-- DAN
CHAPTER 17
“I’ve got a fix!” Scott Charles shouted, staring at the display screen. Brenda Jorden and Ned Fields, who’d been watching a movie in the living room for the last hour, sprinted down the hall toward Scott’s room. The walls shook with Fields’ pounding footfalls. Garrison Vessler was already there, and launched himself out of his seat.
“Where?” Vessler had his phone in his hand.
Scott squinted at the screen and tried to concentrate over the humming in his head. He could feel the guy, feel him out there radiating it.
“Uh...uh...there! Hammerfield Park!” He croaked out the address. Vessler hit one button. “Mobile units 3 and 10. Target is located.” He told them where.
Jorden crowded over Scott’s shoulder, her breath sweet on his neck.
# # #
Matt took Diedra’s hand, and the two of them darted off the walking trail and into the trees, ran toward the scream. The pines only stood in a narrow line, and seconds later they crashed through, into a small clearing with a fountain in the center. A brick pathway encircled the fountain and led out through a metal archway covered with ivy. A tremendous oak, hundreds of years old, stood off to one side in the clearing, and dark shapes writhed and struggled in its shadow.
The scream came again, a little weaker this time. Matt rushed toward the tree. He couldn’t tell exactly what was happening, but it was an obvious assault of some kind, and he shouted, “Hey! Hey!”
He reached the tree and rounded the far side, entered the shadow, and willed his night vision on. A young woman, a college student most likely, lay on her back on the ground, her head and shoulders emerging into the dim light. She wore a jogging suit, and an iPod lay on the ground near her head, crushed. The mugger had torn open her shirt and ripped off her sports bra. He knelt on top of her with his back to Matt, a wiry man in black clothes, both of his hands out of sight as he clutched the girl. The girl saw Matt over the mugger’s shoulder and screamed again, and the mugger twisted around and looked Matt in the eyes.
There was something very very wrong with the mugger’s jaw, and with the length of his arms and hands, and with his eyes, and a stray beam of light glinted off slick, glistening spines like the teeth of an angler fish.
Matt skidded to a stop and stifled a scream of his own.
# # #
The target showed clearly on the screen as a red dot the size of a dime. It echoed and whined in Scott Charles’s mind like hornets in a jar, and he tried to keep his eyes from swimming out of focus. “Jesus,” he said, less like a young boy than like an old man. “Look at the size of that signature.”
A voice came over the phone. “Mobile unit 3, ETA ninety seconds.”
The whining in Scott’s head increased enough for him to look away from the screen without losing track of the signal. Tears streaked down his cheeks. “What is this guy? What’s happening?”
Vessler shook his head. He put a comforting hand on Scott’s shoulder as he stared at the glowing red dot. “Same thing that’s been happening. He’s an augment, just like us.”
Scott returned to the screen. “Oh no he’s not. ...He’s not like us at all.”
Brenda Jorden watched the screen silently, and neither Scott nor Vessler saw her eyes light up.
# # #
The mugger flung himself at Matt, gave Matt no time to think. Out of reflex Matt clamped one hand on the mugger’s right upper arm, jammed the other one under the man’s left armpit, twisted down to one knee. The mugger’s feet shot over his head as his body flipped, and the force of his own momentum slammed him into a young pine. Needles showered down. He immediately rolled to his feet, still cloaked in shadow, as Matt sprang up.
They faced each other, frozen. Matt blinked. He stood opposite a perfectly normal young man.
What the hell had he seen a few seconds ago?
The jogger on the ground moaned, and Matt yelled, “Diedra! This girl’s hurt!”
Warily circling Matt and the mugger, Diedra moved to the girl’s side and tugged a cell phone out of her purse. The mugger stood there, frozen, for just over three seconds, then spun and sprinted away, like a cat through the trees. Diedra started to say something, but Matt cut her off with “Call an ambulance!” and bolted after the retreating figure.
A dozen yards into the woods, safely out of Diedra’s sight, Matt stopped briefly, cursing the time it took but too scared not to do it. He found a cleft in a lightning-struck tree and plunged his hand into the darkness inside it. Immediately the air temperature around him dropped, and a number of nearby leaves cracked and fell to the ground, coated with frost. Matt drew his hand back out of the cleft holding the Glock 17.
He chambered a round as he ran.
# # #
Vessler stood near Scott, barking orders into the phone, when he heard the boy gasp. He turned, glanced at the filter screen and almost dropped his handset.
Another target shined on the display. It chased after the primary’s dime-sized blip and glowed like a small sun. Vessler figured it easily the diameter of a half-dollar. The computer-generated lines and contours of the filter’s map began to distort around it.
Jorden paled when she saw the new signal. Her eyes flicked over to Fields, who inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment.
“What the hell is that?” Vessler hissed, but Scott couldn’t answer. His body shook with a sudden convulsion, and small, unnoticed tendrils of smoke rose from the metal band at his temples.
On the screen, the immense energy signature approached the smaller one, rolled over it, consumed it like an amoeba enveloping its food. The console itself began to smoke.
As soon as he realized Scott was in pain, Vessler jerked the metal headband’s connector cable out of the filter, pulled Scott away from the console, and screamed into the phone, “Mobile units! Pull back! Pull back! I say again, mobile units, pull back!”
Brenda Jorden disappeared from the room, reappeared almost immediately with a cool, damp wash cloth. She laid Scott down on the bed and sponged away the thick, greasy sweat that had popped out all over his face. To Vessler she said, “What was that? What were we looking at?”
Vessler had to leave, and knew it, and hated himself for abandoning the boy. He spoke without looking at her or Fields, who’d stepped back out of the way.
“Something, I don’t know. That other signature he picked up on—it must have been another augment, but good lord... Damn it, I have to get back to the temporary HQ.” His handset buzzed. “Damn. Damn it!”
His seamed face grown even craggier with concern, Vessler went to the door of the bedroom and spoke quickly into the phone as Jorden sat down on the edge of Scott’s bed. Scott shook with small tremors, and Jorden dabbed at his temples with the cloth.
Vessler clicked off the phone, turned back to Jorden. “Take care of him. Make sure he’s okay, and put him back on the filter soon as he wakes up, all right?”
“No problem, sir,” Jorden said neutrally.
Teeth gritted, Vessler ran for his car, cursing as he went. He knew he wouldn’t see Scott again for days, probably weeks. Damn it all to hell.
# # #
In Scott’s room, Ned Fields came and stood over Brenda Jorden until she looked up at him. On the bed Scott wheezed and didn’t open his eyes. Fields motioned with his head, and followed Brenda out into the hallway.
“Well,” she sighed. “Our job just got twice as complicated.”
Wearily, Fields said, “Yep. ...I suppose we’ll have to find that one too. Ourselves, I mean.”
“If we do this with the first one, we’ll have to do it with the second. It’s our asses now.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “...Unless we can make the primary go after that new one.”
“Christ. We could’ve stuck with the original plan. For that matter, Vessler’s right here. Why couldn’t you just zap him, like you did the kid?”
She shook her head. “I tried to sell that to Stamford to begin with. He doesn’t think the guys upstairs would buy it. Too much faith in Vessler. It’s got to look like plain incompetence. Plus, Stamford already approved the new idea, so we’re stuck with it.”
“Grand.” Disgusted and suddenly thirsty, Fields turned and headed for the kitchen, floorboards squealing beneath his weight. He’d spent a good deal of time thinking about what the group would be like, once Vessler was dethroned and Stamford took over. No—no point in kidding himself—once Stamford and Jorden took over.
Fields got the feeling that, no matter who she worked with, Brenda Jorden would be the one in charge, sooner or later. Not for the first time he wondered what the chances would be of getting a letter of resignation accepted.
Behind him, Jorden went back in to tend to Scott.
The image of the massive energy signature flitted across his mind. For many years Ned Fields had had good reason not to be afraid of any other person on the planet...but now tiny prickles of fear made their way down his spine like a spider’s icy footsteps.
AUTHOR’S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION.
Posts
5 comments:
This section has the same problem I mentioned when Scott Charles was first introduced; I'm planning on losing the filter device completely and making him a remote viewer. The problem there is that I really love the image of Matt's energy signature rolling over Simon's on the filter's screen.
That's a baby I'm willing to kill, though, sad as it'll make me.
Really? Why lose the filter device? I think it adds something to the realism of Scott's predicament.
The one "hummmm" moment I have with this chapter is when Matt throws Simon, and Simon shifts back to fully human (or as human as he ever gets). He seemed to do so with a little too much ease. He'd already started his "feeding" mode, and I'd think it would be quite a stretch for him to stop instantly once he got going.
Or not. I'm not nearly as much in his head as I am in Matt's. Simon's mindscape reminds me too much of wasteland.
Well, as I observed in an earlier comment, the filter device is basically Cerebro from the X-Men. I still don't know what I was thinking with that.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the filter.
The functions of the filter (as far as I can tell) are to protect Scott from his vulnerability and to allow other people to see what he is sensing.
Cerebro doesn't do either of those things (though Prof X probably often wishes it did). All it does is extend a trained psychics ability to detect mutant thought patterns.
The filter is very cool and as aplot device it isn't any closer to Cerebro than it is to the Bat Computer.
Alex
You raise an interesting point, Alex. I spent a while thinking about it today, and on the drive home this afternoon a way to satisfy both of us presented itself to me.
I think you'll like the modified direction I take with Scott's character in the revised version.
Post a Comment