thegingernut

  thegingernut

  Peter hadn’t been in a vehicle since the helicopter ride to the compound. He was not expecting how much the thing vibrated. Charlotte was to his side, strapped into the middle seat so he could pce his arms around her and provide some level of comfort. A little voice inside him informed him the child in the front of the car probably wanted to be comforted too. A nastier bit of him informed it she shouldn’t have let Irene die if she wanted someone to hold her hand while she bawled her stupid eyes out.

  He could hear her sniveling occasionally. Was she genuinely upset about Irene’s passing, or was this another act? She was hard to get a read on. Her face remained bnk most of the time. Was she truly returning them to Irene’s long lost brother? He knew the man of course. He hadn’t been an Elder when Peter had left but he was famous among the town’s beastshifter popution for spending most of his time yelling at them. He was a bulwark against the way the elders and frankly everyone in town treated beastshifter lives as expendable.

  “Where are we meeting the teleporter?” he demanded out loud. “No teleporter. We’re driving all the way there I’m afraid” she responded. His heart skipped a beat. Who was this girl that the elders trusted with a secret known only to them? Even teleporters usually couldn’t find it on a map.

  She was clearly a witch. The way she had cut down an enemy even Irene couldn’t bring to heel with a single word proved that much. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something sinister about her. Where had she learned to drive? To shoot? She mentioned her father taught her but where had he learned? Who was he? There was nobody in town named Carlisle that he had ever met. And if there was someone in town so talented with outsider weapons, surely he’d have heard of him, right?

  She had been learning to shoot since she was six she said, right? She couldn’t be more than 14. They’d been in the complex for six winters. How had they never crossed paths with Vanessa’s father? “Your father…” Peter started. “Haven’t seen him in months. He thinks I’m dead and I’d like to keep it that way” she grunted emotionlessly.

  The town wasn’t big enough to hide from a grieving parent, even with mind control. She had to be an outsider. She wouldn’t be the first outsider witch to find the town. Elder Laurent was an outsider for crying out loud. But she still clearly had a mysterious past. Could he trust her? Was she taking them back to town, or did she learn about Elder Sampson from somewhere else and was actually working for their captors. Or one of the many rivals of their captors Charlotte was always going on about. Were they just being requisitioned by the Canadians? How could he trust her?

  “Irene trusted her” said a part of him. He sighed. Irene’s instincts had always been better than his own. If she trusted the girl, then that had to count for something. And the girl didn’t have to lie. Hell, if she was an ally of their captors then why had she killed the general. And if she was selling us to one of their enemies… well those enemies couldn’t be all bad if they wanted to destroy that foul pce.

  “You can sleep if you want” Vanessa intoned bnkly. “We’ll be on the road for a while. I’m not even sure where we are yet, besides anywhere but there”. “I’m not resting” Peter replied. “As you wish” she sighed. “Charlotte, you can sleep if you want” she said. Charlotte didn’t answer. She was already snoring adorably.

  Doctor Forge admitted his next patient. An exhausted looking teenager. At first he couldn’t guess whether she was a boy or a girl, but as soon as she got a bit closer he couldn’t even remember why he had been confused. Her father and sister trailed in after her. Maybe it was the sister’s pink hair. Those damn liberals. He must have seen a bright hair colour and panicked. He couldn’t imagine why someone would let their child dye their hair like that. It was unsightly and unchristian. The older sister had short, jet bck hair.

  She sat down on the examination bench without being asked. “I got shot in the hip and an integrated circuit impnt in my arm malfunctioned and I think the solder melted” she said tonelessly. SHE WAS SHOT? WHAT? And she said it so casually! He’d heard grown men weeping because they’d stabbed themselves with a barbed fishing hook, (which hurts like hell and he thought no less of them for it) but here was this god damned child talking about being shot with less apparent interest than her generation showed in going outside and pying in the muck!

  He didn’t believe her at first. But then she took off her t-shirt and revealed a dreadful looking bruise and a shallow hole stuffed with white cloth dyed by the blood it had kept in her poor body. He’d be vomiting if he hadn’t seen worse in medical school. He investigated the bullet hole first. He gently removed the cloth and took a look inside. That was a lot of blood following the cloth. He walked over and picked up an instrument not unlike a curling iron. “I’m going to need to cauterize the wound. I don’t have time for anesthetic” he warned. “Do what you gotta do doc” was all he got back.

  The girl did scream when he put the very hot instrument in her body. That much implied she was actually human at least. She started crying too. But credit to her, she barely moved an inch. He used some sterile medical wipes to wash away some of the remaining blood, then took a peak in the bullet hole. No bullet. She must have removed it herself before she plugged it.

  “You were lucky. It didn’t hit any of your major organs” he noted. “Lucky” she repeated sardonically. “What would you like me to do about the impnt” he asked. “Remove it” she grunted. “That may do a lot of damage” he cautioned. “There’s possibly heavy metals in my bloodstream. I need the motherload removed and I need whatever you prescribe people who have ingested lots of heavy metals” she tutted. He found the scalpel in his hand before he was consciously aware what he was doing. He carefully cut into her arm. He carefully removed the ruined integrated circuit. He was no engineer but he was pretty sure those weren’t meant to have scorch marks.

  She was very brave during the extraction. She barely cried at all except when he was carefully cutting it out of her. She seemed to be thinking about the weather as he sewed her arm up again. He wrote her a prescription for a chetion agent. “Take this and drink plenty of water. It will bond to any loose heavy metals and they’ll come out in your urine” he expined kindly. “Thank you” she responded robotically, and gave a little curtsy, except she wasn’t wearing a skirt. It was a strange but charming gesture.

  “How long before I can drive” she asked. “Are you even old enough to drive in the first pce” he gasped. She shrugged. “Lets for a moment pretend I am” she posited. “I… I’d give it two weeks at least” he half choked. She sighed. “Thank you for your kindness doctor” she said. Then she and her family left his practice without paying the bill or without memory of ever seeing her. He’d have been madder about being robbed of the story honestly. How often do you get to tell your mates you treated a 14 year old for a bullet wound she barely seemed to have noticed?

  “There’s too many people here” compined Peter. “There’s more anonymity in a crowd anyway” I snapped back unempathetically. “What if there’s hunters hiding in the crowd” he growled. “Their leader is dead and they just had a massive riot which probably ended in mass casualties. If they have resources to waste guarding a random DMV in Dals right now, they’d have caught us before we left the compound” I proposed. “I still don’t like it. It makes me uncomfortable” he groused. “Well we’re not here to to make you feel groovy” I chastised.

  We marched up to a desk at random. Nobody in the queue compined. Nor would they remember us. “I need to speak to your manager” I told the dy at the desk. She called a manager over and he escorted us to a back room. He took our photos and then handed us two drivers licenses in the names “Vanessa Cooper” and “Peter Dickens”. (Stereotype? No I’m not! Its perfectly normal and unlesbian behaviour to change your name to that of a girl you’ve never even been on a date with!)

  “My name’s not Dickens, it’s Justice” griped Peter. “Who cares. Its only to make a cop go away if he stops the car” I griped back. The manager handed us a set of new Texas license ptes for the car, just in case they’d put out an APB on the ptes the car had come with. By the end of they day the car would have a whole new history in their system.

  “Why would I need one? You’ll be the one driving!” he compined. “My arm hurts like hell after being burnt and cut into and the more I move it the more it hurts. It was bad enough st night. You’ll be driving from here on out” I decreed. “But I don’t know how!” he compined. I sighed. “Don’t worry, I’ll be the one sending instructions to your body” I reassured him. “You want to use me as a MEAT PUPPET!” he yelled.

  I shot him a dirty look and then put out a very loud “SEE US NOT” that I really didn’t have the energy for right now. “Yes. The alternative is we spend at least two weeks recuperating in some motel within 200 miles of hunter central. That’s long enough for them to find their asses and start searching for us” I noted. “I don’t like it” he seethed. “Honestly I don’t either. I’ve never tried driving by proxy before and I can’t imagine the headache its going to cause me. But I’ve got a girlfriend who’s probably worried sick about me back in town. And I’m WAY behind on my mathematics lessons” I replied.

  Detective Snow looked over the desotion that had once been a top secret government bck site. Hundreds of the men were dead. They had apparently turned their guns on each other and opened fire. Most of the dead were just outside the main entrance. Most of the living and all of the dead tested positive for a variety of narcotics including LSD and magic mushrooms.

  All the computers were dispying a prompt demanding a payment in bitcoins that incremented once every half hour. It was already demanding more than every bitcoin ever mined. Someone had set fire to the paper records. Apparently the culprit was convinced the allies were coming to shut down the base and try them all for crimes against humanity. By his account this operation was an extermination camp. Other’s told other stories.

  Some believed there was a demon buried deep beneath the base that required daily human sacrifices to prevent it from awakening. Others were certain this was a CIA experiment to discover the secret to mind control. (Ridiculous. The CIA discovered the secret to mind control in the nineties). Some believed they were a super soldier program being run by the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler on behalf of the Argentinian government. Consensus among the ones who passed a drug test is they were a super soldier program that kidnapped witches to train them to join the army. That wasn’t quite the most ridiculous story of the lot, but that was only due to the fierce competition.

  The general of the base was found dead in the parking lot, near another unidentified body. There were a lot of bullet holes in the other woman. She seemed so old and frail, and yet even dead she was deeply unsettling and looking upon her face triggered ancestral memories revolving around surviving hippopotamus attacks.

  The general was a legend in her own right. The invincible soldier they called her. She had done tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan and earned a reputation for crawling out of holes the devil himself wouldn’t even have crawled into. And her body was pristine. Not a mark on her. Not even an old battle scar. The preliminary autopsy failed to find a cause of death. Her heart had just stopped for no reason. Her bloodstream had been flush with adrenaline. It was probably the third scariest thing about this investigation.

  The communications array of the base had been blown up. The culprit had insisted the devil was using it to escape to earth from the moon, and there were half a dozen other equally deranged stories from other would be saboteurs.

  There was some sort of enclosure, deep within the complex. All of the conspiracy theorists had a different answer to what had once been held, ranging from a demon to a hundred foot tall pink bunny rabbit that sometimes tuned into a cute little 12-year-old girl.

  He couldn’t decide if the base had been destroyed by external factors or if the soldiers had gone mad from hallucinogen use. On the one hand, it would have taken an impossible conspiracy to introduce this problem from the outside without the general noticing. On the other hand, the destruction of the communications array, the server and the paper records by three separate people all suffering temporary leave of their senses was just too much of a coincidence.

  His only lead on what might of happened was a DNA sample the base had sent out for identification earlier in the week. The result they had received just hours before the disaster was that it identified one Jedward Carlisle, who his source in Deware informed him had vanished into thin air st year along with his father Edward.

  Elder Sampson sat near the bottom of the mountain and observed. It had been around three weeks since they had lost Vanessa. How long could that poor girl hold out against torture? There was no doubt in his mind they’d break her eventually. And then maybe dozens of beastshifters would be lost as the teleporters desperately evacuated everybody. (They’d lose other witches too, but that was the other elders’ responsibility. He was an elder because none of the other elders ever seemed to care about beastshifter lives)

  He had called for an early evacuation of course. He never would have imagined this was what would put him on the same side as elder Laurent. At times like this the mans coldness came in handy. But elder Maggie wouldn’t hear of it. Even now she was certain Vanessa would find her way back to them. Her optimism was as beautiful as it was reckless. She was so sure the girl would never break. But the girl had never seen a real battle. Her ability to raise the dead gave her a warped perspective about death, that’s all. She probably never intended to let the rabbit stay dead at all.

  He heard the noise of a car engine and his heart sank. He looked around for the source of the noise. He couldn’t see it. They must be driving without headlights as an attempt at stealth. Even with his enhanced night vision he couldn’t see. If only he’d been a nocturnal predator. They got all the best abilities. The car whizzed by his station. He never saw it, just its afterimage. He quickly slid off his trousers, tied them around his neck like a scarf and shifted to bear mode.

  He could run pretty quickly in bear mode. Quick enough to keep up with slow moving cars, and as they were travelling uphill, well. The efficiencies of the wheel reverse on steep terrain in a way that legs do not to the same extent. Elder Sampson could climb a sheer wall if he had to, at almost his full bear running speed.

  But the car did not seem to care for his natural advantage, and climbed the hill like a mountain goat. He watched in horror and awe as it fjorded a stream, seemingly by jumping over it like a gazelle. He couldn’t keep up. It seemed to be getting away from him. He ran as fast as his grand legs could carry him. It suddenly spun 150°, slid to a stop and then took off in another direction. He was able to cut through the trees and just missed intercepting it. He barrelled after it again and it suddenly swerved to avoid his advancing form. It came to a sudden stop and three of the doors swung open.

  Elder Sampson roared out in challenge. These outsiders would not reach his home! The driver stepped out with her hands in the air. “Whoa there big guy” she soothed. “Easy. Its just me” she added. He couldn’t really describe her, but his nose told him it was Vanessa! He let out a gasp. Elder Maggie was NEVER going to let him hear the end of this one and he’d let her say as many I-told-you-sos as she so desired. Another two passengers exited the car. His jaw dropped.

  “V-V-Vanessa?” he gasped. “Long time no see Elder Sampson” she stated cordially. “P-P-Peter?” he asked. “Long time no see big guy” ughed the dead man. “Ch-Ch-Charlotte?” he all but sobbed. “GRANPA SAMPSON!” she squealed and tackled him for a hug. He turned to look at Vanessa again, who was giving him a mencholic smile. He walked over (carrying Charlotte as if she weighed nothing) and grabbed her in a literal bear hug. He had no words. He just cried.

  “I’m sorry” she whispered. “What on earth could you possibly have to apologise for” he wept with joy. “Irene” she choked. “I couldn’t save Irene”. His heart dropped. He had been so certain his sister had been dead. He had finished grieving for her a long time ago. Now she was just a shrine in the memorials park he occasionally shit talked to about elder Laurent.

  “I’ll authorize a rescue mission in the morning. You can have Elder Nichos and Elder Laurent. I’ll come with you myself. We will free her!” I vowed. Vanessa broke into an actual sob. “She’s dead. She died helping us escape”. I patted her head. “Then she died the noblest death she could have possibly died” I soothed. “I don’t want her to have died at all! I want her back!” cried the child. He didn’t know how to respond to that so he just started stroking her hair gently. “You did your best” he reassured.

  “She said… She said… She said to tell you your sister was… proud of you” she cried. Elder Sampson chuckled. “That’s a first. She was always so hard on me when we were kids” he ughed. “Come on, lets get back to town. I’m sure the other elders will want to talk to you in the morning” he said. He let her go, incidentally dropping Charlotte in the process, who had been cheerfully clinging to his arm the whole time.

  Vanessa walked over and climbed into the car. “Want a lift?” she asked. “Nah” chuckled the elder. “Peter?” she asked. “I know its almost impossible but I’m pretty sure that if I ever climb into a car with you again you’re going to kill me” Peter replied testily. Vanessa gave a nod, then took off up the hill leaving Elder Sampson with the victims of the very tragedy that had gotten him assigned to Elderhood.

  Vanessa colpsed backwards into bed. She took a deep breath. She screamed and burst into tears. Everything she had been desperately holding back for weeks came crashing down upon her, and finally in the privacy of her own home, she let the vast ocean of her trauma take her.