Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 53
Solveig showed the guy the image of the gene-freak.
I’ve never seen somebody’s face change so fast. Might as well have told her we’d skinned her kids.
She shoved the tobacco at one of the trench coat guys and frowned at us.
“This girl dies tonight,” she said, “as soon as we recover her.”
“We just want a body,” Solveig said, “Whatever they’ve paid you for her–”
She shook her head. “She contained what was necessary. She is no longer necessary.”
“Hey,” I said, “Great. Like she says, we just need the body, take it off your hands for fucking free –”
The gal jabbed a finger at me, looked over at Solveig. “I don’t want to talk to this one. Keep him shut. As for my girl, she and all she is belongs to us. You want some other gene-freak, and I can get you half a dozen.”
I grabbed my sister’s sleeve. “Solveig, I think that means we –”
“Shut up, Poul.”
I was kinda offended by her tone.
“Listen,” she said. “I need this gene-freak to bring back to Diego with me, and if I don’t have it, I’ve just wasted three days in the shittiest city north of Vancouver. If you have to kill her, I want a deal for the body. This is a private recovery. You know we can pay.”
“How much did Barry tell you, gene-freak?” the woman said.
Solveig glanced over at me. I shook my head. I didn’t know any more than she’d told me: Barry’s daughter got kidnapped, took some important information with her, and he needed her back, dead or alive. Rumor had it somebody was looking to breed her, but gene-freaks aren’t supposed to breed, and freak-police were on his ass about it, which meant the regulars were starting to poke their noses into his smuggling ring. Very bad for business.
“Barry’s never been one for honesty,” the woman said. “Let me. This girl holds information we paid Barry for, but when she arrived, the information was unsatisfactory. She’s no longer useful, and the information she carries needs to be destroyed with her. Go home, girl. There is business here which does not concern you.”
Now, I love my sister and all, and most of time, when she’s not acting loopy, she can be kinda smart, but go around calling a woman who wears steel-toed boots and has her teeth filed to nasty little points “girl” isn’t a great idea. She can be kinda sensitive. Not like me, right?
Solveig leapt at the woman. She had three of them on the floor before the woman at the door ran in, and by that time I was sliding all over the icy floor, looking for another exit.
Solveig always fucked everything up. Temper, temper. Mom said it was a genetic flaw.
Just like the rest of our traits. Bad sneeks, we were, like that freak with her fruitcake-pitted face.
I wasn’t exactly sure what my sister’s brilliant plan was, though the last time she used this tactic, she killed a handful of mercenaries and tortured the info out of their leader. I guess that could have worked this time, if our friend didn’t have a dozen more people holed up just behind the warehouse waiting for an emergency signal.
I could have told her these guys used alert devices (who doesn’t?), but she never asked, and unless she’s going to clue me in on her plans, it’s not like I can help, right?
Their back up surrounded us. It took six to subdue Solveig, and you know, the usual amount for me, but it’s not like a pissed myself or anything.
They hauled us out the back exit and into the fish processing plant. Turned out they didn’t process fish here, which I should have figured out sooner. So-Galay made most of its fortune in catching crab. They processed crab here.
So here were me and my sister, bloody and sore, forced down onto our knees in front of a nasty grinding wheel used to shave off the inedible parts of newly acquired crab legs.
“Did Barry tell you what the girl carried?” the big woman asked us. Well, she looked pretty big now, anyway, since I was beat up and hunkered down on my knees in a pile of crab exoskeleton bits.
Solveig spit.
Some guy in a trench coat turned on the crab wheel. I had a real good feeling that I was going to get tortured, then tossed into a batch of crab bisque and served throughout posh waterfront restaurants down in Kenai and Ketchikan.
“You can turn that off,” I said. “Really, you can.”
A part of me was hoping that Hardcore had noticed something weird going on and was about ready to show up with a cigarette in one hand and her handgun in the other, screaming some garbled Spanish approximation of a battle cry, but when the trench coat guys started in on me, I began to lose faith in our pleasant cab driver.
I lost some skin on my hand and Solveig had a big red patch where the skin got burned off her cheek. It wasn’t a good time, so I won’t get into it. But we didn’t have anything to confess. We were just mercenaries, basically, sneeks, sure, but still just guns for hire. Nobody tells us shit.
“Get rid of the bodies,” the big woman said. “We’ll meet you downtown.”
We got dragged outside the crab processing plant, pulled out behind the warehouse, and told to face the rusty aluminum siding. The bay was at our backs. Solveig, standing at my right, scowled, and I resigned myself to finding immortality in the form of crab bisque.
I heard the guys behind us loading the gun. I got ready to close my eyes.
But there are times when I forget who my sister is. Combat-reflex training. School as a genetically modified freak tailored to hunt down other freaks who want to breed and spread viruses that would surely end the human race. All that. She waited until the car doors on the other side of the building slammed, about the same time one of the guys behind us cocked his gun.
And then Solveig moved.
It wasn’t even like a continuous thing, she just moved, and then she wasn’t standing beside me anymore, and me, knowing what was coming, ducked.
I heard the gun go off. I wasn’t fast enough. I hit the ground, but not before some of the spray got me in the shoulder, ripping three sharp holes into my flesh. It burned like hell.
Solveig slid across the wet, graveled ground. She slithered up to the guys and ducked away from the gun. They didn’t have time to reload. I started running back toward the front where Hardcore and her cab of rescue awaited. Listen, I’m a coward, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I like living. Not fond of being sea food.
I ran out to where the cab should have been. My shoulder was throbbing pretty bad by now, a nasty, biting ache. I looked out around the side of the warehouse, but Hardcore’s cab was gone.
Shit.
I huddled against the side of the building.
Solveig screamed from somewhere behind me. My shoulder hurt.
No girl. No money. No exit.
I closed my eyes. Damn, I hated this city.
“Eh, Paulie-boy?”
I jerked my eyes open to see Hardcore standing in front of me, waving her handgun. “Paulie-boy, this chica!” She gestured out toward the dock built up next to the warehouse, a long, meandering construction made for the crab boats to sidle up to. “The water, my friend!”
She had driven her rusty old cab out onto the dock, away from the prying eyes of the backup unit.
“Solveig!” I yelled. I saw her struggling with eight guys, still standing.
“No, no,” Hardcore said. “She Ok. Ok, yes?”
And sure enough, that’s when they all go down. And there my sister is walking up, blood sticking to her bleached hair, cheek red and raw. She looked great.
“Hey, Soul-woman,” Hardcore said.
We followed Hardcore out to the end of the dock where she’d parked her car. She gestured to the dark water.
“This chica,” Hardcore repeated.
And there was the body, just floating there off the pier.
I stared into dirty brown water at a blue, bloated face that didn’t look at all like the one in the image. But the hair was red, the eyes greenish, and the complexion, still not the best.
“Who toasted her?” I said.
“Nobody,” Solveig said, quietly. And then, “Pack her up in car. We need the body.”
It was sort of a letdown, really. I mean, I was glad I wasn’t crab food or anything. But they had already killed the girl. Done half our work for us.
We had to be quick about it. Solveig had left enough trench-coated bodies behind her that somebody was bound to get suspicious eventually, and the free rads weren’t going to take kindly to us once they figured out that their people weren’t coming back. We tied the body up in the back with a couple of garbage sacks and some twist-ties. The legs got in the way, as far as that went, and the body was really stiff and hard to manage.
Hardcore turned up the radio and sang along to a throaty rendition playing on a Christian Fascist Punk station indigenous to Anchorage. I rolled myself a cigarette, lit it.
Solveig scooted up between the two front seats and eyed me over with that heavy stare she gets when she’s feeling all philosophical.
“Why do you think they wanted to kill her?” Solveig said.
“These radio stations are really shitty.”
“Hey, listen to me, shithead.”
I shrugged. “People die.” I squashed my cigarette on the dashboard, saved the rest for later. “We got asked to bring back a body. Let’s not think it over anymore, okay? Let’s pack it up and send it out to Diego.”
But it wasn’t enough for Solveig. It never is.
Hardcore brought us out to a friend of hers who packed up our cargo into a nice neat little plywood box that didn’t look too much like a coffin, packed the body in salt, and got us a room at a different hotel, even shittier than the last one. I wanted to get the hell out of there as soon as I could, but there weren’t any flights out of Anchorage with a straight shot to Diego until morning, which didn’t sit well with me at all. That big woman and her crab wheel and vats of bisque kept coming to mind.
Hardcore agreed to pick us up in the morning. Me and Solveig hauled our box up to our crappy little room and collapsed in a heap onto the bed. She cleaned out my shoulder, pulled the shrapnel. I passed out about halfway through the procedure, which made it easier on both of us.
When I woke up, it was to the sounds of a crowbar prying up plywood.
Solveig stood over the box with the body in it. She ripped up the boards as I watched and dug down deep into the salt. She pulled up the body covered in the black trash bag and ripped open the bag enough to reveal the red haired head.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said.
Solveig opened the knife on the handy multi-tool she kept in her pocket and started slicing off the body’s scalp.
“Hey, whoa! Solveig!” I tried to leap out of bed, but moving my shoulder wasn’t working without a lot of nasty pain, and I ended up falling out of bed.
“She knew,” Solveig said. “She knew what she was.” My sister ripped the scalp free and tried to hack at the skull with her knife. When that didn’t work, she grabbed the crowbar and brought it down with a nasty crunch on the exposed skull.
Blood and bits of bone splattered Solveig’s face. I ran up next to her. But by that time, she was already digging into the brain, tugging at bits of gray matter, her hands bloody. The body stank.
“Stop it!” I said. “Have you completely bit it?”
“She wasn’t a gene freak,” Solveig said. “She couldn’t have been. They wouldn’t have asked for the body unless she was a fucking cyborg or something, something else, something different. She’s not like us.”
She stood there, one hand thrust into the skull of a dead redhead, blood droplets spattered on her face.
I remembered what our mom said to me once, when I flunked out of sneek school. “We made you different,” my mom said. “We made you different, and by making you different, we tried to save you. It turned out we didn’t know what we were doing, not then, not now. What’s next, after you?” They were a bunch of arrogant bullshitters, the people who came before us. I’d tell her that to her face, but she died in the SoCal gene riots when some group of radicals poisoned the city water. Anybody who wasn’t genetically fucked with died, leaving me and Solveig and a bunch of other kid freaks alive. You win some, you lose some.
I wanted another cigarette. And a bottle of vodka.
“Hey,” I said. I took Solveig’s arm, kinda gently, you know, cause she can get pissed off. “Hey, Soul, we’re just doing a job, right? It’s just a fucking job. All of them are like us, Soul. That’s what we fucking do.”
“No,” she said. “She must have a chip in her head or something, some nano shit or…. You and I are more than just carriers, Poul. They aren’t going to fucking pay somebody to bring back our bodies, to cut us up or leave us dead in the water or grind us up. We’re more than just–”
“Gene-freaks?”
Her shoulders slumped. She pulled her hand away from the body and sank to her knees.
“She got tailored to carry info,” I said, “just like mom had you tailored to be a fighter. Our parents all made us to be used, just like robots. They forgot we were people. How about we don’t make that same mistake, OK?”
“Fuck that.”
“She just bit it, Soul. That’s all. They did it, or she offed herself. Who cares?”
Solveig slid to the floor. I’ve never seen my sister cry, but watching her huddled there, I imagined what it would be like to see her cry, you know; big tears mixing with the blood and rolling down her cheeks, running over the raw red patch from the crab wheel. I think if she cried I probably would have cried too. But we were too deep for that now, had been too deep for a long time.
We repacked the body. There was only one bed, so Solveig slept curled up next to me, holding on for dear life, and I held her back, because that’s all we have any more, while the world here crumbles around us, while we dream of socialist utopias in Siberia. Just now, just this. Cigarettes and vodka; same as it ever was.
When we die, I know, we’ll die just like this. Me and Solveig in a shitty hotel in a shitty town, hunting down our own kind. We’re gene-freaks too, waiting for somebody else to find us, to hunt us down for being alive in a world that despises us, for living second-class in a place that only caters to firsts. No, we can’t have any kids, but they don’t care about just sterilizing us anymore, I know. They’ll hunt us down after we’ve hunted down all the rest of us. It’s how it goes. Same as it ever was. Solveig will try to fight them, to deny them, to scream at them in their own language and pretend that she and I are different: something else, something better, something more than gene-freaks.
I used to think it would be great if we died together, so I could cover her eyes. But as we lay there now, I thought about a future for the first time. I wondered what would happen if we didn’t give up, didn’t give in to that story.
What if we didn’t lay down here and die like the red head? What if we got the fuck back up.
I smoothed Solveig’s hair away from her face.
“How’s your Russian?” I asked.
THE ONE WE FEED
WHERE WERE YOU when Suldana got shot?
Everyone here knows where they were, but you’ve got a raw, rotten hole in that memory of yours, right? You always do, when bad things happen, and you need to fess up to what went wrong.
Let’s see if we can jog that tongue of yours loose.
Suldana came down to me yesterday morning, sat with me over black coffee, asked me if I’d seen you. I said no. I always do.
Don’t look at me like that. No use getting her worked up. She told me she missed you – can’t imagine why she’d feel so low about it. I never miss you at all when you go scouting in the wasteland. I’m the one who taught you to ride that motorbike at the edge without drawing attention, you know, making sure you stay just out of range of the monsters peeling in from the black. I always kinda like the respite when you go off, and the extra rations. Never know when you’ll be back – three days, three weeks.
I like the quiet.
Suldana doesn’t.
More the fool, her.
So Suldana says to me she misses you, and’s wondering about where you go when you leave her. I told her you have a hankering for the river and riding motorbikes. True enough, I guess. I tried to tide her over, but she asked who you went out riding with, and I told her. Yeah, shit, I told her about them. She got all white and her hands started shaking, y’know, like she does when she’s fit to scream. I stood up and tried to calm her down. But she wouldn’t drink anymore coffee.
She got up and went to the old radio, the one you and I cobbled together after the last junker came through, and I figured she was going to give the Call.
Yeah, you’re paying attention now, aren’t you? Huh. Well, I tried to stop her from calling, but by this time, the color was back in her cheeks. Those butternut-colored eyes of hers were all wide and glassy, and she had her voice raised, calling me all manner of nasty names, worse than you ever call me when we have our spats. She said I was trying to break you two up. Me, after all I’ve done for her.
I didn’t know what she was up to, yet. Maybe she didn’t either. The truth always comes as a shock to these women, when they ask.
When I finally tell them.
Oh, keep drinking, you old sow. You’re too chicken to tell them. Someone has to. And it’s me. Always me. My burden. You leave that burden to all of us, when you act like a dumb rich kid from some dead age.
She asked what was wrong with her, that you had to be out there with them instead of her. She said you didn’t write to her anymore. You only called when she cried out over the radio, yelling that she had some fool cause for you to take up. You only called when she told you about the monster inside of her, the one that’s gunning to take us all.
Maybe that’s all true. You don’t need to defend yourself to me. We’ve all done things we don’t care to name, let alone talk about. It’s how you survive, after the fall of what you knew. You fuck like the world is ending, cause for each of us, it is, day by day. Every day is one day less you get. Might as well live it good, heh?
