Is there a confidence machine? she thought to me. Then, You’ve got this, Writer Gideon.
After a few deep breaths, I knocked. The door opened, and the smell of marijuana wafted out. A guy with dreads coughed, smiled at me, and said, “What’s up? How can I help you, brother?”
“I need your laptop, and I want you to think you lost it and go get a new one. In fact … shit, nope, I left the money upstairs. I can’t pay you for it now, but I’ll send someone down with money later. Or I’ll have some money slipped under your door or something.”
“My laptop?” he asked, his eyes glazed over. He had a pockmarked face and a scraggly beard. A tie-dyed Bob Marley shirt and cargo shorts completed his getup.
“Yep, I need it.”
He took a step back, sized me up, and shrugged. “Sure, man, if that’s what you want.”
“Who is it?” a female voice asked from inside the room.
“This dude wants my laptop.”
“What!”
“Yeah, so I’m giving it to him.”
I heard the patter of feet as the woman came to the door. She looked pretty much like him, only a female version. Also, she had beads in her dreads.
“Sure.” She locked eyes with me. “He’ll give you his laptop.”
“And both of you will think he lost it. Because he was stoned, and none of that will make sense anyway in the morning, but he lost it because he was stoned, and he smokes too much weed.”
“I smoke too much weed too,” she admitted.
“Well, then you both do, but that’s okay. It’s legal in this state. Hell, it’s almost legal in all the states, but that’s beside the point. It does make you very forgetful, but personally, I’d prefer a stoner to a drunk anyway. Don’t worry about the laptop you lost. I’ll have some money sent down if I remember. If I don’t … well, sorry, it’s been a very stressful day.”
Concern swept across her face. “It’s been stressful for you? I’m sorry to hear that, do you want some weed?”
I glanced over my shoulder at Grace. “As interesting as that would be, I don’t know if weed is the answer tonight.”
“They got some dank bud here in Pueblo,” the guy said as he handed me his laptop. It was small and sleek, with a Grateful Dead bear over the AppleSoft icon.
It would do.
“Charging cable too,” I told him.
Stoner Joe returned a few seconds later with the charger. “You need anything else? We just smoked half a joint, so if you want to partake, it’s all yours, brother.”
“We’re good,” I said and turned back to Grace.
Chapter Thirty-One: Back and Forth
I had no idea what I was looking for as I clicked through Ken’s folders on the stoner’s laptop. I checked the facilities and all the info I could find about them, played more videos of supers doing all sorts of crazy things, cycled back through, checked things again, tried to see if there was a hidden folder.
All to no avail.
I just wanted to get this situation solved, to find out as much as I could about where they’d possibly taken them, but I knew there was nothing these folders would show me. That didn’t stop me from going through them anyway.
Grace was next to me, already asleep, Dorian and Veronique still awake, their eyes glued to the television screen. I also had the strange sense that we were missing something, and I couldn’t tell if it was just me being paranoid or that I had possibly intuited it through Grace’s ability.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling.
I had the notion to check the mansion we’d destroyed, and I wished we had stayed around longer.
I closed the laptop, even tried to sleep for a little bit, but I still kept coming back to it.
I needed to check.
“Grace,” I said, squeezing her shoulder.
“Sleep, Writer Gideon,” was her whispered response.
“No, I need to take care of this.”
I carefully got out of the bed and moved over to Veronique and Dorian.
“Come to join us?” Veronique said in her stilted way. She didn’t quite have the flirting thing down, but she definitely got an A for effort, especially after how she’d fucked me last night.
Or fucked Grace? I hadn’t even begun to unpack that experience.
“As fun as that would be,” I finally told her, “I actually came to ask for some of Dorian’s assistance.”
“There’s room right here,” Dorian said, scooting over and patting the place between them.
“Why are you two fucking with me? I’m being serious.”
“Okay, what do you need?” she asked.
“We need to go back to the mansion in Colorado Springs. I just feel like we might have missed something, and I’m hoping I can sort it out.”
“Missed something? What could you have missed?”
“It’s just a feeling I have,” I told Dorian. “We don’t have to go for long, but I’d like to scratch this itch.”
Veronique nodded toward Stella. “I need to stay here in case she wakes up.”
“That’s fine; I don’t think this will take many of us. Just two, and we won’t be gone long.”
Dorian stood and stretched her hands over her head, yawning. We didn’t have a change of clothes, unfortunately, so she still wore what she’d been wearing under her bulletproof vest earlier. Well, no pants this time, just panties, which she remedied by slipping into a pair of black jeans.
“Are you ready?” she asked as I finished lacing up my shoes.
“We’ll make this quick,” I told Veronique.
“I’m sure you will, and good luck.”
Dorian stuffed her paintbrush in her pocket, just in case we encountered anything, and we teleported to the mansion. We popped up a block or so away, mostly because she figured there would still be investigators on the scene. “How do you want to do this?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“There are people over there.”
“Yeah, of course. Let’s just keep a low profile and teleport away if anyone sees us.”
Dorian’s hand in mine, we crept along the shadows on the far side of the street. I didn’t know what we were looking for, but I figured if we got close enough, maybe something would present itself.
We crouched behind an SUV parked on the street, and I moved to its farthest edge, peeking around at the investigation taking place. They already had the police tape up, and there were three vehicles out front, one of them an unmarked black sedan.
“There’s no way we’re getting over there,” I said.
“I could have told you that.”
“We’re going to have to try something else.”
I knew that Grace could touch things and intuit what had happened through her Psychometry ability. I wondered then if she could focus on something and perhaps see a ghost outline of interactions. She’d never verbalized this to me before, but it seemed like something a psychic would be able to do if they concentrated hard enough.
So I gave it a shot.
Looking at the collapsed home, I closed my eyes and began to extend my psyche toward the scene.
After trying this for a good two or three minutes, I realized it wasn’t going to work. So I opened my eyes, figuring that maybe with my eyes open I would actually see something. And to my surprise …
It was just a glimpse, but I saw a flashback play out in real time over my pane of vision.
It was incredibly short-lived; hell, if I hadn’t been concentrating so hard, I would have thought it was a hallucination or a vivid memory.
I tried again, focusing all my willpower on reliving what had happened there. The glimpse never came back to me, but I was sure of what I had seen.
I turned to Dorian. “Take me to the pizza place from the other night.”
She dropped her hand on my shoulder and we disappeared, our forms reappearing at the pizza joint.
Nothing was out of the ordinary, and the parking lot was empty aside from a delivery vehicle. I
focused my psyche, closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I again experienced an hallucinatory image.
“This way,” I said, motioning for her to follow me around to the back of the restaurant.
It only took us a moment to find Michelle, who sat with her back against the wall shivering, her arms wrapped around her knees. She was also completely nude, or rather, her clothing had been shredded and she was trying to use what swaths of it she could find to cover herself for warmth. She’d been in her sleep clothes when she took off; the friction from moving so fast had torn most of the material.
“Michelle!” Dorian said, running over to her.
I joined them, stripping off my shirt to give the young Super something to wear.
Michelle started sobbing. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I ran, I didn’t know what to do.”
“What happened?” I almost shouted at her, then forced myself to take a deep breath. “What happened? Tell us every detail.”
“Let’s get back to the hotel, and then we’ll ask her,” Dorian suggested. “We’ll need to order some food too.”
“I’m so hungry!”
“Just relax,” Dorian told the girl, pulling her in for a hug. She reached her hand out to me, and before I could notice just how cold it was outside now that I had my shirt off, we reappeared at the Marriot in Pueblo.
“Food,” Dorian reminded me.
“Crap, um, yeah. Sure.” I hurried to the hotel phone. I knew the food service grub would be shit, but it would have to do.
“Michelle?” Veronique asked, surprise on her face.
Grace woke and turned to the girl. “You’re okay!”
“Ohhh, it was terrible.” Michelle pulled at the bottom of my shirt so it would cover her naked legs better. She went from confused to even more distraught when she saw Stella passed out in the chair. “Is she okay?”
“Yeah, she’s just resting,” I said, dialing the front desk. “And she’s going to be pissed when she wakes up, but she’ll be happy to see you.”
The front desk phone continued to ring but eventually, the guy from earlier picked up. I told him we were hungry and to send whatever they had, which happened to be wrapped subs.
“That’s fine,” I said and hung up. “Food will be here in a moment. Now, what happened?”
“Ah, I see,” Grace said, her eyes indicating she’d just downloaded all the info she needed from Michelle.
“Tell us all,” I said. “I want to hear it in person.”
Michelle sat on the edge of the bed and sobbed. I wanted to reach out and comfort her, but Dorian beat me to it. The teleporter wrapped a bath towel around Michelle’s shoulders and made sure she was cozy. At least she’d stopped shivering.
“It was because of the backpack.”
“Backpack?” I asked.
The CBGs and I exchanged glances.
“The backpack was floating, and it told us to call a number.”
“And why did you?” asked Veronique.
“The backpack said so. Said it was Grace. Said to call Gideon, that you had some issues. A teleportation issue. We thought it was Grace using a man’s voice.”
“And you didn’t open the backpack?” I asked.
“No, it said not to. We were in the garage looking for things to play with and the backpack just floated up out of the blue.”
How could we be so stupid not to check on Angel before we left? Shit! I thought-screamed.
It’s okay, let Michelle finish.
“So we called the number the backpack told us using the house phone, and it wasn’t you.” Michelle wiped her nose with her forearm. “It wasn’t anyone.”
“And that’s how they located you,” I said, fury roiling through me.
We should have blown Angel up when we had the chance. He wouldn’t have been able to heal from that.
Maybe, Grace thought back to me.
“They came an hour later.”
“And the backpack?” I asked. “What happened to it?”
“Funny thing. As soon as we made the call, it slammed into the garage door. Fiona figured it wanted to go outside, so she opened the door and it flew away.”
Veronique was still half-listening to the television. I didn’t get a sense of cold-heartedness from her; rather, it was a sense of ‘knowing what happened isn’t going to change anything,’ and ‘we must act.’
I pretty much felt the same way, but the clarity helped, and what Michelle told us next only added a sense of urgency to our already tense situation.
“Then they came. The ones from the New Mexico facility. They appeared out of nowhere. I think it was like Dorian. Just appeared. A helicopter too.”
“So it was Augustin, Victoria, and Chloe,” I said under my breath. And another teleporter? I’ll need to look into that.
“Did they fight you?” Dorian asked.
“No fighting. Ingrid and Fiona were knocked out. Completely. It was like a screeching sound that turned into a wave of light. But the light didn’t do anything like knock down walls. It just took them both off their feet and then the guy, he froze them.”
“Froze them?” Dorian asked.
“Augustin,” I whispered.
“He made them cold, so they couldn’t use their powers. It was really bad for Fiona. I think she died. She wasn’t breathing.”
“You don’t know she died,” Grace assured her. “Let’s not assume that.”
I shook my head, my mind filled with anger, fear, and pity for the two supers. “And you watched all this take place?”
“I kept running back and forth, passing through the walls. They weren’t so focused on me. They just took the other two in the helicopter and left. The Augustin guy also left the bomb. So I just started running toward the pizza place. I don’t know why. I didn’t know where to go.”
A knock at the door signaled that room service had arrived.
I took the sandwiches and tipped the guy a fifty-dollar bill after I used Grace’s power to intuit he was the writer the receptionist had mentioned earlier.
Michelle tore into her sandwich. “So hungry,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-Two: Coming Clean over Waffles
The next day started normally. I awoke to find myself sleeping on the floor, a crick in my upper back. I’d forgotten I volunteered to sleep on the ground so Michelle could share the bed with Grace.
The perennial gentleman, am I right?
At least I wasn’t alone.
At some point in the night, Dorian had gotten down from the bed and joined me, and her rear now pressed into my side, warm as ever. I turned and spooned her for a moment, enjoying the position even if it stirred my loins a bit.
“I was cold,” she said, looking at me over her shoulder.
“Veronique isn’t warm enough?”
She laughed quietly. “I didn’t want her to have a crazy dream and drain me while she was sleeping.”
“Fair enough.”
“And what’s that?” she asked as she reached around and grabbed my semi-erect little writer.
“Hey!”
“You keep buzzing,” she said, letting go. She was referring to my phone, which rested on the floor near her pillow.
“Probably messages from Luke or other emails.” I yawned and rolled over to my back, propping my hands behind my head.
I stared up at the ceiling, the urge to write swelling within me. The urge was always there, but that didn’t mean I had to scratch it. I still needed to plow through the rest of Mutants 3, but now wasn’t the time, especially after the shit that went down last night.
“You want to come down to breakfast with me?” I asked.
“Breakfast?” Michelle sat up and crept over to the edge of the bed to peer down at us, a big smile on her face.
“Yep, get ready.”
She nearly exploded out of bed, still in my shirt.
“You’re going to need pants.”
“Can I just wear a robe?”
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea. T
here are two terry cloth robes in the bathroom if I’m not mistaken. Bring the other one for me.”
She did as instructed, back in the time it took me to blink twice.
Michelle got into the oversized robe, and I did the same, which I wore over my pair of jeans.
“How’s this?” I asked, not feeling a bit like Hugh Hefner, especially with my scraggly beard, facial scar, and nerdy glasses.
Veronique woke, and the first word out of her mouth was, “Coffee.”
“Yeah, downstairs, they have a buffet. And Grace? Are you coming with us?”
Grace got out of bed, and as she did, she morphed into the image of Natalie Johansson.
“No, let’s not draw attention to ourselves.”
“Fine,” she said and cycled through forms. She finally settled on what was pretty much the body of her brunette in yoga pants, but with her Asian face (just for a little diversity and inclusion), and her hair was pulled into a cute side ponytail. “Ready.”
“Where am I?” Stella sat up, and she would have tried to blow us all away with a vibration attack if she hadn’t seen the young teen standing before her. “Michelle?”
“They found me last night!”
Michelle practically jumped into Stella’s arms for a hug.
“You guys found her?” Stella asked, looking from Veronique to me. If she had focused on Veronique longer, she would have seen that her hand was charging red, but as it stood, Stella was more interested in Michelle’s story and how she came to be in the hotel room.
Once Michelle got through those details, Stella turned her attention to us. “I would suggest not doing that again,” she said curtly. “And you know what that is.”
“Relax, it was easier that way, trust me,” I told her. “We needed time to regroup.”
“At my expense, huh?” she asked, climbing out of her chair. She looked a bit haggard, but then again, everyone but Grace looked as if they’d seen better days.
“I promised you we’d recover the teens. We already have one. You really need to start trusting me.”
“Fine,” she said, “but we’re going to talk about this later because what you did wasn’t cool. We’re a team now, and we can’t just knock someone out if they don’t agree with us.”
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