by S. A. Beck
Then Otto saw something else—Grunt’s pistol lying at the other end of the aisle, right next to the two fighters and not ten feet away from him.
Otto leapt to his feet, ran to the gun, and scooped it up.
He aimed it at the tangle of fists and limbs at his feet. “Hold it right there!”
Grunt grinned up at him, smiling with a split lip that dripped blood. “Hey, Pyro! Looks like you’re good for something after all.”
Otto gestured at Isadore, trying to keep his hands steady as his entire body trembled. “Get up and move to one side.”
“I’m calling the police!”
That was from the shopkeeper, who had stood up and was holding a phone in his hand.
“Don’t do that!” everyone shouted at once.
The shopkeeper stared at the brutish mercenary, the kid with a gun, the nondescript woman with the crazy martial-arts moves, and the teenage girl who had run up to the weapons display and grabbed a pair of sai, and he let the phone slip out of his hand to clatter on the floor.
Otto turned back to Isadore. “Okay, we’re walking out of here with you in front. If any of General Meade’s goon squad is out there, you’ll be the first to get it.”
Grunt chuckled and walked over to him, taking the gun. “Cut it out, Pyro, you sound like a damn movie. Besides, you couldn’t shoot anyone with that thing.”
“Yeah, I could,” Otto said, feeling defensive.
“No, you couldn’t,” Grunt replied, flicking a switch on the side of the gun. “You left the safety on.”
Otto blushed.
Grunt pointed the gun at Isadore, who glared at them and looked ready to pounce.
“You’re just as good as you always were, baby. I barely had time to draw my weapon before you sent it flying across the room.”
A slow smile spread across Isadore’s lips. “Oh, Bill, you still know how to show a girl a good time. But hitting a lady? Tsk tsk.”
“You’re no lady,” Grunt grumbled.
“You okay, um, Bill?” Otto asked, indicating the soaking-wet bloodstain on his shirt and the blood dripping down his side.
“Just a graze. I’ll be fine. And don’t call me Bill.”
“It isn’t his real name anyway,” Isadore said. “I never knew his real name.”
The distant wail of a police siren made them all freeze. It drew closer.
Otto glared at the shopkeeper, who remained frozen behind the counter.
“It wasn’t me!” the man said, his hands over his head. “Just get out of here!”
Grunt jabbed a finger at the terrified shopkeeper and asked Otto, “Is he always like that?”
Otto nodded. “I think so, yes.”
The siren grew louder.
“Time to go.” Grunt glanced between Otto and Jaxon. “You kids coming?”
Otto looked at his girlfriend. She was staring at the angry, bloodied killer that had been her foster mother.
“Yes,” Jaxon said.
“Move it,” Grunt ordered. Isadore went through the door first, hands above her head. Grunt came right behind her with the gun leveled at her back.
Just as Jaxon was about to step out, she tucked the sai in her belt, grabbed a pair of nunchucks, and turned to the proprietor. “These weapons come out to eighty bucks. Keep the change.” She placed the hundred dollars Stephen and Isadore had given her on the nearest shelf.
Otto took her hand, and they hurried out of the store.
As they emerged, a car screeched to a halt at the end of the abandoned street. Otto leapt with fright, thinking the cops had arrived already, but immediately relaxed as he saw it was a civilian car with Vivian at the wheel.
Otto hustled Jaxon toward the car. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw Grunt get out of reach of Isadore and hide his gun inside his jacket.
“You’re making a mistake not killing me, Bill,” Isadore shouted after him.
“I don’t shoot down people in cold blood.”
Isadore smirked. “Not anymore. Be seeing you!”
The assassin turned and ran the opposite direction as the police siren wailed closer.
Chapter 7
July 12, 2016, SOMEWHERE IN THE ARIZONA DESERT
8:30 PM
* * *
After the fight in the martial-arts shop, the pack of weirdos calling themselves the Atlantis Allegiance drove her through the back roads of Los Angeles in a convoluted pattern to avoid pursuit, changing cars three times. Each time, the car was fetched by the strange woman named Vivian, who managed to look glamorous despite a fresh black eye, a bullet wound through her leg, and another bullet hole through her purse.
“Bit of trouble with the boys, darling. Government agents have no class,” she said.
Each car was a different make and model from the previous one, and Jaxon got the impression they were all stolen, not that she got a good look at the vehicles or anything else since Otto told her to keep her head down and stay out of sight because General Meade’s agents were everywhere.
Also, that gave her a close-up view as she witnessed her boyfriend treating Grunt’s gunshot wound in the blood-soaked backseat.
“No, Pyro, not that way!” said Grunt. “Here, give me the needle. I’ll do my own damn stitches.”
Then came a rendezvous in the desert with some geeky scientist named Yuhle, who asked, “Can’t you guys go anywhere without getting shot at?”, an even geekier guy named Edward, who said, “Sorry about your phone, Jaxon. I short-circuited it remotely so no one can trace the GPS. Can’t be too careful,” and a Japanese-American scientist named Yamazaki who wouldn’t stop staring at her and said, “You have no idea how important you are. May I take a blood sample?”
She had gone from a group home to a foster home to a lunatic asylum.
They were camped out in the middle of nowhere in the Arizona desert while Grunt and Vivian cleaned their weapons and Edward locked himself inside a trailer doing God-knows-what with a satellite uplink.
At least she could be with Otto again. They stayed close all day, hiking in the little valleys between the rough hills that hid their camp, admiring the saguaro cacti that stood as tall as trees and watching the sunset turn the ruddy cliffs from gold to crimson. At night, they looked for meteors in the star-filled sky as the Milky Way traced a faint, glimmering arch high overhead.
Jaxon had spent most of her life in cities and had never gotten to experience such natural beauty. To share it with Otto made it doubly special.
They also shared all that had happened to them in the past few weeks. If not for the fight in Chinatown and their crazy getaway through the streets of Los Angeles, she would have never believed his tale of gun battles, hidden tracking devices, ambushes, and renegade Native Americans.
And she’d thought her life was weird.
Still, Otto trusted his strange friends, and Jaxon got the feeling that she should too. Otto seemed dedicated to the people and was accepted by everyone despite Grunt’s constant teasing. Her boyfriend had that same easy way with them that he had with everybody. That was what had attracted her to him back at the group home. She had always been a bit in awe of people like that, as if they had some magic secret that her awkwardness and shyness kept her from discovering.
After a couple of days of rest, Vivian and Grunt looked much better. Jaxon marveled at how they could shrug off gunshot wounds like paper cuts, but the two mercenaries just said they were “flesh wounds” and “nothing important.”
The two scientists, Yamazaki and Yuhle, poked and prodded her, taking blood and DNA samples, running a bunch of medical tests, and asking her all sorts of questions about her powers. They put her through various physical tests like lifting large stones and running up and down steep hillsides in the hot sun. Even Grunt was impressed by the results.
“Don’t piss off your girlfriend, Pyro. She’ll tear you in half.”
They also tested her ability to grow plants and confirmed what she’d suspected about how her powers worked. By the end of the second day, the
saguaro cacti around their campsite had grown noticeably taller, and she had to constantly chug water to keep from getting dehydrated.
“Careful with that ability,” Dr. Yamazaki warned. “If you learn to do it faster and more powerfully, you might hurt yourself.”
Then came a series of tests to look for other powers. Yuhle showed her a deck of cards with various symbols on them, like a star or three wavy lines, and then hid them from her, looking at them one by one while she tried to read his mind and tell him which card he had drawn. She blew that test, which actually came as a relief. At least she was a little bit like normal people! Other tests to predict the future or find hidden objects or break up clouds in the sky just by looking at them didn’t work either.
“Can people really do this stuff?” Jaxon objected.
“You can make plants grow simply by holding them,” Yuhle said with a shrug, “so I think it’s time to throw skepticism out the window.”
She didn’t have an answer for that. The tests continued, searching for any trace of other paranormal powers. They even took her to an old graveyard at the site of a little ghost town, and she had to try to commune with the dead. Luckily, that didn’t work out.
For some reason, though, she didn’t tell them about being able to move objects without touching them. They tested her for that too, and Jaxon felt immense relief when that power didn’t manifest itself. She hadn’t been practicing much because it freaked her out. Too much strange stuff was going on in her life already.
After dinner on the third night, the Atlantis Allegiance sat down around a fire at the center of their campsite. Even Edward came, which surprised Jaxon. He usually hid in his trailer 24/7. Jaxon sensed something was up.
Grunt spoke first. “We can’t stay here. Meade’s goon squad has proven too damn resourceful. If we’ve learned one thing from those bastards, we’ve learned to keep moving. The question is, where to?” He turned to Dr. Yamazaki.
The scientist looked at Jaxon with a worried expression. “Well, that depends on you, Jaxon. We need to find more people like you, more people of your race.”
“I’m mixed race,” Jaxon said.
Dr. Yamazaki shook her head. “No, you only look mixed race. You’re actually a distinct race that’s a blend of all the other races or perhaps the original race. You’re Atlantean.”
“Huh?”
“As in Atlantis,” Otto said.
“Yeah, I get it,” Jaxon said, “but that makes no sense. Atlantis is a myth.”
“We don’t think so,” Yuhle said, adjusting his glasses. “We’ve been studying people like you for some time now. Many supposedly mixed-race people carry what we call the Atlantis gene. From what we can tell, it goes back thousands of years to a common source. We think that there really was an Atlantis that sank into the Atlantic Ocean several thousand years ago. You and the other Atlanteans are descendants of the survivors of that disaster.”
Jaxon chewed on that for a minute. “So, I’m some sort of alien or something?”
“No, you’re human,” Yamazaki said. “You just have some extra genes, ones that give you powers. I met some of your people not so long ago. General Meade had given me a drug that induced a stroke in my brain. I was lying in the hospital, almost a vegetable.”
The scientist shuddered. Yuhle put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She took a minute before going on.
“I could barely move. My thoughts were all scrambled. I couldn’t even feed myself. Then a group of people who looked just like you snuck into my room. One woman touched my head, and within minutes, all the effects of my stroke had vanished. Most people take years to make even a partial recovery from a serious stroke, and here I am, perfectly fine.”
“Where are those people? Can I meet them?” Jaxon asked, leaning forward.
Dr. Yamazaki shook her head sadly. “They were all killed during the escape. And I don’t have any contact information for any of the other subjects I studied over the years. General Meade stole all those files.”
Jaxon slumped. For a moment, she’d thought she would actually find people like her.
As if reading her thoughts, Dr. Yuhle said, “We know where we can find more Atlanteans—over in Morocco in northwest Africa.”
“Why Morocco, and how can you really know Atlantis was real?” Jaxon asked.
“My old professor made that discovery,” Dr. Yamazaki said. “He spent his entire career studying the Atlantis legend. Cultures all around the Atlantic have stories of a great civilization that disappeared when the island it was on sank to the bottom of the ocean. The most famous of those stories is the Greek legend that the philosopher Plato wrote about, but it’s found in a lot more sources than that. The ancient civilizations of northern and western Africa had traditions about Atlantis, and there seem to have been similar stories among the Native American tribes in the Caribbean. We don’t know much about those because most of those tribes got wiped out within a century after Columbus landed.”
“So the legends are true?”
The scientist nodded. “The details vary from culture to culture, but the core idea of a lost civilization in the Atlantic Ocean seems to be true. I’m a geneticist, and I study the history of how certain genes spread through populations over time. The Atlantis gene, actually a whole string of genes, seem to have come from a single population several thousand years ago and spread first to northwest Africa, where Morocco is today.”
“Check this out,” Otto said, handing a tablet over to Jaxon.
Jaxon stared. The screen displayed a photo of a woman in loose robes and a Muslim headscarf. Behind her was a village in the mountains, with simple whitewashed one-story buildings and goats standing in the street.
But it was the woman who captured her attention.
She could have been Jaxon’s mother or aunt. She had the same dark skin, the same broad cheekbones, the same Asian eyelids, and the same brilliant blue eyes.
“I punched a bunch of typical Atlantean features into a facial-recognition program,” Edward explained. “Then I did a Google image search for matches. Most came up in northern and western Africa and the Caribbean.”
“It’s not the most scientific method”—Dr. Yamazaki shrugged—“but it supports the genetic data.”
Jaxon was only half listening. She scrolled through the photo gallery, seeing face after face that echoed her features, her lost identity. Some were in what looked like Third World cities, others in mountains or along a brilliantly sunny coastline. Many more looked like they lived in the desert.
It took her a while to be able to speak. “These are my people.”
The words came out sounding strange. She’d never had a people before. She’d always thought of herself as mixed race, and not knowing her parents meant she couldn’t really attach herself to one group or another. But she was of a particular race, a hidden race, one she had dismissed as only a legend.
“Yes, they are your people, and they’re a very special people,” Dr. Yamazaki said. “My old professor has been digging through everything he could find that has ever been written on Atlantis. There’s a lot of junk, of course, but he found some gems too. In the Renaissance, some of the leading European scholars thought that Atlantis had been located right off the western Moroccan coast. Several archaeological sites on that coastline show an early, advanced civilization. When Atlantis sank, the survivors would have made for the nearest shore. Today, Morocco is one of the most mixed countries in the world. There are Arabs; Berbers, who have African features but white skin; Europeans; Jews; and black Africans. All these people mingle, of course, so there’s a huge mixed-race population. You wouldn’t look out of place there at all, Jaxon. That’s why we think most of the Atlanteans decided to hide there.”
Jaxon tensed.
“Hide?”
“Throughout history, people have always feared any community that stood apart and had different traditions,” Edward said. “Look at how the Jews have been treated over the centuries… or the Gypsies.
Did you know that Hitler threw the Gypsies into the concentration camps right alongside the Jews? He wanted to wipe them out too. He killed more than a quarter of a million of them, but there’s still so much prejudice against the Gypsies that their Holocaust has been almost forgotten. Imagine what he would have done if he knew about the Atlanteans. He would have killed them all.”
“Or used them as weapons,” Grunt said.
A chill went down her spine. Yeah, as weapons. That’s what Stephen and Isadore wanted to turn her into. They didn’t see her as a human being, just a tool.
Otto put a hand on hers. “We want to go find these people. Maybe they’ve kept some of the old stories. We could learn more about what happened to Atlantis.”
Jaxon cocked her head and looked at Dr. Yamazaki. “I wasn’t born in Morocco, was I?”
“Probably not,” she replied. “Your CPS records show you were a newborn foundling. Chances are you were born right here in the United States. Atlantis sank thousands of years ago, and so the Atlanteans have had a long time to spread across the globe.”
Jaxon perked up. “You said you met others like me. Could any of them have been my parents?”
“I don’t think so. You were left at the door to a clinic in San Francisco, and I can remember studying only a couple of subjects from there. Neither of them were old enough to be your parents. Sorry, Jaxon.”
She sighed and looked back at the photos. “So it looks like if I want to find myself, I have to go to Morocco. Wait, go to Morocco? I’ve never even left the West Coast. I don’t even have a passport!”
“That won’t be a problem, honey,” Vivian said.
Jaxon rolled her eyes. “Uh oh. This is going to be one of those crazy, illegal plans you people always make that ends up in a gunfight.”
Dr. Yuhle shook his head and sighed. “Almost certainly.”
Otto laughed and high-fived Grunt. “Welcome to the Atlantis Allegiance!”
Jaxon gave her boyfriend a sidelong glance. He’d changed, and she wasn’t sure she liked all the changes.
Vivian smiled. “Don’t worry. I have a contact who can get us real, government-approved passports, but they’ll have different names on them.”