Subject 12

by S. W. Douglas

  "Alright." She sighed. "We needed to know how good you were. We also needed to find out who the hell Alpha Zulu is."

  I had started to slouch, but at the mention of Alpha Zulu I stiffened. "What did Magda tell you?"

  "Damn. I was hoping it was a mistake."

  "What?"

  Someone knocked on the door, quietly, probably so as to not disturb me, and Venom put her index finger to her lips in the universal "hush" sign.

  I nodded and even went so far as to lay down. Frustration at her not continuing what she was saying was tempered by curiosity as to what was going to happen next. That all of this might be a further attempt to manipulate rather than what it seemed on the surface wasn't lost on me. I had underestimated them once. I wasn't going to do it again.

  The door opened on a tall, male but otherwise unfamiliar and unidentifiable, silhouette. Venom stepped outside at his insistence and the door closed, but the moment I saw her in the light streaming from the hallway something clicked in my head. I was left alone in the room and in looking around occurred to me that all I had to do was push the screen out of the window and I could fly away.

  So why wasn't I going?

  Curiosity, I told myself. That and I wasn't looking forward to having The Justice Fiend on my ass for the next year before I gave in and one of us killed the other. Maybe I didn't want to disappoint Venom; even as pissed as I still was at her, there was something about her I found interesting. Pretty Poison indeed.

  She'd seemed willing to share more, but the knock on the door had stopped her. That was too much of a coincidence for my tastes. The room had to be bugged and someone had to have been listening. When I gave a response they wanted, they decided to swap up. Probably good cop/bad cop again, and the good cop just left.

  Shit.

  The door opened but Venom was nowhere to be seen. Instead, I was treated to the slowly stiffening walk of Jackhammer. He wasn't wearing his costume, so I got a good look at his face. His nose had been broken and reset badly many years ago. His brown eyes were still bright, if a little yellowed at his age, and his beard had been trimmed recently. His skin was the color of well-tanned buffalo hide, and when he smiled it must have showed more wrinkles than a shirt wadded into the bottom of the dresser.

  He wasn't smiling.

  "Alright, boy, I know you're up." He grabbed a wooden chair and dragged it the length of the floor to the bed I was laying on. "You might as well quit foolin'."

  I sat up and focused just enough to let a hint of ozone float across the room. I didn't know if he was aware of what that meant.

  "And if you try anything I'll break your spine. I'm too old to monkey around."

  I relaxed and let the ozone fade. So he did know. Damn. "You can try. What do you want?"

  "We're gonna talk for a while, just like Vivian tried, 'cept I won't be givin' you no sissy hugs."

  Yup, Bad Cop himself.

  "What do you want to talk about, then?" I met his stare and pushed with every bit of willpower I had. He just smiled.

  "For starters we're gonna talk about them boys you killed. I---"

  "That's fine," I interrupted, just to throw him off his stride before he built up too much momentum "But I have to ask if the accent is for my benefit or not."

  "I talk like this an' if you don't like it you can stuff it up your ass with a handful of salt." He spun the chair around so the back was facing me and sat down. "I ain't ashamed of my roots.

  "Now, tell me, why on earth would you kill them boys? Clarence did worse to you and you didn't even say boo. Was it 'cause you knew you could kill 'em?"

  I shook my head. "Not in the slightest. I just didn't like Grid Iron. I didn't like what he did, how he acted, or the fact that you bastards had let him get away with it for as long as you had. When he provoked me that was it. As far as I'm concerned he had it coming and it was long overdue." I scratched at my arm where, if memory served, Venom had grabbed me in Rio. It had started to itch. "No, as to his friends, well, I didn't want them coming after me later."

  "But, son, you pulled his damn heart out of his chest and showed it to him. That ain't right. That ain't right no way, no how. Why'd you do that?"

  I shrugged. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

  His eyebrows shot up. "A good idea? Boy, you are one sick puppy."

  I put my hands up and halfway shrugged again. "I wasn't in a good place at the time, I'll admit it, but that doesn't matter. That whole Guildhall is one giant clusterfuck." The itch was getting worse but it felt more like a healing itch than anything more sinister. "Do you have any idea what Grid Iron had been getting away with and for how frigging long?"

  "I have an idea, yeah."

  "And you did nothing?" My tone was accusatory. His was deadpan.

  "Son, it wasn't my place."

  "Bullshit!" Anger had flooded me and it took an act of will not to stand up and yank him out of the chair. "You and yours are in charge of those assholes, yet you stand back and let them commit whatever crimes they see fit as long as they prey on people who may or may not have broken the goddamn law. Grid Iron was a sadistic murderer who took delight in torturing his victims."

  "Unlike you?" His tone was cold enough it froze me in place and brought me back to myself.

  "I don't find pleasure in another person's pain. He did. He got off on the pain he was causing, and if he'd continued for much longer it would have become sexual if it wasn't already. He'd been accused of rape at least half a dozen times and every single time one of your goddamn lawyers got him off. By his own set of rules, let alone yours, what I did to him was justified." I leaned forward and spoke in a hard, quiet voice. "I only did what you should have done years ago."

  He nodded. "You're probably right, son, but I'm not the one with his blood on my hands. Last I checked, you were."

  I glanced down and saw, indeed, that my hands looked black in the dim light. The illusion faded even as the itch in my arm disappeared.

  I looked up quickly. "You son of a bitch."

  He smiled a patronizing smile and put his chin on his hands, folded on the back of the chair. "What about them other boys?"

  Venom had given me a full antidote to whatever she'd given me back in Rio. Jackhammer didn't know. In fact, he was acting like he was counting on me to be falling back into a compliant stupor.

  I guess he was about to be disappointed.

  "What about them? The warlock was dangerous, so I thought it was best to put him down before he could become a threat to me. Speedfreak was a coward. All I did was trip him. He did the rest. And what the hell does it matter? They're dead."

  "Son, it's not nice to be talkin' about the dead like that."

  "I'm not your son, Jackhammer. You don't even know my name."

  He changed gears quickly. "Dammit, Vivian."

  "No, it's not Vivian, but thanks for playing." I stood and walked to the window to get more fresh air in my face. "Tactically speaking it was my best move. You should know that. Of all the people in that room, his friends would be the most likely to hold a blood grudge, so if I took them out before they could come after me I was safest. I'm sure they'd committed their own crimes, but I don't care what." I took a deep breath and let that sink in for four seconds, which seemed like a good dramatic pause. "Does Venom have a daughter?"

  "Say what?"

  "Venom. Does she have a daughter, by any chance?"

  "You'd have to talk to her 'bout that. I really don't know. When we retired I stopped pryin' into her private life." He looked uncomfortable and I had the feeling he was lying.

  "I'll be sure to ask her, then. And that's all I'm going to say to you until we reach an agreement. You don't try to drug me anymore and I promise I won't try to escape until either you're satisfied or we reach an impasse."

  "I could make you stay."

  I laughed. "The Justice Fiend couldn't make me stay and he could turn you inside out if he didn't respect you so much. I stayed because it suited me to say. Right now it sui
ts me to stay here, too, but it's not going to suit me forever."

  "That a threat, boy?" His voice lost some of the folksy twang he'd been using.

  "No, it's a statement of fact. As soon as it doesn't suit me to stick around I'm leaving." I turned around to face him. He'd risen from the chair and taken a silent step backwards to open up the distance between us. "But you can get me to stick around longer if you're willing to give while you take."

  "What do you mean?" He looked thoughtful, confused, or constipated. I wasn't sure which.

  "You talk to me, I talk to you. Simple tit-for-tat arrangement. I tell a story, you tell a story. Right now I'm one up on you."

  "That's it?" He sounded doubtful.

  "That's it. Well, that and let me see my food being made. And for the love of all that's holy, keep Venom out of the kitchen. I don't want to butter my toast and have it blow up in my face."

  He laughed, like I'd intended.

  "I'll talk to the others, but for me, you have a deal."

  I could only imagine the heated debate that must have taken place. Venom was probably going to be chastised rather harshly, but I had the feeling she had her own agenda. I could see why she'd changed her name. Pretty Poison didn't pack anywhere near as much of a punch as Venom, and she wasn't anyone's puppet.

  She hadn't wanted to drug me back in Rio, that much was obvious. That she'd taken as long as she had after touching me to go along with what apparently had been the plan must have thrown them for a loop. Then again, the speed my body had burned through the chemicals had surprised even her.

  So I'd been altered in more than one way by the crap I'd agree to have done to me. I'd probably have found out sooner if I'd been able to lay my hands on anything stronger than a beer the entire time I'd been hiding. Good to know, but damn it.

  A small amount of trust had formed, at least on my end, with her. She could have killed me a dozen times over, yet she'd felt so bad about doping me to get answers that she'd given me an antidote for it against the wishes of the others. Maybe it was a ploy, but something told me she'd changed since the last time they'd worked together. It was possible she didn't fully trust them after seeing what had become of their beloved Guild, but I didn't think that was it. As above, so below, as they say, and the below had become pretty corrupt.

  Like any police force left unpoliced, the Guild had corrupted itself. There were good members, just doing their jobs and keeping their heads down, but so many had become tainted it was hard to tell them apart.

  It made me wonder if The Justice Fiend had retired to his compound willingly or if he'd been banished there to keep him from doing a blood purge the likes of which even the Vikings would have paled at.

  No matter what, though, I was damned if I was going to call her Vivian. At least not yet.

  I didn't sleep the rest of the night. I didn't feel tired. Probably an aftereffect of the latest doping I'd received, not that I was complaining. As long as I didn't start dragging ass before the sun went down I wouldn't mind in the slightest. I'd lost enough time in the past month.

  Come to think of it, if this was Canada in late summer the days should be fairly long and the nights comparably short. That might not be a bad thing.

  I tested the door and found it unlocked, though Wildcard was sitting outside watching me when I poked my head out into the hall. I inclined my head in his direction by way of greeting and he nodded back before indicating with a wave of his hand that I should get back in the room. I nodded in acceptance and pulled the door shut behind me. Well, that was interesting.

  I hit the light switch and took better stock of my surroundings. One wall had a bookcase that was filled with books ranging the gamut from Dickens in sumptuous red leather to a cheap paperback about a supernatural assassin working for the devil in a futuristic setting. My curiosity aroused, I picked it up and thumbed through the first chapter, all four pages of it, and nearly gagged at the bad writing and total lack of understanding of anything. The thing that stuck the most in my craw was the second and a half it took the main character to draw an uchigatana/katana. Let's face it; a second and a half was dead slow --- and when I say dead I mean the character would have been laid out on a slab in about half that. How anyone in the modern age could have missed seeing a movie, live-practice demonstration, or handling one themselves was beyond me. There's no excuse for that kind of authorial sloppiness.

  The book was replaced, carefully, before I turned it into confetti.

  The opposite wall had a dresser, thankfully empty of any clothing, a mounted mirror with a small stand next to it holding a few combs and brushes, and the aforementioned window. The woodwork was beautiful; much of it was sealed, lacquered, and buffed to a high gloss. What was left unsealed perfumed the air. The floor was random-width hardwood with plenty of character, the ceiling high-beamed with pendant lights, each one filled with those twisted fluorescent bulbs. These seemed to be daylight spectrum, judging by how stark white the light was, which I actually appreciated. I always found the incandescent bulbs to have an unpleasant yellow tinge to them.

  The original lighting I'd been seeing the room by was from LED strips lining the walls. I couldn't find the toggle for them, so either they were always on or they were switched elsewhere.

  I returned the chair to where it came from and sat back down on the bed. It was comfortable, so why not? After a couple minutes I laid back and let my thoughts run wild.

  I replayed my interaction with Jessie to see if I'd made a faux pas, other than the three killings, in front of her. Near as I could tell I hadn't. Not that she was likely to give me a good character reference, but if it came up... No, I'd been good there. My memory of her face was fairly clear, so there was no mistaking it. Jessie and Venom were related, and I was willing to stand by my decision they were mother and daughter. They just looked too much alike.

  Then there was Magda. I rubbed the scar on my hand as her face flashed before my eyes. She'd made her feelings clear. Not that I'd been trying to rekindle our old flame, but it still stung that she had such harsh feelings towards me. The level of resentment she must have harbored towards me at the end of our relationship shocked me. It made it worse that I'd never suspected it.

  So much for asking her if she'd had any contact with Kinsey recently.

  On that note, how the hell did the Guild know about Alpha Zulu? I hadn't mentioned them at all before I'd been asked, unless I'd blabbed while drugged and I didn't think that was too likely since they seemed to be mostly interested in my powers, and if Venom was to be believed Magda hadn't said word one.

  It was possible they'd known about Alpha Zulu for years. I didn't find that too likely, though. Alpha Zulu was too secretive for that. Kinsey might be a megalomaniacal sexual sadist, but he was too careful to let shit slip. A traitor was possible, but if it'd happened it would have surprised me if I hadn't been sent after him or her.

  Even before I'd agreed to testing I'd been one of the top operatives. They'd been very reluctant to let me start the tests for that reason.

  If it had happened after I'd left I wouldn't have heard about it, but even if it had happened while I was being altered I would have learned about it either through the grapevine or from Kinsey himself when I joined the inner circle.

  That's when another possibility sprang to mind. One that set my teeth on edge because it felt right.

  Either they'd tracked me to Reno or Kinsey had known I'd go straight to Magda if he name-dropped and I got loose. He knew I'd either get caught or blend in, and either way he'd be dealing with the Guild. So he introduced himself and demanded they turn me over, probably showing off a little at the same time. Power perceived is power achieved was a maxim he loved to quote.

  And maybe, just maybe, he'd demonstrated by taking out a small Guildhall --- or was planning it soon. If anyone could, Alpha Zulu was capable. If Kinsey hadn't made the order yet he would soon. Three weeks was more than enough time to plan and execute such a bold move.

  The though
t of Kinsey getting even more powerful as a result of my escape haunted me the rest of the night.

  The sun had been up for roughly twenty minutes when someone started pounding on the door. I considered getting up and letting them in when the door swung open anyway and Jackhammer sauntered in. He eyed the bookcase, noticed the out-of-place book. but said nothing for the moment. I looked innocent.

  "Good mornin', Sunshine. The others would like to speak to you over breakfast, so if you'd be so kind as to get your chunk out the door and in a chair, the meal will begin." His voice was entirely too chipper for so early in the morning, even if I hadn't slept. The southern accent was still there, but not as pronounced or "folksy" at least. "I'm afraid you won't be makin' your own, but we'll be eatin' out o' the same dishes. I hope that'll be enough."

  "That'll be fine. Mind if I use the bathroom first?"

  "Yes, as a matter of fact I do. The dining room is down the hall to the left." He stepped aside and gestured for me to precede him.

  "Of course."

  The walk was short, and my bladder really wasn't that full, but it was the principle of the thing.

  I hesitated to sit in the chair proffered me, but a firm hand on each shoulder from both of the gentlemen I would be sharing this meal with encouraged me. I didn't really feel like fighting so I just sat. It was comfortable, though I would have preferred a little more lower back support than the straight-back design gave. Then again I'd bitch if someone tried to hang me with a new rope. I was funny like that.

  "Wildcard will not be joining us," Steamroller said from her chair as she layered some sliced apple on her oatmeal. "He refuses to eat in front of anyone."

  I nodded to show I'd heard her. "I'm sure his absence will be intensely felt. Is that quiche?"

  I deflected every question they asked me till I was done devouring the entirety of a nicely-prepared quiche Lorraine, three late-storage apples, a small cup of oatmeal mixed with maple syrup, two slices of French toast with butter and more of the syrup, four glasses of cider so fresh the press was still wet, and a small sausage link that looked lonely on the serving platter. I had just finished eating the sausage, and was daubing my lips with the napkin they'd thoughtfully provided, when I belched. I immediately excused myself but Venom laughed.