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                     PARIAH #15: "Confirmations"
         Copyright 1994, Greg Fishbone, all rights reserved.

  Permission is hereby granted to disseminate or reproduce this
  work via electronic means only, for entertainment purposes only,
  and only if all attributions and headers remain in place and the
  text of the work (including attributions and headers) is not
  altered in any way.  Any reproduction of this work for profit of
  any form is strictly forbidden without the express written
  permission of Greg Fishbone.  Hard copy reproduction is limited
  to single copies printed for the use of the user only, and
  cannot be mass produced or disseminated in any way.  All other
  rights not specifically referred to in this notice are reserved
  to Greg Fishbone.  "Pariah", "Wilcox Township", and all
  character names used in this story are trademarks belonging to
  Greg Fishbone, who reserves all rights to their use.  Feedback
  to fishbone@astro.ocis.temple.edu is always appreciated, even
  the critical nit-picky stuff, though I prefer unqualified
  praise.  Prior issues in this series are available from
  ftp.dhhalden.no and gopher.dhhalden.no.


   Phil awoke looking up into a pair of worried green eyes.  "Well?" he
asked, before she could say anything.  "Did you win?"
   "Win?  Win what?" asked Becky-Sue.
   "Field hockey."  He sat up and looked around the office of the school
nurse.  The room was sterile and sparsely furnished, with a few small
posters bearing nutrition-based themes.
   "You must have hit your head harder than they thought," she said,
putting a cool hand against his forehead.  As she did so, he once again
saw the glow under Becky-Sue's skin flicker and fade away.
   "I want to know," he insisted.  "How did you do?"
   "I scored two goals--"
   "That's great!"
   "--for the other team.  Tell me, Phil, is it normal for a team to hold
a no-confidence vote for their captain in the middle of a game?"
   He smiled at her, reassuringly.  "So field hockey isn't your sport --
but with your strength, you couldn't go wrong with football."
   "Is that the game that takes place on ice?"
   "Then again, I could be wrong..."
   The door opened, and Mr. Harris, the principal of Wilcox High School,
stood in the doorway, as if making a conscious decision not to enter the
room.  He seemed extremely nervous, which Phil thought might have
something to do with some defect in the school's insurance coverage.
"There's somebody here who wants to see you," he said, simply.
   "A doctor?" asked Phil.  "A nurse, maybe?"
   "Um, actually I was talking to her," said Mr. Harris, nodding vaguely
at Becky-Sue.  The red-haired girl's mouth dropped open in surprise, and
she gave Phil a questioning look.  He shrugged back, declaring his ignorance.
   "You'll be okay here without me?" she asked.
   "No promises," he answered, with a wink.  She leaned forward and gave
him a quick kiss.  Mr. Harris looked as if he wanted to say something,
but he kept quiet.  He moved aside as Becky-Sue approached, and
maintained a distance of at least five feet as they walked away down the
hall.
   A few minutes later, the door opened again, and the school nurse
entered, along with Phil's father.  "Dad?" he asked.  "What are you doing
here?"
   "Well, Ah reckon I'm here to take y'all home, son," Mr. Richardson
drawled in the most unconvincing mid-west accent of all time.  "They tell
me you conked your mellon on the see-ment stairwell."
   "I'm fine.  Really.  But--" he paused, examining his father's worried
face.  "There's something I need to talk to you about."
   "Of course, of course.  I'm all ears, y'know."
   "Alone," he said, looking over at the nurse.  She left the room
immediately, without a word or even a gesture.
   "Impressive.  Now, what's all this about?"
   "I had a strange dream last night," he said, trying to read his
father's reactions as he spoke.  "There was an ancient city, and a
strange little man who called himself the Giver."  Phil's father gaped at
him for a few seconds.  "I need to know...  Have you been there as well?"
   "Ankha," said Mr. Richardson.  "Many times.  As real as it seemed, I
was never quite sure that it wasn't just a symptom of a nervous breakdown
until just now -- but how could you and I possibly be having the same
breakdown?"
   "Your accent's gone," Phil noticed.
   "It was pretty bad, wasn't it?  I thought it would be better to let
you and your mom think that I had gone a little crazy than to tell you
the real reason I suddenly moved us all to this backwater town.  Your
mother would never understand that my family have been mystical hit-men
for a three-hundred generations."  He smiled.  "In some states, that
would probably be grounds for divorce."
   "But it's all true?  Everything the Giver said?"
   "What did he say to you?"
   "The Gift has been abused, the Gifted must be punished by one of the
Charmed, and if you can't do it, I'll have to.  And if I can't do it--"
   "Chaos, torture, death, and enslavement for the entire human race,"
his father finished.  "The collapse of all civilization as we know it,
the perversion of mankind, and an eternal reign of terror and fear.  Even
worse than what we have now, I think."
   "Not much of a choice when it's put that way, is it?"  Both of them
nodded, knowing the answer all too well.
   Phil and his father left the school together.  Becky-Sue ran after
them, catching up just as they reached the battered-up pickup truck that
Phil's father had traded his Mercedes for.  "Hey, Phil!  You weren't
going to go home without saying goodbye, were you?"
   "I didn't know where you had gone," he told her.  "Who was it that
wanted to talk to you, anyway?"
   "The FBI."
   "Dangnation!" Mr. Richardson exclaimed, lapsing back into his fake
accent.  "What in tarnation have you done now, little missy?"
   Becky-Sue eyed Phil's father, suspiciously, and pulled Phil a few feet
away, out of his range of hearing.  "Nothing to worry about.  I don't
think they know about me," she whispered.
   "Then why did they want to talk to you?  They must know *something*."
Becky-Sue turned away, not wanting Phil to see her tears.  "What?  What's
wrong?"
   "My parents.  They're investigating the deaths of my parents...  The
Judge fixed all of the records to make them less suspicious, but what can
you really do about a pair of spontaneous combustion cases that take
place a week apart?  It won't take them long to figure out that I was the
one who did it to them, and then they'll try to take me in for study,
and--  they'll either kill me or I'll end up killing them as well!"
   "I won't let that happen," said Phil, but there was a strange sadness
in his voice that Becky-Sue did not quite understand.  He pulled her
close and whispered in her ear.  "Listen very carefully...  Run away,
now, today.  Get out of Wilcox Township as fast as you can and just keep
on going."
   She was stunned at the suggestion.  "You know I can't do that!"
   "If you don't, you will die.  He'll have to hunt you down, and he will
find you eventually, but at least it will buy you some time."
   "Who will try to hunt me down?"  Phil said nothing, but Becky-Sue
could swear that he unconsciously glanced back at his father.  "Phil,
you're not making any sense.  What are you saying?"
   "Just go.  Please!"
   "You'll come with me, won't you?  What, why do you look so sad?"
   "I can't.  That would be the worst thing we could do."
   "Then I'm not leaving.  I'd rather die here than live somewhere else
without you."
   "You don't know me well enough to say that," Phil told her.  It was as
if he had slapped her across the face.
   "But I love you!  And you said you loved me!  Were you lying?"
   "No, but--"
   "So it's all an act then, Phil Richardson?"
   "No, you don't understand--"
   "Of course not!  I'm just a country bumpkin while you're a
sophisticated city-boy.  How could I possibly understand your petty
little games?  Isn't that what all this is about?  Somebody challenged
you to win the heart of the super-powered girl and then step all over it?"
   "Look, just forget I said anything.  Just--"
   "You bet I will!" she shouted.  "I'll forget I ever met you at all,
Phil Richardson!"  She strode purposely over to Phil's father's pickup
and punched her fist into the metal frame.  Then she swung her arm upward
and effortlessly flipped the vehicle over in the air.  Becky-Sue looked
past Phil to the front of the school, where the two Special Agents were
standing, watching impassively.
   "What are you looking at?" she demanded of them.  "You want a show?
I'll give you a show..."  She somehow managed to get the leverage needed
to lift the now-smoking vehicle over her head and looked back at the
school, hoping to scare the two agents away.  They were already gone.
Angrily, she pitched the truck out of the parking lot and into the empty
practice field, where it flared up for a few seconds before exploding.
Then she turned and ran, at a pace that an Indy-car driver would envy.
   "Lovers' tiff?" asked Phil's father.
   "Our first and probably our last.  Sorry about the truck, dad."
   "That's all right, partner.  We'll just mosey on home the old-fangled
way -- by foot."

                             * * *

   *Damn, there goes another pair,* she thought, as her sneakers
succumbed to the heat and friction of her running.  Soon she was
barefoot, with bits of rubber and canvas smoldering in the path behind
her.  Whimsically, she thought that going barefoot all of the time would
save her Uncle Clem a lot of money on footwear.
   Becky-Sue ran instinctively, her feet moving at a speed too fast for
her own mind to follow, which fortunately left her free to think about
other matters.  She was no longer angry at Phil, and probably never had
been in the first place.  Her poor boyfriend just had the misfortune of
triggering the anger she had built up for Special Agent Milner and
Special Agent Grabowski of the FBI.  She wondered what it was that made
them think they were so special anyway.
   The first questions they asked had been innocent enough, about the
town and the people in it, and she had given her answers freely and
willingly.  Then they wanted to know about her parents and how they had
died, and the answers came more reluctantly, half-truths, accompanied by
tears.  And then--  Then they had shown her the picture.  Phil would have
understood her anger if she had told him about the picture, but she had
not wanted to worry him.
   Becky-Sue looked up into the sky as she ran, wondering whether they
were watching her at that very moment.  She had read somewhere that the
only man-made structure that could be seen from space was the Great Wall
of China, but that was apparently no longer true.  Special Agent Winter
had a photograph of Wilcox Township, taken by satellite, that clearly
showed the buildings and fields and roads, as well as the trails made by
her high-speed running that cut through and around the township.  When
they asked her about them, she had no answers for them at all.
   They knew.  They knew, and it frightened the hell out of her.  That's
why she had lashed out.  And if they had not known before, they certainly
did now.  Phil would understand it all once she explained it to him, and
then everything would be all right again.  Uncle Clem would probably even
offer to buy Mr. Richardson a new truck, and Becky-Sue would figure out a
way to pay him back by working odd-jobs after school.  There had to be
something that a girl with super-strength could do to earn money, even in
Wilcox Township.
   She hoped that Phil would understand, but something still bothered her
about the way he had spoken about her leaving Wilcox.  He had been so
insistent, almost pleading, as if he knew more about the dangers she
faced than she did.  But that only went to show that he cared about her
-- or did it?  The only thing Becky-Sue knew for sure was that it would
take her at least a few more circuits around the town to sort everything
out in her mind.
   Without knowing it, Becky-Sue broke a series of light-beams as she
ran, triggering a sophisticated tracking computer that calculated her
mass and velocity to an amazing degree of accuracy.  Electronic messages
were relayed through the system, a magnetic switch was triggered, and a
high-speed hydraulic pump was primed for action.  A building-sized metal
box popped out of the soil in the path directly ahead of her, where
before there had always been nothing.  It happened too quickly and was
too close for Becky-Sue to avoid.  She passed through the circular
opening and slammed into the far wall, which gave way as it had been
designed to do, absorbing the impact of her body to a point, backed up by
the hardness of steel and concrete.  Behind her, an iris door closed and
sealed.
   "What the--?"  She punched the right-hand wall, denting the metal.
Two more times, and she fell to her knees, exhausted.  There was a
strange smell in the air, and Becky-Sue realized that she was being
gassed.  Desperately she hit the wall, three more times, each time weaker
than before, until she was no longer able to move or keep her eyelids
open.  "I should have taken your advice, Phil," she said, just before she
passed out.

--
Greg Fishbone                               fishbone@astro.ocis.temple.edu

    "Language lessons -- inspiring words from a man who knows how to ski."
                                                       --*Better Off Dead*