Positive comment or not, Callie’s façade of confidence cracked, if only slightly. “They know who I was and who I am now. They’re staring. What else is new?”
Her voice held a note of defeat in it, and once more I reminded myself she’d had to go through as much crap as I had—if not more. Mood notwithstanding, she insisted that she had to get her shopping done and brightened when we went into the ladies’ fashion section. “Mind if I try on some clothes?”
“Do I have to wait outside?”
She gave me a long, fluttering wink. “I’ll model them for you.”
Had to admit it, each outfit she tried on was better than the last. They looked expensive. “Well, my mother made some investments for me when I was a kid. It’s for university—if I can get in.” A shadow swept across her face. “Even if I do, I’m not sure if I want to go. I like being me, but the people here...”
She fell silent and flicked a few nervous looks at the other girls. I didn’t see what the problem was. Callie was simply prettier than they were. And she was a girl to me. End of story.
Not to the others, though. Callie went inside and changed back to her regular outfit, bought a few items she’d tried on, and announced she was in the mood for something to drink. “There’s a food court in the basement,” she said as she started for the escalator. “Follow me.”
Downstairs, we got ourselves a couple of drinks and sat down in a relatively quiet corner. A few people walked by and whispered something to the effect of, “Two dudes having their private time,” but Callie concentrated on her drink.
If it had been only me sitting there, I’d have gotten up and confronted the jerks. One punk muttered, “Fags should get their own room.”
I got up, whirled around, and let my claws out. “You want to say that to my face?”
He immediately ran off, the little maggot. Steaming mad, I thought about running after him, but Callie grabbed my hand, and the feel of her skin on mine made me rethink my ways. Retracting my claws, I stalked back to my seat, stewing about what asshats people could be. “It isn’t worth it,” she said once we were seated again.
I gulped down some of my drink, but the taste had gone out of it, so I chucked it into a nearby bin. “It is to me. That’s because it’s you.”
Call it a clichéd line, that’s how I felt. My girlfriend’s face softened, but then her expression changed to one of alarm. She hastily stabbed a finger to indicate I should look behind me. “Mitch, that man... see him?”
Doing as she suggested, I pivoted around. A man, perhaps in his late fifties, stood watching us at the edge of the food court. Tall and skinny to the point of emaciation with a shock of wild white hair, he wore a rumpled ratty black suit and held a drink in his hand but didn’t sip from it. Occasionally he glanced around with a furtive look in his eye but always came back to rest his gaze upon me and Callie.
“How long has he been there?” I asked.
She replied that she’d seen him earlier on. “I think he followed us here. I’m not sure. Just ignore him.”
Easy for her to say to ignore him, but he continued to stare. Finally, I’d had it. Temperature rising time and this would have to happen. “That guy is pissing me off,” I said as I rose from my seat. “If he has a problem, he can talk to me.”
Callie grabbed her bags and came with me. “Don’t get into a fight over me, please,” she begged. “That’s what they want.”
Passion and reason ruled her statement, but all the same, it didn’t dissuade me. “I’m just going to talk to the guy.”
Direct approaches usually worked best, so I motored on over in his direction. “Are you staring at me or my girlfriend, mister? If you are, stop, because I don’t like it.”
This time, he took a sip from his drink and then tossed it into a nearby garbage can. “I’m looking at both of you. You’re Mitchell Kessler, and you’re Cal Winston.”
“It’s Callie,” my girlfriend said in a firm voice, her stance set. “I don’t go by my old name anymore.”
The guy bobbed his head at her in an apologetic manner. “Sorry. Callie. I’ll remember. But you both need to come with me. We have to talk.”
His manner, quiet and reasonable, got me interested. I couldn’t see a bulge under his armpit or anything near his waist, so he wasn’t armed, and he held his hands clasped together in front of his body. If he was going to start something, he was leaving himself wide open. “You’re not an FBI agent, are you?”
A sharp bark of a laugh came from him. “No, I’m not. I’m from the committee that created you.”
We sat on a bench in a quiet part of a nearby park. The sun shone through the leaves, casting a friendly yellow glow around us, and he began to talk in a calm, rational manner. “I’m not going to give you my name, but I will tell you that I belonged to the committee. Yes, they’re the people that created you, your friend Joseph, and the other boy, Neil. The four of you, you came from us.”
Fantastic, but if true, how could we know he was telling the truth? Asking him, he nodded as if he’d been expecting to be quizzed. “Your handler’s name was Donald Lucas. That’s public knowledge, so I’ll try to do better.”
He then took out a piece of paper from his breast pocket and handed it over to Callie. “All right then, here’s more proof.”
“What’s this?” she asked.
“It shows a timeline for when you started changing to the exact day. You remember, don’t you?”
A look of shock came over her face. “Yeah, I’ve always kept a record, but how would you know?”
“It’s science. This paper also shows whether you had male organs or not, and how long you stayed at each gender. It will also predict when you’ll shift from this point on.”
It seemed impossible, but then again, I could fly and turn into a monster, and my best friend was a spinning top. Right now, anything was possible.
With a trembling hand, Callie took the paper and carefully stowed it away in her purse. She then asked the obvious question of why. The man sighed. “There’s always a why. Years back, some individuals in the military, some in the sciences, and some in homeland security, wondered how to make this country safer. They discussed germ warfare, bombs, modifying food, and more.
“Then we turned to genetic manipulation. Gene therapy isn’t new. It offers a whole range of possibilities to treat diseases. Cystic fibrosis, cancer, leukemia—I was on a council that researched gene therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. I got results, and then the committee recruited me.”
Always the committee, always the same faceless people, and it turned out this guy didn’t know any more about them than we did. “A man, a soldier, came to my place of work one day. I never got his name, but he asked me to come with him. I was blindfolded and brought to a research facility. There, still blindfolded, I was briefed and told what I would do should I join up.”
“And you did,” I said.
He nodded. “The possibility of research had always fascinated me. It was too big to turn down. Once I started working for them, they wanted results. That’s a given, but they expected them fast, and their goals went in a totally different direction. They’d been trying to build someone out of the comics and the movies. So instead of changing someone’s existing structure, they decided to go right to the source—your parents.”
Apparently, they’d chosen the best matches among many, including a small place from where to take a sample, a place no one would bother thinking about. My parents, Joe’s and Callie’s, as well as Neil’s, had been the guinea pigs.
“I was working in a lab in Washington,” the man said, still sneaking glances here and there at the passersby. “I never left the facility. When I finished my tests and wrote up the results, they were taken from me. All the discs I’d used to store information, they were taken as well. I never saw any of the other scientists. Never. For all I knew, they were in the room next to me or clear across the country.”
He went on
to tell us that when Callie’s mother and Neil’s mother got pregnant, there was much, “Joy and trepidation,” as he put it. “They were the prototypes. You and Joe were the second wave. We were wondering what the result would be. Would you live, would you be mentally normal or aberrations—both?”
A soft sigh came, one laden with regret. “We were playing with fire, pretending we were gods, but we didn’t know. No one did.”
My anger surfaced. “But you did it, anyway.”
The man blinked. “Yes, I did. It was science.”
So he said, and in a sudden burst of rage, I grabbed him by the lapels of his worn jacket. It took a lot of willpower to keep my wings and claws from emerging. “And that was all, right? It wasn’t for the money or the fame, just for science?”
“No, Mitch, let him talk,” Callie said as she tried to pry my hands away. “He’s trying to help us.”
Glancing at her, my voice came out in a snarl. “Is he?”
She stared into my eyes. “Yeah, he is.”
With a grunt of disgust, I let go, and the man, clearly shaken, sat back and wiped his brow. He cleared his throat a number of times before answering. “Yes, I’m trying to help. But I can’t give you specifics. I mean, I don’t know. The people working for them, us, we never knew. I never knew.”
But the army had been involved. That much was certain. “Did you know Mr. Lucas?” asked Callie.
“I met him once,” he said, nervously tugging at the collar of his shirt. “Or rather, he met me. This is about two years or so before your powers manifested themselves. He’d come to see our results and wanted to know the possibilities inherent in tinkering with the human body, so I showed him some of the lab simulations. He asked me about the potential for success as well as the possibility of failure. Maybe he visited the other scientists. I don’t know. He never said much. The other guy did the talking.”
“What other guy?”
The man ran his tongue around thin lips. “I didn’t know his name, but he was a general in the army. I could tell from his uniform. There were stars on his collar, and he wore a bunch of medals. Tall guy, really big all over, like an Olympic weightlifter.”
Okay, now we had a description, if only a very basic one. I asked, “So what happened to this committee after the government decided not to go through with things?”
The committee had been disbanded, all the results destroyed. “You have to realize this research had been going on for more than twenty years,” the man said in an earnest voice. “It started from the time before your parents even met and before I came onboard. Like I told you, the results I got were taken from me and combined with the research from the other scientists. If you’re going to ask me who was leading them, my answer is I don’t know.
“About a year after my final lab test—again, this was before your changes began—I was abruptly informed by my superiors that the project was being abandoned. I got a nice paycheck, was reassigned to a lab elsewhere in the Northwest area, and from that point on, all I did was research protein compounds related to Alzheimer’s.”
Callie worked her tongue over her lips and spoke barely above a whisper. “Did they ever find a cure?”
The man stared at her, his mouth ajar and his eyes curiously guileless and empty. Obviously, he didn’t know about such a thing, and his next words confirmed it.
“Cure... no, there was no cure. The program wasn’t designed to cure you. It was designed to create you. That’s all. I was never told to research how to counteract the gene manipulation because, at that point, I didn’t know what they were going to do.”
He stopped talking to wipe his brow, and his body shook, either from fear or stress, I wasn’t sure which. “No cure, just research, development, and then birth. That was it.”
“Did you know that Lucas disappeared?”
A look of fear flashed across his face. “If that’s true, then he’s probably dead. It wasn’t too long ago that I heard about accidents.”
“Accidents,” Callie echoed, her voice beginning to quiver. “Accidents to whom?”
He snapped back, “Accidents to the other scientists, who do you think? Whoever is in charge wants to make sure no one will talk.”
Hang on a second. The committee was supposed to have been disbanded. Telling the man so, he offered a look of contempt. “Get this through your head—this is the government we’re talking about. They can do whatever they want, and no information ever goes away unless they want it to.”
The meaning was clear. While the original committee had been disbanded, someone else was running the show. I sat there, thinking about how my life had been changed by a group of anonymous individuals who wanted to rule the world. I’d never had a chance. Neither had Callie, Joe, or Neil. While I thought things over, the man glanced around like a trapped rat seeking a way out of a maze.
“If you’re looking for clues, check and see which scientists have died in the past two or three years,” he said in a low voice once he focused his gaze on us. “Check who was with government organizations or private ones involved in research. Maybe there’s a connection, maybe not. That’s what I’d do.”
“And then?” I asked.
A blank look greeted me. “Then you do what you have to do. Make some noise, if you think it will help. If I were you, though, I’d leave things alone.”
His comment pissed me off, and I leaned forward to confront him. “Mister, leaving things alone isn’t on the agenda. A creature from your science experiment already tried to kill me. There might be more, so I need answers.”
He frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know anything about a creature. As for answers, I’d like to give them to you, but I’ve already told you too much. You have the clues. Chase them. Maybe you’ll find out who’s running the show. That’s all I know, and I’ve got to go.”
In a quick movement, he arose, but I caught him by the arm. “So why are you telling us?”
A look that could only be described as haunted crossed his face. “Because you and this girl and the others, all of you deserve to know. I didn’t know what would happen. I thought I was doing research on how to manipulate male and female DNA.”
“Manipulate,” Callie echoed, her eyes widening. “Manipulate, as in—”
“Changing female genes to male ones. That was all I did, I swear.”
Shock coated her features. “Female genes. You mean—”
The man hung his head as if he’d committed the greatest crime in history. His next words made me wonder what depths people would sink to. “Yes, I helped to create you. That’s why I gave you that paper. It’s something I smuggled out. From what I know, the people I worked for wanted to make someone capable of switching genders to be used as a decoy or as a spy.”
“A spy,” she echoed. “Why?”
He picked his head up to face her. “As a gender-shifter, it would be easy to infiltrate an enemy facility. That’s why I’m telling you now. You have a right to know why you are what you are.”
In a shockingly fast move, Callie leaped up and belted him with a hard right to the jaw. The impact of her fist sent him to the ground. Way to go, girlfriend! She stood over him, fists bunched and ready, and fury coated her every word. “Do you know what you did to me, what kind of crap I’ve been through?”
Blood leaked from his torn lip. “I’m sorry. My research was legitimate. I’m asking you to believe me on that.”
Eyes spinning, he got to his feet, swaying like a willow branch in a breeze. Callie made to slug him again, but this time I held her back. The man gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a lure in the water.
“Understand this happened long ago. When I read about you doing what you could do, I knew someone had succeeded. And that’s when I knew things would change, for me, and for all the other scientists.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why,” he repeated. His head swung back and forth, scoping out the area for possibl
e danger, and his voice shook with the nervousness of someone who expected to be jumped at any moment. “Weren’t you listening? No loose ends, that’s why. When you went public, the reporters wanted to know all about you. The government had Lucas as their mouthpiece, but he was only one person.
“Others like me, scientists who’d figured out what the program was all about, they needed to be silenced.” He shuddered. “The government couldn’t allow them to talk, so they arranged accidents. I have no proof, but all the same, I know.
“That’s why I ran. That’s why I’m here. I live alone, and hell yes, I’m terrified of what might happen. For all I know, I’m next. That’s the price I’ll pay for what I did.”
He took a step away from us and then stopped. “What we did was a crime. What I did was a crime, but at that time, I honestly didn’t know.”
“So help us,” Callie said, fighting back tears, her face a mask of rage and shame. “You messed up my life, along with Mitch’s and Neil’s and Joe’s, but you can at least talk to the reporters.”
Now a terribly calm smile, sad and fatalistic, emerged. Along with that, his voice grew quiet, as if resigned to the inevitable. “And what will I tell them? Even if they believe me, I won’t live long enough to stand trial. The government doesn’t work that way. They’re very good at hiding things, and they’re even better at making things go away. But I can tell you this much—everything I’ve said is true.” He turned to Callie. “If you don’t believe me, look at that timeline. You’ll know.
“Good luck.”
And then he was gone in the swirl of humanity. Talk about a conspiracy. This was something out of a bad spy novel. Government cover-ups, lab-created assassins, false identities, and there was probably a whole lot more to it than I could figure out.
As for our contact, he had to be a certifiable nut, but all the same, a lot of what he’d said to us made sense. He knew far more than anyone. Also, he didn’t give me any bad vibes as the other clone-monsters had. So now we had something to go on, something—and nothing.
Outcasts Page 10
