Xenofreak Nation (32 page)

Bryn got kicked out of the ambulance when a severely injured xeno was pulled from the Warehouse alive. She sat next to Scott on the curb, where they shared a bottle of water and a protein bar the ambulance driver had offered them and watched emergency personnel scurry around.

“You’re lopsided,” Scott said, looking at her quills. “You really did a number on Dundee.”

“He tried to…” she trailed off as her shoulders shook in a disgusted shudder.

Scott had suspected the Australian xeno had tried something and gotten schooled by Bryn. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“No.”

“And Fournier? Did he say anything before the tunnel collapsed?”

“He said he had a mutated form of typhoid that could devastate humanity.”

“Those were his words?” Shasta would appreciate the confirmation, but even with Bryn’s testimony, he doubted the sluggish, bureaucrat-bloated CDC would jump on it. Bryn’s words were hearsay; hardly damning evidence of a bioweapon, even combined with the bacterial samples they already had. They just didn’t know enough about it.

Bryn rubbed her face, smudging the tearstained soot on her cheeks. “He said xenos were immune. That’s one of the reasons my dad did this to me.”

“To protect you. Huh.” Scott looked over at the remains of the Warehouse and flexed his claws. He would always be a xeno, but he no longer had to pretend to be a xenofreak. Would his decision to mutilate himself to avenge his sister and parents ultimately save him? The irony struck him as funny somehow, but he didn’t laugh. “Is that all he said?”

Bryn’s brows dropped in a perplexed frown. “It was weird. I mean, everything’s been weird, but he said something particularly strange about my mother. He gave me a message for my father that some girl—I don’t remember the name—but he said this girl was not for my father. He said he made her for himself. The weird thing is that my dad’s been talking about cloning. Human cloning; how he wants to legalize it.”

“Was the girl’s name Nicola?” Scott asked. He remembered the knapsack on his back and pulled it into his lap.

“Yes! How did you know? I don’t understand what he meant, but he said she wasn’t Miranda, and he was talking about my mom. I guess he was her surgeon all those years ago. He had all these gross body parts in jars just like everyone always said he had, and I saw…I saw my mom’s heart…” Bryn’s eyes shut tight on the memory.

Scott moved closer and put his hand on her back, rubbing up and down. “Look. I don’t want to freak you out, but do you have any pictures of your mom when she was a teenager?”

“At home, yeah, why?”

“Because the cloning thing is real. I know for a fact Nicola is a clone.”

“Okay.” She sounded skeptical. “How do you know?”

“Because my sister was a clone. She was Fournier’s first successful attempt. Well, successful to a point. She died because he made mistakes.”

“I’m so sorry. But how did your sister..?”

“She was adopted. After he got busted, they found her and put her in the system and my parents adopted her without knowing what she was. Nicola looks just like her.”

Bryn said slowly, “And you think my mom might look like…both of them?”

“These are Nicola’s books.” He unzipped the knapsack and took out one of the psychology textbooks. Inscribed on the inside front cover was the name he’d expected to see. Bryn looked at the words ‘This book belongs to Miranda McKim.’

“You see?” he asked. “It makes sense.”

“No, it doesn’t! None of this makes sense. I want to see her. Nicola.”

Scott took a breath and exhaled in frustration. “She’s with Lupus and Padme.”

“And Dundee? That’s great. You want me to believe Fournier cloned my mother and now that he’s dead, she’s on the run with a bunch of psychotic killers, one of whom can kill people just by sneezing on them?”

From behind them, Shasta broke into the conversation. “She’s not your mother. And Fournier isn’t dead. They excavated the collapsed tunnel. No body. Looks like that last cave in shook him loose on the far side of the rubble and he managed to escape after all.”

Chapter Fifty-nine

Two weeks later.

Bryn sat at a table and waited for the guard to arrive, scratching nervously at her head. Since she was the first ever recipient of a porcupine xenograft, there’d been no one to warn her that newly sprouted quills itch like the dickens. Scott sat on one side of her and Carla on the other. They’d come along as moral support, but she suspected Carla was also itching—to tell her father off.

When Harry Vega was finally led into the room, he wore an ill-fitting orange jumpsuit. His handcuffed hands were secured to his waist and he shuffled to his chair with shackled ankles. Bryn steeled herself against any sympathy as he sat across from her and stared into her face unblinking. He had puffy under-eye circles and his skin looked sallow in the artificial light.

“Hi, honey,” he said. His entire demeanor was somber, as if he’d been beaten down. Scott’s words came back to haunt her, “There’s a lot of xenos in prison.”

The first thing she said to him, the only thing she really wanted to discuss, was, “Did you have Mom cloned?”

His gaze dropped to the table as he took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Not long after your mother received the pig heart, Fournier told me it wouldn’t last. He said he wouldn’t be able to convince the corporation that funded his research to pay for another xenotransplant attempt until he worked out the kinks. Said it was only a matter of time before the xeno heart would begin to fail and she would have to be put on the human heart donor list, which at the time was practically a death sentence since healthy hearts were so scarce.”

Her father lifted his eyes. “He told me there was another way. If he could keep her alive long enough for a clone to grow up, for its heart to become big enough for transplant…”

“Its heart? A clone is still a person, Dad.” Just like a xeno is still a person. “Mom would never agree to kill someone to save herself.”

His head went back. “Of course she wouldn’t. And neither did I. I told him no, but Vonda said he did it anyway. He was in love with your mother. You know she and I were having problems. I think she only stayed with me because of you, but I loved her with all my heart. Towards the end, if it had been up to me, I might have chosen to sacrifice the clone after all to save her. But that wasn’t an option. It…she…was just a baby when Fournier was arrested. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but I like to think there’s another Miranda in the world somewhere. A Miranda whose heart is healthy.”

Bryn felt Scott shift in his chair next to her, but he said nothing. She folded her arms on the table and leaned forward. “Dad, legalizing cloning won’t change the fact that you’d be essentially raising human beings to harvest their organs.”

That old fervent glint appeared in his eye. “Nonsense. Eventually, individual cloned organs will be grown in host bodies just like surrogate mothers grow babies. If you can bioengineer animal parts that are invisible to the human immune system, you can bioengineer human parts.”

She didn’t come here to give him a platform to air his ideals. He hadn’t cooperated with the XIA, and they thought he might open up to Bryn if she asked him outright about the typhoid.

“You told me before that you thought a pandemic was coming. How did you know?”

He let out a short laugh. “After the surgery, your mom never got sick, even though you were a typical germ-filled kid who kept bringing home whatever was going around at school. You and me would get symptoms, but she never caught anything. I told Fournier I thought the xeno heart might have something to do with it; it intrigued him. After he went underground, Vonda and I occasionally talked. She’s not allowed to speak to anyone about what Fournier does, but she considers me the exception because I know so much already. She told me about a xeno who’s infected with a mutated form of typhoid and how Fournier was looking into ways to capitalize on it. It frightened her.”

He tried to lift his hands and the chain rattled. “Not only did I not want to scare you with the truth, but it would have been dangerous to tell you. Vonda told me those people who died after the bank robbery were exposed. Anyone who came into contact with the carrier would die—unless they were a xenofreak.”

Carla spoke up. “It’s rude to refer to all xenos as xenofreaks.”

He blinked. “Potato potahto. You think anyone cares at this point if I pretend to be reformed? I’m the enemy Grand Poobah. The only person more unpopular than me in this jail is Kareem Williams.”

Scott drummed his furred fingers on the table, drawing her father’s disapproving eye. “Protection is only a little cooperation away,” he said.

Her father frowned and shook his head. “The XBestia have a long reach. They can get to xenofr—xenos in solitary confinement. They can get to me.”

“Actually, they can only get to other xenos that have nanoneurons,” Scott said. “I guarantee they won’t touch you if you help us. We need to know where Fournier might be right now. Vonda’s in hiding. How do you contact her? Help us stop him before any more pure humans die.”

A veil dropped over her father’s eyes. He sat back in his seat. “No. I’ve said enough. Bryn is safe and that’s what’s important.” He stood so abruptly the legs of his chair scraped against the painted cement floor. “Guard!”

He shuffled to the door, looking resigned and defeated. Despite everything he’d done, Bryn suddenly found she believed his intentions were good. “I love you, Daddy.”

His reply came softly. “I love you, too, Brynnie.”

The door clanged shut behind him.

Chapter Sixty

Scott’s usefulness as an undercover agent had run its course. If Fournier reestablished himself in the area, word would get out that Scott was a plant. He’d done his best to convince Shasta that Bryn needed a team to protect her, but Shasta demurred.

“She’s not a threat to him. We already know everything she knows, so there’s no point in his going after her.”

“I’m not as worried about him as I am about Padme,” Scott had pointed out.

It was moot; Shasta would have given in, but Unger was inflexible on the subject. Bryn was on her own.

Scott had been assigned a training position teaching recruits to fight dirty. He’d spent his free time over the last two weeks with Bryn, hoping some day he’d get to teach her some dirty things, too. But they’d taken it slow. What she needed right now was a friend, not a complicated romantic entanglement.

Today’s visit with her father had been XIA-sanctioned, so he was technically on the clock when he drove Bryn and Mouse to the zoo. Mouse had quit Bluto’s and gotten a job managing a concession stand there. When she tucked her hair into the forties-style hair net and plopped the little paper boat hat on her head, she became all business. Scott was hoping to get a break, but she made him pay full price for his and Bryn’s lunch; hotdogs with all the fixin’s that reminded him of Coney Island.

With a full mouth, Bryn said, “Remember Nosferatu?”

He nodded. Nosferatu’s real name was Gordon Amador, a sex-offender out of California who hadn’t bothered to register in New York. Coney Island attracted drifters like him looking for a lawless place to hunker down.

Scott and Bryn strolled in the direction of the new zoo exhibit. He saw a long line of people waiting to get in. It was a warm day, but Bryn didn’t have to wear her leather jacket anymore. As a surprise, he’d had a local leather artisan construct a special collar for her. It was made out of soft-but-tough kidskin dyed to approximate her skin tone. It fit around her neck and flared out over her shoulders and down her back only as far as the quills reached. The artisan made it to be as unobtrusive as possible, and when Scott had given it to her, she’d been so touched she almost cried. Almost. After everything she’d been through, tears had become scarce in her new life.

They joined the back of the line, which stretched along a row of trimmed hedges. The people in front of them stared at Bryn, who smiled at them until they turned away. He caught the hurt look in her eyes, but she avoided his gaze and finished her hot dog in silence. The line moved slowly. They finished their lunch and he broke out of line to toss the wrappings in the trash. When he stood back next to her, it seemed natural to reach for her hand. She looked startled when he took it, and ducked her head to hide a smile.

They were almost to the entrance of the exhibit. A freshly painted black and white mural decorated the outside of the brick building. Scott caught a glimpse of tall bamboo plants inside the glass enclosure. He automatically looked around him just before they entered. Other than the usual looks of contempt or interest, no one seemed to be watching them. In the distance, he saw the top of a cell tower on a hill.

The End.

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