A/N1 And so, at last, we reach our cold open, our teaser; at last, we make contact with the initial scene of our story.
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Don't own Chuck.
Too Old For This
CHAPTER EIGHT
Chief of Spiders
Sarah let the damp, slickened binoculars fall to her chest, their weight pulling the strap against her sweaty, irritated neck. Mosquitoes were swarming around her, but she forced herself to ignore them, to ignore their teasing, incessant buzzing, their constant, pinprick bites. She glanced to her side, seeing the bites on Casey's face, measuring the intensity of his concentration as he peered through his binoculars and ignored the mosquitoes she could see swilling on the backs of his hands and his cheeks.
Doing for him what she would not do for herself, she waved her hand at the insects, forcing them all back into the live clouds of their kin that encircled her and Casey. As she did, she thought involuntarily of watching The African Queen recently with Chuck, of that scene on the riverbank, the sudden attack of swarming insects...
Casey pulled the binoculars away from his face, blinking at her in thanks, for the thought, anyway. She could read the further thought in his eyes; she was thinking it too: We are too old for this. Sarah nodded a tight you're-welcome, knowing that her face was as blotched with bites as Casey's. They were both exhausted.
They were also both sick with worry, worry about Chuck and now about Rider. Rider was behind them a few yards away, seated against a tree, his arms on his knees, his head hanging. The medication Sarah was giving him had helped, but not cured him: he was comprehending things now, not so glassy-eyed. But he was ill.
Sarah's hopes were pinned on the little encampment in the jungle. Her hopes for Chuck and her hopes for Rider too. She was sure Chuck was there, and likely more effective medications for her son.
The encampment. They had discovered it an hour or so earlier, heard its noise. They'd worked their way closer, inch by inch, partly because of caution, partly because Rider was weak. At the center of the encampment was a ruined temple or some ancient building, a building long, long ago abandoned. Parts of it had fallen in and others were so heavily overgrown with vegetation that it was nearly impossible to see any stone or wood in the structure.
Around that central building stood tents, four of them, not huge, but large enough. Each had a vestibule of mosquito netting in which there were fold-out tables or chairs or both. There were generators running, and small barrels of fuel, presumably, near them.
There were several armed men in the encampment, four as best they could count. They had also seen Wheelwright, briefly, once, as he walked from a tent to the central building. He'd stopped and given orders to the men. The encampment seemed under stress or under subdued excitement.
But the most surprising feature of the encampment was the hole above it in the jungle canopy. She was unsure how that feat of engineering had been managed, and when she nudged Casey, pointing it out, he shrugged in response. He had no idea either. The hole was not large, but it was enough to allow the sight of the blue sky.
Casey stiffened beside her, his binoculars back up. His posture became a pointer. Sarah looked up at the hole in the canopy. The largest mosquito she had ever seen was coming through the hole, buzzing like a fighter squadron.
Or that's how it seemed. Sarah blinked, shook her head and looked again. It was a drone, a delivery drone. It was bigger than any such drone Sarah had ever seen, and she had seen many of them online one night when Chuck and Rider had thought about building one themselves. The drone had a large tank; it was evidently powered by liquid fuel. It had a small barrel hanging beneath it. It was delivering more fuel for generators.
Casey relaxed his arms, letting the binoculars tilt away from his eyes. He looked at the drone. "That's top secret shit, Sarah. High-grade, next-generation hardware. Wheelwright has powerful friends or something…"
Sarah put her binoculars back to her eyes, and before she could sweep her field of vision upward to the drone, she saw a statuesque blonde woman in fatigues leave the central building. Sarah gasped. Robyn Cunnings. What the hell was she doing here? She heard Casey whisper the name. Cunnings was supposed to be in prison. But it seemed like no one stayed there these days. Cunnings had been a beautiful woman. As Sarah observed her, she judged that she still was. But the inner ugliness, the twist in her, was showing more now, in the deepening lines on her face, around the cruel set of her eyes and in the corners of her frown.
Sarah had expected to face a madman. That was bad enough. But Cunnings wasn't a madwoman. She was just a true, evil bitch. She made the madman Wheelwright suddenly far more dangerous and, clearly, far better connected. The question was: Who was Cunnings working for? Herself? Or someone else? Just when Sarah least needed it, things had gotten more complicated. She looked over her shoulder at Rider. He was in the same seated posture, looking small and sick, his skin greenish in the midst of all the green.
ooOoo
Beckman walked out into the heat, humidity, and bugs. Bad as it was outside, she needed to clear her head. She'd been inside forever, it seemed. She'd finally been able to reach Roan. He was fine, joking about himself, concerned for Chuck and Sarah and Rider.
He was recovering from his final round of chemo, and, although he was still enfeebled by the procedure, he was rapidly returning to himself. The cancer was in remission. Beckman was deeply torn between wanting to be here, on the edge of the jungle, and wanting to be home with Roan. He could see about himself, she knew, but she hated being away from him.
But Chuck and Sarah and Rider were, in a real sense, also her family. The only one she had. She had grown to love and respect Chuck and Sarah years ago, and she had fallen for Rider the first time Sarah put the tiny boy in her arms, not long after Sarah brought him home.
She wanted to spend more time with Roan, and he felt about Chuck and Sarah and Rider as she did. She had never admitted it to anyone, but she and Roan owned the safe house in Montana, and her plan had long been for it to be a second home. Until then, it was there for the Bartowskis. Beckman just needed to get herself to unpin the stars and the bars, and hang up the uniform. It was hard to do, though. It had been her life. But she knew it was time. She didn't know how much time she had left, but she wanted to spend as much of it as she could with the people who counted most, who mattered in her private world. She'd served the public one long enough.
She needed Rider to be ok, Chuck and Sarah, too. And of course, Casey, although Casey still seemed to her to be indestructible, more granite than man. She laughed to herself at that. If Casey was granite, it was on the outside. After all, he was out there with Sarah, hunting Chuck, putting himself in danger for people he loved, even if he couldn't admit it to them.
Beckman gazed up at the sky, sighing as the blue of it washed over her, taking some of her tension with it. The tech team was supposed to have a report for her in a few minutes. She hoped the team had figured out some way to re-establish contact with Sarah and Casey. She needed to know where everyone was, where Rider was, and she needed to know they were all ok.
ooOoo
The legion of spiders had dispersed as day broke. Chuck had been awake all night, returning their stares and slowly reinhabiting his own body. It had been the strangest of nights-all those spider eyes on him, the chants of murmurs in his head, the cold-sap slow return of volitional control of his body. The spiders were gone when Wheelwright came in, eating some sort of fruit, juice from it running down his hands and onto his arms. He slurpily announced that he was expecting big things from Chuck soon. Luckily, he hadn't really paid much attention to Chuck. Wheelwright licked his fingers and then started typing on his computer. Chuck hadn't noticed it before, but Wheelwright seemed strangely impervious to the heat and humidity. He did not appear to be sweating or uncomfortable. The guy was spooky.
Chuck was imprisoned in puzzles. Why did the early Intersect bear Chuck's face? What did the spiders want? Were they really...communicating...with him? Why didn't Wheelwright sweat? (Admittedly, Chuck found that the last puzzle was less pressing than the others.)
Chuck was on his cot, pretending to be asleep. Wheelwright left. Chuck started to test himself, to find out how much control of himself he had gotten back, when Robyn Cunnings came in. She looked behind herself, clearly making sure that she had come in undetected. Then she turned to Chuck and looked at him with undisguised lust. But Chuck could tell quickly that the lust wasn't for him per se; it wasn't physical or sexual, or not dominantly so. It was dominantly lust for the power he could see she took him to represent or to be.
She walked to his cage and opened the plastic, pulling it back from the door, and then she unlocked the wooden bars, the chain that Wheelwright had around the door and the nearest non-door bars. She ducked down and made her way to Chuck, bent over. Her green fatigue shirt was sweaty-unlike Wheelwright, she responded to jungle humidity and heat. Chuck continued to pretend. She bent down over his face, her face merely an inch or two above his own.
"So we meet again, Bartowski, and this time that CIA skank you married isn't here to save you. You will be mine, all mine. Wheelwright has nearly served his purpose. As soon as you are good to go, we will go, you and I. Most men beg me to use them, and I will use you, Spider-Man. I'll make you tingle all over. And you'll make me a force to be reckoned with. You see, I have money, loads and loads of it. I secreted it away before my unfortunate detention." She exhaled, inhaled, her breathing more shallow and quicker. Panting.
She pressed her breasts into his arm, his shoulder, rubbed herself against him. "It's been a long time since I've been free: you know, life, liberty...and the pursuit of… happiness?" She leaned in all the way and her tongue slipped out. She licked his lips wetly, sighing to herself.
Her hands were gripping the cot; she moaned low in her chest; he felt her tremble against him. Her eyes closed. Squeezed shut. He did not want to know what she was imagining. When she opened them, she saw that he was awake. "Good," she observed, her eyes running along the length of him. "I'm going to enjoy you. But you won't enjoy me. I will hurt you, Bartowski, it will hurt, I promise. It has been a long time since I was able to hurt someone...in the way...I like." She smiled at him, greedy and hungry, obviously relishing some fantasy. She licked his lips again. Then she lifted herself above him a bit. She adjusted her shirt and her pants, watching him look at her as she did. She was flushed; her hands were shaky.
"You're tasty." She licked her own lips. "Maybe I get what Walker saw in you after all. But Wheelwright is making you so much more. You're a computer guy, right? Well, now you really get to be the webmaster!" She laughed. Like Wheelwright, she seemed to crack herself up. But somehow jokes, even bad ones, coming from her seemed more ominous, for all that she was attractive and Wheelwright looked like Freddy Krueger. Maybe it was partly the taste of her so strong on his lips. The feel of her against him still fresh.
She left the cage, locking the chain behind her and closing the plastic. She was facing away from him, outside. She smoothed her hands over her hips slowly, throwing him a glance after she did so. The remaining taste of her on his lips made Chuck's bile rise. He knew he had to do something. Do it soon. Soon.
When she left the room, he tried his hands. He could move them, make fists. They tingled. But as he did move them, he heard the murmurs against, low but intensifying. And then there were spiders around him on the floor again, coming in through holes in the walls. Not as many as the night before, not nearly, but there they were (maybe the daylight decreased the number?) They were watching him. Again. Murmurs again. At least it seemed like they were the source of the murmuring.
The Intersect screen from years ago re-appeared before his mind's eye, and he contemplated it, trying to scry it for answers. After a moment, he saw his face a second time in the composite of images.
It was like those puzzles in the Sunday comics when he was a boy. A picture that did not seem to contain the image, but was revealed to do so only when you looked at it the right way, looked at it divergently, looking 'past' the images. Magic Eye Pictures. Autostereograms. The 3D image somehow nestled almost invisibly among the 2D images.
He turned his head and peered over at the table with the laptops resting on it. He saw a stack of files there, each full of pages. Wheelwright said he had Chuck's dad's files. Orion's files. Maybe that was them, or maybe his dad's files were among them. Chuck wanted those files. Suddenly, several of the spiders moved. They climbed the table and they crowded together around the files. They seemed to want them too. The murmuring in his head increased in volume. But then he thought of Cunnings again, of her licking him, and his concentration broke. The murmurs quieted, ceased. The spiders wandered away.
ooOoo
Sarah crawled as silently as she could back to Rider. It was hard in the damp heat to be sure, but although he still felt feverish, he was not as hot as before. The meds were at least regulating his fever. He looked up at her, his eyes blue with misery.
"Sorry, Mom. I made all this worse. If anything happens to you or Dad or Casey because of me…"
Sarah pulled him to her and hugged him. "Don't take all this on yourself, sweetheart. It's all ok. We'll all be ok." Please, please, let us all be ok. "Do you need more water?" He nodded, and she was grateful that she'd been able to redirect his thoughts. "Casey and I have formulated a plan, but we need to wait for it to get dark. That means a long, miserable day of sitting in the jungle."
Rider looked up at her. "I can make it, Mom, I promise. I'll be quiet." My brave little man. She kissed the top of his head. "Ok. Keep the water. I'm going to go back to Casey and we are going to finalize the plan." Rider gave her a weak smile and she gave him the strongest one she could muster in return. She waved vainly at the mosquitoes around the boy.
ooOoo
Chuck was still trying to shake off the visit from Cunnings when Wheelwright entered. He took a look at Chuck and grinned. "Glad to see you awake, Chuck. Today is our big day." Without further ceremony, Wheelwright went to a canister of gas and began cranking it open. Chuck heard a hiss and soon he could detect a faint scent and see wisps of gray. He hadn't noticed it before, although he now realized that he had been smelling it at least faintly for a long time. Revoltium.
Wheelwright left, making a Be-right-back gesture with his hand. He came back in with a small cage in his arms, two large spiders inside it. He sat the cage on the ground near Chuck's plastic-encircled cage. He had placed the cage atop a plastic bag. He pulled the bag up and sealed it, then attached a tube to an opening in the bag, and sealed the connection with some kind of heavy tape. Then he attached the hose to a much smaller canister and turned the gas on. Chuck watched as the spiders were slowly enveloped in a grayish haze too.
Chuck felt his eyes growing heavy. He sank into the cot. He began to dream. He dreamt that he was wrapped tightly in a web, cocooned, and that a huge spider with Robyn Cunning's face was slathering him and cocooned in white spit, preparing to consume him. From somewhere, he could hear murmurs that sounded like "...The purssssuit...of happppinesssss…"
ooOoo
When Chuck woke, he was seated next to Wheelwright. He was also staring at a computer screen, one covered in crawling images of spiders. A second computer screen, with what looked like the early Intersect Chuck downloaded, was also open. Chuck felt a strange sensation, then looked down and saw a spider in his lap. It was just there. It was alive but unmoving. It almost seemed serene, like a dog in its owner's lap. A serene spider? What am I thinking? Chuck was careful not to move, but his flesh was crawling even if the spider wasn't.
"Now, Chuck, I need you to concentrate. Tell your hairy friend there to move to the floor. Don't speak, of course, tell the spider to do it by willing it." Chuck had to play along. He fixed his desire on the spider moving to the floor, and then he gave the spider a mental push. Nothing happened. At first. But then the spider lifted itself on its legs and moved. But it didn't move to the floor. A moment later, it settled back into its serene posture.
Wheelwright muttered a curse. "Ok, Chuck, try again." Chuck went through the same procedure, but this time, as he gave the spider a mental push, he moved his fingers on his hand, the one away from Wheelwright, just a little. The spider scurried down Chuck's leg and onto the floor. Wheelwright scooped it up with a little shovel and dropped it back into the small cage. Then Wheelwright began a bizarre victory dance, a dance that reminded Chuck of the small man macabre-dancing in the Twin Peaks' Black Lodge. The dance was stiff and awkward (Wheelwright looked more like he was convulsing, really) but Wheelwright's stretching smile told the story.
"It's all a matter of fine-tuning now, Chuck." He kept dancing, swaying. "I control you," a quick slide step, "and you control spiders," another quick slide in the opposite direction, "hence, I control spiders. Oh, a great, great and glorious day, this one! But tonight will be...the cherry on top. Tonight you, Chuck," Wheelwright stopped dancing to stare at the spider he put in the cage, "you and your friends will drop in on the ever-so-uncharming Ms. Cunnings, and you will...get her out of my hair." Wheelwright chuckled as he ran his hand over his mostly bald head. He began to dance again, swaying. "Then I will begin the open bidding. And get the hell out of the jungle." Step, step, quick step, step...
ooOoo
Beckman was angry. Very angry. The tech team had bad news. Wheelwright was using a disrupter, but a new, unknown one; it destroyed the functionality of many signal devices, including radios. Evidently, Wheelwright could not power the device continuously, so it was pulsing once in a while, probably as a generator created enough power. The pulses were weak but they accumulated, or so said the tech team. It would take time and a succession of pulses for any particular signaling device to cease working, but eventually, it would. Sarah and Casey's radios weren't coming back on. They could not be contacted. Not unless they could find a way to turn off Wheelwright's device or could find a means of communication that was unaffected.
Carina trudged back in from the outside. She shook her head at Beckman, frowning. No sign of Rider. A couple of villagers, a man and his wife who had extensive experience in the jungle, had volunteered to take the small all-terrain vehicle the tech team brought and find the Land Cruiser, see if Rider was there. Carina went with them.
Her tone was heavy as she reported to Beckman. "Nothing, except that we found boy-sized footprints near the edge of the heavy jungle. Rider went in after them, General, as we thought."
Beckman shook her head. As she so often had been in relation to Chuck back in the day, she was unsure whether to be pissed at or impressed by Rider. She was both, she decided. What a man that boy could be one day. She chuckled to herself for a moment: she'd had the same thought about Chuck years ago in Burbank.
Carina didn't respond to the laugh. She was distracted. "If it's ok with you, General. I am going to go back in tomorrow, deeper. I can't leave them out there. If it were me and Simon and Bryan, Sarah would come for us."
Beckman gave Carina a look of respect. "Let's decide tomorrow, Carina. I don't want to be hunting four instead of three, you know. Get cleaned up and rest."
ooOoo
Cunnings walked to the edge of the encampment and slipped into the heavier jungle. She took her communicator from her pocket. It had been insulated against destructive pulses from Wheelwright's disrupter. The man was a genius and a fool. He should have known she would find a way to stay in contact with the outside world. She pushed a button, alerting her team, put the communicator back in her pocket. Tonight, at dark, Wheelwright would die and Chuck Bartowski would be hers, all hers. She licked her lips, wishing she was licking Chuck's. She ran her hands over her hips. She then laced her fingers together and extended her arms, palms out. Her knuckles cracked.
ooOoo
It had just gotten dark. Chuck opened his eyes. He knew the answer. It was so incredibly simple. How had he missed it, all this time? Chuck Bartowski was not the Intersect. The Intersect was Chuck Bartowski. He smiled a silly smile at himself, then grew grim.
He silently called for the spiders.
A/N2 Tune in next time for Chapter 9, "Spy-dery". We are poised now for the two biggest chapters of the story. We have only four (I think) to go. Please, leave a review.
Best Wishes to David Carner. He's celebrating his one-year anniversary as a fanfic writer. Thanks, David; it's been a fun year!
