Max Collins: After the Dark

Alec, returning from his rotation, came up to Max and said, “You better take a look.”

She joined him from their vantage point and saw a car rolling into the parking lot from that private lane — a black stretch Lincoln. The parking lot was now brimming with vehicles of many varieties — mostly expensive numbers, but not all.

“I make out license plates from all over the West Coast,” Alec said. “Also, rental vehicles. What do you make of that?”

Max lowered the binoculars. “We’re gonna have a full house of Familiars tonight. Comin’ from miles around...”

“Why?”

She gave the X5 half a smile. “Big night for ’em.”

“You mean, it’s the annual snake-cult Christmas party?”

“No — it’s the End of the World Fling. Comet’s comin’, remember?”

“Oh yeah... and, the good news is, Jesus is comin’ back, right?”

She nodded. “Only they don’t know the bad news: she’s pissed.”

Alec grinned and nodded. Then he looked at the sky. “I think we might have a white Christmas.”

“Let’s hope not much of one.”

Around dusk a dusting of snow did arrive, but nothing troublesome; and then, after the dark came, its charcoal hand caressing the compound, they made their preparations for the coming battle.

They would have only one chance to free Logan — and it vexed Max that the fate of the man she loved depended largely on the whim of Ames White. But — though nothing was said, not directly — all of them knew that more than Logan Cale’s future was at stake tonight.

For the cultists below, midnight marked a new future for their own twisted kind, and the beginning of the end for mankind. Whether there was any truth to it, Max couldn’t say — what the hell could she do about a comet? On the other hand, the sick bastards below, who longed for the death of all ordinaries, and prayed for the death of transgenics, particularly herself, represented the kind of problem Max and her boys were eminently qualified to correct.

The transgenics had been bred to be soldiers to protect the United States from enemies foreign and domestic, and tonight, on homeland soil, they were finally going to get the opportunity to put those skills to use for their own country... at an insane asylum.

She watched them prepare now, her offbeat commando squad — Alec casually doing push-ups to burn off excess energy and stay limber; Mole checking the clip from his pistol (the presence of the weapon still troubled her); Joshua sitting on the ground, back to the car, legs straight out in front of him, his mouth yawned open in a silent roar as he slept.

Funny. They had come so far, the transgenics at Terminal City — their hometown finally accepting them, Alec about to run for city council, the arts and crafts mall revealing an entrepreneurial spirit, and a surprising well of creativity from within creatures trained to fight and to kill. They had come so far...

... and they had come far, making it to this hilltop, too. To fight. And to kill.

About ten minutes before midnight on Christmas Eve, Max stood with her three friends at the edge of the hilltop. The other messiah had three wise men to attend his birth: she had two wiseasses and a not so cowardly lion. Well, she’d take what she could get.

Nearby were the two corpses — the dead Familiar, rigid with rigor mortis; and the boy wrapped in the white sheet. She spoke to Mole and Joshua, telling them that when they reached the edge of the woods, they were to wait for her signal before emerging with their grim cargo. They nodded somberly.

Then she went up to Alec, who was tending to Bostock, keeping the gun snugged in the man’s side. The private secretary still had not only his mouth but his arms and ankles duct-taped.

“Ready?” she asked Alec.

“Ready,” Alec said. “But Max... before we do this...”

“Second thoughts? Like maybe you’d hate to see your political career nipped in the bud?”

“No. I have no second thoughts about helping take these sons of bitches down... but Max — consider.” He gestured with his head to the trussed-up Familiar. “If this guy is right... if these snake cultists are correct about this heavenly biotoxin... your blood is where the vaccine would come from, that would... you know.”

“Save the world?”

“Something like that. Are you sure you’re the person who ought to be walking up to the front gates of Snake City, ready to pick a fight?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then she put a hand on Alec’s shoulder. “I have considered that. But we’re here to save Logan. I’m not prepared to believe anything these wackos say... but just in case, I’m putting you in charge of gettin’ my carcass on ice, toot sweet.”

He grinned at her. “Sure you wanna hand me a money-making opportunity like that?”

And she had to laugh. It felt good.

Then the two X5s exchanged serious nods, and Alec said, “Let’s go wish those serpents a Merry Christmas, what do you say?”

“And help ’em shed their skins for the New Year,” she said, and they bumped fists and started down the wooded hillside.

Max was in the lead, with Alec several paces behind her, guiding Bostock, who had to sort of hop along, else be dragged bodily by Alec. Joshua and Mole, carrying the corpses, were several paces behind Alec. Max’s point position allowed her to spot one of the three-man patrols, in camouflage TAC apparel.

Bostock made some noise, and Alec slapped him with the pistol.

But Max was already on the move, throwing a kick into the lead guard. Suddenly Joshua and Mole — having laid down their gruesome burdens — were right there with her. A martial-arts blow to the neck from Max cancelled her guard’s contract with life, and Joshua broke his guard’s neck with a quick twist of both hands. Mole buried his gun so deep in his man’s body that the guard’s flesh muffled the shot.

Max looked over at Mole, the gun in his hand as he stood over the dead Familiar. He returned her gaze and whispered, “I know you don’t like firearms, Max... but I gotta do this my way — ’kay?”

Hating it, she nodded. Some part of her mind wondered how she could be such a hypocrite — after all, she’d crushed her opponent’s windpipe with a knife-blade of a hand, the “gentle” giant Joshua had just snapped a Familiar’s neck like a twig... and she was having trouble with Mole killing a man with a gun?

Maybe she could talk to somebody at Big Sky about this psychological hang-up of hers...

They were still fifty yards from the building when her cell phone rang.

“Go for Max.”

“ Time’s dwindling, 452 ,” Ames White said, in the same distant, processed sound as his previous calls, as if he were on the moon and not, most likely, within shouting distance. “Do you have my son? ”

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s here with me.”

“ Put him on ”

“Not possible. We have to talk about that...”

“ ... I’m getting the feeling I’m not going to like where this is going. ”

“Are you at Big Sky?”

Perhaps the question took him by surprise, as there was a long silence; she could almost hear the wheels turning, as her longtime antagonist tried to figure out just how much she knew.

“Yes or no?” she asked finally.

“ ... Yes. ”

“Are you on a secure line?”

“ What do you mean, 452? ”

“I mean, are we ‘alone’ or are your friends listening in?”

“ I’m on my cell ,” he said, the tone implying he could talk.

“We’ve been enemies for a long time, White.”

“ We agree on that much .”

“But you need to know something... We have mutual enemies.”