Super: Underground: Book 2 in the Super: Series (18 page)

“I’m guessing you bought these on the street somewhere,” Riss said, flipping one and then the other over as if she couldn’t quite believe what she saw.

Kate shrugged, looking at the floor as she nodded. “Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess,” she said in a low tone.

Riss shook her head as she looked up again. “I didn’t mean it as an insult, Kate, I was just thinking that people will try to get away with anything these days. Give me an hour and then we can go downtown and get you two fixed up. Pick some new names, too, please, so that we can start you both fresh.”

Victor and Kate looked at one another, Kate with a raised eyebrow while Lex nodded in, she hoped, an encouraging way. Riss turned her laptop around moments later. “Here’s a name database, in case you need some inspiration.”

After they’d picked their new names out and gave them to Riss, she turned the laptop back her way. “Rose Lewis and Peter Pombo. Pretty solid, but I notice you’ve kept your former first names as middles.”

Kate shrugged, throwing a glance at Victor. “We thought it made sense, since I don’t think we’re going to stop calling each other what we always have.”

Riss nodded as she collected her laptop. “You’re probably right; the rest of us did something similar, as well.”

“So,” Kate asked as she watched Riss head to her room, “what’s she going to do?”

“Well,” Lex answered, “she’ll cause everything to get created for you—birth certificate, social security number, everything. No one will be able to tell the difference, because all your IDs will come from the people who normally issue them.”

“She’s that good, huh?” Kate was silent for a moment, considering. “She must have kept most of what she could do under wraps, didn’t she?”

“Pretty much,” Lex agreed. “We’re lucky she’s not stuck in the labs.”

The weather seemed pleasant for late summer as they made their way to the DMV offices, not as hot as it had been the previous week. Lex, Kate, Victor, and Casey sat there for fifteen minutes or so, conversing in murmurs as Riss typed furiously into the laptop she’d brought with her for a minute, then a number of screens flashed by quickly before Riss nodded.

Riss looked at Victor and Kate before she leaned over to whisper to them. “Your data is in the computers now. Just wait until the person taking photos calls you,” she finished, sitting back into her chair and fiddling with the laptop again.

Kate looked at Lex, who shrugged and nodded. Five minutes later, the person at the photo counter called Victor’s new name. Victor smiled at the women and got up to move over to the counter. About ten minutes after that they called for Kate. Giving Lex a big grin, the other woman went up to get her picture taken.

As Lex watched, however, waiting for her friend to get her photo taken, she felt her stomach clench as she watched Kate and the woman taking the photos begin a discussion that seemed to turn into an argument. They argued for a minute or two, until Kate turned towards the wall and gestured the woman to come nearer.

Suddenly, the woman who’d been taking the photos ran for the back room with her hands over her mouth. She nearly ran into a man who’d been coming out of the door, and he just looked after her, stunned. Lex watched as Kate finished adjusting her eye patch, then sat in the photo chair and waited. After ten minutes, a different woman came out from the back room and took Kate’s picture.

“Finally,” Kate said as she came back to the chairs where all her friends were waiting. Victor’s new license had been finished some time before, and both he and Lex fixed Kate with anxious glances as she sat heavily in a chair near them. Kate busied herself by looking out the window, however, avoiding her friends’ eyes.

They all fell silent until Kate’s name was called, and once her license was ready, made their way back home. Lex tried to catch Victor’s eye along the way, but he wouldn’t return her look for some reason. Finally Lex just sighed and tried to put the incident out of her mind.

Over the next few days the group of them had settled into a routine much like the one that Casey, Lex, Riss, and Lou had become used to before the other two had arrived. Lou and Casey seemed to wake earlier than everyone else, followed by Lex and Kate. Victor usually followed and Riss invariably woke last. The four early risers usually worked out after they awoke and the group would then eat breakfast together afterward. From late morning to sometime in the afternoon the band members practiced while Victor tested the sound equipment or recorded them and Casey researched show venues. Everything had been going well with working Kate into the existing songs, and they had even recorded a new song that all four of them had written together.

One morning, however, Lex came into the main room from the gym sometime after she’d become used to Kate joining them. She noticed that it seemed someone was in the big bathroom downstairs and knocked.

“Hey, Kate! Are you in there? I was wondering if you were coming to work out with us this morning,” Lex called, then waited for an answer, but there was no sound from behind the door.

When she tried the door, she found that it stood ajar, so Lex slowly opened the door. “Kate? Are you in here?” she asked. Still hearing nothing, Lex opened the door wide enough to enter the room and walked in. Lex gulped in a big breath as she saw Kate’s body sprawled on the floor. Her friend lay in the robe she usually wore in the mornings, and Lex felt herself start to tremble as she saw a trickle of blood near her friend’s head.

“Kate,” she almost whispered, kneeling near the other woman. Lex could see now that Kate had her eye patch off, and she took in a sharp breath of air as she saw Kate’s eye socket. She’d expected to see something like the injury Kate had described, looking as if someone had poked a hole into her eye and then cooked it like an egg, but what she saw looked like the entire socket was empty. It looked red and angry, as if infected, with a blood trail coming from the socket. Blinking against her tears as she tried to focus, Lex grabbed for a clean towel and wet it. She used it to gently clean along Kate’s hair, face, and eye socket.

“Your poor eye,” she remembered whispering at one point, and then Lex gasped as she distinctly saw something move within the empty socket. Looking more closely, she saw the flesh pulse again and sighed, closing her eyes. She finished cleaning up Kate’s face and then grabbed another towel to put under her friend’s head. Quickly, Lex ran to the gym to get Casey.

“Hey,” she said, leaning in to get her friend’s attention, her fingers tapping on the doorframe as she struggled to reign herself in, “I need your help to carry something, Casey. Lou, can you come to talk to us in five minutes in the kitchen?”

He looked at Lex with a quirked eyebrow, then at Casey. The two nodded at one another, and then Lou answered. “Sure, I’ll see you then.”

“So, what’s this about?” Casey asked as she followed her friend into the next room.

“Kate’s collapsed. There’s something wrong with her injured eye. It looks infected or something. It actually looked like the flesh in there was moving when I looked at it,” Lex said, looking up at Casey.

Casey stopped walking for a moment and looked down at Lex. “Pulsing, kind of?” she asked. Lex thought about it a moment, then nodded. Casey looked away from her friend, then continued walking towards the main room. “Yeah, that’s what Lily said they called it at the lab. It’s normal for people that they’ve given the ‘treatments’ to. It happened to you a lot while you were sick. Your neck and face, especially,” Casey said, her voice uncertain.

Lex grabbed her friend’s hand and said, “Don’t you worry about this. Everything’s going to be fine. OK?”

Casey gave Lex’s hand a gentle squeeze in return before letting go with a sigh. “Everything will be fine,” she repeated, her tone of voice not convincing.

Casey lifted Kate into her arms carefully, making it appear as if the other woman weighed nothing. When the two came out of the bathroom, Lex spotted Victor on the stairs. His face went pale as he saw whom Casey carried.

“We’re all going to talk in the kitchen in a few minutes,” Lex said as she and Casey moved past him on the stairs.

Victor just nodded, then mutely followed the two women back upstairs into Kate’s room. Lex could feel him watching as Casey put Kate back into bed and Lex tucked the covers in around her friend, shut the blinds, then fiddled with the glass of water by the bed. She touched Kate’s forehead and sighed, looking up at Casey. Casey nodded as all three of them left Kate’s room.

Riss had emerged from her room as the three of them came out into the hall and gave them a look with one eyebrow raised high. Lex gestured with her head for Riss to follow as they headed back downstairs. Lou was already in the kitchen making a pot of coffee and quietly watched them come down to the main room.

When they all sat around the table some time later, some looked at Lex while others tried to catch Victor’s eye.

“Why don’t you start this out, since you found her?” Casey asked Lex. Riss and Lou’s eyes both flew to her and then fixed on Lex. She sighed and then explained to everyone at the table what had happened.

“I was hoping that Victor could shed some light on what’s going on,” Lex finished, her eyes turning to the man in question.

He’d been staring down at his hands but looked up and around the table before he started talking. “I would have said something sooner, but Kate made me promise not to tell you.”

“Since we already know now, you’re not breaking a confidence,” Lex replied. “Could you tell us what you know?”

He sighed, then continued talking. “I don’t know exactly when it started, because I found out by accident. I figure it wasn’t long after we got away, though, because I noticed that she’d never take the eye patch off anymore and she seemed grumpier than she used to be most of the time. I caught her once with it off and saw that it looked like it had been infected. I told her to go to a doctor, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t talk about it, either, but I got the impression that something scared her. I know it hurt her because she’d go through these huge bottles of aspirin in a couple of weeks. At first, I could tell she didn’t want to come here because she thought you wouldn’t want her because of this, but then she changed her mind. I’m not sure, but I think she started thinking, I don’t know, that she didn’t want to leave me alone.”

Lex stared at Victor as he spoke, letting his words sink in. After his last couple of sentences she’d gazed over at Casey to see an upset look in her eye. Lou had reached over the table to grab her hand, though, and Casey gave him a little smile in return as Lex watched.

“She’s not going to die,” Lex said, the sound of her own voice surprising her. “I didn’t die, and neither will she. We’ve just got to figure out what to do.”

Closing her eyes, Lex stopped to think. After a moment, her eyes popped back open.

“Riss,” she began, turning to look at her friend, “I know you said that you wiped out the records at the lab we broke into to find Lou, but I was wondering, do you think you could look at whatever’s there now and see if you can find Kate’s records? I don’t know if they’d help much, but at least it could be a start.”

“I could probably get back in there if I wanted to,” Riss said with a shrug and the ghost of a grin. “But I don’t think there’d be much reason, since I still have all of that information even though they don’t.”

Lex knew her mouth had dropped open. “Riss, I don’t believe you!” she said, shaking her head and looking at the other woman with a little smile. “In that case, could you see if you have Kate’s records in the data you have?”

Riss smiled a little more broadly. “It’ll take me a little while to figure out what’s in there, since I haven’t looked at it since we got it, but I’ll search for them.”

Nodding, Lex looked at the other three at the table. “Now all we have to figure out is how to get some help for Kate—”

“Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” a voice broke in from the stairs.

Everyone turned quickly to see Kate, in jeans and a t-shirt and with her eye patch back on, walking down the stairs, focusing on the steps under her feet and clutching the hand rail. Lex heard her chair hit the ground somewhere behind her as she realized she’d leapt to her feet.

“Kate! How are you feeling?” she asked, happy that her friend was up and about, but not sure what to do next.

Victor had moved over to the stairs before anyone else and proceeded to take Kate’s arm and lead her to the empty chair at the dining table. Kate had given him a hard stare as he’d done so, but he didn’t even turn his head to meet her eye. Once Kate sat, she looked down at the table as everyone else around it directed their gazes at her.

“Would you all stop,” she mumbled, appearing both grumpy and sheepish at the same time.

“Sure,” Lex said, reaching across the table to grab her friend’s hand. Kate looked up at her as their hands touched. “As long as you tell us what’s been going on with you.”

When Kate looked back down and shook her head a little, Lex squeezed her hand once before continuing. “Kate, we’re together now. If you have a problem, we need you to tell us. We all have to be honest with one another if this is going to work. All right?”

“OK, already,” Kate agreed, rubbing the back of her head with her free hand. “You sure are pushy,” she continued, looking up at Lex with a small grin.

“Yeah,” Lex said, grinning back, “so you better come clean before I have to start pushing again.”

“Fuck,” Kate said, taking her hand back so she could rub at her eye. “There’s not all that much to say, really. Not long after Victor and I left, my eye started getting weird. At first I thought I had some sort of infection, so I tried every kind of disinfectant I could find in the drug store, but then I realized that it didn’t seem natural. I saw something move in there, and then the flesh started being eaten away.”

Kate stopped for a moment, the look on her face grave as she glanced in the general direction of the others without looking anyone in the eye.

“Yeah,” Casey spoke up, “that sort of thing is common for someone who’s had the drug regimens that we all had. The people at the lab called it ‘pulsing,’ Lily told us.”