Chapter 15: The Last Stanza

By the time I reunited with Blizzard, he wasn't alone. There were six others in the clearing by the river, not including the mystery compatriot who was still mostly hidden from the suit's sensors. The introductions were brief, but it was the bulk of the Guardians from this region. Blizzard introduced me to Silver; a woman clad in a form-fitting silver outfit that might have seemed revealing if it wasn't completely smooth and featureless. Red Ryan; a young man who appeared to be about my age, dressed in red leather pants with bloused leggings tucked into high red leather boots and a leather jacket and a red helmet-like head covering with a built in tinted visor. He wore twin guns on his hips and there was a whip coiled on one shoulder. Crater; a middle-aged man, thick-bodied with a full, bristly beard and visible chest hair sticking up out of the open shirt he wore tucked into a pair of dark green pants made from what looked like heavy canvas. Crater's hands were both covered by balls of an oddly pitted metal, but several times I saw one or the other of them sort of fold back to reveal a hand while he grabbed or scratched or adjusted something.

Along with those three I met Starhawk; a man with wings who glowed with a soft blue light and had eye sockets that seemed empty at first, but which seemed to be windows to the stars when you got close enough. He was accompanied by The Leopard, a heavily muscled man dressed in a leopard skin, or perhaps a leopard print. He had a heavy mustache, a pointy goatee and bare feet that appeared to be cat-like.

The last of the six was a man dressed in what seemed an ordinary business suit who called himself Blackout.

"The seven of us are going to be your backup, and we're going to deal with any problems once the people of Macon come back to their senses." Blizzard told me.

"I'm taking out this musical mesmerist on my own then?" I asked.

"No, not alone. You and Nightshade will take him out." He answered. That ripple in the gravity field that had been hiding off in the corner since the first time I'd dropped in here solidified then into a womanly form, dressed in black and darkest purple, wearing a cowl that covered her entire face except her mouth and ears. There were no eye holes in the cowl at all.

"I am Nightshade," She seemed to whisper, but I had no trouble hearing her words. "I will ride your shadow and strike when the time is right."

I had no idea what she meant by that, but it was somehow reassuring. "Once I've kicked in my soundproofing, I won't be able to hear anyone. How will I know you are safe?"

"When you see me again as you see me now, you will know it is over."

Not for me to decipher the mysteries of another hero, at least not now. We gave the rest of the group thirty minutes to position themselves and then I was off and running. Wing and Becka had mapped my route for me based on observations made during my last flyover, so I got little pointers and flags in my HUD to guide me.

I was interested at first in the visible signs of my passage through the streets of Macon. The crush-clang sound of my running footsteps and the sight of dust and debris shaking loose from the buildings around me was cool. I only hoped I wasn't doing any real damage to anything. Once that got boring I did think back again, on my own this time, to the meeting I'd had with my staff the day before. It had gone well, I thought. Overall I wasn't sure there was anything that needed tweaking from me there. To be honest, Mrs. Nolan could probably have ridden herd on that group without me. What I was going to have to get a handle on was the assignment of staff and resources. Separately I had asked Mrs. Nolan how she would describe her own research skills.

"Adequate, in a crunch, but not my favorite activity," she told me.

"I suspect yours are better than mine, but good research skills are something I'd like to be able to add to my resume," I confessed. "I think we will be the departmental safety valve when things get tight."

That meant getting everyone to show me the ropes when things weren't tight.

An insistent warble from the suit's detection system brought me back to the here and now. There was a row of people blocking my path. They were just standing there. Not a one of them showed any concern that I might step on them. I did a simple forward roll right over the top of them. It made me think of that first awkward forward roll I'd done in the suit. A lot of fuel had passed through the reactor since that day!

"Seems like we've been noticed," I said into the comm.

"You have people moving in your direction in large numbers," Wing announced.

"We're rerouting you slightly to avoid the majority of them," Becka told me. "The new route follows the railroad spur off of Ash street. Once it hits Edgewood Avenue the campus will be to your immediate left."

I had a new flag blinking on my HUD, but I already had a visual on the rail line. I made sure the HUD agreed with what I was seeing, but then I cut left onto the spur and increased my speed. I also lightened up the crush-clang of my footfalls by lightening myself up some gravitically.

"Becka," I asked, suddenly having a thought. "Do we have any grav generators to spare, what with our sound-proofing modifications?"

There was a long pause before she answered, but she seemed confident in her answer when she did. "Yes, we could spare one more - just as long as you're sure you're not going to be doing anything but running and some low altitude, low speed flying. Why?"

"I was thinking it might be hard to keep from stepping on people if more of them get put in place as a barrier between me and whoever or whatever is doing this. I could use a gravitic field as a wedge to plow my way through them without doing much more than knocking them over."

"Ooh! Good idea. Give me a minute," she said. I kept running.

The grassy open area in front of the one brightly lit building was in front of me, and the need for a way through a crowd imminent when Becka finally came back on the comm. "Okay, here's what we've got," she began. "We've added a setting on the squint and twitch menu for your chest repulsor. See it?"

I did. It had been set to glow in a soft lavender color, setting it off from the green, red and amber of the other controls. "Got it."

"Its like a dimmer switch, the longer you hold it, the bigger the effect, but it'll start out with a field of effect two running strides in front of you and half your height. That should work for anything human."

"Sounds good," I said with some relief. "Good work."

"Thank you sweetie," came Becka and Wing's reply in perfect stereo. Interesting as that was, I had no time to dwell on it. I was already plowing people out of my way and I slowed down to make sure the action wasn't strenuous enough to cause injuries.

At the slower pace, I could see that the people moving themselves into my way didn't look particularly aware of the here and now. They stared off in odd directions, their heads making random movements now and then, as if participating in some unseen play to which I wasn't privy. They also seemed to move in a rippling variation of a mass lockstep. As if their directions came at them in waves and during the peak of the wave their movement and purpose was hard and fast, but during the valleys between the waves, their purpose was much more uncertain and subject to bouts of random misdirection.