“No need. I have the situation in hand. But any assistance is always welcome.”
Jake snapped his gaze to the lieutenant, “You don’t know what kind of power you’re dealing with here. You’re on the verge of seriously pissing me off, and believe me, that’s not something you want to do.”
And with that, Jake took to the air. He did not engage his suit’s anti-grav energy field – he simply leaped into the air, the Earth’s gravitational field now having negligible effect on him.
The lieutenant and the Guardsman stood, looking after him.
“You know, men,” the lieutenant said, “I think we should all be grateful we’re still alive.”
Because of his injured leg, Scott could not get to his feet, but he managed to lean against a large chunk of broken concrete and get the weight under one foot.
The soldiers were now aiming their stun guns at him.
A voice spoke into the communication field now forming around him, “Force field under repair by nanobots. Now forty-seven percent effective.”
It was his belt’s onboard computer speaking. The very fact that the communication field was again initialized meant repairs were under way. However, the force field was not yet strong enough to be effective, and he was about out of time.
How could he have not foreseen something like this? He was supposed to be the most intelligent being to ever walk the face of the Earth, and yet he had been outwitted by these glorified neanderthals.
“Sammy, can you hear me?”
Still nothing. Communication with home base was still apparently blocked.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light from above, and one of the choppers exploded in flames.
The men all turned. One of them touched a communication piece in his ear.
There was a second flash of light, and a second helicopter exploded. Tompkins and Kincaid found their own chopper rocked by the shock wave.
“What the hell is going on?” Tompkins shouted.
Kincaid was about to say he didn’t know, but Tompkins cut him off. “Find out!”
“Yes, sir.”
But then, a voice in Tompkins’ ear piece said, “Agent Tompkins. You don’t know me, but we’ve spoken before.”
“Who is this?”
“I am in control now. You killed April Hollister, and now you’re going to pay.”
That voice, Tompkins thought. He had heard that voice someplace. But where?
There was another flash of light, and a third helicopter burst into flaming debris.
“All right,” Tompkins said quickly. “What do you want?”
“I believe the word is vengeance. Or, payback.”
“Look, the death of the girl was unforeseen. We don’t know what happened. She was hit with stun guns only.”
“Too late, Tompkins.”
“Look, can we negotiate?”
“Nope.”
A fourth chopper was blown to flaming bits.
Wait, Tompkins thought. He knew this voice. He had heard it over the phone once. It was Tempest’s computer. He was talking to Tempest’s goddam computer.
“Look, you have to stop doing this.”
“I have stopped. Your helicopter is the only one left in the air. The others are either destroyed, or have taken off. But I’m not going to blow you out of the sky. Instead, I’m going to hunt you down. Every waking moment, you’ll be looking over your shoulder. And when you least expect it, I’ll be there. And you’re going to meet the same end April Hollister did.
“Agent Tompkins, your time on this Earth is about over. Have a good day.” And the communication ended.
“Scott,” Sammy’s voice came through the audio field now surrounding Scott. “The electromagnetic field has been broken. Rather violently so, I might add.”
“Sammy..,”
“I know. April is dead. I’m connecting with your bio-sensors to evaluate your situation. Which, by the way, is not good but could be worse.”
“Mandy Waid seems to be missing.”
“No, I’ve found her. She’s buried under some concrete and steel thirty-five feet northwest of you. She’s still breathing. Heart action is surprisingly strong. The fetus is unharmed, but no surprise there. I’m preparing to initialize teleportation, and I’m setting up a bio-stasis field to hold her until you can get here. Though, keep in mind, the child within her is generating powerful amounts of zeta energy, and I am not sure if a bio-stasis field can hold it for long.”
“Got you.”
“By the way, Jake’s approaching.”
Scott glanced skyward, and saw Jake coming in for a landing. He had leaped into the air under his own power, but had initialized the anti-grav field so he could steer once he was in the sky, and execute a controlled landing.
Jake said, “Sorry I didn’t get here sooner, but I had problems of my own. Apparently a lot of thought and expense went into this attempt to capture us both.”
“And it cost us our dearest blood. I won’t let myself be fooled twice. We’ll be prepared next time.”
Sammy said, “Hey, guys, I’ve been executing a scan for general radiation fluctuations. You know, just for the hell of it. And there’s something strange going on. Levels of quantum particles are fluctuating all around. First they were almost negligible, and then they started to spike.”
“Yes,” Scott said. “I see it.”
A few yards from them, a series of light flashes had begun. Some small, barely noticeable, and others bright. They coalesced into a glowing patch of light. At first shapeless, and then it began to take on the silhouette of a humanoid. And then, the light faded, and April stood before them. She was naked, her hair blowing in a small breeze that had kicked up.
She folded her arms about her chest. “Scott. Jake. What’s happening to me?”
Scott said, “I don’t know, but I have a theory.”
Scott hobbled over, and draped his lab coat about her shoulders. He said, “I just thank God you’re alive.”
Telekinetic Man was still lying unconscious. Rick Wilson, the speed guy, was kneeling beside him.
“How is he?” Scott asked.
“He’s still breathing.”
Jake said, “Just who are these guys?”
“I’ll fill you in.”
Chuck Burroughs approached, cradling one arm. His face was scratched, and blood trailed from one corner of his mouth. “I could have prevented all of this, if I could only have some control of my ability.”
“We’ll work on that,” Scott said. “I want you all to come to our facility. We’ll patch you up, and see what we can do to help.”
Sammy said, “Mandy’s now here. The teleportation was a little rough because of the high levels of zeta energy the child’s producing, but she’s here. I have her safely in stasis, but I don’t know how long it’ll hold. Her child’s energy is extremely disruptive. We need to teleport the child from her, but I would like you here when I do so. Just in case something goes wrong. Teleportation with this amount of zeta energy is always a crap shoot.”
“Amazing,” Jake said, “how zeta energy disrupts so many different kinds of energy fields.”
“Hang on,” Scott said to Chuck and Rick. “We’re going to beam to our facility. This will tingle a little.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
April was once again in her trademark shorts, tank top and running shoes. She was sitting beside Scott’s desk. A monitor stood on the desk before him, on which scrolled a series of binary combinations.
“Sammy and I verified your test results separately, and we came to the same conclusion,” Scott said. “Your genesis gene somehow became activated when the stun guns hit you.”
“Wow,” she said. “So, I, like, turned into a living beam of light?”
He nodded. “Essentially.”
He turned away from the monitor, meeting her eyes. Green eyes, he realized for the first time. Beautiful eyes. Her hair was pulled back in a tail, and he noticed little freckles sort of danced along her
nose. How was it he had never noticed any of this until now?
Maybe it was like Jake had said more than once. Maybe Scott was too lost in his study of life to allow himself the opportunity to actually appreciate it.
The fact that Tompkins and company had so easily tricked him told him as thorough as he thought his approach was, it was apparently more two-dimensional than he realized. Maybe he needed to step back and re-evaluate a few things. And maybe the appreciation of life was one of those things.
He thought maybe this appreciation would begin with April. She really was quite incredible. He just had somehow never allowed himself to fully appreciate this before.
“When I thought you were dead,” he said, “I didn’t know what to do. It was like something inside me died, too. I didn’t realize how much you mean to me.”
She beamed her incredible smile at him, and she did not need super abilities to do so. “Really? How much do I mean to you?”
He smiled. “Maybe we can have dinner tonight, and talk about it.”
She said, “Are you asking me out for a date, Doctor?”
“Maybe I am. Not that we have a lot of venues available. The cafeteria is about all I can offer. But the company is what matters.”
Jake walked in, carrying two beers. He set one down on Scott’s desk. He then realized there was an awkward silence, something he did not expect from any situation involving Scott. “Am I interrupting something?’
“Not yet,” Scott said.
This brought a grin from April, who decided it might be best to change the subject. At least for the moment. “So, tell me, regarding this ability of mine, where do we go from here?”
“Well, the fact that you were able to re-corporealate yourself – I think I just invented a new word – indicates you have some control over this. I’m thinking, and Sammy agrees, there might be a sort of mental trigger, like with Jake when he powers-up. We just have to work on that. And an interesting aspect is that when you re-corporealate, you do so in perfect condition. The injuries you sustained when the building collapsed around us were gone.”
She said, “Of course, when I...how did you put it? Re-corporealate? When I did this, I didn’t seem to have any clothes on. My clothes don’t turn to light with me.”
He smiled. “A rather pleasing aspect of all of this.”
She threw a mock scowl at him.
Mandy Waid had been near death when Sammy beamed her to the facility and placed her in stasis. Once Scott had returned, he used the teleportation field to remove the child from her body, which went off without a hitch despite the high levels of zeta energy the child was generating, and beamed the child into a new device he had developed. An artificial womb. Nutrients were pumped into the child, and the womb would expand as the child grew. And Scott had set up an energy wave that neutralized zeta energy, and the child was being continually bathed in it.
Jake had not known Scott was even developing an energy wave to neutralize zeta energy. He could never hope to keep up with all of the projects Scott had in the works.
Energy fields encouraging rapid cell regeneration were used on Mandy and now, two weeks after the incident, she stood beside Jake, looking as though she had never been injured at all.
They were looking through a window at the artificial womb. It looked like a large steel gray egg, mounted on a stand. The room was insulated to prevent the anti-zeta energy from escaping and in any way affecting Jake.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Jake said.
“What the hell do you think I am thinking about?"
He shrugged. “You have always been something of a mystery to me. A series of contradictions. I really don’t know what you’re thinking.”
“That’s my child in there, ripped out of me by your teleporter. And it had to be done, or the child would have killed me. In there is my child, still only a fetus, but with enough power to bring down a skyscraper. This whole situation – you and your abilities and this lab, and what happened at the newspaper. All of the people who died.”
She turned to face him. “You’re dangerous, Jake. That’s what I’m thinking. At first, our weekend together - I thought it was a lark. And I was going to build a career on it. But now I see what we’re really dealing with. You’re dangerous. And so is Scott. You two are the most dangerous people on Earth. He’s nothing more than a mad scientist, and you’re his living experiment. And you both have the power to conquer the entire world, if you chose to do it.”
This brought a puzzled frown and not a little confusion. “We would never do that. You know us.”
“Lucky us, huh? All of us mere mortals owe our freedom to your benevolence, to the fact that you choose not to harm us.”
He did not know what to say. The truth was he had never really looked at it this way before.
She continued, “And that little child in there, my child, is nothing more than a glorified monster. It’ll be born with the potential, at least theoretically, to power-up to such a cosmic level it could have a temper tantrum and destroy the entire Earth. So it has to be held in check by an energy field. What kind of chance will it have for any kind of a life?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“There’s nothing you can say. Nothing anyone can say. Except this – I’m through. I’m going to have that annoying super computer of Scott’s beam me back to Boston, then that’s it. I don’t want you contacting me again. I’m not going to carry that little communication device anymore. I’m out of your life, and I want you out of mine. All of you. Is that understood?”
“But that’s your child in there. How can you walk away from it?”
“It was never really my child, Jake. It was yours. Yours and Scott’s. Another result of Doctor Frankenstein’s experiments. A child belongs to who raises it, and I’ll never be able to be a mother to a child that’s potentially a monster.”
She turned away and started down the hallway. “I’m walking away because I have to. Don’t follow. Don’t ever look me up again.”
Jake watched her walk away, then turned his gaze back to the strange egg-shaped device holding his child.
Were they really monsters? Scott and him? Was Tompkins actually the good-guy in all of this? He had to admit, he was no longer sure. God help him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Davenport had heard about Tompkins and Kincaid, and their epic failure in capturing Tempest and Calder. An entire building destroyed. Civilians killed. Both agents had been suspended without pay, and Tompkins was going to stand trial. He was looking at early forced retirement without pay, at best. At worst, there might be jail time.
Tompkins had always struck Davenport as sort of a zero on the personality scale, but he had been a dedicated agent. Tompkins had sincerely believed Tempest and Calder were a threat to society, and was making it his mission in life to capture them.
Maybe that was the man’s problem, Davenport thought. Tompkins didn’t know how to just leave the job at the office, and go home and unplug. He had to make everything personal, and when you do that, you get careless. Now people were dead, Tempest and Calder were still on the loose, and Tompkins was suspended.
Davenport thought about all of this as he stood in the corner of a small Mom & Pop’s variety store, on a remote corner in a poorer part of Southie. South Boston. In some parts of the country, these stores were called beer stops, because beer sales accounted for probably eighty percent of their take.
It was almost midnight. This store was officially closed, and the owners were not here. Davenport had flashed a badge at them, and requested the use of their store for the evening. They had been more than happy to oblige.
Agents were set up outside, to steer away potential customers. The door was unlocked, and the OPEN side was hanging in the door, facing out. The store looked open, even though it was not.
Agents were set up in the store. One, a woman, was dressed casually – jeans and a sweatshirt – and was casually browsing her way up one aisle and down another. A
second agent was sitting on a stool, in a corner at the other end of the store. One more agent was behind the counter, looking like she worked here. Forty-ish, her hair tied back into at tail. No makeup. A Red Sox t-shirt under an apron.
There were hidden cameras throughout the store, all aimed toward the front. All set to begin recording as soon as a signal was given. There was also a camera set to snap off still shots, one after another, using a strobe light for a flash.
It was ten o’clock at night. This part of the city was slowing down. There was little night life, except for occasional gang activity. Exactly the place for a meta-human who fancied himself a vigilante.
Tompkins had said he didn’t believe in the Darkness. He had said this man was no more real than the Easter Bunny. Davenport didn’t know what he believed. All he knew was he was assigned to go through the motions of a hunt, and he was doing as assigned. This was the third store he had waited in this week. He and his agents would be here all night, if necessary. Just like they had the previous two.
There was one difference to tonight’s venture, though. A little theatrics were going to be employed. It had been the idea of Agent Quinn, who was the one in the apron, behind the counter. Instead of just waiting, they were going to stage a little incident. See if they couldn’t draw out their quarry.
“All right,” Davenport said into a mike mounted on his shoulder. “Let’s give it a go, and hope for the best. And remember, if this character does show up, don’t give him any reason to attack you. If what we found at that apartment, that guy exploded all over the room, was caused by him, then we don’t want to make him mad.”
“Roger that.”
Within seconds, a man burst through the front door. He was African American, with long dreads falling out from under a bandanna tied about his head. In his hand was an automatic.
“Nobody move!” he screamed. “Don’t nobody move!”
Agent Quinn, behind the register, screamed. Long and loud. The man with the dreads, Agent Carter, fired his gun into the ceiling. “I said nobody move! Quiet!”
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