One More Day

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  “You are insane. You’re fucking delusional. You murdered my mother, you absolute son of a bitch,” I said, my voice rising. I drew my fist back and sent a punch of power at him, and he flew through the house, crashing through the opposite exterior wall into the empty yard outside. I stormed after him. He sprang up and launched at me, swords hissing through the air. I jumped back, then sent another punch at him.

  “Impressive,” he said. “When’d you learn how to do that?” I punched again, and he went flying through the air. He bounced back up and stormed toward me, faster than should have been possible. Faster than I remember him being able to move.

  And then it hit me. I should have known he was there. The house wasn’t that dark inside, that he could completely stay obscured by the shadows. He’d been invisible before he’d killed Death. The other samples Alpha had undoubtedly sent him would have included Crystal’s sample. Invisibility.

  He’d been the success that Death had mentioned.

  He swung again, and I flew up into the air.

  “Get back here. We’re not done yet.” And then he rose into the air, too, and I wanted to scream. I flew toward the freeway, trying to get some distance to figure out what the hell to do. He was bigger than me. Had a healing factor, which made him really hard to hurt enough to slow him down. Plus he apparently had a crazy soup of a bunch of other powers thanks to Death’s injection.

  “Ah, ah, ah. Get your ass back here,” he shouted, his deep raspy voice sending chills down my spine. Not the way it once had. Once, it had been a pleasant chill. Excitement. This… this was terror. “Look,” he shouted. He lifted his wrist to his mouth and said something, just as I noticed that StrikeForce had appeared in the yard where we’d been fighting. And, at that moment, a second team appeared. I was able to make out a few villains I knew of. A Russian guy who called himself “Red Scare,” a guy from Britain known as “Plague” and a chick from Japan that I think was calling herself “Flame” or some shit like that. I looked at Connor.

  “I figured they’d want to come and help you,” he said. “They’re becoming a complication I don’t need. But you’re worth the complications you give me.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I punched out at him again, and again, and again. He went flailing across the sky. I tried to keep an eye on StrikeForce as I got ready to hit him again. He’d keep healing, but maybe if I hit him hard enough I could knock him out. It would be enough, maybe, to get a dampener on him.

  Assuming, of course, that my teammates had remembered to bring one. Or a dozen, based on the crowd he’d ordered into place. How the hell had they gotten there so fast?

  Of course. He’d moved them into place, because he probably had Portia or Brianne’s powers too, that same ability to transport.

  He flew toward me, brandishing his swords, and I punched out at him. I vaguely noticed news helicopters circling nearby, traffic stopped on the freeway below us. It was raining harder now, fat drops that splattered against my uniform when they hit.

  I lost track of how many times I sent blasts of power at him, how many times I ducked his blades. How many times I felt a blade scrape across my body armor. This wasn’t working, I realized with more than a little terror. A quick glance below me, in the lots around Darla’s house, showed, to my surprise, that my team seemed to be holding their own. David was facing off against two of Raider’s people, back to back with Steel, who was in her metallic form and keeping three of the baddies off of David’s back. Screamer was doing her thing, and five of the villains were clutching their heads. As she kept screaming, their agony got worse, and Toxxin went around, easily and quickly putting them down with her powers. Portia and Jenson were taking on Raider (the current Raider, Connor’s ex-wife) and two of her henchmen.

  Holy shit. We were winning, I realized. I saw some of the others, including a few of the more powerful guards from the prison, who were going around quickly and efficiently collaring the baddies that lay there unconscious.

  I flew away from Connor.

  “I’m getting bored with this game, sweetheart,” he shouted. I needed to do something now, while StrikeForce had the upper hand, which, in and of itself, was practically a miracle.

  I dove, fast and hard, right at him. He was so used to me hitting him from afar that I think it took him by surprise when I rocketed toward him. I smashed into Connor and he went flying, falling, his swords clattering to the ground on the freeway below. I’d stunned him. Now I had to make sure he stayed down.

  I stayed with him, and it came to me. This was when I had to try to use the things Ryan had taught me, all of that wrestling shit I thought I’d never have to use once we discovered how my body compensated for my messed up reflexes. I knew any move trying to hold him would fail, because he was so much bigger than me. But everyone has pressure points. Even him.

  And his uniform isn’t padded at the throat, I realized, remembering the way it looked when he rolled it up to kiss me. I shook the memory away.

  We landed in a heap on the side of the freeway, and I moved as quickly as I could. I dug my fingers into the side of his neck, hard. Someone with my strength, someone who’s been trained to incapacitate someone this way, even against someone of Connor’s size… It was almost frightening how easy it actually was. He slumped to the ground within seconds.

  “Bring one of those collars over here,” I called, hoping one of the prison guards would hear me.

  “Oh, shit. He’s down, he’s down,” I heard one of the baddies shouting, terror in his voice. “Fall back. Fall the fuck back. Pick him up.” I looked around, keeping a hand wrapped around his wrist, making sure I didn’t lose contact with him.

  “I need a collar,” I shouted as I felt him start stirring. I went to hit his pressure point again, and suddenly, he was just gone. Not invisible, but actually gone. I noticed, almost at the same instant, that the sounds of battle had ended as well. I looked around in a panicked frenzy, then rose into the air to see my team looking confused where they’d been battling. Every one of our opponents was gone.

  “What the hell was that?” Ryan growled. “What’s going on?”

  “He wanted you guys here. To get ambushed by his people.”

  “That was Killjoy,” Jenson said, confused, and I nodded. She stared at me. “Killjoy?” she repeated, and all I could do was stand there, just as confused as she was. Maybe more.

  They all looked stunned. Confused. Pissed. And I felt pretty much the same way, with the additional sense of being a complete, absolute fool.

  “We better get back. Come on,” Portia said woodenly. We gathered around, and she teleported us to the meeting room at Command.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Once we appeared back at Command it only took us a second to realize that there were alarms sounding, and we ran out of the meeting room. It was all eerily quiet. No one moving around on the upper administrative floors. We made our way down to the main lobby, and that was where we saw the first signs that something was horribly wrong. The woman who’d taken Jenson’s place at the receptionist’s desk was on the floor. Jenson went over to her, then breathed, a look of relief on her face.

  “She’s alive,” she said. We saw more bodies near the prison wing, and I flew in that direction, the rest of the team behind me.

  I could see from the blood that these people probably hadn’t made it. The door to the women’s wing stood open, and my eyes went to a prone figure on the floor in front of an open cell.

  “No, no, no,” I muttered. I came to a landing next to Marie. Her eyes were open, and she was still. I checked for a pulse, knowing I wouldn’t find one. I glanced toward the open cell. I knew before I looked whose it would be. Brianne. The transporter from Dr. Death’s…. Connor’s team. She was gone.

  I looked back at Marie. She’d been kind to me when she’d been my prison guard. She’d helped us stage our little uprising, and she’d become a friend. I gently closed her eyes, then shook my head and took off for the men’s prison wing.

&n
bsp; There was more carnage there. My team was gathered at the far end, and someone was sobbing. I raced there, unsurprised, now, to see Maddoc and Daemon’s cells empty. I glanced toward where Alpha and Nightbane were held, and noted that they were both in their cells.

  They truly had pissed Connor off, I guess. When I got to my teammates, I found Dani sobbing over someone on the floor.

  “Oh, Christ,” I breathed. Monica lay on the floor in a pool of blood. My knees finally gave out on me then, and I sank to the floor, unable to tear my eyes away from Monica but seeing, instead, Mama lying there.

  I couldn’t breath. I started shaking, and I covered my mouth with my hands, afraid that I’d either sob or vomit and not feeling like adding to the insanity by doing either of them. Amy knelt next to Dani, her arm around her shoulders, and Dani rested her head on Amy’s shoulder as she cried. Portia stood there like a statue. David and Jenson stood together, neither of them looking, for once, like they knew what to do next.

  I just kept shaking. I jumped when I felt a strong arm around my waist.

  “Okay. It’s okay,” Ryan said quietly as he pulled me up off the floor.

  “How did you guys decide to come there today?” I asked him, determined to pull myself together at least a little.

  “We got a bunch of anonymous tips that you and Dr. Death had been seen there, and that there were other villains around. So we went, figuring you’d need back up. When we got there, we didn’t see anything at first, other than you and Killjoy.”

  I closed my eyes. “He wanted to draw you guys out of here. This was part of the plan,” I said softly. “David and Jenson,” I said.

  “Yeah?” David asked.

  “Can you guys go over the security footage? I want to see who he sent in to do this.” I already had a sinking feeling that I knew at least one of them, realizing that someone had been missing from our battle by the freeway.

  David and Jenson nodded, then left, David patting Dani’s shoulder as he passed, Jenson leaning down and hugging her quickly before stepping away.

  I spent the afternoon helping to put things somewhat back to normal. Portia was locked in her office with Amy and Dani, making burial arrangements, while Ariana, Ryan, and Chance worked with me organizing the med staff and fielding questions from StrikeForce employees who had been in other parts of the building at the time. I was just grateful, at this point, that they’d been focused on particular people, not mass slaughter. I remembered what Jenson had said, that in a world where people had super strength, someone with her low-level powers didn’t stand a chance. That was true for most of those who worked at StrikeForce.

  Once things were somewhat calmed down, I made my way to David’s lab. He and Jenson were looking at the monitors over his desk.

  “So. Lemme guess. Virus,” I said, and they nodded.

  I closed my eyes, fighting back the nausea trying to come over me, the rage I had at myself. One more person in an ever-growing list of people I stupidly trusted once upon a time.

  “Did he have help?” I asked. Jenson nodded toward the screen, and I watched. He’d come in with two guys. The first one used some kind of telekinetic powers to toss the receptionist across the room, and they left her lying where she landed. They made their way to the prison wing. The first guy kept tossing people out of their way, but the second did some weird little wave with his hand, and slices opened across throats.

  “That’s Render,” David said quietly. “Until now, we all assumed he was dead. No one’s seen him in over a year.”

  We watched as the first kinetic guy went after Marie. She was trying to block them out of Brianne’s cell, and he threw her. Her head hit one of the walls, and she went down. I watched as Virus started moving his hands, a movement, a gesture I knew well from when we’d worked together. Brianne’s door slid open, and, after a bit more gesturing from Virus, her manacles opened and she joined the group of villains, smiling and talking as they made their way out of the women’s wing, and toward the men’s wing.

  I didn’t want to watch the moment Monica died, but I felt, in some weird way, that it was the least I owed her. I watched as the villains marched in, taking down guards as they did. Monica stood at the end of the hall. She used her powers to throw the kinetic back and into Render. They both stumbled, and she threw Virus at them. That happened three or four times. Every time they got up, she did it again, and I realized, sickeningly, that she was trying to buy time.

  That she assumed we were coming to help her.

  “Why weren’t we alerted?”

  “Communications systems were all fried. They probably signaled for help right away,” Jenson said.

  I watched her throw the kinetic again, and then a large red slice opened across her throat, and another down her chest, and she fell to the floor. It only took moments for Virus to get Daemon and Maddoc out, all of them laughing, shaking hands. They started walking out, and as they passed the camera, Maddoc looked up, grinned, and mouthed the words, “Later, Daystar.”

  A small sound escaped me, and I barely refrained from blasting the monitor. I dug Dr. Death’s phone, which I’d hung onto since taking him, out of my pocket. “I know tracing calls can be tricky. Can you trace where this has been though? Some kind of internal GPS thing? Is that how it works?”

  David nodded. “That shouldn’t be a problem. Gimme a minute.” He took the phone from me and hooked it up to one of his computers. Jenson looked at me questioningly.

  “I’m working on something.”

  She nodded and let it go.

  “There’s some extra security on here. I think I can crack it, but it’ll take longer than I thought. Maybe by tonight,” he said. I looked at him, at the dark circles under his eyes, the bruises on his face from the fight.

  “Get some rest. Work on it when you can,” I said.

  David watched me for a minute. “I’ll rest later.” I nodded, then turned and left.

  I took the elevator up to my floor, then let myself into my suite. I glanced at my phone automatically checking to see if Mama had called while I was out, then remembered that she was gone. I sank down onto the couch and stared into the darkness of my suite. If there wasn’t anything I could use on that phone, this had all come to nothing. Worse than nothing, because now we’d lost some of our people and we had to track our three former prisoners down again.

  I leaned my head back against the couch and closed my eyes. I’d spent all day either trying not to think about what I had to do the next day or dealing with the chaos that Connor…Connor! I couldn’t think about that now… had brought into my life. But now I was alone and nobody needed me, and all I could think about was that tomorrow I’d have to see my mother in a coffin. I’d have to listen to well-wishers say how sorry they were. I’d have to sit through a meal after laying Mama to rest.

  I didn’t feel strong enough to do any of it. And the thing was, there wasn’t any other way to look at the fact that her death was my fault. I’d trusted Connor, not questioned him when he told me he knew where Mama lived. I’d gotten involved in this superhero shit, ignored his demands. If I’d done just one of those things differently, Mama would still be alive.

  He was going to pay. And it was going to hurt. But it wouldn’t change the fact that me and my shitty judgment when it comes to people was a pretty direct cause of Mama’s murder.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” I whispered into my empty suite. I drifted off, and I don’t know how long I was asleep when I woke with a start, taking a minute to realize that Jenson’s voice was talking to me over my comm.

  “What. What? I was asleep,” I said groggily.

  “He cracked it,” she said, and I jumped up. I got down to his lab as quickly as I could. They both greeted me, looking exhausted. David pointed to a map on the large monitor in front of him. There were several red dots on the map, of varying sizes.

  “The larger the dot, the more often the phone was there, right?” I asked, and he nodded.

  There was a large red dot ov
er Detroit, which made sense. A few smaller dots elsewhere in the midwest and in Britain and Scotland.

  And then there was a large red dot over what looked like an island off the coast of Mexico.

  “What’s that? Can we get a satellite image of that?”

  David nodded and after a moment, a sat image popped up. He zoomed in, showing a nondescript concrete building, roughly square. No windows. A chainlink fence and a single driveway leading up to the front door and parking lot.

  “You’re a miracle worker. Thank you,” I said to David, and he shook his head, even if he did end up looking pleased. “Thanks, both of you. Now go get some rest.” I took the phone with me, unplugging it from David’s computer, then made my way up to Portia’s office. She was just coming out when I got there.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  She turned to look at me. Her eyes were bloodshot, with dark circles beneath them.

  “It can wait. You don’t have to deal with this now,” she said gently.

  “No. I really do. I found something, and I feel like I owe you some information about Killjoy.”

  She opened her office back up again and walked in. I followed her, and we sat down on opposite sides of her desk.

  I started by filling her in on how things started between me and Killjoy. And, later, what he’d told me about his days of Raider. How I’d decided to stop seeing him and how his persistence had been both annoying and scary, all at once. And then I told her about the moment he stepped out of the shadows and killed Dr. Death.

  “I thought I’d lost my mind. That I couldn’t possibly be seeing what I was seeing. At first, I thought, maybe he was trying to save me from Death or something, you know? Maybe he was still on my side. And then he started talking. He’s been behind it all along. The emails, forming Mayhem, working with Alpha… all of it.”

  She sat there, looking pale, her face drawn and tense. “I never pictured anything like this when I agreed to lead this team,” she finally said. “I am so sorry, Jolene. I can’t even imagine what you’re feeling. I feel like I’ve landed in an alien world with no map and no clue how to speak the language.”