The Liminal People (11 page)

The two guards in the front seat never knew what hit them. No weapons drawn. No attempt to get out. Only screaming and clawing at their own skin, trying to get the pieces of glass out of their eyes. I can't hear them. The explosion destroyed my eardrums. That's why I'm stumbling, why I almost impale myself on a flaming metal spike thrown up from the trunk of the car.

I take a break from making new pink lungs to redraw my eardrums. That means I also take a break from shutting down my pain receptors. I have to know what balance feels like. I feel it all for a second and understand the value of painkillers as I never have before. Fuck. The car blew up.

We're on one of the bridges over the Thames. I can't tell which one. I can't shut my eyes. I have no eyelids, and just melted flesh where there used to be a skinny face, and half my throat is gone. A piece of metal from my seat is lodged in my back. All I can really see is the modern-art piece that used to be the car . I'm pulling myself through the still-flaming debris. I see the upper part of Yasmine's arm and grab it instinctually. The car, body parts, norms—we're all scattered across the street. I move a melted piece of engine and realize that it was half-merged with Yasmine's hip. She doesn't scream. She's too far gone. I can see skull. I scream my pain and hers. It wakes her for a second.

“Baby!” She's still alive. I can heal her.

“Oh God, oh God . . .” She's talking with absolutely no control over her lower jaw. It's dislocated, maybe broken as well.

“You're fine. I've got you. You're with me now. I can heal you. . . .” Three of her ribs are stabbing into her pancreas, her lungs, and her spleen. She's literally burned to the bone over most of the right side of her body. Both her legs are gone. I can't stop her organ systems from failing. Her jaw is dislocated. I should've eaten more.

“Oh God, Darren. He . . . Is he . . .?” I want to laugh; she almost sounds drunk. I want this to be a mistake, a joke, anything other than a successful assassination attempt. I'm regretting my world, all my time away from her, coming back, meeting her, sharing that first cigarette in college. I wish I'd never met her, wish there was some way that this wouldn't hurt so much.

“I can't do anything for him, Mene. Sit down . . . No, Yasmine, don't move. I'm trying to heal you.” My power is limited. The thing inside me won't let me heal her, because it's too busy healing me. I'm trying. I'm pushing, but it's like the powers don't think I can do anything. For all my control, it is still the thing that lives inside me that does the work. And it, not me, has decided my life is more important than hers. But I can—

“Where's my daughter?” I can't heal, but I can still sense. I've felt this before. This is death. Death hates me. Just like everyone else. Death wants me. When it realizes it can't have me, that my lungs are already healed, that I'm working on my esophagus now, that soon my skin will be coming back, when it realizes this it targets my reason for living. She coughs blood in my face. A message from death. The poorest people in Africa told me a healer is death to a warrior's spirit. But they don't know what death is to me. Death is my ultimate enemy, and given enough time, death always wins.

“I'll find her, Yasmine. I'll find her. I'll protect her. I promise . . .” She's gone. There's nothing in this bag of flesh that I know anymore. It's just a collection of elements, mostly water and blood, calcium deposits, nerve clusters . . . there is no more Mene. I want to curl up next to her, be under her like she was under me back at G.W. late at night, listening to Liz Phair, a lifetime ago. But there's something ugly and dark inside me that knows to run when it hears sirens. The rest of the world starts demanding attention. It's all broken cars, people, and screams. Nothing on the bridge remains whole after the explosion. I am not fully featured yet. I have only the stubs of eyelids. I'm missing a face. My clothes are half burned off me. But I run. I run down by the Thames. And out of some perverse need to cleanse myself of my sins I am yet to commit, I consecrate my body to the water. I baptize myself in the Thames and do not reemerge.

I'll find this power. And when I do, I'll kill them. No. I'll make their ribs go through their spines; I'll make a wired mess of their spinal cord. I'll make them allergic to their own blood. Then I'll kill them.

But I can't yet. I don't know where to find them. What's more, the public nature of this thing—it isn't what we do. People like me, we go under the radar. We don't attract attention unless we're ready to square off with the norms
and
all the other powers that don't want the attention. People like me don't do that. Sane people like me don't. The kid in India, his powers had made him crazy. I've met three others like that: a girl in Singapore who jumped between dreams and was unable to distinguish between the dream world and this one; another girl in Ankara who found everything she touched, including her parents, turned to liquid; and a third in Garoua, Cameroon, whose body was in constant flux, shifting its physical characteristics based on the desires of the people around it. Nordeen had me cull them all, and I was thankful that was his order.

But the one who killed my Yasmine wasn't crazy. Whoever they are, they're sane enough to work with the animal girl. The animal girl was a street kid, hungry, desperate, scared out of her mind, but not crazy. And if I'm right about the animal girl being subordinate, that means the one who caused the fuel in the car to blow is superior to her, maybe the one calling the shots. So they're not crazy, they're just bold. Bold can mean stupid, or it can mean backed up by an even larger power. A power unafraid of killing a semi-famous politician and another power in broad-ass daylight.

I'm killing the asshole either way. But I've got to know which way the wind is blowing. I tried to go mellow on this one, tried to keep it all away from the boss. But that's not the way it's destined to go down. He's going to know about this. Hell, it's on the BBC. Maybe he was always going to know and I was just deluding myself. But I've got this much control over the situation: I can call him.

I'm half dressed in a clean suit, one that makes me feel like I'm going to a funeral, when it hits me. I held her severed arm in my hand. I forced the snags and sinews of bone back into place and made marrow and red blood vessels rejoin, but it was no good. Yasmine is dead. She'll never come back. I can't heal her. I thought I could handle it.

I'm throwing up. I just make it to the bathroom, the tub. Succumbing to involuntary, unconscious physiological activity brands me as weak, distracted, not on my game. It's the first surprise my body has given me in years. I'm bawling without making a sound. Before my powers, when Mac used to beat me, this is how I cried in my closet when he was done, just so I wouldn't disturb anyone else. That's not the concern now. I just don't know any other way to cry. I don't know how to stop, either.

Figure it out. Focus on death. That feeling of pull that shut down each of my broken girl's systems, when all I could do was watch. I couldn't break free of her, couldn't let her face the darkness by herself. I know in the end she didn't love me. I was a poor substitute for her massacred man. Didn't matter. I couldn't let her go. So I felt her brain shut down; I suffered her heart pumping as she bled out. I sensed her lungs pulling in blood and mucus and marrow—futile and useless bags of organs not capable of saving her. Just like me. Her pull on my arm, weak already, went limp, and I felt the lack of electrical impulse in her body. I didn't just feel it; I recorded each and every sensation. I can replicate each one. I will. I'll play it back plus ten for the bastard that caused my love to fall. And before they go down, I'll wet concrete with their brain matter. I'll explode their marrow out of their bones and make a mess of capillaries. I'll make a paste of their eyes, Yasmine, I promise. I'll make them bleed from their ears and turn their digestive system against them. They'll digest their own organs. I'll increase their pain receptors so that their clothes feel like sandpaper. I'll make their own breath sound like a DC-10 is landing in their chest. I'll fill their lungs with every excessive fluid in their body I can find. I'll make a decomposing mess of them, I swear I will. They'll pray to gods they don't believe in for the pain to end before I explode each taste bud in their mouth and inflame their genitals with the stray parasites their immune system usually fights off.

Nordeen said the best I could hope for would be to at one point be of assistance to a god. He's wrong. I'll turn into a god of pain and disease, and build an altar to you from the bones of your murderer. Their suffering will be my first odes, and they will not end until I feel satisfied that even dead, resting wherever you are resting, you can hear the pain of the idiot that thought your death would go unavenged. In the end I'll make their skin like taffy and pull it across a full city block and set fire to it. Even then I won't let them go unconscious, let alone die. They will feel what you felt; cry as you were too strong to do, beg for the death that already claimed you. And when they can take no more, I'll heal them completely and totally. I'll take every moment of pain and suffering from their body. I'll make them feel better than they ever have in their life. I'll give them that peace for a full minute. Then I'll tear them apart, cell by cell again until there is absolutely nothing left for them to do but kill themselves. And then, when they've put themselves out of their misery, then I'll find your little girl and let her know her mother's killer has truly suffered for what they did.

I'm calm now, replete with purpose. I make my way downstairs and to the nearest bus. I ride it to Essex. It takes a while. I'm overdressed for the bus. Luckily I'm carrying the “Fuck with me” look in my eye, so even the drunk kids with their singsong neighborhood patois leave me alone. I get off the bus with an hour to spare before the bars close. I find a hopping club. The Black Dog. Perfect. It's how I feel. I order a drink, and in under a minute I've pilfered a cell phone from a chav woman's purse hanging off her chair. Everyone's drunk. Nobody cares. I dial eight different international codes from memory. I'm beginning to think I screwed one up when, after half an hour of waiting, it finally rings.

“Speak.” It's Suleiman. He's speaking in Arabic. I used the hash wholesale number we have.

“It's me,” I say in French.

“There are many me's in the world. Give me a name or I lose the connection,” Suleiman responds in deadpan French.

“The Godfather to your second child shouldn't have to identify himself.” I wait for a second and interpret this silence as acceptance. “I need to speak to our big brother.”

“At this number?” His voice is full with as much happiness as he'll ever allow on the phone, and I miss my old life. It feels like a distant shore getting smaller and smaller.

“If it's tonight. If not, I'll call from another number in thirty-six hours.” When he's confident I won't say anything else, the consummate professional hangs up. Somehow, I can feel his concern.

I set the phone to vibrate, then hide it deep in my pocket. Finally, it's back to the bar, where I demand a Black and Tan with a double shot of Jameson to start off. I want to kill off my body's ability to process alcohol. I want to feel drunk. I want to wreck my system. If not for the call in to Nordeen, I would. But the small razor sitting on my chest seems to burn when I think about it, and I know whose property I am.