Jesse followed Henry back to the couch. Henry dragged out an old office chair from the corner. “Have a seat,” he said, sinking back into the skinned and swollen leather cushions.
Jesse squeezed himself between the armrests of the office chair. A metal caster collapsed beneath his weight, its wheel zipping off across the floor. Henry erupted with laughter.
“Now there’s a problem only a few of us know about, right?”
Jesse spread his Army boots until he had his balance, then rocked a little to make sure that what remained of the chair would support him.
“You were always big for your age, weren’t you? But it was your strength that set you apart. The things you could lift. The distances you could toss them. I picked the front of my old man’s car clear off the garage floor when I was eight.” Henry chuckled up more smoke. “He didn’t like that too much. ’Course cars were much more expensive back then.”
Jesse had done something similar at that age and gotten walloped by his own father.
“That was the damn thing of it,” Henry went on. “Instead of appreciating what you could do, the adults had it in for you. Your parents for breaking this or that. The parents of the other kids, because, God forbid, you might hurt one of their precious babies. They’d go to your teachers, telling them you were too big to be on the same playing field. Next thing you knew, you were sitting on the sidelines, watching.”
Jesse knew those sidelines.
“Come your teen years, the police started getting involved, right? Then the whole juvenile justice system. The harder they could bring the law down on your head, the more smug it made them. Like you were that evil giant from the fairy tales or some shit. But then what happened? You got noticed, right? Someone from the same world as those adults said, ‘Hey, you know something? You’re special.’” Henry’s voice rose to a sarcastic falsetto. “‘You sign this contract and do whatever we say, and we’ll keep treating you like you’re special.’”
“How do you know so much?” Jesse asked.
Henry propped his cigar arm over the back of the couch and twirled his hand. “Because I’ve been there. I’ve done that. Right now they’re training you up to fight the commies, right? To do your patriotic duty? Man oh man, but what they’re not telling you…”
Jesse swiped at a mosquito that was whining around his ear. “Name one thing.”
“Well, let’s see.” Henry puffed his cigar, then pointed the red-glowing end at Jesse. “For starters, that you’re gonna die.”
The chair clung to Jesse’s rump like a tortoise shell when he shot to his feet. He swatted the chair away and doubled up his fists. Henry remained at ease on the couch. He laughed and took another puff, his fingers twice as thick as the cigar they were holding.
“Easy there, fella. I’m not talking about tonight. These abilities of yours. These abilities of ours, I should say. Size, strength—oh, and say, has your skin started to toughen up yet?” His eye glinted, telling Jesse he already knew the answer. “They’re mutations.”
Jesse lowered his fists, slowly.
“Our cells developed in a way nature never intended. They’ve given us these incredible powers, right? But with good news like that, there’s bound to be a kicker, and this one’s square between the legs. Ever heard of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma?”
Jesse let his head shake.
“It’s only about the worst kind of cancer you can contract. When the doc tells you you’ve got non-Hodgkin’s, you might as well skip the hospital stay and check into the morgue. The kind of cancer we get? It’s worse.”
“I don’t feel sick.”
“That’s because it’s still latent. Give it a few years.” The skin on Henry’s boots glistened wetly as he crossed his legs. “Heh, heh, I can hear those gears grinding upstairs. You’re thinking, ‘I’ve got people looking out for me. They’d tell me if I was diseased. They’d treat me.’ My answer to you, my friend, is why tell you about something they can’t do anything for?”
“Well, what are you still doing here?”
Henry’s smiled broadened. “I switched teams.”
Jesse didn’t much like how this guy was talking to him. He was starting to sound like a know-it-all. A know-it-all who thought he was going to turn Jesse against the Champions, just like Director Kilmer had warned him. But this cancer thing? Was there something to it?
“You said you were gonna tell me where I came from.”
Parking the cigar in the corner of his mouth, Henry raised a finger, then reached inside his trench coat and withdrew a yellow piece of paper. He gave it a little rattle as he held it up.
“What’s that?”
“Copy of your birth certificate. Your real one.”
Jesse stepped forward, one arm outstretched, only to watch the certificate disappear back into Henry’s coat.
“Hey, whaddya think you’re doing?” Jesse started to draw himself up in front of Henry, but a billowing jet of smoke stung his eyes and forced him back. He ground his fists against his watering sockets.
“Oh, you’ll get your certificate. But first I need something from you.”
“What?” Jesse grumbled.
“Your word.” Henry’s shadow-cast face reappeared behind the haze. “Your word that this meeting will stay between me, you, and that desk over there. See, your organization doesn’t like me too much. Probably the whole switching teams thing. But the fact is, I’m the reason they’re still in business. They just don’t know it, or can’t admit it, one.” The grooves in Henry’s face, which had begun to bunch together, let out again.
“But why am I tellin’ you all of that? Look, it’s just better they don’t know—for your sake as much as mine. There’s a lot of things they’d just as soon keep you in the dark on.” He patted his trench coat at his chest, and Jesse heard the soft crinkle of his certificate. “We got ourselves a deal?”
Jesse looked from where Henry’s hand had begun to slip back inside the trench coat to his raised eyebrow.
“Yeah,” Jesse said after a moment, “we’ve got a deal.”
This time Henry allowed Jesse to take the piece of paper. He unfolded the yellow certificate and pored over the print. “There’s no name,” he said, “how do I know ‘baby boy’ is me?”
“I don’t know too many baby boys who pop out at twenty-two pounds, eight, do you?”
Jesse’s gaze flicked back to the date: his birthday.
“And this is my real mother? Ruthie Boon?”
“Well, if that’s what’s written in the box labeled ‘mother.’”
“Where is she?”
“Houston.”
Jesse started to work it out in his head. If he drove straight, it would take him two days. Another day, probably, to find this Ruthie Boon. Then he’d make her a deal: agree to be his guardian for the next few months, until he turned eighteen, and he’d split his pay with her during that time. The woman was probably young and poor when she’d had him. That was the reason for most abandonments, as Jesse understood them. Seventeen years would have changed the young part but not necessarily the poor. She’d be happy to get some extra dough.
“Come to think of it, she’s just outside of Houston,” Henry amended. “Calvary Hill.”
“That the name of the town?”
“Nope, the cemetery.”
Jesse dropped the hand holding the certificate and stared at Henry. The man’s expression appeared mournful, cheeks drawn down, but Jesse could swear the son of a bitch was fighting back a smile.
“What happened?”
“Well, given that the date on the certificate in your hand and her date of death are one and the same…” He puffed his cigar. “Hey, it sucks. Same thing happened with my mother. Women weren’t built to push out twenty plus pounds of baby. Another one of those hidden kickers they never told us about.”
“So who’s my father?”
“How the hell should I know?” Henry said, dusting a flake of ash from his lapel.
“Well, if you f
ound out all of this…” Jesse looked down at the useless piece of paper in his hand.
“No disrespect to your mother, but stories like hers are a dime a dozen, maybe cheaper. Who’s to say she even knew the father? Could’ve been any roughneck, navy boy, or scofflaw that drifts through a city like Houston. I’d even go so far as to say it could’ve been me, but the only place I’ve been to in Texas is Dallas, and that was the fall of ’63. Wouldn’t that have been a trip, though?” Harsh laughter scattered more foul-smelling smoke.
The certificate fell from Jesse’s hand. He knelt down, but instead of retrieving the paper, he gripped the underside of the couch. “Thanks for nothin’,” he said and heaved the couch up.
Henry shouted in surprise as sparks from his dropped cigar scattered across the floor. Henry and the upended couch landed against the wall with a bang. The entire warehouse shook.
When the noise settled, Henry growled from the corner. “Not too smart, are you?”
“You set me up.” Shielding his eyes from the light of the jiggling bulb, Jesse squinted toward the junk heap. “You knew the info would be useless to me.”
The couch emerged like a missile, straight for Jesse’s head.
He grunted and back-fisted it aside.
“Who said anything about it being useful?” Henry asked. “You wanted to know where you came from, and I just showed you.”
Another projectile shot from the corner. Jesse tucked his chin as Gus had taught him and swung his fist around again. With the contact, something white exploded over Jesse’s face. A dry grit burned his eyes and coated his throat. He doubled over, his great torso heaving for clean air. Cement, Jesse thought. Son of a bitch nailed me with a sack of cement.
A second sack exploded against his shoulder and spun him halfway around. A third drilled him in the back as Jesse was using his tongue to gather up the sludge in his mouth. His teeth clamped down, and the sting of warm blood trickled down his throat.
Can’t fight this guy blind.
Jesse stumbled toward where he thought the door was, swimming his arms out in front of him.
The fist that drove into his gut had a Heimlich effect, blasting the cement from his airways. It also sent him airborne. The heels of Jesse’s boots skipped over the plywood floor until he banged through a wall. He fell several feet, then landed on his back, arms falling out to his sides.
Jesse lay still for a moment. His head was foggy, but his body, which had absorbed most of the blow, felt all right. Still, he had never—and he meant never—been punched that hard.
The room spun a little when he lifted his head. A faint yellow light shone through his squinting lids. He was in the part of the warehouse where he’d parked the car. Above him, Henry was peering through a blown-out hole of corrugated metal.
“I may be going gray,” the man said, “but damn if I don’t still enjoy a good brawl.”
Jesse wiped each eye with the back of a hand and blinked. Cement clung to his lashes.
“Now me and you could go another few rounds … or,” Henry said, drawing out the word, “if there’s something you need help with, maybe you could ask. We might-could work out another deal. I get you weren’t too tickled with the last one, but, you know, I did keep my end of the bargain.”
Henry’s face disappeared from the hole. Footsteps headed for the doorway at the top of the staircase. Following them with his eyes, Jesse shoved himself backward until he was sitting against the Chevelle. Then he scooted up the side of the car. He got the car door open and landed inside.
The engine started with a roar. Jesse was jamming the stick into reverse when he remembered the door on wheels. In the rearview mirror, he studied the sealed exit. If he could hit it going fast enou—
“Hey, I was talking to you!”
The punch that exploded the driver side window reduced Jesse’s world to a clash of black and white. He landed in the passenger seat, his head clanging. With a thumb and two fingers, he popped his crooked jaw back into place, broken glass spilling from his jacket sleeve.
Henry retracted his fist through the destroyed window. “Be glad I pulled that one, buddy. Now tell me what you want.”
“To get out from under my old man,” Jesse heard himself say.
“Oh, yeah?”
More glass fell from Jesse’s hair as he nodded. In the rearview mirror, he glimpsed blood trickling through the gray grit around his mouth.
“Well, then, it’s your lucky day.” Henry was stooped, one arm on the roof of the stalled-out car, his hard grin seeming to fill the space where the window had been. “For something like that, the solution and the deal are one and the same. No contract, no big brother agencies, no legal age of consent—none of that shit. Just good work and pay.” His grin broadened. “And hey, maybe we can do something about your terminal mutation.”
“What are you talking about?”
Henry’s blue-gray eye didn’t flinch. “Wanna switch teams?”
17
“At 6:58 this evening,” Director Kilmer announced, “your teammate, Jesse Hoag, disappeared.”
Scott had already deduced that much when he and Janis burst into the conference room only moments before. Creed and Tyler had been waiting inside, as had Margaret, Janis breaking from Scott’s side to hug her sister tightly. There had been one notable absence, though.
“Two-ton Hoag?” Creed asked incredulously. “How could he disappear anywhere?”
“He made—and was granted—a request to travel to his father’s garage this evening,” Kilmer replied, “to work on his car. A block from his destination, his surveillance team lost visible contact with him. When they reached the garage, Jesse wasn’t there.”
“Didn’t he have his watch on?” Scott asked.
“We lost electronic contact with him as well. Our technical team has been working to reestablish it, but without success.”
Creed threw his chair to one side as he pistoned to his feet. “Well what’re we doin’ sitting around here? Let’s get this manhunt started and waste the perps. No one disappears my bud.”
“All we know at this point is that he’s missing. We don’t know anyone disappeared him. We summoned you here as a precaution, to keep you safe. Agent Steel and her team were dispatched to the area to find him.”
“Any leads?” Tyler asked as his brother lowered himself back down with a scowl.
Scott caught himself scrutinizing the intelligence of Tyler’s mouth, the focus in his eyes. He imagined those eyes staring into Janis’s. When Scott felt his teeth grinding, he forced his gaze away.
Get a hold of yourself.
“His team picked up a faint heat signature from the engine,” Director Kilmer replied. “It entered a ghetto of warehouses near Depot Road, then faded. Fortunately, there’s only a handful of ways in or out. A unit has them covered. Another unit is going building to building.”
“If someone disappeared him,” Margaret said, “who are we talking about?”
“There’s no point in speculating. Our sole aim right now is finding him.”
Creed grumbled. “Lot of good that’ll do if he’s a corpse.”
“He’s not a corpse!” Kilmer shouted.
Scott snapped to attention. The others appeared equally startled as their normally-composed director leaned over the table, his black eyes glaring Creed down. Creed’s expression remained indifferent even as his face went pale.
“He’s not a corpse,” Kilmer repeated. “We’ll find him.” He turned to Janis. “Are you picking up anything?”
Janis had been quiet for the last several minutes, and Scott realized she was using her mind like a satellite dish, trying to hone in on Jesse’s position. Tension pulled on the pallid skin over her forehead. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Something’s blocking the lines that would normally connect us. I can’t seem to reach him.”
“Well, there’s probably a sound explanation,” Kilmer said, as though trying to convince himself of that idea.
“Yeah
,” Creed mumbled. “And that explanation is spelled D-E-A—”
Director Kilmer rounded on him. “Not another word out of you,” he warned. A double beep sounded from his watch. He pushed back his jacket sleeve to read the message. “They found him.”
He powered on the room’s flat-screen monitor. A jostling image came into focus, and Scott understood they were looking at a feed from one of the agent’s helmets, probably Steel’s. Light beams were training past a chain-link fence that had been plowed down. In a dark mass of foliage beyond, a pair of taillights peeked back. Scott immediately identified them as belonging to the Chevelle.
“What are we looking at?” Kilmer asked.
“It appears our charge lost control and went off road,” came Agent Steel’s voice. Four agents approached the car, carbines drawn. A fifth agent with a raised spotlight followed.
The other Champions leaned forward, and Scott caught Creed whispering, “Be okay, buddy.”
Margaret inhaled sharply as the spotlight highlighted a mound of body through the tinted rear window.
“He’s inside,” Agent Steel announced.
As she circled around the driver’s side, her feed panned over the car. The Chevelle had collided into what looked like a pallet of old cement bags. White powder covered the hood. Torn-open bags lay helter-skelter. Through the smashed driver side window, one of Jesse’s massive hands draped the wheel, as if he had just pulled over for a snooze—except the knuckles were scraped and bloodied.
Scott caught himself tilting his head, willing the camera toward Jesse’s face, but two agents cut in front of Steel to open the doors.
One of the agents turned and said something.
“He’s breathing,” Steel repeated for the feed. “Begin evacuation,” she ordered her team.
The room let out a collective sigh, Kilmer massaging his brow. “All right,” he said. “Keep us updated.”
“Copy that,” Steel said.
“You heard her, gang.” Kilmer cut off the monitor. “Jesse’s alive and will be in our care shortly. We’re going to find out what happened, but that’s likely to take some time. Why don’t you head home in the meantime? And listen. No one leaves Oakwood until we’ve debriefed you. Are we clear?”
XGeneration (Book 4): Pressure Drop Page 11