Tormented

by Robert J. Crane

  46.

  Benjamin

  They were staying in what amounted to an enormous hole in the ground, a dusty crater that was teeming with weeds, devoid of anything else for as far as Benjamin’s eyes could see, which, on this moonlit night, was quite a distance.

  The chirp of crickets was in the air, and silvery clouds rolled across the sky, avoiding the giant disk in the middle of it all as though on purpose. That was both good and bad; Cunningham could have done with a little less of a view, really. He knew where they were, and it made him shudder more than a little. He’d never been to Glencoe, Minnesota, before in his life, and this didn’t seem like the time to visit this graveyard. But, then, this hadn’t been his idea, no, nor Anselmo’s either.

  No, this had been the brainchild of the voice on the phone, the woman with the rasping voice who had spoken in his ear when Anselmo shoved it up next to his face and told him to do as she bade him. And he had, finding them a new car, stealing it as she’d walked him through how to do it. He’d never stolen anything in his life, but now he’d stolen a car. Then he drove them here and carried Anselmo, whose face was still missing, eyes sightless, bones and muscle and cartilage exposed, all the way to the middle of this near-lifeless crater, where they sat in a field of weeds, assured that no one could or would watch them.

  “Do you know how many people died here?” Anselmo asked. The Italian was sitting with his back to Benjamin, moonlight washing down on the scarred back of his bald head, leeching the dark color from it and making it appear that his complexion was whitish-silver.

  “Thousands,” Benjamin said. “The whole town exploded. Some sort of … incident. Gas leak? I can’t recall.”

  “It was a metahuman,” Anselmo said, “named Aleksandr Gavrikov.”

  That perked up Benjamin’s ears. “He … scorched this place? With fire?”

  “Yes,” Anselmo said. Benjamin hadn’t seen it, but he thought the Italian had probably regained his mouth by now, since he was no longer making the noise indicating he was drooling, lipless, all over his whole face. “He was like you.”

  “Like me …?” Benjamin felt a tingle within. “I … didn’t know anyone was like me.”

  “Do not get me wrong,” Anselmo said, “he was a man, and made his own decisions, a skill you have yet to learn.” He drove the knife squarely into Benjamin’s heart. “But you will learn.” That lessened the sharp, stabbing pain just a little.

  “What … what are we going to do here?” Benjamin asked after a few minutes passed. He watched the silver light play over his fingers, and just to try, attempted to draw flame from them. His fingers flared to life, causing him to cry out and jump to his feet.

  “We are going sit for a few more minutes while my eyelids grow back,” Anselmo said, with a strange sense of satisfaction.

  “Uh … very well, then,” Benjamin said, and sat back down. He looked down at a seed pod, a dandelion. Thankfully, he was not allergic to those. He extended a finger toward it, and imagined himself burning just the little white strings of seed. A small fire, no more than a cigarette lighter would produce, sprang forth from the tip of his index finger and consumed the seed pod whole, making a tiny light in the night for the three seconds it took to burn it into nothingness. “Ah!” he cried out in pleasure.

  “Yes, yes, very good,” Anselmo said, now facing him. Benjamin started to say something in surprise, but halted before he even opened his mouth as he caught sight of Anselmo’s face in the moonlight.

  It was …

  It was …

  Flawless.

  “You’re … you look so different,” Benjamin said, cocking his head to stare.

  “Yes,” Anselmo said, smiling with full lips and skin that looked as new as a baby’s. It only extended between his forehead and cheekbones, however, providing a bizarre spectacle—scarred skin around the sides of his head and newly grown, pink flesh in the space that the doctor had broken off with her freezing liquid. “I am … renewed.”

  “But how?” Benjamin asked, coming to his feet and easing closer. “How did you …?”

  “Reed Treston’s sister scarred me with a grenade of fire,” Anselmo said, mimicking an explosion with his hands. “It burned my skin, over and over, not allowing it to heal properly before burning it again. I had assumed I was … permanently disfigured in … all ways.” Anselmo’s head sagged downward. “But the doctor … she has done me an unintentional favor. It turns out that beneath this scar tissue, if it is removed … my true face can re-emerge.”

  “But … how could you possibly remove it all?” Benjamin asked. “Go back to her and ask for more of that freezing solution?”

  “No,” Anselmo said, and his lips were tight with discomfort. “I am afraid that will not work. I would be vulnerable while she did it, and thus at her mercy, and I cannot be at anyone’s mercy. No,” he said, and stood, rising to place a hand upon Benjamin’s shoulder, “the answer is right here.”

  That answer came to Benjamin in short order, and he blanched. Visibly. Obviously. When he spoke, his voice went high. “Me? You want me to—?”

  “I want you to make me whole again,” Anselmo said. “I have told you I will help make a man of you, and I will do this thing. We have already begun. I undertook this without selfish motives. I simply thought that you would be a useful ally in the battle against our common foe. But now I see something that you can do for me as well, a favor that would repay this thing that I do for you.”

  “But … but …” Benjamin said, trying to come up with a perfectly reasonable reason why he shouldn’t have to do this thing. “I’m not a doctor. You could die.”

  “Since this happened to me,” Anselmo said, squeezing Benjamin’s shoulder, “I have not lived. It has been a half-life, a shadow life, one in which the women who were with me when I recovered—the cows—could not even look upon me as a man. And I could not look upon them as a man would, either, because of the nature of my disfigurement.” He looked deep into Benjamin’s eyes, and there was already a fire there. “You, though—you can restore to me what I am giving to you. As I make you a man, you, too, can make me whole again. And, then, together … we will finish this, and you will be free of worry, of fear, of always looking over your shoulder and concerning yourself what others think of you.”

  Benjamin swallowed hard. “Truly?”

  Anselmo looked him hard in the eye. “Truly. Now … help me.” He offered his hand, holding it out before him in a manner that told Benjamin that he did not intend it for being shaken.

  Benjamin stared at the scarred, pitted, puckered flesh, knotted and ridged over the back of Anselmo’s hand. “All of it?” he asked, not looking up in Anselmo’s eyes, for fear of what he might see.

  “To the bone,” Anselmo said and drew a deep breath. “Which is what we will do to our enemies, yours and mine, when this is over.”

  Benjamin swallowed hard and nodded, raising his hand. It couldn’t be that hard, could it? He imagined the fire licking out of his fingers, and it was there, a torch in the night. He looked once at Anselmo, who nodded, and brought his own flaming hand down on Anselmo’s scarred one, and the screaming began—both his and Anselmo’s.

  The sounds, the horror, the fire lit the night, and drowned Benjamin in the sensations of another’s pain. It was a screaming that filled his ears, filled his head, and made him want to shut his eyes and run away more than once.

  but that’s not

  what a man

  DOES

  And so he looked on, quieting that screaming voice in his own head, letting it wash over him and ignoring it, and proceeded with his task, burning away every inch of scarred flesh he could find, searing all the way to the bone, a little at a time, watching the blood fall boiling to the ground, until the task was finally done, and he was sure that he was deaf from screaming and numb from the horror of what he’d seen.

  47.

  Sienna

  It didn’t take long for Brant’s gift to start working, flooding my
nose and taste buds with the awful smells of my body at war with itself. I didn’t know if it was hours or minutes that passed, but they seemed to move both at the speed of light and desperately slow, as my bowels went into upheaval and my stomach churned as though it was being threshed by a particularly violent shark. Maybe a whole school of them.

  I made it to the toilet before hell began, but it was ultimately irrelevant, because I was vomiting uncontrollably within minutes of the start of the show, and there was no holding back the storm that was raging in my body. I was sweating and feverish, the open window to the frosty storm outside completely ineffective at keeping me cool. I shivered and burned, my hair matted down in front by profuse sweat as my digestive tract fought against me with a violence it normally reserved for meatloaf.

  However long it took, my guts purged in both directions until there was nothing left. I managed to clean myself up, sweating and feeling sick all the while, my shirt sticking to my chest and back, my jeans absorbing my diffusion of liquid slightly better. The smell remained, though, and it was awful, a scent of sickness that was thick as smog in the air.

  When the worst of it passed, I couldn’t even raise myself up enough to walk to the bed. I tried to crawl, but gave up because it was so. Damned. Far. My arms were weaker than I’d ever felt them, my legs shuddering like a newborn calf who was trying to stand for the first time. If Brant had come into my cell right then and gotten down on his knees to put his neck into my hands, I don’t think I could have physically managed to strangle him. I mean, I would have tried like hell, but he probably would have ended up laughing at the neck massage.

  I curled into a ball and cursed a lot of names, but mostly my own. I should have left town at the first warning of “GET OUT,” but I hadn’t. I’d been arrogant and overconfident, thinking that just because I was a total badass who consistently cut through my enemies that somehow I was invincible. I wasn’t, and I knew it deep inside. I’d had it driven home to me more times than I could count, even as recently as last April in London with Phillip Delsim, and in January when the damned Brain had temporarily chemically castrated me of my powers.

  Maybe Reed was right. Maybe I’d gotten so damned full of myself that I’d started to think I was a goddess, and that my judgment was paramount. That I could kill at will, for the wrong reasons, and who cared, because of my power.

  I thought a lot of thoughts while curled up on that hard, cold stone floor. My body may have felt paralyzed with weakness, but my mind was sprinting in circles, moving like a greased wheel down a smooth hill.

  Also, I think my ability to make analogies and metaphors might have been compromised by my sick feeling.

  I felt another round of fever shakes coming on and I let it rack me, shuddering as though it would bring me the warmth I desired. I hoped that the lack of a blanket and the air from the window would keep me cool enough to avoid horrendous brain damage. I wasn’t sure how it would affect me, but I needed my wits about me if I was going to escape and murder every one of these assholes.

  Errr, excuse me. If I was going to escape and find some way to bring these jerks to some form of justice. Which may have included me ripping their spines from their still-living bodies. Or not. Maybe it would just involve jail time.

  I felt utterly debased and humiliated as I lay there, my stomach railing at me for a crime I hadn’t even committed against it. I wanted to tell it that if I’d known the hamburger was poisoned, I wouldn’t have eaten it, but when I said that, it called me a crone in response.

  Yes, my stomach called me a crone. And that was when things started to get really weird.

  The light above grew in blinding intensity until everything around me was nothing more than a white light, and suddenly I could see a face in there somewhere, a face that was more than familiar, a face that was old, was creased with the lines of that age, was the living embodiment of that furious storm outside my window—

  “Oh, God,” I said in a whisper, on the floor of the Bayscape jail one minute and in an office hundreds of miles away the next, an office that I knew for a fact didn’t even exist any longer.

  The stone desk was the giveaway. It looked like an enormous slab of rock that was stood up on two pillars that held it in place, the surface just smooth enough to write on. The view behind the man with the wrinkled face was a window that looked out on snowy grounds, rolling green flatlands that had been completely overtaken by the seasonal drifts of—

  “Winter,” I said, standing before him with something just short of horror.

  “Hello, Sienna,” Erich Winter said, rising from his chair to look me right in the eye. His voice was deep and smooth, with a Germanic accent. “It is so pleasant to see you again.”

  48.

  Reed

  I was between the metaphorical rock and the hard place, and both my choices sucked. I talked with Isabella for hours, and we went round and round between the answers, boiling them down to two choices.

  Hang around here and wait for Anselmo in order to stop him from killing again or go north in hopes that I could maybe, just maybe, find out where Sienna had gone missing.

  Like I said, both choices sucked.

  “If I go north, I may find nothing,” I said. “I might end up driving hours and hours to get there and never see a single sign that Sienna had ever been there. And then Anselmo strikes here, kills people—and boom. I’m shit out of luck. Or has the Brain track me on the road and bushwhack me up north somewhere—like Sienna.” We already knew that Anselmo and Cunningham had ditched the car they’d made their attack on the agency with. We’d found it in a nearby carpool park-and-ride where we had agents standing by to catch the third-shift workers when they got off in a few hours, hoping to identify what kind of car had been stolen in exchange for it. That’d at least give us something for Harper and J.J. to look for through their digital eyes in the skies.

  “Or you could find her quickly,” Isabella said. “Perhaps she simply decided to go elsewhere. It could be as you have said, Anselmo merely referenced her obliquely. Anselmo is not a subtle man. He would have taunted you more if she were dead or dying.”

  “He wants her to suffer,” I said. “He wants us all to suffer. And we have no idea what the Brain is like. She could be unleashing hell on Sienna right now for all we know.”

  “What are you going to do?” Isabella asked, after pausing a moment to allow the thoughts to percolate.

  Dammit, this was where the choice really started to suck. Because I knew what Sienna would say to do.

  The job. She’d led by example in this regard. Say whatever else you wanted about her, she’d blown up her own relationships for the job, pushed everyone else away to be the shield she thought she should be. Whatever her motives, she did the job like no one else, and she let nothing interfere with it.

  “I have to stay,” I said. “With Anselmo and Cunningham out there working together, I need to be near the cities. They could try almost anything.” And really, while I suspected Anselmo was going to confine his crazycakes revenge schemes to me and my most dear, Cunningham had proven himself a wild card on multiple occasions now. If he’d been accidentally drawn into this by a failure to control himself in the Minneapolis airport, since then he’d shown that he was moving toward intentional killing by both choice and his associations. Even if I sliced it in the most favorable way possible and gave him the benefit of many doubts, he’d somehow killed his co-worker and come along with Anselmo on the man’s attempt to kill Isabella.

  My understanding had reached its limit with him. He was dangerous, and it was clear that for whatever reason he had put himself in cahoots with a man who had proven himself power-mad and perhaps even more explosive than Cunningham himself.

  I couldn’t leave Minneapolis and St. Paul nearly defenseless against that.

  “What are you going to do about Sienna?” she asked, with a little more emotion than I would have expected, even after her talk about them being a kind of family.

  “I’m g
oing to do what I can,” I said, trying to figure out what that was. “I’ll send agents up there to try and track her down. They won’t be of much use here, and maybe I can get them working out from underneath Phillips’s nose.” I knew for a fact he wasn’t going to give two shits about Sienna being missing. He wouldn’t even give one shit if it was plugging him up for days and getting rid of it meant he’d be comfortable at last. “Hopefully Hannegan can find some sign of her.” And hopefully wouldn’t get killed by whatever was responsible for her disappearance. I looked straight at her. “When’s the soonest you can get Augustus back in the fight?”

  “Tomorrow perhaps,” she said, shaking her head. “He could probably walk now, but he is weak. I fear a reinjury would set back his progress significantly, or may lead to spinal scar tissue of the sort Anselmo carries on his body. It could paralyze him for life.”

  “We’ll play it safe, then,” I said. “We’ll hold off for now, hoping that Anselmo moves soon.” I felt my mouth grow dry as I circled closer to the grim pronouncement of the decision I was making in my soul—one I didn’t think I’d have to make. “I’ll deal with him first, and then—”

  “How will you deal with him?” Isabella asked, but forcefully this time. Her hand found my arm, snaking around it and squeezing me tight. “You can’t fight him like you did before.”

  “I know,” I said, swallowing hard. “I know. And I won’t. Because this time … I’ll do it.”

  “Do what?” she asked. She knew. She knew what I was saying, but she pushed me anyway, because if I couldn’t say it, I probably couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “I’m going to kill him,” I whispered. And so help me, I was going to do it.

  49.

  Sienna

  Fever dreams are absolute hell, and even knowing somewhere inside that I was dreaming, Erich Winter didn’t help. I could feel the spin of unreality around me, of a world moving too quick by half to be real, of my forehead burning and my eyes pressed closed, the color of things not quite right. It wasn’t reality; it was surreality, and the vision of the man who had most hurt me in my life standing in front of me just added the extra dash of crazy it took me to buy into it for the moment.