by John Ridley
Mostly, that's the way it was with MTacs in hospitals.
But right then?
Eddi, Alcala and Soledad right then couldn't bust up enough. The situation was funny in a relieved kind of way. Everybody was relieved Soledad was still alive. Her left leg, specifically her knee, was fucked-up to a monumental degree by the hit it took from the Expedition. Beyond that, some scrapes and bruises she collected skimming over the asphalt on Ivy, the situation was funny. To a degree. After squaring off against flamethrowers, shape-shifters, even a telepath, Soledad had almost gotten taken out by a representative hunk of one of the worst automotive treads ever to get spat out of Detroit.
To the MTacs. it was hi-F'n-larious.
"Jesus, Soledad." Alcala joking. "Making all of us look damn near pathetic. An MTac getting put down by a station wagon."
"Wasn't a station wagon. You know it wasn't a-"
"Actually heard a traffic cop making cracks about MTacs. A traffic cop, Soledad." "Hey, I had the right-of-way."
Eddi: "Yeah, you always have the right-of-way."
"I'm serious. Had the right-of-way, and this ass…»
"Shoulda hit him with one of your bullets." "Guy barely brakes. Hate stupid SUV-driving sons of-"
"I've got an SUV," Eddi said, wearing that slick smile of hers.
"Figures. And he was on the phone too."
"You shoulda hit him with one of your bullets." Alcala saying it again. "What do you got for asses on cell phones driving their-"
"Lead. Nothing special. Just lead."
"Getting slow, Soledad." Eddi flicked through some food on a tray next to Soledad's bed with her index finger. Nothing worth trying. "You twenty-nine now? Might be time for your gold watch."
"Hell with that. I was making a move."
"Moving from human to hood ornament."
"Like to see you get out of the way of a speeding truck, kid."
'That's the thing: Us kids wouldn't let ourselves get boxed in first off."
Eddi and Alcala laughed, dapped.
What the hell, Soledad thought, was Alcala laughing at? She was older than him, but he was junior rank to her.
She was going to say something about that, but Vin walked in the room. Walked pretty decent for a guy with one real leg. That Otto Bock worked good. Vin walked in carrying some flowers.
Things quieted some, the laughing fell off.
Vin asked what was funny, what was the joking he heard before coming into the room.
Eddi and Alcala mumbled about busting Soledad's chops.
Then there was quiet. The uncomfortable kind.
Vin asked Alcala and Eddi how things were.
They said things were good.
The quad talked on about sports; what the hell was going on with the Lakers. The weather, the other night's episode of some sitcom.
Some more quiet.
Eddi announced she had some things to do. Alcala, too, said he had some things that needed taking care of. Both said their good-byes to Soledad, Vin.
"Good seeing you again, Vin."
"Take 'er easy, Vin."
Then it was just Vin and Soledad.
Soledad gave Vin an update on her knee. Tom ligaments. There'd he further surgery. There'd be physical therapy, a limp that would, hopefully, diminish over time. Time when Soledad couldn't work MTac. No matter how she'd gotten busted, she was a busted cop. Being busted was to be automatically inactive. Yeah, there was other cop work she could do: file files, write up reports. Any temp could do that. Doing that, the Admin work of law enforcement, was not being a cop. And the feeling that came with doing that-no matter she'd previously tried to convince Vin otherwise-was one of supreme uselessness. A car with no tires. A fork with no teeth. A Hollywood actress over the age of forty. It was a feeling as discomforting as any Soledad knew. Her job was her life, her purpose. It was her obligation. So no job…
No life?
No purpose?
And then Soledad got honest. "Scared me, Vin. Scared the hell out of me."
"Screwed up your knee some."
"Thought I was going to die."
"If a freak can't kill you…" Vin maintained a stare at the room door.
"That's what scared me. I've gotten it in my head I'd go out in a general alert, gun in each hand taking on a rush of muties. Put down as many of them as I can before I go."
"John Wayne."
"Angela Bassett. But then you see mortality rushing at you in the grille of a Ford… what the fuck, Vin? I was going to die, and I was going to die for nothing. From after birth to a stain on the asphalt, and what did I amount to in the between time?"
Still looking at the door: "This an ego thing? You figure your obit wasn't going to run enough column inches?"
"It could fill the paper, but right then I wondered, what would it amount to? That's what I was thinking: I was going to die without ever amounting to anything."
"Your gun, the telepath you took out…»
"I shot its wife."
"Another freak."
"I shot its wife. If I hadn't, would Yar still be alive? Would you still have your leg?"
"Wife or no, you want to talk about what the telepath would've done if you hadn't stopped it? Think about that."
"What I'm thinking, I'm starting to think… it's a war that breeds war." "Jesus, Soledad-"
"It's the kind of shit that never stops. So my gun, how many of them I take out… doesn't matter. They'll keep coming at us, we'll keep going at them. So what I do, what we do, what does it amount to? Might as well pack the fighting up, move it to the Middle East."
"You almost got killed. I get that. But you don't-"
"It's not a near-death experience. It's more like a-" It was more like what? "More like a near-useless death experience. I'm just feeling a little useless right now."
"Tell me about it, Soledad. Tell me all about it and act like it's new to me." Through Soledad's self-assessment, her talk of her feelings and concerns, Vin maintained his stare at the room door.
When Soledad finished her venting, Vin said at the door: "I'm a bad memory to them."
Soledad knew who and what Vin was talking about. Alcala, Eddi. Their distance, their coolness when talking with Vin. From the second he stepped in the room the shift in their mood was obvious. Soledad'd hoped Vin would take it in stride. He didn't. This was not good for her. Bad enough she had her own concerns. Now she'd have to put some emotional work into dealing with Vin's as well.
Soledad said: "You're not a bad memory. Alcala wasn't even on the element when we went at the telepath. You're not a bad memory for him."
"Then I'm a poster child for what happens when things go south. Couldn't even look at me. Barely could. Eddi could barely look at me, and Alcala-"
"That's their own guilt; that it was you, not them. They're staring at you, they're staring at mortality. They look at you, and they've got to deal with their own shit, so they-"
"They were laughing with you. They can laugh with you, but with me…" Vin realized he was still holding the flowers he'd brought Soledad. He formally presented them to her.
"They're pretty. Thanks."
"Got them downstairs. Was on my way up, figured I shouldn't come empty-handed."
"Or you spent all day picking out ones you thought I'd love," she coached. "You don't have to be honest. Sometimes it's okay to lie a little." Soledad, touched, genuinely: "Thank you."
Again, Vin looked to the door. "How's Eddi?" "Good."
"She good or just getting by?" "She's good."
"I worry about her. She likes to talk tough, but she's more girl than man."
"I'm telling you she's good."
"She had a thing for Yar, you know. Watching him get killed like that-"
"You want to make her?"
"Do I what?"
Soledad was kidding on the square. A little jealous, never mind her jokes. "I can slip her a note, see if she's got a date for prom."
"Or you could talk to her, make sure she's good
like you think. She worships you."
"She doesn't worship me." Adjusting herself, Soledad tried to turn down the volume on the throb in her leg. Meds had kept it subordinate for a while. Soledad had quit those. Wasn't some hard-ass ploy. Opposite of that. The painkillers were gooooood. Made Soledad feel as sweeeeeet as she had since… in years. She could see how people got hooked on the stuff. She could see herself getting hooked on the stuff.
So she quit 'em.
Soledad, finishing the thought: "She doesn't worship me. Not anymore, if she ever did." "She get a tattoo?"
"No."
"You sure?" "Checked."
"Checked everywhere?" Soledad stared at Vin.
Vin: "She's not dumb. She knows you hate hero worship. She's not going to get a tattoo on her shoulder,"
Soledad, still back at the head of Vin's statement: "Check everywhere like where?"
"Her ass, maybe. Maybe… you know how some girls like to get one right near the crotch."
Slow roasting. Soledad did some slow roasting. "No. I don't know. Why don't you hip me to how some girls like to get one near their-
"Soledad-"
"Okay, just so we're clear on things: You really want to bang her?"
"Do you talk like a guy because you think guys think it's sexy, or-"
"Yes, and do you-"
"I think Eddi's a very attractive person." Soledad opened her mouth to spew fire.
"But I think she's nothing compared to you."
No fire. No fury. Not a word. She didn't say a thing. Soledad's mouth maintained its slightly open position.
"So what are you going to do with yourself?" Vin asked. "I know you taking downtime isn't going to happen."
"I don't know." Soledad was talking to the wall opposite Vin. Forgetting for a second that her black skin didn't blush, humility made Soledad look away from him. "Was thinking of seeing if I could get assigned, to DMI. Next best thing to being an active MTac, right?"
Vin shrugged.
"Figure it'll be good too, you know; doing Intel. Find out what they know about freaks, how they track them, how many there really are out there. Now's the chance."
"Why don't you get assigned to HIT? You can keep your research going there."
"HIT is bullshit." Looking back to Vin, blush turned to heat. "Bunch of geeks who couldn't get jobs at Metal-storm or DARPA, sitting around with their bullshit theoretical science. 'Gee, maybe if we perfect a particle beam or a rail gun, we can take out muties.' Meanwhile, I'm in my garage making shit that works. Just because my knee's messed up doesn't mean I'm gonna go waste my time."
"But that's just your first reaction. It's not like you put a lot of thought into it."
Referring to Vin's causticity: "So what's the deal? Takes me getting just about run over to get you back to your old self?"
Rubbing at where his prosthetic and stump met: "The days of being my old self are good and gone."
And whatever trace Soledad had seen of the used-to-be Vin, cocky Vin, get-that-last-word-in Vin evaporated. Returned in brief, gone quick. By Soledad, bitterly missed.
She said to Vin: "You could come over with me. Real easy, you could get detailed to DMI."
"To do what?"
"To work Intel. To get intelligence on freaks." "Yeah, but for me; why?"
"Because you should be doing something. Because it's been eight months, and you should
be-"
"You want to get married?"
Soledad managed: "… Married…?"
"Do you want to marry me?"
In this second go-round, Soledad couldn't even muddle out the one-word response she'd given the first time Vin asked.
"You don't want to marry me. You don't want to… You talk about what'd help me heal-"
"It's not that I don't want to… " No conviction there. Soledad quit talking, didn't even try working past what Vin knew, what she knew was the truth.
"If you're not going to marry me, and believe me, the question was more for shock value than meant as invitation, but if you're not going to really be part of my life, then don't try to orient my life."
Soledad wanted to say something counter to that, but short of "Yeah, I'll marry you," what counter was there?
Vin told Soledad he'd be back later to see her. He'd be back to quietly kill time with her as she'd done with him when the situation was exactly flipped. Exactly, except Vin's leg'd been chewed off, not busted by an SUV.
A kiss to Soledad's forehead. A squeeze of her hand.
The sounds of the hospital bled in through the open door, then died off as Vin left the room.
Figuring there couldn't possibly be anything on TV worth watching, Soledad passed time looking at the flowers Vin had bought downstairs, brought upstairs.
Her thought: Painkillers'd be real good right now.
What's the difference, the joke goes, between an MTac cop and a DMI cop?
You can see how fucked-up the DMI cop is.
That's the kind of interdepartmental ribbing that beat cops, SPU and SWAT cops think's funny.
It's not funny.
But like most jokes that trade on. stereotypes, it's true. Kinda.
We're fucked-up, MTac cops; inside we are. Any MTac who's honest would tell you that.
Normal people-in the physical sense-who want to earn their pay busting superpeople…
You can say to yourself: Somebody's got to do it. Somebody's got to protect all of us from all of them. Yeah. You can say that. But most people, most cops included, would respond: Somebody, but not me.
There's something in us, people like me, that makes us respond: Okay, I'll do it. There's something in us that is, honestly, off. Not quite right. For some it's too much macho in their DNA. For some it's fatalism. Me, I feel guilty for my survival, and that guilt's informed or misinformed every other thing in my life. The choices I make. The ones that I do not.
Vin, for example. Why can't I just tell Vin I like him? Why can't I accept that I like him? When he asked me to marry him, why couldn't I just say…
Because I feel guilty. Because I won't let myself he happy. Because I can't commit.
For starters.
Yeah. MTac cops: fucked-up on the inside. On the flip side…
DMI cops, cops who work the Division of Metanormal Investigations, you can see how they're fucked up. Mostly, they're ex-MTac cops who'd survived going up against a mutie, but just barely. Routinely, DMI cops had burned flesh, scarred flesh, were absent limbs or eyes or extremities. They limped. Sometimes they wheeled themselves. But they wanted to stay in the game. Fight the fight to the bitter, bitter end.
There was no way they could work an element, serve a warrant on a freak. But they could work with the brain boys who kept tabs on the freak community, gathered information to use against the freaks: identify freaks who thought they were passing; living as normal when there was nothing normal! about them. Track the comings and goings of such freaks. Who they socialized with. What their abilities were. Most important: What were their weaknesses?
It's a hard little game trying to figure which muties to leave be, keep under active surveillance in hopes they "d lead you to something good-good being a boss mutie- and which muties are too dangerous to let walk around like they were free, white and twenty-one. The wrong pick, bad information getting passed up the line concerning which freaks were at worst a nuisance and which were a clear and present danger… that could be somebody's life.
Not a mistake that happened often.
Most of the men and women in DMI were there because of somebody else's bad Intel or incorrect choice. Being a victim of stupidity makes you want to keep anybody else from suffering through the same.
DMI didn't suffer stupidity. They didn't tolerate slacking. They were arrogant about their work. They were more important-more self-important based on who was doing the talking-than MTacs. All MTacs did was shoot. DMI gave the MTacs an edge when it came time to pull their triggers.
Whatever.
You could
go back and forth forever over who's the spearhead of the fight against muties. All I know, I'm not ready to give the fight up.
For a while, at least, I'll be working DMI.
Utilitarian, but as a style choice rather than a necessity of budget. Soledad hit the DMI headquarters in West LA and was, in return, hit with a mix of awe and resentment.
The awe: This is Soledad O'Roark. This is Bullet; the girl with the gun who'd been an operator on an element that'd taken out a telepath. Taken it out, mostly thanks to the gun. Hers. The one she'd made. She'd been BAMF a record number of occasions in a record short span of time. This was one of the best cops ever to wear a shield.
The resentment: "Who's this girl, this shimmer come 'round because her leg's bad- temporarily bad-and who'll go away soon as it's good again? Who's this MTac grant who thinks she's got the smarts, the skills to work DMI?
Some of the resentment wasn't so territorial. Some of it was just garden-variety bigotry. A woman cop? A Mack woman?
The mix of awe and resentment fluctuated from person to person. And while Soledad could do without the awe, she was surprised, from even those who admired her, to a person they all carried some resentment toward her.
"Don't worry about it." Abernathy passed a hand in the air, shooed away Soledad's concerns. Abernathy- his first name, rarely used in-house, was Benjamin- was, or would be for the time being, Soledad's CO. Her lieutenant, her "lieu." He was physically, Soledad thought, an unremarkable man. That wasn't, a slight. There was just nothing about the guy-his size, the cut of his hair, the way his features were arranged on his face; nothing biological or self-generated-that would make you give him, if you passed him on the street, a second thought. Except, except if you heard his voice. His voice was opposite his slight stature. It was deep and rich and booming. The voice of a beefy soul brother, not a negligible white guy. Should be singing some R&B. Should've, at least, been doing voice-overs for movie trailers.
"It's not personal," Abernathy said regarding Soledad and the cold shoulder she'd been getting hit with tag team-style from the minute she set foot in DMIville. Abernathy said: "Can't take it personal. DMI cops, their life is about being suspicious."
