Maelstrom Force/Red Rover

From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

When I was a kid I had superpowers. All of my friends did. Matthew could make a coin toss come up heads or tails, whichever he wanted, every time. Sandy could remember anything anyone ever said to her, word for word, forever. I could tell the temperature to the degree and I always knew when a storm was coming. There were one-hundred and eighty of us and we all had our small gifts. Nothing spectacular. No one could turn invisible or bend steel or start fires with their eyes. But to us they were superpowers. They made us feel like we were something amazing. We needed that to get through the hard times.

Part of our story you know. In the spring of 1988 a man named Sebastian Paul committed an act of bio-terrorism against the United Nations, releasing a designer mutagenic virus into the building. It was the single worst security breach in United Nations history and the only reason it wasn't an international tragedy is that adults were completely unaffected by the virus. We weren't.

Yeah, I'm one of those kids. We'd come from all over the country by special invitation. We were t-ball champions, story contest winners, ace spellers, charity cases or just children whose parents could make the right donations or pull the right strings. We were the first-graders of Celebrate Young America, the lucky kids who got to go to New York and end up systemically infected with an engineered viral nightmare.

For the first thirty days after our exposure we didn't get to see our parents. We didn't get to see anyone at all except from the wrong side of observation windows in the CDC in Atlanta. After a month they had done enough tests to be certain that we weren't exhaling live virus and no adult would be affected by contact. That's when we got to leave our isolation ward and move to the Ranch.

Its official name was the Children's Hope Quarantine Hospital, but even the doctors just called it the Ranch. It was in a pretty part of Montana and it had been a working ranch once upon a time. To this day I can't watch "A River Runs Through It" without feeling like I'm back there again. It had been converted to a state of the art facility with a full medical staff and our parents were allowed to visit any time they wanted. They could even move in if they liked. Not as many did as you would think. It wasn't simple. Some of us had brothers or sisters and our parents were afraid of taking the virus home even though the doctors said it wasn't possible. They couldn't afford to leave their jobs, and there were only so many to be had on the Ranch. The locals weren't going to hire anyone living at the 'plague camp'. More than a few of our parents divorced when one parent was ready to leave the world behind to be close to us and the other wasn't. There were little cottages for us to stay with our parents when they visited or for those few that lived there. Most of the time, for some of us all of the time, we lived together in big bunkhouse dormitories.

We spent most of the first year sick. It was like having the flu for a year. We were always tired, always fevered, always aching. Needles and pokes and prods and tests and IV drips were just a part of life for us. It's amazing the resilience children have. We still laughed and smiled and played and did our chores and went to classes so when we got to go home we wouldn't be behind in school. Nobody ever talked about what would happen if we never got to go home. You could see the fear of it in everybody's eyes, but nobody ever talked about it.

After that first year, when we got better, we got superpowers. Nobody does healthy like the suddenly healthy and nobody can turn anything into a game like seven and eight year old kids. We ran around like wild things. "Jenny can hold her breath for ten minutes!" "Rick can taste dirt and tell you what kind of plants were growing in it!" "Daryl can make his eyes turn different colors - they don't even have to match!" We made capes out of our pillowcases and gave each other code names and planned all of the adventures we would have when we grew up.

If we grew up. Our immune systems were scrambled by the virus. They started attacking our organs like they were foreign bodies. We all had to go on immuno-suppresants like transplant recipients. For the doctors it was an endless battle between the virus and their ability to keep its secondary symptoms from killing us. They hoped that if they could keep it at bay long enough puberty would destroy the virus, cure us in the same way that it made adults immune. There were discussions of the merits of forcing it on us early, artificially. But there would be serious side effects and it wasn't a guaranteed cure. They decided to hold that measure in reserve.

Like any game, 'superheroes' got old and we moved on. Rick really didn't like eating dirt, nobody would have a hold-your-breath contest with Jenny or toss coins with Matt and nobody but nobody wanted to hear Sandy repeating everything everyone said in her singsong voice. By the time we were nine and ten we were too 'grown up' for pillowcase capes.

We still played games, though. One day in the winter of 1992 after four years on the Ranch a game of Red Rover changed everything. You know the game, don't you? You line up side by side with your team, just far enough from the team facing you to get up a good run. Then you join hands and pick someone from the other team, call them out by name, dare them to try to break your line. "Red Rover, Red Rover!" We called Ben out and he ran right at me, fast and furious. We were holding tight and none of us was going to let him get through. We were going to stop him. We had to stop him. Everyone in the line wanted me to be strong and I could feel them wanting it. My 'storm is coming' feeling started rolling around the base of my spine. A heartbeat later Ben was flat on his back ten feet away, thrown there by the gale force wind that sprang up around me.

I couldn't do it again. I couldn't do anything at all. Nobody in my line could. Daryl's eyes were stuck, Amanda couldn't balance on her fingertips, Luis couldn't whistle a bird out of the trees. It was like we used it all up. Somehow they gave me everything they had and I used it up.

The next morning at daily exams everyone that had been playing on my team was completely healthy. We still had the virus and it was still active, but we didn't have any symptoms. The battle between the virus and our bodies was in a state of detente. It lasted a whole day before the virus resurged.

From that day on Red Rover was a whole other kind of game for us. We'd call someone out and join hands around them and give them all we had. It was a way to hold the virus at bay as long as we stayed together. It was a way to do and be and see amazing things. Twenty of us joining hands and wanting could make one of us strong for a minute or two. Miracles happened in those minutes. The best sand castle you ever saw built itself for Rick. Carol blew the bunkhouse door off its hinges by yelling at it. We had snowball fights in July and shows from marionettes made of fire. Every amazing thing we did bought us one more day of life and we spent weeks planning the things we'd try the next time it was our turn.

Planning those minutes and being part of them got us through medical exams and geography exams and the times when our parents split up and the times when they should have but didn't, when a grandparent died and we didn't get to go to the funeral or when it was our birthday and nobody came to visit. We were each other's best friends and worst enemies, first crushes and first fights. We were blood brothers and soul sisters. We said we'd always be friends.

Life happened. In 1993 after five years of quarantine the first of us hit puberty. The change killed the virus almost immediately. Within days of the first signs they couldn't contribute to our games anymore. Within a month their bodies were virus free and they could go home. By the time each of them was well even their strange little parlor tricks had gone. They had only their IV scars to remind them of the childhood both sad and amazing that they were leaving behind.

My turn came in 1994. I didn't have anywhere to go. I never had. I'd been in foster care in first grade. So I just stayed at the Ranch until the last of us grew up in 1996. It was hard being there with my old friends but not being the same anymore. I can understand why a lot of us didn't stay in touch like we'd said we were going to. I can understand going back to families and lives, in part missing the amazing things that happened and never would again, in part just wanting to be the normal kid at their new middle schools and high schools. Not wanting to be the quarantine freak. Wanting to forget.

When the Ranch closed for good Dr. Kemper took me in. He'd been the lead virologist and like me he didn't have a life to go home to when the whole thing was over. So he just kept going back over the notes and tests and research and I helped as much as I could. Saving our lives wasn't enough for him. He had a true scientist's passion to know and understand. In the beginning it was just a hobby for both of us. It became an avocation. We went all the way back to the beginning, to Sebastian Paul and his attack on the U.N. We even managed to get permission to visit him in prison.

It turns out Sebastian was a 'true believer', a peace activist (if that's not an oxymoron) and somebody's fool. Sebastian believed that if we all ever really understood each other we could set aside our petty differences and grow up as a species. He was told that the virus he was carrying was a ruse, something that would give the appearance of lethal danger but no actual harm. The diplomats were going to be forced into quarantine, believing their lives were in danger. The forced proximity and perceived danger was a metaphor. We are together in this. Saving each other is saving ourselves. The symptoms were only supposed to last a few days but the understanding gained in those days was going to change the world. He told us everything that he could remember about the people who created the virus in return for us telling him everything that had happened after. The protective confidentiality we were entitled to as minors had kept our real story out of the press. Of course the public knew there was a quarantine hospital, but not what happened there.

Sebastian's full story painted the outlines of a picture that Dr. Kemper and I spent years filling in. Something took shape in the shadows of the story, a group of power brokers that thrived on secrecy and capitalized on the instability of international relations. If the virus had been as lethal as they hoped and nations had begun pointing fingers at each other, blaming each other for holes in security or accusing each other of being behind the attack, these conspirators would have reveled. Even better if the diplomats developed bizarre powers and mental instabilities. It would mean more discord in the long term, more distrust of metas, more tin pot dictators scrabbling for power. If the virus hadn't failed Sebastian would have created the very thing he was trying to stop forever, the thing the puppet masters wanted. He would have created a war.

So it's fitting that my story finds the end of its beginning in a war. Something happened to me during the second Rikti invasion. Doctor Kemper and I were living in Paragon City when it began. The sky was torn open and invading ships poured through in a wave of strange energies. Rampant power from alien machines and weapons discolored the night and I felt it. I felt it like I'd felt it when I was a kid and Ben was charging at me, trying to break our line. Something long asleep woke up inside me and I could do things again. I could call the wind and the rain and it didn't go away in a minute or a day or even a month. I didn't get sick. I didn't get tired. The virus had gone, but the power hadn't. Like me it had just grown up, grown up and waited to be awakened.

When the invasion was over and the sky was no longer awash with alien energy my power remained. When I found Doctor Kemper murdered in his lab and his records missing I realized that like my power the men in the shadows had never really gone away and never stopped watching. They're the type of men that don't believe in loose ends. I have so few hints; a Maltese cross, a name that can make government officials turn pale as they deny any knowledge. Malta is out there and they're coming to clean house.

But I have old friends, close as brothers and sisters down deep. What woke up in me is going to wake up in them, sooner or later, quickly or slowly. The first of us got back together at Doctor Kemper's funeral. The rest will come. We'll find them, or they'll find us. I can feel a storm rising. It's our storm. Red Rover, Red Rover, Malta. Send your best. Do your worst. We'll be waiting and you're not going to break our line.