The Empowered, page 99
Keisha’s fearful expression suddenly changed to manic glee. “Damn straight,” she said. “Let’s go!” She scrambled toward the cave mouth.
“Wait, they named me,” I mumbled. I raised my voice. “Shouldn’t I go first?”
She glanced back. “Like hell.” She disappeared outside.
Alex and I followed and emerged from the cave, blinking in the light. We walked through the notch.
One of the tractor trailers had driven across the road and onto the gravel verge on our side. The cab was empty. There was no one there.
The voice boomed from the truck again. “Please enter the cab. We will take you and your companions to safety.”
Keisha shrugged when I glanced a question at her.
“Guess it’s worth a shot,” Alex said.
“Not like we have a lot of options,” I added.
“At least life with you is always exciting,” he quipped.
“Funny. You’ve been hanging around with Keisha too much.”
She pulled her head back in mock outrage. “Don’t you be getting me involved in your couple’s stuff, girl.” She winked at Alex.
Crazy times called for courage, Ruth used to tell me. Lenore had said something similar. Neither were around anymore—Ruth had died, and Lenore was probably dead, too. I swallowed.
I’d have to settle for a lighter step and a joke or two, stupid as that sounded.
9
The cab’s air conditioning was running. After the dry heat, it was good to not feel like I was burning up. Alex sat behind the wheel, and Keisha took the seat behind us.
“Who are you?” I asked the cab.
“The help,” the voice replied.
It hit me then. One of the hackers. Maybe Hacker Three.
“I’m glad. I thought we were shit out of luck,” I said.
“We don’t leave people behind.”
Keisha grimaced. “Gee, thanks.”
Alex looked puzzled, but said nothing.
“This tractor trailer is still under our control. It will drive you to a hidden complex, once part of RAMPART’s backup system, where we can meet up.”
“We’re supposed to take your word on that? Why didn't we know about this, before?” I demanded. I’d had my fill of cloak and dagger bullshit over the last X number of years.
“Security protocol.”
That sounded familiar. Support loved those. This was exactly the supremely annoying routine they’d put me through, again and again.
I felt a pang at the thought of Winterfield being gone. So many people I’d known were dead.
But this was a play he and Zhukova would have run, if they still lived. Funny how these cloak and dagger games were so common, but it went with the territory—the hidden facilities, bases, the secret tech, etc. The Hero Council had been the shining knights and righteous guys, but Support had been their men and women in black suits, and the Scourge and Ultimate, now Liberation, used the same tactics.
“Security B.S.,” Keisha snorted, gestured with her hands.
“You’re cute when you make rude gestures,” the voice replied.
Keisha’s mouth rounded in a little o. “What the fuck?”
“There’s a person behind this voice, you know.”
“Yeah, well, um, yeah,” Keisha stammered
“And you’re cute even when you aren’t making rude gestures.”
Keisha was dark-skinned, but it was obvious it embarrassed her.
“Never thought I’d be embarrassed long-distance.”
“I apologize if it was sexual harassment.”
Her jaw tightened. “Well, I didn’t say it was that. You really think I’m cute?”
I couldn’t help it. We’d just been through the biggest mission I’d ever been on, nearly killed multiple times, and were now on a mystery ride to yet another secret base, and the remote-control operator came on to Keisha.
I lost it. I bent over, giggling, laughing until I couldn’t breathe.
Keisha smacked my arm. “This isn’t funny,” she said.
“Like hell it isn’t,” I gasped. Alex kept a straight-face through the entire thing.
When I got my breath back, I sat up. “Seriously, you’re driving us to another hidden complex? Why is it always another hidden complex?”
“They were overbuilt and now the market’s depressed.”
It was my turn to do a double-take and stare at the dashboard speaker.
“Okay, all joking aside, as someone told me, we live in a wilderness of mirrors, and the shadows are the only places we can be alone.”
That sounded familiar. It was the thing Winterfield might say, though he’d have left out the bit about the shadows. He lingered in my mind. Guess I missed the man. Ironic, since he’d have told me to not let emotion rule my thinking, and definitely not to fall for bullshit.
“Yeah, well, any port in a storm, I guess,” I said. What choice did we have?
“How long until we arrive?” Alex asked, speaking for the first time since we’d boarded the truck.
“Ten hours, approximate.”
Keisha leaned back against the rear wall, crossed her arms. “Great, ten hours with you blocking the view?” She grumbled.
“We can take turns riding shotgun,” I offered.
“Whatever.”
She was moody, suddenly. Time was, I would have ignored her snit. But, she’d kept her chin up through this latest shitstorm of an operation, and even joked while boarding this mystery bus slash creepy self-driven semi-truck.
I squeezed past my seat and crowded into next her.
She frowned. “Hey, really not room for two here.”
“Too bad, I’m sitting.”
She got up. I blocked her with my arm. “Not so fast. What’s up?”
She slumped back in her seat. “Really? You have to ask? Maybe I’m just tired of all this shit.”
“You and me both.”
She sighed, slowly. “We’re best friends, Mat, but you don’t always get it, you know that?”
“Tell me then.”
She twisted her fingers, head down. “You got Alex. You got your sister. Your mom is back from the dead. People look up to you. But you’ve got a family.”
“You’re part of my family.”
She sighed a second time. “Okay, so I appreciate that. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. You’re also all I have. I need more. I mean, my family, the less said the better. I haven’t seen them since I became empowered. Everyone else is just someone either on my side or not. Mostly not.”
She looked up at me. Her eyes glimmered wetly. “So, yeah, I’m scared.”
“We’re all scared,” I said.
“I’m not just scared of the usual stuff.”
“You mean like dying.”
She snorted softly, and, for a second, her face twitched into a half-smile, then she was serious again.
“I’m afraid of dying without ever having an actual life. All this empowered shit, I mean what good is it, really? It just messes up the world more than it already is.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. She was right. We sat side by side in silence for a while.
I brushed a strand of hair back into place. My braid had gotten tangled.
“Maybe we need to find a new meaning, one that doesn’t mess up the world more than it’s already messed up.” I swallowed. “But first, we have to save it.”
She laughed softly. “Again.”
I soft-punched her in the arm. “You got that right, bitch.”
Our route took us past Spokane. The air was thick with gray-white smoke. Something big burned.
“Forest fire?” I asked Alex. He typed on a tiny laptop computer cradled on his knees. Keisha slept in the back.
“Not sure.” He typed more. “I can jack in through the on-board computer, thanks to Hacker.”
“Which one?” I whispered.
He shrugged. “Good question. I don’t know.”
Probably didn’t matter, but not knowing who someone was, that bugged me. Here it was also stupid, since all three Hackers were unknowns. But one of them, at least, was helping us.
Did that mean Zarathustra and Michelle cared about us? Hell if I knew, but it seemed likely. I mean, why throw us away?
But she hadn’t exactly warned me about being left behind. When I’d tried to talk to her about what Zarathustra had told me, I couldn’t find her. She had already left, supposedly because she had to hurry to get things in motion.
Had that been the truth? Or had she just been a bitch-queen?
“Still thinking about who we can trust?” Alex asked me.
“That, and their intentions. I know we can’t trust Zarathustra, or my mother. But, what throws me for a loop is the idea that she’d be fine with leaving me behind.” I unclenched my hands. “Well, we wound up with this sweet ride. It just would have been nice to have gotten some warning.”
“Their operational organization could use improving.”
I chuckled. “No shit, dude.” I grew serious again. “Winterfield would have had a field day with the sloppy planning.”
“He would have.”
I leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “Why is Liberation doing this?”
He hugged me, lips brushing my ear. “This might not be them.”
I pulled away, eyes wide.
He shrugged, drew me close again.
“Then who?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s another faction,” he whispered.
I sighed. “There’s always another faction.”
“Seems like it.”
“What do you think Liberation is really up to?” I asked.
He held me close. “I wish I knew. RAMPART dampened down Gaia; now the power flows much more strongly, freely than it had. But it seems erratic. I’ve felt my power much more strongly. Everyone has, and that’s on top of a million or more new Empowered.” He pulled away and rubbed his temples.
I began massaging his shoulders. “You’re real tight there,” I said.
“I’m still trying to get my mind wrapped around a million new Empowered.”
“Me, too,” I said, working a particular stiff knot in his right shoulder.
A dashboard alarm beeped loudly. Alex sat up, grabbed the steering wheel, but the semi was already slowing to a stop. A dented old model school bus, cracked windows, and broken lights blocked the two-lane highway.
“What?” Keisha blurted from the back.
“We have a roadblock. Has to be an ambush.”
My skin started tingling.
Keisha pushed past me to the door. “Not for long.” She flung it open and hopped down.
I scrambled after her. “Hold up.”
“Fuck that,” she growled. “I’ve had enough of this shit.”
“Keisha, hang on!” I shouted.
She charged to the side of the road, made a slicing motion. Metal screamed and the ancient school bus separated into two sections. She crumpled the metal in both, leaving a pair of bus-boulders and room for the semi to get through.
A woman in a brown duster and broad-brimmed hat rose from the ditch on the far side of the road. She made a shoving motion with her palm at Keisha. The force slammed into Keisha and into the hillside.
I charged the woman and hit her in a flying tackle. We went down in a cloud of dust. The impact jarred my bones and made my teeth rattle. I rose and smashed my fist into the woman’s mid-section. Air whooshed out her mouth.
A big shaggy-haired white guy in gray overalls with huge, muscled arms barreled toward me, yelling. Alex’s stunner zapped twice, and the giant collapsed. Alex fired a third time at the woman on the ground, and she went unconscious. A pair of Empowered. But these days, where there was two, there was probably another dozen.
I ran to Keisha, knelt beside her. “You okay?” I asked. I scanned the area. There was a rock pile just ahead of Keisha and me. If there were more Empowered, some would be there.
“Just had the wind knocked out,” she gasped.
I nodded at the rockpile.
“On it,” she said, and the two buses began spinning, faster and faster until they were blurs. She slammed one into the rockpile, rocks exploded in all directions.
Three people darted from where the rocks had been, and she sent the second bus tumbling after them. It was like bowling for Empowered. The mass of twisted metal squashed two of them. Keisha gestured, and the mass of twisted metal rolled after the third. The man turned and flung fire at it. Red flame bloomed around the boulder.
Idiot. Now he had a flaming bus-boulder bearing down on him. He tried to run for it a second time, but the giant, blazing metal ball hit him before he could take two steps. A rending crunch split the air, followed by a series of crashes and distant shouts. I turned back in time to see the bus-boulder, now embedded in the ruins of a house. The power pole lay broken at the base, sparking power lines snaking across the ground.
I went over to the woman, kicked her with the toe of my boot.
She moaned.
“Wake up.”
“Ow.”
“What’s with the roadblock?” I demanded.
She tried to raise her head, then slumped back against the ground, glaring at me.
“We have a right to survive. The Coalition and the militias are hunting us. You don’t expect us to just roll over and die, do you?”
“How about being better than those assholes?”
She laughed. It was a hollow sound. Not an ounce of compassion in that laugh. “We do what it takes to survive. We thought your rig was one of those self-driving ones. They usually carry food or other specials. If not, we’d strip it. The government, they find us, they’re just going to kill us.”
“If you kept acting like this, absolutely. You have to be smarter.”
She closed her eyes. “You sound like that zealot we met two months ago, who said we needed to join her in her so-called Liberation movement. Fools think they can get rid of all the normals in the entire world. Can’t they do math?”
The sinking feeling returned to my stomach. Michelle and Zarathustra. More proof that they planned, somehow, to get rid of the non-Empowered.
“You’re right,” I told the woman, “that’s a terrible idea. It’s also evil. Like what you were doing. How about you hide and be smart about what you have to do?”
I stalked back to the truck and climbed aboard. Keisha followed me.
“Six dead, three survivors,” she said. “I’m sick of having to use deadly force.”
“Me, too. But they didn’t give us any choice,” I replied.
Her face was sad. “No, they never do.”
The semi rumbled to life, lumbered forward in a jerk and then picked up speed. Hacker was quiet for once.
We passed a line of tents in a little hollow. The truck sped down the highway. We turned away from Spokane and toward Walla Walla.
“You did the right thing, Keisha,” the voice said from the speaker. “Mathilda’s right. Listen to her.”
“That’ll be the day,” Keisha said, but she laid her head against my shoulder and cried silently.
Eventually, the three of us drifted off to sleep. The voice said we should rest, because we still had quite a few hours. It refused to tell us where we were headed, saying it was a surprise.
I ground my teeth. Not funny, but I didn’t waste time trying to get more out of it.
I woke up with a start. The truck had stopped. Night had fallen. The truck parked on a hillside gravel road. Mountains loomed in the distance.
“This is as far as I can get you,” the voice said.
Keisha rubbed her eyes, leaned forward. “We’re supposed to take all this on faith?”
“Afraid so. I’d say trust me, but you don’t know me. If only you did.”
“Yeah, I’d love to meet you in person,” Keisha said. “Then I could beat the truth out of you.”
Laughter. “You wouldn’t have to. One look at my innocent face and you’d trust me implicitly.”
“I doubt it, not with that attitude.”
“Okay, so the hatch is right where that wall of rock is. Take the trail from the road, right outside this door. It’s only a hundred yards.”
“No, this isn’t an ambush,” Keisha groused. She had a point.
10
The hidden hatch slid open with a hiss of escaping air.
“I’ll go,” Alex said and slipped inside before I could argue. Keisha and I followed him in. The inside was dark and smelled of recycled air. My hand brushed a wall. The concrete was cold to the touch.
We stood there for a moment, letting our eyes adjust to the dark.
The beam from Alex’s flashlight showed we were in a corridor; walls, floor and ceiling were bare concrete. The corridor ran straight away from us. A metal hatch gleamed at the far end.
Alex pointed at a spot on the ceiling above and to the right of the metal hatch. A dark blister.
“Surveillance,” he whispered.
“Let me see if that’s still active,” Keisha said, raising her arms and gesturing.
Her brow furrowed in concentration. She’d gotten better at what she could do with her power. Used to be, she could create razor blades or knives out of thin air. Now, she could detect electricity in the metal, see the metal in whatever construction she viewed, and where that metal touched and interacted with anything else. Especially electricity.
“It’s not active, but it’s functional.”
If we weren’t up to our necks in deadly danger, I’d give her crap for using a word like functional. She and I didn’t use words like that. Old Keisha would have just said, “it still works.” But being around people like Alex had rubbed off on us. We’d changed.
“The door connects to an electrical system with an alarm trip,” she added.
“Can you disable it?” I asked.
“I can help, if you tell me what you see,” Alex said.
She nodded. “It'll take a minute.”
“Hey, we made it here in one piece. I’d say we have that minute.”
She smiled, closed her eyes.
The metal hatch slid into the wall, revealing what looked like another concrete corridor.
