Skin Game Page 7

  She grinned. “Always knew you would. You may be a lard-ass bike messenger, but you got a good heart, Sketch. You should remember that more often.”

  The goofus was starting to tear up.

  “Don’t even,” she said, raising a single digit. “Get the hell out of here and get back to work. You’ll be lucky if Normal doesn’t fire your lazy ass.”

  Grinning again, Sketchy slipped through the door.

  Original Cindy put her arms around Max. “You watch behind you, Boo, ’cause I ain’t got your back.”

  “You too.”

  Original Cindy’s smirk dug a dimple. “You think Normal’s holding a job for a bitchin’ Nubian princess who just happens to be playin’ for the home team?”

  Max grinned. “In a lot of ways I think you scare him more than I do. . . . Oh yeah, he’ll have a job for you.”

  The hug went on a few seconds longer, neither of them wanting to let go. Then Sketchy ducked back in and said, “Group hug! Can I join in?”

  “In your skinny-ass dreams, maybe!” Original Cindy said.

  He disappeared back through the door, Original Cindy sprinting behind him, yelling something about kicking his ass until his ears bled.

  With her friends this close to safety, Max couldn’t help but smile.

  Logan hung back and said, “So . . . I’ll see you soon.”

  “Yeah. Take care out there.”

  “I will,” he said, his eyes boring into hers, their feelings burning back and forth, riding the connection. “And you too.”

  She gave him a little nod. “I will. You better get going before Cindy kills Sketchy’s skinny ass. Of course, if she does, we won’t need my diversion.”

  Still refusing to take his eyes from hers, he said, “Seeya.”

  “Yeah, seeya.”

  This is where they would have kissed—if hers wasn’t a literal kiss of death.

  Then Logan Cale edged through the door, paused for one last look at her, and shut the door. Joshua stepped forward, gave her a quick hug.

  “Gonna be okay, Little Fella,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He said, “We better go.”

  She took a last glance at the door and said, “Yeah, we better.”

  As they walked back down the tunnel, Joshua’s face turned somber again, just as it had that morning.

  “You still worried about our brothers and sisters outside?” Max asked.

  “They don’t have family out there. Even Freak Nation has freak family. But out there,” he said, and pointed vaguely toward the ceiling, “out there, they’re alone. Might get scared by things they don’t understand.”

  “What?” Max asked.

  “Like Isaac. Afraid.”

  Isaac had been Joshua’s test-tube twin brother, a gentle soul. But abuse from the guards at Manticore had snapped the young transgenic’s mind, and when Max had set them all free, she’d turned loose a serial killer who preyed on men in uniform.

  But she couldn’t figure how Isaac tied in with whatever was bothering Joshua.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked him.

  “What Mole said this morning.”

  That only served to confuse Max more. “What did Mole say this morning?”

  “When we saw the news story about the murdered policeman.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mole said, ‘And they’re worried about us?’ ”

  “Go on.”

  “What if the one who killed the cop is one of us?”

  “Joshua, don’t pay any attention to what they said on TV—they’re going to blame us for every bad thing that happens in the city, for a while.”

  He turned those soulful, sorrowful eyes on her. “What if—we deserve the blame?”

  “Why would you even think that?”

  The dog man gazed toward the city. “Our brothers, our sisters . . . they could be out there now, alone. Scared, like Isaac.”

  All of a sudden, Max saw where he was going. “You think a transgenic really may have killed that cop?”

  Joshua shrugged. “People are afraid of what they don’t understand. We are people too. . . . Could be.”

  “But it could just as easily be one of them too.”

  He shrugged again. “Could be.”

  “You . . . you think it’s one of the basement people?”

  She was referring to the animal DNA experiments—like Joshua himself—who’d literally been caged up in Manticore’s basement.

  “A lot down there had it bad, Max . . . real bad. Isaac, Dill, Oshi, Kelpy, Gabriel. Many bad things done to our brothers. Guards were afraid of what they didn’t understand and they did bad things.”

  Joshua didn’t have a theory—he had nothing to go on but his experience, and in his life, if someone was killing men in uniform, it was a transgenic. Like Issac. Max tried to rid herself of the thought . . .

  . . . but it didn’t go away easily.

  Hustling back to the media center, Max laid out her orders, then, with Joshua and Alec accompanying her, she walked up to the blockade at the main gate at exactly nine P.M.

  Half a dozen officers pointed guns at them from behind cars. Illuminated only by the light bars, Max could nonetheless see the hatred in their eyes. She knew that each now fought the impulse to pull the trigger and kill the three transgenics without hearing a single word.

  In her earphone came Dix’s voice: “Jesus, Max, you really set them off. Security cameras show them hunkering down at every post. They’re getting ready for a fight.”

  Not changing her passive expression, she yelled, “Where’s Detective Clemente?”

  A very white man in a camouflage uniform and Kevlar helmet inched up so his head and neck were visible above the roof of a police car. “I’m Colonel Nickerson, National Guard! . . . I’m in charge here.”

  “You may be in charge of them, Colonel, but you’re not in charge of me . . . and I only talk to Clemente.”

  “He’s not part of this anymore,” Nickerson said. He was practically yelling, and Max didn’t know if it was because he wanted to be heard . . . or just because he was scared.

  “They’re on the street,” Dix said in her ear, meaning Logan, Cindy, and Sketch. “Everything’s go so far.”

  “Colonel Nickerson,” she said, her voice emotionless and almost bland, “do you want to see a peaceful end to this little situation?”

  “Yes, I do. The question is . . . do you?”

  Max nodded and took a couple of steps toward the fence. She heard guns being cocked as she moved—deadly little echoey clicks in the night.

  Nickerson came out from behind his car and faced her.

  “I’ve never wanted anything but to live peacefully,” Max said.

  In her ear Dix said, “They’re in the car—it’s started and they’re moving off. No one seems to have even noticed their asses!”

  “Then why the hostage situation at Jam Pony?” Nickerson asked, with some edge in his voice. “And why all this?”

  “Do you know an NSA agent named Ames White?”

  The question seemed to catch Nickerson off guard. “No—never heard of him.”

  Max could buy that—just as White had excluded the local PD from carrying out his dark agenda at Jam Pony, the National Guard colonel might well be out of the Ames White loop here at Terminal City. “That’s why I need to talk to Detective Clemente.”

  Nickerson looked confused.

  “By the time I get you up to speed, this mess may have blown up in all our faces. . . . The clock’s ticking, Colonel, and there’s nothing you or I can do to slow it down. The only thing we can do is work with it, and if you really want a peaceful ending to this, then you’ll do what expedites that. And that would start with finding Detective Clemente and getting his ass down here . . . now.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Otherwise, you’re lying about not knowing Ames White . . . and I’ll know where I stand with you.” Max looked at him hard. “Bip bip bip
, Colonel.”

  Then she, Alec, and Joshua turned and walked into the welcoming gloom that was their Terminal City home.

  Chapter Four

  * * *

  OTTO BODY EXPERIENCE

  SECTOR ELEVEN, 9:28 P.M.

  SUNDAY, MAY 9, 2021

  Bobby Kawasaki could feel the inner him—the real him—coming out. He had more energy now, though he still had not been off the sofa all day. The drug was finally winding down, and he could feel his true strength returning.

  On a normal weekend Bobby would have already been out; but even before it started, this weekend had been screwed up. He felt lucky that he’d gone out Thursday and gotten a jump on the weekend’s shopping. If he hadn’t done that, he’d be further behind—further from his goal—and he would have felt even more lethargic than he did now.

  The hostage situation at Jam Pony had almost screwed up everything. Bobby was a transgenic passing as an ordinary, and not even Max or Alec had known; not CeCe, either. Max and Alec he admired for helping other transgenics; but he’d been unable to find the courage to join in.

  Maybe he would find that courage, one day soon—after he reached his goal.

  In his run-down rattrap of an apartment on the eighth floor of a condemned building, Bobby was glued to his tiny used television—which he’d liberated from a sector checkpoint—carrying coverage of the hostage situation at Terminal City. This shabby studio apartment with its tiny stove, dwarf refrigerator, a coffee table that Bobby also ate on, and worn-out sofa was not going to be his home for much longer. Once he reached his goal, and finished his project, and could truly pass as human, things would change for the better.

  And Bobby Kawasaki would finally have everything he wanted.

  Rising, Bobby wandered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. He stared at himself—the white face, the features sort of pinched, the bone structure vaguely reptilian—in a manner reserved only for the vain and the self-loathing.

  He knew very well he’d been an experiment—something involving splicing chameleon DNA into his human genetics—though the Manticore scientists (his abusive “parents”) had reminded him over and over that he’d been a disappointment to them. Their goal, their project, had been for him to blend in with his surroundings on command; but as it turned out, this ability only manifested itself when his adrenaline spiked—something over which he had no control.

  Fear, anger, anxiousness, any extreme emotion set him off; but any other time—zippo. Oh, he sort of blended in anyway, in a more subtle manner; just not to the extremes his Manticore creators had intended for their projected military uses.

  The scientists had tested him extensively. In a crowd of Asians, Bobby appeared somewhat Asian, while in a crowd of Caucasians, he took on the poly-Euro cast thought of as all-American; if he’d been sitting with African-Americans, they’d remember him as a light-skinned brother, albeit a quiet, unremarkable, definitely undistinctive one.

  Of course, that had been too distinctive for Manticore—the point had been for him to blend in so well, he would virtually slip away, and if anyone remembered Bobby at all, that was seen as a failure.

  Manticore was looking for an invisible man.

  And sometimes Bobby was just that—that was the worst part. On occasion the blending effect happened at the most inopportune times, as well. He’d lost a couple of job interviews and more than a few first dates when he’d simply blended out of sight in his nervousness to please.

  And once the blending began, once he had faded into the woodwork, he could not speak, did not dare call attention to himself, lest he expose himself as the freak he was.

  That had been the case until the drug, anyway.

  The drug—Tryptophan, to be exact—worked differently on his X3 metabolism than it did on his later X5 brothers and sisters. He knew that in them it controlled their seizures, made them more human. In Bobby the results were much more extreme. Sure, it kept him from blending in, but it also kept him from living.

  The pills made him feel like a hundred pound weight had settled on his chest. He felt drowsy, slow, and unable to connect with the world. They did allow him to hold down a job, though they had made him a different kind of invisible man: no one, not even at the hectic Jam Pony, seemed to notice either Bobby or his lethargy. His boss, Normal, dismissed Bobby’s listlessness as typical behavior, commonplace conduct among his regular layabout employees.

  “Bip bip bip, Bobby.”

  The words still echoed proudly in Bobby’s head. When Normal yelled at him, he was just like everybody else—human.

  The recent hostage crisis had exacerbated his already high anxiety level, however, and he’d had to double his Tryptophan dosage to keep from blending during the crisis. If he’d blended then, there was no telling how much damage it would have done. The ordinaries would have seen him as a transgenic—he would have been exposed, as Alec and Max had been—and any chance to keep up his human life would have been gone.

  Even the transgenics might have reacted badly, would finally realize he was one of their own, and perhaps see his blending as a betrayal. Either way, both sides would have hated him.

  And hatred was one kind of attention Bobby Kawasaki did not crave.

  Now, though, Bobby struggled to fight off the dulling throb of the drug. Tomorrow he’d have to be at work, and Normal wouldn’t expect any less from him. That meant by tomorrow he’d need to get back on his damn meds, so he’d have to pursue his project tonight, or else it would need to wait clear till next weekend. Though Thursday’s shopping hadn’t been discovered until yesterday, the effort of a midweek foray had weakened him considerably, and the double dose of Tryptophan on Friday had practically turned him into a zombie.

  He needed to go shopping—he was so close! One, maybe two more trips, then the big one . . .

  . . . and Kelpy—the name he’d been called by the other transgenics at Manticore—would be gone forever, and so would Bobby Kawasaki . . . gone, history, a ghost . . . as he evolved into the person he’d always wanted to be, the one person that would gain him access to the affections of the only woman who had ever meant anything to him . . .

  . . . Max Guevera.

  Looking into the mirror again, Bobby—for now he was still Bobby, stuck with Bobby—realized that he was starting to blend into the bathroom wall behind him. The drug was almost gone now. He would soon be at full strength and then he’d go shopping for material.

  After all, he had a human suit—a suit of flesh—to complete.

  Even though he bore a German name, Otto Gottlieb strongly resembled the Hispanic portion of his lineage.

  Otto’s Jewish great-grandfather had smuggled his wife and two boys out of Nazi Germany just before the onset of the Second World War. The family had ended up in South America, where the two brothers, Otto and Fritz, had grown up safe from Hitler’s clutches. Though many Nazis came to Argentina after the war, the Gottliebs were already firmly entrenched and the family furniture business had flourished.

  Otto’s grandfather had eventually married an Argentinian woman and they had a son, Samuel, who went to school in the United States, where he married an American woman and put down roots. Samuel and his wife, Eliza, lived the American dream. Selling furniture to families in Bloomfield Heights, Michigan, the Gottlieb family included Samuel, his wife, and two children—a girl, Elizabeth, and Otto, named after his father’s uncle.

  Brought up with a deep love of justice and an even more deeply ingrained sense of patriotism, Otto joined the Army straight out of high school. Then, following his service stint, where he had nearly made a career of it, he went to the University of Michigan for his bachelor’s degree, followed by earning a master’s degree in Criminology. Not long after that, Otto had been recruited into the NSA and—after four years of dedicated service—found himself partnered with the enigma known as Ames White.

  Not quite six feet tall, Otto liked to play basketball to stay in shape, but mostly he jogged, or really, ran—like he was r
ight now. Sweat dripped onto the front of his gray T-shirt and his feet thudded on the concrete of the street as he ran alone in the cool evening silence. The shirt and his matching gray shorts were both emblazoned with the logo of the FBI; but being with NSA, Otto had many clothes and many IDs with the names of various agencies on them.

  Working on mile seven of a ten-mile run, Otto huffed a little, but otherwise ran easily, arms and legs pumping in a natural rhythm. He loved this time of night. Darkness settled on the city, a gentle blue softening the edges of what Seattle had become, post-Pulse; no one to bother him, the job wasn’t pressing on him, the day’s work behind him, and, most important, time to himself, to sort out whatever problems occupied him at the moment.

  Tonight’s problem had to do with his boss and partner—that lovely specimen of humanity known as Ames White.

  Something was going on behind Otto’s back—or anyway, White was up to something behind Otto’s back—and the NSA agent hated that. He’d suspected White was pursuing a secret agenda, well before the crisis situation at Jam Pony; but, before, Otto had always been able to write off his suspicions about White to the man just being a little . . . odd.

  Otto knew plenty of government agents, and they were all—including himself, he realized—wired up wrong, in some way—even twisted in one fashion or another. Scratch a cop, and find a guy who’s looking for a little piece of personal power; scratch a government agent, and find the same sickness, writ larger.

  For the most part, though, these quirks were harmless, outweighed by the sense of civic responsibility that attracted a man to government service. White, however, was a weird, self-absorbed, negative son of a bitch . . . no question. The man seemed to have two saving graces: competence and patriotism. Only, Otto had started to doubt the latter attribute, wondering if White served some secret master. . . .

  Running like this, getting the poison out, usually made Otto dismiss such thoughts as absurd, even silly. But now—after the weird climax of the Jam Pony hostage crisis—whatever suspicions Otto had about White were only magnified, and given weight.

  His feet pounding the pavement, Otto let the movie of that night run in his head. . . .