by RB Stutz
“I’m not quite sure. I mean something strange happened, at least I think it did. It was all so quick and unintelligible. It’s kind of hard to explain,” I said before trying to gather my words.
She reassured me with a squeeze at my shoulder. “Please try. Have you been getting the headaches as well?”
At this, I quickly turned to her. “You’ve been getting headaches?” Concern overcame me.
“Please, just tell me what happened,” she said
I wanted to know about the headaches, but felt I should go ahead and explain what happened at dinner before she’d tell me more. I explained the two short instances where I felt the sharp pain in my temples followed by Emily’s jumbled voice that seemed more ethereal rather than to be coming from her mouth.
“It was like her voice was being received and processed by my ears and brain as if she was talking with bad reception, but she hadn’t been talking.”
“Are you sure it was Emily’s voice?” she asked.
“I guess I can’t be sure, but it sounded like her and it happened as I was focused on the conversation with her.”
Sara looked thoughtful for a few seconds. “I have an idea. Focus your attention on me, on my thoughts. Look at me and try to see if you can hear anything.”
I was struck by what she was suggesting. “Do you think I was hearing Emily’s thoughts before?”
“It’s just a theory. We won’t know unless you try to make it happen again.”
I thought what she was proposing was ridiculous, but did as she asked.
“Okay, I’ll give it a try, but I’m not quite sure how it happened before.”
“Just focus on me. Wonder what it is I’m thinking right now,” she said.
Sara seemed to jump quickly to mind reading as a plausible explanation. I wondered if it was happening to her as well. Could she hear other people’s thoughts? Could she hear mine?
“Can you hear anything yet?”
I actually hadn’t tried yet but didn’t bring up that point. “Not yet.”
I focused on Sara, stopping first to admire her soft face for a second before moving on and into her deep eyes. I wondered what she thinking at that moment. I couldn’t see how willing myself to hear her thoughts would make it happen, but I tried. It was only a matter of seconds when I felt the sudden pain at my temples, stabbing and sharp. I cringed. With the pain, came Sara’s voice, not clearly but broken, unintelligible. I continued to focus, trying to ignore the pain. Her voice didn’t go away and the longer I stayed focused, the clearer it started to sound. She was thinking something over and over, a short phrase. I couldn’t make out the words, but could hear the pattern of sound. The pain’s edge began to dull as I continued to concentrate until it was more of a deep throb. Finally, I was able to make out the phrase she was repeating in her head.
I released my focus. “I love you too.”
She wrapped her arms around me in a tight embrace. “You did it. It’s not just happening to me.”
“You can do this as well?” I said, surprised, in response to her statement. The deep throb in my temple was fading but still very well there.
“Well, not exactly. I mean I haven’t heard anyone’s thoughts, at least not yet, but something else happened.” She raised her hand to me. “Could you remove your ID tags?”
“Okay, sure.”
I thought it was an odd request, but pulled the tags out from under my shirt and over my head. I held them out to her. My mind was swimming with the wonder of what I had just done and the anticipation of what Sara was about to show me.
She directed my gaze to a spot on the floor right in front of us. “Now, please set them on the ground.”
I set them down. “What are we doing?”
“Just wait.”
She held out her right hand with her palm open and fingers stretched towards the metal tags. Her eyes focused directly on the tags and her face held a look of intense concentration.
What was she doing? I knew what it looked like she was trying to do, but dismissed it because of how absurd it was. Now I was thinking about absurdity when everything about us and the situation we were in would be fantastic to anyone outside of the little world we were trapped in, including the fact I had just read Sara’s mind.
It turned out my guess was not so wild after all because suddenly the tags floated off of the ground. They slowly rose to a point at eye level. Once there, they froze in place, hovering above the ground, but still.
I looked over at Sara and her concentration was intently focused on the tags. It caused her typically smooth forehead to form a V in the space between the eyebrows. I stared at her, amazed at what she was doing. It was incredible. Sara moved her focus from the tags back to my staring face and when she did the tags fell back to the ground with a clink.
She smiled shyly. “So what do you think?”
I wasn’t sure what to think about what either of us had just done. Were the new abilities a good or bad thing? Sure, being able to read minds or use telekinesis was amazing, but what did it mean about us? What else was going to change? Did it mean we were now further from human than we had thought? What was it we were becoming?
I picked up the tags. “That was amazing. How do you feel?” I wondering if she had the same intense crushing head pain as I had.
“It feels like someone is using my temples as a bass drum, but okay. The pain should stop,” she said.
“How long have you known?” I asked.
She explained she first experienced her ability just two nights prior. She was dressing after her shower and knocked her ID tags off the bureau. They fell in the narrow gap between the bureau and the wall. The bureau was fastened to the floor so she couldn’t move it without breaking it. She tried to reach behind it, but they were just out of her reach. She tried several more times, hoping somehow she’d be able get the added few inches she needed.
She reached and stretched her hand towards the tags, pushing, trying to get the extra few inches when there was a sharp pain at her temple and the tags flew towards her out stretched hand. The sharp pain starting to fade as she stumbled back to her feet, unsure of what had just happened. Her initial thought was she had just imagined it, that she overstrained, causing the headache and confusion. She was sure her hand never reached them though.
Neither Emily nor Rachael were in the room at the time, both still in the bathroom, so she decided to try to make the tags move again to determine whether she was crazy or not. She laid the tags back on the bureau and stepped back. She reached her hand towards the tags, focusing her thoughts to make them move towards her. She felt stupid even trying.
After just a few seconds of concentration, the pain returned and the tags flew into her hands. Since then, she had retried the experiment on other objects, her control and endurance improving each time.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before? Has anyone else seen you do this?” I asked.
“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I should have. I was very careful to only try when absolutely alone. No one else could have seen.”
I put my arm around her. “Please. Don’t apologize. I get it. Until you had me try to hear your thoughts tonight, I wasn’t going to say anything to you. I didn’t want you to think I was losing it. I thought I was going crazy, too.”
“What do you think this means?” Sara asked. “Do you think this is happening to the others as well?”
“I don’t know. I think we should keep this between us for now, though.”
Sara leaned into me. “I agree. How’s your head feeling?”
The deep throbbing had faded into almost nothing. “It’s better now. How about you?”
“It still hurts a little, but I’m okay.”
We moved in closer and continued to hold each other. We didn’t talk much the rest of the night, both of us lost in our own thoughts. After a few hours we decided to head back to try and get some sleep.
“I love you,” I sai
d before we separated.
She leaned in and her soft lips met mine. We stayed connected, locked in a kiss full of many emotions and meaning. The kiss was the physical message of how grateful we were to have each other. Our lips eventually parted.
“I love you too,” she said and walked away.
That night, I eventually fell asleep. My mind was full of thought. There were many more questions now. We were changing more than we had been told. How much did Caldwell, Dr. Roberts and the others know, was a key question. The next day was to be a new day, a new day in a world that had changed even more. I decided I wouldn’t be able to sit by taking everything at face value anymore. I needed to have more than that. I needed to make sure we were safe. Now, I had a tool I could use to find the answers I was searching for. I fell asleep while thinking of the endless possibilities my new found ability could grant.
That night I had the first dream of the girl and twin babies. The dream was short, just a short conversation with the girl in the hospital room and then the young couple walking away with the infants. Like all the dreams I’d had since, it ended with me running, the bright light and pain. The first dream brought such strong feelings for the girl and babies. I didn’t know them but was heartbroken when they were carried away and left with a feeling of guilt for feeling love for someone other than Sara.
With a start, I woke from the dream and the pain instantly faded. I could tell I hadn’t been asleep for very long. There was some sort of commotion outside of our room. It sounded like heavy footsteps moving down the hall. I rose and looked at the clock on the wall and it was just a few minutes before 4:00 a.m. I hadn’t been asleep for long at all.
“What’s going on?” Alex asked as he rose from his bed.
James and Brian, both awake now sat up as well. All three followed me to the door.
The hallway leading to the main training hall was fully lit. There were several voices coming from the direction of the training hall itself. With a swift pace, we were at the training hall and saw Emily and Rachael along with Dr. Roberts, Caldwell and Matthew standing in the center of the room in what seemed to be an intense conversation.
At the far end of the room, where the exit to the rest of the facility was, I saw a small motorized vehicle surrounded by three people wearing light green medical scrubs, another sitting in the driver’s seat of the one man vehicle as well as two more in black fatigues, armed. The vehicle was a black flatbed with six large black wheels. Lying on the back of it was a person, motionless and covered with blankets obscuring my view of the face.
I looked back at the group in the center of the room. They were looking back at us, Rachael and Emily with red eyes and worried faces. It must have been the fatigue that caused me to not notice the second I walked in the room because it finally hit me. Sara wasn’t standing with them. Still, not comprehending the obvious, I was just about to ask where Sara was when the vehicle started and moved towards the open doors to the main part of the HUB. Then it clicked as I watched Sara get taken away, away from me.
CHAPTER 15
Wally thought it was finally his lucky night as he was lead from the bar through a back door by a beautiful, blonde girl. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before and unfortunately for him, his idea of lucky wasn’t what the girl leading him had in mind. Now, if his idea of getting lucky meant getting dead, painfully dead, then it was his lucky night.
Blood, ritual, savagery, darkness and death was what I saw when I journeyed into the blonde girl’s mind. What I’d expected to see was that her interest in Wally was maybe a result of a joke or a dare, but I was wrong. Her mind was like the cold focused mind of a predatory animal. I sensed not even a trace of compassionate thought or humanity, no sense of a soul.
Her plans were to get him alone and take him to her brothers and sisters. The poor disillusioned, un-expecting Wally was to become sacrificial nourishment for her family. I wasn’t sure what that exactly meant, but her almost orgasmic excitement at the thought of blood, so much blood, sent chills through me. I stayed in her mind only for a few moments, but the coldness numbed me.
The door they left through was for employee only access as indicated by a white square sign with red letters. I carefully opened the door and saw it led to a stair well. Just inside the door was a small landing with stairs going both up and down. There was no sign of the blonde girl or Wally.
The Cross occupied about half the space of the three-story building’s street level floor. A vintage clothing boutique and music store occupied the other half of the space. From what I understood, the top two floors had been converted into apartments.
My first thought was she took the man up to one of the apartments. I started to head up the stairs and after the third step, heard a soft noise of something being moved from below so I turned to head down towards the lower level of the building.
The stairs that went down were blocked by an old dirty white metal gate. The sign on the gate said ’authorized access only,’ but there was nothing locking the gate. The stairs were steep and there was a landing half way down between the first floor and the basement. I paused when I hit the landing and listened for any sound from below. I didn’t hear anything.
The light from the level above only illuminated the remaining stairs about halfway down to the very dark basement.
There’s nothing like going in blind. I started down the stairs.
“Stop!” I heard a stern woman’s voice say right above me.
I turned and saw officer Raymond completing her last two steps onto the landing with her weapon drawn.
“Where are they?” she asked in an accusatory tone.
“Who?” I thought playing dumb may be worth a try.
It wasn’t.
“The couple I saw you watching in the bar and then follow down here,” she said.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. If I find them, I’ll let you know.” It had sounded more smart assish than I’d intended but I didn’t know what else to say.
Now that we were standing there having a conversation, the blonde woman could probably hear us. I needed to get down there and find them before she was able to get away with her intended victim.
“Why exactly are you looking for them? Do you know them?” she started to interrogate me, and before I could answer she added “or maybe you could tell me why you sit in the bar upstairs or in the club down the street every night just watching people?”
“Do you like watching people? What else do you like to do?” she added moving closer with the gun still raised. “Now let me ask you again, where is the couple you followed down here?”
The smart thing to do was to hit the PTD and jump out of there, get the hell out of Dodge, or Seattle in that case. I didn’t though. If I did that, I knew Wally would probably die and if the blonde woman was behind all of the murders, so would many others. Maybe officer Raymond would have continued down and found them, but somehow I doubted it. I couldn’t leave, so I decided almost complete honesty was be the best course of action.
“I think the man the blonde woman took down here is in trouble. I think she’s going to kill him,” I explained.
“That’s not what it looked like to me. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the most likely suspect for murder. Why should I believe you?”
I didn’t answer and there was a pause before she asked with a sigh “Ok. What makes you think this woman is going to kill him?”
She sounded conflicted between my obvious guilt and the slight chance I was telling the truth.
“You don’t have to believe me. Just follow me down to find them. Keep your gun on me the whole time if you‘d like, but you may want to point it at the woman once we find them. I’ll explain everything once we’ve found them and have stopped her”
Of course, once we found them and she was in police custody, I’d mysteriously disappear, without a trace. There hadn’t been a need to tell her that though.
“We need to move now. I’m sure she’s he
ard us. We need to get down there and find them before they can get out,” I said as I moved down the stairs.
Officer Raymond hesitated for a few seconds and then followed with her gun raised and pointed at my back. I wasn’t armed. I didn’t think it would have been a good idea to be caught with a gun, especially when the police had already suspected me, plus they checked for weapons at the door.
The officer and I stepped down into the dark basement. Initially it was completely black. I couldn’t see a thing. Once my eyes had a chance to adjust, the light from the stair well was enough for me to make out shapes just a bit darker than the dark room.
The space was musty with the scent of age. It was an old building, I think originally built in the mid 1800’s. From what I could tell, the space was open and used for storage. It looked like there were several groups of boxes stacked in various positions throughout the room.
“It’s too hard to see down here,” I whispered. “If she knew where she was going, she could be out by now.”
“There is no way out. We performed a thorough search down here. The only way in or out is up the stair well we just came down,” the officer whispered back.
“Why would she bring him down here then?” I said, still in a hushed tone.
“You tell me, since you seem to know what is going on,” she responded smartly.
I didn’t answer but asked “Do you know where the light switch is?”
“No. I don’t”
At that we moved forward into the black abyss.
A few moments later there was a crash, like someone had knocked over a stack of boxes. It sounded like it was just ahead of us, to the right. It didn’t sound far away.
“This is officer Raymond with the Seattle Police Department, please identify yourself,” she shouted.
I jumped. Her announcement had caught me by surprise.
There wasn’t any response.
“Please identify yourselves and move to my position with your hands raised,” she ordered again.