xp_logs | Shadow King: Out in the Black

Terry and Jennie locate what's left of Haller.

Except for the darkness and the large number of people in bathrobes under their parkas, you'd never have guessed it was the pre-dawn hours. Police cars blockaded nearly every street and concerned citizens gossiped on their front lawns while they comforted neighbors awakened by what was reportedly a tall armed man. Reports varied on the nature of the weapon. Some said a gun, a crowbar, a bat or a knife. One little girl insisted that he hadn't been armed at all, he just looked like he missed his mommy.

Terry reported this all rather bemusedly to Jennie as they wandered down the street, residential areas giving way to storefronts as they continued on, following the sounds of police chatter. They'd had to abandon the car a couple blocks back when a stern policeman with a bushy mustache had stopped them and ordered them to go home. It had been a tricky thing to convince him that they could go on without their car. Terry tightened her scarf and peered across the street at a broken doored shop. Somehow she doubted that Mr. Haller was inside More to Hug Fashions. "Do you have anything, Jennie?" she asked as she shivered.

Jennie blew into her mittened palms and shivered. "Just more of thataway," she gestured to a vague north-east direction. Probability was a tricky thing to follow, especially when your target kept moving. The number of residences and shops lacking doors was starting to increase as the pair made their way into Salem Center proper. At this rate, Jennie figured they wouldn't need either of their skills to locate Haller. They'd just have to follow the trail of destruction.

"Hear anything else?" the younger girl added.

"The guy on the phone over there is having a fight with his wife. She thinks he's cheating on her." Terry responded, with a flip of her hand as a young man on a mobile phone paced agitatedly under a street light. "Hey, there's a light on up there. What is that, a 7-11? I want something hot to drink. Oh, and we can ask if they've seen Mr. Haller." The prospect of someplace out of the wind made Terry speed her steps.

"Terry--" Jennie started, then paused. A much sharper tug on her senses, and a strong thread of white wound it's way down the street towards the convenience store. Jennie began to speed up to catch the other girl. "Terry! Wait up!"

---

He watched the bubbles.

The bottle of water was in his hand, cool and heavy, and Jack watched the bubbles trapped under the plastic. Tilting it to the side, he could make them crawl.

He was nowhere in this zone. Not out there. Not anywhere. And now, nowhere else to go but the place that had been the heart of his existence for as long as Jack could remember.

Go, and wait.

Alone among the shelves of chips and beef jerky and the electric hum of refrigerators, Jack stood and turned the bottle.

The automatic doors slid open with a quiet hiss--someone else might have said soundlessly but nothing was soundless to Terry. She stepped into the buzzing of cooling units, the faint tinkle of glass and plastic, the soft sounds of breathing, all scored by the local adult alternative station. Would they ever stop playing Unbreak My Heart? Probably not until the sun expanded and destroyed all life on earth. The bored eyed kid behind the counter was a year or two older than Terry and, she was guessing, had no idea what was going on outside tonight. She smiled at him and he straightened up but her gaze moved on, over the racks of shelving to the only other person in the store. Then Terry looked over her shoulder and waited for her partner, holding up a hand to give Jennie some warning.

Jennie followed soon after, face red from the cold and she shivered compulsively as they stepped into the convenience store and its well-maintained heating system. The store was deserted except for "Hi! My name is Stanley!" and the tall man in the corner with a bottle in his hands. His movements were slow, methodical, one would almost say robotic. Even though his face was turned down and his eyes completely focused on his hands, his cheeks were wet. Jennie exchanged a wide-eyed glance with Terry, and then wet her lips and stepped cautiously forward. "Mr. Haller?" she ventured carefully.

The bottle stopped.

At first there was nothing. Whatever response was pending seemed to be fighting its way up from the depths to awareness, slow and numb as frostbitten fingers. When the answer finally came the man didn't even look around.

"I'm out of places to look."

Terry placed the accent immediately, not Jim but Jack. She stepped forward to Jennie's side, a little away from her so they weren't forming a wall, just a pair of young girls. They'd been told as they were shoved out the door that no one knew what state the psis might be in. If they were dangerous. If they were even capable of reason. But Terry didn't believe that he would harm them, she felt like she had a sense about these things. "Mr. Haller, we need to go home now," she said, voice lilting as she slipped automatically into the soothing tones her uncle had always used with her as a child.

Jennie swallowed nervously. She knew about the personalities, and what they were capable of. But whatever it was, Jennie felt it was her duty to help bring him home safe.

After all, he'd done the same for her.

"Yes, come back with us. We'll take you home," she added.

The man finally looked at them. His cheeks were still wet. He studied them with unfocused eyes, as if he was having trouble fixing their images in his mind.

"You," he slurred, looking at Terry. He turned woodenly to Jennie. "And you. You we found in the dark. What are you doing in ours?" Jack stopped, eyes drifting to fix on the yellowed tiles. The bottle in his hand went through another mindless tilt as he said, "I should remember killing you."

That wasn't the most reassuring thing in the world to hear. "Sure that would be a fine trick if you did," Terry said cautiously, taking another step closer. "We're all alive and well here, you know. Frozen to the bone though chasing you all through the town in the middle of the night."

Jennie gave Terry a gentle elbow. "He's not the kid personality," she hissed through clenched teeth. "I don't think he'll respond to puppyspeak." From what Jennie had read, the grey eyes (for she could see them now) meant the defender. "Um. Yes, you did find me, just like we've found you. Do you remember what you said to me? It's time to go home now, Mr. Haller. We'll put everything right there." Or so she hoped.

"Already close to home as it gets." Jack's eyes raised again, his attention briefly reestablishing contact with reality. He swung his gaze in a wide arc, taking in the bright plastic junkfood wrappers and waterstained tackboard on the ceiling. "Place he always comes back to, anyway. Why he's not here, I don't know. Maybe he's still out there in the black somewhere."

The tall man froze, as if only now realizing something. His free hand rose to touch his cheek, came away wet with tears. Jack stared at the dampness, uncomprehending.

"Who's doing that?" he asked, eyes fixed on his fingertips.

Terry gave Jennie a vaguely exasperated look. She knew very well who she was talking to. She had ears, did she? "Mr. Haller...what do you mean? We're all supposed to be going back to the school. Whoever you're looking for will be there." This was making her more and more nervous as time went on. She'd gone back to look at the files more closely and this was not normal behavior for Jack. Which meant it was a matter of time before something went really wrong.

The clerk behind the counter was transfixed, wearing the kind of expression that indicated the only thing that allowed them to remain in the store was his terror that he might push behavior that had until this point been merely bizarre into outright violence. The alter, who'd lowered his hand as if he'd forgotten why he'd looked at it, didn't even notice.

"No. He's gone." Jack raised the bottle again, eyes fixed on the label as it came out like a sigh, "David's not anywhere."

"All right, everyone on the ground now NOW NOW!"

The words came almost simultaneously with the door hitting the frame, the string of bells looped around the inside handle crashing into the glass. The intruder was holding a gun and wearing a ski mask which revealed only wide eyes and a nose red and raw from the cold. The gun's muzzle rose and fell in time with his harsh breathing, tension screaming in every line.

"Oh. Mother. Fucker," Jennie sighed. Some days, she hated probability. Hated it so very much. She raised a fist, a small red disk forming between her index and middle fingers. Her eyes flicked from the wannabe robber back to Jack. The lights had begun to bleed bright red. Probability was snapping into place, all pointing towards a single, rather messy, outcome.

The fact that the shelves began to rattle wasn't a good sign either.

There was the sound of plastic hitting tile as the clerk's labeller dropped to the floor, shortly followed by the clerk himself. He was the only one in the store to do so. For the first time that night, Jack's attention was riveted.

Until now, the world around him had been just a skewed haze -- incomprehensible, unnavigable, like something in a dream. The gun in the man's hand ripped through the veil like a knife.

Something had attacked him, torn into him, left him gutted and bleeding and someone was going to pay.

It happened one after the other: the explosion of the water bottle, the surge of telekinesis that shuddered the store, and one clawed hand rising towards the gunman, dragging murder behind it.

Jennie shielded her face with her arm, Jack's telekinetic pull tearing at her hair and clothes. Tactics that had been pounded repeatedly into her head immediately took hold. Assess the situation, determine the biggest threat, and take them down. Before Jack could turn his power towards the completely unsuspecting robber, Jennie sharpened a line and flung out her arm, the disk sailing through the air and splashing against the back refrigerated display in a shower of red light.

The temperature gauge shuddered, and when a metal rack bumped against it, the glass display cracked and shattered, the contents inside were caught up in Jack's whirlwind, and then collided with the figure in the nexus.

The blind pull of wild telekinesis took over. What had been a vortex of light projectiles like chip bags and candybars suddenly found itself infiltrated by glass, bottles and cans. In his rage, Jack noticed none of them. None, until the long-necked green bottle that struck him in the back of the head.

The telekinetic sprawled onto the tile, debris abruptly released to rain around him. Gun still poised but far less steady, the stupefied robber looked from the slumped figure to the two girls. Clearly taken aback by the absolute insanity he'd just witnessed, he went on with the only speech he had.

"Get -- you, you better get on the floor --"

Terry lifted her hands away from her sides, palms facing out. Her heart was racing a mile a minute and she was a little afraid that she was going to throw up before this worked. "You don't want to hurt us," she said in a voice that was clear and careful, the words sing-songed and laced with power. This was only going to work if it was true and Mother of God, why hadn't she practiced this more? She took a slow step closer, putting herself between the clearly terrified clerk and the equally terrified attempted criminal. "You can put the gun down now."

"Are you shitting me? After that?" The snap held more panic than anger; the man kept looking between Terry and Haller's crumpled form like he was waiting for it to rise up and attack again. Despite his clear terror the gun was wavering, as if he was no longer so sure of his position. "I don't know what you people are but you, you better--"

A smile that she didn't mean curved her lips. "It's all right," she crooned soothingly, hypnotic in the truest sense, "No one here is going to hurt anyone. It's over now and everything's okay. You don't need that anymore." Trust me, her tone invited, believe me.

Jennie looked from Terry to the man with the gun, to Haller's crumpled form, and back to Terry and the man with the gun. She really had no idea what the hell was going on, but unless the man decided he was going to shoot (and the likelihood was shrinking by the second, if probability was to be believed) then Jennie would let Terry do whatever the hell she was doing.

There was no immediate response from the man, but his eyes were no longer darting behind the mask. His breathing became slow and deep, like a man falling asleep.

"All right," he mumbled at last. He put the gun on the shelf, the movement wooden and slightly confused, as if he wasn't quite sure what was happening.

For a moment, Terry remained still, sort of shocked that it had worked. Now what the hell was she supposed to do? "Um..." She hesitated, fisting her hand in her hair while she thought, "Right then. Go on home with you now. And...we should be going too." Wide-eyed, she looked from the robber to Jennie and Mr. Haller then to the clerk. "We...probably better not to tell anyone about this. Right?"

"Police! FREEZE!"

Two armed police officers stood behind the robber with their guns drawn. The cavalry had arrived it seemed, as "Hi My Name is Stanley!" had clicked the panic button under the counter.

Jennie froze and looked at Terry. "Shit," she said faintly.

And right in front of them, the robber's eyelids snapped open like a pair of shades.

"Shit!" he shrieked, more yelp than invective. Completely bypassing any transition from trance to full-blown panic, he whirled on the police, gunarm leveled at the head of the nearest officer as he almost stumbled into a display. "Son of a bitch put your hands up! Put them up now! I swear I'll--"

And then, inexorably, three sets of eyes came to rest on the robber's hand. His empty hand.

"--uh--"

A few brief seconds ticked by as the robber stared stupidly at just what he did not have pointed at the police. Then, realizing the error, he lunged for the gun set on the shelf. In the same moment the two police officers reached the same decision. They crashed together in a tangle of arms, legs, and creative cursing.

"Wow," said Jennie, backing away slowly and lowering her arms, "I totally did not do that." She turned back to Haller's limp body. "Crap, we gotta get him out of here before backup arrives." She spotted a stocking cart and pointed to it. "Terry, grab the arms and I'll get the legs?"

Terry didn't waste a second in running to help Jennie, "Might want to add to that a little bit while you're at it," she suggested as they heaved Haller's six feet four inches of dead weight over the cart. She winced as his head banged hard on the handle.

Jennie looked over her shoulder at the melee, and then tossed out a little something extra to make sure they would be in the clear long before the trio extricated themselves. The red disk splashed against a beer display, and cans that had been improperly pressurized burst, showering the policemen and the would-be robber in gallons of cold beer.

"Okay, let's go out the back," Jennie nodded, helping Terry push the stocking cart out the door.