Muts, page 11
She gave my shoulder a final reassuring squeeze then headed towards the door.
“Thank you for listening, Sash. Means a lot.”, I called to her before she swung the door shut. She rolled her eyes at me as she quickly went back inside, all without even reminding me that she hates that nickname. The smile I had slid off my face as soon as I realized it was there. I had a bad gut feeling that this was just the beginning of more stress coming into my life, and I had to shake it away. If I listened to every bad feeling I had, I’d end up pulling my hair out. It was time to make a plan. Leaning back, I continued rocking slowly as I sipped my tea and watched the shadows chase each other.
Chapter Nine
Sasha
“I mean, it does sound like something out of a comic book but I still think the theory holds water.”, Carrie aimed her paintbrush at me like a weapon as she babbled on the next morning, “The logic behind it is sound, you can’t argue.”
“True, true.”, I muttered, not really listening as Carrie mindlessly filled the silence while she painted on the floor. I just wanted to read my book. I knew that coming in here first thing in the morning was a stupid idea, but I wanted to put off meeting everyone downstairs for as long as possible. This was our first full day with our new housemates, and I foolishly thought I could get in some quiet reading while she slept in—rookie mistake. I should’ve known she’d be up and scheming before the red sun could rise. First, she bustled around fussing about if Abby was going to blow up over breakfast, then about what to do about Richard’s behavior, then how she ended up in all of this mess. And somehow that devolved into…
“I’m just saying. If we put a charger into James’s mouth or armpit or something, Uncle-Fester-style I should, logically, be able to charge my phone. I know there won’t be any service, but at least I could listen to my music.”
She dipped her brush into the paint again, then angrily tossed it into the murky water glass and flopped backward to lay on the floor. I gave up on Austen for the moment, not that I could ever have enough of that Darcy goodness.
“Let’s just go and get this over with. You’re just getting weirder by the second, and I’m running out of things to read.”, I said, looking down at her.
“What if I just lock the door, and we just stay in here forever?”, she sighed, her exhaustion clear.
“Don’t even tempt me. I do not want to deal with the fuckery on the other side of that door.”, I shook my head. Before I could even stand up, a piercing scream sliced through the house, causing my entire body to immediately tense.
“What the -”, Carrie exclaimed, quickly rising from the floor. Another shout rang out and we both ran to her window. Terrence was flying high in the air in a wide arc around, arms spread, screaming with joy at the top of his lungs. Under him was Abby with a wide smile on her face, with Clint, Samuel, and Jess all laughing hysterically and pointing. Carrie and I looked at each other, laughing, and ran down the stairs and out across the wide lawn.
“Alright, now try to lower him to the ground. Gently.” Jess coached through residual tears. Clint and Samuel were still chuckling quietly as Abby watched Terrence’s slow descent with a stare and a smile. After he stepped lightly to the ground, Abby smiled up at the three of them.
“Did I do good?” Abby asked Samuel with a wide grin. He leaned down and ruffled her hair affectionately, which she swatted away with a false scowl of displeasure.
“You did wonderfully.”
“Hey, Carrie!” Jess called out as she noticed our approach. Carrie walked straight to her sister and they both reached out to touch each other as if the shield wasn’t there, but her fingers came to rest a few inches away from Jess’s. I turned to speak to Clint, but I noticed Abby’s hard stare at Carrie and stepped in between them.
“That was really amazing, Abby. What else can you do?”, I asked her. She looked up at me with cold green eyes that warmed as she gave me a soft smile.
“Pretty much anything.”, she said casually, but the pride in her voice was obvious.
“We were just talking about her ‘flexing the muscle,’ so to speak.”, Clint began before Samuel cut in.
“Yeah, she can do some things you couldn’t even imagine. I was just catching Clint up.”, he said slyly, cutting his eye over to enjoy Clint’s building anger. I heard Caroline’s little giggle when Clint started puffing up angrily again, and I looked around before I noticed her leaning against Jess’s shield, idly picking the blades of grass that had managed to survive. She caught my eye and smiled widely at me, while the boys started bickering again.
“I wonder how long it will be before they stop this pissing match.”, Carrie muttered, watching Clint and Samuel shoot snide comments to each other. Between Samuel hating Clint and Abby hating Carrie, this was getting annoying. We already had Richard pissing everyone off, we didn’t need more tension. Right then I heard the front door open and Allana, Matthias, and James all spilled out onto the porch to watch.
“Hey, Carrie.”, I called, ripping her attention away from her sister again. “Let’s go up there and get out of their way.” I gave Abby a soft smile.
“We’re going to go up there and watch you practice. Is that okay?”, I asked her hesitantly. I desperately wanted to see what this powerful little girl could do, but I also didn’t want Carrie to be within ‘accident’ range. Treating someone like an equal will do wonders in any situation. She only responded with a curt nod before turning back to Clint and Samuel, as far as getting her blessing, I think that was as good as it was going to get. Carrie and I started heading up to the porch, and as we sat down in our favorite rockers, I noticed Jess and Caroline following behind us silently. Jess perched on the side railing, a few feet away from the rest of the group, but Caroline quickly sat under her and leaned against her shield again. It looked like the boys were trying to test Abby’s abilities this time by sliding Terrence across the wide lawn and stopping him as soon as they said so. It was like a telekinetic game of Red Light, Green Light. At least she had one willing volunteer for her to practice with. Terrence was pleased as punch, it seemed. After the damage she caused yesterday, you couldn’t get me to volunteer for the job. Perks of having our resident wacko, I guess.
“She’s like an angry blonde Matilda.”, Matthias muttered to me out of the corner of his mouth. I couldn’t help but laugh, which cut out the second I saw the death glare Caroline shot him. Geez, maybe Phoebe naming the girl the “Devil Twins” wasn’t completely wrong. They were unnerving at best. If I ran into them holding hands in the house at the end of a dark hallway I’m positive I would have a heart attack then and there.
“Allana.” Carrie’s voice cut in, her voice tense. “If you’d like to touch her shield, you should ask instead of staring at her like a psycho.”
“I don’t want to touch her shield.”, she shot a dirty glare to Carrie at being called out, but diverted to Jess instead, “Jess, I actually wanted to ask you what the muts are like at the institution.”
Wow. She was surprisingly polite. Obvious staring aside.
“Well, we were called ‘patients’ there. But I guess we’re all ‘muts’ now. All of us already had mental abilities, and most of us didn’t merge with things the way most of you did.”, she smiled at James pointedly, “With my shield for instance, before the flux, as we called it, my shield was only a few inches away from me. Since then, it’s been growing, not fast, though. Then we have people like Phoebe who have become so potent it’s not easy to even be in the same room when she uses her powers.”
“Huh, so you don’t have any cosmetic muts like us then?”, Allana asked. Jess’s brow wrinkled for a second before she understood.
“Oh, like your mirrors and his wires. Exactly. Most of us are like James now. We all look normal, but our powers are hidden underneath the surface.”
“Aw, we’re special, Lana.” Matthias smiled at her, directing his next words to James while shaking back his sleeves to flex his wires like he just got a new tattoo, “Too bad you don’t look this cool.”
“They are pretty weird, they kinda look like veins…”, James muttered before jumping up happily, “Wanna check if they follow vein patterns? I’m positive Richard has some kind of anatomy book somewhere where we can confirm.”
“I believe there's one of those old medical textbooks in the library…” Matthias said, his head cocked to the side as if running inventory in the library. Ever since we put the two in there, he had gone through every book on those shelves and I doubted that he wouldn’t know exactly where said book was. The two boys rushed inside excitedly talking, not even bothering to wait for Allana, who muttered about ‘vein patterns’ before following with an exaggerated eye roll. I never realized that Matthias and James had become that close. I really have been unobservant recently. All of my attention has been focused on Carrie and Clint, I needed to work on that. I couldn’t neglect my other friends, there weren't too many of those left.
By the time I joined the trio in the front room, James had already run upstairs and snagged a dusty copy of Grey’s Anatomy. He hopped up onto the edge of the couch with the thick book open across his legs, then leaned back onto the television behind him and started quickly flipping through the pages. Matthias perched beside him and was comparing his wires to the various illustrations, with Allana leaning over the back of the couch for a better view.
“I have a theory about why most of us are siblings.”, Allana directed at nobody in particular, “Must be something in the DNA that makes us not reject our mutations. Same reason why the siblings that have lived look really similar, must be something in our genes.”
“That would make sense.”, I agreed, stretching my legs across the opposite couch from the boys, “Especially with how Clint and Carrie managed to survive while their siblings are natural muts.”
“Maybe that’s why both of you are only cosmetic muts.”, James chirped.
“Too bad for you beauty runs in our DNA, huh?”, she teased him back with a mischievous grin. Yeah, I really have been out of the loop. Allana was warmly smiling at him the way she only does at Matthias. It was like she had adopted another baby brother. She can never know how absolutely adorable that is, I thought with a smirk.
“Meanwhile, you really shouldn’t lean on the TV like that, James.” I scolded him playfully when I noticed the TV behind him shift at his weight. He shrugged his dark hair out of his eyes while grinning at me.
“It’s not like we can use it anyways. Without electricity, this bad boy is just a shiny box.”
“Speaking of electricity, James, I had an idea.”, Carrie strode into the room, “Do you think you could charge my phone?”
“What…?” he asked, confused, his smile slipping a little.
“You know, like Uncle Fester. I could put my charger in your mouth, and you could push out electricity to charge my phone.”
He didn’t respond to her comment, he just cocked his head to the side in question. Carrie waved off his disapproving look and plopped beside me.
“Don’t get your panties in a twist.”, she teased him, trying to diffuse the tension. James’s face didn’t change it’s confused expression, but his eyes widened and his grip on Matthias’ forearm tightened. Geez. She must’ve hit a nerve there. Carrie kept droning on about her idea, but something wasn’t right. James’s expression wasn’t changing, he wasn’t making any smart comments, and Matthias kept looking at him with wide, unblinking eyes. He couldn’t be that annoyed at her talking about using him as a generator. That’s when I noticed James was trembling. It was very faint, but I could also see his hair slowly rising to stand on its end. Right then the familiar crackle started to build in the air around me, causing the fur trailing down my face and neck to raise in instinctual fear.
“Let go of him!”, I shrieked. I had no idea why he was charging up like he did when he hit the electric fence, but he couldn’t keep touching Matthias. His current would completely fry him. I leapt up and barrelled to them, tackling Matthias in an effort to get him away from James. As soon as I collided with him, my entire body jerked. It felt like my muscles had taken on a violent life of their own. My vision faded and pinpointed into a bright dot in the distance. All I could hear was what sounded like static before my body gave a debilitating spasm that locked my jaw hard enough to crack a tooth. Then all there was was disjointed screaming and deafening static before I fell into pitch.
Chapter Ten
Carrie
Sasha finally woke up after five agonizing hours of pacing, fighting, and the occasional flicker of the overhead lights that worked again. The nickname “Captain Constant Concussion” for her was becoming less funny by the day. She seemed well enough and was pestering Clint and Maria alternately with questions about how James and Matthias were doing. Clint kept shooting me desperate glances every time Sasha’s eyes bounced from his to Maria’s. I was going to have to tell her, and I knew it had to be before she put all the pieces together. She was getting less spacey by the second. I met Sasha’s eyes and took a deep, fortifying, breath. The dark brown had completely clouded over the whites of her eyes, and her pupils had become more oval and horizontal than before. With that and the fur that was constantly growing down from her crown was giving her an unearthly look. She looked kinda like a naiad now that I thought about it… I heard the door snap shut behind Maria as she quietly exited, knocking me back into the here and now. Okay. Focus.
“So, as you know, the electricity that started through James and caused all of this came from the television…”
And we were off. As I explained everything Sasha just leaned back onto her pillows, her eyes staring around her with a blank look on her face as she digested the news. I told her everything, well almost everything. After James got shocked and flung both Matthias and Sasha across the room all of the electricity in the house turned on. We were lucky that nobody else was touching James as it came on, he ended up catching the sofa under him on fire. By that time the television signal had cleared, the fire was put out, and we had a clear view of the man smiling a bit too widely behind a desk somewhere. His short black hair was obviously balding, but he combed the pathetic, leftover gray strands over his shiny bald spot. He was wearing the classic military uniform, with all the shiny bells and whistles to complete the look. He had a square, overweight face that was spotted from years of alcoholism and his dark brown eyes seemed curiously dead. A complete contrast from the wide, disquieting crocodile smile that stretched his face.
When General Waldie started introducing himself and talking about our area his voice was a bit too clipped and his eyes kept glancing to the side of the camera when he had to mention a city nearby by name. Cue cards, obviously. But then he started into his rehearsed speech and nothing else existed to either of us. He began to explain that the government had reassembled itself after this “sudden and erroneous attack” and was sweeping the nation state by state for its surviving citizens to “eradicate the more rabid of our mutated friends”. That at least explained the recent decline of cannas around the house. They didn’t die out naturally; they were hunted. He explained that they had been working for a long time, but they managed to fix the electrical plant in the nearby area for long enough to display this message. They were here to help its remaining citizens in their time of need and to set up “camps” for everyone to go to for assistance. His crocodile smile widened when he disclosed that they would have to separate the muts from the humans, for each other's safety of course, and for us to not be alarmed when we arrived. Even retelling Sasha about this, that same squeeze of paralyzing anxiety gripped me again. You couldn’t drag me into one of those camps. Half of my family escaped here from Germany, I learned my lesson from them. If there was one thing I didn't trust, it's governments that want to classify and separate you.
His scare tactic for making the camps seem more appealing was the threat of, as he called them, even doing air quotes, “wannabes”. According to him, there had been an upsurge of humans hunting down muts or vice versa. What I could hear about that seemed like a load of crock anyway, but I had to explain everything to her.
“Does everyone else agree that we’re not going to the camps?”, she asked me in a whisper as if that disgusting man could hear her.
“Well, not exactly. Richard is obviously for the whole thing, but luckily it seems like he’s the only one.”, I explained, attempting to keep my anger at him out of my voice. That man always had to make everything difficult. Sasha scrunched up her face like she does when she’s thinking, then she started to push herself upright. Clint and I went to stop her, but she slapped our hands away.
“So, where to then?”, she questioned.
“What do you mean?”, Clint asked her, his head cocked to the side.
“Simple.”, she shrugged, “We can’t stay here. Even Carrie said that they were going to make rounds to check on everyone. If we want to avoid going to those camps or getting put on a list somewhere then we can’t be here.”
Crap. She was right. I was so panicked about everything, I didn’t even put two and two together. We had to leave, but where to go…
“We’ll have to go back to the institution…”, I whispered as it slowly dawned on me. This was our only option. This was not going to go over well. Clint shot up angrily, his ears already turning a bright red.
“Absolutely not!”, he exclaimed angrily, “We are not taking them back there! Richard said that he checked them all out and that everyone is perfectly fine! There’s no reason to go back there!”
“Shut up for a second and think about it!”, I snapped, cutting off his building tirade, “We can’t stay here, it’s not safe. They have numbers and secure walls, and we need that right now. Besides, the people who did this to them aren’t even there anymore! And, it’s not like we’ll be there forever! We’ll keep an eye on the house and after they come here to check on us we’ll move right back.”
