Chapter 37
It was weird, how freaking peaceful the sky outside looked, compared to everything that was happening at that very moment. The skies blue as can be, the sun shining so fiercely that it was nearly blinding and little South Floridian critters singing and going about their business with an almost foolish determination.
And yet, amid the sickening cheeriness a girl was hunched over her computer, her Forensics textbook open to a random page by her side as she typed with a strange passion.
Her long brown hair spilled over her back in a myriad of angles, the glare from the computer making her look sickly.
"Come on…" she muttered, tapping her finger on the enter button repeatedly. "Come on already!"
The room she was in was fairly messy. Steven King and Marry Higgins Clark books strewn all over the place, heaps of both dirty and clean laundry, bed unmade and the lingering smell of axe coming from a boy's hoodie.
She then suddenly, she pumped a fist in the air, whisper-shouting, "YES!"
She quickly printed out all the sheets and copied all the files onto one of many Zip Drives scattered over her desk, Bag of Bones and All Around the Town falling to the floor.
"Damn everyone for volunteering me to do this…" she muttered petulantly, picking the books up with small hands, smoothing out the crinkles. "Does Cookie have anything better to do than hack into some files? No. And dang them for pulling the whole 'You got us hooked on Fang's and Tally's Blog' card. I feel used," all this was mumbled so low that it barely seemed like she was talking.
She pushed some hair back; face the picture of annoyance as she let her eyes skim through the information as it loaded onto the disk. Then they widened fractionally, "No way…these people are bastards."
However, she never got to finish it.
She whirled around on the spot when she felt the usual prickle of her neck that meant some idiot was peeping through her window or something.
But her black eyes flashed in terror as the shards of glass seemed to almost hurl at a slow speed as if through water with a resonating smash of hurricane proof glass.
Cookie never got the opportunity to even scream as a clawed and gnarled hand swiped her across the cheek, slamming her into her four poster bed and effectively knocking her out.
The Goblins had captured yet another human.
A fifteen year old PRO-FLOCK member.
-
Tally openly gaped at Max, how was Kravtsov—that idiotic woman who managed to screw up on a surgery— managing to hide entire kidnappings while the Flock couldn't sneeze without someone looking at them suspiciously?
She didn't even notice the way her hands started shaking even harder, They're—They're kidnapping innocent kids?! Kids that are on our side?
Well, she certainly felt sucker-punched.
Kravtsov was defintely exploiting all their faults.
She dang well knew that Max had to save everyone and just mentioning that little fact caused everyone's feathers to stand on end.
Stupid underhanded woman was playing on their Hero-Syndrome.
"Simple, then we don't kill Goblins anymore!" Max huffed, eyes not focused—a clear sign that she was directing the statement at the Voice rather than at Fang, Iggy or Tally.
Tally looked over at Iggy as Fang abandoned her in favor of his girlfriend.
He had his face mussed up so that he looked somewhere in between pissed and annoyed, the bruises and scars didn't help to soften the fifteen year old boy's features.
Tally made her way over to him, leaves crunching under her feet, and ran a finger down his arm hesitantly.
He recoiled, startling her as she snatched her hand back, not noticing how in the process she had accidently slowed the molecules in a beetle down to the point where it was frozen. "Dammit, leave me alone," he said quietly.
Another punch; she just wouldn't get any slack today, would she?
Or was she getting clingy?
Tally shook her head minutely obstinately ignoring the sudden warm sting and blurring in her eyes, choosing instead to stand a few feet away from the blind giant and switch topics quickly. Before she became a blubbering idiot, that is.
The world was really messed up if some money took precedence over kidnapped kids.
And then there was the fact that made guilt weigh her down even more.
How would they get rid of Goblins knowing that they were kids?
And were they dying? The regular old genetically enhanced kids died off like flies…so normal non-genetically enhanced children…
Tally winced, taking a sharp intake of breath at the same time a wave of acid washed down her chest again.
No, she really wasn't going to get any breaks it seemed.
"Fine," Max huffed like someone would before hanging up on someone. She then turned to the older members of the flock, her eyes dancing on Fang a moment longer before she spoke, pushing some dirty blonde hair back. "The Voice says that we have to get to the Facility. No matter what."
"And the kids?" Iggy asked; a certainly sour and caustic tenor to his voice. "Are we supposed to just blow them to bits knowing they were innocent kids the day before?"
"Of course not," Max snapped, almost snarled. "What the hell is wrong with you? We're going to treat them like Erasers. Injure them enough to get away and that's it."
The blind boy scowled, "The only thing that's bothering me is that we're still fighting a freaking useless battle."
"Huh?" Fang muttered just as Max blew up.
"It's not useless! We will save the world! We'll do it, we'll destroy the Facility just like we did Itex and that's final!"
"No! Sure, it's useless like that too, since the world we're saving wants our wings to help with 'Global Warming' but I don't mean that! I mean that every time we turn around, there's a new law that restricts us! Something that prevents us to do things the way we did a year ago! You remember, right? Saving Angel, New York, Anne, Florida! Things were so much easier back then! It's just getting hopeless now!" he threw his hands out in a strange parody of Talon's gesticulations.
Tally blinked, flinching back from the increasing volume of Iggy's voice.
She—She wasn't going to agree with everything Iggy said (partly because she had barely been with the Flock a year…and only had a vague semblance of how they described New York and saving Angel to her)… but she wasn't going to disagree either.
Everything he said was true to some extent…but she just didn't want to fall to that level of…depression?
No, she was already that. And she acknowledged it, what with her self deprecating thoughts…the way she could link everything that happened back to her being the catalyst…
"Calm down," Fang's voice cut through the palpable tension like a knife to butter, looking at both of them evenly when he saw his sister was more inclined to watch the grass grow. "Fighting's not going to get us anywhere."
Iggy huffed, his light blue eyes still narrowed into a horrible glare.
Talon winced again. Gosh, she just felt like shriveling up and dying under all the glare fest! Maybe she should have gone to sleep with the little kids instead of staying up and apparently doing something stupid to get Iggy mad at her.
Maybe.
Then again, she liked being in the loop.
However, at the cost of her sanity and relationship?
Not so much.
She grimaced, another spasm of pain rippling up her chest. Her mouth opened in an inaudible "oh."
"Fine," Max said.
Iggy just stomped away to a tree, far away from the three other flock members. And when that happened, her twin and leader shot her a questioning look.
She gave a feeble shrug and let herself slide down, highly aware of the elephant called fatigue that had decided to sit on her.
Whatever I did, sorry, she thought, taking off her sweatshirt and balling it up.
He gave her no answer save for an annoyed clicking of the tongue.
She was pretty darn sure she was going to be cold that night…and even colder when she had watch and had to wake up her—Iggy.
What the hell had she done!?
-
I frowned. (Something I seemed to do a lot lately)
We had stopped at the border that led into the Facility, only a short distance away from the Headhunter's school.
And I couldn't believe our luck.
The whole place, and even a whole five miles away from it, was fenced in.
And no, it wasn't those little cutesy white picket fences or that I just didn't notice the fence way back when we were on the rescue mission for the stoic twins. But it did seem to have gotten an upgrade.
It was a hulking fifteen foot chain linked fence, with a nice hurt-your-eyes yellow sign happily telling us to stay away because of the voltage (sadly, there was a dead maggot laden squirrel as proof) and another five feet of barbed wire towards the top.
Now, my first though was Fly over it.
But the twins were quick to practically tackle me down on that one.
I looked at them incredulously, wondering why they just seemed to have developed ants in their pants by osmosis, as they hazarded glances at the fence.
Fang calmly (though somehow not) pointed up above from thee fence where I caught some shimmering for about all of half a second.
"What?" I asked.
He didn't answer, because at that moment, Talon had climbed up into a nearby tree and chucked a rock at the shimmering stuff.
The poor pebble, innocent in its doings, suddenly collided with an invisible something in a crackling, snarling mess, bright sparks of blue electricity jumping off.
When the fireworks display was over the pebble was gone and all that was left was some steaming ashes.
"Unless you want to turn into fried birdkid, I suggest a different plan," Fang said with a pointed look.
I made a grossed out face (banishing the mental image of Total, battered and fried next to some mac 'n' cheese and mashed potatoes from KFC) before scanning everything again. "How did you guys get out last time?"
"There wasn't barbed wire last time…and the back fence was opened," Fang replied.
"They usually open the fence with a keypad…and the forcefield's always been there…" Angel said, probably reading Tally's mind as she jumped down from the tree in one leap.
"I still say we blow it to smithereens," Iggy said, scratching his nose.
"Too ostentatious," I said. "But we can still fly over the fence."
Gazzy made an alarmed sound as Nudge began babbling about not wanting to be turned into fried bird kid, and Total began to question my sanity. Only Angel, Iggy, Tally and Fang stayed quiet, waiting for my verdict.
"No one's going to be fried anything," I shot Fang an exasperated glance for even giving them that idea. He just smirked. "For it to be giving off that much energy there has to be a power-box of some sort that we can override…or go back to that area where Tally and Fang escaped from and retrace their steps."
"Excellent plan," Fang whispered. "Then what?"
"No idea, start walking."
-
"I don't like this, not one bit," Dr. Martinez said briskly into the phone, peeking out through her curtains at the road almost imagining those hellish things Max had described to her while Ella wringed her hands next to her.
"Neither do I, Valencia," John Abate replied. "The flock are only children and yet people want to kill them for 350,000 dollars."
Immediately, Dr. Martinez got a picture of her daughter threatening to poke out John's eyes and make him eat them all while yelling a thousand reasons for why they weren't children.
"People have killed for less," she said, turning to a picture of said birdkids she had on the counter beside the impaled bread holder Max had nearly destroyed with her newest power.
It was a large eight and a half by eleven inch blue frame.
They were all in the living room, Fang and Max sitting on the loveseat comfortably with soft smiles, Total, Nudge, Gazzy and Angel grinning at the camera with smiles made of sunshine, bunny ears on all of their heads. Tally was on the couch, mouth forever frozen halfway through a silent laugh with Iggy's head in her lap, milky eyes shining with mirth as he told a joke.
"Even more of a reason to create the CSM."
Dr. Martinez was rudely yanked from her reverie. "No," she shook her head, brown eyes almost mournful. "Max vetoed it."
"But that was a while ago. And she hasn't said anything about those PRO-FLOCK meetings…"
"I'm not sure, I mean that was back before all this stuff, when we had a chance of it taking off…"
"I know a ton of people in power who still think that the Coalition to Stop the Madness is a good idea. Even better, I can have the Vice-President on our side in no time."
"A bit conceited now, aren't we?" she asked teasingly while giving Ella's shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
"No, just stating the facts."
And so the CSM was born.
-
A/N: Just saying that I am disappointed with the amount of reviews I got for last chapter.