“Once, as Quetzalcoatl,” he said. “I fly to see if stories true.”
“What did you see there?”
“Army buildings. Big building too.”
“Any people?”
Diego smiled. “Army people.” He leaned backward to laze on the sun-warmed sand and folded his hands behind his head. “I show if you want.”
Sally was about to say no, but then remembered the thing Glimmer had put in her mind. She debated whether she should risk it without any support from the team. In the end, she decided, she was anxious to prove herself and earn a permanent place on the Just Cause roster. If things got really bad, she could always run away. “Okay, Diego. Show me.”
He sat up, brushed sand from his shoulders, and shook it out of his hair. “Come.” He held out his hand to her. She hesitated as she thought of Jason, but she decided holding hands wasn’t cheating, and anyway, she was at work. She took the proffered hand and let Diego lead her off the beach.
She asked, “How do we get there? Is it far?”
“You fly?”
“No.”
“Run then?”
Sally considered it. “Better not. Do you have another way?”
“My cousin has motorcycle. We ride there.”
Sally’s heart pattered a little faster. She’d never been on a motorcycle. “All right, I trust you.”
Diego took her to the docks. She kept an eye open for Stacey but saw no sign of the team leader. Diego talked to another man, older and less handsome. They went around the corner of a warehouse. In a moment, Sally heard an engine fire and Diego came back astride a dirt bike. He pulled it up next to her and shouted over the BRAP BRAP BRAP of the exhaust. “My cousin say you very beautiful. Please…” He motioned to the seat, which looked like it belonged on a touring cycle.
Sally climbed onto the seat behind Diego.
“Exhaust pipe very hot. Don’t put leg on it. Put feet there and there…” He motioned to two pegs bolted to the body of the bike. “Arms around my waist.”
Sally clasped her hands together against his abdomen. In spite of the humidity, his skin was warm and dry and stretched tight like canvas. It was a very intimate position, she thought.
Diego pulled the bike away from the docks, careful to avoid any rapid acceleration or sudden maneuvers. He navigated quickly through the town and took them along a one-lane road that headed northeast. “This road take us up above compound. Maybe you see what you look for.”
“Sounds great.” Although Sally had been determined not to enjoy herself, she found the feel of the wind whipping her hair very pleasant, like when she ran, but without the effort.
For the next forty-five minutes, Sally had a lot of fun. Diego picked the smoothest path along the rough road. He didn’t try to show off with daring maneuvers or riding too fast. Every ten minutes or so, he’d turn his head to shout over the engine and ask if she needed to stop. The road climbed back and forth up the side of an ancient volcano and wound through the trees. They skirted the caldera, which had lush green bushes and a pool at the bottom.
Diego shut off the bike and wheeled it into the foliage at the side of the road. “Guards down below. We walk from here.” He pulled a long machete from a sheath strapped to the front shock absorbers. They pulled some broadleaf fronds over the bike to disguise it from anyone passing by.
“How much further is it, Diego?”
He thought for a moment, and said, “Not far. You need rest?”
“No,” Sally said with a smile, “but thanks for asking.”
He motioned toward a nearby peak that jutted up into the sky. “We climb up there, go around a ways, and then we see the compound.” He patted a canteen at his side. “I have water for now. We refill at stream along the way.”
“Well, aren’t you just the little Indiana Jones?”
“No sé qué es eso, señorita.”
“It’s a movie, about—oh, never mind. Lead on.”
Hiking through the mountainside jungle wasn’t at all like in the movies. The trees had thick boles, but weren’t so far apart to make it hard to pass between them. Vines dangled from overhead branches or clung to the trunks. The ground was damp and little red and yellow flowers grew in clumps, surrounded by clouds of tiny insects. Broadleaf plants grew everywhere, which made a second canopy at knee height. Instead of hacking away at every vine and sapling within reach, Diego barely used the machete at all. He picked a path around the thickest undergrowth. Bugs the size of model airplanes buzzed past her, quick enough that try as she might she couldn’t slap one away. After several minutes, she got so tired of slapping at herself that she gave up and knew she’d be one big itchy spot by nightfall.
Diego’s canteen was empty by the time they reached the stream; the heat and humidity had taken their toll on the two hikers. “Is it safe to drink?” Visions of dangerous bacteria and viruses danced through Sally’s head, courtesy of a thousand hours of late night movies and video games.
“If no,” said Diego as he smiled and wiped his mouth. “We get sick. Rest now, señorita.”
Sally stripped off her boots and socks and plunged her feet into the stream to let the cool water soothe her feet. Climbing was a lot harder on her than running. She wasn’t tired, because she could go for a few hundred miles at a single stretch, but whereas running was nice and rhythmic, hiking through the Guatemalan jungle was a series of starts, stops, and stutters that had her feet aching. Some people might long for a comfortable recliner after a long hike; Sally longed for a long stretch of straight, flat road where she could get up to a comfortable cruising speed and just run.
“Maybe I come with you to America,” said Diego. “Be a superhero like you, señorita.”
“My name’s Sally, Diego. It’s okay to use it. I don’t know if you could join Just Cause or not.” She cursed at herself for her accidental slip. She hadn’t wanted to mention Just Cause at all. She hoped it hadn’t spoiled their plans, but Diego didn’t react to it.
“Maybe I just come and visit you, then. You have boyfriend in America?”
“Yes, I do.”
He shrugged and smiled. “Is it serious?”
Sally yanked the canteen away from him. “Yes, it’s serious. How old are you, anyway?”
He puffed out his chest. “Almost fifteen.”
“Well, almost-fifteen-Diego, let me tell you something. When you’re twenty-two, you are going to be absolutely stunning. Girls won’t be able to keep their hands off you. But for now, you should find a sweet young thing your own age. Now you tell me…” Sally took a swig from the canteen. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
He chuckled. “Sí.”
“Is she very pretty?” Sally passed the canteen back to him.
“Not like you, señori—er, Sally. She’s sixteen and wears glasses.”
“I can tell you this, Diego. If she’s two years older and still with you, she must think very highly of you. You should be thankful for that.”
“Okay,” he said as he stood. “Maybe I leave her for someone better someday.” He winked at her. “Time to go. We see compound very soon.”
The downhill side of the volcano proved much easier hiking. They followed along the stream and only had to worry about slipping in the mud. Even the hot sun relented as puffy white clouds blew in from the ocean.
Soon Diego put his finger to his lips to indicate silence. He motioned for her to get down as he moved with the quiet confidence of a cat. Sally crawled after him until the two of them peeked out into a large clearing from under the shelter of a large fern.
Down below, Sally saw several buildings. Most were made of cinderblocks, but the largest was modern, high-tech construction. She thought it might be a power plant of some sort, since a large smokestack belched forth steam into the already-humid air. It had no windows, but she saw fortifications on and around it, machine gun nests with sandbags and razor wire. One contraption looked like it might be some kind of missile launcher amid a forest of radar dishes. She w
ished Jack were there, because with his knowledge he’d know immediately what she saw. People guarded the fortifications, inattentive until they heard a distant engine.
In a few moments, an ancient bus wheezed into the center of the compound, flanked by three jeeps full of soldiers. The compound became a flurry of activity as uniformed troops rushed from the buildings to take up positions around the bus. People began to get off the bus. They held their hands atop their heads and trudged at the direction of the soldiers, grim and hopeless prisoners.
Several of the soldiers floated into the air and trained guns or pointed hands at the prisoners. Sally gaped in astonishment. As she looked around, she saw evidence of more parahuman powers: a man whose skin seemed to be metallic, and a woman whose eyes had an unearthly glow.
She whispered, “How many are there?”
“What?”
“Parahumans, Diego. How many?”
“I don’t know. Many.”
This was bad news. Based upon pure percentages of population, Guatemala shouldn’t have more than two or three parahumans altogether, and Sally suspected there were at least ten times as many down in that compound. More, if some of those who held guns had less-obvious abilities.
Two men came out of the large building to inspect the prisoners. One was very old, hunched, and skeletally thin. He leaned on a cane. His skin was very dark. The other was Heinrich Kaiser. He affected a slow pace, either out of choice or out of deference to the older man. He stood, ramrod-straight, while one of the men from the jeeps reported to him. He nodded and gave an order. The soldiers hustled the prisoners into the large building.
The compound went into another brief period of activity as troops opened several round hatches in the ground and climbed into underground facilities of some sort. In a few minutes, the compound seemed entirely deserted and quiet.
“What are they doing?” Sally wondered.
Diego’s eyes were wide and sweat ran off his face in rivulets. “Time to go, señorita.”
“What’s going to happen? What are you afraid of?”
Diego didn’t have a chance to answer. The ground suddenly vibrated, as if a giant had struck a powerful chord on a subsonic guitar. The vibration made Sally’s feet go numb and her eyes water. Something came from the large building, like a shockwave or a ripple that traveled in an expanding concentric circle. She felt a hard prickling in her skin as it passed over them, like her entire body had been asleep and tingled as it awoke. A huge puff of steam emerged from the cooling tower, rivaling a large cloud overhead in sheer volume.
Diego fell down on all fours to cower like a scolded dog.
She hauled him to his feet. “What just happened?”
“El fuego, el fuego,” the boy said repeatedly. The fire.
“Snap out of it, Diego!” She slapped him across the face. Hard.
His eyes regained their focus. “Lo siento,” he said. “Time to go.”
“Change into the snake and lead the way. I’ll keep up with you.”
Diego nodded, and transformed in a flash of light. Sally hoped nobody saw it or attributed it to anything besides lightning. The jewel-toned Quetzalcoatl spun around, hovered like a hummingbird, and lit out up the side of the hill. Sally scrambled after him as fast as she could go.
Unfortunately, Sally stepped in a hole right at the crest of the hill and went sprawling. In a flash, she was back on her feet but her knee already throbbed. Diego swooped around her like a nervous satellite. “I’m okay.” She waved at him. “Let’s go.”
They crossed the ridge they had come up earlier in the afternoon and a few seconds later Sally limped to a halt by the bike.
Diego kept going. “Diego!” She yelled after him. She took a dozen half-hearted steps in pursuit, but her knee felt like it was full of broken glass. She hoped she hadn’t torn a ligament or something worse.
Okay, how hard could it be to ride a bike?
She struggled to get it upright and back onto the road. It wasn’t a big bike, but she wasn’t very big herself. Moving it proved even more difficult when she couldn’t put all her weight on her right leg. “Son of a bitch, Diego,” she mumbled under her breath. “Shit.”
She wondered why she even bothered with the bike at all. She was a superhero, dammit. She thought about running back to town, gimpy leg or no, but she feared her running would be over for a few days, maybe longer if she really damaged herself. She was still supposed to stay incognito, and it would look very suspicious if someone spotted her limping along the road without any obvious transportation. It would have to be the bike, then.
She got herself astride it, held onto the handlebars, and wondered how in the world to start it.
There was no key that she could find, but maybe she didn’t need one. She’d always seen guys on the X-Games start their bikes by jumping on one of the pegs. She closed her eyes and tried to access the perfect memory that Glimmer had set up for her the night before, but there didn’t seem to be any sign of it. How had Diego started it? Maybe that peg at the end of the arm was it. It didn’t have one matching on the left side of the engine.
She tested it with her injured leg, to see if it even moved. It did just a little. That had to be it. She didn’t know how she was going to manage to jump on it. Her knee already resembled a balloon, and the idea of landing with even a fraction of her weight on it was enough to make her feel faint.
A small voice behind her said, “I’m sorry, señorita.”
She turned to see Diego hunched down amid the bushes at the edge of the road. She’d never been so glad to see someone else, and the relief overcame her and her eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh, Diego!”
“I am very scared. Please no be mad.” He hung his head in shame.
“I’m just happy that you came back, Diego. I don’t know how to drive this stupid bike, and I hurt my leg real bad back there.”
“I drive it.”
He stood up and stepped out of the bushes. Both he and Sally realized that he was naked. The moment only lasted for a brief second before he hurried to cover himself, but not before she’d gotten a real eyeful.
“I’m sorry!” Diego was mortified.
“Oh, uh, that’s okay.” Sally turned away from him to save him from further embarrassment.
“I lose all my pants that way. Mi madre no understand it.”
“Here,” said Sally decisively, and slipped her own shorts off. Underneath was the bottom half of the bikini she’d bought on a day when she felt particularly brave. Her mother would have called it scandalous for the lack of coverage it provided.
She tossed him the shorts and turned her back, but not before she caught another glimpse. His girlfriend is very lucky, she thought, and almost giggled aloud in spite of her discomfort. In a moment, he hopped onto the bike in front of her.
They rode back to town. Every time the bike jarred Sally’s leg, pain shot down to her toes and up to her hip. Diego took her right back to his mother’s bar. Glimmer sat outside the building and watched people pass by. He jumped up when he saw the bike pull up and helped Diego get Sally off it, since she couldn’t straighten her leg or bend it any further. She’d given up all pretenses of being a tough hero, and tears of pain and frustration streamed down her face.
Glimmer and Diego carried her up to her room above the bar. Diego went downstairs to get some ice. Glimmer inspected her knee. “I’m no doctor, but I don’t think it’s broken. Maybe a sprain?”
Sally leaned back on the bed and threw an arm across her eyes in frustration. “A sprain. Great. What the hell am I supposed to do now? I could heal a pulled muscle in an hour or two, but a sprain will take at least three or four days.”
“There’s a technique I can try,” he said. “But there’s a catch. I’m not very good at it, and it’s going to hurt a lot whether or not I succeed. Your call.”
“I thought you said you said you couldn’t use your powers here, that the mystery psi would be able to detect you.”
Glimmer nodded.
“That’s true, but I’ve been doing some very light scans around the area, getting a sense of what we’re really up against. I think only direct telepathic contact, like mind-reading or psionic attacks will put up a red flag.”
Sally tried to make sense of this. She’d never understood psionic abilities or the related terminology. “So you can use some of your powers safely, but not all of them?”
“More or less,” said Glimmer. “It’s more complicated than that, but you’ve got it essentially right.”
“And you can do… whatever-it-is… to me safely?”
“I believe so.”
“Then do it,” Sally said. “Before I change my mind or pass out or something. Can’t you just put me to sleep like you did in training?”
“It doesn’t work that way. Psionically-induced sleep isn’t like anesthetic. It’s just sleep. You’d wake up if a dog started chewing on your leg, wouldn’t you?”
Sally wiped tears away. “I hope so. Is it going to hurt that much?”
“Worse, I’m afraid. It’s why I don’t generally use the ability. It’s hard to hurt your friends.”
Sally glared at him. “I’m no good to you stuck here in bed with a bum leg. I forgive you for whatever I’m going to feel. I forgive you in case it doesn’t work. But if you don’t try, I’ll never forgive you, Jay Road!”
Glimmer placed his hands on either side of her swollen knee and closed his eyes. Searing hot pain exploded in her leg. It made white stars erupt in her vision. She let out a yelp that she muffled in the crook of her elbow. It felt like he was digging around inside her damaged leg with a telekinetic scalpel and pushing every cell back into its correct place by brute force. Nausea roiled her stomach. She could not bear to look, out of fear that he had ripped her leg into fleshy ribbons.
Glimmer leaned back and pulled his hands away from her leg. His hair was damp and sweat poured down his face. “Finished.”
“Did it… work?” Her leg throbbed, but compared to the pain of psionic healing it was almost tolerable.
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see how you respond to it.”
Just Cause: Revised & Expanded Edition Page 21
