Surrogacy

by Rob Horner

  “What’s the end game?” I asked quietly.

  “What’s that?” Fish and Brian said simultaneously.

  “There’s three of them protecting the fourth with some kind of shield,” I said, not really talking to them, just working through the problem. “They can make the shield bigger, but there’s probably a limit to it. Not that it matters. We can’t get in, but they can’t go anywhere either. So, what’s their plan?”

  A high-pitched sound began, barely at the edge of hearing, but quickly getting louder.

  Sirens.

  “They’re waiting for the police,” Brian said. “That’s their escape plan.”

  “Which means the local police are under their control,” I finished.

  “Jeff, are you with us?” Fish asked.

  “Yeah,” the older man’s voice replied. “Just winded.”

  “It’s a little worse than that,” Little Jack said flatly. “But nothing Ricky or Angie can’t fix.”

  “Okay, start getting them out of there,” Fish said.

  “What about these four?” Brian asked.

  “We’ll have to leave them,” Fish said.

  That wasn’t all right with me. It wasn’t about leaving behind four Dra’Gal. It wasn’t even about leaving three people with powers who we’d eventually have to face again.

  It was about the girl, and about taking a stand. If I didn’t actively start addressing my dreams, then I’d forever be in their power, a slave to the whim of fate.

  “Johnny, what’re you doing?” Brian yelled as I approached the expanding red globe. “You can’t get through that thing.”

  Our powers had substance, sometimes. Tanya’s telekinetic grip and Gina’s wall of light both had a compressible outer layer, which could be pushed in until the unbendable center was reached, an impervious core that gave strength to their creations. My power could affect those cores, if I could bring it to bear on them. Like connecting battery cables to a steel plate, it would flow back to the creator, giving them a jolt. Tanya said it felt like a rubber band snapping back into her head. It wasn’t incapacitating, but then I hadn’t been trying very hard. Even if it did no damage regardless of how much power I put into it, it might distract them long enough for me to do…something else.

  With Gina’s wall it was different. In that case, my power wasn’t being used to try to hurt the creator, but rather to bolster her creation.

  I pushed, anticipating a complaint, a sudden disappearance of the wall and our imminent demise. After all, pushing my power into something like this had hurt Tanya that night in the parking lot. I’d even used it to my advantage just a few minutes before.

  But a new light, the brightness that accompanied my power whenever it was unleashed, formed at the point where my hands touched the wall. Her power had seemed impressive when viewed by itself. But my light was whiter…purer…brighter.

  Reaching out with both hands, teeth gritted in anticipation of a numbing shock, I pictured my power as a nimbus around my hands, protecting me, letting me reach for the center of the bubble.

  If Brian’s touch sounded like the death of a single mosquito, mine engendered a deafening roar like a power-line transformer dropped into an ocean, or like the nighttime serenade of a million bugs dying in every trailer park in the country at once.

  A coruscating shower of red sparks like the flickering spots of brightness off a Fourth of July sparkler flew out in all directions from the points where my hands met the wall. I squinted my eyes, a natural reaction to guard against a blinding spark, though I needn’t have bothered. There was no heat to this contact.

  There was resistance, and not just the feel of a slowly compressing outer shell. The energy of the wall, whatever it was, fought back against my light. I had to consciously push more of my strength into my hands the further forward I drove just to keep it back. There was a bite to it, like tiny rat teeth nipping at my skin, waiting for a chance to get through and seize a piece of meat.

  After what felt like an eternity, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds because the police sirens hadn’t gotten much louder, the resistance stopped. My hands broke through the barrier, and I staggered forward as the shocking outer wall surrounded my body.

  The white light still surrounded my fists. That’s what saved me. Every muscle in my body clenched as I fell into the protective bubble. When the Dra’Gal that used to be a middle-aged salesman, still dressed in his light-brown suit, lunged forward, my hands met his, and he disappeared.

  Then it was just me, the unconscious woman, and the boy-band twins, who turned identical expressions of disbelief toward me.

  I reached out and Purged them before they could begin to Manifest.

  The globe of red light vanished.

  Kneeling quickly, I laid a hand on the side of the woman’s face, using my power to drive out the Dra’Gal presence inside of her.

  “Jeff,” Brian said, “hurry back. Johnny got them all.”

  The handcuffed Dra’Gal hadn’t changed back to human. I could Purge them, but it would mean deliberately banishing two people into nothingness. In the end, I left them alone. Banishing them would remove two more Dra’Gal from the fight, but two against millions wasn’t worth the loss of life. Left alone, there was still the chance of catching them in human form later.

  Long before the first flashing lights came into view on Atlantic Avenue, we were back in Mandatum.

  We’d have to do something about the police, assuming they were coming to assist the Dra’Gal, rather than responding to a call from a terrified civilian.

  But first, I needed to go see what that device underneath Mandatum was all about. In the dream, I was down there when the attack came, but it was only after we did something to the police, and at a mall. Maybe going down there first would change something.

  It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  Chapter 14

  The ferries aren’t running on time

  It became obvious very quickly that my date in the Distilling Room would have to wait. Nothing so simple as just asking to go ahead and get it done, of course. Angie hadn’t returned from her meet-and-greet with the group of callers to the hotline, which meant Chris, Jason, and James were also gone. Because of his status as the intermediary between humans and Qintanans, Fish was unavailable to brief me on the machine, what I might need to do, and more importantly, what it might do to me.

  Unlike our venture, which started out as a trap but which netted us three new Chosen, Angie’s hadn’t been as exciting. (Did it count as three Chosen if two of them had to Wonder Twin in order to use their ability?) From everything being said, it sounded like the group they were supposed to meet stood them up. Angie reported red flashes weaving in and around the cars parked in one of the long-term lots outside Norfolk International Airport, but no one approached them. She thought they might be regular commuters going about their normal day-to-day Dra’Gal business. Perhaps it was a trap and they were reluctant to spring it. A lot of people went with Angie, so the demons might not like their odds. Had there been a report of someone with an alternating red and white aura, the story would be different, with Jeff taking me to join the group, rather than going off to bring them back as soon as Ricardo healed him.

  While I waited with Brian in the Assembly Room, feeling every jet of air from the ventilation ducts on my wet clothes, we listened to Little Jack telling the story of our adventure.

  “Bastard Dra’Gal almost gutted him,” Little Jack said. “Jeff pops us up there and it’s all good at first, except for Gus puking.”

  There were a couple of murmurs at this, as the five people gathered around Jack on the central couches bowed their heads. The first thing they would have been told was that Gus wasn’t coming back.

  “He was a good guy to ride with,” another man said. It took me a moment to recognize Raymond, the co-pilot of the van which transported the captured Dra’Gal from the carnival. He wasn’t in uniform, though it was hard to mistake the buzzed hai
rcut and straight-line shoulders for anything but a military man.

  “There’s all these vent humps and air exchange units, you know, but it doesn’t occur to us to check behind anything since Jeff dropped us off right over the gift shop. So, we’re watching, peering over the edge of the roof like pigeons looking for a target to poop on, and everything starts to go sideways down on the sidewalk. Johnny and Jeff go staggering around like bears with their snouts covered in honey and an angry mess of bees covering their faces and looking for revenge.”

  Aside from Raymond and Little Jack, every other person was a Chosen. Mrs. Jean and Dave, the telepath, occupied one couch, while Michael, the thirty-something redhead, and a pretty brunette in her twenties, a little on the stout side, bracketed Little Jack on the other. I couldn’t be sure, having been unable to see her face during my first trip downstairs, but the profile looked like the one they called Danielle.

  “Should have burned them,” Mike said, holding out a hand in my direction. A ball of flame appeared in his upturned palm, flaring like a miniature bonfire for an instant, before disappearing when he closed his fist.

  “Nah, it wasn’t like there were real bees,” Jack said. “I just wanted you to get a visual on how they looked, dancing around and flailing.”

  “What did they do to you?” Dave asked, turning to look at me. Immediately after my ears heard those words, another sentence came into my head. Don’t react to this, just answer the question. We’ve got some things to talk about, and it needs to happen this way, so no one gets suspicious.

  “I…uh…” I stammered, flustered by the second voice, the same voice, just heard in a different way. “It was water. She covered our faces with water, like we were drowning.”

  “Uh huh, well I guess we’ve all seen crazier things since getting here,” Jack said, picking up his story.

  Here began one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced, and that’s saying a lot! My ears could hear Jack’s story, while something else, a third ear, heard Dave in my head. The best comparison I can come up with would be holding two different telephone handsets to opposite sides of your head and trying to pay attention to two different callers at once. Even stranger, Dave’s voice sounded exactly the same, making me wonder if the mental projection of his voice matched the physical one because that’s how he heard himself, or if the physical voice was a natural outgrowth of something inside his head, and not a product of laryngeal shape and strength. It was one of those idle thoughts to latch onto to avoid dealing with the insanity of having a man talking inside your head.

  “So, there goes Johnny, hacking and bent over double, while Jeff looks like his eyes are about to pop out of his head—”

  I’ve been here long enough to start picking up images from Fish and the people upstairs.

  “—does his vanishing trick, and there’s Johnny all alone. He does something, like a clap of his hands—”

  —all comes back to Bradley, and his paranoid conspiracy theories—

  “—there’s a bright light, but even cooler, this Asian chick is pouring water at him like her boobs are fire hydrants with the plugs popped!”

  “Was she big enough for that?” Michael asked.

  —know you’re already aware that the Quins upstairs—

  “—a good look, because just then Jeff starts yelling from behind me about Dra’Gal—”

  I closed my eyes, maybe looking like someone trying to picture the events as the speaker describes them. I wanted to reduce the number of stimuli coming into my brain.

  “My little girl once asked my wife why she had water balloons on her chest,” Raymond offered, the comment so off-hand that Dave laughed, breaking his concentration.

  “—were two of them up there with us, but we didn’t see them. So, Jeff pops onto the roof, and he’s in between the one closest to us and one behind him. He’s looking at us and never sees the one in back. He yells, which makes me see the one between us, and Gus looks back to see the farthest one about to jump on Jeff. Gus moved, but not before that one got to Jeff, tearing up his back.”

  The big man’s voice dropped, funny storyteller morphing into eulogizer. “He couldn’t risk a shot because of how close Jeff was, so he went toe to toe with the thing. I blasted the one between us, but by the time that was done, Gus was already going down. The Dra’Gal chewed his throat open.”

  A moment of silence ensued, broken only by the occasional soft plop of water dripping off my shirt.

  I can see you want to get to the Distiller. That’s good. I’ll contact you then. I’ll be more coherent. As hard as you think it is to listen to two conversations at once, it’s even harder to do this. But with your dreams and Bradley’s theories, we need to get you two together.

  There was more to this than just conversation. With his words came emphasis, placed so perfectly that not even the best public speaker would be able to match it. The transmission of thought brought with it every nuance imaginable, so it was as if I was in his mind, sharing the concepts that informed the words.

  “He did some damage though,” Little Jack said. “Got his push knife right into the thing’s chest. Bastard thing was already going down, growling and coughing, when I put one into its head. I checked on Jeff, made sure he was gonna be okay, then got back to the edge to check on Brian and Johnny.”

  By unspoken rule, no one hung out too close to the bookshelves whenever Jeff wasn’t present. It was his favored return spot, and although he assured me that it wasn’t possible for his ability to transport him inside another person, no one wanted to test the theory.

  The rush of air heralding his return surprised everyone, stopping Jack in mid-sentence. Angelica and Chris stumbled away from the teleporter, who immediately disappeared again in a flash of light.

  “Man, it don’t matter what I turn my skin into. Nothing stops that dude from turning my guts to jelly,” Chris complained.

  “I thought you were Superman’s half-brother,” Raymond quipped.

  “Yeah, I got the looks, but he got the unshakable six-pack.”

  Jeff returned a moment later with James and Jason, which occasioned another comment from Raymond, this time accompanied with a hummed ditty about the return of the Triple-J’s. Groans sounded from several directions; Ray had a penchant for making quips based on the obvious.

  I started toward Angelica, hoping to get down to the Distilling Room before anything else could interfere, but Jeff held up a hand, pointing to his right ear, where the blue Port-Comm still resided.

  “Okay, I’ll tell them,” he said.

  “Tell us what?” Chris asked.

  Jeff gave a searching look around the room, eyes settling briefly on everyone before coming to rest on Angie.

  “Go round up everyone,” he said.

  “What do you mean, everyone?”

  “I mean everyone who’s here, except those people guarding the civilians downstairs and managing their transfer.”

  “What’s going on?” Dave asked from his place on the couch.

  “Just a sec,” Jeff answered, reaching up to tap his Comm. “Fish, I’m bringing everyone.” A pause. “I know what you said, but this involves all of us.” Another pause. “Well, most of us aren’t military and we think for ourselves.” A final pause. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”000

  Eyes flashed back and forth during this one-sided argument, silent conversations whose points and counterpoints were expressed with a widening of the eyes, a lifting of the eyebrow, or a quirk of the lips.

  Jeff let out a loud sigh. “There’s no easy way to say any of this or really prepare any of you, but we’ve got some news to share.”

  “So, share it already,” Little Jack said.

  “Not yet. Let’s get everyone here first. That way there’s no messed-up hearsay where half the meaning gets lost in repetition.”

  Come over here, Dave said into my head. It’ll take a few minutes for Angie to gather everyone, and from what I’m seeing, we need to have this conversation
now.

  A general hubbub began, centering on Jeff, as Ray and Little Jack rose from the couches and approached the teleporter. Chris and James, Jason and Brian all edged closer, though Brian appeared more pensive than anxious. I wondered if he was thinking about what we’d seen in the Operations Room that morning, all those Dra’Gal masquerading as Quins, essentially running our lives and us none the wiser.

  How much did Dave know, with his ability to read minds. Was it something he turned on and off, like Angie with her aura-reading ability? Or was it more like Crystal, who saw the auras all the time? Was he constantly picking up stray thoughts like a radio without an OFF switch?

  Dave and Mrs. Jean scooted apart, opening a space between them. Without having to be asked, I accepted the invitation. Mrs. Jean held out her left hand, palm up, while Dave did the same with his right. Feeling a little foolish—was all this rigmarole necessary? —like we were sitting down at a seance, I took their hands.

  A scene opened in my mind, much the way you can close your eyes and relive a memory. But it wasn’t my memory.

  For starters, the vantage point wasn’t right. Whether we realize it or not, we’re always conscious of how we perceive the world, from the height of our eyes as we navigate a room to the position of things within the room relative to our height. It doesn’t take much difference to recognize when things aren’t right.

  The eyes were too high, and the floor was too far away. For a moment those differences overshadowed my understanding of what I was seeing. Then I looked up and saw the wall of monitors. The Operations Room. But instead of two hundred monitors showing two hundred different images, there was just one large picture, with each monitor making up a piece, like a jigsaw puzzle once it’s put together.

  The picture was familiar, a map of the world laid out on a flat plane, something spherical rendered in two dimensions. There was an impression of shading around the widest parts of the image, as one might see looking through binoculars. With one exception, it was identical to what we saw that morning, while Iz fiddled with the controls and showed us how a normal plague would spread, then how the Dra’Gal would push humans out of the cities, forcing them to congregate in the centers of each country. At the time, the continents were shown in brown, collections of humanity in green, and a red the color of fresh blood denoted where the Dra’Gal made their strongholds.