Xenofreak Nation (7 page)

“Psst! Cougar!” Barney said. “Hey Cougar!”

Out of the corner of his mouth, Scott said, “Shut it, dumbass!”

“You!” One of the agents said, pointing right at him. “Come with me.”

Scott gave Barney a dirty look and snarled, “You’re dead,” before trudging forward, the picture of unwilling cooperation. The agent said loudly, “We’ve been looking for you, Cougar,” before grabbing his arm and man-handling him out the door. As soon as they stepped into the sunshine, the agent said quietly, “It’ll be a bit of a wait.” He tucked Scott into the back of an unmarked car and shut the door.

It had been a multi-agency raid. Scott watched as xeno after xeno was escorted into police or FBI or ATF vans. Most of those that hadn’t fled the Warehouse in time were tweakers or alcoholics; the lowest members of the community, too high or drunk to appreciate the danger. Scott didn’t see Padme among the captives—maybe she’d gotten away.

He hoped not.

Chapter Thirteen

Bryn’s adjustable mattress allowed her to sit upright, a position she favored so she could avoid the discomfort of laying her head down. The doctors and nurses had removed the bandages and told her what they saw, but refused to allow her a mirror so she could see for herself. They also forbid her from touching her new ‘hair.’

“You don’t want to accidently get stuck with one of the quills,” said Dr. Lauren, the young resident assigned to her case. Dr. Lauren’s brown hair was pulled back into a perky ponytail, something Bryn would never be able to do again.

She was so wrung out from her ordeal she couldn’t even cry. Dr. Lauren told her father that she was in shock, told him she’d made a referral for someone from the psych ward to come talk to her, as if talking would somehow make everything all right. As if anything would.

Bryn spent almost an hour answering the questions two XIA agents fired at her. She’d never even heard of the XIA, which, she was told, stood for Xeno Intelligence Agency. She told them everything she could remember, but got the strange impression there wasn’t much they didn’t already know.

Her father stood outside her door, engaged in an intense conversation with the head of Middleborough Hospital’s neurology department. Bryn had a private room with a guard stationed outside. She’d eaten as much of the bland hospital lunch as her stomach could stand, and now waited to hear the verdict: what would be done about the porcupine pelt that had replaced her hair?

She’d loved her hair. It wasn’t her father’s thick black or her mother’s thin blonde, but somewhere in between. It wasn’t unruly like her best friend Maria’s curls, nor stick-straight like her other friend, Kim’s. Bryn could coax her hair into curls or blow it out straight.

Past tense.

She tried not to think of her scalp and hair lying in a bloody wad in some landfill. She also tried not to think of the poor porcupine that had been genetically engineered, raised in a lab and killed so that her captors could send her father a message: Look what we can do.

Bryn had asked Dr. Lauren what her options were and had been devastated at the response.

“Cadaver hair is one option,” Dr. Lauren had replied, clinically objective. “That would of course involve taking anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life, and there’d be no guarantee it would work. We could also remove the xenograft and use your own skin to rebuild your scalp.”

“My own skin? From where?”

“Your thighs or your back.”

“I’d be bald,” Bryn said.

“Yes. But there are wigs made out of human hair for chemotherapy patients that are quite good.”

Bryn remembered when she was six, before her great-grandmother died. Gram fought the cancer to gain some time even though it was the incurable kind. She’d been brave and cheerful despite the chemo that made her sick and made her hair fall out. She’d purchased synthetic wigs in several styles and colors, some of them quite bold and sassy, like the bright red bob she wore to the Fourth of July picnic.

Bryn was not brave like Gram. She didn’t want everyone knowing her hair was really a wig. But there was no way the hospital staff could keep this out of the media. Word would get out; pictures would be taken in secret or leaked from her file. She’d already had to pose for snapshots.

Her father came back into the room, followed by Dr. Lauren and the neurology guy, Dr. Brunswick, plus two other people Bryn didn’t know.

“Honey,” her father began and she knew from his tone that the news wasn’t good. “Dr. Brunswick has serious reservations about…well, about what would happen if we removed the—the—graft.”

“If?” Bryn asked in a small voice.

Harry Vega looked helplessly at the covey of doctors standing behind him. Dr. Brunswick squared his jaw and stepped forward. “Miss Vega, when we scanned your brain, we found that whoever did this to you also implanted nanoneurons, which are programmed to stimulate the brain in specific ways depending on what the graft is. Nanoneurons can never be removed, but they can usually be disabled—reprogrammed to do nothing. In this instance, however, we don’t know what program they used; it’s unreadable to our scanners. This means it could be dangerous to remove the graft. If the nanoneurons can’t perform their intended function, there’s no telling what will happen.”

Bryn stared back at the doctors’ concerned faces and at her father’s tortured one.

“I want a mirror,” she said. “Now.”

Chapter Fourteen

Scott had been in jail once before, in San Diego, his first day of leave after twelve weeks of intensive Marine Corp boot camp training. He and his buddies had gone out to burn off some excess energy playing volleyball on a beach populated with southern California hotties. When it got dark, they visited a tattoo parlor, snuck into a Pacific Beach bar and got into a fight, in that order. The fight gave him two things: his scar and a one-way ticket to the downtown jail.

The San Diego jail had been in an eleven-story building and smelled like bleach. Scott had gotten rudimentary medical care for his knife wound and sat in the drunk tank with his friends even though out of the three of them, he was the only sober one.

The xenofreaks, including Scott, that were rounded up in the Warehouse raid were taken to Rikers Island. Scott’s cell smelled like Pine Sol tainted with urine and vomit. He wasn’t surprised when he was processed like all the rest, denied bail and transferred to a Federal facility in an old building with thick layers of paint on the walls. He waited for his day in court, chafing at the necessary delay—any special treatment would look suspicious. As it was, his day came around faster than it should have, but all Scott felt by then was relief.

The officer that escorted him to his arraignment had no idea who he was. Scott wanted to slash him when he said in a suggestive voice, “The cons are going to love those soft little paws once we get you declawed, Puss-puss.”

Shasta Fox, Scott’s handler, was waiting for him in the box-sized virtual courtroom. He hadn’t seen her since the day of Bryn’s abduction when she’d arranged to bump into him at the fast food place a block away from the Warehouse. She’d gotten her hair cut since then and the short, spiked style did nothing to soften the dark skin of her aging face. On the wall were three holovision monitors labeled “Presiding Judge,” “Prosecutor,” and “Defense Attorney.” The monitors for the judge and defense attorney were blank, but a pre-recorded holo was playing on the one from the prosecutor’s office, explaining Scott’s rights and the legal process.

They ignored it. A holocam was pointed at them, but the blinking red light indicated it wasn’t on. Still, Shasta spoke quietly with barely moving lips.

“We lost her.”

No shit, Scott thought. “What happened?”

“They disabled the tracking devices.”

“How?”

It was a dumb question; a frustrated knee-jerk reaction kind of question in the face of the obvious. He’d sprinkled the micro-transmitters Shasta had slipped him onto Bryn’s hamburger and watched her unknowingly consume them. If the XIA had any inkling Fournier’s people could disable the supposedly undetectable, foolproof tracking devices, they wouldn’t have let Fournier take her. They’d gambled and Bryn had lost. Scott didn’t wait for Shasta to answer.

“What about the reconnaissance satellite and video surveillance?” he asked.

Shasta gave him a quick, impatient shake of her head. It was another useless question. If anything had worked, Bryn would have been rescued before they’d mutilated her and Fournier and his goons would be standing where Scott was now.

He’d done his part and there was nothing he could do about the rest of the team’s failure, but that didn’t mean he could shrug it off. He had his own reasons for hating the paranoid, psychopathic doctor, reasons Shasta had used to recruit him when she sought him out in that San Diego jail.

The camera light went green and a uniformed bailiff appeared on the judge’s screen. The bailiff announced, “All rise for the Honorable Judge Pricilla Adams.” There were no chairs in the room; Scott and Shasta were already standing when the background screen came to life and the bland face of Judge Adams popped up in front of it. Simultaneously, the prosecutor’s holographic face appeared. His only introduction was a line of 3D text that scrolled through the air in front of him, reading, “Marcus Quick, Assistant District Attorney.”

Shasta straightened her shoulders and said, “Shasta Fox for the defendant.”

After Quick read the criminal complaint against Scott, Judge Adams perked up.

“Mr. Harding, these are serious charges,” she said. “Do you understand them as they’ve been presented?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Scott said.

“And how do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

Shasta switched her holopad to 2D and handed it to him as the judge launched into a lecture about high-profile trials and media coverage. He tuned everything out in order to concentrate on the typed paragraphs on the holopad. His assignment was far from over.

There’d been two agents prior to Scott who’d insinuated themselves into the Warehouse community. Both had disappeared. Scott didn’t know much about the first agent; just that his name was Eduardo Quinones and he’d been a Green Beret. The agent immediately preceding Scott had been forty years old, an eminently qualified, decorated former detective from San Francisco with years of undercover experience. He had a wife and two kids. Voice stress analysis of his last communication before his disappearance showed extreme duress, and the XIA analysts determined it was probably a relayed message from Lupus or even Dr. Fournier himself. The agent had called on his burn phone and said simply, “Records can’t be expunged.”

The fact was: the agents’ records had been expunged. Deep-cover standard procedure is to thoroughly erase and replace with false identities and criminal records, and yet that cryptic message suggested their true histories had somehow been accessed despite the best efforts of the XIA computer forensicians. This prompted a search for new recruits, candidates who had no affiliation with any law enforcement agency and therefore no records, no old news items, nothing lurking on the net that could get them killed. Preferably someone with no family—not because they wouldn’t be missed if they disappeared—but because family could be used by the enemy as leverage. Someone young, smart and good in a fight.

By the time Judge Adams banged her gavel, Scott had memorized his orders.

Chapter Fifteen

The scar, one long, thin pink line joining Bryn’s skin to the pelt, was almost undetectable now. The intern who’d removed the stitches hadn’t been very tactful when he’d examined Fournier’s handiwork. He’d pursed his lips in a light whistle, a glint of undisguised admiration in his eyes.

That trip back to the hospital was the only time Bryn had left the house since she’d identified three of her four kidnappers in a series of lineups. She’d lost her job at the daycare center, of course. They’d replaced her after she’d been gone two days, out of necessity, and had respectfully declined to rehire her now that her head was essentially a dangerous weapon. Bryn was disappointed, but understood. She couldn’t imagine cuddling with a child ever again.

She’d hidden in her room, ignoring calls from friends and strangers alike. The media had been aggressive and unrelenting in their efforts to get an interview with her, a recent photo, anything. They’d camped out in front of Harry Vega’s modest house, an oppressive presence that made Bryn want to run out and throw flaming bags of poo at them. Among the news vehicles hogging up the street parking and thrilling their neighbors was an unmarked sedan with at least one XIA agent inside at any given moment, watching.

It was too little, too late, but Bryn’s new holopsychiatrist continually urged her to focus not on what was done and irreversible, but on the future. Bryn tried, but no matter how many ways she envisioned that future, her girlish hopes for a happily ever after were just—gone. So what if there was someone out there for everyone? Someone who would love her despite her artificial deformity, despite the fact that her dubious fifteen minutes of fame would be resurrected every time someone recognized her? The real question was: could she love someone who could love a freak?