Face the Change
Menopausal Superheroes - Book 3
Samantha Bryant
Contents
1. Cindy’s Daddy Issues
2. Mary’s Mother Simmers
3. Sally Ann Wings It
4. Leonel Licks His Wounds
5. Jessica’s Heart to Heart with Patricia
6. Sally Ann Takes the Call
7. Jessica and Walter Sitting in a Tree
8. Cindy Liu’s Formula for Family
9. Patricia’s Breakfast of Champions
10. Sally Ann’s Suspicions
11. Mary Calls in Reinforcements
12. Leonel’s Forty Pounds of Cure
13. Sally Ann Doesn’t Believe Her Own Eyes
14. Jessica Flies without a Net
15. Cindy’s Deal with the Devil
16. Leonel’s Home, David’s Castle
17. Sally Ann and the Dream Team
18. Cindy’s Electric Personality
19. Jessica’s Word to Her Mother
20. Patricia and the Call of Duty
21. Sally Ann Gets the Silent Treatment
22. Leonel’s New Look
23. Sunday in the Park with Patricia
24. Mary Burns the Candle at Both Ends
25. Leonel under Fire
26. Cindy Made a Monster
27. Mary Finds a Lifeboat
28. Cindy’s Had Enough, Period
29. Mary Climbs Aboard
30. Sally Ann Makes a House Call
31. Cindy Faces the Music
32. Mary in the Line of Fire
33. Cindy’s Gold in Stupidity
34. Jessica Gets Smoke in her Eyes
35. Sally Ann Draws the Line
36. Patricia’s New Horizons
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Samantha Bryant
Falstaff Books
For Sweetman, proof that a girl's luck can change.
Cindy’s Daddy Issues
Cindy Liu pulled the stolen van off the Indiana state highway, down a gravel access road, and into a stand of trees, hoping to go undetected for a while. Things had been chaotic when they’d escaped, and she hoped the confusion had covered their tracks, and she could risk resting for a little while before she took off again.
What had she gotten herself into? Sitting in the dim, early dawn light, she waited for the sound of her heart pounding in her ears to fade so she could think. Breathe, damn it. She forced herself to inhale through her nose and exhale through her mouth several times. The van’s engine made gentle clicking sounds as it cooled, and finally she let go of the steering wheel, removed her foot from the brake, and forced her shoulders down. Her arms vibrated from how tightly she’d been holding the chunk of plastic and her fingers hurt almost like her arthritis was back.
It wasn’t like her to panic, but then again people weren’t generally shooting at her and trying to arrest her. And she wasn’t usually trying both to get away and to drive perfectly safely, so no police officer felt the need to pull her over.
Thank goodness no one had, or they’d have learned she had the driver’s license of a sixty-seven-year-old scientist and fugitive of justice and the visage of a thirteen-year-old Eurasian girl. She had kept her sixty-one inches of height through her transformation. That made sense. The first time around, she’d been about thirteen when she reached her adult height. If she had shrunk as she’d grown younger, she wouldn’t have been able to reach the pedals and see over the wheel at the same time, and they really would have been in a fix.
Glaring into the backseat at the bundle of blankets encasing her father, she wasn’t even sure why she’d tried so hard to save the bastard. Maybe I’m just not done with him yet. Sure, he had saved her—in a way—when he’d had her picked up from the bus station when she’d fled Springfield, but he had also abandoned her as a child and let her grow up thinking she didn’t have a father at all. But when she ran from the agents at the compound, she’d still taken him with her.
He’d been under anesthesia when she’d stolen him from the operating room and rolled him into the elevator. He was beginning to stir, finally, six hours down the road. Good. If fortune smiled, he’d have some resources he could call on. Because if not, they were royally screwed. The Department didn’t mess around.
Cindy hadn’t even believed the Department was real until her father started talking about them. She’d thought them an urban legend, wishful thinking for the aluminum-foil-hat types. People who want to believe in someone out there helping with impossible problems and protecting the public from madmen and villains. Turns out the Department was real enough to mount a rescue mission and destroy months of preparations in a moment. Instead of a lab and plan for the future, she had her father’s brain in a dying body in the backseat of a stolen van somewhere in Indiana, no one to call, and nowhere to go. But she was still free.
Sitting up on her knees, Cindy faced backward to peer at her father laid out across the bench seat where she had hastily buckled him in to keep him from rolling off. His chest still rose and fell steadily, though his arms were pinned at odd angles thanks to the seat belts. He’d expected to be in surgery for several hours, but she’d been driving for six hours. It had to be time for him to wake soon.
She poked him, none too gently. “Hey, wake up.”
He groaned a little. That was something. When she’d last tried waking him, she’d had to check his pulse to be sure he hadn’t actually died.
I could leave him here. Just slip off into the woods never to be seen again. But Cindy had no idea where she was, limited funds, and no good plan. Her father, at least, had Bertrand, his old government contact. Even if he couldn’t set them up with a lab again, there had to be something he could and would do for them. Maybe he could regain access to her bank accounts and files.
Cindy slid down off the seat and out of the van, dropping onto the leaf-strewn ground. Before she’d made herself young again with her formula, a drive like that would have locked up her hips and had her grunting her way through a set of stretches before she could even walk. She’d have been exhausted, too. Now she felt like she could have kept going for days. In the fifty intervening years, she’d forgotten what it had been like, this adolescent energy. If not for the quickly emptying gas tank, she might have kept going well into the afternoon before exhaustion took her. Even now, part of her wanted to run whooping through the woods, throwing handfuls of leaves in the air. It was glorious.
Looking around at the trees surrounding them, she saw no sign of other people, so she checked her pocket for tissues and looked around for a likely tree to lean against to relieve herself. She had never liked camping, preferring a nice hotel and a hot breakfast to more rustic pleasures, but she was a practical woman and, well, nature called. There hadn’t been a sign on this logging road, so even though the trees were posted with “No Trespassing” signs, she didn’t think anyone would come looking.
As soon as she settled into an awkward squat against a tree trying not to urinate into her own shoes, she heard something—a rustling something—moving quickly through the bushes and small trees behind her. Cindy finished, yanked her pants back up and jumped forward, tripping over a tree stump. Too afraid to call out, she whirled around and listened. The woods had gone silent again. It sounded so large. Are there bears in Indiana?
She took a step, and a large rabbit burst out of the thicket by her right side and hopped past her in a flash of brown fur and white tail. Cindy ended up sprawled on the ground, dazed. Pulling herself up, she cursed her skinned elbow and dirty clothes and decided she’d better get back to the va
n. Of all the ignominious endings, “brained by a charging rabbit” seemed the most pathetic she had ever heard. Enough of Mother Nature already. She wanted back into a laboratory where the animals all resided in cages.
Feeling thirsty, Cindy went back to the van and opened the passenger door to look for the water bottle that had rolled under the seat earlier. Ah, flexibility. Another boon of youth she only dimly remembered. She folded herself into the area in front of the seat easily and stretched a slender arm underneath to find the missing bottle.
When she extricated herself, she popped the cap and took a long swig.
“Water?”
Cindy spluttered, having swallowed wrong when the voice rose up from the backseat. Wiping her face and chin with the back of her hand, she looked around for another bottle. She didn’t find one, but the one she held was still half-full. A bony hand grasped the headrest, and her father’s pale face rose like some kind of vampire sitting up slowly from a coffin. He looked terrible—even worse than he had looked before he’d been put under for the brain transplant surgery that never happened.
His skin glowed greenish in the car’s internal light, and it hung oddly on the bones like it didn’t quite fit. He dipped his head awkwardly, turning to examine his surroundings while pushing at the seatbelt still caught around one of his elbows.
His control over the body that currently housed his mind had been weakening for months. If he was going to survive, something would have to be done. He hadn’t gotten the new body he expected, thanks to the arrival of Patricia and Jessica and that other woman from the Department.
“Where are we?” His voice was scratchy and weak. He grasped the bottle she held out to him without comment, managing to flip open the lid after a few tries and downing the rest of the water. He sat looking at his own hands for a moment. “This is not my new body.”
Cindy shook her head, not looking forward to explaining what happened. “No. We were interrupted before the doctor could operate.”
“They found us?”
“The surgeon—she was working with them. I told you she couldn’t be trusted, not after they captured her. There was no escape from the Department. They let her go so she could lead them to us.” Cindy expected her father to share her anger, to rage against fate for throwing a monkey wrench into his works. She was not prepared for the sob that rose up from the depths of him like the wail of a lost child.
“I will die in this body.” He wept, his face buried in his hands, his narrow shoulders quaking.
Cindy stared, aghast. How could this man be her father? This blubbering coward, folding under the first pressure as if he was made of tissue paper. She’d pulled his sorry ass into this van despite having the upper body strength of a child and saved both their lives by getting them out of there. With no destination, no help, and scared of every shadow that might have been an official vehicle, she’d driven for six hours to get them to safety. He’d been awake all of five minutes, and already he was giving in to despair? Where was his backbone?
In all the years she’d imagined what her father might have been like, all the years she’d believed him dead, she had imagined a man of vision and determination. Someone a little cold and clinical, but resolved and self-assured. Someone like herself maybe. Someone who knew what had to be done and would do it—consequences be damned. And, in the compound he’d brought her to, that was who had he had seemed to be. But now?
She laughed. One short, barking “ha” echoed against the metal roof of the van.
He stopped crying and looked up at her, snot dripping from the end of the snub nose of the face that wasn’t really his. “You would laugh at your father?”
Turning around, she knelt in the passenger seat so she could face backward and look at him squarely. “My mother told me my father was a genius. That he was heartless and cruel, but brilliant and brave. She didn’t tell me he was a self-pitying weakling who would give up at the first obstacle. Maybe she was trying to protect me from the truth.”
His eyes went hard and cold. If he’d had better control of his limbs, Cindy suspected he would have slapped her. He pushed out his chest and tilted his chin in the air, all wounded pride. “Who are you to talk to me like this?”
“I’m the woman who just saved your miserable life. I’m the only one left who can save either one of us now. Who are you?”
He sat up straight and threw the empty water bottle on the floor of the van. “I am Anton Lorre.”
Cindy moved over to the driver’s seat and started the engine. “Then freaking act like it.”
A few hours later, Cindy pulled into the far end of the parking lot of a motel, out of view of the office windows, looked at the sad, half-lit neon sign, and grimaced. It wasn’t the Four Seasons. It wasn’t even a Motel 6. But it also wasn’t the Bates Motel. At least, she hoped not.
The small, rural hotel probably used to be a pretty nice family-owned place, back when this state highway actually got enough traffic to support it, before the interstate changed the flow of cars. Perhaps now it was the sort of place that might not have too many questions about a strange pair of guests who wanted to pay in cash.
She pushed on her father’s shoulder to wake him. His head lolled to one side, and she could see the wetness on his cheek where he had drooled in his sleep. It didn’t make him more attractive. Not that this was his face anyway. That would probably be weirder if she’d known him as a child, but Anton Lorre’s real face was just an image in an old photograph to her. The face he wore now was freckled and around forty years old. Less than half her father’s actual age, a couple of decades younger than her own.
Oh well. The two of them looked the right ages to be father and daughter. That would probably help. People would assume this white man had adopted a little girl from China. Even here in the cornfields of Indiana, such a thing wasn’t unheard of.
She pushed harder on her father’s shoulder. His breathing was labored, and his skin was sallow and sunken. He really did look horrible. What would she do with him if he died before they could do something about his condition? He had spoiled the shoulder of his shirt with his drool and snot, and they didn’t have a clean one for him to put on. They definitely looked disreputable. That wasn’t going to make it any easier to get a room.
When she’d rolled her father out of the operating room, his cane and his clothes were the only personal items that had been with him, tucked into the holding area under the gurney. All Cindy had with her when they fled had been the contents of her pockets. Luckily for both of them, that had included some cash and emerald dust. Her habit of always having those items on her person might save both their lives.
One more shake and he bolted awake, flailing out one arm as if to ward off an attacker. Cindy ducked, then grabbed his arm, noting again how the flesh seemed baggy on the bones, spongey in a way it shouldn’t be.
“It’s me,” she said.
“Cindy?”
“Yes, Anton. It’s Cindy. You’re going to need to go in there and rent us a room.”
He looked at the hotel and sighed. Cindy wasn’t sure if he doubted the quality of the lodgings or his ability to make it up the four steps to the office. She sighed right back at him. “Come on. I’ll help you.” After hopping down out of the driver’s seat, she ran around to the passenger side to help him down. Between the stiffness of his limbs and her slightness, it was awkward, but they managed and soon were making shuffling progress toward the door, him leaning on Cindy and his cane in turn. “What are you going to tell them?” she asked, grunting when he stumbled and landed more heavily on her shoulder.
“Tell them?”
“Yes. What’s your story about why we need to pay cash and who we are and all that?”
They shuffled along a few more steps in silence.
Cindy sighed. “You don’t have one, do you?”
Anton shook his head. “Bertrand always had someone handle these things for me.” He waved a dismissive hand at the motel, and Cindy wondered how of
ten he had gone into hiding during all his years of body hopping. Stopping just out of sight of the window, she leaned her father against a crumbling stone wall. She pulled out a few bills from her wallet, folded them neatly, and gave them to her father. “Here. Put these in your pocket where you can get to them easily. It’s going to look weird if I pay. Let me do the talking. I’ll tell them you’re not well. It’s not a hard sell. You look like shit.”
“That’s no language for a young lady to use.”
“Luckily, I’m neither young nor a lady.” She tugged him to his feet and let him settle an arm across her shoulders again. “Come on.”
The lights were on in the office, but somehow the room still seemed dim. Cindy looked up at the lighting fixture and saw several insect corpses resting against the once-white, but now yellowed, plastic. Lovely. The lady behind the counter looked friendly enough. She smiled at them over a pair of drugstore readers perched on the end of her slender sloping nose. Cindy put on her best earnest face and walked her father to a cheap plastic chair with a crack in the backrest. “Here, Papa,” she said, “you rest now.”
The woman behind the counter pushed her glasses up and gave Anton a long sideways look. Cindy pretended she didn’t notice and smiled at the woman. “Good evening, ma’am. Please, could my papa and I get a room, please?”
“What’s wrong with him?”
Cindy frowned, pushing out her lower lip in an attempt to look more vulnerable. She knew she looked like a young thirteen, but it might help their case if this woman thought her even younger. “He’s sick. He’s been in remission, but things got worse while we were traveling. We’re on our way back to Mama, but he’s going to have to rest before he can drive us any further.” She tried, but couldn’t quite muster teary eyes. Still, the woman seemed to be buying the performance. Cancer was always a good card in the sympathy games.
Face the Change (Menopausal Superheroes Book 3) Page 1