The Authority
The Importance of Teeth
Susan Truman, a.k.a. Whitecloud, was twenty three years retired from the Business. It’d been nineteen years since she’d decided what she’d really wanted to do with her life, and had opened the Oaklands Day Care Centre with the money from her modest government superannuation package. Since then, she’d never looked back, and her small operation had been a roaring success, currently holding a two-year waiting list and growing as parents from all over Christchurch tried to secure a place for their newborns. Susan loved children. More than that, she’d slowly discovered over the years that caring for the planet’s next generation of leaders and scientists and mathematicians and parents left her with a far greater feeling of satisfaction — of being a hero and of making a difference — than fighting aliens and robots and mad scientists ever had. Which wasn’t to say she’d renounced her powers as well as her old job; not even close, because being a latent telepath with a sixth sense for danger definitely came in handy when trying to wrangle thirty snot-nosed, sticky-fingers little toddlers. Sometimes she thought that maybe that was what the world needed more of; posthumans using their abilities for mundane, everyday activities rather than flying around in brightly coloured spandex battling monsters. A woman who could read your mind was terrifying, even when she was saving your life. A woman who could look after your Terrible Two-Year-Old for eight hours a day, five days a week and send them home every day in better condition than she’d received them was a godsend.
The man sitting across from her was currently reminded her of why she’d quit the Business in the first place. Dressed in dark olive fatigues and a tight black t-shirt that did nothing to hide the kind of physique that looked best when showcased by tight black t-shirts, Susan had been almost shocked at how unrecognisable he was. Not nondescript — because there was nothing about a man who looked like he listed “strangling terrorists” as a favourite hobby which could possibly be described as ‘nondescript’ — but simply unrecognisable, and if she hadn’t known beforehand who she’d been meeting she would never have made the connection with the man in front of her and the Midnighter; possibly the world’s most infamous living weapon.
It was something about the hair, she decided. The rest of it should could maybe see, but that red-brown not-quite buzz-cut belonged to a marine, not a superhero. She supposed it made sense, in retrospect — considering what little snatches of information about the man she’d pulled from the media over the years — but it was still… unexpected. The other thing that had surprised her, and which in retrospect probably shouldn’t have, were the scars. There were lots of them, of all kinds, running up and down his exposed arms to congeal, en masse across broad knuckles. Susan had once watched a martial arts film in which the protagonist had, as part of a training montage, repeatedly punched a brick wall to ‘toughen up’ his hands. Midnighter’s fists looked like they’d seen the hard side of a lot of bricks. At high speed. It was a disturbing thought. Actually, the whole situation was disturbing. It was like sitting in the same room as a deactivated sea mine. It wasn’t dangerous now, but it could be, and no amount of reassurances of safety could ever change the fact that this was something that had been designed for the sole purpose of killing as many people as possible, as fast as possible.
“You come highly recommended, Mrs. Truman.” When he spoke, it wasn’t much better; his voice was dark and gravelly and Susan thought she could almost detect a slight metallic edge to it. It was the sort of voice that made little children cry.
“You’re too kind.” She barely batted an eyelid. “I sure the current Left-wing government’s sympathetic stance towards the Authority has nothing to do with anything.” Which of course was utter rubbish. It had been an old friend from the SIS who’d contacted her about the possibility of taking this contract. He hadn’t specified who it was for at the time, only that it would be a ‘high-security, powerful post-human’ child who would benefit from Susan’s experience. Susan had readily agreed; it wouldn’t have been the first time they’d had kids with powers come through, and she knew her centre had a reputation for being sensitive and nurturing in that regard. It hadn’t been until two weeks later, when agents had arrived to vet her entire staff for top secret national clearances, that she’d started to think that maybe she’d gotten in over her head.
To his credit, Midnighter merely gave her the slightest of grins. “Nor the fact that there’s been no recorded post-human threat against New Zealand. Ever.”
“We like things quiet down here.” She tapped the manilla folder currently resting underneath her hand. “Nevertheless, rest assured all my staff have been made familiar with the security procedures. You have my word that we will do our absolute best to keep little Jenny safe.”
Big, round brown eyes looked up quizzically at the sound of her name, before the girl in question returned to where she was methodically attempting to fold a robot back up into a fighter jet. She was sitting in her father’s lap, looking for all the world like there was nowhere else she would rather have been. Susan had heard the controversy around Jenny Quantum, of course — and being raised in a dubiously legal adoption by gay post-humans on a spaceship was definitely a situation that attracted controversy — but she’d always decided to reserve judgement on the matter herself. She’d cared for a lot of different children in her day, with a lot of different parents and a lot of different family situations. Some lessons she’d learnt the hard way. Some lessons still kept her awake at night.
“Are you looking forward to starting with us, Jenny?” she asked. Half a quizzical eye turned her way, though most of the girl’s focus remained on her toy.
Jenny just shrugged, giving a small, non-committal noise. “Daddy says I should try and find some friends my own age.”
Susan smiled. Jenny wouldn’t be the first four-going-on-forty year old they’d had, and she probably wouldn’t be their last either. “I’m sure we can help you with that.”
One final plastic-sounding snap and those too-wise eyes lit up. “Daddy! Daddy look!”
“Hey girly girl, you did it.” A big, scarred hand reached up to intercept the plastic jet before it could be enthusiastically and accidentally smashed into Midnighter’s face, the other ruffled short, dark hair affectionately as the girl climbed to her feet. Steely grey eyes flicked up meet Susan’s briefly, and she was shocked by the affection reflected there. “These damn toys… spent hours last night trying to work the thing out, and still couldn’t fold it up right.” It was the smile, though, that settled it for her; that finally convinced her, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she was doing the right thing and she had nothing to worry about. It was the slightly abashed yet irrationally proud smile of a father with nothing but adoration for his daughter. It was doubly stunning because, now that she was thinking about, in all the media and all the magazines and even the entire length of the time he’d been here, Susan had never, ever before seen him smile.
And she knew, as she watched him rub his nose goofily against the gleefully squealing girl’s, that all the critics were wrong.
They enrolled her under the name Jenny Quinn and Susan watched her closely for the first few weeks. She was quiet, but eerily confident in a way Susan had rarely seen in such a young girl. Jenny mostly kept to herself, which was fortunate for the adults at the centre since when Jenny wanted to stir trouble, she could really stir trouble. The other children did what she said, if she decided to say anything. Even the group of girls the staff referred to as the Christine Crew — a cadre of six spoilt middle-class princesses with too many Bratz dolls and not enough brain cells — who’d instantly taken a set against Jenny for being more interested in books and robots than dress-up and playing house. Somewhere along the line Christine had discovered that Jenny had been orphaned, and used this information to mercilessly taunt the other girl. Not that it ever got much of a reaction; Jenny took all insults against her family with an indifference born from the absolute knowledge that in a game of playground “my daddy can beat up you daddy”, she would always come out on top.
Overall, Jenny was well-behaved, though the circumstances of her home life meant that whenever there was an incident, it was invariably… interesting.
The first one had been roughly four months after she had first started at Oaklands, during the first week of September. Father’s Day had been looming on the horizon and on Wednesday afternoon the children had been gathered together with crayons and pots of paint and instructed to produce a picture of a scene of idyllic paternal involvement. At the end of the day, the Activity Wall had become a showcase of pictures of barbecues and fishing trips and football in the park. Susan had been surveying the results with a contented sort of smile, when Julian had approached.
“I think you need to see this.”
She sighed. Julian was fairly new to the child care business, but Susan certainly wasn’t. It was an unfortunate reality that, invariably, some of the pictures produced by children of their fathers were… less than ideal. She put on her grimmest face. “Who is it this year?”
“Jenny Quinn.”
Susan’s eyebrows had decided to take a trip into her hairline. “Jenny? Show me.”
When Julian had handed over the picture, Susan had said, “Ah.”
“I just don’t know what to make of it,” Julian had admitted. Susan had been sympathetic.
The picture — loving worked on in crayon and poster paint — depicted three figures. The middle one was obviously Jenny, shorter than the other two and with a large red-and-blue splat on her triangle-shaped ‘dress’ that to Susan’s trained eye was clearly a Union Jack. She was holding hands with two other figures; one filled in with a lot of black scribble, and holding what was undoubtedly a severed head, dripping blood. The other was radiating yellow scribble-lines and seemed to be setting fire to a large… well, to be honest Susan couldn’t really tell what it was, but it certainly didn’t look like the sort of thing that normally appeared in drawings by little girls of their fathers. Underneath the whole thing was written:
I loV mY DaDYs! XOXOXO
Eventually, Julian had asked, “Well?”
Susan had thought for a moment before pulling a thumb-tack from the Activity Wall. “Not everyone’s father is a bricklayer or a clerk.” She pinned the picture up between a a fishing holiday and a trip to the zoo. “But that doesn’t mean they are loved any less by their children.”
Julian had simply nodded.
The issues with Christine had come to a head on a boiling hot February day, about an hour before afternoon nap time. It had all started with Jenny’s pillow. It was an oddly-shaped lump of a thing, a little under a foot square and made from thick, worn-looking Nylon with one red stripe, one white stripe, half a ring of stars and a splatter of what that looked suspiciously like burn marks. It was sewn up with silver thread, and was probably one of the oddest security blankets Susan had ever seen. Because that, more-or-less, was what it was; Jenny got nightmares sometimes, and when she did she would clutch the oddly-shaped thing tightly. Susan had once heard her refer to it as a fetish. She’d almost been worried until Kura had explained the word could also mean a kind of magical object, like a medicine bag.
Christine had been fascinated by the thing, and had mercilessly called it Jenny’s ‘baby pillow’. The other girl had never been particularly phased, but Susan didn’t need a sixth sense to sense there was going to be trouble later on.
She’d been packing up paintbrushes when Stephen had come running up. An energetic, precocious child, Stephen was notorious for climbing up onto to the tops of cupboards and other places he really shouldn’t have been able to get to. He was also Jenny’s most solid playmate; they’d often be found together huddled together in high places, giggling hysterically. Susan knew Jenny was under strict instruction not to use her powers while at day care, but some of the places she and Stephen had been retrieved from… well. Susan had never said anything, and had told the other staff to do likewise; no use ruining a friendship over something so petty.
“Susan Susan Christine cut open Jenny’s pillow wi’tha scissors and butterflies fell out!”
Susan blinked. “Oh dear,” she said. “You’d better show me.”
They were out in the yard, gathered on the tanbark underneath the A-frame; Jenny in the middle, surrounded by Christine and her clique — Sarah, Jess and Alexandria — and beyond that, a ring of peering onlookers. The ground was covered in feathers, and the air still sparkled with strange pink glimmers. Jess was sitting halfway up the A-frame, diligently unstitching the ‘pillow’ with her fingers, and cooing and giggling over the way the silver thread bent and held shapes like a piece of wire. Christine was on the next rung up, holding something in each hand that Susan couldn’t quite make out from this distance.
“Give them back!” Jenny’s voice was cracked with tears but right now she was more angry than upset. Susan could see the faint blue glow around the girl’s clenched fists and she knew that if she didn’t act fast there was going to be trouble.
“What’s going on here?”
She stepped forward, placing herself between the two girls, hoping vainly that Jenny wouldn’t fry her in order to get to Christine. Assuming her powers were directional. It occurred to Susan that she’d never actually received a straight answer about what Jenny’s powers were, exactly. It occurred to her that maybe this was because no-one else knew, either. The thought was somewhat worrisome.
Five pairs of too-big eyes turned to look at her, and Jenny had been about to say something when Christine beat her to it. “Jenny let us play with her dolls.”
“Did not!” Jenny snapped at the same time as Stephen had piped up with, “Liar!”
“Two versus four!” Christine shot back, outvoting the truth with playground democracy.
This close, Susan could finally see what Christine was holding, what all the fuss was about, and when recognition dawned a sudden stab of uncharacteristic rage ripped her heart at the callous cruelty of it all. Because in each hand Christine was clutching six inches of cheap, mass-produced plastic Authority action figure — Midnighter in her right, Apollo in her left — and suddenly the whole thing made sense. Terrible, tragic sense and Susan had never been a violent woman really, but right then the urge to slap the smirking little brat was so strong she could feel her nails cutting tiny semicircles into the palms of her hands.
Instead she said, “I think maybe you should give those back.” Christine’s eyes flicked towards her, and the girl’s smile faltered slightly at the seriousness there. “Now, Christine.”
She knew as soon as she’d said it that she’d gone too far, pushed a little too hard. She could see the cogs in Christine’s mind turn over, see the plan snap into place as the sickly-sweet smile emerged and Christine said, “Okay,” and opened her hands.
Twenty years ago, Susan would’ve been able to catch them. As it was, she could only watch in horror as gravity did its thing. Apollo landed first, head-first in the tanbark but his dull thwap was drowned out by the sharp, plastic snap as Midnighter’s path was interrupted by the A-frame’s bottom rung. His arm landed before the rest of him.
Jenny screamed.
“What the fucking crap is going on here!”
Later, Susan realised he must have teleported; called in one of the Doors the Authority were so notorious for using, though no-one she spoke to could remember seeing it. At the time, rational thought had been obliterated by the fury in that voice, and Susan had visibly jumped, turning sharply. He was standing about four feet to her left, dressed in black sweatpants and a dark grey wife-beater, a cup of coffee clutched in one hand and a rolled-up issue of Vanity Fair in the other and suddenly decapitation by paper cut had never looked so likely.
“Mi— Mister Quinn!” she’d said, though had been drowned out by Jenny’s cry of, “Daddy!” and had felt the wind as the girl had raced past her, caught easily by her father and lifted up into a tight hug. Susan wasn’t convinced her feet had been touching the ground.
When no aliens or robots or secret agents emerged from behind the equipment, Susan saw the tension melt straight out of Midnighter’s shoulders. He turned to his daughter, wiping tears away with the back of a hand still holding the cup of unspilt coffee. “Hey girly girl, what’s wrong?”
Jenny murmured something incomprehensible, and Susan saw the steel creep back into his eyes. He turned, two long strides and he was looming over where Christine was still clutching the A-frame. “What did you do to my girl?” The tone of it made the hair on the back of Susan’s neck stand up, and she couldn’t help the little voice in the back of her head that said, For God’s sake she’s only four…
Susan could feel the fear radiating off Christine but it was battling with something else, too, something infinitely more bratty and cocksure. Something that maybe Midnighter, down past all the death and cold humming static, wasn’t prepared for.
She said, “I’m not scared of you.” Midnighter’s eyebrow quirked, pulling tight against the vicious-looking scar that traced across the ridges of his face. There was a light crunch as Christine’s Mary Janes hit the tanbark and she pouted, hands on hips, as she glared upwards. “You won’t hurt me. I’m just a little girl.” Without the advantage of elevation, Susan thought that a truer word had never been spoken; it was like watching a sparrow take on a panther.
The playground held its breath.
Midnighter’s face had curled into a Death’s-head grin almost instantly. “You’re right,” he said. “I won’t hurt you; I won’t have to.”
Christine’s face crunched up in confusion at the words, but her reply had turned into an outraged shriek as she’d been knocked backwards, the ground in front of her exploding with a blue crack and the sharp smell of ozone. When she looked up — blinking and dazed and flat on her butt in the dirt — Jenny’s grin had been as wicked as her father’s, little hand held outstretched and curled into a fist, still smoking softly with an odd blue light.
Susan had felt a headache coming on.
About an hour later, it had moved in permanently. Susan liked children, even when they bickered. Unfortunately, most children came with at least one — if not two or three — adults attached, and when adults bickered, things got messy.
Her small office was currently being crowded out by six parents in various stages of annoyance and horror. Linda Ferguson, representing Sarah, had been highly apologetic. David Muldoon, representing Jess, had been resigned. Rebecca and Peter Young, representing Alexandria, took a sympathetic route. All were currently cowering against the back wall of the office to escape the yelling match that was going on full-tilt in the middle, where Scott Lander — representing, of course, Christine — had spent the last ten minutes braiding down a somewhat nonplussed ‘Mr. Quinn’. Susan got the impression he didn’t get yelled at by civilians much, though the novelty of the experience was just about to wear thin and she was silently debating about whether she should call the ambulance in advance.
Ironically, the subjects of the argument themselves were all currently huddled just outside, sitting on the floor in an amicable circle around the forgotten issue of Vanity Fair. Jenny was reading it out to the other girls, and it seemed that a kind of truce had finally been reached. (An impression that would be confirmed the next time someone had pulled Jenny and Stephen out of the top of a cupboard, only to find Christine huddled in there with them.) If only the parents had been so simple.
Or rather, if only Lander had been so simple.
Though no-one ever said it out loud, none of the staff at Oaklands could stand Scott Lander; Susan had occasionally seen them drawing straws to decide who would have to deal with him on any one particular issue. She didn’t blame them; the man was a bully, no use mincing words. Bald-headed, red-faced and big in all dimensions, he came off like a sort of demented Santa Clause after a particularly naughty year. Lander ran a reasonably successful chain of newsagents in the city, but as far as anyone could tell spent most of his time as the head of a highly-conservative right wing lobby group; viciously Christian, pro-guns, pro-business, anti-union, anti-gay. Nothing particularly original, but Susan got the sneaking suspicion that should any of that information come up, all bets would be off in the not-calling-the-hospital stakes. Hence the headache.
Lander was the kind of man who’d spent most of his life getting things done by throwing his weight around — in all senses of the word — and whose general solution to any kind of problem was to yell at it until it ran away in terror. Susan suspected he’d never before encountered someone whose usual reaction to that sort of thing was to start breaking fingers. Not that Lander maybe wouldn’t have deserved a few broken fingers… but still, Susan was glad for the show of restraint. Mostly. At any rate, it probably would have all been a moot point if not for the fact that — as far as his darling dearest only daughter went — Lander did not take suggestions. She’d seen him before, a hundred times over, and it never failed to break her heart; the kind of parent who substituted toys for time, and who soothed his guilty conscience by letting his ‘princess’ get away with murder.
As far as she could tell through the bluster, Lander was currently in the middle of a full-blown lecture about how ‘coddling’ children lead them to grow up as “whinging, hang-wringing welfare mothers”. Susan knew from previous experience that Lander liked to use a kind of ‘survival of the fittest’ reasoning to excuse his daughter’s playground bullying since, in Lander’s world, only the strong survived and everyone else brought it on themselves. It was about halfway through this tirade that Susan realised that Lander didn’t Know.
The other parents did — or rather, they didn’t Know but they definitely Suspected — which is why they were all currently looking on with such expressions of horror. Lander’s tirade was noisome at the best of times, but when it was directed against someone who could have very likely disembowelled everyone in the room before anyone could think to call for help… then it was terrifying. Their eyes kept flicking back and forth between the two arguing men and Susan didn’t need to be psychic to hear them all thinking, Please God, don’t let him take Lander up on his offer…
To his credit, Midnighter had just listened to Lander’s ranting with a kind of horrified fascination, occasionally butting in with incredulous interjections of “Excuse me?”, but otherwise leaving the man to it. Lander was big, but Midnighter still had about half a foot of height on him, not to mention the fact that he was a solid wall of muscle as opposed to Lander, who Susan rather suspected was composed mainly of beer and pies. He was standing with his arms crossed — which was doing nothing to make him look more approachable — and was currently almost cross-eyed as he stared down at where Lander had started poking him in the chest to get his point across. Susan couldn’t tell exactly — Midnighter was nothing but a dead hum of electronic static to her post-human senses — but she rather got the impression he was debating as to whether Lander might be more amicable if his hand was over the other side of the room. Her fingers twitched for the telephone. Again.
And then Lander said, “… so that a hard-working taxpayer like me has to come out in the middle of the day because people like you, Quinn, get so worked up over something that’s no big deal. When I—”
No-one saw Midnighter move; one moment he was standing, arms folded, and the next he’d grabbed Lander’s index finger with his own and twisted in a way Susan couldn’t follow but had left Lander on the floor, clutching his hand with tears in his eyes. Nothing looked broken or bleeding, so she pulled her own hand back from the phone. There were always plenty of ice-packs in the freezer.
“I don’t care who the fuck you are, or what the fuck you think you know,” Midnighter said, and he was using That Voice again; the one that could deflect bullets through the power of intimidation alone. “But when you get called out to come get your girl ‘cause she’s crying hysterically; when you do that, then you can look me in the eye and tell me it’s ‘no big deal’. Get it?” He glared at Lander, and Susan could hear the click as the other man finally did, indeed, Get It; joined the ranks of the rest of the parents in Suspecting who he’d just spent the last fifteen minutes yelling at.
Susan had never seen Scott Lander at a loss for words before; not on the TV news and certainly not in real life. She rather thought he looked like one of those flabby, deep-sea fish they occasionally trawled up; mouth flapping open and shut and glossy black eyes hazed with mortal fear at the new and unexpected turn its world had suddenly taken.
And then, for the first time in his life, Scott Lander backed down. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah okay.”
“Good.” When Midnighter turned to Susan the death had gone out of his gaze and he was just Mr. Quinn again. “I’m gonna take Jenny for the rest of the afternoon.”
“Of course; I’m very sorry about all of this.”
He just shrugged. “At least it wasn’t aliens this time.” She didn’t really have a comeback to that, instead simply watched as he walked out to crouch down where Jenny was reading an article about world music out loud. “Hey kid, I’m gonna go meet your dad at the Singapore Zoo, you wanna come?”
“Can we see the monkeys?”
“Well I dunno, I reckon Uncle Jack’s a bit busy—”
“Daddy.”
“Okay okay, we can go see the monkeys…”
Susan sighed, and went to get an ice-pack.
But there’d been one incident that would stick in Susan’s mind for years to come. It would pop up whenever anyone would ever make offhanded complains about having to pick their kids up, or drop them off, or take them to ballet or leave work to watch the hundredth Nativity play with the cross-dressing Joseph and the angels with bent halos. Susan had always tried to be fairly understanding about the time demands of the average working parent. Sometimes — despite everyone’s best efforts — meetings ran late, and this was the 21st century and things were tough on the employment front, but even still…
Every day, without fail, Jenny would be dropped off at Oaklands at 9am sharp. Every afternoon, without fail, she was picked up at 4pm. Usually by her father, but very occasionally by a pretty brown-haired woman Susan had figured out as being the Engineer, sans the usual metallic outer shell. She supposed they’d been chosen for being the two least recognisable Authority members, at least out of uniform, though Jenny’s identity was fast becoming an open kind of secret. Things all came to a head on a dreary winter’s day in June; the day of Jenny’s dentist’s appointment.
It had been cold and wet and windy for at least two weeks, which meant that all the children and carers had been slowly going stir-crazy locked up inside the centre all day long. They’d coloured all the colouring and made a hundred houses out of popsicle sticks, and finally on Monday they’d dragged out the television. TV3 had been running Oprah when the wide-eyed faces of kids orphaned on an attack in San Francisco had been cut out by a station call as the channel had switched over to an emergency simulcast of CNN. Susan could remember a time — not that long ago, really — when she would have been able to count such occurrences over the past ten years on the fingers of one hand. Nowadays, however, were interesting times indeed, and when the broadcast cut it was greeted with a resigned sigh rather than horror or amazement.
The vision was blurry — most of it captured off camera-phones held by unlucky onlookers — but the no-nonsense voice-overs informed the world that somewhat that looked a little like a Hydra and a little like the monster from Alien had emerged from underneath Athens and proceeded to stomp on the local residents. It was currently being battled by the Authority, who had instantly gone to work cutting and searing heads (Susan made a mental note to commend Midnighter on his team’s knowledge of ancient mythology the next time she saw him). This had unfortunately proved less than effective, since apparently whoever had made the monster had read the same books as everyone else and the thing seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, fireproof. So the fight raged on; shaky footage of larger-than-life destruction cut by serious talking heads with thick Greek accents thanking the Authority for their fast response time and assistance evacuating the city. The usual, and Susan half-watched it as she cleaned up the sloppy grey-green mess that had once been brightly-coloured pots of paint.
More and more children started to gather around the TV, fascinated by the gory scenes of destruction and the massive, black horror-movie carapace of the Hydra. Susan had long since tried to stop them from watching, though a part of her mourned for their lost innocence. As usual, right in front-row-centre sat Jenny, flanked by Stephen and Christine. Susan tried not to watch Jenny too hard at times like this; there was something about the set in the girl’s burning eyes that bothered her in a way she couldn’t even begin to articulate. Too old, too determined, too not like the little girl who’d cried that day underneath the A-frame and far, far too much like the man who’d come to find her. Susan hated the world, just a little, for forcing that kind of look onto the face of a child. Hated the way her mind always reminded her of the first time she’d seen Jenny like that, staring at a radio with grim determination and, when Susan had asked what she was doing, saying, “I should be out there with them…” in a voice that hadn’t sounded like that of a four year old at all.
Interesting times indeed.
Susan had been washing brushes when Kura sidled up and reminded her, “Isn’t Jenny supposed to go to the dentist at three today?”
She looked at the clock; 2:40pm. Sometimes they made arrangements with parents in these sorts of circumstances, but… “Her appointment is in Melbourne; not a lot we can do about it.”
“Talk about a bad day at the office. And we think these little monsters are bad…”
Someone had managed to get a helicopter and a wide-angle lens camera in amongst the carnage and the CNN reporters were currently taking great glee over footage showing Midnighter, foot securing the bottom jaw of one of the Hydra’s heads as he attempted to pry the smooth shell off the thing’s ‘face’. Susan watched with grim fascination — again ruefully reminded herself why she had quit exactly that line of work — as a gore-splattered TV-Apollo descended into shot and done some animated talking not picked up by the cameras. Midnighter pulled one hand off the Hydra to do something that looked suspiciously like looking at a watch, and was followed up by a redoubled effort which finally separated off the slick black shell; much to the consternation of the Hydra as well as the watching children who let out a rousing chorus of, “Ew!” at the green-grey mush of the thing’s exposed organs. ‘Ew’ turned into a cheer a moment later when the mush exploded into flames, care of Apollo; a sentiment that was happily echoed by the commentators (“Looks like it’s only fire-proof on the outside, Bill!” “Looks that way, Stacey, and what a turning point this discovery could be for the Authority.”).
More silent screen-talking and another watch-glance from Midnighter, followed by a strange sort of shrug which provoked a laugh from Apollo. Something apparently decided, the pair kissed briefly — provoking another round of “Ew!”, though Susan knew from listening that it was a general consensus amongst the boys that, while kissing was totally gross in general, kissing another boy was slightly less gross on account of it not carrying the dreaded risk of Girl Germs — and Midnighter turned…
And then a bunch of things had happened at once.
She felt the prickle along her skin first; the dreaded tingle that preceded danger. There was no obvious source — the only children in the room were clustered around the TV, which didn’t look like it was about to fall on anyone or blow up — when suddenly the room was washed by an odd yellow light and a very distinct sound not unlike the static-burst of an old CRT screen turning on. Her ears popped.
On the TV, Midnighter had opened a Door and was about to step through and suddenly Susan got the horrible feeling that if she’d turned just slightly to her left she would have seen a heavy black boot appearing not two inches in front of the Activity Wall. But she didn’t turn; eyes instead glued in horror to the screen where a huge black tentacle had ripped out of the fractured ground not a foot away from the limp Hydra head. She watched TV-Midnighter turn, just slightly, but half-in-half-out of the Door there wasn’t much he could do and the thing was so fast, slamming into him and sending him reeling backwards into…
“—seitcloseitclosethefuckingdoor!”
Something large and black shot past her and Susan ducked on pure reflex. Another static pop and the yellow glow faded from the room and when her eyes opened again a long trail of red-and-green gore was tracked across the floor starting at the Activity Wall and ending at…
“Unf!”
The closed Door had cut off the tentacle before more of the Hydra could come through but there was still a good eight feet of it on the floor of her day care centre, currently wrestling with an extremely annoyed Midnighter. He’d pulled a huge Bowie knife out of somewhere and was busy hacking it through the tentacle in what looked to Susan like random intervals but when nevertheless seemed to be reducing the thing’s thrashing.
It couldn’t have been more than a second or two, and things were looking good until the tentacle had reared up, flexing and stiffening as huge black spines erupted from the surface. From there, there was no-where to go but down.
“Ohmigawd!” A harsh clatter from her right as Kura dropped the glass of paintbrushes she’d been holding and a muffled grunt from Midnighter as a spine the size of an arm crashed with a sickening finality through his shoulder. Everything was still.
“… ow.”
“Daddy!”
Susan watched Jenny jump through the crowd of enthralled children to crouch down against her father’s uninjured shoulder; in turn, he reached up to ruffle her hair.
“Hey kiddo, I bet you thought we’d forgotten.”
“Huh?” Jenny said, in the voice of someone who knew exactly what hadn’t been forgotten. She climbed easily onto Midnighter’s chest and proceeded to pull the spine from his shoulder, provoking only a slight wince, before rolling the whole thing off onto the floor. “Door to the sun, please Carrier,” she chirped to no-one in particular, and a long, low Door roughly the size of the tentacle opened up a foot or so in front of her. With a no-nonsense sort of determination, she proceeded to roll the tentacle through it.
“Someone has to go to the dentist today.” Midnighter sat up, rolled his shoulder and flexed his hand, before inspecting the long trail of gore and the large, bloodied hole through the Lino. He turned to Susan, “Uh, sorry.”
She shrugged. “This is a day care centre; we’ve had worse on the floor.” Internally, she debated whether or not it would be worth cleaning the mess up before the SIS got wind of what had happened and quarantined off the area. Officially, the New Zealand government wasn’t interested in developing its own posthuman engineering projects. Officially. Biological containment of the blood of one of the world’s most powerful bio-weapons and an unknown UGE would be purely for the safety of the public.
“What about the others?” Jenny had her hands on her hips and a pout that promised trouble and Susan knew that the room would be pristine by the time anyone outside Oaklands caught wind of what had happened.
“Oh, they can take care of themselves. But teeth are important.”
He stood up, retrieving the knife from the floor as he did so — it promptly vanished into his coat faster than Susan could follow — and held out a black gloved hand.
Jenny took the offer without hesitation. “Do we hafta go?”
“Uh-huh. Door.”
“I won’t tell daddy.”
“I bet you won’t.”
Another static pop and they were gone. Almost as one, the children breathed again, excited chatter exploding a moment later and Susan knew that Jenny would be swamped with questions tomorrow morning. Kura had already overcome her previous shock, prompted into action by a couple of boys who had inched towards the long smear of gore and were looking dangerously close to touching it in order to test if superpowers were contagious.
“Ben! Michael! Stay away from that! C’mon everyone, out of the Activity Room. Time for afternoon tea.”
Susan sighed, putting the half-empty paint pot down onto the table with a soft click, and tried desperately to remember the best thing to use to clean up blood stains.
Eight months later, the Revolution came and went, taking the Authority with it.