Psychic Meetup
A van pulled up in the picnic grounds just before midday, stopping with a jerk. The driver stepped out, looked around, then grumpily stomped over to a picnic table. A young woman with long blonde hair hopped out of the passenger side, and opened up the back of the van. An older man, maybe sixty or so, hopped out, and helped a woman in early pregnancy down, and then her toddler. A man in his mid twenties followed, and gave the entire place a wide look.
“No-one else here, then?” asked the older man of the driver, who seemed to be in his early thirties.
“No, but the barrier just went down. If any of my colleagues are alive, they ought to get here soon.”
“Sure make me feel a lot safer, son.”
The young woman sat opposite the driver, and smiled at him. He looked at her, and she said “Teach me how to shoot one of your guns.”
“Maybe later. We need to be out of here by nightfall, in case someone was compromised.”
“Compromised?”
“Vampires tend to ask those they turn questions, just in case. And us being here first is a bad sign.”
The young woman paused for a moment, then got up to talk with the rest, who were idly chatting. The driver sighed, and rested his head on his arm.
An hour or so later, they heard a loud motorbike approaching. The driver pulled out a gun from under his clothes, and said “Get near the van.”
A motorbike being driven by a woman roared to a stop in the parking area, and the man riding passenger hopped off immediately and pulled off his helmet.
“Phillip!” the driver called out, lowering his weapon.
“Mitch! Haha,” the middle-aged motorbike passenger said, approaching. “You must be the eliminator who was in town!”
“Yeah. What happened to your team, and who’s this?” Mitch asked, indicating the woman.
“That’s Julia Cross, she’s an empath I ran into,” Phillip said. He sighed, and then continued, “My team’s dead, or at least, most of them are. John might still be alive, but last time I was able to call him he was fighting for his life. Who are they?”
Mitch nodded sadly, and introduced Phillip to the people he’d brought. “The blonde chick's Ellen, the old guy is Maxwell, the young guy is Darren, the mother is Terra and her toddler’s called Henry. I saved them from a scheme the dark tribe had setup. I’d ended up there after getting knocked out by a loose brick.”
Phillip chuckled at that, but only a little.
“It’d be funny if I hadn’t woken up in warehouse containing a good thousand or two people, being guarded by vampires. None of them knew that, of course, they thought they were being protected, and that their movements were being restricted so that they could be ‘checked out’ so the bastards knew they weren’t, well, vampires or something.”
“They all believed that?”
“Most of them were brought in after seeing some really bad shit start to go down. Safety looked good to them, even if they were stuck in the one warehouse all the time.”
“How many did you save?”
“The last twenty eight. There were too many guards until then, and I still had to dispatch eight to make my escape this dawn. This lot,” he indicated the others, who had bunched around to listen in, “followed me all the way to my van. What about you?”
“I ran into Julia after I picked up supplies from the safe house – which wasn’t so safe, there were blood bloats in the basement – and we hid in a tree for a week.”
“A tree?”
“Not many people were hanging out in the public parks, and the leaves stopped the blackwings from spotting us.”
“These would be great war stories, but with the amount of shit staring us in the face right now…”
Phillip nodded, and said “Mind me taking command?”
“It’s just the two of us, Phil, and I work independently, so you may as well be in charge of the shit in my van.”
Phillip chuckled and said, “We’ve got some sausages, if you want to cook them.”
Mitch burst out laughing, and everyone else chuckled a bit. “Damn, that’s so normal.”
While everyone was eating, Mitch asked Phillip whether or not any psychics got inside the barrier in time. “Possibly,” said Phillip, “Since I tried to scramble in everyone I could. I doubt they managed to do much good, though. We were in way over out heads. I have something to ask you, too. Did you get the blood maiden?”
“No. I’d figured out where the cult was when I got knocked out, I’m guessing they managed to revive her again.”
“I could really use some good news right about now.”
“Hell, we all could,” added in Max. “Mitch here forgot to explain, but all of us here except Darren lost family and friends to those vampires. It’d be nice to know someone we know is still alive, somewhere.”
They all talked about what happened, what they were going to do, where they were going to go, about psychics, and about the monsters, for hours. The psychics figured that there was no longer a need for secrecy, not after Midwel, so they shared everything they knew about monsters, about psychics, and informed guesses about what was going to happen next. Phillip thought they had a chance, if the IPC went forward and told the governments of the world what they were fighting and how to fight them; and Mitch thought that it would’ve already been tried – and the lack of soldiers everywhere meant that it had failed. The conclusions drawn from the conversation were disheartening. The psychics were pretty much the only people who could fight back effectively, and they were now horribly outnumbered.
Late in the afternoon, they considered where to head next. Phillip urged them to leave before nightfall, as he knew that at least one vampire group would hunt them here. Mitch agreed, and suggested driving all night to get away.
Phillip had opened his mouth to reply, when a female blackwing landed in the middle of the clearing. “Hannah?” he said, as Mitch said, “Sly?”
The blackwing smiled, and said, “Yeah. Me, Danny, Luke, Bill, Mike, Lisa and Rain all made it through the barrier. Werewolves tore up Danny, Fred and Rain before we killed them. We made our way towards Midwel, and yesterday morning blackwings cornered us in a house. Luke and Georgia were shot dead, Simon got out, I think. I got whacked in the head with something, and then I wake up infected and tied up. I couldn’t escape, but the dumb fuckers had me untied after I woke up. They had barely realised something was wrong when I leapt out the window.”
“Is she-,” started Terra.
“She’s in control of herself, yeah. Sly taught the course on keeping the blackwings from messing up your head for a couple of years,” Mitch said, and then turned back to Sly. “How do you feel?”
Phillip laughed, and said “You know she doesn’t, anymore.”
Sly gave Phil a baleful glare, and said “Actually, I do.”
“What? But that means you stopped the entire pro-“
“Yeah. Now I’m not just an angry bitch, I’m an immortal angry bitch with fucking wings,” Sly smiled a vicious smile. “I even still have my powers. Been using them to let the goop mess with my brain slowly, so no changes occur.”
“I, er, don’t get it,” said Darren, looking awkwardly at Sly.
“Don’t worry,” said Mitch, “Although I think a well fucking done is in order.”
Sly grinned, and she felt Mitch and Phillip poking around in her head. She poked back, and they both looked sheepish. “We had to check, you know,” said Mitch.
“So anyway, what happened to you guys?”
No comments:
Post a Comment