Blackout (21 page)

FORTY-SEVEN

ALEC COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS LUCK,
nor could he stop the grin from covering his face.

Laura
, he thought.
The stupid little bitch.

She’d put up quite a fight, but he’d seen the final bullet, seen it hit her in the chest. Laura was tough, but she couldn’t take a bullet so close. He was sure of it.

His team hadn’t had trouble with the Green Berets. They were so predictable, so ridiculous.

As soon as Alec had heard that the army was trying to create superpowered military strike forces—teams like his—he’d known they’d be simple to defeat. If anything, adding untrained superpowered teenagers to an army team made it weaker, not stronger.

It was fear. No one trusted a kid with that kind of power. Even Alec’s own trainers—his “parents”—had trouble trusting him, and that was after years of working together, years of testing and training and teaching. They were afraid of him, because he had a weapon they could never take away. And he was young. Adults instinctively distrusted the young.

So it was easy to implant a memory to make the Green Berets detonate the bombs.

Alec hadn’t even had to approach the captain. One of Alec’s new team members had lifted him into position near one of the snipers, and minutes later that sniper was sending panicked radio calls that one of the Lambdas was planting bombs near the Space Needle.

Alec didn’t know what happened after that. The army team was in complete disarray, Laura managing to escape with another Lambda, only to be shot in the chest.

And while all of that was happening below, the other two members of Alec’s team launched up to the center of the Space Needle. Lee—a Lambda like Alec had never imagined—superheated his body into a white-hot ball of flame and melted through the steel supports.

It was all perfect. Better than perfect. They’d taken the thing down in front of a team of Green Berets, a team of Lambdas, and Laura had been shot.

He had more important targets to focus on now, but he’d never forget this success.

FORTY-EIGHT

“WHAT HAPPENED?” AUBREY SHOUTED, LOOKING
out the back window.

Laura didn’t care—her side was screaming with pain as she lay awkwardly in the backseat. Blood was soaking the makeshift bandages.

Jack was driving the car, bleeding from his head, and Aubrey was trying to treat the bullet wound to Laura’s torso.

Laura took a gasping breath and then gritted her teeth.

It had come down. Whatever team had been attacking, they’d succeeded, and Laura couldn’t help but be pleased. And she’d even killed a few Green Berets while she was at it.

But her side—her rib, her whole body—felt like it was on fire.

Aubrey had saved Laura’s life, and if she could have breathed better she might have found it funny. Aubrey, a loyal soldier, saving the life of her enemy. If Aubrey hadn’t slammed into Sergeant Eschler and knocked him back Laura would have been dead. And if Laura was dead, Jack would have been dead. The three of them were on their own, and Laura needed to keep herself together and stay in control.

Jack kept wiping blood from his face as he moved through the mostly empty Seattle streets, flying well over the speed limit. The Space Needle had come down, after all—who would care about a speeder?

“They turned on us,” Laura said, and dug in her pocket, wincing in severe pain as she did so. At last she pulled out the detonator, now a crumpled mass of electronics, smashed apart in Laura’s brutal hands.

“But why?” Aubrey asked, trying to inspect Laura’s wound in the bouncing car. “What did we do wrong?”

“Nothing,” Laura answered. “We did exactly what they wanted.” It wasn’t even a lie. Laura hadn’t done anything to prompt the detonator, and neither had Jack—she’d been right next to him. And Laura was sure that Aubrey hadn’t; she was a complainer, not a rebel.

Aubrey looked to Jack for an answer. “What do you think?”

Laura had to keep that in mind, too. Aubrey and Jack were totally devoted to each other. She couldn’t play one against the other. They’d always pick each other over her.

Jack glanced back at them. His face looked awful, like something from a horror movie. Aubrey’s hands shook even harder. Head wounds bleed a lot. Laura had heard it forever. Head wounds bleed—they look worse than they are.

“We didn’t do anything,” he finally said.

Aubrey had pulled up Laura’s shirt to expose the bullet hole in her second-to-bottom rib. Blood was seeping from the wound, but not like the bright red gush from Jack’s head. It was just a simple hole, not the violent tear above Jack’s ear—Laura could even see the butt of the bullet. It looked like it had hit a rib and just stopped, flattened.

There weren’t any tweezers in the first-aid kit, but Aubrey found some in her purse. She tore open a packet of antibiotic ointment and squirted it liberally all over the tweezers, and then positioned them on the bullet.

“This will probably hurt,” she said.

Laura strained to smile. “I’ve already been shot. How much worse can it get?”

“Jack,” Aubrey said. “Slow down for just a minute.”

Jack slowed and pulled to the curb, turning to watch the surgery.

Aubrey wiped the exposed bullet with gauze to dry it. She positioned the tweezers and pulled.

It didn’t come—the tweezers slipped off and Laura let out a little gasp.

It felt like a drill was boring down into her—even now, even with the bullet motionless.

“Hang on,” Aubrey said, whispering something to herself and repositioning the tweezers. They weren’t made for surgery. They were for plucking eyebrows. They barely fit around the bullet.

Aubrey pulled again, the tweezers hanging on a second longer this time, but eventually sliding off.

“Dammit,” Laura wheezed, and brushed Aubrey’s hands away. She grabbed the bullet between her thumb and two fingers, dug deep into the skin with a guttural groan, spit curse words through gritted teeth, and yanked the bullet free. She gasped and exhaled, and threw the bullet at the window, cracking it.

Bright red blood bubbled from Laura’s chest, and Aubrey immediately placed a heavy gauze pad over it, and affixed it in place with surgical tape.

The immediate pressure was gone, but the burning, searing pain remained.

Aubrey sat back in the car, plainly exhausted. She looked at Jack. “We need to find a place to get you cleaned up.”

“And then we need to get out of this car,” Jack said. “It looks like a murder scene.”

Laura tried to sit up more in the seat, wincing as she did but not stopping. “We need to figure out where we’re going to go, too.”

“We have these bracelets,” Aubrey said, pointing to her wrist. Her bracelet was splattered with a little blood, and she wiped it clean. “They’re supposed to be like a free pass, right? They say we’re healthy.”

“They’re a free pass assuming our faces don’t show up on any wanted posters,” Laura said. “The only reason the captain would have used that detonator is if he thought we were terrorists. And nothing happened back there, so the only reason he would have thought we were terrorists is if someone radioed it to him. Someone whispered in his ear that he needed to disable all of us.”

“Speaking of,” Aubrey said, “we still have these things on our ankles. I assume they’re tamperproof.”

“I destroyed the detonator.”

Jack spoke. “Do we know if that’s the only one? Can they be detonated by someone else? More remotely?”

“Listen,” Laura said, pointing ahead and talking through gritted teeth. “Look at that neighborhood. What do you bet that half those houses are empty? Let’s go get cleaned up.”

“What if they have alarms?” Aubrey asked.

“The freaking Space Needle just collapsed. I don’t think police are going to care about a burglary.”

User: SusieMusie

Mood: Whatever

It’s time to talk about the military, I guess. I was lucky, too young to go. But now they’re talking about kids my age having to go there, too. Be fearless, everybody. They say there’s a virus or something.

FORTY-NINE

JACK LET AUBREY DRIVE THE
rest of the way. Her eyes were much worse than his, but he felt too light-headed to stay behind the wheel.

They picked a road off a major street, and searched for houses that looked empty, unprotected. It seemed like no one had cars here. Rowley’d said that Seattle had been hit harder than many cities, but would that make everyone flee? Maybe it was just because these houses were more expensive—these people could afford to run for the mountains, or Canada, or the little islands in Puget Sound.

Aubrey checked several houses—invisibly peering in windows—before they broke into one.

There didn’t seem to be an alarm—there were no keypads anywhere—and they took turns in the shower.

It was the first time that Jack had looked at himself in the mirror, and he was horrified. The grazing wound over his ear had mostly stopped bleeding, but his hair was matted and tangled in dark patches, and his entire left side was soaked, from his shirt to his shoes.

He washed quickly—the hot water was off. He wondered if that was a precaution the family took before evacuating, or if terrorists had hit the natural gas lines somewhere in the city.

He tried to scrub around the cut, but even so there was a constant stream of red dripping down his body and into the drain. And he couldn’t control the raging, splintering pain in his heightened senses. He had to give up, trying to rinse and numb the wound with cold water.

When he was out of the shower, Aubrey appeared with the first-aid kit. She had him kneel in front of the sink, and she gently—excruciatingly—rubbed at the wound with a washcloth. It took three clean towels to dry his head and dab the blood from his gash before she was willing to put the antibiotic gel on the skin and wrap gauze around his skull like a headband.

“You’re enjoying this just a little too much,” Jack said, as she finished the painful process and taped the gauze in place.

“I’m not going to let you get infected,” she said. “You have such a nice face.”

Laura came down the stairs wearing clothes that looked a little too old for her, a little less trendy, but they fit well enough. Aubrey was in a similar style, though she was drowning in a two-sizes-too-big fleece jacket.

“We need to talk, guys,” Laura said. She was walking a little more gingerly than before, but you could hardly tell she’d been shot in the abdomen. Not for the first time, Jack thought that he’d love to trade powers with her.

Laura tossed a bottle to him. “Painkillers,” she said. “I found them upstairs.”

Jack took a tablet and swallowed it.

“I assume,” he said, “that you want to talk about what we do next?”

Laura nodded as she sat, and Aubrey plopped down in an easy chair, stuffing her hands in the pockets of the jacket.

“We can turn ourselves in,” Jack said, not because he really believed it, but because he wanted to get it out on the table. To his surprise, it was Aubrey who spoke first.

“No,” she said. “They want to kill us. And, even if they didn’t want to before, they do now.”

“It could have been a mistake,” Jack said.

“Do we all want to risk our left foot on that?” Laura said.

“So what other options do we have?” he asked. “Hide out somewhere? Go on the run? Escape to Canada?”

“There are terrorists in Canada,” Aubrey said, and the other two stared at her. No one had heard that.

“The newspaper upstairs,” she said. “It’s dated three days ago. It says there have been attacks all through British Columbia and Alberta.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jack said. “Since when do terrorists go after more than one country?”

“When more than one country is pissing them off,” Laura said. “Al-Qaeda went after the US, but they also went after all sorts of places in Europe and Africa. They just don’t make the news because we don’t care as much unless it’s happening right in front of us.”

“So we go to Mexico,” Jack said. “Any terrorists there?”

Aubrey shrugged.

“Do you guys have any place you can hide here?” Laura asked. “Any contacts?”

“We’re from the same town,” Jack said. “They’re armed, and I bet they’ve formed a friggin’ militia to try to get their kids back, but I don’t trust the town to keep a secret long. It’s too small, and everybody knows everybody else.”

Aubrey nodded. “We can’t go back.”

No one spoke for a long time. Jack thought about Mexico. It sounded awful. He knew that Aubrey had taken a class or two of Spanish, and she almost certainly got A’s, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy to flee there and live in peace.

Besides, betrayal or no betrayal, he didn’t want to just run away and watch while America burned to the ground.

“I know some people,” Laura said. “I haven’t been totally honest with you guys. But I’ve been aware of my powers for a long time—like you, Aubrey—and a couple of my friends have, too. They hid out better than I did, I think. We could see the writing on the wall and we started to get ready for the government to come after us. We built bomb shelters and things—well, not bomb shelters, but you know—storage.”

“What kind of storage?” Jack asked.

“Just food and stuff. We didn’t get as much as we wanted, because we were only in college. We didn’t have a lot of money.”

“So,” Aubrey said, “you’re saying we should find these storage places? Would they be enough for us to lay low and hide?”

“Probably not,” Laura said. “I’m saying that we should do exactly what we’ve been doing—infiltrating the enemy—but Aubrey, I think you should get into the military base—where we were yesterday?”

“What?” Jack said, before Aubrey got a chance. “If you haven’t noticed, every single one of these ‘infiltrations’ have been disastrous.”

“And what would I be looking for, anyway?” Aubrey said.

“If we can find these guys, then that’s five of us instead of three. And for all I know, they’ve been working more on storage. They might have a safe place we can go. More important—we need to find out how to get these bombs off our legs.”

“Is this about the rebellion you were talking about?” Aubrey asked, suddenly sounding suspicious.

“Not really,” Laura said. “We weren’t part of the rebellion, and I don’t think they would be now. They definitely wouldn’t be part of a violent rebellion like the one that attacked us. I’m just saying that I don’t think this is all black-and-white: that we’re either on the run as criminals or we’re helping the army catch Lambdas. There has to be a different way to live.”

Jack looked at Aubrey and she stared back at him. She didn’t appear at all convinced. Neither was Jack, but it wasn’t like he had a better solution. He definitely had no interest in a rebellion, and even though he didn’t mind the prospect of spending all his time with Aubrey he wanted to be legal. He didn’t want to be on the army’s list of most wanted. He didn’t want to have an explosive tied to his foot for the rest of his life. He didn’t want to live in fear, marked as a terrorist.

“What if we do something easier?” Jack said, still looking at Aubrey. “What if we just infiltrate the army base, find out why the order was given to kill us, and see if we can make things right?”

Aubrey was clearly discouraged, though it looked like she was trying to hide it.

Jack continued. “I’m just thinking that if we know why they’re after us, then maybe we can make things good? Maybe we won’t be criminals if we can give them what they want?”

Aubrey spoke. “I screwed up breaking into a demolished school full of homeless people, and you think I can make it into a military base?”

“You didn’t screw up,” Jack said. “You got in. You assessed all of the dangers and gave an exact account of the guards. Then you got down to where the girl was, and when the Green Berets couldn’t take her down, you did. It was a huge success.”

Aubrey exhaled long and slow. “It felt like a failure.”

“And today wasn’t your fault,” Laura said. “You saved my life. He was going to take another shot at me.”

Aubrey stared straight ahead.

Jack spoke. “You’re good with computers—you get straight A’s in everything—and they’ll probably be everywhere. Just get into one of them. You probably won’t need to hack a password—use a computer while someone else isn’t watching.”

“And it’s not even a real military base,” Laura said. “It’s a Marriott. There will be a lot of soldiers everywhere, but there shouldn’t be too much security. There’ll probably only be the cameras that the hotel already has.”

Finally, Aubrey sighed and looked over at Jack. “You’ll have my back?”

“I’ll follow every step you take. And if you get caught, I’m coming in there with you. I’m not going to let them split us up.”

“But you’re not going to get caught,” Laura said.

“What are the names of the people you want me to find?” Aubrey asked.

“Alec Moore and Dan Allen. They’re both from Denver, like me. I’ll write it down for you.”