The Neo-Spartans: Altered World (28 page)

              “Demon Juice!” said Davies under his breath. “I’ve never been this close to it.”

              “Not only is this jam-packed with stuff that could kill us, it gets into the blood stream so fast you can’t finish the can before you feel it. Stock up. A couple cans of this each will have Mallory and his team rethinking using our organs for anything but footballs,” said Gabriel.

              Davies looked sidewise at him.

              “I mean other than what they’re for. Namely us.”

              They went about loading themselves up with Demon Juice cans.

* * *

              Nico made his way down a crooked street in a section of the Sanctuary even he was only vaguely familiar with. Feral dogs and rats the size of possums guarded a potholed alleyway where chaotic music emanated from an upstairs window. Almost nothing frosted Nico’s cookies more than being in debt, but he was here, like it or not, because he owed Quinn big time. The Vaqueros’ spirits were soaring as the notion of a future manifested itself, and it occurred to him that the only way to reciprocate was to get Quinn information about the Citadel, no matter what the cost to his own well-being.

              He snarled ferociously at the rabid-looking canines that confronted him and they scattered, allowing him to slip his way up a set of rickety stairs.

              “Chris!” shouted Nico over the sound of what was meant to be some kind of guitar. “Chris Auer! It’s Nico Renaldo.” Moments went by. “Chris Auer!” The strangled music stopped abruptly and Chris Auer poked his head out the window. Chris was rail-thin, his buzz cut hair dyed pink, wearing a tattered skin-tight bicycle outfit, also bright pink. In his hand was an electric guitar composed of spare parts.

              “Nico, my man. S’at you? What in hell happened? You look good,” Chris commented as he stared at him. “Come on up, I want to get a look at you.”

              “Yeah,” muttered Nico as he climbed the stairs, kicking away the dogs and watching for loose slats.

              Chris flung open the door, arms held out wide. Nico endured his bro-embrace like a cat in a flea-dip. As they broke it off, Nico looked around the room and Chris gestured him in. The room was wall to wall cast-off lamps, toasters, microwaves, and miles of cables,

              “I’ve almost got the solo to ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ you want to hear?” asked Chris.

              “Stairway what?” asked Nico.

              But Chris was off and running with a hideously fractured version of a song that was old before Nico was born.

              A hand clamped down on Chris’s. “Chris, please, you got company.” There stood Christina, Chris’s girlfriend, her leg in a cast. She too sported a pink buzz cut and tattered pink bike gear. “Hi,” she said. “Call me Chris.”

              “That must get confusing,” commented Nico.

              “What must?” asked both.

              “Not important,” said Nico, smiling and admiring girlfriend Chris. “I guess she’s why you left the Vaqueros.”

              An aw-shucks look crossed Chris’s face as he took his girlfriend’s hand. “Can you blame me? She is a gamer, man. You should’ve seen us hang-glide into that gazebo a couple weeks ago. That six seconds was the best in my life.” Girlfriend Chris’s pink hair glowed brighter.

              “We’re what you call a perfect match,” she added.

              “You can say that again,” said Nico. “Listen, after you left us, word was you worked for the man.”

              Chris got up and moved away. “I can’t talk about that. You want a shake?” he asked, holding up a container.

              Nico got up and followed him. “This is important. I know you worked as a low-level electrician on the Citadel. Everybody knows,” said Nico.

              “Everybody knows? Even us grunts had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. You know, where you can’t even talk about it. Very serious stuff.”

              “What happens if you talk about it?” asked Nico.

              “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know,” added girlfriend Chris, parking an affectionate hand on Chris’s shoulder.

              “I understand. Look, man, anything you can tell me…”

              The two of them just looked at him stone-faced.

              “See, there’s this girl, I know it’s not like me, I’m not what you’d call the romantic type. It’s strange territory for me. All this… feeling.”

              Chris and Chris were melting. They shared a look. He was speaking their language. Nico saw he was getting through and pushed a touch further.

              “Her brother was taken. And now she has this crazy idea of breaking into the Citadel and springing him loose. Imagine the danger. But what can I do?”

              Girlfriend Chris’s face was pure rapture. “Yeah, but you love her! Go ahead, Chris, tell him.”

              “Well, just between you and me, I did make a few notes, just in case,” said Chris coyly. “Let me tell you, the whole Citadel project was weird. The electricians did their part. The guys pouring cement did their part. The dudes running pipe did their part. But nobody had the whole plan. It was so secret you couldn’t help but make notes. Chris, off with it.”

              Chris’s girlfriend Chris turned her back and stripped off her shirt. There, tattooed in a crude hand was a schematic of the Citadel.

              “Nice work, isn’t it? Did it myself.”

              “But why?” asked Nico.

              “That’s a heavy philosophical question, my friend. Why come to the Sanctuary? Why choose to live at all? Thing is… the man makes you sign a contract to shut up, you know you gotta shout. Besides, I knew it’d come in handy some day. And here you are.”

              “You got paper?”

              “I am a man of many disciplines,” said Chris, and he supplied Nico with a yellowing piece of paper and a pencil. Copying Chris’s back, Nico drew himself a map of the Citadel interior.

              Chris put her shirt back on and shot Nico a smile. “I hope you get the girl,” she said and slipped away.

              Chris guided Nico through the ins and outs of the Citadel schematic. But as he finished, a dark look crossed his face. “Listen, I don’t know what you got in mind. This will help once you’re in, but I gotta tell you, the place is a real fortress. All those access points I showed you, they’re reinforced up the yinyang. Your only chance is numbers. Takin’ it down, if that’s what you got in mind, you’re gonna need an army.”

              “I don’t know what to say,” said Nico.

              “Ahhh, don’t say nothin’, listen to this.” He ran his fingers across his hand-made guitar doing what must have been “Stairway to Heaven.”

              “Wait,” shouted Nico. “Take this.” He produced some of Quinn’s cleansing herbs and hand-written instructions. “This is intense, but knowing you two, you’ll probably dig it.”

              “What is it?”

              “Follow what I wrote… it’s a way to hang with Chris for another eight to ten years,” said Nico.

              “Dude!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

              Quinn sat alone in the nosebleed seats watching the guys’ vigorous work-out. Every stick and jab, every kick and thrust spoke of healthier bodies at work. But it wasn’t enough to lift Quinn’s spirits. Her mission had stalled and she knew it.

              She felt someone’s gaze, looked up and found Nico. “Something on your mind?” she asked.

              With a sly smile he produced the hand-drawn map off of Chris’s girlfriend’s back. She moved to him and he spoke quietly. “It’s a map of the Citadel. An old friend…” She threw her arms around him.

              Far below Tyra observed this touching moment. Her eyes became slits, and she stewed as she watched the two of them put their heads together.

              Together Nico and Quinn pored over the oddest of maps. Nico pointed out what Chris had indicated were the only possible points of weakness, and together they tried to imagine a strategy for exploiting them… only to realize that this was a mission for which they were severely undermanned even if the Vaqueros could be persuaded to undertake it.

              “Chris was right. We are going to need an army.”

              She stared for a moment at the map as an idea took shape for her. “Maybe I can help,” said Quinn.

              As the sports arena’s silhouette receded in the distance, Quinn felt a peculiar kind of homesickness. She’d been there only a matter of weeks but discovered that the bonds she’d made tugged hard at her, and that the mission she undertook now was every bit as difficult as it was when she was forced to leave the hearth of the Neo-Spartans.

              It was late at night when she popped out of the Sanctuary wall and trotted along toward the city. The air was so fresh she broke into an out and out run toward Kilbert’s place. As she ran, she assembled what she’d say to him. But was Kilbert going to see things her way?

              Though the horizon revealed nothing but a long thin dawn, Kilbert was already up as she entered his domicile. He smiled, assessing her. “You bring news,” he said.

              “I do bring news,” she said. “Some of it very good. Some… unusual.” Quinn wrestled with herself.

              He could see she was an ocean of ideas and emotion, all bottled up. “Sit down,” he said. Quinn did so as Kilbert served her up a cup of green tea. Quinn savored its fragrance. All the comfort and security of her youth coursed through her, and she relaxed enough to be accessible. Kilbert saw that she was ready.

              “So, the good and unusual news,” he said as plainly as he could.

              She quickly ran down how her fight club skills had led her face to face with Grisner himself, and how he’d made the veiled reference to Gabriel’s being troublesome, which was to say, alive. She quickly conceded that Celeste had been wrong about a serum. They weren’t going to take their blood for studies, they were going to harvest their organs. All to save Grant Hughes. Kilbert listened gravely, the brutal reality not exactly a surprise to him.

              “But you’ve found the Citadel,” said Kilbert as calmly as he could. “That’s the good news.”

              “Yes,” she said, and forced out the rest. “But I don’t believe the extraction team plan will work. Ten men trying to take this place: impossible. We’d need ten times that.”

              “Quinn, you were asked to recon, not to strategize,” Kilbert said coolly, but as kindly as he could.

              Quinn hurried on, “This place is an impregnable fortress. You need many people. You need explosives. You need an army to defend and fight while a cordon of guys takes the kids out of the Sanctuary.”

              “You must know how difficult it will be to get a ten-man extraction team in, and now you want to sneak in a hundred? It can’t be done.”

              “You’re right,” she said, “it can’t. That’s why I came to you.” She took a deep breath, knowing she was venturing into hazardous territory. “This group I’ve penetrated, the Vaqueros, is willing to help me, help us–”

              “Why would they do that?”

              “Because I helped them. Using everything you taught me. I helped them get clean,” she exhorted. “They’ve embraced our ideas. They know the territory, but we have to work in concert. Co-operate with one another. The extraction team working with the Vaqueros, it can be done. We can get the boys out.” She leaned back and studied him. She had laid it out, plain and simple. It was in Kilbert’s hands now.

              Kilbert thought hard before he answered. She could see him vacillate between outrage at the idea and pity for her innocence.

              “Quinn, you had a single task: locate Gabriel and the boys and bring us a layout of where they’re being held. Apparently you got distracted.”

              “No, Kilbert, I didn’t get distracted. I’m looking at the bigger picture. It could be the end of suspicions. It could mean understanding. A unity forged from need.”

              “Tell me,” said Kilbert, “are you proposing some kind of future with these Eugenics?

Co-mingling?”

              “Why not?” she asked.

              “Because our purity will disappear.”

              “Maybe, but we’ll be giving others a chance to live longer, to improve and multiply our numbers. And to defeat this upside down society where one percent of the people decide the fate of everyone else.”

              “I see you’ve given this some thought. What else have you given?”

              “What is that supposed to mean?” Quinn said, but she felt herself turning red.