"Brain Drain" for boosette (Burn Notice, PG13)
Title: Brain Drain
Author: florahart
Recipient: boosette
Fandom: Burn Notice
Characters: Michael-centric, with OC and others
Rating: PG13?
Words: about 5100
Spoilers: I think none; if anyone disagrees, holler.
Warnings: I can't quite decide if I need to warn for death-type things given the nature of the fest. To be safe: death-type things.
Summary: When you're a spy, there are certain things you have to assume. And sometimes, your assumptions lack anything like enough imagination.
A/N: So, this was a pinch hit, and resultantly, I failed to adhere as closely as I might have liked to an aspect of the request that I may have failed to clearly observe in a timely manner. In theory, there are zombies, but I can just about guarantee they are not the zombies of any existing canon. I hope that in making them different (and weird) I didn't make them less okay. …of course, I am not sure in what way zombies are okay in the first place, but I digress. Thanks to Lee for being willing to beta something quite so off the wall as this.
Brain Drain
When you're a spy, there are certain things you have to assume. You know that sometimes these assumptions are over the top, but you also know that not making the assumption, especially when it's about something like 'someone is trying to kill you,' is a good way to end up dead.
For example, if you see a car following you at nine in the morning while you're on what should be a simple courier trip with a side of low-grade espionage regarding a string of mysterious disappearances out in the Keys, and then you see the same car, its occupant doing a lousy job of subtlety as he watches you, during what should be a casual little early lunch at a café you've never been to before, you have to figure one of two things: he's lulling you into complacency, or he's the one you're supposed to notice so you won't see his associate.
The easiest thing to do is move again, call for some low-key backup, and wait for him--or them--to show.
Michael looked at his phone one more time, a casual glance that wouldn’t be visible through his sunglasses from the front, and wouldn't be apparent from the side, with the phone positioned as it was at an angle between his glass and the crumpled tent of napkin.
Still no news since the text from Sam an hour and a half earlier.
And Fi was now fifty minutes late with an update, and just before she was supposed to get back to him, he'd been cut off a little strangely on a call from his mom, who wasn't picking up now. It wasn't--at the time--strange enough to go looking, but now he was starting to wonder.
He'd spotted the clumsy watcher again as soon as he'd sat down, and despite a fairly careful survey of the area over several minutes, he hadn't spotted another. Which meant he was dealing with amateurs. And that, taken together with the absence of contact, meant either the pros were leaving him alone and focusing on his associates, or something else was very wrong somewhere; while it wasn't as though this was the first time an op had gone south in ways that required creative communication control, he and Sam had had enough plans fall apart over the years to have some pretty well-established fallbacks, and if Fi had been unable to contact him any other way, she'd probably have blown something important up by now. Either way, at least one alternate means of contact--a call from his mother, even--should have come into play at least twenty minutes ago.
He leaned back in his chair and held up a finger toward the waitress, gesturing toward his drink. One more. He'd been watching her in between glances at the phone, and while involving a civilian was always risky for both of them, he was pretty sure she'd hold up.
People see what they expect to see. That's true even when they're tailing you, though it's easier to fool some goons than others. They rarely think you'd deliberately screw yourself, and since most of them, especially the ones on the low end of the food chain, aren't experienced in using their imaginations, once you've had an unfortunate accident, they stop using their eyes.
That's when you make them use their other senses to misdirect themselves.
The waitress brought him his drink with the kind of obvious wink and lean--cleavage at the ready, lips in an almost-genuine smile--that meant she needed the tips enough to take advantage of assets she didn't want to, and set it down on the table. Michael smiled back, his intent a lot more genuine than hers, and waited for his moment, then reached just in time to tip the glass, spilling all over his phone.
He stood, scowling, and gave her a tight, controlled glare, pulling his sunglasses off his face and speaking quietly, with the same vaguely-Central-European accent and barely-broken grammar he'd been affecting throughout the op. "Do not worry; is going to be fine and you still are getting your tips if you play along like I believe you may, but I am now, to gesture very angry and blame you very obvious for fucking my phone, yes?" He flung out his arm and spoke a little louder. "Damn every thing, now my whole list for contact--is simple competence too much for asking in America?"
Her jaw dropped slightly, but he had to give her credit; she managed to pull off the look of someone stunned to be blamed, rather than startled by his words, and reached for both his phone and the clean napkin on the table, blotting hurriedly as though she didn't quite realize electronics didn't give a shit about post-dunking intent. So far, she'd come across as bright, so he assumed it was a bimbo act, and for a second he felt bad about making her put on an act she was clearly familiar with. In his experience, no one who wasn't an idiot enjoyed playing one for a measly couple of bucks in tips.
He snatched the phone from her, slipping a twenty and a card invisibly into the loose sagging pocket in the front of her apron. He was a lousy pickpocket, in the grand scheme, but his skills were serviceable enough for this. He leaned forward, right in her face, pointing and baring his teeth as he said, "Note, is in pocket, for my friend. Please not to look until alone."
She blinked a couple of times, leaning away from him like she was scared, then nodded tightly as he gripped her arm hard.
She bit her lip and went back to cleaning up the mess as he yanked his wallet out to toss a barely-adequate bill on the table and stormed out.
When he was pretty sure he was away clean, he glanced back.
And that was when chaos took over.
In this line of work, you have to be willing to play the odds. A lot. Most of the time, you win, because you stack the deck every way you can without making anyone look twice. Still, even if you've set up a situation in which you have a 99% chance of coming out on top, and if you're good at your job then most of the time you can, things could go wrong, or an unanticipated factor could screw up your day. This is why you also institute every redundancy and backup plan you can, again without making anyone look twice.
Even then, all the one percents add up, and you wind up in a no-win situation you could never have predicted.
Sometimes then, your only chance is to leap out of a helicopter into the bay and hope you don't cramp up.
At first, he thought the flash in his peripheral vision was a bomb, but there was no accompanying explosion, and there was a second flash.
And the flash was coming off the water. The café's occupants, those who weren't on the ground, were running toward him, some of them falling as they were hit, and his watcher had somehow vanished without a trace, car and all.
Michael glanced from side to side quickly to see if he could identify the source, then came to a speedy decision. This was a time to retreat and regroup. His waitress, no longer falsely friendly, all business, was sprinting toward him, and while a tiny fragment of his brain considered whether she was the pro, his instincts had saved him enough times that he generally heeded their signals. He turned and ran with her, and then as a third flash bounced off of windows around them, shattering a few, he grabbed her hand and pulled her into the nearest alley. If nothing else, that put a couple of brick walls between them and whatever was happening, and right now, mystery lightning out of the water was a bigger threat than any waitress or any spy pretending to be one.
Her ragged breathing and quivering shoulder against his as they stood, backs to the wall, made him think his initial assessment had been good.
It's a good idea to carry a second phone. Something cheap enough that losing it doesn't really cost you, but tough enough that when you have to dive headfirst under a bus to avoid explosives, small arms fire, or an angry mobster who thinks he sees someone he recognizes, you can still get a signal.
Sometimes, even the best of us have lapses.
"You have a phone?" Michael asked. "Mine is toasted." He didn't think the weird sideways lightning was actually something his incompetent tail had produced, but he maintained the accent, if not all of the grammar. Just because he thought his assessment was sound didn't mean he wanted to invite the girl home to meet his mother.
She nodded, one single jerky bob of her head, and reached into her pocket, pulling out a cheap pre-paid thing that she probably carried for emergencies, to make her family feel safer about her walking alone after dark. She flipped it open, pressed a button, and handed it toward him.
The lightning flashed again, crackling along the street and electrifying the Dumpster across from them briefly before leaping toward them. Michael realized where it was going before it could quite happen, and yanked the phone out of her hand, tossing it into the air where it lit up and exploded colorfully.
She turned toward him, eyes wide. "Would that have--"
"Still in your pocket?" Michael dropped the accent. Now was no time to waste brain power on that when staying alive was looking a little less likely by the minute. "Yeah, maybe. Probably would have caught fire, then. Bad scene. Hey, we should move. You got a name?"
Asking people questions gives them something to think about when you need them to focus. It's a simple trick and doesn't take much time to implement.
Asking them easy questions allows them to answer, and do so while you move them. Asking them difficult questions tends to freeze them in place while they think. If your situation isn't secure, you should stick with the easy ones, especially when you're dealing with unknowns or civilians.
"Kate," she said. "Your accent is gone. Five minutes after you staged a scene to get out of my restaurant. Are you a spy? Should I be blaming you for the world exploding?" She hadn't resisted as he pulled her deeper into the alley, which ran the length of the block uninterrupted. He was going for the middle, looking up as he pulled her by one hand.
"No, and no, but good questions," he said. So far, no flashes had passed overhead, though two more had followed the ground past the end of the alley ahead of them. Maybe they could get out by going over the next building.
And probably avoiding metal.
"Then, what?"
"No idea, Kate. I'm Michael."
"Until a minute ago, you sounded more like a Yuri or a, a, I don't know, what's a common name in Albania or something?," she said. "How do I know this is the real one?"
"You don't," Michael said. "But I did pull you away from freaky horizontal lightning, twice, and that has to count for something."
She nodded and followed his gaze up. "So, you think we should go up and over."
"I don't think we should stay here," he said.
"True. Still…" She pointed at the tendrils of current now crawling in along a phone line from the far end of the alley. "I don't know if we have much chance of not running into that."
Michael glanced back over his shoulder to see the same was true behind them, and reconsidered. "All right, if not over--"
"Then under," she said. "Doorknobs are metal. So's that manhole cover, by the way, and you just saw the lightning jump. You think it was the metal or the signal?"
Michael raised his eyebrows as he stepped a little further away from the manhole cover, which he'd been peripherally aware of but had discounted because his shoes had rubber soles. It was a good question. "Can't say. I'd been thinking metal, but you're right, it jumped when you added signal." Michael looked around for a minute, listening to the weird charged stillness of the air nearby and the increasingly distant sounds of crashes and sirens. The fact of the increasing distance was disturbing. He set it aside and licked his lips, forcing the same focus on himself that he'd just expected of her. "All right, we need to start making some assumptions. Let's assume it's either metal or both, and if it's metal alone, then it's metal that conducts current well. It's easy to avoid creating cell signals, hard to avoid metal, and if it were signal alone you'd think higher up would be pulling more of the power, right?"
She nodded. "Makes sense. So then… look for a door or a lock made of, what, iron?"
"Cast iron would be even better," he said absently, scanning the nearby options and then pointing. "There. Still, don't touch it." He bent and picked up a partially-shattered pallet next to a nearby doorway and pulled free a sturdy plank, careful not to grab a nail in haste, then followed her to a spot next to the old-fashioned door on the back of whatever property this was.
He glanced in through the windows, scowling at the discovery that the reason for the iron was that it was part of a security system that involved window bars. "Damn. I was hoping to shatter the glass and then figure out maybe something plastic to open the door from the inside."
"Maybe we should just try opening the door. It's the middle of a weekday." Kate held out a towel. "Not perfect," she said, "but if we hope this metal will conduct less, maybe it'll just be a shock."
Michael took the towel, checking for dampness because water and electrical current were a bad combination too, then wrapped it around the knob, which did, in fact, turn. And did, in fact, feel itchy-warm under his palm.
Huh.
He pushed the door open enough to let go of the knob, then used the wood around the glass to push it the rest of the way ajar and stepped inside. Kate followed close behind. "Good call," he said over his shoulder.
"Thanks."
It's a good idea, even when the situation is tense, to re-evaluate your assumptions from time to time. If you've made any bad ones, especially early on in your decision-making, you may be walking into a completely-avoidable disaster, and no one wants their tombstone to read, 'Died of Stupidity.'
If someone else manages to point out your bad assumptions in a way that doesn't cost you anything, for example by repeatedly demonstrating competence and good sense with which you hadn't credited her, you should take it with grace and gratitude, and remind yourself to be aware of your own assumptions.
The air smelled metallic and burnt, and Michael turned around again. "Being inside didn't help whoever was in here," he said, "and this might be anything from creepy to gory, depending, but I think it's still worth a shot to see what we can find. Stay low, since there are shelves and a counter, and ignore the way your body is probably reacting to the smell with what seems like a compulsion to leave immediately. If it's hard, it might help to visualize yourself as a character in a game, under your control, all right?"
She nodded. "I'll try. If whatever is frying everyone doesn't kill us both, you're going to tell me who the hell you are, right?"
"Yeah, maybe." Michael started forward, bent into a walking crouch behind the (wooden, and he was glad to see it) shelves. They'd managed to choose a used bookstore, which probably boded well--lots of pulp, little metal aside from the nails in most of the furniture. "Either way, if you have any ideas, I'm listening."
"Good to know." Her answer was a little slow, a little shaky, but she was holding up all right, and Michael figured if he didn't have to stop and do any psychological propping-up, he'd rather stick to the recon.
"Michael?"
He stopped and swiveled on the balls of his feet, still crouched. "Yeah?"
She pointed to the left. "I see the top of an exit sign. Might be a basement, if there are stairs there."
He raised up slightly and looked. Sure enough, the sign was over a wood-and-glass double door that said stairs, and while those might only go up, he could see what looked like an downward-sloped arrow on another sign beyond it. "Okay, yes, probably I'll tell you," he said with a grin.
She smiled back and followed him between rows of shelves, gamely maneuvering over the outflung limbs and in one case entire torso of half a dozen or so electrocuted customers or maybe staff, nearly all of whom were clutching phones in scorched hands.
Score one for quick reflexes.
This door didn't have a knob, and was unlocked, so he pushed it open, still using the towel for good measure, and found steps both up and down. The ones leading down were made of cement, but had strips of metal-edged grip-strips at the lip of each riser which gleamed a little too brightly, though they weren't sparking or arcing current. Michael considered the costs and benefits of trying to keep staying low and get down the stairs without touching them, but really, what was the other choice? Maybe there was something they could use to cover them. He turned back to Kate.
Who had vanished.
"Kate?"
She returned with a couple of cardboard boxes. "Sleds," she said.
Michael took the offered box, looked around her to the apparently recently-dumped-out piles of used books on the floor, and shook his head. "All right, now you're starting to freak me out."
She didn't answer that, instead only yanking apart the glued box corners and unfolding a flat(ish) piece of cardboard. "Might catch fire," she said. "Still, as long as it makes it to the bottom."
If you have a choice, avoiding injury is always a good idea. However, one of the downsides of working as a spy is that sometimes you have to accept a smaller amount of damage, in order to avoid a larger one. Never the less, avoiding head injury and death is critical, so it's a good idea to check, before you go getting your shoulder dislocated, whether you have anything at your disposal that might help.
While books are usually lousy weapons--though, don't get me wrong; in a pinch they're better for throwing than a rolled up pair of socks--they're nearly always pretty good for insulation. If you have a bunch of them that no one needs, it's worth using them up. I recommend cheap supermarket romances as they're both ubiquitous (and therefore not irreplaceable) and, unless you got them from a library, unlikely to contain metal detection strips.
"I have an idea," Michael said. He left Kate making sleds and went back into the store, collecting a handful of books to use to propel themselves. He caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, and then another, but a careful, if brief, look, suggested nothing out of order, aside from the bodies and the ongoing crackles of electricity.
He looked around one more time, saw nothing, and despite a lingering trace of uneasiness--the flicker had seemed warm-colored, and the electricity was plainly blue--concluded it had been a reflection of that.
When he returned to the stairwell, Kate had both boxes flattened and was judiciously pressing one against the first riser. "Making sure it doesn't like, go up in flames on contact," she said as she looked up.
"Good idea." He held up his books. "To use as oars."
She frowned, but then shrugged. "I don't think sleds have oars, but I see your point."
Before Michael could go first, she set her box in position and sat down, taking her books and propelling herself downward. The stair-edges, predictably, sparked and spit, but she reached the landing undamaged and looked back up.
And that was when chaos took over for the second time of the day.
Just because you think you've identified the problem, it doesn't follow that you have. It only follows that you're working toward solutions to that problem.
If there's more than one problem, you're likely to need more than one set of solutions. It's important to keep that in mind.
This is more difficult than it sounds, especially when you're cut off from support, working under pressure, unable to touch half the objects in any given room, and more than a little concerned about why the so-far level-headed civilian you've been working with is looking at you, or rather, past you, with an expression of horrified terror. Or terrified horror.
If that happens, you probably want to assess your weaponry options even as you start to turn around.
Michael gripped his paperbacks tighter and started to turn. Well, bludgeoning someone with a book would at least have some potential for surprise. He ran through the options in his head as fast as he could. Another civilian? Probably not horrifying. A cop? Even with a gun drawn, the uniform tended to reassure most people, unless they'd had some seriously nasty experiences. A criminal with a gun? But firing a gun would briefly create enough friction to… Michael shook his head and finished turning.
Nothing could have prepared him for the actuality.
The man over whose torso they'd crept was standing against the door. Or rather, leaning against it, one hand and the back of his bald head propped against the handle and the hinge so as to absorb the crawling blue lines of current gathering there.
Michael took a step back, considering his options. Throwing his books seemed unlikely to help, and heading down the stairs was also possibly-problematic, depending on whether there was actually an outlet from the basement. Which he really didn't want to count on.
The dead man--he clearly was still dead, and his eyes were starting to glow a pretty unholy icy blue--started to move toward Michael, which meant he was kind of out of time. He glanced around desperately, realized the current had all collected into the man, and yanked his shirt up as a makeshift towel as he pulled open the door to the fire hose. "Kate, duck and cover if you can," he shouted. She wasn't in his line of sight; he'd backed past the edge of the stairs.
"Do what you gotta do," she called back.
Michael gritted his teeth and turned on the spray full force.
Water and electricity are a terrible combination. Water tends to short out electronics, and electronics tend to boil and evaporate water. If you have to spray water on your electrical fire, you don't want to do it from a distance of seven feet. The odds are depressingly high that you'll be standing in water before the current dies out, and then you'll get shocked.
If you don't have a choice, try to find something nonconductive to stand on, and try to stay dry.
The first blast sent the bald guy flying backward, dead muscles impossibly spasming and seizing with crackling bolts of lightning that would probably have hit Michael if he hadn't been tossed back through the door. He stepped forward onto the paperbacks on the floor. They weren't great, but they might take a minute to soak through, and he did still have rubber soles.
"Kate, use your cardboard to keep the water from creeping," Michael said.
"Already did, and what the hell is that thing?"
"You really want me to say this out loud?"
Just then, the bookstore's fire suppression system went off, dumping fine powder everywhere and, evidently, smothering electrical contact points. At least for the moment.
Michael pulled his t-shirt up over his mouth and nose with one hand and turned off the water with the other. As soon as the dust started to settle, he called out, "Did you do that?"
"It seemed like a good idea," came a familiar voice from the vicinity of the twitching, wet, dust-covered dead guy. A moment later, Fiona came around the corner in a rubbery wetsuit and knee-high boots, pulling up a faceplate. "Who are you talking to?"
"Fi!" Michael dropped the hose, but stayed where he was. "Water might still be--"
"No, Sam and I took out a bunch of them down by the water. Once the wave has passed, they're really pretty vulnerable if they can't corner you. For electric zombies, I mean. You should be in the clear, for now."
Michael stepped gingerly down off his books. "Kate? You good down there?"
"Who's Kate?"
"I'm Kate," she said, poking her head around the corner. "You're sure it's okay to walk in the water?"
Michael bent forward at the waist, glancing at Fi. She shrugged, so he poked at the water with one finger. "Yep."
Kate jogged up the stairs. "Electric zombies? Seriously?"
"You got a better description?" Fi had one hand on her hip, though her other hand was obviously itching for a weapon, the bigger, the better.
"No," Michael said. "How'd you find me?"
"Knew where you started," Sam said from behind Fiona. He was wearing a get-up about like hers. " Hey, Mikey. Got a call from a buddy out in the Keys, said there was somethin' hinky goin' on. Government project run amok, he was pretty sure. I texted you I might have something while I was still on the phone with him, then texted Fi to find out where you were, because it seemed like it might be related to your disappearances."
"Sam!" Michael smiled. "I don't suppose you have my mom?"
"She wasn't home, and then the rest of the cell towers went out anyway," Fiona said. "Probably just electrical, but for all I know, the towers themselves have gone evil."
"Anyway," Sam went on, "We figured just because we were willing to run toward unexpected creepy reanimated lunatics--by the way, we should probably move on; just because we killed this batch doesn't mean more won't come looking for your brains or whatever, oh, hey, I bet electric zombies come after the electrical neural stuff--it didn't follow that you were. We found a building where there was activity likely to kill them, and--"
Michael raised his eyebrows. "How did you know how to kill them? Also, where did you get wetsuits?"
"I may have relieved some poor fellow north of here of his overstock," Fiona explained. "And Sam's friend had some basic specs."
"Electric zombie specs." Michael nodded. "Right." He turned to Kate. "You still want that explanation of who I am?"
"Not really. But I do think your friend Sam may have a point about leaving." She pointed toward the shapes moving about outside the storefront.
"I don't suppose you brought extra wetsuits…" Michael said.
"In the car." Fiona looked Kate up and down. "I brought a few, just in case."
Michael turned toward the stairs. "So, up, then?
Kate shook her head. "While I was busy hiding from the freaky dead guy, I could see down into the basement. There is a door, and it's probably worth a try?"
"Could be surrounded," Fiona said.
"You bring anything we can use?" Michael looked back and forth between Sam and Fi.
"C4 doesn't seem like the ideal choice for zombie-killing," Fiona said. "But of course, there's some in the car. Well, and a little in my bag."
Kate held up both hands. "I retract any interest I ever had in what exactly you do," she said. "Also, should I assume this is who I was supposed to call?"
No battle plan ever survives the first engagement with the enemy. It's a truism because it's true, and this is why you make back-up plans, why you try to stack your deck. Still, most of the time any halfway decent plan does make it as far as the field itself.
If it doesn't, you just have to punt. If you're smart, and you think on your feet, and you don't panic, and you're lucky, it all works out in the end. If any of those things fails, your odds go down the tubes.
"Uh, Michael?" Fiona said as she cleared the bottom step and turned toward the light coming through the door. "I think we have a problem."
Michael turned at the sound of shattering glass at the front of the store and answered, "Is it a problem that necessitates going up the stairs?"
"Yeah."
Just as her clumping footsteps started back up toward them, Michael came around to the stairs leading up, and shook his head. "Bad idea." Two hulking, glowing-eyed men in scorched jeans and t-shirts, followed by a woman in ridiculous heels and a skirt that had once been short and was now torn as well were lurching somewhat clumsily down toward them.
Fiona sighed and rummaged briefly in her bag. "So, should we draw straws for who gets his brain eaten while placing the charge?"
Michael had already seen where this was going, and had maneuvered himself toward the basement stairs. He shook his head and took the explosive. "If this doesn't take the building down, go find Ma." He pointed at Sam. "I'm counting on you."
He headed down the stairs and ignored the couple of guys down there feeding directly off the light fixtures, using the dim outdoor light to figure out the best place for the charge. He turned around to find them between him and the stairs, waited for them to get close, and dashed toward the door. "It's set," he shouted.
When you're a spy, you don't work for yourself. You go into risky situations at the direction of your handler or your boss, and half the time you don't even know if your objective was truly met.
When you've been burned, you call your own shots. You set up your op, your way, and you follow up if you want to.
It's the only up side. Except for when whoever burned you calls them instead, or whenever an unknown entity creates electric zombies out in the Keys. Then, you take what you can get, and then try to get the hell out of Dodge.
Author: florahart
Recipient: boosette
Fandom: Burn Notice
Characters: Michael-centric, with OC and others
Rating: PG13?
Words: about 5100
Spoilers: I think none; if anyone disagrees, holler.
Warnings: I can't quite decide if I need to warn for death-type things given the nature of the fest. To be safe: death-type things.
Summary: When you're a spy, there are certain things you have to assume. And sometimes, your assumptions lack anything like enough imagination.
A/N: So, this was a pinch hit, and resultantly, I failed to adhere as closely as I might have liked to an aspect of the request that I may have failed to clearly observe in a timely manner. In theory, there are zombies, but I can just about guarantee they are not the zombies of any existing canon. I hope that in making them different (and weird) I didn't make them less okay. …of course, I am not sure in what way zombies are okay in the first place, but I digress. Thanks to Lee for being willing to beta something quite so off the wall as this.
Brain Drain
When you're a spy, there are certain things you have to assume. You know that sometimes these assumptions are over the top, but you also know that not making the assumption, especially when it's about something like 'someone is trying to kill you,' is a good way to end up dead.
For example, if you see a car following you at nine in the morning while you're on what should be a simple courier trip with a side of low-grade espionage regarding a string of mysterious disappearances out in the Keys, and then you see the same car, its occupant doing a lousy job of subtlety as he watches you, during what should be a casual little early lunch at a café you've never been to before, you have to figure one of two things: he's lulling you into complacency, or he's the one you're supposed to notice so you won't see his associate.
The easiest thing to do is move again, call for some low-key backup, and wait for him--or them--to show.
Michael looked at his phone one more time, a casual glance that wouldn’t be visible through his sunglasses from the front, and wouldn't be apparent from the side, with the phone positioned as it was at an angle between his glass and the crumpled tent of napkin.
Still no news since the text from Sam an hour and a half earlier.
And Fi was now fifty minutes late with an update, and just before she was supposed to get back to him, he'd been cut off a little strangely on a call from his mom, who wasn't picking up now. It wasn't--at the time--strange enough to go looking, but now he was starting to wonder.
He'd spotted the clumsy watcher again as soon as he'd sat down, and despite a fairly careful survey of the area over several minutes, he hadn't spotted another. Which meant he was dealing with amateurs. And that, taken together with the absence of contact, meant either the pros were leaving him alone and focusing on his associates, or something else was very wrong somewhere; while it wasn't as though this was the first time an op had gone south in ways that required creative communication control, he and Sam had had enough plans fall apart over the years to have some pretty well-established fallbacks, and if Fi had been unable to contact him any other way, she'd probably have blown something important up by now. Either way, at least one alternate means of contact--a call from his mother, even--should have come into play at least twenty minutes ago.
He leaned back in his chair and held up a finger toward the waitress, gesturing toward his drink. One more. He'd been watching her in between glances at the phone, and while involving a civilian was always risky for both of them, he was pretty sure she'd hold up.
People see what they expect to see. That's true even when they're tailing you, though it's easier to fool some goons than others. They rarely think you'd deliberately screw yourself, and since most of them, especially the ones on the low end of the food chain, aren't experienced in using their imaginations, once you've had an unfortunate accident, they stop using their eyes.
That's when you make them use their other senses to misdirect themselves.
The waitress brought him his drink with the kind of obvious wink and lean--cleavage at the ready, lips in an almost-genuine smile--that meant she needed the tips enough to take advantage of assets she didn't want to, and set it down on the table. Michael smiled back, his intent a lot more genuine than hers, and waited for his moment, then reached just in time to tip the glass, spilling all over his phone.
He stood, scowling, and gave her a tight, controlled glare, pulling his sunglasses off his face and speaking quietly, with the same vaguely-Central-European accent and barely-broken grammar he'd been affecting throughout the op. "Do not worry; is going to be fine and you still are getting your tips if you play along like I believe you may, but I am now, to gesture very angry and blame you very obvious for fucking my phone, yes?" He flung out his arm and spoke a little louder. "Damn every thing, now my whole list for contact--is simple competence too much for asking in America?"
Her jaw dropped slightly, but he had to give her credit; she managed to pull off the look of someone stunned to be blamed, rather than startled by his words, and reached for both his phone and the clean napkin on the table, blotting hurriedly as though she didn't quite realize electronics didn't give a shit about post-dunking intent. So far, she'd come across as bright, so he assumed it was a bimbo act, and for a second he felt bad about making her put on an act she was clearly familiar with. In his experience, no one who wasn't an idiot enjoyed playing one for a measly couple of bucks in tips.
He snatched the phone from her, slipping a twenty and a card invisibly into the loose sagging pocket in the front of her apron. He was a lousy pickpocket, in the grand scheme, but his skills were serviceable enough for this. He leaned forward, right in her face, pointing and baring his teeth as he said, "Note, is in pocket, for my friend. Please not to look until alone."
She blinked a couple of times, leaning away from him like she was scared, then nodded tightly as he gripped her arm hard.
She bit her lip and went back to cleaning up the mess as he yanked his wallet out to toss a barely-adequate bill on the table and stormed out.
When he was pretty sure he was away clean, he glanced back.
And that was when chaos took over.
In this line of work, you have to be willing to play the odds. A lot. Most of the time, you win, because you stack the deck every way you can without making anyone look twice. Still, even if you've set up a situation in which you have a 99% chance of coming out on top, and if you're good at your job then most of the time you can, things could go wrong, or an unanticipated factor could screw up your day. This is why you also institute every redundancy and backup plan you can, again without making anyone look twice.
Even then, all the one percents add up, and you wind up in a no-win situation you could never have predicted.
Sometimes then, your only chance is to leap out of a helicopter into the bay and hope you don't cramp up.
At first, he thought the flash in his peripheral vision was a bomb, but there was no accompanying explosion, and there was a second flash.
And the flash was coming off the water. The café's occupants, those who weren't on the ground, were running toward him, some of them falling as they were hit, and his watcher had somehow vanished without a trace, car and all.
Michael glanced from side to side quickly to see if he could identify the source, then came to a speedy decision. This was a time to retreat and regroup. His waitress, no longer falsely friendly, all business, was sprinting toward him, and while a tiny fragment of his brain considered whether she was the pro, his instincts had saved him enough times that he generally heeded their signals. He turned and ran with her, and then as a third flash bounced off of windows around them, shattering a few, he grabbed her hand and pulled her into the nearest alley. If nothing else, that put a couple of brick walls between them and whatever was happening, and right now, mystery lightning out of the water was a bigger threat than any waitress or any spy pretending to be one.
Her ragged breathing and quivering shoulder against his as they stood, backs to the wall, made him think his initial assessment had been good.
It's a good idea to carry a second phone. Something cheap enough that losing it doesn't really cost you, but tough enough that when you have to dive headfirst under a bus to avoid explosives, small arms fire, or an angry mobster who thinks he sees someone he recognizes, you can still get a signal.
Sometimes, even the best of us have lapses.
"You have a phone?" Michael asked. "Mine is toasted." He didn't think the weird sideways lightning was actually something his incompetent tail had produced, but he maintained the accent, if not all of the grammar. Just because he thought his assessment was sound didn't mean he wanted to invite the girl home to meet his mother.
She nodded, one single jerky bob of her head, and reached into her pocket, pulling out a cheap pre-paid thing that she probably carried for emergencies, to make her family feel safer about her walking alone after dark. She flipped it open, pressed a button, and handed it toward him.
The lightning flashed again, crackling along the street and electrifying the Dumpster across from them briefly before leaping toward them. Michael realized where it was going before it could quite happen, and yanked the phone out of her hand, tossing it into the air where it lit up and exploded colorfully.
She turned toward him, eyes wide. "Would that have--"
"Still in your pocket?" Michael dropped the accent. Now was no time to waste brain power on that when staying alive was looking a little less likely by the minute. "Yeah, maybe. Probably would have caught fire, then. Bad scene. Hey, we should move. You got a name?"
Asking people questions gives them something to think about when you need them to focus. It's a simple trick and doesn't take much time to implement.
Asking them easy questions allows them to answer, and do so while you move them. Asking them difficult questions tends to freeze them in place while they think. If your situation isn't secure, you should stick with the easy ones, especially when you're dealing with unknowns or civilians.
"Kate," she said. "Your accent is gone. Five minutes after you staged a scene to get out of my restaurant. Are you a spy? Should I be blaming you for the world exploding?" She hadn't resisted as he pulled her deeper into the alley, which ran the length of the block uninterrupted. He was going for the middle, looking up as he pulled her by one hand.
"No, and no, but good questions," he said. So far, no flashes had passed overhead, though two more had followed the ground past the end of the alley ahead of them. Maybe they could get out by going over the next building.
And probably avoiding metal.
"Then, what?"
"No idea, Kate. I'm Michael."
"Until a minute ago, you sounded more like a Yuri or a, a, I don't know, what's a common name in Albania or something?," she said. "How do I know this is the real one?"
"You don't," Michael said. "But I did pull you away from freaky horizontal lightning, twice, and that has to count for something."
She nodded and followed his gaze up. "So, you think we should go up and over."
"I don't think we should stay here," he said.
"True. Still…" She pointed at the tendrils of current now crawling in along a phone line from the far end of the alley. "I don't know if we have much chance of not running into that."
Michael glanced back over his shoulder to see the same was true behind them, and reconsidered. "All right, if not over--"
"Then under," she said. "Doorknobs are metal. So's that manhole cover, by the way, and you just saw the lightning jump. You think it was the metal or the signal?"
Michael raised his eyebrows as he stepped a little further away from the manhole cover, which he'd been peripherally aware of but had discounted because his shoes had rubber soles. It was a good question. "Can't say. I'd been thinking metal, but you're right, it jumped when you added signal." Michael looked around for a minute, listening to the weird charged stillness of the air nearby and the increasingly distant sounds of crashes and sirens. The fact of the increasing distance was disturbing. He set it aside and licked his lips, forcing the same focus on himself that he'd just expected of her. "All right, we need to start making some assumptions. Let's assume it's either metal or both, and if it's metal alone, then it's metal that conducts current well. It's easy to avoid creating cell signals, hard to avoid metal, and if it were signal alone you'd think higher up would be pulling more of the power, right?"
She nodded. "Makes sense. So then… look for a door or a lock made of, what, iron?"
"Cast iron would be even better," he said absently, scanning the nearby options and then pointing. "There. Still, don't touch it." He bent and picked up a partially-shattered pallet next to a nearby doorway and pulled free a sturdy plank, careful not to grab a nail in haste, then followed her to a spot next to the old-fashioned door on the back of whatever property this was.
He glanced in through the windows, scowling at the discovery that the reason for the iron was that it was part of a security system that involved window bars. "Damn. I was hoping to shatter the glass and then figure out maybe something plastic to open the door from the inside."
"Maybe we should just try opening the door. It's the middle of a weekday." Kate held out a towel. "Not perfect," she said, "but if we hope this metal will conduct less, maybe it'll just be a shock."
Michael took the towel, checking for dampness because water and electrical current were a bad combination too, then wrapped it around the knob, which did, in fact, turn. And did, in fact, feel itchy-warm under his palm.
Huh.
He pushed the door open enough to let go of the knob, then used the wood around the glass to push it the rest of the way ajar and stepped inside. Kate followed close behind. "Good call," he said over his shoulder.
"Thanks."
It's a good idea, even when the situation is tense, to re-evaluate your assumptions from time to time. If you've made any bad ones, especially early on in your decision-making, you may be walking into a completely-avoidable disaster, and no one wants their tombstone to read, 'Died of Stupidity.'
If someone else manages to point out your bad assumptions in a way that doesn't cost you anything, for example by repeatedly demonstrating competence and good sense with which you hadn't credited her, you should take it with grace and gratitude, and remind yourself to be aware of your own assumptions.
The air smelled metallic and burnt, and Michael turned around again. "Being inside didn't help whoever was in here," he said, "and this might be anything from creepy to gory, depending, but I think it's still worth a shot to see what we can find. Stay low, since there are shelves and a counter, and ignore the way your body is probably reacting to the smell with what seems like a compulsion to leave immediately. If it's hard, it might help to visualize yourself as a character in a game, under your control, all right?"
She nodded. "I'll try. If whatever is frying everyone doesn't kill us both, you're going to tell me who the hell you are, right?"
"Yeah, maybe." Michael started forward, bent into a walking crouch behind the (wooden, and he was glad to see it) shelves. They'd managed to choose a used bookstore, which probably boded well--lots of pulp, little metal aside from the nails in most of the furniture. "Either way, if you have any ideas, I'm listening."
"Good to know." Her answer was a little slow, a little shaky, but she was holding up all right, and Michael figured if he didn't have to stop and do any psychological propping-up, he'd rather stick to the recon.
"Michael?"
He stopped and swiveled on the balls of his feet, still crouched. "Yeah?"
She pointed to the left. "I see the top of an exit sign. Might be a basement, if there are stairs there."
He raised up slightly and looked. Sure enough, the sign was over a wood-and-glass double door that said stairs, and while those might only go up, he could see what looked like an downward-sloped arrow on another sign beyond it. "Okay, yes, probably I'll tell you," he said with a grin.
She smiled back and followed him between rows of shelves, gamely maneuvering over the outflung limbs and in one case entire torso of half a dozen or so electrocuted customers or maybe staff, nearly all of whom were clutching phones in scorched hands.
Score one for quick reflexes.
This door didn't have a knob, and was unlocked, so he pushed it open, still using the towel for good measure, and found steps both up and down. The ones leading down were made of cement, but had strips of metal-edged grip-strips at the lip of each riser which gleamed a little too brightly, though they weren't sparking or arcing current. Michael considered the costs and benefits of trying to keep staying low and get down the stairs without touching them, but really, what was the other choice? Maybe there was something they could use to cover them. He turned back to Kate.
Who had vanished.
"Kate?"
She returned with a couple of cardboard boxes. "Sleds," she said.
Michael took the offered box, looked around her to the apparently recently-dumped-out piles of used books on the floor, and shook his head. "All right, now you're starting to freak me out."
She didn't answer that, instead only yanking apart the glued box corners and unfolding a flat(ish) piece of cardboard. "Might catch fire," she said. "Still, as long as it makes it to the bottom."
If you have a choice, avoiding injury is always a good idea. However, one of the downsides of working as a spy is that sometimes you have to accept a smaller amount of damage, in order to avoid a larger one. Never the less, avoiding head injury and death is critical, so it's a good idea to check, before you go getting your shoulder dislocated, whether you have anything at your disposal that might help.
While books are usually lousy weapons--though, don't get me wrong; in a pinch they're better for throwing than a rolled up pair of socks--they're nearly always pretty good for insulation. If you have a bunch of them that no one needs, it's worth using them up. I recommend cheap supermarket romances as they're both ubiquitous (and therefore not irreplaceable) and, unless you got them from a library, unlikely to contain metal detection strips.
"I have an idea," Michael said. He left Kate making sleds and went back into the store, collecting a handful of books to use to propel themselves. He caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, and then another, but a careful, if brief, look, suggested nothing out of order, aside from the bodies and the ongoing crackles of electricity.
He looked around one more time, saw nothing, and despite a lingering trace of uneasiness--the flicker had seemed warm-colored, and the electricity was plainly blue--concluded it had been a reflection of that.
When he returned to the stairwell, Kate had both boxes flattened and was judiciously pressing one against the first riser. "Making sure it doesn't like, go up in flames on contact," she said as she looked up.
"Good idea." He held up his books. "To use as oars."
She frowned, but then shrugged. "I don't think sleds have oars, but I see your point."
Before Michael could go first, she set her box in position and sat down, taking her books and propelling herself downward. The stair-edges, predictably, sparked and spit, but she reached the landing undamaged and looked back up.
And that was when chaos took over for the second time of the day.
Just because you think you've identified the problem, it doesn't follow that you have. It only follows that you're working toward solutions to that problem.
If there's more than one problem, you're likely to need more than one set of solutions. It's important to keep that in mind.
This is more difficult than it sounds, especially when you're cut off from support, working under pressure, unable to touch half the objects in any given room, and more than a little concerned about why the so-far level-headed civilian you've been working with is looking at you, or rather, past you, with an expression of horrified terror. Or terrified horror.
If that happens, you probably want to assess your weaponry options even as you start to turn around.
Michael gripped his paperbacks tighter and started to turn. Well, bludgeoning someone with a book would at least have some potential for surprise. He ran through the options in his head as fast as he could. Another civilian? Probably not horrifying. A cop? Even with a gun drawn, the uniform tended to reassure most people, unless they'd had some seriously nasty experiences. A criminal with a gun? But firing a gun would briefly create enough friction to… Michael shook his head and finished turning.
Nothing could have prepared him for the actuality.
The man over whose torso they'd crept was standing against the door. Or rather, leaning against it, one hand and the back of his bald head propped against the handle and the hinge so as to absorb the crawling blue lines of current gathering there.
Michael took a step back, considering his options. Throwing his books seemed unlikely to help, and heading down the stairs was also possibly-problematic, depending on whether there was actually an outlet from the basement. Which he really didn't want to count on.
The dead man--he clearly was still dead, and his eyes were starting to glow a pretty unholy icy blue--started to move toward Michael, which meant he was kind of out of time. He glanced around desperately, realized the current had all collected into the man, and yanked his shirt up as a makeshift towel as he pulled open the door to the fire hose. "Kate, duck and cover if you can," he shouted. She wasn't in his line of sight; he'd backed past the edge of the stairs.
"Do what you gotta do," she called back.
Michael gritted his teeth and turned on the spray full force.
Water and electricity are a terrible combination. Water tends to short out electronics, and electronics tend to boil and evaporate water. If you have to spray water on your electrical fire, you don't want to do it from a distance of seven feet. The odds are depressingly high that you'll be standing in water before the current dies out, and then you'll get shocked.
If you don't have a choice, try to find something nonconductive to stand on, and try to stay dry.
The first blast sent the bald guy flying backward, dead muscles impossibly spasming and seizing with crackling bolts of lightning that would probably have hit Michael if he hadn't been tossed back through the door. He stepped forward onto the paperbacks on the floor. They weren't great, but they might take a minute to soak through, and he did still have rubber soles.
"Kate, use your cardboard to keep the water from creeping," Michael said.
"Already did, and what the hell is that thing?"
"You really want me to say this out loud?"
Just then, the bookstore's fire suppression system went off, dumping fine powder everywhere and, evidently, smothering electrical contact points. At least for the moment.
Michael pulled his t-shirt up over his mouth and nose with one hand and turned off the water with the other. As soon as the dust started to settle, he called out, "Did you do that?"
"It seemed like a good idea," came a familiar voice from the vicinity of the twitching, wet, dust-covered dead guy. A moment later, Fiona came around the corner in a rubbery wetsuit and knee-high boots, pulling up a faceplate. "Who are you talking to?"
"Fi!" Michael dropped the hose, but stayed where he was. "Water might still be--"
"No, Sam and I took out a bunch of them down by the water. Once the wave has passed, they're really pretty vulnerable if they can't corner you. For electric zombies, I mean. You should be in the clear, for now."
Michael stepped gingerly down off his books. "Kate? You good down there?"
"Who's Kate?"
"I'm Kate," she said, poking her head around the corner. "You're sure it's okay to walk in the water?"
Michael bent forward at the waist, glancing at Fi. She shrugged, so he poked at the water with one finger. "Yep."
Kate jogged up the stairs. "Electric zombies? Seriously?"
"You got a better description?" Fi had one hand on her hip, though her other hand was obviously itching for a weapon, the bigger, the better.
"No," Michael said. "How'd you find me?"
"Knew where you started," Sam said from behind Fiona. He was wearing a get-up about like hers. " Hey, Mikey. Got a call from a buddy out in the Keys, said there was somethin' hinky goin' on. Government project run amok, he was pretty sure. I texted you I might have something while I was still on the phone with him, then texted Fi to find out where you were, because it seemed like it might be related to your disappearances."
"Sam!" Michael smiled. "I don't suppose you have my mom?"
"She wasn't home, and then the rest of the cell towers went out anyway," Fiona said. "Probably just electrical, but for all I know, the towers themselves have gone evil."
"Anyway," Sam went on, "We figured just because we were willing to run toward unexpected creepy reanimated lunatics--by the way, we should probably move on; just because we killed this batch doesn't mean more won't come looking for your brains or whatever, oh, hey, I bet electric zombies come after the electrical neural stuff--it didn't follow that you were. We found a building where there was activity likely to kill them, and--"
Michael raised his eyebrows. "How did you know how to kill them? Also, where did you get wetsuits?"
"I may have relieved some poor fellow north of here of his overstock," Fiona explained. "And Sam's friend had some basic specs."
"Electric zombie specs." Michael nodded. "Right." He turned to Kate. "You still want that explanation of who I am?"
"Not really. But I do think your friend Sam may have a point about leaving." She pointed toward the shapes moving about outside the storefront.
"I don't suppose you brought extra wetsuits…" Michael said.
"In the car." Fiona looked Kate up and down. "I brought a few, just in case."
Michael turned toward the stairs. "So, up, then?
Kate shook her head. "While I was busy hiding from the freaky dead guy, I could see down into the basement. There is a door, and it's probably worth a try?"
"Could be surrounded," Fiona said.
"You bring anything we can use?" Michael looked back and forth between Sam and Fi.
"C4 doesn't seem like the ideal choice for zombie-killing," Fiona said. "But of course, there's some in the car. Well, and a little in my bag."
Kate held up both hands. "I retract any interest I ever had in what exactly you do," she said. "Also, should I assume this is who I was supposed to call?"
No battle plan ever survives the first engagement with the enemy. It's a truism because it's true, and this is why you make back-up plans, why you try to stack your deck. Still, most of the time any halfway decent plan does make it as far as the field itself.
If it doesn't, you just have to punt. If you're smart, and you think on your feet, and you don't panic, and you're lucky, it all works out in the end. If any of those things fails, your odds go down the tubes.
"Uh, Michael?" Fiona said as she cleared the bottom step and turned toward the light coming through the door. "I think we have a problem."
Michael turned at the sound of shattering glass at the front of the store and answered, "Is it a problem that necessitates going up the stairs?"
"Yeah."
Just as her clumping footsteps started back up toward them, Michael came around to the stairs leading up, and shook his head. "Bad idea." Two hulking, glowing-eyed men in scorched jeans and t-shirts, followed by a woman in ridiculous heels and a skirt that had once been short and was now torn as well were lurching somewhat clumsily down toward them.
Fiona sighed and rummaged briefly in her bag. "So, should we draw straws for who gets his brain eaten while placing the charge?"
Michael had already seen where this was going, and had maneuvered himself toward the basement stairs. He shook his head and took the explosive. "If this doesn't take the building down, go find Ma." He pointed at Sam. "I'm counting on you."
He headed down the stairs and ignored the couple of guys down there feeding directly off the light fixtures, using the dim outdoor light to figure out the best place for the charge. He turned around to find them between him and the stairs, waited for them to get close, and dashed toward the door. "It's set," he shouted.
When you're a spy, you don't work for yourself. You go into risky situations at the direction of your handler or your boss, and half the time you don't even know if your objective was truly met.
When you've been burned, you call your own shots. You set up your op, your way, and you follow up if you want to.
It's the only up side. Except for when whoever burned you calls them instead, or whenever an unknown entity creates electric zombies out in the Keys. Then, you take what you can get, and then try to get the hell out of Dodge.