by John Ridley
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 something 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 fail 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."
H e 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.
Via didn't crack wise much anymore. When he used his barbs, his jests were focused m
ostly 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 information 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 CLeg'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, haying 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 Yin'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 hank.
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.
Nubian Princess.
Much as Soledad despised all of them with their stupid names and ridiculous costumes, the thought of the Nubian Princess sometimes still gave her a thrill-chill.
Vin took it, the details of the call, as a matter of course, showing an emotional spike only when Soledad detailed the metanormal rights protesters.
"They've got an opinion… " Tight little shakes of Vin's head. "I don't care how stupid it is, okay, they've got their opinion. But…" Vin reduced his thoughts to a phrase: "Freak fuckers." Added: "Israel Fernandez; glad he died."
"Oh, no. Didn't die. The black copters from the special ops assassinated him." Sarcasm buttered with bitterness. "He probably killed himself just so we'd get the blame."
Then, talking about Eddi, Vin said: "She's good. She's a good operator."
Soledad said yeah to that, complimented Vin for having seen Eddi's abilities early on.
Vin was the one who wanted Eddi to join his and Soledad's element as a probee to keep her hot head from getting taken off by a freak.
Ironic.
Vin thought it was ironic: He'd brought Eddi onto the element to help watch over her. Eddi ended up walking away from their bad, bad call relatively unhurt. And he had…
Vin looked to his bionics.
He thought of his days on MTac. Two-legged days. Days without painkillers.
Days that were only months ago.
Like she was dialed into his thoughts, Soledad: "What are you going to do?"
"Order a pizza. Watch The Simpsons."
"With yourself: What, are you going to do? It's been eight months."
"Thanks. 'Cause a lot of times it's hard for me to keep track of how long it's been since I had my leg-"
"You're off rehab. You've got your new leg. So what are you going to do?"
"The only thing I've ever been is a cop, and that's done with."
"You could work Admin. You could work DMI."
"I was just thinking how much I want to hang around a bunch of other busted MTacs talking about how good things useta be when we had all our limbs instead of just a couple of them."
"So instead you're going to sit here, get fat off pizza and watch TV. If you were any more pathetic, you'd be a cliche."
Vin said nothing. Vin, fractured Vin, let Soledad have the last word.
And then, again, there was quiet between them.
And sometime after that Soledad said: "I was scared yesterday."
"Going against a homicidal shape-shifter, how are you not going to be scared? All the macho bullshit aside, I never knew an operator who didn't get tight on a call. You're crazy if you don't. You can plan on getting killed otherwise."
"I'm not talking that kind of scared. Scared that makes you sharp. I was scared to death. Vin, I was scared to where I felt Death. I felt it right there with me, crawling all over me same as a million ugly maggots."
"And you were wrong about it. Wrong about it for you, for the element." Thinking of Whitaker, thinking of him still lying up in a hospital between the here and the hereafter: "Maybe you were." Vin worked himself to where he was as sincere as he could be. Open as he knew how to be. "If you really felt Death, if that's what you really felt, fear, there's no shame in stepping aside. Bo was as tough an operator as there was. When it was time for him to get out of the bag and behind a desk…" Recalling a moment he and Soledad'd shared; their senior lead, Bo, telling them he was quitting MTac: "Nobody's done it with more whatever. Dignity."
Bo was still around MTac. Around in a big way. He was 10-David. Unit commander. He was the guy in charge of day-to-day operations. That meant a lot of pencil pushing. Politicking. A lot of filling out requisitions and forms. Begging one way or another for the couple of extra bucks in the budget that
meant the difference between good equipment and the best equipment for G Platoon. And difference between good equipment and the best equipment? Sometimes the difference was living and dying. Soledad wasn't sure how other operators felt about Bo's choices. But how she felt, how she felt when she saw him knee-deep in paperwork: She felt he was lucky. Not just lucky to be alive. Lucky to have the smarts to know when to get out off the streets.
Maybe not just lucky. Bo, different from most MTacs, had a wife. Kids. Probably, Soledad conjectured, having something to live for keeps you from doing shit that's) get ya killed.
Probably.
She didn't know. Not for sure.
From Soledad, a tick of her head, dismissing all that. Getting back to what was what: "The way I felt wasn't just about the call. I felt… it was like an O'Hara novel. I felt like things were inevitable."
"Well, you're pressing thirty. Thirty, and you're not married. Yeah, you're thinking about
dying."
And Soledad laughed. A little. And this was why, despite their distant natures, she chose to spend time with Vin. Vin knew her. Could slice the bullshit. Could move her. Could touch her from feet away. Always could.
She wanted to kiss him.
Just a peck.
Maybe a little more.
Wouldn't let herself. And she wouldn't tell Vin that when she thought of death, she thought of him. Thought of losing him or being lost to him. Whichever. Thing was, Vin gave Soledad something to live for. And the thing about that..
"You think too much, Soledad." No idea what was going on in Soledad's head, but Vin was precise with his insight. "You think, then you let your thinking get to you. Yeah, you're gonna die someday. Somehow. You stay on MTac, it's gonna involve a mutie. But you're getting a cloud over you,… what's got you feeling like that? Like that.
What had Soledad feeling like that: Last time Soledad felt like she had something to life for, someone to live for, turned out to be a freak.
Hell if that was going to happen again, freak or normal human. Hell if it would.
Love = weakness all around.