by P. S. Power
Orange Cat Publishing
Electronic Publishing Division
2012
All rights reserved.
Orange Cat Publishing books by P.S. Power:
The Infected:
Proxy
Gabriel
Cast Iron
Gwen Farris:
Abominations
Monsters
Dead End:
A Very Good Man
A Very Good Neighbor
A Very Good Thing
Keeley Thomson:
Demon Girl
Keelzebub
The Young Ancients:
The Builder
Knight Esquire
Knight of the Realm
Ambassador
Counselor
Stand alone titles:
Crayons
The Infected:
Gabriel
By
P.S. Power
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Sample Chapter from Dead End: A Very Good Man
Sample Chapter from Crayons
1
“You know the one good thing about IPB lock-up?” Denis said to himself, glancing down at the orange jumpsuit, that he knew, even if he couldn't see it, said prisoner on the back in ugly black letters.
“No anal rape on Wednesdays.”
None at all, on any day, of course, but since there was only one prisoner in the whole place, him, that would have taken some doing to work into the schedule. That and a foreign object or two, and maybe some lubricant, which the bare walls and empty space around him didn't allow for at all. Everything was just silver metal, except his sleeping pad, which had a very thick plastic coating with a steel mesh woven through it for strength, making it a non-shiny gray color. Not exactly comfortable to nap on. No blankets, no pillow. No comfort at all. Marginally better than the floor, but only the tiniest bit.
He'd grown bored of reading self-help books for some reason, probably because the same eight were recycled one after the other. One each day while the lights were up to full. That plus spending twenty-four hours a day in his cell anymore.
The guard's choice, not his.
They didn't even trust him enough to take a shower alone or outside of his cell, even though the little shower room was just two doors down to the left. They'd set it up so water just sprayed in from the ceiling at designated times instead. Cold water. Not freezing, but more than cool enough to force him into flashbacks of his childhood. If the bastards would just pump in organ music and pray at him while doing it, the whole thing would feel like home.
They probably thought they were being bad-asses, but he'd grown up with worse.
Much worse.
This little box didn't even have spiders or rats in it at all.
The cage, and calling it a cell would be a little too PC he thought, so he didn't, not being that kind of guy, was done in steel, sure, but not new even, scraped and marred by scrubbing over time even if stainless. No rust to play with or potentially weaken the walls, as if he could get through them anyway. They didn't even leave him shoes, not even flip-flops. They'd taken everything away. On purpose.
Trying to “break” him.
Idiots.
Sure, he was “dangerous” having the ability to make anyone feel anything, any emotion, any sensation at all, including pain and fear. A virtual tough guy really. But that didn't mean he could kill a man with a stick of chewing gum or turn a newspaper into a deadly weapon. Even if it did, how was he going to reach anyone? No one had come into his cell for months and if he couldn't see them, there was no way to affect them with his power.
No, they knew what they were doing and it had nothing to do with safety, taking all his stuff away like that. It was torture. They were trying to break his mind. His spirit. As if he had any of that left. That was their plan at least.
It wouldn't work though. Boredom might take him down, but not having things wouldn't.
As an Infected his first mode, his primary emotional state, had turned out to be greed. The morons thought that meant he had to have things in order to stay sane or something. The stupid idiots probably hadn't even read his psych profile then. He wanted stuff, all the time. Even if he had it, he wanted more. Always. Things, people, friends, sticks of chewing gum and newspapers now that he'd thought of them. Even incredibly dumb things, like more guards.
It was already torture.
That he didn't have stuff didn't change anything for him. If he had everything in the world, he'd still want more. It sucked, because he could never be happy, there was no way in the world to ever have enough and not even a tiny bit of relief came when he got something, not even for a moment. Being here didn't help, but it didn't hurt that way either. He wanted without reason and without end. Life had simply made it so that physical objects had very little meaning for him at all. He could be bribed with the promise of getting things, but having them?
Meaningless.
The books they'd given him had been another dig, but he read them anyway, there literally wasn't anything else to do. All self-help crap geared toward making him a better person. “How to Make Friends and Influence People” and “Do as I Do”, most of which had some decent points and just didn't apply to him at all. Not in here. What, he should practice being nice to himself? Hello, empty cell, and how are you doing today? The exact same as yesterday you say? Yeah, that would work wonders no doubt.
That part, the books, well he could write that off as rehabilitation. He was, and had been most of his life, a complete dick. Denis knew it and had even embraced the idea a long time back. A real a-hole shit-heel that made life difficult for almost everyone around him. It was his thing, how he protected himself from the people that might hurt him if they got too close. Too small to fight physically most of his life, or too fat when younger, before his new life started, other ways had been found to get the job done. He'd started as a class clown, the chubby kid in the back of the room that said things to get attention, if not love, but found that being abrasive got more laughs than telling jokes so tried to expand on that from an early age. Yeah, there really had been more to it than that, of course. A lot of it had to do with him.
The Prophet Darren Jones... Thinking about it now just made him angry, so Denis didn't. Stewing on the bad times just wouldn't help at all. Lock-up had taught him that, hadn't it?
Then when he was seventeen he'd popped Infected and didn't have to take crap from bullies or anyone else, chubby little lard ass or not.
So he didn't.
That hadn't really helped, not his demeanor any way. The powers had gotten him free though. Away from that evil prick.
“If you want to see a real dick-head develop, give an asshole kid super-powers.” He muttered to no one. Oh, it was all recorded, he didn't doubt, but that was the IPB all over, wasn't it? Everything got put on camera at the base, even if you were “free”.
He thought about it for a moment and wondered if he should make up an imaginary friend. Someone to talk to and practice being polite with? Denis gave that up after a minute and laughed, since it would be dooming the poor imaginary person to live with an ass like him without a break. Kinder not to even try. Plus, honestly, he'd never had much of an imagination really. Not something encouraged back at Faithhome and if you didn't start that habit as a child it really just didn't seem to take, did it?
That had been what got him into this mess he knew. Being a jerk with powers, not the muttering to himself or lack of imagination. No one cared at all if he talked to himself, not here. Heck hal
f the people in the IPB looked like they were doing that most days anyway and for all he knew a good chunk of them really were chatting with an imaginary friend. The guards all wore little phones that hugged their jaws like black worms and would start talking at random times without warning, for instance. It was eerie.
Oh sure, it was nothing that he'd say out loud just yet, but it was the truth, the reality behind why he was put away in lock-up. Denis had run his mouth for so long with impunity that he forgot that a lot of people around him had powers too. They didn't strike out at him often and when they did, they got their asses kicked. Denis was a freaking class four after all and his powers hit from a direction that most people here couldn't guard against at all, since most of them were physically oriented.
Until the fat kid came.
Brian Yi.
When he'd come hobbling into the lunch room Denis had really wanted to be nice. Seriously. The boy was so much like him it was hard not to feel for him, a fat kid with sudden powers he didn't understand. More to the point, Denis being an asshole or not the kid was clearly in pain, having been worked half to death by that dickweed of a trainer Jason Montrose on his first day, not just a hard workout, but a helping of physical punishment that literally should have been illegal. As words always did with him, his joke about being the hyper intense trainer's new bitch had backfired badly.
Well...
Honestly, in retrospect it hadn't really, had it? Yi had just joked back with him about how there'd been no penetration yet, playing along like a trooper, not even taking offense and asked if he'd gotten any lately. It was a little pointed, or felt like it, since a lot of people thought Denis was gay, wearing a bow tie and suit all the time along with his tight curly hair and mustache did it. Instead of laughing, or just telling the truth, that an ass like him didn't get a lot of chicks at IPB headquarters, which would have probably gotten a laugh, if only a polite one, he'd lied and suggested that Penny, the invisible girl, had been with him the night before. He'd meant it to be funny.
It wasn't.
Not to her.
That was the start of it really, because apparently Penny, who no one else could see or hear, could talk to Brian. Which made no sense at all, since the guy practically didn't even have a power. That got a joke about gay porn back and being a sensitive issue got Denis to attack. It was a dumb move, but he'd just lashed out on instinct.
Not a real attack, since Yi hadn't done much yet, just a bit of a threat really. Denis Tompkins, having read the briefing packet on the guy, it being required by admin since Brian was a special case, in need of delicate treatment, took away the kid's pain. Since that had been all that held the guy's power back at the time, it made for a good way to hassle him and frankly gave him a tiny bit of relief from the clear agony everyone else had planned for him. Just a prank really, meant to frighten the kid into thinking that his power would kick in and he'd have to go away and fight to the death or some shit like that. Nothing should have really happened and as Brian screamed at him to stop, Denis had felt pretty smug about the whole thing. Teach that little bastard to claim he was gay, right?
Until he disappeared, off to actually fight someone, half crippled, fresh from more beatings than a person should ever have to take and totally untrained. Oops.
He should have realized, when Yi came back alive and not even more injured, that the guy was tough, despite the pudge around his middle and not knowing how to fight. Then... it just got worse, because, as a rule, Denis was a prick. That being the case, Brian Yi and Denis had been going round and round for half a year nearly, each time they met there was a fight, Denis starting it and class four or not, one of the top few thousand most dangerous people on the freaking planet or not, Brian Yi finishing it.
Hard.
The guy didn't even have a real power! Teleporting away at random to get your behind beaten over and over again didn't mean you should be able to take out a class four like he'd done so many times.
It was aggravating.
Scary too.
A class four was categorized that way for one reason, and one reason alone, they were tough. Their powers let them do things like take down a full squad of armed military men or more. That was the basic rule for it. If you could take down thirteen or more trained and armed men at once, you were a class four. Do a hundred and you were a class five. That a chubby Chinese gamer kid kept beating him down was more than embarrassing. It was... humbling. Yi simply shouldn't have been able to do it. Not at all. He was no better than a class two, like a guy with a stick or something.
Really that only even counted when his power kicked in, because of the element of surprise he got, just showing up out of nowhere ready to throw down to try and save someone. He'd never even used his power against Denis at all. No, he just walked through Denis' ability and kicked his ass. The first time Denis had even had a gun trained on him. It was fucked up. He just sat and thought about that for a while, for about the hundredth time in the last two months.
He still couldn't really figure it out.
After a while he exercised, sit-ups and push-ups, deep knee bends and every other exercise that could be figured out that would work in the tiny cage of steel. Then he meditated for an hour.
That was a new thing, Zen. He didn't know if it would help, the idea came from one of the books the guards shoved through the hole in the door at him on the fastened down stainless steel tray that required him to eat his meals sitting on the floor. No fork or spoon even. He had to use his fingers. Like an animal. Another punishment.
He liked the Zen idea though. The Buddhist mindset. Accept what was and be happy with it, so that there was no suffering. If he could get that shit down he'd be home free wouldn't he?
It was almost impossible to master a first mode, still, he knew people that had. Some with things harder to get a handle on than greed too. Worth a shot. Plus there was nothing else to do in here. Even writing a manifesto wouldn't work. The cell didn't have toilet paper in it, leaving him nothing to write on. No pen or pencil either.
“Stand away from the door. Prisoner Tompkins, stand away from the door!” A loud and stern voice came from the speakers in the twelve foot high ceiling.
Denis snorted and stood up, walking toward the back of the room, book left on the bed. They liked to do this to him about once a week at random times, probably just to entertain themselves. For a second he wondered if they actually jacked off while they did it or if that came later, in bed at home?
It wasn't that anyone was coming in, they just used it as an excuse to boss Denis around and humiliate him, knowing that they could run an electrical current through the floor at any time if he didn't obey instantly. The walls and bed too, the whole place was designed to take away all options and all control a person might have over themselves. Part of the time they liked to do it, shock him, even if he did exactly what they said. They'd left it on for a while a time or two, just to show him who was in charge. That little bit of fun had started about two and a half months back after Prime had trashed the upper levels of the place and everyone had to go outside in case of a collapse.
Taking advantage of the situation Denis had tried to make a bit of trouble for Yi, which ended with him being beaten again. Of course. The guards claimed he tortured them, but honestly, he didn't. There was a blank spot and he'd woken up having been beaten, pretty solidly too, but no way did he hurt any of the guards. Before then they'd even gotten along alright mainly, the worst he'd do was something like put them to sleep so he could run away.
Now, he had kind of gotten several people to attack Prime, but it wasn't like the ego obsessed super-being heartthrob to millions had been hurt or even in real danger, he was practically invulnerable for God's sake. All he'd gotten out of it was a kick to the head by Brian, who he really almost didn't recognize by that point. The first time they'd fought the guy had been chunky, but now was freaking hard, and his eyes had gone all scary. Psycho. None of that translated into hurting the guards or anyone else of c
ourse. Why would he do that? Maybe call them names or something.
Yeah, he'd do that. Sure, there was that blank spot in his memory, and that might mean he'd done what had been claimed, but should he be held responsible for something he couldn't even remember? How could he defend against the charges? Or take responsibility for something he knew nothing about and didn't think even sound like an action he might take?
They seemed to think he should and punished him for it regularly. Now it was time for “screw with the prisoner pain calisthenics” again. Denis got ready to turn around, put hands on head, the wall, or whatever. If he took too long they'd zap him. It fucking hurt, so he just did what they wanted if he could, and tried not to cry out if he couldn't. That was why he was locked up twenty-four hours a day though, he knew. To punish him for whatever they thought had happened.
The shocks brought on flashbacks of Faithhome too, which was worse than the pain itself, but he tried to stay calm and not think about that. Had Christian told them about how to best get to him? The specific use of cold water and electricity seemed pretty exacting, didn't it? She didn't normally use her telepathy for crap like that, but she wasn't his biggest fan in the whole world either, so... maybe?
After all, even trying to be all Zen now, those guys were going to get a taste of what they'd been dishing out as soon as he saw them, even if it meant getting worse later himself. It would be a lot worse than a few jolts too.
Instead of calling out to him like normal, the door actually clicked and slowly began to open. Denis blinked.