The Story Of A Lifetime
Shocked faces met Max’s first statement. Suddenly Spike burst out laughing. He pointed at Angel and almost fell out of his seat laughing so hard. He squeezed his eyes shut as the group glared at him. "1999?" He shrieked. "Angel the cradle robber!" Angel sighed and ran a hand over his face.
"Shut up Spike," both he and Buffy told the bleached blonde. Spike just grinned at them. They turned back to Max, ignoring the man.
"I meant in my time line," she clarified. "Crap, this is tough. Can you just listen, let me tell you everything? Then we can laugh or whatever." Angel and Buffy nodded and after some fearful glares from Buffy, Spike calmed down and nodded as well.
"Okay, I was born in 1999, I don’t know the month or day, just the year. I always add a year to my age at New Year’s, just to keep track." She took a deep breath and plunged in. "I was born in a military compound outside of Gilette Wyoming. The place was called Manticore. Obviously I don’t remember it as a baby and it took me a long time to remember the early years, once I was older. I had to piece things together. The purpose of Manticore was to create a line of perfect soldiers." Both Buffy and Spike hissed when she said that. They still remembered the Initiative that tried something very similar.
"So along those lines, Manticore started before birth," Max continued. "They found pregnant girls, runaways mostly. They did experiments with recombinant DNA. Soon, they had perfected things enough that they were getting the desired results. I’m part of the X-5 series. I remember that when we were kids, we tried to figure out what DNA we had each been given. We all got feline DNA. It made it so we had highly developed agility, sight, strength, speed, and all the good stuff. But there were other mixes. Jondy and I also figured that we received shark DNA, just from the fact that we required little to no sleep." She grinned up at them. She turned to Buffy. "When you first said my tattoo, I thought you meant this one." She turned and lifted her hair so that the other woman could see the barcode present there. "It’s not a tattoo per se. It was encoded in my genome before I was born. We all had them, except for Joshua. He was the first." She paused as Joshua’s loving features rose before her. She could almost hear his words, hear him lovingly calling her little fella as he always did.
"Anyway," she continued on. "We grew up in the facility. We were trained everyday as soldiers. We learned tactics, fighting skills, everything they could think of." She saw Angel with a question in his eyes. "The whole purpose of the perfect soldier was bound up in Colonel Donald Lydecker." The others noticed how she almost spat the name. No one doubted the strength of her animosity of the man. "He wanted to instead of sending in one thousand soldiers and losing one hundred, send in ten and lose none."
"I take it you didn’t agree?" Angel asked gently. His mind was reeling with the number of admissions coming his way.
"As a kid," she began, then took a deep breath. "When we were kids, we thought this was normal. We didn’t know any better. We thought that that was the way the world was, how kids grew up. Everyone around us were soldiers. I remember the first time we saw a balloon. It was red, shiny, floating down to land in the tree. I was just amazed by this strange pretty thing. I wanted it, so Zack climbed up into the tree to get it. But before he grabbed it, Lydecker showed up and shot it. He yelled at us, telling us that the next soldier caught with contraband items would be thrown in solitary."
"How old were you?" Buffy whispered.
"We were eight," Max admitted. Knowing how life should have been, she saw how abhorrent the behavior appeared to others.
"Oh my God," Buffy groaned. "That’s just…" Angel shook his head at her. He knew then that they had to be silent. Let Max get through this and then they could grieve for the child’s losses.
"Things got worse after that," Max continued after a moment. "We started thinking that there were other things in the world, and we wanted to know what they were. But anyone asking was punished. I think the last straw for us was the experiments." She waited for an interruption, but none came. "The doctors there, would break our legs, to see how quick our healing factor was. They’d put all sorts of viruses in our systems, to see how well we could fight them off. But the worst was the seizures. We all had them. It was one of the side effects from the recombinant DNA. They were trying to fix it. They found out through trial and error that tryptophan would control the mild seizures. But if they progressed, the brain would eventually swell and burst. One night, my brother Jack, started to seize." Her voice broke a little as she named her friend and sibling. "It was horrible to watch, knowing we couldn’t do anything to help. We weren’t allowed to call for help. Barracks rules stated that we weren’t allowed out of bed until role call. So we sat and watched Jack seizing most of the night. We should have called for help, demanded it, but we didn’t. We were just kids and we had this secret fear that if they discovered our seizures, we’d be thrown into the dungeons, with the ‘Nomlies. Ben used to tell us that the Nomlies would tear our hearts out and eat them and then we’d be just as crazy, just as insane as they were. And we didn’t want that for Jack."
No one noticed Spike, shaking in his seat. He remembered everything the Initiative had done to him while in their captivity. But he felt he was going to be sick. They were bloody kids. No one should ever be forced to endure that, especially kids who couldn’t fight back.
"But someone must have noticed," Max continued, heaving a sigh. "Two guards came. We heard them and scrambled back into bed. They came for Jack and dragged him out of the barracks. I was so scared about where they were taking him, but I couldn’t let him go alone, so I followed them. They took him to the medical wing. I remember looking in through the door to see what was happening." She took a big breath and the words began to rush out, tumbling over each other, as if by saying it swiftly, it would hurt less. It was a futile hope, as nothing could erase the pain. "The doctors had put him on an examination table. They’d cut him open, to see how his body was reacting to the seizure. They studied him and watched as he died. And Lydecker was there, calmly drinking his coffee, just as if he were watching something on the television. Just sipping his coffee, his hands covered in Jack’s blood. He hadn’t even bothered to wipe it off, just drinking his coffee, not a God damn care in the world!" She screamed the last and before she could react, Angel’s arms were around her and she was sobbing into his chest. All the times she’d never been able to cry out her pain erupted from her now. She barely noticed Angel’s hands stroking her back, or Buffy’s stroking her hair. She didn’t notice their quiet sobs as they grieved with her.
She finally pushed Angel away, gently. She looked up at him. "I have to finish," she told him. He nodded and sat back. "After that, I returned to the barracks. I told everyone what happened. We decided that we needed to get out, get away from them. So the next day, we planned. It was simple, we were so simple. We knocked out the guards and took their guns. We ran down the hallway, Eva in the lead. We just planned to demand that they let us go, but before we could make that demand, I started to seize. Lydecker came and saw what was happening to me. He had other ideas. He told them to return to barracks and for the guards to take me. But Eva had the gun, I remember watching her lift it up, aimed at Lydecker. The bastard just shot my sister, through the heart. She was trying to keep them from taking me and it got her killed Then Lydecker told us to return to bed and he’d forget our little rebellion. We stood there for a moment. And I remember Zack squeezed my arm. We all turned and before they could react, we jumped through the window. Just crashed through. We were only on the second floor. We split up as soon as we hit the ground and made for the perimeter. We climbed the fence as the Army mobilized to go after us. I remember being shot at, but I was too fast. I ended up on a stream that had frozen over. One of the bullets broke the ice underneath me and I fell in. It was so cold that the ice reformed a little on the surface. I could hear the soldiers decide that no one could survive the temperature, so they took off to report in. Once I was sure that they were gone, I broke the ice and took off again."
"Bloody hell," Spike murmured, still shaking in his shock. Buffy rested a hand on his knee, understanding his reaction. She was experiencing something similar.
"I made it to the road, and was going to hide, but a car pulled up beside me. It was Hannah Sukova, one of the doctors from Manticore. She told me to get in. I did. I think I was under the impression that if she took me back to Manticore, I would knock her out and take the car. I was only ten, but I knew how to operate vehicles. But she didn’t. She took me to her cabin. She gave me a blanket and told me to warm up. She left the room and I left. I think I was scared that she’d call Lydecker. We were always taught to keep moving that no place was safe. So I ran." She rose from her seat. She got herself a glass of water before continuing.
"That was in 2009," she explained, a little calmer, now that she was moving about. "A few months after we escaped from Manticore, some terrorists set off a bomb on the East Coast. It knocked out all the computers and basically reduced America to a third world country. It was easy to disappear. I went through foster care families like tissue. Usually running away after a few months so that they couldn’t keep me in the system. When I was sixteen, I found a job to support myself. I eventually ended up in Seattle. I got a job as a messenger for Jam Pony bike messengers. I had an apartment in a burned out warehouse with a roommate named Kendra. Life was good. But I couldn’t forget my brothers and sisters. So, I began to search for them. But it was expensive. So I started stealing from the rich. They acted like nothing bad had happened. They were still having champagne parties, driving fast cars and looking down their noses on the masses, struggling just to feed their kids once a day. So I didn’t feel guilty about it." She grinned at Spike, when a momentary smile flashed on his face. It was a similar philosophy to his own.
"That’s how Logan Cale found me," she told them with a chuckle, noting Angel’s stunned expression as he recalled her conversation with Jonas Cale, Logan’s uncle, earlier that evening. "I broke into his apartment to pick up some art I could fence and whatever else I could find. I didn’t really count on the security that he had hired. See he was a cyber-journalist with too much time and money. His MO was to gather as much info as possible, then expose the scum on television. The cops were corrupt, but there were a few to be counted on. Anyhow, the current scandal he was working on was the Mayor. Steckler had let this scumbucket Sonrisa, buy up all the cortodiazapine used to treat Balkan war veterans and sell it on the black market. They put placebos in the stuff given to the vets. Logan had discovered this and found a woman, Lauren, willing to testify abut this. She oversaw the procedures. Logan was protecting her and her daughter Sophie. I broke in and scared the hell out of them, because they thought I was after them. So this bodyguard runs in, I overpower him and got the hell out of Dodge. But Logan was intrigued by my skills. He tracked me down and threatened to expose me if I didn’t help him. I told him to get lost and walked away. He then offered to help me find the others. I told him no. But when I got home that night, I found out that my friend Theo, who was one of the vets on cortodiazapene, had died. Then, it was on the news that Logan had been shot while trying to protect Sophie. Lauren got away, but Sonrisa’s men had Sophie. It really got to me, that I could have protected them, but I didn’t. So long story short, I figured out a plan and got Sophie back to Lauren. Logan was paralyzed, but alive. So when he asked me again, we made a deal. I would work for him when needed and he would research the others. Twelve of us made it out that night." She sighed, her throat tightening. She’d been talking so much; it was starting to hurt. But she needed to finish.
"So we worked together when we could, some bumps along the way. Zack managed to catch up with me. But he killed my other informant. The cops came after me, but Zack admitted to it and Lydecker sent soldiers to pick him up. That night, it was on the news that the military transport had crashed and there were no survivors. We kept searching for the others. A few months after, I got a phone call from Zack. He’d been taken back to Manticore where they tortured him to find out where the others were. He didn’t break, just made himself forget the information. He got out again, but he remembered me. I went to get him clear, but they’d implanted a hearing device in his ear. They heard us talking about where the others were, as he began to remember. We made it back to Logan’s place and Zack was just crazy over the fact that he hadn’t protected our siblings. Logan came up with a plan to warn them. He set up his Streaming Freedom television hack and exposed the X-5’s before the Army could get them. They all got out, except for Tinga. She was in Portland. So we headed over there and got her out. She and Zack headed for Canada, but I decided to stay behind. To help Logan. A few months later, I found out that Tinga had a family that was searching for her. They put out a missing person’s ad, the worst thing they could have done. I tried to warn Charlie, her husband, to take their son and run, but he didn’t believe me. So I went to Portland to rescue them. Tinga returned and we managed to get them out. But we discovered that Lydecker had gotten to Case first. He’d put a virus in Case’s system that we couldn’t fix. So we made a deal, Tinga for the cure." Max felt close to breaking again, but she knew that she had to get through it all. "They tried to get both of them, but Zack and I fought them off and got Case back. They took Tinga and disappeared. We got Charlie and Case out of the country. And things settled down. Of course other things happened. I ended up with a little piece of metal in my neck, basically revved me up even more, but my system couldn’t handle it, damn near killed me. But it was made of a certain alloy and they were able to track me. So, the night that Zack returned to tell us that he’d found Tinga, the enemy found me. They tracked us to the silo compound where Tinga was being held. But when we broke in, Tinga was already dead. I couldn’t get out and Lydecker found me. They knocked me out and took me away. I ended up in a hotel room, chained to the bed, with Lydecker sitting by me, an entire bottle of whiskey in his system." She heard Angel growl, but kept talking. "He told me about how they tracked the implant and told me that the new director of the company, Renfro, was after me. He offered to kill me rather than let her get me. I managed to kick the gun from his hand. I could hear them coming, so I convinced him to let me go and we ran. I found out where Logan and Zack were and we headed there. Zack had called in Syl and Krit. And that’s when we decided to take down Manticore. Lydecker told us about how after our first escape, they almost shut the place down, and funding began to disappear. So the plan was to blow up the DNA lab, to prevent them being able to continue making new soldiers. So we got in and did exactly that. Only problem was that Zack was shot and-!"
"You were shot too," Buffy realized in an instant. Now she knew where the scars had come from. Max nodded.
"I didn’t know until after how it went down. All I remember is that my younger counterpart shot me and left me for dead. Logan found me, he told me it would be okay, but then I was gone. I woke up later in the infirmary, inside Manticore. Renfro was there. I was chained to the hospital bed. She told me that Zack had sacrificed himself for me. I didn’t want to believe her, but it was exactly the sort of thing he’d do. I found out later that when we were in the ER, they told Renfro that my heart was too badly damaged to repair and that they had nothing to transplant. So they were going to prep me for organ harvest. Zack snapped. He got loose and grabbed Renfro, threatening to kill her unless the doctors brought me back. She made it clear that only an X-5 heart would work. So he shot himself in the head, so I could have his heart." Buffy was openly sobbing by this point, remembering how she had given her own life once to save her sister and the world. They were all quiet for a moment, in respect for the loving warrior they did not know, but whom Max had loved dearly.
"I was at Manticore for four months as they tried to brainwash me. I played along, but when they sent Alec to rape and impregnate me, I knew I had to get out. Joshua showed me how and I was gone. I went back to Seattle. Logan just about died when I showed up at his apartment. We were so happy to see each other. Until I discovered Renfro’s little revenge. She wanted to punish him for helping us. So, when they did the procedure to cure my seizures, she had the doctors put in a little extra surprise. Basically, I was poison to Logan. Any skin to skin contact would kill him. So that really wrecked any relationship we hoped to have. I concentrated then on helping any Manticore runaways I found and I eventually went back and freed everyone. Ames White replaced Renfro and he came with all sorts of schemes to get us back. Or kill us, whatever his whim was at the moment. So his big plan was to expose us to the world, playing on people’s fear and prejudices. We became hunted. We formed underground movements to help get our people safe and clear. It was at that time that we discovered that White wasn’t working for the government. He was working for a religious cult that was looking to eradicate normal humans. They had a group of elite fighters, known as the phalanx. We found out that White had a son, ready to join the cult. The boy’s mother just wanted her son safe. I went after him and was caught. They injected something in my system that was supposed to kill me. But it didn’t. It prepared me. I found out that it wasn’t Lydecker who’d dreamed up the entire DNA scheme. It was a man by the name of Sandeman. Joshua’s father. Apparently, Sandeman had inserted something in my genome to prepare for this day. That’s when the first prophecy appeared. Like I said, it took us a while to translate. We kept up the good fight and discovered that the cult wanted me dead. Apparently, I was the only salvation for humankind."
"I know how that feels," Buffy chuckled.
"So when Gem and Dalton came to us for sanctuary, a pregnant X-5 and X-6, they ended up in a hostage situation at Jam Pony, where I still worked. Gem was in labor and I went in. We negotiated with the police to get ourselves out, but White interfered and my friend Cece was killed. We retreated into the office. Gem was too close to giving birth and we knew that we didn’t have much time to get to safety. Logan had translated the prophecy. And that’s when I heard them. Well, felt them more like it. The Phalanx was coming for us. I herded everyone, all the hostages upstairs and we got ready to attack. It was just Joshua, Alec, Mole, Logan and I. But we took them down. White was there and Joshua tried to kill him for killing his girlfriend Annie. But I convinced him to stop. We knew that if we killed a human, the people would never stop hunting us. Gem’s baby was born during all that, a little girl. But we still had to get out. So we tied up the Phalanx members took their uniforms and walked out. Joshua, Dalton, Gem, Mole and I pretending to be prisoners. We headed for our base, but the cops caught on and followed us to Terminal City. They had us surrounded, but they didn’t count on there being over two hundred mutants there to take them on. They left us in peace, for then. And we decided that we had to make a stand. It was humans that made us what we were and they had to accept the consequences of what the government they elected had done."
"Heavy stuff," Angel commented with a small smile on his face.
"Almost done," Max sighed. "We continued to research the prophecy. Logan figured that something bad, like biblically bad was going to happen and I would be the one to stop it. We needed more information and decided to go to the source. Sandeman put it in my cells, so we figured he had the answers. My new mission was to track him down. I finally found him, but it was too late. He was dying. He died before he could tell me what was coming, what I had to do. And that’s all I remember. I mean, I have the feeling that I stopped whatever apocalypse was coming. But I don’t know how. The only thing I remember after that was pain, then blinding light. Then I woke up in the chamber."
The other three who had been listening stared at one another. It was a story unlike any other, but bits and pieces were so similar to their own tragedies and lives. They all knew. It was the truth. The truth of Max.
Deciding
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