Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  Of course, dear audience, you might already know this.

  I hope you care.

  Chapter Eleven:

  Working For A Living

  Steve Libbey and Mercedes Lackey

  The women’s locker room rung with excited chatter. Ramona ignored the women and went to her locker, at the far end of the row.

  Under normal circumstances, she might have felt intimidated by the lithe bottle-blond trophy wives that made up the usual clientele of a Workout Plus gym. Buff, beautiful, and self-assured, each one must have been detestable in high school. At least metahumans had an excuse for their perfect physiques. Ramona felt dumpier than usual.

  Ramona stripped out of her jacket and skirt, and pulled on sweat pants. Topless, she could still find the nearly healed bruises where Valkyria’s bullet had fractured her ribs. Today would be her first workout in a month. One of the blondes looked away as she pulled a T-shirt over her head.

  It’s wartime, honey, she thought. Deal with it.

  The women hushed themselves with warnings: “Here she comes!” An expectant silence fell over the room, leaving only dripping shower heads to echo off the tiles.

  Sleek with sweat, Shahkti strode into Ramona’s aisle, two towels divided between her pairs of hands. The clusters of women stared as she passed them.

  “Slumming, aren’t you?” Ramona said, allowing the smirk to bloom on her face.

  Shahkti’s own dark face lit up with a comradely smile. “Hello, Detective. Have you just arrived?”

  “Oh yeah. I want to get pumped up for my rematch with the Nazi dominatrix.”

  Shahkti opened her locker to reveal a nanoweave Echo uniform, crisply folded, and toiletries neatly arranged beside it. “Understandable. You cannot always be assured of a handy printer within reach.” Without a hint of self-consciousness, Shahkti peeled off her damp shirt, maneuvering all four arms free of the sleeves effortlessly. Nude, her body was that of a goddess, reminding Ramona of the rumor that the inhabitants of her village had worshiped her as one.

  Shahkti draped a towel over her shoulder. “I have finished my routine for today, but if you wish any coaching on hand-to-hand techniques, I would be happy to offer my services.”

  “Really? Wow. I mean, heck yeah, girl.” Ramona held out both arms. “I’m a little bit unarmed for your style.”

  That made Shahkti laugh out loud. Ramona hadn’t seen this much warmth in her, ever. “Four-armed teachers were not exactly listed in the Yellow Pages. I know many conventional styles.”

  “Then I’ll take you up on it.” She could see the metahuman was ready for her shower, but Ramona wanted to bask in her glory a little more.

  Shahkti smiled. “Notify me when you are ready for some sparring.” She patted Ramona’s shoulder and trotted off to the showers, leaving an audience of Atlantans behind her.

  Ramona gave the room an offhand shrug. “Office talk,” she told them.

  * * *

  Another familiar face greeted her in the weight room: Matai, easily the biggest man in the room, grunting under the leg press machine. He nodded in acknowledgment of her presence but kept up his routine. Ramona noted that he had the machine set at eight hundred pounds. She waited in awed silence until he finished.

  He greeted her as he wiped sweat from his forehead. The Samoan dwarfed virtually every non-metahuman she had ever met. He would have looked at home as a defensive lineman. No, as a defensive line. Most of his size came naturally; he lacked the definition of a conventional body-builder. Matai simply gave the impression that he didn’t have to make any effort to remain huge.

  “So is this the new Echo gym, Matai? I just saw Shahkti.” She handed him his water bottle.

  “Thanks,” he said after a healthy swig. “Mostly SupportOps and a few OpOnes. These machines don’t carry enough weight for most of the metas.”

  She began a stretching routine. “Ah, that’s right. Only your brother is a meta. I keep forgetting. You Samoans look metahuman already.”

  Matai chuckled, his round features suddenly boyish with amusement. “It’s the company I keep.”

  “How’s your brother doing?”

  “Not good.” The smile disappeared. “He lost a lot of friends from R & D in the attack. I think it broke his heart.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  Matai shook his head woefully. “A broken heart’s bad for people like us. Samoans, I mean. It’s worse for him, I think. He’s always been sensitive. At home Mama would send me out to bring him to dinner. He would be out in the trees, watching a spider building a web. Sitting for hours, just watching.”

  “The soul of a poet.”

  “Fighting isn’t natural to him.” Matai paused as a pair of racketballers passed them. “Sometimes I pray to God for Him to switch our places. Give me the powers. Not because I want to be a metahuman, but because he hates it. And I wish he could have some peace.”

  Ramona at once thought of Bill, the Mountain, back in his dark hole. “Yeah, I understand.”

  “Out in the field, I’m like a child among adults. Isn’t that curious?”

  “But you do have a power. You’re a leader. It takes a certain temperament and mind-set. Quick thinking, decisiveness, alertness. They don’t call you ‘Chief’ for nothing, right?”

  “Not if I can help it, they don’t.” Matai exhaled as he began another set of reps. Several nearby weightlifters stopped to watch. Ramona wanted to announce to them, to everyone, that Matai was no metahuman, that his strength came from good-old-fashioned genes and willpower. Instead she punched in an ambitious program on the Stairmaster and started pumping.

  She pedaled in silence; the whirring of the Stairmaster’s gears and the rhythmic clank of Matai’s leg presses provided a soundtrack to her questing thoughts about Slycke. She had digested his meager dossier over the last week. News searches added little to supplement the data already in Echo’s recovered database. Born in Macon, Georgia, Walter Slycke had acquired his powers one night near a toxic waste dump. He had been recruited by a gang of metahuman bank robbers, the Easy Men, lorded over by a man who called himself Easy Listener, and took it upon himself to dub each of the crooks with a corny fifties-style moniker. Slycke hadn’t suffered the indignity of his handle, Smooth Operator, for long. A string of increasingly violent solo crimes followed until an OpOne team apprehended him in 1999. Georgia law enforcement had refused to mount a search effort for him; they were already overwhelmed, and their unspoken attitude was that Slycke was Echo’s problem.

  And that’s all she had to track down the only man who had heard Eisenfaust’s final words.

  “Matai.” She tapped the Stairmaster’s power button. “If you had broken out of prison, where would you go?”

  “Somewhere I could blend in.” Matai relaxed his legs and exhaled. Ramona laughed, but left it at that. Some jokes just wrote themselves.

  “But what if your personal appearance was offputting? Inhuman.”

  “Ah. A metahuman. Well…I suppose I would try to cross the border into Mexico.”

  “That’s a bit far from Atlanta.”

  Matai shrugged. “Maybe I’d go to ground until my pursuers gave up.”

  “I’m not giving up on this guy.”

  “Law enforcement has a lot on their plates now. It would be easy to disappear. Unless your perp is as big as the Mountain, he can pretty much move around at will.”

  Ramona wiped her forehead. The Atlanta heat managed to penetrate even this soulless, air-conditioned box. She imagined her sweat was the strange oily substance that Slycke’s skin exuded. Like the Mountain, he must live in perpetual horror at his own body, cut off from society at large. Except that Bill the Mountain retained a sense of ethics, as lonely as he was, essentially dead to his wife and family.

  A germ of an idea took root. Ramona had a sudden urge to dump a liter of 10W-40 motor oil over her head.

  “You sleuths have the tough job,” Matai continued. “I have no idea how you gather information and dig need
les out of haystacks. I prefer field work: five minutes and either the problem’s solved or I’m a red smear across the pavement. No suspense there. Still too much paperwork, though.”

  A slender blonde approached Ramona. “Are you done?” she asked while never taking her eyes off Matai.

  “You can have him. Some of us girls have to work for a living.” She gave Matai a wink and bustled off to the locker room, head swirling with possibility. For the first time in days, she didn’t wonder what Mercurye was doing.

  * * *

  The first thing Jack Point did when Ramona entered his office was give her a white rose.

  “Why, thanks, Jack,” she said.

  “Identify yourself, please,” Jack Point said. His garish harlequin three-piece suit, pink gloves and polka-dotted top hat belied his solemn, intent scrutiny of her face.

  Ramona tilted her head. “Jack, Jack, Jack. How many times have we worked together? I can’t believe you don’t recognize me.”

  “You’re lying,” Jack said with a sad smile, “whoever you are. If we’ve worked together, you must be an EchoOps detective. And female…Jeanine Carlson?”

  “No.”

  “Adrianne Penn.”

  “Wrong again, buddy.”

  Jack leaned back into his chair. “The only detective cruel enough to torment the guy with prosopagnosia is Ramona Ferrari.”

  Ramona clapped her hands together twice. “Brilliant deduction. Nice to see you again.” She tucked the rose into her lapel. “Does that help?”

  “Yes, thank you. And thank you for not lying when you say it’s nice to see me again.” Jack Point had relaxed from the awkwardness.

  “It is nice, you freak. You always keep me entertained.”

  “My blindness to faces amuses you?”

  “No. The workarounds you find for it impress me.” She adjusted the rose. “The flower’s a nice touch.”

  “Looks classier than the ‘Hello My Name Is’ badges. What do you have for me today?”

  Ramona leaned forward over his desk with a photograph. “Here’s my quarry.”

  Jack Point squinted at Walter Slycke’s scowling mugshot, complete with an oily black film over his skin. “Now that’s a face even I could remember. Metahuman?”

  “Until the attack, he was a prisoner in the security wing. He was too slippery, literally, for the Nazis to execute him.” She passed him Walter Slycke’s dossier and pointed to an italicized section. “That gunk he exudes can all but eliminate friction. With fancy footwork, he can deflect bullets.”

  “He’ll be tough to recapture.”

  “I have to find him first. He’s gone to ground.”

  Jack Point shrugged. His attention wandered to an etching on his wall: a scene from Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard, featuring the jester who was his namesake.

  Ramona waved her hand in his face. “Stay with me here, buddy. I’m in a bit of a hurry and the courts are tied up with aftermath nonsense. Warrants and court orders are hassles I don’t need. Your built-in polygraph will make interviews much more to the point.”

  “Jack Point, that’s me.”

  “You bet. What kind of paperwork do I need to fill out to get you on the case?”

  “Not much.” Jack Point wrote “out of the office” on a Post-it and adhered it to his computer screen. “Funny how informal things have become since…hmm.” He cleared his throat. “Where to?”

  “The sticks. We’re paying a visit to Ma and Pa Slycke.”

  * * *

  Three hours later, Ramona wished she had requisitioned a helicopter instead of one of Echo’s unmarked sedans. The Atlanta traffic had gone from bad to impossible thanks to the destruction wrought on the highways. It took an extra hour to crawl through rush hour traffic. She bit her lip and resisted the urge to activate the siren that would clear a path—and announce their presence to the world. Jack Point’s top hat was bad enough; fortunately he had to doff it to fit into the car. He watched the cars creep by and glanced at his hands at regular intervals.

  “Those gloves aren’t going to change themselves,” Ramona said.

  “Hmm?”

  “You keep staring at them. Did you mean to wear the white ones?”

  He held up his gloved hands. “Ah. No, it’s a mental trick. I’m usually the only person in the room with pink gloves, thus I know these hands are mine and not someone else’s.”

  “Of course they’re yours. You operate them, you receive tactile information from them, right?”

  “Sometimes it’s not enough,” Jack Point said in a quiet voice.

  Ramona blew air out her lips. “Sorry. I guess I forget how acute your condition is. You can’t even recognize yourself?”

  He shook his head.

  “So you’ve never really seen your own face?”

  “I was normal until I was twelve. That’s the last time I saw myself.” He smiled. “But among neuroscientists, I’m a rock star, so it’s not so bad. The most acute case of prosopagnosia in history. I go right off the charts.” He chuckled. “Some of them are convinced vivisecting my brain will reveal the nature of consciousness itself. I’ve lost count of the MRIs I’ve been subjected to.”

  “You could say no.”

  “They mean well and they’re very grateful. Who knows? They might learn something genuinely useful. Meanwhile, Echo has use for me as a walking polygraph.”

  “The good with the bad,” Ramona said.

  “Everything’s a trade-off,” he agreed, giving the hat on his lap a flip.

  Unsummoned, an image of Mercurye entered her mind. Handsome, metahumanly strong, able to fly…what trade-off did he make for his powers?

  Suddenly she missed him terribly.

  Well south of Atlanta, the afternoon sun illuminated the edges of kudzu-engulfed trees that formed a parade of grotesque shapes on the side of I-75. Traffic had died down as Ramona and Jack Point left behind the extended suburbs that established Atlanta’s reputation as a major center for urban sprawl. A few intrepid commuters still drove their air-conditioned SUVs to their suburban palaces, their faces tight with exhaustion as Ramona zipped past them.

  “Look at those bogs,” she said. “It’s no wonder there haven’t been any sightings of him.”

  “You think he’s hiding out in the swamps? How very pulpy of him. Could it be that he’s trying to scare meddling teenagers away from a hidden treasure?”

  She chuckled. “Not if he’s smart. But right now he’s scared and lost. Nothing in his history indicates he’s much of a survivalist, so I’m betting he’s lurking around Beechwood.”

  “Beechwood. Hmm.” Jack Point shuffled through the papers. “Born 1974, Beechwood, Georgia. Isn’t that a little obvious?”

  “Slycke’s trying to have it both ways.” She took the State Route 401 exit off the highway, bypassing a cluster of gas stations and truckstops. “And that’s how I’ll catch him.”

  They cruised through Fort Valley and Nakomis, sleepy southern towns settling down for an evening’s dinner. Ramona stopped for a quick refuel and some gritty gas-station hot dogs. Jack Point settled for a honey bun and coffee. Twenty minutes later, as the sun set in a swath of crimson, they entered the swamps of Beechwood.

  The tiny village had all the rustic emptiness that Ramona expected from the deep south: a handful of elegant plantation homes with peeling columns, surrounded by mobile homes and decaying shacks. The air lacked the pollution of Atlanta but retained the thick humidity, made worse by the earthy smell of the swamp.

  Despite their map, it took three passes down Carter Lane to find the turnoff to the Slycke home. Five hundred yards through bramble and willow trees led them to a yard littered with car parts, broken appliances and overgrown foliage. A shape peered out from a stained curtain when they pulled into the driveway and parked.

  “So much for stealth,” Jack Point said. “What if he’s bolting out the back door?”

  “I doubt it, but keep your eyes open.”

  Wood groaned und
er their weight as they mounted the steps.

  “Take your hat off,” she told Jack. “Manners.”

  He sighed and cradled it in his arm.

  Ramona knocked on the frame of the screen door. She heard furtive voices within, and the patter of feet. Jack Point arched an eyebrow but she shook her head.

  Finally, the door opened to reveal a stout black woman in a fading-pink-floral house dress. Her scowl dented the folds of her face.

  “What you want?” The woman’s voice was deep and husky and tired. She stared bug-eyed at Ramona’s companion. “You circus folk?”

  Ramona smiled and flipped her Echo badge open. “Echo Detective Ramona Ferrari, ma’am. I’m hoping you’ll answer some questions for me.”

  The woman nodded her head at Jack. “Who’s he?”

  “That’s Jack Point. May we come in?”

  The sigh that escaped the woman had in it decades of bitterness and resentment. “Might as well,” she said at last.

  Inside the house, the flickering light of a television bathed the room in a dismal blue luminescence, spitting out audio from a battered speaker. A man in his sixties slouched on a dusty sofa with a can of Coca-Cola. His face bore a look of passive acceptance, as if he had given up even moving.

  When Ramona and Jack Point came into view, he tilted his head with sudden distrust. “Who’re you?”

  Ramona repeated her introduction as the woman leaned against the wall and glared. The man grunted. “Pull up some chairs, Ma,” he said.

  “They ain’t staying long.”

  “Don’t back-talk me. They’re guests.” He made no effort to move or even emphasize his anger.

  The woman dragged creaky wooden chairs into the living room. Ramona feared hers would give out, but it held firm.

  “Say your piece.” The man shifted his eyes from the television to Ramona.

  She cleared her throat. “I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. I promise I’ll make it painless.” Her smile was lost in the darkness. “We need to ask you a few questions about your son, Walter.”