by Stacy
"We're almost finished. These new specimens you brought me are perfect," Heath said. "As soon as I've siphoned their powers, you can be done with this farce of a registration."
The government was utilizing the User Registration Act to gather up Users and drain them of their powers. Heath had found a way to isolate and extract their special abilities from their DNA, he was then able to divide and duplicate them, before injecting them into humans where they would infuse into that person's DNA. This would enable the transfer of User powers to hundreds of ordinary humans. Of course, as soon as he had presented his findings, the American government couldn't wait to get their hands all over it. Their dreams, of having an unstoppable super-powered army coming to fruition, were well worth the projected costs and whatever tools the doctor requested, he was given.
Alaric frowned. Being used as a chess piece in the government's game, was not his idea of being the great hero he had worked so hard to become, and he didn't like it one bit. Of course, he liked the idea of losing his powers even less. Better to be a pawn than a Guinea Pig. That was the deal for the All Americans, they put on the public show of support and bring in the Users who didn't register, and in return they were granted amnesty from the power extraction.
"Where are the Barber and Icer?" Heath asked as he walked the rows of glass cylinders with a notepad and pen, jotting down notes as he went.
"You mean Barber and Ryker?" Alaric asked, knowing full well who Heath was referring to. "They have escaped."
"Escaped?" Heath hung his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. "What do you mean escaped? This is unacceptable. I need one of every User."
"Okay, we will get you a different Barber and Icer then," Alaric said, but Heath stared at him as if he were some kind of asshole.
"Ryker and Barber are one of a kind Users," Heath said, steadily raising his voice. "There are no other Barbers or Icers, you musclebound dolt. You will get them for me, and you will get them for me now."
With his crescendo, he slammed his clipboard to the ground and stomped his foot like a petulant toddler. The remainder of the All American team, still doing their best to avoid any interaction, jumped at his outburst.
"Finding them may be difficult," Alaric said, remaining calm. The fragility of their own status was ever at the forefront of all of his interactions with the good doctor.
"I want them now and I want them alive," Heath said in a threating tone.
Without so much as another word to Heath, Alaric turned his back on the man and headed for the door.
"Let's go," he said as he passed his companions on the way out. "We've got work to do."
*****
Alaric watched a wall full of monitors for any sign of Barber or Ryker. After leaving Heath and the government lab, the All Americans went straight to their base of operations, a secret facility built into the side of Mount Rainier. Upon arrival, Alaric sent out a series of drones to search the woods outside of Seattle for the two missing Users. Alaric watched the feed from the drones in real time on a massive arrangement of screens that stretched from floor to ceiling, but so far he had found nothing.
Alaric slumped back in his chair, kicked his feet up on the table, and watched in fixated silence.
"Any luck?" Stella asked as she came around the chair and put a hand on Alaric's shoulder.
"No sign of them...yet," Alaric answered.
"Do you think we will find them?" Stella asked.
"Oh, we will find them." Alaric confirmed. "We don't have a choice. We have to find them."
"About that," she said. "Do you really think this is a good thing to be doing? The right thing?" She walked over to face him, staring intently into his bright hazel eyes and blocking his view of the screens.
Alaric leaned to the side in his seat, trying to see around her, but she simply stepped in front of him again.
She was an eccentric dresser, wearing a tight pair of leather pants, a purple vest, and flowing silver colored blouse. Her hair hung over one side of her face, highlighting the fact that it was dyed bright purple.
"This is what we do. We stop the bad guys. It's what we've always done."
"This time it feels different. Doesn't this feel wrong to you?" Stella placed her hands on her hips. "I mean the way Heath said it was precisely right, we're hunting them down; like animals. Don't we have a similar duty to protect our own kind from becoming lab rats for the mad scientist's twisted experiment."
"Our kind, these are not our kind. They are breaking the law, and if they can't behave in civilized society, perhaps they don't deserve to have their powers. Did you consider the lives we may be saving?"
"But at what cost, Alaric? To provide the government with a possibly uncontrollable military force? Who knows what they may do with it. Who knows what the individuals that are crazy enough to volunteer, will do with it." Stella continued to plead, "It's not their natural power, so who will be held accountable for the outcome when this goes terribly wrong? How may will die then?"
"What would you have me do?" he asked frustrated. "Do you want to end up in one of those glass cylinders? Do you want your powers sucked from your body for the government to distribute and feed their super powered army?"
"We could always fight."
"Fight? The United States government? Are you kidding me?" he asked. "We may be superheroes, but we aren't Superman. We are not some invincible alien being, this isn't some comic book where we can't die."
"I would rather die doing what's right than live as their eternal indentured servant." She said. "We have upheld their laws without question for decades, maybe it's time we pushed back."
"We would face insurmountable odds. The full force of the United States military, including those newly designated with our same abilities," he said. "It would be a witch hunt. Anyone with any perceived exceptional ability would be targeted. They would strike fear into the heart of every human, and most would turn on us. With their help there would be no hiding. They would hunt us all; to extinction. The only ones left with powers would be those they could maintain under complete governmental control, everyone else would be eliminated." It was now Alaric's turn to plead his case. "This way is easier. Only those needed for Heath's experiments are taken. The rest register and leave. Sure, some of the Users will lose their powers, but the rest will return to their lives as normal."
She looked at him doubtfully. "I don't know. Something just doesn't feel right about this. Won't the families of the missing Users notice when they do not return?"
"Heath will be done with them in a few days, and they will be free to go. Without their powers they can live as normal humans do. Hell, most of them should consider it a blessing. There's no pain that comes with being normal."
Stella headed for the door, with her hand on the knob she stopped and turned her head over her left shoulder to address Alaric one last time.
"Who is to say what is normal?" she questioned him, as she exited the room.
Alaric shook his head. For every answer there were only more questions. Questions that needed answering, but he had no time to go searching for them. Right now he needed to find Barber and Ryker. He stared at the screens on the wall, finding nothing, but more trees, shrubs, and wildlife. He hung his head in frustration and let out a deep sigh.
Chapter 5
Carter eyed his surroundings carefully, to be sure no one was watching him, as he pulled back the dilapidated plywood to enter the abandoned house they were temporarily calling home. He squeezed between the board and the door jamb to enter the foyer of what appeared to have been, at one time, a very nice home. Clearly a victim of foreclosure during the market crash, it was still littered with expensive looking furniture, the owners had failed to take with them in their haste to clear out. Carter guessed they were fairly safe from prospective buyers intruding in on their hideout, even with the steadily rising market; the place was a disaster.
There were shards of broken glass, from previous squatters busting out the windows, scattered
across the floor. The walls were decorated with magnificent graffiti murals that had taken some time and serious effort to complete. Most likely it had become a meet up spot for the local kids looking for a place to drink booze and party. Carter ventured it was pretty much a sausage-fest by the filthy porno mags they had left behind. The entry smelled like piss and the dirty little bastards had no doubt been using the corner of the room as a urinal.
For Carter, the last few days were reminiscent of his worst of days, spent in one junkie flophouse or another. Time stood still and flew by at the same time. There was no forward progression in their world, no movement, no change, but the time they had spent there doing almost nothing, seemed as though it was just a moment. None of them had showered or brushed their teeth in days. They looked every bit the part of a displaced band of wanderers. It was almost too much for the normally germaphobic Carter to bear.
Along with Ryker and Evan, he had passed their time in refuge speaking mostly of inconsequential nonsense. There was no real motivation to do anything else. They wondered on exactly what their Compound family was experiencing. How many had escaped, what did they do with those that were caught and still refused the registration?
As soon as he was safely inside, Carter took a knee to catch his breath. He had just run halfway across town, through the woods to the Compound, and back again. He could have easily flown and saved his time and energy, but he didn't need the unwanted attention that a man on fire, flying through the air, attracted. They were holed up just inside the Seattle city limits and had spent the past few days without so much as peaking out one of the boarded up windows until now. With no sign of the other Compound Users, and despite the objections of his friends, Carter insisted he go back to check it out.
He found Ryker and Evan eagerly awaiting his return, but Barber didn't even look up. It was probably for the best, Carter didn't exactly have great news for them anyway.
"They're all gone. The place was deserted," Carter said, still mildly winded as he entered the living room."The Compound is in ruins. They left the place a total shit hole. Most of the cabins are destroyed. The big house is barely standing."
"Those fuckers," Evan spat as he jumped up and began to pace the floor, chewing on his nails anxiously. "Figures they'd ruin the only good thing we had going for us."
"What are we going to do now?" Ryker asked. Not that any of them were wearing their Sunday's best, but the normally suavely dressed Ryker was in shambles. His jeans were ripped in the knees and grass stains adorned his jacket from their tumble across the yard. "We need a plan."
Barber meanwhile, sat in the corner of the room, as if Carter had said nothing. The young man had barely spoken more than a few words since the incident. Carter had become accustomed to Barber's recent unresponsiveness. He was still a kid after all. A kid that had already been through so much, and carrying the weight of addiction on top of it all. Even now, he sat removed from the group, pulling on his spiky blond hair and staring at the floor.
Carter was not encouraged by what he had seen, with the rest of their User group captured or scattered to the wind and the compound all but demolished, he could see very few options. It didn't help that he had been without medication since fleeing the Compound. Maintaining his state of mind was a full time job at the moment, none the less evolving a plan. He was barely holding it together these last few days, but knew he had to, he must hold it all together, put on a brave face for everyone, but most importantly for Barber.
Unfortunately, he had not been able to sneak into the big house and retrieve his pills during his trip to investigate the Compound. Not for lack of trying, it had been buried in the rubble and he spent all the extra time he dared, in an effort to make his way to it. In desperation, he had tried to squeeze between the fallen roof beams blocking the door to reach his bedroom where the medication was hidden. It was just too tight, and he was afraid that if he moved one of the fallen beams the whole roof would collapse in on him.
"There is more to this registration than the government being some kind of User watch dog," Evan said as he continued to pace nervously back and forth across the room.
"Like what?" Carter asked as he took a seat on the floor.
"I don't know, but it just doesn't make sense," Evan said. "Think about it. Why would the government send the All Americans to chase us down like we were draft dodgers for something as little as a registration?"
If Carter didn't know any better, he would have thought Evan was on drugs. The man was speaking like a paranoid junkie. He was shocked Evan wasn't peaking out the boarded up windows like they were being watched.
"We should just go turn ourselves in," Ryker interjected. "Let's just get this registration over and done with. Then they'll have no reason to come after us." Ryker, always the cool headed one in the group, was trying to diffuse the situation.
Carter let out a heavy sigh, pinched the bridge of his nose, and closed his eyes. He concentrated hard. He couldn't help but be torn between Ryker and Evan's thinking. One side of him wanted to trust that Ryker was right, that people were inherently good, and they could just go register and be done with it. But the other side told him that people were also evil fucks and they can't be trusted.
"Have you even been listening to a word I said?" Evan asked incredulously. "If this was just a registration, how come we can't find any sign of our friends? Why haven't we at least heard from them?"
"Maybe because we've been hiding in this dump the whole time," Ryker answered.
"Maybe you're right," Evan said, much to the surprise of Carter and Ryker. But what he said next was not so much of a shock. "Maybe we should skip town. Lay low for awhile."
"You mean run?" Carter asked. He stepped in front of Evan to stop the man's nervous pacing. "I don't like the sound of that."
"Me either. If we run now we'll be running forever," Ryker said. "I don't want to spend the rest of my days looking over my shoulder."
"Then what should we do?" an exasperated Evan asked.
"You know what I want to do," Carter said. "I want to fight."
"You always want to fight," Evan said.
"You bet your ass I do," Carter said. "I don't blame the government for their part in this though. I blame the All Americans. They're the ones that destroyed our home. They're the ones that drug off our friends. They're the ones that turned on their own people, and I for one want to find out where they took them."
"You're crazy." Evan waved Carter off dismissively.
Tensions were high and that was the Carter's final straw.
"Hey, fuck you man. Your run and hide, live to fight another day bullshit, doesn't work for me," Carter said, moving towards Evan and poking him the chest with his pointer finger. "You can spin it any way you want, you're just trying to save your own skin. You're a fucking coward."
"Fuck me? Fuck me? No, fuck you," Evan countered, and pushed Carter back away from him. "You're the one that finds need to be the big man and put on a big show for the world, and for what so they like you, so they accept you? You want to be one of them, why don't you just go and register? Submit to their fascist registration.
Carter and Evan erupted in incoherent argument, shouting over each other and coming close together again.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Ryker stepped in between them and pushed them both back. "Carter is right," Ryker said.
"What?" Carter and Evan said in unison, looking at him quizzically.
"But we've got to go about this the right way."
"So...what's the plan?" Evan finally conceded.
*****
"It's been three days Trisha," Alaric said. "Three days." Alaric watched Trisha from his seat at the table in the center of the room.
"Yeah, well your fancy drones haven't had much luck either," Trisha said as she paced back and forth. "You know that sniffing isn't an exact science."
The surveillance room was clinical, with a single table and a few chairs. Otherwise the room was empty, except for the solid wall of monitor
s at the back of the room. Alaric had kept an almost constant, vigilant watch since their return from the Compound; barely even sleeping.
"Yeah, but three days? Come on," a thoroughly frustrated Alaric said.
They had the drones on around the clock surveillance of the city and had turned up exactly squat on Ryker, Barber, or the companions they fled with. Trisha's attempts at sniffing them out hadn't been much better. She had picked up the trail through the woods, but was lost as soon as they got to the city limits.
Trisha finally stopped her pacing and turned to stare Alaric in the face. She put her hands down on the table directly across from him. "It's not like they want to be found," she said.
"Maybe they fled," Stella said in an vain attempt to ease the tension. "Maybe you need to widen your search."
"Thank you, Stella. You're a world of help," Alaric said facetiously.
Though his current disposition was a far cry form his normally calm demeanor and Stella knew he was stressed and lacking sleep, she did not give a single fuck. She wasn't about to tolerate his flippant remarks and disrespect. "Now look here asshole..."
"Just find them!" Alaric slammed a fist down on the table, silencing her.
"What do you expect, Alaric?" Trisha asked putting one hand on her hip and pointing at the monitors with the other. "Do you expect them to just show up on your front door with pretty red bows wrapped around their heads?"
Suddenly, an alarm went off; a pulsating red light illuminated the room.
"What's that?" Stella asked.
"Shh!" Alaric shushed her. "That's the proximity alarm."
He stepped over to the wall of television screens and the control panel full of buttons below it. Alaric turned the screens from the drones camera feed to the cameras that surrounded the base.