by Lee French
“Damn,” Jayce said as he stooped to check for a pulse, “I hit hard. He’s still alive, though.” The metal man hurried around to the other side of the car, where Bobby had the other deputy distracted. Bobby pulled the swarm away and Jayce punched him in the jaw. The dragons caught the deputy as he fell, and set his limp body on the ground.
Bobby re-formed and grabbed the boxers from Jayce. “We should see what they got.”
Ai picked up the gun, holding it gingerly and away from her body. She cringed and asked, “Do we want this?”
“I’ll take it.” Jayce traded her the baton for the gun.
“I… I could kill someone,” Alice whimpered, staring at her hands.
Bobby climbed into the car and checked for anything useful. Catching sight of the radio, he did as much damage to it as he could. He found some spare clips of ammunition in the glove box, and guessed there might be something worth taking in the trunk. He popped the release and went to take a look. “I think we could all kill people pretty easy if we put our minds to it.” Inside the trunk, he found flares, vests, jumper cables, all kinds of things. A red canvas bag caught his eye. “Whatever we want, we got something to carry it in.” He grabbed it and tossed it to Alice.
She watched the bag hit her arm and fall to the ground. “This is wrong. Really, really wrong.”
Bobby pursed his lips and looked her over. The girl’s eyes seemed stuck on the nearest unconscious deputy, wide and horrified. Taking a step closer, he poked her with a finger. “Do I gotta slap ya? ”
She gulped and shook her head, then bent and picked up the bag. “No.”
“Good. My Momma says only assholes hit girls.”
Jayce helped him pull out everything that seemed useful. As the strongest, he’d carry it, so his opinion of the weight mattered the most. “We should check their wallets and take whatever cash they’ve got.”
Ai zipped away while they did all this, checking all the closest streets. She breezed through several times, crossing back and forth.
“We can’t do that,” Alice whined. “We can’t steal from the police.”
Bobby rolled his eyes and knelt beside one deputy, yanking his wallet out of his pocket. “This one’s got thirty-three bucks.” He left the guy with three ones. “I left him with snack money, you happy?”
Alice flared her nostrils and scowled hard enough to be sulking. “No.”
“We don’t have time for this argument right now,” Jayce said.
“Ain’t that the truth.” Bobby took both the deputy’s spare clips for his gun, then moved to the other one. He had another two spare clips, and two twenties in his wallet. In a show for Alice’s benefit, he left the five and two ones. “We got fifty bucks now. That ain’t much, but it’s something.” All of it, he handed over to Jayce. “Which way ya think?”
Alice paced back and forth between the cruiser and the sidewalk, wringing her hands and muttering. He thought she said something about medical school. Treating her as a distraction, he gave Jayce his full attention.
“Depends.” Jayce hefted the bag over his shoulder and looked around. “We could head for a city, or we could go into the wilderness. So long as we don’t go east, we’ll hit The Appalachian Trail at some point. We could get lost there for a while and probably survive one way or another. That would mean abandoning the others like us, though.”
“I don’t see that as an option. City, then. We ain’t really that far from DeeCee.” Bobby shrugged back into the shorts and shirt as he spoke. “You got the list, or Ai still have it? If there’s one in DeeCee, we maybe got a serious destination.”
Jayce pulled the crumpled page from his pocket and ran his finger down it. “Jasmine Milani is in Washington.”
“Sounds like a plan, then. That’s east.” Looking up at the sky through the trees, he pointed. “More or less that way.” He looked back at the beat up cruiser. “Shame about that.”
“Alice is going to have a heart attack, but we should steal a car.”
Bobby pursed his lips and checked up and down the street. He saw a beat up old Nova on the street, even pointing in the right direction. Must be fate. “You smash the window, I’ll hot wire it.”
“You’ve boosted a car?” Jayce raised his brow and smirked.
“Nah,” Bobby shrugged. “Girlfriend broke the key off in her ignition once, couldn’t afford to get it fixed.”
Chuckling, Jayce led the way. He rammed an elbow through the passenger side window and unlocked it. After tossing the loot into the back seat, he leaned against the car and watched Alice with a sigh.
Bobby slid into the driver’s seat and grinned. “Suck it up, I got work to do.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Jayce patted the car and jogged away.
Five minutes later, Alice sat clenched up in the backseat with Ai hunkered down on the floor beside her. Jayce leaned back in the passenger seat with the brim of a Nationals ball cap they found in the car lowered over his face. No one should look at three kids in a car with the windows down on a warm summer day and think anything of it.
Bobby drove them towards the nation’s capital. For the first time since they broke out of that lab, they finally managed to be accomplishing something and getting somewhere. They had a goal and plan, of sorts. He spared a thought to wonder and how many more cops they were going to have to beat up to get it all done. Cities should be relatively safe, he thought. They could blend in around the homeless, and probably find folks willing to trade for what they had now.
Construction on the other side of the highway made him think of roadblocks. He kept the car going near the speed limit, and paid attention to the other cars. After a half hour of this hypervigilance, he decided they hadn’t yet realized the car had been stolen. They’d keep the search focused around that town until someone noticed, he guessed.
“I’m thinking we should ditch the car pretty quick. Soon as somebody notices it’s missing, they’ll have plates to look for.”
“Good plan,” Jayce nodded.
Alice grunted. “This is all screwed up.”
“Ayup.” She reminded Bobby of this girl he knew back home: prim and proper, and wouldn’t date him to save her life because he occasionally strayed from the straight and narrow. That would ruin her reputation, of course. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw she stared out the window and had let her arms relax enough to no longer have them crossed over her chest.
“I’m going to Stanford.”
“Yeah, you told us that,” Ai snapped, “like, fifty times already. I’m sure that makes you five hundred times better than the rest of us.”
“I worked my ass off to get into that school!”
“And now you’re a superhero who can make ice instead of just being made of it,” Ai sneered. “Grow up, seriously. Like this is only happening to you or something. We’re all sooooo sorry your carefully planned and manicured life is all messed up. News flash, ours are, too.”
Alice scowled and huffed and glared out the window. Bobby and Jayce both chose not to get involved. The exchange and the silence that followed it made the car awkward and uncomfortable, so Bobby switched on the radio to find it tuned to a station with a male announcer talking.
”…considered extremely dangerous. The four fugitives are ages nineteen to twenty-one, two males and two females. The two females are of Asian descent, one male is white with light brown hair, the other is of Native American descent. All four have blue eyes with a shape being described as ‘somewhat unusual’. We’ve got pictures on our website—”
Jayce clicked the radio back off. “We could split up to deal with contacting the rest of the people on the list. We might have enough money to get some cheap pre-paid cellphones to keep in touch with.”
“I think we’ll need more than we got for that.”
“Oh, great,” Alice growled, “we can just go steal some more. What a brilliant plan. I guess we’ve already done grand theft auto, so why not a little more assault and battery?”
“Alice, if’n you wanna get outta the car and let them pick you back up so they can stick you with needles again, that’s fine. Just say the word, I can pull over anytime. If’n you got a better idea, we’re listening. ‘Til then, we’re kinda stuck. None of us even has ID, and even if we did, using it would just lead ‘em to us.”
“Be part of the solution or get out of the way,” Ai said.
Alice glared at the window in silence.
Chapter 6
The bridge over the Potomac had a toll. Bobby took an exit in Arlington and found a place to park. They piled out and left it behind, the bag slung over Jayce’s shoulder. Walking across the bridge slowed them down, but a toll would take cash they couldn’t afford to spend on something avoidable. Time cost nothing.
As Bobby hoped, the area had endless city, and he felt confident a body could get lost and never found here. This helped them and complicated their mission. With only fifty bucks and no phone, computer, or transportation, they had to find one particular person. The best option seemed to be hitting an internet cafe and using the time there to look up addresses for everyone on the list.
Alice took the ball cap from Jayce and went to go pay for internet access by herself, in the hope that one of them alone might not get noticed. Bobby went for a flight, leaving his clothes behind with Jayce, who sat on a park bench, trying to look like he had every reason to be there. It was midday by then, and Ai ran off and swiped them a couple of sandwiches. She got enough from multiple places for all of them to eat when Bobby and Alice returned.
From above, Bobby could feel the dragons getting impatient about eating. The vast horde dwarfed the tiny group of satisfied dragons. He sent scouts again, looking for them to find enough food for the whole swarm. For a while, he drifted around, watching cars and people moving around.
One scout hit the jackpot, finding a junkyard. Eager to reach it, the little things flew at a good clip, faster than they had before. Motivation put a fire under their tails. The swarm slipped into the back of the junkyard and slipped through. Dragons stopped and settled as the mass wormed its way through, delighted at finding pieces to devour.
He noticed they ignored most of the large metal pieces, choosing mainly gears and cogs and other small, shaped parts. It seemed to be certain kinds of metal, and the thickness mattered. They might be less picky in a pinch. This particular junkyard, though, offered more than enough of their preferred ‘food’. Each one gorged itself and streaked up when it could eat nothing more. When the last dragon, happy and sated, rejoined the swarm, he directed it back to the park.
“I scored for the dragons,” he told the other three when he’d re-formed behind the bench.
Jayce held up his clothes, and he shrugged into them before a cop could notice and get annoying about his nakedness. “There’s a sandwich for you, and some carrots and juice.”
“I managed to get addresses for all the names, but I have no idea if they’re all the right people, or current. In cases where there were multiple choices, I wrote them all down. I also made copies, so we all have one.” Alice handed Bobby his copy as he hopped over the bench to claim his lunch and sit down with them.
“Not sure how I’m gonna carry it with me.” He stuffed his face with sandwich and his pocket with the paper.
“Just don’t lose it.” Jayce patted the red bag beside him. “We should go together to try to trade the stuff, I think. Stick to the sketchy parts of the city and we should be okay.”
“I think we should split up,” Ai said. “I’ll go find Jasmine.”
“I’ll go with you,” Bobby told Jayce. He crunched a carrot stick, then looked to Alice. “You should come with us, too. Let Ai go zippity and you get to have a say in what we get for what we got.”
Alice pursed her lips and furrowed her brow. “I guess.”
Bobby wanted to say something friendly, something that would make her feel more welcome, maybe. He scratched his head and tried to think of what might be taken well right now and came up empty. Chewing his bite of sandwich, he decided to be grateful she’d left some of her attitude behind in the car and leave it at that.
Jayce, who’d been looking at a city map for a while now, suggested a place they could meet back up that he felt confident had to be a lousy part of town. Ai took off before Bobby finished eating, and the trio set off with his hands and mouth full of food and juice. When he finished what he had, he knew he could pack more away without feeling full. The next time they sent Ai to swipe food, he’d ask her to grab extra for him.
An hour later, they still had twenty bucks, and Jayce and Bobby had jeans and t-shirts, combat boots, and trenchcoats with pockets. Alice had pants and a shirt and a sports bra, along with regular, cheap shoes. They got the same for Ai. They also had four super-cheap pre-paid cellphones. The bag had been replaced with a gray backpack, and now held a set of basic tools, the extra clips for the gun Jayce hid in his trenchcoat, the baton, and a battery-free wind-up flashlight.
The meeting place turned out to be a gathering point for homeless people, and Bobby looked around with interest at their tactical approaches to life without stuff. Actually, a lot of them had plenty of stuff, in shopping carts and shabby wheeled packs. With nothing better to do while waiting, he sat down next to a guy in an old Army jacket and asked about the weather. Nearby, Jayce leaned against a streetlight and watched everything happening around him.
Alice hugged herself and took excessive care to not touch anyone or anything. She gave the impression of a fish out of water—one with disdain for its new surroundings. Bobby noticed a woman deliberately bump into Alice, then stop and growl at her, too low to be overheard.
Brushing her arm off, Alice stepped away and shook her head. She used both hands to ward the woman off and kept taking small steps towards Bobby. Jayce’s head shimmered to the same mottled gray as the lamppost and he stood away from it.
“You come down here for a school project, Princess?”
“No, wait, I know, court ordered community service!”
“Some new church come to save our souls?”
“Some new church come to save our souls?” Several different people bumped Alice around, all unhappy to see her here.
“Stop touching me!” She covered her head and repeated the plaintive wail over and over.
Jayce pushed one man aside without using his full strength, his low voice murmuring something soothing. His action had no effect, and the group pushed Alice around until she screamed. With the scream, which Bobby recognized from having heard it before in the lab, the air temperature dropped like a rock. Ice shot out of her in jagged shards and covering everything with frost.
The ice smashed into Jayce, his body protecting everyone behind himself. It tore through the four people directly harassing her, ripping them to shreds in seconds. Those farther away suffered less deadly cuts and scrapes, and several slipped and fell.
“Alice,” Bobby cried out, far enough away to be safe, “Stop it, you’re killing them! ” He rushed in to check on the woman nearest to him while Jayce dropped down to check for a pulse on the other one next to him. “You killed them.”
Shaking all over, Alice’s eyes had gone wide and wild and her flesh had turned deathly blue. Her mouth hung open, panting breaths coming out in frozen puffs of cloudy vapor. She slowly stood from a crouch and turned around on the spot, surveying the disaster. “They wouldn’t stop,” she whispered. “They wouldn’t stop.”
Ai showed up out of nowhere and slipped on the frost covering everything. She fell on her ass, letting out a squawk of surprise. A dead body stopped her slide, leaking blood all over the ground. The moment she noticed, she scrabbled away from it, through the pool of blood. Despite her mouth moving, no sound came out.
“Let’s go, we gotta go now.” Bobby nodded for Jayce to take control of Alice while he hauled Ai to her feet and hustled her away. “Where’s Jasmine,” he asked as they kept moving. When she didn’t answer, he squeezed her arms a little. “Do I gotta slap ya?” It
worked before.
Shaking her head, Ai took a deep breath. “She invited us to dinner. When I got there, I was a little confused about what to say, so it kind of came out all wrong. I should have gone over what to say with you first. What happened back there?”
“Alice freaked out and blew up.”
“She killed those people.”
“Yeah. As if things weren’t screwed up enough before. Which way to Jasmine’s place?”
Ai pointed and they walked. Jayce herded Alice along in silence. She had nothing to say all the way to Jasmine’s apartment complex. It was a big place with lots of shade trees around three tall buildings. Bobby would call the neighborhood nice, though he suspected Alice needed more to be impressed. Rather, she would if she wasn’t so busy being numb. Little Miss Follows The Rules had to be exploding inside from what she just did, and when it came out, the mess wouldn’t to be pretty.
“Is she nice?”
“She’s sweet,” Ai nodded, “really nice, yeah.”
“Let’s go in, then.”
Jasmine answered the buzzer with a voice so cheerful it felt weird. She also let Ai in without question. In the middle of a middle floor, the door had a sticker of a squirrel with a word bubble over its head, the word ‘hi’ printed in large block letters inside.
The woman who answered the door had a squirrel in her hands, and stood aside so the four of them could come in. She smiled and greeted each of them, delighted to see them all for no apparent reason. Jayce steered Alice to the couch and forced her to sit, then sat himself down on the floor, away from her. Jasmine hugged Ai enthusiastically. “I didn’t expect you back so soon! Is everything okay?”
Her olive complexion hinted at Mediterranean ancestry, and she had long brown hair in a perky ponytail that hung to halfway down her back with the ends forming loose curls. Bright and pleasant, her open face welcomed them as much as her words did, and Bobby found himself smiling at the pretty lady in the ruffled floral blouse despite what they’d just dealt with.