Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set

by Harmon Cooper

  B.J.

  If those were my initials, I’d have them monogrammed on the cuff too.

  “I’m glad you enjoyed the breathing exercise,” I said as she cycled through some of her avatars. “I think it’s called pranayama, but it could also be savasana. One of those is corpse pose, but I can’t remember which one.”

  “Who would you like me to go as?”

  Grace morphed into Cammy again, and I felt something twitch in my pants.

  “You really like these things, don’t you?” she ran her hands along the contours of her chiseled body. How Cammy fought in a green, one-piece bathing suit that ended in a thong was beyond me.

  “What things?”

  “Superheroes and Street Fighters and whatever else is in your mind. There’s a lot of weird anime stuff I haven’t even tapped into yet. We should watch some of this anime together.”

  “Um, yeah, about that,” I said as she sat down on the couch. She morphed into her geisha form, this time in a light blue kimono with cherry blossom decals all over it. “You sure like that one, don’t you?”

  “It’s this or your mom,” she joked. “Besides, this was one of the first forms I took when I met you. Remember?”

  “The first one you took when you met me was me.”

  Her face filled with excitement. “Do you want to go with twins?”

  “Why don’t you surprise me, show me a form you haven’t taken in a while.”

  Grace’s brows furrowed as she thought this over. “A form I haven’t taken in a while.”

  “Don’t think so hard about it,” I laughed. “Fine. Just go with your brunette.”

  She morphed into her brunette form and stood, turning to show me her derrière. “Are the jeans tight enough?” she asked, looking at me over her shoulder.

  “I believe they are.” I patted her on the ass.

  Streaks of blonde appeared in her hair and her complexion darkened by a few shades. For a top, she chose a loose T-shirt with a tree on the back. She tucked the front of the shirt inside her jeans, allowing the back of it to flow over her behind. On her feet were boots that reminded me of UGGs but a little bit higher up the leg, covering her shanks. “How’s this?”

  “Great,” I said.

  She turned to me. I placed my hands around her waist and looked up at her.

  “What?”

  “What do you really look like?” I asked suddenly, a question that had always bothered me.

  “Like this,” she said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Dorian teleported behind the couch and said, “Boo!”

  “Are you still drunk?” Grace asked her.

  “Not really.”

  The punk rock teleporter had changed into a leather jacket and tight black jeans with holes on the thighs and knees. She also wore her red combat boots. “Is everyone ready?” she called upstairs.

  Michelle burst past her, her hair now in a ponytail, the right side of her head defined by the pink streak in her dark locks. “I’m ready!”

  Next up was Fiona and Ingrid, both of whom had actually put on a little makeup, which I assumed they’d found in the master bathroom.

  “Ah, I see,” I said when Stella came down, also wearing makeup. Her hair was still braided, and she wore a one-piece getup that nicely accented her features.

  Last but not least was Veronique, who wore yet another outfit that Dorian had picked out. It was a short black dress with a frilly white collar, completely at odds with her normal style, yet it worked somehow. She also had a choker on with a little heart as its centerpiece, which seemed really out of place on her.

  Like she was leading the main prayer at a polygamist cult, Dorian dropped her head and lifted her arms wide. All of us gathered around – Praise be! Praise be! – so we could touch her in some way. I had already shown her the location, and I could tell she was concentrating on it. The thing was, we didn’t want to just appear in the middle of a shopping complex, so we had to choose a spot in the small meadow beside the parking lot.

  If someone saw us, well, Grace would handle that.

  As Dorian bowed her head, and I offered a final whispered, “Praise be,” just for fun, our forms disappeared.

  We reformed seconds later in the same position we’d left in.

  It was still a nice day outside. Damn, is Colorado beautiful in the spring.

  My next action was to take charge, to become the leader I was destined to be!

  Or something like that.

  “Let’s go, that’s the P.F. Panda’s right there,” I said, waving the CBGs and Super Teens in the right direction.

  “Food!” Michelle shouted.

  I’d forgotten to make a reservation, which meant we had to sit for thirty minutes waiting for a private room. It’s no surprise that a guy surrounded by beautiful women and teenage girls will illicit funny looks and raise suspicion, and I was about to ask Grace to wipe the fuck out of everyone’s mind when the waiter came and brought us to our private room.

  While this lunch was meant to be a reward and a great time just to relax a little, I needed to go over tonight’s plans with the CBGs.

  To facilitate this, we sat at one side of the table, the Super Teens at the other. I ordered a couple of the party sets, and the waiter explained it would be a little bit longer to get them out because we hadn’t made a reservation.

  “That’s fine,” I told the tall, gangly man. When he was gone, I dove right into the ‘adult’ talk. “The facility isn’t very large,” I reminded the Cherry Blossom Girls, “and none of it is underground.”

  “The guy at the gas station told us that,” Grace said.

  “I’d say it’s about three times the size of this restaurant.”

  Our beverages came. The teens had gone for sugary sodas; Dorian, Grace, Stella, and the Writer at Large with virgin daiquiris; Veronique with two cups of coffee. Yes, two.

  After a sip from my daiquiri, I said, “I thought it’d be hidden on GoogleFace or something, but it’s there, and cars were also parked in the picture. So I was able to, you know, get a little scale.”

  “Why don’t we just appear outside and blow it up?” Stella asked around the straw in her mouth.

  “That’s the thing about this facility, it’s heavily guarded outside; plus, it has blast barriers.” I turned my phone around to show her the pictures I’d copied from the internet. “The walls are pretty high too, from what I can tell. No, we’re going to have to get inside to blow it up. And we still have the bottles full of gasoline that we can use.”

  “You said we should work together. What if Veronique and Dorian …” Grace’s eyes flared white and I suddenly understood what she was suggesting.

  “That could totally work!” I said after her idea played through my mind. “Did everyone get that?”

  It only took a second for everyone to nod.

  “Good, let’s plan for that then.” I took several more sips of my drink, instantly regretting it when a brain freeze came on.

  Once it had passed and I was done wincing, I continued. “Mother has already said there are more supers coming, as in new babies to be born; future supers, then. She told me that back in Austin. Plus, she’s pregnant, something we really can’t do anything about at the moment. But yeah, that’s definitely a Super. I mean, I’m no OB/GYN, but I’d put good, stolen money on her inbred-ass baby being a Super.”

  I then realized that we’d never talked about the CBGs’ menstruation cycles. Not that we needed to (or did we?), but one of them should be having her period at some point.

  Your mind is drifting, Writer Gideon.

  Sorry. You four aren’t sterile, are you? Weird question to think to someone. No need to answer, but if you need any lady products, please, let me know or get them yourselves or whatever.

  Grace smirked at me. Your mind is wild.

  I cleared my throat, trying to hop back on my train of thought. “So even if we were able to destroy all the facilities, if we miss the embryo storage th
ey’ll still be able to create more like her.”

  “And we’ll have to kill Mother as well,” Veronique added.

  “Yes, but you three already knew that,” I finally said.

  As we continued to discuss our options, a few appetizers started coming out. The Super Teens loved them – especially Michelle, who practically shoveled food into her mouth. I could tell by the color of Veronique’s face that she was hungry. We would need her power tonight, but finding someone for her to drain …

  Maybe it would be best to do what we’d done before: have Dorian teleport away, bring someone back and then return them where she’d picked them up.

  I hated doing that, though.

  I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to just be going about your business and suddenly a super-hot punk rock girl appears, touches you, and you reappear with her in someone’s freaking living room, where there’s a blond-haired hotbody coming at you with glowing red hands. You then feel energy leaving your body as you struggle, and about a minute later, you’re back to where you were originally standing, your skin purple, feeling as if you’d just run a marathon through a vacuum.

  We really needed another system.

  Would there ever be a moment of atonement for my manic, happy-go-lucky ass? That remained to be seen, and rather than feel guilty, I decided to focus on something else.

  I heard chattering in the background, a soft whispering all around me.

  Grace’s abilities were still with me; I was picking up on other people’s thoughts. I’d grown used to being in the – for lack of a better way to say it – bosom of her power.

  But being in public … this was something else entirely.

  Just ignore them, Grace thought to me. The voices are always there, but you have the power to ignore them if you’d like.

  How long are you going to let me have some of your power? I thought back. I don’t want it to limit what you’re able to do.

  I think it would be helpful for you to hold onto it for a little while. I’m not giving you very much, but you’re definitely able to do some things, as you’ve already seen.

  Percentage-wise, how much are you giving me? I thought to her as Stella listened to Veronique and Dorian discuss one of the training exercises they’d taken part in at the Rose-Lyle facility.

  Under twenty percent. Back in Santa Fe, when I was in that telekinetic coma, I was giving you thirty percent. So a little less, now.

  But you may need these powers, Grace.

  Gideon, my role in this group is more for support than for combat. I’m similar to Michelle in that regard, and I’m fine with that.

  I looked over at the young Super, who was scooping a spicy peanut appetizer into her mouth, a genuine smile on her face.

  You have three incredibly powerful combatants, but they will need support from both of us. If I want to take my power back, I simply will. We have bonded, and in a way, we are now part of each other. So don’t worry about it.

  A dish with diced chicken, cashews, purple onions, and red peppers came and I dug in. It was delicious; crunchy and sour, sweet in all the right places, and spicy. Fried dumplings arrived soon after, and I taught them how to use chopsticks.

  “Why would I use a chopstick when I could just use my hand or a fork?” Ingrid asked.

  “That’s not a bad question,” I said as I demonstrated for Dorian how to hold the chopsticks. We locked eyes for a second, her bangs lifting as she grinned.

  Dorian was great.

  Maybe it was our shared tattoos or the experiences we had, or maybe it was our solo time back in Austin or our quick trip to the East Coast. No telling, but I felt a closeness to her, a closeness that was different from what I felt with the others.

  “You know, chopsticks would make pretty good projectiles,” she suggested.

  I laughed. “You would be thinking that, wouldn’t you?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Goodbye Future Super Babies

  Our bodies took shape behind the gas station twenty miles or so from the embryo storage facility in Nevada. We were near the dumpsters, and it smelled like microwaved dirty diapers.

  It was evening now, and the Super Teens were safe back in Colorado. After P.F. Panda’s, we’d trained some more, and then everyone spent the remainder of the afternoon resting. Dorian had also brought a few unsuspecting victims for Veronique to feed upon. Gruesome, but now we were charged up and ready to do this.

  Our attack would be easier with a vehicle, so we made our way around the gas station to the pumps, waiting for someone to pull up.

  Just to be safe, Grace went inside and took over the mind of the attendant, making sure he wouldn’t remember anything.

  Eventually, a vehicle big enough for the five of us pulled up to the gas station. I’d never driven a Tesla before, so I was pumped to get behind the wheel of the electric bad boy.

  The owner, a lady just stopping in to get a bottle of water, soon found herself seated in the rest area, reading a stack of magazines and forgetting she ever owned a Tesla. I glanced back at her one more time as I opened the driver’s side door, wondering how long she would be looking at those magazines.

  Could be several hours.

  The feel of the car was great, the dash something out of the future. Grace sat in front, as always, but with a purpose this time, and the other three were smushed together in the back.

  One glance in the rearview mirror and I saw all of them in their body armor. Well, all but Stella. Stella was in the black mil-spec suit she’d been wearing when we first met her. It had some type of armoring; it would do.

  And all of us, aside from Stella, wore ballistic helmets.

  I got a glimpse of myself as I looked back at the three. Who would have thought this was what you’d become, I thought as I traced my eyes over the scar on my face.

  “Remember, we have to get inside the facility first,” I said this mainly to boost my confidence, to assure myself we were supposed to be doing this. They knew the plan; they’d done a test run in the back yard just a few hours ago.

  It would work.

  “Don’t worry,” Grace said, sensing my apprehension.

  “Yeah, we’ll be out of there as soon as we release the detonation,” said Stella.

  “This is going to work, and we’re not going to run into any issues here,” Dorian added. “It won’t be like the other times; we’ve gone over the plan, in and out.”

  “Never say never,” I reminded them. “You have to be ready for combat if that’s what it comes down to. I’ll do my best to provide support as well.”

  “Combat is kind of our specialty,” Veronique said. One glance at her in the rearview mirror and I saw those dark eyes staring right back at me, lit by the lights of a passing vehicle. Even now, after all that had happened between us, she still made me feel uncomfortable at times.

  Rather than continue my worrying aloud, I focused on the road as we drew closer to our destiny. Everything was fine until we came to a series of cameras that stretched over the highway, their lights flashing as we sped by.

  “Shit,” I said, instantly increasing my speed.

  “What is it?” Stella asked.

  “Cameras are everywhere along the highway,” Grace said.

  Talk about the understatement of the year. After we passed the first barrier of cameras it seemed that every half mile there were more scattered along the highway – 1984 on fleek, big brother police state shit.

  “They may know we’re coming,” Grace said, voicing my thoughts.

  “But we can’t change the plan,” I told them. “We have to destroy the facility. We didn’t destroy the facility in New Mexico, which we’re going to have to go back to do, so let’s at least get the embryo storage place out of the way.”

  I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and stomped on the gas pedal.

  The night blazed past, stars and flying comets, the lights around us blurs on the periphery. I was going a hundred and ten now, pretty damn fast, and the Tesla was resp
onding relatively well.

  The urge for speed was driven by a feeling I had: this would be a terrible fight if we didn’t hurry up and destroy the place.

  The slower we drive, the more time they have to come after us.

  So it was with utter apprehension that we saw the exit to the facility, took the access road, and sprang into action.

  A helicopter spotlight beamed down onto the car as we sped toward the facility. My only response was to press on the gas pedal even harder.

  “Faster!” Veronique shouted.

  “I’m going as fast as I can!”

  As we’d planned, Stella used her powers to create a vector shield around the vehicle.

  Veronique’s window came down, her eyes trained on the chopper. It was directly over us now, and the moment it veered to the right or left, she’d be able to do something about it.

  This was going to be hard, especially once we saw an automated wall start to close over the entrance.

  “I can teleport up there and back,” Dorian said. She was squeezed between Stella and Veronique.

  “Too risky,” Grace called over her shoulder. “We’re in a moving vehicle. The helicopter is also moving.”

  “I can do it. I’ve done that type of thing before!”

  I recalled the time when Dorian appeared in our vehicle. Then again, we needed Dorian to get us out of there, which meant we needed her with us at all times.

  “Overruled, Dorian, we need you here!” I said, my eyes set on the impending doom ahead.

  “Hold onto me,” Veronique told Dorian as she started pushing herself out of the window.

  “There’s no time!” I shouted.

  But they were fast, and Veronique was back in the vehicle fifteen seconds later, an explosion sending a burst of red and orange across all the mirrors visible from the driver’s seat.

  With the helicopter down, time stood still as we neared the protective barrier, Stella’s abilities the only thing protecting us from instant death.

  I shut my eyes, gunned it, and clenched my sphincter.

  This was it, or it wasn’t.

  There was no other option.