by John Conroe
Chapter 13- West
The green Land Cruiser rumbled down the driveway and out onto the main road, leaving Mike West free to step out of the cover of the big poplar tree.
The hardest thing he had learned in spy school was mixing procedure, common sense, and his instincts. His gut had told him to park his car off the road a goodly ways past the hidden driveway and walk back. Procedure frowned upon leaving his ride so far away, but he listened to his talent and had found the kid’s car on the dirt road, turned and ready for a getaway.
Common sense planted a GPS device under the heavy front bumper, and when he heard the voices coming down the driveway, he’d jumped behind the tree.
Now that the kids had both left, he needed to find out what had happened to Machete. Sidearm held loosely in one hand, he walked quietly to the house and spotted the hapless AIR agent just beginning to regain consciousness, trussed like a turkey on the concrete walkway. Machete’s rental car was sitting near him, one tire flat and the smell of fried electronics sharp in the air.
He pulled the strip of duct tape away from the other agent’s mouth. Immediately, commands issued forth.
“I’m a federal agent in pursuit of a violent fugitive. Cut me loose and give me your car keys.”
“Tsk tsk tsk. You’re lying to me already, and we only just met. Bad way to start a relationship, Machete,” Mike said.
The other agent’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”
“I’m from Oracle,” Mike replied, enjoying the way the light dawned in the AIR agent’s eyes. He settled himself cross-legged on the ground.
“Let’s chat, you and I, about the little girl who beat you up, took your gun, and disabled your car,” Mike said, pulling a Taser X26P out of his coat. The bound man in front of him locked his eyes on the black pistol-shaped weapon, then strained in vain against the silver tape that held him in place. “Now, about that girl who is so damned handy with duct tape?”
Chapter 14 – Declan
“I don’t understand. How can you rape a witch? Couldn’t they defend themselves?” Caeco asked.
It was technically my turn, but I answered anyway. “They were both drugged. Only, my aunt woke up during the… event and blew her attacker off her. Then she drove the man who was raping my mother off of her and got her away. Aunt Ash is pretty powerful when she’s angry, but if my mom had woke up first, they wouldn’t have found anything bigger than a fingertip of the two guys, ‘cause Mom was world class. Now, my turn, and I get two in a row by the way.”
Her eyes, which had been a bit wide, now narrowed, but she nodded.
“If I remember right, a chimera was a mixture of animals. In your case, does it mean you’ve got stuff added to your genes?”
“Yes. My muscle fiber has chimpanzee DNA, my eyes, inner ears, and nervous system all have feline DNA. My synapses are influenced by mantis shrimp genes. I was created in a test tube and born in a lab,” she answered, her tone very flat.
“But your mom is really your mom?”
“Yes,” she answered. “You said before that your mother was a world-class witch, whatever that means. Well, my mom is a world-class geneticist. She was young, just out of grad school and full of ideas. Brilliant ideas. She was approached by the government—at least, she thought it was the government. They gave her the best lab money could buy, a concept for improving humanity, and turned her loose. She used her own eggs and frozen sperm from a carefully screened, deceased special forces soldier. Initially, there were seventeen ova, nine female, eight male. All of the males and two of the females turned out to be nonviable after the… splicing procedures were concluded. See, she used a virus to introduce the genetic material, and it triggered immune responses in some cases. Of the seven remaining females, five had complications from the added material. Uncontrolled organ growth, failure of cells to differentiate, things like that. They were all… terminated. At the end, two of us made it to full term.”
“You have a sister?” I asked, not caring that it wasn’t my turn. Apparently, she didn’t either.
“Had a sister. She died early into the training program.”
“Wow, Caeco, I’m really sorry,” I said.
“Why, Declan? I never knew her really. I have only the vaguest memories.”
“Still, she was a sister. It’s not like I would know… I’m an only child.”
“You say all that like it should matter to me. Why should it? I’m partially animal, less than human. It’s like losing one puppy in a litter,” she replied, her tone devoid of emotion.
“Less than human? Are you kidding me?” I answered with a short bark of laughter that made her head swivel my way. “Here I thought you were good at math. You have additions to your DNA, not subtractions. You are more than human, not less.”
“You are attempting to present the circumstances of my engineered birth in a more positive term, but it is still semantics. The reality is that I am not fully human.”
I snorted. “The reality is you’re just pissed that you met a bigger freak then you are.” I felt her tense beside me, and a frantic little voice of self-preservation told me to stop antagonizing her. I squashed the little voice and forged on. “So you were engineered. Big deal! That just means your mother put care and thought into the child she bore. I was bred. Bred by rape. My mother was the strongest witch seen in Ireland in over five hundred years. All of her ancestors had been carefully selected and married off to finally get her. Like a prize cow. Her family arranged for her to be married to a male witch from Europe. He and his brother came to call upon my aunt and mother and ended up raping them when they said fuck no to the whole thing.”
“Why not someone from Ireland?” she asked, which was a whole lot better reaction to my outburst than ripping my throat out, in my opinion.
“Witches are mostly girls. The gene passes from mother to daughter. Guy witches are rare. They’re also almost always a lot weaker, too. There were no unrelated dude witches available among the Irish Circles, so they went outside the families. Made an agreement with some Croatians. They kinda forgot to ask Mom and Aunt Ash’s opinions, though.”
“So you’re like a rarity or something?” she asked. Our little deal was apparently forgotten.
“Big time,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Like I said, most male witches are pretty weak, but they tend to produce strong witch daughters. I’m not weak. Aunt Ash says I’m stronger than my mom was. And my gifts are compatible with tech stuff, which is a whole ‘nother level of odd. You could say I’m a super freak among freaks.”
“That man you electrocuted with your hands bound? That was your… gift?”
I nodded. “Yup. I just needed a source of power nearby like the batteries. When the guy touched me, I channeled all the power I could draw, and it was a lot.”
“Did you feel bad for killing him?”
“At first, I was just happy to be alive, then when the DA was grilling the hell out of me, I got scared, but I stuck to my story. Trey claimed he didn’t see a thing, which left them with a dead serial pedophile and two live boys. We found out the guy had probably assaulted and killed a half dozen kids at least. I didn’t feel so bad for him after that. But I still have nightmares about it—about him.”
“I killed my first man when I was ten.” She had started to take off her torn t-shirt, but she stopped as she remembered. “He was a rapist. They took him from death row. Gave him a deal. If he could rape me, he could go free. They purposely worked me hard for three days first, not letting me get much sleep. Then they brought this guy in and told him that in front of me. My job, they said, was to resist, run away, whatever. Of course, my main instructor said, if you fall asleep, oh well.”
She pulled the shirt off, leaving her in just her black bra. I tried to keep my eyes on the road and my brain on her story. It was a struggle, till she got the new tee on.
“I ran the calculations. I was operating on about six hours sleep in three days and low rati
ons. This guy was fresh, rested and well-fed, and outweighed me by sixty or seventy pounds.”
“What did you do?”
“He leered at me and I ran. I was faster, but like I said, I was already tired. We were in a demonstration room, so there really wasn’t anywhere to go. He cornered me and then I turned and went at him. I went for his right leg and groin. He protected his groin but I slashed the back of his hamstring with my claws and..”
“Claws? Wait, you have claws?” I interrupted.
She held her left hand up where I could see it and flexed her fingers. Inch-long conical points slid out from under her fingernails. Claws. The girl had actual claws.
“Anyway, he collapsed; I took his back and choked him out. But they wouldn’t let me out of the room. The guy woke up and started coming after me again, dragging himself. I kicked him in the head and knocked him out, this time for a good ten minutes. But when he woke up, he started right after me. I was really, really tired, and he was still coming. I got frustrated and mad. When I kicked him in the head the second time, it was a lot harder. He died and they let me out.”
“Your mother knew about that whole thing?”
She shook her head, short hair shifting. “No, and when she found out, she went ballistic. They told her to calm the fuck down or she’d be off the project. That’s when she started to plan for our escape. Took another seven years to get things ready, cash built up, contacts for getting false identities made, codes to breach the alarms and locks, stuff like that.”
“How did she know when the time was right to escape the… what was it? A lab or something?”
“She didn’t, and yeah, it was a lab, way out in the desert. But she’d hacked the director’s secure email account and kept tabs on his conversations. When he got orders to terminate my project, she read them and we got out before they could do it.”
“Why would they terminate your project? You’re like the perfect soldier.”
“They spent decades of time and millions of dollars to get me. I wasn’t male, which was a negative in the minds of the leaders, and it took too long for me to grow up. Plus, I was unstable. They had developed Juice by then, and it was faster and easier to find trained adult soldiers and Juice them. Not as effective as me, but much quicker to produce.”
“What do you mean unstable?”
“You said I was the perfect soldier. I’m not. The perfect soldier follows orders exactly and fights like a machine. I’m stubborn and have a wicked temper. I resisted orders I didn’t like and when an instructor pushes my buttons too far, I’ve been known to kick their ass. They could punish me, but they built me tough, so it wasn’t an easy thing for them to accomplish. It was determined that some of my animal DNA was possibly effecting my emotions.”
I snorted. She glanced my way, eyebrows raised. “Stubborn and temperamental? Sounds like every teenage girl I ever met.”
I thought she might get mad, but she surprised me. “Really? Some girls are like that?”
“Some? Try all,” I said, then changed subjects. “Listen, do you want to risk your home, or head straight to your mother? Who you should probably text, by the way.”
“Already texted her. She’s on her way and no, let’s skip the rental home.”
“How did you text her? You don’t have your phone anymore.”
She looked my way and then forward. Went still for a moment. Finally, a full ten-count later, she answered. “Chimeric Adaptive Enhanced Combat Operator. The Enhanced was an add-on. A separate project—nanotech stuff that came along when I was nine or so. Self-replicating nano scale machines that bind with my nervous system and feed me information. Nannites. They act as antennae, picking up cell and wireless signals. Each is like a part of a computer chip. Together, they form a pretty powerful computing and memory storage system. So I don’t really need a cell phone.”
“That’s why you didn’t need a calculator for math,” I said.
“Wait. I told you I have micro machines inside me and you think of math class?”
I reached my hand across, touching the bare skin of her left forearm lightly. The static-like spark I had felt once before was there, but this time, I was ready for it. A light hum filled my ears, although I was pretty sure it wasn’t an audible sound. A wave of feeling passed into me.
“What did you do?” she asked, jumping enough to break physical contact.
“Why do you think I’m so good with computers, Caeco? I can read them. Sense what they are doing, running, computing. Feel software conflicts and system errors. I touched you once—by accident—the day we met. When the keys fell off the table. I couldn’t figure out what I was getting from that one touch. Now it makes sense. I felt your nannites,” I explained. “Although that sounds a little dirty when I say it like that.”
She laughed. A true laugh. I hadn’t heard her do that before, not a full-on laugh. It was a good laugh, deeper than I would have suspected. I found myself chuckling with her, my stupid comment suddenly much funnier than it should have been.
“Wow, I wasn’t sure you could laugh,” I said in mock shock. She snorted and smacked my arm with a really fast backhand.
“I was raised by scientists and soldiers. I have a sense of humor. Odd, but there nonetheless.”
“Oh, so something like the Big Bang Theory crossed with Inglourious Basterds,” I replied, rubbing my arm when she turned to look out the window. Damn, that girl was strong.
“Perhaps. Now, where should I tell mother to meet us?”
“Rowan West.”
“You would bring this mess to your aunt?” she asked.
“You don’t know my aunt. She’s probably already expecting us.”
Caeco glanced my way, one eyebrow raised as she considered my answer. I turned the Beast onto my home road and headed to the restaurant.
Chapter 15 – Declan
I was right. Aunt Ashling was sitting at the kitchen table when I led Caeco in through the back door. She had three places set, with bowls of soup and fresh-baked bread at each.
Despite her awesome abilities at Divination, she was still worried. The Craft gave her the big story, but a lot of detail could fall by the wayside. She knew, from her Readings, that Caeco and I would show up, but she couldn’t know in what condition. Seeing me, she jumped up and rushed around the table to hug me. Then she spun around and hugged Caeco as well, a move that caught my genetically engineered killing machine friend completely and utterly by surprise.
Caeco stood awkwardly while Aunt Ash wrapped her in an embrace, her dark eyes looking at me a little helplessly. I just grinned and headed for a bowl of soup. Caeco’s eyes followed me and lit up at the sight of the food.
“Goodness, dear. Yer a right solid one, aren’t ya? Declan, wait for your friend before making a hog of yerself. Now, Sarah dear, have a seat and help yerself to seafood chowder before Declan devours it completely. Fresh dill bread and butter, too,” she said, bustling around and getting the chocolate milk from the fridge.
I knew Aunt Ash was just burning off her nerves and she would shortly settle into her calm planning mode.
“Her name is Caeco, Aunt Ash. She was born in a government lab and they wanted to kill her, so she and her mom escaped.”
“Pseudo government lab. Agents in Rebus is not really a government group. It was formed decades ago by wealthy patriots to protect our country from a dysfunctional two-party government that changed leaders too often to be truly effective at defending our way of life. It was created within the government and has access to almost every part of it, but is not actually of it. Mother says the original intent may have been sound, but like everything else run by humans, it eventually morphed into something darker,” Caeco explained. She sniffed a spoonful of chowder, her eyes getting round at the rich delicious scent. The spoon disappeared into her mouth and her eyes suddenly closed in bliss, her expression just exactly like that of our cat Brona after a can of tuna.
“Where is yer mum, Caeco?” my aunt asked.
&nbs
p; “I’m here,” a voice said from the doorway. I jumped a bit to see Caeco’s mother standing in the door, eyeing us with distrust. I did notice that Caeco hadn’t even flinched at her mother’s voice. Instead, she continued to devour her soup and bread.
I looked back at her mother and this time noticed she was holding a nasty-looking semi-automatic pistol in her right hand, which was thankfully dangling alongside her leg and not pointed in our direction.
“Mother, the gun is not necessary. Declan and his aunt have done nothing but help us since we arrived.”
