Hush (The Infected: Ripped to Shreds Book 1) (13 page)

Cindy glanced out the back, using
the rearview mirror.

"
Fuck
."

"What? Do you see
something?" Turning all the way around, seat unbuckled, he pointed the all
black handgun that she'd seen earlier.

Cindy took a breath, not wanting
the guy to go off yet. It did look like they were being followed, and
aggressively
.
That there was a problem was clear, but they didn't know what was going on,
which was her point. Not that she'd
said
that yet.

"No. My power isn't working.
It's too tense, I guess. Hold on, hard left coming up in about ten seconds. Get
a belt on." She didn't know if that was clear, but the thin man moved
quickly, and held himself in place bracing with his hands, the gun pressed
against the passenger side door.

The turn made the tires squeal
against the blacktop. It was sudden enough that the vehicles couldn't make it
happen in time. One of them, the van, drove up on the sidewalk and hit a tree.
That got Proxy to smile.

"We have room to lose them.
Keep going. I need to call this in and see if I can get..." What he wanted
to have happen she didn't know. Hopefully it was the people being caught, or at
least identified.

Cindy hadn't known this about
herself before that point, but now, suddenly, she realized that she didn't love
being chased like that. It wasn't about her, but it was
annoying
. It
made for a tense twenty minutes as they drove around and finally parked behind
some bushes in an alley, the lights turned off.

Brian had been on his cell,
talking to someone who he didn't announce to her. She would have called that
rude, but too much of her attention was being spent on trying to hide and pick
up anything she could get. Her heart was pounding from the excitement, which
didn't really keep her from doing her reading thing, she realized after a bit.
As soon as her attention went to Proxy, the feed started again.

So Cin could tell that he was
talking directly to Marcia Turner. She was Infected too, but also in charge of
the IPB. That the woman, and there was a picture of her that appeared in front
of Cin's eyes, with tidbits of information under it. Skimming, the words moved
fast, but she got the general idea.

The woman was calling in a lot of
people on it,
including
satellite imagery. That got her to look outside,
since it was dark out, and there were clouds above. That the government might
have super night vision or infra-red that could see from space wasn't a new
thought for her, but if so, they'd still probably need to have a clear shot to
the ground.

Which explained why they weren't
getting anything that way. What
did
work was getting tiny Impulse out,
running up and down the streets. She moved fast, and her mind ran to
distraction. It took careful reading, and was another computer like screen, but
Cindy got it to come up along with Brian's. After all, she'd met her before,
and connected with her words.

Not that she'd ever done anything
like that before really. Past twenty-four hours earlier than that she'd never gotten
readings at greater than seventy or eighty feet. That was when the words got
too small to see for her. It was kind of clear that her ability was better than
she'd thought. It still wasn't eye beams, or super speed, but you worked with
what you had.

"Can you get Impulse to go
back? I think she had the van..." There was, and it kind of freaked her
out as she watched it, a video feed in the corner of the screen for the girl.
Her eyes locked on it, and after a bit she understood that she was staring at
what the kid was looking at. She even got it when she stopped and talked on her
phone. There was no audio, but she got a transcript. Not that she was looking
at the words, the moving pictures being too big of a shock.

It was a person at the base
speaking to her, with Brian telling Marcia, the boss, what was needed. It made
for a strange time delay, but after a few minutes the girl had the van in her
sights.

"There. The one with the
pushed in front right hand side. The cream colored thing?"

She got the response from Bridget
first, the words
got it
popping up as she closed with the thing. For a
bit she wondered if there was a chance she was wrong, and that it was some
other vehicle, but luckily they started shooting. That was
kind
of a big
give away. Especially when the back opened up, and a man with a green tube
pointed it at her.

Cindy didn't know what it was,
but Impulse did, and closed anyway.

"Um, an RPG? Out of the van?
I can't get the other car." What she did see was the explosion. That
knocked the girl from her feet, sending her flying through the air.

The captions under the spinning
vision said, "Wheee!"

That probably meant she was all
right. The words didn't seem that concerned or anything, but her phone was
destroyed. Cindy got that from the screaming that came over Brian's cell.

Cindy called back, not knowing if
she'd be heard or not.

"She's good! Her cell didn't
make it, but she's back on her feet. Um... The van is out of sight though. I
think... She doesn't seem to know which way to look, and is going to try
running a grid?"

That got more yelling, but it was
just stern, not half panicked seeming. Brian shoved the phone against the side
of her head without asking then. It actually slapped against her cheek, causing
a bit of pain.

"Ow. Watch it." She took
the thing anyway, which was small and black, still staring at what Bridget was
looking at.

The woman that spoke in her ear
sounded concerned, and her voice held a commanding tone, which almost instantly
pissed Cin off. Worse, from her picture the woman was prettier than she was.
That
had
to make Marcia Turner a bitch. Even if it hadn't been the case,
her tone was enough to make that certain. She was stressed, it was clear, but
yelling at Cindy wasn't going to help.

"What's happening? Tell
me!" There was no commanding now, so she took a breath and refrained from
telling her to fuck off.

"She's running up and down
streets looking. So far I don't have a visual on the van. It was some kind of
green tube thing that hit her. She tried to get close to it, but didn't make
it, so it exploded? She needs new clothes..." It was a funny thing for her
to be thinking, as she used superpowers to try and find dangerous people, but
it was there.

About ten seconds later she could
see herself, sitting next to Brian in the alley they were hidden in.

Proxy growled.

"Damn. She's here. That's
almost certainly the wrong direction. We lost them."

That seemed likely, so she waved
to the rapid blur, which stopped in front of them. She wasn't totally naked,
some threads of what she'd been wearing still clinging to her
very
slender body. There was black charring over everything except her hair, which
was short enough that it didn't even seem mussed.

The distraction of seeing her got
the moving images to cut suddenly, and the words moved over the girl's head,
snapping into place. She walked toward the car, breathing hard.

Turner, the bitch, was screaming
at her to explain the sit-rep. Over and over.

"Shut up and let me find out
for you?" Cindy climbed out of the car, and held the cell phone out, but
Bridget's text said that she couldn't speak clearly yet. "Fine, I'll do it
for you. She lost visual on them. On the good side she
does
have the
plate number." That was given, with her taking it from above Bridget's
head, carefully.

"I'm running that now. Wren,
can you take over? We have... Sorry, didn't get your name?" The voice was
a bit suspicious sounding, like Cindy was a bad guy, trying to sneak into
things to get information.

Since that was right she smiled.
It was fake, but no one noticed.

"Cindy. I'm a local. Out on
a date with Brian? We were
just
going to pick up some dessert and head
back to my place for the night.
That's
ruined now. Here, he wants to
talk to you?" He had his hand out, and was smiling anyway.

It wasn't a happy thing.

"Marsh?" The woman
wasn't there anymore however it seemed, another person taking over.

Brian spoke, and a few seconds
later his words flashed. Telling her that six people were incoming to the area.
The group that appeared in front of the car made her jump, and yelp a little
bit. Without waiting they scattered, off to look for the van, she guessed.

That left only one person. He was
an elf.

At least he has an all leather
outfit, cat slit eyes, and what seemed to be a cittern in his hands. He was
also about four feet tall. The man moved in next to Bridget, and gently put a
hand out.

"Are you well, m'lady?"

The girl smiled at him, and
gestured at her clothing.

"Not bad, except the
wardrobe. I don't know that this really needs the big guns. Team Four... We
could have handled it."

Cindy was distracted, not by the
strange man, since a lot of Infected people looked different. Being a good
looking elf wasn't too bad that way, since a lot of them ended up kind of ugly.
So it wasn't that. It was just that the words she saw for the form in front of
her didn't make sense.

They were all about cooking, and
getting waffles out for the fourth meal. It was really in-depth, too. Planning
on a maple walnut syrup that had been made earlier in the day. Staring at it,
she read for a bit, which started to explain the situation after a while. The
back story was interesting. The man in front of her wasn't real. He was a
different person altogether, in a far off place.

"Rigsby? All of this team is
one man?" She whispered the words, but everyone there turned to her. Brian
was standing not three feet from her, so had heard it like a normal person. The
others had really great ears, so it worked the whole way around.

Bridget nodded.

"That's a secret. We don't
talk about it." There was no command that she shouldn't speak on the
topic, but the idea flashed up instantly above her head.

The IPB was hiding the fact that
what they called Team Four was one individual. Possibly the most powerful
person in the world. That they knew about. His power let him create energy
beings that
had
super powers. At a distance from his body. Many at one
time, and all indestructible, as long as he lived.

The picture of him that came up
was bizarre however. If Bridget didn't have a concussion from the rocket thing,
then the man was a teddy bear. It was possible, Cin guessed, but seemed too
unlikely to credit.

Still, keeping her mouth shut
wasn't something that she had a problem with. The only trouble with Rigsby was
that the man had created a telepath. It wasn't the one in front of her at the
moment, but one of the women that had dashed away, flying with bat like wings,
was the one she needed to fear. June. She was a shape shifter too, as well as a
mind reader.

A thin line of panic tried to
pass over her then. From Rigsby's text she could tell that he wasn't
consciously aware of anything the others were doing. Not directly. It was all
there in the back of his head however, so by going to the index, she was able
to flip over to June, the telepath.

That got weird, fast.

Because there was a voice in her
head. Talking to her.

"Hi! Are you on our
side?"

Speaking out loud, Cindy tried
not to feel sick. She focused harder and got a visual of what that part of
Rigsby was seeing at the moment.

"I'm Cin. Any luck on the
search?" It was tempting to tell her to not read Cindy's mind, but doing
that would be a bit like
telling
her to investigate harder.

"Nothing. I can only get
what people are thinking at the moment, and in about a two mile radius of where
I am. Can you get anything?" It sounded like they were just talking, and
the voice was mellow, female and calm.

She shook her head.

"
Nooo
. Not unless I
meet them first."

June was not having that one, and
there was a strong feeling of eye rolling.

"
Nope
. Think about
it, you found me, linking from T'ket, to Rigs, over to me. If you can do
that
,
you can eventually find almost anyone. It's just like doing a Google search. If
you can find the right person, you can do it."

That made a lot of sense, and as
soon as it was said, she could see how it might be done. That the telepath had
known all that was kind of telling however. Thankfully, before she could slip
up too much, Brian spoke to her.

"Are you on with June?"

She nodded, and forced her eyes
wide.

"Currently. What do you
need?"

That, it turned out, was telling
people all about the van. She was able to bring up what Bridget had seen,
reading from her computer like screen, and used that to send the images to
June, who in turn spread the data to her other people.