Most of this story has run parallel to "Bleeding Through" without any need to reference it directly. However, it's important to know that this chapter is between chapters 12 and 13 of "Bleeding Through".
"Come on, Cleo!" The girl whispered frantically to the kitten in her jacket as it mewed again. "Be quiet!"
When Denise Edwards had left the Base in early afternoon, she'd thought that she had plenty of time to go home and find Cleo. It hadn't worked out that way.
Everything had been so crazy that first night – packing what they needed and fleeing, barely a step ahead of those…things. Denise hadn't realized until they were already at the Base that they'd forgotten Cleo in the confusion. She'd cried and begged, but no one would let her go back. That was three days ago, and she'd been so worried. All this time, Cleo alone in the house, without anyone to give her food or water, and who knew if something had broken in and gotten her?
Finally, she could stand it no more. She'd snuck out and gone home. She'd searched the house from top to bottom, and finally, to her great joy, she found Cleo alive. The poor thing had been hiding in the back of her parents' closet. Dad was going to be sooo tweaked when he found out what Cleo had done to his shoes. But at least she was safe.
Unfortunately, the search had taken hours, and when she finally came out, the sun was going down.
Bad things came out at night in Middleton these days. There were the lake-things, and there were…well, she supposed that they still counted as people. Maybe. Technically. But before everything had gone off the air but the occasional emergency broadcast, it had been pretty clear that the world was going crazy. And as far as Denise could tell, Middleton was a little bit worse.
She thought of them as Ravers, but someone back at the Base had called them Bacchantes. They roamed the Tri-city area in packs, looting and burning and breaking, eating their food straight from the butcher shop and the snack-food rack and rutting like animals. It seemed like everyone in the Tri-City area who had any vicious in their nature had gone wild and feral.
She'd seen a young couple that had been caught by Ravers. There was barely enough of the man left to bury, and the woman still hadn't spoken.
And there were a pack of them on her trail.
"Here, girl, here, girl…"
"We just want to play. Don't you want to play? Don't you want to be friendly?"
"You can't get away, you know. We can smell you. Smell your sweat, smell your fear…"
"Smell your cunt, just like Multiple Miggs. And soon we'll taste it."
Denise clutched Cleo closer, and the kitten squeaked in protest.
"There! She's there!"
Denise ran.
She raced through the darkening streets of Middleton, past empty, blind-windowed houses, taking turns at random and praying that she was still heading for the Base, toward safety instead of further into the hungry dark that Middleton had become.
It wasn't working.
They were right behind her, just around the last corner, taunting her with howls and yips and mocking shouts.
She wasn't an athlete – the most exercise she ever got was mall-walking. Her legs – and Cleo – were getting heavier by the second, and her breath came harder and harder, like the air was somehow turning solid around her.
A stitch pierced her side. They were going to catch her.
I should let Cleo go – at least then she'll have a chance to escape. If I keep her, they'll kill her in front of me just to make me cry. And without her meowing, maybe I'll even have a chance to –
Then something happened. The shouts and howls turned to screams.
Oh, God, no.
There was only one thing worse than Ravers.
Lake-things.
Denise found that she had a little energy left after all.
Her fresh burst of speed only lasted a few steps before she skidded to a halt, clutching Cleo even tighter. The kitten hissed and sank her tiny claws into the skin of her human's chest, but not because she was getting squeezed too tight.
Three lake-things had just come out of dark.
Two had once been coydogs before something had twisted them into misshapen things the size of Great Danes. Their mangy fur stuck out in spikes that actually looked sharp, and their mouths were filled with jagged, oversized teeth.
The third had once been an entire nest of snakes. Their bodies had fused into a single huge trunk that trailed off into the night. It looked like a snake that had no business being outside of a rain forest, except that where a head that could swallow a goat should have been, there was a hissing, writhing mass of heads that dripped with venom.
One of the coydogs growled and scraped sparks from the macadam with its claws as it crouched. Denise knew what was about to happen, but she was all but paralyzed with terror. All she could do was whimper and take a single trembling step backward.
Then the coydog launched itself at her and she screamed, reflexively turning away and curling herself around Cleo.
There was a strangled yelp and something hit her, and she screamed again before she realized that whatever had hit her, it wasn't solid muscle and spiked teeth, but some sort of hot liquid.
Slowly, cautiously, she turned back around, uncurling from around the protesting Cleo and opening her eyes (she didn't even remember closing them, but they were, they were squeezed tight).
The first thing she saw was that she was covered in blood. Blood and…other stuff. She didn't want to know what it was, but it looked gross and smelled worse. The next thing she saw would have made her scream again, if she could have gotten her chest to unlock.
The coydog hung in midair, its limbs twitching, its eyes bulging, and its gaping jaws dripping blood and foam.
Felix Renton hung in the air above it, in his wheelchair. He had impaled the monster on one of his chair's claws.
The other coydog huddled and whimpered, its tail between its legs, but the snake-thing reared up and hissed. Could it spit its venom? Hell, who knew? None of its heads were supposed to have venom in the first place – they were all grass-snakes and garter snakes and water snakes, and once they'd been harmless.
They never found out. There was a flash and a blast, and suddenly there was only smoke where the snake-thing's heads had been. It stayed upright for a moment, still swaying, then collapsed to the ground, twitched a few times, and lay still.
Monique Pearman strode out of the night, holding something that looked like a high-tech rifle, and that trailed faintly glowing smoke from its barrel.
"Nobody hisses at my man," she declared.
The remaining coydog crouched and growled, undecided about which way to leap. Then another energy beam shot out of the dark and shattered the asphalt in front of its forepaws.
That made up its mind. It fled yelping into the night.
"Damn," Bonnie Rockwaller cursed as she appeared at Monique's side, holding a smoking pistol. "Missed."
"Can't be the queen at everything," Monique said. "Whatcha got?"
"We were too late for the psychos," Brick Flagg reported, coming up behind Bonnie. Instead of a high-tech weapon, he had a baseball bat slung on his shoulder.
"Hearbreaking," Bonnie said dismissively. Then she turned scornful eyes on Denise. "At least we managed to save the idiot."
Later, Denise would realize that she'd put both herself and them in danger by leaving the Base. It wasn't really that difficult a concept, but right now, she was too deep in shock to realize anything but: 1) Bonnie looked angry and 2) She was pretty sure that she'd wet her pants, but it was hard to tell with all the blood.
"I'm sorry – " She whispered. Bonnie looked like she was about to snap 'you should be' when Denise opened her jacket to reveal the trembling kitten clinging to her sweater. " – but I had to save Cleo."
Bonnie and Monique looked at each other. Bonnie seemed to concede something, and she turned away with a roll of her eyes and a noise of disgust.
"Of course you did, honey," Monique said, putting an arm around her, unmindful of the blood.
"Come on," Felix said, landing beside them. "Let's get you back to Smarty Mart."
----
Denise's parents rushed out as soon as the rescue squad reached the Smarty Mart parking lot.
"Denise! Honey!"
"Oh, my God!"
"It's okay," Monique said as she handed the girl over to them. "She's okay. This isn't her blood."
Mom was satisfied by that, and promptly turned her full attention to hugging Denise tight and alternating between telling her how scared they'd been, how happy they were to see her, and how they'd kill her if she ever pulled a stunt like that again. For her part, Denise did her best to defend herself, holding up a protesting Cleo as evidence.
Dad, however…
Monique was just turning away to give them a moment when he whirled on her.
"Is that what our idea of 'okay' is now?" He demanded.
Caught off-guard, Monique froze, staring at him.
"She's in shock and covered with blood," He continued. "But everything's just peachy!"
"Glen!" Mom protested.
Recovering, Monique's face clouded over. "You have no idea how much worse it could've been," she said. "And you're welcome."
She turned to a glaring Felix, took his hand, and started to walk away.
Dad watched them go, his face turning purple. Part of him realized that she was right, and may even have been ashamed. But another part was still in a frenzy of fear hidden as anger, and wanted to keep lashing out. The rest resented being put in its place by a teenager.
"Glen, don't – "
"Not good enough!" He bellowed after the departing teenagers. "Not good enough, and I'll see to it – "
He spun on his heel, and nearly ran directly into Bonnie Rockwaller, who was standing behind him with her hands on her hips.
Immediately upon arriving at Smarty Mart, she'd hurried to the infirmary that Mrs. Dr. Possible had set up in the pharmacy, and retrieved Bethie, who'd chosen to help out there rather than woman the barricades with tweeb-constructed firearms as Bonnie had volunteered to do.
Upon returning, and seeing just which set of parents had rushed out to greet their idiot rescuee, she'd known there would be trouble.
Funny. They'd expected to get this kind of crap from Burlson, but no one had seen him since the evacuation. Apparently, there always had to be at least one.
Glen Edwards was the father of not just Denise, but the infamous Darren, and it hadn't taken long after meeting the man for Bonnie to figure out where his children had gotten their looks and their brains, though she had to wonder – considering that Mom was such a washed-up nonentity – where Denise had gotten her guts.
He was a Partner at one of Middleton's law firms – a big fish in a small pond, and used to getting his way. He'd been trying to put himself in charge ever since the population of Middleton had retreated to Smarty Mart, and despite the fact that few, even – especially – his co-workers and employees, wanted him to have any kind of power, the scared, confused people of Middleton might have allowed it to happen if the Possible family hadn't come from as far away as Florida and Montana to rally the populace, build the defenses, and ruin it all for him.
He didn't stop trying, though. And he wouldn't. He couldn't. If he wasn't in charge, if he couldn't control his world, he started to panic.
Bonnie understood perfectly. Didn't mean that she could allow it.
"Complaints about the service?" She asked.
"You could say that," Glen Edwards answered, recovering from the near-collision.
"Maybe you should show us how it's done, then," Bonnie said. "Or are you too busy hanging around in the camping section trying to convince everyone that if you were in charge, we'd be sitting back in our living rooms watching American Star Maker by now?"
Edwards turned purple. He'd been shamed by these little girls one too many times today.
"I know you," he said, shaking a finger in her face. "You're the delinquent who's been disrupting the high school for the last month, trying to get Kim Possible un-expelled."
"And Ron Stoppable."
He didn't show any sign of having heard her. "You've spent that month telling us how brave and helpful and heroic and wonnnderful she was, when she wasn't blowing up rooms full of innocent kids. So tell me: where's your plaster saint now, when she might actually be useful? Huh? Where is Joan of Arc now?"
A non sequitur. That happened when you were lashing out at random. Attacking what he perceived as a weak point, just to score a victory of any kind, to diminish her in the eyes of any onlookers, or at least her own. And throwing some blame on someone other than himself in the bargain, someone that he already resented.
Also, a mistake.
Slim and Joss Possible reined in their mechanical horses and turned their heads.
Nana Possible looked up from her conversation with Felix and Monique – they were apparently delivering a report on the rescue mission – and frowned in Glen's direction. It was the sort of frown that the people of Middleton had come to respect after the third time she'd broken a lake-thing's neck with her bare hands while wearing it.
Bystanders – including Mom and Denise – either stared in disbelief or openly glared at him.
Bonnie just met his glare calmly. More than anyone else in Middleton, she knew how to handle Glen Edwards.
Hell, I could've grown up to be this moron.
"I know you, too," she answered. "You were one of the people who sued to get her out. Well, congratulations –" She waved at the Smarty Mart's parking lot – the trashbarrel fires, the barricades made of wrecked cars and piled furniture, the pyre where they were burning a lake-thing (a frog the size of a small pony with three-inch teeth and a tongue that could catch and hold one of the Montana Possibles' mechanical horses). "This is what getting your wish looks like."
Ignoring his hostile audience, Glen puffed up and prepared to deliver a retort, when the voice of Wade Load – a voice that had become familiar and trusted to all of the refugees of Middleton – came over the loudspeakers:
"Attention, everyone! Attention! I have the news that you've all been waiting for: they're coming home. Repeat: they are coming home!"
The refugees of Middleton burst out into wild cheers as Glen Edwards looked around, stunned.
"Besides," Bonnie answered with her once-customary smirk spreading across her face. "There's your answer."
To be continued in "Bleeding Through"
