The Walker Tracking System, Part Five
I always kind of admired Elle.
Actually, no, that’s not really the case. I admire her now, present tense. When I was younger, past tense, I worshipped her.
Nope, that’s not a strong enough sentiment either. As a kid, I, in all seriousness, wanted to be Elle.
It all started that day in the car, as we were driving away from the hospital, ignoring the chaos the had resulted from the blackout. She was driving, and had been for about ten minutes before she slammed the breaks in an attempt not to crash into a Hummer. This seemed to jolt my fathers out of themselves, and they as one they both rounded on her.
“What happen-”
“Why did you need-”
“What gives you the right-”
“How could you possibly-”
For an answer to all the above Elle threw a paper at Appa. “Sorry its not the Times, but I actually just picked it up for the comics,” she said sarcastically.
I had a quick glimpse of the cover- a collage of pictures of people with their heads cut open and brains missing, people stuck to the wall with pens and staplers, people crying hysterically, and one lone man, Sylar, talking with the police, his hand in flames- before Appa opened the paper, purposefully turning towards the window so I wouldn’t see.
“He’s in the open now,” I said softly. “Even when he was bringing us to Appa’s lab, he was afraid of being noticed by ordinary people. Now he doesn’t care.”
“Yeah. I kind of figured that when he released his evil monologue,” she snarked.
“He wrote a monologue?” I asked.
“What? Did I stutter?”
“Well, what did it say?” I asked impatiently.
Dad warned inside my head. I ignored him. “Well?”
“Something about biological imperatives and survival of the fittest and the basis of evolution consists of weeding out the competitors. Plus a whole lot of blah blah blah I am invincible yadda yadda yadda all your base are belong to us,” she mocked, flipping the bird at the driver of a sedan who had cut us off. “Actually, if you cut out that last part, he sounded a lot like you, Doc. Only without the accent.”
“I’m not surprised,” Appa muttered darkly. “He seems to have based his entire ideology on a twisted version of my father’s work.”
Dad gave him a pointed look, and he fell silent.
“Can I see?” I asked.
“No,” both my fathers answered as one.
“Please?”
“No.”
“Pretty please?”
“No!”
“Pretty, pretty please with sugar on top?”
Dad ordered. I sulked. Elle shot me a glance in the rearview mirror.
“If you thought the monologue thing was clichéd, wait till you here this; he killed those people while robbing a bank,” she informed us, almost gleefully. “He stole several thousand dollars in cash and jewelry. He also killed four people- specials- and took a kid - also a special- hostage after he left.”
“He didn’t kill the kid?” I asked, frowning.
“Not for the cameras,” she said.
“He couldn’t have done this alone,” Appa muttered, frowning at the paper. “It says he was working with accomplices…”
Dad’s frown deepened, and he reached behind me to give Appa a slight tap on the top of the head, indicating me when he turned around to glare at him indignantly.
“That’s right. You know one of them: Adam Monroe, the functionally immortal founder of the Company, and two others- an unknown woman Daddy thinks is Japanese, and a man named Fred Curtis we thought had died about a year ago,” Elle continued.
Appa‘s head snapped up. “Adam Monroe? The man who tried to release the Shanti virus last-”
Dad shot him a warning look, and Appa closed his mouth. He then turned to Elle and said
“Fine, fine, we’ll talk about it later. You’re such a wet blanket Parkman, I don’t know how Molly puts up with you,” she huffed, oblivious to the fact that he had just completely nulled her free will.
“Sometimes, neither do I,” I muttered, glaring at Dad, who blushed slightly.
he explained.
I thought back.
he promised.
I rolled my eyes. That right there, is probably what made me like Elle in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my Dad- I love my Dad- but his having been on the receiving end of his little Jedi Mind Trick a few hundred too many times I can tell you that it can feel annoying to downright frightening to discover you’re doing something that wasn’t actually your idea and that you never actually agreed to. With Elle, yeah, you end up doing a lot of stuff you never wanted to do, but she’s always honest about how she’ll have fun either forcing you to break into an abandoned warehouse or shocking you in unconsciousness. You know what you’re in for. With Dad… well, I ate my cereal for breakfast for seven years straight before I realized that I was still following an order he gave me back when I was eight.
If you know what the threat is, you can find some way to fight it. And I’ve always been good at finding things, so…
But, it wasn’t just that she was blunted, and acted like she didn’t give a damn (and it was at least partially an act, because I know she cared a lot about what I thought of her), it was that she could face the consequences of doing something like that. Me? I’d rather just wait for people to figure out what I think of them and then have them act huffy, rather than saying something like "No, Ethan, I don’t like you, because you smell like a gym locker, your face looks like a pizza and you keep talking to my breasts!" and then get punched in the face because on top off all that, he had no self-control.
Not that that happened, or anything. Ahem.
But, really, sometimes I think my life would be better if I were more like Elle.
Take the first day school problem. Every time you go to a new school, the teacher asks you to say something about yourself. If I were more like Elle, I probably would have said something like "My parents were murdered when I was eight and now I live with my two fathers. Anyone here got a problem with that?" and then flounced off to my seat while everyone was still dumbfounded.
In reality, I normally just muttered something about being vegetarian and practicing Judo, than slinked into the nearest empty seat as quick as I could. Unless Elle had dropped me off at school, in which case I probably would be late and listing off the reasons why Elle should not be impersonating a high school student, and no, it wouldn’t be fun to charge up the urinals in the boys’ bathroom, because it would be next to impossible to get into the boys’ bathroom long enough to deliver the charge, let alone watch.
God, I’m going to miss Elle. I do miss Elle, but it hasn’t really sunk in yet. Not with all that’s happened, all I’ve done. I haven’t even really added her name to the list yet, the list that begins with Brian Davis- telekinesis and ends with Joanna Dawson- elasticity.
But enough about that. Eight years ago, Elle was alive, driving that SUV out of New Orleans, and I was thinking intently about what Sylar could be planning.
I knew the Mr. Petrelli had been shot outside Company Headquarters, and I knew the Company’s job was to find and study people like Dad and I. I knew they had a list, probably like the one Appa kept in the password protected part of his laptop.
“Turn around,” I said suddenly.
“What?” Elle asked.
“Turn around,” I repeated. “Sylar’s inside the Company. They know where Monica and Micah are. He’ll find them! We have to go back!”
~*~
Link to the next part is here.