Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3)

Wearing the Cape: Young Sentinels.

by Marion G. Harmon

Copyright© 2013
by Marion G. Harmon

Cover by Viktoria Gavrilenko

Edited by Melvin Bankhead

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

We got a breather after taking down Villains Inc., sort of, or a chance to change to a slow dance anyway. I missed Jacky, but the new members fit in nicely, even if sometimes I thought Watchman was trying to kill me. While peace didn’t exactly descend on our great metropolis, we didn’t see all-out supervillain battles slaughtering civilians and wrecking real estate. Except for the one Omega operation — and the public never found out how close
that
one came to ending the party — nothing came along to bust up the good time.

But Charlie was about to dance the foxtrot and we didn’t have enough partners to fill her card.

Astra,
Notes from a Life.

We were just lucky I was flying morning patrol instead of sitting in class when Potowatomi Woods decided to destroy the Chicago Executive Airport.

“Shelly? Are you seeing this?”

My patrol circuit had taken me over the greenbelt that ran through the suburbs and communities of North Chicago. From my height, the wave of green erupting out from tiny Potowatomi Lake looked like a surging carpet of leaves — at ground level, the edge of waving trees had to be moving faster than the panicked early-morning joggers using the forest park’s running trails could run. And they
were
running.

“
Jeepers creepers!
” Shelly whistled in my ear. Now that she was Galatea, she couldn’t tap our old neural link to see with my eyes anymore, but she remained my Dispatch wingman and had full access to the microcam they’d built into my mask. I’d have head-smacked her if she’d actually been with me, but her joke nailed the scene below perfectly.

“Get more eyes on it, Shell!” I yelled. “I’m going in!”

I dropped, counting on her to bring the rest of the team into the loop — even to light up the whole Crisis Aid and Intervention dispatch tree; we were
so
going to need the help. Watching morning joggers flee along the trails under trees suddenly whipping like they were being beaten by hurricane winds, I wondered if every hero in town would be enough.

There was no wind, and the trees were
growing
.

“
The spread is stopping at the Des Plaines River,
” Shelly reported as I landed hard on the running path, leaping up to shatter an oak branch as it curled down to sweep a crowd of stumbling joggers.

“Stay on the trail! Cross the river!” I yelled to them.

“Thanks!” one of the men gasped. He and a buddy pulled a hobbling, pink-suited fitness granny into a two-man shoulder carry, and they all broke for the turn and the bridge. Popping up above the trees again, I could hear panicked cries on surrounding trails and wanted to swear. There was only one of me! I saw my joggers hit the wider trail and left them to drop back down and pull a middle-aged jogger out from under a tree root that looked like it had thrown itself over him. I lifted him into a fireman’s carry as the forest groaned around us.

“Any help would be nice, Shell!” I shrilled.

“
Speed-evac commencing, sheesh! Rush, Crash, Sprints, and Sifu are on it!
” Further down the trail, a jogger disappeared in a blur.
Yes!

Lei Zi broke in. “
Astra, I want you to get back upstairs, stay available for any extraction assistance our speedsters may require. Copy?
”

“Get high, assist evac where necessary, got it.”

With Sprints from the South Side Guardians
and
Sifu helping our own, Dispatch had fielded all four of the city’s fastest speedsters. Dropping my shaken but unhurt jogger across the river, I got back in the air — high enough that I could see the leading edge of the whipping green tide. Yeah, like I was going to stop any of that with my little maul.
Ajax’s
maul. What would
he
have said? Use a bigger hammer? There was no hammer
big
enough.

“Astraneedalittlehelphere!”
Crash’s run-together call for help reached me through Dispatch, and Shelly obligingly threw a red bracketing box up on my new contact lens display. I dropped again, breaking through swirling tree limbs to find the narrow forest path beneath. Crash struggled to pull another twisted root off of a trapped morning hiker’s legs. Around us the path
shrank
and suddenly I was in the middle of a childhood flashback of
Babes in Toyland
and The Forest of No Return.

“Go!” I ripped the exposed root out of the ground with more force than I needed to — I’d lived in fear of the old, gnarly trees on our street for
months
after seeing that show. Crash pulled the hiker up into an assisting carry and disappeared in a red blur, and I launched up through the thickening canopy of branches. Back up in the open air, I spun around slowly, trying to put a frame on what I was seeing.

The trees weren’t walking, they were
growing
; seeding, springing up, the spreading edge of the growth made it look like they were on the march. But the growth wasn’t in a neat circle — it had started at Potowatomi Lake and was moving south, expanding to fill the entire greenbelt between the Des Plaines River and the Tri-State Tollway as it went.
Why —

The sharp
crack
of snapping roadway cut off my thought. The south edge had reached Dundee Road, the four-lane road that ran through the wide greenbelt to connect Wheeling to Northbrook. Arching roots buckled the pavement while new saplings burst up and out, trapping morning commuters.

“Evacuating Dundee Road! Get here now!” Choking down rising panic, I dove again to snatch up a minivan full of screaming carpoolers and drop them gently on the other side of the river, flew back for more. How many could we get out before growing green started grinding people under?

“
Watchman and Variforce on station!
” Lei Zi returned as Watchman dropped out of the sky above me, Variforce in tow. “
Continue vehicle evac!
”

Watchman joined me in picking up and airlifting cars while Variforce configured his golden aura of variable-property forcefields into whirling blades, decapitating climbing saplings before they could thicken and crush trapped cars.

“It’s worst on the edges!” Watchman shouted. Coming down, he’d had a wider perspective, and he was right; as the edge swept south of Dundee, the frantic, twisting forest growth left behind slowed. He smashed a tree aside as it tried to anchor itself across a sporty convertible, extracted the terrified driver. I lifted a delivery truck up and out of the danger zone and returned for more, listening for more intervention calls.

“
The next road south of Dundee is a ways down, Willow Road,
” Shelly informed us. “
But then there’s the Northbrook Hilton on the wrong side of the river, businesses south of that. The Northside Guardians are assisting evac there, we’ve got other teams moving up, and here we come to save the day!
”

The Sentinels floater came diving out of the morning sun, Shelly-Galatea hitching a ride outside the canopy. Variforce swept a landing zone clear and Lei Zi, The Harlequin, Riptide, and Seven piled out. Rush appeared in a red blur.

“Dam Number One is still out from the spring flooding,” he reported to Lei Zi. “So Dam Woods Road is clear and there aren’t many civilians in the woods south of Dundee. We’re ahead of it, boss.”

Galatea settled next to me. Her newest silver-and-blue chrome body was almost completely covered in weapons and magazines, but she’d had a strong hand in designing it. Underneath, it looked even more like her old Robotica sketches than the first model. She leaned in as close as her shoulder-mounted missile racks would allow.

“Wow — so
Babes in Toyland
, isn’t it?”

I snorted before I could stop myself, turning it into a sneeze that wouldn’t have fooled any of my old schoolteachers. Coach Gorski would have asked me to share the joke with the team — and then do laps around the field.

Lei Zi considered the scene, expressionless as if she was looking at a traffic accident that needed unstacking, as if we weren’t
standing in the middle of a
walking forest
. I tried to ignore the crunch of roots, the groaning wood, the crashing beat of branch against branch as they fought for room. And the weird smell — churned earth and tree sap.

She nodded. “All right, then. We move south, follow the edge, leaving no one inside the live zone. Watchman, finish clearing Dundee, then catch up. Astra, stay on backup with the speedsters. The rest of us will follow the edge. Everyone?”

There were salutes, nods,
got it bosses
, and other affirmatives, and we got to it. I flew through the creepy trees answering Dispatch calls, but like Rush said, there weren’t many left to pull out. I rescued an older couple — she’d gotten trapped between two new oaks and he wouldn’t leave her behind, so I carried them both out — then there was the early morning birdwatcher who’d started snapping pictures instead of, oh,
running for his life
. He’d gotten knocked down and concussed by a fleeing white-tailed deer smarter than he was.

Everyone got dropped at the designated evacuation stations across the river, and Galatea’s drone video showed the rate of expansion was slowing, short of Willow Road. Maybe —

“
The woods just jumped the river!
” Shelly-Galatea sang out. “
It’s headed for the Chicago Executive Airport!”

And that was just
wrong
. Sure, Dundee hadn’t stopped it, barely slowed it down, but for a forest, even one growing fast as a wildfire, to take a
right turn
?

An airport — a place where things happened at high speeds and lots of flammable fuel lay around just waiting for Bad Stuff to Happen — comes equipped for disaster and able to let the whole wide field know to Head For Cover; sirens began wailing as the forest threw itself over the road and across the parking lot at the main terminal buildings in a cacophony of ruptured pavement and breaking glass. Explosively erupting trees thrust cars aside and smashed into the glass-sided buildings, and the screams inside told us not everybody had seen it coming soon enough to get out.

Despite being further away when the alarms sounded, Watchman and I hit the airport before anybody but the speedsters. Watchman simply battered trees down or uprooted them in the loose soil and torn paving while I swung my short-handled maul with both hands, shattering reaching trees as they tried to thicken and dig into the buildings.

“They’ll tear the terminal apart!” I shouted.

He pulled another tree. “Rush’s team is on it! All we’ve got to do is slow it down!”

Thunder shook the air as Lei Zi arrived to make her contribution; lightning split trees from crown to roots, throwing chunks of tree and boiling sap with each strike. Riptide splashed down, changing from flying spray to pissed-off man in an eye blink. Trees went down, sliced away at their bases as he called water from the air and forced the flow into pressure and velocity high enough to make a water-saw that could cut rock. Variforce arrived to add his whirling forcefield blades, edges only microns thick. Smoke-trails in the sky ended in erupting craters as Galatea emptied her missile racks into the trees on both ends as they tried to outflank our zone of destruction to get at the buildings to the north and south.

“
Mainbuildingemptied!
” Rush reported over the general channel, voice ragged.

Lei Zi’s orders came sharp and fast. “
Let it have the building! Speed-evac the neighbors! Everyone work the sides, let the forest have the field!
” Good plan — beyond the terminal lay wide open space, acres of runway and parked private and small commercial planes for us to channel the growth into. But how long could we keep it up?

Just another twenty minutes, as it turned out, even with the help of another dozen heavies from the Guardian teams. The new spur of forest made it more than halfway across the airfield, grinding under hundreds of millions of dollars worth of private and company planes, and then just ran out of steam. Growth slowed, trees shivered, reaching branches turned skyward, and there was nothing to fight; just a dense wild of primeval trees where a commercial airfield had been.