Red

Red put the phone back against his ear. “Wait, shut up. Are you sure it’s a ten?”

“Do you think I’d be talking to your sorry ass otherwise?”

The last class ten had been the darkest day of his life. “Fine, send me what you know. But my parking spot better be there when I get back.”

“Try to keep everyone alive this time, okay?” Karen said, cutting off the call.

Red pulled a tablet out from the center console and started scrolling through the file. A level ten spike of ESH had just been detected near a city park in Houston with no clues as to its origins.

Nina drummed her fingers on the arm rest. “We’re wasting time. Let me drive, you can read on the way.”

Red held the same single dismissive finger up to her face as he continued reviewing the brief. Kids these days. No patience.

Nina continued to squirm in her chair and after what probably seemed like the longest minute of her young life, Red put the tablet down and backed out of the parking spot and headed towards Brookwood Park.

The first few minutes of the drive passed pleasantly silent, but he could tell Nina had more to say as she tried to focus on her cell phone but still occasionally shot him dirty looks.

Finally, she let it out. “You could have blocked that ADS from torturing me you know.”

Red smiled. “Yep.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“You wouldn’t have learned anything if I had.”

“Yeah, you’re right, I learned you’re an asshole.”

Red huffed in amusement. “Did they update the manual?”

“What?” Nina responded, not breaking eye contact with her phone.

“Underaged prostitute isn’t in the dress code.”

He thought she would argue some more, but she just sighed crossly and closed her eyes. Her halter top changed to solid white and her shorts and suspenders to black. She pulled a black jacket out of her bag and put it on.

“Happy?”

Red kept driving.

After a long enough silence, she added, “Just because you got that seventies pedophile look going on doesn’t make me a prostitute.”

“Why were you assigned to me? Karen still pissed about those two Sovs I crossed off in Panama?” Sovs were members of the Sovereign Sect, an organization diametrically opposed to the Wrecht Order.

“That or something I did, I don’t know.” Nina said, still looking at her phone.

“Well, she is your mom.”

“I don’t talk to that hag unless I have to.”

Finally liking something that came out of her mouth, Red didn’t push the subject, and moved on to more pressing matters. “Have you ever responded to a class ten?”

“Hmm let’s see, I have been in for four years, and the last class ten was decades ago, so no,” Nina responded sarcastically.

“The last one…” painful memories forced their way up, “we lost a lot of good agents, so we are doing this by the book.”

“Which book? The book that says to let arms smugglers go? That book?”

“Yeah, the book that says don’t settle for one petty smuggler, put a trace on someone to try to get the source.”

“Whatever,” Nina said with irritation in her voice. “The book also says we shouldn’t be taking this baby-barf yellow clunker. Why aren’t we taking a standard patrol vehicle?”

“Because this is better than a standard patrol vehicle. Now check your blood sugar.”

Nina sighed, like a huffy teenager but pulled a glucometer out of her bag and stuck her finger. “Blood sugar optimal.”

Using ESH taxed you. Some of the energy came from the ESH in your system and some from the wielder. If your blood sugar crashed, it left the wielder basically powerless. Red had seen it happen in battle and it wasn’t pretty.

A stab of pain hit Red’s arm. Nina read the glucometer with sly smile on her face. “You’re good too.”

Red scowled. “Sidearm?”

“Sidearm? Seriously? You know I don’t need a sidearm.”

“Level ten. By the book. Sidearm?”

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She threw her hands up. “Fine.” She dug around in her bag and pulled out a pistol and holster. After some twisting in her seat and huffs of frustration she fit herself with it. “Anything else?” she shot back with some heat.

“ESHwear,” he continued, not missing a beat. ESHwear was the equivalent of a bulletproof vest to deflect ESH attacks.

“Why didn’t you say that first?” Nina snapped, digging around in her bag again. She pulled out a large, thin, white garment and awkwardly stripped down to her underwear. “Eyes on the road, this isn’t a peep show.”

“Underage prostitute isn’t my thing,” Red snapped, not breaking his gaze on the road ahead.

After fumbling around with clothes, gun, bag, and brushing her hair back into place for a few minutes she picked her phone up again to resume ignoring Red. He was just getting used to the peace and quiet when she spoke up again.

“I am pretty sure no one liked baby-barf yellow in the seventies, regardless of which, rolling up in this car doesn’t really help us blend in. How about a nice blue?”

“Don’t you touch my car,” Red growled, finally taking his eyes off the road to glare at her.

She held her hands up in defense. “Okay, just saying.”

Red sighed, she was right. He hated that. He turned a dial and the car’s color faded to white.

“You forgot, the specs,” Nina said, pulling a pair of glasses from her jacket pocket and dramatically flipping them open and on her face with the flick of her wrist. “The only cool part of the uniform.”

Red glanced at the GPS. “We’re close, check the wide area scanner, there’s a button under the dash.”

Nina ran her hand until she found the button which triggered a control panel and screen to unroll out of the dashboard. “Still showing remnants of the initial level ten disturbance, but whatever caused it has faded or is gone. I am also tracking a level three signal nearby. It seems to be moving very slowly away from the original location of the level ten.”

“Someone on foot?”

“Could be.” She continued to stare at the console, tapping the screen. “But I have never seen readings like this before. The signal is so…well…pure, all the component radiation levels are peaked right at three, which doesn’t make sense. It’s like someone just turned the volume down.”

“What?” The weirdness was starting to make Red nervous.

“This signal is either fake, or someone is masking an extremely strong signal. Like, so strong that no one has ever seen anything like it.” She looked up and grinned at him. “Or your scanner is old and busted, like this car.”

Red thought back to his last level ten encounter. “You better call it in, I don’t want a repeat of Goblin Valley.”

“Goblin Valley?”

“Just call it in.” His grip on the steering wheel tightened.

The now white DeVille rolled up to the edge of the large park, complete with a few baseball diamonds, playgrounds, pool, and recreation center. The smell of smoked beef, grilled chicken and the sounds of parents cheering on their kids over a game of baseball filled the air. Nina and Red got out of the car and followed a sidewalk before passing a soccer game, and headed into a break in the tree line.

Red, under most circumstances, gave little indication of what he was feeling, if he was feeling anything at all. Partly because he had seen it all and partly because he had a reputation to keep. He wasn’t sure if it was the intense sun or the excess ESH radiation they were approaching, but he couldn’t hide the concern on his face. To make it worse, Nina was picking up on it.

“Behind those trees,” Nina whispered, giving Red a wide-eyed look. She looked scared and he was glad. Scared people were careful people. Red’s heart started to thump faster as they rounded the corner.

What they saw was both underwhelming and bizarre. Their ESH radiation specs showed intense hyper-colored markings everywhere, but there wasn’t anything there other than a sidewalk and a ditch with a muddy puddle.

Nina slowed as she approached the markings on the concrete walkway. “Have you ever seen anything like this? There’s enough residual radiation here to fry a turkey.”

A tiny metal shard glowed a brilliant yellow through his glasses indicating it was laden with ESH radiation.

“I hope we aren’t the turkeys.” She twisted the shard gingerly between finger and thumb and dropped it into an evidence containment bag designed to hold ESH charged material.

Red approached the small ditch filled with a puddle off to the side of the walkway. “This looks like the focal point.” He pulled out his phone and called into HQ. “We located the epicenter, but whatever happened here, we missed it. There is nothing here but excess radiation. I need a cleanup team, two would be better. We also have an odd class three disturbance close by. It’s moving slowly, probably on foot. Considering proximity these must be related. We’re going to investigate.” Red paused, holding the phone up to his ear looking around making sure he hadn’t missed anything. “Copy, proceeding with caution, permission to use max level force as necessary, confirmed.” Red took a deep breath, his grip on the phone tightening. “We won’t engage until all teams have arrived, Karen. I know! By the book!” Red smashed the end call button as hard as he could, imagining it was her face. He regained his repose and put his phone back in his jacket pocket.

Nina stared at him like she had just witnessed a miracle. “Did you just hang up on her?”

Red shrugged. “Let’s go find that class three.”

Back in the car Nina checked the screen. “It is heading south easterly, same pace, a few miles an hour. It seems to be following the sidewalk we were just on.”

“There,” Red said, as he pointed at the screen. “Let’s try to cut it off at that overpass before it gets to this neighborhood.” Red stomped on the gas. Gravel clattered against the underside of the car as they surged forward. He weaved the DeVille through the neighborhood streets and traffic as fast as he could without running anyone over.

Nina’s voice was low, her hand gripped the handle on the door “Are you worried? It’s just a class three.”

“At Goblin Valley we didn’t know what happened until it was all over. We are going in blind. We have no idea what we are tracking. We don’t know what the source of all that radiation was, so yeah…I’m worried.”

Arriving at the overpass, Red swerved off the road into some grass in a skid of dust. They both jumped out of the car and jogged toward the sidewalk which headed into the shadow of the overpass. Red looked at his watch. “Backup should be here soon…wait, someone is coming.”

Adrenaline surged as the echo of footsteps came from the darkness of the underpass. He felt the ESH surge within as he readied himself for whatever was about to come around the corner. Nina’s hand edged towards her holstered pistol. He held his breath.

“Whoa!” The teenaged boy said as he came around the corner. He had a baseball glove in one hand and a backpack slung over his shoulder. “Ya’ll scared me. Lurk much?”

Red breathed out some his tension and gave the kid a sheepish grin.

“Hi,” Nina responded, with a nervous wave. “Uh…sorry about that.” After the teenager passed them she turned to Red. “I nearly blew that kid’s head off.”

A bizarre rainbow swirl of ESH radiation flowed directly at and through them down the walking path. Red pointed towards it. “That wasn’t the class three. Put your specs back on, it’s still coming.”

The energy twisted in the most magnificent technicolor show Red had ever seen. He pulled his specs off to look at the spot that should have been the source but saw nothing. Nina had also taken her glasses off doing the same comparison.

“What is going on?” She kept looking back and forth from the source to where it was flowing. “Where is all the ESH coming from and where the hell is it going?”