The Underground

Crosses

The Martinez Trilogy.

Maiyri

PG13

Disclaimer: I don’t own this, Ella or her mother, except for Doc’s first name, which I’d probably pinched off The Fraggler or whoever used it first. I own pretty much everything else.

Authors Notes: If you recognise anything here, it’s because it was originally for the original fic of the same name that a) wasn’t finished, and b) was cannibalised for this.

This is a threeshot on what really should have happened with Doc and Ella Martinez. Because the book version was crap.

--

One

Make your choice. We will take your daughter, she’s valuable enough, collecting…specimens is difficult. You, however, may not be useful to us. But we’re giving you a choice about this. We’re actually giving you a choice. It’s more than most get, understand that, and be very grateful, and make your choice. Go with your daughter, or…

I don’t blame you. I know that it’s not your fault. I don’t even know where you are, and the look on your face, the fear and the remembered pain is more that enough to convince me that you had no intention of getting me involved. Sorry fact is that I am.

Why would they want to have anything to do with a lowly veterinarian from backwater boonieville who never even got a parking ticket?

I don’t know. Or at least, I don’t really understand.

Because, yes, I do know. Three weeks ago I met a charming girl a few years older than my own daughter by the name of Max. She stopped three of the nastiest and stupidest boys in town from hurting my daughter. And got shot for her troubles. So this girl, shot, bleeding, stumbled across my house, and asked for my help. Well, Ella offered. Feeling as if I owed something, I gave it. And doors opened that I never though would be. She had wings. Max had wings, and could fly.

And this amazing girl had a tracker chip implanted in her arm like somebody’s pet dog. I was disgusted. They must have been watching her, tracking her in the two days while she was here, recuperating. They knew. They watched. They made a note of it.

They came back.

Oh, I’d met them once before, when Max came to the practice. I took an X-ray, which I them burned. No evidence. Oh, yes, I’d met them. Had to, or they couldn’t have come BACK.

But they did, breaking into my house with a shattering of glass. Four-fifteen on a Friday. I remember seeing the clock in the hall as I raced with my daughter to the relative safety of the desk in the study. And of course it’s Friday. Friday the thirteenth. They’re right about that superstition. I never was superstitious until now.

Not a thing about them that was scary last time I had the pleasure of making their acquaintance. Lovely voices. Perfect people, supermodel beautiful. Maybe that was odd, something a little bit off, but not a thing of nightmares.

Until now. My bruises are proof of that. Maybe my arm’s broken. It hurts. And my head.

I’m sitting here now, back against the vibrating wall of the chopper, with my hands bound, and a wad of cloth in my mouth that’ll stop me screaming. The cloth tastes of sweat and blood, mine probably. After all, I think that it was torn from my coat. Noise hurts their ears, sensitivity and all that. So they gagged me. Doesn’t really matter too much, right now, because I’m all screamed out. It’ll be useful later, maybe. If there is a later.

I was screaming before, when they first came. They’ll cover it up too, that they were there, I’ve no doubt of that. Officially, nobody knows that they exist, they’ll make me disappear. The telltale marks on the door. The blood.

Maybe they’ll say that Reilly did it. My ex-husband. And I’ve moved away somewhere where he can’t find me. And I’m so terribly sorry that I couldn’t give notice on my job, but I couldn’t stay.

I couldn’t stay. They made me make a choice. I was given five seconds, and I made a decision that I have no doubt I will regret.

I’ve made my choice.

Join them or die.

For Ella.

Oh God, I know what they’re gonna do to her! They told me, and then they laughed like it was the funniest thing that they ever heard. I can see it in their beautiful faces, they’re enjoying what’s going to happen. They like my pain.

That’s what they’re gonna do, the same thing that they did to Max. And I saw Max’s face, even if when I asked, she said very little. She’d seen pain, death, known fear. And she was little more than a child. I hope she and the others that she was going to find are safe from these monsters.

And I’m not talking about the part wolf things that call themselves Erasers either. They’re scary and intimidating. They’re the muscle types who have nothing in the way of brains. The others, the scientists.

I know who and what they are, they told me. A place called the School, in California. And I’m a risk. I know too much.

My head hurts. Concussion, I know. Vets like me know a hell of a lot about biology, and all mammals are similar. I’m human, and not that different from your average rabbit. On the inside, anyway.

Definitely a concussion.

My brain’s swelling up from that nasty clip on the head that I got as they shoved me into the wall. Though I’m not entirely sure which time. Three times, you see. I got shoved into the wall three times that I can remember. Or maybe it was the punch. I got punched a couple of times too.

Definitely a concussion.

And I know that it’s perfectly natural for a concussion patient to think in circles. Circles make my head hurt. No they don’t. My head was hurting anyway.

From the concussion.

Or was that from the clip on the head. I don’t think that they’re mutually exclusive. Why should they be? I have the concussion from getting my head either slammed against the wall or from being punched. Whichever time doesn’t matter. My head hurts because of either getting my head slammed against the wall etc., or from having a concussion.

If that made sense. Concussed people rarely do. At least my memory’s working fine. I know exactly what’s wrong with me. Page 415 in that big ugly blue textbook that my second year lecturer loved. I hated it, 714 pages and dammed heavy to carry around.

Memory’s fine.

I can tell you the names of all the States and Presidents, I can tell you what patients I was supposed to be seeing on Monday.

I can describe every one of my Ella’s birthday parties, and what I gave her for each of her birthdays, from that purple teddybear that she’s still got, at age one, to the heirloom sapphire necklace my mother gave to me.

I can tell you the names of every single one of the guys I dated in college. Helps that I could count them all on one hand. Didn’t like guys back then, too busy trying to graduate and get that scholarship.

And then there’s the bastard I married. Joseph Rielly. Left me after Ella was born, didn’t want kids. Last I heard he took up a job in California. Maybe he works at the place I’m headed to. Told me it was in California. Remember that.

He’d suit it. Reilly. Always was a screwball. Ten times worse that me on horse tranq’s and with a concussion.

Don’t know why I married him, and that’s got nothing to do with the concussion. Mr. Bigshot Biologist. Sadistic Asshole.

Ella really didn’t need a father like that.

Ella. Where is she?

I have to know. I can’t ask, with the gag. So it’s all on me. Eyes open a crack, that’s a mistake. I knew it probably was, but no help for it. There she is, my daughter, drugged and bound on the floor of the chopper. It’s a nice chopper, although the turbulence isn’t helping the concussion.

No child should ever be in this position, especially not my own. I hate them all for doing this.

She’s in her school uniform still, high socks, skirt, and blouse, the latter torn by Eraser claws. She’s been out for the last hour, they didn’t want her damaged too much, one hit, and she was out.

No damaging the merchandise, huh?

I can feel the nausea rising in my throat. I’m not sure if it’s disgust or injury. It doesn’t matter. Sour bile is always a good weapon, and I make no effort to stop it. I wait for my moment, and turn my head and throw up all over the normal looking Eraser sitting next to me.

It’s wonderful. My vomit, all smelly and rancid, with carrots and corn that take ages to be digested. And there’s lots of cookie too, from brunch, all mixed up and partially broken down with lovely stomach acid.

I had curry for dinner last night, and the helicopter stinks to high heaven. Well, we’re in the sky, but not that high up. And the monsters in here with me would go straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Thank you cruel world.

I’ve got more pressing things to deal with. The Eraser for example. He shrieks in disgust and cuffs me over the head. Hard. My mind flares white, then sinks into dark unconsciousness.

What kind of a choice is that? So I come with you, or you kill me. I join this merry band of depraved lunatics or my life ends. Right now. Do I get any time to think about it? Nope.

Fine. I’ll come then. I’ll come and work for the School.

--

Two

Somehow I’m aware that I’m only dreaming.

That doesn’t make the nightmares seem less real.

In the first dream/nightmare there are dancing bullclips that twirl around my head like ballet dancers. They’re so pretty. They spin and they swirl about each other. And then they chase after me, metallic monsters of death with gaping open mouths. Closer, closer. One clamps onto my head painfully, pressing down on my skull. Funny, it’s in the exact same place as the sore spot where the Eraser hit me when I technicolour yawned on him.

Then it’s gone. I don’t know if I wake, sweating, screaming in terror or just fade into the next.

The second dream is full of bubbles and clouds. They look like people I know. There’s my dad, and my high school science teacher, and there’s that bastard of a husband. My mother appears out of nowhere to tell me to hurry up and make the nachos for dinner tonight, or I can’t go out with my friends. Then I’m making the nachos, and I find out that there aren’t any tomatoes, so I can’t make them. I’m trying to convince mother, but she’s not listening.

The third dream is just me and my pet cats. All five of them. Despite the fact that all of them are years dead, they all comfortably sit around me and purr like muffled machine guns.

There’s the aptly named Blackie, the companion of my toddler and early primary school years. He was the deepest black, and I never said that my two-year-old self had originality. Just lots of tail-pulling ability. That cat never did sleep easily around me. Molly and Polly, the tabby sisters that Dad got me after he accidentally ran Blackie over with his car sits by my feet. Molly purrs the loudest, and Polly has that funny snore-hic purr that my friends found hilarious.

Dad ran over Molly too.

Grey Thunderstorm, Thunny, my favourite cat lies tucked up by my left arm. Found him as a half wild kitten in the middle of a thunderstorm. I was seventeen at the time, and he was the cutest most gorgeous thing I had ever seen. My least favourite cat sits on my chest. Black as night with a soul to match, Plato was the terror of the student accommodation block at University. We never had a mouse in sight.

I wonder what to do now.

“Don’t worry Doctor Martinez, the hallucinations will pass,” says the cat.

“Thank you, Plato,” I reply rustily, and wait for the hallucinations to go away. After all, my kitty said they would. My kitty can’t be wrong.

“Who’s Plato?” Plato asks.

My kitty must be somehow confused.

Things begin to rush back to me in horrifying waves of recognition and remembrance. The break in, the Erasers, the screaming, the offer, and my acceptance. Them taking Ella, and the look in her beautiful dark eyes as she begged me, her mother, to help her. And me, alone and helpless, frozen by the weight of massive hairy Eraser Paws.

Although I don’t really want to, I open my eyes. The cats vanish. Plato gives me one last Cat-glare, before departing. Ungraciously, he leaves he weight on my chest behind. Never liked that bloody cat.

I can still hear beeping, and I know the sound of a heart rate monitor like I know the back of my hand.

‘Plato’ is a middle-aged, black-haired man, attired in a white lab coat, standing by my bedside. I think he must wonder if I’m mental. I am, I did take this job didn’t I?

“The hallucinations,” I say by way of explanation, but I see from his face that I have only confused him more. “You said the hallucinations would pass, but the hallucinations made me think my pet cat was saying it.”

“So who is Plato?” He inquires politely.

“Plato is my cat’s name,” I explain. “Plato-puss.”

He blinks at me. I understand. No sense of humour whatsoever. Pity.

I try to sit up. The strap across my chest stops me, and I look down at it in surprise. I’m strapped to a bed. I’m actually strapped to the bed.

“Where is my daughter?” I ask. Important things always come first, long dead talking cats notwithstanding.

“Your daughter?” He repeats. His face screws up in concentration. I’m beginning to get frustrated. No emotion, no humour, there’s something very wrong about this man. “No one was brought in here with you. My orders were to wait until you woke, and then send you to the Director’s office.”

Where is Ella?

Maybe this ‘Director’ person will know. “Well, I’m awake now.” I say to him.

The man blinks again. “Yes, you are.” He says. Then he looks at me intently.

“Can I go and see the Director then?”

He blinks again, the confusion clearly evident in his face. “ What’s your name?” I ask him, wondering what is wrong with this man. He’s…not all there. Not quite right in the head. Have they done this to him, or was he always like this?

“I have no name.” The half-man says. “You will come with me to the Director’s office because you are awake.” He orders in his half intent, half childish way. He reaches over and fiddles with something I can’t see on the side of the bed, and abruptly the weight on my chest from the strap is gone.

I sit up. I’m still in my clothes, though my jacket (and the knife I’d stowed inside the pocket) is gone. I’m careful in looking myself over. Nothing’s too out of place for what’s happened, so I follow the man as I am.

We reach the door of the infirmary, as I arbitrarily decide that this is indeed the purpose of this room, and the two morphed Erasers that stand there talking amongst themselves come to attention. I have already discovered that they have control over how they appear, and that they choose to look like werewolves now for effect.

I suppress a shiver as both look me over. I feel like a piece of particularly juicy meat getting appraised by a pack of very hungry wolves. Which I suppose I am, for they are Lupine hybrids, and I’m mainly meat, and 70 percent water.

“You will escort Dr. Martinez to the Director,” He says to the monsters. He hands them a piece of paper in his half-man way. One looks it over. “Director’s orders.”

--

Three

Ella Martinez’s life up until now had been pretty average bar a few not so average things. She’d gone to school with her friends, and lived with her mother, who had an average job, and visited her Great-Aunt Muriel (although she didn’t want to) every other weekend.

And then some things had happened that had set Ella apart from her classmates and friends. Things she’d seen, things they wouldn’t have dreamed of being real. Such as meeting a girl with wings, being kidnapped by half-wolf half-men things called Erasers and being mutated herself at the place of horrors called the School.

She wondered what her friends were doing now. Fliss and Adrienne. It was a Tuesday, well, she thought it was Tuesday, so they’d be on the class trip to the museum. Or maybe Fliss had forgotten to pay. Again. Ella smiled. That was Fliss for you. That girl had a memory like a sieve that had been attacked by a lawnmower.

They’d never believe her if she told them what was going on, she’d never told them about Max. They hadn’t even believed her when she told them about the cow that her mother had seen with the freaky uterus and two healthy calves inside.

Ella wished she was with them now, in her house, worrying about homework and whether Bobby Phelan wanted to ask her out. Because ignorance was bliss, and half knowledge had turned out to be the most dangerous thing that Ella had experienced.

She’d woken about a week ago in a room, although it probably didn’t deserve being called a room, being little bigger than a closet, where three kids and herself had been stacked within their cages. She’d known that there were three of them, just like she could tell that the one above her was part bat, and both below her were some kind of seahorse and snail and human recombinants. She’d shuddered at the knowledge that had filled her mind upon waking, and had tried to shove it away.

It hadn’t worked, and it still didn’t. She knew things that she couldn’t possibly know. Ella could look at any of the children who were unfortunate to live in this place and tell exactly what had been done to their DNA.

That’s what the scientists had done to her. She couldn’t use her power on herself, but she could tell that their intention was to make her be able to know genetic changes by touch. A sort of Genetic Psychometry, based on the Psychometry that a number of others had been given. She’d overheard that much, and had decided to trick them. Make them think that they’d got it wrong.

So there! Her pathetic resistance.

They put her in a room, and made her put a hand on a little boy’s shoulder through the bars of his cage. When they’d asked what she knew about the boy (seal and walrus) she’d looked at them in confusion and said that he was a boy, and he looked to be about five years old, and had brownish funny skin and whiskers.

The small brown-haired boy had looked at her in amazement, she’d smiled at him, and he’d uncertainly smiled back. The Whitecoats, (as the boy had muttered to her that they called the scientists that) had looked at her in despair, shaken their heads, and she’d been put back into her cage.

And so her life had been little more than that in the days that she’d been at the School. Every day she’d have something injected into her, every day she’d be put into the same little room with the same little boy. They’d started pulling faces at each other the time before last, and it had been a heck of a lot of fun, the most fun that she’d had in a while. The Whitecoats had sat around and scratched their heads and argued and ignored the two kids in the room before them. Ella and the boy, who was called Pup, as he whispered to her, just sat and laughed.

Now she was stuffed into a closet on the second floor of the School hearing and sensing the Erasers as they ran past, growling in their gravelly voices to each other. The Erasers’ own sense of smell was good, but she’d ‘accidentally’ managed to spill a whole drum of disinfectant around the corner, and the stink was clouding over her own scent. And burning nostril hair in the same breath. That stuff really was wicked – had to be or it wouldn’t kill germs.

She’d managed to give the impression that she was a scared little weakling girl, that she knew better than to fight, or that she was just a little on the thick side. The Whitecoat who’d been assigned to walk her from her lovely little cage to the room had fallen for it. He was such a sexist pig, even if he was a bit cute, blond and tall. And a really nice Scottish accent too. Pity he worked as a scientist in hell-on-earth.

Then, today, she’d waited until they were at the four-hall junction. She’d stopped and pretended that her leg was really itchy. Then as the Whitecoat turned away to stare at the message board on the wall in boredom, she’d hit him on the temple. And he’d dropped like a stone. There were no Erasers in the hall, no Whitecoats, and the junction had no cameras. She’d freed herself, and then she’d started running. Towards the room where she was supposed to be headed to.

It was an interesting double bluff. And they’d called it, seeing her before she’d got to her destination. So she’d gone into the corridors with no cameras and managed to hide, knocking over the disinfectant as she went.

Another squad rushed by, the crackle of the radio telling her that they were still at full alert. There was no way she’d be able to get out right now.

She would wait. The red alert would be called off, they’d be off their guard, and then she’d be able to escape. Although she’d have to leave her mother behind.