Robert Crane - Family

“This can’t be from the crash,” Scott said, a slight static hiccup marring his words. “There’s nothing here that would have caused this kind of damage.”

“Oh, you’re a forensic pathologist now, are you?” Kurt said. “This from the guy who can’t even tell that a helicopter went down sideways.”

I listened to them bicker as the clouds blew over the moon, and I shuddered again, a kind of gut-deep nervous tension that was causing my insides to shake, almost like they were clacking together. I hated it, especially because I had nothing to direct it toward. I blinked, felt the fatigue held back by adrenaline from being up when I should have been sleeping, and my eyes watched the woods past our helicopter, which was still sitting about twenty feet away, rotors still spinning, waiting for us. The blades were killing all the ambient noise around us, disrupting any chance I had of gauging any activity. I wanted the pilot to circle and come back, but at the same time I thought that was probably the stupidest idea I could have had; who wanted to send away your escape route when you’re alone in the woods at night and something has already knocked one of your helicopters out of the sky?

I saw the movement of the trees as the wind picked up again. It was a cooler wind than at the Directorate, probably because it was blowing west from the river. My skin prickled under my shirt, and my hands tensed inside my gloves, the leather against my flesh giving me no comfort. I kept my finger off the trigger like I’d been taught.

I tasted bitterness in my mouth, and I felt a buzz in my head that I couldn’t define, something that was causing all my senses to twitch. “Guys?” I said, and I heard their discussion cease; I had stopped paying attention to it a few minutes earlier. “Something’s…wrong here.”

“Yeah, our helicopter’s down and our people are dead or missing,” Scott said, explaining in a tone that told me he thought I was an idiot.

“Beyond that,” I said, taking a deep breath and letting it exhale slow. “You think they just sacked the wreckage, killed the pilots and took Parks and Reed with them? Whoever shot down the chopper, I mean?”

“Sounds about right,” Kurt said. “Probably burned out afterward.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” I said, and took steps closer to them, avoiding the front of the helicopter, where the pilots were, and looked into the back. One of the things that was bothering me was now clear, something I’d seen without noticing before. “There’s no blood in the passenger compartment and the doors are wide open.” I clicked my teeth together, trying to find an outlet for my nervous energy. “If it went down, whoever was in the back doesn’t look like they were injured, which means—”

“Parks wouldn’t have gotten caught easy,” Zack finished for me. I felt him next to me, at my shoulder, looking into the compartment for himself. “He could morph into a wolf and outrun almost anyone. And your buddy Reed—”

“He’d ride the wind and blow the hell outta here,” Scott said. “Or at least put up a nasty fight; it’d look like a tornado went through the clearing. So, they got out. Where would they go?”

“They’d have to know we’d send help,” I said, cautious, and I turned back to the woods, looked at the outline of the darkened trees all around us. “They’d want to hang nearby so they didn’t miss rescue.”

“Unless they were chased,” Kurt said, finally getting into the game. “In which case…what? Outrun and double back?”

“It’s what I’d do,” Zack said, and I saw Jackson nod. “But that’s predicated on losing your pursuers, and hoping they don’t get wise to that strategy.”

“Then the question is, what kind of pursuers are we dealing with?” I asked, and raised my gun, pointing it at the treeline as I turned in a slow circle. There was movement all around us, but I was unsure whether it was the wind rustling the underbrush, the wash from the helicopter, or something else. “Smart or dumb?”

“Always bet on dumb,” Kurt said, but I saw his gun come up to cover the woods that I wasn’t.

“I always do with you,” I said, tension causing that to pop out. I looked to my right and caught his eyes; he had a half-smile, then shook his head. Hard to define, but I didn’t mean it harshly for once, and he didn’t take it that way.

“The rotor wash is drowning out everything,” Scott said from behind me. “Bigfoot could be sneaking up on us right now and we wouldn’t know it.”

“I’m not worried about Bigfoot,” Zack said. “Since he doesn’t exist.”

“We trade in mythological creatures and people with beyond human powers,” Scott said. “Is it really that hard to believe that Bigfoot exists?”

“Will you idiots cut the chatter about Bigfoot?” A staticky voice broke into our comms, startling me and causing Kurt to jerk, his eyes wide. “Between your idiotic rookie assessments of what happened to our chopper and yours throwing off enough rotor backwash to stir the winds in Eau Claire, I think the things after us are probably well aware of which way we’re going.”

“Parks?” I asked, cupping my hand to my ear so I could hear him better. “Parks, is that you?”

“Yeah, kid,” I heard his gruff voice. “We got two on us, and we’re thirty seconds out from your position. Hold your fire.”

“You got two what on you?” Zack asked.

There was a pause, and a crackle of static. “That’d be a great question to ask them. Meta of some kind. Nasty. Tore up the pilots while Reed and I were making our escape.”

“Wait, did they do that with…like claws or something?” Scott asked. I caught a tenor of fear from him. I understood it, felt a waver of it myself.

“No,” Parks’ voice came back, winded from running. “Their teeth. They did it with their teeth.”

There was a crashing of brush in front of me, undeniable this time, followed by a roar of wind, and I saw Reed whip through the air like he’d taken a long leap assisted by a powerful gust. Parks was a moment behind, the most bizarre thing I’d seen from him yet – his head, mostly human, with the body of a cheetah. He finished the last of his transformation and leapt to his hind legs and ran the last few feet to us, his breath coming in steady gasps.

“I’ve never been so glad to see you Directorate people as I am now,” Reed said, his suit torn in a few places. I saw an open cut on his wrist, blood dripping down his hand. “They’re right behind us.” I raised my gun and pointed it toward the spot in the woods where they’d come from, but Reed shook his head. “Bullets don’t do squat.”

I looked to Parks, who nodded. “Emptied a whole clip into one of them and he just shrugged it off. Nasty bastards; never seen anything quite like ‘em.”

I let the strap take up the weight of my gun and reached down to remove my gloves, quickly, one at a time. “What kind of meta can take bullets and shrug them off? Like Clary?”

Parks shook his head. “No. Something else, not metal at all. Pale skin, red eyes. Nasty teeth.”

“Kinda reminded me of Wolfe, in a way, but smaller,” Reed said.

“Why are we not getting in the helicopter and leaving?” Jackson said. “We don’t need to fight this out right now, do we? We’re supposed to retrieve these guys and leave.”

“They’ve got an RPG launcher,” Parks said. “You try and take off now, you’ll be back on the ground in two minutes with no extraction.”

“Everyone’s got rockets nowadays,” I said with a sigh. “Whatever happened to settling things mano a mano, with fisticuffs? I like fisticuffs. I just like saying it. Fisticuffs.”

“Movement,” Kurt announced, and we all closed in tighter. I felt Zack bump into my shoulder, at my back. I exchanged a look with him, and I tried to soften it as much as possible, tried to convey regret, to say, “I’m sorry,” with nothing more than my expression. I saw his eyes in the dark, the sorrow in them, and I saw some regret in them as well.