.12
Once at home and settled in, I actually had time to slow down and feel like it would be okay. I missed all of my brothers and sisters, even those, like Adam, who had been taken years beforehand. I resolved not to let any more of my brothers and sisters get taken.
One morning, not long after I had gone through everyone's life, I walked into Mom and Dad's apartment. Qeleigh and Roan were there, their faces plastered with what I honestly hoped was chocolate.
They looked so much alike that it was difficult for me to figure out which was which. It was actually kind of sad, me trying to see if the one in the long pants was the boy or the girl; or perhaps it was the one in the shorts.
"Dad?" I called out. Like I said earlier, if those kids were covered with anything I hope that it was chocolate. Cooking with Dad seemed to be the thing you would want; not them in something Mom left out after she was finished with some project.
I glared at their heads as they disappeared into the kitchen, giggling. I smugly decided that the one in the long pants was bow-legged.
"Dad's not here," Mom came out of the kitchen, quite literally covered in about three times as much chocolate as the twins. How adorable, I did *not* think. She looked silly. Distastefully, I sat myself down on the couch.
Oops! I had sat down on a small black object. Wait a second, I thought, didn't I have a cat? Mom was busy with wiping her face, but one of the kids saw it fly away to the other end of the couch.
"Laura."
I looked where the panted-brat had pointed, its chubby -- I don't think *I* ever had chubby anything -- finger fixed unsteadily on the cat.
"Lorna," I corrected automatically. "She's my cat." It was true, I said to Mom in defense of her stare. Lorna was my cat. I had killed her mother. I was the one who Lorna had snuggled to; I was the one who had felt out Lorna's emotions.
"No!" the shorted-thing suddenly. I glanced over at it. "'Tis my cat."
"Roan-Sullivan," -- so the thing in pants was the boy -- "Ripe Strawberry, this is Tyronica. Lorna is Tyronica's cat, remember?" Mom pointed at me, her eyebrows raised high. I was feeling rebellious, so I didn't look back at her with the kindest of looks. Besides, who in the world nicknames their kid Ripe Strawberry.
Qeleigh started in now. "Laura-na is Roan-Sul'van's," she declared. I shook my head. I knew I was losing the battle. Even I couldn't keep baiting a kid like I was doing for long.
"Never mind, it's Roan's," I got up, glaring at both the twins in turn. "Ma," I turned to my mother, "when Dad get's home, have him give me a ring. I need to talk with him."
"About what?" Mom looked at me, her arms full of twins and her hair full of flour. I didn't remember her cooking when I had been living there. In fact, the only time I could remember her cooking was when she accidentally set fire to the trash can and some banana peelings started baking.
"I need some information on where my siblings are staying," I said, turning on my heel. I was almost at the door when fat little fist grabbed my arm.
"Wait," Qeleigh said. "Since you can't have Laura-na, maybe you want one of her kittens? They're at Aunt Orange-nal Cindy's."
I rolled my eyes. Did this kid have some persistent lisp. I shook her hand lose. "Look, Qel," I said to her, "I'll go look at them, but, to tell you the truth, I'm pretty damn disappointed my cat was promiscuous."
Qeleigh looked up at Mom. "I wont tell," she whispered, "that you swore."
I shut the door behind me forcibly. Then I ran down the stairs; ran like the days when I had been racing Her; when she had been my mother and had set fire to banana peels.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I sat in my apartment most of that day, working diligently on some information on Martin that I wanted to write down, to translate. However, by the end of the day, I was getting itchy. I had been taking it too slow, I saw, and I needed to work off my steam.
I grabbed my coat, on that Mumma in France had gotten me for the light winter that we had been experiencing, and jogged out the door, locking it as an afterthought. I didn't want anybody stealing the things that I had in there.
The air was cool and sharp; as I well remembered from my year in Seattle. The people walking by were hurried and distracted, with no time at all in their lives to take notice of a small girl streaking by them.
The smells of the air around me were thick and heavily scented with the various fumes from the exhaust of cars.
I have always been drawn with some sort of weird fascination to the smell of exhaust. It holds a sort of exotic smell to it and I can really understand the reasons why people would scream at a tired and bleary eyed roommate, "You been taking a shot out of the Honda?"
The streets, previously unexplored by me on my return to Seattle, were as familiar to me as they were so many months ago, when I had last walked their maze from school and store. There were a few new stores, I saw as I rounded certain corners, but they were almost immediately filed away into my internal map.
Not the site, but the memory of. I can know exactly what a store looks like from remembering it . . . give me the name and I'll immediately bring up in my mind a store front. If I have been in the store, I'll probably have the outline of the store memorized, much as you memorize the outline of a house that you live in.
Its all a matter of me wanting to always be aware of my surroundings. Always.
I turned a corner and was met head on with a heavy fog, blown over from some part of the ocean. What was it about the constant lingering of the salt air that made me want to scream for the joy of it? I had always loved the ocean. As I jogged, rushing my energy out in great puffs of crystallized air, I couldn't recall why.
! ! ! ! !
I ended up at Original Cindy's digs. Call me a sucker, but I wanted to see the homely things that Lorna, my cat of Solitude, had dropped out of her into this world of crime and poverty. I paused, almost, when entering the building . . . then I walked in, my head pounding.
The hallways were even dirtier than I remembered. Time does not cause cigarettes to stain less, though it does fade the blood on the bottom step, from where that stupid little kid Oscar or Omar or whoever had fallen and hurt himself. Visiting someone, he said, when I asked where he lived. Scared the pissants out of the little dork.
I almost just walked into Original Cindy's . . . but then I remembered that she wouldn't like that. She probably had some honey in the bedroom and Cindy is quite the bee when it comes to honeys, if you know what I mean. I didn't like, to pry into Original Cindy's private life, even if I did feel like breaking a door into the solid mess I had made of my walls.
I never wanted to hunt in Original Cindy's head . There was something way too familiar about her thoughts, about her memories, that I was partially frightened of. I mean, damn, how many times do you meet a women dressed to kill who has the words, "He's a soldier, he was sent out to kill or be killed. If you don't kill him, you're through here," in their heads.
So, after my quick customary inventory of her head, I stopped prying. I never told Mom, I never told Dad. I tried to just think of Original Cindy as a great person, and it worked. Every time, though, I stop myself from going in her mind, I get this vague idea of familiarity, then, in the back, I remember the line, faintly.
It wasn't as if I wanted to keep on remembering the line. It was of no great importance to me. It just was a warning sign that her life had been hell for a norms life. I didn't want no sob story on my hands, so to speak. I tried, at that stage in my life, to keep out of military thinking.
Zack changed that. Odd how thinking of Cindy turned my minds to the Grand Master Facade. When I was younger we played a game of war . . . we played a game of Manticore . . . he had been level with my thinking . . . but once I got older I realized . . . what had I realized? That my thinking was wrong when I was younger? That it was the only thing I could do, run, after they killed my brothers and sisters. That I would have been killed too? Then they came back, not dead at all, and the scenario changes.
I know, though, I know, that I wouldn't have been killed. In the back of my mind I knew that Dad wouldn't kill me just because he needed to kill the others. I was the last of my breed, an endangered species. You don't kill off the last Dodo bird. You try to figure out how to make it tick, so you can stick it in with the X-7s to be the leader they need.
Only I tricked them. I knew what they were going to do to me when I heard Dad's thoughts. I knew, from my little experience with the X-7, that they were a different breed of PA-1s, that I was better, but I didn't have the siblings to match.
Why the hell did they want to transplant me? Why kill off all of my brothers and sisters? I'd never know.
Pushing all thoughts to the back of the room, I reached out and knocked smartly on the door. I don't mean to say that I did it in an intelligent manner; I just gave it three short raps with my knuckles. It was opened after a few minutes by Original Cindy, her hair a little wet, so she had obviously come from the shower.
"Hey, girl, you lookin' to stand there drippin' all day, or you gonna 'vite me in?" I asked, my speech falling easily back into the slang that I had become accustom to in Cindy's presence.
"Giiirrrlll," Original Cindy drawled, "it has been too long! Max and Logan said you was back in town, but they said you weren't looking to party, so I laid off. How's it been, eh?"
"You would not believe the food in France. Its horrible. All I wanted was some oatmeal and milk, maybe some lasagna . . . but they tried to feed me snails. I mean, goodness, my foster mother was a stupid Englishwoman and she couldn't stop it with the snails and stuff. If I hadn't have been able to mess with the mind of the cook, I would have starved," I declared.
"Mmm-hm," Cindy said, trying to figure out if I was just bullshiting her or if I had honestly been force fed garden pests.
"It is the truth," I said. GET ANNA TO TRANSLATE TO FRENCH.
She rolled her eyes at me. I was about to explain that it simply meant, "It is the truth," when she told me, "Sure, its the truth, but can you sit down and have cup of copy with me?"
"I'd tell you no, that coffee stunts my growths, and all that other crap, but I'm an addict. I even took a test in the Streets of Seattle. Its the caffeine buzz that gets me going. If I can't get coffee, I get the Dew or even a Pepsi," my mouth was watering thinking about it. Its a digestive reaction. If you even think about food, your mouth will start watering. I learned that in the fifth grade, not at Manticore. We didn't study too much about food at Manticore.
"It isn't strong, but I add Pepsi to it instead of sugar, so that you get that extra oomph you need. I'm glad you approve of Pepsi, because I don't stock my shelves with none of that ratty Coca-cola, hear me?"
As Original Cindy and I sat down, we discussed the past few years. I asked about her job, about her boss, about Sketchy and Herbal. She told me that, oddly enough, Herbal had disappeared. I had only known him for a year, but I was disappointed, to say the least, that he wasn't there anymore.
"Sad times we are coming to," I told Cindy in the way of Herbal Thought.
"It's like, you know," said Original Cindy, at a loss for words.
"I'll take short lived 1990s sitcoms for one hundred, Alex," I said to her. She grinned at me. "I hear that Lorna had herself a fling with a cat down the way. Mind if I see the fruits of her labor?"
Original Cindy led me down the length of the room to a corner where a large cardboard box stood. About nine kittens were in the box, each being about four weeks old, each totally confident that they were going to beat the hell out of the other cat it was fighting against.
"I take by the size of it that it isn't her first litter. You guys let my cat become a tramp. We aren't starting a kitty mill, are we?" I asked brightly. Original Cindy punched me lightly on the arm.
"Y c'n take one if you want. 'Taint no hair off the backs of us. Warning to you, they all a bit hungry every four hours, so keep the food out," Original Cindy gestured to a large bowl she had set down in corner of the box. Anther corner contained a bowl with water.
"Who said anything about a kitten?" I said, my mind's wall easily blocking out the emotions of the kittens as they tried wrestle. I could tell by the fluid motions of their bodies that the Tom of the litter was a good one. I picked up a little orange cat who had a bullseye of white on either side of him, along with a few stripes for good measure. "Poor homely fella, gots the Roman nose, he does."
"Take him, makes these guys have an even number," Original Cindy pushed me out the door. "Just remember to chop anything you try to feed it up . . . oh, and contrary to popular belief, cats get very sick if they drink milk. Its from a cow, not their mother. Give them water."
"Like I'd waste milk on a stupid cat," I said, half-way down the stairs. How the heck did accept this flea infested lump of fur as a pet? I wasn't quite sure, but I didn't like it.
When I got home and sat the homely thing down on my table, I started applying names. Abraham. Brigham. Carl. David -- pronounced in the Spanish way, thank you very much -- and Edwin all sucked biggie for the orange thing. So did my favorite name in the world, Fred. I stopped before I got to Geronimo. It was getting pretty pathetic.
I took the cat's head in my hands and sat, "What do you want to be named, you stupid cat?" He bit my nose in return for my consultancy I called him a fair few amount of names that would never ever grace the pages of "Help! I'm Pregnant and Its A boy -- I need a name!"
! ! ! ! ! !
The cat and I got used to each other by morning. I went out and pocketed a few coins from men and women who would never miss them, then I went to Albertsons and used the machine thing to change my coins into dollar bills. You would never believe how much money you can get from just bumping into someone and taking their wallet for five seconds, tops.
Of course, if it were a real swell, the type of family that Logan came out of, why, I took fives and tens from them. Mumma had been of that breed, as had her husband, and I knew exactly what they could spare and what they couldn't.
So, after I got my dollars from the Albertsons machine and banged it a few extra times and got my coins back -- a trick I learned quite by accident my first day, so I kept a jar filled the with the coins. Nobody saw me, with my lightning quick strikes, hit the machine in the special spot, so nobody else figured it out. I guess you could say I never paid a fee. Hell, they shouldn't have made the waiting chamber in the machine. Anyway, I'd go into the store and buy stuff, like any honest shopper.
Albertsons was one of the few of those little stores that survived. They were like cockroaches, them and Target, and nobody could get rid of them. They'd survived WWIII I heard somebody say that Einstein had said that he had no idea how World War III would be, but World War IV would be fought with sticks.
You get the idea.
So, I bought my things, jog past the fruit stands, and buy there too, because the stupid cat would only eat celery and ham. That's right, celery and ham, with a little bit of beef. It was an expensive cat, I can sure tell you that. Though I must say that I ate well too. You didn't expect me not to have some before I gave it to the cat, did you? Now that would be just weird. Its expensive meat, for Christ's sake!
I found out his eating habits the night before, when trying to feed him. Desperately, I opened my refrigerator and thrust before him what was supposed to be my dinner, but which hadn't been finished when I was preparing it. It was cooked ham, cooked beef, and steamed celery bits. Heaven only knows why he took to it.
So there I was, at seven-thirty-six in the morning, making the cat and me some breakfast. As breakfasts go, it wasn't that bad. I was having oatmeal, something that I had always had for breakfast as far back as I can remember, which is almost to the age of non-verbalness, and the cat was going to have a bit too, before I began preparing the stuff for him.
He lapped it up. That really surprised me . . until I realized what trouble this cat would be. It would be like having a child, only one that never spoke to me and never came to me if I called it. God forbid, they had given me a teenage. Rotten dirty of them, I thought darkly.
Then, I heard him, the one I could never block. Not his thoughts, but his emotions, very strong. Great, I thought, gathering up the dishes. He's about two blocks away. I dumped my oatmeal into the cat's bowl, wishing I had some milk to gulp down, because I was feeling a bit shaky, but I decided on taking a pill to cease my worrying. Then I grabbed my notebook and pens and locked the apartment door. He was one block away.
I paused momentarily on the stair landing, debating taking the cat with me, because I most certainly didn't want to come back and see on my hardwood floors where the cat had mess all over them. Thank goodness that I hadn't bothered to put any carpets in the apartment. Shaking my head to myself, I walked down the stairs.
Knowing which direction to go was easy. Even though I didn't want to open the wall up so that I could view what he was viewing, I could vaguely tell which way he was by the strength of the emotions and fleeting words that I was getting. Firstly, I was heading in the wrong direction and I started catching snatches of sentences.
Finally, after three minutes of brisk walking, my shoulders set straight and my eyes never straying to the side, the last wisps of him were gone from my mind, and with good riddance. Walking cheerfully forward, I noticed a park that I had frequented as a child.
Mom used to bring me here, I thought with a smile. The park had been near Mom and Dad's apartment and it was easy to walk there after school and finish my homework. I sat down on the grass and watched, my eyes half glazed over, several school-aged children. A woman sat beside me on the bench; I ignored her, choosing to stay in my semi-trance just a few moments longer, enjoying the crisp air on my cheeks.
We sat that way for several minutes; me, almost asleep, so calm and peaceful was I; her, quietly watching as the children played. My mood was totally different from the hurried and anxious one that had been my previous. Finally, the woman tapped my shoulder and I turned toward her.
"Mom," I said, surprised, "I didn't realize it was you. Why didn't you say something earlier; you could obviously tell it was me. I mean, come on, I haven't changed much in like a day, have I?"
"You didn't seem to want to be disturbed," Mom replied congenially. "I would have thought that you would have detected me immediately, but maybe with your sorting and stuff, you didn't feel hear me?" My mother looked at me with a question left unsaid.
"I finished sorting a few weeks ago . . . well, not all of it, but the major ideas. When they surface, I shove them into a drawer and lock them in," I explained to her. I omitted the most serious part; I hadn't been letting thoughts into my room.
I think she understood what I left unsaid, for any part she told me that Dad was able to track down the addresses to the information that I had left on my siblings' locations. The only problem was with Lezli's group home, or orphanage . . . as the romantics like to call them. Dad had found the group home, however . . . "He says that Lezli's name isn't in the system, but he isn't surprised. With the unusual spelling, he bets that she has gone with a more conservative Lesley or even stayed out of the computer all together."
"I can't quite see her changing her name. It isn't in her style. She likes to stick out . . . she must have just deleted her files . . . or even gone with a totally different name . . . like Fredrika," I grinned, almost to myself. I could just imagine the teasing names that a Fredrika would get.
"Are you certain on the spelling of her name, Tyronica?" Mom looked at me sideways, "I mean, we never exactly signed our papers at Manticore, now did we? We just wrote our designation number on anything that wasn't already supplied with our barcode."
"We had our own written code, Mom," I reminded her. "That meant that we had to translate her name into an English spelling. Besides, I never hear a name that I don't spell out in my mind automatically . . . like in Anne of Green Gables. You know, that book has always prejudiced me against any Anns I'll ever meet. Even when I found out that Rosie O'Donnell's first name was Roseann, it kind of cooled something for me, because I love her work, especially all the charity work she's done for the gay and lesbian community."
"You sidetracked," Mom informed me. "The problem here is Lezli. We aren't sure if she's in Texas, like you have."
I fumed silently. "Look, we found the others the system, right?" My mother nodded her head. "Well, Lezli is probably the only one who had the smarts to delete her file."
"I don't remember you deleting your file," Mom said with a smug look.
"I never had one. I went to low budget gigs where the computer equipment was so outdated that I couldn't play PacMan, let alone hack into the Pentagon."
"You've done that before?" Mom asked, curiosity getting the best of her.
"Now who's sidetracking?" I asked wickedly. She slapped me on the arm, hard enough that I knew I would bruise. I grinned. "Glad you aren't treating me like a china doll anymore. Remember when you broke three of my toes by stomping on my foot?"
"Logan gave me hell for that, I sure do remember it," Mom told me. Her pager went off at that moment. "Speaking of your father . . . " she said, trailing off. "Wanna have lunch with us?"
"No, thanks," I told her, "gotta get some work done. Catch you later, 'kay?"
"Yeah, later," she told me as she got on her bike and pedaled off. I hadn't even noticed it parked in the bushes behind the bench. Then again, I hadn't any need to turn around. "Don't stay too long; this place has gone to the dogs."
! ! ! ! ! !
What is better than sitting in a park and translating pages of information about your siblings? Sitting in a park and enjoying yourself. Martin's notebook had page after page of meticulous information on the weeks that he spent with them. It seemed he had kept a journal. To tell you the truth, I hadn't remembered just how annoying the sound of Ally's laughter was, but the way Martin had constantly written about Ally laughing, or, as Marty put it, hehawing, brought back the worst of it.
It was getting dark, nearly nine o'clock, when I had finished. I don't pretend to say that I had spent eleven o'clock to nine o'clock working. I had, of course, gotten up and enjoyed myself, ran around in the soft grass a bit, rolled on my back, and taken a few naps
I was just wrapping up some finishing touches on the last translation when, out of nowhere, the strong smell of alcohol wafted over to me. My eyes glanced around in a hopefully nondescript manner. I saw a drunk man, about fifteen yards away, stumpling in my direction. I paid him no heed until he stopped near me and grabbed the back of my blouse.
"Hello," he said in a slurred voice. He had dark, disheveled blonde hair that looked like it hadn't been washed in ages and a crooked nose, probably broken in a drunken brawl. I tugged forward slightly, which loosened his strong grip on my clothing. A quick sizing up revealed that he was a big guy, maybe six three, and his arms looked muscular. "Naw, naw, now, dohn do dat," he warned me but to me it sounded more like a threat.
One, I said silently inside my mind. Aloud, I said, "Leave me alone." I hoped he would be intimidated and just move along. It had worked before, many times, in France. You can never be too sure what kind of peds you'll meet in a post-Pulse world, even in an area like the French suburbs.
Again, the man grabbed at my shirt. "Missy, you come on with me. I'll help you find you're way home." Even though he was drunk, he made sure he had a strong grasp on me. By the look in his eyes and his jerky movements I started to wonder if he was also high on something. Just what had he snorted, injected, or smoked before partying with the guys?
Two, I thought, sighing a bit. "I'm not lost. If you don't leave me alone, I'll hurt you." I started to walk forward, but he clamped is hands around my waist. Three. "Stop it, now, stop it! I'm going to have to hurt you." I yanked myself free of his grasp which, even with all of my Manticore-bred strength, was surprisingly hard. I had only managed to run a few steps when the fool tackled me from behind. I was already seething inside at the temerity of this drunken moron but now I was truly pissed at his actions. I mean, how many thirteen year old girls, even genetically engineered super-humans, like getting tackled by a two hundred and fifty pound guy? I smashed face first into a concrete trash can and I immediately could feel blood trickling down my face at several points. This didn't exactly improve my spirit.
I reached into my front pocket, which was difficult, considering the Hulk was lying on me, messing with cutting open my Levis, and brought out my trusty glasses case. Inside the case was the best friend that I would ever have; my good ol' knife. I felt the cold metal slide between my fingers as I fought to find a good grip on it.
Bringing it behind me, I stabbed blidnly at the general area where his fingers were. The knife stalled in my hands as the tip of the blade left the air as I felt it cut into the fleshy parts of his hand. Twisting and tearing as I stabbed repeatedly into my target. But he didn't cry out in pain, he just tried to pick up his knife and continue working whenever it was knocked out of his shaky hands.
"Be still," he warned. It still sounded like another threat I didn't want to deal with.
I finally couldn't take it anymore and turned on him with my bare hands, thoroughly enraged. I envisioned myself savagely and brutally beating him to the ground for so many reasons. For everything he was putting me through to everything that was going wrong in my life. I expected to sink my first right in his gut hoping to knock the wind out of him. Unfortunately for both of us he was bent over. My fist made contact with the flat top of his head and sent it flying toward the trash can, where it thudded dully like the sound of a baseball bat striking a wet block of wood. His left hand clenched his knife -- he was left handed, or ambidextrous -- and his eyes looked surprised, but, other than that, he just looked dead.
Oops.
I got up and brushed myself off while glancing at the limp form lying prone on the ground. Oh well. What's one norm, more or less. And this guy, covered in tattoos, was a drunken ped who had hyped out on some drug that really made him seem fearless . . . and painless. I looked at his fingers. One was actually missing. I had never seen anyone act like that. It was like he was a Temi user or something.
Jesus. He was a Temi user . . .
Temicoxtrin . . . it promoted the manufacturing of adrenaline in the body . . . and made the user freakishly strong and stopped him or her from feeling pain. Not many people survive an encounter with someone who used too much of it. The high, or buzz, gotten from Temicoxtrin was described as getting married, losing your virginity, and becoming a parent all in the same period of time. As I had experienced none of these enjoyments, I could curse all users.
I didn't need to worry about killing him. They'd think two Temi users got into a fight and one came out victorious. The other . . . well, the other had probably gotten the farm he'd always wanted as a kid.
I wouldn't have felt bad for killing him even if he was just a drunken norm, not a Temi user. Norms are to Manticores what deer are to norms. If you run over them in the road, you regret it, because they're useful to have around, but you don't cry your eyes out unless it was a pet or something. Like Logan was my family member, that stupid deer in The Yearling was to his owner.
At least it was a Temi user.
Once at home and settled in, I actually had time to slow down and feel like it would be okay. I missed all of my brothers and sisters, even those, like Adam, who had been taken years beforehand. I resolved not to let any more of my brothers and sisters get taken.
One morning, not long after I had gone through everyone's life, I walked into Mom and Dad's apartment. Qeleigh and Roan were there, their faces plastered with what I honestly hoped was chocolate.
They looked so much alike that it was difficult for me to figure out which was which. It was actually kind of sad, me trying to see if the one in the long pants was the boy or the girl; or perhaps it was the one in the shorts.
"Dad?" I called out. Like I said earlier, if those kids were covered with anything I hope that it was chocolate. Cooking with Dad seemed to be the thing you would want; not them in something Mom left out after she was finished with some project.
I glared at their heads as they disappeared into the kitchen, giggling. I smugly decided that the one in the long pants was bow-legged.
"Dad's not here," Mom came out of the kitchen, quite literally covered in about three times as much chocolate as the twins. How adorable, I did *not* think. She looked silly. Distastefully, I sat myself down on the couch.
Oops! I had sat down on a small black object. Wait a second, I thought, didn't I have a cat? Mom was busy with wiping her face, but one of the kids saw it fly away to the other end of the couch.
"Laura."
I looked where the panted-brat had pointed, its chubby -- I don't think *I* ever had chubby anything -- finger fixed unsteadily on the cat.
"Lorna," I corrected automatically. "She's my cat." It was true, I said to Mom in defense of her stare. Lorna was my cat. I had killed her mother. I was the one who Lorna had snuggled to; I was the one who had felt out Lorna's emotions.
"No!" the shorted-thing suddenly. I glanced over at it. "'Tis my cat."
"Roan-Sullivan," -- so the thing in pants was the boy -- "Ripe Strawberry, this is Tyronica. Lorna is Tyronica's cat, remember?" Mom pointed at me, her eyebrows raised high. I was feeling rebellious, so I didn't look back at her with the kindest of looks. Besides, who in the world nicknames their kid Ripe Strawberry.
Qeleigh started in now. "Laura-na is Roan-Sul'van's," she declared. I shook my head. I knew I was losing the battle. Even I couldn't keep baiting a kid like I was doing for long.
"Never mind, it's Roan's," I got up, glaring at both the twins in turn. "Ma," I turned to my mother, "when Dad get's home, have him give me a ring. I need to talk with him."
"About what?" Mom looked at me, her arms full of twins and her hair full of flour. I didn't remember her cooking when I had been living there. In fact, the only time I could remember her cooking was when she accidentally set fire to the trash can and some banana peelings started baking.
"I need some information on where my siblings are staying," I said, turning on my heel. I was almost at the door when fat little fist grabbed my arm.
"Wait," Qeleigh said. "Since you can't have Laura-na, maybe you want one of her kittens? They're at Aunt Orange-nal Cindy's."
I rolled my eyes. Did this kid have some persistent lisp. I shook her hand lose. "Look, Qel," I said to her, "I'll go look at them, but, to tell you the truth, I'm pretty damn disappointed my cat was promiscuous."
Qeleigh looked up at Mom. "I wont tell," she whispered, "that you swore."
I shut the door behind me forcibly. Then I ran down the stairs; ran like the days when I had been racing Her; when she had been my mother and had set fire to banana peels.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I sat in my apartment most of that day, working diligently on some information on Martin that I wanted to write down, to translate. However, by the end of the day, I was getting itchy. I had been taking it too slow, I saw, and I needed to work off my steam.
I grabbed my coat, on that Mumma in France had gotten me for the light winter that we had been experiencing, and jogged out the door, locking it as an afterthought. I didn't want anybody stealing the things that I had in there.
The air was cool and sharp; as I well remembered from my year in Seattle. The people walking by were hurried and distracted, with no time at all in their lives to take notice of a small girl streaking by them.
The smells of the air around me were thick and heavily scented with the various fumes from the exhaust of cars.
I have always been drawn with some sort of weird fascination to the smell of exhaust. It holds a sort of exotic smell to it and I can really understand the reasons why people would scream at a tired and bleary eyed roommate, "You been taking a shot out of the Honda?"
The streets, previously unexplored by me on my return to Seattle, were as familiar to me as they were so many months ago, when I had last walked their maze from school and store. There were a few new stores, I saw as I rounded certain corners, but they were almost immediately filed away into my internal map.
Not the site, but the memory of. I can know exactly what a store looks like from remembering it . . . give me the name and I'll immediately bring up in my mind a store front. If I have been in the store, I'll probably have the outline of the store memorized, much as you memorize the outline of a house that you live in.
Its all a matter of me wanting to always be aware of my surroundings. Always.
I turned a corner and was met head on with a heavy fog, blown over from some part of the ocean. What was it about the constant lingering of the salt air that made me want to scream for the joy of it? I had always loved the ocean. As I jogged, rushing my energy out in great puffs of crystallized air, I couldn't recall why.
! ! ! ! !
I ended up at Original Cindy's digs. Call me a sucker, but I wanted to see the homely things that Lorna, my cat of Solitude, had dropped out of her into this world of crime and poverty. I paused, almost, when entering the building . . . then I walked in, my head pounding.
The hallways were even dirtier than I remembered. Time does not cause cigarettes to stain less, though it does fade the blood on the bottom step, from where that stupid little kid Oscar or Omar or whoever had fallen and hurt himself. Visiting someone, he said, when I asked where he lived. Scared the pissants out of the little dork.
I almost just walked into Original Cindy's . . . but then I remembered that she wouldn't like that. She probably had some honey in the bedroom and Cindy is quite the bee when it comes to honeys, if you know what I mean. I didn't like, to pry into Original Cindy's private life, even if I did feel like breaking a door into the solid mess I had made of my walls.
I never wanted to hunt in Original Cindy's head . There was something way too familiar about her thoughts, about her memories, that I was partially frightened of. I mean, damn, how many times do you meet a women dressed to kill who has the words, "He's a soldier, he was sent out to kill or be killed. If you don't kill him, you're through here," in their heads.
So, after my quick customary inventory of her head, I stopped prying. I never told Mom, I never told Dad. I tried to just think of Original Cindy as a great person, and it worked. Every time, though, I stop myself from going in her mind, I get this vague idea of familiarity, then, in the back, I remember the line, faintly.
It wasn't as if I wanted to keep on remembering the line. It was of no great importance to me. It just was a warning sign that her life had been hell for a norms life. I didn't want no sob story on my hands, so to speak. I tried, at that stage in my life, to keep out of military thinking.
Zack changed that. Odd how thinking of Cindy turned my minds to the Grand Master Facade. When I was younger we played a game of war . . . we played a game of Manticore . . . he had been level with my thinking . . . but once I got older I realized . . . what had I realized? That my thinking was wrong when I was younger? That it was the only thing I could do, run, after they killed my brothers and sisters. That I would have been killed too? Then they came back, not dead at all, and the scenario changes.
I know, though, I know, that I wouldn't have been killed. In the back of my mind I knew that Dad wouldn't kill me just because he needed to kill the others. I was the last of my breed, an endangered species. You don't kill off the last Dodo bird. You try to figure out how to make it tick, so you can stick it in with the X-7s to be the leader they need.
Only I tricked them. I knew what they were going to do to me when I heard Dad's thoughts. I knew, from my little experience with the X-7, that they were a different breed of PA-1s, that I was better, but I didn't have the siblings to match.
Why the hell did they want to transplant me? Why kill off all of my brothers and sisters? I'd never know.
Pushing all thoughts to the back of the room, I reached out and knocked smartly on the door. I don't mean to say that I did it in an intelligent manner; I just gave it three short raps with my knuckles. It was opened after a few minutes by Original Cindy, her hair a little wet, so she had obviously come from the shower.
"Hey, girl, you lookin' to stand there drippin' all day, or you gonna 'vite me in?" I asked, my speech falling easily back into the slang that I had become accustom to in Cindy's presence.
"Giiirrrlll," Original Cindy drawled, "it has been too long! Max and Logan said you was back in town, but they said you weren't looking to party, so I laid off. How's it been, eh?"
"You would not believe the food in France. Its horrible. All I wanted was some oatmeal and milk, maybe some lasagna . . . but they tried to feed me snails. I mean, goodness, my foster mother was a stupid Englishwoman and she couldn't stop it with the snails and stuff. If I hadn't have been able to mess with the mind of the cook, I would have starved," I declared.
"Mmm-hm," Cindy said, trying to figure out if I was just bullshiting her or if I had honestly been force fed garden pests.
"It is the truth," I said. GET ANNA TO TRANSLATE TO FRENCH.
She rolled her eyes at me. I was about to explain that it simply meant, "It is the truth," when she told me, "Sure, its the truth, but can you sit down and have cup of copy with me?"
"I'd tell you no, that coffee stunts my growths, and all that other crap, but I'm an addict. I even took a test in the Streets of Seattle. Its the caffeine buzz that gets me going. If I can't get coffee, I get the Dew or even a Pepsi," my mouth was watering thinking about it. Its a digestive reaction. If you even think about food, your mouth will start watering. I learned that in the fifth grade, not at Manticore. We didn't study too much about food at Manticore.
"It isn't strong, but I add Pepsi to it instead of sugar, so that you get that extra oomph you need. I'm glad you approve of Pepsi, because I don't stock my shelves with none of that ratty Coca-cola, hear me?"
As Original Cindy and I sat down, we discussed the past few years. I asked about her job, about her boss, about Sketchy and Herbal. She told me that, oddly enough, Herbal had disappeared. I had only known him for a year, but I was disappointed, to say the least, that he wasn't there anymore.
"Sad times we are coming to," I told Cindy in the way of Herbal Thought.
"It's like, you know," said Original Cindy, at a loss for words.
"I'll take short lived 1990s sitcoms for one hundred, Alex," I said to her. She grinned at me. "I hear that Lorna had herself a fling with a cat down the way. Mind if I see the fruits of her labor?"
Original Cindy led me down the length of the room to a corner where a large cardboard box stood. About nine kittens were in the box, each being about four weeks old, each totally confident that they were going to beat the hell out of the other cat it was fighting against.
"I take by the size of it that it isn't her first litter. You guys let my cat become a tramp. We aren't starting a kitty mill, are we?" I asked brightly. Original Cindy punched me lightly on the arm.
"Y c'n take one if you want. 'Taint no hair off the backs of us. Warning to you, they all a bit hungry every four hours, so keep the food out," Original Cindy gestured to a large bowl she had set down in corner of the box. Anther corner contained a bowl with water.
"Who said anything about a kitten?" I said, my mind's wall easily blocking out the emotions of the kittens as they tried wrestle. I could tell by the fluid motions of their bodies that the Tom of the litter was a good one. I picked up a little orange cat who had a bullseye of white on either side of him, along with a few stripes for good measure. "Poor homely fella, gots the Roman nose, he does."
"Take him, makes these guys have an even number," Original Cindy pushed me out the door. "Just remember to chop anything you try to feed it up . . . oh, and contrary to popular belief, cats get very sick if they drink milk. Its from a cow, not their mother. Give them water."
"Like I'd waste milk on a stupid cat," I said, half-way down the stairs. How the heck did accept this flea infested lump of fur as a pet? I wasn't quite sure, but I didn't like it.
When I got home and sat the homely thing down on my table, I started applying names. Abraham. Brigham. Carl. David -- pronounced in the Spanish way, thank you very much -- and Edwin all sucked biggie for the orange thing. So did my favorite name in the world, Fred. I stopped before I got to Geronimo. It was getting pretty pathetic.
I took the cat's head in my hands and sat, "What do you want to be named, you stupid cat?" He bit my nose in return for my consultancy I called him a fair few amount of names that would never ever grace the pages of "Help! I'm Pregnant and Its A boy -- I need a name!"
! ! ! ! ! !
The cat and I got used to each other by morning. I went out and pocketed a few coins from men and women who would never miss them, then I went to Albertsons and used the machine thing to change my coins into dollar bills. You would never believe how much money you can get from just bumping into someone and taking their wallet for five seconds, tops.
Of course, if it were a real swell, the type of family that Logan came out of, why, I took fives and tens from them. Mumma had been of that breed, as had her husband, and I knew exactly what they could spare and what they couldn't.
So, after I got my dollars from the Albertsons machine and banged it a few extra times and got my coins back -- a trick I learned quite by accident my first day, so I kept a jar filled the with the coins. Nobody saw me, with my lightning quick strikes, hit the machine in the special spot, so nobody else figured it out. I guess you could say I never paid a fee. Hell, they shouldn't have made the waiting chamber in the machine. Anyway, I'd go into the store and buy stuff, like any honest shopper.
Albertsons was one of the few of those little stores that survived. They were like cockroaches, them and Target, and nobody could get rid of them. They'd survived WWIII I heard somebody say that Einstein had said that he had no idea how World War III would be, but World War IV would be fought with sticks.
You get the idea.
So, I bought my things, jog past the fruit stands, and buy there too, because the stupid cat would only eat celery and ham. That's right, celery and ham, with a little bit of beef. It was an expensive cat, I can sure tell you that. Though I must say that I ate well too. You didn't expect me not to have some before I gave it to the cat, did you? Now that would be just weird. Its expensive meat, for Christ's sake!
I found out his eating habits the night before, when trying to feed him. Desperately, I opened my refrigerator and thrust before him what was supposed to be my dinner, but which hadn't been finished when I was preparing it. It was cooked ham, cooked beef, and steamed celery bits. Heaven only knows why he took to it.
So there I was, at seven-thirty-six in the morning, making the cat and me some breakfast. As breakfasts go, it wasn't that bad. I was having oatmeal, something that I had always had for breakfast as far back as I can remember, which is almost to the age of non-verbalness, and the cat was going to have a bit too, before I began preparing the stuff for him.
He lapped it up. That really surprised me . . until I realized what trouble this cat would be. It would be like having a child, only one that never spoke to me and never came to me if I called it. God forbid, they had given me a teenage. Rotten dirty of them, I thought darkly.
Then, I heard him, the one I could never block. Not his thoughts, but his emotions, very strong. Great, I thought, gathering up the dishes. He's about two blocks away. I dumped my oatmeal into the cat's bowl, wishing I had some milk to gulp down, because I was feeling a bit shaky, but I decided on taking a pill to cease my worrying. Then I grabbed my notebook and pens and locked the apartment door. He was one block away.
I paused momentarily on the stair landing, debating taking the cat with me, because I most certainly didn't want to come back and see on my hardwood floors where the cat had mess all over them. Thank goodness that I hadn't bothered to put any carpets in the apartment. Shaking my head to myself, I walked down the stairs.
Knowing which direction to go was easy. Even though I didn't want to open the wall up so that I could view what he was viewing, I could vaguely tell which way he was by the strength of the emotions and fleeting words that I was getting. Firstly, I was heading in the wrong direction and I started catching snatches of sentences.
Finally, after three minutes of brisk walking, my shoulders set straight and my eyes never straying to the side, the last wisps of him were gone from my mind, and with good riddance. Walking cheerfully forward, I noticed a park that I had frequented as a child.
Mom used to bring me here, I thought with a smile. The park had been near Mom and Dad's apartment and it was easy to walk there after school and finish my homework. I sat down on the grass and watched, my eyes half glazed over, several school-aged children. A woman sat beside me on the bench; I ignored her, choosing to stay in my semi-trance just a few moments longer, enjoying the crisp air on my cheeks.
We sat that way for several minutes; me, almost asleep, so calm and peaceful was I; her, quietly watching as the children played. My mood was totally different from the hurried and anxious one that had been my previous. Finally, the woman tapped my shoulder and I turned toward her.
"Mom," I said, surprised, "I didn't realize it was you. Why didn't you say something earlier; you could obviously tell it was me. I mean, come on, I haven't changed much in like a day, have I?"
"You didn't seem to want to be disturbed," Mom replied congenially. "I would have thought that you would have detected me immediately, but maybe with your sorting and stuff, you didn't feel hear me?" My mother looked at me with a question left unsaid.
"I finished sorting a few weeks ago . . . well, not all of it, but the major ideas. When they surface, I shove them into a drawer and lock them in," I explained to her. I omitted the most serious part; I hadn't been letting thoughts into my room.
I think she understood what I left unsaid, for any part she told me that Dad was able to track down the addresses to the information that I had left on my siblings' locations. The only problem was with Lezli's group home, or orphanage . . . as the romantics like to call them. Dad had found the group home, however . . . "He says that Lezli's name isn't in the system, but he isn't surprised. With the unusual spelling, he bets that she has gone with a more conservative Lesley or even stayed out of the computer all together."
"I can't quite see her changing her name. It isn't in her style. She likes to stick out . . . she must have just deleted her files . . . or even gone with a totally different name . . . like Fredrika," I grinned, almost to myself. I could just imagine the teasing names that a Fredrika would get.
"Are you certain on the spelling of her name, Tyronica?" Mom looked at me sideways, "I mean, we never exactly signed our papers at Manticore, now did we? We just wrote our designation number on anything that wasn't already supplied with our barcode."
"We had our own written code, Mom," I reminded her. "That meant that we had to translate her name into an English spelling. Besides, I never hear a name that I don't spell out in my mind automatically . . . like in Anne of Green Gables. You know, that book has always prejudiced me against any Anns I'll ever meet. Even when I found out that Rosie O'Donnell's first name was Roseann, it kind of cooled something for me, because I love her work, especially all the charity work she's done for the gay and lesbian community."
"You sidetracked," Mom informed me. "The problem here is Lezli. We aren't sure if she's in Texas, like you have."
I fumed silently. "Look, we found the others the system, right?" My mother nodded her head. "Well, Lezli is probably the only one who had the smarts to delete her file."
"I don't remember you deleting your file," Mom said with a smug look.
"I never had one. I went to low budget gigs where the computer equipment was so outdated that I couldn't play PacMan, let alone hack into the Pentagon."
"You've done that before?" Mom asked, curiosity getting the best of her.
"Now who's sidetracking?" I asked wickedly. She slapped me on the arm, hard enough that I knew I would bruise. I grinned. "Glad you aren't treating me like a china doll anymore. Remember when you broke three of my toes by stomping on my foot?"
"Logan gave me hell for that, I sure do remember it," Mom told me. Her pager went off at that moment. "Speaking of your father . . . " she said, trailing off. "Wanna have lunch with us?"
"No, thanks," I told her, "gotta get some work done. Catch you later, 'kay?"
"Yeah, later," she told me as she got on her bike and pedaled off. I hadn't even noticed it parked in the bushes behind the bench. Then again, I hadn't any need to turn around. "Don't stay too long; this place has gone to the dogs."
! ! ! ! ! !
What is better than sitting in a park and translating pages of information about your siblings? Sitting in a park and enjoying yourself. Martin's notebook had page after page of meticulous information on the weeks that he spent with them. It seemed he had kept a journal. To tell you the truth, I hadn't remembered just how annoying the sound of Ally's laughter was, but the way Martin had constantly written about Ally laughing, or, as Marty put it, hehawing, brought back the worst of it.
It was getting dark, nearly nine o'clock, when I had finished. I don't pretend to say that I had spent eleven o'clock to nine o'clock working. I had, of course, gotten up and enjoyed myself, ran around in the soft grass a bit, rolled on my back, and taken a few naps
I was just wrapping up some finishing touches on the last translation when, out of nowhere, the strong smell of alcohol wafted over to me. My eyes glanced around in a hopefully nondescript manner. I saw a drunk man, about fifteen yards away, stumpling in my direction. I paid him no heed until he stopped near me and grabbed the back of my blouse.
"Hello," he said in a slurred voice. He had dark, disheveled blonde hair that looked like it hadn't been washed in ages and a crooked nose, probably broken in a drunken brawl. I tugged forward slightly, which loosened his strong grip on my clothing. A quick sizing up revealed that he was a big guy, maybe six three, and his arms looked muscular. "Naw, naw, now, dohn do dat," he warned me but to me it sounded more like a threat.
One, I said silently inside my mind. Aloud, I said, "Leave me alone." I hoped he would be intimidated and just move along. It had worked before, many times, in France. You can never be too sure what kind of peds you'll meet in a post-Pulse world, even in an area like the French suburbs.
Again, the man grabbed at my shirt. "Missy, you come on with me. I'll help you find you're way home." Even though he was drunk, he made sure he had a strong grasp on me. By the look in his eyes and his jerky movements I started to wonder if he was also high on something. Just what had he snorted, injected, or smoked before partying with the guys?
Two, I thought, sighing a bit. "I'm not lost. If you don't leave me alone, I'll hurt you." I started to walk forward, but he clamped is hands around my waist. Three. "Stop it, now, stop it! I'm going to have to hurt you." I yanked myself free of his grasp which, even with all of my Manticore-bred strength, was surprisingly hard. I had only managed to run a few steps when the fool tackled me from behind. I was already seething inside at the temerity of this drunken moron but now I was truly pissed at his actions. I mean, how many thirteen year old girls, even genetically engineered super-humans, like getting tackled by a two hundred and fifty pound guy? I smashed face first into a concrete trash can and I immediately could feel blood trickling down my face at several points. This didn't exactly improve my spirit.
I reached into my front pocket, which was difficult, considering the Hulk was lying on me, messing with cutting open my Levis, and brought out my trusty glasses case. Inside the case was the best friend that I would ever have; my good ol' knife. I felt the cold metal slide between my fingers as I fought to find a good grip on it.
Bringing it behind me, I stabbed blidnly at the general area where his fingers were. The knife stalled in my hands as the tip of the blade left the air as I felt it cut into the fleshy parts of his hand. Twisting and tearing as I stabbed repeatedly into my target. But he didn't cry out in pain, he just tried to pick up his knife and continue working whenever it was knocked out of his shaky hands.
"Be still," he warned. It still sounded like another threat I didn't want to deal with.
I finally couldn't take it anymore and turned on him with my bare hands, thoroughly enraged. I envisioned myself savagely and brutally beating him to the ground for so many reasons. For everything he was putting me through to everything that was going wrong in my life. I expected to sink my first right in his gut hoping to knock the wind out of him. Unfortunately for both of us he was bent over. My fist made contact with the flat top of his head and sent it flying toward the trash can, where it thudded dully like the sound of a baseball bat striking a wet block of wood. His left hand clenched his knife -- he was left handed, or ambidextrous -- and his eyes looked surprised, but, other than that, he just looked dead.
Oops.
I got up and brushed myself off while glancing at the limp form lying prone on the ground. Oh well. What's one norm, more or less. And this guy, covered in tattoos, was a drunken ped who had hyped out on some drug that really made him seem fearless . . . and painless. I looked at his fingers. One was actually missing. I had never seen anyone act like that. It was like he was a Temi user or something.
Jesus. He was a Temi user . . .
Temicoxtrin . . . it promoted the manufacturing of adrenaline in the body . . . and made the user freakishly strong and stopped him or her from feeling pain. Not many people survive an encounter with someone who used too much of it. The high, or buzz, gotten from Temicoxtrin was described as getting married, losing your virginity, and becoming a parent all in the same period of time. As I had experienced none of these enjoyments, I could curse all users.
I didn't need to worry about killing him. They'd think two Temi users got into a fight and one came out victorious. The other . . . well, the other had probably gotten the farm he'd always wanted as a kid.
I wouldn't have felt bad for killing him even if he was just a drunken norm, not a Temi user. Norms are to Manticores what deer are to norms. If you run over them in the road, you regret it, because they're useful to have around, but you don't cry your eyes out unless it was a pet or something. Like Logan was my family member, that stupid deer in The Yearling was to his owner.
At least it was a Temi user.