Disclaimer It's all somebody else's. No money made. Suing will profit no one.
Want? Take ... Have ... just lemme know where it's going :)
At first she hadn't noticed, the weight of the others emotions pressing on her mind with comforting and welcome familiarity she had instigated. The trepidation and fear she could soothe, it gave her something to concentrate on besides her own internal versions of the emotions. It wasn't until she tried to disconnect that she finally realised she couldn't.
Emma paused for a second, allowing the panic in with a rush that cleared her head of outside information for a moment, then resumed stirring the sugar into her coffee. This probably couldn't be counted as a good thing, but between Brennan's stubborn refusal to wake up and Shalimar's increasingly wild pacing and continually glowing eyes, she couldn't bear the thought of adding any more to Adam's 'must save the world from...' list.
Perhaps if she found the extent that she was open, she could start 'zipping' her mind shut from the beginning. It had to be the stress, the over-use, all she had to do was stay calm. Taking a deep breath she set the coffee down and closed her eyes, looking in, and then out.
p:a:i:n:f:e:a:r:j:o:y:b:o:r:e:d:c:u:r:i:o:u:s:l:i:f:e:d:e:a:t:h:v:i:o:l:e:n:c:e:p:e:a:c:e:t:e:r:r:o:r:w:o:r:l:d:m:a:d:d:a:r:k:h:u:n:g:r:y ... oblivion
Jesse saw her begin to fall out of the corner of his eye, turning to race across the room towards her, phasing to avoid tripping over any of the many obstacles shadowed by the flickering light. In a baseball slide he managed to cushion her fall, holding her tightly as she convulsed with a scream trapped in her throat.
"Adam! Shal!"
Without the once constant background hum of the machinery, his yell carried and echoed away.
"I avoided them about two corridors over, Adam's declared open season on Shalimar with a tranq gun"
Jesse blinked up at the person entering from the solid black of the doorway, trying to force his eyes to make out more than an unfamiliar outline as he desperately tried to work out how to keep Emma from hurting herself while she seized, but still be able to take on the new comer. His wish list wasn't looking wonderful, but talking could always buy him some time.
"I'm guessing you're not the electric company, so want to explain what you're doing here?"
At last the intruder's form took on a visible appearance. The light glinted off red hair and the silver metal on her jacket, but the rest of her seemed to swallow the light whole. The face was pale, lips set into a stubborn line he recognised well enough from most of the women in his life. She had a job to do, and she was going to do it, damn the torpedoes and go ahead. There was a syringe in her hand; she began to deftly roll up the sleeve of the woman still shaking in his arms as she spoke.
"This is just a sedative."
Calm eyes met his, obviously waiting for his permission before administering the dose. Jesse gave a hesitant nod, if the stranger wanted them dead or out, there were better ways to get it done.
"Yeah, okay."
The needle found a vein and he watched as slowly the yellow tinted liquid inside was pushed in, almost transfixed by it to take his mind off the worry vying with pressing questions clamouring in his head. By the time the injection was done, he could already feel the spasms beginning to fade, Emma's breathing evening out from the harsh panting to the steadiness of sleep. Gently he disengaged himself and lifted her up onto an examination table. After pillowing her head on her jacket, brushing the hair from her forehead and watching for a moment longer to make sure there would be no side effects, he found himself without any more distractions. Damn.
Making his smile as confident as he could, he turned to face their guest and crossed his arms casually.
"I'm Jesse. Who was that masked woman?"
A twitch at the corner of her mouth was the first response to his admittedly poor joke, but after a few moments she spoke, as perfunctorily as she had before.
"My name is Jude. Jude Riley. Any Beatles references will be dealt with harshly."
"Gotcha, no 'Hey Jude'. Here's the million dollar question, and don't think I'm not grateful, but what are you doing here and who do you work for?"
That at last got a blink out of the poker face; he was starting to think she had the emotional range of a carrot. It didn't seem she had a reply to hand either, as she bought herself time slipping the syringe into a med pack, then putting that into the black bag slung over her shoulder. For a moment the to and fro of zips was the only sound other than Emma's still slightly wild breathing.
He wanted to sit with her, talk and see if it would bring her out of it. He wanted to go fetch Adam, and settle back into the happy belief that the old man could make anything right. He wanted Shalimar to tease him about the panic he was sure was written plain across his features. He wanted Brennan to wander in reading a book by candlelight. What he had was an intruder wearing a knowing expression and a shortness of breath he couldn't shake. But, while he was dreaming, he also wanted a Lotus Elise and a small Caribbean island to call his own.
"I'm an Operations Manager at Genomex, currently fronting up one of their satellite companies, Gen-Core. You've all been infected with a large dose of a very fatal virus we hoped Adam would be able to cure for us. The information was on the disk you were kind enough to steal from Gen-Core. We just weren't counting on one of you having contracted it already. So, now I'm here to help, bring you up to speed and take Adam back to a working lab. Preferably before you all succumb and Mr. Eckhart has me killed or stuck in stasis."
Jude looked pointedly at the LED readout of her watch as Jesse blinked.
"Not much time."
How long he'd been awake he wasn't entirely sure, it seemed like forever, but with conscious thought only kicking in seconds ago. Maybe. Dimly he could hear the sound of something scratching at his door, but his legs seemed to be operating independently of his will and refusing to even think about moving. Maybe he'd had a late night, his tongue definitely had that 'one too many' feeling and the roaring in his head was just about numbed enough to suggest there was alcohol involved somewhere.
Vaguely he noted his body couldn't seem to decide whether it wanted to be warm, or freezing. If he could have moved, he'd probably be throwing the cover on and off all night. But he couldn't, so that was okay. It was nice to just float a while, the instinct that he should care about something never quite making it through to where he was worried.
Then, probably in a last ditch attempt, Brennan's mind chose to present him with the picture of his team-mates flying back as an electric pulse, his electric pulse, hit them. And suddenly, the last of the sedatives left his system in a cold rush. The noise outside was gone, but he didn't know how long it had been gone. At least he was back in control, gingerly sitting up and taking stock.
Oddly, he felt better. Not cured of whatever had happened, but releasing the charge had helped for the moment. For a brief second he smiled, hoping it was a sign he was getting well, and then he remembered again how hard Jesse had flown back into Adam and how scared Emma had looked and the smile died. If he was in his room, they must have been okay. He nodded to himself as he pulled on his shoes with as much speed as his still slightly drugged self could muster. They had to be okay.
He hit the door at a staggering half run, the crude lock someone had managed to work on the outside with chain and padlock not lasting a moment against an ex-thief with a paperclip. The scratching of earlier was discounted as a drug haze, he ran on down the storm lamp lit hall, failing to notice the deep gouges on the outside of the door that swung shut behind him.
He had to say, Adam wasn't a light man. It came from having more muscle than Brennan felt was really necessary for a geneticist. And, on that note, he was suspicious of any scientist with reactions like that too. It said they probably spend a lot of time ducking from the contents of whatever test tube mix was about to explode. Not confidence inspiring. But given the scientist in question was currently pressing him into the floor with a combination of weight and the business end of a rifle at his back, he decided not to mention it.
"Hi Adam. Uh, you can get off now ... ?"
Adam didn't move.
"Well, that depends. I just got the generator working and figured you must have woken up. If you think there's any chance of a repeat performance, I'm going to have to sedate you again." There was a pause as Brennan tried to work out whether he was going to go haywire again that Adam spoke more conciliatorily into. "I've just had to play cat and mouse with Shalimar, she's tranq'ed in her rooms as well. I can't take any chances right now with your mutations, well, mutating. Sorry."
"Yeah, I understand. But I'm tapped. In maybe three or four hours I'll have to be put under or something, but until then, no harm no foul. I couldn't make a charge if I tried." He spoke quickly into the silence above him of a man definitely being pushed too far. "And I haven't tried! I just know."
"Okay. You don't seem to be deteriorating as fast as Shalimar did, perhaps it's a different strain of ... whatever the hell this is." Adam stood and reached down a hand to help the other man up, trying not to wince at the slivers of pain from the multitude of scratches from the claws of the Feral.
"Do you ... you think I bought this in?"
Adam shook his head as they started towards the lab. "No, or if you did something else has happened to it. The generator should be charging to full in the next couple of minutes, then we'll have light and maybe, if we're lucky, we'll have computers and I can try find answers before..."
The lights flickered onto their emergency setting, casting the corridor in tainted white neon that bled the colour from skin and turned dark shades into black.
Turning into the doorway of the med lab with Brennan a step behind him, Adam took a moment to survey the scene with one arched brow, unable to quite work up the shock or surprise the situation would normally warrant.
Emma was out on one of the examination tables, moving slowly in her sleep as if fighting off a nightmare. Jesse was on his feet, holding a woman he had never seen before by the neck and about to lift. The woman was kicking out but meeting no resistance or finding herself hitting rock, as he seemed to be controlling which parts of his body had density, and which had none.
He spoke calmly as both those in the land of the awake turned to look at him, apparently only now realising there was light as they blinked into it.
"Jesse, put her down. And I would like you to concentrate on staying solid for me, please."
"Why? Hey Brennan! How's Shalimar?" Automatically, Jesse obeyed, releasing Jude who turned to lean a hand against the wall as she coughed for air and cursed his ancestors in a mix of Spanish and English that, were he paying more than half attention to, he would have found entertainingly inventive.
Adam stepped forward to take Emma's pulse, finding it steady and strong, if fast. Not dangerous though, not yet. He had a fair idea what must have happened to her, mentally berating himself for not telling her to stop reading people when he had realised she was. Her closed eyes moved in REM, the sedative she was obviously under not bringing peace to a Telempath who's powers were feeding her emotions from the population of a planet.
Brennan waved half-heartedly and crossed over towards the woman whose tirade was now winding down, watching her closely as Adam replied to Jesse.
"Shalimar has gone almost completely Feral. There's very little there to communicate with any more, I have had to sedate her and lock her up." He kept his tone as matter of fact as he could, trying not to betray the sick fear in his heart, the horror of watching a young woman who had an uneasy alliance with her nature at the best of times overwhelmed by it.
"Yes, the virus works on Ferals the fastest, although we haven't been able to work out why. Really, it should be Elementals, given their genetics are unstable at the best of times ..."
Jude trailed away as Adam stared thoughtfully at her, mustering a polite smile that failed to reach eyes gone winter. She had thought, from what Eckhart had alluded to, Adam was the soft one of the two men, the bleeding heart. But at his expression, she had to conclude Eckhart was fooling himself. There was nothing soft there, there just wasn't Eckhart's particular favoured brand of insane fanaticism. He held out a hand.
"Adam Xero. And you are going to help us."
She nodded, taking the offered hand and shaking it by habit.
"Yea, that's why I'm here."
"Excellent. After you've helped, we'll discuss how they became infected. And I would imagine the outcome of that discussion will fall heavily on how much help you've been."
No, she was wrong, he was as insanely fanatical as Eckhart, he just chose not to flaunt it. Stasis suddenly looked good.
Notes
Sorry about the time this chapter has taken! The story will be finished, honest. Hopefully the next chapter will be out much quicker :) It's suddenly occured to me Jude could be called a kinda Mary-Sue. I really hope not though. If she starts looking that way, slap me.