"About eight," Katherine replied, kissing her son’s offered cheek. "We’re waiting for Carol and Mitchell."
"Cool," Steve approved. He, too, dove into the refrigerator, but he opted for a bottle of Gatorade. He sat opposite his father at the table. "How’s it goin’, Dad? You look like hell."
"Gee, thanks, Son," Joseph smirked. "I had to fire one of our employees today. The man caused a bit of a scene." Well, Joseph, that’s certainly putting it mildly.
"Anybody I know?"
Joseph shook his head. "I doubt you’d remember him."
"Richard McLane, honey," Katherine piped in as she bent over to peek into the oven.
"Ah," Steve — who in fact did remember McLane and had formed much the same opinion of him as his mother — nodded knowingly. "Good call, Dad."
"Steven, you don’t know the half of it."
"Educate me."
Joseph opened his mouth to do just that, then caught himself. "I, uh, I can’t go into a lot of detail ..."
Steve held up his hand. "Gotcha. Don’t worry about it." He downed the entire bottle of thirst quencher in several long gulps.
"Just finish working out?" Joseph asked, grateful for his son’s ending the subject. "I thought John and Dan were with you."
"They were, so we played a game of basketball at the gym. I’ll run an extra mile tomorrow morning to make up for it."
"Just do me a favor and steer clear of his motorcycle."
Steve rolled his eyes. "Jesus, Dad, I didn’t even mention it."
"No, but I saw it in the garage when I pulled in. I remember vividly our arguments the last time he had the damn thing out here. Now, you’re old enough to make your own decision this time, but I’d appreciate if you’d remember what happened to your Uncle Daniel before you hop on."
"If I recall, Uncle Daniel was drunk at the time and not wearing his helmet."
Joseph found his fingers pinching against the Headache From Hell once more. "Steve—"
"Never mind, Dad, don’t worry about it," Steve sighed theatrically. "If it bothers you that much, I won’t ride it. I give. Subject closed."
"Thanks," Joseph said. He reached across the table and playfully nudged his son in the arm. "You just lowered your old man’s blood pressure ten points."
"Glad to be of service," Steve said over his shoulder as he stood and headed back toward the living room. "We wouldn’t want our financial provider having a heart attack."
"There goes your inheritance!" Joseph called. He smiled, finished his beer, and set about helping his wife with dinner.
PCA
Two minutes after five in the morning, Steve finished his stretches and thrust forward, out of the garage and into his daily run. Heading down the driveway, he veered to his left, toward the steepest hills his neighborhood had to offer. As the sweat began to creep from his pores and the familiar warmth flowed into his muscles, Steve’s thoughts began to drift ...
So Dan was off to college ... a tidbit that had turned up, not during yesterday’s basketball game, but at the family dinner. Carol had blurted it out, so proud of her wonderful son, and Steve had not missed the look she’d offered her sister, his mother. That look that seemed to say, "Maybe Dan will be a positive influence on the family’s little black sheep" — namely, him.
Steve realized that most of it was probably his own insecurity rearing its ugly head, but he knew that his father was disappointed in him. Neither son showed much interest in the family business (hell, it wasn’t even the family business anymore, not since the PCA moved in — didn’t his father see that?), but at least John was going to school. Sure, he was just piddling around until he decided what he really wanted to do, but their parents seemed to appreciate the effort, and the image it offered.
The problem was that Steve had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Maybe John hadn’t really decided on a major, but at least his occult studies intrigued him. Steve enjoyed his sports, and yet he couldn’t see pursuing those for life, either. Sooner or later, as his dad loved to remind him, he would pass his prime, and then the only option was coaching, and that held little to no appeal for him.
Take Dan, for instance. His declared major was Pre-Law, with an emphasis on Paranormal Rights. The damn thing didn’t even exist five years ago, so Dan obviously couldn’t have planned on it for long. Circumstances had changed — hell, the world had changed — and he found something that apparently spoke to him. Why couldn’t the same thing happen to Steve?
As the subject of the paranormals lingered in his mind, Steve unconsciously glanced skyward ... but the Seven Stars had long since set with the arrival of morning.
The paranormals ...
Steve’s jogging circuit closed, and he found himself back at his own driveway. But now he felt like continuing on, just to keep his train of thought. He turned to jog downhill this time when he spotted his cousin’s motorcycle. He considered his father for a moment, then shrugged. After all, his old man had pointed out that it was his own decision. And even if it weren’t, Joseph Davison would still be asleep for another hour.
Steve rolled the motorcycle carefully out of the garage, down the driveway, and up the street. Part of him felt guilty, but the only other time he’d ridden a motorcycle had been an absolute blast, and he’d been eager to repeat the experience.
At the end of the block, he straddled the cycle and slipped on the helmet. To his annoyance, he discovered that the fixed visor was tinted — he couldn’t see a thing in the early morning light.
Terrific, he thought. Wouldn’t Dad just love this!
He removed the helmet and secured it behind the seat — he would simply have to be careful. He turned the key and kicked the cycle to life on the second try. A look left, a look right, and he was off.
He roared along the street, making a lazy circle around the block, the air whipping past his face and through his hair, and he breathed deeply. The first time he’d ridden a motorcycle, one belonging to the father of a friend, he’d felt as though he were flying. It wasn’t the same as performing a roundoff in gymnastics. This was a sustained feeling, a prolonged sensation of soaring through the air free as a bird! Of course, these days, doing that might cause one to run smack into a flying paranormal ...
Huh. The paranormals again. Unlike his brother John, who thought they were the coolest thing in that they "proved" the existence of magic, Steve still wasn’t sure what he thought of them. In some ways, he had trouble believing that they truly existed. He’d never personally met or seen one — in fact, with the exception of the conversion of his father’s business, the paranormals hadn’t really affected his life in any—
Steve was coasting back toward his home when it hit. He felt it an instant before, a tingling of his skin, the rising of his hair, but he was helpless to avoid it. A bolt of pure electricity crackled through the air from his left. The bolt missed his leg but ripped into the front tire, exploding it like a pin in a child’s balloon. Steve yelped as he catapulted over the handlebars, sailing through the air over the edge of the road. A tiny, disconnected part of his mind noted that he was lucky that he wouldn’t land on the pavement, but even that small part got involved in his panic as he descended into the ditch running parallel to the street, a ditch the local teens used as a beer bottle depository.
Steve tried desperately to twist, to land on his feet like he’d done thousands of times. When he realized that he was too stunned to perform so intricately, he switched gears to a Judo roll, but it was far too late. He landed hard, face first. A jagged stone lacerated his left forearm and nearly fractured the bone in the process — this was the least of his injuries. He struck the ground with his forehead toward the right temple — this, too, resulted in a relatively minor concussion, nothing he hadn’t experienced before in his years of kick-boxing.
A beer bottle, crusted with dirt and still containing a smattering of tobacco juice and saliva, shattered across the bridge of his nose. Had it not been for the impact near his temple, the resu
lting glass fragments would have been driven all the way through to his frontal lobes. As it happened, they did not penetrate that far, but both his eyes were punctured simultaneously, rupturing like pierced grapes. For a brief moment, he fumbled blindly to pull the jagged glass out, then he lost consciousness.
Richard McLane and his two companions gazed down at Steve from the top of the ditch.
"Would you like me to finish him off?" one of McLane’s men asked, a redhead with electricity still crackling around his hand.
"He’s dead," McLane pronounced smugly. "And I want some of the bodies left identifiable. Now let’s do what we came here to do."
McLane stole one last glance at the young man, out cold and bleeding profusely, and then led his men up the road toward the Davison home.
TAKAYASU
"Takayasu, Ensign Michael," Lieutenant J.G. Barry called.
Michael looked up, hoping to God that he didn’t look as nervous as he felt.
"The Captain will see you now, Ensign," the man said.
"Thank you," Michael said, rising to his feet and striding for the office doors ... and trying to act as though he visited the head of the Paranormal Control Agency’s regional headquarters every day.
The doors slid open at his approach, and although it was far too subtle for any normal human being to detect, Michael knew that he had been the subject of a thorough identification process, ranging from passive retina scans to skeletal structure comparisons. Otherwise, far from opening, the doors would have sealed shut, and no one short of a Class One Paranormal could have gotten through them.
The office Michael entered was no different in appearance from that of any other law-enforcement agency. Again, Michael knew that there were sensors and weapons and defenses, all present and ready for use, but none of them would ever be noticed by the few civilian visitors who might have cause to visit. He knew from his technical training at the Academy that if a paranormal were to use any of his or her physical senses to spot them, such as x-ray vision or an electro-magnetic probe of any kind, the very act of their detection would be enough to activate half of them. There wasn’t much they could do yet about mental senses, such as a psychic paranormal who just knew where they were, but advances were being made in that arena every day.
Michael stood at attention before the captain’s desk. The gruff-looking, dark-complected older man was sipping a cup of coffee and held up a hand for him to wait.
Michael waited.
"Sit down, Mister Takayasu," he said at last.
Michael contained his surprise at the incongruently high-pitched voice that came out of the man. His experiences at the Academy, and perhaps all those cop movies, made him expect the order to emerge as a growl.
"Coffee?" the captain offered.
"No, thank you, Captain."
"Mm. Your loss. Mister Barry makes a helluva cup." The man smirked. "You’ll forgive me if I usually avoid the use of our designated ranks. I served four years in the Navy, and spent a good part of my life in the FBI until I was pulled for PCA detail back in the day. I, personally, find it rather silly to be addressed as ‘Captain,’ but I suppose it’s no less pretentious than ‘Deputy Director.’ How about you just call me ‘sir,’ and I’ll continue to address you as ‘Mister.’ "
"That’s fine by me, sir," Michael smiled casually.
"Mm. Now ..." The Captain leaned back and laced his fingers behind the back of his head. "Mister Takayasu, as I’m sure you are aware, you are the first graduate of the Academy to work for this particular district, though we’ll have a bunch of you running around this region soon enough. Since they just started cranking you kids out this past year, everyone else you’ll meet here was pulled from any number of law-enforcement agencies, mostly the FBI, but also from the CIA, the U.S. Marshall’s office, et cetera. You know all this, of course. My point is, you’re going to encounter all kinds of different ideas on how things should be done in the PCA. Between you and me, this agency was slapped together so damned fast that I don’t think any protocols were worked out beyond the general idea of ‘stop the rogues!’ So I admittedly don’t really know what they taught you at the Academy about the so-called rules and regulations, but in this office, it basically just means you come to me with any disputes or conflicts and I settle them on the spot as I see fit. Clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"Your file puts you at the top of your graduating class."
"Yes, sir."
"Now, you are norm, correct? No paranormal abilities popped out yet?"
"I am completely normal, sir. I’m told I score particularly high on the ESPer tests, but it’s nothing that couldn’t have been charted before the White Flash. The theory is that if I were attacked by a paranormal whose abilities were mental in nature, I would prove more tolerant than the average norm agent."
"Interesting. You ever have psychic flashes, Mister Takayasu?"
"None that I am conscious of, sir, beyond a strong gut feeling from time to time that rarely leads me astray."
"Mm. In other words, if your talents weren’t being wasted nailing rogues to the wall, you would have made one helluva cop back in the day."
Michael assumed this last bit was rhetorical and remained silent.
"It’s dangerous work, taking down the Class One rogues, especially for a norm. Somebody’s got to do it, of course, but a lot of norms request detective or paraforensic work. I understand that you volunteered for Class One duty. That correct?"
"Yes, sir."
"Mm. How exactly does a norm deal with a rogue that could burn you down with a thought?"
"I’m in top physical condition, sir, and have been trained in all of the state-of-the-art paranormal containment equipment, ranging from weapons to psi-jammers. If we’ve built something for it, I know how to use it. The Class Ones are a problem for us all, but anything below that, I can handle virtually on my own, sir."
"Good. Some might find that a cocky statement. Personally, I appreciate someone who knows their abilities. However, this is the PCA, so we don’t get to pick and choose whom we tackle. Class Ones or not, they stir up trouble, we take them down. But I don’t want to lose my first, bright, young Academy-graduated ensign anytime soon, so I’m assigning you a partner. He didn’t go to the Academy, obviously, but he’s been with us for a while."
"I look forward to meeting him, sir."
"Mm. Just wait’ll you do meet him, Mister Takayasu, and you might not be so eager about it. He’s a paranormal, a true Class One, so unfortunately we have to put up with a lot of his bullshit in the bargain."
"Understood, sir. His abilities?"
" ‘Generation and partial manipulation of kinetic shockwaves.’ Started off as a purely offensive ability, but he’s recently learned to turn them into crude force fields, so long as he’s at the center of the protected area."
"Sounds like an excellent associate for the PCA, sir. What’s his codename?"
"Mm. ‘Shockwave,’ if you can believe that. Me, I find the notion of codenaming our paranormals about as clever as calling our agents ‘ensigns’ and ‘lieutenant commanders’ ad nauseam, but there it is. It’s comic book silliness, I think, but then we’ve found ourselves in a comic book world of late, haven’t we?" The captain leaned forward. "Well, that’s about all the time I have for today, Mister Takayasu." He extended his hand. Michael stood and shook it — Jarrah either did not notice the scars on Michael’s hand, or he was better than most at covering any reaction he might have had. "Report next Monday to the training arena to meet up with Shockwave. And don’t say I didn’t warn you."
"Thank you, sir. It was a pleasure meeting you."
"Mm. Likewise."
PCA
Five of Hearts, Jack of Spades.
Dealer showing a Seven of Spades. If the hole card was a ten or face, then the dealer had seventeen. Couldn’t take a hit, but still beat fifteen.
There had been no face cards at all in the last hand, so odds were fairly good that the dealer was holding sevent
een.
So, hit or stand?
Michael closed his eyes. He concentrated, tried to feel the next card. All he needed was at least a three, but no more than a six.
Concentrate ... feel the next card ...
"Hit," he decided. He was committed now, but he felt certain that the next card ...
... was an eight. Break. Dealer had sixteen.
"Son of a bitch," Michael muttered as he scooped the card back into his deck and shuffled. Sometimes he thought that, now that he was graduated and an "officer" in the PCA, he should find the instructor who scored him so highly in the ESPer tests and fire him.
Paranormals (Book 1) Page 5