He put his hand on the knob of the next door down from hers and she said, “Um...sir?”
He stopped and looked almost offended. “The name’s Jason.”
“Oh, okay... Jason. Are we far enough down?”
He took his holophone out of his pocket, and she rolled her eyes. Her phone could be traced, but not his?
He must have seen her reaction, because he said, “My phone’s secure. And it looks like we do get a weak signal, but there are something like ten more levels to this facility. If this Padme chick activates your nanoneurons, we’ll go down until it stops.”
Bryn wasn’t okay with that. “I’d rather just go where the signal can’t get through at all.” She didn’t want to experience one additional second of the fear that Padme could begin dishing out at any moment.
He shrugged. “Fine by me, but I’m staying here. The other levels are unfinished.”
He opened the door and she caught a glimpse of bathroom fixtures. After he’d disappeared, she stood there for a moment, trying to summon the courage to explore the other levels. Ultimately, she decided against it, thinking that maybe the weakened cell tower signal meant Padme’s attack would also be weakened.
She shook off a feeling of premonition and entered her designated bedroom. It was small, about ten-foot square, lit with a plain dome light in the center of the ceiling. There was nothing whatsoever on the white walls aside from a vent that began to blow warm air into the room. The mattress on its steel frame was bare. The only other piece of furniture was a narrow standing cupboard in the corner made of white laminate. She opened it and found sheets, two blankets and a pillow all sealed in plastic.
After she’d made up the bed, she went through the bag from Carla’s house. It was clear from the contents that Carla herself had packed it. Besides the undergarments and clothes Bryn was most likely to need, Carla had made up a smaller bag of Bryn’s favorite cosmetics, the special veterinary shampoo she had to use on her quills, and her toothbrush and toothpaste. Plus, at the bottom of the bag was the stuffed panda Scott had bought her at the zoo the day they’d gone to see the real panda they’d rescued from Dr. Fournier.
Bryn buried her face in its fur, inhaling the faint, familiar odor of cigarette smoke. She’d nagged her godmother to quit smoking and for the most part, it had worked. Carla only smoked now when she was under duress. Like last night. Bryn felt tears sting her eyes.
Her psyche had finally begun to heal from her father’s betrayal and she’d accepted the new direction her life was going. She would never be the innocent girl she’d been before Dr. Fournier got his hands on her, but she’d come to terms with the limitations of her future. She’d gotten to know Carla during the months she’d stayed with her, and through Carla, had gotten a better idea of who her mother had been.
But all of that had been an illusion. She’d never been safe with Carla, not while Padme was out there. The xenofreak girl had already tried to kill Bryn once, and now she had a weapon that Bryn could only run and hide from.
Chapter Five
Scott held the door for Dr. Padilla as she exited Shasta’s office, but when he made a move to leave as well, Shasta said, “Just a moment, Agent Harding.”
He let the door close once more.
Shasta opened the top drawer of her desk and removed what looked to Scott to be an old-fashioned pencil box with a tiny bow on top. She handed it to him.
“Happy Birthday.”
Scott was twenty years old today, but he felt much older, especially after the last week. He used his forefinger claw to open the hinged lid of the box. Inside was a tube with a medical label on it, like he’d seen on prescription pill bottles.
“Um...thanks.”
“It’s an auto-injector. Tranquillizer.” Shasta made a stabbing motion towards her leg. “In the outer thigh, right through your jeans. It’ll take less than a minute to work. You know, in case Padme switches you over to the dark side.”
The dark side. If Padme activated his nanoneurons to produce fear instead of pleasure. “This is my birthday present?”
Shasta’s red-lipsticked mouth curved in a rare smile. “I thought you’d appreciate it more than flowers.”
He chuckled and reached for the door handle. “Well, it’s just lovely. Thanks again.”
“Scott.”
He turned. Shasta’s smile had given way to her usual dead serious expression.
“Under no circumstances,” she said, “are you to die from a heart attack because you didn’t use that tranquillizer on yourself. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He put the box in the pocket of his leather jacket.
“That’ll be all.”
After leaving Shasta’s office, he wove his way through the cubicles to the one he shared with another agent. Technically, that agent was Scott’s partner, but they’d both been assigned solo duties and almost never crossed paths.
Someone had been watering the plant he and his partner had inherited from the previous occupant of the cubicle. It was some sort of hardy ivy with tendrils that clung to the fabric of the cubicle walls. He wondered idly how an aggressive plant like that would do out from under the halogen lights and into the sunlight. Probably take over the world.
He unlocked his desk drawer. As he was reaching for the keys to his assigned vehicle, someone behind him said, “Agent Harding?”
He twisted his torso around. Dr. Padilla was standing there, an uncertain look on her face.
“I thought you left,” he said.
“I’m sure I was supposed to, but I couldn’t fight this feeling that I should accompany you when you go see Mr. Cruise.”
“No offense, Doc, but next time you should fight a little harder. Even if I thought it was safe, I’d rather jump off the Brooklyn Bridge than go against Shasta’s direct order.”
Dr. Padilla offered him a wan smile. “She seems...competent.”
Scott suspected she’d been about to use a different descriptive word but changed her mind out of politeness.
“Right,” he said. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“I guess I’m just trying to understand the big picture here. This supposedly rock-solid intel,” she made quotation marks with her fingers, “that xenos are immune and Fournier is deliberately infecting them - and then sending them out to further infect the public. How is he finding the carriers? The odds are five percent. Out of a hundred people, only five can potentially spread typhoid.”
“Have you ever been to Coney Island? They got more xenos than the sewer has rats.”
“So how does he test them all?”
Scott looked away as something occurred to him. “What kind of tests would he need?”
“A blood or stool culture.”
He sat down in his office chair and activated his holo keyboard. After accessing the Fournier case files, he scrolled down until he located the transcripts of Bryn’s debriefing.
After countless XIA agents had tried and failed, Bryn had single-handedly identified the company Dr. Fournier had been using as a front for his illegal enterprises. Shasta’s boss, Deputy Director Mark Unger, had decided against shutting Best Medical Services, Corp down because Fournier was still out there - unaware that the XIA had a bead on his business dealings. Fournier had used his own secretly-owned company as the supplier for his bioengineering lab, and to launder the money he made providing illegal xenografts.
XIA analysts hadn’t been able to pinpoint any suspicious activity since Fournier’s facility had been destroyed, but they were watching Best Medical closely, hoping it would lead them to him when and if he began providing xenoaugmentation services again.
Scott pulled up all the businesses run by Best Medical. As he expected, most of them sold medical supplies. He knew from the smell of her perfume that Dr. Padilla had moved to look over his shoulder, and he was just about to tell her to back off when her arm shot out and she pointed. “There!”
BMS Blood Donation Center.
&nbs
p; “Yeah, but the FDA prohibits xenos from giving blood,” he said.
“So? Would Fournier let that stop him?”
She had a point. Scott dragged the address for BMS Blood Donation Center to his holophone icon before shutting his computer down and standing.
“I’ll walk you out,” he said.
“That’s it?”
He made a pained face at her. “For you it is. Go do what you do and let me do what I do. Hopefully, we won’t have to meet again. No offense.”
He stuck with her until the parking garage, when she got off the elevator on the visitor’s floor. Something about the way she said, “See you later,” made him nervous. In all likelihood, she simply expected them to meet the next time the super typhoid struck, but she didn’t have to sound so cheerful about it.
He got into his assigned car, a dark sedan identical to all the other XIA cars, and for that matter, identical to the cars supplied to the FBI and who knows how many other government entities. He knew the agency didn’t have the funds to purchase a variety of cars that would better serve an undercover who didn’t want to be outed by the very vehicle he drove. At least the sedans were comfortable, reliable, and fast, although he personally hadn’t had the opportunity to take it over eighty miles-per-hour. As he drove out of the parking garage, he thought about Bryn and wondered if she was right now riding in a car just like this one.
She’d looked so tired after a restless night where she’d startled awake at every little sound. Since she got up, there’d been smudgy blue half-circles under her eyes and a desperate cast to her every glance, as if she was pleading with him to promise it would never happen again.
God, he wished he could.
Instead, he’d stood by helplessly as she left with Alton, whose xeno name was Dragila, after his infamous xenograft, a dragon that he’d supposedly designed himself out of the skin of a Gila monster. Alton had a nasty reputation as an agent who would do anything to close a case. Some would call it dedication; and Scott was no stranger to that mindset. But he’d heard Alton had been given the same immunity with the Mad Eyes that Scott had been given when he’d been under cover with the XBestia. While Scott had done some things that would forever weigh on his conscience, it was rumored Alton had done much worse - and bragged about it.
Scott drove onto the freeway. The suspect lived in the Bronx, in a neighborhood composed of primarily of low-income xenos - but not as low as the average xenofreak.
It was eleven a.m. when he found a parking spot half a block away from Cruise’s apartment building. The people going about their business were xenos of all ethnicities, and most of them openly eyed his sedan. He got out and made sure his claws were easily seen. Leaning against a lamp post nearby was a woman with a frizzy red wig and a short, very tight black dress. She called out to him as he passed, “You wanna date, handsome?”
“Next time,” he replied.
Double-parked in front of Cruise’s building was a white van. Scott thought at first it was a delivery van until he saw the letters OCME emblazoned on the side.
The medical examiner.
With a feeling of trepidation, he took the front steps to the building’s open double doors. The walls of the small foyer were painted various shades of green in layered rectangles that obviously covered graffiti. On the left was a bank of mailboxes. Scott located Cruise’s and started up to the third floor. He only got halfway up the first set of narrow stairs when two medics hauling a stretcher made him go back down again. He backed up against the mailboxes to let them pass. Strapped to the stretcher was a black body bag.
“Hey,” Scott said to the medics. He nodded to the body bag. “That wasn’t apartment 315, was it?”
“318,” one of them replied.
“What’d he die of?”
“Do I look like they pay me to know that?”
“Was he a xeno?”
“What are you, a reporter?”
Scott stepped closer and lifted his shirt to display the badge on his belt. “I’m a cop. Now answer my freakin’ questions.”
If he thought the medic would stop with the sarcasm, he forgot he was in New York City. “They let xenos be cops? What’ll they think of next?”
“You wanna stand here over this dead body and debate the subject or you wanna answer me?”
“Come on, man,” the other medic said. “I’d like to get to lunch on time for once.”
The first medic pushed on the inside of his cheek with his tongue for a second, but he said, “Guy wasn’t a xeno. Lived in the building for thirty years. Not popular from what the manager said, but it looks like he croaked from natural causes.”
“Thanks.” Scott started back up the stairs. On the third floor, he knocked on Robert Cruise’s door. No answer. He kept knocking until the next door down, number 321, was yanked open.
“Take a hint already!” The speaker was an elderly black woman in a thin cotton housecoat. “When they don’t answer, it means they ain’t home!”
Before he could ask if she knew where Cruise was, she slammed her door. Scott sighed and went back downstairs. Outside, the van was gone. He walked to his car and found the frizzy-wigged woman leaning against it.
“Sure you don’t wanna date?” she asked. “You look like you could use a friend.” She lifted her already short skirt up until it was almost indecent. Wrapped around her upper thigh was a snakeskin xenograft in the shape of a snake.
“Nice,” he muttered, getting in the car and waving her off. She huffed away and he pulled into traffic, activating his holophone.
“Shasta Fox,” she said by way of greeting. “Are you driving, Agent Harding?”
“Yes, ma’am. But I promise I won’t look away from the road.”
“Did you pick up Cruise?”
“Wasn’t home. But one of his neighbors, a non-xeno, was just taken away in a black plastic suit.”
“I’ll have Dr. Padilla check into it. Did you find a place of work for Cruise?”
“He’s on disability, so he could be anywhere. I have a lead on something else, though.” Driving through traffic, he told her of his conversation with Dr. Padilla. “I’m headed out to the BMS Blood Donation Center right now.”
“Keep me apprised,” Shasta said, and disconnected.
Scott fed a parking meter two blocks up from BMS and walked. The air was still cold, but the sun came out from behind the drifting clouds briefly and warmed his back. He decided to stop for lunch at the Holo House Cafe, which was across the street from the center, where he could eat and scope the place out at the same time.
There weren’t any empty tables on the terrace, but he spotted a lone woman reading a holo tablet and drinking a cup of coffee. Even before he got close enough to see her face, her pulled-back black hair gave her away.
“Dr. Padilla,” he said.
She looked to the right and to the left before leaning towards him and saying quietly, “It’s Mia. And since you probably don’t want to advertise why you’re here, I should call you something other than Agent Harding, don’t you think?”
She was trying, but he wasn’t charmed. “My name is Scott, and you can’t be here.”
Chapter Six
Bryn opened her eyes. For a disoriented moment, she didn’t recognize her surroundings, but then she remembered laying her head down on the pillow; she must have dozed off. Voices and music came through the wall from the main room.
She sat up, set the panda bear she was clutching aside, and stood, smoothing her hands down her clothes. She was still wearing the jacket she’d arrived in, but even though the room was warmer, she kept it on because the heavy fabric with its high collar protected her neck from her quills. In the living area, she found Jason lounging on the couch. A holovision she hadn’t noticed before was blaring some kind of action movie.
He glanced over at her and turned the volume down. “Have a nice nap?”
She nodded, but the truth was, she rarely napped because she hated the groggy feeling it gave her.
<
br /> “There’s no cable,” he said. “But we got a huge library of movies.”
He’d showered and shaved, and was wearing grey sweat pants, a black t-shirt and white tube socks. Bryn was astonished at the change. Not only did his comment make him seem far more pleasant, but the malodorous man who’d driven her here was gone. She tried not to stare, but the hints she’d gotten from looking at his profile in the truck hadn’t prepared her for the face hidden under the beard and hair and grime. He was strikingly handsome.
He noticed her hesitation and paused the movie. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head and looked at the frozen holo of a scantily-dressed woman holding a shotgun. “I doubt you and I have the same taste in movies, is all.”
“I’m sure we can agree on something. Not much else to do.”
She went to the opposite side of the curved sectional and sat, leaning against one of the oversized throw pillows. “Do you like romantic comedies?”
He snorted. “No. Do you like horror flicks?”
Now it was her turn to snort. “Not so much.”
They whittled down the acceptable categories and settled on their first movie, a thriller.
Before he queued it up, he said, “You know what? We need popcorn.”
He got off the couch, but instead of heading for the little kitchenette, he shoved his feet into a pair of unlaced tennis shoes, opened the door to the stairwell and disappeared. Bryn waited all of two seconds before springing up and following him. She didn’t want to be left alone here; the whole place seemed so strange and unnatural, like a dollhouse or an alien habitat for humans meant to fool them into thinking they were home.
She ran up the stairs after Agent Alton - Jason - and caught up with him halfway down the tunnel to the entrance.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Coming with you. To help carry the boxes.”
He shook his head. “Sorry. Too dangerous.”
She ignored him and kept pace with his long strides. When they reached the exterior door, he said, “I’m serious. You stay here.”
Xenofreak Nation, Book Two: Mad Eye Page 3