There’s more to me than that, he thought.
But thoughts played unbidden through his mind like images projected in an old-fashioned theater. All of the things that he had imagined doing to Celina, to Theresa, to Savannah. All of the disgusting and absurd things that he had done and said with Morgan.
You are... ugly, said Theresa’s voice.
He felt his limbs stiffen as he turned and started walking across the grass on the back side of the Hamilton building. It felt like walking inside somebody else’s skin, except that she was inside his skin.
Fighting it will only make it hurt, he thought.
Yes, she replied.
And so he gave in, feeling her presence throughout his body.
I was trying to rescue you, he thought.
Rescue.
The two of them walked around the end of the building to the front and onto the drive that circled around the heart of the campus. From here, Bowen could see several people rushing out of the Administration building. Orderlies, nurses, Simmons, Tolbert, Jones-McMartin. Security personnel with rifles.
I’m going to show you. I’m going to show all of you what you’re trying to destroy.
I don’t want to destroy you, thought Bowen. I want—
But as they stepped onto the asphalt drive, she stopped him. He tried to move his arms, his head, even his eyes, but nothing would move. He could only stand there stupidly and watch as the crowd of people ran across the campus lawn toward them.
Please don’t, he thought. They’re going to kill you for this.
No, they won’t even touch me.
Four drones emerged from behind buildings and buzzed toward them.
Please run, thought Bowen. You can’t stop those drones.
But even as he thought this, the security guards stopped running and fired their rifles at the drones, which shattered into pieces and showered the people below with bits of metal and plastic. Then the guards turned their guns on the crowd around them. Several people tried to run, but a spray of bullets mowed them down. Muzzle flashes bloomed like bright flowers, and the reports echoed—first off of the buildings that surrounded the quad, then off of the mountains. When they had finished with the crowd, the gunmen turned on each other. Soon, all that remained standing were Simmons, the senator, and the general. These three walked stiffly toward Bowen and Theresa.
I wish you had killed those two, thought Bowen. The general and the senator. They’re the ones who deserve to die, not the others.
Now I’m going to show you.
Show me what? Please run.
But now Bowen’s hand moved to his shirt pocket and removed the pen that he had there.
What are you doing? he thought.
Teaching.
Bowen’s thumb depressed the clicker at the top of the pen to expose the point.
I could have been something good, thought Theresa. But you didn’t want me to exist.
I do want you to—
He knew before it happened what she was going to make him do. Still holding the pen, his hand swung toward his face. With a wet pop and a burst of light and agony, the point of the pen plunged into his right eye.
41
“Seriously,” said Merida, “if they’re not going to feed us, I wish they’d go ahead and kill us already.” She paced the wall twice before sitting down on the couch again. “Anything is better than starving.”
They had been in the same room since Francis had come and read her mind early that morning. He had told the senator where she and Merida had hidden the computer, and he had found out about Taylor. He had probed around until Jessica could see the image of the baby nursing at Beck’s breast.
“I’ll bet Carlo is about to lose his shit, huh?” Merida said.
The senator’s whole demeanor had changed when Francis told her about the baby. Her facial muscles had tightened, and she had wrung her hands in expectation. Christmas had come early.
“Babe?” said Merida. She waved a hand in front of Jessica’s face.
“I just condemned that baby,” said Jessica. “They’re going to bring her here and this is all she’ll ever know.”
She stood and walked first to one wall, then to another.
“That might not be any different than where she is now,” said Merida. “She’s in an underground bunker there. She’ll be in an underground bunker here.”
Jessica turned. “She’s with her father,” she said. “He has to keep her a secret for now, but he’s still her father! Here they’ll just experiment on her.”
Merida’s face reddened. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”
But she didn’t finish the thought. A noise like thunder had erupted from somewhere in the building. Automatic gunfire.
Blood rushed to Jessica’s head, and her tongue suddenly tasted like iron. Somewhere far away a woman screamed, then a burst of gunfire shut her up.
Merida jumped to her feet. “Shit. How the hell do we get out?”
There were no windows in this room, and the only way out was through the locked door.
“We don’t,” said Jessica. “We just...”
There were the couches and the chair. That was it.
“We wait,” she said.
“Well, that’s just great, isn’t it?” said Merida, throwing up her hands. “We just wait here to die?”
“What do you want me to—”
Voices and running footsteps in the hallway outside.
Jessica and Merida watched the door. The footsteps grew farther away.
“I’m sorry,” said Jessica. She put her arms around Merida, pulling their bodies close together. “This is my fault. All of it.”
“It’s not your—” said Merida.
More gunfire. It sounded a little closer.
Merida grabbed Jessica’s shoulders and held her at arm’s length.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, her hands trembling. “You’re doing your best. You were trying to help.”
She kissed Jessica, breathing in her breath.
More gunfire.
When Jessica drew back from Merida, tears dripped from her cheeks.
“Maybe you’re one of the ones who starts the fire,” she said. “Like a forest fire, you know? The kind that burns everything down so that things can start over.”
Gunfire again. It wasn’t far away now.
More footsteps.
“I wish we could have gotten married,” said Merida. She touched Jessica’s face.
Jessica wished that she could answer—but even now, at the end of everything, she couldn’t. She closed her eyes and rubbed her cheek against Merida’s face.
Another burst of gunfire. The footsteps stopped right outside the door.
“I love you,” said Merida.
Beep. Click. The whirring sound of the door unlocking.
42
He tried to scream. No, his lungs and throat and mouth tried to scream. But he couldn’t because she wouldn’t let him. Instead, he fell onto the hot asphalt, lying on his back and barely aware of the scream burning in his chest, trapped there.
The pain radiated, white hot, from his eye into his head and down his spine. His hand touched the ruined tissue where his eye had been. A mass of soft flesh filled his eye socket. A warm, sticky mixture of gore and vitreous humour dribbled from the ruptured eye down his cheekbone into the hair at his temple.
I could have been something good! Theresa’s voice screamed in his head. Bowen only barely registered the intensity of her voice and feelings over his own anguish. She would kill him, torture him until he died, and they would still kill her.
Please, he thought. Oh, God, please.
Her face hovered over his face, and Bowen realized now that the vision in his remaining eye was blurring. He was about to pass out. At least there was that. As Theresa’s face came closer to his, he saw an inhuman fury in her eyes, a blazing anger that could destroy the world if it eve
r got free. This was why they kept the Anomalies at the Institute, why the governments of the world had tried to snuff them out.
“You wanted to rescue me?” she said out loud. “You wanted me to be grateful to you? You wanted me to do things for you? You wanted me to let you fuck me? That’s the word for it, right? Fuck?”
She drew back so that her face blurred. He wanted to faint. God, he wanted to faint. But she was keeping him awake and aware. His head buzzed with a kind of super-awareness—probably a combination of the drug and Theresa’s ability.
“Now you can be grateful to me,” said Theresa.
A feeling grew in his chest—Bowen knew of no other way to think of it than a warmth—and moved steadily up his throat and into his head. As it rolled through him, the buzzing sound slowly became something more like the sound of water washing up a beach. Everywhere it touched, he felt relief, and when it finally reached his eye, he gasped—not only with relief, but also with astonishment and with pain. As if it had developed muscles and a will of its own, the remains of his eye began to move. Folds of ruptured sclera shifted and attached to each other, and when the rupture had closed, he could feel the eye begin to refill with vitreous humour. And then the pain and the sound and the warm presence in his body were gone.
Bowen blinked. He could see out of his left eye, but his right eye was still blind. He blinked again.
“You...” he began, but he didn’t finish the thought.
No, he wasn’t blind in the right eye. A thick film of blood and the gelatinous fluid from inside his eye still covered it. Using the sleeve of his coat, he wiped the sticky mixture away, and slowly he began to see light, then color, and then the shape of Theresa’s face with both eyes.
“You healed it,” he said, sitting up. She had let go of his mind.
“I healed it,” she said.
“Have you...” Bowen said, pushing himself to his hands and knees and then standing. His legs wobbled beneath him. Everything—the ground under his feet, the air on his skin, the smell of the trees in the valley, even his own body—felt new. Even the narcotic he had bought from the Canadian couldn’t make him feel this way. “Have you always been able to do this?”
Theresa’s mouth trembled, her lips stretched and the corners turned down. Her eyes wore a look of disgust. “All you ever wanted from me is to listen inside people’s heads and to control them.”
Bowen looked around. Theresa had made Tolbert, Jones-McMartin, and Simmons kneel in a semicircle around them—like worshippers.
“Well,” said Theresa. “You wanted something else from me.”
“Theresa,” Bowen began. “You’ve seen everything inside me. You’re right about me.”
But the look in her eyes shut down that thought.
“I’m not perfect,” he said instead. “But you also know I’m scheduled to die next year. You know something is wrong with me. I’m losing myself. My body shakes sometimes, and before long I’m going to start losing my memory, probably having hallucinations. If I wasn’t planning to die next year, I’d eventually be a bedridden idiot—shitting and pissing myself.”
She stared at him, daring him to ask.
“Please, Theresa,” he said. “I know you think I don’t deserve it, but I was trying to get you out of here. These two—” He pointed at Tolbert and Jones-McMartin. “They ordered me to kill you. They want you dead. But I want you to live and to be free.” He stepped toward her. “Because I know that you’re good.”
Her eyes softened, the rage and hatred that had filled her face receding.
“Look into my mind if you don’t believe me,” said Bowen.
But Theresa was shaking her head. A tear dripped down her cheek.
You’re ugly, her voice said inside him. When I look inside you, I only see things that I don’t want to see.
“If you look now, though,” said Bowen, “you’ll see that I’m—”
Theresa held up a finger, and Bowen’s jaw clenched shut of its own accord, his teeth snapping together with a click.
Please just hear me out, he thought.
But the senator and the general both let out moans that sounded like vomiting heaves. Bowen turned just in time to see looks of terror and dawning realization on their faces before an unseen hand forced them onto their hands and knees. Screaming, they slammed their heads into the ground with dull thuds. Then they raised their heads again, leaving dark stains on the asphalt. Blood poured from the torn skin of their foreheads.
“No, please!” squealed Jones-McMartin.
Again, thud. Again. Again.
The general collapsed first, his forehead a bloody mess and his body twitching for a moment before finally going still. Jones-McMartin, on the other hand, managed more hits.
A lot more.
Blood flew in droplets, and with each thud she left bits of skin and flesh on the ground. Her screaming started as a high-pitched wail, interrupted with a huh each time she slammed her face into the ground. Soon she collapsed onto her stomach, but Theresa kept making her raise her head and smash it into the black surface of the drive.
Bowen couldn’t help smiling a little. For all his manly talk, the general had been a weak old bastard in the end, but Jones-McMartin had some real toughness in her. He even thought he saw her fighting Theresa’s control, her whole body trembling as she struggled to keep from slamming her head down.
Color me impressed, he thought. The senator is a badass.
Not tough enough, though.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
“Stop it!” screamed Simmons, who remained on her knees, horror stretching her face into a hideous grimace.
But Jones-McMartin went on pounding the ground with her face. Her arms shook and wobbled as she raised her upper body from the asphalt in what looked like a half-hearted pushup, and then she brought her face down. Thud. Her face was an angry red pulp, the nose broken, bits of shredded skin hanging from the bone. A puddle of blood, several teeth, and pieces of pink flesh lay in the spot where she’d been planting her face.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
And finally, with one last groan, the senator raised herself from the ground and gave Theresa a look of agony that reminded Bowen of a painting he had once seen—a medieval piece that depicted people being tortured in hell. Hair matted with black gore stuck to the pulpy flesh of the senator’s cheeks. A tooth dangled by a string from her upper gum. Strings of blood mixed with saliva dripped from her chin like drool from an English bulldog’s jowls. She let out a noise that sounded like a whimpering child, and then her face fell onto the red puddle with a wet smack. She didn’t move again.
“Thank you,” said Bowen, his trembling voice nearly a whisper. “Thank you so much for letting me see that.” He looked at Simmons, who stared at the bloody mess that had been the senator’s face. Tears and snot dripped down her face.
“Please,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Please.”
“I know we don’t deserve your mercy, Theresa,” said Bowen. “But please don’t hurt us like that. Dr. Simmons was always good to you. These two pieces of shit deserved what you did to them, but Simmons doesn’t.”
Simmons looked up at him, her face almost accusing.
“Know what she’s thinking?” asked Theresa. “She’s thinking, No, we all deserve this. Everyone who has power. We deserve to have our faces erased, too.”
Simmons broke down at this, weeping so hard that her body shuddered.
“Theresa,” Bowen began, but she made him clench his teeth again, his jaw muscles so tight that they burned.
Feeling like he was moving through the landscape of a dream, Bowen stood and walked past Simmons, stepping over the senator’s body. For a moment, he wondered if this could all be a hallucination brought on by the drug, but then his foot slipped a little in a stream of blood, nearly sending him to the ground. No, this was no hallu
cination.
He regained his balance, and Theresa made him walk slowly toward the bodies that lay on the ground on the other side of the quad, and he understood before he got there what she was going to make him do. He was headed to one of the guards whose arm was stretched out toward his rifle. Theresa wouldn’t heal him. Fine. He didn’t deserve that, and maybe she couldn’t heal genetic illnesses like his, anyway. Maybe she only had the power to heal physical injuries. But at least she was going to give him a clean death. One trigger pull, and then nothing but blackness.
He stepped over the man’s body and picked up the rifle.
Thank you, he thought, not knowing if Theresa could hear him.
But instead of putting the muzzle of the gun into his mouth or under his chin, she made him grasp the grip with his right hand and the forward stock with his left. He started walking back toward the spot where Theresa and Simmons waited.
No, he thought. No, please.
But Theresa’s voice was silent. The sound of his footsteps, which were heavy and awkward because of his resistance to her, echoed in the quad.
Please, Theresa, he said. Kill me. Hurt me, even. But not her.
She made him walk until he stood right behind Simmons, who knelt like a penitent before her god. Bowen looked over her head at Theresa. The girl with the pretty green eyes stood with her hands by her sides, the braid that Bowen had wanted to touch and to smell hanging over her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Simmons,” Bowen said. “I always... I always liked you.”
He had wanted to say loved, but he didn’t think she would understand what he meant. He wanted to put his hand on her shoulder and tell her that it was going to be okay, but Theresa wouldn’t let him. Instead, he closed his eyes and felt his hands lifting the rifle to aim it at the back of Simmons’s head. His finger moved to the trigger. For a few long seconds, the only sounds in the world were the breeze coming down the valley and Simmons’s sniffling.
“You don’t have to—” Bowen began, but the blast of the rifle cut him off.
The Way Out Page 23
