Teek

by S. Andrew Swann

  Allison felt dizzy and realized she was still holding her breath. She gasped, and when she started breathing, her coughing rivaled Zack’s.

  Tear gas? Allison thought. Lethal force? They’re terrified of us. A small part of her mind, which sounded like Chuck, said, why shouldn’t they be?

  Allison began to realize just how irrevocable this all was. Even if she wanted to surrender, there was no way she could disarm herself. Right now, she was supposedly drugged, so Prometheus security wouldn’t even be able to trust that anymore. To these men, she would always be a threat.

  “Move,” Zack said in a hoarse voice.

  Allison nodded and whispered back, “Stay behind me.” Her own voice sounded raw. “Watch my back.”

  Allison headed around the corner and toward the door to the secure part of the ward. The door itself was emblazoned with all sorts of security warnings. “Yellow Access Only.”

  The orderly had seen them coming, and he was aiming some sort of weapon at them through the glass. There was a speaker mounted next to the window and it activated in a burst of static. “Now, why don’t you just stay there and wait for the guards. We don’t want anyone to be hurt here.”

  The gun he held wasn’t a tranquilizer gun, Allison could see that. It was a real firearm, something designed to kill people. The orderly was red-faced and sweating. He looked terrified. However, his possession of that weapon made her lose whatever sympathy she had for him.

  She wrapped her teek around the gun, a familiar sensation by now, and yanked it out of his hands. Unlike Barney, his grip wasn’t either firm or steady enough for the maneuver to injure him. He simply said, “Oh fuck,” as the gun flew out of his hands to slam into the glass shield separating him from Allison. The window turned opaque with cracks as it bowed out around the gun.

  Allison kept pulling the gun, and the window made a sound like someone grinding sand into concrete. The window continued deforming in a convex bulge toward her. The only thing keeping the window an intact sheet was the chicken wire embedded in it.

  Then the window stopped resisting her pull on the gun, and it flowered out around the bulge, spraying fragments of safety glass everywhere. Allison let the gun go and it skittered on the ground behind her. The orderly stared at her, aghast, through the hole in the window.

  “Get out of here,” Allison told him, her voice raw with gas and anger.

  The man ran.

  8:55 AM

  “We should wait for her,” Sean said. He faced Oscar and Thad in the nearly-empty classroom building. “She’ll know what to do.”

  Thad looked out the window of the lounge. His voice was heavy with irony, “I’m sure she would, Sean.”

  Oscar shook his head slowly. “Security here is panicked—”

  “I can see that when I look out the window,” Thad said. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “What did you say, Thad?” Sean asked. The others ignored him.

  “There’s no need to act like an asshole, Thad.”

  “Sorry,” Thad said. He continued looking at the window. The courtyard was normally filled with students at this hour, and the classroom building was normally a hive of activity. But the sirens had emptied the grounds as if it was an air raid. Occasionally, a group of guards would run across the compound, toward the medical building. “I would like some specific information.”

  “I was going to tell you. From what I picked up, there seems to be at least two students loose in the medical complex.”

  Thad cursed and turned around. “That does seem to be where everyone’s running. Could it be people from the ward?”

  Oscar shrugged. “Do they have Class IIIs in the ward?”

  “It is her.”

  A disturbed expression crossed Sean’s face. “Does this mean Jessica isn’t coming today?”

  Oscar looked downcast and Thad nodded. “I’m sorry Sean, it seems that way.” Under his breath, so Sean wouldn’t read his lip movement, he added, “You poor love-struck bastard.”

  “Now what?” Oscar asked.

  “She isn’t coming,” Sean said, his odd accent growing thicker as he spoke.

  Thad paced. “We have a lot of problems. From guilt by association all the way down to the fact that Prometheus security is probably going to make life here rather unpleasant after an incident like this.”

  Oscar nodded. “Don’t I know it? But what the hell can we do about it?”

  “We can get while the getting’s good.”

  Oscar stared at him.

  Sean shook his head. “Get what?”

  “Security’s in chaos right now,” Thad said. “I don’t think electronic surveillance away from the medical center counts for much right now.” He reached out and grabbed Oscar’s arm. “And with our telepath here, we can avoid the human guards.”

  “Just like that?” Oscar asked.

  Thad shrugged. “We have an opportunity here, we take it or we don’t.” He tilted his head toward the dormitories. “We aren’t likely to get a better one.”

  “You want us to leave?” Sean asked.

  Thad looked up at the large man and said, “You don’t have to come.”

  “You’d abandon Sean here?” Oscar said, distaste coating his voice.

  “If he chooses to stay and wait for Jess, we aren’t abandoning him.”

  “You’re a cold bastard.”

  Thad shrugged. “I’m a pragmatist. I want him to come— I’ve always wanted to try our good luck charm in Vegas— but the time to leave is now. I’m not going to spend the time fighting about who’s going.”

  Sean looked downcast. “Jess isn’t coming, is she, Oscar?”

  Oscar sighed, reached up, and put a hand on Sean’s shoulder. “I’m afraid not, buddy.”

  Sean stared at Thad with moist eyes and said, “Let’s go.”

  THIRTY

  NAVARRO COUNTY, TX: Wednesday November 3, 1999

  9:00 AM

  Fred led a security detail following Jessica Mason. It took them nearly half an hour for them to reach the servers in the basement of the research building. It wasn’t because Jessica was hard to follow. The swath of destruction she wrought through the corridors of Prometheus blazed an unmistakable trail. What ate up time was the caution Fred enforced on the three-man team he’d appropriated.

  Even Fred seemed to chafe against the restraint he placed on the team, but the need for such restraint was graphic and undeniable. The corridors they followed were etched by charred calligraphy, marking the location of every wire that had been buried within the walls. Twice they came upon guards that had been less cautious than they were being, piles of corpses with burnt hands and livid necks.

  At the second pile of corpses, Fred had told his team, “Our only chance against this is surprise. We have to use overwhelming force before the target is aware of us.”

  The team had nodded in unison.

  When they reached the servers, a choking white haze had migrated from the computer room to flood the entire basement. With the reduction in visibility, the team had to slow even further.

  Fred shot questions into the pseudo-phone that connected him to what was left of Prometheus security. After a few moments of heated debate over the phone, he called his team together at the opposite end of the computer room.

  “Here is the news,” Fred told his team. “We’re authorized to use all necessary force to secure this situation. The sabotage here has taken down the whole network, including surveillance, but we have the rogue elements contained in the medical complex. Both buildings are surrounded and contained.” He nodded at all of them. “Since the target is not leaving the building, we’re going to do slow sweeps, by the numbers. If you see the target, you take it out.”

  Fred’s team nodded.

  Then one of them opened the exit and covered the stairwell beyond. Carefully, one by one, the team slipped up the stairs, after the target.

  9:05 AM

  The Ward made Allison sick. Ten minutes of throwing open d
oors told her that no distraction would come from here. Even Zack was left speechless. What Allison had expected— and from Zack’s reaction, what he had expected— was to find something akin to political prisoners. The forced normalcy of Prometheus elsewhere led her to expect to find regular kids here, dissenting, maybe disturbed like the twins she had seen in the film, perhaps even violent—

  But not like what they found.

  The doors, all of them, had shutters over the windows. Each door was stenciled with a case number, no names. Each of them had electronic locks that Allison had to force with her teek. Each of them opened on the same scene.

  The rooms in the Ward were large, their size necessary to contain life-support and monitoring equipment. Central to each room was the bed, and strapped to the bed was an immobile figure. Some of the kids were nearly cadaverous, some appeared to be sleeping, while some only stared at the ceiling when Allison pushed the doors open.

  The two of them slammed open door after door, only to see the same thing. Boys, girls, catatonic, feeding through tubes, breathing through tubes. It was like an intensive care ward, but Allison had the awful suspicion that none of these kids had anything wrong with them— at least not before they’d come here.

  Only one of them spoke to her. When Allison opened the seventh door, the boy on the bed actually focused on her for a few seconds. “I know you,” he whispered. “Pretty… Pretty…”

  Allison raced to his side, but he had degraded into mumbling something incomprehensible. She looked at the kid’s face, which had a wild expression on it, and felt an incredible feeling of hopelessness.

  She looked up at Zack, who stood in the doorway, staring at the babbling kid, and said, “It’s like all they are to them is a life-support system for a brain.”

  Allison shuddered.

  “Let’s get out,” Zack said. “We can’t do any good here.”

  She didn’t want to leave, but she looked down and saw that the kid wasn’t even aware of her presence anymore. She didn’t realize she was holding the kid’s hand until she let it go.

  After that, she let Zack lead her through the halls. “I’m sorry,” Allison said to him.

  “This isn’t your fault,” Zack said.

  “It was my idea.” Allison grimaced. She felt disgusted and naïve. “I was expecting some sort of prison revolt. Just open the doors and these kids would, would…” Her voice was choked off by a sob. It had been a stupid romantic notion, and now she and Zack were trapped here because of it.

  She stopped moving, and Zack put his arm around her to lead her along. For once, the touch didn’t feel uncomfortable. “Come on, Allie, you had no idea of the shape these kids were in.” Zack sucked in a breath. “I certainly didn’t.”

  They stopped in front of another secure door. Next to it was another glassed-in office, but this time there wasn’t an orderly. “Hold on,” Zack said. “I’ll open this one.”

  Allison nodded as Zack slipped into the little guard office. It was obvious now that this security set-up, unlike a prison or a mental hospital, was more interested in keeping people out than keeping them in. If she had given herself at least one more day to think, she would have realized how pointless ducking into the Ward would be.

  “How do we get out of this?” she asked. All the initiative had drained out of her. She had no idea what to do next.

  “We’re doing pretty well improv,” Zack said from inside the little glassed-in office. “Good news. From the monitors in here, their security system seems to be down.”

  “Could that just be the office there?” Allison said, walking up to the glass and staring at Zack through the chicken wire.

  “The camera down the hall, is the light on? Is it moving?”

  Allison glanced down the hall at the camera that should have been panning down the hall. It was frozen and its little LED indicators were dark. “It seems dead.”

  “Luck’s on our side. No guards since the tear gas. That’s why. No clue where in the building we are.” Zack looked around the little office and picked up a Styrofoam cup and sniffed it. “I guess they evacuated people quick.”

  “We don’t have time,” Allison said. “They know what floor we’re on at the least.”

  Zack looked up at her.

  “The orderly was the last to see us, and they must have flooded all the stairwells with gas—”

  Zack frowned. “And shut off the elevators. They’re trying to contain us, drive us somewhere.” He flipped a switch to buzz open the door in front of them. Allison pulled it open and held it for him as he made his way out of the office.

  “There’s one direction I bet they haven’t surrounded,” Zack said.

  Allison got his meaning immediately. “You think you can?”

  Zack shrugged. “Worth a try when we get to a window.”

  “You’re sure you’ve recovered from—”

  “Who knows, let’s move.” Zack stepped through the door.

  If Zack could manage it, without getting shot, levitation was probably the only clean shot they had for getting to the airstrip. At least Zack’s shot. Allison still couldn’t imagine teeking herself airborne and surviving. She could still vividly remember the feeling of dizziness and vertigo right before she had slammed into the garage.

  But it had to be possible, if Zack could do it—

  What happened when she tried to levitate herself? She gripped herself with her teek and…

  Realization struck her. Allison muttered, “I’m a fool.” She slipped out the door after Zack. As she did, she called after him, “Hey, I think I’ve figured out the problem…” She trailed off.

  Zack stood in the center of the corridor, staring down toward where the walkway connected the Ward to the medical building. Zack backed toward her, away from the walkway.

  Allison realized that she heard more than one siren now. Additional wails rose against the klaxons that had accompanied them ever since they’d left the classroom building. These new sirens were closer, more piercing, and coming from beyond the walkway.

  “Oh shit,” Zack whispered.

  9:10 AM

  Jessica Mason walked through the research building, leaving flames in her wake. No more guards stepped into her path, the building had been evacuated ahead of her. She was only accompanied by the sound of fire alarms and the crackle of the flames themselves.

  Pain also accompanied her. There wasn’t only the searing within her skull. Now every muscle in her body was torn by cramps that felt as if they severed her limbs. She was sweating and wracked with fever. Somehow, she managed to continue walking.

  She felt disconnected, watching from some tiny flare of identity inside herself. The pain didn’t reach her anymore. Instead, the pain seemed to feed her power.

  Jessica wasn’t thinking any more. The destruction was supposed to be a release for her anger. Instead, every time she destroyed something, it heightened her fury at Stone, at Prometheus, at everything.

  She’d balled herself up into her anger, and now she lashed out at everything around her. All the craft, all the subtlety, all the control, eroded away. She no longer disabled the sprinklers. She simply fed the heat of her anger into random objects as she passed.

  Couches erupted into black synthetic smoke. Bottles of chemicals exploded into corrosive clouds. Electronic equipment discolored and sparked. Carpeting melted and charred in her path. By the time she reached the second floor of the building, her attacks were completely reasonless and random.

  Then she turned a corner and saw him.

  Zachary Lanagan.

  They stared at each other across the walkway. Both frozen in recognition.

  He backed away, and Jessica stepped forward. Seeing him— the person who had derided her, mocked her attempts to control what was happening, someone who held in disdain everything she had just lost— it fed the rage within her.

  Jessica pushed everything she had at him, every flare of emotion fed into her power. She willed an inferno and sensed…
/>   Nothing.

  The damn interference.

  Suddenly, now that her anger again had a focus, her mind began to sharpen, to work again, through the pain. She felt like part of the world again. Heat blew against her from behind, where parts of the medical lab burned. White smoke scoured her nose and throat with the scent of charred foam rubber. Her skin was flushed, the sweat stinging where her flesh had been seared. Between her and Zack, the air in the walkway rippled in the morning light, casting shadows like water.

  Above all were the twinned sensations in her heart, feverish agony and insatiable anger.

  Zack might have sensed something, because he scrambled back from her. Someone was behind him—

  Her.

  There she was, the avatar of everything she had lost, Jessica’s replacement. Allison Boyle.

  Allison called something down the walkway at her, “Wait! We aren’t the enemy.”

  Jessica laughed; the sound strangled and tasting of soot. Everyone was her enemy.

  She couldn’t get past the interference, but the fire could. Damn them both, Jessica thought as she focused her mind above the two of them, around them.

  “We can get out of this together,” Allison said. Jessica tuned out the voice and closed her eyes, concentrating on the upper surface of the ceiling suspended above their heads. “Please? We can get past all of them.”

  It was hard to do this at distance, especially with tiles that weren’t supposed to burn, but she felt the tiles themselves begin to char, then smolder, sucking oxygen through the crawl space between the tiles and the ceiling. The temperature rose, the flames feeding themselves now with little help from her power, above the smoke detectors and the sprinklers, immune.

  “We can help each other—”

  Jessica could sense what was about to happen, so she opened her eyes. She didn’t look at Allison, or Zack. She looked at the ceiling above them. She smiled as she saw the wisps of white smoke drifting down from around the metal framework. Then the smoke was sucked back into the ceiling. One or two tiles were actually blown upward, as the fire tried to feed its voracious appetite for oxygen.