by Lee French
He sated his belly enough to trust it would last a few hours, then blew out into dragons again. Except for that one, all of them gurgled with hunger to his mind. Damn. At least it seemed they could go for a while yet. From listening to them, he got a small child vibe, reminding him of the grandkids of some of Momma’s friends.
When he touched down and re-formed, Ai had already returned, now in a red shirt and sandals with her curtain serving as a skirt. Alice had a pair of the same sandals on, without the shirt. Jayce handed Bobby his curtain piece without a word.
“Looks like you did alright. The dumpster behind the diner has some food that’s decent and free. I went ahead and filled myself up because I got a new issue. Apparently, my dragons need to eat separate from me.”
Alice gave him a flat look. “That makes no sense.”
“Tell me how you spitting ice from your hands makes sense.” Bobby shrugged, because the amount of logic his life operated on now didn’t much matter to him. “Anyway, I’mma go off and see if I can find something for them while you all do what you gotta do.” Before any of them could object, he blew out into the swarm again. Somehow, he’d have to figure out a way to bring clothes along with him. It wasn’t the best possible way ever to travel if he couldn’t manage that, but it did still beat walking around barefoot.
He saw the other three head off in the direction of the diner and trusted they could take care of themselves. With four scouts already out, he sent ten more, looking for whatever they wanted to eat. The one that found its meal rejoined the swarm, carrying another gear it found. It could barely manage the weight and other dragons helped by converging and devouring it. By the time it was truly back with the swarm, he had fifteen happy dragons and no gear. At that rate, these things would be a plague of locusts for metal. He was made up of hundreds of the things, maybe even thousands. Hopefully, they didn’t need to eat very often.
Twenty minutes later, he noticed his three fellow escapees leaving the alley behind the diner. Jayce licked his fingers. The girls had no such issues. Few of his scouts had managed to find anything he considered acceptable to take. Functioning machinery needed to be left alone, and people needed to be avoided. Aside from a handful of old cars with a few gears and cogs, they had nothing to eat. Most of the swarm remained cranky, so he dove down to the alley and re-formed there.
“Just get cash if you can, but if you see something that would help us a lot, try to swap for as much as you can.” Jayce handed the radio over to Ai. He tossed Bobby’s curtain at him without looking.
Ai and Alice both nodded. Ai took a deep breath and grabbed Alice’s hand, tugging her across the street and into the general store a few buildings up.
Bobby sighed lightly as he watched them. “I didn’t find nothing worth going for.”
“At least the girls have shoes now.” Jayce leaned his bare back against the wall of the building behind him. “What do you really think about hunting down the people on that list?”
The question made Bobby raise his brow and blink a few times. “I said what I meant. It’d be crappy if anybody else had to go through this. Even worse if they decided their superpowers made ‘em above the law in a big way. Imagine if Alice decided she just wanted stuff and took it.”
Jayce crossed his arms over his chest, looming over him. “Ai already did that. You encouraged her to, even.”
“Just for survival, though.” Bobby had been intimidated and beaten up by badder guys than Jayce. He shrugged. “I wouldn’t tell her to go get a ‘spensive handbag or something if she wanted it. I think we really just need to get clothes, then start finding the others. They won’t have the same problems getting their own money as we do. They’ll be able to pack a bag, even.”
“True. If we did want to wreak some havoc, though, we could do quite a bit.”
“Oh, sure. I can see that. Ai could rob a place blind. You can probably kill a person with your fist. Alice, she’s pretty deadly, or plenty of chaos. Me, I can be a horde of gremlins and the ultimate big brother, both at once. We’re real dangerous, and we need to keep everybody else from realizing that. ‘Cause the second they do, we’re not walking free anymore, we’re either in a cage or hiding.”
“I’m glad you see that.” Jayce gave him a small smile. “Alice and Ai, I’m not so sure they really do. Alice seems more in denial than anything else. Ai… The small theft she did do seemed like it left her more excited than I feel comfortable with. As far as our continued survival is concerned, anyway. I really don’t care if she steals a Gucci handbag, I just care whether her stealing it leads to someone deciding I need to be in a hole in the ground.”
The girls backed out of the store with the radio still in hand and hurried to the alley, cutting off Bobby’s reponse. He frowned and gestured for Jayce to duck farther into the alley with him. The obvious question was obvious, so he didn’t bother voicing it, and neither did the bigger man.
“They had a TV on inside,” Ai whispered. “It had a breaking news report. They called us federal fugitives, extremely dangerous. I don’t think the guy working there saw us before we backed out.”
“They had pictures of us.” Alice wrung her hands together. “Why are they saying we’re dangerous?”
Bobby looked past them, reflexively wanting to see the TV somehow, and recognized the front end of a cop cruiser. “Come on, we need to move.” He noticed Jayce saw it, too, and they both herded the girls away from the mouth of the alley. “I guess it’s safe to say they noticed we were missing by now.”
Alice snorted. “Ya think?”
“Maybe we should split up.” Ai peered out the other end of the alley, checking both ways before waving to indicate the way was clear. “I can get pretty far in a short time.”
Jayce shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We’ll be better off if we stick together.”
“Even if we aren’t, at least if one of us gets nabbed, the others’ll know. And shoot, facing all this alone is kinda crappy.” Bobby checked behind them and saw another cop car driving past the alley. He wasn’t sure if the cops inside saw them, but how could they not? Likewise, before they had to cross that last street, the cops—he amended himself to use the word ‘deputies’, because this car had ‘Loudoun County Sheriff’ plastered on the side—in that other car had to have seen them, also. “Why ain’t they getting out and pointing guns at us?”
“Are you upset about that?”
“No, it just…” Bobby stopped. “Hold up a sec.” He could see they considered that a dumb idea, and he held up a hand to ask for a minute’s grace. “Just listen for a minute. S’posing the deputies,” he pitched a thumb over his shoulder to where the car went past, “are here in this podunkville because that old guy heard about us on the radio and called it in. Now, we walked here from that lab, right? So we ain’t real far from it. If I was the bad guys here, I’d have a van or something, full of guys with big guns, just waiting to scream out to wherever we got sighted.”
Jayce narrowed his eyes as she stared at the mouth of the alley. “You think they’re herding us.”
Bobby nodded. “It makes sense, and explains why these deputies ain’t all trying to be heroes by taking down the known terrorists.”
Ai rubbed her face and mewled. Alice’s eyes watered and she hugged herself.
Jayce, on the other hand, kept staring, his eyes gone hard. “If we engage them here, they’ll get a good handle on what we can do.”
“How can we avoid it?” Ai shook her head. “Scratch that. How can you all avoid it? I can just run right by.”
“And I can fly away.” Bobby frowned and tried hard to think. “We gotta go backwards, or do something unexpected. Come on.” The quartet hurried back the way they’d come for one block. Instead of sticking to the alley, they turned down the next street and ducked into the first open door they came across. It was somebody’s house, and a voice came from farther inside almost immediately.
“Rich, is that you,” a woman’s voice calle
d out. “Did you forget something?” They heard the babbling of a young child, too. While this place might be better for a few minutes than running up the street, it sucked as a hidey-hole. Before any of them did more than make a face to express unhappiness at this turn of events, the owner of the voice turned the corner and stopped, her expression comically surprised. She turned out to be a pretty, petite, and very pregnant brunette.
“Ma’am, we don’t mean you no harm at all, and we ain’t here to rob you or nothing.” Bobby put up his hands in the universal sign of ‘I’m harmless’. Thank goodness Jayce hid the baton and radio behind his back. Thinking fast, he searched for words to make this better instead of worse. “We had a bit of trouble, and are really just lost and confused and stuff. I gotta admit, we were hoping to get a drink of clean water and maybe use the phone, and if you weren’t here, we mighta took some clothes, but that’s all, I swear on my daddy’s grave.”
The woman stood there, blinking in stupid shock. “We don’t have a lot, but, um, if all you want is a drink of water, I…um, suppose that’s…not a problem.”
He hurried down the hallway to her, mostly to make sure she didn’t slip in a phone call to 911, while doing his best to keep looking harmless. “Hi there,” he said cheerfully to the little girl in the high chair, her hand stuck in a bowl of dry cereal. He waved to her, she waved back. “She about eighteen months?” Glancing back, he met Ai’s eyes and jerked his chin for her to join him. She struck him as the most harmless looking of the group.
“Um, nineteen, yes,” the woman said with a nod, her wide eyes darting between them. She edged towards the little girl.
“I swear we will not harm you, or her, or the one yet to come.” He gestured to her belly. “We’re just really having a rough time right now. It ain’t your fault, and we ain’t gonna put it on you.” He could see Alice and Jayce having a whispered conversation out of the corner of his eye, probably around the topic of what to do now, and ignored it.
Moving slowly and keeping her hands in plain sight, Ai got herself a cup from a cabinet that hung open already and filled it with tap water. She gulped the water down and gave a satisfied sigh as she refilled it. “This is a really nice house. And you have good water. The water at my parents’ house is really crappy, we have to use a filter.”
“Thanks.” The woman put her rather substantial girth between Bobby and the little girl, her hands reaching behind her to grip the tray of the high chair. “What do you want from us?”
“Not much.” Bobby looked around the kitchen and imagined Momma in it. She’d be tickled pink to have this much space. When his eyes fell back on her, he realized that made him appear to be casing the place. He threw on his ‘aw shucks’ smile. “Not calling the cops would be real nice.”
“Why are the police after you?”
Bobby felt Ai watching him and thought for a moment how to answer the question. “We ain’t rightly sure. It seems like a mistake to all of us, but they sure do seem to want us.”
For the first time, the woman’s eyes traveled down his body. He hoped that meant he’d managed to get her to relax enough to not scream the second they left. Even better, she appreciated what she saw. His job did, after all, having him doing manual labor five days a week. She tore her eyes away from his bare chest and cleared her throat. “How did you lose your clothes?”
“We all woke up naked in a lab and broke out.” In reaction to this, Ai goggled at him. She turned away to avoid letting the woman see it. He scratched at the back of his neck to keep Ai from distracting both of them. As he’d hoped, the woman found his flexing bicep more interesting than Ai’s sudden movement. “Don’t rightly know what they were doing to us, don’t rightly much want to know, we just wanted to be outta there.”
“Oh my goodness, that’s horrible. Who would do that?” The woman let go of the high chair and held her hands out in a kind of low-key invitation. “Are you hungry? You know, my husband, he’s not that much bigger than you. Some of his clothes might fit you reasonably well. Sweatpants, maybe.” She pointed and tried to lead them out of the kitchen.
Bobby put up a hand to stop her. “You should stay with your daughter, ma’am. If you don’t mind us just taking something to wear, we appreciate that, and we won’t take nothing else.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jayce head off in the direction he saw some stairs. “I swear I’m being honest.”
Ai huffed in exasperation. “Why are you explaining this stuff?”
“I don’t know.” He sighed and shook his head. “I guess I figured if I told somebody, it would make more sense or something.”
“I’ve never seen an Oriental person with blue eyes before.” The woman decided to sit down beside her daughter, her hand on her belly. The little girl ignored everyone in the room and stuffed more cereal in her mouth.
“Japanese.” Ai filled the glass back up and handed it to Bobby. “Nobody in my family has blue eyes but me. We don’t know how it happened.”
“There’s…well, you know. A…usual sort of way for— For that to happen.” The woman shifted as she spoke, and dropped her eyes to their feet.
Bobby chuckled, hoping to disarm her more. “Yes, ma’am, there sure is. Right now, our eyes seems like the main reason why they want to experiment on us, though.”
Brow furrowed, the woman lifted her head again and cocked her head to one side. “Isn’t that the kind of thing the Nazis did? Experimenting on people because of their genetics. Twins and all.”
“I didn’t do all that great in school, but that sounds about like what I heard of ‘em.”
One corner of Ai’s mouth curled into a scowl. “Our government has done plenty of that kind of thing, too.”
Bobby heard Jayce making his way back and turned in time to catch the pair of boxer shorts thrown at his face. “We really do appreciate your kindness,” Jayce said politely. “We’ll get out of your home shortly.”
“Yeah. Do you mind if we use your bathroom before we go?”
Chapter 5
It was good to have underwear, Bobby thought as they hurried through backyards to avoid being seen on the streets. He hoped that saint of a woman got the long, happy life she deserved. Maybe someday, he’d come back here and do something nice for her and her family. All because he now had boxers, shorts, and a t- shirt—a significant improvement over the curtain kilt. Without shoes, he still had to watch where he walked, but at least he didn’t have to worry about flashing anyone anymore.
Jayce now had flip-flops, putting extra bounce in his step. The sweatpants and plain shirt fit tighter on the bigger guy, making his buff physique somehow more obvious than it had been without. The girls got underwear, too, which made both of them instantly less cranky. For whatever reason. Bobby didn’t really understand women that much.
“Do you think she’ll call?” Alice took Jayce’s help to get over a low fence the rest of them had no trouble hopping.
“‘Course she’ll call.”
She frowned. “Why all the talking, then? We could have just backed out again and tried another house or something.”
Bobby opened his mouth to give her the same reason he had given Ai. Someplace between his brain and his mouth, he realized there had been more to it. “It ain’t never killed no one to be polite. ‘Sides, she’s gonna wait a few minutes, I’d wager.”
Jayce grunted in agreement. “She’ll give us a head start, maybe ten minutes or so.”
“What makes you so sure?” Ai peered around, but they hadn’t yet seen any sort of official vehicles tracking them, or even trolling along looking for them.
“She didn’t feel threatened,” Jayce said.
Bobby grinned and let the unspoken compliment sustain him for a minute or two. They dashed across a street and plunged through more backyards, skirting around a house surrounded by hedges. “I say, next time we see cops, we go towards ‘em.”
Alice panted, having trouble keeping up as they kept moving without a break. “Are you crazy? They have guns.”<
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“We got superpowers.” He wagged his eyebrows at her, feeling clever. “I been thinking, you know, those lab guys must have some clue what we can do already. They maybe don’t know the limits, but they must know what kinda things we got up our sleeves.”
“If that’s true,” Jayce nodded as he hopped over a kid’s bicycle, “we won’t lose much by using them.”
“‘Specially on regular cops what ain’t going to believe what they saw anyway.” Bobby spent so much time paying attention to everything else, he jogged into a tree. His body exploded into tiny dragons and his clothes fell to the ground.
Jayce stopped and scooped the clothes up. “You need to figure out a way to take these with you, Bobby,” he groused. “Might as well stay that way for now.” His eyes rested on a metal swing set in the backyard they stood in. “Actually, I might as well be something else, too.” He gripped one of the legs, sending white painted aluminum spreading down and across his body.
Ai stopped and leaned against a shed near it, and Alice dropped to the ground to take a break. Apparently, she spent all her time with books and none of it with exercise.
Rising up into the sky, the swarm spread out. Bobby watched Jayce give Alice a hand up, then he flew along with them as they hurried through yards again. He saw the cruiser half a second before everyone else did, and they all followed the plan to converge on it.
Ai disappeared, a handful of leaves blown around by her passage. The cruiser bucked like a bronco and the front dented like a rock fell on it. Bobby’s best guess had her jumping on the hood.
The two Sheriff’s deputies scrambled out of the car, both reaching for their weapons. Jayce put his head down and charged them, plowing into one and throwing him to the ground. Something smacked into the other deputy, knocking him on his ass and sending his gun spinning away across the asphalt. Alice ran up to the car, screwed her eyes shut and grimaced, then flung ice shards at it, ripping two of the tires apart.
It looked to Bobby like the three of them had the situation under control. He sent the dragons in to swarm the deputies anyway, so Ai could grab the gun if she wanted to. The dragons behaved like a big pile of flies on rotting garbage, provoking a lot of swatting and cringing from one. The other seemed to be down for the count, so he left the poor guy alone.
