I heard Jax Moore bark at some subordinate agents out in the hall: “No mistakes. Keep a close eye on him—he may be human, but he’s a slick, dangerous sonofabitch. Remember, he’s had augmentations. Probably why he was able to fool us for so long.”
My head was pounding with so many questions. I had to be an Elite—no human could do the things I could. “Augmentations” couldn’t possibly cover it. I mean if humans could be made to perform like top Elites… then why had it never happened before? Even the way my body was healing—didn’t that prove something? I was sore, incredibly sore, even in places I hadn’t known existed, but everything worked, including my adrenal glands—I felt like a river gone wild with spring rains.
But I shoved all that to the back of my brain. The only thing that mattered right now was getting out of here. But how could I? The Agency believed I was a traitor.
I tested the restraints. A metal-enforced jacket bound my upper body and held my arms tightly across my chest. Shackles pinned my wrists and ankles to the bed frame. They were too strong even for me… the world’s strongest human, right?
Right.
Chapter 23
THIS WAS THE finest hospital in the world—and long ago I had learned this axiom from my mother and father: greatest strength is also greatest weakness.
How could I work with that? There had to be a way out of this. But what was it? What could I do now?
Greatest strength is greatest weakness, I repeated over and over in my head.
Late that night, the highly sensitive cardio monitor near my bed let out a sudden bleep. The steady rhythmic line on the screen jumped along with the sound.
A second later it bleeped again, then started into a rapid-fire alarm pattern, while the line leaped in erratic peaks.
A guard stepped into the room—his face hard and wary. Not a shred of sympathy.
“What’s going on here?” he barked.
“My heart,” I gasped. “Racing like crazy. Won’t stop. Feels like it’s going to explode.”
The guard looked at the cardio monitor, then didn’t waste any time—he wheeled around and ordered his partner, “Get the doctors the hell in here! Do it. Now. He’s having a heart attack—a big one!”
That was one thing I had in my favor. They wanted me alive, not dead; they had questions that needed answering… about how I got to be me.
Greatest strength is greatest weakness. This was the most efficient hospital in the world—they weren’t going to let me die.
I revved my heart rate even higher than the 300 beats per minute I’d already reached. I was pushing 350 when the team of emergency medical personnel burst into the room.
I writhed and grimaced in fake agony, though I actually was in pain. “Can’t… breathe,” I moaned. “There’s an elephant on my chest. Help me! Please!”
Chapter 24
“WHAT THE HELL happened?” one of the doctors yelled at his staff. “You’ve been monitoring him from central control. The skunk was doing fine five minutes ago.”
“Don’t ask me—I never wasted any time learning medicine for skunks,” another doc said. “We’d better get him out of that jacket though. Take him to a trauma room. He’s up to three sixty!”
“Whoa, no you don’t,” one of the guards said and stepped in. “Our orders are not to let Hays Baker leave the room for any reason. That’s not happening. Unless he’s in a body bag.”
“He’s about to stop breathing for good. How’s that for a reason?” the lead doctor snapped. “You can explain it to your boss, unless you’d rather explain that you’re the one who killed him. Now get out of our way. He’s dying!”
Reluctantly, the guard stepped back.
Next, a pair of burly orderlies wheeled a gurney alongside my bed. They started to release the restraints.
I had never thought I would harm another Elite. But I’d never had Elites threatening to put me to a slow death either.
I kept up the act, but my muscles were tensed and ready to spring. The instant the shackles were unsnapped and the metal jacket pulled from my arms, I reared straight up out of the bed. I punched the nearest orderly and felt his nose break against my fist. He stumbled back in pain. I caught the second orderly with a chop across the neck, trying not to hurt him too badly. I was also careful to keep the orderlies between myself and the guards’ guns.
The Elite doctors were rooted in shock. I pushed them aside and went for the guards, who were already clawing for their pistols. Fortunately, the room was full of equipment, including several monitors on stands.
As I lunged forward, I wrenched one free and swung it like a mace. I took out both guards before they could administer a “fast death” with their guns.
Alarms were shrieking and strobes were flashing all over the building by now. I could hear footsteps pounding down the hallway.
I grabbed a doctor by the neck—the one who’d never wasted his time learning human medicine—and held him in front of me as a shield.
“One more step and I start throwing around his body parts,” I yelled at the approaching security team. “And, yes, I’m completely serious about it, and I’m capable. I’m human, right?”
I backed down the hallway to where it turned. I swung the doctor horizontally, then I sprinted toward the front of the building. Now I was using him like a battering ram to crash through everything and everyone in my way.
Carts went flying, gurneys were overturned, wide-eyed, shrieking nurses leaped back against the walls to avoid being trampled.
Still holding on to my screeching hostage, I bounded down an escalator to the lower level. Next, I burst into the cafeteria’s kitchen, where blank-faced robot workers tended the huge, metallic complex, churning out no-cal grub that was also virtually no-taste.
As I raced through, I dropped the doc into a bin of scraps. I caught a glimpse of his bulging-eyed face as he flopped around in the rank garbage.
“That’ll teach you to call me a skunk,” I told him.
Then I charged out through a loading-dock door into an alley—and, hopefully, the freedom of the night.
Unfortunately, I thought, maybe I am a skunk.
Chapter 25
THE COOL, FRESH night air quickly filled my lungs and began to dry the fevered hospital sweat off my skin. Adrenaline was keeping the pain at bay, and running was stretching and loosening my traumatized body.
Before long, I was pounding along the pavement at close to my top speed, fifty miles an hour.
I had to see my daughters and my wife—hold them in my arms, tell them I loved them, try to explain that whatever wicked stories they might hear weren’t true. Or, at least, that there had to be some reasonable explanation for the mix-up.
No matter what else, I wasn’t a traitor. That much I was certain of.
Our apartment wasn’t far from the hospital; I reached the building in less than ten minutes.
Suddenly, I was very nervous and apprehensive.
I paused to listen for sounds of pursuit, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Not so far, anyway. The side-door entrance recognized my bioprint and opened on contact. The police probably figured this would be the last place I’d go right now. I hoped so.
Was it possible that Lizbeth had turned on me as totally as Jax Moore said she had? Or was he lying—another part of this insanity? But why would he lie to me?
This time, when Metallico answered the apartment door, there was no robo-rap music playing, or sounds of any kind. The place felt empty. The air smelled strongly of antiseptic, and there were cleaning materials left out all over the living room.
“Hello, Hays,” Metallico said. “I’m afraid I can’t invite you in. Sorry about that.”
His tone was flat and neutral, and he seemed downright stiff—like an ordinary android instead of his usual sassy self.
“This is my house. You work here. What do you mean you can’t invite me in?”
“The apartment is being decontaminated.”
“Where are they
?” I demanded. “Lizbeth? The girls? I need to know. Right now, Metallico! I’m not in the mood for games.”
“I’m not at liberty to say. That’s final.”
I groaned. This was going nowhere fast, and I was pretty sure this unfaithful robot had already sounded the emergency alarm. Indeed, my hearing picked up the sound of fast-approaching airborne cars—and a couple more vehicles stopping on the streets below. I suppose I should have expected as much.
I rammed the heel of my hand into the robot’s silicone chest, sending him spinning across the room. Metallico crashed into a wall with a bright flash as his circuits collapsed and shorted him out.
“Take that, you treacherous vacuum cleaner!” I said, standing over his crumpled body.
Next, I peeled the silicone skin off the back of his bulb-shaped head. I quickly removed his short-term-memory chip, grabbed my backup PDA from the drawer in the desk in the hall, and dumped the chip’s data into it.
“Grandmère,” I said, sighing. Of course. Lizbeth had taken the kids to her mother’s house in the suburbs. Where else?
Grandmère was an aging, but still beautiful, lady with an icy charm and a keen sense of social class. Only the best of the Elites were good enough for her.
Once upon a time, that had meant me, but no more. And, probably, never again.
Dammit though, I missed my family. Didn’t that alone prove I was Elite?
Chapter 26
NO TIME FOR such sentimentality. The Agency commandos would be up here in seconds, heavily armed, ready to kill me if they had to. I was fairly certain the luxury building was already surrounded. So I ran to the back of the apartment and threw open the balcony door. Sure enough, police vehicles were already circling in the air and barricading escape routes on the ground. They wanted me—badly.
Spotlights flared suddenly. A voice boomed, “Stop where you are, Hays Baker! Down on your belly and spread your arms and legs!”
I’d spent time on the other side of those spotlights, and I knew the weapons that went with them—stun guns that would paralyze me if they were determined to keep me alive. Or lasers that would turn me into a six-foot-two cinder.
Question was—did they want to keep up this charade of pretending I was a skunk who needed to be brought in and interrogated?
I dove sideways to the neighboring balcony, twenty yards away, caught its lower rim, and swung myself down to the floor below.
The searchlights followed, and then bursts of laser fire hissed around me.
Well, that question was answered anyway. I was obviously wanted—dead or alive.
I went from balcony to balcony, flipping and twisting like a monkey dodging poison darts. Only the poison darts were traveling at the speed of light and punching three-inch-wide gashes in the concrete walls. Also, if I’d actually been a monkey, I’d have already lost my tail—one of the blasts came so close that it set the trailing edge of my hospital gown on fire.
I didn’t bother swatting it out. No time for that. Instead, I plunged headfirst toward the dark, roiling surface of the lake below. A blitz of searchlights and laser flashes followed me, but I somehow sliced into the cold water.
One good thing to be said for a 110-foot dive from a high-rise into a North American lake in the early summer: the freezing cold water quickly takes your attention away from the sting of slamming into the lake’s surface.
It was hard to hold my breath and think straight when all I wanted to do was scream. But I stayed underwater, knowing that cover meant survival.
My brain was racing faster than my body now. What next? Normally, I could hold my breath for several minutes, but how far would I be able to swim in that time? Well, let’s see!
I swam straight for the opposite shore—my strokes actually getting stronger—and finally ended up in a partially submerged culvert. The storm sewer it connected to ran up under the Esplanade, an eight-lane highway that bordered the lake.
I entered the first manhole shaft I came to, climbed furiously up, and came out in the middle of a landscaped median full of tulips, roses, exotic grasses, and hybrid cherry trees in full bloom.
The city’s ground traffic was heavy as usual, moving at a crawl—about thirty-five miles per hour.
It was just slow enough for me to sprint after the most anonymous-looking service vehicle I saw, grab hold of its rear bumper, then tuck myself down between the rear wheels, hopefully hidden from overhead police scanners.
In a matter of a few seconds, I had disappeared into the flood of vehicles flowing in and out of New Lake City.
As in the theme song from that old movie—one of the James Bond films, I believe—“nobody does it better.”
Chapter 27
STILL PLAYING THE superhero in my head—it just might help me survive—I jumped off the service vehicle as it slowed for its destination, a distribution center on the edges of an infamous human slum on the south side of town. I smelled the humans before I actually saw one. No wonder they were called skunks.
Humans aren’t the most fashion-savvy creatures on the planet, but even so, I figured I would stand out in my singed hospital gown. To avoid attracting too much attention, I stayed in alleyways and shadows, scouting for food, shelter, and, yes, clothes to replace the johnny.
It was a depressingly poor and bombed-out area of town, and there weren’t a lot of inviting spaces around. Mostly it was a long row of metal-sided buildings, shuttered loading docks, and gritty, litter-strewed sidewalks.
I’d gone maybe a half mile in the direction of what looked to be a human neighborhood when I rounded a corner and saw a group of jeering Betas—named so by Elite sociologists because they behaved like lawless young male wolves, living lives of opportunistic violence on the edge of the pack. The dangerous human thugs were armed with knives and clubs and were clearly not on their way to help out at an area soup kitchen.
They’d surrounded a girl—she couldn’t have been much more than sixteen years old, and she looked very pregnant. As they shoved her back and forth, her pale, tattered skirt billowed up around her waist. She was screaming at the top of her voice: “Nooo, my baby!”
It was against my Agency training to put myself at risk for a human, but the girl was clearly in trouble. I had to help her if I possibly could. But could I?
“Nice dress, man,” said the lead Beta as I approached the punks.
His friends stopped molesting the girl long enough to size me up and then pull a couple of knives from their belts.
“See anything you like?” I offered up a human-style wisecrack. “Maybe I do.”
“Watch it, pretty boy,” said the leader, a bull-shouldered hulk with a scarred face and a broken nose.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to dance?” I said.
“We’ll dance with you all right—till you’re bleedin’ out of places you’ve never bleeded before.”
“Sounds like fun,” I told him. “Will it hurt? I like pain.”
His buddies had stepped away from the terrified girl and were gathering around me now. The girl took off running down a nearby alleyway. Not even so much as a thank-you.
“Yeah,” the lead trog went on, clearly pleased with himself. “Why don’t we do some slam-dancing? We stand in a circle like this, and you get slammed.”
“Or,” I said, not to be outdone in my knowledge of retro human dances, “we could break-dance. You know, you try to lay a hand on me, and I break your ugly heads?”
His grin widened and then disappeared into an expression of stone-cold seriousness. “Kill ’im, boys. Rip ’im up.”
It so happened that I was already having a very bad day and had some serious aggression to work out. In fact, the hardest part would be checking my fury so that I didn’t overdo it and end up coming out of this fight without any usable clothes from this rat pack.
Of course, usable is a relative term. After I’d won the street fight—in under a minute—and stripped a couple of the skunks’ semiconscious bodies, I almost decided to stick with my
hospital gown. Their pants, boots, shirts, and jackets smelled that bad.
At first I was convinced the clothes achieved what I wanted: they made me look—and smell—just like another Beta. But as I buckled up my pants, I realized somebody wasn’t entirely buying the costume. Footsteps were coming up behind me lickety-split. Now what?
I took a breath and got ready for another fight.
It was just the young girl though, and she was very pregnant indeed. Poor thing.
Chapter 28
NORMALLY, I DESPISED sentimentality—except when it came to Lizbeth and my girls—but I found that I couldn’t help myself. Maybe my own recent circumstances were teaching me some compassion. I certainly hoped not.
The girl’s teeth were broken and decayed, and her skin pockmarked by some childhood disease, probably treatable at the time. Sad to say, but hospitals and other medical care for the humans were substandard at best. It was a policy I didn’t approve of, but the president had never asked my opinion on the subject.
“Can’t b-believe you got ’em all,” she stammered, with the slangy inflection of so many humans in these slums. “How’d ya do it?”
“Just dumb luck, I suppose. But I’m sure there are others lurking around. You should go someplace safe. Don’t depend on me, girl.”
She laughed, exposing several more infected teeth. “Safe? In Beta-Town? You’re not from around here, are ya?”
“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“Come with me,” she said. “Going to storm hard soon. I got a place.”
She was right about the weather. The sultry air was thickening and held the promise of rain, and this was the time of year that flash floods were common. I was bone tired too—my body wasn’t through with its healing.