Xenofreak Nation, Book Two: Mad Eye Read online

  Xenofreak Nation

  Book Two: Mad Eye

  by Melissa Conway

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2012 by Melissa Conway

  www.melissaconway.net

  Cover background photo courtesy of CG Textures.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, with the exception of brief quotations for use in articles and reviews.

  Chapter One

  Scott Harding kicked the covers aside and jackknifed up in bed, every hair standing on end, claws fully extended. He didn’t have to look at the clock to know it was the middle of the night. This was the third time it had happened this week, but he’d planned ahead, and tonight he wasn’t going to let her take control.

  He rolled off the mattress and, sweating profusely and bent nearly double, stumbled to the bathroom. The mere act of sliding the shower stall door aside and turning the knob took a monumental effort. Stepping under the cold spray was painful, but thankfully, it provided enough of a physical distraction to take the edge off the intense pleasure flooding his body. The nanoneurons embedded in his cerebellum were doing a number on him, and Padme was the only one who could be behind it.

  As the needle-sharp water rained down over his head, Scott began to shake from the cold, his teeth chattering so violently he briefly worried he might chip a tooth. But he wasn’t capable of more than fleeting thought as waves of ecstasy flowed through his nervous system. Just when he thought she was never going to let up, never going to release him from this exquisite torture, the pleasure abruptly stopped. It had been years since he’d cried, but as he cranked the water to hot, he felt tears of relief start in his eyes. He stripped off his soaked boxer shorts and rested his forehead against the tile.

  This could not continue, and yet the XIA had no idea how to find her, much less stop her.

  He stayed in the shower until the small bathroom was filled with steam. When he finally stepped out, he heard the faint musical tone of his holophone. He grabbed a towel from the rack and hurried through his bedroom, snatching the phone off the nightstand.

  With a flash of grim hope that it might be Padme herself, he glanced at the ID. It was a holo of a little white mouse.

  Carla.

  He tapped the holo control to set it to voice, since he couldn’t very well project himself naked.

  “Hello.”

  “Scott? Is that you? Something’s wrong with Bryn. She’s all freaked out! Seriously, she’s acting like she’s on drugs or something, but she would never take drugs!”

  “Slow down. Does she seem, uh, happy or scared?” With his free hand, Scott rubbed the towel through his hair and down his body.

  “She’s terrified. Ranting and raving. It’s-” a screech from the background drowned out Carla’s words. Scott didn’t recognize the noise as coming from Bryn, but he knew it had. Padme wasn’t done meddling this evening, but while Scott had gotten a dose of pleasure, Bryn was being flooded with fear.

  “How long has it been going on?” he asked.

  “God...about five minutes. I asked her what’s wrong, but she’s not making any sense. My neighbors are gonna call the cops if this keeps up. Should I call an ambulance?”

  He tucked his holophone between his cheek and shoulder and pulled on the jeans he’d discarded on the floor earlier. “No. They won’t know what to do. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Tell her it’s her nanoneurons. Tell her...they’re malfunctioning and she should distract herself.”

  “I can’t tell her anything! She’s too far gone. I’m so worried, Scott. Please hurry.”

  He disconnected and quickly finished dressing before tucking his gun into its holster. He grabbed his leather jacket and left the apartment, taking the stairs two at a time to the parking garage. The temperature was typical for January; a not-so-balmy thirty degrees Fahrenheit, but his motorcycle cooperated for once and started on the first try. The trip to Carla’s apartment building in Brooklyn took almost twenty minutes, even with him speeding through the nearly empty streets.

  When he knocked, Carla yanked the door open as if she’d been hovering over the doorknob. She wore a tattered black silk kimono and was smoking a cigarette. She pointed. “Over there.”

  He didn’t see Bryn at first, but as he got closer he spotted her huddled on the floor in the corner of the room. Her arms were wrapped around her legs, knees pulled tightly to her chest. The quills on her head were puffed up defensively.

  He squatted down and said gently, “Hey.”

  He halfway expected her to explode, but her voice came soft and weak, “Hey.”

  “Is it over?” he asked.

  “I think so.” She looked up. Her green eyes were huge and bleak. “What was that?”

  He wanted to tell her. He wanted to wipe that look of devastated confusion from her face. But the XIA had been specific about what he could and could not reveal to her. As long as she still had access to visit her father in prison, she might inadvertently pass along information that could cripple the investigation.

  But he wasn’t going to lie. “I can’t say.”

  Her voice shook. “You told Carla it was my nanoneurons. They malfunctioned?”

  Harsh light shining down on her quills from the nearby floor lamp sent jagged black shadows slanting down the wall behind her. Sometimes, and not just because the quills gave her the illusion of toughness, he forgot how vulnerable she was. She’d not only proven to be resourceful under extreme duress, but had somehow retained her sweetness when other girls might have turned bitter and defensive. This, though...this attack from what would appear to be her own psyche - as if she were suddenly struck with a violent mental illness - this she couldn’t fend off with cleverness.

  He held out his hand and said, “Come on. Get up.”

  Her fingers were ice cold. He led her to the couch and the pullout bed she’d been sleeping on when Padme attacked. Bryn collapsed face down onto a tangle of blankets and burst into tears. Scott gently rubbed her back, sliding his cougar pads up and down the patterned flannel of her pajamas. He glanced over at Carla, who was standing nearby with a freshly-lit cigarette. The older woman blew out a stream of smoke, placed a fist on her hip and demanded, “How you gonna to fix this, hero?”

  Chapter Two

  Normally, Bryn loved to ride on the back of Scott’s motorcycle; it gave her an opportunity to put her arms around him. But this morning she was too on edge to enjoy much of anything. She simply could not stop thinking about last night. It had started in her sleep, when a perfectly pleasant dream about swimming with Scott in a warm, iridescent pool had gone horribly awry. In the dream, he’d suddenly changed into a cougar and begun mauling her until the water was scarlet with blood. She woke under an unrelenting spell of pure fear, as if the imminent danger inspired by the nightmare was unable to switch itself off. In her eighteen years, she’d never felt anything like it - not when she’d been kidnapped, not when she’d faced torture, not when Fournier’s underground facility was burning all around her and she had no way out. Even under those dire circumstances she’d retained enough sanity to fight back. Last night, not even the smallest corner of her mind had been spared from the bombardment of terror; there’d been no place for her to take refuge.

  It had been the single most h
orrific experience of her life to date. A twenty-minute trip through several circles of Dante’s inferno, all without leaving Carla’s modest apartment.

  She’d gotten very little sleep despite the fact that Scott had bunked out on the floor next to the pullout bed. He’d made a call to his handler not long after sunrise and now they pulled up to the gate of XIA headquarters, where Scott waved to the guard and held his palm under a holoscanner. When the gate didn’t automatically open, the guard approached. He had a light blue surgical mask over the lower half of his face.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “Security’s been upped. I’ll need to I.D. your guest, too.”

  Bryn handed the guard her driver’s license and unfastened the chinstrap of the helmet covering her quills. When she removed it, the guard’s eyebrows rose in alarm and he stepped back, saying hastily, “Oh! Wait here.”

  He went back to his booth. Bryn saw through the reinforced glass that he was calling someone. A few minutes later he was back. He handed her driver’s license back and said, “Sorry about that. How are you this morning, Miss Vega?”

  “Fine, thank you.” It was a lie, of course. Even now, while casually exchanging pleasantries with the guard, she felt twinges of last night’s fear pinging along her nervous system.

  When she and Scott entered the building, she went to the left to wait in line for the full-body scanner, while he went to the right, pulling a gun she didn’t know he’d been carrying from the holster at the small of his back and setting it into a plastic bin. All the employees seemed to be wearing the same blue surgical masks as the gate guard.

  She and Scott met on the other side of the security barrier. He holstered his gun and asked one of the guards, “What’s with the masks?”

  “Just a precaution. There was an incident at the downtown courthouse a few days ago.”

  Bryn exchanged a concerned look with Scott. She’d known it would only be a matter of time before Dr. Fournier’s handiwork began to surface again. Her frank discussion with the doctor when he thought he was dying had confirmed for the XIA what they already suspected: Fournier had branched out from bioengineering and cloning into experimentation with a deadly bio-agent. His main facility may have been destroyed, but he and his staff had gotten away and a madman like him would surely set up shop elsewhere.

  They took the elevator to the ninth floor and walked down a long, deserted hallway. There were no pictures to break up the monotony of the white walls. Even the carpet was boring; grey and unpatterned. Bryn had been here before just the once, after the fire, for a ‘debriefing.’ It was still a cold, impersonal place, just what you’d expect from the headquarters of an elite branch of the government. The Xenofreak Intelligence Agency wasn’t a secret organization, but hardly anyone knew it existed nonetheless, and Bryn supposed that was the way they preferred it.

  The end of the corridor opened onto a reception area. A lone woman sat at a counter behind a square of the ubiquitous reinforced glass. This woman, too, had a mask over the lower half of her face, but Bryn saw her eyes crinkle in a welcoming smile.

  “Well, good morning, Agent Harding. Ms. Fox is expecting you.”

  A buzz and a click heralded the unlocking of a heavy security door to the left. Scott led the way into the interior, an open space crowded with cubicles colored a slightly lighter shade of grey than the carpet. The office was bustling with personnel going about their business. To the casual observer, this might be any other place of business, but to Bryn, the professionally dressed men and women all seemed uncommonly fit and she suspected that like Scott, most of them were packing concealed weapons.

  Over the last several months, ever since Bryn had been forced to undergo the surgical xenografting of a porcupine pelt where her hair used to be, she’d amassed a collection of headwear designed to hide her quills. She’d been in such a state of upset when she left this morning that she hadn’t brought a hat or scarf with her. She caught several sidelong glances from the XIA personnel. A few stared openly.

  The story of Bryn’s kidnapping and mutilation had been broadcast all over the world, so it was unlikely the gawkers didn’t recognize her, even if they didn’t know the details of Scott’s undercover operation. Still, she worried they would judge her. She couldn’t have the graft removed altogether because the doctors had warned her they didn’t know what her nanoneurons would do if they weren’t able to perform their intended function. She did have the option of clipping the quills short, but in the end she’d felt a strange kinship with her donor porcupine. The poor animal had been bioengineered by Dr. Fournier to be compatible with humans for the express purpose of harvesting its body parts as decorative grafts. Bryn knew it was irrational, but she didn’t want the little guy’s sacrifice to have been in vain. Besides the fact that twice now her quills had actually protected her.

  She lifted her chin a little higher as they walked to one of the doors set along the perimeter of the office space. Scott knocked, the fur on his knuckles muffling the sound.

  “Come in.”

  Inside the office, Shasta Fox sat behind a wooden desk, tapping rapidly at the holo keyboard displayed in front of her. She glanced up as they entered and swept a hand over her work, dimming it from their view.

  “Sit,” she said.

  Scott’s eyebrows shot up. “You on an op?”

  As Bryn perched on the edge of one of two chairs in front of the desk, she flashed on the first time she’d seen Shasta; right after the older woman had rescued them from the blocked escape tunnel. Bryn had been too sick from smoke inhalation to register much about Shasta’s appearance other than that she was a thin black woman with very short, greying hair.

  Today Shasta looked completely different. She’d gotten hair extensions that hung to her shoulders. The dark brown strands curled gracefully around a face that, unlike the few times Bryn had seen her since that first meeting, was expertly made up. Her features were too austere for her to be called pretty, but she was attractive - like an uncut diamond in a fancy new setting.

  Shasta’s red lips pursed. “You know I don’t go into the field. If you’re referring to my appearance, that’s not what’s relevant here, is it?”

  Scott sat in the other chair and replied, “No, ma’am.”

  “Tell me again what happened,” Shasta said.

  Scott leaned back in his chair. “Remember that, uh, malfunction of my nanoneurons we talked about earlier this week?”

  “Quit dancing around it,” Shasta interjected. “If Padme Lango is attacking Bryn, the agency can no longer justify leaving her on her own. She needs to be taken to a secure facility.”

  “What?” Bryn looked from Shasta to Scott. “Padme did that to me?”

  As Scott avoided her gaze, she suddenly remembered what he’d said last night. She’d asked him what had caused her nanoneurons to malfunction and he’d muttered, “I can’t say.” He hadn’t meant that he didn’t know; he meant he couldn’t tell her.

  A slow fury began burning in her stomach. She’d been kept in the dark for the last four months, never knowing what the XIA was doing to find Fournier, terrified that at any moment he’d send his goons after her. Scott had supposedly been pulled from the investigation to teach new recruits how to fight, but now it seemed that wasn’t all he’d been up to.

  “She can control my nanoneurons? When were you going to tell me this?”

  “I wanted to,” he said, shooting Shasta a dark look.

  Shasta pressed her lips together. “It wasn’t an issue until now. Padme’s equipment and files were destroyed in the fire. There was no evidence she had a backup system, but now it’s obvious she either did, or she was able to recreate the program. Regardless, we know from the number of xenos who’ve died of apparently natural causes from inside our prison system that she has the ability to literally scare anyone implanted with Fournier’s nanoneurons to death.”

  A sickening chill travelled from the base of Bryn’s brain to her ankles. “My God,” she murmured. She looked at
Scott. He’d asked Shasta if she remembered discussing his nanoneuron ‘malfunction’ last week. “She did it to you, too?”

  Scott blanched and avoided her eyes again. “Yeah, kind of.”

  Bryn didn’t have a chance to ask what he meant, because Shasta tapped a holokey and said, “Send Agent Alton in, please.”

  A disembodied female voice responded, “Right away.”

  Scott leaned forward. “Is there a secure facility? Where Padme can’t reach her?”

  Shasta nodded. “It’s not ours, but the FBI has agreed to accommodate us on this one. The facility is crude, and it hasn’t been used in years, but it was constructed in an old Atlas Missile silo two hundred feet underground so signals from nearby cell towers are blocked.”

  “Cell towers?” Bryn asked.

  “That’s how Padme activates the pleasure or fear,” Shasta replied.

  Pleasure? Bryn blinked and looked at Scott. An uncharacteristic flush stained the tops of his cheekbones.

  A knock sounded on the door and Shasta barked, “Come.”

  A man entered, shut the door and moved to the side of Shasta’s desk, standing with his hands shoved in the pockets of his ragged, dirty jeans. He had a full beard and his shaggy brown hair was matted and greasy. Bryn’s nostrils flared in disgust as a pungent combination of body odor and sour beer followed in his wake.

  Shasta sighed. “No time to shower and change, Agent Alton?”

  “Two hours ago I was deep under cover. Had me a cozy crib under the Yakaburra underpass. Six months of work and I get yanked to babysit your girl.” He jerked his head towards Bryn, who detected more than a trace of resentment in the brown eyes that flickered briefly over her face.

  “Is your cover story in place?” Shasta asked.

  He nodded. “Local cops arrested me in front of my crew, and as far as any of them know, I’ll be extradited to Utah for murder.”