Chapter 5: The Exercise of Vital Powers

When a change comes, some species feel the urge to migrate, they call it zugunruhe. "A pull of the soul to a far off place," following a scent in the wind, a star in the sky. The ancient message comes calling the kindred to take flight and gather together. Only then they can hope to survive the cruel season to come.

The usual conversation had started again after the meeting, though the tension that had pervaded the entire day certainly remained. The normal banter of discussing dinner options and other plans for the evening was quieter and more subdued than it had been at other meetings, and had segregated into smaller and tighter cliques than Kate had ever seen. Even at the height of staff drama, socialization within the group had never devolved into small, almost conspiratorial huddles like those she was seeing now. We need something to bring these people back together, she almost pleaded. For God’s sake, we’ve got a convention to run in three months, and --

It is often said that one should be careful what one wishes for, lest one receives it.

At once, all conversation in the room stopped as the piercing scream of terror echoes through the hallways of Hamburg Hall. People flooded into the hall, led by Rebecca and Chris, who looked up and down the hallway in an attempt to find the source of the scream. Rebecca stared off into space for a moment, feigning as if she were simply listening intently, then turned to Chris and said “Girls’ bathroom.” The two of them raced down the hall, a small bag tucked firmly under Chris’s arm, followed closely by Jim and Jimmy.

Jimmy was attempting to calm his mind enough to reach out and hear Whitney’s thoughts, concentrating on one power as Bayani had advised him during their conversation-out-of-time. Unfortunately, his natural worry and panic, combined with the loud thoughts of everyone around him, made that almost impossible.

Rebecca reached the bathroom, following the clear thoughts of Oh God, oh God, please no, oh God and slammed the bathroom door open with her shoulder. Whitney sat on the floor, bent double over herself as she rocked slowly back and forth, tears streaming down her cheeks. Jeanie’s body lay slumped in her arms, blood splashed over her shirt. Whitney looked up at the noise of the door as it echoed through the bathroom, and even though Rebecca already knew what she would see, she still had to fight back the nausea and revulsion of the sight that greeted her.

The top half of Jeanie’s skull had been neatly sliced open and removed, along with her brain. Her eyes, now glazed over and lifeless, stared unmercifully into the ceiling, her mouth frozen open in a look of surprise and agony. Despite herself, she whispered “Sylar” through a sharp intake of breath.

Cat burst through the throng of people that were now gathering at the door, her face unusually serious and undeterred by the horror that now met them. Rebecca caught a flash of God damn amateurs as Cat bent down to take a look at the body, but she remembered that Mike had worked as a nurse for quite a while, and was therefore accustomed to working with injuries and medical emergencies. Still, she couldn’t help thinking that the reaction was notably callous for Mike, who had a penchant for emotional reactions. Cat started barking orders to the assembled group -- “Get me something to handle the body with! Someone call 911! And for the love of all that’s holy, someone get Jim and Whitney the hell out of here!” -- and after a moment of surprise, they snapped into action. John grabbed a cell phone and headed outside. Kate and Bayani grabbed Jim by the shoulders; he was obviously in a state of shock, and went with them without saying a word.

Jimmy tried to pull Whitney away from Jeanie’s dead body, his tears almost as numerous as hers, but she fought to maintain her hold on her friend with a strength he was unaccustomed to seeing from her. He, Lindsey, Shaune and T.J. all tried to talk her out of her hysteria, but it seemed to be of little use. Finally, Cat snapped “Hey! If you don’t let go of the body, I can’t take care of it!” at her, took her by the wrists and effortlessly pried her hands away from Jeanie’s shoulders. With a yelp of pain, Whitney crumpled sobbing into Jimmy’s arms, and the group of friends ushered her outside.

Cat looked up at Chris and Trevor, who were still looking over the body as Chris removed a syringe and cotton swabs from his bag. Carefully, he prepared himself to remove some blood from Jeanie’s body as he handed the swabs to Trevor and told him to get some samples from the wound area. “What the hell are you two doing?”

Chris looked at his housemate very evenly and calmly, more so than would have been expected given who was lying dead in front of him. “Trying,” he started in a carefully measured tone, “to figure out what the hell just happened. Now,” he continued, the emotion building in his voice, “you can help, or you can get the hell out of my way, but I do NOT HAVE TIME FOR YOUR BULLSHIT RIGHT NOW!!” Cat glared daggers at Chris as she mentally debated whether it was worth the time and effort to fight him on this.

Trevor stood up and leaned over to speak softly into Cat’s ear. “'Cat…'" he said, using her preferred name in an attempt to cut through her anger, "this isn’t the time. I promise.” Tears began to well in his eyes as well. “C’mon. That’s Jeanie lying there. Let him work through this, at least until the cops get here.” The mention of the police caught her attention, and after another moment’s thought, she walked off in a huff. She punched the door in frustration as she left, and her hand tore easily through the wood. Trevor raised one eyebrow in surprise, staring after her as she left, and then went to inspect the hole in the door.

John walked back in with Mila, snapping the phone shut and slipping it back into his pocket. “What’ve you got?”

Trevor wondered for a moment whether feigning surprise would perhaps be prudent, but the frustration at the growing chaos of the situation got the better of him. “We’ve got Jeanie, dead from the Sylar treatment, and Olsen just punched a hole in the door, John; what the hell does it look like?!?!” He closed his eyes and took a breath to relax, then faced his friend again. “What did the cops say?”

“Someone will be here in a few minutes to deal with the situation. In the meantime, we need to figure out what we’re going to do about the rest of this group. Chris, what are you doing?”

Chris looked up from Jeanie’s body, his syringe now filled with her blood. “I… think I may know something about what’s going on, but I need samples from her “ -- he held up the syringe, then the cotton swabs -- “and the wound area in order to compare. I can… um…” He fumbled for a moment, suddenly remembering that John had not been told about his father or the group’s powers, then finished his statement as a mumble under his breath. “…run some tests…”

John exchanged uncomfortable glances with Mila as Chris and Trevor went back to work. The four of them were silent for a few minutes until the sound of squealing tires came from outside. It was not a police car, however, but a large dark blue van with “Coroner” painted on the outside. A number of men dressed in what looked for all the world like protective hazmat suits got out, a number of them carrying equipment and weapons. A man wearing a beige trench coat over his suit and tie entered the bathroom, flashed a badge so quickly that none of them could read it, and introduced himself as “Thompson.”

“Who called in the situation?” he barked. John stood up, and he and Mila went out of the bathroom with Thompson as a number of the men shoved Chris and Trevor out of the way to get to Jeanie’s body. They loaded her into a body bag with practiced efficiency and placed her onto a stretcher. As they carried her out of the bathroom, Chris and Trevor followed them, both concerned not only about her but their other friends as well.

Aside from John and Mila, they were now the only members of Tekkoshocon Staff that either one of them could see. They looked at each other quizzically.

“Where’d… everyone… go?” asked Trevor.

“They wouldn’t have all gone home, not without at least saying goodbye or something,” asked Chris. “Plus, I mean, Shaune, Olsen and T.J. all rode with us, so, I mean, wouldn’t they…” He let his voice trail off as Thompson walked up to them.

“You need to come with us,” he commanded.

Something in his voice didn’t sit quite right with Chris, and his face scrunched up in confusion. “Can’t you just take our statements here? We have lots of people who can verify that we didn’t have anything to do with -- “

“I said, you need to come with us,” Thompson snapped, cutting him off. John and Mila stood behind him, both looking self-conscious and slightly guilty.

“Now wait a second,” Trevor started, stepping forward to stand side by side with Chris. “I understand that you’ve got a job to do, but this is our friend, and we have a right to know --“

“I no longer have time for this,” clipped Thompson. He looked back at Mila and cleared his throat. She stepped forward, her shoulders slumped in resignation, and looked up at the both of them.

“Chris, Trevor,” she started, her voice echoing with an eerie resonance that neither of them had heard from her before. “Get in the van. Right now.” Both of them blinked somewhat confusedly, then nodded and climbed into the back of the van. Trevor looked at the young man sitting on the bench; his head moved back in inquisitive surprise.

“Joe?! What in the nine Hells are you doing here??”

Joe Napolitano, Mila’s brother, simply turned his head to look at them. He said nothing. John and Mila joined them, took their seats and the doors closed.

##############################

Jim sat in the living room of Kate’s apartment, the recliner shaking along with him. A mug of tea sat forgotten on the side table, wafts of steam rising from it to drift through the air. Kate was cross-legged on the floor in front of him, while Bayani paced back and forth beside the dining room table. Neither of them knew whether to try to encourage Jim to talk, or wait and let his brain sort through the situation on its own before trying to communicate with them. The uncertain silence was uncomfortable for all three of them. Finally Kate, frustrated by her not knowing what else to do, turned to Bayani.

“Did you know this was going to happen?”

“What?” he answered hazily, her question having shaken him out of a contemplative reverie.

“You went to the future. You saw Tekko, what was going to happen. Did you know Jeanie was going to…” Her voice trailed off, unable to finish the statement. If she said it, then she would have to admit that it had actually happened.

Bayani’s shoulders fell with his emotional burden. “I didn’t. I swear. She wasn’t there, but there were lots of us not there, so I just thought…”

“What do you mean,” Jim’s voice floated weakly over the back of the chair, “you went to the future?”

“Jim, it’s… hard to explain,” Bayani said as he stepped forward. Jim turned the chair around, his eyes burning even through the streaks of dried tears that covered his face.

“Try.”

##############################

Whitney had not gone back to her college after the meeting. She had already called the professors for her Monday classes and told them that one of her closest friends had been killed; they each assured her that she was excused from their classes for the next day. Instead, she, Jimmy, T.J. and Mike sat silently in the living room of Chez Tekko -- the house that Chris and Mike had, until recently, shared with Jeanie. The room was silent, except for Whitney, who was making a pile of every sketchbook she had with her. When she was done, she looked up at Jimmy and said “I need a lighter.”

Her intent was obvious, but Jimmy felt the need to ask the question anyway. “What for?”

“I need to get rid of these. They’re evil, and nothing but bad things have happened since I started drawing them.”

T.J. looked confusedly at her, leaning against the back of the couch. “What are you talking about? You’ve been drawing as long as any of us have known you, and nothing like this has ever -- “ He stopped short, though, when Whitney grabbed a sketchbook and shoved the picture of her holding Jeanie’s dead body under his nose.

“I drew this more than a week ago,” she stammered, trying to choke back a fresh wave of tears.

“Whitney, I think it’s time you told -- whoa!” Jimmy tried to lay his hand on her shoulder, willing his strength into her, but the molecules of his body slipped in-between hers, and his hand fell with a soft “thump” onto the carpeted floor. Whitney shivered, clutching her arm and shoulder, which were now icy cold to the touch. “H-H-H-How…” she stammered through now chattering teeth, “…how did you…” She gazed at Jimmy, trying desperately to understand.

But Jimmy was no longer looking at her. His eyes moved back and forth between Mike and T.J. “OK,” he said somewhat hesitantly, “which one of you can phase?”

Mike immediately piped up. “Hey, don’t look at me,” he said defensively. “I have no idea what any of this is about!” Three sets of eyes suddenly converged on T.J.

“Guess it wouldn’t do any good to try and deny it, now would it?” he sighed, eyebrows raised in a desperate attempt at a bit of levity. Pulling himself forward to sit on the edge of the couch cushion, he lowered his hand through the coffee table, the wooden molecules rippling slightly, like a stone lowered gently into a pool of water.

Whitney looked back and forth between T.J. and Jimmy, whose eyes were now rooted to the floor. “I don’t get it. What, precisely, can you do?”

Jimmy pulled a small sketchbook from his pocket, laying it open in front of Whitney. The page showed John Prager, wearing a “Tekkoshocon V Public Safety” t-shirt -- a t-shirt that hadn’t even been printed yet. He was running through the halls of the ExpoMart, flanked behind him by his lieutenant, Joe, as well as Joe’s sister Mila. In one hand, he held a cell-phone to his ear, and he looked to be shouting into it angrily. In his other hand, he held a large handgun, the long S-shape of The Symbol prevalently engraved on its barrel. “When I’m around you… I can do what you can do.” He locked eyes with T.J., then phased his hand through the coffee table, narrowly missing T.J.’s laptop computer. “And when I’m around you… I can do what you can do.

“Look at me,” he said to Whitney with a derisive laugh, resignation evident in his eyes. “I’m everybody’s sidekick.”

##############################

Trevor woke with a start in the middle of the night, shivering under his covers. His hand absent-mindedly reached to scritch the head of one of his cats who usually slept with him. Slowly rousing himself from his bed, he started to run his fingers through his long brown hair, trying to smooth out some of the nightly tangles as he walked down the hall towards the bathroom. Crap, he thought as he looked at the clock, I missed gaming. It took him a moment to recall the events of the afternoon: the ending of the meeting, Whitney discovering Jeanie’s body in the bathroom, and then…

… waking up in his bed. Man, I must have been exhausted, he thought to himself. I don’t even remember driving home. He noticed that the lights were still on downstairs, and when he poked his head into Shaune’s room, he found it empty. Still fully dressed from the day, he descended the stairs to find his housemate sitting in her usual chair, her legs pulled tight against her chest, her arms wrapped around herself. The ‘80s hair-metal wailing of Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You Got ‘Till It’s Gone” came softly from the open laptop sitting on the side table next to her.

“Couldn’t sleep either, huh?” he asked her in a voice heavy with defeat. She shook her head, tears still welled in her eyes.

“He’s going to come for all of you, isn’t he?” she asked quietly.

Despite the fact that they had broken up several months previous, Trevor and Shaune were still very close, and he knelt down beside her and put his arms around her. “Who’s going to come?” he asked her, as gently as he could. “What are you talking about?”

Shaune pulled away from him, incomprehension on her face. “Trevor… didn’t the way Jeanie was killed seem familiar to you at all?” Her jaw dropped as he squinted his eyes in confusion and slowly shook his head “no.”

“I’ve… never seen anything like that, Shaune.”

“Sylar, Trevor,” she told him, starting to get annoyed at what seemed to her like a cruel prank. “You know, Sylar? Serial killer, chops people’s heads off to get their powers? Straight outta ‘Heroes?’”

“’Heroes?’” Trevor blinked, any sign of recognition absent from his face. “What’s ‘Heroes?’”

“Trevor, stop playing! This isn’t funny!” Shaune was near panic at this point. “Whitney draws the future! Jeanie had a perfect memory! You can fly!! Isn’t any of this ringing a bell??”

“Fly?!” Trevor said, either completely confused, or doing the best imitation thereof Shaune had ever seen in her life. “Don’t be ridiculous, Shaune. I can’t fly.”

##############################

“Bayani explained it to me,” Jimmy said, as Whitney, Cat and T.J. sat in rapt attention. “Just before the end of the meeting.”

“But,” Cat said, slowly and shrewdly, her brain chewing each piece of information like a chunk of fine steak, “you and Bayani never spoke during the meeting. I saw you go outside, but Bayani stayed in his seat the whole time.”

“Time,” Jimmy said with a laugh. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you: he stopped time. He said that he needed some time away from everyone, but it shouldn’t have surprised him that ‘someone came along for the ride.’ He explained a lot of things to me: the fact that we’re all exhibiting powers, that someone’s coming for us, and… he said something about something happening at the con. Something bad. He said he couldn’t go into details, something about a rip in time or something, if we knew too much. But he told me something else.

“He told me you have to keep sketching, Whitney. You may be the only chance we have.”

Whitney’s eyes were wide with shock. She had always hated responsibility; her greatest fear was that she would let down the people she cared about the most. And now, here was her boyfriend, telling her that she was going to have to face that precise fear! “But…” she whispered, “why me?”

“He couldn’t tell me,” Jimmy said, almost in mourning. Whitney looked as if she was going to press him for more information, but he continued before she could get the chance. “Not because he thought it would be dangerous, he physically couldn’t. There were things about what happened that he just couldn’t see. He couldn’t get there.

“He knows, because he’s tried. About 10 times by now.” Jimmy paused to breathe, and the silence in the room was almost oppressive. Cat was the only one who didn’t seem surprised by this news; in fact, her face betrayed only the slightest hint of scrutiny. “But he did give me something. He said only to use it in a dire emergency… but if things are as bad as it sounds, you giving up drawing counts.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out an envelope and handed it gingerly to Whitney. She unfolded it carefully, as it looked like it could disintegrate at any moment. It was scorched, crumpled, and ragged around the edges. She peeled open the sealed flap and took out the folded piece of paper that was inside. As she started to unfold the paper, her eyes became wider and wider: the simultaneous comprehension, disbelief and bewilderment dawning in her brain threatened to overwhelm her thoughts.

She recognized the picture immediately, of course. How couldn’t she? It was the same picture she had scanned and sent to Trevor just two short weeks ago: he was carrying her in his arms as they flew away from the burning ExpoMart. But it was wrinkled and faded with age, and overlying the picture were words. She read them, once, twice, ten times, twenty, then laid the picture on the table for all to see.

Even Cat was awestruck by what was on the paper. “You’ve…” she said slowly, “got to be kidding me…”

To be continued…