He shifted uncomfortably, and after a very long pause, he said, “I’m just a guy yer better off not knowing.”

She snorted a laugh through her nose, although her drugged state seemed to rob it of all impact. “I know that now. Tell me why.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

Another sullen pause. “’Cause I don’t remember.”

“No, I don’t buy that. You wouldn’t seem ashamed if you couldn’t remember a thing.”

“I’m not ashamed, I’m…” he floundered for words, and she let him. (Besides, she was too stoned to be much of a help.) Finally, he said, “I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“What I am.”

What did you say to that? “You’re a Human being, Logan. I know that’s scary by itself, but-”

“I’m not.”

“What do you mean you’re not? Of course you are! What the hell else could you be? Are you gonna say alien, is that it? Don’t make me come over there.”

He sighed heavily, and she could hear his hand rubbing roughly against his beard. “I don’t know what I am. I’m just not like you.”

“Damn right you’re not like me. You’re not in a hospital bed once removed from a stone slab.” Although right now, with the drugs still in full effect, it wasn’t so bad. I.V’s clustered by the head of her bed like faithful attendants, and monitors bleeped along happily in silent mode, their light just blue and green enough to make everything in a half meter radius look sickly and slightly putrid, including her own pallid flesh. “So why aren’t you like me?”

The pause dragged out so long she wondered if she had fallen asleep. Except she couldn’t have thought that if she wasn’t awake. “I’m just not,” he said. That was so helpful, he might as well have said nothing at all.

With a sigh, she asked, “So what were you in the military? Some kind of operative?”

She noticed he sat up sharply, as if she had poked an open wound. “Why d’ya say that?”

“The tags. I saw the dog tags under your shirt.”

His hand went to his chest, like touching a secret talisman, or the anchor around his neck dragging him down. After allowing him the chance to say something - anything - she asked, “What’s it say on your tags, Logan?”

He muttered something that was probably, “Nothing.”

She wasn’t about to let him get away with that. “If they are army - Marine, Navy, whatever the fuck -” (Did the Navy guys have dog tags?) “- it has your name, rank, and serial number. My granddad served during World War Two, you can’t tell me that’s not true.”

“It isn’t, not for mine,” he said defensively. “It just has numbers.”

“And a name. You can’t tell me your name’s not on it.”

“That’s not my name,” he growled bitterly, as if this was an argument he’d had with himself many times.

“Oh? What’s it say?”

Another long period of silence, where the unbearable itching of her stitches convinced her she was still awake. “It says Wolverine.”

At first, since he was obviously talking down towards his shoes, she was sure she hadn’t heard him right. But out of the two things he could have said - margarine or wolverine - only the latter made some kind of sense, although just barely. “Wolverine? That’s all it says?” She saw his silhouette bob; a nod. “When do they slap nicknames on dog tags?” It was a rhetorical question, but he shrugged anyways.

She wasn’t about to tell him that she thought wolverines were the most nasty bastards of the animal kingdom, kind of the dry land equivalent of the shark (another creature she couldn’t bear, although she supposed Jaws was responsible for that), because she didn’t think he’d take that information well. But how could you like those vicious little things? Even cougars were afraid of them, and they were almost four times their size. To be called a wolverine was, in her book, a huge insult; it was like calling someone a psychopath. But if she thought about it in a logical way, it kind of made sense that someone would call him that. He was definitely a survivor, and it was easy to characterize his dispatching of the gunmen as vicious (and they had a “size” advantage as well - they had semi-automatic weapons), and what the fuck was up with all that ‘smelling” things? Wolverine’s were known for their sharp sense of smell, so that fit (maybe). Also, didn’t they have remarkable sta! mina - couldn’t they travel an entire mountain range with little trouble? That tracked too.

But it also made her wonder anew what the fuck he was. So, the army - she was just going to assume the army - had this guy, trained him to be a killer (the guy knew damn well what he was doing - rage alone wasn’t enough to make you lethal, not in plain old hand to hand combat; it wasn’t as easy to take down an armed opponent as some self-defense classes would teach you. You needed training and skills, and Logan obviously had them in spades), and then … what? She knew Monie would say ‘Secret project - they messed with his mind. He probably knew too much,” but in spite of Monie’s entertaining flights of fancy, things like that didn’t happen in real life. Sure, the army fucked up, and desperately covered up its mistakes rather than acknowledging them, but almost all bureaucracies did. He could have been a part of something that fucked him up in an unexpected way, and they - what, abandoned him? It was possible, though unlikely. The most plausible scenario was they loc! ked him up in a military hospital and he escaped, but now that he was out, they weren’t going to acknowledge their responsibility for him. Clearly he could be extremely dangerous, more than she ever credited him with, and yet she assumed if they thought he was going to turn serial killer, they’d have made a conscious effort to round him up, maybe using a bullshit cover story. So, where were they? They must have thought he was more of a danger to himself than anyone else. But why then call him wolverine? Why give him dog tags to remind him, rub it in his face? They might as well have stamped “killer” on them and sent him on his way.

“I don’t wanna hurt anyone,” Logan said, as if reading her thoughts. She heard his boots scuff nervously on the floor. “But I wanna be left alone.”

“Fair enough. So why not do what most people do nowadays? Hide in plain sight. It’s safer in a crowd anyways. That way whoever’s after ya will have a harder time getting to you, as long as they don’t want people to possibly capture it all on videotape and sell it to a cable news network. And I’m just guessin’ here that’s not what they want. By isolating yourself, you’re doing half their job for them.”

He nodded, but didn’t say anything. She had a feeling she was being politely dismissed. After letting the time drag - did this guy have no social skills at all? - she pointed out, “We could run the numbers on the tags, see if we can get a match. You could be in a military database somewhere.”

He shook his head emphatically. “No, I … I don’t want them to know I’m still alive.”

That was such a curious thing to say she considered it a moment. Any other way to take that? No, probably not. “Are you saying they think you’re dead, or they tried to kill you?”

Another big ass pause. “I dunno. Maybe both.”

“Why would they do that?”

You could park a truck in his pauses, and it was getting really annoying.“ I dunno. I’m a freak.”

“Why are you a freak? And if you say “I dunno” again I’m throwing an I.V. stand at you.”

He scoffed humorlessly. “Haven’t you guessed by now?”

He had a point. Shouldn’t it have been obvious? He was alive and breathing, after freezing his ass off, after starving, after taking several bullets to the body; not just alive, but perfectly fine - he was the epitome of physical health. (And he looked pretty damn good in a general sense, although she wouldn’t go as far as Monie.) That itself was impossible, if you didn’t count how many miles he must have traveled on foot, and his rapid, precise elimination of the would be drug barons. “Not to be completely facetious, but are you invincible or something?”

He stood up, preparing to leave. “Nuh, I get hurt. I hurt a lot. I just … get better. Fast.”

“Ever been exposed to gamma radiation?”

“Huh?”

“Nothing - joke.” It really wasn’t fair to tease an amnesiac.

Another long pause. “That’s not normal, is it?”

“What? Sucking up a three rounds to the chest? No, not really.” It was her turn to pause. Was he actually embarrassed about this? He was ashamed of being different? Well, that wasn’t right. Not that she couldn’t sympathize; being half-Indian and half-white had always been an interesting experience, especially since her parents had broken up so acrimoniously and she ended up living with her mother and her very white family, that had never quite approved of the “half-breed”. A position that became more undeniably clear once her mother remarried, and to a white man this time, and had the white kids her grandparents were so eagerly waiting for. But he was a white guy - he was the one group that never had to worry about being overtly discriminated against. What the hell did he have to be ashamed of? Not being normal? Not being Human? Well, he was Human, so … oh shit. “You’re a mutant, aren’t you?” Now it seemed so obviously she could have hit herself in the forehead, if she wasn’t afraid of pulling out the I.V. tubes.

She saw his posture stiffen sharply. “Wh-what’s that?”

“Oh, come on - you must’ve seen a newspaper or magazine article referring to it. “

“I’m not … I don’t … animal; I’m an animal.”

“We’re all animals; we’re descended from apes. Or made out of dirt, sand, ribs and slaw, whatever your religious inclination. But still animals, of a sort.”

“Not like me.”

“What makes you so fucking special?” She didn’t know if the wearing off of the medication was making her more daring, or simply more stroppy.

Long silence, and she was sure she had offended him. But finally he admitted, “I can’t think of myself as a person. I don’t know why, but Logan equals animal in my mind.”

It was just weird enough to be true. “Why? ‘Cause that was drilled into your head?”

He shrugged, his arms falling loose at his sides. “I don’t know a lot, okay? I just know that this feels right.” He was clearly leaving; he must have felt he had said as much as he ever intended to say.

She wanted to say something philosophical, profound, or at least encouraging, but she was drawing a blank. Really, all she wanted to do was go back to sleep, even though she knew it was probably the last time she’d ever see him. “Why didn’t you leave me there, in the cabin?” She asked. “I told you you could.”

That made him pause. He was a black shadow by the door, a slash of light from the blinds showing that - while he may have changed his clothes - he still kept that haggard looking leather jacket. “I … I tried. I got to the door, but … I couldn’t. I don’t know why; I couldn’t leave you there.”

“That was almost Human of you, Logan. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

He just stood there, frozen in silence, perhaps trying to discern if there had been sarcasm in her statement. There wasn’t, just a sort of weariness. She was simply tired, and didn’t see why a guy as obviously powerful as he was would stand for being a victim of some weird version of the Stockholm Syndrome (“I‘m an animal, therefore I deserved this.”). Maybe somebody fucked him up good and proper, but he must have survived them. He could survive this bullshit too, if he gave himself half a chance.

Finally he opened the door and left, far more quietly than any man she had ever known, but then again, he wasn’t like any man she had ever known. It fit.

She closed her eyes and groaned, happy to let the narcotic cocktail pull her down into blissful nullity, but she couldn’t help but wonder - for the thousandth time - how she was ever going to put this into a reasonably plausible report, and leave his name off of it.

12

He was honestly at a loss as to how he was supposed to proceed, but then he realized - if his supposition was at all correct - the mountain would come to Mohammed. He just had to make sure the mountain knew where he was.

First, he dropped by Tagwa’s again, to retrieve what was left of the dart, pull the synopsis page out of the report, and get Ellison’s home address (unlisted - but with Tohiro’s connections, he found it in five minutes). Logan decided to test a theory he had about the dart, and once that was done, broke into Ellison’s split level in a run down suburb (the house itself was verging on the edge of quaint) and planted the dart and report page in the medicine chest in his bathroom. Ellison would hopefully get the dart back in the evidence locker before someone noticed it was missing, and maybe the report would give him some answers. He knew he’d be pissed off that he broke into his place, but he needed to realize - cop or not - how vulnerable he was to the likes of people him, and others even more unscrupulous. Logan then returned to Yasha’s place, long enough to drop off the books he bought (all but one - he slipped a paperback into his inner jacket pocket) and make sure no one else had been there, then headed out to make sure he was conspicuous.

Mainly he walked around the city, openly perusing the fruit and vegetable stands in the Asian quarter of
the city, buying an over-priced, fancy puréed fruit drink from a coffee stand, wandering around a tiled
mall for no fucking reason at all, until the sheer joyless monotony of the place (and its overpowering chemical/human smell) made him want to scream. That’s when he decided to walk to the nearest open space, which was Queen Elizabeth Park, almost violent in its greenery.

There was no denying the beauty of the place, although something about it always struck him as far too manicured, far too rigid; a Scott attitude in park form. Although it was the landscaping that seemed anal, not the land itself.

The day had become overcast, although it had yet to rain, and there were a few people wandering around the massive park paths, mostly camera wielding tourist. After briefly wondering if he should send Marcus a picture of the big and aggressively shapeless Henry Moore sculpture outside the conservatory (well, it wasn’t all that ugly; it was just, in his eyes, remarkably pointless. And besides, he didn’t have a camera), he wandered off until he found a place to sit, near a pond but pretty well exposed to the main path. Paths crisscrossed the park like flat lines everyone was supposed to follow without fail; again, like Scott, they didn’t like people getting off the straight and narrow. But Logan kicked back and pulled out his copy of Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles” and started to read, daring the clouds to open up and pour down on him, and someone to come and tell him he had to move. Neither happened.