“You stand right there,” Clarissa commanded. “What did you do to him, you witch?” She scowled at Elsu. “You voodoo witch. Get out of here this instant! All of you!”
“Clarissa?” Nick said, shocked and dismayed by his wife’s outburst. “Get ahold of yourself.”
“She’s got you under her spell.” Clarissa glared at Elsu, defied her to lock horns with her over the control of her husband.
Clarissa fumbled about beneath the counter.
“She’s going for the gun!” Aiyana shouted. “I can see it in her mind. I can see her pulling the trigger, and not giving it a second thought.”
When Elsu pried her eyes off Aiyana it was because Clarissa had found the gun beneath the counter—and was pointing it at her.
Clarissa pulled back the trigger. It was as if she was suddenly moving at a different tempo than the rest of them, at normal speed, as the rest of them were stuck in slow motion.
Clarissa exploded all over Elsu and Nick like a sack of red flower dropped on the floor.
The three girls glared at one another. It dawned on the three of them around the same time what had just happened.
“Nick, be a dear, and wipe your wife off the counter,” Elsu said.
“Seems like the reasonable thing to do,” Nick said. “Maybe I should get the hose.”
“I think the hose is a fine idea,” Elsu said supportively.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Elsu.” Nick turned toward the part of the nursery exposed to the elements.
“I wish we could have all agreed on that a lot sooner,” Elsu said.
Nick propped the glass-door open to make room for the hose.
A few seconds later he was wielding it ably inside the store.
Aiyana pleaded, “We can’t stay here. Don’t even think about it.”
“Why not?” Adsila wiped her eyes halfheartedly, to ensure the extra water blurred the scene of blood and gore running ahead of the hose and Nick’s ability to wash it away.
Aiyana pointed to the security cameras. “Those images are broadcast directly to the security service. And the software has alerted them to more than just routine footage on this end. They’re mobilizing.”
“How—?” Elsu never finished the question. She figured she knew how her sister knew, the same way she knew Clarissa was reaching for the gun. “Calm down, the both of you,” Elsu said.
Aiyana waited a moment to evaluate the situation. “Thank God that shit doesn’t work on the two of us. Now let’s get to hell out of here.”
The three girls ran out of the store, left Nick placidly washing down his wife’s remains, and whistling “Yankee Doodle Dandy” to himself in honor of Patriot Day.
***
Stan scrutinized the footage of the three sisters in the nursery, ending in a very comic-leitmotif manner, with Nick hosing down his wife’s remains as if he was only too happy for the divorce to go through ahead of schedule. “I do love it when they make it easy on us.”
“You see why we called you?” said the security officer who worked for Systems Control. He and his uniformed partner were literally shaking. They were both pressed against the far walls of the room as far away from the video feed on the monitor as they could get, so that, from their distance, whatever Stan said next would ring true. Any closer, and they might not buy the line of bullshit they expected he’d be feeding them. That’s what men in black did, after all; feed people comforting bullshit they could live with so they never had to face the truth. It was a unique form of social service few were qualified for, few humans having the necessary genes anymore to know what the fuck to do with truth when it was staring them in the faces.
“I can definitely see why you called us, sons. Damn fine decision it was, too,” Stan said, before pulling out his peacekeeper. “And you can see why I have to shoot you dead as a proverbial doornail, by the same logic.”
He pulled the trigger twice, hit them both square in the foreheads, which did nothing to wipe the shocked stupor off their faces, and the silly paradoxical grins that went with them. They crumpled to the floor, carrying the clown faces to their graves.
Stan’s partner, Lorena, joined him.
“We need to come up with a strategy for how to get close to these three.”
Stan took out a stick of gum, and inserted it in his mouth. “We get past the one who reads minds, we gotta get past the one who controls them. Succeeding at that, we got to get past the one who can end us with a thought. All in all, one crack team that’s just about unassailable, and with just three people. Puts a Navy SEAL team to shame. They need at least five to do half as much.” Throwing the gum wrapper in the waste basket, he added, “I can’t figure out how to make them any more invincible for the life of me.”
He collapsed on the swivel chair, threw his feet up on the counter with the monitors, and watched the footage of the girls on endless loop, as Lorena bided her time riding the hard ons of the stiffs on the floor. Necrophilia was a craving she couldn’t satiate any more than he could his sweet tooth with doughnuts. What was it about a world gone mad that lent itself to all sorts of compulsive behaviors?
***
A couple hours later, Stan slipped his shoes and socks off, and rolled up his pants to his knees to give his legs some breathing room, before elevating them on the counter. He gawked at his feet and legs, swollen up to his knees. They were red, and the skin was flaking off his calves. Diagnosis—poor circulation secondary to the diabetes. Prognosis—not good. Well, it wasn’t like the doctors hadn’t warned him. Soon they’d cut off his legs at the knees, he thought, as he reached for the box of stale doughnuts the security guards were kind enough to leave for him as a parting gift. He refused to worry about it. Hell, they had guys running in the Special Olympics on those peculiar flexi-metal posts that allegedly performed better than real human legs. They could keep hacking away at him all they wanted until all that was left of him was his head. He could only get better at his job in the process.
Lorena was still going at it with the two dead men on the floor. He couldn’t argue the staying power of rigor relative to his own half-hearted hard-ons.
***
Thor was waiting for the three girls when they walked in. “My God, that’s the biggest dog I’ve ever seen!” Adsila exclaimed, before running over to him. She dropped to her knees, and gave him a big hug. Thor licked her face, figuring breaking from character this early on in their relationship probably wasn’t the healthiest choice to make.
“It can swallow your head whole, and what do you do? You stick your face in his,” Aiyana squawked. “Tell me I didn’t save you from a bullet just to have to fend off the Grim Reaper from here to eternity.”
“Go on, get out of here,” Elsu commanded Thor. When he didn’t respond, Elsu’s eyes went wide, and Aiyana’s jaw dropped.
Seconds later, Aiyana said, “He’s one of us.”
“No way!” Adsila exclaimed. “Now I absolutely must keep him. I need someone I can’t hurt beyond you two every time I throw a tizzy. Or I’ll never be close to anyone or anything ever again!”
Elsu frowned, upset she wasn’t able to overturn her sister’s logic.
Thor easily read her mind.
He yapped at Aiyana. “He says he’s here to protect us from the men in black,” Aiyana said.
“The men in black?” Adsila said. “Who are they?”
After a few seconds of psychically communicating with Thor, Aiyana replied, “You don’t want to know.”
Elsu ran her eyes over Nick and Clarissa’s home, the only home they’d known since fleeing their shanty in Mexico. Her next words, as a matter of course, did not come easily to her, Thor realized, reading her mind. “Come on, we need to get out of here,” Elsu said.
Thor yapped agreeably.
Aiyana translated for him. “He says we have to leave now, as opposed to five minutes from now.”
Elsu, used to being in charge of the bunch, didn’t appreciate Thor usurping her authority.
He went over and stretched out obsequiously before her.
Aiyana laughed. “That’s his way of saying he knows you’re in charge, and he’s really not here to challenge you for control of the group. It was just a recommendation. If you like, he can go out and kill the two waiting in the car for us to make a misstep.”
“How is it you didn’t sense them?” Elsu asked.
Aiyana thought about it. “I don’t know. I don’t sense them even now.”
Elsu sighed. “They must have seen the video, and they’ve already got countermeasures in place.” She threw a glass globe of a Japanese monastery done over as a pagoda house against the wall. It refused to shatter. Instead, she had ominously stirred up the snow inside the globe, portending stormy weather ahead.
“I prefer to be the one who loses it first,” Adsila said, thinking the joke would settle everyone’s nerves.
“You better get used to losing it last,” Elsu said, “or we’re going to leave a trail.” She growled and fumed, did her best to hold herself in check by directing all her violence toward shoving beloved items in a suitcase with far too much force.
“I’m over the whole flower shop ordeal, already,” Adsila said. “C’est la vie. Que sera, sera. It’s high time we moved on.” She picked up the snow globe and added it to the collection in the grip.
“We better get on with following this dog’s advice.” Elsu glowered at Thor. “And don’t think we’re done squeezing your story out of you, you bag of fleas.”
“Look a gift horse-dog in the mouth, why don’t ya?” Adsila said. “Let’s hope it’s as easy to find the rest of our kind. Maybe we can do a X-Men plot, you know, mutants unite against the testy normals. Or do you think this is more of a Heroes deal, season one, I mean, not those God awful follow-up seasons. Maybe we’re genetic freaks mutating under the pressure of this inhuman economy. Oh, wait, I think that theme belongs more with Dune, the best sci-fi story of all time. If so, at least we’re in good company.”
At times like this Elsu bemoaned their Americanization. Her sister had been here just long enough to get a little too enculturated for her liking. Thor, reading her mind, would laugh if he could.
“Must you babble every time there’s a crisis?” Elsu said. “I can’t think straight! I need room in my head to think.”
“Must there be a crisis every five minutes for you to solve?” Aiyana shot back at her. She threw a favorite teddy bear into the suitcase. Thor noticed that so far none of them had thrown in anything practical, only stuff with sentimental value.
“Maybe you think I’m making up the men in black out of a pressing need for drama?” Elsu snapped back at her.
“No,” Aiyana said placatingly.
Thor yapped at Aiyana. “He says he knows a way out of here. He’s good at sniffing out trails that lead away from danger.”
“Very well,” Elsu said finally, still having trouble relinquishing supervision of the threesome even for a second. He realized he was going to have his hands full with her.
Thor stood up on his hind legs, and scooted the sliding glass door open, leading to the back patio. “How do you imagine he learned to do that?” Adsila said.
Aiyana remarked curtly, “I don’t know, Adsila, maybe shortly after he learned to talk, communicate psychically, and strategize war games better than the men in black. I swear you are so daft, sometimes.”
“I’m just that way so Elsu has someone to boss around,” Adsila said defensively. “Or she wouldn’t know what to do with herself.”
“She’s got that much right,” Aiyana said, then, having had it with both her sisters, was the first one out the door behind Thor. Reading her mind, he could tell she was getting tired being the glue holding the family together, helping both the others to get some distance on themselves, which just seemed impossible without her. Thor figured, by taking some of the pressure off Aiyana, she was easily going to be his greatest ally, after Adsila’s fickle attachment to him (as to all things) had worn off, and Elsu had gotten tired fighting him for control of their destiny.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Suro glued the base of the pagoda to the mountain top. He was old now, necessitating he work with special magnifying lenses clipped to his glasses. The tools spent more time shaking in his hands than productively carving out anything.
“I don’t get why you only do this one snow globe design, and no other. Don’t you ever get bored with it?” Sonny asked. He looked up to see the workspace filled with identical snow globes, some bigger than others, but all showing off the same Zen monastery in the shape of a pagoda at the top of a mountain.
“All my life I’ve been driven to make them. The first twenty years, I didn’t know why, either.” Suro glued the miniature trees in clumps to the side of the mountain with a pair of tweezers. “Then it came to me one day.”
Sonny stuck his face up close to where Suro was working. He looked strangely distorted in the magnifying glasses Suro was wearing, like a big-eyed fish swimming too close to the side of his aquarium.
The old man reached for another tree clump, fussed over the right one for this mountain ridge. The minor variation from snow globe to snow globe of the clumping trees, born largely of his perennial indecision, was the one anomaly he allowed himself. He probably doubted anyone would ever notice but him.
“What came to you?” Sonny asked impatiently.
Suro carefully stuck the latest clump of trees into place. “The psychic energy I invest in my globes will provoke a reaction in the right person who picks it up. Perhaps bridging their minds to the psychic impressions they most need to connect with to be all they can be. Has to be the right person, though, at the right time in their lives, or it just won’t work.”
“So, what you’re saying is, after making these things nonstop for twenty years, you eventually went mad. No surprise there.”
“You’ll take over for me, one day,” Suro said confidently. He rotated the base of the mountain he was working on to attend to the still bare-faced other side.
“Of course. If madness runs in the family, I see no other out.”
“Don’t make me laugh, my hands are unsteady enough already.” Suro reached for a miniature boulder this time that would serve as a base for a miniature tree with roots clutching the boulder.
“Mad people laugh. All is not lost then.” Sonny lifted his face away from his close up view of the globe to scoff at the collection. “I suppose if I am to be poor, madness shall be a delicious reprieve.”
He was just eleven, so how could it feel like his life was already over? He had to break free. He would not let his world shrink to where it was just the little scene inside that snow globe, and no more.
He didn’t know where he was going to get the power of mind to break free of his fate; but he was going to get it.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Brutus didn’t much care for his new assignment. Thor had sent him after the zookeeper at the San Diego Zoo, whose job it was to feed the animals. Brutus didn’t care to be around them. Their plight, living in cages, reminded him of just how much his own body had become a cage, no longer able to keep up with his brain and the things he wanted to do with it. And he was the dolt of the lot of Bullmastiffs. He wondered how the others were managing.
Apparently there was something about Norman Welling worthy of his protection.
Brutus followed him around all day like his shadow. Norman had gotten so used to having Brutus nearby, that he’d gotten bolder with his feeding of the animals. He no longer bothered to lock them in their cages prior to feeding them. Instead he let them roam freely when he laid out their food. He couldn’t stand to see the animals in cages any more than Brutus could. The few times Brutus had run interference for him, come between Norman and one of the male lions, and one of the Kodiak bears, both the animals had backed down. Brutus was only too happy to match their savagery and project pictures into their heads of just what he could do to them if they didn’t back down. They had taken the hint. But they were hard to
control. The time might come when he’d have to kill one of them to protect the old man. A shame. He thought they were rather wondrous creatures, even as dumb as they were.
Brutus watched Norman ladle the male lion urine into a jar, tighten the lid on it, and mark the label with the date. He was forever collecting animal piss. When he wasn’t collecting creature excrement, he was tranquilizing the animals to inject them with some concoction. Brutus realized Norman was looking for a way to make the animals happier and more content with their caged confines, because he could see into his mind. But the science he was using was beyond Brutus. What’s more, it seemed beyond the animals, as well, as none of them looked the least bit happier. Brutus could note no progress in the few months he had been here watching Norman plying his trade, while auspiciously attending to routine duties.
Maybe Norman was in the early stages of his experiments. Or maybe there was something way bigger going on here than he could grasp. He was tempted to psychically reach out to Thor for assistance. But it wouldn’t look good. He’d never get the more difficult assignments, and never rise any higher in the pack hierarchy than “hit man for the mob,” if he didn’t learn to crawl up rung by rung on his own merits. With the new generation of pups coming on line, he might even see himself fall in the rankings, if he couldn’t get better at learning.
He chuckled ruefully inside his head at his “hit man for the mob” reference. He missed the gangster movies he and Thor used to watch on the neighbor’s TV when they were living at Hartman’s. Norman was into the Discovery Channel. God help him; more animals. As if he didn’t get his fill during the day.
One day soon, this assignment would be over, and maybe he’d have earned the right to pick something more up his alley.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 169