The Point

by John Dixon

  Yes, this was power! This was glory!

  Using telekinesis, he tore away additional light fixtures and guided their sizzling wires to his power loop, which grew and grew and grew, illuminating the auditorium in a hissing, flickering light that played in a flickering chiaroscuro across the wide-flung eyes of his captivated audience.

  He bared his teeth in a grin and willed the top of the loop to lower slowly, then punched it straight into his forehead.

  The cadets gasped.

  Jagger stumbled backward, steadied himself, and cackled static laughter.

  His audience writhed with awe.

  When he spoke, his voice, inhumanly deep now, boomed from the speakers high above in the mess hall.

  “Attention!”

  The West Point cadets upstairs shot to their feet and stared up with wide eyes toward the ceiling, as if God himself had spoken.

  Which was appropriate, Jagger thought.

  “This is your supreme commander,” he said. “On the count of three, I will give you an order, and you will all comply immediately. One, two, three…”

  SCARLETT TRIED TO SCREAM BUT had no voice.

  “I never cared about you,” Seamus said, and threw back his head with a gale of cruel laughter. His features were exaggerated somehow, sharper and more beautiful and completely merciless, not entirely human.

  She moaned in this private hell, unable to speak, unable to apologize, unable to agree.

  “You’re so stupid,” Seamus said. “Look at yourself. You really thought I could fall for a loser like you? I just used you. Now I’m free, and you’re paying the price.”

  Another wave of cruel laughter crushed down on her.

  And then the dream vanished, and Scarlett returned once again to the Chamber. She fought to catch her breath. Her eyes burned from crying, her muscles throbbed from struggling against the restraints, and her throat itched, raw from screaming.

  Please, she prayed. Please, make it stop.

  She wanted to end this, needed to end it, even if that meant dying, and now, thinking of herself, how stupid and selfish, how reckless and cruel she’d been, she understood that she deserved to die…and yes, she longed for death.

  Her death wouldn’t fix the damage she’d done—she could never atone for her mistakes—but at least she would end her suffering, erase her shameful squandered life, and save others from the pain she would no doubt otherwise inflict.

  Yes, death…

  But for now she was trapped, facing the facts, facing Dalia, whose face filled the square window of the Chamber door: Dalia standing outside, looking in at her, poor Dalia, whom she had so wronged…

  She had no idea how long the dream torture had been going on, only that she couldn’t bear another second. “Mercy,” she pleaded. “Death…”

  “Death?” Dalia said, and smirked. “I’m afraid not, sweetie. Jagger wants you alive. He wants to know how you managed to resist him. But of course, I can answer that. I know all about how stupid and stubborn you are, how you can disregard those who try to help you. Death? I don’t think so. We’re just getting started.”

  Scarlett squeezed her eyes shut and trembled. She was wrung out. She didn’t have the energy to argue or tears to shed.

  “I’ve been watching your dreams since you came here,” Dalia said, “and a lot of people want to chime in. Consider this an intervention. All the people you’ve hurt, coming together to help you understand what a self-centered bitch you’ve been.”

  “I can’t take it anymore,” Scarlett said. She was broken. Dalia had shown her everything: the people she’d hurt, people suffering in private, things she’d never even considered, guys she’d jilted, friends she’d ditched, elderly drivers she’d scared, blasting past on the Yamaha. She saw her brother, decomposing in the grave, asking again and again why Scarlett had done this to him; her mother, dead from an overdose, whispering that it was all her fault; her father, alone, weeping like a child, the man a hero both for the lives he’d saved and for the degree to which he’d suffered, protecting his family from the rage that burned inside him, all while Scarlett treated him like dirt. She watched tragedies yet to come, things she would have done, people she would have let down, without this intervention. She wanted death, deserved death, needed death. “Please kill me.”

  “Not a chance,” Dalia said. “We could have been such good friends, Scarlett. I welcomed you here, saved you from your tormentors, and made Rhoads give you every privilege. And what did you do with these privileges? Used them to sneak around with Kyeong. I tried to warn you, but would you listen? Of course not, because you’re stupid and selfish and cruel. Well, now we’ll—”

  Her words cut off abruptly, and things shifted.

  Scarlett was still in the Chamber, still hurting, still wanting death, deserving it, needing it, yet Dalia’s dream thrall was lifting away like a poisonous gas. Dalia was out of her head, and the somnopath’s face was gone from the window.

  But then—no!

  Dalia’s face filled the window again, and Scarlett cried out—not for mercy; she knew now that Dalia was utterly merciless—but out of sheer terror.

  “Scarlett!”

  That voice…

  She looked again.

  It wasn’t Dalia at the window.

  “Scarlett,” Seamus said, his face pressed to the glass. “Are you okay?”

  Not Dalia at all…Seamus…

  “I took care of her,” Seamus said. “I saw her at the window and heard what she was saying, and—I took care of her.”

  Took care of her? She didn’t know what he meant, and her mind shied from the possibilities. Seamus’s cruel laughter echoed from wherever her mind stored its nightmares. “Leave me alone.”

  “I heard what she was saying,” Seamus said. He put his hand to the glass. “It was all lies. She was just playing on your fears, trying to break you.”

  When Scarlett spoke, her voice was a tortured rasp. “You said it was all my fault.”

  And it is. It is all my fault.

  “Snap out of it,” Seamus said. “Dalia messed you up. That’s it. None of that was real. I came back for you, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Stop,” Seamus said. “We don’t have time for this. Sort your shit.”

  Sort your shit, she thought, and heard another echo, not from her nightmares but from the past: Ginny laughing as Scarlett panicked, Ginny saying, Sort your shit. It’s just a trip. It’s all in here, and tapping Scarlett’s skull.

  That was what they’d always said during moments like that, when one of them had taken the Paranoia Express to Terrorville.

  She took a deep breath. Sort your shit, she told herself. It was code, and it took her back to her partying days, anchoring her. A curious place to find strength, perhaps, but a drowning woman doesn’t complain if someone throws her a garden hose instead of a rope. “All right,” she said. “Okay. Yeah.”

  Seamus was describing things he’d seen on his way there, things he’d heard. “Something’s going on, something big, like an invasion.”

  “Jagger,” she said, remembering. Her panic spiked again, recalling Jagger’s excitement as he had probed her mind and ability.

  “We have to get you out of there,” Seamus said, “but it’s locked, and I don’t have a key. Hold on for a second. I have to check Dalia’s pockets.”

  “Don’t leave me,” Scarlett pleaded. Without Seamus, she was afraid that she would slide back into the black pit of self-loathing.

  Seamus disappeared from the window, filling her with panic. Whose face would next fill the glass square? Dalia’s? Jagger’s? The charred face of the woman she’d failed to save?

  Scarlett lay there hurting and helpless, reminded of her first night here at The Point, when Hopkins and his telekinetic goons had pummeled her from behind a similar
door. All the work she’d been through, all the Level III torture, and she was still trapped behind a door, helpless as a baby in a crib.

  Seamus’s face returned, twisted with concern. “No keys. I don’t know what to do.”

  Scarlett, returning to her senses, said, “Can’t you break it down?”

  He shook his head. “The door and lock are too strong. They were designed to contain TKs.”

  It was hopeless. Again she was reminded of her first night, the helplessness she’d felt, lying there with no way to fight back as Hopkins and his thugs pounded her through the door, all of this before she’d learned how to—

  “I have to look for a guard,” Seamus said. “Try to overpower him, take his keys.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Don’t leave. I’ve got it.”

  For a fraction of a second, she feared that he hadn’t heard her, but his face appeared again in the glass square. “What?”

  “Hit me,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Blast me with your mind…hard.”

  “HOOAH!” A BOOKISH-LOOKING PLEBE SHOUTED as he plunged a fork into the stomach of the upperclassman beside him. The upperclassman convulsed, yelped with laughter, and buried his fingers in the plebe’s eyes.

  The West Point mess hall was a collage of terrors soaked in blood and set to insane music: screams of pain and rage, maniacal laughter, orders bellowed on top of orders, most of them absolutely nonsensical in the current context.

  In one corner, a silver-haired officer shouted “About-face!” again and again to the cadet whose face he pounded rhythmically into the tiled floor.

  Nearby, a quartet of cadets overturned their table atop a trio of lunatics and then turned on one another.

  Beneath the giant mural, a pair of female cadets twirled, locked in a gruesome embrace, plunging knives into each other’s abdomen, their mutual screaming and laughter entwined in an uncanny braid.

  All of this played out on the large screen at the back of the stage behind Jagger, whose leering grin was mirrored by the cadets and cadre staring up from the auditorium seats, an absolutely rapt audience riveted to the bloody spectacle.

  Beautiful, Jagger thought. Absolutely glorious, much like the sizzling ring of electricity filling him with unimaginable power now. He’d discharged only a fraction of it when he’d commanded the West Pointers to fight to the death, and since then it had continued to build.

  “Colonel Rhoads,” he said. “Patch in the media. No exclusives. Footage for everyone.”

  “On it,” Rhoads said, tapping away at the laptop.

  Soon every network in the world would be broadcasting the footage, and the web would follow. Fear would go viral, unsettling millions of people, which would only make them more malleable. In mere seconds, tens of thousands whom he had prepared, all the bums and runaways, college kids and congregations, would understand that the Day of Reckoning had at last arrived. All across the nation, they would swing into action, spreading mayhem. The terrified masses would run for cover, lock their doors, turn on their television sets, and look to their government for help.

  “Senator,” Jagger said, turning to Ditko. “Now it’s your turn. Contact the president. By the time you get through, his people will be showing him the breaking footage. Give him the basics, then tell him that you’re handing the phone to the man with all the answers. I need to speak to him before he addresses the nation.”

  Before I address the nation, he thought. But Ditko didn’t need to know that. The man’s usefulness was nearly at an end. After that, who knew?

  Maybe I’ll have Penny burn him alive.

  Ditko saluted and turned away, pulling out his phone.

  Using his mind, Jagger peeled a section of electrical conduit from the wall, snapped the pipeline, severed the wires inside, and sucked sparking electricity into the glowing globe of power now engulfing him. The power ring burned more brightly than ever, impaling and empowering him. Other rings formed, circling him, and between those rings arced tendrils of electricity, creating a pulsing latticework sphere of white static shot through with bolts of yellow and veined in propane blue.

  This was omnipotence. This was euphoria.

  By then the news was spreading, and in thousands of towns across the land, his sleeper cells were leaping into action. Horror stories from all over would flood the news, making even the gentlest souls pick up weapons.

  “Yes,” Ditko said into the phone, “I need to speak with him directly. As in now. Yes, we have a situation here.” Then, after the pause that Jagger had made him practice, he said, “A posthuman situation.”

  WITH EVERY STRIKE FROM SEAMUS, Scarlett grew stronger.

  After the third blast, she snapped the restraints and shoved aside the metal ribs of the machine’s cage. Stepping free, she spread her arms and thrust her chest forward. “Again—as hard as you can!”

  Seamus blasted her once, twice, three times, each strike harder than the last.

  She shouted for him to step away from the door. Her first kick bent the door and snapped a hinge. The second strike ripped the door free and tossed it across the corridor, where it clanged loudly off the block wall and fell to the ground. She stepped free of the Chamber, bones still thrumming with pent-up force.

  They embraced.

  On the floor, Dalia murmured softly, still unconscious but starting to come around.

  “She’s Jagger’s puppet now,” Scarlett said. “So are Rhoads and Ditko.” She quickly explained Jagger and his power.

  Seamus frowned. “Rhoads gave an all-call to the auditorium.”

  “And Jagger’s the guest speaker,” she said. “They’re his by now, all of them.”

  “We have to get out of here before they come for us.”

  Dalia stirred, mumbling.

  “What about Dalia?” she said. “We can’t protect ourselves from her.”

  Seamus smiled grimly. “I know how to make her leave us alone.”

  A short time later, as they hurried away down the hall, Scarlett wished that she hadn’t kicked the Chamber door completely off its hinges. It would have been good to block Dalia’s screams as the machine shone its merciless spotlight on whatever nightmares she had stored in that dark mind of hers. By the bloodcurdling sound of her screams, she must have been harboring some terrible dreams indeed.

  They reached the intersection. To the left was the auditorium and Jagger. To the right was a clear path to the subway stairwell, safety, and freedom.

  Scarlett turned left.

  Seamus grabbed her arm. “What are you doing?”

  “We have to stop Jagger, Seamus.”

  He tugged in the opposite direction. “He’s too powerful.”

  “If I don’t try to stop him, I’ll spend the rest of my life hating myself,” Scarlett said. She remembered the pain Dalia had put her through and shivered, knowing that most of it was true. She’d hurt a lot of people. Whenever the going had gotten tough, she’d quit or begged off or stuck her head in a sand made of weed and booze and boy toys: anything to ignore the problem. The sum total of her life had led her to this crossroads. If she turned right, she would set all the things Dalia had shown her in stone, but if she turned left…“I have to try.”

  “Even if you could stop Jagger, it wouldn’t bring Dan back.”

  “It’s not just about Dan,” she said. “It’s about everyone. And this place, and West Point, and duty. I know that sounds stupid, but we’re part of something here, and we swore an oath. That’s bigger than me or you or Dan or what we think of Rhoads.”

  He looked at her with thoughtful eyes, the corners of his mouth drawing downward.

  “Think about Lucy DeCraig,” she said. “How are you going to feel if—”

  “Shut up,” he said, and closed his eyes. “Just shut up, all right?” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a
pack of gum, and handed her two pieces.

  She raised one eyebrow. “Gum?”

  Unwrapping a piece, Seamus said, “Hubris kills.”

  “Huh?”

  He plucked the chewed gum from his mouth and stuffed it into his ear. “Let’s not fool around like Odysseus.”

  SCARLETT CROUCHED IN THE SHADOWS just offstage and stared in terror at Jagger, who levitated several inches above the stage, impaled on a ring of sparking power that swelled and swelled.

  I hope Seamus lost his nerve, she thought, and, glancing across the stage, saw no sign of him. They had split up, agreeing to attack from opposite sides. I hope he lost his nerve and ran.

  Now, standing here, seeing Jagger and feeling his unbelievable power, she understood how foolish she and Seamus had been, coming here, thinking they could intervene.

  Jagger gestured toward the ceiling, and a large light tore away, dangling by a twist of metal over the heads of the mesmerized cadets, who took no notice whatsoever. They were utterly transfixed on the dining hall horror show playing out on the screen behind Jagger. Wiring tore away from the damaged light and descended, weaving through the air and spraying sparks, and joined Jagger’s glowing ring of electricity.

  Jagger was using the ability he’d stolen from her to build an incredible power loop—but for what?

  Jagger spoke, and his voice was crackling static. “Senator Ditko, what is our status?”

  With one hand, Senator Ditko held a phone to his ear. With the other, he still clutched the tiny hand of Sav’s murderous little sister, Penny.

  You see this little bitch, Lopez’s voice echoed in her mind, kill her on sight.

  But Scarlett knew that she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t kill Penny for things she’d done under Jagger’s spell.

  Ditko gave Jagger a thumbs-up and said into the phone, “Yes, Mr. President, that’s correct: a posthuman situation. I have someone here who can answer all of your questions.”

  Jagger extended an arm, and the phone whipped from Ditko’s hand to his.