Fear response - Part 3

Where Alaina found these places, Caitlyn did not want to ask. This time, instead of a stark, abandoned wasteland, Alaina had found a stark, abandoned, half-built building. Not quite a skyscraper, such as those that had glutted the centre of New Hastings, but one with a number of different floors, all in one stage of construction or another. It felt oppressive, as though it blamed her, personally, for its sorry state.

Alaina, wearing exercise clothing, not school authorised, stood in front of Caitlyn with a whistle and a stop watch in her hands, both attached to loops of cord wrapped over her neck. She had even tied her hair in tight braids, like athletes, or boxers, or MMA fighters did, though Caitlyn had never seen Alaina exercise in her life. Not outside of gym class and even then she managed to get away with doing as little as possible.

"What are we doing here? It's late and I promised Aunt Mary I'd make dinner." Caitlyn grimaced as Alaina tried tugging the tight jogging pants out of areas they were designed to creep into. "Are we even supposed to be here?"

"Ha! No! All part of the fun. Just, if you see a flashlight coming from that-away ..." She nodded away to the other side of the building. "... run. Or, you know, fast float, or whatever. This is your exercise for today my studiously heroic friend."

For some, unknown reason, Alaina had started talking like a character from an old comic book. If she ended up calling Caitlyn 'my dear', then that was it. There was helpful, then there was delusional and Alaina was straddling the border with an inner ear problem affecting her balance. Off to the side, on a block of concrete blackened by an impromptu fire, some time before, Caitlyn saw a bag with a few triangular party pennants sticking out of it.

"I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you've been here a while? The flags?" She picked one up, noting the cheap glitter falling from it like colourful snow. "Look, whatever it is, I appreciate it, but I'd just like to get home, relax, maybe finish that essay on geology ..."

"Silence!" Alaina held up a finger, giving Caitlyn an imperious look down her nose. "I, your sensei, have placed twelve, count them, twelve flags throughout this building, on various floors. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find every single one of those flags and return them to me within ten minutes or less. In order! You will notice they have numbers on them? In that order. Starting in five ..."

"Wait! Wait! The numbers are in glitter, and it's already falling off this one." She held up a flag that only had half the 'four' visible of the 'fourteen', and almost none of the 'one'. "Can't I just ..."

"Four ... three ... get ready ..." Alaina ignored Caitlyn's concerns, holding the stopwatch in front of her face and the whistle at the ready. "... two ... suit up ... one!"

The whistle echoed and reechoed around the abandoned building, causing even Alaina to clutch at her ears. Even so, despite the pain, she held up the stopwatch, showing Caitlyn the diminishing time Alaina had given her and, Caitlyn hated to admit it, Alaina was right again. While she had this dumb superhero suit, she needed to know how to use it. She felt the stupid thing wrap itself around her, hiding her clothes as though they weren't even there, and jumped up through a hole in the roof above them.

This floor looked little different from the one below, only there were a few more concrete posts rising from the floor to the ceiling above. She took a few seconds to orient herself before seeing the first flag and Caitlyn could only imagine Alaina had decided to make the first one easy for her. Dangling from a cable runner in the ceiling, the flag with the glittery '1' on it billowed in the slight breeze.

Caitlyn ran toward it, reaching out and up to grab it, only for the flag to speed away, pulled by a thin thread that Caitlyn hadn't even seen. A thread that led all the way around until it reached Caitlyn's ankles. Alaina had said it was a test for her fast floating ability and she wasn't lying. She tried to concentrate on the ground, looking for that thread and something in Black Staff's suit 'heard' her. Everything suddenly came into sharp focus, as though Caitlyn had put on a pair of perfectly adjusted spectacles.

Caitlyn decided, right there and then, to keep an eye on Alaina and make sure she never turned to super-villainy because she was, without a doubt, a diabolical genius. And also had far too much time on her hands. The entire floor of this part of the building had a criss-crossing network of threads that, if Caitlyn walked instead of fast floated, she would collect around her legs, rendering her unable to move. The enhanced vision from the suit couldn't even unravel all the different levels.

Seeing defeat on the horizon, Caitlyn thought about fast floating and she rose upward, above the threads on the floor and searched again for that first flag that had moved out of reach. There it was, at the other side of the floor beside a hole where doors would have become hung. With a sweep of her hand, she collected the flag and looked for a clue to the next one.

A few yards away, a big arrow, scratched into the old concrete, pointed toward another hole beside a pillar that had sheet of metal leaning against it. That made sense. If Alaina didn't give her clues, she could end up racing around this building all night without finding any of the other flags. She swooped that way, wishing the suit could actually make her fly, not this half-assed floating, and dived head first down the hole.

And regretted that immediately. Evil Alaina had struck again and, as she passed through the hole, another piece of thread caught across the mask over Caitlyn's face and, up above, that innocent looking sheet of metal crashed down over the hole, leaving Caitlyn somewhere almost entirely dark. The suit came to her aid once again and she began to think having such a thing may not, actually, be so bad.

Her surroundings once again became clear, only, this time it had a green tinge to it, like those night vision goggles soldiers wore. In front of her, she could see some kind of material and, turning in a circle in the air, she saw that same material all around her. At her feet, however, she saw the second flag, sweeping it up and holding it along with the other. She reached out for the material and it fell away, as did the green night vision of the suit.

A curtain. A filthy curtain that Caitlyn felt certain something, or someone, had peed on. Retching, not wanting to vomit in the mask, she gritted her teeth and looked around for the next marker. More arrows pointed the way until she found a forest of twisted rebars and, in the centre, another fluttering pennant. But it wasn't as easy as floating above it. Oh, no. More sheets of metal were laid atop the rebars and Caitlyn had to carefully wend her way through the maze.

"You're a monster, Alaina, you know that?" Taking the flag, she returned the way she came, looking for the next arrow. "And just how did you get all this done."

"Less talking, nugget! Time's running out." The voice sounded further away than Caitlyn thought Alaina should be. "I got Jeremy and the lacrosse team to set it up. They think it's an art project for my photo media channel."

"You don't have a photo media channel!" Keeping a wary eye on everything, not trusting Alaina in the slightest not to try to kill her in the name of training, Caitlyn raced to the next flag. "Wait! You told people about all this? What the hell!"

An evil sounding laugh was the only reply, drifting through the abandoned building turned rookie superhero training course. Alaina had always had a way of talking to people that Caitlyn could never replicate. In fact, Alaina could have more friends than she could ever need, but she had always remained steadfastly loyal to Caitlyn. One of the many, many reasons Caitlyn loved her. This obstacle course was not among those reasons.

Something caught Caitlyn's eye and she turned in the air to see, expecting another flag, but there was nothing there. Probably only a bird, or something, making a nest in the most desolate place it could find. For certain, people had used this place before, for all kinds of reasons Caitlyn didn't want to imagine. Even as she rushed through the various levels of the building, she saw the refuse and waste of human occupation.

By her count, she only had another six flags to go, now, having survived another few, devious obstacles. Whether she would collect them all in the time remaining, she didn't know, but she had started to get a much better handle on this whole fast floating thing. A little more practice and she could possibly even say she was getting used to it.

A flurry of wings erupted in front of her and a flock of pigeons exploded into the air before her, proving her theory correct about what she had seen from the corner of her eye. Almost laughing at how shocked, and maybe a little terrified the birds had made her, she easily avoided them, watching them fly away, up through yet another hole in the structure, above her. What she didn't expect was something dropping down through that hole.

Before she could even move out of the way, the thing landed on top of her, driving the air from her lungs, the padding on the suit making little difference as she, and the thing that hit her, landed on the hard concrete below. Dust billowed out around her and she began to curse Alaina's overzealous attachment to making this training harder than it needed to be. She stopped when she saw what had fallen on her.

"You think yourself a hero in training, but you are nothing next to the power of Fear." Through the pain, Caitlyn could only see bright metal claws flashing before her eyes and, behind those claws, a mask of fangs and burning red eyes. "And to know Fear is to know death!"

The claws slashed against Caitlyn's chest and she couldn't help herself. She screamed and that scream echoed back to her, reverberating from the stark concrete walls and pillars. The claws had slashed right through Black Staff's suit, carving through her normal clothes and into her flesh, and all she could think about was that she hoped Alaina escaped. Alaina's escape and that she would never see Aunt Mary again.