Nocturnal

Origin Story

Bryan drove Pookie’s Buick, following the Jessups’ jet-black, highly modified Dodge Magnum station wagon. Passing streetlights cast sliding reflections off the Magnum’s polished body. Bryan had never really thought a station wagon could be sweet. The customized Magnum, however, would make any gangsta wannabe green with envy. It rode on black chrome rims. Tinted windows hid the inside from view. Pull-out drawers packed the cargo area, hidden from view by the rear hatch. Bryan could only imagine what kind of arsenal the grandfather/grandson team had stashed away in the back of that car.

Adam, oddly, drove like an old lady: slow, obeying every traffic light and sign, giving people plenty of room to pass him if need be. Bryan didn’t know much about cars, but even following behind he could hear the Magnum’s engine gurgling with unused power.

The Magnum turned south on five-lane Potrero Avenue. Two-story houses and small trees passed by on Bryan’s right. Just a few blocks now. He had time for one quick call. He dialed. She answered immediately.

“Hello?”

How could just the sound of her voice make him feel better? “Hey.”

“Bryan, are you okay?”

“Sure. Didn’t you get my note?”

She paused. “I did. Thank you for that. But a nice note and a pot of coffee aren’t a replacement for knowing that you’re okay.”

“I’m okay.” He wasn’t sure if that was the truth, but it was what she needed to hear. “I just wanted to check in.”

She didn’t say anything. He waited. Up ahead, he saw SFGH coming up on the left.

“Robin, I gotta go. Erickson might be in trouble tonight.”

“Forget him,” she said. “Come get me and we’ll just go.”

“What are you talking about?”

“All this death,” she said. “You and I could just leave, Bryan. We get in my car, we pick a direction, and we go. Together.”

She was afraid for him. Or maybe she was afraid of what he might do. The sentiment broke his heart, but her solution wasn’t an option.

“Robin, I can’t.”

She sighed. “I know. I hope we don’t regret it.” Her tone of voice changed again, from melancholy to business-like. “Listen, I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to you. When you were a kid, you had the usual cuts and scrapes, right?”

“Sure,” he said.

“And this rapid healing thing, that’s new?”

“Yeah. I always seemed to heal a little faster than most people, but nothing like it is now.”

“It’s because your Zed chromosome was suppressed,” she said. “That means you had all this genetic information, but it was dormant, your body wasn’t doing anything with it. Basically, your Zed information was switched off.”

That didn’t seem possible. How could you have parts of your body that were shut off? Still, he wasn’t about to argue with an expert. “So what switched it on?”

“When you came to see me in the morgue, you were sick, right? Really sick, as in body aches, chest pains, all of that?”

How awful he had felt — the fever, the hammering aches, the joint pain. “Yeah, it was bad.”

“We need to take x-rays. I bet they’ll show the same strange organ we found in Blackbeard. I also bet we find your bones have changed, or at least are starting to change. The sickness was because your body underwent a massive physical transformation. The question is, when did you start to get sick?”

So much had happened in the past few days. It seemed like an eternity since he hadn’t been dealing with Erickson, Rex Deprovdechuk, the BoyCo kids, Father Paul …

… that was it. The roof, where he smelled something that made him dizzy.

“I started getting sick the same day I saw Paul Maloney’s body.”

“Did Maloney’s body smell like urine?”

He nodded. “It did. Urine and something else I couldn’t identify. I started feeling crappy soon after that.”

“Bryan, I know what happened to you. Well, the general idea, anyway. We’re sure Paul Maloney’s death was a symbol killing, like Oscar Woody’s. We know Woody’s killers had the Zed chromosome, so it’s logical to assume Maloney’s did as well. I’m pretty sure there are hormones in the urine that activated your Zed chromosomes, made them start expressing. You had all this dormant code inside you, waiting for a signal. When that signal came, boom, your body was off to the races.”

That was one for the comic books — he had superhealing and, apparently, some level of superstrength, and what was his origin story? I sniffed pee. Not exactly as cool as being bitten by a radioactive spider. “But why would my Zed be dormant?”

“I have no idea,” Robin said. “Based on everything else we’ve seen, it’s got to be some kind of species protection strategy. If one of your kind is—”

“My kind? I’m not one of them.”

“Scientifically speaking, you are. Don’t be a Sensitive Sally. Anyway, maybe tens of thousands of years ago — no, hundreds of thousands, but that creates a whole primate family tree issue that—”

“Robin, I’m almost at the hospital.” He saw the SFGH complex coming up on the left. “Can you get to the point?”

“Sorry. My guess is that way back when, if one of your kind was isolated and their genes did express, maybe normal people killed them. So maybe suppressed genes contribute to survival. Maybe the genes evolved to only express if others of your kind are around — a safety-in-numbers kind of thing. Nature triggers suppressed genes all the time with hormones and other signaling mechanisms. You started out suppressed, normal, until your body detected others like you, then your latent genes activated.”

He didn’t understand a quarter of what she was saying. Not that any of it mattered right now.

“I gotta go,” he said.

“Have you called Pookie?”

Shit. He’d forgotten about his partner, and the fact that he’d had Pookie’s car for going on twenty-four hours now.

“No, I haven’t. Can you call him and tell him he can pick up the Buick at the hospital?”

She paused. “Bryan, he was looking for you all day yesterday. He called me this morning. He’s pretty pissed you didn’t let him know you were alive.”

As well he should be. But Bryan had too much to deal with at the moment — he really couldn’t handle Pookie’s disappointment on top of everything else.

“Look, Robin, just call him for me, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “I love you, Bryan.”

“I love you, too.” Those words were surprisingly easier to say the second time around. He hung up.

San Francisco General Hospital had many buildings, but the northern-most one housed the mental health wing — where Erickson was being kept. A head-high brick wall lined the sidewalk, with a ten-foot-high red fence rising from the top of it. Bryan wasn’t sure if the fence was to keep people in, or out.

Adam slowed, then did a fast U-turn to slide into an open parallel parking spot just before Twentieth. Bryan struggled to turn the Buick as sharply and realized that not only was the Buick a crappy car, Adam was a far better driver. Bryan parked right behind the Magnum. The Magnum’s rear passenger door opened. Alder leaned on his cane as he slowly got out. Bryan got out to meet him.

“Wait here, Inspector,” Alder said. “I’ll find Chief Zou and straighten this out.”

“Are you good friends with her?” Maybe Alder could help patch things up, get Pookie his job back.

“I haven’t seen her in twenty-eight years,” Alder said. “And we’re far from friends. Adam? Let’s go.”

Alder’s cane clicked against the sidewalk as he and Adam walked toward the opening in the wall that led into the hospital complex.