Slowly, he reached up, lifted his hat, and with a soft tearing of Velcro, removed the satellite phone hidden inside. He and the robo-dog eyed each other warily as he dialed Black.
Jubilee and Paige sat on the floor of the Xabago counting their dwindling funds. Ev was taking a turn playing lookout in the crow’s nest, Monet was zoned out on the couch, while Angelo drove and Jono rode shotgun in the front. After a hundred or so miles on the back-roads, they’d returned to the freeway. “You’ll get better mileage,” Espeth had told them, “plus, if you can keep in traffic and crowded places, the ’Goths are more likely to keep their distance. They don’t like attention.” Angelo peeked at the girls in the rearview mirror. “What up on the budget situation, ladies? It’s hard to tell with this sCrewy gas gauge, but I think we’re on fumes, and there’s a mega-truck stop coming up soon. If we have to wake up Monet and have her push again, we are never gonna hear the end of it.”
Paige swept all the bills into a little pile and wrapped them together with a maroon hair scrunchie. “Do it,” she said. “Daddy needs a new tank of gas,” cracked Jubilee.
“I don’t suppose,” said Angelo, “there’s enough there for another burger run, is there? Cold Beanie Weenies and Spam sandwiches are getting old.”
“Not to worry,” said Paige, “the Beanie Weenies are running low, and we ate the last of the Spam for breakfast.” Angelo groaned. “A simple ‘no’ would have done the job.” He lapsed into a mock-announcer voice. “Come on down to Mr. Fixit’s World-O-Trucks for the Beer Nuts and tree-shaped air fresheners, but be sure to bring your Visa, ’cuz they can’t drive fifty-five and they don’t take Avengers’ Identicard!” Paige snickered.
“Like,” said Juiblee, “the Avengers would ever let you in, Angelo.”
“Hey,” he said, “they let the Beast in didn’t they? There’s got to be some flaw in the membership process. Me, I figure you just have to slip Jarvis a C-note or something.”
“Well,” said Paige, scrutinizing their kitty, “that leaves you a couple of twenties short. We should just about get there, but I have no idea how we’re getting home ”
“The way I figure it,” said Jono, “once we get in there and rescue the guys, the Genogoths have no reason to bother us. As long as they don’t have a grudge, we should be able to fire up the old charge cards and ride the plastic surf-board home;” “They won’t hold a grudge, will they?” Jubilee seemed doubtful.
Angelo shrugged. “Ask Leather Lass,” he squinted into the mirror looking for Espeth, “assuming you can find her.” “She’s been brooding in the back ever since we got the tires fixed,” said Monet, without opening her eyes.
'» “Hey,” said Jubilee, “I thought you were sleeping!”
“Sometimes,” replied Monet, “I like to see if you’re any less annoying when you think I’m not listening.” She opened her eyes. “So far, it hasn’t worked.”
“I know you are,” said Jubilee, “but what am I?”
Monet sat up and straightened her long black hair with a sweep of her fingers. “Sticks and stones may break my—” She gave a look of mock realization. “Oh, wait, they won’t.” “Exit coming up,” said Angelo. “I’m going for it.”
“At least,” said Jubilee, “the hot water in the restrooms is free.”
“Hot water,” said Angelo, as he put on the turn signal, “the other white meat!”
Suddenly Ev shifted violently in the crow’s-nest seat. He yelled, “Heads up!” Then he relaxed and slumped back into his seat. “Sorry, false alarm.”
Jubilee wrinkled her nose at him. “Huh?”
“To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a black Volkswagen is just a black Volkswagen.”
The Xabago slowed and pulled into one of the diesel
pumps among endless rows of much larger semi-trucks. “Could be our last stop for a while,” said Angelo. “Everybody out for stretch and pottie break.”
“Just keep it short,” said Paige, “and don’t pick any fights with truckers.”
Espeth appeared from the back bedroom. She avoided eye contact and slipped silently past them.
Angelo scratched his nose idly. “What did we do this time?”
The boredom of the North Carolina interstate was broken as Black’s phone rang. He snatched it up off the passenger seat, expecting news of the missing mutants. Instead, it was Smokey Ashe, a friend from his earliest days as a Genogoth in Phoenix. Ashe had spent the last twenty plus years on a deep-cover guardian assignment, screening an isolated mutant from detection.
“We got bad trouble here,” said Smokey. “Some kind of government super-troops after my boy Catfish. I’m pinned down and can’t help him. The jamming tower was working fine when I checked it two hours ago. I don’t know how they found us.”
Black cursed under his breath. He had a guess how they’d bypassed the screen that protected mutants from scanning devices like Xavier’s Cerebro, but he hoped he was wrong. “Troops, Smokey? How many? This is important.”
“Three. One of them is a tracker, one freezes things somehow, and the other has a pack of robot dogs. One here ready to rip my throat out if I make a wrong move. I need backup. Lots of it.”
A knot tightened in Black’s stomach. “I’m in North Carolina right now, Smokey. Most of our east-coast rover-packs have been pulled south of here. It’ll take hours to get help there. You’ll have to hold out.”
“With my last breath, Black, for all the good it will do Catfish. This dog is looking at me funny. I think it’s figured out what my phone is for. It’s—”
Black shook the phone and tapped it against his steering wheel, but the problem wasn’t on his end. The phone had gone dead.
Heart pounding, gills gasping, Catfish Quincy ran through the Kentucky woods like his life depended on it, and just possibly it did. Behind him he could hear something a little like the baying of hounds, and yet different enough to make his leathery skin crawl.
He didn’t know who the strangers from the helicopter were, or what they wanted, but Smokey had said they were bad, and that was enough for him. Smokey was his best friend in the entire world, like a big brother to him, and he’d never, ever, steered Catfish wrong. If Smokey said run, he’d run.
The hounds, or whatever they were, were closer now, but so was the lake. It was a big, sprawling man-made thing, nestled between two hills and held back by a huge earthen dike that the WPA had built back in the 30s. The water was green, murky, and as much as fifty feet deep in places. Catfish knew every inch of it, not just the surface and the shoreline, but the bottom as well, even to the location of a limestone cavern in the deepest part.
If he got into the water, he could shuck off his boots and coveralls and just stay down there, for months if he had to. They’d never find him, even if they came back with submarines and sonar. He’d just be the Loch Ness monster of Muddy Gap, Kentucky.
He groaned as he slid down an especially steep bank covered with a thick layer of dead leaves. His webbed feet didn’t fit into boots that well, and they were no danged good for running on the best of days. He’d be glad to get in the water and shuck them off.
This was the last hill. Once he topped this rise, cut through that thick stand of trees, and slid down the bank, he’d be in the water, free and clear. Up, over, down. Even as he slid down the bank, he could see that something looked wrong about the lake. Then he landed with a syrupy splash, and found himself waist deep in—slush.
It startled him, but it wasn’t much of a problem. Cold, even freezing cold, had never hurt him, just made him sluggish. He dived under the slush with no more hesitation, and began swimming with powerful strokes down for the deep water. Then he ran face first into a wall of ice. He recoiled. His eyes were especially sensitive, but he couldn’t see much. He relied on his incredible sense of touch, and the feelers on either side of his mouth. He couldn’t find a way through the wall. He turned 90 degrees and started swimming again. Ten yards later, he hit the ice again. He doubled back the other way.
Maybe fifteen yards. Back the other way again, maybe he’d missed something.
Ten yards. How was that possible? Not only had the pond never frozen completely in all the years he’d been coming ’here, it was spring. When he’d swam here catching fish this morning—well—it hadn’t been like bathwater, but it had been nowhere near freezing. Now it all seemed to be frozen except the little bit he was swimming in, and even that was getting smaller.
Cautiously, he poked his eyes above the surface. White flakes were falling all around him. He’d seen snow before, but never like this. There were three men on the bank, looking right at him. They wore some kind of armor, like the hardsuits the girls in The Bubblegum Crisis video wore. He quickly ducked under the surface—and his feet ran into the ice coming up underneath him. In a panic, he reached out. The ice was closing in from all sides, close enough to touch!
He shoved his head above the slush, just in time to feel it freeze solid around his shoulders. He struggled, but the ice held him solid, sapping his strength, till even his brain seemed to work in slow motion. “Who are you?”
The one in the blue armor spoke, though apparently not to him. “Hound units Three-dog-night, Top Dog, and Bloodhound reporting. Mission successful. Mutant target located and immobilized. Calling for air pickup.”
“Who are you?” wailed Catfish. “What did you do with my buddy, Smokey? Why are you doing this to me? I never hurt nobody!"
“Cease struggle, mutant'” said Blue. ‘‘You are now the property of the United States Government Hound Program,” “Let me go,” cried Catfish. “Mutants ain’t real,” he sobbed, “they’re only in the movies!”
The students filed back into the Xabago. Angelo handed Paige the thin stack of bills left as change after he’d paid for filling the tanks. In return, she handed him a small, plastic bag with a cartoon pig printed on the front. He looked at it, puzzled.
“I took pity on you,” she explained. “There was some pork jerky in the double-discount, close-out bin.”
Angelo held it at arm’s length, between thumb and forefinger. “Yum,” he said without enthusiasm.
' Jono looked around, puzzled. “Where’s Espeth?”
Paige looked surprised. “She’s not here. She left the ladies’ room while we were washing up, and said she was headed straight back here. That was ten minutes ago. Ev, look in the back.”
Ev disappeared for a moment, then returned. “No joy” he said. “We better spread out and look for her.”
“You won’t find her,” said Angelo, “if she doesn’t want to be found.”
Jono glared at him. “What’s that bloody supposed to mean?”
Angelo smirked. “Isn’t it obvious. Leather-lass has skipped out on us.”
“No,” said Jubilee, “she couldn’t have.”
“Ev,” asked Angelo, “was her bag in there?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t notice. I’ll go check.”
He ducked into the bedroom, then came out with a folded fast-food napkin in his hand. Somebody had written on it “JONO” in felt pen. “Her stuff is gone,” said Ev, “and this was on the bed.” He handed the paper to Jono, who unfolded it, read, then groaned and closed his eyes.
“What?” demanded Paige. “What?”
Jono held out the napkin so the rest of them could see. There were two words written there. “TRUST ME.” It was signed, “Espeth.”
“In recent days, you’ve heard me joke about my missing cohost, Recall, Scooter McCloud is his real name, one you don’t hear him use very much. Well, I’ve made light of his absence, in large part because I just couldn’t believe anything serious had hap-pened to him. It had to be some kind of misunderstanding. [Pause] I’m not so sure of that now. Now, Recall has been a thorn in my side since he joined this program last summer. More than once I’ve wanted to—[Nervous laughter] But I’ve come to respect his intelligence and his devotion to his cause, no matter how much I personally think he’s full of hot air. Things just aren’t the same around here—[Pause] I miss him, the little pain-in-the-butt. Look, / read the ratings, I know how many of you out there are listening. Lots of you already know what Recall looks like. If not, check our web site for a picture and description, or call and we ’11 send it to you. But somebody out there must know something. So this is old Walt Norman asking you—[Pause] No, I’m begging you, send an e-mail or call us, we’ll have operators on duty around the clock till this is over, or call your local police—[Pause] If you think you can trust them with a—[Pause] He may be a mutant, but he’s just a boy for God’s sake. [Pause ] I need to go to a commercial here.”
—Walt Norman Walt and Recall radio program
Paige was the last one to meet back at the coffee shop. The vinyl cushions made a rude noise as she slid heavily down into the booth with the others.
“I take it,” said Angelo, who was warming his hands with a heavy china cup of joe, “that you found her. Probably got her in your back pocket so we don’t lose her again.”
She frowned. “No, Angelo, I didn’t find her. I take it nobody else did either?”
The all looked glumly at her, and that was answer enough. “Well,” said Paige, “here we are, broke, six-hundred miles from home, our friends are in mortal trouble, we’ve told more lies than a Roxxon ‘environmental spokesman’ at a Greenpeace conference, and we don’t even know where we’re going.”
Angelo grabbed a salt shaker to use as a microphone. “That was last week on ‘Mutant Teenagers In Trouble.' We join today’s episode, already in progress.” Angelo noticed a rough looking trucker a few tables over staring at them, and tugged his lower lip up over the bottom of his nose.
Jubilee pulled the collar of her coat up to hide her face and tried to slide under the table. “Gross me out, Skin. Like things aren’t bad enough, you’re going to start a riot.”
Angelo let his lip snap down to its normal position, revealing a big frown. “Yeah, well right about now, getting to bust some heads would be a big improvement as far as I’m concerned.”
Jubilee sighed. “Ang, this wasn’t a fun routine when Wolvie used to pull it, and he had way more couth than you do.” ‘
“Let’s face it,” interjected Paige, “she probably hitched a ride out of here on a truck. She could be sixty or a hundred miles away by now.”
Angelo was looking indignant. “She disrespected my couth.”
Paige ignored him and continued. “I think we need to move. In case she, intentionally or not, leads the Genogoths back here.”
“Where I come from,” said Angelo, “a man’s couth is his castle. Now, I will walk down the street, and they will shake their heads and say, ‘there is a man with a disrespected couth.’ ”
Paige slapped her hand on the table. “Shut up, Angelo!” Angelo suddenly looked very serious. “Chica, I was just trying not to say ‘I told you so.’ ”
Her anger faded. “Point taken.”
“Look,” said Jono, “we still don’t know what this is about. She could be back.”
Angelo shook his head. “So we can just sit here on our hands, waiting for her buddies in black to come and collect us? No way. I’ll hitch out of here on my own first.”
Jubilee straightened her back and put her elbows on the table. “But where do we go? Back to the school? She never told us where the guys were being held.”
“Sure she did,” said Jono.
“Huh?” Paige stared at him curiously. “Since when?” ’‘South Carolina,” he answered. “I’m a Brit, and even / can find that on the map.”
“That,” said Monet dryly, “narrows it down to only thirty-thousand, one-hundred and eleven square miles. That’s only five-thousand, eighteen-point-five square miles each.”
Jono looked indignant. “It’s a bloody start. We might find some clues when we get there.”
Jubilee seemed to be thinking about something intently. “Gosh, Scoob,” mocked Angelo, “let’s get back to the Mystery Machine.”
Paige glared at him. “You got a better
idea?”
Angelo shrugged. “I would have gotten away with it too, if not for you meddling kids.” He rolled his eyes. “Let’s go.” “Wait,” said Jubilee. She put out her hand, “Give me the phone.”
Paige handed it over, a puzzled look on her face. “What are you going to do?”
Jubilee was already dialing. “I’m calling the X-Mansion.” Jono tried to grab the phone, but Jubilee snatched it away. “Hey, Sparky, trust me, okay?” Someone answered. “Hey, Rogue, this is Jubilee. Can I talk to Logan?”
They all stared at her as she slipped out of the booth. “I’m gonna take this outside.”
The helicopter was gone for perhaps ten minutes before it returned to land briefly in the middle of Muddy Gap. The big door opened in the side and the mutant-hunter in the purple armor jumped out. He had only to look at the robot-dog for it to drop the crushed phone from its mouth and dash back into the pod in the ’copter’s belly.
Smokey Ashe muttered a curse under his breath as he looked into the aircraft’s rear compartment. The other two armored men sat on a bench seat on either side of Catfish. The poor fellow was a sight, shivering, one boot missing, his coveralls tom, wet, and icy, his hands and feet bound with some kind of high-tech shackles.
As soon as the dog disappeared, the townspeople began to appear from their hiding places. They slowly advanced on the ’copter. Several of them saw Catfish chained in the back. One of those was the postmaster, Tavish. His mouth hung open. He looked pale, and sick. He seemed to come to some decision and trotted up to the armored man. “Let him go,” he yelled over the helicopter’s din. “He didn’t do anything!”
The others began to gather around Tavish, joining him in the protest. The man in armor just stood there. Somebody picked up the broken phone and threw it at him. He didn’t flinch as it bounced harmlessly off his helmet.
Smokey straggled, and one of his boots came free of the pavement with a wet crunch. It took him a minute, but he freed the other one as well, and ran forward to join the group. He didn’t yell at the man in armor, who was now climbing back into the helicopter. Smokey locked eyes with Catfish. “Don’t you worry, pard’na! I’ll come get you out of there!” The door started to close. He pushed forward. “No matter where they take you, Catfish, I’m coming to get you, boy!”
Generation X - Genogoths Page 12