Chapter 24: Overkill

“Over there they call it fireworks. Here we call it insanity.”

Excerpts from the diaries of Panpar

∞

Whitney’s mind sunk like a rock the moment her head hit the pillow. If any day, in the history of days, could be considered a long and arduous day, then she had just lived it. She slept soundlessly and dreamlessly, but she did not sleep for as long as her body wanted to sleep.

She awoke early to a hand on her shoulder shaking her, coming awake hard, like a car suddenly crashing into a wall, and the shadow connected to that hand, belonged to Decker. Whitney sat bolt upright, her mind going from sleep to alert in a flash, knowing she could be waking to a new threat.

She immediately stretched her mind, looking for approaching shadows, but saw only the shadows that should be around. Decker’s was right next to her, and Raris was with him. Whitney slipped her mind into Raris’s and the first thing she noticed was that it was still dark outside.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked.

Decker responded by tossing her a pair of sweats and a t-shirt. “Yeah,” he said curtly. “You run like dog dragging his doghouse behind him. Get up! We start your training today.”

“Training?” she said, but Decker was already turned around and headed for the door.

What’s he talking about, Whitney asked in Raris’s head.

Jo-Karna took the liberty of inviting him to make sure you were ready. He took the assignment on with enthusiasm.

Whitney lay back down on her bed, Tell him we can start in another hour. I need a little more...

I wouldn’t do that Raris warned. He has a bucket of water waiting outside just in case your enthusiasm doesn’t match his.

He wouldn’t?

He is very determined to fulfill his assignment. It seems that he understands the severity of this situation without any explanation.

Raris’s comment piqued her curiosity. Tired or not, Whitney got out of her bed, slipped on her sweats and headed for the door with Raris behind her. She almost tripped over the bucket as she exited her room, and only missed it in time. She couldn’t help but notice, as Raris viewed the bucket, that it wasn’t just a bucket of water. It was a bucket loaded with ice and water. Decker’s shadow was already out back and Whitney went to it.

He was standing in the middle of the back yard with both hands behind his back. They weren’t just dangling there, but placed palm to back, a few inches above his buttocks. If Whitney didn’t know any better she would have sworn he was a cadet or soldier in some army. He wore a pair of Blake’s sweats and a short sleeved t-shirt that he ripped the shoulders out of. Despite the lack of material surrounding his armpits he already had sweat stains drooling down his sides and back, and he looked much older than he had when Whitney first met him. He looked much older than his twenty years should have made him look, and when she’d seen him before he had no scars on his face, arms, or chest, but he’d accumulated a few along the way. Some were from small and shallow cuts, but some were more serious. Whether prison had changed him, for better or worse;, couldn’t be said for sure, but his eyes were deep and angry looking and the prison tats on his arms seemed to belong there. He had comedy and tragedy on both arms. At least that’s what Whitney thought they were supposed to be, although it looked more like tragedy and tragedy. None of those tattoos seemed any happier than he seemed.

“Why did you do it?”

“Do you know how to do jumping jacks?” he asked instead of answering her question.

“Answer my question,” she demanded.

“Do twenty jumping jacks and I’ll be happy to. If you don’t know how and need me to show you, I don’t have a problem with that.” He answered without moving, or without looking anywhere but straight ahead.

“I know how to do jumping jacks.”

“But you choose not to do them. At least you haven’t chosen to do any regimen of workout ... from the looks of it, for your entire life! You are weak and you are out of shape.”

“What? You are judging me?”

“YES!” he yelled. “I AM JUDGING YOU! I sacrificed the last five years of my life for you! NOW DO THE JUMPING JACKS! Then I will answer your dumb assed question!”

Whitney took a step back, put her arms to her sides and began.

“Count them off as you do them,” he ordered.

“Two, three, four, five, six,” she counted as she began slapping her hands together over her head.

“Keep your arms and legs stiff. You look like a rag doll in a dog’s mouth. Keep your body firm and breathe in and out with every repetition. Your breathing will become important. You must learn how to breathe as you move your body; otherwise you will tire faster.”

Whitney nodded and continued. She stiffened her arms as he had instructed and concentrated on her breathing. “Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty!” She said as she finished. She put her arms down to her sides and waited for Decker to keep his promise.

“Put your hands behind your back, like this,” he instructed, again placing his hands in the small of his back, behind him. “Puff your chest a little, and take control of your breathing. Unless I’m making you all hot and bothered, your breathing needs to be controlled.”

Whitney complied instead of arguing. She promised herself she would begin doing what he was making her do. She knew he was right about her lack of exercising, and she supposed placing her hands where he suggested, wasn’t anything to argue with. She stood in front of him with her legs shoulder width apart and her hands in the small of her back, feeling herself, like a soldier.

“Your twin sister is the one who trained me to fight,” he began.

Whitney crinkled her brows, “My sister only exists on the other side of the veils.”

“Do you want me to answer your question or not?”

Whitney nodded.

“Then shut up,” he said shortly.

“Listen. I’m really sorry for...”

“You don’t have to apologize to me, Jo-Laina, and don’t even think about correcting me on that like you tried to do with Jo-Karna. Because I’m not here to help Whitney Leighton. I don’t give two shits about Whitney Leighton. To me, Whitney Leighton is a lazy little girl who has spent her entire life hiding behind her brother. It’s my job to get rid of Whitney Leighton entirely. It’s my job to turn you back into Jo-Laina. Got it?”

“I was...”

“I don’t need your apologies, Jo-Laina. I did what I had to do in order to protect Jo-Laina, and I protected Jo-Laina because I believe in every damned thing she stands for. I believe in her missions, I believe in her desires, and I believe in her! I sacrificed the last five years of my life because I saw that side of her ... in YOU come out that night, and I knew, right from the moment I saw your silver eyes, that everything I learned, I learned for a reason. I knew every drop of sweat I spilled while I trained, was NOT in vain. I knew all of the bruises I suffered, I suffered for a reason, and I knew all of the blood I shed from cuts and scrapes, was going to mean something. That my life was going to mean something. Before I met you that day, I thought I was going crazy! The moment I realized, really saw it for the first time, it was you! At that very moment I knew I wasn’t nuts. I began to take the message your sister gave me, and I had begun to twist it. Now drop and give me ten pushups.”

“But how...”

“TEN PUSH-UPS!”

Whitney got down and started doing the push-ups. The jumping jacks were easier and she immediately began to wish he asked her to do more of those. Her push-ups were awkward and slow.

“In my dreams Jo-Vanna could whip out fifty push-ups in less than a few minutes. She always told me that Jo-Laina made her look like a puppy dog when it came to working out, but you are truly pathetic,” he said turning around. “I don’t know how you could possibly be her.”

“Keep insulting me,” she said as she raised herself into her third push-up, “and you’ll find out.”

“Are you threatening me?” he asked, “challenging me? Because if you are, you will find out I can outmatch you with a sword. Unless you use your correllium ones and I don’t have one, of course. That’s the only way you could beat me in a sword fight. That’s also my job, because I’m not supposed to be able to beat you in a fight. The real Jo-Laina, the one who existed before you came to this side of the veils, was unmatched with a sword. Not even Jo-Viel could beat her, and your sister tells me she is second only to Jo-Laina. You will, once again, become that version of yourself.”

Whitney got to seven on her push-up count and collapsed.

“Pathetic,” he said. “But that too will change. By the time we get to the Black City I will have you pumping out a hundred of those without trying.”

Whitney got up onto her knees. “I doubt it. We will be to the City by nightfall.”

Decker shook his head no. “We won’t be there for a week. Maybe more.”

Whitney shot to her feet. “That’s way too long! She’ll be dead by then!”

“Who’ll be dead?”

“Jo-Vanna! We can’t let it take a week!”

Decker reached up, scratching his head as he paced two steps away from her. He turned around; eyes filled with frustration, and took two steps back toward her. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a second as if he were trying desperately to control his anger.

“I’m afraid we don’t have a choice.”

“The hell we don’t, Decker. I don’t think you get it. Jo-Vanna is supposed to die at the hands of Isolem Treff. He is inside the walls of the city. If he kills her, he becomes more powerful and more difficult to stop! If that happens I’m not sure anyone there can do anything about it. He’ll have free reign, right there in the city!”

“I don’t think you get it, Jo-Laina. If Jo-Vanna can’t handle him then you don’t have a chance. The old Jo-Laina might have a chance, but the new one? The new one has let herself become soft and coddled. The new one can swing her swords fast, but her movements are still untrained and awkward, she can’t even do ten push-ups without quitting! And if the new Jo-Laina goes storming in to face Isolem by herself, without disciplining herself first and without training herself to fight the way the old Jo-Laina could fight? Isolem will have her soul and not Jo-Vanna’s and if he gets her soul? Your soul! We all die. Not just everyone within the walls of the city, but everyone, everywhere!”

“You think my movements are untrained and awkward,” she asked.

“That’s what you latched onto from all of that?” he asked. “The new one still has an ego, I’ll say that much.” He shook his head. “Heal yourself and then give me twenty more j-jacks, and ten more pushups.”

“Heal myself?”

“You know,” he said making his fingers touch his thumbs. He did it sarcastically, with wide eyes, and a condescending attitude. “Your sister told me to make sure you do this after each set of exercises. It will reduce your training time, and you’ll be able to get as much out of it in a day as a normal person could in a month.”

“How much time did you two spend together? You seem to know an awful lot.”

“Your sister trained me for years. She came into my sleep every night from the time I was ten until I was about thirteen and then she just stopped. That’s when I started to think that I was going crazy. At least until you showed up.”

“Showed up and made you go to prison. I guess I can see why you hate me so much.”

Decker shook his head again. “I don’t hate you. But you’ve had enough coddling to satisfy an entire nursery of little kids. You won’t get any from me. I will like you by treating you like a soldier. If you can’t handle that, then we’re all screwed anyway. Now quit dawdling. We’ve got a lot of training to do.”

∞

The sound of big motors woke Tommy up for the second day in a row. He’d heard them early the day before and the sound was like an earthquake rumbling his entire head. Sometimes having hearing as keen as his was much more of a burden than a blessing. Yesterday it was just one large diesel motor, but today there seemed to be more and they weren’t just down one side of the street. They seemed to be coming from both sides. Whatever the construction was, it was a big project.

He got up from his bed and got dressed. There was no way he was going to sleep through that. By the time he walked through his bedroom door, the workers began pounding stakes into the ground. He looked at his clock on the way out and saw that it was only six in the morning. He had half a mind to go out and let the workers know what he thought of their early schedule.

∞

Jo-Karna joined in with them within fifteen minutes of their official start. Their talk became much less and their training became much more. Decker was right about healing herself between each set. Touching her fingers to her thumb, concentrating on the tiredness of her muscles, focusing on healing the tiny tears in those muscles, so she’d be ready for the next set, was working. After only about ten minutes, she was able to get her ten push-ups, and she wasn’t getting tired after the twenty jumping jacks. Decker was adding more to her regimen as Jo-Karna walked up and began duplicating the exercises that Decker was telling Whitney to do.

It was still a little bit dark out, but the sun was beginning to show signs of her proximity to the horizon. She wanted to peek her rays over the side of the world, to hush the chirping crickets, and she wanted to shed some light on their routine. It would only be a matter of time before she was smiling down on them, ending the night entirely, and drawing the face of a new day in the shadows of the nearby trees.

When Jo-Karna did join them, Decker seemed to intensify the training at a faster rate, giving Whitney less and less time to regroup. He added crunches mixed with full-blown sit-ups, leg lifts, side-planks with leg-lifts, then intensified the sit-ups even more with frozen v-sit-ups, making them lift their legs in the air, while crunching their way upward toward the toes. Decker did these exercises with little effort, showing that he wasn’t just making them do them, but that he’d been doing them for a long time. He led by example. Jo-Karna also did these exercises easily, but even she began to show signs of strain as they began to do the frozen v-sit-ups.

“Don’t you ladies just stand there and watch,” Decker said unexpectedly. “Come join us.”

He was referring to Tommy and Jim who came outside, but hadn’t joined in.

Decker seemed to get even more motivated as more students joined his little mock class. His requirements escalated more, and pushups became diamond kiss pushups, bouncy spring pushups, and missing arm pushups. Their counts went quickly from ten to twenty, escalating even farther to thirty. Within another twenty minutes, Whitney’s finger dance began to fly with a frenzy between every exercise and even with them, her breath wasn’t recovering as fast as she needed it to.

Then they just stopped.

Not everyone stopped, but Whitney and Jo-Karna both froze right in the middle of an exercise. Decker took a deep breath, as if he were about to lose his mind on them, but Jo-Karna stopped him mid-sentence, by bringing her finger to her lips in a hushing motion. His lips smacked shut with an audible clap, but he didn’t utter a word and neither did anyone else.

“Margraves,” Whitney whispered which prompted a nod from Jo-Karna.

“And he’s far from alone,” she whispered back.

∞

“They have Kat and Kam!” Whitney said with frustration. “Why? Why do they keep taking people we care about?”

The entire group migrated back into the house. Blake and Carol Anne were sitting on the couch, Raris next to them, Tommy on the other end of it, while Jim, Decker, and Jo-Karna stood facing toward the couch with a space in between, where Whitney paced back and forth angrily. Step, step, turn. Step, step, turn.

“Margraves isn’t a complete idiot,” Jim said. “He knows it’s the only way he can keep you two from just warping right out of here. It’s insurance.”

“He is an idiot. He’s a complete moron. He’s an absolute butt-face!” she spat. “Doesn’t he realize that he can’t win? Doesn’t he realize there is nothing he can really do? That our plans can’t change?”

“Um, Whit?” Tommy cut in gently and with caution.

Whitney stopped pacing. “What?”

“I, um ... think he might have brought tanks.”

“YOU THINK WHAT?”

“And jets.”

Whitney folded her arms in front of her as she waited impatiently for him to explain what he was getting at.

“It’s kind of what woke me up this morning, but I didn’t think much of it. I just thought someone was getting ready to do construction. I can hear them. They are still far away, but they’re getting closer.”

“You thought that jets were getting ready to do construction?”

“Well, no. I just started hearing the jets. They are high up, but they’re around.”

“Anything else, genius?” she asked.

Decker chuckled uneasily at her comment.

“More choppers,” Tommy added simply. “Five, at least. Maybe six.”

Tommy could hear the artillery they were holding in reserve, and Whitney and Jo-Karna could see the shadows of all of the personnel they had brought to their little party. The way the shadows were positioned reminded Whitney of what it would look like if a thousand termites surrounded a single chunk of wood and ate their way toward the center of it. Her comparison made her feel uneasy, because they were the center of the little chunk of wood.

“So what’s the game-plan, Jo-Laina?” Decker asked.

Whitney began to pace back and forth again, finding it easier to think with her movement, as if walking gave her brain a little more freedom. “I know we aren’t supposed to be using portals, but I think it’s the safest way. We jump in, grab Kat, and Kam, and jump forward, probably just go straight to the lake.”

Jim took a step forward. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. “Is he with your friends?”

Whitney and Jo-Karna both nodded at the same time.

Margraves’ shadow was right next to the shadows of Kat and Kam, but they weren’t alone. There were people surrounding them.

“He is next to them, and they are surrounded by others,” Jo-Karna confirmed.

“If he’s close to them he’s there for a reason. It only makes sense that he knows you’ll pop in, and he wants to be there when you do. My guess is that he has them surrounded because he also knows that Tommy’s shield won’t be very effective with everyone that close.”

“So now what?” Tommy asked.

Whitney didn’t answer with words. Instead, she headed straight for the front door. She didn’t stop when she got there. She opened it and headed out front, not stopping on the front porch, or the sidewalk. She kept walking in the direction of Kat and Kam’s shadow. The others followed behind her.

At first, there was nobody in sight. Everything seemed perfectly normal. The neighboring houses seemed quiet and still, the sparse trees were just as they had always been, and there wasn’t a single car on the road, but that all quickly changed. As Whitney’s feet left the grass and she made her way across the ditch, people began to come out of the surrounding houses, but they weren’t the people that lived in those houses. The people that stepped through the doors and from around the corners of the houses were all wearing fatigues, armed to the hilt, and pointing automatic weapons in Whitney’s direction. As Whitney walked, her clothes began to change, the sweats seemingly replaced by a more leather looking outfit that clung tightly to her body, and her temperament and walk became more serious.

It wasn’t until Whitney got closer to the corner of Broad and June Ave. that things really began to change. The sounds of the motors driving the tanks became clearer, and Whitney had to refrain from turning around and smacking Tommy. It wasn’t as if there were two or three tanks positioning. There were eight on this side of their house, and she could only imagine how many more in the other direction. She could also begin to hear the sounds of chopper blades. There might have only been four or five when he first heard them, but more were on their way. Margraves had ordered up a full-scale war to secure his two twins. He wasn’t holding anything back, and he wasn’t playing games.

There was a tent set up on the other side of the first house beyond Broad Avenue. The tent was an off colored tan camouflage, with all of the flaps closed. The fools had driven the stakes of that tent right through the pavement of the road.

I suppose you didn’t hear them driving those stakes into the road either? Wait ... Let me guess. You thought it was part of the construction.

Well, yeah, actually.

Get rid of that tent, Tommy. Pull the tent stakes right out of the ground, and lift that thing straight up in the air.

Before Tommy could do any of what Whitney demanded, Margraves pulled the flap of the tent back, and stepped out. John stepped out directly behind him and they both began walking toward Whitney and her group as they walked toward him. His eyes blazed above his nose, and his suit seemed completely at odds with the situation.

“Have you lost your mind?” Whitney asked as she stopped in front of him.

“Have you?” he returned. “What did you think the response would be when you broke a murderer out of prison? Did you think the government would just shrug their shoulders and order a piece of pie for lunch?”

“I need him,” Whitney answered. “And I need them,” she added nodding her head toward the tent behind the director.

“And I suppose what? That I’m supposed to just give you what you need? That I’m supposed to just let you take the twins over there and be on your merry way?”

“That’d be nice. It would save the neighborhood a lot of unnecessary noise and damage.”

Margraves took a deep breath. He held it for a second, before releasing it. He looked over at Jo-Karna, then at Raris before bringing his eyes back to Whitney. “I don’t think you have a lot of options here, young lady. There’s only one way out of this without people getting hurt. Just come with us. Let us bring you in.”