Extremis by Marie Jevins

Author:Marie Jevins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Marvel
Published: 2013-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

T E N

“Mallen, gimme a beer.”

Mallen grunted something unintelligible from the back of the van. Beck turned around.

“Huh?”

“No more beer.”

“Nilsen, pull off at the next exit. We need beer. Mallen, do you still drink, now that you’re all…uh…?” Beck motioned at Mallen—whose appearance had transformed during his time in the slaughterhouse, from man to creature, then deceptively back to normal man—and shrugged.

“I can drink you under the table, Beck.”

“You can’t. You still owe me ten bucks for the last time you tried that.”

“You wanna find out?”

Beck shook his head, demonstrating a bit of common sense for a change. “No. After what you did back there…Mallen, did you have to burn the whole building? We could’ve just gone after the guys that killed your—”

“Shut up, Beck. People that join the Feds make a choice.”

“If we don’t get beer soon, I’m going to make a choice, too. A choice to drive through the window of one of these crappy gas stations so we can get some beer. Why the hell does everything close so early here?” Nilsen had pulled off into a small Texas town that seemed to be little more than a rest area along the highway.

“Remember back at the group home,” said Beck, “when we used to swipe beer from Old Man Cecil down at the guard shack?”

“No, you stole beer from Old Man Cecil. I used to hang with him. He was all right,” said Mallen.

“You just liked him cuz he knew your dad.”

“My dad used to make bets with him. Like telling him he’d give him his old Civil War musket if Cecil could skin a rabbit all in one piece.” Mallen chuckled. “Cecil always lost.”

“Like with you and my ten bucks.”

“Shut up.”

Beck shut up a lot faster now than he used to, Mallen noticed. There were fringe benefits to being the strongest, fastest, most invulnerable man in town. In the state? The country?

The world?

Mallen hadn’t thought about his father’s Enfield musket in years. He had wanted it, wondered where the Feds had taken it after the raid. No family possessions had come with him to the county shelter or the group home—or the first foster home, or the second or third. He’d been allowed nothing that belonged to his parents. The government took it all.

They took his parents, too.

Mallen had been ten years old, sitting on the floor playing with his .22—he’d just gotten it for his birthday—in the corner of the old cabin, when his father pulled up outside in the ’57 Ford pickup.

His dad ran in, shouting. His mother, older brother, and uncle looked up from their poker game.

“It was a Goddamn trap! A government trap!”

“What?” said his mother. “ATF? FBI?”

“They were waiting for me to buy the guns. Hell, they were the ones selling me the guns! It was all I could do to get out of there! And then they followed me on to our property—”

“Are they here now?”

“I think…I think I killed one.”

“Mr. Mallen.” A voice over a bullhorn echoed through the cabin.

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