“I was once a controlling man. I had the second implant ever put in. I wanted the power that came with this thing—and it’s not like any you've heard of—but there are never enough. I realized it as I examined Amanda’s body. Because of what you did, I had full access to her body at the UNE. I was just going to have her brain stem implant and her thumb. The pineal can't be taken out without destroying data, or so I thought, until you murdered, and my unit of the UNE got involved. When I closely and meticulously examined her dissected brain—”
Jamie’s top blew, and despite knowing the man wouldn't feel a thing or probably even move, he gave in and slammed his free fist into the entire left side of McElroy's face with the expertise of a man who’s been punching faces all his life, and the bloodthirsty revenge fury of one who means every bit of that blow with each inch of his being.
To Jamie's surprise, McElroy fell to the side, lost his balance, and crashed onto the floor. His cheek was split along the bone and bleeding all over him, as only head wounds do. The lower half of his jaw looked like dark red jam outlining pure, uncovered and polished bone. Jamie kicked him in the ribs over and over, yelling incoherent words of anguish, and then finally just stood over him, breathing heavily.
“You can hurt me here, Jamie,” McElroy coughed. “You know that now…”
But there was that pause in his voice…the one he'd had before. The one that made Jamie think of the old saying of hearing wheels turning in someone’s mind.
The storm.
Maybe this is what he could do in the storm. Or was this a game? “Make me stop,” Jamie shouted.
McElroy wiped his mouth with his blue sleeve, then spit, still so young and alive. “I said the air needed to be cleared. Do what you will.”
“Will it carry over?” Jamie asked. “To there? To friggin’ reality?”
The pause. “No.”
“You don't know.” Jamie towered over him, then crouched down and got in his bloody, mangled face. “What if I poke your eye out?”
The now-young man sat straight up, holding his sleeve to the gash on his face. “Why do you hate me?” he hissed, a little spit flying from his thin lower lip. “I know best, and I chose you because she did.”
“What did you have with Amanda?”
He dropped his chin into his red-soaked sleeve. “Cecily.” He jumped to his feet and Jamie did the same out of reflex. He stood inches from Jamie’s nose. “Cecily is the one who matters!”
Jamie took a step back. “What are you talking about?”
McElroy licked his lips and slurred out as slowly as possible, “Amanda piqued my interest in you, but Cecily needs nobody. I know her better than she knows herself. She hates it, but we're just alike.” His speech sped up. “She finds value in you, enough to trust you with little Emily. Of course, I've seen her in Cecily’s mind. And Steven. I knew he wasn't dead. A father knows. But Cecily…she brought you with her to kill me.” He slumped into an empty crewman’s chair, tenderly holding his ribs. “She's never let anyone get that close. And in moments, she decides this about you. I've seen all of it.” He looked up at Jamie through a swelling left eye. “So, what’s so special about you?”
The room was dimming into the black void again, taking McElroy with it. He became just an outline of blue and red light, and then there were more of them. Outlines in the void, made of light for the lines where their physical attributes would normally be.
Two small forms moved toward him, drifting sparkles. Details came out as they grew closer to him. His children. Their eyes were electric.
Mandy spoke. “I think you're special because you're my daddy.” Pink lights of her lips turned up. Her hair was like golden fireworks.
Jamie recognized Becca’s brash tone of voice. “It's time. We are becoming one!”
The lit figures smiled and strange beams of their fingers reached through one another.
Jamie was absolutely terrified.
A strange woman’s voice filled the void, screaming. “He's bleeding, oh, God. Look! Michael!” Most of the lit figures surrounded McElroy, their glowing eyes pointed at Jamie. Only two stood by Jamie—the smallest of the light people by far. There was blood; there was trust.
The same woman cried out, “And Cecily! She's not here. It's not now. It's not happening. He did something.” Her voice sounded more and more like a thousand screeching hawks as she carried on, and it became a jumble of squeals as others joined in. Jamie couldn't see McElroy's light persona reaction.
But he was still bleeding. He'd brought everyone in except for Cecily. He was up to a scheme, but what? And why? What was the big mystery?
What was the hidden truth from Jamie’s perspective, no one else’s?
What were the answers and how would they change him even more?
The swirl of lit people and colors wrapped around Jamie and the twins, and Jamie instinctively pulled them both close to his sides and squatted down to at least try to protect them. From what, and if he actually could, he didn't know, but he had to shelter them.
As the members of the thirteen bombarded his family into a nugget of a ball of light, faces streaming like they were melting at the speeds they were moving, Jamie peeked through the sphere of lights whirling around them and saw that the deformed man stood a few feet—or was it miles in the void?—away. His light was dim, and he just stared down into the blackness below his brown, glowing sandals, his dark red mess of hair shining as though magic moss over his scarred cheeks. He wasn't attacking, if this was an attack, and it certainly felt like it.
The rest of the chosen of the thirteen squeezed even more tightly around Jamie and his children. He heard Mandy crying, and he said into her gold curls, “It's alright, it's okay.” He didn't know what else to do.
Was he giving up?
Giving in…to mainly confusion? Because he sure as hell had no idea what was going on.
Junior stuck his face close to Jamie and Mandy’s cheeks, and the twins met eyes. Jamie heard Emily’s little southern voice scream, “Now!” from everywhere and nowhere.
Streaks of rainbow light raced into and out of the twins’ gazes as they did something strange and unexplainable. Instantly, they went into pure white light bursts of two convulsing children.
And then they all were back in the ranch, Mandy and Junior on the floor twisting and contorting unconsciously. They stopped within seconds and fell unconscious like they had in the past. Emily had communicated to the children to do whatever they did…but what and how?
Everything was much, much different than before McElroy took Jamie into the void for his bizarre speech in a mind world of a space station long out of use and forgotten. Space junk. Space junk, however, was the last thing on Jamie’s mind when he saw McElroy again. Cecily was kneeling beside him. He was unrecognizable and Cecily had finally found her lone tear.
Chapter 6
The eighteen-year-old McElroy, born who knows when, could take a beating. The ageless one, however, could not, and Jamie’s wrath had followed McElroy from his safely controlled phantom space station—from a memory that should be dead and forgotten—into a harsh reality.
He lie on the floor, bent at an odd angle in the middle where Jamie must have kicked half his ribs in. But his face was what must've brought out whatever tiny bit of love Cecily had buried for her father.
His cheekbone was shattered, and the many tiny bone fragments made the entire left side of his face, from his temple to his slack-jawed mouth, like a bloody mudslide. It was as though he'd been in one of those gasoline car wrecks from way back when and smashed one side of his face through the windshield.
The other side of his face was a different matter entirely. Because his left eye was swollen shut, Jamie watched with chills as the one good eye stared blankly at Cecily as she bent over him, stroking his face. Then it rolled with purpose around the room until that black eye rested on Jamie.
He realized it was quiet, an odd thing to notice maybe. He'd been so focused on first the children, and
then McElroy, that he hadn't taken care to examine his surroundings.
All the rest of the thirteen were in various positions on the floor, eyes closed, breathing evenly. There was no wind or thunder; they were right smack dab in the eye of the storm.
“You ass!” Cecily told McElroy in a hushed tone. “You had more than anyone could want. Why did you make me watch that? Why do you have to keep trying to control me?” The tear was long gone, and now a lifetime of anger spilled out of her. “You make me watch, helplessly unable to do anything, invisible, while you torture Jamie with details of his wife’s murder. You think you really are exceptionally good at being smarter than everyone? Well, you're really stupid. You're a fucking shit. I absolutely hate you.” She shoved him out of her arms and stood up, unable to look at McElroy’s broken form anymore.
Jamie knew better because that black eye hadn't moved from Jamie's face since it landed there. He doubted McElroy even heard Cecily bare her soul. Or maybe, with his superior brain power, he could compartmentalize. He could hear her, but stay focused on what he was about to do to Jamie. And Jamie knew more was coming. The dead of the air and the light filtering through the boards over the windows felt like the entire universe was holding its breath.
“Cecily, come here, to me and the kids.” He kept his gaze on McElroy as he scooted down to his twins, still unconscious. “Cecily, please.”
She had a hand over her mouth, and he could see the corners of her lips were turned down. She looked at him. He beckoned to her with his fingertips, as he ran his other hand over each twin’s head. His eyes never broke with McElroy's.
“Come on, come over here. Please. We're in the eye of the hurricane. Emily said something would happen in our favor when the storm was at its worst. It's dead calm and if something is going to happen, it’s now. Please, come to me.” He said it as gently as he could.
She walked over, knelt next to Jamie and the twins, and finally got another look at her father. “Oh, Em,” she whispered. “She forgot you don't know hurricanes. You never lived anywhere with them. The eye is the worst part. The tornados hover around the eye. She was telling you he'd be weak. She sent me a small sign, so I expected something…Katie's a genius.”
“Maybe we can find some way to activate the pineal implants and reach Emily and the others. Get information. What the hell just happened? We need time. How long does the eye last?”
Cecily took in a quick breath. “Not long enough to figure out what he has planned for us when it passes.”
“What do you mean?”
“His nirvana. It was supposed to happen at a certain time. One of Michael’s many obsessions is the weather, predicting it and the effects it might have on implants. There is an unusual energy signature in the eye of a hurricane. I think he planned to use it to somehow to invoke his psychic nirvana and begin his road to being a god. But Katie figured something out. Just not sure what.” She tore her gaze from McElroy crumpled ten feet away on the floor, listening to everything they said. The healthy eye continued to pierce without a definitive expression of the mind behind it.
She reached up to Jamie’s cheek and turned his face away from McElroy, toward hers. Her features were soft, hair a mess and falling around her shoulders. He realized her locks had grown faster than his. He just knew she had been like him and refused to ever cut her hair again after having her head forcefully shaved.
“What are we going to do?” she whispered. “I know him. Something he said is right. We are alike in some ways. A lot alike. Where his mind tortures him with lack of any human empathy, mine dishes out too much. Any imbalance with empathy for other people will drive you mad.”
Jamie caressed her cheek and chin. Her skin was soft as satin. She smiled shyly at him. “Later,” she whispered. Jamie could almost hear Junior say, “That's sarcasm.”
His attention went back to his twins and the others lying around on the floor. “It feels like this is forever, that this moment will never pass. I have no idea what to do, how to prepare.”
Cecily touched his cheek again, eyes sad, jaw set. “I do. Do you have a knife?”
He cocked his head at her. “What? Yeah, but are you thinking…?”
“Just slit his throat. Then when the eye passes, it's over.”
Jamie took her hand. “I have a knife, but I'm going to do it, not you. He's still your father.”
She squeezed his hand and let go, looking away into the corner of the room where a couple of men were passed out, bodies in strange positions. Jamie's gaze followed hers and he noticed the redheaded cripple was one of them. “You knew him,” Jamie said to her. “Who is he?”
“Don't worry about it.” She turned to McElroy. “I have to watch. Otherwise I won't believe it.”
“The hair. He's Emily's father. Is he…what happened to him?”
“There's not enough time to explain. But yes, he's Em’s dada. Michael destroyed him. He destroys everything.”
Jamie glanced at Cecily and the twins, worry seizing his chest. He turned back to McElroy, who still glared with wicked intent at Jamie. He went to him and knelt down. He pulled his skinning knife from his pocket and tried not to think about it. If McElroy would just stop staring at him. And all the answers Jamie needed would be left unknown with a slash of that knife.
It was more than that though. Jamie had committed murder twice, even though his rage prevented him from remembering much of it. This was different. He was different. Jamie didn't think he had it in him to slash a helpless old man’s throat when his body was so broken it wouldn't last the storm without finding its own way into the netherworld. He had no idea what was going on with the other members of the thirteen club. And his kids’ brains were hooked up to this wretched excuse for a lifeform before him, just staring and staring into both of Jamie's eyes at once somehow.
“Do it. Please, just do it,” Cecily said. She sounded scared. “You don't know what he's capable of.”
She ran to him and took the knife. “What are you waiting for? We have no time! I'm doing it.”
She reached down to McElroy's hair, took a handful of it and thereby lifted his sunken face up. His throat was fully exposed and covered in dried blood. She brought the knife close to his jugular and whispered, “Sorry, dada.” She closed her eyes and slashed across.
Jamie let out a small yelp. He looked at the perfect slice on his right forearm. Her eyes popped open. “What?” And then, “Why? Oh my god, you're bleeding everywhere! Why did you do that?”
“Look, it was an impulse to stop you, but I have good reason.” He took her shoulders and looked her dead in the eyes, pretending McElroy wasn't still staring at him. Even just now, when Cecily had closed her eyes and tried to slit his pathetic throat, the man never stopped his one-eyed glare at Jamie.
Her eyes got huge and her lips parted, but she made no sound. They both heard a few piddling raindrops hit the roof of the ranch. The hurricane was on the move, taking the eye away from them. She trusted him. She wasn't doubting him or getting angry, but listening to him with all her heart.
“These people aren't supposed to be like this. Did you see what the twins did? In the void?”
“I call Michael’s place the pit. But yes, I saw everything. I was there, but Michael wouldn't permit you or anyone else to be aware of me. I've never seen the space station before. I'd be surprised if he's shown it to anyone.”
The rain fell harder.
“There's more than we know, and we have to figure it out. Michael had to have been alive in the twentieth century. There's so much to the stories of the blue mark rangers, and he was showing me that's what he was. Claiming he was in the first group. If any of that is true, then he would be in his late teens at the turn of the century. And I think it's true.”
She was quiet a moment, and then said, “So do I. But I thought they were in the 20s.”
Jamie shook his head, trying to find the right way to voice his suspicions. “It's like, I have this gut feeling. It's like when I knew to come to Vi
rginia after breaking out of the UNE hospital. That, but different. It may sound crazy, but I think this pineal gland communication is…”
“A total mind-fuck.”
He smiled at her, thinking how crazy it was that he could even think of smiling at this moment. He wanted to impress more on her. “We don't know what happens to all of us if we kill him. All these people? The thirteen? My children? My children. What if we kill him when he's weak, but the real truth is that he knows that if he goes, we all go?”
“What do you mean by real truth?” she asked.
“Look at him, Cecily, look at his eye. He knows something. He still has some power. I can't explain it. I just know it.” He met the black eye again. It had not changed its solidity in the least.
She carefully examined McElroy's broken face and free eye, but he wouldn't look at her. “It could be him playing a mind game with you. Trying to make you think there’s more, that he has more control. That he knows some important truth. But some things just should never be said. Or known.” She said it so carefully, totally uncharacteristic of her. Trying to explain to him how twisted the man is? She really did know.
He glanced back at the cripple in the corner. He'd once been a strong young man, younger than Jamie. Cecily loved him enough to have a baby with him, and that's the only way a woman like Cecily would get pregnant. “Why is he one of the thirteen?” He looked back at her as the wind picked up in the eaves.
“Michael hated him. So he became his closest confidant. And then Michael promised John the pineal implant—which at the time I knew nothing about—if John did a certain job for him. Oh, it's so complicated the way you manipulate people, Michael,” she said to her father, but he completely ignored her. “I guess we're waiting then. Let him bleed out for all I care, but we need to get him talking. He's going to take us into the pit again the second he has access to the satellite systems.”
“We need to think fast. How can we block him from our thoughts? I've torn my mind in half trying to think of a way.”
Confrontation (Implanted Book 3) Page 3