by James Maxey
“My father had, shall we say, unofficial agreements with several wardens. If the prisoner put to death had no family, my father would take possession of the body. He’d also arrange that the lethal injection wasn’t quite 100% lethal. By any ordinary test, the inmate was a corpse. But enough of a spark of life was left that my father could revive the bodies.”
“Why the hell would he do that?” asked Steam-Dragon.
“My father had a lot on his mind,” said Sarah. “So he… uh… he borrowed some extra minds.”
“Borrowed?” asked App.
Sarah took a slow breath before diving into the truly weird part. “Dad put the prisoners into these big, life-sustaining tubes of goo. Then he would use his telepathy to take over their minds, wiping away all traces of their old personality, devoting each prisoner’s brain to thinking through problems. He just… just had too many thoughts to keep them all in one… one head.” She shook her head. “Christ, even I can’t quite believe it. But, I swear, it’s true.”
“And Mark was one of these prisoners?” said Steam-Dragon.
Sarah nodded.
“But… he wasn’t abusive. He was a good person! Gentle and sweet and—”
“He did have a hobby of building battle armor with razor sharp claws,” said App.
“If these people were all murderers, what were they doing out on the streets?” asked Chimpion. “Why weren’t they back in prison?”
“You did hear the part where I said they’d all been executed, right? Legally, these people were dead. On a purely technical sense, after my father died there was no legal framework to return these people to prison. There’s also the complicating factor that what my father was doing to these people wasn’t exactly legal. The wardens who cooperated with him were operating outside the law. Some of them had been blackmailed by my father. Some bribed. Others persuaded by reason. Others were… persuaded by me.”
“With your mind control,” said Steam-Dragon.
Sarah nodded. “It wasn’t really mind control, but, whatever. Before I had my vocal chords surgically altered to rid myself of the power, my voice emitted a subsonic frequency that stimulated the pleasure centers in people’s brains. Agreeing with me gave people a sense of extreme euphoria. A thrill, as it were.”
“You had your voice surgically altered?” asked App.
“I didn’t want the power anymore,” said Sarah. “My power didn’t affect everyone. My sister and father were immune. So were a lot of the villains we fought, thanks to some technological assistance from Rex Monday. But ordinary people… even my own mother… I could and did manipulate without a second thought. When I was younger, I enjoyed the power I had over other people. I mean, I don’t think I was cruel. I didn’t cause people to do terrible things like jump off buildings. But, you know, I’d, occasionally have people, uh, I guess I had them… lend me stuff.”
“You’d rob them by asking for stuff when they couldn’t say no,” Steam-Dragon translated.
“You could put it that way,” Sarah said, crossing her arms. “It’s not like I didn’t feel guilty afterward. But the temptation was always there. But the worst thing about my powers was… anyone I talked to wound up liking me.”
“What a terrible cross to bear,” said Steam-Dragon.
“It was,” said Sarah.
“From now on, when I’m being sarcastic I’m going to raise my hand,” said Steam-Dragon.
“But it was terrible. Can you imagine going through your life without a single genuine friend? Without any hope of actual love, since anyone you met was attracted to you not for who you were, but because your voice was some sort of sonic opium?”
“It can’t be as terrible as having someone who does love you then finding out that person was some sort of zombie psychopath,” said Steam-Dragon.
“But when we turned the prisoners loose, they weren’t psychopaths,” said Sarah. “If Mark seemed like a decent, loving man, it’s because he was. After my father died and we released the prisoners from the goo tubes, they all had profound amnesia. None of them had any memories at all of who they once had been. To make their brains more compatible with his own, my father had removed their capacity for aggression. He’d wiped away any and all traumatic memories or unhealthy desires. With most of these criminals, that meant he’d wiped away their entire personalities. They were all taken to a special hospital that deals with traumatic brain injuries. None of them ever showed any signs of remembering their old lives. They all accepted that they’d been involved in accidents that had given them amnesia, and didn’t fight when we assigned them new identities and careers following careful assessments of their intelligence and aptitudes. None of them were geniuses, but some of them, including Mark, were suitable for highly skilled, technical labor. It wasn’t too hard to place them in jobs in the real world. Social workers kept close tabs on them, and all of them had regular meetings with psychiatrists and doctors. For years, the prisoners have lived quiet, unremarkable, law-abiding lives.”
“And now two of them turned into mad scientists in a matter of months,” said Chimpion. “I think it’s well past time we paid a visit to the other names on the list.”
“The Knowbokov Foundation is way ahead of you,” said Sarah. “The second you got back with your report, Chimpion, we contacted the FBI and requested they check in with the rest of the names on the list. At least, the ones who were still alive. One of the prisoners died a few years back in a car accident. Which, uh, I should probably mention, has sort of a tangential relationship to you, Clint.”
“How so?”
“You know that the pastor you follow, Amy McPherson, isn’t the first famous preacher in her family.”
Servant nodded. “You’re talking about Delilah McPherson.”
“Where have I heard that name?” asked Steam-Dragon.
“You would have been only a child when Delilah McPherson was in the news,” said Sarah. “She had a big ministry down in Florida and was a pretty famous author writing books about how if you gave your money to God, he’d give it back and make you rich.”
“But that’s not why you would have heard of her,” said App. “You’d have heard of her because she used to get her older parishioners to make out their wills to her, then, because she wasn’t the patient type, she’d hasten them along to their graves. By the time they finally caught her, she’d poisoned thirty-two people.”
“Delilah’s failings were what led Sister Amy to launch her own ministry,” said Servant. “But what does this have to do with the list of names?”
“Delilah was one of the death row prisoners my father revived. She died in a car wreck after her release, though. It really doesn’t have anything to do with our current situation, but as long as I’m telling you everything, I want to tell you everything.”
“Great,” said App. “But what happened when the FBI went looking for our zombies?”
“Long story short and terrifying, all the other names on the list have vanished. At pretty much the same moment Chimpion arrested Smith, everyone else on the list ditched their jobs and families. Witnesses say that they stopped talking in mid-sentence, turned glassy eyed, and walked away.”
“When were you going to tell us about this?” said Chimpion.
“When my mother told me I could,” said Sarah.
“Seriously?” asked Steam-Dragon. “You’re a grown woman and you still need your mother’s permission?”
“Think of it as payback,” said Sarah. “From as soon as I could talk, I could make my mother obey my every command. Imagine having this sort of power during your teen years. If I could live my life over again, I’d do all I could to spare her from the trauma I put her through. Now that I’m back in her life, I’m not blind to the new dynamic between us. She enjoys manipulating me. She has power over me and she’s not afraid to use it.”
“What power does she have?” asked Chimpion.
“Aside from mountains of money and armies of super-scientists?” said App.
&n
bsp; “She knows who I really am,” said Sarah.
“So do we now,” said App. “You’re Sarah Knowbokov. You just told us.”
Sarah shook her head. “Servant’s not the only one who was born again. After I went into hiding following the destruction of Jerusalem, I drifted around a few years, using my powers to live comfortably. Finally the guilt and self-loathing became so great that I decided to have surgery on my vocal cords. It worked. My ability to control others was gone. In the aftermath, I took a new identity. I have an entire life outside the Covenant. It’s… astonishingly banal. I move about in small town anonymity. I’ve got friends, loved ones, a community. Most importantly, I have a husband. He doesn’t have a clue who I used to be. Then, the day Sundancer and Pit Geek robbed that bank in Richmond, I got a phone call from my mother. With her resources, she’d known where I was for a long time. She told me that the Knowbokov Foundation had already recruited two superhumans to hunt for Sundancer, but she wanted me to lead the team. I hung up the phone. Ten seconds later I got a text letting me know that if she could find me, someone worse might figure out my secret as well.”
“Especially if she told them,” said Steam-Dragon.
“She’s never made that threat,” said Sarah. “She says she just meant she didn’t know how much of Rex Monday’s old network was still active. If Sundancer and Pit Geek were back, hunting down their old enemies might be on the top of their list. Still, even though she never tells me she’ll tell other people, she mentions my vulnerabilities every time I tell her I’m done with the team.”
“We’ll have to discuss your relationship with your mother another time,” said Servant. “If there’s an army of mad scientists out there with murderous pasts, our priority has to be finding them.”
“Which can’t be too difficult,” said App. “The fact that they all vanished at the same time means they had to be in communication with each other. We can get our contacts at the NSA to look at phone records and emails and—”
“We’ve already done that,” said Sarah. “There’s no evidence at all that these individuals were ever in contact with each other through any traditional methods.”
“Let me take a look at the list,” said App.
“It’s not like I have a copy on me,” said Sarah.
“I saw the list,” said Chimpion. “I have names, addresses, dates of birth and, in the case of Delilah McPherson, her date of death.” She pulled out her phone. “I’ve already had my contacts in Pangea researching the names.”
“I don’t see how they can know more about them than we already know,” said Sarah.
Chimpion said, “Human law enforcement plainly didn’t catch onto the fact that Mark was buying industrial strength 3d printers, or notice anything odd about Smith ordering all the high tech gear he needed to build a time machine. These purchase were made with supposedly untraceable cryptocurrency. A lot of this takes place on Pangean servers, and the metadata we record can be analyzed for information invisible in any single transaction, but detectable in the bulk data. All of the names on the list started making these encrypted transactions in the last year. In another day or two, we should know what they were buying.”
“A day or two might be too late,” said Servant. “We can’t just sit around doing nothing. We need to get out to the neighborhoods where these people lived and start interviewing people ourselves.”
“Going out into residential neighborhoods after you’ve begged dervishes to attack us could cause panic. Our missing psychopaths have to have left some sort of trail. Sooner or later we’ll get an actual lead. For now I want all of you to head to the gym to run combat training scenarios. Let’s stay sharp for when something does happen.”
“My staying sharp doesn’t really have much to do with a gym,” said Steam-Dragon. “My suit does all the heavy lifting.”
“Your mind is the true power behind the suit,” said Chimpion. “I’ve watched the video records of your fights with App. You’re not using your suit to its full potential. There is much I can teach you about the art of combat.”
“Whatever,” said Steam-Dragon.
Sarah left the others and headed to the command hub to let Nathan and Katya know about the connection they’d discovered with the beheadings. She walked into the room and found them both waiting for her.
Nathan grinned as he said, “Servant certainly made that interesting.”
“Why does this amuse you?” asked Sarah.
Nathan shrugged. “The internet’s already filled with parodies. Some of them are funny as hell.”
“It happened ten minutes ago!”
“More like fifteen. That’s, like, a whole year in meme time,” said Nathan.
“App cut his mics,” said Katya. “What did you tell them?”
“Not much. Just, you know, everything.”
“Your mother is going to kill you,” said Katya.
“That would be easier than what she’ll actually do,” said Sarah. “Screw it, I’m glad I spilled the beans. We shouldn’t have been keeping this information from the rest of the team. Chimpion’s already got her contacts working on leads we didn’t have before. And Becky, especially, deserved to know the truth.”
“How did she take it?” asked Katya.
“Who the hell knows?” asked Sarah. “I mean, her face is hidden while she’s in the suit. She protested at first, but I think she accepted the truth. How she feels about it is anyone’s guess. I don’t think she’s the type who’s quick to share her real feelings.”
“For what it’s worth,” said Nathan turning away from her toward his computer, “I think you did the right thing. Now take a look at this video of Serv—” He stopped speaking.
“What about the video?” asked Sarah.
“Die!” Nathan shouted as he leapt to his feet, drawing his arms back above his head. His fingers shimmered as an executioner’s sword materialized from thin air. With a high-pitched laugh, he brought the blade down toward Sarah’s unprotected head.
Chapter Fifteen
Evasive Action
Nathan swung the executioner’s sword with a two handed grip. Sarah wasn’t wearing her helmet, but she was wearing her body armor, and sheer instinct brought her arms up in time to bear the brunt. The blow knocked her from her feet, almost always a good thing in her case, since she was much faster off the ground than on it.
“Katya!” she cried as she rose toward the ceiling. “Run!”
Katya didn’t run. Instead, she laughed maniacally as she lunged toward Sarah and swung a blade of her own. Now in the air, Sarah spun to have her thigh bear the brunt of the blade. The swords looked wickedly sharp, but the diamond nanothreads of her outfit couldn’t be cut by any known metal and the non-Newtonian fluid lining of her suit absorbed some of the kinetic energy, reducing the impact of a blow that would have severed her leg to one that merely felt like she was being whacked with a crowbar.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it!” she shouted as she rocketed toward the hallway. At high speed she had no room for error as she threaded through the doorway and executed a perfect ninety degree turn. As always, her body went where her mind willed it in utter disregard for all laws of physics.
She couldn’t stop to look back, but felt confident that Nathan and Katya were in hot pursuit, which suited her fine.
“Servant!” she shouted. “Main hall! Nathan and Katya have turned into dervishes!”
There was a white blur at the end of the hall that came into focus as Servant formed a one man barricade in front of the door, bending out of the way at the last second to let Sarah flash through into the safety of the next room.
“Don’t hurt them!” she yelled, spinning around to see how close behind they were. Pretty close, it turned out. Nathan wasn’t particularly athletic, but he was moving with insane speed, and there were now five of him. Katya ran marathons for a hobby so she was even closer, as were her four doppelgangers.
The Nathans and Katyas cackled like hyenas on methamphetamines as t
hey chopped at Servant’s neck.
“I’ll take those,” said Servant, snatching the blades away.
“Sarah!” Chimpion suddenly shouted over the coms. “App’s down! The whole freaking med team just changed into dervishes!”
“Don’t hurt them!” shouted Sarah.
“They’re doing their best to hurt us!” Chimpion shouted back. “They chopped off App’s head!”
“He’ll walk it off,” said Sarah. “Immobilize your opponents, but don’t do any permanent damage, and definitely don’t kill them!”
Steam-Dragon’s voice came over the com. “I don’t have a lot of non-lethal options in my toolkit.”
“Then stand there and get hit!” said Sarah. “Chimpion, take evasive action.”
“Way ahead of you,” said Chimpion. “I can keep out of reach until they burn out.”
“Crap,” said Sarah. “Staying alive isn’t good enough. We’ve got to keep them from having heart attacks!”
“Any ideas how to do that?” Servant asked. He kept snatching away the blades and breaking them, but new blades kept appearing in their hands.
“Can’t your force fields manipulate time? Slow them down!”
“They alter my time inside the field. I can’t project it onto other people.”
“I just took all but one here with a sleep gas grenade,” said Chimpion.
“And I’ve got my jaws clamped around the torso of the last one,” said Steam-Dragon. “He’s fighting like crazy. He’s going to tear himself apart.”
“The ones I knocked out are stirring,” said Chimpion. “They seem to be fighting off the gas.”
“Crap, crap, crap,” said Sarah, finding her helmet where she’d left back in the control room. She pulled on the helmet and fixed her gaze on the clock in the heads up display. Dervishes usually burned out in under five minutes. At least a minute was already gone. How the hell was she supposed to stop the burn out when they didn’t know what was causing this? Even if they could save the crew, how could they fight a foe that could possess anyone at any time?
