Max Collins: Skin Game

The van filled with whoops and cheers as Joshua and Mole knocked fists.

“Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Mole yelled.

“It’s all good,” said Alec, a wide smile breaking his normally laid-back demeanor.

Grinning into the rearview mirror, Logan said, “Just for the record, that girl was kickin’ your ass.”

Logan was referring to a particularly bulked-up female fighter on Ames White’s hit squad, back at Jam Pony.

Alec’s smile tightened a fraction. “I had her. I was just settin’ her up.”

Everyone laughed.

Keeping her voice low and even, knowing they weren’t really in the clear yet, Max said, “All right, head for Terminal City.”

Something nagged at Clemente — this just didn’t feel right — and when he entered Jam Pony it was with gun drawn and both arms extended, his flashlight in his left hand, his pistol in his right.

Behind him, four members of the SWAT team — the Pd’s men, not White’s — fell into a loose line and then spread out once they were inside the door. The power was still out and the place was bathed in eerie shadows, strangely quiet after the tension of the day. It was almost as if the building needed a rest too...

Coming around a corner, Clemente saw three people sitting on a bench, apparently just waiting for the police to enter. Nearest him sat a young woman of perhaps twenty, her short brown hair tied into two tiny pigtails. She wore a tan hooded pullover and khakis.

Next to her sat a taller, muscular, nerdy guy with black-rimmed glasses, a blond flattop, wearing a blue pullover short-sleeve shirt and jeans. Beyond him, a tiny bald guy, also in his early twenties, wore a plaid flannel shirt and jeans. They all seemed calm.

Very damn calm, for just-released hostages.

“Anyone hurt?” Clemente asked, shining his flashlight toward them, but not into their eyes.

“No,” the young woman said. “We’re okay... but you better go look upstairs.”

Was there something... mocking in her voice?

Slowly, all his attention focused on the doorway ahead, Clemente led the way up the stairs. On the landing, he hesitated for only a second before swinging through the door with his pistol outstretched. Behind him, the SWAT team fanned out into the room.

It was immediately obvious that a ferocious battle had taken place up here. Nearly every pane of glass in the windows and in the top half of the wall that separated the warehouse space from the office space lay in shards on the dusty floor. Shelves had been tipped over, furniture broken — the place was a shambles.

Playing his light around the room, Clemente settled his beam first on a muscular redheaded woman lashed to a cement support. She had been gagged and taped to the pillar with packaging tape, as if waiting delivery, perhaps by one of the bike messengers.

Swinging farther around, Clemente’s light fell on a trio in their underwear — they’d been stripped of their uniforms and lashed to another pillar. They too had been trussed up and gagged with packing tape.

Clemente realized at once that this meant the SWAT team members who’d seemingly hauled off 452 and the rest were impostors, wearing the uniforms of the SWAT team they’d defeated. And he knew he should spring into action, but...

He couldn’t keep a wide smile from spreading across his face.

“Special Agent in Charge White,” Clemente said, in mock good humor.

The normally smug and very trussed-up government man, Ames White, growled something that came out garbled because of the packing-tape gag. He had not been stripped of his clothes — just his dignity.

“What was that?” Clemente asked, as if actually understanding the agent’s muffled outraged words from beneath the packing tape. “The transgenics tied you up and took your uniforms?”

Another growl erupted from the agent as he fought against the tape that bound him.

The detective chuckled and his grin grew even wider. “No way!”

White’s eyes went wide with anger and he yelled something — probably obscene — that was again swallowed by the tape.

As if making sure he was understanding White correctly, Clemente asked, “And you want me to go after them?”

The NSA agent’s cold stare carried every ounce of anger and hatred that the tape wouldn’t allow him to utter.

“Now that’s a good idea,” Clemente said as he rose. He went to the door with his men on his tail, none of them making any move to untie White or his cronies.

As he stepped into the hall, the detective heard another muffled scream from White. It sounded quite a bit like, “Son of a bitch,” even with the tape over the man’s mouth. Clemente allowed himself to enjoy the moment, then took off at a run for his car.

White wasn’t the only one who’d been fooled by the transgenics, and Clemente — the pleasure of seeing the arrogant White hung out to dry receding in his mind as his duty kicked in — wasn’t going to let this slide. Now he would catch the transgenics, and succeed where White had screwed up.

And let Ames White stare into Clemente’s smug smile, for a change.

The crew had lapsed into silence; the tension of the long day finally seemed to be leaking out of them, and they all looked beat. Max was proud of her family, her friends. This day could have ended as the bloodbath Ames White had sought, and the transgenics’ cause irrevocably hurt, had anyone besides CeCe — one of their own — been killed or injured.

Not that Max and the others didn’t hurt because of the loss of their sister; but had any of the “ordinaries” died, well, that would have been the end of her hope of getting the humans to accept them as equals. She was just settling down to rest herself, in the back of the van, when she heard the first siren.

She looked out the rear window at the same moment Logan spotted the flashing lights in his mirror.

“We’ve got company,” he announced.

Clemente’s voice came to them over a loudspeaker from the lead car. “ Stop your vehicles now or you will be fired upon!”

Logan ignored him and kept driving.

Again Clemente’s voice came over the loudspeaker: “ Pull over now or we will use deadly force to stop you.”

Looking out the windshield, Max said, “Don’t stop — keep moving.”

Not slowing, Logan kept the van going straight down the middle of the street, Sketchy at the wheel of the ambulance behind him, following Logan’s lead, the police cars close behind, but none of them moving forward to try and block their path.

To Max, the trip to Terminal City seemed as though it took hours, not minutes. But finally they approached the locked gate of the no-man’s-land the transgenics had claimed for themselves, signs proclaiming, NO TRESPASSING. IT IS A FELONY TO PASS THIS POINT, and BIOHAZARD. UNSAFE FOR HUMAN OCCUPANCY.

“Go straight through,” Max said, almost casually.

Logan didn’t hesitate in following her instructions — he pressed down steadily on the accelerator and slowly the van gained momentum as it neared the gate.

“Hold on,” he advised, and everyone in the van tried to burrow in for the impact.

They slammed crunchingly through, the ambulance roaring in after them, right on their back bumper, police cars in a long line behind them. Inside the van, they rocked with the impact, then settled as they sped into the makeshift compound.

“Right, left, then straight up the ramp,” Max said.

Driving like a lifelong racer, Logan followed her orders.

As they accelerated up the incline, Max said, “Straight through the building.”

Again Logan complied, steering through the maze of concrete pillars as fast as was possible in the unwieldy van. Finally, they reached a barricade of junk that not only prevented them from moving forward, but cut them off to the left and right as well.