Bark 2.2
I probably should feel like a creep. After all, here I was, following person after person around and noting down where they went. It was a heck of a way to spend a Sunday afternoon and evening, after I'd gone and helped Rachel out earlier. I wasn't spending quite as much time with her lately as before, but I tried to explain what I was doing.
She'd just nodded, in the kind of way that told me that she understood the idea of busy, even if she didn't see the point of all of it. And to be fair, I wasn't really doing anything yet. It was going to take a while before I had the right places to attack. Because I didn't want just a warehouse where they listened to people screaming 'songs' about how the Aryans will slaughter the jews or whatever nonsense they got on about.
I didn't really care about the specifics, just that this was a gathering place where they relaxed and listened to music. But beyond that, where did I go next? I needed to follow them to their bases, to their houses, and that was a little harder.
At first. But I followed Othala back to an apartment, keeping a block and a half away at all times. She went up, she went in, and one of my flies came with her.
If only I could figure out exactly how to use my power. It was frustrating and stressful, trying to understand all of the inputs. To a bug, every sound was far different than it should be, every sight was bizarre and even a little unnerving, and there I was, trying to interpret it. The bugs were giving me 'good' data, it was just that what they considered good wasn't the same as what I considered good.
By now I thought I could almost tell when someone was talking, and I could also almost maybe tell voices apart in a very, very general sense. This seemed like progress, but it was the kind of progress that gave me headaches and made me wish I could just skip straight to the understanding, since it did feel as if it was something I could practice and improve. It was far easier to deal with that then figure out exactly what I was going to do about Rachel, or how exactly I was going to be more threatening in an actual fight. I had the bugs, and if I could get more of them, then that was more of them.
But anyone who couldn't be taken out by bugs was just going to laugh at it. That was a problem without an easy solution, and in fact I had thought about it a lot, over dinner or those blank moments when I was just relaxing by Rachel's side, enjoying life in general.
But of course, all good things came to an end, and that included the weekend.
******
I was walking to my locker when it started. I had been prepared for it, sort of, and so I half-dodged Madison's outstretched foot, merely stumbling a little, but that still led me to careen into another student, who turned and said, "Hey, watch it!" His voice was loud, his veins bulging, clearly not glad to be back at school.
"Sorry, sorry," I said, gritting my teeth and turning to smile at Emma. Well, not smile, but I'm pretty sure that's what she saw it as as she stepped up the stairs, keeping close behind me, which meant that Sophia was somewhere ahead, ready to harass me. And indeed, that's what my bugs told me as well.
"Having trouble walking straight?" Emma asked.
Part of me wanted to snap back. There were so many insults I could give out, but another part of me knew that it'd do no good, wouldn't it? But I wanted to get right up in her face, I wondered what she'd do if I really fought back, not just ignored it or tried to force her to quit it.
"Should be asking you that," I muttered, too afraid to come out and say it. I knew the kinds of things they did to get revenge whenever I actually tried to make things better. When I tried to tell a teacher once, or when I got too close to some kids who didn't give a shit about me either way, and thus were willing to talk to me as long as I didn't do anything.
They didn't like the idea that I'd fight back, they didn't like people who resisted them. But if that was all it was, then it'd be easy to get out of it. If I fought back enough, they'd go on and pick on an easier target. But instead, Sophia and Emma both seemed to take any hint that I still had any strength left in me, anything other than an instinct to lay down and die, as proof that they needed to redouble their efforts.
It frustrated me, and it made me wonder sometimes how they had a life when they spent so much of it on something like that. They weren't doing it because they were bored, and that only made it worse.
I opened my locker, wary of them getting up behind me and trying it again, though I doubted even they'd be fucked up enough to do it again. Not after all of the trouble it'd caused… at least for a while.
Inside, though, all of the locker was painted. Not even a horrible color, just wet grey paint layered all over the locker. If I set down any of my books in there, it'd make a mess. How had they gotten access to it, and why hadn't anyone noticed…
But those were questions for another time. I slammed the locker, wishing I had somewhere to put all of the books I'd had to haul around. My mood was turning sourer and sourer, but I tried to focus on the positives. My bugs were spreading out carefully, and I'd hopefully get some good practice in. When I started to think about my power less as "the bees! Oh no, not the bees!" and more as spying and the like on top of bees, then that meant I could practice it anywhere and everywhere. So I tried to just drift through classes.
It was Monday, so it wasn't as if I was alone in that. The teachers seemed like they'd rather be anywhere else, and so did the students. Everyone was a little too tired to give me that much crap, other than a few whispers here and there.
I wondered what Emma would say if she knew about Rachel. Except I didn't have to wonder at all. If she knew about Rachel and not Bitch, then it'd prove every dirty rumor true, and if she knew about Bitch? She'd report me to the police and watch as my life fell apart.
Luckily, she didn't know about Rachel and me. Not that there was a Rachel and I, of course, besides us being friends. At least I'd managed to do my homework on Sunday. Rachel had watched me do it, and she'd even worked up a few questions about what I was doing. I wasn't sure how much she got from my explanations, since it was clear that the school system had failed her, among other systems, but she at least seemed more willing to learn and try new things than I might have thought if you'd described her to me before.
She played video games now, as long as they weren't too complicated, and we could have conversations about books I'd read to her, and all in all, it was just fun being around her. We didn't share all that much in common, except where we did.
I didn't know how and why she triggered, but I did know that this was something we shared. And sometimes when I was thinking about what she did and how she was acting, it felt like there was an echo in how I could have acted, or what I should be doing. Or maybe what I shouldn't have done, and what I had done.
I mused a lot all the way through history and english, and luckily there was no gym today, because that was usually a humiliating process. I wasn't as out of shape as I might have once been, but people avoided me, and the locker rooms were annoying, and probably would have been even worse now, so I gratefully went off to lunch.
At least Greg was there and willing to sit with me as I poked at mashed potatoes that had clearly been kept in a box, and meat that was grey and looked like it'd been dead far, far too long. None of the food was terrible, it was just bland and distasteful. But it always gave me the feeling that I was slowly but surely getting closer to death with every passing second, and that if I was going to do so, it shouldn't be eating cafeteria food.
Greg, on the other hand, ate it up as fast as possible. And in between bites, he talked. "So Taylor, how's the gaming been going?" he said, in chunks of two or three words between a round of chewing and eating.
"Fine, and I've been dealing with other things." I paused, frowning a little. I didn't know whether or not he could keep a secret. On the one hand, who would he even tell? His blue eyes seemed earnest enough. "Well, I have a new friend, and so that's something."
"You do?" he asked, breathlessly, having just finished chocolate pudding in record time. I gestured slightly, and he flushed and wiped his mouth.
"Well, I met this girl, and we've been talking and hanging out for a while. It's not something I really want to talk about at school, because you know them."
"Oh! Right. We could always just text each other about this, or… whatever. I mean, I really wanna know now."
"Well, her name's Rae, and she's sorta gruff, but in a nice way? We've been hanging out the past week or two a lot. That's what I've been doing on the weekend," I said, "though things can sometimes get a little awkward."
"How?" Greg asked, almost eagerly.
"I dunno, just different expectations, that sort of thing?"
"What's she like? Besides gruff. I mean, imagine that you're trying to describe her for a video game poster or something."
I pictured her costume. Really, considering what she had to work with and the fact that she had been on the run for years, it was a pretty decent costume. I even had to admit that I liked it. "She's really strong."
"Strong?"
"Yeah. You know, physically strong? Strong arms, and solid muscle, and she knows how to use it. She's shorter than me, not that that's saying much, and she has dark, intense eyes," I said, thoughtfully, "kind of like they could just stare through you. Thin lips, and short, dark hair that she usually keeps pretty simple."
"Oh?" Greg asked, and I wasn't quite sure what I was hearing in his voice.
"She usually dresses pretty simply, jeans or shorts or the like, and a T-shirt. Simple, but it sort of fits what she's going for, I guess," I said, feeling almost like Emma when I said that, "and she has this way of standing. Sort of stand-offish, sorta confrontational, like she's in charge and taking the lead?"
"Uh."
"Let's see, she usually wears sneakers, she has rough hands, sort of callused. Experienced hands, I think you'd call them, and she keeps her nails short, of course--"
"Uh, Taylor," Greg said, and I looked up to see him red-faced for some reason, "I think I get the point?"
"Oh, sorry. But does that paint a picture for you?"
"More than a thousand words," Greg said, and then he looked at me for a moment, his lips pursing before he said, "so, uh, you like girls?"
"What," I said, for the second time in not all that long. "What?"
"I mean, uh… not that I'm judging or anything, I'm just curious or whatnot."
"Just. Curious. About what?"
"Well, the way you described her…"
"Yes?" I asked, and then tried to just consider it objectively. Okay, maybe it did seem a little detailed. "You can describe someone without it being a… thing. And it isn't a thing."
A… thing? My tongue was tripping on itself, and I really wanted to get out of this conversation before it was too late.
My face was red and I didn't want to think about what I'd said or what it could mean, especially since it shouldn't matter and didn't, right?
"Okay, fine," Greg said, "so, about that game, have you gotten past level 9?"
"Level nine? My game skipped from eight to ten," I said, frowning, "I was wondering if that was a glitch."
"No, it just means that you missed a secret," he said, "so you see, what you have to do…"
And there we go. He was distracted again, and he didn't bring up Rachel again, though I did mention her once, when talking about one of the games.
Oddly, talking about her cheered me up a little, though that didn't last. Inevitably, the trio kept up their rumors and their games, and by the end of the day I was glad to escape, and even more glad to be able to go to Rachel to unwind.
Of course, it was not a day I could tell Rachel all about, especially the part with Greg, but just being able to lean against her and talk about the Trio alone was enough, and that night I'd have plenty to do.
******
I went home at seven-thirty, to return to see Dad watching television. "Hey Dad, I'm back," I said, glancing over at the TV. It was showing a rerun of this movie about capes or something, I remember a lot of people protested at the time, back in the 80s, that it wasn't realistic. It turned out not to matter that much, since cape movies had started to fall out of fashion over a decade ago, but at the time back then, I think it had been a big deal?
You had things like that, where they mattered once but they didn't anymore, and you had causes that died stillbirths because time marched on. But then you had neo-nazis, I thought, still trucking along, and I should be out there stopping them.
"Hey, Taylor. How's it going? How'd it go with your friend?"
"I just talked about my day and we played video games," I said, defensively. I was gritting my teeth rather firmly as I ground out the words. I really wanted to not have to deal with this. I was out there fighting crime, and he thought… what? I wasn't sure what he thought, only that it seemed like everything raised it worse and worse.
I could see the way his jaw set when I mentioned Rachel, like he was grinding out the words.
"So, how was your day?" Dad asked.
"Fine."
"Must have been a short conversation, then," Dad said, standing up to his full height and walking over to the fridge. Probably for another beer.
I flushed. "Okay, it wasn't great, but wasn't horrible. Some people tried to bully me, and someone almost tripped me, and classes were boring, but I talked about a new game with Greg. I didn't have gym, luckily, and I did my math homework ahead of time, and wrote a little prep work for an English essay while I was at Rachel's, too." I had to admit I wasn't exactly sounding friendly, and I let out a sigh.
"Good," Dad said, rather firmly, as if he'd made some kind of point rather than just getting me up in arms. "So, do you have any more homework to do?"
"A little," I said, trying to sound casual, for he'd stumbled on another secret, and that was that I'd already done most of it, and I was going to save the rest for the bus tomorrow, because I had mapping to do.
And then tonight, I'd have a long night of geography homework, up close and personal. Too bad I didn't have any clothing that'd make it look like I was out for a night of partying. But I'd done other work that should make it possible to sneak out and get some good knowledge.
A lot of it involved not wearing a costume at all, and a lot more of it involved looking up maps online of what was where.
********
When you imagine someone staking out an area, you don't picture them at a fast food joint, nibbling on fries, do you? I was wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that were both a bit ratty and old, and I was carefully not smelling how rank this particular hole-in-the-wall chain was. It was the kind of place where you hoped that the grease didn't kill you, and where, especially at nine at night, the people were dead-eyed and clearly didn't want you there.
But nearby there was a house that was used for E88 parties, and I'd be traveling from one greasy restaurant to the next. It'd be less plausible the later it got, but for the moment, my bugs were able to monitor a few things.
First, where everyone was. Second, I could sorta interpret the sound if I focused, as either a lot of people talking or a few, as either people who were probably-maybe male and those who were probably female. That wasn't exactly great data, but I'd already checked this area, and I knew that it was actually an abandoned old house, at least most of the time.
I checked the map on the phone, trying to imagine how I'd change it, given time. If I had a smart-phone, I'd be able to easily do it in real time, but even looking at the map, something became apparent.
The members of the E88 were young, all in all, and they liked their parties. They partied, they did drugs, they had dog fighting rings, though we'd broken up the biggest one, I think. They were not holed up in the middle of nowhere, guns trained at the entrances.
That meant that I could guess that the capes were the same, or at least, for all that Kaiser had to keep some distance, the capes mingled with the powerless.
I tried to keep my bugs out of the dark corners of such places, since the last thing I wanted to do was notice when people were having sex. Plus, having a fly buzz around a couple like that would be way too noticeable.
Visual data, as I was trying to think about it, clinically, was harder to get. Harder to understand too, for that matter. But I could get a decent feel for the scope of a room by sending bugs this way and that to land on walls, so what I really wanted to do was figure out how to listen in.
If I could do that, then I could just sit in a room and write down details and information while they spilled everything.
As it was, though, I was building up a map that I knew was going to get more concrete. It was concentrated in places, and I could imagine it as a series of webs. Spider webs were often imagined to be these beautiful things, but they could sometimes be clumps, or even balls. Spiders were weird and fascinating, and so was the map.
There were webs and nexuses, and I'm pretty sure if I spent enough time I could identify the stash houses, the dens of iniquity, and so on and so forth. But at the moment, I was really mostly just trying for the places they hung out, and their meeting grounds.
Because like some team before the big game, when they were going out, they stopped at one place, the better to communicate face to face. The Protectorate had lawyers, and they had capes who could build devices that easily tap any phone conversation without any of the hassle or complexity that regular technology had to go through. So, face to face was the best way to make sure nobody knew what was up, as long as they missed it.
So, if I identified the warehouses and houses that they were using most often, then I could enact the next stage of my plan.
Calling it a stage probably implied a lot more scheming than was actually involved, like I was a secret mastermind who was carefully orchestrating everything to my end, rather than a fifteen year old girl who wasn't sure what she was doing.
But the plan was simple enough that hopefully even I could pull it off, with some Protectorate help. There were two, maybe three, centers of activity that I had identified, all of them somewhat close to each other, and each of them important to the gang. There was an old house that they used as a base, there was a store that secretly sold drugs on the side and served as a way-station too, and there was a warehouse that had used to be used by a tech company that had gone belly up and been eaten by its competitors. And this warehouse had, from what I could tell, slipped through the cracks.
If I hit the drug depot, then they'd come swarming out after me like a hive of insects, and if the Protectorate was waiting outside their doors, well? Insects, meet flamethrower.
I was sure they'd agree if I laid it out right. I hadn't spied on anyone's privacy in a way that broke the rules, and they wanted to get at the E88. The three people they held would probably bust out eventually, and now was the time to strike if they really wanted to weaken one of the largest and most powerful gangs around.
The real weak link was the fact that I was going to be going against a bunch of gang-bangers protecting a drug stash all alone, but I'm sure I could manage it, and perhaps I'd get lucky and a few of the people would be less powerful capes that I could sting and harass.
It all relied on me being able to convince people, and I hoped that things would go well. I wasn't going to tell the Undersiders about the plan, and it'd need to be on a Friday night in order to get the most targets.
So I choked down some fries, and I planned on keeping that up until I knew what I needed.
********
The days passed with glacial slowness, and then Wednesday came, which didn't mean anything in particular, really. I was halfway through the week, but I didn't think that it'd be anything special.
Except halfway into just hanging out, Rachel dropped a question on me.
"What are you doing with Lisa's shit?"
"Her shit?" I asked, looking at Rachel. She was wearing a short-sleeve shirt, and the temperature out that evening certainly justified it, as well as the shorts she was wearing. Little detail I'd noticed #35: Rachel didn't shave her legs, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Not that it really mattered.
"Plan, whatever. She mentioned it," Rachel said.
"Well, I'm going to strike out on Friday," I said, "hopefully with the help of the Protectorate."
Rachel stepped closer to me her arms crossed, and I felt uncomfortably warm. It'd gotten harder and harder to just be around her, and it was like my heart was… but I couldn't, I mean. It'd just…
Okay, I thought, as I found my world filled with annoyed, maybe even pissed off Rachel…
Maybe I had a very, very small crush. Physically, that was. I was allowed to, I thought, without it being anything. I had crushes all the time. Wait, no I didn't. But I could have them all the time, and I was attracted to Brian but that didn't mean that I was going to start dating him. Plus, Rachel hadn't exactly asked about dating, had she? And I didn't want to be--
Look at that slut. Probably puts out before the first kiss. She once tried to molest me during a sleepover. That freak. Don't be friends with her, unless you're looking for an easy lay--
My stomach churned, and I felt almost sick. Sick and nervous and wanting to be anywhere but there. Rachel, added up objectively, wasn't that attractive. Yet somewhere and somehow, subjectivity had told me a different story. It talked about her closeness, it looked at her arms and the odd intensity to her, it added all of that up and came up with a different solution. Two plus two equals five, and I couldn't exactly tell myself I was wrong.
Actually, I could, and I was. I didn't want to be someone who got into crushes that easily. Not after what they'd said. It was a sick, disgusting feeling, worse than that sensation of my bugs the first time, that had led to a freakout and a stay in a psychiatric ward.
Crazy slut.
I wasn't.
"I'm going," Rachel said, reaching out and taking my hand firmly, as if to anchor me back in the world.
"What?" I asked. For the second time in less than a week, I was startled and confused. She had a real skill at surprising me.
"I'm going with you. Fuck it, I don't have anything else to do, and you need protection."
"You're going to… protect me? I don't need protection, I'm not some princess in a tower or something," I said.
"I know. People need backup sometimes. A pack at their back," she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "And I can help out. You've done all sorts of shit for me so far, like helping with the dogs, so just call this repayment or whatever." She shrugged, as if it meant nothing.
But I knew Rachel too well. I knew that look on her face. Stubborn, but also oddly concerned. I realized that she would do this for me. She'd try to protect me and work with me, because she was my friend, and perhaps there were other reasons, but I wasn't sure.
Rachel seemed like someone who was loyal once she found a friend, but perhaps a little hard to befriend.
I was blushing so hard, and I thought about it for a moment and then said, "Alright, why not?"
Rachel nodded, and then hugged close to me for a moment, and then backed off just as quickly, leaving me confused and dazed in her wake.
******
A/N: So, now here we go.
Thanks to
@NemoMarx.
