ALTERED HUMANS

Prelude To The Pet Plague

Darrell Bain

A DF Books NERD’s Release

Copyright ©2005 by Darrell Bain

Double Dragon Publishing 2005

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ALTERED HUMANS

Prelude To The Pet Plague

To the memory of Biscuit, and to all of our furry friends who share our homes and lives. We would be a poorer species without them.

CHAPTER ONE

"Is that all you can find for him to watch?” Gary Daniels asked as the front door automatically closed behind him. He eyed the wall holo disgustedly. A life sized image of a conservatively dressed evangelist was striding back and forth, easily covering half the room. With his neat powder blue suit and silver white hair he should have looked distinguished. He didn’t. His dark, piercing eyes burned with fanaticism and he waved his arms around like a yeoman on the deck of a ship semaphoring a message to another ship. Gary didn’t even have to listen to know what the evangelist was preaching about. Enhanced animals and altered humans seemed to be the only subjects worthy of concern these days.

Gary’s wife turned away from the holographic scene playing out against the backdrop of a blank wall.“You should be watching it yourself,” she said. Amelia Daniels was pretty. She wore her black hair in waves to her shoulders, matching the smartly tailored black jumpsuit she was wearing. She had a patrician face and a fine body, but her expression was sharp, almost feral. It distracted the eye and made one feel uncomfortable in her presence. Gary had always disdained highly opinionated people, but by damn, here he was married to one. Somehow he didn’t remember her being like that until recently.

“You know I can’t stand those Bible-thumpers,”he said.

“My father is a Bible-thumper, as you put it,”Amelia said. Her eyes narrowed and her body tensed like a bird dog at point, ready to jump all over the next thing he said.

“Yeah, sorry.”

Amelia relaxed slightly.“You should listen to my father. He could get you into another profession. You’d be better off and you know it. Genetic engineers aren’t very popular right now.”

Gary knew it and didn’t feel like commenting. He came on into the den of their home and began making a drink under Amelia’s disapproving eye.

“I still have a job,”he said.“Besides, genetics is all I know. What else could I do?”

This was a recurring argument and it always made him wonder why on earth Amelia had ever married him, or why he had married her for that matter. He blamed himself, thinking that he should have been more alert to the latent religiosity in her background, a state of mind completely alien to his own point of view. He should have paid more attention to her frequent mention of her father and his preoccupation with political groups opposed to genetic engineering, but he hadn’t. It all happened so fast. After the long years of concentrated study to receive his doctorate in mammalian genetics, he had been more than ready to break free from the grinding academic environment at the University of Houston. But the following two years had helped his social life precious little while he learned to turn theory into practice at the government research lab in Houston. The rising tide of public opinion against genetic manipulation of animals and humans kept his contacts confined to a small circle of co-workers and friends, neither of which contained women he was very interested in.

He met Amelia on a blind date and was immediately captivated by her beauty and sophistication. He followed in her wake like a leaf caught in a whirlwind as she drew him into the entertainment and cultural world of Houston Society. He was completely befuddled by her, and before he quite knew what was happening, he found himself married to her, only weeks after they had met and despite her father’s objections. In the six months that followed, his bemusement changed to a sharp awareness of just how little they had in common, and the awareness was compounded when she became a devout convert to her father’s fundamentalist beliefs. By now, only short months after the wedding, he was tiredly resigned to their differences. He should have known—oh hell, he just shouldn’t have married her in the first place. They had nothing in common, nothing at all since the initial lustful couplings. He was ready to call it quits, but in his typical non-confrontational manner, just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. He doubted that Amelia would object. She was becoming more and more involved with her father’s preaching, and whatever her motives had been for marrying him, they were subjugated now to her father’s beliefs.

Amelia spoke again, breaking his train of thought.“You may not have a job much longer. Bradshaw is going to win the election you know.”

Gary grimaced, holding back an epithet.

“He will win, you know,”Amelia insisted. Her eyes strayed back to the prancing preacher while her head nodded unconsciously in a gesture of agreement with his words. The evangelist was busy exhorting his audience to work and contribute to the campaign of Terrace Bradshaw for president of the United States and Canada. Bradshaw was campaigning on the promise to immediately shut down all government work in genetics other than essential agricultural studies.She’s probably right, Gary thought. Bradshaw was far ahead in the polls and the election was only a week away.“I don’t have to work for the government, you know,”he said.

“There’s still private firms doing genetics in my line.”

“They’re laying off, not hiring,”Amelia said with smug finality.“And after the election…”She broke off as if she knew something he didn’t. Gary had no answer for that. Unfortunately, what she said was true. Too many enhanced animals had escaped from owners and laboratories and begun breeding in the wild. More intelligent than their forebears, they were proving impossible to eradicate and in the meantime were ravaging crops and other wildlife, much more so in other parts of the world, but they had a toehold here now and were multiplying rapidly. This was especially true of the enhanced rats and mice and dogs and cats. They were creating havoc everywhere. There was already a total, though ineffective, ban on the importation of exotic enhanced or altered animals from South America where most of them originated, and the restrictions on domestic genetic engineering of mammals and humans were becoming onerous. In a deteriorating economy, and with feelings running so high against genetic engineers and their products, another job would be hard to come by. But damn it, helikedgenetic engineering. He loved the manipulation of genes and chromosomes and the complex mathematics and physiology that went into the weaving of new characteristics into mammalian species. It was all he had ever wanted to do, and now it looked as if the whole profession was falling into an abyss of government restriction and public abhorrence. And his wife was on their side! He decided to change the subject.

“Is there anything to eat?”

“Don’t you remember? We’re going to Dad and Mom’s for dinner tonight. And don’t have another drink. You know how they feel about alcohol.”

“I had forgotten,”Gary admitted. In truth he hadwantedto forget. A gathering at Deacon Pilkington’s place wasn’t his idea of a fun evening. Amelia had fostered the commitment on him in the after throes of sex a couple of weeks ago and he had conveniently put it out of his mind since then. He remembered now though, and knew that he and Amelia would be expected. Gary figured he had as many faults as the next man but breaking social engagements on short notice wasn’t one of them. He would rather have broken a promise to his cat.

“I’ll get dressed,”he said resignedly.“Have you fed Booger Bear?”

“I’m not going near that blasphemous animal again! You should get rid of it. The neighbors are beginning to complain.”

Gary doubted that. Few of them even knew he owned an enhanced cat, but he didn’t want to argue. He never did. His usual inclination was to listen politely, then go on doing whatever he thought was right.“Never mind,”he said.“I’ll do it.”Booger Bear the cat was coal black and fluffy haired, with only a stub of a tail. He was short and stout, and the lack of a tail made him look remarkably like a small bear cub except for the large, high-domed forehead, essential in order to have room in his skull for enhanced intelligence and speech facility. Gary had bonded with him soon after birth, feeding him himself, and carrying him around in a detachable padded pocket that fit all of his jean jackets. He was well over a year old now and just learning to talk. Gary loved the little critter, and until his recent marriage to Amelia the fat, bouncy cat had been one of the focal points of his life.

The back room where Booger Bear lived was empty. Looking around, Gary saw that Amelia had been telling the truth about not going near the cat. The room was cluttered, unlike the rest of the house that she kept meticulously in order. The bed covers were rumpled and little pyramids of fabric stuck up in patterns where his claws had caught on it. Several objects that rightfully belonged on shelves were scattered on the floor.

Gary picked up a little figurine of a black wolf and another of a black ferret, two of the species he had worked on for his doctorate. He measured the distance from the floor to the shelf where the figurines belonged with his eyes and whistled softly. It would have been a good leap for a full grown cat, verifying the enhanced muscles in his genome. He replaced the objects then opened the back door and looked out.

A high fence enclosed the spacious yard. It contained low ornamental bushes and a fine carpet of no-grow grass. It also sported a small wading pond in the center, now given over to decorative fish. Booger Bear was crouched at the edge of the pool, staring intently down into the still water. As Gary watched, a paw shot into the water with a loud smack. The cat jumped back as the water splashed. He looked at his wet, empty paw with feline amazement, then shook it disgustedly. Gary laughed out loud. Booger Bear heard the laugh and came bounding up to him. He rubbed against Gary’s legs and began purring with a deep rumbling noise that sounded too loud for his size. Gary reached down and rubbed his hand along the cat’s back.“Booger, if you’re going to take up fishing, you’re going to have to learn some physics first. Refraction, you know. The fish aren’t where you think they are.”

“Re-frac-tion?”

“The light bends when it enters the water, like this.”Gary demonstrated with an angled wrist.

“Why?”Booger asked, for all the world like a three year old child.

“It’s a natural law, Booger,”Gary said. That seemed to satisfy the cat though he really didn’t understand the explanation. He meowed and rolled onto his back, asking for a belly rub. Gary stroked the soft furry pelt covering his belly and tickled him on the insides of his hind legs. Booger Bear’s purrs increased in volume to a deep throaty roar.

“We’re going out for a while. Do you want to eat?”

“Eat liver?”

“Dream on, young man. I can’t afford liver for you every day. How about some nice, fish flavored protein?”

“No liver?”

“Sorry. It’s fish or nothing.”

“Okay,”Booger Bear agreed reluctantly.“Ride?”

“Sure.”Gary stood up, bringing the cat with him. He draped Booger Bear over his shoulder in the cat’s favorite position. Booger Bear thought it was great fun to ride there, looking back over his human’s shoulder.

Gary took Booger Bear back to his room and fed him, then hurried to shower and change. He dressed in his usual fashion, jeans and jean jacket, casual shirt and soft leather boots. The boots were an anachronism since the introduction of thermometric footwear but he liked them. He tucked his little lasergun into a side pocket, ran a brush over his short brown hair and considered himself ready. Amelia came into the bedroom just as he was finishing. She looked over his tall, lean figure critically while Gary waited. He knew that women found him attractive, with his high cheekbones and dark coloring reflecting an Amerindian ancestry, but what he didn’t know was that his honest sincerity put many of them off. In troubled times woman look toward strong, aggressive men, not the quiet intellectuals.

“Are you going like that?”She finally said.

Gary looked down at himself then back up at Amelia.“What’s wrong with the way I look? I always dress like this.”

“Nothing, if you were going on a scavenger hunt. I suppose you’re carrying your gun, too?”

“You know I always do,”Gary said. This was another point of contention between them. Most governments had long since given up trying to enforce any kind of gun laws, although many of them were still on the books. Gary always carried his little lasergun, rightly having little faith in police protection. The Houston Police Department had deteriorated to such a sad state that a call for help was likely to be heeded only when their own turf was threatened.

“Yes, I know,”Amelia answered.“And you never use it. Not that you should. Violence never solves anything.”

“It’s usually not necessary to pull a weapon so long as the other fellow knows you have one. If I had my way, I’d issue one to every responsible citizen in the city.”

“I’m sure you would. Shall we go?”

Gary shrugged.“Let’s do it. I’m hungry.”

CHAPTER TWO

Houston was favored over many other cities in the middle part of the twenty first century. By virtue of being a seaport, many of its imports came by water rather than over the execrable highways of the land, and it still retained a thriving computer industry, one of the few in the country since the great California quake had destroyed Silicon Valley.

It had an operating fusion plant, and since the Mexican border was heavily policed now, the unemployment rate was only in the low teens. Even its freeways were more or less intact, albeit not so crowded as in former years, and even they were slowly deteriorating. Gasoline was severely rationed and the manufacture of electric and hydrogen powered vehicles was still embroiled in statutes designed by politicians to protect older industries despite a crying need for better transportation. Gary considered himself lucky to have been able to purchase one of the last consignments of electrics before the omnibus trade bill had forbidden their importation. The whole issue didn’t make sense to him, but then the Byzantine edicts of governments seldom did. He was as apolitical as a sequestered monk, feeling that the epitome of government had been reached with Thomas Jefferson and had been going downhill ever since.

“Who’s going to be there tonight?”Gary asked, not really caring that much but trying to be pleasant. He hated dissention.

“It’s a discussion group Dad has gotten together,”Amelia said as he unplugged the car, letting the cord zip back into its compartment.

“What are they discussing?”

“They’re finalizing their recommendations about altered humans and animals. Bradshaw is sure to have a program ready when he takes office and the church wants to give him their input. By“church”, Gary knew she meant the national organization she and her father belonged to. He didn’t bother to comment further. He could well imagine what their position would be. Most religions didn’t even consider altered men and women as members of the human race, and their stance on enhanced animals was even more draconian. So far, their opinions had little force of law but he thought that would change quickly once Bradshaw was elected. The man challenging President Carver had spelled out his feelings explicitly on the issue, not even attempting to be rational. And why should he? Gary thought. Feelings were running high, people were scared and altered humans didn’t have a constituency. Gary had mixed emotions on the subject. He wondered about the motives of parents who planned to have their children altered in some way with foreign genes but felt like it was their own business so long as the children weren’t exploited afterward. And certainly an adult had the right to change their own genome if they wanted to. He knew that for the most part, the children weren’t exploited. Most of the alterations were confined to the members of small cults which emphasized specific characteristics such as simian strength or horns or some such, and were mostly harmless. Besides, techniques were available to reverse most alterations. He didn’t see why anything should be done about those groups. It struck him as no more extreme than raising offspring as Amish, atheists or Republicans.

On the other hand, there was a clandestine trade in monstrosities, supported by persons of jaded wealth and appetites and little moral sense. And there was always the criminal class of course, dealing in exotic creatures for sex, amusement or combat. He loathed the way those groups perverted a basically benign aspect of genetic engineering for their own profit.

Gary steered the little electric car out of the drive and pointed it toward the Freeway. Their home was in a suburb north of central Houston. He had picked the area more or less at random, wanting only to be removed from the squalor and crime of the main city and to live in a neighborhood with its own security force. Outside the boundaries of gated living areas, one either paid the criminals for

“protection”or became one. Neither option appealed to him, and he was quietly grateful that he had been born into a family that had enough left of an inheritance to not only pay for his education but enabled him to live now where he wanted to.

Traffic was very light going into the city and he passed up the computer control option in favor of steering himself in the outside lanes. There was a momentary slowdown as they passed a line of barricades being constructed in a great arc around the city. Eventually each end would tie into the seacoast. The hope was that the giant barrier would stymie the influx of enhanced animals that had gotten loose and were multiplying so prolifically in the wilds. No satisfactory solution had as yet been found, simply because the pets and laboratory and farm animals had been altered to be as resistant to disease as younger humans, such as himself were. The changed animals were so much smarter than their un-enhanced cousins that they were quickly displacing the indigenous population.

Gary sometimes wondered how it would all end. He felt responsible in a way, but not enough to worry about it. The same techniques that his parents had opted to use on him, the ones that made him much superior to his twentieth century ancestors, were simply variations of the techniques that made escaped pets and lab animals such a plague in the countryside. At the moment, he felt as if it had been a fair exchange, but he was still uneasy at times. Amelia was more than uneasy. She had begun agitating for them to move somewhere inside the barricade line. Gary didn’t think it was necessary yet, though he admitted to himself that it might come to that in the future.

“You’re being awfully quiet tonight,”Amelia said.

“I usually am.”

“Well, I hope you stay that way at dinner. Don’t embarrass me with any of your wild notions.”

“Such as?”Gary asked, beginning to feel a slow burn.

“You know how Dad feels about most things. Just don’t aggravate him.”

“Aren’t I entitled to my own opinions?”Gary realized that he was irritated and wanted to bite back the remark. It would only lead to an argument.

“Where we’re going, they won’t count,”Amelia said.

“You’re right about that,”Gary admitted. He was going to feel as out of place as a blackboard in a computer room while mingling with guests of Deacon Pilkington’s ilk. Amelia sniffed and Gary was happy to leave further conversation alone. He wished that he could have a nice relaxing drink before dinner, but there was little chance of that. Finding liquor at the Deacon’s home would be roughly analogous to politicians leaving unspent government money in the bank. And besides, he figured he would probably need a drink more after the dinner than before, if previous experience served as a guide.

Gary passed the airport exit, noting the absence of the huge jets of his youth and the presence of swarms of the much smaller solar-magnetic floaters, moving about with a dexterity almost like the flitting of bats at feeding time. He took an off-ramp to the east. The deacon lived in an upscale development centered around the People’s Church of Houston, a denomination of a national sect that took the Bible literally in some interpretations and convoluted the meaning of other parts of it in ways that would have astounded the originators had they still been around to see it. Gary never cared what other people believed in, feeling rightly that it was their business. He could even tolerate proselytizing so long as it wasn’t overly aggressive, but he drew the line at judicial measures designed to force others into behaving contrary to their own beliefs, such as The People’s Church advocated. It rankled him as few other things did.

There were few cars parked around the deacon’s spacious home. Most of the congregation lived close enough to use the moving sidewalks and it was a fine Spring evening, with the humidity not up to its usual muggy standards. Gary parked along the curb near the house and locked the car after they got out.

“You don’t have to lock up in this neighborhood,”Amelia stated righteously.

“Just habit,”Gary answered, not believing her for a minute. He always secured the car for the same reasons he always carried a gun. There were simply too many drug addicts, starving refugees and vicious youth gangs roaming the city to ever feel completely safe. Not to mention the occasional enhanced carnivore that wandered into the city. They walked up to the door, which opened before he could ring the bell.

“Good evening,”Deacon Pilkington greeted them. He hugged Amelia and gave Gary a perfunctory handshake. His nearly bald head glistened under the porch light.

“Hello,”Gary said, taking back his hand as soon as he gracefully could. Shaking hands with Amelia’s father always reminded him of how it might feel to pick up a hunk of warm bacon. He went into the living room with Amelia, noting the prosperous looking couples engaged in animated conversation. He would bet a month’s pay already on not being interested in any of them, nor what they might have to say. He caught fragments of dialog as he followed Amelia to the punch bowl and poured both of them cups of a sickly sweet concoction.

“—the little tramp had the nerve to—”

“—just wait, Bradshaw will change all that, you mark my words—”

“—and he had the nerve to say they had souls. I told him—”Gary let the words roll off his thoughts like drops of grease on Teflon. He wondered what on earth he was doing here with these people. He had never had the slightest tendency to believe in organized religion. He thought it made so little sense and went so against all available evidence that he thought the geneticists had pegged it rightly as an ancestral survival trait that was still hanging on even after it was no longer needed. He knew intellectually how much culture could influence expression of genes and gene complexes, but nevertheless he couldn’t for the life of him understand how otherwise intelligent people could be so utterly convinced of some of the more bizarre religious teachings. It was a puzzle that he had given up trying to understand, other than an amused observation that what most religions had in common was that they each professed to be the only true one.

“You’re Mister Daniels, aren’t you?”Gary turned sideways to see who was addressing him. He didn’t know the man. He was short and fat, with rosy red cheeks and cheerful eyes.

“I’m Gary Daniels, yes,”he said, leaving it at that.

“You must be very proud to be the son-in-law of Deacon Pilkington. He’s a fine Christian man and I can assure you that the government will listen closely to the recommendations that his congregations and others like his send us.”

“What government is that?”Gary asked politely, tongue firmly in cheek.

“Why the federal government, of course. Senator Bradshaw will certainly be elected, then we can start doing something about these evils that have been fostered upon us.”

“And I suppose you will be a member of the new government?”

“Of course,”the little fat man said, pulling at the lapels of his too tight jacket.“My appointment has already been pre-confirmed. I’m Wiley Collins. I’ll be in the science department, once we get the resignations of the ones presently occupying the administrative positions. Or mis-occupying, I should say.”

“Are you a scientist?”Gary asked.

“Me? Heavens, no!”The man looked horrified.“I’m an administrator. We’re going to remove the scientists from policy making completely, and put them back to work in their laboratories where they should have been all along.”Gary had no interest at all in the conversation but he found himself continuing it for lack of an easy escape.

“What do you think the scientists should be doing?”He asked.

“Why, it’s obvious! They should be working to relieve world hunger and disease, not creating monstrosities that are contrary to the will of God. I’m sure you agree that altered humans and those enhanced animals are abominations, spawned by Satan himself!”

“How can you be sure I agree when I haven’t said so?”Gary said. He had been here for less than fifteen minutes and already he was anxious to leave. This was no place for him and he knew it. He tried to think of an excuse to take Amelia home but none came to him. Wiley Collins seemed to sense Gary’s disinterest but he forged ahead.“You must be joking, sir. Any man married to Deacon Pilkington’s daughter must agree with our policies. Why, I’ll bet we could find a place for you in the new administration. It would be good for a young man like you, regardless of your present occupation. What line of work are you in now?”

“I design four-breasted prostitutes for tit-happy preachers,”Gary said the first thing that popped into his mind. He remembered Amelia’s admonition but his present mood kept him from following her directions. The mood had been building up he realized, and this evening had only brought it to fruition, starting with Amelia’s failure to feed Booger Bear. He turned his back on the sputtering administrator and began searching for Amelia. He spotted her in the crowd and began weaving his way through the bodies, intending to tell her that he was leaving this gathering, with or without her.

Why should he have to stay and listen to his profession being berated by child-minded idiots who couldn’t tell a gene from a geranium?

They are like children, he reflected as he got closer to Amelia. They believed whatever an authority told them with undiscerning trustfulness, like a child’s faith in Santa Claus. He came up behind Amelia as she was talking to the Deaconess. Pilkington’s wife was heavy-set, unlike her daughter, and radiated an air of authority, totally unhampered by reason.

Gary heard her saying,“—there is no room for compromise, dear. You simply must make him get rid of that ungodly animal. Simply being around that spawn of the Devil would be too much for me to bear. It is a poor reflection on us as well; just ask your brother—he’s even more adamant about it than I am. You must tell him, Amelia.”

Gary’s rebellious mood grew even worse at hearing these remarks. He interrupted brusquely.

“Are you talking about my cat?”

The Deaconess turned to face him. Her voice was sharp.“Devil cat, I should say!”

“He certainly is,”Gary said pleasantly.“Why, the way he tortures mice before he kills them is positively inhuman. And what he does to rats is so cruel it can’t even be described in polite company. And birds! He just loves to eat those poor little sparrows without even taking their feathers off first. Oh, he’s a Devil cat all right. If there was such a thing as witches he’d be right there with one, sitting on her broom.”

The Deacon’s wife snapped her mouth closed into a narrow, white-lipped line of dislike. Amelia drew in a breath, then closed her own mouth in a countenance that promised fire and brimstone later. Gary shrugged and headed toward the dining table as Deacon Pilkington announced that dinner was being served. He still was not quite ready to carry out his plan to leave, perhaps because he knew that if Amelia came with him, the rest of the evening would consist of nothing but argument and derision from her.Right after dinner, he promised himself.

Gary stood behind his place-matted seat at the table and rested his hands on the back of the chair, knowing that a lengthy prayer was in the offering. A thought trailed through his mind on the prevalence of blessing food among almost all religions. He knew that it originated far back in history, when hunters gave thanks to forces they couldn’t comprehend for allowing them to partake of the bounty of earth, and that present day blessings were merely a continuation of the tradition, melded smoothly into religions like liquid butter into a recipe. To his way of thinking, it was silly but harmless in the main if that was what a person believed in. Certainly it was of no consequence in his own life he thought, right up until the next moment.

“Gary, would you mind asking the blessing for us?”The Deacon invited, but with a tone in his voice that held no room for dissent. Gary had politely declined similar requests in the past but this time his mood made him speak up much more forcefully.

“Yes, I would mind,”he said rebelliously,“but if someone else wants to make a fool of himself I’ll be glad to wait while they do.”The Deacon’s face turned as red as a Montana beet.“A fool! You say it takes a fool to ask God’s blessings on the food He has provided? Young man, I won’t have that attitude in my home!”

“Fine,”Gary said, still speaking in a pleasant tone of voice.“I’ll go somewhere else and let you folks go right on destroying such civilization as we have left.”

“Gary, how could you!”Amelia exclaimed. He could see that she was chastising him more to protect her place in the family and church than over any surprise at what he had said. He guessed she had been building up a mood of her own, antithetical to his.

“It was easy. The Devil made me do it,”Gary said, then laughed at the varied expressions he could see on the faces around the table. The laughter was misinterpreted, of course. They thought he was laughing at their beliefs when in reality the dumb-struck expressions on their faces had caused a joyous sense of release within him.

“Get out! Amelia, I forbid you to go with him!”Pilkington shouted. He turned to take in the assured support of his wife and daughter.

Gary laughed again.“I was leaving anyway. My cat has an appointment at the local voodoo and juju convention. Don’t wait up for me, dear. I hear Montrose calling.”The Montrose section of Houston hadn’t changed much over the years. It was still an area catering to gays, artists, theatrical aspirants and seekers of sex, drugs and adventure from other parts of the city. Lately, it had also become a refuge for altered humans and owners of enhanced pets, one of the few places in the metropolis where either of them were safe and welcome. Gary didn’t click his heels as he left, but it wasn’t because he didn’t feel like it. A burden had just been lifted from him, one he had been only vaguely aware of since his marriage. He started the car and spun out of the driveway, happy for the first time in months.

CHAPTER THREE

Gary turned south on the freeway, intending to head to the Montrose area of Houston but within a couple of miles he changed his mind. He took an off ramp and wheeled back around, absorbing some bumps in the process. Only the main thoroughfares were being kept in any semblance of repair. He headed back toward his house—he doubted that he could call it a home any more. The thought of Amelia and her mother discussing Booger Bear had given him pause. He thought it might be a good idea to pick up his pet before Amelia got there—if she did. She might not even return tonight for all he knew, and he really couldn’t care less right now.

He remembered a small bar down on Bissonet Street that a year or so ago had catered to Genetic Engineers and their hangers-on, and which ignored health regulations so far as letting enhanced and altered animals into their establishments. As he thought more about his circumstances he decided to just go ahead and pack up, take what he needed for a few days and make arrangements to store the rest until he found a smaller place to lease. He couldn’t imagine Amelia wanting to live with him any longer after his behavior at her parents’home, and his ebullient feelings now had no place for her anyway.

Gary was miffed that his usual parking place was taken. He started to enter the license number of the miscreant into his computer and report the person to management, then said to hell with it. He wouldn’t be parking here any longer anyway. The door opened automatically as it retrieved his code from his computer that he wore as a necklace. He entered and called out,“Booger! Come here, Boy! We’re moving!”

There was no answer and he paused, puzzled. Booger had the run of the house, though he usually stayed in his own room and away from Amelia while Gary was away. But he should have come bounding through the door of the back room to greet him when he heard him calling. And he shouldn’t be out in the yard; he had strict orders to stay in the house when no one was home. There were too many crazies in the city for him to be allowed to wander around by himself. Gary walked purposely through the door to Booger Bear’s room and saw that it was empty. That left only the yard. He spoke to the room to tell it to turn on the outside lights and opened the door into the yard.

A laser beam flamed the woodwork an inch from the side of his face. It was so unexpected that he was dazed for a moment, blinking his eyes against the after image. He fumbled for his own weapon but it would have been far too late had it not been for his pet. Before the intruder could get off another shot, the cat leaped from a concealing bush where he had been hiding. He landed on the back of the gunman’s neck, claws curling around to seek his eyes. The next shot went high, the bullet following the laser beam and exploding above the door.

Gary didn’t hesitate any longer. He had never killed before but his instincts were working fine. He pulled the trigger of his gun past the aiming beam and laser beam and all the way to where it fired a tiny rocket-assisted slug directly into the chest of the cat-entangled man. The slug’s shaped charge exploded inside his body with a sound like a melon dropped onto a hard surface, driving splinters of its tip into his chest in all directions. Booger Bear leaped free as he collapsed with a smoking hole marring his torso. The cat had his hair fluffed fully out. He gave a yowl of triumph as he arched his back, spitting out his rage.

“Booger! Are you okay?”Gary asked shakily, thinking how easily a piece of the slug could have hit his pet, and not concerned at all about the man. He supposed the intruder was a burglar, seeking cash or goods he could trade for drugs or food. Then he stopped to wonder how he had gained entrance. So far as he knew, only he and Amelia possessed the code to enter their home. How had the burglar gotten in without setting off an alarm?

“Bad man!”Booger Bear said. His fur began laying down as he circled the body. He seemed as unconcerned over his demise as Gary was.

Gary moved forward to examine the corpse. It was sprawled on its back in the grass. He averted his eyes from the smoldering chest wound and looked at the face. If he had had any doubts about leaving, that convinced him, for even slack with death as it was, he recognized who the face belonged to. Amelia’s brother was as dead as Gary had ever wished him to be when he so sanctimoniously spouted off his belief in the sinfulness of genetic manipulation of animals and humans and ranted that they should all be disposed of.

Ordinarily, a homicide committed on an intruder into a home or business wouldn’t warrant even a grand jury investigation, but this was a different matter. The Deacon would certainly press murder charges against him and he had the influence in Houston to make them stick. This was going to mean trouble, more trouble than he had ever thought to imagine. Splitting up with Amelia had been in the works but killing her brother hadn’t occurred to him in anything but fantasies. Then he remembered the unencumbered intrusion. Only Amelia could have given her brother the entrance code, and that meant that she had intended for him to enter on this very night, while he was away. He could think of no other reason than her hatred of Booger Bear; she must have induced her brother to come here with the sole intention of killing his pet. He hated to think that she could have been involved in such a sick scheme, but the evidence said she was. Booger Bear must have sensed his intent and retreated to the back yard. Had Amelia’s brother known the spoken code for turning on the outside lights, Booger would probably be dead now, unable to have hidden in a lighted yard. And had the altercation at the deacon’s place not caused him to leave early, even that probably wouldn’t have saved him. He shuddered at how close death had come to his pet, but he was purring now. Gary bent down to pick him up and slung him over his shoulder. The cat clung there, twisting around to lick the back of his neck. He knew that the cat’s time sense wasn’t the same as a person’s was. Gary figured that he probably thought that his human knew he was in danger and had come home when needed.

All these thoughts coursed through Gary’s mind as he carried Booger Bear into the house. If he had wanted to leave before, it was imperative to do so now. He had no illusions about the reaction of Amelia and her family to the death of her brother. They would see that he was not only prosecuted, but convicted. They had too much influence in the city for any other outcome to be expected, not even counting how the public felt about enhanced pets. Any jury would convict him. Killing a man to protect an enhanced cat? It wouldn’t even be a contest.

Gary took out a bag and threw some clothing and toiletry items into it, not getting into any particular hurry. The sound of shots was a common occurrence and he didn’t expect the nearby neighbors to complain or sound an alarm, or have it answered if they did, so long as his own security alarm hadn’t been activated to summon private guards. He added some extra power packs for his lasergun and a few food bars for the cat and himself, then took off his jean jacket and put on a heavier garment that had a pocket for the cat, even though Booger Bear was getting a little too big to ride comfortably in it. He threw his bag into the car, then called his pet. Booger Bear jumped into the front seat beside him, still purring.

“Don’t be so happy,”Gary told him.“We’re in trouble.”

“Trou-ble?”

“A world of trouble,”Gary said, wondering where to go and what to do. He had no idea how a fugitive was supposed to act, but he knew one thing: he had to get away from the house and make himself hard to find. He would figure out the rest later.

He pointed the little electracar south toward the city. If there was any place to hide it would be there, at least for a temporary solution. He would have to decide on a better destination soon, but for the life of him, he couldn’t think of one now.

***

Bissonet Avenue was brightly lit. He cruised slowly, taking in the sights. Even in the few short years since his student years, it had changed. There was less vehicular traffic and the normal pedestrians were interspersed with occasional altered humans, sporting their differences rather than hiding them. Prostitutes and transvestites mingled with uptown visitors. Many of the wanderers were obviously gay or lesbian, strolling in twos or threes with arms entwined. Haggard looking refugees from blighted areas of the country mingled with the permanent residents, staring gape-mouthed at the bright holograms advertising sex, stimulants and entertainment. Some were trudging along as families, sometimes having two or three women with their children staying close to a single man. That was a reflection of both a heavier selection of male over female offspring and the fact that more men were dying trying to protect their families. The refugees wore drab clothing and long hair, marking them for transients as surely as tail feathers did a rooster. He noticed as he passed that some of the poorly dressed immigrants had already gotten into the predominant business of the district.

He saw a young girl in overalls who couldn’t have been over fourteen accosting a man in tights and cod piece. As the scene faded behind him, she made her score and led the visitor into an alley where she almost certainly had confederates waiting to separate him from his money. Farther on, a crowd was gathered around a dope dealer with a new consignment of euphorics and temporary youth genes, waving currency or trade items. Young men and women crowded forward, baring their bodies as they worked the crowd, hoping to exchange sex for drugs or money. Some flaunted alterations; furred bodies, extra breasts, long forked tongues and other aberrations. A patrol car with two cops in it hovered half a block away, waiting to collect their share of the booty. A robot skirted the crowd, top light blinking in accordance with the law, warning that an artificial intelligence was on an errand.

The mad scene was all too familiar from his student days when he had occasionally ventured into this section of the city, but it was more overt now, less clandestine. A failing economy brought hedonism, back-street activities and hustling into full sway. With so many competing for so few jobs, the ones who failed to find legitimate employment scoured the streets for other sources of income. The thought of income brought a thought to Gary.

He touched the disk hanging from a chain around his neck. His computer was still functional but he wondered how much longer it would be useful. He and Amelia had a joint account; either could obtain credit from their bank. Damn, he hadn’t thought of that. A fugitive would need some money. He turned his car around and headed back the way he had come, trying to remember where a cash outlet other than the ubiquitous banking machines was located, one where gold coins could be obtained this time of night. Currency was still being depreciated, almost on a daily schedule. Best to get gold, all he could. He braked suddenly. There, a brightly lit sign advertising in holographic splendor:GOLD,CURRENCY, FOREIGN EXCHANGE. BEST RATES.

He pulled up in front of the place and parked, leaving Booger Bear in the locked car. The receptionist in the foyer was slickly pneumatic and as photogenic as a news anchor. She raised lacquered eyebrows when he presented his computer extension code.

“In gold?”

“All of it. No, leave half of it in there.”His conscience told him that Amelia deserved part of their account, even considering that she had brought nothing into it and had added nothing to it since their marriage.

The pneumatic beauty instructed her terminal, then raised her eyebrows again.“Half of your credit comes to three thousand and thirty two dollars. That would be one point two ounces of gold at the current rates and half of that—”

“Oh Goddamn,”Gary said. He was too late. Amelia had beaten him to it.

“Is there a problem?”The woman asked, an amused expression crossing her face.

“Never mind,”he said, thinking that Amelia had left that little bit of money in the account only to tide her over until she opened her own separate account. She had left him enough money to survive on for a few days, anyway, even if that hadn’t been her intention.“Forget the half. Give it all to me in gold.”

“What denomination?”

“Small,”Gary ordered, remembering that it wasn’t wise to display coins or currency of large denomination in this area.

Coins clinked into a basket, minus an usurious exchange rate. He pocketed them and left, wondering what else was in store for him before the day was done.

CHAPTER FOUR

Gary stepped off the slowly moving slidewalk and stood in front of a familiar building with an unfamiliar name. The sign on the lounge had been changed since the last time he had been here. Before, it had been called THE ANIMAL HOUSE. Now, a large holographic display proudly announced its new name: THE ZOO. The sign was accompanied by a moving holographic display of nude men and women entwined with various animals. Prominent among them was a woman with huge breasts using a snake as a sexual partner.

Gary entered the lounge through a hologram of a huge bear on skates. It growled ferociously as he passed through it. He blinked his eyes to rid himself of the after-image once he was past, but then his senses were assailed by realistic looking scenes displayed on three walls of the huge room. On the first, husky men thudded against each other, flailing armored hands and feet in some sort of parody of an old sport. On another, cats, dogs, bears and other animals fought and copulated in pornographic splendor with humans and other unlike species. The third was more sedate, consisting of scrolling lists of news, quotes on drug prices, betting odds on lotteries and sports events, stock prices and winning numbers of the hourly house lottery. It was all displayed silently, needing a bar or table control to access the sound. Gary threaded his way through the crowd of drinkers and revelers, up-towners and residents, pimps, whores and confidence men and all the other warp and woof of a society seeking pleasure and distraction in a crumbling world. He passed several tables with animals ensconced on them; dogs and cats and ferrets and others that appeared to be crosses. Some he recognized, others he didn’t. Mostly, the inside of the place was as he remembered it except for the blatant pornographic displays of animals and humans; that was new to him.

He sidled up to the bar and gave the terminal his purchasing code. A display sprang into being, listing the services available. He skipped quickly over the menu of sexual adventures being offered and almost as quickly past the drugs, both legal and ostensibly illegal. The only difference appeared to be in the price. He was momentarily surprised to see tobacco among the stimulants but imagined there must be a demand from some of the refugees who had flooded the city to get away from the depredations of the roving gangs of outlaws in unpoliced areas, and from the hordes of enhanced animals that were rapidly turning the countryside into an uninhabitable wilderness. He stopped the scan with a finger when it came to alcoholic beverages and ordered a simple rum and coke.

The display blinked negatively at him, then he remembered that he had converted all his credit into gold. A human bartender came to his rescue, truculent until he displayed a gold coin.

“Why didn’t you say so,‘stead of tapping in?”she grumbled.

“I forgot,”Gary said, sliding the coin over to her. The barmaid made an unintelligible noise and dropped his change on the bar. Seconds later his drink moved along the bar and stopped in front of him. He took it and turned his back on the bar, surveying the massed humanity.

There was little new to see that he didn’t already know about or had seen before. Prostitutes plied their trade, males, females and others of indeterminate sex. Enhanced pets performed tricks for their owners. Uptowners were relieved of their money by smooth professionals in such a way that they hardly noticed or minded. Smoke from various drugs wafted into his nostrils, familiar from the few times he had been here as a student. He felt almost at home, in an odd sort of way. Then the floor show began. It started with a large cage being trundled into the center of the floor among the tables. Inside the cage was a man, a nude woman and a huge white tiger. The man acted as trainer, going through the ancient routines of barking gun, cracking whip and pushes and shoves at the animal with an antique, straight backed chair. Eventually the trainer“subdued”the animal, then forced it toward the nude woman cringing in apparent fear in a corner of the cage. The tiger bounded forward, bearing the woman down under its paws. The woman went through a fake struggle until she was turned around and forced down on all fours. The tiger mounted her and began thrusting against her buttocks. Gary turned his head at this perversion of his profession. He could tell that the tiger was enhanced by its swollen head. He wondered what went through its mind as it was forced to perform an act alien to it in the normal course of events. Or perhaps it had been convinced by its owner that this was the only life possible. Whatever, he almost hoped it would discover that there were others of its kind in the wild and escaped this kind of life someday.

While he drank, he tried to think over the cacophony of sounds and voices. What should he do? Where should he go? He knew for certain that very shortly, if not already, he would be a wanted man. In the ordinary course of events this would hardly matter. Only the grossly repugnant forms of crime could induce the police into an effort to apprehend a fugitive—either that or political influence which the Deacon certainly commanded. If that weren’t enough, he also had the wherewithal to hire private security forces for the same purpose. Unlike the police, they were efficient as hell. Booger Bear squirmed in his pocket and Gary freed him. He crawled out onto the bar and looked around curiously, blinking his eyes and twitching his stub of a tail.

“Want something to drink, Booger?”Gary asked.

“Coke,”the cat said. He enjoyed the tickling sensation of carbonated beverages although he never drank much of them after the first few tastes.

“Let me buy,”said a voice from his left.

Gary turned. While he had been considering his options, a thin man with graying hair and sharply pointed nose had taken the stool next to him. He was casually dressed in jeans and a loose coat with wide pockets. Gary could tell by the cut of the material that it had never been bought off a shelf.

“Sure, why not?”Gary said, holding out his hand. The thin man punched for the beverage. It arrived quickly. He took Gary’s hand while the cat began lapping at the soda.“I’m Terry Lee. You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t been here for a while. I used to stop in occasionally when I was in the area.”

“Fine animal you have there. What’s his name?”

“Booger Bear.”

“What happened to his tail? And you got a name?”

“Uh, Lawrence,”Gary said, the first thing that popped into his head.“And Booger is a Manx. They don’t have tails.”

“Don’t think I’ve seen one before, at least not the enhanced variety. You interested in selling him?”

Gary eyed his companion warily. Was this a casual encounter or could he be a private security agent, already sniffing at the trail? He had no way of telling, but the idea of selling his pet was repugnant. He would as soon have sold his right arm.“He’s not for sale. He doesn’t do any tricks, anyway. He’s just my pal.”

Lee stretched his arm and tried to pet the cat. Booger Bear shrank away at first, then relented. That told Gary a lot. He trusted Booger Bear’s instincts. The man at least was no antagonist.

“Fine animal,”Lee repeated.“Say, you looking for some action?”

“Not really,”Gary said. So that was the angle. He was either a pimp or a runner for a gambling or drug cartel. But maybe the man could be useful anyway. It wouldn’t do to keep his car; it could be too easily traced. He could just abandon it, but it would be far better to raise some cash. And the title was in his name only.“Know where I could sell a car?”He asked.

“Could be. Is it hot?”

“No, it’s mine. I just need some cash.”

“Let’s see the specs and title,”Lee said, all business now. Gary keyed in the information, forgetting that he had given Lee a different name. Lee raised his brows in wry humor.“The price just went down, Mister Daniels.”Gary sighed.“How much?”

“Cash or Gold?”

“Gold,”Gary decided.

Lee named a figure, horrendously under what he had just recently paid for the car. Gary winced, but decided to make the deal while he still could.“One condition. You forget where you bought it. Or even better, you bought it up north somewhere.”Lee smiled.“No problem friend. I never saw you before. Let’s go look at the car.”

Gary tucked Booger Bear back into the pocket of his jacket and slid off the stool. He really didn’t trust Lee to keep his whereabouts unknown for long. Enough money could buy men like him many times over, but he hoped the man’s own interests would give him a few days grace while he decided what to do.

There were many considerations he needed to act on, some coming to him like an unfamiliar and very bad dream. He would need a new identity and a new computer if he stayed in the city. The one hanging from his neck was so individualized as to be like a blinking beacon over his head, telling the world who and where he was. And he needed a temporary place to stay, one where no questions would be asked. He had no idea how to go about arranging such things. Lee might be able to help, but he decided against that course of action. It might be better to distance himself from his first contact. The electracar was still intact in the guarded parking lot where he had left it. Gary interfaced the codes needed to transfer the title and operate the car with Lee’s computer. As soon as the transfer of title was recorded in the city’s archives, Lee paid him from a voluminous inside coat pocket. Gary removed his bag from the car.

“Anything else I can do for you, friend? A woman? A place to stay?”

“Not now, thanks. Just forget you ever met me.”

“It’s forgotten friend. Be careful; you’re carrying a lot of money for this part of town.”Lee got into the car and drove away without a backward glance, leaving Gary standing in the parking lot.

Gary returned to the slidewalk, not knowing exactly where he was going. At first he simply wandered, changing walks now and then, wanting to put some distance between himself and his last transaction. Carrying the bag didn’t make him overly conspicuous; many of the slidewalk throngs carried bags, some by handles, some slung over shoulders. It was a reflection of the high unemployment rate and the fact that Houston had more jobs available than most cities, though a good portion of it was only quasi-legal. Nevertheless, it made the Houston area a target for the jobless and those displaced from other parts of the countryside by the plague of enhanced animals.

Booger Bear squirmed uncomfortably in his pocket. He was really too big to carry that way for long now but Gary didn’t want to free him in such strange surroundings.

“Want a date, Mister?”

A vacantly pretty young woman was blocking his path. She wore a bright red vest, hanging loosely open to display her young breasts, and a very short skirt split on both sides. Her blond hair was cut short, little longer than his own. Gary nodded no and started to go around her, then reconsidered.

“How much for the night?”

As young as the girl was, she had already learned to gauge the prosperity of her Johns. She named a figure he was loathe to pay, but at least it would get him off the street for the night and give him a chance to get re-oriented.

“Let’s go. What’s your name?”

“Veronica. Call me Vera. You want me to carry your bag?”

“Is your place far?”Gary asked, ignoring the offer. The young girl stopped and gave him a curious stare.“We’re not going to my place, Mister. You have to buy a room. Where are you from?”

“Call me Larry. I’m from out of town. Look, I’ll make it worth your while to go to your place.”

Vera sighed.“My old lady wouldn’t like that. Come on, we’re holding up traffic.”

Of course, Gary thought. She would have a pimp. Still, maybe she could help.“Look, Vera. I don’t want to go to a hotel. Isn’t there some other place?”She wrinkled her forehead then brightened.“I know somewhere but it will cost you.”

“Lead on,”Gary said. His money wasn’t going to last very long at the rate he was spending it. No use worrying, he thought. Tomorrow will probably be worse and the most important consideration now was losing himself.

CHAPTER FIVE

When Maria daydreamed, it was of herself as a cat in a woman’s body most of the time. She had been engineered in a genetics laboratory in Mexico and grown in utero by a host mother. The lab had long since defunct; a casualty of the tight security now along the Mexican/United States border designed to stop the influx of altered humans and enhanced animals. She remembered little of her younger years. She assumed she had been raised in the laboratory crèche her first owners sometimes referred to. Her earliest memories were of a secretive Mexican couple who called her Maria and kept her inside most of the time, allowing her out only in their presence, with constant admonishments to keep her nails retracted, her long pelt-like hair covered with a scarf and to always wear opaque glasses on to keep anyone from seeing her eyes, which looked exactly like a cat’s with their slit pupils. All this made for a lonely childhood. She had no friends and her early education came only through a primitive computer. She spoke Spanish and learned how to speak English in order to work with the computer. She learned quickly, pleasing the couple with her quick intelligence, but still they kept her under tight rein and gave her no love at all. She played only with cats. They had an affinity for her, as she did for them, sensing that they were kin. She enjoyed their company and found that she could interpret many of their sounds and mannerisms and even talk, in a limited fashion, to the few feral enhanced cats she came in contact with.

When Maria was nine or ten, still pre-pubescent, she was suddenly and without warning delivered to another couple, this one in Ciudad Acuna, across the border from Del Rio. She spent more years there, and they became increasingly traumatic. Senor Munoz, as he insisted on being called, began trying to instruct her in sex as soon as she showed the first signs of developing into a woman. He was fat and oily, and not all pleasant to be around. Senora Munoz only compounded her problems. The senora used an electric whip to make her obey, black eyes glittering with undisguised pleasure when she winced from the shocks.

Maria was no fool. She was allowed free access to the home computer terminal and she knew she was being trained as an exotic, eventually to be sold like an animal to some Norte Americano to use as a plaything. There was little she could do about it except resist as well as she was able. Both of her captors soon bore scars from her claws, retractile and sharp pointed like a cat’s. Senor Munoz was a poor instructor. Maria learned to hate his attentions even more than his wife’s. He was big and he hurt her young body more often than not. Senora Munoz’s sexual demands were not painful but were extremely disgusting. On the nights when the senora had her, it was almost always necessary for her to use the whip before she would submit, and even then she rebelled, using her teeth and nails forcefully enough to sometimes be able to cut the sessions short. Maria often daydreamed of a life away from people entirely, with only cats for company, but she saw no way to satisfy that longing. She did still play with cats and studied their ways over the net. And as bad as her situation was, she still dreaded the day when she would be sold to the north. On the other hand, if she ever managed to escape, she was determined to somehow try to make her way to the great rich country and try to live as a free person. Altered humans were still considered human there, though barely. The Munozes made one mistake. They allowed her to play outside during the day. An enhanced leopard lived next door, kept behind a slatted fence. She made friends with the big cat and even began to learn some of the odd language that enhanced animals were beginning to use among themselves. One night when Senora Munoz was being overly enthusiastic with her whip, Maria screamed and the leopard came to her rescue. It tore its way through the slatted fence and battered down the door of the house. It tore out Senora Munoz’s throat. Senor Munoz killed the leopard but suffered a fatal wound himself in the process. He lay on the floor gurgling his life away while Maria watched and smiled. As soon as Munoz was dead, Maria gathered up what few belongings she owned, then searched the house and took all the money she could find. She knew that the authorities would come looking for her and that left only one alternative, the Boystown section of Ciudad Acuna where she could hide. The police never entered that part of the city. It was devoted to servicing visitors from Estados Unidos, the great rich nation to the north. In Boystown, she quickly found a house that would accept her and allow her to practice the only profession she knew. As an exotic, she commanded a premium and could choose what kind of sex she charged for. That enabled her to avoid the more degrading experiences most prostitutes were forced to engage in. She stayed for several years and learned in the meantime that across the border she might find other, more pleasant ways to earn a living. She saved her money and dreamed of escape to a place where she might live a more normal life. Eventually she made contact with a smuggler who dealt in humans. She used most of her savings to buy passage across the border and on to Houston, where she thought she might find work at their zoo, caring for the big cats. Unfortunately, once she arrived in Houston she found that the zoo had been shut down for lack of funding, the same way others were closing all across the country. With the optimism of youth she didn’t know that they wouldn’t have hired her anyway without proof of citizenship. That could be illegally obtained but it was far out of her price range. When her money ran out, she took a job with a man who promised that all she would have to do was act as hostess at his place of business. Maria accepted the job, then found that she was nothing more than a captive, her illegal status in the country held over her head like a dangling weight, ready to fall at any moment. One day her employer took her aside and insisted that she engage in prostitution with his customers. When she refused and tried to leave, his guards barred her from the door. She retreated to the lounge where the food vending machines were located. The huge owner cornered her there and sat her down at a table. He spelled out her status and again ordered to service his customers. When she refused for the second time, he began beating her.

***

Gary followed Vera along the slidewalk through the night time throng of people, down one street and across to another, through an alley and onto another slidewalk and off again until he was thoroughly lost. Finally they stopped at a two story building on a short cross street. It displayed no sign of being a business establishment and the door was locked. Vera touched her thumb to an inconspicuous spot beside the entrance and the door opened. Two huge men dressed in blue pants and leather vests barred the entrance. Gary could tell at a glance that their bodies were augmented by hormones as well as gene enhancement. Vera turned and held out her hand. Gary blinked, then realized that she wanted money. He handed over the agreed upon sum and the guards moved aside.

He followed her up a set of stairs and down a hall marked with thumbprint dependent locks. She stopped at one and pressed her thumb to it as she had before. The lock clicked, but before entering, she tapped out a code on the touchpad and had Gary press his thumb to the lock. He realized then that the house must be personally attuned to the residents rather than managed by the net or a commercial security system. That suited him; he didn’t intend to use his own computer again. The room was better than he had expected. It had holovision controls and a smart bed with touch-sensitive covers, designed to increase the intensity of skin sensations. Vera closed the door, allowed him time to drop his bag, then shrugged off her vest and began tugging at the fastenings of her skirt.

“Wait,”Gary said.“I’m not interested in that. I just wanted a place to stay.”

Vera stopped undressing, her hands still on the closure of her skirt. She looked at him askance, then shrugged.“Whatever you say. You’ve paid for it; you can have it if you want.”

“I’d rather have something to eat,”Gary said, realizing that he hadn’t touched any food since early morning.

“Go to the right in the hallway, then down the back stairs. There’s some vending machines against the far wall. I’ll wait here.”

Gary eyed his bag.

“Don’t worry; it will be safe here. You’re a strange one, you know.”

“Me and my cat both,”Gary remarked as Booger Bear poked his head out of the carrying pocket.

“It doesn’t matter here. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You can bring me an alcohol popper if you feel like it.”

Gary decided to trust her. He really was hungry and he had certainly paid enough money to expect at least a minimum amount of honesty. He left his bag and departed.

The back set of stairs opened up into a rather largish room with several tables and chairs and food vending machines along one wall. He had to change a gold coin at a ruinous rate to obtain money for the machines, but then he was able to punch out not only a meal for himself and Vera’s popper but a food bar for Booger Bear as well. He ignored the only other couple in the room, a very large, well-dressed man and a small, pretty woman with Hispanic features and peculiar hair sitting in one corner. From where he was standing, it looked almost like a pelt. What he could see of her face appeared to be shadowed, then he realized that it was hair too, but of a very short and fine variety. He sat down and began to eat, letting Booger Bear use a chair for his meal. The cat ate while peering intensely across the room at the young woman.

They were only half finished with their meal when Gary realized that the voices of the couple across the room had become louder. He looked over at them just as the man struck the young woman a brutal blow to the side of her head. She gave a cry of pain and held her hand to her face. The large man stood up. He doubled his fist, ready to hit her again. Gary wanted to ignore the scene. He had troubles enough of his own, but Booger Bear had different ideas about the matter. He abandoned his meal and bounded from the chair. He used only three tremendous leaps to cross the room and attack, claws extended. He landed slightly askew of where he had intended to strike, on the man’s neck rather than his face. He only had time for one swipe at his eyes before his antagonist used one huge hand to tear him loose and fling him away while he drew his weapon with his other.

He fired at the cat, but the woman spoiled his aim, bringing her hand up to deflect the shot. He backhanded the woman and fired again, this time sending a slug along with the laser beam, but Booger Bear had recovered and was moving. The shot missed, booming loud in the room and exploding the front of a vending machine the cat had been in front of a second before.

“Stop!”Gary yelled, pulling his own weapon from the pocket of his jean jacket. The man whirled, clearly intending to shoot anyone interfering in his business. Gary fired first, his slug exploding into the man’s face, sending blood and bits of bone spraying into the air. He toppled backwards, just as dead as Amelia’s brother.

Gary froze in place. It had all happened so fast that he had reacted without thinking of the consequences, his only desire being to protect Booger Bear.Good Godhe thought.I’ve killed someone else!

His hands shook so uncontrollably that he put his gun away before he loosed another shot unintentionally. Booger Bear jumped into the woman’s arms and began purring, such an unusual reaction to a stranger that Gary couldn’t understand it. He stared at the scene in momentary consternation.

“Bad man,”Booger Bear said, as if trying to explain the situation. The pretty young woman petted him briefly then looked up.“That was the owner you killed. Let’s get out of here.”

Gary dithered only a moment longer, then decided she had the right idea. He thought briefly of his bag up in his room and mentally abandoned it. He could buy more powerpacks and clothes.“Which way?”

“There’s only one guard out back. Let’s try that way, but be careful; he’s bound to have heard the shots.”

Gary was only momentarily curious over why no one had responded to the noise, not knowing that in this environment, people normally either ran or hunkered down when fighting occurred. He let the slim young woman with the curious hair continue to hold Booger Bear while he drew his lasergun again and took the lead when she pointed the way.

The guard was at the bottom of the stairs, apparently trying to decide whether to abandon his post and investigate or to wait for reinforcements. When he saw them coming down the stairs he raised his gun. Gary had been ready. Before the guard could fire, he sent a laser beam sizzling into the arm holding the gun, causing him to drop it. They ran down the stairs two at a time, with Gary waving the guard aside with the threat of shooting him again.

“To the right!”The woman shouted. Gary ran that way. He saw a door and opened it.

“Go! To the left!”

Gary ran as directed, down the narrow alley, stepping in refuse and mud. They burst out onto a street little wider than the alley. He kept going, following his companion’s directions, over to another street, down another alley and finally out onto a wider thoroughfare, finally stopping only when the woman cried out.

“Slow down!”

Gary held up. He quickly checked to see how Booger Bear was taking all this. His pet’s fur was laying down and he seemed quite content where he was, despite the strenuous activity. He let her lead the way afterwards, mostly along the side of the streets until they came to a slidewalk area of shops again. They were still thronged with pedestrians. Eventually she took them into a small park, where she stopped, breathing heavily.

Gary had no idea where they were and little idea of what was happening, other than the fact that he seemed to be turning into a gunfighter rather than a geneticist. His mind was numb with the day’s events, still unable to comprehend the enormous changes that had occurred in his life in the course of just one day. He spotted a park bench and collapsed onto it. The woman sat down beside him. Booger Bear jumped from her lap to his and curled up into a ball.“Bad man,”he said again. Then he began purring.

CHAPTER SIX

Thank you,”the young woman said.“I was having a bad time.”Gary turned to his new companion. For the first time he had the leisure to examine her closely. The glow of the park lights told him plainly that she was an altered human. Her hair was dark but it had the appearance of a long thick mane rather than human hair. She wore it collected behind her neck in some kind of clasp. Her skin was a light brown color and the hair on her face was more like a down. She sat erect under his examination, her pretty young face unquestioning. She gazed back at him with the slitted pupils of a cat. That caused him to glance down at her hands. She had retractile nails, the pointed tips just peeking out from beneath their sheaths. Her palms were free, but more down covered the back of her hands and fingers. There might be other alterations but from all appearances, her body was human, slim and nicely curved, with the nipples of her ample breasts limned against her shirt. Like him, she wore jeans and had on old fashioned footwear, a pair of simple slippers.

“You don’t have to thank me,”he said.“It was Booger Bear who got me involved.”

“Booger Bear?”The cat looked up from Gary’s lap, still purring.“Oh, your cat. He’s an unusual one. How smart is he?”

Gary knew she was referring to his enhanced intelligence; his high-domed head was an unmistakable sign.

“I don’t really know. He’s a new development, but his genome indicates that he should be nearly as intelligent as a human, allowing for differences in species, of course. What’s your name?”

“Maria is the name I was given as a child. That will do well enough.”Her voice had a Hispanic lilt to it, but it was melodic and pleasant to listen to.

“I’m Gary Daniels,”he said without thinking, then realized he had given his real name. Well, it probably wouldn’t matter to her one way or another. From all indications, she was now on the run too, and certainly she was almost as involved in his latest homicide as he was.

“What was going on in that place anyway?”

“I thought I had taken a job as a hostess there, but it seems I was mistaken. The man you killed owned the place, and I guess he decided he owned me too. He thought I could serve him better by favoring to his customers with sex rather than drinks. He kept me from leaving when I tried to quit. That’s when he began beating me and that’s when you and Booger Bear stopped him.”

“Just call him Booger,”Gary said absently, still trying to figure out what to do.“By the way, I left my bag back there. Is there any chance of getting it back?”

“I wouldn’t try it if I were you. Too many dealers were into him for one thing or another and they would like nothing better than to make you liable for it. Was there anything important in it?”

Gary considered. He had gotten away with his money and his lasergun with two spare powerpacks. Anything else could be replaced fairly easily. The bad aspect was that he could be traced through his belongings, and then both killings would be connected to him if there was an investigation of any consequence. He wondered about the girl-woman, he amended. She wasn’t carrying any belongings other than what might be in her pockets. But perhaps she had things elsewhere.“No, there was nothing important in my bag,”he finally said.“How about you? Do you have anything to collect?

“No. I’ve never had much to start with,”she said simply. Gary eyed her again, looking carefully for signs of age. He decided that she was even younger than he had thought, perhaps no older than sixteen or so. Other than her few brief words, he knew nothing about her. Nevertheless, he and Booger Bear had intervened in her life and now he felt somewhat responsible. Besides, she appeared to know more about the surroundings as he did and he badly needed some advice; he just didn’t know quite how to ask.

He yawned suddenly and his stomach growled at the same time, reminding him that he still hadn’t finished a meal since breakfast. His purchases from the vending machines had been only half consumed before the fighting started.

Maria was also giving him a searching examination, from his expensive jeans and jacket to the very expensive cat curled in his lap. Taking in the sight of the cat, her expression softened for a moment, but then she remembered where she had first seen Gary Daniels. It was not a place where she would ever have expected a savior. Was he one of the customers? If so, she didn’t think she wanted much more to do with him. On the other hand, his pet cat seemed to be not only satisfied, but pleased and trusting of him. That carried a lot of weight with her. And he spoke of a bag. Customers normally didn’t carry luggage into a place designed for clandestine activities such as sex and drug dealing or hiding from such law as still prevailed. Yet she was destitute and needed even more help that he and his cat had already provided. Finally she spoke.“I have to find a place to stay,”she said, leaving the rest of the gambit up to him.

“So do I,”Gary replied, trying to stifle another yawn.

“I think I know a place if you have a little money,”Maria offered.

“I have some,”Gary said cautiously.

“There’s one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“It’s mostly a place for altered humans. Would that bother you?”

“It wouldn’t bother me and it certainly wouldn’t bother Booger. He would probably just find it interesting. The question is, would they mind him?”

“They would probably like him. It’s sort of like a hotel catering to altered humans, so long as they can pay a little toward their keep.”

“How do you know about it? No—sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”Maria decided to be at least mostly honest since he obviously could tell she was an altered human.

“I stayed there for a few days when I first came to Houston,”she told him. Gary didn’t ask any more questions about her physical being. He was curious but he knew that many altered humans were sensitive about their differences, especially since most of them hadn’t asked to be born that way. He held none of the common prejudices concerning altereds, but like any young man in the presence of a pretty girl, he wanted to find out more about her. That could wait though. The important thing now was to get off the streets and try to devise a long range plan. He stood up, waking Booger Bear in the process.

“Let’s go.”

***

The hotel, as Maria had described it, was several streets over where the business and entertainment districts began merging with old apartment buildings and homes converted into boarding houses for transients and refugees. Several apparently normal humans were lounging on the porch as they came up, including an enhanced dog of indeterminate breed laying on the floor. It woke up as they approached, eyed the cat without animosity and went back to sleep.

Inside there was a foyer inhabited by a matronly, gray-haired woman dozing in a corner lounger. She opened her eyes as they entered.

“Hello, Maria. Back so soon?”

“It didn’t work out,”Maria said shortly.“Is my room still open?”

“If you can pay. Who’s your friend?”

“He’s with me,”Maria evaded.

The woman raised one brow in a cynical expression.“It will cost extra.”Gary stopped her speculation.“It’s not like that. We just need a place to camp for a day or two. And something to eat and drink too.”

“Money? Extra for your cat.”

Gary fished for a gold coin. The old woman weighed it in her hand, then surprisingly, gave him some change taken from the folds of her voluminous skirt. She dropped the gold coin into her bosom. He was satisfied. There would be no record of their visit. He doubted that she kept any records at all, merely paying off the police to avoid word getting to the city that it was a business establishment. From the other side of her skirt she produced an old fashioned key and handed it to Maria.“Go ahead. I’ll bring you something to eat and drink. Mind the cat now. No messes.”

“Thank-You,”Booger Bear said, deciding to speak up for a change. He pronounced the words slowly but articulately. The gray haired woman raised her brows again but said nothing. Maria led the way down a narrow hall to the back of the first floor.

The room was small but neatly kept. There was a standard double bed, a dresser, some shelves and a tiny bathroom with shower. There was even an old holovision set. Gary glanced at the controls and saw that it had modern search programs for all that it was an older model. He thought of trying it out to see if his name was in the news yet, but he was simply too tired to worry about it, even supposing he was ready to share the events surrounding his previous homicide with Maria, which he wasn’t yet. A tap on the door produced the taciturn old lady, holding out a container of food and a jug of water. Maria took the meal from her with thanks then closed them in again.

The food was all synthetic but Gary ate hungrily. He sat in the single chair, while Maria sat cross legged on the bed. She let Booger Bear nibble from her hand as she ate, which the cat liked to do, and something that had always given Amelia fits. Maria smiled and talked to his pet as they ate, raising her a notch on his approval scale.

When they were finished, Gary stood up and brushed away crumbs. He eyed the bed, hoping that Maria intended for him to sleep there rather than on the floor. She perceived his intentions.

“We can both use the bed, but let’s keep it at that, huh?”

“Fine.”

Gary began undressing while she used the tiny bathroom, then he took his turn. Booger Bear joined him and complained about the lack of cat facilities.

“Just go ahead and use it,”Gary told him.“I’ll take you outside tomorrow.”He stripped and began showering, a necessity his pet thought was simply one more of the strange things humans did that were both unnecessary and inexplicable. Maria was already under the covers when they came back out into the room. He crawled into bed while Booger Bear jumped onto it and waited patiently for Gary to settle down and get the covers arranged.

“Lights out,”Maria told the room.“Good night, Gary. Good night, Booger.”

“G’night,”Gary said and closed his eyes. He was asleep before Booger Bear replied, if he did.

Maria waited tensely for the expected overture or thinly disguised groping, but none came. Shortly she heard his breathing slow into sleep and relaxed, undecided over whether to be relieved or miffed. She closed her eyes again and let Booger Bear’s soft purring lull her to sleep.

***

Gary woke to the sound of noises coming from the bathroom and took the opportunity to turn on the holo. He puzzled out the search program and entered his name. Seconds later his picture appeared, then those of Amelia and Deacon Pilkington. The facts of the accompanying story were more or less accurate, but the opinions and explanations were decidedly slanted, and not in his favor. He found that he was wanted for both murders, with no ameliorating circumstances mentioned. Maria was named as his accomplice in the second, and possibly first, killing. She was also cited as being an altered human and probably as dangerous as he was.

The Deacon’s face stared at him as though they were both in the same room. His forehead crinkled in genuine grief and simulated puzzlement at the murder of his son by his son-in-law. Amelia flanked him on one side and her mother on the other.

When the deacon finished speaking, Amelia declared to the world that Gary was an anti-Christian freak-lover and that if she had known it beforehand, she wouldn’t have married him. The tears streaking her pretty face were soap-opera real.

Fascinated by the unfolding version of events being presented to the Houston viewing audience, Gary failed to hear the bathroom door open.

Maria watched tensely, and sensed with her feline awareness that her partner of the night was feeling no remorse; rather, he emanated emotions of disgust mixed with apprehension. She trusted her senses to a certain extent, but she began wondering what she had gotten herself mixed up in. She froze her expression into normality as Gary cursed his erstwhile family and switched off the holovision set. He turned around and saw her standing in front of the bathroom door. Her unexpected presence held him in place.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Now you know why I’m on the run,”Gary said resignedly.“If you want me to leave, I will. I’ll give you enough money to take care of yourself for a few days. All I ask is that you don’t report that you’ve been with me—and I’ll do the same for you.”Maria was more startled by Gary’s offer of money than anything else. Anything ever given to her in the past had meant a sexual trade. She didn’t know what to make of him, but she didn’t intend to split up, not unless he showed a darker side of his character than he had so far. She was under no illusions about what would happen to her if caught. Altered humans fared very poorly in court these days, and that wasn’t even considering the fact that she was an illegal immigrant.

“I think we should both leave,”she said, coming forward and holding out her arms to take Booger Bear. The cat was agreeable; he jumped from the floor and landed on her chest. She cradled him into a comfortable position before he needed to extend his claws for purchase.

“You mean together? Don’t you want to know anything else about what you just saw?”

Maria lowered her gaze to Gary’s pet, who was practically shaking the room with the deep bass rumble of his purrs.“Yes, I’d like to know why you murdered you wife’s brother,”she said simply, not willing to credit him with being as cold blooded as the news clip she had just watched made him out to be.

“Her brother is a fanatic when it comes to genetic engineering. He thinks enhanced animals and altered humans like yourself should all be killed, preferably after some very disagreeable pain.”

“Lots of people feel that way.”

“Yes, but he tried to sneak into my house while my wife and I were out and kill Booger Bear. She gave him the house code and told him when we would be gone. The only thing that saved Booger is that we broke up and I came back early. Then he tried to kill me as well. I had no choice, just as I had no choice when that guy beating on you tried to kill him.”

“You love your cat, don’t you?”

“Yes. He’s a better person than most humans, altered or otherwise.”

“That’s good enough for me. You already know I have some cat in me, don’t you?”

“For someone like me, it’s hard to miss. I’m a geneticist, and specialize—or did specialize—in improvement of mammalian species.”

“Okay, I won’t hold it against you.”She smiled, showing canines slightly longer than those of normal humans.“Shall we go?”

“I’m willing—but to where? Everyone who watched that news clip knows what I look like now.”

“Which means we should get out of the city,”Maria said.

“Yes, but how? The airports and bus stations require computer identification. I don’t have any now, and unless I miss my guess, you don’t either.”For the first time, Gary was beginning to regret selling the car. Then he remembered that it wouldn’t have helped to keep it, not without money for recharging, or even to eat on for that matter.

“We’ll have to go overland. The trucks are still running, and they’ll take passengers so long as they’re armed and can pay.”

Gary could understand about being able to pay, but armed?“Why would they want passengers to be armed?”

“To help fend off hijackers, and in case of breakdowns to keep the feral animals at bay.”Gary thought she knew a hell of a lot about how to get around for a sixteen year old girl.“How do you know so much about them? Have you traveled that way?”

“It’s how I got to Houston from Del Rio. Don’t worry, one of them will take us.”

Gary did worry, but he didn’t see where he had much choice. He was so far outside the bounds of his previous life that almost every waking moment held some new surprise for him.“All right, Maria. Lead the way.”

***

They were on their way, but barely two blocks from where they had spent the night, waiting at an intersection for a hole in the undirected traffic to slow enough for them to cross the street. Maria stopped suddenly, senses alert. She looked casually around as if trying to decide which direction to take, then grabbed Gary’s hand and urged him quickly through the entrance of a used clothing store. Gary didn’t know what was happening, but followed Maria’s lead. He was beginning to trust her more and more.

“Security Rats ahead,”she explained softly, still holding his hand.

“How do you know?”

“Never mind now. There was one on each side of the street, coming our way. Listen, I don’t think they spotted us, but we’ll have to buy something to stay here more than a few minutes. Best to try it on some pants or something and get out of sight. I’ll wait here; they don’t know my face yet.”

The proprietor, a slight man with a limp was already eyeing them suspiciously. Gary quickly began looking at a selection of jumpsuits. Surprisingly, he found a consignment of the new temperature controlled garments, usually available only in upscale stores in affluent parts of the city.

“Find a pair your size, and whatever else you need,”Gary told Maria, knowing she would need a change of clothes as well as him.

While Maria was still looking, Gary took a jumpsuit he thought would fit and asked the little man if he could try it on. He agreed reluctantly only after Gary showed him the color of their money and after insisting he hold a coin for“security”. Gary took his time in the dressing room, pausing to read the instructions for setting the controls for different temperatures. When he came out, already wearing the jumpsuit, Maria had a jumpsuit and several other garments in her possession. Gary selected undergarments and a shoulder bag big enough to carry Booger Bear with room to spare. At the last moment, he also bought a western style straw hat, hoping it would help shade his face. At his suggestion, Maria also bought a bag to carry her purchases in. By this time the shop owner was smiling happily and wasn’t adverse to spending a little time dickering over prices. All the while, Gary was holding his breath, hoping he wasn’t a news junkie and that no one who was would come into the store while they were there.

“They’re past,”Maria said, leaving first then motioning Gary on out through the door.

“Do you think it was us they were after?”

Maria’s shoulders twitched.“Who knows? They were heading in the right direction anyway. Best to be careful.”

“How did you spot them?”

“It’s easy once you’ve seen a few of them. They’re always down in this area, trying to find out who’s paying the cops, who’s changed identities, and so on. And some of them regularly came into the place I was at, looking for payoffs.”

“Speaking of identities, don’t we need some new ones?”

“Best to let it wait until we get where we’re going. The truckers won’t ask.”

“How does someone as young as you look know all this stuff?”

“You learn by being a fugitive, or by being around others who are.”

“I didn’t know you were wanted.”

“I wasn’t, until yesterday. Or at least not by no one but the Border Rats.”

“Oh,”Gary said, feeling small. She was an illegal immigrant. He should have guessed.

“Don’t worry about it. If you want my life story, I’ll tell you about it, but not now.”

Just then, the stutter of small caliber automatic weapons sounded from back the way they had come. There was an explosion, then more automatic gunfire that gradually tapered off to single shots and finally stopped completely.

“It sounds like we got out just in time,”Maria said, showing little emotion. She did take his hand though, and hurried him along.

Gary fell silent and they trudged on, block after block. Eventually they came to a part of the city that he had never frequented, consisting mostly of small gated truck farms. They specialized in genetically altered crops for the synthetic foods market. It was one of the few growth industries and promised to expand even more as transportation between cities grew ever more hazardous and expensive. Interspersed with the little farms were old homes and vacant lots peopled by squatters and drifters with no other place to go. When they passed a general store with a sign advertising ammunition and power packs, Gary insisted that they stop.

Inside, while he was selecting powerpacks and clips of ammunition for his lasergun, he saw Maria looking hungrily at hand weapons similar to his. He checked the price, decided that they could afford one and he bought it and some more packs and clips. He waited until they were back outside to hand it to her.

“For me?”Maria asked wonderingly. No one had ever given her a present like this. Gary chuckled.“The way we’re going, you may need it. Do you know how to use a lasergun?”

“No, but I can learn.”

“Wait until we get to an open area with no people around and I’ll run you through the basics and how to use it safely.”

They walked on, each feeling friendlier toward the other now. A couple of hours later the farms on the eastern edge of the city played out and the industrial area began as they began working their way west and north. Low rent housing and apartments were interspersed with factories and warehouses. Long after his feet were beginning to sting and hurt, even wearing the soft leather boots, he finally asked,

“How much farther?”

“Not too far now. We’ll hit the old interstate to Dallas in a bit, then we head north. And after that, you know as much as I do. I came in from the west.”

“We could have taken an off the books taxi.”

“Too conspicuous. We’ll arrive on foot and look poor and maybe not have to pay too much.”

“Well, I want to stop and rest for a minute.”Gary looked around. They were coming into a little area on the north side of the city specializing in manufacturing clothing and expensive leather goods. After decades of tending toward a service economy, assembly lines were making a comeback, again primarily due to transportation difficulties, both from overseas and within the continent.

“There,”Maria said, pointing to a spot along the solid wall of a three story building. It was a loading bay for raw goods but empty of trucks just then.

Gary gratefully sat down and leaned back against one of the docks. While they rested, he showed Maria how to use the lasergun he had bought for her. She caught on so quickly that he had to explain a function of the weapon only once and she could repeat his instructions back and demonstrate her aptitude.

“The hardest part is learning to sense the different trigger tensions so that you can use only the laser function, either for aiming or as a lethal beam, and then hold up before getting to the point that will fire the slugs. The only way to do that is to practice, so take out the clip and try it as we go along. Put it on your lowest setting so you don’t waste power.”Maria did so, being cautious with her weapon as he had instructed. He would have liked to be somewhere that they could fire some slugs so she could get used to the noise and recoil but that would have to wait. At least she wouldn’t have to worry much about recoil, he thought. The rocket assisted slugs being used in most weapons alleviated that problem. After a while they moved on.

***

The city sprawled over such a large area that it was nearing dusk when they finally approached the truck plaza. It was a huge complex, not really a single entity. It consisted of too many freight hauling and ancillary businesses to count, and had burgeoned for dozens of miles along the Interstate corridor between Houston and Dallas as imports from overseas fell and manufacturing rose in North America. It was composed of hundreds of enterprises devoted to bringing goods into and out of Houston from the nexus at Dallas where other Interstates ran east and west and further north.

“I talked to the trucker who bought a bunch of passengers from Del Rio,”Maria said.

“He was one of the few nice men I’ve met. He let me ride in the cab with his shotgun and told me a lot about how it all works.”

“Like what?”Gary asked.

“Like how to stay on the good side of the Border Security Agents, for one thing. The law says people without private transportation should either fly or take passenger buses so they can keep track of everyone. It’s pretty much of a joke though, with so many refugees and so many plane and bus crashes. If you can’t afford a floater, you’re better off on a truck, regardless of what the law says.”

Gary knew this to be true intellectually; he had never expected to experience it first hand.“So where do we go now?”

“To one of the littler plazas. There’ll be a restaurant there and we can find a broker to connect us to a trucker who hauls people on the side.”

“How much, do you think?”

Maria shrugged.“Depends on how comfortable we want to be.”She named several figures, all of which Gary thought were highway robbery—until he considered the alternative. He sighed.“We’re going to be broke before long, but lead on; I’m tired and hungry.”That statement made him realize that even if he did have cash, some places accepted only computer credit. And in order to have computer credit, he needed not only a new computer but a new identity.“Is there any way to get us some ID and a cheap computer in one of those places? I miss being in touch with events.”

“Let it wait. The truckers don’t care and chances are, whoever we ride with can connect us to a place in Dallas for that. They work both sides of the street.”He had to be content with that.

***

Gary’s feet refused to go any further. He wondered how Maria managed so well in those thin slippers she wore, then remembered: she was part cat; she probably had pads to cushion her weight. In the course of his work he had read numerous articles and reports of successful blending of feline traits with humans, as well as seeing the finished product on occasion. They had become one of the more popular selections for altered humans, perhaps because it was a natural inclination. Women had been compared to cats for centuries at least, perhaps longer.

“Are you ready to try a place?”Gary asked wearily. Maria stopped and let Booger Bear down, cautioning him not to stray.

“Tired riding,”the cat said. He went off a little distance and relieved himself.

“I’ll carry him now,”Gary said.“How do we go about this? Just go into one of the roundhouses and ask?”

“More or less,”Maria said.“We can eat and look around. The brokers will find us, unless I miss my guess.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The roundhouse was centered in the small truck plaza with a conglomeration of large and small freight haulers congregated around it like a mixed litter of animals nosing in to feed from their mother. A slidewalk led from the street they had been following but it was unpowered, even if holographic posts along each side did mark the way. Gary and Maria followed it to the main building where the restaurant and rented cubbyholes were doing a thriving business. The tables were organized in ranks and rows with narrow paths between them for waiters, servitors and patrons to move about. Maria led him along a corridor through tables with an odd assortment of humans occupying almost all of them. The truckers were a mixed bag, most wearing silver jumpsuits to mark their profession but their appearance was as varied as marks at an old time carnival. Some were bearded; some wore hats and helmets at rakish angles, most with tiny blinking lights of different colors that told supplicants what they were hauling and whether they were coming or going. Almost all were openly armed. Brokers occasionally wandered among them, expensively dressed and speaking to their computers or to truckers and their hangers-on in loud confident voices, but still inaudible over the cacophony of voices and rattle of trays and the blare of the giant holovison playing against both side walls. Shouts of food and beverage venders to the cooks and bartenders added to the clamor. A part of the huge room was taken up with entrances to cubbyholes, available for an hour or a night for any use one might want. Prostitutes of both sexes worked the aisles, vying for room with the human waiters carrying trays. A table at the back of the room came open and Maria grabbed it while Gary was still looking around in wide-eyed wonder. He had never seen, nor even heard of such a place. It brought the realization that, while he might have a doctorate in genetics, other parts of his education were sadly lacking. He was like an upper class child suddenly dropped into a juvenile detention facility. Even though he had killed two men and wounded a third in the last two days, he felt as insecure as an otter suddenly transported to a sandy desert. Despite the assault on his senses, he had to stifle a yawn. The day’s events were catching up to him.

Maria unwillingly mimicked him.

Gary reached up to remove his hat and get some of the breeze from overhead fans into his sweaty hair.

“No, not yet,”Maria warned.“It helps to conceal your face. Listen, I think we had better rest before we try the trip north. Let’s take a cubby and have some food delivered. We can have a broker come see us there.”

“I’d rather get on the road, but we’ll do whatever you think is best,”Gary said.

Maria started to tell him how tired she was, then saw that his attention had been diverted. Gary was staring at the holovision display. A news program was on, something about congress and genetics, but he couldn’t hear it over the multitude of conflicting noises in the place.“How do we get sound?”He asked, never taking his eyes from the screen, reading the dialog that scrolled beneath it.

“You don’t. Just read. What is it?”

Gary made shushing motions with his hand. This was important. He stared at the screen, mesmerized. Maria shrugged and began looking for a broker.

Before long, one appeared, beating the waitress by a step. She passed on by and let him make his pitch.

“You folks looking for a ride?”

Maria reached over and tugged on Gary’s sleeve to get his attention, at the same time motioning for the nattily clad broker to sit down.

Gary tore his attention from the holo and eyed the man sitting opposite him. He was dressed in jeans and jean jacket, much as Gary had been wearing the day before, but they were of some synthetic different than the usual make, with highlights of silver and gold catching and reflecting the multitude of lights, making them appear to glitter. He examined the man’s clothes while he shook hands. Only well-off people could afford that kind of raiment.

“We need a cubby and a meal,”Maria said, not bothering to give their names.

“No, we need a ride north, but we’ll take some food packs with the ride. And we want something where we can get a little rest.”

“No problem. Dallas or farther north.”

“Dallas,”Maria intoned before Gary could debate choices. The broker stroked his luxuriant mustache with one hand and touched his chest with the other, bringing up a display in front of his eyes that was invisible to them. He stared into space for a moment then looked back at them.“I’ve got one leaving in two hours. Ride in back the first part, but as soon as she’s two hours on the road, you have to move to the front.”His face twitched in the barest smile of understanding.“That would give you four hours of rest. And you have to be armed, both of you.”

“How much?”Gary asked.

He named a sum.

“No,”Maria said bluntly.“What do you take us for, refugees?”The broker’s eyes narrowed.“I did, but perhaps you’re not. Most refs are headed south, not north. Dallas isn’t hiring, except for barricade work, and frankly, it’s not worth it unless you’re starving.”

“Casualties?”

“Lots. Since the dry line shifted west, lots of those damned smart animals are moving with it. They’re multiplying like crazy, and so far as the carnivores are concerned, humans are as good to eat as anything else. The herbivores are hell on crops, too.”Gary knew all of this in a general sense, but this was bringing it home, and it was just one more reason for the broadcast he’d just listened to.“Well, we still want to go north, but not at that price,”he said, taking his cue from Maria.

“What kind of heat you got?”

Gary stared for a moment until he understood what he was referring to, then told him, not mentioning that Maria was a novice at handling her lasergun, but adding that they were well supplied with powerpacks.

“Good. That helps. The hijackers are getting too damned desperate and it makes them fearless. Okay, final price, assuming the driver agrees.”He named another sum which was much lower than before.

“Deal,”Gary said, not bothering to consult Maria. He wanted to get the hell out of this place and under cover.

The broker touched his display, pursed his lips and nodded, then looked back at them.“Done. Let’s see your money.”

***

The truck driver looked them over with a jaundiced eye. She was pleasant looking, though older than either of them by a number of years. Her face was tanned and slightly wrinkled from driving in sun and wind. After hearing about how enhanced animals were ravaging the area around Dallas, Gary had slid his hand into Booger Bear’s pocket and touched him with the signal that meant to stay still and quiet until told otherwise. He didn’t want the appearance of his enhanced pet to mar the deal. Appearing to finally approve, the driver said“I get you there safe, I get a bonus. Ten percent and no argument. Another ten and any Security Rat as asks gets told nothing. I saw that broadcast and I’ve heard of you.”Her lips parted in a jaded smile that held no animosity toward them, despite their wanted status. Gary winced, but agreed.

“All right, jump in back. I got some connections to make. Here’s something to eat now so you don’t have to wake up when I leave.”She handed them some food bars and a canteen.“I’ll keep the rest for when you move up front. Sleep tight.”The female trucker smiled again and turned to lead them to the back of the truck but then stopped and spoke to both of them.“Oh yeah. I’ve been in that place and seen how Mac treated his help. So far as I’m concerned, someone shoulda shot him long ago.”She appeared sincere, right down to the heavy duty lasergun riding on her hip that she patted every so often, as if to make sure it was ready at an instant’s notice. She opened the rear hatch for them. There was very little room left after the load had been braced and padded. A cargo pallet in a narrow cave-like space barely big enough for the two of them was what they would ride on. The hatch closed behind them and a glow light came on, providing a barely adequate bulwark against complete darkness. It was just sufficient for Gary to see how to unwrap his and Booger Bear’s meal, but Maria had no problem at all with her eyes, the slit pupils letting in enough light to activate her night vision.

“What was that about a broadcast?”Maria asked around a mouthful of synthetic ingredients flavored with artificial spices and sweeteners.

“You didn’t see it?”

“No, I was looking at people.”

Gary took a bite of his food bar. He was so hungry that it tasted delicious, despite its synthetic origin.

“Congress jumped the gun. I guess they figured Bradshaw was going to be elected for sure and wanted to start him off right.”

“What did they do?”

Gary took another bite before answering.“They passed a bill outlawing all further mammalian genetics—and nationalized all agricultural genetics. They drafted every geneticist in the country, but there was something funny about the way it was announced. I think they’re going to imprison the ones like me that worked with animals. Maybe worse. Whatever, we’re going to be scapegoats.”

Maria could tell even in the dim light that his face was strained with worry.“Is that all?”He licked the wrapper of the bar and crumpled it up.“No. Right at the end, they put out a list of

‘Outlaw Genetic Engineers’. I was on the list.”He smiled grimly, and they went on.

“Altered humans are no longer citizens. They are required to turn themselves in, thence to be shipped to‘reservations’. I can only imagine what that would mean, if they even intend to carry it out. I suspect it’s just a ploy to get them all to register so they know where they are.”

Maria took a moment to absorb it all, then lay down.“It couldn’t be any worse than what I’ve already been through. Not that I intend to let myself be hauled off to a reservation.”Gary lay down beside her.“What could be worse than being hunted as outlaws?”Maria wondered if he would be as friendly if he knew about her past.“I’ll tell you later. Right now let’s get some sleep.”

There was only one comfortable position possible for them all, with Maria holding Booger Bear in front of her and backing up to Gary spoon fashion. The cargo pad was soft enough and they were exhausted enough that neither woke to the rumble of the truck’s engine that got them on their way.

***

The only way Gary could sleep had been with his arm around Maria’s waist as they lay on their sides. When the truck stopped, the lack of movement woke him. The first thing he became aware of was that his hand was cupped comfortable around Maria’s breast. Almost at the same time he sensed that she was awake; for how long, he didn’t know. Hastily he removed his hand and struggled into a sitting position. Maria rolled over and looked at him.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean anything,”Gary said.

“It’s all right. You were asleep and I just left you that way.”She gave him a tiny smile that gave him a brief glimpse of her canines.

“Meow,”Booger Bear said, in English.

“You’re trying to be funny,”Gary admonished. He pinched his thumbnail and forefinger together and read the time. They had been on the road only an hour.

“Why did we stop?”he asked Maria.

“I don’t know. Probably to talk to another trucker for a minute.”As if to verify her statement, the idling engine rumbled to life and the ride continued.

“Want out,”Booger Bear said.

“Sorry, you’ll have to wait another hour,”Gary told him. The cat wasn’t able to reproduce a human sigh but he gave out a sound remarkable akin to one. Maria couldn’t get back to sleep. After a moment she sat up and leaned back against a crate next to Gary. She reached down and gathered the cargo pallet and stuffed it behind them for padding against the bumps.

Booger Bear sighed again before crawling up into her lap and quickly dozing off. If he couldn’t get out to stretch his legs or relieve himself, Maria had a very soft lap. Gary looked down at his pet with a fond gaze.“I’ve never seen him take to anyone like he has to you.”

“Makes sense,”Maria said.“I do have some cat genes, after all.”

“Still … Booger knows who’s naughty and who’s nice. He has an innate sense about people and he obviously has you on his good list.”

“I’m glad.”

Gary decided that he really had to find out more about the young woman who had so suddenly become such an overwhelming influence on his life.“So long as we’re just riding, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?”He suggested, then amended,“If you want to, that is.”

For a long time Maria remained silent. The man she was riding with was certainly a different breed of male than she was used to. He was quiet but competent in emergencies, as she well knew, and he appeared to like her, as she did him. But how would he feel when he discovered that she had been prostituted since early girlhood, even if most of it was forced? In her experience, men held nothing but disdain for her kind, scorning any kind of close relationship. And her altered status made it even worse. Most of the Johns treated her as if she were a toy, an object rather than a person. She knew that some couples liked each other, even fell in love and married and stayed together, but she had little comprehension of what a normal relationship with a man entailed.

She glanced to the side, seeing his face reposed in a patient wait for her answer. Finally she said

“Are you sure you want to know?”

Gary knew almost immediately that she must have been hurt terribly somehow and somewhere.

“Only if you’re comfortable talking about it,”he said gently. Maria sighed, making almost the same sound that Booger Bear had a short time ago.“All right. It began in Mexico…”

CHAPTER NINE

Gary listened with growing horror as Maria related her story against the backdrop of the dimly lighted space and the sway and bump of the truck as it traveled north toward Dallas. He had known intellectually that traffic in altered human beings existed but her story brought the fact home in a way that nothing else could have. By the time she finished, his horror had turned to anger toward anyone who would treat a person as badly as she had been. And she was as human as he was. Long ago he had resolved any moral and philosophical doubts about the mixing of genes from other animals with humans and vice versa. The only ethical issue in his mind was exploitation of the end product of such combinations. He didn’t believe that humanity was inherent in appearance, nor even in the ability to manipulate language and abstract concepts. To him, it went even deeper, to the basic sense of worth that all humans should enjoy, and anyone depriving humans such as Maria and Booger Bear—and now himself—of their freedom and pride in their self awareness were worse than evil; they were the dregs of humanity, no more worthy of a place in society than captains and owners of the sixteenth and seventeenth century slave ships who had visited so much carnage and despoilment on so many innocent beings.

Maria didn’t look at Gary the whole time she was talking; she was afraid of seeing revulsion on his face instead of understanding. As she neared the end of her story she found a storm of emotion working its way to the surface of her mind, events that she had totally forgotten coming back and erupting into her thoughts like unrepentant prodigal sons returning to upset their homes and parents and siblings all over again. Even when she was being beaten or subjected to degrading acts she had never broken, keeping a core of herself intact against the unwholesomeness of her environment. Now, the suppressed memories roamed through her mind like unwelcome guests in an overcrowded home, poking into rooms she had kept closed for too long a time. Unnoticed, tears began trickling down her cheeks. She felt an overwhelming tightness in her chest that threatened to suffocate her if it wasn’t let loose and at last it came welling forth in unwanted cries.

Gary was appalled at what she had gone through. He wondered how she had ever managed to reach adulthood and still remain sane. Her tears and deep wracking sobs tore at him almost as badly as they did her. He put his arm around her and gently, against her faltering resistance, drew her to his chest and let her cry. Before long he was crying with her, his tears dripping from his chin and falling onto her face, mixing with hers.

Booger Bear sensed the emotional turmoil taking place but had no idea what it was about nor what to do about it—except to try to comfort his new friend as his human was attempting to do. He added his soft, affectionate purrs to Gary’s murmuring sounds of comfort and at last the crying stopped. Maria eased back from Gary’s chest a few inches and dared to look up at him. She raised her hand and touched a finger to the wetness of his face as if assuring herself that his tears had been genuine. No one had ever cried for her. She hadn’t expected that anyone ever would. Gary tried to smile and got a tentative parting of Maria’s lips in return. He lowered his head and gently touched her lips with his own, then quickly withdrew.

He didn’t know it, but that gentle, undemanding kiss was the best thing he could possibly have done. She lay her head back on his chest, pleased that she could do so and not have him demand anything else. For the time being, she was too emotionally wrung out to respond to any further overtures and she was grateful that he appeared to know it.

***

Gary felt the truck slowing. He touched his thumb to forefinger and was startled to see that almost an hour had passed since Maria first began telling of her travails and journeys. For the first time since then, he spoke.“It feels like we’re stopping, Maria. Are you okay now?”

“Yes,”she said, stroking the cat still curled up in her lap.

“Look, I’m sorry for the way you’ve been treated. I only wish there was something I could do to help you forget it. Life shouldn’t be like that.”He knew his words were completely inadequate but it was all he knew to say.

“Thank you. I’ve never unburdened myself like that to anyone. It’s in the past though. If you can live with it, I can.”

“Nothing that happened was your fault. I think you’re a fine person. And so does Booger.”He reached down and placed his hands on the cat, stroking him along with her. Their hands touched. Maria squeezed his briefly then made signs of being ready to get up. He withdrew his arm from around her just as the truck stopped. A few minutes later, the back hatch opened.

“All out, kids,”the driver announced. Her voice wasn’t nearly as cheerful as the last time he had heard her speak, and there was no smile on her face. Gary climbed down from the cargo unit then reached up to help Maria. She steadied herself on his shoulder as she came out of the tiny compartment. Booger Bear was last, but he hesitated. He sensed that something was wrong, though he didn’t know what.

“Come on down, Booger,”Gary said, holding out his arms. The cat refused to move.

“Gary…”Maria’s emotion-laden voice came from behind him, like the start of a dirge.

He turned around to find two men clad in the gray jumpsuits of Federal Marshals pointing laserguns at him. He slowly raised his hands. Maria already had hers up.

The driver had a hangdog expression on her face that added to the crowsfeet around her eyes.

“I’m sorry, folks. They were waiting on me to stop. Someone ratted.”

“Be damned glad we’re not arresting you too,”One of the Marshals said. The other moved toward the hatch of the truck.“Who were you calling for?”

“No one. Just my pet,”Gary said, hoping the man would leave Booger alone. Perhaps the truck driver would give him a home.

“We’ll see. Keep them covered, Walt.”He moved to the hatch. Gary took a deep breath.“Run, Booger!”He shouted, with all the concern he could muster in his voice. He tensed his muscles, hoping he wouldn’t get shot for warning his pet to flee. Booger Bear shot out of the back of the truck like a black streak, passing under the laser beam the Marshal sent at him. It hit something flammable right inside the hatch and almost immediately smoke began boiling out. As Booger raced away toward some nearby brush the gunman whirled halfway around, instinctively trying for another shot rather than watching his captive. Ignoring what the other lawman might be doing, Gary dived at the one shooting at Booger Bear. He knocked him off his feet and grappled desperately for his weapon. It went off with a thunderous roar near his ear. The slug missed by millimeters but the laser beam scorched his cheek, making him wince. Behind him he heard a groan as someone took a blow, but he couldn’t take time to look. The Marshall he was fighting was a powerful man. He gritted his teeth and used all his strength in a burst of power to try to force the gun away from his head. It was no use. It moved only inches then started coming back toward his face. His other arm was pinned and he simply didn’t have the strength to overcome his opponent. The barrel of the weapon that was fixed in his sight looked as big as a howitzer as it got closer.

“No, don’t!”He heard Maria scream. The terror in her voice gave him the power for one last effort. Still holding the gun away from his head he brought his knee up between their interlocked bodies, trying for a blow to the groin. It glanced off the thigh of the other man with no effect. At the same time he felt the muscles in his arm begin to tremble with his last desperate effort to keep the gun away. From somewhere close he heard the sound of another blow and Maria’s next scream was cut off like it had been chopped with a hatchet.

Just when he thought he was finished, Booger Bear intervened. Gary’s pet had streaked to cover then turned upon hearing Maria’s screams. When he saw his human in trouble, he began creeping back, waiting for an opening. When Gary tried to knee his opponent, he saw an opportunity and sprang into action. He landed next to the struggling figures on his third bound and immediately began clawing at the Marshal’s eyes.

The gun went off again, perilously close to both of them, and so close to Gary’s ear this time that it deafened him to all else. Booger Bear’s fighting yowl increased in volume, then just as Gary felt he could not possibly keep the gun away for a second longer, Booger Bear’s claws found an eye. The Marshall screamed and relaxed his hold on the gun, grasping for the body of the cat. His hands closed around one of his hind legs and he used brute force to pull the cat from his face and fling it away. That gave Gary an opportunity to free his other arm and roll free. He and the Marshal saw the gun on the ground at the same time. The Marshal made the mistake of diving for it, forgetting that Gary was still armed. He got his gun out just in time and fired, pulling the trigger all the way back. The slug exploded with startling force in the other man’s chest, flinging him to the ground amidst a spray of blood and bits of smoking bone charred by the laser beam that had preceded the slug by a microsecond. For the first time since the fight started, Gary was able to pay attention to what else was happening. He turned around, still on his knees, just in time to see the other Marshal rising up from Maria’s prone body. His face and arms were marred by deep, parallel slashes from Maria’s cat-like nails that were bleeding freely. One cut had traveled right through his lips, leaving them gaping open from the ugly wound. The Marshal dived for the gun that Maria had knocked from his hand and whirled to fire at Gary, but he was in too much of a hurry. The laser beam hit Gary in the forearm just ahead of the slug, which nicked the flesh but passed on through cleanly without exploding. The laser burn and cut from the slug were enough to spoil his own shot and knock the gun from his hand though, and he found himself staring into the barrel of the other man’s weapon as he moved it to take better aim. Just as Gary thought he was going to die, the Marshall got a startled look on his face and crumpled forward. The back of his garment was no longer gray, but red and smoking from the hole blasted in his spine. Beyond him, the truck driver stood, holding her gun ready, but it was all over—except for the flames and smoke boiling from the back of her truck.

“Sorry damn bastards,”the truck driver said, holstering her gun and running forward to lift Maria’s body and begin pulling her away from the burgeoning flames boiling out of the cargo module of the truck. Gary could feel the heat from where he was, and it was growing hotter by the second. Seeing that Maria was being taken care of, he shielded his scorched face from the flames and looked for his pet.

Booger Bear was safe. He had been stunned when he hit a nearby concrete picnic bench, but he was already wobbling shakily back to his feet. Gary braved the erupting flames and ran to him. He gathered him into his arms and turned his back on the burning truck as he felt his hair beginning to singe. He ran toward where Maria’s rescuer was dragging her further away and helped her with his good arm, cradling his pet in the one that had taken the hit. Between the two, they got Maria and themselves and the still-dazed cat safely back from the flames.

Gary spared no time for thanks until he checked to see that Maria was still breathing. When he saw her breasts moving he let out a sigh of relief, but continued his examination to make sure that she wasn’t hurt any more than the bruise that he could see high on one cheek. But even as he was looking for more injuries, she began to regain consciousness. When Gary’s face came into focus, she smiled and tried to sit up. Gary slid his hand behind her neck.

She rose up, then lay her head on her bent knees for a moment. When she did look up again, there were tears in her eyes.“I thought we were all going to die, just when I was beginning to live.”

“Honey, you almost did die,”the truck driver said.

“Thanks to you, we didn’t,”Gary said.

“The kitty helped.”

“I would have expected him to, but why did you? Now you’ll be wanted just like us.”

She gave a short, mirthless laugh.“I already am bud. Didn’t you hear the news? Altered humans that don’t turn themselves in are outlaws now. Of course I might have shot the sons of bitches anyway for burning up my truck, but that’s just a side issue.”Gary looked around, the import of her words not becoming clear just yet. The burning truck was parked on a length of dirt-covered tarmac in what was once a roadside park, though it was rife with overgrowth from lack of maintenance, and obscured from the nearby highway. Beyond the overgrowth a mix of pine and oak and sweetgum were growing unimpeded by logging that once had practically scoured the countryside clean. He wondered why the driver had stopped here in the first place. Perhaps she saw his puzzled look because she sat down on another old picnic bench and said“I stopped here so I could decide what to do. Those feds must have been following pretty close, though damned if I know why, and I didn’t recognize them in their fancy van. Once out of their home city, they usually don’t bother with fugitives.”

Gary decided he had best be honest with her.“There’s political pressure being used to find me I think. I appreciate your help, but you’d probably be better off hitching a ride and separating yourself from us.”

She grinned.“A little late for that now, don’t you think? Oh by the way, I don’t think we ever introduced ourselves. My name is Lea Springer.”

“I’m Gary Daniels and this is Maria.”He came forward to shake the woman’s hand, then had to sit down beside her. He suddenly felt dizzy. The woman laughed.“Adrenaline overload, I think. Put your head down for a minute or two; it’ll pass.”

Gary did so, but continued the conversation.“What did you mean when you said you were deciding what to do? Were you talking about the Marshals?”

“Not really, though I’ll confess I was wondering what it was going to be like, suddenly becoming an outlaw. I may skate the edges here and there but I’ve never done anything really outlandishly illegal.”

“Then—oh! I’m sorry. It just now struck me. You implied that you were altered.”

“Implied hell, I said as much. I am altered, and now I’m an outlaw, just like your friend.”

“My name is Maria,”Maria said as she got up and joined them on the bench.

“And thank you for helping.”

“Sorry I didn’t react sooner. I was worrying about my truck, but I saw pretty quickly that it was gone. And maybe I’m a bit overloaded myself. Anyway, I pulled in here out of the way so I could talk to you two before going any further. I wanted to know what your plans were.”

CHAPTER TEN

Plans?What plans? Gary thought.“This is all new to me,”he said aloud.“I never thought it would come to this; with geneticists being required to register and work for the government and altered humans being completely outlawed. It’s unconstitutional!”Both Lea and Maria laughed without a bit of humor. Gary was chastened. Constitutional safeguards were going the way of the Dodo and Great Auk, and he thought the other two probably considered his remark the height of insanity.

“I’m sorry,”he said.“I know what’s happened but it all hasn’t sunk in yet. Just a few days ago I was married, had a job and had never even shot at anyone, much less killed people. Now…”His voice trailed off.

“Now you’re jobless, a wanted killer and you can add another charge of harboring fugitives: me and Maria here,”Lea filled in for him.

“I guess that sums it up,”Gary conceded. He started to say something else but a rumble in the background caught his attention. He looked around but saw nothing unusual that could account for the noise. It grew louder and then he recognized what it must be. He turned his gaze up to the sky. A plume of smoke was trailing from a distant point, widening as the source raced ahead of it on a plume of fire.

“That’s always a pretty sight,”Lea said.“I love to watch the shuttles go by overhead. It’s even better closer to the spaceport.”

“It is pretty,”Gary agreed.“And exciting, too.”He had always been fascinated by spaceflight, especially the manned variety.

“Yeah. Too bad we can’t get on one. In the space stations and Moon City they don’t give a damn about what you look like. All they’re interested in is whether you can do the work.”

Gary agreed, but going into space was only a dream, and so far from reality now as to not be worth thinking about. Lea was right though. Moon city, the underground warren of tunnels and caves being built on earth’s satellite needed trained help badly, but only the best and brightest were allowed passage to it and the space stations, and even then, applicants were few. Living conditions in both environments were still very harsh, and crowded to their limit. Seeing how the ecology and economy on earth were deteriorating, they were trying desperately to become self-sufficient, but attaining that goal was a long way off yet. Idly, he wondered if they needed geneticists, but it was only a thought. Whether they did or not, they certainly wouldn’t want outlaws, which is what he was now. Besides, he didn’t think they were allowing pets, so that ruled it out on another score. There was no way he would ever abandon Booger Bear. And he had Maria to take care of now too, although he thought wryly, she was taking care of him as much as he was her.

They watched until the plume began breaking up.

“We won’t be seeing many more of them taking off from this part of the country,”Lea remarked.“I heard from a good source that they’re going to close the Dallas port and just keep the east and west coast facilities open.”

“You’re right, they are,”Gary agreed. He had read the same thing just recently. He looked at the purpling bruise on Maria’s face and asked,“Do you have any kind of a first aid kit on you, by chance? Maria could use something and I guess I could too. This arm and the place on my face is beginning to hurt.”

Lea glanced over at her burning vehicle.“Everything I had went up with the truck. However …

those feds had to park somewhere close. Let’s go take a look along the highway.”She got to her feet and Gary and Maria followed, with Booger Bear scampering along beside them, fully recovered now and happy to be out of confinement.

They were barely in time. A family of refugees in an old diesel-fired junker were just pulling up behind the sleek federal van, standing with its doors open. Gary supposed they intended to see if the smoke pouring from just beyond the brush line meant that it was being abandoned. If they had intended to try looting it, the sight of them with drawn weapons dissuaded them. They pulled back out onto the highway and rattled off.

They quickly found not only a first aid kit, but much more besides.

Gary stopped looking over the contents of the vehicle as soon as he spotted the red cross on a white box attached to one of the rear seat brackets. He began trying to open it. He couldn’t find a way except the thumbprint indentation spot and he knew that wouldn’t work. He cursed. So did Lea, who couldn’t get the storage compartment open either. She abandoned the attempt, looking disgruntled, then suddenly brightened. She left the van and hurried over to the two dead Marshals, drawing her knife from its sheath as she went. When Gary saw what she was doing, he winced and turned his head.

Lea reappeared a few moments later, bringing four severed thumbs with her. Her lips parted in a caricature of a grin.“I didn’t know whether they were right or left handed, so I took them all. If we’re lucky, we can get the van to start and see what else we can find after we get on our way.”

They weren’t lucky. Lea cursed when none of the dead thumbs would fire the ignition, then went on to other matters as if she robbed federal vehicles every other day. She looked at the severed thumbs resting in her hands and turned to Gary. She handed him two of them.“Here, try the fist aid box with these while I work on some of the other locks. Best to hurry; I’m pretty sure that these FedRats have timed intervals for checking in.”

“What happens if they don’t?”Maria asked.

“I’m not sure. I’ve heard the vehicle blows up but that seems sort of drastic to me.”

Drastic or not, Gary wouldn’t put it past them. He hurried. The first thumb he used opened the first aid box. He scooped the contents out and dropped them into Booger Bear’s carrying pouch while Lea was getting the storage compartment open. When she saw what was inside, she gave a shout of triumph.

Gary came forward to look. The compartment contained an assortment of laserguns and laserifles folded into their stocks, but what Lea had been shouting about was the stash of gold pieces she found in a corner pocket.

“Easy to see they’ve been on the take, isn’t it?”She began dropping coins into the pockets of her silver jumpsuit. When she filled several pockets with two dozen coins, she moved aside and let Gary finish the looting. He saw that she had been fair. There were at least that many left. He took some and handed the rest to Maria, then began removing the weapons, ammunition clips and powerpacks. Lea took a bundle of them in her arms and hurried off.

Gary handed another laserifle and more of the ammunition to Maria. She raised questioning brows and he noticed for the first time that they were the same pelt-like texture as her hair; they had simply been thinned and trimmed so that it wasn’t quite so obvious.“I don’t know what we can do with all these, but Lea seems to want them. Go!”

A half hour later they had robbed the van of everything worthwhile and had carried it into the woods where a fallen tree with a hollow trunk made a handy place to store their cache, and a good place to sit while they decided on their next course of action.

Gary was feeling somewhat ambivalent about taking the gold, weapons and other goods. He hadn’t been raised to be a thief. He said so.

Lea laughed.“You’re a real innocent, aren’t you?”She gathered her locks of heavy, bright blond hair and pulled it behind her head. She fastened it there into a short ponytail. With her raised arms, the long sleeves of her shirt pulled back from her wrists. The area revealed was a distinctively different color than the skin of her hands and face; it was a bright golden color, almost iridescent. She caught Gary’s unintentional stare and laughed again.

“Yeah, I guess you were wondering what turn my alterations took, huh?”Gary nodded, too embarrassed to speak.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ve been decent enough not to ask; lots of folks aren’t. My parents were Sun Worshipers. Me and my brothers and sisters were born this color, along with a good bit of genetic design work on our bodies besides. If you’ve heard anything about Church of the Sun, you can pretty well guess what the rest of me looks like.”Gary could. COTS had sprung from the advent of global warming. He didn’t know what the exact tenants of the religion were, but he definitely remembered seeing the image of its Deity on a program, though the members of the cult never showed that much of their bodies in public. The image he had seen was a stylized depiction of the sun rendered into the figure of a shining nude female of more than generous proportions. He could only imagine what Lea must look like beneath her clothes. She finished binding her hair and knowing what he must be thinking, said“I’ll let you look at me some other time. I don’t mind. And in case you’re wondering why my face and hands aren’t dolled up like most of the Sunny People, it’s because I paid a goddamn fortune for the gene work to get them back to natural after I split from my parents and the church. I almost had enough saved to have the rest of my body done, but I guess I’m stuck with it now.”

“I’m sorry,”Gary said, sincerely.

“No need to be sorry. Even if I hadn’t gotten hooked up with you two, these latest laws would have killed that idea anyway.”

“There’s always the black market,”Maria said.

“Yeah, but now the price will quadruple. Look, you two don’t worry about it. I’ve lived with it for more years than either of you have been alive and it doesn’t bother me that much. Matter of fact, some of my lovers have found it attractive—for a while.”

“I wish…”Maria started to say something then stopped. Gary knew what she had almost uttered. She had never had a real lover, only ones who paid for her services, and they could hardly be called lovers in the real sense of the word. He made a vow to himself that he would treat her with the utmost respect so long as they were together. Perhaps that would give her a start on learning to trust men. He patted her hand and she looked up at him gratefully.

“So where should we go?”Lea asked, bringing them back to their original subject.

“We need to get away from here pretty soon, but it would be nice to have some idea of which direction we’re heading.”

“I really don’t know,”Gary admitted,“except that we can’t stay in the woods.”

“Nice smells here,”Booger Bear contributed.

“But we need a house, Booger.”He looked at Maria and Lea.“And it can’t be in Houston, for sure.”

“Which leaves Dallas as the nearest place where we might get lost,”Lea said.

“How can we do that without credit or computers, and with the feds looking for geneticists and altered humans? Not to mention that enhanced animals like Booger here, are already being hunted down by the Department of Agriculture.”

“They’re not getting many of them,”Lea said.“They’re too damned smart to get caught, huh Booger?”

“Cats smart,”Booger Bear agreed. He wasn’t old enough yet to know much about the world other than what Gary had spoken of, and he frequently gathered misconceptions from both him and from watching holo programs.

“Whatever, you haven’t answered the question.”

“There’s always an underground in any city, I would think,”Maria said.

“Why should Dallas be any different?”

“Good point,”Gary said, but he had noticed a lisp in her voice, as if the swelling on her check also extended to the inside of her mouth. And his own wounds were hurting more than ever.

“Listen, while we talk, I’m going to see what was in those first aid supplies we stole.”He began rummaging in his bag, taking items out and examining them. He quickly found a package of pain ampoules, strong enough to help his aches and then some. He took one and pressed it to the inside of his forearm and thumbed the dispenser.

“May I have some?”Maria said.

“I was getting there.”He took out another one, but warned,“This is fairly potent stuff. It will help, but it will make you a bit euphoric for a while.”

“You too. And I know what they can do. Some … customers … used them on occasion to get a high. And I had to have it sometimes when I was with that damned Munoz couple. Anyway, I need something; my face is hurting like hell.”

Gary gave her one and she used it. Within a few minutes she began to feel the familiar wave of relief blank out the pain, just as she remembered. It also made her feel as if she were sitting on a pile of feathers rather than the trunk of a tree.

Gary was already experiencing the same euphoric sense of relief as the pain from his wounds abated. He had used the medication before on a couple of occasions. It was sold freely everywhere, even though theoretically it was illegal to dispense without a prescription. As soon as he felt better, he found some disinfectant and healing balm. He applied some of that to Maria’s cheek, then let Maria use the same product on him before binding his arm.

In the meantime, Lea began telling them about the Dallas underworld, where for enough money, personal identification was never requested so long as services were paid for in cash or gold.“It’s a pretty big section of the old part of Dallas called Oak Cliff, but well south of it. It’s just northwest of the spaceport and caters to the workers and astronauts and freight haulers looking for excitement.”

By excitement, Gary knew that she meant drugs, sex and forays into the world of bizarre enhanced animals and altered humans.“You’re sure we could get lost there?”

“Unless someone is really on your ass, you can.”

“That might exclude me then,”Gary admitted, making direct eye contact with both of them. He didn’t want them to have any illusions about how safe they might be around him.

“I ran afoul of Bradshaw’s religious supporters and they carry a lot of weight these days. I doubt that it much matters where I go; they’ll still be looking for me. And just because I rescued Maria, they’ll be after her too; if for no other reason than thinking she might lead them to me.”

Lea frowned, but didn’t seem discouraged.“I assume they know your face. How about Maria’s?”

“Not yet, unless some customers from Del Rio are in Houston and have pictures they took of me. Or if some customers from Houston at Mac’s place got me digitized, though I don’t know why they would have since all I was doing was selling them drugs and happy juice.”

“Well, let’s assume they don’t yet. Even so, you can cover your hair and wear glasses and loose clothing and you’ll be pretty well disguised. And for the time being Gary can remain under cover. All that is just temporary though. Those feds were following my truck and they’re bound to have reported it. My mug will be out there soon enough.”Gary was beginning to use his mind to see further than the next gun battle.“Well, suppose we do get hid well enough to keep the feds or the private Security Rats away from us. That still leaves us needing some way to make a living. Our gold won’t last forever, or not even very long when you have to pay extra because you don’t have computer credit.”

“I could…”Maria began to speak very hesitantly, feeling as if she had to offer, but Gary cut her off immediately, knowing what she was preparing to say.

“No!”he said emphatically.“That’s history Maria. Understand?”Maria nodded meekly, her face blank, but inside she was pleased as a contentedly nursing kitten. She liked him more all the time.

“Look, let’s not worry about what to do when we get to Dallas, or wherever for now,”Lea said.“How about we get on our way before the bad guys start looking for us here, much less some other place?”

Gary was nodding agreement at her sensible suggestion. It became even more sensible when a tremendous explosion rocked the forest, coming from the direction of the federal van. The force of it knocked them all off the log and got them moving as nothing else could have. They paused only to stick most of the weapons into the hollow of the tree, just in case they ever came back that way.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lea advised against walking along the highway or even trying to hitch a ride until a few days had passed and their escape had faded from memory a bit. That left only the forest and old secondary roads that they anticipated would be in disrepair if not completely overgrown. She had already been thinking of what to do when they were rifling the van for goods and had appropriated a map of the area from the driver’s compartment. Once they were farther away from the still-smoking truck and destroyed van, she stopped and showed it to them.

“Look here, this map shows a secondary road just a few miles north that intersects the highway. I’ve seen it on my route. The access ramps are down so it’s probably not being used much, especially by the feds. We can try it. If it’s even halfway open it would be a lot better than the woods. And it parallels the interstate for a long way.”She swatted at a swarm of deer flies hovering around her head for emphasis.

“I’m for it,”Gary agreed readily, smearing blood-engorged mosquitoes from his hand.“Once that van went up, they’ll sure as hell come after us.”

“If they can spare the people,”Lea said.“The government is cutting back on a lot of things now, what with the economy going to hell. They may just try anticipating which direction we’re heading and intercept us. But best not to take the chance. With those new laws, they have a license to kill now, and you know what kind of people that go into enforcement work these days.”

“They’re scum, for the most part,”Maria said.“I know.”

“So let’s get moving,”Lea said.

Gary was certainly no woodsman and quickly found out that the others weren’t either. He did feel a little more secure carrying one of the heavier laserifles taken from the van. No one knew any more how many, or what kinds of enhanced animals were loose in the wilds, but it was a certainty that there were plenty of them. Carnivores roamed the countryside that were too smart to be susceptible to the old ways of killing or capturing them, and mice, rats and rabbits were a scourge to crops, and they too were intelligent enough to learn quickly to avoid poisons, traps and the unenhanced animals that once preyed on them. It made a walk through the forest a study in caution, especially since they had only the sun to give them direction and it was frequently blocked by high trees. Many times they had to retrace their path to get back to traveling in a generally northerly direction.

After a while, Gary thought he would settle for a cougar or even a tiger rather than face any more mosquitoes or deer flies. They were persistent and ravenous and no amount of slapping or waving of hands discouraged them. Only Booger Bear seemed to be unaffected but he stayed close to Gary as they struggled through underbrush, vines and over and around fallen trees, the remnants of past hurricanes and tornadoes. Even the sounds were threatening since none of them were familiar with noises in the wilds made by unseen animals.

“Wrong way,”Booger Bear said.

Gary stopped, causing the others to do so too, as he was leading the way at the time.“How do you know, Booger?”

Booger Bear gave the cat equivalent of a human shrug.“Just know. Wrong way. This right way.”He scampered a few feet away from them at an oblique angle.

“Follow him,”Maria said.“He’s right, I think.”Gary shrugged and took off the way the cat wanted to go. After another quarter mile of hard going, they came upon a large stream, running east to west. The forest formed a complete canopy over it. Booger Bear hung back, causing Gary to stop. The cat looked around as if he were scared.

“Bad,”he said, crouching nearer to his human.

“Gary, look up!”Maria warned from behind him.

Gary turned his gaze up to the trees. It took a moment but then he spotted what his pet had warned them about. A very large cougar was crouched in the fork of a pine that had grown two trunks. Its color blended almost perfectly with the brown bark. He saw that it had a high domed head, indicating that it was an enhanced variety. It had obviously been waiting on unwary prey coming to drink from the stream. The cougar saw that it had been spotted and snarled at them. Booger Bear made a harsh rumbling sound that came from deep within him, but Maria made the strangest sounds of all. She began speaking in a weird patois of English, Spanish, cat sounds and some other noises that none of the others recognized. The cougar’s ears twitched. It flexed its muscles and opened its mouth. Its English was barely understandable but Gary caught it.“Humans go,”it said. Maria responded again, unintelligible to anyone but the cougar, but it must have understood, for it twisted its position in the fork of the tree and leaped away, hitting the ground and slithering off through the brush with hardly a sound.

Gary and Lea both turned to Maria in wonder. Gary knew what she had done, but not where she had learned it. Enhanced animals did communicate among their kind and between species to a certain extent, using a polyglot of sounds that very few humans could understand without working directly with them.

“Where—”Gary began to ask, then remembered.“Oh! The leopard that saved your life in Mexico. You must have learned from it.”

“Yes,”She said.

“What did you say?”Lea asked.

“I told it we were too dangerous to eat, and to watch out for any humans with guns like ours.”

“You mean we’re the first humans it’s seen?”

“Probably not, but I doubt that it’s run across very many; otherwise it wouldn’t have even thought about attacking three armed humans. Anyway, it’s gone and won’t bother us again. What’s more, if it runs across any other animals and takes a notion, it may warn them, too.”

Gary nodded thoughtfully, remembering now how Maria had sometimes talked to Booger in a low voice. He wondered if she had been teaching him the animal patois she had learned. If so, it might prove to be beneficial in the future. But in the meantime, the flies and mosquitoes were driving him crazy. After they all paused to drink from the stream, he led off again, accepting wet feet and legs in order to cross the stream and follow the game trail Booger Bear pointed them to. Fifteen minutes later beams of sunlight became visible through the trees and they came out on the highway they were seeking. The secondary road had once been a wide two lane thoroughfare, built to handle lots of traffic. Now grass and weeds were growing in cracks and crevices and there were few signs of vehicular travel. It was still open though, and the sunlight falling on it depleted the swarms of insects that had been feeding on them. With a sigh of relief, Gary suggested a halt to refresh themselves.

“I should have thought of canteens,”He said as he sat down with a sigh of relief, but already feeling thirsty again. He didn’t notice how quickly Maria appropriated the spot closest to him, insinuating herself between him and Lea.

The truck driver noticed it, though, and smiled to herself at the thought that Maria herself didn’t appear to be aware of what she was doing. She had also begun to suspect what Maria’s previous profession had been and thought it unusual that she was demonstrating such a proprietary interest toward the geneticist, even though so far, she thought it was probably unconscious on the cat woman’s part.“We’ll come to more water farther on,”Lea said.“This part of Texas is wetter than it used to be and it’s not high summer yet. We can find water, but I’m really going to miss being able to change clothes by the time we spend a few days on the road.”Just the thought gave Gary pause. He had spent a lifetime using all the amenities of civilization without giving a second thought to them, even though he knew from reading that many people in the country were suffering from having to desert homes that were very far away from large cities.

“How long do you think it will take to get to Dallas?”Maria asked. She edged closer to Gary until they were almost touching.

“Too damn long for my money, and I don’t know what I’ll do there now that I’ve lost my truck,”Lea said. She looked reflective for a moment then added,“If I thought they’d have me I’d try to get into space, despite the overcrowding and synthetic food.”

“Would they still take you? Being wanted now and all?”

“Sure. I’ve talked to lots of floater pilots and they talk to the shuttle pilots. The moon and space stations don’t give a damn about your past, nor what laws we might have broken down here. If you’re on the list of professions they’re after and can pass a psycho exam, they’ll take you. They’re just interested in making themselves self-sufficient before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“They seem to think the world is going to be taken over by the enhanced animals eventually. Hell, they may be right for all I know. Look what’s happened to the countryside already.”Gary didn’t answer. He was seeing firsthand the result of all the genetic manipulation of animals. Too many had been sold as pets, then abandoned and too many experimental animals had escaped and begun breeding. And almost invariably, they contained the same long life and disease resistant genes that most pet owners had themselves, and insisted on having in their pets, he thought glumly. Not to mention that the genetic changes wrought in them were almost all dominant traits. Even when they bred with normal animals, their characteristics prevailed in the offspring. And yet mankind had survived innumerable technological advances. Somehow he thought they would survive this too. What he was more interested in was survival for himself and his companions and his pet. He suddenly noticed that Maria was sitting so close to him that their legs were touching. He smiled at her and got one in return.

***

By afternoon they were miles further on their way, following the secondary road which more or less paralleled the main interstate. By that time, they were becoming worried about finding a place to spend the night. Twice they had gone off on old driveways or once-graveled roads hoping to find a house but neither had worked out. One home had been burned to the ground; the other was occupied by a rat colony. They hastily retreated from it. Gary had heard stories of unwary travelers whose bones had been found picked clean by rats; he didn’t want them to end up that way. Just before dusk, another side road appeared, paved and not quite so grown over as the previous two. Lacking a better alternative, they decided to try it. A short way down the road they came to an abandoned service station and grocery, built of concrete walls and with a slanted roof that had kept debris from piling up and collapsing it. It was surrounded by cracked tarmac and the ruins of old gas pumps. They approached cautiously. The glass of the main entrance had been shattered but the holes did let in the last of the sunlight. It showed a spider web infested interior and a floor cluttered with debris left by looters. There was a strong smell of feral dog or perhaps wolf but the interior was empty.

“Will this do for the night?”Gary asked, his cleanly soul blanching at the prospect of sleeping among such clutter and the sharp odor of unwashed canines.

“It’s better than staying out in the open for sure,”Lea said, leading the way inside.

“Dog smell,”Booger Bear said, disgust evident in his voice. He had had dealings with a dog in the past, a bad tempered pet from the neighborhood that was allowed to roam free. Twice it had attempted to break into Gary’s yard. The last time he had singed it with a laser beam enough to discourage further encroachments but Booger Bear still remembered the smell.

“They’re gone,”Gary told him. He began to clear rubble and spider webs away from a corner of the small shop for a sleeping space.

“Still close,”his pet declared.“Bad dogs.”

“We’d better block the door and have someone keep watch tonight,”Maria suggested. To her, the canine odor was closer to wolf than dog, or at least a cross between the two, much like the smells that had sometimes come in on the wind in Mexico where she had lived. Wolves that had been enhanced by well meaning zoologists had made a remarkable comeback and were in the process of decimating the livestock of ranches and farms. The intelligence-enhanced animals bred freely, both among themselves and with feral dogs abandoned by owners or others that had deliberately left homes where they were mistreated. They were beginning to outrun their food supply. By dark they were settled in, with the door blocked by furniture and sleeping places cleared. Maria had shoved aside the rubble next to Gary’s spot in preparation for sleeping there later. She had volunteered for the first watch.

There was little to eat; only some snacks that had been salvaged from the federal van, and nothing at all to drink. Booger Bear declined a portion of crackers that Gary offered him. He climbed easily over their barricade and disappeared for a half hour, then returned dangling a mouse from his jaws, one that had been watching more for owls than a very smart cat. Booger Bear settled down and gnawed happily at his meal. He had seldom tasted the natural food of his species.

Talk was desultory and centered on what to do once they reached the southern environs of Dallas. Gary knew that they could find lodging and food there with the gold they carried, but it was new identities and computers they all needed now if they were to try hiding in the city. They couldn’t function long without them in an information oriented society. He knew that he would have a worse time than the others so far as staying safely under cover; his image had been widely spread. For the first time in his life he regretted the genes his parents had selected for him that left him beardless. That would have been the start of a good disguise otherwise. On the other hand, he certainly couldn’t complain about the longer life and disease resistance components of his genome. Drinking the untreated water from the stream they had crossed held no dread for him; he knew he wouldn’t get sick, and he was fairly certain that Maria and Lea wouldn’t either. Almost all altered humans who hadn’t changed themselves as adults had those same genes inserted at birth, along with the ones that made them different from“normal”humans.

Night sounds kept Gary awake for a long time. A few he could identify from his work with mammals, but most were totally unfamiliar. Once or twice a cry would cause the Booger Bear’s fur to fluff out in alarm and just before he drifted off there was a noise that almost anyone would recognize. The long, drawn out howls of a wolf pack getting ready for a night hunt echoed and resounded again and again. It raised the hair on his neck for long moments but finally the howling died out and his tired body fell into a restless sleep.

Gary came back half-awake with the sensation of Maria’s soft young body snuggling up next to him. He moved and she inched backward, practically forcing him to put his arm around her waist. She took his hand and brought it up to her breast and held it there until he responded and curled his hand around it in the age old fashion of sleeping couples. It felt entirely comfortable and in just a little while he was back asleep, followed shortly by Maria.

Across the room, Lea sat up and watched by the moonlight streaming through the broken windows and door; it was her turn to stay awake. She felt somewhat left out at the pairing, but there was no jealousy; she had already sensed that Gary was falling for the cat woman, whether he knew it or not. And her female instinct told her that Maria was staking a claim and wanted no interference, whether she knew it or not too.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Gary’s watch was as undisturbed as the previous ones had been. He spent most of the time thinking of Maria. When awakened, she had slept on contentedly, not even moving as he gently disengaged his hand from her breast, and from her hand that had been covering his. He had no inkling of the thought processes of prostitutes, even those forced into the profession, but he did know something about altered humans, simply from his profession. Some resented the changes made to their bodies that they had never asked for, especially those with the more bizarre manifestations. Others accepted it and tried to live the best they could in a society gradually becoming antagonistic toward them. So far as he could tell, Maria had grown to young adulthood remarkably free of bitterness and was striving fiercely for a chance to live a normal life. He was only sorry that it looked as if he would never be in a position to provide it for her. And that thought made him realize that she was becoming attached to him, and him to her. He admitted to himself that despite having been married, he knew little of the processes of female thought, altered or otherwise, but he did know that the little tug at his heart he felt when he looked at her was a good indication of his feelings.

As he waited for daylight he turned the new emotions over in his mind again and again. By the time the first signs of daylight began to appear, he decided that if she wanted to stay with him he could forget her previous life. It hadn’t been her fault. The only thing he worried about was whether she felt as strongly toward him as he was beginning to about her. He hoped so, and he vowed to act in a manner that would let her know how attracted to her he was, but would let her take any further steps. And even then he would be careful. The last thing he wanted was a union formed from her being grateful to him; he wanted it to be natural if it happened at all. That decided he sat contentedly, absently stroking the sleeping cat, his black fur practically invisible in the darkened room now that the moon had set. He smiled over at Maria’s shadowy form, just beginning to stir. Perhaps soon he would have another cat in the family, or one with some cat in her at least. A man could do much worse, he thought.

***

Now that they were on the secondary road they made much better time, delayed only by the occasional fallen tree and washed out spots that had formed deep cuts through the tarmac. Booger Bear was almost ecstatic at being able to run free. He had never been allowed to venture far outside the area of Gary’s previous home without supervision and when going any distance, he had always been carried by his human or ridden in the pocket of his jacket designed for him. His nose twitched at all the new sights and smells as he bounded ahead then waited on the humans to catch up. Some of the odors he recognized by instincts patterned into his genes over thousands of years; others were completely new. He could smell the presence of mice in abundance and had to be spoken strongly to in order to keep him from going hunting again. The dog/wolf smell was still strong and he kept a close watch for any that might come close. Rabbit scents were recognizable and he salivated at the memory of the pet rabbits he had seen on occasion. He would hardly have recognized the ones he smelled now. Their heads were large with instilled intelligence and extra large and strong legs, bred into them only recently as a survival trait necessary to live in the wilds among equally intelligent predators. Booger Bear didn’t even realize that, strong as his sense of smell was, much of it had been discarded to make room for the genes of intelligence that had been added.

Gary and Maria walked comfortably close together, occasionally holding hands. Gary enjoyed the touch of his fingers on the fine down adorning the back of her hands. There was a breeze and clouds overhead and the promise of an eventual rain in the air. If he wasn’t so dirty and sweaty from all the walking he would have felt almost like they were out for a walk in a park, but again, as the day progressed he began to tire. Even with a genome selected by his parents for muscular strength as well as other traits, he simply wasn’t used to this kind of steady exertion. Nor he noticed were either of the others, though neither had complained. He saw that even Booger Bear was showing signs of faltering; cats could move fast but they weren’t designed for steady walking for long periods. All this made him begin to think of suggesting a break for a few minutes.

It was Booger Bear and Maria whose keen ears first picked up the sound of an aircraft, or more accurately, the sound of an unpowered floater moving air out of its way with a soft whistling noise.

“There’s a plane or a floater coming down,”Maria announced, looking to the sky.

“I hope to hell it’s not looking for us,”Lea said nervously. Gary stopped and the others followed suit, scanning the sky in all directions. Soon the floater came into sight. Ordinarily a combination of solar power, ambient magnetic conversion and hydrogen fuel cells kept the craft aloft, but something was obviously wrong with this one. It was flying far too low to simply be crossing a stretch of the wild countryside. It passed overhead and curved around out of sight, obviously following a turn in the old road, and even more obviously looking for an open space to set down.

“It’s in trouble,”Lea said.“There’s no sound from the impellers and it was still dropping when it went around the bend.”

Gary strained to hear, wanting to know if it was going to crash or make a safe landing, but again it was the enhanced cat who told them what was happening.

“Sky car on road,”Booger Bear said.

“You’re sure, Booger?”

“Sure.”

“It must have come down easy then,”Lea said.“And I don’t think it was looking for us. Did you see the windows? And its size? It’s a passenger, not a cargo craft.”

“Let’s go see what’s happened,”Gary suggested, thinking to himself that if they could offer the craft and its crew some help, maybe they could get something to eat and some decent water from them.

No one had an alternative suggestion and they trudged on. Gary estimated that the craft must have come down two or three miles further ahead.

Half an hour later, Booger Bear stopped suddenly in the middle of the pavement, ears tilted forward. He listened intently for a moment, then turned around.“Dogs. Bad dogs. Hurt people.”Gary listened. He thought he might hear something but the wind was behind them and he couldn’t be sure.

“I hear it too,”Maria said.“Wolves. From the sound of them, they must be attacking.”

“How could wolves attack a floater?”Lea asked, knowing how tough the composite skins of the aircraft were; the freight haulers she drove were made of the same stuff.

“Some of them must have gone outside,”Gary said.“Come on, let’s go. Maybe we can help.”He patted his sidearm, checked the laserifle he was carrying to be sure it was ready and began to move, taking long strides.

Lea followed, not quite as enthusiastically but unwilling to be left behind. Maria hurried to keep up with Gary. She didn’t quite understand why he wanted them to hurry into a dangerous situation on behalf of complete strangers. No one except him had ever offered to help her before and the attitude was foreign to her. She was learning to trust him though, and she was beginning to mimic his attitudes in her desire for a normal life. If he wanted to help the people in the floater, she was willing. From the sounds she could hear, she had doubts about them being in time though.

Only Booger Bear was hesitant. He didn’t understand at all why his human wanted to rush into a fray with strangers and ferocious dogs as he thought of them. As soon as Gary missed him, he turned and saw him reluctantly following.“Come on Booger,”he said.“When we get close, you find a tree and wait on us. Stay out of it, understand?”

“Okay,”the black furred cat said. Climbing a tree sounded like a fine idea. Within a few more minutes, even Gary and Lea could hear the sounds of wolves growling, humans screaming and the occasional shot from a gun. The explosive noises sounded far too few to him in relation to the number of different growls and snarls coming to them. As he listened, a horrible human scream was cut off abruptly, as though a throat had been ripped out. There were two more shots, then only the guttural growls of a pack of animals disputing their kill. Gary feared they were going to be too late to help anyone by the time they arrived at the scene. He was panting heavily as they rounded a final sharp curve in the old highway and saw the floater grounded in the middle of the tarmac. It was surrounded by a pack of almost two dozen large enhanced wolves, grayish red in color. The thin, rangy animals were divided into small groups, all tearing ravenously at bodies on the ground as if they hadn’t eaten well lately. There were three bodies that he could see. At the back end of the floater, another three persons huddled together, protected by a single man with a hand weapon who waved it threateningly when a wolf came close. He was obviously saving power or bullets, probably both Gary thought. He began to run.

The wolves were so busy concentrating on their first victims that they didn’t notice until Gary and the others got close. It was almost too close, as he soon found out. His first shot boomed amidst the growling of the pack, dropping one of them. It kicked and died. The others, alerted now, acted intelligently. They spread out and ran fast and low to the ground, obviously aware that a moving target was harder to hit. They growled and snarled with an occasional word in English mixed in as they ran. Lea fired and missed three times in quick succession. Maria was calmer and took her time. Her first shot missed, but then she brought down one of the wolves. Gary was grateful now for his hours of practice with weapons at the firing range where he had worked. He knocked four of the vicious, starving animals down as they came close, emptying the rifle’s clip and almost depleting the power pack with continuous laser fire. Maria’s laserifle jammed at the same time. One of the charging animals saw the opportunity and came in low, intending to hamstring her. Gary screamed an oath and dived in front of it, taking the teeth that had been meant for Maria on his left arm. The jaws closed on his flesh with a horrible jolt of pain even as he drew his sidearm. He was on his knees by the time he got the gun barrel against the head of the wolf and pulled the trigger. Gore spattered out in a red cone as the slug exploded the wolf’s head. He was barely in time to kill the next one as it closed in, and behind him he heard Lea’s gun barking explosively.

Maria screamed like a panther making a kill as she saw the damage the wolf had done to Gary’s arm. The wild screeching sound unnerved the remaining wolves. Most of them didn’t understand that it was coming from a human. She fired at the ones that were close just as Lea finished emptying her weapon. Then the man who had been protecting his charges joined in with the last of his ammunition. More of the wolves dropped and the rest fled. Starving or not, they were too intelligent to press an attack that had failed and already cost many of them their lives. Had they seen how well armed the travelers were to begin with, they might not have attacked at all.

Gary turned in a half circle, still on his knees, looking for more of the fierce carnivores. Then the pain from his mangled arm washed over him and he groaned. He just managed to change clips and shakily holster his lasergun before his muscles weakened like wax under a hot summer sun. He fell onto his side, clutching his arm. He could see the ends of one of the bones in his forearm grating together in the open wound. He wondered dazedly whether both of them were broken while a mist seemed to hover in front of his eyes, spoiling his vision. Still, he had enough strength to speak.“Maria? Where are you …

are … oh, I see.”Her image wavered in front of him. He squinted, trying to see if there was any blood on her but it was hard to tell through the mist.

“I’m fine. Hold still Gary, please hold still.”Maria said senselessly. She took his torn arm and held it while tears streamed down her cheeks, making darker streaks through the fine down on her face.

“Here,”Lea said. She knelt and pressed a pain ampule against Gary’s neck and thumbed it into activity, then began examining his arm. She shook her head.“I don’t have anything we took from the van to fix this. Maybe there’s something in the floater.”

“There is,”The man who had been single-handedly holding the feeding wolves away from the survivors from the floater said. He had come forward once he had gone hurriedly inside the floater cabin and replaced the powerpack and clip for his weapon from supplies there. His charges had gone with him, almost running over him in their anxiety to get back inside to the shelter of the floater. Lea looked up at him and saw a lean, deeply tanned face above her. It was lined from the sun and he appeared to be at least her age. He had a receding hairline and threads of gray woven through his reddish hair. He wasn’t very tall but there was no spare flesh at his waist.“Well, get it then,”she said irritably.

“Wouldn’t it be best for us all to get inside first? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to face those goddamned beasts again.”

“They’re gone,”Maria said, her voice shaky.

“He’s right though. Let’s get inside. Help me with him.”Lea got her arms under Gary’s shoulders then looked up again, more irritated than ever at his lack of help. Then she saw him pulling his gun. She looked behind her.

“Don’t shoot mister. That’s just Booger Bear.”Gary’s cat had indeed climbed a tree while the shooting was going on, knowing he was no match for a wolf. He looked up at the man from the floater.“Bad dogs,”he said plainly. The man’s mouth opened then closed again. His thin lips turned up in a grin.“Damn straight they were bad dogs,”he said and secured his gun. He bent down and assisted Lea and Maria in getting Gary to his feet. Together they walked him to the floater and helped him inside, where he collapsed onto a passenger seat.

“I got you all bloody,”Gary managed to murmur as they laid him down. He tried to wink at Maria who was hovering close by, but only managed to shut both eyes. He kept them closed for a moment, then opened them again and looked toward the man who had been helping him.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m just grateful to be alive enough to wash it off. I’m Jake Douglas, by the way, the pilot on this misbegotten trip.”

“I’m Lea and this is Maria,”Lea said.“Maria, please help him. I have to go outside for a minute.”

Both the pilot and Maria thought she must be going to be sick. Instead, she stepped down from the floater and went from the remains of body to bloody body, searching each of them until she had found what she was looking for.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Maria hovered next to Gary in the double passenger seat like a mother cat protecting her kittens. She had seen the rage on his face when he thought the wolf was going to get her and remembered how instantly he responded by throwing himself in front of it to protect her, deliberately thrusting his arm between her and the wolf, readily accepting the harm meant for her. If she had anything to do with it, nothing would ever hurt him again, not if she had to die to prevent it. She didn’t realize that the response she was showing demonstrated love, not just for a fellow human, but an emotional bonding with a man, something completely new to her.

“Do you have any water?”She asked the pilot, who had gone to get first aid supplies from the forward cabin and was just returning.

“Oh yeah, should have thought of that too.”Jake set his bag down and left. He drew a large pitcher of water from the tap that ran from the fuel cell. There was never a shortage of water on a floater; it was a byproduct of hydrogen combustion and salvaged through an osmotic membrane. He carried the pitcher and a stack of glasses back down the aisle between the passenger seats and handed them to Maria.“Here, you pour him some water while I get the wound dressing ready. You’ll have to move over too; I’m gong to need some working room.”He began taking supplies from the bag.

Lea came back into the floater. When Jake saw her, he spoke up.“Was that a painkill shot I saw you give him?”

“Yes.”Leas saw what he was dragging from his bag and added,“I have some more if you need them.”

“I’ve got plenty. You might want to help here though.”

“I’ll help,”Maria said instantly.

Jake saw the entreaty in her eyes.“All right. Give him some water then Lea can take the rest back to the passengers.”

Maria held the glass while Gary drank thirstily. When he was finished, she knelt in front of Gary and followed the floater pilot’s instructions, holding Gary’s arm as tenderly as if it were made of the most fragile crystal. Lea came back and lent a hand as well. The two male passengers hadn’t even thanked her for the water.

Gary watched abstractedly. The drug was working fine. He felt no pain at all and watched the proceedings as if they were being done to another person.

Jake first washed the wounds, then pulled gently on his arm until the two ends of the broken bone were lined up. He had Maria support it while Lea kept the tension on it, then he took a tube and squeezed a line of yellow paste directly into the wound. He set the tube aside and pulled the two sides of the gaping cut together. The semi-live gel immediately dissolved into thousands of tiny tendrils that burrowed into the raw flesh in both directions. Tiny hooks formed at the ends of the tendrils, then they shrank and tightened, holding the sides of the cut together as neatly and better than stitches would have. After a minute or two, Jake let loose and followed the same procedure for two smaller wounds.

“Now for some skin topper and this will be fixed,”he said. He cut off a strip of skin colored tape, peeled off the backing and laid it over the line of the closed wounds. This material sent its tendrils down into the skin. It would form a perfect patch and dissolve in a couple of days, leaving no sign behind. Not even a scar.

“You can let go now, Lea,”Jake said.“I’ll put a brace on it and the cut and bones should be fine in two or three days.”He saw her hesitating and added,

“It’s okay; the ulna, the large bone in his arm wasn’t broken; it will hold his arm straight.”

“Thanks,”Gary said.“Can I have some more water?”Jake nodded.“Water we have plenty of.”

Maria held the glass for him while he drank some more. It revived him better than a shot of whiskey would have. He sat up straighter and looked around. This was the first time he had ever been inside a floater.

There were alternating double and single seats half the length of the fuselage, a dozen and a half in all. At the back was a very small lounge taking up half the width of the fuselage, with soft padded seating attached to three partitions. The other half had a door that was partially open, revealing several narrow beds. At the very back was the head and a tiny bar with pre-packaged beverages. Taking in all the surroundings, Gary knew that it must be a craft for transporting VIP passengers. Even the seats were spacious and soft.

He saw the two remaining passengers eyeing him from the little bar. No, it was Maria they were looking at he decided, and not with a favorable expression on either face. When they caught his glance they turned away, as if the mere sight of him and his friends might contaminate them.“They don’t look very happy,”he said to the pilot, not bothering to keep his voice down. Jake leaned down and whispered to him.“Be careful. Those two are big shots in government, such as we have these days, and they’re not very happy right now.”

“I guess not after their friends were killed.”

“It was their own fault,”Jake said in a low voice.“I told them to stay inside while Jim and I went to see what went wrong, but they thought they knew everything; they wanted to go out and see the sights. Hell, they weren’t even armed. If you hadn’t come along we all would have died because of their stupidity.”

“Sorry,”Gary murmured.

“For what?”

“That they didn’t get killed too. Did you see how they were staring at Maria and Booger Bear? Like they were freaks of some kind.”

“Just cool it, okay? We’re going to have to get along with them—at least until the sun comes out so I can recharge the solar battery, and then we’re still stuck here for another day while it gets up to full charge unless I can fix the fuel cell.”

“What happened?”Lea asked. She had sat down next to the pilot.

“The fuel cell went down first, then the clouds moved in and I couldn’t keep the solar batteries charged. I tried to baby us along and make it to Dallas, but it didn’t happen. And whatever went wrong took the power cell for the radio with it. I couldn’t even call for help. Jim, my copilot and I had just gotten into the fuel cell panel when the wolves hit.”He shook his head with forced admiration.“Damned smart animals too. They blocked the entrance almost immediately so we couldn’t get back inside, then started the slaughter.”

“How long until the clouds break?”

Jake shook his head.“I don’t know. The weather service is just making guesses until they pay the satellites for past forecasts.”

“I think I need to lay down. I’m woozy,”Gary said.

“Come on, I’ll take you to the back. If one of you ladies will refill the water pitchers, you can wash off there, too.”Jake didn’t say so, but Gary knew he must indirectly be telling them that their body odors were rather pungent in the closed space of the floater. One other thing he noticed was that Jake was treating Maria with the same courtesy as Lea, despite her obviously altered appearance. He was glad he had been able to help him. He just hoped his passengers would behave around Maria, at least until he regained his strength.

Maria wouldn’t leave Gary’s side. She helped Jake steady Gary and helped him toward the back of the floater where the beds were.

When they got to the little lounge where the two passengers were still downing drinks, one of them, a large florid man in a rumpled business suit held up his hand.“What the hell do you think you’re doing Douglas? This is the passenger lounge, not a haven for freaks. And goddamned dirty filthy ones at that!”

Jake gritted his teeth to keep from punching the man in the face.“Mister Johnson, these people saved your life, in case you don’t realize it.”

“If they were so intent on saving someone, why did they wait until the others were dead? I wouldn’t be surprised if these creature weren’t running with those goddamned dogs or wolves or whatever the hell they are. Besides, it’s your fault for not getting us to Dallas. You’re incompetent and your boss is going to hear about it. Now take them back up front and away from us.”

Gary was wobbly but he started to pull his gun anyway. Lea, coming up behind them with a big bucket she had found and filled with water, beat him to it. She drew her weapon and stuck the end of the barrel under the man’s nose.“Bud, you strike me as a good example of your mother breeding for bluster instead of brains. Shut up and get out of our way before I shoot your fucking ears off.”The florid man’s face lost its color and turned a dead white. He went cross-eyed looking down at the barrel of Lea’s handgun poking him in the upper lip. His companion gave Lea a dirty look and pulled him out of the way. He whispered something into his friend’s ear that she paid no attention to as she helped Maria steer Gary into the little bedroom. As they got him laid out on one of the narrow beds, Lea heard them talking back and forth about why they should have taken another carrier and what they intended to do when they reached Dallas. She closed the door on the voices. Maria and Lea first stripped Gary’s clothes and bathed him, then covered him with a blanket. He had begun shaking, caused partly by delayed shock but mostly by the rapid response of his body as his metabolism speeded up to help the healing process begun by the medications. Lea went back for more water, leaving them alone for a moment.

“I’m sorry, M-Maria. That son of a b-bitch had no business talking like that.”His teeth were chattering.

Maria said nothing but she sat beside him on the little bed, then bent over and kissed him firmly on the mouth—and found herself wishing he were well enough that she could do more than just touch lips with him. Just the thought of it made her begin to tremble.

Gary felt the tremor in her body and murmured words of assurance.

Maria touched him gently on the cheek just as Lea returned with more water and some wraps they could use. She intended to wash all of their clothing while Maria tended to Gary.

“You can bathe first,”Lea said.“I’ll be back in a minute or two. I want to talk to Jake about those two bastards he’s transporting. I don’t like them one bit, nor trust them either. Maria, keep your gun handy, huh?”

“I will.”

Lea left and she stood up and began undressing.

Gary’s teeth had stopped chattering as his body absorbed more liquid from a container of something Jake had sent back with the water and wraps. It must have had some sort of stimulant in it he thought, because almost immediately he began to experience a tingling sensation all over his body, and he also felt his strength returning. He found himself unable to take his eyes from Maria’s body after she stripped off her dirty jumpsuit. He finally looked away, embarrassed at his interest; not in her differences from normal humans, but in her beauty. Presently he felt a gentle touch on his bare shoulder. He opened his eyes.

Maria was still naked. She smiled at him.“It’s all right, Gary. I don’t mind you looking at me. You don’t treat me like most men do.”

“I wasn’t staring, I was admiring,”Gary admitted.“You’re beautiful.”

“Like cats,”Booger Bear said.

Maria laughed.“Thank you both. I’m glad you like me.”Gary thought she blushed but it was hard to tell with her face covered by the light down, almost the same color as her skin. The down grew heavier over the rest of her body, becoming more than hair but less than a pelt. It was short and a light brown color, giving her a sleek, shiny appearance. It grew heavier at the junction of her thighs, turning into the same kind of pelt as her hair, but forming short, curly locks of a much darker shade, even darker than her hair.

When she was finished washing, she wrapped the cream colored coverlet around her and tucked it in so that it left the upper slopes of her ample breasts showing. It made her look small and vulnerable and in need of protection, but she had kept her gun within easy reach all the time she was cleaning up. She intended to protect herself—and Gary if he needed it. Again she sat down beside him and bent to kiss him a second time, hardly noticing as the coverlet came undone and dropped away from her. The kiss went on longer and they were still locked in the embrace when Lea returned.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It looks to me like our patient is recovering nicely,”Lea said, standing in the door. She laughed and closed it behind her as Gary and Maria broke their embrace.“That’s more than I can say for those two passengers. They’re royally pissed off.”

“Why?”Gary asked.“Hell, we saved their lives. They should be grateful.”

“They should be, but they’re not. And they’re scared of something; I don’t know what, but Jake said he was ferrying the bunch of them from Government House in Philadelphia and they’ve been talking nothing but finances and the economy the whole time—except when they thought he or his copilot were paying attention.”

“Where’s the copilot—oh. I guess he was one of the ones that the wolves got.”

“Yes. Jake isn’t happy about that either. He said his friend died trying to save their sorry asses, and that’s a quote. Hey listen kids, excuse me, but I’ve got to get out of these clothes and get at least half way clean. I can’t stand myself any longer.”Lea proceeded to undress and wash as if no one else was present. Gary didn’t deliberately try to look but he couldn’t help but notice that Lea had nothing to be ashamed of in the body department. Mostly though, he kept his eyes on Maria. He couldn’t get over how beautiful she looked without clothes, with the sleek, soft down-like pelt covering her body like a second skin where the wrap still left her exposed to the waist. With her back to Lea, she took his hand and pressed it to her breast and closed her eyes, smiling softly at the touch.

***

By mid-afternoon, Gary was feeling much like his old self and Jake let the two remaining passengers reclaim the lounge and bedroom. As they were going toward the front of the craft, Gary looked back and saw the larger of the two eyeing Maria in a way he didn’t care for. He didn’t like it, but Jake took his arm and urged him along.

“Just leave them alone,”He advised.“They can cause me a lot of problems, and you too. We can live up front for a day or two. And tomorrow you all can stand guard while I see if I can fix the fuel cell. In the meantime, how about something to eat?”At the mention of food, Gary was suddenly ravenous. His body was demanding energy to replace that used in healing his body, and to make up for what had been missed the last two or three days. As they were eating, Gary remembered that Jake had said his passengers often were discussing finances. He asked the pilot about it.

“Oh yeah. Seems like the government has run out of money and can’t borrow any more. That’s all that’s been on the news the last day or so. Hell, I don’t even know if I’ll have a paycheck coming when this gig is over. For that matter, I’m not even sure if I can get the old girl here serviced in Dallas like I usually do.”While Gary and the others finished their meal he thought about Jake’s words. He was almost afraid to ask but finally decided that honesty with the pilot would probably be best. And it would be better to know, one way or another.“Did you see anything on the news about Maria and I?”

Jake stared at him.“Be damned! Now why didn’t I recognize you? I saw your face all over the place a couple of days ago. Sure, you’re the arch criminals wanted for murder and mayhem. And I didn’t see Maria’s pretty face, but she was mentioned along with you.”

“You don’t seem to be very worried about harboring criminals,”Gary said carefully.

Jake gave them all a cynical grin.“I got the real story through the pilot’s web. We’re a bunch of gossips. Up until the economy started taking up all the news spots, there was lots of back and forth about you. First you were just plain murderers and altered humans on the run, then I started hearing the other side.”

“I’m probably responsible for that,”Lea confessed. She turned to look at Gary and Maria from where she was sitting.“Guess I forgot to mention; while you guys were sleeping, I passed the real story on to a bunch of groups I’m tied in to. I guess some of them sympathized. Though not all of them, by any means. There’s still a lot of resentment against altered humans. And enhanced animals like Booger Bear are being shot on sight some places if they don’t have a human nearby to claim them.”

“Shot?”Booger Bear asked, looking up from a bit of Gary’s food bar he had been sampling, not very enthusiastically.

“Don’t worry Booger. I’ll take care of you.”He didn’t mention that he didn’t know exactly how.

“It may be a mute point by now, what with the economy, though I doubt altered humans and the smart pets will have an easy time of it for the foreseeable future, especially with that Bradshaw bigot getting into office.”Jake mused a moment then said,“Guess what? Today is election day.”He wiped his mouth.“Well, if you folks are finished here and if you don’t mind, let’s go take a look at old Betsy and see if I can find out what’s wrong with her while we still have some daylight. No use waiting until morning.”

***

Gary stayed close to Maria, even as he watched their surroundings very carefully. It was the first chance he had gotten to view them leisurely. Jake had done a good job of setting the floater down on an area of the highway not obstructed by overhanging trees or covered with obstructions washed up during past heavy rains. He didn’t like how close one outcrop of woods was to them; it was obviously what the wolves had used to get close to the humans. He was amazed that Jake and his dead copilot had managed to fend them off at all. Lea was posted on the other side, which had a much larger area free of obstructions that could block the view.

While they waited to see what Jake could do with the bad fuel cell, Gary wondered again, for what seemed like the hundredth time in the last few days, what to do next. He seriously doubted that Amelia’s father was going to call off his dogs, and even if he did, there were still the new laws that had been passed. Wherever they went, Maria would be subject to arrest and confinement to a camp with probably worse to happen afterwards. And Booger Bear wasn’t even considered close to being human. With the law to back them up, cities would start purging their environs of enhanced pets, not bothering to distinguish them from the feral enhanced animals, the ones doing all the damage to crops and humans living outside the cities. When people were in trouble they always looked for scapegoats, and in this case he knew they didn’t have far to look. From now on, wherever they went, it would be dangerous.

“You’re being so quiet. What are you thinking about?”Maria said. He looked fondly at her and put his arm around her waist.“I’m wondering where we’re going to find a home, sweetheart. Those men back inside the floater are probably going to be the norm from now on, as if things weren’t already bad enough for people like you and Booger.”

“Will they report us, do you think? That is, if we get to Dallas?”

“You can bet on it.”

“I could try disguising myself maybe,”Maria offered.

“No. I want us to be able to live like a normal couple.”He bent down and kissed her upturned lips briefly before going back to keeping tabs on their surroundings. While Gary was looking in another direction, Maria touched the fingers of one hand to her lips, trying to recapture the sensation of Gary’s lips on hers. Every time he did it now, it sent a thrill though her like nothing she had ever felt before. Was this how normal women, those who had led a life embodied in a family reacted? She hoped so. It felt so good, and yet there was a hurt to go with it, that of still being uncertain of his exact intentions. What had he said?I want us to be able to live like a normal couple. Did this mean what she hoped it did?

Her thoughts were interrupted by Jake backing out of the panel that concealed the fuel cell. He stood up and shook his head, wiping his hands with a rag. Seeing Gary’s questioning look, he said

“It’s worse than I thought. One of the superconducting coils failed and it shorted out a bunch of other connections. Damn it, how do they expect me to fly when they replace worn out parts with crap?”he began refastening the panel.

It was a rhetorical question. Gary had run across the same phenomena in his laboratory work. Replacements for older equipment had become increasingly hard to come by and some of the parts and devices he did receive were of shoddy workmanship. So much of America’s industry had been shipped overseas in the last 50 or 75 years that trying to get the new factories being built here up to specs was a point of contention with both political parties. Gary doubted that things would get much better so long as enhanced animals continued to cause disruptions to the economy and to global trade. He had been against the barriers going up in great circles around major cities the last few years at first, but now he was beginning to believe that they might be the only long term solution to a stable society and economy. Build the barricades and make the cities as self sufficient as possible. He though agricultural genetics could manage enough food sources if the rats and mice and rabbits and birds could be kept out of the cities. After that, more manufacturing could be started.

“Are we going to be able to leave?”Maria asked.

Jake gave his usual cynical grin.“If we expect to get to Dallas, we have to.”His grin grew wider.“At least we won’t have so many politicians weighing us down. Give me a couple days of sunshine and if I can get the old girl off the ground at all, I think we can make it that far. In the meantime, I want to try something.”

“What’s that?”Gary asked.

“Just before we went down, I spotted the Trinity river just ahead. It looked to be pretty shallow and I saw where it curved around and left a real nice place to soak up more sunlight than here. It’s not nearly as shadowed. I could get her charged up a day or two quicker soon’s the sun comes out. What’s more, the curve skirts a limestone beach of sorts. That’s a perfect spot to get a real bath and camp until we can take off.”

“How are you going to get there?”

“If I put everyone off and let them walk, I think I can just make it. It’s only a mile or so, and you three all have good weapons. I doubt you’ll be attacked so long as you watch close.”

The hand bath had gotten the worst of the dirt from Gary’s body, but not all of it by any means. A real bath sounded great, even if it was in a river. And sleeping in the floater might be okay but it was very stuffy without any air circulation. Being able to stay outside during the day would be welcome, too.

“Sounds good to me,”he said.

“Great. Let me finish closing this panel and I’ll break the news to our esteemed guests that they’re going to have to walk a ways.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The two remaining government officials were reluctant to even leave the craft at first, but Jake finally convinced them that it would be much better to move away from the bodies.

“Aren’t we even going to bury them?”The big man, obviously the superior of the other one, asked.

“With what? Our bare hands? You people should have stayed inside like I asked you to. Now come on—we’ve been lucky so far. The scavengers have pretty much left them alone so far, but that won’t last and should a big enough bear come along, I can’t guarantee it couldn’t rip the door off the floater.”

The man blanched.“Don’t you have any more guns for us?”

“No I don’t, but don’t worry. These three people can guard you well enough. Just hurry along and don’t stop to sightsee.”Jake did have more weapons in his gun locker but he didn’t intend to trust his passengers with them. Nor would he loan them his own weapon.

“Come on now, you’ll be fine.”

Reluctantly, the two men left the floater, eyes avoiding contact with the scattered, mangled bodies, now being picked at by crows and rats. Remembering how the officials had been eyeing Maria, Gary decided to lead the way and let Lea and Maria bring up the rear. He avoided the stomach-turning picture of crows plucking at eyes and entrails. Some sights were best left alone when possible. Before they started off, he remembered that they had never even been introduced. Just in case he had to give orders to one or the other, he asked,“What are your names? I’m Gary, and the taller lady is Lea. The shorter one is Maria.”

“I’m Marvin Hedgeworth, financial advisor to President Bradshaw. My partner here is Devin Copeland, Bradshaw’s minister of genetics in the new seat of government.”

“New seat?”

“Never mind. That’s none of your business. Let’s get this over with.”Gary shrugged and led off, skirting the encroaching growth of new forest as widely as possible. They walked a couple of hundred yards, then following Jake’s instructions, moved off the road to where there was an open spot. All of them turned back to look, including Booger Bear, who had been traveling almost under foot and well away from the two strange men. Like Gary, he didn’t trust them.

The floater made little noise as it started up, relying almost entirely on its magnetic coils to get it into the air, and using what was left of its solar powered batteries to help them attain greater power. It rose, hovered, then moved forward only a few feet above the ground. It passed them and continued on, disappearing around the curve of the secondary road.

When no crash sounded, Gary assumed Jake had landed safely at the spot he had picked out.

“Okay, let’s move on. I think he made it.”A few minutes later the floater came into sight. It had been set down lightly just where Jake had intended, right at the edge of the river, adjoining a limestone beach that reached several yards out before meeting the water. Gary hurried his group along, wanting to get settled and his charges out of his hair. He would much rather leave them to Jake to deal with.

As they came into sight, Jake stepped out the door of the floater, his perennial grin displayed for all to see.“Close, but we did it.”He patted the composite skin of the floater like an old cowboy would have done to his horse.

“Now what do we do? Just sit here?”Hedgeworth said, disdain in his voice, as if no one else could possibly run things as well as he. That he now had to depend on a lowly floater pilot and a gang of refugees was obviously rankling him.

“Just make yourself comfortable and don’t stray. If you want to bathe, I’ll set some guards.”

“We’ll wait,”Hedgeworth said, edging toward the open door of the floater.

“Well, I’m not. And I’d suggest that you stay right inside while the rest of us get cleaned up.”He turned his back on them and motioned the others to follow. Gary and Maria bathed first, with Jake and Lea standing guard. The river was moving slowly at this time of year and the water was clear only to a depth of a couple of feet, about as good as it ever got in this part of Texas. Jake had furnished them with soap from his own kit and light blankets from stores. Maria was completely unembarrassed about being nude in the water with Gary, who tried to conceal his own modesty. It didn’t work too well, especially when he was washing her back and accidentally bumped her with the unavoidable result of the sexual interest she was inducing in him.

“Sorry,”he apologized.

Maria turned around. She moved so close to him that he had to put his hands on her waist to avoid losing his balance and falling backward—and that caused him to bump her in front. She laughed.“You act as if it’s something to be ashamed of. Please Gary, I don’t mind, honestly.”To prove her point she moved closer, pressing her generous breasts against him and bringing his erection against her belly.

“I’m not ashamed, Maria. It’s just that I don’t want you to think of me like other men. I care for you.”

Those were the words she wanted to hear. She reached up and pulled his head down for another of the kisses she enjoyed so much. It was she who broke it, very reluctantly, a moment later.“I think we should wait a bit to carry this any further, but … when we have some privacy, I want to. And believe me, you’re not like other men. I care for you too. Okay?”

“Okay. Absolutely. Now how about washing my back for a minute so I don’t have to look at you naked until then?”

She laughed and complied.

A little later they came happily out of the water.

“You guys took your time. Get dressed, then it’s our turn,”Lea said. When the other two had undressed and entered the water, Maria suddenly said“Oh patuta. I forgot my hairbrush.”

“Go ahead, I’ll stand watch. Booger Bear will warn me if anything dangerous is near. Unless he wants to bathe too?”

The cat looked at Gary as if he had suddenly gone around the bend, then caught on that he was kidding. Human humor sometimes escaped him.“Water wet,”he said.

“That’s the idea Booger, but if you don’t want to, just help me look out for bad animals.”

“Okay.”

Maria ran to the door of the floater and disappeared inside. She didn’t know that the two men had been watching her and Gary play in the water through one of the windows; or rather that they had been watching her almost exclusively, especially when they got a frontal view of her breasts with the down covering them slick with water and her nipples partially erect.

Gary kept his eyes on the nearby forest, but he wasn’t too worried, especially with his pet nearby listening with his acute hearing for possible danger. Jake and Lea were in the midst of their own play. Gary had noticed it with a bit of amusement; it appeared that the two of them were getting along very well. He was glad. He liked Lea and Jake both the more he got to know them. Jake was an obvious free thinker and cynical almost to a fault. He intended to ask him to help him and Maria out once they made it to Dallas. He thought of Maria again and smiled to himself with anticipation. He didn’t give a damn what her past had been; he knew he was falling in love with her—and she had as much as said that she loved him, or at least cared for him, over and above any other men she had known. Booger Bear’s ears suddenly twitched. He turned halfway around and they twitched some more.

“Bad men. Hurt Maria,”he said, and bounded toward the door of the floater. Gary cursed and followed, running without a thought about the two he was supposed to be guarding. Booger Bear was halted by the closed door of the floater. Gary pressed the recessed latch and the entrance sprang open. From inside he heard Maria scream, sounding almost like a cat herself, then the sound of a human voice followed, growling in pain and frustration.“Shut up you bitch, or I’ll kill you right now! Hold her damn it!”A thud followed and another scream. Gary was already racing down the aisle between the seats. From the narrowed opening into the passenger lounge he could see a struggle taking place. Both men were attempting to subdue Maria. Hedgeworth was holding a bloodied knife from the galley in one hand and trying to press it against Maria’s throat. She already bore several shallow cuts from previous attempts. Copeland was behind her, his face grimaced with the tension of trying to get one of her arms up behind her back. His neck had four deep parallel cuts where Maria’s unsheathed claws had tried to rip open his throat. She was still trying, while Hedgeworth was tearing at her jumpsuit, already cut open down the middle. Gary couldn’t shoot from where he was for fear of hitting Maria. He ran up and grabbed Hedgeworth by the back of his collar and jerked backward as hard as he could. Cursing furiously, both at the men and at himself for letting her go back into the floater with them by herself. Hedgeworth let go and they both fell backward. He was still clutching the knife and after they landed, he tried to twist it around to drive it into Gary’s side. Gary twisted to avoid it and suddenly had a clear shot at the man’s head. He took it. The shot was so close to his own head that the explosion of blood splattered his face, blinding him. He flexed his body in an effort to roll the dead weight of his victim from him. He got it off and came to his knees, wiping furiously at his eyes and nearly deafened from the explosion from the gun shot.

Booger Bear had attacked too, and now Copeland was cowering and trying to cover his face from the claws of the suddenly released Maria and the cat both. He screamed as Maria’s sharp cat-like nails found his ear and ripped it to shreds; at the same time, the cat clawed at his exposed hands. He screamed again and finally Gary got enough of the blood away from his face to see what was happening. He couldn’t shoot at the mixture of struggling man and woman and cat but he got to his feet and took two steps forward. He started to kill Copeland too, as soon as he was able, but by this time the man was moaning and curled into a fetal ball.

“Enough, Booger! Maria, let him be. We’ll tend to him in a minute.”Maria reluctantly stopped and backed away at the sound of Gary’s voice, but was still baring her canines. Booger Bear looked at Gary, plainly wanting to know why he should stop when things were so clearly going their way—and when the men had so obviously attacked and hurt his friend.

“Calm down, Booger,”He commanded, drawing Maria into his arms but keeping his gun pointed at Copeland.

“Who started it, sweetheart?”Gary asked, hoping it was Copeland so that he would have an excuse to kill the man. Outwardly he had calmed down, but inside he was still raging.

“Both of them. As soon as I came back to get my comb, they were on me. They wanted to …

to…”

“I know what they wanted.”

“So do I,”Jake said as he arrived, totally naked and still dripping.“What a poor excuse for humans those two make. Go ahead, take this one outside and kill him. No sense messing up Betsy any more than she already is.”

Gary heard the man begin crying.“It was Hedgeworth’s idea,”He sobbed.

“He made me do it.”

“Uh huh. Get up.”

When Copeland didn’t move, Jake reached for him and yanked him to his feet.“Would you rather me do the honors?”He asked, looking at Gary.

Gary thought a moment.“I hate to kill an unarmed man. I’ve got a better idea.”

“If you have, let’s hear it.”

“Why don’t we make him walk back to Dallas?”

“No!”Copeland screamed.“That’s as good as murdering me!”

“It’s more than you deserve,”Gary said.“Can you and Lea handle him, Jake?”

“We’ll take care of it. Stay here.”

Jake and Lea manhandled Copeland back up the aisle and out the door. Jake pointed north.

“Dallas is that way. Get going.”

“No, I won’t!”

“You’ve got about ten seconds to get moving or I guarantee you’ll never move again. And if you try hanging around here, we’ll kill you for sure. Go.”Reluctantly, Copeland wiped at his bleeding wounds and walked slowly away. After a moment Jake sent a laser beam that scorched the tarmac near his feet and hurried him along. After that, he and Lea went back to the river to get dressed.

Inside, Gary was pressing a cloth to the shallow cuts on Maria’s neck and trying to still her sobbing.

“They … they wouldn’t leave me alone. Th … then they grabbed me. I told them it …

was rape and that big man said … said it couldn’t be rape b … because I wasn’t human.”She broke into fresh spate of crying.

“Hush, sweetheart, hush. You’re as human as I am and far more human than either of those sorry bastards.”

“I was s … scared they were going to…”

“Hush, love. It’s all right now. I love you.”That caused her to gulp and press her head against his chest.“Do you? Do you really?”

“Yes. I love you. I’d marry you if I could.”

“I don’t care about that. Just so long as you love me and stay with me.”

“I will sweetheart. I’ll stay with you forever. No one is going to touch you like that again, not while I’m still living.”

That brought on more crying, but this time it was tears of happiness, and even those stilled after a few minutes, completely stifled by Gary’s warm embrace and continued words of assurance. After he had given them time to recover, Lea and Jake returned. He looked down at Hedgeworth’s body and shook his head.“You folks do have a knack for getting my aircraft all bloody.”

“At least this time, we’re close to the river. We can feed him to the fishes,”Lea said.

“Good idea. That way we won’t be bothered by scavengers.”It took three of them to drag the body to the edge of the water and shove it into the current. It turned in a lazy circle, half submerged, then floated away, with fish already beginning to nibble at the remains.

“Good riddance,”Gary declared, bending to wash his hands.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

As if the previous day’s terror had been attached to the hovering clouds that began to dissipate, by morning Maria had already put the incident away in that part of her mind that no longer had a place in her new life. She had slept with Gary in one of the narrow beds but they had not made love. Without words, both decided to wait until there was a better time and place and some degree of privacy, absent from danger.

They all went outside and Jake gazed at the morning sunlight with unalloyed pleasure.“Give us two days of this and we can be on our way. To Dallas anyhow,”he amended.

“And what then?”Gary asked.

Jake started to speak, then suddenly closed his mouth realizing that he didn’t have anything to say. All his passengers were dead. Finally he shrugged and said“You know, I really don’t have any idea what’s going to happen. I was supposed to carry them all the way to Sacramento. They didn’t tell me why, so didn’t ask.”

“Hedgeworth mentioned something about a new seat of government.”

“Yeah, I heard that too, but I don’t really know a damned thing. And even when we get juiced up enough to leave here, the radio still isn’t working. I think we can safely say that Bradshaw won the election though. And you know what that means.”

“All too well,”Gary said.“Even if I wasn’t wanted for murder, I’d still have to register and work for the government. If I heard right.”

“You’re a genetic engineer right?”

“Yes. That’s all I’ve ever done. And I specialized in mammalian genetics, so I might not have had a job anyway.”

“Aren’t the principles the same?”

“Yes, but the techniques aren’t. I studied all the fields in undergrad school but I’d have to go over everything again if I did any agriculture work. I have had some thoughts about inserting mammalian protein genes into edible crops, thought that would increase their food value a lot. Not that I’ll ever have a chance to work on the idea.”

“Well, you never know. The aliens may have landed by the time we’re back in contact with our fellow man and want to hire you. Let’s wait and see how it plays out.”

“I don’t want you to put yourself in danger for harboring us.”Jake laughed.“We’ll figure something out. Hell, I’ll probably be out of a job too after losing all my passengers.”

“I’m already out of a job,”Lea said.

“Tell you what,”Jake said.“I’ve got a place I keep on hold a bit south of Dallas. It’s where I lay over on this route. We usually stop at Dallas, the halfway point from east to west for maintenance and resupply and so forth. The place is secure and I’ve got an extra bedroom. We can all stay there while we sort things out. If you want to that is.”He raised questioning eyebrows.

“We’ll take you up on it Jake. And thanks. You’re a real friend.”

“Aw man, no need for thanks. You saved my life remember? Besides, I always like good company. We can have a party and think up bad things to say about the government.”

“Bad men?”Booger Bear asked, trying to follow the conversation. Gary chuckled.“Yep, bad men in government Booger. Almost always.”

***

The rest of the day and the next were almost idyllic. The only sign of how enhanced animals were taking over the countryside came the morning of the second day, when Booger Bear made friends with a pair of half grown cats who had either just left their mother or had lost her to a larger predator. The feral cats had high-domed heads like Booger Bear and were much too intelligent to come close to the humans. They stayed upriver, giving the humans only a glance now and then to make sure they kept their distance. Gary’s pet had fun teaching them to fish from the limestone outcropping, remembering what his human had told him about refraction. He didn’t understand the theory, but a little experimentation showed him how to judge the depth and position of the small fish and minnows. After a while he left the feral cats and came back to doze in the sun. He really liked humans better. Except for maybe a nice female cat. Now that… he dozed off again with the thought.

Gary and Maria bathed again after the sun was well up and had warmed the water a bit. He was so entranced that he found it almost impossible to keep his hands off her while they frolicked. They washed their clothes and spread them on the rocks to dry and used the wraps Jake had provided to partially cover themselves.

“We’ll guard if you want to bathe,”Gary offered. Jake had seen how they were enamored with each other. He remembered some of his younger days when his girl friend had been altered by her parents to conform to a standard of beauty currently fashionable, a split tongue and shiny scales on her shoulders and buttocks. She had grown to hate her differences, though Jake didn’t mind. He thought Gary was lucky in that Maria seemed to be entirely comfortable with her appearance, even though she hadn’t asked for it.“No, I’m not ready yet. Why don’t you kids go take a nap. We’ll go in when you wake up.”

Maria gazed at Gary with a look that would have melted a statue’s heart. He stood up and reached his hand out to help her to her feet. They left their garments drying, the crude stitching of the repairs made to Maria’s suit looking like some errant fashion statement. Holding hands, they walked slowly back to the floater. Maria sensed that whether Gary had caught the nuance or not, Jake was advising them that if they wanted privacy for a period of time, neither he nor Lea would bother them. Inside they walked single file down the narrow aisle to the lounge then into the bedroom. Gary closed the door behind them and waited to see what Maria wanted. She shrugged and her wrap dropped to the floor, exposing all of her slimly curved body. She came to him and gently took his hands away from his wrap. It fell in a puddle at his feet but he never noticed. All of his attention was focused on Maria, thinking how beautiful and how desirable she was. He reached for her and they sank to one of the narrow beds together.

Maria was eager, compliant and enthusiastic all at the same time, wanting nothing more than to please him and be pleased. There was nothing she wouldn’t have done for him at this point. Gary was feeling the same emotions, wanting her to enjoy their union, wanting more than anything to please and satisfy her. Her lips parted readily for his tongue, then even as their lips were locked together she couldn’t help but gasp as his hand closed firmly over her young, resilient breast, molding it in his hand and holding her captive to the thrill of his touch, a touch that sent waves of pleasure through her body and dissolved any last hint of reluctance to join with a man again, most particularly this man. She reached for him, felt his readiness and drew her over him. She guided him inside with one easy motion of her body and then surrendered to the weight of his body that really was no weight at all, only a continued surge and retreat that she wanted to never end. She held him tighter with her arms and legs and when she thought she could stand it no longer the shuddering release of a fiercely intense orgasm swept over her. From what seemed like a far distance Gary heard her scream with the release of pent up passion just as he finally vented himself into her, feeling as though he was pouring his whole body into hers. A long time later, how long he was never sure, he raised his head up to look at her.“I just thought I was in love before,”he said.“Now I know what it really is.”Maria was so happy and drained that she couldn’t talk at all; she simply clutched him to her, not wanting his weight to leave her even after their co-joined bodies finally slipped apart.

***

“Do you think maybe our clothes are dry by now?”Maria murmured huskily.

“I don’t know, but even if they’re not, we probably need another bath,”Gary said. He caressed her breast, loving the feel of the soft down against his hand, making the contrast between it and her bare nipple all the more enticing. Her breasts were firm under his hands; in fact her whole body was taut and sleekly muscled, like a young cat just coming into its full strength. She laughed and lifted her head to kiss him one final time then reluctantly separated herself from him.

“I think we really ought to give Lea and Jake a turn, don’t you?”

“It seems only fair, but remember, they’re both 20 years ahead of us in experience. We should get more time so we can catch up to them.”

“I doubt that they’ll see it that way.”

“Oh well, I’m getting hungry anyway. How about you?”

“Ummm. Hungry for you, but we can go eat anyway.”Gary rolled off the bed and reached for the wrap and his gun.

***

Lea and Jake were waiting patiently, sitting together with one of them watching the woods and the other keeping an eye open for anything untoward that might occur up or down river.

“Hi kids,”Lea said.“Nice nap?”

“Um, yes,”Gary said.“Anything going on?”

“No, except we were getting hungry. I was about ready to go wake you up.”Neither of them admitted that they hadn’t been asleep, though Gary suspected it was pretty obvious without a word being said. He gathered their jump suits and handed Maria hers.

“I’ll buy you some new clothes soon as we get a chance,”he said, eyeing the crude repair job they had done on her suit.

The four of them walked back to the floater together, along with the yawning Booger Bear, who had to be awakened before they left.

Back inside the floater, Jake passed out water and the ubiquitous food bars, a staple fare for travelers and also produced in quantity (though in a less flavorful variety) to keep hungry refugees fed enough to prevent rioting or looting in cities.

While they were eating, Jake brought up the subject of what to do again.“It’s like this folks; without passengers I think I’ll be grounded in Dallas until I’m assigned another flight, and that’s assuming I still have a job. If it weren’t for that, I could just keep you under wraps in the floater while it’s worked on, then take you on to Sacramento. No one would suspect that you could get that far without getting caught, and there’s even a chance that you aren’t even wanted that far west. I know the government pays lip service to the anti-genetics crowd, but the election is over with now. They’ll be so busy trying to figure out how to keep the country from falling apart like China and Russia have that if I could get you out there, chances are good that you’d never be caught. Of course we still have to figure out how to smuggle you out of the floater in Dallas. Ideas anyone?”

Lea rubbed her chin pensively.“How do the officials know how many passengers you have, if any? When I haul someone, like a routine government courier, they tap into my console, same as I have to.”She looked crafty and grinned.“Of course we know ways around that, but never mind. Do the floaters do it the same way?”

“Just about.”He snapped his fingers.“Damn, if I had thought to salvage those passengers’body computers, we could have used them to fool the master log. The FedRats never check to see if the bodies match the specs; they just look to see if the right computer has logged in again.”

“How about if you had some of them? Could we three pose as the government guys?”Jake bellowed with laughter.“Sure—so long as they didn’t get a good look at you!”

“Well, what if we tried that? You’re going to have to tell some sort of story about what happened out here, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah—but I still don’t have their computers.”Lea reached into the big thigh pocket of her jump suit and brought out four rounded disks; three attached to neck chains and one posing as a bracelet. All of the disks were ornately decorated with gold and silver inlay so that they resembled jewelry.“I thought they might come in handy, so I salvaged a few of them. Pretty, aren’t they?”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Gary held his breath and Maria’s hand as Jake maneuvered the recharged floater into the air. He had seen them take off before, and while seeing one take flight and being in one when it did were bound to be much different experiences, he knew Jake’s craft was sluggish. It barely cleared the next big growth of forest, but then slowly gained height. He tilted the solar panels into position to catch the most of the morning sun and synchronized the setting with their time and speed. As the morning progressed, they would keep the maximum surface absorbing sunlight and converting it to power. Within a few minutes he picked up the interstate and began following it north.

The view was magnificent from the truncated height that a floater usually traveled at. Forests and open bodies of water sparkled in the sunlight. Occasional coils of smoke rose from small towns along the main interstate highway still holding out against the ravages of enhanced animals. Trucks such as Lea had driven were frequent, but there were few private vehicles on the road. Twice they flew over small towns that looked to be abandoned. Both of them were surrounded by rings of dead vegetation where poison or herbicides had been used to try to keep enhanced animals at bay. At one of them, Gary examined the place through Jake’s field glasses and could see winding columns of rats with high domed heads going into and out of abandoned buildings. There were thousands of them, more than he could possibly count. The whole ecology of earth was mixed up now, with sudden explosions or depletions in the population of animals, which in turn affected other parts of the mix. He knew it would be many more years yet before it stabilized.

At last they neared the huge Dallas/Fort Worth metropolis. Even from a long way off, he could see dust rising from construction equipment working furiously in a great circular arc around Dallas, trying to get a barricade completed that would isolate it from enhanced animals. He had read that the northern part of the barricade was already nearing completion and that like Houston, steps were being taken to get manufacturing going again and to limit the number of refuges from blighted areas of the country. Dallas only had one nuclear plant to depend on for energy. It was supplemented by the importation of coal through long pipelines and tunnels kept open and guarded as were the mines, by remnants of the country’s armed forces.

“Get your bandages on kids; we’re getting close,”Jake ordered. Gary, Lea and Maria began applying the bogus bandages to their faces and other parts of their bodies as a disguise and to back up Gary’s story. It wasn’t certain that they would be needed but Jake wanted to take no chances and they had all agreed that it offered the best chance of the three of them getting off the craft and away from the airport without being hindered or held for questioning. Three of the computers Lea had stolen from the bodies had already been tapped into his console. As soon as he landed, that information would be relayed to the airport computer—which would immediately send up a flag, requesting an explanation about the passengers he had started with but were no longer aboard. That was when he would have to tell his tale—and send his“wounded”charges off for treatment. He had already given them the address and house code for his residence. Gary and Lea in turn, had passed him enough gold for a substantial bribe if the FedRats were insistent on nosing about too closely.

Jake used all his skills to make his aircraft wobble in the air as he came close to the airport tower, signaling that he had no communication and was in trouble. He wasn’t worried about faking that part of their plan. Hewashaving problems and had to override computer control to keep it from grounding his craft immediately. The floater had used more power than he had thought it would getting it there. He juggled current flow from the remaining superconducting coils to provide magnetic lift to the section left without robbing Peter to pay Paul. More than one gauge was blinking red when he finally set the craft down with a very hard bump that jarred their teeth.

“Whew! Folks, that was closer than I wanted it to be. I should have picked a spot on the interstate and got a tow the rest of the way—except I couldn’t be sure there were still any tow trucks left.”His lips split in his crinkled-eyed grin.“As the old saying goes, any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. Now get into your acting shoes kids, and let’s hope the FedRats or SecRats aren’t very bright today.”Jake was also hoping that not too many questions would be asked, but the importance of the passengers he had been carrying suggested that there would be. Only the fact that he came down at the southern, smaller airport was cause for optimism. They might not be so security conscious there. Aircraft with mechanical trouble routinely landed at the smaller field, as well as unscheduled craft from other areas, usually manned by refugees or paid for by refugees. Before long, he doubted that such craft would be allowed inside the barricades in order to keep the population down to manageable levels. At any rate, he had his story ready.

Checking to see that the others were properly bandaged up, he stood and got ready to open the floater. He looked back at them.“Don’t forget to moan and groan a bit. And try to act like it’s all my fault. Remember, Gary will do the talking if they ask you anything.”He pressed his thumb to the door latch and was confronted immediately by a uniformed man waiting outside.

“I need to send these folks to a treatment center right away. They’re hurt, and they’re the only ones left alive,”Jake said immediately to the Federal Officer who stood ready. He was thankful that he was a low ranking functionary.“Here. Take this and get them to my car. It’s in parking area C. It will be the only one with an eagle painted on the trunk. They’ll take it from there.”He passed the man a large denomination gold coin and his spare lock card without giving him time to ask questions.

The uniformed officer took the coin and slipped it into a pocket of his uniform as if taking a bribe was an old habit, but still he peered into the craft, purposely left darkened by Jake. Seeing the bandages on the three passengers, he keyed his computer and spoke to the holo projection in front of him.

“Raymond? I’m going to use the baggage cart to take the passengers to the parking lot, then come back for their luggage later. They need to get to a treatment center right away and I don’t want to wait for an ambulance.”He waited on an answer then spoke again.

“No, the pilot will stay here to report. No problem about that. Yeah, he said these three are the only ones alive. Must be quite a story. Be sure to tell me about it when I get loose.”Having done his part to earn the coin, the officer waited, knowing that the situation was unusual enough to ask for more money. Taking the cue, Jake surreptitiously passed him another gold piece of the same denomination and let himself be pointed toward where two other higher ranking officers were waiting to take him to a briefing room. He recoiled inside, but then relaxed. He had rehearsed his story enough to make it believable—and horrible enough to capture their attention while his friends drove away in his car. If he got away with the scheme, he would follow later. If not—well, he still had his gun at his hip and another concealed under the legging of his jump suit.

Groaning for effect, Gary pretended to help Maria along, being careful not to bump Booger Bear, concealed in an improvised shoulder bag. Maria’s whole head was bandaged, as well as her hands. She kept up a soft keening sound, interspersed with saying,“It hurts, oh God, it hurts.”Even the man who had just taken Jake’s money looked away as they made their way to the baggage cart and sat down on the plastic pallets. The officer drove the electric cart silently away as soon as they were settled.

Jake’s vehicle indeed was easy to spot. The bald eagle, now extinct, was painted in brilliant colors and covered the whole rear section of his sedan.

“Are you sure you can make it from here?”The officer asked after Gary had gotten Maria seated in the back.

Gary took the hint. He dug out another gold piece and the man walked away whistling a happy tune. With that much gold in his pocket he didn’t mind walking back to the terminal at all, especially since the federal paychecks had been delayed for some reason this month. The lock card also keyed in directions once Gary figured out that they were voice activated and gave the car the right words, already standardized from years of use by drivers. He sped away without looking back.

Behind them, Jake was singing his song of woe to a rapt audience.“I did my best to keep them inside once we went down, but the fools insisted,”he kept repeating.“What was I supposed to do? They were high enough in government to have my job in a minute if I hadn’t done like they asked. Say, where is everyone? Usually I see a whole gang of people out in the corridors.”

“We haven’t gotten paid yet this month. I think Bradshaw must have already made a deal with theCities Firstcrowd before the election.”

“Damn politicians,”the other added for emphasis. The way that government worked now was well understood by the two doing the questioning. It had become like non-material merchandise, for sale or trade by the highest bidders. Jake proved this after an hour of questioning by using the last of the gold that Gary had given him to thank the men for their courtesy and to have them conveniently forget to take his computer code to contact him if they had more questions. They thanked him profusely. He left to find transportation and noticed as he rode the slidewalk through the terminal that many of the desks were unmanned and that where they did have officials behind them, they seemed to be paying more attention to their holosets than passengers coming and going. As he left the airport in a rented car, he was thankful that no one had spotted the most glaring deficiency in his story. Two females had left his craft, but he had started the trip with only one. He had hoped that they would look at names rather than gender and sure enough, it went the way he hoped. He was whistling as cheerfully as a young boy just out of school when he drove off.

***

Jake’s rented home was inside an upscale gated community, but semi-isolated from its neighbors by a high growth of shrubs. Gary parked Jake’s car in the garage, where the door had slid aside as soon as he turned into the driveway. When the car stopped, lights went on and the garage door closed. He hoped no inquisitive neighbors had seen them drive in and came over to ask questions-at least until Jake arrived.

The door into the interior of the house responded to the same lock card as the car had. It opened directly into a small mud room that held the converters for the solar panels and a place for raingear and work clothes to be stored. From there another door led them out into a spacious, recessed den containing two large loungers and two smaller seats, a central table and a kitchen and bar. Three of the walls were decorated; the fourth was left a neutral color as a background for holoprojections. Maria and Lea began removing her bandages as soon as they were inside.

“So far, so good,”Lea said.“Nice place, this. Pilots do pretty well by themselves. The cross-country ones anyway. Too bad truck drivers don’t make the same kind of money.”

“Yup, but then you would probably have been deprived of all these great adventures,”Gary said.“I wonder which bedroom he wanted us to use?”

“Let’s go look. I can tell where Jake sleeps.”She led the way into the back of the house.“And here it is; the master bedroom. Wow! I’m going to enjoy resting my carcass in here,”she said, with no hint of embarrassment.“Now let’s see where you two are going to park.”

The guest bedroom was only slightly less luxurious than the master. Maria took it all in with wide-eyed wonder. Her background had not included any such luxuries as a memory mattress or a sauna in the bathroom. Gary was less interested in those items than some of the other amenities, like tooth care equipment and shampoo. He saw Maria staring at the bed.

“Beats our last one, huh?”

“Oh, yes! I can’t wait!”

“Well, I think it would be polite to wait until our host arrives before we go to bed. Tell you what, I’ll just bet he has something better to drink than recycled water in that bar in the den. Let’s go look.”

Lea was already making herself at home. She had the holovision going and had plundered Jake’s bar. She finished adding ice to the large pitcher of alcoholic beverage she had concocted and brought it back to the big center table. Gary rummaged around and found glasses for them. He sat down with Maria on one of the big loungers and let Lea pour.

While they waited to see if Jake’s story was believed they turned their attention to the holovision. What they saw was disheartening—or perhaps encouraging if viewed from the other side of the street. Under the revised constitution, Bradshaw had taken office immediately after winning the election, and as Jake had already discovered, he had his agenda ready. They caught only the tail end of the report, then had to wait until the top of the hour for the whole thing.

It began with the animated news anchor, depicted as a near-beautiful young woman nude from the waist up except for sparkles of glitter adorning her breasts. She got right into the meat of the main news of the day, and perhaps the main news for a long time to come. The federal government would immediately begin concentrating such resources as were available into the big cities of the nation, helping them build barricades and get factories to manufacture necessities operating. Only the most essential highways would be kept open and even that would become secondary to upping the production of freight hauling floaters. The Dallas spaceport would be closed in the very near future and essential imports from the satellite complexes and Moon City would be ferried into and out of the east and west coast spaceports. None of those policies had been unexpected; many of them had already begun. It was the draconian measures outlined in next section of the new president’s mandate that got their attention.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Gary listened with growing horror as the animation continued in her simulated bright young voice, just as if millions of altered humans and friendly enhanced animal pets were not being given what was essentially a death sentence.

Altered human beings, as defined by government geneticists, will no longer be allowed inside citiesonce the barricades are complete. They will be given a grace period, depending on theconstruction schedule of individual population centers, to find other habitats. After the graceperiod, all altered humans and all enhanced animals, other than those defined as“useful”bygovernment geneticists, will be evicted whenever found inside the barricades. Those resisting willbe moved by force, using whatever means are necessary.

Essential occupations, such as agricultural geneticists, structural engineers, superconduction specialists and such others as may be defined by individual cities, will be drafted into the work force and paid by each metropolitan authority. The federal government will give help and advice in all the situations mentioned. Given the increasing difficulty of transportation, the country is to be divided into areas of semi-autonomous authority and all remaining armed forces will be deployed to those areas needing them the most.

Sacramento is designated as the new seat of the federal government since Philadelphia has become untenable. President Bradshaw will issue directives in accordance with such laws as the new congress shall pass and…

Lea switched the holo off with a curse.“And you just know who’s going to tell congress what laws to pass, don’t you? Damn it all to hell, I can understand making war on the animals in the countryside, but why altered humans and pets like Booger?”

“They’re being made scapegoats for everything else that’s wrong,”Gary said resignedly.“Even with all the enhanced rats and mice in Houston, I couldn’t let Booger out to help keep them under control. Someone would have killed him for sure.”

“Bad men,”his pet agreed.

He gazed fondly at the cat purring in Maria’s lap and enjoyed the scene with a certain amount of amusement. He was beginning to wonder just whose pet Booger Bear was. Since meeting Maria, he had spent more time in her lap than his, and they were beginning to talk together in the animal patois that he could understand only slightly.

“Bad men for sure,”Jake said, coming into the room. He wore a grim expression on his face.

“Which ones?”Lea asked.

“You should have been listening to the latest news,”he said, eyeing the pitcher but heading to the bar where he poured a hefty shot of whiskey.

“We were,”Gary said.“Until Lea turned it off when they started talking about drafting workers.”

“You should have left it on—or did you hear the part about the wanted list?”

“Wanted list?”

“Yeah. A long list of, and I quote,‘notorious and avaricious genetic engineers who have changed the very fabric of the animal kingdom, and experimented without conscience on human beings’. You’re on the list. Hell, even old Hector Cross is on it and he’s so old he’s bedridden.”

Hector Cross was one of the pioneers of species-mixing genetics. He had once been deported from the country, then allowed back in when enhanced pets had become wildly popular.

“What do they want to do with us?”

“Send you to the wall like all revolutionaries. Seriously, there’s a bounty on your heads, dead or alive. And of course there are a few altered humans who are wanted too. Not just to kick out of the cities but to be shot on sight.”

Gary put an arm around Maria in an unconscious gesture of protection.

“Maria?”Gary asked, fearing the answer.

“Yeah, they got her picture from somewhere.”Jake poured another shot and sat down across from them beside Lea.

“I guess we better leave then. No use you getting into trouble for harboring us.”Jake waved his hand at them.“Forget it. Besides, I’ll have to leave here before long myself. I won’t be able to afford the rent.”

“Why not?”

He grinned lopsidedly, causing the wrinkles on one side of his tanned face to form little lines and furrows.

“Because in less than two weeks I’m going to be out of a job just like the rest of you. They’re going to close the Dallas Spaceport and when that happens, I’m gone. My usual gig was hauling special passengers and freight from the space port here to the east and west coasts. Those Philadelphia bigwigs were an exception. Besides, I can’t see much point in even going back for the last few flights. They’ve stopped paying a lot of federal employees, and those working for the spaceport here are among them.”

“What will you do?”

“I guess I can get a job working on the barricades, and after that in a factory somewhere. There’s too many floater pilots already standing in line for jobs.”

“Maybe we could find a truck,”Lea suggested.

Jake rubbed his chin.“Hmm. You know, that’s something to think about, but right now, I have two questions: who’s hungry and who can cook? I’m tired of those concentrates.”

They all were hungry but it turned out that only Lea had much experience with real cooking.

“I knew there was some good reason for all this. Let’s see what I have handy here that won’t bite back.”

Jake rummaged through his pantry shelves and found enough packages of irradiated food to keep Lea busy. While she busied herself in the kitchen alcove, he turned the holovision set back on. This time, Gary and Maria watched the slightly updated news all the way through. Toward the end of the program, he had to hold Maria as she trembled violently when it showed a young woman altered in much the same fashion as herself being chased down and raped and killed by a mob, along with her companion, a cat that she tried desperately to protect before being overwhelmed. There were no city police in evidence, though the camera panned to a gray government van that was parked with its occupants simply watching and making no effort to intervene. Gary knew that this was done purposely in order to impart an effective legality to the mob’s actions.

“Turn the damned thing off!”Lea shouted from the kitchen. Jake complied.“Sorry kids. It looks like the programs are starting early. The pendulum has swung against anyone who is different now, and we’re on the wrong side of the fence. I wish I could help somehow.”He was beginning to get an idea of how this might be possible, but didn’t want to say anything yet.

“You’ve done enough for us already,”Gary said.

“Yeah? Let me tell you something. My first girl friend was altered. She caught so much flack about it from so-called normal humans that she wound up killing herself. I’ve hated the anti-genetic crowd ever since. I’ll tell you something else too. You can bet that the very people who are responsible for these new programs were either born with long life and disease resistant genes or had them inserted after they were grown. They’re as altered as Maria or Lea are, just in different ways. Acceptable ways, so to speak. Damn, I hate bigots and hypocrites worse than inept aircraft mechanics. I could almost wish I had tried for shuttle training instead of becoming a bus driver.”

“Why didn’t you?”Maria asked curiously. Opportunities to do different things were still something she could only imagine.

“Too confining. I like the wide open spaces.”He glanced at his thumbnail watch.

“By the way, wake Booger up. There’s someone that will be arriving in a few minutes he needs to meet.”

As if on cue, a sound very much like a bark came from the door leading to the converter room and garage. Booger Bear came awake instantly and jumped from Maria’s lap. He landed on the carpet and stood crouched and alert.

“Easy, Booger,”Gary said, suspecting what was coming. An almost full grown, obviously enhanced dog with German Shepherd in its ancestry padded into the room and directly over to Jake, ignoring everyone else, including the cat. Jake ruffled the dog’s fur and accepted a face lick. He turned the dog around to face the others.

“Folks, this is Pluto. My neighbor watches him while I’m gone.”He annunciated the humans’names and the cat’s slowly and clearly, pointing to each one as he did.

“Pluto, say hello.”

“Hello humans. Hello cat,”the dog said. It kept its mouth open after speaking with tongue lolling as if it were grinning at the reaction of the humans, and especially that of Booger Bear. His experiences with the canine species to date hadn’t been very happy ones and he was wary. The humans spoke to the dog. Booger Bear very cautiously crept forward until he was close. Pluto reached with his tongue and licked the cat’s nose, surprising him. He jumped back to a round of laughter. He looked around to Gary for advice.“Good dog?”

“Yep, he’s a good dog, Booger. Be nice.”

“Okay,”his pet said, dubious but willing. His human had never steered him wrong yet. The dog and cat soon went over to a corner of the den and began the process of getting acquainted. Jake gave his attention to the others once he saw that the pets would get along all right.“Now you know another reason why I’m so upset. What you saw on the holo could happen to me and Pluto just as well.”He sniffed the air.“Lea, honey, is that steak I smell? If it is, me and Pluto will probably want to keep you.”

***

Lea hadn’t stinted on the steak and both the pets got some too. Afterward, there was real coffee from fresh ground beans, a luxury most people couldn’t afford.

“There’s a pipeline for coffee and other stuff among floater pilots,”Jake told them,

“and between the space jockeys and us. We trade things back and forth. The coffee is the one thing I’m really going to miss.”

“It’s great,”Gary said, trying to relax and enjoy the moment. It was hard to do without worrying about the future. He and Maria needed new clothes and other sundries and a place to hide out that wouldn’t threaten Jake’s safety. And transportation to wherever he decided they could find a refuge. And they needed all these things while a price was on their heads, preventing them from going out in public. He hated to ask, but he knew he needed another big favor from Jake.

“Jake, I wonder if you and Lea would do something for us tomorrow. We need to buy some things but I hate to risk going out in public until I can come up with some way to do it without getting us mobbed like that poor woman we saw on the news.”

“I’ve already been thinking about it, old buddy. Tell us what you need and what sizes and Lea and I will go shopping tomorrow while you two stay here and make nice to each other and our furry friends. We’ll drop the rental car off while we’re at it.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask about the car,”Lea said.“Isn’t it going to give us away?”

“No, I put it in my brother’s name.”

“Seems like that wouldn’t help much. They can trace us through your brother.”

“I guess they could if I had a brother, but I don’t. My car and house are in his name, too.”

Gary began fishing for some more of his dwindling supply of gold to pay for his requests, but Jake saw what he was up to and told him to keep his money.

“I’ve got plenty. I’ve seen this coming for some time and been saving against the day. If we can keep you two out of sight for a while, the hoorah may die down, at least so far as you being on the wanted list is concerned. But I don’t even want to think what’s going to happen to all the altered humans in the country, not to mention their pets. There are millions of altered humans by now and most of the changes are fairly apparent, like Maria. Lea could probably stay concealed for a while, but only until it gets so bad they start making people strip.”

“Do you really think it will go that far?”

“Trust me, Gary. Pilots don’t have much to do while in flight except read or watch recordings, and I do a lot of reading. It’s not only going to be terrible for altered humans, but think of all the refugees we already have. That problem will only get worse as conditions deteriorate and the big cities start barring them from entering. Most of those people will die, except for the ones having a trade or occupation that’s desperately needed to keep the cities going. Millions upon millions of people are going to die, just like they did in Russia and China when those countries imploded, and like it’s beginning to happen in India and Europe. Within a decade or so the whole world is going to revert to city states, enclaves, so to speak, with air or sea and river transportation the only means of communication and trade. The more I think about it, the more I’m sort of glad I won’t have a job. I can start planning for survival for me and Pluto now instead of later. The rest of you are welcome to stay with me while we get organized. And don’t worry about being a burden. Anyone who isn’t scared to use a gun is going to be welcome in my world. That’s going to be the only way to survive outside the city before long—and inside the cities for that matter if you’re not among the aristocracy.”He paused and grimaced.“Sorry for the speech but that’s the way I see it. Now how about we each have a big brandy with our coffee and then head for bed. And don’t worry about the hot water for your showers or the sauna; there’s plenty.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Lea snuggled up to Jake, wriggling her hips as the bed carried on a continual gentle massage that adjusted automatically to her contours. She emitted a little sound of pleasurable contentment.

“Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but I’m curious. Where do you keep your other women?”

Jake kissed the top of her head and admired her long golden body.“Too bad you had to remove the color from your hands and face.”

“Yeah, but it attracted too much attention and I’m damn sure not a sun worshiper like my parents. And in case you’re wondering where all my men are, I don’t have any. As soon as I take my clothes off, most men treat me like some exotic animal or an erotic freak instead of a woman. As soon as I sense that, I move on. In the meantime, you’re avoiding my question.”

“I decided I liked dogs better than women until you came along.”

“Sure you did. Hey, if you don’t want to talk, ignore me. I can’t help being curious though. There’s no sign of another woman having been here and I can promise that it isn’t because you’re not a good lover.”

“Compliments will get you anywhere. It’s really pretty simple. After my first love suicided I stayed away from relationships for a long time. I always tortured myself with wondering what I could have done to prevent it. By the time I came out of the funk I started flying, and I’ve been more or less on the go ever since.”

“That didn’t keep you from bringing me home.”

“No. I’ll confess, I have girl friends other places, but I’ve never kept one for long. Not many women will put up with my cynicism for more than a few weeks. And besides, women are looking for someone to stay home and protect them these days. I couldn’t do that while I was flying. I did take an option to buy this place just in case though. I picked it for a permanent home if I ever decided to settle down, but I never wanted to bring anyone here in the meantime. You’re the first.”

“I’m honored love, but I don’t have any illusions about how special I am. Why me?”

“Sometimes things just work out like this. I’m not sorry. Are you?”

“No. Not if you’ll just lay back and let me show you how much I like your old cynical body.”Lea began kissing her way down the hard muscles of his chest and abdomen, taking her time and gradually working lower and lower.

Later, Jake poured them another brandy from the bottle he had brought to the bedroom with him.

“This stuff is getting hard to find,”he said.“Enjoy it.”

“I am. And you, too.”

“Good. Now about tomorrow. Get the sizes for the kids so we can buy them some clothes and whatever else they need first thing tomorrow. After that I’m going to try to do something else for them.”

“What’s that?”

“I got to thinking. Moon City needs geneticists. I’ve got some contacts here, so before the spaceport closes, I’m going to try to see if they’ll take him.”

“He won’t leave without Maria or Booger.”

“I know. That’s going to be a real sticking point, but I still want to try. Wild dogs would be cracking my bones for marrow by now if you guys hadn’t come along.”

***

In the other bedroom Maria and Gary had already made love. Now they were relaxing in the sauna with hot water surging waist deep around them. Gary sat on one of the underwater ledges with Maria between his legs and her hands resting on his knees. His hands were covering each of her breasts, moving in a slow, sensual rhythm that had her purring almost like Booger Bear after filling himself with liver.

“Mmm. That feels so nice. You’re a good lover. And a good man. I didn’t know anyone like you even existed.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through what you did sweetheart. I can’t imagine how you managed to turn out as sweet as you are now.”And it was true, he thought. The longer they were together the more she opened up to him, both in mind and body. Her emotions and attitudes now were like water from a broken dam being released to swirl around and envelop him with all the love and attention that had been inherent in her nature but never given the chance to mature.

“It’s all right now, and I’d do it all over again to be with you and Booger.”

“I’ll try to deserve that. Are you ready to get out of the water? I’m getting crinkled.”

“Umm. Ready for that and other things. Honestly, I feel like a cat in heat; I can’t get enough of you.”

When Maria was finally satiated and had dropped off to sleep, Gary worried some more. He hoped Jake could come up with an idea for long term survival. He certainly hadn’t been able to think of one.

***

“Just relax and enjoy yourself kids,”Jake told them the next morning.“But don’t answer the door. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”Maria hugged both of them before they left and said a quiet thanks to Jake.

“It’s okay kitten. Be good now. Things will work out for us. Just wait and see.”After dropping the rental car off, and while on the way to the nearest shopping mall, Jake began to have another idea. It wasn’t a real long term solution but it might insure their survival until turmoil in the cities settled down. Of course it would only work so long as the interstate highways stayed open. Even so, he would have to make the deal quickly. He didn’t know how long their deception at the airport terminal would hold up. Certainly no longer than it took for the officials in Sacramento to discover that his erstwhile passengers were overdue and begin backtracking. When they couldn’t find a record of the three owners of the computers Lea had purloined at any of the medical centers of the city, he expected someone to come looking for him. It would take a while before they traced him to his home, but it was inevitable that they would eventually find him.

“How would you like to go on the road again?”He asked.

“Are you serious? I can’t afford a new truck. And you know insurers don’t handle the little guys like me any more, so I can’t make a claim for the one I lost. I’m broke, Jake. Totally.”

“Not to worry. If I work it right I think I can swap my option on the house for a freight hauler. You’d have to teach me how to drive one of the things though. I’m used to going up and down, not longways and sideways.”

Lea laughed merrily and pulled him close.“You got it, love.”

***

The mall was crowded with shoppers, out to stock up on food and other essential supplies after listening to all the changes in store for the country—as if the transformation had not already been occurring for years. Now though, it was official and the people were scared. Those who chose to think could figure out that there were going to be hard times ahead, and that many people were going to die, including a lot of normals along with the overtly altered.

While Jake was shopping for the others, he decided to stock up on some items for himself, including ammunition, concentrated rations and clothes and footwear made of long lasting materials. Nor did he stint on the same goods for the others, buying as much for them as he did for himself. The section dealing in weapons he left alone. The crowd there was impossible; he expected it to break into fights at any moment. Besides, he had enough guns at home. It took three trips, with both of them pushing carts to the secure parking area before he was satisfied, and it took a long time to pay for all the goods. Some clerks were missing from their positions and the computers were being overloaded with credit checks and overdrafts. He paid with gold he had taken from his safe before leaving but even that took time. It was well past noon before they got away and his big car rode two inches lower than when they had arrived. After stopping at a drive-through for a meal, he headed for the spaceport.

“Where are we going now?”Lea asked, seeing that they weren’t heading back to his house.

“To the spaceport. I could have called, but this is best done in person and I don’t have to risk a busybody FedRat listening in.”

“What’s at the spaceport?”

“Some help for Gary and Maria maybe. I want you to stay with the car while I go in and talk to a man I know.”

“What kind of man?”

“One who handles immigration to the Moon.”

“Oh.”

They drove past the airport, which appeared to be busier than usual with floaters landing and departing. There was more traffic on the road, as well as refugees walking along the shoulders with rucksacks and bundles on their shoulders. Lea noticed that many of them consisted of several women and children with only one man in the group. She knew that was an increasingly common phenomenon. As parts of the countryside were deserted, many men died while trying to protect their families, either from feral enhanced animals or from other humans scavenging on their misery. It left an imbalance in the normal male/female ratio. That was going to happen even inside the cities she thought, and wondered how that would influence future society, given that there was already an imbalance because of more parents selecting boys rather than girls.

She also wondered what had happened in Philadelphia. The newscast said it was

“untenable”. Had the whole city collapsed into anarchy? She shuddered at the thought of millions of people being displaced at once. If it did happen, she doubted that it would be shown to anyone. The government could control the news now that the satellites were no longer part of corporations on earth. They were owned by Moon City and charged heavily for their services, taking the pay in organic material they were always in need of. If Jake did find a truck, she decided to ask him not to make plans for driving toward the northeast part of the country.

***

“Don’t listen to the stories you may have heard about him Don,”Jake told his friend at the Space Immigration Office.“He’s bound to be a top notch scientist, just judging by what he was doing. And I can personally attest to the fact that he’s a survivor.”

“I never bother with a person’s personal problems. All we’re interested in is whether he can be useful. And I can tell you for a fact that we need geneticists of any type for our agriculture. You said he had some ideas about growing animal tissue in veggies?”

“Uh huh. That’s what he told me.”

“Good. We need something like that. All beans and no bacon makes for a poor diet, not to mention that we don’t like what’s happening here on earth any better than you do. The sooner we make ourselves self-sufficient, the better. Now how about that altered woman he’s supposed to be traveling with. Is she still with him?”

“Yes. Plus an enhanced cat that’s learning to speak English.”

“She’s going to be a handicap. Not that we discriminate against altered humans, but you say she doesn’t have any occupational skills. The cat is a plus though. The damn mice have gotten loose in the warrens and are hard to eradicate.”

“So what do you think?”

“Ordinarily, he’d probably get a downcheck because of the woman he’s with, but since it’s you, I’ll talk to him. When can he come in for an interview?”

“Best if you come to him given the circumstances. Come out to my place to talk to him and I’ll turn my back while you rob me of a carton of real coffee beans, a grinder and two bottles of brandy.”

The beginning of a frown on his friend’s face turned quickly to a smile.“You do know how to get a man’s attention. Would tomorrow be okay?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Okay, give me your address. I’m going to give them tentative places on the last shuttle out of here, the same one I’m leaving on. I’m not guaranteeing anything mind you. If he doesn’t score high enough there’s nothing I can do.”

“I understand. And thanks, Don. You’re a good man.”

***

Lea saw that Jake was whistling as he arrived back at the car. She took that to be good news.

“It’s not a sure thing yet, but it looks good so far. That would take a load off my mind, giving the kids a chance to get off world and away from all this.”

“Too bad we can’t do the same.”

“Yeah, but they aren’t looking for truck drivers, nor floater pilots either, babe. I didn’t even ask.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Don’t get your hopes up, but the odds look pretty good right now,”Jake said after telling Gary and Maria about the interview from a representative of the Space Immigration Service.

“Jake, I don’t know how to thank you. That sounds great.”Gary felt his emotions surging with hope for a much brighter future than he had been envisioning.“Maria, Booger, what do you all think about going to Moon City?”

Maria was all smiles.“Do they really treat everyone the same there?”

“Trust me on that one,”Jake said.“I’ve got a number of friends in the Space Service. They all tell me the same thing. They want talent, not appearance.”

“But … but I don’thaveany talents!”Maria said, her smile dissolving and tears beginning to appear in the corner of her eyes.

Gary took her chin in his hand and made her look at him.“Yes you do, even if you haven’t had a formal education. Besides, maybe I’ll have enough for all of us.”He kissed her then turned to the cat.“How about you, Booger? Want to chase mice on the moon?”

“No bad men?”

“Not a one. Just plenty of mice.”

Booger Bear began salivating.“Okay.”

“When will your friend be here?”Gary asked.

“Tomorrow morning. I hope the interview is just a formality. He said he’s already marked you down for a spot on the last shuttle leaving from the Dallas Spaceport before it closes.”

“That’s all great, but what about you and Lea? What are you going to do? Can you come with us?”

“Nope. We don’t have the skills they want, and besides we’re both past the age limit. But don’t worry; we’ve got things all worked out. We’re going to go into the trucking business together.”He didn’t mention that it wasn’t a certainty yet for fear of upsetting the younger couple.

“Wonderful,”Maria said. She was glad for them, glad for herself and Gary and glad for Booger Bear. She smoothed the thick black hair on the animal’s back and thought of how fortunate she had been to meet up with them. And with Jake and Lea. It made all of her past life seem like a bad dream, one that was rapidly fading from her memory as remnants of dreams will do upon waking.

“Okay, now that we’ve got our futures settled, I hope you kids tried to fix something to eat rather than spend the day in bed.”He winked at them.

Gary and Maria looked at each other. His blush could be seen; hers was concealed by the down on her face.“Uh…”

Lea laughed.“Never mind. We were young once. Come on Kitten, let’s see what we can do about dinner while our cave men talk over the world situation.”

“Actually, I need some help to unload my car,”Jake said. Gary went out with him. His eyes widened with astonishment when he saw how the car was crammed with goods.“What on earth are you doing, Jake? Stocking up for the end of the world?”Jake began handing out bundles.“Nope. Lea and I are planning on getting a big freight hauler. Some of this stuff is for us, some is trade supplies. What with the way things are going, I thought it would be a good idea.”

“What kind of rig are you planning on buying?”Gary asked as they came back for a second load.

“That’s up to Lea. She knows the business better than I do, but we did talk about it. I imagine we’ll get something big enough for a couple of passengers, some freight, and still leave room for living quarters in case we have to camp out.”

“Isn’t trucking going to get really dangerous with so many refugees on the road? Not to mention all the altered humans that are going to be kicked out of the cities.”

“Yeah, but it’s a living. And the newer rigs come equipped with armor and solid, flame proof tires, as well as a front mounted gun big enough to clear roadblocks. Don’t worry old buddy. Once I let the option on the house go, I can afford the best.”

“Great. It sounds almost idyllic in a way.”

Jake gave him one of his lopsided grins.“Yeah, like in a book. But books are never like real life. It will work for a while, but we’ll be looking for a safe place to settle down while we’re traveling. I don’t give the highways more than another five years, ten at the most, then all travel in the country will be by floater or river boats. Here, you grab this big box; you’re younger than me.”

***

The next morning Gary waited anxiously for Jake’s friend to show up. He was scared that something would happen to prevent them from leaving earth now that there was finally a chance for them to lead a normal life—or as normal as a life could be in the underground warrens of Moon City. At least he would have a job again rather than being a wanted felon on the run. And Maria was very intelligent. It would be easy to train her as a laboratory assistant despite her lack of formal education. He was still going over possibilities when the immigration agent arrived.

Don Fairbanks introduced himself then got immediately down to business, pausing only to sip appreciatively now and then from the cup of freshly brewed coffee Jake set in front of him. The first thing he did was to verify Gary’s identity and academic credentials. Many applicants lied about their accomplishments when applying for a position.

The interview consisted mainly of asking Gary questions and recording the answers into his computer. That took over an hour. After that he spent a few minutes with Maria and the same with Booger Bear. He was taken with the cat. Not many enhanced pets had gone into space so far. He seemed surprised at his intelligence and devotion to Gary and Maria.

The last part of the interview wasn’t an interview at all but a DNA test of Gary to be sure he was the same person that national computers had in their registry, and then a lie detector test followed to make sure he wasn’t exaggerating or deceiving his questioner. Part of that had already been conducted with questions asked in different ways or using different words, then sorted for truthfulness by the computer program. Fairbanks spent little time on the physical or psych tests after seeing those results. After all the data was recorded he asked his computer for its score.

Gary had no idea what the numbers projected into the air meant, but Fairbanks appeared to be happy about them.“Your score, tied into having a dependant with none of the skills we’re looking for, puts you right below the acceptable limit,”he announced. Seeing the disappointment in Gary’s expression he added hastily,“But that doesn’t take into account my recommendation. When I add that in, you’re more than acceptable.”He held out his hand.“Congratulations. You’ll be leaving six days from now. Here, take this and don’t lose it.”

Gary shook his hand and thanked him. Maria hugged and kissed him, much to his surprise. Booger Bear wasn’t certain what all the excitement was about but he contributed his bit by rubbing against the spaceman’s ankles and buzzing loudly.

Fairbanks had handed Gary a card to get into the loading area of the shuttles that was keyed to his thumbprint. When he touched his thumb to it, it blinked with the time and date when they were to appear.

“That’s the latest time they’ll let you into the waiting area, but I’d suggest that you arrive a day early and stay overnight there. Oh yes—plug your card into any home computer and it will give you your luggage limits and a list of what you should bring with you.”

“Thanks again,”Gary said.

“No problem. Good to have you aboard. I’ll be glad to get back to the rock myself. This damn gravity is a killer.”

***

Jake and Lea left early the next morning, Jake to try to sell or trade the option on his house, Lea to look at freight hauling rigs. On the way into the more congested part of the city, they began seeing more refugees, but this time many of them were heading out rather than in, and many of them were in private vehicles.

Jake pointed.“A lot of those are altered folks, leaving now before they get thrown out. Most of them probably think they have someplace safe to go.”

She caught the tone of reservation in his voice.“But you don’t think so?”

“I doubt it. Maybe they have relatives in the country; maybe they think smaller towns will accept them. I don’t know what’s on their minds love. I’m just glad I’ve got you with me. And while ordinarily I would love to have your face and hands the same color as the rest of you, it’s a good thing that they aren’t right now.”

“It’s reversible, you know.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Uh huh. But if I decided to re-color my face and hands, I suspect I would need to get it done soon while there’s still supplies and mammalian geneticists around.”

“Yeah. Hey, maybe I can get the stuff and we’ll get Gary to tell us how to use it. Then if we find a place where people care more for what’s inside than outside a person’s body, you can change back.”

“Would you really like that?”

“Why not? Your skin is lovely. No reason the rest of you shouldn’t match.”Seeing her hesitation, he patted her leg.“Hey, it’s like when women used to use lipstick or facial makeup. Just a way to make a pretty woman prettier.”Seeing that he really did seem sincere, Lea thought she might consider it. She remembered how she had once looked and it was attractive—or at least more attractive than she was now, with no color on her hands or face. It was only that men didn’t take it that way. That and the fact that she couldn’t get good jobs with her face a glowing golden color, not after the bigotry against altered humans began to build. But Jake—Jake didn’t give a damn what other people thought. He knew what was right and wrong and wouldn’t compromise. She decided that if that’s what he wanted, and if they could indeed find safety somewhere, she would reverse the changes she had begun. Just for him.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Jake was surprised and Lea was even more surprised when they got to the brokerage houses and found that the value of homes in gated communities had almost doubled since the edicts from President Bradshaw came out, and that the value of rigs, new and used both, was sinking. Two hours later they came away with a deal that got them an even better rig than Lea had been anticipating and had money left over. They took it in gold. Jake signed over the option and Lea drove off in the brand new freight and passenger hauler with Jake following in the car. He had decided to see if his neighbor wanted to buy the car; if not he could sell it to any number of altered humans seeking transportation to leave the city.

***

Pluto perked up his ears, then began a soft growling.

Gary sat up from where he was relaxing with a drink from Jake’s well stocked bar. Booger Bear jumped down from his lap and twitched his ears, as alert as his canine friend. There was a strange rumbling noise outside, muffled by the thickness of the walls. Gary reached for his gun and called for Maria to get out of sight. She ran for the bedroom but was back a second later with her gun, ready to fight if need be. He let loose with an epithet. She ignored it and came to stand by his side.

“What is it?”

Maria cocked her head, listening intently.“It sounds like a big truck of some kind.”The sound died away and a moment later the front door opened. Jake came inside and saw their drawn weapons. He held up his hands in mock surrender.“Nothing like having my place well defended. Except it’s not mine any more. Come see what we got in exchange.”

“Wow!”Gary exclaimed when he saw the big rig pulled up in the front of the house. It hadn’t been able to fit into the garage by a big margin. He took in the size and newness of it with open-mouthed admiration.“What are you planning on hauling? Fusion reactors?”

“No, but damn near anything else. Including you for a little while. We’ve only got three days to vacate the house. Sorry you couldn’t stay here until you were ready to go, but I couldn’t pass the deal up.”

Lea came in and stood at his side with a smile on her face almost as wide as the truck.

“Isn’t it beautiful? It’s even got living quarters in it for four, besides room for freight and all our personal belongings. We’re going to just live in it while we negotiate for our first load.”

“That’s great, Lea. I’m happy for both of you. And we’re going to miss you, damn it.”

Her face fell.“Yeah, there’s that, but at least we’ll know you’re safe while we’re on the road.”

***

The next three days passed in a blur of helping Jake pack what belongings in the house he wanted to keep and arranging them in the truck. Gary was amazed all over again the first time he carried a load into the cargo and living section. It looked even bigger from the inside than he had anticipated. He set the big box down where Jake directed, then had to let Lea show him the merits of her new toy.

“See, there’s the room on either side here at the back with double beds, and a john up toward the cab. And there’s ports inside the rooms that open if need be, for fresh air if the circulation unit fails for some reason, or even to shoot from in case of bad guys coming up from the rear. And there’s an observer port on the little ledge up there above the rooms with a carbon glass port and another gun rack, just like the two up in the cab.”

“I think the factory that made it must have been anticipating conditions,”Gary observed.

“If that’s so, they did a damn good job. This baby can go just about anywhere too. It’s got impeller air jacks to get over real rough spots and hell, it’s even air tight and has extendable stabilizers in case we want to float down a river sometime. Isn’t it gorgeous?”Gary had to agree that it was. And very utilitarian. He went back for another load.

***

The last night before leaving, Jake laid out a spread of his best food and drink. He figured it would probably be the last time they would all be together with room to spread out and enjoy themselves. It was an almost bacchanalian farewell for them all.

Gary and Maria enjoyed themselves even more after they left Jake and Lea, knowing this was also most likely the last time they would have so much luxury and privacy in a bedroom. The love making rose to heights of pleasure that neither had dreamed was even possible, much less likely. Gary wanted it to never end and from the way Maria responded he was sure that she felt the same way. It made him wonder why the world had to be so dismayingly brutal and savage for so many innocent people not as lucky as they.

***

While they were sleeping, other men were actively planning their demise. What Jake had feared had happened. The government executives were reported missing in Sacramento after they failed to arrive as scheduled. From there a tracer went back over the government net and picked up Jake’s explanation. When no treatment facility could be found that had taken the three officials who supposedly had survived, other queries followed. Inevitably, the veracity of Jake’s story began to be questioned.

The federal officer in charge of security at the airport was put on the spot. He was the one who finally caught the discrepancy in the female to male ratio of survivors.“Aha!”He said to his subordinate.“No Goddamned wonder they were all bandaged up. I’ll bet that whoever those people were, they were using the bandages to fool us. That floater pilot probably robbed those government folks and dumped them somewhere in the wilds.”

“What should we do now?”

“Do? Go bring him in, you dolt! We’ll make him tell us the real story.”

“Uh, Captain, we still haven’t gotten paid. Why should I risk my life for nothing?”

“Because I said so. Now take a couple of men and go arrest him. I want him alive, hear?”

“Yes, sir. When are we going to get paid? I’ve got a family.”

“I don’t know. Just stay on duty so you’ll be here when wedoget paid. Don’t get left out like the deserters will be.”

Reluctantly, the Sergeant obeyed his superior, but he could find only two other men to go with him. He figured that ought to be enough. Besides, if the truck driver offered more gold, he might just decide not to bring him in at all. As it turned out, one of his men went missing while he was powering up the van they would use. He thought about going back to report it, then decided not to. If the two of them weren’t sufficient to carry out an arrest, then three probably wouldn’t be either, and in that case a payoff would suit him just as well.

***

Jake was attaching laserifles to the gun rack in the rear top platform when the federal van arrived, easy to recognize by its solid gray color and the intimidating silence of its powerful electric engine. He hadn’t heard it coming.“Uh oh,”he muttered to himself. Gary had just carried a big crate of supplies into the cargo section. His muscles were aching from the heavy lifting that he wasn’t accustomed to, and he was tired from the previous night’s festivities. He climbed down the steps of the ladder Jake had dropped from its recess and backed right into the barrel of the sergeant’s drawn weapon. His partner stood to one side, watching the house.

“Just hold it right there, mister. You aren’t going anywhere.”Oh Goddamn, Gary thought.And we were so close! There was nothing he could do. He was captured and he knew the reputation of the FedRats. They wouldn’t hesitate to shoot. He thought for a moment of resisting anyway, even if it got himself killed, but decided to wait. Here he had no chance at all. Later, maybe he could contrive something. And maybe Lea or Maria would return and create a diversion before he was handcuffed and pushed into the van. Lea had walked over to Jake’s neighbor to pay him for Pluto’s care and Maria was back in the house gathering her personal items to carry in a handbag.

Lea came around the truck from the direction that neither of the federal officers were looking toward and almost bumped into the man holding the gun to Gary’s back. They saw each other at the same time.

“Security! Freeze!”The sergeant yelled, pushing Gary to the ground with a violent shove and swiveling his weapon toward Lea. Slowly she raised her hands, fuming at being caught so easily but unable to do a thing about it.

The other officer had taken his eyes off the entrance to the house for a moment when Lea appeared but seeing that his superior had the situation under control he turned back. He was just in time to fire a warning laser beam that stopped Maria in her tracks as she was coming outside, as unconcerned about danger as a schoolgirl primping for a date. She had no choice, either. She was wearing her gun but it was already too late.

Jake was still on the ledge above the rooms at the back of the truck. He cursed silently to himself as he saw the situation developing. Anything he did now was apt to wind up with one of them getting killed. Nevertheless, knew he had to do something. He fumbled for the latch of the port window and silently pulled it back. Then very slowly, so that no sudden movement would attract attention, he begin easing it open.

The sergeant’s companion was one of those who believed that altered humans were an abomination. He had fired the warning shot at Maria by reflex but now he saw that, in his mind, she wasn’t even human and therefore fair game. He barely remembered now how his father had deserted the family for an altered woman, but that event had shaped his life. He had seen the graphic images of altered humans being harried and killed on the news too. The admonition to bring the culprit back alive didn’t apply to her. His mind told him that she must be resisting arrest and he prepared to kill her outright. Only the fact of her beauty made him hesitate at all. Jake still didn’t see a way to take out both of the FedRats but he knew he had to try; he could see the hand of the officer holding the gun on Maria trembling. He might shoot at any moment and at this range he wouldn’t miss. Jake eased his weapon toward the open port, preparing to try a shot, even if it meant that he might hit one of his friends. Then, from the corner of his eye he saw another figure by the outcropping of hedge separating his yard from the neighbor’s. He whistled shrilly. Jake had trained Pluto well. Like a silver and brown streak, he was across the space separating him from the man pointing a weapon at Maria and lunging for the arm holding the gun. A laser beam scorched the earth behind him as the officer didn’t correct for his speed. He never got another shot off. Pluto had his jaws around his arm, crushing it in his teeth.

Now Jake could take a shot and he did. He killed the one who had been holding Maria at bay with a needle fine laser beam to the head, knowing that Pluto was keeping the other one busy. In the meantime the sergeant quit struggling with Pluto and simply tried to protect his throat.

“Pluto, down! Don’t move, man, or he’ll kill you.”Jake said from the port of the truck.

Slowly, the sergeant raised his hands, one of them mangled by Pluto’s jaws. He trembled, hoping he wouldn’t be killed. In short order he was inside the house, sitting with his wounded arm cradled in his lap. His companion’s body had been dragged from sight. Jake did the questioning.

“Who else knows where you went?”

“The Captain knows. He’ll send someone out here if we don’t report back by a certain time.”

Jake eyed the man closely and suddenly recognized him.“Aren’t you the one I helped out financially the other day? Fine way to repay me, don’t you think?”His prisoner remained silent, unable to meet Jake’s scrutiny. He was asking himself why he hadn’t just asked for some more gold and then gone to work on the barricades? Anything would have been better than getting himself killed for a government that couldn’t even pay him.

“How come you’re still working for the government? Did they finally pay you?”

“No, not yet.”

“Maybe you don’t need money, is that it?”

“No. I’ve got a family. I always need money.”

“Let me think a minute. Lea honey, how‘bout making us one last drink, then we gotta get out of here. Sooner or later someone will be over to see what the yelling was about. And the folks will be here at noon to take possession of the house.”

“What are you going to do to me?”The federal worker asked.

“I don’t know. We could just kill you and dump both your bodies in the river, but then your captain would still come after us.”He rubbed his chin as if thinking. It was deliberate. Jake wanted the man to come up with the idea himself. Lea brought him a glass and he practically gulped down the shot of liquor.

“I could tell the captain my partner deserted, and that you weren’t here. I could say you left your dog behind and it bit me,”the prisoner offered, bargaining for his life, he thought, even though Jake had no intention of killing him. Not yet, anyway.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Fifteen minutes of hard negotiating got them on their way, with the sergeant taking his payoff and promising to report that his partner had deserted and that no one had been present at the address they had gone to. In return, he got his arm bandaged and his uniform cleaned, its pockets now pleasantly heavy with gold.

“And you never saw that truck out there either, did you?”

“What truck?”

“Okay, I like your attitude. A hint, though.”

“Yes?”

“See my dog here?”

“Sure.”

“You know what he did to your arm?”

The sergeant shivered and nodded.

“If I hear you changed your story, I can have you found. I’ve got contacts all through the city. I’ve got your name and know where you live. What my dog did to that arm can just as easily be done to your throat. Savvy?”

“Yes, sir. You can trust me.”

Jake handed him his uniform jacket.“Okay, you can go. Don’t report back until the last minute before you have to.”He handed him his weapon back after first disabling it.

“Let’s get on the road, people.”

***

“Do you think that FedRat will keep his mouth shut?”Gary asked as they drove away. He and Maria were already in one of the little rooms in the cargo module. Jake glanced far enough to the side to see Gary’s face on the two way truck intercom he had activated.“So long’s they don’t question his story, he’s probably okay. And if he doesn’t get paid soon, I doubt he’ll stick around for long anyway. We’re probably safe.”

“So where are we going now?”

“To the freight loading terminal to see what we can round up in a hurry. I’m sorry, but you all are going to have to sort of live in the rooms in back and stay out of sight until it’s time to take you to the spaceport.”

“We can do that,”Gary said. He could think of much worse fates than being locked up in a room with Maria for two days.

“Good. When you hear the loading door open, stay quiet. And time your visits to the head for right after you hear it close. I’ll keep in touch, but I’m going to kill the visual now so your smiling faces don’t distract Lea from driving. Not that I think you could. I’m glad I have Pluto up here to keep me company. She’s so enamored with this rig she probably won’t pay any more attention to me until it gets a few dents in it.”The little screen vanished, the holoprojections swirling away into its depths. It kept an animation from internal files playing to show that the voice was still active and the screen was ready. Booger Bear stared at the cartoons with rapt interest. He had loved cartoons from kittenhood, especially some of the old Tom and Jerry. He harbored an eternal expectation that Tom would get the best of Jerry if he just watched their antics often enough.

While the truck was moving, Gary and Maria lay on the six inch high memory mattress while they were traveling in order to let it absorb the bumps. Even in such a big rig they felt them occasionally because of the abominable state of repair of the roads and streets. When it stopped, they moved to the little love seat that was barely big enough for the two of them and turned the communication module to standby so that no noise could be heard unless Jake thought it safe to talk to them. Booger Bear complained but had to suffer with a silent rendition of his cartoons.

***

Nothing much happened so far as Gary and Maria were concerned all the first day and night. The truck started and stopped on occasion but they never knew what it signified. The rear hatch wasn’t opened at all the first twenty four hours.

It gave them a good opportunity to engage in bouts of slow, sensuous couplings and kissing and touching as they explored and expanded their relationship. And it brought a new aspect into it as well. Eventually Booger Bear grew bored with cartoons and began watching them. He knew what sex was of course, from watching holovision in Gary’s room while he was gone, but Amelia had never allowed him to be present when they were engaged in it. Now he could watch and use all his senses to learn more about what made the act so important to his humans.

During the late evening, while Gary and Maria were laying side by side, satiated for the moment, Booger Bear came up onto the little mattress with them. He snuggled up against Maria. She curled a lazy arm around him.

A moment later Gary heard a gasp of indrawn breath. He glanced over and saw Booger Bear busily licking Maria’s nipple in much the same fashion as he had done just recently himself. And obviously it was a pleasurable sensation. Her nipple had already become fully erect and her breathing had gotten faster.

“Ah, enter my competition,”Gary said.

Maria clutched at his thigh as their pet continued his ministrations, fascinated with how the tissue of her nipple went from pebbled softness to slick erectness in just a few minutes.“Don’t laugh. You’d be surprised at how good that feels. His tongue is like a soft little file, rough enough to stimulate but not enough to hurt. Mmmm.”Her hand moved up from his thigh. Now it was Gary’s turn to gasp as she used the back side of her hand that was covered with fuzzy down to tickle and arouse him further into a state that he had already begun to enter just from watching. Presently she turned her hand around and he felt the touch of her fingers and hand being filled with his burgeoning erection. And a few minutes after that Booger Bear had to be content with watching. Gary just wished that some of the idiots who were so violently against altered humans, particularly in the matter of having sex with them, could enjoy it as he was doing. Perhaps they wouldn’t be so prejudiced then.

***

The hatch opened for the first time the next morning. Jake had already warned them that they would be loading at two separate docks during the day. Gary cautioned Booger Bear to stay silent during the intervals and Jake did the same with Pluto before moving him into the cargo hatch. He had been riding in the small back seat behind the driver’s console but now that they would be stopping where dockhands would be roving around in unpredictable patterns, he didn’t want to take a chance on him being seen, nor Maria and the cat either.

Both Gary and Maria were curious about the cargo Jake and Maria were going to be handling, even though neither of them were likely to see the end destination of the goods. If all went well, they would be in space, perhaps all the way to Moon City and their new home by that time. When the hatch bumped shut for the last time that day, Gary breathed a sigh of relief.“Okay gang, time to hit the head. Who’s first?”

The animals wanted to go and they were allowed to precede the humans. They could take care of their needs quickly, while the humans required somewhat more time for their ablutions. While Pluto and Booger Bear were busy, Gary and Maria gazed around at the nearly filled cargo hatch. It was packed with food bar concentrates, all labeled for human consumption, and a consignment of laserifles. He thought the cargo must be headed for a city that had a surplus of something the City Fathers of Dallas were short on and vice versa, in the usual manner of trade; except that now he imagined it would be a straight barter situation, with Jake and Lea charging in gold for the transportation. Gold was rapidly becoming the standard medium of exchange as money markets and currency values continued to plunge in the same manner they had done so many times before in the world. Capitalism was a viciously efficient system but it always foundered eventually, simply because of governments borrowing beyond their means of repayment. Bread and Circuses, Gary thought. The age old means of keeping the peasants at bay. But now it was work and survival. Jobs in the cities would mean safety and food and shelter, enough to survive on anyway. How it would play out in the end, he didn’t know and was only mildly concerned, except as it influenced the viability of the habitations off earth where he and Maria were going, and the safety of his friends who were staying behind.

***

Once they were buttoned up for the night, Jake and Lea came back to visit. Jake appeared to be worried. His usual good humored grin was missing.

“What’s wrong?”

Jake sat down on the mattress and crossed his legs.“Maybe nothing, maybe everything. The city isn’t broadcasting the fact, but there’s been some violence here and there, and rioting in the old Oak Cliff sections of the city. There were lots of altered humans there and some of them are well armed and refusing to leave. Others are just generally raising hell. I’ll be glad for us to hit the road.”

Gary asked about the food and weapons they had loaded, more as a conversational gambit than anything else. The closer they got to separating from the older couple, the worse he felt, even though he knew it was for the best. They were so different than the crowd that he had mingled with while married to Amelia—and so much better that he realized again how constricted his world had been.

“We bought this load purely on spec rather than as a consignment. I figured prices of weapons and food can only go up. It’s a bit of a chance, but we’re aiming to find a place where Lea and Pluto won’t be at risk and where we can settle down. Hell, we might even start a family.”

Hearing Gary’s deafening silence, Jake continued with a chuckle.“We’re not that old pal, regardless of what you sprouts think. And we both have the long life genes. We’ll be around a good long while yet. Maybe one day you can come back to earth to see us. Or we can go up there.”

“That would be wonderful,”Maria said.

“That it would. Just living long enough to see the time when it’s possible would be nice. For now, though, let’s hit the sack. I want us to get an early start tomorrow. We’re going to drop you by the spaceport, then swing back up to catch the interstate and head east. There’s two medium sized cities along the route over in Louisiana that aren’t included in the government list of potential enclaves, but they’re trying to get barricades erected anyway. Chances are they can use what we got. And just maybe they won’t be so goddamn intent on the government’s luddite philosophy now that they’ve been left high and dry.”

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Jake woke everyone shortly after daylight and told them to grab a food bar for breakfast. He intended to start immediately. He had kept the voice potion of a twenty four hour station on air all night with it programmed to wake him if a certain number of key words came up. Riots and violence were among the ones he had listed. When he came out of the sleep fog the program woke him from, he asked for a replay of the announcement that had gotten its attention.

It was not so much of an announcement as an admission by city officials that the eviction of altered humans was progressing on a“voluntary”basis but that some“unrest”was being caused by“instigators and criminals”. The spin was so blatant that Jake had to read between the lines to get the gist of it. What it meant to him and his companions was that the sooner they left Dallas behind, the better off they would be.

The traffic wasn’t much worse than the previous day, but before long he noticed that more of it was outbound than before, and when he turned off on the exit that led to the spaceport, it became apparent that many vehicles were heading in the same direction, joined by others who must have come up from further south, from just inside where the barricades were going up. Before long he began to see several columns of smoke rising from the direction of the spaceport. An ominous sense of depression began settling over him because he thought he knew what was happening. When it was announced that the spaceport was going to close with this last flight, desperate people, altered and normal alike had begun converging on the immigration office. As more and more of them were denied a chance to leave, without even an interview, the situation began to turn ugly. Now the day before the last flight, the scavengers and looters had begun getting ready to steal whatever was left behind. As they edged closer to the fences and gates in hopes of getting in front of their fellows, the guards saw what was happening and either deserted their posts or joined the mob. Before long it was flowing toward the administrative and support offices like a dirty tide. Jake couldn’t blame them too much but it was playing hell with his plans to drop Maria and Gary off for their flight.

Lea drove carefully, trying to avoid swarms of pedestrians hurrying along the shoulders of the access road to join the others. Soon it became impossible. She saw a side street ahead that was marginally clearer than the one they were on and put on her turn signal.“Jake, we’ve got to find an alternate route. We’ll never make it going this way.”

“I know,”he answered grimly, fondling the lasergun in his lap, already drawn and ready to use.

“Don’t risk yourselves,”Gary said from the seats behind the driver’s console. He could see what was happening as clearly as Jake and Lea and liked it even less. Lea got onto the side road by narrowly avoiding a cluster of armed men, along with a few women, who were crossing the intersection against the warning holographs. She drove on down the road, then saw that it was going nowhere that would help them.“Sorry folks, bad move. I’m going to turn around soon as I find a place where I can.”

A few moments later she found a half empty parking lot and got the big rig reoriented. Just as she was ready to drive back the way they had come, a brilliant flash of light lit the horizon. She stopped and waited. Jake, an infantry veteran of a war from twenty years back, began counting, intending to use the flash/bang method of calculating how far off the explosion had occurred. He stopped bothering a few seconds later as the last shuttle to leave the Dallas Spaceport lifted off, trailing a brilliant plume of exhaust. All four watched in silence as the shuttle rose higher and higher, only a tiny silver glint atop the fire from the rockets. The sound came after more seconds had passed, a deep continuous thunder that went on and on and gradually faded as the spaceship vanished into the clouds. Gary held Maria very tightly as he watched their dream rise from earth, their last chance for a normal life. He felt as if it were taking a vital portion of himself with it. He felt the wetness of tears on his face, not for himself but for Maria, who had never expected a real chance in life until he came along. How must she be feeling to see her first real vision of stability and acceptance into society go up in a contrail of fire and smoke?

“I guess they had to leave now to avoid the mobs. I’m sorry kids. Goddamn, I’m sorry,”Jake said.

“It’s not your fault, Jake. In fact, any chance we had to begin with was all your doing.”

Lea was looking in the other direction from her vantage point in the driver’s seat. She could see that the overpass they had descended from was even thicker with traffic than before, both vehicles and people on foot, families and outlaw gangs intermixed without rhyme or reason. They looked small from the distance but were no less of a threat. A sudden rattle of gunfire and an explosion unlike the noise from the spacecraft’s liftoff got everyone’s attention.

“I hate to pour oil on the fire folks, but we need to get out of here,”Lea said.“This area is going to be pure bedlam real quick.”She touched the controls and the big rig began moving forward again.

“Where are we going?”Maria asked, the first thing she had said since seeing their ride into space take off a day early—without them aboard. Her voice was subdued, like that of a man struggling to feed his family who had suddenly been fired from his job.

“Where? Why kitten, we’re going to keep on just like Lea and I planned. To the interstate and then east, at least to the Mississippi. I don’t think we’ll try going beyond there. The northeast corridor is on its way out, I think. And the Southeast is too wooded and brush filled. A perfect environment for the feral enhanced animals.”

“I guess you can let us out soon as you get clear of the city,”Gary said resignedly.

“I’ve got enough money left for a clunker at least. Maria and I will try to find a place to live outside the cities.”

“Sure you will, but damned if you’re going to do it by yourselves. You ain’t going anywhere but with us, old buddy.”

“Jake—”

“Shut up. Do you think we’d put you out with the mess that’s brewing now?

Hell’s bells, if for no other reason, you need to stay and help protect us from hijackers. The two of us can’t keep watch all the time, and if it comes to a fracas, four armed persons have a hell of a lot better chance than two.”

Maria was still holding tightly to Gary, her thoughts in tatters such as she had not experienced since being rescued by the enhanced leopard in Mexico. Why was Gary asking to be put out? She thought rapidly back over events and suddenly realized that it was simply a part of his basic decency, not wanting to take advantage of his friends even at risk of their lives.

She was saved from further delving into the past by Lea.“We’re not going to separate, hear? If I had ever had kids, I would have wanted them to turn out just like you two. Now you all just hush and let me drive.”She twisted the steering knob as savagely as if it weren’t powered.

“Thank you,”Gary said quietly. Again, he realized that there were still decent and caring people in the world, no matter that civilization was disintegrating into fragmented parts and that he had no idea how it would end. He and Maria would just have to try to deserve their help and return it whenever and however they could.

“We’ll make it,”Jake said.“Somewhere there’s got to be a place where us and our furry people will be accepted for what we are. All we have to do is look for it.”As the big rig headed back the way they had come, Lea managed to steer it to the other side of the divided road without being stopped and get it headed away from the space port. That direction had less traffic and fewer straggly, ill dressed people. She thought that most of the ones they saw now were probably former employees trying to escape the violence taking place behind them. Just like we are, Gary thought. On the horizon a wan moon was rising, pale in the morning light and almost full. He stared at it a few minutes, thinking of what might have been, then put it out of his mind. The present was more important. And the best dream of his young life was sitting right beside him.

“We’ll make it, sweetheart,”he told her.“We’re young and we have the best friends in the world to help.”

“Good friends,”Booger Bear agreed, looking up into Maria’s face. Slowly, a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She nodded.“Yes, Booger. Good friends.”She inched closer to the comfort of Gary’s body.“Now that I think about it, going to the moon wouldn’t have been worth losing them.”Gary bent to kiss the top of her head.“Of course not,”he said.“What were we thinking of?”

In front of them, Jake and Lea nodded their heads in concert.

Nothing could replace true friends.

THE END