by Jack L Knapp
But not all; Ray had found people he could respect among the science department staff, but few such who were teaching the humanities. Math, too; Ray found math teachers to be weird people anyway, in most cases. At any rate, there were few of them that he had much in common with. Their lives had been unlike the one he’d lived.
Anti-militarism was a hallmark of the social sciences and humanities and was not uncommon among the math faculty. As a result, Ray let his hair grow longer and didn’t talk about his military background.
He was looking around the street as he walked away from the parking lot. That’s when he saw the little girl.
There was a small group of people arguing off to one side. One might have been the girl's mother, the other two were young men, and the trio seemed agitated. There was a certain amount of arm waving and raised voices. It appeared that a vigorous argument was in progress, but only that, nothing that might lead to violence.
Similar things happened from time to time and Ray would have likely paid the three participants only passing notice. He was due in class shortly, and had barely enough time to walk the distance from the parking lot to his class. A car leaving the parking lot held him up for a moment, then he resumed walking.
The little girl had lost interest in what the adults were doing and wandered over to look at a plant on the side of the street; she paid no attention to the car leaving the parking area. The car wasn’t moving fast, but there was no sign that the driver was trying to move away from the curb where the three people were arguing. Most drivers will instinctively try not to get too close to pedestrians of any age...if they see them.
Like most of the plants around the university grounds, this one was desert-native, covered with thorns or spikes as most desert plants are. As the little girl reached for the plant, her finger contacted a sharp point. She turned toward mommy and began crying.
The child had only recently graduated from crawling to walking; now she lost her balance while turning to look for her mother and tumbled backwards off the curb. The car that was leaving the parking lot was no more than twenty-five or thirty meters away when she fell.
Ray instinctively started to move in her direction, but then he spotted someone else. A couple, a younger guy with a short beard and an older woman in a ponytail, had also seen the child's danger. The young man sprinted across the street, grabbed the little girl, and pushed her to safety. Ray watched the girl and was barely aware of a faint red glow that appeared behind her in the street. Reflection, perhaps; the sun was quite bright.
The car stopped with a screeching of brakes, and as the engine died Ray saw the cell phone in the driver’s hand.
The older pedestrian of the pair had also been moving toward where the young man now lay in the street. The rescuer had been tossed by the impact. He’d tumbled forward after being hit by the bumper, but was now regaining his footing. The minor mishap hadn’t resulted in injury, obvious from the way he bounced to his feet. The woman turned away to examine the child, who was up now and still crying.
Ray looked at the driver. She was clearly shocked and was now trying to open the car’s door. She finally got out, still shaking off the seat belt and trying to talk, cell phone forgotten in her hand.
Nice legs; Ray noticed them, but then other things captured his attention.
For a moment the young man looked familiar. Ray looked closer but decided that the bold young man was no one he knew. Still, there was something about him, and for that matter, something about his woman companion...
Ray sighed. He wouldn’t be making it to class on time today.
#
The campus police finally showed up, accompanied by a city police cruiser. They began questioning witnesses and taking statements. After they finished, Ray decided he might as well walk over to the SUB. He could get a cup of coffee; maybe it would be better today than the last one he’d had from there.
Ray found a table and dropped his backpack. He went over to the snack bar and passed through the line, picking up coffee and a Danish. After paying, he took his order back to the table.
The couple from the accident site, the young man and the older ponytailed woman, were there too, sitting three tables away. Having nothing more interesting to do, Ray cut off pieces of the Danish and ate it while studying the two. They were quiet, drinking coffee as Ray himself was and just sitting at the table.
Ray looked away for a minute; there was an obviously happy group playing cards at a table to the side. The noise they were making got his attention...two of the card players were women, and attractive...and they were having noisy fun playing spades, slapping the cards down as they were played. When he looked back, the two from the accident scene had gone.
Well...if he knew them from somewhere, the answer would come to him.
Eventually.
Chapter Twelve
“T?” The two were sitting at a table, still recovering from the morning’s involvement with the texting driver. Shezzie switched to contact using her Talent.
The man at the table finally lost interest and looked toward a noisy card game. T and Shezzie quietly got up and left. The man paid them no attention as they walked out of the SUB.
T agreed and the two walked westward to where they’d left the Chevy pickup.
After considering a used car or truck, they’d finally decided that a Ford or Chevrolet would be anonymous and reliable transportation as they moved around the area. They chose a new Chevrolet Silverado 1500 for no better reason than that they liked the salesman more than the one they met at the Ford dealership; the Chevy was now parked across Mesa Street on a side avenue.
Parking was, as always, a problem around UTEP. The school was known as a commuter school, where most students lived at home and commuted to classes by car. Even if you had a parking pass, it could be a chore to find an empty space on campus. The pickup had been left a few blocks away from their destination so they could walk into the campus on their way to the library.
This was how they’d spotted the child; events had caused T to intervene, almost without thinking. He’d had a quick image, almost a flashback, and reacted.
After the girl was pushed away from danger, T had protected himself by quickly forming his bubble. Once he stopped rolling, he’d collapsed the bubble and picked himself off the street. He’d seen something like this happen before, a child dying needlessly because he couldn’t save her; it wasn’t going to happen again if he could stop it.
He felt good about what he’d done. There had been no certainty that the child would have died or been seriously injured had the car struck her, but it was better to be safe than sorry. It was likely that no one had realized just how he’d escaped injury. He’d not even picked up road rash; he was unmarked from the car’s impact or the ensuing roll down the street.
T took Mesa north and followed the signs to the freeway. He would take I-10 west, then switch to I-25 at Las Cruces. The interstate highway passed through Socorro, then Albuquerque. North of Albuquerque he’d take the Bernalillo exit west at NM 505. A final turn north at state highway 4 would take them to the cabin they’d bought in Jemez Springs.
#
They had rented an
apartment on the west side of El Paso soon after arriving, and they'd kept it even after buying the cabin; Surfer was living there for the time being while he took a number of premed courses.
He had become more paranoid as time passed. It was simply not possible to forget that death hid in the back of his neck, and he had no idea if there was someone who might still be hunting him. Even an accidental detonation could end his life without warning. The knowledge meant that the implant was never far from his thoughts.
T was studying anatomy, too; he read extensively and Shezzie tutored him, so he felt no need for formal classes. Between what Surfer learned and what T picked up, they hoped to find a way to safely remove the explosive implants. While admittedly no doctor, Shezzie had spent considerable time in operating rooms, assisting those who were surgeons.
It was accepted that at some point Surfer would join them at the cabin in the Jemez Mountains. There would then need to be an attempt to remove the charges from T’s and Surfer’s necks. They had no clear plan as yet, but working to learn as much about anatomy before making any attempt seemed wise. In the meantime, T had acquired a plastic model of a spine from a supply house that sold to primarily to schools and chiropractors. He worked with that, concentrating on the region of the cervical vertebrae where they thought the explosive charges had been planted.
The implant was located in the deep curve below the atlas bone and above the thoracic vertebrae. Removing it would be technically easy, but detailed knowledge of nerves, tendons, and muscles was needed; collateral damage was something to be avoided, just as had been the case in the Rockpile. A mistake could paralyze or leave the patient unable to control his neck muscles properly. Balancing the head depended on precise control of the muscles in the neck, and if one muscle was unable to respond, there would be difficulties holding the head upright.
He’d gotten the best teaching prop they had, surprisingly expensive, then bought models of each of the cervical vertebrae. He learned to sketch them and pencil in tracks where the nerves exited. Shadowy outlines indicated the location of muscles and the long tendons that held the head upright.
T had considered whether he wouldn't be better off seeking the aid of a surgeon from the US or Mexico, but decided that it would be too dangerous. The doctors would talk, and questions would be asked. Conceivably, T could do the surgery on Surfer, with Shezzie’s assistance, and Surfer could then do the same for T; It looked to be a fairly simple procedure and neither an MD nor a license to practice medicine would be necessary.
For the moment, they studied pre-medical topics. They hadn’t yet made a final decision regarding whether to seek help from a Mexican surgeon or do the extraction themselves; in the meantime, preparations went on. The more knowledge each of them had, the better.
It might be possible to cross into Ciudad Juarez or Palomas and find a competent surgeon who would also keep his mouth shut. Equally, it might not be possible or advisable to try to find such. A Mexican surgeon might talk, if not to newspaper or television reporters, then certainly to his medical colleagues. That report could then find its way back, to people that T and Surfer didn’t want to learn about what had happened, about removal of explosive charges from necks. For that matter, many surgeons practicing in Juarez also had offices in the US, negating the very reason for going to a Mexican physician in the first place.
So far as the agency knew, the one that had developed the School and sent T to Afghanistan, only Surfer was still thought to be alive. No one connected with the School knew of Shezzie, because only the three of them knew that Surfer, later T, had helped her awaken her dormant Talents. T was presumed dead or a captive of the Taliban; the Army wouldn’t be looking for him in the US. Surfer had last been seen in California, and no one from the agency or the School had any reason to suspect he was hiding out as an undergraduate in El Paso. The three were as safe as it was possible for fugitives to be.
#
Colonel Peter Paul Henderson, formerly Brigadier General and Commandant of the School, looked ruefully at the bumper of his car. It never failed to annoy him. Instead of the blue star of a general officer (which got him a lot of perks when visiting a military installation, even as a retiree), there was a blue eagle. Granted, that got him most of the same perks, but it grated nonetheless.
He’d been sent to intelligence duty early in his career and had worked with a variety of agencies thereafter; first with Defense Intelligence, then a stint with the NSA, from there back to the DIA, and finally to the CIA; he’d been attached to the agencies as a military officer but not an employee. In a sense, he was the perfect commandant for the School, someone outside the recognized intelligence community who could be disavowed if somehow the story leaked.
Henderson had maintained his Army affiliation and hoped at some point for a command, possibly a battalion. He knew there would be no regiment for him without successful battalion command first, and even then, attendance would be required at the various service schools for senior officers before he would be considered qualified for the higher rank.
He’d taken the Command and General Staff College course by distance learning, a bone for his service in intelligence; but he soon came to understand there would be no War College for him.
And then had come the offer to command the School; it carried with it a promotion to brigadier general, and since his other option was retirement, he’d jumped at the opportunity. Who could say? A successful ‘mission accomplished’ might lead to other assignments.
For a while, it had been golden. The School was less like a military base, more like a campus of a junior college. An obscure junior college to be sure, but that was to be expected since it was an offshoot of the intelligence community. A number of academics had been employed who designed a curriculum and system of recruitment that showed promise. Computer feedback, little known at the time, had been developed into an effective training tool. The students lacked discipline, but that could be remedied.
Early successes could be readily exploited; graduates of the training program, those who could communicate long distances in a manner that couldn’t be intercepted or jammed, would be seamlessly integrated into a separate branch of the CIA’s Operations Directorate. This would blend operations in foreign nations with special intelligence gathering via unusual ‘humint’, human intelligence, assets; some of the communicators who were stationed in foreign countries, perhaps in embassies, might pick up information from the thoughts of people in those countries. The information obtained would then be instantly returned to Langley for analysis and integration into the daily summaries and briefings for high officials. He, General Henderson, might become the officer in charge of that office.
The newly-recruited students were an unruly bunch at best, secretive, superior, and resistant to discipline, including the military discipline he’d attempted to establish. Many were unwilling even to do what they’d been recruited to do, what so much public money had been spent teaching them how to do.
General Henderson had begun to wonder just what he was creating. Hence, the ‘kill switch’ had been designed, a pulse-code decoder circuit mated with a small explosive charge. After a particularly irritating exchange with some of the students, he had made the decision to have the implants installed without their knowledge.
That had been sufficient to allay his concerns, but it had not been enough to satisfy his superiors, the ones who provided the funding. So one day the peremptory order to close down the School had come. How he went about that was left to his discretion, so long as he did it quickly. He understood that something had happened that spooked the senior officials in the intelligence community. Whatever it was, it was enough to discourage his superiors and frighten them into stopping the program. There would be no further attempts to improve the School, no curriculum changes, and no modification of the way that students were selected and recruited. Politics, he thought; perhaps a committee engaged in cutting back on nonessentials had found reports that his student-recruits spent m
onths playing video games. Such reports might even have come about through deliberate leaks. Those who had not done well at the School had been disgruntled enough to possibly express their dissatisfaction by informing someone in the administration. Others, who were envious of the money spent on the School, who might otherwise have gotten that money for their own pet program, could leak information in the hope of embarrassing their superiors or simply ending the attempt to develop paranormal abilities. The idea of establishing a way of developing telepathy had not been universally popular when it was first proposed. In government, those who disagree in some fashion usually bide their time, waiting for another opportunity; issues never really go away, decisions are never really final.
It had been necessary to find places to put the failed students. Such reassignments were unpleasant, to encourage others to do their best. Dropping a leak might appeal to such who thought they'd gotten a raw deal. All in all, it created an atmosphere that would not play well if a Congressional subcommittee should begin to nose around.
And of course, he would never be able to explain what the School had actually been attempting to do. Lying to Congress might become necessary, even though it was dangerous. There had been an official budget as well as various accounts with differing sums of money, some of it from clandestine funds. BG Henderson had diverted a certain amount of the money when he found it expedient to do so in ways not easily tracked; at the same time, the diversions could not easily be explained.
A number of transactions had moved the clandestine money to accounts not associated with the School, and only the accountable money was spent thereafter. What was left of the accountable money was returned to the providing agency when the School officially went out of existence. But Henderson had decided that his duty, as well as his personal reputation, required there be no loose ends, that there remain no danger from rogue super-humans, who might have abilities that no one knew about and that no one could control. The former students were loose ends, and loose ends can cause trouble, but only if they’re still alive.