Kzine Issue 22

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  He continued to harness the energy until every nerve in his body tingled with it. At the point of no return, he sent it towards the man in a single wave, immediately realising his mistake.

  The man had been bluffing, and he absorbed the abilities like a flagpole in a lightning storm. He even seemed to glow for a moment, and George felt his energy slip through his fingers like confetti. The man locked into his consciousness, holding him in situ as he had done to the girl only a few moments ago.

  Give us what we are owed, he sent.

  No, George replied. Let me go, or I can make life very difficult for your sister here at Ormill Community College.

  We’re way beyond extra homework here, the man smiled in response. Last chance before I take the rest of your ability. You can feel my power, you know I can. Do you have the money or not?

  George wanted to tell him to go fuck himself for a third time, but he felt too weak to produce the thought. Weak and afraid. Like love, the ability could grow and diminish, but once it’s gone, it’s gone.

  “Ok,” he said out loud. “I’ll get it.”

  The connection broke suddenly, and George felt an enormous weight leave him, as if he had been released from a choke-hold. He shook his head, feeling anger and embarrassment surge into the gaps where his ability had been.

  The man ignored him and bent to his sister, combing the hair out of her eyes. “Sarah, wake up. You ok? It’s Ben.”

  “Ben?” she said, looking around herself as she lifted her head from the table. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” he said, looking at George. His voice, far from the commanding tones George had heard in his head, was high and squeaky. He sounded like Kermit the goddamn frog. Fuck. “We just need to get our money then we can go.”

  “Yes, fine,” George said, removing the key from his belt and unlocking the second drawer down. “I need to get my card, I don’t keep that kind of cash on me. That ok?”

  The man nodded once, the same way his sister had done almost exclusively through their interaction. He helped her from her chair and put an arm around her. “There’s an ATM on this floor, just down the hall.”

  “You don’t think I know that?” George snapped, removing the key from the lock and sliding open the drawer.

  “We’ll come with you,” the man said, trying to sound stern through a voice that broke at every third syllable. “Just to make sure there’s no funny business.”

  George nodded. He reached into his desk drawer, moved his wallet to one side, and took out the 7.62x41mm calibre silenced SP-4 instead, aiming the barrel and pulling the trigger twice, one for each of them. Despite their psychic ability, the brother sister duo had been so enraptured in worrying about each other that their faces had not even had time to register shock as the rounds exploded from the back of their heads, jerking back their necks and sending a fine red mist into the air. Love! Ha.

  In the quiet of the office, the sound was no louder than an air rifle, and George moved over to where they had fallen, crouching down on one knee between them. It was still possible, but he needed to be quick.

  After he finished, he lay back in ecstasy on the tiles, letting the rejuvenated life spirit flow through his veins. There was nothing like a Restoration to blow away the cobwebs and re-start his engine. This time, he had even got a double dose. It was crazy really; even the best psychic in the world will still die like a dog from a hot piece of lead to the face. He continued to lie there until the pooling blood had nearly reached his shoes.

  Five minutes later and he was making his preparations—setting his out-of-office, dropping the Dean (a painfully trusting Freudian fanboy) an email to arrange cover for his lessons due to illness, and calmly writing a do not disturb note for his office door.

  The brother and sister had gone now—to where, even he didn’t know. Their bodies, however, would not be found until 3:17 on Sunday, when the cleaning lady would finally be so concerned about the smell she would request a key from the Dean. They would come to the office together and stand back in horror as the grey faces of two former students stared up at them from green tiles.

  George Durman—along with Keith Holman, Gerald Arthur, Craig Halliday, and a long list of other aliases he had used—would be long gone by then. Maybe he would go to south of the border this time, find himself some actividad psíquica. He had read something only a few days ago about a toddler with the ability to levitate objects with their mind down in Hermosillo. It was probably bullshit, but it was worth a shot. He could do with a little sun anyway. Yes, Hermosillo sounded just fine.

  Readjusting himself in his seat, he began to stack the cards again, holding them in place using a tiny portion of what he had taken.

  This time, he knew, the cards would not fall.

  TWINS

  by Mark Bilsborough

  Charlie passed the salt to Zack without being asked. He never needed to be asked, at least out loud.

  “You’re doing it now, aren’t you?” said his mother, clearly not impressed.

  “We’re always doing it, Mama.”

  “Your father wishes you wouldn’t.”

  Charlie glanced at his brother. “We don’t actually have a choice.”

  “You always have a choice,” said his mother.

  “No we don’t,” the twins answered together, laughing.

  “It’s not funny,” said their father, breaking his silence.

  Charlie wished he could read his father’s mind, the way he could read Zack’s. But he didn’t really need to gauge the emotions radiating from him like a furnace. Fear, suspicion, and betrayal.

  He’s mad ‘cause we’re leaving, he said to Zack. Mom looked over, puzzled, aware that they were talking telepathically. He knew his parents felt excluded by the link he had with Zack, by the closeness that it delivered that was far stronger than the parent child bond could ever be.

  No, he’s relieved. But he feels guilty, ‘cause we’re his boys and he knows he should love us.

  And he’s running out of opportunities to tell us what a disappointment we are.

  Charlie wondered whether he should respond to his father with tact or rudeness, but then the food arrived and the moment passed.

  Charlie and Zack ordered the same meal, of course. Chickpeas and spinach with more than a hint of chilli. A glance over to his parents reminded Charlie how annoyed that made them, eating the same food, doing the same things. Mom ordered the same, probably in some misguided attempt to get closer to them. Everybody knew she hated chickpeas.

  His father, Davis McCall, nearly cancelled when he realised that the restaurant was called Veganomics. Steak was more his thing: blood red and dripping. The old man sat rigidly, like the proud man he was, holding his cutlery with surgical precision. His hair was short and grey now and gravity had pulled his thin, pinched face downwards. Charlie wondered if that was how he and Zack would look in a few years. No, they took after their mother too much. Heavier, stockier, shorter, with fuller, more rounded features. Nadine MacCall had been a beauty when she’d been younger, and her sons had inherited her easy, casual attractiveness.

  Zack filled their mother in on all the mission details. “I’m the lucky one,” he said. “I get to go to the stars.”

  Charlie wasn’t so sure, and he hadn’t argued much when Zack had run, anguished, to Mission Control when they’d first suggested Charlie should be the one to go. Zack got his way, of course, like he always did.

  “Lucky?” she said. “I’ll never see you again!”

  Zack sighed. “They need me, Mom.”

  “Nonsense. They’ve got two other sets of twins. They don’t need all three of you.”

  “Yes they do, Mom, Because…” Zack’s sentence tailed off as Nadine picked up on the implications.

  “Because they don’t think you’ll all make it.”

  “They’re just being cautious, is all,” said Charlie, putting his hand on his mother’s arm. “They estimate the chances of failure are less than twenty percent, and
that makes it almost certain we will make it.”

  “We’re not a gambling family, Charles, never have been.”

  She’d clearly never seen them play cards, Zack at the table, getting all the attention, Charlie opposite, standing unobtrusively behind his opponents.

  “They have to put us in cryo though. Otherwise we wouldn’t be the same age at the other end. And they don’t think the link will work so well if we’ve aged at different rates.” Not to mention the fact that Charlie would be eighty four years old by the time the thirty three year old Zack arrived on Sanctuary, courtesy of speed of light time dilation. Seven years for Zack but fifty four for Charlie.

  When the first set of twins had displayed proper telepathic powers, they’d been regarded as freaks and curios. But inevitably the scientists wanted to poke and prod until the limits of their abilities became apparent. They split the twin sons of an Idaho farmer up and sent one to Mars, and that’s how they discovered that the communication between them was instantaneous. They shared thoughts with no gap at all, faster than the speed of light. And that made them a very precious commodity indeed.

  “Well I don’t know why anyone has to go at all.” Nadine said, reaching for another glass of wine. Zack had said she was drinking more, but Charlie hadn’t noticed until now.

  “Because it’s out there, Mom, said Charlie. “And because there are seventeen billion people on the planet and real estate is at a premium right now.” Not to mention the upcoming war, the continued destruction of the ecosystem and the need to do something dramatic this side of the election.

  “But our lives are good here,” Nadine said. “We have money, a fine house…”

  “And we get to eat in fancy restaurants like this one while half the population outside is starving to death.” said Charlie. “And things are only going to get worse.”

  “Besides,” added Zack, “It’s just like Earth. Better, it’s just like Earth used to be, before we started with all the pollution and the overpopulation. It’s paradise, Mom.”

  We’re getting out of here.

  Charlie wasn’t about to argue, with his mother on the verge of tears and his father staring ahead in silence.

  “We’ll be gone in the morning.”

  Their father nodded. Nadine took another drink. Zack and Charlie stood together, scraping their chairs back with such a unity of sound that other diners turned and stared. Nadine stood too, embracing first Zack then Charlie, sobbing.

  Davis MacCall didn’t stand, but he did nod once. Charlie started to put out his hand, but Zack pulled him back.

  As they walked out into the cool rain Charlie risked a look back, but his parents had already left their table and, he realised, gone out of his life for ever.

  * * *

  Charlie and Zack discussed what they’d come to call the Last Supper as they ignored the briefing before the cryofreeze. They were in a military hospital with stark white walls and nurses in severe uniforms. The New Beginning launched in three days, and the twins needed to be deep frozen well before then. Charlie would be moved underground, to a secret location deep in the Rockies. Zack would be off into space.

  Should we go back? Mom looked so sad, Charlie said.

  She’ll get over it. Zack held out his arm so one of the medical staff could inject the drug cocktail which would prepare the body for cryo.

  There was nobody left to say goodbye to. No girlfriends, no wives. When your brother is constantly in your head it’s difficult to have a relationship with anyone else, let alone girls, and it was maybe inevitable that they were leaving nobody behind.

  Charlie settled back into the upholstered coffin that would be his home for fifty-four years. He began to feel drowsy.

  Zack?

  Uhuh?

  You still there?

  There was no reply. For the first time he could remember, Zack was no longer in his head.

  * * *

  Charlie woke, groggy, and waited for the seal to click open on his coffin. It released its gas with a sibilant hiss and slowly sprung open. He checked his chin for stubble, slightly disappointed that fifty-four years growth probably didn’t even warrant a shave. He sat up and looked around. He’d seen images of this room in the pre-freeze briefing, but what he’d seen had been a brightly lit chamber filled with people and machinery. As he looked over the darkened, deserted cavern he wondered if he was in the same place. There should have been doctors. Something wrong then.

  Zack? The silence he got in response told him something else was wrong, too.

  He wondered where the others were. He’d barely noticed them at the briefing, because they weren’t important then, and because he’d been arguing about something with Zack. But now, with his head silent, he had a strong desire for company.

  He eased himself out of the coffin and dropped his bare feet onto the ground, settling not on the cool tiles he expected but on a thick layer of dust.

  There were three coffins in the room, laid out side by side. Two coffins in was supposed to be Dee Nordstadt, whose twin Freya should currently be in orbit around Sanctuary. Assuming she’d made it. Twenty percent failure odds meant that statistically one of them wasn’t likely to, and Charlie had always thought those odds had been doctored to reassure them.

  Rolf Gaarder, a forty-five year old Norwegian, was supposed to be in the remaining chamber. As Charlie peered down at Rolf’s partially desiccated corpse, he began to get a very uneasy feeling. Rolf had played the odds and lost.

  Dee Nordstadt’s chamber was empty, and that probably meant she was alive. Charlie sank to the ground. Very shortly he was unconscious.

  * * *

  When he woke the lights were on and someone was looking down at him.

  “Had me worried there for a second,” said Dee. She had short cropped spiky blonde hair which emphasised her Scandinavian heritage. “You okay?”

  He lifted himself up on his elbows. “I’ll live.” He looked around. “Unfortunately.”

  She hauled him up. “Gotta be positive. Life is good.”

  “I can’t hear Zack.”

  “I said life’s good, not perfect. I can’t hear Freya either.”

  “That means they’re dead though, doesn’t it?”

  Charlie could see by her expression that he’d used up his quota of negative questions.

  “No, it just means they’re not awake yet.”

  He chanced one more. “But we were all supposed to wake at the same time.”

  “Hey, I’ve been awake for three days now, down here, alone, going slowly mad. Rolf’s clock here says he’ll be up sometime next Tuesday, not that it will do him any good, being dead and all. So much for our precision accurate clocks.”

  “Alone?”

  She leaned back against her coffin. “Yeah, Completely. There’s been no one down here for a long, long time.”

  “But the power?”

  “Same geothermal source that’s been powering the coffin batteries. But I don’t entirely trust it, so I suggest we keep things dark as much as possible.”

  “But we’re not staying here.”

  “Ah. And that’s another problem.” Dee dragged him to the elevator shaft and showed him the shredded wiring. “Looks like someone sliced the top end right off.”

  “Helpful. Staircase?”

  “We’re a third of a mile down. Still, in the interest of getting the hell out of here, I had a look.” She opened a set of double doors next to the lift shaft. The insides were completely clogged with rocks. “So we’re trapped.”

  “We’re dead, then.”

  “Boy, you are a pessimist. This place was built to house a medical team of fifty. They may not be here, but their food certainly is.”

  “But we’ll run out eventually.”

  “Not in our lifetimes.”

  Which are likely to be short and pointless, thought Charlie, but he didn’t have time to say so because Dee had already disappeared round a turn in the corridor.

  “C’mon,” he heard he
r say, faintly, from what seemed far ahead. “All that talk of food is making me hungry.”

  The kitchen was large and well equipped. Dee set plates up on the central island while Charlie stood and watched, bemused. A lasagne steamed on the counter.

  “I’m going to be charitable and assume you’re too groggy to have noticed that I’ve done all the work here and you’ve just stood around. Just so long as you know that’s the last time. One free pass, buddy. And pass the wine.”

  “Wine?”

  “Sure, bottle’s on the work surface. Should have aged nicely after all these years.”

  She took a tentative sip.

  “Good?”

  “Vinegar. Let’s try another.”

  The second bottle was drinkable. Not good, exactly, but for the first time since waking Charlie started to relax.

  “What do we do now?” said Charlie, once he’d started on his third glass.

  “I have absolutely no idea,” said Dee as she put her hand to her mouth to stifle a burp.

  “There must me another way out.”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, and reached for another bottle.

  * * *

  She knocked on his door with strong black coffee and a couple of pills. “Take ‘em. If your hangover is half as bad as mine, you’ll need them.”

  “I don’t remember getting here.” He looked back into the cramped cabin.

  “You passed out. Again. Do that a lot?”

  “Never.”

  “Well it has been fifty-four years since you had a drink.”

  “You too.”

  “I found the bottles three days ago. So I’ve had practice.”

  “I still can’t hear Zack.”

  “Give it time.”