by J. C. Diem
“This is Agent Steel,” he said and was silent while the caller spoke. “How long ago?” He glanced at his watch and motioned us towards the path. “We’re on our way,” he said grimly and hung up.
“I take it there’s been another incident?” Reece queried.
Mark nodded and glanced backwards to see me shouldering my backpack and falling in behind the others. “Two teenage girls were just involved in a fight in an internet café. What started out as a shouting match quickly spiraled out of control. Apparently, one of the girls was jealous of her friend’s boyfriend. She took out her frustration by smashing the other girl’s head against the wall a dozen or so times. It sounds to me like this might be the work of Envy.”
“Yep. That sounds like jealousy gone overboard all right,” Kala said.
“Change into civilian clothing,” Agent Steel ordered his team once we reached the base. “I’ll meet you in the garage in five minutes.”
Since I was already wearing civilian clothing, I loitered in the hallway near the door to the garage. The others entered the main area and presumably raced up to their rooms on the second floor. Reece was the first to return several minutes later. He frowned when he saw me standing in the hallway then ignored me completely as he placed his palm on the scanner. The door unlocked and he pushed it open. I caught it before it could close and followed him inside. Taking a set of keys out of his pocket, he unlocked the SUV and continued to ignore me as he climbed into the driver’s seat.
Feeling awkward and unwanted, I waited for the others to appear. Being alone inside the vehicle with Garrett would have been torture so I opted to stand beside it instead. Mark was the next to show up and Kala and Flynn weren’t far behind him.
Bailey opened the door and politely gestured for me to enter. “Ladies first.” I doubted he was being chivalrous, he probably just didn’t want to get stuck sitting in the middle.
Sandwiched between the two agents, I kept my backpack on my lap as I buckled myself in. The garage door rolled upwards and closed behind us when Garrett put the car into motion. He drove far faster than Mark had the night before and we reached the gate in less than a minute. He barely waited for the gate to open before putting his foot down. The SUV fishtailed on the dirt road before gaining traction.
We’d barely left the compound and my heart was already in my throat. Being in the middle seat gave me nothing to hold onto as he took the twists and turns far too quickly. I clashed elbows with Kala and Flynn each time I lost my balance, but neither seemed to be annoyed by our frequent collisions. Bailey smiled widely at me, clearly enjoying the thrill of the ride. Kala stared out the window and almost seemed to be bored.
Leaving the mountain range behind, Garrett zoomed along the highway, overtaking anyone who slowed him down. He took risks that I wouldn’t have dared to, but the other agents didn’t even blink an eye when we came close to colliding with slower drivers several times. They might not be concerned, but my heart thundered in my chest throughout the entire journey.
Walker turned to me after I gasped out loud after a particularly close call. “Don’t worry,” she reassured me. “Reece is an excellent driver. He has uncanny reflexes.”
“Yeah, but the other drivers don’t,” I countered. I’d seen the aftermath of car crashes far too many times and I had no desire to become a statistic on the nightly news. I was torn between wanting to see disaster before it struck and covering my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see my impending death.
Garrett smirked at me in the rearview mirror, apparently amused by my fear. He turned his attention back to the road before I could scream at him to watch where he was going. No one else was bothered by his driving techniques, but I didn’t know him yet and I didn’t trust him. It would take time before I’d become comfortable with his maniacal driving. Our mission would probably be over long before that could happen.
By some miracle, we reached Denver without being involved in an accident. Reece was forced to travel at the speed limit once we were in town. It was apparent in his glower that moving at the much slower pace chaffed him. Mark directed him towards the area where the death had occurred and Garrett pulled over in a loading zone. He clearly wasn’t concerned about receiving a parking ticket. Agent Steel probably had the connections to have any tickets waived.
Police officers had cordoned off the street with yellow crime scene tape and plastic barriers. Curious onlookers crowded around the perimeter of the café, craning their necks in morbid fascination as they tried to catch a glimpse of the mayhem that had occurred inside.
We approached the scene and slowed as we walked past a girl around my age being interviewed by a reporter. “It was awful,” she sobbed. A soggy tissue was clutched in both of her hands. “I saw the whole thing. This girl wandered into the café and started shouting at another girl about a guy she was dating. She grabbed the girl by the face and shoved her head into the wall. A couple of guys tried to stop her, but it was like she was possessed. She pushed them away and just kept smashing the other girl’s head into the wall over and over.”
She shuddered in reaction to the memory. “There was blood everywhere when she finally let her go. She stood there all glassy eyed then fainted and was taken away in an ambulance.” She shot a fearful look over her shoulder at the café where someone had died over an argument about a boy.
I knew teenage girls could be intense sometimes, but this was far worse than anything I’d ever heard of before. “Is it normal for the victim of mind control to pass out?” I asked Kala.
Searching the crowd for the psychic, the female agent nodded. “From what we’ve been able to determine, once they’ve fulfilled their orders, they fall into a coma that can last from several hours to a couple of days.”
I mulled this over as Mark ordered his team to split up. “Alexis, you’re with me,” he said.
I nodded my agreement. There was no way I wanted to walk around on my own with a crazed telepath on the loose. The idea of being in an elite squad had been exciting at first, but now that we were actually on the hunt, I was decidedly spooked. “Do you think Envy is somewhere close by?” I asked him quietly.
Scanning the area for a familiar face, Mark nodded. “They like to watch the havoc that they wreak. He was here when his puppet went off the rails and I’m confident that my team will find him.”
Minutes passed and I found myself watching the faces of the crowd as well. I didn’t know what any of the psychics looked like, but the team had surely seen photos of them. Most of the onlookers were appalled by the attack, but some sick individuals actually seemed to be excited by the murder. Impatient police officers kept the crowd back. They’d seen senseless violence before and they’d see it again. For them, this was just another day and just another death. They had no idea that the attack hadn’t been random at all and had instead been targeted and specific.
“Take this,” Agent Steel said and pressed something into my hand.
It was a tiny earbud that was roughly the same color as my skin. The coloring would make it difficult to see once it was in place. I pushed the device into my right ear, hoping it wouldn’t become lodged too far inside. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, but at least I could now hear the action. I didn’t have to wait long before the team reported in.
Flynn spoke first. “I’ve got nothing,” he said.
“Neither do I,” Kala said a few moments later.
There was a long silence from Reece before he spoke. “I’ve got him. He’s heading westward.”
“We’re on our way,” Bailey replied.
Grabbing me by the elbow, Mark hustled me back to the SUV. I climbed into the front passenger seat rather than in the back this time. He took off before I’d even buckled myself in.
Reece gave his boss directions as he made his way through the back streets and alleys of the city. He had to be running flat out, but he didn’t sound out of breath. Kala and Flynn were closing in from the north and south in an attempt to box their target in.
“I have a visual,” Reece said in a near growl. “I’m moving in.” For a moment, I was confused by his update. If he’d only just spotted the target now, how had he been following him?
“Be careful,” Agent Steel said as he negotiated his way through the traffic. Even on foot, Garrett had moved far faster than we’d been able to with the streets clogged with vehicles.
Reece didn’t call out a warning, he just ran his mark down and pounced. It sounded like he slammed the guy into a wall, judging by a thud that was followed by a pained grunt. “Gotcha,” Garrett said with profound satisfaction.
Envy wasn’t going to surrender easily. “Let me go,” he commanded. I couldn’t even see the psychic and I could almost feel the compulsion to obey him.
“I don’t think so,” Garrett replied, showing no strain at ignoring the telepath’s order. A strange gargling sound came through the earbud and I shot a look at Mark. He remained expressionless even when we heard objects whistling through the air and connecting with flesh.
“Envy has telekinetic powers,” Mark explained. I felt ill at the thought of Garrett being pummeled with flying debris. A bottle smashed and I flinched, picturing him being cut open and bleeding to death. My concern ratcheted up a notch at the distinct crackle of several bones breaking. The gargling sound was cut off and I had no way of knowing if Reece or Envy was the injured party.
My question was answered a moment later. “Aw, couldn’t you have waited for us?” Walker complained. “We’re only five seconds away!”
Mark cleared his throat to get his team’s attention. “Alexis is listening in, guys. Keep it PG.”
Flushing at basically being called a child, I clamped my mouth shut so I wouldn’t prove him correct by whining.
“That’s one dead dude,” Bailey pronounced when he arrived in the alley a few seconds later.
“Yep. He’s dead alright,” Walker agreed. “No question about it.” It was chilling how casually they were acting when Garrett had just strangled a man to death. It finally hit home that this was real and that more people were going to die. It was a long shot, but some of them might even die at my hands.
Parking near the mouth of the alley, Mark motioned for me to stay in the SUV. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”
Waiting until he was halfway down the alley, I quietly eased the door open and followed him. Moving as stealthily as possible, I snuck up on the team. Agent Steel was taking a photo of the body on his cell phone when Kala spoke. “Should the kid be seeing this?” she asked without turning her head. It was a mystery how she’d known I was there without actually seeing me approach.
Mark whirled around and held his arms out wide, automatically trying to shield me from seeing the corpse. “I thought I told you to stay in the SUV.” His tone was just short of forbidding.
“I’m not a child,” I said reasonably. “I’m going to see dead bodies sooner or later. What’s the big deal with letting me see this one?”
“Let her look, boss,” Reece said. “She might be traumatized into running back home to her Mommy where she belongs.”
The glance he sent me was mocking. He was deliberately trying to drive me away and I wasn’t going to let him win. Rising to the challenge, I stepped around Mark and walked closer to the dead man. Flynn moved aside to let me get a better look. Steeling myself, I looked at the psychic’s face. It was hard to guess his age, but from the lines on his forehead and around his eyes, I’d put him in his late forties or early fifties. His black hair was long and unkempt and his clothing wasn’t in much better shape. He looked like he’d been living on the streets.
Debris surrounded the body. Presumably most of it had been snatched by the telekinetic and had been hurled at Garrett. The smashed bottle lay at his feet and some of the shards were bloody. Apart from a few stains on his clothes, Reece was unmarked.
Steeling myself, I looked into the dead man’s pale blue eyes. They were wide with horror and had a shiny, glazed look as he stared up at nothing. His head rested at an awkward angle and I remembered the disturbing cracking sound of bones breaking. The beginnings of a dark bruise ringed his throat. I could easily imagine Garrett placing his arm around the man and squeezing with all of his might. Curiously, there was no blood on the telepath either. It was a mystery where the blood had come from.
“Yep. He’s definitely dead,” I agreed. Stepping back, I desperately tried to pretend that my stomach wasn’t churning and that I wasn’t on the verge of throwing up. “For the record,” I said to Agent Garrett, “I don’t have a mother. She died when I was a baby.”
Reece had the grace to look ashamed at his jibe. Kala and Flynn shared a look as Mark’s hand briefly came to rest on my shoulder in silent sympathy. “I would have told the team more about you, but I didn’t want you to think that I pried into your background,” he said.
It didn’t surprise me to discover that he knew about my mother. As a government agent, he probably had access to everything there was to know about me. I flicked off his concern with a small smile. “What now?” I asked. I was acting calm on the outside, but on the inside I was a gibbering mess. There was a corpse lying right in front of me. He’d been a living, breathing human being only a few minutes ago. It was disturbing how quickly and easily he’d been eliminated. Garrett, Walker and Bailey didn’t look like killers, but that was exactly what they were. I had to force myself not to turn around and run just as Reece clearly expected me to. Their mission was important, or my father would never have allowed me to be a part of it in the first place. I kept that thought in the forefront of my mind and it helped to drive away my internal hysterics.
Mark’s brows rose at my matter-of-fact tone. I had the feeling that he wasn’t quite buying my act. “Now I call in the Cleanup Crew.”
He moved away to make the call and I removed the earbud so I didn’t have to hear the details. “Who’s the Cleanup Crew?” I said to Kala.
The blonde was watching me curiously, almost as if she could see through my façade and knew I was screaming on the inside. “They’re the people who clean up after us. They dispose of the bodies and evidence so the cops don’t become suspicious.”
“Oh.” If they belonged to a federal agency, then why did they have to cover up what they were doing at all? I wasn’t quite brave enough to ask that question.
₪₪₪
Chapter Eight
It only took a few minutes for the Cleanup Crew to arrive. A dark gray van pulled up and blocked the far end of the alley. If anyone wandered by, they wouldn’t be able to glance down the alley to see what the crew was up to.
Two men climbed out and hurried towards us. One was tall and skinny and had short, sandy colored hair. The other was short, bald and had a solid build. Both were dressed in dark blue coveralls that any handyman or maintenance person might wear. One carried a bucket and cleaning products. The other carried a body bag.
Wordlessly, they went to work. While one man cleaned up the broken, bloody bottle, the other rolled the corpse into the body bag. When all signs of the altercation had been erased, they worked as a team to carry the body to the van then drove away.
“Good job, team,” Mark said. “Let’s return to the base.”
Still feeling slightly ill, I followed him back down the alley. I wasn’t sorry that I’d defied him and had examined the body. Apart from the terror on the dead man’s face, it hadn’t been so bad. It might have been too much for me if he’d been riddled with bullets.
Now that I’d seen death with my own eyes, I wondered if I could really pull the trigger and end someone’s life. I’d wanted to be a soldier for all of my not quite eighteen years. My father had sacrificed a great deal to keep his country safe and I could do no less. I realized that I really could pull the trigger if it meant that I’d ultimately be saving civilian lives.
Something that Agent Steel said had been weighing on my mind and I sought clarification from Kala. “Why are you three resistant to mind control?” I asked.
“We’re genetically blessed,” she said with a lazy wink.
“In what way?” I probed. I was probably being pushy, but my curiosity wasn’t going to let it go.
Flynn answered my question, but his reply didn’t help to clear my confusion. “We have an anomaly that makes us slightly different from most people.”
“What type of anomaly?”
“We’re not entirely sure,” Mark turned to say. Once again, Garrett was driving. I wondered if he had control issues that meant he always needed to be behind the wheel. “Their brain scans show slight differences that makes them all but impervious to the telepaths’ orders.”
I didn’t like the sounds of ‘all but impervious’. It seemed to imply that they weren’t completely resistant to them after all. I had a thousand questions, but refrained from asking them. I was only a temporary member of the team and I’d return to my normal life soon enough. There was no point digging into their secrets when this would shortly all be behind me.
We went our separate ways when we returned to the base. Kala walked over to the couch, plonked herself down and picked up a magazine. Bailey and Garrett disappeared upstairs, presumably to their rooms. Mark climbed up to the coms area and stood at the computer table. His hands moved over the screen and information popped up on the wall monitors. My eyesight was good, but not quite good enough to be able to read the words.
Feeling out of place, I headed for the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. I’d been addicted to caffeine for years and no force on Earth would ever be able to make me give it up.
“I’d love a cup of coffee,” Kala called without turning around. “I take mine white with one sugar.”
I took mine the same way and carried two mugs instead of one into the living room. I handed one to Kala then tentatively took a seat. “How long have you been a member of the squad?”
Glancing up from the glossy magazine, the blonde took a sip of her drink. It was far too hot for me to drink yet and I was amazed that the liquid didn’t burn the other girl’s tongue. “Five years,” Walker replied.
