Empathy

by John Richmond

  Now, girl! Move! She whipped her power out and lashed it around Charlie. Careful, quiet, so quiet, she lifted his bulk only a quarter inch. Any higher would risk Fine’s attention. Emily held her breath and reeled him in, laying Charlie in the crook between the wall and floor. (She’d have floated him right out the door and into the trunk of her car if she could have, but it seemed she had to be able to see what she was touching with her mind.) She could feel his warmth, smell him all over her as if she were snuggled into one of his shirts. Hot tears welled up in her eyes. One fell and splashed on his cheek far below. His long eyelashes fluttered.

  It only took moments to get Charlie to safety—just long enough for her to look up in time to see Samuels ripped in half like a sheet of paper. Emily spasmed with the shock and sat back hard against the wall. Her head hit the cinderblocks and red flashed in her vision.

  She stood up as if propelled by something outside of her, her will pulling her to her feet faster than her physical ability to do so. She lunged onto the railing and sailed out into space. Again, the summer wind caught her and set her down. There were no voices in her head now.

  It was time to serve.

  Emily Burton, daughter of Andrew, walked into the light.

  Drummond Fine turned to face her.

  * * *

  SHARON DIMKE STARED at the hospital’s main boiler. It looked like a big metal spider crouched in a web of rusting pipes. For a moment she was sure she would fail The Doctor. How was she supposed to find the—what did he call it—the main pressure valve? But a second later it made itself visible. Not appearing out of nowhere, but just kind of realizing itself. The big red valve wheel seemed to glow.

  All she had to do was raise the pressure into the critical zone. The ensuing explosion would vaporize just about everything in the room including the two big jugs of bleach and ammonia she had brought with her. The Doctor had explained it all: They would mix and the gas would waft up and out with the steam cloud. Sharon would waft up and out of the hell she called her life. On the other side her soul would be waiting for her. He’d promised.

  Sharon carried the two sloshing jugs over to base of the boiler, the fumes already stinging her sinuses. She uncapped them and turned to the valve. A yellowed tag hung from a twist of wire. She squinted at the old typed lettering:

  Main Pressure Release

  Manual Override

  DON’T NOT TOUCH!!!

  Don’t not touch. That was kind of cute. Sharon imagined the facilities manager who’d printed up this tag: an older man, first generation Greek or Italian immigrant. That was a taste of real New York, a splash of the human stew that made this city. His image wavered into view in a dark corner of the room, waggling one hairy-knuckled finger. Heyah, you-ah dere! Don’t not touch-a dat! Sharon squeezed her eyes shut and shook it off. She was hurting bad now for the Oxy, the chemical messenger from her soul calling out for her to reclaim it.

  She wrapped her fingers around the red valve wheel. Don’t not touch. Okay, if you say so. She yanked hard to the left. Lefty-loosey, righty-tighty, but all she managed was a grunt and what would most likely be a very sore shoulder in the morning…if she were going to have a morning. Sharon swore and threw herself at the valve, tearing at it, sweat popping out on her skin in the heavy boiler-room air. The flimsy hospital gown slipped off her shoulder exposing her left breast. She heaved and felt more muscle tissue tear.

  Sharon reeled back, almost knocking over the bottles of bleach and ammonia. The dim basement dimmed further. “Whoa-oh,” she dipthonged, swaying on her bare feet a moment. There was a tiny splotch of fuck-me-red nail polish on her big toe left over from the last time she’d cared enough about her body to paint it. How long had that been, three weeks? A month? Red nail-polish. Red valve-wheel. Sharon blinked. Okay, to hell with this. She yanked the hospital gown out of the way and pulled the Glock. She put the muzzle a few inches away from the where the valve-wheel attached to the pipe and turned her face away.

  BLAM!

  Sharon went deaf again, but more than her ears were ringing. She looked down at the fist sized hole in her abdomen just below and to the right of her belly button. Her mouth an “O”, she glanced from the valve-wheel to her belly, back to the valve-wheel. There was a tiny chip in the red paint and it looked like it might have turned a degree or two. The hollowpoint slug had just ticked off the iron valve wheel and ricocheted back through her stomach.

  “That didn’t just happen.”

  She stared at the hole in her body and shook her head. In another second she was going to lose consciousness and die in this fucking basement without having carried out The Doctor’s will. She would expire and what? No soul. The Doctor had promised her she could have her soul back but only when she completed the plan. No explosion, no soul. The dark would simply eat her. No, it couldn’t be that way.

  Sharon let out a savage grunt and threw herself at the valve-wheel. A loop of intestine slipped out of her belly with a whiff of shit and scored iron. Sharon hauled on the wheel as the world began to gray at the edges. “Not yet,” she said. “Not yet.” She yanked and yanked, throwing the last of her energy into her task. Please, please, please. “PLEASE!” she screamed and the metal screamed back as the wheel hauled over to the left. A dusty red light bulb in a steel cage burned into life and flashed its warning, but she didn’t see it. Sharon Dimke collapsed into a pile of her own hot guts. She was staring at the gage next to the valve and the little black arrow that was steadily climbing into the danger zone.

  It happened fast. The pipes sprouting from the main boiler began to shake, dust snowing down. She felt the sneeze rise in her sinuses and realized that if she gave in she was dead. A sneeze would be enough to send her over the edge. An alarm began to bray in time with the flashing red light. The boiler was actually beginning to swell outward like some cartoon robot that’s eaten too many metal sandwiches. An ancient bolt popped and rocketed past her head on a jet of superheated steam. Sharon sneezed and agony like nothing she had ever felt lit up her insides. Her face twisted into a silent hell-mask. Sharon had a final realization: the pain was real. The pills and the rest of it had always been the lie. Pain was everlasting.

  The last thing Sharon Dimke saw was the red valve-wheel shooting off the manual override pipe. It sheared through her skull like the blade of a pizza cutter. An instant later the boiler howled a long low note, the world’s biggest teapot, and exploded.

  * * *

  EMILY STOOD A few feet away from Fine. She no longer attempted to steady the tremors in her right hand and noticed with a detached curiosity that his left hand shook as well. Weak arc-sodium light sprayed in from the street. It was dark but there was enough to see by, to mark Fine where he stood and Samuels where he lay shattered.

  Emily spared a glance over Fine’s shoulder then locked his flat, reflective eyes with her own. She’d never felt anything like this before. Empty. She was here to kill another human being and felt nothing. She understood him then—how death bleached the mind. The great rushing chorus of all of THEM! receded even farther. Could she have become like him if her life had been different? There was a time, not so long ago, when she might have considered it. In the face of the madness wrought by so many alien emotions anything would have been an improvement. When it had come down to ending it, she’d chosen to take her own life. Fine had turned outward.

  For what seemed like a long time they stood and stared. Emily half-expected a spiky ball of russian thistle to go rolling between them. This was more than two cowboys itching to draw and shoot. They were opposing nuclear powers with their fingers on the button. In the same amount of time it would take Fine to stop her heart Emily could hurl him against the far wall with enough force to pulp his bones.

  It was her curiosity that broke the silence.

  “You can feel people’s emotions, like me,” Emily asked, “is that right?”

  Fine tipped his head to the side. Without her mate as a control they were equals. She with her brute stre
ngth, he with his precise aim. His control over the nurse would have served to disarm her. Now…well, this was going to be interesting. “You’re curious about me,” he said. “Did you think you were alone, miss Burton?”

  “Did you?”

  “When I was younger than you are now, I thought I was the only real person in the city, on the planet, and that everyone else was some species of specter sent to torment me.” He grinned and spread his hands. “Now, I know they’re just people.”

  But they’re still not really there for you, are they? “Do you understand what’s happened to us?”

  “I know that when we crossed, something changed. Humans are interesting creatures. Our intelligence quotient is increased by exposure to new stimuli. Rats in ‘enriched environments’ containing other rats become smarter than test subjects left in solitary confinement.”

  Emily remembered her hand print embossed in the grill of that SUV, smashing in the chrome ribs as easily as she could punch through a wet wicker basket. She thought of how that might look on Fine’s solar plexus.

  A normal person would have been disquieted by her smile, but Fine was amused. She was imagining his murder. Like to like indeed.

  “We learned from each other.” She shook her head. “You think it could have happened that fast?”

  “Who’s to say? To my knowledge—and let me assure you I’ve researched the topic extensively over the years—there are no real experts.” He showed his teeth. “Save for the two of us, perhaps.”

  “But how come I can throw around the furniture and you…?”

  “Break? Hearts?”

  Emily flicked her eyes over Fine’s shoulder and tipped her chin at the savaged remains of a kind old man. “You can do a hell of a lot more than that.” God, that could have been Charlie. God! For a moment, she hated herself for even thinking it.

  Fine indicated the twisted steel pillar to his left like a spokesmodel on a showroom floor. “And it would seem that you can do a hell of a lot more than throw the furniture around, Miss Burton. That was impressive, by the way. I’m surprised the roof hasn’t fallen in yet. Do you think that if it does Mr. Dunbar will be crushed in the rubble with us?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Oh, as to that, well… I think it must have something to do with our own personalities. You see, I’m a medical doctor with a particular interest in the cardiovascular system.”

  “Thought you were a shrink.”

  “Indeed, but shrinks go to medical school just like everyone else before they specialize. Specialization is what this is all about, I think. I break hearts, as it were, because I have an intimate knowledge of, and fascination with them. You have a more extraverted approach to your new ability because you understand the world in terms of events outside of yourself.”

  “Interesting theory.” He was hard to read behind those glasses, so flat.

  “Tell me, Miss Burton,” his voice pranced, “has the empathy made life a little blurry for you? Your friend Harlan told me you traveled here from a very small town. It’s emotionally noisy here in our great city. The individuals are nearly impossible to differentiate unless one pushes. In—oh, what did he say? Janesville! One can only assume that the low population density thinned the boundaries between your psyche and those of your neighbors.

  “My professional opinion, Emily, is that you’ve never known your own internal workings very well at all. In fact, I’d wager these last few days in Manhattan have been your first as a defined individual. In short: your power is outwardly focused, because that’s all you know.”

  The skin around her mouth tightened at the sound of her home in his mouth. She remembered Daddy’s lesson about using a person’s name to gain an edge over them. It worked with other important names, too. And he was right about her. These last few days had been an introduction to herself, but instead of trying to find out who she was, she’d drawn closer to other people, running from the prospect of spending any time alone. If it wasn’t with Charlie it was with poor Samuels.

  It doesn’t change a thing about the here and now. Her father’s voice again.

  Through her numbness Emily heard herself ask, “So how’s this going to work?”

  Fine snuffled the air. “You’re not afraid.”

  “No. I just want all this to be over.”

  “As do I, Miss Burton.”

  “Your hand’s shaking.”

  “So is yours.”

  Emily half-smiled. “Charlie thinks I’m killing myself or something. Every time I use this new whatever-the-hell-it-is.”

  “Ah, yes, your Nurse Dunbar.” Fine seemed to probe the dark over her shoulder, but he could barely make her out let alone anything else outside a circle of about ten feet. His eyes, beautiful and strange, were nearly blind. “I can feel him. You moved him, but I can still feel him.”

  “Why are you doing all of this? Can I actually give you something to make you stop?” Emily set her shoulders. “What do you want me to do?”

  “To submit, Emily. Merely that.”

  “Merely that.”

  Drum stuck his hands in pants pockets and leaned back on his heels. Just your average guy makin’ conversation. “You know, I have a theory about our abilities.”

  “Something else?”

  “Indeed. I might even consider writing a paper. I’ve had an inspiration concerning the original well-spring of our shared abilities: the empathy itself. Miss Burton, you have much more empathic power than I.”

  “Great. You want it, you can fucking have it. I came here to blow my brains out to get rid of it.”

  Drum took a step closer and stopped himself. “I do want it. I want it very much. All of this,” he swept his arm around in a dramatic arc, “was arranged so that you and I might share.”

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but asked, “Why?”

  “Very soon, if hasn’t happened already, the entire city will be engulfed in a wave of fear it hasn’t experienced since Nine-Eleven. As you know, I have an affinity for fear. It’s clean, you seen? That last, great burst of terror as a person succumbs to death under the weight of his own phobia is bliss.”

  “What’s that got to do with me? Can’t you just go surfing on this fear wave, or whatever, on your own?”

  “Not to the extent you can, Miss Burton. I’m not as gifted as you in that regard.”

  “So what do you want?”

  He smiled, a sick old man leaning out of a van with a lolly pop. “To tap you, Miss Burton. To feel through you.”

  Emily fell back a step as the revulsion spiked. When she and Samuels had encountered Fine in the Park, it had been like sticking a toe into his poisonous psychic pool. Now, he wanted to pour himself down her throat.

  “I can’t do that.” She grimaced, not giving a shit if it was safe to offend him or not. She wanted puke. “Even if I would go along with something like that, it would wipe me out. Actually allowing all of that in at the same time? And you on top of it? No.”

  His face was a piece of stone.

  Understanding dawned on Emily’s face. “That’s why you grabbed Charlie. I thought you took him just to get me out here because you wanted to kill me or something. But you wanted me for this fear wave stuff. You thought you could, what, like hold him for ransom or something? Hurt him unless I did what you wanted because you can’t just make me do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Guess we screwed up your little plan pretty good, then, huh?”

  * * *

  CHARLIE OPENED HIS eyes in the dark with the sensation (for the second time that long, horrible night) that someone had been beating on his chest with a sledge-hammer. He knew he was still in the warehouse because of the smell. Pigeons. Fine had killed those pigeons, piling them at his feet where they fell from the rafters. Fine had done what then? He’d wrapped Charlie in a glowing fog of pain so intense the memory of it now filled him with terror. Charlie pulled his knees up to his chest and shook. He’d never been so afraid in his li
fe.

  In the dark, voices, a woman. His woman and the monster.

  “To tap you, Miss Burton. To feel through you.”

  Charlie slowed his breathing. Breathing was loud and if Fine heard him the pain would come back. Charlie was cold. It was high summer and he was freezing, almost expecting to see his breath smoking in front of him. Shock. Charlie clapped a hand over his mouth as a giggle threatened to spill out and flare his position. He had to get a hold of himself. People in shock, especially when they’ve been terrorized, don’t think clearly. He was the patient now.

  Charlie lay on his back, aware of the wall next to him and the empty floor spreading out into gloom on the other side. He lay his hands on his sore, sore chest and took slow, even breaths. After thirty seconds he felt better, more himself. He was still scared shitless, but now he feared like a man instead of an animal. His chest even felt better. Charlie sat up and listened.

  “That’s why you grabbed Charlie,” he heard Emily say. She sounded strange, flat. “You thought you could, what, like hold him for ransom or something? Hurt him unless I did what you wanted because you can’t just make me do it?” No, not flat. She was enraged.

  Charlie sat with his head cocked to one side and considered the situation. Emily and Fine could do each other in a heartbeat. Yikes, bad pun, but seriously. All either one of them had to do was think about it. Charlie was supposed to be the edge in Fine’s little equation, but Emily had gotten him away somehow. It had to have been her. How else could he have gotten all the way across the floor like this? Now that he was out of play, though, they were stuck. Eventually one of them would have to act and they would likely both die.

  Charlie got up. His legs were shaking, but not because he was shocky anymore. In fact, he felt strong, solid. Hell, if you wanted to be honest, he felt better than he had in years. His chest no longer hurt and the grooves in his wrists where Fine had cuffed him no longer burned. Even his old torn rotator cuff (a constant background buzz of discomfort) was being quiet. Adrenaline and endorphins, had to be. Considering what he was about to do it made sense. He was swimming in the body’s own cocaine cocktail.

  Charlie slipped out of his shoes and hoped that Emily and Fine would be too busy paying attention to each other to feel him padding across the floor. Emily never said anything about being able to locate hidden things. All it would take is a second of distraction, just a second. If he could throw Fine for an instant, Emily could get the drop. Please, God, Charlie prayed, help her not to hesitate. If she didn’t act right away, Fine would kill him and it would be deadlock again. Except he didn’t think Emily would be able to maintain her cool after that. She would attack and they would kill each other.