The Liminal People (8 page)

I take my time getting over to the girls but increase my perspiration rate and kick the “I'm sexy” hormones into overdrive. I'm making sure I'm downwind of the nuns, scared of what they'd do if they caught a whiff of me now.

“Any of you know a girl named Tamara?” I say, standing in front of five girls out of a bad eighties punk video. Two try to hide their cigarettes. Two take long drags and stand, looking at me with a scowl. One blushes. Girls respond to “I'm sexy” in different ways.

“Who wants to know?” A girl with a Southie accent. One day she'll be fat and bloated, like her mother; I can already feel a slower metabolism than normal. Which is why she smokes, so she doesn't have to eat and so she doesn't have to work off those calories. It's all unconscious for her, and that's what makes her the cause of stains on many teenage boy's sheets right now. But her cavity-ridden mouth and pockmarked face make her tough-girl impression almost laughable. Only I'm not playing games right now, so I give her the respect she thinks she wants. She doesn't realize she's standing so close, or that she's pressing down her skirt with her free hand, trying to make a good impression.

“Look, I'm not a cop, OK? I'm an intern down at the hospital. I know she's been missing for a while, but look, she's sick, OK? I can't say what. I've just got to find her.”

“A bit much, the personal attention, enn'it?” the blushing one says, still not standing and not intrepid enough to look in my face. She'll grow to be gorgeous, provided she deals with the ulcer eating away at her intestines.

“We were . . . are . . . friends. I'm not trying to get her in trouble or anything, I promise. Look, if she's run away I won't tell anyone.” Heart rates go through the roof on that one. Not sure what that means, but they're focusing on my words.

“You some kind of perv?” the second unabashed smoker is asking, leaning on her friend's shoulder, glaring hard, trying not to lick her lips. She tries for a posh accent, but her Brixton roots won't let her go. Although she's five shades lighter than me, even now with me at my lightest, one of her parents came from the Caribbean recently.

“Listen to me. She's sick. Really sick. But she doesn't know it. She could die. Plus, she's contagious. If you've seen her, if you shared drinks with her or ate from the same plate of food, you could be sick, too.”

“How come the news hasn't said anything?” the blusher asks. She believes every word from my mouth.

“The news doesn't know. I'm sitting on it for as long as I can. Her father's a politician, and Tamara wouldn't want to be part of anything that would ruin his reputation. . . .”

“So, who's she to you, then?” Again, the brash smoker. Not as brash this time. Investigating. She wants to believe me.

“Like I said, we're . . . friends. She means a lot to me. She was acting weird before she disappeared. Came to the clinic where I work, all the time. We started talking, went for coffee. Oh God, I just realized how that sounds. I'm not attracted to her. I mean she's a beautiful girl, but I'm not . . .” They make my excuses for me, eating out of the palm of my hand. To them I'm a sexy but shy intern who's fallen in love with a girl too young for him. They'd kill their own mothers for me now.

“Awright, luv,” unabashed Southie smoker says, patting my cheek. “We're all right here, yeah? An' none of ours been in spits breath of her since she disappeared yeah? But if you want to find her, it's that one over there, been looking at yaw since yaw come over here, yaw got to talk to, yeah?” She points past the park to the corner where I'd been standing. Another girl, not in uniform but around the same age, holds up a wall with her shoulder. She's frail, not more than one hundred and ten pounds, and dressed like she just raided the cool kid's store. Green button-up blouse, half-open, with a gray wifebeater underneath. She's wearing leggings of some sort, and a black trench coat three sizes too big for her. And she's got yellow sneakers that look like boxing shoes laced on to her feet. When she sees me looking, she starts walking away.

“You shouldn't smoke” is all I leave the Catholic girls with, taking the cigarette out of Ms. Brixton's mouth. I fix her asthma at the same time. I turn, marching toward my first real lead, suddenly feeling stupid in my scrubs.

When she rounds the corner, out of eyeshot, I reach for her body with my senses—and find an electrical storm in her brain. She's like me. I quit faking nonchalance and begin to run. I hit the corner hard and spot her at the end of the street. She's tensed and ready for a fight. Whatever she's got going doesn't block my skills. I could take her out in a second if I wanted to. But she knows where Yasmine's daughter is, so I play it smooth.

“I just want to talk,” I say, closing the distance between us by half. Her respiration is through the roof. Her eyes are dilating. She's using her power. But not on me.

“What did you do?” Her voice betrays her youth. She can't be more than thirteen.

“Nothing. I'm just looking for a friend.”

“You felt me. You touched me.” The distance makes yelling the only way to communicate. I try to come forward, and she raises her hand. I'm half expecting fire or ice to flow from it. When nothing happens, I continue walking toward her.

“Yes. I did. I'm like you. Do you know Tamara?” Why are all the dogs in these houses barking?

“Stay away.”

“I don't want to hurt you.” Only a manhole cover separates her and me now. “I'm just looking for Tamara.”

“Stay away from Tamara. She's ours now.” She's trying to sound tough, but her fear is evident. But so is the squall of heat from her mind. I'm about to push her heart into calming down when I hear a window behind me shatter. I turn. A fucking dog, a big one. German shepherd. Big teeth, all showing. He's mad at me. I get it now. She talks to the animals.

I turn to face the girl. She's gone, but she's left a few dozen surprises. Rats the size of overweight cats swarm up from manhole covers with the same fury as the dog. Shit.

On instinct, I beef up my leg muscles, jump over the rats and away from the dog. For a second, I hope that the dog and the rats will get into it and leave me alone. Of course not. Three more windows break, and now there are four dogs. Great. Plus more rats every second. I hate rats. I hate little Pied-Piper-of-Hamlin girls that talk to rats and dogs. I run. No real strategy except to get to higher ground. I'm like a demented Dr. Doolittle, with a band of enraged house dogs and street rats forming a vicious tail behind me. Usually I'd just outrun them all. But I expended so much energy on my morphing that it's all I can do it keep the rabies babies from making a lunch out of my Achilles tendons. Since when do rats attack people? She does something to these animals. I'll figure it out after I get to surviving.

That may be harder than it sounds. Every second I have more enemies and fewer options. Ten dogs now. Can't count the seething mass of bouncing brown and black rodents. Too many. Is this how I go out, a feast for the vermin of London? I survived walking across Africa, damn it! Lions didn't touch me!

Right. Lions didn't touch me. I adjust my pheromones quickly, but I'm tired. Running, changing, Yasmine—too much in one day. I bump up my pheromones again, until I reek of predator, of the biggest, most vicious animal these city-dwelling creatures have ever had nightmares about. I'm what makes them want to grab their babies and run. I'm the biggest dog on the block.

By the time I round a corner into an abandoned construction site, my own face is back—I've got no energy to keep up the illusion—and I smell like Mr. Big Critter. But they just keep coming.

Somewhere nearby, that girl is still driving these creatures. They've slowed down, they're afraid of me—the pheromones. But she's pushing them to keep coming; I can feel their brains near seizing from her electrical storm.

I'm just about out of options. But not quite . . . someone's done me the solid of leaving a lead pipe here. I grab it. The first rat is a dead rat. The first dog is a wounded dog. After that, I can only promise I'll go down swinging. Too bad my powers don't work on animals. . . .

But they're not just animals, are they? This girl's got them on puppet strings. I can even feel them, through her. And if I can feel them, maybe I can hurt them. I reach out with my senses. Affecting them is going to be like trying to give a back massage with a catcher's mitt, but I think I can do it.

Fuck it. It's them or me. I raise my free hand and slam them all with my power. Half the rats die of heart attacks. Three of the dogs let out yelps of pain and spasm on the ground. I do it again. Another quarter of the rats go into spasm. Two dogs go down. If I were stronger, maybe . . . But I'm so tired. Some of the other animals scamper away. Not all. I use the last of my strength to beef up my muscle and reflexes, and bang the pipe against the outlines of a building that will never be constructed.

“Come on, you varmints!” Pathetic epithet, but it's all I've got. They come. I swing. Three rats first. I kick one back, stomp another's head, and dodge the third.

I guide the pipe into an arching swing, like I'm trying to reach deep left field. The blow tags the third rat in mid flight, and a German shepherd who just reached pipe's distance. Never seen a dog stagger before, but it couldn't come at a better time—he falls onto the mini army of rats that just reached the ankle-biting area. I take advantage of the reprieve and climb. The scaffolding behind me is all metal. There's a pit bull below me I don't want to figure out how to deal with. But the rats could get up here, if the girl didn't stop them. She's got them all huddled below me. And now I'm hearing her voice.

“You killed them!” she's bawling from the other end of the construction site. “What kind of man are you?”

“The kind that refuses to be eaten by animals!”

“They were just doing what I told them to do!”

“Then you're just as responsible for deaths as I am. Unless you want me to kill the rest of them, I suggest you call them off now.” Pure bravado. Let's hope she can't read my mind.

“You're just as bad as her,” the girl says, raising her hand. The animals disperse.

“Where's Tamara?”

“Whoever you are, whatever you really look like, you stay away from her. If you go near her, we'll kill you.”

Now I've met twenty-one people like me.