The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage (35 page)

Every stranger to ever cross my path has looked at me with surprise or fear or revulsion or my absolute favorite, pity. I’ve lived with adults treating me like I must be retarded because of the big eyes and weird head and the short hair. My own mother loved to refer to me as her “special” guy.

I was alone, everywhere, with everyone.

I thought maybe Donner’s Declaration would change all that, but no. I’m not even a Sovereign. No such luck. I can’t even rate being a real metahuman. I’m the unexpected offspring of a failed military experiment.

I thought Lina would change that, too, but no. Not in any way that really mattered.

Project: Rancher outcome: one crazy, uncontrollable animal man and the freakish sport he made in turn, and left behind.

If the intended result was to make a killing machine, a gun loaded with teeth and nails and inhuman strength and speed and rage, rage, rage…that’s what I would be.

There was no point in pretending I was anything else.

I thought my progression had peaked with Evelyn. I didn’t mean to kill her. I lashed out at her in self-defense and fear. She was stupid enough to point the gun at her own head. I didn’t want it. I didn’t like it.

I was wrong.

The progression would end in the dirt and pine needles on a hillside in Montana. It would end when I dug my fingers into Lou Uldare’s throat and pulled meat away until I could see that motherfucker’s spinal chord.

His face was purple. I relaxed my grip so that he could pull in a few ragged, painful swallows of air.

He shat himself then, too. It smelled like surrender. It smelled great.

“This is what you get,” I said to him.

I caught Byron’s scent. All I could see was Uldare and black and red in my peripheral vision, but I knew he was there.

“Nate! Lay off!”

I pulled my right hand back and curled it into a stiff claw.

Uldare wept. A bubble of bloody snot grew on his nostril. He was a destroyed person.

“This is what you get.”

I hoped the blood would shower me when I ripped the first gibbet of flesh from his throat.

Instead, I felt hands under my arms. I was pulled away, and up. I hit the ground on my right shoulder, and the air rushed from my lungs.

I wanted to roar with frustration. I could barely catch a breath.

I saw Uldare twist onto his belly and try to slink off.

No. He wasn’t getting away. Not again.

Byron reached down, grabbed Uldare by the collar, and tossed him. He hit the pavement twenty feet down the hill, feet first. One of his ankles bent. He went down.

I could still get to him. One leap, and I could be on him. I could still finish the fucker.

I got to my feet.

“Nate.”

Byron put his hand on my chest.

“You’ll lose that,” I rasped.

“No. Nate. They’re working on him. Look.”

He grabbed my right shoulder, hard, and pain shot down my arm and my back. I was helpless. He twisted me and pointed. “Look. Your dad’s still alive.”

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Thirty Three

I was told they gave Denver and Sandy access to one of the empty apartments to get cleaned up and rest. Byron and his friend Haze took me to the cafeteria and let me refuel my spent metabolism with a plate full of everything ready to eat in the place.

While I stuffed my face more out of necessity than with any sense of enthusiasm, Byron and Haze tried distracting me from the fact that doctors were operating on my father.

“This place is a trip,” Byron said. “It’s, like, almost totally self-…you know…they can do everything right here.”

Haze grinned and looked sideways at Byron. “Self-sufficient?”

“Right.” Byron nodded. “The cafeteria; there’s an arcade—"

Haze raised her hand. “High score,
Star Castles
, right here.”

Byron glanced at her and smiled, then turned back to me. “We even get cable in our apartments…heck, we get our own apartments! That’s pretty cool.”

“Beats living with your dad, huh?”

Byron shrugged, threw up his hands and blew air through his lips. “Dude, I don’t even know what to make of my dad. He’s been harassing this place since I got here; he’s trying to sue you guys…then he shows up on Declaration Day with some guy they tell me he saved from certain death, or whatever?” He shook his head. “Who is that? Not the dad I remember, that’s for fucking sure.”

Haze picked up one of my leftover toast crusts and gave me an inquiring look. “Where is he, anyway?” I don’t like the crust, so I nodded, and she popped it in her mouth.

Byron’s laugh was thick with disbelief. “Actually meeting with Doctor Donner. Can you believe that?”

I remembered Marc Teslowski boasting on live television that he would snap Donner in half if he got in the same room with him. Whatever they were talking about, I bet it wasn’t going like that. I chuckled. “I…it’s pretty funny.”

“It’s a trip, dude.”

There was a crack in our conversation just wide enough for me to start obsessing about my own dad. Haze filled it up.

“So, Nate. Byron tells me you once almost kicked his ass.”

My eyes met Byron’s. We both smiled slightly.

“It was more like a draw,” I said. “And it was totally my fault.”

“Damn right, dude.” Byron looked at Haze and pointed at me. “It’s, like, two days after the Declaration, and I’m freaking out, putting everything together in my head, and it’s totally making me crazy. I figured the only guy I could talk about it with is Nate.”

“Except,” I said, “that’s the same guy you’d been picking on for, I don’t know, forever? I wasn’t in the mood.”

Haze clicked her tongue and regarded Byron with narrowed eyes. “I knew it. You’re an asshole.”

Byron didn’t look happy, remembering it. “I was.” He looked at me. “I was.” He shook his head slowly. “A whole fuckin’ lot has happened since then, man.”

It struck me how much more grown-up Byron seemed. I wondered if I seemed that way to him. I know I felt eight hundred years old.

“It’s been a year,” I agreed.

Haze looked over my shoulder. I turned to see Spencer Croy walking toward our table.

“Nathan, come with me.” He turned for the door.

I got to my feet and to his side quickly. My stomach played rock tumbler with the mountain of food I’d just eaten.

“Is it my dad? Is he out of—?”

We passed through the doors of the cafeteria and into the early-afternoon sunlight. Croy stopped and faced me.

“Andrew Charters did not survive his injuries.”

“What?”

I heard him. But I didn’t get it. It was my first time. Stupid; weird, what happens when you get news like that. My head felt empty. My ears filled with a sort of rushing sound.

I couldn’t feel my body.

“But…he’s…”

Croy put his hand on my shoulder and applied some pressure. I put one foot in front of the other and moved where he directed me.

“Would you like to see him?”

Those words drove an icepick of
real
into the glacier I felt around me. It was hard to breath. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

I just nodded.

Croy took me into the Institute infirmary, down a hall, through a door…I have no idea where we went. If we were there right now and you asked me to retrace my steps, I couldn’t do it.

Croy guided, my legs moved, and we were there, in front of a door. It had a little glass window reinforced with diamonds of thin wire. Through that window was a shape under a sheet. I looked away, fast.

Another body.

My father’s body.

“Take all the time you need.” Croy pushed the door open for me.

I plodded through.

His face was uncovered. His eyes were closed. His skin was not right.

He smelled like chemical things. Residual odors from the operating room, maybe. Anesthesia gas. I don’t know.

His
smell was
missing
. The musty, feral, adrenaline-infused signature that was just a few molecules and several decades’ worth of living different than my own…it wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there.

He’d come all that way. Got a haircut and a bath and fresh clothes. Sat in a car for hundreds of miles. Got as far as the gate.

And now he wasn’t there. Wasn’t anywhere.

That was really, really unfair.

There was a metal stool near the table where they’d laid him out. I slumped onto it.

It was really, really unfair.

That’s what brought the tears out of me. I hope that makes sense. I hope you get that.

Because, see, we didn’t really know each other. When you get right down to it, most of the time I’d even known he was alive, I’d been kinda pissed at him. It was only when I figured out I was kind of losing it, kind of getting to be more like him, that I thought maybe he might be able to help me get a grip on…me.

He left. Then he was there, and he left again. I had figured he
owed
it to me to help, in a way. I was his responsibility. I was his creation, you get right down to it. It’s his fault I’m the way I am.

I wanted him to do something about it.

How could I know, until we’d sat in the back seat of poor stupid dead Evelyn’s car, that he wanted to do something about it, too?

Now he was gone. The same fuckers who made him managed to finish him, after all those years.

I was, right then, beyond being angry. The fact of my father’s dead body, inches away from me in that, cold, sterile, silent room…it was too far from all the things that brought us to that place. It was bigger.

It was tragic, is what it was. Right out of the dictionary: tragic.

And it made me cry. Hard. From my chest. From my gut. From my heart.

I howled in that room. I threw things around. I exhausted myself, felt a little self-conscious, and then I’d see his face and start all over again.

It was a whole new kind of crazy for me.

It hurt. So much.

I don’t know how long I was in there. After I’d been mostly quiet for a while, Spencer Croy opened the door.

“We have somewhere you can rest.”

I looked at my dad’s face, half-expecting that it would set me off again. I only shuddered.

That was it, then. That was it. I was done.

I let Croy walk me to an apartment, somewhere in the same building that held the cafeteria. We passed people. We rode in an elevator. He held another door open for me. I walked through and found myself in what pretty much looked like a big hotel room.

There was a bed. I fell on it. I thought I would cry more, but I didn’t.

I slept.

When I woke up, the light through the window felt like late afternoon. I was thirsty. I was hungry. My face hurt.

I wanted to know what they had done with Lou Uldare.

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Thirty Four

I was awake less than five minutes when Byron called on the room phone.

“Nate…I’m…I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

A beat of awkward silence. Awkward for me, at least. I was still sleepy; I hadn’t finished processing things.

“Uh,” Byron said, “Listen, do you think you’re up for being around people? Doctor Donner is going to, like, talk to the people who…I mean, the guy from that militia and the guy who…”

The guy who killed my father.

“Fuck yes.”

“Okay. Good. I’ll come get you in, like, half an hour, okay?”

“Okay. Hey, Byron?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. I really want to be there.”

“Dude,” Byron chuckled. “Donner wants you there. This is, like, a big deal. Bad news for those pieces of shit, too, I bet.”

“Even better,” I said. “Half an hour?”

“Half an hour.”

“I’ll be ready. Later.”

“Later.”

I hung up, took off my filthy clothes, took a very hot shower, and put my filthy clothes back on.

Evelyn’s bloodstains on my jeans didn’t bother me anymore. I hoped I’d have a chance to tell Uldare what they were. Maybe he’d cry like a little baby again.

Byron showed up and took me into a building I was told was the nerve center of the Institute, where Donner and Croy and all the other Sovereign bigwigs had their offices. We got into an elevator in the lobby, and Byron pressed B8. We went down.

When the doors opened, we stepped into a nearly featureless, wide corridor with a tile floor and the dropped-ceiling/fluorescent-lighting combination like you’d see in a classroom or my lawyer’s office. Totally normal; totally plain vanilla.

I sniffed. The air was almost sterile, too. It made me a little uncomfortable.

“I feel like I’m in a James Bond movie,” I said.

“I’ve never been down here,” Byron said. “I don’t think this gets used a whole lot. So far. Come on.”

He led me down the corridor until we came to a steel door with I-01 stenciled on it. He faltered.

“I…I’m not sure if we’re supposed to just, like, go in, or knock, or what.”

I shrugged. “You’d know better than me.”

He shook his head. “Dude, every other day something happens around here that makes me feel like the new guy. I don’t know.”

An older guy with a narrow, lined face opened the door and decided for us. “Byron. Hi, Nathan. I’m Ewing Kass. Come on in.”

The room was almost as plain as the hallway. White cinderblock walls. No windows, of course, since we were apparently eight floors below ground. About a dozen plain gray metal folding chairs set up in three rows, but nobody was sitting in them. Everyone was standing near them—Byron’s dad, Sandy, Denver (okay, he was sitting, but in his own wheelchair), and Spencer Croy—looking at the two people in the middle of the room.

One of them was an old man with thick, slicked-back white hair. The other one was Lou Uldare. They’d been dressed in white coveralls. They had handcuffs on their wrists and shackles on their ankles. Uldare had a cast on his left leg and a thick bandage on his hand.

Seeing Uldare was not good for me. Heat spread under my skin, out from my chest, and up my neck. My breath went all fast and shallow.

The last man in the room, who had been standing apart from everyone else, came toward me with his hand extended.