Nobody Gets The Girl (11 page)

"What's happening, Father?" asked Amelia.

"One of our transports has been intercepted.
The prisoner is now missing."

"When?" asked Amelia.

"One hour ago in Austin, Texas."

"An inside job, obviously," said Amelia. "How
many people will you need to check before you find a lead?"

"Only three people knew the truth," said Dr.
Know. "I've checked them all, and they're shocked and worried by
what has happened. I've done a broader search of the area without
results. I can't find anyone who knows about this. Which
means—"

"Monday's involved," said Amelia. "I'll suit
up."

"Question," said Richard. "Who was this
prisoner? What's so important about all this?"

As if in response, one by one the televisions
on the far wall tuned to the same broadcast.

Dr. Know turned pale as he saw the
screens.

In a dark room, three figures stood. One,
Richard recognized from the battle in D.C. It was Sundancer, and
she was holding the face of a bound man with a shaved head,
pointing it toward the camera. The man's mouth was covered with
duct tape, and his eyes darted nervously around the room. The third
figure was a man dressed in a nice suit, with a green hood
concealing his face.

"Greetings, Planet Earth," the hooded man
said. "I'm Rex Monday. Welcome to an exciting new episode of
Monday's Revelation. The man my attractive associate is presenting
to you is named Anthony Wayne Walters. Two hours ago, he was
sitting in an electric chair, sentenced to die for the tragic,
pointless deaths of twelve children. Mr. Walters did the
prosecution a tremendous favor by videotaping these murders for his
own personal viewing pleasure. There is no question of his guilt.
There was no last minute pardon. The switch was pulled at the
appointed time. But, as you can see, Mr. Walters is very much
alive."

"He's made a mistake," Dr. Know said,
swiveling around in his chair to face Amelia. "They're in a
television studio in Austin. They've killed two technicians, but a
security guard is hiding in a closet, listening to them even now. I
know where they are!"

"Yeah," said Richard. "They're in Texas."

"On my way!" said Amelia.

"Take Richard," said Dr. Know. "There's no
time for your sister to get there."

"Whoa," said Richard. "Even in your jet,
Texas is, what, four hours from here? They'll be long gone when we
get there. What's the hurry?"

"I'm the hurry," said Amelia, as shards of
metal materialized from thin air around her, wrapping her in armor.
She thrust out her hand and grabbed Richard by the shirt. The
flowing metal slithered from her hand, engulfing him in
seconds.

There was an astonishing boom, then
silence.

Richard was blind, deaf, and immobile. He
couldn't breathe, and his heart seemed ready to burst. His efforts
to scream only led to a terrible pressure in his chest and head. He
felt as if he weighed three thousand pounds.

Then as quickly as it had begun, it was over.
The metal that encased him crumbled to dust, and he slumped to his
knees, gasping for breath, coughing. He looked up.

He was in a television studio.

Rail Blade stood before him, soaked in sweat,
the shards of the armor she had created dropping to the floor
around her.

Just beyond her, the hooded man known as Rex
Monday grasped at his throat, gurgling, blood pulsing between his
fingers with every beat of his heart.

And just beyond him, a single blade, a foot
long and razor sharp, hovered in the air, red and wet.

CHAPTER NINE

ROLLER COASTER

SUNDANCER LOOKED PISSED
. She began to
glow, and Anthony Wayne Walters screamed as his face started to
sizzle. In the second it took for the spinning blade to reach her,
Sundancer had turned white hot. The blade liquefied as it touched
her, smearing sloppily against her neck before spinning off wildly
across the room. Flesh peeled from Anthony Wayne Walters and his
scream died abruptly.

Nobody covered his eyes and crawled away from
the terrible scene. Behind him, Rail Blade grunted as she parried
Sundancer's plasma flare attacks with a mirrored shield.

The desk Nobody was hiding behind burst into
flame. Sprinklers opened, drenching Nobody, and filling the air
with steam. The desk continued to burn despite the water. He
scurried in the most direct route he could manage to put as much
space between him and Sundancer as possible. He didn't know what he
could do that would be of any use. The steam was burning his lungs.
Running seemed practical. He looked around for doors, and found
plenty of them. None were marked with a friendly exit sign. They
all seemed to be offices or…

"Security guard in the closet," he said,
snapping his fingers. On a hunch he grabbed at a drab beige door
and jerked it open. The security guard inside yelped.

"Don't kill me!"

"I'm saving you, idiot!" said Nobody. Of
course, the guy didn't hear him.

Fortunately, the guard took one look at the
flame-engulfed room and the two battling women and decided to make
a hasty retreat. Nobody followed the fleeing man through a glass
door into a hallway, and outran him to reach the exit door in the
lobby. He reached for the door bar and stumbled as his hand passed
through it. He ghosted through the door, off balance.

Seconds later, the guard pushed open the door
and ran through. Nobody regained his footing and chased after
him.

Now safe, he looked back. A pillar of flame
rose high in the sky, turning night into day. A steel rail spiraled
into the air around the flame, as Rail Blade chased her fiery foe.
Across the flat field that surrounded the studio, blue lights
flashed as cops sped toward the scene.

Nobody looked at his wrist, at the nice
stainless steel diver's watch he'd picked up on one of his
shoplifting excursions. Not even three minutes had passed since the
broadcast had begun.

The pillar of flame vanished. The roof of the
studio was still ablaze, but the intensity of light dimmed,
blending into the night. Looking up, Nobody saw Rail Blade
plummeting from the sky, fragments of her red-hot armor sparking
away, leaving a glowing comet's trail. She crashed into the roof,
and, from the sound of things, through it.

Nobody ran back into the burning building.
The smoke from the broadcast studio had yet to fill the front
hall.

"Amelia!" he cried out, pushing open doors
and staring into darkened rooms, searching for one with a hole in
the roof. "Amelia!"

He found her sprawled on the carpet in some
sort of meeting room. Her armor had fallen to red dust around her,
and her body was covered with raw, bloody blisters. Though they
were far from the center of the fire, the carpet she lay upon
smoldered.

"Amelia," he said, running to her side. He
slid to his knees beside her and turned her face toward him,
flinching as he realized it was stupid to move her.

She groaned as she slowly opened her
eyes.

"Amelia!" Nobody said. "You're alive. I'll
get some help. Somehow. Just hang on."

She grinned feebly, then said, softly,
"You're no good at this, Nobody. You're supposed to call me 'Rail
Blade' out here."

"I'd rather call you an ambulance," said
Nobody, looking around for a phone. Then he remembered the police
cars on their way. Dialing 911 seemed redundant.

Rail Blade groaned as she grabbed the seat of
a nearby chair and pulled herself into a sitting position. "I've
lived through worse," she said, her voice quavering. "My training
helps me block off the parts of my mind that feel the pain. We
should leave before the police arrive."

"Are we going to do that metal prison
teleporting thing again?" he asked. "I'd rather walk back to the
island."

She shook her head. "Don't have the strength.
Would have done better against Sundancer if I hadn't exhausted
myself pulling that stunt."

"What did you do, anyway?"

"Earth's core is one big iron crystal," she
said, gingerly picking carpet fibers from her wounds. "I can tune
into it and trigger a magnetic quake, then surf the resulting
shockwave. Takes me anywhere on Earth in seconds. I only use it in
real emergencies. Father worries that frequent use might cause the
magnetic poles to flip, which could be bad."

She grimaced as she rose, steadying herself
against the seatback. "This chair has a steel frame. Sit."

Nobody sat.

The chair lurched upward, as a single steel
rail materialized beneath it.

"Hold on."

The rail snaked upward through the hole in
the roof and they began to rise along it. Nobody felt like he was
on the front seat of a roller coaster, only there was no bar to
hold him down. He clenched the seat edges with white knuckles.

The studio parking lot was filled with police
cars and ambulances. Nobody coughed as Rail Blade steered them into
the smoke.

"Sorry," she said, coughing. "Don't want them
to see which way we're going. I can't make it far."

"Explain to me why we're running away?"

"I killed Rex Monday on live television,"
said Rail Blade. "I guess I should have gone for the cameras first,
but I didn't want to give them time to exit. Monday has some kind
of teleportation device. These guys can vanish in a blink. I did
what I had to, but it's still going to be bad PR."

The rail slowly slinked into the tops of a
nearby grove of trees. They’d barely traveled two hundred yards,
Nobody guessed. She sat them down in the middle of the grove. She
leaned against a tree, panting.

"Take the chair," said Nobody.

She collapsed into it.

"Just need a minute to catch my breath," she
said. "Left so fast, I don't have my radio. Can't call Father for
help."

"I don't have mine, either," said Nobody.
"Maybe we should turn ourselves in. Or you turn yourself in, at
least. You need a doctor. You look like you're about to faint."

"No," she said, jumping out of the chair.

Then her eyes rolled up into her head.

He rushed and caught her before she hit the
ground. She was surprisingly heavy. He struggled to place her back
in the chair, worried about laying her on the ground with her open
wounds.

Before he could decide what to do next, he
heard the crunching sound of someone approaching over leaves. He
pulled off the sweatshirt he wore and draped it over her. The
sweats she had been wearing earlier were mostly burned away,
leaving her wearing only a sports bra and tights. The beam of a
flashlight glinted across the chair's metal legs. The crunching
grew closer.

A tall, heavyset man entered the clearing. He
looked like a former football player gone to pot but still
physically formidable. He was dressed in a cheap blue suit with
cowboy boots and a string tie. The guy looked around, then walked
over to Rail Blade. He checked her pulse, then he took a small
radio from his pocket, the type Dr. Know had given Nobody before
his first mission.

"Dr. Knowbokov says that there's an invisible
man here and that I should put this radio down then turn around if
the little lady here couldn't talk," the man said and turned
away.

Nobody grabbed the radio and held it to his
ear. "Hello?" he said.

"Richard," said Dr. Know. "Is my daughter
alive?"

"Yes. I don't know how badly injured she is.
She took a pretty bad beating, but was conscious a minute ago. I
think she's gone into shock."

"The man who found you is named John
Starkner. He's the warden at the nearby state prison. Keep close to
him. He'll take Amelia to safety."

"OK," Starkner said. "Guess that's long
enough. I'm going to turn around now."

As he did, Nobody feared the radio would slip
from his grasp. It didn't. Apparently, Starkner no longer expected
to see it.

Starkner gently lifted Rail Blade, and
carried her through the woods with his flashlight turned off.
Nobody followed.

"How did you find us, Doc?" asked Nobody.

"There are still several dozen Soviet spy
satellites in orbit over the U.S., most with infrared and a detail
resolution of six inches. It was good fortune that one was passing
over Texas."

"Why do you have access to Soviet spy
satellites?"

"I have access to every satellite. The
Soviet’s built theirs to last, but their security is so primitive I
could have hacked them even without telepathic access to the men
who encoded them.."

Starkner took Rail Blade to a huge SUV, then
popped open the rear hatch with his remote. He gently laid her on a
sheet he had spread out there, and covered her with a thick
blanket. He went to the passenger side door and opened it.

"Wanna ride, Mr. Invisible?"

"The name's Nobody." He climbed into the
seat, pulling in his left foot seconds before Starkner slammed the
door.

STARKNER DROVE TO a plywood shack way out in
the boondocks. Nobody stood by helplessly as Starkner carried Rail
Blade's still body from the SUV, up the steps, and onto the rickety
porch. The door opened on his approach.

An elderly woman, her hair pulled tight in a
bun, stood in the doorway. She wore a white coat, with a
stethoscope around her neck. Beyond her, the main room of the shack
was brightly lit. As Nobody's eyes adjusted to the brightness, the
interior revealed itself to be a very clean and modern-looking
surgical room. The woman wrung her hands and paced as Starkner
placed Rail Blade on the table.

"I knew this would happen," the woman said,
sounding frightened. "Did you see the TV? I saw the TV. It's out.
The whole damn world knows Walters is alive."

"Was alive," said Starkner. "Old news. It's
Knowbokov's roof to patch. Right now, this little lady needs your
help, Summer."

"We're going to prison for this," said
Summer, gently pulling aside the blanket that covered Rail Blade.
"Every time we've turned a prisoner over to that man, I've gone
cold in my stomach knowing it could come to this."