Chimera

Eighteen Dirty Outs

Warinanco Park was easy to find. As soon as he heard the destination, Marco shifted into his raven form, then flew off to find the place so he knew exactly where to go later. He would be driving the Sport containing me, Teresa, and Dr. Kinsey. Teresa had insisted on being part of the exchange, not just for security but in case Kinsey needed assistance with Maddie on the drive back to HQ.

My entire body hummed with kinetic energy, with the need to stretch and flex and use the power that my damaged skin no longer allowed. Mostly it was from nerves. I was scared to go out there without my friends. Scared to be a prisoner, even if it was with a bunch of teenagers. Their powers rivaled ours and they knew it. So much could go wrong so easily.

So what else is new?

Teresa twisted around in the front seat and looked back at me, her eyebrows arched. I stopped tapping my fingers on the door, starting tapping on my thigh, then just sat on my hands. Her sympathetic look made me want to burst into tears. No one knew how long the swap would last. Dr. Kinsey needed to assess Maddie’s wounds before he could guess at her recovery time.

The entrance to the park loomed like a table at a high-stakes poker game—one wrong move, one tell, and it was all over. I shivered.

“Learn everything you can,” Teresa said for the third or fourth time since the trip began. She was nervous, too, if she was repeating herself. “Try to get on their side.”

“I was the way wrong person for this job if it requires being friends,” I said. My attempt at levity fell flat, because it was so often true. I wasn’t the diplomat of our group, and I never would be.

Why had I volunteered to do this again?

Marco met my gaze in the rearview mirror, his glowing green eyes warm and sincere when he said, “You will succeed, Renee.”

His vote of confidence meant more to me than anyone else’s. Marco didn’t offer encouragement very often. Hell, he didn’t talk much anymore, period, but he had a quiet strength he couldn’t hide, even if he tried, and I liked knowing he believed in me.

“Thanks, sweetie,” I said. I reached up and squeezed his shoulder. The muscles under my hand tensed. Relaxed. He patted my hand, then returned both of his to the wheel.

The park was no longer used—like the rest of the town of Elizabeth—and vegetation had begun to retake the grounds. Our headlights bounced off trees and bushes, casting creepy shadows all over the damned place. Marco drove toward a large lake that reflected the moonlight. He stopped when the lights fell on the same rusty oiece-of-shit car from the rest stop. He shifted into park, but left the engine running so the lights stayed on.

Teresa opened her door first. The rest of us followed suit. I almost fell over when I hit the ground. My knees were watery and I wanted to barf up the sandwich Teresa had forced me to eat before we left HQ. I made my feet take forward steps and met my group at the Sport’s fender.

The two front doors of the car popped open. Sasha emerged from the driver’s side, clutching a linen bag in her hand. I expected Rick again, but it was the Incredible Growing Boy, sporting a red-stained bandage on his wrist. The pair of them came toward us.

“You’re the doctor?” Sasha asked, looking right at the man in question.

“Abram Kinsey,” he replied. He lifted the shoulder supporting the strap of his travel medical kit. “May I see Maddie?”

“Barry will take you.”

The Incredible Growing Boy, aka Barry, led Kinsey over to the car. Kinsey opened the back door and leaned inside to do his thing.

“Thank you for trusting us to help her,” Teresa said.

“I don’t have a choice,” Sasha replied. “Maddie and I haven’t know each other very long, but I can’t let her die.”

“You don’t have to know someone well to know you’re connected.”

“True.” She tossed the linen bag at me, and I almost dropped the thing. “Put that on, please.”

My insides clenched up tight when I pulled a collar out of the bag. “This wasn’t part of the deal,” I said.

“Would you rather be tied up?”

“Fuck, no.” I detested the idea of being collared, but I couldn’t handle the alternative. The collar was the same as Ethan’s—slim, black, cool to the touch. I didn’t understand how it worked, only that when Teresa helped secure it around my neck, a gentle buzz of energy crept along my bare skin everywhere it touched me. It was tight without choking, and the scariest damned necklace I’d ever worn.

“Maddie is as stable as she’s going to get,” Dr. Kinsey said from the car. “We need to move her to the Sport.”

“I got it,” Barry said.

Before any of our crew could question him, Barry grew to an eighteen-foot-tall version of himself, creating hands the size of manhole covers. He reached into the car with surprising grace and carefully lifted Maddie out. She was wrapped in blankets, her face ashen, eyes shut. Marco opened the rear compartment of the Sport, and Barry placed her there in a nest of pillows and blankets.

He shrank back down to a more average five-eight or so, and then leaned into the Sport to kiss Maddie’s cheek. The gesture was more brotherly than romantic, and he glared at us when he pulled back. I’d put all my chips on him being the Landon to Maddie’s Bethany. This might have been the first time Barry and Maddie had been separated since they were children.

“Take care of her,” he said to Dr. Kinsey.

“I’ll do my very best, you have my word,” Kinsey replied. He got into the back with Maddie, and Marco closed the hatch.

“Time for you to go,” Sasha said to Teresa.

“Keep that phone handy,” Teresa said. “I’ll call with updates.”

“Good. Thanks.”

“Sit tight, and keep your friends out of sight, okay?”

“Duh.”

I didn’t hug Teresa or Marco good-bye. We’d done all that before leaving HQ, getting and giving last-minute bits of advice so when the time came, they could leave me behind without fanfare, like it was something we did all the time. I stood beside Sasha and Barry and watched two of my best friends drive off without me. A phantom chill settled in the space they had once occupied, and the cold crept into my guts. I didn’t know where I was going, or what would happen when I got there.

Thatcher and I hadn’t really said good-bye. I didn’t know what to say to him after that kiss, and we had no privacy anyway. His final words to me rumbled around in my head like the warning they’d been intended as: “Never forget they’re young. They may not act rationally. Be ready for anything.”

“Let’s go,” Sasha said after we’d waited a few minutes in silence.

They directed me into the backseat, still warm from where Maddie had lain. No blood on the seat, though, which was a good sign. From the front, Barry handed me something. A necktie.

“Blindfold yourself,” he said.

I swallowed a protest. This was their show now. I gave him my very best Is-this-the-best-you’ve-got, kid? look and tied the strip of cloth around my eyes. Maybe the bravado didn’t impress him, but I felt a little bit better.

Even though my arms and legs were free, I was still bound by that fucking collar. I was at their mercy. I hadn’t felt this helpless since Specter drugged and pretzel-tied me to a pommel horse nine months ago.

The car engine rumbled to life, and we were off, destination unknown.

Tracking time in the dark doesn’t get easier, no matter how many chances you get to try it. At some point, after at least one hour but less than five (because the sun wasn’t up yet), the car stopped moving and Barry told me I could take off the blindfold. We were parked in a dirty alley behind a long row of brick residences. Most had broken windows, falling gutters, and fenced-in yards long overrun with weeds and waist-high grass. The skinny three-story row homes suggested we were close to a large city.

The only large cities within reasonable distance of Elizabeth were Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Scranton in Pennsylvania, or Wilmington down in Delaware. I doubted that Sasha would go much farther than that from Manhattan.

The air was thick with the odors of vegetation rot, wet cement, and pollution fumes—strong enough to make my nose tingle. I followed Sasha and Barry out of the car, down at least eight homes from the car, and through the broken gate of one backyard. They wove a path through the overgrowth, careful not to trample it and make it obvious that someone was living—squatting?—here. Sasha unlocked a rusty, once-white metal door and went inside.

We stepped into a kitchen that hadn’t been new in at least fifty years and had the yellowish stains to prove it. The silence surprised me, and I figured out why—no hum of electricity anywhere in the house. A kerosene lantern on one of the warped countertops was the only light source. More golden lantern glows came from the next room.

The living room was an interesting disaster of single mattresses and sleeping bags jumbled together along the various walls. The windows were papered over and the staircase was blocked by what looked like boxes of groceries. Tate, Rick, Bethany, and Wings (name still unknown) were sitting together on one of the mattresses playing cards. The trio of boys watched as we entered, all eyes on me.

I felt a bit like I’d interrupted the worst sleepover ever.

Barry scuffed over to one of the sleeping bags, dropped down, and curled up around a flat pillow. Worrying, mourning, or sleeping, I didn’t know.

The cell Teresa had given to Sasha chimed with a text. She glanced at the screen. “Maddie is back at the Meta HQ,” she reported. “She’s in surgery to remove the bullet.”

“Good news,” Tate said.

“As long as she survives.”

Sasha said it to Tate, but I couldn’t help but feel that the statement was directed at me.

“Bathroom’s over there,” Sasha said to me, pointing to a closed door beneath the stairs. “The water’s off, but we fixed it to drain right down. If you have to take a shit, go outside into one of the yards.”

Oh, lovely. “Thanks,” I said.

“Bottled water’s on the stairs. Help yourself. Ask before you eat anything.”

“Okay.”

To the others she said, “This is Flex.”

“Renee is fine,” I said.

They all said their names, which I mostly knew. Turned out Wings’s name was Nicolas. We all stared at each other, waiting for someone else to say something. As I stood in the dim light, knowing it was at least two a.m. and probably closer to dawn, fatigue crept over me. I cracked a yawn, which had the adverse effect of making everyone else start yawning.

“You can sleep there,” Sasha said, pointing to a bare mattress in the corner by the bathroom. She dropped down onto another mattress and pulled a tattered blanket up over her, not even bothering to take off her boots.

“Thank you,” I said.

Everyone scattered to their individual sleeping spots, and one by one the three living room lanterns were turned off. I stared at the water-stained ceiling, barely visible from the glow of the kitchen lantern, and listened to six strangers breathing. My arm throbbed, my chest hurt from stress, and my neck itched from the collar. My eyes drooped shut, but my mind was racing with too many things.

I rested, but did not sleep.

A ringing phone snapped me out of my dozing. I shot upright and blinked across the dim room, out of sorts from the lack of sunlight. Sasha sat up as she said, “Yes?”

Some of the others stirred while she listened.

“Okay, thanks.” She hung up. “That was Trance. Maddie is out of surgery and resting. She’s getting blood and antibiotics. Trance will call again in a few hours with another report.”

Various voices mumbled things I didn’t understand. Sasha rolled off her mattress and retrieved a bottle of water from the stairs. She saw me watching her and tossed one at me, which I caught without fumbling.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“A little after six.” She plunked down on the mattress next to me without an invitation. “Tell me about the Rangers.”

“Like what? I was twelve when the Rangers ceased to exist.”

“But you still believe in the idea of the Rangers, right? What they did and stood for?”

“Mostly I do, yes. We genuinely want to help people.”

“Why?” She didn’t seem to mind carrying on a conversation at full volume while four other people were trying to sleep, so I went with it.

“Why do we want to help people?” I asked.

“Yeah. You don’t know them. I don’t understand it.”

“You might understand better than you think, honey. Bethany and Landon helped people, using the skills Uncle taught them. They stole food and gave it to strangers who needed it.”

“That’s different.”

“How?” I glanced at Bethany, whose eyes were open, watching us from across the room.

“Giving them food isn’t the same as jumping in front of a bullet for someone.”

“Sure it is. The act is different but the intent comes from the same place.” I could see her face screw into an epic frown, so I grasped for something she could identify with. “You’d take a bullet for any of the kids in this room, right?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“They’re important to me. They’re family.”

“You understand better than you think, then.”

More of the kids were waking up, listening, lighting the lanterns. Only Barry didn’t seem to have noticed the conversation.

Nicolas sat with his wings wrapped around his shoulders like a blanket. “Were you always blue?” he asked suddenly.

I paused, thrown by the left-field question, until the reasoning behind it made a little bit of sense. For most Meta kids, powers and accompanying physical changes developed in childhood and early adolescence. Nicolas’s wings should have started growing sometime after the age of eight or nine, but I knew from talking to several other young Metas, ones whose powers didn’t appear until last January, that that hadn’t happened for them. Overnight, Kate Lowry went from a French manicure to thick claws she had to hide with gloves.

“No, I wasn’t,” I replied. “I was born with ordinary skin. I began to turn blue right after my eighth birthday.”

“Did it hurt?”

Fear coiled around my spine. “The physical change didn’t hurt, no.”

“My wings hurt.” He frowned and shuddered. “Felt like someone was ripping my bones out through my back for, like, a solid hour. When it was over, I was all bloody and scared.”

“You knew you were Meta, but you didn’t know what your power would be?”

He shook his head, and the others made noises that suggested they hadn’t known, either.

“Did you know?” Sasha asked.

“I didn’t even know I was Meta,” I replied. I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to give details of my hellish childhood to a bunch of strangers. But it also felt right. Like I could relate to them somehow, even though we were nothing alike. “I was born in a place called Paradise Ranch in Montana. It was run by a group of people who believed that Metas were demonic spawn, and that Satan was working through their powers.”

“The fuck?” Bethany said, as incredulous as I’d ever seen her.

“Unfortunately, Paradise Ranch wasn’t an anomaly. Other places like it did and probably do still exist.”

“You were born there?” Sasha asked. Her sparkly eyes went wide. “What did they do when you turned blue?”

Icicles stabbed me in the guts. My skin felt cold, tight. I pushed through the panic and dredged up the offending memories. “It didn’t happen all at once,” I replied. “I could hide it for a few days, until it spread to my hands and face. The morning I woke up and my eyes were glowing, I ran straight into my parents’ bedroom, sobbing, and I begged them to help me. My mother looked at me and started to cry. My father left the room. Neither one of them would touch me.”

“Did they turn you in?”

“Not at first. They kept me out of school for a few days. I couldn’t leave the house.” My skin tingled. “They tried giving me scalding-hot baths, then ice-cold baths, like it would leach the color out of my skin. They prayed over me. I was terrified, because all I knew of Metas was that they were demons, and I didn’t want to be a demon. Then I used my Flex power for the first time—stretched my wrist out six inches.”

My eyes burned with tears from old hurts.

“They called the town elders. My parents accused each other of being the cause of my”—I made air quotes—“possession. The elders promised to cast out my demon.”

Six horrified faces stared back at me, and I found the words were coming more easily. Now that the dam had cracked, the pressure was too great. Everything was coming out.

“I was taken to the church where everyone worshipped and then locked in a pitch-black cell in the basement. My parents threw me into hell, and they did it willingly. For two months, I was deprived of light, starved, beaten, tortured with water and sound and heat and light. The elders performed what I can only describe as rituals, where they chanted and flung things at me. Water, wine, blood, urine, I have no idea. I told them I wasn’t a demon, that I didn’t want my powers, that I was sorry.” I withheld some of the details of my torture from my audience. They didn’t need to know the most vile parts, the acts that still occasionally gave me nightmares. The things the elders did that—I realized many years later—had nothing to do with the exorcism attempts.

“My parents never came for me,” I said.

I glanced at Bethany, whose cheeks were streaked with tears, and damn it, I wanted to hug her. And I had no idea why. I wiped at my own eyes with the back of my hand, as torn up by the memories as I was calmed by them. Saying these things out loud took the monster from the closet and exposed him to the light of day.

He wasn’t so scary anymore.

“But you got away?” Sasha asked.

“I was only eight,” I said. “I couldn’t have gotten away if I’d tried. My last night there, the elders declared they’d failed to exorcise the demon from my body, so the only thing left to do was send us both to hell so the demon no longer walked the earth.”

Phantom flames licked my skin, and I closed my eyes. “They built a wooden platform in the yard behind the church. They stoked a bonfire beneath it, and they tied me to a post in the middle. I was terrified, so completely out of my mind that I let them do it. I remember the heat of the fire, the smell of burning wood. I remember looking out and seeing my parents, watching so calmly, like they’d already accepted I was dead.

“And then a woman in a blue uniform flew in and doused the flames before I was burned too badly.” Love for that woman and a long-ago act of bravery filled my heart nearly to bursting, and I remembered clearly why I did what I did today. “A Ranger Corps Squad found me and saved me before I was murdered.”

“Christ,” Rick said.

Christ wasn’t my savior that day. That distinction belonged to four Rangers—one of whom died during my rescue. The others died before the end of the War. Those brave souls brought me back to Los Angeles to recover at Rangers Headquarters. I had mixed memories of my early weeks among the Rangers. I suffered from severe PTSD. I was terrified of adults. I hadn’t realized until later that a Ranger named Delphi made the decision to put psychic shields around my worst memories of the torture. Those shields allowed me to trust, to make friends with the other kids at HQ, and to find a sense of normalcy among other Metas.

The day we lost our powers in Central Park, Delphi’s psychic shields broke. For days after, I was dealing not only with the loss of my powers, the loss of my friends, and the destruction of my entire life, but also an influx of memories I’d thought long gone. The government put me into a psychiatric treatment facility for four months before I was given to a foster family.

If the Rangers saved my life when I was eight, then Alfred and Joan Wimbley saved my life again when I was twelve. They were the most loving, patient, understanding parents a traumatized ex-Meta could have asked for, and I missed them every day. But I didn’t dare visit them. As long as no one realized our connection, they’d stay safely out of public scrutiny. I’d never put their lives in danger.

I briefly outlined these things for my audience. They needed to understand that not all mundane people were evil, and that the Rangers had been, at heart, doing the right thing. No matter what the government tried to do under the table, there had been a lot of true heroes in the Corps.

“After the War ended, it wasn’t easy still being blue,” I said. “But I learned to embrace my skin color. I can’t change it, so I can at least celebrate it. And the thing that unites us, you guys and me? We’re Metas, no matter what. We might be different, but we’re all different together.”

No one spoke for a long minute.

“Thank you,” Sasha said. “For telling us all of that. You didn’t have to.”

“I think I did, but you’re welcome.”

I got up to partake of their self-draining toilet, then used a bottle of water by the sink to wash my hands. I didn’t bother to look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I knew it well enough. I embraced the lightness inside me at having exorcised a demon from long ago in the simple telling of a story. I felt it all over.

The others were back to sleep when I returned to the living room. I curled up on my mattress, unsurprised to see a pillow and blanket had been left for me.

This time I slept.

The next day was definitely in the running to become Longest Day Ever by the time evening rolled around. Teresa called roughly every four hours with an update on Maddie’s condition, which ping-ponged all over the place. At ten o’clock she was “feverish and fighting an infection.” Around two she was “stable and her fever’s going down.”

We spent our time indoors, keeping a low profile just like Teresa said, and slowly losing our minds. Seven people, six of them teenagers, stuck in a small house with no fresh air and few forms of entertainment, led to a lot of fighting. And talking. We played poker for matchsticks, and I hustled Tate, Nicolas, and Sasha the first game. Afterward, I taught them all about tells, odds, and how to bluff.

Barry mostly kept to himself, reading a battered paperback that had probably been left behind by the house’s previous owners. He only became animated when the phone rang with an update. Bethany and Rick paired off quickly and spent a lot of time in the kitchen, out of sight. At one point they disappeared upstairs, and we listened to a lot of creaking and heavy breathing for a while.

At least she isn’t flirting with Ethan anymore, right?

When they came downstairs later, Bethany was beaming and Rick looked stunned. Poor guy.

Teresa’s next call didn’t come until nearly seven. Sasha, bored with poker, had taken a nap, and she bolted upright when the phone rang. “Yes?” she said.

We all stopped our activities and watched as her eyes widened. She grinned and said, “Maddie?”

Barry fled across the room as fast as a boy without superspeed could go, and he barely stopped himself from yanking the phone away from Sasha. “She’s talking?” he asked. Sasha slapped a hand over Barry’s mouth.

“You had us all scared, girlie,” she said. “They treating you good?” Nod. “Excellent.” Pause. “Yeah, hold on.” She handed the phone to Barry, who looked ready to burst into tears.

“Madeline?” he said after he fumbled the phone three times.

I sympathized with that sort of worry and fear. I’d been there. I’d gotten the phone call telling me someone I loved was out of danger. I’d also felt the grief that came with the opposite news.

“The infection’s gone,” Sasha reported to us while Barry spoke into the phone in hushed tones. “She’s alert and feeling better.”

A round of cheers went up, followed by some hugging and backslaps. I sat quietly, cheering on the inside, happy for them. Truly happy.

Barry and Maddie spoke for a few more minutes, and then he handed the phone over to Sasha. She wandered into the kitchen to finish the call. I’d almost made up my mind to teach the group to play seven-card stud when she came back into the living room. Her expression made everyone pause and stare.

“What?” Rick asked.

“They did what they promised and healed Maddie,” Sasha said. “So far, they’re keeping their word. I trust Trance.”

“Okay.”

“Trance invited me to visit the HQ. Not just to see Maddie, but to meet everyone and see the facilities. Their defenses, too.”

Rick stood up, hands flashing blue with firework power. “You’re going alone?”

“Yes.”

“Sash—”

“I’ve made the decision, Rick. Renee will stay here with you guys, and you’ll be in charge while I’m gone.” She waved her hands around. “Isn’t it better to let them protect us than keep living like this?”

“So we go from being on our own to being their prisoners?”

“We wouldn’t be prisoners. And what’s so great about being on our own? We’re hunted now, and we have no clue what to do next. This feels right.”

Rick scowled, but he didn’t argue further.

“Are you taking the car?” Nicolas asked.

“No, I’ll, uh”—she glanced at me—“get another one. I’ll be back tomorrow by noon, I promise.”

“Hey, can you do me a favor?” Bethany asked.

Sasha nodded. “Sure.”

“Tell Landon I’m sorry I’m not there, and that I love him.”

“I can do that.”

After Sasha left, the house settled into an oddly melancholy state, despite the good news about Maddie. We slapped together a dinner of peanut butter sandwiches with pretzels. I told a few stories of my adventures since January, leaving out the gory or depressing things, but even that got old. It wasn’t until later, when I wanted to know what time it was, that I realized no one else had a watch or cell phone.

We were well and truly cut off.

Bethany and Rick went upstairs, probably to have sex again, and the rest of us migrated to our respective sleeping places. I hoped Sasha brought good news with her tomorrow—like news that I was going home. The kids were pretty cool, and roughing it was an experience all its own, but I was bored out of my fucking skull.

Boredom I wasn’t prepared to alleviate with the fight that landed in our laps when—just as I was dozing off—Sledgehammer burst through the tenement’s front door.