While the Queen’s Guard were now a little meta short of meta human, CJ was still the most powerful being on the planet. When he saw the now falling dead man’s switch ignite, the area suddenly crackled with purple electricity, a swell of energy radiating out from CJ and engulfing the team surrounding Cynthia Arrow.
All of their heads felt like they were exploding simultaneoulsy, and CJ screamed with the effort of transporting so many people at once, something that he’d never done before, something that he didn’t even know if he could do.
The last thing that Doc saw as they were teleported out of the cannery was a door being blown open as the explosion ripped through the factory, destroying everything within a quarter-mile radius and poisoning the ground forever more.
The room between the factory and loading bay wasn’t a storeroom at all; it was a daycare centre for the children of SOUL members while their parents worked, and today it was full. At least it had been, moments before the explosion reduced the occupants to ashes.
chapter 13
HIDDEN SECRETS
The minibus turned off the motorway and started its journey through the more attractive countryside. Green fields and tree lines passed by as they drove, taking over from manmade concrete.
Jamie-Lyn watched out over the others. Doc had dozed off, Jesus had his nose buried in a file on his tablet, and most of the other agents were sleeping, while CJ merely sat bolt upright as usual.
Thinking about it, she had never actually seen the alien sleep, or at least sleep in the way that humans did; just another of their many differences, she imagined.
The doc moaned and grumbled a little in her sleep, and Jamie-Lyn could see that it was not a good dream. She supposed that’s what came of talking about Havencrest.
The explosion at the cannery had rocked the entire countryside back as far as the parked van where she had been sitting with God. A huge cloud of debris and smoke rose into the afternoon air, and the smell! The smell had hit them hard in spite of the distance they were away.
God, of course, had lost his mind at the sheer disobedience on show from the team. Unable to raise anyone on comms, he had started the van, preparing to drive into the blast zone, but it had been Jamie-Lyn who had spotted the telltale purple electricity signatures.
The team had been scattered around the landscape, and it had taken some time to find them one by one. All of them had been unconscious at the time, even CJ when they’d eventually located him.
The first member they’d found was the doc. As a result, by the time they’d located CJ, the final teammate, the doc was awake… groggy, but awake.
She had been the one to tell them what had happened. She had explained that once Cynthia Arrow was aware of their assault, she’d had a backup plan to lure them all in and blow them all to hell using C4 to destroy the cannery, combined with the stockpile of chemical weapons to make sure the job was done to such a degree as to kill a superhero space alien.
The doc had also told them about the daycare centre, about the glimpse in through a doorway that showed her a vision that she’d never be able to unsee: a room full of innocent children wiped off the face of the earth because of the team’s collective arrogance.
Their own hubris had led to their reckless assault. Believing in their own hype and abilities to end the war, they had caused the death of heavens knew how many people, and, more importantly, many innocent children at the cannery and many innocent people just living their lives in the wider town.
When CJ had finally been located, he had groggily told them that he’d never attempted such a large scale teleportation in terms of distance and numbers and it had wiped him out completely. He had also told them something else, something very disturbing on a day of disturbing knowledge.
His initial intent had been to grab the whole team and get them out before the explosion, but the sheer panic of the situation meant that he had reached out to everyone in the vicinity in a blind panic, and, as a result, he had also brought along an unwelcome bystander – Cynthia Arrow had come along for the ride.
They had scoured the entire area, or at least as far as they had dared go without exposing themselves to the chemical weapon’s range, but they had found no sign of her… indeed, no sign of life of any kind.
The team itself had been finished that day. The collective guilt, combined with the distrust exposed when CJ had revealed a previously unknown ability to temporarily rob them of their powers, divided them, making going forwards as a unit unworkable.
They had limped along in name only for a few more months. God had gone to work securing the site that had once been Havencrest. The chemical clean-up had been slow and dangerous as no one was entirely sure what they were dealing with.
For her own part, Jamie-Lyn had helped put out the public message that SOUL had been finally defeated, that the terrorist organisation had been wiped out by their own hand, by their own weapon. It had been at least partly true, and the innocent bystander deaths had been buried along with the bodies.
The entire area had been quarantined with a strict government seal. No one went in or out, and no one from the outside ever found out what had happened there. The truth ended up in one of the mass graves.
The only thing that had held the team together for the next few months was the thought that Cynthia Arrow was potentially still out there and on her way back.
But as weeks grew into months, they started to hypothesise that perhaps, given the inaccurate nature of CJ’s teleporting, the SOUL leader hadn’t made it all the way out of the blast zone; perhaps she had, in fact, gone over the edge of the high steep cliffs that surrounded the town, or maybe, with any luck, she had simply landed out in the middle of the ocean instead of on dry land like the rest of them.
In any case, she had never reappeared, her or her organisation – until now, that was.
The minibus slowed down and took a turn onto the long private gravel driveway to the Ryhill Care Home, the last resting place of one Harrison Millington, known to his friends as Bull.
The morning was cold and there were several uniformed police officers guarding the gate as they pulled in. The men were rubbing their hands and blowing visible breath as they hopped about from foot to foot at the damp air.
The minibus driver had to stop and show appropriate ID before they were allowed in. Of course, the badge flashing was unnecessary as CJ was sat at the front of the minibus and when the officers standing outside got a look at the alien, their eyes bulged with recognition. To their credit, they resisted the urge to pull out their phones and start taking selfies… just.
The destruction through the nursing home and in the garden was obvious as they came to a halt outside the main building.
They trooped off the minibus and stood for a moment in the cold damp air, surveying the scene, before Jesus finally broke the silence.
“Okay, people, we’ve got a job to do,” he ordered, and the agents under his control went about their business led by CJ.
“Jesus,” Janie-Lyn mused as she moved about the wreckage from the outside.
“Yes?” the Queen’s Guard commander responded.
“No, not you. I meant…, well…,” Jamie-Lyn said, motioning towards the damage.
Walls had been blown out from within the building, and in several places, the roof had collapsed in, folding the home inward. It was easy to follow the trail of destruction as one of the side walls was completely exploded, sending a shower of broken masonry and splintered wood out into the garden where there was a jagged tree stump looming up out of the ground. The wooden summerhouse looked like a bomb had gone off in it.
“Were there any…?” Forbes started as she looked around.
“Survivors?” Jesus asked. “No.”
“How many?” Jamie-Lyn asked, tensing for the answer.
“8 staff, 12 guests and Bull himself,” Jesus confirmed as he looked down at his tablet screen.
“How did he…?” Jamie-Lyn trailed off.
“It wasn
’t pretty,” Jesus replied delicately. “From what we can tell from a preliminary investigation, there was a fight. Something big and powerful took Bull on in hand-to-hand… Bull lost.”
“I didn’t think he could,” Jamie-Lyn said with disbelief thickly lacing her thoughts.
“None of us did, but as for what, we have no idea.”
“We were rather hoping that you might help us with that, Doctor?” a voice from behind enquired.
They all turned around to see CJ standing behind them, his hands laced together behind his back as he stood with his customary polite etiquette.
“I’m not on active service, not for a long time,” Forbes replied, her voice frosty.
“We need your help here, Doctor,” Jesus pressed. “Time is of the essence right now, and lives are in danger – your lives, to be exact.”
“That door is shut, Jesus. I shut it a long time ago and I don’t want it opened again,” Doc replied, her voice somehow managing to drop even lower and colder.
“You can do some good here, Doctor. You can help us stop this from happening to anyone else,” CJ tried again, his voice straining to the point of almost pleading.
“I… I can’t,” Doc said, lowering her gaze.
“Doctor, please,” CJ said, stepping forwards, and Jamie-Lyn heard an uncertainty there that unsettled her. “I understand that you have your reasons for stepping away. I respect them, honestly I do, but this? This is…”
“Family,” Jamie-Lyn said, finishing the thought on instinct and feeling slightly uncomfortable at the ease in which everything seemed to be slipping back into place.
She stepped in between Doc and the males, knowing that that they were on the verge of trying to force Doc and only entrench her position further.
“We need you, Helen,” she pressed, taking the woman’s hand gently. “I understand that you don’t want to do this. I understand that you don’t want to be here, honestly I do, but someone is out there, Helen, and they’re hunting us. They’re killing us. Marshall and Harrison are already gone, and we still have no idea who’s doing this.”
Jamie-Lyn felt Jesus open his mouth, and she flapped a hand back at him, ordering him to keep quiet.
“Don’t do this for them,” Jamie-Lyn said, meaning Jesus and CJ. “Do it for Harrison… do it for Marshall.”
Forbes let out a long frustrated sigh before finally responding.
“Goddamn it,” she hissed, taking off a stylish black leather glove. “I’m not back. I want to make that absolutely clear to everyone, right?”
Jesus and CJ both nodded before Forbes stepped forwards towards the shattered wall and placed her hand against the smashed open brickwork
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. A plume of visible white breath rose up around her face and grew exponentially until it engulfed her head completely. When she opened her eyes again, they were the crackling purple of Dr Quantum.
Her head tilted to one side and two fingers on her right hand rose involuntarily to her right temple as she concentrated her mind.
“It hunted him,” she finally said after several minutes of perfect silence. “Through the home, killing residents to draw him out, covering its tracks. It’s stealthy, quiet, like a shadow. It’s… it’s hungry, angry. My god, it’s… it’s ripping them apart like tissue paper. They were so… so scared.”
Tears started to fall from her eyes as she felt the pain and fear from the slaughtered staff and patients alike.
“They tried to run; a few tried to fight.” More tears fell from her crackling purple eyes.
“It knew Bull, or at least knew of him, his strength, his power. It respected that, but it came with a plan. I feel… I feel…”
The doc’s face creased with effort as she struggled to maintain her grip on the remnants of emotion still attached to the physical plain.
“Bull fought, but he had been still for so long. He was angry, angry at what the killer did to the innocent people here… it made him reckless.”
The doc walked away from the building and headed out into the grounds in a daze, following the trail up to the tree and beyond.
“Bull was hurt. He was bleeding heavily by here.”
“Bull was cut? By what?” Jesus asked, puzzled, and CJ shot him another harsh look, indicating for him not to disturb the doc while she worked.
“The deaths in the home left him angry, angrier than he’d been in a long time, since Havencrest. He was too eager to engage when he could have… he could have run, retreated for help. Here,” she said, pausing at the spot where Bull had thrown the creature into the summerhouse. “But he kept on going, he kept going when he could have run… Damn you, Bull.”
The last words broke through the veneer of Dr Quantum surveying a crime scene and sounded a lot more like Helen Forbes thinking about her friend, a good man and one of the good guys, perhaps the only true one amongst them.
“He died in there.” She pointed to the summerhouse remains. “But I… I can’t go in there.”
She closed her crackling purple eyes, and when she opened them again, they were back to plain old hazel brown, albeit misty wet ones. She wiped the tears away and took a deep tired breath.
Jesus looked to CJ before the alien nodded to allow him to speak.
“Did you see it? Did you see what attacked him?”
“Shadows mainly. Something large, something with claws, claws or…”
“Knives?” Jesus asked, hopefully.
“You really think this could have been Crimson?” Jamie-Lyn exclaimed.
“I can’t rule anything out,” Jesus replied.
“It wasn’t Crimson,” Doc said firmly. “I know Langston. I know his energy signature. I would know if it was him and this wasn’t.”
A phone rang and Jesus pulled it from his pocket, checked the caller ID, before hitting ignore and slipping it back into his jacket pocket again.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
The doc nodded three times, each one more sure than the last.
“So who the hell was it?” Jesus asked aloud with a heavy sigh. “I mean no offence, Doc, but I was kind of counting on you here.”
“It wasn’t… it wasn’t anyone I’ve ever felt before; it wasn’t anything I’ve ever felt before,” Doc said, shaking her head.
“Well, what the hell could have hurt Bull like that? Cut his skin?” Jamie-Lyn asked, but her question was directed at CJ.
The tall alien looked uneasy now as the others all turned to him.
“I do not know,” he said calmly to the group.
“Bull’s dead, CJ. Marshall’s dead too,” Jamie-Lyn pressed. “Now I know that I’m here to try and coax information out of you, CJ,” she said, holding up a hand to cut off the rising protest about to come out of Jesus, “but to be honest, I don’t think that we have the time here. Three of us are already dead, and I don’t want to waste time pissing about playing games, okay?”
Jesus’ phone rang again, and again he hit ignore.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” CJ said, drawing himself up to his full height and exhibiting that aloofness that had so often infuriated her in the past.
“Oh, cut the crap, CJ!” she burst out. “You know something here, or at least you suspect something. Don’t you think you owe us?”
“Owe you?”
“We’re here because of you, CJ, all of us were.” the doc chimed in. “Now don’t get me wrong, we all came along of our own volition, but it was you that led us, that… enhanced us.”
“I suppose that Cynthia Arrow and her crusade is my fault as well?”
Jamie-Lyn again heard the crack in his usually impenetrable façade and again it troubled her.
Jesus’ phone went off again.
“You need to get that?” Jamie-Lyn snapped. “You know, if you’ve got something better to be doing?”
Jesus took the phone from his pocket and took a couple of paces away from the group before answering in hushed tones.
“No…,
it’s okay… No, I’m fine…,” he said, speaking quickly and quietly. “I don’t know if I will be… could be late… okay… I will… no I will… honestly… alright then, I’ll try… I’ve got to go… okay… I love you too.”
He hung up and turned back to the group; a flash of a happy smile still lingered for a few moments more on his lips before he put his game face back on.
“Sorry,” he said, looking down.
“Well at least one of us has a life,” Jamie-Lyn said, not entirely joking.
CJ turned to leave, but Doc stopped him with her words.
“Look… Cynthia Arrow and her SOUL soldiers were not your fault, but you were her particular catalyst,” she said without judgement. “I’m sure that if it wasn’t you, then she would have found something else, some other excuse for her actions, but you were her fixation, CJ, you.”
“You cannot blame me for her madness, for her… delusions!” CJ exclaimed, and this time his façade didn’t crack, it shattered. “All I have ever tried to do is to help you people, your planet. Why should I be blamed for the actions of a madwoman?”
“No one blames you,” Jamie-Lyn said soothingly. “We don’t blame you,” she added quickly. “We never did.”
She turned to Doc for support, but it wasn’t immediately forthcoming.
“We all followed you, CJ, all of us. We believed in what we were doing, what we were trying to do,” Doc said heavily. “Maybe it was on you to give us more answers, or maybe it was on us to ask more questions.”
“Then what are you asking of me now?” he demanded.
“How about the truth?” Doc said softly. “After all this time, you owe us that much at least.”
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High-powered binoculars watched the scene at the nursing home from a safe distance, far enough away so that the doc wouldn’t sense watching eyes or a curious mind.
The young agents came and went about their business, well dressed and obviously well trained. The crime scene was shut down and security was tight; no one was getting in or out.
It wasn’t just the physical protection that was impressive. The local news had already reported that the home had suffered a gas leak explosion and there had been some casualties.
Capes Page 18