He felt another round of gagging and threw up again. After a minute he got up and started jogging toward his house. He still had three miles to go, and all he saw in front of him were the psychic shadows where he knew he would not be seen. As he ran he played back in his mind the confrontation that had just taken place. He knew that he didn’t think about what to do;, he had just reacted to his attackers instinctively. The hours he had spent going through the self-defense moves at home must have saved him, but that practice could not account for what he had just done. He realized that he could feel what the attackers were going to do before they moved, which allowed him to avoid their attack and take advantage of them.
Tag had never been in a real fight or any physical confrontation. Perhaps his self-defense instructors were right about some people having an affinity for these skills. But even those that had an affinity still had to train for years to be able to do what he had just done, and he had not trained for years. It dawned on him that most of the training must be to teach how to avoid the attack of one’s opponent while delivering them appropriate strikes. He realized that the skill was something he possessed naturally because of his gift. Seeing what his opponents were going to do in very slow motion allowed him to do exactly what he did at five-years-old playing tag. They moved one way, he went the other. He remembered seeing, in his mind’s eye, the thin, dark psychic shadow that went from him to the first gunman. He threw the knife at that shadow and it never dropped an inch or wavered in its flight. It went straight in the gunman’s eye just as he crouched to fire, as if that shadow knew where the eye was going to be. He did the same thing with the second knife throw. He saw the shadow under him as he rolled and threw the second knife at it. He didn’t even see the gunman behind him. It had all happened so fast, and Tag felt no joy or sense of victory from killing his attackers. Even knowing he had no choice and that if he had not fought back he would be the one lying back there dead did not remove the sorrow and pain he felt inside. All the way home he second-guessed himself.
“Maybe if I had just run as soon as I sensed them approaching; or maybe if I had just wounded them…” he thought. But he knew deep down that if he had run they would have just shot him, and by the time he sensed there were five they were already surrounding him. He also knew that if he had only wounded the gunman, they would have continued shooting. Still, he couldn’t help himself from feeling pain, because it was not in his nature to deliberately hurt anyone. He vowed that in the future the last thing he would do, unless he had absolutely no other choice, would be to use the skills he discovered tonight.
The moon was up and he visualized the man in the moon crying over the wasted lives. The night sounds surrounded him, and he heard the chirps and buzzing of the insects along with the sound of the floaters overhead. Life continued and he was going to have to do the same.
Then a thought penetrated his self-pity. The cameras had seen him. He stopped running and began walking. He replayed the attack in his mind. The cameras had recorded him sitting against the wall surrounded by the five men. He thought hard and knew he had kept his head down while the camera was on him. He was also certain that during the attack the cameras were turned away. However, he knew that when the cameras swung back they would see the results of the fight with him still sitting against the wall, confronted by the big man. “I’ll bet that causes the security investigators some confusion,” he thought. “Could they possibly connect this fight with what happened at school tonight?” He had been careful to make sure that he would not be seen, and he had been successful until the confrontation. “I wonder if the cameras could tell how old I am.” Then another thought struck him. “The security people are going to wonder how the person sitting against the wall got there. That’s a question that the investigators are going to have a hard time answering. No one is on the cameras, then boom, someone appears.” He was sure that the five men could be tracked back from the scene of the attack, but that made his appearance all the more suspicious. That might shift all the attention away from the attackers and on to him. Someone that could handle five armed criminals single-handedly and appear from out of nowhere was a lot more of a concern for security than the one remaining unsuccessful criminal. “All I wanted to do was steal a test booklet, and look what happened. I guess nothing is ever simple,” he thought. He walked through the cool night, moving in the shadows without conscious thought. “Will they be able to connect the fight to the theft of the test booklet?” he wondered. He could still smell grass in the park and it smelled good. The moon had finally risen high over the horizon and the night took on a beauty that Tag saw and savored. The moon shining through the trees cast intricate shadows on the ground, and the grass blades reflected some of it back into the trees. Tag could see small flying insects move through the moonlight like fairies. The close brush with death had sharpened his senses and made every color, every sound, and every smell intense. “This is the flavor of living,” Tag thought. “I don’t see how they can connect the two, and worrying about it won’t change the outcome.” So Tag put it out of his mind and savored the night while he continued to move toward his home.
He finally arrived; it was barely daylight, so he sat down next to his house between the climate control and waste removal bins and then waited for his parents to leave for work. Thirty minutes later he saw the lift on the roof raise the floater and then watched it fly away with his parents. He made sure he wouldn’t be seen and entered the front door. He was exhausted from being up all night, but he knew he had to go to school to make sure that the public transportation records would show him leaving his house. He took a quick shower, put on clean clothes, put the clothes he wore last night into the auto laundry, and left to board the floater that would take him to school.
He was sitting in his seat almost asleep when Leila and Tara sat down on the seat next to his. “I must be really tired not to have sensed them board the floater,” he thought. But they were not thinking about him, so his psychic sense wasn’t triggered. They didn’t notice him because they were having a deep discussion.
“Leila, you have to ask to take the test again,” Tara said.
“And what reason would I give?” Leila responded. “If I tell them about my mother’s plans to leave and how I had been up all night, then I won’t be given a good job anyway because of my parents’ inability to maintain a long-term relationship.”
“You have to try!”
“Don’t you understand? If I bring that up then they’ll investigate my parents and discover that she’s only staying until I get married. Then not only will I not get a good job, but I’ll also lose the chance to marry and have a family.”
“You’re right,” Tara said, almost crying. “I haven’t thought it through. That’s exactly what would happen.”
“Well, at least after today I’ll know where I stand and try to put this behind me,” Leila said.
Tag sat in his seat and knew that what was going to happen today was only the beginning. He knew Leila was about to face the full attention of security investigators because of the theft of her test booklet. He also knew that she knew absolutely nothing about it, and the investigators would make that determination quickly. She would not be able to offer a clue as to how it went missing. He suspected she would have to endure questions about all her friends and anyone else that she had spoken to after the test. Her reactions to their questions would be genuine and honest and the security truth fields would show that. He was hoping that this would lead to her being made to take the test again. Since she had never spoken with him and had not seen him when he gazed at her, then it should be impossible for the investigators to connect them, he determined.
Tag’s wildest dream didn’t touch what he saw when the floater stopped at school. There was a heavy security floater unloading boxes, and ten security speed floaters parked around the entrance. That was a lot, but what really concerned him was the company of armed naval marines in full battle armor surrounding the school. He felt a sinking
feeling in his stomach, fearing that the enforcement division had been able to tie the theft and the fight together.
“Here goes nothing,” he thought.
Chapter 7
Chief Inspector Esa Connor looked around the crime scene and tried to picture what happened. Usually he had no problem determining the sequence of events of a crime. But this one had him really confused. “The pieces just don’t fit,” he thought. There were eight emergency vehicles parked around the crime scene, and their flashing lights almost made the area look like a dance club. The blood on the wall and ground looked black instead of red in the flashing blue and violet lights. The bodies were sprawled along the wall of a building with the two shooters on each end possessing all the weapons that were used in the fight, two of them being the knives stuck in the men. “Someone obviously made a point with those two,” Connor thought. The two dead men in the center looked like they had been beaten with a small building. “Looks like head trauma killed both of them, not the broken and cut arms. I just can’t figure the order here. One thing for certain, these four look like eight miles of bad highway,” he thought.
Danielle Ash, a Directorate medical technician, inserted the electronic beam into a victim’s mouth and recorded the results on her med screen. She had arrived thirty minutes earlier and had immediately started her analysis. The flashing strobe lights of the security floaters made the crime scene look otherworldly. The bodies on the sidewalk next to the building looked almost plastic in the flashes that were being reflected off the crystal windows of the building. This was her third straight shift and she was starting to feel the fatigue. “Be sharp,” she commanded herself. “Inspector Connor won’t tolerate sloppiness.” Her supervisor had assigned her a third shift knowing how tired she was. Danielle suspected that her supervisor felt threatened by the quality of her work, so she was assigned shifts where superiors wouldn’t be around to see her. “Looks like she made a mistake tonight,” Danielle thought as she probed the second body.
She was small, standing only five feet five and weighing 125 pounds. She had her blond hair tied into a braid that hung below her shoulders and she wore the customary helmet with faceplate as she examined the four dead bodies. She had to use leverage to move them, but she was capable of handling the weight. “This doesn’t make sense,” she thought again, and began taking her readings with a different unit. Her brow was furrowed as she commed army headquarters for information and went back to her readings. She noticed that two more floaters were moving toward the crime scene. “Maybe someone else can make sense of this,” she thought. She had just turned nineteen the week before and knew she was young and had only eight months experience, but she had taken a lot of time to study crime cases to learn her craft. She had never read about anything that came close to the readings she had just made. Inspector Sinclair walked up to her and asked her to report her findings to Chief Inspector Connor as soon as she finished her analysis. She gathered her materials and walked toward the man who was head of all continental security. She had already taken three readings, and taking more was not going to change them. “It is what it is,” she thought. “Be sharp,” she commanded herself again.
“John, what do you make of this?” Chief Inspector Connor asked Inspector Sinclair. “Do you think one person did this? Do you have the video footage yet from the cameras? Which one do you think was killed first?” He rattled off question after question.
John Sinclair, Inspector Connor’s second in command and an eighteen-year veteran on the force, said, “Slow down, Esa. The medical technician is electro-probing their brains now to determine the exact time of death. Also, since this looks like it was done in hand-to-hand fighting, I’ve called my liaison with the military and they’re going to send a Lieutenant Colonel Ortiz, who is an expert, and I believe that’s his floater that just landed over by the medical sled. I’m having monitoring service send the video from the cameras to your floater’s computer and it should be here in less than two minutes.”
John suddenly held his communicator to his ear and said, “Okay. If you think it’s necessary, then come on.” He then turned to Chief Inspector Connor and said, “Major Daniels is coming down here in person to discuss the video footage that was taken tonight.”
Inspector Connor raised his eyebrows and John said, “I know. It’s highly unusual that the head of city monitoring would take the time to visit a crime scene. For that matter, I’ve never heard of him leaving his surveillance duties for any reason. He should be here momentarily. He also says that a Sergeant Garcia will be joining us in about ten minutes.”
“I haven’t ever heard of him going to a crime scene, either,” Inspector Connor said, “so there must be something very unusual that happened here on the video tonight. John, I want you to bring the medical technician as soon as she gets her readings, then get Colonel Ortiz and Major Daniels and meet me over at the wall where all this happened. Tell Jack to bring Sergeant Garcia over when he arrives.”
“Yes sir,” John said.
Esa stood at the wall where four men had lost their lives. He slowly walked from body to body, looking at how they fell, trying to piece together how this had taken place. He looked up the wall of the towering building, but there was solid crystal as far as the eye could see. It would be almost impossible to break one of those windows, and there were no crystal shards around the crime scene. The pieces just didn’t seem to fit. There had to be more information. “These men were poorly dressed,” he thought. “Unfortunately, most criminals today are similarly dressed; poverty is a cruel mistress.” Then he noticed John approaching with the others.
“Inspector Connor, this is Danielle Ash, the medical technician who took the readings for time of death,” John said.
Inspector Connor thought she was rather small for the type of work she did, especially having to move dead bodies. She was only five feet four or five feet five, slim build, and quite pretty, almost too pretty, with sparkling blue eyes. There was something about her eyes that spoke of high intelligence. “I bet she could be distracting,” he thought. He could see in her expression that something was bothering her. “We’ll get to that in a minute,” he decided.
“This is Colonel Ortiz, our hand-to-hand combat expert, and Major Daniels, head of metropolitan monitoring service, whom I think you know,” John said.
“Good evening,” Esa said. “I need some help here, people. Major Daniels, I’m surprised to see you here, but I suspect you have something important to tell us that might help us understand what happened tonight, and Colonel Ortiz, I hope you can make sense of how these men were killed. Who would like to go first?”
“I need to know which man was killed first, then second, third, and so on before I can accurately put together what I think happened,” Colonel Ortiz said. “Then, if you have any video, I’d like to see that.” Colonel Ortiz was dressed in his civilian clothes, but there was no mistaking he was military. He had short hair, a stocky build, and deep-set eyes, and moved with an economy of motion.
“This is a very dangerous individual,” Esa thought, then said, “Okay, Miss Ash, why don’t you share your findings with us so we can get started?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, “but I think you’re going to find them hard to believe; I took the readings three times and they didn’t change.”
“Why is that?” Colonel Ortiz asked.
“Because all four men were killed in less than six seconds,” she replied.
Inspector Connor was stunned and, glancing at Colonel Ortiz, he could tell that he was also surprised by her response. He said, “Slow down, let’s go over your data step by step.”
“All right, here’s what I’ve been able to determine,” Danielle said. “The first one to die was the gunman on the right.” She turned and pointed at the body with the knife protruding from an eye socket. “He died at exactly 11:46:11 by a knife that entered his right eye. The second one to die was the gunman on the left, and he died at exactly 11:46:13 by a knife puncturing the
main artery in his heart. The third one to die was this fellow with the broken arm. He died from massive head trauma. Apparently he was slammed into the wall face first. His time of death was 11:46:15. The last one to die was this man with the severed tendons in his wrist. He also died from massive head trauma. Apparently he was thrown back hard enough to fracture his skull on the concrete. His time of death was 11:46:17. I checked my readings three times, and I used a different probe the third time, and the readings still didn’t change. I’ve matched the third victim with the blood on the wall here,” she said, and she pointed to a bloody spot on the wall about head high. “Also, the blood on the concrete here next to the fourth man matches his blood.”
“Thank you,” Colonel Ortiz said. “Is there anything else you’d like to add, Miss Ash?”
“Yes, there is one more thing,” she said. “The first and fourth victim had army serial numbers on their arms.”
“How do you know they’re army?” Colonel Ortiz asked quickly.
“I’ve run into serial numbers on victims before, so I went to defense five months ago and learned how to tell the difference between the different military branches,” she replied. “All army serial numbers begin with a ‘T’ and end with a ‘Z.’”
Annihilation: Love Conquers All Page 8