by John Ridley
Soledad: "Even when there's nothing to be suspicious about?"
A shrug. "You spend your days doing surveillance on the corner pharmacist or a soccer mom who's actually a freak that can take out a city block without producing a sweat, suspicion's a hard habit to shake."
"I can deal with a little negativity. Compared to actually having to be the one to take down that pharmacist or soccer mom, it's nothing." Soledad wasn't so much displaying machismo as she was giving support to the whole of G Platoon.
Abernathy said: "There are bad habits all around. MTacs included. Again, nothing personal."
Cold. Distant. Unable, unwilling to allow people into their lives because their lives were, generally, short-lived. MTacs had bad habits to spare.
"I don't," Soledad said, "take it personally. Mostly." And mostly, Soledad didn't. She didn't take personally the ice, the propriety glances. Except for the cops that hit her with their straight-up old-school bigotry. Soledad personally wanted to kick that bunch in the teeth. Otherwise, long time ago, Soledad'd decided she wasn't in the give-a-fuck business.
Abernathy: "Would you mind?"
Just that said. Soledad knew what Abernathy was talking about. She pulled her O'Dwyer, removed the clip from the back. No need to eject a shell from the chamber. Didn't have a chamber. Handed it butt-first to Abernathy.
He looked the piece over, asked a couple of questions about it, and Soledad went into what'd become a standard speech on her sidearm. How Metalstorm had agreed to let her modify it, how the governor had okayed her field-testing it. Soledad skipped over the history of the field test: the disciplinary action against her and the trumped-up IA investigation that'd preceded it, her almost getting hung out to dry for getting a cop killed-a cop she admired, respected. A cop whose death she had nothing to do with, whose passing had changed her life. Whose tattoo, an exact duplicate of, Soledad wore on her left shoulder. Five simple words: we don't need
another hero.
All of that Soledad gave the go by to. She didn't need to bring it up. Abernathy knew about it. At least knew a version of it. There wasn't a cop on the force who hadn't heard the rumors filtered through the blue wall that's supposed to shield fellow cops from acrimony from the outside. Truth: All it does is make a cell where accused cops can get gang-raped from the inside by intimation and allegation.
So let others speculate and wonder. All that mattered, same as her encounters with a fire freak and a speed freak and any of the other freaks she'd gone against, Soledad'd survived that departmental attempt on her life as well.
Abernathy handed back the gun.
"I don't believe you'll be needing that much here."
"Never know."
Nodding to her assertion: "No, you don't. But the use of deadly force is the last thing events should come to. Here we watch, we wait, we note. We fight with our heads, not our fists. The grunt mentality stays with MTac." Abernathy wasn't accusatory. He was even. And that voice of his, he sounded like he was reading copy for a public service announcement.
"Don't have a grunt mentality," Soledad said. "With MTac or otherwise."
"That business with IA-"
"Was never carried through. An OIS that was investigated as required."
He was probing. Soledad knew Abernathy was testing her same as any lieu would an operator being rotated in who had a… a situation in their package. They'd want to know, not so much the details of the event, but could the cop coming off the situation handle himself? Herself. Or are they burned and bitter, full up with anger they're just waiting to spew at a moment that's inappropriate? Inappropriate, in a cop's world, is a moment that gets someone killed.
"I guess the concern is," Abernathy said, "you have a history of independent action."
"Independent thought and independent action are two different things." Soledad was composed, quite controlled. Soledad said: "I've been point on any number of MTac elements, and on all of them my record speaks for itself. I know how to work as part of a ream. But I also believe in thinking beyond the box. That's got its own rewards, and it's got its own risks. But when it comes down to us versus the muties… yeah, you play things smart, but it's no good for cops to go at things overly cautious. That's just as dangerous as being a hothead."
"If you do say so yourself."
"I do. But would you want a cop jobbing for you who's not willing to take a stand?"
Nothing from Abernathy.
A moment more.
Abernathy said: "I don't mean disrespect when I talk about the grunt mentality. It's not an attempt to put down G Platoon. It's just, I don't know, call it departmental hubris. We all work together, yes. Nice, as company lines go. But as far as DMI is concerned, it's just a line. Three-quarters of the operators here are here because the grunt way of thinking got them shattered. Now they're ready to use their heads.
"This is not G Platoon. This is not MTac. I have no doubt once your leg heals you have no intention of continuing on with DMI."
No protest from Soledad.
"But you are here now. If you want to be effective here, now, then forget about G Platoon. They're not your family. We're your family. It's this family that has your back."
No flinching around with her gaze. Soledad gave Abernathy a stare hung on a taut tether eye-to-eye. "While I'm here, I'm here, sir. But I'm always going to be MTac."
What Soledad got for her forthrightness was sat down at a desk in an office empty of light that was natural and colors that weren't primary. What she got was a hard drive full of e-files that had to be cross-referenced with paper files that were prime for an incinerator. Most of the files were left over from surveillances that were shut down, a warrant having been served on a suspect. The suspect, the freak, probably dead by way of an MTac element. Occasionally, a freak was brought in alive and ended up housed at the SPA. The euphemistic way of saying they were incarcerated at the California state Special Protective Area located in the heart of the Mojave.
But freaks going to the SPA was very occasional. Mostly, when it came time for freaks to get arrested, freaks didn't do things the easy way.
The files, the cross-referencing, it was busywork.
For all the talk of brainwork, of how special DMI was, how DMI was the secret weapon in the war on freaks,
Soledad had been handed paper to shuffle. Duty buggery. Glorified secretarial fare, and that shit was what Soledad hated more than any single thing. Worse than being useless, it was the imitation of usefulness. For most cops their living nightmare was to get caught gun empty in the middle of a firefight. For Soledad…
So what was this? Was this a test too? Was this Abernathy having a look-see at how much banality Soledad could take? A gauge of how committed she was, despite her assertion of always being an MTac, to the job at hand?
That was a good thought to Soledad: that she was getting fucked with. That she was worth fucking with. That she rated some kind of initiation made Soledad feel special. Unique. Not, at least, like a cop too thick to be trusted with brainwork.
Soledad looked up from her papers. Outside the door was a guy she guessed to be in his early forties. Sandy-blond hair. Hazel eyes. One hand. He had one hand. His left. A prosthetic hook was the terminal device on the right. He was in the corridor lined up in the doorway staring at Soledad.
Soledad said: "Yeah?" And she said it to mean: Yeah, what do you want? Yeah, what do you need? Yeah, there's a black woman on leave from MTac working in your joint. What about it?
The guy's stare didn't beg any of that, but whenever presented with the air of confrontation, Soledad usually took things to the extreme.
The guy walked on, no words for Soledad.
Should've, Soledad thought should've put in for HIT. Too late now. Not because she couldn't still get the transfer. Ego wouldn't let her leave. Leave and have others think she'd been chased off by the stares, the cold shoulders. The busywork DMI passed off as intellectual endeavors.
Soledad had the tenacity to survive all that was
presented to her.
Soledad put all of her formidable tenacity into finishing her e-files.
The message on Soledad's integrated cordless phone/digital answering machine was from Soledad's mom. Same hi-how-are-you-just-checking-in message Soledad had been getting, had been dodging, for six weeks. A month and a half. Little more than that. Soledad didn't feel like, could not take, talking with her parents. Loved her parents, her parents were great. Just couldn't handle at the moment the stress of their regard. The near-daily worry they heaped on her about her life, her work… Soledad could very much do without a repeat of five years previous when she'd been clipped by a car while out running. Her mom on the first flight out from Milwaukee, around all day every day for eight days solid to help Soledad recuperate when there was little or no recuperating to be done.
Her own fault.
Soledad knew the current state or her relationship with her parents-strained, distant, vague-was her doing. And it was as obvious as it was natural that the more Soledad pushed her parents off, the more clingy they became.
They clung to their daughter.
They held on tight to the little girl who inexplicably cried every time someone sang Happy Birthday and defiantly painted all her white Barbies black, shaved the heads of all her black Barbies 'cause "they look more kick-ass that way." Too young to even have a word like «kick-ass» in her lexicon. Soledad's parents hugged in absentia the young woman who- when others her age worshipped pop stars and teen heartthrobs-was in awe of the Nubian Princess, the greatest of the superpeople. Her opinion. And Soledad's parents quietly, daily, prayed for Soledad, the woman who shut down on the first day of May years prior when half the city of San Francisco and her citizens were removed from the planet along with Soledad's faith.
They loved her, Soledad's parents were there for her, and all Soledad had to do was reach out to them. Offer herself up as the daughter her parents wanted her to be.
Easy. Sure.
If you could resurrect a city, 600,000-plus people. If you could basically hop in a machine that bent time and could carry you back to a moment before the demigods who should have guided aspirations instead sparked fears, then maybe Soledad could trade her solitude for effusiveness.
Wasn't gonna happen.
So, for another week, Soledad would put the dodge on her folks. Give them a callback when she was pretty sure they wouldn't be home.
From her integrated cordless phone/digital answering machine Soledad erased the message from her mother.
Couldn't see it. Think about it.
You hold a magnifying glass over an ant on a hot day,
you can't see the sharpened sunlight that fries it.
So…
If a person has the ungodly-extra-godly- ability to refract the light collected by their retinas into focused shafts of intense heat, you cannot see the hot: death coming at you.
You can in movies.
In movies, people with heat vision are always lighting up the area around them with their death-beam eyes. But that's movies.
Movie audiences have to have their fleshy minds entertained for them. The excitement's got to be obvious.
In real life, feeling your flesh start to heat up when a fire-eyes freak looks your way: That's all the excitement you need.
But you always got extra excitement thrown in gratis.
In a parking garage in the Bridge, in the middle of a firefight with a fire-eyes, Eddi and her element got melting glass and warping metal and bursting tires and instant heat damage to everything that was in the general direction of where the fire-eyes looked.
Good thing: In a parking garage, there was ample steel for the element to put between itself and the fire-eyes' killer stare.
"Where is the iamb for the burnt offering?" the freak screamed.
Bad thing: All that cover made it hard for the element to get off a clean shot. They swapped fire for fire, but they couldn't drop the thing.
"Reload." came the call from Tipden.
A hail of .45 Colt auto covering fire was Eddi's response. It was her present for being upped to the element's point in Soledad's absence. The most ferocious handgun in existence. One of 'em. Didn't hardly feel enough in Eddi's hand. And to think her max dream had been to thread every freak she crossed with her pop's knife.
That she'd managed sharp-force trauma on any freak ever… Luck? A miracle? Stupidity.
Glass melting.
Metal renting.
Tires popping.
She wasn't going bitch, but Eddi couldn't put enough cover between herself and this freak.
"His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed," the freak yelled, "I cannot."
"Reload," Eddi yelled.
Tipden and Allen picked up their rate of fire. Eddi crouched, popped the Colt's clip. Fed it another. She missed hefting an HK.
She sure as shit missed Soledad's O'Dwyer,
And she was up. She was firing. Three guns against a tire-eyes. Odds weren't hardly good. Three against one,
and the MTacs were getting pushed back.
"He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants!"
That was… Even as she jerked her the Colt's trigger, signaled Tipden and Alien to drop back, Eddi was working to remember. Sundays. Church with her mother, her father. "Winds his messengers." "Flames of fire his servants." Psalms.
And if Eddi could dial her rage, up it went. She wasn't the most Christian person. Not even close. Never much cared for church on Sundays. But her parents, her father, tried to put. some God in her. Freak's acting like God had taken her
dad.
And now this one was spouting the Word? Unacceptable.
Bur. just about unstoppable. Eddi could feel the heat of the thing pressing closer.
Cutting closer. "Reload!" she yelled.
The freak just kept spouting pseudo-Bible, No reloading for him. No ammo out. No stovepiping, stoppages, jamming.
Just heat billowing. Steel bending. An Escalade sagged, bowed down before it.
The freak: "After me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry."
Bad call. Eddi was starting to think she'd planned wrong.
"He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit…»
Planning wrong was gonna get her killed. Not so bad. She could take it. What made her feel like shit: Tipden and Allen were gonna get dead too.
She saw the concrete of a vertical support char. She saw Allen make a move as hot light punched its way through the side of a German car.
How, Eddi wondered, would Soledad have played it?
"And he will baptize you with fire! Revelation is coming! The truth will-"
The standing theory with freaks, the one few normals were ever hoping was proved otherwise, was that the vast majority of muties only owned one significant fetish. They had one superpower. And it would be a very bad day for the normal human race when freaks started developing a second ability.
For a split second the fire-eyes looked like it had suddenly acquired the ability to rent open its chest and spit its innards outward. Would've been a useless superpower had it been a superpower. In fact it was a one-ounce slug fired from Alcala's Benelli punching its way through the freak's front carrying a good-sized mass of the freak's back and spine and lungs and whatever else it could grab up before heading out its chest.
And then it was like the freak was rushing to scoop up what it'd ejected from itself. Making a quick move to avoid a spill like some guy who'd accidentally dumped his martini at a cocktail party. Really, he was just falling over. Crashing into the garage floor. Splashing into a puddle of his own insides.
The fire in his eyes was out.
The freak was dead.
And then there was this moment, this blessed moment that occurs only rarely and only when a call goes good.
When the freak gets dropped, there isn't an operator down and what's left of the element's screaming into a radio
for a bus. After the guns quit talking in their particular vernacular there is just quiet. Calm, halcyon quiet that is a harsh counterpoint to the raging hell that existed in the same space an instant earlier.
It made Eddi think or realize that it was just that much or just that little between chaos and calm. An instant.
And then the quiet was gone.
Tipden was calling in an all-clear to Command.
Alcala, easing for the freak-the Benelli giving the body a stare-down-called for Eddi: "Dropped it."
"… Yeah… " Eddi's racing heart and spinning mind were a couple of gears that wouldn't sync.
"Dropped it, Eddi." Breathing hard. Words pitched between excitement and fear. Alcala sounded like a bull rider who'd just made his seven seconds. "Didn't even see me coming."
"Took your damn time."
"Only had one shot, wanted to make it count."
"Good call," Alien to Eddi. "Letting Alcala circle around like that."
Eddi to herself: It wasn't a good call. It was a gamble that turned out good. Most points would never hold a gun back against a freak. But she figured if three could keep it distracted, one could get the drop.
"Hell of a good one," Alien said, "for first time on point."
Alcala added: "Bullet wouldn't've called it any better."
She could see it. Beyond the dry prose of the perfunctory reporting in the Daily News, in the theater of her mind Soledad could see Eddi leading Pacific MTac-the element Eddi'd been elevated to point of upon Soledad's leg getting jacked-against a freak that could generate and discharge heat from its eyes. And they had taken it out sans casualty to the operators on the element, according to the Daily News. Usually, the News, the Times, local TV, didn't much bother reporting the details of warrants served on freaks, since warrants being served on freaks, no matter some flew and others spat fire, had grown over the years to be reasonably commonplace. Like gang shootings. Like politicians and their whores. Like Hollywood leading men getting outed. In this day and age what else was new?
What was new: a twenty-two-year-old cop, female on top of that, taking out a freak that could shoot heat beams with not much more than a knife.