Crawling From the Wreckage Read online

  After wrestling a final moment of doubt into submission, Drake knocks on the door. Jason X answers immediately and greets his guests with a mild smile.

  “You’re six minutes late,” he says.

  “We wanted to make sure everything was kosher,” Drake says.

  “I wasn’t reprimanding you; I expected you’d dawdle out of excessive caution. Come in.”

  “Can you blame us for being squirrelly? I didn’t think you’d ask us to meet you at your place.”

  “Oh, I don’t live here. I chose this location because so many of the units are empty. Any residents who aren’t at work won’t think twice about complete strangers coming and going. They’ll assume we’re potential buyers come to look at one of the available apartments, such as this one — which is quite nice, I must say. I’m seriously considering renting one myself.”

  Jason leads them inside, into an open floor plan apartment devoid of furniture. Two men and a woman clustered together in the kitchen pause in their conversation.

  “Allow me to introduce the other new recruits,” Jason says with a small gesture of presentation. “This is Skadi.”

  “Hey,” says the tall woman. Pale blonde hair falls to her broad, densely muscular shoulders. “You can call me —”

  “Ah! No real names, please. For the present I’d prefer it if we all stuck to our code names.”

  “Works for me,” Drake says.

  Jason introduces the two men in the group collectively as ThunderStorm. They offer nods in greeting. Drake takes in their upper-middle class ensembles and decides they’d be more at home in an upscale country club than participating in a clandestine meeting with wanted super-villains.

  “Nice to meet you,” Thunder says, offering a hand.

  “Yeah, same here,” Drake says. “Are you two brothers?”

  “Spouses,” Storm corrects.

  “Ah. Sorry. I saw the matching polo shirts and khakis...”

  “I understand. Yes, we’re one of those couples who tend to dress alike,” Thunder says. “Nauseating, I know.”

  “Is this everyone?” Candace asks.

  “Not everyone,” Jason says. “Some of our other members have their own projects. I hope you’ll get to meet them later.”

  Drake cocks a suspicious eyebrow. “Why wouldn’t we meet them?”

  “Ah, that is the very topic we’re here to discuss. Having reviewed John Nemo’s notes on his potential recruits, I learned that he had yet to draw solid conclusions on several of them, present company included. He wasn’t convinced you could handle yourselves in a real-world, high-pressure situation.”

  “You want us to prove ourselves,” Skadi says.

  “I wish I could say it’s merely a formality,” Jason says, pacing an idle orbit about the room, “but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. My organization is merely being pragmatic.”

  “We do have a track record, you know,” Drake says.

  “A handful of successful bank jobs do not a super-villain make. Now, don’t think I’m dismissing your past successes. It takes a respectable level of competence to escape capture repeatedly, but let’s be honest: none of you have faced a real challenge to your abilities. Fortunately, Nemo left a great many projects unfinished. If you were to successfully tie off one of these loose ends...”

  “I’m game,” Thunder says.

  “Me too,” Storm says.

  “Count me in,” Skadi says.

  “Typhon? Echidna?” Jason says. “If you’re uncertain about proceeding, you have but to say so and you can go your own way, no questions asked and no feelings hurt.”

  “Uncertain? Hell, no,” Drake says. “This is the first time in months we’ve felt like we actually have a purpose. Right, Can — uh, Echidna?”

  “Yeah,” Candy says, the corner of her mouth quirking nervously. “Sure.”

  “Excellent,” Jason beams, “because I had something very specific in mind for you. Tell me: have you ever heard of the Wardens?”

  ***

  For two solid hours, Skyblazer takes abuse like a champ and asks for more. He screws up, gets called on it, feels like an inept idiot for a couple of minutes, shrugs it off, and gets right back to work. Like I said, he has a lot to learn, but man, he is a dedicated student — and I tell him so when we break for a lunch. We partake of mediocre food truck barbecue atop the Notre Dame Bridge, a steel suspension bridge spanning the Merrimack River. The food’s pretty meh, but the company’s nice, and the view of the city’s awesome.

  “I have a great teacher,” Skyblazer says, taking a bite of his pulled pork sandwich. If nothing else, I’ve earned enough good will that he’s letting me see his face. He has the complexion of a Middle Easterner, though I couldn’t guess his ethnicity beyond that. His eyes are dark yet somehow bright at the same time, though I only see them in profile; he never looks directly at me.

  “Great view,” I say. He grunts through a mouthful of food. “Is this where you go to get away from it all?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How’d you find it?”

  He shrugs. Okay, he’s not up for small talk. Back to business, then.

  “We should figure out a training schedule,” I say. “We can get a lot of work in before school starts. You are still in high school, yeah?”

  “Mm-hm. Starting senior year,” Skyblazer says, brightening. “Technically I’ll have enough credits to graduate before Christmas break but Dad wants me to stay and finish the year out. I’m trying to convince him to let me enroll in this program that lets me take community college courses while I’m still in high school. Any credits I earn would get rolled over when I go to MIT.”

  “Oh, you’re MIT-bound? Nice.”

  “I haven’t applied yet,” he admits, “but that’s where I want to go. Anyway, a training schedule, yeah. You probably have a million things going on...”

  “Not so much, but why don’t we say Tuesdays and Thursdays to start?” I suggest. “We’ll meet right here at nine and see where the day takes us.”

  “Cool.”

  I close my Styrofoam takeout container and hand it to Skyblazer. “Here, you can have my leftovers.”

  “Didn’t you like the food?”

  “Oh, it was fine,” I lie, “but you could use the extra calories. I mean, look at you. You’re built like a yardstick.”

  “A manly yardstick,” he corrects.

  “Yes, very manly.” I stand. “Your homework for the week —”

  “Not even back in school and already I’m getting homework,” he gripes playfully.

  “Read up on basic aerial combat. There are a lot of solid techniques you’d benefit from knowing, including some that will help you compensate for your speed and range limitations.”

  Skyblazer tosses me a salute. “Aye-aye, captain.”

  “Lieutenant, actually, but you can call me Carrie.”

  “I’m Dennis.”

  “It was nice to meet you, Dennis.”

  “You too.”

  I smile all the way home. For the first time since I got back, I feel like I’m in a good place. I feel useful, like I have a real reason to be on this planet again.

  Here’s hoping it lasts.

  TEN

  Jessica pinches the ignition key between her thumb and forefinger and draws a breath, bracing herself. She turns the car off, and there it is again, that rattling sound, like a quarter pinging about inside a coffee can. She releases her breath as a whispered stream of profanity.

  It’s okay, be cool. The car’s still under warranty, she tells herself, but that kindles her temper rather than cools it. A brand-new car should not be making such noises. Were the dealership not fifty minutes away, back in Burlington, she’d drive the damn thing down there right now and make them fix it on the spot.

  Not make them like that, though. No, she’d persuade them like a normal person would, with a compelling argument based on the facts. It’s a four-month-old car and shouldn’t be having problems already. She need
s it to get to work. She needs it to get anywhere. That’s the tradeoff for her solitude; all the necessities of life are miles away, and there’s no public transit to speak of this far in the boonies.

  Plenty of good reasons to see things my way. No need for extreme measures. Just talk to them.

  Jessica heads inside, changes out of her work clothes and into comfortable sweats, and rehearses her pitch as she makes a dull but satisfying chicken Caesar salad for dinner. She scrutinizes every word, every turn of phrase to ensure her expectations are expressed clearly and dispassionately. Once dinner is eaten and the dishes put in the sink to soak, she pours half a glass of white wine and steps out onto her porch to practice her speech aloud.

  “Whenever I turn off the car, I hear a rattling noise coming from the engine,” she says to an audience of one, a rabbit nibbling at the edge of her lawn. Someone else is having salad for dinner, too, she muses. “It started a week ago. I have no idea what the cause might be. I’d like you to take a look and fix the problem, please, and I’d like to point out that the car is only four months old and is still under warranty. Thank you.”

  Direct yet civil, hits all the points, doesn’t sound accusatory or confrontational.

  She recites the monolog again, many times over, finding spots to add gentle emphasis, experimenting with different inflections, and carefully adding beats to make the flow of her words sound, ironically, less rehearsed — tricks she retained from her high school drama club days. As a teen, she lost several meaty roles because of her stiff line delivery, but on occasion, she was able to inject enough soul into an audition to land a halfway decent part — something that required more of her than to walk onto the stage, hit her mark, say her one line, and then exit.

  Only once did she exploit her special ability to land a lead role — Kim MacAfee in Bye-Bye Birdie — and that ended disastrously. She had enough control over her power to influence a single mind — that of the director — but it would be years before she could affect a large crowd, so the opening night audience saw her for the mediocre thespian she was. They were polite enough to let her finish the show without booing her, but the director caught an earful afterwards — mostly from angry parents, utterly baffled as to why their own daughters had been passed over for the role in favor of, in the words of one irate stage mother, that no-talent twit.

  Jessica’s theatrical career ended that night, but she carried the many lessons she learned, good and bad, into her adult life, although it took her a long time to realize which were the right lessons. Almost too long.

  Jessica fishes her phone out of her sweatpants pocket to call her office. To her astonishment, her supervisor’s voicemail answers.

  No, that can’t be. Stephen’s always there.

  “Hi, Stephen, it’s Jessica. I wanted to let you know I may be a little late getting in tomor—”

  Aside from a fox den a few yards into the woods surrounding her home, Jessica’s nearest neighbor is more than a mile away, well outside her range, and that neighbor is a perfectly lovely retiree and widower — certainly not a man capable of radiating such powerful hatred. Nor is he the type of man who would skulk about in the tree line.

  A long-dormant instinct awakens. Jessica throws up a wall of telekinetic force a heartbeat before a sharp crack, the unmistakable report of gunfire, fills the air. She feels the impact through her shield, right about head height. She knows only one person who could make a shot like that — or would want to take it.

  Muzzle flash betrays her attacker’s position in the trees. Slugs ping off her shield, each shot hitting like a boxer’s knockout punch. She retreats into her house, chased by a series of tight, carefully controlled bursts of gunfire. She slams the door shut and backs away, her shield still up.

  A grenade’s next. That lunatic loves her grenades.

  The door explodes in a spray of debris and shrapnel, turning the living room into a meat grinder. Her shield saves her from getting shredded to pulp, but it does nothing to muffle the accompanying boom or blunt the shockwave. Jessica reels, stumbles, falls to her knees, a banshee screaming in her ears.

  The floor shudders beneath her. A dust storm stinking of drywall and scorched wood fills the room, burning her eyes, her lungs. She blinks away tears well enough to make out the thing looming over her — a colossus in the approximate shape of a person, its outer skin mimicking the look of plate steel.

  “I got her,” the giant says, its voice tinny and hollow.

  Jessica’s first telekinetic ram causes the hulk to rock on its heels. A second staggers it. A third, powered by rising panic and boiling rage and sheer desperation, blows it through the back wall. The juggernaut rips a trench across her back lawn and rolls to a stop.

  Now’s your chance. Get up, dammit. Get up. Run.

  She stands, bracing herself against the crushed remains of her couch. Dizziness threatens to pull her back down. She fights it. Exhaustion turns her legs to jelly, her feet to leaden weights. She fights it.

  Jessica’s heart stutters as a humanoid blur coalescences into a coherent if startling image, that of a man melting through the wall, ghostlike. Black pits in place of eyes, set against a face painted with a bleach-white skull, bore into her. She lashes out with a telekinetic ram. She reaches out with her power to grasp a toppled easy chair and flings it. She pours her fury into a telepathic assault that should reduce the horrible vision to a quivering, mindless mass. Nothing stops the specter’s advance. It reaches out to her, like the grim reaper itself coming to claim her mortal soul. Immaterial fingers slide into her head and ignite a firestorm in her brain. The world disappears in an explosion of color and light.

  She screams.

  ***

  Jessica opens her eyes to a darkening sky and to a circle of vague, watery shapes towering over her.

  “I told you I should have handled this,” someone says — a man, his voice as ghostly as morning mist.

  A woman speaks next, a woman Jessica knows well. “And I told you she was mine to kill.”

  “And you did such a bang-up job,” says the steel giant.

  “Shut it, Leviathan. You could have just bombarded the house, so don’t criticize my tactics.”

  “I have air-to-air missiles, Grimm, not air-to-ground missiles.”

  “If you’d aimed them at the ground, they would have become air-to-ground missiles. Idiot.”

  “Knock it off. She’s coming to,” a third man says.

  A weight settles on Jessica’s chest — someone’s foot. Her vision clears. The woman looking down on her, dressed in black fatigues and military-grade body armor, has hard features and harder eyes — the eyes of someone who has stared into the proverbial abyss and welcomed the darkness when it stared back. A scar, old and pale, runs from the corner of her lips to the arc of her jaw. Jessica gave her that scar — that and another, deeper, hidden scar that also never fully healed.

  “Jess,” Jane Grimm says.

  “...Please,” Jessica croaks.

  “Please what, Jess?” Grimm shifts her weight to press down on Jessica’s sternum. “Please what?”

  “Please, leave me alone,” Jessica whimpers.

  “And why would I want to do that? After all the trouble we went through to find you?”

  “Come on, Grimm,” Steampunk Leviathan says. “Get on with it.”

  “I said shut it!”

  “Back off, Leviathan,” the third man says. “This is her kill. Let her do it her way.”

  “Let me remind you, Faultline, letting her do it her way is what caused this mess in the first place,” the ghost-man says in his otherworldly murmur.

  “Quit your bitching, Zombi. I’ll make this quick,” Grimm says. “Not painless, though.”

  Jessica finally notices the pistol in Jane Grimm’s hand.

  “Please,” Jessica weeps. “This isn’t my life anymore. I’m not that person anymore!”

  “You think it’s that simple, Jess?” Grimm says. “You call a mulligan and I forget how you de
stroyed my life? Is that it?!”

  The pressure on Jessica’s chest increases. A dull pain spreads into her arms, into her belly, like a heart attack building to critical, and her head throbs in time with her quickening pulse.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, expending the very last of the air in her lungs. “Jane, I’m sorry.”

  Jane Grimm thumbs off the safety, pulls back the slide, and slips her finger onto the trigger.

  “I’m not,” she says.

  ELEVEN

  I glance at my alarm clock. The display blinks over to 12:00 AM. I’ve been lying in bed wide awake for three hours.

  Getting a good night’s sleep seems to be a lost cause, so I grab my laptop, head downstairs, turn on the TV, plant myself on the couch, and poke around the Internet, hoping the tedium will lull me to sleep. No such luck. I sit there all night and into the morning, until Sara comes down to grab breakfast. Wednesday follows her like a loyal minion.

  “You’re up early,” she says, almost as a question.

  “I never fell asleep,” I confess.

  “Carrie, that’s not good.”

  “My sleep patterns are still screwed up. Not much I can do about it.”

  “Maybe you should pick up some kind of sleep aid.”

  “I’d rather not resort to taking drugs.”

  “They’re not drugs; it’s medication.”

  “So were those pills Bart used to give you to suppress your telepathy so you could sleep,” I counter, “and I don’t remember you ever taking them.”

  Sara frowns but doesn’t push the matter further.

  I follow her into the kitchen to set up the coffee maker. This time, I get the prep right on the first try. See? All the old habits are coming back to me.

  “What do you have going on today?” Sara asks as she sticks a couple of Pop-Tarts in the toaster oven for me. “Are you training with Dennis again?”