean, when I flew to England and when I flew back, it took a lot longer. And it’ll be dark. They’re not really going to try to parachute into the area here in the dark, are they?”
Dr. Finn just nodded. “They may try something else, too. My husband Riley? He’s an Orphan, too, like in the news. And he works with real superheroes. If we’re really lucky, he’ll be parachuting in, only with Terawatt.”
“Terawatt! Really? That would be so awesome!”
Dr. Finn smiled. “You should talk to her … since you have superpowers, too.”
“Me? Umm, no way, I’m just a kid. And I know a lot about animals from my parents.”
“Mm-hm. If you say so,” Dr. Finn said smugly. “Now watch carefully. You’ll have to do the other side.”
Eliza watched in alarm as Dr. Finn managed with just one hand to tape up the bullet hole in the front, and she was taping it up so there was plastic wrap over the hole. It looked like it really hurt, but Dr. Finn was just refusing to yell. “Doesn’t that hurt? A lot?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, it hurts a lot. But not as much as getting shot.”
Dr. Finn changed position, which wasn’t that easy in the seat of a jeep when you had a nasty bullet hole in your thigh and another hole in your good arm and a place in your chest where a bullet went all the way through you. Eliza tried not to wince at the pain on the doctor’s face.
“Umm, Dr. Finn, the hole back here looks worse than the one in front.”
Dr. Finn just said, “Yes, honey, that’s what we expect. The exit hole is usually more ragged than the entrance hole, and that’s even assuming the bullet doesn’t rotate during its passage through the body, or hit a bone and flatten so something wider exits, or hit a bone and then fragment.”
Eliza tried as hard as she could not to hurt Dr. Finn, but it was messy and bloody and gross. She’d seen worse injuries on animals, but seeing it on human skin just seemed so much worse.
“Good job,” Dr. Finn breathed. She directed Eliza as they put together some of the parts Eliza had found in the few medical stores that weren’t locked tight. Then they duct-taped everything in place. “Good. Now don’t be squeamish on this part. Hand me the largest needle.”
Eliza clenched her jaws. Dr. Finn took a huge needle, hooked it up to a tube that went to the gadget they’d put together, and jabbed it right into her side. Within seconds, blood and air were squirting through the tube into the glass bottle that was part of the gizmo. “Is … is it supposed to do that?”
Dr. Finn took a slightly bigger breath than she’d been managing. “Yes, Eliza, that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. The blood and air are keeping me from breathing right. We’ll aspirate this, and hopefully I’ll be better. And we’ll have help long before I need to worry about problems from antisepsis.”
Eliza crossed her fingers that the doctor knew best.