Chapter Twelve
Everyone in the Warehouse was on high alert. Dozens of squatters were packing their things and moving on in anticipation of the retaliation that was sure to occur, and probably soon. Like everyone else living there, Scott knew the police looked the other way when they cruised down the sprawling block that was home to the Warehouse and its tumbledown outbuildings. They did so not out of kindness towards the xenofreakish people, but because Lupus ensured it was worth their while to give the block a wide berth. But the big news of the day had everyone fidgeting nervously, wondering when the raids would begin and how bad it would go for them.
Scott watched a Holonews Worldwide broadcast from Abel’s office, which was powered, like the exam rooms, with a portable gas generator. The reporter was young but remained unflustered even when the swirling wind out in front of Middleborough Hospital blew her shoulder length blond hair into her face. She removed a strand that had gotten stuck in her lipstick and began her report:
“It has been confirmed by the FBI that the daughter of Harry Vega, the director of a New York-based anti-xenofreak organization known as The Pure Human Society, who mysteriously disappeared two weeks ago, has been found alive. Although no one has agreed to speak with us in an official capacity, our sources tell us the FBI had no leads on the case and had received no demands from seventeen-year-old Bryn Vega’s captors. She disappeared in broad daylight after the latest in a string of rallies by her father to gain supporters for his cause: regulating xenoalteration in the Legislature. Our sources say the girl was dropped off a block away from Middleborough Hospital, where she was admitted and examined and is in protective custody as we speak. No word on her condition, although witnesses described her as disoriented, with nearly her entire head swathed in bandages.”
So it was something on her head, Scott thought. He hoped it wasn’t her face, and not for the first time felt helpless and frustrated. With Abel in the room, he kept his face blank and appeared to be unmoved by the holocast. Abel, however, was jubilant.
“Now everyone will think twice before messing with us,” he said with a guttural chuckle. “I can’t wait for the big reveal. I heard Dr. Fournier outdid himself on this one.”
Scott nodded, thinking, you’re insane. The general populace already did think twice before messing with xenofreaks. As far as Scott was concerned, this act of stupidity would accomplish exactly nothing towards inspiring fear and respect, and it was more likely to fuel Harry Vega’s fire than shut him up. Once Bryn told her story of how she’d been kidnapped by the XBestia gang, and once they examined Dr. Fournier’s handiwork, swift retribution could be expected from the authorities. A few were responsible, but many would pay, and Scott doubted the flak would be contained within the city of New York.
“People are leaving.” He jerked his head towards the door. “Even Paddy packed up his hotdog stand and took off. Shirley said she and her girls are going to lay low until this blows over. She’s got two strikes.”
Abel threw his hands into the air. “Let ‘em leave! Damned place is too crowded anyway.”
Scott nodded. “Exam Room Three’s been sanitized and the word’s out.” Everyone knew what would happen if they talked. It was said that Lupus’ wolf face disguised one of the ten most wanted criminals on the FBI’s list, and he’d certainly proven himself to be vicious enough to qualify since he’d been in charge of Dr. Fournier’s operation.
Abel shut off the holovision and stood. He reached for the stained and battered cowboy hat he wore in public and settled it over his horns. “My wife has chemotherapy this morning.”
Coming from just about anyone else, the statement would elicit sympathy, but Abel made it sound like an inconvenience and an excuse to leave at the same time.
Scott asked, “What should we do if the cops come?”
Abel looked annoyed. “Run. Walk. Sit on your tuchus. I don’t care; just keep your mouth shut.”
Scott preceded him out the door and watched as he locked the office and set the alarm, a necessary precaution to prevent theft from the Warehouse folks, some of whom had proven desperate enough in the past to risk severe retribution to fuel their expensive habits. The alarm wouldn’t stop the police from breaking down the door, but they wouldn’t find information linking this branch of the facility to Dr. Fournier, much less anything leading them to his location. Scott knew because he’d already searched for it.
Abel took the one elevator in the Warehouse leading down to a very small underground parking lot with four large spots used exclusively by him and Lupus and for the vans that transported patients. Scott made his way to his tent. More and more xenos were leaving; it was starting to look like a mass exodus. As he approached Padme’s tent, he saw beyond the unzipped opening that she, too, was packing.
He’d tried to talk to her after Bryn was carted off, tried to use what he’d learned to get her to open up to him, but if anything, it backfired. Padme had muttered, “Stupid girl,” and walked away. She hadn’t spoken to him since, and he didn’t push it. The last thing he wanted was to give the impression that he was chasing after Lupus’ woman.
But today’s events gave him an opportunity to casually approach her and he wasn’t going to pass that up. He didn’t go so far as to invite himself into her tent however. Standing a few feet from the entrance, he said, “You leaving?”
Padme pressed her lips together in an approximation of a smile. “Obviously.”
“Well, I heard there’s room at Montenegro House.” It was a battered women’s shelter.
She tossed her rucksack over her shoulder. “They require residents to attend counseling sessions and to have a green card. I have a place to go, thank you.”
He wondered if she was going to be allowed to stay with Lupus, but didn’t dare ask.
“Well,” he said in a deliberately casual tone, “If I don’t see you again, good luck.”
“Scott,” she said.
He turned, surprised she’d used his real name. She didn’t say anything right away, like she was deciding if she should. Finally, she began walking backwards. “You seem like a decent guy…which is why they don’t trust you.”
A cold knot formed in his gut as she spun on her heel and disappeared from view. He’d worked hard for ‘their’ trust, done things that he never would have imagined himself capable of doing—all to gain their slippery trust. If his basic decency showed through, it was because the one thing he couldn’t do convincingly was pretend he enjoyed it. That’s why he kept his face as inscrutable as possible at all times—so they’d expect him to show no emotion no matter what was going on.
Padme’s words were intended as a warning, but Scott didn’t have time to contemplate them. Someone ran towards him, shouting, “They’re coming!” Before Scott could even react, a loud, bright series of flash-bangs sounded all around and smoke began belching out of multiple grenades from every entrance along the perimeter of the Warehouse. Armed and armored figures poured in, gas masks covering their faces. Scott hoped none of the panicked xenos fired on them, or there’d be a bloodbath. Just in case, he lay flat on the ground and waited.
The acrid green smoke that burned his eyes and nasal passages had dispersed evenly by the time a team of two agents ordered him to his feet at gunpoint. Scott stood, arms raised, and allowed himself to be frisked, bagged and tagged. He was forced to stand with one of several guarded groups of frightened xenos, hands bound behind his back with a specially-made zip-tie. They’d been told to stand quietly, but Barney was making his way over to talk to Scott, who refused to meet his eyes.
“Psst! Cougar!” Barney said. “Hey Cougar!”
Out of the corner of his mouth, Scott said, “Shut it, dumbass!”
“You!” One of the agents said, pointing right at him. “Come with me.”
Scott gave Barney a dirty look and snarled, “You’re dead,” before trudging forward, the picture of unwilling cooperation. The agent said loudly, “We’ve been looking for you, Cougar,” before grab
bing his arm and man-handling him out the door. As soon as they stepped into the sunshine, the agent said quietly, “It’ll be a bit of a wait.” He tucked Scott into the back of an unmarked car and shut the door.
It had been a multi-agency raid. Scott watched as xeno after xeno was escorted into police or FBI or ATF vans. Most of those that hadn’t fled the Warehouse in time were tweakers or alcoholics; the lowest members of the community, too high or drunk to appreciate the danger. Scott didn’t see Padme among the captives—maybe she’d gotten away.
He hoped not.
Chapter Thirteen
Bryn’s adjustable mattress allowed her to sit upright, a position she favored so she could avoid the discomfort of laying her head down. The doctors and nurses had removed the bandages and told her what they saw, but refused to allow her a mirror so she could see for herself. They also forbid her from touching her new ‘hair.’
“You don’t want to accidently get stuck with one of the quills,” said Dr. Lauren, the young resident assigned to her case. Dr. Lauren’s brown hair was pulled back into a perky ponytail, something Bryn would never be able to do again.
She was so wrung out from her ordeal she couldn’t even cry. Dr. Lauren told her father that she was in shock, told him she’d made a referral for someone from the psych ward to come talk to her, as if talking would somehow make everything all right. As if anything would.
Bryn spent almost an hour answering the questions two XIA agents fired at her. She’d never even heard of the XIA, which, she was told, stood for Xeno Intelligence Agency. She told them everything she could remember, but got the strange impression there wasn’t much they didn’t already know.
Her father stood outside her door, engaged in an intense conversation with the head of Middleborough Hospital’s neurology department. Bryn had a private room with a guard stationed outside. She’d eaten as much of the bland hospital lunch as her stomach could stand, and now waited to hear the verdict: what would be done about the porcupine pelt that had replaced her hair?
She’d loved her hair. It wasn’t her father’s thick black or her mother’s thin blonde, but somewhere in between. It wasn’t unruly like her best friend Maria’s curls, nor stick-straight like her other friend, Kim’s. Bryn could coax her hair into curls or blow it out straight.
Past tense.
She tried not to think of her scalp and hair lying in a bloody wad in some landfill. She also tried not to think of the poor porcupine that had been genetically engineered, raised in a lab and killed so that her captors could send her father a message: Look what we can do.
Bryn had asked Dr. Lauren what her options were and had been devastated at the response.
“Cadaver hair is one option,” Dr. Lauren had replied, clinically objective. “That would of course involve taking anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life, and there’d be no guarantee it would work. We could also remove the xenograft and use your own skin to rebuild your scalp.”
“My own skin? From where?”
“Your thighs or your back.”
“I’d be bald,” Bryn said.
“Yes. But there are wigs made out of human hair for chemotherapy patients that are quite good.”
Bryn remembered when she was six, before her great-grandmother died. Gram fought the cancer to gain some time even though it was the incurable kind. She’d been brave and cheerful despite the chemo that made her sick and made her hair fall out. She’d purchased synthetic wigs in several styles and colors, some of them quite bold and sassy, like the bright red bob she wore to the Fourth of July picnic.
Bryn was not brave like Gram. She didn’t want everyone knowing her hair was really a wig. But there was no way the hospital staff could keep this out of the media. Word would get out; pictures would be taken in secret or leaked from her file. She’d already had to pose for snapshots.
Her father came back into the room, followed by Dr. Lauren and the neurology guy, Dr. Brunswick, plus two other people Bryn didn’t know.
“Honey,” her father began and she knew from his tone that the news wasn’t good. “Dr. Brunswick has serious reservations about…well, about what would happen if we removed the—the—graft.”
“If?” Bryn asked in a small voice.
Harry Vega looked helplessly at the covey of doctors standing behind him. Dr. Brunswick squared his jaw and stepped forward. “Miss Vega, when we scanned your brain, we found that whoever did this to you also implanted nanoneurons, which are programmed to stimulate the brain in specific ways depending on what the graft is. Nanoneurons can never be removed, but they can usually be disabled—reprogrammed to do nothing. In this instance, however, we don’t know what program they used; it’s unreadable to our scanners. This means it could be dangerous to remove the graft. If the nanoneurons can’t perform their intended function, there’s no telling what will happen.”
Bryn stared back at the doctors’ concerned faces and at her father’s tortured one.
“I want a mirror,” she said. “Now.”
Chapter Fourteen
Scott had been in jail once before, in San Diego, his first day of leave after twelve weeks of intensive Marine Corp boot camp training. He and his buddies had gone out to burn off some excess energy playing volleyball on a beach populated with southern California hotties. When it got dark, they visited a tattoo parlor, snuck into a Pacific Beach bar and got into a fight, in that order. The fight gave him two things: his scar and a one-way ticket to the downtown jail.
The San Diego jail had been in an eleven-story building and smelled like bleach. Scott had gotten rudimentary medical care for his knife wound and sat in the drunk tank with his friends even though out of the three of them, he was the only sober one.
The xenofreaks, including Scott, that were rounded up in the Warehouse raid were taken to Rikers Island. Scott’s cell smelled like Pine Sol tainted with urine and vomit. He wasn’t surprised when he was processed like all the rest, denied bail and transferred to a Federal facility in an old building with thick layers of paint on the walls. He waited for his day in court, chafing at the necessary delay—any special treatment would look suspicious. As it was, his day came around faster than it should have, but all Scott felt by then was relief.
The officer that escorted him to his arraignment had no idea who he was. Scott wanted to slash him when he said in a suggestive voice, “The cons are going to love those soft little paws once we get you declawed, Puss-puss.”
Shasta Fox, Scott’s handler, was waiting for him in the box-sized virtual courtroom. He hadn’t seen her since the day of Bryn’s abduction when she’d arranged to bump into him at the fast food place a block away from the Warehouse. She’d gotten her hair cut since then and the short, spiked style did nothing to soften the dark skin of her aging face. On the wall were three holovision monitors labeled “Presiding Judge,” “Prosecutor,” and “Defense Attorney.” The monitors for the judge and defense attorney were blank, but a pre-recorded holo was playing on the one from the prosecutor’s office, explaining Scott’s rights and the legal process.
They ignored it. A holocam was pointed at them, but the blinking red light indicated it wasn’t on. Still, Shasta spoke quietly with barely moving lips.
“We lost her.”
No shit, Scott thought. “What happened?”
“They disabled the tracking devices.”
“How?”
It was a dumb question; a frustrated knee-jerk reaction kind of question in the face of the obvious. He’d sprinkled the micro-transmitters Shasta had slipped him onto Bryn’s hamburger and watched her unknowingly consume them. If the XIA had any inkling Fournier’s people could disable the supposedly undetectable, foolproof tracking devices, they wouldn’t have let Fournier take her. They’d gambled and Bryn had lost. Scott didn’t wait for Shasta to answer.
“What about the reconnaissance satellite and video surveillance?” he asked.
Shasta gave him a quick, impatient shake of her head. It was another useless ques
tion. If anything had worked, Bryn would have been rescued before they’d mutilated her and Fournier and his goons would be standing where Scott was now.
He’d done his part and there was nothing he could do about the rest of the team’s failure, but that didn’t mean he could shrug it off. He had his own reasons for hating the paranoid, psychopathic doctor, reasons Shasta had used to recruit him when she sought him out in that San Diego jail.
The camera light went green and a uniformed bailiff appeared on the judge’s screen. The bailiff announced, “All rise for the Honorable Judge Pricilla Adams.” There were no chairs in the room; Scott and Shasta were already standing when the background screen came to life and the bland face of Judge Adams popped up in front of it. Simultaneously, the prosecutor’s holographic face appeared. His only introduction was a line of 3D text that scrolled through the air in front of him, reading, “Marcus Quick, Assistant District Attorney.”
Shasta straightened her shoulders and said, “Shasta Fox for the defendant.”
After Quick read the criminal complaint against Scott, Judge Adams perked up.
“Mr. Harding, these are serious charges,” she said. “Do you understand them as they’ve been presented?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” Scott said.
“And how do you plead?”
“Not guilty.”
Shasta switched her holopad to 2D and handed it to him as the judge launched into a lecture about high-profile trials and media coverage. He tuned everything out in order to concentrate on the typed paragraphs on the holopad. His assignment was far from over.
There’d been two agents prior to Scott who’d insinuated themselves into the Warehouse community. Both had disappeared. Scott didn’t know much about the first agent; just that his name was Eduardo Quinones and he’d been a Green Beret. The agent immediately preceding Scott had been forty years old, an eminently qualified, decorated former detective from San Francisco with years of undercover experience. He had a wife and two kids. Voice stress analysis of his last communication before his disappearance showed extreme duress, and the XIA analysts determined it was probably a relayed message from Lupus or even Dr. Fournier himself. The agent had called on his burn phone and said simply, “Records can’t be expunged.”
Xenofreak Nation Page 5
