Xenofreak Nation (10 page)

“Thanks, Dad.” It was her standard answer.

“Well, you’re very welcome, Honey. Listen…now that the graft has pretty much healed and you’ve had a chance to get used to it, I think it’s time to hit back.”

Bryn looked at her father like he’d spoken in an alien tongue, but he forged ahead without noticing.

“I’ve hired a marketing director for The Pure Human Society and he wants to strike while the iron is hot. If we wait too long, we’ll lose momentum. Media interest has already started to fade. Did you notice we only have a few die-hard crews still outside?”

Bryn hadn’t so much as peeked out the blinds this entire time for fear someone would snap a shot of her. She shook her head at her father, dreading to hear more.

He said, “Manny, the marketing guy, is as good as they get. He’s already got you scheduled for appearances on two major morning news shows. You’ve always wanted to meet Hannah MacManus, right?”

Bryn knew who Hannah MacManus was, but had never expressed interest in actually meeting her. As she listened to her father rattle on, she finally understood the phrase, ‘through the looking glass.’

“I don’t want to,” she interrupted him.

“What?”

“I’m not going to do any of that.”

He stared at her uncomprehendingly for a moment before clenching his jaw and speaking through his teeth. “Yes, you will. This is essential to everything I’m trying to accomplish. You’re the victim here, Sweetie, but you don’t have to lie down and take it. You can be a voice for all the other victims out there.”

“No,” she said in a small voice. “I just want to be left alone.”

“That’s the depression talking. I thought you were getting better. The psychiatrist is helping, right? Or maybe we should talk to the doctors about medication. Until then, if you really need more time, I can ask Manny to reschedule. But no more than a week, tops.”

A germ of an idea was spreading in Bryn’s mind; a terrible confluence of what she’d assumed were separate, and coincidental, events that had one thing in common—her father.

After they’d mutilated her, when she’d surfaced briefly from her drug-induced fog, she’d heard a snippet of conversation. She’d told neither the XIA agents nor her father what she’d heard because it hadn’t made any sense and she’d convinced herself she’d hallucinated it. Now it came back to haunt her.

Someone, and from the deep, barely feminine voice, Bryn suspected it was Nurse Vonda, had said, “He asked for something subtle.”

A man’s voice had responded authoritatively, “Subtle won’t cut it. He needs public outcry or no one will give a damn—is she awake?”

She’d faded out again almost immediately, but somehow the words stayed with her.

Her father was waiting for her to say something. She did, but not what he expected. “Why didn’t you do anything to protect me at the rally?”

“What?”

“Why was I there all by myself? Why was I allowed to walk back to my car alone when you knew I was in danger?”

Her father’s face froze except for tiny twitches around his mouth and eyes, as if he was struggling to control multiple emotions. “I was planning on setting something up after the rally, but it’s not like we could afford to hire a body guard. I feel awful enough about everything without you trying to make me feel worse.”

He’d turned it around, like he turned everything around. If she screamed at him, threw accusations at him, she would lose. He would have an answer for everything and his strategy would be to deny everything. It was not a battle she was equipped to win. There was only one possible way for her to get to the truth. He may outgun her in the lying department, but she had an advantage—she rarely lied and he wouldn’t expect it.

She sniffed pathetically and rubbed a hand under her nose. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

His tense body relaxed like a puppet whose strings had been cut. “Oh, Baby Girl, I know I’m asking a lot of you.”

She forced a tremulous smile and lifted her chin. “I’ve decided I will do it after all. I’ll help you, but there’s a catch. I want you to tell me the truth.”

He started to say something, but she held up a hand and continued resolutely, “I’d do anything for you, and for Mom. And…just so we’re clear…I already know. They told me when they kidnapped me, but I need to hear it from you. I need to know why you did it.”

Her father looked like she’d slapped him, but as he searched her face to verify the meaning of her words she didn’t give her own fake honesty a chance to waver. She reached over to the photo album, turned it around and tapped her finger on Nurse Vonda. He leaned down to look and couldn’t hide the flash of recognition and guilt that swept over his face.

“She was your contact, wasn’t she?” Bryn asked.

He sat on the bed, defeat in every line of his body.

“They could have saved your mom, you know,” he said, low and slow. “The corporation who gave her the pig heart.”

“Why didn’t they then?”

“They paid for everything the first go-around, when she agreed to be their lab rat. Then they abandoned her when the heart failed. Said they wouldn’t fund another one. Said we were on our own, that we had health insurance. But back then, insurance only covered human donors, not another porcine one, even though by that time there were so many bioengineered pigs out there we could have juggled the damned things. But human hearts? Not so many, and none that matched. That area of science, anti-rejection medicine, hadn’t advanced, still hasn’t.”

“What does that have to do with me?” she asked.

“Your mom never should have done it. I fought her every step of the way. You know how I feel about xenoalteration in any form. It’s unnatural, especially when stem cell regenerative cloning would use human cells, pure human cells, to accomplish even more—if only the conservatives would get off their ethical high-horses and allow it. There are bioengineers who’ve already made amazing advances in the area, but they’re crippled by the world-wide ban on embryo use.”

She was struck dumb by his words, by a revelation so earth-shattering, she stopped breathing and wondered if she had the fortitude to begin again. He didn’t have to say another word; she already knew the depths to which he’d sunk to further his cause. That he’d used her as a pawn was bad enough, but that he’d done it hand-in-hand with a monster like Dr. Fournier was the ultimate betrayal.

An unnatural calm suffused her soul. “You want to make human cloning legal?”

Her father let out a frustrated growl. “I’m not alone. In the last decade, cancers and autoimmune diseases have skyrocketed. Health insurance premiums are second only to the mortgage in the average household budget. Quality of care is in the toilet. If the United States doesn’t take a stand, there won’t be anything left to stand for.”

“The legislation,” she said dully. “The Pure Human Society is a front.”

“No. Everything I’ve said about regulating the practice of xenoalteration has been true. It needs to be made safer for the poor fools who choose that lifestyle.”

“I didn’t choose it.”

He grabbed her hands and squeezed painfully. “But you understand, don’t you? You see why I had to make the ultimate sacrifice…my beautiful daughter. Think what will happen once the legislation passes and grant money becomes available! Research facilities will break the speed barrier to compete for the money. In a couple of years, I guarantee they’ll be able to grow new hair for you from your own cells.”

Bryn’s shaky nod went off to one side, but she managed to keep a look of agreement on her face even though tears began streaming down her cheeks. Her heart was breaking, not only from the betrayal, but because what she’d always mistaken in her father for fervent zeal was in reality something much more dangerous.

“So you’ll do it?” He, too, had tears in his eyes. “All we lacked was public support, and that’s where you come in. You’ll be the anti-xenofreak poster child, and once we have their attention, we can change the message.”

Bryn was having a harder and harder time maintaining her composure. The rage and hurt rose in waves, and every time she beat it down, it rose again more strongly. Her goal now, for the short term, was to get her father out of her bedroom.

She gulped a breath of air and said, “I’m on board, Dad. Just—can I be alone for awhile? I really need to think.”

He made an aborted motion like he was going to hug her but didn’t want to deal with the quills. “I’m so, so sorry, Baby. Sorry that I didn’t trust you enough to let you know what—what needed to be done.”

If he didn’t leave, she was going to explode in a fiery ball of hate and fury and that couldn’t happen. She no longer knew what he was capable of. It was vital that she keep her true feelings under control if she wanted to get out of this in one piece. He’d had her kidnapped and mutilated. What else would he do to secure her compliance if she didn’t go along with him now? She recalled his words, “Maybe we should talk to the doctors about medication.”

She choked out one last word, “Okay.”

When he left, she took her pillow with her into the closet, shut the door and despite the quills, managed to muffle her sobs. When she emerged an hour later with a tentative plan of action, she hid the shredded pillow and picked up each and every feather.

Chapter Twenty

Scott wanted to drive, but Padme pointed out that anyone looking in would see his hands on the steering wheel.

“You should have found a pair of gloves,” she said.

“In July? That’d be just as conspicuous.”

“We are both wearing our hoods up. Is that not conspicuous? We radiate conspicuosity.”

Scott didn’t think ‘conspicuosity’ was a word, but didn’t argue.

She drove. The car was, indeed, a clunker, a gasoline-powered monstrosity that probably cost its owner a bundle every year in green tax. If they did as he asked and destroyed it, he’d be able to put a down payment on a modest electric version. Instead, because there was no way they trusted the guy not to call the police immediately after they walked out the door, Padme parked the car four blocks away, near a corner convenience store.

Scott picked up some snacks in order to break one of Shasta’s twenties while Padme selected a small bottle of antacids and two sodas. There was an old television behind the counter blaring a news report. In the worst timing possible, they’d come in just as their mug shots were plastered across the screen. Scott sensed Padme tense up next to him, but since the cable networks only broadcast in holo, the picture on the television was blurry and the color off just enough to make the photographs resemble almost anyone fitting their general descriptions. Except for the fact that the woman who was supposed to be Padme had normal ears. He hoped she wouldn’t notice.

Their good luck held out. There were no other customers in the store and the guy behind the counter, in typical New York fashion, showed no curiosity whatsoever. They stayed calm, paid for their stuff and walked out casually.

Half a block away, they sat on a bus stop bench. Padme opened her medicine bottle, penetrated the safety seal with her fingernail and handed Scott four blue capsules and one of the sodas.

“No thanks,” he said. “I have an iron stomach.”

“I’m not suggesting your anxiety level is producing excess stomach acid,” Padme said. She held her hand out until Scott accepted the pills. “The new class of proton-pump inhibitors will cripple any micro-transmitters we may have consumed in jail.”

Scott’s cultivated neutral expression helped him disguise his shock. He tried not to sound as avidly curious as he was. “What does that mean?”

“Routine countermeasure. The FBI and CIA, and probably the XIA now, as well, can track our whereabouts with microscopic devices that transmit infinitesimally small radio pulses undetectable to normal receivers. They have no power source, but instead use acid from the host’s gastrointestinal track to run, like battery acid. Ingenious, really, but not infallible. The key is that unless you happen to be in possession of one of the feds’ special receivers, they are undetectable, so the host is never aware of them to attempt countermeasures. Dr. Fournier, however, is the most paranoid person I’ve ever met.”

Scott looked at the capsules in his hand suspiciously. “So the antacid will disable the transmitters?”

“No, just weaken them enough so the radio pulses can only be picked up when we’re close to a receiver. Mostly, they’re located on cell towers, so easily avoided.”

“Wow,” he said. Unbidden, the memory of Bryn being subdued by Nurses Vonda and Nancy came to mind. They’d given her a shot of something that calmed her significantly and then coaxed her to swallow some pills. They’d initiated Dr. Fournier’s ‘countermeasures’ right in front of Scott and he’d been none the wiser.

When they got on the bus, the driver didn’t so much as glance their way. There weren’t very many passengers this time of day, and the few that were on the bus were either snoozing or had their heads buried in holoreaders. They rode that bus, took the subway and then got on a few other buses until debarking on Coney Island.

After Poppy, a powerful category four hurricane that dealt Long Island a direct blow in 2020, the already seedy Coney Island underwent a drastic change for the worse. Poppy didn’t discriminate. She wiped out public housing and rich communities alike. Tourist attractions that had been there for more than a century were flattened. Many businesses were destroyed, and others moved elsewhere as the neighborhoods failed to regenerate. The stadium that housed the popular Brooklyn Cyclones had collapsed from the flooding, and the city, beleaguered with the cost of reinstating basic services everywhere, had temporarily condemned it. Temporary had become permanent, at least until funding sources manifested, and in this economy, that wasn’t likely any time soon. The XBestia gang moved in.