Two in the Head

by Eric Beetner

  “Don’t drink anything!” I said. “Don’t touch any cups or coffee mugs. Not yours or any else’s.”

  They took me for some sort of authority. In a time of crisis sometimes all it takes is the loudest voice to be the expert in the room.

  I moved out to reception to find Melanie, or Melody, just as she took a dive for the floor. Blood spurt out of her nose as she gagged and spit on her way down.

  I stopped and turned. I shut my eyes as tight as I could and tried for something I wasn’t sure would work. If I could see what she sees as she sees it, why not be able to conjure up some memories?

  I had no idea how it might work so I ended up trying to remember extra hard. That undersells it a bit. It was the memory equivalent of reaching for something you lost that is slightly farther than arms length away. You stretch, you pull, you feel muscles tearing and tendons ripping in two but you know with one more push you can get one pinky finger on your lost car keys and this nightmare will be over.

  Yeah, like that.

  A hot skewer of pain bore a hole through my skull. All this straining at my brain couldn’t be good for me. Images started to come. At first they were my own memories of what I’d seen while I rode in the car with Blake. Don’t ask me how I knew the difference between my own memory of her view and her real memories. I just knew.

  I felt the shift. I tapped into her memory bank. I felt like someone pulling off a heist. It took some work but my fingers spun the tumbler to the right combination and I was in.

  I knew what to look for. The drinks. She didn’t look down very often so it was hard to pinpoint an exact moment, but finally I got one. She squeezed a dropper into a coffee mug on one of the paralegal’s desks. I cycled back the image four, then five times until I knew.

  In the back of the gun locker back at the DEA, lived a tiny refrigerator. No one ever went in there. Most of us weren’t quite sure what they kept inside. We’d heard rumors. In addition to the guns, the Tasers, the mace, we kept some more heavy hitting weapons of the trade. Fast acting poison being one of them.

  My whole head throbbed and I think I knew what it felt like to have brain surgery with no anesthesia as I willed a memory out of the thick grey matter. Her hands, still warm from snapping Adam’s neck, opening the squat refrigerator, removing the vial.

  I couldn’t recall the name, but I remember the basics. She must have seen the same brief flash of that first day tour of the munitions locker. The way Adam had been so proud of the little goodies he never got to use. Nine millimeters he saw all day. Sniper rifle with a night vision scope? More interesting. Serious spy shit like a neurotoxin that kills within five minutes? Those are the perks that make working the basement worth it.

  Of course, Adam would never get to play with his toys again.

  BIGGER FISH TO FRY or

  OUT OF THE FRYING PAN AND INTO THE FIRE or

  I’D BETTER GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE OR MY ASS IS GONNA FRY

  Some people survived. More than I can say for my own office. I heard at least three voices plus the guy in the conference room. They were all in full panic mode, but that wouldn’t last forever. Someone would piece it together, or look at the security tapes and see me. Her, really. But to all the city employees currently watching their friends drop like roaches after a can of Raid, I was their killer.

  Time to move on. The place started buzzing with the survivors asking for help and wanting to know what the hell was going on. I couldn’t exactly tell them to keep this under wraps until I worked it out, so I knew the secret would get out, even if no one knew the real truth of it.

  I reached the lobby and felt a strange sensation like someone watching me. I spun around, expecting to see her or maybe even Calder and Rizzo. Nothing. The feeling buzzed in my brainstem like a phone on vibrate wedged inside my skull.

  She watched through my eyes. I hadn’t been aware of the feeling before, but it seemed vaguely familiar—the needle and thread through my eye. I gave it right back to her. Focused my brain, ignored the ice pick headache, and saw her.

  She tilted the rearview mirror so I could see her. I can’t tell you how weird it is to look through her and at her at the same time while I knew she’s looking through me. I had zero extra brain capacity to even try to unravel that Möbius strip of a mindfuck.

  She wanted me to see. Wanted me to know she’d been watching and she knew what I saw upstairs. She smiled. I felt my fist clench. It was useless, I know, but it felt good to at least have some vague expression of anger.

  I saw her gaze turn and latch on to a car leaving the garage. She moved forward. I stood frozen on the marble floor of the lobby staring into space like an idiot, but really I watched her fall in behind a huge burgundy Cadillac. It wasn’t Lucas’s car, that’s for sure. But who?

  As the Cadillac slowed at the exit gate I saw a hand reach out with a key card and Sam focused in on the side-view mirror for my benefit. She wanted me to see who was going to die next.

  Judge Randolph. A sweet old guy. Also, the judge working with Lucas on the case against Calder and Rizzo. Lucas had been so pissed the night he came home after Randolph told him to keep working because there wasn’t enough evidence yet. Lucas was eager, but also thankful to the judge because he knew Randolph didn’t like to let anything into his courtroom he couldn’t fully take to trial. When the judge eventually did give him the high sign, it would mean Lucas truly did have a case, and if he had a case at all—he had a winner.

  And now Judge Randolph had hellhounds on his trail.

  The gate lifted and he revved his Cadillac up the ramp and out onto the street. Sam followed. They were right below me, coming up to street level less than a hundred yards from where I stood, and I was helpless.

  I needed to get to him before she did, but with no way to do that.

  Not true. A long shot, but one worth trying if I wanted to make any attempt to keep the body count out of the absurd and stick with plain ridiculous.

  “Ma’am, are you okay?” A young man in a suit and retro hip glasses eyed me like I might be an escaped mental patient. Too much time standing still staring into nothing.

  I tried to give him a pacifying, “I’m fine,” but the truth is I was anything but fine so the lie wouldn’t come out.

  “I need to look for something.”

  He looked less than reassured. Behind us, the lobby began to move with activity. Security guards rushed for the elevators. Going to check on the trouble. I saw a woman stumble into the lobby from upstairs, her legs wobbly and tears running down her face.

  I ducked and ran for the parking garage, skipping the elevator and pounding down the stairs two at a time. Level P2, third row on the end. There it was.

  A few months ago Lucas got the environmental bug after seeing some documentary about melting ice caps. He decided his car caused too much of a “footprint” he called it. How a car can have a footprint I don’t know. He still had two years on his lease so he couldn’t trade it in for a hybrid like he wanted, but he came up with a solution. His Smart car.

  He kept it at work where he could charge it and where he could use it for going out to lunch, making meetings during the day, stuff like that. Short trips he didn’t need his full size car for. He was very proud of it, even after I told him it looked like a computer mouse with wheels. It made him feel better, and hey, if a penguin gets a new lease on life then I’m all for it.

  Even Smart cars need keys. I went back to the fourth floor.

  I could hear voices, but not what they were saying. I decided my best course of action would be sneaking. I didn’t want one of the survivors to see me and think their killer returned to finish the job. Get to Lucas’ office, get the keys, sneak on out. Easy.

  For the second time in a day I had to navigate a field of dead bodies to get where I wanted to go. It had been less than ten minutes, but the dark stains of blood leaking from the noses of the dead had widened and started to coagulate.

  I got clos
e enough to hear a one-sided conversation—a man on the phone with the police. He finished with, “Please hurry,” and hung up. He stepped quickly out of an office door and nearly ran into me. I recognized him from the conference room. He recognized me too, or thought he did.

  “It’s her!” Two more heads popped around a corner.

  “No, you’ve got the wrong idea.” Explaining the right idea seemed pointless.

  The two people up ahead, a man and a woman, stepped out into the hall. They held a body between them, him with the shoulders and her with the legs. I guess they were stacking the dead like firewood, maybe to have something to do until help arrived. People do love to bring order to chaos.

  “You poisoned us,” said the conference room guy.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why?” said the woman. This conversation would get me nowhere. I needed to get what I came for and leave. So much for sneaking.

  I bolted back the way I came, intending to make it around the long way and come at Lucas’ office from the back hallway. I heard the body they were carrying drop. I hated to think how much more blood came spilling out.

  Running away seemed to be within my capacity for good. As long as it wasn’t the police I suppose. Or maybe since running would be in the effort to save the Judge’s life it fit within the bizarro rules of my predicament.

  I ran like hell, glad my job allowed me to wear sensible shoes. I heard feet thundering after me and one of the men shouted, “I’ll go this way!” I turned right to run down the hall passing the bathrooms and then I’d make two more rights to be back in the hallway with Lucas’ office. As I turned I tripped over a pair of legs sprawled out across the width of the hall. I tumbled and felt carpet-burn across my palms as I tried to stop myself going down and again on my knees when they hit. I wondered if she felt any of the skin-peeling burn.

  I turned back and saw the body of a young woman, blood drying around her nose and mouth. Her eyes were stained red with burst vessels. Some poison Sam used. Why the hell we kept that nasty crap in the arsenal of the good guys is beyond me. ‘Course the good guys were also waterboarding and sleep depriving and hell, us good guys invented the car battery on the testicles. U.S. Government agencies have invented more ways to torture someone than Atilla The Hun. And when you’re talking targeted assassination, we wrote the book. So am I really surprised we kept highly concentrated neurotoxin at the DEA? Not especially.

  Damn, that girl died young though. She could have been me ten years ago. Before I went bad. And now seeing my bad side outside of my body like this, I finally realized how far I’d fallen. No time to cry over it now, though.

  I rose to my feet again. I felt blood run down the inside of my pants from the scrapes on my knees. The fabric of my pants already started to darken with blots of my blood. I threw a glance over my shoulder and saw the guy who had been holding the body hot on my heels. The woman lagged far behind. Guess my cardio training was more regimented than a paralegal. Daddy used to say watching me outrun boys was his favorite pastime. Lucas hated when I crushed him in the first 10K we ran together by over a minute ten.

  All I had to clear were two more right turns. As I neared the next corner, conference room boy was there. I skidded to stop, feeling my lungs burn for the first time.

  He stood blocking the hallway, arms out in a wrestler’s stance, his jacket off, sleeves rolled up and his tie tugged down a few inches. I saw blood spots on his shirt, probably where he tried to help someone.

  We stood for a second, waiting for the other to make a move. Our standoff took place outside the glass wall of the conference room where we first met. It reminded me of a fishbowl with all the water drained out. Dead fish cluttered at the bottom waiting to be flushed down the toilet.

  I got hit from behind. The other, very eager, man tackled me. He crashed into my back and I could tell he hadn’t pulled up his forward momentum in the slightest. He drove me forward and into the glass conference room wall. It wasn’t made for an impact like our two bodies at full force.

  The wall shattered. Thousands of pebbles of safety glass exploded from the panel we hit. As we passed through the first pane, his body hit the panel to his left and my body hit the panel to my right and two more shattering pops fired tiny diamonds of glass in every direction.

  The sound was impressive. A sharp crack and then the whole window would explode all at once like someone pressed a button. I guess they made them so there wouldn’t be long sword-like shards of glass, but instead they created glass grenades sending shrapnel in all directions.

  I fell on top of two bodies. They cushioned the impact a little. He crushed down on top of me and I lost my breath for a second. I tried to suck air, but got only a mouthful of glass pieces when I opened my mouth.

  I rolled and put my hand down on the carpet. It landed on a wet spot, dark with blood. I spit glass and tried to stand up, but my legs wouldn’t allow it. My attacker came down with his forehead against the edge of the eight foot long conference table. The dark wood table had rounded edges which probably saved his skull from caving in. He was knocked loopy though.

  I found a small pocket of air in my lungs and stood in a hunched-over crouch. My roadblock in the hallway went fetal. The shower of glass turned him into a coward and he shrank into the floor with his arms wrapped over his head and a glass mosaic in his hair.

  I moved down the hall while I could. The woman did not follow. My shoulder ached, so did the back of my head. I knew Sam would be able to feel those. I wondered for a second if the impact and sudden shock of pain would make her drive off the road. I guess I’d know it if she did. Crushed in the wreckage of a car is something I’d feel for sure.

  Lucas’ desk drawers were organized as ever. The keys to the Smart car were exactly where I knew they would be. No searching, no detective work needed. I stuffed the keys in my pocket and headed back for the elevators the short way.

  Back through the open office area I found the woman. She stood frozen, like she’d seen a grizzly bear or something. She made no aggressive moves.

  “I didn’t do this,” I said.

  She stared at me, her body tense and ready to flee.

  “I didn’t. I’m going to stop who did though. Right now I need to save Judge Randolph’s life.” I don’t know why I felt compelled to explain myself. The idea of so many people thinking I’m a mass murderer didn’t sit well with me, as if it sits well with anyone. “I didn’t kill anybody. I’m not killing you, right? And I could if I wanted to.”

  This didn’t seem to reassure her. Time to forget about what anyone else thought about me and get the hell out.

  I dodged a few crumpled bodies and made it back out to the elevators. I heard voices before the doors opened and ducked around the corner.

  The elevators dislodged six police officers, guns drawn. They rushed into the main office, crouching down, fanning out and taking a quick survey of the layout. I slipped out and slid into the elevator while the doors closed around me. As the doors slid shut I thought I heard a woman’s voice say, “She went that way.”

  SMART STUPID CAR

  The tiny electric car drove annoyingly slow. As I ambled through traffic I kept finding new pieces of glass in the folds of my clothes and brushed them away. I knew where the judge lived from when Lucas took me to a Christmas party at Randolph’s house last year. I remembered the neighborhood because I made Lucas promise me we’d move there someday. He laughed and said something like, “At my salary?”, but hey, you gotta have goals, right? A fairly self-righteous type, Randolph held his own Christmas party ever since the state sanctioned end-of-year celebration had been tagged a Holiday party. Don’t know why it surprises me a judge could be judgmental.

  There wasn’t a whole lot of hope in me getting to the Judge’s house before they did, but it was worth a try. I failed twice already at stopping Sam in her massacre. I needed one in the win column. Plus, not doing everything to save someone’s life is not somethin
g Good Samantha would let happen.

  I came to a red light with four cars ahead of me. I knew I had some time so I shut my eyes and tried to get an update on Sam’s whereabouts. The pictures were really fuzzy and far away but I could see her still driving. All had not been lost yet.

  I felt a sudden urge to pee. How long had it been? No idea. My sleep had been terrible, I hadn’t eaten and now I needed a bathroom break rather urgently. I wondered if she felt the same thing. I had no idea how in tune we were. I was fairly sure if I got my period right then she would have too. The thought reminded me I’d missed my birth control pill. Oh well, not like Lucas would ever touch me again when all this was over. All I could hope for was to keep him alive so he even had the choice.

  Or that I stayed alive to give him one.

  Peeing would have to wait. It did make me think though. After I’d been able to dig out some memories I wondered how far I could reach across the airwaves and into her.

  I let my mind wander with my eyes open until I got flashes of her vision playing across the windshield of my stupid little car. A windshield I was too damn close to, by the way. Damn car is a death trap. I tried more of the deep focus that got me into her memory bank. I figured she could feel me invading her brain, but I kept working in deeper. I really should have taken up yoga or transcendental meditation so I could really tap into some deep subconscious and take her mind over like a brain ninja. Instead I nearly ran a red light while trying to look more through her eyes than my own.

  I took the respite of the light to burrow deeper, an insect in her brain, laying eggs. When the light turned green I went for it. I turned a sharp right and I saw her hands move on the wheel. She swerved back immediately, but I’d made it in. I could make her move.