The Talented (12 page)

“Yes,” I replied, “One of the last things Kate and I talked about was the fact that the Program was based near Norfolk, and its former director still lived there.”

Curiouser and curiouser.

Turbulence rocked the plane as we descended into Norfolk.

CHAPTER TEN

Norfolk is a pretty waterfront city not far from Virginia Beach. It’s host to the battleship Wisconsin and other maritime attractions, and would be a nice place to visit during the day, I thought, after all this is over. That was a mildly comforting thought; surviving this adventure, then taking a long vacation.  Do you need to have a job to take a vacation? With all the money that I have spent in the last few weeks, I will have to get a job pretty soon. That notion sent a shudder down my spine. A real job.

The plane had started its descent and the lights of Norfolk were visible. Cutting through the lights were dark winding paths that must be the numerous waterways of the area, connecting to the vast dark expanse of the Chesapeake Bay. I think. Since Alicia had the window seat I had to lean over her to look out the tiny window. She smelled amazing. That vanilla scent that she used had been annoying at first, but it was growing on me.

I turned to her to discover that she was already looking at me with a raised eyebrow. I was in her personal space but she didn’t seem to mind.

“Seen enough?” She asked.

“Not yet.” I replied, “Actually I was thinking about that perfume you wear. Smells like vanilla ice cream. I like it.”

Alicia took the flattery with a smile, “Thanks. What you’re smelling is just my body lotion. I put it on after I shower. My skin gets dry and ashy if I don’t slather myself with it.”

That left me with some rather distracting imagery.

She interrupted my fantasy. “So what is the plan?”

“The plan is to check out the facility tonight. It’s late now, so it will probably be after midnight when we get there. We scope it out, see if we can learn anything. At the very least we should learn about the entrances and exits, security precautions, that sort of thing.”

“Okay,” Alicia replied brightly, “Then what?”

What a fantastic question. It left me speechless.

“Uh, well, I’m not sure yet. I guess it all depends on what we find out.”

Alicia seemed unhappy about my response, but she didn’t say anything.

The plane landed roughly, and shortly we were in yet another airport terminal. We rushed to get to the rental car area before it closed down for the night. We barely made it. The tired young man behind the rental counter was displeased when we showed up one minute before closing.

I stood before him and stared. He stared back, annoyed, then everything changed. His face fell slack and his pupils dilated wide. He turned and opened a cabinet full of keys and grabbed a set. He handed the keys to me and spoke in an eerily peaceful monotone, “Thank you. GMC Yukon. Blue. Go out these doors and it’s in the lot.”

“Thanks and have a great day!” I said cheerily and walked toward the doors.

Alicia whispered, “Did you just steal this car?”

With a mock offended look on my face, I said, “Not stealing. Borrowing. It’s not about the money. We don’t want to leave a paper trail. Did you notice that we didn’t have tickets for our flight? Same reason.”

She thought that over then muttered, “Your powers are kind of creepy, do you know that? If you were a bad person, you could do anything you wanted and get away with it.”

I could. I knew it, but it was best not to talk about it. No need to give temptation a voice.

The Yukon was at the end of the row of cars. Midnight Blue. Appropriate, given the time of night. As we drove out of the lot, the guard at the gate waved us through without reviewing my nonexistent receipt. Sometimes it’s good to be me.

We stopped at the first hotel we saw, a dingy local motel called Paradise Inn. What a dump. The last time it was redecorated I was in diapers. We checked in and stopped by our room just long enough to drop off Alicia’s shopping bag. Then we got back in the Yukon and drove directly toward the AMTM facility.

On the way I stopped at the first open gas station and picked up some sodas and granola bars. They would have to be enough to hold us over until morning.

The highway was basically a long bridge intersecting one bay after another. The signs indicated that we were driving on the Bridge Tunnel, and we soon discovered why it was called that. The dark road swiftly began to descend until it sloped down into a hole in the earth. The tiled walls of the tunnel were awash in dreamsicle orange light. It was creepy to be the only car in the tunnel at close to one in the morning, though my fatigue took the edge off. After a few minutes the tunnel began to slope upward again, and not long after that we emerged back into the open air, the bridge part of the Bridge Tunnel.

We continued our drive north through Virginia. We passed the turnoff for a Naval base and for the FBI. The presence of the federal government was everywhere. This was disconcerting considering that we intended to sneak around the outside of a quasi-governmental facility. Speaking of which, I could feel that we were getting closer to the turnoff. On the right there was a sign that read “Private Property” and under it, “Authorized Personnel Only.” That was the one. I began to turn when Alicia exclaimed, “Stop! Don’t turn in there. Keep going straight!” I jerked the wheel to the left to get back in the right lane, my heart pounding in my ears.

“What? What did I miss? What happened?” I asked.

“Shut up, Adam,” Alicia ordered while intently studying the forest to our right. “See that closed gas station up ahead? We should park there and walk back.”

“Walk? That station must be a mile away from the entrance.” I whined.

“Adam, do you really believe that we can drive up to the parking lot and snoop around? What are the chances that they will have security cameras? Pretty damn high, if you asked me. We need to sneak through the woods if we’re to have any chance of going undetected.”

Made sense. I wish I had thought of that. It was becoming clear to me that Alicia had the better head for this sort of thing. I admit that I’m no intellectual giant. For years I had been getting by on my gift alone, rarely having any need to exercise the traditional use for my gray matter. Besides Gus drilling me on my vocabulary and my addiction to the Discovery Channel, I had no outlet for deeper thinking. All that mental laziness came at a cost. With this in mind I happily shut up and did what I was told. Then I forgot to shut up.

“Did you tell me to shut up?,” I asked, “for real?”

Then Alicia glared at me through hooded eyes, as if to challenge me to make something of it. “Adam, my boy, you know I love you, so stop crying like you have a wet diaper and pull into the lot.”

Works for me. Did she really use the “L” word?

I did as instructed, pulling into the gas station lot. It was actually more of a service station with a few gas pumps for convenience. With the name “Todd and Rod’s” above the door in raised red lettering, it was clear that this was no corporate chain. I parked in the shadow of a large red tow truck.

The full moon loomed large in the night sky, its silvery glow lending the landscape a surreal quality. It was just enough illumination to reveal the pristine condition of the tow truck. Its candy-apple red enamel shone like it was new, and the chrome reflected like a mirror. The pristine image was only marred by some black grease coating several hinges on the back of the truck. That gave me an idea.

Alicia watched patiently as I scraped off some of the grease and smeared the nasty stuff all over my face. When I was finished I held my hand out to her.

She shook her head and said, “I’m black enough already. If we are going to do this we had better get moving. Lead the way.”

I took a deep breath and released it slowly, taking in the forest and all its inhabitants. I don’t mean deer and tiny woodland creatures. The forest was filled with men, lots of them, maybe twenty. Some were difficult to read, but the minds of many of them were wide open, and they were all intent on one thing.

“Oh crap. New plan. Get back in the Yukon.”

“What?” Alicia asked.

“No time to explain. Back in the car, now!”

We jumped in and sped away as quietly as the big V8 engine would allow. Once we were on the road back to Norfolk, I explained, “There were people in the forest looking for us, expecting us to go through those woods. They couldn’t have been more than 100 yards away.”

“What people? Who were they?” Alicia asked.

“They were goons for that anti-metahuman alliance thing. Harrison’s goons. About half of them must have been wearing those weird helmets, but the rest of them were easy enough to read. They were hunting us. Harrison must have a way to track us. How is he doing it?”

Alicia thought on that, then replied, “Well how did you find me? With your voodoo powers, that’s how. Same with him, I’m sure.“

Frustration swelled in my chest like heartburn. How can we hope to rescue Kate when Harrison seems to anticipate my every move? Thoughts of giving up were so tempting at that moment. We tried, right? We gave it a shot. No one could blame us if we threw in the towel. It would be insane to go back there. Right?

When the adrenaline wore off I began to yawn, which made Alicia yawn and stretch in sympathetic response. When we re-entered the bridge tunnel the bright lights were welcome, but didn’t quite dispel my fatigue.

In fact, I was so tired that at first I hardly noticed the man standing in the middle of the tunnel far ahead of me, wearing an all too familiar black and gray camouflage jumpsuit. My foot slammed on the brake, sending the rear of the car skidding forward to the right. Flooding out my senses I became aware of the ambush, the Hummer-like trucks blocking the entrance and exit, and the men with guns. Lots of them. This was very, very bad.

“How the hell did they get here so quickly?” I asked.

“It was a setup, Adam. Who knows, maybe they are psychic,” Alicia answered with the deadpan delivery she does so well. “Psionic…” I muttered, then threw open my door and crawled out on my hands and knees, with Alicia right behind. Immediately the tunnel erupted with automatic gunfire, which was deafening in the enclosed space. Bullets thudded against the open car door. I refocused the light to bend around us as we lunged to the side, and we disappeared.

Two more soldiers then joined in, bullets flying everywhere. Along with the light I tried to bend the path of the bullets to curve around us. It would not be long before the whole gang arrived. We crept along the edge of the tunnel toward our attackers, who were firing bursts down the length of the tunnel. They stopped for a moment, then pulled small gas masks over their heads before hurling canisters into the confined space. Thick, yellow smoke began pouring out of the canisters.

Leaving Alicia behind, I dropped my invisibility and sprinted toward the gunmen, accelerating my nervous system and my body to its limits. The world slowed down around me enough to see the flying bullets spin. This was the first test of my new physique, and I pushed it hard for speed. Bullets glided all around me in deadly precision and for the first time I was almost moving as fast as they were. Alicia and the soldiers looked eerily stationary, like wax statues.

The first soldier to see me was a stocky blond woman with a scar on her cheek. Her pupils widened at the sight of me materializing out of thin air. What did I look like to her, moving that fast? Although her body moved so slowly that it looked frozen, her thought processes roared to life. She decided to shoot at me before she even realized who or what I was. In her mind she began shouting to her companions, but the only visible sign of it was a slight parting of her lips. All three rifles continued to fire and I pushed even harder, ducking under the steady flow of bullets emerging from the barrels.  I spread my arms wide and grabbed the pant legs of the outer two men. My head and shoulders barreled into the legs of the woman, which responded with a sickeningly slow series of cracks. At that speed the horrible sound seemed to stretch out forever, sounding like a giant tree limb that had grown too heavy, slowly splintering away from its source. Two wrenching pops emanated from the hips of the men. There were no screams, no cries of agony as their brains struggled to cope with the onslaught of trauma messages from their nerves. I allowed my perceptions to drift back to normal speed, and was assaulted by terrible screams and the much worse empathic waves of pain. The suffering that I had caused rolled over me and through me. Oh, the pain. This is why I hate violence. The feeling overpowered me, erasing me, and it was all I could do not to cry out. Maybe I actually did scream, since Alicia ran up and slapped me so hard that I saw stars. Not an expression, by the way. Those little swirling specks of light in my vision were real, and by God, they looked like stars.

At least it brought me back to reality. Alicia pulled the assault rifle off of one moaning soldier, then kicked him hard in the face. The other man pulled a handgun and fired wide before I could react but Alicia dropped to one knee and shot him with a three-round burst. He slumped to the ground and to my horror I could feel his life departing from his body. It felt wrong the way that it feels on an airplane when the altitude sharply plummets. His last thoughts were of Erica, the stocky blond soldier. He loved her, but never had the courage to ask her out. Now he never would. Alicia handed me a gasmask and frowned when she saw the look on my face. “I’m okay,” I rasped, sounding weak and asthmatic. The noxious gas had finally reached us and we struggled to put on the masks in time. My eyes and throat burned, but by the time the mask was on tight I could still see and breathe. We climbed into their truck and there was no ignition key, just a push button, so I pushed it. The engine roared to life and I put it into gear then floored the accelerator, driving up the rise of the tunnel as fast as it would go.

The gunshots started out in sporadic bursts, but when we burst free from the toxic smoke, the bullets pelted the truck like a hailstorm from hell.