She waits until they’re on the elevator to say, “Are you trying to blow my cover?”
“I’m sorry,” Melanie says again. “All this cloak-and-dagger stuff is kind of new to me.” Then she smiles and says, “But maybe it’ll help you sell your cover since now they know you have a friend here to visit.”
“I suppose.” Robin forces herself to say, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I haven’t been sleeping much lately.”
“It’s all right. We can sleep plenty tonight.”
Robin’s relieved when the key actually works on the first try. The room is a typical two-star motel affair with a king-size bed, desk, chair, and an empty mini-fridge. She has stayed at a lot of better hotels over the years and at a lot worse ones too.
It doesn’t take long for her and Melanie to test out the bed. For a half-hour she allows herself to forget all about the other Rob Holloway back in Redoubt City. She forgets all about the possible conspiracy to destroy the female Super Squad. She allows herself to enjoy being with Melanie again after an absence that has seemed like years.
As they snuggle on the much-too-large bed, Robin says, “I missed you so much.”
“I missed you too.” Then of course she has to ruin the moment by asking, “How long are you going to stay?”
“I don’t know. A couple days.”
“Oh.”
“You’re coming home for Thanksgiving, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then it won’t be that long until we see each other again.”
“I guess not.”
Robin strokes the hair Melanie apparently hasn’t got cut since she started school. “Don’t be this way. Let’s make the most of this weekend.”
“I’ll try.”
Robin’s dozing with Melanie against her when the alarm sounds on her iPad. The insistent warning tone indicates something really bad has happened. She gets up to find out what. “Don’t go,” Melanie mumbles, trying to pull her back down on the bed.
“I have to see what’s going on.”
She taps a button on the iPad to disable the alarm. Then she sees why the alarm sounded. It’s not because of another robot attack. It’s even worse: her tracking devices on Allison and Elise have both gone dead.
***
Starla has to search all of downtown until she finds Billy at the counter of the Rockford Tavern. He’s hunched over something amber in a glass: whiskey, maybe? As she hurries over to him, the bartender says, “Hey kid, we don’t serve minors.”
“I don’t want a drink. I want to talk to my boyfriend.”
“She’s not a minor anyway,” Billy says. He turns to her, his eyes red and glazed over; how many drinks has he had? “How old are you?”
“We can talk about that later. Right now we should get you to bed. Come on—”
“Don’t touch me!” His voice is far angrier than she’s ever heard it before. It’s then she fully understands how much she’s hurt him. She awkwardly climbs onto a stool so she can look him in the eye.
“Billy, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t tell you the truth before. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“You made a fool out of me for a whole year.”
“I didn’t mean to.” She looks around the bar. There are a half-dozen middle-aged men in the place, all dressed in Carhart working gear like Pa usually wears. “Could we talk about this in private?”
“Why? What do you have to hide now?” He raises his voice to announce, “Hey, this here used to be Apex Girl. Now look at her.”
“You’re drunk.” She turns to the bartender. “How many of those has he had?”
“That’s his first one.”
Snickers accompany the bartender’s words. Starla can only imagine how quickly the alcohol would throw her tiny body for a loop. She puts a hand on Billy’s shoulder. “Let’s go talk about this—”
“Get away from me!” He tries to swat her arm away but ends up spinning around on his stool before collapsing to the floor.
Starla hops down to squat next to him. She runs a hand through his hair. He doesn’t seem hurt, just drunk. She looks up at the bartender. “Can I get a hand with him? He needs to go sleep this off.”
“I could call the sheriff to put him in the drunk tank.”
“No thanks.” She tries to get Billy to his feet, but he’s too heavy for her now. She could drag him, but it’s a good quarter-mile back to the car. She doesn’t want to leave him here until she can fetch the car either.
“I’ll help you with him,” an older man says. She recognizes the grizzled face of Mr. Clark, Ma and Pa’s neighbor. He easily lifts Billy from the floor and then drapes him over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Where we taking him?”
“Our car’s down by city hall,” she says. Then she thinks of their tiny car already crammed full of what little luggage they have. There’s no way to fit Billy in the backseat. “I hate to ask, but I don’t suppose you could give us a ride over to the motel? It’d be a lot easier than trying to fit him in our car.”
Mr. Clark shrugs his free shoulder. “I got plenty of room so long as he don’t mind riding in the back.”
“I don’t think he’ll mind right now.”
Mr. Clark’s pick-up is in front of the bar, along with a trio of nearly identical trucks. There are a few boxes in the bed of the pick-up, probably some supplies he was buying from town before he heads back to the farm. With surprising gentleness he squeezes Billy between some of the boxes. As long as Billy doesn’t wake up and try to jump from the truck he should be fine there.
She climbs into the cab of the truck as awkwardly as getting on a stool. Mr. Clark backs out the second she has her door shut. “So what’s a pretty young girl like you doing here?”
“We’re sightseeing.”
“You up from the big city then?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t really sound like the big city type.”
“I don’t?”
“Nah. You sound like you grew up around these parts.”
“I grew up over in Cedar Creek. I moved to the city not long ago for school and stuff.”
“What sort of things you studying?”
“Just general studies right now. I haven’t decided on a major.”
The only motel in Rockford is an old motor court predating the national highway system. Before Mr. Clark can get Billy down, Starla reaches into Billy’s pocket for his wallet. She opens it up to find he only has twenty dollars on him. She’s not sure how much he has on his credit cards, but she doubts it’s much after the car rental.
“You kids need somewhere to stay tonight, you can stay at my place,” Mr. Clark says. “I got plenty of room.”
Starla knows this is true since Mr. Clark’s wife died five years ago and his kids have all grown up and left him to run the farm on his own. She supposes that’s why he was at the bar, to escape the loneliness for a little while. “That would be very nice of you. Thanks.”
They get back into the cab of the truck. It’s sad to think if someone in Atomic City offered to put her up for the night she’d think they must be a serial killer or thief. All her work as Apex Man and then Apex Girl still didn’t put a dent in that culture of mistrust.
Mr. Clark’s house looks almost identical to the one she grew up in, except the wood is more chipped and the paint more faded. He pulls up next to a rusty old Dodge she doubts has run since the Reagan administration.
While Mr. Clark carries Billy, Starla takes as many of the bags of groceries as she can, which isn’t a lot. She makes three trips before Mr. Clark comes back down to help her finish. “You didn’t have to do that,” he says.
“It’s the least I could do.” Her face turns warm as she says, “I’d offer to cook us some supper, but I’m not much good at cooking.”
“Neither was my wife,” he says. They share a polite laugh at this.
As she unloads the bags, she notes they’re filled mostly with microwave meals and canned goods, the kind of things a
bachelor would buy for easy preparation. “Well, I think I can manage to nuke something for us,” she says. She gets three of the meals out, but leaves the third one on the counter to warm up later if Billy wakes up.
They eat their meals in the living room in front of the old console television. Starla’s face turns warm as she watches a story on the news about Apex Man ending a hostage situation in Kenya. It’s strange to think the man on the screen could ever have been her, that he had grown up across a couple acres of farmland.
“I’m going to make some coffee,” she announces. “You want any?”
“I’m fine,” Mr. Clark says, motioning to his bottle of beer. “You can have one of these if you like. I won’t tell.”
“No thanks,” she says. In the kitchen she has to get on a chair in order to reach the coffee beans and filters. From the date on the bag of beans, she doubts Mr. Clark has drank anything except beer in a long time.
While the coffee brews, she goes upstairs to check on Billy. Mr. Clark set him in a guest room not unlike Greta’s back in Atomic City. This thought makes her miss the old woman and their simple evenings of reading and listening to the radio.
Billy is still asleep and for the moment doesn’t seem to have thrown up on himself or anything like that. She runs a hand through his sweaty hair and whispers, “I’m sorry about this. We shouldn’t have come here. I didn’t know what else to do. I was afraid if I told you the truth you’d hate me.
“The last year we spent together was really great. It had been so long since I had friends like that. You made me feel like a normal person again, like I wasn’t some freak. I never meant to hurt you.”
She starts to cry as she looks down on Billy and thinks of what he said in the bar. “Now you hate me and it’s my fault. I’m so sorry. I love you Billy. I love you and I’ll do anything to make things right.”
She starts to get up, but then feels a hand take her sleeve. She turns to see Billy sitting up in bed. His eyes are bleary, but there’s a smile on his face. He pulls her back onto the bed and then wraps her in a hug. “Don’t cry,” he says. “I love you too.”
They kiss on the bed as passionately as at the scenic overlook earlier that day. She’s tempted to do more, but Billy gently pushes her away. He barely makes it to the toilet in time.
She waits until he’s finished to take him by the hand. “Come on,” she says. “I made some coffee for you downstairs. And dinner will be ready in a jiff.”
“Sounds great,” he says. They walk hand-in-hand downstairs.
Chapter 18
Elise hears Ariel crying in the distance. She tries to paddle out of bed to answer her daughter’s plaintive cries, but something is holding her back. As she flails around, she realizes it’s a heavy comforter.
The sound of her daughter’s cries fades away. She sits up in a bed somewhere on the surface, not underwater. She turns her head to see what time it is, but the green digital numbers on the clock are fuzzy. She has to squint in order to see it’s three-twenty. Morning or afternoon? From the dim glow around the curtains, she figures it must be the afternoon.
Where is she? The last thing she remembers was being in a zero-G prison cell. Colonel Storm’s latest henchman had injected her with something. She’s not sure what exactly it did to her, but Major Hall joked she’d been hit with the ugly stick. Just how ugly? No matter what, she’s sure it’s not as bad as when Dr. Roboto made her into the Sea Hag, a disgusting creature more fish than human.
She rolls onto her side and then fumbles around the nightstand by the clock until she comes across a pair of glasses. That would explain why the clock display is so fuzzy. The glasses have the bulky shape of those an old lady in the ‘80s would wear, but she supposes beggars can’t be choosy.
The glasses bring the room into focus. Even without much light, she knows where she is; she has seen this bedroom plenty of times. She’s in Paul’s apartment in San Francisco. How did she get here?
Her stomach rumbles to alert her to the smell of bread baking. She rolls out of bed and then gets unsteadily to her feet. She pads towards the door like an old woman with a bad hip. Too bad Paul doesn’t have a cane or a walker. It occurs to her as she toddles towards the door that she really might be an old woman now. That stuff they gave her might have made her a hundred years old.
She needs two tries to get the doorknob to turn. Once she jerks the door open, she’s relieved to see the skin on her hand is smooth and the limb about the right size. The skin is deathly pale, not uncommon for Pacificans since they spend most of their time underwater.
She’s exhausted by the time she gets to the kitchen. There she finds Paul bent over the oven, taking out a loaf of homemade bread. He nearly drops it when he turns to see her. “You shouldn’t be out of bed, sweetie,” he says. He sets the bread aside so he can rush to her side. His hands are still clad in oven mitts as he guides her over to a dining room chair.
“How did I get here?” she asks. Her voice sounds like she has a cold—or has been smoking a pack a day for a couple years.
“Some fascists dropped you off on my doorstep. I guess I’m still listed as your emergency contact.”
Elise nods slightly. Erek doesn’t have a phone number or an address anyone on the surface could understand. “Did they say what happened?”
“They said something about an accident. Another of those alien devices.”
Her eyes narrow behind the glasses. The bastards of course lied to Paul. “No. They did this to me. And Allison. Where’s she at?”
“I don’t know. I suppose they dropped her off with whoever her contact is.”
Elise’s hazy memory brings up a detail: Allison doubled over, her face turning blue as she struggled to breathe. She might be dead. Tears come to Elise’s eyes; her ugly glasses dam the tears up. “They injected us with some drug. They wanted to make us normal.”
“Why would they do a thing like that?”
“To get us out of the way. He said the place isn’t big enough for two Super Squads.”
“Oh dear, how awful. Well don’t you worry, you can stay here as long as you need.”
She shakes her head. “I have to get down to the harbor. I have to go home.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. You don’t look very strong yet.”
“I don’t care! My daughter needs me.”
“All right, settle down. I can take you down to the harbor. But first, I think you should get a little food in you. You look like you’ve missed a few meals.”
Other than noting she’s not a grandmother, Elise hasn’t paid much attention to her body until that moment. She notes how thin her arms are, the bones practically visible against the skin. She brushes aside a tress of mousy brown hair to put a hand on a tiny B-cup breast she probably can’t squeeze one bottle out of. She’s going to need a wet nurse for Ariel. She looks up at Paul. “How old do you think I am right now?”
“Nineteen, maybe twenty.”
“I was afraid of that.” She wonders what Erek will think when he sees her; will he still love her even if she’s a scrawny Plain Jane teenager now? Of course he will. He loves her. They have a daughter together. The rest of it doesn’t matter.
Paul slices off a couple pieces of fresh bread for her. She chews on the bread, grateful they didn’t decide to put braces on her. As she eats, she watches Paul. The way he keeps moving around, he seems nervous about something. “You can sit down. I won’t bite.”
“Oh, sure.” He sits down across from her, but he continues to twitch. She thinks of the loaf of bread, much too big for one person. And he wasn’t expecting her to be awake yet.
“So who are you entertaining tonight?”
“No one.”
“Uh-huh. You made a whole loaf of bread for fun?”
He sighs. “All right, you caught me. There is someone coming over.”
“Who?” When he looks down, she asks louder, “Who?”
“Ellis.”
“Ellis Pate? The same ba
stard who humiliated me in public and helped do this to me?”
She crumples a piece of bread up to throw at Paul’s head. Then, ignoring the weakness of her body, she gets to her feet. “How could you?”
“I’m sorry, Elise. He came over to see me a few days ago and he was the way I remember you being. How could I turn that down?”
“So were you planning to go to our place tonight?” She notes the guilty look on his face. “You’ve already been there, haven’t you?”
“Yes. I’m really sorry—”
“I don’t care. I’m going home. To my real home.”
Her rage propels her down the stairs, out to the front door. She gets a block before she finds a taxi. She tells the cabbie to take her down to Fisherman’s Wharf. She’ll be able to find a spot to dive into the water from there. Then she can go back home.
Before the taxi can take off, Paul pounds on the window. “Elise, wait!”
“Go away!”
“Listen, sweetie, I’m sorry. Come back. Please?”
“No. I want to go home.”
“Then at least let me give you some money for the fare.”
Now that he mentions it, she doesn’t have any money in the gray sweatpants they dressed her in or in the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt. She rolls down the window. “Fine, give me some money.”
He slips a twenty through the window. “I’m sorry, Elise. I wanted things like they were, you know?”
“I don’t care.” She looks ahead at the driver. “Go.”
She leaves Paul standing there at the curb. She doesn’t feel as good about that as she thought she would. Guilt begins to gnaw at her. Of course he wouldn’t be able to resist Ellis Pate. How could he? They had been practically married before Ellis became Elise. Why wouldn’t he jump at the chance to have his almost-husband back?
By the time she reaches the wharf, she knows she should go back to apologize. But it’s too late. She has to get back home. The military might not have stopped with injecting her with that stuff. They might have gone after her family too. Or if not them, then that rotten bastard Lord Neptune might have. It’s hard to believe she could ever have been that rotten bastard.
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