Fire and Thunder

by Bowen Greenwood

  “We need to earn Ms. Jackson’s trust. Right now, she must be thinking she fell into an alternate universe or something. Try to remember how little you trusted Ms. Wales and I the first time you saw her exercise her power.”

  Connor remembered it well. They had appeared out of nowhere while he’d been sitting in a cell waiting to be tested for his abnormal ability, as the government called it. He’d been so startled by the concept of someone popping into existence from thin air that, even when they offered him a free ticket out of the prison, he hadn’t been willing to say yes to them.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet she’s wondering if we’re all crazy right now.”

  “We can discuss the prophecy with her once she feels safe with us.”

  “Mr. Moses, do you think the prophecy is about the end times?”

  “No. The end times are part of God’s plan. He wouldn’t give us a way out of them. He wouldn’t say, ‘You can prevent my plan by finding Terri Jackson.’ I don’t know what the prophecy is; it could be in reference to a natural disaster, or nuclear war, or another event like the great Chicago fire in the 1800s, or something we haven’t imagined yet.

  “I do know it’s not the apocalypse, Mr. Merritt. So no one should abandon his responsibilities. Don’t you have a class to teach?”

  Connor nodded and stood up. Before he left the room to go change, Mr. Moses added, “Remember, we haven’t gone into too much detail with the rest of the Sons of Thunder about the prophecy. I don’t want them to panic so don’t talk too much about it, not with Ms. Jackson or with anyone else. We don’t want people to overreact when they hear that the city we’re in might be doomed.”

  ***

  She locked the door. The room to which Pitch had shown her looked like a luxury hotel room. The bed stretched for acres, or so it seemed. A genuine hot tub bubbled in the middle of the floor. Apparently, some advantages came with having your headquarters in one of the most luxurious casinos in the world. A window looked out on the Las Vegas strip. Outside, the bright day gave every appearance of being a scorcher.

  She reached behind her back, lifting her suit jacket slightly.

  She eased her Sig Sauer .40 caliber pistol out of its plastic holster inside her waistband and held the reassuring weight for a moment. In a situation where she was the only person without some kind of abnormal ability, it felt good to hold a different kind of power in her hand.

  In the mind of Terri Jackson, a bright line separated “misleading” from outright lying.

  She’d been telling the truth earlier. Her father was a pastor. She was a regular church-goer.

  Yes, she told the truth about that. And she’d also told Pitch the truth. At 23 years old, she was older than almost anyone she’d seen here except for the man named Moses.

  Dishonesty hid in the words she didn’t say.

  Terri Jackson was a Special Agent with the Abnormal Abilities Agency.

  She eased her pistol back into its holster and worried over how she came to be here.

  Fresh out of college with a major in physics, she had applied to the CIA hoping to work on nuclear non-proliferation. No luck, so she had applied to the FBI instead. Still no luck, until a couple months later when she had received a mysterious letter from a federal law enforcement agency of which she’d never heard. By then, she was working in a movie theater and had moved back in with her parents, so she jumped at the chance.

  Whatever it was, the Abnormal Abilities Agency didn’t sound much like nuclear non-proliferation. It didn’t sound like much use of her physics degree at all. But it paid better and had way more prestige than telling people, “For only fifty cents more you can get the extra-large.” The regulations permitted her to tell her parents she worked in federal law enforcement, but nothing more. It was enough for them to feel better about the hundred thousand dollars they spent on her degree.

  Disillusionment sat at the very top of her job description, though. When she had first pursued working for the federal government, she had imagined a life something like a female James Bond, where handsome men in tuxedos brought her martinis that were shaken, not stirred.

  She didn’t know if CIA officers got any of the Hollywood fantasy, but the AAA’s people certainly didn’t.

  Most of her first year on the job had consisted of training and paperwork. First, she had graduated from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. She had learned to defend herself, to shoot, and to follow someone without discovery. Then she had gone to a separate, secret facility where she had learned about the epidemic of unusual abilities spreading across the country and the world. She had learned that government researchers had found no trace of a genetic link, or a viral link, or any other understandable cause.

  And when the training had ended and she had worked her first few shifts in the Operations Center, she had discovered that she’d be living full time on an air base where the AAA had its top-secret holding facility for people with abnormal abilities. Despite the proximity to Vegas, there would be no casinos and/or formalwear or anything remotely resembling a movie. Being a secret agent turned out to be uber-boring.

  On the bright side, though, about the same time she had figured out she wouldn’t be ordering many martinis, no matter whether they were shaken or stirred, she had also figured out her degree might prove useful after all.

  Most of the time she sat in the ops center, watching reports pour in from law enforcement agencies around the country. A mugger escaped from prison. Did he walk through the walls? EMTs abandoned CPR on a heart attack patient, and then he got up again completely healthy. These reports and more came into the AAA’s Tactical Operations Center. Terri Jackson made decisions about which could wait until morning and which merited agents going out right away.

  In the past couple of days, reports had begun to trickle in from a military recon satellite. Its radiation detectors reported a signature consistent with a nuclear weapon in Las Vegas, NV. Terri had sat up straighter in the chair at her duty station when she saw it. To her absolute shock, for the first time in her career as a law enforcement agent, something was going the way she dreamed of it going. Those early attempts to get a job at the CIA all sprang from her interest in nuclear weapons.

  The bad old days of the cold war were gone. The U.S. and the Soviet Union no longer teetered on the brink of hurling missiles at each other, but anyone who thought that led to world peace would have been sorely disappointed. The threat simply shifted to terrorists and third world dictators trying to get their hands on those nuclear warheads. To an 18-year-old kid with dreams of saving the world, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons looked like the perfect mission.

  After so many rejections and failures, Terri had almost given up on it. Last night, though, that satellite report had come in.

  She had dutifully forwarded it on to her superior officers. They, in turn, had issued an order for investigation.

  Terri, at first, had thought the way she learned to think in college — the way she had always wanted to think at the CIA. She had thought of terrorists smuggling a nuclear device into the U.S. It had taken a higher-ranking agent to realize the other possibility.

  What if the next person with an abnormal ability turned out to be thermonuclear?

  That agent had ordered Terri out to the parking lot of a deserted, bankrupt casino called Star of Fortune. Her orders: find out if there was a new person with abnormal abilities — and if those abilities might send a mushroom cloud into the sky above one of America’s major cities.

  Like the rest of Terri’s life, it hadn’t gone as planned.

  The first person she found in the Star of Fortune parking lot had no abnormal abilities other than a lust for methamphetamine and a Glock. She remembered the moment well, standing there with his pistol aimed at her head. Federal Agents learned at FLETC to de-escalate the situation if possible. Her training was clear: avoiding any risk to civilians took priority. There were techniques for disarming someone with a gun pointed at one’s head, but the hand-to-
hand combat instructors were all very clear: none of them were guaranteed. She had let the criminal have her purse, all the while psyching herself up to draw her weapon the moment the mugger turned his gun away.

  And at that moment the mugger with no abnormal abilities had led her to something no one in the AAA suspected.

  There was a second group of people with abnormal abilities, other than the Legion.

  Now, sitting in the headquarters of the Sons of Thunder, Special Agent Terri Jackson reflected on her choice. She could have declined to come with Connor and Anna, but that would have turned her back on the most valuable lead this investigation had produced so far.

  She could have tried to arrest them all, but one lone agent against a building full of people with abnormal abilities added up to a bad equation. Besides, the mugger had taken her purse, which included her badge.

  However odd the chain of events that had led her here, she had landed smack in the middle of something her agency needed to know. Who were the Sons of Thunder, and what did they really want?

  Connor Merritt and Pitch were both known to her. Connor had been in the AAA’s facility when a raid by others with abnormal abilities had broken him out. And at the head of that break out team? Pitch. The two perched atop the AAA’s most wanted list right beside Sebastian Crest.

  She hadn’t seen anything nuclear yet, but she had seen two of the people the AAA considered most dangerous in America. Now, a crucial choice loomed before the young agent. Stay here or go back to the parking lot.

  On the one hand, the radiation detectors on that satellite pointed straight at that deserted, abandoned casino. Whatever created the signal was there.

  On the other hand, as soon as she had gone looking for nuclear-powered abnormal abilities, the Sons of Thunder had shown up. That made them primary suspects.

  When she thought of it in those terms, Terri decided to stay. It was the best chance she had to stop a thermonuclear explosion.

  Chapter 6

  Almost all the young people who had been at breakfast came to the dojo, all dressed as she was. She saw that no one else was wearing a belt, so Terri undid the one that had been included in her uniform and held it in her hand.

  Pitch wore the same uniform she did. He held an orange-colored belt in his hand instead of the white one Terri had. She wanted to go over and talk to him, but he seemed deep in conversation with the girl named Kila from breakfast.

  Connor walked over to her, gave her a broad smile, and shook her hand. “I’m glad you decided to join us here.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d want me. I’m still not sure about all this talk of super powers but even if it is true, I don’t have any.”

  Connor rested his hand lightly on her shoulder. “That’s where we all start out: not sure if we believe it or not. As for not having any, well, millions of people have put on a gi and a belt over the course of history, and almost none of them had any miraculous gift. You don’t need special powers to enjoy the martial arts.”

  “Yeah, so what kind of martial art is it? Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Judo, or what?”

  “I’ve studied several styles, and I know enough to instruct in a couple. I’m not exactly teaching any of them. I’m focusing on teaching all the practical fighting techniques I can as fast as I can. The Legion has their own style called Chojin Ken, so I figure we should have our own style too. But I don’t know what it is yet. I let it come to me as we go.”

  The clock hit the top of the hour, and Connor yelled, “Let’s line up!”

  He went to the front of the room, and all the other young people made two lines in front of him. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that, as the newest, Terri should take the last place in line.

  Connor started with prayer, and then the students put on their belts. They started with some work on basics like punching and kicking.

  None of this caught Terri by surprise. AAA Agents trained in multiple kinds of self-defense, and that included unarmed combat instruction. The AAA’s training program didn’t teach any particular style, but rather a derivative of what the armed forces called “combatives.” It was, like Connor said, a stripped down effort to study just the practical combat techniques.

  All of which meant Connor quickly picked up on Terri’s ability to throw a punch.

  “What style do you study?” he asked.

  “I tried to join the FBI and washed out,” she said, once again conscious of the fine line between misleading and lying. “This is what they teach. I don’t like to talk about it very much.”

  Connor accepted that explanation easily and paired her up with Renee Wales, the woman who had healed Connor when they had teleported back. Terri got along with her right away, as they were both older than most of the other Sons of Thunder. Soon they traded punches and blocks at regular intervals.

  Renee put her whole heart into the practice. Every other minute, she passed the sleeve of her white gi over her forehead, mopping up sweat. Terri took note of her gritted teeth and set jaw, signs of intense concentration.

  Soon, they transitioned from practicing technique to light sparring. Again, Renee’s dedication shined brighter than her actual technique. Her punches flew a bit wild and landed a bit soft, but she never quit boring in and trying to hit her. The two women stalked around each other in a slow-motion dance, looking for opportunities.

  Terri’s training in FLETC focused more on quick take-downs than on extended sparring matches. She soon doubled over, panting for breath, while Renee showed no sign of quitting despite the sweat.

  When the class ended, all the other students milled around for a bit or wandered out of the gym and down the hall to their rooms to change. Terri sidled up to the edge of a group that included Renee and Pitch.

  “…it should be a part of every strike. not the be-all, end-all of every fight. It’s about merging two parts into something that’s greater than the sum of its parts.”

  Terri thought she recognized the speaker as the girl named Kila. and had her memory confirmed a moment later.

  “It’s hard to figure out what that would look like for me,” Renee said in response. “Obviously, I can heal people after they fight, but how do I make that a part of every strike?”

  The brown-haired girl named Kila said, “Look, I don’t know it well-enough to teach it, but here’s how I would do it if I had your gift. Never fight alone. If you have to fight, get with a partner and stay close to her. because your partner becomes stronger by having you around. Your partner won’t have to fight through pain if you’re always near her. Every time she gets hit, you should put your hands on her and take that damage away. Then, your physical fighting becomes more a matter of keeping threats away from you so you can have your hands free to heal. You’re not trying to take people down; you’re trying to keep them from taking you down, so you can help your partner. Combat isn’t an individual thing; it’s a team thing.”

  Connor walked up to the outside edge of the group listening to Kila. She noticed him, smiled, and waved.

  “I’ve been trying to teach Connor that. Don’t fight alone. Let your team fight with you. That’s when you win.”

  Connor rolled his eyes, and then smiled at her to show it was good natured. “She’s not kidding — she’s been on me about being less of a lone wolf ever since she came here.”

  He shifted his focus to Terri and asked, “How’d you like your first look at life with the Sons of Thunder?”

  “I notice I’m not the only girl here. How come it’s not called Sons and Daughters of Thunder?”

  Connor shrugged. “Yeah, that’s actually a frequent topic of discussion. We have some scriptural traditionalists who insist that because the Bible says sons, we have to say sons. We’ve also got some people who feel strongly that because there are girls, we should say Sons and Daughters. Me, I don’t have a strong opinion one way or another, so I try to say Sons when I’m with the traditionalists, and Sons and Daughters when I’m with someone who prefers that.”

 
Terri asked, “So you mentioned the Legion and so did Pitch. Those must be the people you fought with after you saved me from that mugger?”

  Connor nodded. “Yeah. Sebastian Crest – the guy with the flat top – he’s their leader. He tried to recruit me, but he’s crazy. He’s full of a bunch of stupid talk about using their powers to rule the world. I know hating’s not what we’re about, but it’s really hard not to hate him.”

  “Why? Just because he’s crazy is no reason to hate someone.”

  “Yeah, but he corrupted my friend. My old roommate, Lincoln Blunt, was with me when the Legion tried to recruit me. Now he’s totally fallen under Sebastian’s spell. He believes everything: people with powers should rule the world, the government deserves to be overthrown, the whole big bucket of crazy. I had to fight my own friend just to get away from the Legion, and it’s Sebastian’s fault.

  “The fact that I can’t beat the snot out of him just makes it worse. I’ve been studying martial arts for years. I’m a second degree black belt. And besides all that, my skin’s impenetrable. It shouldn’t even qualify as a fight. I should be pulling that jerk’s arms off before he even throws a punch.”

  Connor sighed. “But his power is that he can turn invisible. How can I hit someone I can’t see?”

  As the crowd dispersed, Kila heard him talking and walked over. “Connor, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It doesn’t have to be just you. Fighting Sebastian should be a team effort. That’s why we’re all here together.”

  “Yeah, but you guys are only just getting started with your study of the martial arts, Kila. Sebastian’s a serious fighter. I don’t want to put a bunch of beginners at risk fighting him.”

  Kila grimaced and gave him a look that was half glare. “But if you can’t figure out how to fight what you can’t see, how are you any less at risk? Don’t forget Pitch and I trained with Sebastian before we came away with you. Both of us know him; we know how he fights. Let us help you. Don’t take it all on yourself.”