Dark Angel: Skin Game (14 page)

"Oh yes. Gabriel looks like Max."

That surprised her. "Like me?"

Joshua hesitated for a long moment. "Normal. Not like Normal at Jam Pony—normal like ordinaries. But Gabriel can lift six times his own body weight."

"Anything else out of the ordinary?"

"No.... Well, he has an extra pair of arms."

"He has an extra pair of arms, but he looks normal."

Nodding vigorously, Joshua said, "They come out of his ribs, so Gabriel just wraps them around himself. Gabriel looks chubby ... but normal."

She studied her shaggy friend. "You know where Gabriel is, don't you?"

Joshua looked at the floor. "Not anymore. Not since I moved to Terminal City."

"He's in Seattle, though?"

"Gabriel was in Seattle."

"And you two were friends?"

Joshua continued to look at the floor. "Yes."

"You never mentioned him," Max said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, not hurt, though oddly, she did feel that way, a little. She thought Joshua was her closest friend, among the transgenics; and yet he had kept things from her, clearly.

"Gabriel was passing for human. I only saw him when he came to visit me in Father's house."

"So ... he could still be out there."

"Yes. Still. Out there."

"... Did they hurt him at Manticore?"

Finally looking up at her, he said, "They hurt us all, Max—you too."

She could hardly argue with that.

"The guards, they were scared of Gabriel because of his strength. They hit him with the prods whenever they went near his cell."

Max had tasted the electric prods of the guards herself, and knew firsthand how much it hurt.

"Guards try to keep Gabriel weak by always hitting him with them."

In the darkness, she shook her head. "I'm sorry, Joshua. I'm sorry to ... dredge this all up."

"Nothing to be sorry for," he said. "They did it, we didn't."

She knew that, but like all victims, she suffered strange pangs of guilt.

They had all suffered immeasurably, and it wasn't a surprise that one of them might have gone rogue. To Max, the surprise was that the rest of them hadn't.

After a while she said, "I think you mentioned another one."

Joshua thought hard. "Oh! Almost forgot... Kelpy. 'Chameleon Boy,' the guards called him."

Max needed no explanation about Kelpy's DNA mix.

"Kelpy didn't work right," Joshua said.

"What do you mean, didn't work right?"

Joshua shrugged. "I just remember, guards and others, talking about what a waste of time Kelpy turned out to be."

"Was Kelpy beaten too?"

He shook his big head. "No, they said his power only worked when he was angry or scared or something ..."

"Agitated," Max supplied.

"That's the word," Joshua said. "Agitated. When he was agitated. So they didn't agitate him. They ignored Kelpy. Left him to die."

"No one to love him or help him," Max said. "No one. Sometimes, Kelpy would just disappear into his cage."

Max knew that on some level all the transgenics felt that way. No one was going to help them, no one was going to love them. She'd learned different when she'd met Logan. Joshua had learned different when he'd met her. "Was Kelpy still there when we came in?" With a quick nod, Joshua said, "Yes—you even opened his cell yourself."

She shook her head. "I have no memory of him." "I bet Kelpy has memory of Max.

Later, Kelpy asked me your name and I told him, 'Max.' He said you were the only one who ever cared." Someone she had never noticed.... They got up and started walking back up the tunnel. She tried and tried, but she just couldn't seem to remember Kelpy.

As they climbed the stairs back up to the first floor of Medtronics,her cell phone rang.

"Go for "max." she said. "They're listening," a computer-altered voice said. "Who's listening?"

"The ones outside the gate," the metallic voice said. "Thanks, I already knew that,"

Max said. The voice said, "The last time we spoke we were interrupted." Clemente.

"Yes," she said. "We were."

Why was he calling now, and why all the secretiveness? "Our mutual acquaintance supplied what looks like irrefutable information."

White had given him evidence that a transgenic was the killer.

"You do understand?" the altered voice asked. "Yes. But that information . . ."

"Initially, damned near absolute. I've seen it We'll talk later. Like I said we would."

The phone went dead in her ear. "What is it?" Joshua asked.

“I think it was very bad news" Max said.

she thought about what Clemente had said last. Initially, damned near absolute. What the hell did that mean? Was that strange phrasing some kind of code? Initially...

But it wouldn't come.

Max looked at Joshua. "We better get back."

They stepped outside into the purplish light of breaking morning. The sun had barely dented the horizon, and she could already tell this was going to be another long day.

They walked up the street in silence, Joshua lost in his thoughts, Max trying to figure out what Clemente had been talking about....

Initially, damned near absolute.

Finally, as if coming toward her out of a heavy fog, she put together the detective's little code. Initially Damned Near Absolute. D-N-A. White had provided DNA evidence that the killer was a transgenic.

Now the next question was, why was Clemente telling her this?

There seemed to be only one reason for him to trust her at all: he didn't trust White any more than she did.

So maybe they did have an ally on the other side. She felt she had connected with Clemente, and that he had believed her, even including the absurd—but true—snake cult story.

Even so, that good news was heavily outweighed by the bad. Either White was manipulating evidence to make it look like a transgenic was killing cops or, even worse, there really was a dangerous transgenic loose, in the city. A serial-killer transgenic, at that.

Terminal city, 11:39 pm

Monday may 10, 2021

Sitting in Dix's room to one side of his work station, finally getting some time to herself, Max sorted through mental files filled with the things she and Joshua had talked about. Even though it had been just this morning, that conversation in the tunnel seemed so long ago—perhaps because these facts, new to her, summoned old memories ... of Manticore.

Even as Max had dealt with the daily task of just trying to hold the fragile truce together, what Joshua had shared with her weighed heavily. She sifted through everything again and again, over and over... and the conclusion never seemed to change.

These grotesque, terrible killings were—partially, at least— her fault.

After all, wasn't she the one who had turned the transgenics loose in the world in the first place?

She would have preferred not to feel responsible for the killings, to be able to rationalize them away; but the guilt, the responsibility, was hers. It had been her decision not to leave anyone behind at Manticore. Now, while hundreds, maybe thousands, of transgenics lived free and happy, a few failed living experiments were loose who would have been

better off in captivity—better off for themselves, better off for the populace.

Max wanted to think White was behind these killings, and she knew him to be heartless enough to do such deeds, or have them done in the pursuit of the conclave's twisted agenda; but something deep in her gut told her that the evidence he'd presented to Clemente just might be real....

A quick knock was followed by handsome, hazel-eyed Alec—in a blue T-shirt, Levi's and running shoes—filling the frame of the doorway. "You might want to take a look at what's going on outside," he said, jerking a thumb toward the hallway.

So much for some time to herself.

"What now?" she asked, not bothering to hide her weariness.

"Hey, I'm sorry to bother you—I know you're carrying the weight.... But you better come look."

With a deep sigh, Max rose and moved out to the media center. "Something good on?"

Luke, Mole, Dix, and the various monitor monitors all seemed tense.

"Not my favorite show," Dix said, and pointed at one of the security camera screens.

"Some drunks on the west side are lobbing Molotov cocktails over the fence."

Max knew the nearest building was a good thirty yards in from the fence on that side, but as she moved to the monitor, she saw that the drunks were getting closer with each shot. And the building was a wooden structure, a two-story glorified shed that would not resist flames well at all.

Pointing at another monitor, Luke said, "And it looks like a TV crew's trying to get in, around the corner from the drunks."

Smirking, Alec said, "Is that the gentle whiff of a conspiracy I detect?"

"Where's the damn National Guard?" Mole asked, half a cigar bobbing in one corner of his reptile mouth. "They got

the whole goddamn place locked down... and a buncha street-rabble drunks make their way through?"

Looking at Alec, Max said, "You take care of the incendiary substance abusers, and I'll take care of the media." "Publicity hound."

"Why not? I'm almost as pretty as you are." "Ouch," Alec said, joining her as she headed outside. Soon they were behind the building that was serving as a target for the drunks and their firebombs. "Stop them," Max said firmly, "but don't mess them up."

"Would I do that? Gentle soul like me." "I'm serious, Alec. There's enough of the public against us already."

He shook his head as if he could hardly believe he was hearing this. "That's not John Q. Public out there, Max— that's some lowlife drunks who were probably paid to cause a distraction for that media crew."

"We don't know that. The news crew might just be taking advantage of—"

"Even so, do you really think I'm going to convert a bunch of drunks by talking to them?"

"Just don't mess them up, okay? That media crew would love to see you going transgenic on a bunch of ordinary asses." "Fine!" Disgustedly, he took off into the shadows between two buildings.

Max waited two beats, then took off herself, in the other direction, to cut off the television team.

From twenty feet away, she watched the television crew fiimbling on the other side of the fence. A short pudgy guy in a T-shirt and jeans hefted the camera while the obvious "talent," a too-tanned bimbo in an off-the-rack suit, tried to look like a network anchor. In the meantime, a skinny guy in a windbreaker with the station's call letters and channel number emblazoned on the back tried to keep the wires from tangling.

Max eased forward, stopping at the corner of the building, staying in the shadows as she peeked around to see if Alec was talking to the drunks yet. As she watched, Alec sauntered out from between the buildings and approached the four inebriated men throwing firebombs. There still didn't seem to be any sign of the National Guard or the cops moving in from their barricade position.

"Gonna have to ask you fellas to stop doing that," Alec said to their guests.

The biggest of the drunks—a scruffy-bearded guy in frayed jeans and a MUTANTS

GO HOME T-shirt, which included a bad, monster-movie-type image of dog-boy Joshua— stepped forward and yelled through the mesh: "Get stuffed, freak!"

The potbellied guy then heaved another bottle with a burning rag stuffed in its neck, this one in Alec's general direction. But the guy was so drunk though that Alec never moved and the thing still missed him by ten feet, shattering to spread a pool of fire that threw orange shadows on the blandly handsome planes of Alec's face, revealing a hood-eyed sinister quality that few ever had noticed.

"Look, guys," he said, his voice reasonable but with an edge, "you're half in the bag.

Stop playing with fire before you get burned."

One of the drunks lit bottles for the other three and they all heaved them at once. Two landed on either side of Alec while the third sailed far over his head. Max watched as it crashed into the building and a splash of fire erupted on the wall.

This was going to get ugly....

Alec turned his face toward where Max was hidden in the shadows—she guessed she shouldn't have been surprised that his transgenic-attuned senses would have betrayed her position—and he said softly, "Hey—I tried."

Then Alec jumped the eight-foot fence in a Superman sin-

gle bound, landed in the midst of the four drunks and dispatched them with a blur of martial arts moves—assorted chops and kicks—before any of them even realized he was on their side of the fence. As the last one fell, Alec hopped back up the fence, pausing at the top to smile down at his arrayed victims, sprawled in bloody unconsciousness; then the X5 alighted to the transgenics' side.

Watching from the shadows, Max shook her head—so much for not messing them up; but in Alec's defense, he hadn't killed or even maimed them—a few missing teeth and a broken bone or two was about it.

On the other hand, the drunks had managed to spread their hatred in a literal manner, prior to Alec spanking them: the fire, courtesy of the one Molotov cocktail that had reached its target, made its way quickly up the wall, and soon the entire building was endangered.

Transgenics showed up, seemingly from nowhere, to fight the blaze with extinguishers and an old-fashioned bucket brigade—losing precious water—and in less than five minutes, the fire was under control at least, which was good news.

Only, news of another kind had also been made: Max had looked helplessly on as the TV crew captured Alec's attack on the drunks; but the camera also caught the fire, and the teamwork of the transgenics.

As the TV crew was recording the firefighting efforts of her brothers and sisters, Max had a moment of elation at the notion of the media showing something positive about the transgenics; then she noticed how the flames and smoke-streaked air played on those animal-tinged faces: her brothers and sisters, so many of them already condemned by appearances considered freakish by mainstream America, looked distorted, even more monstrous in the eerie lighting provided by the fire.