My shoe was completely mangled. I didn’t even bother to pick it up.
37. In which Drew lives happily ever after.
That day, for the first time—for the only time—my nightmare had a different ending.
That day, I got her back.
38. In which Hannah comes full circle.
The Section Five cross-country championship took place on the second Saturday in November. That was a couple of weeks later than it should have been, which could have been a problem in Western New York—but the weather cooperated, and we didn’t have to run in snowshoes. Briarwood was actually supposed to have hosted the meet that year. We would have gone there, but there’d been a massacre on campus near the end of the SZA, and nobody was getting anywhere near the school. So, we ran at Perinton instead.
It was a minimalist race. There weren’t any officials. There weren’t any timekeepers. There weren’t any coaches, or trainers, or parents, and there were only three runners—Tara, Devon, and me.
Nathan was there for me, and so were Micah and Jordan. I don’t think they understood what I was doing, but they’d come along to see the show. Devon had a couple of friends watching from up on the hill.
Nobody came for Tara.
She was waiting at the starting line when Devon and I got there, hands on her hips, face set in a permanent scowl.
“Hey,” I said. “We gonna do this?”
Tara’s scowl got even scowlier.
“Easy,” Devon said. “I promise not to stomp your ass this time.”
“Fuck you,” Tara said. She turned to me. “And fuck you too, Hannah.”
“Hey,” I said. “Why are you down on me?”
“Because,” Tara said. “Your outbreak-monkey dad turned my mom into a sex pig. She was bad enough before. She’s disgusting now. I’ve got to lock my bedroom door to keep her from sneaking into my room at night and molesting me. So, you know—thanks for that.”
“What are you talking about?” Devon said. “The whole nympho thing isn’t permanent, Tara. They’ve got pheromone blockers.”
“Yeah,” Tara said. “Mom won’t take them. She likes the pheromones.”
I had no idea what to say to that.
“So,” Devon said after a long, awkward pause. “Is this it? Nobody else coming?”
Tara looked up at her.
“Do we need anyone else? I mean, would they make any difference?”
Devon smiled.
“Nah. Just checking.”
If this had been a real meet, there would have been a chalked line, and cones, and starting boxes. It wasn’t, but we knew where the line would have been. Devon did a short stretching routine. Tara and I stood and waited. When she was ready, we stepped to the line, Devon on one side, Tara on the other, me in the middle.
“How do we do this?” Devon asked. “Just ready, set, go?”
I looked up to where my friends were, at the top of the hill over the soccer field.
“Jordan!” I called. “Come start us off!”
He climbed to his feet and sauntered down the hill. When he got to the edge of the field, maybe fifty yards away, he raised both arms over his head. The three of us tensed, our weight shifting forward. When his arms came down, we went.
That race was the strangest one I’ve ever run. I’d lost a bit of muscle in the dungeon, and pretty much all of my fat, and I was as light as I’d been before I hit puberty. I felt fast, almost like I was floating, but also delicate, and I remember thinking that if I fell, I might not get back up—I might just hit the ground and shatter into a million pieces.
I don’t know what the others had been doing, training-wise, since everything fell apart, but Tara started out in what looked to me like a dead sprint. She opened up a thirty-yard lead in the first half mile, and I actually lost sight of her when we went into the woods. Devon, on the other hand, seemed content to hang on my shoulder, at least at the beginning. I could hear her breathing behind me, could feel her hand brush my elbow when I shifted her way. Two months before, that would have made me nervous, but after so much time running alone, knowing she was there was almost comforting.
A mile in, we hit the first big hill. I’d been a good hill runner at a hundred and fifteen pounds. I was a better one at a hundred and five. Halfway up, I could hear Devon straining. When I crested, I risked a glance back. She was at least ten yards back, and struggling. She closed up most of the gap on the down, but I pushed even harder on the next climb. By the last of the three big ups, right around the end of the second mile, I was pretty sure I’d broken her.
Tara, on the other hand, was not broken. I could see her, off and on. She wasn’t stretching it out on me, but I didn’t seem to be making up much ground on her either. When we came back out of the woods, a bit more than a half mile from the finish, she still had twenty yards on me.
Here’s the weird thing, though—I really wasn’t hurting. I wasn’t slacking. I felt like I was pushing as hard as I could, but I wasn’t panicked, and I wasn’t in pain. Tara was starting to struggle. I could see it in her stride, and in the set of her shoulders. I knew then that I could take her. I stretched out my stride just a bit, just enough that my breath came a little deeper, and I swear it felt like I had her on a line, like all I needed to do then was to reel her in.
Her lead was fifteen yards when we came around the bottom of the hill. Jordan and Micah were screaming for me. Even Nathan was yelling something, though I couldn’t tell what. It was ten yards at the quarter-mile mark, and less than five when we came to the field. Tara was kicking by then, but her form was all wrong. Her body was too upright, her head thrown back, one shoulder dipping with every stride. She was dying. I rose up onto the balls of my feet. I was barely breathing hard. I was three yards back, then two, then one. I could have touched her when we made the turn onto the last straightaway. I could hear her half sobbing with every breath.
And then, with a hundred yards to go . . .
I eased off.
To this day, I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t feel sorry for Tara. I didn’t even really like her by then.
For some reason, I guess I just felt like she deserved it more.
We crossed the finish line with her a half stride ahead. I slowed to a walk and looked back. Devon was just making the last turn. Tara was doubled over with her hands on her knees, puking. I waited until she was finished, then offered her my hand.
Tara looked at the ground, then up at my face.
“You let me win,” she said.
I started to deny it, but then stopped before the first word was out. She wasn’t stupid.
“I don’t need your fucking pity,” she said. “I worked for this, Hannah. I wasn’t built for it.”
Devon came up to us then, sweaty and grinning. She looked at Tara, then at me.
“What’s her problem? She won, right?”
I shrugged.
Tara looked back and forth between us, then turned on her heel and stalked away.
39. In which Drew puts a bow on it.
So they came out with a vaccine for the Goo Flu eventually, but it was way too late to stop DragonCorn from happening, and in the end not many people took it. Most people had already turned by the time things were more or less back under control, and most of the rest wound up choosing to take DragonCorn from a needle. Turns out there are a lot of advantages to being yellow, and it’s pretty intolerable to walk around these days if you’re not infected, you’re not on pheromone blockers, and you don’t want to be the center of a rolling orgy.
There are still a few holdouts, though. Sex between a Homo sap and a slutty zombie is freaking amazing for both of them. I’d never tell Kara this, but I still sometimes dream about Bree and her cat eyes, and the two of us rolling around on our living room floor. If you’d told me beforehand that I could take the vaccine and have that kind of sex for the rest of my life, and all I had to give up was perfect health and a body like an Olympian and an extra thirty years’ lifespan, I would have th
ought long and hard about it.
Hannah turned out to be a pretty big deal, running-wise—state champ three straight years, full ride to Michigan, two-time trials qualifier, the whole works. Another benefit of the SZA—nobody gave her any shit about her mods. I still think my work gave her some advantages over the proles, but nobody seems inclined to throw stones on the Engineered front these days.
Speaking of my work, I actually managed to hang on to my job, believe it or not. Bioteka reorganized pretty severely after NatSec figured out where the Goo Flu had come from and threw Robert Longstreth down the memory hole—but folks still need corn, I guess, and nobody makes a better kernel than me. Hannah kept in touch with Longstreth’s daughter, off and on. I asked her once if he thought he’d actually accomplished anything. She just shrugged, and said Marta only got to visit him for an hour, once a year, and that wasn’t one of the things he wanted to talk about.
NatSec sniffed around me for a while too, which was more than a little terrifying, but eventually they figured out that I didn’t have a clue what my own project team had been up to. I guess even NatSec can’t send you to the gulag for being a doofus.
I still get pings from Inchy every now and then. The last one said that the Bioteka intranet turned out to be a lovely place to raise a family. Not sure exactly what to make of that.
I go back and forth over whether what happened that fall really changed anything. I mean, it definitely finished the UnAltered. There aren’t enough baseline Homo saps left on the planet now to fill a basketball arena, let alone to start a war, and the ones that are still hanging around are mostly really rich and really horny. The old-style race stuff is pretty much out the window now too. You don’t need to worry about being color-blind when everybody’s yellow.
At the end of the day, though, I think Longstreth just didn’t understand the depths of human tribalism. If they figured out a way to make us all into clones, we’d still find things to fight about—I mean, look at the way the Satanists and the Cthuluites are going at each other right now. You wouldn’t think there’d be that much to argue about when it comes to goat sacrifice, but apparently you’d be wrong.
Things are mostly better, though. Nobody’s tried to wipe anybody off the planet recently, anyway.
Baby steps, right?
Acknowledgments
The list of people without whom this book would never have been written is a long one, and I hope that anyone who I forget here will forgive me, but—special thanks go out to Paul Lucas and the good folks at Janklow and Nesbit, for preventing this story from winding up as a sad series of blog posts; to Chloe Moffett, for helping me to carve this story out of the misshapen lump of words that I originally presented to her; to Kira and Claire, for letting me steal chunks of their biographies, and for not suing me for libel; to Keely, for her bloodhound nose for typos; to Alan, Rob, Chris, John, and Jack, for their insightful criticism; to Michele, for her complete lack of criticism; and finally to Jen, for never letting me forget that I’m not nearly as clever as I think I am.
An Excerpt from Three Days in April
If you liked The End of Ordinary, make sure to read the enthralling technothriller by Ed Ashton
THREE DAYS IN APRIL
Available now wherever e-books are sold.
1. Anders
I’m turning away from the bar, drink in hand, when I feel a glass bump against my chest. I look down to see a girl with her mouth hanging open, a bright blue stain spreading down her white silk shirt. She’s barely five feet tall, with curly red hair, shoulders like a linebacker, and biceps that look like short, angry pythons under ghost-pale skin. She looks up at me, and yeah, there’s the brow ridge. This is not going to go well.
“Shit!” she says. “Shit! This was a brand-new shirt, you asshole!”
She puts a hand to my chest and pushes me back. I hit the bar at kidney level, hard enough to leave a bruise. Beer sloshes over my hand and runs down my arm. By the time I look back, she’s already swinging. I slip to the side, and watch her fist sail by. The bartender is reaching for something under the bar, and the bouncer is starting our way. My hands are up, palms open. If I have to hit her, it’ll be a slap. I have no problem with punching a girl in principle, but Neanderthals have heads like bricks. She looks me in the eye. I can see the wheels turning. That wasn’t as fast as I can move, but it was fast enough to make an impression. She straightens up, and drops her fists.
“I’m Terry,” she says. “Buy me a drink and call it even?”
“So let me guess,” I say. “Dad wanted a football star?”
Terry leans her elbows on the table and takes a surprisingly dainty sip from her drink. She called it a parrot, but it looks and smells like blue Drano.
“Something like that, yeah. Didn’t have the money for a real engineer, though. They even botched the gender, obviously. I was supposed to just get the muscles and the extra bone strength, but . . . well, you can see what I got. What about you? Manufactured for the NBA?”
“What makes you think that?” I ask, and finish my beer in one long pull. I’m not actually much of a drinker, but I’m still winding down from our scuffle by the bar, and I feel like I need to take the edge off.
“Come on,” she says. “What are you, seven feet tall?”
I laugh.
“Not quite,” I say. “I’m six-seven, and it’s one-hundred-percent natural. I come from a long line of giant, gangly Swedes.”
“Maybe.” She takes another sip and leans back in her chair, tilts it up on two legs and balances for a moment, then drops the front legs back to the floor with a bang. “But you’d be surprised how many times I’ve taken a swing at someone in a bar, and I don’t usually miss that badly.”
I laugh again, a little harder this time. Alcohol-wise, I might actually be moving past taking the edge off at this point.
“Nah,” I say. “I wouldn’t be surprised. If the original Neanderthals were as douchey as you guys are, it’s no wonder we wiped them out.”
Her eyes narrow. I’d guess she’s thinking about taking another poke at me, but instead she leans back in her chair and smiles.
“You’re avoiding, my gigantic friend. I hang out with a lot of Engineered, and I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. Even the military exoskeletons are more strength than speed. I don’t know if you’re mechanical or biological, but you’re definitely something. What did they give you?”
I raise one eyebrow.
“That’s a pretty direct question.”
“I’m a Neanderthal. We’re douchey but direct.”
She grins and takes another sip of her parrot. She has a wide, toothy smile, and I catch myself thinking that she’s really kind of cute when she’s not trying to punch me.
“My mods are biological,” I say finally. “I’m a genetic chimera, technically. They cut me with mouse genes. I’ve got something like eight percent type C muscle fibers.”
That earns me a flat, blank stare. Apparently, I need to elaborate.
“Ever try to catch a mouse?” I ask. “They’ve got tiny little legs. They ought to be easy to get hold of, right?”
“Sure,” she says. “But they’re quick.”
I nod.
“Right. Big mammals have fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles. Little ones have a third type. Think of it as fast twitch plus. It’s what keeps them a step ahead of the cat. That’s what I got.”
Her smile turns into an almost-smirk.
“But you don’t have an entourage, and I’ve never seen you on the vids. So, I’m guessing there’s a catch.”
I run a hand back through my hair and sigh.
“Yeah, there’s a catch. It turns out there’s a reason that only tiny animals have type C fibers. I can jump through the roof—but only once every six weeks or so, because pretty much every time I try, I pull a muscle or break a bone. I played ball in high school and for a year in college. I was one of the first Engineered to play at that level, and for a while there was actually some fus
s about whether it was fair for me to compete with the unmodified kids. I gave it up after my freshman year, though. I got tired of getting crap from the other players, I got tired of having to be careful all the time, and I got tired of hanging out with the trainers.”
She leans back, and laces her fingers behind her head.
“Did you ever ask them what they were thinking?”
“What who were thinking?”
“Your parents. You look like you’re about the same age as I am—north of twenty-five, south of thirty, right?”
I nod. I’m thirty-six, but she’s close enough.
“So,” she says, “germ-line mods weren’t even legal in most places when they cut us. And even where they were, nobody knew what they were doing.” She looks down at herself and scowls. “I mean, obviously, right? So, what were they thinking? You wouldn’t buy the first model year of a new car, would you? But they took a flyer on the first model year of a new species.”
I shrug. She’s right, of course. And the fact is, I did once ask my dad why he did it. I was nineteen then, in the hospital with a shattered femur, the morning after my last basketball game. I was bitter and sulking, blaming Dad for the fact that I was hurt, that I hadn’t been able to keep a lid on it, that I hadn’t been able to stay under control.
He probably should have just smacked me in the back of the head and walked out of the room, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “I knew we were taking chances, Anders, and I’m sorry that things didn’t entirely work out. But even back then, I could see what was coming. Twenty years from now, unmodified kids won’t be able to make a high school basketball team, let alone play in college. Twenty years after that, unmodified kids won’t be able to get a job. That’s where we’re going, son, and I thought it would be better for you to be one of the first ones of the new breed than one of the last ones of the old.”
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