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Chapter 176 – Prom NightHanna was halfway along the long exterior side of the gym, moving past what looked like a couple of big fuel storage tanks and away from the short exterior side with the three sets of double doors. The applause suddenly stopped. There were gasps. There was a small crash, and a loud crash.
She couldn’t see in, because the windows on her side were thirty feet above the ground. But there was no mistaking when a massive TK pulse shattered half of the windows above her and made the side of the building shake.
Those were supposed to be impact-resistant glass, too. Whoever was wielding TK in there was out of Klar’s weight class. If Hanna’s guess about the force of the impact was right, they might be out of Azure Crush’s weight class, too. That would not be good, when they had been preparing for someone who could lift a book or pop a lightbulb.
She turned and sprinted for the double doors. Lieutenant Jo was fifty feet closer to the doors and already running that way.
She heard over her comms, “Stepmom to Dad. Call in a Code Terawatt and get the hell over here with everything we’ve got in the trunk!”
Hanna caught up with Jo just as they turned the corner. The double doors all slammed shut, two pairs suddenly locking a chaperone or two out, and one pair crushing a student who was standing in the doorway.
Jo pointed at the injured boy and yelled, “Help him!” Then Jo grabbed the closest doors and tried to force them open.
Hanna could hear the screaming inside the gym as she sprinted for the desperately yelling boy.
The two doors had clamped together until they had nearly cut through the boy’s right arm and leg. She grabbed the edges of the two doors and heaved.
The doors barely moved. Even with all the telekinesis being thrown around inside the gym, their threat had enough left to outmuscle Action Girl without even trying. That was not a good sign.
And what was wrong with the idiots inside there that they were stopping and capturing the events on their phones instead of trying to help the injured or get out of there?
* * *
Alex was a silvery puddle in the passenger seat of an SR-71, but she still winced when the window popped up on her Blackbird-connected tablet.
Acid Burn: brown stuff has hit the fan
General Nuisance: we got trouble right here in River City. And
General Nuisance: hey who changed my codename? We agreed it would be Kid Crash!
Acid Burn: Two words — frog pictures.
General Nuisance: Fine! Be that way! Okay, T, we’ve got a TK girl who is massively overpowered and loose in the school prom. We still don’t have an ID, but Burn Sherlocked it down to one of these five girls.
Acid Burn: here u go
Another window opened up, and school pictures of five teenaged girls appeared. Four looked like cheerleaders, and one looked like that one girl who always got picked on by the school pretties. Alex studied the pictures and the names.
Terawatt: I wont be onsite for maybe 20 or 30 mins
Acid Burn: Good thing Stepmom called for backup over an hour ago.
Acid Burn: Eww! Prom kids are getting some of this on their phones and cams!
Another window popped up with a little video box inside it. Alex could see people running around and screaming, while something big was ripped loose from the stage and sent flying through a high window. Fire ran from something outside, through the window, and down the wall like it was burning liquid. It cascaded over the rolled-up wooden bleachers, which began burning, too. More people started screaming and running mindlessly.
Terawatt: This is bad! They’ll all be dead before I can get there!
Acid Burn: Stepmom, Dad, Daughter all on-site. And
General Nuisance: Damn it! Invisible Friend is probably trapped inside, and Dad reports no contact since well before incident.
* * *
Martha glanced up at the TV. She was putting away leftovers while Andrew scrubbed pots and Patti ran plates through the dishwasher. Someone had left the channel on CNN, but that was okay. Some of their anchormen were pretty hot.
Oh, shit. That was some kind of supervillain attack in a prom. And the scroll across the bottom said it was happening back in Chamberlain! She knew people there!
“Andrew, I …”
A pot clanged on the floor.
She turned to look. Andrew was gone. The doors at the far end of the kitchen were only just starting to swing shut. How fast was that kid?
Patti glanced out the door. She turned and shrugged. “It’s like he vanished or something.”
Andrew hadn’t planned on using his superpowers, but he hardly ever planned on using them. He just had some crisis turn up, and then he was using his powers to save the day.
Okay, a couple of times, he was using his powers to get someone in trouble. Or get himself out of trouble.
But he had never really tackled more than a team of bank robbers. Or a scam artist. Or a Mob hitman. Not a real, live supervillain. Not like Terawatt did all the time. But if he didn’t stop this one supervillain, hundreds of kids at a senior prom were going to die.
That was why he was running. He could only fly at about eighty or ninety kilometres an hour, but he could run at about two hundred eighty kilometres an hour, and he could do short sprints at a little better than that. So he could get from the Outward Bound camp to Chamberlain in maybe four minutes if he ran as fast as he could down the road and he didn’t have any problems with cars or trucks. And he didn’t set his shoes on fire from the friction or kill himself, because he had never in his life tried running this hard for this long.
He wondered how Terawatt did it. Did she have special super-clothes from the U.S. government or something? After all, she hurled lightning bolts from her hands and you never saw her gloves burning or anything.
He wished he had his own super-costume. At least he had a name. Ultraman! He’d picked it years ago, but Dr. Jeffcoate had talked him out of using it. But now there were real superheroes with real super-costumes and real super-names out there. So he was going to be Ultraman again.
He made a slight detour through a front yard that had clothes hanging on a line, and he stole two t-shirts. With his strength, it was easy to tear one in pieces so he had a mask to put over his eyes and nose, and a mask for his lower face. The bigger t-shirt went over his Outward Bound Counselor t-shirt. He really needed not to get recognized, because Dr. Jeffcoate would be so upset with him!
* * *
Lieutenant Jo Lupo heaved for all she was worth on the double doors, but they weren’t opening. She could see through the panicked crowd that there was one girl still standing on the stage. The girl looked like someone had practically poured blood all over her. If it was her blood, Jo didn’t know how the girl was still upright and conscious.
If that girl was the TK wielder, then Jo just needed one shot to end the crisis. She was packing a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum that would stop anything short of a Code Terawatt. But if the girl was one more confused vic, the perp would attack anything that might be a threat, and things would get a lot worse.
If only Klar could have contacted them and given them some decent intel. Too bad that life didn’t run on ‘if only’. They didn’t have the intel, so they were going to have to get in there, get these bystanders to safety, and track down a serious threat.
She could also see that someone with TK had pulled fuel out of those damn fuel storage tanks, and had turned one side of the gym into a big Molotov cocktail. If Klar was over there, he was in trouble.
If Klar was anywhere in the gym, he was in trouble. There was no way for them to find him now without infrareds, and once the gym got hot enough, infrareds wouldn’t help a whole lot, either. Since he hadn’t responded on comms and he hadn’t stopped the threat on his own, he was probably out of commission.
* * *
Sergeant Walters raced the car across the grass to the gym doors. If Lupo and Action Girl couldn’t pry them open, it was going to take the Jaws of Life. Or at least the heavy chain in the car’s trunk and a lot of horsepower. And he sure couldn’t just smash a set of double doors in with his front bumper, because there were dozens of teenagers pounding hard to get out.
* * *
Andrew ran past the side of the school and up to the gym doors. The first thing he noticed was the two babes. He could see a pretty blonde trying to rescue a prom guy, while a hot Latina struggled to get another set of doors open. He ran past the Latina to the blonde, and he grabbed the doors holding the trapped guy. He gave them a good yank. The handles tore off in his hands, but the doors refused to open.
What the hey? Something was holding them, even if he couldn’t see anything. So he grabbed the edges of the doors and he yanked hard. The doors ripped off their hinges and went flying off behind him. Fortunately there weren’t any people standing there, or he might have killed them.
The sexy blonde grabbed the injured guy in one hand like he weighed about thirty pounds, instead of more than she did, and she hauled him out of the way of the stampeding promgoers. Whoa. Another superhero? Well, he was hoping she was a superhero and not a supervillain, because she was hot.
She yelled at him in a voice like a female drill sergeant. “There’s a strong telekinetic loose in there! We have to get these people out now!”
He leapt into the air and landed beside her as frightened people came pouring out. And a guy who acted like a principal started yelling. “Everyone remain calm! Follow me over to the street so we’re a safe distance from the building!” Andrew thought that sounded like a good idea, even if it wouldn’t do much for anybody who was really hurt.
He dashed in and found water pouring onto the floor on the side away from the fire. And live electrical cords waving in the air. Uh-oh. He could see four of them. He ran at his top speed to the first one, flew into the air, and grabbed the thing a couple of feet behind the plug that was waving threateningly in the air. He yanked it hard, and the other end came ripping out of the wall. That worked pretty well.
He hung onto the cord in his hand and snapped it at the next two live wires, tangling them in his cord. He yanked them out of the wall, too. The fourth cord tried to dodge out of his way by leaping up toward the ceiling, so that gave him a few seconds to dive down to where the thing was plugged in and yank it out of the wall.
He let the water keep pouring onto the floor, hoping it would stop some of the fire on the other side of the gym. Instead, he flew across the room and scooped up two people who were unconscious on the gym floor. Then he ran them out to safety. He did that twice more in a matter of seconds. But the gym was starting to fill up with smoke, and the fire was getting bad.
Fire? Extra uh-oh. There were fuel tanks on the side of the building over there. He had seen them when he ran up to the gym. He sprinted over, tearing two more doors off their hinges as he went. One mostly-empty fuel tank was already ripped open, with burning fuel pouring up the side of the building and rushing into the gym through broken windows. The bigger fuel tank looked like it was still intact.
For a few seconds. Because fuel from the smaller tank was splattering all over it and turning it into a giant bomb that was about to blow this entire school into splinters.
* * *
Lieutenant Lupo slid past the desperately fleeing prom kids and rushed into the heat and smoke of the burning gym. She had her Desert Eagle out of her purse and ready. She didn’t give a shit how bad it freaked the prom rats who saw it. At least Unknown Superguy had done the helpful thing and helped get the fucking doors open. Or in his case, completely out of their doorframes and thrown thirty feet back toward the parking lot. She hoped he could deal with the burning fuel tanks before they exploded and took this whole building with them.
“You can’t bring a firearm onto school grounds!”
Jo stared at the pompous old biddy who was getting up in her face. “Department of Homeland Security. Unless you WANT a crazed supervillain to kill every kid in here.”
“No! Of course not!”
She glared. “Then organize the other teachers, and get everyone out of here, including the injured!”
For just a second the swirling smoke cleared enough that Jo could get a look at the stage. She snapped up her automatic, but the stage was empty.
Was the blood-soaked girl the perp? If so, where had she gone? If she wasn’t, what had just happened to her?
Jo made for the corner where Klar was supposed to be. Oh, fuck. Several metal tables were crushed like an angry giant had stomped on them. Behind them, two girls had been smashed against the wall. Neither one of them was alive. Neither one was anywhere close to ‘still alive’. Jo didn’t need to go over and check their pulses. Someone smashed into a concrete wall until they looked like they’d been tossed into a car crusher? No chance of a pulse, or anything else.
If Klar was over here when the TK blast came through, he might be in the same condition. And she couldn’t find him. God damn it!
* * *
Sergeant Cliff Walters ran past one of the teachers, who was standing there prying the safety tab off a CO2 fire extinguisher, like something that small would help against the massive fire raging across the bleachers on that side. Idiot.
He yanked the canister out of the guy’s hands and said, “I need that. You need to get as many people out of here as you can.” Then he ran through the smoke and fire for the corner where Klar was supposed to be. It would have been real frigging helpful if the sprinkler system was working, but maybe someone had telekinetically crushed the waterlines.
Lupo was already over there, only she was doing her job. She had her DE out, and she was carefully checking the burning stage for their supervillain.
He clicked his earjack. “Dad to Stepmom. I’ll find Klar, you track.”
Action Girl came running barefoot across the gym wielding two of the Desert Eagles she had gotten out of their car trunk. He was pretty sure that he couldn’t dual-wield something of that caliber and hit a target more than twenty feet away. He was also pretty sure she could.
Action Girl said over the comms, “Daughter to Stepmom. She did not get out the front doors, so she is still in here or else she took a back way out.”
“Stepmom. You take point.”
“Daughter. Roger that.”
Two hot women in sexy dresses — two women who could rip him into bite-sized pieces without breaking a sweat — moved like a pair of commandos onto the burning stage. He hoped like hell that there was a way out back there, and not a death trap.
* * *
Andrew looked at the burning but intact fuel tank. It was all up to him. If he couldn’t handle this, things would get really bad, really fast. And it wasn’t like he was invulnerable.
On the other hand, being super-strong but not invulnerable was a much better superpower than being invulnerable but having normal human strength. As he knew from personal experience.
He darted thirty feet away onto the grass, and used his superspeed to start digging it up as fast as he could. He tore handfuls of dirt out of the yard and hurled them onto the fire. An ordinary person would be wasting their time. But he hadn’t been ordinary since he walked into Dr. Jeffcoate’s lab at the wrong time and got hit with that energy thing as he fell into those chemicals. Except for the times when he’d been hit with an energy beam and temporarily lost his powers, he’d been like this non-stop for nearly three full years.
In seconds he had hundreds of pounds of dirt and dust covering the tank and burying that part of the fire. Only problem? The building was on fire, too, and the ripped-open fuel tank next to it was on fire, and so that tank would just get hotter and hotter. He had to get it away from the building.
He heaved on one side and tore it loose from the supports it was welded to. He heaved on the other side and freed it. Perfect!
Not perfect. Either the TK from the supervillain or his own strength had torn a rip in the side of the tank. Fuel was spurting out through the rip. Even worse, there was already spilled fuel all over the place, and fire was racing from the other tank along the leaked fuel toward him. It was going to set off that whole storage tank. Unless he did something.
He grabbed the tank and heaved it onto his shoulder, but the fuel was still streaming out of the rip in the side, and the fire was racing toward the tank. He ran. The leaking fuel followed him relentlessly, and the fire followed the fuel. He couldn’t run at anywhere near his top speed with this weight on his shoulder, but he was definitely keeping ahead of the flames. He headed for the road he had taken into town. There was a bridge across a big creek a couple of miles back. All he had to do was get to the bridge, run through the creek to the other side and far enough away that the fuel couldn’t run down to the creek, and the fire wouldn’t be able to follow the fuel leak.
He took off.
* * *
Jo Lupo moved down the dimly-lit hallway. She had her shoes off and tucked in the self-belt of the dress. They needed the element of surprise, and clattering along in high heels was not the way to do it. If their supervillainess heard them before they found her, they were probably going to get what those prom girls had gotten. Or what the gym had gotten. But if they got out of the school, she was going to need her shoes again. Hanna had just ditched her shoes somewhere. Too bad Jo’s feet weren’t nearly indestructible.
They were following the blood trail that Hanna could smell. According to Hanna, it wasn’t human blood, but pig or something like that. Jo wanted to know what kind of sick fuck dumps gallons of pig blood on some poor kid as a prank. That wasn’t a prank, it was a psychotic assault.
So they knew where their suspect had gone, but they had no idea if she had doubled back, or even left some sort of psychic trap for them. They moved swiftly down the hall, checking doors and side halls as they went. Jo held her automatic carefully, and she was extremely glad that Hanna’s ‘dad’ had been a real asshole, because Hanna’s gun safety was excellent even under fire-zone conditions.
They came to a crossing corridor. Hanna signaled that they needed to go forward. She signaled Hanna to check to their right as she checked to their left.
She whirled around the corner, her gun pointing at where potential threats might be, and then she snapped back out of sight of an attacker. The left-hand side hall was clear. Hanna signaled that her side was clear, too, and they moved on.
It was pretty clear where the supervillainess had gone. The doors at the far end of the hall had been smashed open and were halfway off their hinges.
Hanna moved forward on point, and Jo moved as silently as she could behind her. They were cautious as they moved toward the doors, since their perp might be lying in wait just outside, in case someone was crazy enough to chase after an insane telekinetic who could rip steel security doors off their hinges with her brain.
Hanna stopped and snapped her head up a couple of inches, like she had heard something from above the doors. Jo stopped, too. Ignoring good intel was stupid, and Hanna’s senses were an exceptional source of intel. Then Jo heard it, too. There was a tearing, groaning noise that grew louder and louder. The far wall collapsed, burying the opening. And the ceiling in front of the doors fell in, with tons and tons of concrete and steel smashing into the hallway. That entire side of the building was falling inward.
Jo yelled, “Run!” and she sprinted madly back toward the other side of the school. She tried to ignore the way her breasts were bouncing in her lowcut bra, and the way her skirt was swirling up around her thighs. She promised herself that she was never wearing a dress and heels on an op again.
* * *
Sergeant Cliff Walters stepped over the crushed tables and tried to ignore the mangled remains of two people. He was guessing from the tatters of prom dresses and the long, blood-soaked tresses that he was looking at what had once been two prom girls. Whoever their supervillain was, she had a TK blast like a punch from Azure Crush.
If Klar was really where he was supposed to go, then he ought to be around here somewhere, assuming the girls hadn’t blocked him from going where he needed, and assuming the TK attack hadn’t slammed him across the floor to somewhere else.
Cliff used the CO2 extinguisher in short blasts, checking the floor first and then the area under the bleachers. The frost formed over an unconscious but still breathing invisible teen. “Thank God.”
But Klar was out cold. Cliff put a hand on Klar’s invisible throat and could feel Klar had a decent pulse. But when Cliff sprayed some more CO2 to get a better look, he could see the kid was slammed against a steel support post. When Cliff put a hand behind the kid, he could feel blood dripping down the post. Damn!
Cliff checked the back of the kid’s head and found a major scalp wound. At least there wasn’t a squishy area or a depression or bone fragments sticking out. On the other hand, Cliff could feel blood trickling down from the kid’s nose and the closer ear, so either the TK force that hit him in the face did that damage, or the kid might have a skull fracture.
Cliff really wished he had a neck collar or a back board. Or a team of medics briefed on Klar’s unique medical problems. Or even some time. But the other side of the building was a massive fire from floor to ceiling, and the stage was on fire, too. He only had seconds before these bleachers were on fire as well.
He gingerly peeled the kid out of the spot he’d been wedged into, and cradled Klar’s neck as carefully as he could before hurrying toward the gym doors. He figured he looked ridiculous, carefully carrying no one. He’d worry about that if someone in authority called him on it.
* * *
Jo Lupo used her comms while they trotted all the way around the school building to try and pick up the blood trail for Hanna. “Stepmom calling Dad. Stepmom calling Dad. We had to back up and try again. Perp brought entire side of the building down right in front of us.”
“Dad to Stepmom. Invisible Friend is out cold. Concussion, scalp wound, possibly a skull fracture. We need to get him medical treatment. Useful medical treatment, not what the civvies around here could cough up.”
Jo told him, “Call Grandpa for emergency evac and ask for Aunt Jan.” She was pretty sure Willow was the one who had tagged the general with the codename ‘Grandpa’ for the op. She figured the general would have gone for something more like ‘Cool Uncle Jack’.
What the hell. At least ‘Stepmom’ was better than being ‘Rarity’. And the general still hadn’t gone with Rainbow Brite characters. Even if Miller was worried the general was going to use Barbie character names for an op now that Pyre had a shitload of Barbies. Frankly, she wished she’d had a Terawatt Barbie when she was little, instead of the girly-shit Barbie stuff she’d been given. Her Terawatt Barbie would have beaten the holy fuck out of her brothers’ G.I. Joe army men.
She heard, “Dad to Stepmom. Got Invisible Friend stretched out in the trunk, a floormat rolled up as a temp neck-brace just in case, and a compress on the scalp wound. Calling Grandma and Grandpa.”
Hanna sniffed carefully, but she couldn’t pick up the scent again. Granted, it was not as if she was a bloodhound, and she was not sticking her nose to the ground. But old cars driven by students had leaked so much oil and gasoline and radiator fluid and everything else over the years that the parking lot and the ground around it were saturated with other odors. She couldn’t find the scent of the blood.
She asked Jo, “How do you get enough pig blood to drench a person ten feet below the buckets?”
Jo muttered, “There was a hell of a lot of blood on the stage there. Unless there’s a neighborhood butcher who lets teens rummage around in the back for free, they probably stole it.”
Hanna suggested, “You could kill a couple of pigs and hang them by their back feet and slit their throats and drain the blood. Except for the part about being pigs, I think that is not unlike how some kosher meats are prepared.”
Jo glanced at her. “How do you know that? Willow?”
Hanna explained, “No, Deborah Goldstein at my school. She is very friendly and very interested in learning German and Polish because she has relatives in Europe.”
She walked about, staring at the ground and hoping to find some new blood spatter to start from. She finally admitted defeat. “I cannot pick up the scent.”
Jo casually said, “She went that way” and pointed down the street.
Hanna started to ask how Jo could tell, but when she looked up, it was obvious. And it was obvious that there was going to be very little useful police response.
Several blocks down the little street, there were two police cars. They had been slammed off the street, through a yard, across a garden, and most of the way into a house.
* * *
Sergeant Walters finished the medical report on Klar.
The general cursed colorfully and then added, “Good job. Uncle Walter is calling Aunt Jan now. We’ll have an SRI chopper with med support on its way ASAP. It’ll be there in … a little over two and a half hours.”
Damn it. It wasn’t like he knew how to put his field medic training to good use with a patient who he couldn’t see. He had dealt with the scalp wound as well as he could. He had checked the kid’s heartrate and breathing and BP. He had carefully palpated the wound so he knew the skull wasn’t dented or pulped. If the kid had been conscious, Cliff could have at least gotten some data on pain and focus and eyesight and possible confusion. But an invisible patient? You couldn’t even check the guy’s pupils or look for injuries that would have been obvious on someone you could see.
Cliff checked, “Any word on The Family Friend?”
“Inbound, since you and Stepmom were smart enough to fire off the Fantasti-Flare. ETA ten to twelve minutes now.”
“Thank you, sir,” Cliff replied. Ten to twelve minutes wasn’t great, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. He really didn’t want Lupo and Action Girl engaging a supervillain who could crush you to a pulp with just a thought, unless they had maximum backup. “Do we have any new intel? Stepmom reports threat appears to be straightlining due west along Maple Street.”
‘Grandma’ jumped in then. “West on Maple? That’s useful. Jackryanrules put together a town map with relevant locations for our five suspects. Looks like the only candidate we have is the house of Carrieta White, also known as Carrie. One parent, mother. Father apparently out of the picture. Let’s see … Wait … Okay, accidental death a couple months before Carrie was born. No police files at all on the daughter, but the mother has a mondo list of really minor charges and such. Public nuisance, misdemeanor harassment, trespass … It looks from the notes in the police department files like she’s a religious nut who won’t take no for an answer.”
He sighed unhappily. Poor kid. Home life was probably grim, bullied at school, and finally utterly humiliated at prom. Someone must have pulled a lot of strings to get Carrie White up on that stage. Had the whole prom been in on it? There must have been a lot of votes for her for prom queen to get her under those buckets. He was feeling less and less sympathy for the promgoers he’d just helped rescue.
“Dad to Grandpa. Leaving sat phone connected to base comms. I need to give the new intel to the family.”
* * *
Jo Lupo moved swiftly down the street. She was monitoring their six, as Hanna tracked the perp by the damage. She didn’t really need Hanna as a tracker. Stevie Wonder could have tracked this one. They had gotten half a block past the unconscious policemen in the wrecked police cars before they needed to deal with the next obvious signs. Every streetlight was ripped loose and hurled out of the girl’s way. Traffic lights were wrecked. Electrical lines were ripped apart, and a lot of them were still sparking angrily. Several houses too close to the sidewalk had their fronts smashed. The girl had cut through a grocery parking lot instead of walking around it. There were cars tipped over in her wake and store windows smashed in, and four streetlights ripped loose from their concrete moorings. Jo took a moment to put a couple of rounds in a big transformer on a utility pole to knock out the electricity to the streetlights before the gas leaking from the wrecked cars got to some still-sparking cables.
Whoever the girl was, she was probably too traumatized to think straight. Jo was betting it was the girl on the stage who was covered in pig’s blood, and the two pulped girls by the corner of the stage were some of the pranksters. Pranksters? Assholes guilty of felony assault and probably a lot worse. She needed to get to the girl and talk her down. Maybe it wasn’t too late to salvage this mess and save the girl. And save the fucking town while they were at it.
She listened as Dad called on the earjack with new intel. They had addresses for all five girls, but only one was straghtlined from their route. Carrieta N. White, aka Carrie White, bullying victim with a mom who was a religious nut. Jo figured based on some kids she had grown up with that Carrie was either just like mom, or else browbeaten to keep her mouth shut. She looked at the damaged house she was running past. Based on the street number, the White place couldn’t be more than three blocks ahead.
Hanna was still moving ahead of her, but not so fast that she would leave Jo behind. Granted, you had to run pretty freaking fast to leave Jo Lupo in your wake.
Jo spotted the house by guessing on the street numbers while they were still a block away. It was already too late. The house was collapsing. It was simply crumpling in on itself like a cardboard house in the hands of an angry giant. By the time the dust settled, the entire building had been brutally compacted into something that nearly fit into its basement. That was a pretty terrifying level of TK there.
And there, standing on the other side of the wreckage, was the girl. Carrie White. Still in her prom dress. Still covered in blood and looking utterly traumatized. Only now she had a carving knife sticking out of her chest. Holy Christ, had the kid’s mother done that to her? If so, it was pretty unlikely they were ever going to convince her to take a few deep breaths and chill out. After the prom incident and this, it was pretty unlikely she would ever trust anyone ever again.
The girl snapped her whole head to the side and stared in Jo’s direction. Jo saw the air ripple, and she dived to the side as she yelled, “Take cover!”
Hanna moved like greased lightning, darting in the opposite direction. Working with a teammate like Hanna was a real pleasure. Even now.
Something invisible slammed into her like a speeding truck and threw her back across the street. She landed hard enough in someone’s front yard to knock the wind out of her. The pulse rushed onward and smashed in the wall of the house behind her. A roughly circular area about twenty feet across was smashed in like a full-sized wrecking ball just hit that home. If she hadn’t dodged, that would have been her. She ignored the pain and she snapped off a three-shot grouping at the girl’s center of mass.
* * *
Hanna dived out of the way of the TK attack. Then she kept moving, in case there was a follow-up assault on the position where someone would expect her to land. She did a hands-free cartwheel and snapped off three shots with both handguns.
She really liked the Desert Eagles. She was still hoping General Jack could get her something more powerful, but what she really wanted didn’t exist yet. She was sure she could control a handgun that fired the ammo that Colonel Riley used in his Barrett.
She heard Jo firing a three-shot grouping at the same time. That told her that Jo wasn’t injured enough to worry about. And Jo would be really angry if Hanna — or anyone else — acted like they thought Jo was hurt enough to be cared for. Jo did not like to be babied. Jo had not wanted to be treated as injured even when she had two broken bones in her lower leg.
None of the bullets hit the girl. Hanna was a little disappointed, but not surprised. After all, she had seen what Alex could do against even heftier firepower. And she was pretty sure this girl had a lot more TK than Alex did. The girl just brute-forced her way through it, stopping the bullets cold instead of deflecting them.
Hanna spotted it out of the corner of her eye as a TK blast ripped the gun out of Jo’s hand and tossed Jo like a ragdoll into the wreckage of the house behind her. Hanna instantly moved and opened fire again, trying to distract the girl enough to give Jo some relief.
Something tried to rip the automatics upward out of Hanna’s hands, but Hanna hung on. That didn’t work very well, since it suddenly meant she was flying up into the air and backward while hanging onto her Desert Eagles. She hung on, but she was flying higher and further away. When she began to fall from about a hundred feet up onto a roof speckled with antennas, she knew she was in trouble.
Someone flew in and grabbed her from behind. Her first thought was ‘Alex!’
But this wasn’t Terawatt. This was the super-strong speedster from the gym. The guy flew, too! Neat! And he was sopping wet, so Hanna could see through his outer shirt to read the ‘Outward Bound Counselor’ shirt underneath. And the guy’s mask wasn’t really very good, even for something that was probably thrown together at the last second. She could even see his eyes where he had punched holes through the upper part to let him see.
He totally needed someone to help him with a uniform. That mess was just embarrassing.