AN: Told you I wouldn't abandon this. Maybe the extra-long chapter will make up for my extra-long absence? :-)
Turn Signals
Miles. Miles Miles Miles Miles – fuck, why can anything never go right for one second around her uncle? If he's not self-destructing with a bottle of bathtub gin, then some actual life-threatening surprise is popping out of nowhere to try to kill the man off. Hunted down by his best friend's soldiers? Hell, that's a normal day for Miles Matheson. Chomped on by a fucking mountain lion? A minor inconvenience, but par for the course.
Drowned in the middle of a midnight escape across a freezing river?
Well, shit.
Charlie rubs her hands furiously up and down her arms, trying to un-numb her skin. Get it together. Half the thoughts running through her head sound like they ought to be coming out of Miles' mouth. Somebody needs to retain a shred of optimism on this disastrous trip, and, since she's the only one around, it's going to be her.
Fandamntastic.
She'd heard Miles say that once, relating a pre-Blackout story about Monroe and an ill-fated experiment with a girl and a carton of ice cream she's pretty sure she wasn't supposed to overhear. The corner of her mouth twists.
Fine. Time to get moving.
Miles' horse looks dead – at least, it's not stirring, though it's too dark to tell from this distance if it's breathing or not – but there'll be supplies in the saddlebags and maybe a jacket she can dry out once she builds a fire.
Surprisingly, she notices the cold more as soon as she starts moving. Every joint takes an extra effort to shift, and negotiating the loose shale of the riverbank becomes an unexpectedly challenging process. Slip, shift, stab of pain in her knee, slip, scramble, every muscle tensed against the cold wind –
She reaches the horse with a crunch of gravel, and the soft slap of her hand on its wet flank. There's a sort of absolute stillness that comes with death, and Charlie can feel it the moment her fingers make contact. The body is there, but everything that made up the horse is gone. She lifts her hand to rifle through the saddlebags –
And something moves behind the horse.
Six-months-ago Charlie would have yelped.
Now, she just pulls the knife from her boot and leans slowly over the horse, bracing one hand on its cold, motionless ribcage.
At first, it's just distinguishing "dark" from "darker," the shadow of the horse obscuring the form underneath…then a hand reaches up from the darkness and closes around her wrist.
She almost stabs him before she realizes it's Miles.
...
Maybe it's just a hair-trigger reaction to that sound that's burned in his brain, but Bass just moves when he hears the gun cock.
He hits the ground so hard it feels like his leg's broken off, and it actually takes him a second to realize he's jumped toward Harold instead of away. What the fuck is wrong with him?
Later. Get the gun, shoot the fucker, ask introspective questions later.
Fortunately, he's damn fast for a guy with one leg and a pounding headache. Pain becomes irrelevant pretty quickly when the alternative is getting shot where you lie.
Bass's body slams into Harold's legs just below the knee, and he's surprised when he doesn't hear the gun go off. Instead, there's a clang of metal – and was that Aaron's sword hitting the wall? – as Harold goes down, Bass delivering a wrenching twist that he hopes will dislocate the man's knee.
Then Aaron, of all people, hollers, "Don't move!" and Bass can't be sure if it's directed at him or Harold but hell if he's going to listen to the guy who got his combat training from World of Warcraft, so instead, he lands a solid punch to Harold's ribs and grabs for the older man's gun arm –
"Monroe! …Bass!" A tennis-shoed foot kicks him in the shoulder as he reaches for Harold's arm, which has gone unnaturally still.
"I've…I think I got him." That's Aaron's voice again, but the words aren't linking up with any sort of rational meaning in Bass's brain.
And then he catches the glint of metal out of the corner of his eye and realizes that Aaron has actually managed to put his sword to Harold's throat. Well, good for him. If he can manage to do that about three hundred more times, maybe they'll actually live through this little adventure and then Bass can throw Fatty McSwordfight a goddamn party.
Harold raises his hands as Bass rolls off of him, but Bass misses his next exchange with Aaron, because his vision blacks for a second like his whole body's refocusing on – oh yeah, that. Yeah, he might actually die from the pain in his leg. Miles would tell him that isn't actually possible (they've seen men in a shitload more pain than this want to die from it and fail) but it feels pretty goddamned likely right now.
"…really don't want to stab you," swims Aaron's voice back to the edge of Bass's consciousness.
He shifts to see if Harold still has his gun, and nearly blacks out again. Hold. It. Together. They're sure as fuck not out of this yet.
"Gun," he grits out from his place on the floor, throwing out a hand in Harold's direction.
"How about I take that instead?" Aaron offers. Fat bastard's getting cocky.
And Bass must really be losing it now, because suddenly he bursts into raw, choking laughter as his brain dredges up that scene from A Christmas Story. Except, in place of Ralphie, there's Aaron Pittman in a pink bunny suit, asking for a Red Rider bb gun.
"You'll shoot yer eye out, kid," he rasps, and if Aaron can't figure out what's so funny, screw it; at least Bass'll die laughing. He hears a thunk as Harold places the gun on the floor and barely manages to add: "Safety."
There's a soft click as Harold engages the safety, and then the 9mm slides across the floor to Aaron.
And Bass's hearing really isn't the greatest right now, what with the blood roaring in his ears, but he's pretty certain he hears Aaron mutter:
"Now what?"
They are so screwed.
...
They are so screwed. Like, really, really, royally screwed. Aaron had managed to get the sword against Harold's neck by pure adrenaline more than anything else, and now his hands are shaking so hard he's terrified he's going to cut the guy's throat by pure accident.
Bass is splayed out on his back on the floor, breathing hard. And no wonder. Aaron had never seen anybody except Miles move like that. He'd practically teleported across the room, with a broken leg.
Those two, on the same side, would be pants-pissing terrifying.
Trying hard not to replay that little horror film of an idea on his mental screen, Aaron reaches – slowly and carefully – to retrieve the discarded gun, trying to keep his eyes on Harold's throat and not on the look the older man is giving him.
"You brought that man into my house – my house – when Nora knew it could ruin everything I've worked for. Bad enough that I had to let Miles Matheson in here, but – " Harold levers himself up on an elbow, pressing his throat into the point of Aaron's blade. He jerks his bearded chin at Bass. "Sebastian Monroe? That man is the worst kind of mental case."
"Just shut the damn door and shoot him already," Bass snaps, through gritted teeth, and apparently he's gotten his breath back, Aaron thinks as he suppresses a jolt of surprise. "No one'll…hear – " Bass pauses with a hiss and a labored breath. " – over those pipes outside."
"I'm not going to shoot him!" A note of incredulity creeps into Aaron's voice. Heck, it's not like he even could. Harold's gun weighs a ton, and he's already got the sword in his right hand, and – as Bass should know after several hours of haranguing him about his footwork – Aaron's just really not that coordinated.
"If you don't…shoot him…" Bass pauses for a few deep breaths, and Aaron flicks a worried glance at him. He might be a murderous bastard, but given that his crazy teleportation stunt just saved both of their lives, it doesn't seem very thankful of Aaron to let him expire on the concrete floor. Finally, Bass finishes: "…he's just going to call his resistance buddies down here to shoot us."
"Is there an option that doesn't involve shooting, here?"
"Yes," offers Harold, quietly. Aaron can't really help staring into the guy's eyes what with trying to keep the sword pointed at his neck, and he feels, not for the first time, that he's on the wrong side here. From everything he's seen, Harold's a standup guy who's actually making the world a better place. And who's he defending? The dude who murders people's families and conscripts children for kicks.
"Turn over Monroe to me," Harold continues. "I'll make sure he gets justice and you can walk out of here and go join your friends. Hell, I'll give you a horse, an escort, and two weeks' worth of supplies."
Aaron takes a deep breath. "I…"
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Bass close his eyes.
...
The minute Harold makes his offer, Bass knows it's over. His only play had been to get Aaron to shoot the bastard before he could start talking. But now, he can see the crisis of conscience in Pittman's eyes, and he knows that's it. He's done.
He feels like he ought to be cursing Miles out – for leaving him here with the worst babysitter in existence, for shooting him in the goddamned leg so he can't fight, for abandoning him in Philly in the first place…
No. The first place had been further back than that.
The first place had been an orange tent, a fight on the side of the road, and Miles blowing two guys' brains out so they wouldn't hurt anybody else. Well, fuck, Miles – by that standard, everybody in the whole world ought to be put down by now.
And God knows, Bass had tried.
Maybe it's just his turn.
Pittman takes a deep breath – "I…" – and Bass closes his eyes, soaking in the feeling of the cool concrete, the agony shooting up his leg. Maybe Harold'll just put a bullet in his brain. At this point, it might almost be a relief.
"…I can't."
The world tilts on two words.
Bass's eyes snap open. "..th' fuck?" he mumbles, barely aware he's voicing the words. And maybe it's the blood roaring in his ears or he's just losing his fucking mind, but did he just hear Aaron refuse to let Harold kill him?
"Look, I'm really, really sorry." Aaron's voice again. "I just made a promise to Miles –and Nora, and the rest of them – and I know you don't think much of him, but he's saved my life about six hundred times in the last twelve weeks, and on the off chance that he's actually got some sort of a plan and Bass – Monroe is his bargaining chip, I just…can't." He pauses like he's out of breath from the explanation. Really, it wouldn't surprise Bass. The guy probably can't run three steps without having a heart attack. "It – it would put Nora in danger too."
Actually, that's pretty smart. Aaron's not as good at it as Bass is, but bringing Nora into the discussion is a decent way to soften Harold up. Good on you, Pittman.
Of course, the smartest way would be to just shoot Harold, as Bass had originally suggested. If he could get up off the floor, he'd stage a demonstration. You know, for educational purposes.
Harold snorts. "Nora's already in danger – plenty of it. Neville thinks your buddies kidnapped Sebastian Monroe…oh wait, you actually did. What in hell was Matheson thinking?"
Bass tunes out for a moment as Harold and Pittman argue over Miles' motives. Bass has finished a goddamned PhD course in that subject over the last eight years anyway – for all the good it's done him.
His blurry eyes travel past Pittman to focus on the tall, locked cabinet in the middle of the room.
Locked.
Inside a secret room.
In the basement of the house of a closet rebel sympathizer.
Suddenly, Bass has a burning need to know what's in there.
"Hey, Harold." He's not as well-versed in pain management as Miles, and even to him, his voice sounds strained. He forces himself up on one elbow, noting that – fantastic – he's bleeding again. That explains the fuzzy feeling in his head, and maybe also the blurring around the edges of his vision.
The old man gives him a sideways look, surprised.
"What's in the closet?" Bingo. Harold's face twitches for just a moment before he sets his bearded mouth in a hard line.
"Gun." Bass waves at Aaron, ignoring the matching wave of pain that ripples up his leg.
"I know you're probably a little delirious, but we've already been over this. I'm not handing you a gun."
"I'm not gonna shoot anyone. Dungeon Master's honor." He manages to twist at least half his face into a grin and tries to make the sign of a pentacle over his heart, but it's pretty clear Aaron's not getting the joke. "Gonna shoot off that lock."
And then, like an idiot, Aaron turns his head to look at the cabinet.
Harold lunges before he's fully turned, and Bass has only a second to grit his teeth – this is going to hurt like hell – before he twists and uses his good leg to kick Harold's feet out from under him. Aaron spins back around, startled, bringing his hands up in reflexive self-defense…
…and the sword runs Harold through the chest.
Aaron drops it in shock, watching as Harold slides to the ground, gurgling. The gun falls from his nerveless fingers and he doubles over, leaning against the far wall like he's going to be sick. The first time'll do that to you.
That blur around Bass's vision is getting pretty bad, but he's had worse. The gun's only about four feet away, and Miles would kick him in the ribs and tell him he can crawl that far.
So he does.
His fingers close around the cool metal. Harold is whispering something to Pittman, desperate hisses between rattling, gurgling breaths. Suddenly, Aaron's head turns sharply toward the cabinet.
Just in time for Bass to blow the lock clean off it. The CRACK of the pistol is still echoing in the small space when Aaron leaps up and sprints into Bass's line of fire, flinging the cabinet door open. The ex-Google exec's knees shake as he just stands there and stares for a minute, blocking Bass's view.
Then Harold mumbles "Hurry…" and Aaron fumbles in the cabinet for a second. When he turns around, he's holding a small box, a laptop computer –
– and a pendant.
...
"Miles!"
Charlie's only answer is a groan. Down the shoreline, she can see flickers of torchlight reflecting across the sand and hear the voices of a Militia patrol closing in. She vaults the horse quickly, grinding damp sand into her knees as she drops next to Miles. He's half pinned under the weight of the horse, and it's going to take more than she can manage to move him.
The torches and voices are getting closer, and Charlie springs quickly to her feet, rifling through the horse's saddlebags for – there. Miles' flint. His swords are lashed to the side of the horse securely, but Charlie just draws one and uses it to cut the scabbards loose. She hesitates a moment, then buckles them around her waist.
She glances at Miles. He's half unconscious and there's not exactly time to spell out her plan. If she waits here any longer, the Militia will just catch two of them.
Mouthing a silent apology, Charlie takes one last look down the shoreline and sprints off into the woods. Running forces lukewarm blood pumping through her cold-slowed muscles, and by the time she reaches the trees, she's no longer shivering violently.
Her feet crunch on brittle, dry underbrush. The river may be running heavy with snowmelt, but it hasn't rained in this part of the country for nigh on a month.
And that's what Charlie's counting on to save Miles' skin. With shaking hands – just cold, got to be the cold – she scrapes together a pile of dry leaves and sticks, grabs a rock, and waits.
The Militia soldiers find Miles and the horse a minute later, and it's almost more than Charlie can do to sit tight there while about eight of them surround Miles and one kneels to see if he's dead or not.
He rises pretty quickly, and Charlie's heart drops into her stomach for a second. But then the soldier jerks a thumb at the horse and the other men set to work moving it off Miles.
Praying she's timing this right, Charlie positions the rock over the pile of dry leaves and strikes the flint twice.
The embers hit the brittle tinder and blossom immediately into flame. Charlie stokes the fire, but honestly, it doesn't need much encouragement. Everything in this forest is ready to burst into flame at the touch of a spark.
She jams a branch into the growing fire and watches the end blacken and then glow. Forcing herself to walk slowly, she creeps along the edge of the tree line, trailing the burning branch through the underbrush for about thirty feet, hurrying her steps as the ground behind her starts to catch fire.
Fire safety had been a big topic once she'd hit six or seven – old enough to help her Dad cook and build fires. A big fire, without the helicopters, water pumping systems or fire trucks her parents always talked about, could rip through acres of crops or woodland, destroying every town in its path.
Honestly, Charlie's had so many lessons on how not to start a forest fire that it's almost ludicrously easy to do the opposite.
She hears the shouts from the soldiers on the shoreline well before she gets back in sight of them. On the way back, she has to sprint through the trees, making a much wider circuit to avoid what is quickly becoming a wall of roaring flame.
She stumbles out of the tree line, coughing a little, in time to catch the silhouettes of the Militia soldiers running away down the beach, presumably to try to defend their base from the rapidly growing fire. As she'd hoped, a forest fire is a much bigger and more present concern than a half-drowned ex-Militia general, especially since Monroe – the prize they really care about – isn't with him.
The fire is starting to light up the beach pretty clearly, and she can see from almost twenty feet away that she'd timed it perfectly: the soldiers had finished moving Miles out from under the horse before they'd run off to start up the emergency fire brigade.
Miles' swords clink at her sides as she kneels next to him – and honestly, now that it's a bit lighter, he doesn't really look any worse than he'd looked before the swim.
Not that she really thinks that'd be possible.
His eyes are fluttering, and Charlie turns her best encouraging grin on him. "Hey, Miles…"
"…Charlie?" Her grin widens till it threatens to split her face. He tries to lever himself up on one elbow and catches sight of his swords hanging at her waist. "You gonna tell me what the hell's going on?"
"Well, you fell into the river, got crushed by a horse and then nearly shot by Militia soldiers, and then I started a forest fire to save you."
Miles blinks at her, but doesn't offer a comment. "Th'others?" he slurs, trying to roll to his side.
Charlie reaches forward to steady him, avoiding the torn patches on his jacket. "No idea. Upriver, I think."
Miles raises an eyebrow at her, and she can tell he's wondering how she ended up down here with him, but thankfully, he doesn't ask.
"Can you walk?" She hates to even ask it, but it's not like they've got a choice. If there's one thing she's learned about her uncle in the last three months, it's that he appreciates her being practical.
She holds out an arm, and Miles takes it. In the end, she has to get her shoulder under his to leverage him to his feet, but at least he's standing – wavering a little, but standing.
With Miles' arm over her shoulders and his swords clanking at her waist, Charlie sets off up the shoreline toward the others. Behind them, the fire Charlie had started lights the night sky in shifting orange ripples. Even with the wind blowing the worst of the heat away from them, it's suddenly a lot warmer on the beach.
Charlie grins. Miles, still using her shoulder for balance, jerks his head back at the flames. "Not bad thinking, Charlie." She can tell that's only half the statement, so she waits, putting one weary leg in front of the other and trying to flex her shoulder so it's more comfortable under Miles' weight. Miles pauses, gathering his breath for another comment, and finally says, "It's something Bass woulda' done."
After that, he falls silent, and suddenly, Charlie isn't sure whether to be proud or sick.
...
Bass has lost enough blood that he's not entirely sure if he's hallucinating as Aaron kneels next to Harold and flips open the laptop. The computer geek looks like he's going to be sick or maybe pass out from sheer disbelief, and it's a feeling with which Bass is intimately acquainted.
It was how he'd felt when he'd finally gotten his hands on the first pendant.
The first. How many of these things were there in the world? And how had Harold ended up with one in his basement? More importantly, did he know what it –
There's the unmistakable bweep of something powering up, and Bass's heart clenches as he misses a breath. He'd never thought he'd miss a sound so much.
"Hang on, hang on…" Aaron is muttering, face creased in the blue glow of the laptop screen. Harold murmurs something Bass can't hear; there's a desperate clatter of keys, Aaron typing as fast as he can, and then the ex-Googler is fumbling with the mysterious box, hands shaking so hard he almost drops it twice. He hands something from the box to Harold, and a second later, Harold lets out a scream so loud that Bass uses the last of his strength to flip over and slap a hand over the old man's mouth.
"Damn it, Aaron," he snarls, past caring how much it hurts to talk. Or move. Or breathe. "He'll have the whole house down here in a sec – "
Suddenly, Bass's vision goes pure white as Aaron reaches forward and jams something into the bullet hole in his broken leg.
A scream louder than Harold's echoes in the enclosed space, and Bass feels someone clamp a hand over his own mouth. His leg is crawling, from the inside out – bones moving, muscles jumping and buzzing, blood suddenly coursing from his thigh all the way down to his toes again.
The hand leaves his mouth and he rolls over and immediately empties the contents of his stomach all over the concrete floor. He can barely hear his own retching and heaving over the deafening pounding of his heart.
After a minute, he rolls back onto his back, ready for another wave of pain to hit him.
But it never comes.
…the hell? Slowly, Bass sits up, testing his weight on an elbow, then raising himself to a full sitting position.
Aaron has set the laptop to the side and is bent over Harold, shaking the older man by the shoulder. Bass can't tell if he's dead or alive, but by the way he's not moving, his money's on dead.
He glances down at his left leg – splinted, pants torn, covered in half-dried blood. On impulse, he tests it, wiggling his ankle in a circle.
It takes him a second to rip the splint away – Miles and Nora, like them or not, had done a decent job trying to repair Miles' violent handiwork – but a minute later, he tosses it to the side and peels his pants leg up to reveal perfectly smooth, unmarked skin.
His leg has healed. In about five or six seconds.
Bass stares down at the limb in disbelief, bending his knee just to make sure he's not hallucinating. When his eyes snap up again, Aaron's staring at him from over Harold's corpse, eyes wide and panicked.
"…the fuck did you just do?"
Aaron just shakes his head, jerky and panicky. He's halfway into shock, from the look in those eyes.
Bass has never been one to pass up an opportunity. The gun's still lying on the floor next to him, so he grabs it, rolls to his feet, and jogs over to the cabinet. And fuck he's missed this – moving so easily on his own two feet. Don't know what you got till it's gone, and all that.
There's an empty, hard-sided briefcase sitting open in the cabinet, with three spots for the laptop, pendant, and…whatever that box is. Bass snags it, then grabs his sword belt from the corner of the room and tugs the buckles tight around his waist. And damned if that doesn't feel good, too. He's less…edgy, when he's properly armed. He can practically feel the tension drain out of his shoulders.
It's the work of maybe thirty more seconds to gather the laptop, pendant, and box and fit them into the briefcase. He flips the lid on the box and is greeted with one clear, pill-shaped capsule, blinking an iridescent – and clearly electric – blue. There are two matching empty spaces next to the capsule.
Aaron makes no move to stop him as he gathers the electronics – not even when he reaches down and tugs the sword out of Harold's chest. In fact, the chubby programmer doesn't move at all, just stares at the pool of Harold's blood on the floor.
Bass wipes the blood from his sword and re-sheathes it next to the other. He should walk out that door. Right now, get as fast and as far as he can from here. Harold had mentioned Neville leading the patrol specifically, and maybe it's just that paranoid tickle in the back of Bass's mind, but he can't imagine Jeremy sending Neville out alone after him. The man's been angling for the Presidency since there was a Presidency to angle for.
He should go, now.
Pittman may know more than he's letting on about the contents of this briefcase and what they can do, but he's a fucking liability in a fight and frankly, a pain in the ass.
There's no way he'll be able to track Miles with Fatty McSlowpoke in tow.
Shit. Since when had his plan turned into "tracking Miles?" He's got to be losing it. Well, he can ponder that on the road. Bass takes a step toward the bookshelf door.
Then he swears, and turns around.
"Pittman." No response.
"Aaron." Aaron stirs slightly, eyes leaving the floor for the first time.
"Let's go, Padawan. Get up." He grabs Aaron by the jacket and tries to haul him from the floor. When that won't work, he kicks him in the leg.
"Why?" Aaron mutters numbly as he – finally – stumbles to his feet.
Bass shoves the briefcase into Aaron's hands, draws one of his swords, and uses the other hand to drag Aaron out through the bookcase door.
"Hell if I know."