Los Angeles

2020

My name is Zane. My designation is X5-205. I'm a fugitive, but I'm not running from justice; as a matter of fact, it's the opposite. I'm a fugitive from injustice. I'm not the criminal – I'm running from the criminals. Hard to believe, maybe. True, definitely.

The problem with being a fugitive, even one as well-trained as I am, is that after a while, you stop feeling like a fugitive. It's just human nature to stop looking over your shoulder when you feel safe. And I'm mostly human.

That's what I tell myself, anyway.

The people chasing me are dedicated like you wouldn't believe. So far, they've always caught up to me. They get better at their jobs even as I get better at mine. It took them only four months to catch up to me in Tacoma, back in 2010. I narrowly escaped that one with my life. I learned from it, though; took my lessons away with me just like I took the bullet wound they gave me. I lasted nine months in Portland. My mistake that time was not running far enough before going to ground. When they found me there, I got away clean, and I didn't stop until I hit New Mexico. I made it four years there, long enough to build a bit of a life for myself. My mistake there was forgetting a core part of my training – getting lost was easier and more effective if you did it in a crowd. I felt safe in my sleepy little town, where I knew everybody's name. The problem with that was that, after a while, they all knew mine. To this day, I'm still not sure how they found me.

Doesn't matter. Point is, they found me. I got away that time because of sheer luck. That's a story for another time. After that, I remembered my training. I used it to my advantage. I picked the biggest population I could find and went to ground in Los Angeles. I was a model citizen. No more break-ins. No more doing things the easy way. I got a simple job as an auto mechanic and kept my head down. Zack found me, but that didn't worry me. Zack was better at his job than Manticore. In a way, he was more Manticore than Manticore. Zack never forgot what they taught us. He used it against them at every turn. He took me into the fold of his mission, which was to keep all of us escapees isolated and safe.

So after five years in the same place, in the same job, that's exactly how I felt – safe. I knew Manticore hadn't given up. They'd never give up. They couldn't. But I hadn't had a blip on my radar in five years. I had Zack, the perfect soldier, watching my back. I fell into a daily routine, experienced a little happiness, a little normalcy. I even got a dog. No girlfriend, no close friends...those things weren't an option for a guy like me. But my dog Bruiser was loyal. He'd never rat me out, because they couldn't threaten Bruiser. They couldn't intimidate him. They couldn't tempt him with money. All he cared about was his daily rations and a little attention from me.

I worked ten hours a day, just like everybody else. I had co-workers I liked and disliked, just like a normal person. I bought a car and worked on it in my spare time, and even that felt normal.

One night, in the spring of 2020, the world I'd built for myself came crashing down around my ears. Again.

I was on shift with Daryl. Daryl was a pain in the ass. He was the owner's son, so he felt entitled to boss me around. Never mind the fact that he was an ignorant, loud-mouthed buffoon with the mechanical skills of a Rhesus monkey.

And he always got to pick what we listened to on the TV.

We were working on an old wreck of a pre-Pulse Ford. Well, I was. Daryl was underneath on the crawler, pretending to check the bolts that I'd already replaced and occasionally asking me to stop what I was doing to hand him something, just to remind me who was in charge. I was reattaching the transmission I'd rebuilt to the engine block when the television program suddenly transformed into a message.

A message for me.

"This is a message for those known as X5. You have been compromised. You are in danger. You know what to do. I repeat, your locations have been compromised. You know what to do. This message will repeat every hour, on the hour, until each of you has checked in."

That message was like a time machine. Instantly, I was nine years old again, barefooted and in a hospital johnny, sprinting through the snow with bullets flitting around me as I made a mad dash for freedom. All conscious thought had left my head. My emotions had disappeared, and what replaced them was a cold curtain of training and instinct. Only three words were in my brain, and they repeated over and over, like a stuttering neon sign.

Escape and evade.