Starcosmo

Chapter 13: Shiprock

Shiprock, NM

New Mexico / Arizona border

Zero hour + 5 days

Jaden Shadenfort hitched her backpack up higher on her shoulders, and wiped away a stubborn tear.

It hadn't been her fault. The dumb military wouldn't leave her alone. It was their fault, for kidnapping her in the first place, for taking her way from Dad, from her home, from the hospital where she should have stayed -- she didn't even need to go to the stupid hospital in the first place. She was fine.

It was obvious the mushrooms had done it. It had given her this new. . . sensitivity, where she literally felt everything out there in the world. She could feel things as far as she could see them, all the way to the horizon. She could feel the drones flying above in the sky, the cars moving on the highway, the sharp edges of everything that was near her.

The sharp edges. . . weapons. She could especially feel the weapons. While she was hitchhiking she had felt a warning prickle in her mind as tiny little locks disengaged something smooth on that one drone, a long, round phallic object, and Jaden had felt sure it was a missile and it was going to land on the car she was in unless she did something, so she broke the drone in two, and it crashed.

Jaden sniffed as she cut through the underbrush, hiking cross-country towards a farmhouse she could see in the distance. It was dark, but she could feel through the dark, too, and there was nothing in the big field before her until the farmhouse. A few warm little mouse bodies scurrying here and there, and an owl, far off in a big tree. Nothing else.

She knew she'd hurt a lot of people. It was their own damn fault for stealing her, for locking her up, for strapping her down. God knew what else they were planning to do to her. She would have been like their dumb science experiment, a prisoner until she was old and gray like somebody's Grandma. Except she wouldn't be a Grandma because she'd never get married. What good is feeling everything if you have no options in life?

She'd been hitchhiking and just plain hiking cross-country since she escaped. That evil, evil, terrible escape. Men shouting, screaming even, as she battered down all the locked doors she could feel between her little cell and the precious outdoors. A lot of ugly weapons pointed at her, and a lot of broken fingers, wrists, and even some arms as she tore the guns away from the ugly men who wanted to stop her.

The net. They'd shot a huge net at her. It was so skinny it was hard to get her mind around it. She'd brought a sharp piece of metal to hand and sliced through it like butter.

Then, the darts. Sloshing with toxic liquids and synthetic compounds, designed to put her to sleep, to numb her, for a very, very long time. They sparkled with malevolence in her mind, and she shattered them and misted the liquids and blew them back towards the men who shot at her.

A shiver went through her. It was an evil, evil time. Flashing red lights and screaming men and snapping bones and exploding plastic and shattering doors.

She was sorry, so sorry, for all the damage she'd done, but she couldn't help it -- she was so scared, and so mad, and so lonely. She didn't know these people but she knew they wanted her for her Power.

She’d battled her way up level after level of concrete corridors, metal doors, reinforced bars. The whole place was on lock-down but she’d bent the bars aside like taffy. Some of them men had been so scared they were crying.  A few of them had thrown down their weapons and run off, their trousers stained. Those were the ones she was grateful for. She didn’t want to hurt anybody.

Finally, she’d smelled fresh air and felt only a thin layer of earth and steel above her head. There was a ramp, and it led up to a warehouse-like structure. She slammed out and found it was empty, mouldering desks and chairs and cobwebbed ceiling fans and no lights. It had been mid-afternoon when she’d crashed outside, into an empty parking lot, and saw nothing but miles of chain-link fence, and a dirt road, and a few cameras perched on tall poles, and a massive sky whipped with clouds.

She had no idea where she was. All she had was a thin paper smock. She ran.

She ran for miles and miles along the dirt road, and eventually found it connected to a highway, behind a cattle guard and a chain. Regular cars whizzed by. Regular people! She loved and feared them now. Her feet were bloody and she was afraid of what she’d tell them if they asked her. “I just ran six miles to escape from the military. Don’t ask why.”

Come to think of it, she wasn’t even sure it was the military that had her. She hadn’t seen any rank or insignia. They were uniforms, and they looked like military uniforms, but that didn’t mean anything.

She hiked along the shoulder of the highway and didn’t put out her thumb. Nobody stopped.

She was near exhaustion when she hit the first off-ramp. In a small cluster of service buildings, behind a charging station and mini-mart, she dived into her first dumpster. She found food and clothing. People were so wasteful.

It had been two days; scavenging, traveling, upgrading her clothes so she looked more and more normal, even finding a backpack, a stroke of luck that enabled her to carry another pair of shoes and a change of clothes, just in case.

She had no money. There was enough fresh food tossed carelessly into dumpsters that she had enough to eat if she wanted to. She really wasn't that hungry. She mainly ate because her Dad would want her to keep her strength up.

She was utterly alone. She didn't know what state she was in. She had no way of knowing where Dad was. She could beg for money, she guessed, but didn't want to draw attention to herself -- didn't want to have to hurt anyone else.

She'd hitched, twice. Each time just telling the driver she was going "to Iowa". They had just nodded and driven on, and Jaden hadn't asked any questions, like how far was it, or how long it would take to get there.

The first man had only taken her about ten miles down the freeway who wouldn’t let her use his cellphone. The second one was a woman, and after about ten minutes of driving Jaden had felt the drone following them, and then all the men with weapons in the two vans, and one of the men had a long tube with a missile in it and he was aiming it at her car and she couldn't let them kill her or the women she was with, so she hit the front of their truck, just above the front tires. But before she'd done that she'd said, "You better pull over," to the woman giving her a lift. And the woman had done so; but it was a lucky thing that she had.  

Going with other people was just putting them in danger.  Jaden had to do this alone.

She kicked a clod of dirt. She was traipsing through a mucky field, not quite flooded but saturated with water, being let fallow for a season. The farmhouse was getting closer. Jaden liked farm people and hoped they'd let her use their phone. She really had to call home. Dad would be worried sick.

For once, his worrying was okay with her.

* * * *