Tremor

by Patrick Carman

  Clooger’s string of profanity sent Faith into peels of laughter as Dylan got a hand on each of Clooger’s shoulders and pulled him back.

  “Cloog,” Dylan said. “Calm down. It’s us—Hawk and Faith and Dylan—and that pain in your ear? It’s about to get a little weird.”

  “Weird how?” Clooger asked, freezing in place. He knew Hawk well enough to understand that as bad is this was, it could actually get worse.

  “Lube him up!” Faith yelled, still laughing.

  Hawk squirted gel all over the side of Clooger’s head, which effectively numbed everything from his cranium to his mouth, because Hawk had a terrible aim. Clooger was practically drowning in numbing agent.

  “I’m having a nightmare,” Clooger said. “That’s what this is. It’s not real.”

  But it was real, and when the wire started moving toward his eardrum, Clooger went for the door. It was the one aspect of the HumGee’s fail-safe system that Hawk had never quite gotten to; and before anyone could stop him, Clooger had his door open, trying to roll out onto the empty freeway. While Dylan was being pulled clean up over the front seat and Hawk was on the floorboard wrapped around Clooger’s legs, Faith pressed her finger and thumb against her sound ring and spoke.

  “Clooger, this is your captain speaking. We’ve reached a cruising speed of 212 miles per hour. If you jump out now, we’ll need to change your name to Road Kill. Now stop acting like a lunatic and close the door.”

  She delivered the message in a calm, Captain Kirk voice that caught Clooger’s attention. He closed the door.

  “I’m losing my mind,” he said, but his face was pretty well numbed up, so it came out something closer to “Imoozingmimed,” which sent Faith into another fit of laughter. She’d unbuckled her safety belt and rolled down on the floor of the backseat.

  Hawk bolted from the floor, where he’d gotten wedged between the gas pedal and the brake, and tapped out an instruction on the Tablet duct taped to the dashboard, and the HumGee slowed rapidly. A few seconds later, they were stopped.

  “I think that went rather well,” Hawk said, his hair disheveled and wild on top of his small head. He looked in the backseat. “Where’s Faith?”

  They all got out and explained the situation to Clooger as he tried to eat half a protein bar he’d found on the floor under the steering wheel. His face was quickly coming back online, but the food was still falling out of his mouth as fast as he could put it in. Once he understood what had happened and tried out the new gadgetry a few times, he was in a fine mood, even excited.

  “I don’t approve of your methods, but the tech is, as usual, very strong.”

  It was sloshy sounding, but Hawk understood him just fine.

  “Thank you, Clooger. That means a lot. And thank you for not killing me.”

  “So now you’ll know everything I know,” Dylan said, stretching his arms over his head. He was feeling a little twang in his right shoulder from the struggle with Clooger. “If I get into any good intel, I’ll fire away.”

  “Don’t be too hasty with it,” Hawk said. “If they see you clutching your ear and talking to yourself, they’ll be smart enough to figure this out. Only use the sound ring if you’re sure you can get away with it. And listen, everyone; this system isn’t for goofing around. Everything you say when you press in we can all hear. Let’s keep it serious when we’re on the ring.”

  “Affirmative,” Clooger said. His face was back; he was feeling good.

  “You’re talking that way again,” Hawk reminded him, then turned to Faith and Dylan. “He goes all military commando in the field sometimes. It’s weird.”

  “I like it,” Faith admitted. “Very direct, straightforward. No confusion.”

  Clooger nodded. “Thank you, Faith. We’re going to get along fine.”

  Everyone became quiet, looking up into the sky or off into the woods at the edge of the road. There was a chill in the air, the first signs of winter moving in. It was too dark to see Mammoth Mountain on the horizon line, but they could feel it. Mountains, the big ones, were like that. Like the ocean or the Grand Canyon, their massiveness felt like a weight in the air all around them.

  It was late, running on midnight, and the stars were thick and layered across the open sky.

  “I guess we’re stuck with one another for real,” Faith said. “I can’t even get you three out of my head.”

  “Welcome to the madhouse,” Dylan said, smiling as they all got into the HumGee and started off again.

  An hour later they left the main road and headed into the wild, Faith and Dylan leaning close to each other in the backseat, stealing kisses as they moved quietly along forested dirt roads.

  “I wish we were alone,” Faith said as quietly and closely into Dylan’s ear as she could.

  Dylan was in a quiet mood, a little distant, as if he was already halfway gone to someplace she couldn’t go.

  “Where are you?” Faith asked quietly, closely.

  She searched Dylan’s eyes for where his mind had gone off to but found no answer. He looked out the window at the passing shadows, and Faith kissed the soft skin on his neck. Dylan pulled her close as the HumGee sped up, passing 220 miles per hour on a long expanse of open road.

  Not long after that, on the far edge of an abandoned stretch of Colorado farmland, Clooger stopped the HumGee.

  “Close enough. Let’s get some sleep.”

  They had arrived within a few miles of the prison, and with Clooger snoring and Hawk curled up like a kitten at his side, Faith and Dylan held on to each other. Sleep took them all in rapid succession; only Dylan stayed awake.

  Faith knew before she’d opened her eyes at the coming of dawn that something had changed. She felt a lonely weight in her chest as her arm moved around, searching for the soft leather. The jacket was there, but the boy who owned it was not.

  Dylan was gone.

  part two

  PRISON BOUND

  Chapter 6

  Hey, Dad, How’s It Hangin’?

  Before Gretchen was the wife of Andre Quinn, she was a devoted follower of Hotspur Chance, the father of the modern State movement. She had been at the top of her class at Harvard before choosing Stanford to work on a double PhD. It had been there, in the chemistry lab, where she had taken the same test Meredith had taken on her Tablet, the one that asked its participants to concentrate and move objects with their minds.

  Two days later she stood before a table, summoned into the Arizona desert by Hotspur Chance himself. She was struck at once by the clearness of his eyes, the way he zeroed in on her as if no one else existed. He had an intelligent smile that made her want, more than anything, to please him. This was the rare breed of man who attracted her: older, ambitious, driven, and against all odds smarter than she was.

  Unlike Meredith, Gretchen encountered a lot of trouble with the color red. No matter how hard she concentrated on the apple, it didn’t budge. Everything else moved under the power of her mind, which she found both intoxicating and mysterious. But the red apple might as well have been hammered through with a tent spike. Her thoughts, no matter how focused, had no effect on forbidden fruit. Gretchen’s intuition told her she had badly failed to come out on the winning end of whatever game she was playing.

  “You’re a special one,” Hotspur said, and she turned away, feeling as if he’d slapped her across the face with his sarcasm.

  Her gaze drifted away from the table and landed on Chance’s assistant. Andre Quinn was more like a lapdog than a high-level insider, at least that’s how she felt about him. He was always smiling at her, telling her to remain calm, everything would be fine.

  I have PhDs in astrophysics and biology, she thought then. You don’t need to worry about me. Worry about yourself.

  A month later Gretchen had mastered red just fine and moved up in Hotspur Chance’s pecking order. She was his star student, the one, as he liked to say. No matter how much she prodded, he wouldn’t reveal anything else about her unique condition
.

  Gretchen also discovered, to her surprise, that Andre Quinn was not only a match for her intellect; he was a lot smarter than she was. There was nothing she knew that he didn’t understand in a deeper way. Psychology, biology, physics, literature—he was a genius nearly on the same level as Hotspur Chance himself. At first this had infuriated her, but over time she came to find Andre almost as enthralling as Chance.

  Gretchen had fallen into a routine of playing chess in the early afternoon with Andre, moving the pieces with their minds as they talked about the States, Hotspur’s plans, genome sequencing. Andre routinely went easy on her until she insisted he try his very hardest. The results were swift and merciless: Gretchen was no match for Andre’s brilliance.

  It was then that she discovered her second pulse, because losing badly, especially at an intellectually driven game, made Gretchen see red. She got up from the table, enraged with herself, and walked out of the room. The hallways at the compound were lined with slick, painted walls of concrete. She balled up a fist, unable to accept the fact that five years of postgraduate work had done nothing to make her the equal of a natural-born genius. When life was unfair, it was fine as long as it was to her advantage. When it was not, Gretchen could barely stand the unjust nature of the world around her.

  She turned to the wall, reeled back, and punched as hard as she could. Midway through this event her brain was loath to remind her: This is going to hurt. It’s going to break your hand. You’re a fool for doing this. But Gretchen didn’t care. She’d expected her hand to flare with pain on impact. She wanted to feel the sharp blow all the way up to her elbow. When it didn’t happen, Gretchen only grew angrier. She punched again, harder this time, and, looking at her hand, felt confused and frustrated beyond anything she’d ever felt (because confusion was a feeling that had always sent her into a tailspin). She went into a full-fledged rage. She flung herself against the walls, back and forth, harder and harder, until the paint started to crack.

  When she lay on the concrete floor, sobbing and out of breath, she heard footsteps clicking down the corridor. They were far away, or at least they seemed to be. When she opened her eyes and sat up, Hotspur was crouching at eye level.

  “I told you. You’re special. You’re the first.”

  “The first what?” Gretchen asked. She was, surprisingly, still thinking about the sting of losing to Andre.

  Hotspur reached out and took her hand, pressed his fingers against the soft inside of her wrist, and closed his eyes. Gretchen felt her breath catch as he pressed down, the touch of his hand catching on something hidden.

  “You have a second pulse.”

  Hotspur beamed as Andre came into view; and, looking at the man who had defeated her in chess, she understood that she had bested Andre in something much more important. She had something—something big—that Andre would never have.

  “The rage will settle down, but it will take some work,” Hotspur said, standing as he raised her to her feet. “Come with me.”

  He had developed a visual stimulus he called a Wire Code. He was still experimenting with the technology, but he felt sure a Wire Code would speed the process of bringing her emotions under control. As they walked away, Hotspur holding her at the elbow as if she were a doddering old fool, Andre returned to the room with the chessboard. He flung the pieces off the table with his mind and wondered if he would ever come to find a second pulse of his own.

  Time and effort would show him that the answer was no.

  It was, in the simplest view of things, the reason why Gretchen found herself able to be with a man who was smarter than she was. The fact that Andre was an Intel began to bother her less and less. She could put him through a wall whenever she chose, and he would cease to exist. He could not do the same to her. This was a variety of unfairness she liked in the universe, the kind that fell in her favor. But the unfairness could work both ways, and this seemed to be an especially strong pattern in her relationship with Andre. He had absolutely no romantic interest in Gretchen. It was as if her second pulse was an emotional wall around her, one he had no interest in scaling or knocking down.

  First it was the brains, now it was his heart. This man had a way of always making her feel inferior.

  And then Meredith arrived on the scene, a strikingly beautiful, older, and vastly more confident mature woman. From the moment Andre walked into the room with her, his hand on the small of Meredith’s back, Gretchen knew. No matter how useless this new creature was, no matter how stupid or weak, it wouldn’t matter. By virtue of no great skill or intellect as far as Gretchen could see, Meredith was the master and commander of Andre’s heart from the moment he’d laid eyes on her. And she never let Gretchen forget it. Seven or eight times a day, sometimes more, Gretchen would fantasize about slamming Meredith’s stunning face into the tile floor of the lab. She had to be careful about these thoughts, because fantasy and reality were but a hair’s length apart when you could move things with your mind.

  Wire Codes at lights-out helped settle Gretchen down; but the next morning she’d wake up, see Andre and Meredith walking in the desert outside, and her hatred would bubble up again. What she wouldn’t have given for a piece of space junk to fall from the sky and flatten the wicked witch who’d shown up in her domain.

  Of course Meredith never reached her potential. She was clever, but no genius. She never showed any sign of a second pulse or, for that matter, much of an aptitude with a single pulse. The most she ever moved with her mind was a garbage can full of bricks. Or was it a car? No matter. It was inconsequential. In the end, possibly because she was such a catastrophic failure, Meredith abandoned them all.

  This was a turn of events that pleased Gretchen very much.

  “Go to him,” Hotspur had said, and though Gretchen secretly desired Hotspur even more than Andre, she did see the logic in the precise timing of reuniting with her husband.

  She was pregnant with twins almost immediately, the course of her life set like a block of cement.

  She would have been wise to examine carefully all that had happened. Could Meredith have been with child when she left? And if so, how might that child be a problem down the line? Could Meredith have been smarter, more powerful than she let on? Was she really so weak, this woman who held the key to Andre’s heart?

  But Gretchen never thought about any of those things. Instead, as her belly swelled with the weight of not one but two second pulses, all she ever thought about was the fact that she’d won.

  Years later, with their plans altered and Hotspur gone, Gretchen never forgot what those early rages felt like. She missed the pure energy they gave her, a feeling that was harder and harder to come by. She hadn’t used a Wire Code since Hotspur Chance was still in the picture, a long time ago. And besides, she’d never believed they’d moved the dial on her emotions. Wire Codes were a fun little diversion, but no synthetic mind drug was taking credit for work she’d done herself. Gretchen was in charge of her own emotions, always was, always would be. She did find it humorous that the technology had leaked out into the abandoned world of youth culture. Let them have a little fun, she concluded.

  She looked across the training facility and saw Wade and Clara laughing, and felt her mind flare with the idea of knocking their heads together. Not that it would matter if she did. Her children were second pulses; she couldn’t harm them, and they couldn’t harm her. It was a balance of power that took care of itself.

  Why couldn’t they take things more seriously? They were, without question in Gretchen’s mind, the two most gifted children in the world. But they were undisciplined and arrogant and, worst of all, blatantly disobedient.

  “This isn’t a track meet,” she yelled across the facility. “Get serious.”

  Wade Quinn was sick and tired of living inside a maximum-security prison. It was eating away at his soul.

  “What’s the rush? We have exactly nothing else to do today, and this won’t take nearly that long.”

  “Get
in position,” Gretchen said. “Maybe you have all day, but I don’t.”

  Wade and Clara were restless; she knew that. She knew what boredom could do, how it could make you lazy and less alert. Training was the only way to keep them focused and ready.

  Gretchen tapped out a connection on her Tablet and gave the order. “Move in.”

  She had two units of single pulses, one with eight and the other with ten members. One of the units was stationed in the gun turrets, keeping an eye on the outside world. The other unit advanced on Wade and Clara with an array of weaponry. They couldn’t use bullets inside the training grounds: too much risk of single pulses killing themselves with ricocheting or wild shots. It had already happened twice, and Andre had put a strict rule in place: no more dead pulses, guns were off-limits. At first the unit of single pulses hated the new rule that required them to throw and not shoot, but they got used to it. And they were getting more and more creative as the weeks went by.

  “Better get ready,” one of them said. “We got new tricks.”

  Clara rolled her eyes—Yeah, right; these guys always had some new deception they were trying out, but it never amounted to a hill of beans in the end. There was nothing they could do that Wade and Clara couldn’t deal with. She took a good look at her competition. Throwing stars, shot puts, crossbows, ropes, a flamethrower—these guys were loaded for a real confrontation.