by Naomi Stone
She looked back as a pair of men in flak vests got him on his feet, hoisting him up, each taking an arm. They dragged him, while he hung like a dead weight, moaning and incoherent, to the back of a police van parked directly outside the main doors to the building.
She’d dealt with other hostage situations before, successfully derailed them, and never seen a hostage-taker fall apart like this.
Fluke stayed beside her. “That man’s not right. Like one of those wind-up toys keeps banging into a wall over and over again—can’t change directions when it hits an obstacle.”
“Yeah. That’s it.” Rachel turned toward him. “He said something about doing this because somebody told him to. And if it had been his own idea, he’d have reacted to me differently. The question is, who wound him up and pointed him at this wall?”
Two
Mesmero. That’s what he’d call himself. Great name. Better than Albert Johnson, which was a nothing name, an anonymous, lost-in-the-crowd name. Like he’d been lost in the crowd as a salesman for Farmland Dairy Distributers. He’d been good enough at his job for twenty years. Never made Salesman of the Year, but he brought in clients and kept existing customers happy. Then that new crop of baby-cheeked sprats started in with their e-sales and web presences—bugling and twitting and what all.
Bastards. Speaking of which, he should have heard something by now. Mesmero checked the device on the passenger seat beside him. Damn. The signal had gone dead. A glance over at the neighboring building, across from the back lot where he’d parked his ten-year-old Camaro, told him there’d been no explosion. All he could see from this distance was the police van pulled up to the main doors. Something had screwed up his plans. Or someone.
He turned up the volume on his scanner, tuned to the police band. Annoying chatter and static, and then, “suspect apprehended.” They had his meat puppet.
Grinding his teeth, he flicked the device off again. It should have worked. He should have those board members by now. But you didn’t work as long as he had in sales without learning a little lesson called persistence. He’d have to find another way to get the bastards. He’d lost his job, his wife, and his home. They had to pay. Everybody had to pay.
~ * ~
Fluke remained close enough beside Rachel to distract her. Not only with his palpable nearness, but she caught a scent like deep woodlands where the smoke of a distant fire lingered on the air, primal and faintly alarming. It distracted her so much she had to work at keeping her feelings on an even keel.
“Where do you go from here?” he asked.
“Good question.” She’d come by teleport and now couldn’t spot Tom anywhere around. Danged teleporters, always disappearing on a person. She turned, scanning the area. David stood by the police van, talking
with an older man wearing a neat brown suit.
“I’d better catch up with my brother,” she said, “and cadge a ride home. I left without filling the cats’ bowls.”
“Connolly is your brother?”
“Yeah. For my whole life now.”
“He looks busy.” Fluke’s grin reached eyes in which unapologetic mischief played. Her keel tilted, but the sensation reminded her there was more to life than keeping an even keel.
Rachel sighed. David did look busy. She’d probably be cooling her heels here for an hour before he wrapped up his end of the business.
“Why don’t I give you a lift?”
A tempting thought, but impossible. Her pulse leapt at the mere prospect of being alone with this guy. Maybe she could live with a little unsettling of her keel, but there’d be repercussions if she risked any serious impact to the carefully kept equilibrium of her feelings. Repercussions felt by anyone within a city block of her, as she recalled from her one high school make-out session with Josh Forster.
“It’s very nice of you to offer, Mr…” He waggled an eyebrow at her. “All right. Fluke. But I’ll just wait for David.”
“Oh, come on.” His eyes twinkled like sparklers on a July evening. Dimples appeared at the corners of his mouth as he grinned. “It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other better.”
That’s what I’m afraid of. But she was being ridiculous. “Which way are you heading? I don’t want to take you out of your way.”
“I’m staying at the Team guest quarters downtown.”
“I guess it’d be on your way…” She found herself going along as he took her arm and steered her toward a cherry-red sports car parked at the far edge of the lot. Beyond the likely blast range of debris had the bomb been detonated, she noted.
“Nice car.” She hardly knew one make from another, but the vehicle he stopped beside had sleek curves and shone as if polished on a daily basis. Her bike suited her fine for the city, especially with Tamara doing most of the driving for the ashram.
“Yeah.” He opened the passenger side door for her, still smiling like a kid with a present to unwrap. “It’s one of my indulgences. A guy likes his toys.”
“Guys aren’t the only ones.” Rachel smiled too, unable to resist the infectiousness of his, slipped into her seat, and buckled in. “I’ve got quite the collection of miniature rocking horses myself, and my friend Tamara builds the most incredible kites you’ve ever seen.” David had never let her keep more than she could fit in a backpack. She’d had no room for toys. When they finally found a home, she’d made up for it by collecting every variety of the favorite toy she’d had to abandon in their original home.
Fluke buckled his own belt and started an engine so quiet it might be
a lion cub’s purr rather than the firing of steel pistons. His grin struck her as smug.
“And you don’t need to tell me that rocking horses and kites don’t compare to high-powered machines—”
“Never said that. To each his—or her—own. Where am I taking you?”
Man, how defensive could she get? Her cheeks burned. Of course she couldn’t hide her feelings. A person could be stone blind and know she blushed, the way she broadcast every dang feeling to everyone in a city block’s radius. She took a deep breath, centering herself.
“I’m sorry. I’ve got ‘poor-kid’ syndrome. I get defensive about it.” She shrugged, smiled, and projected some warmth and good humor to make up for her lapse. “And I often slip up if I’m not careful, project my mood without meaning to. It’s why I didn’t want to accept your kind offer at first.” Why she generally preferred to be alone. People were work. Easier to deal with loneliness when she chose it than when people began to shun her. “I’ll understand if you want to rescind it now. I don’t mind waiting for David.”
Fluke barked out a laugh. “Forget it. You’re not the only one who grew up poor and gets defensive about it. And,” he gave her an assessing look, “I bet I can handle anything you make me feel.”
~ * ~
Fluke started the Porsche, pulled out. Cute how Rachel didn’t know a Porsche from a Civic. She leaned back and stared out the window, showing no inclination to talk. He’d have to be the one to get that ball rolling.
He cast a glance toward her as he steered onto the road fronting Capital Finance’s offices and headed for the nearest entrance to Highway 100. “So, what’s your origin story?”
“My what?” She turned puzzled eyes his way, giving the impression he’d pulled her attention from some secret inner world. A paradise, no doubt.
“Not a comics fan?”
“Not in years.”
“The story of how you got your super powers. Where were you when the P-bomb hit?”
“Oh, right. It’s been a while, but I did read comics as a kid. Before...”
“You must have been pretty young when it hit.” He raised an eyebrow, glancing toward her before merging with traffic.
“It hit about a week before my fourteenth birthday.” She sighed, projecting a sense of faded melancholy. “Not much of a story, really. We didn’t go anywhere for summer vacation that year, just stayed in Moorhead. David was seventeen. He’d go
ne off to Horizon Shores Park with a group of his friends. I went out by myself. I liked to bike to the mall and meet up with friends from school. I could take Center Avenue most of the way, but this time I never got there. The bomb hit. The earth trembled – even though I found out later the impact was all the way out west of Fargo. I fell off my bike onto the grass on the verge of the road. The world went crazy.”
“Yeah.” That part went much the same for everyone he’d talked with who’d been through it. For a moment it seemed the maw of pure chaos howled through your mind, your skin, your bones... Everything that could and couldn’t be somehow manifested all at once, and all around.
“Then it got worse. I could tell what was happening.” She clenched her jaw as a wave of distress rolled off her.
“Hey, if it’s too hard to talk about—” He flipped open a compartment in the banc between seats—nodding to the collection of CDs there. “We can just listen to some music.”
She drew an audible breath. “No. Thanks. Talking puts it in perspective. It’s okay.” He could feel the shift in her projected emotions as she steadied herself. She turned to the collection and looked idly through the disks as she went on, dispassionately.
“It terrified me. Trees danced—I kind of liked seeing that, but then they turned into monsters, walked, melted, the road reared up into the sky and tied a knot in itself. Cars vanished, fell, turned into giant gum drops or beetles, vanished in puffs of smoke. An SUV turned into a cloud of yellow butterflies and the people who’d been inside floated to the ground not far from me. The girl sprouted wings and flew—you may have heard of her since—goes by ‘Angel Lass.’” Rachel radiated her sense of wonder at the memory.
“Oh, sure—even met her once.” He caught her eye with a sidewise glance-taking his eyes from the road for scarcely a moment as they roared past a Perkins set near an exit from the highway. He meant the glance to suggest some camaraderie in their mutual acquaintance, as if knowing the winged woman made them part of some secret conspiracy. He caught a frisson of something more and Rachel’s gaze slid instantly aside. He wanted it back. “Sounds like you were a lot closer to the epicenter of the explosion than I got.”
“Yeah. I’ve heard of effects as far off as Chicago and Kansas City, but we were just across the Minnesota border from Fargo.”
“I’d been on a fishing trip with buddies—to a lake resort between Alexandria and Saint Cloud. We’d already set out for home and were half way back to Iowa.”
“I always wondered why the terrorists would make a strike someplace in the Black Hills of Dakota instead of a proper military target.” She radiated her puzzlement.
“Rumor is, we did have a military research facility out there.”
“Oh. I heard that rumor, but wouldn’t people know if it were true?”
“People who talked about it afterward had a way of disappearing. Later, the official story got entrenched in the public consciousness. Now it gets dismissed as another crackpot theory.”
“A lot of what goes on today would’ve been dismissed as crackpot ideas before.” She straightened. “You’ve got Brahms and Weird Al?” He sensed a playful, merry spirit poised, ready to tease him.
“I’ve got facets. So, back to your story, when did your power come into play?”
The sense of her hidden, mischievous self vanished instantly. “I was alone in the middle of all that. Alone, terrified, beyond fear, until my need to reach someone became the only solid thing in the world. I needed my parents, my friends, David—anyone. It seemed like my whole being turned into one giant cry for attention.”
“So, after that, your feelings kept on reaching out?”
“Right. It didn’t seem to affect David at all. He told me how he and his friends got caught up in having a good time at the park and he absolutely refused to let anything distract him. I suspect he was making out with his girlfriend at the time and he wouldn’t have noticed anything else if the world had actually ended.”
Her cheeks pinkened when she mentioned the possible make out session and her gaze flitted toward him and away before he could catch it. Shame he had to watch the road and traffic.
Fluke caught a mix of wry humor and fondness as she spoke of her brother.
“What about your parents?”
She emitted the aura of an old sorrow grown wistful as a faded photograph over the years. “We never found out. They were at work. The whole downtown district suffered so much damage. We’re pretty sure they died.”
“So, you and your brother were left on your own after that, two kids, fourteen and he’s what, a few years older than you?”
“Yeah. We both made our way home afterward, to where the house used to be anyhow. We found a pit filled with coconuts when we got there. We did a lot of moving around after that.”
“Didn’t you have relatives to take you in?”
“Some cousins—at first—but they couldn’t handle having us—me—around.”
At mention of her cousins he picked up a sense of old hurt, and fresh compassion as if she soothed the feelings as they arose, by long habit. Trees wrapped like an endless green shawl around the buildings bordering on the highway.
“And then the Freak Collectors started their witch hunts.” He shared her shudder at the thought of the government agents and independent operators who’d planned for a while to study and contain the thousands of wild Talents generated by the P-bomb.
He caught a waft of lonely-little-girl hiding behind her warm, grown-up smile.
“Yeah.” Fluke scowled. “I got lucky in more ways than one. My talent wasn’t obvious enough to draw their attention, but they got some friends of mine. That got me involved politically for the first time in my life.”
“Oh? What did you do?”
“Mostly just put money into the ACLU’s fight for the rights of the Talented—”
She cast a sly grin his way. “So you’re the one.”
“I did what I could.” He kept his eyes on the traffic around him as the cross-town merged with I35. Several six-figure contributions sure hadn’t hurt the cause.
“Seriously. Is this the part where I get to hear your origin story?”
“If you insist.” He shot her his hottest core-melt-down smile. “Not much to tell. Summer vacation. My buds and I had already started home from our fishing trip. I’d’ve thought we were far enough from the strike zone to be unaffected. But you know how that was.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Like the impact splatter from dropping a giant can of paint—some effects hit a thousand miles out from ground zero, and other people, practically on the doorstep felt nothing.
He went on. “I heard reports on the radio and remember feeling incredibly lucky to be alive and, at the same time, kind of wished I could’ve been part of something that big—history in the making.”
“Hmmm.” They fell into brief silence. He, for his own part, remembering the sense of how stunned the whole world had been by the event.
“I didn’t find out about my luck for a while. My longest ever winning streak in the dorm poker parties clued me in.”
“You were in college?”
“Yep. My first year. I had ‘Partying 101’ as my unofficial major. But the constant partying lost its appeal after a while. I completed a degree in Business Management, studied some European Folk Literature…” and learned a couple languages and a dozen skills, from disarming bombs to unarmed combat, to gardening and needlepoint, to the mechanics it took to maintain my own cars in top condition. The whole resume sounded like bragging, so he only mentioned the first couple items.
He didn’t want to tell her the part of his story involving all the women. She seemed so shy of the attraction he felt from her, allowing only hints of it to escape her control. Didn’t seem like she’d relate to exactly how much experience he had with the opposite sex.
He’d met all kinds of women in the ten years since the P-Bomb had changed his life. He’d met even more after building up a bankroll in
Vegas and parlaying his incredible luck into a fortune, playing the stock markets. Just another kind of gambling, really. His money and looks were catnip to some women. He’d tired of the sort soon enough. Easy come, easy to let go. When he’d started moving in circles with women of real substance he’d been motivated to become more than luck and money alone could make him.
Still, he’d never met a woman who could make him feel things the way Rachel did. Even with feelings as wonderful as the amazing inner peace he got from her, it worried—well, concerned him. No one should have that kind of power over him. But he wouldn’t run blindly from a threat, any more than he’d turn down a dare. And getting to know Rachel Connolly could be a lot of fun…
A shift of topic seemed in order. Better than the silence of things unsaid. “So how does this thing of yours work?” He broke the silence.
“Hmm?” She turned back to him as if she’d wandered off into some daydream. “Oh, it works all by itself—whether I like it or not. The trick is to keep it from flooding the airwaves with my every passing reaction. You have no idea how embarrassing it can be, knowing every stranger in my neighborhood knows about my every flash of jealousy or resentment, my every childish urge.”
“I haven’t gotten any of that from you.”
“Only because I’ve gained some skill at dealing with the troublesome feelings before they become a problem.”
“How do you manage that?”
“The yogis say, ‘Those who practice compassion are its first beneficiaries.’”
He glanced from the road to see the lines of her features limned by the light of the fresh June day. He’d thought at first her eyes were brown, but now, large and luminous, they looked a soft, mossy green, radiating her serenity. “How’s that?” he asked.
“When I meditate, focusing compassion on the feelings that embarrass me, it changes them: calms, soothes, eases. It puts things in perspective, and instead of bothering everyone around me I can spread a sense of peace.” Her glance revealed a flash of sunshine, warming him in the instant it passed.