Outcasts by Alan Janney

Ships passing in the night. Are you sure you want to talk about this? We’re being followed by a lot of ears and this is pretty juicy gossip.” She indicated our protective contingent. I glanced around and several airmen snapped their eyes forward, faces wooden and fixed. Our group crossed a street and began jogging along side the green Destroyer Golf Course. We had swelled to twenty total joggers.
    After a transport helicopter thundered overhead, we could speak again. I asked, “Why can’t it be permanent?”
    “They live on different planets. Richard’s life is here. Samantha’s is…everywhere.” She had begun taking deep breaths. So far the run wasn’t affecting me. “Do you mind if I take your photo with my phone while you jog?”
    I said, “I don’t care. Does the age thing bother you?”
    “Smile!” I smiled. Click. She asked, “What age thing?”
    “Infected can live a long time,” I explained. This was dangerous territory and I’d been dreading this conversation. “Two or three times longer than normal.”
    “You mean, does it bother me that when I’m sixty-five you’ll still look like a hot twenty-five year old?” she grinned, brightening the world. She could charge solar panels with her smile. “I’m okay with the arrangement.”
    “Well, when you put it that way…”
    She elbowed me lightly. “I’ll try to die young, like maybe seventy, so you can start dating hot girls again.”
    “This conversation has grown weird.”
    “What bothers me is the suicidal tendencies you Infected have. I’ve heard you and Samantha and Puck talking about it, about how Infected don’t live long because cheating death sounds so…adventurous.”
    “You have nothing to worry about,” I said.
    “You don’t feel it?”
    “No, I do. I feel it. But I have more to live for than the others do. I have you.”
    “If you keep talking like that, Outlaw, then you can have me right here on the golf course.”
    The Air Force airmen surrounding us around stifled laughter.
     
----
     
    Puck called us that night. “Oh man. Turn on your television.”
    “Which channel?”
    “All of them.” His voice came through my speaker phone. He didn’t sound happy. Katie shot me a worried look and pressed the remote. The television on the dresser flickered on. Samantha wandered in from the other room. She was sharpening a knife.
    All the major stations were playing a video recording they’d just received. Teresa Triplett was on screen. The lighting was bad. She appeared to be in an empty room, sitting on a chair, looking exhausted and scared. She wore a blue robe tied across the middle with a wide red sash.
    She spoke. “This is Teresa Triplett, reporting from downtown Los Angeles, within the Empire of the New Age.” Her voice was shaky and hollow, and the mic wasn’t close enough to her mouth. “I’m here to read a message from Martin Patterson, the man you call the Chemist.”
    Samantha Gear and I sat on the edge of the bed, just inches from the screen.
    Teresa Triplett said in a rush, clearly going off script, “I’ve been told if I don’t read this statement then my roommate will be executed.” I groaned inwardly. Not a good idea, Teresa. You might be punished for that later. Her roommate and fellow hostage was the movie star Natalie North. “I’m being treated well. We all are. It is the presence of the United States’ military that keeps us hostage. The farther you remove yourselves from our Kingdom, the more freedom the Emperor will grant us.”
    Samantha grunted as Teresa Triplett read from the paper. Katie had to elbow us aside so she could see the screen. Puck was silent. Most of the world was watching, I bet.
    Teresa continued, “Our Emperor has taken notice of the media’s Outlaw discovery. This masked terrorist has been identified as a child, a mere high school student named Chase Jackson. Our Father has known this all along, and wants you to know the boy may appear innocuous but in reality he