by James Maxey
covenant
A SUPERTEAM NOVEL
JAMES MAXEY
Covenant:
A SUPERTEAM NOVEL
Copyright © 2017 by James Maxey
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Cover art by Mike “Mez” Phillips
First Edition
The author may be contacted via email
[email protected]
Is it okay to dedicate a book to a fictional character?
If so, this book is for Brainiac 5, even though he’d hate it
because the science is a teeny-weeny bit inaccurate.
Prologue
Feet on the Ground
Five years earlier
It was a little after midnight when Sarah left her second floor motel room. She leaned over the balcony railing and surveyed the silent parking lot. Certain that no one was watching, she climbed over the railing and turned her face toward the moon. Unable to resist, she spread her arms and shot into the sky.
She stopped rising about a hundred yards up. This close to the ground, she was unlikely to be seen by radar. She was far above the lights of the parking lot and well out of range of the headlamps of the big trucks rumbling along I-40. In her dark jeans and brown leather jacket, she was more or less invisible in the night sky, despite the bright quarter moon that turned the nearby Arkansas River into a sinuous silver ribbon. Far to the east, Fort Smith, the only city of any size within a hundred miles, was a dull glow on the horizon.
Sarah took a deep breath. The night air was cool and clean, faintly floral. It was April in the Ozarks, with spring stirring trees and flowers into new life. Sarah pressed her lips tightly together in a grim smile, contemplating the unintended symbolism of the moment. She was starting a new life as well. And what was she doing on the first night of her new life? Exactly what she’d done the night before, and the night before that. Flying in the dark.
When she’d flown her charter plane into the tiny airport at Park Station, Oklahoma she’d used her new name for the first time. The guy who checked her in at the hangar had let his eyes linger on her face when she’d signed the paperwork in the small office. She’d managed not to panic. It had been two years since her face had been on television every day, and back then her hair had been long and blonde. Now it was short and dark, and she’d put on weight, filling out her face. Plus, after things went south in Mexico City, she’d escaped with a broken nose that never healed into quite the same shape. With the constant strain of life on the run, worry wrinkles had become permanent parts of her features. The face she saw in the mirror looked less and less like the face on the wanted posters with each passing day.
Checking into the motel had gone smoothly. She’d paid a small fortune for her new identity papers, but this had been the first time she’d used the credit card linked to her new name. She’d gone tense when she’d swiped the card, expecting something to go wrong, just waiting to hear the desk clerk say, “Hmm, that’s odd.” Those words never came. The clerk, a skinny old woman who reeked of cigarettes, had barely made eye contact as she’d handed Sarah her key and told her about the continental breakfast.
Sarah had eaten dinner at the Waffle House next door and got into bed around 10 p.m. She’d tossed and turned for two hours before the need to get into the sky had become too powerful to fight.
Still hanging in midair, she crossed her arms across her chest and grumbled, “Well, that didn’t last long.” She’d thought that her new job as a pilot might satisfy her urge to move above the earth, but it wasn’t the same, separated from the wind by metal and glass. She could fly, driving her body at tremendous speeds, freed from gravity by simple willpower. It was the most fantastic, marvelous thing about her, and the very reason that she was utterly alone. More than alone. Hated. Hunted. Public enemy number one. People called her a terrorist. They said she was an alien.
Of course, she wasn’t. She was human. If she wasn’t hovering in mid-air, it wasn’t hard for her to blend in. She could be normal, walking among other people. She craved an average, uneventful life the way some people crave celebrity or fortune. And she could have it, she knew, if she would only keep her damned feet on the ground.
Unfortunately, flight was hardwired into her mind and muscles. Not flying was like asking a perfectly healthy person never to walk again. How was this ever going to work?
She pulled out her phone. Her reception in the motel had been terrible, but up here she had plenty of signal. She googled the nearest bar and saw it was just off the next exit on the interstate, right across from the airfield. In addition to not flying, she’d also vowed to stop drinking. If she was off the ground, she might as well be off the wagon.
She flew slowly above the road, barely faster than if she’d been running. She hadn’t brought her helmet, and hitting bugs in the dark at high speed was painful. She spotted the bar a few minutes later and almost changed her mind. The parking lot was full of motorcycles and pickups. There were a lot of people hanging around in the parking lot. From several hundred yards away she could hear the thudding bass of loud country music. This gave her pause. If the place was popular, that increased the odds of running into someone who might recognize her. The building itself was a Quonset hut. The place had a hand-painted sign out front that read, “The Hangar,” and beside the words were two crude outlines of planes. She decided that the aviation theme was a good omen and descended in the shadows behind the building.
She stood in the darkness for several minutes, completely understanding the cartoon metaphor of an angel and a demon on each shoulder. The angel whispered to go back to the hotel, get some sleep, and get a fresh start in the morning. The demon whispered that she’d sleep better after a few beers. The angel told her that, as a young, unaccompanied woman, she was going to be harassed the second she walked through the door. The devil told her the same thing, and told her how good it would feel to have someone hunger for her, buying her drinks, and talking to her as if she were an ordinary person. A person they just wanted to sleep with, scolded the angel. Would that be so terrible? the devil replied. She hadn’t had sex since her abrupt exit from Mexico City six months earlier. Normal people had sex, didn’t they?
Her devil made a compelling argument. Stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jacket, she walked around the corner into the lights of the parking lot. It didn’t take long for people to notice her as she moved toward the front door.
Inside, the music was loud enough to rattle her teeth. She really didn’t know enough country music to even guess who the artist was. The place was dark, lit mainly by neon beer signs. There was a dance floor with about a dozen couples on it moving more or less in synch with the thumping bass. Tables made of old oil drums were scattered around the edges of the room and people gathered around them in clusters, shouting unintelligibly at each other.
She headed toward the main bar that ran along the right side of the room. As luck would have it, there were three open stools. She climbed onto the middle one. The bartender was girl with a three nose rings and a skin-tight tee-shirt adorned with a rebel flag. Sarah ordered a PBR and noted that she’d been seated for at least a minute without a man sitting next to her. Before her fall from grace, she’d been celebrated as one of the world’s most beautiful women. Her bent nose and hints of a double chin hadn’t lowered her currency that badly, had they?
To her relief, just as the beer was placed on the bar in front of her, she sensed someone sitting on the stool to her left. Her relief ended as a drunken male voice slurred the words, “Howdy darlin’. New in town?”
She cast a sideways glance at a pot-bellied man with thin gray hair who looked old enough to be her grandfather. “Just passing through,” she said, tersely.
“I hear ya,” he said. “Ain’t it the truth? Folk�
�s call me Lucky Bob. Whash your name, darlin’?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I only give my name to sober people.”
“Then wha’ the hell you doin’ in a bar?”
“That’s pretty much what I’m asking myself,” she confessed.
“Ain’t it the truth,” he muttered. “Ain’t it the truth. They call me Lucky Bob. Hey, what’s your name?”
She rolled her eyes and turned away, taking a long deep swallow of her beer.
“I know your name,” said a second voice to her right.
“Get outta here, Carson,” said Lucky Bob. “I was here first.”
Sarah turned her head slightly to take a glance at Carson. To her great relief, he was decent looking, and roughly her age, maybe a little older. When he spoke, he didn’t sound drunk. But what the hell did he mean that he knew her name?
He seemed to sense the question. “You’re Sarah Buchanan, aren’t you?”
“Um,” she said.
“My brother works at the airfield. He’s who assigned your hangar space.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I was waiting in the parking lot to give him a ride home when I saw you leave. When he came out to the car he told me your name was Sarah Buchanan. We went to school with a Sarah Buchanan.”
“Ah,” she said. “It’s not an uncommon name.”
“I’m Carson by the way. Carson Lee. Pleased to meet you.”
“Okay,” she said, taking a closer look at him. He had blond hair tightly cut in a military style. He looked trim and fit, a little short though, maybe 5’8”, no taller than her.
“You former military?” he asked.
“Nope,” she said.
“Just wondering. Lots of pilots are.”
“Yeah,” she said. “My dad was a pilot and he got his start in the military. He taught me how to fly way before it was legal to put me in the pilot’s seat. I do charter flights. I was supposed to meet three geologists and take them back to Houston this evening. They got delayed and won’t get here until tomorrow.”
“You did a good job of finding the only night life in a thirty mile radius,” he said.
“How about you?” she asked. “Former military? You kind of look it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Army. Did a tour in Syria after the whole region went up in flames after Jerusalem.”
She felt muscles in her temple twitch involuntarily. She’d been in Jerusalem when her sister had flattened the place. It was the reason she was a fugitive, though it really hadn’t been her fault.
“I, uh, I hear it’s pretty rough over there,” she said.
He shrugged. “I guess. It’s not the danger that wears you down, though. It’s the craziness. The sense that absolutely nothing is going to work. You crack down hard, the tensions rise, and suddenly you’re making more terrorists. You pull back, try to let off a little pressure, and suddenly every terrorist who’s been in hiding thinks it’s time to make a move. A few months into my tour, I was in a truck that got stuck in the sand. We sat there, spinning our wheels, wondering when someone was going to come along and start shooting at us. Spinning wheels in the sand seemed like a pretty apt metaphor of what I was doing over there.”
“I’m sorry it was so hard for you,” she said.
He gave a faint smile. “I don’t mean to complain. We didn’t get shot at that night. I made it home alive and none of my buddies were hurt too bad. Things could have been worse. It just drove me crazy that I couldn’t see any way to make a difference.” He motioned for the bar tender to bring him a beer. “Man, this is a whole lot of crap to lay on a total stranger. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said. “I’ve been through some rough times myself. Sometimes it’s easier to talk about it with a stranger.”
He nodded as he took a drink. “Look, I don’t regret going over there. Honestly, it was probably the most important thing that ever happened to me. I realized that, maybe I couldn’t fix the Middle East, but I could definitely make a difference in my own back yard. Right before I joined the army, a lot of money started coming into town because of fracking. Plenty of problems followed that money. I kept hearing about people I went to school with getting caught up in drugs, either using them or selling them. So I came home and got a job as a deputy.”
“Oh,” she said, managing a smile despite her stomach tightening up. Just how cursed was she that on her first night out as a normal person she wound up chatting with a cop? She felt a weird silence growing, and before he might notice she said, “I bet you have some interesting stories to tell.”
“I wish,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Your job that dull?”
“It’s kind of a slog, most days. TV really doesn’t come close to showing what a cop’s day is really like. There’s a lot of waiting around. When you do actually get a call, ninety percent of the time you’re just asking questions of people who either don’t want to talk or people who want to talk too much. And God help me if I arrest someone. I spend more time filling out paperwork than the perp’s likely to spend in jail.”
“No good deed goes unpunished,” she said.
“Wow, I don’t know what’s got me in such a whining mood,” he said. “Honestly, I love my job. Even on its worst day, things make sense. When I was in Syria, I never understood what it was I was fighting for. I mean, some alien woman came down from the sky and destroyed Jerusalem by pointing at it. How does that make any sense at all?”
Sarah nodded, hoping her face didn’t betray the turmoil of her memories.
“Suddenly the whole Middle East explodes and bombs are going off in New York and London and I’m spending my time patrolling some ruined Roman temple to make sure that the locals don’t ruin it some more. It was hard to see how what I was doing mattered. Here, everything clicks. I’ve seen what happens when someone drifts across a lane and plows head first into a semi. Arresting someone for a DUI feels meaningful. I bust some dude cooking meth in his garage, and I can sleep at night knowing I’ve kept his trash out of the hands of some kid. Over there, I felt like I was just contributing to the greater chaos. Here, I’m working for the greater good.”
“So you’re the hero type,” she said.
“Not at all,” he said. “But I like feeling that my job’s worth doing.”
“And that job’s defending civilization,” said Sarah.
“I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me,” he said, taking another swig of beer. “Sorry if I come off as a little intense.”
“It’s okay,” she said, smiling. “I mean, I kind of expected meaningless small talk when I came in, but I’m good with discussing the foundations of civilization if you’re into it.”
“Oh lord,” he said with a sheepish grin. He turned his head away, then looked back, did a take like he was seeing her for the first time and said with a smile, “Hi, I’m Carson. I’m a Pisces! What’s your sign?”
She laughed. “I think I’m a Gemini?”
“Awesome,” he said. “The stars say we’re made for each other.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” she said.
“Don’t,” he said. “I have no idea what I’m talking about.”
She laughed again, delighting in the sound. It had been ages since she really laughed.
“You dance?” he asked.
“I can try,” she said, feeling her cheeks flush. This evening was working out stupidly well. Much better than she’d imagined.
They both got off their stools and turned to the dance floor. Standing in their way were three large, long-haired men dressed in biking leathers. The biggest of the three had a beard that hung down almost to his belt. His companion to his left also had a beard, but it was scraggly and kinked, like someone had glued pubic hair all over his cheeks. The guy on the right was clean shaven, and for some reason was wearing mirrored sunglasses despite the darkness of the bar. She couldn’t guess how he saw anything.
The big guy with the long beard gave a sinister smile as he
said, “Well, well, well. If it ain’t Deputy Lee. Ain’t looking so tough without your gun, are you?”
“Out of prison already, Lawton?” Carson asked. “Three months is really all you get for shooting a guy these days?”
“It’s not like I killed him,” said Lawton. “But it’s still three months I’m never getting back. Three months you owe me. I figure I break your legs in a couple of places, you’ll be in a cast at least three months. Should make us about even.”
“Lawton, get out of my face,” said Carson. “You might not be a genius, but even you have to know that if you lay a finger on me you’ll be back in prison for a lot longer than three months.”
“Then it’s a contest,” said Lawton. “See if you can get out of the hospital before I get out of the big house.”
Lawton lunged, arms spread, aiming to tackle Carson. Carson ducked to get out of the way. A lifetime of training kicked in for Sarah as her feet came an inch off the floor. Not only could she fly, she could also make anything she touched while flying effectively weightless. Her hand darted out, her fingers dug into Lawton’s beard, and with a grunt she curled under him and rolled his now weightless mass across her shoulders, increasing his momentum. She let go and he cleared the top of the bar, crashing into the booze and mirror beyond.
Carson, meanwhile, had come up from his dodge, planting his feet as he gave a savage uppercut to pubic hair face right beneath his chin. The big guy fell backward, flopping limp onto the dance floor.
Sunglass guy had barely moved. Sarah wasn’t sure he saw what was going on. Screw him. Anyone who was a friend of Lawton probably deserved a beat down on principle. She went vertical in the air and kicked him in the chest with both boots. The second she made contact he was weightless. He launched a good ten feet across the room before crashing into a table. It was pure luck that he didn’t hit anyone else in the crowded bar.
Sarah dropped to the floor before anyone noticed that her feet hadn’t touched down for at least five seconds now. She glanced at Carson and said, “You sure know how to show a girl a good time!”
