by Jason Brant
“We believe that Smith has weaponized Jamie Welsh’s ability.” Nelson paused. “I can’t say anymore. Inform Lieutenant Benson at your discretion. I’m sure he could take whatever information he wanted from you anyway. We’ll be in contact.”
The window went black.
Nami closed the laptop. “Shit balls.”
“Who is Jamie Welsh?” I asked.
Jim grunted from behind us. “Who gives a damn? You promised me that if I helped you, I would get a ride out of this hellhole.”
I turned around. “What do you want me to do? Swear at him some more? They’re going to come and get us, but it’s going to take a little while.”
Jim sat against the short wall running around the building. He glared at me, his chest puffed out slightly. He was obviously a man who used his bulk to intimidate most people.
Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t most people, and that kind of animal-kingdom bullshit didn’t work on me.
He kept staring, but didn’t say anything else.
I hoped we wouldn’t have a problem.
The last thing I needed was to get in a fistfight while trying to stay hidden. I rolled my shoulder several times, grimacing at the stiffness settling in. I could feel a couple of the tiny lead balls in there grinding against something soft.
That wasn’t too pleasant.
Rene Folsom. 500 Shuttered Drive. Bring her to me.
Theresa Kay. 921 Broken Garth. Bring her to me.
I turned my attention back to Nami. “Now tell me who this guy is and what Smith is doing with him?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t put this together sooner.” Nami smacked her forehead with her palm. “Before we drove up here to get your smelly ass, I’d been working on data recovery for a destroyed mainframe we found at Smith’s old operations center. When Murdock went nuclear, Smith smashed a lot of his equipment before he went into hiding.”
In my dealings with government dickwads, there were certain patterns they all fell into. One of those was misplacing evidence as quickly as possible when they were about to be put under a microscope.
But this was a lot worse than a president destroying some audiotapes or the IRS erasing a couple of hard drives. Smith had real power, the kind that scared the shit out of everyone in the know. He could start wars and crash economies. He might have done both today.
If he was hiding something he’d been doing, God only knew how it bad it was.
Nami continued, “A huge part of Smith’s budget was research. They were supposed to be developing ways of defending against telepathy. There had been prototypes of helmets and EMP pulsators—shit that was supposed to disrupt weirdos like you from fucking with princesses like me.”
A small group of crazy townies walked by the barbershop, their infected minds battering against mine. I closed my eyes, focused on walling myself off from them.
My strength had begun to fade.
It wouldn’t be long before I couldn’t hold them off anymore.
What would happen then, I didn’t know. And I sure as hell didn’t want to find out.
The congregation by the courthouse was just outside of my telepathic reach. If they were any closer, I figured that I’d have been a blubbering pile on the roof already.
“What is it?” Nami asked. “Need to fart?”
I smiled despite the building pressure in my head. The woman had a way with words. “Keep going.”
“I’m not sure I want to if you’re going to start busting ass all over the place.” Nami leaned away from me. “Anyway, they brought me this mainframe from the old Pysch Ward. It had been burned to hell and back. Looked like someone had taken a sledge to the hard drives. Whoever had destroyed the thing didn’t wipe out everything though.”
The group by the street finally walked out of my mental reach, and the pressure in my skull dissipated a bit.
Nami kept going. “Long motherfucking story short, I’ve been slowly pulling small bits of data off this bitch.”
She paused, watching me.
“What?” I asked. “Why did you stop?”
“I just wanted to put a dramatic pause in there.”
I palmed my face in both hands. “I hate my life.”
Nami said, “Smith wasn’t just working on defensive measures against tool bags like you. He was trying to harness your abilities, to make some kind of offensive weapons based around your powers. And we found out that he’d discovered quite a few more telepaths than he’d been reporting to his bosses. One of them was a man named Jamie Welsh.”
“Let me guess.” I rubbed my temples. “He could drive people insane.”
Nami shrugged. “Like I said before, I’ve only been able to get a handful of pieces to the puzzle, so we don’t know what Welsh was capable of. But we did find out that whatever it was he did to people would fade over time. So he wasn’t like Murdock, who could disengage from someone’s mind and they’d be back to normal. Welsh’s ability took a while to wear off. He’d been a focal point of Smith’s research.” She gestured toward the courthouse. “So yeah, I’d say your guess is pretty damn close.”
“That seems a bit farfetched, doesn’t it? I mean, we’re talking about Smith weaponizing someone’s mental ability and then, what, broadcasting it through a cell phone signal? How could he do that?”
Nami shrugged again. “How would I know? None of what I uncovered said anything about signals or anything like that. But that does explain what’s happening around here.”
That explanation did fill in a couple more pieces of the puzzle, as impossible as it seemed. That also made sense of why the infected people’s minds had such an effect on me. If I’d been close to a telepath, the Bridge would have formed.
The feeling I got around the people below felt like a weaker version of that.
I shook my head. “Even if this giant leap of logic is true, why here? Because I’m living outside of the town?”
“Sure,” Nami said. “You’re here. Drew and I came into town today, so they could take us out at the same time. Arthur’s Creek only has one cell phone tower, so a single blast through it would hit most the people in the area. It’s a perfect place to test out a new weapon.”
“And to show your enemies what you’re capable of.”
I had to admit, what Nami had said made some sense. It seemed farfetched, kind of like a bad science fiction novel, but here we were, surrounded by psychos who were killing and torturing their loved ones.
It still didn’t explain why Smith’s men hadn’t killed me after the agents had failed outside of my cabin. Maybe he’d wanted to see how I would react to the infected people around me. Perhaps he didn’t really care if I lived or died. The smug bastard might not have even seen me as a threat because I’d checked out of the fight after the Murdock incident.
This might have been a way for him to kill multiple birds with one stone, even if he didn’t get all of them.
I’d have to ask him, fist-to-face style, if I ever got the chance.
The mayor’s droning stopped. A loud pop came through the speakers, as if he’d dropped the microphone. He never came back on.
“You need to see this.” Jim was peeking over the wall again. “It’s getting worse.”
“How can it get any worse?” Nami slid along the roof. “We’re already in the ninth circle of Hell.”
I followed and slowly raised my head over the wall.
“Over there.” Jim pointed to our right.
Marching down the center of the street, single file, were thirty or forty people, all clearly frightened. They cried and marched.
Armed men and women flanked the long row. They prodded at their captors with axes and knives, drawing blood and laughing raucously as the prisoners pleaded for the lives.
The procession moved toward us, no doubt being led to the courthouse.
Butch, the massive man who had murdered the sheriff, walked to the right of the line. He carried his enormous hammer in both hands, lightly tapping the handle into on
e of his palms.
A teenage girl stepped out of the line and stopped beside him. She grabbed his forearm, begged him to let her go.
He swatted her across the face with the back of his hand, sending her crashing to the pavement. Blood poured from her mouth and nose. She tried to get up, but her knees gave out and she fell back to her ass.
“The next person who tries to stop gets a piece of this!” Butch bellowed, raising his weapon in front of him.
As the group moved forward, the vice-like pressure in my head returned.
“Who is that big bastard?” I whispered to Jim.
“His name is Butch. He owns the old Bakersfield place out on Danver Road.”
One thing I’d noticed since moving out into the country was that everyone casually named people and places in conversation, as if I had any idea who or where they were talking about.
“I caught his name earlier when he was beating the shit out of me. What I mean is—what’s his deal? Why is he so goddamn huge?”
Nami said, “And I thought you were an ogre. That guy should be living in a house at the top of a giant beanstalk.”
“Butch has the same thing that Andre the Giant had. I think they call it gigantism or something.” Jim grimaced down at Butch. “He’s real embarrassed by his size, so he doesn’t come into town all that often. People used to make fun of him all the time.”
“And he didn’t rip them in half?” Nami asked.
“Nah. Butch is a gentle man. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Jim shook his head. “At least, he was.”
The line of survivors marched down to the block the barbershop sat on, and then cut right, heading for the courthouse. When the people in front saw the piles of bodies and smelled the gasoline, they panicked.
The first two dropped to their knees and begged for mercy.
The third, a tall, athletically built woman in her twenties, burst from the line. She sprinted past a man holding a pair of shears. He hollered and reached for her, but she evaded his grasp.
Butch took two bounding steps forward.
He swung the massive hammer as if it weighed as little as a baseball bat.
The business end cracked against the side of the woman’s head.
A sickening smack silenced the cries of those in the line.
Blood and gore sprayed into the air.
The woman flew sideways, ragdolling to the sidewalk, sliding almost five yards.
The side of her head was crushed in, unspeakable goo seeping to the concrete.
Nami’s hand flew to her mouth, a gag escaping her.
Jim slid down the wall and stared at the roof.
“Anyone else feel like running?” Butch hollered. He held the hammer out with one meaty hand, letting the captors see the blood and hair stuck to it.
“I’m gonna hurl.” Nami crawled a few feet away from us and puked.
By the courthouse, more people were being guided close to the piles of bodies. Some had their hands bound, others just stood there, too afraid to make a break for it.
I couldn’t blame them.
Most people weren’t built to see those kinds of atrocities. Those who could better handle that type of violence usually had their own baggage.
Like me.
“What are they going to do to them?” Jim asked. He’d begun to shake lightly.
I assumed that the pain from his burns had finally started to break his resolve down.
“Kill them.” I set my jaw. “They’re going to massacre the whole town.”
I stared down at the dead woman, unable to take my eyes off her ruined head. She’d died as I sat there and watched. I hadn’t even attempted to help.
It didn’t make me feel any better that there wasn’t anything I could have done to stop it. The one thing that damned curse in my head allowed me to do was help people, and I couldn’t even manage that.
My knuckles blanched as I squeezed my hands into fists so tight that my nails dug into my palms.
Rage boiled to the surface of my mind.
I needed to do something.
Anything.
I spun around, intent on going down the ladder and charging straight at Butch.
One of the windows on Nami’s computer screen flashed, and Nelson’s face appeared.
I moved close to it, my mug appearing in the window. “Get in here. Now.”
“Has something else happened, Lieutenant?”
“People are getting murdered, you asshole! Every minute you sit over there in D.C. with your dick in your hands is getting a lot of people killed.”
Nami wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and slid beside me. “They’re gathering the survivors by the courthouse for what we can only assume is going to be a massacre. It’s time to shit or get off the pot, Chief.”
“We’re coming in.” Nelson’s frown had fallen to almost comical levels. “Smith has leaked footage of the mass murders in Arthur’s Creek to the press. He’s threatening to broadcast the signal in a major U.S. city. Everything has ground to a halt out here. People are panicking and yanking their kids out of schools. They’re fleeing the cities in droves. This is 9/11 on steroids.”
“I don’t give a damn about what’s happening out there.” My jaw hurt from clenching my teeth so hard.
“President Thomas has ordered us to move, quarantine be damned.” Nelson nodded at whoever was perpetually standing behind his screen. “We’re going to gas the town, then move in with rubber bullets and other riot suppression gear. You have approxi—”
The entire screen went black.
“Balls!” Nami grabbed the laptop and lifted it from the roof.
Strings of thick, black tar pulled away from it, the oppressive heat making the entire roof soft to the touch.
“What happened?” I asked. “Get him back.”
“The computer overheated. It’s too hot on the roof for this.”
“That piece of shit won’t work outside?”
“It works fine when it’s not on a black-tar roof, Ogre. If we go inside the barbershop, I should be able to get us back online in a few minutes. It won’t take long to cool down once we’re off here.”
Jim slid beside us. “Did he say they were going to gas the whole town?”
I nodded.
“That can’t be good for us.”
“It’s better than sitting here and watching everyone get murdered.” I didn’t really want to get gassed either, but I would rather have a bitching headache when I woke up than have to deal with the memories of witnessing another massacre.
I’d seen enough death to last a thousand lifetimes.
Nami shoved the laptop into her pack and pulled the straps over her shoulders. “I’m not too keen on getting gassed either.”
I sat on the roof, my ass cheeks baking from the hot tar, and thought. We could go inside a building and hope that it was sealed up tight enough to keep some of the gas out. We might get a bad migraine from it, but we might not get knocked out.
Then again, a few trigger-happy agents might kick the door in, guns blazing, and mistake us for hostiles.
I looked to Jim. “Where’s the fire station?”
His face lit up. He pointed to the east side of the building. “The next block over. We have to cross a three-lane street, which might be tricky, but I bet we could make it.”
“What are you thinking?” Nami squinted at me. “I can tell that damaged brain of yours is working because I can smell smoke.”
“Well, Short Round, I’m guessing that the fire department has gas masks in there somewhere. If we can get inside and put those on, maybe we won’t get hammered by whatever chemical shit they’re about to spray on this town.”
Jim got to his haunches. “I was a volunteer there until last year. They got a big grant from FEMA for equipment in case of a chemical attack or some shit. They bought all kinds of gas masks and HAZMAT suits with the money. A lot of the locals were pissed cause they said it was a waste of tax dollars.”
“Now we’re
talking.” Nami glanced over the wall. “That line of people hasn’t completely passed the barbershop, but we should be good to go in a minute or two.”
We moved to the back of the building, waiting by the top of the ladder.
I said, “There’s no telling what these gas masks are rated to protect us from. We’ll go inside, close all the doors, put on the gas masks, and then climb inside one of the fire trucks. If all of that doesn’t protect us, then I don’t know what will.”
They both nodded their agreement.
I checked the street again.
The tail end of the group was still out there, marching their way toward the courthouse.
Nami asked, “Do you really think that Smith can do this to an entire city? We’re talking World War levels of destruction if he does that.”
“I don’t know.” I thought back to how the world had radically changed after the towers fell.
People had stopped flying.
The stock market crashed.
Wars were started.
Millions had died since then.
After the madness at the National Mall with Murdock, a smaller version of the same thing had happened. Oppressive laws had been passed to ‘keep people safe’ while doing nothing of the sort. Gun sales skyrocketed.
Fear permeated every public appearance.
Tourism dried up.
Sporting events stopped selling out.
People were scared of what could happen, and they were right to be. Things were much worse than the government had told them. If they ever learned about telepaths, the world would fundamentally change forever.
God help us all if Smith used his weapon in a major city.
Nami blew out a long breath. “If he can send the signal over cell phones, why not through a television or on the internet?”
If she was trying to scare the shit out of me, she’d succeeded.
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I just don’t know.”
“If I can’t watch my anime shows on YouTube, I’m going to freak the fuck out.”
Jim looked from Nami to me. “I have no idea what either of you have been talking about since we came up on this roof.” He locked his gaze on me. “Are we really talking about a massive war being waged inside of America? Us against us? Could this Smith guy really take out New York the same way he wiped out Arthur’s Creek?”