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Chapter 175 – Prom QueenAlex loved the Corcoran Museum, and the ‘downtown’ campus for Corcoran College was really nice.
And she was totally surprised that Jack pulled something. Not!
One of the Corcoran College upperclassmen had been interning with National Geographic in South America and had a big photographic exhibit in the museum. Of frogs. And Jack knew Willow had ranidaphobia, which Alex didn’t even know what it was until Willow walked into an exhibit hall while talking with Jack and turned around and unexpectedly found herself face-to-face with a four-foot-high frog.
Okay, it was a framed blown-up picture of a really tiny frog, but Willow still screamed. She screamed like it was a live ten-foot tarantula. And then, when two security guards rushed in, she was totally embarrassed and she couldn’t stop babbling about how she had ‘frog fear’ and she didn’t know the exhibit was about frogs and she was really, really sorry. Meanwhile, Jack just stood next to her and acted like the supportive boyfriend who would never do something horrible like tricking his phobic girlfriend into walking into a room full of big frog pictures without telling her first.
Later, when they were walking north to get back to Jack’s car, Willow complained, “Okay, there’s plenty of scary stuff out there, but there’s only two things I’m really phobic about, and one of them is frogs. The other is public speaking, especially singing in front of other people, but … frogs. Ranidaphobia. And Jack darn well knows it, too.” She glared at him.
Jack casually said, “Hey, a bet’s a bet. Remember what you did to win our little bet last week? First one to the restaurant?”
Willow insisted, “Hey! I paid for the dry cleaning on your uniform afterward. And the steam cleaning for your car interior. And I bought a whole new bottle of olive oil.”
Alex decided she was not going to ask for details. Sometimes Jack and Willow were just too weird.
Willow went on, “And it’s not like I scared the peepee out of my significant other, like some great big doodyheads I know!”
Jack checked, “Pee? Do we need to cancel dinner at the Ritz?”
Willow scowled. “No, it’s pee of the figurative. But you were really naughty in there, so you don’t get to pay.”
Jack smirked. “I’m not the one who screamed and caused security guards to scramble.”
Alex told him, “But you were really naughty. So I’m paying.”
Jack stared at her like she had just sucker-punched him.
Willow burst into giggles. “Yes!” She even did a little victory dance and gave Alex a high five.
Jack pretended to scowl. “And now they’re ganging up on me.”
“Poor, pitiful you,” Willow said without an ounce of sympathy in her voice. “Forced to go to a really nice restaurant and get delicious food for free.”
Jack insisted, “But I like picking up the check! Well, I like paying when it’s you. Or Alex. Joe Frady? Him I’d stick with the check even if I had to pull the old ‘dine and ditch’ trick.”
Alex even knew what that was. There were some guys at her school that Louis warned her about, because if you were eating with them and they ran out, you might be stuck paying the whole check. And Louis had been carrying enough cash to pay for him and Marsha, but not four more people as well.
Why did stuff like that always happen to Louis instead of someone else?
But after a very nice dinner where Alex totally could not eat as much as she wanted because they were being waited on by the world’s most attentive waiter, Jack drove her back to the Cessna. She hugged Willow and General Naughty, went silvery, pulled her gym bag into her morph, and flew into the jet to get ferried back home.
Alex got a few more hours done on the unix tools course. Who knew that knowing awk and sed and C and unix was going to be mega-helpful for learning perl? Or at least the piece of perl the course wanted to teach you. Okay, perl looked pretty cool, in the sense that not only was there more than one way to do a task in perl, there were probably more than a dozen ways. On the other hand, perl was weird. Even weirder than sed and awk and C, because it sort of deliberately took all the weirdness of sed and awk and C and unix commands and a bunch more programming languages and stirred them all together in a big pot with several tablespoons of wacky for seasoning.
Once the Cessna got within a hundred miles of Paradise Valley, she bailed out and flew home. She even got home in time for dessert. Yay! And kitchen clean-up. Yuck. Not that she could complain out loud about the clean-up part, because Shar was already avoiding doing kitchen clean-up whenever she could.
After clean-up, Alex took Willow’s hint to heart. She moved her uniform out from under her bed. She just flopped down on the floor so she could watch what she was doing, and she used her TK cutting wheel to slice a tiny line along the bottom of the baseboard behind her bed until the gap was big enough for her to puddle through it and into the space between the walls. The space was only about three and a half inches deep, so she had to take her boots and boob padding and a few other things out of the gym bag and turn everything sideways so they’d fit in the cramped space. She figured it would only take her a couple extra seconds to pull what she needed into her morph, and everything was way safer now. The weights got to stay under the bed, along with the gym bag, which now only had energy bars and her dopp kit and innocent stuff like that. And she remembered to put the Annie Farrell valise back together with clean stuff in it, and that went inside the wall, too, even if it had to go in opened up so it would fit.
And then Alex had to take her mom and dad and Shar into the living room and give them the bad news that Shar was going to have to be at Jack and Willow’s house for the next four school years.
Shar was really sad, but she said, “I sorta thought that’s why you were feeling totally unhappy.”
Alex’s mom looked weepy, but she gently murmured, “Alex, I think we all knew this was coming, sooner or later. There is no way you can go off to college and take a nine-year-old with you.”
Her dad gently asked, “But Jack’s base is pretty close to Washington, isn’t it? Can’t you just fly back and forth when you want to?”
Alex nodded miserably. “Jack and Willow said I could fly up after Friday classes, and it’s under an hour for me to fly to their house, and then I could be with Shar all weekend and fly back late Sunday night or mega-early Monday morning, depending on my class schedule.”
Her dad told her, “I know guys who live in the Bay Area or outside L.A. and have to commute an hour each way every day, in rush hour traffic. So it’s manageable if you want to try it. You can go visit Shar just as often as you two need to.”
Her mom softly pointed out, “And we know Terawatt has to fly off to save the day all the time. What would Shar do if she was left behind for days?”
“I could eat as much chocolate as I wanted!” Shar piped up.
“You’re really not helping your case here,” Alex hinted.
Shar gave her a smile. “Well, it’s the truth.”
Alex’s dad added, “And I imagine ’round the clock showings of ‘The Iron Giant’ might figure in there somewhere.”
Her mom sighed. “And we don’t know if D.C. could be the next target for … The Empire.”
“The Evil Empire!” Shar insisted.
Her mom kept going. “So maybe Shar would be a lot safer at Jack’s base. And if your babysitter might be Action Girl, you’d be a lot safer than we can manage.”
Shar pouted, “But I like being with Alex! And I’m too old for a babysitter! And … and what if Auntie Willow won’t let me make my secret carrot recipe?” She got off the couch and pressed her face into Alex’s blouse before she started sniffling.
Alex hugged Shar tight. “I’m pretty sure Willow will let you make your secret carrot recipe. She might even let you make our secret cauliflower recipe or Aunt Janet’s secret broccoli recipe, because she says Jack needs to eat more veggies and less cow. And Cindy could teach you how to make her secret green bean casserole that’s really great, too. And Jack can teach you how to grill meat, because Willow says he’s really good at it.”
Shar sobbed into Alex’s shirt. “I’m gonna miss Sophie and Maria and Brandi and Dottie and Dennis and Patty and Danielle and all of ’em, but I’ll miss you a lot more!”
Alex hugged her and reminded her, “I won’t be gone. I’ll be back every few days, like all weekend and stuff.”
Shar wondered, “Even when Ray’s team is playing games?”
Alex winced. “Oh, crud. I forgot about that.”
Her dad suggested to Shar, “Maybe Jack would want to drive down with you so you two could sit with Alex and watch Ray when he gets to play.”
“Can I get a shirt with Ray’s team on it?”
Alex thought about Willow and smiled. “Jack’ll probably want to buy you shirts that say Air Force Academy on ’em, but I think you could probably get Ray or me to buy you a Georgetown shirt.”
But even after a long talk, Shar still snuck into Alex’s bed when Alex finally came to bed around eleven. Alex just hugged Shar tight and rubbed her back. And tried not to cry.
Sometimes, being a superhero was just really, really cruddy.
* * *
Alex was feeling mega-guilty in the morning, so she got up and scooted Shar through dressing and eating breakfast and doing her hair and all that stuff. Then she drove Shar to school.
Alex was already dressed and wide awake and everything, so she went over to her high school to check on how the yearbooks went. She had to go to the admin offices to find out, because the room they had been using for the yearbooks was closed up.
Principal Wilson saw her through the glass window of his door, and he came out to greet her. “Alex! What brings you back here? Can’t get enough school?”
Alex smiled at him and replied, “I think that would be my sister Annie. I came by to check on the yearbook sales.”
He walked her over to Debbie, who handled attendance and class-cutting and all the stuff like that. “Debbie, do we have any yearbooks still to be picked up?”
Debbie glanced at a sheet on her desk and told him, “Just seventeen, and we’re down to two extras.”
He slowly shook his head. “I’m sure some of those seventeen won’t get around to picking up their yearbooks until after we close for the summer.”
Debbie looked up at him. “I’m pretty sure last time we had four people wait until September to pick up the yearbooks from the spring before.”
Alex had a thought. “Well, if you sell the last two extra books, get a list of anyone else who wants one, because we can get them a lot of the computer files instead. At a minimum, we can copy the DVD for them.”
Principal Wilson smiled at her. “That DVD’s the best idea the yearbook team’s had in ages. Good work. I just wish I had a dozen more students like you for the next few years.”
She blushed all the way to Gloria’s. And the four Bavarian cream doughnuts she bought were strictly as a reward for the yearbook thing, and not because she was being a pig. And anyway, she needed the calories for working out later, and she got all the way up to 295 pounds on her best TK lift, even if she had to go take a bunch of ibuprofens after, and eat a big bowl of chocolate chip ice cream with all the hot fudge sauce left in the jar and the last ten Oreos. And then her mom made her go to the grocery store to buy stuff and even wrote a note on the grocery list.
She was so not ‘eating them out of house and home’!
* * *
On Friday morning, she took Shar to school, too. She had been thinking about summer Shar-care as sort of a burden, but now that she was going to lose Shar at the end of the summer, it became totally necessary and something really special. Even if Shar still had half a week of school left, plus summer camp and science camp. The summer camp was a two-week sleepover camp Shar was excited about because Maria was going, too, and the science camp was a day camp that the Paradise Valley Chemical plant organized over at the college. And Shar already had a crazy number of playdates lined up, some at the Mack house and some not.
Alex was still driving around Shar’s school checking for badguys when her tPhone went off. So she pulled over and answered her phone.
Jack said, “Hi, Tera! Having summer fun yet?”
Willow added, “Frank talked with Jack and said he was really impressed with you and he was looking forward to being your mentor and giving some of the college ‘artheads’ a hard time.”
“Ooh, good! Is that why you called?”
Jack replied, “Well … no. I just wanted to give you an FYI. Burn picked up a couple of YouTube videos and tweets and Instagrams and such that were all possibles and all from the same high school, so we’re going to send Action Girl in as a scout, with Lupo and Walters as ‘parental units’.”
Alex was about to ask why not Sergeant Scott, but Sergeant Walters looked a lot more like he could maybe be Hanna’s dad, even if Sergeant Scott was the one who was blonde.
Jack added, “And we’ll send Grover along as invisible backup. Having support that badguys can’t spot is … totally of the tera.”
Alex checked, “So you’re giving me an FYI in case you need to Blackbird me there?”
“Got it in one,” Jack told her.
“So where is it?”
Willow said, “It’s a small high school in a small town. Thomas Ewen Consolidated High School in Chamberlain, Maine.”
Alex admitted, “I’ve never even heard of the town.”
Jack complained, “Well, there are lots of places people only know because bad stuff happened there. The OK Corral. Tunguska. Petrie’s Island. Ogden’s Marsh …”
Alex winced, “You can stop now.”
Willow jumped in, “Hopefully this isn’t like that. But it does look like someone using TK in the school. But there’s nothing about this that’s older than a week ago on the interwebs, so probably a student who just discovered his or her powers, instead of a teacher with a lot of practice.”
Alex hoped, “Maybe this won’t be so bad.”
Jack just replied, “Well, we can hope. But if Action Girl and Lupo and Klar and Walters can’t handle this, then we’ll need our big gun.”
Alex wasn’t sure she liked being thought of as their ‘big gun’.
“Hey, Canada!”
* * *
Andrew walked over to Craig. “Hi, Craig. Why can’t you just call me Andrew?” The guy was even polite about it. Still.
Craig looked over at the dining hall. “Yo! Joisey!”
Martha wiped her hands off on a towel and flipped him a bird. She headed on over, still in her cook’s apron. Craig led Andrew over to meet up with her.
Martha was about thirty, and not bad-looking for thirty, but she had a rep around the place as a cougar. She could have been getting pounded by any of the older guys who actually ran Outward Bound, but she liked ’em younger. And she was a great cook. No doubt about that. And she had that Jersey accent, which just grated on Craig’s ears.
“Andrew? This is Martha Gray. She’s our head cook, and she just loves people to make fun of her New Jersey accent.” Martha gave Craig her death glare. “Martha? Andrew Clements, all the way from Briarwood, which is some sort of suburb or something of Toronto. In Canada. He’s one of our noobs. You needed someone to fill in for Jack today and maybe tomorrow? Here you are.”
Andrew put his hand out and smiled politely. “How do you do?”
Martha smiled a little less politely and a little more lustily as she looked him over. “I do pretty damn good, Andrew. So have you ever cooked before?”
“Well, my mom always insisted that we know how to do the basics, like peel potatoes and cook macaroni …”
She led him off to the kitchen area, where he would get a full afternoon and evening of scut-work, and at least that much of getting hit on by Martha. With Jack out sick for at least a day or two, that took care of one of Craig’s problems … and maybe two of them if he was lucky.
* * *
Hanna walked into the school. Her ‘parents’ were right behind her, and she could hear Grover was right behind Lieutenant Jo. He was really hard to track, but the soles of his invisible shoes made the slightest scuffing sound on some materials. An invisible person with Colonel Riley’s skillset would be really fun to spar with, but Grover was still working with Sergeant Scott on really low-level martial arts techniques. And Cindy would be really mad if Hanna accidentally hurt Grover in sparring.
She was even wearing a ‘Cindy’ kind of outfit for the op. The miniskirt was cute and flirty with soft pleats, and stopped around mid-thigh. The short-sleeved top showed off her collarbones and framed her face. Her one-inch heels were really pretty, even if they were not designed for fighting. And she was wearing a metal ribbon bracelet that wrapped around her right forearm four times. It was not as good as a bracer, but it was a steel-titanium alloy with a fake silver finish, and it would provide fairly good protection against a blunt instrument or a knife slash, while looking purely ornamental.
‘Stepmom’ was wearing a dark red wrap dress and two-inch heels, and she was wearing a lot more makeup than Lieutenant Jo Lupo ever wore, and she had her hair down and styled with a lot of mousse. Hanna thought that Jo looked really gorgeous like that. She also thought that men who were afraid to date Jo were total dorks. Totally of the dorky, as someone would say.
There were just not enough men out there like Charlie O’Neill, who knew exactly what Hanna was, and just what Hanna could do, and just wasn’t scared off by her. Plus, he was a very good kisser. Considering that his dad made Willow very happy, Hanna was figuring that someday Charlie would make her very happy, too. In exactly the same way. Even if her mom would have a cow if it was in Hanna’s bed at home.
‘Dad’ was wearing a sport coat and khakis, with a nice button-down shirt and a boring tie. Hanna knew that Sergeant Walters was not carrying as much weaponry as Lieutenant Lupo had in her purse, but he was far from unarmed. Hanna would have liked to have more than her ribbon bracelet and the hairbrush in her purse that was really a six-inch stiletto.
It looked like they had already missed the chance to really study the student body up close, since the signs said today was the last day of classes and tonight was the senior prom. Without having the entire student body in close confines, it might be a long-term undertaking to track down a possible TK user. While she was fully aware that undercover work and investigative work could be months-long efforts requiring patience and diligence and care, she didn’t really want to take on that kind of job. Not unless it was in a place like New York City where she could get out her bat-grapples and swing around the skyscrapers for hours at night to burn off all her excess energy.
Plus, General Jack said the Batman would be very fun to annoy.
* * *
Principal Henry Grayle was assuming the afternoon would be a breeze. He was trying to catch up on paperwork. The last week or so had been a headache, with a couple of bullying incidents, and angry parents protesting Miss Desjardin giving their little darlings detentions and in one case said girl being barred from the senior prom. Not that he wasn’t backing Miss Desjardin. This kind of thing needed to be addressed, even if the bullies were seniors. He was just glad that none of the guilty parties had parents with any pull, or the school board would be all over him.
When his secretary beeped him on the intercom, he opened his door and welcomed in the little family. Even if he had to make an effort not to stare. He was not the kind of man who was interested in children, especially not the children who were in his care, but the two women who walked into his office made even the cheerleaders of the school look like garbage. The teenager was a shoo-in for the next time a Hollywood teen movie needed a girl to play ‘incredibly gorgeous Swedish exchange student’. The woman was too young to be her mother, and was a stunning Latina probably in her middle or late twenties. If the woman could act, she would probably put Michelle Rodriguez out of business. The man was a massive Nordic-looking guy who looked just barely old enough to be the teen’s father.
“Principal Henry Grayle. Pleased to meet you. Go ahead and sit down.”
The women sat on either side of the man, which was a little unusual. Usually, the daughter wanted to sit beside the mother, unless there was some friction going on. He made a little mental note.
The big guy smiled. “Cliff Peterson. This is my daughter, Hanna Anne Peterson, and my wife Josefina. I’m lookin’ at some job opportunities in the area … we’re tryin’ to move out of the Quad Cities as soon as we can … and they said this was one of several towns where their personnel commuted from, so we’re tryin’ to get a look at the schools before everyone’s gone for the summer.”
The Quad Cities? Henry tried not to gulp, but everyone in the whole country knew about Davenport Iowa and Umbrella Corporation and zombies. No wonder they wanted out of there. He smiled back. “Well, as you can see, you’ve pretty much missed that window here. Most of the classes have let out for the school year, and there are only a few students around who aren’t working in the gym getting ready for the senior prom tonight.”
The woman purred, “Hanna Anne would be a senior next year, so perhaps we could look around or peek at the preparations in the gym?”
The daughter scowled. “Please Jo, I can speak for myself.”
Well, he’d seen that problem before. Teenaged daughter, new wife. It wasn’t that uncommon. And the younger the wife, the more friction seemed to happen. He suggested, “Why don’t we see if we can find a student assistant to show Hanna Anne around, and I can give you two a short tour of the school.”
He wasn’t surprised that both women seemed relieved to hear that. Now he just needed to find a student assistant to give Hanna Anne the tour. He had too many boys who would melt into hormone-addled blobs as soon as they got a look at Hanna Anne, and too many girls who might not like dealing with a girl who looked like a lock for the next prom queen. Maybe Karen was available.
* * *
Jo Lupo didn’t like playing ‘meek housewife’. Not even if the sergeant had asked her to be more determined and less of a pushover. Not even if she got to play ‘pushy stepmother’ with Hanna, who was scary good as an actress. No one would guess that the pretty Iowa girl with the light Midwest accent was really Finnish. Or whatever the hell the E.U. decided she would be. It wasn’t like anyone could say ‘oh, German mom and dad so she must be German’. All anyone really knew was that Johanna Zadek had been just a convenient uterus, and no one was ever going to be able ID the genetic donors. If what Dr. Fraiser had said was correct, then Hanna had multiple genetic donors, some of which probably weren’t even mammalian.
And Jo knew perfectly well that if she dressed like this, and spent this much time on her makeup and her hair, and acted helpless and sexy, men would fight each other to take her out. But this wasn’t her, and it never would be. At least most of the men in the SRI couldn’t care less, as long as she was Orphan-level good on the battlefield.
She wondered how Alex made it work with Ray Alvarado. Granted, there was a massive disconnect between Terawatt and ordinary Alex Mack. Alex was a gentle, kind, caring type who was apparently more of a mother to Shar than she was a ‘several years older cousin’. Terawatt was a force of nature who could face down a fucking three-hundred-foot radioactive dinosaur. If what O’Neill had hinted was really true, Terawatt had gone into a real hell dimension and helped fight a real, live hellgod. That kind of put some of this shit into context.
Jo was more like Hanna. They could both fake being a normal, if very pretty, girl. Neither of them really was normal. Guys wanted a girl who was like J-Lo; they didn’t want an apex predator.
She still wasn’t sure what to do about Professor Winkelman. The guy had asked her out on a date just a few hours ago, while she was waiting for O’Neill to do the briefing for this op. And it was the most awkward invitation to a date she could remember hearing since she was about twelve. At least that twelve-year-old guy had acne and a voice that was still breaking. Winkelman had asked if he could take her out to dinner and her choice of movie, even if he stammered half the time he asked her. She knew he hadn’t stammered when he gave that presentation in front of a bunch of generals and Orphans at Andrews AFB, so he must have been damn nervous when he asked her.
But why? Was he serious? Guys didn’t want to take Jo Lupo out to dinner. Plenty of guys maybe wanted to take Jo Lupo to bed, but those guys didn’t stammer and dance around the issue, and most of those guys could barely use words of more than one syllable. The only guys who asked her out were guys who saw her as one more hot Latina and didn’t know what she really was. Except Winkelman, who knew exactly who she was, and what she was, and what she could do. But Winkelman was a nerd. A computer geek who loved geek stuff like ‘Firefly’. There was no way they had anything in common, other than not being able to talk about their work.
And holy crap, would her family have a collective shitfit if she dated a Jewish guy. It would be worse than Willow’s family when she told them she was dating a Christian, assuming Willow had told them yet.
* * *
Klar followed as carefully as he could, while the girl showed Hanna around. They walked around in the gym, which was going to be the usual prom crap. The girls talked about academic interests, and Hanna went with her cover story, which made her a pretty cheerleader type who wasn’t really interested in scholastics. So the tour was pretty boring for him.
At least Hanna was good at the undercover gig. “I am so totally glad to be out of the Quad Cities! If I never have to go back to Davenport except to pack, I am so down with that!”
The guide, Karen, was utterly fascinated at meeting someone who had been anywhere near a massive disaster. Karen just had no idea how close that whole mess had been to a real nightmare that could have spread all over the freaking continent. If Jack hadn’t jumped the gun and sent teams in before he had official clearance, there would have been t-virus outbreaks pouring out of the Spencer Mansion and all across downtown Davenport before anyone even knew there was a threat.
But Karen’s questions eventually gave Hanna the perfect entry point. “I bet there’s nothing at all like that around here. I could so use a year of just plain normal.”
And Karen fell for it. She started talking up some of the little tidbits Willow had managed to glean off the internet. The gym class with the exploding lightbulbs in the shower. The English class with the flying book.
Klar made mental notes on every one of Karen’s stories, as Hanna subtly lured Karen into talking about the teachers involved and the class periods and the school schedules. He figured there couldn’t be that many students who were in every one of those classes.
The gym class incident in the girls’ showers made it a girl. A quick look in the school records would cut that down a lot farther. Girls getting suspended from the senior prom probably made it a senior girl, or possibly a junior. A database join with entries from the other classes Karen mentioned would reduce that to something manageable.
As soon as Karen walked Hanna back to the administrative offices, Grover ducked out to the car and called Acid Burn to give her all the intel and let her do the firewall invasion. He was taking some computer classes, but he was going to have to get private tutoring from her before he could do even a fraction of what she could do.
It was just disheartening that Willow had been doing world-class computer cracking since she was maybe eleven, and he was still a long way away from one eleven-year-old’s skill level. Even if he was comparing himself to the best eleven-year-old cracker in history.
Sergeant Cliff Walters waited until he was sure Klar was in the car, too, and then he closed the side door. He hopped into the driver’s seat and pulled out onto the road. “What do we have?”
Klar explained what Hanna had wormed out of her guide, while he connected again with Acid Burn. He made sure his phone was on speaker for the rest of the car.
“Burn here!” came the AutoTuned voice he had heard so many times before. “I got into the school intranet, and I got it. We have five possibles that are in all the classes where people observed possible telekinetic events. That we know of, anyway. All senior girls. Susan Snell, Christine Hargensen, Christina Blake, Norma Watson, and Carrieta White. The first four were among a group of girls who got detention for bullying the White girl. Hargensen refused to serve her detention and got banned from the senior prom.”
Action Girl calmly said, “Then most of them will be at the senior prom. Maybe Hanna Anne Peterson needs to find a way in there.”
Klar disagreed. “You haven’t seen how tight the security is on stuff like that. You have to buy tickets to go to prom, and they guard the entrances like it’s Fort Knox. Then they check that you’ve got the right ticket, and maybe they even toss people who aren’t dressed according to the prom rules, if they have ’em here. You should ask Cindy about the Prom Nazis at the junior prom.”
Cliff glanced over at Lupo. “Lieutenant?” He wasn’t going to call her by her op codename until he needed to, because ‘Stepmom’ sounded like the kind of codename that would just piss her off. He didn’t mind being ‘Dad’ and Action Girl hadn’t shown any complaints about being ‘Daughter’, but Lupo had definitely scowled when General O’Neill assigned her the codename ‘Stepmom’. He was also assuming Klar wasn’t thrilled about getting the codename ‘Invisible Friend’ even if it had to be tons better than ‘Amy’ or some of the other codenames the general had come up with.
She stared out the windshield. “A prom’s dangerously crowded in a lot of places, but there ought to be clear areas. Klar, can you slip inside?”
There was a silence, and then Klar said, “Dang, I gotta stop shrugging and stuff. Okay, I can definitely get in, but not with an earjack. And that’s what I really need.”
Action Girl calmly said, “No problem. I just walk into the gym, thank Karen for being so nice, and step off to the side to sneeze. Then I plant your earjack on the back side of the gym bleachers they have pressed up into the sides. I’ll plant it at the north corner of the west side, near the right-hand edge of the stage area.”
And it went that smoothly. Cliff drove back to the front door of the school. Action Girl grabbed a strip of duct tape from the car kit, walked in, and was back four minutes later.
They grabbed an early dinner of fast food, even if Klar had to drink that clear Pedialyte crap instead. And then they drove off to find the Hargensen girl and talk to her.
That was the last time things went smoothly.
* * *
Sergeant Cliff Walters drove into the large side parking lot east of the school. He tried not to grumble. “Okay, Klar, go for it. First tasking is to get in place behind the bleachers and let us know you’ve got that earjack in.”
“Roger that,” Klar said. The car door opened and closed.
Cliff sighed. “I hope this goes better.”
Action Girl calmly said, “It was not our fault that Christine Hargensen is in hiding.”
Lieutenant Lupo tensely replied, “I hope that’s all it is. If she’s our telekinetic, she may be up to something as payback for getting banned from the prom. She seems unpleasant enough. The longer this goes, the more I’m glad I called the general.”
Cliff just nodded. Hargensen hadn’t been at her father’s house. Her father thought she was supposed to be at her mother’s place. Her mother thought Christine was supposed to be at her cousin Taylor’s apartment. Her cousin Taylor figured Christine was off with her asshole boyfriend Billy Nolan, either at Billy’s parents’ house, or off at this scummy local roadhouse that would serve underage kids alcohol if the cops weren’t around, or off at the nearest drive-in, or hanging out with Billy’s gang, or just screwing somewhere in Billy’s car. Just before they had checked the roadhouse and nearly had to beat the shit out of two bouncers, Lupo had finally called it in and told O’Neill that Hargensen might be off partying, but she might be off planning a Code Terawatt.
By the time they had gotten back to town, the prom had already been going on for well over an hour.
The ell-tee said, “All right. First, you find a place to park at the far end of the parking lot. Then we wait until Klar gives us a sitrep.”
“Yes, sir.” He obliged. He picked a spot that wasn’t right on the street edge of the lot, where a police car might spot them, but still gave him some flexibility. If he had to, he could drive from the parking spot right onto the grass of the school property, to rush everyone up to the gym or to race off away from the school.
And they waited. After fifteen minutes, there was still no peep from Klar. That couldn’t be good.
Lupo said, “Turn off the base comms and reboot it. A.G., check your comms.”
She fished her own earjack out of her purse and checked it, once he was done giving the comms a chance to reconnect with Klar. She stepped out of the car and closed the door. “Stepmom, calling Dad. Stepmom, calling Dad.”
He answered, “Dad. Reading you five by five.”
Action Girl tried her comms. “Daughter to house. Reading you loud and clear.”
“Dad. Also reading you.” He gritted his teeth in frustration. They had no way of finding out what had happened to Klar. Was he inside? Had he found the earjack? Was it OOC? Had it been found earlier and thrown away? And why, if Klar couldn’t contact them, wasn’t he coming out and tracking them down?
The ell-tee said, “Looks like it’s time for the Peterson women to make a little sortie. Dad, you stay put and handle comms. A.G., you and I walk around the outside of the gym looking for anything amiss. If anyone stops us, you wanted to go peek at the prom because your bitchy stepmom told you not to, and I came over and tracked you down because my bitchy stepdaughter snuck off when she was supposed to ride with us over to the next town to find our motel rooms for the night.”
Action Girl smiled. “That should work. People do not see planned ops when the people are not dressed for one and they are apparently not cooperating with one another.”
Lupo nodded. “Well, we’ll see how that flies with the Barney Fyfes around here, if it gets that far. I’m hoping we don’t get anything more than the principal, who will remember us. And he’ll remember we didn’t get along in his office.”
Action Girl added, “He will also remember your cleavage, because he had a very hard time not staring at it.”
Cliff had a hard time not laughing. Lupo did have a great rack, and that dress really showed it off. And he’d also noticed the principal had a hard time not checking out Lupo’s cleavage. And her legs. And her can. Lupo in that dress was pretty spectacular. If Cliff wasn’t happily married, and he wasn’t a non-com, and he wasn’t currently on her team for the op, he definitely would have asked her on a date by now.
He watched as Lupo gave Action Girl a one minute head start and then moved to intercept.
He wondered what else was going to go wrong. The problem with low-level telekinesis was just what the general had said in the briefing. Its power was not in sheer force. Its power was in the ingenuity and ruthlessness of the user. General O’Neill had obviously been thinking about this a lot. He’d pointed out that all you had to do to humiliate someone was to use your TK to press on their bladder. And all you had to do to cripple someone was poke them in the eyes or press on their brain. And all you had to do to kill them was clamp their carotids shut or squeeze their heart. Someone with six ounces of telekinetic force and really good telekinetic feel could do a hell of a lot of damage in the time it took you to realize you were under attack. Lupo and Action Girl were hellishly good in a firefight, but against a sneaky telekinetic, they could be out of action before they even spotted their attacker.
* * *
Klar was getting pretty worried. He’d needed to crawl under the tables where people had been counting prom ballots, because someone had put them right where he needed to go to get at the end of the bleachers. He had nearly been stepped on a couple of times, but he had finally managed it. Then he’d gotten to the place where Hanna was supposed to have taped his earjack in place. But there was nothing there. He’d even run his hands up and down the wood and steel in case he simply couldn’t see the damn thing.
He had found a sticky area that was probably from the duct tape, but there was no tape there now, and no earjack. He had to assume someone had found it and peeled it off and thrown it away. If they had turned it on, Sergeant Walters would have been alerted because he had the base system.
And now he couldn’t get out, because two giggling girls had backed up against the edge of the bleachers, forcing him to squeeze in between a couple of steel posts to avoid having them bump right into him. They were watching as the prom king and queen got crowned. The girl was fairly pretty, but the guy was strikingly handsome. Klar figured maybe it was one of those ‘vote for me and also my date’ deals. Or else a lot of people at the prom knew Carrie White was the bullying victim from a week ago and were casting votes of support.
What was so damn funny that the two girls in front of him couldn’t stop snickering?
That was when he saw the liquid pour down on the girl who had just been crowned prom queen. Big buckets of something liquid and sticky. And then the smell hit him. It was blood. He had been exposed to too much blood too many times not to recognize the stomach-churning coppery tang.
And the two girls were laughing their asses off. He had seen plenty of nasty tricks in high school and junior high, but this one was the worst.
One bucket fell and caught the surprised guy in the head. The kid dropped like a rock. That was going to be a hell of a concussion, if it didn’t kill him. The girl was covered in horrid, sticky blood. He had never seen any prank victim so horrified and humiliated. And the two bitches in front of him were still laughing their asses off. They had known all along what would happen.
Carrie White glared at the two laughing girls, and suddenly the air rippled. The two girls were smashed back into the wall so hard he could hear their bones break. Their bones, the tables, the wall … everything broke. The telekinetic blast slammed him backward, and his head hit the support pole behind him. Everything went black.