Abruptly, the façade fell away, and his lips tightened. “All right, you know about her. I know about you as well. You’re trespassing on private property. What the papers are saying about you is true.”
“And I suppose you’re going to tell me that Mr. Lucas’ name is Ronald Garvin?”
A sneer formed on his mouth. “You’re freaks and monsters.”
Wonderful, someone else was dumping on us. “Doctor Wallis, are you trying to stall us until the government men arrive?”
His voice came out in a hiss. “Get out.”
“Wrong answer.”
I grabbed him by his collar and pushed him into the emergency exit. We had to work fast. More than likely, Wallis would try to contact someone. Problem for him was, he couldn’t. His cries for help stopped when my claws went to his throat. “Let’s go to the roof.”
Luck was with us once again as we met no one on the way. We had even better luck when we reached the top, and I kicked the door open. The area was clear. Joe spun up behind me, and I hauled the doctor over to the ledge to deliver the truth. “We’re pretty high up, mister. Roadkill looks awful in the sunlight.”
“Please, if I tell you, they’ll kill me!” he babbled.
Okay, now we were getting somewhere. As for the unnamed people, I had a pretty good idea of who they were, but right now I didn’t care. “I’ve already had a couple of monsters try to kill me. I’ve got my own problems.”
In a swift move, I swung him over the ledge. “Now you’ve got yours.”
He began to mewl and sob. It was not a pleasant sight. “I’ll tell you... tell you what I know. Just put me down, please!”
“Thank you.”
After tossing him to the gravel surface, he hugged his knees and shook. Eventually, he calmed down enough to tell us his version of how things had gone down. “I know about O’Hara. She was brought in here about the same time as Mr. Lucas, suffering from similar symptoms. She lasted three months and then passed away.”
Passed away. “What did she die of?”
Wallis took in a deep breath. “Multiple organ failures as well as brain damage, the same damage Mr. Lucas has, only in her case it was faster acting. We did what we could, but there was no way to treat her condition. She didn’t suffer much, if that’s what you’re concerned about. Her mind reverted to a child’s mind and then an infant’s.”
The more he spoke, the calmer he got, and by the time he’d finished, his voice had turned from frightened to practical. Just the facts, Jack, just the facts, and nothing more, but I guess it had to do with his training. He couldn’t get involved emotionally. That was how he protected himself from all the misery.
Additionally, fear had to be a factor. Whoever had messed up Lucas and O’Hara would do the same thing to him. That’s why I knew we’d never get the whole truth, but some information was better than none.
“We need to know more,” Joe said as he stepped over to confront him. “You know who Mr. Lucas was and who he worked for, right?”
Wallis’ expression never wavered. “Yes, I knew both of them worked for the government. The men ordered me to take care of them.”
“Who were they?” I asked.
He shrugged. “They could have been CIA, FBI, NSA, or some other organization. Lucas told us he’d worked for the Department of Defense when he was first admitted. He’d been badly beaten, but he had the presence of mind to tell me that.”
Something clicked in his eyes. Maybe it was regret or something else. I didn’t know. “The men who brought him here, they told me to take care of him and that was all. Later on, they brought in O’Hara. They never gave me their names or contact numbers. They simply asked us to take care of them.”
Joe cut in to ask what kind of drug they’d used on Lucas and O’Hara. Wallis shook his head. “It mimics the effects of Alzheimer’s. That disease causes a buildup of unhelpful proteins in the brain, but whatever this drug is, it acts in a faster, more powerful manner, shutting down most of the memory processes as well as the cognitive responses. Organ failure follows soon after. I’m a gerontologist. What you’re looking for is someone versed in genetic research.”
The look of fear suddenly returned. “Oh god, they’re going to know you were speaking to me.”
Whoever they were, maybe. Paranoia ruled, but now it was my turn to interrogate. “They have eyes and spies, is that it? Are they here now, watching us?”
Sweat poured down his face, and he hissed, “This is the government, you dumb kid. They’re everywhere. They’ll know about this sooner or later. But, I won’t talk.”
“You’d better not. It would be very easy to put your name on the social sites. I’m sure the assassins would love to have a one-on-one with you.”
At the mention of the word assassins, Wallis began to cry all over again, and only a slap to his face, courtesy of me, stopped him from becoming unhinged altogether. We continued to question him, but he didn’t know anything. Some people were good actors. Wallis wasn’t one of them. I could read his face like a book.
It was time to go. Grabbing Joe’s hands, I flew high into the bright sunshine, hoping that if anyone decided to take a shot at us, we’d be too far out of range. Once we’d gotten back to Independence, I landed at my place, and Joe sat down, wiping tears from his eyes. “This is all wrong,” he said.
“What is?”
“Lucas. He wasn’t so great, but going out like that, not knowing who you are, no way is that right.” He shuddered. “So what do we do now?”
The basics of a plan started to coalesce in my mind. “We go to the source.”
Chapter Eleven: The Haunt
“What are we doing here?”
That came from Neil as we walked around our old hangout. He’d initially taken off in order to go back to San Diego, but had turned around halfway there and come back to Portland. “I didn’t feel like staying there, anymore,” he’d said when he arrived back at my place. “Like, I don’t really have a home, you know?”
Understood. This place had once been my home, a temporary one. As I walked around with Callie at my side, I recalled seeing Mr. Lucas kneel down to install something on a table a few days before our training period ended. “What is that?” I’d asked, pointing to a small box he’d rigged up on the table. It had three buttons, red white and blue.
“That is our kill switch,” he’d replied while screwing the box into place. “You know all those old superhero movies where the bad guys blow up their hideout with a self-destruct weapon? Well, this is ours. Press the red, then the white and then the blue button, and two minutes later, poof!” He threw up his arms. “Once you push them, there’s no way to stop things from going bang. So do it and get out fast.”
Uh-huh, blowing ourselves up if things went bad didn’t help in the confidence department. Lucas then smiled, a rarity with him, and got up to stretch out. “This place is going to be your second home, so I hope you can get adjusted to it.”
A second home, he’d said. It had been for a short time... sort of.
Now a musty smell hung in the air, something that denoted neglect and decay. It had been only a year, but the entire place had gone straight to the dumpster. Mold covered the walls, a steady drip-drip-drip from a leaky pipe spattered at the far end of the facility, and a few insects scurried out of our path in search of a safe place to hide.
A mental image of how things used to look sprang up in my mind. Over there, far left corner, there used to be a row of desks housing computers. Cables as thick as a boa’s body had run from them to the generators that powered the place.
In the far-right corner, a few workstations still stood where some experimental armor had been left for us to try on. Kevlar-lined suits for Joe, me and Callie, considered to be bulletproof. However, after trying my suit on, I had to discard it. It hampered my ability to fly. Some of the armor was still there, covered by dust, a relic of a failed experiment.
“What are we doing here?�
� Neil asked again as he looked around at the rubble, kicking a few pieces here and there. A cloud of dust sprang up, and he irritably waved it away before sneezing. “Man, this kind of dust is bad for my allergies. I need fresh air. That’s why I came back to Portland. It’s cleaner, hear me on this?”
Trying to be patient, I replied, “We’re looking for clues, Neil, that’s what. So make me happy and start searching.”
He stopped dead in his tracks and turned around to stare at me. “For what? And since when did you start giving the orders?”
Attitude, it was all about attitude. Neil had never liked taking orders from anyone. When a person couldn’t be hurt, perhaps they felt they didn’t have to care. “Since I got attacked twice by nightmares. Since whatever came after me might come after the rest of us. That’s why.”
Neil then muttered something to the effect that I was dragging along a girl-boy who’d probably come unhinged if he-she saw a rat or cockroach. Callie offered a cold stare and an even icier reply. “Neil, remember what happened the last time you dissed me?”
A look of fear flickered in his eyes, and he twisted his hips away as if to protect his little friends from an attack. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Good. I’m not unhinged, but I am scared, and if you say you aren’t, then you’re not half the tough-ass you think you are.”
From her tone, as well as her mouth being set in a straight line, things would soon escalate, so Joe stepped in. “Neil, we’re searching for discs, computers, files—there must be something here.”
“Fine,” Neil muttered, and stalked off, still complaining about the dust and not being able to breathe. He strode over to a pile of rubble and started heaving rocks left and right, cursing as he did so. A few more violent sneezes followed.
Callie whispered, “Neil’s right about one thing. This place gives me the creeps. It was a training ground when we were here, and now it’s like a war zone.”
“I got something,” Joe called out.
“What is it?” Neil asked, abandoning his search in the far corner.
Joe held up an old laptop. It was battered, and the screen had a couple of hairline cracks in it. I went over to the electrical switches on the wall and flicked them on. Fortunately, they worked, and after we found a modem and booted the computer up, the screen lit.
“Don’t tell me that piece of junk actually works,” Neil said with a sour expression. “The sooner we’re out of here the better. I hate this place.”
Joe snorted, tapped a few keys, grunted with exasperation, and finally, after ten minutes of teasing the machine back to life, he gave a cry. “Look—at—this.”
It was a video of Lucas. The date was blurry, but from what I could make out, it looked to have been made about a year back, due to his appearance being the same along with the same cool, almost detached air about him. He sat in front of a camera, a green screen behind him, and when he spoke, he sounded almost philosophical.
“Mitch, Neil, Cal, Joseph, if you’re watching this, then all you have to know is that things have come to pass as we predicted they would. You are now showing your powers, and you will change the world.”
Show our powers, change the world. I’d never wanted my powers to begin with. I’d never wanted to look like a gargoyle and never wanted to be an outsider. The more I watched the video, the greater my anger grew, and I started to shake.
“Cool it,” Callie whispered in my ear and squeezed my hand. It helped, but only a little.
Lucas’ voice came out slurred due to the condition of the video, but the meaning was clear. “Your parents were selected by our committee years back. They thought that they were getting immunization shots. Instead, their DNA was altered. They didn’t know. When you were born, all of you, we wondered about the side effects. As it turned out, all of you were healthy babies.”
Joe paused the tape. “DNA shots,” he muttered.
That’s what Raney, the dead scientist, had told us. Confusion reigned on Neil’s face, and he speared us with quick glances. “What’s all the stuff about a committee? I never heard nothing about no committee. Did you?”
Quickly, I filled him in. His follow-up query consisted of, “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
Good question. Before now, I’d only had the word of a now-dead source, but now, things had changed. This was concrete, something to go on. Neil accepted my explanation with all the aplomb of an angry rock, grinding his teeth together. “That’s just great. Using us, they were using us.”
Not only that, Lucas had lied to me. He’d said that he’d found two other unique people—Callie and Neil—at our initial meeting. Wrong. He’d known all along who they were.
The tape continued with the sound wavering in and out, but it couldn’t hide the distinct note of sadness in Lucas’ voice. “So here we were, altering DNA with the idea of creating a group of super-human people. We didn’t know exactly how you’d all turn out.
“Originally, the members of our committee, our scientists, and geneticists, thought you’d all be stronger or a little faster or have improved aural and visual ability. That’s all we ever expected. They had no idea you’d come to be... as you were.
“As for my part in this, I came in after your parents had already had their DNA altered. I used to work for the CIA. After I retired from their service, the people I went to work for offered me the chance at being your guardian and team leader. I accepted. However, I didn’t know the extent of your powers until I met you...”
The computer then started buzzing, and the video froze. “Aw crap,” Joe said, and cursed the machine when the screen went black. “I’ll see if I can fix this.”
He set to work, and while he did, Neil collapsed to the ground as if his knees no longer existed. “This friggin’ sucks,” he stated, grabbing a bunch of rocks and crushing them. Dust sifted through his fingers in a fine mist. “Our parents, having their bodies changed or fixed or somethin’. He’s telling us, like, we’re a product.”
Callie started to cry, and I held her in an attempt to comfort her. She’d cried after the scientist had told her, but this video from Lucas, it was more substantial, and it brought our problems home. “No, we’re not products. We’re experiments,” she sobbed. “All of us, that’s all we ever were, just experiments.”
“Yeah,” Neil replied, his voice subdued. “I’m as dumb as a bag of hammers, and even I can see it. But we’re not experiments. We’re failures.”
He held up his stony hands to the ceiling as if praying for a miracle. Finding none, he lowered them in utter defeat. “I can’t hold nothin’ unless it’s reinforced. I can’t sit on nothin’ unless it can hold a weight of at least four hundred pounds. I eat rocks and then crap them out. No girl wants to go out with a stone dude who eats rocks.”
While he ranted, I took stock of the situation. Out of us four, the only one who was down with his powers was Joe. He looked normal. He could pass, go out into the world and hang out with others if he chose to.
As for Neil, he had it pegged right. Being a rock monster wasn’t going to win him any long-term relationships, much less friendships. He’d been counting on a cure as much as I had.
“Try living life like me,” Callie said, wiping her eyes. “I’m not a boy or a girl. I’m somewhere in between. Mitch is the only person who’s been there for me all this time. Try going to school when you have to use the men’s room before lunch and the ladies room ten minutes later.”
Neil looked at her and then looked away. No, he didn’t get it. He never would.
“Yeah, well I’m screwed, too,” I said, too pissed-off to keep my bitterness hidden. We weren’t a group of crime-fighting wannabes anymore. Neil had put it best. We were failed lab tests.
“You try walking around with wings like mine. Try looking like a mythological creature. I get angry, and you know what happens. I look like what those committee people made me—a monster. So tell me how great I’m supposed to feel.”
&
nbsp; Hooray for me, I’d had my say and would it do any good? As for us, what choice had we been given? Had those guys on the committee, whoever they were, had they given us any chance at all? Those questions and more swirled through my mind, and I didn’t have an answer to any of them.
“I got things working again,” Joe announced. “I don’t know how long it’ll last.”
“Does it really matter?” This time, the question came from Callie. Her head was down, gaze directed at the floor. Sorrow now gone, every word came out laced with anger. “Did he know what would happen to us? Does he know now? Does he care?”
I’d seen the empty shell of a man only a short time ago. He didn’t remember us. At the time, I didn’t think it an act. You could fake some parts of dementia, but the eyes always gave a person away. In his eyes, though, nothing had indicated any semblance of humanity left.
In the video, the time frame had shifted to December, several months ago, before his accident. Face looking old, lined and tired, he stood where the generators would have been positioned. He sounded lucid enough, and the action resumed with him reaching with his left hand for something off-camera. “If you don’t want to watch this, I don’t blame you,” he said.
He brought his arm into view, holding a syringe and a length of rubber tubing. In a series of swift movements, he tied the tube around his right arm, tapped the bulging vein, and then stabbed himself with the needle.
“I’m sorry, team,” he said as he withdrew the syringe. “Originally I thought you would become the next wave in urban law enforcement. That’s what you were designed for. That’s what I thought.
“However, I learned from my superiors that you were supposed to be the next wave of super-soldiers, designed to reconnoiter and destroy any target deemed to be the enemy, foreign... or domestic. That, I could not abide, so I resigned from the organization.”
Too little, too late, and while I thought about smashing the computer, his next words made me reconsider. “My superiors have also mentioned that your team would be disbanded and our scientists reassigned.”
Outcasts Page 13
