Xenofreak Nation, Book Three: XIA (25 page)

The first indication that the broadcast had been seen was the news helicopters. This time there were five of them, maneuvering for space above the pier.

Fifteen minutes later, the first boat showed up. It was a privately-owned tugboat, and the captain and his two crewmen wore blue face masks. They took as many xenos as they could carry, with the exception of anyone wearing an orange jumpsuit. After that, boat after boat appeared; barges, tour boats, ferries and trawlers. The evacuation of the detainees was unscripted and unauthorized, but the army did nothing to stop them.

Half an hour after the broadcast, special units had been mobilized and soldiers swarmed onto the pier. The prisoners, including Bluto, were rapidly and efficiently shuttled into the prison transport buses and driven away, while the remaining detainees were herded off the pier and onto the Hudson River Greenway.

The UAAV, driven by Lo as usual, with Boardman in the passenger seat, took Shasta, whose gun-shot leg had been field-dressed by Mia, as well as Fournier, Singh, Dundee, and Congressman Abbott’s body. The rest walked behind as it drove off the field and onto the street beyond the pier.

Bryn laced her fingers with Scott’s, Jason stayed close to Mia’s side, Nicola walked between Carla and Savvy, and Unger took up the rear with Padme.

Maddy had disappeared.

Lo pulled up next to the surveillance vehicle Shasta had been driving. The keys had been taken from Shasta, but luckily the vehicle had keyless entry and start capability. Unger got into the driver’s seat, Jason sat shotgun, and everyone else piled in. There weren’t enough seats for everyone, but they made do by doubling up or sitting on the floor. Nicola cried out happily when she saw Perky’s birdcage. Scott lifted a black box from one of the seats and set it on the floor to make room for Bryn.

Soldiers directed them north along West Street, but they’d only gone a couple hundred yards when a series of muted
booms
resonated through the ground and shook the vehicle. No sooner had the tremors subsided when a throbbing roar began to build, shuddering through the air and the street like an earthquake.

The surveillance van was solid along its sides, but Bryn was seated to the rear of the vehicle with a clear view out the back windows. She gaped at the pier, lit quite dramatically by spotlights from the news helicopters.

The remaining windows in the structure surrounding the pier shattered as the infrastructure collapsed. The walls crumbled and the roof of the building – the parking lot – caved in. Billowing dust rose into the air, mingled with steam from the bonfires, rapidly extinguished by rushing water. The side of the pier parallel to the river sank rapidly, and displaced water created a mini tsunami that radiated out from the epicenter. Waves crashed into the seawall and flooded the road.

“My God.” Mia sounded awestruck and humbled. “It really happened.”

Soldiers they’d driven by moments before caught up to them on foot. As one of them ran past, he waved his arms wildly and shouted, “The road’s collapsing! Move it, move it,
move it
!”

The UAAV took off, and Unger pushed his foot down on the electrigas pedal, squealing the van’s tires and driving down the street until they encountered another road block. He pulled up next to the UAAV and they just sat there, stunned, as the dusty aftermath of the pier’s collapse drifted through the air and blanketed the vehicles.

After a few minutes, a man in fatigues appeared out of the haze, cut across the front of the vehicle through the headlight beams, and made his way to Unger’s window. He rapped his knuckles on the window, and Unger rolled it down. Bryn didn’t recognize him at first because of his face mask, but when he spoke, his voice gave him away as the colonel who’d addressed the detainees through the holosphere.

“You are Deputy Director Unger of the XIA, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Colonel Jeremy Carter. Sir, on behalf of the United States Army, I’d like to thank you for your warning. This would have been a terrible tragedy if you hadn’t gotten word out. Is Philip Singh in your custody?”

“I’m not releasing him to you.”

Colonel Carter’s white eyebrows shot up. “I’m afraid that’s not your call. And…need I remind you that members of your team attacked a National Guard unit this evening? Some of my men were injured. I’d be well within my rights to arrest all of you.”

Mia stood and made her way to the front of the van, pulling her face mask down to hang around her neck. She reached across Unger to stick her hand out the window. Colonel Carter shook it as she introduced herself. “Doctor Mia Padilla with the CDC. My team was dispatched to identify the pathogen and verify its mode of transmission, which we’ve done. Patient zero is in that vehicle.” She jerked her thumb at the UAAV. “Philip Singh is sitting next to him, which normally wouldn’t be a problem, because Singh is protected by a xenograft. However, if you listened to the broadcast, you’ll know that we strongly believe the carriers of this disease are xenos with crocodile or alligator grafts. Unfortunately, Singh has one such graft. Being as how he’s definitely been exposed to the bacterium, the CDC will be quarantining him for an indefinite period of time.”

The colonel didn’t look convinced, but Unger jumped in before he could respond. “We have several injured agents and witnesses who need to get to a hospital. I respectfully request that you back the hell down.”

Bryn wasn’t sure swearing at the man was the best tack for Unger to take, but Colonel Carter surprised her.

“Look. I don’t like to admit this, but I’ve been second-guessing orders all day. My superior officer told me specifically that your warning was a hoax. If my men hadn’t seen a SEAL dive team enter the water several hours ago, I would have followed his orders and ignored it. But nothing that’s happened today was sitting right with me, and I couldn’t do it. Damned glad I didn’t, either, because I probably would have blown my brains out if I’d been responsible for all those deaths.

“I don’t know what the deal is with Singh. I’m supposed to take him into custody, but I’m not going to. The piss is going to trickle down all over me no matter what I do at this point, so I’m just going to keep doing what I think is right.”

He stepped back and signaled to his soldiers to let them pass. Unger offered a jaunty little salute and then accelerated past him. Bryn heard his sigh of relief all the way at the rear of the van.

As soon as Mia sat back down, she rummaged through her purse for the hand sanitizer. Then she asked Jason to use the van’s equipment to contact her team. However, it wasn’t until they’d driven within the sphere of a working cell tower that he was able to get through. Mia directed her people to assemble at Middleborough Hospital, advising them to initiate quarantine protocol. After that, she contacted the coroner’s office about Abbott’s body.

Unger spent the rest of the ride on the phone conducting agency business. Bryn tuned him out while Scott dozed next to her, snoring lightly.

Nicola was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the birdcage on her lap. She had a hand stuck through the door and the grey bird sat on her hand while she rubbed the feathers on its head with her thumb. She looked up at Carla.

“You seem familiar.”

“She should,” Padme said.

Carla shot Padme a warning look, but Nicola had already latched onto the hint and come to the correct conclusion. “Are you Mouse?”

“My name is Carla, but yes, they call me Mouse.”

Nicola beamed. “Hi.”

Carla smiled back, shaking her head fondly. “You look so much like her.”

Nicola set the bird on its perch, took her hand out of the cage, and deliberately shut and latched the little door. “I know her name was Miranda McKim…but who was she?”

Carla made a regretful face like she wasn’t going to tell her, but Bryn spoke up. “She was Carla’s best friend. And my mother.”

Nicola swung her head around, eyes wide. “Really?”

“Really.”

“That’s…” Nicola stopped and considered it. “What does that make us?”

Bryn laughed a little. “I have no idea.”

“But family, though, right?” Nicola asked. “I’ve never had a family. It was always just Dad and me.”

Bryn still didn’t know how she felt about the situation, but she didn’t want to be responsible for crushing the hope in Nicola’s eyes. She reached out and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder.

“Definitely family.”

When they arrived at the hospital emergency bay, Mia’s team met them decked out in hazmat suits. Mia got out of the van first, and one of her team members helped her into a suit of her own. Only then did she direct them to let the passengers out of the vehicles – all but Boardman, Dundee and Singh.

Fournier and Shasta were taken away in wheelchairs. Scott and the others were escorted into a large room marked ‘Quarantine.’ Against one wall, there was an empty hospital bed with a blue curtain hanging from the ceiling on a pull-track. The rest of the room was just an open space with plastic chairs, except for a small table in one corner with bottled water and snacks on it, and a holovision mounted on the wall. A line quickly formed to use the one attached bathroom.

Nicola set Perky’s cage down on the snack table and refilled the bird’s water dish.

“Well, this is nice,” Lo said, looking around at the sterile white walls. “Homey.”

Carla opened a packet of crackers and stuffed one into her mouth, speaking around it. “Better than the pier.”

“Let’s can the chit-chat,” Unger said brusquely. “I’ve got some pretty big gaps in my knowledge of what went down today.”

He grabbed the back of two chairs and dragged them to the far corner of the room near the bathroom door, then went back to get two more. He switched the holovision on and said, “You four.” He indicated Carla, Nicola, Savvy and Padme. “Sit over here so I can talk to my agents in private. You can watch holovision.”

Bryn obviously wasn’t an agent, but Unger seemed to want to include her. Scott sat wearily next to her with the 3D printer in his lap. He’d taken it from the UAAV because Shasta wouldn’t want him to let it out of his sight.

They spent the next half hour filling the deputy director in on their eventful day. In the background, the holovision had been tuned to a news channel. Every once in a while, they stopped talking to watch coverage of the disaster at Poppy’s Pier.

It was during one such break that Scott caught a glimpse of someone familiar standing on the deck of a tug boat. He jumped up and strode over to the holo, sweeping his hand to reverse it.

“Well, what do you know,” Lo said. “Maddy Singh, on the run.”

Scott looked at Padme. She seemed neither surprised nor betrayed that Maddy had left her behind. Padme glanced at Nicola and answered Scott’s unspoken question. “It was my decision not to go. Just in case Fournier was telling the truth.”

Not long after that, Mia arrived with two women in white lab coats and a man in blue scrubs. She was no longer dressed in the Hazmat suit, but they all wore face masks and gloves. The man pushed a portable device on wheels over to the hospital bed.

Nicola stood. “How’s my Dad?”

“He and Agent Fox are in surgery,” Mia replied. “This is Doctor Bales and Doctor Knox.” She indicated the two women. Then she walked over to Nicola.

“Your father said you were sick. What can you tell me about that?”

Nicola’s brows came together in uncertainty. She turned to Padme, who shook her head and said, “I didn’t know until he told us on the bus.”

“Felson?” Nicola asked.

Savvy stared down at his clenched hands, rocking back and forth slightly. “He told me not to tell.”

“What’s wrong with me?” she asked tearfully.

“The woman you were cloned from wasn’t healthy,” he replied. “So neither are you.”

Nicola looked across the room at Bryn. “What was wrong with her?”

“It was her heart,” Bryn said.

Scott shifted in his seat. He and Bryn had wondered how Fournier managed to raise Nicola down in the facility under the Warehouse. He must have kept her from watching the news, or she would know Bryn’s story – and what happened to Miranda Vega.

Nicola blinked a few times. “Well, that’s not too big a deal, right? I mean, major surgery sucks, but I can get a—a pig heart.”

Mia nodded. “Yes, if it turns out to be necessary, that’s definitely an option. The thing is, your father made a comment earlier that we would like to investigate.” She turned to Padme. “Would you agree to a holosound?”

Padme practically leapt up out of the chair. “Yes…please!”

The doctors directed her to lie down on the hospital bed, and then they pulled the curtain. Scott and the others could hear everything they said, up to the point when their voices were replaced by the sound of a beating heart. They spoke in hushed whispers after that. One of the doctors rushed out and came back several minutes later with a man whose lab coat covered a business suit. They disappeared behind the curtain and he heard her introduce the man to Padme. “This is our chief of surgery, Doctor Gellar.”

After a few minutes of silence, a man’s deep voice said, “Extraordinary. I went to medical school with Nicolas Fournier. He was a brilliant man, but disturbed. This is…if it’s a
human
heart, it’s absolutely ground-breaking. Look at the umbilical cord and the stunted circulatory system. It’s so…graceful…I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Scott caught Bryn exchanging a look with Carla, who smiled and held both thumbs up.

“What’s going on?” he asked quietly.

“He did it,” Bryn said, voice laced with admiration. “Remember what my dad said in jail? That cloned organs would eventually be grown in host bodies? Fournier grew Nicola a new heart.”