Emergence (54 page)

#

“…Port Haven Tower, this is Quintara 311. Mayday, Mayday! I repeat, we are losing fuel, request urgent and immediate emergency descent, over.”

The response was garbled static, just as it had been the past five minutes. Something had impacted the DC-10’s fuselage somewhere. A smaller aircraft perhaps—

“What’s our altitude, Jensen?”

“The rudder’s jammed, Bill. Elevator controls are gone. Nothing’s working!” I reached across and knocked on the altimeter. Actually
knocked
on it, like that would do a damn thing.

“Jesus Christ, keep trying them.”

I nodded as Bill pulled with everything he had at the steering throttle. We were flying blind at low altitude during a gale thunderstorm with no instrument panel, no radio contact, losing fuel, and with airframe damage a foregone conclusion. Even worse, we may have overshot Port Haven, which would put us above the Pacific.

“Port Haven Tower, this is Quintara 311. Mayday, Mayday! Suspected structural damage requesting emergency landing. We are in emergency descent, vector and altitude
unknown
! Acknowledge, over!”

“Throttle cables must be cut!” The captain fought the controls, teeth clenched. “Jensen, even if we somehow find a safe place to put down—”

“Captain!” Heather reeled into the cockpit, her face sheet-white. My stomach dropped even more if that was possible. I had a soft spot for Heather Casey. “Engine two’s on fire,” she announced, looking at me, terrified.

“Strap in,” I told her.

She started to move to the empty co-pilot’s chair, then stopped and pointed out the cockpit window. She didn’t say anything, just gasped.

Forks of lightning backlit it, whatever it was. Some form of massive, winged, white…
monster
. That’s really the only thing I could have called it. It flew in a sweeping arc ahead of us, slashing through the air from left to right, then whipped in our direction coming straight for us. It looked like a man sat atop its shoulders. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

And then it struck.

The airliner shuddered. Metal separated, tore like paper. Heather screamed. Then everything went still. My mind was crystal clear for ageless seconds as my vision dimmed and flickered. A
voice
in my head chattered and chorused, warned and hummed, and finally pealed like a thunderclap.

Like the lid of a sarcophagus slammed shut, the cacophony ended.

Time resumed. A snail’s pace.

I watched as Heather was sucked into the raging void. I reached out. Too late. Then went Bill, tumbling after her, still tethered to his seat, his head caved in and sporting shards of glass. And I heard, no,
felt
nearly two-hundred voices screaming, nearly two-hundred lives being snuffed out.

Then, like emerging from a broken shell, I was battered by jagged metal and wind and cast into the storm.

#

She interrupted me. “Quintara 311? You’re Noah Jensen. You’re
Hero
.”

So much for remaining patient 02-A. “People hear the name of that flight and it’s like they know me. In fact, yesterday was my 12-year anniversary. Since coming
online
.” I finally took a sip. Filtered water always tasted like charcoal and carbon. I was used to it. Fluoridated water tasted a hell of a lot worse.

I watched as Legato processed whatever was going on inside her pretty head.

“So…you’re Hero…and this is your
first
time in therapy? How long have you been an active PwP? Ten years?”

I cut my dismissive chuckle short. “What are you getting at?”

She shook her head. “Pardon me for putting it this way, but you’ve been through a lifetime of, well…”

“Shit?”

“Well, I was going to say hardships.”

I scoffed. “Tell me about it.”

She took a slow sip of water, then said, “Why don’t you tell me?”

#

Waking up in a thunderstorm during a free fall with every nerve in your body on fire? Not advised. I still remember the utter terror. Flaming debris tumbled through the air all around me. This was worse than any nightmare I’d ever had, and as a pilot I’d had my share of dream explosions and accidents and terroristic acts. The difference when it was happening for real is you so wished you’d just wake the hell up.

But this was no dream.

Why me?

Lightning. Wind. A screeching roar.

Snapshot images of falling bodies. Screaming faces.

A white-scaled
thing
coiled in the air.

It swooped upwards, toward me, wings extended.

I could do nothing but fall toward it, terrified. A flash of lightning illuminated the beast, its snakelike jaws agape. A human-sized figure was mounted atop it, pale face and wild hair in the swell of the storm.

Damn this world and every chimeric in it,
I thought, and prepared to die.

Well, ‘prepared’ isn’t exactly the right word. Preparing for something is like you were doing it intentionally, with a purpose. This? This was an utter and complete inability to do anything
but
die. I was powerless.

Then, something struck the dragon like a missile. A small, dark projectile.

My panicked brain barely had time to register whatever it was, then time slowed down. Again. Or maybe it was my senses that sped up. I saw a girl. That’s right. She was falling, like I was, only with greater velocity. She had been screaming—obviously as freaked out as I was, too—right before she smacked into the beast.

The monster’s wings folded. It began its own plummet toward the ground, its rider screaming, not in panic, but more like rage.

I had enough wits somehow to scan for the girl and found her, limp as a rag doll after slamming into the creature, and now she spun in the air maybe a hundred feet away. It might have been five-hundred. I don’t know. But then, just like before, time slowed to a crawl. The alien gibberish and white noise warbled in and out of my ears as bodies and debris and fire tumbled to earth.

Impossibly and unexpectedly, I started to fly.

That’s right. I
flew
. Just like in the comic books. Somehow the gibberish let me know I could control my fall. Told me, somehow, don’t ask me how, that I could even stop it. So, I pointed my body toward the falling girl and launched after her.

#

Dr. Legato interrupted again: “So that was your ASD event, when your powers as Hero first manifested?”

“ASD?”

“Acute Stress Disorder. It’s the trigger that affects the locus coeruleus, causing a
momentous
oversupply of norepinephrine which, in turn, ciphers the meta-sequence interlaced in every chimeric’s hypothalamus. The only way to access the sequence is via an exceptional stressor event.”

“Riiight.”

“You have a different viewpoint?”

I shook my head. “I just…I really don’t know. I mean, sure, seems like most of us have some sort of life or death experience that sets things into motion, I guess. How does that explain children being born with abilities? Or the cheerleader in Austin who ‘came online’ and detonated while she and her boyfriend were beneath the bleachers doing whatever kids do these days beneath bleachers?”

She started to speak, stopped, her lips slightly apart, then seemed to quickly make up her mind to continue. “I believe we’ve set off an evolutionary chain reaction.”

“Evolutionary? Makes as much sense as any other theory, I guess. What makes you think it?”

“Well, it isn’t really my area of expertise, but I’ve done several studies—”

“What, on your patients?”

A few moments passed where neither one of us said anything. She took another sip of water. I glanced through the window at the lake and the geese.

“Perhaps we should get back to the assessment.”

“I’d rather talk about your findings.”

“I digressed. It’s not what we’re here for and time is limited. Why not just tell me what happened next.”

I sighed.

#

I was a terrible flyer, especially for a pilot. You’d think it would be the whole fish to water analogy, but on my first pass I tried to grab the girl, completely missed, and shot past her, whirling off-balance. About three-hundred yards later, I figured out how to right myself and bank. By then, she was a dot among dots, but my vision did something weird, homed in on her like a telescope. I desperately set off on a trajectory to intercept.

When I got to the girl, we collided so hard I heard bones crack. I thought I’d broke her spine, but found out later she had a few broken ribs, a snapped collarbone, and a shattered arm. Let’s say I was glad she was already unconscious when we impacted.

Unconscious, but
alive
.

Turns out we weren’t over the ocean. We were close. We hit the ground on the western fringes of the Los Padres Forest, our emergency descent coming to a less than graceful end. I had instinctively shielded the girl’s body with my own, and when I came to I was on my back, stripped of clothes, lying in the falling rain in a trench of broken trees and churned earth. I had my arms wrapped around the girl and she lay on my chest, quietly breathing.

I looked down at my arms and hardly recognized them. They had to be twice as big. I looked at my torso, slabs of muscle on my chest, a ridged abdomen.

“What…the…fu—?” Thunder hammered the skies. I looked up into the storm, the play of light flickering amongst the clouds.

I held the small girl close to my chest. I went to check her breathing and realized I could hear her heart beating, a steady rhythm. Good. I put my head back and closed my eyes.

#

I tried to wake up. I once lifted a blue whale and flew it back to the deep. I could toss an SUV like a football. But my eyelids were so heavy.

Sounds sorted into vague voices.

#

“So this one lived. You saved her?”

“Yeah. Yeah, she lived.”

“Who was she?”

I frowned. “Just a girl.”

The doctor watched me a moment. I was getting restless, and my head was hurting.

“Okay,” she said. “Continue then.”

“What’s the point? Why not just do your mind thing? You probably took a peek and already know who she is.”

“Even if I were a telepath, I…well, you’re
Hero
. I’m sure you’ve had some training along the way. How to shield your mind. You were in a team with
Veil
, after all.”

This doctor sure knew a lot for someone who didn’t know who she was going to treat. “Yeah. You have a trading card or something you want me to sign?”

#

I met Viviana Ortega, again—the falling girl I’d saved. She was 13 and living with her grandmother, since both her parents were killed during the crash. I paid her a visit on a whim. By then, the media had fatuously christened me as Hero. I hated that stupid name, but TCA encouraged it. Hell, I suspect they were actually responsible, said it was great public relations.
Hero
.

About six weeks after the Quintara 311 incident, I was signed over by the State of California to a government machine known as The Chimeric Agency. They probed and pinched as much as they could and taught me how to control, even hone, my abilities. Back then, I thanked God for these people, and I’ll begrudgingly admit there are still a few good souls there…well, one or two maybe. I’d still like to dropkick Director DeAngelo into orbit.

I keep digressing. I guess it’s because that first meeting with Viv really let the wind out of my sails. Hmm, how does one let the wind out of sails? I can see letting the wind out of a balloon…
anyway
…

I floated over Santiago Square. Not the best of neighborhoods in our fair city. I knew the girl was sitting on the porch in her grandmother’s backyard, smoking her third Lucky Strike. Her thick eyeliner was a mottled mess from tears that had dried up ten minutes before.

I quietly touched down. “I hear those give you cancer.” Yeah, that was the first brilliant thing out of my mouth.

She didn’t even look at me, just took another draw and blew the smoke from her lungs, flicked some ashes on the cement. She may have been acting cool and unaffected, but her heart was thumping like a jackhammer.

I took a few steps toward her, a sudden brisk wind flapping my red cape. “Can I sit?”

“Why? You tired?” She took a draw and suppressed a small cough. “Do you get tired?”

“I…sure, I get tired. Well, sort of.” This already wasn’t going how I expected. “I, uh…I just thought I would check in and see how you were.”

“How big of you. I’m fine. You can go.” She blew smoke and peered off to the side, looking at anything but me, I could tell. Her heartbeat pulsed at me in a way that felt oddly similar to Agent Supernova’s neutron beams during advanced combat training.

“Listen. Uh, if there’s something I can do to help…”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure you’ve done enough for me already,
Hero
.”

What was with this kid? We stood in silence for an uncomfortable length, then she turned her face to me. She had several piercings in addition to her ears—her right eyebrow, her lip, the bridge of her nose, her septum. I wondered for a second if she shoved all that metal through her flesh and cartilage herself. Maybe. Her dark eyes stared intensely into mine. “You know, some people don’t ask to be saved.”

“They don’t have to.”

“So you decide for them.”

“I just…I can’t just stand by. It’s my duty to—”

“Why didn’t you save my parents then? Huh? Why just me?”

The snapshots of screaming faces. Mothers. Fathers. Grandparents. Children.

The images played and replayed all the time.

I paused, mouth open, then, “Look…I manifested the same time you did. If I had known—”

“Known what?”

I blew out a breath. “I…”

“Known. What.” Her young girl’s voice deepened menacingly. She flicked her cigarette in my direction. It landed on the ground between us.

“Viviana…I’m sorry about your parents, kid, I am. I just…”

Her heartbeat turned into something physical now, deafening. Her breath like a jet engine. The Agency had taught me how to filter these things out; I suppose I was feeling
vulnerable
when it came to this girl. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll leave you alone.”