Orphan of Mythcorp (13 page)

“
I saw you in the hall walking with . .
. him,” Ava answered. “You had Study Hall but you were going the
opposite way, so . . .”

Lamorak shrugged.

Ava turned to look at me, then back at
Lamorak. “So what are you doing here, with him?”

Lamorak shrugged. “Ash convinced Sanson to .
. . repay Kant,” gazing at her. “Now sit down over there and be
quiet. He’ll be here any second.”

Ava sat down next to him. I couldn’t help but
stare. The Morai dudes were weird, but ponytails and white hair on
a chick is a whole other bucket of chicken. I could go for her. She
caught me staring, made a ‘what the heck you looking at?’ face.

“
I’m sorry, it’s just, I think you’re
hot.” Oh man, what a doushe. “I mean, beautiful . . . and stuff. I
like your . . . shirt.” Great job, pervert, stare at her chest
while babbling like a moron.

Ava did not smile, but when she looked down
at the floor (after giving me a dirty look) she pulled her braid
around and started fiddling with it. And as every guy knows, when a
chick plays with her hair, she’s saying she really wants to play
with something else.

I was totally and incredibly down with
that.

“
He’s coming,” Lamorak piped
up.

“
Excellent.” Now I’d have a chance to
show her what a badass I was. I slunk into the shadows, raised the
baseball, and got ready to pounce. The doorknob jiggled and in
stepped Manny Kant. He checked out the light bulb, probably trying
to decide if he’d left it on from the last time he was down
here.

I was hoping he’d do a little CSI. Instead,
Kant stopped where he was and inhaled. “Crap.”

He snapped around, rushed for the door. But I
was too quick. I smashed the baseball into his left cheek, where it
made a lovely wet smacking sound. His head jerked to the left and
he stumbled back. As Kant grabbed his cheek, I paused—which was my
first mistake.

Kant recovered quickly, leaping forward fist
first. I managed to snap my head back but Kant’s knuckles still
made contact, barreling into my nose.

“
Ah,” I screamed, not from pain—there
was none—but from surprise. I rubbed at my nose, vainly trying to
discover if it was broken or still streamlined. “You freaking broke
my nose!” I shrieked and turned to Ava. “Did he break my nose? I
think he broke my nose.”

Ava had her hands to her face. “I don’t know.
It looks broken but maybe it’s always looked that way?”

All the while Kant was circling me. He
suddenly darted forward. I stuck my hand out but in a fight no one
ever stops just because you want them to—not unless it’s a Fight
Club fight or your opponent is massively submissive and
outrageously stupid.

He rammed straight for my gut. I heard air
being expelled but felt nothing. Kant landed a right hook into my
ribcage while I was still trying to recover from the nose debacle.
I didn’t feel the blow, but couldn’t help notice that it shifted my
footing. It must’ve been a fierce mother. What kind of damage was
this jerk doing to my poor body?

I tried to shove him off, but he had his arms
around me now in a bear hug. So I reared back and struck him. He
gasped but held fast and we both went down. Real fights are not
like you see in the holovids; neither fighter gets more than one or
two well-placed punches in before both grapple and fall. Then it’s
all about who gets the stranglehold first. Wrestling more than
boxing. We flailed around, grunting and cursing, our shoes scoring
dozens of black streaks on the vinyl floor. I could see that Kant
was sweating. If I could just hold on a little longer.

BEEPBEEPBEEP

My dang thermal went off again. I managed to
squiggle my left arm around Kant’s back to sneak a peek at the
digital readout. “Fifty-Nine,” I breathed. Had to finish him quick
or my joints would start seizing up, and God knew what he’d do to
me then.

Or to Ava.

I looked around as we danced
idiotically on the floor.
Ah, that will
do
, I thought, spotting a Louisville Slugger standing
beside the canvas bags of balls.

We scrapped on the floor, Kant getting in a
few half-hearted blows every couple seconds; he couldn’t really put
in his full strength, as I had his biceps pinned to his sides. But
while he probably thought he was wearing me down, I was slowly
shifting us over to the bat. Thirty seconds of this (with Ava
panicking and Lamorak just watching) and we were close enough. I
reached for the bat with my left hand, releasing Kant’s arm and
risking my hide.

He reared back for a blow to my face. I
sidled to the left and grabbed the bat. Kant’s fist landed on the
vinyl and he started balling—which gave me leeway to shimmy out of
the clutch of his legs. I raised the bat awkwardly, thermo howling,
joints seizing.

With all the strength I could muster, I
slammed it down.

The beefy part of the wooden bat caught Kant
smack dab on the points of his shoulder blades. A gruesome
double-crunching sound followed.

He screamed. In my peripheral vision I
noticed Ava covering her ears and cringing. Lamorak stood
stock-still, his expression bordering on . . . satisfaction?
Whatever. Kant screamed some more and messed the floor with a
mixture of tears and blood.

Panic welled inside me. I had to shut him up.
Down came the bat again and again. The wet smacking sound of wood
on flesh and bone was enough to make me want to puke (if only I
could), but the stubborn yahoo just wouldn’t shut up. So I kept at
it, up and down with the Slugger, until finally his cries waned.
Soon the sound he was making was the slobbering of
blood-drooling.

I stood still, dropped the bat.

It clanged against the floor, bounced a few
times and then went still. The only sound was that of my thermal
wailing and Ava sobbing behind me.

Before I could end up a bleeding statue, I
walked over to my backpack. Still, it was a struggle, my knees
creaking and not wanting to bend, my hip joints nearly frozen, and
my arms like wet laundry left on the clothesline in the winter. I
bent down, removed case-gun-vial, and injected myself.

A few minutes later my temp was back up to
62.

Ava was leaning over the unmoving Kant when
Lamorak shook my hand. “Thank you.”

He walked out of the room. Ava looked back at
him. “Where are you going? Lam!” She turned to me. “We can’t just
leave him here. He needs a hospital.” She put her hand to Kants’
neck, her breathing becoming erratic. “Oh man. His pulse is really
slow. Do something.”

I stood there.

“
You did this. Now fix it!”

I looked around. What did I expect to
see, a doctor? Then I remembered the case.
Worth a shot
, I figured. Ava watched as I
reloaded the hypogun and injected nanites into the unconscious
Kant. For a few seconds nothing happened, but then, as she was
checking his pulse again, Ava exhaled. “It’s a little better. Okay,
help me carry him out.”

“
Carry him out?”

“
That’s right,” she snapped. “Help me
take him to Miss Little, she’ll call an ambulance and—”

“
And then the police will show up and
I’ll be taken away. Uh-unh. No way. I’ll help you carry him to the
end of the bleachers. Coach Pangborn will find him soon
enough.”

She seemed peeved but listened to reason,
maybe because she was an accessory or complicit or whatever they
call it when someone witnesses a crime and doesn’t do jack to stop
it. We bent down and hoisted him up. Ava grunted and I could tell
she didn’t have the strength to carry him far.

We made it to the end of the bleachers, where
I could hear Coach Pangborn’s class of yahoos running around. We
set Kant down there at the end. All I wanted to do was run to the
bathroom and check myself for serious injuries, but the Morai
chick, panting, stepped up to me and gazed in my eyes. “You will
help me take him to Nurse Little.”

I looked down at her. Her face was frigging
perfect, white skin drawn taut over sharp cheekbones. But this only
made me feel worse about what I’d just done. Guilt-sick? Sure I
was, but not enough to turn myself in.

“
Didn’t Ash tell you,” I said to her,
“your Mesmer thingy doesn’t work on me.” She stepped back and
pouted. “Listen,” I pursued, “I’m sorry what went down in there. I
only meant to smack him around a bit. But I am
not
going down for this. I did this for you and
your Morai pals for what he did to Garfield.”

“
Gareth.”

“
Whatever. I’m going to walk away now
to check myself out for injuries. Give me a head start and you can
pretend you just found him like this. Cool?”

Ava sneered. “No, it’s not cool.
You
are not cool. But . . . maybe you
did it for the right reason, I don’t know.” She paused. “You got
ten seconds. Then I’m screaming.”

I ran out of the gym. When I was twenty feet
down the hall, the screaming began.

“
Who’s Knox?” I asked.

The gingersnap looked set to answer, but then
his jaw snapped shut and he turned. “You hear that, tiny?” he asked
Kana.

She finished cleaning off her short swords
with the shirt of one of her victims. “Yeah I do,” she said.
“Sounds like a couple of Knights. We better scat, get Morgan here
to Court before they filet him.” She zoomed over to me quicker than
thought, grabbed my arm with her child-sized hands and proceeded to
drag me away from the obamafest.

“
Knights?” I said. “Like real knights?
And why are we going to a Court?”

My new kooky saviors led me along one of the
aisles in a real slap-dash manner. All the folks along the jammed
lane skedaddled out of Kana’s way with fear in their eyes. The only
reason I was able to keep myself from being dragged behind was that
my legs were longer than theirs. Hundreds of peepers fell on my
face as we rushed past.

For the first time since entering this
freakazoid city, I could hear music, and I noticed speakers
stationed high on the graffiti-decorated walls. It was some type of
rap, old school, the rappers babbling in a sort of African
accent.

“
What’s with the music?” I mumbled
through a haze of pain.

“
Die Antwoord,” Faustus declared with a
snort. “The King’s favorite band. He even tried to have Yolandi
shipped over here so she’d perform live. He thinks . . . hey, watch
where you’re going, fatso!” He’d paused in the lane to yell at some
fatty-patty who’d had the nerve to step backwards into traffic.
“Anyway, the King thinks the music keeps everyone in a buying
mood.”

“
Right.” I’d never heard of the band
but the music did make me want to haggle. “But why is it I have to
go to Court? You two are the ones who . . . is that blood? Are
those people drinking blood over there?” I said, noticing a group
sipping from tall slender glasses filled to the brims with a
disturbingly red syrupy substance.

“
Well they sure ain’t drinking Mai
Tai’s,” Faustus quipped.

“
Are they . . . like, vampires?” In a
place this crazy, anything seemed possible.

Kana snorted, continued to drag me through
the crowd towards the dark end of the lane. Faustus said, “Don’t be
a druid. There’s no such thing as vampires. They’re so cliché that
if any did pop up, I’d stake and burn them myself and then piss on
their ashes.” Then he added in a lower tone, “Thank God congress
passed the Meyer Law.”

I recalled reading about that in the old
papers they gave us back at the Home. (Occasionally we’d find
cutout sections—likely things the government didn’t want us second
generation freaks to know about.) The Meyer Law made vampire
literature illegal. Apparently there’d been one too many
vamp-novel-inspired groups out there attacking people for their
blood.

But it seemed that it was perfectly cool to
down blood here.

“
Can you please release me?” I asked
Kana. “I’m losing circulation in my arm.”

Faustus shuttled over to her, nodded slowly.
Kana released me and I exhaled. “Thank you.” Too quick though.
Faustus went and grabbed my other arm as I wobbled, and then he
resumed the march. “What gives? I’m not going to try to
escape.”

“
But it needs to look like you are,”
Kana said. “We bring the troublemakers to Court so Arthur doesn’t
send his Knights out to do their thing.” The handles of her short
swords protruded from a sheath on her back, bounced as she did. She
caught me peeping at them.

“
My dirks,” she beamed. “Venus and
Serena. Knox bought them for me years ago.” She whipped one out and
sliced a big X through the air. You could actually hear a pop, like
when you snap a belt.

“
Who’s Knox?” I asked again.

“
Your father, I suspect,” she
whispered.

Could she be right? Had Anne Thrope been
right? Had I stumbled on old friends of my father here? Did they
know where he was? “What happened to him? Why’d he abandon me?”

Kana seemed ready to answer, so of course
Faustus interrupted her with “We’re here.”

Turning the corner of the last vendor
on the lane, a plastic-constructed booth housing what I took to be
a butchers shop, due to the abundance of meat-selling
advertisements. But there were no bundles of meat and no salami’s
hanging from the ceiling. In fact, the place was pristine. As the
gingersnap led me past the booth, called
Studmans’s Fine Cuts,
I noticed something on one
of the neon signs that seemed a real funny way of advertising slabs
of beef: THE FINEST YOUNG WHITE MEAT IN VERA CITY. PROCESSED RIGHT
HERE AT HOME. FRESH AND TENDER AND VEGGIE-FED VIRGIN MEAT. DARK
MEAT ALSO AVAILABLE. ALL PRODUCTS VERY LOW FAT. LATHERED IN COCOA
BUTTER EVERY NIGHT.