by Kate Danley
She waited as a mangy dog walked across the deserted street and trotted down an alley. Then she walked to the fence and examined the gate. The chain that locked it had been sawed clean through and hung from the links like a forgotten party streamer.
Tanis reached to the belt loop on the waist of her jeans for reassurance. The hammer was still hanging there. She had kept it with her, the only weapon she could think of that wouldn’t raise much suspicion during her travels. “I’m a carpenter,” she had said when people asked her.
Lifting the latch on the gate, she walked into the dark expanse of urban wilderness. In the dim light from the streetlamps she could just make out the beds of tomatoes and cabbages, beans and squash, laid out like graves before her. A strange clucking sound came from a meshed wire hut to her right. Chickens in the Bronx? Tanis was amazed that anything could surprise her after the events of the past week, but poultry in the ghetto made her stop and stare.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could make out a figure in a hoodie, crouching down by the chicken hut. Matt had told her to meet him here, and her heart beat faster as she thought of all the questions she had for him. But when the figure stood up she saw that it wasn’t Matt, but rather a child of ten or eleven. She was about to speak to him when a hand gripped her arm and pulled her back off the path into a small stand of apple trees.
Reaching down to her hammer, she pulled it from the loop and swung around at the head of the stranger who had grabbed her arm. The stranger bent sideways to dodge the hammer and grabbed her wrist as it swung past.
“Whoa, Nelly!” the man said with a cackling laugh. “You’re a real firecracker, aren’t you? Matt Cahill sent me.”
She relaxed, but just a bit.
“He told me to meet him here,” she said. “Where is he?”
“He’s around here somewhere,” the man said. “My dog can sense him.”
She looked around but she didn’t see a dog. All she saw was a skinny, grizzled man who could have been anywhere from forty to sixty, with a Mets cap pushed back on his head and at least three layers of clothes hanging off his rangy body, so he looked a little like a scarecrow come to life.
“Where’s your dog?” she whispered.
His narrow face crinkled into a smile. “Hunting. Same as me. Same as Matt.” He looked at her, and his green eyes seemed to reflect the light from the far-off streetlamp so that they glowed like an animal’s. “Same as you,” he said.
She gripped the hammer and thought about striking him and running. But the glow in this old codger’s eyes wasn’t like the glow in her brother’s eyes, and it was gone as he turned away from the lamplight.
“I’m not hunting anything,” she said.
“All righty. Then why don’t you turn around, walk outta here, and never bother Matt again? But if you want to join the freaks, you sit and wait.”
He sat back on his haunches and peered into the darkness at the boy who waited by the chicken coop. She sat down beside him.
“What freaks?” she asked.
“Freaks like me. I’m Wilson. And freaks like you.”
“How am I a freak?”
“You tell me.”
“How are you a freak?”
“Ask my dog. Hush now. If you’re in, you’re in. Be quiet and wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“For the creepers to show up.”
He pulled her down further, and they sat watching the boy for what seemed like an eternity.
The boy sat on a bench by the chicken coop and started to scratch his neck. Really scratch it, like there were bugs crawling all over it. Finally, it seemed to be too much for him. He pulled the hoodie down, and for the first time, Tanis could see his face. He had whitish blond hair and his features were almost delicate, so that he would have been pretty if it weren’t for the red, scaly skin that covered his face.
As he scratched at it, the skin peeled from his cheeks in shreds. Watching, Tanis had to turn away and choke back bile. When she looked again, he was pulling his hoodie off over his head. His whole body was covered in scales, flaking off him like the worst sunburn Tanis could ever imagine. He began to peel the skin from his torso, like a snake shedding its skin, leaving long translucent strips hanging off him.
Tanis put her hand over her mouth and pressed it there to hold back the gasp.
Then a voice spoke up from the darkness. “Hello, Andy.”
Two men dressed in black walked out of the darkness, one of them holding a gun. A tall bald man and a short, stocky one, looking like the Bert and Ernie of hired killers. The boy stopped scratching and stared at them, startled.
“It took us a long while to track you down.”
Andy, if that was the boy’s name, swallowed and asked in a whisper, “Are you from the university?”
“Yes,” the man said. “Dr. Dorcott sends her regards.” The tall man gestured with his semiautomatic pistol. The short man pulled a zip cord from a burlap bag.
Frightened, Tanis turned to Wilson. She was more frightened when she realized that Wilson was nowhere to be seen.
The short man chuckled, pulled a knife from his pocket, and stepped into the light. Now that Tanis could see the short man’s face, she wasn’t surprised to notice the rot infesting his cheek and jaw. “Dr. Dorcott can’t wait to peel off the rest of that skin of yours and see what’s inside.”
They approached Andy from either side. Andy looked from one to the other and whispered, “Why don’t you look for yourselves?”
He reached to his shoulders and peeled off sheets of skin. The men moved in on him, as if to grab him, then stopped stock-still in their tracks as two huge, membranous, bat-like wings slowly unfolded from Andy’s back and raised themselves like twin, moist, dripping flags over his head.
A dog leapt from the darkness and bit the wrist of the man holding the gun. The man ripped his arm away from the dog’s jaws just as Matt Cahill appeared from the shadows, swinging his ax, butt first, at the man’s jaw. The tall man collapsed. The short man took off running. Right towards Tanis.
She didn’t think. She just swung out with her hammer and cracked him right between the eyes as he ran by. He dropped, like a dead tree, to the ground at her feet.
Tanis looked down in the darkness to see if he was still moving, but she couldn’t make him out. Then a young woman walked up to Tanis. Her face was pretty and pale, and her eyes were big and terribly sad.
“Is he dead?” Tanis asked.
“I don’t know. Let’s see.” She shut her eyes and her flesh began to glow like a beacon, with a blinding incandescence. Tanis took this in stride now. After the batboy, a glowing, light-up lady didn’t seem all that strange.
In the gleaming light Tanis could see Matt and Wilson standing and staring at the short man’s body as it lay on the garden path.
“He’s breathing,” Matt said. “Tie him up and put him in the van.” He glanced at Tanis. “You come along.”
“A thank-you would be nice,” Tanis said.
Matt considered. “You do good work with that hammer,” he said. Then he turned and walked away.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Brooklyn
“Where are we?” Tanis asked, looking through the busted window at the Manhattan skyline across the river.
“Brooklyn. Abandoned warehouse. Freaks Incorporated,” said Wilson with a cackle.
Tanis looked around the loft—a large, open, high-ceilinged space with exposed pillars and a few sofas and card tables scattered about to define “rooms.” What light there was came from a few flickering fluorescents and the ever-present glow from the massive city that came through the windows.
There were three people in the loft, other than Tanis and Wilson. A hard-faced man of about thirty sat in a wooden chair and looked out over the city through the window, sipping coffee from a cup he held in gloved hands. Andy, now wrapped in a blanket, rested on a sofa eating soup from a bowl, while the glowing lady, now unlit, stripped the last of the scal
es off his face and applied a wet cloth to the shiny fresh skin underneath. The kid looked surprisingly healthy and a little older now that she could see him in the light. Maybe twelve or thirteen.
“So,” Tanis said to Wilson, “are these all freaks?”
“Every man jack of them. Even that one there.” Wilson pointed to the back wall of the warehouse.
“Where?”
“Hey, Jake!” Wilson yelled. “Show yourself to the lady!”
All at once, she could make out the figure of a naked man against the back wall. One second he wasn’t there and the next he was. And a fine specimen of a man he was, too. In his midtwenties, with a shaved head, very fit, and very…well, very, thought Tanis.
“How does he do that?” Tanis asked. “Is he the invisible man?”
“More like a chameleon. He can change his skin color to match his surroundings. Works best in low light, with a solid background. Plaid makes him crazy, ain’t that right, Jake?”
“Shut up,” Jake said, blending back into the color of the wall. “Matt told me to keep watch, so I’m watching.”
Wilson snickered. “Now she’s watching, too, aren’t you, Tanis?”
Tanis could make him out, now that she knew where to look. Just his vague outline against the wall. But a nice outline it was—that was for sure.
“How ’bout you?” Tanis asked Wilson. “What’s your freakazoid power?”
“Me? I’m just a guy. It’s my dog who’s got the power.”
She looked around. “Where is your dog?”
“You’ll see him. When the time’s right.” Wilson cackled away.
The young woman who was tending to Andy spoke up. “Don’t let Wilson get to you. He’s crazy, but he means well.”
Tanis crossed to her and put out her hand. “I’m Tanis.”
The woman looked at Tanis’ hand for moment, then took it in hers. “I’m Carrie.”
As she took Tanis’ hand in hers, Carrie began to glow like an LCD display on an iPhone. She snatched her hand away.
“Whoa!” said Wilson. “Carrie don’t light up for everybody. You must be special! What do you do anyway?”
Tanis shrugged. “I hit people on the head with a hammer.”
“We all got our oddities! Take Andy, here. He sheds his skin every six months!”
She shook Andy’s hand and said, “Pleased to meet you,” because she couldn’t think what else to say.
“I’m glad it’s over,” Andy said with a tired smile. “How old do I look?”
“Um…about twelve or thirteen, I guess.”
“Huh. I can’t wait till the next change. I’ll be fifteen then. That’s almost grown-up.”
Carrie rubbed his head. “You’ll grow up soon enough, Andy.”
“You see,” explained Wilson, “every time he sheds his skin, it’s like he grows two or three years. Clock-wise, he oughta be just six years old.”
“What about the, uh…” She gestured to her back.
“The wings!” Andy said, excited. “I know, aren’t they cool? They just started showing up two changes ago. I wonder if I’ll be able to fly soon.”
Carrie smiled at him fondly. “We’ll see.”
“What about him?” Tanis asked, gesturing to the man who sat apart, staring at the city skyline, coffee cup steaming in his hands.
“That’s Lowell,” Carrie said. “He doesn’t talk much.”
Lowell grunted and nodded but didn’t look their way.
“What is his—”
“Hey,” Carrie cut Tanis off. “You can’t be expected to know this, so I’ll just say it once and let it lie. We don’t talk to strangers about our abilities.”
Tanis felt slapped down. “Sorry. This is all so new to me.”
“That’s all right,” Carrie said, in tone that told Tanis that it wasn’t all right. “Matt told you to come here?”
Something odd registered in Tanis when she heard that question. What was it? Jealousy? Did this girl really think that Tanis had driven halfway across the country so that she and Matt Cahill could hook up?
“I have to talk to him,” Tanis said. “Just talk,” she added, then felt stupid saying it.
“Wilson!” Matt’s voice spoke up from the other side of the room.
Tanis turned and saw Matt standing by an open door in the back wall. Through the door Tanis could just glimpse men in the back, tied to chairs, their heads hanging down on their chests.
“Yeah, boss?”
“These men need to talk to your dog.”
“All right!” Wilson set off at a trot to join Matt. Together they went into the room and shut the door.
“What’s going on in there?” Tanis asked Carrie.
“What do you think?”
Tanis looked to Andy. “Matt used you as bait? To catch them?”
Andy shrugged. “He could’ve used any of us. I volunteered.”
“Who are they?” Tanis asked, nodding her head towards the closed door.
“If you don’t know”—Lowell spoke up from behind the steaming coffee—“there’s no point in us telling you.”
The door in the back wall opened and Tanis could hear a dog snarling as Matt walked into the loft. He shut the door behind him and crossed to the coffeepot.
“It’s cold,” he said to Lowell.
“Sorry,” Lowell replied and took off his gloves. Lowell grabbed the pot and held it. The coffee started to boil.
“Thanks,” Matt said and poured himself a cup. Then he turned to Tanis and nodded.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Tanis said, automatically, because that was what you said when somebody asked you if you were okay. Then she stopped and shook her head. “No, I’m not okay. What are you doing using a kid like that as bait? And why did you ask me to be there, in the middle of all that?”
“I wanted to see how you’d react.”
“I could have gotten killed.”
“It’s not so easy to kill people like us.”
Tanis considered. “It’s not?”
“Death already spit us out once.”
“And how did I react?”
“Not bad. I was impressed.”
She tried not to feel pleased. “I wasn’t trying to impress you.”
“Better yet. Do you want a cup? Lowell makes some fine coffee.”
She looked at Lowell as he pulled his gloves back on. “I’d rather have something cold.”
“I can’t do that,” Lowell said, looking out at the city. Tanis took it as a joke and laughed. She had to laugh at something in this world. Lowell smiled back at her slyly.
Matt pulled Tanis aside to a semiprivate alcove of sofas and chairs. He sat her down. “Tell me what happened in Dallas.”
Tanis swallowed. She had relived the scene in her mind a thousand times in the past days, but she hadn’t talked about it to anyone, except to tell Matt on the phone that something bad had happened. As she related the story, she felt a weight lift from her spirit, as if she was sharing the awful burden of that day with Matt Cahill. And Matt listened. He didn’t say much, but it was as if he took the story into himself and by taking it in helped her start to heal.
When she was done, he reached out and took her hand for a moment. “At least you didn’t kill your brother. At least you were spared that.”
“Yeah. He’s in a coma. They don’t know if he’ll ever come out of it.” She wished she’d taken the cup of coffee now.
Tanis looked to the closed door. They could hear the sound of Wilson’s dog snarling. “So who are they?” she asked.
“Agents from the university I told you about. We know their main campus is outside Seattle. We’re trying to get some more information out of them.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m sick of just reacting to whatever shit they deal out. I’m tired of playing Mr. Dark’s game. They are hunting for people like us to find out what makes us tick so they can create hugely profitable drugs from what they learn. It’s time to sto
p running and take the fight to them. There aren’t very many of us. We could use whatever help you can give us.”
Tanis considered. Then she stood up and said, “Well, good luck to you, but I don’t give a damn about the university or your fight. What I want is revenge. For whatever drove Brett to kill my mother. I want to make that bastard Dark pay.”
The intensity of her feelings shocked even her. The thought of the way Dark had played her, the thought that he’d been inside her, made her want rip the skin from her body like Andy and emerge fresh and new and ready to kill.
“Look,” Matt said, his eyes locked with hers, “I understand your feelings, but there’s a bigger picture here. There are a lot of people like your brother. It’s been happening all over the world. Ordinary people who killed loved ones in order to ‘save them.’ I think it’s Mr. Dark’s way of trying to distract us, to scatter our resources. The only concrete lead we have is the university. That’s where we have to strike.”
Tanis shook her head. “Mr. Dark, when he touches people they rot. They decay. My brother wasn’t like that. This is something new. You didn’t see his eyes!”
Matt nodded. “I’ve seen that myself. The yellow eyes. I don’t know what it means. But evil is evil. We have to hit it where it lives. The university has been chasing me for years. They’ve kidnapped people like Andy and Wilson and Carrie—”
“Freaks?”
“That’s what they call themselves. They’ve been experimented on. Tortured. Killed. And all this time I’ve just been reacting to what they’ve been throwing at me. Too busy putting out little fires to see the whole picture. No more. The time to be aggressive is now. Time to go take this fight to the university. To free the kidnapped freaks, to get the research for ourselves.”
“And what are you going to do with it? You’re not doctors.”
“There’s a virologist outside of Seattle. He’s offered to help.”
“How can you trust him?”
“I can trust him,” Matt said simply. “We just have to find a way to get into the compound. They change the password on the keypads every three days.”