Eddi’s chestplate kept her ribs from busting. Eddi’s chestplate shattered Alcala’s wrist on impact. Both their weapons were lost as their bodies played a limp game of twister across the floor.
Soledad up, moving. Moving for the action. Two jerks on her trigger. Eight of her special slugs added to Whitaker’s rhythmic bursts. A spray of blood signaled a hit on the freak. Whitaker’s rounds, not Soledad’s. Soledad’s, and the thing would be down.
The thing.
The thing contracted, expanded. Went from looking like, from being a serpent, to . . . Scales into fur. Tendrils into claws.
Serpent into tiger.
A white tiger.
Soledad, to herself: Jesus H. Christ. It’s a goddamn freak show.
And the tiger leaped, leaped for Whitaker. Whitaker fired, nicked the freak as it reached the apex of its arc.
Then it was on him.
Then it was tearing at his throat.
Sick joke.
Then Whitaker was screaming. Trying to. What he was doing, really, as he was failing, was gurgling. Blood was free-flowing. What wasn’t pooling in his throat was just spraying. Whitaker kept up the fight, swung at the thing. Bare-handed, tried to beat it back. Whitaker was fighting for his life.
Whitaker was losing.
Eddi was sailing.
Like a Hollywood, A-list action chick, Eddi was sailing for the mutie. One hand out and groping at it, the other hand clutching her knife. The knife. The one her late father, a casualty of May Day, had legacied to her.
In all of MTac a single, nonreg weapon got the same dispensation and respect as Soledad’s O’Dwyer. At the moment, Eddi was driving the weapon hilt-deep into a freak.
And blood fountained, turned the fur of the white tiger pinkish red.
And the freak went crazy with itself. It bucked. It kicked. It juked. It threw Eddi, finally, clear.
And good, Soledad thought. Good for that. Eddi was out of the line of fire. It was just her and the freak.
Soledad squeezed her trigger.
The O’Dwyer let slip its bullets. The bullets, four, nearly in unison found their way into the freak. Lethal on their own, Soledad’s bullets carried a little something more. Hollowed, each with a flywheel. Air ramjetted against the wheel, which drove a microturbine that self-generated an electrical charge. Eleven hundred feet per second, the flywheel making 850 revs per one hundred feet. It made for a hell of a charge. On impact with the freak’s body, inside the freak’s body, the charge discharged. The freak got 675,000 kV of fresh-brewed juice. Per slug. That kind of electricity does a horrid thing to a malleable mass.
The freak snapped, contorted grotesquely against itself, voltage punching at it, ripping at it from the inside out. Its struggle made it seem as though, against its own will, it was trying to move in three or four or five directions at once. Limbs—ones that were properly formed and others, little mutated things that sprang from the tiger-form wherever they pleased—both reached for help and curled in pain. The whole of it twitched spastically and gave the impression of one of Satan’s brood that, hellish as it was, fought the twin mortal afflictions of Parkinson’s and epilepsy. From a tiger, from the nightmare tiger it’d become, the thing took on the form of a dog. A partial dog, partial humanoid. Then it, the humanoid portion of the thing, kind of started looking like John Madden if John Madden were melting. If his face were on the side of his head, if his mouth were pried open but incapable of delivering the scream it attempted to yelp.
Then it was a deformed John Madden with what looked like a goat making an escape from his thigh.
Jerking. Twitching. Slowing.
Then it was just a freak on the floor bleeding out.
Whitaker was bleeding out.
Aoki was curled, clutching herself.
Alcala was sitting, his right hand folded back in an incorrect manner.
Into her mic, Soledad: “Pacific to Metro! Eleven ninety-nine; officers down! We need EMS at this location forthwith!”
And then she was over to Whitaker, putting pressure to his neck, lips to his ears. Talking to him but not telling him false promises—it’s going to be all right. Don’t worry, boy, you’re gonna pull through. What Soledad was doing, Soledad was handing out orders.
“Hang on, Whitaker. You hear me? I do not lose operators! You hang the fuck on!”
And in herself she heard herself say, no longer as a command but as a sigh of relief: I will not die today.
And outside the bank, across the street, as the door opened, as EMS, as uniformed cops spilled in and got a look at the torn-up MTacs, Soledad heard voices chant: “Metanormals are people too!”
If the general public wanted to have a scare, they’d consider what happens immediately following a rough or south MTac call. A rough call is when one or more operators end up in serious condition. A call gone south’s when one or more end up terminal.
Most MTac calls were rough calls.
And when a call goes south, when operators land on a bus to the closest ER, the nearest morgue, for a minute until a replacement MTac (or MTacs) can be slotted into an element—whether elements are shuffled or a cop is added to G Platoon, the LAPD unit that covers Metanormal tactical responses—the city, the people of the city are just that much more vulnerable. If freaks, if muties were a little more on the ball, if they really wanted to stir up some trouble, they could come at the MTacs in waves. We could take on a couple of them at once. I know we could. A few of them. Maybe. But sooner or later . . . There are about forty suspected muties in LA County. That’s the best guess from DMI, the Division of Metanormal Intelligence, the spooks who keep a surreptitious eye on freaks.
Forty of them.
If the freaks really wanted to have at it, how long would it take for them to wear us down, wipe us out? My fear . . . well, honest, I’ve got a lot of them. But one that’s becoming vivid to me is the one where I come off a call, I’m in a hospital healing up, or there tending to an operator who’s gotten it bad, when we get a general alert: A flamethrower in Tarzana. A terraformer ripping up Carson. A UCM is flattening Century City. And when that happens, when that call comes in, I’ll know, we’ll know: It’s not a coincidence of incident. It’s the opening salvo. It’s the beginning of the end. The race war we’ve been waiting for.
And when that happens . . .
When that happens . . .
I’ll load up my gun.
I’ll go to work.
Have to.
I’m alive for a reason.
Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center.
Soledad’s mouth had been stitched. Alcala’s wrist was getting set. Eddi’d been bruised up, but that was it. No broken bones, cracked ribs. She was good. Soledad would’ve been clear of the hospital, clear of Santa Monica—its own city, a liberal city that brushed up against LA; that they had a different take on the “metanormal problem” was obvious from the cold looks Hypocritically oathed doctors openly sent her—except for Whitaker.
Whitaker was in very rough shape. Mauled about the neck. Massive blood loss. A stroke while under the knife. It was a mild one, but there’s never, Soledad imagined, any good thing about having a stroke.
Best to be hoped for, out of surgery, Whitaker would get listed as critical. From there, the slow crawl from critical to serious was going to take a while. If it happened at all. And from there . . .
Eddi and Soledad sat in a waiting area just off emergency surgery flipping mental coins. The opposite sides: Whitaker was gonna make it/Whitaker was gonna expire. And even if things landed right, even if he did live, what kind of living would he really have to look forward to? Months of physical therapy to get his jaw and facial muscles working enough to chew Jell-O. Vicious scars a reminder of the incident every time he so much as looked in a mirror to shave.
And mentally?
Forget about going through a near-death experience. Just a near-death experience. What Whitaker might . . . what he will, Soledad modified herself, what he will survive was somethin
g that would walk with him beyond a couple of sleepless nights and a handful of sessions with a PTSD counselor.
Jesus.
Soledad thought as she did after every call that went south: All this to take out one of them.
Just one.
Jesus.
She let her head fall back, rest against the wall behind her.
All this for one of them. How many were in the SoCal area? How many were there really? Those forty: a guesstimate from DMI. There could be, could be twice that. Three times . . .
Jesus H. . . .
“It’s been good.”
Soledad lolled her head on the wall, looked to Eddi.
Eddi, one more time: “It’s been good operating with you again.”
“Got a guy down, he’s probably not going to be getting up soon if at all. It’s been real good.”
“If you hadn’t been the senior lead, things could’ve been worse. And more than that, I just mean, you know, personally. Personally, it’s been good having you—”
Jumping in, cutting Eddi off: “If the brass got off its asses and approved the O’Dwyer departmentwide . . . Wait four more months just to evaluate my field test? That’s a bunch of—”
“You’re a piece of work, you know that?” Eddi smiled, but the laugh she gave was unkind. “All I’m trying to do, I’m trying to give you a compliment. I’m not trying to make a moment out of things. You don’t want a moment, you want to avoid anything that comes close to you and me having a conversation? Cool. Fuck you.” And she was very serious about that. “Now we don’t have to have a moment.”
The wall across from the pair got a steady look, got Eddi’s full stare.
The wall was blank. Cinderblock jazzed up on a budget by a dull shade of green.
But Eddi gave it all her attention.
Soledad kept up a stare at Eddi . . .
Kept it up . . .
She rubbed her tongue over the stitches inside her mouth. Brittle. Prickly. Their alien nature begging to be scrutinized. Rejecting touch with a very standard form of pain, common to a hurt she’d had at one point or another in her arm, her chest, her back just below her scapula. Very, very common to her throat. The scars she wore there the first of so many forget-me-nots freaks would leave with her. This one, the mouth wound, it’d be what? A week or more of careful masticating before it healed? Even at that she’d probably end up biting the swollen meat a couple of times. At least that. Keep it from healing right. One of the hazards of a rough call. A minor one. The polar opposite of, say, being dead.
Being Whitaker.
Soledad to Eddi: “Let me see your shoulder.”
“Fuck that.”
“You’ve got a foul mouth, young lady.”
“Fuck—”
“Want me to make it an order?”
“You’re gonna order me to show you my shoulder?” Eddi gave a “yeah, right” smirk and bob of the head.
Soledad was without humor. “You want a write-up for insubordination, I will write you up.”
“Like that’s going to—”
“It’d sit you down for a while. And I know, for you, missing out on so much as one watch, one call, would tick you off royally.”
Eddi’s look shifted from the wall, the dull green wall, to Soledad. The two of them got into a quiet knife fight with their eyes.
They would’ve grappled forever.
Except Eddi, eventually, not quite backing down, but chewing her lips same as if she were grinding bits of lead—the job done with both grit and disgust—zipped down the front of her Nomex jumpsuit, started to reveal her right shoulder.
“The other one,” Soledad instructed.
Oh, the disdain Eddi seeped. The petulant callousness of a young girl being called to task by her mom. Still, she shifted her suit, revealed the opposite shoulder. Flesh. Just flesh. No tattoo.
Eddi: “Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Got over it a long time ago.” Eddi adjusted her suit, zipped, went back to looking at the wall with all the unwavering discipline of a Shaolin monk.
Soledad stared at it with her.
There was the occasional page for a doctor, a specialist. Hushed voices refracted by the acoustics of the space carried down the corridor. Mostly, there was quiet.
But elsewhere . . .
Elsewhere there were babies being born, spleens being removed. An organ or two being transplanted. Maybe. Being Santa Monica, there were mostly breasts being implanted, lipo being suctioned, tummies getting tucked. Probably at least one somebody dying.
But it all went on in a respectful quiet. Good news, bad news. Life. Death. Here it was held in the same clinical, objective manner. Perhaps we can save you, perhaps we cannot. Here is your child, but she needs a new liver.
Soledad struggled with: “I’m . . . It’s good we got to work together again. You’ve become a solid operator, and I’m, I’m . . . that your first call got to be under my watch . . .”
And the difficulty Soledad had in communicating that little actually gave Eddi humor. It brought ’round that smirk of hers, that smart-assed variety of grin usually owned by frat boys playing pranks and kept women playing men. And Eddi when things tumbled her way. Very often things tumbled Eddi’s way.
With as much shit-giving pleasure as anyone who’s survived a fellow cop, another fellow cop getting maimed by a freak: “Damn, Soledad. Don’t kill yourself.”
He used to crack wise. Was always quick with a comeback. His word was the last word. His talent, his fetish was the ability to add with rapidity the final line to a conversation. If need be, or if he just had the desire, with an unblunted mocking of the person to whom he was speaking. Call it snaps, call it the dozens. Call it a sense of humor sharp as a brand-new knife. He could’ve been a put-down artist. He could’ve. In younger days.
Younger in spirit, not age.
Vin didn’t crack wise much anymore. When he used his barbs, his jests were focused mostly inward. Self-deprecating. Sometimes self-destroying. What wit he had was leaden. His humor, his high humor, was ripped away along with his ego, his cockiness and his right leg by an animated engine block brought to life by a telekinetic freak.
Months.
After the incident—really, it was an ordeal—months followed of lying in the hospital recovering. Getting well enough physically, mentally, to just get out of bed.
Going half a day without pain was a miracle.
Going to the bathroom in something besides a bedpan became a minor victory.
Then there was the physical therapy. The physical therapist with his two good legs and easy platitudes who didn’t have one idea in hell what it was like—how much it hurt—learning to stand. Learning to walk with crutches. Learning to walk with a fake leg and a cane. Learning to walk with just a fake leg.
Not so hard, the just walking.
It was walking without the gimp, the gimp that advertised to the world there was something wrong with him. Something different about him. Vin could do without the stares, without the pity. Pity from others. For himself, for himself he had plenty of pity. And his melancholy made him jaded. Stole his humor. Made him quiet.
Soledad didn’t mind. She . . . liked? Preferred the Vin Vin was becoming, having been a perpetual target of the cocky Vin. The macho Vin. This Vin—unobtrusive and removed—suited her nature; isolated and detached.
It was New Leg Day. That’s what Vin called it in a rare display of levity. Heavy as the levity was. It was the day he was set to get his permanent replacement leg. His phrase. Again, humor. Squarely jested from the thirteenth step of the gallows.
Soledad came around for the celebration. That made it a party of two.
Vin’s permanent replacement leg was an Otto Bock Health Care C-Leg® with its patented microprocessor-controlled knee-shin system featuring onboard sensor technology, which reads the individual’s every move by measuring forces at the ankle and angle of the knee fifty times a second. The C-Leg’s microprocessor then uses this in
formation to guide the knee’s hydraulic stance resistance as well as swing phase to ensure that the user’s gait is as natural and efficient as possible. The efficiency of the C-Leg’s swing-phase dynamics—all this Soledad got from the Otto Bock Web site—even at varying walking speeds and uneven terrain, provides a more secure, natural and efficient gait. Using unique algorithms developed from studying how thousands of people walk, combined with input from multiple built-in sensors, the microprocessor determines the phase of gait. Then automatic adjustments are made to the knee’s function to provide stability. The result is increased stability, ease of swing and greater efficiency with every step! The exclamation Otto Bock’s own. There’s even a knee-disarticulation version available.
Nifty. Really. To Soledad, having majored in emerging technology, it was all really nifty.
The days of prosthetics merely mimicking human ability were fading. Getting fucked-up and coming back at or below your birth abilities was yesterday’s news. Science had found a way to improve on the Lord’s work. The leg the Otto Bock was replacing had been a millimeter longer than Vin’s remaining leg. The Otto Bock was the exact length of Vin’s real leg. Science didn’t make mistakes. Take that, God.
Vin jogged around his apartment a couple of times, displayed his leg for Soledad.
That ended his New Leg Day celebration.
After that, as was common, as was comfortable for Soledad and Vin, they sat together saying nothing. Physically close, they maintained distance. Incredible how much they dug that about each other: the ability to be in each other’s sphere without taking up space.
After a while more, Soledad downloaded Vin on the previous day’s call. The freak in the bank.
Never mind her facial bruises, Vin hadn’t trespassed Soledad’s privacy. Had asked no questions. He’d waited until she was ready to tell her tale.
And she told it.
She told Vin about leading the element against a thing that could alter its shape at will. She played back details of the freak getting taken down, finally, by a combo of Soledad’s high-tech piece and Eddi’s old-fashioned sharpened metal. It was a story that would’ve been—just a couple decades prior—fantastic. Before the likes of Nightshift and the Headman and the Miko.
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