Outlaw

by Dale Ivan Smith

  I sat up straight. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get you worried. It’s…” How could I explain without sounding crazy? Especially to someone who didn’t have a power?

  Screw it. I wasn’t keeping anything from Alex.

  “I saw an energy rising up from the earth, like a million water fountains, and the whole time, there was this strange mist that glowed blue-green like the water fountain things.” The words all tumbled out of my mouth in a rush. I must have sounded like a nut. But Alex wasn’t looking at me like he thought I was crazy. He listened, his expression sympathetic.

  When I finished, he nodded. “This has never happened to you before?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Mossville, how much did you know about that place before going there?”

  Suspicion slithered up my spine. “Not jack before going there. Why?” Had he kept something from me?

  “All I know about Mossville is that it’s being monitored by Support.”

  “Monitored?” I shivered. Had all the trouble I’d taken to hide my tracks been a big waste of time? Had I exposed myself anyway? “I blundered right into Support’s gunsights.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Support isn’t out to kill you, Mat. They think you are dead, remember?”

  “You keep telling me that.”

  “I’ve seen the file.”

  “But do you know everything they know?” That was the kicker, wasn’t it?

  He hesitated. “I can’t say for certain. But I’ve seen no evidence to contradict the official report on your death.”

  “Okay, fine. But why are they monitoring Mossville? I mean, okay, I know it’s bizarre there, but why do they?”

  “Reports. It’s on a watch list, a list dealing with locations possessing special phenomena and anomalous potential.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means unexplained energy.”

  “That a common thing?”

  “No, but less rare than you’d think. The Reclamation Zones are dripping with it.”

  “You mean the radioactive off-limits-to-everyone-places in Germany and Russia?”

  He looked sad. “Yes. And China and the English Republic, and D.C.”

  “That’s just freaking bizarre,” I blurted out.

  He smiled faintly. “You could say that.”

  “How can you be around stuff like that and not have it gnaw at you?”

  He shrugged. “Goes with the territory. It’s part and parcel of being in Support.”

  “So, somehow weird energy place Mossville messed with me?”

  “I’m making a leap, but your power has been growing stronger. Your sensitivity and awareness to it and the living world all around you seem to be growing sharper.”

  I cocked my head. “All that just from what, my gasp?”

  He smiled faintly. “I’ve been around a lot of Empowered, and seen a lot of anomalous things,’ AKA ‘weird shit’ as you put it. I’ve seen something like this before.”

  I wanted to ask him for more detail, but something beeped warningly from the inside of the pilot house and Alex sprang up. “Navigation hazard,” he called back to me once he was inside.

  He turned the boat, heading out into the middle of the Columbia. The shores here were dark. No houses. We must be past Longview. I could just make out the high ground to the left. Oregon hills. On the right was the Washington shore.

  The sky behind us was beginning to brighten when we reached Astoria.

  Alex hadn’t said anything more about the permanent node in Astoria. But, I had slept like shit, my nerves were still raw, and I had a throbbing headache just behind my eyes. Alex pulled the boat up to an ancient-looking wharf.

  “This is where we get off.”

  “What about the boat?”

  “Going to leave it here. We’ll have to hoof it into town.” He grinned at me, looking ready to take on the world.

  I didn’t know where he got the energy from. To be this cheerful at zero dark too freaking early.

  “You have money? Because I don’t,” I said.

  He didn’t let my grouchiness slow him down.

  “I have a secret cache here.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You dealing drugs now?”

  He laughed. I was torn between wanting to laugh with him and smack him for being so cheerful so damn early, but I was too tired to do either.

  “Cache, not stash,” he replied, and grinned. “Winterfield always encouraged me to have a few caches of money and supplies that only I knew about.”

  “But Astoria of all places.”

  He grinned. “I have caches in all places.”

  I frowned. Winterfield liked to keep things close to his chest, but I didn’t see him hiding stuff from Support. “What did Support think about this?”

  “What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” he said with a straight face.

  I started shaking with laughter, and bent over. That was the dumbest saying in the world. Of course what you didn’t know could hurt you.

  “It wasn’t that funny,” Alex said after I stopped to take a breath.

  I waved a hand at him, still half bent over from laughing. How could I explain that it was just too damn funny, especially when you were as wiped out as I felt. That saying was right up there with “this will hurt me more than you.”

  “Winterfield doesn’t seem the type to keep things from the boss,” I said.

  “That’s what you think.”

  “What?”

  He tapped his nose. “Trust no one,” he said. “That’s a Winterfield quote.”

  I laughed. “You got that right.” It sounded exactly like the sort of thing Winterfield would say. Because Winterfield never trusted anyone.

  We left the boat tied up to the rotting dock and began walking along the worn and cracked asphalt road. Birds were chirping, way too enthusiastically for so early. My stomach rumbled. I kept yawning. I was either going to crash into deep sleep or starve, I wasn’t sure which.

  I pinched myself to focus.

  Something nagged at me. Dark-Net. They weren’t exactly going to transport us for free.

  “How do you plan on paying Dark-Net?”

  “How did you?”

  My mouth hung open for a moment. “I have some money.” I told him an amount.

  He laughed, only this time it grated. “That wouldn’t be enough.”

  “Okay, fine, I probably would have used my power to create plants they wanted.”

  “Like illegal ones?”

  “No!” I shuddered. Shit, this was impossible.

  “Then what would you have done?”

  I didn’t answer for a moment. Why was he grilling me like this? We walked on in silence.

  “I would have figured something out,” I said finally. “Why does it matter anyway?”

  “Because you can’t just improvise on the big stuff.”

  “Now you definitely sound like old stick-up-his-butt Winterfield.”

  “Maybe, but that wouldn’t make him wrong, or me.”

  I swallowed the snapping retort I was about to hurl at him.

  He was right. It didn’t.

  And I’d been about to fly by the seat of my pants smack into the unknown. Persia of all places.

  “Okay, fine. So, how do you plan on paying our way? Mega bucks from your cache?”

  He snorted. “Five hundred dollars won’t get us far. Maybe not even out of Astoria.”

  We kept walking.

  “Well?” I asked we’d walked fifty yards and he still had answered me.

  He tapped his nose again.

  I smacked his arm.

  “Don’t keep going after me to say what I would have done and then not tell me what you are planning for us, Sanchez.”

  “Knowledge. Let’s just say I know things that certain groups would pay a lot for.”

  The sun crested the coast range behind us, but I suddenly felt a chill.

  “Won’t giving Dark-Net intel point right bac
k to you?”

  “The Dark-Net isn’t a super-villain group.”

  “How do you know that?” I demanded. Annoying how sure he was of himself. “Why would the Hero Council let it operate if they knew about it?”

  He grinned. “Because the Hero Council doesn’t know about the Dark-Net. Support does.”

  I stopped, crossed my arms. “Then this makes even less sense. Then why not shut it down?”

  “That’s above my pay grade.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Seriously?”

  He shrugged. “It’s monitored, somehow, at a distance.”

  “You don’t know?”

  His eyes took a faraway look. “I’m not actually supposed to know about it.”

  “But you do,” I said in a low voice.

  He nodded. “Winterfield told me.”

  “Why would he?”

  “He said he wanted me well-informed.”

  “But why is the Dark-Net classified code ultra-violet or whatever?” I asked.

  “Honestly,” he said, “I don’t know.”

  The world was even crazier than I had thought.

  We stopped at a little greasy spoon on the road into Astoria. “Fresh Start,” it was called. We took a booth in the back. I had pancakes, eggs, a couple of pots of strong coffee and a cinnamon roll the size of my head. The locals ignored us. I shoveled food in.

  Alex raised an eyebrow, but I ignored him.

  An hour later we had reached the river again, near its mouth.

  A tall bridge spanned the mouth of the Columbia.

  Wharfs clustered along the river.

  We stopped across from a pier with an old boarded-up wooden building that had “Cannery” in giant faded letters on the landward facing side.

  Sea gulls glided past us.

  “Here?” I looked at Alex.

  He nodded and led me toward the boarded-up cannery.

  The place stank of brine and rotting wood.

  Seaweed floated in the water below the cannery. It whistled faintly in my head, the whistles becoming a babbling song when I stretched my senses into it.

  There was something else, a hard surface, hidden beneath the water. I sensed it through the kelp below that brushed up against it.

  “What is that?” I asked in a whisper.

  “You must have found the node,” Alex said.

  I shivered. That wasn’t what I expected to find.

  A couple of grubby-looking guys appeared out of a little shack near the boarded-up cannery. Both wore hooded sweatshirts, old beat-up jeans, and work boots.

  “Friends of yours?” I asked Alex. “They have the same fashion sense.”

  “Ha,” he shot back in a low voice. “Just looking the part. Like me.”

  Mutt and Jeff meandered toward us, faces hidden inside their hoods, weaving like they were drunk on their asses from too much Night Train. I wrinkled my nose when they got closer. They definitely smelled like they’d been riding the train.

  “Whatcha doing?” The one on the left mumbled. He sure sounded wasted. “Th-is is our place. Go find another.”

  “The gulls said we could stay,” Alex said, suddenly back to being Grunge Dude. “My girl and me want a trip.”

  The Hooded Twins stared through us, like street versions of monks in those damn hoods of theirs.

  I wrinkled my nose. They still stank.

  “What sort of trip?’

  Alex stopped fidgeting. He looked at the two thoughtfully for a moment.

  We hadn’t talked about having to use pass phrases or whatever. Shit. I swallowed.

  “The kind that needs a secret way,” Alex said at last.

  The two stared at him, and he stared back.

  The two both stood taller, backs straight. “You want to walk the secret way?” The one on the right asked.

  Alex nodded. “We do.”

  The right-hand dude nodded. “Better come inside then,” he said. He and his pal turned and trooped across the deserted street toward the deserted cannery.

  I let out the breath I’d been holding, and glanced at Alex.

  “How did you know what to ask?”

  He shrugged. “No idea. I improvised.”

  “You improvised right then,” I said.

  He flashed me a grin. The pier creaked beneath our feet, and swayed in the ocean swell. That was not a good sign.

  “Miracle this place doesn’t come crashing down,” I muttered.

  One of the hooded sweatshirt duo stepped up to the wall, put a finger against the wood, and a door appeared.

  I just managed not to shout when that happened. The door was an oval. It reminded me vaguely of the weird portals in Emerald Green, only this one looked like it was made from the same weather-beaten wood as the rest of the Cannery building.

  My skin tingled faintly.

  I peered around but we were the only people there. One of the guys went inside, while the other slouched by the wall and motioned for us to follow his buddy.

  Inside there was a quiet hum and my skin still tingled. It wasn’t the sharp prickle of another Empowered nearby, but it felt similar, only weaker.

  The second dude entered, and the door thing sealed behind him, becoming a wall again.

  The air no longer had that briny stink. It was fresh, like air just after a rainstorm.

  This place had the feel of a Support facility or Emerald Green, minus the mutant hell plants and hissing sounds in my head, but there was the same electric energy in the air, only much more powerful.

  The door behind us vanished. Light came from ceiling panels, like the golden glow of an early autumn twilight.

  The room was empty except for a hatch in the center of the floor. I caught Alex’s eye, raised an eyebrow.

  He shrugged, another I don’t know.

  No surprise there. To be fair, apparently he only knew the location of some of the Dark-Net “nodes.” And that only because Winterfield had told him.

  There had been nothing but the ocean below the closed cannery.

  The two men stood in front of us. They pulled back their hoods. One man was black, the other white. Couldn’t tell their ages, older than me, but not ancient. And there wasn’t a single hair on their heads.

  “Where are you going?” The black man asked.

  I glanced at Alex, who shrugged again. He wasn’t any help.

  “Persia,” I mumbled.

  No reaction.

  “The Great Persian Empire?” I asked after a moment. I only knew the name, that it ran that part of the world, and that it was supposedly an ally of the United States, a member of the U.N. in good standing, blah blah blah.

  “That will cost you extra.” Easy, no threat, just a matter-of-fact statement.

  I blinked. “You don’t even know what we have to trade.”

  The white guy answered. “We have a very good idea, since your friend is a Support agent.”

  I froze. The two looked at us.

  “Is that going to be a problem?” I asked.

  They stared at me. No, they didn’t stare. They regarded me. That’s how Ruth or Winterfield might have put it.

  This went on for like five minutes. I started fidgeting, and glancing at Alex, who flashed me a “I don’t know either” sympathetic expression.

  Finally, the two guardians or whatever they were looked at each other, nodded. “You will need to pass a test in order to make the journey on the secret way.” They answered like they were one person, at the same time, not missing a beat.

  Something about the way they talked, it didn’t seem human, not at all. There was no emotion in their tone. It wasn’t cold, it wasn’t warm, it sounded other. That was the only way I could put it.

  “A test?” Alex asked.

  They nodded, still watching me. “Yes, you will need to pass a test. But first, please wait while we begin negotiations with your companion.

  The two guardians turned to Alex.

  “We require information.”

  Alex hesitated.
>
  “If there is no information, we will not be able to test your companion, and she will be sent away.”

  “What about me?” Alex said.

  “You will face the same fate as others from your organization who tried to penetrate the secret ways.”

  I shivered. That was a threat. I started to extend my power.

  Alex shook his head. “I’ll answer your questions if I can.”

  This was crazy. “We should go.”

  The two continued to speak in stereo. “He cannot. He has entered the secret way. He must give us what we seek.”

  Alex smiled. “I’m fine, Mat.”

  He was far calmer than me.

  This was insane. What if he couldn’t answer their questions? What then? I turned away, crossed my arms. They began by asking Alex simple questions. Dates. Times. Places. My mind wandered and my feet followed.

  The air inside the cannery building was fresh smelling, not stinking. The salt air tang made me feel more alive. I went up to the nearest wall while the others went on with their back-and-forth. The wall looked like metal, but when I tapped it didn’t ring, it thudded, more like wood.

  A moment later it whispered, like it was plant life.

  I jumped back. The room was alive.

  “What is RAMPART?” One of the Dark-Net dudes asked Alex.

  What a strange question, I half-thought, but I was only half-paying attention.

  I took a deep breath, just like I always did when I got too stressed, but it didn’t help. I just felt more charged up.

  The walls’ whispers almost sounded like song.

  “I don’t know.” Alex said.

  “You have never heard of it?”

  “No.”

  I dimly heard more questions about RAMPART.

  “Perhaps your companion has heard of it.” The two Dark-Net dudes were back in stereo mode. Not only that, but they actually sounded annoyed.

  That got me to focus.

  “What?’ I turned around. The air was thick and sweet-tasting.

  “Have you heard of RAMPART? Its guardians?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Neither do we. Yet it seems of great importance.”

  The three of them began to blur.

  It felt like I was inside a huge oak tree, sap rushing through me, drowning me. My vision grew sharper, way beyond what I could normally see. The shining walls, I saw tendrils, like roots, running through them, thousands and thousands of them. Maybe million.