The Other Eight (4 page)

“I haven’t gotten any orders.”

“You might want to check your e-mail,
sir.”

Siegel cleared his throat viciously and
tapped the intercom.

“Roberts!”

“Yes, sir. I have the e-mail right here.
Major St. John is correct,” the clerk instantaneously replied.

“I’d better get working then. Wouldn’t want
to violate any orders. Private Summers?”

“Yes, sir, right behind you.”

Aiken quickly got up and left the room
through the still-opened door, attempting to ignore the feeling
that General Siegel was trying to burn a hole through the back of
his head with only the force of his glare. Once they were out in
the hall and on their way to his office, Aiken turned to
Summers.

“Thank God for that guy,” he whispered.

“Yes, well, we’ll see if you change your tune
if he sticks around.”

“Why? Is he trouble?”

“Again, I’ve only been here for a little
while, and so far I’ve been too far down the ladder to have to deal
with him, but most people don’t just call him Major St. John.”

“What do they call him?”

“It varies, but usually it involves a
colorful adjective. I used to think his first initial was F, if you
know what I mean.”

“Ah. Well, he can’t be worse than
Siegel.”

Now that it was clear that he wasn’t going to
face a court-martial or a firing squad or whatever it was that
happened to people involved with security leaks, Aiken could feel a
sort of giddiness coming over him. Meta-humans were rare. At the
best estimate, the gene occurred in less than one-half of one
percent of the population, and screening wasn’t very widespread.
Finding even one of them to interview had been a challenge back in
his college days. The profiles they had on file were tantalizing,
but they didn’t ask the sorts of questions he wanted answered. Now
he was facing the mother lode of sample sets. It was going to be
glorious.

In a Chinese
buffet in rural Washington, a pair of parents had just sat down
with their third helping of steamed crab legs. Their teenaged
daughter was already at the table. A plate of what had once been
beef and broccoli rested in front of her, abandoned after an
exhaustive search had failed to turn up any more meat among the
pile of useless vegetables.

“Janet, put the phone away, you’re at the
table,” scolded the mother. The teen didn’t look away from the
screen of her smartphone.

“Waitress!” yelled the father. “We’ve been
waiting for refills on these beverages for five minutes.”

A thin, young Asian woman hurried up to the
table with the weary and worn expression of someone who had been
filling glasses with sugary beverages for about three hours longer
than sanity could withstand. Now she was on dead-eyed autopilot
until quitting time. With a pitcher in each hand, she eyed the
glasses on the table. The two lemon-slice-bearing glasses were
filled with diet cola, the bare glass, with regular. She turned to
make another sweep of the nearby tables when the father sampled his
drink and caught her by the arm, causing her to slosh some of the
soft drink onto the sleeve of her shirt.

“Excuse me,” the man blurted, the tone of the
phrase making it clear that it was in this case a euphemism for
‘come back here, you idiot.’ “This is diet. I had regular with
lemon.” He turned to his wife. “You’d think she would have
asked.”

The waitress scowled slightly. “Tortoise
magnet,” she said.

The father twitched. “What?”

“Oh, so sorry,” the waitress said in a thick
Chinese accent. “My English is not so good. I mean to say I will
get you a new beverage, very much fastly.”

“Oh. Figures. Well, get on that, then,” he
said.

The waitress turned to head for the kitchen,
face twisting into a sneer, but before she got two steps, a video
on the smartphone caught her ear. It was the voice of a local
newscaster.

“… was first thought to be a hoax has now
been confirmed by representatives of DARPA. The US Army has issued
an open recruitment drive for any ‘enhanced human beings’ who would
like to serve their country. Spokesperson Major Chester St. John
made the following statement…”

The waitress quickly circled around the table
and peered over the shoulder of the daughter. On the screen was the
sleazy Major St. John, talking up the special coalition created to
assemble the team and describing where applicants could find
additional information.

“Um, aren’t you supposed to be getting me a
new drink?” griped the father, who had reached across to steal a
sip from his wife’s full-calorie cola.

“Festival hula,” the waitress said, prompting
another twitch from him at the precise moment he put the glass to
his lips. The result was a splash of cola that got up his nose,
down his shirt, and all over his pants.

She marched quickly toward the kitchen again,
a satisfied grin on her face as the man sputtered and yelled about
this outrage. “Mom! I’m taking my break!” she called out, no trace
of an accent in her words this time. She set down her pitchers at
the nearest table and started to work at her apron strings. “And
get someone to cover for me. I’m heading out of town for a
while!”

#

In an office building in Indiana at the end
of a long day, a maintenance man was just finishing up his last
shift before his vacation. He was gliding out of middle age, with
the patchy scatterings of gray beginning to claim his previously
black hair and peppering his neatly trimmed mustache. A lifetime of
hard work had left him with a formidable build on a towering
six-foot-three-inch frame. Hanging by his side was a canvas
messenger bag, bulging slightly with its contents.

“You sure you want to do this, Floyd?” asked
his partner, a shorter, fatter man, who was balding rather than
graying. A blue cap to match their jumpsuits represented his
halfhearted attempt to cover it up.

“I’d say I have to, John,” said Floyd. “I’m
proud of the work I’ve done here, but I’ve only got a few good
years left in me before my health starts to slide. And let’s face
it, I haven’t exactly been adventurous. I mean, when’s the last
time I even left town? Before you were hired, probably. This is my
last chance at serving a higher purpose, no doubt about it.”

“A higher purpose than general maintenance
and electronics work at the third regional headquarters of
Flemington Toiletry Sales and Distribution Incorporated—does such a
thing exist?” John asked, removing his hat and putting it to his
heart as he said the name. “Seriously, though. You’ll be up against
kids half your age. What good you figure you’ll be? There’s
probably an age limit on these things.”

“If so, then that’s all she wrote. I’ll come
back here and get back to doing all the work so you can do whatever
it is you do in the backroom all day.”

“Just the way God intended it.”

Floyd tightened the last few screws on the
casing of a drinking fountain and pressed the lever, sending an arc
of water spritzing into the air.

“There. That’s that. End of my shift. I got
an awful lot of vacation saved up. Probably won’t be back for a
while. Shucks. Might never be back, for all I know. My bags are all
packed and in my car, so I figure I’ll head out directly.”

He shook hands and slapped his partner on the
back.

“Pleasure working with ya, Floyd,” John
remarked. “See you in a few days when ya wash outta this whole
mess.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, John. Now
before I go, I’ll ask you one last time. You were supposed to
replace all of the bulbs around here that came out of my bag. Are
you sure you got them all?”

“Sure I’m sure, Floyd,” John said. “What do
you take me for, some sort of lazy idiot?”

“You said it, not me. All right then, so long
John.”

“So long, Floyd. Figure I’ll stay on and do
some overtime.”

“Take it while you can get it.”

The older man paced down the hall and out
through the service exit. A minute later the beat-up engine of a
1976 Ford Granada coughed to life, and he rode off toward the
interstate. Twenty minutes after that, just as John was rethinking
his overtime plans in favor of a night of chicken wings and fishing
shows, he heard an odd rattling noise. Looking up, he saw three of
four fluorescent tubes in the ceiling fixture shuddering in place.
A similar sound began to radiate from the hall, and from just about
every door along its length as well. Finally there was a puff of
yellow-white smoke, and the rattling bulbs simply vanished,
flickering out of existence one by one. John sniffed and looked
around in the now almost completely darkened room.

“I suppose I may have missed one or two, come
to think of it.”

#

At a bland gray counter between two drab blue
cubicle walls in a DMV just outside Chicago, a white-collar drone
was tapping away at a keyboard. A cardboard sign labeled him
Preston Logan. He had not-quite-orderly blond hair, day old
stubble, and a face completely devoid of expression. So far the day
had been comprised of a steady stream of irritated people trudging
in a slow-moving line, waiting entirely too long to engage in some
manner of vehicle-related bureaucracy.

“Face the camera. Wait for the flash. Don’t
smile,” he stated lifelessly.

Most days he would make it from nine to five
without saying anything but those three sentences. To be fair, all
three were rather unnecessary. By now most people knew how a camera
worked, and no one who has stood in line for more than forty
minutes has ever had to be told not to smile. Pictures were
snapped, licenses were renewed, and the line shuffled forward. When
a digital tune broke through the monotony, Preston tugged a
smartphone from his pocket, swiped to answer, and crammed it
between his ear and shoulder without skipping a beat.

“Yeah, Mom? Face the camera. Wait for the
flash. Don’t smile.”

“Are you near a computer?” asked the woman on
the other end.

“It is the twenty-first century. I’m always
near a computer. I’m near
five
computers. What’s up?”

“I have a website I want you to go to.
There’s a video,” she said. Her voice was almost giddy.

“Yeah, I can’t do a video, Mom. I’m busy
serving the public. Wait for the flash,
please.
”

“This is important, Preston.”

He sighed. “Keith. Man the fort. I’m taking a
cigarette break.”

“When did you start smoking?”

“I didn’t, but they don’t give you
humor-your-mother breaks. Give me two seconds.”

He climbed out of the seat, leaving his
crucial service to be done by his trusted second in command, who
may or may not have been aware of what he was supposed to be
covering. Preston then navigated a few twisting aisles until he
reached the break room, which was magnificently appointed with all
of the best conveniences the prior decade could offer, including
folding chairs, a now useless rabbit-ear TV, and a vending machine
that paid out about as often as a slot machine. He pulled his
backpack out from where he’d stashed it, slipped out a tablet, and
woke it up.

“Where to, Mom? And this better not be
another cat video.”

“I e-mailed it.”

He tapped and swiped until he found the
message, then let it load. It was a newscast covering the superhero
recruitment. As it became clear what the story was about, and the
ramifications of it, his posture drooped and his expression
hardened.

“I don’t know, Mom…”

“Preston, you know your dad would not have
rested until you tried out.”

“Considering what happened to Dad, I’d like
to think he would have changed his mind about that.”

“I think we both know that’s not the
case.”

“I really don’t think—”

“I’m not asking you to make the decision
right now.”

“Yeah, but this is pretty—”

“Just think about it.”

He sighed heavily. “Okay. Good-bye, Mom.”

He hung up the phone. For a few moments he
stared at the screen of icons against the default phone wallpaper
he’d never bothered to change. One icon was garnished with a little
red number 1, indicating he had a saved voice mail message.

“I should delete that,” he muttered. “I
certainly shouldn’t
listen
to it again.”

His fingers ignored the infallible logic and
tapped the icon.

“Yeah, Preston. This is Gina. I know what you
saw, and… look, I just wanted someone exciting for once. You’re a
nice guy, but you
never
take a risk. Sorry about everything.
So… bye.”

He sighed again. An older man came to the
door, a fellow with a firmer grip on the dress code and an overall
stressed-out attitude that screamed “middle management.”

“Logan. I’m gonna need you back out at the
camera. Keith has somehow managed to put the same photo of an old
lady on seven different licenses already,” grumbled the
manager.

“Yeah, I’ll be right out, sir,” he said. His
eyes lingered on the contact information attached to the news
report. “Say, boss. I’ve got some vacation saved up…”

It had been a
long day already. Ever since the “casting call” had gone out, the
DARPA building had been besieged by every manner of would-be
superhero imaginable. As requested, Dr. Aiken created a
standardized form to be filled out by all applicants in order to
speed up the screening process, as well as a questionnaire and
survey to get a behavioral baseline. Once they had filled out the
form, and the more overtly unstable applicants had been rejected,
the mob of “special” individuals were given numbers and directed to
an interview room set up in a temporary facility constructed in a
formerly vacant lot a few miles outside of the Capital Beltway. Per
Aiken’s requests, the setup was roughly the same as one of the
behavioral laboratories back in his old university. Flimsy walls
framed out a well-lit white room with a large one-way glass mirror
along one wall, behind which General Siegel and a few of his staff
sat to observe. Inside, a metal table stacked with folders
contained applicant information, a phone, and a laptop. On one side
stood two folding chairs occupied by Dr. Aiken and Private Summers.
A third chair intended for the applicant stood on the opposite side
of the table. Initially the doctor had insisted that he and Private
Summers be the only ones in the room, in order to “engender an
atmosphere of trust.” That policy was abandoned when the third
applicant, The Hocker, attempted to demonstrate his ability to spit
sunflower seeds at lethal velocity.