After the Dark

by Max Allan Collins

  Incursions by antitransgenic forces had been nil—unless you counted the occasional protesters—and, for their part, the Manticore refugees were fitting in nicely with the community, economically if not physically. To their surprise, the same attributes that made them premium-quality soldiers had also served them well in a business setting. With handsome X5 Alec leading the way through much of this new wilderness called commerce—had he been an '80s yuppie in a former life?—the transgenics had not only become successful, but were actually thriving.

  The spark for this pleasant bonfire of capitalism in the transgenic commune had been an unlikely one. It turned out that the very first Manticore creation—that hulking, lovable dog boy, Joshua—wasn't the only Terminal City resident with an artistic bent. Joshua's paintings had earned him money before, in a top Seattle gallery, and with the group in need, he'd painted with a new fervor.

  Based upon his sheer, instinctive talent, Joshua had been successful even before his tabloid celebrity, and now the value of his powerful, primitive paintings was skyrocketing. Gallery owners were clamoring for more “transgenic art,” and the residents of Terminal City responded.

  Dix, the potato-headed security man with the monocle, and his baseball-skulled partner Luke, were more than engineering whizzes who had hooked up Terminal City's security network, supervised the motor pool, designed and built its own power generator and water system. They were also burgeoning welding sculptors, forming abstract shapes that created concrete images in the eyes and minds of viewers. Overnight their hobby became a business.

  And Mole, it turned out, had a knack for sand sculptures; and many of the others had skills of their own, not always on the artistic level of Joshua and the sculptors, but in an arts-and-crafts fashion reflecting their own peculiar makeup.

  Max grinned at that thought. Let's face it, she told herself, who on this planet has a more unique combo of environment and genetics in their past than the transies?

  So they opened up a street market, and within a month the transgenic art had become a hit with patrons throughout the city, from culture mavens to average folks. Not only were the transgenic artisans prolific, they were talented, and they were media darlings—not the first media devils who'd made that transition—whose pieces fetched top dollar. In less than three months they had leased the seven-story building on the corner across the street from the main gate.

  To Max, the seven-story home of Terminal City Artworks was a building with memories. It had been in the coffee shop on the first floor of this building that she and Detective Ramon Clemente began to finally share the truth with each other—in the critical Kelpy matter—and to Max the restaurant represented the beginning of a shared trust, even friendship, between transgenic and ordinary.

  It had been necessary, of course, to open their arts-and-crafts mall outside the boundaries of Terminal City—the toxic industrial area where they had squatted was inhabitable only by the genetically altered transgenics themselves. That Terminal City loomed across the way—a vast steel and concrete ghost town haunted by transgenic specters, a shadow of capitalism run amok, free enterprise at its worst—provided yet another irony, a sweet one, as the counterculture mall flourished, a blossoming of free enterprise at its best.

  The nearby presence of Terminal City also provided an air of mystery and celebrity that attracted ordinaries to the “exotic” mall. Sketchy had hyped the mall in the New World Weekly, and the rest of the media had quickly latched on.

  Max liked the fact that the transgenics now owned the building—Logan Cale had loaned them the money, and was well on the way to getting paid back—and that first-floor restaurant had been reopened. Gem—the X5 who gave birth during the Jam Pony crisis that ignited the Terminal City siege—worked behind the counter, and two other X5s shared management responsibility (where food service was concerned, it was thought best to keep the more radically mutated transgenics behind the scenes). Most of the Jam Pony messengers stopped there to eat when they were making deliveries in this sector of the city, and with the cops still on duty around the perimeter, there was a constant threat to the doughnut inventory.

  The rest of the building had been turned into the shops of an eclectic arts and antiques mall. Those transgenics who didn't participate artistically worked the antiques booths. With tutoring from the former cat burglar Max—whose street-gang mentor Moody had taught her well, years ago, back in L.A.—the transgenic pupils learned which artifacts were worth saving and which could be ignored, not only within the boundaries of Terminal City, but at flea markets and dump sites throughout the city.

  Sitting in the first-floor Terminal City Artworks restaurant, nursing her cup of coffee, Max let slip a tiny smile as she considered how much they had accomplished in so short a time.

  “You look like the cat that ate the canary,” Logan Cale said as he walked up to her.

  “You know I'm a vegetarian,” she said.

  Logan swung into the booth across from Max. “I know you're trying to be a vegetarian . . . How's it working out?”

  She smirked. “Let's just say, next time you're ready to cook up a batch of that beefy chili of yours . . . I'm there.”

  Tall, with spiky dark blond hair, wire-frame glasses, and bright blue eyes, Logan Cale looked athletically fit. And, in a way, he was—maintaining a rigorous workout schedule in his modern apartment in a seemingly abandoned building just outside Terminal City's toxic borders.

  But beneath his casually stylish, baggy earth-tone trousers, Logan wore an exoskeleton that gave him the ability to walk, a skill stolen from him by the bullet lodged near his spine and regained through the use of the mechanical marvel that he wore all the time now.

  Though wealthy, Logan was far from being one of the idle rich. Instead, he used his money to try to fight government and private sector wrongdoing, working in support of the disadvantaged. Thus, he spent nearly every waking moment as the underground cyberjournalist that the city—and now much of the nation—knew as a mysterious voice and an image limited to those piercing blue eyes: Eyes Only. Barely a handful of people knew that Logan led this double life; another handful thought he was an agent of Eyes Only. But Max knew the truth—she had been working with him for several years now.

  “I see you're reading Sketchy's latest attempt at a Pulitzer,” Logan said.

  “Oh yeah. He's gonna pay.”

  “Ooooh . . . you sound so sultry . . . enigmatic, even . . .”

  She slapped at him with the tabloid, but she couldn't hold back the grin. “Coal in your stocking this year—definitely coal.”

  “We can always use the fuel,” he said. “You know what I want for Christmas? What I really want?”

  “No. But I bet you're gonna tell me.”

  He reached his gloved hand out and took her black leather-gloved hand in his. He squeezed. “That's what I want,” he said. “Only . . . I wish it was you and me . . .”

  “With the gloves off?”

  He grinned, almost shyly; but what he said was rather bold: “At least.”

  Max loved this man.

  She loved him, he loved her, and they should have been holding hands right now, really holding hands . . . Hell, they should have been living happily ever after, starting a long time ago . . .

  “We should be living happily ever after, about now,” she blurted, sharing the thought. “Don't you think?”

  “We could be facing a much bleaker Christmas.”

  “Only here we sit,” she said, ignoring his remark, “governing a biotech wasteland turned Jamestown for transgenics.”

  “Don't be so hard on the place. Or yourself. You've accomplished so much.”

  Calling Terminal City a Jamestown had been harsh, she knew—“Jamestown” referred to the modern-day Hoovervilles that had sprung up post-Pulse and were named after then-President Michael James. Terminal City had become much more than that.

  “Yes, we could be facing a much bleaker Christmas,” she finally admitted. “I don't know what's wrong
with me, Logan—it's like I have an itch I can't scratch.”

  He gave her a look. “I know the feeling.”

  Max damn near blushed.

  She waved for Gem to bring a cup of coffee for Logan.

  The real reason she and Logan weren't living happily ever after, of course, was because of a late and very unlamented blonde bitch Max had known only as Renfro. This was back at Manticore HQ—not long before Max had burned the place to the ground—where Renfro planted a designer virus inside Max, a time bomb ticking down to kill Logan.

  Basically, Renfro had made Logan allergic to Max's touch—fatally so.

  Christmas always brought thoughts of home, didn't it? Max reflected. And like it or not, to her and the other transgenics—whether the “normal”-looking X5s or the mutated freaks like Joshua and Dix—Manticore had been home.

  The result of genetic experimentation on a scale unheard of in the rest of the world, the Manticore refugees were freaks, and a large segment of the city still wouldn't let them forget that. After Colonel Donald Lydecker, the surrogate “father” of Manticore, had left, Renfro assumed command. She'd been in charge when Max was captured.

  Before Max's escape, Renfro and her team of conscienceless scientists—the Nazis might have relished having these “mad doctors” on staff—had injected Max with the virus, which was harmful to only one person on earth: Logan Cale. If Max and Logan touched in any way, he would get the virus . . . or rather, the virus would get him: Logan would die within twenty-four hours.

  For this reason, the two were careful not to touch, and both constantly wore gloves, and long pants in the warmest of weather . . . and even in intimate situations like this one, as they sat in the restaurant in a booth, the couple kept a respectful distance, like a middle-school boy and girl on a first date.

  Earlier this year they got a firsthand look at what the virus could do if it went unchecked. During Max's capture of Kelpy—the chameleon-boy-turned-serial-killer—he had somehow caught the bug. Due to Kelpy's fixation on Max, his ultimate target had been Logan, his prime goal to “become” Logan and thereby win Max's affections. When Kelpy started his chameleonlike morphing, turning him into a pseudo-Logan, Max had touched the changeling transgenic, and somehow that had been enough for the virus to be passed on—that is, to be unleashed on Kelpy.

  Max and her friends—Logan, best buddy Original Cindy, Alec, Joshua, and several others—had witnessed young Kelpy's meltdown and horrifying death. Since then, Max had worked even harder to make sure that she and the man she loved never touched. Anything—the brush of a kiss, the holding of bare hands, even the most perfunctory of hugs—would be the touch of death to him.

  Gem brought his coffee, placed the steaming cup in front of him and offered a warm smile, which Logan returned.

  “How's Eve?” he asked the waitress.

  The night after the Jam Pony hostage crisis, Gem decided that since her baby was the first transgenic to be born in freedom, the child should be named after the first woman in the world . . . hence, Eve.

  “She's already standing and she wants to walk,” the slim, attractive waitress said, “though she's not quite ready yet. She's gonna be a handful.”

  “Standing already?” Logan asked, astounded. “At six months?”

  Max just smiled. “Good genes—that is, really, really good genes. All of us X5s did that.”

  Logan shook his head in wonder, then sipped his coffee as Gem returned behind the counter. Max ran a hand over her face and let out a long sigh.

  “You look beat,” he said. “Too bad you weren't genetically enhanced to be a mayor, not a killer.”

  She gave him a weak grin. “That's how tired I am—even a weak-ass crack like that made me smile.”

  He snorted. “Weak-ass, maybe. But you did smile.”

  “I did smile,” Max admitted.

  “And we do have much to be thankful for.”

  “Yes, we do. Do I sound ungrateful . . . ?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Max just shook her head. “Sorry . . . I wasn't wired up to be a leader . . . I'm a loner. A commando.”

  After taking another pull from his coffee, Logan said, “Well, loner or not, there's a whole lotta people up on the roof, asking for ya.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Joshua, Alec, Original Cindy, Mole. I think Dix and Luke are up there. Sketchy, too . . . case you wanna toss his ass off the building.”

  “Now you are tempting me . . . But it's cold up there.”

  For most of the last two weeks, the weather had been miserable, even by Seattle's standards. The temperature had hung near the freezing mark, and the wind howling at thirty to forty miles per hour, with gusts as high as fifty.

  Logan gave her a look. “I don't see you wearing a coat . . . Anyway, aren't you the one told me 'bout holding your breath for five minutes? In a pond under a sheet of ice? Back when you escaped from Manticore?”

  “That doesn't mean I liked it.”

  “Where's your Christmas spirit?”

  “Christmas at Manticore didn't build a whole lotta holiday nostalgia into me.”

  “How about your foster family?”

  “Yeah, that was great—like when my foster father got roaring drunk and pushed my foster sister into the tree.”

  Shaking his head, Logan asked, “Talk about gettin' coal in your stocking, Miss Grinch. You gotta get in the Yuletide swing.”

  “I know a way, and it's not up on a cold rooftop.”

  “What's that?”

  “Sitting by a fire with you. What's that old song? ‘Chestnuts Roasting'?”

  “See,” he said, and his smile lighted up the place. “You do have some Christmas spirit in ya.”

  That smile of his—all those white teeth, those deep dimples. She loved his smile; she loved most everything about him. She just had a hard time saying so, and she knew he had a similar problem. But they both knew how they felt, and maybe that was enough.

  The two of them had also been so busy of late that they barely saw each other. Logan continued to use Eyes Only as a positive propaganda machine for the transgenics, and Max always had some Terminal City crisis or other that needed attending. If it wasn't trouble with the water supply, it was building code violations, or choosing a logo for the new arts and antiques mall.

  She might not have been interested in such mundane matters a few months ago, but now they were the tedious minutia that seemed to occupy her every waking moment. Having even a few minutes alone with Logan felt like finally coming to shore after swimming across Puget Sound.

  “Why don't we just go up there,” Logan suggested, “see what it is the gang wants, and be done with it?”

  She playfully shook her head. “I have a better idea.”

  “Which is?”

  “Ditch them.”

  His headshake was more serious. “You know we can't.”

  She huffed. “All right, we'll go up on the roof, we'll deal with whatever they want . . . on one condition.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The rest of the evening—it's just us. A quiet evening together. Starting with, I'll cook you dinner. I'm gonna officially fall off the vegetarian wagon tonight.”

  Now, she had his attention. “Just the two of us?” he said.

  “Do I stutter? Just the two of us.”

  She was already out of the booth, finishing her coffee on her feet, and fishing a crumpled bill out of her pocket. “Let's go.”

  Dix had the building's elevators running again; in fact, the mall was getting to be in such good shape, it was in danger of losing its funky appeal. Max and Logan went to the seventh floor, which was still in the process of remodeling and not yet open to the public.

  At the end of the hall, the couple entered the stairway to the roof. As they climbed, they both pulled on stocking caps; they were already wearing gloves. When she started to open the door, Max felt the wind—it had sharp teeth!—try to drag the door from her grasp, and only her special strength allowed her to k
eep the thing from flying open all the way. Once Logan was through, she managed to push the thing closed; then she turned to see the others waiting for them under a gray sky, dusk settling on the city like a low-slung cloud.

  Across the way, atop the main building of Terminal City, the Freak Nation flag flew, as straight out as a salute, stiff in the wind, its red, white, and black bars easily visible even from this distance, the rising red dove seeming to take flight.

  The group standing before her in a loose semicircle, and Logan to her right, now made up her family. She smiled at the thought, feeling guilty at her reluctance to accept their invitation, flushed with warmth, despite the bitter cold, as she looked at them.

  A girl could do a lot worse.

  Original Cindy stood in the center, her puffball Afro mashed beneath a stocking cap pulled down over her ears, her hands conspicuous by their absence as they hid behind her back. Though an “ordinary,” she was a true beauty, with lively brown eyes and a wide grin that challenged the cold.

  Not one to ever be considered “ordinary” on any level, though, Original Cindy's powers were somewhat more discreet than those of Max, her best friend and sistah, her “Boo”; but Cindy's attitude was in no way discreet. Original Cindy came on like a four-hundred-pound tiger on its fifth espresso, and she didn't give a diddly damn whether anyone liked that approach or not.

  Which, Max knew, was probably why O.C. and her had hit it off from the beginning, each recognizing the rebel in the other and relishing it.

  On Original Cindy's right stood Alec, his dark blond hair grown out some; normally he combed those locks back, though now the wind tossed them back and forth. He had sharp dark eyes and his face bore its usual wiseass smirk; he could be a self-centered jerk, Max knew, but he had his good side.

  An X5, like Max, Alec had never met a hurdle too low to try to find a skirting shortcut; he would happily spend an hour looking for a way around a problem that he could've solved with hard work in half that time. Lately, though, Max had noticed that Alec—to his credit—had finally started to realize that what he'd once considered a gift might really be a flaw.