Max Collins - Skin Game

He found Hankins’ body on the fourth floor, where it had been dragged from the stairwell — he knew it was Hankins, though there was no way to recognize the naked, bright gleaming redness of blood and exposed muscle and bone as any particular human.

Merely a skinned one.

Very fresh, this time.

And the scream he heard in his ears, now, was his own.

Leanly muscular, with spiky brown hair, icy blue eyes, and the empathy of a shark, Ames White pressed the palm of his left hand against his forehead.

He didn’t know whether to laugh or scream, so he did what he always did: he smirked, even in the face of death... he smirked.

White knew Hankins and Thompson were not the sharpest men on his unit; he had even suspected they were inept — but he’d had no idea that they were this lame.

Yet somehow this seemed typical. He was a man with a mission of almost cosmic importance, in a city, a country, that was a shambles, barely worth ruling... though one took one’s best option, right? And here he was, with this huge responsibility, surrounded by fools and incompetents. It seemed to White, these days, that he was constantly on the verge of a great victory or a humiliating defeat.

He wondered which column this one would end up in.

The upside of this, if there was one, was that at least he’d be rid of the bungling duo now. Hankins, of course, was dead. White glanced at the skinned body, then looked away again — what a disgusting mess. Thompson, huddled in a corner, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, cradling his broken arm, seemed unable to tear his eyes from his partner’s grotesque corpse.

White already knew the kid was washed up, he could see it in his face. And the fact that Thompson had nearly been taken out by a geriatric homeless person only compounded the failure.

The downside of this was the pair’s ineffectiveness would reflect on him, and White despised failure, even if his was only one by association. Shaking his head, he turned to his associate, Otto Gottlieb.

Hispanic-looking with his black hair, dark eyes, and olive skin, Gottlieb was not in the know about government agent White’s several secret agendas. In fact, Gottlieb’s best trait — as far as White was concerned — was that the man did what he was told.

So far, Gottlieb had resisted the urge to grow a brain and start thinking on his own; but White was afraid that couldn’t last forever. And when the moment came, he knew he’d miss Gottlieb. He didn’t really like the guy — White didn’t really like anyone, and prided himself on a superiority devoid of such weakness as compassion and sentimentality — but he had gotten used to having Gottlieb around, and his associate’s presence somehow brought him peace.

Even if the man was a moron.

Motioning toward the two partners — one dead, one alive — White said, “Get him out of here, Otto. He disgusts me. Get him out.”

“The body? Shouldn’t we wait for—”

“No. That’s evidence. Thompson, I mean. Lose him.”

Gottlieb, finally getting it, nodded and moved to the other agent. Helping Thompson to his feet, Gottlieb drew the blanket around the man’s shoulders and led him toward the door.

When they neared White, Thompson looked at his boss with golf-ball eyes and said, “That transgenic skinned him so fast — so fucking fast. He skinned him.”

“You screwed up. This was an unacceptable loss.”

Now Thompson’s eyes tightened and tears began to trickle. “I tried to get to him in time... I tried to help... I...”

White smirked again, and shook his head slowly. “You just don’t get it, do you?”

A wide-eyed blank look settled on Thompson’s face.

“I’m not talking about Hankins. This transgenic saved me the trouble of firing his fat ass.”

“You said... it was an unacceptable... loss...”

“And it is. The transgenic got the thermal imager.” White grabbed the front of Thompson’s wet raincoat. “And how long do you suppose it’ll be before they figure out what it is, and what it’s for?”

White released the young agent’s coat. Thompson said nothing, his head turning back to Hankins on the floor. His lower lip trembled as he said, “You... you’re a monster.”

“No. They’re the monsters — and you’re fired. Get him out of here, Otto.”

Gottlieb hauled him away.

Alone but for the body, White slammed his fist into a concrete wall, leaving a fist-sized dent.

To the glistening scarlet corpse, White said, “I can’t believe you let a goddamn transgenic get hold of a thermal imager.”

But Hankins said nothing — he just grinned stupidly back at his boss, his teeth huge in the raw red pop-eyed mask of his face.

Her heart jackhammering, the transgenic the public knew only as 452 prepared to step out of Jam Pony into a cool night smeared red and blue by the lights of police cars. She and a group of her closest friends — her brothers and sisters in the fight to be free — appeared to be in custody, about to be escorted by what seemed to be a cadre of SWAT officers.

Her long black hair hung loose and her black shirt and snug slacks were smudged with dirt — the aftermath of a vicious round of hand-to-hand combat with a hit squad attached to Ames White. But 452 — Max to her friends — was still unbowed, and not even bloodied.

Nonetheless, blood could still flow — and some already had.

The hostage situation at Jam Pony had started by accident — literally. Earlier, before sundown, the lizardish transgenic Mole — brave but impulsive — and her towering friend Joshua — who the tabloids had termed a “dog boy” — had just picked up two transgenics headed for Terminal City, the ten square blocks of biochemical wasteland where the societal outcasts spawned by the gene-manipulating Manticore project had taken up residence. The transgenic squatters could survive behind the fences, despite chemical and biotech spills, where everyday humans would get sick and die; the transgenics — whether beautiful physical specimens like Max or Alec, or genetic “freaks” like the lizard man and dog boy — had been immunized against such poisons... one nice thing Manticore had done for them, anyway.

Accompanied by a teenage boy named Dalton, the young woman, Gem — an X5 — was pregnant and about to pop, so Mole was in a hurry to get her to the shabby sanctuary that was Terminal City. They had made it less than two blocks when a junk-piled truck backed into their path and what should have been a minor, bumper-bumping accident turned into a disaster.

Forced to make a run for it when a mutant-hating mob gathered, Mole, Joshua, and the two new arrivals had sought refuge at the bike messenger service where Max and two other transgenics, Alec and CeCe, worked. But the cops were already on their heels, and a full-scale hostage crisis quickly developed. Alec and CeCe had posed as hostages along with the ordinaries who became prisoners, though the handsome, usually self-centered Alec eventually outted himself as a transgenic, by coming to Max’s aid.

At first Max had not been on the scene, and lizard-man Mole had terrified her friends; when she arrived, Max took over and before long the hostages realized that they and their “captors” were faced with the same challenge — staying alive.

Not so long ago, Max and the police department negotiator, Detective Ramon Clemente, had reached an accord that provided for trading half the hostages for a getaway van. Clemente’s rooftop SWAT team had backed off, as promised, but Ames White — that CIA agent with an antitransgenic agenda — had unleashed his own hidden snipers.