Attack Doll 2: Junior Prime

by Douglas A. Taylor

Chapter 4

  

  I looked at Angie; she seemed at confused as I was. "Excuse me," I said to the group at large. "Do I know any of you?"

  One of the guys came over to us. He looked like he was maybe in his late twenties or early thirties, shaven-headed with a goatee. "My name's Trevor Baxter," he said. He pointed to the person closest to us, a muscular black guy. "That's Trevor Smith. Next to him is Trevor Miller and then there's Trevor . . . Johnson, is it?" The teenage kid he indicated nodded vigorously. "Maybe you get the idea."

  "Yeah, I think so," I said, feeling a little dazed. "I'm Trevor Chiao."

  "You mean, everybody here is named Trevor?" Angela asked incredulously.

  Baxter's eyes narrowed as he caught sight of my sister. (Yeah, I'm going to call this guy Baxter. I don't normally go around calling people by their last names, but I'm the only Trevor in this story, and you'll just have to deal with it.) He turned to me, putting his back towards Angie. "Uh, how well do you know this gal?" he asked me quietly.

  "Pretty well," I replied with a touch of surprise. "Why?"

  "You didn't just meet her on the way in here?"

  I shook my head, puzzled. "No, I --" And then I stopped, because I suddenly understood what he was getting at. He was confusing her with Lily Lee. Now, I could easily tell that Lily and Angie looked nothing alike, aside from the long, black hair, tan skin, high cheekbones, and Asian eyes, but I had seen them both before. If he had merely caught a glimpse of some Chinese chick hanging around with JB Swift, I could see why he would be suspicious of her. Or heck, maybe he thought that Enclave recruited lots of young, pretty female Asian bodyguards.

  I looked around the room. Most of the guys there, in fact, were giving Angela suspicious looks, and I could see she was starting to get nervous. "She's all right," I tried to assure the room at large. "Believe me, she's definitely not one of the bad guys. I'd stake my life on it."

  A lot of the guys seemed to relax after I said that. Baxter thought for a moment, then nodded. "Okay, if you say so. Not that we have any particular reason to trust you, either, but I suppose we have to start somewhere." He turned to Angie with an engaging smile. "Sorry, darlin', but you can't be too careful. To answer your question, yes, everybody here is named Trevor. Everybody but you, that is," he added with a grin, "unless your name happens to be Trevor, too."

  That made her laugh. "No, I'm Angela. Angie."

  "Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, Angie," he said, reaching out to shake her hand.

  I said, "So, how long have you guys been stuck here?"

  He turned away from Angie with a show of reluctance. "I guess I've been here the longest -- about four or five hours." He grimaced. "They've been bringing guys in pretty regularly since then, and every damn one of them has been named Trevor. We've been trying to figure out why. I get the impression these jokers think that one of us is a Prime. You know, those guys that go around fighting all these monsters that keep popping up all over the place?"

  I grinned. "Yeah, they said something like that to me, too. And the little red guy even thought that Angie was a Prime. Crazy, huh?"

  Things were starting to make a bit more sense now, and all of a sudden I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Enclave knew that Prime Indigo's first name was Trevor, thanks to Padma's yelling it out that one time in Vietnam, and we knew they knew that, because that was how they had conned Padma into powering down her force shield. But they obviously didn't know that I was Prime Indigo. They were just rounding up every guy named Trevor that they could find.

  But there was still something that didn't make sense. Trevor was not that uncommon a name. Even if they limited themselves to youngish guys about my height who were in fairly good shape -- and from what I could see of this group, that was exactly what they had done -- I would think there ought to be more than twenty or thirty of us in the world. I was missing something somewhere.

  "Interesting outfit you got on there," Baxter commented. "Do you do martial arts?"

  I looked down at myself. I was still in my studio uniform: loose white pants and a white jacket with black cross-hatches, tied shut, of course, with my black belt. "Yeah," I admitted, "I do Tae Kwon Do." Then, since not everyone is familiar with it, I added, "It's sometimes called Korean karate."

  He nodded. "I know what it is. Fact is, I do Tae Kwon Do myself. What rank are you?"

  "Uh, fourth Dan."

  That sent his eyebrows arching upward. "Really! That's interesting; I'm a fourth Dan, too." We stared at each other in surprise. "I wonder," Baxter said slowly, "how many of the other guys here are fourth-degree Tae Kwon Do black belts."

  I barely heard him. I was thinking back to the last time I had been in an Enclave base, trying to rescue Padma. She had attacked me when I first came upon her; Enclave had told her I was dead, and she thought I was an impostor. To calm her down and prove who I was, I had told her . . . what, exactly? "Fourth Dan, Kukkiwon, and all that." Something along those lines.

  Had the room where I found Padma been bugged? It was certainly possible. If so, then I myself had told Enclave that Prime Indigo was a fourth-degree black belt certified by Kukkiwon, the Tae Kwon Do international governing body. Dumb, dumb, dumb. And what else had I told them? Nothing, I hoped. I couldn't remember for sure.

  "So, is every single one of you guys a black belt?" Angie's voice pulled me from my reverie. Looking up, I saw that she had somehow managed to win over every guy in the room. Someone had pulled a stool over for her, and she was sitting on it in the middle of a crowd of Trevors, every one of whom was paying her rapt attention.

  She had always had a talent for making friends, even back in high school when I was a senior and she was a freshman. Miles more popular than I ever was. The truth is, it always made me a little jealous.

  "Well, I'm a fourth-degree black belt!" one of them boasted. That was followed by a chorus of "me, too"'s. Every single one of them was, it appeared.

  Well, all except for one guy in the back. He was taller and slenderer than most of the others, while still remaining close to the Trevor parameters, with dark wavy hair and dark eyes. He looked a bit like the hero of one of those vampire movies that girls are always swooning over. He smiled shyly and said, "I passed my fifth Dan test just last week."

  "Your girlfriend is pretty cute," Baxter said to me as Vampire Trevor -- excuse me, Master Vampire Trevor -- received congratulations all around. "You probably want to keep an eye on her; one of these guys might take it into his head to steal her away from you. And that guy might just be me."

  "No worries there," I replied with a chuckle. "She's actually my sister, not my girlfriend." Raising my voice, I added for the benefit of the group at large, "And she's underage. Only seventeen. Sorry, guys."

  I heard a few groans, but not many. Angie stuck her tongue out at me, and then, with a flip of her hair, she turned back to her circle of admirers, clearly enjoying herself. Hmph. So much for fulfilling my big-brotherly duties.

  After half an hour or so had passed, the door opened, and JB Swift entered with what looked like a couple dozen Zoinks at his back. "I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you," he announced as all talking gradually ceased and all eyes turned toward him. The level of tension in the room increased ten-fold.

  "Be careful with this guy," Baxter muttered to me. "He doesn't look like much, but man, can he move! He can run across this room and back before you can blink."

  Yeah, that was one of the things I remembered about JB Swift. He was one of Enclave's successful experiments with speed. Put a metal pipe in his hands, and he could bang up your knees something awful before you ever knew what hit you. It was possible to beat him -- I had done it once, in fact -- but it was hard. You had to know exactly what you were doing, you had to time it just right, and you needed a bit of luck, too.

  "According to our researc
h, one of you gentlemen here must be the indigo Prime," JB Swift was saying, "but it's not obvious which one. To be frank, we were hoping that he would be carrying a certain device that gives him his powers, but such was not the case. The people who employ me have decided that it's too much trouble to try to guess, so we will simply kill one of you every fifteen minutes until the indigo Prime gives himself up to us."

  There was a long, uneasy silence. I saw a lot of hands clench themselves into fists. Finally, someone asked, "Uh, dude, what if the first guy you kill is this Prime guy? Where does that leave the rest of us?"

  JB Swift's smile was deadly. "In a whole world of trouble, I would assume," he said. He made a beckoning motion, and the crowd of Zoinks behind him began pouring into the room. Lily, I noted with relief, was nowhere in sight. "But I agree, that would be most inconvenient. So, just to make sure that doesn't happen, I have decided to start with . . . her." And he pointed a finger directly at my sister Angela.

  Now, up to this point, I had hoped to bluff my way out of this mess by pretending to be just some dumb guy who had accidentally been caught up in their sweep. I couldn't let them hurt Angela, though, no matter what. And hey, there really wasn't much point in hiding the fact that I'm an expert martial artist, and a pretty damn kickass one, if I do say so myself. That's no secret. So I launched myself at the gaggle of Zoinks.

  And so did every other guy in the room.