Skin Game

by Max Allan Collins

  Pointing at another monitor, Luke said, “And it looks like a TV crew’s trying to get in, around the corner from the drunks.”

  Smirking, Alec said, “Is that the gentle whiff of a conspiracy I detect?”

  “Where’s the damn National Guard?” Mole asked, half a cigar bobbing in one corner of his reptile mouth. “They got the whole goddamn place locked down . . . and a buncha street-rabble drunks make their way through?”

  Looking at Alec, Max said, “You take care of the incendiary substance abusers, and I’ll take care of the media.”

  “Publicity hound.”

  “Why not? I’m almost as pretty as you are.”

  “Ouch,” Alec said, joining her as she headed outside.

  Soon they were behind the building that was serving as a target for the drunks and their firebombs.

  “Stop them,” Max said firmly, “but don’t mess them up.”

  “Would I do that? Gentle soul like me.”

  “I’m serious, Alec. There’s enough of the public against us already.”

  He shook his head as if he could hardly believe he was hearing this. “That’s not John Q. Public out there, Max—that’s some lowlife drunks who were probably paid to cause a distraction for that media crew.”

  “We don’t know that. The news crew might just be taking advantage of—”

  “Even so, do you really think I’m going to convert a bunch of drunks by talking to them?”

  “Just don’t mess them up, okay? That media crew would love to see you going transgenic on a bunch of ordinary asses.”

  “Fine!” Disgustedly, he took off into the shadows between two buildings.

  Max waited two beats, then took off herself, in the other direction, to cut off the television team.

  From twenty feet away, she watched the television crew fumbling on the other side of the fence. A short pudgy guy in a T-shirt and jeans hefted the camera while the obvious “talent,” a too-tanned himbo in an off-the-rack suit, tried to look like a network anchor. In the meantime, a skinny guy in a windbreaker with the station’s call letters and channel number emblazoned on the back tried to keep the wires from tangling.

  Max eased forward, stopping at the corner of the building, staying in the shadows as she peeked around to see if Alec was talking to the drunks yet. As she watched, Alec sauntered out from between the buildings and approached the four inebriated men throwing firebombs. There still didn’t seem to be any sign of the National Guard or the cops moving in from their barricade position.

  “Gonna have to ask you fellas to stop doing that,” Alec said to their guests.

  The biggest of the drunks—a scruffy-bearded guy in frayed jeans and a MUTANTS GO HOME T-shirt, which included a bad, monster-movie-type image of dog-boy Joshua—stepped forward and yelled through the mesh: “Get stuffed, freak!”

  The potbellied guy then heaved another bottle with a burning rag stuffed in its neck, this one in Alec’s general direction. But the guy was so drunk though that Alec never moved and the thing still missed him by ten feet, shattering to spread a pool of fire that threw orange shadows on the blandly handsome planes of Alec’s face, revealing a hood-eyed sinister quality that few ever had noticed.

  “Look, guys,” he said, his voice reasonable but with an edge, “you’re half in the bag. Stop playing with fire before you get burned.”

  One of the drunks lit bottles for the other three and they all heaved them at once. Two landed on either side of Alec while the third sailed far over his head. Max watched as it crashed into the building and a splash of fire erupted on the wall.

  This was going to get ugly. . . .

  Alec turned his face toward where Max was hidden in the shadows—she guessed she shouldn’t have been surprised that his transgenic-attuned senses would have betrayed her position—and he said softly, “Hey—I tried.”

  Then Alec jumped the eight-foot fence in a Superman single bound, landed in the midst of the four drunks and dispatched them with a blur of martial arts moves—assorted chops and kicks—before any of them even realized he was on their side of the fence. As the last one fell, Alec hopped back up the fence, pausing at the top to smile down at his arrayed victims, sprawled in bloody unconsciousness; then the X5 alighted to the transgenics’ side.

  Watching from the shadows, Max shook her head—so much for not messing them up; but in Alec’s defense, he hadn’t killed or even maimed them—a few missing teeth and a broken bone or two was about it.

  On the other hand, the drunks had managed to spread their hatred in a literal manner, prior to Alec spanking them: the fire, courtesy of the one Molotov cocktail that had reached its target, made its way quickly up the wall, and soon the entire building was endangered.

  Transgenics showed up, seemingly from nowhere, to fight the blaze with extinguishers and an old-fashioned bucket brigade—losing precious water—and in less than five minutes, the fire was under control at least, which was good news.

  Only, news of another kind had also been made: Max had looked helplessly on as the TV crew captured Alec’s attack on the drunks; but the camera also caught the fire, and the teamwork of the transgenics.

  As the TV crew was recording the firefighting efforts of her brothers and sisters, Max had a moment of elation at the notion of the media showing something positive about the transgenics; then she noticed how the flames and smoke-streaked air played on those animal-tinged faces: her brothers and sisters, so many of them already condemned by appearances considered freakish by mainstream America, looked distorted, even more monstrous in the eerie lighting provided by the fire.

  Max made her decision—she ran toward the fence, alighted atop it, then hopped over and landed in front of the cameraman, who nearly toppled backward when she filled his eyepiece. Stepping forward, she steadied him and in one swift motion ejected the tape and removed it from the camera.

  “Hey!” the cameraman yelled.

  “It’s her!” somebody said.

  Max gave the cameraman a stony stare, and he backed up a few steps.

  The reporter with the smoothed-back hair, power tie, and too much cologne stepped forward. “This is why people hate you transgenics.”

  She spun toward him. “Why?”

  “You can’t interfere with freedom of the press.”

  “Actually,” she said, “this is why people hate us transgenics.”

  And she grabbed him by the front of his cheap suit and, like she was plucking a flower, hauled him five feet off the ground. He looked down at her with terrified eyes in that tanned face, and was whimpering when she set him down again.

  “You . . . you may not look like some of them,” he said, trembling, “but you’re a monster, too. . . .”

  “We’re monsters because you make us monsters.” Wheeling around, talking to all of them, she said, “It’s not freedom of the press when you set up a bunch of drunk dipshits to try to firebomb us.”

  “How dare you!” the would-be anchorman blurted. “Are you accusing me of manufacturing a story? I never—”

  “Save it for the morning news,” Max said. “You’ll need the blather, ’cause you won’t have the footage—I’m taking your tape. And you’re lucky that’s all I’m taking.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I already did.” She turned and saw that the pudgy cameraman had plopped in a fresh tape and gone back to work, grabbing the tail end of this confrontation. “What’s your name, bud?”

  “Bud,” the cameraman said, astonished by her apparent psychic abilities.

  “Bud, tell me the truth. Did Wannabe Anchorman here bribe those drunks?”

  The cameraman stood stock-still, the lens settled on Max’s face. Finally, he asked, “Do I keep my tape?”

  Through his teeth, the anchorman said, “Bud, I will fucking fire your ass.”

  “Thanks, Ben,” the cameraman said, “for saying that on camera. The union will love you for it.”

  Max smiled. “I think you’ve answered my question,
Bud—glad to see there’s some integrity left, in certain corners of the modern media. Thanks.”

  She gave them a little one-fingered salute, and jumped back over the fence—like Alec, in one bound—and alighted in her catlike manner. Then she walked slowly toward where the wooden-frame building still burned. In the cool of the predawn morning, the heat of the flames on her face almost felt good, like a blush of pride. She knew Bud was still filming her, but she didn’t give a damn.

  Stepping forward, she tossed the tape into the flames.

  Other camera crews emerged from the darkness to catch the dying fire on tape too, and she was sure that the anchorman would be spreading lies to his colleagues; but there was nothing she could do about that. Sooner or later she would talk to Clemente and try to explain it to him.

  She hoped the detective would not consider her brief excursion over the fence—to defend Terminal City from flames and lies—as a violation of their agreement that she and the other transgenics remain within the boundaries of the toxic nightmare they called home.

  Finally, trailing even the newspaper photographers, the police and the Guardsmen came rolling up. They talked to the anchorman with the attitude, and they interviewed Bud as well, and some of them helped up the drunks, who seemed to be coming around, one or two spitting a tooth like a watermelon seed. Glancing over at Alec, Max saw him working at suppressing a smile.

  Watching the building burn, Max found memories swirling to the surface of her mind, dark remembrances of that terrible, wonderful night last year when Manticore had burned.

  She wanted to think she’d done the right thing that night, freeing her brothers and sisters, even the failed experiments in the basement; but all this trouble—the deaths, from CeCe to the skinning victims—and with so many lost souls to worry about now, she could only wonder if she had done right.

  The X5 also wondered if she would ever really know if she had done the world good or ill, or if she would always be haunted by the mantle of leadership and responsibility she had taken on herself.

  Max was not alone among the transgenics who were haunted by memories of Manticore. Elsewhere—sleepless in Seattle—Bobby Kawasaki lay in his bed, remembering Max and how they had met and how she had liberated him. . . .

  Kelpy had heard the commotion before it got anywhere near him.

  The disturbance had started upstairs, and even through the floors and walls he could hear the yelling, the stamping of feet, and—scariest of all—the gunfire. His anxiety level rose, but inside his Plexiglas box, in the middle of the cell, there was nothing to blend in with. . . .

  And so he’d stood there, petrified, rocking from one foot to the other. Lately, the doctors kept him in a straitjacket as well, over his clothes, which prevented him from stripping off those garments and trying to blend in on those few occasions they actually let him out of the box.

  Joshua—the only one of them down here with anything resembling freedom at all—appeared in the small window in the door.

  “It’s going to be okay, Kelpy,” the dog man’s soft, reassuring voice had soothed. “Max is coming. . . . Then we blaze.”

  Before Kelpy could respond or ask who this “Max” was, Joshua was gone on to the next door.

  Upstairs, the firefight seemed to grow in intensity, and Kelpy—just as he had countless times before—examined the lock mechanism of his Plexiglas prison in hopes of finding a way out. And just like those countless times he’d previously looked at it, he saw a device as cruelly indecipherable to him as the mystery of life.

  Kelpy knew he couldn’t have overcome that lock, even if his arms hadn’t been pinned to his sides by the straitjacket.

  When he heard the tumult break through the door at the end of the hall, Kelpy gave up and simply sat down, waiting to die, and not really minding the opportunity. Almost within seconds of the basement door bursting open, he could smell smoke. Realizing the building was on fire, Kelpy now actively hoped that one of the guards would step in and shoot him. The quick mercy of that seemed preferable to burning to death, or for that matter, surviving at all.

  The sounds of the others screaming—whether from pain or fear, he couldn’t tell—invaded the privacy of his skull. When it came to blending in with people, one of the secrets to success was empathy—and Kelpy had it; now he just wished he could turn it off.

  The wails from the other cells felt like an army of demons inside his body trying to rip his soul to shreds. He curled into a fetal ball, trying to make himself as small as possible, and covered his ears with his body as best he could . . . but the screams still pierced, and the pain became unbearable.

  Kelpy was about to start beating his skull on the plastic floor of his cage when the heavy metal door to his cell swung slowly open.

  Sitting up, Kelpy searched for the sight of a guard or Joshua or someone . . . but no one came, and the screams suddenly shifted in volume. The door was only open a few inches, less than a foot—a smidgen provided by the release of the magnetic lock—but through that slit, Kelpy could make out motion.

  He hoped someone was coming for him, either to kill him or release him. He really didn’t care which, and was afraid to admit to himself which was his real preference.

  No one stopped, though, the motion through the slit almost continuous now, and finally Kelpy realized that the others were free. They were running down the hall to freedom while he was still locked in the Plexiglas cage within his cell.

  Suddenly it struck him that he really didn’t want to die.

  Struggling to his feet, Kelpy yelled; but he had a small voice, one that didn’t stand out or draw attention, one that most certainly couldn’t be heard above the cacophony in the hall. He shouted over and over, but he knew they didn’t hear, couldn’t hear. They were all running for their lives and didn’t have time for him.

  Tears ran hot down his cheeks and Kelpy resigned himself to burning to death, alone, his oven . . . and then his tomb . . . to be a plastic one, and eventually his remains would blend in with the mound of melted goo.

  Then she came through the door!

  Kelpy was so overcome, he simply stood still as she swept in.

  How beautiful she was! Long black hair, luminous dark eyes, bee-stung red lips, and skin the color of the sugary caramels he was given at Christmas, all wrapped up in the black package of her attire.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everybody’s getting out.”

  He watched silently as she ripped a leg off the steel bunk against the wall.

  Stepping up to the cage, she said, “Stand back.”

  Kelpy backed up against the rear wall.

  Raising the busted-off bunk leg, she crashed it down on the lock, and the plastic around the metal mechanism seemed to vaporize.

  The door opened, she reached in and helped him out onto the floor of the cell. She spun him and—from behind—he heard a rip as she tore the straitjacket to shreds, as if he too were a present and she was unwrapping him.

  For the first time in days, Kelpy’s arms swung free.

  “Down the hall to the right,” she said, her voice calm. “Follow the crowd, stay close to someone, and we’ll all get out of here.”

  He nodded, struck dumb by her dazzling beauty, her commanding presence.

  “Can you talk?”

  He managed to say, “Yes.”

  “Good—you can help. Keep people moving, follow the crowd. Got it?”

  He nodded again.

  She smiled at him, and, for the first time in his very strange life, Kelpy was in love.

  Before he could say anything else to her, she turned and sprinted out the door, off to help anyone who needed it.

  Stripping off the remnants of the straitjacket, Kelpy in his prison gray immediately blended in with the gray walls of the cell. He knew that if anyone came in now—though he wouldn’t be invisible exactly—he would be nearly impossible to see. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest . . . whether this physiological response derived from fear or the a
ppearance of the black-haired goddess, he didn’t know, and he didn’t care. Either way, his adrenaline level was high enough that he blended in easily. He stripped out of his gray prisoner’s uniform. . . .

  Stepping out into the hall, the naked Kelpy kept to the sides, out of the way, and moved slowly among fleeing transgenics. While the rest ran pell-mell for their lives, Kelpy calmly searched for the dark-haired woman.

  Of course, like the others, he did continue to move toward the exit; but he glanced into every cell, knowing she would be rescuing others, knowing too that—just as no one noticed him—his goddess would stick out in any crowd . . . let alone this one, where she was the only one who didn’t resemble some sort of animal and the only one not dressed in gray.

  Four cells from his, he found her, helping someone else; and he fell in behind her. She never knew he was right there, but he was close enough to smell her sweat and he knew no perfume would ever match her own scent. As she continued toward the exit, shooing some, cajoling others, checking cells for stragglers, Kelpy stayed as near to her as he could.

  Finally—with nearly everyone out and the fire encroaching rapidly—Joshua shouted, “Max, come on! We’ve got to go!”

  Max—so the goddess had a name, and her name was Max.

  She took off running, practically dragging two transgenics as she went. He stayed right on her, her unseen shadow, protecting her without her even knowing he was there. She got the other transgenics outside, then headed back inside, Kelpy on her tail, hugging the wall. She sprinted down the hall and entered the control room . . . with Kelpy trailing.

  The guard standing immediately inside the door caught a foot in the face from Max and went down in a heap. Amazed by her prowess, Kelpy watched from a corner as Max came up silently behind the seated blonde woman in a lab coat; the woman seemed to be in charge.

  “Where’s 452?” the woman, positioned before banks of monitors, demanded into a mike. “I’m not leaving without her!”

  Grabbing the woman from behind, by the hair, Max said, “Good—’cause I’m not leaving without you, Sunshine.”