Photo courtesy of JensenAcklesFans.com

*****

“You feelin’ all right?” Alec asked Max as she pulled on her black jeans. He propped himself up on one elbow in their bed and regarded her more closely, as usual enjoying the sight of his lady half-dressed, but more than her naked breasts on his mind. “I know you had a dream last night.”

“I’m fine,” Max said, her voice clipped in a way that warned the X5 to tread warily.

“Wanna tell me what it was about?” he asked carefully as he rubbed a hand across the two-day’s growth of bristles on his chin, noting he should probably shave this morning.

“No.”

“Fine,” Alec said lightly, swinging his legs out of the bed and reaching for his boxer shorts, telling by her tone that they were done for now with anything resembling foreplay. The bedroom of the old farm house wasn’t heated and his breath steamed in the frigid morning air. Jeans slung over the back of a chair were pulled on followed by warm socks and motorcycle boots. By then Max had her t-shirt, vest, and an overshirt on and was reaching for her own shoes.

“Was it bad?” Alec had to ask, not looking at her.

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Max, you were cryin’.” He glanced back at her over his shoulder as he propped a foot on the bed frame and tied his boot lace.

Angry brown eyes glared accusingly at him through a tangle of long, unbrushed dark hair. “Shut. Up.” Viciously, she yanked down on her canvas vest and deliberately turned her back on him.

“Fine,” Alec said, tightlipped now himself as he pulled on his own black t-shirt followed by a layer of flannel. He headed for the bedroom door. “I get it. No snuggle for me this morning. I’ll go put on the coffee.” But he stopped with his hand on the knob and just looked at her. Usually their days started better than this, if not with sex than at least with a few passionate kisses. Max, however, was still not looking at him.

Shaking his head, Alec turned his back as well and went into the narrow hallway that led to a set of stairs. The bathroom was to the right, but he’d taken a leak just before dawn and didn’t have to go again. As his hand slid down the smooth bannister, he could hear sounds from the kitchen. Apparently Joshua was already up. There was also the smell of fresh brewing coffee and something cooking ... bacon and eggs maybe? The big guy wasn’t a half bad cook, and this morning Alec was glad of a little help. Max in a bad mood wasn’t something either he nor Josh particularly liked facing. Good hot food wouldn’t improve her temper, but it would certainly help him hold onto his.

“Hey, Josh,” Alec said from the entrance to the old fashioned kitchen. The dog man was standing in front of the gas stove, flipping pancakes in a cast iron frying pan.

“Blueberry,” Joshua said, grinning toothily. “Maple syrup.”

“Sounds like Heaven,” Alec said as he reached for the coffee pot and poured himself a cup. “You need any help?”

“Joshua’s got it,” the big transhuman said, flipping several more pancakes onto a plate then setting it down on the old wooden table in front of Alec. “Alec eat.” His eyes went to the doorway. “Max coming soon?”

“Hopefully,” Alec said as he pulled out one of the mismatched chairs, sat down, and immediately reached for the butter. “But she’s in a really bad mood this morning. She had one of those dreams last night. You know, the kind she won’t talk about?”

Joshua shook his long-maned head. “Father gave Max a gift, Alec. Sometimes she sees things we can’t.”

“Well, this gift is drivin’ her nuts,” Alec said, making a wry face.

The X5 knew that some of the transgenics -- Sandeman’s “children” -- had been created with extrasensory abilities, often latent, just like a lot of the Breeding Cult progeny possessed. He, himself, had an uncanny knack for reading people -- “empathy” psy-ops had called it -- as well as subtly influencing those around him ... making them like him ... accept him ... valuable traits for a black-ops assassin who often needed to ingratiate himself quickly and completely into a situation in order to make his kill -- or so Manticore had theorized.

In reality, X5-494 was far more likely to use his powers of persuasion and “people reading” to woo a girl into his bed, pick out marks at a pool table, win a hand of poker, or -- most valuable of all -- tell if someone was lying or not.

Max’s gift, however, was a bit more sinister, and far less under her control. She had flashes of prescience that bordered on literally seeing into the future ... a future she couldn’t control. It had started six years ago, during the Jam Pony siege when she, himself, Joshua, Mole, and several other transgenics had been cornered by the police and Ames White’s super-cultists. They’d escaped from that tricky situation, partly due to Max “seeing” the final assault coming before it actually began thus giving them time to take cover and set an ambush.

Afterwards, Max’s visions had come only infrequently, sometimes during the day, but also in the form of dreams at night that she tried to palm off as meaningless. However, those dreams and visions did have a spooky way of coming true, be they innocent predictions like what Sarah would be serving for dinner that night at the diner, or something a bit more serious like him having engine trouble with his bike and being stranded three hours on a back road in a snowstorm last month.

She’d apologized to him for that one ... not warning him ...

But lately, Max had stopped talking about her dreams, even though Alec knew she was still having them, perhaps more frequently than ever before.

He wondered what she was seeing.

He also wondered if he really wanted to know.

“Max,” Joshua said, looking over at the doorway to see her standing there looking a bit disheveled since she still hadn’t brushed her hair.

“You all right?” Alec asked through a mouthful of food. He swallowed and pointed his fork at her. “You look like hell.”

Her smile wasn’t friendly. “I’m fine,” she repeated what she’d told him earlier. “Can’t a girl be in a bad mood once in awhile.” Then she looked at Joshua and Alec would swear he saw ... something ... in her eyes. “How you been, Big Fella?” she asked. “Sleep well?”

Joshua dropped the batter spoon he’d been using to dish out the pancake mix, the utensil clattering to the floor. “Joshua slept fine,” he muttered as he went to his knees to pick it up then began mopping the batter off the floor with a wet rag.

Alec scowled, sensing that there was something going on. It was one of the things he found most annoying about his own “gift” -- that he could often tell when things weren’t right but didn’t have a clue as to the specifics. “What’s wrong, Josh?” he asked, his voice taking on an edge that made the request border on a command.

“Nothing,” the dog man mumbled, not looking up.

Alec looked at Max, eyebrows raised. And then he saw the look on her face and his stomach lurched. Suddenly, he wasn’t hungry any more. However, he forced himself to take a sip of his now tepid coffee. “Josh,” he said carefully, his eyes flicking once more to Max’s before looking back to the dog man. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Joshua whimpered, now literally crouching on the floor, curling in on himself as if bracing for an assault. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Joshua’s emotions were palpable to Alec, now that he was focusing on his friend -- but then fear was always strong ... easy to detect. “Josh!” Alec said sharply. “Tell us.”

“Didn’t mean to,” Joshua whimpered, making puppy noises.

Max was across the room in an instant, kneeling down at Joshua’s side, her hands on his arm as she tried to make him look at her. “Didn’t mean to what?” she asked, her own voice rough. “Joshua, I know. I know what you did. But you need to tell us what happened.”

Alec scowled, edging forward on his seat, almost in the game, but not quite. “Max?”

“He killed someone,” Max said simply.

Alec’s jaw dropped open.

“Last night ... in the woods by the pond,” she continued, her voice flat. “But I don’t know who ... or why.”

Alec was already on his feet, reaching for his leather jacket that hung on a peg by the kitchen door.

“Show us where,” Max said, giving Joshua a rough shake. “And you have to tell us what happened. We have to know, Joshua. People might come looking for him ... for us.”

“Joshua didn’t mean to,” the dog man wailed, burying his face in his hands. “He was a bad man. He wanted to hurt Max and Alec ... wanted to hurt me.”

Shaking his head in frustration, Alec was already out the door, headed for the small pond that bordered one side of the farm lot. It used to have a wooden fence around it, but most of the rails had fallen to the ground and the nearby woods had encroached to the point where part of the shore was almost inaccessible. There was a light powder of snow on the ground, new fallen since last night. He didn’t see any tracks, nor could he smell anything in the just-below-freezing air. There was a light skim of ice on the surface of the water, and the milky early morning sky made the pond shine silver like mercury. It hurt his eyes ...

The X5 spotted Joshua’s easel where he’d been working on a painting the day before, set up along the narrow, well-worn animal trail that led down to the water’s edge on the opposite side of the pond from the farm house. Making his way around the perimeter of the water, he watched carefully for signs of a struggle ... a body ... He’d almost reached Joshua’s easel when he noticed the freshly broken branches of some shrubbery. There were also tracks in the mud, but they were covered with fresh snow. Looking closely, he made out where something large had been through more of the low growing shrubs, a broken branch here, a crushed twig there. 494 wasn’t an expert tracker, but he did have a hunter’s instincts, and it looked to him as if something had happened here.

“Did you find anything?” Max called out as she made her way around the pond the way he’d just come.

“Maybe,” Alec said, his breath ghosting as he squinted his eyes in the glare of the reflected light off the ice and snow. He took a few more steps toward the easel, rubbing his hands together for warmth, and stubbed the toe of his boot against something. “Yeah,” he called back to Max without turning his head as he stared down at the body of a very dead man. “Yeah. I found something.”

*****

Photo courtesy of Still Frame

The three transgenics sat around the kitchen table, Max and Alec trying very hard to not look angry, or even stern, but Max in particular not quite succeeding. Joshua, for his part, was hanging his head like a little boy who’d been caught doing something naughty.

“When did it happen?” Alec asked quietly, realizing he needed to get things started since Max was apparently speechless with worry, or perhaps anger. On the other hand, he couldn’t blame her. One of their biggest fears was that Joshua would be found out by the locals, and the dog man killing one of their Ordinary neighbors certainly didn’t put those fears to rest. There were going to be inquiries ... maybe even a search. Already Alec was going over his own cover in his mind, wondering if anything he’d said or done during the weeks he’d been working in Pemberton would cast suspicion on him or Max, the two “newcomers” to town.

“When?” he repeated.

“Yesterday,” Joshua finally said, his answer muffled by the fact he had his face buried in his arms as he lay with his head on the table.

“When yesterday?”

“Late. Almost dark. He was walking up the path from out of the woods and he saw me painting.”

Alec glanced over at Max who said quietly, “You and me were at work.”

“We can’t guard him twenty-four seven,” Alec said. “He’s a grown man.”

“One of us should have been here,” Max protested, her face once again clouding with anger, although whether at him, herself, or Joshua Alec wasn’t certain. Suddenly she banged a fist on the table, making both men jump. “This shouldn’t have happened!”

“What did he do to you, Josh?” Alec asked, telling himself that Joshua must have been provoked.

The dog man shrugged. “He looked like one of them.”

“Them?”

“Breeding Cult. He looked a lot like Ames White.”

Alec’s eyes widened at that. The guy lying dead down by the pond was a dude named Vaughn Miles -- a middle-aged farmer who owned the property next to theirs. Luckily, he lived alone, or at least Alec thought so, hence no one was looking for him ... yet.

“What did he do, Josh?” Alec persisted. “When he saw you? Did he have a gun?”

“Gun,” Joshua said, nodding. “He was hunting.”

Alec hadn’t seen a rifle on the ground, and knew he’d have to find it. “Was he going to shoot you?”

Joshua shrugged elaborately.

“Did he point the gun at you?” Max asked.

Again, Joshua shrugged, and Alec wondered if this was what it was like being the parent of a recalcitrant teenager. “Why’d you kill him, Josh?”

“Thought he was bad,” Joshua said. “He looked angry when he saw me, and he had a gun. He shouted at me ... said I had to get out ... said he was going to call the police.”

“Did he aim the gun at you?” Alec repeated Max’s question. For some reason it was important to him that he be perfectly clear that Joshua had only killed in self defense.

Maddeningly, the dog man just shrugged again. “Don’t remember. Joshua was scared ... scared for you and Max. The Breeding Cult wants you dead and I didn’t want them to find you because of me.”

“Okay,” Alec said quietly, rising from the chair and giving Max a significant look. “I’ll take care of the body and find the gun.”

Her eyes conveyed her thanks even though she said nothing.

“Question is,” he continued, “what do we tell people when they come looking for Miles?”

“Nothing,” Max said softly. “We tell them nothing.”

Alec nodded. “I’ll bury the body deep.”

*****

“This is what you dreamed?” Alec said much later that night when he and Max were wrapped around each other in bed, their naked bodies warming one another.

“Yeah.”

“We can’t let this happen again, Max.”

“I know. We’ll have to keep a closer eye on him ... not leave him alone so much.”

“I really thought Josh was more savvy than this,” Alec said as he gently kissed the top of her head and shifted his arm so she could snuggle closer to his chest. “I thought we could trust him.”

“He doesn’t mean to kill people. He’s not like Isaac.”

“And I’m not like Ben,” Alec said, carrying the analogy a step further. “But we’ve all got that instinct in us, Max. Even you. Under the right circumstances any one of us is capable of some pretty horrible stuff.” He noticed the look in her eyes. “And that’s what you dream about the most, isn’t it? Not us gettin’ killed, but rather us doin’ the killing?”

She sniffed loudly and turned her face away from him, and Alec knew he was right. He could feel it.

However, he also knew he couldn’t do a damn thing about what their tangled DNA provoked them into, not even with Max’s visions to forewarn. “We’ve just got to take things one day at a time, Max,” he said. “Cover our asses, protect our own, and not look back too much.”

“And let Joshua kill more innocent people?” she asked cynically.

“We won’t let that happen again.”

Max just shook her head and began to cry.