The Renegades (The Superiors) (19 page)

Then
Leo woke up and started screaming again, and again she cursed herself for
bringing the baby. Each cry sent a stab of pain into her brain. For a long
time, she couldn’t think of anything but her headache and stopping Leo’s mouth.
It seemed an impossible task. Finally she got him to take some milk powder and
a little water, but immediately afterwards, he started screaming again.

Dusk
had fallen by the time Draven came back, carrying a folded tarp under one arm
and a stack of clothes in the other. When he reached the open end of the
shelter, he dropped to his knees like he couldn’t stand for one more second. He
crawled into the shelter next to Cali and Leo. While Draven undressed at the
end of the shelter, Cali kept her back to him until she heard the leaves
crunching when he lay down. A black body-shaped bag encased him, leaving only
his face visible.

“There
are two foldable water bottles in the front pocket of that backpack,” he said,
nodding towards the new bag. “Refill them from the stream when they are empty.
You know where the food is. Do not awaken me unless you hear someone or
something approaching.” He spoke without opening his eyes, and when he had
finished, he pulled the bag tight around his head, and a zipper slid closed from
within, covering his face and hiding him completely from sight.

Chapter 33

Byron
paced the floor of his apartment, not realizing how tightly he gripped the can
of sap until it crumpled in his hand. He stopped, threw his head back and
finished it off, then slammed the crumpled can onto the counter so hard it
bounced off and skittered across the floor.

He
stomped back to his desk and checked his pod again. No new messages, no
attempts at contact. Where the hell had his trackers gone? He hadn’t heard from
them in two nights. This was unacceptable. He tried to contact them again, but got
no signal to Lapin’s device. He tried Lathan. “Invalid code,” his screen
blinked back. He checked it again, swore, and strode to his desk.

He
touched the desk screen and jiggled his leg impatiently while the start-up ad
informed him of the joys of surgical facial contouring. He didn’t care if he
looked perfect right then. He just wanted his damned saps back. This time he’d
really teach the bitch a lesson.

The
iridescent blue screen prompted his ID to activate. He slid his pod into its
station and pressed his hand to the handprint on the screen until it welcomed
him. He accessed the database and put in Lathan’s name. He chose the Lathan
Perkington of Princeton—there were only three in the database—and waited. He’d
put in the correct ID. He tried it again, and again he got the message “Invalid
code.” So Lathan had somehow broken his pod. But Lapin’s still worked, although
it didn’t connect when Byron tried it again.

He
slammed out of the apartment. Never before had one of his shitty moods lasted
so long. He noted the stormy cast of the sky. Looked like snow again. Just what
he needed to improve his mood.

He’d
been so angry he’d forgotten his pod, and he had to turn around at the car and
go all the way back to his desk to get it. He drove to the sapien farm with the
breeder he’d meant to try next. The woman who ran the farm had lost a sapien once,
and he’d interviewed her as part of the current case. She’d seemed simple and
honest and plain. He inspected the livestock, asked about their health, looked
through her records. After renting a trailer, he purchased an older sap who had
already given birth to five live saplings. The sap’s chart said she had less
than average intelligence but was strong and obedient. She didn’t say anything
to him except ‘Yes, Master,’ every time he spoke to her.

Byron
drove back to his apartment and led his new sap to the room with Shelton. He
had no need for a chain anymore. He’d locked the door to the garden after the
last bitch escaped, and he would probably never unlock it again. After watching
the sapiens make acquaintances, he told them to start making babies or he’d
pronounce them deficient and send them to the blood bank. Then he went back to
his desk. Still no messages from Lapin.

Damn
trackers. He probably could have found the renegades himself by now. But of
course he’d never take such a demeaning job as tracking saps through the woods.
He was an Enforcer, for evolution’s sake. An important man who had better
things to do.

Except
really, he didn’t. The case was at a stand-still.

He’d
taken the two newly assigned Enforcers to visit the partially-burned ghost town
where he’d thought, after the massacre, the case would end. But they’d never
found the bodies of any more saps or Superiors after that night, never found a
trail leaving the area, never found another clue. And the two people who might
have led him to a clue had somehow escaped.

It
was his fault, and that was what ate him up the most. He should have taken
Angel and Draven back with him that night. But he’d paralyzed them. That had
always been enough. How could he have known they’d escape somehow? How could he
have known Meyer was in the area to take the steel rods out of their brains?

Meyer
Kidd. The bane of his existence. He should arrive in Princeton any day now.
Then the fun would really begin.

Until
then, he had nothing to do but stare at his computer screens and scan records
he’d already studied until he knew them without having to turn on his computer
at all. He turned on his desk screen and looked through the case files one more
time. Then he switched over to the Enforcement feed and waited for something
interesting. Of course that didn’t happen. But he did find the closest thing
he’d had in a while, though it did not relate to the case. Someone in the Green
Zone, the label Enforcers used for an area so full of illegal activity that
they could go to make arrests when they had nothing else to work on, had
reported a man had bitten him and drank some of his blood.

Byron
claimed the case, snatched his jacket and hurried from his apartment. He had
been meaning to use his Deactivator on someone, and this proved an opportunity
too rare to pass up. He ducked into his car and started off towards the seedy
part of town where the altercation had taken place. In the two years he’d lived
in Princeton, he’d never had occasion to visit this side of town—he had his own
saps of higher quality than anything offered in the Green Zone, he didn’t want
a whore, and public pornography made him squeamish.

He
arrived at the crumbling apartments where victim and perpetrator both lived.
The buildings here, old army barracks from the War, made the Spartan apartments
of most Thirds look like castles for Firsts. He knew from other cities how these
buildings operated—the owners didn’t check identification and accepted
questionable goods and services in lieu of rent. If he announced his presence,
the residents would scurry out like rats from a sinking ship. But he wasn’t
looking for that sort of entertainment tonight.

Instead,
he followed the directions on his pod and arrived at the cannibalistic Third’s
door. He rapped three times and was answered by a voice telling him where he
could go and what he could do to himself once he arrived. He drew both his guns
and shouldered the door in. It crashed to the floor. A naked mistress with
enough surgical alterations to appear cartoonish leapt from the sofa, where
she’d been attempting to remain mounted atop the bucking cannibal beneath her.

The
man looked like a typical Third, thin but soft, with slightly pudgy arms he no
doubt hated, but which he lacked the means to enhance with surgery, and a bit
of extra padding around the middle. His cannibalistic act had filled him with rampant
energy, which he now worked off in the manner consistent with Thirds everywhere.
What a mistake it had been to evolve an entire generation of nothing but
teenagers and young twenties. They were so sexually charged they could barely
function. If it weren’t for Seconds creating laws to govern them, their
conception of an ideal society would consist of participating in one giant,
unending orgy.

The
mistress had gathered her scant clothing and was now struggling to wedge her
sizeable breasts into a pair of seashells fastened with elastic bands to form a
top of some sort. “I’m just leaving,” she assured him as one of her breasts
escaped the confines of the clam shell. She stuffed it back in just as the
other one popped free. “I don’t live here,” she said. “I’m going.”

Instead
of growing angry at the destruction of his door, the man only lay grinning on
his sofa as if displaying himself. “Oh, come on now, Lucinia, don’t be in such
a hurry,” he said. “Maybe he’d like to join us.” He grinned disgustingly at
Byron.

“Sorry,”
Lucinia said as she squeezed past Byron, holding her top in place with one hand
while carrying her glowing golden heels in the other. He let her go. She hadn’t
done anything more than her job, distasteful as that was.

“Aww,
now you gone and chased off my Luci,” the man on the sofa said.

“I
have a report that you bit someone.”

“That
bastard reported me, did he?” the man asked. He groped around on his end table
and wiped his finger in some white powder, which he rubbed along his gums. He
couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

“He
did,” Byron said. “And I’m here to arrest you for cannibalism. Are you going to
run?”

“Why
would I run? I didn’t do nothing. You can’t prove I did nothing. I ain’t gonna
run. Then you’d have something to arrest me for.”

Byron
did want him to run for that exact reason. Then he’d have an excuse to use the
Deactivator. He rarely had the opportunity, but he’d been meaning to since
Draven escaped, though he was fairly certain Meyer had engineered the whole
thing. Still, it never hurt to double check. Thoroughness was one of Byron’s
strong points.

Unfortunately,
Thirds rarely fought back during arrest. They usually groveled and begged like
the pathetic dogs they were. But today, Byron needed one to resist arrest, and
he had ways of making that happen.

“Put
yourself away before I shoot it off,” Byron said, aiming his gun at the man’s genitals.
He strode to the sofa and stood over him.

“Man,
you’re crazy,” the Third said, jumping up. He had a wild look to him now, like
an animal that might bolt at any moment. Depending on how much Superior blood
he’d ingested, he’d be experiencing a burst of energy that might even match his
strength to Byron’s, if only temporarily. The danger came when he realized it.

Byron
did not intend to let him find out.

“It’s
‘sir’ to you,” Byron said, knocking the man’s feet from under him with one
swift kick. He bent and pushed the muzzle of his Deactivator against the man’s
temple. “This will only hurt a bit,” he said.

“What
the fuck,” the man on the floor said, his voice nearing a whine. “I didn’t do
nothing. My neighbor, he’s lying, man. Sir. I swear it.”

Byron
moved the gun, feeling for the exact spot. He always hit it. He’d trained to
use the gun for years, though he rarely had to. But he’d paralyzed many, many
Thirds during his training.

He
squeezed the trigger and felt the satisfying crack as the bullet burst forth
and stopped in the soft bed of brain matter within the man’s skull. His eyes
stared up at Byron, aware but unable to move or even blink. “That’s better,”
Byron said, kneeling beside the living corpse. “Doesn’t that feel good, being
completely relaxed? Just surrender. Not that you have a choice. Probably
doesn’t feel much different to a Third. You are never in control, not even of
your own bodies. Disgusting, the way you carry on.” He leaned over and spit in
the man’s open eye, which fluttered with involuntary reaction.

Byron
laughed and stood to walk around the apartment. It was a shithole if he’d ever
seen one. The floor was bare and dirty, like an animal’s hovel. The sofa looked
like rats had spent more time on it than people had. The bedroom contained
nothing but a bare mattress patched with wide bands of tape in several places
and piled with a few filthy rags. Men who debased themselves this way were less
even than typical Thirds, more like saps than Superiors. Byron spit on the
mattress and stalked from the bedroom. A man like this did not deserve even
animal sap, let alone human sap. And he’d taken it upon himself to draw the
sacred blood of a Superior?

“You’re
a pathetic smear of sapshit,” Byron said, stepping over the vagrant. At least
his paralysis had rid the Third of his erection. Now all of him lay limp and
soft on the floor like some kind of bloated corpse. “You’re a slimy, rotting
leach on the testicle of society. And I’d bet my life you’re an Illegal. It’s
not even legal for you to be alive. You’re a waste of life, of sap, of every
resource this government gave you that you pissed away like some disgusting
animal. And now you’re going to start eating your own people, like some kind of
savage?” He kicked the man’s soft belly. It sank in, and his lips emitted a
puff of air. “You don’t deserve to live. You don’t even deserve the time for a
trial, you sapsucking cuntivore.” He kicked the man again, this time in the groin.

With
cold fascination, he watched the lack of expression on the man’s face as he
began to kick him again and again. The thing was revolting, worse than a sap,
worse than anything Byron could imagine. He’d been given all the advantages and
opportunities of eternal life, and instead of appreciating his beneficent
government’s generosity, he’d crawled into a filthy hovel like a cockroach and fucked
his life away, quite literally, while taking advantage of the very society that
had nurtured him for a hundred years, betraying the people who spent their time
and energy finding ways to feed and clothe him and offer him employment,
preferring instead to steal his food, rather than earn it like a man, if by
some stretch he could have been called such, when he couldn’t even bother to
register when he arrived in Princeton but instead skulked about, sneaking
suckles from the dredges of society, participating in evolution-only-knew-what
debauchery to earn his keep, waiting for Byron to turn his back for one second
so he could sneak in like a weasel and snatch the very sap Byron had once shared
with him as a gift, out of the generosity of his heart…

Byron
stopped his foot mid-strike and turned away, breathing hard. He’d forgotten
himself for a moment, and the man he’d begun kicking hadn’t been the man he’d
continued to beat far longer than the excusable length for a criminal resisting
arrest. But he could always say the man had fought back, that he’d used the
Deactivator after the fight. Who would believe an Illegal over an Enforcer? He
turned back and looked at the man. Blood had begun leaking from his flaccid
penis.

Byron
shuddered and turned away again, crossed the room and stood at the window. He
wished he was back home, where he could retreat to his study to have time to
think, or even at his Princeton apartment where he could look out over the city
glittering before him. From this tiny window, he could see only the wall of
another old barracks building. He stood for a few minutes considering his next
move. Then he found the man’s clothes, a stained and greasy shirt missing most
of the buttons and a pair of ragged shorts. Though he didn’t relish the thought
of dressing the filthy man, he didn’t want to waste clean government-issue
clothes at the jail, so he shoved the man’s limp legs into the shorts and
dragged them up.