Double Helix Ch. 20

"In a moment," he said. "Now relax your arm." He put a hand at my wrist and elbow and slowly rotated it outward, then upward towards my head. At some point, the ball suddenly lurched back into the socket. The pain was sharp but not as bad as I had expected.

After giving me some pain meds, Mike checked over Tilly's leg wound and found that the bullet had grazed deeply through the meat of her calf, but did no lasting damage. Her nose had been broken, but he had the tools he needed to realign the bones and cartilage. He offered her pain medication, but she declined, asking for him to wait. She closed her eyes and looked like she was meditating. Half a minute later, she opened them and told him that she had blocked the pain, and that he could proceed.

We decided that it would be best to spend the night up here, so Alice went into town and bought a couple of large tents and several propane heaters. Mike stayed in the tent with the four of us who were most seriously injured, while the rest of the group either slept in the other tent or in one of the cars. I wanted to talk to Tilly and Nissi about what we had seen and heard from our attackers. More than that, I wanted to see Sasha, but whatever Mike had given me knocked me out after just a few minutes.

In the morning, Mike took Nissi into the city, with Casey driving scout, while the rest of us packed up to head back to the farm. Moments after he had gone, Sasha entered. She looked at me with a stern expression. "Norm, coming here to rescue me was incredibly stupid. Any one of you, or even all of you, could have been killed in the attempt." I stared at her in disbelief, about to throw out a protest, but then her features softened. "But I must thank you for doing it. Especially you three and Nissi, who fought and bled out there for me. I owe you my life."

I put up my good arm, and Sasha obliged me with a one-armed hug, then went to Tilly. Stanley cleared his throat loudly and Sasha knelt to give him a hug as well.

"Your people here have talked so much about you," he said. "I feel like I already know you."

Sasha straightened and turned back to me. "I can't wait to see this farm. Everyone keeps going on about it. They say that Tilly here built a new kind of greenhouse?"

Tilly shrugged. "It's nothing special, just a refinement of existing designs. What I'm working on next is the truly revolutionary stuff. Now that we've got you back, I can pick up where I left off."

"I still don't know what to think of mamochka," Sasha said. "She isn't the same person I knew before. And not just because of how she looks. She thinks and acts differently."

We had a meal from our stores while we waited for Nissi and Mike to return. The rest of Mike's crew had trickled in through the night, and all had been accounted for. The only injuries from his team were Lenny from the extraction team, who had taken a bullet through the torso just above his chest plate. The rifle round had penetrated the Kevlar and buried in meat. It wasn't immediately life-threatening, so Mike had extracted the bullet and stabilized him, leaving him with another member of VIL. Justin, who had helped start the food riot, had been hit with a thrown brick, but had only suffered cuts and bruises.

Mike came back in the afternoon with a sleeping Nissi. He showed me an X-ray of her lower abdomen. The bullet was clearly visible amid a few splinters of bone from where it had hit her pelvis.

"The surgery went well," he said. "I extracted the bullet and all of the bone fragments I could reach. She's still in a lot of pain, but I think she's out of the woods."

I decided to stay one more night up on the mountain. I had slept much of the day away, and I wanted to be alert while we were on the road.

We broke camp the next morning. Mike's people had filtered away during the previous day, so it was mainly my people from the farm, and Casey who were left. Nissi looked a lot better. Most of her color had returned, and she was able to walk with crutches. The pain in my head had reduced from blinding agony to merely crushing, so I wasn't ready to give up on the pain meds just yet.

For the trip south, I rodewith Nonna, Sasha, Mike, Nissi, Tilly, Stansy, and Stanley in the Suburban. It seemed best to keep all of the wounded with Mike, and Sasha was eager to catch up with us on what had been happening while she was in prison, both on the farm and out in the wider world. I rode in the third row of seats next to Tilly and Stanley.

For the first hour or so, the talk largely centered on Nonna's treatment and recovery and the weeks of planning and preparation for Sasha's rescue. I let them talk, brooding in my own thoughts for a while, but once the conversation hit a lull, I brought up the topic that had been bothering me. "We were fighting against genemods the other night," I said, "and we need to understand why."

"Are we certain of that?" Mike asked. "They were fast and strong, sure, but it's a bit of a leap to-"

"One of them had tapeta lucida in his eyes," I interrupted. "You don't get that through training. And there's no way an unenhanced human could match Tilly for physical strength. I think someone was watching that transport more closely than we thought. Once we started jamming their radio transmissions, those gunmen were dispatched to deal with the threat. I also very much doubt that they were coordinating with the police or marshals. They didn't seem to care about the officers or the other prisoners in the transport."

"Military?" Sasha asked, half turning in her seat to look back at me. "Some holdover from before the Ban?"

"If they were," Mike said, "they aren't part of the regular services. All branches of the military were phasing genemods out even before the Ban was announced. Those guys were skilled, but not seasoned. And they were suicidally brave. They should have pulled back when Nock took out the first one. Being under sniper fire is scary as hell, but they kept pressing the attack until three of them had gone down. I think they had to be ordered to take cover."

Having Nock on overwatch might have been the only thing that had prevented us from being overwhelmed. It had certainly limited our losses.

"Any thoughts on why they showed up when they did?" I asked. "Four minutes isn't a lot of time. They would have to have been within a couple of miles of where we staged the attack."

Mike held up a finger. "Yeah, I've been thinking about that. Maybe they were on standby and got dispatched when the transport first reported the accident on the freeway."

"But dispatched by whom?" Nonna asked. "Police? The marshals?"

"Or someone else entirely." Mike said. "Like I said, not a part of the regular services. Maybe a new group."

"But genemods?" Stansy said. "Would the federal government really be using genemods? After all that rhetoric about us being the enemy?"

"Genemods have been disappearing since McCain's amnesty period last year," I said. "Not reverted and released, just gone. I think we all just assumed that they were being executed." I paused, choosing my next words carefully. "What if, instead, they are being pressed into service?" I took another moment to recall the words of the Stansy that had attacked me. "One of them said that she was going to take Nissi to be conditioned. What could that mean?"

"That sounds like brainwashing," Nonna said. "Back home, the communists were said to have developed methods for re-educating those not loyal to the regime. I also heard that those methods were neither reliable nor lasting."

"Or it could just be a euphemism for torture," Stansy suggested.

"That's plausible," I admitted. It sounded like the most reasonable explanation, but it didn't sit too well with me. None of the others had looked one of them in the face and seen the emptiness, the total lack of humanity that I had seen. Nonna's suggestion felt like the closest to the truth, but I balked at the idea of it. It was the stuff of sci-fi. Things just didn't work like that in the real world.