Maybe my white blood cells were attacking the bacteria and getting their asses kicked. Maybe the bacteria was replicating itself. That might explain the heat. Either way, it didn't really matter. Whatever was going on inside me, it was going to be over soon, and then there would be nothing left.
Someone might try to corpse clone me, but I doubted the bacteria was going to leave much of my mind left. If I was cloned, I'd probably end up a vegetable. I'd prefer to be dead.
I could still hear the voices of the Snakes all around me. They were very loud now. They all seemed to be shouting. Maybe that was just my augmented hearing, maybe they really were.
There was a loud whirring sound at the edge of my consciousness that came and went several times. Then, the voices faded and the blackness finally took me.
Chapter 28
I was lying in a bed in a well-lit room. My father was telling me that the doctors would be in soon and that everything was going to be okay.
I looked down at my hands, they were very small. Not at all the hands I remembered having. Should they be this small? Hadn't they grown?
I turned my head to look at my father. He looked so young, not a hint of gray in his short black hair. His face was much less lined than what I remembered.
How had he gotten here and what was here exactly?
The door to the room opened and two doctors stepped through. A man and a woman. They exchanged nods with my father.
"We've got some more paperwork for you to fill out, Mr. Ecks. If you wouldn't mind," the male doctor said and motioned for the door.
My father nodded and turned to me, "Everything will be okay. Just answer any questions they have and be strong."
I tried to smile and wave, but I suddenly felt too sick to move. I groaned as waves of nausea rolled over me.
My father's expression started to turn grim, but he covered it with an easy smile as he stepped out of the room and shut the door behind him.
"I can't believe we're making him pay." said the female doctor. She had on white scrubs with a name sewn onto the right breast but I couldn't read it.
"Nothing wrong with making a little money on the side, Acadia," the male doctor said, and leaned over me with a penlight in his hand. He flashed it in my eyes and I tried to blink and turn my head away from the light. but I was still feeling too sick to move. It felt as though a lead blanket had been laid across my entire body.
As he pulled away, I managed to read the name stitched into his scrubs. Dr. Bic.
"It's not right," Acadia said, "he's just a child."
"He's a commodity. None of the others have lasted this long without treatment. He's shown true resilience. If he responds well to the treatment, he may very well validate the entire project. Is this really the best time to be discussing this?" Bic said and cast a meaningful glance in my direction.
"We both know he's not going to remember any of this. He'll be lucky if he even survives."
"Still," Bic said.
"Still nothing," Acadia said angrily, "I believe in the project and I understand and agree that it's necessary. That doesn't mean we should be taking these people’s money! The corporation gave us medicine. They gave us this facility. They told us to contact everyone on that list and get them in treatment."
"They also gave us the opportunity to make a good deal of money behind their backs. You don't think you're going to be able to afford a clone for your husband and child with your making here, do you? Cancer runs in your husband’s family, doesn't it?"
"That's a low blow, Doctor, and you know it."
"It's the reason I approached you in the first place. You need the money and so do I. So let's stop arguing about it. Every day it's the same thing. Next time you go on a guilt cruise, leave my ticket at home."
Acadia sighed.
"Now, " said Bic, "we need to get these tests out of the way before his father comes back and starts asking questions. We're only supposed to be administering a shot, remember?"
"I'll get the blood sample," Acadia said, sounding defeated. She picked up a menacing looking needle and moved toward me.
Fear rolled through me. I'd always hated needles. Just as Acadia was positioning the needle above a vein on my arm, everything started to fade away. First the needle, then the doctors, then the room.
I was left floating in a great expanse of nothingness. Surrounded on all sides by bright white light.
I hung there for a long time, unable to think, unable to move. I just existed and that was fine by me.
*
Consciousness came back to me slowly. I felt as though I was rising out of the depths of a very deep swimming pool, the surface getting closer all the time. I kept my eyes shut so the chlorine in the water wouldn't get in and start stinging.
"He's coming around," a voice said.
"Move, move, lemme see 'em," another voice said. "Aw, Sev. You're pulling through. I knew ya would. I just knew it."
When I felt it was safe, I opened my eyes expecting to see my father hovering over me, my mother not far off. I could almost imagine their faces. The joy at seeing me again.
It wasn't my father's face I saw when I gazed up from where I was lying on the bed, it was Zenigra's.
I tried to open my mouth to speak to ask him where my parents had gone, but Zenigra held up a hand.
"Wait, wait, don't try to talk yet. Here, lemme get ya some water first. You been out almost twenty-four hours, kid. Thought we lost ya there for a while." He put a glass to my lips and I parted them to allow the cool liquid to fill my mouth and run down my throat. I took another gulp, then another. When my thirst was quenched and my throat felt well enough to talk I nodded my head slightly and Zenigra stepped back, putting the glass down on the floor by the bed.
"I thought we'd lost you too, mano," I told him. "Wait, did you clone?"
Zenigra shook his head and his massive frame shook with laughter, "Nah, takes more than that ta kill me. Muscle grafts saved me. I got so much extra in the chest that it protected me well enough."
"There was so much blood though," I said. My head was starting to clear and I was starting to think about sitting up and seeing how that felt.
"Yeah, course. I did get slashed open with a katana. What'd you expect?"
I laughed with him, though mine was dry and lacking in any real humor.
"Lucas?" I asked.
"Well, ya almost killed 'em. Would have if the Snakes hadn't got up to the roof finally and pulled ya off 'em."
"Should have let me finish it," I replied quietly.
"Nah. Then we'd all be in real trouble," Zenigra said.
"The cops would never know," I said quietly.
"It's not the cops we'd have to worry about kid, it's his clone."
"Huh?" I furrowed my brow in confusion.
"Who knows when he last updated. Could have been yesterday, the day before, or last month, but you can bet your ass he'd figure out what happened eventually."
"Oh, yeah. I hadn't thought about that."
"Yeah, death ain't so permanent as it used ta be. Listen, you might have some withdrawals coming your way. You gotta prepare for that."
"Withdrawals?"
"Yeah. From the V-202 ya took? The boys said they found the broken vial on the ground. Knew what it was right away ‘cause they sell the stuff, after all. So they figure you got a hold of it somehow and took it to beat Lucas. Why else would you have been seizing and flipping out on the ground after they pulled you off of 'em, ya know? They tranqed you five or six times before you finally stopped."
"I--" I thought about telling Zenigra the truth, but I didn't feel up to it right now. It was probably better this way anyways. Now I didn't have to explain anything. Yeah, that sounded good. "Yeah. I'll be ready for 'em if they come."
Zenigra nodded.
Then Plex stepped into view and I smiled at him and said, "Glad to see you made it."
"Thanks to you. I'm in your debt. We all would have died in that hallway if you didn't give yourse
lf up."
"You never would have been in that hallway if it hadn't of been for me, so I think we're even."
Plex smiled and nodded.
"How did you get out?" I said to Zenigra.
"Long story short, Malak never really thought the merc had turned Kain on his boss. He dropped an emp grenade on the subway and knocked out the mercs’ comm. Then he made 'em tell the real story."
"The real story?"
"Yeh, see Lucas sent the merc. It was his plan all along to lure as many Snakes as possible away from the base. He thought they would protect you, not want to bring you along to any meeting. He thought the Snakes would just show up and start shooting. So he sent the merc in with a story. That got all the Snakes out and left him free to come here and raid the place. It would have worked if Malak hadn't seen it coming."
"Good thing he did," I replied.
"Yeh. For both of us. Malak got my location out of the merc before he killed 'em and came and got me. Then we got back here as quick as we could. We found the place crawling with mercs. The Snakes started fighting 'em and I came to find you."
"Thanks, Zenigra. I'm so sorry for leaving you to get captured."
"If you'd come back and gotten captured after I'd stopped so you could get away, then you'd need to be apologizing."
I heard the sound of a door opening and then another face came into view. It was Malak. He stood next to Zenigra and more than ever I could tell they were brothers. They didn't look all that much alike, not with all the grafts Zenigra had gotten, but the resemblance was there.
"You're a lot of trouble, kid," Malak said.
"Yeh," Zenigra agreed.
"Still, you were willing to sacrifice yourself to save Plex and the others, that means something in my book. You're welcome here," Malak said.
Zenigra beamed down at me.
"Welcome?" I replied, confused.
"Yeah, kid, you're welcome to join the Snakes. You've already proven you can fight and die for your brothers and sisters. Damn, everyone's talking about it. Noble sacrifice and all that. I'd have a mutiny on my hands if I turned ya out now."
I laughed. I'd wanted to come here with Zenigra to help work off his debt. I didn't think they would actually make me a member of the gang though. It was perfect. The Snakes were off the grid. If someone did manage it, I would have an entire gang to get my back.
"Will I be able to make money?" I asked. Thoughts of collecting enough money to somehow find out had ordered my parents deaths filled my head.
"You're a good fighter, couple that with the smarts Zenigra here says you've got, and I think you'll be able to pull in some serious cash, kid. If you want to join up that is. Zenigra says you're going to help him work off the money he owes me for your clone. That's fine by me. He says you want to earn as well, so here's what I propose."
And he laid it out for me. He told me how normally the gang takes 40% of all the money a member makes, doing whatever the member does. Cutting drugs, selling drugs, organizing or participating in fights, selling guns, whatever. He said he'd knock it down to thirty percent since I was a hero. Then, there was the matter of the money Zenigra and I owed him personally. So he said he'd take twenty percent of what was left after we'd paid our tribute to the gang. That money would go to paying off our debt to him. The remaining fifty percent I could do with what I wanted. Spend it, or send it home.
I talked him down to a twenty-five percent tribute to the gang. Plex laughed the entire time.
Chapter 29
I slept off and on for the rest of the day. Plex came in with food and water a few times and Zenigra sat with me for a while. We talked about a lot of different things. His past, mine, our plans for making money now that we were both official members of the Snakes.
I never mentioned the dream I'd had after the Snakes had tranqed me. I never mentioned my abilities or the bacteria.
Zenigra told me that the room I was in was part of a two bedroom apartment that I would be sharing with him. He told me if I needed anything, he was right next door and I could just yell. The room wasn't big, but it was mine.
I was already planning on how to set it up. I'd need a TV for starters. There was already a stand for it sitting next to the door. The carpet was stained with dirt, but that was easily fixed. The walls were painted green and were in pretty good shape, which suited me just fine. The bed was just a mattress on the floor, but I'd slept on worse. There was also a small closet opposite the bed for clothes.
When I woke up early the next morning, I found a pile of clothing next to my bed. I hopped out of bed, feeling much better than I had the day before. My body was still aching, but my mind was clear and I felt like I was on the road to recovery. Zenigra told me that the Snakes treated my wounds and bandaged the worst of them.
I reached up to touch the side of my head where I'd hit it when I'd fallen. There was a huge bruise that was painful to touch but would be gone soon enough.
I reached down to look through the clothes. My amazement grew as I lifted each article of clothing and tossed it on the bed. It was the entire Du-Wear outfit that Zenigra had bought me back at the train station shop.
I pulled it on, careful not to disrupt the bandages on my legs, arms, and ribs. Apparently, Malak wasn't kidding when he said I'd made a big impression on the Snakes.
I left the room and went to see Zenigra. When I opened the door to my room, I found myself in the living room. There was a closed door opposite mine which I took to be Zenigra's room and a door to the left of that which was open. Inside I could see a toilet and the shower.
Sitting on the only piece of furniture in the room, a long couch, were Zenigra and Malak, and sitting in front of the couch was Plex. They all nodded to me as I walked out of my bedroom.
I walked up to the couch and sat down on the floor next to Plex. Big as it was, it was barely containing Zenigra and Malak. To the right of where I was sitting were the same floor to ceiling windows I had seen in Plex's apartment. The view wasn't of the city though, it was of the ocean.
"Morning, Sev," Zenigra said. "Want a beer?"
I laughed and shook my head, "What time is it?"
"About nine," Zenigra replied.
"What are we doing today? I'm ready to start making some money."
"Not yet. We've still got some things to work out," Malak said.
"Okay, what's up?" I asked.
"Lucas," Plex said, "We need to figure out what we're going to do with him."
"We can't kill him. We can't keep him here and we can't let him go," Malak said.
"Lucas has a lot of enemies," Zenigra said, "I've buried some of them. We can turn him over to them."
"That would work, but we don't know who his enemies are or how to contact them," Plex replied.
"There's also another problem," I said.
"Why am I not surprised?" said Plex.
I looked at Zenigra and said, "The bounty hunter. He's still after me."
"Bounty hunter?" asked Malak, "What bounty hunter?"
Zenigra let out a long breath and turned to face his brother, "Vic Lansing."
Malak stiffened and if I hadn't known better I would have sworn a look of terror flicked across his face. Plex was the first to speak.
"You're a Snake now. We protect our own. If he comes knocking, we'll deal him with him."
Malak looked as though that was the last thing he thought was going to happen if Vic Lansing showed up, but he didn't say anything. Malak talked about family and protection a little too much to try and cut me loose now, no matter how much he might have liked to.
We all lapsed into silence. I spent the next five minutes watching Zenigra and Malak sip their beers. It was obvious that everyone was lost in thought, looking hard for solutions to the problems we were now locked into facing together.
I ran through everything I knew about Lucas, everything he had ever said, looking for something that would help. Finally, I found what I was looking for.
"Here's what we do..."
<
br /> *
Three days later, I was sitting in the Command Center with Mez. The boy had been pretty shaken up by his time hiding in the vent, away from his computers and things he could control. That much was obvious from the quaver in his voice each time he spoke, but he was holding it together.
The screens in front of him were scrolling through different camera feeds from around the building. I itched at a spot on my arm. Then I itched at my neck, where my comm implant had been installed the day before by the gangers’ cyber doc.
It was still taking some getting used to, the comm implant. It was like having a chat room in your mind. The Snakes were always talking. Giving status updates on the public channel, bragging about large drug sales they just made, or gossiping.
It had been disconcerting at first, not being alone in my own head. But the feeling of being part of something larger was growing on me. Plus, it was dead useful. I could send private messages to anyone on the network, get to know Snakes I hadn't met already on the public channel, and get a list of whoever was awake. The chip shut down when you were sleeping.
There had been an uproar on the public channel when word got out that I'd gotten my implant. Everyone was congratulating me, offering advice, welcoming me. It would have all felt really good if I hadn't been so stressed out about what had to happen next.
"We've got an Aerodyne inbound from the city," Mez's quaky voice said.
"How long?" I asked.
"Less than a minute."
"I'll let Zenigra know."
I reached out with my mind, found Zenigra's alias on the network and sent him a message.
Mez says he'll be here in less than a minute. I'm ready when you are.
The response came almost immediately.
I'll be on the roof.
A few moments later, I caught Zenigra walking out onto the roof on one of the camera feeds. He was bare-chested and unarmed. I'd seen Zenigra without a shirt on many times during our training sessions back on the plantation but his muscle grafts never stopped amazing me. I'd have to get me some of those.
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