Xenofreak Nation (3 page)

It wasn’t the response Abel expected. He burst out laughing and swung around to look at Scott. “I heard she broke Fiske’s nose. You got your work cut out for you.”

Scott took that to mean he had just been appointed the target’s official jailer, which in the Warehouse also meant protector. He nodded.

“Nurse Nancy will be here in a few to run her through the protocol. Don’t let any of the yahoos get any ideas.”

Scott nodded again. The ‘yahoos’ consisted of nearly every man in the place and several of the women. Their ‘ideas’ would involve harassment at the least and sexual assault at worst. The Warehouse was not kind to the innocent. Not that Scott had ever seen anyone here that fit that description.

After Abel left the exam room, Scott and the target stared at each other for a full minute. Her bottom lip quivered the whole time. Finally, she asked in a little girl voice, “Are you going to rape me?”

Scott didn’t bother to hide his surprise. “You want me to?”

“No! God.” She sniffed and ran the back of her hand under her nose. “I want you to take me home.”

Scott imagined himself trying to do just that. “Me and what army?”

“My father is rich. He could pay you.”

She was a terrible liar. “Your father’s a mailman.”

“There—there’s lots of people who would help him. The Society…” her voice broke on a suppressed sob.

Scott waited until she pulled herself together before saying, “Look. I don’t really feel like doing this, so if you don’t mind, let’s just can the chatter.”

“Chatter? Chatter?” The second ‘chatter’ she uttered was so shrill it was almost out of Scott’s range of hearing. She leaned forward, still gripping her legs. “This is just another day for you, isn’t it? You kidnap people all the time.”

He shrugged, getting uneasy. Vonda said to come get her if the target started raving. He was pretty sure an emotional breakdown wouldn’t qualify.

Luckily, her hysteria didn’t escalate. She took a deep breath and let it out. Scott looked at the door and wondered when Nurse Nancy would get here. Maybe he could hit her up for a sedative that might make the target more amenable.

She must have caught him glancing at the door, because she asked, “What’s the ‘protocol’? What does that mean?”

“Ask Nurse Nancy.”

Even with red eyes and blotchy skin in a furious face, the target still managed to present an attractive picture. Even with the bruise, which had spread further under her eye, a thin streak of purple. She was tall, 5’8” or so, but not overly thin. Her legs, what he had seen of them anyway, looked like they belonged on an athlete—a runner maybe. Too bad she wouldn’t be able to run from what was coming.

Her eyes closed. In a defeated whisper, she said, “I can’t believe this is happening.”

Neither can I, thought Scott. Less than a year ago he was completing Marine basic training and looking forward to serving his country in the Fourth Iraq War. Turns out his country had different plans for him.

Chapter Five

It took every ounce of self-control Bryn possessed to stay relatively calm. Her head pounded and the effort to hold back tears didn’t help matters. Perched on the examination table with its stained and torn vinyl cushioning, she told herself it could be worse. She could be in a bare concrete cell chained to the wall—naked. She could be fair game for the ‘yahoos’ the old devil-man referred to.

She could be dead.

These xenoscum obviously had an agenda—some plan to make use of her—most likely to blackmail her father into backing off. They’d bring in a holocam, hand her a holoreader displaying the main page from some news site and tell her to read a statement. She’d cooperate fully.

There was no guarantee she’d get out of this alive, but the fact that she hadn’t seen where they’d taken her was a positive sign. One glaring negative was that her jailers weren’t hiding themselves from her. If they eventually set her free, she’d be able to describe everyone she’d seen.

Dead girls don’t talk.

In an effort to avoid further contemplation of that terrifying possibility she focused on the young man leaning against the wall, hands still casually in his jacket pockets. He looked like he was about to break out in bored whistling any second now.

“What’s your name?” she asked, not expecting him to answer.

“Scott.”

A short, humorless laugh escaped her. His face showed no curiosity as to what prompted the laugh, but she told him anyway. “I thought all xenofreaks had weird names.”

“Most do.”

“How’d you get that scar?”

“Fight.” He looked at the door again.

“So what’s your graft?”

In an instant, his face changed from indifferent to coldly angry. “Why don’t you shut up?”

“Because I’m scared and I’d rather not think about what you people are going to do to me,” she snapped. Ever-present tears filled her eyes again. She did not want to cry in front of this cretin.

He went to the door and opened it, looking out into the dark, cavernous space she’d glimpsed while upside-down over his shoulder. Nurse Nancy must not have been anywhere in evidence because he shut the door again and sighed.

Bryn knew she’d have a better chance coming out of this alive if she connected somehow with her jailers. But these people had debased and dehumanized themselves; how was she supposed to make them sympathize with her?

This Scott guy took taciturn to a whole new level, but Bryn felt it was imperative to get him talking. She asked the first thing that came to mind.

“What the heck’s that smell?”

He flashed a fleeting grin and responded, “That’s just us xenofreaks.”

It winked into and out of existence so quickly she almost missed it: Scott had a sense of humor. Desperately, she tried to think of something funny to say.

“Well it smells like a janitor’s mop,” she said. When the corner of his mouth barely twitched, she resorted to the one thing all guys found amusing: potty humor. “Or a dinosaur fart.”

That did it. Scott looked at her like she’d gone insane, but he laughed. She’d wedged the chisel in the crack; too bad she didn’t have time to hammer away and make it wider. A perfunctory knock on the door heralded Nurse Nancy’s arrival.

She was a he.

Nurse Nancy ignored Scott and greeted Bryn with a wide smile. In a feminine twang, he said, “Having a rough day, are we?”

She nodded, struck dumb by his xenoalteration. The skin of his lower face, along his jaws and chin and above his lip, everywhere a man’s beard would grow, had been replaced with soft brown fur. She tried to keep her gaze level with his, but it kept dropping.

“You want to touch it?” He leaned forward.

The last thing on God’s green earth Bryn wanted to do was feel this man’s face, but she couldn’t afford to alienate him from the outset. Keeping her revulsion under control wasn’t easy as she placed her fingertips against the fur. It wasn’t as soft as she’d expected, and as soon as she realized the stiffened tufts contained remnants of past meals, she snatched her hand away.

Nurse Nancy didn’t seem to notice. “Much better than a prickly old man beard, don’t you think?”

Bryn flashed on a memory from last year during her blissful two-month relationship with the junior class president. She and Paul made out at every opportunity, and not even the best moisturizer had toned down the redness and chafing around her mouth from the sparse stubble on his chin. Paul ended up dumping her for skanky Sheila Gottfried, claiming that all Bryn’s teasing drove him to it. She wondered how he would feel when he saw her picture in the news.

“Alright, my pretty,” Nurse Nancy said. “I need to take some blood and get your vitals. Have you ever a serious illness?”

For the first time, Bryn noticed the tray of medical accoutrements Nurse Nancy held. He set it on the only other piece of furniture in the room, a small end table in the corner.

“Yes? No? Maybe so?” he prompted.

Baffled, Bryn answered, “No.”

Nurse Nancy continued to pepper her with questions about her medical history while he wrapped a flexible tube around her upper arm and withdrew some blood. For the life of her, Bryn couldn’t think of a logical reason for what he was doing.

“Anyone in your family have cancer?”

“My great-grandmother died of pancreatic cancer.”

Nurse Nancy removed the tube and the needle and pressed a cotton ball on the prick site. “Hold that.”

Obediently, Bryn put her forefinger on the cotton ball while he stuck a piece of tape over it.

“How about heart disease?” he asked.

For some reason, Bryn’s eyes sought out Scott’s. He’d heard her father’s speech. He knew about her mother. Yet there wasn’t the smallest bit of sympathy on his face.

“My mom,” Bryn said.

Nurse Nancy tutted, wrapped a blood pressure cuff on the same arm and rapidly squeezed the pump.

“What kind of heart disease?”

“Dilated Cardiomyopathy.”

He nodded sagely, watching the dial on the cuff as he slowly released the pressure. “She die?”

“Yes.”

Apparently, not everyone here knew her history. Did he even know who she was or that she being held against her will? She’d assumed he did because he’d asked about her day, but maybe he was just referring to her swollen cheek. A brief flash of hope was squelched when he said, “Alright gorgeous, you’re all set. Blood pressure’s a little high, but I think that’s understandable under the circumstances.”

He picked up the tray with its medical instruments and finally acknowledged Scott with a hard look. “Don’t mess with her.”

Scott just lifted his eyebrows.

“Mr., um, Nancy?” Bryn asked. “Why did you do all this?” She indicated the tray.

“Oh, Sweetie,” he shook his head, features suffused with compassion. “Cooperate and you’ll be back home before you know it, I promise.”

It was a non-answer, but it gave her the first hope she’d had since this nightmare began. Nurse Nancy offered her a final reassuring smile before sashaying out the door.

The tears she’d been holding back would no longer be denied, but now they were tears of relief.

Chapter Six

In basic training, there’d been a lecture or two about keeping things in perspective when in combat. Scott knew he’d have to kill people, knew those people had families, friends, lives that if Scott was lucky, he’d cut short before they cut his short. He’d been told to forget about all that; keep his distance, stay focused on the goal, which was to shoot the target. If you sympathize with a target, you’d better hope your body armor holds up.

Bryn Vega seemed to be doing everything in her power to become more than a target to him. After Nurse Nancy told her she’d be going home, Scott almost said, “Yeah, in a box,” but he didn’t because she began crying like her mom just died all over again.

It was one hundred-percent essential that he show no weakness. ‘Bestia’ was Latin for ‘animal,’ an apt name for a gang of animalistic criminals. Even alone in the exam room with her, he couldn’t risk appearing soft in any way. She cried for ten minutes, and he bit back maybe a dozen comments his traitorous brain produced to make her feel better.

When her wet sniffles got to be too much for him, he opened one of the drawers under the exam table and handed her a paper gown. She blew her nose several times and wiped her eyes. To Scott’s surprise, she left no black smears of mascara on the paper. Her lashes were really that thick.

The door opened and Barney stuck his head in. “Hey Cougar, you still combustin’ tonight?”

“I’m on duty. Tell the Viscount I’ll kick his ass some other time.”

Barney gave a little, “heh,” and focused his attention on Bryn. He started to come into the room, but Scott shoved him out, said, “Later, dude,” and shut the door. As soon as he did it, he knew what she’d say.

“What is that? On your hands?” Her voice was thick from her bout of crying.

Scott had kept his hands hidden in the pockets of his jacket because he didn’t want or need her questions. “None of your business.”

“Is that your alteration? You got fur put on your fingers?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. Cougar fur and the claws that came with it.

“Why?”

“Why’d you wear that dress today? ‘Cause you like it, right?” He’d said too much. He was not ignoring her very well.

“No,” she replied. “I wore it because my dad asked me to.”

Bryn was sitting with her lower legs hanging over the side of the exam table. The dress had a fitted bodice and flared skirt straight out of the 1950’s. Almost a poodle skirt, like the costume his sister had worn for Halloween when she was six. Bryn’s dad had good taste; she looked great in the dress, but he doubted Harry Vega had picked it because it made his little girl look hot.

He blew out a frustrated breath. “Whatever.”

“What does ‘combusting’ mean?”

His brows dropped. “Seriously?”