Operation Blackout

by J. L. Middleton

  “… that helps people like you,” she finished. It was not like him to simply brush her off, but it had been years since they’d spoken, so she couldn’t blame him for being unsociable. Regardless, she’d come to have this conversation, and she wasn’t going to allow him to leave it so easily. She followed him, and Sone, who was judging her wordlessly, trailed behind. Sone paused, his attention caught briefly by something she didn’t see, and then joined them with a bemused expression on his face. He didn’t offer an explanation and she didn’t bother to ask; her attention remained on Aaron.

  The extent of the construction had been only partially visible from the outside. The interior plaster had been torn away to expose old copper wiring, which Aaron had slowly begun to replace by hand with modern insulated wiring. Some of his completed work was also visible in the form of new drywall installations and unopened kits of molding, mud, and primer paint, while the unfinished sections revealed a rat’s nest of archaic supply and return wires covered by powdered gypsum chunks. “Yeah, you’ve done a great job, from what I hear,” she said, deciding that compliments might help reestablish their rapport. “Have you been taking classes? I didn’t know you knew so much about carpen—”

  “This is the first time you’ve talked to me,” he stated straightforwardly. He picked up a pair of pliers and began stripping some wires in the wall. She thought about following him, moving into his space so that her voice wouldn’t be muffled, but then she recognized that her interference near a possibly live wire wouldn’t be welcome, and she kept her distance.

  “I know. I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I should have—”

  “Don’t know who that other guy is supposed to be,” he said, evidently ignoring his presence.

  “Sone. He’s a friend,” she repeated. She sighed deeply, steeling herself again for what would come next. She was terrible with words, especially when it came to her own emotions, and her apology was something that needed to be done. She wanted to make amends for abandoning him; if only she could find the right words. “I should have spoken to you earlier or before I left, but I didn’t know how to deal with it. I mean, I still don’t, but I want to give it a try.” She dared to touch him, caressing his back lightly so as not to distract him.

  “At least the two of you are a welcome change,” he muttered into the wall. His callused fingers were carefully working the wiring away from the wall, isolating the K&T wiring from the brackets and washers that were meant to anchor it in place. The section he was working on was small but tangled, and the worn wires were sometimes patched with tape, which had long lost its adhesion.

  Sone pawed at her shoulder, unintentionally shoving her into the rough surface of the wall sealant. “Naught—”

  She ignored the interruption and straightened, addressing Aaron. “I know this is sudden. I know I have no right to come back into your life again, but I promise you that I’m not going to leave again,” she continued. Memories of the night she left came flooding back to her. He’d been asleep on the couch with a half-empty beer bottle in his hand; she’d known that if she’d plied him with alcohol, he would sleep more soundly. She had planned to take only one bag, which had already been packed and hidden in the bedroom closet ready to go. While retrieving it, she’d paused to take one last account of the items she’d felt that she would have needed or would have been leaving behind when she’d heard a crash coming from the living room. She’d known instinctively that he’d fallen onto the floor and that he would have woken back up if she’d gone to check on him, so she’d left through a side window instead. She hadn’t even left the note that she’d promised herself she would write.

  “I’m going to work through it,” she promised. “I mean, we are, and we’ll get you help for the other thing. The organization I’m with—”

  “Naught!” Sone repeated more urgently, making contact with her shoulder with greater force. She’d half turned to identify the source of the interruption, when Aaron suddenly dropped his tools and buried his face in his hands. She could see his lips moving and hear the slight whisper of words, but she caught only the odd syllable. As she started to lean down to check on him, she noted an odd creeping movement at the edges of her vision as if something lingered just out of view. When she turned her head to see it better, it danced away from sight and then abruptly changed direction, landing haphazardly on the floor with a splash. The shadows in the room had liquefied and were coming for them.

  - - -

  “Looks like someone beat us here,” Orion said as they pulled up, commenting on the car parked in the receiving area. “Isn’t that your friend’s car?”

  Connor pulled their vehicle beside it and parked. He scrutinized the car’s exterior, but since it was a common model and color and he hadn’t paid close attention to it earlier, he couldn’t be certain. “Might be,” he agreed.

  “What is she doing here?”

  He shrugged as the two of them exited the car and met at its front bumper. He hadn’t spoken to her since college, and she could have been there for any number of reasons, but the why really didn’t matter; her presence alone made him change his game plan. Luna had mentioned a small backyard cottage that had been converted to an apartment, which was where Aaron lived. While it was the logical place to check for a mentally ill recluse, and a confrontation there would minimize collateral damage, Connor needed to place the safety of the apparent bystanders first.

  Based on probability, the house was the most plausible destination. If Aaron was receiving visitors, the guesthouse or the manor would be equally credible choices given that the latter was also his place of work. However, if Sam were one of the caretaker staff and Luna had simply forgotten to mention her, then she would head to the house, and any visitors—likely de jure trespassers—would choose to explore the house if they were seeking ghosts. This meant that Connor should adjust his strategy and search the house first to divest himself of any civilians before confronting Aaron.

  Having made this decision, he turned to Orion, who awaited his direction uncomplainingly. Orion was a good, obedient kid, and he hoped that the situation with his sister would be resolved without issue because he deserved better than the hand he’d been dealt. He considered instructing Orion to remain behind him, which would enable Connor to shield him from harm, as he had done during the previous confrontation with Lena Malmkvist, but the broad range of this Other’s ability gave him pause. The hallucinations had affected an entire park, and it was just as likely that the two of them might be overtaken by phantom images, so concern for Orion’s safety might be moot; if it was not a directed attack, neither of them could take shelter.

  In following his train of thought, Connor also realized that his sidearm would become a liability in the imminent encounter. None of the previous victims had been armed—though some had tried to fight their visions and had injured bystanders—and he couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t try to employ his firearm. Therefore, it behooved him to remove it from his possession, and he reached for his belt to disengage the holster. Abruptly, Orion shuddered in a false start, and his eyes became wide with panic. “Cassie!” he screamed in a frenzied voice and took off toward the house before Connor could stop him or even incite caution. Without breaking his stride, Orion burst through the unlocked front door and disappeared into the house. Driven by concern for his young partner, Connor went against his better judgment and took off at a jog up the sidewalk with his hand pinned firmly against his holster.

  A burning wave broke over Connor, stealing his legs from beneath him and sending him flat onto his back. A sharp reverberation chased it like thunder and lightning cracking the sky open. His head struck the pavement hard, causing him to see stars, and he shut his eyes against the splintered wood and glass that shot across his vision. Debris bit into his exposed flesh, and when the cloud settled, he quickly found his feet again and rushed to survey the wreckage that had for
merly been the manor.

  The scene reminded him of a bomb detonation, and he was doubtful he’d find survivors as he made his way cautiously through the rubble. “Orion!” he shouted, making the young man his priority. He saw movement beneath some loose planks of wood and rushed to uncover the victim. He began digging, carefully removing each fragment so as not to cause a collapse and further injury, and he focused on exposing Orion’s head. His progress was swift, but it halted instantly the moment he recognized the casualty’s face.

  His chubby cheeks were obscured by blood and dirt, and gypsum dusted the ridiculous wisp of a mustache on his upper lip. His tight dark curls had been sheared to the scalp in deference to easier style management, but Connor recalled its wild appearance in the weeks between trims. Connor could even see glimpses of his desert uniform between chunks of rubble. All was as he had remembered it—frozen in time since the last day he’d seen him… the last day he’d been alive. It was not Orion, as he had hoped, nor Sam Anderson, nor even another bystander. It was Jacob Stern—his best buddy during deployment and the first Other he had ever met—who had sacrificed his life so that Connor would survive.

  Terrified, he recoiled instantly and retreated, losing his footing in his haste as his heel caught on a loose board. Compounding his ill luck, he was jarred into a different direction as he fell, and he could only imagine that it was a secondary detonation and that they were still under artillery fire. He wanted to save Stern—to drag his body to safety in one of the hardened shelters—but he knew that he was dead; he’d used his supernatural ability to create some sort of domed shield and sealed the primary blast in with him. Stern’s body was in pieces, and he was rapidly bleeding out, if he hadn’t already; no amount of first aid instruction had prepared Connor for the reality of this moment. Other artillery strikes were still incoming, and he needed to make it beneath hardened cover before the next hit, or Stern’s sacrifice would be for nothing.

  - - -

  Naught became conscious of a blanket of silence swallowing all sounds, and she knew then that Sone had taken charge of the situation. Given his experience as a leader of the Vanguard, this was to be expected, and the idea of seeing him in action appealed to her curiosity. She was aware of his aptitude with sound, although she had never seen it demonstrated, and she wondered how much she could perceive on the visible spectrum.

  She, contrastingly, would be useless in this fight. SION had been sympathetic to her plight when she’d first arrived among their ranks, but its leadership had also shown enthusiasm about her ability and had immediately solicited her to join the Vanguard. In comic books, the superheroes who exhibit enhanced speed are never affected by the adverse effects of moving quicker than the eye can see; but this was not true in her case. The wind blinded her when she was moving at top speed, which was something that she quickly learned to combat with goggles, and no pair of athletic shoes, let alone normal clothing fabrics, survived the stress she placed on them. She had “reappeared” naked more than once, and this was only one among the practical problems. Through her experiments, she’d begun to realize that her body could not cope with the speeds at which she was capable of moving; rather, enhanced speed accelerated the wear and tear on her ligaments, tendons, and joints, and her internal organs often expressed their displeasure within a few minutes. Her metabolism also increased, which thankfully spared her from dieting but increased her grocery bill. She’d also discovered that she had become proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity: The quicker she moved in relevance to the world, the faster she aged. She could live hours in the span of a few nanoseconds, and her ability didn’t spare her from time’s wrath. Once she’d discovered that she had not been born with a complete set of powers, she’d stopped using her abilities and had instead learned to rely on her mind and practical self-defense techniques as a contingency plan against the BSI.

  Sone took an aggressive posture, and she mimicked him, deciding to interpose herself between Aaron and any harm; furthermore, having her back to the wall was prudent. She knew that the BSI employed Others—why they chose to betray their own kind was a quandary for another time—but she had reservations about the coming confrontation. She’d believed that she’d be able to convince Aaron to join her without encountering any agents, and she didn’t want to injure anyone unless her life was at stake.

  The liquid shadows crept forward, first rising into columns and then refining their shapes into those of small children. They kept their distance, forming a semicircle around the three of them, and despite the dark clouded pools where their eyes should have been, she could feel their judgmental stares. She looked to Sone for his expertise, but he seemed as stunned as she was.

  She felt the vibrations of the frenetic impact from the front of the house, followed by the erratic tremor of light feet running across springy floorboards, and the young blond man appeared in the room. His face was ashen and panic-stricken, and he threw himself onto his knees a distance away, sobbing and rambling inaudibly through his tears. Stunned by his arrival and subsequent strange behavior, she leaned forward and squinted, trying to see beyond her normal perception. Her attention was violently seized by one of the shadow children, who grabbed her chin in its small hands and forced her to meet its corrupted gaze. Its touch was cold, inspiring revulsion, and she instinctively resisted its unnaturally strong grip, but her animal strength was not enough, and she looked it in the face.

  She had been tossed around as a youth and knew how to swallow fear in favor of survival, so she was able to look past its absent eyes and see its whole visage. It was not a child, as she had believed; no, it had the square jaw and sunken eyes of a grown man, and worse yet, the longer she stared into the abyss, the more she realized that its forebear must have been Aaron. She tore her eyes away from its face to examine the other children, who were closing their circle, and she confirmed that they all bore a striking resemblance to her ex-boyfriend. She felt her stomach drop and her heart skip a beat. She wrenched her head free from the child’s fierce grip and gaped at Aaron, who was still kneeling on the floor behind her; he had barely moved, only to curl himself up further, and he pulled his knees to his chest. The heels of his hands were still in his eyes, and his lips moved intermittently as he murmured noiselessly into his kneecaps.

  Movement at the front of the house diverted her attention, and Connor stumbled in, exaggerating the placement of his feet as if the ground were carpeted with broken glass and he was barefoot. He settled into a spot near Orion and, like his partner, behaved peculiarly by pantomiming the stacking of invisible objects.

  Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw an eruption of powder like fine snow and felt heavy, granular debris strike her face and exposed skin. The overhead fixture slanted violently, shattering the unlit bulbs it contained. “Sone, what are you doing?” she chastised him, and when she failed to hear her own voice, she realized that his absolute silence had not been lifted. He did not react to her outburst and continued his seemingly undirected acoustic onslaught.

  Her awareness broadened as she tracked each person simultaneously. Connor staggered backward, tripping over Orion’s extended heel as he backpedaled unexpectedly. Sone’s plaster sonotechnics continued, the bursts leveling out and becoming more controlled, and she realized that Connor was in the middle of his strike path. She sprinted toward him, accelerating her body just beyond the speed of sound, and jerked him clear of the destruction, mindful to support his neck and not jolt him too severely with her velocity. She overlooked Orion’s existence—perhaps because she had met him only briefly—and the sound wave collided with his head, whipping it backward violently. The cavitation further traumatized his brain, if not his viscera as well, and the burst lifted his body and propelled it across the room and through an exposed wall before burying him in the rubble.

  Knowing that she had to neutralize the crisis before it escalated further, she released Connor to the floor, where he
fell with a thump, and she focused on Aaron.

  The children had swarmed his contracted body, transforming into a writhing mass from which faces surfaced sporadically. She swallowed her disgust and reached into the inhuman mound in an effort to uncover Aaron. It was cold and endless, and she thought she might lose herself in it. Her mind turned to the times she’d pretended that his night terrors hadn’t disturbed her and to the days when she’d wished that he was normal. Whenever she hadn’t been able to deal with it anymore, she had run away and found activities that had kept her out of the house until he had already fallen into a drunken stupor. Even though she’d loved him, she’d come to resent the amount of care and understanding he’d needed, but she had been the one to let him down. He had been dealing with an illness, and instead of assisting him in the healing process, she had exacerbated the situation by chiding him for not dealing with it better. She had been a vital part of his support network, and she had abandoned him.

  Her fingers wrapped around a wrist and followed the arm until she found his shoulder. She caressed his back, pulling him into a hug as her other arm found his body, too. She was pressed against him, cradling his head against her shoulder, and she stroked his hair as she whispered comforting words he couldn’t hear. She willed the warmth of her body to envelope them both in a protective bubble, and she wrapped him in a blanket of affection. She felt his tears begin to soak through her shirt and his ragged breath become even again, and she knew that he would be OK because she would make his recovery her mission.

  After what seemed like hours, their intimate reconciliation was interrupted by Connor’s unsteady yet firm voice: “Sam, please step aside. It’s time for us to go.” She became aware that the other noises of the world—from the settling of the house to the distant hum of an airplane—were pouring into the room. She took in more of her environment. The shadows had dispersed, lightening to pale shades and returning to their corners. The room was spattered with plaster and littered with misplaced tools, but there was no sign of the children’s invasion, save for the shattered wall beneath which Orion’s body lay. Beside her, Sone had regained his senses and was standing, seemingly waiting to follow her lead.