Empowered Academy 1985

by Dawn Jansen

The junkyard below us sprawled out in all directions, the full moon casting its spectral glow on the rusted pickup trucks, stacks of old tires, and abandoned construction equipment strewn about the field. I was trying to map out the maze of junk so that I wouldn’t be totally lost once we got down there. It was like a labyrinth of beat-up cars and scrap metal, and in the middle was that tumbledown shack, which looked quite a bit different from the out-of-date satellite photos we had seen earlier. It now was equipped with several satellites, two backup generators, and a tangle of wires connecting it to the main road. Apparently it had gotten some upgrades during the past few years.

  For the first time ever, I had my arms resting on both Edgar’s and Ramsey’s shoulders. I was secretly ecstatic that they were letting me show my affection for both of them at the same time. Now I knew how Lizzy probably felt when Blink and Wesley surrounded her. Outwardly, however, I remained focused on the mission.

  “I can see four of them walking around outside. They seem to be patrolling. And there are some lights on in the shack, but I can’t tell how many might be in there,” Mr. Hill said, squinting through his binoculars.

  He passed the binoculars to Edgar and continued talking. “Emily and I will take the lead,” he said decisively. “We can redirect any patrols we see with hallucinations. That should be enough to get us to the shack.”

  We nodded and began moving down the slope, which was strewn with ancient car mufflers and raggedy mattresses. The full moon was making it difficult to stay completely hidden, but we tried sticking to the shadows as much as possible. Ramsey and Edgar stayed a few dozen feet behind me and Mr. Hill.

  It was right after turning the first bend in the junk-car labyrinth that we heard the first patrol coming. I poked my head out ever so slightly to see who it was, thinking that it might even be Hugo. Though things had escalated so much with Ramsey and Edgar, I would’ve been lying if I said that I didn’t still think about Hugo. Everything about him was so mysterious, and over time he’d grown to an almost mythical status in my head.

  It wasn’t Hugo, though. It was a female patrol. She was dressed in cargo pants, a camouflaged tank top and a trucker hat—and she was built like a brick shit house. I didn’t know if she was empowered, but empowered or not I didn’t want to mess with her.

  Mr. Hill gave me the hand signal to proceed, meaning that I should be the one to make her hallucinate. I guessed he found this a relatively safe arena for me to try out his power for the first time.

  Using a new person’s power for the first time was interesting because while I always had some notion of how the power worked, I never knew what it felt like to use it until I actually did. Keeping my eyes trained on the young woman as she approached, I concentrated, imagining the bright lights off on the other side of the junkyard that I wanted her to see.

  To my delight, the ruse worked. I couldn’t tell exactly what she was seeing, but the woman seemed distracted by something off in the other direction and went searching for it. Mr. Hill gave me a thumbs up, and I cheekily looked back at Edgar and Ramsey, who nodded approvingly too. Perhaps it was because I was starved for approval from my dad, but I always loved feeling like I had done a good job on something important.

  It was too early to celebrate, though; that was only the first obstacle. As we moved further into the junkyard, I soon saw the antennas and satellites of the central shack jutting out over the mounds of rusted chassis that boxed us in, and now I could even hear the deep hum of its diesel generators.

  “Pst,” came a call suddenly from behind, making Mr. Hill and I turn our heads.

  It was Ramsey, and he was signaling to us that somebody was approaching from their side. No sooner had Mr. Hill and I turned to look behind than we heard a large number of footsteps crunching through the dirt from in front as well. Not good—we were surrounded on both sides.

  From the cover of a large shadow, I took a quick look ahead and saw a tall, heavyset man approaching with three Dobermans. Judging by the robotic way they were following the man, he was either a really good trainer or had complete control over the dogs with some kind of power. The dogs were not something we expected, and I had no idea if Mr. Hill’s hallucination power would affect them.

  We all turned our attention to Mr. Hill. At a time like this, it was of utmost importance that we acted cohesively. Mr. Hill signaled for us to split into groups of two and address each threat independently. I was planning to use Edgar’s transmogrification ability to pose as the female sentry from earlier, when all of a sudden I heard a thunderous voice echoing through my skull.

  “TRESPASSERS!” it boomed.

  It was a psychic call being sent out throughout the entire junkyard. Whoever had sent the call was obviously a very powerful psychic to be able to not only detect us, but also transmit the alert across such a large area. We all looked at each other. To my relief, I didn’t see panic in anybody’s eyes, nor did I myself feel flustered. Thanks to all of the experiences we’d shared, we were confident we could take on anything as long as we worked together.

  For a moment, I reflected on my rotten luck with stealth—for a woman who often had the ability to cling to ceilings and pass through walls, I had an awful track record with covert missions. I didn’t have much time to dwell on this, though, because soon I heard the three dogs barking like angry cerberuses. Commotion was spreading throughout the whole junkyard; it was time to kick some ass.

  The dogs’ barking forced us to dispense with any pretense of sneakiness. Mr. Hill and I stood there surrounded by two lanes of junk as the trainer and his vicious dogs came rounding the corner ahead of us. The subtle red glow in their eyes made me sure he was controlling them directly. They moved in a tight-knit pack and charged at Mr. Hill immediately.

  “Emily, I got this!” Mr. Hill shouted. It was imperative that we didn’t both try to use his powers on one person at the same time, as it was possible that the mixed hallucinations would cancel each other out.

  Despite the three vicious dogs and one giant of a man charging at Mr. Hill, he held his ground like a complete badass. I felt his power surge out and attack the trainer, and I didn’t know exactly what he had done until about a second later when the man stopped running forward and started frantically swiping at his clothes.

  “What the hell?” he shouted in horror. “Get them off!”

  Mr. Hill was making him think he was being swarmed with bugs, and he was desperately trying to swat them away.

  Unfortunately for the trainer, his ability to control his dogs telepathically was also his curse, because now that his concentration was broken, so was his link with his Dobermans. As the man panicked in fright, trying everything to get the bugs off of him, so too did the dogs. They yelped and spun around and nipped at each other, and eventually they ran off completely, tormented by the mental anguish of their owner.

  Mr. Hill kept the hallucinations going long enough for me to walk straight up to the tall man and punch him right in the groin (his height proving to be his downfall this time, as it lined his crotch up perfectly with my fist). Of course, I loaded my fist with as much density as possible as I threw the punch as well. He collapsed to the ground instantly, and I gave him a good, ultra-dense stomp to the temple to make sure he wouldn’t get up any time soon.

  “Good work,” Mr. Hill said to me, somewhat out of breath from using his power so strenuously just now. “This is gonna get nasty. Let’s regroup with the others.”

  We jogged back to where Ramsey and Edgar were. I was glad Mr. Hill gave the call to regroup—I didn’t like being separated from my boys. If anything happened to them while I wasn’t with them, I knew I’d never be able to forgive myself.

  Ramsey and Edgar were in the midst of doing battle with some woman who had long, prehensile hair. She was giving them a hard time with her acrobatics and freakish hair that she used for grappling, but just as Mr. Hill and I arrived, Ramsey landed a stupendous punch that sent her flying into the backseat of an old junkyard Cadillac. All threats were
neutralized for now, but we knew there would be more rogue empowered converging on our location soon.

  “Let’s get to the shack!” Mr. Hill commanded.

  We ran past the dog trainer I had knocked out earlier and continued on beyond the next curve. Turning this bend, we found the old shack about fifty feet ahead of us. Now that we could see it up close, I realized just how much tech they’d added to the thing. It was covered in makeshift satellites of all different materials and sizes, and there were thick power cables and thin electrical wires snaking in and out of the house. Whatever they were doing in there, it needed a lot of juice.

  To my dismay, however, when I tried to take my next step forward, my feet wouldn’t budge.

  Confused, I looked down to the ground and saw disgusting mushrooms and fungal growths rising up from the ground and clinging to my feet. They grew with impossible speed, sprouting new spores that quickly wrapped themselves around my calves and knees, rooting me to the ground.

  “What the shit!” I shrieked, looking around to my squad members, but they were being trapped by the same fungal binds as well.

  It was an ambush. As the monstrous mushroom forms crept up our legs, several figures stepped out of the shadows.

  “Your hallucinations do not work on us, fools.” the conceited psychic voice from before said once again, only this time I saw who it belonged to—a bespectacled young man wearing shabby clothing like the others. I could feel the psychic message coming directly from him. He was somehow blocking Mr. Hill and me from using our hallucination-causing power.

  Standing by his side was another man, much older and even decrepit-looking, who had mushrooms and mold growing on his pale skin—evidently the one responsible for the mushrooms trapping us in place. Beside him was a woman with long dreadlocks who seemed to have an inexplicable aura of darkness hanging about her, and next to her was an athletic-looking man who was presently... transforming into a tiger!

  We would have been screwed were it not for the fact that the mushroom growths were a part of the mushroom-man’s body. They were extensions of his own skin. That meant I’d been discretely absorbing his power this whole time. Just as the weretiger completed his transformation and pounced on Mr. Hill and brought him down to the ground, I immediately unleashed my now fully-assimilated power, causing the mushrooms that bound us to shrivel into harmless husks.

  We immediately jumped into action. Four-eyes might have been able to stop me from using my hallucination power, but I wanted to see if he could stop me from punching his lights out too; I lunged forward with a wild, density-loaded haymaker that the confounded psychic was too startled to dodge. With him out of the equation, I was free to use my full arsenal of powers.

  It was hard to follow exactly everything that happened in the desperate melee that followed—Ramsey dove for the tiger that was tearing into Mr. Hill; Edgar struggled with the dreadlocked woman; and I grappled with the disgusting fungus-man, who seemed perplexed that somebody else could use his own power against him.

  It was a vicious brawl, but it soon became obvious that we were gaining the upper hand. I had pulverized the mycokineticist into unconsciousness and moved on to help Edgar with his opponent when suddenly I heard a shout, this time from a familiar voice: Hugo’s.

  Chapter 19

  Emily

  “Stop!” Hugo called out from behind us.

  I turned and saw him standing there with a strange remote in his hand. He looked horrified at the brawl he had walked in on.

  What horrified me though was that my powers had abruptly stopped working. It was like they just deadlined; I called to my core, trying to channel energy out of it, but I received no answer. I felt like a major part of me had died, and it was starting to make me panic.

  “Hugo?” I shouted. I had now fallen to one knee—not only had my power been drained, but my whole body felt weak too.

  “Emily?” Hugo replied. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “You know this guy?” Ramsey shouted. He sounded furious but strained, and I noticed he was on his knees too. Apparently, whatever had stripped me of my power was affecting all of us.

  “What the hell happened?” Hugo screamed. “I leave to get supplies for one hour and I come back to this?”

  “The Grays ambushed us!” said the woman Edgar had been grappling with. She was now helping the mycokineticist up. “They killed Hector!” she added.

  “Hector” was evidently the man who had transformed into a tiger. It hadn’t been easy rolling around with a freaking fully-grown tiger, but Ramsey had eventually caved the beast’s skull in with his fist.

  “Yeah, well you killed one of ours too,” Ramsey shot back, spitting blood out of his mouth as he talked. It was only then that I realized Mr. Hill wasn’t moving. I felt a knot forming in the pit of my stomach. Mr. Hill was a good teacher; a good man. He had been alive and leading us on the mission just moments ago, and now things had gone irreparably wrong.

  “What the hell happened to our powers?” Edgar shouted.

  “I disabled them,” Hugo said coolly, holding up the remote in his hand. It looked like nothing I had ever seen before; it was big and clunky, gunmetal gray with a conspicuous knob on one side.

  The psychic who had first alerted the whole junkyard to our presence was still knocked unconsciousness—proof that my striking was getting better—but the fungus-man and the woman had joined Hugo at his side now. They were wounded and furious.

  “Let’s kill them!” spat the woman, clutching at her injured ribs with one hand.

  “Yes,” added the old man with sickly mushrooms sprouting from his skin. “They will make the perfect incubators for my next spore colony.”

  I wanted to strike out at them, but I couldn’t. Whatever the device was that Hugo held in his hand, it was not only disabling our powers, but enfeebling us too.

  “No,” Hugo said defiantly. His comrades looked surprised, but it was obvious they deferred to him as well. Hugo had to be their leader. “We’re not going to kill them. We’re going to show them. Show them the truth.”

  ━━━━━ ▣ ━━━━━

  “You can turn off your stupid device now,” Ramsey growled.

  We had been taken inside the shack by Hugo and his team of rebels and we were now standing to one side with our wrists tied behind our backs like prisoners. I thought the shack looked impressive from the outside, but it was even more complex on the inside. Everything looked hodgepodged together—bulky computer terminals; glowing monitors; all sorts of communications equipment. It was evidently a base of some sort, and while I was indignant at how they were treating us, I was also curious about everything I saw. How long had they been there? What was their purpose?

  “Fat chance” Hugo scoffed. “You have to prove your trustworthiness. As it stands, you three barged in here and just started busting up the place. That’s why this disempowerer stays on you at all times.” He waved the device around, but still kept it generally trained on us. “As you know, my comrades would prefer you dead, but I have hope that you’ll be able to see past the lies they’ve been feeding you and recognize the truth.”

  “Whose lies?” I asked, glaring at Hugo.

  “The Academy’s,” he replied quickly, staring right back at me. “Take this device, for example,” he added, nodding to the remote in his hands. “Anyone care to guess where it came from?”

  None of us spoke.

  “Alright then, I’ll tell you. We stole it from the Academy,” Hugo said.

  “You were the ones that broke in to Epsilon last night,” I said.

  “Correct. Truth be told, stealing this device wasn’t our goal. We just took it on the way out after failing our actual mission.”

  “So what were you actually trying to accomplish?” asked Edgar.

  “We were trying to save Vera,” Hugo replied, a grave look spreading across his face.

  “That girl...” I said. She had stayed in my mind ever since we first saw her. I could tell there w
as something special about her.

  “You know her? Just what’s the deal with the two of you anyway? How did you know his name too?” Ramsey asked, nodding toward Hugo.

  “That night at Old Field...” I said quietly. “While you guys were fighting, I chased him and then...”

  “And then she let me go,” Hugo said.

  “What? Why?” Ramsey asked. He sounded confused and angry.

  “I... I absorbed his power when we were wrestling at one point and... I could tell from how his power felt that he was a good person. Not the enemy like the Academy wanted us to believe.”

  When I said this, Hugo’s expression took on a subtle warmth, and I thought I saw a slight smile form on his lips.

  “What’s so special about this ‘Vera’ then?” Edgar asked.

  “As I told Emily then, Vera is the most powerful empowered on the planet. She has the ability to enter the fourth dimension and manipulate the world from there. But she’s mentally broken. She was the culmination of the Soviet empowered program, their finest specimen, and they let her loose in the US to wreak havoc from the inside, but the training had been too intense; by the time she arrived in America, she was already in the state you saw her in now. Catatonic. Unresponsive. The Soviets went too far. Her own powers were too much for her. Luckily, we found her before anybody else did. We’d been keeping her safe in the abandoned insane asylum for weeks, helping her, slowly making progress... and then you Grays showed up.”

  It was only now that I made the connection that they called us “Grays” because of the dark-gray uniforms we always wore.

  “But why did the Academy tell us you guys were Soviets?” Edgar said, still trying to work everything out in his head.

  “Why indeed,” Hugo said, and then he turned to the woman with dreadlocks. “Jasmin, pull up the evidence.”

  Jasmin walked over to one of the terminals and started clacking away at its dirty keyboard. Images and blocks of text started scrolling by on one of the large monitors overhead.

  “We’ve been here collecting evidence for months, hacking into the Academy’s servers and stealing top-secret data. It’s a lot to parse through, but let me give you a basic rundown,” Hugo said, turning to the monitor that Jasmine was operating. “I’m sure you guys have heard of the Philadelphia Experiment? Not a hoax after all as it turns out. They sent the USS Eldridge through a portal and made contact with other beings. That’s all in this document here.”