“I’m a prisoner in hell house, and you’re concerned about building character. Buddy, trust me, it’s not at the top of my to-do list.”
Radon smirked. “Don’t pretend this isn’t the best day of your life, you drifting piece of tumble weed—with no place to call home and no one to care.”
“No offense, pal, but having a lizard for a dad and zombie for a grandpap doesn’t exactly make me eschew my loner lifestyle.”
“I love it when they play hard to get. Now, get on with your new life as my indentured servant.”
The kid saluted him. “Yes, master sir, you vile piece of shit, sir, and that goes double for rotgut over there.”
He scurried off to the kitchen to run the water and start in on the dishes.
Radon smiled, felt a glow in the pit of his stomach he never expected to feel ever again. Maybe the Lady in Red knew what she was talking about. He turned around to find her regarding him.
“Not bad, Radon. Always knew you had it in you.”
“We really need to talk about this insufferable goody-two-shoes side of you. And don’t get me started on how full of yourself you are.”
Lady in Red smiled back at him. “Don’t you go playing hard to get.”
She disappeared just as he was reaching out to kiss her. “Cock tease. Just like you to fall in love with a ghost. Though that’d go a long way to rounding out this family.”
THREE
When she wasn’t fidgeting with her newly acquired wristband, Lorena chewed her fingernails, and spit the shrapnel on the dashboard of his car. The nail-biting was a disgusting habit that Stan didn’t appreciate.
She fiddled with her wristband. “You sure this thing works?”
“It works, I tell ya. No way is any telepath broadcasting thoughts into our heads past these things.” He felt up his own wristband. “And no way are the other ones going to sense our presence, or telekinetically command our cells to explode.”
“We still don’t know what they’re doing in there. We should have wired the place.”
“One of them can sense video and audio surveillance, remember?”
“I need something to take the edge off.”
He glanced at her chewing her nails once again, and decided he’d had it. He grabbed the next john to walk by the car, snapped his neck and threw him in the back seat. It was a 1966 Lincoln, so there was plenty of back seat. Let her get her necrophiliac groove on; better that than he have to keep prying pieces of fingernail out of the carpet with a pair of tweezers. They had a nasty way of working their way into the fibers, worse than dog hair.
About twenty minutes later, tired of watching the scene in the back seat, which was cutting into their anonymity by rocking the hell out of the car, he angled his rearview mirror for a better look at the back of the house. “Hurry up, they’re on the move.” He freed the door and drew his gun before stepping out of the car.
Stan was impressed by how fast he could move on his new legs. He glanced at the flexi-metal extensions from the knee down. He still couldn’t run particularly fast on them, as they were a bit of a balancing act for the uninitiated. So far it was working out just as he’d predicted; the diabetes slowly eating through his body because he refused to stop surrendering to his sweet tooth wasn’t slowing him down in the least.
“Shit!” From the back of the house, he surveyed the slope of the hillside the three sisters had fled down with a dog the size of a donkey in tow. Quite the jaunt. The only thing getting down that mountain after them was a billy goat. What a way to break in his new legs.
Half way down the hill he stopped looking back for Lorena. He just wished she could throw some of that codependent love back his way, realize he relied on her as much as she on him. That said, he was a fast study, and he was having the time of his life on his new legs. By now, he must have looked as if he were showing off. No way would he have had any chance going after them along this terrain without the prosthetic blades. He was still huffing and puffing. But the bionic heart wouldn’t arrive until his own heart finished failing, so what did he expect?
When his bullets bounced harmlessly off some rocks, missing his targets, he cursed the pistol in his hand. He should have thought to reach for the rifle in the trunk if he was going on safari.
Luckily, Lorena, who routinely won sniper awards, had had a little more time to size up the big picture. She fired a shot from the road above, hit the dog, who yelped. “Go girl. As degenerate human scum goes, glad to see you’re not a total waste.” Maybe it was for the best she hadn’t heard that.
***
“My powers aren’t working,” Adsila informed the rest of their party.
“How do you know?” Elsu asked, suspicious of her sister jumping to premature conclusions as part of her generally over-impulsive nature.
“Because I keep killing them over and over in my mind, and nothing happens.”
Needing to rest up, they were using a boulder for cover. Elsu advised the group, “Assuming I don’t have to use my voice to compel them, I tried giving them some suggestions telepathically, and had no luck, either.”
Aiyana chimed in. “And I can’t read their minds to divine their intent beyond the obvious.”
They stopped talking long enough to catch their breaths. Replenishing energy reserves, and getting their bodies back under their command, struck Elsu as the higher priorities in any case.
Aiyana seemed to connect with the dog again. “Thor says if you can’t influence them directly, influence those around them.”
Elsu realized she was pouting. “I’m sure I would have thought of that eventually.”
“When? After they sunk a bullet into me?” Adsila barked.
“You could stand to be more of a team player,” Aiyana said, directing her comment at Elsu. “Your ego isn’t what’s fighting for survival here.”
Speak for yourself, Elsu thought. She’d been the team’s master strategist all this time, and she didn’t like having her value-add to the group undermined by a genetically modified dog demonstrating more smarts and psychic abilities than her.
***
Robin observed the three sisters from behind the wall of glass facing the hillside, the house she occupied but one of many cut into the sloping banks of the canyon. She’d come to make sure they eluded the men in black. Now she had an even bigger problem on her hands.
She’d let her guard down, and now Aiyana had become aware of the obelisk from which Robin drew much of her power. Robin doubted the three girls could channel that kind of energy without making matters far worse on themselves.
It didn’t take long to test that hypothesis.
Aiyana tapped the obelisk, and forged a psychic link with Adsila by grabbing hold of her arm.
Adsila lit Lorena and Stan afire, relished their burning alive a little too much for Robin’s liking. Great, Robin thought, just what I needed, more damage control in another timeline, helping Stan and Lorena to find the god in themselves. If there were two people who needed a little more time than most to do so, it was those two.
Shortly thereafter, Adsila, at Elsu’s prompting, ignited the house the three sisters had lived in, erasing any clues about their identities and future whereabouts they may have left behind.
The house exploded across the hillside as if a bomb had gone off.
The three sisters craned their necks at Robin ominously, seconds before blowing up the house she was standing in. So much for gratitude.
The dog, realizing everything that was going on, was the only one to remain calm. He hadn’t been the least tempted to tap the obelisk. He had more sense than the three sisters put together.
The sisters, with the aid of the obelisk, teleported themselves away from the burning hillside.
Robin re-materialized the house she was standing in, and her body, in the wake of their departure. She teleported Thor to her side. “You were wrong to leave the robot for these three,” she said.
I realize that now, Thor communicated psychically.<
br />
“Something tells me that robot is going to be a lot more interesting down the road.”
Yet you refuse to investigate your gut instincts further. Afraid of the future?
“The future is not set in stone, not even one so ominous as to include that obelisk. Besides, best we learn to think amid uncertainty, and feelings of being overwhelmed, otherwise our minds fail to grow.”
Thor yapped agreement.
She teleported him back to his robot. And, with her mind heavy, she teleported herself after the three sisters.
She had never actively engaged in murder before. Not directly. Not by conscious intent. Her Nietzschean morality, allowing others to do so as part of their man-into-superman unfolding, as situations dictated, may not have pleased traditional moralists. But by her own yardstick, she’d kept her own hands relatively clean up until now.
Maybe there was still something she could do to avoid snuffing out the girls.
***
The three sisters had materialized themselves at the Cliffside restaurant in San Francisco for some calming cinnamon-rums, essentially straight shots of rum over ice with a hardened cinnamon stick as a stirrer. The waitress acted as if put out by the fact that they’d seated themselves without her and had walked clear to the windows overlooking the ocean without any of the staff ambushing them. But she rebounded well. “Anything else I can get you?”
“No,” Elsu said curtly.
Robin, seated among them at the table, kept her presence masked behind a cloak of invisibility. Her aura shone for those with eyes to see. One of those was a young boy, six or seven, the table over, with a well-developed third-eye; he focused his attention on her glowing iridescent outline.
“What the hell just happened?” Elsu asked.
“Aiyana freed up my power somehow, and amplified the hell out of it,” Adsilu proclaimed. She chased the revelation with a swig of the rum.
Aiyana took a deep breath, swizzled the cinnamon stick inside her rum as she came to terms with this latest twist of fate. “Some woman… One of us, one with powers. She was watching us.” She fought to keep her voice down in the crowded restaurant, attracting large numbers due to the storm welling outside. Cliffside restaurants were quite romantic in rainy and stormy weather.
Aiyana seemed jealous of the young couples wooing one another. When she could no longer stand the pain of opportunities lost, she reined in her mind. “She was tapping a power source to amplify her abilities. So I tapped it, too.”
“We can’t control the power we have!” Elsu shout-whispered.
“I know! I know!” Aiyana pleaded.
Santa’s elves, hired for the Christmas season, were going table to table singing, “Happy Birthday to You,” and it was grating on Adsila’s nerves.
“We’re free and clear of the men in black. Seems to me like we should count our blessings,” Adsilu said. She tried to stack the ice cubes in her glass with her swizzle stick like the child at heart she was, or so Elsu thought dismissively when Robin read her mind.
“Our blessings!” Elsu barked. “You have the self-control of a toddler, and the power of a god to go with it.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Adsila proclaimed defensively.
“Maybe we should tone down the histrionics,” Aiyana suggested, playing peacekeeper.
At the latest round of “Happy Birthday to You,” sounding off cue and disturbing their quiet, Adsila showed what a goddess with frayed nerves could do. She sent the ocean rushing through the glass wall facing the ocean. It washed over everyone in the restaurant, and sucked all but the girls back out to sea.
Adsila mended the glass wall behind them. “Not to worry. We won’t have need for the waitress. I took the opportunity to gather us some rums.” She grabbed a couple more hot-buttered rums off the serving cart beside her that she’d thoughtfully materialized.
Aiyana trembled from the shock of her sister’s latest outburst, as Elsu fumed over someone making a decision to act she hadn’t approved of in advance.
“Great, Adsila,” Elsu remarked. “And what do you do when the next hissy fit strikes, and it’s not enough to commit genocide to exorcise your rage? Split the planet in two? Erase the solar system?”
Robin realized those were all very real possibilities, even likelihoods, considering that it would take these girls too long to control even their unaugmented powers. First they had to heal from all the hurts, starting from early childhood up through to the present. She had full access to their memories, courtesy of the obelisk. They had to learn to vent that lifetime of stored-up rage in a healthy manner, hard enough to do with such ungrounded natures, even in the absence of powers. And babysitting them fulltime, even if that were possible, couldn’t undo all the damage they would do, not entirely. Even bringing people back from the dead, with the aid of the obelisk, couldn’t entirely erase the impact of the traumas to the victims’ psyches, not even with memory wipes. Some slime trail would remain.
On the plus side, the next time Robin encountered them in an alternate timeline, she wouldn’t make the same mistake. Maybe she could send the message out telepathically across timelines to the other Robins. She had enough souls to oversee, and her plate was getting fuller by the minute.
She restored the restaurant scene to its state prior to the sisters’ intervention.
And, with sorrow and regret, she made the three sisters, together with their hang-jawed expressions, disappear for good.
The young boy with the clairvoyant abilities stared at her bug-eyed, evidently able to see the departure of the girls and remember that they were even in the restaurant, despite Robin’s psychic patching.
He tugged at his mother’s sleeve. “Mommy, the Grim Reaper glows. She’s pretty.”
His mother sighed. “You really have to do something about your morbid imagination, child.”
“I’m not the one who washed everyone out to sea!” the boy shouted.
The mother cast her eyes heavenward and said a silent prayer, as Robin departed.
FOUR
“Hi, my name is Steven.”
“Such a formal introduction. It must portend something truly momentous,” Katia said. She was having a little fun with him.
“Yes, it does, actually. You see, from the moment you held that turnip and turned it in your hands, I was entirely in love.”
“As you will.” She handed him the turnip and continued down the produce aisle.
“You mock me. That’s not very nice.” He stepped up behind her, pressing his chest to her back. He breathed heavily against the nape of her neck.
“You’re starting to feel like a stalker.”
“I should hope so. I’ve been stalking you for three aisles, now. So far you’ve held everything in your hands but me. You can understand my desperation.”
She was glad her back was to him so he couldn’t see her smile. He really didn’t have a stalker vibe to him. This one was innocent, playful, nearly childlike in his exuberance—but not so childlike as all that—considering the nature of his obsession.
“Only on account of your slavish loyalty,” she said, stuffing a rubber-banded cluster of green onions into a green plastic bag, “I will agree to have tea with you in a public square in full view of a couple thousand people.”
“Olivetti champagne and fondue, my place, tonight.”
“What is Olivetti champagne and fondue?”
“Honest to God, I have no idea. Words come to me from out of nowhere when I’m entranced. Might be the devil speaking. Maybe you should be cautious.”
She whirled around and found herself pressed up against his chest, a banana in her hand. “What would be the fun in that?” They both nervously eyed the banana. He clutched the one in her hand and substituted it for a bigger one.
She made a sour face. “Very funny.”
“I just thought we should start this relationship off without any lies coming between us.”
She bit her lip.
“If you keep biting you
r lips off, I won’t have anything to kiss.”
“How did—?”
He pointed to the security mirror in the corner. He was gauging her reactions the entire time. Swine. Cute, huggable, adorable swine.
***
Steven opened the door to his apartment. “Maybe now you can understand why I’m such a romantic. It’s all I have.”
“The cockroaches do spoil the mood.” Katia watched them scurry across the kitchen counter.
“Nonsense. They’re paired for life, as are the rats.” Two rats were caught up in a fierce tug of war over the cheese left out on the counter.
“I’m glad you chased away all the ones you felt didn’t fit your image. At least I know you’re a man of your words.”
Steven started taping blankets to the windows to make it “night” at ten in the morning. Amused, she set about converting the kitchen and dining area into something that might accommodate humans rather than vermin, starting with the dishes in the sink. “You needn’t bother with the windows. Something tells me it’ll be night and then some before this stage is set.”
“I wish you wouldn’t cheapen our love like that by suggesting I can’t move mountains for you in the prescribed timeframe.”
He did seem to be multitasking well; in between throwing out verbal zingers, he taped the curtains, moved boxes to clear seat cushions, and kicked shoes under the sofa. When he noticed the look she was giving him over the shoes littering the floor, he explained, “To trip up the cat burglars.”
She lowered her head over the sink so her long straight hair would drop in curtains to either side of her face in order to hide her latest smile.
***
Katia fought to scrub the stain out of the kitchen counter with a zeal she didn’t find reasonable, considering the rest of the ground to be covered. But still she couldn’t help herself. Then she flashed on the stain in the mattress it resembled in that other life, locked in a room as a sex slave. Something was keeping her mind from dwelling further on the past, some force.
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