For the Love of Super Soldiers

Time and Truth

I glanced at her and shrugged. "Can we do the important things first?"

"Right. Yes, we can. Definitely." This woman had to have at the most five years on me, yet her actions and words were almost childlike. It was an unpleasant realization.

"What is this?" I asked as she laid a laptop down in front of me with line graphs covering the screen. "Statistics for...?"

"Numbers of the "zombies" when they would attack. When all of this started, it was sporadic." She said, all the while pointing to the bottom left of the graph.

"Three, maybe four at a time," she continued. "Now we're talking maybe forty or fifty of them appearing and causing damage at once."

I nodded as I watched her hand move upward to the right of the graph. I was still staring at the screen when she spoke again.

"Usually after an attack, unless it was just eerily calm where we were, I'd enter what I had gathered from it. How many there were, what they looked like, even abilities or observable characteristics and tendencies."

"Right. And? Had something changed?"

"It's not entirely set in stone but..." she hesitated and moved the graph window towards the bottom of the screen, revealing her spreadsheet of observations. "Look."

My eyes scanned the cells of the page, reading quick notes from Stephanie's point-of-view.

Scattered.

Unintelligent.

Low strength.

As I got toward the more recent data entries, discomfort began edging its way into my gut.

Increased speed.

Battle formations implied.

Increase of deadly intent.

"They're getting...better?" I whispered to myself.

"Yeah," Stephanie responded."They are. Somehow, Lieutenant, and I honestly have no idea what that somehow is, but I do know that wherever they're coming from..."

"It's being done deliberately. Yeah, I got it." I answered while getting up. As I walked toward her suite door, I paused when I didn't hear her footfalls behind me. "Is there something else you-?"

The end of the sentence fell off as she stared at me and purposefully turned her head toward a laptop on her bed.

"I thought you were going to show your skills," she said in a taunting tone.

I laughed and walked over to her bed and pulled the laptop toward me. I opened up a command  window and my fingers began clicking all sorts of codes into the computer. When I finished, I simply hit the "enter" key and stood up.

"I'm done," I said.

Stephanie dropped onto the bed beside the laptop. "That's all? What did you do? Nothing has changed."

"I'm not as good as Victorian made me out to be," I said while shrugging. "Sorry."

As I left the room and closed the door, a distinct pinging sound from behind the door made me pause.

"Wait! Dammit!" I heard Stephanie mumble. After about five minutes of furious clicks and clacks from her side of the door, it flew open and I stared bemusedly at Stephanie. "You're better than he said. Much better."

"So are you." We both walked to the stairs and descended quickly.

"Yeah, thank God, or you would've crashed my computer," she said with a playful glare.