GeneSix (31 page)

The following morning, Davenport reported to the captain. The man who had been standing behind him for a while the night before. The older, white-haired guy. Captain Sherwood.

Davenport had been knocked unconscious as the Darkness exited the room, the night before. So had Quinn and Carter. After a visit to the ER, they were sent home. They had each suffered a mild concussion, so they were on medical leave for the next two weeks. Except, Davenport came in voluntarily to meet with Sherwood.

Davenport was sitting in front of Sherwood’s desk. Sherwood was behind the desk, looking like his usual foreboding self.

“He got clean away,” Sherwood said.

Davenport nodded. “The trap, the xenon cube, apparently could hold him only for a little while.”

“What looked to be a resounding success has turned into a colossal failure.”

“It’s my fault, sir.”

Sherwood shook his head. “No, Davenport. The fault belongs to all of us. And to none of us. This is a creature we know nothing about. Nothing at all. For all we know, it doesn’t even play by the same laws of physics as we do. I think we should be thankful we had it captured for as long as we did. We did some spectral analysis. That might be all we’ll have to go on, at least for now.”

“I still can’t help but thinking there was something different I should have done. Something I might have done that I overlooked.”

Sherwood smiled. Maybe he wasn’t so foreboding after all. He said, “That’s the sign of a good agent, Davenport. Never accepting failure. But you did all anyone could have done. More than most of us. Look at it as a lesson. Try to figure what he can learn from all of this.”

Davenport nodded. He appreciated the kind words, though they really did nothing to help him feel better about himself.

He said, “Thank you, sir.”

Morning came, gray and windy. Quentin and his team stood on the roof of a building, across the street from their headquarters. Quentin was in his long coat, and the wind from Boston Harbor was catching his hair furiously. His hands were thrust in his pocket, as he looked down to the street below.

Mandy stood beside him, the wind making her long hair dance. She wore a jean jacket, and her arms were folded across her chest. Beside her was Cosmo, his baseball cap in place, and a cigarette between his pursed lips. Chloe was there, also. A long scarf twirled about her neck. Her hair was pulled back into a tail, and her eyes were decorated with black mascara.

“So, what do we do now?” Cosmo asked.

Quentin said, “We had no real choice in abandoning our little facility. And now we have no place to go at all. Things have gone from bad to even worse.”

As Quentin and his team stood watching, the mammoth body of LaSalle was carried out and into an ambulance. LaSalle stood six-eight, and with the extreme density of his muscles and bones, weighed close to five hundred pounds. EMT workers had removed a door from its hinges for use as a stretcher. The ambulance pulled away, but eight police cars were parked outside the building, their blue lights flashing.

As Quentin and his team watched, a black sedan rolled down the street. Four men got out, in dark suits.

“The FBI has arrived,” Mandy said. “Right on schedule.”

Quentin said, “As soon as the police discovered it was Peter LaSalle, they probably called them.”

Quentin loved Mandy. This much he admitted to himself. But now he found himself caught between feeling appalled and downright angry. Appalled at the easy way she could destroy a human life, and angry at how careless she had been in protecting the team.

“Do you realize what you have done?” he said. “You not only have deprived of us what little headquarters we had managed to find, but now you have deprived us of our strongest member. And you have brought the FBI to our very doorstep. After what happened at the newspaper building, do we really need them snooping around here?”

“You move too slowly,” Mandy said. “Trying to come up with plans - plans we don’t have the resources to pull off. I took matters into my own hands.”

He turned to face her. “You took matters into your own hands? You acted impulsively, is what you did. And you have probably brought an end to any hope we might have had of succeeding, before we could even really begin.”

She smiled. “Don’t be foolish. What I have done is practically brought Scott Tempest and Jake Calder to us.”

“Bait,” Chloe said, realization suddenly dawning on her. “She’s using the big dude as bait.”

Mandy nodded at her. “Now, all we have to do is be ready.”

Jeff said, “I have always had the ability to, you know, just sort of travel back and forth through time. I can travel from one place to another, too. I don’t know how I do it. I just do it.”

He was sitting on a stool by a lab table. Scott was sitting beside him, staring into a computer monitor. They had just run a thorough scan, which involved Jeff standing still for a couple minutes while the central computer simply bathed him in various energy fields. They were now waiting for the computer to process the results. It would have been quicker for Scott to run a scan with his tricorder, but the results wouldn’t have been as thorough.

A day had passed since Scott and his team had returned from their mission to the alternate universe. His battle suit was in a locker they kept for their battle suits, and he was in jeans, a t-shirt and his long, flowing lab coat.

April stood by. She had grabbed a shower after her morning run, and was now in a floor-length robe, and held a smoothie in one hand.

Scott said, “So, I suppose it’s safe to assume you vanished from here voluntarily, even though you were just an infant.”

Jeff shrugged. “I guess.”

Jake was sitting on a swivel chair at the far side of the room, staring at the boy who was his son. The previous morning, he had been the parent of an infant. Now, he had a son who was thirteen.

In Jake’s hand was a coffee mug with the Boston Red Sox logo painted on it. “When you beamed out of here, do you have any idea where you went?”

The boy shrugged. “Boston, I guess. That’s where I was raised. I don’t really remember any other home.”

“Who raised you?” April said.

“A bunch of people like us. Well, not like us, really. Like us, but different.”

“How different?” Jake said.

“They look different. Some don’t look human at all and some do.”

Scott took his eyes from the computer monitor. “You mean meta-humans? Super humans?”

“Yeah, I guess. People with different kinds of powers. There’s an older woman who’s sort of center of the group. They claim she’s an Indian. An Iroquois. She was the only mother I knew. We all just call her Mother. She’s a healer. There were others, too. A man who had green skin. They call him Snake. His skin looks more like a crocodile, though. And there’s a blind man. His name’s Nate. He can reach into people’s minds and share thoughts with them. Plant ideas there. He can teach a person an entire language in the blink of an eye, just by planting the language there. There was a Mexican, an illegal, I guess. He was covered with sharp little quills, like a porcupine. He couldn’t speak a word of English, but Nate - he just touched his mind and gave him English. Sometimes Nate uses a seeing-eye dog. He can actually see through the dogs eyes.”

Scott said, “Just how many people like this are there?”

The boy shrugged. “Dozens. Maybe a hundred or more.”

Scott was staring with disbelief. “
Dozens
? Dozens of meta-humans?”

“Yeah. I guess. Mother and Snake are the leaders. Then there’s Chloe. She’s not quite like Snake. She looks normal. In fact, she’s really kind’a hot, if you know what I mean. She’s a little older’n I am. She can talk to computers. Doesn’t even have to touch ‘em. She can just think at ‘em and make ‘em do anything. She gets money from ATM’s so we can eat.”

April said, “This Snake person, the way he looks, it sounds horrible. Are most of them disfigured like this?”

Jeff shrugged. “Not really. Most look normal, I guess. They’re people Mother and Snake rescued.”

“Who did they rescue them from?” Scott said.

Jeff shrugged. “I don’t know. Cops, I guess. Some of them from the FBI. They had gotten into trouble. People see ‘em use their powers, and get scared and call the cops. You guys here - you’re safe. But most of the people like us are alone out there. So Mother and Snake step in and rescue ‘em. Another thing Nate can do is tell if someone is like us or not. He can just feel it as he walks past you. He can even feel the presence of one of us from a distance, sometimes. Mother and Snake rescue them, and most of them are welcomed them into our little community. Chloe escaped from the foster care system, and they found her living on the street.”

April glanced at Scott. “I thought we were alone. That there were only just a few of us in the world.”

Scott said, “So did I. I mean, I theorized the genesis gene was a rather rare occurrence. That’s why I was so surprised to find you have it, too.”

Jake said, “For the smartest man in the world, you seem to screw up a lot, don’t you?”

Scott nodded reluctantly.

Jake got to his feet and crossed the room, and dropped a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Don’t take it so hard. I’m just kidding. You might have this four-dimensional thinking, or whatever, but you’re still only human. Maybe you’re trying to do too much. Maybe it’s time we all shared more of the burden. Maybe it’s time I took on more of a leadership role around here.”

Scott looked up at his friend. He had never heard Jake talk this way before.

“After all,” Jake said with a grin, “they
do
call me Captain, don’t they?”

“I thought you hated that.”

He shrugged. “I guess it’s not so bad.”

April took a slurping sip on the straw stuck into her smoothie, and said, “Jeff, where do all these people live?”

“Mostly in abandoned buildings and stuff. Snake used to live in the sewers when he was alone, before Mother found him. Being amphibian, he can do that. I don’t know how he could stand the smell, though. Some of us live under bridges.”

“This Nate,” Scott said. “You say he can feel the presence of others like us?”

Jeff nodded. “That’s how they found me. And his ability to tap into people’s memories is how we figured out where I came from. Mother had the idea. She thought Nate could touch my memories, from when I was too little to remember. She said we all have those memories from when we are a baby, locked away somewhere in our subconscious. He brought these memories out, and that’s when I remembered all of you.”

He took a sip from a bottle of Coke. “What apparently happened is I beamed not just away, but back in time about twelve years, and landed in Boston. Mother and Snake found me in an alley. They don’t think I had been there long. It was a few months before they found out I had my ability. Then, Nate had to use his ability to help me control mine, until I was old enough to understand how to do it myself. Once Nate tapped into my memories and I knew I came from here, I wanted to come back. I wanted to reconnect with you all. I wanted to meet my father. And find out where my mother is.”

“That,” Jake said, “is another story entirely.”

“Apparently when I beamed back here, I somehow tied into a sort of trail created when I beamed out, and landed here just moments after I left. Even though, for me, twelve years had passed.”

“I didn’t know that was possible,” Scott said. “I thought if you were gone twelve years, your time, you had to come back twelve years later, our time. That’s a limitation my own time travel device has.”

Jeff shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know I can do it. I can dance and sidestep all through time.”

Jake said, “Maybe it’s because his ability is organic.”

Scott nodded. “It gives me a lot to think about.”

“That’s what we need.”

Scott chuckled, and Jake returned the grin. What had been something of a bone of contention between them, often expressed in jabs and taunts, was now progressing into simply a joke.

The computer console in front of Scott beeped. “The analysis is completed.”

“So, what’s it say?” April said.

Scott glanced at the monitor, as binary code flashed by. “As I suspected, Jeff has the genesis gene.”

Jake nodded. “I suppose that should have been obvious.”

“Not necessarily. It does, however, tell us something about Mandy Waid.” Scott looked at Jake, who was still standing beside him. “To have a genesis gene, at least one parent has to have one. “

Jake said, “And I don’t have one.”

Scott shook his head. “You are the way you are solely because of that reactor accident.”

April said, “You mean, Mandy has the genesis gene?”

Scott nodded. “Apparently. I should have scanned her for one when she was here at the complex. I didn’t even think of it, because I believed the genesis gene to be so rare.”

“So,” Jake said, “my son not only glows with zeta energy, but he also has the genesis gene. He’s a time traveler.”