While my bed called to me, the possibility of the toad-thing still being out there was impossible to ignore, so I went into the kitchen. It overlooked the forest. Guard-duty time, and I stayed on the alert, listening carefully just in case Mr. Toad or whatever it was decided to make a return appearance.
Damn, that thing had hit hard, but glancing at my arm, at least the welts had already disappeared. So had the swelling. Then exhaustion slammed me, so I leaned back to get some much-needed rest. Still, in rest came dreams and memories, and they were of the past, always the past, and always of the same thing...
One year ago, Independence, Oregon, two PM, my house.
“I’m Donald Lucas.”
Those were the first three words the visitor had spoken. We’d gathered in my parents’ house. Lucas sat on a chair, while Joe and his father occupied one of the two couches in the living room. I sat on the other couch across the coffee table from them. Silence ruled. While no one said anything, everyone had a look on their face of something going down. What it was, though, no one knew.
“I’ll make coffee,” my mother said, breaking the silence, and went into the kitchen after throwing some nervous looks in our direction. When she returned, she served everyone. Tall, spare, and taciturn, Mr. Lucas declined the cream and sugar. He drank his coffee in three gulps and then set the cup down.
“We heard about what happened,” he began, his face placid. “When I say what happened, I mean the incident at your school, Mitch.”
My mother, who’d taken a seat on the couch alongside me, threw a look of consternation in my direction. “Mitch, you didn’t tell me.”
Mr. Chambers aimed a glare at his son. In contrast to Joe, he stood a good six feet tall, with dark hair and a beetle brow. “You didn’t tell me, either.”
Confession time, so I gave the details to my mother, and gradually her hand came up to cover her open mouth. Her voice came out in a hush. “I never knew.”
“News like this travels fast,” Lucas continued. “One thing led to another, and our department was informed—”
Mr. Chambers cut in with, “Which department are we talking about? If this is the government, what does this involve and why do you need to talk to my son and Mitch?”
Lucas turned to me and Joe. “Show us what you can do. We’re all friends here.”
No, we were not. I had no intention of showing anyone what I’d become. Puberty had been relatively painless, outside of the usual voice cracking and zits and whatnot, but it didn’t include growing wings and claws unless you were part of the harpy family.
While I did my best statue imitation, Joe wore a huge grin and offered up a spinning version of a mini-cyclone. It sent papers and cushions flying, but at the end of ten seconds, he stood in place, grin intact and not even breathing hard.
My mother’s mouth was already open, but now her jaw dropped about a foot, and Mr. Chambers’ jaw dropped even further. “Son,” he whispered but didn’t make a move at first. He then hesitantly put his hand on Joe’s shoulder as a gesture of support, or what I took to be support.
“It’s your turn, Mitch,” Mr. Lucas had said.
He wanted my answer? “How about no? I don’t feel like showing off.”
Let’s hear it for my mother, as she immediately arose and went to the door, wrenching it open. Her tone was not friendly. “My son’s answer is good enough for me. I think you’d better leave, Mr. Lucas.”
As for Mr. Chambers, his head kept swiveling back and forth between me and my mother. Finally, he asked the obvious question of, “What’s going on here?”
“Talk to your son,” Mr. Lucas said. He’d stayed on the sofa, and so far, hadn’t moved a muscle. “He’s the gifted one, as is Mitch.”
Gifted? How had I been gifted? With bat wings and claws? The irony of it all pissed me off, and I closed my eyes, hoping what had happened before wouldn’t happen again. My mother’s gasp told me it had. “Mitch, your face... your hands...”
Opening my eyes, everyone was staring at me. Wordlessly, I turned around and viewed my reflection in a nearby cabinet. “Holy crap,” I whispered.
The reflection showed abnormally high and slanted cheekbones, thin lips, coal black skin and deep-set red eyes. Raising my hands, the claws had emerged and the relaxed feeling in my back told me that my wings had come out. “When I get angry, this happens.” My voice sounded like something from the Lower Depths, and I tried to fight back the tears. “Sorry.”
Ignoring the pleas of my mother, I ran upstairs to my room and shut the door, heaving out great gusts of air. A knock on the door startled me into wiping my face. “Who is it?”
“It’s Mr. Lucas. Your friend Joe and his father went home. Can we talk?”
Curious as to what he’d say, I closed my eyes, made a mental effort to slow my thudding heart and breathing, and felt my wings melt into my back. When I opened my eyes, to my relief my hands and skin had gone back to their default condition. Lucas knocked again, and I opened up. He stood in the aperture, face impassive. “Can I call you Mitch?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
He came in and sat down on the bed with me. “Mitch, we need to talk.”
While I sat wondering about how unfair life was, he spoke about the program he’d been involved in, tracking down others like me. “I work with the government. So far, we’ve found two other unique people. They’re a little older than you are, but they also have special abilities.”
Turning into some kind of Saturday night fright feature wasn’t my idea of being unique. “Who are they?”
“If you and Joe come with me, you’ll see. The initial training period is two weeks. You’ll be taken care of. Then you’ll be brought back here. After that, we’ll see.”
Two weeks... where? Asking him, he shrugged. “It’s a place we have set up, sponsored by the American government.”
“Can you cure me?”
His face remained impassive. “We have a specialist waiting. She’ll take samples and analyze you. The rest is up to her and modern science. That’s all I can promise. I’ll come by tomorrow morning at nine. I hope you’ll have made a decision by then.”
He said nothing more then and left me alone. I wondered what to do. What with all the pros and cons, maybe someone with scientific knowledge could come up with some kind of fix for me.
When I went downstairs, my mother waited at the bottom, a pensive look on her face. “I’m going,” I said, and my mother broke down, sobbing.
I hugged her, and she kept crying, but after a while, she said, “If they can help you, then go.”
Lucas came by the next morning in a nondescript car with Joe sitting in the back seat. At the door, my mother had tears in her eyes and bid her goodbye with, “I hope they can cure you. You’ll always be my son.”
Nice to get that vote of confidence. After Lucas had tossed my suitcase in the trunk, we motored out to Portland’s countryside. What, no trip to a hidden mountain sanctuary or exotic foreign country? I was a little disappointed, but still, one of the virtues of living in this state was a lot of forest and no people. “We won’t be disturbed here,” Lucas had mentioned the further we went.
After thirty minutes, we ended up in a particularly densely forested area of the countryside. Our guide told us to get out and pointed straight ahead. “Start walking.”
We set off through the forest. About three hundred or so feet in, Lucas stopped and pressed something on his belt. An audible click sounded, and the ground in front of him slid away to reveal concrete stairs leading down to... where?
“This used to be a fallout shelter for the military top brass,” he said as he led us down the passage. “The army built it during the Cold War. It was decommissioned about twenty years ago, but we—our group—reopened it.”
Pretty freaky this place had been here for such a long time, and no civilian had ever found it. The way down was dim with only a few lightbulbs overhead to show us the way, but my eye
s soon adjusted.
As we descended to parts unknown, the air grew mustier, but oddly enough, it started to get lighter, and we finally emerged into a brightly lit open place. “This is it,” Lucas announced. “We’re over a mile underground.”
The room, roughly half the size of a football field, had been hollowed out of the earth. The ceiling was surprisingly high, maybe sixty feet up. A large, circular green mat sat in the center. A row of cabinets stood against one wall, and a table with all kinds of funky equipment sat next to the opposite wall. To the left of the table were a number of entranceways carved out of the rock, and who knew where they went?
At the same time, I sensed a presence, something about the spirits of people long dead. This place wasn’t haunted, was it? Joe glanced at me. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s like a mausoleum here.”
My comment got a barking laugh from Lucas, the first time I’d ever heard him show any emotion. “You’re not wrong. Some members of our armed forces did stay here for a while. But that was a long time ago.”
“There aren’t any skeletons here, are there?” I asked.
“You never know.”
His answer didn’t reassure me in the least. He said nothing else, merely directed us to a table dominated by equipment and where a short, stocky unsmiling woman in her forties sat. She wore a white lab coat, got up and approached us. “My name is Noelle O’Hara,” she said in a lilting Irish accent, with no hint of friendliness whatsoever. “I’m a geneticist working for Mr. Lucas. I’ll need samples of your blood.”
She led us to a side table where she took a syringe and some rubber tubing, tied the tubing around my upper arm, and drew out three vials of blood. After repeating the same procedure with Joe, she disappeared down one of the side passages.
“Well, that was fun,” Joe opined, rubbing his arm.
No, not really, and then one of the doors opened. Two people came out. One of them was a short, slender guy who looked like a junior high school kid. At maybe five-three, he had dark hair, very white skin, and average looks. He wore a pair of jeans and a plain dark blue shirt.
Accompanying him was another guy, taller and wider, who appeared to be around twenty. It was pretty hard to tell, as he wasn’t a guy, not exactly. Shirtless, he had a rock-like upper body—literally, rock. Jeans covered his lower body.
“Mitch, Joe, I want you to meet our two newest recruits, Neil Morton and Cal Winston,” Lucas said and pointed to the rock guy. “Neil is from just outside Portland.”
“I used to go to Landing High School,” the rock dude rumbled. “Graduated a couple of years back. Still living near here with my aunt.”
Lucas picked up on it. “Yes, he’s a local boy. Cal is also from Portland, but the eastern side, near Tacoma.”
With Neil, it was pretty obvious what he’d been turned into. He nodded at us and then sat heavily on the floor, his body sending up a vibration that jarred me. As for the other guy, he nodded at me. I asked the question, “So what can you do?”
As a response, Cal turned around and then back. Oh wow, he’d become...
“Holy crap, you’re a girl?” Right, blurt out those words and act like a total tool.
“I guess so,” he/she said with a faint smile.
Oh geez, he—or she—was. No change in height, but his hair had turned long, with rivulets of blonde cascading around his/her shoulders. His body had become a girl’s body, slender and toned and...
“Holy crap.” Her green eyes mesmerized me and only in the best way, and heat flooded every fiber in my body.
“That’s twice you’ve said it,” she offered in a feminine but not overly girly way. “My name’s Cal, but when I change over, you can call me Callie.”
“Uh, yeah, okay,” I mumbled, still dazzled by the transformation. Seventeen-year-olds tended not to be very articulate. I’d always been interested in girls but never had the opportunity to ask anyone out, especially since my transformation. Seeing this, though, my thoughts changed. All the same, Cal was a guy... or was he?
A few seconds later, she pivoted around. In a flash, the hair shortened and turned dark. The girl I’d been entranced by had become a guy once more. He swiveled back to face me. “I’m still learning how to control it. It’s not like I can turn it off and on, you know. I have to concentrate.”
“I can’t turn mine off at all,” Neil said from his position on the floor. He picked up a few pebbles, popped them in his mouth, and crunched them. “Yeah, I eat rocks. I pee pebbles and crap stones. That’s what I do. That’s all I do.”
A note of disgust sounded in his voice, and he turned his gaze to the far wall. What to say in this kind of situation? The answer—nothing.
Lucas had then shown us to our rooms, taking us down the passageway Neil and Cal/Callie had come out of. Bare-bones one-person affairs, they had a single bed and a shower and toilet combo. No windows and nothing else save a few extra blankets.
A hissing sound alerted me to where the air was coming from. A single vent overhead supplied it. It smelled dead in here, but then again, we were deep underground. Whoever had designed the place probably hadn’t considered max air circulation an overwhelming priority at the time. Yeah, more spirits hissing their displeasure at us.
After I dropped my suitcase by the bed, Lucas then took Joe and me outside again where we sat on the mat. He pulled up a chair, propped one foot on it, and gazed at us in the manner of a professor about to deliver a lecture. “The reason you’re all here is not only to find out why you are as you are but also to train you.”
“Train us... for what?” Joe asked.
Tapping his fingers together, Lucas replied, “You have certain abilities that the US government is willing to pay you to use. That is, in exchange for your services.”
Hold on a second. “I thought you were going to try to cure us,” I said, simultaneously going for not being desperate and acting forceful.
Lucas nodded. “We are. However, cures don’t spring up overnight. Dr. O’Hara needs to study your DNA, and that is going to take some time.” He spread his arms wide. “So this is where you’ll stay. We’re thinking of forming a team to combat crime. Your abilities are far beyond what anyone out there has.”
Hold the bullshit. First, they promised a cure, and now we were supposed to be part of a crime-fighting league? Looking at the other participants, they also wore dubious expressions. Joe raised his hand. “Uh, Mr. Lucas, can Mitch and me and the others discuss this, please?”
“Go ahead.”
Neil got up and lumbered over to the far wall to lean against it. Joe followed, and Cal stuck close to me, which was sort of disconcerting. Had we become best buds all of a sudden? Whatever, once we had a little privacy, Joe glanced at each one of us. “So, are we in or out? Me, I think this is totally cool.”
He would feel that way. Consider my feelings, will you? “You don’t turn into a monster, Joe,” I said, feeling my temperature rise. “And I don’t think Neil—”
“I can answer for myself,” the rock guy interrupted with an edge to his voice. “I’ve been here two days already. Lucas gave me and Cal the same speech. What I want to know is what you guys think.”
I bowed my head. “Sorry. I don’t think you like being rock or that Cal, er, Callie likes changing back and forth.”
“I live with it.” This time Callie answered in her feminine voice. She’d changed to her girl self but didn’t sound overly happy about it though. That was my take.
What got me, though, outside of a slight tinge of sadness in her voice, was her and how she’d made me feel. Right away, my impending temper tantrum disappeared. It was a very alluring transition, and suddenly I became aware of being attracted to her in a major way. Was it pheromones or something else?
This is all wrong. She’s a guy! Guys don’t date guys!
Neil piped up, cutting into my thoughts of intersex—if that’s what it was—potential dating. “Man, I got nothing. I
live with my aunt. We don’t have a whole lot of cash. I figure, cash now, cure later.”
“If they can cure us,” I responded, wondering how long it would take.
We went back and forth on the situation for a few more minutes, but in the end, came to a decision. “We’ll do it,” I said once we rejoined Lucas. “But you have to keep up your end of the bargain. We want that cure.”
He bobbed his head. “We’ll do what we can. That’s a promise.”
It was a promise or a hope of one.
Training began the next morning. After a night of listening for whispers of the dead, an alarm went off at the ungodly hour of five, jarring me out of my semi-coma. Lucas’ voice came through the loudspeakers in the wall in drill instructor mode. “Up and at it, gang. Time to face the day!”
After we wandered out of our rooms in our nightclothes, Lucas, suit neatly pressed, told us breakfast would be served soon. Morning rations consisted of a pre-packaged meal. It tasted like something made fifty years ago. I ate mine, prayed for death, and then went back to my room to change into jeans and a tank top, figuring I’d have to fly and didn’t want to ruin a t-shirt.
Lucas introduced our instructor, although he never gave us the man’s name. Around five-eleven, with a large chest and fat gut, he didn’t look like a fighter. He also had to be around fifty years old, bald and very nondescript looking. He then pointed at me. “Mitch, try tossing that rock kid to the ground.”
Even without trying, fighting Neil was like trying to throw a large boulder. Although my strength had tripled, I tried doing it and succeeded in moving him around three inches. Neil grinned. “Yeah, that’s me. I plant my feet, and I can’t be thrown.”
He then faced off against the instructor. Two seconds later, though, he ended up on his back, staring at him with incredulity. The man waved at Joe and said in a pleasant tone, “It’s all about leverage. Now, hit me, kid, if you can.”
Joe didn’t fare any better and soon found himself face down, gasping for breath. “Your turn,” the man said, pointing at me.
Outcasts Page 4
