Kilmer frowned, hands deep in his pants pockets. “A small platoon did make an attempt to access the facility, but the launch control center’s own guards began firing on them. One was heard screaming something about ‘lizard men.’ It seems they’re under the influence of mind control. But even if they had accessed the ground-level building, the platoon would still have had to reach the launch control center.” Kilmer clicked the remote again, and a cutaway of a bunker appeared, deep below ground. “Those are walls of concrete and reinforced steel you’re looking at. And this here is a ten-ton blast door. Control centers were designed to survive a direct nuclear hit. All well and good until the hostile forces are on the inside.”
“Did you say mind control?” Margaret asked. “So these are Specials we’re dealing with?”
“Not Specials.” Kilmer clicked the remote. “Artificials.”
The facility disappeared, and the black-and-white image that rose in its stead looked as though it had been rendered from a security camera. A nightmarish face stared out at them, one eye bulging and discolored. The man’s jaw was narrow, coming to a point, and though his mouth was closed, Scott imagined it to be full of sharp brown teeth. A shag of hair covered one half of his head, while the other half was bald and scar-grooved. Beside Scott, Janis drew a sharp breath.
“His Russian name is Trifimov, but he’s also known as Trips,” Kilmer said. “Thanks to Soviet engineering, he has the ability to penetrate the amygdalae, where our fears originate. His powers are potent, often deadly. He incapacitates his victims by making them believe their deepest fears are coming to life around them. According to a source of Janis’s, a group retrieved him two weeks ago, presumably the same group behind the occupation of the Sterling Launch Facility. That would explain the guards’ change in behavior.”
“Maybe this Trips needs a taste of his own medicine,” Creed muttered, flashing a blade-tipped hand.
“Is the rest of the country, like, totally freaking out?” Margaret asked.
“The rest of the country doesn’t know,” Kilmer said. “And that’s the way the president wants to keep it. That’s why he called us.”
“Wait,” Scott said. “Ronald Reagan asked for us?”
Kilmer nodded. “He knows we have someone who can enter computer systems with his mind. And that will be the team’s job: to get you inside, through the blast door underground, and into the main launch console. There, you’ll tap into the central server and disable the launch programs.”
Scott thought of all the times in his training that the alarms and red lights had gone off. He felt like he was going to be sick.
Janis’s hand slipped inside his and squeezed.
“All right,” Kilmer said, “Agent Steel’s going to take you to the Barn and run you through some simulations. A jet is on its way. We don’t have much time. The group has given the president an ultimatum to surrender or face the consequences. The deadline is eight o’clock this evening.” Kilmer glanced at his watch. “That’s a little more than four hours from now. I’ll notify your parents of the developments and will be monitoring you remotely. Good luck.”
“Let’s go,” Agent Steel said.
When Scott turned, Janis was already standing. Her face bore a stanch expression that, though out of place in his mind, was unmistakable. For the first time, she looked like a committed Champion.
* * *
Janis undid the thick belt that crossed her chest as the jet rolled to a stop. Agent Steel had called the jet a “supersonic,” and Janis understood why. It had delivered them from north central Florida to southeastern Missouri in less than fifty minutes, the force of forward motion compressing Janis’s body into the back of her seat. Even now, she had to labor to fill her lungs, to reinflate herself.
Through a plate-sized window, she took in a view of an olive-green bay with what looked liked military aircraft parked outside it, and, beyond the bay, some low-rise buildings.
“Sorry for not making more of an effort at conversation,” Scott said from across the jet’s narrow aisle. He removed his padded earmuffs and jimmied a knuckle in each ear as though trying to get them to pop. “Didn’t think I could compete with the sonic booms.”
Janis chortled as she removed her own earmuffs, but she felt her eyes sharing a look with his that said, I know you’re as scared as I am, but we’re going to do this. And she was scared. The fate of all of those cities, all of those people…
Not to mention the six of them.
She peeked around to see how the others were faring. Margaret, seated behind her, looked pale and queasy. Creed didn’t look much better. She couldn’t see into the cargo bay, where Jesse and Agent Steel’s armored team were seated, though she thought she heard a low groan. Her gaze traveled back up the aisle, touching on Tyler, who was behind Scott. He was looking out his window, half of his face cast in stark light, the other in shadow.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t with you.”
“Huh?” Janis turned toward Scott.
“Today,” he said. “I should have gone with you to Tallahassee. I was wrong not to.”
She waved her hand. “I was the one in the wrong. You heard what Kilmer said. Not a former Champion after all. They didn’t even know Trips was there until I told them.”
“No, that’s not the point,” Scott said. He leaned toward her, his brown eyes earnest in their contrition. “Look, I don’t know if now’s the best time, but there’s something I need to—”
“Welcome to Sterling Air Force Base,” Agent Steel said, emerging from the cockpit. “We’ll gear up here, quickly. A van will transport us to the nuclear launch site. Estimated arrival time is nineteen hundred twenty-two. That will leave us thirty-eight minutes to do our job. Now move it.”
When Janis turned back, Scott’s face looked stricken. “Thirty-eight minutes?” he whispered.
A temporary outbuilding had been set up on the runway near the jet’s landing site. Upon entering, Janis and the others were ushered into separate rooms by a waiting team in fatigues. Before she could process her surroundings, Janis was being helped from her yellow jumpsuit and into a new charcoal-colored suit with a metallic sheen. Zippers were drawn and adhesive straps tightened until the suit felt like it was a part of her, a lithe exoskeleton. A helmet descended over her head, like the ones worn by Steel’s team, and Janis heard her fast breaths. Someone clicked a cable into the back of the helmet, connecting it to a flat box between her shoulder blades.
One of her wardrobe team appeared in front of her wearing an identical helmet, the visor a nearly opaque band. Something crackled softly beside Janis’s right ear. “Testing. Do you read?”
“Copy,” Janis said.
On the inside of Janis’s visor, a small computer screen appeared. It ran through a flurry of number and letter combinations, as though performing some sort of self-check, then blinked off.
The woman’s voice instructed Janis through a series of movements — arms over her head, in front of her, behind her, touch her toes. Though the thickness of the material introduced some resistance, Janis apparently completed the movements to the woman’s satisfaction. The woman, who had been circling her, nodded to the others and disappeared.
Janis was ushered back into the main room, then immediately directed to file outside and into the rear of a large transport vehicle. A bench lined each side of the idling vehicle’s dim interior. No sooner than Janis had buckled herself in, the vehicle roared into motion. Bits of gravel pelted the undercarriage. The smell of exhaust seeped inside her helmet.
This is real, Janis thought dimly. This is happening.
And it was happening so quickly.
She tried to slow her breaths. Through her rattling visor she studied the other faceless Champions. With the exception of Jesse, with his hulking size, and Scott, with his special helmet, she couldn’t make out who was who. Snatches of what Mr. Leonard had once said returned to her.
It’s not about you. It’s about your powers. Remember that.
/> Janis closed her eyes. Mr. Leonard had been trying to help them, to protect their innocence. But with the abilities they possessed, with the world on the brink of nuclear war, could any of them afford to be innocent?
Ten minutes later, the truck pulled to a stop. The back doors swung open. Through a blast of heat and late summer-day light, Agent Steel’s silhouette appeared and waved them outside.
Janis stood on tremulous legs, a clammy wave of anxiety rising inside her. Someone rubbed her back in reassurance. She turned, expecting to find Scott’s circuit-webbed helmet facing her. But it wasn’t Scott. The person nodded once, then filed past her. When he leaped out, Janis recognized him. At the rear of the vehicle, Janis accepted Tyler’s hand and leaped to the ground herself.
She turned from the sunlight and took in a line of military vehicles and a battalion of soldiers. She followed their gazes to an open field. In the middle distance stood the same fenced-in building she had seen in the hologram in the conference room. When she squinted, a square appeared inside her visor and zoomed in. A steel antenna rose beyond the red-tiled roof like a steeple, while a pair of white satellite dishes peeked skyward. Otherwise, the T-shaped building appeared inconsequential. Beside it, an American flag flapped forlornly.
Is this where the end of the world begins? she thought with a cold shudder.
Janis’s gaze lingered on the flag before she turned toward her team.
33
Sterling Nuclear Launch Facility
7:29 p.m.
Lungs heaving for air, Tyler peeked around the edge of the military barrier and took in the security fence fifty yards away. The facility beyond, which threw a slanting shadow, was silent. Creepily so. The doors on the long side of the building were closed. The windows dark.
Tyler crawled back behind cover, the ground beneath his hands torn up where the barrier had skidded to a stop. Jesse had heaved it from more than two hundred yards away, something he’d been practicing in training with truck tires. The barrier protecting Janis had landed to his right and a little behind his. Farther to Tyler’s right, on the short wing of the T-shaped building, Scott crouched behind a third barrier.
They had arrived at their present positions at a sprint, Agent Steel’s team providing cover. But no one had appeared to stop them, not even the guards under Trips’s mind control.
Agent Steel had selected the three of them for the advance team because of their offensive abilities. The initial phase would have to be fast in its execution. The second phase, even more so, especially once those below ground discovered the facility was under assault.
The others — Creed, Jesse, and Margaret — were on the second team, positioned fifty yards back.
Tyler closed his eyes and reviewed the next steps in his mind: access the launch control support building; disable the five security personnel under Trips’s control (a sixth had managed to escape); and clear the way for Janis, Scott, and Jesse to descend to the launch control center. The rest would be up to those three: penetrating the ten-ton blast door, clearing out the control room, and aborting the launch program.
They had succeeded in the simulation at the Champions training center hours earlier, but this wasn’t a simulation. Failure here would mean the most populated cities in the U.S. reduced to craters and smoking rubble. And that was to say nothing of the nuclear fallout.
Agent Steel’s voice bit through his earpiece. “Check that your helmets are secure. They’ll blunt Trips’s powers. Same goes for your suits, but remember, they’re bullet resistant, not bulletproof.”
“In other words,” Janis said through the communication system, “hit them before they hit us.”
“Exactly,” Agent Steel replied. “And remember what we practiced. Advance on zero.”
A red 10.00 appeared in the upper right corner of Tyler’s visor and began to count down. A nauseating panic climbed from the pit of his stomach. He willed it back down as he opened himself to the atmosphere. The summer air was humid, not as amenable to giving up its electricity as dry air. But gradually, a sharp tingling bristled his hairs. The susurration of static filled his head.
When the number inside his visor hit 0.00, Steel said, “Now.”
He stood, aware that Janis had appeared behind her barrier. The fence in front of him shook as Janis raised an arm toward her section. Links began to pop. Farther to his right, Scott unleashed a blast.
Jaw clenching, Tyler focused on his own section of fence. A white, stream-like current conjoined his right hand with a three-foot-by-three-foot area beneath a sign that read:
WARNING: RESTRICTED AREA
USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED
The metal links turned orange, then began to droop like molten slag until the section dropped away entirely.
Sprinting, Tyler dove for the smoking hole, hit the dirt lot beyond, forward rolled, and gained his feet. Janis and Scott were through as well. Tyler aimed his left hand toward the door in front of him, hardly aware of the wound at his neck. The medics had shot it up pretty good with Novocain. A white stream illuminated the lock plate. Tyler arrived at the door with one foot raised and kicked it with his entire weight, just like Gus had taught him.
The softened bolt sheared away. The door clapped open.
Tyler’s visor went transparent to compensate for the sudden dimness. He found himself peering into an entertainment room. A ring of lavender couches faced a television cabinet. The lower doors to the cabinet were open. A spill of VHS movies littered the floor — Splash, Caddyshack, Stripes.
Tyler shot his gaze around the room. No one.
On the far wall, he made out what looked like a pair of bloody handprints.
Tyler stepped over the threshold and nearly hollered. The man on the couch was half slumped, one leg on the coffee table, his back to the door. And something was wrong with him. Tyler couldn’t say what, exactly, but something was definitely wrong. Steadying himself, Tyler crept laterally. The man’s neck popped; his head began to rotate. Tyler raised a charged hand.
A charred, pus-encrusted face waxed into his view.
Tyler opened his mouth, but no sound came. He stared, not believing.
Lidless eyes stared back at him, their orbs nicotine-yellow, their pupils sagging, as though they had melted before congealing again. Charred lips spread into a grin, revealing a set of crooked teeth. Familiar teeth.
“Son…” the man whispered.
Tyler staggered backward.
34
Eyes closed, Janis pictured one of the mandalas that Mrs. Fern had hung in their training room: a blue-purple symbol of balance and unity. She composed calm, purposeful breaths through her nose. If the mission was going to succeed, she had to integrate the part she thought of as herself with the part that controlled her powers. Uncertainty trembled through her.
Center yourself, she repeated in her head. Center yourself, Janis.
Agent Steel’s voice emerged from her helmet’s earpiece, startling her. “Check that your helmets are secure,” she ordered. “They’ll blunt Trips’s powers.”
Just blunt? Janis thought. Well, that’s reassuring. Upon arriving at the barrier, something damp and cold had wriggled inside her head. The sensation had been fleeting, but for an instant it had brought back the nauseating terror of her encounter with Trips. She even imagined a roach crawling inside her suit. That sensation had faded away, thank God. But Trips was near. And mind-control-blunting helmet or no, she wasn’t looking forward to a rematch.
“Same goes for your suits,” Agent Steel continued, “but remember, they’re bullet resistant, not bulletproof.”
Janis activated her microphone. “In other words, hit them before they hit us.”
Strangely, the armed guards were the least of her worries.
“Exactly,” Agent Steel said. As Steel told them to remember what they had practiced, Janis considered the frigid texture of her team trainer’s voice, the complete absence of emotion. For the first time, she found the quality reassuring. An un
movable iceberg on a roiling sea.
“Advance on zero,” Agent Steel said.
Janis nodded, her gaze shifting to the digital display inside her visor. As the display counted down from ten, Janis called forth the vibrations of her out-of-body state. The smell of the sea filled her nose. Vibrating lines grew around her. She pictured them running along the diamond pattern of the chain-link security fence.
The display reached 0.00. “Now.”
Janis stood. With an outstretched arm, she willed the lines apart. The diamonds snapped and popped open until she was facing a hole large enough to run through. Beyond the fence, sand and gravel crunched beneath her thin-soled shoes. Tyler was through as well, to her left. At the top of the T-shaped building she could hear Scott firing through the fence.
She scanned the rectangular windows high in the wall, expecting rifle barrels to appear from them at any moment. The windows remained closed. Running low, she raised an arm toward the door ahead of her, the one in the center of the long side of the building, and she pushed.
The door blew apart.
Janis ducked beneath a cloud of debris and peered into a dining room. The room was small, but something had happened here. Something awful. Two round tables had been toppled, chairs knocked every which way — and not from her entrance, though fragments of door littered the floor. No, also marring the cream-colored linoleum were at least two sets of bloody shoeprints.
One set wandered in and out while a second set disappeared behind a counter across the room. The recessed space housed a kitchen with a refrigerator, wooden pantries, and a stove range. Whoever had left the prints was behind the counter, hidden from Janis’s view.
Janis felt throughout the room but sensed no one.
No one living, anyway.
She crossed the threshold and, lowering herself to hands and knees, crawled alongside the bloody prints. The floor was sticky. She pushed aside utensils and shattered plates. Something small and dark skittered off to her right. By the time she turned, it had disappeared.
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 83
