A Perfect Darkness

by Jaime Rush

  “That sounds promising. Print it out,” Amy said. “And keep looking.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, giving her a mock salute.

  She gave him a mock salute back with one particular finger extended. She nearly ruined the moment by laughing at his shocked expression.

  He gave Petra the coordinates to find it on the map, ignoring Amy. Petra rolled her eyes. “Look, we’re stuck down here together for God knows how long in this place with no windows, no sunlight, sameness.” She shuddered. “We have to get along or at least be civil.” To Amy, she said, “If you’re engaging Eric in a power struggle, forget it. You won’t win and everyone will be miserable.” She shot him a look. “Everyone but him. He’ll love it.”

  Amy saw the challenge in his expression. “I’m not interested in a power struggle,” she said. “But I do insist on respect.”

  Eric had already tuned them out, continuing to tap on the keys. Tap. Tap. Tap. Amy twitched with each tap.

  “Here’s another promising one, and it’s near Fort Meade. It was built in the 1800s, went through a few different transitions, but has always been military something or another. I can’t tell what it is now.” He printed it out. “How many do we have?”

  “Three possibilities in this area, three more farther out,” Petra said.

  He got down on the floor with them and studied the map. His fingers touched one of the marks Petra had made. “I’ll start here, the last one I found.”

  He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes. Like before, he took several minutes to sink into a semiconscious state. His body began to tremble. Sweat broke out on his upper lip. His breathing deepened.

  Even though Amy knew what he was experiencing, it was still spooky to watch. She’d endure it a thousand times to see Lucas. She glanced at Petra, whose expression tensed with fear as she stared at Eric.

  “What are you afraid of?” Amy whispered. “Is there something dangerous about remote viewing?”

  “There wasn’t until someone was at the other end. Someone like us.”

  Amy nodded. They didn’t know the boundaries of their powers. Or the dangers.

  Eric’s mouth, usually in a hard line, softened. She imagined this was what he looked like in sleep, those strong features relaxed, the anger muted. He mumbled for a few seconds and then his words became intelligible. “People. Busy place. Checking out basement.” He winced. “Dead people.”

  Amy’s heartbeat jumped. “Who?”

  “One’s getting cut open. Autopsy. Oh, shit. This is the morgue.”

  She exchanged a relieved look with Petra.

  “Coming back,” Eric said.

  A few moments later he opened unfocused eyes. They met hers, and she got that uncomfortable feeling that accompanied her memories of what she’d seen in his mind. She always used her plain clothing and unruly hair to create a wall around her, so she rarely had to deal with admiring looks or sexual innuendo. Ozzie was subtle, and certainly not sensual. Seeing blatant desire made her feel clammy inside.

  “It was just a regular hospital,” he said, his voice softer now that he was tired. He sat up and studied the map. “I’m going to try the next one.” He settled on the floor again and closed his eyes. “This is the one that was shut down eight years ago.”

  It took several more minutes before he sank into the ethers. “I see the building. It’s not as big as the last one, only one story, but it’s wide. There’s a tall fence around it. Weeds growing all over, looks abandoned. Except…ah, very interesting. There are two armed guards patrolling the perimeter. I see about five cars in the parking lot. I’m going to get closer.”

  His eyebrows furrowed. “I can’t get through the roof. It’s like there’s a shield. I’m going to try to punch through—” His face tightened. His body stiffened. “Almost.” A moment later his eyes snapped opened. “I got kicked back again, just like when we went to Lucas.”

  “That’s it!” Amy said, hope rushing through her body.

  Eric’s voice sounded weak. “That’s the good news. The bad news is they probably know that we know.”

  “What do you mean?” Petra blurted out.

  “If an enemy Offspring put the shield on, he might know if someone tried to come through.”

  “We may be looking,” Amy said, “but if we can’t get in, we don’t have verification. They can’t be sure we’d try anything based on a hunch.”

  Petra nodded toward her. “Annoyingly optimistic, isn’t she?”

  “Just annoying,” Eric said, and stretched out on the floor again. “I’m going to go back but stay overhead and not alert anyone to my presence.”

  This time Amy didn’t watch him. She read through the article on the defunct asylum. “This has to be it,” she whispered, handing it to Petra, who was watching Eric.

  It didn’t take him long to open his eyes. He looked more tired than before, but grabbed a notepad and sketched the building’s outline and perimeter. “The building’s a wreck. I don’t get the impression this is a high-level operation.”

  Amy popped a raisin in the air and caught it in her mouth, a poor substitute for chocolate-covered cranberries. “Remember, this program is off the records. Whoever’s heading this isn’t going to be able to requisition a bunch of guards.”

  Eric said, “They still have the resources of the U.S. government behind them. Do you know how many experiments have been done under the shield of ‘Classified’? Dozens, if not more. While I waited to see if you two made it back here alive, I trolled around on the Internet. I didn’t find anything about DARK MATTER or BLUE EYES, but I found secret psychic projects that were declassified. In one they even explored remote viewing, though without any concrete results. And no one had pyrokinesis,” he added with a touch of pride.

  “That the public knew about,” Amy added, just to keep him in check.

  He gave her a frigid smile but with a shrug conceded, “There was plenty on those reports that was still blacked out. I saw nothing about a cocktail given to the subjects either, but in one program, subjects were secretly given LSD. One guy flipped out and threw himself out a window.” He got to his feet and stretched.

  While the computer was free, Amy got on and typed in the asylum’s address on Google’s satellite image maps. “Here it is, about forty minutes from here, give or take, depending on traffic. And if I’m not mistaken, tomorrow—well, today, technically—is Saturday, so traffic should be light.”

  Eric said, “We’re not going today. We’ve got to make a plan.”

  “Every hour that passes brings less hope of rescuing Lucas alive.”

  He looked at both of them and took a breath, as though gathering strength. “We’re not going to bring Lucas back alive.”

  “What?” Amy balled her hands into fists, ready to fight. “The hell we aren’t.”

  “When he came to warn me you were in trouble, he said he’d be dead soon. There’s no hope, Amy.”

  She felt a rush of cold wash over her. “There’s always hope!”

  He shook his head. “Lucas’s right. We’re not risking a rescue. Only a recon.”

  She got in his face. “No! We are not giving up!”

  “He doesn’t want us risking our lives for his dead body.”

  She pounded on his chest. “We can’t leave him there! He’s just trying to protect us.”

  He grabbed her wrists, jerking her against him. “That’s right! He’s trying to protect us from getting killed. Or getting caught. They’re putting something in him that’s tearing him down. Killing him. We have to accept that we’re not going in to bring Lucas back. We’re going in to find the truth. We have to be stealthy. That means being unemotional, cool, and calm. You are not unemotional about Lucas. So you’d better get that through that pretty head of yours.”

  The truth about her dad’s suicide and who she was had been important to her in the beginning but now had taken a distant second to finding Lucas. “Maybe you can be unemotional. Maybe you don’t have a heart. I can’t
!” Her breaths were coming quickly. “You can pretend you’re cold and detached, but that’s a damned lie! We are not giving up—”

  Eric kissed her, hard and without mercy.

  After a moment of shock she shoved him away. “Don’t you ever touch me again.”

  “You’re getting hysterical. That seemed better than cuffing you.”

  “Eric!” Petra said.

  Amy wiped her hand over her lips, rubbing away the imprint of his mouth on hers. Okay, maybe she’d gotten a bit overwrought. She took several calming breaths.

  His glow was jagged. “We can’t go in guns and emotions blazing. Doing that will get you killed.”

  “You know that Lucas is just telling us not to get him in order to protect us. You said earlier that he was noble. So forget what he said. What we know is that he will die if we leave him there. If we rescue him, we at least have a chance of saving him. I don’t care what condition he’s in; we’re getting him out of there.”

  Eric studied her face, obviously seeing her conviction and hearing it beneath her calmly spoken words because he said, “We need to rest today. Don’t go off and do anything stupid. We’ll go tonight.”

  “To bring Lucas back,” Amy said.

  He met her gaze, then Petra’s. “To bring Lucas back.”

  Lucas woke in the dark, sure that he was in an oven. He’d heard the chime. Time for his third mission. He tried to sit up but had no strength. Sweat covered his body. Not an oven. The heat was inside him, burning through his veins.

  Got to get through this. One more time. Amy will be safe.

  He had no choice but to believe, to cooperate. He summoned the memory of the man’s picture. Dark hair, wavy, something exotic about his looks.

  When he tried to sink into the zone, though, his mind faltered. He was already seeing the shapes floating in the darkness. This deprivation was driving him insane. Or was it the Booster? He was slipping away from sanity. That’s the only thing he was sure of anymore.

  The shapes morphed into images. Memories, of his childhood, of the five children at the inflatable pool, Amy with her freckles and wild hair, each image coming faster. Then the storm began. He saw the man with the beaten face again. He was screaming, arching his body. Another man standing by him. Giving him an injection. The same brawny man who had given Lucas the first injection and claimed to be a nurse. The Devil’s voice: Your mission… The man telling the Devil to go screw himself. The Devil: If you want your grandmother to live… Then, strangely, he saw the children again. Zeroed in on the boy, the fifth child…saw the boy’s face. Rand. Then he saw the bruised face. He was here. The person he’d seen being wheeled down the hall.

  Hell, they had him, too.

  The images ceased. For a moment, quiet, and then he saw the target. The man was sleeping in an elaborate, four-poster bed, the dawn light spilling in through an immense arched window. The woman next to him lifted her head, looked at the clock, and then lay down again. Lucas centered over the man and then floated away. He was losing control, like a Macy’s parade balloon with only one rope holding it to the earth. He struggled to maintain his position. He was tired, so damned tired.

  Even in sleep the man’s face was all hard lines and furrowed brows.

  Let him be a bastard.

  And he went in…

  Olivia returned to the facility later that day, feeling anxious and restless. She’d forgotten some papers she wanted to work on, but in truth just needed to escape her family’s dynamics. This place was no serene escape, though. It gave her the creeps, especially when there weren’t many people here.

  She found herself again in the east wing, where the criminally insane had once been housed and the prisoners were kept now. She passed the darkened room where the newest one was being held. Farther down, where a guard was hovering just outside an open doorway, she heard Peterson’s tense voice: “Come on, stop moving already. Let’s get this over with.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  Harry Peterson, a big, muscular guy with a military haircut, jerked his head toward the door where she stood. “What are you doing here on a Saturday?”

  “I have no life.”

  “I told you I could fix that.” His cheeks actually reddened. He wasn’t the man she wanted to fix her lonely life. Though she liked him, it was one of the subjects who had caught her attention. Any kind of relationship there would be frowned on. His expression sobered. “You shouldn’t be in this wing.”

  “I know. Darkwell’s a hard-ass.”

  Peterson smiled. “Yeah.”

  She walked in, and saw that the prisoner was burning up again, feverish and delirious. He was on the bed trembling and murmuring, his eyes closed. “Boy by the pool…get him out…”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I need to give him an injection, but he’s shaking so hard I’ll never hit the vein.”

  She nodded to the needle that contained a milky blue substance. “What is it?”

  “Something to help him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Not my place to say.”

  “Why the secret?”

  He shrugged. “Look, I’m just following orders. To be honest, I’m not even sure what’s in it.”

  She digested that for a moment. He was probably telling the truth. Darkwell was notoriously secretive about things.

  She leaned over and put her hand on the man’s forehead. “He’s burning up again. We need to cool him down.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He—” Peterson held his words. “He’ll sweat it out eventually.”

  “He won’t sweat it out. This man’s probably got a temperature of a hundred and five.” She unbuttoned his shirt. “Help me get him out of these clothes and in the tub.”

  Darkwell called Peterson a nurse, but Olivia doubted he had more than sketchy medical training. They maneuvered Lucas out of his clothing. His skin nearly burned her.

  “He should be taken to a hospital.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Why not? Prisoners have a right to medical treatment.”

  “Not this one. Let it go, Olivia.”

  She took the man’s feet, Peterson took his upper body, and they carried him down the hall to a room at the end. The shower area had a musty smell. They carried him through the open room and to the far stall that held a tub. It was probably for patients who couldn’t stand. The once white porcelain was now gray and stained. She ran the water as she had the last time, and they lowered Lucas in.

  The guard who patrolled the hallway had followed them. Olivia said, “Look, this guy isn’t even going to open his eyes, much less attack me.” She looked at the gorgeous man in the tub. He must have done something terrible for Darkwell to deny him medical care. He didn’t look like a terrorist, but looks were deceiving.

  The guard paid her words little attention, still hovering in the hallway.

  She turned to Peterson. “You look exhausted.”

  “I’ve been in this morbid place for ten hour shifts.” He looked at his watch. “I’m on my last hour, and all I’ve got to do is give him the injection, and then I was going to eat dinner and grab a snooze in the lounge.”

  “Why don’t you go home early? I’ll take care of him.”

  Peterson frowned. “I can’t leave. Darkwell wants us around. He’s wary of trouble.”

  “He’s always wary of trouble. Well, go, grab your dinner and a nap.” She looked at the man in the tub. “His name’s Lucas, right?”

  “Yeah. All right, maybe I will take a quick snooze. Hey, you haven’t grown keen on this guy, have you? You seem to like hanging around, taking care of him.”

  “Of course not.” She looked at the prisoner, with enviable cheekbones and the kind of mouth a woman might want to lose herself in. Not her, but another woman. Like maybe this Amy he kept asking for. “But I am interested in what he’s done to end up here and what Darkwell’s doing to him.”

  Peterson shrugged. “You’ll have to take that u
p with—”

  “Darkwell, I know. He won’t tell me either.” She ran a wet washcloth over the man’s forehead.

  “Thanks, Olivia.” As Peterson left, his footsteps echoed through the shower room and down the hall. She continued to drip water over Lucas’s face, wondering what his story was.

  A few minutes later she heard footsteps coming back. Didn’t Peterson trust her?

  He walked in, looking agitated. “Someone took my dinner. Again. This place drives me crazy, no pun intended. You don’t have any crackers in your desk, do you?”

  “Sorry, no. Why don’t you go to that bikers’ bar down the road? I’m sure they’ve got some kind of food there.”

  Again he looked conflicted.

  She said, “No one will know. Darkwell won’t be back tonight. As soon as Lucas is stable, I’ll give him the injection. I’m good at sticking. Go on. Eat and sleep. You look almost as bad as he does. Mr. Personality out there will keep me safe.”

  Peterson nodded, though he still appeared doubtful. “All right. You’ve got my number in case you need me.” After another moment of indecision, he left.

  She stopped the water when it just covered Lucas’s body and checked his pulse. It was fleeting.

  His body wrenched as if in pain. His muscles contracted, defining them sharply. “Amy. No, Amy!”

  “It’s all right, Lucas,” she said, trying to calm him. It wasn’t, but she couldn’t tell him that. His body finally relaxed and he sank back into unconsciousness. “Who is Amy? And why are you so worried about her?” She expected no answer. She moistened the washcloth and dabbed it over his face. “You must be one bad dude,” she whispered. And unfortunately for him, she thought, he was probably one dead dude, too.

  CHAPTER 21

  “I’m a decoy?” Amy shouted as Eric outlined the plan. “No way. I want to go in. Let Petra be the decoy.”

  They sat around the table with a rough sketch of the facility in front of them. Eric gave her the kind of look a tired parent would give a child. “I need her hearing ability. And she’s fired a gun before. Have you?”