by Lee French
Taking the easier route, Jasmine went squirrel and walked through the bars. “What do you want me to do?”
He sighed and hoped he be able to keep his clothes while swarming soon. “Stand there being yourself. Say something if it seems right. Turn into a squirrel when I ask you to.”
She nodded earnestly and smiled. “I hope she’s nice.”
“Me too. That’ll make this all tons easier.” He checked numbers and found the right one on the ground floor. A pretty girl answered the door, showing them polite interest. “Hannah Parson, my name is Bobby, this is Jasmine, we’d like to talk to you for a minute, if you don’t mind.” Damn if he wasn’t getting surrounded by gorgeous women.
Hannah had that girl-next-door kind of look. Her straight, blonde hair had been put up in a casual ponytail and her pink tee and shorts suggested she had no plans to go out tonight. Her eyes, of course, were the same blue as theirs, and she noticed that sameness right away. “Are you selling something?”
“Not in the way I’m pretty sure you mean.” Bobby reached up and tapped beside his eye. “The two of us and a few others, we all have the same eyes, just like you.” He pulled his now crumpled list from his pocket and offered it to her. “All of us are on this list, and some part of the government is hunting us down because of it. They’ll come for you, sooner or later, and we’d like to help you avoid becoming a lab rat for some kind of crazy experimentation.”
She smoothed the list out and used her finger to scan it. When she reached her own name, she tapped it. “You’re nuts.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. “Don’t mean I ain’t right.”
With one eyebrow quirked, she smirked at him.
“Not exactly. Jasmine, this is the time.” Since he’d already seen the show, he watched Hannah to see her reaction. Her smirk disappeared and she said something his Momma would smack him for. He picked the squirrel up gently and offered her to Hannah for a closer look. Adding to the experience, he popped a dragon off his thumb and it buzzed around them once, then returned to him. “Can we come in? ”
“Whoa. Um, yeah, okay. Sure.” Five minutes later, the entire group sat at her table, on her couch, and on her floor. Jasmine chose to remain a squirrel, and attacked a can of mixed nuts Hannah happened to have. Like they’d done for Will, Bobby and Jayce told the story, now with what happened at Jasmine and Will’s apartment added on.
She listened without interrupting and showed no signs of denial or rejection. “That waking up thing happened to me yesterday, actually. In the middle of the night. I woke up cold and sweaty, except I was trapped and couldn’t move. One panicked freakout later, it stopped and I could move. Now…”
Lifting her hands, she flicked them out, the same way Bobby did to spritz Momma while washing the dishes. A near-transparent blue edged disk about four feet in diameter popped into existence with a brief hum to announce itself. “It’s a force field. Blocks everything in both directions. So far, that’s all I can do with it, but it’s only been a day. I think when I woke up, I was encased in it, so I’m guessing I can shape it if I try hard enough.”
“That would make an excellent shield to hide behind if we get shot at again.” Jayce reached out and poked it. His finger shimmered blue, then stopped. “Nope, can’t take that on. Such a shame.”
Hannah shrugged. “I haven’t thought much about how to use it yet.” She grabbed her laptop from the nearby counter and opened it. “I’ll see what I can find for properties we might be able to use.”
Bobby raised his eyebrows. “You don’t want to think about pulling up your stakes and trucking off with us?”
“After everything you just told me? Are you nuts? I’d have to be six kinds of stupid to stay here and wait for them to come grab me. Even if they didn’t want to experiment on me, can you imagine the military getting their hands on us? No, thanks. If I’m going to serve my country, it’ll be willingly, and after I figure out how to use this power, not with them constantly pushing me with what they think I might be able to do. The second I realized what I’m capable of last night, I started thinking about running for it, I just didn’t have a clue where to go. Now, I have a clue.”
“This was easier’n I expected it to be.”
Hannah laughed. “Maybe we could make a video and send it to everyone, so they all know they aren’t crazy as soon as possible and can make their own way to wherever this base winds up being.”
Will said, “That’s not a bad idea, actually. Getting it into the right hands and not the wrong ones is the biggest problem.”
“Not in the wrong ones is the problem,” Jayce agreed. “We could just put it up on the internet and get it to everybody it needs to, but our would-be captors will see it, then.”
“I was joking, but if you all want to try to figure something out, I have a laptop.” Hannah gestured to the machine in question for emphasis. “First things first, though. You can all crash wherever, but my bed is my bed. It’s not really big enough for anyone else, either. Besides that, where do you want to put this base?”
“Someplace in the middle of nowhere,” Alice said.
Ai added, “Not too far from a city, though. We’ll still need to get supplies and stuff.”
“Middle of the country somewhere,” Bobby suggested. “It’ll need to be big, too. Lotsa space so we got a buffer ‘tween us and the neighbors. Ten acres ought to be enough, I expect.”
“At least ten acres, within…we’ll say 75 miles of a big city, in the middle of the country. Okay, I can work with that.”
Bobby shifted so he could see the screen. “What is it you do for a living?”
She smirked. “I’m a secretary for a real estate agency.”
Grinning, he huffed a quiet laugh and noticed everyone staking out their spot for sleeping. Will and Jasmine settled together on the couch, Jayce grabbed some floorspace off to the side, Ai commandeered the easy chair, Alice curled up on the other end of the couch. Bobby figured he’d wind up doing what Jayce did, and probably soon.
Hannah paused in her churning through web pages and leaned over. “If you promise not to do anything,” she muttered, “you can share the bed with me. One hand starts wandering, though, and I’ll shove you on the floor. I would have offered to one of the others, but you seem like the nicest of the lot, aside from Jasmine, and she’s doing fine.”
“Thanks, that’s nice of ya. Don’t want to make you uncomfortable, though. I’ll just take a pillow.”
With a shrug, she returned to flipping through property listings. “It’s really okay if you change your mind.”
“Good to know.” He pointed to the picture of a derelict farmhouse she clicked onto. “What’s that one?”
She peered at the screen and scrolled down the page. “Thirty miles from Fort Morgan, Colorado. Fifty acres, they want half a million for it.”
“Dollars?” He goggled at the picture.
“Yeah.” She chuckled. “That’s a lot of land, and it’s not so far out of the way as to be the total boonies. Let me see if I can find out who ‘they’ is.”
Bobby kept watching the screen as she clicked and typed and typed and clicked. Within fifteen minutes, his head nodded and eyes drooped enough that he noticed. He saw Jayce lying on the floor probably already asleep. It looked inviting, compared to the chair he sat in. His eyes drifted to Hannah and her offer popped back into his head. Thanks to her generosity, he could sleep on a soft bed tonight. It sounded like heaven after the past week. “I’m gonna take you up on that offer after all,” he told Hannah softly.
She nodded and checked the time. “I should get some sleep myself.” After shutting her laptop and setting it aside, she led him to her bedroom. Five steps in, she paused and looked him over. Her hands moved toward her hips, then shifted in mid-motion and she crossed her arms.
The last time Bobby felt this awkward in a girl’s bedroom, the night had gone less than stellar. She never spoke to him again. He had no intention of doing anything like that here. As much a
s he found her attractive overall, he needed sleep too much to think about her as anything other than a nice host. To put an end to the uncomfortable moment, he turned his back on her and looked down at himself to decide how much to strip down. The more he kept on overnight, the more likely he thought the dragons would let him keep it.
After half a minute of deliberation, he pulled off the boots and trenchcoat. He could sleep in jeans and a shirt, and this would be the last time she slept in this bed anyway. It occurred to him that he might have a harder time getting is clothes washed if the swarm rejected something afterwards. That problem could wait, though. He sat on the edge of the bed and sighed with pleasure at the softness.
A beautiful woman climbed into the bed next to him, and he had to resist the urge to touch her. It had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with wanting to check this all was real. The creepy doctors could be playing tricks on his brain, or he could have passed out on the side of the road, or something else. How touching her would prove that, he couldn’t say, but it made sense in his head. The urge to start a conversation bubbled up next. To kill it, he shut his eyes and thought about dragons. It surprised him when Hannah shook his shoulder a few seconds later.
“Breakfast is ready. I didn’t have the heart to wake you sooner. You seemed really peaceful.”
Bobby rubbed his face. “I’m thankful for that. I did plenty yesterday, and today promises to be more.”
He sat up and took a deep breath of cinnamon and coffee. For that reason alone, today started better than yesterday. His belly growled and his bladder pressed, which helped him to get up and get moving. A few minutes later, he grabbed a bowl of oatmeal and some fruit. The chair he’d used last night remained empty, and he took it.
“So,” Hannah said as she turned her screen to show him, “this property is owed by the state of Colorado. I didn’t find the whole story, but the main gist is that it was seized by eminent domain for some energy project that failed due to budget cuts. The owners were already reimbursed and moved on, so the state just held onto it in case the project went forward.
“At some point, I expect everyone forgot about it. Now it’s just sitting there, growing wild. We’ll have to do a lot of work to make it livable, and there won’t be any electricity, possibly no running water unless we can figure out how to set ourselves up with that. Odds are really good, though, that by the time anyone notices we’re using it, we can defend it from anyone who wants to evict us.”
Alice groaned. Ai shrugged. Jasmine bounced in her seat with a delighted smile. Will sighed, nodding his acquiescence. Jayce sighed. “If that’s the best we can do, then it’s the best we can do.”
“We should split up here, I think.” Bobby looked around the room. “I can fly on my own, Ai can run. Hannah, you have a vehicle?”
“I have a van, yeah.”
“That’s two cars. Y’all can split up however you want. Ai and I can go west and see who else we can convince. The rest of you go up and down the coast and stuff, hit as many people as you can as quick as you can. We keep in touch by phone, so everybody knows who’s been visited and no one wastes any time.
“Tell folks to get money and as much of their stuff as they can, point out what the conditions’ll be like. No sense in springing that on ‘em. Maybe we get lucky and someone can do something about power and water. We all got pretty obvious powers, so we can all demonstrate. If’n anybody else is willing to go around and find more of us what’s also got an obvious power, get ‘em to do it. Otherwise, send ‘em there.
No one objected.
“Will you all stay and help me pack my stuff?” Hannah asked the room. “I have a van because I’ve moved a bunch of times in the past few years, and it’s just cheaper this way. I can go from living here to being packed in the van in a day, but it’ll go a lot faster with help.”
Jayce nodded. “Bobby, you and Ai go ahead. I’ll help pack and go with Hannah in the van.”
The group spent the next ten minutes discussing how to explain this to others. After that, Bobby, Alice, and Ai sat down and divided the names into four lists based on location while everyone else helped Hannah pack. Bobby would take a southern track to the west coast, starting in Baton Rouge. Ai would take a northern one, starting in Chicago. He’d be the one who got to go out to Honolulu, and she’d go up to Juneau. Jayce and Hannah would go north from here, Will and Jasmine would go south. Alice decided to ride with Will and Jasmine, for safety. And because Jayce failed to fully smother a frown at the idea of her coming with him.
“That’s that, then,” Bobby said around a mouthful of reheated Chinese takeout. Breakfast had already worn thin, and he took a few minutes to stuff his face with food Hannah would otherwise have to throw out. Dumping the empty box into the garbage, he blew out into dragons to see what stayed and what came along. Much to his surprise, nothing fell under the swarm. He had no idea how it worked and had no intention of questioning it; somehow, all his clothing and everything in his pockets got gobbled up by the dragons. He re-formed with a grin, stuffed more things into his pockets, and saluted the others before going swarm again and setting off.
Bobby knew he had about three thousand miles to cross, plus however much father for Hawaii. He’d have to sleep, and eat, and had no idea how far he could push himself before he’d have to stop or fall on his face. Faces. Wings, maybe? Whatever. Without knowing his speed for sure, he could only guess how long it would take. Besides, he had to go down and around, and stop to talk to the others on top of sleeping and eating. His best guess put him at their new base in two weeks.
He went up. The dragons had no problem with heights, so he kept going until the highway he needed to follow became a tiny ribbon cut across the land. Nothing should see him up here, other than maybe people in an airplane. The hardest part, he figured, would be turning at the right points. Without a map in hand to keep track of his path, he’d need to stop often to check his progress and stay on course. At first, he put the ocean at his back. That approach only worked for a while, then he had to rely on his limited knowledge of the region.
Flying felt different up here. Going at full speed with nothing to stop them, he reveled in the freedom. His dragons flew with their mouths open, letting the air stream out the back somehow, gears on the inside using it to propel them faster. That made no sense to him, considering the fact they ate metal. Where did it go? Resolving not to think about it, he let his mind go blank and enjoyed the simple sensations.
Eventually, he noticed the sun had climbed high enough to guess it must be around noon. He ought to be hungry. Without a belly, maybe he couldn’t feel that. Despite being made from his body, the dragons had no connection to it. Suddenly concerned about starving to death by accident, he sent the swarm diving into the nearest city. In a run-down part, he flooded into an alley and re-formed himself. His stomach hurt so much from emptiness, he groaned and had to double over.
One of the things he’d pocketed at Hannah’s happened to be an apple, which he grabbed and devoured. He ate everything but the seeds and stem, spitting those out onto the ground. It took the pain away without curbing his hunger, and he went looking for more. He also looked for something to tell him where he was, a map or signs. At the mouth of the alley, he found a newspaper dispenser for the Charlotte Observer next to one for the Charlotte Post.
When he looked at the map on Hannah’s laptop, he hadn’t noticed his route might take him right over his own house. In a direct-line path, Atlanta sat squarely on the way from here to Baton Rouge. He could stop in, tell Momma everything was okay, grab a few things, and be on his way. Maybe empty his bank account. What would the cops have told her? Would he be better off sneaking in and out and not seeing her? What if she believed this garbage about him being a terrorist?
Questions circled around his mind, refusing to answer themselves and give him peace, so he walked. Normal people passed him on the street, doing normal things with their normal friends and families. He wanted to stop someone and sha
ke them, to tell them what their government had done to him. What would any of them do about it? Nothing. Their lives, as he could plainly see, weren’t affected by any of it. If someone else asked him for help with this, he liked to think he’d try, but knew well enough he wouldn’t.
He happened across a park with a group offering free meals and joined the line. When he reached the table, he encountered kids his own age spooning up pasta and salad and some kind of casserole. They all had that hippie college look, with hair in dreadlocks and weird piercings all over their faces and bold patches on their clothes. The hand drawn sign proclaimed them to be ‘Food Not Bombs’ in large blocky letters. A week ago, he knew he would have passed these people by with a sneer. Not because they fed the homeless; because they looked like hippie college students.
“Is that enough?” The girl with the ladle smiled at him.
He glanced back at the line and saw plenty of people still waiting. “I reckon it’ll do, yeah. Thanks.” His belly growled loudly enough to be heard a few feet away.
She picked up an extra plate and covered it with food. “Here, let me help you.” Carrying the plate, she led him to a nearby bench and sat down beside him, offering the plate. Another person stepped in and took her place.
“This is real kind, but why’re you sitting with me?” His stomach refused to be ignored, so he started feeding it.
“Most of these people,” she waved at those eating and waiting, “are regulars. We come here every week and see the same faces. I’ve never seen you before, and you haven’t had it rough for very long, I think. At the same time, you look awful, like someone killed your puppy or best friend.” She patted his knee, and it managed to not seem condescending. “I thought maybe you might want to talk to someone. You know, instead of finding a bottle or a needle to climb inside of.”
He sat and ate, and she sat and waited. When he emptied his plate, she traded with him. “It’s kinda complicated.”
