Robison Wells - Blackout

He washed quickly—the hot water was off. He wondered if that was a precaution the family took before evacuating, or if terrorists had hit the natural gas lines somewhere in the city.

He tried to scrub around the cut, but even so there was a constant stream of red dripping down his body and into the drain. And he couldn’t control the raging, splintering pain in his heightened senses. He had to give up, trying to rinse and numb the wound with cold water.

When he was out of the shower, Aubrey appeared with the first-aid kit. She had him kneel in front of the sink, and she gently—excruciatingly—rubbed at the wound with a washcloth. It took three clean towels to dry his head and dab the blood from his gash before she was willing to put the antibiotic gel on the skin and wrap gauze around his skull like a headband.

“You’re enjoying this just a little too much,” Jack said, as she finished the painful process and taped the gauze in place.

“I’m not going to let you get infected,” she said. “You have such a nice face.”

Laura came down the stairs wearing clothes that looked a little too old for her, a little less trendy, but they fit well enough. Aubrey was in a similar style, though she was drowning in a two-sizes-too-big fleece jacket.

“We need to talk, guys,” Laura said. She was walking a little more gingerly than before, but you could hardly tell she’d been shot in the abdomen. Not for the first time, Jack thought that he’d love to trade powers with her.

Laura tossed a bottle to him. “Painkillers,” she said. “I found them upstairs.”

Jack took a tablet and swallowed it.

“I assume,” he said, “that you want to talk about what we do next?”

Laura nodded as she sat, and Aubrey plopped down in an easy chair, stuffing her hands in the pockets of the jacket.

“We can turn ourselves in,” Jack said, not because he really believed it, but because he wanted to get it out on the table. To his surprise, it was Aubrey who spoke first.

“No,” she said. “They want to kill us. And, even if they didn’t want to before, they do now.”

“It could have been a mistake,” Jack said.

“Do we all want to risk our left foot on that?” Laura said.

“So what other options do we have?” he asked. “Hide out somewhere? Go on the run? Escape to Canada?”

“There are terrorists in Canada,” Aubrey said, and the other two stared at her. No one had heard that.

“The newspaper upstairs,” she said. “It’s dated three days ago. It says there have been attacks all through British Columbia and Alberta.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jack said. “Since when do terrorists go after more than one country?”

“When more than one country is pissing them off,” Laura said. “Al-Qaeda went after the US, but they also went after all sorts of places in Europe and Africa. They just don’t make the news because we don’t care as much unless it’s happening right in front of us.”

“So we go to Mexico,” Jack said. “Any terrorists there?”

Aubrey shrugged.

“Do you guys have any place you can hide here?” Laura asked. “Any contacts?”

“We’re from the same town,” Jack said. “They’re armed, and I bet they’ve formed a friggin’ militia to try to get their kids back, but I don’t trust the town to keep a secret long. It’s too small, and everybody knows everybody else.”

Aubrey nodded. “We can’t go back.”

No one spoke for a long time. Jack thought about Mexico. It sounded awful. He knew that Aubrey had taken a class or two of Spanish, and she almost certainly got A’s, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy to flee there and live in peace.

Besides, betrayal or no betrayal, he didn’t want to just run away and watch while America burned to the ground.

“I know some people,” Laura said. “I haven’t been totally honest with you guys. But I’ve been aware of my powers for a long time—like you, Aubrey—and a couple of my friends have, too. They hid out better than I did, I think. We could see the writing on the wall and we started to get ready for the government to come after us. We built bomb shelters and things—well, not bomb shelters, but you know—storage.”

“What kind of storage?” Jack asked.

“Just food and stuff. We didn’t get as much as we wanted, because we were only in college. We didn’t have a lot of money.”

“So,” Aubrey said, “you’re saying we should find these storage places? Would they be enough for us to lay low and hide?”

“Probably not,” Laura said. “I’m saying that we should do exactly what we’ve been doing—infiltrating the enemy—but Aubrey, I think you should get into the military base—where we were yesterday?”

“What?” Jack said, before Aubrey got a chance. “If you haven’t noticed, every single one of these ‘infiltrations’ have been disastrous.”

“And what would I be looking for, anyway?” Aubrey said.

“If we can find these guys, then that’s five of us instead of three. And for all I know, they’ve been working more on storage. They might have a safe place we can go. More important—we need to find out how to get these bombs off our legs.”

“Is this about the rebellion you were talking about?” Aubrey asked, suddenly sounding suspicious.

“Not really,” Laura said. “We weren’t part of the rebellion, and I don’t think they would be now. They definitely wouldn’t be part of a violent rebellion like the one that attacked us. I’m just saying that I don’t think this is all black-and-white: that we’re either on the run as criminals or we’re helping the army catch Lambdas. There has to be a different way to live.”

Jack looked at Aubrey and she stared back at him. She didn’t appear at all convinced. Neither was Jack, but it wasn’t like he had a better solution. He definitely had no interest in a rebellion, and even though he didn’t mind the prospect of spending all his time with Aubrey he wanted to be legal. He didn’t want to be on the army’s list of most wanted. He didn’t want to have an explosive tied to his foot for the rest of his life. He didn’t want to live in fear, marked as a terrorist.

“What if we do something easier?” Jack said, still looking at Aubrey. “What if we just infiltrate the army base, find out why the order was given to kill us, and see if we can make things right?”

Aubrey was clearly discouraged, though it looked like she was trying to hide it.

Jack continued. “I’m just thinking that if we know why they’re after us, then maybe we can make things good? Maybe we won’t be criminals if we can give them what they want?”

Aubrey spoke. “I screwed up breaking into a demolished school full of homeless people, and you think I can make it into a military base?”

“You didn’t screw up,” Jack said. “You got in. You assessed all of the dangers and gave an exact account of the guards. Then you got down to where the girl was, and when the Green Berets couldn’t take her down, you did. It was a huge success.”

Aubrey exhaled long and slow. “It felt like a failure.”

“And today wasn’t your fault,” Laura said. “You saved my life. He was going to take another shot at me.”

Aubrey stared straight ahead.

Jack spoke. “You’re good with computers—you get straight A’s in everything—and they’ll probably be everywhere. Just get into one of them. You probably won’t need to hack a password—use a computer while someone else isn’t watching.”

“And it’s not even a real military base,” Laura said. “It’s a Marriott. There will be a lot of soldiers everywhere, but there shouldn’t be too much security. There’ll probably only be the cameras that the hotel already has.”