Cherry Blossom Girls International

by Harmon Cooper

  “Is this how you normally treat lobbyists?” I asked them, cool as ever, even if my heart was thumping in my chest. I knew Veronique could stop all their weapons, but seeing a bunch of guns aimed at you was definitely unsettling.

  Still, I had to keep my calm.

  “Put your hands where we can see them!” the lead security bro barked. He was a black guy in a ballistic helmet, a pair of sunglasses too, even though they were inside. I kind of didn’t understand that part, but I didn’t question it as I kept my hands down.

  “That’s not how this is going to play out,” I slowly said to him. “First, you are going to lower your guns.”

  “Ready at your command, sir!” the overzealous officer next to him shouted, the short fucker jonesing to kickstart the bloodbath.

  “Last warning,” I told them. “Lower your weapons.”

  The muzzles of their guns began to shake, bending upward.

  The smarter ones immediately dropped their weapons, their slings pulling the weapons to their sides as they went for their sidearms. The ones more freaked out by Veronique’s power took longer to respond.

  And that was when all of us heard the clicking sounds of heels coming down the hallway.

  “That’s quite enough, Commander,” a woman said. I wasn’t familiar with the woman enough to recognize her voice, but I definitely knew it was Sen. Ellicott when I saw her face.

  She wore a pair of tortoise shell glasses, a peach colored pantsuit, a briefcase clutched tightly in her hand. The lady’s skin was tinged orange, too much sun, her nose large and a bit hooked.

  “Gideon?” she asked as she locked eyes with me.

  “Gideon? Never heard of the guy. My name is Manchester.”

  “Manchester?” she asked as the armed guards moved aside.

  “That’s Mr. Manchester to you,” I told her, and if I had sported a mustache on my currently morphed face, I would have twisted its end in her general direction.

  “All right, then, if you want me to call you that absurd name, I will. Mr. Manchester, I’m glad you could join me here in the Capitol.”

  “You are the one joining us,” I told her. “Our meeting isn’t for another two hours.”

  Gideon, something’s wrong, Grace thought to me.

  I looked over to the morphing beauty, who currently looked like J-Lo in the early 2Ks.

  “Yes, you are right,” said the Senator, “I decided to join you instead.”

  Grace’s voice ricocheted inside my head: That’s not really the Senator. Everyone get ready!

  “Not so fast,” Sen. Ellicott said, bringing her hand up. “I am aware that one of you is a psychic, you,” she said, pointing at Grace. “And you are correct, things are about to get very bad. So let’s get something straight before that happens.”

  Sen. Ellicott’s face split open from the center, peeling away, her true features becoming apparent.

  She was an albino with weird beady red eyes, eyebrows that were hardly there. Her outfit was completely white now, shiny, almost looking like spandex, something an Instagram cosplayer would have worn at Dragon Con.

  But she was the real deal.

  The woman standing before us was a goddamn super, which meant that…

  All the paramilitary soldiers surrounding us fell to the ground, suddenly constricted by their armor, unable to move. I looked to Veronique to see both her hands glowing red, the metal vampire ready for the signal to kill all of them.

  A couple of the men tried to bring their hands up to their necks, hoping to loosen the pressure of the armor, but those who tried to move felt their armor constrict even more, a few of them crying out in pain, the stronger ones gritting their teeth as beads of sweat appeared on the sides of their heads.

  “I wouldn’t do anything else if I were you,” the albino woman said. “After all, you wouldn’t want to be responsible for killing this many Americans, would you?” she asked, now in a British accent. “No, no, I don’t bloody think so.”

  The men that had seen her transformation kept glancing from us to her, still being choked by the uniforms, but also in shock that the Senator had morphed into whatever the hell stood in front of us.

  “Where’s the real Senator?” I asked, my own face changing back to what it normally looked like.

  Unfortunately, I was never as strong as the powers that I borrowed, stuck at about the sixty percent mark, which meant it was hella difficult for me to keep the transformation, especially if I was distraught.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know, Gideon,” said the albino Brit. “I have a message from you, from my master, my Lord and Savior.”

  “Your Lord and Savior?” I asked.

  Don’t do anything to her yet, I thought to Grace, and tell the others.

  If the albino woman standing before us was just a shapeshifter, then she was heavily outgunned considering the crew I was currently rolling with.

  “Yes, you may know him as Damon, and he sent me here to deliver a message to you, and for that matter, the American people. The Americans will continue their eradication of all things mutant like you, and you, and you and even you,” she told me. “But not me, and not my Damon Lord. For us to begin again, we must start anew.”

  Chapter Two: Damn You, Damon Lord

  “Famous last words, bitch,” Veronique said as she aimed her palm at the albino woman, red energy glowing all around her.

  A blast exploded outward, forming a shell around the woman.

  Dorian touched her finger against her tongue, using her power to trace up an energy creation, but the ceiling came down before she could release it. Luckily, Grace used her power to form a telekinetic dome around us to stop the debris.

  I helped as well, jumping into the action now that I realized that shit had been hitting the fan for a good twenty seconds now. I was nowhere near as strong as Grace, but I aided her as best I could, the structure holding around us as the ceiling continued to crumble.

  It was what I saw outside our clear, protective barrier that had me frightened.

  All the MercSecure men who had been pointing guns at us just moments ago were buried in the rubble, and floating in the air now, an oval of energy around her, was the albino shifter, an utterly furious look on her face.

  “We are getting out of here,” Dorian started to say, just as a bubble of energy exploded from beneath us, throwing the four of us into the air, the walls of the Capitol’s visitor center continuing to collapse.

  Oof!

  I landed on the steps that faced First Street, the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court situated across from me, crowds of people moving away from the pandemonium as I struggled to find my glasses.

  Helicopters would soon start to swarm, and I was pretty sure the military was on their way, at least if any movie I’d seen turned out to be accurate.

  Sirens, people screaming, throngs of tourists trying to get away—it came to me at once as I got to my feet.

  I activated my healing ability and started to remove the custom suit I’d had made. Beneath it was my superhero uniform, dark blue with pink highlights, and sure, I would have to wear brown leather dress shoes with it for the time being, but there was no sense in allowing any of the material to restrict my movement.

  Now out of my clothing, I took a pair of backup glasses out of my side body pouch and put them on, adjusting a strap around the back of my head.

  Grace, tell me you are near… I projected my thought out.

  Gideon…

  A tyrannosaurus rex made of purple energy with cannon arms instead of its normal, shitty little appendages stormed past, one of Dorian’s creations. Even cooler was the fact that the T-Rex was accompanied by a velociraptor-looking energy creation, both of them charging across the Capitol grounds toward…

  There.

  I caught sight of the albino woman floating in an oval of cosmic energy. If the CBGs were anywhere, they would be addressing her, so I took off in the direction of Independence Avenue, ready to activate Jules’ power n
ullification ability.

  If we could shut her down, if I could do something, anything...

  I ran toward the action, watching as the metal was stripped from a police vehicle and hurled at the glowing oval in the air.

  Veronique.

  An explosion near the House of Representatives, police sirens, a helicopter directly overhead now—my God, was the chaos visceral!

  Bap bap bap bap! Bap bap bap bap!

  The approaching helicopter fired at the ground, the bullets stopping midair and turning, flying back in the opposite direction.

  “Veronique!” I shouted as I reached her. The metal vampire tried to hit the albino woman with everything she had, while also protecting us from bullets.

  I heard cries overhead as some of Veronique’s bullets dinged against the helicopter's rotor, the vehicle descending toward the ground.

  Ka-BOOM!

  An explosion near the road took a parked vehicle or two with it, debris and jagged hunks of metal falling from the sky, the blast force hitting me in the chest.

  I heard a loud screech and turned to see an amphibious-looking military vehicle skid to a halt near the Capitol grounds. MercSecure soldiers poured out of it with their weapons aimed at us, ready to engage.

  As her T-Rex made of energy and its counterpart fizzled out, Dorian appeared in a purple flash above the military vehicle, forming a giant ball of energy as she spiraled toward the earth, disappearing just in time, the vehicle exploding.

  “No, no, no…” I mumbled, knowing this was going to come back to haunt us. I cringed at the thought of what this would look like on the news, Gideon back and attacking the heart of the nation...

  Fuck! There was no way around this. It was going to look bad.

  Grace, still in her Salma Hayek circa 2005 look, telepathically moved as many objects as she could, helping people out of the way, making her way toward Veronique.

  Well, sort of.

  There was a lot of debris in the area now, especially with the smoldering helicopter and the shrapnel from Dorian’s attack.

  I had played enough videogames to know that the albino shapeshifter was charging, that she would soon let loose whatever it was she was storing up, and by the looks of the destruction she’d already wrought, I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  “We’ve got to go!” I grabbed Veronique by the elbow and started dragging her toward Grace. Veronique’s first instinct was to drain my life force, but the metal vampire stopped as soon as she saw it was me.

  “Gideon!” she hissed, still throwing everything she could latch her magnetic hands on at our suspended enemy as I dragged her away.

  Dorian flashed into existence next to me, and started running alongside us, tracing up another purple energy creation, not paying attention to where she was going.

  I only wish I could have said something in time.

  Dorian cracked her knee into a barrier jutting out of the road, and fell forward, smacking the side of her head on another barrier.

  “Shit!” I said as I went for Dorian instantly, crouching before the punk rock teleporter. She too had her uniform on under her business attire, her clothing mostly torn.

  “There’s no time to heal!” Veronique said as we both saw a ring of energy start to form around the woman in the air.

  “Okay… Okay! We will do this on foot then.” I lifted Dorian over my shoulder, and we took off, away from the woman about to explode in the sky.

  We caught up with Grace and started toward Independence Avenue.

  “I will protect us.” Grace slowed her run a little, her features morphing back to her base form: Scandinavian beauty, blue eyes, crystal-clear skin in a tight-fitting uniform courtesy of Vince Porter.

  She looked every bit the part of a superhero as her eyes went white, the crowd opening up all around us.

  Of course, this would make us a target, which I quickly relayed to her. Grace changed up her game plan.

  The people began fleeing in a way that would shield us, which was sort of fucked up, but did manage to get us about a quarter of a mile away from the US Capitol before the largest explosion I had ever seen rocked the ground. The concrete cracked, cars swerved out of their lanes, more helicopters appeared in the air, everyone and everything pressing away from the blast radius.

  I could feel the punch in my chest, like I had stuck my head in the loudest subwoofer ever in existence.

  But we had to keep moving, and since people were abandoning their cars…

  We took the next left we could take, Grace and Veronique still running with me, Dorian flung over my shoulder.

  We were somewhere across the street from the US Department of Health and Human Services, traveling down Washington Avenue now, the crowd still swirling all around us, more police vehicles starting to appear on the perimeter, soldiers, mayhem, dammit, dammit, dammit!

  We saw a truck peel out, and I pointed to it, the unnecessarily large vehicle stopping as soon as Grace got hold of the driver’s mind. We hopped into the large cab, and I sat with my back against the truck’s back window, Dorian in my arms.

  “Come on, Dorian, wake up…”

  “Heal her,” Veronique said as the truck sped off, smashing through a smaller hybrid vehicle and continuing onward.

  “Okay, I’m trying to…” I told her, accidently pushing Father’s power out of me and absorbing Dorian’s ergokinetic power.

  I wasn’t normally this goddamn clumsy, but my ears were still ringing, and the shock of the explosion and the aftermath that we would have to wade through later were fresh on my mind.

  We were going to be blamed for this…

  I knew it as I fumbled in my side pocket for Father’s violet blood.

  People would want blood for this.

  The loud truck barreled toward the southeast freeway, and I tried to keep my hand as steady as possible. I held the vial, uncapped it, placed my thumb on the other end and dabbed a bit of his blood.

  Now more focused, I was presented with two options that I could sense in my mind’s eye, one being Father’s reality manipulation; the other his healing power.

  I focused on the second channel, mentally replacing the ability I had just absorbed from Dorian.

  I had to be careful when touching her.

  The truck hit something in the road and bounced, our trajectory forcing us to careen down a side street, my stomach doing somersaults.

  “Find an onramp!” I called to Grace.

  “On it,” she said, her eyes white as ever as she steered the driver.

  “Gideon?” Dorian asked as I healed her. “What happened?”

  “You ran into a barrier and hit your head,” Veronique said.

  “You were knocked out,” I told her, basically repeating what Veronique had just said. “Are you ready to teleport us?”

  “I’m still a little shaky...”

  “How about we keep things simple for a while?” I asked, the idea coming to me suddenly. “We can have the driver pull into the next parking lot, get our own vehicle, and head west. Old-school, right?”

  “You want to drive when we can teleport?” Veronique asked.

  “Sure, I figured you’d be good for us to drive for a bit. I need some time to talk this out, to let this process. We’ll figure out our next step. Yeah, some driving. I need to drive for a minute.”

  “The whole reason we even have this misstep is because of your contact with the Senator,” Veronique started to say.

  “I knew you and Stella were against the plan, and I’m it sorry didn’t work out the way that we wanted to!” I told her over the wind. “But there’s nothing we can do now. Let’s find a vehicle, and start driving. Maybe get a hotel for the night, and get back to Colorado in the morning. I can email Father in the way that we devised, letting him know that we’re safe. It will also help in case they are tracking us somehow. If they attack a hotel, well, we can figure that out. We don’t want them finding out about our base.”

  “Got it,” Grace said, tra
nsferring the message to the truck’s driver.

  We were heading south now, and I saw exit signs for both Maryland and Virginia. The carnage was momentarily behind us yet simultaneously looming in our future. There was no other way to look at it.

  We were back in worst-case scenario mode.

  Chapter Three: Tourists to Terrorists

  Destination: Richmond, Virginia.

  We’d switched out cars near Alexandria, and now I was driving some sort of Honda electric car, possibly a hybrid. All I knew was that it was completely silent as it drove, and there were definitely times when I had to look at the car to see if it was actually on.

  I had experienced this before, in the Tesla we had “borrowed” somewhere in the Southwest. Well, it might’ve been near the Rocky Mountains. I couldn’t remember, but now, especially after we’d turned a new leaf, I didn’t like stealing vehicles.

  Which was why I had the Honda owner’s contact information with me. I was going to get it back to him after we used it, come hell or high water.

  We didn’t know if we were being tracked, and we didn’t know how they could track us, but it was better this way, and besides, sometimes you just need to take a drive.

  So that’s what we were doing, cruising down I-95, Grace to my right, Dorian behind me, Veronique in back.

  Déjà vu on fleek.

  Every time I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Veronique, I remembered the last time we had headed south, what it was like every time I looked back there, her dark, hollow eyes that had seen more death than probably any of the other CBGs.

  Talk about nostalgic being with the original three, the OG CBGs, and while I knew that the others were waiting for us back in Colorado, part of me was happy for this familiar distraction.

  It had been a day.

  We’d started off as tourists, and ended up as terrorists, a story confirmed by Grace, who was already on my phone looking at some of the news stories.

  She had seen my background photo, a cosplay snapshot of 2B from Nier Automata, and had morphed into a white-haired woman, her gothic Loli outfit matching exactly what 2B wore in the game.