EVERYBODY NEEDS A HERO

Part VI: Is Anybody Here?

By Emily Snyder

Rahne padded down the hall in half-wolf form, sniffing. Pete, she knew, was following her because he knew his way around but had no skills that were advantageous to subtle searching in solid metal cells. His shoes made a tiny noise, barely perceptible to the most alert of human ears, that made Rahne want to gut him, she found it so massively irritating. She clenched her fists. “Pete!” she hissed. “Can’t you walk any more quietly?”

“No, I can’t – wait. I’ll take my shoes off.” He reached down and untied his black loafers and continued to pad down the hall in sockie feet.

“Thank ye.”

“Anytime.”

Rahne looked at him. He was being awfully strange lately. So nice. So polite. So utterly considerate. And SO not Pete. He was way out of character, from what she knew, and she was starting to worry. Maybe he was a clone.

Meggan yawned. She’d been napping, but something had awakened her. Her empathic sense rumbled and… mooed? Her empathy didn’t moo! Unless… no, it couldn’t be! Why would there be COWS on Muir? There definitely weren’t supposed to be any cows. At least, she thought there were no cows. But if there were no cows, why was her empathy MOOING? There had to be cows. Something was definitely wrong, because she didn’t remember any cows in the area. Were there cows? She could be wrong. But that was beside the point, she decided, since there were definitely cows now. And they were getting closer to Muir at an alarming rate. Why were there COWS stampeding – for they were stampeding, as far as Meggan could tell – toward Muir Island?

She tried to find an influence on the cows. There was a thin spell on the cows. They’d been teleported from the southwestern United States, she gathered. But why, she wanted to know. They did also have a spell on them to guide them to Muir. But still, she thought, why would anyone want a herd of cattle to stampede them?

Bridgit Shane knelt nervously in the Catholic church, praying. She’d lately been having a hard time getting here, she reflected, because Reverend Craig had almost shoved to the back of his mind Rahne’s admonition. She prayed that it would be a little easier in the future, since she knew she needed to go to church.

God has a way of answering prayers that seems strange to us sometimes.

Reverend Craig swaggered in, whistling. He walked up to the pulpit and reached underneath. He was sure that nobody was here, so he uncorked the sacramental wine and took a tiny sip.

Bridgit’s eyes almost bugged out of their sockets. She gave a disapproving, surprised squeak.

Reverend Craig whipped around to see who’d seen him. Seeing no-one, as Bridgit had ducked under a pew, he put the cork back in the wine bottle and turned around.

Bridgit crawled toward the door as he replaced the wine. He turned around to face the pews. Bridgit froze. She almost cried. ‘Oh, Mummy,’ she thought. Then: ‘Oh, Lord, please help me.’

Reverend Craig laughed. “Bridgit Shane, is tha’ ye?”

She cringed and shuffled a little closer to the door.

“A ken it’s ye, lass.”

She almost cried out, “How can ye know?!”

“Show yuirself, Devil-Spawn!”

She remembered that there was nothing he could do to her. She had powers, she knew, and she could use them, even if she wasn’t very refined at using them yet. She’d been practicing because she also knew that if she were to lose control, people could and probably would die. Fire powers were dangerous.

She stood up. “Ah am nae Devil-Spawn, ye crusty, dirty, filthy, wine-bibbing, crude auld priest!”

“Oh, but ye are. Rahne b’lieved me for years about tha’, ye should b’lieve me too.”

“Rahne said ye’re wrong!”

“Rahne Sinclair has fallen away!”

“No!”

“Aye!”

Bridgit realized they were both shouting. “Never!” she cried.

“Oh, aye, wee Bridgit.”

“Ah think it’s ye who’ve fallen away! Ah dinnae think ye’ve ever believed! How could you do such horrible things?”

Reverend Craig went cold. Bridgit could sense his body temperature drop the tiniest fraction of a degree.

“Get yourself from the house of God,” he whispered. “Go, Devil-Spawn, ‘r A’ll hae ye burned.”

“No.”

He grabbed her arm to steer her toward the door.

She didn’t know what happened at that precise moment; she thought she remembered something like a switch going off deep in her mind. All she knew was the hot feeling that swept through her. “Take yer hand off my arm.”

“No.”

“Ah said, take it off!” She was very, very hot. It was too hot in here. She wanted to cry out for somebody to open a window.

He was guiding her toward the door. She started to cry. “Let me go! Ah want tae pray, let me go!”

“Ye dinnae b’long here.”

How dare he? She was still hot and she felt like she was going to explode.

He opened the door and began to shove her out.

‘How dare he, how dare he, how dare he?!’ she cried mentally.

“Get out,” he said.

“No!” she cried, with all the defiance fourteen can muster. “Ah won’t go!”

“Aye, ye will, Devil-Spawn.”

She exploded.

When the red haze in front of her eyes fell away, she saw a Craig-sized charcoal briquette and the charred remains of the tiny church.

She vomited and ran into the woods, crying and praying inside. ‘Oh, Lord, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean to kill him, it was an accident! Please, please, Lord, forgive me!’

She hid, praying over and over and every five minutes or so, she sobbed.

Kurt Wagner slid over to the wall.

He hated plasma rifles. Just hated them. He liked them less than he liked cable blackouts when he was trying to watch an Errol Flynn film on television.

He winced. The blast had hit him in the side, and he’d been unconscious long enough to make Black Air think he was dead. He slid into the shadows and shut his eyes. He probably wouldn’t be found now. These shadows were nice and dark, his favorite kind. Yes, these were good shadows. He certainly liked them more than he liked – he shuddered – plasma rifles.

His side hurt badly. He looked at it and sighed. It was burned.

Yes. He REALLY hated plasma rifles.

Meggan felt Bridgit’s outburst distantly.

The mooing still filled her mind.

She was going stark raving mad.

Maybe it had something to do with her injuries, which hurt like crazy…

Pete and Rahne still looked. Pete knew that Black Air used the same plan for every single complex. This, he mused, probably had something to do with the fact that Black Air employees all wore the same thing all the time. Black Air were pond scum, but at least they were consistent and predictable pond scum.

He knew they’d searched all but one of the areas in which prisoners were kept, and that was on the way to meet Kurt. He pointed Rahne through a small room, which held a gurney and an I.V. This, he remembered, was where they executed prisoners. The next room over held the bodies until they could be disposed of. He’d always hated the bodies and the thinly-veiled stench of death when he’d worked in there. He wandered in and picked up a can of spray potpourri. His stomach churned, and he lifted a sheet gingerly from one of the gurneys.

The lifeless eyes of a thin old man stared toward the ceiling. Pete shuddered and sprayed some of the potpourri in the air. The man had been dead for almost a week, by his figuring. Ugh.

He looked under the next sheet. His eyebrows went up and blended into his hairline. For a second, he thought the young lady under the sheet was Meggan. He poked the body. No, it – she – wasn’t Meggan. The elf ears were missing, and the hair was a shade too red. She’d been dead too long to be Meggan, anyway, he consoled himself.

He skipped a few of the sheet-covered forms to get to the more recent bodies, spritzing the air a few more times with the potpourri. The room reeked of death.

Rahne poked her head in. “Mister Wisdom, whit are ye – OH! It smells in here. There are dead people in here!” She panicked.

“I know,” he said, spraying potpourri everywhere. “Go away.”

“Nae! Whit if Meggan and Moira are in here?”

Pete peeked under the last sheet. The still-warm body underneath was not one of the people he was looking for. “They’re not.” He sprayed the potpourri one last time.

“Are ye sure?”

“Yes. Let’s go.”

“Well, if ye’re sure. . .”

“I’m positive.”

She beamed. “Ah’m glad they’re nae dead.”

Pete’s face broke into a tiny, weak ray of sun. Not massive sunshine, but as close to beaming as he got. ‘Me too,’ his whole posture said.

Pete held the door open. “This way.”

Kurt shuffled deeper into the shadows, aware of a pain in his leg now that the sporadic jolts in his side has faded momentarily. They’d grazed his leg, he recalled unhappily. He had, of course, enough sense not to try to get up and walk away. He gritted his teeth as his side stabbed again. He’d lost his communicator, and he hoped that Pete and Rahne would come down this way to search.

The door opened. He bit his lip to keep from whimpering. Pete and Rahne… it was only Pete and Rahne.

He called out quietly. Nobody heard. Mumbling, he told his synapses to connect and managed a feeble BAMF…

He winced. That hurt…

Rahne heard. She turned her head and sniffed twice, then walked right over toward him. “Kurt!”

“Ja?”

She tried to help him up.

“Ach, nein, Rahne. Don’t do that.”

“Whit’s wrong?”

He pointed to his side and leg.

“Ooh, ouch! Ye’re burned!”

“Ja.”

She gingerly picked him up.

He gritted his teeth. “Let’s get out of here,” and they scooted out the back door.

Brian sat up. It was getting easier to do that. Spying a note on his leg, he grabbed it.

Brian, it said, We’ve gone to find Meggan and Moira. We’ll be back as soon as we can – Kurt.

He sighed. They’d left without him. He wanted to cry, or at least smash something.

They came in then, and he aimed a baleful glare at them. “You didn’t take me with you.”

“You were sleeping,” Pete informed him.

“I know! You could’ve awakened me. Where’s Meggan?”

“She’s not there.”

Brian’s eyebrows shot up. “WHAT?”

“I think you heard Pete, Brian. Meggan and Moira are no longer at this complex.” Rahne deposited Kurt in a chair.

Brian sighed. “Where are they, then?”

“They probably went back to Muir, which is where we are headed now.”

Tangerine saw the fireball go up, and she reached her mind out toward it. She carefully approached the mind on the other side of the water.

{Hello!} she said in the mind.

{Go away!} the mind thought back.

{Who are you?} Tangerine would not give up.

{Bridgit Shane,} it told her. {A murderess. You don’t want to talk to me.}

{Yes I do! How old are you?}

{Almost fifteen.}

{That’s almost my age! I’m about thirteen. My name’s Tangerine.}

{That’s a fruit.}

{I know, but it’s my name. I think it’s either that my parents were mad, or because my hair is orange.}

{Could be both,} Bridgit pointed out.

{Could be. Did you make that big fireball?}

{Yes…}

{Wow! Why?}

{Because I was angry!}

{At whom?}

{Reverend Craig. He said I had no right to be in the church. Maybe he’s right now…} Bridgit thought at her bleakly.

{I always heard God can forgive anything.}

{But I’ve killed.}

{God is God. Can’t He do anything?}

{Yes.}

{Then He can forgive you. Where are you now?}

{In the woods.}

{I’ll see if I can get Meggan to get you out.}

{I think I know Meggan. Does she have blonde hair and elf-ears?}

{That’s her! I’m glad you know her, so you can trust her to pick you up!}

NEXT ISSUE: Tangerine and Bridgit Shane – face to face! Kurt and company get a lovely surprise on their arrival at Muir – everybody loves a good pile of rubble! Plus: Rahne decides even more firmly that Excalibur needs to stay around!