I let the gun fall. It hit the pavement just as someone inside the van turned the ignition, threw it into gear and drove away. The van dragged the man I’d just kicked for a few feet, but he fell out when the back wheels hit the road outside the alley.
The van’s tires squealed, and the doors hung open, swinging as it drove away.
Maybe I could have jumped inside if I’d tried, but I hadn’t realized there was anybody in there. Continue reading Cassie: Part 6
“What grad school?” I asked. It wasn’t as if I’d know if he were lying, but maybe he’d stumble.
“Georgetown,” he said.
“Yeah? What professor?”
“Why? Are you in the program? Don’t get me wrong, but you don’t seem like a scientist type of girl.”
Compared to Nick, neither did this guy. Continue reading Cassie: Part 5
The CIA provides Mom with a car when she needs one for work, so Mom doesn’t keep one in D.C. Even if they were loaning her one that day, I knew I couldn’t take it. I walked a few blocks and took the Metro, D.C.’s subway.
It was rush hour. Almost every seat on the train seemed to be full—men and women in suits, little kids sitting on their parents’ laps, tired maintenance workers still in their uniforms.
I hung on to a metal pole in the aisle, thinking maybe I should have gone for her car. As the possibly dangerous product of mad science, I probably had a thick file (or more than one) with an official assessment of my level of threat to the United States. That made my entertainment needs a matter of national security, and part of Mom’s job, right?
In short, Uncle Sam owed me a trip downtown, but I knew I wouldn’t get to take him up on it—not that night, for sure. Continue reading Cassie: Part 4
Mom wasn’t putting up with it. “I’m not going to talk about classified information here. It’s too easy to hear us. I’m not trying to get out of it, but we can’t talk here.”
“Where can we talk about it? Should we set up a secret meeting in a park? We’ll pretend we barely know each other, and feed the ducks. That’s how you do it, right?”
“Cassie! We’re not having this conversation.”
“OK. Go for it.”
With the number of times they’d poked me already, it seemed pointless to refuse now. Besides, if some of the weirder parts of my genetic heritage had been activated, I wanted to know.
It all came down to Dr. Mind. All of his life, Dad kept on fighting a Nazi brain in a jar. The guy (if you can call a brain a “guy”) always had minions, and the last time, he created an army cloned from Dad’s DNA. He brought the entire League together for one last mission (they’d all retired). They defeated the clone army, destroyed Dr. Mind , and found a gender-swapped girl clone in the complex.
I hadn’t originally planned to write a story from Cassie’s perspective yet, but I had the idea, and I’ve been wanting to get certain facts about her origin out for a while now. The main story hasn’t allowed it though. Fortunately, these short stories are a good way of going about that. Thus, this is a decent segue into the next major storyline or two.
Waiting rooms are boring. It doesn’t matter whose waiting room. Even top secret, government owned laboratories that exist solely to study metahumans still make me want to scream after half an hour.
Especially when they manage to stock the same seven month old copies of People as my dentist.
It had to be a conspiracy.
So that’s where I was. In a waiting room. The one for studying metahumans. Not my dentist’s. Continue reading Cassie: Part 1
They came toward me even though the Rocket suit had risen one hundred feet above the ground. Many weren’t more than shapes with legs—squares, triangles, rectangles, but those were some of the smaller creatures. The larger ones shouldn’t have seemed ominous at all, but they were big, and they shouldn’t have been flying.
But I still haven’t said what they were, have I?
I was being attacked by infrastructure—stoplights, telephone poles, city buses, trains, rails, roads, power lines, police cars, firetrucks, and more, some of it mixed together, not all of it from our time. Continue reading Under 30: Part 30
Marcus had managed to resist, but I didn’t know exactly how.
If Daniel had been there, he could have told me. Better, he could have helped. Well, maybe. A telepathic link might have opened him up to Evil Beatnik’s influence.
Obviously Marcus had had more control of his body than Evil Beatnik had, and a considerably weirder physiology. That couldn’t hurt. Continue reading Under 30: Part 29
Evil Beatnik didn’t have an easy time of it.
Marcus started to twist toward me, but one leg shrunk, and he fell over. He began to push himself away from the ground, but it wasn’t simple. Long spikes had grown out of Marcus’ legs, sticking themselves into the ground.
I couldn’t see it to know for sure, but judging from the way Marcus’ legs and body shrank, I suspected I couldn’t see half of what Marcus had sunk into the ground. Continue reading Under 30: Part 28
Evil Beatnik said, “Yeah?”
He snapped his fingers, and the music stopped. Then he let out a breath, and gulped in another. Losing the music wasn’t the end of the world. It had served its purpose. The way he’d snuffed it so easily bothered me more.
Then I guessed how. In the reports Jaclyn’s grandfather mentioned that he could make things happen, and the more probable it was, the easier. He’d described fighting Evil Beatnik as fighting someone with the power of Murphy’s law—anything that could go wrong would. Continue reading Under 30: Part 27