Chapter 2
Monica rode in the center of the back bench seat holding Cassie’s shotgun, watching me silently through the rearview mirror with a face more of a curiosity than outright suspicion.
Cassie, sitting in the front passenger seat, was less subdued in her observation, glancing askance repeatedly while I drove through the brisk night air, heading out of the urban area and toward the secluded outskirts.
Monica finally spoke, interest laced within her silky voice. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I said curtly, focusing in the road as highlights passed us by on the parkway.
“Why would you drive a whip like this all the way to a ghetto-ass neighborhood like mine when you could be sipping the good-good at a rich bitch bar?”
“Eh. Affluence often comes at the cost of authenticity, and I like going places where no one knows me.”
“They know you now… everybody’s gonna be talking about the badass in the brown trench-coat after tonight.”
“I guess,” I chuckled. “Maybe I’ll wear a new coat.”
“Jax?” Cassie chimed in.
“Yes, Cassie?”
“If you’re not a Mutable, then how did you do that back there?”
Monica scoffed. “Pssh! Girl, do not start trippin’ after he just gave us a place to stay, with your nosy ass.”
Cassie looked over her shoulder with a frown. “I’m not tripping, I just wanna know what’s going on!”
“Mmm hmph. I’m pretty sure that heat he’s packing says it all. Something along the lines of ‘don’t fuck with me’, or did you miss that part?”
Cassie ignored her and looked back at me. “Jax, we’re friends right?”
“We are? I thought I was just an interesting customer,” I teased.
“Of course we’re friends, you dick!” Cassie replied while punching me in the leg.
Monica screamed. “You’re gonna get us killed you psycho bitch! Let the man drive!”
“He just ate a bullet, I’m pretty sure a punch from me isn’t going to hurt him,” Cassie retorted.
“Let. The man. Drive!” Monica replied through clenched teeth. “I ain’t trying to crash after living through a shootout.”
“Fine,” Cassie sighed, slumping in her seat before taking off her seatbelt to turn her torso toward me, leaning in. “Look, I’m not big on conspiracies, but I’ve worked enough bars to know that Mutables get black-bagged after they’re discovered.”
“Or killed,” I corrected.
“Right, so… what happened? How’d you get away with it?”
“Now she wants him to tell on himself,” Monica murmured from the back.
Cassie didn’t back down. “If you want me to shut up, just tell me to shut up and I will. But since we’d already get in trouble for not reporting you, I should get to ask that at least.”
A silence followed in which I took a deep breath while watching the road, weighing my options.
I’d already exposed myself, and as she had a point about them being the ones in danger, I figured that telling them my story couldn’t hurt any more than it already had.
“So we’re clear, if you tell anyone about this…” I turning my head slightly to stare intensely at her. “You’re fucked.”
“I know,” Cassie replied with a big blue-eyed puppy dog gaze.
“I’m not snitchin’,” Monica uttered with the shotgun in her lap.
“Right…” I replied before focusing back on the road. “Technically, I’m not a Mutable—at least, that’s not what they called me.”
“They?” Cassie replied. “You mean they let you go?”
“They didn’t let me go. I left,” I replied with a slight glare.
“You escaped?”
“No, I left. And if they ever mess with me again, I’ll kill them all.”
“Okay, now I need to know,” Monica remarked, leaning forward with her face between our seats.
I chuckled at her candor. “The news only tells half the story. Yes, there was a meteor with a kind of germ on it—a pathogen.”
“You mean the Xenophage?” asked Cassie.
“Yup,” I confirmed. “They had to tell everyone that part because people were making off with rock fragments and getting infected. Most people turned them in, some didn’t.
“When those guys changed and started making trouble, others saw opportunity. They didn’t just pick up Mutables, they picked up normal people—like me.”
“Fuck…” Cassie breathed. “They ran tests on you?”
“Not exactly,” I made eye contact with Cassie. “They tried to kill me.”
Cassie’s eyes opened a bit wider. “How’d you survive?”
“By being in the wrong place at the right time,” I stated darkly. “After it happened, I started getting stronger each time something hurt me—immune. Once they realized what was happening, they backed off.
“I’m sure they could just drop a nuke on my head, but they probably don’t want to find out what I’d become if they did. So they got the hell out of my way, and paid me to stay out of trouble.”
“Hold up,” Monica interjected. “You’re tellin’ me that the government is paying you not to buff up?”
“It’s more of a corporate bribe, but more or less,” I said. “I still pick up work on the side; a man’s gotta stay loose. Tonight was my last job, in fact—or at least it would have been.”
“What was the job?” Cassie questioned.
I grinned. “Clean up the streets. If a Mutable pops up, I take ‘em out.”
“So…” Cassie began. “You kill people?”
I met her gaze with stoic seriousness. “Yes.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” a look of surprise found its way onto my face. “You’re not bothered about this? I figured you’d freak out.”
“I mean…” Cassie began. “You’re still the same person. More like a vet than a serial killer.”
“With superpowers! I mean, damn, a dude got shot ten feet from my window last week!” Monica chimed in before asking shrewdly, “What do you do with the Ichor?”
I looked at her through the rearview mirror briefly, keeping both hands on the wheel. “Why do you wanna know?”
“Do you sell it? I’d sell it,” Monica mused. “A pint of it came through the streets once. The kind of bag that sets you up for life—or gets you killed.”
“I don’t sell it, I get rid of it,” I replied. “I could sell it, but the Ichor, it’s… not what people think—but that’s all I can say.”
Both women fell silent after my description, at least until I turned off the parkway and into my own neck of the woods, a suburb far removed from any major population centers, where my ten acre territory and six thousand square foot property awaited.
“Holy shit…” Monica breathed before jerking her head quickly to stare at my cheek. “Do you have a maid?”
“No, I don’t have a maid,” I replied, leaning slightly away with a bemused expression. “Why?”
“I could make you even more money. Like, stupid, ignorant, fuck you money.”
“Not where I thought that was going…”
“Wow, Momo,” Cassie replied. “Jax shares his life story and all you see are dollar signs.”
Monica glared at Cassie. “Hey, I’m just trying to contribute, and we all want out of our shit-holes!”
“I wouldn’t exactly call this a shit-hole,” I countered as I pulled onto the long gravel driveway.
“No, this is nice,” Monica pointed forward with the hand resting on Cassie’s seat. “But they don’t call me Mo Money Monica for nothing.”
“Says the chick who still lives in the south side,” Cassie contradicted. “If you can’t get rich on your own, you’re not gonna make him richer.”
“Flipping a bag ain’t as easy as you think when everyone with a trap house is trying to get at this ass!” Monica argued before meeting my eye in the rearview mirror. “I know about a building. A place where people who do sell Ichor keep their money.”
I hit the brakes, lurching slightly forward before turning my body to come eye to eye with a smiling Monica. “They’re selling Ichor on the street? Where are they getting it from?”
She flicked her ponytail. “From the Muties they’re trucking in. People go in, they don’t come out.”
“And how do you know about this place?”
“Word gets around. All the locals know about it, we just don’t get too close.”
This was a lucrative pearl of information. If there really was a warehouse full of Ichor, money, and Mutables, I could solve a number of problems in a single heist.
And they wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to stop me.
But I had to play this smart, so the people I knew wouldn’t get hurt. Part of my deal was not to go running into trouble, not to intervene, and leave the world as it is in return for it leaving me alone.
Except I knew I couldn’t trust that. They’d turn on me the second they found some kind of counter or cure for my condition. They’d already tried to kill me before, and only backed off when they discovered they couldn’t.
The vipers had slithered away until they could find a new poison. They weren’t just trying to buy me off, they were buying time, and I knew it.
A windfall like this was just what the doctor ordered.
And by doing it secretly, I could enjoy the fruits of my labor without all the collateral damage. Oh, I was in.
“Okay, what’s your cut?” I finally asked.
“Wait, seriously?” Cassie blurted out.
“Oooh!” Monica squealed, then framed my face in her hands to squish my mouth and smooch me directly on the lips. “Don’t you worry about a cut, just let me live with ya’ll and I’ll be your paid maid after we hit this lick.”
Even though it was just an excitement smooch, I enjoyed the fact that it came from her caramel complected face.
“You can’t be his maid!” Cassie protested.
Monica spun her head around with a glare of umbrage. “And why not?”
“Because that was my pitch for staying!”
“He’s still gonna need somebody after you leave!”
I cackled at their little quarrel, chiming in with a raised finger of consideration. “You really wanna be a man’s maid?”
“Work from home and live in a nice house I don’t gotta pay for? You’re damn right!” Monica enthused.
“At least until he gets a girlfriend…” Cassie murmured with her arms crossed. “Which I’m helping with.”
Monica scoffed. “Bitch, please. She won’t have to clean, either.”
“I’ll remember you said that,” I replied before taking my foot off the brake to get underway. “Alright, let’s do this…”