Runaways

by Christopher Golden

  Gert smiled thinly and pretended to prop up her eyelids with her free hand. “Not at all. I’m so tired I feel like a zombie. We can probably go to sleep now. The thing with the Crimson Cowl is over. They’re coming back.”

  “What’s the point in sleeping? You know they’ll just wake you up when they get back. If the others don’t, then I’m sure your boyfriend will.”

  Gert crossed her arms. “I guess he will.”

  “If you were my girlfriend, I’d let you sleep.”

  She stared at him. Zeke had big eyes, light brown that glittered with a frosted golden hue. Beautiful, Gert thought, surprising herself. But the observation was pure fact, and it wasn’t just his eyes. He was the most gorgeous guy she’d been within a hundred yards of since her life had changed and school had become part of her past instead of the future. And now he…

  “Are you flirting with me?” she asked, resisting the urge to adjust her purple hair.

  Zeke opened a little bag of pretzels, ignoring the question. He took a few and then offered her the bag. Gert dug her fingers in and took several, popping one into her mouth. The salt helped revive her.

  “Our friend Alex’s dad loved pretzels,” she said. “I’m sure that’s why they were stocked in there.”

  “I’m a cheesy puffs kinda guy,” Zeke said. “But pretzels will do when it’s dawn and you’ve been up all night.”

  “It’s just weird,” Gert replied, ignoring the pretzels now. She didn’t want any more. Even the water bottle seemed something foreign to her. “Thinking of Alex’s dad—”

  “This is Alex Wilder?”

  “Yeah. And Mr. Wilder—Super Villain Mr. Wilder, leader of the Pride—loved pretzels. And Dr Pepper. What a strange thing to remember.”

  “It makes him seem so normal,” Zeke said sadly.

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking. It’s so normal. Dr Pepper and pretzels. He probably liked bad sitcoms. When I think about my parents, it makes it easier to think of them as these time-traveling sort of sinister characters, like them being my parents was just a kind of masquerade. Roles they were playing. Like underneath the masks they wore when they were pretending to be my parents they were man-eating insect monsters.”

  “Something really other,” Zeke said.

  Gert froze. Her throat tightened and she bit her lip a little, hoping the tiny bit of moisture in her eyes wouldn’t turn into something else. “Yeah. That’s exactly it. I want to think of them as other. As alien, and not in the way Karolina’s parents were aliens.”

  “That’s how I feel about my mom,” Zeke said quietly. The air in the cavern seemed to grow warm and still, and he glanced away as if he didn’t want to meet her eyes. “My mother…I want to think she wouldn’t have killed me herself, but I have no doubt in my mind at all that she would have let the others kill me. I’m not even sure if Tess and Carlos are alive. I’m just hoping. It’s easier to think she changed, that she wasn’t always this horrible thing, but I guess she was.”

  Zeke put his soda on the counter in front of the computer array. Gert set her water down. Here it was again, the real Zeke, the authentic, vulnerable human inside the swaggering ego. She wanted to comfort him, even thought of taking his hand, but she knew it would be wrong, so she kept her hands to herself.

  “Is it horrible for me to say that I’m glad we’re not alone in this?” Gert asked.

  Zeke frowned. “In what?”

  “In this.” She threw her arms out, gesturing to include the whole base. “My friends and me. It’s just always seemed like some kind of awful joke on us. No, not a joke…a curse, like somehow we were all being punished for something we could never have controlled. Like, who does that? What kind of losers do we have to be to have parents who turn out to be the worst human beings on earth?”

  Zeke glanced at his feet. “I kind of think every teenager in the world hits a point when they realize their parents aren’t the people they thought.”

  Gert laughed. “This is a little different, don’t you think? It’s not like finding out your mom had an affair or your dad drinks too much.”

  “Totally different,” Zeke agreed, “but just in degrees, right? Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. Everybody wears one mask or another.”

  Gert stole his pretzels. She’d changed her mind. “I’m not wearing a mask, Zeke. I’m exactly who I seem to be.”

  Zeke watched her. He picked up his soda can and took a sip. “I think you’re lying. I think you’re a lot more complicated than you seem to be on the surface.”

  “Hey—”

  “All I’m saying is that nobody’s ever just one thing. We make things simple—our choices, our relationships—because it’s easier on us and the people around us. But inside nothing’s black-and-white.”

  Gert rolled that over in her head, staring at him.

  Zeke slid his chair a little closer, until their knees were touching. He rested his soda can on her left knee. “And to answer your question, yes…I was flirting with you.”

  The sound of some pretty obvious throat-clearing interrupted them, and Gert glanced around to see that Allis had entered the cavern. The girl had tugged her bloodstained pants back on and had dragged her hair into a ponytail. She looked pale and tired but also deeply irritated.

  “Sorry if I’m interrupting,” Allis said.

  Gert slid away from Zeke. She picked up her water bottle and fiddled with it. “Zeke couldn’t sleep. He set off the motion sensors in the corridor and…well, I shut them off as fast as I could. You didn’t get up right away so I sorta hoped I’d silenced them fast enough that you hadn’t been woken up.”

  Allis put on a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Yeah, I can see you were hoping not to be disturbed.”

  “That’s not what I’m…” Gert sighed, a little flustered. For a few seconds she forced a smile, but then she let it fade. Forcing a smile to make someone else feel better had never been one of her talents, but she figured you had to give a damn about other people’s comfort before you could hone that skill.

  “You do remember that we saved your life, right?” Gert asked instead.

  Allis narrowed her eyes and for a second Gert thought she was going to say something else about her and Zeke, but then the girl rolled her eyes and lifted a hand as if waving the moment away. “Sorry. I’m not trying to give you a hard time. It’s just that I was lying there forever trying to get back to sleep after that alarm went off—and why the hell did you need that to begin with? A motion sensor? Are we supposed to be prisoners?”

  “Of course not,” Gert said quickly, on the defensive now. “It’s nothing like that. We didn’t even…it’s something the Pride set up. We just moved in here last night, remember?”

  Allis studied her. Gert wondered if the girl could tell she was lying.

  Zeke stood up and clapped his hands together. “Look, I don’t know about you two, but I’m starving. Let’s find the actual kitchen in this place and see if we can make some actual breakfast. Pretzels ain’t doing it.”

  He set off in search of food. Gert looked at Allis for a few seconds, wondering if she should apologize, and wondering if maybe the caustic, irritated girl of a few moments ago was what Allis looked like when her own mask came off.

  Not that you can fault her, Gert thought. Zeke had been right. Everyone wears a mask at some point or another, and they were all tired and hungry and afraid.

  “Come on, Allis,” she said. “Zeke’s right. Let’s get some food. Everything’s going to get better once the sun comes up. It always does.”

  Another lie. A new dawn might make things seem better, but it never cures anything.

  Lying seemed to be coming easy to her this morning. But why not? After all, she’d been raised on lies.

  Many hours later, Chase woke to find Gert kissing his neck. He felt her warm breath on his skin, the gentle touch of her lips, and his eyes opened slowly. It had been after dawn when he, Nico, Karolina, and Molly had returned, and Gert had kis
sed him the moment he’d climbed out of the Leapfrog. She’d been worried about him, she said, and at first he’d thought she was kidding around. Gert had never been the clingy type—in fact, half the time she wanted nothing to do with him, boyfriend or not. But after they’d all agreed to get some sleep and talk about the night’s events when they were more capable of stringing words into sentences, Gert had walked Chase back to the room he’d picked out for himself and she’d never left.

  Nothing had happened. They’d both been exhausted and she’d climbed into bed with him, curled up into his arms, and fallen dead asleep.

  Correction, Chase thought. Nothing happened last night.

  This morning, something was very definitely happening. Gert turned his face toward hers and kissed him. Without her glasses on, she barely looked like herself, as if they were some kind of wall that usually shielded her from revealing too much of herself. Under the covers, her right hand traced lines down his chest and toyed with the waistband of his boxer briefs, exploring.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Gert—”

  She kissed him again, almost as if she just wanted to shut him up. Chase didn’t argue. The kissing was nice, and so was the way her hand kept exploring. She kissed his neck again.

  Her right leg slid over his thigh, bare and smooth, and she snuggled closer against him, soft skin on soft skin. Chase’s eyes went wide and his breath hitched. He slid an inch or two away from her under the covers.

  “Wait, are you naked?”

  She flinched, green eyes pinched with hurt. “Is that bad?”

  Chase felt blood rushing through him, like his whole body was blushing. His breath quickened and he kissed her, turning toward her under the sheets. It felt as if his brain split in two, like part of him—the lizard, id part—was all body, all flesh, and the other part, the guy who’d always felt like an outsider, abnormal and weird, someone who’d end up a forty-year-old virgin—that part had a thousand questions. He quelled those questions, quieted the hesitant voice in the back of his head, because Gert Yorkes, the girl he loved, was there in bed with him, kissing him, soft and naked and pressed against him and her hand kept moving. He touched her in ways he’d been dreaming about day and night, and though she trembled and a little noise escaped her lips, there was something else that even the lizard part of his brain noticed, a stiffness in her, a tension in her body that didn’t seem like passion at all. Not that he had a lot of experience with passion, but still, this wasn’t it.

  Heart pounding, throat dry, he managed to push himself back from her, the lizard brain part of him telling him that he was the stupidest guy on earth, that when you were a virgin and your brilliant, cautious, beautiful, body-shy girlfriend decided now was the time, then now was the damn time!

  But he loved her. And he could see something wasn’t right.

  “What is it?”

  She ignored him, moved in to kiss him again, but Chase drew back.

  “Gert, stop.”

  “Are you serious?” She looked stricken and pale. “I mean, this is what you want.”

  Chase shifted away from her and sat up in bed. The sheet fell off him. Self-conscious now, Gert gathered it around her throat to keep from exposing herself.

  “Hey—” he began.

  “Are you saying you don’t? You’re always saying you don’t want to die a virgin—”

  “And I don’t! Jeez, do you?”

  “Obviously not.”

  Chase shook his head. “No. There’s something else going on here. I know everything’s up in the air. We had to run again yesterday and now we’re somewhere new. Is it because you stayed behind? Were you—wait, were you afraid something would happen to everyone and you’d be alone?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, now you’re psychoanalyzing me?”

  Chase stared at her. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened between yesterday and today that made you decide now was the time for us to do it.”

  “‘Do it.’ Such a romantic.”

  “Hey. Don’t do that. Don’t be mean just to piss me off so we’ll fight and move off topic.”

  “I don’t do that,” Gert protested.

  “You so do.”

  Gert sighed. She sat up, surrendering her grip on the sheets, which slipped down to pool around her waist.

  “Well, those are definitely a better distraction,” he admitted.

  Gert punched him in the shoulder, which was how he knew she was more herself.

  “Ow,” Chase said.

  She smiled weakly. “You know you’ll kick yourself later. You just had your chance.”

  “I hope it’s not my only chance. And by the way, it was your chance, too.”

  Gert nodded, smile vanishing. “I just…yeah, I’m scared about the future, okay? I don’t like…unveiling myself, or whatever. We’re together right now—you and me on the one hand, and the whole group of us on the other. We’re together. We’re family. But every day we make a choice to stay together, even with all we’ve been through—”

  “Because of what we’ve been through.”

  “—but I worry about what happens to us next. Chase, there is going to be a next. Maybe not today or even this year, but next, at some point, is coming. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve done the right thing, staying together like this.”

  “Wait,” Chase said. “You mean us-us, or the Runaways-us?”

  “All of us. I feel like trouble finds us faster when we’re together, that it puts us in more danger, and I know it’s not what’s best for Molly.”

  “I disagree,” he said quickly. “Molly’s crazy strong. Mini-Hulk strong. She’s a mutant. If she wasn’t with us, eventually the wrong person would figure out what she is and then she’s not in foster care, she’s in some mutant research facility or whatever. Is that what you want for her?”

  Gert pressed the heels of her hands over her eyes. “Of course not. And you’re right. I know that. It’s just…a lot of responsibility.”

  “We’re responsible for each other,” he agreed. “That’s the best part of being together, looking out for each other.”

  Gert took his hand. “But we’re also responsible to each other, don’t you think?”

  Chase looked at her. “I don’t know. I mean, we all have our own choices to make. I really hope you don’t decide you’d rather be in some foster home than here with us, and I’d try to talk you out of it, and I guess it wouldn’t be that long before you turned eighteen anyway, but…Wait, you’re not going to leave, are you?”

  Suddenly it seemed like a real possibility and he panicked.

  “No. I’m not leaving.”

  “Then what are we talking about?”

  Gert slid out of bed, taking the covers with her. She wrapped herself in them, taking a few steps away from the bed. The lamps were all off but the room had dim, recessed lighting that threw a soft glow along the edge of the ceiling, and it made Gert look almost like a statue, backlit and perfectly carved in all of her short, shapely glory. Sadness radiated off her.

  “Please tell me,” he said.

  Exhaling sharply, she snatched her clothes off the floor and held them against her, bunched with the sheet and blanket. “Zeke woke up while you guys were gone last night. This morning. Whatever. He was flirting with me.”

  Chase went cold inside, but he forced himself to keep his composure. Zeke had rubbed him the wrong way from the start, but he hadn’t expected this. “That’s a dick move, considering he knows you have a boyfriend, but I’m not exactly surprised. Some guys are like that. Who wouldn’t be tempted to flirt with you?”

  Gert scowled. “Don’t. I know I’m not pretty—”

  “You are.”

  “I’m short and fat—”

  “Gert.”

  “—and I don’t try to make myself more pleasant just to make other people happy.”

  “All reasons why I love you.”

  Gert shot him a hard look. “That’s kind of missing the point, isn’t i
t?”

  “Okay, all reasons I admire you. Both things are true.”

  Chase felt sick to his stomach. He had a question he wished he could ask, but he didn’t dare. Gert answered it without him asking.

  “Nothing happened,” she said. “Just the flirting.”

  His parents might have been geniuses, and maybe that had always made him feel stupid, but there were things about which Chase Stein had never been dumb. Understanding dawned on him.

  “You flirted back. That’s what this was about.” He glanced around the room as if he could find answers somewhere other than her eyes. “You feel guilty, and you thought if you…if we…Damn it, Gert. Do you really think I’d want the first time we had sex to be because you felt guilty? Do you want that?”

  “No! And it wasn’t just that. I just—I felt really far away from you last night. It’s why I wanted to stay in here with you. And this morning, watching you sleep…I just wanted to be closer to you.”

  Chase lowered his head, put both hands on the back of his neck, and just tried to breathe. His body still felt exhausted from the marathon of lunacy and violence they’d endured the day before, and the electric thrill of arousal still clouded his thoughts. How was he supposed to make sense of this? Should he be furious? Would Gert want him to be jealous—Well, he was definitely jealous, but did she need him to fight for her? He had a kind of caveman brain sometimes, but he’d always thought she was above that kind of thing, too smart to play games.

  “You don’t even know him,” he said. “The guy’s a stranger.”

  “Chase…” she began.

  “He is good-looking,” Chase admitted.

  “Nothing happened,” she said again.

  Something about her tone made him narrow his eyes and look up at her. In the moments his thoughts had wandered she’d dropped the sheet and blanket and pulled on her underwear and bra. Now she tugged on her shirt and picked her pants up off the ground.

  “Nothing happened,” he echoed.

  “I swear.”

  “Gert,” he said, sliding to the edge of the bed, sitting there and staring at her. “Did you want something to happen?”