Authors: Shannon McKenna
Roy felt compulsion flailing his mind, though he knew it was just conditioning. Rudd couldn’t do his badass juju over the phone, only in person. “You want me to off her?”
Rudd sighed. “I always have to spell it out for you. Do you want to read about the amazing effects of psi-max in
Time
and
Newsweek
? What would that do to our edge? Have your Arbatov friend and his thugs help you if your balls aren’t hairy enough. If you can make her tell what she knows, so much the better.
Everything Kasyanov told her. Who else knows. If there are any doses of the new formula left. Where they are. But after she spills, she dies. Have I made myself clear?”
“I’m on it,” Roy said hoarsely.
He broke the connection. His head throbbed. He got the headache often these days. The more psi-max he used, the more it hurt. It was so worth it, though. He reached into his shirt, clutched the vial. Out of eighteen pills, he’d taken one and given six to Dmitri, in exchange for his backup and his personnel. Only eleven left. Fucking shit.
It drove him nuts, that the bitch could block him. He was not slipping! He was red-hot! A super-hound. Loyal like a hound, too, though all he got for his loyalty was abuse and contempt.
If Kasyanov’s fairy tale of stabilizing the psi was true, oh God it would be sweet. To be able to use his gift without having to scramble for a dose, to beg and plead and bargain. No headaches.
No side effects.
And no Rudd, either.
If he didn’t need the drug, he wouldn’t need Rudd. In fact, if he were free, he would start making some careful plans for Rudd.
Plans that involved large amounts of C-4 and det cord. Yeah, that’s right.
Boom.
Suck my dick, boss. President, his ass. Psi-Max 48 was too good to be true. He hadn’t believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy for some time now, but just look what this Nina Christie chick could do. Blocking him and Anabel both, just two hours after initial dose. And look what Kasyanov had done to him that morning.
The memory still made him shudder, swallowing bile. He rubbed the old scar on his neck. It itched, uncomfortably.
Too good to be true. But a guy could dream.
A sense of desperate urgency prodded Helga from below.
Wake up.
She resisted. Nothing awaited her up there but pain and terror. She wanted to let go and fall back, arms out. Like she had into the water of the lake, as a child, long ago. Letting the cool dark catch her, embrace her. She’d been dreaming of that deep lake. So cold. So clean.
Lara. Nina. Not yet. Not yet!
She rose up, by slow, agonizing increments, as the black turned to angry, pounding red. Every part of her hurt, but para-doxically, her senses were very keen. She heard the breathing of the woman in the next bed, every word spoken in surrounding rooms, wheels on the gurney a hundred yards away. Every
beep
and
whir
of monitoring machinery. She was in a hospital. It hardly mattered. She was dying. Day five. The process could not be ar-rested now. Too late. She was just a corpse that still breathed.
Just a matter of time. And not much time.
She should be dead already. Deserved to be, certainly, after what she had been forced to do. She’d lasted longer, now, than any of her unfortunate test subjects. It tormented her, that it had been she herself who had identified all those wretched people, gathered their names and addresses into a database in the course of her studies. Before she knew what Rudd was. Before she knew what he would make her do to them. Her own original parapsychological talent was in identifying people with enough latent psi to survive pharmacological enhancement.
And she’d done nothing but kill with it.
Her victims’ eyes haunted her. Looking up at her, strapped down to the gurneys, hooked up to the machines. She wondered if they would all be waiting for her when she stepped across the threshold. Their eyes, reproaching her for all eternity. But she could not worry about eternity.
Lara was still alive. Still captive. And Rudd still needed to die.
No time for guilt, but still it twisted, like a blade inside her.
She should not have involved Nina, either, but the girl was the only person she could think of that had enough intrinsic control of her psi to handle the effects of the drug, even if she had never recognized her abilities for what they were. Helga wished she’d been able to explain, but after four days, the A dose of the Psi-Max 48 had disintegrated the language center in her brain.
Everything broken down, mixed up. It was up to Nina to figure it out for herself. God help her. And help Lara.
Please.
She’d been watching Nina since she was a child. Lovely girl.
So gifted and kind. Lara had always been so happy when Nina had come to sit for her, on those evenings when Helga had needed to go out.
Nina had deserved better than that hellhole she’d been forced to exist in, but Helga had never succeeded in convincing Helen, Nina’s mother, to leave Nina’s stepfather. That bastard pervert Stan had destroyed his wife, but Nina seemed to have come through the fire intact. Subdued, but whole. The stress of her family life had caused the child’s talents to develop naturally, in sheer self-defense. As a result of that, the Psi-Max 48 would not crush her. Or so Helga fervently hoped. Assuming the girl got the B dose in time.
Oh, please, God. Please. Not another death on her
hands.
She pushed away the guilt. Any woman would be driven to desperation by what she had been through. They had faked her death, enslaved her, forced her to do cruel, unspeakable things.
Things that made her hate herself. And they had done it so easily. By constantly reminding her of what they would do to Lara if she did not comply.
She should have known from the start. The research that led her to psi-max, upon which all her work had been based, was tainted by horror and cruelty. She’d distanced herself from the madman Osterman years ago, and his twisted applications of the formula. She had tried to create something good. Something pure from what was once evil.
She might have known such a thing would be impossible.
She’d tried to escape four months ago, but her shield had not been strong enough. Anabel had caught a tail, followed it back.
Busted.
The American slang term drifted up from the garbage heap of her brain. Before she’d been injected, she had been flu-ent in eight languages. They were a jumbled mess, databases dissolved. All that was left was the dialect of Ukrainian she’d spoken in her infancy, and that was slipping, too. A dose of Psi-Max 48 dissolved barriers. All barriers. Even blood vessels, in the end. Unless the B dose was injected in time.
They had taken Lara to punish her. Mounted a video camera in Lara’s cell so that Helga could watch her daughter’s captivity, minute by minute. It had driven her mad, shaken her down into her composite pieces, to watch her daughter sleep, stare into space, weep. Exercise, meditate. Eat the small, bland meals they gave her. Vomit them up, more often than not. Week after week.
Thinner and paler every day. Enduring it, completely alone, never even knowing why. Lara thought her mother had died in that research facility fire three years ago.
Then Helga caught the frequency, the way one caught a bad smell. Anabel’s bright, toxic mental sparkle. She was sending out questing tendrils to the limits of her range, about twenty feet.
Anabel was enhanced, at peak dose. There was no evading her.
And Helga could not move anyway. She heard footsteps. Smelled Anabel’s perfume, sensed her body heat. Helga forced her eyes to open. The lids were so heavy, like lead. Her own frail body barely made a bump in the sheet.
Anabel was dressed like a health care professional. White coat, ID badge. Hair swirled in a neat updo. Smiling, pleased with herself.
“Helga,” Anabel murmured. “At last. We missed you.”
“Go to hell,” she whispered, in Ukrainian, but with a telepath, it hardly mattered.
Helga gathered thoughts, feelings, with their vaporous dangling tails. Stuffed them into that still, calm place inside where no air moved.
“You were injected five days ago, Helga,” Anabel went on cheerfully. “And you do not look good. This suggests to me that maybe you weren’t being completely honest with us about the effects of Psi-Max 48. Maybe you were trying to poison us? Oh, Helga.” Anabel looked hurt. “How could you? After all we’ve been to each other.”
Helga gasped and twitched as the mental probe sank in, like a heavy hook thrown into her flesh. The woman didn’t bother to be gentle. It was breaking and entering, poking, jabbing, knocking things over.
“Don’t think you can play your new illusion trick, Helga, like you did on Roy,” Anabel whispered. “I am so on to you. Roy’s just a dog.”
Helga stayed calm while Anabel ravaged. Stillness surrounding her secrets. Floating separate, apart from the ransacking invader.
“Roy and his Arbatov thugs killed Yuri,” Anabel said. “But not before they dragged every last detail out of his thick brain that would stick. Let’s see . . . Joseph, right? Your ex-husband? And the B dose?”
Anabel felt the jolt of alarm in Helga’s mind. She tittered.
“You can’t block me. You made Psi-Max 48 a binary drug, hmm?
Naughty, naughty! You thought you’d inject us, and then be able to control us by withholding the B dose? You thought you could cut us a deal, Helga?”
I had to try.
Helga whimpered, writhing. Blood trickled from her nose into her throat, making her cough.
“Nina!” Anabel crooned, triumphantly, at the goodies she prized out of Helga’s mind. “Nina Christie. The New Dawn Shelter. We’ve got her already. Yuri gave her to us. She’s meat, Helga. And we’ll get Joseph, too. They’ll tell me everything.
They always do.”
Helga tried to stop the tail as it flicked out of control—
But Anabel caught it, with her lightning mental reflexes, and followed it down to the source. “Oh!” she whispered. “You’re still fussed about Lara? A little late to worry about her now.
You’ve signed her death sentence, you dumb cow. Some mother you are. We’ll tell her how badly you handled everything . . . before we kill her.”
Helga writhed, arching in the bed. Anabel stared down, bright blue eyes white-rimmed and burning, face contracted in a feral snarl.
“Tell me now, Helga,” she hissed. “Tell me where the B dose is, and maybe Lara’s death will be a little quicker.
Tell me!
”
Helga twitched as that probe got closer and closer to the dark hiding place. Another second, and Anabel would be inside, sacking the inner sanctum.
Think, you idiot, think.
She glimpsed that face, reflected in the shiny paneled surface of the medical equipment on the nearby table, and baited the trap, tossing up a thought tail for that vain bitch to catch.
Mirror,
mirror . . .
Anabel took the bait, like a trout after a fly. She looked into the reflection, and for a brief moment, she caught sight of herself and was distracted by the way that the glitter of the teardrop diamonds in her ears set off the perfectly sculpted angle of her jaw . . .
now!
Helga punched into the other woman’s unguarded mind, and Anabel’s reflected image transformed. Her skin wrinkled, horrified blue eyes bulging in dark sockets, her lips shriveling from lengthening teeth. Her skin withered, splitting like old leather.
Maggots boiled out.
Anabel opened her mouth to scream, but maggots squirmed out of her mouth, too. She went down to the floor, gurgling and thrashing.
Helga watched her fall. Anabel made noise, but she couldn’t hear it. So far away. People were rushing into the room, but she was falling backward, arms out, into the waters of the dark lake.
One lingering thought linked her to the chaos of pain, strife. One last desperate wish.
Nina, please try.
And the dark water accepted her, closing over her head.
Nobody here. Nobody here.
Nina huddled on the subway seat, twisting her hands together until her fingers were colorless. Scared to death, but not of being noticed. On the contrary.
It was like she had no walls around her mind. Other people’s thoughts were trampling through her head as if it were their own.
Mind reading.
It was the only concept that would come to her, but as a definition it wasn’t quite right. “Reading” implied a deliberate act, a seeking out. This wasn’t deliberate. This was more along the lines of being crushed by stampeding wild animals.
Maybe she was crazy. Or else really, really stoned on Aunt Helga’s mystery drug. She preferred the second option. As an explanation, it was simpler, more reductive. Comforting, even.
Temporary.
So much noise.
If she shut her eyes, hid in the gray fuzz, it helped, but the second she opened her eyes and caught sight of someone, their thoughts slammed into her mind, full force. The train squealed on a curve as it braked. Nina peeked to check the station sign—
. . . she’ll kill herself if I leave her, but I’ll kill her myself if I don’t . . .
It was the guy across from her. Her eyes had brushed over him to read the sign. Young, wispy dark goatee, John Lennon glasses, tattered jeans. Eyes red and puffy from smoking too much pot.
The frantic buzz of chronic desperation that emanated from him had snagged her mind.
Images flooded in.
Peter.
Bass player. His manic-depressive girlfriend, Jodie, was on a downswing. His belly hurt like a spear was stuck through it. So afraid of coming back from a gig, finding her in the bathroom, dead. Her empty eyes telling him that it was all his fault.
She jerked her gaze away, squeezed her eyes shut.
I’m imagining this. I’m fried on Aunt Helga’s drug, my mind creating things that
aren’t there. His name is probably Brad or James or Tom. Not Peter.
But sensible self-talk was irrelevant. She couldn’t ride the subway with her eyes squeezed shut. If she was tripping on some powerful hallucinogen, well, tough titties. She’d just figure out how to function normally in spite of it. Junkies did it all the time.