Skin Game Page 11

  The cop stopped to look at her. “You do?”

  Max stopped and nodded. “Ramon, if we want to be part of this society, we have to prove to people that we’re not monsters. If one of us is doing this, he needs to be stopped.”

  “Now that would be good PR,” Clemente said.

  “It’s more than just PR—it’s the right thing.”

  She escorted the detective to the gate, where the two transgenic sentries awaited. As he walked through, he turned back to face her.

  “No one in, no one out—right?”

  “Right.”

  Clemente started to turn away, but turned back. “And, Max . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “We will talk again.”

  Her smile tight and sober, she said, “Good.”

  Clemente walked off into the early morning darkness, his two uniformed bodyguards falling in alongside him, heading for the National Guard barricade.

  Her back to the gate now, Max asked, “Dix, did you get all that?”

  “Oh yeah,” came the voice in her earpiece.

  “Call Logan, and transmit that tape to him. And, Dix?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell Joshua I need to talk to him right away.”

  “I’ll get on it. Where are you gonna be?”

  She started walking. “Coming to you.”

  Already waiting when she arrived, Joshua looked up when Max entered the media center. Dix, Luke, and several other transgenics manned the monitors, most of them concentrating either on the security screens or watching the TV news coverage. Dix sat up on his raised platform in front of his computer monitor.

  “You get Logan?” she asked.

  Dix nodded. “Got him online right now. You wanna talk to the boy?”

  “Yeah.” She climbed the two stairs up to Dix’s work station. He slid aside so she could ease in front of the camera mounted on top of his monitor.

  “Hey, you,” Logan’s face on the screen said.

  “Hi—need your help.”

  “When did I ever say no?”

  “Did Dix send you the conversation he taped?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Good. When you check it out, you’ll hear Clemente refer to a killing a while back. It was mentioned in passing on the news coverage of the cop who was skinned two nights ago.”

  “Rings a faint bell.”

  “It’ll ring clearer when you listen to that conversation. What I need you to do is find out all you can about that first murder.”

  “Okay—get right on it. Are we trying to solve a murder? Do we have some sort of serial killer out there, skinning his—or her—victims?”

  “All of the above and more. But mostly, know this: White’s involved with this somehow. One of White’s minions, Otto Gottlieb, called Clemente while he and I were confabbing.”

  “Does White suspect a transgenic? The TV newscast indicated that, remember. Or is this just antitransgenic media games?”

  “I don’t know,” Max said. “But there’s definitely something going on—typical Ames White manipulation and disinformation—and we need to know exactly what that is.”

  Logan said, “All right, Max. I’ll find out what I can.”

  Relief flowed through her.

  Somehow, having Logan working on this made her feel that it would all come out all right in the end. The other problems they’d met together had turned out all right, hadn’t they?

  Then she thought about where she was and the situation they were in and felt like laughing. Even surrounded by police and the National Guard, not knowing when an all-out genocidal attack might be launched on Terminal City, she felt everything was all right simply because Logan was on her side.

  Max allowed that perhaps Original Cindy had been right in saying, “Boo, you are so whipped.”

  She couldn’t help but smile; maybe she was.

  “Something funny?” Logan asked.

  She shook her head. “Just nice to know you’re working with us.”

  “Nice to be appreciated. . . . I’ll let you know when I have anything.”

  “Thanks,” she said, wanting to say, I love you, instead saying, “I’ll seeya.”

  “Yeah,” he said, pausing, as if fighting his own urge to say something significant, but saying only, “Seeya.”

  And the screen went blank.

  Max climbed down from Dix’s perch and put a hand on Joshua’s shoulder. “Can we go talk?”

  “Sure, Little Fella.”

  They went for a walk, ending up again in the tunnel below the far end of Terminal City. Though it gave them privacy, the claustrophobic space also reminded Max of the basement at Manticore; and she found herself feeling uneasy about being down here, especially when she considered what she wanted to talk to Joshua about.

  Finally, she just dove in. “You remember us talking about the others—the ones like Isaac.”

  “Yes, Max.”

  “I want to talk about them again.”

  “Okay.” His canine brow wrinkled. “Something wrong?”

  They took a few steps, the tunnel dark, their footfalls echoing very softly off the walls. Neither of them really needed the lights to see, and without Logan along, they didn’t bother to turn them on.

  “There . . . may be.”

  Joshua said nothing.

  “You see . . . another policeman died tonight.”

  “And now Max thinks it was one of us too.”

  Max shook her head quickly. “No—it’s just that Detective Clemente thinks there might be evidence that it was a transgenic.”

  “Not good. Not good.”

  “Joshua, that doesn’t mean it was someone from the Manticore basement, or even that the evidence is real . . . considering the source.”

  “Source?”

  “Ames White.”

  A low growl escaped from Joshua and his eyes burned with hatred.

  Though, like Max, Joshua sought only a peaceful life and a chance to fit in, a part of him longed to tear White into tiny pieces and watch him die very slowly. White had murdered his friend Annie—sweet Annie Fisher, a blind girl who had never hurt anyone.

  Gentle giant or not, Joshua still wanted to exact a full measure of revenge for this heinous crime. Max had kept Joshua from killing White that night at Jam Pony; but they both knew that if he ever caught up with White again, she would be wasting her breath, trying to stop the beastlike man that was Joshua from killing the manlike beast that was Ames White.

  Max eased down the wall and took a seat on the tile floor. Though she was someone who needed to sleep only every few days, she felt like she could just curl up on the cool tiles. Joshua slid down and sat facing her, his back propped against the opposite wall.

  “Because it’s White,” she said, “I’ve got to find out what really happened . . . and the more I know about our brothers and sisters on the outside, the easier it will be to deal with whatever ‘evidence’ White supplies.”

  Joshua considered this for a few moments, then said, “Father made many of us, but the others—the ones after Father—they didn’t care about us. They hated us, the ones in the basement.”

  Nodding, Max asked, “What can you tell me about them, individually?”

  The question seemed to perplex Joshua.

  Taking a deep breath, Max asked, “You remember how you taught me about Isaac?”

  “Isaac was easy to tell Max about—he was my brother, he was gentle. But they changed him.”

  “The others down there, you told me some of their names before . . .”

  “Dill.”

  “Yes!”

  Joshua looked surprised and a little scared.

  “Sorry,” she said, “I don’t mean to startle you—it’s just that that was one of the names you mentioned before. I want to know about them. Start with Dill.”

  Leaning back and closing his eyes, Joshua seemed to drift off for a moment. “He came after Isaac and me. Him and his brother, Oshi. After Father tried dogs, he mo
ved to cats next.”

  “Dill and Oshi have feline DNA?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Of all the things in her genetic cocktail, the feline DNA had provided some of her most inconvenient if not biggest problems. She still battled going into heat twice a year—just one example of the kind of humiliating shit being a genetic test-tube baby could bring a girl.

  “Any idea what kind of cats?” she asked him.

  “Not sure for Dill. Oshi—a Siamese, I think. They hated being kept in cages, but because of the way they could run and jump, they were kept in the smallest cells. That was mean.”

  “Very mean, Joshua. And when they got out?”

  Joshua shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “Didn’t you mention a Gabriel?”

  The snoutlike mouth smiled. “Joshua likes Gabriel. He comes from an ant.”

  “An ant?” Max asked, stretching her legs out in front of her. “No kidding—insect DNA?”

  “Oh yes. Gabriel looks like Max.”

  That surprised her. “Like me?”

  Joshua hesitated for a long moment. “Normal. Not like Normal at Jam Pony—normal like ordinaries. But Gabriel can lift six times his own body weight.”

  “Anything else out of the ordinary?”

  “No. . . . Well, he has an extra pair of arms.”

  “He has an extra pair of arms, but he looks normal.”

  Nodding vigorously, Joshua said, “They come out of his ribs, so Gabriel just wraps them around himself. Gabriel looks chubby . . . but normal.”

  She studied her shaggy friend. “You know where Gabriel is, don’t you?”

  Joshua looked at the floor. “Not anymore. Not since I moved to Terminal City.”

  “He’s in Seattle, though?”

  “Gabriel was in Seattle.”

  “And you two were friends?”

  Joshua continued to look at the floor. “Yes.”

  “You never mentioned him,” Max said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, not hurt, though oddly, she did feel that way, a little. She thought Joshua was her closest friend, among the transgenics; and yet he had kept things from her, clearly.

  “Gabriel was passing for human. I only saw him when he came to visit me in Father’s house.”

  “So . . . he could still be out there.”

  “Yes. Still. Out there.”

  “. . . Did they hurt him at Manticore?”

  Finally looking up at her, he said, “They hurt us all, Max—you too.”

  She could hardly argue with that.

  “The guards, they were scared of Gabriel because of his strength. They hit him with the prods whenever they went near his cell.”

  Max had tasted the electric prods of the guards herself, and knew firsthand how much it hurt.

  “Guards try to keep Gabriel weak by always hitting him with them.”

  In the darkness, she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Joshua. I’m sorry to . . . dredge this all up.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “They did it, we didn’t.”

  She knew that, but like all victims, she suffered strange pangs of guilt.

  They had all suffered immeasurably, and it wasn’t a surprise that one of them might have gone rogue. To Max, the surprise was that the rest of them hadn’t.

  After a while she said, “I think you mentioned another one.”

  Joshua thought hard. “Oh! Almost forgot . . . Kelpy. ‘Chameleon Boy,’ the guards called him.”

  Max needed no explanation about Kelpy’s DNA mix.

  “Kelpy didn’t work right,” Joshua said.

  “What do you mean, didn’t work right?”

  Joshua shrugged. “I just remember, guards and others, talking about what a waste of time Kelpy turned out to be.”

  “Was Kelpy beaten too?”

  He shook his big head. “No, they said his power only worked when he was angry or scared or something . . .”

  “Agitated,” Max supplied.

  “That’s the word,” Joshua said. “Agitated. When he was agitated. So they didn’t agitate him. They ignored Kelpy. Left him to die.”

  “No one to love him or help him,” Max said.

  “No one. Sometimes, Kelpy would just disappear into his cage.”

  Max knew that on some level all the transgenics felt that way. No one was going to help them, no one was going to love them. She’d learned different when she’d met Logan. Joshua had learned different when he’d met her.

  “Was Kelpy still there when we came in?”

  With a quick nod, Joshua said, “Yes—you even opened his cell yourself.”

  She shook her head. “I have no memory of him.”

  “I bet Kelpy has memory of Max. Later, Kelpy asked me your name and I told him, ‘Max.’ He said you were the only one who ever cared.”

  Someone she had never noticed. . . .

  They got up and started walking back up the tunnel. She tried and tried, but she just couldn’t seem to remember Kelpy.

  As they climbed the stairs back up to the first floor of Medtronics, her cell phone rang. “Go for Max,” she said.

  “They’re listening,” a computer-altered voice said.

  “Who’s listening?”

  “The ones outside the gate,” the metallic voice said.

  “Thanks, I already knew that,” Max said.

  The voice said, “The last time we spoke we were interrupted.”

  Clemente.

  “Yes,” she said. “We were.”

  Why was he calling now, and why all the secretiveness?

  “Our mutual acquaintance supplied what looks like irrefutable information.”

  White had given him evidence that a transgenic was the killer.

  “You do understand?” the altered voice asked.

  “Yes. But that information . . .”

  “Initially, damned near absolute. I’ve seen it. We’ll talk later. Like I said we would.”

  The phone went dead in her ear.

  “What is it?” Joshua asked.

  “I think it was very bad news,” Max said.

  She thought about what Clemente had said last. Initially, damned near absolute. What the hell did that mean? Was that strange phrasing some kind of code? Initially . . .

  But it wouldn’t come.

  Max looked at Joshua. “We better get back.”

  They stepped outside into the purplish light of breaking morning. The sun had barely dented the horizon, and she could already tell this was going to be another long day. They walked up the street in silence, Joshua lost in his thoughts, Max trying to figure out what Clemente had been talking about. . . .

  Initially, damned near absolute.

  Finally, as if coming toward her out of a heavy fog, she put together the detective’s little code. Initially Damned Near Absolute. D-N-A. White had provided DNA evidence that the killer was a transgenic.

  Now the next question was, why was Clemente telling her this?

  There seemed to be only one reason for him to trust her at all: he didn’t trust White any more than she did.

  So maybe they did have an ally on the other side. She felt she had connected with Clemente, and that he had believed her, even including the absurd—but true—snake cult story.

  Even so, that good news was heavily outweighed by the bad. Either White was manipulating evidence to make it look like a transgenic was killing cops or, even worse, there really was a dangerous transgenic loose in the city.

  A serial-killer transgenic, at that.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  LAND OF THE FREE

  TERMINAL CITY, 11:39 P.M.

  MONDAY, MAY 10, 2021

  Sitting in Dix’s room to one side of his work station, finally getting some time to herself, Max sorted through mental files filled with the things she and Joshua had talked about. Even though it had been just this morning, that conversation in the tunnel seemed so long ago—perhaps because these facts, new to her, summoned old memories . . . of Manticore
.

  Even as Max had dealt with the daily task of just trying to hold the fragile truce together, what Joshua had shared with her weighed heavily. She sifted through everything again and again, over and over . . . and the conclusion never seemed to change.

  These grotesque, terrible killings were—partially, at least—her fault.

  After all, wasn’t she the one who had turned the transgenics loose in the world in the first place?

  She would have preferred not to feel responsible for the killings, to be able to rationalize them away; but the guilt, the responsibility, was hers. It had been her decision not to leave anyone behind at Manticore. Now, while hundreds, maybe thousands, of transgenics lived free and happy, a few failed living experiments were loose who would have been better off in captivity—better off for themselves, better off for the populace.

  Max wanted to think White was behind these killings, and she knew him to be heartless enough to do such deeds, or have them done in the pursuit of the conclave’s twisted agenda; but something deep in her gut told her that the evidence he’d presented to Clemente just might be real. . . .

  A quick knock was followed by handsome, hazel-eyed Alec—in a blue T-shirt, Levi’s and running shoes—filling the frame of the doorway. “You might want to take a look at what’s going on outside,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the hallway.

  So much for some time to herself.

  “What now?” she asked, not bothering to hide her weariness.

  “Hey, I’m sorry to bother you—I know you’re carrying the weight. . . . But you better come look.”

  With a deep sigh, Max rose and moved out to the media center. “Something good on?”

  Luke, Mole, Dix, and the various monitor monitors all seemed tense.

  “Not my favorite show,” Dix said, and pointed at one of the security camera screens. “Some drunks on the west side are lobbing Molotov cocktails over the fence.”

  Max knew the nearest building was a good thirty yards in from the fence on that side, but as she moved to the monitor, she saw that the drunks were getting closer with each shot. And the building was a wooden structure, a two-story glorified shed that would not resist flames well at all.