Under My Skin (Wildlings) (15 page)

"I figured you'd try to make a break for it. Your plan was pretty obvious when you slipped into the back room."

"That still doesn't tell me how you got out here ahead of me."

His head shimmers and he flashes me a quick coyote grin. "I have my ways."

 I nod and let the door close behind me. Inside, I go into the bathroom, flush the toilet and wet my hands, like that was all I was doing. When I come out into the store, I'm drying them on my jeans. I don't even look at the FBI agent. I just sit on the floor beside Barry and shoot the breeze for a while. My phone vibrates with a text from Marina.

just gang of 2 @ garage

I say bye to Barry and leave the mall.

Secret Agent Man, a.k.a. Agent McCloud, follows me all the way back to Desmond's place. He's carrying his jacket over his arm, has his sleeves rolled up and his tie in his pocket, but he still doesn't look like he belongs anywhere except for doing secret agent stuff.

Desmond and Marina are in the garage when I get there. If Elzie had shown up in the meantime, I'm sure Marina would've texted me. I don't like to show the Feds anything about my life, but Cory told me to do what I'd normally do and this is it.

"She wasn't here when—" Desmond begins, stopping as I hold up my hand.

I find a piece of paper and write:
Could the place be bugged
?

They both look at me with wide eyes. Desmond starts to say something, but I put a finger to my lips.

I write:
We can't talk without some noise
.

"Let's play some music," I say aloud.

I pick up my guitar, turn on my amp, check my tuning. Then I stand right beside Marina at her drum kit and start to play the theme song from that old British TV series
Danger Man
: "Secret Agent Man." I can play that song in my sleep. I think Johnny Rivers sang it and yeah, I know he didn't write it. Not a lot of people wrote their own material back in those days. But they still put their own stamp on it. Our version's kind of a Ventures/garage rock take that keeps the slinky spy vibe.

Desmond laughs at the song choice. He and Marina fall in, bass and drums locking down the rhythm, but at a low volume, like I'm playing. Desmond steps closer so that he's on the other side of Marina and we can all talk without shouting.

"Do you really think they put a bug in my garage?" he asks.

"I have no idea," I say. "Maybe I'm just being paranoid. But that FBI guy definitely followed me all the way to Spyglass Games and then back here to your place."

"It's like being in a James Bond movie."

"No, it's like having your life go down the tubes and there's nothing you can do about it."

I go on to tell them about meeting Cory and what he told me.

"I don't mean to take sides here," Marina says when I'm done, "but Cory was right."

"I know."

"What are you going to do?" Desmond asks.

"There's nothing I can do except what Cory said: be cool and try to act as normal as I can. Right now, I just want to make some noise."

Without waiting for either of them to respond, I thumb the volume control on my Les Paul way up and start playing the chunky chords for "Louie Louie." Desmond shrugs and falls in with the simple bass line. Marina grins and pounds on her drums.

We play through a bunch of songs until Desmond's mom finally comes into the garage with her hands over her ears and tells us to put a lid on it.

Marina

From Nira's LiveJournal blog,
My Life as an Otter
:

Congressman Clayton Householder. Take note of that name, my friends. This man might be the biggest danger that we face. He's been on a crusade against Wildlings ever since the first one of us showed up. The media love him and with all the press that he gets, he just may succeed in getting everyone else to hate us, too.

For those of you who haven't seen what's trending on Twitter and the other social media, let me fill you in. Clayton Householder is a religious zealot who claims that the kids who've changed to Wildlings must have done something to bring God's wrath down upon their heads. He says his job is to stop this "sinful disease" from spreading.

So he's lobbying the legislature to pass laws that will allow the government to capture all the Wildlings and contain the "disease" by imposing a quarantine on all of Santa Feliz.

That's right, kids. Quarantine means if there are good curls down in San Diego or Mexico, you're not going to be riding those waves. And say your favourite band is playing a gig in L.A. or Long Beach—you're not going to be catching that show. Of course, if you're locked away in some hellhole, it's not as though you'll be surfing or catching shows anyway.

Look, it's been proven that what we have is not a virus, so a quarantine isn't going to "solve" anything. And you don't see Wildlings going around attacking people. You're way more likely to have a banger messing up your face.

I've so had it with the bad rap that Wildlings are getting. It seems to me that we're being persecuted for having something extra that other people don't have. I don't know exactly what this is or why it happened, but I am one hundred percent certain that what we have is good, not bad. I wish we didn't have to hide it and we sure shouldn't have to feel ashamed of it.

Fortunately, not all politicians are as whacked out as Householder. It's early days still, so talk to your parents about his witch hunt. If that quarantine happens, it's going to affect them as much as us, so ask them to call their congressional representative.

But speak discreetly, my Wildling friends … until all danger has passed, keep the secret of your gift to yourselves.

Josh

I read through a bunch more of the archived
My Life as an Otter
blogs after dinner, when I'm supposed to be doing my homework. A message pop-up tells me that Nira has just posted a new entry, so I click on her latest blog about Congressman Householder.

Man, this keeps going from bad to worse. One wrong move could put me in that same holding facility that Cory broke into last night to rescue his friends. I'm glad Mr. Delaney gave me an extension on my history essay because of my "trouble at home," but with something like this hanging over my head, it's hard to care much about English homework or that overdue essay.

Actually, up until this latest post, I haven't concentrated very hard on the blog, either. Mostly, I've just looked for clues to see if I can figure who the mysterious otter girl really is. She's pretty circumspect. Her blogs manage to be really personal without giving away any information about her identity.

I might be better at finding those clues about Nira if I weren't so distracted worrying about Elzie. It's almost midnight now and there's still no word from her. My phone's sitting between my keyboard and the monitor. I keep waiting for it to vibrate with either a call or text.

Maybe I'm being watched somehow. I'm tempted to sneak out to see if I can spy FBI agents skulking around, but I promised Mom I'd tell her if I was going out and it's not like I can tell her the truth. She was so cool about letting me off the hook last week and I really don't want to lose her trust. It's bad enough I can't tell her about this whole Wildling business.

My window's open. I get up from the computer and lean on the sill. I let the night air fill my nostrils and see how many scents I can identify. Maybe I'll smell an agent out here.

It's weird how
much
there is to smell. I never really paid attention to it before. The night's full of sounds, too, if you take the time to concentrate. I suppose it helps if you can tap into a mountain lion's senses, but really, I think we mostly go through life half asleep—oblivious to all the little details of the world around us. I like being able to notice all these things. It's definitely one of the gifts that comes with being a Wildling.

That makes me think of Nira again. Maybe I should try to send her a private message. But just as I start to turn back around, something catches my attention beyond the window.

It starts out as a feeling, more than actually hearing or smelling anything. I pop the screen and lean out a little, really opening my nostrils, smelling and listening. That's when I hear a giggle. The backyard is dark, but my night sight cuts right through the shadows to find Elzie crouched low along the side of the house. I'm so happy to see her, my heart does a little leap.

"You should see what your face looks like when you do that," she says in a loud whisper.

I smile and lean further out to look at her. "What are you
doing
there," I whisper back.

"Stand back from the window," she says.

I barely have time to get out of the way before a large cat comes bounding through the opening. It lands in the middle of the room, transforming back into Elzie. A nude Elzie.

"Whoops," she says as she strikes a sultry pose.

There's a rapid transformation into her Wildling jaguarundi shape, then back to her own, this time dressed. I know she did it on purpose just to get a rise out of me—figuratively as well as literally. Her gaze goes to where I've got a stiff tent pole under my pants. She grins.

"Happy to see me?" she asks in a normal voice.

I nod, but put a finger to my lips.

She steps close to whisper into my ear, "Are you worried about your mom hearing me?"

Her warm breath in my ear tickles. It also makes the bulge in my pants push harder against the fabric.

I shake my head and whisper back into her ear, "Maybe the room's bugged."

"Oh, you don't have to worry about that," she says in a normal voice. "If the room was bugged I'd know. The transmitter has to send out a signal and Auntie Min taught me to identify it. Checking for that's the first thing I did when I got outside your house because—you know the Feds have a car parked down the street, right?"

"I figured they might. They questioned me at school and they've been following me around ever since."

"Do you have anything to eat?" she asks. "I'm starving."

I go into the kitchen and bring back a bag of tortilla chips and some salsa.

"Yum," she says and digs in.

"Why didn't you call me or send a text?" I ask.

"I didn't know who you'd be with."

"I'm not going to be with some other—oh. You mean the FBI."

"Yeah, they've been heavying people all over town. They showed up under the overpass and would have taken everybody in for questioning, except they all scattered while the cops were getting out of their cars."

"Cory told me he broke some people out of the holding facility at the naval base. He thinks that's why the FBI is being so aggressive."

She nods. "And all this talk about quarantining Santa Feliz probably has them scrambling to be in control of the situation."

"I heard about that. Do you really think it'll come to a quarantine?"

"Not unless a bunch of Wildlings get out of control." She pauses, then adds, "Or if the authorities decide they can prove that what's happened to us is communicable, instead of accepting what it really is."

I give her a blank look.

"I keep telling you," she says. "It's a gift. From Mother Earth, or Gaia, or God, or the Creator, or whatever spiritual force it is that guides the world. Auntie Min calls it the Grace, but I'm never quite sure if she's talking about a person, a place, or maybe some combination of the two."

"Auntie Min sounds really interesting," I say. "I would have liked to have met her."

"Why can't you?"

"You just said everybody scattered."

She nods. "Yeah, but Auntie Min won't go far. This is her holy ground. They'll all end up back there after the cops split."

"Her holy ground? You mean Santa Feliz?"

"Not exactly. It's more like the land that Santa Feliz is built on."

I think about that for a moment.

"She's not a Wildling, is she?" I say.

"If you mean, did she get changed in the last six months like us, then no. She's one of the old ones, like Cory—or at least, they're a lot older than either you or me. How old, I don't know. Auntie Min says that there were animal people here when the world first began and some of those first Wildlings are still around today."

"Do you believe that?"

Elzie shrugs. "Why not? What's happened to us is pretty extraordinary."

That's an understatement. But
immortal
Wildlings? I think that's a bit of a stretch, but I don't say anything to Elzie. I don't want to set off an argument.

"This is really good salsa," she says. "What kind is it?"

"Homemade. My mom got the recipe from Marina's mom."

"Mmm."

She dips a couple more chips into the salsa and puts them both in her mouth, chewing with relish.

"Is Auntie Min the leader of the ferals?" I ask, hoping this won't lead to anything confrontational.

"She isn't a feral," Elzie says after she swallows, "and we don't really have a leader. We aren't really that organized. I don't think any of the Wildlings are. If we
could
organize, maybe it'd be different. Maybe we could force the government to accept us as people, instead of trying to round us up and lock us away."

"Do you think that's possible?"

"Why not? Once upon a time, women couldn't vote and your ancestors were slaves. But we fixed that, didn't we?"

There are still misogynists and racists out there, but I know what she means. It's better now. A lot better. Not perfect, but maybe perfection's impossible. You can't just make laws. You have to change the way people think and that can't be legislated.

"But I doubt Wildlings will ever get into organized group lobbying or anything," Elzie goes on. "The change is more of spiritual state—I'm sure you know what I mean. Even Auntie Min says that every individual has to find their own path into the Grace."

"The Grace," I repeat. "I like that term."

"Me too," she says. "Sometimes late at night, when I'm in my jaguarundi shape and running at top speed down some deserted beach, I can feel what she means. I get this whole Zen thing happening inside."