Mind Power

by Jane Killick

  But the hill was steep and the terrain uneven and he soon slowed down to declare himself the winner.

  Pauline joined him as they stood and waited for Katya. Her cheeks were flushed with the exertion and she was breathing deeply enough for her breath to turn to vapour against the diffused light coming through the clouds. It was surprisingly beautiful.

  “What are we going to do, Michael?” said Pauline.

  “We’ll survive,” he said.

  Pankhurst’s reign as prime minister was over. Michael’s call to Andy the cameraman had seen to that, along with an exclusive report on the television news and a vote of no confidence in him from his party. His fellow politicians had been happy for him to stand up in public and decry that all perceivers would be cured, but getting himself injected with a perceiver serum, reading their minds and having it all exposed on national television was something they were supremely unhappy about.

  Pankhurst’s replacement, a woman called Anne Wintershall, did not step in to reverse the decision to cure perceivers. Rather, she endorsed it.

  The King is dead: long live the Queen.

  “I’m not sure we will survive,” said Pauline. “They’re bound to catch us eventually.”

  Michael felt the absence on his ankle where he had cut off the electronic tag. He was now officially on the run, and he had dragged the two women and little Oliver with him. “Perhaps it would be better to hand myself in,” he said. “Have the cure and take my chances.”

  “No!” said Pauline. “We stay together, we agreed.”

  “But it’s rough on you two and the baby.”

  “We should go abroad,” said Pauline. “How about Spain? We could find a beach somewhere and work in a bar which serves too many drinks to British tourists who get drunk and make fools of themselves in public.”

  “Sounds nice,” said Michael. Like a dream.

  Katya arrived at the spot where they had stopped to catch their breath. “You two are crazy, you know that? Crazy!”

  They continued walking to the top of the hill where other perceivers were waiting. In the space of fifteen minutes, the summit was full of people like them, all with their filters engaged so they half perceived each other and half kept their thoughts private. There had to be more than four hundred perceivers there.

  It was a scene that was being repeated all over the country. Perceivers and those who supported them were gathering on hills, in parks and on street corners everywhere. All with packages from Otis.

  Pauline elbowed Michael in the side. “There’s Kev, look!”

  Michael peered through the sea of bodies and saw the back of someone’s head that could be the boy who had allowed himself to beaten up to save them at Galen House.

  “Kev!” Pauline called. “Hey, Kev!” But the wind was blowing in the wrong direction and he didn’t hear her.

  A voice, amplified by an electronic speaker which made it sound almost robotic, drifted across the crowd: “Thank you for coming.”

  At the very centre of the gathering, on the highest point of the hill, stood Otis with a megaphone in his hand. A tuft of his dark blonde hair against the dark of a passing cloud made it obvious it was him, while the bright yellow puffer jacket that he wore made him visible to everyone.

  “Sorry about the megaphone thing,” he said through the megaphone. “I was going to project my thoughts at you and you could all perceive them, but having hundreds of people perceiving me all at once was going to feel a little weird, so I thought we’d do this the norm way.”

  Nervous laughter flitted around them.

  “So you have probably heard,” Otis continued, “that they’ve got this stuff that can turn norms into perceivers. A bit like many of us were turned into perceivers when our mothers took those vitamin pills. They think they’re going to purify it and give it to their special agents and turn them into super spies. But they also think they’re going to round us all up and cure us like taking pigs to the slaughterhouse, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  He paused. “Do you think that’s going to happen?”

  “No!” cried Michael, Pauline and Katya and their voices joined hundreds of others in a unified cry that resonated around the hilltop.

  “I got to thinking, what if this stuff wasn’t given to special agents? What if this stuff was given to all norms? Do you know what would happen? Everyone who used to be a norm would suddenly be a perceiver. Let’s see the government round up and cure more than sixty million people. Where is their support going to be to get rid of perceivers when everyone’s a perceiver? Who’s going to complain about someone trying to read their mind when they can all use their perceiver powers to block it?”

  A group of people to the left of Michael broke into spontaneous applause which rippled around the hill.

  “I asked you here today because I need your help to spread the stuff that turns norms into perceivers,” said Otis. “It lives in the spores of a special moss. I need each of you to distribute the moss spores to your designated areas. We need to distribute it near centres of high population like towns and cities. After that, it’s up to the moss to do the work. Some spores will land and germinate to grow more moss, while others will stay in the air where they will be breathed in. When a norm breathes in a spore, it will give them mild perceiving powers for a short while. After that, they will breathe in another spore and another and another. Eventually, no one will know what it was like to be a norm.”

  A hushed silence fell across the hill. But the thoughts of the assembled perceivers whispered through their minds:

  Is this really going to work? … Is there enough moss? … Does this mean we won’t be special anymore?

  “I will hand out the moss spores in a moment,” said Otis. “But I wanted to release the first set of spores in front of you, on this hill in the centre of England. With all of us joining our minds together. I wanted you all to perceive the determination we have to survive.”

  There was no more time for words.

  Michael opened his perception as he felt everyone around him do the same. It was loud – deafening, pounding at his head like an insistent migraine.

  Pauline reached out for his hand and held it tight. The physical warmth of another person grounded him.

  The nervousness and excitement of the people on the hill settled down and his headache cleared. So many people with only one mind. Such focus. Such strength. Such power.

  Otis lifted his hand into the air. In it, he held a white plastic pot. He tipped the pot sideways and a stream of red dust drifted off into the wind and the tiny perceiver-inducing particles became invisible in the air they breathed.

  They savoured the moment. Hundreds of minds all connected in that one moment as, across the country, other perceivers were also joining together in the same cause.

  Eventually, their minds broke free of each other and an untidy queue formed to collect their own pots of red dust to take home to where they lived.

  Michael, Pauline and Katya collected a pot each.

  Michael caught Otis’s eye and he came over to greet them.

  “Hey, Michael,” he said. “I heard you were on the run. It was a brave thing for you to come here. If news of the meeting had been leaked, the police could have found you.”

  “I thought it was worth the risk,” said Michael. “Do you really think this is going to work?”

  “My dad says it will.” Otis glanced over to where Doctor Smith was handing out the few remaining pots of moss spores. “The moss is virulent and doesn’t care that it’s winter, which is a blessing. I just hope it spreads quick enough to stop the mass cure programme.”

  Little Oliver started to cry and Katya bounced him gently in her arms and left their side to walk around a bit. Another woman with a little girl a few months older than Oliver came over to investigate and the two women ended up talking. Michael took the liberty of perceiving them and confirmed that they were Otis’s daughter and the woman he called his wife.

  �
�My dad would have loved to be here,” said Michael, watching the collection of perceivers drift off down the hill in ones and twos with their little plastic pots.

  “It wouldn’t have been possible without him,” said Otis. “He’s the one who got the moss out of Clairone Labs. My dad just propagated a few more and separated out the spores.”

  “He’ll finally get his wish of turning everyone into a perceiver,” said Michael. “Not as if I think it’ll mean the human race will finally understand each other. There will always be people willing to hurt other people.”

  Katya and Otis’s wife came back over. “The children are getting cold,” said Katya. “We should go.”

  They said their goodbyes and all shook hands because it was the grown-up thing to do.

  Then they opened their minds and exchanged good luck thoughts because it was the perceiver thing to do.

  Michael, Pauline and Katya, with little Oliver in her arms, walked back down the hill and drank the water and ate the chocolate that Pauline had bought from the visitors’ centre.

  They took a convoluted journey back to the youth hostel in Birmingham where they had booked two rooms under a false name and spread their spores in Rugby, Coventry and Solihull. Each sent out a little plume of red dust, like hundreds and thousands of other plumes of red dust being dispersed across Britain.

  In those towns and cities, norms who had once clamoured for perceivers to be cured took a breath and became perceivers themselves. While, at their feet, moss spores took hold in cracks in the pavement and began to grow into plants which would, in turn, release more spores for people to breathe in.

  In the sagging double bed of the stark room in the youth hostel, Michael and Pauline lay together and talked about running away to Spain. Maybe they could escape the cure after all until it was safe to return to Britain.

  “I don’t think it’s right to make Katya keep running with us,” said Pauline, as she rested her head on Michael’s chest. “But I’m worried about leaving her here with the baby.”

  “She’ll be fine,” said Michael. “She’s a norm and by the time her son develops his perceiver power, hopefully the threat of the cure will be gone.”

  “He’s your son too,” she reminded him.

  “Genetically speaking. But a little boy doesn’t want to be saddled with the label of being Brian Ransom’s grandchild. I’d like to stay and watch him grow up, but I think Katya will be better off without me. And, anyway, I perceive Katya wants to make her own life with her baby.”

  “I perceived that from her too.”

  “Maybe one day I’ll have babies of my own,” said Michael. “The traditional way, I mean, not created in a Russian laboratory.”

  “I can’t think about babies now,” said Pauline. “If we have babies together, they’ll probably be really strong perceivers. I don’t know if it’s right to bring a child into the world like that.”

  “Not this world,” said Michael. “Maybe the world of the future will be different.”

  ~ END ~

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  The Perceivers Series

  Four science fiction telepathy thrillers

  by Jane Killick

  Mind Secrets

  Mind Control

  Mind Evolution

  Mind Power

  A series with a definite ending that satisfies. Don’t miss out on reading these great books.

  Acknowledgments

  With thanks to Valentina Kingsolver for the Russian translation.

  And many thanks, as always, to Julia Daly for all her support and sage advise during the writing of this novel and of the Perceivers series.

  Mind Power

  Perceivers #4

  A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller

  by

  Jane Killick

  Published by Elly Books

  ISBN: 978-1-908340-24-5

  Copyright © Jane Killick 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  ellybooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-908340-24-5

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