The Burning Man

by Christa Faust

  34

  Olivia sat in Doctor Lansen’s office, one leg bent. She was picking at the fraying toe of her non-skid slipper sock.

  She’d been in this place for more than two weeks now, and was slowly starting to get the lay of the land. It had been obvious from early on that aggressive resistance wasn’t the way to get out of there. She learned very quickly that behavior like that earned her nothing but restraints, both physical and chemical.

  She needed to focus and direct her energies. Be smarter, patient, and meticulous. She started toughing out the pain and palming her meds, flushing them down the toilet. Because the longer she stayed there, the clearer it became that she needed to get out, and soon. She needed a clear head to make that happen.

  Although she couldn’t get any real details out of anyone—about exactly what had happened to her that night—Doctor Lansen claimed she had suffered some kind of mental breakdown during a fight with that crazy cop who had abducted Rachel. She had no memory of anything from that day at all, so it was hard to argue about what may or may not have occurred. But she was pretty damn sure that there was nothing mentally wrong with her now.

  There was, on the other hand, something very wrong with this place. And a big part of that wrongness was Doctor Lansen himself.

  It wasn’t something she could easily put her finger on. He was in his early forties and not bad looking. Kind of like a blue-eyed, American version of Jeremy Irons. Neat and impeccably groomed. Always wore a tie. But there was something in the way he looked at her that made her deeply uncomfortable. It wasn’t a sex thing, or at least it wasn’t just that.

  Olivia never considered herself a hottie or anything, but she was far from unaware of the effect her developing body had on the male gender. Yet this wasn’t about her boobs or her legs or anything like that. It was like he was perving on something about her that she couldn’t see.

  “Tell me about your boyfriend,” he said.

  Olivia shrugged, refusing to give this creep even the tiniest sliver of her feelings about Kieran.

  “Are you sexually active?”

  Olivia glared at him through her tangled hair.

  “Are you?” she replied.

  “It’s nothing personal, Olivia,” he said. “I’m only asking because there appears to be a connection between the onset of sexual activity and your... disorder.”

  She wanted to smash in his perverted face, but she bit back on the urge and took a long, slow breath instead.

  “Well,” she said, “I hate to spoil your pet theory, but no, I’m not. Besides, correlation does not imply causation. Didn’t they teach you that in medical school?”

  “That’s absolutely right,” he said with a condescending smirk. “Which is why we’re so grateful to have you here, to help us learn more about this unique condition.”

  Condition.

  Disorder.

  Olivia hated those words. All this tip-toeing around what was supposedly wrong with her, but offering no real information. Like she was a cat at the vet who couldn’t possibly understand what needed to be done to her. Like she needed guys like Lansen to do things to her, for her own good. She might be sixteen, but she wasn’t a child.

  She’d been taking care of herself and Rachel for years, and was perfectly capable of watching out for her own good. As far as she could tell, there was nothing wrong with her besides a broken arm.

  “All right then,” he said, closing his notebook. “That’s all for today. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Whatever,” Olivia replied.

  Larry was there, right outside Doctor Lansen’s office, waiting to escort her through what she liked to refer to as “the airlock.”

  It was the elevator area in the crook of the L between the ward and the row of labs and offices. Both wings were behind key-card locked security doors, and to travel from one to the other you had to pass through both doors. They were programmed so that one couldn’t be opened until the other was closed and locked.

  Neither could be opened while the doors to one or both of the two elevators were open. Olivia had been over and over every possible scenario in which she might be able to steal a key card, or find a way to get unsupervised access to the elevator area.

  So far, no dice.

  Larry gripped her upper arm in his big fist and marched her through the airlock and into the ward. Once the ward door clicked closed behind them, he left her to her own devices while he ferried one of the other patients—a quiet little Hispanic girl named Lindsey— through the airlock in the direction of Lansen’s office.

  Walking down the corridor to her room, Olivia wondered for the hundredth time what was behind the other locked doors on the ward. There was Annie, Lindsey, Corrine, and Olivia, but there were twice that many rooms. The nurse claimed the extra rooms were empty, but if there was no one inside, why were they locked?

  The door to the janitor’s closet popped open and a skinny white hand reached out to grab the sleeve of Olivia’s hospital gown, pulling her in.

  Annie.

  She pulled Olivia close, hissing inches from her ear.

  “Let’s get one thing straight, babydoll. I’m the teacher’s pet around here. Not you. I’m the one he really wants.”

  Olivia shoved her away.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she whispered, frowning. “I’m not anybody’s pet, and neither are you.”

  “You think you’re special just because you’re all shiny and new,” Annie said, grabbing her arm way too hard. “But see how fast he gets sick of you, once he realizes that you can’t control it like I can.”

  “What are you talking about?” Olivia said, wrenching her arm loose. “Get off me.”

  Free of the other girl’s grip, she took a deep breath. Poor Annie was clearly nuts—most likely paranoid and delusional—and Olivia couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her. If Lansen was doing things to Annie that made her imagine there was some kind of romantic relationship between them, that was his fault, not hers. After all, he was the adult.

  “Look,” Olivia said, softening her voice. “You shouldn’t let him touch you.”

  “You have no idea,” Annie said, opening the closet door and slipping out. “You don’t know anything at all.”

  Olivia followed her out into the hallway. Corrine was there, sliding along the wall toward her room with her head hung low. She was very dark skinned, chubby and slump shouldered, with a sad, defeated demeanor. She had a pretty face, with widely spaced almond eyes and high cheekbones, but you almost never saw it, because she always kept her chin tucked in and her face turned down and away.

  She hadn’t spoken a single word to anyone in the whole time Olivia had been there.

  As Annie passed Corrine, the chubby girl suddenly slammed backward against the wall as if shoved by a giant invisible hand. She let out a whimper and crumpled to the floor, her hands covering her face.

  35

  The new girl had to go.

  It was becoming clear to Annie that something had to be done about Olivia. Blond, tall, and haughty, walking around the ward like she was some kind of supermodel. Wiggling her cute little ass in Doctor Lansen’s face and acting like she didn’t notice the effect she was having.

  Annie had been here for a little more than a year. Before that she’d been in and out of various foster homes, juvenile detention centers, and psych wards, but had been transferred here shortly after the not-really-accidental death of her abusive junkie mother on her thirteenth birthday.

  Her mother, Angela Pagliuca, was originally from New Jersey. Third daughter out of seven. She’d gone to Daytona Beach for Spring Break one year and never went home. A year later, she was strung out and knocked up, turning tricks out of her boyfriend’s van.

  Police found baby Annie forgotten in a Butchie Burger bathroom stall, wearing an unchanged diaper and nothing else. Her grandparents Sal and Rita in Jacksonville were awarded custody, and for the first five years of her life, Annie had enjoyed a happy, unremarkable
childhood. She had a pool and a Chihuahua named Bitsy and her own room full of toys and books. She got to do fun things like go to Disney World and play miniature golf and be part of a cool science program where she played educational games with this friendly doctor.

  She was loved.

  Then Grandma Rita died. Less than a month later, Grandpa Sal suffered a stroke and had to go live in a home. Bitsy had to go to the dog pound, and Annie went to a foster home.

  That first foster home was okay, even though the parents were very religious and strict and made all the kids do chores all day long, like they were slaves. But then one day, Angela showed up, claiming to be sober and wanting to start a new life with her precious little girl.

  That lasted just long enough to get custody. By the end of the first week, the cute purple canopy bed Angela bought to impress the social worker had been sold for dope, and Annie had to sleep on some old couch cushions pushed together to form a makeshift bed. Two months after that, they were evicted and had to sleep in the car, or in the apartments of Angela’s various male “friends”— many of whom seemed to think Annie was part of a package deal.

  Angela would berate Annie every day, calling her a worthless trick-baby whose birth had ruined her mother’s life. She pulled Annie out of schools constantly, moving her around from state to state. She would abandon her daughter in fleabag motels for days on end and Annie would get so hungry that she would be forced to go into fast-food restaurants and eat the discarded scraps and extra ketchup packets that other people left behind on their trays.

  If there were no scraps, she would sometimes ask the employees if they had anything they were just going to throw away. Sometimes she got lucky and someone might buy her a fresh burger because she was so thin and they felt sorry for her. But when Angela overheard Annie telling a stranger that she was hungry, she dragged her back to the motel by her hair and beat the crap out of her, threatening to kill her for “making me look like a bad mother.”

  That was when Annie first realized what she could do.

  Back then, she couldn’t control it. It was more like a sneeze, a burst of random kinetic energy that fanned out in jagged waves, knocking things off shelves and cracking glasses. It had happened a few times in the past, but she’d never realized that she was the one who was making it happen. But that day she’d been so scared, and sure that Angela really was going to kill her.

  When she felt the sneeze coming on, she’d done something she’d never tried before. She aimed it, pushed it out at her shrieking harpy of a mother, and Angela had staggered backward like she’d been slugged, tripping over a pile of dirty clothes and sprawling on her ass.

  Shortly after the “bad mother” incident, Angela was arrested for solicitation and possession, and Annie wound up back in a foster home. This one featured “special chores” for the female children. Annie was already well used to those kinds of chores, and was just thankful to have food. So thankful, in fact, that she immediately gained more than fifty pounds.

  She started stealing and hoarding candy and carried a pilfered butcher knife to protect her stash. When she used that knife on a fellow foster kid for taking one of her chocolate bars, she was sentenced to her first stint in juvie.

  The girls in the junior joint were absolutely merciless about Annie’s weight. They teased her and bullied her and beat her up until she tried to hang herself with a bed sheet. She got sent to a children’s psychiatric hospital for that little stunt. She was finally away from her tormentors, but their hateful voices had followed her.

  Annie was eleven when she decided to stop eating.

  Hunger was familiar. It was something she was used to, just like she was used to letting men do what they wanted with her body. It was easy, and it felt safe. More importantly, it made her feel in control.

  At first, she went too far with it, and wound up with a feeding tube stuck in her nose. But she soon learned how to eat just enough to stay alive and keep the doctors off her bony back, while still maintaining that cold, hungry sharpness. That iron-willed control. Mind over matter.

  And as she gained more and more control over her body, she also started to gain control over her mind. She devised little games for herself, trying to push small objects or move paper. Then she tried lifting things. Then people.

  Experimenting on fellow patients in the psych ward was easy, because no one believed them when they complained about what Annie was doing to them. Pushing was relatively easy, almost reflexive, but she wanted finer control. So she started practicing pinching, twisting, and plucking out single hairs.

  But her psychic instrument was too blunt, despite repeated experimentation, and she found herself ripping out chunks of scalp, instead of individual hairs. But it did seem to be getting stronger, more powerful. The day she got her first period, she’d punched a six-foot-wide hole in the bathroom ceiling.

  Angela was hit by a car during an argument with Annie. The young girl was out on a day pass for her thirteenth birthday. The driver and several witnesses claimed that the older woman had either jumped or fallen backward into the path of the oncoming vehicle.

  Annie had both hands over her face at the time. Even if she hadn’t, at eighty-nine pounds she wasn’t strong enough to shove a grown woman off her feet and send her flying six feet back into traffic.

  * * *

  Even though she’d hated her mother, and wished her dead a thousand times, Annie suffered a near-fatal mental breakdown after the “accident.” She was tortured by conflicted feelings of guilt and self-loathing, and eventually stabbed herself with a homemade shiv six times in the chest and belly. She only survived because she didn’t do a very good job with the knife, and it wasn’t as sharp as it should have been.

  After that little adventure, she’d been transferred over from the psych ward to this place. When she asked why, she got no explanation. She spent the first week systematically testing the boundaries, like a shark that explores an object by biting it.

  She was on lockdown almost every day for one infraction after another, driving the nurses and aides up the wall with her self-destructive and hypersexual antics. Then she met Doctor Lansen.

  Unlike all the other adult men in her life, he seemed to have little or no interest in her body. He was only interested in her mind, and seemed to really listen to what she had to say. He wanted to know all about her, and not in that nosy, judgmental kind of way—like all the other shrinks, who just wanted to put her in a box and stupefy her with pills.

  He looked at her like she was special. Not a freak, but something beautiful.

  At first she hid the full strength of her ability from him, with the deliberate intention of making him feel like he was teaching her, helping her improve. She made it seem as if she couldn’t have done it without him. Like he was the wise father figure, and she was just raw material for him to mold any way he wanted.

  She made him trust her, so that she could nose around in his office without arousing his suspicion. And once she started to see the true shape of what he was planning to do to her, she fell hopelessly in love with him.

  She knew at that moment that she would do anything for him.

  Then Blondie showed up and ruined everything.

  Now Doctor Lansen spent all his time testing Olivia, like he was prepping her to take Annie’s rightful place as his one true love. Like everything that he and Annie had shared was meaningless, forgotten.

  It infuriated her to no end, because Olivia didn’t have a clue. Even if she did have special abilities, she didn’t seem to know about them, and certainly couldn’t control them like Annie could. So why had Doctor Lansen shifted his focus? Why had he abandoned her?

  Was it something Annie did, or said?

  No way of knowing.

  But what she did know was that she had to figure out a way to get the blond interloper out of the picture, and prove to Doctor Lansen that she could give him everything he needed. To remind him that no one could ever love him as much as she did.

&
nbsp; 36

  Eric Lansen stood behind his desk, telephone receiver in one hand and the results of Olivia’s latest tests in the other.

  “Preliminary results on the Dunham girl are off the charts,” he said. “It’s clear that this current involuntary manifestation of her Cortexiphan-induced abilities has been intensified—as well as complicated—by her fluctuating adolescent hormones.

  “At an early age she showed a tendency to cause electrical disturbances and even fires when emotionally agitated, including the documented events on file from Jacksonville. Since the onset of menstruation, however, she has developed—like all our female subjects—a bit of a hair trigger. In each of them the Cortexiphan-affected area of the brain is activated with less provocation, and in response to a wider variety of emotional stimuli. Just as a normal adolescent reacts to ordinary situations with heightened emotional intensity.

  “I feel that this particular manifestation of their abilities may subside when they reach full adulthood.” He paused, then continued. “Maybe ‘subside’ is the wrong word. Perhaps ‘mature.’ Transform into something unprecedented. We have no way of knowing what the final shape of Olivia’s abilities will be. But there’s no question that she is by far one of our most promising test subjects.

  “I’ll need a minimum of three months to...”

  “We’ve given you ample time to provide relevant results.” The voice on the other end of the line cut him off. “You have two more weeks to wrap up your psychological tests, and collect whatever DNA samples and data you need for your continued analysis. At that point, your highest-functioning patients will be released and monitored from a distance, while those who are not capable of sustaining an independent lifestyle will be transferred to the new experimental campus.

  “Allowing you to monopolize any of our Cortexiphan-positive subjects for your own private study is no longer financially viable. We now have far superior facilities available to meet the subjects’ needs, while providing shared access for a variety of researchers from different fields.” The voice softened slightly. “I’m sorry, Eric. This is not negotiable.”