GeneSix (36 page)

“I doubt it. When they beamed out, I doubt the one with her, that friend of Akila’s, had time to set a destination. Supposing his power works like mine, and it sounds like it does, then he probably would have just been sucked into the time stream wake from when he beamed in.”

“The...what did you call it?
Time stream wake
?”

“Yeah. When you part the threads of time, which is what you do when you time-travel, you create a sort of wake. Without even trying, you can step back into time and then slide back along it to your beginning point. It’s how I found you guys. But you don’t leave much of a trail when you do it.”

“That’s fascinating. How did you discover this?”

Jeff shrugged. “You gotta realize, to me this is nothing more than what it would be like for one of you to walk along in the mud, take a step, and then look back and watch your footprint fill with water. It’s as simple as that. Just something I do.”

“So,” Chloe said, “if your zeta energy messed up your ability to time-travel..,”

“Exactly,” Sammy said. “It would have had at least some sort of detrimental affect on Hasani’s attempt to pull you all out of here. That’s why he could only beam himself and Ms. Waid and the flame thrower out.”

Akila said, “Do you think they are still alive?”

“Difficult to say for certain.”

Jeff said, “The threads of time can be so gentle in a way, and beautiful. Multi-colored in ways you can’t even imagine. They bend and flow and sway. But you step into them wrong, they can rip you to shreds.”

Akila closed her eyes and shook her head. “Poor Hasani. On my world we were part of a team that was, in some ways, not dissimilar to your own. He and I went on many missions together. He risked his life for me more than once.”

Chloe said, “So were you two, like, an item?”

Akila looked at her with confusion. The meta-human called Nate had telepathically given her English, but she still had a little trouble with idioms.

Chloe rolled her eyes. “Were you ever, like, you know, a couple?”

Akila smiled. “An
item
. That’s clever. No, we were more like brother and sister. For the most part.”

“Too bad. He was hot.”

“But now its all gone. The world I knew. My home. In a way, Hasani is my only tie to the world I knew.”

“If he’s still alive,” Sammy said, “we’ll find him.”

Jeff said, “So I’ve found my father. And even though she didn’t know it, I found my mother. It kind’a sucks she’s as crazy as it is.”

Chloe said, “At least you know who your mother is.”

Actually, it was Nate who located Hasani. Nate could suddenly feel the presence of another meta-human with energy similar to Jeff’s. Quentin Jeffries had gone to Mother and Snake to join their community, as he had nowhere else to go, so he and Snake went with Nate and found Hasani under the Boston Bridge. Hasani was lying face down in some long, brown grass. Snake turned him over, and felt his neck for a pulse.

He said, in his sandpaper voice, “He’s still alive.”

Jake and his son Jeff were with them, as Snake had told Nate to give Jake and Scott a psychic call the moment they found Hasani. Jake was in his blue and black battle suit, and Jeff was also in battle suit, complete with his own wristband. His suit was red, and he had requested no black stripe.

“He needs a hospital,” Jake said.

“And how do we explain this to the doctors?” Snake looked up at him with his reptilian eyes. “Tell them it was a time-travel accident? We have some medics among us, and Mother has healing abilities. We’ll take care of him.”

Jake had brought along a stretcher. They lifted Hasani onto it.

“I feel so responsible,” Quentin said. “If not for me this would not have happened. And there is no sign of Mandy at all.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” Snake said.

Jake shook his head. “I’m not so sure. If she has developed an ability, and is as dangerous with it as she appears to be, then I’d feel better knowing where she is.”

“I can’t believe it,” Jeff said. “My own mother, one of the most dangerous people in the world.”

Though Jake was Jeff’s father, Snake had been Jeff’s teacher and a father figure to him for most of Jeff’s life. It was Snake who placed a hand on Jeff’s shoulder and said, “She’s not well, Jeff. That’s not her fault. Maybe, when we find her, we can get her some help. And keep in mind, she loved you enough to risk everything to go back to that facility and try to find you.”

“Was it love? Or was it insanity?”

“Sometimes there’s not much difference.”

Jake looked at Snake and gave him an approving nod. The more Jake got to know Snake, the more he found he liked him.

Jeff said, “I’m not sure I really understand.”

“None of us ever really do.” Snake grabbed one end of the stretcher. “Come on. Let’s get this man back to Mother.”

They stood in the hospital room, looking at the hole in the wall. Scott, April, and Rick. Sammy was connected with them remotely from the mountain complex.

Scott said, “Sammy, you getting this?”

“Yes,” Sammy’s voice came from an audio field surrounding them.

They were standing in the room that had belonged to Peter LaSalle. The patient was now gone. The hospital staff had heard a loud crash, which had shaken the entire floor, and come running in. They found LaSalle gone. Half of the wall was gone with him.

A few days earlier, LaSalle had gained consciousness, and had requested a laptop and Internet access. The hospital staff had seen no reason to say no. For the next two days, he sat in his bed surfing the web. He had seemed harmless, or so they thought.

“He broke out through the wall,” Scott said.

Standing beside him was a man in a white lab coat. Maybe forty-five years old, his hair combed back and away from his face. A stethoscope dangled from around his neck. “I don’t see how that could be possible. I mean, he had been comatose until just thirty-eight hours ago.”

“Regardless, doctor, the patient is gone. And that gaping hole in your wall was his point of exit.”

“Do you think he just smashed through it and, I don’t know, jumped out?”

Scott nodded. “That’s exactly what I think he did.”

“We’re on the top floor. That’s fifteen floors down.”

“It might sound incredulous to you, doctor, but we live with a man and his son who could make this jump with almost no effort. We’re confronted with the impossible every day.”

“Well, I’m not. I guess I find all of this a little hard to get used to.”

April said, “That’s why we thought the government was being reckless in admitting him to a facility like this. They should have called us in.”

Scott stepped toward the hole and looked to the ground below. A car was parked down there, and it looked like it had been turned into a metallic pancake. “You can see plainly where he landed.”

Rick said, “So, now what?”

April shrugged. “I guess we could look at his computer.”

The laptop was still on the bed. It had somehow not been disturbed at all when LaSalle left the building. The machine was open, and its screen saver was on. The words SCOTT TEMPEST – READ THIS were scrolling by.

Rick said, “Looks like LaSalle left you a message.”

Scott tapped the space bar, and a Word doc came to life on the screen.

SCOTT TEMPEST,

AS YOU READ THIS, YOU CAN BE ASSURED I AM LONG GONE. ANY EFFORT TO FIND ME WILL BE A WASTE OF ENERGY ON YOUR PART.

April said, “Who wrote that for him? I mean, he’s not awfully bright.”

Rick chuckled. “I wasn’t even sure he knew
how
to read and write.”

They read on.

A MISTAKE OF YOURS WAS THAT YOU DID NOT KNOW HOW MY ABILITY WORKS. A MISTAKE LIKE THIS CAN BE CRUCIAL, AND AS A RESULT, I ONCE AGAIN HAVE MY FREEDOM. HOWEVER, THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT THIS TIME. NO LONGER WILL I BE THE STOOGE THAT I WAS. INCREDIBLY STRONG, AND YET UNABLE TO THINK MY WAY OUT OF A PAPER BAG. THE ‘POWER MAN’ THAT CONFRONTED JAKE CALDER A YEAR AGO IS NO MORE.

YOU SEE, TEMPEST, MY ABILITY IS NOT REALLY ENHANCED STRENGTH AND STAMINA. YES, I AM BLESSED WITH BOTH, BUT THEY ARE MERELY THE RESULT. A BY-PRODUCT, IF YOU WILL. MY ABILITY IS THAT WHEN I EXPERIENCE SEVERE TRAUMA, MY BODY REACTS BY BECOMING STRONG ENOUGH TO EASILY RESIST SUCH TRAUMA IN THE FUTURE. NOT TO BORE YOU WITH A WOE-IS-ME STORY, BUT WHEN I WAS A CHILD MY STEP-FATHER LIKED TO USE ME AS A PUNCHING BAG. EACH TIME HE HIT ME, I GREW STRONGER AND WITH INCREASED STAMINA. FINALLY, BY AGE 12, I WAS MUCH MORE PHYSICALLY FORMIDABLE THAN HE, AND HE SUFFERED THE CONSEQUENCES. MAY HE REST IN PEACE. WHEN MANDY WAID ATTACKED ME, PHASING THROUGH MY SKULL WITH HER HANDS TO PHYSICALLY TRAUMATIZE MY BRAIN, ALL SHE SUCCEEDED IN DOING WAS TO EXPONETIALLY INCREASE MY BRAIN FUNCTIONS. I MAY NOT BE QUITE ON AN INTELLECTUAL PAR WITH YOU, BOY GENIUS, BUT I AM PROBABLY NOW SECOND ONLY TO YOU.

IN CASE YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT MANDY’S POWER, WELL, I’LL LET YOU FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THAT ON YOUR OWN. I HAVE BEEN AS INFORMATIVE AS I INTEND TO BE FOR THIS DAY.

FAREWELL. UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN. AND BELIEVE ME, WE WILL.

And that was where it ended.

“Well,” Scott said. “This certainly gives us something to think about, doesn’t it?”

She walked along the dusty shoulder of a two-lane highway. The black top was old and cracked from years of frost in the winter and the harsh sun of summer. The morning sun hung over the horizon, and there were no clouds overhead. The day would turn out hot and dusty, but at this early hour the wind brought with it a chill. Such was the weather here on a remote road in the reaches of rural Kansas.

She wore jeans and a sweatshirt, items she had stolen from a clothes line in a nameless small town a few miles behind her. Over the clothes she wore a long, corduroy coat that fell almost to her ankles, like something from the seventies. In an attempt to keep the dust out of her hair, she had tied her hair into a braid and wrapped it tightly about her head and pulled a baseball cap down over it. The hat was a faded royal blue and bore the stylized white, letters KC on its front. The Kansas City Royals, or whoever. Not that she was a particular fan of sports, but the hat had been left carelessly on a front porch and now was hers. Over her hands was a pair of scratched up work gloves. 

She did not understand the science of how she came to be here. It was a teleportation accident - that was all she needed to know. And that she was lucky to be alive. As she understood it, such an accident could have broken her up into detached body parts scattered all over the midwest. Or even shot her molecules off somewhere into space. She was in one piece, however, and was thankful for that.

She pulled the glove from her right hand and looked at the hand as it was now. Perfectly solid, and yet transparent. Through her hand she could see the pavement below, and the gravel at the side of the road. She could still become completely invisible and she could phase through solid objects, but she could not fully remove the invisibility from her right hand. The hand she had attempted to phase through that strange kid with, back at Tempest’s complex. Whatever he was, he had done this to her.

She would return, one day. Tempest and Calder could bank on that. And she would find her child. And she would take out Tempest and Calder in the process. She promised this to herself, and to her missing baby.

When she had first met Tempest and Calder, she had thought it was a great lark. She had referred to Tempest as Egghead Boy, all in fun. She had found Calder attractive and maneuvered him into a weekend of sex, and got a great story out of it. She had been in the process of becoming Kimberly Stratton, star reporter. And now, a year and a half later, her career was over and she had been somehow turned into a mutant freak herself. They would pay. By God, they would pay.

She pushed her hand back into the glove, and continued walking along. She turned up her collar against the chill of the morning air. The wind picked up, and bounced little pieces of gravel against her back.

Scott Tempest, fully adorned in his battle suit, sat on a rickety, wooden chair in an abandoned store front in a forgotten part of Boston. Sitting across from him in an old rocker was the woman known to the group simply as Mother. Long, graying hair tied into a tail fell along her back. Small lines criss-crossed their way alongside her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Not the lines that can be caused by a lifetime of hardship, but instead lines earned from one of smiles. For, despite her hardships, Mother was one who forever saw the glass as half full and greeted each sunrise with wonder.

Standing nearby, pacing a bit, was Snake. Scott had observed Snake never seemed to sit. Snake was still wearing the battered trench coat Scott had never seen him without. His slouch hat was resting on a counter. Snake’s head was fully exposed in all its green, hairless, reptilian glory.