A/N1 This is quite a bit different in tone and content than most of what I have written. As I told David Carner a while ago, I am tired of writing darkling, gritty stories. (Even if they eventually brighten.) This is meant to be old-school, a little over-the-top, comic-booky adventure. Thanks to David for passing an eye over this for me.

Don't own Chuck.


Too Old For This


CHAPTER TWO

Natural and Unnatural History


Sarah stopped her Porsche in front of the safe house. Farmhouse, really. Old and grey and weather-beaten, but not derelict. It had a deep front porch and there were flowers growing in boxes along the steps leading up to the porch, to the front door. It looked like a place where someone lived, although Sarah knew that was a facade.

She climbed to the front door and gripped the handle securely. She stood unmoving. Sensors did their work; she heard the door unlock. Inside, the decor was what the outside implied: old, heavy furniture, Craftsman-style but cruder, bare wooden floors, a grandfather clock in the front hallway ticking as if it had a grudge against time.

Sarah had been careful about her approach, scanning the area for signs of anyone, anything out-of-the-ordinary. There had been none. She stood inside the doorway for a moment, listening. Other than the clock, she heard nothing.

She walked down the hallway and entered the kitchen. Cast iron pans in good condition hung from pegs next to the old stove, and a rack beside it held three old mixing bowls, striped, in various sizes. It all looked orderly, convincing. Off to the side in the kitchen was a narrow door. Sarah walked to it quickly.

There was a bit of needlework in a frame hanging by the door, a picture of a house at the end of a long pathway, and the motto: Find the journey's end in every step of the road. Sarah had wondered about that from the first time she and Chuck had visited the safe house. They'd visited with Beckman, and Sarah could not shake the impression that Beckman had done the needlework herself, chosen the motto, framed and hung it there, although Sarah had no proof of it and Beckman had not called attention to it.

Sarah pushed the frame sideways and behind it was a keypad. She punched in the long code and again heard locks turn. The real safe house was below ground. Sarah turned the knob and opened the narrow door, revealing a long, equally narrow set of steps. As she stepped onto the first one, the stairwell lit up, and she went down.

At the bottom of the stairs was another narrow door, but made of steel and heavily reinforced. Bomb-proof. She punched in another code on a pad by the door, this one plain to see, and then bent down for a retinal scan. A metallic voice sounded: "Sarah Bartowski, cleared." Locks audibly but invisibly turned. She opened the door. Lights came up inside.

She entered the main room. There were two large computer monitors on two small tables, and one still larger monitor hanging on a wall. Other electronic equipment occupied a long narrow table on the other side of the room. Desk chairs at keyboards stood before each of the monitors. Two doors lead out of the room. One led to a small kitchen and past it, a modest armory. The other led to two bedrooms.

Beckman and the government had gone to considerable expense creating the safe house, but Beckman said that she and the government owed it to them. It had seemed an unnecessary extravagance, and not exactly strategically or tactically sound, but Beckman had insisted. They had let her do it. But they had never been back to it. For each of them, the hope was that the first time they visited would be the last, because they knew if they did visit again, it would almost certainly mean they were back in the life, back in the game. Neither wanted that. Neither missed it. Neither had looked back. Until today.

Rider knew nothing of the safe house. He'd been in Burbank, staying with Ellie, Devon, and Clara when Chuck and Sarah had visited it. They had never mentioned it anytime he was around, and had really never mentioned it much at all even to each other. Sarah supposed that they each found the safe house's existence both troubling and comforting: a necessary concession to a life much of which they wanted to forget, but a concession that forced them on occasion to remember.

Sarah noticed that there was a thin layer of dust on the room, the equipment, the desks. That was surprising, given how lived-in the upstairs seemed. Then she realized that the caretakers, whoever they were, were likely unaware that the downstairs even existed, were likely unaware of the true purpose of the house.

Sarah walked over to one of the desks and sat down. She reached into her purse and retrieved the pizza circular. She smoothed it out on the desktop, then reached up and turned on the lamp on the desk; she needed more light. It was dim down there.

Nothing about the circular seemed worthy of notice, not at first glance. The usual photograph of a pizza, lists of deals featured that week, locations for pick-up and phone numbers for delivery. Sarah never paid any attention to these sorts of ads since no one delivered as far out as she and Chuck and Rider lived. If they wanted pizza, which they sometimes did, they went to town.

Sarah sat back in the desk chair, looked up at the ceiling, allowing her eyes to refocus, then she looked at the circular again, slowly and systematically. She saw only what she had seen before. She blew out a breath and started a third time. Still, nothing. She stood up and moved her head, her shoulders, trying to fight back the tension. She sat down. As she did, something about the circular finally struck her.

The pizza. The pizza, hot and gooey-looking, featured in close-up, was a pizza with black olives. Not just black olives as one among many toppings. It was a pizza with only black olives as a non-cheese topping. A cheese and black olive pizza. That would be Sarah's least favorite pizza.

Ads like these either featured pepperoni pizza or pizzas with many toppings. They didn't feature black olive pizzas. There was a reason for that; it looked like a pizza covered in bugs, beetles or somesuch. Odd. And gross too, from Sarah's point of view, both visual and gastronomic. Sarah stared at the photograph for a while but could make nothing more of it. Still, she now not only had Chuck's reaction to report to Beckman, she also had a definite feeling that there was something strange about the ad, even if she was unsure what exactly it was.

She turned on the computer, punched some keys, and waited for the video uplink to Beckman.

When Beckman appeared on the screen, Sarah was struck by how well Beckman was aging. Her hair was now mostly gray, but she had lost none of her focus or bearing. If anything, she seemed more formidable, not less. Taller, but of course not tall. She was unlikely to make anyone think of her as a grandmother, although Rider sort of did, and Sarah knew that both pleased and displeased Beckman. Emma and Mary, Rider's actual grandmothers, found it wholly amusing.

"Sarah, I must say, this is a surprise, and...I fear...an ominous one?" Beckman's tone was clipped and efficient but not unfeeling. It was laced with sudden worry.

Sarah nodded once. "Chuck's gone, General. I saw him last late last night when we…"

Sarah let the sentence die, realizing where it was headed. No need to share anything more. Her blush did the rest of the work.

She and Chuck had shared so much last night. It was probably one reason she hadn't ever gotten back to asking him about the possible flash. He'd made her flash-so to speak-a number of times, in the best possible way, and then she had slipped into a deep, satisfied sleep, wrapped around her husband like a pale blond vine.

Beckman stepped into the sentential gap. "Um, yes, right. I can imagine. I mean I won't, of course, but I can. Not that old, you know." There was the barest hint of a smile in Beckman's eyes for a second but then concern replaced it.

"I was going to call you, Sarah, actually. I should have done so sooner, but I didn't think, at first, I wasn't sure the news signified anything." Beckman's gaze intensified. "Do you remember Dr. Stanley Wheelwright?"

"Yes, General, sure. Atroxium, right. Nightmare-inducing toxin. He's been in a maximum-security cell in an asylum since we captured him."

"That's true...and false."

"And...false?"

Beckman looked embarrassed. "Yes, I did not know it, but Wheelwright evidently returned to the land of the sane. And someone at the CIA decided it would be a good idea to put him to work. So, they moved him. Made him a prisoner at a black site, a lab, and let him be...creative. The in-joke among the few who knew about it at Langley was that he was going to create real ghosts to take the place of CIA ghosts." Beckman's contempt was audible. "Funny joke." She was decidedly not laughing. "But it's the CIA-what can you expect?" A ripple of self-consciousness traveled across Beckman's features. "Oh, sorry, present company excepted from shots at the Company, of course."

Sarah waved her hand; she had zero lingering loyalty to her one-time employers. "Why are you telling me this?" Sarah asked, even though she could feel the answer coming.

"Because Wheelwright escaped, a while ago, three months ago, I've found out, and he escaped not just with his own research, but with a cache of CIA files. Evidently, the black site had also been a paper dump, files were stored there that were supposed to be shredded years ago, but the CIA had never gotten around to actually hiring anyone to run the shredder. Wheelwright found the files…"

Sarah's stomach fell to the floor. "And among the files were…?"

Beckman pursed her lips, obviously not eager to go on. "Old files on you and some early files on Chuck, Casey, Team B. I think those were Graham's files. There may have been others. The CIA evidently did manage to shred one relevant document, the complete list of all the files dumped at the black site. All I could find was a partial list…and finding it took me forever." Beckman waved a yellowed piece of paper on the screen, annoyance written into the gesture. "I didn't learn about the escape for a while, the CIA kept it hush-hush, and then when I did, I didn't find out about the files for a while longer. Anyway, the partial list gave me enough to make me believe I needed to contact you."

Sarah sat quietly for a minute. "So, General, what was Wheelwright working on?"

"More than one project, but the only one we know anything much about was a project to create a much stronger version of Atroxium. We believe he called it "Revoltium"."

"Good to know he's still using the DC Evil Villain Name-Generator," Sarah said in a pinched tone.

"Is there really such a thing?" Beckman was serious.

Sarah shook her head, smiling a tight smile. "No, General, just picking up the slack without Chuck here." Sarah's voice broke a little when she said her husband's name.

"It'll be ok, Sarah. We'll find him. We don't know it was Wheelwright. Tell me the whole story."

Sarah repeated what she had told Carina, then she copied the pizza circular and uploaded it to Beckman. Beckman printed it off and looked at it. "That's an unappetizing pizza, I have to say."

"I agree. Do you think you can have an NSA lab analyze that? I can send the original." Beckman had turned to a computer screen beside her and punched some buttons. "I don't think you need to do that, Sarah."

"Why not?"

"Because I thought the ad looked familiar. I got one at my house yesterday. And it's featured on the national site."

"So it wasn't targeted at Chuck?" Sarah felt dislocated for a second.

She didn't like the story she had been constructing, but at least it was a story, something to act on, a place to start. But if it were all wrong...then she had no clue about what had happened to Chuck, no clue, no plan.

"I'm not sure, Sarah. Let's wait for the lab folks to do their thing. I will get them on this and get back to you as soon as I can. Will you still be at the safe house?"

"For a little while. Then I have to get home to Rider and start trying to figure this out. I can't just sit around, waiting. You know me. Anyway, you can call my cell. It's secure or secure enough; Chuck's tinkered with it."

"Alright, Sarah. Try not to panic. Maybe this is some kind of massive misunderstanding." Beckman paused, looked down, then back up, a spark of momentary hope: "You don't have a birthday or anniversary coming up for which Chuck might be planning a grand gesture, do you?"

Sarah had to laugh at that, even as she shook her head. The momentary hope in Beckman's eyes flickered, died. "Ok. Well, if something has happened...if it has, we'll get Chuck back. We always do." The screen went blank. Beckman's sign-off skills had never improved.

Sarah was about to walk to the armory when she heard or felt-or maybe both-a strange, scurrying, scuttling noise behind her. She turned quickly in her chair.

She was alone in the room. The door was locked behind her.

The noise must have sounded in her imagination. Her worry was mounting. Leaving her purse on the desk, she stood and headed to the armory, getting a pistol with more stopping power and plenty of extra shells. She grabbed the holster of knives she had worn almost continuously from the time Graham had conscripted her until she and Chuck signed the papers separating them from the government. She was unhappy and relieved when she put the knives around her calf and they felt familiar, in-place.

She had just adjusted the holster around her calf when she heard the noise again, a whispery, dancing sound. Barely audible. She whirled. For a second, she thought she saw something in the corner, but then realized it was just darkness in the darkness. Nothing to be afraid of. But her skin was creeping on her bones a little. Too much talk of Wheelwright. Too little light in the safe house. Too much panic over Chuck. It was all adding up.

She grabbed a couple of flashbangs, a tranq pistol, and some tranq darts. She reached up to grab a black backpack hanging on the wall when she heard the sound again. She did hear something. She was sure of it. She took the backpack down; the main compartment was already unzipped. She took the gear off the table and dropped into the open top of the backpack. She swung the backpack up and over her shoulders.

She had just gotten back into the main room when she heard the sound again. She bent down and pulled up her pants leg, securing one of her throwing knives. She had one hidden at the house she sometimes took with her on runs and practiced with, just to be sure she hadn't lost all her knife skills. Now, she was glad she'd made that concession to the past.

She was crouched when she saw the darkness in the darkness...move. Crawl, to be exact. Out, out from the corner and out into the light crept a spider, larger than any Sarah had ever seen, even at a zoo. And it was moving toward her slowly...carefully. It was stalking her. A clump of darkness in another corner moved too. A second stalker joined the first.

Carina had been wrong on the phone. Sarah was prey.

For a few helter-skelter seconds, Sarah had an out-of-body experience, wondered if she'd been gassed with Revoltium. Maybe Wheelwright had gotten it into the air system of the safe house somehow. Maybe the spiders were just in her head….Maybe.

And then she knew the spiders weren't just in her head, because there was one in her hair.

ooOoo

Gina could hear Rider dribbling the basketball outside. He'd been immediately suspicious when he woke up to find Gina there, and Chuck and Sarah both gone. She'd done her best to distract him with pancakes.

But she could see the boy's brain whirring behind his big blue eyes. He hadn't believed her story that his dad had been called away and that Sarah had needed to get some groceries in Bozeman. That was one smart kid.

Gina loved him like he was her own. He wasn't just a beautiful boy, he was exceptional in almost every way. Gina sometimes imagined him wearing a cape; he seemed like a little superhero.

He'd inherited his father's sponge-like mind and gentle heart, and his mother's athletic prowess and true steadfastness, her laser focus.

During the winter months, Gina often tagged along to watch Rider play hockey in the city league. He was so good they had allowed him to play in the age group above him, and he was still dominant there. For such a sweet kid, on the ice, he displayed a killer instinct.

The word about 'the boy wonder' had gotten around, and so there was usually more than just the small crowd of parents around when he played. She admired his ability to play with such intensity and then to just be a kid among other kids when off the ice. He was equally good at baseball.

He was also a terrific student and had been moved into a program for gifted kids early in his time in Montana. Gina knew one of his teachers, his science teacher, and although the teacher was fond of Rider, it was also clear that she was a smidgen intimidated by the little scientist.

Gina sipped her coffee, shaking her head happily. Luck or some higher power had smiled on her when the Bartowskis moved in down the road and befriended her. Her days and nights had been lonely for a long time, but now they weren't. She and her husband had not had kids, so they, she, had no grandkids. But now Gina felt like she did, although Rider called her 'Auntie Gina'.

Gina noticed that the sound of dribbling had stopped. Then she realized it hadn't heard it for a while. That made her curious, so she put her coffee down and went to look outside. Rider's basketball was on the concrete below the basket; Rider was nowhere in sight. Gina went out the screen door and got a better view. She still didn't see the boy.

"Auntie Gina, run!"

Gina whipped her head around to see Rider racing out of the small barn near the house, sprinting as fast as he could. Behind him she saw...spiders. Spiders? Spiders. Spiders as big as kittens, and fast too. No time to think. She ran to the door and held it open. Rider dashed past her and she yanked the door shut hard behind her, just before the first of the spiders got there. It climbed up the door, and she could see the full horror of the thing as it hung from the screen, staring at her with many eyes. She stood there, her two eyes dueling with its crowd of eyes. Eight. For a hanging second, she wondered what octonocular vision would be like. Then she came to herself. She turned and ran.

"Rider!"

"Gina! I'm in my room. Be careful, there might be more in the house." Gina watched her pathway as she hustled to Rider's room. When she got there, she found him already outfitted. He had on his catcher's mask and a batting helmet. He had put on high, heavy plastic wading boots, and as she came into the room, he finished putting on his hockey gloves and grabbed his hockey stick.

Before she could stop him, he bounded from the room. She searched frantically in his closet and grabbed a baseball bat then she chased the little Bartowski. When she got to the living room, she witnessed a bizarre scene, half-horrific, half-comic.

Three large hairy spiders were working their way, cooperatively, toward Rider. He was standing with his hockey stick at the ready, looking like a mutant masked baseball-hockey-fisherman. One of the spiders rushed Rider, but the boy stood firm: he timed a perfect slap shot and sent the spider hurling, airborne. It smacked the wall with a wet-sounding thump-crack, then half-fell, half-slid to the floor, leaving a splash of strange goo on the wall.

Gina turned back in time to see that one of the remaining two spiders had shifted targets to her. It came scurrying toward her, fast, really fast. She got the bat up and brought it down just in time to hit the spider. But she missed the body; she crushed some legs.

The spider tried to pull itself toward her with its remaining legs. She whacked it unmercifully, up and down with the bat, up and down, until it was mangled, smashed on the floor. She looked up to see Rider himself in the air. He had leaped up and he came down with his boots on the other spider. It popped beneath Rider's landing, but the boy stomped on it a few times for good measure.

Gina ran to him and pulled the catcher's mask up, to see his face. She was startled to find him calm. He gave her a quick grin, a copy of his father's, but his calmness was all his mother's.

"Big bugs, huh? Brazilian Wandering Spiders, I think." Gina's mouth moved but she wasn't sure what to say. "School project last year, the natural history of arachnids."

Gina started to ask a question, but Rider turned, pulling down his mask and running toward the door. "C'mon Aunt Gina, we gotta save Mom!"

Gina started sprinting to catch up. "But, Rider, I don't know where she is!"

"That's ok," he said, as he went through the front door, "I do!"

ooOoo

Sarah had to get the thing out of her hair.

She swatted wildly at it. She finally hit it and it fell to the floor. The other spiders had used the time to close on her. The one that had, presumably, crawled out of the backpack now joined them. She was cornered.

The spiders crawled closer, crouching, intent. Sarah had her knife in her hand. One spider rushed her. Her knife hand flashed out and the spider was twitching, impaled by the knife she threw. But the other two were closer now, and it would take Sarah seconds, and she would have to crouch down, to get another knife. She faced almost the same problem in getting anything out of the backpack, assuming there were no more spiders in it.

When that thought crossed her mind, she shrugged the backpack off and let it hit the floor. The spiders came closer. She knew she could likely kill one with her feet, but that would leave the other with an opening. But she had no choice. She gathered herself to leap at one.

...And the safe house door opened, and a small, masked baseball player, no, hockey player, no, fisherman, no...Rider tore through the door. He whacked one of the spiders with his hockey stick. Sarah jumped on the other. Gina came through the door, panting and wide-eyed, saying 'Rider' on repeat.

Rider pushed up his catcher's mask and grinned at his mom. God, she loved that boy so much. She was going to kill him. He had inherited his dad's lack of good sense. Neither one could stay in the damn car, so to speak.

"Rider Bartowski! What are you doing here?" She tried to make her voice sound very angry, but her relief made it impossible.

Rider's grin grew. "Um, Mom, what are you doing here? And where's Dad?"


A/N2 Alrighty, then. More soon.