“It’s not a clip. It’s a magazine, and no, a couple of rounds have been fired.”
“Oh.” Or maybe he’s got the one that killed his father. Is he aware of that? I’m not going to mention it. He’s already starting to turn into a soldier; no need stoking up his revenging fires. He lays the weapon down and pulls out the night vision goggles. I’ve used these once before, in the subbasement of Sans Sanssabre. It was only a few minutes to observe the protected fossilized remains of Smilodon. It was kept in the dark, in a vacuum, thus the need for the goggles.
Matt pulls them down over his head. There are straps that hold it in place. A single binocular-like device sticks out a good eight inches from his face, like a horn on a rhinoceros. He spends some time adjusting the straps and then fumbles around for the switch. I analyze where he is trying to reach and then switch it on for him. He immediately turns away from the fire and points the rhino horn up into the darkness.
“Wow!” he says. “This is awesome! You’ve got to try this.”
The other one is still in the canvas bag. I pull it out. There is blood on it; a lot of blood. I let it flop back into the bag. “I’ll take your word for it.” My gut lurches a bit and then settles, and the need to go out and kill suddenly leaves me. I sit down and rest my gun on my lap.
Sam gets up and then squats in front of us. “Now we have to make a plan.”
“I don’t think I can do this,” I say. “There’s no way I can point this at a human being and pull the trigger.”
“If you don’t, they’ll kill you and then they’ll kill Tanya and Reba. You have no choice.”
“I’m not saying it’s a matter of choice. I’m saying that I’m afraid I’ll freeze at the last second, and that scares the hell out of me.” Maybe the strength will come when it’s called upon, but what if it doesn’t?
“We can’t make a mistake,” Matt says as though he is reading my thoughts. He has the goggles off and is looking at them closely.
“I know that. And we have to do this right, the first time, without the benefit of a practice run. It’s suicidal.”
“So is the alternative,” Sam says.
“I know that, too.” I put my hands on the weapon and take a deep breath.
“This is cool,” Matt says. “It enhances ambient light and has infrared.” He puts it back on and switches it to IR. “WOW! This is rage.”
“Rage?”
“Cool! Rage! Hip! Rad! Bitch! Bleoch!”
“Bleoch?”
“Depends on your generation.” He turns his head so the horn points at Sam. “Can you see a green glow or something, Sam?”
“Yes.”
What the hell is bleoch?
“Then you don’t want to use the infrared setting when you’re facing the enemy.”
“An important thing to remember,” Sam says. “I’d just leave it off. Zach, you need to put yours on and make sure you’re comfortable with it.”
“I don’t think comfortable is something I’m going to get.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, I only have one eye.” A dumb excuse, but the only one I can think off. I don’t want to admit that I’m freaked out by the blood.
She grabs the bag and reaches in for the goggles. “I don’t understand what one eye has . . .” She drops them back into the bag, picks up the bag, says, “I’ll be right back,” and walks toward the room where Tanya and Becky are enjoying their soak. I have no clue, and I don’t care.
When Sam returns ten minutes later, I have done everything I can imagine with the MP5, except pull the trigger. I have carefully kept my fingers well away from that, yet always worrying that it’ll pull itself. Strange thing about guns—how they kill of their own accord. “But I didn’t mean too,” the holder of the gun will say while standing over the body of his best friend. “It was an accident. It just went off.”
I don’t want any accidents.
In one of Sam’s hands is the canvas bag. In the other are the goggles. She drops the empty bag and holds the goggles out to me. Matt has wandered off practicing his quick draw with the goggles on, leaving me to my own form of practice, basically extracting a magazine and inserting a new one. “I scrubbed off as much as I could,” she says to me quietly. I take it, noticing only a discoloration instead of a tacky, plastic-like coating.
“Thank you.” I think I can deal with them now. I look up to where my wife and daughter are. “Did she say anything while you were up there?”
“Yes, but it’s not important.” She points to the goggles. “Get used to them. We need to get going soon.” She walks away.
I put the night vision goggles on, then fiddle with the switch. When I finally get it turned on, what I see is only a blur. I spend the next five minutes fooling with the focus and the diopter adjustment until suddenly I spot a sabre-toothed cat sitting on a ledge in a far, dark corner, looking directly at me. That unnerves me a bit. I power them down and take them off. Noticing how Matt attached them to his belt, I do the same.
I start to tuck the MP5 under my belt and then reconsider. I’ve heard stories about men blowing off a toe, a kneecap, or another more important body part. I wish there was a strap to hang it over a shoulder. I hold it pointing at the ceiling, then pointing at the ground. I put a spare magazine into a pocket.
I’m ready . . . maybe.
Reba
“I can understand if you want to kill Sam,” I say to Mom, “but please wait. We need her so that we can get out of this thing alive. Dad doesn’t deserve to be killed. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t do anything.” I didn’t want to get in the water again, so I’m sitting on the edge with just my feet dangling, talking with as much of a conversational tone as I can. The water feels good. I want my boots back. Now would be a good time to make the switch. It only makes sense. Mom’s not walking anywhere soon, and I probably am.
“Yeah, right. He’s guilty as hell.”
“I saw it, Mom. She made the advance. He rejected her.”
“She was all over him.”
“Of course she was, but it wasn’t his choice. He pushed her away.”
Mom looks at me. “How the hell do you know anyway? What do you mean, you saw?”
I start to roll my eyes and then stop. “Damn it, Mom! Haven’t you figured it out by now. I’m a psychic to the nth degree. I’m a friggin’ mind reader.” I shut my mouth and transmit my next words. “I’m also telepathic.”
“Who the hell are you?” she thinks.
“I’m your daughter.”
Her mouth drops open and she looks away. “Holy shit!”
We say nothing more for a very long time. I throw up a block against her thoughts. I have to create my own personal firewall around my brain, and I’m starting to do it without hardly thinking about it. I’m becoming so weird I’m beginning to freak myself out. What’s next? Levitation? Invisibility? Pyrokinesis?
“How did this happen?” she demands.
“What?”
“This power of yours.”
“How should I know. I’m just stuck with it, and I hate it. How did Dad get it?”
“He can’t do what you just did.”
“Yeah, but what he can do—when did that start?”
Mom thinks for a minute. “When he was a kid; the part about knowing about death anyway. Being able to read people, I don’t know. He’s never talked about when that started.”
“He told me he could see auras ever since he could remember,” I say. “I have an impression that I did, too, when I was three or four. It went away until my trip to Mexico.”
“That’s when everything started?”
I think about that a minute. “I don’t know for sure. I can’t put a finger on a particular day or anything, although my first real impression was of the guy killed by the snake. It may have been my birthday.”
“Humph! A raving psychic on your seventeenth birthday. That’s a horror movie.”
“Horror or not, Mom, I’ve turned into a freak; a ravin
g, lunatic, psychic freak.”
“You and her both.”
I don’t like being compared to Sam, especially in my mother’s eyes. I battle against the hurt and the welling up of tears. “Does that mean you want to kill me, too?”
She struggles for a response, and then her gaze goes to something behind me. I twist around to find Sam standing a dozen feet away.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” she says. She starts to walk by, then stops. “On second thought, I will interrupt.” She looks at me. “Don’t ever call yourself a freak, or a lunatic. You’re an intelligent young girl with a powerful talent. You can only become a freak by turning it into something bad, making it ugly.”
“Sort of like you,” Mom says sweetly.
Sam smiles but doesn’t look at Mom. “And make yourself strong enough to handle the barbs.” She then walks away, disappearing around a wall of limestone.
Mom stares off in the distance and I sit in silence considering Sam’s words. I can see her point, but an ugly duck is still an ugly duck despite what the duck tries to tell herself. My not calling myself a freak doesn’t make it not so. And I don’t want to have to handle the barbs.
When Sam returns, she’s carrying what looks like a gas mask. The bag she came in with earlier is rolled up and tucked under one arm. As she goes by, Mom stops her. “I should let you know that even though we need you in order to get out of this mess, if that’s possible that is, I’m not so sure I’d be able to control myself if you touch Zach again.” Their eyes lock onto each other, Mom’s blazing in the torchlight. “I will kill you.”
Sam raises her eyebrows and tilts her head. “Thank you for sharing that. I’ll be sure to take it under advisement.” And then she walks out.
Mom looks at me. “Don’t you ever question me again.”
“But I . . .”
She points her finger. “Don’t you ever try to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do.”
I open my mouth to try to explain but the blaze from her eyes—I know it is not her, only the reflection from the torch—turns my skin cold.
“Ever!”
I jump, and then pull my feet from the water and hug my knees to my chest. I think about nothing for a time, and then about Christi. What will it be like for her to be an orphan? We will be dead but she will have to live on . . . without us . . . alone. She’ll probably have to live with Aunt Suzie. Aunt Suzie is cool, but not for all the time.
“And stay out of my head! Don’t ever try to read my thoughts. Don’t ever try to talk to me without words coming out of your mouth.”
I close my eyes and clench my jaw to keep from blowing my top completely. I want to disable my firewall and reach in and run around inside her brain until it is mush. I want to tell her, without it coming out of my mouth, to go stick her little pointing finger where the sun doesn’t shine. And that’s just to start out with. After that I want to roll my eyes at her until her head spins and falls off.
But I do nothing. I hug my knees and focus on the black nothing that floats on the inside of my eyelids. When I’m sure Mom isn’t going to say anything else, I stand up. I pickup my socks and Mom’s shoes, then make my way around to her side, well aware of her eyes on me. I drop the shoes on her towel. “I hope your feet fall off,” I pickup my boots. My feet are wet and we only brought up the one towel. I’m not touching it. I turn my back to her and start to walk out.
“Becky,” she says softly.
I turn around.
“I expect an apology.”
“When you do something stupid that causes us all to die, who’s going to apologize to Christi?” She looks at me with her mouth hanging open, but I’m not done. “Maybe Victor Vandermill will go apologize.” I hope the blaze in my eyes is the same for her as hers was for me. “Or maybe he’ll just go kill her, too.”
I leave her in her puddle of ugly thoughts.
Chapter 57
Zach
“Where’s Sam?”
I turn around. Becky is in her bare feet with her boots and socks in her hand. I have the gun pointing at the ceiling. “Don’t know. Probably out huddling with her cats. We’re getting ready to do something but I have no idea what it is.”
She looks up at the gun. “That’s an Uzi?”
“No. It’s an MP5. It’s better than an Uzi.” I lower it and point it at the ground.
“Oh.”
“It can be single shot or full automatic.”
“Does automatic mean it just keeps shooting while you have the trigger depressed?”
“Yes.”
“If you can kill a guy with one bullet, why do you need all the rest?”
“To make sure you don’t miss, especially if he’s shooting back.”
“Oh.” She grabs a towel, and sits down and starts wiping at her feet. As she pulls on a sock that looks like it should be in the trash, she says, “I want to go with you.”
“No. Not possible.”
“Why?”
“It’s dangerous.”
“So is staying here with Mom.”
“I see.” I truly feel for her. “It’s also pitch black dark out there and you can’t be carrying a lantern. You have to stay here. As a matter-of-fact, we need to talk about what you guys will do if we don’t return.”
“What do you mean?”
“If something happens and they get past us . . .”
“If they kill you, you mean.”
“Yes. That’s what I mean.”
We both think about that for a minute as she laces up a boot. I lie the gun down and sit next to her. “I think you both should go deep into the mountain and find a place to hide.”
“Sam said it’d be impossible to hide from the dogs.”
“Maybe we can eliminate the dogs.” It occurs to me that that’s the first thing we should be trying to do. Could Sam send the cats to do that ahead of us?
“So, I’m going to be stuck in a dark hole some place with my mother who I’d rather not spend two more seconds with, for Lord knows how long. And then, if we’re really lucky, I’ll get to lead her out of here to find your dead bodies, and then walk a million miles of mountains.”
“Yeah.”
“How long should we hide?”
“Twenty-four hours. I don’t think he knows how many people are with her, so once he encounters Matt, Sam and me, he might leave.” Maybe. Vandermill most assuredly has the resources to find out who belongs to the cars, including the rentals, and then he’ll know who to look for. If he encounters only the three of us, he won’t go away. He’s not a man to leave loose ends dangling around.
“Take enough food, though, for a couple of days. I’d feel better if you’d stay hidden for at least forty-eight hours.”
“What if Mom won’t go?”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Good luck. I tried to tell her that you rejected Sam, but it seems that that is the highest priority on her mind, well over and above getting killed by Victor Vandermill’s army.”
“I rejected Sam? Where did you learn that?”
Her back stiffens and she looks up at the ceiling. “I’ve gotten so damn good at this mind reading crap that it scares the hell out of me.”
“You read my mind!”
“Don’t go and get freaky like Mom did. No, I did not read your mind. And I didn’t even mean to read Sam’s. It just happened.”
“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say.
“I tried to tell Mom you weren’t responsible for it, though I did lie a little.” She looks at me hard for a few seconds. “You were enjoying it.”
Deny it or keep my mouth shut. I’m a man after all. I’d have to be in a coma to not enjoy it . . . right? Is there something wrong with me if I didn’t push her away in the first half second? My lips don’t move.
“When she wouldn’t listen I had to tell her how I knew, and then to convince her of my abilities, I reached into her mind and talked to her. That’s when she freaked out.”
I nod my head. �
��I understand.”
“I’m also learning how to block it so that I just don’t go receiving a whole lot of personal stuff I don’t want to know about. It’s my firewall.”
“An appropriate term.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t work with Sam.”
“Your mind was probably upset by the images and you couldn’t grab control.”
“I don’t think that was it. Try sending something to me, Dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think of something and try sending it to me telepathic.”
“Okay.” I look at the fire, which has died to glowing embers and think about how hot it is. “I don’t get it,” I say. “It’s like telling someone with no arms to throw a ball. I’ve got this thought, and then what?”
“That’s my point. You don’t have the skill; you don’t have the arms. I do.”
All of a sudden there is a voice inside my head. “Think the thought again.” I look at my daughter. “Think it!” she demands in my head. I close my eyes and bring up the hot coals again.
“You’re thinking about the fire. My point is that you can’t make me see it, but I can reach in and take it. You may be able to learn how to block me, but you can’t force me to see something I don’t want to see. I don’t think it is something you can learn, either. It’s a power . . . and I have it.” She takes a second to pull in a lungful of air and then blow it out. “Sam has it too. Despite my firewall, she made me see what really happened. She played it back in her head and then transmitted it to me like we were a couple of wireless computers.”
“Considering everything, I’m not surprised.”
“Yeah, but there’s another caveat to this.”
I tilt my head at her. “Caveat? Sometimes your vocabulary scares me?”
She rolls her eyes at me. I smile at her. “The caveat,” she goes on, “is that since we seem to share powers, I may have hers.”
I blink a couple of times and then let out the breath I’m holding. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
She nods. “I haven’t tried yet, but maybe I can talk to the cats.”
Chapter 58
Zach
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 75