Catching Up

Jill Scarlet sat, stretched out at full extension, in the reclining bucket seat of the Kestrel 204 Hover Jet, currently cruising at mach 2.5, and listened as her cell phone’s message bank let fly with all of its contents.

“You have—27—new messages,” it told her, its impersonal robot voice still managing to sound judgmental. How dare you ignore your phone, it seemed to say.

With nearly every bone in her body thumping in agony, she put her BluBud in her ear and selected play all. One by one, various voices from her life cheerfully informed her of the latest tabloid headline, or asked for a personal appearance, along with a personal check, or just wanted coffee and ‘to catch up,’ or... She listened to each one, and spoke the command “delete” or “keep” as needed. Unfortunately, there wasn’t very much to “forward” to her personal assistant, Robin.

When she was finished, she had six messages to reply to: Mother, Robin, Dr. Steve Prescott from Strathmore Industries, the Executive Director of Straight Arrow, Ltd., her personal trainer, and the superintendent of Millennium City’s public school system. Every call dealt with projects in motion or of a sensitive nature. She decided to tackle them in reverse order, just to speed things up.

One personal appearance at “Drug-Free Intramural Field Day”, three Pilates sessions, and a fifty thousand dollar check to the Haiti Relief Fund later, Jill called Dr. Prescott and navigated her way past the various robots and computers that safeguarded corporate America from customers and other vermin and waited patiently as a Muzacked version of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” played inoffensively in her ear. The hold music had just started the first strains of “Rock You Like a Hurricane” when a man finally picked up the phone and said, “Steve Prescott,” in a pleasant baritone.

“Hi, Dr. Prescott, this is Jill Scarlet, returning your call.”

“Oh, hey! Thank you for calling me back. I know how busy you are. I frankly thought I’d get your assistant again.”

“Nope. Just me. I’m flying in from Monster Island, and I’ve got a little time, so what’s going on?” Something seized up in her leg and she leaned forward to massage the cramp. “What can I do for you?”

Prescott laughed self-consciously. “I apologize for being so cryptic on the phone, before.”

“Well, don’t be. You’ve got my full attention.”

He laughed again, the nervous laugh of someone who meets a famous person and suddenly forgets how to behave. Jill heard that laugh a lot in her day-to-day activities. It usually only served to slow the conversation down. “Dr. Prescott, is this a good time for you?”

“As a matter of fact, it isn’t right now,” he said, and Jill got the distinct impression that he was not alone. “I was hoping we could meet in person. I know that’s difficult for you, but I’d...”

She cut him off. “No, it’s actually fine. How about Wednesday afternoon?”

“That would be fine. What time?”

“Two o’clock. There’s a café about four blocks from Ren Square on 3rd Street, down from the bank. We’ll meet there, all right?”

“Excellent. I’ll, um, see you then.”

Jill said goodbye and hung up. She continued to massage her leg, even though the charley horse had moved on to greener pastures and thought about what they would be talking about. She replayed his original message:

“Miss Scarlet, this is Dr. Steve Prescott, of Strathmore Industries. I was the lead technician that...examined the heirloom...that you brought in to our labs about six weeks ago. You should have already received the report in the mail to us. I was...just wanting to, um, follow up with you about that. Can you give me a call back at your earliest convenience? I really think that...well, I’d just like to check in with you and make sure you don’t have any questions.”

The heirloom. Her family bow. The one she found that started her down this lunatic path of licensed private hero. She remembered the report that she got in the mail, just over a week ago. At the time, there wasn’t anything remarkable in it. She hadn’t expected anything, really, and so she wasn’t surprised. So, why was Dr. Prescott suddenly calling to ask if she had any questions? It didn’t make sense.

Well, she reasoned, nothing to do now but wait until Wednesday. She dialed Robin’s number and wondered what fires she would have to put out after they talked. Anything to forestall talking to her mother.

The café was full of open laptops, a technological flowering that seemed to attract aspiring writers working on their affected poses, right alongside casual surfers working on their virtual farms. They were all too busy to notice Jill as she slid into one of the two free booths that faced the door. She was dressed down, in her sweats, cap, and sun glasses. Her duffel bag, beside her in the booth, held all of her gear. Years of habit forbid her from even thinking about leaving the house without it.

Outside the plate glass window, a young woman wearing cat ears and a tail swooped out of the sky and landed with a tremor amid the tables. No one looked up from their lattes or their books, and the young heroine seemed disappointed. Jill was actually grateful for the nonchalance of Mil City’s population. It gave her a kind of anonymity in town that she needed between missions. There were gawkers and enthusiasts, to be sure, along with the occasional overheard comment or encouragement, but it was nothing like, say, Los Angeles.

She spotted Steve Prescott right away. Not only did he fit the Oxford Standard definition for Absent Minded Genius, but he was also burdened with an open satchel literally overflowing with files, technical manuals, and papers. It took him five minutes to get from the door to her booth, because his load wouldn’t cooperate and kept falling to the floor. Jill just watched him, trying not to laugh.

His head was pill shaped, and seemed to be larger than the amount of hair he was allotted. This gave him a forehead of Frankensteinian proportions that was currently dotted with sweat. He peered at her over ridiculously thick glasses. “Ah...Jill?”

“Hi,” she said, gesturing at the seat opposite her. “Please. You want some coffee?”

“Ach, no, I never touch the stuff,” he said, his face a mask of disgust. Once settled, he extended a pudgy, sweaty hand. “Dr. Steve Prescott.”

She took it, shook lightly, and made a show of gesturing over her shoulder at the counter. “They do have a wide assortment of fresh teas here.”

“Really?” Prescott leaned over to peer at the menu. Jill quickly wiped his hand sweat off on her shorts. “Well, maybe an Earl Grey...”

Jill motioned the barista over and ordered a pot of hot tea. When she left, Jill leaned in and said, “Okay, Dr. Prescott, you’ve got my attention. I take it that there was something wrong with the test results.”

“No no,” he said hastily, “the tests were all fine. Everything checked out. It’s just that...”

“The lab said that the bow was ordinary,” Jill said, covering his verbal fumbling. “I pieced together most of it. Chemistry wasn’t my strong suit.”

“Yes, well, to that,” Prescott held up his hand. “You see, I was the technician who performed all of the tests on your bow.” He plopped a stack of papers down on the table. “See, right here, it says, ‘Standard Battery of tests,’ and so, I assumed it would be the full work-up.”

Jill nodded, her face a mask of encouragement, as she realized Prescott was going to tell the story his way, and not get to the point until he was damn good and ready.

“Now, this here is your lab results,” he said, rustling through the paperwork, “and based on the family history you provided us with, everything checks out. The bow is yew, it’s been treated with a number of oils and resins over the years, so it’s still supple, and in fact, it’s in perfect condition. While that’s unusual, it’s not exceptional. But there’s one thing that was left out of the tests.”

Jill cocked an eyebrow and Prescott adjusted his glasses. This was his dramatic reveal, and he was loving it. “When I saw your notes about the tree that the bow was made from was struck by lightning, I went ahead and did an energy spectrum analysis on the bow. It’s standard whenever something is exposed to a particle field of any kind. The thing is this: that test takes weeks to come back, mostly because nowadays, we’re looking for energy signatures that are literally extraordinary in nature.” He smiled. “Here’s the results of that test,” he said, sliding a single sheet of paper over to her.

Jill took it and scanned it. “Yadda yadda yadda...wait, tachyon energy?” She looked up at the beaming face of Prescott. He looked like the man in the moon. “What does that mean?”

“It means only one thing: that ‘bolt of lightning’ that hit the yew tree wasn’t lightning. It was time-energy. The fabric of nil-space. And that energy is a carrier for other energy forms.”

“Dr. Prescott, I’m a super hero, not a rocket scientist. Translate, please.” She finished off her coffee.

“Okay, in a nutshell: your bow is in such great shape because it’s never aged. The tachyon energy has perfectly preserved it from the moment of its impact on the tree. As for the carrier energy...well, we can’t trace it. But it could be anything, really. A memory. A thought. A formula. Or something else. But whatever it was got sent back in time to strike that tree, and your bow contains that energy signature now, for better or worse.”

Jill sat back in her seat, lost in thought. “So, then, if anything else were made from this tree, it too would carry the signature, right?”

“Exactly,” Prescott beamed. “You’ve got it.”

“Did you show this to anyone else?”

Prescott’s smile fell into a more serious straight line. “Well, that’s the thing: no, I did not. There are things going on at Strathmore that I thought might be better suited if...” He trailed off. “What are you looking at?”

Jill had stopped listening the minute he opened his mouth. Five men were running out of the park across the street, headed right for the cafe. Hoodlums, all, they carried sub-machine guns and seemed at least trained enough to stay in a rough formation. “Get down,” she said, leaping up into the booth and vaulting over the rest of the customers to the door. “Lock the door,” she called out to the barista, and shouldered her way out the door and onto the open patio.

Ian Nottingham’s men slid to a halt and, by way of conversation, started spraying the area with bullets. Jill took off at a dead run, feeling hot lead whiz past her, unzipping her duffle as she went. A mid-air flip let her get the compound bow out, and she crouched behind a pillar while she slipped the pack onto her shoulder. “Nice to see you, boys,” she called out. “Is Ian still pissed at me?”

More gunfire. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, loading the bow with a splitter. She popped up, fired, and followed it up with a screamer. The thugs had scattered as the first shaft broke up into five smaller pieces, but the screamer caught one of them right in the chest. The piercing sonic reaction was less of a scream and more of a boom, and it stunned the men momentarily.

Jill ran left, flanking them as she went, and dropped a concussive right into the middle of the pack. The sonic was wearing off, and they were all shaking their heads when the explosive tipped arrow went kaboom. Their limp, unconscious forms sank to the ground, and several nearby car alarms went off, and then that was that.

She walked over to the group of men. One of them had a ringing cell phone, and she picked it up and answered it. The man on the other end of the line started talking. What sort of criminal training did these guys undertake, she wondered, and who was their instructor? Boris and Natasha?

“Hey, we’re at the television station. Is she dead yet?”

“Missed me by that much,” Jill growled into the phone. “Tell Ian I’m coming for him.” She hung up and pocketed the phone. The café patrons were now drifting out to inspect the carnage or turn off their car alarms.

Jill spied Prescott, his eyes wide, looking at the havoc three arrows had wrought. She pulled him aside. “Can you keep this meeting, and your findings, under your hat? These are the people looking for my bow.”

“That’s why I am here.” He handed her the overflowing satchel. “I cleaned out the hard drive at work, and erased the data. You don’t want the R & D people at Strathmore Industries knowing about this.”

She took the satchel and stuffed it into her backpack. It just barely fit. “Okay, um, thanks,” she said. “Listen, I’ve got to run, now. My nem—it doesn’t matter. But I’ve got to...”

“I, um, I do have one request,” Prescott said, and then catching the look in her eyes, quickly added, “if it’s not too much trouble.”

“What?”

“Can you get me Doctor Silverback’s autograph?”