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Chapter 167 – Indian Love CallAlex texted some more with Eliza and Debbie during the day. Both of them were kind of freaked that Terawatt wanted to text with them, and Alex couldn’t really tell them yet that she was just an ordinary teenager like them.
Okay, none of them were really ordinary. Even Debbie, who acted like a typical teen but had been keeping Eliza’s secret for a while and had rushed off and rescued Eliza plenty of times. Oh, and Debbie was still mad at Darwin because that shirt Darwin wore everywhere used to be Debbie’s lucky shirt years ago, before some annoying chimpanzee stole it and wore it so Debbie never wanted to touch it again. The Thornberrys led really unusual lives.
School on Friday was pretty ordinary, other than that. The Friday chem ‘pop’ quiz that everyone in the whole class knew about ahead of time was pretty much exactly what Alex had guessed. Mr. Hooper was kind of predictable in some ways.
Then Saturday morning was fun. Well, she had to get Shar going, which was kind of frustrating, because Shar wanted to get out the door and off to Sophie’s about an hour before they were going to leave, and that meant Shar wanted to skip the important stuff, like bathing and doing her chores and eating a proper breakfast and letting Alex do her morning workout.
But then, after Alex drove Shar over to Sophie’s house, she went over to Ray’s house and hung out with Ray for most of the day. Ray was just finished with his morning workout because he was being really serious about off-season training for basketball. He was still in the shower when Alex got there, so she spent twenty minutes helping Ray’s mom in the kitchen and talking about Ray’s basketball career. His mom still wanted him to be a lawyer when he grew up, but Alex was pretty sure Ray was determined to find a job that made him happy and let him be ‘superheroine support’ as he called it.
Once Ray was dressed, they drove over to the Valley Mall and hung with Louis and Marsha for a few hours. Alex thought ‘Valley Mall’ was a dumb name, since all the malls were in their valley, but it was still way better than when it used to be the Atron Mall. Alex wanted to look at the same stuff as Ray and Louis, which meant video games and videos and toys. Anyway Marsha knew not to try shopping for clothes or shoes or stuff like that with Louis, since he’d managed to get them kicked out of three stores, and it sounded like one of them maybe wasn’t even Louis’s fault. The lingerie store where he got them thrown out by calling her ‘Jeff’ really loud and telling everyone she was a guy in drag trying on women’s underwear in the changing rooms? Totally Louis’s fault. Even if Marsha and Louis still cracked up every time they told that story.
And then that night, Saturday Night Live had a Maggie Walsh sketch with one of their comediennes made up like Maggie in a safari outfit and doing a Steve Irwin accent and showing a crowd of people her creations. And she did all the Steve Irwin things, like pointing at something awful and saying ‘isn’t she a beeyootee?’ And then whenever anyone in the crowd complained, she’d feed him or her to the monster. It was funny, but really sick. But maybe Jack was right, and you needed to be able to laugh at some of this stuff or else you’d go crazy.
* * *
The Imam listened as his favored mullah encouraged the freedom fighters and led them in prayers before they loaded themselves onto the jets he had ‘creatively borrowed’ from the Pakistani and Indian air forces. Some of them needed to be cargo planes.
He smiled in appreciation at his mullah’s attention to detail.
* * *
Khan Noonien Singh paced back and forth across his command room, grinding his molars. This was not to be tolerated!
Tran was already here and had just given him the news. That was as expected, since Tran was his councilor in charge of espionage, intelligence, disinformation, and cyberwarfare. The man waited patiently for the arrival of the other four councilors. That was as expected, too. Tran was a very patient man for an ‘Orphan’ as the annoying Americans called his people.
Karenin was the first of the other councilors to arrive. Khan was also unsurprised at that. Ever since Karenin had been identified by that puppet of the main bloc, and then the Russian police had turned up some of Karenin’s early activities, the man had needed to maintain a very low profile. Still, Karenin didn’t need to be out in the city or meeting lots of people in order to function as the ‘idea man’ of the council.
Gupta, Lee, and Marzakian followed in short order. He waited until they were all arrayed about the command table. Then he angrily announced, “Our mole in the primary bloc has just let us know that they are preparing for some sort of indirect assault. I want everyone called back, and I want all our positions on full alert.”
“Should we prepare any of the emergency plans?”
He snapped, “Naturally!”
“Then we’ll need to leave two of our people in their current positions. Otherwise they won’t be in situations where they can send out launch codes.”
He nodded. “That’s a valid point. Are the intercontinental missiles ready?”
“The politicians and the generals still believe our scientist that they require more testing, but we have eight ready to fire from silos once we take over their launch sequences.”
He said, “Very good. Our enemies have to learn that if you poke the tiger with a stick, you will be bitten.”
His science councilor Lee gingerly suggested, “I’ll just make sure our crisis rocket is fully prepared.”
He scowled at that. “What makes you think we will need it? We are not going to lose this battle!”
Lee cringed. “No, sir. Of course not. But it has to be prepared and maintained on a regular basis, and we need simulations so our people are prepared in case we need to evacuate, and thus this is a good excuse.”
He sighed and reluctantly allowed, “Very well. You may perform a full simulation, but the costs will come out of your budget, not Marzakian’s.”
Lee reluctantly nodded. It was just as Khan had expected. The man was excellent as a scientist, but didn’t have the stomach to lead.
* * *
Alex was helping her dad in the back yard and showing Shar how to plant flowers. With your hands. Shar really wanted to try it with telekinesis, but these were plants Alex’s mom had just bought and Alex wanted to make sure they didn’t get mangled or squished or anything. And there was nothing wrong with doing it the normal way, especially when her dad had these really great gardening gloves for everyone.
It was hardly even two pm when her tPhone went off. By then, everyone in the whole house knew what it meant when the ringtone was ‘My Little Pony’. Her dad still thought it was funny, except for the part where it might be a call that Terawatt was needed somewhere. Still, it wasn’t as bad as when Willow called and used the ‘Jaws’ ringtone. That was never good.
She glanced over at her dad, who just nodded and said, “Go.”
She ran into the house and went silvery so she could drop off her dirty shoes and pants and gloves. Then she flew into the home office. “Tera here. Go.”
Jack said, “It’s Khajuraho, which means —”
“Khan. Or Singh. Whichever.”
Jack smarted off, “The singh-ing kan-man who isn’t named West. Yeah, his home turf is being invaded by a team of supers that flew in either directly from Pakistan or used it as a flyover. Based on what we’ve got as a possible backtrack, I think we’re probably looking at Islamic terrorists with superpowers, flying in using stolen military planes, and probably departing from an area in Pakistan with a couple of suspected big terrorist training camps.”
“Oh, crud.”
Jack kept going. “First reports suggest that Singh’s people weren’t immediately overrun, and they’re fighting back, but things are escalating, and there’s a lot of collateral damage across a decent-sized chunk of the state of Madhya Pradesh. But it didn’t become an SRI tasking until the Indian Army just admitted to the U.N. that they think they’ve lost control over at least a quarter of their nuclear arsenal.”
“Oh, crud!”
“Yeah. Acid Burn thinks it’s probably P$ychon4ut, but she can’t find a way into the Indian private military net to do anything about it, because it’s physically isolated from the internet. The Blackbird’s on its way to Camp Atron. Grab your uniform and head on over to the tarmac. We can get you there in four and a half hours, and nobody else I trust is going to be getting there for a lot longer. I’ve got Team Two alerted, but they’ll need close to eighteen hours after they take off. Teams Three and Four are already out on ops and so it’ll be a while before we can get them moving your way. I alerted Finn even though he’s still on compassionate leave, but he’s having to scramble just to find a way to a real airport we can use. It’s hot and dry in Khajuraho right now, so Tsurara’s abilities would be really limited, but I put in a call anyway. And your buddies in London are off on some super-secret case in Northern England that I can’t find out about but I was told it’s not a Code Terawatt. Yet. If this is like the ‘little tasks’ Harry’s boss got sent on when he was younger, then it may not be a Code Terawatt, but it’s probably at least a Code Action Girl.”
Okay, all of that sounded really, really bad. “But Jack, how will I know what to do? And who am I helping?”
He sounded like he was grimacing. “You’re helping the people of India, and you’re stopping monsters, and you’re fighting anyone who’s hurting innocents because this is probably a red-on-red battle … oh, and if you can hurt whichever side is winning, so they’re more likely to wipe each other out, then good. And you need to expect that you’ll have sat phone contact with us, but otherwise you could be on your own for up to twelve or thirteen hours. We’ll have a filled fanny-pack with a sat phone for you when you get in the Blackbird, but you’re the only thing on Earth with your kind of capabilities. Sorry.”
Crud.
He paused for a moment. “Look, you know as much about super-battles as anyone else in the world, and you’ll be able to talk to me and Burn whenever you feel like it. You keep acting like you’re not good enough or you’re not smart enough or you’re not whatever, but you are. Every single time, you come through in the clutch. Maybe Carter built that maser, but you did everything else around the ISS, including saving her ass. Maybe Pyre got you out of that collapsed building, but you were the one who figured out how to use Pyre to take down Gojira. You outfought an entire team of North Korean supers. You outsmarted Danielle Atron. You even outsmarted Wacky Maggie when you were in Ogden’s Marsh. You keep winning, and it’s not because you’re lucky. It’s because you’re that powerful, and you’re that skilled, and you’re that smart. You can do this!”
She swallowed hard. “Okay. I can be at the landing strip in fifteen minutes.”
He replied, “You have … lemme see … about twenty minutes before the Blackbird comes in for its first touch-and-go. I’d say good luck, but I know you won’t need it.”
“Anything else?”
She could hear the smirk all the way across the country. “Your codename is Zok. You’ll know anybody else by their codenames.”
“Jack!” Stupid codenames. She should have known he’d get back to the Herculoids one of these days.
She dived under her bed and changed into her uniform, then flew down to the kitchen to grab a snack. Shar and her dad were already inside and waiting to see what was up.
She told them, “I’ve gotta go. It’s a badguy-vs.-badguy battle in India. Only they may have stolen a bunch of India’s nuclear missiles.”
“Can I firebend ’em?” Shar asked hopefully.
Alex just gave her a look. She told her dad, “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Willow’ll keep you in the loop.”
He looked really worried, but he just hugged her and murmured, “Go be the best superhero out there.”
She used her TK to snitch two of the apple fritters out of the box on the counter, and she took off. She even got to the runway early enough to finish one and start on the other before she spotted the Blackbird coming in.
Maybe it was because she’d gotten faster since the last time she did this, or maybe she’d gotten a little tougher, but she ‘stuck the landing’ on her first try. It did sting, but it wasn’t bad. She puddled in, locked the port in the canopy, and even got two more bites of her apple fritter before she had to go silvery as the jet rocketed upward.
In her seat was a stuffed-full fanny-pack, and there was also a weird computer tablet that was about seven inches by five inches and was hooked up to the Blackbird’s electronics. The fanny-pack had a bunch of energy bars, three high-calorie juice packs, and one of those small sat phones she had to synch up to her earjack. She went ahead and pulled the fanny-pack into her morph, and turned on the tablet. Then she just stayed silvery and held the tablet with her TK so she could read it.
It came up with a written message from Willow that there were files on the tablet to study, and then Alex could call Jack and they’d text. Also, anything they texted would be encrypted, but it still might get intercepted, so she should be careful.
Well, duh on that. If it was hooked up to the Blackbird, it probably had to go through the standard military channels to get to the SRI, so thousands of people would have a shot at intercepting their transmissions.
But the files Willow had already uploaded onto the tablet had a ton of information. There was a map of India at a dozen different scales so she could zoom out to look at where Khajuraho was in relation to other important stuff in the country, and she could zoom in to the point where she could see a street map of Khajuraho with important landmarks on it.
Whoa, Khajuraho wasn’t all that far from Bhopal. She knew a ton about the Bhopal chemical leak disaster from her dad. Methyl isocyanate was nasty stuff, and it wasn’t the only thing that got released in that industrial accident.
Alex memorized as much as she could from the regular maps and the topo maps and the population maps. Then she moved onto a file on the monuments of Khajuraho, and a file on possible Singh strongholds in and around the city, and a file on the Singh family, which was chock full of important politicians and stuff. There were even a number of scientists listed, including several university professors and a husband-and-wife archaeology team Alex thought she might have read about somewhere.
Then there was a big file about the military forces of India, and their nuclear arsenal. Oh, crud, this could be so horribly bad. The Indian Army had nuclear missiles in some silos and some nuclear missiles on special launching trucks. And they had tons of missiles.
They had Agni-I short-range ballistic missiles. They had Agni-II medium-range ballistic missiles that would supposedly fly up to 2500 kilometers. Alex had to stop and do the math in her head, but that was like 1500 or 1600 miles. They had Agni-III and Agni-IV intermediate-range ballistic missiles that were supposed to be able to go up to maybe 5000 kilometers. They had Agni-V intercontinental ballistic missiles that would go even farther. And they had Agni-VI intercontinental ballistic missiles under development that would have special countermeasures and multiple warheads. Crud.
And just in case that wasn’t bad enough, the Indian Air Force had jets specially equipped to be able to carry nuclear payloads, and they were working on subs that could launch nuclear missiles, too. Wow, they were really going for that whole ‘nuclear triad’ thing that the U.S. and the Russians had been pushing for decades. And, just because all of that wasn’t horrible enough, there was a note that Pakistan was believed to have between ninety and a hundred ten nuclear warheads of its own, and if any India nukes flew in their general direction, there would be retaliatory strikes that would get their own retaliatory strikes from India, and so on and so on.
Alex had no idea what she was supposed to do if Khan Noonien Singh managed to launch a bunch of nuclear missiles. It wasn’t like she was The Hulk and she could just go smash all of them.
Oh. Jack helpfully included another file, just in case. Making a nuclear missile inoperable. That totally did not give her a warm, fuzzy feeling.
Oh, wait, these things wouldn’t arm themselves if they didn’t launch and go through their flightpath first. There was a list of a dozen things she could do just to keep the missiles from firing, especially if they were the vehicle-mounted ones. And there were directions on disarming several types of nuclear warheads. That was less okay. But all these warheads were chunks of fissile material held far enough apart that they wouldn’t go boom on their own, with explosives around them to cram the pieces together really hard and set off a chain reaction that would typically be designed to go off hundreds of feet above the ground for maximum badness.
Maybe Terawatt needed to start an international program to halt nuclear proliferation. On the other hand, if she succeeded, then there would probably be what she was going to see today: international efforts to start superpowers proliferation. She didn’t like the idea that people might be thinking she was Exhibit A that superpowers were the new nuke.
There was even a file from Willow titled ‘DO NOT DRINK THE WATER’. She read that one really carefully. Okay, if she ran out of stuff, she could find someone with bottled water. Oh. But she had to check that the seal wasn’t broken. And she should stay away from ice, anything that might have water mixed in like fruit juice, and any fresh fruits and vegetables that someone washed … with the tap water she wasn’t supposed to drink. Ick. Americans had no idea how good they had it with good drinking water … except in Ogden’s Marsh, Iowa.
She read over all the stuff a couple of times. She figured she had more than enough time, since it was a four and a half hour flight. When she thought she was ready, she used the little attached stylus to pop up a chat program with a simulated keyboard at the bottom of the screen.
Zok: Tara, you there?
Tara: Hang on a sec.
Tara: Okay, we’re both here.
Zandor: Tundro got transport. Looks good so far. But ETA unknown.
Zok: I read everything. I don’t think I can remember all of it, but I read it.
Tara: You always remember the stuff you need to.
Zandor: And if that doesn’t work just use your laser beam eyeballs on it.
Zok: :-(
Tara: Keep it up and you’ll be sleeping with Gloop and Gleep tonight.
Zandor: Uh-oh.
But once Jack got done being a smarty-pants, he typed a lot of really useful stuff for her. A lot of it was about the Singh family and how powerful they were in Indian politics. And how the Indian Armed Forces worked, because Big Cheese and Top Banana and some of the Joint Chiefs were trying to get as many potential nuclear missiles shut down as they could. So the subs weren’t armed with nukes yet, and the bombers were grounded, but a lot of the vehicle-based nukes in the northeastern part of the country were probably under Khan’s control, and there were probably missile silos in that state, too, but the Indian government would neither confirm nor deny.
And he had details on where the fighting was going on. The map Willow popped up on the screen showed a ton of damage all around the area outside Khajuraho, and ongoing battles all around the outer edges of the place. The map looked to Alex’s inexpert eye like maybe six attacking forces had hit, all at the same time, and spread out like a big hexagon to surround the city and keep any of Singh’s people from getting out. It also looked like it would pretty much destroy the entire surrounding area and kill an incredible number of innocent people.
Not that Alex thought either side would care. Well, Singh would care, because those were his peons and losing them would damage his political base. And the other side would care, because the more people they killed, the more ‘successful’ they could claim they were.
After Alex signed off and went back to reading the stuff on the tablet, she wondered what the heck people would think if they ever decrypted that chat that Tara and Zandor had with their flying dragon. They’d probably think someone was on drugs. Really weird drugs.
* * *
It took four and a half hours to get over India in the Blackbird, and by then the pilot had alerted her that he was going to have to head straight to the closest military airfield that could handle a Blackbird, because he was low on fuel. That meant she was going to have to fly about a hundred miles to Khajuraho once she bailed out.
Still, she’d left home a little before two thirty in the afternoon, and it was only around seven in the evening back home. But India was on their own private standard time with no daylight savings or anything, so it was 7:30 am local time. She had read a thing from Willow on why they were half an hour off what you’d expect, and it made sense internally, but it just seemed really weird to Alex.
She left the tablet still hooked to the Blackbird’s electronics ports, and she flew out of the Blackbird while it was at about forty thousand feet and still going maybe eight hundred miles an hour. With that kind of speed, she had no trouble zooming off toward Khajuraho way faster than normal. And at eight miles up, she could dive down really hard and not lose too much speed too fast, even if the wind resistance made things way too hot.
And she was still way too late, even if she was still silvery and partly-aerodynamic. She arrived before eight in the morning, and there were fires and damaged buildings everywhere. It looked like the battles had stretched out most of the way north toward Rajnagar and south toward Ghura, and the small town of Khajuraho was mostly wrecked, except for a central area where the fighting was still going on.
And … Oh, crud, someone was firing off surface-to-air missiles at her.
At least two someones.
Make that four someones. Crud!
There were three little things shooting her way from south of Battle Zone Central, and one really massive thing firing at her from what she figured was a Singh stronghold. This was so not good.
She took a guess about what she was facing, and she dived right at the three things she figured were rocket-propelled grenades.
Those things were either going to smash into her and blow up, or fly really high and blow up because of their little timers. They weren’t going to track her or blow up as soon as they got close to her. No, that big thing was the threat. It was a lot faster than her, and it might have weird guidance stuff in it, and Jack had told her some missiles were TV-guided and some guy could guide the thing right into her. If it was just infrared-targeted, then it probably wouldn’t even track her.
She dived between the rocket-propelled grenades, and she looked behind her to see the stupid big missile curving to chase after her. She was hoping it would ram into one of the RPGs and they’d blow up and take out the other RPGs, but no such luck.
She zoomed at the ground, and the big missile kept curving, so she just let it follow her. A bunch of guys below her with machine guns and RPGs were using a damaged building for cover, so she aimed for the ground right in front of the thing. The missile came after her.
Okay, she could work with that. She slowed down a teensy bit so it would get closer, and she dived right at the ground in front of the wrecked building. Then instead of crashing into the ground like a doof, she cut back away from the building and toward the battle zone. The missile couldn’t make a turn that sharp, and it smashed into the ground with a huge explosion that pretty much took down the front of the wrecked building, too, so the badguys there had no cover. She hoped they were retreating, and not getting to shoot more people. But just in case she darted back to the now-collapsing wreckage of that building and caught up with the terrorists who were running out the back. She zapped all of them and grabbed their weapons with her TK.
She ignored the three RPGs exploding over head, and she made for the sounds of battle. And there was a burning building before she got there. With someone up on the top floor screaming for help.
Oh, crud.
And the back half of the building was already collapsing.
Crud! The Orphans and the super-terrorists were going to have to fend for themselves for a few minutes. She flew up to the open window, and the woman stared at her like she was a hallucination. Then the woman looked at the flames on the wall behind her, and tried to give Alex two little kids.
No way was Alex letting this lady die from saving her own kids. Alex grabbed the lady and the kids and pulled all of them into her morph. Then she puddled straight down the outside of the building and a safe distance away, just in case the front of the building collapsed, too.
She let them out of her morph and asked, “Is there any one else in there?”
The woman burst into tears and hugged her kids and babbled something Alex couldn’t understand. Hindi or something. Probably Hindi, but Alex had no idea.
“Do you speak English?” The woman just babbled some more and cried a lot more. Alex looked around. There were people hiding in nearby buildings and trying not to get killed by badguys. She yelled, “Does anyone speak English?”
No one answered her. She at least had learned how to say ‘no I do not speak your language’ in a couple languages, just in case. Not that she knew how to say it in Hindi.
She leapt into the air and went silvery. Then she flew around the building, using her TK to smash windows and check for people trapped inside the place. She found a family of six, an old lady, and a family of four. Each time she pulled them into her morph and puddled them out to safety. By the time she did that, the front of the building was starting to fall down, too, and she just had to pray that she had gotten everyone out.
She flew off toward Battle Zone Central and tried calling Willow. It took her about twenty seconds before she realized she still hadn’t had time to synch her earjack to the sat phone in her fanny-pack. Duh!
She used her TK to turn it on, and …
Oh, crud!
She flew right into a battle between a badguy and other badguys. To the north, in a defensive position, there were a dozen people with machine guns. And they were facing off against a giant half-human, half-spider thing that had to be thirty feet long, with the body and legs of a spider, except the legs were way too thick to be spidery, and where the head of a spider would be, there was the torso and two arms and head of a man. If a man was covered in black spider hairs and had a mouth like one of those movie Predators and was about three times bigger in every direction than a man was supposed to be.
Had these people heard about Spiderman and not seen a picture?
The man-spider thing seemed to be pretty much bullet proof, but every time it tried to close in, one of the defenders would sling a grenade at it. It spit poison and skittered back, but the poison was like a gallon of whitish goo that splattered against the defenders’ wall and took out two of the defenders. The grenade exploded and hurt the man-spider, but not enough to make it run off.
And in between the fighters and the man-spider, off to the side but trapped, there were four children hiding under a stone porch-like thing. Crud!
She swooped down and grabbed Mister Spider by his carotids. At the same time, she hit the row of soldiers with blasts of lightning. That took care of both sides. She went silvery as she dived under the porch-thing. Then she pulled the kids into her morph and puddled way off to somewhere safe before she let them go. She tried to tell them to go home but they didn’t seem to understand English either.
Okay, if a Hindi speaker flew into Paradise Valley, pretty much nobody there would know what he was telling them either. She totally needed a ‘universal translator’ thingie like in the sci-fi TV shows. Too bad even Willow couldn’t make one.
Ooh, that reminded her. She used her TK to check that the sat phone was on, and then she synched it with her earjack. That took less time this time than it did for her to eat two energy bars and wash them down with a juice pack.
She tried, “Burn? Terawatt calling Acid Burn. Come in, please. Terawatt calling —”
“Burn here! Oh, we’ve been really worried when you didn’t call in sooner.”
Alex frowned. “I’ve only been here for a couple minutes.” She checked the clock on her tPhone and saw she’d bailed out of the Blackbird over half an hour ago. “Oops, I think I lost track of time. I was searching for people in a burning building.”
Jack butted in, “No getting stuck in collapsing buildings anymore, okay? That’s a standing order.”
She got as snarky as she could. “Yes, sir, general sir!”
Willow burbled, “I tried calling and you didn’t answer, so I tried remotely linking to your sat phone and that didn’t work, so I was really getting worried, and —”
Alex confessed, “It wasn’t on. I had it off when I was in the Blackbird, and I forgot to turn it back on. Then I didn’t get why I couldn’t call you. Duh. Sometimes I’m so —”
Jack angrily cut in, “Don’t you dare say what you’re about to say, or I will rat you out to your parents!” Then he sounded a lot more patient. “Look, you’re all alone, you’re in a foreign country, you’re behind enemy lines … Hell, you’re behind two enemy lines! People make mistakes under pressure. This was a small one, and it’s fixed. In the words of Phil Esterhaus, let’s be careful out there.”
Alex figured it was a TV or movie reference, but she had no idea who it was or why he’d be saying it. Jack watched way too much TV. And if a teenager thought he watched too much TV, then he watched way, way, WAY too much TV.
* * *
She started circling around the central area, looking for pitched battles to control and innocent civilians to rescue. Boy, were there a ton of them. Khajuraho was only supposed to be about twenty thousand people, not counting tourists, but everywhere she went there were fires and battles and wrecked buildings and everything else you should avoid.
Oh, crud, there was a wrecked building, and people were trying to dig into the wreckage even though there was gunfire going on just a block or two away. She flew in and asked, “Does anyone speak English?”
Still no luck on that, but a twenty-something man in torn clothing was holding a crying two-year-old and he frantically pointed at the rubble. The little girl — well probably a girl, but the kid was covered in dirt and dust probably from being too close to a collapsing building — was crying what sounded like ‘mom’ over and over. Crud!
Alex flew over to the guys unsuccessfully prying at the heavy wreckage. She used her TK to pull the prybars and other stuff so the guys ended up being pulled around and facing her. She put up her hands in a ‘stop’ gesture and then went silvery so she could dive into the tiny gap they were working on.
Oh, crud, she hated doing this. She didn’t think she had been all claustrophobic and stuff before she got trapped under that building for half a day thanks to Gojira. But this was creeping her out. She kept going anyway.
She could hear sobbing and crying up ahead. She ran a small spark between her … well it wasn’t her hands, since she was silvery, but it was between parts of her that weren’t touching so there was actually a little spark. That gave her enough light to see.
There was a woman trapped in a tiny pocket and nearly squashed flat under a big slab of something. The woman was covered in dust, and her right leg … Oh, crud, her right leg was trapped between two chunks. It looked like her calf was pinched in between the rocky edges the way a calf was not supposed to be.
Alex wasn’t sure she could even get the woman out without leaving a piece of leg behind. But if Alex didn’t do something, the woman would die down here while that family stood helplessly not forty feet away.
She used her TK to rip a strip off the woman’s shirt sleeve and tie it tightly just below the woman’s knee. Then Alex took a deep breath — well, metaphorically, because she was still silvery — and carefully pulled the woman into her morph.
Once the woman went silvery, too, her leg oozed out through the crack and came along for the ride. Then Alex puddled back out.
She went normal with the woman held in her arms, although she had to use some TK to help lift because the woman weighed almost as much as Alex did. Alex checked that she could lift into the air with her utility belt and fanny-pack and the woman, too, and she could just barely manage it. She was going to have a miserable headache afterward, but she needed to get this woman to a hospital ASAP.
“Does anyone speak English? Where is the nearest hospital?”
Willow’s AutoTuned voice murmured in her ear, “Rajnagar, pretty much due north. There aren’t any close Red Cross emergency sites set up yet, because it’s a new battle zone and they’re still mobilizing.”
Several people yelled and jabbered at Alex, and she didn’t understand any of it. The people she figured were the husband and kid wanted to run over and hug mommy but they were freaked by the superheroine. She so didn’t want people to be freaked out by her powers. Or by her.
Alex insisted, “Rajnagar! I am taking her to Rajnagar. Hospital?”
One of the men nodded eagerly, “Rajnagar!”
Alex took that as an okay, and she went silvery, pulling the woman back into her morph, and flew off to the north. She had to pop her tPhone out of her morph to get a GPS heading from Willow, but it didn’t take that long to land at the emergency room entrance of the hospital and fly the woman in. As soon as she put the woman on a gurney, she was besieged by doctors and nurses and who-knew-what.
She just asked, “Does anyone speak English?”
Several doctors and nurses did, thank heavens. It still took a minute or two to explain what had happened and where the woman was from.
Alex refused to stick around and fill out forms. It wasn’t like she knew anything about the woman, so what was she going to write down? She just flew out the door and headed back toward Khajuraho. She didn’t go silvery, but she put a tight little TK envelope around herself to make herself more aerodynamic and to cope with the wind resistance. She muttered into her earjack, “Crud, I really need to know how to say ‘I don’t speak Hindi’.”
Willow instantly said, “Mujhe Hindi nahi malum.”
Alex choked, “What?”
Jack swore in amazement, “Damn, woman! You said you didn’t speak Hindi! Don’t tell me you learned a whole new language just since I was in the Congo!”