The Infected [Books 1-6]

by P. S. Power

  “In the end they would have been stopped, but only after nearly a billion died on several continents. I could have let that happen, but it would have been the wrong billion dead. No, a true war is the only thing that will do the trick now. My point here is that you were setting the little girl up to die on that island the whole time. You didn't kill her, but you, and only you, your power, chose the time and place of her death. Even the manner.”

  That made sense to Brian, and left him feeling cold and alone. Had he killed the little girl? Had his power let Barbie Dorn die on purpose to control the rest of what he did too? How many had died because of him?

  Braid put a comforting hand on his back, pressing cold moisture into his flesh, making his skin crawl a little. He shrugged her off with a twist of his shoulder and stared at her, feeling all hope running out of him. She exhaled hard and shook herself, looking sad suddenly.

  “Understand Brian, in your own way you protected nearly a billion lives. That's all I'm saying. The girl was going to die no matter what. Your way hurt a lot less than what she would have faced otherwise. But your power, your real power, isn't just about saving a few people. It's about organizing the future. Haven't you ever wondered why you go and save some people and not others? Think about it.

  “One day you save a senator, the next a homeless man. One time you fight dozens of class fives to the death and the next you scare away dogs attacking a child? There's a pattern to it all, of course, but can you see it? You only save the ones that are important to a specific future Brian. Oh, you're as big of a hero as everyone says, more so, but haven't you wondered why you save the ones you do and not the others that are in trouble at the same time? Or why most of the people you save are in North America and Europe, instead of China and India where most of the people are?”

  The woman started jogging again. After a moment Brian followed, feeling like he might be going into shock. The truth was, he admitted, that he'd always just figured that the ones saved were the ones that he could save. Without super-human physical abilities, he couldn't win every fight, so on some level he'd learned this and didn't try to save the ones he just couldn't. It was the only way to explain how so many fights ended successfully for him.

  “Whatever gets you through the night, of course. But no. You're just like me. Oh, we have different powers, slightly at least, but no one here can really understand you any more than they understand me. That's fine for me, because I can understand you. So can Trivia. Eventually you'll have to come to us for comfort, and then my vision will become the one that wins. If we work together, if we come together, then no one will be able to stop us.” Her face looked greedy and predatory as she said that last part.

  A snort escaped him involuntarily, making her eyes widen a bit.

  “You forgot to add “Mwa-ha-ha” at the end. Join me and we shall conquer the world? How about this, why don't you and your group pack it in and join me instead? I'll bet if we work together we can save a lot more people than either of us could ever do alone... Think about it. Join the light side. We have cookies... I'll get the IPB to throw in free ice-cream too.”

  This earned him a small smile and a head shake.

  “That... sounds tempting Brian, more than you know, but the future can't take the stress of that, it would end up destroying everything. Our own powers wouldn't let it happen. One of us has to win this. I'm older and more skilled, you hold greater power. It isn't certain either way yet, who'll win in the end. I need to go soon. They finally noticed that I don't belong here and people are coming to sort things out. Let me leave you with this one thing though Brian, well two things, but the first one is for you alone.” She stopped again and turned to him.

  “You're not a class two. I imagine a few of your compatriots have begun to suspect that by now themselves. Your powers just baffle them so much they can't understand what's really happening. Think about it... You've fought a class eight to a standstill and killed dozens of class fives in unarmed and hand to hand combat. No class two... or even class six in the world can do that. True, you can't bench press tens of thousands of pounds or outrun bullets, but you keep winning anyway, managing to do just the right thing at the right time, over and over again... You're a class seven at least, maybe... and it seems likely, maybe much more powerful than that, and have a lot to learn about what you can really do. I imagine the ghost in your head can help there.” Her grin became feral.

  “Also, tell my husband I think about him? We haven't talked in a long time, but I do still love him.”

  Suddenly the world flipped and twisted next to him and the woman vanished, pulled away by Tesseract probably. Turning he headed back toward the new building front, a more modern looking facility, glass and shining chrome instead of the more humble ranger station look it had before. Most of it was still under ground, no new levels had been added, but the lobby had a big fountain in it now and an information desk off to the right hand side, manned today by a cute dark haired girl who looked about his own age. She smiled at him when he came in, so he waved.

  The half dozen people that boiled out of the elevator stopped when they saw him, so he explained the whole situation as carefully as he could and then made his way down to the third level, followed by Hobbs who came as a body guard of sorts without being asked. There they found the Director and Marcia already reviewing the security tapes on a monitor that took up about half the wall of his good sized office.

  The first one to speak turned out to be Hobbs, who moved closer to the screen and touched it gently with two fingers.

  “She has the look of a Timberland about her...” He murmured.

  The Director spun, surprised.

  “That's... her maiden name, what she was called before we married. Devorah Timberland. I never met any of her family... She always told me they were too far away to easily visit.”

  Hobbs nodded.

  “Yes. The whole family is gifted with strange precognition, so strong that most of them aren't precisely sane by the age she looks here. They make up one of the six families of gifted in my world. I wonder...”

  He didn't say what he wondered and just shook his head when asked.

  “If she is of that lot, then nothing she does or says is happenstance. No word or deed is a mistake or wasted. They make powerful enemies, but aren't unstoppable. Their flaw is that they become overwhelmed by all the possible futures around them, so they tend to become addicted to a single line and work toward it without end. Come at them from another line and they won't always see you. It's hard to explain, but it can work. At times. It would help to have another of her kin though.”

  Brian laughed and shook his head, relating everything she'd said, most of it not picked up by the microphones at all. What the man had said about possible futures fit perfectly. Marcia stood close to him and Hobbs nodded, a happy looking smile on his face that didn't seem precisely fitting to the situation. Of course he'd just found another person from his own world, possibly at least. Maybe he dreamed of them chatting about old times and the foods they missed from home?

  Of course it probably meant that Hobbs was actually from a different reality rather than just insane. Brian would have to change his thinking on the man a bit. Luckily he liked him anyway. That made it easier to accept.

  “So,” Marcia filled in after they'd all stopped talking. “If she can be trusted at all to be telling the truth, some kind of massive war is coming. We need to get ready.”

  Brian took her hand and nodded.

  One way or the other, things were about to get serious. He had a lot to think about and to learn, apparently. If that wasn't all just hot air to keep him preoccupied of course. The woman, he realized, had been clever, no matter what he did now, he'd always be second guessing himself and that would eventually lead to errors. He said this out loud.

  “So don't. Just pick the course you feel is right and sail it.” Hobbs told him, sounding like this would be a simple thing to do and surprised Brian hadn't thought of it himself.
<
br />   “In the end that's all any of us do anyway.”

  Brian shrugged.

  That really was all he could do, he knew. Try to find what felt right to him and do it, and hope he wasn't being a moron in what he picked.

  Later he and Marcia went back to nine and sat in the dining room with everyone else. Brian sat between Karen and Penny, both of whom held his hands on the table top. After about an hour of discussion the Director came in with Rachel and sat down too. No one spoke for a long time. Christian, the one who, no doubt, knew what everyone was thinking broke the silence.

  “We're all with you Brian. What do you think we should do first?”

  He told them.

  Gabriel

  P.S. Power

  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 anyway. 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 half 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?