by Lee French
Bobby nodded and hit the button for the gate. They’d just have to hope that whatever got caught on tape wasn’t especially useful in tracking them down. Jayce held the gate open while they all filed out and through the front door. “Maybe we should steal a car,” Ai suggested, pointing at the four vehicles parked near the door. “We have that one guy’s keys, right?”
Bobby held the ring of keys up and flipped through them. “These are all just building keys, ain’t no car keys here.” Since they weren’t useful, he tossed them into the landscaping, leaving him with a baton and radio. The radio didn’t seem useful, either, but he held onto it. Might be worth something in trade to someone for something. No question the baton could be useful.
The four of them ran for it. Ai either couldn’t spark her super speed or managed not to so she could stay with the group. They crossed the parking lot and hustled across some grass with scattered trees that led to a patch of woods, then found a street and crossed it and kept going. Alice couldn’t keep up the pace for very long, so they slowed to a walk and looked around as they went.
Perhaps two hours later, when dawn gave the eastern sky a rosy glow, Bobby said, “Where in heckbiscuits are we?”
“‘Heckbiscuits’?”
Bobby shrugged and gave Alice a sheepish grin. “It’s something my Momma says.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “Who knows.” They walked down the side of a tree-lined road with no signs so far, other than a white one with nothing but a number. Grasses and shrubs grew all the way to the edge, and the asphalt had cracks with scraggly weeds growing in them.
“We should have gone a different direction,” Jayce grumbled.
Ai whined. “My feet hurt.”
Bobby frowned and looked around more. “Anybody see a house or something? Can’t just be nothing. There’s a road. Roads don’t get put where there’s nothing.”
Alice groaned, plodding along in front of him, her head hanging with exhaustion. “What are we going to do? Knock on the door and ask to borrow some sugar?”
“Hey, it’s not like I ever broke outta a secret experimental facility before. How’m I supposed to know what to do?”
“I see a house.” Jayce pointed at a building in the distance, one they wouldn’t have to cross the road to reach. “Alice has a point, though. We should decide what to say.”
Ai pouted. “Maybe just one of us should walk up and ask how far to the next town?”
Alice stopped. “Okay, look, we need to make some decisions. Just going without a plan isn’t going to work.”
Everyone else stopped too, and Bobby sighed. “Fair point.” He looked at his three fellow escapees and took in the sight of them. “Okay, imagine you’re a regular person and somebody walks up to you wearing a ripped down curtain, chewed up and spit out, and says they need directions.” The three of them mirrored his thoughts with their disapproval and disappointment. “Yeah, we need a plan. In the movies, folks always steal clothes and then pretend they’re normal.”
“I don’t want to steal,” Alice declared. “I have a bank account. For that matter, I have a family. We should just find a phone and call home.”
Jayce scratched at his chin, a week’s worth of beard growth making the metal-on-metal sound raspy. “We were picked up by FBI agents. That means this is the government trying to experiment on us. They’ll want us back.”
“We gotta stay off grid,” Bobby nodded. Alice and Ai both looked unhappy about that, but neither disputed him. “What do we really need?”
Ai pulled the list she grabbed out of her curtain-dress and scanned it. “There’s more to it than that. There’s a Jayce Westbrook on here, and an Alice Fielding. Is that you two?” Both nodded. “Okay, there are…thirty-five names on this list. What about all the rest? Once they find we’re gone, will they just go and try picking up four more? Or eight more? Or all the rest? Shouldn’t we do something about that?”
“What all is on that page? Just our names?” Bobby stepped closer to peer over the top.
“This is my Social Security number, and the city I live in, and my birthdate.”
“Dang.”
Jayce nodded for everyone to follow him a short distance farther, where the wild forest dropped away from the side of the road in favor of grass and a farmer’s field. He sat himself down with a clank. “I wouldn’t wish what happened to us on anyone. They should at least be warned. We’re not really in any position to mount a rescue, though. Come with us, we have nothing and nowhere to go, but we’re hiding, too! No, it’s a crappy sell. I’d slam the door in my face.”
The other three paced over and sat down with Jayce. “We need some clothes,” Bobby suggested, “some money, and a place to go. Transportation and phones would be good, too.”
“Can’t we go talk to the press?” Alice picked at the spot where Bobby ripped out a little piece of her flesh. It had scabbed over when she reverted back from being blue during the walk.
“I don’t know I want people knowing about what I can do.” Ai shivered. “You’ve heard of the X-Men, right? Regular people hate them because they have superpowers.”
“How do they have a list with all that on it,” Bobby mused. “I mean, what’re the odds that all four of us, with these eyes, just wind up on the same list with that much information about us? ”
“They knew we were different,” Alice nodded. “They knew there was a reason to have us on a list.”
“We must have something else in common then. I know my daddy wasn’t my daddy,” Bobby offered. “My Momma met him when I was three.”
“My father died when I was young, but I’ve seen pictures of him, and he didn’t have these eyes.” Jayce tapped his temple.
Alice sighed lightly. “I was adopted, my parents are white.”
They all looked at Ai, and she shrugged. “If my parents aren’t my parents, they never told me, but yeah, neither of them has these eyes.”
Alice pursed her lips. “I’m only pre-med, but I do know the odds of us having the same highly unusual eyes and not being related somehow are pretty small.”
“That means the folks on that list are our family. Even if it’s the decent thing to do to warn ‘em, that makes it the right thing to do, too.” Bobby shrugged. “I don’t know if we should be public about ourselves or not, but I feel like that’s a decision we ought to make as a whole group, not just four of us taking it ‘pon ourselves to bat our baby blues at the camera.”
“That’s a good point,” Jayce nodded. “We should be careful not to elect ourselves leaders of the whole group.”
Bobby looked to the girls to make sure they didn’t disagree, and found them nodding. “M’kay, well, we all got pretty obvious superpowers—”
Alice interrupted by poking him in the arm. “Except you. You said later, it’s later.”
Bobby pursed his lips, but he nodded. He knew what they could do, it was only fair they know what he could do. Even if he still hoped it hadn’t been real. One deep breath followed another, then he came apart. Some of the swarm had to break free of his modesty curtain, but once it did, the little critters romped about in the grass and the air. The other three reacted with sharp intakes of breath. Ai held out her hand, so he directed one to land there, and it walked on her palm.
“They’re cute! How cool is it to be made of tiny little silver dragons?” The one on her palm reared up on its hind legs and splayed its wings out.
“You win the prize for weirdest superpower.” Alice shrank away, so he directed them to leave her alone.
Jayce held up a finger, and when one landed there, he brought it close to his face. “They look like they’re robotic, even. Do they need to eat separate from you? Actually, Bobby, can you talk through them?”
Bobby made the effort to re-form, doing his best to put himself together under the curtain scrap. He adjusted it as soon as his hands were whole. “No, least I can’t figure how. They can make a little noise, though. Dunno if they need to eat. Guess I’ll find out at some point.
I think I might be able to do just part of me at a time, but I’m not sure how to control it like that yet. Probably take practice. Anyway, I was trying to make a point. Which is that if any of the others ain’t got their superpower yet, or it takes something they injected into us, we all got visible powers that we can use to show ‘em we’re not just crazy.”
Alice pointed her hand away from the group and made a shower of ice shards skitter across the road. On the heated blacktop, then melted into puddles. “Yeah. Not crazy. We need clothes and money, then. We’re back to that problem. If we have to steal, can we at least try to keep it to stealing from people who can afford it?”
“Sounds fair.”
Chapter 4
They skipped the house and kept going in hopes of something better. Like Alice, the act of walking a long distance eventually let Jayce lose his silver sheen in favor of his normal cinnamon skin. About an hour after dawn, a beat-up old pickup truck drove by. It stopped less than a hundred feet in front of them. When Bobby, who wound up in the lead, saw an older man in jeans and a t-shirt with a concerned look on his face getting out, he perked up. Either they’d have to beat the crap out of him to take his keys, or they could get a ride someplace.
“You kids need some help?” He had a mild Southern accent, which made Bobby guess Virginia, Tennessee, or a nearby state.
Bobby threw down some good old Southern ‘aw shucks’. Momma called it him a punk when he did it, then she’d tousle his hair and tell him to go fix something. “We’re totally lost, sir, and real embarrassed. Car broke down, so we thought we’d have a little romp in the woods, ya know? Make the best of it while we wait for a tow.
“Bad storm hit while we was, er, busy, and all our clothes got blown away. When we got back to where we left the car, it was gone, only we got no clue where to. This is the best we could do to avoid walking around naked.” Ai reached him first, so he slid his arm around her waist and she tried not to be surprised by this. Behind him, Jayce stopped with Alice and set his hands on her, suggesting a claim on her.
The older man raised bushy eyebrows, and then cracked a grin and chuckled. “That’s a streak of bad luck. Hop in, I’ll give you a lift to the next town.”
The truck had a bench seat, offering only enough space for three across. Ai perched on Bobby’s lap and he placed his hands carefully on her waist. “This is mighty kind of you, sir. Most folks’d just drive on by. What’s the next town?”
“Purcellville. Where were you headed to?”
The town name was unfamiliar, giving Bobby nothing to work with. “Oh, we come up from the Atlanta area and we’re just kinda taking a road trip to nowhere in particular. I guess we found it, huh?”
While the old man chuckled, Jayce asked, “You from this area?”
“Born and raised, Virginia’s in my blood, through and through. You kids come up through Gainesville?”
“No, sir, we’ve been driving up the country roads, mostly.” Northern Virginia, then. Bobby didn’t know Virginia too well, but he knew where Gainesville was. “Last big city was Charlottesville. Nice place.”
“Sure is.” The man filled the truck with chatter for the next half hour, telling them about family he had in Charlottesville. Bobby had no interest in his four granddaughters and two grandsons, all of whom apparently had won awards, science fairs, beauty pageants, or talent contests. Ai had the presence of mind to make appropriate noises, keeping him talking and not asking about them.
Purcellville didn’t have much, but it did have a gas station, which was good enough. Jayce politely wished the man well when they climbed out, and he went on his way. The teenager manning the gas station stared at them all, and Jayce went over to talk to the guy while Bobby took the girls around back. He saw a garbage dumpster and decided he might as well take a look. Worn, dirty shoes would be better than barefoot.
He hopped up and climbed inside, finding it to be free of anything terribly disgusting. It looked like most of what got dumped back here was packaging from this and that, and it must have been emptied within the past few days. “There’s cardboard in here, we could use that for shelter if we gotta.”
“I live in an apartment.” Alice whined. “I have money. Not a lot, but enough to afford an apartment. This is not fair.”
“You’re talking like fair matters,” Ai said. “Fair left the building the second we were arrested.”
Finding nothing other than cardboard and clear plastic, Bobby levered himself back out again and hopped to the ground. “Sorry, ladies, no designer dresses inside.”
Alice glared at him, Ai snorted. Jayce found them, carrying a paper cup. “Best I could do was some clean water to drink.” He offered the cup to Ai, who took a few sips before passing it on. “I asked what’s in this town. He said there’s a diner, a doughnut shop, a bar, and a few small stores. Most people drive someplace else to do their major shopping. There are two churches, so we could maybe try them for a little charity, but the more we ask for, the more risk we run of being remembered or recognized.
“I ain’t going to a church with the story I fed that old guy.” Bobby smirked and handed the cup to Alice to finish off.
Jayce chuckled. “No, probably not the best choice for that. Any other excuse I can come up with, though, is something we should go to the cops for.”
“Even that excuse, we ought to be going to the cops for, to find the car. Hate to say it, but stealing’s probably our only real option. We kinda need a city, I think, but I got the impression we ain’t exactly near one.”
“No, we’re not. There’s a map up inside. We’re in the north part of the state. Washington, DC is relatively close, but outside walking distance. The border with West Virginia is only a mile or two straight north. We’re not quite in the Appalachians here.”
“That kinda makes sense, I guess. If’n you were gonna set up a secret government lab for human experimentation, you’d put it in the middle of nowhere, but not far from someplace like DeeCee or a military base or something.”
Jayce nodded. “One of the shops might be willing to trade for that radio, but one of us really needs to be wearing clothes.”
“This isn’t really that bad.” Ai futzed with her makeshift dress. “With some kind of cord for my waist, maybe a little effort with folding, it could pass for a dress. I still don’t have any shoes, though.”
“I know we don’t want to take from folks if we can help it, but you can go so fast…” Bobby shrugged uncomfortably. “You could probably swipe something without being seen.”
Ai opened her mouth to say something, then shut it.
“These people are probably not in a great situation, economically speaking.” Alice tossed the empty cup up into the dumpster behind her. “Small towns is where recessions hit the hardest, usually.”
“Yeah, well, we got nothing.” Bobby turned to Ai. “Just grab some sandals, maybe a shirt or something. I can go airborne, I guess, and have a look around, maybe even find out how fast I can go like that. If I get the chance, maybe I can grab something, too.”
Jayce looked around. “We’ll stay back here. It’s out of sight.”
“Okay.” Ai took a deep breath and squinted off into the distance. “Here goes nothing.” She shot off faster than the eye could track, leaving a small whoosh of wind in her wake.
“Yeah, me too.” Bobby handed over the radio and baton, then exploded out into dragons and went up. Focused like this, and with nothing in the way, they actually moved pretty fast. To avoid being seen, he had the swarm spread out. He got images from all the different eyes, and his mind somehow—he chose not to think about it—put them together without making his head explode. Wherever that might be. As a result, he had a birds’ eye view of the town and the sky for miles around.
As an experiment, he picked five dragons and sent them off to investigate specific spots, on a mission to find food. Right now, he’d be willing to grab anything edible. The rest of the swarm kept spreading out until he covered a sizable area. Instead
of seeing through all the dragons, he saw through the majority of them in the large swarm. If he was whole and had a skull with a brain inside it, he’d say there were five little tickles in the back of his head to let him know five dragons had gone elsewhere.
By focusing on one in particular, he saw what it saw and heard what it heard. A queer sensation, to be sure, since he got the distinct impression the tiny dragon had something of a mind of its own. Not an advanced intellect, but instincts and a kind of intelligence. It could solve simple puzzles, probably, without his input. He had to wonder at that, but not for long, because this one found a dumpster with food in it. Another of the ‘tickles’ got excited, so as he started the swarm moving towards the first scout, he focused on the second. It had found a rusty old car with the hood stuck open.
Why, exactly, that would make the dragon excited when he sent it for food, he had no idea. Until it dove in, grabbed a small gear, and devoured it. Oh. The dragons needed to eat, and they ate metal things. Great. If the dragons ate, would that fill him up, too? How about the other way around? Only one way to find out. Since he wasn’t sure exactly what the dragons needed, he went for the people food. Re-forming at that dumpster, he found himself naked again, this time in an otherwise empty alley.
This dragon had found stale baked goods, fruit past its prime, and floppy vegetables. Starving, he ate without caring about the mushy, moldy spot on the apple or the bites out of a mushy grilled cheese sandwich. He started with the stuff that looked the least appetizing and went from there. For the moment, he had to know if filling himself up also filled up the dragons, or he’d have another problem. The others could wait.
Once he’d taken the edge of his hunger off, he looked down at himself. He had four other dragons still out there, and that ought to equate to four bits of him missing. With a brief inspection, he discovered each foot had the two smallest toes missing. Apparently, each dragon didn’t correspond to a specific part of his body, which struck him as both interesting and disturbing.