Superheroes In Denim

by Lee French

  Robert left a pause. “Are you alright?”

  The entirety of the last six weeks tried to push its way out of his mouth. From the joy of meeting Elena to being on the run right now, he burned to share it all. “Yeah,” he heard himself say in a voice so easily controlled by years of practice in the fine art of keeping his parents happy that it happened with no effort. “I…I think I met someone.”

  “Ah. This is all about a girl.” He sounded so relieved that he must have expected something devastating, something he’d dread explaining to his wife.

  “Yeah, it kind of is. She’s…” He turned and kissed Elena’s temple. “Something special.”

  Robert chuckled. “Good to know. I’m glad you called. When you decided to blow off school, your mother got a little difficult, but I convinced her to give you your space. You’re welcome for that.”

  “Yes, thank you, I appreciate it. Things have been, I don’t know, crazy, I guess. I’ll add Chicago to my list of places to take her soon.”

  “See that you do. I’m looking forward to meeting her.”

  Liam felt the urge to say goodbye and hang up. That’s what the conversation demanded. How could he explain what he’d seen and done, what he’d become? How could he even ask about who he really was? He wanted to know and understand, yet he wanted to do it without causing a problem or driving a wedge into the middle of his family. “Dad, um.” It must have sounded awful coming from him, something so inarticulate and needy it made Elena look up at him with concern.

  “It sounds like you fell, hard, son,” Robert chuckled again. “Don’t let her use that against you too much. See you soon.”

  Liam pulled the phone away from his face and stared at it when his father hung up, caught between the shame of not being able to figure out how to ask a question, embarrassment at sounding like an idiot, and something tight in his chest he didn’t have a name for. His father cut to the heart of things, guessing right while also guessing wrong. He did fall, and it was hard, and it was wonderful, and he loved her.

  People tossed that word around in the circles he ran in, using it to mean “like” or “lust”. He feared saying it out loud, worried it would cheapen what he felt. Worse, he had no idea what he’d do if she didn’t feel the same things back. He had no fear of rejection, yet found the idea of this rejection terrifying. He could live if everyone else rejected him for the rest of his life, for everything, so long as Elena didn’t.

  Reaching back, Riker took his phone and pocketed it. “You think that hard for too long, you’re gonna blow a gasket. We going to Reagan?”

  “Yeah.” Liam frowned. Elena had been taken from him there. He’d wanted to show her around the city for a couple of days before taking her home. With the still unconscious man laying across their laps and three other people in the car, he preferred not to make any grand displays of affection, yet he needed Elena’s support now. He pulled her closer and leaned into her, brushing a finger down her cheek. “We’ll probably beat the plane there.”

  “Gives us time to eat,” Kaitlin said with a yawn. “We should go back to the farmhouse. It’s kind of a mess, but no one will look for us there.”

  Liam thought about that. “Privek already knows where it is.” Her logic, though, took no effort to follow. “But he’d never expect me to go there. Even if he thinks Bobby is with us, he wouldn’t expect Bobby to go there, either, because that would be stupid. Going there makes no sense when the people we need to free are in DC.”

  “Sounds like a plan, then.” Riker nodded his approval. “We go there, make an assault plan, meet up with Bobby, and prepare to hit them hard, where it counts.”

  They arrived at the airport with enough time to pick up food for everyone, then boarded the plane while the Moore family pilot took care of refueling. The middle aged retired Navy aviator said nothing about the number of people or the two still unconscious ones carried inside still only wrapped in sheets. He was a professional and worked for wealthy people. Although Liam didn’t think any of them had ever done anything this strange, his father paid well enough for the man not to comment.

  Liam pulled out spare clothes his parents left in the drawers for the times when a business meeting in another city went from a few hours to a few days and left them next to the still sleeping bodies. Paul sat with his sister on the bed in the back of the plane, holding her hand. Kaitlin took a nap on the couch. Liam and Elena sat together at one of the windows. The five soldiers played cards at the table. The other victim lay on the floor.

  About two hours into the flight, the guy on the floor curled up in distress and mewled. He appeared to be having a seizure, or something similar.

  From the back, Paul called out in a panicky voice, “Something’s wrong. She’s waking up, but something’s wrong!”

  Riker nodded towards the back. “Hegi, go check on the girl. Platt, this guy.” The two men tossed their cards and followed orders.

  Liam cringed, knowing he should do something and not wanting to. He much preferred to stay quietly by Elena’s side and enjoy her presence. The piteous noises coming from the guy’s mouth punched him in the guilt, and he left her to crouch beside the guy. The poor guy hurt so much that he twitched, and it sounded like Paul’s sister had the same problem.

  Hesitant to take on that level of pain, Liam rubbed his forehead nervously and took a deep breath. “I don’t want to do this,” he whined.

  Platt gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “Nut up or shut up.”

  The abruptness and crudeness took him off guard; he expected some kind of short inspirational speech. Liam barked out a laugh and put his hand on the guy. Nothing happened. He could tell the man suffered. He could also tell his ability wouldn’t fix it. All amusement disappeared and he frowned “I think…I don’t know. It’s like— His body is attacking itself, but that’s not really the right way to explain. It’s not like cancer, not a tumor. It’s something different.” ven he knew that made no sense.

  Riker gathered up all the cards calmly. “Maybe they were being kept sedated so they didn’t have to suffer through this, whatever it is.”

  “That makes sense,” Liam agreed. “If I had to guess, I’d say he’s mutating.” That thought led to another, which made him want to know how Privek got all these people. “Okay. They’ve had blood from at least a few of us for months now. Assuming they have lots of money and access to lots of intelligent people they can keep under control one way or another, I’m going to guess that a facility connected to this whole thing was conducting research into our abilities.”

  “I’m with you,” Riker nodded, “and I see where you’re headed. They’re trying to make more of you guys. They’ve got the resources to try it, and given secrecy level Ridiculous, they could pretty much do anything they wanted, including human testing.”

  Platt shrugged. “If we had some morphine or something, I could give it to him, but I don’t see anything I can do or diagnose. What I don’t get about that theory is where they got these people.”

  Riker shrugged and gave the guy a closer look. Liam did the same thing. He hadn’t paid this one much attention before, thinking of him as nothing more than some guy in a sheet.

  He was young, maybe twenty at most, with light brown hair and beard. He seemed decently fed but lean, without a lot of muscle mass. Something about him made Liam guess he’d had a hard life before he’d been grabbed, though he couldn’t put his finger on what.

  “Probably not military,” Riker said with a shrug, “unless he’s been in that facility for a while. Hair’s too long. Beard only suggests a couple of weeks at most since he last paid attention to grooming. And the girl is obviously not—too young and pierced.”

  In the back, Liam heard Paul quietly begging Hegi to do something. He couldn’t blame the guy. If it was his own sister or Elena, he’d probably feel the same way. He got up and put a hand on Paul’s shoulder, hoping to distract him. “Come on. There’s nothing we can do here, you need to stop looking. She’ll come o
ut of it eventually and we need to talk.”

  “You don’t know that. She could be stuck like this! It could kill her.” Paul looked up at Liam, naked helplessness on his face, crinkles of pain tightening it. “I can hear her screaming in my head. She doesn’t even pause to take a breath in there.”

  “Paul.” Gripping his shoulder more forcefully, Liam pushed him back. “You have more control than that. You can block it out. I know you can. Listening to that won’t help her, it only makes it harder for you to do anything useful. As soon as we land, we’ll try to get some kind of painkiller or sedative, or something, but we can’t do that right now. There’s nothing we can do, except try to figure things out. We need your help to do that.”

  Paul nodded and let go of his sister. He covered his head with both arms and cringed with agony. When he opened his eyes again, he averted them from the girl and stood up, following Liam away from her. “She’s going to be fine,” he said a few times, probably to himself.

  They sat down in the two seats vacated by Platt and Hegi, who moved the unknown young man to lie on the bed beside Paul’s sister and stayed with them both in case anything changed. “Paul,” Liam said gently, knowing he was still upset, “you said your sister ran away from home. What’s your best guess for what she would have been doing out there?”

  The telepath rubbed his face with both hands. “I could find out, I’m sure it’s there, under all the—” He finished the statement by waving his hand and slumping his shoulders.

  “Just guess for now,” Riker said in the same perfunctory tone he always used. “You know her, right? What do you think happened?”

  Paul shrugged. “She was probably on the streets. Mom checked with all her friends and Dad looked for her. He’s a cop. There are a lot of places a…someone like her can get lost.”

  It wouldn’t help to suggest that Paul actually meant “a young, pretty girl” instead of “someone like her”, so Liam politely refrained. “Seattle is a long way for these guys to go just to pick up a test subject.”

  Paul snorted. It managed to be depressed and amused at the same time. “They could have picked her up at the same time they picked me up for all I know. I mean, they lied to us about everything else. Why not this, too?” One hand gestured back at Elena, who sat looking out the window. “You remember how Maisie said she was picked up by guys in suits, then Privek and his guys rescued her? How can we think that was anything but a setup at this point? Camellia said something similar, so did some of the others.”

  “Yeah.” Liam sat back and stared glumly at the table. They’d all been played, hard, and it annoyed him to discover he had such an obvious blind spot. All his life, he’d been able to finger the women who only wanted him for his money. Privek walked up and manipulated him effortlessly. Elena was his Achilles Heel and always would be. She’d been used against him so easily and effectively that he was ashamed of himself.

  “I think maybe it’s time for you guys to fill us in on the whole story, from front to back.” Riker’s voice startled him out of a brood. “We’re here because we trust Bobby, for the most part, and I’m getting the basic picture, but if you could lay it all out, we can help more effectively.”

  “I don’t think we know the whole picture,” Liam admitted, sounding grumpy because he felt grumpy. “Not as much as Bobby does.”

  Sitting up and rubbing her eyes, Kaitlin yawned. “I know the whole picture, so listen up, kiddies. This is the bedtime story to end all bedtime stories. Roswell. There was really at least one alien. They got DNA from her, one way or another. In vitro fertilization comes along and some asshats say ‘hey, what would happen if we crossed this alien DNA with human?’ They try it through a program that looks like a social service organization, managing to actually impregnate thirty-five women across the country.

  “The program loses funding, the kids all go on to grow up without knowing they were part of an experiment. Their parents don’t know, either. One day, one of us gets a superpower, someone notices, government gets interested. Four of us get picked up by men in suits, of which Privek is one. Bobby was one of the ones they picked up. They fumble the whole thing and all four manage to escape after their superpowers become active. Led to believe they were part of some crazy experiment, they go across the country, with a list they conveniently happen to find while escaping, to try to convince the rest of the thirty-five to band together for the purpose of self-defense.

  “We were going to try to work together to determine what to do, how to live in this human world without fucking it up for everyone and getting war declared on us for existing. Turns out, ten of us were actually taken by the other team,” she gestured to indicate both Paul and Liam, “and convinced the rest of us are the bad guys and need to be stopped and locked up until we can be convinced not to cause trouble. You guys came in the middle of the night and ripped us out of our beds, shot us with tranquilizer darts like animals and bundled everyone off to freezer drawers.

  “I only escaped because I just barely knew what was going to happen. Since then, we’ve learned there’s another one of us we can’t account for, Kanik Okpik, who must be the first one of us that got his power. He’s got to be part of this whole thing, somehow, but whether Privek is using him or the other way around, we don’t know yet. Looks now like they’re experimenting, probably with the intent to create their own little army of supers. Who knows what their ultimate goal really is. Depends on how crazy they are.”

  Everyone stared at Kaitlin as she spoke. She met Liam’s eyes the whole time. He wanted to look away, but felt that would be cowardly beyond even him. When she stopped, she smiled without even the tiniest trace of happiness. “We wanted to be left alone, and you fucks came and killed Tiana’s cat. I buried it myself.”

  The moment she said that, Liam flushed with shame. Paul paled and covered his mouth with a hand. “We didn’t know,” Liam murmured. He regretted the words instantly.

  “Yeah, no shit.” Kaitlin snorted and shook her head. “I bet you all thought you were doing the right thing and deserved a fucking cookie and pat on the head for being such good boys and girls.”

  “Sounds like it’s time to make amends,” Carter said lightly, too lightly for the situation. “Can’t take back the past, but you can own the future. We need a plan to break the others out of the freezer drawers, show the rest how they were played, and then what to do from there.”

  Riker nodded. “If all those people in those beds are going to have superpowers like you guys, good chance we’ll have a war on our hands until we can convince them they’re being used. Even if we can, it’s possible they’ll have someone with mind control, right? Have to plan for that.”

  “Bobby is good for riding to the rescue.” Kaitlin stopped glaring at Liam, which had no effect on how much he felt like an asshole right now. “When we meet back up with him, he’ll have ideas.”

  “His mind can’t be controlled,” Paul offered, his voice subdued. “He’s in too many parts. And Cant’s mind is shielded. Roulet’s blocked from me, too.”

  Kaitlin shrugged. “I don’t know anyone’s last names.”

  “Um, Stephen and…Andrew?”

  “Stephen is a vampire, he drinks blood, is super strong and can fly. Can’t handle sunlight. Andrew can block anyone’s power and make it not work. He’s going to be a big help if we’re up against others like us.”

  Riker nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll need both of them on our team. Here’s hoping our bad guy doesn’t figure that out and shoot them in the head rather than risk facing them.”

  When the conversation stalled, Liam got up to try to ignore the guilt he now felt on top of his shame. She was right. He did all that for a cookie and a pat on the head, and didn’t really stop to consider how he might be wrong, how they might all be wrong. It had been all for Elena. That failed at making it okay. Losing her shouldn’t have prevented him from using his brain.

  Dropping himself down next to her, he took her hand and reveled in how she smiled a
t him. He kissed her palm gently and explained all of that in French, bracing for her to hate him because of it. To his surprise, instead of showing any disappointment in him, she climbed onto his lap and hugged him tightly and told him, “I love you, too.” After a pause she added, “I will try not to do anything that stupid to show it.”

  He didn’t deserve her.

  Chapter 8

  “I need you to kinda take half the wheel, Asyllis. Can you do that? I gotta use dragons to get that tail offa our tail.” Bobby aimed the Humvee at a place where the base had minimal fencing, probably only meant to separate military and public land. It’d keep the weirdo conspiracy guys out well enough, but wouldn’t do much to keep a vehicle like this in.

  “I don’t see the connection between those two things.”

  “It’s my hand and arm. I gotta let them off and I can’t use it while they’re gone.”

  “Why can’t you just make your leg into dragons? You don’t seem to be using that one.”

  Bobby blinked a few times. “Uh.” The thought never occurred to him before. Every time he needed some, they popped off his hand, then his arm. A few times, he’d re-formed without a toe because of a dragon being missing, but he’d never tried it on purpose.“I, uh, don’t really got time for experimenting right now. Kinda need my attention for the road.”

  She sighed in resignation and offered her hand. “What do I do?”

  Oh, heckbiscuits, she had no idea how to drive. Because she spent her whole lifetime on Earth in a box. Great, just great. “Hold on here,” he grabbed her hand and stuck it on the wheel. “Don’t resist when I crank it around, just help me keep it straight while I ain’t turning, okay?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Bobby had a powerful urge to quote a movie he liked, mocking the notion of “your best”, but curbed it since she probably wouldn’t get it. Her room hadn’t had a TV, after all. Instead, he put his effort into pushing his whole right arm into dragons and sending them out to defend the Humvee. They were to try not to hurt anyone or let anyone get hurt, but do whatever it took to stop anything following them. He couldn’t control them directly, not now, so they’d have to…do their best.