Ex-Patriots (9 page)

“I told you, I’ve got to get back to my
place.”

“Well, if you want you can swing by my place
and take all the cushions off the couch. Keep ‘em if you like. I’m
never there.”

“What?”

“I just figured you’d want to build yourself
a little fort to sleep in.”

She stopped pushing the chair. “Fuck
you.”

“If only someone would,” he sighed. He spun
his chair so he faced her. Without the handles to hold onto, her
arms pulled in close to her body. “But let’s talk about you. How
long were you in the armor for this time?”

“As long as I needed to be.”

“How long?”

She sighed. “Four days. More or less.”

“More or less?”

“Almost five.”

Barry looked at her. “It’s only built for
three, right?”

“It can do more if it needs to.”

“No wonder you stink. Have you even
eaten?”

“I can stand to lose some weight.”

“Yeah, you and all the other fat people
running around after the apocalypse.”

“
The suit’s getting tight in
the legs.”

“Whatever,” he said. “Look, you know you’re
safe in here, right? They can’t get you.”

She glanced over her shoulder toward the
gate. Toward the big white cross.

“I’ve got your back,” said Barry. “George and
Stealth have it. Hell, most people here love you.”

She smirked. “Not everyone.”

“Well, there’s a few idiots in every crowd,”
he said. “Point is, you’ve got to stop hiding in the damned
suit.”

“Mister Burke,” called someone behind him.
Barry rolled his eyes at the sound of the voice and Danielle
winced.

“Christian,” said Barry, turning his
wheelchair. “We were just talking about you. What’s up?”

Christian Nguyen had been an L.A.
councilwoman and had hung onto her small amount of power when
society began to rebuild itself inside the Mount. Now she was
district leader for Southeast and all of Raleigh, and some people
thought she had a good chance of being mayor if everyone could
agree on a fair way to do elections. She was also “super-phobic,”
as some called it, and made no effort to hide her feelings.

Danielle kept it simple and called her a
bitch.

Christian marched across the cobblestones
with a half-dozen or so people behind her. She stopped in front of
the wheelchair and glared down at Barry. “What’s this about a
helicopter flying over the valley?”

“It was a Predator,” he said. “Not a
helicopter.”

“Don’t try to dodge,” she snapped. “Why
weren’t we told about it?”

“If you weren’t told about it, how do you
know about it?”

“Everyone knows,” she said. “What I want to
know is why nothing official’s been said.”

“Well,” said Barry, “Stealth figured you’d
all find out in a few hours—like you did—so there was no need to
make some proclamation from on high.”

Christian’s lips twisted into a smug smile.
“What you mean is St. George ordered people not to talk and Stealth
realized they would anyway.”

Barry felt a faint tremor as Danielle took
hold of the wheelchair’s handles again. Part of him hoped she was
going to ram the chair into Christian’s shins. “Yet again,” he
said, “you know it all.”

“Are you going to tell us what the pilot
said?”

“The pilot?”

“The helicopter pilot.”

He sighed. He made sure it was a loud sigh.
“A, it wasn’t a helicopter, it was a Predator drone, and two, a
Predator doesn’t have a pilot.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t have a
pilot?”

“It’s a drone, Christian. A robot.”

“A robot plane? How stupid do you think I
am?”

One of her followers, a scrawny man, stepped
forward and muttered something to her. She glared down at the man
in the wheelchair.

“Did you want me to answer that last one,”
said Barry, “or was it rhetorical?”

“I think you need to start being a bit more
respectful,” she snapped. “Whatever it was, it was a symbol of the
American government.”

“It was a drone,” interrupted Danielle.
“Nobody knows who was controlling it. Could’ve been anyone.”

Barry nodded.

Christian’s scowl turned into a smirk. “Oh,
you’d like that, wouldn’t you? To convince everyone help isn’t on
the way. That the rest of the world isn’t pulling itself out of the
Godless state Los Angeles has been left in.” She threw back her
shoulders and tossed a glance to her entourage. “The days of
Stealth’s little dictatorship are numbered,” she said. “Your power
over all of us is coming to an end and you’ll make up any lie you
can to hang onto it.”

“Seriously,” said Barry, “why wouldn’t we
want that? You think I like spending seven days a week in a metal
ball so you can read at night?”

She waved off his comments and pushed her
hand at his face. He felt the chair shift on the cobblestones and
he was sure Danielle was about to ram it forward. “Things are
getting back to normal,” Christian said. “We’ll see where that
leaves all of you.”

A murmur of consent rose from the followers.
She tossed her head back, glared at Barry and Danielle in turn, and
stalked off with her minions.

Barry took in a breath to shout something
after her and settled for giving the finger with both barrels.

“What a bitch,” muttered Danielle.

“What are you complaining about? You got off
easy.”

“She doesn’t know who I am,” said the
redhead. “Most people think I’m always nine feet tall and
fifteen-hundred pounds. They see a skinny, helpless woman and I’m
just a face in the crowd.”

He twisted around to look at her. “You’re not
helpless.”

“We’re all helpless, Barry,” she said. “As
long as things stay like this, we’re all screwed.”

THEN

The last thing I could remember was trying not to
shiver with all of them standing around me. I’ve got no problem
with air drops, live-fire training, even being under enemy fire.
I’ve been caught in two explosions in my six years of service and
still have scars and a Purple Heart from one of them. But lying on
an operating table, wearing nothing but a paper smock and panties
while they pumped tranquilizers into my arm, that freaked me
out.

I’m not supposed to freak out. Girls freak
out. I’m a soldier before I’m a girl. I was born to be a soldier.
It was what Dad wanted. His dad had been in the Army, and his dad
before him, and his dad before him, and his before him. A line of
Kennedys serving their country all the way back to the Civil War,
long before someone else with our name became President.

Mom says having three girls was murder on
him. He loved us, don’t get me wrong. He was the greatest dad in
the world and he spent every minute he could with us, but it was
rough on him not to have a son to keep up the military tradition.
It killed him when Ellie, my oldest sister, decided to be a
kindergarten teacher and Abby announced she was going to school to
be a lawyer.

I was the youngest. And the tomboy. As soon
as I was old enough to understand Dad’s quiet disappointment, I
knew what I was going to do with my life. I just wish he’d lived
long enough to see me make sergeant. To see how good a soldier I’d
become.

So of course I jumped up when they offered to
make me an even better soldier. Out of about five hundred
volunteers, one hundred and eight made the final cut, two large
companies’ worth. A month of shots and now some surgery. Doctor
Sorensen tried to explain it to us but it was a lot of high-end
words none of us understood. He told us it would be easier to
explain after the operation.

I woke up in a hospital bed. Sorensen was
sitting next to me, reading a letter covered with flowery,
teen-girl writing. I found out later, talking with the rest of my
squad, he was there when everyone woke up. No idea how he timed
that out.

His monkey-boy was hovering in the
background, trying not to look like he was reading over the doc’s
shoulder. I blinked a few times, tried to move my arm and found out
how stiff it was. When I winced I discovered how bad the headache
was.

“Ahhh,” said Sorensen. “Awake at last. Get
her some water, John.” He said that last bit without even looking
back at monkey-boy.

“I’m sore,” I said.

“You’ve been unconscious for almost twenty
hours, sergeant,” he told me. “It’s normal.” He folded up his
letter.

I met his eyes. “Any problems, sir?”

“Just my daughter,” he said. He slipped the
papers into his coat pocket. “She’s starting to pick colleges and
everyone in the family has different ideas where she should
apply.”

I smiled. “I meant with the surgery.”

He gave me a wink and a pen light slipped out
of the same pocket. “I don’t think so,” he said, “but we’ll know
for sure in a few moments.” He flicked the light back and forth
across my eyes. “Focus on my finger.”

I followed his index finger as he moved it
around my face, then up and down in front of his own chest. No
problems. Monkey-boy came back with a paper cup of water. I reached
for it and my wrist clanked. I was handcuffed to the hospital bed’s
railing.

“Just a safety precaution,” said Sorensen.
“People can be disoriented after surgery and we didn’t want you
wandering off and hurting yourself.”

“What if I need to use the latrine?”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“We’ll have you out in a few minutes anyway.
Make a fist with your left hand. Good. Now your right. Good. Hold
this pencil as tight as you can.”

It was a cheap pencil. It snapped into three
pieces. He smiled at that.

The more tests he did, the more I realized I
felt fine. Aside from a splitting headache and stiff limbs, I
couldn’t sense anything wrong with me. And that made me suspicious,
because this wasn’t the first time I’d woken up from surgery in my
life. My appendix when I was fifteen and a torn meniscus in my knee
four weeks after Basic ended. I knew some part of me should hurt
more than everything else.

“No dizziness?” asked Sorensen. “No funny
tastes in your mouth?”

“No, sir. Just really dry.” I sipped the
water.

“It’s a side effect of the anesthesia. You
were in surgery for sixteen hours.”

I let my eyes slide down to my bare arms.
Handcuff on one. Basic IV on the other. No stitches. No
butterflies. Nothing. “Did something go wrong, sir? Why didn’t they
complete the surgery?”

“Do you know why my predecessor’s attempts at
this project failed, Sergeant Kennedy?”

I shrugged. The handcuffs jingled.

“He thought you had to force the body to
achieve the performance levels we’re hoping for. He spent weeks
pumping soldiers full of myostatin blockers and somatotropin and
other things which made a mess of their biochemistry.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what any of
that means.”

“Of course. Sorry. Let me explain it to you
like this. When you were very young, did you play a lot?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Play. Run around, jump, chase other
children, that sort of thing.”

“I was a tomboy, sir. I did all that and
fought with boys, too.”

“Did you ever do so much you collapsed?”

“Probably. I mean, didn’t everyone?”

“Everyone did,” he agreed. He paused to brush
a piece of lint off his pants. “We ran and lifted things and burned
through a day’s worth of calories in just a few hours. We pushed
our bodies to their full potential. Except...”

He paused again, as if he was searching for
the right word. It was a lecture, I know that now. At this point
he’d already given this speech a dozen times to other candidates as
they woke up.

“...we made ourselves sick,” he continued.
“We got hurt. Maybe we even hurt one or two of our friends by
accident. We learned it wasn’t always good to operate on those
levels unless it was absolutely necessary, and often not even then.
You see, everyone on Earth carries the seeds of superhuman ability
within them.”

I took another sip of water and flexed my
feet back and forth under the bedsheet. No tightness or sore spots
on my legs that I could feel. “You mean like mutant genes or
something?”

He shook his head. “No, I mean the things
you’ve heard about your whole life.” He ticked off examples on his
fingers. “People who lift cars with their bare hands to rescue
loved ones. People who run their first marathon with no training or
who can swim underwater for three minutes without taking a breath.
Children who fall off ten-story buildings and only get scratched.
Did you know a woman once fell almost two miles from an exploding
plane and received only minor injuries?”

I thought I’d heard the story before, so I
nodded.

“The human body is an amazing machine,” said
Sorensen. “It’s powerful and durable all on its own, without much
help from us. We rarely see that, though, because we all learned
early on not to use our bodies to their full potential. Even
professional athletes who train constantly are working under a
system of automatic restraint. We hold back. We don’t push
ourselves to our maximum limits because we instinctively understand
how dangerous it can be, to others and to ourselves. And as we got
older our bodies responded, getting slower and weaker because we
weren’t pushing them to be their best. I’m sure you’ve heard
stories of addicts on phencyclidine—PCP—who can fight half a dozen
men or punch through walls.”

I nodded again.

“A similar principle. The drug high bypasses
all those self-imposed safeguards. Of course, it also disables pain
receptors, so it’s not uncommon for them to come down and realize
they’ve broken several bones in their hands.”

Inside the paper smock, I rolled my abs and
shifted my hips and clenched a few female muscles. “So... you’re
giving us PCP?” Nothing. Not even a numb spot where they’d given me
a local. Just a bit stiff from lack of use.