After the Dark (3 page)

“You know you can't afford to fail again.”

“I do indeed, sir.”

“That should you fail, there will be no reprieve.”

“Yes.”

“
Only your family's history with the Conclave allowed you to buy another opportunity this time.
”

“Thank you.”

White remained stubbornly passive. He knew they were watching him from somewhere, knew too that they were well aware that he hated being lectured as much as he hated to fail. He would not give them the satisfaction of seeing him lose his composure.

Soon the sound of a key in the door announced his return to the Conclave fold as grandly as a fanfare of trumpets.

Forcing himself to breathe deeply and slowly, he instead concentrated on the jackhammer pounding in his skull. He was coming to understand that pain had its purposes, and in this case, it seemed to help him focus.

In the case of 452, her pain would bring him only pleasure, and her death would ensure the triumph of the Conclave, in the imminent Coming.

Chapter Two

NAUGHTY AND NICE

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
DECEMBER 20, 2021

From the op ed page of the
New World Weekly
:

Sketchy's Sketchbook
by C.T. “Sketchy” Simon
“Silent Fright”

Not so long ago, if you'd told Emerald City residents that they'd see Christmas lights strung from the high fences of Terminal City, you'd have been not so politely told you were frickin' nuts.

But a lot has changed in the six months since the so-called “Terminal City Siege” began. For one thing, the siege is officially over—both the unconventional residents of the compound and city government agree on that point. Though a brace of police cars remains parked outside the gates, 24/7, the truce has held.

That truce was struck not long after the apprehension of Kelpy, the chameleonlike serial killer captured by the transgenics themselves—the one, defining action that had convinced many in the city that the Manticore refugees were serious about wanting nothing more than to fit in. The National Guard is long gone now, as is the threat of the U.S. Army.

Still, a large segment of the populace remains unconvinced, and so the police still stand guard at the gates. The new mission of the boys in blue, however, is to keep out those who would try to destroy the peace, and not pen the transgenics in.

The denizens of Terminal City are now considered Seattle citizens, American citizens, as equal as any other. Of course, that still doesn't sit well with some of our fine city's less understanding occupants. So, most of those who live inside Terminal City remain within the confines of this offbeat gated community, seldom venturing out for more than work.

Their new place in the community, however, has garnered the transgenics a controversial nonvoting seat on the city council, and at the next election, Terminal City will elect its own alderman to a regular city council post. The
New World Weekly
supports this decision—the transgenics are human beings, too, after all, even if they are genetically enhanced creations of a secret government operation gone awry. (
Editor's Note:
Elsewhere in this issue, read the latest article in our continuing Freak Nation series: “Manticore—the U.S Government Freak Show You Paid For!”)

For the time being, Max Guevera—the enigmatic, beautiful, raven-haired X5 who negotiated the peace—remains the de facto mayor of Terminal City. The dark-eyed and high-cheekboned Max—whose full lips and pleasing form draws stares from men and women alike—has a sultry presence that allows her to succeed in leading this rabble into becoming a full-fledged community. Her taking a stand . . . her courage and leadership . . . has been the backbone propping up this ragtag bunch of squatters since those early difficult days of the siege.

In a black ensemble of turtleneck sweater and vest and form-fitting slacks and boots, the petite, shapely killing machine that was Max Guevera sat in a booth in a restaurant across the way from Terminal City. She was sipping coffee, reading the tabloid rag her friend Sketchy wrote for, a half smile dimpling one cheek. Oblivious to her own Catwoman chic, Max shook her head, thinking she'd have to give Sketch a little kick in the behind for that “sultry presence” stuff.

Ironic, though, that of all the media, the sleazy
New World Weekly
would become the voice of reason, the first among the press to take the side of the transgenics. Ironic, too, that this least respected of Seattle publications would be the only one with national impact, due to its grocery store checkout-counter status across America.

Other than her own centerfoldish write-up, she could hardly argue with anything Sketchy said in his editorial. Things were better for the transgenics now—surprisingly so, considering the genocidal threat they had faced. Still, problems remained—different problems, new ones, often mundane—and a peacetime Max found herself having difficulty adjusting to such minor troubles in a way the wartime Max had never experienced, where major troubles had abounded.

Being bred as a genetically enhanced super soldier had its advantages, no question; but as much as Max had complained about wanting to fit in—and to be like everyone else, and just live in peace—there'd been too many times during the last six months when she felt a restlessness, a yearning for action that distressed her. Had Manticore hardwired her in a way that meant a normal life would remain out of reach, despite her best efforts?

These thoughts, these feelings, troubled her, especially since everything seemed to be falling in place for her fellow transgenics.

Incursions by antitransgenic forces had been nil—unless you counted the occasional protesters—and, for their part, the Manticore refugees were fitting in nicely with the community, economically if not physically. To their surprise, the same attributes that made them premium-quality soldiers had also served them well in a business setting. With handsome X5 Alec leading the way through much of this new wilderness called commerce—had he been an '80s yuppie in a former life?—the transgenics had not only become successful, but were actually thriving.

The spark for this pleasant bonfire of capitalism in the transgenic commune had been an unlikely one. It turned out that the very first Manticore creation—that hulking, lovable dog boy, Joshua—wasn't the only Terminal City resident with an artistic bent. Joshua's paintings had earned him money before, in a top Seattle gallery, and with the group in need, he'd painted with a new fervor.

Based upon his sheer, instinctive talent, Joshua had been successful even before his tabloid celebrity, and now the value of his powerful, primitive paintings was skyrocketing. Gallery owners were clamoring for more “transgenic art,” and the residents of Terminal City responded.

Dix, the potato-headed security man with the monocle, and his baseball-skulled partner Luke, were more than engineering whizzes who had hooked up Terminal City's security network, supervised the motor pool, designed and built its own power generator and water system. They were also burgeoning welding sculptors, forming abstract shapes that created concrete images in the eyes and minds of viewers. Overnight their hobby became a business.

And Mole, it turned out, had a knack for sand sculptures; and many of the others had skills of their own, not always on the artistic level of Joshua and the sculptors, but in an arts-and-crafts fashion reflecting their own peculiar makeup.

Max grinned at that thought. Let's face it, she told herself, who on this planet has a more unique combo of environment and genetics in their past than the transies?

So they opened up a street market, and within a month the transgenic art had become a hit with patrons throughout the city, from culture mavens to average folks. Not only were the transgenic artisans prolific, they were talented,
and
they were media darlings—not the first media devils who'd made that transition—whose pieces fetched top dollar. In less than three months they had leased the seven-story building on the corner across the street from the main gate.

To Max, the seven-story home of Terminal City Artworks was a building with memories. It had been in the coffee shop on the first floor of this building that she and Detective Ramon Clemente began to finally share the truth with each other—in the critical Kelpy matter—and to Max the restaurant represented the beginning of a shared trust, even friendship, between transgenic and ordinary.

It had been necessary, of course, to open their arts-and-crafts mall outside the boundaries of Terminal City—the toxic industrial area where they had squatted was inhabitable only by the genetically altered transgenics themselves. That Terminal City loomed across the way—a vast steel and concrete ghost town haunted by transgenic specters, a shadow of capitalism run amok, free enterprise at its worst—provided yet another irony, a sweet one, as the counterculture mall flourished, a blossoming of free enterprise at its best.

The nearby presence of Terminal City also provided an air of mystery and celebrity that attracted ordinaries to the “exotic” mall. Sketchy had hyped the mall in the
New World Weekly
, and the rest of the media had quickly latched on.

Max liked the fact that the transgenics now owned the building—Logan Cale had loaned them the money, and was well on the way to getting paid back—and that first-floor restaurant had been reopened. Gem—the X5 who gave birth during the Jam Pony crisis that ignited the Terminal City siege—worked behind the counter, and two other X5s shared management responsibility (where food service was concerned, it was thought best to keep the more radically mutated transgenics behind the scenes). Most of the Jam Pony messengers stopped there to eat when they were making deliveries in this sector of the city, and with the cops still on duty around the perimeter, there was a constant threat to the doughnut inventory.

The rest of the building had been turned into the shops of an eclectic arts and antiques mall. Those transgenics who didn't participate artistically worked the antiques booths. With tutoring from the former cat burglar Max—whose street-gang mentor Moody had taught her well, years ago, back in L.A.—the transgenic pupils learned which artifacts were worth saving and which could be ignored, not only within the boundaries of Terminal City, but at flea markets and dump sites throughout the city.

Sitting in the first-floor Terminal City Artworks restaurant, nursing her cup of coffee, Max let slip a tiny smile as she considered how much they had accomplished in so short a time.

“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” Logan Cale said as he walked up to her.

“You know I'm a vegetarian,” she said.

Logan swung into the booth across from Max. “I know you're
trying
to be a vegetarian . . . How's it working out?”

She smirked. “Let's just say, next time you're ready to cook up a batch of that beefy chili of yours . . . I'm there.”

Tall, with spiky dark blond hair, wire-frame glasses, and bright blue eyes, Logan Cale looked athletically fit. And, in a way, he was—maintaining a rigorous workout schedule in his modern apartment in a seemingly abandoned building just outside Terminal City's toxic borders.

But beneath his casually stylish, baggy earth-tone trousers, Logan wore an exoskeleton that gave him the ability to walk, a skill stolen from him by the bullet lodged near his spine and regained through the use of the mechanical marvel that he wore all the time now.

Though wealthy, Logan was far from being one of the idle rich. Instead, he used his money to try to fight government and private sector wrongdoing, working in support of the disadvantaged. Thus, he spent nearly every waking moment as the underground cyberjournalist that the city—and now much of the nation—knew as a mysterious voice and an image limited to those piercing blue eyes: Eyes Only. Barely a handful of people knew that Logan led this double life; another handful thought he was an agent of Eyes Only. But Max knew the truth—she had been working with him for several years now.

“I see you're reading Sketchy's latest attempt at a Pulitzer,” Logan said.

“Oh yeah. He's gonna pay.”

“Ooooh . . . you sound so sultry . . . enigmatic, even . . .”

She slapped at him with the tabloid, but she couldn't hold back the grin. “Coal in your stocking this year—definitely coal.”

“We can always use the fuel,” he said. “You know what I want for Christmas? What I really want?”

“No. But I bet you're gonna tell me.”

He reached his gloved hand out and took her black leather-gloved hand in his. He squeezed. “That's what I want,” he said. “Only . . . I wish it was you and me . . .”

“With the gloves off?”

He grinned, almost shyly; but what he said was rather bold: “At least.”

Max loved this man.

She loved him, he loved her, and they should have been holding hands right now, really holding hands . . . Hell, they should have been living happily ever after, starting a long time ago . . .

“We should be living happily ever after, about now,” she blurted, sharing the thought. “Don't you think?”

“We could be facing a much bleaker Christmas.”

“Only here we sit,” she said, ignoring his remark, “governing a biotech wasteland turned Jamestown for transgenics.”

“Don't be so hard on the place. Or yourself. You've accomplished so much.”

Calling Terminal City a Jamestown had been harsh, she knew—“Jamestown” referred to the modern-day Hoovervilles that had sprung up post-Pulse and were named after then-President Michael James. Terminal City had become much more than that.

“Yes, we could be facing a much bleaker Christmas,” she finally admitted. “I don't know what's wrong with me, Logan—it's like I have an itch I can't scratch.”

He gave her a look. “I know the feeling.”

Max damn near blushed.

She waved for Gem to bring a cup of coffee for Logan.

The real reason she and Logan weren't living happily ever after, of course, was because of a late and very unlamented blonde bitch Max had known only as Renfro. This was back at Manticore HQ—not long before Max had burned the place to the ground—where Renfro planted a designer virus inside Max, a time bomb ticking down to kill Logan.

Basically, Renfro had made Logan allergic to Max's touch—fatally so.

Christmas always brought thoughts of home, didn't it? Max reflected. And like it or not, to her and the other transgenics—whether the “normal”-looking X5s or the mutated freaks like Joshua and Dix—Manticore had been home.

The result of genetic experimentation on a scale unheard of in the rest of the world, the Manticore refugees were freaks, and a large segment of the city still wouldn't let them forget that. After Colonel Donald Lydecker, the surrogate “father” of Manticore, had left, Renfro assumed command. She'd been in charge when Max was captured.

Before Max's escape, Renfro and her team of conscienceless scientists—the Nazis might have relished having these “mad doctors” on staff—had injected Max with the virus, which was harmful to only one person on earth: Logan Cale. If Max and Logan touched in any way, he would get the virus . . . or rather, the virus would get him: Logan would die within twenty-four hours.