Chapter 15 "Danger"
It's what we usual try to avoid, but some are drawn to it, like an addiction. And others are simply cursed to keep running into harms way.. When that happens, we just have to be ready.
- Michael Mules, Journal Entry
For Michael, everything he thought and believed in came from the stories of books, movies, and TV shows. He didn't have any real-life heroes, - not including his parents, as they had never been in this sort of situation - he just never thought one like in any of those stories existed.
Now Tracy was telling him he could be that sort of hero in reality.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked her the day after Tracy's encounter with the unknown woman. "I can't just go clobber them with my abilities. I don't even know how to find them."
Tracy spun on the chair of his desk while Wendy was seated next to him on his bed. The three of them were locked up in his room, and for the dozen time going over everything they knew about these people who were attacking, stalking, and kidnapping them.
Ending her spin, she frowned at him. "Once we find out where these guys live, yeah, why not?"
"I'm actually with your sister on this," Wendy said. She took a baseball that was lying on the floor and started tossing it from one hand to the other, getting rid of her aggravation with the small activity.
Michael looked between her and Tracy, waiting for one of them to add a part of a plan that he hadn't been involved in making.
"Isn't that what you're supposed to do to the bad guys?" his little sister asked.
"It's not really that simple."
Tracy sighed, and began to spin on the chair again. "Comic books are misleading then."
"Tomorrow Tracy, we're picking you up from school and you're going to describe that girl as best as you can to Darwin," Wendy said, now tossing the baseball high into the, almost hitting the ceiling each time.
Tracy merely nodded and changed back to the other conversation. "But what else are we supposed to do when we find them."
That question had been hovering within Michael's head for a while now. What would he do when he finally came face-to-face with these people? One thing would be getting answers from them about how they knew of his abilities and why they had been doing all these things to him.
But then what?
Should he try and get them arrested for what he knew they had done not only to him, but also the Jamesons and the couple who had nearly been killed on the night of his prom.
"I don't know if telling the police would do any good," he admitted out loud. "We wouldn't be able to prove anything that they've done. The fire, the car crash, my kidnapping. How would we be able to link them to it."
"You remember the two men who abducted you," Wendy pointed out. "That should go a long way."
"I vaguely remember them." he sighed and laid his back down on the bed. "That can be easily dropped into the trash."
"And from what we can tell, these people seem to have a lot of money," Tracy added. "To be able to abduct people, erase their memories of it, and cause all these 'accidents' without getting caught."
Wendy lightly threw the ball at the younger girl, who caught it and started tossing it up in the air like she had been doing.
⌠And they obviously have people with super powers like you, Michael."
"That would make a fight with them all the more dangerous."
"But it doesn't matter how dangerous it gets; we need to find these people, soon," Tracy said in a more urgent manner than she had spoken before. "For all we know, next they'll be coming right into our doorstep and do God knows what to the whole family."
"She's right." Wendy looked down at Michael, who now had his face covered in his arms. "We should get to there doorstep first."
Sighing, Michael sat back up and on instinct raised his hand to catch the baseball thrown by Tracy. Following them, he began tossing the ball into the air, only he carelessly hit the ceiling with it.
"I'm open to suggestions."
Tracy nodded behind her to his laptop on the desk. "Check to see if anyone has recognized H.R.G. or the bald man," she suggested.
"If there's nothing else," he said, shrugging.
The three of them gathered together at his desk as he went into the message board and found a few responses to his post with the sketches of his two kidnappers. These were to his disappointment, people asking why he wanted to find these men.
"Look at the last one," Wendy said, pointing to it on the screen.
Michael read it and smiled.
"This guy says he saw the man with the horn-rimmed glasses," he said in a very light tone that he rarely had nowadays.
"Where?" Tracy asked.
"Here in L.A. a few weeks ago." he read the message again. "He remembers him because he had been talking to a young woman who he hit on later but she scared him off by saying that our guy was her father and he was a former army general who would clobber him for the sleazy moves he put on her."
They were all thinking the same thing: This could very well be the girl who approached Tracy on the street the day before.
"The girl was pretty intimidating herself and because he has a friend that works at this hotel, he's still seen her there up until just yesterday."
"The Wanders Hotel," Wendy read. "That's downtown."
"Then that means we're going to the hotel?" Tracy said with a rather large smirk on her face.
"Who says either of you are coming," Michael said sharply. "Tracy, I've put your life in danger too many times now. I could be walking into a bad situation and I don't want either of you there if things get ugly."
A quick jolt of pain hit his head, courtesy of Wendy's hand. "Don't think for one second you're going there by yourself. This could be too much just for you to handle."
"We're going to be there with you," Tracy said in the same sharp tone that her brother had given them. "Like it or lump it."
That next day, Michael stood at the front entrance to the Wanders Hotel, with Wendy and Tracy at his either side. As far as his parents were concerned, he had taken Tracy to the movies with him and Wendy, so he had to make sure that they all returned home in one piece. He honestly couldn't say which confrontation he would want.
"Did the guy say she was in the top floor?" Wendy asked in a bit of a stutter.
"Yeah, that's where he had first seen her, coming out of the elevator with her father."
Wendy swallowed hard. Tracy noticed that she bit the side of her lips and started twisting one of her feet on the pavement.
"Are you okay?" she asked the older girl.
"Oh... yeah, definitely... nothing wrong here." Now this girl was making it obvious.
"We're about to confront a woman who can throw balls of fire at us," Tracy blurted out. Her brother frowned at her. "We all feel the same way, here."
"Tracy, she's scared of heights, alright," he told her.
"Oh, well it's not like we're going to be hanging from the side of the building." This didn't seem to help; Wendy still had a pale face and continued to make s.
Michael stepped in front of them and turned around to face his companions. "Look the second it seems like something bad is going to happen, we're out of there," he told the two of them. "If I say to run - run. Got it?"
Both girls nodded. Michael sighed and turned back to the entrance.
"Okay then. Lets go."
They steadily walked into the hotel and went into the first elevator they could find. No one said anything as they stood in small space, alone. The boring music that usually played in an elevator and their steady rising within the shaft were the only sounds for that long minute.
The door opened; as they exited the elevator, Michael took out the sketch Darwin had made earlier from Tracy's description. They would ask anyone they saw if they had seen this woman.
His insides were rumbling, just like the day he took his driver's test, only this one was ten times worse. This situation was much more nerve-wrecking than taking that simple test like.
Turning on a corner, he caught a person as he was leaving his room and showed him the drawing.
"This lady has the room a few doors away," he said, pointing a short distance to the opposite wall, where a hotel cleaning lady was just entering with into.
"Thank you." Michael started jogging towards the door, Wendy and Tracy at his heels. It closed behind the cleaning lady just as he had made it. He raised his arm to knock, but hesitated.
"Hotel rooms aren't cleaned unless the person who is staying in it isn't there, right?"
"Usually, that's a courtesy," Tracy said. "Like when we went to Catalina Island."
"I have a plan."
He quickly gave them an explanation, and a few minutes later he and Tracy stood at an end of the hallway, heads poking from the corner, while Wendy stood at the door. It finally opened and the cleaning lady stepped out, pulling her cart along and she nearly jumped in fright of seeing a bright-smiling Wendy standing right in front of her.
"Hi, sorry to bother you, but I'm doing a survey on the employment life within hotels and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions."
"Um, I guess I could answer some things," the woman said. "But I do have other rooms-"
"No problem." Wendy took her by the arms and pulled the woman forward, away from the opened door of the room. "This will only take a minute."
She took out a small notepad and pencil from Michael's car and started asking her any question she could think of about how working at a hotel effected her in every way.
From the far end of the hall, Michael and Tracy jumped from out of the corner and began sprinting as quietly as possible. They stopped a few paces behind Wendy and the cleaning lady. Michael took a small breath before tip-toeing the rest of the way in through the door.
Tracy then followed, gasping quietly, having held her breath the entire run. Once they both had disappeared inside, Wendy abruptly ended her Q&A and walked away, and turned at the next corner, leaving the slightly confused cleaning lady alone in the hallway. She closed the room behind her, without knowing of the two trespassers.
The room was rather glamorous. There was a rather shinning chandelier in the sitting room and in the adjacent bedroom; its bed was larger than any either of the Mules siblings had ever slept in. Tracy whistled in envy.
"I told you these people were loaded."
"Come on, lets look for something we can use," he instructed her as he went into the bedroom and started opening each drawer and scoffing through it. "Something that would incriminate them."
"Gotcha." Tracy looked inside the cabinets in the sitting room and found one with all kinds of sweets. As if thinking somebody was watching her, she looked to her right and left before stuffing several items into her coat pocket.
"Find anything?" she asked her brother.
"No, I..." Michael trailed off in an instant; Tracy stepped away from the cabinets cautiously walked over to the bedroom, hoping this woman wasn't suddenly in the room there with them, and holding her brother in a death grip. She instead saw Michael standing paralyzed, looking up at the ceiling with his mouth opened.
Tracy's gaze followed his and she too became frozen: On the ceiling was writing in what looked like the burning surface of the ceiling itself.
I KNEW YOU WERE COMING. ENJOY WHAT'S LEFT OF YOUR DAY.
"We need to leave, now," Michael said in a hush.
Before either of them moved an inch. The ceiling became a radiant color of red and in mere seconds, ashes began falling in sizes of dust, then chunks of rock. The writing was burned away into the flames, and Tracy finally found her voice, so to scream in horror.
The roof chose that instant to collapse right above her.
Danger can be attractive in a sense, but there are consequences to following that attraction. Others can be hurt besides you. So be sure the danger is worth the risk.
- Michael Mules, Journal Entry
To Be Continued