Under My Skin

by Charles de Lint

  "Yeah, but I know stuff now that I didn't then." Barry throws Des a smirk. "I've developed some code that theoretically can get me into anything, given enough time."

  "Time's something we don't exactly have," Chaingang says. He studies the screen a little longer. "So what are you saying? That the best we can do is sneak in through one of those secret entrances?"

  "Pretty much. And then you'll still have to get by their security cameras and guards."

  Chaingang gives another nod. "Not a problem. We can do it the hard way."

  Barry can't know what he means, but I can guess. We're Wildlings. Stronger. Faster. Chaingang expects us to take on the guards with whatever small advantage the animals living under our skins can give us.

  "I guess," Barry says. He hesitates, then adds, "Can I ask why you're not calling the cops? SWAT would be able to storm the building legally—you know, without our having to go through all this spy stuff."

  "They'd have to go through a whole chain of command," Cory says. "Find probable cause, get a judge to sign off on a warrant."

  "And by the time they finished dicking around," Chaingang says, "Josh could be long gone."

  He doesn't add, or worse. Like maybe dead. He doesn't have to.

  "So no cops," Chaingang continues. He looks around at us. "Let's get ready. Who's in?"

  Far to the west of us, the sun has set over the ocean. Surfers have gone home after catching their last few waves. Lovers are walking hand-in-hand along the boardwalk. Skaters are messing around in the lit parking lot by the pier. It seems like a whole other world. Twenty-four hours ago, that was my world—well, except for the lovers part. Now I'm part of some half-assed commando unit that's probably going to get itself killed.

  "I'm still in," I say.

  Everybody else speaks up except for Auntie Min and Tomás, who've remained on the other bench. I'm surprised. I had no expectations with Tomás, but I thought Auntie Min was a tough cookie and I'd like to have her with us.

  "I'm coming, too," Barry says.

  That really surprises me. I know why Desmond is coming—and we wouldn't be able to stop him anyway. But Barry? And he doesn't even know about the Wildlings under our skins.

  "Why?" Cory asks.

  "Josh is my friend. He'd do the same for me. Hell, he'd probably do it for somebody he didn't know if he saw they were in trouble."

  Cory smiles. "Good answer."

  Chaingang stands up. He takes out his phone and makes a call. A few moments later we hear his crew's motorcycles approaching again. By the time Chaingang has swung his leg over the seat of his own machine, the other Ocean Avers come cruising to where we are. Stragglers on their way to their cars from the various stores pause to watch the gang arrive. I glance over to ValentiCorp. The guards way over there are paying attention, too. Alert. The shoppers are nervous. I can smell their fear from where we stand.

  The Ocean Avers pull up in a ragged line behind Chaingang's chopper.

  "Let's saddle up," he tells us. "Buddy up and play nice."

  As we start for the row of motorcycles, Chaingang calls over to me.

  "What's the matter, sweetcheeks?" he says. "Lost your love for me?"

  I aim myself in his direction, relieved that he's already forgiven me for that look I gave him earlier.

  "Don't call me that, babyface," I tease as I get on behind him.

  He laughs and revs his engine. He waits until everybody is in their seats except for Auntie Min and Tomás, then he gives the signal and we're off.

  The bikers take us out of the shopping complex. Chaingang leads his crew back toward the beach, but turns off onto a side street once we can't see the stores anymore. The Ocean Avers with passengers follow him. The others keep going in the other direction.

  "I thought you weren't involving your crew," I say.

  I don't have to lean forward. I know Chaingang can hear me just fine, the same way I can hear his reply.

  "They're strictly transport," he tells me.

  A few more turns and Chaingang pulls over again, killing his engine. He puts the chopper up on its stand. The other bikers let off their passengers, then continue on down the street.

  "We're close to the Pep Boys now," he says. "Don't bunch up. We already created enough ruckus with the bikes. Ritzy neighbourhood like this, we don't want to make anybody nervous."

  Following his lead, we walk in pairs on either side of the street until we join up again, slipping in behind a jade hedge that separates the garden wall of a row of condos from the sidewalk.

  Peering through the waxy leaves, we can see the Pep Boys building. It's starting to hit me that in another few moments, all hell could break loose.

  "You ready for this?" Elzie asks, glancing over as we crouch behind the hedge.

  I turn my head slowly to glare at her. "Sure. Don't you think I'm up to it?"

  I'm insulted that she assumes I can't handle it. Being circumspect has never been my strongpoint.

  "No, no—of course you are. Forget that I said anything. I was out of line."

  I have to bite my tongue from saying, damn straight.

  But to be honest, she's touched a raw nerve. I'm not the bravest person in the world. Sure, I've ridden some big waves and when Josh was being kidnapped, I was ready to go all mother-bear fierce. But that's instinct kicking in. I'm not like Elzie, who always seems ready to take on anybody. And I'm sure not like Chaingang, who's probably carrying a gun and God knows how many knives on him. Not that he needs weapons, considering his size. I saw him fight a couple of guys at school once and he decimated them. Really. It was brutal. And that was before he became a Wildling.

  "Okay," Chaingang says.

  An electronic beep from Barry's computer interrupts whatever Chaingang was about to say.

  "Hang on," Barry says. "This is good."

  He crouches down and opens his laptop. A couple of keystrokes later he looks up, grinning.

  "I'm in," he says. "Here, look. This is the camera feed that's monitoring the street in front of us."

  We all crowd around. The screen is split into a number of black and white windows. They show interior hallways, stairwells, the underground service space, the parking lots. The views in the various windows keep changing. Barry hovers his cursor over one and it fills the top portion of the screen. The rest of the views scroll right to left below it.

  I give the expanded window careful study. There's the street we've come down. There's the hedge. But I can't see us. We're hidden from the camera's view.

  "Look!" Elzie says, stabbing a finger at one of the smaller views.

  Barry brings it up. We seem to be looking at a hospital or infirmary. There's a line of cubicles, separated from each other by floor-to-ceiling glass. Each one has a mattress on the floor and a stainless steel toilet. The camera feed shows two figures in adjoining cubicles, sitting on their mattresses. It's impossible to make out any features.

  "Is that Josh?" I ask, pointing to one of them.

  Elzie and I both press against Barry, trying to get a closer view.

  "I can't tell," she says. "He doesn't have Josh's dreads."

  "They could have cut them off," Desmond says.

  I'm still trying to figure out the room itself. It looks sort of like a hospital. But it also looks like a laboratory. It's hard to see from the camera angle, but I think there's the edge of an operating table at the bottom of the screen.

  "Why would they have a place like that in an office building?" I say.

  "Research and development," Cory says.

  I turn to look at him. "Seriously, what's that even supposed to mean?"

  "They want to figure out what makes them tick," Cory explains. "What makes a Wildling. You can't find that out in a jail cell. But in a lab like that?"

  My heart goes into overtime.

  "Wildling?" Barry says, but no one answers him.

  "Is that Josh?" Chaingang asks.

  Nobody can confirm it.

  "Hard to know, but it makes sense tha
t it would be him," Cory says. "Or that he'd be in the same area. The body shape is right."

  "Okay," Chaingang says. "It's probably him. That's good. Half the battle was figuring out whether or not he was even in there." He holds up a hand before Cory can respond. "Yeah, I know Auntie Min already told us. But I needed to see for myself what they've got going on in there."

  "And now?" Cory asks.

  "Now, assuming that's him, we need to get him out," Chaingang says. He turns to Barry and adds, "Where is that room?"

  "But … um … okay, let's see."

  Barry does something with his cursor and a small window pops up with an identifying code.

  "Fifth floor," he says. "But that's the fifth floor going down—like basement levels."

  The big access tunnels underneath are one thing, but this is really weird. I don't know any building with a basement around here and certainly nothing like this.

  "Let's see what's in front of us again," Chaingang says.

  Barry reduces the image of Josh and brings back the street view from the Pep Boys building.

  "Can you shut the cameras off?" Cory asks.

  "Do we really want to? That'll let them know they've had a breach and the whole place might go into some kind of shutdown mode."

  Chaingang nods. "How about redirecting the feed from just that camera? Can you do that?"

  "Let me see."

  He starts tapping keys. I have no idea what he's doing, but after a few moments, he smiles.

  "Somebody walk out there," he says, motioning toward the street.

  Desmond gets up and pushes through the hedge before I can grab his arm. It should be a Wildling doing this. Somebody better equipped to handle it if things go wrong.

  My gaze fixes on the screen. The street looks bare, even though Desmond is right there, out on the sidewalk. A couple of cars go by and Desmond slips back to join us.

  "What did you do, Barry?" I ask.

  "I've got it repeating a loop of footage. Unless someone notices, you can't tell what's happening now on the street."

  "Good job, bro," Chaingang tells Barry. "See if you can rejig the rest of the cameras along that corridor."

  "No problem. I've got the protocol down now. But I can't do anything about human eyes. Anyone around here or down there will see you."

  "Let us worry about that," Chaingang says. "Give us fifteen minutes, then shut everything down. Cameras. Security. Locks. Lights. The works."

  "You'll just have gotten under the building itself by then."

  "Yeah," Chaingang says. "But in the dark, the advantage is ours."

  Barry frowns. "I don't get it."

  I touch his arm. "It's okay, Barry. Just do what he says."

  But Barry isn't stupid. He looks around at us.

  "You guys are all Wildlings, aren't you?" he says.

  Everybody goes tense. Chaingang's eyes narrow.

  "No, no," Desmond says. "It's not like that, dude."

  "You think I care?" Barry says. "What happened to Josh isn't right. Those guys need to be stopped and now at least I know you've got a fighting chance."

  The tension holds a moment longer, then Chaingang smiles and extends a fist to Barry. They bump knuckles.

  "Fifteen minutes," Chaingang says.

  When Barry nods, Chaingang gets to his feet and looks around at the rest of us.

  "Let's do this thing," he says.

  He pushes his way through the hedge and the rest of us follow, jogging across the street toward the big garage door on the right side of the Pep Boys building.

  Josh

  The man and woman are both dressed in white lab coats. The man's short and slender—or maybe he only looks short because the woman's so tall. She's over six feet and scarecrow thin. Her hair's short and the eyes behind her glasses are scary cold. He looks like one of those old dot-com guys—thinning hair pulled back into a small ponytail, blinking in our direction like we're a line of code that's not doing what it's supposed to.

  They seem surprised to see me standing, Rico sitting up, both of us watching them come in.

  "Are they supposed to be awake?" the man asks.

  The woman shrugs. "No, but I'll take care of it."

  "This is it," Rico says as she walks toward a bank of computer monitors.

  He's standing now, too, balancing steadily on one leg.

  "When I give the word," I tell him, "go to the far side of your cell and bang as hard as you can on the wall."

  He lifts an eyebrow, but nods.

  I focus on the mountain lion under my skin. I bring up the memory of that moment in my bathroom, how I called it up. There's no room for error. I've thought about this a hundred times since it happened, looking for the Wildling in me, weighing its presence, seeing what I'd have to do to let its body replace mine. I just hadn't actually taken the final step again. I'd felt like I was under a microscope, watched everywhere I went. And I'd been too scared.

  I'm still scared, but now I don't have a choice. I've got one chance to do it. If I screw this up, I could be joining Rico in the one-leg brigade.

  "Now!" I tell him.

  He lunges over to the side of his cell, launching himself against the hard plastic, then bangs on it with both hands. He adds a scream that they probably can't hear. The two researchers immediately look in his direction. I grab that momentary distraction and let the constraints go.

  I don't know why I was so worried. The change is instantaneous—just like it was before.

  I feel strong. Powerful. I fit inside the mountain lion as though I've always been under its skin.

  I'm also angry as hell.

  For being in here—caged in their private zoo. For what they did to Rico. For what they want to do to me.

  I bunch my leg muscles. Turning my anger into energy, I throw myself at the plastic wall, claws extended, ready to rip it to shreds. But I don't have to. The force of my impact makes the wall pop out of whatever was holding it in place. It comes crashing down and I'm riding it like it's a board, leaping off just before it smashes onto the floor. It takes down tables and cabinets along the way and sends their contents flying in a jangle of broken glass and metal implements that clatter across the marble floor.

  The man screams. He drops to his knees and starts scrabbling for the door. The woman keeps her cool. She turns, finger stabbing out at some control on the keyboard by the computers. She's fast—I'll give her that—but I'm faster. I bat her away with one paw, not even thinking about my strength. I hear something snap. Her neck, maybe. She flies across the room. There's another snapping sound as her back hits the edge of one of the stainless steel surgical tables. Her body drops to the floor and settles in unnatural angles, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth.

  I want to taste that blood, but then I hear the man. He's at the door, trying to escape.

  It takes me one leap to reach him. My jaws are open, extended wide so I can take his head between my teeth. I can almost hear the bones of his skull shattering under my bite. But before I can crush his head, something slithers between us.

  I register scales. A flat head. Dark unblinking eyes.

  I'm slow on the uptake, but the mountain lion in me immediately recognizes the rattlesnake ready to strike. Before I can assimilate the information, I've already jumped back out of the snake's striking range. I roar my displeasure.

  The snake becomes Rico. He's wearing jeans and a T-shirt, high tops on his feet—feet plural because he has both legs now. I don't understand and that makes me angry again. How did he get out of his cell? How'd he get his leg back? The growl starts up low in my chest.

  He hold his hands up, palms out, before it develops into another roar.

  "Easy," he says. "Easy. Cousins don't eat cousins."

  The man behind him scrambles to his feet. Rico turns just long enough to sweep his legs from under him. As the man falls back onto the floor, arms flailing, Rico faces me again.

  "Why don't you let the boy come back?" he says to me.

>   The boy? What boy?

  But then I get it. I will the change. A moment later I'm standing there in my own shape.

  "Aw, come on, man," Rico says. "I don't need to see your junk."

  The hospital clothes I was wearing a moment ago didn't come back with me when I left my Wildling shape behind. I'm stark naked. In normal circumstances, I'd be mortified, but my gaze goes to the dead woman and I can't pull it away. I don't even bother to cover my dick with my hands. There's a weird whine in my ears and I'm finding it hard to breathe.

  Dead.

  At my hand.

  Not hand. Paw.

  I killed her like it was nothing. Like it was an afterthought. Just swept her out of my way.

  I drop to my knees and throw up until I can only dry heave.

  I lift my head and my gaze immediately locks on the woman's body again.

  I hear water running, then a wet cloth lands with a splat on the floor in front of me.

  "Wipe your face," Rico says. "We don't have time to screw around."

  "She ... I ..."

  "Yeah, she's dead. She also cut off my leg without even thinking twice. Get over it. It's not like you killed a nun."

  I finally look away from the body to him.

  "Your leg ..." I begin.

  "It was gone, now it's back. I know. I'll answer your questions if we get out of this place, but can you just focus for a minute?"

  I nod. I pick up the cloth and wipe my face. The cool rough cotton helps settle me.

  Don't look at the body, I tell myself.

  "They keep the clothes in that cabinet," Rico says, pointing.

  I walk over to the cabinet on shaky legs. I pull out a white shirt and drawstring pants, put them on. It's hard to concentrate. I'm numb and everything seems unfocused. I start to button the shirt, then realize that Rico has a scalpel in his hand. He's holding the man up by the scruff of his lab coat.

  "You get one chance to answer my question," Rico says.

  He lets go and gives the man a push. The man's eyes are wild with panic as he falls back against the wall.

  "I didn't do it," he says, voice pitched high with panic. "You know I didn't do it. It was her idea. I was just ... please … I didn't want any of that to happen."