The Broken Ones (Book 2): The Broken Families

by David Jobe

  All he wanted to do was to return home to his family. Let them know that he was okay and that everything would be fine. To trust in God and his wisdom. First, he had to get home and get out of the cold. The good news was that he neared the end of his journey. A walk of twenty blocks had dwindled down to four. He knew he could have probably used his powers to make it home, but something inside him told him that he shouldn’t. Not just because he was still healing, but because it was a gift bestowed on him. A gift that would be squandered if he started using it for things to make his life easier. One of the officers questioning him had even suggested he start his own transportation service.

  “Need it now? Call Blinko.” The squat officer with the handlebar mustache said ‘Blinko’ like it was a name fit only for a clown. “He’ll get it there in a flash.”

  Julian had thanked the officer for his career advice and asked if he was free to go yet. He hadn’t been. Plus, the career counselor cop had stormed off in a cloud of colorful words. Julian guessed the officer had been working toward getting Julian angry, and when Julian treated him with polite respect, he had left to regroup. He sat in that small room for most of the time, his stomach growling from hunger and his lips cracked from being thirsty. He asked for something, and they had laughed. Again they advised that he pop over and get it himself. They asked if he could do it fast enough that they wouldn’t even see him move. It seemed to Julian that their main drive had not been to get answers but to try and goad Julian into using his powers. After a while, it just seemed like they gave up. Kicked him out the door and told him that the police are the heroes, not some two-bit kid from the east side.

  Three blocks. He could now see the corner he would have to turn to head for where his mom and brother were staying. Though the sun had left hours ago, the street lights did a good job of illuminating most of the street and sidewalks. Up ahead he could see the tattoo shop that Johnny from fifth period had gone to and convinced them that he was of age. Young Johnny had returned home with a crude skull tattooed on his bicep. It took Johnny less than three hours to get caught with the markings. At which point he got a few more with his father’s belt and lost every single one of his gaming systems.

  Julian gave a laugh at the memory, a bigger puff of mist rolling around his face. When it cleared, he saw the same van he had seen earlier roll around the corner. Everything in Julian’s body told him to duck down an alley or to post up inside a storefront nook. He even moved to do just that, but the engine on the old van revved and tore the thought away from him. Bright beams of light focused on him and began to get larger. The van jumped the narrow patch of grass and concrete that formed the median and propelled itself toward him. Tires chirped as the van landed roughly on the street, the vehicle swaying as it straightened to focus on him. Behind the wheel, he could see the gaunt and grinning face of his stepfather wide-eyed and staring at him.

  Julian reached out his hand as if to stop the raging monster of metal covering his face with his other arm. He felt the warm steel of the van’s slanted hood hit his palm and then vanish. Down the street, he heard a loud crash followed by a piercing wail of sirens. For a moment, Julian froze, unsure what to do. When he didn’t hear anything around him but the loud siren, he opened his eyes and looked around.

  He stood in the same spot he had been, but the van had disappeared. He turned his head to look toward the siren and found the van. It had slammed through a bank drive through and completely into the teller’s window. Glass from the van and the teller’s window littered the asphalt. Broken concrete blocks lay strewn about the front of the van, the white powder still lingering in the air. The van itself had managed to mangle enough of the wall that the driver side wheel rested above the ground by about a foot, with the tire spinning well inside the building.

  The wail he heard was the bank's alarm system sending out its distress cry.

  The driver side door creaked open, its hinges protesting with a metallic whine. His stepfather stumbled out, landing inside against the teller’s counter, and then fell over, out of sight. A moment later a bloody hand slapped onto the counter and the rest of his stepfather rose into view. Blood covered part of the man’s face, but when he smiled, his white teeth shone that much more eerily.

  Dumbfounded, Julian stood there. Unsure what to do he just watched. Then off to his left, he heard another set of sirens join the late-night chorus. “The police.” Julian took a step back. Last thing he needed was for the police to find him again, and have another reason to take him back to the station. His stepfather’s van lay in the direction he needed to go to get to his family, but he couldn’t go that way. The police would get there just as he passed by, and probably think he had been a passenger in the van. He turned and ducked down another street running with no real direction in mind.

  Just away.

  After a few blocks, he had to stop. His lungs burned from the exertion and the cold. The wound in his side throbbed with pain. He would have to find somewhere to crash and regain his strength. He could just phone the center from there and let his mom know he was all right. Plus, he wanted to make sure they knew what his stepfather had just done. They needed to be ready for him. Provided the police hadn’t caught him. He looked pretty banged up, so he might get lucky. He didn’t feel lucky though.

  As he slumped down next to a boarded-up pharmacy, he stared at his hand. “So, I can teleport things without going with them. Good to know.” He wiggled his fingers as if fearful that they might fall off. “Blinko’s got game. Yuk yuk yuk.” He chuckled. Looking around he recognized the street. If he headed up this street, he could possibly crash at his friend Johnny’s. Granted, they wouldn’t be able to play video games, but he could catch some shut eye. He chuckled and pulled himself up. He began to walk toward his old friend’s house, trying to decide what he would say for ringing the bell this late.

  “Julian?”

  Julian turned his head to find an old station wagon rolling down the street next to him. The man behind the wheel had on a wide-brimmed brown hat that cast most of his face into shadows. Just enough light emanated from the dashboard to illuminate a cruel smile and a gun pointed at him. “Get in the car, Julian. Someone wants to see you.”

  Julian raised his arms as if he were under arrest. “I’m not Julian. I’m the Great Blinko.” Under his breath he whispered, “Please, God, somewhere safe.” A flash of white light and he found himself standing in the middle of a large and expensive room. A large black couch sat before him. Beyond it stood a raised section with a long black table with ten black chairs around it. All along the back wall were gray metal plates with red stencils of famous comic book characters. Spiderman, Iron Man, Batman and a few that he couldn’t place.

  Two men stood at one end of the table, pouring over a large gray laptop with an alien head logo on it. The head glowed in a pulsating green. The older black man nodded as the younger man spoke. “It looks like his power has a vocal component.”

  “A what?” The older man asked.

  “You know, like Dungeons and Dragons. He has to speak to make it work.” The younger one looked at the older with a look of sheer perplexity.

  “Devil worship,” muttered the older man with a smirk drawing across his face.

  Down at the other end of the table sat the red-headed kid from the highway that night. He sat in a wheelchair with a spider design in the big back wheels. He too had a laptop in front of him, but his focus remained on what looked to be the inside of a drone.

  A dark-haired woman reclined at the end of the black couch closest to the red head. It took Julian a second to recognize her as being the woman from the highway that he had failed to save. Splayed across her lay a young girl with blondish hair. The younger girl appeared to be fast asleep, a long string of drool hanging out of the corner of her mouth.

  . The dark-haired girl looked up and saw him standing there. A slow smirk played across her lips. With one hand, she stroked the sleeping girl’s hair. The other she raised to point at Julia
n. “Yes, the young man up front. Do you have two questions?”

  The rest of the room turned to stare at Julian, questions growing in their eyes.

  It took Julian a minute to understand how he must look. He slapped his arms down to his side but found he had no words.

  The red head started chuckling, boiling from a low rumble until it spilled out into full on laughter. Soon after the rest followed suit.

  Even Julian.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  NPC

  Drew’s heart hammered inside his chest like gunfire from a machine gun. He released control of the Stone Golem and slid open the van door. Outside, it stood with the unconscious Henchwomen in its arms. “Put her there,” he told the creation he had started mentally referring to as Knight. Knight leaned in and place the woman on the battered carpet that covered most of the back of the van. Drew could see the marking etched into his creation’s neck. It had taken him some studying, but he had found how to make one that could take orders instead of needing to be controlled all the time. He had even learned he could jump into the thing and control it, to the point of morphing it from its original shape. Even as he thought it, Knight shifted from the visage of an older man to the chiseled sharp lines of a Knights visor. “Get in,” he told Knight.

  Once Knight was in, Drew slid the door shut and began to bind the unconscious woman. He had no idea how long someone would be out after they had a sleeper hold put on them, so he wasn’t taking any chances. That done he covered her eyes with a thick blindfold made of an old sheet he had found in the van. The blanket reeked so bad he had decided to throw the rest of it away. Even with the majority of it gone, the van still held a smell he didn’t want to ponder on the origin of. After securing her he hopped up into the passenger seat and prayed to the gods of the game that the van would start one more time. Once he got buckled in, he swept his mind into Knight, who stood a good foot and a half taller than him and could reach the pedals with no problem. Three tries in and the old rust bucket sputtered and started.

  Their destination lay about twenty miles north of town but most of the drive would be on barely used back streets. Drew’s ability to drive stemmed from the little that his father had deemed to teach him, and some from the simulators he found at various gaming locations. It took them a good hour to reach their destination, cruising at well below the speed limit with their hazard lights on. Though Drew lived in constant fear that someone would stop them, the roads remained empty for the most part. Those that drove up behind them never stayed long, choosing instead to disregard the speed limit to get around them.

  It wasn’t long before the van crunched onto an old gravel road that led up to a sizable cabin. Easing the van to a stop, Drew returned to his body and gave orders for the woman to be carried inside. He closed the van and shuffled inside with his duffel bag. Locking the cabin door behind him, he turned to Knight. “Take her downstairs.” He rushed over to open the basement door for his creation and then followed it down. “Over there.”

  Before his untimely death, his father had disassembled a park bench that had come with the cabin. He had reassembled most of it in the basement, placing it flush against one wall to serve as a desk for him to work on. Sometimes he had found his father working on his fly fishing stuff. Other times it had been pouring over a case in the quiet of the large room. After the woman had been placed on the table top, he began to tie her down.

  “You won’t get away with this. The others already know what’s happened. They will find you.” She turned her head to face him, though Drew doubted she could see him. “They will find you and kill you.”

  Drew nodded and then he realized she couldn’t see him. He gave a short dismissal grunt and sat down on a nearby chair that he had brought down from the office his mother used upstairs. “That answers two questions I thought I would have to torture out of you. Do you all talk telepathically, and can you home in on each other. Looks like that is a yes and a no. How many of you are there?”

  “Go to hell, kid.” The woman straightened her head as if she were looking at the ceiling. Nothing up there but cobwebs and planks.

  “Oh, nothing clever like “we are legion, for we are many”, which would have been a much cooler name for you, by the way. Henchwomen just screams to be mistreated. I mean, do you watch any shows with henchmen?”

  Henchwoman sighed, “you think this is a game?”

  Drew laughed and claps. “Shit yeah, I do.” He spun in a circle in the chair, letting his feet dangle out. “And we have reached the stage of the game where the protagonist must figure out a daunting puzzle. Do you know much about gaming? Like video games, not what you older chicks call some dude telling you sweet lies to get in your Guess jeans.”

  “If you are just going to keep yapping, kill me now.”

  Drew laughed again. “Oh no. I am not going to kill you anytime soon. In fact, I think I will kill you last. I figured out from the shooting at the courthouse that you don’t care about dying. You’ll just respawn. Which leads me back to my question about gaming. I ask this because I have been thinking a lot about you lately. How you work, who you are. That sort of thing. Then I began to realize something. You are an NPC. I imagine you don’t know what that is, so I’ll break it down. NPC stands for Non-Player Character. It’s pretty much anyone you meet that isn’t run by another person. They are just constructs of the computer, set up to fulfill a specific task. Sometimes it’s to send you on a quest or to sell you things. Every now and then, you run into one that is a great adversary. We call those Big Bosses, in the gaming world. The kind of fight you must build up for. Make sure your character is prepared for. Otherwise, they will kill you every time. But here is the kicker. Even if you kill this NPC, odds are that they will come back; respawn. This is usually so the next player can whack off its head or whatever.”

  “Does this monologue have a point?”

  Drew smiled. “Don’t interrupt.” He leaned in and slid the edge of a blade across her shoulder. A small red line appeared on her skin followed by a faint trickle of blood.

  She flinched and he could see the muscles in her jaw bulging, but she said nothing.

  “Here is the thing about NPCs that most real gamers know. They get treated bad. I mean like really bad. I know in a game that may have NPCs that just say something stupid, and most gamers will kill them for it. Normal people in real life who have no compunctions about murdering a person because they threw a little shade. Talk shit, get hit kinda thing. But I am not like them. No, I am next level when it comes to NPCs. I once spent eight hours of my game time hunting every NPC in a game and killing them in new and inventive ways. Hell, I played a Batman game that was designed to keep you from actually killing NPC s and I took joy in the fact that I knew if the game was real, Batman would have been a murderer. So, while I have no intentions of killing you, I have no qualms about making you hurt.” He drew the blade across the same place, but at an angle and deeper.

  This time she screamed.

  Drew leaned in so he could whisper in her ear. “The way I see it, the world's filling up with people who have these powers. Odds ares before long there will be one on the same site I found you that will have a power that will help me track down where the rest of you are. So, if the rest of you are listening in there, you better scatter. Run you bitches. Run like the bottom feeding cockroaches you are. Because it only takes one mind reader, one psychic tracker, one death note kinda guy for me to kill you all. And I’m patient. Real patient. I’ve got all my video games, and I got my new NPC right here to play with while I wait.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The Green Quarter Mile

  Red Cliffs National Park sat just north of Indianapolis, nestled back from one of the two major highways that cut through the state. Over two hundred acres of trees, pathways, and monuments. Dead center of the whole thing sat a small open air café that looked out over the nearby green lawns that served as enjoyable picnic spots in the warmer months. Café Hangers did no
t see near as many customers in the winter months as it did in the summer, but its warm atmosphere and affordable great tasting coffee ended up being the spot for hikers and joggers alike. Today was no exception. The place sat about fifty if every table was packed, but today it had about fifteen, mostly huddled in groups of two or three.

  Only one sat alone, typing away at a keyboard and making a point to ignore the chatter that surrounded him. Stephen Holger did not see Lanton making the long journey down the quarter mile stretch of pathway that led to the stairs around Hangers. To either side of Lanton well-manicured green lawns stretched out for about two hundred yards.

  Lanton saw Stephen. Lanton moved with the casual ease of any other person that might be strolling the park at this early hour. Just a hundred yards away now. The tip he had received from the barista had been solid and Lanton knew if he spooked Stephen, the possible Altered psychopath would be in the wind again. And if Lanton’s hunch was true, that would mean a lot more deaths that Lanton could prove this man had orchestrated. Lanton’s heart beat so fast he worried he might pass out by the time he reached the man. That would obviously not end well. Not in the slightest.

  Lanton surveyed the scene as he crept closer. Two women sat to the man’s left, bent over their coffees and shivering against the cold. Each wore tight fitting runner’s clothes and had their hair in tight ponytails. To Stephen’s right, the space was empty for two tables and then an older man sat, his gaze lost in a white Styrofoam cup. There were far too many people here for his liking, but then again it did seem to allow him to approach the man unnoticed. Lanton wondered what the man was reading on his laptop, if it was even his laptop. Eighty yards now, but it felt like a world away. He had no idea what this man would do, or might do if cornered.