Four and Counting: Past Reaction

As Tom sat down at his new desk within the squad room at NCIS headquarters, he felt his head begin to spin as images, feelings and ideas began to burst free. Feelings and ideas that he wasn’t to sure belonged to him.

*****

As he searched through the strange images and feelings, he found that some of them formed together to create memories of an event on a Zoombian ship involving Protectors that he didn’t remember occurring, and to add to that, he didn’t remember the other Protector involved either.

‘Mum! Come on!’ the boy protector yelled over the far off, but still deafening nearby gunfire.

            Mum? Tom thought. Who the hell are you?

            ‘Two seconds,’ the boy’s mother replied. Tom attempted to look around to try and find out where the mother was before suddenly realising that he wasn’t in any of his memories, he was in the mother’s memories.

            ‘Angee!’ a voice called over the comms device. ‘You need to get out now!’

            ‘I’ve almost got it,’ Angee replied as she finally managed to break into the engine’s fail safes. As the gunfire closed in and became much, much louder.

            ‘Mum, we need to go now,’ the boy responded, grabbing her arm.

            ‘Two seconds Jeremy,’ she responded, pulling her arm back and continuing to shut down the fail safes.

            ‘Angee, stop being so stubborn and get the hell out of there!’ the voice yelled over the intercom as he watch the hundreds of Zoombians butcher the Protectors that were holding the line outside the engine room. ‘Angee, get the hell out! NOW!’

            ‘Got it,” Angee responded before forming a sword out of temporal energy and using her superspeed to cut down the Zoombians that entered. How? Tom thought. Who is this girl?

            ‘Mum, we have to go now,’ Jeremy warned, the terror in his voice enough to make Tom want to leave.

            ‘Okay,’ Angee agreed. ‘Damien, is the escape ship on station?’

            ‘Just waiting on your orders,’ Damien stated.

As Angee climbed up into the ventilation system, another ten alien soldiers entered from the two entrances and opened fire upon them, causing Jeremy to form Force Fields all around him. ‘Mum!’ he screamed. ‘I can’t move! There’s too much happening. I can’t hold them.’

            ‘You have to,’ Angee called back as she tried to turn herself around in the cramped vent.

            ‘I can’t!’ he cried as his nose and ears began to bleed. ‘You can make it out, run.’

            ‘No,’ Angee cried stubbornly as she managed to angle her arm so that she could send a temporal blast straight at the engine.

Shortly after releasing the blast, the entire ship began to slowly warp and distort. Angee managed to make it out of the vent and to her dying son. ‘I’ll get you out of here,’ she whimpered as she picked up his barely living body. She turned to face the Zoombian soldiers as they managed to slowly gain their balance as the ship continued to warp.

Without warning, the engine let out a blast of energy that vaporised each of the Zoombian soldiers. When the wave struck Angee it launched her backwards into the wall while also vaporising Jeremy’s body. ‘Angee?’ Damien asked. ‘What just happened?’

            ‘I love you,’ Angee reaffirmed as she sat, unable to move, against the wall.

            ‘No, don’t say that, we’ll get you out,’ he stated simply.

            ‘Damien, any protector you send will be vaporised,’ she explained. ‘Why sacrifice more for nothing?’

            ‘Please, find a way out,’ Jeremy begged. ‘We already lost Jeremy and Sam. I can’t lose you too.’

            ‘I love you Damien,’ Angee repeated. ‘I’ll see you soon,’ she lied as the engine began to drown out all other sound.

The engine let out one final temporal blast that mixed in with the instability of the engine following the Angee’s disabling of the failsafes. The blast blinded the girl causing the next image that Tom saw through the memory being someone’s living room in the middle of the day.

‘Mommy,’ a small red-haired girl called out from the other room. ‘There’s a women on the coffee table.’

            However, before the girl’s mother entered the room, Angee deaged herself so that she was s six year old. ‘Hello?’ the woman asked as she came around the corner, to find Angee laid on the table, naked, beaten and bruised.

            ‘Help me,’ she groaned.

            ‘My name is Shannon, this is Kelly,’ the woman explained as she examined the bruise and cuts all over her body. ‘What’s your name?’

            ‘Angee,’ she managed as the pain spiked and she began to slip into unconsciousness.

            ‘Kelly, get dad,’ Shannon ordered. ‘Tell him to grab the first aid kit.’ Turning back to Angee, she asked: ‘Can you tell me where you are from?’

            ‘Newton Abbot,’ Angee coughed.

            ‘Do you know your family’s phone number?’

            ‘They’re all…’ she started before coughing violent. Blood sprayed out all over the carpet.

            ‘Shannon,’ Leroy, her husband, stated as he rushed in. ‘What’s going on?’

            ‘I don’t know, but she needs a doctor,’ Shannon explained as she grabbed a bandage to cover up one of the more problematic cuts.

            ‘Got it,’ Leroy nodded.

            ‘Now, where are your family?’

            ‘They’re dead,’ Angee coughed.

            ‘How?’ Leroy asked.

‘I don’t remember.’ Angee wheezed before blacking out.