Participants:
With local residents portrayed by Elisabeth
| Scene Title | Three Places At Once |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Where Cat finds herself after the Moab raid. |
| Date | April 7, 2009 |
West Prairieland, CO/KS/NE
Gunfire, whirling helicopter blades, bullets flying and perforating the escaping inmates. Knox slowly begins to come back to concsiousness as he is hefted away from the prison, blearily looking back towards the prison, "No shit I made it out?" Members of Phoenix flee away from the chaos of the prison. Amidst the screaming and gunfire, a familiar form dressed in black flickers on to the field of battle, disappearing and reappearing as he moves from point of cover to point of cover, eventually catching up to Helena where she stands by the prison entrance. Hiro rests a hand on her shoulder, squeezing firmly, "Come on, we're getting out of here."
A rush of air and a sudden sensation of falling accompanies Helena being drawn towards Cat with Hiro, and the dark-haired swordsman looks up to the helicopter, then back to Cat. "Peter is downstairs, things did not go as planned. He wants me to get everyone together and " Something catches Hiro's attention as he hesitates in mid speech, first it's Knox being dragged away with Shard's crew under fire from the helicopter, then it's a tingle in the back of his mind as he looks up to the security camera wobbily hanging from the wall of the prison. "What's "
Hiro felt it before everyone else saw it, a rippling distortion around the Moab Federal Penitentiary, a haze of temporal distortion so profound that it mis-shapes the air like a heat-mirage. Hiro's eyes widen ans his mouth hangs open, hands raising as he waves both arms out to the side, "No!" He begins to move to reach and take hold of Helena's shoulder, but the rippling wall of distortion radiating outwards from Moab hits him like a tidal wave, a cascading eruption of space and time that he cannot begin to understand the origin of. "St "
Time stops.
Bullets are frozen in mid-air, a helicopter hangs in mid-flight, Ramon is frozen reaching out for Trask, while Donner clutches at his midsection, laying back on the ground bleeding out. No one notices just how long time is frozen around Moab for, but when the bubble bursts, when time snaps back like a rubber-band made too taut, everything changes.
Where once was the desert of Utah, everything changes. Some were caught in the tidal wave of folded time and space and launched across the globe like stones fired from a slingshot. Others were sent skittering across the desert hours into the future, it was like a bomb, scattering debris in every direction at once from the force of whatever monumental release of energy was undone in that facility.
It's jolting to her, despite having been teleported a number of times by Peter, then Anne when they were testing the GPS extraction system, and on recent occasions by Hiro Nakamura. One moment she's in Moab being approached by Helena, with Hiro telling her what happened down on Red Level and about Peter still being inside as they're evacuating the raid which started to go south. Then there's the atmospheric effect, the visible temporal distortion, and suddenly she's not in Moab anymore.
Cat finds herself face down in grass, and it's dark. There are no security forces, no Hiro, no Helena, no Diego who was thrown past her bodily. No Trask battling the Electromagnetic Man either.
There's just open grassland, flat for miles and miles and miles, not that she can really see. It's dark, and she's in some rural setting. Only the moon's light gives her any indication of the surroundings. That pale illumination settles on an old and weatherbeaten sign with three arrows which declares this to be the meeting point of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska.
There are two roads meeting here, one which leads east and west while the other runs north and south. Not an interstate, no, a rural highway. And here is Cat still dressed in battle gear with two pistols, three M16s, ammo, and grenades with her face behind a ski mask. Her left arm doesn't move, and it's still bleeding. "That's a good sign, I guess," she murmurs. "I've not been passed out for hours, at least."
Priorities are assessed in her head, while she glances down the paths of those two roads to look for and hope there aren't any headlights coming, at least not yet.
A woman dressed all in black, including her face, is not going to be easily seen in this locale. Even with a nearly full moon, this is literally the ass-end of the United States. But even in the ass-end of the country, there are still teenagers. And from the east come the sounds of engines. BIG engines. It takes nearly a full minute for headlights to accompany the sounds, then two sets of them are literally roaring down on Cat's position at high speed. And getting faster. The engines are being pushed at high RPMs and they sound like they might be muscle cars of some kind — the type that if this were 1970 you'd expect to hear on the road but are far more rare in the 2000s. Except in places where people really have a hard-on for those old muscle cars.
About thirty seconds later, the headlights sweep past the black-clad form in the field. And then there are brake lights from one of the cars as the other continues to race along the flat roadway in the even flatter landscape. This early in the spring, no one's doing the planting yet, though the fields have all been turned, so a person standing upright in a field? Yeah, the driver spotted that even in the bare split second the headlights illuminated it. "Hey! Hey! Who's out there? Derrick, that you out there?? What're you doin' in old man Franklin's field??"
Crap on a stick. Headlights. Cat wants to move as rapidly as she can and hide the weaponry before they're on top of her and she's spotted, to be safe, but her left arm doesn't cooperate as a result of being shot in that shoulder. Beyond that, there isn't much place to hide them out here anyway. She has no way of knowing if this might be a county sheriff's deputy for whatever county she's in, or a state trooper and being armed? Not at all good.
Then the headlights are on her, followed by cars stopping and voices calling out. She needs a story to tell, and fast. A good one.
"No, I'm not Derrick," she tells them in a stern voice. "I'm with Homeland Security, my team were tracking two Evolved criminals and the bastards got the drop on us. Got shot in the shoulder, one of them teleported me out here and just vanished. Keep going wherever you were heading, my team has been contacted and they're sending a 'copter to get me."
There's the sound of dead silence from the road. And then the sounds of a car door closing and footsteps. A flashlight clicks on, and the owner of the voice can't be that old; the voice cracks when he says, "Shit!? You serious?" The flashlight comes nearer, following her voice. "We ain't got no Evolved people in town. What the hell they leave you here for?"
"Because he felt like it," Cat informs him. "We were trying to arrest them, that one is a teleporter, and this place is very far away from where he is." She makes it sound like the simplest concept in the world, displaying all the arrogance she's seen used by police officers and DHS operatives on occasion, added to by the fact she's wounded. As far as they know, also, her hostility might be fueled in part by the humiliation of having been shot and dumped here in a field at the corner of West Prairieland, CO/KS/NE.
She needs to get them to leave so she can tend her wound and try to figure out some sort of plan, and they're still here. The blood loss will soon constitute a problem, she knows. If she goes for treatment, assuming there actually is treatment out here, she'll be pressed for a name and there'll be a paper trail. This simply cannot happen.
"Get moving, or I'll tell my team you were out here involved with illegal drag racing and give them your license plate numbers so they can pass the word to the local authorities."
The kid actually snorts with laughter. "Well, hell, lady. You don't want no help, that's just fine by me. But I wouldn't bother with no reporting it to anyone. Kyle's daddy's the sheriff and he knows 'zactly what we're up to out here. Just turns a blind eye cuz ain't no one out here cares, long as we ain't drinkin' when we do it." He pauses and comments, "But I'd get outta old man Franklin's field if I was you. He don't take kindly to folks on his property. Never mind he's got like 3000 acres and such — he catches ya out here, he'll fill ya with buckshot. Got Hank Dursley last year right in his ass!" The boy sounds more than a little amused.
"I'll take that under advisement," Cat replies tersely. Her feet start moving to get her closer to the road and the sign she saw there, her intent to sit and lean her back against it. "I'm all good." The rifles are taken off her shoulders and placed on the ground as best she can manage with only one good arm, then she settles into that seated posture and begins to tear a wide strip out of her shirt, using the hole where the bullet went in as a starting point. It'll make a good field dressing, Cat judges, with which to apply pressure and stop her bleeding. No further attention is paid to the racers.
The second car is on its way back, but the kid with the flashlight has a good bead on Cat by now. He watches her move and suddenly he says, "Shit, lady! Is that a M16? Christ… you ain't playin' around." He moves forward. "Want me to help you bandage that up? I ain't no doc or nuthin, but not the first gunshot I tied up," he offers. The second car is still a mile or so down the road.
"Evolved people can be dangerous," Cat tells him simply. "One teleports. The other one we were facing has magnetic fields, like that guy in the X-Men. That's how I got shot. We thought he just had electricity, so we fired at him. Surprise." It's the truth, even, in a twisted way.
Her right hand motions for the boy to come her way, and she calls up her knowledge of the human anatomy. It's good to have panmnesia and carry a full copy of Grey's around in her head. "The bullet might not be too deep in there. Maybe you can dig it out." It did go through body armor, after all.
The kid turns out to be a towhead, probably 6'4 if he's an inch. He sets the flashlight down next to Cat so that it illuminates the arm she's working on, and he says, "Nah. You're better off leaving it in there for now. Digging it out will make it bleed more and you take the chance of hitting something major digging around." He grins down at her as he squats next to her. "My dad's the town doc. I can wrap you up and take you there, if you want. Or I can wrap it and just leave you to your friends and their chopper." The other car's getting closer, maybe a half mile. And at the speed it's traveling, probably not more than a minute or so.
"Name's Jay Thurston."
She keeps the strip of shirt pressed there, suppressing her bleeding as he checks it out, and nods once. "I'll be all right once they arrive," Cat asserts. She maybe looks a bit pale now, but the wound itself isn't so deep. It's near the top of her shoulder, an entry but no exit wound, and the bleeding hadn't been profuse. It's simply a matter of the time since she was hit that could present concern. "They'll patch me up. I can wrap it, don't want to keep you tied up any longer."
The boy — he can't be more than 17 or so from what she can make out in the dark — reaches out to help her tie the bandage securely. "Well… if you change yer mind, lady, that road there?" He nods toward the road where his friend in the other car is slamming on the brakes and skidding to a stop. "Go left, it'll take you to town in a couple of miles. Ain't much, but there's a phone there at the gas station and stuff, you'll be able to get something to eat and such."
"Jay! What th'fuck you doin? That Derrick out there?"
"Nah," Jay yells back. "G'wan back, I'll be a couple minutes behind you!"
"Are you nuts? Yer throwin' the race? What're you doing out there? You gotta girl 'r somethin'?? Izzat Meredith?"
Jay sighs. "No, Billy! Get goin'! And don't go spreadin' rumors! Meredith's daddy'll skin her if he thinks she's out here with me!"
"Shit!" Billy swears again. "Yeah, all right. I'll wait for ya at the crossroads!" And he climbs back in his car and roars off.
Jay looks at the black-clad woman as he finishes helping her. "I'm comin' back in an hour. If yer still sittin' here, I'm takin' you to town," he warns.
She watches in silence as the car pulls up and the two talk, her face impassive. Once the one called Billy has driven off and his attention returns to the bandage, finishing it, her voice is heard. "Thank you," Cat offers. "They'll have come for me before you pass back this way."
A chuckle follows as she eyes the completed dressing. "Nice work. Good luck in the race."
Jay blows that off with a smirk. "Eh, what the hell. It'll be the first time he's beat me in six months," he tells the woman. He shoves himself to his feet, leaving his flashlight for her. "Take care, lady." And he ambles back toward his car, climbing in without looking back. The engine rumbles to life and he pulls a fast U-turn and roars off after his friend.
She watches the driver depart, giving him a minute before she moves. "Damn," she murmurs. "I almost wonder if I could've gotten him to take me to Denver. How far is Denver, anyway? Airport, food, internet access…" It's then something occurs to Cat. She still has her comm gear. The earpiece remains in place, all she has to do is speak into it. Maybe this will work, maybe not, and if no she's not any worse off than she already is.
A single word is used in that purpose. "Wireless."
Then she waits for reply if one will come, singing the words to a song under her breath.
"…We gotta get out of this place
If it's the last thing we ever do
We gotta get out of this place…"
She gets to her feet and approaches a spot marked in the center of the intersection. It's studied for a moment before Cat places her feet directly in the middle of it. She's now in three places at once.
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