After the Dark (4 page)

For this reason, the two were careful not to touch, and both constantly wore gloves, and long pants in the warmest of weather . . . and even in intimate situations like this one, as they sat in the restaurant in a booth, the couple kept a respectful distance, like a middle-school boy and girl on a first date.

Earlier this year they got a firsthand look at what the virus could do if it went unchecked. During Max's capture of Kelpy—the chameleon-boy-turned-serial-killer—he had somehow caught the bug. Due to Kelpy's fixation on Max, his ultimate target had been Logan, his prime goal to “become” Logan and thereby win Max's affections. When Kelpy started his chameleonlike morphing, turning him into a pseudo-Logan, Max had touched the changeling transgenic, and somehow that had been enough for the virus to be passed on—that is, to be unleashed on Kelpy.

Max and her friends—Logan, best buddy Original Cindy, Alec, Joshua, and several others—had witnessed young Kelpy's meltdown and horrifying death. Since then, Max had worked even harder to make sure that she and the man she loved never touched. Anything—the brush of a kiss, the holding of bare hands, even the most perfunctory of hugs—would be the touch of death to him.

Gem brought his coffee, placed the steaming cup in front of him and offered a warm smile, which Logan returned.

“How's Eve?” he asked the waitress.

The night after the Jam Pony hostage crisis, Gem decided that since her baby was the first transgenic to be born in freedom, the child should be named after the first woman in the world . . . hence, Eve.

“She's already standing and she wants to walk,” the slim, attractive waitress said, “though she's not quite ready yet. She's gonna be a handful.”

“Standing already?” Logan asked, astounded. “At six months?”

Max just smiled. “Good genes—that is, really,
really
good genes. All of us X5s did that.”

Logan shook his head in wonder, then sipped his coffee as Gem returned behind the counter. Max ran a hand over her face and let out a long sigh.

“You look beat,” he said. “Too bad you weren't genetically enhanced to be a mayor, not a killer.”

She gave him a weak grin. “That's how tired I am—even a weak-ass crack like that made me smile.”

He snorted. “Weak-ass, maybe. But you did smile.”

“I did smile,” Max admitted.

“And we do have much to be thankful for.”

“Yes, we do. Do I sound ungrateful . . . ?”

“Oh yeah.”

Max just shook her head. “Sorry . . . I wasn't wired up to be a leader . . . I'm a loner. A commando.”

After taking another pull from his coffee, Logan said, “Well, loner or not, there's a whole lotta people up on the roof, asking for ya.”

“Yeah?”

“Joshua, Alec, Original Cindy, Mole. I think Dix and Luke are up there. Sketchy, too . . . case you wanna toss his ass off the building.”

“Now you are tempting me . . . But it's cold up there.”

For most of the last two weeks, the weather had been miserable, even by Seattle's standards. The temperature had hung near the freezing mark, and the wind howling at thirty to forty miles per hour, with gusts as high as fifty.

Logan gave her a look. “I don't see you wearing a coat . . . Anyway, aren't you the one told me 'bout holding your breath for five minutes? In a pond under a sheet of ice? Back when you escaped from Manticore?”

“That doesn't mean I liked it.”

“Where's your Christmas spirit?”

“Christmas at Manticore didn't build a whole lotta holiday nostalgia into me.”

“How about your foster family?”

“Yeah, that was great—like when my foster father got roaring drunk and pushed my foster sister into the tree.”

Shaking his head, Logan asked, “Talk about gettin' coal in your stocking, Miss Grinch. You gotta get in the Yuletide swing.”

“I know a way, and it's not up on a cold rooftop.”

“What's that?”

“Sitting by a fire with you. What's that old song? ‘Chestnuts Roasting'?”

“See,” he said, and his smile lighted up the place. “You do have some Christmas spirit in ya.”

That smile of his—all those white teeth, those deep dimples. She loved his smile; she loved most everything about him. She just had a hard time saying so, and she knew he had a similar problem. But they both knew how they felt, and maybe that was enough.

The two of them had also been so busy of late that they barely saw each other. Logan continued to use Eyes Only as a positive propaganda machine for the transgenics, and Max always had some Terminal City crisis or other that needed attending. If it wasn't trouble with the water supply, it was building code violations, or choosing a logo for the new arts and antiques mall.

She might not have been interested in such mundane matters a few months ago, but now they were the tedious minutia that seemed to occupy her every waking moment. Having even a few minutes alone with Logan felt like finally coming to shore after swimming across Puget Sound.

“Why don't we just go up there,” Logan suggested, “see what it is the gang wants, and be done with it?”

She playfully shook her head. “I have a better idea.”

“Which is?”

“Ditch them.”

His headshake was more serious. “You know we can't.”

She huffed. “All right, we'll go up on the roof, we'll deal with whatever they want . . . on one condition.”

“Yeah?”

“The rest of the evening—it's just us. A quiet evening together. Starting with, I'll cook you dinner. I'm gonna officially fall off the vegetarian wagon tonight.”

Now, she had his attention. “Just the two of us?” he said.

“Do I stutter? Just the two of us.”

She was already out of the booth, finishing her coffee on her feet, and fishing a crumpled bill out of her pocket. “Let's go.”

Dix had the building's elevators running again; in fact, the mall was getting to be in such good shape, it was in danger of losing its funky appeal. Max and Logan went to the seventh floor, which was still in the process of remodeling and not yet open to the public.

At the end of the hall, the couple entered the stairway to the roof. As they climbed, they both pulled on stocking caps; they were already wearing gloves. When she started to open the door, Max felt the wind—it had sharp teeth!—try to drag the door from her grasp, and only her special strength allowed her to keep the thing from flying open all the way. Once Logan was through, she managed to push the thing closed; then she turned to see the others waiting for them under a gray sky, dusk settling on the city like a low-slung cloud.

Across the way, atop the main building of Terminal City, the Freak Nation flag flew, as straight out as a salute, stiff in the wind, its red, white, and black bars easily visible even from this distance, the rising red dove seeming to take flight.

The group standing before her in a loose semicircle, and Logan to her right, now made up her family. She smiled at the thought, feeling guilty at her reluctance to accept their invitation, flushed with warmth, despite the bitter cold, as she looked at them.

A girl could do a lot worse.

Original Cindy stood in the center, her puffball Afro mashed beneath a stocking cap pulled down over her ears, her hands conspicuous by their absence as they hid behind her back. Though an “ordinary,” she was a true beauty, with lively brown eyes and a wide grin that challenged the cold.

Not one to ever be considered “ordinary” on any level, though, Original Cindy's powers were somewhat more discreet than those of Max, her best friend and sistah, her “Boo”; but Cindy's attitude was in no way discreet. Original Cindy came on like a four-hundred-pound tiger on its fifth espresso, and she didn't give a diddly damn whether anyone liked that approach or not.

Which, Max knew, was probably why O.C. and her had hit it off from the beginning, each recognizing the rebel in the other and relishing it.

On Original Cindy's right stood Alec, his dark blond hair grown out some; normally he combed those locks back, though now the wind tossed them back and forth. He had sharp dark eyes and his face bore its usual wiseass smirk; he could be a self-centered jerk, Max knew, but he had his good side.

An X5, like Max, Alec had never met a hurdle too low to try to find a skirting shortcut; he would happily spend an hour looking for a way around a problem that he could've solved with hard work in half that time. Lately, though, Max had noticed that Alec—to his credit—had finally started to realize that what he'd once considered a gift might really be a flaw.

Next to Alec stood Joshua, the towering dog boy, the first of the Manticore experiments and now every bit a man, at least physically. His cruelly sheltered upbringing—literally in the basement of Manticore—had crippled his development, and on first meeting, you could take him for mentally challenged. Truth was, he was keenly intelligent, and had the best heart of them all. His long mane of brown hair thrashed furiously in the wind, but he seemed not to notice, his leonine face wearing a beatific smile that beamed like a lighthouse as he saw Max.

Beyond Joshua was Sketchy, the surfer bum/messenger turned tabloid journalist, another of Max's “ordinary” friends from Jam Pony. Of course, Sketchy wasn't ordinary in any sense other than that he wasn't a transgenic—tall and lanky, with stringy brown hair highlighted blond, Sketch seemed to be all knees, elbows, and bobbing head, a marionette operated by a clumsy puppeteer. The guy could be a beat behind, and often seemed to just be getting the joke the rest of the group had already finished laughing at.

To Original Cindy's left stood the two bald, albino engineers turned welding sculptors—Dix and Luke—and beyond them, the lizard man inexplicably dubbed Mole. Even in the heavy wind, Mole still chomped on an ever-present cigar.

“What's the dealio?” Max asked, practically yelling to be heard over the near gale.

The semicircle parted to reveal a large Christmas tree lashed to the corner of the roof with steel cables; the spruce—both tall and full—was strung with unlit lights and tinsel roping. Even with its heavy-duty moorings, it seemed the tree might fly off the building at any moment.

Max looked from the tree to Original Cindy, who still had her hands behind her back.

Eyes wide, Max shouted, “This had to be today?”

Original Cindy's grin faded and the rest of the group all developed a quick interest in studying their shoes.

Immediately realizing her insensitivity, Max plastered on a grin and said, “Don't get me wrong, guys—the tree rocks!”

Eyes rose to her, bright; smiles blossomed, glowing.

“It's just . . . it's so windy! It looks like any second it'll give Santa's sleigh a run for the money . . .”

Shrugging, Original Cindy said, “Weather report called for conditions to get better, later tonight, so we took a chance. Tree was gonna die if I let Normal take care of it one more day.”

Reagan Ronald, aka Normal, was the manager of the Jam Pony messenger service where Max and Original Cindy had both gotten jobs when they first hit Seattle. O.C. still worked there, as did Sketchy—his journalist gig wasn't yet full-time—though Max herself hadn't been back since the hostage crisis that led to the siege at Terminal City.

During Max's tenure at Jam Pony, Normal had been a pain in the ass, with a stick up his own. The biggest thrill of his life had been receiving a signed picture of President Bush (one of 'em—Max didn't know which, not that it mattered) back in his community college days when he'd been president of the campus Young Republican club.

Max gestured to the struggling pine. “You let
Normal
take care of this tree?”

Original Cindy's smile returned. “Thas a fact.”

“Our Normal? Straight-arrow, top-buttoned, stone-cold Normal?”

“I'm tellin' you, Boo, ever since he midwifed little Eve, he's one soulful white boy. Hell, he even watered the tree.”

“Please tell me that didn't involve a zipper.” Shaking her head, Max looked back at the tall plump tree, which still appeared to be struggling against the cables. “That must have taken up damn near alla Jam Pony!”

“Purt near . . . hey, but we roll with it, right?”

“I can't believe Normal went along with this.”

“You wanna really lose your mind?” O.C. looked around conspiratorially. “It was Normal's
brainstorm
.”

“Normal's idea.”

“Gettin' you guys this tree, swear on my mama, Boo.”

“Well, where is he, then?”

“Hey! Cut the man some slack, my sistah—gotta at least let 'im
pretend
he's still an asshole.”

Max was gazing at the tree; feelings of warmth were stirring in her, out on this frigid rooftop. “Well, God bless Normal . . . 'cause this is beautiful.”

Taking a hand out from behind her back, Original Cindy offered Max a black metal cube with a silver toggle switch. “Dix and Luke—their latest black box . . . Honor's yours, Boo.”

Lump in her throat, Max took the box, and glanced at her two egghead, eggheaded friends, who both nodded vigorously; then she flipped the switch. Colored lights came on all over the tree, red and white and green and blue, twinkling, sparkling, shimmering, the star at the top shining bright white, colored balls bobbling, a glowing vision in the twilight.

“It's beautiful,” Max said again, her voice hushed.

She turned to the man at her side; Logan smiled at her. The rest of the group gathered round, each taking a turn hugging Max. Even Alec—who rarely touched anyone, other than the occasional one-night-stand female he deigned with his passing presence—gave in.

All but Logan.

He stayed a step or two back—as usual, she and he were aware of the required distance between them.

“This is gonna be a dope spot for watchin' the comet, Christmas Eve,” Original Cindy pointed out.

The whole country was awaiting the arrival of the so-called Christmas star, the once-every-two-thousand-years passing of a comet that some astronomers thought might also have been the fabled star of Bethlehem.

Max smirked. “According to Sketchy's rag, the comet signals the end of the world.”

“According to Sketchy's rag,” Original Cindy said, “Elvis is coming back New Year's, on a flyin' saucer.”