Ex-Patriots

by Peter Clines

  “So you’re doing laundry? Please tell me you’re doing laundry, because it’s way overdue.” He gestured to the open street as they turned onto 3rd. “Hey, use the center of the lane. It’s smoother. Easier on the chair and my butt.”

  “Whatever.”

  She leaned and the wheelchair worked its way out into the center of the road. “Yeah,” he said. “Much better.”

  Danielle gave a grunt. To their south was the Melrose gate. They could hear the distant chattering of teeth in hundreds of mouths.

  “So no movie, eh?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “I’ve got a couple games, too. Finally figured out how to run an optical mouse remote, so I can use a laptop.”

  “I told you, I’ve got to get back to my place.”

  “Well, if you want you can swing by my place and take all the cushions off the couch. Keep ‘em if you like. I’m never there.”

  “What?”

  “I just figured you’d want to build yourself a little fort to sleep in.”

  She stopped pushing the chair. “Fuck you.”

  “If only someone would,” he sighed. He spun his chair so he faced her. Without the handles to hold onto, her arms pulled in close to her body. “But let’s talk about you. How long were you in the armor for this time?”

  “As long as I needed to be.”

  “How long?”

  She sighed. “Four days. More or less.”

  “More or less?”

  “Almost five.”

  Barry looked at her. “It’s only built for three, right?”

  “It can do more if it needs to.”

  “No wonder you stink. Have you even eaten?”

  “I can stand to lose some weight.”

  “Yeah, you and all the other fat people running around after the apocalypse.”

  “The suit’s getting tight in the legs.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “Look, you know you’re safe in here, right? They can’t get you.”

  She glanced over her shoulder toward the gate. Toward the big white cross.

  “I’ve got your back,” said Barry. “George and Stealth have it. Hell, most people here love you.”

  She smirked. “Not everyone.”

  “Well, there’s a few idiots in every crowd,” he said. “Point is, you’ve got to stop hiding in the damned suit.”

  “Mister Burke,” called someone behind him. Barry rolled his eyes at the sound of the voice and Danielle winced.

  “Christian,” said Barry, turning his wheelchair. “We were just talking about you. What’s up?”

  Christian Nguyen had been an L.A. councilwoman and had hung onto her small amount of power when society began to rebuild itself inside the Mount. Now she was district leader for Southeast and all of Raleigh, and some people thought she had a good chance of being mayor if everyone could agree on a fair way to do elections. She was also “super-phobic,” as some called it, and made no effort to hide her feelings.

  Danielle kept it simple and called her a bitch.

  Christian marched across the cobblestones with a half-dozen or so people behind her. She stopped in front of the wheelchair and glared down at Barry. “What’s this about a helicopter flying over the valley?”

  “It was a Predator,” he said. “Not a helicopter.”

  “Don’t try to dodge,” she snapped. “Why weren’t we told about it?”

  “If you weren’t told about it, how do you know about it?”

  “Everyone knows,” she said. “What I want to know is why nothing official’s been said.”

  “Well,” said Barry, “Stealth figured you’d all find out in a few hours—like you did—so there was no need to make some proclamation from on high.”

  Christian’s lips twisted into a smug smile. “What you mean is St. George ordered people not to talk and Stealth realized they would anyway.”

  Barry felt a faint tremor as Danielle took hold of the wheelchair’s handles again. Part of him hoped she was going to ram the chair into Christian’s shins. “Yet again,” he said, “you know it all.”

  “Are you going to tell us what the pilot said?”

  “The pilot?”

  “The helicopter pilot.”

  He sighed. He made sure it was a loud sigh. “A, it wasn’t a helicopter, it was a Predator drone, and two, a Predator doesn’t have a pilot.”

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t have a pilot?”

  “It’s a drone, Christian. A robot.”

  “A robot plane? How stupid do you think I am?”

  One of her followers, a scrawny man, stepped forward and muttered something to her. She glared down at the man in the wheelchair.

  “Did you want me to answer that last one,” said Barry, “or was it rhetorical?”

  “I think you need to start being a bit more respectful,” she snapped. “Whatever it was, it was a symbol of the American government.”

  “It was a drone,” interrupted Danielle. “Nobody knows who was controlling it. Could’ve been anyone.”

  Barry nodded.

  Christian’s scowl turned into a smirk. “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? To convince everyone help isn’t on the way. That the rest of the world isn’t pulling itself out of the Godless state Los Angeles has been left in.” She threw back her shoulders and tossed a glance to her entourage. “The days of Stealth’s little dictatorship are numbered,” she said. “Your power over all of us is coming to an end and you’ll make up any lie you can to hang onto it.”

  “Seriously,” said Barry, “why wouldn’t we want that? You think I like spending seven days a week in a metal ball so you can read at night?”

  She waved off his comments and pushed her hand at his face. He felt the chair shift on the cobblestones and he was sure Danielle was about to ram it forward. “Things are getting back to normal,” Christian said. “We’ll see where that leaves all of you.”

  A murmur of consent rose from the followers. She tossed her head back, glared at Barry and Danielle in turn, and stalked off with her minions.

  Barry took in a breath to shout something after her and settled for giving the finger with both barrels.

  “What a bitch,” muttered Danielle.

  “What are you complaining about? You got off easy.”

  “She doesn’t know who I am,” said the redhead. “Most people think I’m always nine feet tall and fifteen-hundred pounds. They see a skinny, helpless woman and I’m just a face in the crowd.”

  He twisted around to look at her. “You’re not helpless.”

  “We’re all helpless, Barry,” she said. “As long as things stay like this, we’re all screwed.”

  Chapter 7 - Daughter of Liberty

  THEN

  The last thing I could remember was trying not to shiver with all of them standing around me. I’ve got no problem with air drops, live-fire training, even being under enemy fire. I’ve been caught in two explosions in my six years of service and still have scars and a Purple Heart from one of them. But lying on an operating table, wearing nothing but a paper smock and panties while they pumped tranquilizers into my arm, that freaked me out.

  I’m not supposed to freak out. Girls freak out. I’m a soldier before I’m a girl. I was born to be a soldier. It was what Dad wanted. His dad had been in the Army, and his dad before him, and his dad before him, and his before him. A line of Kennedys serving their country all the way back to the Civil War, long before someone else with our name became President.

  Mom says having three girls was murder on him. He loved us, don’t get me wrong. He was the greatest dad in the world and he spent every minute he could with us, but it was rough on him not to have a son to keep up the military tradition. It killed him when Ellie, my oldest sister, decided to be a kindergarten teacher and Abby announced she was going to school to be a lawyer.

  I was the youngest. And the tomboy. As soon as I was old enough to understand Dad’s quiet disappointment, I knew what I was going to do with my life. I
just wish he’d lived long enough to see me make sergeant. To see how good a soldier I’d become.

  So of course I jumped up when they offered to make me an even better soldier. Out of about five hundred volunteers, one hundred and eight made the final cut, two large companies’ worth. A month of shots and now some surgery. Doctor Sorensen tried to explain it to us but it was a lot of high-end words none of us understood. He told us it would be easier to explain after the operation.

  I woke up in a hospital bed. Sorensen was sitting next to me, reading a letter covered with flowery, teen-girl writing. I found out later, talking with the rest of my squad, he was there when everyone woke up. No idea how he timed that out.

  His monkey-boy was hovering in the background, trying not to look like he was reading over the doc’s shoulder. I blinked a few times, tried to move my arm and found out how stiff it was. When I winced I discovered how bad the headache was.

  “Ahhh,” said Sorensen. “Awake at last. Get her some water, John.” He said that last bit without even looking back at monkey-boy.

  “I’m sore,” I said.

  “You’ve been unconscious for almost twenty hours, sergeant,” he told me. “It’s normal.” He folded up his letter.

  I met his eyes. “Any problems, sir?”

  “Just my daughter,” he said. He slipped the papers into his coat pocket. “She’s starting to pick colleges and everyone in the family has different ideas where she should apply.”

  I smiled. “I meant with the surgery.”

  He gave me a wink and a pen light slipped out of the same pocket. “I don’t think so,” he said, “but we’ll know for sure in a few moments.” He flicked the light back and forth across my eyes. “Focus on my finger.”

  I followed his index finger as he moved it around my face, then up and down in front of his own chest. No problems. Monkey-boy came back with a paper cup of water. I reached for it and my wrist clanked. I was handcuffed to the hospital bed’s railing.

  “Just a safety precaution,” said Sorensen. “People can be disoriented after surgery and we didn’t want you wandering off and hurting yourself.”

  “What if I need to use the latrine?”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll have you out in a few minutes anyway. Make a fist with your left hand. Good. Now your right. Good. Hold this pencil as tight as you can.”

  It was a cheap pencil. It snapped into three pieces. He smiled at that.

  The more tests he did, the more I realized I felt fine. Aside from a splitting headache and stiff limbs, I couldn’t sense anything wrong with me. And that made me suspicious, because this wasn’t the first time I’d woken up from surgery in my life. My appendix when I was fifteen and a torn meniscus in my knee four weeks after Basic ended. I knew some part of me should hurt more than everything else.

  “No dizziness?” asked Sorensen. “No funny tastes in your mouth?”

  “No, sir. Just really dry.” I sipped the water.

  “It’s a side effect of the anesthesia. You were in surgery for sixteen hours.”

  I let my eyes slide down to my bare arms. Handcuff on one. Basic IV on the other. No stitches. No butterflies. Nothing. “Did something go wrong, sir? Why didn’t they complete the surgery?”

  “Do you know why my predecessor’s attempts at this project failed, Sergeant Kennedy?”

  I shrugged. The handcuffs jingled.

  “He thought you had to force the body to achieve the performance levels we’re hoping for. He spent weeks pumping soldiers full of myostatin blockers and somatotropin and other things which made a mess of their biochemistry.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what any of that means.”

  “Of course. Sorry. Let me explain it to you like this. When you were very young, did you play a lot?”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Play. Run around, jump, chase other children, that sort of thing.”

  “I was a tomboy, sir. I did all that and fought with boys, too.”

  “Did you ever do so much you collapsed?”

  “Probably. I mean, didn’t everyone?”

  “Everyone did,” he agreed. He paused to brush a piece of lint off his pants. “We ran and lifted things and burned through a day’s worth of calories in just a few hours. We pushed our bodies to their full potential. Except...”

  He paused again, as if he was searching for the right word. It was a lecture, I know that now. At this point he’d already given this speech a dozen times to other candidates as they woke up.

  “...we made ourselves sick,” he continued. “We got hurt. Maybe we even hurt one or two of our friends by accident. We learned it wasn’t always good to operate on those levels unless it was absolutely necessary, and often not even then. You see, everyone on Earth carries the seeds of superhuman ability within them.”

  I took another sip of water and flexed my feet back and forth under the bedsheet. No tightness or sore spots on my legs that I could feel. “You mean like mutant genes or something?”

  He shook his head. “No, I mean the things you’ve heard about your whole life.” He ticked off examples on his fingers. “People who lift cars with their bare hands to rescue loved ones. People who run their first marathon with no training or who can swim underwater for three minutes without taking a breath. Children who fall off ten-story buildings and only get scratched. Did you know a woman once fell almost two miles from an exploding plane and received only minor injuries?”

  I thought I’d heard the story before, so I nodded.

  “The human body is an amazing machine,” said Sorensen. “It’s powerful and durable all on its own, without much help from us. We rarely see that, though, because we all learned early on not to use our bodies to their full potential. Even professional athletes who train constantly are working under a system of automatic restraint. We hold back. We don’t push ourselves to our maximum limits because we instinctively understand how dangerous it can be, to others and to ourselves. And as we got older our bodies responded, getting slower and weaker because we weren’t pushing them to be their best. I’m sure you’ve heard stories of addicts on phencyclidine—PCP—who can fight half a dozen men or punch through walls.”

  I nodded again.

  “A similar principle. The drug high bypasses all those self-imposed safeguards. Of course, it also disables pain receptors, so it’s not uncommon for them to come down and realize they’ve broken several bones in their hands.”

  Inside the paper smock, I rolled my abs and shifted my hips and clenched a few female muscles. “So... you’re giving us PCP?” Nothing. Not even a numb spot where they’d given me a local. Just a bit stiff from lack of use.

  “No, they tried that before,” he said, crossing his legs. “It didn’t work for the reasons I just mentioned and no one could ever get any definitive results. It also doesn’t solve the real problem. We want to make you superhuman, not dependent on drugs that make you superhuman. You’ve felt jittery these past weeks, haven’t you?”

  I had. In fact, this was the first time I hadn’t felt on edge in days. I’d’ve noticed sooner if not for the headache and sore muscles.

  “The injections you’ve been getting for the past few weeks have boosted several processes in your body. It’s a compound called GW501516 paired with AICAR, which activates a metabolic—” He paused again and smiled. “I won’t bore you with all the technical terms. Your muscle tissues are developing faster. So are your skin and bone cells, which also means more red blood cells carrying more oxygen.”

  I frowned. “Isn’t that the same drug dependency, though, sir?”

  “Normally, yes. If we stopped the supplements your body chemistry would go back to normal in a few days. Which brings us back to restraint. What we’ve done is disable those safeguards. If you made a serious effort you’d create new pathways and learn to keep the body in check again. For now, though, you’re going to run at those optimum performance levels. Your mind isn’t g
oing to tell your body to hold back. This is going to be your new normal, so to speak, and we’ve given your body a kick-start so it will change to keep up.”

  I drank some more water. My mouth was feeling better and flexing random muscles was helping the stiffness. As far as I could tell all I needed was a couple Advil for the headache and I’d be good to go.

  My splitting, painful headache.

  It must’ve shown in my eyes, because Sorensen was about to say something and stopped. Monkey-boy took a step back. They were both watching me.

  My free hand, the hand that wasn’t chained to the bed, reached up. The back of my head had been shaved. I brushed the wet threads in my scalp and winced. I put a bit of pressure on the raw skin and felt part of my skull shift underneath.

  “What did you do?”

  “It’s a shock at first, I know,” said Sorensen. “I’m cer—”

  “WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY BRAIN?!?”

  Looking back on it, I admit I lost it for a minute. Which I think he planned on. I lunged out of the bed. Monkey-boy tried to grab me and I knocked him halfway across the recovery room. I heaved the doctor out of the chair and his glasses fell off.

  “What did you do to me?!”

  Sorensen was very calm, even though I had his coat wrapped up in my fists. “That’s not the important question, Staff Sergeant Kennedy.”

  Name and rank was good. Chilled me down, made me stop. I almost cried, but girls cry. I’m a soldier.

  “The important question,” said Sorensen, “is how did you get out of the bed?”

  It took a moment to sink in. I looked away from his eyes, down to my wrists. One had a piece of surgical tape and some blood where the IV had torn loose. The other one had a single handcuff with two links of stainless steel chain dangling from it. The last link was twisted apart. I could see a bruise forming where the cuff had bitten into my wrist.

  I looked over my shoulder. The hospital bed’s railing was bent a good four inches out of line toward me. The other handcuff swung back and forth in a deep gouge. Its last link was broken and stretched long. It looked more like a thick hook than a piece of chain.