by Sara King
Rat glanced at the diagram, then continued to the final note scrawled at the bottom of the page.
P.S. We found a new set of walkie-talkies at the sports store down the road. There’s one on the park bench around the corner, under an overturned cardboard box. But before you try calling me, please remember the gum.
Rat frowned. Remember the gum? As far as she knew, she didn’t owe him any gum. Folding Sam’s note and stuffing it in her pocket, she went around the corner and immediately found a wrought-iron bench that had been thoughtfully bolted to a concrete pad by a city beautification program. A cardboard box had been set atop it, untouched by the flood. She slogged over to it and frowned down at the box. She was about to reach for it when she had a sudden, nagging unease twist in her guts. She froze, then carefully removed her hand.
She opened his note and read it again.
…Please remember the gum. What the hell did that—
Then she remembered how Sam had originally trapped her with a snare and Rat hastily backed away from the bench. Though there was three inches of water covering the street from the remnants of the flood, she could see the taut little line that went from the water in front of the bench and up to something underneath the box. Backing up farther, Rat picked up a rock from a flower edging and tossed it at the cardboard.
Instantly, the line snapped free and a cable that had been hidden under the water jerked tight in a sizzling splash and disappeared through a window on the other side of street. When Rat looked, she saw that directly inside the window, an array of blades and pointy, uncomfortable-looking objects had been affixed to the concrete wall, creating a Tunnel O’Death for anything unfortunate enough to be dragged through it. Then, a moment later, the house exploded in a concussive blast that knocked Rat off her feet and blew out all the windows in the building.
He’s not fucking around, Rat thought, impressed.
This time, she retrieved a twelve-foot flagpole to push the box over and reveal its contents.
A walkie-talkie taped to another note. Her spine itching, Rat stepped forward, eyed the walkie-talkie from all sides, then, when she was sure there were no strings, wires, or pressure-plates leading from the device, she carefully picked it up. Peeling the note free, she opened it.
Either you’re lucky Huouyt #2, or you’re my lady love. In either case, you won’t be able to call me until you get within range. These things have a maximum useable distance of a mile. Good luck.
Rat glanced at the walkie-talkie, then at the diagram Sam had made for her. Then, glancing at the inferno that was even then beginning to engulf the stores around it, Rat decided it was time to get away from the enormous fiery pillar of smoke before it attracted unwanted attention.
Stuffing the walkie-talkie into her pocket, Rat was just turning to head south when she saw the huge male kreenit’s head emerge from an alley ten rods away. Rat swallowed, hard, knowing that, being in the center of the road, with three inches or more of water covering everything, she really had little chance of getting out of sight before it heard her. Heart hammering, she slowly began reaching for her pistol.
The kreenit lifted its nose and huffed at the fiery building, then turned to look down the road opposite her.
Rat’s fingers found her gun holster and she very carefully lifted the snap.
The metallic click sounded like a sonic boom going off. The kreenit, however, seemed interested in licking the wall opposite the burning building, then lifting its tree-sized leg to piss on it. Rat shuddered and, nerves zinging with adrenaline, started to pull the weapon free.
Just as she had the weapon free of the sheath, there was a jingle of the snap against the metal as the gun slid the rest of the way out of the holster. An instant later, the kreenit’s massive, tooth-filled head swung around and two pupilless green eyes the size of Human heads locked onto her like homing drones.
A Dead Frog Doesn’t Count
Over the course of an hour, Slade had gathered all the tools and equipment he needed from various places in the lab—a lot more than he needed, actually, having even dragged in shelves of chemicals that really had little practical use, but were comforting to him nonetheless. Yet, even with gloved hands, his patient’s stomach shaven and swabbed in antiseptics, his drugs and knives laid out in perfect order, Slade was having trouble making the first cut. He wasn’t sure if it was the ghost that Mickey said was still hunched somewhere outside the door of the room, his personal exhaustion, or the fact that he was about to operate on a Human being.
A Human being who, if she woke up during the procedure, could go vengeful cockatrice on his ass and turn him to stone.
“This isn’t going to work, is it?” Mickey asked softly.
“It’s going to work,” Slade snapped. “Stop asking.” He bit his lip and stared down at the unconscious experiment. He had given her more drugs, as a precautionary measure, but it wasn’t her waking up that he was most concerned about.
It was Mickey’s reaction, should his singular foray into medical science end in a corpse.
He’d studied the diagrams and medical journals and notes until he was seeing uteruses and fallopian tubes every time he closed his eyes. He’d memorized the name of every inner organ, the precise lengths and size of every cut and stitch, the terminology of everything that could go horribly wrong the moment he placed scalpel to flesh. He knew, depending on what he found when he performed his laparotomy, whether the procedure would be able to save the fallopian tube with a linear salpingostomy, or whether he would have to remove a portion of the tube itself in a salpingectomy. He knew what to do if the fallopian tube had ruptured and there was internal bleeding. He knew what drugs to use in the case of hypertension or eclampsia. He knew how to restart her heart if she went into cardiac arrest. He had a whole fucking shelf of nanos on standby.
…and he still felt like a virgin getting his first glimpse of live pussy.
“You look nervous,” Mickey noted softly.
“I’m thinking,” Slade growled. “Something that I understand is foreign to you, but, as the man with the scalpel and the very large brain, I’ve gotta ask you to please stop talking.”
“You’re right,” Mickey said, giving him a flat look over scrawny crossed arms, “you do have a fat head.”
Slade twisted to glare at the little dweeb. “At least I don’t look like some sort of lizard,” Slade retorted. “Shut up, okay?”
“What kind of lizard?” Mickey asked, curious. “I’ve been trying to figure out what they did to me.”
Slade groaned. Did the kid just not understand or was he just a complete and total moron? “It’s called an Efrit hivemaster, and technically, they didn’t do it to you, you were born with it because they tinkered with your parent cell’s DNA.”
“So what’d they do to you?” Mickey asked. “And don’t tell me that hair and your whacked-out eyes are normal.”
Deciding it was best to just humor the small, annoying teen with the very large mouth before Slade lost it and threw something sharp at him—and subsequently had it telekinetically returned to him and, oh, say, lodged into his eye for the effort, Slade took a breath to steady himself and said, “They were experimenting with making a very intelligent Human with the ability to shapeshift.”
Both of Mickey’s eyes went up. “You can shapeshift?”
“No,” Slade snorted. “But it did help with the brainpower a bit. As long as I keep gum on hand. Headaches are a bitch. Shut up, okay?”
“I wish I could shapeshift.”
Through teeth gritted so hard they hurt, Slade said, “And I wish I could suck out people’s souls and consume their powers like Rogue. Shut up or I swear to God you will be the first virgin I skewer with something other than my dick.”
Mickey gave him a smug look. “You could try it, Fuzzy.”
Slade tightened his hands into fists and was about to grab something destructive and go after the little twerp when he realized what Mickey was doing. His nerves—and his shaking hands—h
ad effectively been alleviated with pure, pissed-off Samuel Dobbs.
Slade allowed the tension in his shoulders to release. “Thanks,” he muttered.
Mickey shrugged. “You did it for me.”
So he had. Slade glanced again at the unconscious woman on his surgeon’s table, her stomach even then lit up with bright operating lights. Then, before he could allow himself the chance to get freaked out again, he picked up a scalpel and went to work.
#
Rat scrambled over another pile of rubble, narrowly evading the kreenit’s jaws for the third time that morning. Behind her, a half-destroyed concrete wall exploded under the gnashing black teeth of the beast behind her.
“Beda’s bones!” she screamed, hurdling another barrier and diving inside the library.
Like a ferret hunting out a mouse, the kreenit barreled through the front of the building after her, knocking glass out and bookshelves over as it forced its huge, scaly body into the front room with her. Books and furniture from the second story started raining down on all sides, dislodged by the way the kreenit’s back was tearing up the second-story floor.
Rat, who hadn’t slowed, reached the back of the building, yanked the emergency fire escape door open, and hurtled out the other side. The kreenit was right on her tail, simply knocking the building over to get at her.
Diving through the smashed-out front windows of another flimsy Human construction, Rat scrambled over the toppled tables and vandalized furniture of a café, then out the other side and into the street beyond. The kreenit, slowed slightly by the darkness of the café, nonetheless was able to hone in on her location and resume its charge. She’d already shot the beast six times to the back of the head, none of which had so much as made it twitch. She’d heard of such things before in her PlanOps lectures, when a kreenit was especially large and the scales had been given enough time to thicken around the back of the cranium that the energy impact no longer affected them, but it was the first time she’d encountered it in practice. Her PlanOps instructors’ recommendation when she finally ran across one? Drop your weapon, bend over, put your head between your legs, and kiss your simian ass goodbye, because you aren’t going to survive it, furgling.
Kreenit were fast, and, as others in the town had obviously discovered—considering the dismantled buildings everywhere—hiding from the kreenit was the only real method of keeping the beast at bay. Which was, as the piles of soggy, shit-covered Human bones littering the town were a testament to, woefully ineffective.
She needed a distraction, and fast. Behind her, the utterly massive animal was smashing through the café and barreling around the corner. She was frantically trying to come up with something more interesting to a kreenit than a running morsel of live Human flesh, when she heard the sound of falling water somewhere under her feet. She paused just long enough to see a hole that the kreenit’s foot had punctured in the sidewalk, sucking up water. The hole was small, dubiously big enough to fit her head or hips, but obviously opened to some sort of man-made tunnel beyond. Having no idea if she’d fit or only get stuck halfway, Rat, like so many moments in her life, made a split-second decision based entirely on her gut. And her gut said go for the hole. She was tall for a woman, but she was also very lean. She tugged her backpack off, threw it behind her in the kreenit’s path, and used the extra seconds that gained her to slide face-first into the hole in the concrete.
Then, knee-deep in running water, she started sloshing up the tunnel, away from the thunder of the kreenit’s approach. As the kreenit roared and started ripping at her entry point, widening it by car-sized chunks, Rat took a side-tunnel and sprinted up what she assumed to be a different street. Spillages of floodwater rained down on her from all sides. She was just starting to panic, wondering if she had somehow trapped herself in a self-contained tunnel system with an animal that burrowed for its food, when she saw a ladder leading to a tiny speck of light in the ceiling up ahead. Behind her, she could hear a cascade of water and concrete filling the tunnel from the kreenit’s efforts to dig her out.
Swallowing, Rat climbed the ladder and felt around the little hole for a latch. She fought panic when she found nothing but a ring of cold, hard steel. She was just starting to climb down and try to find some other exit point when the kreenit’s front feet slammed into the ground as the beast reared and hopped, collapsing the tunnel one huge section at a time, making the metal above her head jiggle and clank. Frowning, Rat climbed back to the metal ring and pushed on it.
With enough pressure, the metal disc lifted, leaving her looking at an empty alley above the flood water-level.
Heart pounding, listening to the sounds of digging getting closer, Rat carefully pushed the tunnel lid up and, as quietly as she could, considering it had to weigh over forty lobes, shoved it aside. Then she scrambled out the hole and bolted for the other end of town.
The kreenit, thank the unlovable Jreet gods, did not follow her. Though, Rat knew, it would. Being one of the only large meals still alive in the area—and after she had worked it up into such a frenzy—the kreenit was going to keep looking until it found her trail, then it would hunt her down across the planet if necessary.
Which meant she needed to find Sam and his creepy little friends, fast. At a run, Rat pulled out the map that Sam had left her and headed south.
#
Slade made the final stitch, knotted the thread, set down his forceps, administered nanos, then, returning the nannite solution to the cart, he took two steps backwards and fell on his ass and hyperventilated on the middle of the operating-room floor.
Mickey, who had been seated in a fold-out chair with one leg within the 10-foot Do Not Cross line that Slade had insisted upon, lunged out of his seat and rushed to the table to get a good look at Twelve-B. “What’s wrong with her?!” Mickey cried, running his eyes desperately over her body. Twelve-B, for her part, was breathing normally.
From the floor, Slade let out an uncontrollable laugh, which ended in a sob. He took several deep breaths, letting them out in panting, laughing whines, then closed his eyes and just tried to quell the tremor in his hands.
“What’s wrong?” Mickey cried, still looking over Twelve-B. “What’s wrong with her, you asshole?!”
Slade let out a hysterical giggle and opened his eyes. Then, at Mickey’s sharp look, he sobered. “Nothing.” He swallowed hard and flexed his hands into fists and back. They were still trembling like he’d just fought a wrestling match with a cougar. “Nothing,” he repeated, amazed. “She’s fine.”
Mickey’s brow tightened in a frown. “Then why are you crying?” He obviously didn’t believe him.
Slade wiped tears from his cheeks and just shook his head on another happy bubble of relief. “Nothing’s wrong with her. That’s why I’m laughing.” At Mickey’s continued scowl, Slade dropped his arm and said, “She’s fine. Stop worrying, you little prick.” Still shaking, he spent a few more minutes just soaking in his own relief, then forced himself back to his feet and walked over to examine his patient, who was still drooling on her tiny, sanitized pillow. He took a deep breath, then picked up Twelve-B’s warm, limp hand. “You hear that, Emerald? You’re fine.”
Immediately, Mickey stiffened. “Emerald? Her name’s Twelve-B.”
“I hate calling her Twelve-B,” Slade said. “And I had plenty of time to think about what I’d call her if she lived. She lived. Her eyes are the brightest, deepest green I’ve ever seen. Her name is Emerald. Doctor privilege.” He cocked his head at Mickey. “As for you… How does Virginia work? Mickey is too…ambiguous. This is so much more accurate.”
Mickey looked at him so long that Slade wondered if now would be the time the half-pint virgin decided to squeeze his brains from his ear canals. “Lots of the People’s eyes are green,” Mickey finally said, irritation straining his face.
Slade waved off his comment disgustedly. “Of course they are. An aftereffect of playing with recessive genetics. But she’s the one whose life I just saved, so sh
e gets to be called Emerald.”
Mickey grimaced, but turned back to Emerald. “You sure there’s nothing wrong with her?”
“She’s fine,” Slade said, still somewhat stunned by the fact. “She should be feeling good as new in a couple hours.”
“She feels a lot better right now,” Mickey admitted.
Slade gave a goofy grin, so relieved he almost giggled again. Then an odd scratching sound from the lighted hallway made him frown. Eyes on the hall, he said, “Is that Ten-F?”
Mickey glanced at the door and winced. “Uh, yeah.”
In a fully-lit hallway, with the headlights focused directly on the entrance.
“Fuck me,” Slade said, “that’s not good.”
“So what do we do?” Mickey asked, worriedly.
“Start packing up,” Slade said. “We want as much of the equipment as we can take with us. Scalpels, drugs, chemicals, you name it, I want it.” Slade rolled up the bloody towel and its array of knives, spreaders, magnifiers, and other handy devices, knowing this was probably the last time in his life he would ever see the inside of a proper lab. He threw that into another towel and tied it shut, promising himself he’d clean it later, before the blood could eat the blades. Nearby, Mickey started shoving the bottles of nannites, drugs, and lab chemicals into the backpack.
