Chosen Different_Book 1

by Nat Kozinn

  Chief Justice Garret Dwight

  Majority Opinion: Rodgers v. Houston Metro Area

  I don't think he really looks like the Devil, it's just the old woman's mind remembering him that way. None of the other witnesses remembered him with horns and a pointy tail. No one else remembered him with a tail at all.

  I’m looking through people’s visual memories from The Beast’s time in Chicago. I’m hoping to find some clue that can help me confirm if he is actually in Los Angeles. I know it’s crazy. I know he’s supposed to be dead, but so many people in the slums are actually afraid of The Beast. And I did find that kidney. I just need to know for sure.

  Unfortunately, no think.Net reporters ever caught a glimpse of The Beast. Reporters hook directly into think.Net when they are covering a story. The Telepaths are able to read the nerve signals as they come in from the eyes. That way, the Librarians store an unfiltered view for us all to watch later.

  Since no reporter ever got any footage of The Beast, I'm reduced to looking at the memories of witnesses who spotted him on the streets of the Chicago MA. These memories were scanned by Telepaths days or even weeks after they actually saw The Beast. The human mind is not very good at remembering details, especially when it's terrified. According to these warped memories, The Beast looks like a character out of a movie or fairy tale. He might look like a Were-Wolf, Big Foot, the Devil, or maybe even King Kong.

  The first reports of The Beast started appearing in the Chicago Metro Area news six or seven years ago. At first The Beast was only mentioned as a joke. They only brought him up as a little shot at idiots in the boonies who believed in monsters. As more and more people reported spotting The Beast, the press started to take the story more seriously.

  As The Beast turned from tabloid gossip to legitimate fear, the Metro Police had to respond. They set up patrols to hunt for The Beast. The hunters soon became the hunted, as The Beast seemed to target the police patrols. The few officers who survived described an incredibly powerful creature strong enough to crush a man's skull with one hand. That takes several hundred pounds of force. He's also got razor sharp claws and teeth capable of tearing human flesh to shreds.

  The reports of The Beast all culminate in the news story everyone has heard of: "The Beast's Feast." Just about five years ago, The Beast walked into Chicago Metro Police Precinct 12 and killed all thirty-seven officers inside. He ate many of the bodies.

  After the stories about "The Beast's Feast," there isn't much to be found. A few weeks after The Feast, an Office of Exceptional Cases spokeswoman gave a press briefing where she reported that the Different known as The Beast had been hunted down and killed by OEC agents. She did not take any questions from the press. But ever since The Beast was reported dead, there have been reports of him being spotted in every Metro Area. These reports have been dismissed as delusions. People still claim to spot Elvis, after all. No reputable news agency will carry the stories, and reports of The Beast have been relegated to the tabloids.

  I do a search for The Beast in a few tabloid article archives. In between reports of him being the love child of Satan and a Yeti and the supposed killing of a bunch of high-school football players in the Houston MA years ago, I find something useful. A picture, taken with a Pre-Plague camera, I think it’s called a Polaroid. It's a body, one of The Beast's victims in Chicago, a middle-aged woman. On her throat, I can clearly see The Beast's bite mark. I can use that.

  I need to check that bite mark against one of the people who have supposedly been killed by The Beast in the LA Metro Area. I should start with Becky's friend's apartment. I call her on think.Net, and she answers right away as always.

  >>>Hi, honey.

  <<
  >>>The pastor might not have liked it, but believe me, my dad loved it. He likes to see a good fight more than anything else in the world. You scored points by standing up to "Mr. Newman." Not too many people do it. Besides, you're a Chosen Son, remember? A little political debate is not going to be enough to turn my father against you. Trust me, he loved you.

  <<
  >>>I don't know. We have so few nights together. It doesn't seem right wasting them talking about such awful things.

  <<
  >>>You helped me even though you didn't know it. Don't worry so much. We weren't that close. She was just someone I knew from the neighborhood. She wasn't part of the church or anything.

  <<
  #

  The apartment building where Becky's friend was killed is a Pre-Plague structure that looks like it survived fairly well, especially compared to the rest of the neighborhood. Most of the three-story building still looks habitable. There's an old woman sitting on a chair on the stoop. She looks like she’s sat out here every day for the last thirty years.

  "Hello, ma'am. Do you know a Jessica Harris? I heard she used to live here," I say.

  "Why do you want to know?" she snarls back.

  In another world, a world without the Plagues, she would have been a sweet old lady. In this world, she has learned not to trust anyone, even though I'm in my old man disguise.

  "I was a friend of her father's. I knew her when she was just a girl. I heard what happened and felt the need to come see for myself," I tell her.

  "Her and her little girl been dead a long time. The looters already went through and took everything. You won't find whatever it is you're after," the crabby old woman says.

  "I wish I could have been here sooner, but it took a long time for the news to reach me in the Seattle Metro Area. Her father was a dear friend. I feel I owe it to him to see for myself."

  "Awful long way to come just to see some blood and bones. She was on the third floor, number two. Just make sure that's all you're doing. My son is in my apartment, and he doesn't take kindly to uninvited guests."

  "Thank you."

  I go into the building and up to the third floor. Someone has smashed in the door to apartment #2. It could have been whoever killed Ms. Harris, or the looters.

  Inside the apartment, there's a stench of death, but it's old and faint. The old lady was right about the looters. They tore this place apart. Whatever furniture or fixtures Ms. Harris had are long gone. There is blood, though. It's splashed all over the walls, the floors, and even the ceiling.

  There are handprints in the blood. Some of them the size of a grown woman—Jessica—some of them are much smaller—her child. Some of them are something else entirely. They almost look like animal tracks, large animal tracks.

  In the bedroom, there's a huge pool of dried blood and some bones scattered about, no doubt where Ms. Harris and her daughter met their end. The bones have had almost all the flesh torn off.

  I pick up a femur and inspect it. Rats have gnawed on it, but that's not all. Something with a bigger jaw than any rat that's ever lived has chewed on it too. I compare the bite marks on the bone to the bite marks on the woman's neck in the Polaroid picture. The canines are over six inches apart both on the top and the bottom. This is the bite of The Beast, the bite of a monster. A monster I'm going to stop.

  #

  I need to figure out a way to track The Beast down. According to reports of The Beast, he's definitely Physically Enhanced. I would say he can lift over two tons, minimum. Differents who are that strong need at least 50,000 to 75,000 calories a day. That's not all; many of the police officers The Beast killed in Chicago had fired their guns before dying. That means either he's got super-speed to dodge bullets, he's a healer and can recover from his wounds quic
kly, or he's big and strong enough that a handgun isn't enough to stop him. Maybe it is all three. Either way, that's going to take another 100,000 calories a day. That means The Beast needs 175,000 calories a day minimum, probably more like 200,000. That’s a lot of calories.

  How often would The Beast need to eat a person to consume that many calories? To figure that out, I'll need to determine how many calories there are in the human body. According to think.Net, the average American weights 133 pounds. Of that weight, about 15% is bones, 19% is fat, 41% is muscle, and 25% is hair and connective tissue. 19% of 133 pounds is 25.25 pounds of fat. 25.25 pounds is 11,453 grams. Fat has 9 calories per gram, which means the average human body would provide 103,077 calories from fat. Add that to the 54.5 pounds of muscle at 4 calories per gram of muscle protein, and you get 201,961 calories. Add in another 25,000 calories or so from sugar in the blood and what you can eat of the connective tissue, and there’s about 225,000 calories in the average human body.

  That means The Beast needs to kill every day, or maybe every other day if he hasn’t been very active. That is a lot of dead bodies. If people were finding piles of bones on the streets of the Metro Area, The Beast would be more than just a rumor, even in these poor neighborhoods. That means he's hiding the bones, which means there must be a hiding place or places, probably in one of the thousands of abandoned buildings that fill the Metro Area.

  The only question is which one. The blocks near where Becky's friend lived are a good place to start. But to go through every empty building would take me forever. Luckily, I have just the tool to help my search, my nose.

  Rotting flesh lets off some pretty unique odors. There are two gases in particular, putrescence and cadaverine, that give rotting flesh its unique smell. I know all about these gases from my work in the food lab. I just need to cue in on the odor.

  I stimulate my body to generate more olfactory reception cells in my nasal cavity. This will increase the number of molecules that my nose takes in from the air, increasing the general strength of my sense of smell. Next, I stimulate the growth of a particular glomerulus region of my olfactory blub. This will make me hypersensitive to the unique odor molecules of cadaverine and putrescence.

  When it is all said and done, I may have made myself too sensitive to these odors. It seems like rotting flesh is all around me. I can smell the infections of the ill, the purification of vermin corpses, and the fermenting of a thousand scraps of leftover dinner. Still, even amongst all the odors, something stands out. There's a constant flow of rot coming from the south. I follow the river of rank downstream.

  I wouldn't make a very good bloodhound. It takes me over two hours to find the particular building the smell is emanating from. It's a half-collapsed Pre-Plague house. As soon as I step through what's left of the front door, I know that I've found the nest. I'm pretty sure the smell would make me puke if that was still something that could happen to me.

  It takes me another five minutes to make my way through the debris-filled house and climb up the mostly destroyed staircase. I find the graveyard on the second floor in one of the bedrooms. Graveyard is not the right term. It's more like a sea of bones. There must be at least fifty people in there, maybe more. It's hard to tell when you're just looking at pieces of people.

  In the mess, something unusual catches my eye, a piece of metal. I scare some rats away and find a brown leather briefcase lying in the corner. I'm pretty sure it's made of genuine leather. You don't see many of those out here in the slums. I open the briefcase and pull out a piece of paper. I read the top line: "From the desk of Alderman David Gabbert."

  #

  I consider my options while I continue my patrol. I could tell the police about the Alderman, but then I'd have to come up with a good explanation for why I was looking through abandoned buildings in the middle of the night. I don't think they'll buy that I was just bored. It won't take them long to figure out that I'm the vigilante everyone's been talking about.

  I'd like to think the cops would thank me for figuring out what happened to the Alderman they've been trying to find for six months. I'd like to imagine I'd get the reward they're offering and maybe get to meet the Governor. I know that isn't what would happen. Best-case scenario, I'd get put on probation and told that if I ever tried to be a hero again, I'd spend twenty years to life in Great Basin prison. Realistically, they'd probably skip the probation.

  There's a police tip-line on think.Net that's supposedly anonymous, but nothing is really anonymous on think.Net, especially for Differents. I'm not willing to bet my freedom on the fact that the police stick to their word.

  I hear a scream. The sound bounces off the B-Crete apartments, making it as loud as a bullhorn. It's a woman, and she sounds scared. I'll have to decide what to do about Alderman Gabbert later. There's someone I can help right now. I take off running towards the sound.

  As I run, I hear something on the roof above me. I freeze and my thoughts immediately go to The Beast. I look to the roofs, but I can't make anything out. The woman shouts again, which compels me to keep moving.

  It takes me forty-five seconds to get to her, and when I do, I see a scene strikingly reminiscent of my first bout of crime fighting. There are three men chasing a young woman. They are toying with her.

  "Scream all you want, girlie. It's just music to me," one of the thugs says.

  Most nights, he'd be right. I can hear windows slam shut and shades drawn closed from the apartments that line the street. People are too afraid to do anything. Why shouldn't they be? If they intervened, they would become the victims.

  "Leave her alone!" I shout in my most intimidating voice and charge towards the attackers.

  "Yeah, what if we don't, old man? What are you going to do about it?" a thug yells back.

  I pause a moment to size up my opponents. Who appears the most dangerous? As soon as I take a good look at everyone, I can tell something is wrong. The clothes look normal for a trio of punks, but the men don't look right in them. They're clean and they have close-cropped hair. These guys can afford regular haircuts and showers. Maybe they're part of a cartel or something, but then why such ratty clothes?

  When I look at the woman, I know for certain that I am in trouble. Her gaze is fixed squarely on me, and it doesn't waver. She's scared, for sure, but not of her attackers. She's scared of me. Finally, I put it all together. These are the police.

  Without another word, I turn around and break into a full sprint. I pour adrenaline into my system, enough to damage my organs, but I can worry about that later. Right now I need speed.

  "Stop right there, or we'll shoot!" I hear one of the thugs yell.

  I believe him, but I'm still not about to stop. I'll take my chances that his aim isn't good enough to hit a moving target at a hundred yards over a life sentence in Great Basin. I hear a bullet wiz over my head. Several other shots join the first. The whole group is shooting at me, even the damsel in distress. I didn't know gunshots were so loud.

  As bullets ricochet around me, I round a corner to another block where three more officers are waiting for me. These ones are in uniform, and they're yelling at me to stop. I turn around and head back up my original street. I still have a lead on the group of Undercovers.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a young officer built like an ox charge at me from an alley. He's about to tackle me, and there's nothing I can do about it. I think I know how to handle it though.

  The Ox slams into me, knocking me to the ground. I go into a roll and spring back up to my feet. I'm up and running at full speed before the Ox even realizes I'm not lying next to him on the ground. More bullets hit the pavement around me.

  I get to the next corner right at the same time as an older female officer. Before she can raise her gun, I punch her in the neck, damaging her windpipe. She'll live, but she's not about to give chase.

  I round the corner and think for just a second I may have gotten away, but no such luck. Two more officers are running down the street
towards me. They don't bother to yell stop anymore, they just start shooting. A bullet whizzes close enough by my head for me to get a look at it. I need to get out of here, now. One of these cops is going to get lucky soon.

  I turn up an alley and hurdle over a pile of old concrete. As I reach the center of the alley, two officers come running from the opposite end towards me. I take a quick look back behind me and sure enough, three officers are heading towards me from that direction. I only have one option.

  "I give up, don't shoot me! Please don't shoot me," I plead.

  I hear a noise from above and look up. Do they have police on the roofs?

  Then one of the officers approaches and points something at me that doesn't look like a normal gun. It shoots a dart attached to a wire at me. I fall to the ground. I scream at my muscles to move, but they won't listen. Then I hear a loud crash and a grunt.

  16

  No matter where they are born or whom they are born to, all of my Chosen Sons are brothers. Their love for each other shall only be exceeded by their love of me.

  Chosen Sons: 34

  The Beast sees Gavin head out from the Slug, ready for another night patrolling the streets. This time something is different. Gavin looks like he is full of purpose. He is not just wandering aimlessly looking for trouble. He turns and heads into an apartment building. A building The Beast has used for feeding.

  The creature watches through the window as Gavin searches the apartment where The Beast fed. The meal was delicious, a young mother and daughter. Their flesh was tender, truly a bounty from heaven. The Beast knows Gavin will not see it that way. The truth of Cabot has not been shown to Gavin. He doesn’t know that the Lord has granted His Chosen Sons dominion over the humans just as the humans were once granted dominion over the animals. The boy would not spend his nights saving old ladies if he were enlightened.