Outcasts (35 page)

The world saw the Chemist fall. Help would arrive soon. Could I wait? No. Again, not even close. I had seconds.

I punched the glass. But it was curved and slippery and my hand simply squeaked across. I punched again to no effect. Teresa Triplett whacked the glass ineffectually with something. Whang! Whang! All it did was hurt my ears. I fumbled desperately for the Boom Stick but couldn’t grasp it. No energy in any finger.

Then, from some other universe in which people existed, my pocket buzzed. I felt the vibration. Inside its water-tight compartment my cell had received a text message. Curiosity for that instant made me forget I was dying. I dug at the pocket with numb digits, pressed apart the plastic zipper and removed the phone. Pressed the home key and the screen turned on for a tenth of a second. Just a tenth of a second for seeping water to short-circuit the phone’s motherboard. One brief burst of power. But that was enough. I saw the message from PuckDaddy.

>> INCOMING ROCKETS!!!!!

Incoming rockets. That jerk. I told him no rockets. My irritation registered like it was someone else’s emotion. Distant. Unattached. I was dead anyway. Oh well.

Whang! Whang!

Except Teresa Triplett was up here. She would die. I had no way to convey her plight. And she’d never escape in time. That was sad. But I had no options.

No options. And no oxygen.

No oxygen.

Oxygen…

Oxygen! I had a canister of the stuff in my vest.

I patted my chest. Lee’s tube was still there. The Chemist had taken the OC spray but left the oxygen. Don’t confuse them, Lee joked. I groped and fished in the thin pockets. Pulled something out. A flashlight. Dropped it. Went groping again with unsympathetic fingers.

Got it! Carefully I removed a small blue can of pressurized air. Popped the top. The nozzle went into my mouth and I depressed the trigger with my tongue. Sweet, sweet, beautiful, delicious oxygen flooded my lungs. Filled them to the point of pain. My heavy mind cleared. Headache receded. It was probably imagination but the oxygen felt palpable as it circulated throughout my body. Another breath. Another explosion of life. Energy. Strength. Hope. One more deep inhalation and the canister gave out.

It was enough. Full power. I brought my knees to my face. My back against the rear wall. Boots flat on the front curvature of the tank. I pressed. Essentially doing a sideways squat. The glass didn’t even resist. Starbursts appeared. The structure buckled. Great cracks opened at the upper and lower seams. The tube remained structurally intact but shattered into a mesh of slivers and chunks. Water gushed out like a dam breaking.

I easily pulled the Thunder Stick free. The water had emptied to my waist. I shoved the stick upwards and blasted open the hatch. I
Jumped
out and landed wetly beside Teresa Triplett. “Incoming missiles,” I gasped, and we fled.

The rockets made a sizzling noise as they approached from the west. We reached the crest of the pool as the first struck. It released its payload like a punch, vaporizing a path through the upper levels of the Wilshire and coating everything with fire. The Wilshire Grand rang from peak to foundation.

We jumped into infinity as the second and third rocket detonated. And the fourth and fifth. The tower shuddered and swayed and was engulfed, rapid oxidation melting metal.

My parachute opened with a snap. The wall of heat thrust us up and away into the stars. Into clean air. The chute wasn’t meant for two people. The impact would be significant. But we’d survive. We sliced in a wide arc over downtown Los Angeles, curving gently northwards. Towards the barricade. Towards everyone I loved.

Katie’s ambulance took us both to the UCLA Medical Center, just north of Santa Monica. Dr. Whitmer, an abducted surgeon living in captivity for the past eighteen months, clearly struggled with the tsunami of emotions experienced by all released hostages. Except he still had a job to do, a patient to preserve; he had assisted the Chemist with Katie’s surgery and he felt responsible.

An hour later, at one in the morning, Dr. Whitmer, Dad, Katie’s mom, Samantha and I gathered in the hospital room around Katie’s bed. Her beautiful brown hair had been shaved off to allow for multiple surgeries. The sight of so many incisions nearly overcame Ms. Lopez. I knew the feeling. I bordered on nausea and violence. Katie could have been a corpse by appearances.

“Katie Lopez received a more thorough procedure than any previous patient,” Dr. Whitmer explained. He was clearly exhausted and running on fumes. Four other physicians stood in the room with us taking notes. “She was given a full blood transfer yesterday. In other words, every drop of blood in her body was produced initially by the Father.”

“By the Chemist,” I said.

“Correct. He never allowed me a chance to examine his illness. But whatever
it
is, she now has. The Father…err, the Chemist is a truly gifted physician and neurosurgeon. Was.
Was
gifted. He grafted stem cell transplants into the muscle tissue and bone marrow of each appendage. Multiple spinal cord neural transplants. And, as you can see, the brain. Stem cells were taken from the Chemist himself over the past eighteen months. I performed many of the extractions myself.”

Ms. Lopez spoke out of her heartbreak. “Why? What does this do?”

“As I said, he was a genius. And he didn’t allow me access to his methodologies. His understanding of medicine and cell engineering is ten years past anything I’ve studied, ten years past anything in clinical trials. His transplanted cells will begin to repair and replace Katie’s own cells. His goal is structural amelioration. Her body isn’t as strong as it should be because her illness was only recently introduced. For comparison, the Outlaw’s body had eighteen years of preparation. Not Katie’s. So he’s assisting her body with the coming transformations. We did this to a lesser extent with all his Twice Chosen.”

She rubbed her eyes and shuddered. “I do not understand.”

“Think of it as rebuilding a car. The Chemist gave Katie his illness, which is like dropping a race car engine into a Honda Civic. The Civic will tear apart under the power of the new engine. So he rebuilt the Civic too. Making it stronger.”

I was holding Katie’s hand. So cold. So lifeless. I asked, “What about the brain surgeries?”

“He inserted his own brain cells. His own DNA. He wanted to grow new circuitry inside her mind. The brain surgery took twelve hours and he performed it all himself. I can’t stress this enough…his mind functioned on another level. I’m under-qualified to fully understand or explain. We all are.”

Dad asked, “Now what?”

“Now we keep her unconscious to protect brain tissue. Protect her psyche, for lack of better phrasing. Full body reconstruction is difficult for the patient. She’ll need two hundred precent of her usual nutrition intake. I’ve performed this surgery hundreds of times, and monitored the results. Patients will wake when they’re ready. If we force them to wake up…it’s never a positive outcome.”

One of the faceless physicians behind me asked, “Time frame?”

“Ninety days. Give or take a few weeks. Maybe longer for her. The surgery was traumatic. The longer the better. Preserves sanity. Mostly.”

Samantha asked, “What do you mean he wanted to grow new circuitry inside her mind?”

Dr. Whitmer shrugged, eyes bloodshot. “I’m afraid to speculate.”

“Do it anyway.”

“Judging by these two incisions here, it appears he operated on the medial temporal lobe. The limbic system.”

“Which means?”

“Memory processing,” he said. I’d been afraid of that. We all had. He continued, “Maybe. Again, he understood this in ways no one else does. These small incisions here, the frontal cortex, could be any number of cognitive functions. Behavior. Personality. I’d like to run a battery of neural scans to find out what he did. We could fill books with conclusions based on her condition when she wakes. But…” He didn’t finish. He was on the verge of collapse.

I said, “Doctor, one more question from us. The Chemist and I spoke on the roof. About Katie. He said this surgery wasn’t like the others. Katie’s was far more advanced, and she’d wake as a goddess. Was he lying?”

“About the goddess? Well, the Father was prone to dramatic hyperbole. But this surgery was unique in two ways. One, she received a full blood transfer instead of an injection. This was only performed one time previously, with Hannah Walker. The cheerleader. The Chemist was very pleased with those results. And two, the other unique aspect…He wanted Katie to wake up stronger than his previous patients. More powerful. We hadn’t attempted it before, and we are both unsure of its success.”

“Attempted
what
?”

“The muscle and bone marrow transplants? I inserted stem cells from
two
different individuals. From the Chemist himself, and from an individual named Tank Ware.”

Samantha swore. My head swam. My stomach heaved. Dad caught me before I fell. Katie had Tank’s genetic code growing in her bones.

Dr. Whitmer continued, “The Chemist claimed Tank Ware possessed the strongest muscle and bone tissue on the planet. And somehow he got his hands on Tank Ware’s DNA. A significant amount of blood and muscle tissue. This type of gene therapy is Star Trek type stuff. Light years away from us. Simple immunorejection could crash the whole project.”

I heard no more. I sank onto the sleeper couch beside Ms. Lopez and we existed in a shared stupor until morning.

Martin Patterson, the Chemist, was dead. His body was recovered off the street below the Wilshire Grand. His skull and his body had cracked open upon impact. The body of Baby Face could not be found.

News of the Chemist’s death did not provide the result for which we all prayed and hoped. Walter did not throw down his weapons. Blue-Eyes did not release her control over most of Washington DC. And the Chosen went berserk, like their hive queen died. Any party hoping for an easy reclamation of Los Angeles was quickly disillusioned. The Chosen had previously been unruly and dangerous soldiers in a poorly organized army. However, now leaderless, they formed lawless bands of vengeful freaks.

I watched the world lurch from inside the hospital. I’d left Katie once and she paid the price; never again. Far off conversations with the Chemist and with Carter ran through my mind.
Unconditional love protects us
. On Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs love was foundational, only slightly less crucial than food, shelter and safety. Katie needed unconditional love. Her body and mind would undergo hell, but I’d be present the entire time. Vividly I recalled how soothing Katie’s physical touch was, how the headaches fled before her affection, how she kept me sane, kept me alive.

I didn’t leave her room for days at a time, not even when Ms. Lopez relieved me. I massaged her hands, her arms, her feet and legs. Her incisions healed and I rubbed lotions on the wounds to prevent hard scar tissue. I bent her knees and elbows to keep the joints from freezing. I dripped water into her mouth hourly. Moistened her dry lips with vaseline. I talked to her incessantly. Or sang. Or read books out loud. Dr. Whitmer demonstrated how to apply splints to obstruct contractures, and how to administer low doses of neuromuscular electrical stimulation to prevent atrophy. But, he told me, the disease caused so much muscle growth that she’d need very little physical therapy when she woke.

I could do this. For ninety days, for Katie, I could do this.

Samantha remained furious about my surrender to the Chemist, but she stayed to keep rabid paparazzi out. Katie’s capture and release and my skyscraper shenanigans revamped the absurd fanatical frenzy. After a week, however, she grew sick of this lifestyle and left to join Isaac Anderson and his crew of resistance fighters. They operated independently of the Federal government, though with growing underground support from its members and resources. America appeared on a crash course with civil war, breaking neatly between those loyal to Washington and the President, and those recognizing the federal government had been usurped by a mad woman. Isaac and Samantha grew in notoriety and within a month were the figureheads of the resistance. Thanks to Puck’s help, the world learned the White House had indeed ordered the launch of rockets against American civilians, against the Outlaw, on American soil (Blue-Eyes herself issued the order, but that was impossible to prove).

The conflict was growing on too many fronts to count. Walter held a sizable chunk of the wild Chosen in partial abeyance and he set about burning the world down with abandon. The Pacific Northwest lived in terror. His numbers swelled unchecked because Blue-Eyes kept Americans busy in cold war against each other. Officials estimated over twenty thousand Chosen roamed freely, often with adoring attendants toting guns.

Carter healed and paid his respects. I’d grown so bored and lonely that his visit was welcome. He moved with a vague limp, though nothing else had changed. He smelled of cigarette smoke.

“Katie has always been a better person than the rest of us,” Carter said, brushing her arm with surprising tenderness. “She deserves better.”

“What will you do now?”

“Are you kidding, mate? There’s a war brewing. Which means a fortune is up for grabs. You’ve always got a place in my crew. I owe you a favor anyway.”

I grinned for the first time in days. “Good to know.”

“You can’t stay here forever, you know. You’re a target.”

“I’m staying as long as it takes.”

“You’ll go crazy, kid.”

“Maybe.”

Natalie North came a few days later. She brought flowers and pretty gowns for Katie to wear. All the hospital staff followed her around. We hugged for a long time, happy to be friends and allies in such a broken world.

“Wherever I am, you and Katie have a home,” she told me before she left. “Call me.”

Lee visited soon after. He’d grown into a man during the past few months. Taller, stronger, wiser. He cried over Katie. We cried together over our fallen friend Cory. Lee’d been made an E6 military rank, a non-commissioned civilian officer, and traveled with an Army engineering team to demonstrate electroshock weapons for subduing Chosen.