Read The Minus Faction, Episode One: Breakout for Free Online Page B

make it, so can you.
    If I can make it.
    John sat in his dark hospital room and looked down at his legs, limp and bent, barely fitting in the space between the seat and the footrest. He was a big man, always had been.
    They had come, finally. The eyeless suits. The bastards. They were going to take it away. The tiny bit he had left.
    He looked at his legs, then at his burned and mottled skin.
    He scowled and made a fist and punched himself with his good arm. He punched his legs as hard as he could. He heard the sound, but he felt nothing.
    A tear came.
    John Michael Regent held up his one good hand in a ball. It shook in silent fury. He bared his teeth as teardrops fell from his lips. He wanted to scream. But then everyone would come. He wanted to yell. But they'd just look at him with those eyes.
    He clenched his own shut. He was so tired. Of everything.
    This would've been a night for a run. He always went at night. Nobody was likely to see and no body was likely to be missed.
    His first few times he just ran and ran and ran, two firm legs striking the pavement in even strides, some other man's heart pounding. Even a woman's once. John had to take what he could get.
    That was the night he happened on a mugging. It was an accident, a wrong turn at 3 a.m. He taught the jerk a lesson and handed the scared man on the pavement his wallet back. The guy just stared up at the strange woman in the hood and dark sunglasses—sunglasses, at night—who had leapt down from a roof and beat the shit out of his attacker.
    "Those were some moves," he said on his back, wide-eyed.
    The woman had bent the mugger's leg at the knee and roundhoused him into the wall. Right in the balls. Then she popped him straight up the jaw with the palm of her hand, knocked him out.
    She didn't respond. She just dropped the wallet and ran away.
    The next week, John went looking for trouble. That was how he justified it. Taking the bodies. Taking what wasn't his. Stealing them. Stealing tiny bits of someone else's life. They're not using it, he told himself. Like an idle computer or a fallow plot of earth. And I can do some good with it. I should do some good with it.
    So John ran and ran and ran all over the city and all through the night. It felt good. On his fourth patrol, John stopped a backseat rape. Last month he helped a wounded pedestrian, a victim of a drunk hit-and-run, make it to a hospital. Two weeks ago he was tutoring a parkour group in basic self-defense. They were already in great shape. They knew how to move. He was just organizing them, teaching them tactics, things to consider when you happen upon a crime.
    He pushed it that night. He stayed out too long. He watched the dawn come up from the roof of a five-story building. The little stretch of city before him hung on the outskirts of Philly and was full of working-class ethnic neighborhoods and strip malls. He was starting to think of it as his responsibility.
    From what he could tell, the police weren't looking for anyone, or at least not for anyone in particular. All anyone knew was that there were some helpful citizens about, and the only things they had in common were the hoodie and the sunglasses.
    But the attack on the drug den would bring them to the hospital. Sooner or later, someone would put the pieces together, find the connection. They'd all been patients at the fancy new VA. They'd all used advanced hand-to-hand, like what a soldier would know. Regent couldn't stay. It was too much of a risk now. If he ever wanted to run again, he had to get away. It was already on the news.
    But in trying to leave, he had aroused his shadowy pursuers. John knew how it worked. "Ayn" was just the first wave. It was her job to keep him on the reservation long enough for the others to arrive. As his file was chewed by the system, as it triggered automatic flags and warnings, as numbered bureaucrats sipped soy lattes and processed it—processed him —each in tiny chunks, they would summon the