by John Dixon
A crazy thought flashed through her head. Go with him to The Farm. Unplug from everything. She’d spent most of her life high, after all. Why not go all in? Be done with the pain and the struggle and letting people down? Just coast into a pharmaceutical haze and fade away…
Half an instant later, she shuddered. Psych ward drugs were the ultimate downers. Plunging into them would be like spending the rest of your life in a K-hole. Trapped inside yourself, unable to scream, and with no one to help even if you could. After a while, you’d forget why you were struggling, forget who you were, forget everything, the way a drowning man drifting into the dark depths at some point forgets the surface.
“Seamus,” she said, wild with desperation. She pulled him into her arms and hugged him. “You don’t have to kill anybody. You just have to tell Rhoads that you’ll go back to training, and then, in a couple of years, you’ll be out of this place. Seamus, I really care about you.”
She felt his head moving back and forth again. “I care for you, too, Scarlett, and I’m sorry to leave you, but I can’t stay here. I’d rather go crazy behind bars, where I can’t hurt anyone, than stay here and end up killing innocent people…maybe friends, maybe even you.” He pulled back and looked her in the eyes again, and Scarlett realized that she wasn’t the only one desperate to make the other understand. “It’s not too late for you. I understand why you joined the strike force, and I know what you think you’re doing, but Rhoads is just using you. Once you’re his weapon, you’ll be his weapon forever. You won’t be able to turn that off. Do you really think they’ll let you go back to the civilian world?”
She’d never considered it and didn’t have time now. “We don’t have time for this.”
“Even if they let you back out into the world, you wouldn’t be you anymore.”
Tap-tap-tap…a light knocking at the door.
Scarlett panicked. “You can’t go. What about us?”
The door rattled, and she heard the lock turn.
He touched her face. “I’m sorry, Scarlett.”
The door opened.
Scarlett stood.
“Time’s up,” the female MP said, entering the cell. “Cadet Kyeong, my name is Sergeant Khalifa, and this is Sergeant Higdon. We’re here to transport you to another facility and do hope that you will be cooperative.”
Seamus kissed Scarlett’s cheek. “You’re better than these people, this place,” he said. “Don’t let them destroy you.”
“Cadet Kyeong,” Higdon said, “we’re going to need to restrain you prior to transport. Please extend your wrists.”
Scarlett waved impatiently. “Just give us a few minutes.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave now,” Khalifa said. Her hand touched Scarlett’s shoulder, gently nudging.
Higdon moved past her, cuffs extended. “Nice and easy.”
Seamus held out his wrists. “I’m ready.”
“No,” Scarlett said, and pushed the man’s hands aside before he could snap on the cuffs.
Everything happened quickly then.
Khalifa shouted and shoved into her, trying to twist her arm behind her back. Higdon dropped the cuffs and drew a stun gun.
Scarlett yanked her arm free of Khalifa’s grip and kneed her hard in the tailbone. Khalifa staggered across the cell. Her nightstick clattered to the floor.
Before Scarlett even fully understood what was happening, Higdon blasted her with the stun gun. Tens of thousands of volts plunged into her chest. Scarlett extended a palm and blasted the force back out. Higdon went stiff as a mannequin and dropped to the floor.
“Run, Seamus!” she shouted.
Seamus looked at her in shock, looked at the guards—and bolted out the door.
Good, she thought, but Khalifa bent for her club, shouting after Seamus.
“No,” Scarlett said, grabbed the back of the woman’s collar, and yanked.
Then they were in a tangle, wrestling.
“Don’t hit her,” Higdon said, grabbing Scarlett’s shoulders. “She’ll use the force.”
Khalifa fumbled with Scarlett’s hands, trying to apply some kind of finger lock.
Higdon’s muscular forearm wrapped around Scarlett’s throat and started squeezing like a python.
Scarlett’s power provided no protection against finger locks or slow, steady pressure cutting off her circulation.
So she went old school, channeling her girlhood fights with Dan. She twisted her hand free of Khalifa’s fumbling, grabbed Higdon’s arm, arched her back, and squatted, yanking forward. Grunting with dismay, Higdon followed as she flipped him over her shoulders. His back slammed onto the floor with a jolt. She heard the air go out of him. The choking pressure disappeared from her throat. Higdon writhed, holding his lower back.
Khalifa fumbled with her radio.
Scarlett lashed out with a kick, knocking the thing from her hand. The radio smashed into the wall as one piece and hit the ground as many. “Get out of my way,” she told Khalifa, moving toward the door. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
A wasp stung her neck. Reflexively, she slapped a hand to the spot, felt something sticking from the flesh just beneath her jaw, and plucked it free.
The world tilted, going blurry.
She stumbled, caught herself on the cot, and stared down numbly at the little dart in her hand.
It felt like she was melting into the floor. She couldn’t lift herself, couldn’t stand. Moving in slow motion, she turned her head to see Rhoads enter the room, brandishing a tranquillizer gun.
“No,” she said or, rather, tried to say. Even that short word came out slurred. She let the dart slip from her fingers, tried to pull herself onto the cot, and slid to the floor.
“Take her to the Chamber,” Rhoads told the guards coming in behind him now.
A wall of blurry camouflage loomed over her. Hands seized her, lifting.
As Scarlett faded, she heard Rhoads key a radio. When the colonel spoke, his words echoed from the guards’ belts and the hallway intercom. “All cadets and personnel. Stop what you’re doing. Cadet Seamus Kyeong has escaped custody and is trying to flee The Point. He is desperate and dangerous. Stop him…by any means necessary.”
SCARLETT AWOKE SLOWLY, THE ROOM coming reluctantly into focus. She lay on her back, strapped to a table. Metal arms rose on either side, arching over her as if she were trapped within a steel rib cage. The silver disk that she’d watched beam pain and fear and desperation into Seamus’s brain hovered over her face like an alien spacecraft.
The Chamber…
“I’m terribly disappointed in you, Scarlett,” Rhoads said, leaning over her with a sad smile. “You were doing so well. And now—well, we all have our weaknesses, I suppose. Soon your personal weakness will be back in custody and on his way to The Farm.”
“No,” Scarlett said. Her voice was even weaker than her body, which felt stiff and heavy and unresponsive. “You can’t.”
“On the contrary,” Rhoads said, “I must. He corrupted you, nearly killed Dalia, and refused to join the strike force.”
No, she thought, you have it wrong. She had so much to say, so much to explain, but her mental steering wheel had gone loose, and her brain was slaloming down a steep and twisting road obscured by fog, with bottomless darkness yawning to either side of the slick and sloping pavement. It would be so easy to surrender the wheel, slide off the soft shoulder, and tumble once more into the void…
“I rescued you from the hardships of plebe life,” Rhoads said, “and looked the other way when you broke the rules. Even when you assaulted Hopkins and interrupted Kyeong’s punishment, I was lenient, but as they say, a spoiled child never loves its mother. Nor its father, it seems.”
The tranquillizer’s fog thinned, giving Scarlett more control over her racing mind. Rhoads had said that Seamus
would “soon be” in custody, so they hadn’t caught him yet. He still had a chance.
Come on, Seamus. You can do it.
“You really are like a daughter to me,” Rhoads said. “You cadets are the children I never had. I felt the same way about the original recruits, back at Bragg. You see, I created you. All of you. I didn’t intend to, but I did. One decision on my part, all the way back in Desert Storm, created everything, the good, the bad, all of it.”
“The chemical weapons,” she said.
Rhoads gave a slight nod. “Intel said it was a motor pool harboring IEDs. Bush-league bomb builders. I led the assault, and we took the facility with little resistance. Zero casualties. The Iraqis dropped their weapons and fled. We breached the facility unopposed, and that’s when the mist rolled out. My first thought was that we’d cracked a refrigerated unit. That’s what it looked like by flashlight: steam rolling from a refrigerator into a hot room. Then my soldiers started to drop. Someone behind me was shouting ‘Gas, gas, gas!’—but I froze, and the mist rolled over us. All around me, men dropped and started convulsing and vomiting and shouting guttural nonsense like Holy Rollers thrashing on a church floor.
“We were dead. I knew it. I dropped, too. Lost all control of my body. Just lay there, dying, thinking about what I’d done. I’ll never forget the pain. Not of the gas but of failure, of knowing that I’d gotten my men killed. That’s when someone spiked my thigh with atropine and pulled on my gas mask and cleared the filter and moved on to save someone else. That man, the soldier who’d spotted the gas and gave the warning, the man who saved us all, was your father.”
Despite her frustration and desperation and her overwhelming concern for Seamus, Scarlett was rocked by Rhoads’s words. “My father?”
“Charlie saved me, saved us all.”
Scarlett reeled. Dad never said anything about that.
Rhoads said, “We couldn’t recognize his action with a medal, of course, because officially speaking, none of this ever happened. The brass locked it down. So you know what we gave him?”
And suddenly she did. What they’d given him for saving all those lives was sitting, all but forgotten, back in her footlocker. For luck, Dad.
“A watch,” Rhoads said, and shook his head, laughing humorlessly. “That’s it. Your father deserved the Medal of Honor, but all we could give him was a watch, a pat on the back, and a one-way ticket to Gulf Syndrome on steroids. Command medevaced Lightning Battalion to Germany, where we underwent weeks of treatment. The docs couldn’t ID the chemical agent, so they came at it from all sides, including genetic therapy. Well, the combination ended up having quite an effect on my men. Fatigue, respiratory issues, memory problems. Depression, anxiety, anger management issues. Many struggled with suicidal feelings. Some battled homicidal ideations.”
“Seamus’s dad,” she said, wanting to remind Rhoads of his role in Seamus’s tragic life.
Rhoads nodded. “Yes, like Jay Kyeong.” He shook his head, looking troubled. Then he shrugged. “It wasn’t until much later—sixteen years later—that we started hearing about the other side effect. Something—the chemical agent, the treatment, or the combination—had genetically altered my soldiers, activating junk DNA that expressed itself in their offspring.”
“Our powers,” she said, thinking, Keep him talking. Keep things civil. He’s remembering his men, remembering Seamus’s dad. When the time is right, plead Seamus’s case again.
“Yes,” Rhoads said, “your powers, which look very similar to supernatural powers reported in countless cultures down through history. Superhuman strength, magical healing, telekinesis. Now we suspect that these stories stemmed from truth, individuals with genetic mutations that had flipped the switch on abilities like those we see here at The Point, although we suspect that most of them operated with a dimmer switch on low. With you cadets, the junk DNA is fully activated, giving you real-life superpowers. All from that night in Iraq when I led my men into the trap that created you.”
Rhoads pushed a hand through the ribs of the metal cage and squeezed Scarlett’s shoulder. “So yes, I do feel like a father to you, and every father must discipline his child. You aided a prisoner, facilitated his escape, and used your powers to assault military police. I have to punish you.”
“I understand, sir,” Scarlett said, “but Seamus doesn’t deserve The Farm.” She didn’t care about herself. Her life was a string of punishments. She needed to save Seamus. “Dalia pushed him into this.”
Rhoads shook his head. “Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett…”
“Seamus needs help. Counseling. He’s messed up over what happened to his family.”
“He is a traitor, and he is too dangerous for normal society,” Rhoads said. “What do you do with someone who has no place to go? Seamus wanted death. I am giving him life.”
“Give him another chance. But he needs counseling first. He would be amazing.”
Rhoads gave her another sad smile. Scarlett wished she could reach through the bars and slap it off his face. “Let him go, Scarlett. He was only using you, destroying your potential.”
“Bull,” she said. “Keep him here and get him help or I’m quitting the strike force.”
Rhoads shook his head. “Quit? You poor child. I’ve already cut you from the team.”
She gaped at him. “Cut? But I promised Dan…”
Rhoads stood. “The Chamber offers incredibly effective correctional conditioning.” He flicked a switch, and the disk above her face spun with a soft whirring and glowed blue. Underneath her, a flow of electricity tickled. The arched metal arms began to hum, filling her with urgent vibration.
Let it build, let it flow into me and build, and then, when I’m alone, I’ll blast this machine to pieces and go help Seamus.
“Unfortunately,” Rhoads said, flicking the switch again and killing the machine, “this device works through electricity, light, sound, and a laser that targets specific brain centers. In other words, nothing that will work on you. So I must employ a different method.” He stood and opened the door and called into the hall. “We’re ready for you. I’m sorry to leave you two alone, but an old friend has come to visit.”
Rhoads shut the door, offered one final sad smile through the window, and departed.
“Sir, wait,” she called after him. “You have to…”
Once more, a face filled the small window. Not Rhoads, though.
Dalia’s eyes, less than sane and divided by the ugly purple scar that split her face top to bottom, drilled into Scarlett.
“Dalia,” she said, “you’re awake.”
A smile as hard as barbed wire twisted across Dalia’s pale features. “Yes, I am awake,” she said, “but you’re not.”
Scarlett’s nose twitched, smelling smoke, and ghostly fingers tickled over her scars.
OH, NO, SEAMUS THOUGHT. WHAT in the world have I done?
He left them sprawled there, cluttering the corridor like broken toys—Please, God, don’t let them be dead—and ran on. He’d considered using his mind to push the unresponsive guards out of the main hallway, but that would have meant taking a closer look at the men he’d clobbered, and what if it turned out that one or two or all three of them weren’t breathing? What if it just so happened that he sort of, kind of, you know…killed all fucking three of them?
He sprinted toward his only hope: the secret passage he and Scarlett had used night after night to escape from this terrible place. If only they’d kept going, split the academy altogether. They would be free now. Hunted, sure, but free. They could have gotten fake IDs and started over in the teeming underworld of cash and anonymity offered by most large cities.
All a fairy dream now. Because of him, because of what he had done to Dalia—and, if he was honest, because of what he’d done to his father, the memory of which Dalia had used to break him.
And then Scar
lett, stupid and brave and impulsive, had attacked the guards, and now—Oh, Scarlett—there was no turning back, no way to help her. Now there was only flight. What were his chances of escaping? Slim to frigging none, that was what his chances were, but he took them anyway, slamming through the door marked DO NOT ENTER and running down the stairwell, his footfalls echoing after him like the clamor of a dozen hunters hot on his trail.
At the bottom of the stairwell, he shouldered through the door and entered the subway, lips peeled back like those of a snarling dog.
Relief rushed through him. The corridor, the train, the tracks: they were all empty. He hopped off the platform and down onto the tracks and started around the train, feeling his first surge of hope when his eyes found the nondescript door waiting for him in the shadowy recesses beyond the tracks.
Maybe he really could escape, blow the whistle on Rhoads, help Scarlett—
But as he hoisted himself onto the other platform, the squeal of metal on metal sliced through his fledgling optimism like a rusty guillotine.
For a fraction of a second, he assumed that the screeching sound was the train, coming to life, but then he noticed that the door he’d been planning to use, the door to Scarlett’s secret passage to the surface, was swinging open from the other side.
He dropped back down to the tracks, scrambled under the train, and watched people coming through the secret door: one man, two, a woman…others following.
The silver-haired man in the suit had visited The Point before. A politician, one of Rhoads’s cronies. He spoke into a phone, saying, “I’m here, by the train, Oscar. Where are you?”
The man beside him, however, stole the show. Short, dark, and strikingly handsome, he walked with the confident fluidity of an unchallenged predator. He wore camouflage BDUs and sunglasses.
Only two types of people wear sunglasses indoors, Seamus’s father used to say before he’d gone insane and burned the world: blind people and assholes.