by Gant, Gene
Oh, I could get used to this.
I sauntered past the tan-gray façade of the train station, crossed Patterson, and continued north on Main. Main Street had been resurfaced decades ago with concrete tiles and made into an open-air mall. Through the street’s center ran a double set of tracks, over which green-and-gold trolleys chugged. This section of the street was lined with century-old buildings that had been renovated and turned into trendy art galleries and specialty shops.
Tucked between a deli and an antiques store was the Kasmir Coffee Shop. The place offered twenty-three flavors of coffee and sixteen types of tea. By day, its tiny, green-painted wrought iron tables were occupied mostly by straitlaced business folk. Nights saw a younger crowd holding court.
The establishment’s thick, paneled door stood open, pouring a harsh dose of hip-hop into the street. I stepped into a space dominated on the right by a long, brightly painted bar, from which mixed drinks were now being dispensed along with the coffees and teas. I looked at least twenty-one now, and no one challenged my entry.
The tables and chairs had been lined along the left and rear walls, clearing a large area of the brown-and-yellow sandstone floor, where several couples were jigging to the beat. The music wasn’t rattling the walls—there was a noise ordinance in effect for this part of downtown—but I’d noticed more than a few annoyed looks on the faces of passersby. This wasn’t Beale Street, after all. It seemed only a matter of time before the Kasmir would be forced to either change its evening personality or move to another location.
From the doorway, I did a quick mental scan of the patronage. There wasn’t a soul over thirty in the place. The crowd was an almost even mix of black, white, and Hispanic. I didn’t much notice the dudes, having set my consciousness on the sweets. Several of the females caught my pose and liked what they saw. I spotted one who was especially appealing: a tall, brown-eyed redhead, her hair spilling in waves over her shoulders. She had plenty of curves packed into tight blue jeans and a tight pink T-shirt.
I zeroed in on her thoughts, closing out all others. Her name was Candace Lane. She didn’t miss a beat in shaking her rump on the dance floor with her date, a husky white boy who had already noticed her noticing me. He shot me an incinerating look.
I ignored him. I gave Candace a mysterious (or so I hoped) smile and crossed to the bar. The bartender, a stout, dark-haired man of Italian stock, met me at once. “What can I get for you?” he asked cheerfully.
I really wanted a glass of strawberry Kool-Aid, but that would have been a laughable request in these quarters. I’d seen the benefits of alcoholism, however, and I had promised myself it was a road I would never set foot on.
“Gimme an iced tea.” I glanced at the list of flavored teas the place offered and added, “Make that peach-mango tea.”
The bartender chuckled as he reached for a metal scoop. “You must be driving,” he said. He shoved crushed ice into a glass the size of a pitcher, and then turned to one of the big dispensers behind him and filled the glass with tea. He smacked the glass down in front of me with one hand while reaching under the counter with the other. He came up with a lemon wedge that he placed artfully on the rim of the glass. “That’ll be six fifty.”
I produced a twenty and handed it to him. “Keep the change.”
His smile got bigger. “Thank you, sir.”
Candace flicked another glance my way. I liked the look in her eyes. Like a lot of women, she had a thing for guys with round, dimpled, rock-hard rumps. Lo and behold, I now had just such a backside. I leaned forward, resting my right elbow against the bar and poking out my butt (oh, what a wanton tease). Candace closed her eyes with a hungry groan.
I took a healthy swig of tea and reached into her mind, removing every ounce of inhibition. She abruptly strode off, leaving her date on the dance floor, and walked right up to me. She grabbed a handful of my maximized gluteus.
I swiveled my head nonchalantly in her direction. “That’s not my hand you shaking there, baby.”
She didn’t answer, and she didn’t move her hand. She just looked at me, her gaze simmering. I turned to her, and she finally let go. She leaned in close, smiling, her nose only inches from mine.
“My name’s Candace,” she said.
“I’m Micah,” I said, still not much of a liar.
“Let’s dance,” she said.
Her date, as you might have expected, wasn’t cool with this. Before he could interfere, I erased all memory of the woman from his brain. I also erased all desire he’d had to come to the Kasmir this evening. He turned away, tucked his cap on his head, and left.
Candace and I moved onto the dance floor. In my former life, I’d been a lousy dancer. Now I used the orb to tap into the abilities of the dudes around me, and I was moving with the best of them. That inspired Candace to make a move of an entirely different sort.
She wrapped her arms around my neck and gave me a very long, very deep kiss.
WE DANCED for perhaps ten minutes, pausing over and over again as Candace planted sweet, lingering kisses on me. I liked where she was taking me, but I still hadn’t gotten the rest and nourishment my body had been clamoring for, and I soon felt myself dragged down by fatigue. My body swayed; the room seemed to dim. I reached out weakly, groping for support.
“Hey!” Candace wrapped her arms around my chest, and she grunted as she tried to hold up my weight. “Come on. Let’s get you to a chair.”
She was able to guide me off the dance floor and into one of the lounge chairs against the rear wall. “What happened?” she asked. “Are you sick or something?”
“I’m sorry. I need to go home.” I tried to stand and almost fell to the floor. Candace yelped.
“You’re not going to make it home like this,” she said, pushing me back into the chair. “Where do you live?”
I almost gave her my old South Memphis address. “Just down the street a ways.”
She put her arm around me again. “Come on. I’ll help you.”
22
I WOKE abruptly, sitting up and striking my forehead against the underside of a table, which produced a mighty thump. My chest felt constricted, as if a mass of rope had been wound tightly around it. Beads of sweat had sprouted on my face and neck. There appeared to be a fist shoved down my throat, and I couldn’t draw in a breath. I was in the midst of a full-blown panic attack.
As if that realization were a release, I gasped, and my lungs kicked into double time. My heart was also in overdrive, throbbing so hard the center of my chest hurt. Now that I was aware of my condition, using the power to slow my heart and respiration rates to normal was simple enough. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of menace that obviously set off the attack.
Where the hell was I? Night had fallen, and the place was dark. I looked around; the surroundings were strange. Then it hit me that I was in the loft I’d awarded to myself.
I opened my mind, psychically probing the loft. The only foreign thoughts within belonged to Candace. She had fallen asleep on the sofa at the opposite end of the space. The thump of my head against the table had wakened her, and she was hurrying my way.
“Hey,” she said when she reached me, peering under the table. “Are you okay?”
I tried to reassure her with a smile. “Yeah, I’m cool. What time is it?”
She looked at her watch. “Almost eleven.”
“Why am I under the table?”
She smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry. That was as far as I could get you. You weigh a ton. You were able to walk from Kasmir with me helping you along, but by the time we got in here, your legs gave out, and you couldn’t make it any farther. You just curled up here.”
I crawled out, grabbed the edge of the table, and hauled myself upright. Candace took my arm to help me.
“You’re shaking,” she said, concerned. “And your skin’s ice cold.” She wrapped her arms around my waist in an effort to warm me up. “Are you sure you’re okay…?”
I pull
ed back and looked at her. There were no coverings to the huge windows behind us, and chalky light from the street lamps oozed over us. Her red hair flared out in wispy spikes, and her makeup was smudged from sleeping on my sofa, but she was still beautiful. My consciousness was yet skimming the surface of her thoughts, and I knew what she was groping for. “The name’s Micah,” I supplied.
“Sorry.” She wasn’t ashamed to have forgotten my name, but she had the grace to dip her head as if blushing. She looked at me adoringly. I wanted to have sex with her, using my new, supersized equipment. Candace was twenty and would be entering her junior year this fall at Christian Brothers University. The guy she had been dancing with in Kasmir was her boyfriend. They had known each other since high school. He had gone off to Notre Dame while she opted to stay in town, and he had come back to spend the summer with her. Despite giving me the eye earlier in the evening, Candace loved her boyfriend as much as he loved her. They planned to marry after they obtained their degrees.
Until I came along and played with their minds, that is.
I gently drew away from her. I now felt like a lowdown, trifling snake for manipulating her. That didn’t stop me from doing it again.
Candace yawned. “Wow. Suddenly, I can hardly keep my eyes open.” Indeed, her eyes were at half-mast and closing even as she spoke. She slumped, and I caught her before she hit the floor, scooping her into my arms. I carried her back to the sofa. By the time I tucked her comfortably away under sheets that materialized from air molecules, she was snoring softly.
A dim malevolence still hung in the air like a cloud of mosquitoes. I mentally swept the entire building this time, my awareness poking into every nook and cranny like a curious cat. The majority of the residents were swaddled in bed. The most menacing thought I encountered was that of the woman in the studio on the floor below my loft. She was watching a late-night episode of Divorce Court and wanted to slap the judge, whom she felt was unnecessarily mean to both litigants. There were no rapists, muggers, burglars, or other such enterprising types on the premises.
Why the hell, then, did I feel so afraid?
Unable to pinpoint a source, I shrugged off my fear as the remnant of a bad dream. Having gotten some sleep, I was now aware of my empty stomach. The white linen clothes I wore were badly wrinkled from my having bedded down on the floor. I transformed them into blue jeans and a jersey, took the elevator down, and walked barefoot up the street to the Arcade Restaurant.
The Arcade was a twenty-four-hour eatery that had occupied the southeast corner of Main and Patterson since long before my parents were born. I stepped through the door and complied with the “Please seat yourself” sign, sliding into a corner booth next to the entrance. The place was almost packed with late-night diners.
It was too late for dinner and too early for breakfast. I therefore decided to cover both bases. When the waitress came to my table, I ordered sweet potato pancakes, bacon, scrambled eggs, grits, liver and onions doused in gravy, brown rice, rolls, green beans, iced tea, and a slice of lemon meringue pie. The waitress, a trim woman in her midthirties, maintained a pleasant, respectful smile while she jotted all this down. Her thoughts, however, poked me like a thumb in the eye. Hell, why not order a side of cow while you’re at it.
She wasn’t going to be happy with the tip I would leave her.
I DEPARTED the Arcade an hour later, my six-pack bulging, carrying a chicken salad sandwich for Candace. I planned to feed her, restore her emotions (along with her boyfriend’s), and beam her to her parents’ home. I could feel my strength fully returning as I padded along the still-warm sidewalk. There were high, wispy clouds in the dark sky, through which stars twinkled brightly. The night air was a pleasant seventy degrees and, with there being little traffic, the street was quiet.
The moment I stepped into the lobby of my building, the hair on the back of my neck rose. The sense of danger here was so stark that adrenaline sizzled through my entire six-foot-three frame. Unbidden, a protective bubble of blue-white electromagnetic force shimmered into existence around me, and every nerve in my body screamed Run! But the threat was centered on my loft, and Candace was up there.
I didn’t bother with the elevator. I dematerialized and sent my molecules streaming through the intervening floors, taking shape again beside my sofa. Candace still lay there in the dark, a slender figure wrapped in a tangle of sheets. She seemed to be asleep. Then I heard the tiniest of whimpers from her. I reached over and flicked on the lamp.
Her eyes were open and unfocused, her mouth a perfect O of pain and horror. The sheets covering her body were pulsating. I snatched them away, and a multitude of black, wriggling things were tossed into the air. There were hundreds of them on the sofa, each no bigger than a thumbnail. They were ten-legged creatures with a carapace as black and shiny as a beetle’s. They crawled over Candace’s body. They burrowed through her flesh, secreting digestive juices that broke down her tissues into a goo the creatures then greedily sucked up. Through all this, Candace was unable to move but fully aware, experiencing every sensation as she was eaten alive.
The power of the orb poured off me in blue-white tentacles of energy and lashed at the sofa, my intention being to sweep the horrible little beasts from existence and heal Candace’s body. The energy bounced back. Suddenly, I was reeling backward, the room going into backflips about me. There was a loud crash as my protective force field made contact with the dining table and shattered it into splinters.
I found myself lying on the floor amid broken pieces of furniture. A screeching pain sat heavily in the center of my head. Nausea pounded through me so relentlessly I prayed for death. I was barely able to dissipate the force field before the meal I’d just finished came roaring up my throat and out of my mouth.
After my stomach had emptied itself, the nausea quickly faded. I pulled myself up and staggered back to the sofa. The creatures were still eating away at Candace. The mind guiding them was cruel, for the things avoided her organs until the last, ensuring maximum suffering. Mercifully, enough of her nervous system had been destroyed that she now felt little pain. She still knew what was happening to her, and she looked at me with hysterical eyes.
I took her hand and lifted it to my chest. There was little substance left under her skin, and I could feel distinctly the bones in her fingers. The creatures streamed away from my touch, flowing down her arm in a black, undulating wave. I hit upon a new tactic and threw myself across Candace’s body. Where my body met hers, the bugs raced away, only to move to areas uncontaminated by my touch and continue feeding. There was no way for me to save her.
I lay with her, holding her tightly as she slowly melted away, telling her over and over that everything would be okay. In the end, a kind of serenity settled into her face. The creatures began working their way through her brain, heart and other organs. It was only when I felt her thoughts fade away that I allowed the tears in my throat to burst free.
I climbed off the sofa and stood looking down at the body. What had been a beautiful, intelligent, sexy woman was now little more than a skin-covered skeleton, and even that would be gone by daybreak. There was no time, however, to further grieve for Candace. The only other occasion in which the power had been reflected back at me was when I focused it on the orb.
My molecules tunneled southward through the warm night sky in a ball of light. With a crack of thunder, I materialized in the loading bay where Larry and I had died. There was no need to probe for the status of the alien artifact. The yawning, mile-deep shaft in the ground was evidence enough that the orb had been taken.
23
ANTONIO WAS the only person I’d told about the orb. I must have blindly given him the location of the device when I shared memories of my resurrection with him. And when I dropped in on him while he was doing the dishes, when I was distracted and thought nothing of the guilty look on his face then, he must have been planning to go after the orb. Damn.
I transported myself back to Antonio’s hou
se in a bolt of lightning. The energy burned through the family room’s ceiling and deposited the short, skinny Micah in an explosive flash on the floor in front of the fireplace. Antonio was waiting for me, standing calmly beside his dad’s recliner. The Reverend Vaughn Titus was seated there, his large gray eyes glaring at me.
Seeing Titus freaked me out. It was obvious that he and Antonio had come to some kind of accord, and that made my skin crawl.
We faced each other for several seconds. The silence spread through the room as noxiously as an oil slick. I could see Antonio’s jaws working subtly, as if he was chewing gum. It was something he did when he was thinking hard. He was apparently trying to work his way up to the subject of the orb. The orb was nowhere in sight, but I knew it was here. This was one occasion where I felt it was best to jump right in.
“Antonio, I want that machine back,” I said.
It was Titus who responded. “What makes you think you’re entitled to it?”
“I found it.”
Titus sneered. “That doesn’t mean you should have it, you foolish little sinner.”
“Damn it, it’s mine!” Actually, I’d never felt any sense of proprietorship toward the orb, any more than I would toward an ocean or a star. But I was determined to get the thing away from these two.
Antonio raised his hands, frowning and motioning for silence as if the shouts were hurting him. “Come on,” he admonished. “We aren’t going to get anywhere like this.” He gestured toward the sofa, silently urging me to sit. When he saw that I had no intention of taking the invitation, he sighed and said, “Micah, I don’t think you understand what the machine is meant for.”