Dark Angel Reverse Bang: "Trannies In the Mist" Part 2
Part 2
Alec made a circuit around the interior of the building, and then made another, looking for an exit. There were numerous ways out, but no way to get past the police, National Guard, and the civilians without it being messy one way or another. Perched on a cat walk between the first and second floors, he peered out of one of the blurry windows. Though the fog and ever growing crowd, he saw a grey car pull up, and a familiar figure step out and stop to talk to the detective who was running the show.
“Shit, White’s here!” The police had wised up to their dealings with transgenics, but they still weren’t all the way in the know about the various abilities. White, on the other hand, knew them and their limits fairly well. And he was out for blood, both Alec’s and Max’s.
The situation had gone from bad to worse.
Before she could reply, Max’s phone rang. She jumped in surprise, but answered it. “Go for Max.”
“Hey, Little Fella,” Joshua’s voice replied. “It’s all gone sideways for you, huh? Situation’s FUBAR?”
“You can say that again,” Max replied. “You all watching the news?”
“Luke always watches the news,” he replied. “We saw you and Alec were in trouble. Mole and Joshua to the rescue!” He sounded endearingly proud and confidant. “We have the van just past the people. If you can get out, we will get all of us to TC.”
“That’s brilliant, Joshua!” she cried. “Alec! We’ve got an escape vehicle!”
“Well, that’s great - all we need now is an escape.” He leapt lightly down from the cat walk. “It’s gonna be even harder with White out there. And it looked like he was calling in reinforcements.”
“We don’t need that big of a window. Just a few seconds. Maybe we can make a distraction.”
Alec looked like he was about to disagree, but instead he froze. What little light that had filtered through the windows vanished, as if someone had dropped a heavy white curtain over the place. The noise of the crowd, which had been swelling the last few minutes, fell abruptly silent.
“You know,” he said in a low voice. “There might be something weird about that fog.”
They both went still, barely breathing. The air was heavy and cold. There was no noise.
Then, one shrill scream of pain and absolute terror ripped through the air. It was quickly followed by a second, a third, and then the full cacophony of a panicked crowd. And plowing right over it all was an explosive roar.
Max rushed for the door and pulled it open to look out.
“What are you doing?” Alec demanded. He sprinted over towards her, reaching for the door.
“Get inside!” a voice bellowed from outside.
The crowd burst out of the mist, racing for the building. Their faces were twisted into wild masks of pure terror. The mist twisted and writhed like a live thing behind them. Even as Alec watched, a man at the back of the crowd stumbled and fell. The mist swirled around him, and he was suddenly jerked backwards with a scream. Alec thought he saw blood spray across the ground. He knew he smelled it, metallic and hot in the rush of rank, fear scented cold air.
Then the mass of the crowd hit the partially open door. Even if they had wanted to, Alec and Max’s transgenic strength couldn’t have shut the door against them.
Words began to filter through noise of screams, thudding feet and panted breaths.
“Oh God! Oh God!”
“Something’s out there!”
“There’s something in the mist!”
“Jordan just got snatched up!”
“Fuck, there’s blood on me! What’s out there?”
Out of the mess, a familiar voice called out. “Boo!”
Original Cindy and Sketchy wiggled out of the press of bodies at the door.
“What are you doing here?” Max demanded.
“We saw the news, so I pedaled my fine ass down here, and hauled his scrawny self with,” Cindy replied as she slipped behind Max to keep out of the way. “We couldn’t leave friends alone.”
“And now you’re in this mess, whatever it is, with us,” Alec muttered, and then spotted another familiar face. “CeCe?”
The relatively recent addition to TC and Jam Pony slipped out of the crowd and moved to flank Alec. Her entire posture was battle ready and terrified. “Was in the area on a run when the mist closed in,” she said quickly. “There’s something wrong.”
“You’re telling me. How many more people were out there?”
“Just these last few that I could see.”
“Okay, then. Max!” Alec met Max’s eyes through the crowd; he nodded and they hauled the door shut behind the last person, the tall detective who had been talking to White. But there was a deep shout from out of the mist just before it closed completely.
“Little Fella!”
Joshua and Mole galloped out of the white. The dog man looked terrified, while Mole just looked utterly pissed off, the ever present cigar clamped and being shredded between his teeth. They hit the door running, and Mole spun to cover Joshua’s back until they were inside.
“Joshua, are you all right?” Max asked.
At the same time, Alec demanded, “Did you see what was out there?”
Joshua just shook his head in confusion and fear. “I don’t know. Something bad. Manticore bad. Worse.”
“Something that made my blood run like ice,” Mole growled. “And I didn’t even see anything.”
Max frowned. “Wait, something from Manticore?”
“No, worse,” Joshua argued.
“Which is terrifying,” Alec said. “Manticore was all about brain rewiring and torture; the monsters were just people like Mole.”
“Hey!”
“It’s true, you and the early X-series were the ‘Nomalies we were all scared of,” Alec snapped back.
“Ain’t my fault, so don’t blame me!”
“Guys, can we keep this together?” Max demanded.
“Okay, yeah. We need to know what’s out in the mist,” Alec agreed.
In the moment when they all took a breath, Alec realized that the frenzied shouting of the rest of the crowd in the building was directed at something. And that something was the transgenics.
“Oh, shit,” he hissed as the noise erupted once again.
“It’s them!” one man cried. “They’re behind this!”
A woman sobbed, “Oh God, they’ll kill us all!”
“Kill them!” White’s voice rang out, and the crowd made a small, sudden surge forward.
Hands out in a placating gesture, Alec called out, “Hey, hey, everyone stay calm!” He was aware of the other transgenics moving into defense positions, but he shook his head once before Mole could chamber a round in the shotgun and lift it.
A gun shot rang out, loud and surprising the crowd to flinch and fall to inaction.
“Quiet! That’s enough!” the detective bellowed. Silence fell. “Everyone is going to stay calm,” he continued, slowly and deliberately. “I’m Lieutenant Clemente, SPD. We have a situation here that is clearly making everyone jumpy. The last thing we need to do is to panic. I need information, and I need it clear and concise, so no one speaks unless I indicate it for now. Can we all deal with that?”
There was a wave of nods through the crowd, civilians and soldiers alike relaxing minutely under the gaze of a leader.
“Nice one,” Alec said. “I didn’t know the shot fired into the air thing actually worked outside of the movies.”
Clemente holstered his weapon and replied in an even tone, “Didn’t I just say something about not speaking unless spoken to?”
“Don’t like authority figures,” Alec replied, twitching his shoulder out of the way of the punch Max aimed at him. “Besides, I figured that rule applied to the non-genetically enhanced members of society.”
“Right now, I don’t give a damn if he looks like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ cousin,” Clemente nodded at Mole, “or if you have a barcode on your neck. All I do give a damn about is getting everyone out of here, alive and unharmed. The problem is I don’t even know what’s out there.”
“Mist and monsters,” Joshua said, voice low and troubled.
White pushed towards the front of the crowd. “Oh, I don’t know, I see an awful lot of monsters in here.”
There was a quiet mutter of agreement from the Ordinaries.
Clemente leveled a sharp glare at White that was rivaled in intensity only by the murderous looks the transgenics threw at him. “Special Agent in Charge White, I don’t know anything about you, other than you think you’re important and are continuing to work up a bunch of civilians into a riot that will only end badly. Now shut up unless you have something constructive to say.”
White returned the glare, but kept his mouth shut.
Alec’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Impressive. And thanks.”
“My city, my people,” Clemente replied. “I’m a little territorial. And I do know that you lot have the potential to be very dangerous, and I do not want to risk anyone breaking out into a fight in here-”
One of the high windows broke open, the glass shattering with an explosive crackle. Shards fell into their exposed heads and people screamed. When a tendril of grey fog slipped in through the opening, the screams intensified. Glass shattered with an explosive crackle as one of the high windows broke open. People screamed as the shards fell on their exposed heads, and the screams continued as a tendril of grey fog slipped in through the opening. It was fog that was thick and substantial and sentient.
“That’s not fog,” Alec said, more to himself. “Mole, Josh, with me! Max, CeCe, Clemente, get boards or something to start covering the windows! Now!”
He snapped a piece of piping off the wall as a weapon as Mole chambered a shell and took a shot at the … whatever it was. Definitely not fog. Fog wasn’t supposed to wiggle, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to splatter the walls with grey ichor when it got shot.
In seconds, they were up on the catwalk next to the window. There was nothing to be seen through the broken window other than the mist and the wounded thing still wiggling about.
“Is that a goddamn tentacle?” Mole demanded as it swung past his face. He shot again, this time with buckshot, and sprayed the wall with lead and bits of tentacle. “Did Manticore play with octopuses or something and one got loose?”
“Don’t know, don’t care right now!” Alec shouted as a second tentacle appeared through the window. “Chop them! Whatever they’re attached to, it ain’t nice!”
He smashed one tentacle down, flesh squishing under the blow. With one end pinned down under his boot, Alec sawed at the thing with the ragged end of the pipe. There was a squelch, a burst of grey tinted blood, and the tentacle withdrew, leaving the tip flopping around under his foot.
Mole managed to shoot off a chunk of the other tentacle before Joshua bellowed a warning. The next window over shattered, but instead of a tentacle, a snake appeared. Mole shot it while Alec blurred over to attack it with the pipe. The head snapped off and flopped around on the floor, its open mouth displaying a pair of large fangs. A roar sounded from outside, reverberating through the windows. What was left of the snake disappeared and silence fell again.
“Alec! Here!” Max and a small group of volunteers appeared, carrying everything from plywood pieces to interior doors to sides of destroyed freezers.
“All right people, let’s organize and cover the windows! Check around - there might be shutters or grates on some of them. As long as it’s solid, use it.”
When some of the Ordinaries hesitated, Clemente added his voice to the command. “You heard the man!”
Alec skewered the tentacle piece on the pipe and brought it over to Max, letting it dangle in her face. “You like?” he asked with a wicked grin. Now that the immediate danger seemed over, and everyone was fortifying the place, he felt that the mood should be lightened.
“God, are you five or something?” Max groused as she dodged away from the slimy, dripping appendage.
“Feline DNA, gotta show off my kill.”
“To me? Doesn’t that make me your alpha, then?”
“Damn it.”
Clemente walked over, eyes were wide and his face ashy with shock. “What the hell was that thing?” he demanded in a low voice.
“No idea,” Alec said. “If it is something out of Manticore, I’ve never heard of it, and Joshua doesn’t seem to have a clue either.”
“So what could it be?” Max wondered.
“I don’t know what’s out there, but guns hurt it,” Mole said, joining them.
“All my men are armed,” Clemente pointed out.
“Good for them,” Mole shot back. “I’d just like some of my people to have guns, too, because I don’t quite trust your people.”
“I can hardly ask them to hand over their weapons to a group of people they had just been trying to capture ten minutes ago, even if this situation is the strangest one I’ve ever been in. That will cause a riot.”
Alec held up his hand in a placating manner. “Steady.” When both Mole and Clemente had taken a deep breath, he continued. “So, what’s your idea Mole?”
“I have more shotguns and ammo out in the van. I’ll go out and get them, and bring them back.”
“You won’t be able to see through the mist,” Max pointed out. “Not in time to deal with whatever is out there on your own. And what if you get turned around, and get lost?”
“Seriously, sister? Do you think I just popped out of a test tube yesterday?”
“She’s got a point,” Alec said. “And she won’t use a gun.”
Max gaped a bit at the sudden direction change, but it didn’t faze Mole. “Then give her that pipe, I don’t care. This gun’s gonna need more ammo eventually, and I’m going to get it.”
“Fine,” Alec said after a moment. “Where’s the van?”
“Right where I parked it, I hope,” Mole growled. “Just past the barricades on the east side of the building.”
“How far?”
“Three hundred yards, maybe.”
Alec scratched the back of his head, thinking. “That’s a long way out there, with the mist… we could tie a string to you, so we could sorta pull you back after you got the guns.”
“That’d work,” Mole agreed. “Just let me get the guns.”
Clemente was still standing with them, and he shook his head in amazement. “You’ve got brass balls.”
Mole just grinned around his cigar.
“Is there rope or something in here?” Max wondered, glancing around.
“I don’t know, grab some friends and look,” Alec said.
She glowered at him. “Who died and made you boss?”
“Your intelligence,” Alec shot back. “Not my fault you missed all the strategy and leadership classes at Manticore. Even if I prefer solo work.”
“Seem to be enjoying bossing everyone around,” she sulked.
He took a deep breath. “Okay. We have a situation, and we need to get out of it with as little bloodshed as possible. So can we stop arguing and start looking for solutions to the problem? Right now, use all your speechifying skills that has everyone at TC enthralled to keep the crowd calm. I’m going to make rope.” He looked up and waved. “Cindy, Sketch! Help me look around and see if you can get close to four hundred yards of rope or cable or something.”
“Four hundred yards?” Sketchy demanded incredulously.
“Never mind him, Pretty Boy, he just can’t count that high. We got this.” Cindy grabbed Sketchy by the arm and they started poking in the corners and through broken equipment. A few of the civilians who had been standing nearest to the little war council wandered over to them and offered to help.
Alec watched them for a moment, and then turned back to Mole. “You really gonna do this?”
“Kid, this ain’t my first siege,” he shot back. “We don’t have any sort of supplies to wait it out, so we need weapons to fight our way out. That’s the way it’s gotta be. Don’t think just because you’re an X-5 and got all the fancy assignments and the Ordinary looks that you’re smarter.”
Hands up in surrender, Alec took a slight step back. “All right, big guy, take it easy. It’s your call.”
Mole snorted and chomped on his cigar. “Damn right.”
Sketchy and OC showed up at that point, hauling coils and loops of everything from steel cables to thick extension cords. “I think we’ve got enough,” Cindy declared.
“Start splicing,” Alec said, grabbing several extension cords and tied them together with square knots.
“Woulda thought this Manticore did enough splicing,” Sketchy said, a hesitant little smirk on his face.
“Ha ha,” Alec said dryly.
Max joined them and slapped his shoulder lightly. “Good thing you are going to be a journalist and not a standup comedian.”
“His face is a joke,” Cindy offered, and there was a huff of laughter from the small group.
In a few minutes, they had a makeshift lifeline made and tied to Mole’s belt. Alec stood near the door with the line coiled at his feet, adjusting the loops so it ran out smoothly. Mole checked his weapons again and hauled open the door; the mist seemed to press into the gap. Thin white tendrils trickled over the threshold and brushed against the hinges.
Alec felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and he had to repress the urge to snarl. They knew there was something out there, in the mist, but that didn’t make it any easier. He was a soldier, a predator, not the prey. It was all sorts of wrong to feel cornered and trapped.
“I’ll give three tugs when I start back, so you guys can haul in the slack and steer me,” Mole said as he ratcheted his shotgun.
“Be careful,” Max urged.
Mole just snorted and stepped outside.
The mist swallowed him before he made it three steps, but the muffled thumps of his boots on the pavement and the jerky pull on the line as it spooled out through his hands reassured Alec that the other transgenic had not just simply disappeared.
Long moments passed in silence, as even the crowd of civilians was huddled together, eyes on the door, expectant and fearful. The mist outside the door continued to heave and swirl as breaths of cold air blew into the warehouse. Alec’s hackles rose every time the wind brushed over his skin, goosebumps forming across his skin even under his usual layers of clothing.
Then the rope stopped.
A collective breath was taken and held while nothing happened. And then the line jumped with three firm tugs.
Max let out a relieved sigh as Alec hauled the line back in, trying to not pull too hard and unbalance Mole.
“That wasn’t as bad as I thought it woul-” Max started, but a roar cut her off.
Mole answered with a roar of his own, and both were drowned out by a shotgun blast. The rope jumped and tugged and then snapped taut. Alec’s hands closed on it just as something far stronger than Mole pulled at the other end.
The improvised line ripped through his hands, and he snarled, “A little help!”
Max was behind him before the sentence was finished, latching onto a loop of the coil before it could snap free. Joshua, CeCe, Sketchy and Cindy all sprang into action, forming a not quite human anchor. But it wasn’t enough. The line continued to rip through their hands, the knots catching on and tearing fingers. There was a sharp tug that pulled them forward; Alec’s boots skidded across the floor when Sketchy lost his balance and fell into Max who, in turn, bumped into Alec.
“Damn it, hold on!” he ordered, planting his feet.
But even as he hauled back, the pressure gave way. They all fell over at the sudden release. Alec untangled himself from Max, who was snarling at him in discomfort and fear, and scrambled towards the door, snatching up the rope again.
“Mole!” he bellowed into the mist. His voice seemed to reverberate back to him, and only silence answered. He glanced back at the others, who were standing again. “Haul him back.”
For a moment, Alec honestly hoped that it was just adrenaline that made it seem so easy to pull Mole back to the door. He knew, though, that even before his hands slipped on the rope, wet from blood that wasn’t from the torn skin of his finger, that it was bad.
The line was slippery Alec pulled it one last time. What remained of Mole slid out of the mist and slipped across the concrete, leaving a wide, red trail. The entire upper half of his body had been torn away; only the rope tied to his belt had let them retrieve that much.
Screams and cries filled the air when the nervous crowd saw the macabre remains. Alec felt a cold pit open somewhere in his gut, and heard Max and Joshua’s soft sounds of mourning. Whatever was out there was bad and big enough to rip Mole apart with very little effort. He slammed the door shut, wondering at how flimsy that barrier seemed suddenly.
The noise from the crowd swelled, rising to something of a panic. Alec sucked in a deep breath and turned. “Clemente!” he called out. The detective appeared, visibly shaken. “Calm them down. We’ll take care of ours.”
Clemente nodded once and hurried over to the huddled mass, his hands lifting in a calming motion and his deep clear voice rang out confidance.
With one last glance to reassure himself that the panic wasn’t getting out of hand, Alec turned back to his friends. Cindy and Sketchy were clutching each other, shock and horror clear on their faces. They hadn’t known Mole, but that hardly mattered. Joshua, on the other hand, had nearly wilted into Max’s embrace; the two big transhumans had been far from close friends, but Joshua’s heart was too kind and big to not grieve. Alec had to get them all moving again, though, and figure out what the hell was out there, or at least how to get out.
“CeCe, run a perimeter check again,” he ordered. “Make sure every door and window is secured. I don’t want to risk anything getting in. Sketch, OC, I need you two to go and help calm everyone down.”
Sketchy looked mortified. “Calm everyone else down?” he demanded.
Cindy slapped his arm and stood up straighter. “Sketchy, please,” she said quietly. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Good,” she nodded. “But Alec, I don’t think we’re gonna be favorites, not if they’re still worried about transgenics.”
“Remind them that whatever is out there doesn’t care if they’re Ordinary or genetically enhanced. We gotta work together.”
Before they could offer more arguments or seek more reassurance, Alec turned to Max and Joshua. “We need to move Mole’s… remains somewhere for now. We can give him a proper goodbye when we get out of this mess.”
“One of the interior rooms?” Max suggested. “Where there were walk-in freezers?”
He nodded in agreement. “Good, yeah. Josh-”
“I got it.” He had found a tarp and reverently wrapped the half-corpse in it before slowly moving further into the warehouse.
Alec dropped his head for a moment and rubbed the back of his neck. “Damn it, damn it,” he muttered. “This just went from bad to worse.”
“At least we’re safe for the time being. Whatever’s out there doesn’t seem interested in getting inside anymore.” Even though she sounded confident, Max glanced up at the blocked up windows, brows pinched.
“For the time being. And I’m afraid that if we end up sitting here too long, we’re gonna have a lot of problems from the inside too.” He sent a glance at the crowd, who were no longer as violently panicked, but were still huddled in groups and talking quietly. Several eyes kept wandering to the door, the slick of blood, to Alec and Max, and then back again.
“Let’s go and present ourselves peacefully, and hang out with Clemente,” Alec suggested quietly. “I want a war council anyway.”
The detective obviously had something similar in mind. “What the hell are we going to do here?” he demanded.
“It’s a siege, so far. We just have to wait it out, and try to gather intel.”
“We don’t know anything more than we did before your friend got killed,” Clemente snapped.
Alec’s face went flat and emotionless. “We know that it can rip apart a transgenic as big as Mole without much of a struggle, and that we all need to stay calm.”
“And how are we going to get intel on this? We can’t see more than three feet outside the door because of the mist, and obviously no one can risk going out there!”
“I’ll think of something.”
“That’s reassuring,” Clemente muttered, and Max’s expression echoed her agreement.
Before he could reply, he felt the weight of a gaze settle on him, lifting the fine hairs on the back of his neck. He glanced around and saw White, still and silent in the midst of the nervous crowd. His face was rather pale and his gaze slipped from Alec to the door, staring out to where the mist and monsters were.
Only enhanced hearing and some knowledge of lip reading allowed him understand what White whispered. “I thought they were a myth.”
Alec’s face went hard. “I think I found a source of intel,” he said and took off towards White.
There was a moment where Alec was unsure if he should play dumb and ignore the fact that he knew White and what he was, but that passed quickly. White went into a defensive pose that was only slightly disguised as arrogance and bit out, “494. That little headache I made for you obviously didn’t work. Don’t think that I can’t fix that. Of course, I could just throw you out to the mist, and you’d be relieved of more than just your head.”
Every thought about keeping the crowd calm and not scaring anyone disappeared from Alec’s brain in a moment of cold calculated hate stemming from pure fear. He grabbed White by the throat and blurred forward until he slammed against the nearest wall. Fear and then smug satisfaction flashed across White’s face even as Alec set his arm across the other man’s throat and pressed. It took a few moments for sound to leak back into his brain and register.
The crowd was loud again. Max was shouting in his ear and tugging on his arm. Alec kept White pinned for a few more heartbeats before taking a small step back.
“What the hell are you doing?” Max demanded. “What happened to not starting a riot?”
Alec didn’t bother to answer Max directly. “You know what’s out there, don’t you?” He glared at White who just stared back. “Don’t you?”
White just lifted his lips in a sneer.
Max added her voice and glare. “Tell us. We all can get out of here alive.”
“What makes you think I want to let you get out of here alive?” White asked, turning his head to look at her. “Haven’t you got the idea that I want you and all the transgenic scum dead?”
“And didn’t you see the people like you and me getting ripped apart earlier?” Clemente demanded. “Damn it, Agent, your own partner got snapped up!”
“Otto was just a lackey, and far from being on the same level as me.” White’s sneer had turned into more of a smirk.
“Listen, White,” Alec said evenly. “You can tell us and we can all walk out of here, or I can get it from you, and you maybe can crawl out of here. If I’m feeling generous.”
“What are you going to do, throw a few punches, maybe break a finger or two?” White turned back to glare at Alec. “If you know me, you know I don’t feel pain.”
Alec let his weight drive forward against his forearm again, pinching off White’s air supply. “And if you know me, you know that I am Manticore trained, and trust me, I am pretty damn familiar with interrogation techniques.”
Max’s eyes flew wide. “Alec, if you start torturing him, you will set off a riot.”
“We have to know what’s out there,” he replied, not looking away from White. “And he’s our best source.”
“All they will see it a transgenic being a monster with a human.”
“You and I know differently. He’s not really human.”
“Doesn’t matter!”
Clemente broke in then. “What do you mean, he’s not human? Is he a transgenic as well?”
“I’m so far above that filth-” White started, but Alec slammed him against the wall again. He was slightly surprised the man wasn’t actually fighting back.
“Look, Max and Clemente, you two have to go and keep everyone calm and reassure them that this is for the best. I’ll get the intel.”
Max shook her head. “I don’t like this, Alec. This isn’t right, and it isn’t you.”
“It isn’t? This is a way for me to get out alive, and seriously, we can’t argue that I don’t have a really strong self-preservation drive.” He smirked, but it was more of a grimace than a grin. “Besides, Logan has already labeled me as a happy-go-lucky psychopath. Today it’s just a bit less happy-go-lucky and more psychopath.”
“Alec,” she tried again.
“I know what I’m doing,” he said firmly. “Now get over to those Ordinaries and stop the riot before it happens.” He looked away from White then. “Joshua! Come here Big Fella.”
Back from his somber task, Joshua shifted his route across the floor from aiming towards Original Cindy to Alec. His head hung low, hair hiding his face, both in grief for Mole and in sadness at the fearful reactions of the Ordinaries as he walked into the room once again.
“I need to you help me get him into one of the old office rooms, the third door on the left, there,” Alec said. “And bring some of that rope we used earlier.”
White didn’t make a quip about what the rope was going to be used for, as Alec had expected, but rather turned his reptilian gaze onto Joshua. “Ah, you were the freak in the tunnels we were after a few weeks ago,” he said pleasantly. “Too bad about your pretty girlfriend, or chew toy or whatever she was. So lovely, so fragile. Snap went the neck.”
Joshua’s head snapped up and a bubbling growl filled the air just before he launched himself at White.
Max grabbed his arm and hauled him back. “No, Joshua, no!”
“He killed Annie!”
“You kill him and you’re no better than he is,” Max argued.
At the same time, Alec said, “He’ll get what he deserves, Joshua. But not like that.”
Joshua took a deep breath and backed away. He looked at Alec for a long moment, and then at White again. “Rope,” he said finally, and strode back towards the door to the abandoned and bloodied coil.
Alec relinquished his hold on White to Joshua once they had the Familiar’s hands bound behind his back. Then, with the stares of very frightened and confused people boring into his back, Alec led the way across the warehouse.
Near the back door that he and Max had tried to escape from earlier, there was some abandoned equipment - shelving and the like - that seemed like it could be useful for the situation he now found himself in. With a satisfied nod, he turned to White, immobile in Joshua’s grip.
“Strip,” he said without emotion.
White blinked once and then glared back. “Should have known they made you freaks kinky.”
Alec ignored the barb and produced a knife from inside his jacket. “Strip. Kick off your shoes.”
White didn’t move until, after a nod from Alec, Joshua grabbed his bound wrists and started lifting upwards. He grimaced but didn’t make a sound of pain. “Fine.” He kicked off his shoes, flinging them to narrowly miss Alec.
Expressionless and clinical, Alec undid White’s belt and fly and let the pants drop. Then he moved up and simply cut away his overcoat, suit jacket and shirt and tossed the demolished garments to one side. Before White could make any more comments, Alec turned him to a steel shelf that was tilted against a corner, twisted to make it steady on the base. Then with transgenic speed, he cut the rope binding White’s wrists and bound the man, spread eagle, on the shelving.
“This is how you plan to break me?” White sneered. “Hardly original and not likely to work.”
“Joshua,” Alec ignored White as ever. “Go back and get that snake head that got lopped off earlier. I’m pretty sure it’s still on the catwalk.”
Brow wrinkled in confusion, Joshua hurried away.
Alec turned back to White. “What to do when ordinary pain won’t make you talk? Don’t have Manitcore’s tools, but I did learn a lot from them, and improvisation was always one of my higher marks.”
“Christ,” White muttered. “You going to talk me to death?”
“Thought that was the bad guy’s job, and I’m not the bad guy here.”
“Not from where I’m at,” White growled.
“So, physical beatings won’t do,” Alec continued. He glanced down at his knife and tested the edge with his thumb. “There are always nerve clusters. Or the death by a thousand cuts.” The knife flicked out and drew short but not terribly shallow cuts down White’s arms, shoulders and chest. White just snarled in fury.
Joshua reappeared then, the snake head pinched between two fingers and held at arm’s length. Alec took it from him, hooked it on a piece of wire, and used another loop of rope to let it hang above White. The mouth gaped open in death, and the fangs began to leak clear drops of venom. Blood oozed down from the hacked stump of neck.
“From what Max said, even you crazy people are affected by that snake blood in your super-secret ceremony. I have no clue if that snake is like this snake, but I figure it’s not going to do you any good.” He watched a drop of poison fell from a fang and hit White on the chest, right on one of the cuts. White winced but did not react further.
Alec finally allowed a smirk to flit across his features. “I’ll let you sit and stew for a bit,” he said, and left.
Joshua shuffled after him. “What are we doing, Alec?”
“Waiting,” was the reply. “He can sit there for a while.”
“Should someone watch him, just in case he gets out of the ropes?”
“Yeah, good idea, big guy.”
“Joshua watch.”
“All right. I’ll be back in a couple of hours to spell you.”
Joshua nodded and settled on a box within sight of the improvised torture chamber.
As soon as Alec rounded the corner and came into view, Max rushed over to him. “What did you do?” she demanded, voice low and tight.
“Tied him to a shelf in his shorts and socks and let a venomous snake head drip poison and blood on his face and chest,” Alec said as if he did such things every day.
Max blinked a little in surprise. “That’s all you did?”
“What did you expect me to do? Start chopping off fingers and toes?”
Her expression showed that the exact thought had crossed her mind.
“Jesus, Max. You were at Manticore. Think about the torture there.”
She frowned. “It sucked.”
“But it was rarely physical. They knew they had made us tough. So they broke our barriers mentally. Some of it was physical, like leaving us in those little pods for days at a time, but most of it was mental. Psy-Ops, the threat of.”
“So you’re making White break how…”
“He’s stripped almost naked, so he’s going to feel exposed. He’s tied, so he’s helpless. And he’s got that poison dripping into his blood stream nice and slowly, making him wonder how fast he’s going to get sick from it, if he even does. He’s not going to break fast, but he’ll break.” He delivered the information clinically, and never broke eye contact with Max. “I tended to not remember a lot of what Psy-Ops did to me, but I remember enough.”
She shifted uncomfortably; her own stints in Psy-Ops had been bad, but she knew Alec had survived worse. “Is he going to break before we all get killed from whatever is out there?”
“We’ll just have to wait it out,” Alec shrugged. “We’re in a secure location, have repelled one attack already. As long as we pay attention and make sure any place that could be breached is watched and reinforced, we should be fine.”
“We will be,” Max said. “But the Ordinaries?”
“Are they freaking out yet? I thought you were going to calm them down?” His voice took on a slight edge.
She glared at him. “Right, while you were torturing a guy. They settled, until someone realized that we had no food, or more importantly, water, and we have no idea when we’re getting out of here.”
“Great.” Alec sighed and rubbed his face with his hand. “Well, let’s get everyone to stay relatively still and calm and hope the mist dissipates so we can at least see what’s going on out there, even if White never gives us anything.”
Hours crawled by, marked only by the inexorable tick of watches, and by the shift of the nearly invisible shadows across the warehouse floor; the mist blocked out most of the sun’s light, and the reinforcements to the windows didn’t help. And despite their best efforts, Alec, Max and Clemente couldn’t convince everyone to get along. The transgenics, along with OC and Sketchy, sat on one side of the room, while the civilians, sector police and National Guard sat on the other.
Alec settled on a only marginally broken office chair scrounged from a dusty corner and took turns watching the crowd and glancing over to where he could see Joshua’s shoes sticking out past the corner, where the big transgenic continued sat as a guard over White. Whereas Joshua sat still and calm, the Ordinaries could not.
Boredom did not compete with fear, it fed it. Enough people were bored and trapped when at work in their offices and cubicles, but put them in an empty warehouse surrounded by monsters outside and a few inside, and no one was going to stay entirely calm. Alec was having a bit of a problem with it as well, and he was far more used to situations like this than most of the people present.
Max wandered back over to him. “Anything from White yet?”
“Have you seen me move?” he asked.
“No,” she admitted. “I hoped that my subtle hint would encourage you to go check.”
“Testy, are we?” he drawled and rocked back on the chair.
She just scowled at him and leaned back against the wall. “It’s going to be dark in a few hours.”
“Hmmm.”
“We aren’t going to have light.”
“My night sight is fine, how about yours?”
“You know what I mean.” She looked at the crowd of Ordinaries.
“We could cut and run. Head back to TC. Sort it out from there.” He didn’t make eye contact with her, but looked at the windows, as if he could see through the metal panels and past the mist to where answers and what passed for safety for transgenics.
“We?” Max demanded.
“Yeah, us. The genetically enhanced,” he said the words precisely, but his tone was almost mocking.
Max frowned severely. “And leave all these people here against who knows what?”
He shrugged. “They’d do that to us, without a second thought, if they could. Or they’ll finally mob up and try to kill us. And honestly, as fast and strong as we are, they have more people, and more guns. And you probably won’t fight back.”
“Because we are faster and stronger,” she said. “We have to be better than they are. Or we will be just the monsters they see.”
He sighed. “I’ll go check on White.”
“Thank you, Alec,” she said softly.
“If I had my choice, I’d leave,” he replied, but there was very little strength to it.
“I’m not forcing you to be here.”
He sighed. “Sorta are. Besides I’m more worried about Josh. Leaving him with you seems like a bad idea.”
“As if you haven’t gotten him in trouble, too!” she shot back, but there was no heat.
The arrogant Familiar was just where Alec had left him, though much of the bravado had worn away under the hours of inactivity and the pain from the venom. Most of the cuts Alec had inflicted across White’s arms and chest were scabbed over and hardly irritated. But those that the venom had dripped on were red, puffy and still leaking blood. Alec allowed himself a quick smirk when another drop of poison hit White and the man flinched. Then he spotted Alec and sneered.
“Back so soon? Why don’t you get on with it, and I’ll show you what a real man can take.”
“I like to take it slow; no need to rush the foreplay,” Alec replied and stepped closer; he didn’t touch White, but reached up to tap the dangling snake. The head swayed and another drop of venom leaked out to splatter on a scabbed cut. The clotted blood melted away in a heartbeat and the reopened wound started to swell. White snarled.
Alec took in the sheen of sweat on the man’s face, the slight tremors of muscles held in an uncomfortable position for too long and the faint flush of fever creeping up his neck and into his face. The venom was having some effect. Not as much as Alec would have liked, or as fast, but it was working. He had a fleeting thought that maybe they’d be attacked again, and he’d manage to kill another snake and use it. As fast as it occurred, he pushed it away. Way too risky for everyone else.
White shivered suddenly, short and sharp. “Well, what clever trick are you going to use on me to break me now?” he demanded, but there was a hint of strain under his words.
Before Alec could answer, a cell phone rang. Puzzled, Alec tapped his pocket, but realized it wasn’t his. Who would be calling him at this point anyway? Normal? Not likely, after the news has splashed his face all over as a transgenic threat. A second later, he realized it was coming from White’s overcoat pocket, which was lying where it had been tossed those hours ago. An idea sprang into his head, and he acted before the opportunity was lost.
He pawed the phone out of the pocket and brought it over to White. The knife reappeared in his hand and then rested lightly on White’s throat. “I’m going to put you on speaker, and you will answer and speak as you always do, giving no indication of your current situation. If you start deviate from this, say anything thing that will get us in worse trouble than we are with the mist monsters, I will slit your throat.”
White glared at him with undisguised hate, but he nodded.
Onto Part 3
Back to Part 1