Bedlam Boyz Read online

  Bedlam Boyz

  Ellen Guon

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright (c) 1993 by Ellen Guon

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  ISBN: 0-671-72177-1

  First printing, April 1993

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

  Printed in the United States of America

  Chapter One

  Sunset Boulevard was a blur of lights and noise, too many radios and car stereos, too many people talking and shouting and laughing. Kayla jammed her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket and wished all of it would just go away.

  At midnight, it seemed like everyone was on the street, all the weird and lonely and “professional” residents of Los Angeles: the punks and the pretty boys in tight black leather, the women in brightly colored miniskirts, the dealers with too many gold chains beneath their open shirt collars. Ten feet away from where she stood, a nervous-looking blond man traded cash for a little ziplock bag with a bored-looking guy in a cowboy hat; both men stepped back into the shadows of the alley as a black-and-white LAPD patrol car glided past, like a silent shark prowling through the late night traffic.

  Liane and Billy were twenty feet further up the sidewalk, gawking at leather jackets in a storefront window. She took her eyes off the panorama of the street around her, and joined them at the window. “Nice stuff,” she commented, looking at a tailored leather jacket with metal studs. The price tag said $249 … but it might as well have been a million dollars, she still couldn’t afford it.

  She leaned against the cold metal bars over the glass and thought about stealing some aspirin. Just the same as every night for the last few months, it felt like someone was pounding on her skull with a hammer. The noise from the traffic only made it worse. “Guys, okay if we stop someplace for some more aspirin?”

  “Another headache?” Billy asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Kayla lied.

  “You’ve been having headaches every day for weeks now,” Liane said. “Maybe we should take you to a doctor. What if this is something serious?”

  “It’s nothing, guys. I’ll get some aspirin, it’ll go away. There’s a QuickStart down the street, we can stop there.”

  A red convertible slowed on the street next to them, the man in the driver’s seat calling out to them. “Hey, chickies, want to party?”

  Billy glared at the driver until he shrugged and looked away. The convertible pulled away back into the traffic.

  “We could’ve just let him buy us some dinner and drinks,” Liane said softly. “Nothing more than that.” Liane had a hungry look in her eyes, the way she stared wistfully after the fancy red convertible.

  Kayla thought about the man, and that he had a hungry look in his eyes, too. A different kind of hunger.

  Billy shook his head. “He’d want something for his money, wouldn’t he? And then we’d end up in a situation like last weekend with you and Nick.”

  Liane, already pale under the streetlights with her white-blond hair and very fair skin, turned even paler. That had been an awful night, one that Kayla thought they wouldn’t survive. Nick, a local “businessman,” had been watching Liane for a few days. When Kayla and Billy were busy buying Cokes from a street vendor, Nick told Liane that he wanted her to work for him. Billy and Kayla weren’t his style … Billy was too mean-looking, with that knife-scar on his chin and that cold blue-eyed “Don’t mess with me” look, a trick that he said he’d learned from his old man, who was currently up for armed robbery in Folsom. Not at all like the pretty boys on Melrose Avenue. And Kayla, with her long brown hair and green eyes that were too big for her face, knew she just wasn’t cute enough for the chickenhawks, either.

  Liane, on the other hand, was drop-dead gorgeous, blond and with the face of an angel. And she attracted men like a magnet. Especially slimeballs like Nick.

  Maybe Billy telling Nick to go sit and spin wasn’t the best idea, she thought. Billy and Nick had screamed at each other for fifteen minutes. Nick had stormed away, and they were walking down the street two hours later when he and some friends had pulled up in Nick’s blue Chevy, waving a pistol at them. It’d been a fast run through the back streets of Hollywood, with Nick screaming curses in two languages at them, until they’d managed to lose him by climbing over several fences and hiding in a gardening shed in someone’s backyard.

  But, even after a night like that, she knew that getting out of that latest foster home had been a good idea. The lady who ran the place was nice enough, but her husband was slime, and he’d already started hitting on Liane, not even two days after she arrived there. True, every straight guy with hormones tried to hit on Liane, she was just too pretty for her own good, but this place was a foster home. It was supposed to be safe. Especially for someone like Liane, who was just a little too quiet, too easily spooked by people yelling, and scared of crowds and people standing too close to her.

  Liane was quiet and shy, and it had surprised Kayla that the blonde girl had been the one who’d first talked about running away, about how she, Billy, and Kayla could go out on their own. It had started out easily enough, stealing enough money to take the bus from Orange County to downtown L.A. From there, they went to Hollywood, mostly because Liane wanted to see the Chinese Theater. It was Kayla who’d spotted the abandoned office building across the street from Mann’s Chinese, and now Suite 230 (formerly an insurance agency, by the stationery they’d found in a closet) was their new home.

  It wasn’t bad: running water, though no showers or bathtubs, and plenty of old carpet padding to use for blankets. Kayla just wasn’t certain how long all of this could keep working out for them, though—she knew they were balancing on the edge, with too many people like Nick waiting around to catch them if they fell.

  Billy was the one who kept them together. Billy, who knew all about shoplifting and jimmying locks and using Sterno to heat up cans of chili. He treated them like his kid sisters, though sometimes Kayla caught him looking at Liane in a way that wasn’t very brotherly. Kayla knew that she and Liane would never have made it on their own without him. We’re lucky he was at that foster home, too, she thought. I don’t think I would’ve been brave enough to leave there without him… .

  Billy’s words broke into her thoughts. “Hey, Kay, there’s the QuickStart. Didn’t you want some aspirin?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Though she was sure that it wouldn’t help. Nothing seemed to help, not anymore. “You guys hang around up front, I’ll get the pills.”

  The headaches weren’t the worst of it; she could live with the pain, not a problem. It was the weird dizziness that hit her every so often, making her feel like she’d touched a live electrical wire. She was sick with something, she knew that, but it didn’t pay to worry about it … there was no way she could go to a doctor, at least, not now.

  They walked into the store, a brightly-lit building with rows of metal shelves, past a cheerful woman who was chatting with the store clerk, a quiet-looking young man with shoulder-length blond hair. Liane and Billy started looking through magazines near the front counter, and Kayla moved to the back of the store. In the last few weeks, they’d refined shoplifting to an art, running interference and distracting the people so one of them could walk out with enough food for dinner. It was a lot
easier than other kinds of theft. Kayla smiled in spite of herself, remembering how Billy had climbed through an open apartment window only to find the occupant, a fat middle-aged man, up to his neck in bubbles in his bathtub with several rubber ducks floating around him. He’d yelled and Billy had practically fallen out the window, terrified but still unable to keep from laughing.

  The three of them still laughed about that one, but the time when Billy had gone through an open house window and another guy had reached for a handgun next to his bed, that hadn’t been so funny. Fortunately for him, the gun hadn’t been loaded, and by the time the guy had managed to put some bullets in the revolver, Billy, Kayla, and Liane were already two blocks away and still running.

  Since then, Billy had said that they’d have to get by without any more breaking-and-entering. Shoplifting, that was a good trick, though Kayla was getting very tired of pork-and-beans heated in the can, chili, and stew. Sometimes she caught herself fantasizing about fresh-cooked food, something that didn’t come out of a can: baked potatoes, pancakes, or even bowls of oatmeal. Anything but canned spaghetti.

  She found the brand of aspirin she was looking for and checked the overhead mirror to make sure the clerk wasn’t watching—those mirrors worked both ways, if you knew what you were doing—and slipped the package into her jacket pocket, smiling to herself. It was a quiet night, all right, and once she took some pills to get rid of the headache, she’d be feeling fine… .

  Gunshots shattered the silence.

  Liane screamed a moment later, a sound that echoed through the store. Kayla didn’t even think about it; she ran toward the sound of Liane’s scream and skidded around the corner of the row of shelves, stopping short at the sight before her.

  The woman was lying very still in a pool of her own blood, sprawled across a small potted palm. The clerk’s body wasn’t in sight, but Kayla could see more blood sprayed across the wall behind the counter. A man wearing a long leather coat stood near the doorway and smiled at her, a military assault rifle clenched in his hands.

  Not three feet away from her, Billy held Liane in his arms, both of them frozen with terror. The man brought the assault rifle up, aiming at the three of them. Kayla brought up her hands instinctively to shield her face.

  Nothing happened.

  He isn’t going to kill us, Kayla thought with a faint wave of relief, and opened her eyes.

  The man was staring at her. Directly at her, not at Billy, not at Liane. A split-second later, she realized why: her hands were on fire. No, not exactly fire … it was a blue light that flickered over her hands, lines of light that weaved and danced around her fingers.

  She was too startled to do anything except stare at her hands and the pale blue light. A wave of dizziness hit her, and that strange feeling of hot power, like electricity running through her entire body—she could feel the hair on her forearms standing on end, her hands tingling faintly where the light touched her.

  Oh my … oh my God …

  The light faded away. She stared at her fingers, and through them, saw the gunman shaking his head slowly, as though he couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.

  Then she saw his hands tighten on the rifle and knew that in another split-second he’d shoot them anyhow… .

  Kayla didn’t even think about it; she dived for him and that gun, sending both of them crashing into a rack of magazines. She tried to pull the gun out of his grip; he shoved her, hard, and she fell back against the blond woman’s body, which gave way beneath her. She landed on the floor; her head hit hard against the linoleum. She blinked; the barrel of the gun was only inches from her face … she could see the man, smiling with delight, as his finger tightened on the trigger… .

  Billy slammed into the gunman with a football tackle. The gun went off again, gunshots echoing through the small store. A bullet zinged past Kayla to impact the floor next to her.

  She lay there for a moment, concentrating on breathing, then climbed unsteadily to her feet. Her legs were shaking so much she could barely stand as she moved to where Billy and the man were both lying motionless on the floor.

  Billy was still alive, blood slowly staining through his shirt and jeans. She could see where the bullets had hit him, one in his leg, another in his shoulder. The shoulder wound was the worst, blood welling out in a wide stain down his side and onto the floor.

  She wanted to scream, but knew there wasn’t time for it. Billy was always the one who knew exactly what to do in a bad situation; she had to think the way he did, do something fast before all of his life spilled out onto the floor.

  She tried to remember what first aid you were supposed to do for gunshot wounds. Applying pressure to stop the bleeding, that was the only thing she could think of. And shock—you had to cover them with a blanket or something so they’d stay warm. She didn’t have a blanket, or anything to use on the wound … she pressed her hand against the ripped skin and shirt on Billy’s shoulder. Blood flowed out around her fingers, more with every heartbeat.

  This isn’t working… .

  She pressed harder. “It isn’t working,” she whispered. She looked up suddenly at Liane, still standing by the candy racks. “Go get help, damn it!” she yelled. Liane didn’t move: she was standing silently, staring at Kayla … at Kayla’s hands …

  … at the tendrils of blue light, twisting around her fingertips. The light brightened as she looked at it, radiating out from her hands, moving in rippling circles over Billy’s shoulder and chest. Suddenly she saw Billy’s wound beneath her hands, through her hands, as though she was a ghost. No, it wasn’t exactly seeing … it was feeling, knowing, sensing the tears through the skin and muscle, the pressure of the tiny bullet lodged against the bone … so small, to do so much damage! The bullet, a little squashed piece of metal, was buried beneath a layer of muscle—she reached the part of her mind that was sensing all of this deep into the wound and tugged at the bullet, carefully working it loose.

  It slid into her hand before she realized it. With a shudder, she flung it under the magazine rack, then turned back to Billy. There was more blood now, flowing from an artery that had been nicked by the bullet’s passage. She touched the wound with unsteady fingers, and the blue light intensified, so incandescent that she had to close her eyes.

  The light still shone through her closed eyelids, impossibly bright. Now she could feel the cut artery sealing itself, the muscles knitting together beneath her fingertips. She could feel the energy pouring out of her and into Billy, into the damaged tissue. And she knew this without seeing it, her eyes still tightly closed against the brilliance of the light. Somehow she knew how to help him, how to do whatever it was that she was doing, and it felt terrific. It felt better than anything she’d ever done before, exhilarating and electric, as though she was finally alive at last after being half-awake for years. Then it was over; the light faded away, leaving her dizzy and light-headed and as exhausted as though she’d been running for miles.

  She opened her eyes to see what she’d done.

  The bullet hole was gone. Billy’s shirt was still soaked with blood, but the wound had disappeared, only a dull pink line marking where it had been. Her friend was still unconscious, but she could feel the life returning to his body, that the danger of immediate death was over. He was still in pain from another bullet in his leg, but even without looking at it, Kayla knew that she could close that wound as well. As soon as she took another couple seconds to catch her breath, she would … she would …

  Dizziness and nausea hit her like a fist, and she fell back against the magazine rack, closing her eyes and concentrating on breathing.

  This isn’t real, she thought. People don’t just wake up one morning able to seal up bullet holes in their friends just by wanting it to happen. Something is going on here, something weirder than anything I’ve ever heard of in my entire life… .

  She heard a choked noise behind her and turned. Liane was still standing there, visibly trembling, making odd gasping soun
ds like she couldn’t get enough air to breathe. Without saying a word, she ran for the door, flinging it open. The noise of the street outside was deafening in the deathly silence of the store.

  “Liane, wait!” Kayla shouted. Not even glancing back at her, Liane ran through the doorway and out into the street.

  Kayla tried to get up and follow her, but another tide of dizziness washed over her. She slumped back against the magazine rack.

  ” … help me …” a weak voice whispered, very close to her. ” … please …”

  She looked around for the source of the voice, then realized, with a tiny start of fear, who it was. She stared at the gunman, lying on the blood-stained floor not quite three feet away from her. “W-what?”

  “Heal me,” he whispered, his face contorted with pain. “I know you can do it, I saw you help the boy. Please.”

  She edged away from him, shaking her head. He grabbed for her hand, pulling her close. “Please …” His face was very pale, his lip bleeding where he’d bitten it in pain. He placed her hand on his chest, rising and falling with each painful breath, against the torn flesh and warm wet blood.

  He killed those two people, she thought. And he nearly killed Billy. And he would’ve killed me and Liane, too, but now …

  Now his eyes were human again, not smiling inhumanly at something she couldn’t see or understand. She could feel her hands tingling again, that strange feeling like something was going to happen.

  I should help Billy, he’s still hurting, his leg is still bleeding. I shouldn’t help this guy, even if he is dying… . She could feel, somehow, the sensation that his life was fading away in front of her eyes.

  This time she called it to her, that strange cold blue fire, and felt it wreathe around her hands and flow down through her fingertips. The man made a faint noise, something between a whimper and a moan, as the light coursed over his chest. She worked slowly and methodically, drawing the bullet out and sealing the wound shut. It was easier this time, in a way, though she could feel the exhaustion and dizziness pulling at her, a wave of darkness threatening at the edges of her mind. She fought it off for as long as she could, trying to concentrate on the man’s wounds, but everything was moving too fast, whirling around her… .