Vacant

by Alex Hughes

  “Anyways, I yell at Tommy to get down like we practiced and Jason pulls the car sideways, yanking it around while I struggle for the gun. They open fire then, and Jason gets hit twice before he can deploy the car’s protective plates. High-caliber stuff. Tommy’s down, in the foot well, and I’m stretched out on the seat, gun out and firing through the slit in the plates. Tommy makes this sound—I find out later he’s gotten burned from the plate engine deploying too hard, too hot—but he stays down, and he says he’s okay when I yell at him.

  “I’m firing at what little I can see, and I can hear Jason doing the same, though he’s hurt—it’s clear he’s hurt—and the plates are getting hit with this awful sound. The whole car’s shaking with the air from the train. Then it goes quiet. Tommy’s jacket is flashing that red light—he’s pulled the emergency tab and it’s screaming through the police radio channels like it’s supposed to. I’m breathing too hard. I’m worried about Jason.

  “Then this horrible screeching. They have something to breach the plates, like an old Jaws of Life hydraulic or something. I’m screaming at Tommy, ‘Get out the back, run, run,’ and he’s not moving so I push him back into the other foot well, but then I hear a pop and I turn back around and I know it’s all over. This guy in armor and a helmet like the military or something—standing there with the hydraulic thing. The door’s gone. The plates are gone, and he throws the thing down and pulls up a rifle toward my head. I throw myself in front of Tommy, hoping maybe I can buy some time. And then I hear a bullet go off from the driver’s side. The eye of the helmet goes out and the rifle drops, and I’m picking me and Tommy up and getting the hell out of the back.”

  She went silent then, and shivered. She’d run on foot, carrying the kid, at her maximum speed, thinking the whole time that Jason had saved her but was going to die in the process.

  “The train zoomed out, but the blinkers were flashing and I could see the next one coming maybe a mile or two away. It was a stupid thing to do,” she said, looking down. “My trainers will scream murder over it, but I jumped the tracks. I carried Tommy all the way across, another guy coming after us the whole way. We made it clear but he didn’t.” She looked back at me, almost defiant. “He didn’t make it, and when the air wave knocked us down, I got Tommy down without even a bruise. I walked him a mile or more before we heard the sirens.”

  I made a mental note to track down a man’s body on one of the large trains coming through—it would have been found at the next stop, Charleston perhaps, or a smaller town in between. But in the meantime, I needed to know. “This is very important, Tanya. Think carefully. In the time between when you were running away from the car—from the time you exited until you crossed the train tracks—did they shoot? At you or at anyone else?”

  She thought about that one carefully, and I shifted, my butt having gone numb on the hard coffee table. I forced myself to sit up straight, though, for the appearance of authority even if not the reality of it.

  “No,” she finally said. “When I had Tommy, they didn’t shoot at all. My gun was back in the car—I had a knife, but they didn’t know that. Maybe they thought they’d get him more easily. They did start shooting once the train passed again, but I don’t think it was at me.”

  So two important facts: the assailants had likely wanted Tommy alive, based on their actions, and there was possibly another group or a set of cops without sirens involved at the end. “One last question,” I said. “You keep saying ‘they,’ but you’ve only described two men—the first in the armor and the helmet, and the second on foot chasing you. Who were the others? How many were there?”

  Tanya closed her eyes, mind flashing through images quickly in reverse and forward, picking through the jumble of her memories of a stressful time for any clues. “I saw four,” she finally said. “At least four.”

  And of the four she’d seen, none were Sibley. “At least?” I prompted.

  “There might have been one more. Maybe behind the driver’s seat of that van. The door was open and there was a figure with a large-caliber gun, I saw it for less than a second through the slit, but I noticed the gun. I had to. I tried to throw bullets that way, but I don’t know how successfully. The other one was behind the man in the armor; he had a flak jacket on, I think.” She frowned. “Yes, a jacket. My trainer has been running drills on those lately.” Her heartbeat sped up as she remembered the situation and the danger she’d been in. I noticed she took deep, deliberate breaths to get that back under control, almost without thinking about it.

  “Your trainer?” I asked.

  She nodded. “The company has us do two hours a week of skills training to keep us sharp, usually one with guns, one without. I skipped this week because of the high alert, but last week was identifying backup. They try to run us through high stress so we don’t freeze up. Guess it worked this time.”

  Part of that last statement was a lie, or she was hiding something, but I couldn’t tell what, or even if it meant anything. Sometimes being a telepath was frustrating.

  She looked back up at the clock on the wall.

  “Go ahead and call the hospital,” I said, responding to her thought without meaning to.

  A frisson of fear ran up her spine, but she controlled it. Crap, another normal spooked by a telepath. I took an extra moment to examine that fear up close, to make sure she wasn’t going to go out of her way to hurt me to stop the fear.

  No, she wasn’t one of those.

  I let her go as she got up to make the call. I, in the meantime, had other priorities.

  CHAPTER 6

  I entered an old room, ancient floorboards covered with a large rectangular rug in bright colors, an antique small bed topped with a cheerful bedspread with a pattern of cartoon boats. A boy sat in the middle of the rug, on the floor, watching a bright blue toy boat float like an anti-grav car, whirring around and around a path at eye level.

  He moved his hand, adjusting one of the floating yellow guide markers, and the boat’s path adjusted too, a cheerful beep sounding with the change.

  I cleared my throat and the boy turned, too quickly, like he was on edge. He backed up, his knee pulling a cord from the wall. The boat fell, all at once, along with the floating markers, hitting the floor on top of a red-and-green mat with a crunch. “Stupid boat.” He backed up a little farther and yelled, “Mom! Somebody’s here!”

  “I’m Adam,” I said as gently as possible. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” I stayed by the door, giving him space until his mom arrived. More likely, the FBI agents, but I wasn’t going to be picky either way.

  Tommy was ten years old, just under five feet tall, blond and tan, with a round face and deep brown eyes that seemed to catch everything. His khakis and blue polo shirt might have been a school uniform, might not, but both were wrinkled, the shirt with a small stain near the collar.

  Behind me, Special Agent Loyola came down the hallway, a female presence not far behind. The judge, most likely.

  I turned. “Response time is a little slow,” I said to Loyola.

  He took the comment personally. “Perimeter is sealed off. A mouse couldn’t get in or out without either us or the sheriff’s department knowing about it.” He stuck his head in the room as I moved to give a bit more room. “You okay, kid?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I heard from the room. Not exactly happy, but he’d had a big day.

  I nodded to the woman, who was wearing some kind of dark pantsuit with a wide collar and more than her share of expensive jewelry. Her dark-blond hair was noticeably fixed, sprayed down into an almost helmetlike rigidity. She was examining me critically.

  I kept my hands where everyone could see them. “I’m the new telepath,” I said. “Introducing myself as requested. I’ll need a good view of your son’s mind so I can stop any threats before they get through in Mindspace. It’ll take about ten minutes.”

  She looked at me
critically, the full weight of countless hours dealing with criminals riding on her now. She didn’t seem comfortable.

  I opened up a little in Mindspace. As suspected, she didn’t like a grown man wanting to get up close with her son right now, no matter how good the reason. This would have been easier with the female telepath Jarrod usually worked with, just for her comfort level, but the fact was, I was all we had. Media frenzy aside, being male did not make you inherently dangerous to children; there were far more trustworthy, good people out there of both genders than there were criminals of either. But you couldn’t exactly tell that to a woman whose son had almost been kidnapped today. Her reservations seemed normal to me, if big.

  “You’re welcome to be there the whole time,” I said. “In fact, it would probably help things.”

  “What exactly will you be doing with my son?” she asked finally.

  Loyola came out in the hall and shut the door. “Ma’am, Ward checks out. He was specifically recruited by the FBI agent in charge of this situation because he can do the job in front of us. We’ve worked with telepaths many, many times before. There’s a level of coordination and early warning you just can’t get any other way, and I’d highly recommend you cooperate fully with the process. It will keep your son much safer.”

  I was surprised. I hadn’t expected him to go along with this that easily.

  It didn’t mean he liked me, his mind added loudly enough that I’d be sure to pick it up. But united front and successful assignments and all that.

  “What exactly are you going to do to my son?” the judge asked again.

  That was the question, wasn’t it? I pulled on very old school lessons in Minding and best practices for Minding children. “I need—with his permission—to make a light connection with your son’s mind for the next few days, or until whoever it is that is threatening you both is caught. And I need to stay within about a hundred feet of him during that time, night and day, no matter what else is happening.”

  “You want to be in the same room as my son while he’s sleeping,” the judge said, not happy.

  “It’s best practices. We’ve worked with telepaths many times before and they’re trained to a very high standard,” Loyola said. “I’ve had them in and out of my own head multiple times.”

  “Next room is fine,” I said.

  “You can stay with your son yourself if it would make you more comfortable,” Loyola said. “But starting tomorrow morning the majority of the FBI will be tracking active leads, and you’ve requested the security to be at the courthouse, not here. A telepath and a physical guard—meaning, me—are pretty much all we’re going to have to work with, other than local PD drive-bys. I’d suggest you let us do our jobs. I’m still happy to move everyone to the safe house,” he added, with a spot of hopefulness.

  “We’re staying here,” the judge said, with steel, like they’d had this conversation before. “If you won’t let us go to my mother’s in Washington State, we’ll stay in the house. Thanks. Tommy’s had a horrible day, and taking him out of familiar surroundings is not how we take care of my son. I told you. You either work with my decision or you leave.”

  “Do you have any specific questions?” I asked. Then, to assuage her understandable fear: “I’m happy to demonstrate what I’ll be doing on you first, if it will make you more comfortable.”

  She swallowed, and I felt a burst of nerves. Ah, looked like what was driving her reluctance was an underlying fear of telepaths. Looked like the kind of low-level fear half the normal population had as a result of horrible news stories and endless telepath villains in movies. Great. Another one.

  She shook her head. “If the feds say it’s necessary, and they’ve done this before, I have no reason to object. But be aware both I and the other agents will be checking in at unpredictable intervals.”

  I blinked. I had been expecting an outright no, or a demand to experience the properties of the thing herself. “That’s fine,” I said.

  The kid in the other room was getting impatient, I noticed. He’d get up in a moment to see what was going on. I had a sudden attack of nerves myself. I needed to be here. But for what, I didn’t know. The universe thought I could make a difference, save this kid, I told myself, or I never would have seen the vision in the first place.

  The judge was still hesitating.

  Just then, her son opened the door on the other side of Loyola.

  He came out and after a small hesitation went over to hug his mom.

  She looked at me over the top of his head. In that moment, I had her. She’d go along with it. Which was good, because I had to figure out a hell of a lot of other details, and soon, if was going to head off this vision.

  Tommy pulled away. “What’s going on, Mom?” He tried to figure out how to ask about the danger returning, about what had happened to Jason, and couldn’t . . . couldn’t quite get his brain to settle on the tangle of what had happened in a way that would give him words.

  “Do you know what a telepath is?” I asked him.

  He looked up and nodded, slowly, still a lot closer to his mom than he would have stood under any other circumstances. I had the feeling he was a tough guy, usually. But the events of this morning would bother grown men, and he deserved truth, not babying.

  “I’m here to help stop this morning from happening again,” I said, addressing his unspoken fear. “Agent Loyola and I are going to be making sure you don’t get hurt.”

  His anger flared. “Like those punks could have hurt me.” All bravado, hiding fear.

  Fear I understood. “Would you take my hand for just a minute?” I asked. “You’ll feel a tickle in your head for a bit. I’ll be able to find you anywhere.”

  I held out a hand.

  He looked at me, then at Mom. The judge nodded. She wasn’t happy, but she was going along with this.

  Tommy reached out and took my hand.

  Three things happened at once. I reached out my mind and enveloped his carefully. It was instinct. It was something I’d rehearsed in my mind so that the fulfillment of it took little thought. My mind settled like a blanket around him.

  The second thing, he reacted like a prototelepath, like a boy who’d develop significant, reliable Ability—empathy, perhaps, or telepathy—in just a year or two. He moved away from the contact, and then, suddenly, unpredictably, toward it. Our minds merged around the edges.

  And three, my mind recognized him. On the deepest, most visceral level, I recognized his mind. This—this was the boy from my vision. The boy who would be tied up in the barn. The boy whom I’d seen killed in the vision months ago. I was certain. I knew him.

  Before I could suppress the information, it traveled between us. I saw the moment it registered—and fear, real fear, blossomed.

  * * *

  “We have a problem,” I told Jarrod. Tommy was back in his room, unwilling to speak to anyone, and his mom was with him. I had no idea if anyone would let me near him, not after the hysterics he’d thrown. But at least he was calmer—I knew that much through our light link. Unfortunately I had the impression the calm was the calm before the storm, the suppressed disbelief that would wear off over time to lead to more hysterics.

  “Special Agent Jarrod,” I said. I felt beat up, and guilty. I’d screwed this up already.

  “One second.” Jarrod was fidgeted with some kind of electronics board with his left hand, his right holding up one side of a large set of headphones to one ear as he listened to something. One of the household phones was off the hook, its cord plugged into his board.

  I probably should have been concerned; there was a reason normals (and Guild) feared computer technology since the Tech Wars had used the computers to bring the world to its knees. For that matter, I probably should have been more upset that this particular machine was powerful enough, had enough electromagnetic field to it, to change the waves in Minds
pace in subtle ways. It would affect my concentration, my ability to see trouble coming. I should probably be campaigning for him to turn whatever it was way down or off so I could do my job.

  But instead I was focused on damage control right now. I had a hell of a lot more to worry about.

  “This is important,” I said.

  He did something that made it whine in a perhaps-Mindspace-perhaps-reality frequency I wasn’t sure anyone else could hear. It bothered me like nails on a chalkboard.

  Stop, I said into his mind. That hurts.

  He looked up with an annoyed burst, and hit a switch that turned off that sound. “What is it, Ward?”

  “We have a problem,” I said. If working with Paulsen had taught me anything at all, it was that bad news got worse with time. Even worse if someone other than yourself delivered it to your supervisor.

  He set down the handset and turned all the way around. “Exactly what kind of problem?” His voice was low, and cold.

  I filled him in, hitting the vision only lightly, focused on the fact that I’d probably scared the living daylights out of a kid who was already scared. “A completely amateur mistake, and I’m not excusing it,” I said. “But there’s no way I could have predicted his telepathy, or this connection. His mind did not react in a way it should have, and the information traveled without me being able to control it. As far as the vision goes—this is the guy we talked about on the phone. Sibley. At least I think it is.”

  He frowned. “Blair Sibley?”

  “You know him?”

  A burst of frustration, quickly brought into check. “Yes, Ward. I know Sibley. I was the one who gave you the damn file in the first place.”