"Mr. Ellison just puked all over Santa's Village," the girl said.
"Who in the hell is Mr. Ellison?"
"Santa, sir."
"Oh, jeez..." Tapping his plump fingers meditatively on the desk, he caught Ray's narrow-eyed gaze at his hand and stopped, withdrawing it, hiding it under his desk. "Get one of the food court janitors in to clean up the puke. Where's Santa now?"
"Mrs. Claus sent him home."
"Christ, you gotta be kidding me! It's nearly Christmas and we've got no Santa Claus..." His gaze fell on Ray. "Did--Ellison, was it? Did he puke on the suit?"
"There's a little on the lapel. Should clean up easy."
"Good. Ray, what are you doing this afternoon?"
Ray looked from Stanford to the elf and back. "Mr. Stanford, I can't play Santa Claus..."
"It pays a hundred an hour."
He did need the money. Refill the coffers, as Mr. Stanford might say. "But, sir, I really don't do well with children."
"Don't like 'em?"
"More like they don't like me."
Stanford laughed, his belly jostling like the jolly old fat man's. "Nobody doesn't like Santa Claus."
❚❚
RAY PLOPPED DOWN in Santa's chair. Already the beard was itching, the extra stuffing inside the bright red coat made him sweat, and the line outside Santa's house was mind-bogglingly long. Kids crying, pulling each other's hair, tugging on their mothers' sleeves. He nodded to Kelly, who opened the gate, and he waved the first kid up. Kelly lifted the child onto his lap.
"Hel-low, little boy," Ray said, making his voice deep, thanking God for the Oxis. "What would you like for Christmas?"
"Um, um... I want um, a nucular weapond so I can blow up my sister!"
Ray couldn't help but laugh. "That's very naughty... but I suppose we all want to blow someone up every once in a while. I could use one of those to blow up my boss, come to think of it--ho ho ho!"
Kelly gave him a queer look, and Ray lifted the boy off his lap.
"Merry Christmas!" he bellowed, already certain it was going to be a long day.
A dozen kids later, he'd been peed on, gotten a sucked-on candy cane stuck in his beard--which Kelly had patiently trimmed out with scissors--and a child's size shoe in the balls twice. His patience beginning to wear thin and the drugs wearing off, the urge to tear off the whole costume and spoil the mystery of Santa Claus for everyone was pretty strong. Kelly hoisted a skinny kid with brown smears on his freckled face onto Ray's lap. The boy was sucking on the end of a chocolate Santa. Ray's stomach growled. He'd never much liked chocolate... but the kid kept waving it in his face when Ray asked what he wanted for Christmas.
All Ray ever wanted was a mouth full of teeth that didn't feel like shards of glass. He'd been granted his wish, but it seemed like every treat he'd ever gotten in life came with a trick.
The kid leaned in to whisper in Ray's ear, breath sweet. The Santa, its head sucked to a round brown nub, hovered close to Ray's bushy beard as the boy's hot breath tickled his ear. "I want my mommy and daddy to be nice to each other." Not the first time he'd heard something like that in the hour or so since Ellison left sick, but Ray's hunger overcame him, and he leaned forward to bite the top off the kid's treat.
"What are you doing?" his mother screeched.
"What?" Ray said, mouth full.
"I saw what you did! You ate his chocolate!"
The boy saw the demolished treat, and his face twisted up in misery. Before he could start bawling, his mother yanked him off Ray's lap by the arm. The damn busted then, tears virtually squirting out of the kid's eyes. Ray used the moment to chew. The sugary liquor oozed between his teeth and down his throat, so sweet it made him gag.
"Santa wouldn't do that, ma'am," Kelly assured the woman, but her eyes showed she knew the truth.
"I saw him do it!" The boy's mother pushed her son behind her back to approach Santa's chair. "Spit it out," she told him, holding out her hand palm-up like a school teacher to a loud gum-chewer.
Ray wanted nothing more than to spit the excessively sweet saliva into her waiting palm. But the teeth gnashed out, as they'd nearly done to Nora that morning, and his mouth filled with the salty tang of her blood.
The woman screamed blue murder. Ray spit the meaty part of her palm into her hand before she closed it into a quivering fist. A shower of red ran down his beard and spattered the coat's white fur trim as she hugged her injured hand to her breast. Kids began crying, screaming, parents shielding their eyes and drawing them away from Santa's Village. Kelly hugged the freckled boy, who stood in stunned silence with tears rolling down his cheeks while his mother caterwauled, blood painting her fur jacket like an animal rights protest.
Ray fell back against the chair, stunned at what he'd done. The chair toppled, smashing into Santa's gingerbread house, splitting the wall and breaking the plastic "icing" window frame. He lurched off, tripping over the Rudolph and the candy cane fence, and ran headlong, the stuffing shaking loose from inside his blood-stained coat, pushing through the crowd of sudden goggle-eyed onlookers. He barreled through the hardware store turnstile, rushing past a slack-jawed greeter, knocking the flyers from his hands.
"Sir! Sir!"
Ray recognized the voice: Dino, the day security guard. Someone had radioed him. Now he was at Ray's heels. But Ray had one more thing he needed to do. Tearing off the beard as he ran down the tool aisle, he scoured the shelves, hunting, hunting--there! He grabbed the plastic packaging and hurried to the back of the store as Dino rounded the corner, the former football player's beefy shoulder slamming into the shelf, rattling tools and shaking screwdrivers and hammers and wrenches to the floor.
Ray tore the clear plastic open with his teeth, amazed by their strength, their sturdiness. He pulled the tool from the wreckage and slammed into the men's room. Wheeling round, he pushed the door shut against Dino's football tackle, and locked it.
"What the hell, Ray?" Dino said as Ray brought the pliers to the mirror. "I'm mad about the gift certificate too, but you don't have to go nuts."
Ray stared himself down, looking like a demented elf with the baggy red velvet pants and big brass belt buckle. This was going to hurt like hell...
He opened his mouth wide, and reached inside with the pliers. The teeth bit down on it, clacking hard against the metal, pain reverberating in his jaw. "Huck!" he cursed, his tongue depressed by the cold metal, and yanked it free, the bolt scraping against the two front teeth. They clacked shut on each other, refusing to open.
"C'mon, Ray, open the door. You won't like it if I have to bust it down..."
"You don't want to come in here, Dino," Ray said through clenched teeth, then squeezed his eyes shut and swung the pliers at his mouth. The tool rattled off them, bolts of pain shooting up into his temples and exploding behind his eyes. When he flashed his gums in the mirror, the teeth remained unharmed. He yanked on his lower jaw, trying to pry open his mouth, but the teeth held fast.
"You goha be hucking kidding ee..."
Seizing on an idea, he grabbed a fistful of hair and yanked his head back. His mouth opened involuntarily, and before the teeth could shut again he dove in with the pliers, attacking a molar. He yanked. At first he felt no give, was merely pulling his head along by the metal grips, painfully stretching out the tendons in his neck. He would have killed for those Oxis now, possibly literally. And suddenly the tooth tore free from his gums. Blood streaked the mirror, and the tooth rattled into the sink.
Ray dropped the pliers, staring down at the thing in the porcelain bowl.
The tooth had grown roots.
Even more inexplicably, tiny red nerves wriggled and trashed like the tentacles of a dying squid. Ray had a moment to realize the other teeth lining his gums had likely grown similar appendages--that they'd laid down roots, making themselves a home in his unsuspecting mouth.
Behind him, the door frame splintered inward.
Ray saw Dino's eyes widen as the Taser came out. He cried out,
"Wait!" through gritted teeth, throwing up a hand as the larger man pulled the trigger. One dart struck Ray in the chest. The other hit him in the jaw. His whole body seized as the electricity passed through him.
Falling unconscious to the floor, his mouth fell slack.
❚❚
TWO OFFICERS THREW Ray into a small, dank cell. His whole body ached from the Taser and the beating Dino had laid upon him before the cops showed up, when he saw what Ray had done to the poor woman at Santa's Village--all but his teeth, which felt, aside from the constant squirming beneath his gums, perfectly fine.
In the silence that followed the heavy metal bars clanking shut, Ray sat on the bunk, and thought he could finally hear his teeth singing.
He stood, and went to the window. Grasped the bars and pulled himself up. Not a far drop to the ground below. Two stories. Maybe three.
Ray stood on the seatless toilet and twisted his head to bite down on a cold steel bar. He ground his teeth against it, moving them forward and back like a saw, tasting flecks of metal shavings on his tongue.
Oh, the teeth were singing, all right. And they wanted two things: blood and chocolate.
MENTAL
I CAN TELL they're getting close by the ringing in my ears.
They'll find me soon. Find me and lock me up in a small white room with a hard white bed and stark white walls. I know because I've been there. Nothing to look at, nothing to do but submit myself to their experiments, their mind games. Poking me with needles, pushing me to exhaustion, forcing me to my limits, beyond my limits, clouding my conscious mind with experimental drugs to tap into the basement levels, the subconscious... where the killer lies sleeping.
I have to leave this room. If they've sent a low-level Empath, hoping to get the drop on me, I'm already caught. I doubt they'd risk it. They know how powerful I've become. Their training made me the Mental I am now. In a duel of minds, I'd pop a low-level Empath's neural net like frying a circuit board and be out of here before the trench coats have even gotten close.
Still, I shouldn't stay. Just leave this message, and go. I know where that ringing in the ears leads. I've seen it. I've caused it.
They can't use me anymore. I'm a liability. I understand that. They'd happily erase me from the world. Redact me.
I just need to think.
Think about what to do next.
Think about what came before, and how it can help me now...
❚❚
AS A KID, all I knew about my power was that people didn't want to be around me for very long.
My parents abandoned me at the hospital. The other kids at my foster home never wanted me to play with them. Nobody ever picked me for anything. In a big old farmhouse with eleven kids all under the age of sixteen, I was lonely but rarely alone. Our foster mother hated the others, was only keeping us for the monthly checks, and I suppose it's why she took a special liking to me. While she beat and scolded the other children, she taught me how to read and write. She taught me to be strong. To conceal my emotions. To guard my thoughts. She was a cold woman, and she was vengeful. She never married, and to my knowledge, she'd never been in a relationship of any kind.
Mary O'Shaughnessy loathed people. And since people had always taken an unconscious disliking to me, I suppose she must have felt we were somehow similar. Kindred spirits.
The night everything came crashing down around me--the night Billy died--I was up in my room in the attic, the only bedroom not shared by more than one dirty, underfed and undereducated child. I was reading Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and I'd just gotten to the scene where Big Brother's agents capture Winston and Julia when little Billy came bolting into my room, torn shirt, dull brown eyes wide with fear, his face red from crying.
Ms. O'Shaughnessy shouted up after him. By the sound, her voice slightly tinny from echoing off metal pots and pans hung above the stove, she was still in the kitchen. Billy locked eyes with me. I could almost feel his fear turn to calculation, like flicking on a table saw, the blade cold and sharp. In an instant he was scurrying over on his hands and knees so our foster mother wouldn't hear his footsteps. Those dull eyes never left me, his little red mouth twisted into a snarl.
Billy was two years younger than me. Small, but vicious. Even the older boys, like Parker and Jeb, were wary of him. He could slip out of their chokeholds. He could climb onto their backs and jam his thumbs into their eyes while pummeling their kidneys with his dirty little feet. I saw him do it a dozen times. Nobody messed with Billy, and by luck of being in the spot Billy had chosen to hide, I'd stumbled onto his bad side.
Without a word of warning, he leaped onto my bed, swatting the book from my hands, and before I could scream for help, a wiry arm slipped painfully around my neck while his other hand, smelling like sweat and chicken grease, slapped hard over my mouth.
We stayed that way for what seemed like forever, but I knew from the clock on the wall had been no more than a few minutes. During that time, Billy kept whispering to me, "It wasn't my fault. I didn't do it on purpose. Always picking on me. Not fair, is what it is. Anyway, it wasn't my--"
My heart beat sluggishly, as if time had slowed. My imagination still swarming with Orwell's Thought Crimes and doublespeak, I thought if I could get inside Billy's head somehow, I just might be able to make him let me go. Even then I knew it was a silly thought, but fear had its cold claws in me, and I was grasping at straws.
I thought of myself as a small insect, an earwig--no, a spider--and I crawled into the warm, fleshy shell of Billy's ear. My weightless legs navigated daintily through the dark, smelly maze of tiny hairs and brown wax until I reached his ear drum. My abdomen distended, I pushed and pushed until the pale pink orb squeezed out of my shimmering black carapace. I danced over the egg sac, spinning my wriggling, squirming children into a silken cocoon, and scurried out of Billy's ear just moments before he dug a finger into it, feeling nothing but a slight itch.
"--didn't do it on purpose. Always picking on m--"
A low-pitched drone rose to a crescendo in my ears--you know how kids used to say if you hear a ringing in your ears, it means someone is talking about you? Like that, only stronger. Louder. The whole time I imagined myself as an evil little spider crawling into Billy's ear, my own ears burned.
In my imagination the egg sac split open, spilling hundreds of little versions of me into his ear. We broke through the barrier into the spongey, wet tissue of his brain, and bit.
"Ow," Billy groaned. "Ow OW!"
His hand slipped from my neck. I heard it slap against his head. The other came free of my lips and I fell off the bed onto the floor, rolling and crab-walking back until my head struck a rafter. Billy had been holding his head, but his arms fell slack to his sides as the pain at the back of my skull rattled him from my thoughts.
"My ears--" he cried, and that's when blood started spilling down his cheeks from those smelly orifices, as if the imaginary bugs I'd filled his head with had gobbled up all the meat inside. Billy's eyes rolled back to the whites and he slumped over, flopping like a fish onto my bedspread--arms flailing, legs kicking out spastically. I watched him in growing horror, certain he was dying, unable to move from where I sat with my back against the wall. Finally, he rolled off the bed onto the floor, where his head struck a raised nail, and he stopped moving.
Blood trickled into his eyes and he still didn't blink. His body remained motionless. Not even a breath. Somehow, my thoughts had done that to him. Somehow, I'd killed him with my mind.
Ms. O'Shaughnessy's head rose through the attic opening in that same moment. I suppose the first thing she saw was Billy lying there dead, blood oozing from his ears onto the oval rug. She looked up at me and held my gaze.
"You did this to him." It wasn't a question. She could always tell when I was lying, so I nodded.
"He came up here, and you--what? Hit him with something?"
I shook my head.
"You made it so he couldn't hurt you."
I agreed
with a tearful nod.
With a nod of her own, very business-like, she came up the rest of the way. She pulled the folding stairs up, the coils twang-twang-twanging against my nerves. Already it seemed like what I'd done wasn't real--but the evidence still lay on the floor, bleeding into the multicolored wool. Hunched so she wouldn't hit the ceiling, she approached me cautiously, like I was a wild animal trapped in the attic, and she seemed to be undecided on what to do next.
"Whatever you did, we'll tell them he fell."
She nodded as if to solidify the notion, and held out her hand. I took it reluctantly. She gripped mine tight, her fingers dead cold.
"Promise me," she said. "Whatever it is you've done, promise me you'll never do it again."
I promised her. She'd never really meant much to me, our foster mother, and I understood she was not a good person, even though she'd treated me well for the most part. But the promise wasn't for her, it was for myself. Watching Billy squirm, even though just moments before I'd hated him to the core of me, with every firing synapse, even though when he'd had me trapped I'd wanted him dead more than anything I'd ever prayed for in my short, miserable existence, I could never forgive myself for what I'd done. I never wanted to do something like that again.
But it was a promise I wouldn't keep. Not because I couldn't, not because I ever wanted to harm another person after that night...
Because they made me.
The police never arrived. Two men came in their place. Men with sharp, smooth faces, wearing gray trench coats. The other children gathered around in the front hall--their hatred made my skin crawl. My foster mother spoke with the men in hushed tones, then turned to me with wet fear in her eyes. She addressed the others with a forced smile.
"Your sister has been invited to join a gifted program. These men will be taking her with them."
The others, my "brothers" and "sisters" (though Ms. O'Shaughnessy had never referred to us as siblings before), looked at me with pure malice. I'd been chosen. They hadn't. There was always the possibility one of us would be chosen before the rest, but none of them would ever have imagined it would be me.
Video Nasties Page 5
