“How else would I look like someone else?” he asked.
“Well… yeah. I guess.”
“You smell great, by the way.”
“OKAY,” I said loudly, throwing my hands up. “This has officially gone too far.”
“Chill out, babe. I’m just lightening the mood.”
“Yeah, well. Get to work already.”
Rick stepped over to the fridge, bent down, and picked up the milk carton that was on the floor. He took a close whiff of it, wrinkling his odd canine nose.
“It’s relatively fresh. It’s only been laying out for a couple of hours.”
“That’s good. We might be able to pick up Nick’s trail, then.”
“Yep. Smells like…three…no, four people were in here. And one more, seems older than the others. That’s probably Nick. Let’s move to his bedroom, see if I can get a better scent.”
We moved down the hall, ignoring the open bathroom door. At the end of it was presumably Nick’s bedroom, similarly ransacked. The mattress had been ripped apart, a long “X” cut across both sides, the flaps pulled apart, revealing the springs and foam. His nightstand had been knocked over, the drawer hanging out, a book, a pair of glasses, and sleeping pills scattered nearby. The dresser had gotten the same treatment as the rest of the house, the contents spilled every which way.
Rick walked over to where one of the pillows lay slashed apart, near the bed frame. He picked it up, pulled off the pillowcase, held it up to his nose, and inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring. His eyes snapped open, and he looked at me in triumph.
“Got it.”
“Okay. See if you can track where he was last. Maybe we’ll find a clue that these guys missed.”
“Yep.”
Rick began sniffing around as he walked around the room, looking extremely peculiar. His brows furrowed in concentration, he beckoned me to follow him down the hallway. Together, we headed back to the kitchen. He led me over to a small door near the pantry.
“Basement?”
Rick nodded. “He went down here last, ahead of the other four. It doesn’t seem like he came back out.”
“You mean he’s still down there?”
“Maybe. I don’t exactly have a dog’s brain for scent trails, here. My nose is basically just turned up to eleven, and I don’t have the right instincts. I really only have my best guess.”
“Okay,” I said, cracking my knuckles. “Stairs make for an excellent shooting gallery. If there’s anyone here, it could be a trap. I doubt it, but it’s possible. Be ready for a fight.”
Rick nodded, screwed up his eyes in concentration, and his hands began to ripple. In a few moments, his fingers had elongated, hardened, and sharpened into wicked-looking claws.
“Really? Freddy Krueger?”
“Don’t mess with a classic.”
In response, I pulled my Zippo lighter from my front pocket. I looked at it for a moment fondly. Gabriel had given it to me years ago, when we first began studying fire magic. It wasn’t remarkable; no engravings, fancy designs, or anything but sentimental value marked it as something that I treasured. True to its manufacturer’s promise, it lit the first time I spun the wheel.
Exerting some of my will, I gathered the flame into a tiny ball of light that hovered a few inches above my left hand. With a bit of effort, I grew the orb until it was half a foot in diameter, packing the flame like a snowball until it was as dense as I could make it. It was a trick I had learned from watching Jason fight during our confrontation with the Air agents. He had taken four of them out in a matter of about five seconds. I was nowhere near his level of skill, but I had pretty good control over my abilities, especially for someone who hadn’t completed the Bonding. I’d at least be able to cause some damage before I went down, but I’d probably need to get lucky to make it through a fight with all of my limbs attached.
“Stay behind me,” I told Rick.
He moved into position in a half crouch, claws raised.
“You look really creepy,” I told him.
He cast a sardonic look at the fireball floating over my hand. “Really? You’re going to judge?”
“Shut it, Krueger.”
“Lucky I like you so much,” he muttered.
“Lucky I don’t mind dogs.”
“Just do the thing already.”
I eased open the basement door, revealing carpeted stairs descending into the darkened room below. The subtly pulsing glow from my ball of flame was enough to see by, but I flicked on the light switch anyway. Slowly, I crept down the stairs, watching for any movement, listening closely for signs that we weren’t alone. The only thing I heard was Rick’s reedy inhales through his canine nose as he followed me down. I reached the bottom, and peered cautiously around the basement.
It was fully furnished. Soft, plush carpet covered the floor, a pleasant wheat color. A big screen TV would have stood in the corner, but it had been overturned. Two comfortable-looking leather couches lay relatively untouched, though their seat cushions were strewn about the room, along with a few pillows. What I could only presume to be a foosball table was upside down near the eastern wall, the surface beneath pried open.
There was no sign of Nick or any of the Unfocused. Aside from the foosball table, the basement appeared to be the same as the rest of the house.
Rick cleared his throat pointedly. I looked back at him. He pointed one claw across the room, towards a walk in closet.
Board games had apparently been stored there, though not many that I recognized. Reference guides for Dungeons and Dragons were scattered around, tossed by whoever had been here searching, mixed in with the contents of game boxes, some of them with names in German and French. I got the feeling that Nick was something of a hobbyist.
Rick walked in a small circle around the closet, sniffing the air. I half expected him to get down on all fours and start smelling the carpet. After about a minute, he shook his head at me, and pointed into the closet.
All the way in the back, in the far left corner, a section of the drywall was missing, about two feet across and two feet high. Fuzzy pink insulation stuck out of it. It seemed out of place with the rest of the basement, which appeared well-kept. You know, if you ignored the Mongol horde that had apparently swept through here.
I glanced over at Rick. He shrugged back at me, and flicked his head towards the hole. I gave him a silent nod.
I reached over with my free hand, and knocked heavily on the wall near the hole.
“Nick? Are you in there? It’s Nora Tress. I’m not here to hurt you.”
I heard a muffled scrape from the other side of the wall. My pulse sped up.
“Nick, I know you were approached by some people. And I know you told them you wouldn’t sign up. We aren’t with them. We’re trying to help. Please, Nick, if you’re in there, come out and talk to us.”
A few silent seconds crept by. After a while, I heard Nick’s voice, low and urgent. “Who’s with you?”
Rick and I grinned at each other in triumph.
Yes!
“It’s my friend, Rick Torin. He’s all right, I promise. C’mon, Nick, you know me. You know I wouldn’t hurt you.”
A few more seconds passed.
“Are they gone? Are you sure they’re gone?”
“Yes, Nick. It’s just the three of us.”
“Thank God. Okay. I’m coming out.”
The insulation started shifting around, bulging weirdly in places. Then it simply popped out of the wall, plopping onto the floor of the closet. Slowly, Nick crawled out of the hole, stood up, dusted himself off in a dignified sort of way, and screamed in horror when he saw Rick.
“What the fuck is that?!”
“Oh, shit!” I yelled, smacking my forehead with my free hand. “Rick, you still have your creepy face on.”
“Oops,” Rick muttered. “Sorry, Nicholas. Hang on.”
Rick’s face and hands began rippling as he closed his eyes in concentration. After a few moments, his c
laws widened and shortened, returning to normal fingers, and his bloodhound nose retracted.
“Oh,” Nick said. “Skinchanger, right?”
“Yeah,” Rick replied. “Rick Torin.” He stuck out one hand, and Nick cautiously shook it.
“Never met one of your people before.”
“We keep to ourselves.”
“Guys,” I cut in. “Bigger things, right?”
“Yeah,” said Rick. “Nicholas, I assume you know that you’re being targeted by these people.”
“They don’t know that Rick and I know about them yet,” I told him. “And if they came looking for you once, they might come back if they can’t track you down.”
“Do you have some place where we can go?” Nick asked, straightening his glasses. “I hadn’t really planned beyond hiding in that crawlspace.”
“Come with us. We need to talk.”
“How do I know that you aren’t with them?” he asked. “Don’t get me wrong, Nora, I’ve known you for a long time. But I’ve known Sam and Christina for a long time, too, and they were with the others who came here to kill me.”
I shook my head. “Nick… there’s pretty much nothing that I can say to you that will prove that I’m not with them. All I can say is that we’ve been spinning our wheels for the past few weeks trying to figure out what these people are going to do next. We know that a lot of people are going to die if we don’t do something to stop them. We know that too many Focus agents have been compromised. But that’s about all that we know. If you were approached, you probably know a lot more than we do. We need your help.” I shrugged. “Besides which, they wouldn’t have much use for a skinchanger nobody’s met, and an initiate who hasn’t even decided which faction to join. And… if you’re ready to fight the two of us, I don’t think that we’d be able to do much to stop you if you decided to run. Or kill us.
“Basically, Nick, we’re fucked. We need you a hell of a lot more than you need us. And I’m asking you to trust us, at least for a little while. Because if you don’t… I have no idea what we’re going to do next.”
Nick stared at me for a few moments. Then he shook his head.
“All right. Just… don’t make me regret this, okay?”
Rick reached over and grasped his shoulder. “Nick, I can promise you that you are definitely going to regret this.”
Chapter Five
An hour later, the three of us sat around my kitchen table once again, glasses of brandy in easy reach. Rick and I needed a drink after the day we had, but Nick probably needed something stronger, like a Valium. Or a punch to the back of the head.
After he guzzled half his glass, he started without preamble. “They approached me after I finished the Bonding. Six of them, guys I’ve known since school.”
“Which faction?” I asked.
“Air, Earth, and Water.”
“Shit,” Rick said.
“Yeah, that’s not good,” I agreed. “We’ve known for a month that Air was involved, but weren’t sure if any of the others had joined up.”
“Well, I guess they have,” Nick said. He took a deep gulp of brandy, a little too quickly. He continued as his eyes watered. “They took me out for drinks after I finished, you know, to celebrate. We talked about the work we were doing, what I was going to have to deal with as a Water agent, duties I’d be expected to do, that kind of stuff. Then the conversation got a little strange. Steven, one of the Water agents, started complaining about the environment. He began talking about Gaia, that pseudo-religious crap about the ecosystem as a sentient being, and how humanity had damaged it almost irreparably. That humans had basically changed the fabric of the planet’s biosphere, and that eventually it would come full circle and bite us all in the ass if we didn’t do something about it.”
“Did he suggest what that something might be?” Rick asked.
“No, they didn’t try a hard sell, not right then anyway. But then Peter and Raymond, two Earth agents, started talking about natural disasters. They brought up all of the hurricanes that hit the East coast over the past couple of decades, the earthquakes in the Pacific, the tsunamis that hit Indonesia and India a few years ago, the tornados that tore through the Midwest in the past few years, the blizzards that buried cities in recent winters. Apparently, there’s been a serious increase in severity and frequency of weather anomalies over the last twenty or thirty years. They acted like the planet had already started the ass-biting of humanity. Steven cut in that global warming was responsible for a lot of that, and everyone around the table said that that was on us too.”
“So, humans suck, then,” I said.
“Pretty much. Then the three Air agents, Phil, Chuck, and the other Lou, started bringing up other things. Diseases that we haven’t seen in First World countries for decades making a comeback. Remember that Ebola scare a while back? And apparently there have been outbreaks of swine flu, malaria, and even polio recently. That’s not even mentioning all of the other strains that have been springing up out of nowhere, new ones that we haven’t seen before. They said that we were due for another Black Death, and that it was only a matter of time before it happened. They pinned the diseases on global warming, too. They said that hotter, more humid environments were basically creating Petri dishes for these things to grow uncontrollably.
“Then they got into the heavier stuff. War, terrorism, mass killings. They insisted that humanity still hadn’t learned its lesson from World War II, that the ideologies of too many people were simply incompatible. Only instead of armies fighting each other on some battlefield, they said that eventually there was going to be fighting in the streets, and that civilians were the preferred target for a lot of these groups. Apparently Focus has had its hands full with these rogue terrorist cells, and that Fire has had to drop the hammer on madman after madman. They said that it wouldn’t be long before another 9/11 happened, only that it would be worse this time. Some of these groups have their hands on chemical weapons, but they lack the ability to deliver it correctly, or we’d have sarin gas attacks in Chicago and Dallas every other week.”
“I don’t think it’s quite that bad,” I said.
Nick shook his head. “It actually might be. Shit, Nora, you watch the news. Every couple of months there’s word of a new terrorist organization, another explosion somewhere in Europe or the Middle East. There are an enormous number of idiots in the world, and you know it. A lot of them are just waiting for someone to tell them who to hate or who to kill.”
“Maybe so, but I’m not ready to off millions of people to stop it. That kind of defeats the purpose of saving lives, you know.”
“Neither am I, don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying that they aren’t totally incorrect about their facts. They can be wrong without being incorrect.”
“So what happened next?” Rick asked.
“They started sharing these significant looks with each other, after I agreed with a lot of what they said. I guess they thought that I was on board with whatever it is they’re planning. And I’m not going to lie to you; I might have signed up, before they started scaring the shit out of me.” He shook his head. “One of them started talking about statistics. Percentages of the population that were causing problems for the rest of the world. Third world warlords, militia groups, organizations responsible for death, pollution, human trafficking, that sort of thing. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but it was fairly convincing. I mean, sure, these people are a big problem, right? But it turns out that they represent a tenth of one percent of the total population—that much I remember, because Peter started talking over him. About overpopulation, I mean.”
“Jesus,” Rick muttered.
“Yeah. You know we have well over seven billion people on the planet right now, right? Experts of pretty much every field say that that’s not a particularly stable number. Sustainability of life on earth is actually in question. What happens when we hit ten billion? It’s not like people are going to stop having kids.”
&
nbsp; “China tried that. It isn’t working too well for them,” I said.
“I know. But it’s an environmental concern, not a practical one. Ask any economist what a negative birth rate does to a nation’s economy. Hell, ask any of the Russians right now—there’s a reason why homosexuality is so restricted over there, and it has nothing to do with morals. Fewer people means fewer workers, which means less production. It’s sort of common sense.”
“You minored in Economics, didn’t you?”
“What gave it away? Anyway, Peter started talking about overpopulation, and what it’s doing to the environment. And the truth of the matter is that it is a real problem. Not just harvesting raw materials, deforestation, and carbon footprints, either; people need to live somewhere. New houses are being built, new apartment complexes, shopping malls, restaurants, movie theaters… We take up a lot of space. And every permanent structure that’s built is another chip at the biosphere.
“Now, we all know this. Hell, the U.N. discusses overpopulation all the time. So, of course I was with Peter all the way. But…”
“But then he scared you.”
“Yeah. Because he started talking numbers. And not small ones, either. He said that a long term solution would require a drastic reduction in the current population. He said five hundred million needed to be the goal.”
My jaw dropped. Rick exhaled sharply through his nose, his eyes going wide. Nick took another long pull on his brandy.
“He… wants to kill five hundred million people?” I asked. “And they’re fine with that?”
Nick shook his head once more. “No, you don’t get it. It’s worse than that. He wants to bring the population down to five hundred million. As in remove six and a half billion people from the equation.”
“Jesus. That’s…” Rick trailed off.
I understood; there really aren’t words adequate enough to describe the level of horror and apprehension that I felt. We had expected a number in the millions, had been prepared for that, especially considering that we had, at first, thought that they were going to use nuclear weapons to do it.
Shattered Focus (A Paranormal, Urban, Fantasy Novella) (Focus Series Book 3) Page 4
