Xenofreak Nation
by Melissa Conway
Smashwords Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright 2011 by Melissa Conway
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Chapter One
July 2022, New York
As protests go, the gathering in front of the Huffman Building in the Capital District was unimpressive. Most of the people attending were friends of the organizer, the head of a little-known organization called The Pure Human Society. The only media presence was a bookish, bored-looking little man from a small conservative newspaper out of New Jersey.
Bryn Vega watched as her father stepped up on an overturned orange crate and addressed the crowd of about forty people with a completely unnecessary bullhorn.
“Not long ago,” Harry Vega spoke into the bullhorn to get their initial attention. He paused both for effect and to let the crowd quiet sufficiently down. “I saw a young man at the bank with an armband xenograft. Only it wasn’t pig skin or rabbit fur or even snakeskin.”
The woman standing next to Bryn sneered at the word ‘snakeskin.’ She looked at Bryn briefly and shook her head as if to say, “What’s the world coming to?”
Harry Vega raised his voice and the bullhorn magnified it enough to drown out even the traffic sounds coming from busy Huffman Park Avenue.
“What I saw was an abomination. An unforgivable sin of vanity and cruelty. This—this xenofreak…” her father’s face fell into a look of abject disgust as he slowly enunciated each word, “had a pelt strip with a very distinctive black and white pattern on it. It was a zebra.”
A collective gasp rose from the crowd and everyone began talking. Someone shouted out, “Damned xenofreaks!” Another countered, “Xeno murderers, you mean!”
Bryn glanced over to the reporter, who still looked bored, but who was at least texting something on his holophone.
In a voice filled with derision, her father said, “The president of the United States has seventeen tattoos. During his campaign, he showed as much ink as possible to attract the Generation Y and Z votes.”
At almost eighteen, Bryn didn’t belong to a generation that she was aware of. Probably someone had already given her group a name, but since the previous gens had reached the end of the alphabet, Bryn didn’t know if her group was supposed to start over from the beginning or what. She did know that the world she and the other Gen-somethings would inherit was about as messed up as it had ever been. As for the 35-year-old president, she thought it was cool that the youngest president ever had been elected in her lifetime. If she could have, she would have voted for him despite her father’s opinion. The prevailing sentiment among her peers was that only a young president could possibly keep up with the times. President Frisbie’s opponent had been sixty-two years old and barely knew what a holophone was, much less how to use it.
She tried to concentrate on her father, who was only getting warmed up. “Yes, we are in the midst of a depression surpassed only by the great depression of 1929. Our president, our legislature, the leaders of this once-great country are too busy digging us out of a very deep economic hole to care about the wholesale desecration of other species. Violent xenofreak outbursts, like the unprecedented attack against peaceful protesters last month in Chicago, have been ignored, left for local authorities to deal with. This country’s leaders have done nothing to prevent the heinous spread of xenofreakish outrages. Every single year the ethical implications are debated in the legislature and every single year the bills that would impose restrictions on the practice of xenotransplantation are shot down.”
Bryn had heard the speech several times over the last few days as her father practiced it at home. She’d made the mistake of asking him what the difference was between wearing a leather jacket and getting a xenograft, and had to listen to a forty-minute lecture peppered with comments like, “How could you be my daughter and ask such a thing?”
The next part of his speech always upset her so she tried to tune it out, but was only partially successful.
“My wife,” Harry’s voice softened deliberately and the crowd hushed and leaned forward, “was one of the very first recipients of a pig heart in 2014. The donor pig had been genetically engineered for compatibility with the human immune system, but technology at the time was unable to account for the difference in tissue aging. My wife could have lived to be eighty or so, but a domesticated pig only lives to be ten or fifteen years old. The heart began to age and my wife…” here Harry’s voice broke and Bryn’s eyes burned with sudden tears. He cleared his throat and continued with more strength, “My wife died. She was a hero, a pioneer for xenotransplantation—for its intended purpose—which was to save lives. And now that the xenosurgeons have perfected the process, it does save lives. But just the other day I heard tell of a four-year-old child with a congenital heart defect that was unable to get a xenodonor and do you know why?”
Bryn knew why; everyone did. The grim, expectant silence of the crowd demonstrated her father’s control. They were waiting for the high point—the inciting statement that they all knew was coming. Harry Vega did not disappoint.
“Because the genetic xenoengineers make more money producing animals for the perverted lifestyles of xenofreaks! They make millions upon millions of dollars enabling these atrocities!”
Bryn’s father had recruited her to help find words strong enough to convey the depth of feeling he had for the subject. He’d initially rejected the word ‘atrocity’ until Bryn pointed out it was oft-used to describe the horrors of Auschwitz.
The word and her father’s emphatic use of it did its job: the crowd burst out in a supportive cheer, the strength of which made Bryn realize the gathering had swelled to double its original size. The reporter no longer looked bored. His holophone was now aloft and recording her father’s every word.
Standing among the bodies pressing forward to get a better view gave Bryn a moment of panic. She edged backwards, through the shouting, cheering throng until she stood on the fringe and could breathe again. From a more comfortable distance she was better able to assess the crowd as a whole. Most stood together reveling in the whipped frenzy of mob mentality. Several were less involved, with only the occasional, “Yeah,” or a nod of the head to show solidarity. A few—no, there were exactly four of them—showed either no response to her father’s words, or worse, rolled their eyes at each other in disdain.
Two of these dissenters were off to her left eating fast food hamburgers. One young woman with a black scarf draped over her head and wrapped around her neck sat on a cement retaining wall watching Bryn’s father from behind mirrored sunglasses. The fourth stood about ten feet away from Bryn, a tall, broad-shouldered young man with a white scar that sliced vertically through his left eyebrow, leaving his cheek unblemished but then continuing down to mar his otherwise well-shaped lips. Bryn wondered how he’d gotten such a scar; it looked like someone had gone after him with a sword. He certainly seemed tough enough to have gotten into some kind of deadly conflict. His brown hair was pulled back into a stub of a ponytail that revealed he’d shaved his hair from the tops of his ears down. The muscles in his neck
, the only part of his body she could see since he was wearing jeans and a light windbreaker, were thick and strong.
He turned and caught her staring. She looked away, feeling a blush creep over her cheeks, and looked back to where her father was still giving his speech, still putting his all into garnering supporters for his cause. Harry Vega was at the point where he once again, more ardently this time, emphasized the depth of his despair at losing his wife. In many respects, it bothered Bryn whenever he used his personal loss for professional gain. She doubted her mom would find it acceptable that her husband, a man she’d come close to divorcing before her xenoheart gave out, would martyr her for his own purposes.
But she loved her father. He meant well, even though he played the widower card more often than she’d like. And just because she didn’t feel as strongly as he did about xenoaugmentation didn’t mean she approved. Sure, she had a few friends who’d had stuff done; even her best friend Maria threatened to get a bovine ‘tramp patch’ on her lower back to spite her parents. Xenografts were as popular in this generation as plain tats were twenty years ago. The xenofreaks, though, they took it to a level both incomprehensible and frightening.
Bryn realized she’d tuned out a good portion of her father’s speech. Even standing on the orange crate, he was barely elevated enough for her to see his face above the throng. Behind the yawning mouth of the bullhorn, his eyes burned with an almost evangelical fervor. She tried to concentrate on his words and the reaction of his listeners, all the while aware that every once in awhile, the scarred young man glanced her way with bright blue eyes that seemed completely at odds with his severe countenance.
Chapter Two
While keeping half an eye on the target, Scott Harding pretended to listen to the buffoon on the orange crate spewing inflammatory nonsense. The target was a pretty little thing in a crisp apple green sundress; not a mark on the creamy skin of her arms and legs. The speaker, her father, had the significantly darker skin of a Latin American immigrant, and the accent to go with it. Scott idly mused that the target’s mother, the dead woman with the pig heart Harry Vega had so eloquently spoken of, must have been white indeed to tone down Harry’s genetic contribution to the target’s skin color. Her dark blonde hair must have come from her mother, too, although Scott knew a guy from south of the border who’d been born with light hair even though his parents had black. The poor guy’s dad had run a paternity test only to find out it was some kind of recessive gene. One thing was sure; the daughter of the head of the Pure Human Society didn’t bleach her hair. Scott doubted her father allowed her even the smallest act of rebellion. Someone as rabidly anti-xenofreak as he was would pop an artery if his little girl so much as got her ears pierced.
Scott shifted his weight, flexing his fingers inside his pockets. Somewhere deep in the part of his brain that controlled motor function, a clutch of nanoneuronal implants aided him as he unsheathed his claws and then relaxed again. He hated having to wear a jacket on what was becoming a very warm morning, but here among the fanatical xenophobes he had to keep his alterations hidden.
He glanced over at the target and found her looking right at him. She turned away so rapidly it almost brought a smile to his lips. Almost.
He wasn’t in the mood to smile; his reasons for being here didn’t exactly amuse him, and his accomplices weren’t being unobtrusive enough for his comfort. Padme was keeping a low enough profile, but Fiske and Barney weren’t hiding their contempt very well. They actually laughed out loud when Harry Vega suggested that all xenofreaks belonged in the zoo.
Neither of them was the sharpest scalpel on the tray. They thought they were tough, but it was all attitude and most of that came from their xenoalterations. They were members, as was Scott, of a gang called the XBestias. In and of itself, membership gave a person status, but Fiske and Barney weren’t qualified to handle themselves should the crowd figure out what they were. Even Scott would have a hard time hoofing it fast enough to escape this many riled-up people. He was supposed to be acting like he didn’t know either of those fools, but he couldn’t help shooting them a look of warning.
The target happened to intercept it and Scott was just about to mentally kick himself when he spotted her tiny smile of approval. Okay, she thought he was giving the hecklers a dirty look. Still, he shouldn’t make any contact with her whatsoever, so he moved back towards the street. If for whatever reason she wanted to look at him again, she’d now have to turn 180-degrees.
Harry Vega went on and on. Scott hadn’t slept well last night—if he was honest, he’d admit he hadn’t slept well since he’d taken on this assignment—and he fought a persistent series of yawns. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Padme adjust her scarf. She was a mystery to him, more so than most females. Her scarf covered her alteration: a set of drooping cow ears. Rumor was she’d had it done as some sort of penance, but Scott knew different. Whatever the reason, Padme’s cow ears effectively blocked her eardrums, giving the term ‘ear muffs’ a whole new meaning. Sometimes he spoke to her and wasn’t sure if she was ignoring him or just hadn’t heard what he said.
She’d gotten them from the same person they’d all gotten their xenoalterations from, the infamous Dr. Nicholas Fournier. He’d been head of surgery at Manhattan’s prestigious Xenotransplantation Hospital until it was discovered he had a gruesome secret. Despite requirements that all organs and tissue removed from patients be destroyed, Dr. Fournier had been caught with a macabre collection of appendages and whatnot from a wide range of patients, some of them powerful enough to make a very big stink. He kept them in his apartment in a room dedicated to the ghoulish display, a shrine of body parts pickled in jars of formaldehyde. He’d been booted out of the hospital, of course, and his license to practice medicine had been revoked. But that didn’t stop him. If anything, it freed him to pursue his more Frankensteinian perversions.
His ignoble plunge from grace served to embitter him towards the establishment, or so Scott was told. When Scott went underground to get his alteration from the good doctor, he didn’t ask. Not that he actually met him. Scott had been shuttled around by a chosen few nurses, who conducted his interviews and exams, took payment and prepped him for surgery. Security was so tight they’d sedated him before moving him to Dr. Fournier’s secret facility for the procedure.
Scott lifted his chin when Harry Vega began a rant against the XBestias. While in recovery after his xenotransplant, Scott had been recruited into the notorious gang by Dr. Fournier’s right-hand man, known only as Lupus. Latin for wolf, the name fit perfectly, since Lupus no longer had a human face—it had been replaced with that of a grey wolf.
“Two days after I saw that zebra-defiling xenofreak scouting security at the bank, it was robbed at gunpoint by known XBestia gang members,” Harry Vega said. “I have it on good authority that every person in the bank during that robbery is now dead.”
Scott couldn’t control the look of alarm that crossed his face, but if anyone noticed, they’d think he was as appalled as the rest of them.
No one was supposed to know about this.
As Vega went on to assert that the XBestias had somehow identified and killed each and every person who’d been in the bank that day, Scott relaxed. Vega didn’t know squat.
By the time the windbag began wrapping up his interminable speech, the crowd had grown to about a hundred people. The target looked around when a television news van pulled up and Scott practically felt her eyes brush over him again. Once the news crew approached and asked Vega for an interview, the speech was over and the throng finally began to dissipate.
The target seemed to be trying to catch her father’s eye, but he didn’t notice. She waved to him anyway and a thoughtful look settled over her face as she began walking up Huffman Park Avenue.
Padme jumped off the retaining wall and followed her. Fiske and Barney too fell into line a few people behind Padme. Scott went the other way, through the alley west of the Huffman Building, across a weed-choked
dirt lot and through a broken chain link fence.
The gravel parking lot was one of few free places to park in the area, which is probably why Vega chose this location for his demonstration. Scott got into a nondescript white van and started the engine. In the side view mirrors, he watched as the target approached her pert little VW Hamster, which was parked across the aisle directly behind the van.
Padme caught up to her and Scott got a glimpse of one of the shy xeno’s rare and dazzling smiles. The target would think Padme was all friendliness as she asked for directions, but only until she sensed Fiske and Barney closing in.
Chapter Three
Bryn was surprised when the girl in the scarf approached her. She’d pegged her as pro-xenofreak, but here she was, all smiles, saying in a genteel, lightly accented voice, “It was a good speech, yes?”
Bryn shrugged and tried to look pleasant even though she was on guard—and not about to cop to being Harry Vega’s only daughter. Just that morning he’d warned her, “I’m ticking off some very unpredictable people, Brynnie. We need to take every precaution to keep ourselves safe.”
It was just like him to instill a sense of fear in her but not give any indication how she was supposed to protect herself. Just last week a horrible news holo out of Chicago showed a clash between an animal rights group holding a peaceful demonstration and three passing xenofreaks. There were conflicting reports about who started it, but one of the xenofreaks ended the name-calling and shoving by producing a home-made mini-submachine gun and, quite casually, razing the crowd. Miraculously, no one was killed. Cops didn’t catch the perpetrator, but several people got his face on holo. He had a scrolled xenograft curving around the outer portion of one eye a la Mike Tyson, in what authorities believed to be crocodile skin.
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