A man’s face appeared above me. I strained me eyeballs down a saw a clipboard tucked under his arm and a stethoscope around his neck. It all made sense now. The smell, the vision of Great-Aunt Gertie. I hadn’t been in a hospital for years.
“Hi there. I’m Dr. Berry, and this is Nurse Chase.”
I had to take his word for it. She was out of my peripheral vision.
“How’s the head? You’ve got quite a little bump back there.”
Ah… a master of understatement. It felt like I was sleeping on a baseball. Abruptly, I remembered being jumped in the parking lot of the Post-Nuclear Café. I felt a hand on my wrist. The doctor was checking my pulse.
“Fine, just fine.” He looked back down at me. “Your injury was quite serious. You were unconscious for almost two full days.”
I licked my arid lips and croaked, “Where am I?”
The doctor was looking at his watch. “Brownsville Regional Hospital. The police brought you in. Apparently, someone attacked you. They didn’t tell us anything else. On behalf of the town, I’d like to apologize. In general, you’ll find us to be good-hearted, law-abiding citizens.”
I was still trying to grasp what had happened. Then a horrible thought occurred to me.
“Where’s my backpack?”
The doctor shrugged and glanced in the direction of the nurse. “I didn’t see a backpack, did you? No, I don’t think so. There’s a new Z-Mart down on Main Street. I’ll bet you can pick up a new one there. And their prices are generally quite a bit lower than you might expect.”
Damn it. I closed my eyes and tried to think. Who would’ve jumped me? I was almost certain I hadn’t been followed from Mexico City. Maybe it’d just been some drunken drifter, obliterated by a fifth of Cuervo, looking to hit someone. Or it could’ve been some rowdy local teen, rolling an unsuspecting out-of-towner for beer money. I was actually hopeful that whoever had hit me had been after my wallet. Maybe the statuette was still back in the parking lot and had been picked up by someone at the diner. If it was gone — I looked down at my wrist, still pulsating under the doctor’s fingers. There was my watch. It was no Rolex — in fact, it was a cheap piece of crap that only worked under certain climatic conditions. But if I’d been the victim of a simple robbery, they would’ve taken it. Damn.
After the doctor finished checking my vital signs, the nurse gave me a pill the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Several minutes later, everything went into soft focus, and the pain in my skull receded. I struggled onto my elbows and sat up against the metal headboard.
Now what? If the statuette was gone, I was screwed. Maybe the police had picked it up.
Maybe.
I spent the next four hours in medical limbo. Despite my obvious desire to leave, the doctor and nurse were hesitant. Apparently, they felt the medication they’d given me could have antisocial effects. I told them that keeping me locked up could result in violent seizures, but the nurse brandished a hypodermic and held me at bay throughout the afternoon.
Resigned to waiting, I reached for the TV remote. I didn’t have an idiot box in my office, and I hadn’t intentionally watched television since Nickelodeon had replaced Ren and Stimpy with Three’s Company. As I surfed restlessly, special news reports kept popping up with earnest-looking correspondents describing a bombing in Los Angeles.
There was nothing especially newsworthy about a bombing, especially in LA, but this one had obliterated CAPRICORN headquarters. I’d heard about CAPRICORN, but had always been under the impression that it was just another left-wing agency, concerned with suing the NRA and making frantic speeches laced with sound bites and peppered with alliteration.
The reports were informative. I knew, of course, that relations between Mutants and Norms had become more and more strained over the past year. I also knew a little about the Crusade for Genetic Purity, which had grown from a radical right-wing rec room full of anti-Mutant extremists into a mainstream organization with lobbyists, PR people, and a shiny, new temple-esque structure in downtown Phoenix.
According to reports, Norms were flocking to the crusade, which held the belief that Mutants were subhuman and were polluting the world’s gene pool with faulty genetics.
Some of the most admired minds in the world had affiliated themselves with the crusade and were backing what they called a eugenics movement, which seemed to involve classifying people by their genetic makeup.
The reports went on to say that, recently, CAPRICORN had officially joined the Mutant League in countering the growing power and influence of the Crusade for Genetic Purity. The media usually depicted the crusade in a dubious light, hinting that it had been behind the bombing and subtly accusing the crusade’s leaders with backhanded compliments and innuendo.
One news show went into detail about the president of the Crusade, the Reverend Claude Sheppard. Apparently, the good Reverend had a somewhat checkered and mysterious past. The program also described the process of initiation for joining the crusade and told how aspiring members had to pass a genetic screening. Once accepted, members advanced through a series of sixteen levels of indoctrination. Eventually, they could reach the ultimate stage of enlightenment, at which point they were invited onto the Moon Child, an orbiting resort station for the spiritually elite. On the Moon Child, members would undergo the final rites, which would result in them receiving the Good Housekeeping Pure stamp of approval.
I’d never taken a gene screen, as they called it, but I knew I was a Norm, though I’d never considered it an issue. I made my home in a primarily Mutant section of the Old City, and most of my friends were Mutants. The whole thing seemed ridiculous to me.
Back when my grandfather was growing up, people were still discriminating on the basis of race. It seemed strange to think about, but there had actually been a time when people of color were forced to use separate facilities and were banned from certain places. Now, here was a racially mixed organization picking on a different group because its genetic structure wasn’t the same. In my mind, it was just another playground scenario gone bad in the hands of adults.
And as far as I was concerned, the Crusade for Genetic Purity wasn’t any different than the hundreds of other hate groups that had come before it. The KKK, the Nazis’ Final Solution, South African Apartheid, Bosnian Ethnic Cleansing, the West Coast Gang Wars, the Asian Scouring, the African Tribal Siege, the Middle Eastern Alliance.
In every case, the destructive movement had been suppressed. After World War III, everyone looked around at what they’d done and seemed to decide that we were down to our last thread. Then came the post-war generation, and “Mutant” became a new check box on the census form. Originally, it was used to classify war veterans for benefit purposes. Then came the second generation, and the children of the Mutants were born into the same classification. Now, at the start of the third generation, when the Mutants were beginning to make up a substantial portion of the population, genetic discrimination had started to rear its ugly head.
It wasn’t something I planned on getting worked up about, but I hoped that the crusade would, like its predecessors, takes its fifteen minutes, then disappear. But I sensed that this time, it was different. To a lot of people, Mutants represented something bad, the visible evidence of man’s stupidity and mortality. They were society’s scar tissue.