Dark Angel: Skin Game (19 page)

"What have you got?" Alec asked.

"Tryptophan in the fridge," Joshua said, holding up a white bottle big enough for five hundred or so doses.

"Take it."

"That's stealing, Alec."

"Take it!"

Joshua stuffed the bottle in his pocket. In the bathroom, in a cupboard under the sink, Alec found a canvas bag. Inside he found the wallets, pistols, stun rods, and badges of two sector cops and an NSA operative named Calvin D. Hankins.

"Not exactly the jackpot I was hoping to hit," he said.

Ducking into the bathroom, Joshua looked at the items and frowned, and his voice quivered as he asked, "Kelpy ... Kelpy is skinner, isn't he?"

"Looks that way.... Sorry, big guy." Alec loaded the evidence back in the bag. "We've got to get this stuff to Max, ASAP."

"Okay. But Alec—she won't be happy. We won't be heroes."

"No, but she'll be pleased we found this before the cops or Ames White. Did you find anything?"

Joshua shook his head.

As they walked out into the main room, Alec noticed a door next to the one they'd busted in. A closet, had to be. "Did you look in there?" he asked.

Joshua shook his head. "Didn't see it."

Glancing from Joshua to the door, Alec turned the knob and opened it.

Inside they saw something even their Manticore hardened eyes were unprepared to process.

A dress mannequin stood on the floor, wearing a Frankenstein patchwork, an incomplete garment, whose sections were various tones, ranging from brown to off-white, depending in part upon their relative freshness.

The garment in progress consisted of the stitched-together flesh of Kelpy's victims.

"Crazy bastard's making a human suit," Alec said.

"Why, Alec? Why?"

"To be human, I guess. Somewhere in his Manticore-fried brain, he came up with that hot one... . Wait... what the hell... ?"

Hating to touch the thing, Alec swiveled the mannequin slightly.

On the blank head of the thing, Kelpy had pasted a photo

of a white face with spiky hair, wire frame glasses, and a serious save-the-world look.

Joshua said simply, "Logan's picture. Alec—why is Logan's picture on that statue?"

"Not good," Alec said. "Not good."

Walking down the eighth floor hall, Bobby Kawasaki knew something was wrong.

He could almost smell it. At his apartment he paused and saw the faint glow beneath the door.

Someone was inside!

Not wasting a moment, his fear spiking, Bobby stripped, tossed his clothes down the hall, and blended into the wall.

Not thirty seconds later, his head covered by a motorcycle helmet, Bobby's old friend Joshua stepped into the hall. A young man who appeared to be an X5 followed, the canvas bag of goodies hanging from his arm.

They took a few steps in the opposite direction and Kelpy attacked.

Reaching into the bag, Kelpy pulled out a stun rod before the X5 could react. He touched the X5 with the rod, and the young man yelled as he shook violently.

Growling, Joshua spun toward Kelpy, but not in time....

Snatching up the second stun rod, Kelpy hit Joshua in the chest even as the beast man lunged forward with a lionlike roar that turned into a shriek. Kelpy hit both of them again, and left them twitching but unconscious.

He dropped one of the stun rods, keeping the other with him. There was much to do now and very little time to do it. The cops would probably be on their way, if any neighbors had heard and reported the ruckus. That meant getting his project, and getting out of there, as fast as he could.

Kelpy would have to move his plan up now—he would need to work faster.

But that was all right: the sooner he finished, the sooner everything would go his way.

He removed his project carefully from the mannequin and packed it in a suitcase. He dressed quickly, once again becoming Bobby Kawasaki, bike messenger. Slinging the suitcase's strap over his shoulder, Bobby took one last look around the rathole. He wouldn't miss it a bit.

Leaving the apartment—forgetting to collect his Tryptophan in the fridge—Bobby picked up the canvas bag, felt the weight of the pistols inside and thought about killing Joshua and his intrusive playmate, still lying helpless in the hallway.

Then he heard sirens, the elevator buzz, and decided discretion might well be the better part of valor. Turning, he walked to the stairs at the far end of the hall and disappeared

... in that way that only Bobby/Kelpy could.

TERMINAL CITY, 10:59 P.M.

TUESDAY MAY 11 2021

Pacing, Max asked, "Where the hell are they?" Dix shook his lumpy head. "Haven't seen them since the meeting this morning ... and I can't find them on any of the video feeds."

Lizard-man Mole offered, "Terminal City is a big place." She whirled at him. "You're not in on this, are you?" Mole's cigar almost dropped out of his mouth. "No! Hell no—

in on what?"

"I wish to hell I knew," she growled. The X5 had a sick feeling about this; as much as she valued Alec—as much as she secretly liked the guy—Max was well aware of his self-centered, guileful ways.

They were in the media center, waiting for the eleven o'clock news. Max prowled restlessly, while Dix and Mole sat here and there in the room, the crew watching the monitors hugging the screens.

"If they are up to something," Mole said, "what pisses me off is they didn 't invite me."

Max shot him a look. "Don't whine—it's not becoming." Mole shrugged, leaning back in a spring-sprung easy chair no self-respecting thrift shop would accept. "Hey, it's not like it was my idea, them jumping the fence. I'm just sayin'—"

She raised an eyebrow and the big tough lizard man piped down, sucking his cigar like a pacifier.

"Anyway," she said, flopping into another shabby easy chair, "we don't know for sure that they've gone anywhere." This was said without much conviction.

Mole started to open his mouth again, probably to ask where the hell she thought they were, but the ugly frown etched on her lovely features encouraged him to keep his questions to himself.

"All right," she said, heaving a sigh. "We've got plenty of other things to worry about.

Let's get back to work."

And she hauled herself out of the chair, without even having really settled in.

"Wait!" Dix said, "News is starting." He turned the volume up some.

"Would it be asking too much," Max said dryly, "that the lead story not be Alec and Joshua?"

The news anchor was a blonde woman with manicured hair, suspiciously energetic blue eyes, and a long, thin face. She looked as though she hadn't had a cheeseburger since before the Pulse.

"In our top story tonight," the blonde said, "transgenics invaded the Ichiro Suzuki Elementary School today ..."

Mole spoke for all of them: "Holy freakin' shit...."

"We go now to our reporter on the scene, Ben Petty."

Petty stood tall, straight, and wore a nearly identical suit to the one he'd worn the night before, when he'd bribed the drunks. "Thank you, Liz."

"Hey, Max, isn't that your pal?" Dix asked.

Max shushed him.

Petty was saying, "Today, two transgenics invaded Ichiro Elementary, apparently intending to kidnap children."

"Kidnap children?" Mole asked, half out of the easy chair, dangling cigar stuck to the saliva of his lower lip. "Why in the hell would they do that?"

As if speaking directly to the lizard man, Petty said, "Local police have refused comment, but a high-ranking federal government source has speculated that the transgen-ics hoped to barter a deal to end the Terminal City siege by using school children as hostages."

"Ames White," Max said, spitting the name like an epithet.

The shot widened to show a man with a bandaged nose standing next to Petty. "Janitor Hampton Rhoades successfully fought off the transgenics, though one of them did, before fleeing, manage to break the janitor's nose."

One of the monitor crew sat up, a slender female, gesticulating, yelling, "Hey, I know him—he's a second-gen X5!"

All of them turned toward the source of that comment, an X5 whose name Max didn't know—typically pretty, with short brown hair, doe eyes, a pug nose, and a red-lipstick blossom of a mouth.

Dix asked, "Where d'ya know him from, Kade?"

"Not the streets—Manticore. His name was Stoop. He was a squad leader. If he got his nose broken, it's 'cause he let somebody do it."

They all traded looks, obviously wondering why these "transgenics" would invade the school... and, beyond that, why one of their own would fight them.

Were the two Alec and Joshua?

On the tube, the janitor was being interviewed by Petty.

Rhoades was saying, "I don't think they wanted trouble."

"Then how do you explain them breaking your nose?"

Shrugging, Rhoades said, "They were scared. I discovered them in my supply room—

probably just looking for stuff, you know."

"You're being heralded as a hero," Petty said, "for saving these children."

"I don't think—"

Petty turned toward the camera. "There you have it—a

pair of transgenics, chased off in fright by a grade school janitor."

Max shook her head. This just kept getting better and better, didn't it?

"Keep a tape of that garbage," she told the monitoring crew. "But for now, I've seen enough."

She was on her way out of the room when the phone rang. She answered with her standard, "Go for Max."

"It's me," Logan said in her ear, and just the sound of his voice soothed her.

"Hi. Anything?"

"I may be making some progress. Can you stop by?"

"New place?"

"Yeah. Now would be good."

"I'm on my way."

She hung up, relieved at the thought of being in Logan's presence. This leadership gig was the pits....

Walking toward the back fence of Terminal City, she watched as the community settled in for another night. A helicopter thrummed overhead, its searchlight probing their home like a prison beam searching for escaping prisoners; but at least it kept moving, stopping to hover for only a moment, at various points. The tension level in their toxic little town was high enough already, without choppers and firebombs, and she had to wonder if Clemente's control outside the fence was any less tenuous than her own, inside.

Here and there she saw transgenics bedding down. Some, she knew, like Dix, had real beds and real rooms, however shabby they might be; many, though, had only whatever scraps they could make into a bed, with a hollowed-out building to serve as shelter.

Sooner or later this situation had to break. Other than Clemente, though, no one on the outside seemed interested in talking. She could only guess the authorities—and this included Ames White, but also more

responsible types, without snake-cult hidden agendas—were patiently waiting to starve the transgenics out.

That was a plus, since the outside world was unaware of their Medtronics tunnel supply line.

On the minus side, her slender grip on the Terminal City reins seemed to be slipping.

If she couldn't even get her closest comrades—Alec and Joshua—to follow her orders, how did she expect to get any of the others to?

Arriving at Medtronics, she slipped through the door, down the stairs, and into the tunnel. She trotted easily to the other end, went upstairs and found Logan bent over his computer, hard at work.

The office looked only slightly neater than the last time she'd been here, and a third desk had already been added to the cluttered two. Three different monitors displayed images, and Logan seemed to be tasking between all three.

"Hey, you," she said.

"Hey," he answered, his attention still on the computer stuff, but just enough warmth in that one word to make her feel better. The disappointment of Joshua and Alec's betrayal might have degenerated into self-pity, had she not known that Logan was still there, steadfast.

She tried to look over his shoulder without getting too close. If she leaned in to read, and even a stray virus-infected hair touched him ... well, she didn't want to think about that. "Progress, you said?"

Logan nodded but kept working. After a few seconds of punching keys, the image on the middle monitor changed. "No kidding," he said to the monitor.

"What?"

He glanced at her. "That tape you gave me of you and Clemente?"

"Yeah?"

"Clemente talked about prints in the computer coming up as a shoe salesman on the skinner's first victim."

"That's what he told me," Max confirmed with a nod, "but also that something was hinky with the ID."

"Hinky is right," Logan said, tapping some more keys.

"Don't tease—what do you have?"

"The victim's name, according to the fingerprints, is Henry Calvin."

"Okay."

"Only, the shoe store where Henry supposedly worked went out of business six months ago."

"Making the late Henry an unemployed shoe salesman."

"Well, his being out of work might explain why he lived on a vacant lot—'cause that's what his address checks out as."

"Sure about this?"

He gave her the "puh-leese" look.

"How'd you do that?"

Small shrug. "It was easy, really. The file was designed to stand up to a cursory viewing. The government, as usual, never thinks that anyone will dig any further."

Max took a step closer, still careful to not get too near. "So the guy's ID is fake."

"And if he's a fake shoe salesman, in a government file— what is he in real life?"

"Someone who works for a government agency—a covert one, maybe?"

Logan swung around in the chair. "I think that's a reasonable assumption."

Excited, Max said, "The NSA, then—White!"

He favored her with a grin. "Interesting thing, though. I hacked into the NSA files and there's no file for Henry Calvin."

"Why, does that surprise you?"

"Not really—so I kept digging, and it turns out that on the same day that Henry Calvin died, an NSA agent named Calvin Hankins retired."

"Retired?"

"Yeah ... and another odd thing is that his partner, only twenty-seven years old, left the NSA the same day, on full disability."