For Reginald, his irises had been the feature most difficult to shift. They were the last feature he changed when he underwent a transformation and the first to revert back. Reginald guessed that, among shape shifters, the challenge wasn’t unique to him. And all the time he’d been talking, he’d been watching the black struggling eyes beneath him.
Only now their irises were turning blue.
“Two years ago, you were referred to an office in need of a secretary. You filled the position, and we all called you Mrs. Nance. You played the role perfectly. Slipping into Hal’s office when no one was around, photographing files, rigging the phone and intercom system for eavesdropping, following us when we’d leave meetings. You learned everything there was to learn about the Program. Came to know us better than almost anyone. When the time came, you used that knowledge to take us out. Only question is, who are you working for?”
Reginald eased off the shape shifter’s throat. The man’s eyes blinked once, and it was as though Reginald was peering into the blue of his own eyes. And then he understood: the son of a bitch was mirroring him.
Reginald kicked him in the side. “Who?”
The shape shifter jerked with the blow, but his eyes didn’t change. Neither did he speak. He gritted his teeth, though whether from pain or insolence, Reginald couldn’t tell. Reginald didn’t care.
“Who, goddammit?”
A rib snapped beneath his next kick, a kick that became the first in a brutal series — right foot, left foot — that knocked the shape shifter across the motel room. And though Reginald continued to scream the question, he was no longer listening for an answer. The man had simply become the murderer of Madelyn and their child. The man who had taken everything from him.
Reginald’s final kick knocked him face-up in front of the bathroom. Light around the curtained window illuminated his swollen, bloodied face. A face that was no longer Kilmer’s.
No longer a man’s, either.
Breathing heavily, Reginald descended to a knee. He took the dark chin in his hand and angled the face toward him. Where his blows hadn’t split them, her lips were full, sensuous. Her nose broad and flat. Breaths wheezed through a fractured septum. Reginald placed a thumb beneath one of the woman’s narrow eyebrows and lifted the slack lid. A bright blue iris stared out, the pupil withdrawing from the light.
Reginald hesitated.
Daddy started screamin’ again, ’bout gettin’ the devils out Mama’s head. Now she won’t wake up.
The woman looked to be in her mid-twenties, about the same age as he was. Reginald reexamined her nose, her lips, the similar bone structure to his own. He studied the eye beneath his thumb. Propped open, it appeared just as large and fearful as in his dream the moment before he turned from the girl and pulled open the door on their shack.
He stood back from his sister.
Twin sister.
The thought made his knees stagger. He sank to the edge of the bed, elbows on his thighs, hands limp. He stared at the woman’s twisted body. But it all made sense, didn’t it? Immense sense. No one had broken into the Champions laboratory and stolen his hair and skin specimens. The evidence recovered from the murder scenes had all come from her. The only person in the world who shared his cellular makeup. Someone whom he hadn’t seen since the day their father killed their mother and shot himself.
He fought to think back. The state would have swooped in and sent them to separate homes. Boys’ and girls’ foster homes for colored children. Reginald remembered the depths of his isolation in those early years. Save his one failed placement, Reginald hadn’t known family, not until Director Halstead found him when he was sixteen and recruited him to become a Champion.
For some reason, no one in the state system had bothered to tell him he had a sister.
But who found my sister? Who trained her? He studied her sleek black jumpsuit, easy to morph into a variety of costumes, her lithe muscles, her thin-soled shoes, meant for speed and stealth.
Who contracted her to eliminate the Champions?
He knelt beside her again, this time patting her cheeks. “Hey,” he said, “wake up.”
With a grunt, her head jerked toward his voice. Scabbed lines scored the far side of her neck, courtesy of Madelyn’s fingernails.
“Hey,” he repeated.
Her eyelids fluttered.
Behind Reginald, the door to the motel room exploded off its hinges. Splinters rained over his upraised arm. The door collided into the wall above the bed, then slid off the mattress to the floor. Reginald drew his pistol. The man who stooped through the doorway rose to his full height, his dark blond hair brushing the ceiling.
“You!” Reginald cried.
Henry “Titan” Tillman smiled and cracked the knuckles of a giant fist. “Miss me much?”
“What in the hell are you doing here?”
“What does it look like? I’m helping out a partner.”
The muscles between Reginald’s shoulders unbunched. Blowing out his breath, he slipped the pistol back into his pocket. “Thanks, but I’m good now. Our friend here’s down for the count. Another shape shifter.” He stopped short of telling Titan about his just-reached conclusion that the shape shifter was likely also his twin sister. He felt an unusual instinct to protect that information. To protect her, maybe.
And besides, he was talking to Henry Tillman, someone who, by all rights, should have been decomposing.
“So what’s going on?” Reginald asked. “The Program orchestrate a fake death for you or something?”
“Or something,” Titan replied, his shadow falling over him.
“What about the body they pulled from the river?”
“Belonged to that missing wrestler, Bud Body. Sad irony, don’t you think? Calling yourself Body?”
“Does that mean Firebrand’s safe, too?”
“Fraid not. You and me are the only one’s left, buddy. Well, me, anyway.”
Reginald looked up in time to see Titan’s looping fist.
The blow caught him in the stomach, blasting the air from his lungs. Glass shattered around him. He’d left his feet, crashing into the mirror above the bathroom sink. He tumbled from the counter, the Kevlar undersuit sparing him some nasty punctures.
Reginald groped for his pistol.
“Uh-uh-uhhh,” Titan scolded, grabbing his neck and hurling him the length of the room.
Reginald managed to roll in mid-flight and catch the far wall with his legs. But he lost his grip on his pistol, fumbling it out of reach. Pain crunched through his shoulder where he landed. Through his jostled vision, he saw Titan striding toward him, crushing the pistol’s barrel beneath the heel of one of his massive boots.
“Nothing personal, you understand,” Titan said, grunting into a kick.
Reginald twisted away, but Titan’s boot followed. A shocking numbness spread through his hip as he was knocked halfway up the wall. He landed into the corner of the room, toppling the chair he’d been keeping vigil in nights. He struggled to his feet, holding to the chair’s side. Something clunked inside his left hip. If it wasn’t broken, it was dislocated. Blood trickled into his right eye. He wiped at the dark blur with the back of his wrist and eyed his former teammate.
Injured and weaponless, he was no match for Titan. Not in close quarters.
Titan followed his gaze toward the doorway to the outside and smirked. “Not gonna happen.”
“Why are you doing this?” Reginald panted.
“Same reason you’re doing what you’re doing. To save humanity, right?”
“By killing us?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
Reginald was holding to the back of the wooden folding chair now, the flimsy partition the only thing standing between him and Titan. “And what’s our crime?”
“Your loyalty to the Champions Program.”
Reginald shook his head. “You’ve been brainwashed. You can’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Believe me
when I say nothing’s ever been clearer.”
“We were this close to ending the Cold War.”
Titan smirked again. “And you think the Soviets were just going to roll over and play dead? Your naiveté would have cost lives — billions of them. One more victory like the one in Berlin, and the Soviets would have rained every last nuclear-tipped warhead on the old red, white, and blue. A U.S. retaliatory strike? What would the Soviet Union care? They’d already lost their empire.”
“Spare their empire and forestall the day of reckoning, is that it?”
“That’s what Halstead and the others couldn’t understand.”
“So it fell on you to end the Program.”
Titan’s brown eyes flickered with some deeper knowledge. Something he wasn’t prepared to share. “It was either that,” he said, “or stand by while you do-gooders brought death and carnage on the world.”
Reginald’s gaze shifted past Titan to where the woman was struggling to her side. “Who’s she?” he asked.
“A partner,” Titan answered. “You all right, Shadow?” he called over his shoulder.
The woman stared around, dazed. One hand groped along her belt.
She’s looking for her gun.
Without shifting his eyes, Reginald envisioned the spot where it had skittered under the bed, about three feet from where he stood — scratch that, three feet from where he was propping himself up to keep from collapsing. In his condition, those three feet felt like three miles.
Just keep him talking.
“Say what you want,” Reginald told Titan, “but there’s more than altruism motivating you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re working for someone. The same someone who recruited you, who fed you this cock and bull about saving the world, sacrificing the few for the many. But the real world doesn’t work like that, does it? With the Champions, we knew the score. We were pieces in an economic contest: Western capitalism versus Eastern communism. Nothing less, nothing more. But it did become more for some of us, didn’t it? We found a family.”
Titan snorted. “Hold on while I fetch my violin.”
“What about you?” Reginald continued, wiping more blood from his brow. “Did you ever stop to ask yourself what your employer was really after? Or is this just a paycheck? Those fancy cars you drove, the tailored suits… You always lusted for the finer things. That’s why you were singled out, Mrs. Nance here alerting her employer that she’d found someone on the inside who could be bought. That’s the real story here, isn’t it?”
Titan’s broad smile was hard and without humor. “You always had a big mouth, Perry.”
“Blood money,” Reginald sneered, “not altruism. And for that you murdered your family. Our family. My family.”
“I’m done talking.”
As Titan stepped forward, Reginald flung the chair into his path. Titan batted it away like a pest, but the diversion gave Reginald the split second he needed. He grasped the underside of the bed and, with a grunt, flipped it out. As the bed tottered onto its side, Reginald flopped behind it.
The handgun was right where he’d pictured it. He grasped its grip in both hands and rolled onto his good hip. Titan’s upper body appeared over the bed, a huge fist raised.
Reginald squeezed three times: chuff-chuff-chuff.
Titan flinched back, the slugs deflecting from his cheeks and brow. His skin was as dense as rawhide, but he had his weaknesses.
The first was that he was easy to anticipate.
Reginald pressed himself to the back wall just as the bed rocketed toward him. Its legs crunched into the plaster. Metal coils beneath the bed’s frame consumed Reginald’s view. He took a steadying breath and, readjusting his grip, gauged the gun’s weight. Two more rounds in the magazine, max.
Titan tore the bed away. Reginald aimed and squeezed. The first shot glanced off his right temple.
Keep still, damn it.
The second found Titan’s other weakness.
His left eye disappeared in a black spray. Shrieking, Titan clamped a hand over his blown socket. Blood and a serous fluid spurted between his giant fingers. He wheeled around the room in a mad dance.
With any luck, the bullet pierced his orbital plate, entered his brain.
But Reginald had no plans to wait to find out. On hands and knees, he shuffled around the bed, his left hip thunking in and out of place. The room shuddered as Titan stumbled over Shadow and landed in the bathroom, splitting the counter. Water gushed up from burst pipes.
For half a second, Reginald considered reaching for his sister, pulling her along with him.
Instead, he found himself on cold pavement, squinting into the late afternoon. He pushed himself to his feet and hobble-ran around the side of the motel, past a Vendo bottle machine — “Drink Coca-Cola” — and into a line of towering bushes. When he emerged onto the street that ran behind the motel, he was a stooped Hasidic Jew, hailing a cab.
A red taxi pulled over. Reginald climbed inside, his vision starry from pain.
“Where to?”
Reginald pulled his black hat low to hide his bleeding brow. Long, gray locks dangled from his temples. “Union Station,” he answered in a thick accent.
The cabbie nodded and, popping his turn signal, eased the taxi into the start of rush-hour traffic.
32
Gainesville, Florida
Sunday, August 18, 1985
3:38 p.m.
Scott faced Director Kilmer, his throat raw from yelling, from demanding to know where Janis was. If he was wearing his helmet, he would have blasted Director Kilmer through the far wall, consequences be damned. The man had done something to Janis, to his girl.
“Where is she?” he repeated.
“Yeah,” Creed said, glancing around at the armored men, “and where’s my little brother?”
Agent Steel sighed. “We don’t have time for this.”
That was the last straw. Scott stalked around the table. He didn’t have his helmet, but he had his combat training. He’d only get one solid punch off, maybe two, but Kilmer would receive the message.
“Scott, wait,” someone called in a tired voice. “I’m here.”
He turned. She was edging through the open door, between two of the armored men. Strands of hair hung across her pale face as she limped forward. Scott rushed over and enveloped her. She was weak, but God, her warmth, her vitality, felt so good against him. He stooped to look at her face.
“What happened? Are you all right?”
Janis clenched and relaxed the muscles around her eyes, as though trying to focus, and nodded toward Director Kilmer. “It wasn’t his fault. My powers got away from me, went berserk. He hit me with a stun shot, like the ones we use in training. That did the trick. I’m still a little weak, but I’ll be all right.”
With his chin against her head, Scott heaved a long sigh through his nose.
“And your brother’s fine as well,” Director Kilmer told Creed. “He’s getting stitches and antibiotic injections for some injuries he sustained earlier today. He’ll be with us shortly.”
“Come on,” Janis whispered, taking Scott’s hand and guiding him to the conference table. “He has something to tell us.”
The others sat as well, Jesse lowering his chair. Margaret stroked her sister’s hair and gave her a hug.
“This afternoon, during my meeting with Janis,” Director Kilmer said, “I received an urgent message on my computer, a Level One. A threat to national security. The powers that be have determined it cannot be handled by conventional means. They’ve called on us.”
He clicked a small remote, and the lights dimmed. A holographic image of the world rose from the center of the table, rotating slowly. The image zoomed in on the midwestern United States, then to a green and tan patchwork of countryside. Inside one of the tan patches an unremarkable-looking complex took shape. Security fencing and what appeared to be a small school rose into the dust-speckled air above
the conference table.
“A little before noon, Eastern Standard Time, the Sterling Nuclear Launch Facility in southeastern Missouri was taken over by terrorists,” Kilmer said. “A group that calls itself the Scale now occupies the launch console, which controls ten nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. I don’t think I need to tell you the seriousness of the situation.”
“But wouldn’t they need the launch codes to do anything?” Scott asked, seeing Kilmer as their director again — not someone to be smashed to pieces. “The commander inside would never give those up.”
“He already has,” Kilmer said gravely. “At around thirteen hundred hours, the Strategic Air Command detected new target coordinates being uplinked to a military satellite. Before SAC could access the satellite to reprogram it, they were locked out of the system.”
Scott felt faint. “Should I ask what those coordinates are?”
“Major cities in the United States,” Kilmer answered gravely. “New York, Chicago, L.A., Atlanta. Others. In exchange for sparing those cities, the group is demanding the U.S.’s immediate and unconditional surrender to the Soviet Union.”
“But what about mutually assured destruction?” Janis asked. “Don’t they know the second those missiles take off the U.S. is going to launch a massive counterstrike? What they’re proposing is suicide.”
“The Soviets claim no connection to the Scale,” Kilmer said. “They say they’ve never even heard of them. The Soviet Ministry of Defense has been trying to contact them, to order them down, but the group has refused their call. That we’re collaborating with the Soviets at all should tell you the level of threat.”
“Why not just send in the military?” Tyler asked.
When Scott turned, he saw that Tyler had joined them quietly, taking a seat on Jesse’s far side. Padded bandages covered the back of his neck. Injuries from Tallahassee, Scott guessed. He experienced another jolt of regret — and jealousy — at the thought that Tyler had stepped in where he had backed out.
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 82
