Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

“You’ll enjoy seeing me do to them what I’ve done to you.”

  “What?” He glowered at her, his face stretched in painful surprise.

  “Soon, I will make them more alert, more aware, more sensitive than they were at any other moment of their lives, as I continue to perfect my lovemaking practices on them.”

  “I’ll kill you!”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll watch, sharing in their agony. And when I bring each of them to orgasm, the rest of you will come to orgasm too. You won’t be able to help yourselves. My growing flock of devotees.”

  “Ahhh!!!” He screamed so hard he tore the sutures in his face, bleeding through the seams.

  ***

  Mudra expected more visions of the weeks and months Reacher and she spent together. More from the highlights reel. But instead her mind took her to her father, to her return to village life after she’d completed her studies in biochemistry.

  ***

  Upon Mudra’s reunion with Jacko, she found the old man was interested only in what she could teach him to deepen his trances, deepen them and vary them. He was as interested in alternate states of consciousness to explore for himself as he was learning about opening doors to different kinds of hells for his victims.

  She did not disappoint. Her studies had taught her to expose and highlight age-old substances her father was familiar with. As good as her father was, he’d never had the advantage of a microscope, of the science of genetic manipulation to understand how to concentrate, intensify, abstract, separate only the things he wanted from the cruder whole plant, which had many substances that would only curtail his efforts to manipulate others.

  Little did she know, when her teachings were complete and she was no longer of any use to him, he started subjecting her to the revised potions she’d given him. Slowly, he eroded all the adult defenses she’d built up that she didn’t have as a child. All the mental practices she’d perfected in the U.S., her meditative disciplines. The stronger sense of ego that had hardened about her more primitive sense of self like a crust; he just peeled it away.

  Fused with him once again, with him more in her mind and body than she was, it wasn’t long before she mistook her aspirations for his. Even when he saw him reach into his ass and pull out his feces to stir into her food, before handing her the plate, she took it as a sign of love.

  Before long she and Panno were his hand puppets once again, roaming through the forest for him, expanding his reach to the other tribes, putting them under his spell as well.

  By the time Panno had arrived back from the U.S. upon completion of his studies, she was lost to herself. Had little interest in catching up with her brother. On finding out what blessings he’d returned to the tribe with. Unless of course Jacko was interested in these things, and needed to pass some of the teaching on to her as part of her new assignment.

  Every once in a while the sense of freedom, riding the mount of her Nomad, threatened to break the spell. Took her back to that all-day ride with Reacher. That was true freedom then, too. But Jacko’s magic was too strong even for the reminders to steer her free of it.

  As angry as the memories of Mudra’s return to the village and to Jacko made her, they did make one thing clear. Never had she been more herself—not when she was with Reacher, and not when she was living in the States—as she was right now.

  So it was with pride and a sense of triumph that she smiled in the face of oblivion.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  Leon had blacked out. When he came to he was on the floor of the bicycle gym, in the same oval he’d been fighting in earlier. And so was Panno. So why was he still alive?

  When his eyes locked on to Panno he was gyrating, spasming, but still on two feet, like some crazed ceremonial dancer footing it around one of the many bonfires. The fumes of the burning pyres had filled the coliseum. Even near the ground like this, away from the worst of the fumes, Leon was hacking up a storm.

  He thought he knew what was going on. All the weird-ass composites between the one-of-a-kind bicycles and the resins that held the frames together, and the many replacement parts, the aerodynamic uniforms, were putting too much ingredients in the air for Panno’s nanites to neutralize at once. They were trying to morph him into some creature more immune to atmospheric contaminants. He was increasingly losing his human form to give rise to some demonic shape from hell. But stuck in the middle of shifting into one creature or another when the nano changed its mind, he was looking more like a chimera than any one beast in particular.

  Leon figured he could still do his small part to help Panno finish walking through that portal to hell instead of standing in the doorway so indecisively. With only his flimsy, skin-tight leather gloves to protect his hands from scalding, Leon pulled the unmelted bicycle poles free of their frames and started making his own voodoo doll, using Panno as his pincushion.

  One shaft to the heart.

  One shaft to the liver.

  Two shafts, one to each kidney.

  Meanwhile he continued to fight off Jacko’s own imaginary needles going into him. At least now they could both play this game.

  Panno’s nanites were having enough trouble fending off the complex fog of chemicals. Let’s see how they do with the vital organs needed to process those toxins out of his body under duress. Leon fought the latest pains in his own body making it hard to charge Panno in a straight line to drive the latest bicycle post into Panno’s stomach, right through his spine. Without the compromised nanites, Panno would have long since been dead. But Panno’s hollering was helping Leon’s war effort, all the same.

  Panno had failed to regain control of his own beast despite the Nomad’s pain from having its eyes removed subsiding somewhat. Regrettably for Panno that opportunity to regain control was neutralized by the rising pain in Panno’s body courtesy of the compromised nanites that infested him. Distracted by his own pain he couldn’t apply his own psychic tortures nearly as effectively.

  The blinded Nomad, with nothing else to get its bearings off of than Panno’s screaming, turned its flames on Panno. The boluses of flames coming from the Nomad were the final straw. The nanites had been finally totally and utterly overwhelmed.

  A fitting end for a fitting monster, Leon thought.

  Like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz, Panno screamed as he melted into a puddle of ooze on the floor. As if the portal to hell was not a door to step through so much as a camouflaged manhole to fall through. In truth it was the nano infusing his body doing the melting. His cells had burned until he was little more than a fragile golem. Then the golem combusted to ash, the flecks dancing in the fire as if for a brief time they were the indestructible nanites celebrating their newfound freedom.

  “You hear me, Jacko!” Leon shouted. “You’re next! See what your voodoo does to stop me, you prick!” Leon roared. “Oh, wait, did I make a funny?”

  Leon marched towards the exit, a bicycle post in each hand like a pair of fighting batons, which is what he supposed they’d become. His gait made painful and unnatural under the sustained assault of the voodoo needles to his effigy.

  He left the Nomad behind him to succumb to the same fate as Panno, overwhelmed by the complex mix of aerosolized chemicals. Just took a little longer in the Nomad’s case.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  A FEW YEARS PRIOR

  Panno’s lab partner at Princeton walked up to his workbench with a “Whoa!” hanging off his mouth. “What the hell?”

  Panno had to admit, the device in his hand did look alive. It spread its silver tentacles out in front of it as if searching for something to attach itself to.

  Pietro couldn’t resist sticking his finger into the sea-anemone-like spread of silver strands. The feelers immediately grabbed on to him and drew blood. He yelped and retracted his finger all at once as part of the same spinal cord reflex. “What the bleep is that thing, Panno?”

  “You wear it on your ear like a hands-free headset. It burrows into your brain and attaches itself.”


  Pietro was nodding. “Wetware. Cool.”

  Panno laughed. These Americans were pretty shockproof in their own way, even without the go-go juice Panno’s fellow natives of the Amazon jungle used to sustain their trances.

  “So, what, it grows a nano-net around your neural net? Gives you instant access to the World Wide Web? Telepathy with anyone also wearing the gear? Speeds up your neural processes by supplementing them?”

  Panno chuckled. “Yeah, it could definitely do all that. But I had something else in mind for it.”

  “Like what? Dude, you’re about to be richest man alive. Assuming you don’t end up lobotomizing an entire generation with your beta-gear. Seems almost worth it.”

  “Yes, it does,” Panno said absently. He was thinking more of the device’s other use.

  “So, like what application could possibly compete with what we’re talking about?” Pietro wiped his constantly running nose with the back of his hand.

  “Try it on and see.”

  “No way!” All the same, Pietro couldn’t resist grabbing the headset from Panno and turning it over in his hands. “How long does it take to see results?”

  “For what you’re talking about, days, weeks maybe. But for my proposed application, maybe just a few minutes.”

  “You’re telling me I can see an uptick in performance in just a couple minutes? Shiiiiit!” Suddenly Pietro was eying the device differently. Clearly talking himself into slipping it on. Looking at it from all angles, to convince himself his survey had been comprehensive. “How do you take it off?”

  “Trust me. You won’t want to.”

  Pietro smiled. “Really? That good, huh? It’s like drugs, right? Only better? Like some kind of natural high that pretty much does away with pot, coke, heroin, you name it? That’s the short-term application you’re talking about.”

  Panno glanced over at the kid’s spilled backpack on his workbench, his bag of pot slipped halfway out the satchel, a bag of white powder beside it. Panno was guessing it wasn’t flour. He nodded and smiled. “I like having you as a partner, Pietro. You’re very fast on the uptake.”

  Pietro laughed. “Wonder how much faster on this thing?” He went over to the mirror and donned the device. “Whoa!” he said, watching it extend its tendrils into his ear.

  He watched his face melt in the mirror, like candle wax, as the probes extended into the medulla oblongata, relaxing some muscles beyond reason and flexing others just as oddly. “God, this is trippy,” he said. He ran his fingers over his face. “So cool, though.”

  With a wince and an “Ah!” he recoiled and put his hand up to the device. “Damn, that hurt!”

  He put his face up to the mirror again and couldn’t recognize himself. “Shit, who’s that?”

  He pivoted on his heels and glared at Panno. As in really glared. As if he had no eyelids, and what eyes he had were popping out of their sockets. He hissed and spit, surprised by the drool coming out of his mouth. “What did you do to me?” His voice was deeper, by a register or two. Hoarser.

  “The tendrils wrap around the regions of the brain associated with certain behaviors.”

  “What kind of behaviors?” Pietro grabbed a beaker and smashed it. Took a provocative step towards Panno.

  “I think you might have already figured that part out for yourself.”

  His face flush. His muscles strained from trying to contain his surging emotions. He charged Panno.

  Before Pietro could get to him, Panno turned up the controller at his desk. Pietro screamed in pain and stopped dead in his tracks, as if he’d run into an invisible shield. Panno dialed up the pain some more and Pietro shrieked more intensely as he dropped to the floor.

  At the next setting up, Pietro’s body convulsed and contorted on the cold speckled black tile, his back arched spookily. He frothed at the mouth, almost like you’d expect with a supernatural possession. All the more true, considering the hissing and presyllabic sounds coming from him, which could have been curses in high Latin, if this were some low budget horror film.

  The teen, ordinarily as white as mother’s milk, flushed again with color as his muscles strained even harder against themselves. He’d already ripped through his tight-fitting tee shirt simply with muscles not used to being this fully dilated. His shorts held, but the straps on his Birkenstock sandals tore. Take away the tension, and he’d have that fresh-out-of-the-gym at a hundred-sixty-pounds look about him.

  Panno slipped on his companion headset.

  Pietro immediately began to fight his way past the pain to a standing position, which he held, if barely.

  All Panno had to do was concentrate.

  He made Pietro turn for him. Pietro did so but then immediately reversed his position, battling back.

  Panno made him dance for him, laughing all the while. Pietro made complaining sounds, his muscles strained more from resisting than performing the dance steps.

  “Thanks for your invaluable help perfecting my device, Pietro,” Panno said, sending him scampering for the windows.

  Pietro leapt right through the plate glass, his legs flailing on the other side as if he’d just cleared a hurdle in a steeple race.

  The fading scream eventually dialed down to nothing at the sound of impact with the ground below. The yelp replaced by a cracking sound, very much like a coconut falling out of a tree, Panno thought.

  The lab was filling up with his classmates. One of them walking in in time to catch the sound of the window shattering. By the time he looked there was nothing there.

  Curious, he approached the breezy, gaping hole. Gazed down and saw Pietro splattered on the asphalt below. He sighed. “What’s that, like the third one this month? And they say Princeton undergrad is a walk in the park. Damn shame.” His already hunched shoulders, meant to hide his basketball-player height, sank further. “Monty, did you see this?”

  Monty, a lanky white dude with red dreadlocks, having entered on his heels, sauntered up to the window, gazed at the ground below and at Pietro lying there, mangled and broken, like a marionette that couldn’t find the right shape absent its strings. “What were his combined SAT scores? Like 1440, right?” He shook his head. “It’s not just the equations, it’s the friggin’ Homeric analogies. No one with less than 1600 should be taking freshman physics with Bartholomew. They’re just asking for trouble.”

  ***

  ONE YEAR AGO

  “Let’s do this,” Panno said with a chuckle, revving his Harley.

  The starting line was little more than a chalk line in the dust, which would be all but obliterated the instant they let go of their brakes. Their audience: mostly ghosts, who alone inhabited the deserted town, some leftover relic from California’s gold rush days. Barring the rest of their biker gang, of course. Most of whom would likely be too drunk to remember the race come morning, but would happily repeat the tall tale as part of tribal lore for time immemorial all the same. After hearing it from those who did remember. Panno knew a bit about tribal lore, considering his Amazonian River upbringing. Perhaps why he felt more comfortable with his biker buddies than in his dorm room with his books back at Princeton.

  The tattooed tart dropped the flag and he and Spencer sped off, making a mad dash for the finish line. Only, there were a few complications en route. Numerous ramps, some the kinds skateboarders used, others, a bit more makeshift, such as the stairwells leading to second story apartments pulled clear of their original structures. Upstairs patios and balconies. Flat-top roofs, which granted had to be accessed first. This was urban acrobatics, only as performed from atop a motorcycle.

  He laughed with each jump he took, working the obstacle course. It was an initiation. It had been his once, and today he was indoctrinating Jasper. The latest member of their gang.

  Only, destiny had something different in store for them that day.

  Panno was enjoying his hang time when the sounds of sirens alerted him that something was wrong. He glanced down at the street, a good two storie
s below—as he was currently hopping rooftops from one flat-top tenement to another—at the swarm of cop cars. Also visible from this high up: the police were coming from every direction. Someone had set up the Hell Riders. He doubted it was one of the town’s ghosts who didn’t take kindly to outsiders. Probably a rival biker gang that didn’t take kindly to being out-biked.

  The race was on for real this time. And every driver in the gang was involved. They were all pretty hot shit when it came to driving motorcycles. It was, if anything, the essence of the bond they shared.

  The hot pursuit quickly left the small town behind. Initially for the woods. The cop cars were no match for their motorbikes. Some of the gang members even had dirt bikes to make the most of the trails.

  From there it was a race across the urban jungle. Their true home. Freeways and overpasses, underpasses. The cops couldn’t quite keep up with their bikes’ ability to jump from overpass to underpass. Their beefed up shocks had been specialty-ordered for days like today.

  Between riding cross stream and upstream of traffic, the cops were struggling to keep up. His gang’s ability to drive one-handed while wielding KEL-TEC sub2000’s, AR type rifles and C96 Mausers—another trademark, all of which handled well one-handed courtesy of their pistol grips—didn’t help the policemen’s cause any. Not every gang member played with such finesse, of course. Others in the pack preferred Uzis and some, for lack of a better term, hand cannons. The backlash of their .44 magnums and sawed-off shotguns would have knocked less experienced bikers off their mounts. As it was, his people were expert at firing with pin point accuracy while shucking and weaving around traffic.

  It was when they started missing and deliberately hitting civilians in the cars getting in the way of their clear shots of the police officers that the cops took offense. Their reaction was predictable.

  They slowed and broke off the chase.

  Panno laughed as he eased up on his accelerator.