19
The downdraft from the blades made Ember’s hair dance as she faced me in the front yard. Behind her, Lark, Berenice, Reid, and Abby were situating themselves into the seats that lined both sides of the second red-and-white helicopter. I’d be with Jillian in the main helicopter, of course, and we’d all agreed that she’d probably want Marco there, too.
Ember grasped my hand. The nurse knows what to do. This isn’t the worst thing she’s dealt with.
I turned and watched the flight nurse in my helicopter speak to Jillian as they secured the stretcher to the floor of the helicopter. How is she?
Ember sighed. She’s out of it. Try to keep a happy face for her, will you?
I gave my best smile, but I could feel how pained it was.
Ember grimaced. Just don’t get bogged down with the burial. You’ve got to keep moving forward. That’s your new motto, right?
“Hey!” Marco yelled from the helicopter door a few feet away. “Stop gabbing and get in your seats!”
I squeezed Ember’s hand and leaped into the helicopter, where Marco had his arms folded over his chest and a glare fixed on his face. Moving forward, I reminded myself. Focus on the here and now.
The flight nurse slammed the door, shutting us in. Marco and I buckled up in the spare seats, placed there for the predicted team members of whatever hapless superhero was in the bed. At least, that’s what I figured. I’d never studied the design of the air ambulances that serviced the Super hospital.
The dim whine of the rotor grew higher, and then we were in the air, the helicopter nosing forward slightly. Marco’s glare melted away, replaced by sincere childlike wonder.
I elbowed him. “Never been in a helicopter before?”
He stared all around us, his mouth slightly open. “No,” he said, dazed. “Just the plane to Baltimore last month.” He twisted around in his seat and pressed his nose against the window. “Whoa. Is that the Chesapeake Bay?” He pointed to the iron-gray body of water to the east.
“Yep. And we’re over the South River now.”
“How far to the hospital?” he asked, still staring out the window.
The flight nurse, Genele, answered without looking up from Jillian, who’d dozed off. “Half an hour.”
We both turned our attention to what she was doing. Genele expertly set up respiratory support, inserting oxygen tubes so Jillian could breathe better. Next, she inserted an IV to keep her hydrated, then a bag of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Finally, she drew a sample of blood and sat at a tiny desk to analyze it. I was tempted to ask her to explain what she was doing, but I knew better than to interrupt an EMS professional at her work.
“What are we flying over now?” Marco asked after several minutes of thoughtful silence.
I gazed out the window at the neighborhood below. “Northern Virginia, I think,” I said, taking in the enormous houses and highways. “D.C. is that way,” I added, pointing towards the pink-and-orange sunrise, “and Saint Catherine is that way,” I finished, pointing south.
“I can see a hospital,” he said, squinting. “There’s a helicopter pad and the big buildings. It looks just like Saint Catherine General.” He turned to Genele. “Is that the Super hospital? It doesn’t look anything like how I’ve been told.”
Genele glanced out the window for a fraction of a second before returning to the vial of blood. “We’re over Reston. It’s viral pneumonia, by the way.” She stood up and adjusted Jillian’s IV bag. “Ten minutes, guys. I need to go speak to the pilot.”
She pulled open a small door that separated us from the cockpit, then shut it with a bang.
“Where am I?”
Jillian’s quiet, wheezy voice made us both spin around in our seats and grin.
“Guess,” Marco said. “Just guess. I bet you can’t.”
She made a face at him. “Is this an ambulance? It doesn’t sound like one.” She coughed again, then rubbed her forehead. “I feel like I was hit by a truck.”
We both threw off our belts and leaped to our feet. “We’re in a medical helicopter,” I explained, brushing away the lock of hair that continually skimmed her face. “You sound better already.” And she did, if exhausted. Her eyes were a little clearer, and she was speaking relatively normally. What the heck was in that IV bag?
The sun glinted off the metallic logo on the bag: Bell Enterprises.
Oh. Well, they’d made the Supers. Nothing should surprise me anymore.
Marco leaned on the edge of the stretcher. “So, guess where we’re going?” he said, his tone laced with teasing.
Jillian’s face cracked into a huge grin and she sat up as much as the straps would allow her. “Home? Are we going home?” She reached for my hand. “I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.” She leaned back on her pillow, dreamy satisfaction erasing years from her face. “Maybe I’ll get some more reading in. I found an online used bookstore that sells paperback romances for a buck each. Ah, I can’t wait.”
I couldn’t meet her eyes.
Marco shook his head. “Sorry, kiddo. We’re going to the Super hospital. You went and got yourself viral pneumonia. You know, like a champ.”
Her smile fell off her face. “The Super hospital? That’s where Beau and Alysia are. Why didn’t Ember tell you?” Her fingers tore little holes in the sheets. “I—we can’t. We have to go somewhere else.”
I was with her on this, but I didn’t have any idea where “somewhere else” could be, so I elected to kiss her knuckles and hope she didn’t see the anxiety I felt.
Yet, Marco actually smirked and said, “If you can make a good argument for how Beau and Alysia will get in, I’ll freak out with you.”
Jillian scowled at Marco’s calm face for several seconds. Finally, she said, “A bomb.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, come on. Like they haven’t thought of that. The only bomb that would work is a nuke, and I think we can safely assume that Beau doesn’t have one of those.”
She rolled her eyes and muttered something. Her words weren’t audible to me, but Marco scoffed, “A know-it-all? Please. I just remember what I learned from the final test.”
“What final test?” I asked. Conversations like this were a painful reminder that they’d had a completely different life than I had.
Jillian’s unhappy countenance softened. “We all had to do a battery of exams to qualify for service. Some were physical, like the obstacle course, and others were mental, like the problem-solving portion.” She paused to cough, gesturing for Marco to continue for her.
Marco sat back down in his seat. “There are about fifteen different questions that they recycle among trainees. Mine was to figure out how to break into the Super hospital and stop a supervillain from releasing a deadly virus into the air.”
“What did you do?”
“Eh, it was an elaborate scheme that involved me fake-breaking my leg or something. I kinda pulled it out of my butt, but it worked. The important part of this story, though, is that I was told all the defenses.” He shook his head. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that they were guarding the US gold reserve.”
“Tell me,” I said as I sat down next to him.
Jillian watched us, a sleepy smile back on her face. Though she sometimes moaned about how hard camp life was, deep down I knew she loved the ferocious competition with herself that this life provided, and all the grittier aspects of her training she’d endured. After all, this was the woman who’d returned to Saint Catherine despite everything. She hadn’t exposed the camps because she hated superheroes, she’d done so because she hated the system.
Marco folded his hands on his lap and chewed on his lip while he thought. “The hospital complex is in the middle of a huge campus. The perimeter of the campus is surrounded by two walls, both of which are six feet thick. The walls have the usual: razor wire, electric field, all that. Manned guard towers line the wall every…thirty feet, I think? Something like that. They’ve got machine guns, grenades
, the works. Between the walls is a twenty-foot-wide moat, but it ain’t filled with water.”
“What’s in the—”
“They never said,” he replied with a significant look, “But I was told that if I ever stepped in the liquid, I’d swiftly regret it.”
Ah. “Go on, then.”
“The walls themselves are filled with weird layers to stop people like Alysia. Do you know if there’s anything she can’t go through?”
That was easy. “Water.” Alysia avoided all pools and other places of aquatic merriment on principle. She always had to be at the advantage.
He laughed quietly. “Both walls have a bladder of water in the middle. She won’t be able to walk through them, and even if she could, she wouldn’t want to.” He grinned. “Beyond the walls is a half-mile of land mines.”
“Land mines.”
“Yep, land mines.”
“Well…damn.”
“They’ve got some sophisticated monitoring going on, too. Lark told me that she heard from someone that there are weaponized drones on site now, though she’s not sure if that’s true. But the biggest defense isn’t ordnance,” he said, gesturing all around us. “It’s this, the helicopter system. Nobody can drive in. There isn’t even a road. Everyone is vetted out the yin-yang and flown in. The staff lives on campus. When Reid made the call, he had to give our numbers and information. We were run through a computer before the choppers were ever dispatched. But the computers are on a private network, so it’s unlikely that Beau would be able to hack in without physically being on the campus.”
“There’s no computer on earth that’s safe from Beau,” I said, but my head was spinning. I’d always heard that the hospital was guarded, but I’d assumed that entailed lots of metal detectors, cameras, and maybe an armed patrol. What Marco described was more in line with a military weapons testing facility than a hospital. “Just one more question.”
“Shoot.”
“Who pays for all this?”
“Bell.”
Of course. They’d shown themselves to be knee-deep in every aspect of the Supers, most especially where superheroes were involved. If we opened up the can, how many worms would we find?
Jillian rearranged herself in the stretcher. “He could still get in, you know,” she said with a yawn. “Ember said he distracted y’all with a bomb a few nights ago.” She began to fiddle with the straps to get comfortable. "He's a scumbag, but he's not stupid."
Marco crossed his arms, his eyebrow quirked in amusement. “Sure, he could toss a bomb. Then he’ll have to develop magic bullet-stopping powers, dodge drone strikes, cross that stupid moat—let’s assume it’s filled with either gators or acid—and then play hopscotch with landmines. Frankly, I’d pay cold, hard cash to watch that.”
“Smart ass.”
“Wow, you said that without coughing up a lung. I’m impressed.”
Marco and Jillian launched into an enthusiastic insult war, punctuated by coughs, that I could only watch in wonder. Jillian was almost her normal self, but where was the angry, let’s-murder-them-all Marco I’d seen over the last two days? Where was the guy who’d openly threatened to kill Ember and Reid if they didn’t stop fighting?
Jillian stopped mid-sentence to cough, at one point struggling for breath from the virulence of her effort. Marco tenderly held her hand and spoke in soothing tones while she recovered, eliciting a beaming smile from her. I leaned my head against the window, awareness dawning like the sun behind us.
Angry Bitter Young Man was a mask he wore, and without a reason to wear it, I was now seeing what was underneath.
In that regard, he and I were a lot more similar than I’d first supposed.
The door cutting us off from the cockpit slid open, and Genele stepped back in. She saw Jillian struggling with the straps. “We’re almost there. There’s no point in trying to jump out now.” Her world-weary tone hinted that superheroes busting out of the stretcher and jumping from the helicopter was a regular part of her job.
I looked out the window. We were low, flying over a subdivision of large, boxy houses on the edge of Leesburg. We were so close to the ground that I could see children playing in the snow. Some of them stopped and waved at the helicopter, probably hoping that one of the superheroes would see them. Our shadow slid over a flat, white backyard and then crossed a road.
Woodland appeared.
And then a wall.
And then another.
I could see the machine guns mounted behind turrets. Between them, liquid shimmered in the moat, the light refracting in such a way that I instinctively knew that I’d never want to drink it.
I turned back to Jillian, whose eyebrows knit together in worry. “What is it?” she asked.
What did my face look like?
“I was wondering…what problem did you have to solve before qualifying for service?”
Jillian paused, then laughed in little wheezes. “I had to save the president’s daughter from terrorists. Why are you asking about that?” Her laughter was so beautiful that I vowed to record it somehow in the near future.
Little drones darted all over the wide, flat, snowy minefield. We were only twenty feet or so off the ground.
Marco closed his eyes and shook his head, though he was smiling. “What were the two unknown variables they threw at you?”
Jillian’s smiled widened. “She was pregnant and couldn’t run, and then it turned out that the terrorists had an identical decoy. I was like, okay, I’ll just carry her, and I can totally smell which one is the real daughter and which one is the impostor. There is no such thing as an identical decoy when you’re me, as someone back in Chattahoochee can tell you.”
There was an armed patrol. They were lined up around the perimeter of the helipad.
Marco looked out the window, then back to Jillian. “Remember when Davey got to the top of the Jacob’s ladder--”
“—on the obstacle course, and he started crying and wouldn’t come down?” Jillian finished for him. “And then we all had to take a break while the instructors—”
“—climbed up there and tried to reason with him.” They both cracked up. Marco playfully punched her shoulder. “And remember Berenice falling into the creek later and how she kept saying for the rest of the day that a fish had bit her?” Jillian began to laugh so hard that tears streamed down her face.
I sat back down in my seat. Something was so wrong. It was in the air. Marco felt it, too. That’s why he was helping me distract her.
The helicopter’s nose angled down ever so slightly. Genele stood up and patted Jillian’s leg. “We’re landing. You ready?”
Jillian looked at me, and I nodded. “I’m not going anywhere.”
There was a hard lurch as the helicopter touched earth, and then the doors flew open, revealing a medical team led by a doctor in a starched white coat. He began to shout over the din of the blades, but I couldn’t hear him.
The war drums were too loud.
Item Twenty
Excerpt of article from the New York Times, dated May 11, 1933
Three schoolgirls were killed in a tragic super-power accident yesterday when a super-powered youngster, identified as Ellen Cannostraci, 11 years, lost control of her youthful temper and set fire to her friends’ clothes on the playground. Miss Cannostraci’s parents have removed their daughter from school to protect the other children.
This marks the seventh such tragedy in the state since the beginning of the year, and eightieth since the beginning of the decade. The debate of whether to segregate super-powered citizens continues to rage; as the body count grows, it is super-powered people themselves who advocate the loudest for segregation. Mrs. Christina St. James, the well-known mouthpiece of the segregation movement, was unable to be reached for comment.
20
Blinding sunlight shone down on us through glass ceiling panels as a six-man medical team wheeled Jillian through silent sliding doors and into the main building. I hadn’t had t
ime to take in the exterior of the hospital, so efficient was the group of doctors and nurses.
One nurse consulted with Genele while nearly running alongside the gurney, while the doctor who’d greeted us and unloaded Jillian asked my wife questions about how she was feeling.
Jillian, to her credit, appeared to be almost perfectly comfortable, though I saw the tension around her eyes and jaw. We could never forget that Beau and Alysia were somewhere nearby.
When our large group reached solid wood double doors, Jillian’s gurney was pushed through with a sharp bang. One of the nurses turned to us and blocked our passage.
The last I saw of Jillian was her sitting up in her bed, her eyes wide and her hand held out for me.
The nurse’s badge read Laura. She looked surprisingly like Jillian, tall and dark and muscular, with a similar face.
Marco let out a low whistle.
Laura raised her eyebrow at him for a second, then said, “Patients only past this point. Josh will show you all to your dorms. I’ll come get—” She stopped to consult her notes, then frowned. “My file doesn’t have a listed commander.”
“She’s the commander,” Marco said, jutting his head at the double doors. He jabbed his thumb at me. “He’s her husband.”
Laura opened her mouth in surprise for a second, then closed it. “Okay, that’s fine,” she said, a tiny verbal question mark hanging off her words. “The flight nurse says that Jillian’s signs are already improving, and from what I could see, she’s out of the danger zone. You guys were right to call us, though. We’re going to treat the infection and monitor her condition until the doctor says she’s okay for discharge. Treatment for pneumonia usually lasts a couple of days, so I’ll have my colleague show you around and make sure you’re comfortable.”
She waved at someone behind us, and we all turned. A young man in the same navy blue uniform approached with a warm smile. “Josh, show them to the dorms, please.” She looked back at me. “I’ll come get you soon.”
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