“Tell that to the wrecks you keep in the Ward. Tell that to the kid the docs fried yesterday. Tell that to Billy Jackson.”
Stone resumed pacing. He worked his way around the desk. “The sacrifices are necessary if we’re to control the Change.”
“You mean if you’re to control the Change.”
Stone stood on the other side of the desk, leaning on his cane. He had regained a little of his composure. “I was the one to see the Change coming.”
“Who better,” Jessica said. Stone nodded. He must have been deaf to the irony in her voice. Jessica felt her stomach churning, and perspiration made her clothes stick to her body. Her temper finally boiled over into her voice, “Bullshit!”
Stone’s expression lost its carefully regained composure. “There’s no need for that kind of—”
“You arrogant hypocrite.” Jessica walked up to the other side of the desk. “You think you can dispense power and take it away as if you were some sort of god? You think you’re the chosen one? You think you’re the prophet of the age?”
“I think our conversation is over.” Stone reached over and pressed a button on the intercom. The button clicked, but nothing happened. He pressed it repeatedly.
“Solder is designed to have a low melting point.” Jessica said.
Stone looked up at her. His face had gone ashen. “What do you mean?”
“Electronics don’t take well to abrupt rises in temperature.”
“You? You’re supposed to be—”
“Pharmaceuticals can be cooked too.”
He stared at her. For once he was speechless.
“You gave me all I had. For that little taste of power, I would have done anything for you. Did you ever understand that? Could you? If you only asked, I would have burnt a city to the ground—”
“Jessica…” His voice sounded choked.
“Do you know now how much I hate you for trying to take that away?”
Stone slumped in his chair, shaking his head. He was flushed and sweating. “Please…”
“You’re not going to get your Change. You’re not going to buy your way into messiahhood.” Jessica leaned over the desk. “And the only taste of this power you’ve been hunting is what you’re feeling right now.”
Stone loosened his tie. Behind his glasses his eyes appeared unfocused. “What are you talking about?”
“Do you think every manifestation has to be blatant? You’ve taught me a lot since I ignited my father’s clothes.”
Stone stared at her, blinking slowly. His breaths became deep and ragged.
“Your blood doesn’t need to boil, Stone. All it needs is to have its temperature raise a dozen degrees or so.” Jessica smiled. “I can feel your heart pumping. I can sense the liquid rushing like a periodic avalanche. And with each little pump I’m dumping a little more energy into it. I’ve been doing it a few minutes already—”
Stone’s eyelids drooped. “Stop it,” he muttered. His cane clattered to the floor as he sagged into the chair.
Jessica walked around the desk and leaned over him. “I want you to know one thing.”
He shook his head weakly. “Stop,” he repeated. His face now flushed a beet red.
“Your dream is going to burn,” she said.
8:15 AM
George’s lower body was awash with blood from the hole in his gut. His face was pasty white and lined with pain. His left arm clutched his abdomen as if it had been welded there, and his movements had a jerky, random quality.
It had taken him nearly half an hour to drag himself the ten feet to his desk, and another fifteen minutes to pull himself into his chair. The trail he’d taken was blazed by his own blood and trails of shredded documents.
Occasionally he’d wince and jerk his head. Other times he’d gasp and catch his breath as if someone was kicking him. But most of the time, as he typed at the keyboard of his computer, he wore a sickly grin.
In all that time, no one had come. In that time, Barney never moved. Barney stayed where he had fallen, face-first in a pile of shredded paper, his left arm draped across the shredder, the remains of the phone scattered by his head.
Barney’s gun now lay on the desk in front of George.
He’d been typing one-handed at the keyboard for nearly fifteen minutes before he heard a pounding on the door. On the screen, a question flashed at him, “Format Drive N: (Y|N)?”
George reached for Barney’s gun with his right hand. He pried his left hand away from his gut and pressed the “Y” on the keyboard. He leveled the gun at the door.
The screen responded with, “All Data on Drive N: will be erased. ARE YOU SURE? (Y|N)?”
From outside, George heard someone shout, “This is PRI Security. Whoever is in there, step away from the computer.”
With a shaking hand George pressed “Y” again, smearing blood across the keyboard.
The door flew open and three guards stormed in to his office. “Drop the gun,” one of them said, “Step away from the computer.”
George said, “Fuck you.”
The room erupted in about five seconds of gunfire. The monitor exploded, splinters erupted from the desk, and seven bullets slammed into George’s upper body. When it was over, George slumped out of the chair, sliding to the ground. He hadn’t returned fire once.
One of the guards looked around, at the shredded documents, the blood, and the two corpses, and said, “What a fucking mess.”
8:20 AM
“What are we waiting for?” Macy asked.
She and John had made their way down to a sun-dried drainage ditch. John had led them to just within sight of the airstrip and stopped. He lay on the sloping edge of the ditch, flattening himself as much as possible.
“We’re only going to get one chance at this,” John said. “We’re going to need Allie’s diversion, or, at the least, a gap in their patrols.”
Macy nodded without looking at John. She faced down the ditch, to where it ended. About a hundred feet away was the fence surrounding the airstrip. Below the fence, the ditch ended in a six- foot-tall concrete wall. A corrugated metal pipe about four feet in diameter pierced the wall.
“What about the drainpipe? We wouldn’t have to go through the front door.”
“You do see the camera up there, don’t you?” John said.
Macy nodded, but kept looking down in that direction. “Yeah, but it keeps on panning.”
John turned his head to look at the camera above the pipe’s outflow, mounted on a post on the far side of the fence, slowly panning across the ditch. The way it was angled, they weren’t swept by it. But a few dozen more feet in and they would be.
“What are you getting at?” He asked.
“Does anything cover that drain?”
“Not really, but—”
“So within about ten feet of the wall the camera can’t see you.”
“Yes.”
“How fast can you run?”
John stared at her as she slipped off the side of the ditch and crouched on the flat, concrete-lined bottom. “Come on,” Macy asked him. “I know I can make that distance before the camera pans back.”
John inched down the edge of the ditch a little. “What about your feet?”
“Shut up about my damn feet.” She scowled. “If we make it down there, can we get through?”
“There should be a grating blocking the drain.”
“Something we can get past?”
“Possibly.”
“Good, I’m tired of waiting.” Macy turned away from him, touched the ground in front of her with her hands. The camera ahead panned across the ditch, and once it had passed, she dashed toward the concrete wall at the end of the ditch.
8:25 AM
Allison and Zack had made their way through the basement of the classroom building, leaving a trail of disabled cameras in their wake. The basement was a dark maze of boxes and shelves. The combination of dust and cobwebs reminded Allison too much of her nightmares. When the
y finally reached the opposite end of the basement, Allison was glad to be out of it.
The stairway they took led back up into the classroom building. On the ground floor, a short hall and two doors lead off from the stairwell. One led back inside the building, and the other looked outside, onto a part of the Prometheus complex that Allison had never seen before.
They both inched up toward the door, and Allison kept an eye out for the ubiquitous surveillance cameras. Beyond the chicken-wire glass in the door, Allison saw a cluster of buildings interchangeable with every office park that she had ever seen.
If she hadn’t lost her sense of direction— which would have been all too possible in the maze of the basement— the student area was all behind them now.
Zack nodded toward the door, at the buildings beyond the glass. “There it is,” he whispered. It was the first time he had spoken since they’d slipped out of the bathroom. The sound scared her, and made her think of microphones in the walls.
She told herself to calm down. Her plan, such as it was, assumed that security would be closing in on them by now. Disabling the cameras was only a delaying tactic. She knew that it was likely that, by the time they got to their destination, security would know exactly where they were. They’d certainly would shortly afterwards.
What Allison hoped was that, by then, security would be worried about other things.
Allison looked out the window, trying to see what Zack was talking about. A small courtyard sat behind the classroom building. She saw a few benches and plants, but it all had the sparse look of an area that no one really used.
“Where?” she finally whispered.
“Ahead and to the left,” Zack said. “That building to our immediate left is a wing off the medical building. See the walkway?”
Allison nodded. Now that Zack had pointed it out, Allison could see that the neighboring building was the same place they’d tested her, and the same place where Jessica had gone nuts. She was just seeing it from a different angle. From the second floor emerged a walkway that led to another building, further back.
“The Ward’s at the other end of that walkway.”
The building that Zack talked about didn’t look that much different than any of the other buildings. If she didn’t know any better, Allison might have thought it was another classroom building. It was all the same anonymous concrete and glass.
She still couldn’t see where the cameras were, though she knew that there had to be at least one covering the courtyard in front of them. She was about to ask Zack about it, when she heard a door close above them.
They both looked back toward the stairs. Footsteps echoed down the stairwell toward them. They came at a near running pace.
“Shit,” Zack said. “I think the gig’s up.”
Allison darted toward the stairs, out of Zack’s disruptive sphere of influence, and felt out with her teek. She didn’t feel up the stairs, where the sounds came from. Instead, she felt out through the door back into the building. If security was closing on them, that was where they should be coming from.
They were there, on either side of the door. She could feel bone like a petrified spider web, fibrous muscle, and the crystalline solidity of the weapons they carried. Four or five men, waiting to push through and grab them. Allison’s heart pounded in her ears.
“Move,” She told Zack in a harsh whisper. As she did, she wrapped her teek around the door. She had to delay them, if only for a few seconds. Her mind slipped through the skin of the door and found the mechanical skeleton of the latch holding the door shut. To her teek, the inside of the door, next to the frame, was a tightly fitted collection of levers attached to a single tongue of metal that held the door in place.
Allison found the lever that led to the handle on the opposite side of the door and, with all the force her teek could muster, pushed it in a direction it wasn’t designed to go. The sound of warped metal echoed through the stairwell, and to her teek sense, the tightly-fitted machinery of the lock had turned into an immobile lump of metal.
“Move,” she repeated as she turned to run after Zack.
The footsteps above them closed, and as she turned she could hear the guards on the other side of the broken door trying to force it open against its frozen lock.
Zack was already in the courtyard by the time Allison reached the door. She ran through it before it shut completely.
Somewhere, a siren began to wail.
As she ran to keep up with Zack, she remembered what had happened to Jessica. Somewhere, above them— and in a moment, behind them— there’d be a sniper with a tranquilizer gun.
Her teek’s response to the thought was automatic. She wrapped herself, and the dead spot containing Zack, with her teek. The effort of covering such a wide area spawned a pressure behind her eyes. She had done it before she had fully emerged from the door, and before she could reconsider the effectiveness of spreading herself so thin, she felt something pierce the skin of her teek field.
Like when Macy had tossed a cue ball at her, Allison could feel an object splash into the field, and her brain felt the ripples as the field soaked up the energy. It hadn’t been going as fast as a bullet, but it was fast enough to be painful.
Another invader tried to slice through her over-extended field, tearing through her mind like a ghostly mosquito. Then another. And another.
The impacts became painful, another blow to her skull trying to prevent her concentration. She had to screw her eyes shut and run following her teek sense alone. She could follow Zack that way, he was a fuzzy blind blotch right in front of her, a ragged hole in her teek that otherwise blanketed them like a twenty-foot-diameter umbrella. The sheer wealth of sensory feedback was nearly as bad a blow as the needles firing into her teek. She could feel the whole universe wrapped around her.
Except for that hole where Zack was. She could feel nothing inside it. Worse, as they ran, the angle of the shots began to shift to focus ahead of her, toward him. Not only was it further away and harder for her to teek, but if a dart punched through into the dead area—
The snipers confirmed her worst fears. She felt a rapid succession of three shots. The first shot slammed into her awareness above her. Even with her eyes closed, she could feel it plunge in and stop, hovering a few inches above her, as if it had been fired into a vat of molasses. It was another hard mote of matter hovering around her, like the other half-dozen she’d stopped as they ran.
The second plunged between her and Zack. It was further away, and the impact felt even worse, more like a bullet than a compressed-air dart. This one took even longer to stop, descending to eye level before stopping between them. As it slowed, the dart briefly brushed into the dead area around Zack. Even though it was on the fringes of the area, it was as if the dart ceased to exist to her teek, and she didn’t feel it again until it tumbled to the ground at her feet.
She was running over the lost dart when the third one pierced her teek about fifteen feet in front of her. Even though it was primarily mental, the impact knocked the breath from her. If the last impact had been like a bullet, this one was like a small cannonball. It blew through the grip of her teek, and shot through the dead area around Zack.
Then, suddenly, she had run into the blind area and lost all sense of her teek. She collided with Zack, and they both tumbled to the ground next to the Ward building. The sirens sounded louder than ever.
TWENTY NINE
NAVARRO COUNTY, TX: Wednesday November 3, 1999
8:30 AM
Macy’s limping sprint ended with a dive into the drainage pipe, just as the camera began sweeping the ditch in its return pan. She didn’t land well, sliding into the pipe on her shoulder, and John winced as he watched her dive in.
John leaned forward and called, in a harsh stage whisper, “Are you all right?”
In response, Macy waved at him from her spot on the ground. She scrambled to her feet, crouched in the pipe and out of view of the camera. She duck walked backwards, near
ly falling with her unsteady gait, and waved John forward.
John slid off the slope where he’d been presenting as low a profile as possible, and, in imitation of Macy, crouched in the bottom of the drainage ditch. He wiped his palms on his jeans as he locked his eyes upon the camera.
Macy kept gesturing frantically.
John waited, breathing deeply and wiping his hands. Then, as the camera panned past the ditch in front of him, he ran. He didn’t limp, as Macy had, but he was older and he couldn’t match her for speed. He kept his gaze on the camera.
By the halfway point, John’s cheeks were puffed with effort, his face was flushed, and the camera was already on its return pan. He sucked in breath and accelerated.
Macy crouched in the pipe waving him forward and mouthing encouragement to him.
When the camera began to pan over the ditch, John was fifteen feet away from the mouth of the pipe. John dived forward, toward the cover of the concrete wall ahead of him. He hit and rolled on the concrete floor of the ditch, tearing his clothes and abrading the right side of his body.
He crawled to the concrete wall next to the pipe, and leaned against it. Macy came to the mouth of the pipe and said, “You made it.”
John nodded and wiped his forehead. His hand came away smeared with equal parts blood and sweat. “I’m not in shape to do things like this anymore.”
“You beat the camera?”
John nodded again, still catching his breath. “Pretty sure I ducked out of sight in time. Let me get into the pipe.” He began pushing himself up the wall.
Macy put a hand on his shoulder, “Maybe you should give yourself a minute to rest. You trashed yourself pretty good.”
“I don’t think we have a minute,” John said.
As if in response to John’s words, a distant klaxon sounded. Both of them froze in response. “For us?” Macy asked, the emotion leaking out of her voice.
“I don’t think so,” John said. “That may be Allie’s diversion.” He pushed himself up and entered the pipe. “We better move.”
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