Xenofreak Nation (2 page)

Harry Vega went on and on. Scott hadn’t slept well last night—if he was honest, he’d admit he hadn’t slept well since he’d taken on this assignment—and he fought a persistent series of yawns. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Padme adjust her scarf. She was a mystery to him, more so than most females. Her scarf covered her alteration: a set of drooping cow ears. Rumor was she’d had it done as some sort of penance, but Scott knew different. Whatever the reason, Padme’s cow ears effectively blocked her eardrums, giving the term ‘ear muffs’ a whole new meaning. Sometimes he spoke to her and wasn’t sure if she was ignoring him or just hadn’t heard what he said.

She’d gotten them from the same person they’d all gotten their xenoalterations from, the infamous Dr. Nicholas Fournier. He’d been head of surgery at Manhattan’s prestigious Xenotransplantation Hospital until it was discovered he had a gruesome secret. Despite requirements that all organs and tissue removed from patients be destroyed, Dr. Fournier had been caught with a macabre collection of appendages and whatnot from a wide range of patients, some of them powerful enough to make a very big stink. He kept them in his apartment in a room dedicated to the ghoulish display, a shrine of body parts pickled in jars of formaldehyde. He’d been booted out of the hospital, of course, and his license to practice medicine had been revoked. But that didn’t stop him. If anything, it freed him to pursue his more Frankensteinian perversions.

His ignoble plunge from grace served to embitter him towards the establishment, or so Scott was told. When Scott went underground to get his alteration from the good doctor, he didn’t ask. Not that he actually met him. Scott had been shuttled around by a chosen few nurses, who conducted his interviews and exams, took payment and prepped him for surgery. Security was so tight they’d sedated him before moving him to Dr. Fournier’s secret facility for the procedure.

Scott lifted his chin when Harry Vega began a rant against the XBestias. While in recovery after his xenotransplant, Scott had been recruited into the notorious gang by Dr. Fournier’s right-hand man, known only as Lupus. Latin for wolf, the name fit perfectly, since Lupus no longer had a human face—it had been replaced with that of a grey wolf.

“Two days after I saw that zebra-defiling xenofreak scouting security at the bank, it was robbed at gunpoint by known XBestia gang members,” Harry Vega said. “I have it on good authority that every person in the bank during that robbery is now dead.”

Scott couldn’t control the look of alarm that crossed his face, but if anyone noticed, they’d think he was as appalled as the rest of them.

No one was supposed to know about this.

As Vega went on to assert that the XBestias had somehow identified and killed each and every person who’d been in the bank that day, Scott relaxed. Vega didn’t know squat.

By the time the windbag began wrapping up his interminable speech, the crowd had grown to about a hundred people. The target looked around when a television news van pulled up and Scott practically felt her eyes brush over him again. Once the news crew approached and asked Vega for an interview, the speech was over and the throng finally began to dissipate.

The target seemed to be trying to catch her father’s eye, but he didn’t notice. She waved to him anyway and a thoughtful look settled over her face as she began walking up Huffman Park Avenue.

Padme jumped off the retaining wall and followed her. Fiske and Barney too fell into line a few people behind Padme. Scott went the other way, through the alley west of the Huffman Building, across a weed-choked dirt lot and through a broken chain link fence.

The gravel parking lot was one of few free places to park in the area, which is probably why Vega chose this location for his demonstration. Scott got into a nondescript white van and started the engine. In the side view mirrors, he watched as the target approached her pert little VW Hamster, which was parked across the aisle directly behind the van.

Padme caught up to her and Scott got a glimpse of one of the shy xeno’s rare and dazzling smiles. The target would think Padme was all friendliness as she asked for directions, but only until she sensed Fiske and Barney closing in.

Chapter Three

Bryn was surprised when the girl in the scarf approached her. She’d pegged her as pro-xenofreak, but here she was, all smiles, saying in a genteel, lightly accented voice, “It was a good speech, yes?”

Bryn shrugged and tried to look pleasant even though she was on guard—and not about to cop to being Harry Vega’s only daughter. Just that morning he’d warned her, “I’m ticking off some very unpredictable people, Brynnie. We need to take every precaution to keep ourselves safe.”

It was just like him to instill a sense of fear in her but not give any indication how she was supposed to protect herself. Just last week a horrible news holo out of Chicago showed a clash between an animal rights group holding a peaceful demonstration and three passing xenofreaks. There were conflicting reports about who started it, but one of the xenofreaks ended the name-calling and shoving by producing a home-made mini-submachine gun and, quite casually, razing the crowd. Miraculously, no one was killed. Cops didn’t catch the perpetrator, but several people got his face on holo. He had a scrolled xenograft curving around the outer portion of one eye a la Mike Tyson, in what authorities believed to be crocodile skin.

The girl in the scarf removed her sunglasses with a flourish to reveal large, amused brown eyes. With a bounce in her step, she walked to the back of Bryn’s Hamster so Bryn had to spin around to keep her in view. It struck Bryn that the girl seemed to be almost aggressively trying to engage her attention.

“Do you hate us, then?” The girl asked, pulling her scarf away on one side just enough to reveal long black hair partially covering what appeared to a droopy bunny ear, or, given the rough appearance of the fur, a cow ear attached upside down. A cold ball of dread formed in Bryn’s stomach.

The girl’s smile faded, and her eyes shifted for a fraction of a second to somewhere over Bryn’s shoulder. Bryn started to look around, but something pressed firmly into the small of her back and a low male voice said, “Don’t move.”

Bryn stared into the xenofreak girl’s newly expressionless face as the newcomer positioned himself to stand behind her, so close she shuddered at the feel of his hips brushing against the back of her dress and stiffened when he rested his chin on her shoulder. His unshaven face pricked her bare skin and she flinched away from the rank odor of onions on his breath. “Do as we say and you won’t get hurt.” Like the girl, he sounded cheerful.

Bryn’s knees began to shake as he grasped her arm with his free hand and steered her toward a white van. Another man—except Bryn had already begun to think of them as less than human—sprang ahead of them. As soon as the second man reached out for the door handle at the back of the van, a burst of adrenaline sent Bryn’s heart racing. She reacted without thought. Clasping her fist in her hand she shot her elbow up and back, connecting with onion-breath’s nose. Ignoring the shaft of pain down her forearm, she bent forward at the waist and simultaneously lifted her knee. A hard stomp on her accoster’s instep forced a grunt out of him. The xenofreak girl stepped back and held her hands up as if denying any involvement. Bryn had just enough time to suck in a breath for a scream when onion-breath’s hand came from behind and awkwardly tried to cover her mouth. She was frantic now, throwing her arms out and twisting away.

She heard a distant voice yell, “Hey!” and experienced a fleeting hope that help was on the way just before something fast and hard caught her in the temple. The ground rose up to meet her face, crushing gravel into her cheek. She lay there, stunned and barely aware when she was dragged, lifted and dropped onto a hard metallic surface. The sound of the van doors slamming in finality was the last she heard before floating away into unconsciousness.

Chapter Four

If he compared the loosely structured hierarchy of the XBestias with that of the US Marines, Scott figured he’d fall somewhere between a private first class and a lance corporal. Not at the bottom of the heap exactly, but in the six months since he’d been playing henchman to the goons who reported to Lupus, it had been extremely difficult to gain their trust. Every one of the xenofreaks he’d met had some kind of serious personality flaw—which would explain why they’d chosen to basically mutilate themselves. Not that they thought of it that way.

The Warehouse was located in a primarily xenofreakish part of town, and that’s where they took the target. The story was that the Warehouse had been home to a chemical manufacturer shut down by the EPA for transgressions unknown to the XBestia squatters now occupying the huge tumbledown space. It took Scott months to get used to the smell, kind of a cross between sewer gas and car exhaust that was so strong it permeated the brick walls and cement floors. The original owner had purportedly gone bankrupt and never complied with EPA orders to decontaminate the site. The building went up for auction, but no one wanted to buy it, for obvious reasons. Scott and the others had no idea what they were exposing themselves to every time they came ‘home,’ but until the consequences of living in such a toxic environment manifested itself, they considered the risk marginally better than living on the streets.

He drove the van through the gate of a chain link fence with battered privacy slats and left the keys in the ignition. They got out and Scott hefted the limp and unresponsive target in a fireman’s carry. Another XBestia got into the van and took it away while Scott carried his boneless burden into the Warehouse, inhaling the scent of her vanilla body spray before the noxious odor inside had a chance to overpower his olfactory sense.

He took her to Exam Room Three, one of about a dozen eight-by-eight rooms along the west wall that had functioned as offices for the management of the previous occupants. Most of the exam rooms had blacked-out windows, but number three was built up against a load-bearing section of wall with no windows at all, and when not in use by the nurses, it doubled as a detention room of sorts. Exam Room Three got a lot of use.

Scott was met by Vonda the Snake, whose job history included surgical nurse and a short-lived stint in the medical ward at a correctional facility. From there, she’d been fired for insubordinately flouting the dress code. This was a euphemism for Vonda having gotten herself xenografted with, at last count, the skins of a dozen types of snake. Vonda was heavy-set, butch as they come, and even though she’d been nothing but nice, Scott secretly found her intimidating as hell.

He laid the target down on the exam table, said, “She took a punch to the temple, but I think she came to during the drive. Fiske didn’t hit her hard enough to last this long. I’m pretty sure she’s faking it.”

Vonda gave the target a cursory examination, lifted her lids, shined a penlight into her eyes and said in her phlegmy smoker’s voice, “This’ll go much faster if you just open them on your own, Missy. Otherwise, I’ll have to examine you further. That might involve some probing I guarantee I’ll enjoy much more than you will.”

The target’s slack face instantly tightened and her eyes opened, the left one not as widely as the right due to swelling. Scott noted an abrasion on her cheek and a bruise forming under the eye. The target glared when Vonda chuckled and gave Scott a pleased look. He forced an answering smile.

“What are you going to do with me?” were the first words out of the target’s mouth. Vonda threaded her fingers together across her prominent belly and smiled beatifically, producing an impressive double chin. “Oh, I hear you’re in for a real treat.”

From the door, a gruff voice said, “That’s enough.”

Scott looked over at Abel, an older man who functioned as Lupus’ mouthpiece and sometimes enforcer. His hairless pink pate reflected the light from the bare bulb mounted twenty feet above them, but most people didn’t so much notice the baldness as the two horns that protruded from his skull. Set above his forehead in line with his eye sockets, the pointy, three-inch long dik-dik horns were the perfect complement to Abel’s sunken cheeks and hollow grey eyes.

Vonda compressed her lips for a moment before turning to Scott. “If she vomits or starts raving—really raving, not faking it—come get me.” She walked out with her nose in the air. Not many people got along with Abel, who didn’t, as far as Scott could tell, have a good side.

Scott leaned against the wall farthest from the target as Abel entered the room and shut the door. The target had lifted herself up on her elbows, but now she sat fully up and scooted backward until her back hit the wall. She pulled her knees up under the apple green dress and wrapped her arms protectively around her legs. Scott noticed that her eyes were green, a shade or two darker than the dress.

The spurs on Abel’s cowboy boots jangled ominously as he took the two strides necessary to reach the target’s side. He reached out and grasped her chin, lifting it to get a better look at her face. She let him do it, a tear sliding down her cheek.

If Scott didn’t know him better, he’d think Abel took the tiniest bit of pity on her. The lanky old man moved back a few feet and smiled, a movement of his lips that normally reminded one of the Grim Reaper, but now looked almost pleasant.

“Your father’s a pain in the ass, did you know that?”

The target’s head seemed to be frozen in the position Abel had placed it. Her mouth barely moved as she replied, “Yeah, I know that.”