Authors: Clint Gleason
A few weeks have passed, and
I still hadn’t contacted Rabin even though I had questions. I couldn’t be sure about
what I believed anymore. Maybe those pills I’d taken for so long kept me a little
more stable. Ever since I stopped taking them, my moods seem to spike up and then
drop way down. My rage often keeps me up at night. It might even be better if I
started taking those pills again.
Jerrol was at work today.
I hadn’t seen him in months. The way he showed up was strange; he just sidled up
next to me at the open workstation and started talking as if no time had passed.
He wasn’t acting like himself. His attitude was gone. He seemed nervous as I listened
to him go on and on about where he’d been working and his plans for what he was
going to do once he got up top.
I simply listened, grunted,
and nodded, just to keep him talking. Just so I could analyze him further. Whenever
I looked him in the eyes, he looked away. The things he was saying seemed to be
premeditated. When people speak normally, they’re usually so into what they’re saying
that they don’t look at you. They look around, envisioning what they’re talking
about. When people are thinking about what they’re saying, if they’ve prepared it,
then eye contact doesn’t throw them off.
“You wish you were me, don’t
you?” I said.
“What?”
Jerrol had been in the middle
of some bullshit story. I stepped down from my workstation and slowly walked over
to him. “I said…you wish you were me…don’t you.”
“Hey, man. Not so close, not
so—”
“You learned things about
me. Things I don’t even know. Can you even do what I do?”
The fear in Jerrol’s eyes
and his slack mouth answered my question. He was losing it. He was having some sort
of stress breakdown.
“What can you do?” I said.
“Show me.”
He shook his head back and
forth. He looked up. “He knows…help me!”
“Who are you talking to?”
“I uh—” Jerrol stepped down
from his workstation and started toward the nearest management office. “It’s fine.
Everything is fine.”
“Jerrol!”
He turned. We were never supposed
to produce with our hands off the couplings. If any employee did then their work
commitment would be for life. Except it was the only way to know.
“Show me this.”
I raised my hands, and the
energy vapors emanated with a dim glow. Jerrol was wide-eyed. He turned again, only
this time he ran. I put my hand on the floor, and Jerrol froze in his tracks, rocking
back and forth as I allowed a slight amount of energy to course through him. Except
a little turned out to be way too much. It scorched his insides, and his eyes exploded
out of their sockets.
My assumptions were correct.
I’d been tricked. The other employees at the facility didn’t produce the power for
the surface; I did. Just me. The others were only mimicking what I could do, including
Jerrol. That’s why Rabin had been so eager to answer my questions. The company was
trying to keep me distracted.
As Jerrol’s body hit the grating,
I stood.
I was in a room answering
questions from a man I’d never seen before. He was tall and old, probably in his
late thirties. I knew I’d been right in my assumptions because the facility continued
the charade. There were cameras all over, and they’d probably watched the footage
before they’d decided how to deal with me. I wondered how many people were involved
in those decisions. I was going along with it because I wanted answers. If I was
dangerous why not just kill me? I needed to find out.
“So, then what happened?”
he said.
“Jerrol said that everything
was OK. I thought he was having a bathroom emergency or something, like he was about
to shit himself.”
That part was true.
“What did you do after he
fell?”
“Like everybody else, I ran
over to see what was wrong when I saw that something very powerful had killed him.”
I let that last statement
hang in the air, watching the old guy’s reaction. His eyes widened, but he was determined
to continue his bullshit performance.
“What happened next?”
“None of management had showed
up, so I pulled the fire alarm.”
“And that was when you went
back to your room?”
“Yes. We were all told to
go back to our rooms.”
He wrote some notes. “Just
so you know there will be a further investigation.”
“OK. And just so you know,
bring it the fuck on.”
He smiled back at me and left
in a hurry. As he passed, I saw he was sweating.
I looked up. If I were to
stand on the table and jump as high as I could, I could probably reach the air shaft.
There had been cameras in
every corner since I could remember. They were all over the facility. Because of
that I could get a sense of the entire layout and plan my escape. But since I was
constantly being recorded, I couldn’t just go up to someone and ask where the main
security hub was. I had to find a way in, without actually being there.
Before I went to work, I planned
it out as best I could. I figured at least most or all of the employees at Facility
Three were aware of who I was. If they were supporting the facade, then those people
probably had dual professions consisting of a worker or actual supervisor, and actor.
I raised my hand, and a supervisor came over.
“What’s the problem?” he said.
“Workstation’s too warm.”
I was making it that way.
“I’ll call maintenance.”
Maintenance? Ha!
When the maintenance guy lifted
the chassis cover to my workstation, I swiped his badge that dangled off his trousers.
By the time he knew it was missing, he probably would have thought he’d dropped
it. Besides, why would anyone steal the maintenance man’s badge?
***
I knew there were cameras everywhere,
but I was betting that common decency prevented them from installing them in the
bathroom. If I was wrong I was screwed. I opened the laptop I’d swiped from a supervisor
a few days before, and its camera scanned the data from the maintenance man’s badge.
I found feeds within seconds. There were hardly any security measures in the firewall
once the correct login information was entered, a callous mistake by management.
It gave me the facility layout
as I’d hoped, but I was surprised by what I found. I always thought that each facility
was its own separate location. It wasn’t. It was its own floor, accessible by a
hidden elevator located at different locations on that particular floor, and there
were seventeen floors in all. I sure as hell couldn’t spend a month in this bathroom.
I would have to focus on one floor at a time. The first being mine, the Facility
Three floor. I’d get to the elevator, hang on to the computer and badge, and work
my way up.
Maybe I should steal a uniform
and try and disguise myself among them. It would probably make it easier. Then I
remembered that because everyone probably knew who I was, I would need to plan my
escape better.
I started looking at the feeds:
hallways, grated walkways, empty offices, workstations harnessing the energy I’d
created. I clicked on a date from yesterday, and suddenly the room was full of management
having a meeting. I saw Rabin talking to the group. There was a woman sitting next
to him as he spoke. She was strikingly beautiful and wearing a business suit. I
leaned in closer.
It was Sandra.
From the way the room was
laid out and where everyone was sitting, it looked like Rabin was in charge and
that Sandra was of high ranking also. When Rabin spoke, she would elaborate.
I’d yet to turn up the audio
because I didn’t want to hear her voice. I thought it would be too painful. Once
it sunk in that whoever I thought she was didn’t actually exist, I did anyway.
Rabin was speaking. “—subject
hasn’t been terminated is because we need him. It’s possible to maintain this facility.
Of course that all hinges on the fact that this guy doesn’t know what he’s capable
of.”
This guy? They were talking
about me.
“He killed Jerrol fast enough,”
one of them said. “I’d say that’s evidence that he knows.”
Sandra stood and leaned on
the table. “We need to continue to reinforce the illusion of what he’s capable of
so far, nothing more.”
“I still don’t know how that’s
possible—”
“You’re welcome to visit the
psych department if you want answers. This isn’t it,” she said. “We need to go on
normally. If he knew what was actually going on here…”
The group reacted. It was
unspoken, but clear.
She went on. “He’s a good
man and a fine worker, but under stress and anger, retaliation would be too easy
for him.”
“What happens if he flips?”
Silence.
Rabin stood, nodding to Sandra,
who sat. “Then we use the defense teams. They’re mobilized and ready.”
Whatever that meant. I’d heard
enough. I entered the same date, only an hour ahead, and the room was empty. I went
back twenty minutes, and Rabin and Sandra were holding each other. They were kissing.
I paused the footage, staring
at it…
I remembered what it was like
to kiss Sandra, or whatever her real name was. It felt like I belonged to her and
she belonged to me.
A burning started at my core;
an unstoppable flow of anger grew from my very being, rising to the surface. It
was impossible to stop. However they were using me was terrible, but what I will
do to them will be much worse.
I’ve decided to keep writing
for my own sanity, when really all I want to do is fight. My memories are for myself,
I hope, so I can reexperience them, or for others so that they understand that this
is no longer a journal. It’s a proclamation. An explanation. A reason for what I’m
about to do.
It was the middle of the night.
I was actually close to falling asleep right before I decided my first attack would
come from my room. I could no longer wait. I would sleep after. If there was an
after.
I didn’t want to go out of
my way to hurt anyone, just as I imagined I would never want to hurt an animal or
a bug if I didn’t have to, but the knowledge that those who worked at the facility
were a threat to me made my decision simple.
I’d memorized the layout,
and after closing my eyes, I aimed the energy—already created at the workstations—at
key points along the floor, and when I did, Facility Three was instantly in flames.
Then the sprinklers turned on.
I was surprised by the reaction
time of the defense team, the one Rabin had mentioned. I could see their body heat
in my mind. They were blobs of orange along the dark, cool outline of the facility.
Those who survived the first
phase of my attack had gathered at the other side of the floor away from me. They
knew what side of the facility I was on, and most likely they would be sending more
defenders toward me, moments away from identifying my position. I needed to get
out, away from where they thought I was and into the air ducts. If there were any
cameras in there I’d fry them.
***
I headed to where the employees
of the facility had gathered. They weren’t innocent in all this. It wasn’t like
they didn’t know what was going on and were hoping that the heroes would take down
the bad guy. No, they were in on it and encouraging the defenders to kill me. Because
they wanted me dead, attacking them was easy.
Management had set up a barrier,
a room with reinforced steel that would have held back most enemies. Not me though.
My attack wasn’t limited to the defenders. I quickly learned that the rest of the
Facility Three employees had qualified training as well, and they fired weapons
at me that were more powerful than the ones the defenders carried. It was still
only a small percentage of my power and a juvenile mimicry of what I had been capable
of as a boy, an insignificant percentage of what I was able to create in only a
second, a revolver compared to a nuclear warhead, but they could still hurt me with
a direct hit.
The power flowing through
me made me feel as if it had never been awake, and dormant for when needed. I knew
it was powerful but not anything close to this. It seemed to flow around me, giving
the area a strong electric field that I could bend to my will.
I had to take care of the
defenders before I attempted to make my way up to the next floor, and I suspected
that each floor—each facility—had its own defender team in preparation for a day
like today, so I would have to kill as many as possible before making my way up
from floor to floor.
The first few shots nearly
hit me, but I was able to create a barrier just by thinking about it. The volley
ricocheted off my shield and destroyed parts of the facility around it. Then I started
redirecting their shots back at them. I wanted them to stop, to get them to think
I was close to destroying the facility. That way I could finish off the defender
personnel. I aimed the shots back at the barrier until there was a hole large enough
for me to walk through.
My favorite way to kill the
members of the team, the ones who had trained their whole lives for this very day
only to be killed by me, was redirecting the energy fired from their weapons to
explode in their faces. The fact that they were wearing body armor was irrelevant.
Those who watched screamed.
The impact from my power did
more damage than I intended and blew the room apart. It didn’t kill everyone, but
I felt whatever remained of Sandra, the Sandra that I knew, vanish. I’d reacted
too quickly, too angrily, and I knew she was gone before I even entered the room.
I’d felt her. She’d been a part of me but was no longer. She wasn’t who she said
she was anyway. I didn’t want to know the truth. Nothing she could have said could
have made the pain go away, so it was better that she was dead.
But not for Rabin. He was
getting his bearings with the others and was looking stunned. He was bleeding out
of both ears. I grabbed him. When I did, the others ran.
Rabin sobbed. “You killed
her!”
“Don’t tell me who she was
to you.”
“She was my wife!”
“I just told you not to do
that!”
Sandra must have been among
the broken debris. I didn’t bother looking for her to make sure. I didn’t want to
see her body.
“I want answers,” I said.
“Fuck you!”
Rabin wasn’t going to talk
voluntarily, so I decided to raise his temperature.
He grimaced. “Are you doing
that?”
“You know I am. It’ll get
worse if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
“What do you want to know?”
“My coworkers, did they have
power?”
“No,” he said, eyes closed.
What I was doing to him must
have been extremely painful.
“They were using what you’d
already created.”
“They were pretending?”
“Yes. Do you know how long
it took to train those people that you killed? Jerrol? The others? They were professionals.”
“Please. Jerrol was hardly
a professional. Sending him was a mistake. He lost it at the end. Before I killed
him.”
Even after spending all that
time with him, I knew he hadn’t learned much. He was a moron. Expecting him to understand
what I was capable of was equivalent to sending a toddler to understand the complexity
and inner workings of the couplings that produced the energy up top.
“Yes,” Rabin said. “We sent
the wrong man.”
“Was he sent to just learn
about me and what I do?”
“Yes.”
“And he reported what he learned
back to you guys?”
“Yes.”
“Why was I tasked to do menial
work?”
“Menial? What you do is incredible.”
His flattery only pissed me
off. I raised his temperature more.
“Please stop.”
“You wanted me to do those
mundane tasks so you could analyze how much power I exuded to accomplish them.”
“OK, Trent…O…K.”
“Who were those kids I was
with when I was young?”
“Children of those tasked
to work the facility.”
“What happened to them?”
“Their parents got nervous.
They didn’t want you to harm them.”
“Why am I still here? Why
the deception?”
“Edgar Fodero.”
“Fodero? Who is he to me?
My father?”
“That’s right.”
“What does he have to do with
this facility?”
“The more accurate question
would be ‘what did he do?’”
“Go on.”
Rabin swallowed. “You have
the same…abilities he did. During his time, he was described…”
“Go on!”
“As a weapon.”
“He was a terrorist?”
“Worse.”
“What’s worse than a terrorist?”
Rabin shook with pain as I
tortured him, forcing him to answer.
“What happened to him?”
“They killed him.”
“Why?”
“For what he did. We were
left with that monster’s child…you. What do we do with such a creature? Keeping
you under control and in production kept the power on for those that lived through
your father’s attack. Pretty fair, considering most who lived wanted you dead. We
tried to power the surface on our own, after the attack…but nothing came close to
what you could do.”
“What would have happened
to me if you would have succeeded in duplicating my power? Is that the real reason
I wasn’t killed?”
Rabin didn’t answer, so I
heated his blood some more. He shook with pain.
“Is that why there are so
many facilities? Are you all trying to mimic what I can do? What he could do?”
Even though I was concentrating
and didn’t allow as much to course through Rabin as I did Jerrol, I still thought
I’d taken it too far and fried him. It hardly took any effort from me, but the pain
must have been excruciating, judging by his screams, yet he still had more to say.
“Penance, fucker! You owe
us!”
“For how long?”
“Until your death!” he said,
sucking air. “You’re smart, Trent. Just answer your own questions.”
I released my hold over him,
and he collapsed to the ground. He looked up. “Are you going to kill me?”
“If you can make it to the
surface before I do, no.”
Rabin stared at me as if he
didn’t know if I were telling the truth, then he started running.