Asunder (The Infected: Ripped to Shreds Book 3)

by P. S. Power

  “Ready!” She seemed to mean it and actually already had the skills needed, which was shocking, to tell the truth. Cindy couldn’t have done it. Not without way more help than the kid was getting at the moment.

  That reminded her of something, so finding that Marcia was off in her office still, working on papers that wouldn’t be going anywhere if she went to have dinner, she loaded up two trays, and headed in that direction. When she got in, Penny was behind the front desk, so that Lydia could actually have something like a life. Not that she was really getting one. Not yet.

  As she got in the door, Director Turner snorted.

  “Et tu, Brute?” Her eyes were on the food, and so were the words over her head. She needed to eat more, but it wasn’t fun for her.

  Which was foolish to allow.

  “You need to get that fixed. The next time Tim or Taman come, get hunger put in, as well as the ability to taste and smell. Maybe a switch on your first mode, so that you can at least turn it on and off at will? I don’t know if that’s a thing, but they’re trustworthy and won’t use it against you. Honestly, they’re more on our side than half our own people here. Speaking of which…”

  Turner growled a bit, then picked up a roast beef sandwich, and took a bite that was big enough to show she meant it. After she swallowed, with too little chewing for that to work with anyone who had normal pain receptors, she closed her eyes.

  “Lydia? Is she going to pull a Sinclair on us?”

  That got her to grin. The nice thing was that she actually got to mean it for once. Lydia was a great kid.

  “Nope. Not even a little bit. I was kind of thinking we should get her in full time training and have her do more with the other worlds projects. A real promotion. She’s young, smart and flexible enough to make it all happen for her. I was also thinking that we should get Sinclair in to do her job. Be the secretary? That and work with Penny. Just in case we need to off her before the end of her probation year. That part is just about filling the space though, if you have someone else you’d rather put into place for either position. Oh, also, Lydia’s parents actually like her, so we need to arrange some visits. Maybe even figure out how to have her work from home, now that she won’t be endangering them just by being there. That was a big part of why she had to leave in the first place. Both of her parents had taken several beatings, trying to protect her.”

  That got a nod, instead of a denial.

  “Right. Who do we have to set all that up for us?” From the look that was supposed to be her, but she shrugged, actually having plans for a while.

  “I’m pretty sure we just promoted Lydia to that job? That’s how this works, isn’t it? We find some poor slob and dump all the hard work on them, then tell them it’s an honor?”

  That got a laugh, then some food eaten.

  “That… It isn’t totally wrong, Hush. Not really wrong at all.”

  Chapter nine

  Cindy made a point of seeming normal over the next month, as she worked things out with Mariah the Divine Wind. Or, as it actually turned out, what was formerly known as that group. It wasn’t the only threat to the IPB that way, of course. The higher up in the secret food chain she went, the more she noticed that there were about two thousand people in the world who truly wanted to mess with things to a level that meant they needed to die.

  So they did.

  It wasn’t that dramatic from the outside. Except for the fact that fifteen members of the House and Senate just stopped living in their sleep at night, and another twenty-odd suddenly resigned inside four weeks. That got some raised eyebrows in the press, but oddly enough, no one suspected that she had anything to do with it.

  Well, Trivia did, and Chris knew about it straight out. Those were the only ones that caught on to her though, she thought.

  At least until Bridget Chambers knocked on her door at eleven one night.

  Her face was cheery and she seemed a lot calmer than she had the entire time that Cindy had known her.

  “Hiya! Did ya miss me?” That was a good question, since they hadn’t really been able to hang around that much, since being coy about it or not, Cin had been working close to eighteen hour days for a while. Given that she had to spend at least two with Sara, that had meant sleep was short in her world.

  “I did! Come in, what can I do for you?” The words over the smaller red-head spoke only of meditation, which could mean anything from her doing something secret, to simply trying not to grab Cindy’s behind when she moved in to hug her.

  There really was a hug, so it might have actually been that one.

  As soon as the door shut, the girl went totally still, however.

  “So, our enemies have been dying. That, or running so hard that it’s becoming kind of noticeable. I mean, even the slow kids like me are starting to pick up on it. Marcia and Brian both kind of figured out that someone was taking them all out. Penny has been teaching Sinclair the ropes here each day, so it isn’t her… Trivia clearly knows who’s doing it, but she won’t talk about it. I mean, like fifteen conversational interruptions per minute. The woman is really great at that, but eventually even I’m going to work out what’s going on. You know?”

  There was a direct look, the brown of the girl’s eyes more red than not at the moment. It was very different seeming, but other than being famous, she could kind of pass as being un-Infected. Most days. At least if she was willing to stay in a trance like she was in the moment. The subdued body language was telling, if you knew her. She wasn’t playing around, for instance. Also not a threat to Cindy at the moment.

  It went beyond her new found toughness as well. All the way down to the fact that inside the kid, she understood that what had happened, wasn’t Cindy killing for fun at all. It wasn’t assigned either. Not through any official channel. Bridget would have probably been informed if that were the case. That left other things.

  The biggest one, at least to her precognitive powers was that she was safe now. Bridget’s friends weren’t at risk either, after so many had died in the distance.

  Cin shrugged at her and moved back into the room and sat on her bed.

  “Well, I’m sure that will calm down now. It sounds like there was a pretty major plot against us. Possibly a couple, don’t you think?” She knew that for a fact, but didn’t spill the beans totally. After all, Bridget didn’t really need to know that some of the most powerful people in the world had feared her so much that they’d planned to drive her insane, as an excuse to nuke her.

  Personally.

  It was bad enough that Mariah the Divine Wind and three other groups had wanted to destroy reality. That threat was, more or less, gone now. Oh, they might rebuild, someday, but it wouldn’t be for hundreds of years. Not with so many key people dead or out of power suddenly.

  The girl, who was nearly seventeen, just shook her head a bit.

  “Right. So, you’re going to act like you don’t know anything about this?” It was a bit of an accusation, but not really all that mean sounding.

  So Cindy didn't lie to her friend. Not really.

  “Always. Forever and ever.” Then she went still herself, as she felt the kid trying to read her mind. That was strange, and not actually a super power. Just what anyone with good focus and a desire to know the mind of another might pull off, from time to time.

  She got nothing, and didn’t realize that she’d been trying at all.

  “Oh… Well, cool. So, Clemance Thomson is coming in a few days? The new space program is setting up in Utah. That’s kind of neat, isn’t it? Secret, of course, but the government is involved, so of course it is. We can’t admit that nifty aliens gave us all that swag, right? We’d look like we couldn’t hack it for ourselves.”

  “Too true, Kiddo. Now... If we can just make sure that the food gets into France well enough. Africa, the whole continent, is sharing theirs pretty well, but… Well, you know how Infected people are.”

  It was the kind of thing they said, as if that, the Infection,
was why the food hadn’t been shared with that particular foreign power. It wasn’t, being down to actual politics. A thing that, when she’d tried to explain it to Tim Baker, the man had actually understood. Perfectly.

  Bridget stood up and gave her another hug, holding her for a long time.

  “So, now that you have all this free time, what do you have going on? Marcia is betting that you’ll put in for my job. Mark…” There was a long wait then… “I think he actually wants to see about teaming up with you? To make the trips he has to take into the unmoving less frequent? That would be good, actually. Now that he doesn’t have to live in constant fear, he really isn’t as worried about losing his place here, you know?”

  Cindy shook her head a bit, then smiled. It was a soft thing, but one that she actually meant. It occurred to her that Mark understood what she could do, at least in part. Since his girlfriend was Chris Poures, it didn’t take a lot of cross referencing to see that the blonde lady had been dropping hints to him about what might work. Even without a first mode, she wanted to keep her secrets as far as mind control of others went.

  That ship had kind of sailed as far as Cin Mableton was concerned. Her work with Kerry was already logged into the files, meaning that a lot of people understood part of what she could do now. Too many, but short of killing hundreds of otherwise innocent people, there wasn’t a lot to be done about that. On the great side, no one was talking about putting her on Team One yet. Not openly.

  Charlot Chambers wanted her for it, but she was working her own plot that way, trying to make the first team a collection of about half the operatives on the base and more than a few of the cuter Agents. It was different than anything they’d done in the past, but far more open about who they really were.

  The Infected Protection Bureau.

  Their job was, more or less, to protect the Infected. A thing that got forgotten by some, along the way.

  “I can do that. Mark is a great guy, after all. Anyway, I was thinking that I might take off and go back to Vancouver for a bit.” Her old hunting grounds.

  Interestingly, Bridget didn’t start out assuming she was going for dark purposes. Which was because she was ninety percent certain that if Cindy wanted someone there to be dead, she could get it done without moving from the spot she was in. Then, carefully, the girl made that thought go away well enough that even Cindy couldn’t find it easily in her story.

  “Oh? Going to see if Wally Clarkson wants to hook up?” There was no condemnation in the words.

  Then, Bridget didn’t know that Cin had tortured the man’s brother to death, personally.

  “Something like that. If nothing else we need to keep in touch. He’s sort of powerful. More than he knows. Given that he can control the world’s weather, if he wants. The thing there is that he could also just control the weather inside this room. A thunderstorm in here… Lightning… Thunder… Boom. Try to dodge that, right?” She waited, but the smaller woman got it, instantly.

  “Ooooh. That’s good then. He didn’t want to join up though, so we should keep that hidden. Or at least not… This being in charge thing is kind of hard, you know that?”

  “Yep. Which is why I’m not really going to be trying for your job. So, I’m planning to go and wrangle a Wally. You in on that one?”

  There was a simple, single nod then. Her face calm.

  “Yeah. It’s hard. He reminds me of his brother enough… But… I can’t let that rule my life, can I?”

  “Agreed. So, in the morning?”

  That, it seemed, would be enough for the girl.

  Now Cindy just had to pretend that she wasn’t the killer that she actually was. It was kind of a shock to her when she thought about it. After all, when she’d started, killing had been her entire world. Her greatest love.

  Now it was her greatest skill.

  Things had changed, but, even though she missed the allure and thrill of her old compulsion, she wasn’t done being what she was supposed to.

  So she smiled, and hugged her little friend.

  “We should drag Sara along with us. Maybe Lauren, if you can handle that? I know that there’s history there.”

  That got a slow inhalation for the tiny woman, but a nod as well. After all, she’d been angry at Lauren for a long time, but her words showed that she wasn’t holding on to that. Not now, after things had changed as much as they had.

  After all, unlike her, Impulse wasn’t a killer. A fighter. A warrior. Those weren’t the same thing though. It was good, she knew. Possibly the best thing ever.

  After all, the world didn’t really need more people like her.

  It just needed enough of them.

  That was all.

  So, for the first time in a while, after Bridget left, Cindy just turned the lights out and slept.

  Dreaming of who needed to die next.

  It was relaxing.