A/N
You will understand why I'm adding this author's note when you read further into the story, but I just want to say before you begin reading that, even though I'm Canadian and was only two years old when the incident occurred, my thoughts and love goes out to anyone involved or anyone who had friends and family involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
This is just a warning that this chapter does refer to the attack on the Twin Towers, so I just want to let you know that if this is a sensitive subject matter for you personally, I would advise you not to read this chapter. It is not offensive, and does no go too deep into the attack, but it could still be a trigger for some people.
RIP to all those who lost their lives on September 11th, 2001. Hope everyone enjoys this chapter.
*****
"We were working secretly for the military, our experiment in sound was nearly ready to begin. We only know in theory what we are doing, they told us all they wanted was a sound that could kill someone from a distance. So we go ahead, and the meters are over in the red, it's a mistake in the making."
-Kate Bush
*****
Marsha laughed as Jack finished his story, the two of them were both heading towards the western sectors of Area 52 that morning as Marsha's office was in that direction, as well as the training room where the children were waiting for Jack. It was a particularly normal morning so far, but that was all about to change.
They ran into Dr. Grant not half a second after Jack had finished speaking, and they immediately noticed his irregular composure. Jack glanced at Marsha questioningly, and the look she sent him in return told him that she, too, knew that something was up with him. He must have wanted something, and that was never a good sign.
"Good morning!" Grant said as he nervously pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. Surprised at Grant's strange way of greeting them that morning, Jack glanced back at Marsha, who all of a sudden rolled her eyes with a cringe. She recognized Grant's strange composure, but she'd only seen it three times before this. All the same, she knew exactly what it was that Grant was up to.
"No! No way, Grant, maybe ten years ago but not now." She said quickly, and Grant looked at her pleadingly while Jack remained confused as to what exactly was happening.
"Oh, come on, it won't be like the other times!" Grant argued, for what, Jack still wasn't sure.
"Oh, yeah right. Something always goes wrong!" Marsha sighed and clutched the file she'd been holding a little bit tighter.
"Hey," Jack finally butt in as Grant and Marsha suddenly looked at him, as if they'd forgotten he was even there. "one of you mind telling me what you're talking about?" He looked from Grant to Marsha in confusion. Grant was about to offer up an explanation, but it was clear that he and Marsha had slightly different views on whatever the situation was, so Marsha began before Grant could explain it completely wrong.
"He wants us to go undercover." She said with a blunt sigh, as if that would explain it all. Instead, Jack found himself even more confused.
"I'm sorry, are we a part of the FBI now?" He said sarcastically as he desperately wished for a real explanation.
"He used to do this to me all the time," Marsha said impatiently, gesturing towards Dr. Grant. "for some reason, whenever they needed someone to do undercover work for the facility I was always their go-to."
"And why did you ever need to go undercover in the first place?" Jack said impatiently, the sarcastic tone still present in his voice.
"For a variety of reasons," Dr. Grant began to do his share of explaining. Jack just hoped he was better at it than Marsha had been. "sometimes we would be suspicious of someone having powers, so we would send people undercover to investigate. Or someone was maybe considered a threat to the facility and we would send someone in to determine how much of a threat they really were."
"Alright, so what's the deal this time?" Jack asked, finally beginning to comprehend the situation.
"Well, there's a man living in southern British Columbia who we've begun to take notice of. We think he may possess superhuman abilities and we were hoping to send the two of you in to investigate. Based on what we know so far, he wouldn't be very responsive to us asking him straight up if he has powers and then confining him to our facility, also if he does not have any powers, we don't want to jeopardize the identity of our facility."
"Canada? Why is it our problem, can't the government there take care of it?" Jack questioned.
"Theoretically, they could. But their branch in Ottowa doesn't specialize in metahuman physiology, we're the only branch in the world with a Zenith Program and an actual team of people with abilities, so they've contacted us, hoping that we could get a jump start on that and potentially acquire a new member."
It made sense, but Marsha's opinion on the matter remained solid. "Well, I don't think it's a good idea. Do you not remember what happened the other three times you made me do this? It was a disaster, people died!"
"Well, that was, what, fifteen, twenty years ago? How could we have possibly predicted the outcome of those times?" Grant argued back.
"And yet you still made us do it all over again two more times! Now look, you're making me do this for a fourth time! Something is going to go wrong, and if it's as bad as the other times, it's not going to end well!"
Jack looked on in confusion once more as the two of them continued to argue back and forth. He wondered what the hell had happened during Marsha's prior "undercover missions."
"I assure you, it won't be like last time. You'll both be perfectly safe. We've greatly improved our technology, we can have eyes on you at all times, you'll be one hundred percent protected." Grant said calmly. Jack understood that something terrible must have happened, something that he intended to find out about, but even so, he was almost excited by the idea of going undercover.
"Come on, Marsha, it'll be fun, like James Bond!" He attempted to convince her, but could tell by the look on her face that she couldn't relate. "Oh, come on, don't tell me you've never seen the James Bond movies. Seriously?"
Marsha shrugged her shoulders and glanced from Jack to Grant, and back to Jack. She sighed once more before speaking, "Fine." Dr. Grant and Jack both smiled, happy that they managed to get her to agree, "But this better not backfire on us." She said with an edge to her voice.
Grant assured her that everything would be fine, just as he had the three times before, and Marsha mentally cursed herself for once more being lured into doing something she was uncertain of. He told them to meet him in his office at four that afternoon, where he would explain their case a little bit more in depth. Then, he was off to do some work of his own, leaving Jack to boast to Marsha about how cool this would be.
When he was finally finished, Jack remembered Marsha's hesitation and grew curious once more, "Wait a second, did you say that people died during some of these cases?"
Marsha recalled the incident with a sharp pain in her chest, "Every case was elaborate. We'd thought of everything, disguising ourselves, coming up with aliases, memorizing our made up backstories, everything was always carefully thought out. The first time I was sent out somewhere, Grant made me dye my hair blonde and call myself Elizabeth. The girl we were investigating was someone who had been contacted by Area 52 before because they'd thought she may have had powers. When we brought her in, it was obvious that they were wrong, but as the years went by she became more of a question, so they sent me in along with a few other guys to do some investigating."
I was twenty-four, I'd only been working at Area 52 for two years, so when they told me I had to go out and do this, I was in no position to refuse. Besides, I thought it'd be simple, pretend to be someone else, get to know this girl, and determine whether or not she had powers."
"Hold on," Jack interrupted and Marsha glanced up at him, "you were blonde?"
"Seriously, Jack? Out of all that, the thing you're going to focus on is my hair colour?"
"I just can't really see it, you as a blonde."
"Can I continue?" She asked, wondering how he could get so easily distracted. When he gave her a teasing look, she rolled her eyes and continued her story. "Her name was Melanie, she worked at Windows on the World restaurant." She paused, waiting for Jack to put two and two together.
"Windows on the World, that's...?" He began, Marsha nodded. "So it was before..." He left his sentence unfinished, knowing that Marsha would know what he meant.
"Well, I was twenty-four about fifteen years ago..." She added cautiously, hoping he would understand what she was saying.
"Fifteen years ago? That would have been... " Jack raised an eyebrow as Marsha nodded, knowing that there was much more to this story than he had expected. Windows on the World was a restaurant found on the one hundred and sixth floor on the North Tower. One of the two towers that fell on September eleventh two-thousand-and-one.
"She worked at Windows on the World, so it was decided that I would get a job there as well as a waitress, in order for me to get to know her. We had a few other employees of the facility here and there on various days, as dishwashers at the restaurant or as customers, just in case they caught something that I didn't. It all went smoothly for the first few days, nobody questioned my fake backstory, I would work at the restaurant whenever Melanie had a shift, I got to know her pretty well, and at the end of the day I would crash in a hotel."
On the fifth day, I could confirm that she did in fact have powers, but instead of going back to Area 52 that morning and telling them that they should bring her in, I decided to work another shift. We'd actually gotten to be pretty good friends, we were the same age, she was friendly, and it didn't really feel right for me to just vanish without at least saying goodbye. We were both working the early shift that morning, it wasn't long, just from 5:00am to 9:00am."
Jack almost cringed as he could only imagine what came next. He hoped that Marsha's story wouldn't go in the direction that he was predicting. "It was September eleventh, and I remember waking up that morning at around 4:00am, and contemplating what I would do. If I decided to go back to Area 52, I would have gotten on a plane in an hour, gone through a layover in Boston, and then fly back to Los Angeles and be back at Area 52 by ten in the morning. But instead I decided to go into work. And I still wonder what would have been the better choice."
Jack looked confused, by now, he could put two and two together and realize that Marsha had probably been in the North Tower during the nine-eleven attacks, and wondered how on Earth catching a plane and going home could have been worse than that. Marsha noticed this and glanced up at him again before continuing.
"The flight that I had tickets for from Boston to L.A. was the American Airlines Flight 11. The one that they crashed into to North Tower. I would have been involved either way."
They both fell silent for a moment, Marsha because she was wondering where she could pick up her story again, and Jack because he was trying to process what an eerie coincidence that was. It was as if the universe had some kind of death wish towards Marsha by giving her two options, be in the building while the attack happened, or be in the plane.
"So we worked our shifts as usual, I got excited that Melanie would be coming to Area 52, not that she knew it, and we both watched the clock as it got closer to quitting time. I can't really remember what happened after 8:46am that day, but I remember the screams, and the smoke, and the panic. Nobody knew what was going on, it happened a few floors below us, to this day, I still don't know how I made it out alive, it was basically impossible. I can only remember bits and pieces of split seconds here again between the time the plane hit and I made it outside, but I remember waking up in the hospital the next day and hearing all about what had happened."
"Five of us were sent to New York and I was the only one who returned. Melanie died in the attack, too. And it wasn't until I had been back at Area 52 for a few days that I realized if I hadn't chosen to come into work that day I would have been on the plane that crashed into the same tower I was in when it happened." Marsha felt the familiar chill down her spine that she always did when she recalled the incident.
"That's insane, you really would have been involved either way." Jack said with the shake of his head, Marsha nodded in response.
"So, after that incident we thought that we were done with any undercover work like that, but, sure enough, a couple years later, Grant comes up to me again, all nervous and weird, acting like he needed something from me. I tried to say no, but for some reason I was pulled back in again. This time, he supplied me with dark red hair dye, the name Andrea, and an entirely knew persona. Three of us flew up to North Carolina where we were installed in a small town college, pretending to be students in order to assess this crazy, old professor who had become a concern when it seemed that he knew something about Area 52."
The plan didn't go smoothly once, he was suspicious of us from the beginning, as were all of the other students. The point of going undercover is to pretend to fit in so that we could get some insider information, and we'd never even got a chance to do that. It had been about a week and we were all exhausted, staying in tiny dorms, not accomplishing anything that we were supposed to, we had nothing. And that day, during third period, was the day that a student named Robert Jackson decided to bring his handgun to school in his backpack."
Jack cringed once more in horror. It seemed that an extreme amount of bad things seemed to happen to Marsha. And he'd thought that he was the one with the tragic backstory.
"Once again, I can't really remember the details, it all happened so quickly. But, with our luck, the classroom that he began with just so happened to be ours. All three of us from Area 52 were shot, along with fifty-one other students and professors in the school, and at the end of the day, Robert had saved a bullet for himself. Some people got multiple bullets in them, I remember realizing that he was watching to make sure that if the first shot didn't kill the victim, he would put enough bullets in them to make sure that they were dead. So when I got one in the shoulder, I went straight to the floor and pretended to be dead in hopes that he was finished with me. And it worked."
It had only been about a half hour from the time the first shot was fired to the last, so I managed to hold in there until the paramedics came, and once again, I was the only one from Area 52 going back home. As it turned out, the professor that we'd been investigating in the first place had suffered a heart-attack throughout the attack and he had also passed away, so we didn't even need to worry about him anymore."
"And nobody thought this was some kind of sign?" Jack began, suddenly concerned about their own undercover case they were going to be working on.
"I assumed that we would be done with this undercover stuff for good, because it was just uncanny that we'd firstly been put through a terrorist attack and then a mass shooting, but about four years later, Grant comes up to me once more. This time, we were going for a more direct approach, they gave me jet black hair, a bunch of dark makeup, skin-tight dresses, and sent me to a tiny, creepy town in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota. The subject was a man a little older than me, so they figured that if they just sent me in there with clothing that showed a lot of skin and dark makeup, I could get all the information out of him that we needed."
This case was a lot easier, apparently we should have gone with this approach a long time ago, because I managed to find out that he was someone who used to work at the Pentagon and he had powers, then he signed up for a military tour in Vietnam and when he came back, he'd completely lost his powers, moved to Minnesota, and started selling crack in the back alley behind his apartment. Things only started to turn weird when I was full of information and ready to go home. First of all, I was finally informed of the strange things that went on in that town, there was an intense serial killer that nobody could track down just making his way through town, knocking off people here and there in horrific ways."
He had a very precise way of doing things, he would carefully select a victim, pursue them without their knowledge for about a week, begin to leave little clues around their house such as misplaced objects, writing on mirrors and just freaky things like that. Then, after he'd practically driven you to insanity, you'd be found dead in your own home and a stab wound straight through the heart. So, of course, when I heard this I thanked God that I was on the next flight out of that insane town, and went back to the motel I'd been staying in for that week."
The first thing I noticed was that I had a missed call from the airline I was flying with the next day, saying that, due to a storm, my flight would have to be postponed for a few days. The next thing I noticed was the sticky note on the inside of my window that wasn't there before. All it said was "Don't look behind you," which obviously scared the living hell out of me, and I called the police, who came almost immediately since they were so keen on finally catching this guy. I stayed at the police station overnight while they tried everything to track the killer, but they didn't manage to find anything on him."
Of course, I was paranoid beyond belief, terrified that I was his next victim and there was nothing anyone could do about that. But I guess maybe we managed to get the best of him, because the storm had passed and my flight was back on track for the next morning. So someone escorted me to the airport, and I guess it was some kind of last-ditch effort to get to me since he'd thought my flight had been cancelled, and the killer showed up in the airport with three knives on him and luckily people were able to pull him off me before he could do any damage."
Jack was still stunned from the first and second stories she'd told, how was he supposed to process this one too? "Okay, am I getting this straight? You're asked to go undercover three times, the first time you're caught in the middle of a terrorist attack, the second time you get shot, and the third time you become the victim of a serial killer?" He asked, blinking away his confusion.
Marsha just nodded her head and Jack continued. "And now you've been asked to do it a fourth time..." he sent a cautious look her way, "... and we're just going to do it?"
Marsha sighed, realizing that the universe had constantly seemed to be warning her not to do this, but still... "Yes, we are." She said with determination. "And we are going to prove, by having everything go perfectly smoothly, that everything that happened before was just a coincidence. And we are going to see if this guy has powers, we are not going to get targeted by Al-Qaeda, nobody is going to open fire at us, and there won't be murder involved."
Jack wasn't convinced, but he managed to push the looming threats aside and let himself get excited about playing the "James Bond" type character. "We're really doing this?" He asked, and got a confident look from Marsha in response.
"We're really doing this."
YOU ARE READING
Zoom, Academy for Superheroes: Part 3
FanfictionThis is a sequel to my first and second stories; "Zoom, Academy for Superheroes: Part 1" and "Zoom, Academy for Superheroes: Part 2", if you have not read those two stories yet I suggest you do that first! View the first story for the book descripti...
