by Sara King
“I’m thinking,” Slade said. “Your resident genius is thinking, bat-boy. Silence.”
“Codgson thought someone tampered with the experiments. They found these weird glowing ball thingies in like a fifth of the—”
“Shhhh!” Yet again, the plebs of the world had shattered the symphony of his mind with the greasy, hayucking dross of beer and Friday Night Football.
Mickey sighed and went quiet. Eventually, he said, “Those dead people stink.”
Indeed, the smell of rotting meat was almost enough to gag him. Slade glared. “Let’s say these ‘ghosts’ are actually just a case of a faulty datacard that needs to be wiped. Like it had the wrong info embedded into it and now we just need to erase it and start over. How would you start over?”
Mickey blinked at him with the look of a stone-deaf chimp.
Trying to tone it down for the idiots of the group, Slade said, “Whatever energy these experiments are manipulating, it can obviously be instilled in their surroundings and stored there, like info on a datacard. We need to find a way to erase the card. Erase the card, boom, problem solved.”
“Uh,” Mickey said, “What datacard?”
“Ten-F’s datacard,” Slade sighed.
“She’s dead,” Mickey said, frowning.
Slade narrowed his eyes. “You are being intentionally dense.”
“There’s no card,” Mickey replied. “You see a card? I don’t see a card.”
“It’s metaphorical.” Slade wanted to say that yes, the wiry little patch-wearing bastard would see a card on his coroner, hanging from her pretty white coat, just as soon as Slade got to a gun, leveled it between his eyes, and blew him away, but he refrained, considering Mickey was currently his only means of spotting the psychopathic scalpel-wielding freak and he didn’t want to upset his replacement lackey until Tyson or Rat could come back and take his place. Preferably with a gun he could level between the sarcastic little shit’s eyes. Or fit right over his freaky purple eyeball. That would probably have more effect.
“Ghosts put me in a bad mood,” Slade commented.
“You and me both,” Mickey said, rubbing his hands over his arms. The kid was actually having to shove corpses aside to get through with his overladen skateboard, and the stench was unbelievable.
“So,” Slade suggested, “if these guys standing around aren’t crazy, why don’t you pull them in?”
Mickey gave him another disgusted look. “They’re dea—”
“Dead, yes,” Slade interrupted, when his foot misstepped and it went through a rotting arm, squishing putrid flesh and maggots everywhere. “Thank you for clarifying that for me.” He kicked fetid skin off the bottom of his foot, swallowing down nausea at the immediate odor of decay that followed. “Why don’t you do it anyway?”
“They’re dumb. You really want me to be like that?” Mickey demanded.
Slade considered that, considered saying something to the effect of, “No, of course I don’t want you to become stupider than you already are,” and then refrained, realizing the kid probably had the ability to squish him with his mind. He began to whistle, instead.
Scowling, Mickey said, “You’re a smartass, you know that?”
Realizing he was going to get nowhere with the inebriate, Slade decided to file the conversation of dumbness and datacards away for later, to be brought up again at a time when they weren’t pushing cartloads of lead and acid through putrescent Human corpses and five dead, possibly homicidal science experiments who had a penchant for scalpels and razor blades. “Where is Ten-F now?” he asked.
Mickey’s eyes immediately lifted nervously to the far end of the hall. “She’s over there.”
“Use your words, please,” Slade said, as they weaved their way past the last of the corpses and into the empty hallway beyond. “A distance would be good.”
“End of the hall,” Mickey said.
His response was less than satisfactory, but Slade grunted. “What are the others doing?”
“Just watching,” Mickey said. “They don’t like you, Sam.” The ominous way he said it left cold tingles of alarm crawling up Slade’s back.
“Great,” Slade muttered. They walked down the hall, took a left, and stopped at the first set of doors, where Slade read the room descriptions before they moved on. Then, indignant, “Why the fuck not?”
“Well, uh,” Mickey said, eying him, “you’re a lot like the guys who kept us in here.”
Slade snorted. They stopped at another room, this one marked MECHANICAL/EMERGENCY, and Slade tried the door, which was locked. “Believe me, kid.” He propped the bike up against the wall and lowered Twelve-B to the ground. Pulling a piece of gum from his front pocket and popping it into his mouth, he gave Mickey a wide, confident smile. “I am nothing like the guys who put you in here.” He turned, squared off against the door, and kicked it open.
Except, instead of bursting open in a glorious punctuation of his badassery, Slade’s foot exploded in a blast of pain. Lots. Of pain. And the door remained thoroughly shut.
“You know,” Mickey said with a sly smile as Slade groaned and doubled over to cradle his foot, “I think you might be right, Boss.”
“Shut up,” Slade muttered, holding his arch. He gestured at the door in irritation. “Get that bastard open for me before I use your head as a battering ram.”
Mickey gave him a sarcastic salute, put his palm out and, with an elegant flourish, burst the door inward with such force that there was a whomph of air pressure equalizing around them. Then, brushing nonexistent dust off his gloved hands, the four-foot-tall twit looked up at him with a smug grin. “Anything else?”
Slade lowered his foot to the ground. “I hate you.” Then, scowling at his companion, he yanked Mickey’s flashlight out of his hand and hobbled into the mechanical room.
Sure enough, inside, he found an emergency generator and a linkup to a solar array, which had kept the emergency battery banks at full charge. He went over, checked the fuel on the generator, noted it had enough for a couple days, then fired it up. “You know what, Mickey?” he asked, as he went over to the wall and opened up the massive breaker box. “You be Magneto.” He went to the circuit breakers and studied the handy map and table of locations, then began switching the main power from outside-sourced to emergency backup. With each click, the lights somewhere in the building came back on. He left the power off in strategic areas of the building, giving Ten-F a place to hang out and keep her scalpels company, but turned on the rest. He left lights in the mechanical room and outside hall very last for punctuation purposes. “I’m perfectly happy being Dr. Xavier.” He slapped the breaker box shut.
“You mean Tony Stark,” Mickey commented, eyes on something farther down the hall. “He was insane too, you know.”
Slade narrowed his eyes. “Where’s Ten-F?”
“She’s hiding in the dark you left for her,” Mickey said, watching the shadows in the distance.
“Excellent,” Slade said. “Let’s get this show on the road.” He walked out and slapped the LED flashlight back against Mickey’s chest, heaved the unconscious woman back over his shoulder, grabbed his bulky, overladen bike, and started toward the area of the map that had been marked IMAGING. A few minutes down the tangle of corridors, however, he realized that Mickey wasn’t following him.
Frowning, Slade glanced over his shoulder. Mickey was staring at a small, unmarked green door set into the wall. His smug grin was gone, replaced by a petrified look. He was shaking, the flashlight almost falling from his fingers.
Slade glanced at the door, recognized it as the one marked CLINICAL TRIALS on the handy diagram of the building he now carried in his head, then immediately lowered the bike against the wall and went back to his little friend.
“Hey,” Slade said, grabbing his thin shoulder and giving it a squeeze.
Mickey continued to stare at the green door in a sweaty pallor.
Slade stepped between Mickey and the door and squatted in fron
t of him. “Hey!” He snapped his fingers.
Mickey reluctantly blinked and refocused on Slade’s face, looking a little dazed. Slade felt a pang of anguish at the obvious terror in the kid’s face and took his gloved palm and gave it a squeeze. “You okay there, bud?” Slade asked gently.
Mickey anxiously tugged his fingers out of Slade’s hand and took a step back, his lips formed into a tight line. He was trembling, his breathing sped up to near-hyperventilation levels. Slade thought he was going to run, but reluctantly, Mickey nodded.
“You sure?” Slade asked. Mickey didn’t look okay. He looked like he was on the verge of having an all-out panic attack. Which could be bad, coming from a telekinetic, soul-sucking puppetmaster.
“F-fine,” Mickey whimpered. His eyes had dropped to something in the hall in front of them, and Slade noticed for the first time the bodies huddled in the hall ahead of him.
“Th-they…di-didn’t…w-w-w-w—”
“Didn’t want to get close to this door,” Slade finished softly. “So they starved to death rather than find the exit.” He glanced again at the unobtrusive green portal. “All right, Mickey.” He got up slowly and put his bulk between the door and Mickey, who was once again staring at the door. “Come on,” he said, taking him by the arm, “Walk between me and the wall. Don’t look at it.”
“I wanna go home,” Mickey whimpered.
Slade opened his mouth to make a sarcastic comment that, technically, they were in his home, then his eyes fell on the cluster of huddled, naked dead bodies and his words died in his throat in an ashamed puff of mental exhaust. Clearing his throat, he said softly, “We’ll get you out of here soon.”
“P-p-pr—” Mickey stuttered.
“Promise,” Slade finished for him. “Come on.”
To his extreme relief, Mickey yielded to his gentle tug deeper into the hall. Slade wasn’t quite sure what he would have done had mini-Magneto decided he was not going any farther, but he knew his plan for helping his drooling friend would have come to a crashing halt.
“All right,” Slade said, pushing the bike ahead of them. “Just a little farther and we’ll be able to figure out what’s going on with her, okay?”
“Okay,” Mickey whimpered.
As they worked their way around the second group of dead bodies, Slade watched his companion rapidly lose even more of his composure, until Mickey was barely holding the rope to the battery-skateboard, while at the same time he had taken to clutching Slade’s shirt-hem with a death-grip. Mickey said nothing as they walked, just nodding or shaking his head whenever Slade tried to make polite, distracting conversation.
“We’re here,” Slade said softly, stopping at the door to the imaging center. “You gonna be okay?”
Mickey nodded again, despite the fact that he was obviously not okay.
“Tell me about your friend Twelve-B,” Slade said, reaching for the door, which was locked. He dragged out the magnetic keycard he had taken from the crow-eaten corpse of one Dr. Molotov in the parking-lot and swiped it. “How did you meet her?”
Mickey’s purple eye slowly climbed from the hall to meet his face, and for the first time in ten minutes, Slade saw a flicker of that old Time To Humor The Crazy Man. “We were raised together in a genetics experiment.”
“Oh yeah?” Slade asked, when the door beeped green and he shoved it open. “You two lovebirds have the same cell or what? Have some great sex when the doctors weren’t looking?”
Mickey’s pallor further retreated, to be replaced by a small frown. “No. They left me and some others in solitary at the back of a separate wing. Twelve-B was in the main part of the Containment wing. She was one of the ones Twelve-A left behind because she was in stasis.”
“So you haven’t had sex with her,” Slade said, deciding he’d stumbled upon a good distraction, by the frown on Mickey’s face.
The frown morphed into indignant fury. Jackpot! “She was raped, asshole!”
“So?” Slade asked, distracted. “That doesn’t make her incapable.”
“No, goddamn it,” Mickey snapped. “I didn’t have sex with her.”
“So you are a virgin. Thought so. I can read it all over your face. Innocence with a tint of hope…” Stepping into the room, he was relieved to see a sonogram machine in one corner. He hadn’t been looking forward to fiddling with intravenous contrast agents for a CT scan or an MRI. Wheeling the ghost-busting bike into the center of the room, he pointed one of the brighter headlights at the entrance and put the kickstand up, then carried Twelve-B over to a padded exam table beside the sonogram machine, identical to a hospital table in all ways except for the ominous leather restraints handing from the edges.
Turning back, Slade realized that Mickey had gone beet red and was carefully looking at anything but Slade and his patient.
“Ah,” Slade said, amused. “I see.” He went over and began powering on the sonogram machine. “So how’s that lack of sex working out for you, Mickey?”
Mickey flushed brighter and started kicking at the floor. “You are such a dick.”
“Oh yeah?” Slade said, as he began prepping the transducer probe. “Have you just never had the opportunity, coming from a life of containment, or have you tried and been rebuffed? Personally, I think the second option is the worst kind of virgin. They’re the kind that end up forty and hairy and still unable to get laid.”
“Don’t be an asshole!” Mickey snapped, stepping into the room with him.
“So you were rebuffed,” Slade said distractedly, as he fiddled with the equipment. “How interesting. Who was she? Did she actually have tits?”
“Of course she did!” Mickey growled. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
Slade stopped in applying the probe to Twelve-B’s stomach. “Kid,” Slade said, somehow keeping a straight face, “I’m your doctor. I need to know these things.”
Mickey narrowed his eyes. “You’re not a doctor.”
“Actually,” Slade said, stuffing another piece of gum into his mouth as he watched the black-and-white image on the screen, “I am. In eight different specialties. Had six PhDs before I was twenty. Kind of stopped caring after that, though. Money got more interesting.”
“You’re not a doctor,” Mickey repeated.
Slade chuckled and started imaging Twelve-B’s uterus and fallopian tubes. As he’d feared, the right fallopian tube was distended, allowing it to actually show up on a sonogram. “Damn,” he muttered. He examined the rest of her abdomen anyway, to make sure, but final analysis pointed very strongly to ectopic pregnancy of the right fallopian tube. A bad one. “That’s not good.”
Mickey’s face had fallen. “She’s going to die?”
Slade caught himself, remembering his audience. He set the transducer probe aside and switched off the machine. “Well, not good, no. But it doesn’t look like it’s ruptured yet, at least from what I can tell here. But yeah, I’m gonna need to do a little surgery.”
A man probably couldn’t have looked more devastated if Slade had told him she was already dead.
“Don’t worry!” Slade cried. “I can handle this.”
When Mickey tore his gaze up from Twelve-B’s prone form to meet his face, there were tears in it. “A dead frog doesn’t count,” he whispered.
And, for the first time, looking at a terrified kid, Slade realized the weight of responsibility of what he was about to do. It wasn’t just theory and diagrams and bullet-points. It wasn’t an experiment. It wasn’t something to do when he was bored. He was about to operate on a Human being. And, when he turned to look at Twelve-B’s peaceful, sleep-slackened face, Slade realized that Mickey was right.
A dead frog did not count.
#
Rat had found the library abandoned and was making her second nighttime pass slogging through the waterlogged town when she saw the cables someone had affixed to a light-pole and hesitated. Following the cable into an alley—while keeping a wary distance—she found a dumpster that had most
of its paint burned off the outside. Melted blue plastic jugs and what looked like some form of singed guns were affixed to the top of the lid. Bands of rebar had been forced through the lid and into the frame of the dumpster itself. Frowning, now, she carefully went over and pried up a tiny corner of the top and shone a flashlight inside.
She immediately wished she hadn’t. Rat found herself looking at her own roasted face, open in a scream. The concrete meridian divider her corpse was sitting on was covered in scorch-marks, and the whole inside of the dumpster was black with creosote.
One point for the good guys, Rat thought, with a grudging smile. She dropped the lid and looked around. “All right, Sammy,” she said, “where are you?” She had mentally given herself two days to find Sam before she could no longer justify hanging around waiting for him when the Huouyt were descending on Twelve-A. Which meant she needed to find the lab.
If I were a top-secret government research facility, Rat thought, where would I be?
It would need to be somewhere secluded, but on a road where heavy traffic would go unnoticed. Which, she supposed, meant either a factory or near another government facility that the Average Joe didn’t give a crap about…
Frowning, Rat thought of the reservoir. Reservoirs had water-treatment plants. But where? She was running out of time. She was about to head back to the reservoir and spend her last day scouring the mountainsides there when she saw the full-color swimsuit ad for a purple spandex thong affixed to the concrete wall across the alley. Her eyes had already slid over it and dismissed it when, with a start, she realized that, unlike the other papers and posters left over from before Judgement, the thong poster was not sun-bleached.
Her heart starting to pound, Rat crossed the street and, after warily checking for strings, wires, or other nastiness leading from under the paper, yanked the sheet down. On the other side, scrawled in Human English, Sam had written:
“Well, Kitten, here’s hoping that the, uh, ‘genetic material’ that this guy collected was from a certain bikini we left stranded on the hillside, and not your dead body. I don’t give it much of a chance, but you’ve surprised people before. So, my lady love, if you’re reading this, from the descriptions the mouthy little twit is giving me, his home is somewhere along the road out of town, disguised as an abandoned coffee-shop. It should be on the right off the main road, maybe a hundred yards out of sight on a dirt drive, surrounded by barbed wire fencing. He says it’s unmarked. I’ll draw you a little picture, but this is as good as I could get from the twerp before he got bored and wanted to go play with his new slingshot.”
