Heathen

What's the best way to get blood off clothes? Burning them was becoming a bad habit. It wasn't like I was above stealing—though it'd be funny. Walking around buck naked flashing my junk at all the respectable ladies on this Godforsaken Earth. Really, though, I needed to look it up—how to get bloodstains off clothes? Better do it on an incognito window… Maybe in a library's computer in the next town over just to be safe.

My hobby isn't what anyone would call legal. Or safe. Or…

"Wow—I really feel you trying, chump!" I yelled, heading for a ledge having a fire escape as a target. Come on, a little faster. You needed to run as fast as you could before the jump, get as close to slipping off… And push! I put all the force I could into that one impulse, into my left foot. I sailed through the air. The rush of free-falling only heightening my already spiked adrenaline levels, before my palms met rusted metal.

Fingers curling on tight. Bones aching, I pulled myself over the railing. Breathe, Jay. Breathe and—

"Shit," I ran up the stairs, going for the top of the another building. "This fucker's actually putting up a chase." Too bad I was the one being chased.

I wasn't a betting man—but if I had to guess, I'd say this dude's H-gene had heightened his endurance. For sure.

Ignoring the sweat clinging to my body, itching my skin and dripping from my hairline, I ran with everything I had and with what I didn't. I knew I should've eaten two large pizzas. Always needed to stack on carbs before a patrol. Stupid, Jay, so idiotically—

I heard a clang behind me. Dude had just repeated my feat. Great. The bloodhound was right on my tail.

I gritted my teeth. I couldn't keep making like a monkey, jumping from building to building. This night had been long—about four hours long. There were risks I'd learned not to take, like forcing myself across a huge gap when I was so clearly feeling energy depleted. Once had been all I'd needed. Ended up with a broken arm and two broken ribs. Had been off the streets for about a month—I hated sitting still.

Okay—I caught an emergency door—time for a detour. I ran up and kicked out against it. It flew open—banging off the wall. I rushed inside, not stopping to close it. The guy would just open it, there was no way for me to make a blockage. I ran down the dark hall doing a rough left, almost slipping on a puddle. Leaky pipes. I rammed my hands against the elevator doors.

OUT OF ORDER

Fucking-tastic.

Looking left and right I squinted. Images sharpened in the dark, showing me an image clear as day. Eyes like a cat. Bingo—stairwell. Big breather and… Go! I ran like fire was licking at my heels. This flight of stairs was hellish. Never ending. I was taking two stairs at a time. My heartbeat jumped when heavy footfalls echoed from above. Faster, gotta be faster, faster. Pain pummeled into my leg muscles, pain so bad I thought the fibers would tear. With a groan, I jumped over five last stairs, landing in a practiced crouch. I got up quickly, I needed a head start to lose this douche.

Fucker. Fucker. Fuck—

"This…" I gasped, shoulders slumped. I heaved again, deeply. "Is just not… my night!" I hissed rolling my shoulders, cracking my neck taking a few steps back. Time to make like a bull and charge with hard-ass horns.

The door upstairs hadn't been closed. Pretty damn sure about it. This one? The front door? I hit once. I shook myself from shock. Again. The door shook, whining under my strength. One… more… time.

I charged thinking about what I always thought about when I needed anger. Family. Yeah, I was seeing red now. With a grunt, I rammed my shoulder into the door and stumbled outside, into fresh air. No time to stop, no time to think. I smirked under my hood. Not thinking was how I rolled anyway.

This wasn't the most crowded neighborhood or the richest. People didn't exactly care about broken doors, street brawls, but there was a limit as to how long the police—or what passed for it—would come checking out crimes. I hightailed toward the alley on the building's left. Empty. I searched with trained eyes from spending nights plunged in darkness.

I sighed, smiling.

Ah, now things were coming up Wheeler. A cut fence. I ran up to it, squeezing through the cut wires. A sharp edge cut across my right palm, I ignored it, flexing my hurt hand—willing the biting pain to the back burner of my mind. I ran past a dumpster, then edged along the alley wall to spy if the coast was clear. A couple of drunken idiots were sitting outside a broken down club. Blood ran down my fingers, pelting the ground and my boots. Just a scratch, but it could get worse if the bastard caught up.

I wasn't armed with my guns. All I had was a hunting knife. Which wasn't an actual problem, since I'd trained with every cold weapon from swords the length of my arm to daggers the size of my hand. I wasn't physically apt, not tonight.

Seriously, this was the worse reckon patrol ever. Best chance to get out was underground. Through the old subway tunnels. There were tons of abandoned networks since the government put an ending to subways everywhere. The GTP—gene triggering program—had taken too much money to fund resources and research. The subways hadn't been the only thing they'd cut loose. Heading out I quickened my pace, keeping my injured hand in a fist, trying to stem the blood flow. I kept my head down—strategically—surveying as much as possible, keeping my ears open for uneven footfalls. Looking over my shoulder would be too suspicious, I needed to look like I fit in. That I belonged in this shitty neighborhood.

Sizzling came from overhead. The spotlight under my feet flickered in and out of existence. Ah. That's how my brain felt, like a motherfucking bulb on the fritz of giving out. I should've eaten that second pizza—and I should've slept a couple of hours. Being awake for almost forty-eight hours wasn't healthy business.

I exhaled slowly, breathing too loud was something I'd been afraid of doing since I was a kid. Every time I'd woken up from a nightmare I'd been afraid of moving and breathing loudly. Afraid the monsters were real and were in the shadows of my bedroom just waiting for a tiny sign of life to pounce.

Did it still freak me out? Hmm.

I walked two more blocks before I spotted an outdated sign. It was painted over with some unreadable graffiti, but I saw the metro logo well enough. It was pointing left. So far, I'd walked by homeless people—a lot of them. Again, this was a bad district. Other people walked by me, some were hookers, some tried getting my attention, calling me 'honey', 'sweetie', 'hunk'. If this was some leisure walk, I might have stopped to look them over. Wouldn't be my first time paying for sex. In my line of work, you didn't get to meet people, fall in love, have a couple of kids and all the fairy tale crap my sister grew up thirsting for. At least, that's how she'd been last time I'd seen her. She'd been nine then. I'd been thirteen.

People changed? Hmm.

Bounding down the subway stairs I finally took a minute to whirl around and spy a wide glance over my shoulder. I didn't see my fierce stalker. Nope, no red-headed motherfucker standing out in any corner.

With a satisfied wolfish grin, I turned forward and faced the dimly lit tunnel. Lights—the ones that still lived—flickered just like the one on the street, only this time the annoying pings and peek-a-boo show was a thousand times more annoying.

"Be grateful there's light down here…" I muttered to myself. I trusted my heightened vision, but as tired as I felt, I loved the help.

There were bound to be more homeless people in these tunnels. I'd used this escape route before, normally they ignored me, thinking I was just another unlucky bastard who'd run out of money, been kicked out on the street and was looking for a place to keep warm and safe from thugs.

"Pepperoni… no olives… Hmm, yeah. That's what I'm gunning down next…" talking to myself was a habit I'd developed along the years. Since the Facility, I thought darkly. Now it was something I did when I was tuckered out. Kept me awake. Mostly.

Blinking, I lifted my head to read the signs over the splitting tunnels. Which one would take me home? Stifling a groan, I took the one on the right. Jumping off the platform, landing on the old tracks. With any luck, I'd get home in half an hour.

***

Luck, shmuck.

It'd taken me almost an hour and a half to reach destination: mi casa. Oh, God. My brain was so scrambled it was speaking multilanguages. Too heavy right now. Too heavy… I all but slammed my steel reinforced door. I squinted at it, hating the four locks. They looked too many. Somehow, I summoned enough focus to lock up. I threw my key onto my round kitchen table. The pizza card box from earlier was sitting there, along with an empty Mountain Dew bottle. Oh, and my cigarettes. A flutter for a fix rose—it was squished by growing hunger for sleep. Heavy lids fell once, twice. I stumbled into a chair. Yawning, I rubbed my head with my good hand.

"…don't leave things in the middle of the room…"

Why couldn't the bed be here? For real, man. For fucking real. Somehow, someway, I walked towards the bedroom. Good thing this was a studio apartment and not a mansion. Couldn't get lost here—well, not true. I'd once made my way to the bathroom totally convinced it was the bedroom. Long story short, the tub ended up my bed.

My arm muscles protested as I unzipped my hoodie, shimming it off. It fell in a heap on the floor. Next, I unstrapped the Kevlar vest and I know it's supposed to be lighter—and it was—than all other traditional materials, still like everything else right now, it weighed more than a bag of rocks. It fell on my hoodie with a muted thump. Taking off the wife-beater would be too much work, lifting my arms and all…

"Hello bed," I slurred smiling into the darkness of my room. The only light coming in came from the neon sign across the street, through my shutters. I pulled off my serrated knife, slipping it under my pillow before I fell face-forward on my bed. Somewhere in my head I knew my hand was still stinging from that cut, that bruises were starting to show on my shoulder from bulldozing the door. I didn't care. This was my safe house, keyword: safe. I sagged into the mattress, into my pillow.

Did those nightmares still freak me out? No, nightmares weren't real. I'd learned it the hard way. If there was anything to be feared in this world, it was people. People touched by high-tech science. People who liked to play God and hid the consequences—the severe side effects.

People changed? Yeah, people did. Question was… what type of change? The voluntary type or the forced kind? The kind parents paid labs for.

My thoughts drifted a little longer, lingering on tonight's gone-wrong spying mission. I'd been spotted—made—before, not such a big surprise. But not on reckon patrols. They'd had someone on the lookout for me—for people like me. Not that I knew tons of 'lunatics' who liked going out at night and play vigilante.

Whatever went down at that meeting had been big—they'd picked a broken down district. Not Mead Lab's usual MO. Something big… I was going to find out what.