Dragon Virus (4 page)

Jordan couldn’t remember whose arm it had been — wasn’t him,
but it might have been Ollie, who moved away the next year. Teacher had
freaked, there were town meetings that came to nothing ’cause it was illegal to
not let them go to school with everyone else. People had yelled about it for
almost a year, both sides. His mom had cried every night, when she thought he
couldn’t hear.

He never told her he could hear almost everything, long as
the air was clear.

o0o

“Bag it!” Max yelled, and Jordan surged forward to snatch
the ball from his hands, rolling forward to avoid the other team’s grounders.
Up on his knees, shoulders flexing to toss the heavy rubber ball at Green’s
goal. Green at random, because that’s the way he rolled. Blue was a weaker
team; Beth and Steve didn’t have Changes, but they were fast and smart, and
they had Carly. Blue team — Ray, Sen and Ian — were new to the game, and hadn’t
really gotten good at it yet.

“Goal!” He pumped one arm into the air as Beth missed the
defense and the ball thunked home.

“And game.” She collapsed next to him on the ground. “Nice
shot, earless wonder. How the hell do you throw so hard?”

“Ancient secret, never taught to icky girls.”

She thwaped him on the shoulder, and he grinned, lying on
his back and staring up at the blue sky. Beth wasn’t bad, for a normal. Her
brother Rob was a pain in the butt, one of the older kids who stared, and
called them freaks. She’d told Rob off more than once, in front of his friends,
even. Jordan knew that she took a lot of flack at home for hanging with them,
but she didn’t seem to care. And her dad stopped once to give him a ride home
when it was raining. You couldn’t help who your family was, he supposed.

“They’re scared,” his mother told him, not about Beth’s
family but people in general. “Scared because you’re the first. People are always scared
of what comes first.”

Although they weren’t the first, not really. The first ones
died, mostly when they were babies, because of internal stuff not forming
right. Even the second ones died, a lot of them who shouldn’t have, medically,
until the Alteration Protection Act which he wasn’t supposed to know about but
Carly found on the ’net and they all read way back in third grade, the law that
made it illegal for doctors to not do whatever it took to keep ’em alive.

“Come on, you stupid grounders.” Ray’s skin glinted pale
green, and he scratched at one scale absently as he extended the other hand
first to Beth, then to Jordan, pulling them to their feet without effort.

“I’d kill for a soda,” Ian said. “Gonna ride by Dackey’s.
Anyone else?”

“Count me in.” It was still early in the summer, not too hot
yet and pretty dry, but Jordan’s shirt was sticking to his back and his scalp was
sweating. Freeball wasn’t for wusses.

Beth and Steve had to get home, and Sen was broke, again. Ray
wouldn’t go — he rarely went anywhere other than school and home. His mom
worried a lot.

“Can someone give me a lift?” Marta’s bike had been stolen
last week, and Dackey’s was too far to walk.

“You can ride with me,” Ian offered, making a gallant bow that
failed to look even remotely graceful. Jordan snorted — Ian would do a lot
better if he let that tail out of his pants all the time and used it for
balance like it was meant, more than just when they were playing. But people
who could overlook his ears, or Carly’s teeth, or even Marta’s winglets, so
long as she kept them folded, just freaked over a tail. And Ray, well, Ray was
screwed, even if his mom would yell at him for using that word. Even the social
services women who kept trying to talk mom into taking their money for surgery
for his ears looked the other way when Ray walked by.

He was too Changed. He wouldn’t even be in school if his dad
wasn’t the biggest hardass on the planet, and took it all the way to court.

There were seven of them in Applewood. Carly, Ray, Ian, Sen,
Marta and him — and Leon, whose folks sent him to a special school. You couldn’t
really count Leon, though. He was a mess, closer to the old ones, the ones who
hadn’t lived, than them. He wasn’t real Changed.

For one thing, he was slow.

The Applewood Seven, the newspapers had called them, back
when it was still a big deal.

As though reading his mind, Marta asked, “Did anyone else
get reporters hanging around their house last week after that guy, the
scientist, was on
The Tonight Show
?”

Jordan had, until his mom took out a shotgun and told them
to clear out or she’d show them what a southern girl could do with low-life
possums. He’d laughed at that, until he’d seen how mad she was. He thought it
would have been cool to be interviewed, but not if it made her that mad.

“My dad called the cops on ’em.”

“Yeah, so did my dad. Said it ‘wasn’t conducive to me
leading a normal life.’”

Carly’s folks were doctors — “shrinks,” his mom said — and
really big on stuff like that. Most of the words his mom approved of him
knowing, he’d learned from Carly.

“Who wants a normal life?” Ian asked.

There was a pause as they came to where their bikes were
stacked on the rack.

“I do,” Marta said. Jordan wasn’t surprised. Marta wanted to
be invisible, she didn’t want anyone looking at her, anyone watching her. To
her, that was “normal.”

“Well, I don’t.” Ian pulled his bike out of the rack, got on
it. “Last one to Pine Street’s a wussy normal-boy!” And he took off, legs pumping
madly. Max yelped in outrage, grabbing his bike and running with it, trying to
catch up even as he got a leg over and started pedaling. Carly laughed and
followed hard on their heels on her brand-new ten-speed.

“So much for me getting a ride with him or Max,” Marta said
in disgust. “Can I ride with you, Jor?”

“Yeah, sure.” His bike was old, a second-hand dirt bike one
of the ladies from the Outreach Group gave him last year, but it would take
their weight. Wasn’t like Marta weighed anything, really, with her bones so
bird-light.

“Here, let me carry your bag,” she said, slinging it over
her shoulder with hers. They were identical backpacks, dark green army-navy
surplus her mom had bought for all of them at the beginning of the school year,
but Marta’s had an owl appliquéd on the back, while his was plain and more worn
at the corners.

Jordan took the first corner at full speed, enjoying the
feel of the warm air hitting his face. From the yelp Marta let out, she liked
it too.

“I wish they were real wings,” she shouted in his ear. “I’d
fly away and never come back down.”

For her, for that, he took the next corner even faster, and
grinned at the yelp of glee that came from behind him. Traffic was light, and
only a few people were out, walking their dogs or going to a friends’ house or
something. He saw Mrs. Adelaide and waved. She had taught music in school
before retiring last year, and told him he was her very best piano student,
that music “grew inside him.”

That was the thing about the Change, the part his mom didn’t
want to think about, but maybe Ms. Adelaide knew. It wasn’t just the way he
looked, or the way he heard, it changed something inside his head, too. People
just saw the outsides and thought that’s all it was, something you could “fix”
with lots of surgery. You’d only just be pretending, though.

Graceland Avenue turned into Apple, which became Oak, Ian
and Max far ahead of them, pedaling madly, then the last corner and Pine Street
up ahead. Carly was nowhere to be seen. She must have won already.

“Wussy normal-boy,” he said to himself, then laughed,
hearing Marta’s giggle in his ear. If the guy on
The Tonight Show
last week, the one who’d caused all the mess with
the reporters, was right, the mutated gene that caused the Change was really
just evolution leapfrogging, and some day
he
would be the normal one. Well, not him, but anyone Changed.

And the normals would be the weirdos.

He stopped pedaling, letting the bike coast around the last
corner. Dackey’s was right there, and with his luck he’d hit somebody hanging
around outside the store and never hear the end of it. Not to mention his mom’d
ground him for a year.

His attention was pretty much focused on the road in front
of him, to make sure there wasn’t any traffic coming from the little strip mall
across the street, so when Marta gasped in his ear he thought he’d missed a car
somehow and jerked the handlebars hard, to pull up onto the curb.

The first thing he saw was Carly standing over her bike in
the street in front of Dackey’s. She was gripping the handlebars like she was
afraid the bike was going to take off without her, staring at the scene on the
sidewalk.

“Oooo, monkey boy’s mad! Whatcha gonna do, throw banana
peels at me, monkey boy?”

Jordan dropped the bike on the grass, and the two of them
hid, instinctively, behind the trunk of a nearby tree. He kept Marta behind
him, feeling her leaning into him as she peeked around his arm.

Two older boys, maybe ninth graders, and they were standing
way too close to Ian.

Most people kept their distance, even when they were being
nice, like the Change could rub off and go home with them. One of the boys,
dark-haired, reached out and shoved Ian on the shoulder, making him stagger a
little.

“Leave him alone!” Max was being held by another boy, one
arm twisted behind his back at an angle that had to hurt.

“You ought to pick your playmates more carefully, Max,” the
boy holding him said, and with a rush of anger Jordan recognized him as Beth’s
big brother Rob. “Maybe this’ll teach you.”

Carly snarled and, dropping her bike with a clatter, rushed
at the boys still yelling at Ian. The one with lighter hair didn’t even look,
just backhanded her across the face and sent her flying on to the sidewalk on
her butt.

Marta whimpered, and Jordan swallowed hard. He wanted to go
to Carly’s defense, wanted to help Ian — but what could he do? Where were the
adults? Why didn’t Mr. Dackey come out and do something?

“Stay here,” Marta whispered. “Don’t move and maybe they won’t
see us. Max can take care of them. Maybe they’ll go away.”

He could hear the fluttering of her wing flaps, the way she
always did when she was scared, like she really could fly up and away from
everything. She was trembling, even though he knew she couldn’t hear what he
did, with his inverted ears.

“Man, Jack, hitting a girl. That’s so not cool.”

Ian, sounding braver than Jordan could ever be, in a hundred
million years.

“That’s not a girl, that’s a thing. You’re all
things
.”

Carly was wiping her face with the back of her hand. Jordan
couldn’t see if it was blood or tears. “I’m as close to a girl as you’re ever
going to know, snot-face.”

“Rob, stop this.” Max’s voice was shaking, but Jordan couldn’t
tell if it was from anger or fear. Probably both. “He’s just a kid. What did he
ever do to you?”

Rob shook Max’s arm, as though to make him pay better
attention. “Look at them, Max. Christ, you’re bad as Beth.
Look
at them. They’re not human. They’re mutants, mistakes. Not a single one of ’em’s the same, isn’t that proof enough?

“I know your sister’s one of them, but you’ve got to think
about yourself, first. You’re one of us, not them. Your body’s already picked your
side.”

Max spat on the ground, the phlegm hitting just next to the
toe of Rob’s shoes.

“They’re my friends. You’re a creep and a bigot. I’d rather
be with them.”

“Freak-lover,” Jack said.

Rob sighed, and Jordan was reminded of the way Mr. Lipsky
used to sign when someone said something really stupid in class. “I’m trying to
look out for you, Max. Do you a favor. Don’t be a wiseass, or you’ll end up
with them in more ways than one.”

There was a snick of something metallic, like a switchblade
opening, and the dark-haired boy lunged for Ian, catching him by the arm and
swinging him around so that he fell face-down over the other boy’s leg.

“Hold him, Jack. Don’t let the little monkey wriggle too
bad. We don’t want to cut the wrong thing off. At least not yet.” Then he moved to
stand over Ian, blocking Jordan’s view of whatever was happening.

“No!” Max screamed, and Carly tried again to attack Jack,
but was kicked away. This time, Jordan heard the distinct sound of her arm
breaking as she fell, an ugly greenstick crunch between her elbow and wrist
that made him wince in sympathy.

“Get the little monkey’s jeans off,” Jack ordered. “Let’s
see how much of a freak he really is.” He gestured, and the sun caught the
blade in his hand, making Jordan’s eyes close against the sudden glare. It was
a hunting knife, the kind you saw on those shopping channel specials. He couldn’t
see the handle but the blade looked like it could carve up a deer no problem.

The tip was hooked, and the edge of the blade was jagged
like... serrated, that was it. Jordan smelled his own fear like a slap in the
face, and fought it down.

“Marta, run. Fly!” His whisper caught them both by surprise.
He didn’t know what he was going to do, or what was going to happen, but Marta
shouldn’t see any more of it. “Go, get help! Find someone, anyone!”

He felt her hair brush against his neck as she nodded, and
then she was gone. He could hear the sound of her sneakers as they hit the
pavement, and the harshness of her breathing, and then all his attention was on
the scene in front of him.

Mr. D. wasn’t going to come out and help. Nobody was going
to come and help.

Jordan tasted something sour in his mouth, and grit his
teeth against the dizziness that threatened to overwhelm him. Where were the
reporters now? Nobody cared enough to stop this. Nobody cared at all.

“Rob, don’t let them do this!” Max, his voice high and
scared. “You’re going to hurt him!”