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Our Paranormal Chernobyl The cab pulled up to the curb. It was just before eight p.m. on a cold November night, and raining. There was no one on the sidewalk but a big German shepherd resting under the awning of a closed grocer's. The driver leaned over to push open the front passenger door, and the dog jumped in. "Hey," the dog said. Its lips didn't move. "Argo, m’mon," the driver said. He turned to look at his passenger. Gigantic dreads blossomed from a rainbow knit cap. The license displayed above the meter gave his name as Eekamouse Johnston. "Where you to, dis fine evenin'?" "Mike's Tavern," Argo said. There was a macrame rope tied to the handle, installed special for the dog. Argo pulled on the rope with his teeth, and swung the door closed. "N-o-o problem," Eekamouse said. They drove down town in the rain, with YellowMan singing low on the tapedeck. It was a reggae version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." "So, you ever found dat girl you been looking for, mon?" "Never did," the dog said. "PRIMUS thinks she's somewhere in South America, but that's just a guess. She could be anywhere." The night they'd flown back from New Orleans, they'd been hoping that Roya Sontag was still in Chicago, but they soon learned from Detective Hammersmith that she'd been spirited away. At the same time that the shapechanger had been riding in the Q-Ball disguised as Goran Vrlick, a woman looking exactly like Freya had chartered a private flight out of O'Hare—her personal jet having been hijacked an hour before by a kid in a suit and a man in an iron mask. On the flight were Sontag, two female assistants, and a "critically ill patient" being transported in a six-by-four-foot container. The pilots never saw the patient. They dropped off the passengers in Brasilia, and from there they disappeared. Was Roya was still alive? Argo hoped so. Maggie Thorin and Goran had worked for months on a suppressor, but with no way to test it, they had no way of knowing if they'd succeeded. Thorin had spent her own money publicizing the fact that she was looking for the girl and wanted to help her, but no one had stepped forward. Not even the shapechanger was volunteering information. The gray humanoid who'd tried to kill them all in Thorin's lab was an enigma in itself. Was Freya Sontag the shapechanger, or was the shapechanger only impersonating her? And who was it that got on the plane—yet another one? The gray thing stayed silent. It had been turned over to the Chicago Police, who were ordered to turn the creature over to PRIMUS and Stronghold; Mayor Daley said that's what they were paying them for, after all. The trial had not been very satisfactory. Goran had testified, as had Maggie Thorin, but it turned out to be impossible to prove, who, exactly, the shapechanger was. Not even its DNA was stable. It refused to speak, though its lawyer was extremely vocal. Instead of the multiple counts of murder that Argo and the others had been hoping it would be charged with, the D.A. only had evidence for Attempted Murder, for its attacks in Thorin's lab. At least her employees, the robot puppeteers, would be punished. Two days after the Chernobyl, Russell Reinhardt-Mapes and his sidekicks, Margaret and Woody Weiss (Woody, it turned out, was Margaret's son from her first marriage), had appeared in front of the Central Police station, bound by lengths of bent sewer pipe. They looked like they'd spent time in Hell. They confessed to everything and swore up and down that Freya Sontag had hired them. Iggy's other prisoner never saw the light of day. Only a few people knew that Iggy kept Jigsaw locked up tight in a room with no light, no food, and no exit. It tried every day to dig itself out, and Iggy re-filled the tunnels every day. So far, the thing seemed as unkillable as Theo August. "Hey!" Argo said. They were passing a small park. "Pull over, could you?" Eekamouse stopped the car, and Argo hopped out. "I'll be back in a second." The dog trotted through the wrought iron gates to an open area surrounded by trees. In the center was a large stone statue. It was an abstract figure, something that suggested wings, and trees, and lion's paws, rendered in different varieties of stone. It was over twelve feet tall, and twice as wide, though there were many airy spaces cut into its structure. There was no plaque explaining what it was supposed to be. And how could there be? It changed gradually every day. "How you doing, Eli?" Argo said. The statue didn't answer. The dog padded around stone structure, sniffing and checking for grafitti. No one seemed to have defaced it recently, not even the animals. They must be learning. Argo came to stand in front of it again. "I'm off to a birthday party, and I'm going to see some of the others. Do you need anything? Maybe some nice granite? I think Iggy can dig up some of the deep stuff for you." The dog waited, because you couldn't rush Eli. After a full two minutes of silence, though, the statue still hadn't said anything, and Argo's fur was getting soaked. "Well, okay then," the dog said. "Just checking in. I really like what you've done with the wings, by the way." Argo ran back to the curb, shook himself vigorously, and jumped back inside the warm cab. In the darkness of the park, the statue shifted slightly, and the wings stretched a few inches higher. "Yoo-hoo, I'm home!" Darius Blake heaved the two suitcases through the doorway and dropped them to the floor. One of them fell over sideways with a thud. "Did you miss me?" There was no answer. "Guess not," the old man said under his breath, and kicked the door shut with his heel. He dropped his keys in the 14th century iron chalice they kept on the entry table, and threw his coat over the couch. He went through the apartment turning on lights and opening drapes. The apartment was thirty stories up. Outside, the lights of New York burned as bright as ever. Darius went into the hall bathroom, relieved himself, then made his way to the back bedroom. He flicked on the lights. Jonathan Blake lay on the bed, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. He snored softly. He wore the same t-shirt and sweats Darius had left him in a week ago. "Goodness gracious, Sleeping Beauty. You haven't moved an inch, have you?" Darius lifted the bandage on his nephew's head. The gauze came away clean, but the wound was still there, seeping redly. It never got better, but it never got worse either. He checked the boy's leg, and it was the same as always, too: bruised almost to black, the stitches holding together the muscles that had caught all those bullets last year. Darius sat down at the chair next to the bed. "Well, Jono, the trip was not entirely successful." He got the scissors from the bedside table and snipped away the bandages wound around the young man's head. "The hospital has the whole wing locked down now. It took me days to get in—the guy I bribed got pneumonia, so I finally just had to bust in. Me and the boys wheel in the equipment, and there it is, right in the middle of the hallway, sticking up like a medieval toothpick. I mean, the tip of it's only sunk a couple inches into the cement. Piece of cake, right?" He unrolled some fresh gauze and with practiced motions began to cut and fold new bandages. Not that it mattered. The blood and mucus clung only to the surface of Jonathan's body. Neither did he sweat, drool, defecate, or pee. As patients went, he was pretty low maintenance. "So of course I yanked on it, and of course it doesn't budge. I was expecting that, I've read my books. So I break out the relics and the spellbooks and I'm trying every chant I know while the boys hook up the chains and pulleys and yank to beat the band. A half hour of that nonsense and the thing hasn't moved, so we figured, what the heck, let's go right for the jackhammers and pull out the whole chunk of floor with it. Well, the first jackhammer wouldn't work—completely dead. Then we plugged in the second one and pop! Blew a fuse for the whole wing. So we're sitting there in the dark, staring into our flashlights—thank God we brought flashlights—and the only thing we've got left is the dynamite. I brought Timmy, you know, because he knows his way around things that go boom. So while Timmy's wiring everything up, the security guards show up, and we had to skedaddle!" Darius shook his head. "What a mess. Never had so many things go wrong at once. But that's magic for you, ain't it? No such thing as a coincidence." Darius gently lifted Jonathan's head, and wound the bandage twice around. The young man slept on, oblivious. "At least we know now why Woodbridge didn't take the sword along with the armor—that thing's protected. I doubt the Fisher King hisself could yank it out before its time." Darius pushed a lock of the boy's blonde hair free of the bandage. "But don't you worry, that time's coming. You'll be needed again soon enough. You just get your rest, now." The old man yawned hugely. "And that goes double for me." He stood up, patted the boy on the shoulder. "See you in the morning, Jono. If you get up before me, make breakfast." He nosed through the tavern door, into a party that was already in full swing. Buddy Guy wailed on the jukebox. Cigar smoke hazed the air. "Hey Argo!" someone yelled. "A dog walks into a bar!" "Ar-go! Ar-go!" "Come on, give us one, Argo. A dog walks—" "Okay, okay, give me a second" the dog said without moving his lips. He put his paws up on one of the tables and looked around at the crowd. "All right, a dog—" "Louder!" "I say, a dog walks into a bar and says, bartender, it's my birthday, how about a free drink? And the bartender says sure, the toilet's around the corner." There were groans and cheers, drunken laughter. An easy crowd. Argo padded across the room, nodding hello and saying hey to friends and acquaintances. There were cops, as usual, and a few folks from the chem lab at University of Chicago where Argo had been doing some consulting, and a few of his friends from the street, like Hungry Jack. The big meta dominated one end of the room, surrounded by people cheering him on as he blew smoke rings as big as hoola-hoops from his hatchback-sized mouth. After the PRIMUS docs taught him to switch off the dimensional portal between his teeth and his gullet, Jack was finally able to get food to his stomach and satisfy his raging hunger. The judge had sentenced him only to 500 hours of community service, and he'd proved remarkably effective at clearing abandoned lots for the city. Argo hopped up on a bar stool, between Detectives Hammersmith and Waters. "Evening, officers." Hammersmith smiled. "Well whaddya know, a talking dog." Waters only nodded slightly, which for him was a warm hug. "Is Stokes coming?" Argo asked. Hammersmith shook his head. "Detective Stokel is on assignment. Very hush hush. Even I'm not allowed to know what he's up to." But I bet you do, Argo thought. Mike came over, wiped the section of bar in front of the dog, and set down a coaster. "The usual, Argo?" she said, without removing the pipe from her lips. The German Shepherd barked affirmatively, black lips smiling over white teeth. "Beer in a bowl, comin' up." "Are you old enough to drink?" Hammersmith said. "Dog years, Detective. So, all's quiet on the South side, eh? No more sightings of the Stranger?" "Not since Halloween." Hammersmith laughed ruefully. Theo had come out of the sewers that night, and gone trick-or-treating back at his old psychiatric hospital. Evidently he thought no one would look twice at another guy in a mask. He "freed" the patients, though most of them didn't want to leave. He'd gotten a few of them to follow him toward the sewers when the SWAT team and a dozen rookie PRIMUS agents showed up. It didn't go well. He started tossing trees, vowing vengeance all the while, just like he'd done in the Q-Ball that night coming back from New Orleans. As they'd descended toward Chicago, Stranger had DuFord open the hatch well before he dropped off the others. The masked man stood in the doorway, the wind whipping the tatters of a his black shirt, and waved goodbye. "See you all in the funny papers," Stranger said, voice echoing behind the dented steel mask. Then he pointed at Maggie. "Everybody except you and that lump of shit, Goo. I don't forget a debt, and lady I owe you a real nasty one. So the next time you see me you better fucking run." And with that he stepped off into the sky. They heard the boom as he impacted the concrete a hundred feet below, but by the time Argo peered over the edge of the door the streets were empty. The dog shook his head. "He saved our lives, you know. If he and Ed hadn't arrived, the shapechanger would have torn us apart." "And yet," Waters said. Argo sighed, agreeing. "And yet, he's nuttier than a fruitcake." Mike arrived with the bowl of Sam Adams, and Argo had lapped up half of it before the door slammed open and all conversation in the room stopped. Three bulky Asian men in expensive black suits stood in the doorway, surveying the room through identical dark sunglasses, each of them young, sleek-haired, square-jawed, and near 300 pounds of muscle. Someone pulled the plug on the Jukebox, and the room was silent. Argo smelled cologne and gun oil on the men. From the beyond the door wafted expensive perfume, and something else: a scent he recognized. "Can I help you boys?" Mike said. Her hands were on top of the bar, in plain view. Hammersmith, however, shifted off his stool, blocking their line of sight to Waters. The three men said nothing. They moved aside, and an elderly woman—Chinese, Argo guessed—stepped into the room. Her evening coat was simple black wool, but the cut was elegant. Diamonds sparkled at her throat. She glanced behind her. A translucent shape suddenly filled the doorway like a wave. The shape broke in two and flowed around the old woman, re-forming into a man-sized gumdrop in front of her. "Everybody?" Goo said. "Meet my m-o-o-o-m!" Mrs. Yan, it turned out, liked Scotch, and carried her own cigarettes in a silver and pearl case. Argo ordered another bowl of Sam Adams, and then another, and some time after that he was showing Mavis how to do the Dirty Dog, his front legs resting on her shoulders, as the other nurses from Cook County's E.R. danced around them. Goran and Maggie arrived after 11pm, late as usual. Goran was haggard from the late nights, but Maggie looked fresh as always. She tucked her aluminum briefcase under the table, flipped her long hair over her shoulder, and ordered coffee for both of them. "Have we missed the guest of honor?" Maggie asked Argo. "I think not!" the dog said. Which didn't make complete sense, but it was that kind of night. "It's good to see you, Maggie," Goo said, oozing himself between Goran and Maggie. "It's good to see you, too, Goo. Your mother seems lovely." "I've told her about all about you. I was wondering, if you had some time this trip, we could maybe have dinner, and then—" "We're going back in the morning, Goo, right after the deposition," Maggie said. "Deposition? A-ah, the lawsuit about the patient." During the firefight with B & K at the hospital, a patient with a heart condition had died while waiting for an ER doctor. The family of the man was going after the hospital, then Maggie. As the only vigilante in the fight with a public identity—and a huge bank account—she was a prime target. "Not fair," Goo said. "Oh it won't be the last time," Maggie said. "The price of not wearing a mask. Oh, don't worry, I'm sure we'll be able to settle this out of court eventually. And I promise you, the next time I'm in town we must get together." "Re-e-a-lly?" "Of course! I've been meaning to get to know you a lot better. I'll make sure to bring proper equipment." The gelantinous meta seemed to flush, as liquids of varying viscosities re-mixed under his membrane. It lowered its voice. "Equipment… well, I've never actually… are you sure you want to—" "Goo, we have to figure out out if there's been any further shift in your cellular structure. It's quite possible that everyone injected may continue to mutate. Full testing is the only way to make sure." Goo looked at her, then slowly began to ooze backward, like a balloon leaking air. "Sure. Testing. That would be gre-a-t." Argo sighed. Maggie was still oblivious in ways of the heart. The dog waited until Goo had left the table, and then hopped up on a seat. "Were you successful?" Argo asked quietly. Maggie glanced at Goran, and sighed. "None of our formulas worked. I think we've figured out that none of them can work." Argo's heart sank. Everything they'd gone through a year ago, everything the city had gone through, amounted to nothing. The way they'd fought together that night, bringing down Sontag when it seemed like there was no way to walk out of Thorin's lab alive, had made him believe that anything was possible. Argo was a latecomer to the group, but he felt like they'd become something of a team. But what was left? Goo and Maggie were here, but Q-Ball was in hiding somewhere out west, Crossfire was in a coma, and Stranger had become an uncontrollable element in the underground. Ed had disappeared as soon as they'd touched down in Chicago, saying that he had to go find out what happened to his Grandmother. And Pender—well, what happened to Laura just wasn't fair. PRIMUS had failed miserably during the Chernobyl, and they needed a scapegoat. Laura Pender had been Acting Silver Avenger of Chicago for one day, and now her PRIMUS career was over. The "heroes" had scattered to the winds, leaving behind the dead and altered bodies of the Chernobyl. The shapechanger and a couple of her henchmen were in jail, but that was a pale victory. There was one thing that was still left to do, one act of pure good that remained. The team had survived the fight with the shapechanger, so how could they fail? "So that's it then," the dog said. "Roya will die." Goran glanced at Maggie. "Not necessarily. There is one option." Someone shouted, Look! A great brown fist appeared in the rafters, wrist and arm ghosting harmlessly through the ceiling. Mrs. Yan's bodyguards stepped protectively around the woman. The crowd parted as the hand lowered to the floor. The fingers opened slowly to reveal an attractive woman in a jade-green dress. Her hair was newly-dyed red, and she was holding a round-faced toddler on her hip. She reached up, patted the huge fingers, and then the hand withdrew the way it had come. The partiers broke into applause, and then someone started singing Happy Birthday. The crowd took up the song. The woman held up the child and he looked calmly around at them singing, not bothered by the noise even when people split into clashing harmonies on the last line. Argo hated it when people sang harmony on Happy Birthday, but tonight he forgave them, and howled a high keening note his lupine ancestors would have been proud of. Argo trotted down the pitch-dark alley, his nails clicking on the wet pavement. His eyesight was no better than a human's, but his nose led him unerringly though the dark, guided by psychic as well as olfactory markers. He kept track of the other night animals in the alley, among them a trio of rats. They scurried away from the dumpster at his approach, then doubled back to the delicious-smelling garbage as soon as the dog had passed, their simple minds vacillating between fear and hunger. A tom cat hissed from its perch on a window ledge, then abruptly leaped away, scared not by the dog but by something else. At the end of the alley was the near-human smell of a shapechanger. "Here boy," the shapechanger said in a woman's voice. It seemed to have no trouble seeing him in the dark. Argo was relieved. If the shapechanger had come for the meeting, then Roya was still alive. It had taken a familiar shape. Anna Sorensen had been one of Gorin's lab assistants, and Argo had liked her. He'd known that she didn't smell right, and that her mind was full of static that made her hard to pin down, but he hadn't known what those qualities meant until he'd met the gray thing that had tried to kill him in Thorin's lab. This creature before him wasn't the shapechanger they'd fought, but it was a close family member. "Are you sure you didn't bring any of your friends? Thorin, perhaps, or the telepath?" "You said to come alone," the dog said without moving its mouth. "We're not trying to capture you. We just want to help." "Oh I know, I know," Anna's voice said. "That's the great thing about working with you people. You really are motivated by altruism." She put her hands on her hips. "So. Did they come up with a formula?" Argo opened his mouth and tossed his head. The little aluminum vial that Maggie had given him clinked and rolled across the pavement. The shapechanger picked it up between index finger and thumb, and wiped it off on her skirt. "This is it?" The dog nodded. "So, they finally succeeded where my mother failed." Argo said nothing. The two-sided pellets that B & K injected into the victims that night released first the suppressor candidate, allowing it to be absorbed into the victim's body, and then hours later released Roya's active protein. Many would die, and some would survive their transformations, but Sontag had been betting that one of the suppressor formulas would prevent the victim from changing at all. B & K would collect the untransformed victim for further tests, and Sontag would be on her way. But the experiment was a failure. None of the suppressors worked. Every victim transformed—even Lily. Before B and K found her, Lily was a malnourished heroin addict who'd been on the street for two years. After the injection, she was hardly any better: her body was still bone thin and ravaged by scars, and when JigSaw cut out her tongue, she was not able to heal herself. But Roya's protein did giver her one remarkable ability, the "superpower" she'd craved: the power to create a baby. She did it without a father. The baby was created through parthanogenesis, yet it is not a clone: it has it own distinct DNA. She also did it without a uterus. The girl had had a hysterectomy after a botched abortion when she was eighteen. Yet somehow her body created a womb and a placenta for the fetus. When the placenta detached during birth, some blood must have mixed; Maggie said it wasn't rare, and it happened with mothers with AIDS who passed the disease to their children. The baby may have healed Lily's tongue then. Or maybe it truly was when she kissed the child, as Lily claimed—the mixed blood may have been on its lips. The fact was that Lily no longer showed any metahuman traits, and the child did. It's blood was as protean as Roya's—maybe more so. "Which suppressor did they base it off of?" the shapechanger said. "It's a custom job," the dog said. He didn't add what else Maggie had told him. The substance was the child's blood, plain and simple—though from what Maggie had said, there was nothing simple about it. It was too complex to synthesize, and highly unstable: the transformative powers it possessed broke down hours after extraction. The blood had to be fresh. At tonight's party, it was left to Maggie to explain to Lily that they needed to stick a needle into her boy one more time. The shapechanger stood up, holding the vial to catch the moonlight. "How, exactly, do I administer it?" Argo repeated the directions that Maggie had given him. "And one other thing. Maggie said that you need to inject it when Roya's in a stable shape, and then you need to have her concentrate. The substance is psychoreactive. Roya needs to visualize the body she wants to assume." Anna's eyes stared down at him. "You're saying she has to make a wish?" The dog returned her gaze. The shapechanger tucked the vial into what looked like a purse, but could have been an elaborately folded and shaded flap of skin. "One thing, Argo. If this stuff kills my sister, or harms her in any way, I'll be using your hide as a living room rug." The dog bristled but said nothing. A moment later the shapechanger was gone, becoming a shadow itself. Argo tracked its scent for a few moments after it vanished from sight, but then even that dissipated. "You can come out now, Detective Stokel," Argo said. From above, a small sound as Stokes poked his head over the roofline. Absurdly bulky nightvision goggles covered his eyes. "Fuck, dude, you sniffed me out? I thought I was downwind of you. Or above wind anyway." "You scared away the cat," Argo said. Stokes pulled up the goggles with his bad hand. His good hand held the barrel of a rifle. "Fuck." Argo waited until he climbed down the rusting fire escape, metal squealing. The rifle was slung over his shoulder. "I wanted to do this alone," Argo said. "I was just covering your back, dawg," Stokes said. "You can't trust those shapeshiftin' motherfuckers. Now how about some breakfast? I have some kibbles in the car." "Don't make me bite you," Argo said. |