Twenty-Eight, Chapter 1: A Normal Day
Twenty-Eight by Isabel Risone
Chapter One: A normal day
The alarm clock buzzed. She groaned, not lifting her head as she picked it up and threw it at the wall. It landed with a crash and stopped buzzing. Several minutes later, her mom’s voice came up the stairs, “Gwen! It’s seven in the morning! Get out of bed already or you’ll be late!”
She groaned, lifting herself up and throwing a pillow at the door. “Mom! It’s Saturday. I don’t have school today!”
“No, it’s Monday. You were gone all weekend again.”
Gwen’s eyes opened quickly. “What?” she yelled, though she had heard rather well. She jumped out of bed, muttering, “Crap.” She finally remembered. There had been an assignment some days before. She’d gotten back home at three in the morning.
She left her room a jumbled mess and half slid, half jumped down the stairs. She dashed through the kitchen, grabbed a piece of toast, gave a mumbled, “Thanks,” to her mom and then dashed out. Hopping into her SUV, she had to turn on the wipers a moment to get rid of the autumn leaves.
She had light brown hair and lively green eyes. She was slim because she was fit, because she was a captain-in-training. She disappeared almost every other week because of her assignments. What her assignment the day before had been did not matter to her right now; she was more worried about her steadily decreasing grades. Missing classes because of the assignments and lacking sleep because of the TelePathic Dreams were doing their damage.
She slid into class as the bell rang. When the teacher said there’d be no quiz or test that day, she lowered her head to her desk to catch up on some well-needed sleep.
—
“Now that you kids are all done with the training programs, you can request custom weapons according to yer specialties.” The husky voice with a possibly slight Irish tint belonged to her commander, Monts. He was a bulky man, military, in his mid to late thirties. He had dark brown hair and a short beard.
It was a TPD, or TelePathic Dream. Somewhere out there, telepaths had linked the sleeping minds of the team. Gwen would get no sleep tonight.
“Any gun,” Trigger said as he shrugged. He was their gun expert. He had short, dark, curly hair. He was strong, and good in a fight even without a gun.
A blonde girl with her hair in a neat bun shrugged. “Crossbow?” She was Ban, the team’s medic. She was good with poisons, grenades, and setting traps, but she could use just about any weapon with as much ease as the rest of her teammates.
Deep black spiked hair and grey eyes was Sparky. He was a pyro-path: he was evidence of just how unique the group was since they were able to find and recruit people like him. Sparky shrugged, “I don’t really need a weapon…”
Monts shook his head, “Your powers can’t be used all the time. Someone would find out and then there’d be trouble.”
Sparky nodded, “Any standard gun.”
Trigger looked up to the last person left. “What about you, Gwen?”
“I don’t like being called Gwen,” she muttered. “Gwen’s a name for pretty princess-damsels in distress. I’m neither.” She looked down and to the side, thinking hard for a long moment. Finally, she came to a decision. Her green eyes almost glowed as much as her eager grin she looked to the Commander. “I want knives. A lot of knives. Twenty-eight knives.”
—
Her new alarm clock buzzed. She growled and tiredly rolled out of bed, landing on the floor in a tangled mess of sheets. “Grah…” she growled. It was Tuesday.
Kicking away her sheets, she made her way down the stairs. There were two cups of coffee steaming on the table. “Thanks, mom.” She put the mug to her lips and took a sip. She really needed sleep. She wondered if the Group would really grant her request. She wanted to stand out; she wanted a new nickname. Her team had been assembled for about three months and it was now November. She hated being called Gwen.
“Gwen, you should sleep earlier,” her mom said, wandering back into the kitchen.
Gwen nodded grudgingly, “Yes, mom.” She finished her coffee and put the mug in the sink.
She slept again in school that day. When she got home, there was a note on the table. “Do the dishes,” she grumbled, reading it aloud. She wandered into the kitchen, towards the sink. After finishing with the dishes, she got to the steak knives. She kicked the kitchen door closed. There were three dartboards hanging from the back.
She faced the door for a moment, the three steak knives within reach. Closing her eyes, she tossed one, turned to toss another, and then tossed the third with her back to the board. She opened her eyes as the three knives landed. She sighed and smirked with pride at the three bulls eyes. Then the door swung open and the handles bounced against the wall.
“Gwen! I’ve told you to stop playing with knives and cutting up the walls.” Her mom put some bags of groceries on the kitchen table as Gwen rolled her eyes and walked past her to pull the knives out of the door.
—
Little over a week passed, and it was a Thursday evening. Gwen stood on the curb alone, a dark silhouette in the night. Headlights illuminated her as a large black pickup truck drove up. Monts was in the driver seat, and he threw her a filled bag. She caught it. It was heavier than usual. She climbed into the back of the truck quickly and they drove off.
It would be a weeklong assignment. They arrived at the compound a few hours into the morning. Monts stepped out of his truck. The team was in uniform. Trigger already had a submachine gun and two handguns. Sparky wore black and had a gun readied as well. Ban wore a pasty grey uniform and held a crossbow. Gwen wore a tight tan leather top and short, tight, tan leather shorts. Along a loose belt were at least half a dozen knives in matching tan leather sheaths. There were knives sheathed along her arms and legs. Each knife had a black handle three inches in length, one inch in width, and half an inch thick. The blades were four inches and sharpened on both sides. She grinned and simply stated, “Its twenty-eight knives.”
“Okay Gwen,” Trigger nodded with a shrug.
She frowned at Trigger, “Call me,” she thought for a moment and then grinned, “Twenty-Eight. Not Gwen. Twenty-Eight.”
“Mmk. Sure.”
Their assignment this time was to just guard a coder for a week. There was already a team of scientists there. Ban looked up to Monts, “What’s a coder?” It was their first time to deal with a coder. The other times they had to move scientists around or whatever else.
Monts explained once they were settled within the compound. “Coders are people who get a virus that allows them to read the code. The origin of the code is unknown, but it definitely ain’t a human language, and has to be made understandable by a coder.”
“So a coder decodes code?” Ban queried.
“Yeah.”
The coder was a man who was alone in a room with a computer screen and keyboard. Twenty-Eight watched through a square of glass in the door for about a minute. He typed nonstop, seemingly distracted by nothing. He looked thin as if starved, and had a neglected beard that made him vaguely resemble Ulysses Grant.
Days passed without event. There was a barracks room with rows of cots, a cafeteria, a decent shower room, and an armory. The scientists had their own rooms and could access the camera room.
One day as Twenty-Eight patrolled with a machine gun hanging from her shoulder, she heard a sound from the coder’s room that differed from the ceaseless tapping of keys. It sounded like someone had closed a large book. She looked through the glass in the door and found the room empty except for the coder at his computer. She shrugged it off and continued her patrol. Not once during those days did she see the coder stand up to go eat or sleep.
By Tuesday, the coder had died. The team had to delay their departure by a few days so they could deal with the body. The scientists took the papers and computer away, Monts and the team had to bring the dead coder back to his hometown. They left him in front of a cemetery.
—
Friday, Twenty-Eight was home again. She wasn’t squeamish, but she wasn’t used to dealing with dead bodies either. She had dealt with death before, though. That coder, as strange and ill as he had been, was still a human being. He probably had family somewhere, a family that knew nothing of why he’d disappeared or been returned dead.
Still, she wondered. What if that dead coder had children? What if a little girl or boy out there somewhere got the news that their father was dead, and didn’t know why. Just like when she’d been a child, and her father… The turning thoughts in her mind bothered her, so instead of going to school, she stayed at home, telling her mother she felt under the weather. Normally people other than the medics and captains on teams would have their memory wiped after an assignment. But she was a captain-in-training, in fact, her entire team was. Every assignment gave them the experience they would need to lead their own team someday.
Saturday evening, she got a TPD. It wasn’t an assignment or training program. Instead, the telepath behind the desk in the empty and dim meeting room handed her a message. “Deal with it. Disposing of dead coders and scientists is a common job.” It wasn’t any of her teammates, and it couldn’t have been Commander Monts either. She wondered who sent the message and continued on with her life.
