Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set

by Harmon Cooper

  It’s time to put an end to all this, I thought as my nerves settled, and I was finally able to breathe. I figured the pileup we caused behind us would make the rest of our trip easier.

  If only things were that simple.

  Chapter Nineteen: Angel

  I knew there would be other superpowered individuals, but I didn’t think they’d be coming after us so soon. I didn’t think they would be able to fly, or have superhuman strength, or the ability to heal.

  I happened to be looking in the rear-view mirror when it happened.

  Something that resembled a comet crashed down onto the trailer of the eighteen-wheeler, separating it from our cabin, and sending the top portion of the trailer up and over.

  The cabin tipped and was dragged to the right, where it quickly flipped onto its side and slid along the highway, as the four of us fell against each other.

  Worse yet, it had fallen over onto my side of the cab, and Grace, Veronique, and the driver were all pressed against me.

  It settled. I barely had time to suck in a breath when a gloved hand punched through the window and grabbed the hypnotized driver by his neckbeard. The sudden punch also sent a thick piece of glass skittering across the cabin directly into my face.

  “Fuck!” The shard connected just an inch or so away from my eye, the eye itself protected by the frame of my glasses.

  “Gideon!” Veronique said, trying to squirm around to check on me. All three of us were pressed together, Veronique on top, Grace in the middle, and me on the bottom.

  She actually cares? I would have been touched if not for the fact that the situation had taken a turn for the worse.

  “I’ll be fine.” I wiped my face on my arm. “What hit us? A comet? Whose hand was that?”

  The vehicle jittered as the gloved hand yanked the driver out of the shattered window, slicing his gut on the jagged glass as he was lugged through the opening.

  “It’s Angel,” Grace gulped, and with that, her eyes flashed white and she blew off the driver’s side door.

  It was like my writer buddy Luke had read ahead. Whatever was out there was our villain, and action was imminent. Hell, death was imminent too.

  Veronique pulled herself toward the open doorway, followed by Grace, followed by me with a bloodied face and my duffle bag over my shoulder.

  Looking back, I don’t know how I had the wherewithal to bring my bag.

  I wasn’t dumb enough not to write in the cloud, but I still needed my laptop with me to handle all the other publishing aspects.

  All of which was stupid to think about, especially as I took in the sight of a muscular man in a mil-spec body suit standing on top of a cratered car next to our overturned cab.

  Angel had long dark hair, the majority of which was covering his face.

  His features, from his beard stubble to his dark skin, gave him a Mediterranean male look. His black, armored bodysuit was similar to the one that Veronique still wore except his was more muscled and covered with flexible graphene plates.

  “What are his powers?” I asked, in awe of the man standing before us.

  Pieces of metal began to lift to the air and surround us as Veronique said, “His powers are strength, healing, and he can fly.”

  With the swipe of her hand, Veronique used her power to hurl the bits of metal at him.

  They hit Angel in the chest, sending him up and over the car. But I knew the victory was short-lived when he lifted into the air, his arms at his sides. He dipped his head toward us, a furious look on his face.

  Veronique stepped in front of us. “You two go, I will hold him off.”

  With everything that was happening all around me – from the chaos to the accident we’d just experienced – I hadn’t been able to connect an emotion to what was going on.

  Now I could.

  Veronique’s act of bravery snapped me out of my shock and stupor. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to help her, to be there for her.

  “We can’t leave her behind!” I told Grace. The mysterious woman who’d first shown up at my doorstep looked at me, utter fear on her face as she grabbed my wrist.

  “We have to,” she said, her voice quivering. “We can’t beat him here.”

  Veronique moved forward, a vortex of metal swirling over her head. “Go!” she shouted to us.

  “But we can’t!” I cried out, the slice on my cheek pulsing with my heartbeat. I wiped more blood from my face to my arm.

  “We’ll go after her before they can terminate her or anything else,” Grace said quietly. She took a deep breath and continued, “My abilities don’t fully work on Angel, but I was able to see that his intentions are not to kill her; he’s here to take her back to the facility.”

  “But –”

  Grace tightened her grip on my wrist. “Listen to what I say.”

  I would recognize later that this was just a formality; Grace didn’t have to say anything to take over my mind.

  But it was nice of her to at least be polite about it.

  If I’d had a bird’s-eye view of what followed, I would have seen my eyes flash white.

  I would have seen Grace leading me away as Veronique went to meet Angel. I would have seen my hypnotized ass dragging one of the drivers affected by the overturned eighteen-wheeler out of their car. I would have seen Grace getting in the passenger seat, me starting up the vehicle, and stepping on the gas pedal.

  I would have seen myself driving away, looking at Angel and Veronique clashing in the rearview mirror.

  We got all the way to New Haven before Grace let me have my mind back.

  Chapter Twenty: Stitched Up

  Without Veronique, I didn’t know how we would do all this. I was glad Grace had me park before she returned my ability to make rational decisions. She was smart enough not to give me my mind back on the highway, which would have proved disastrous.

  As soon as my mind was my own, I punched the steering wheel, not even caring that we’d made it to downtown New Haven. Oblivious to my surroundings, I cursed, shuddering when I thought about what we’d just been through, before finally turning to Grace.

  “We shouldn’t have left her,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “We can’t take on Angel that way,” she said calmly. “I’m not strong enough, not yet, even with the way you adjusted my abilities. I have learned so much being here in the real world with you.”

  The way she said ‘real world’ really dug into my core. I was finally starting to understand just how odd this all must be for her, to go from solitary confinement to a high-speed chase in under a week.

  At the same time, I still couldn’t forgive us for leaving Veronique behind.

  “You two should have worked together,” I told her. “You could have taken him together.”

  “I … I don’t know. It was so sudden.”

  “I wish I had one of your powers,” I mumbled as I watched a homeless man approach our stolen vehicle.

  She grimaced. “No, you don’t.”

  “I could have done something …”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  I thought of Angel again, his hair whipping in the wind, the sullen look on his face. A quote from East of Eden resonated at the back of my skull: “To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.”

  Boy if that didn’t fit …

  The homeless guy knocked on the window, asking for change. He had on an oversized trench coat and a dirty beanie. Since we needed to ditch the car anyway, and since there was a nice hotel nearby, I figured now was as good a time as any.

  “What happened to your face, man?” he asked as I stepped out of the car.

  “Grace?” I said as she got out on her side. She had taken the form of the kimonoed Asian woman from my wall.

  Her eyes flashed white and the homeless man took the keys from me. “Sure, man, I’ll drive this car to Hartford.”

  “Drive it to Vermont,” I said.

  “Great, Vermont,” was
his reply.

  He got in and drove off.

  “That was easy enough,” I said. I took a shirt from my duffle bag and dabbed at the blood on my face.

  “We need to do something about your face,” Grace said.

  She wasn’t lying. This cut was deeper than I thought, and portions of my beard were already covered in dried blood.

  “Let’s just get to the hotel, and hopefully no one really notices us.”

  “Will they have medical help at the hotel?”

  “That’s a good question.” I glanced around the area and realized we weren’t far from the Yale medical school. If there was a nurse or someone who could stitch up a wound, it’d be at Yale. I figured we could walk into the school and Grace could use her ability to find the right person to stitch me up.

  She wasn’t so sure, and I couldn’t blame her, considering I had a face that was bleeding out. But she trusted me, and I quickly led us in that direction, trying to cover my face and keep its view from incoming traffic.

  We approached the first building that looked most like a hospital and waltzed right in. The place smelled of antiseptics, and its color palate could have been described as ‘bland,’ but I’d never been happier in my life to see light turquoise, beige, and pistachio.

  Grace went to work.

  Like this was the latest primetime medical thriller, a team of nurses came at the call of the front desk woman. I’d never had a chance to adequately count how many people Grace could mind wash at once, but if the medical staff were any indication, it was at least ten.

  They put me on a stretcher and rolled me into an operating room. No paperwork was taken – also thanks to Grace – and it wasn’t long before a female doctor, a Muslim woman with caramel skin, dark eyes, and a purple hijab, came into the room and started stitching me up.

  Talk about cheap health care.

  “It’s going to leave a scar,” was the only thing the woman said to me. “I’m sorry there isn’t more I can do.”

  I shrugged her off. “Well, I shouldn’t have fallen down … those stairs. Nope, I shouldn’t have fallen down those stairs and landed on something sharp. I’ll be more careful next time.” Once she finished, she smiled at me and quickly left the room.

  “Your abilities are amazing,” I told Grace for what must have been the thousandth time as we exited the room and turned back to the main lobby.

  She only nodded at this.

  I found a bathroom and excused myself, eager to get a look at my face.

  Needless to report, Mrs. Caldwell’s little boy had finally grown up.

  My hair was disheveled, there was a gnarly scar on my face, and my beard was as unkempt as ever. I was ready for my mug shot, ready to become an extreme wrestler, and possibly join a biker gang.

  Keep dreaming, Writer Gideon.

  “You aren’t supposed to be in my mind,” I said and thought at the same time.

  Hurry.

  I knew I needed to change the look up a little more just to keep them guessing, so as we quickly walked back toward downtown New Haven, I stopped in at a barbershop – a black one, I was feeling tough! – and had my head shaved.

  I don’t know what they thought about the hipster looking dude with the gnarly scar on his face, but I did hear some guy mention I was the toughest looking white boy he’d seen all day.

  “It’s not too bad,” Grace said when we left the barbershop. “Can I touch it?”

  I stopped, and she rubbed my head for a moment.

  “No shifting in public,” I reminded her.

  I was hungry, and now that I looked like a badass, there was a lot to be done.

  Our top priority was infiltrating the Rose-Lyle facility and rescuing Veronique before they put her out of commission. The next step was to burn that place to the ground, but rescuing her was most important.

  Grace had assured me that this would take a little time, but I was ready to do it come tomorrow.

  There was also the fact that I needed to get the book out. The longer it stayed on my computer, not accessible by e-readers across the globe, the longer the secret remained behind closed doors.

  Part of me thought this feeling self-serving, selfish. The other part was hopeful it would do some good. To prove my intent, I would set the book at $0.99. The royalty I’d make from that would be a pittance, but the book would hopefully have more reach.

  But first, as with every good plan, came food. And we could do that at the hotel.

  We checked in at the Omni New Haven with ease. After placing an order that had ‘already been paid for,’ we took a top floor room overlooking Temple Street.

  I’d seen this building before, but never thought I’d be staying on the top floor, looking down at the rest of the city. It amazes me to this day the perspectives we gain on our cities, and how quickly they can be turned on their heads by seeing them from a different angle.

  As soon as we got in the room, which was a pretty large suite with a nice, comfy bed, I ran to the window to check out our view. I could see West Rock from here, as well as some of Yale’s Gothic spires.

  “Great view,” Grace said as she approached me.

  “It is.”

  She placed her hand on my shoulder. “You want to write.”

  “Are you telling me to write or reading my mind?”

  “You decide.”

  “I’ll write. I need to get this book out, so I can focus on getting Veronique.”

  I set up my laptop and began editing Mutants in the Making. No, I shouldn’t have been self-editing my own book, but timing was of the essence, and I had a pretty good AI editor on my laptop that helped out quite a bit.

  Luckily, a six-pack of beers came with our food.

  To make things simple, we decided on pizza, or as they call it in New Haven, apizza. Actually, no one I knew called it that, but at least thinking they called it that made me feel more local even though I was from Rhode Island.

  Needless to say, Grace loved the pizza, and I swear she ate six or seven slices.

  “When I eat pizza, it reminds me of you,” she said as she wolfed down another slice.

  Food coma commencing, Grace lay on the bed with a distended belly, and I got back to work.

  It was about five o’clock, and I knew I was racing against time. I wanted to go after Veronique tomorrow – tomorrow night to be exact – and I needed this book to be out before we did.

  Because I didn’t know if we’d be coming back or not.

  I formatted the text, made sure the headers looked right, and then I began the long, and tedious, process of using Excel and Paint to create shadow boxes for Grace and Veronique’s stats. It was a primitive way to do this; writers now are formatting their characters’ stats in a variety of ways, from gifs to advanced Photoshop.

  But I was going old school, and everyone who read this book would recognize that.

  Street cred, I didn’t have much of, but I wanted to have some with this book. Besides, it was going to be harder than hell to find readers interested in a creative nonfiction shifter sci-fi story for gamers.

  And all of the publishing and editing was a way for me to suppress just how fucked my day had been. I’d seen people die, I’d lost Veronique, and if I didn’t already have a target on my ass, I certainly did now.

  “Just get the book out,” I mumbled to myself as I took a sip of my beer.

  I brought up the EBAYmazon direct publishing page, uploaded the cover, uploaded the file, and began working on the product description. Damn did I hate writing product descriptions. That was one of the shitty things about being a self-published author; you had to do all that stuff yourself.

  I decided to keep it simple:

  A government conspiracy. Secret mutant soldiers. A true story.

  What if you were just lying down for bed when a naked woman showed up at your doorstep? What if she was a powerful psychic shifter? What if she had a terrible secret?

  Based on a true story, author Gideon Caldwell takes the reader on
a journey they won’t soon forget. Part one of Mutants in the Making is a living testament to a cover-up that will go on to change the world.

  Superheroes are real, and if we’re not careful, they’ll soon become our enemies.

  “What do you think about this?” I asked Grace. I read her the description. “Well?”

  “We aren’t going to become your enemies,” she said after I finished. The lights of the television flashed across her face.

  I didn’t have to check on her to know that she’d been practicing faces of the people she was watching, mimicking their movements and body posture, then turning back to her base form.

  “I know you’re not going to become our enemies, but you could. And if you and Veronique truly are super soldiers, then future versions of you could become someone else’s enemy. Could be North Korea, or maybe a Middle Eastern country, but still. And Angel? Tell me he’s not our enemy.”

  She shrugged. “I guess that makes sense to me. Can I have a beer?”

  Giving a shapeshifter a beer …?

  “Sure, help yourself.” I returned to my document.

  There was one thing I was forgetting to do.

  I pulled the document back up and added a disclaimer to the front and the back. I knew I was going to get some messages from tin hat weirdos, but that came with the territory, and it was something I was willing to sift through.

  If you, or anyone you know, has any information about these government experiments, whether it be in America, or another country, please contact Gideon Caldwell at writer_gideon_caldwell@gfacemail.com

  With that, I added the disclaimer to the front and back of the book, reuploaded the file, set the price to $0.99 and pressed publish.

  My next step was to research as much as I could about the Rose-Lyle Facility. I needed Grace’s help for this, so I pulled up a map of Yale campus and had her point out where she’d escaped from.

  From there I checked some maps I found on GoogleFace.

  Since I had no idea what I was doing, part of my work involved sipping a beer and thinking of the best way to use Grace’s abilities to their fullest extent.