Vacant

by Alex Hughes

  You couldn’t have told me about the mind-control machine? Stone asked me.

  I paused. I thought I had, honestly. Why didn’t you pull it from my brain?

  I was kind of in the middle of something, and you didn’t seem to be lying. You’d rather I had spent the time to go rummaging through your mind instead of saving the boy here?

  Um . . .

  A moan came from his general direction. “Oh, good, she’s waking up,” Stone said. “Early even. We’ll get another meal bar in her and she’ll be fine.”

  Tommy held on, for a long, long moment. I let him, wanting comfort after that day we’d had myself.

  “You showed up,” he said quietly.

  “I told you I would,” I said.

  And let him hold on for a while.

  “You hurt?” I finally asked.

  He shook his head and I felt it.

  I pulled away. “Why don’t you call your dad?” I asked, and got him the slip of paper from my trouser pocket.

  “I know the number,” Tommy said, in that dismissive tone.

  I took a sigh of relief. He was okay, if he could talk like that. I might be blind, and the hand might not quite be working, but he was okay. Hopefully all else would be as easily remedied.

  Then came the sound of the receiver being picked up and numbers dialed. After a few seconds, Tommy said, “Dad, it’s me.”

  I heard some loud sound on the end of the line as Quentin went wild on hearing his son’s voice.

  “Don’t yell, okay?” Tommy said, then paused. “Yeah, I’m okay. Adam and this other guy and a girl did the teletotting thing and, like, showed up in the middle of the room with this crazy loud sound. The bad guy didn’t stand a chance.” His voice caught a little on the last part, and I knew he wasn’t over what had happened.

  I sat down on the floor, careful of the hand, and listened to Tommy talk to his dad. For all the fear of the day, for all the roughness, sitting there listening to the love in Tommy’s voice as he talked to his dad made it all worth it. He was okay. He was really, honestly okay.

  And I’d done that.

  CHAPTER 24

  The phone rang in the stable several more times before the cavalry arrived, but I told them to let it ring. Fiske could wait. He’d done enough damage for one day, and not knowing what had happened would be good for him. Even if I suspected that it would make things worse for me some other day. The consequences would be rough, I was sure. They would haunt me for weeks or months or years. But right now, with Tommy alive, it all seemed worth it.

  Margaret, now awake and hungry, fussed over Tommy while they both ate meal bars. Stone had sat down near me.

  “Thanks for showing up on no notice,” I told him.

  “Yeah, well, it’s nice to be a hero sometimes.” He paused while he tried to figure out how to say something.

  “My debt’s going up from this stunt, isn’t it?” I asked quietly. I was resigned to the cost. If they didn’t overcharge me.

  “It’s not that—I’ll give you my time for free. I have the discretion. The situation was exactly as you described, and you’ve earned a few of these. It’s just, Margaret—”

  “She’s one of the elite couriers, isn’t she?” I asked. “To send you here and there separately, she has to be good. She’s pretty thin for someone who eats that much, and pretty comfortable pushing until she passes out.”

  “She’s special,” Stone said, a little wistfully. He’d never really been special, not like that, but he’d done well enough. He pulled his focus back to me with a snap. “Anyway, they track her every quarter hour, and since she says she’s going to be out for a day or so after this, I have to charge you.”

  “Wait. She pushed herself to passing out and she only needs a day of recovery?”

  Stone laughed. “And enough food to feed a small horse. You think I’d have her teleporting me for effect if she couldn’t spare the energy?”

  I shook my head—and stopped immediately. “Ouch,” I said.

  “They’ll be here soon,” he said. “I called the Guild board here and they’ll send somebody out to take care of your eyes.”

  “Good,” I said.

  The helicopter arrived a minute before the paramedics, the distinctive sound of the rotor blades filling the sky above the roof. The stable door opened with a screech a few seconds later.

  “Dad!” Tommy yelled, and ran to see him, by the sound of the rapid footfalls.

  “They’re hugging. It’s sweet,” Stone said quietly.

  “Good,” I said. “I’m glad.”

  * * *

  At the hospital, they fused my tendons back together with a machine and sewed up the hand with an old-fashioned needle. I whimpered.

  “You’re under local anesthesia. Don’t be a baby,” the nurse said from next to me as the doctor sewed.

  “It hurts.”

  “I sincerely doubt it does,” she said. I gritted my teeth and held on as another nasty stitch went in.

  Everything hurt worse when you couldn’t see it coming.

  Ow. Another stitch. And another. After an unthinkably long amount of time, the butcher finished the job.

  “We’ll get you set up with a brace when you leave,” the doctor said. “Don’t move it for the next three weeks any more than you have to. The binder protein won’t set, and your body won’t grow a proper cell matrix if you move it.”

  “Okay,” I said. Then jumped into the scary question, made worse by the lack of sight. “What’s the long-term damage?”

  “If you take care of it properly, you should get most of the use of the hand back,” the doctor said. “It may always be stiff, but there are exercises you can do to encourage the strength to come back once it’s fully healed. Don’t move it for three weeks, or the damage will be a great deal worse. You’re lucky we got you within an hour and it’s a clean cut. Any longer, or any more complicated, and you’d lose a lot more.” He thought about mentioning artificial nerve implants, then decided I’d be better off not knowing about other treatment options. Maybe scare me enough not to cut myself again.

  He stood up. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Ward. Don’t get into trouble again anytime soon, okay?”

  “Do my best,” I said.

  Stone’s phone call paid off a short while later, as the Structure Guild specialist arrived at the hospital. I had a long—and embarrassing—conversation with her about exactly what I’d done to myself, with details. Then, after a thorough and professional exam, she reset my mind.

  Two things happened at once: I got a blinding headache, worse than the worst of my life, and my vision returned in full color. My eyes watered from the pain.

  “Hmm,” the specialist said. She was a black woman, taller than I’d thought she was, in the scrubs of someone who worked in a hospital full-time, though probably a mental hospital rather than this place. “Reaction headache is stronger than expected. With your permission?”

  I nodded—then stopped. My neck still hurt, and the bandage pulled. “Do what you have to do.”

  She put her hands on the side of my head to help her focus better. I felt like I was in a blender for one terrible moment, the world wrenching and liquefying, and then it was over. The headache had turned into a dull pound. And my vision, if anything, got sharper. The world and Mindspace resumed their normal patterns.

  “Thank you,” I said. Took a breath. “How much do I owe you?”

  She smiled, a truly beautiful smile. “This one’s on the house.”

  I smiled back then. Today was not such a terrible day after all.

  * * *

  It was two a.m. by the time Jarrod drove me back to the hotel, my arm in a sling to keep me from jarring the thick hand-brace. It was dark outside, very dark, as we drove through south Georgia in an area largely without streetlights. The headlights made pools of light on t
he asphalt ten feet below, and on the trees on the sides of us. He was in the lowest skylane, and driving sedately, which was fine with me. I was tired, and the hand hurt pretty bad since I’d refused pain pills, and I was distracted by the trees going by outside.

  “You realize you broke practically every rule in the book sometime in the last forty-eight hours,” he said, after a long silence.

  I looked over at him and remembered the ethical boundaries I’d crossed with reading that unconscious man. That would haunt me for a while. With Tommy okay, though, it seemed worth the cost. “You sure? That procedures manual is pretty long.”

  Jarrod laughed then, a surprised, open laugh that filled the car. I’d never heard him laugh before.

  “I’m sorry I got Tommy kidnapped,” I said quietly when he was done.

  He shook his head then. “That’s all of our fault. For not investigating to the end fast enough, and for leaving you on your own. You were the one who got him found first. We were still working through the list of abandoned barns.”

  They’d have gotten there, but too late. And who knew whether Fiske would really have given Tommy back if I hadn’t been here? He liked his cruelties. In the end, though, I’d fended off the vision, or its consequences. Enough, more than enough, for today.

  “You’re unconventional, even for a telepath,” Jarrod said to me then. “But you brought me solutions like I asked for, and you got the job done. They don’t always go this well.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Thank you. I’d like you to work with us again, if you’re willing, when something comes up.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  He nodded then. “Your check’s in the glove box. There’s a bonus. I know those Guild guys don’t come cheap. I can’t hire them directly, but . . .” He trailed off.

  I reached forward, careful of my hand, and opened the glove box in the darkened car. I pulled out an envelope, which was going to be hard to open one-handed. Instead I pulled the amount from his mind. It was right on his surface thoughts, after all.

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said.

  “I have a discretionary budget,” he said. After a few moments of silence, he added, “It’s another half hour to the hotel. If you want to sleep, I’ll wake you up when we get there.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  * * *

  Jarrod woke me up as promised when we reached the hotel, pointing out the rental car of mine they’d reparked here.

  “This is good-bye?” he said.

  “Yeah. I need to get back to the city,” I said, yawning. “If there’s anything else I need to handle, call me there, okay?”

  “Can you drive with your hand like that?” he asked me.

  “I drive with my right hand anyway,” I said. “And it’s mostly interstate.”

  He nodded. “We’ll need a report and some other paperwork. The rest of the details here we’ll handle with the locals.”

  I opened the car door, then paused. “What’s going to happen to Tommy?”

  Jarrod shrugged. “Up to the locals, but I have the feeling Tommy’s going to end up living with his father.”

  “Maybe just as well,” I said, then got out and said my good-byes.

  I climbed up the outside stairs, exhausted, but oddly free. I’d stopped the vision. It had cost me, but I’d stopped the vision and I was still alive. It was like some immense weight had been lifted and I could breathe again.

  The hotel room had the same musty smell, with a new component. No minds were there—that much I had made sure of before I’d entered the room—but there was a new note, just a note, sitting on the bed.

  You won’t see it coming, it said. One day soon—but not too soon—you will die. Let the anticipation take you over.

  It wasn’t labeled, signed or anything, but I knew who it was from.

  There were advantages to being as tired as I was. I didn’t have any energy left to worry about my safety in the future. My precognition was typically pretty good at giving me a warning, and by his own stupid design I knew death wasn’t coming all that soon.

  So I put the note in a plastic bag with some tweezers—just in case somebody could get prints from it later—and packed it up along with everything else.

  When I got to the puzzle box in the drawer, I paused.

  I wrestled back and forth with the decision, but in the end I took it with me. I slung my bag over my uninjured shoulder and checked out of the hotel, talking to the same poetry-thinking clerk. The FBI had already paid up my bill. That felt good.

  There was an all-night coffee shop on the interstate just a few miles up the road. The car was working, and the bill was paid. I could leave at any time. But I had something to do first.

  * * *

  I stood in front of the hotel dumpster, a car-sized rectangle that smelled of rotting eggs, dirty laundry, and overly strong cleaning products bought on an industrial scale. It had been emptied since I’d last seen it, the pale resin covers shut over the top, all but one, still open, on the right.

  I set down the bag on the ground, with a thud I felt should be louder. And all the old cravings, all the old justifications played in my head, but they seemed quieter somehow. I pulled out the puzzle box from the bag, struggling with the zipper one-handed. Then I straightened, and just held it in my uninjured hand while I stared at the dumpster.

  I’d kept a vial of my drug in a secret compartment in my apartment for years without touching it, like a security blanket, like a promise to myself that I could use if I wanted to. That being clean was only today, and only tomorrow, not forever. This box would fit nicely in that little compartment. It would fit nicely in my life. No one would know. Even Cherabino wouldn’t know, and I didn’t have to take the drug tests anymore, not like I had. I even had my own money, to buy more of the drug.

  But that was the thing. I didn’t have Swartz here, to barge into my apartment, and his health was such that he might not do that for me again for a long while. No, it was just me, facing myself, and at home I wouldn’t have all the distractions I had had here. I wouldn’t have a ten-year-old prototelepath who I literally couldn’t think about the drug around. I’d be there, me, nothing else.

  I wanted the vial. I did. I wanted to fall off the planet, to make the world disappear, just one more time. Maybe I always would. But I wanted other things more.

  Tommy was alive because of me, and Fiske hadn’t won. Both of those things had required that I stay clean, and I was proud of them both, injured hand, injured mind, and all. I was legitimately proud of them. And those things—and the world that made them—could not live in the same world as using.

  So, though it hurt something inside me, I lifted up the box and threw it—threw it—into the open side of the dumpster. It hit the back rim with a crunch that splintered the box. All the pieces fell, and I heard the sound of breaking glass.

  My heart broke then too. But I was also proud, proud in a sad way. I picked up my bag and headed toward the car. I’d have a long time to figure out what I had to say about this in the next NA meeting. Several hours, at least, fueled by coffee, to think and wonder and plan. I hoped with everything in me that Isabella was okay, that her sanity and her hope had held even if the worst had happened, and that she’d give me a chance to be there for her now.

  I’d given up my drug for the chance.

  * * *

  I arrived at Isabella’s small brick house in north Decatur about seven a.m. The sun was just coming up, making pretty stripes in the pollution-covered sky. I was so wired on coffee that my right hand shook, but I was strangely happy. Worried and happy and everything, all at once.

  She answered her door in a nightgown and robe. She seemed upset, but not destroyed, not from the quick look at her mind. One critical part of me relaxed.

  “Can I come in?” I asked.

  She pu
lled her robe closer around her, and I could feel the tiredness that matched my own. “Nice that you finally showed up,” she said, but I felt her regret at my earlier absence, stronger than pleasure to see me.

  “I’ve been up all night,” I said. “Please let me in.”

  So she did.

  “What happened?” I asked, inside. “With your job, what happened?”

  She looked up, pain in her eyes obvious to even a nontelepath. “They fired me. For excessive force and police brutality. I’m gone from the force. I can’t appeal. I can’t appeal, Adam. And you weren’t here!”

  “What?” I said. I was tired, and not quite tracking.

  “You heard what I said. You weren’t here.”

  “You told me that I could work,” I said, not knowing how to react. I felt guilty enough without her making a huge thing of this, especially if she was okay. She seemed okay. “I saved a kid’s life yesterday.”

  She literally took a step back. “I didn’t say you couldn’t save the kid.”

  I could feel her anger and frustration bubbling up, though.

  “But you couldn’t be here, and then you show up out of the blue, without so much as a call. You could have been dead. You could have been sleeping with some tramp.”

  Now I was hurt. “You know me better than that. If I’m sleeping with anybody, it’s going to be you.”

  “You couldn’t tell.”

  I took in a deep breath, getting angry myself. “You’re the one who doesn’t want the permanent commitment. I’m keeping my damn promise! You want things different, you say the word.”

  She looked down first. Crap. This wasn’t about the no-sex policy, was it? As tired as I was, my body was all too interested in the sex. I took a breath, then another, to get it under control. Exhaustion helped.

  “What is this really about?” I asked her, taking control of my body and emotions by sheer will. This was the worst possible time to do this, but it was what I had.