T-Minus

[Pippi]

Where was she?

No. Wrong question. Wrong thing to ask. Wrong thing to try - and ‘try’ was the focal point of that statement - and focus on.

Where had they put her?

What had they put her in?

It was something malleable, something fluid, something- no. Something fabric? She could move her arms and legs, just about, her limbs feeling for all the world as if they were wrapped in lead, and the material she’d been encased in rustled and flexed with their movement. She could turn her wrists. Her palms faced down, pressed into the same hard, rough material her head was forced to use as a pillow. Twist. Her palms looked up, slowly being suffocated by the fabric draped atop them. She could raise her head, but again only just, to look at her body, and see that whatever she was trapped in, it was pitch black, darker than night.

Okay. That told her something, at least. But it was a very small something, and it wasn’t enough to stop it from getting lost in the whirlpool that had consumed her mind.

Her head swum desperately against the current, grabbing out at her capsized thoughts as they span and tumbled past her, each one a blur and a jumbled haze, each one impossible to concentrate and focus on except for the crystal clear memory of Ms. Duffy’s head disintegrating into a puddle of blood and viscera. Everything circled back to that. Every single one of her thoughts and fears and drives and desires and needs, they all stemmed back to that event, that gunshot, that directive from the owl with the pistol, and no matter how hard she tried, no matter how hard she began to writhe and thrash and try to rip the fabric apart with her teeth, she couldn’t see any of them.

Only a gunshot and a spray of blood. Over and over and over.

She felt her head tip back. She felt a rugged, hoarse scream erupt from her throat. There were dark spots in front of her eyes. She blinked, and they transformed, morphing into vultures circling overhead, the morning sun glistening off of their wings. She blinked again, and they turned into burn marks in an Oregon postcard. Wish you were here, pooling in your own sweat, choking on your own heavy breathing.

She was boiling alive.

She grit her teeth, relinquishing any attempts at thought, handing desperation the controls, letting it find her a way out of this fabric prison. She couldn’t even move her arms anymore, everything in her body was shutting down, five seconds until blackout, and there was one option left. One option she had to take. Twist. No, fuck. Twist again. Palms up. Ready. Aim.

Mercedes roared, as twin beams of sapphire blue tore through her gloves and ripped through the front of the sleeping bag, scorching a gap right through it, letting her use the last of her strength to roll out of her cage and onto the asphalt. She ripped her burning gloves off, throwing them into the desert, and lay there on the road for a moment, gulping in air and watching scraps of singed black fabric drift and twist in the sky overhead. She would have happily stayed there for longer, but the stench of burning polyester suddenly hit her nose and made her eyes water, forcing her upright in a coughing fit.

“F-Fuck…” she managed to choke out, her shoulders still sagging heavily as her lungs worked overtime to feed her air, sweat staining her tanktop and collecting on her forehead. She said nothing more for a little while, letting her ragged breathing talk for her. Then;

“Fuck!”

She weakly smacked the tarmac with her right hand, shaking her head in disgust and forcing herself to stand, even as her legs wobbled and more black spots floated into vision. She had disintegrated a sleeping bag for no real reason, but that wasn’t what had pissed her off so badly; another couple of minutes in there, and it really would have been a death trap, cooking her from the inside out. She had needed to escape. In the end, this had been the only avenue available to her. ‘In the end’, however, now that was the sore point.

She had panicked.

It had been the first thing her dad had drilled into her when she’d been learning to properly control the energy flowing through her body. With a Gift as volatile, as dangerous, as deadly as her own, both to those around her and to herself, she needed to learn how to tame it. There could be no rash actions with her powers. No mistakes, because there was every chance that any beam fired off in blind fury could be the last thing someone ever saw. She hadn’t always taken this knowledge to heart, as the singed corners of throw cushions and scorched holes through refrigerators could attest to, but for a while now, Mercedes had prided herself on her adeptness with her Gift.

And now, just because she was in an unfamiliar location, she’d immediately freaked out and put herself on the back foot.

This wasn’t even the first time her life had been threatened; there had been several instances of unexpected heatwaves hitting Bend, of exercise routines that had proven to be too much for her body to properly handle. And this hadn’t been the first time she’d destroyed a pair of gloves with her Gift, either. But the chances of being able to order a brand new pair online out here, in her current situation, well… she doubted Amazon Prime delivered to the middle of the goddamn desert. Let alone did Next Day Delivery.

There would be time for remonstrating with herself later, though. Time to focus on what was going on around her, too, and most importantly, time to actually think, all as soon as she got into somewhere shady. She was still standing in the middle of a cracked and crumbling road winding through the desert, after all. If she stayed out here for much longer, then her ‘great escape’ would all have been for naught, and she’d be nothing more than perfectly cooked roadkill.

She took a breath, even though it still wasn’t enough and it still felt like the fire inside of her had breached into her lungs as well. There was a building up ahead, not too far away, within walking distance even for her. This one was a simple answer. Even if she’d been running around like her head had been lopped off, she could have figured out where she needed to head towards.

One last breath. One last quick, look around. It always paid to take a second or two before you did anything, and thus the logic proved sound. She scooped up the duffel bag from the pothole a few feet away. Hers, she presumed. The second gift she had been lumbered with on this team building exercise, this time so graciously handed out by their captives.

She would deal with her thoughts towards them, and their words, later.

For now, though, Mercy slipped the bag over her shoulder and walked slowly down the road towards the once-abandoned compound.

((Mercedes Guenther continued in Play Dead))