Noelle - Day 308 (Even More Survivors!)

Hi guys!
Its your favorite blogger, Noelle!  Just kidding, I'm sure that somebody else is your favorite :P  Anyway, I just want to say sorry for posting so much RMS story parts in the past few days...The Survivors has become very popular to my geometry class and they've been demanding more.  MOAR.  So, of course, I agreed.  :)  Hope that's okay with you guys.  I'll try to change it up every so often, of course (maybe tomorrow I'll do a fan art dump or something idk)

Anyway, ON WITH THE BOOK:

The Survivors (Parts 41 & 42)

The seconds ticked by.

Shouts echoed downstairs.  Rough shouts, like police forces containing a rowdy party.  Jess shivered and huddled in the corner.  Sam paced.  Blue kept glancing expectantly at the ceiling, for some reason.

The shouts were getting louder.  The unmistakable ‘pew-pew’ noise started going off like pop rockets.  Jess’s lips pressed together.

Blue looked at the ceiling again.

Suddenly, a blinding flash of red light and crackle of lightning filled the room with the smell of burnt hair.  Red came crashing out of the ceiling, landing with a barely-audible thump.  The portal snapped shut and the everything returned to normal.

Blue, in the meantime, had jumped up and started helping Red place all the bags on the floor.  Sam recognized them right away as Jess’s supplies.

“You...you just fell out of the ceiling,” Jess commented, looking a little shell shocked.

“She does that,” Blue said calmly, sorting through the largest bag.  “Is this a long-range ICER?  Sweet.”  She tossed the light-weight sniper gun in the air, then strapped it with expert speed onto her back.

Jess shook her head and recovered.  “Actually, it's my own twist on the ICERs.  FitzSimmons made ICER bullets, right?  This is a pulse, completely solar powered, with a thirty-minute knock-out guarantee.”

“Who or what is FitzSimmons and what are ICERs?”  Sam wondered, digging his helmet out of the smallest of the four bags.

“FitzSimmons is a pair of famous S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists,” Red and Jess chorused.  Red’s frown deepened to a glare and Jess continued, “ICERs are stun guns.”

“Coolio.  Can we go now?”

“With pleasure,” Jess commented.  “Preferably before the S.H.I.E.L.D. troops downstairs bust down the door?”

“Point taken,” Red said and peered out the window.  “Do we have a place to go?”

Jess glanced at her watch.  “How far away can you take us?”

“Anywhere in the world, and to the moon if I take only one person at a time,” Red said calmly, pulling body armor that certainly didn’t belong to the semi-friendly party girl downstairs out of her purse.  She stuffed the empty jeweled bag in Jess’s backpack and strapped the metal shoulder pads on.  “Don’t push me though, it's been a long day.”

“Dang I don’t have time to change.  Whatevs,” Jess said, and glanced at her watch again.  “Can you get all four of us to Kazakhstan in one go?”

“To Kazakhstan?”  The sisters chorused, surprised.

“Kazakhstan?!”  Sam echoed, his clothes changing smoothly from a t-shirt and shorts to his super suit.  He rolled his neck, getting used to the feel of his helmet, and then finished, “Why Kazakhstan?”

“It’s a logical choice - cold mountains with some irregular heat signatures, they speak mostly Russian, which I happen to speak well, and it’s the last place S.H.I.E.L.D. would look for me, after New Jersey.”

“Why New Jersey?” Red questioned, as if curious, but her voice was more of a growl.

Jess didn’t answer, but grimaced at Sam and grabbed the final backpack.  She quickly typed in a set of coordinates on her laptop, then showed the map to Red.  Red nodded.   More gunshots rang out from below them.  “Can we get a move on?”

“Yeah sure,” Red said.  She wiggled her fingers like a magician preparing for a magic trick, then laughed at Sam and Jess’s glares.  “The portal’s open you two, I thought we were in a rush?”

Jess nodded.  “It’s cold in Kazakhstan, so bundle up best you can.”  She pulled a sweatshirt over her white dress (a very weird combo) and flipped the hood over her blonde hair.  “Computer, cancel all concealment programs and detach.”

Sam watched, shocked and disgusted, as Jess’s top layer of skin seemed to peel away and vanish into the wristwatch Sam always thought was too big for her.  The transformation revealed some streaks of natural blonde hair, white scars that patterned across her neck and legs, and a lighter shade of skin.  This was no longer the Jess that Sam knew - she looked like an entirely new person.

From beneath her dark hoodie, Jess whispered, “It's not actually my skin, before you ask.  It's a special set of microbots that protect my real skin and hides the scars.  Unfortunately, it's trackable.  Can we go now, finally?”

“So it wasn’t my phone that they tracked!”

“Shush, Sam.”  Jess’s voice was quiet and calm, but so depressed sounding, as if she had just watched a puppy be beaten up, or a fire consume a home.  Sam decided it was better not to ask as he clambered out of the window and fell into a ripping portal.

*******

Sam’s scream was never heard by anybody.  The portal was horrible and pokey and stretched his skin like a rubber band, but before that could even register in his mind he was falling out of the redness and into a pile of snow and howling wind.  He fell on his knees, panting, while Red and Blue leapt lightly to their feet.  Jess came last, reacting little better than Sam.

The wind whipped around them like a crashing ocean wave crossed with a hissing snake.  “This is your idea of a safe place?”  Sam screamed over the noise.  He wiped a snowflake of his cheek and shuddered.  Mountains jutted up all around them, but judging by the freezing temperatures, they were probably pretty high up as well.

Jess’s legs must have been freezing, as she was still in her white dress.  She didn’t show it, though, as she struggled to keep her hood down.  “Gimme a sec, I’ll make a shelter!”

Red and Blue were trudging around them, peering into the flurries.  “There’s nothing for miles, and certainly nothing we can get to in this blizzard!  This is your plan, Jessica?!”  Red howled.

Sam could only see her smirk under the hood, but he knew her well enough to know that she still had a plan.  Before he could say (scream, that is) anything though, the four teens dropped.  The snow piles slipped away and Blue, Red, and Sam all tripped into the ten-foot hole that certainly hadn’t been there a moment before.  Nova was wearing his helmet, luckily, but Red and Blue could only shriek as they plummeted.

Jess dove in after them, letting her wings scrape up against the wall.  There really wasn’t enough space for them, and the horrible screeching noise that they made was enough to spook even her.  She tucked them away and let herself go into freefall down the tunnel.  Just like at the warehouse, the rock caught them in the last moment and sent them not crashing to their death but falling in a messy pile on the floor below.

The tunnel shut before anymore snow could come falling down and the cavern went dark.

“What...what just happened?”  Red whispered, a few feet away.  Jess, who had abandoned all protocol and connected herself with the stone, noticed that she was putting more weight on the ground then someone of her size should be.  She was stressed.

“We fell, you dimwit,” Blue muttered angrily under her breath.  Everybody heard her.

“It’s not my fault!  You practically pushed me in!”  Red hissed back.

“Did not!”

“Did too!”

“Quit it you guys,” Sam said from somewhere behind Jess.  He was floating just a little, but no light emanated from his helmet.  “Jess?”

“Don’t look at me-”

“-I can’t look at you it’s darker than Danny’s sense of humor.”

Jess winced at the sound of Danny’s name and tried again.  “I got us out of the storm.  You’re up, Blue.”

Lightning crackled to life, contained in a tiny ball in Blue’s hands.  It didn’t look very safe, but the warm glow that it sent throughout the room was so welcome.  Sam nearly shuddered, watching the living light entwine itself around Blue’s fingers and cast stark shadows around the room, but he forced himself to relax and look around.

They were kneeling in a room or cavern of sorts.  It was obvious from down here that it was human-made - the jutting edges in the wall were much too uniform to be natural.  He suspected, however, that from above, if looked at from above by a ground-penetrating scanner it would look like a normal cave.  Two doors, angled at random, stared at them like dark eyes.

Red looked suspicious as she glanced critically around the area.  “Who made this?  It looks ancient.”

Jess gave her the most poisonous you’re-an-idiot look that Sam had ever seen.  Red was facing away, lucky for her.  Blue was running her finger across the wall, leaving the ball of lightning in the middle of the room.  Sam skirted around it, determined to investigate the two holes, while Jess flicked her hood even farther down her face.

Red turned around, her jaw set.  “You don’t need that anymore, you know.  The hood - take it off.”

Jess didn’t move.

Sam froze.  Why was Jess wearing the hood so low anyway?

Blue slowly turned around, keeping her hands close to the wall.  From a tactical standpoint, she was defenseless, but Jess’s survival instincts were going haywire.  She could shock everybody in the cave from where she was standing.  There was no dodging room.  The only exit was directly towards Red.  There was no room for Jess to bring out her wings, much less fly.  I walked right into this!  Jess thought, furious with herself.

“Take off the hood,” Red repeated, sliding her right foot forward into a fighting position.  She was close enough to kick Jess in the jaw, and with those combat boots she would probably fracture Jess’s skull if she wasn’t careful.

Jess still didn’t move.

“I’m not going to say it again,” Red said, threateningly.  Sam floated into the air, ready to attack if something happened.  Blue glared at him, her eyes flashing with anger and electricity.

“See, now you’re going to have to say it again,” Jess said, her pink lips grinning under the shadow of her too-low hood.  But there was something wrong - her voice sounded different, if only slightly.  It sounded more natural, as if she had just stopped disguising it a little.  Red recoiled backwards, nearly tripping over a backpack.

“Do I...do I know you?”  She whispered.  Blue looked similarly frightened.

“Now if you did, why would I tell you?”  Jess said calmly.  Sam stiffened.  What now?

“Take off the hood,” Red said again, then clapped her hand over mouth.

Jess’s lips were formed into a mischievous smile.  “I told you, you just had to say it again.”  Her fingers curled hesitantly over the rim of the hood.  And threw back the hood.

§§§

Sorry that's so long!! I hope you enjoyed it, and have a fantabulous day!!

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