“And I’m just supposed to do what you say?” I asked in disbelief, a sinking feeling entering my stomach.
“I’m the leader of this team. So yeah, you’re supposed to do what I fucking say.”
“I don’t remember agreeing to that,” I said quietly.
He studied me.
“I don’t remember agreeing to blindly follow your orders, to do what you say like a goddamn puppet or something. I don’t want to sit in my fucking room and rot. I want to go for a walk. I want something other than this stupid fucking pink sweater to wear. Where are my shoes? I—” By now, I was shouting, and realized a split second too late that he’d raised his hand. It wasn’t until I felt the impact of his backhanded slap across my face that it connected, that he’d hit me.
It hurt like a motherfucker. And it did something to me. Muscle memory or some ingrained knowledge or whatever.
I hit him back. And to my own surprise, I hit him hard enough to knock him back down the corridor, sending his body crashing into the vestibule door. I only had a moment to revel in my small victory, in the memory of what I could apparently do, before I felt a needle jab into the side of my neck.
“You will learn, you dumb bitch. Even if I have to destroy your mind to do it,” Connor said, wiping blood from his nose. I tried to say something, tried to argue, but everything went black and then there was nothing.
White room. Glaring bright lights overhead, a constant beep-beep-beep sound off to my right.
A heartbeat. A scent of deodorant, but clearly one that wasn’t strong enough to hold up to its job. A shuffling step.
“Do you know who you are?” the pale man with the white hair asked me.
I had to think about it for a minute.
That should have freaked me out more than it did, shouldn’t it? But there was nothing but numbness, as if I was wrapped in layers and layers of cotton, all sandwiched inside some kind of steel casing. Shielded, muffled.
Suffocated.
I studied the pale man. “Jolene Faraday,” I said in a hoarse, dry voice.
He smiled. “Good. Very good. Anything else?”
I thought for a while longer, trying to come up with something, anything other than that name.
“No. Why don’t I remember?”
“You’ve been through some things. You’ll have to relearn what you’ve lost.”
I wanted to nod, but I was strapped down to the sterile white bed.
“Why is everything so loud and smelly?”
The pale man laughed. “That’s your power messing with you. Once you’ve been awake for a while, it’ll feel more normal. We keep the building as quiet and clean as we can, at least while you’re getting used to things.”
“We?”
He nodded. “Our boss. Our team. He’ll explain it all to you later, Jolene.”
“Okay.”
I really didn’t care. The numbness kind of just made me feel like I was floating. The moment of curiosity had passed, and with it, any desire to know anything at all about anything. I vaguely noticed the pale man unstrapping the restraints holding me down to the bed. He pressed a button, and the head of the bed inclined until I was in a mostly-upright position. The rest of the room, now that I could see it, was just as stark and overly bright as the ceiling had been.
“Once he’s come in and seen you, we’ll get you to your room.”
I nodded. I didn’t care either way. I could sit here all day, or go to my room, or take a flying leap off a tall building; none of it mattered. The door opened and a tall man with dark red hair walked through. He had a short beard and bright blue eyes, and he smiled widely when he saw me.
“There you are, sweetheart,” he said. There was an accent to his voice, not the same as the pale man, who sounded mostly like me. The redheaded man was tall, muscular, and the jeans and black sweater he was wearing allowed me to see every bulging muscle.
That probably, maybe, should have had some affect on me, I guess.
“I’m Connor,” he said, still smiling as he stood next to my bed. I nodded. “I’m the leader of Mayhem. We’re a superhero team, fighting for the freedom of powered people against the tyranny of government-sponsored prison squads, such as StrikeForce.”
He was watching me closely, as if maybe waiting for a response. I nodded.
He smiled wider. “You were undercover with StrikeForce for a few months. We allowed them to capture you, and you won their trust. We had to fight hard to get you back here, but now that you’re here, you can help us destroy them. You can help us be as powerful as we should be.”
I nodded again.
“When the time is right, sweet girl, you’re going to make them all fear you.”
“Okay.”
Connor glanced at the pale man and laughed. “Well done.”
The pale man merely tilted his head in acknowledgment.
“We’ll need to get you familiar with using your powers again, but that shouldn’t take long. The body remembers, even if the brain doesn’t. Do you remember what powers you have?”
“I know my senses are pretty strong. I can hear everything.”
Connor nodded. “Anything else?”
I thought for a moment, then shrugged.
“Ah. It’ll come to you when you try it out. You can fly, and you have super strength. I gave you the super senses, as well as the power to be invisible when you want to, the power to transport yourself instantly when you need to. Believe me when I say that that combination of powers is devastating. There’s no fuckin’ way anyone can fight against it, because they never see you coming.” He laughed. Then he met my eyes. “Things are all going to be the way they should be. Things’ll be right between us, Jolene. It’ll all be the way it was meant to be.”
I nodded numbly, and he took my hand in his. His hands were large, rough. He stroked the back of my hand with his fingertips. I grimaced a little. Some feeling, some emotion, something sort of buzzed below the surface of the numbness I was feeling, but I had no idea what it was. Before I could really wonder at it, it kind of drifted away. The man, Connor, was watching me closely.
“We’re gonna be unstoppable,” he said in a low voice. “You and me. And nothing’s gonna get in our way.”
Another weird sensation, emotion, whatever it was, tried to bubble up, but seemed to fizzle almost immediately.
Connor raised my hand to his lips and kissed my fingers, then set my hand back in my lap. He stood up and looked at the pale man.
“Get her settled into her room.” Then he turned to me. “I want you to stay there until I call for you.”
He stood, waiting for an answer. The pale man was watching me as well.
“Okay.”
“When I do call for you, it will be for your mental conditioning to begin. Lorne will be in charge of that.”
“Mental conditioning?”
“I’m sure you’ve noticed that most of your memories are gone. An unfortunate side effect of the trauma you went through,” he said, meeting my eyes. That whatever-it-was buzzed again, that sensation that there was something I should be feeling here but whatever it was was out of reach. “We’re going to get you back to where you should be.”
I watched him.
“It won’t be entirely pleasant,” he said quietly. “I was thinking we wouldn’t have to go this far, but there was no other way to get you as you should be.”
I sat, absorbing his words. I tried to ascertain if I had any opinions about what he’d said. It seemed like he’d said something important, but I just couldn’t seem to manage to make myself care.
“Okay,” was all I managed to say. He studied me for a moment longer, then patted my knee and walked toward the door.
“Get her settled,” he said to the pale man, Lorne, and then he walked out of the room.
I spent two days in my room. It was a plain, sterile, empty place and I mostly spent my time sitting on the gray sofa staring at the white wall. In the dresser, there were jeans, tops, underwear. Al
l of the shirts were pink or peach, and I wondered if this had been something I liked. In the underwear drawer were two white tank tops, and I pulled one of those on over my bra. In the closet, there were two uniforms. One, jet black with crimson slashes across the shoulders and arms. The other was dark gray, a big black star emblazoned on the chest. I ran my fingers along the sleeve, trying to remember it. I don’t know how much time passed before I gave up, realizing that nothing was coming to me. I ate the food Lorne brought to my room on a plastic tray, learning that while I didn’t seem to have objections to anything they gave me, I couldn’t eat more than a few bites of anything before becoming queasy, my taste buds overwhelmed by the flavors, my stomach protesting against the strong smells. Nobody bothered me about how much or how little I ate, and I went back to staring at the wall. Twice each day, Lorne came in with a syringe and administered my medications, a quick poke in the arm that I barely noticed.
On the third day, my door opened and Connor stood there. “Come on, Jolene. Time for the next phase.”
I stood up and went to him.
“Not wearing the pink shirts?” he asked mildly. I looked down at my tank top.
“This is easier, considering the injections I have to have,” I said. It seemed easier to tell him that, than that for some reason, the idea of putting on the pastel clothing in that drawer felt somehow like an act of defeat. I couldn’t explain it.
He accepted my answer with a nod.
“That makes sense. Okay. So this next phase of your conditioning is not going to be pleasant.”
“You’ve said that already,” I reminded him.
He laughed. “Well, I wanted to make sure I warned you,” he said, with a grin, a dimple showing, a flirtatious sound to his deep voice. I wondered again if I should have felt something. And then I didn’t care either way. “We need to implant some of your old memories. Some of the programming you lost.”
“Programming?” I asked, and he glanced away.
“Training. Commands. Things you should know.”
“Am I a dog? Trained circus lion, maybe?” I asked with a laugh. He glanced at me sharply, then grinned.
“Nah. You’re a whole fucking lot scarier than either of those things. And it’s time for you to know that.” He stopped and looked down at me, looking into my eyes with an intensity that made my stomach twist. “It’s time for you to remember how fucking good you are, when you’re doing your worst.”
I held his gaze for a moment, then nodded and looked away. “How bad was my worst?” I asked when we started walking again.
“When I found you, you were a thief. A pretty damn good one. Drove the police nuts for years because they could never get a read on you. You got powers in one of the Confluences — that’s how we got them, originally — and then you became more. You messed with StrikeForce. You took the whole fucking thing away from their pretty boy leader, stole money from the team. You can kill a man without even trying all that hard.”
I glanced over at him. “How many?”
“How many what?”
“How many have I killed?”
He shrugged. “Not sure. At least one that we know of. I don’t doubt there are more out there.”
“And I do this for you?” I asked, trying to remember something, anything.
“Yeah. Yeah, you do it for me.”
“I’d think I’d remember something like that,” I said. We walked through the double doors that led into the room I’d been in on my first day, the stark white room with the bright lights. Lorne stood next to a chair that had a bunch of wires, cords, monitors hooked up to it. I studied it. There were shackles at the wrists and ankles, a strap on the headrest that I guess was to keep my head immobile.
Connor watched me, giving me time to take it all in. “Like we said, we’re going to get you back the way you should be. Better.”
“Okay.”
Irritation bubbled up out of nowhere. Why was that all I could say? Shouldn’t I care more about being hooked up to the monstrosity in front of me while the pale man messed around with my mind? But other than mild irritation, I couldn’t bring myself to bother protesting much more.
“Have a seat, please, and I’ll get you strapped in,” Lorne said.
“Are those really necessary?” I asked as I sat in the firm seat.
“This is not going to be pleasant,” he said, bending to secure my ankles. Each click of the shackle sounded like a clap of thunder. “You’re being secured for your own safety. We don’t want you to hurt yourself. Some of your responses may be violent,” he added.
Connor laughed. “What he really means is, we don’t want you to hurt us if you get out of control.”
“That, too,” Lorne amended.
“Don’t you have powers?” I asked Connor. “You could protect yourself from me, right?”
A dark look crossed his features, and then he seemed to force a more neutral expression. “I have powers. But I don’t want to hurt you, either. This is better for everyone.”
“Okay.”
He smiled, then he looked at Lorne. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be ready to put the hurt on, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Lorne said. He picked up what looked sort of like a syringe. “This might hurt a bit.”
Everything from that moment on was torture. Whatever was in the syringe, Lorne injected directly into my spinal column, right at the base of my skull, after tilting the chair forward and gaining access. I remember screaming, feeling like my brain was on fire, like my body was freezing, like I’d never not feel pain again.
Until I felt so much pain I wanted to die.
The injection, whatever it was, was the easiest part of it.
Once that was finished, Lorne attached some contraption to my face that forced my eyelids open. I couldn’t blink, and my eyes started stinging almost immediately. A mask was placed over my eyes, and it started showing me a series of images. I didn’t know what they were. Meaningless flashes of things, shown almost too quickly for me to even try to understand them. And, as it happened, it felt like my mind was exploding. Names, places, situations, fights… all of it came to me, and soon, the things I remembered started to mesh with the images I was seeing. Mostly, they were of a group of men and women in black and gray costumes, and I came to know their names.
Portia.
Beta.
Jenson.
Caine.
Steel.
Screamer.
Toxxin.
My mother. My mother dying when StrikeForce should have been protecting her.
Me, beaten, damaged permanently, nobody on StrikeForce lifting a hand to help me.
Me killing a man, rage filling me.
Me, trusting Connor, meeting with him in dark places, confiding in him when I had nobody else.
I knew what it felt like to have murder in my heart, to want to hurt somebody so badly I could practically taste it.
Over and over, I watched myself murder until it didn’t feel strange, until it didn’t feel like anything. I watched myself beat men senseless, carry Zambonis through the air, destroy buildings with nothing but my fists. I watched myself steal, and cheat, and lie, and con my way through life.
After a while, it all stopped hurting. After a while, I knew that my one and only goal in life was to destroy the faces that kept flashing across the screen. StrikeForce. I would take the world away from them and I would watch them burn.
After a while, I knew exactly what I was: I was what angry, desperate trailer trash becomes when they get powers. I was the best there was at getting into places nobody wanted me to get into. I was good at causing pain. I was unstoppable.
I was cold. I was focused. I was ready.
And I would make sure everyone came to fear my name.
I don’t know how long I sat there, those images flashing across my vision, words I hadn’t even noticed being whispered in my ears, over and over again, those memories from whatever they’d injected me with crashing acr
oss my mind. Time stopped mattering.
Eventually, the images and sounds stopped. The world went black. I was aware that my eyes were still forced open, but the darkness was so complete they may as well have been tightly closed. I wondered, idly, if this was another part of my programming or whatever Connor, who I also now knew was called Killjoy, had called it. Sensory deprivation or something like that.
I felt strange. There was rage there, purpose, but over everything I still felt numb, empty. Maybe this was what made me so good at what I did, the fact that I seemed to feel nothing at all.
I became so used to the darkness, the silence, that when footsteps rang out, crossing the linoleum floor, I had to try to remember where I was. The mask was pulled off of my face, and I wanted to close my eyes against the glaring white light that replaced the darkness, but my eyelids were still being held open, my eyes dry and painful.
“We’ll get those off of you. Hold on,” Lorne said quietly. I waited patiently while he removed the things holding my eyes open, and then I moved my arm, jerking it hard, and I heard the shackle snap. I grabbed him by the front of his checked shirt.
“That fucking hurt,” I snarled at him, and he whimpered. I wrenched my other arm out of the shackle.
“Help!” Lorne screamed. I picked him up higher, hoisting him above my head, then I drew my arm back to throw him.
“Jolene, no,” I heard Connor say.
“Jolene, yes,” I hissed, and I threw Lorne. “He hurt me.” I watched with more than a little satisfaction as Lorne crashed into the cabinets on the other side of the room, sending bottles and vials and other medical-looking paraphernalia flying. Connor went to him, and Lorne waved him off with a grimace.
“Well, you got what you wanted, boss,” Lorne said.
“Almost,” Connor said. Then he looked at me. “When I tell you to do something, or not to do something, I expect you to fucking listen.”
“This isn’t on her. Aftereffects of the conditioning. I should have waited for you before I undid the shackles. I forgot how strong she is,” Lorne said, rubbing the back of his head. “She couldn’t have listened just now even if she wanted to. Her mind is raw, her emotions are a mess, she’s in pain and her senses are still new to her. I know you expect compliance, but believe me when I say that this isn’t the time. She needs to adjust.”
Strikeforce (Book 4): Day's End Page 10