This For That
Chapter 20- Rachel
I gasped for fesh, clean air, grasping the sides of the pool table that I was on. I looked around, to Vicky's smiling face and a lot of tired people. Marco looked half-dead as he greeted me. Then I saw David, on his knees on the floor, head bowed. He looked half-dead also, but not as bad as Marco.
I stood there, wrapped in a big towel, as men brought Jake out and Vicky took David's blood and injected it into Jake. He gasped, shuddered, then woke up. Someone wiped his face clean of the pink gooey stuff. Then Tobias, Cassie, and Ax, who was the hardest to do. Erek helped bring him out, after he came with a pathetic looking man.
There were hugs, kisses and cheers. Jake held Cassie for dear life.
A roar was heard.
David had morphed amidst the good will. Lion. He ran away, out the big door of a pier and into the early morning.
Jake muttered an expletive. "That was David, right?" Marco nodded. "Tobias, Ax, take to the air, go owl, Rachel, Cassie, after him as wolves, I'll be right with you, Marco, get some sleep, Vicky, we might need you, one of you drive her after us." He gave that final order to a person wearing a windbreaker that said FBI on the back.
I morphed, suddenly feeling reenergized from a long sleep. Rejuvinated might be the word.
I started running, catching David's scent and following it. Cassie was next to me and Jake was behind us. People got into their police cars and SUV's and followed us. Some went in front to catch David before us. If they lost him, they would wait until one of us caught the scent or Ax or Tobias found him from the air.
It was like that all the way to Nob Hill, where David finally stopped in a playground, and the church next to it rang its bell 5 times. David walked onto grass, and stood there, heaving.
Come on Jake, you and me, right here, right now, and if you win, I promise never to bother you again.
Duh, he's lying, I said privately to Jake.
I know. You see the way he keeps flickering from one to another? He doesn't know which one is me. Rachel, you go first, don't say anything, fight him until I morph into something that can take down a lion.
My pleasure. I waited until he left and hid behind some bushes, and I ran towards David, with sheer and relentless anger.
David saw me coming, and swiped his paw at my face. I barely missed it, going at his paw with my teeth, shredding it as much as I could. He hit me with his other paw, pounding my ribs. Then he bit down hard into my middle, and Cassie came in, biting his rear leg. I swerved and bit him in at his stomach, trying to get his guts out.
David, Jake said. Cassie and I backed away quickly, before David figured out that he hadn't been fighting Jake all this time.
Jake had taken the Howler morph.
Chapter 21- Jake
I felt memories surge in my mind, of the Sharf Den recieving a pleasant suprise, even though they didn't know what to make of it. I didn't see any memories after that. Crayak must have destroyed them all when he saw that they wouldn't work anymore.
I ran towards a shocked David, my eyes seeing his heart beating, and I aimed for it. The claws on the back of my hand dug into and beneath his ribs, but missed, barely able to puncture a lung.
I rammed again, this time hitting a lung. David cursed. He swayed a bit, but turned towards me and tried to swipe at me with his good paw. And then I saw something I did not want to see. The wound that I had give him healed. Rapidly. But the wounds where Cassie had made were still bleeding.
Cassie?
I don't get it either.
Can you...?
I'm not going to like it, but sure.
I demorphed, standing in the cold air in my underwear. Cassie attached him again and again. Blood spewed across grass and damp sand and David didn't try to hit Cassie, just trying to defend himself against her. The early dawn light let me see everything in this sort of ethereal vision.
Micahel Diatchenko, David's dad, walked closer to where the fight insued. Vicky came over and gave me someone's trench coat, since my clothes were in rags back at the pier when I morphed.
"I thought he couldn't die," Michael said to me. I could just shrug in confusion.
"I told you he made a deal with the devil," Marco said, coming up behind Michael. "David's failed to keep up his part."
"What was David's part of the deal?"
"I'm not telling you."
"I thought I told you to go to sleep," I said.
"I tried, then I realized that I had some of San Francisco's strongest coffee just an hour ago."
Michael had left. Ax and Tobias had demorphed, being lent jackets from some of the bigger Feds. Rachel stayed wolf, to save her the embarassment of being in her underwear in front of people.
There was a loose circle around Cassie and David, and Cassie was starting to back away, tired of mauling him.
She looked at me. What do we do?
I was just about to answer, when David began to demorph. He had grown, dishwater blond hair and hard brown eyes. Heavy built with normal clothes covering him, and he let himself be beat. He still kept his wounds that Cassie gave him on his body. His blood soaked the white shirt he was wearing.
"What do we do now?" Marco asked. I didn't know. Then, realizing that people were watching me, I walked over to David, telling someone to call and ambulance.
And I started talking to him.
Chapter 22
"How, David?"
"A guy named Crayak. Never met him. He sent someone else to talk to me."
"Drode?"
"Name was Gage. He was the one who bought the place where I live."
"The pier and the apartment?" Marco asked.
"Yeah." David spat out some blood. None of us made any move to comfort him.
"What was your deal?" I asked.
"Play. Kill or capture most of you, let one of you try to stop me. Had to, see. I don't know why."
"I do. Why all the bombs?"
"The first one was to kill you. You were there, Rachel should have been. Then it was just to destroy. It's a great feeling, to just destroy. I tapped your phone lines. That's how I knew your plans."
That explains the static, Ax said.
"Yeah, it wasn't as high-tech as I would hope it would be."
"That reminds me. How on earth were you able to do the things you did?" I asked, looking at him.
"Surgery. Brain surgery, supposedly to enhance my human abilities to move stuff. Be psychic."
"I'll explain later," Vicky said.
The ambulance came. The paramedics took one strange look around, seeing a dying guy surrounded by a lot of people, two wolves, and an Andalite. They cautiously made their way around Cassie, checking on David and putting him in the stretcher.
"Keep a couple of agents on him. Bring a radio. Call in every hour and if there's an emergency."
Two got into a car and followed the speeding ambulance, which hadn't turned on its' loud wail since it was so early in the morning.
Then the sun broke out.
Chapter 23- Marco
I looked at all my friends, half-asleep but feeling a little jittery. Agents and everyone else had left, going home to get some sleep. Heath stayed behind, looking at all of us with a slight smile on his face.
A couple of people had stayed behind to give us a lift to the hotel where all the out-of-county agents were staying. Vicky, in one car, and me, in another, relayed everything that had happened in the past 12 hours. We communicated between vehicles using Ax and Tobias, who were seperated for this purpose.
Rachel, in Vicky and Tobias' car, was mad that she had missed all the action. Jake, in the same car as me, was just relieved that Vicky and I hadn't been killed. Everyone but me and the driver was half-asleep. Pedestrians had to fight for their lives in this city.
We were dropped in front of the same hotel that I had been in a few hours earlier. Guess once the people found out it was the safest place they could be, they checked in.
"Hopefully I'll be able to get to sleep after this. My hair's turning gray, I'm sure of it."
"Get some sleep when you can, Marco," Cassie said, her head resting on Jake's shoulder.
"I'll be sure to listen to that."
We went up the elevator to the top, where a suite had been checked in for us. I collapsed on the couch, and promptly fell asleep.
Chapter 24- Jake
I sat down in a chair near Marco, not feeling any bit tired since I had been in a deep sleep for the past 12 hours. Everyone else sat around the living room, and Heath and the two agents went away.
Vicky laid down on the floor.
"How about that explanation?" I asked.
"You mean the whole psychic thing?" I nodded. "Humans have a slight ability to tell the future, even though they can't exactly use it whenever they can. It's sort of like a bad feeling in the morning and you know something's bad's going to happen. Sort of the way you can finish someone else's sentence or have the exact same thought as someone else in your class. The way that you knew that black cave meant death, Jake."
"What about telekinises?" I ignored the stare from Cassie.
"Well, that's even more rare. I don't have it. David had said that his power was limited only by the machines he had. A machine can possibly move matter, once it's made. But probably only two centuries from now, depending on which species can make it. And probably not as sophisticated as the one David had, he was able to bring it with him to our town. Well, not telekinises, something that could bend and move solid matter like he could at the movies. That'll probably be out in about a millennium or so."
"Where do you think he got the machines?"
"Duh."
"Right. So Crayak gave him a bit of a start and let David go on his own from there?"
"That's what I think. I'm not a profiler, Jake, that's the FBI's job. And I haven't had any sleep since last morning."
"Sorry." She took that as a dismissal. She went inside one of the rooms to go to sleep.
I reached for a phone, and called my parents. Then the rest of the my friends called their parents, who had been going through hell knowing their kids were in the hands of a monster.
A knock at the door, and then a woman came in, tall, and aged. Erek followed her in.
"My name's Anderson. I'm relieving Heath." She dropped some bags onto the coffee table. "Clothes. Shoes are going to be coming up soon." Rachel smiled her thanks.
"What's up, Erek? Thanks for doing this for us. We owe you big time," I said.
"No prob. And I just got a call from the hospital that David is at."
"What?"
"Change and I'll show you."
Chapter 25
Once dressed in badly fitting clothes but good enough shoes, we came into San Francisco General Hospital, and a creepy feeling came over me. 'Telling the future,' I thought grimly.
There were thought-speech yells coming from the right. We followed it.
Two agents I hadn't seen before were carrying a small cage, and inside, a small white rat.
David had been cursing so loud, the whole world could hear. He called me a few names before he finally shut up.
"You're lucky, David," I said. "I would've killed you."
David muttered an expletive.
"This was found on his pillow," a nurse said, and gave to me a few bits of cold metal. Upon further inspection, I saw that they looked like computer chips.
"Care to explain?" I asked.
"Probably the machines that he used his power for," Tobias mused.
David hadn't answered. He had cuddled up in a corner, staring at me.
Pyaht, chi-tee-reh, tree, dvah, ah-deen, Jake, He said privately to me. Your time will run out. Soon enough.
I looked at him, letting him know that what he just said was an empty threat.
Cassie will be mine.
And then he died. Just put his head down and died.
"Weird," Erek muttered.
"About time," Rachel said. "He didn't deserve to live in the first place. Don't forget, the senior prom's tomorrow night."
"Alright, Rachel," I said. I think I was calming myself down. "Alright."