Face the Change (Menopausal Superheroes Book 3)

by Samantha Bryant

  Her mother’s attack on the boxes and crates in the storage unit became less cautious as Helen became frustrated in her search. Helen seemed to think something here would lead them to Cindy, but she hadn’t said what that might be. But Mary thought she’d try and help anyway, starting with making it easier to see what they were doing.

  The light was a hanging fluorescent fixture of the sort seen in garages and warehouses. She jumped up to pull the string and turn it on. The light flickered weakly, before stabilizing into a yellowish glow that cast a cone of brightness in the area around where Mary stood. The fixture bounced and swung, screeching on its chains and casting long shadows up onto the walls. Really sweating now, Mary pulled off her extra layers and dropped them on the floor. Now that there was some light, she could see what there was to see.

  Along wire-rack shelves, some boxes and containers were carefully labeled in a spidery and backward slanting handwriting. “Lab Notes” and “Old Samples” were among the ones she could read. Others were left unlabeled and weren’t properly closed or had long objects sticking out them like they’d been packed in a hurry.

  Mary recognized the trend from her last move. After a few days of neatly labeling everything and making a spreadsheet of the contents of each box, she got frustrated with how much still was remained and pushed whole shelves of stuff into crates by sweeping it all off with one arm. It made for more work on the other end, but she’d been in a hurry to get out. Obviously, Dr. Liu and her mother had been in a hurry when they moved this stuff over here.

  Mary wandered around the shelving, examining the contents. Jorge popped up beside her and laid a hand on her shoulder, letting his thumb trail up and down her neck. She turned and smiled at him. He smiled back. “What are we looking for?” he asked.

  “I’ll ask.” Mary turned to the dark corner at the back wall, where her mother knelt on the floor. Helen held her hand aloft, cradling a flame she was using as a light as she dug through a crate between her knees with the other hand. Mary approached quietly. “Mom?”

  Illuminated by fire, Helen’s face stretched long, and the shadows under her eyes grew into pits. Mary made herself move forward to kneel beside her mother. In a very calm voice, like she might have used to coax a trapped animal, she asked, “Did you find what you were looking for, Mom?” She peered into the crate her mother had been sorting. She found what appeared to be the contents of a spice rack. There were jars of things that looked like cloves and ginger root and other herbs Mary didn’t recognize. She picked up a mortar and pestle and touched a finger to the green sand in the bottom. It was sharp, like finely ground glass.

  Her mother picked up the bottles one at a time and lined them up on the floor. Mary and Jorge started helping. Soon all the bottles stood sentry. Helen brought her flaming hand down to floor level, so the labels were lit. “It has to be here,” she muttered.

  “What has to be here, Helen?” Jorge’s voice had an edge to it, something more insistent. “Tell us, and we’ll help you find it.”

  “It’s a kind of green rock.”

  “Are we talking about something like chlorite or amazonite? Or something more like jade?”

  Mary turned to stare at him. He shrugged. “Geology class,” he whispered.

  “More like a gem,” Helen said, standing up and shining her flaming around her in a circle.

  “You thought it would be with these things?” Mary shook the box. When she did, something rattled around in the bottom. She reached in and felt around for it. Her fingers closed around a crystal, smooth and oddly warm in her hand. As she held it up it caught the light of her mother’s fire. It glowed as if it made a light of its own. It was beautiful.

  “That’s it!” Helen reached with her flaming hand, and Mary had to pull back to avoid being burnt.

  “Mom!”

  “Oh, sorry,” Helen clasped her hands together extinguishing the flame against her other palm. A wisp of gray smoke rose from her palms. “Let’s have it.”

  Mary dropped the stone into her mother’s upturned, still-smoking hands. Helen held it up to the light, twirling it in her fingers. “This is definitely it. Are there any more?”

  Mary shook the box again. It still rattled. Jorge pulled a flashlight from his jacket pocket and shined it into the box. They found three more pieces.

  “This will get her attention,” Helen said, gripping the pieces in her fist. “These are the key to all her experiments.”

  Mary was confused. “How will it lead us to her?”

  “Oh, it won’t. But it will get her to come to us.”

  Helen started walking back toward the entrance, Mary and Jorge following in her wake. She picked a prominent spot on the floor, just inside the door, and laid out a cloth taken from one of the shelves. She placed one of the smallest gemstones on it, angling it to catch the light from outside. Still squatting on the floor, she held out one finger, brought up a spear of fire, and used it like a pen to scorch a message into the concrete floor. “You want the rest? Come and get it, bitch.” She frowned at her message, then signed “Flamethrower” beside a sketch of a flame.

  Standing up, she dusted her hands on her capri pants and turned to her daughter. “Let’s make sure there aren’t any more and if there’s anything else worth taking in here. Be quick, though. I’m hungry.”

  Mary stood staring down at the still smoking scorched message scrawled on the floor. This was her mother’s grand plan? She felt like an idiot. This was why she’d called in Jorge, put him in danger of arrest for aiding and abetting? So her mother could grab some rocks and leave threatening graffiti? “Mom,” she began, trying for a placating tone, but hearing the sharp edge of her irritation rasp instead.

  Helen heard it, too. She put her hands on her hips and glowered at her daughter.

  Jorge stepped between them. “All right. We’ll need a place to hide out while we wait for this Ms. Liu to take the bait.” He pointed at the message on the floor. “When she finds this message, where will she look for you?”

  Helen broke the staring contest with Mary and offered a sweet smile to Jorge. “Mary’s place, of course.”

  “Mom—they’re sure to be watching my apartment. We’d be walking right back into custody.”

  Jorge rubbed his chin, smoothing an imaginary beard. “I don’t know. Maybe not. I’ve been by your place several times while you were missing, and I never saw anyone. Maybe it’s not as crazy as it sounds. There’s something to be said for hiding in plain sight.” Mary must have still looked unconvinced because he went on. “How much effort do you think they’re putting into finding you right now? You were only a couple of hours out of town, after all. And they have bigger fish to fry with the robberies and all. The city’s in an uproar.”

  Mary had to admit no one seemed to be chasing them so far. And it wasn’t like she had a better idea. “All right,” she said. “But I’m going in first, to see if it’s safe.”

  Helen raised a flaming hand. “And if it’s not safe, I’ll get you back out.”

  Some hours later, Mary and Jorge stood in her yard, talking. It was early yet, and the neighborhood was quiet except for the distant sounds of work trucks and chirping birds. After their midnight excavations at the storage unit, Helen had been manic the rest of the night. She’d laid claim to several boxes of Surge Protector pills. As she washed them down with swigs of beer from Mary’s refrigerator, she had gleefully laid out the revenge she planned to take on Dr. Liu when the woman showed up. Something she seems very confident would happen soon, though Mary didn’t see any reason to expect it.

  “First, I’ll surround her with a ring of fire. I’ll pull it in closer and closer to her until she starts to choke on the smoke. When she’s apologized and threatened and begged for her life, I’ll let the fire have her.” Her face, as she spoke, had turned an alarming shade of purple and Mary would have sworn there was actual flame visible in her eyes. The room had grown noticeably warmer.

  Neither she nor Jorge had said anything
at all—just stared at Helen in horrified disbelief, then at each other trying to communicate their fear to each other through their eyes alone. Helen had not noticed their silence, caught up in her plans for how she would burn Cindy Liu to death. Each plan was more horrific than the last. Finally, exhausted, she had dropped off to sleep in Mary’s recliner chair and begun to snore.

  As soon as she was sure her mother was asleep, Mary took Jorge’s hand and pulled him out to the yard. “What are we going to do?” she asked him, praying he had an idea.

  Jorge looked up at the lightening sky, where the moon was still visible in the gray-blue dawn. Mary stayed quiet and let him think, but when he finally looked back down, meeting her gaze with his dark brown eyes, she knew before he spoke that he didn’t have any ideas either. “Your mother needs help. If only there were someone we could go to…”

  There was, of course. But that train had already left the station. The Department wouldn’t want anything to do with them now, except maybe long-term incarceration. Not after the damage her mother had inflicted on the way out.

  Mary turned away, plucking a frond from a nearby bush and de-leafing it with her fingers, before flinging the pieces away. She felt so trapped. They couldn’t take Helen to a regular hospital. She’d burn the place down. The police would be useless—they’d either shoot her mother or end up dead themselves. Bringing in any of the usual authorities would get someone killed.

  Nor could they stay here at the apartment indefinitely, waiting for Cindy Liu to turn up. Who knew where she was by now? There was no reason to expect Cindy would visit the storage unit and discover their thefts and Helen’s threatening note. Cindy could be in Buenos Aires or Thailand by now. The madwoman had been missing as long as Helen had.

  Mary turned and looked at the van Jorge had borrowed from his cousin. It was stacked full with boxes they’d taken from the storage unit. All the things Helen thought important enough that Cindy Liu would come looking for them or had wanted for herself—in particular, three additional crates of the Surge Protector pills that her mom had been popping like Tic-Tacs. Helen seemed to believe she needed the pills to keep her powers, as if they were batteries fueling her. But Mary saw no logic in that argument. After all, Helen had been away from the pills for months while in the Department’s custody, and her powers had not waned.

  Jorge reached for her arm and turned her to him, pulling her close for an embrace. “Do you think you and your mother could lie low here for a day or two? Without being spotted?” They both looked back at Mary’s apartment. The one above it had a “For Rent” sign in the window, meaning Mary’s former neighbors must have moved on. The apartment in the back was buttoned up tight, probably still waiting for the repairs from the water damage last winter when the couple living there had tried to turn the whole apartment into a hothouse for a marijuana farm. If they stayed in the apartment with the blinds closed, it was pretty unlikely anyone would see or hear them.

  “Yeah, I think we could.”

  “I’m going to go to work then. I’ve got a shift starting in an hour, and if I don’t show up, there will be questions. You rest. We’ll both think, and we’ll figure out what to do when I come back.”

  Mary kissed him, hoping it wasn’t goodbye for good and watched him walk away. Then she went to move the van down the street and around the corner.

  When she came back, it was six thirty, a time when normal people were getting up and starting their day. Helen still snoozed in the recliner, and Mary left her there, secured the window shades so no one could see inside, locked the door and threw herself on her bed. She expected sleep would elude her, but in no time at all, she was out, too.

  By the time Mary awoke, it was early afternoon, and sunlight had thrust its way through the crack in the blinds, illuminating the dust motes in the air like some sort of disco ball, throwing patterns up on the walls. She jolted upright in bed, confused and disoriented. Though it didn’t take long for her to remember where she was and why, Mary didn’t know what had awoken her. There wasn’t any noise she could discern now, but maybe a car had backfired or something? Or maybe she’d had a nightmare-fueled adrenaline burst.

  Whatever it was had left her heart racing. She went to the bathroom and threw water on her face, waiting for her heart rate to slow. Peeking into the other bedroom, the one her mother had been using before she disappeared, she saw that the bed remained undisturbed. She hoped sleeping in the armchair wasn’t going to give her mother an achy back.

  “Mom?” she called out—not too loudly, remembering what Jorge had said about lying low.

  There was no answer.

  Mary walked out into the kitchen. The chair where her mother had slept was empty. “Mom?” Mary’s heart rate accelerated again. Had her mother gone out? They hadn’t talked this through and who knew what her mother might do out there alone. She looked at the phone, considered calling Jorge, and immediately talked herself out of it. The Department probably had her phone lines tapped, just in case she came back home.

  She spun around as if there was some part of the apartment she couldn’t already see. The only sign her mother had been here was the coffeepot. Its red light still glowed and half a pot waited. Mary hurried to the window to check the yard, but saw nothing besides the ill-kept lawn and little garden. She went back to the bedroom and looked out that window, too, but there was no one in the narrow alleyway behind the apartments either.

  “Fuck.” In her haste, she pulled a drawer out of the bureau, spilling tank tops and yoga pants to the floor. She picked up one of each at random and put them on, then went to the closet for some shoes. She was sitting on the bed tying her sneakers when the front door opened.

  “Mom?” Mary rushed into the living room, running out of the shoe she hadn’t yet tied.

  Jorge stood there, holding a bag of groceries. “She’s not here?” Panic colored his voice, mirroring the bubble rising in her own chest.

  Mary shook her head. “She was gone when I woke up.”

  Jorge put down the groceries and started to pace. “Shit. Shit. Shit. This isn’t good. They’re not going to like this.”

  “We’ve got to go find her.”

  Jorge stopped pacing, suddenly resolute. “No. I’ll go. You stay here.” He was already halfway out the door when he called back, “And if she comes back, don’t let her leave.”

  Mary stood there, still wearing only one shoe. “They?”

  Leonel under Fire

  Leonel stood in the vestibule of the Arts Center with Jessica, waiting for their cue. The mayor was making a big announcement about the city of Springfield’s partnership with the UCU, and he and Jessica were there to make it an event, complete with demonstrations. Leonel looked down at his body, unable to believe he had agreed to this, and without David’s support. He hoped he wasn’t just being reckless, dealing with the potential dissolution of his marriage by jumping feet first into something he didn’t fully understand. He’d said the work was too important to him to give up, so there was no point in going only halfway.

  The costume—which was what it was, no matter what the support crew tried to tell him—with its fairly normal black pants coupled with a bright red fitted shirt that clung to every muscle, made him very self-conscious. It was better than the slick shirt they’d given him at first—he’d looked like John Travolta mixed with Zorro. He found he was grateful for the mask for more than just obscuring his identity. It hid his embarrassment as well. At least his grandchildren found the outfit exciting. Carlitos had asked his mother to make him one like it.

  He shuddered to think what David would say, assuming he would even still talk to him after this. Still, he understood the importance of hiding who he was—for their protection. And compared to Jessica, he practically wore ordinary street clothes. Jessica looked like a figure skater or maybe a member of Cirque du Soleil in a full body unitard in a swirling pattern of blue and white. It was strange, seeing the bright red locks resting on his friend’s shoulders. He’d barely b
ecome accustomed to Jessica’s sleek new short haircut. It did effectively distract from any feature someone might use to identify her, though.

  Jessica reached out and took Leonel’s hand and squeezed it. Leonel squeezed back gently. He was only half-listening to the speech the mayor was giving, something about our new partners and a step forward in fighting crime. In fact, he nearly missed his cue, and one of the agents standing with them had to hiss, “Now,” to get him out the door.

  Leonel came out first, picking up the steel bar propped against the building and bending it to the sounds of light applause from the gathered crowd. Someone called out his alias “Fuerte” like this was a pep rally, and the players were being introduced. “And Flygirl.” Jessica came out in a leap and spun in gentle circles to land next to Leonel in their assigned spot, just to the side of the podium. The crowd went silent, then erupted in roars of appreciation. From her position in the crowd, Sally Ann gave them a discreet nod, and Leonel felt reassured.

  As they’d planned, Jessica stepped up onto Leonel’s body, like they were acrobats. She pushed off her friend’s shoulder while Leonel added more thrust with a toss from below. As a result, Jessica burst spectacularly into the sky. While they all watched her, she performed a series of aerial acrobatics, then came back down, lowering herself slowly with one leg bent to pose again next to Leonel. Leonel laughed and clapped her on the shoulder as the cameras flashed.

  Maybe being the public face of the Department wouldn’t be so bad. If David would come around, would accept the shift in their relationship, he could even come to enjoy moments like this, full of the joy of what his new abilities made it possible to do.

  Leonel’s happiness was short lived. As he turned to pick up the weights that had been placed for his own demonstration, a fireball hit the wall above his head. He ducked automatically, looking up in time to spot the banner that had been knocked loose by the impact and to catch it before the large, heavy rod fell into the audience. Leonel tossed it behind him and looked out at the crowd. They hadn’t dispersed. Many of them probably thought this was more demonstration, part of the floor show. A publicity stunt.