The Doomsday Brunette

by John Zakour

  “HARV, she was in the morgue for three days,” I said. “Coroner shot her with lasers. You stuck her with anal probes.”

  “Yeah, I feel a little bad about that.”

  “Are you sure that she’s not dead?”

  “Oh, I’m sure all right,” HARV said.

  “How?”

  “Because five minute ago she got up off the slab and walked out.”

  “What?”

  “HARV,” Tony said, “let me speak to Dr. Shakes.”

  “I’m afraid he’s occupied at present,” HARV replied.

  “What do you mean?”

  HARV’s image disappeared from the interface and was replaced with the live feed from the security camera in the main examination room. There we saw Lenny Shakes standing atop the examination table doing the YMCA dance.

  “Oh my Gates,” Tony murmured.

  “By the way, does anyone know what YMCA means?”

  “It means that Foraa Thompson is alive and well and apparently wasn’t too pleased about those anal probes,” I said. “Tony, I think we’re in trouble here.”

  Tony didn’t have time to respond because at that nano, his men who had been mirandizing Twoa and Threa suddenly started shouting.

  “Captain?”

  Tony and I turned just in time to see the forms of Twoa and Threa bathed in an increasingly bright, silver light. And then with a blinding flash, they disappeared. The neuro-cuffs they had been wearing clattered to the floor like coins in a rude beggar’s tin cup.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “What was that?” Ona gasped.

  “It looked like teleportation,” I said.

  “Teleportation without a pad?” Tony said. “That’s impossible.”

  “HARV, get over here,” I said. “I need to you track a teleportation trail.”

  HARV’s hologram was beside me before I finished the sentence and in a nano he was inspecting the area from where Twoa and Threa had disappeared. He had a holographic magnifying glass in his hand, by the way, signifying that his metamorphosis from butler to detective was now complete.

  “There are definite teleportation energy traces,” he said. “It looks like a smash and grab.”

  “Can you trace the energy signature?” I asked.

  “It might take a minute.”

  “Put a rush on it.”

  “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on here?” Ona yelled.

  “Well, Ona, as you know, two of your sisters killed your youngest sister and have now disappeared,” I said. “The upside of this is that apparently your other sister isn’t dead after all.”

  “What?”

  “And she’s disappeared too. Did I mention that?”

  “You mean Foraa’s alive.”

  “That’s our understanding.”

  “Oh dear,” Ona said. “That’s not good at all.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Boss?” HARV said.

  “Hold on a nano, Ona,” I said, turning back to my wrist communicator. “Have you traced the teleportation yet?”

  “Still working on it. I just wanted to let you know that you have a call coming in from your mother.”

  “Tell her I’m busy…”

  But it was too late. HARV’s face disappeared from the interface screen and was replaced by Mom’s. She was standing in front of what looked like a large (yet very dimly lit) computer and she seemed a little more…intense, than usual.

  “Zach, honey,” she said. “Thank Gates I got you. Listen, there’s a bit of an emergency here.”

  “I can’t talk now, Mom. I have an emergency of my own.”

  “No, Zach listen…”

  “Mom, really, I have to go,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

  “You’re shutting me out of your life, now aren’t you?” she said.

  “I’m not shutting you out. I’m working here.”

  “Work is just an excuse with you Zach. You use it with me. You use it with Electra.”

  “Don’t bring Electra into this.”

  “It’s an emotional wall,” she said. “You hide behind it because you can’t bear to face your insecurities.”

  “Mom, nothing personal here, but I’m terminating this call.”

  “Don’t do it honey, you’ll regret it when I’m dead.”

  “I’m busy now.”

  “I know, I know. You need to find Foraa Thompson.”

  The entire room fell silent and as one, all eyes turned toward me and my wrist interface as Mom’s words echoed in the room.

  “Mom,” I said warily, “how did you know that?”

  “Because I’m your mother, Mr. Bigshot,” she said. “Now for once in your life will just please quiet down and listen to me?”

  “Boss?” HARV said, as his hologram appeared beside me.

  “Not now, HARV,” I said. “Go ahead, Mom.”

  “You’ll need some weapons, dear,” she said. “Big ones would be best. Can you get those?”

  “Boss?”

  “Not now, HARV.”

  “And you should get some friends,” Mom continued. “Don’t go alone. But for Gates sake, don’t bring Ona. That’s just what she wants?”

  “Where am I going, Mom?”

  “I’ve pinpointed the source of the teleportation,” HARV said.

  “And clean underwear. Are you wearing clean underwear?”

  “Mom!”

  “Did she just ask about your underwear?”

  “HARV! Will one of you please tell me where I’m going!”

  HARV and Mom in unison: “Vegas.”

  “Vegas?”

  “Get there soon,” Mom said. “There isn’t much time.”

  “Mom, I think we need to talk.”

  “Not now, Buttlebug. I have a bit of an emergency. I’ll call you back.”

  And she was gone.

  “So,” Tony said, putting a friendly hand on my shoulder, “your Mom’s been keeping busy, huh?”

  “Tony, I don’t know what’s worse, Foraa alive and missing or me having to take my Mom seriously.”

  “Either way,” he said. “It looks like we’re going to Vegas.”

  46

  One hour later we were in Tony’s hovercraft and on the road (the skyway, actually) tearing flat out and headed to New Vegas at 400 kph. Tony was behind the wheel, white knuckles on the steering column, heavy foot on the accelerator. HARV’s hologram was in the backseat, smile on his face and a wind-effect whipping through his digitally-enhanced hair. I was in the passenger seat (trying hard to remember the prayers I learned during my brief time in Sunday school). As a cop, Tony was used to regularly ignoring speed limits. Now, fueled by desperation and what I sensed was some very strong anger, the only limits that mattered to him were the g-force limits on the hovercraft’s chassis (which I was certain we were in danger of exceeding).

  “Remind me again why we didn’t just ‘port to Vegas,” I asked, hanging on tight to the dashboard.

  “Because we have an arsenal of unportable weapons in the trunk,” he said.

  “Oh yeah. Remind me again how us dying in a fiery hover crash is going to help matters.”

  “Gates, Zach,” Tony said with the slightest of smiles, “show a little backbone, will you.”

  Tony and I had split up immediately after leaving Ona’s mansion. I went to Randy’s lab for a quick load of high-tech weaponry and gadgets. Tony went to his stationhouse to talk to his commissioner and get us some firepower and (more importantly) some back-up. I had to admit, I felt a lot better about heading to Vegas knowing that when we got there we’d have about a hundred of the best SWAT Team officers that the NFPD had to offer at our back.

  “What did you get from Randy’s lab,” Tony asked.

  “The standard weird ammo for my gun,” I said. “My body armor’s all charged up too. There’s a generic armor suit for you as well. It’s a whole lot better than the department issue stuff you wear.”

  “Thanks.”


  “He also gave me this,” I said, reaching into my pocket.

  “What is it?”

  I pulled a small gray box from my pocket and popped the lid to show Tony. Inside were what looked to be two sets of clear polymer earplugs.

  “Ear plugs?” Tony asked.

  “Maybe it’s loud in Vegas,” I said with a shrug.

  “They’re psi-blockers,” HARV said.

  “What do we need these for?” I asked.

  “Because Foraa’s a psi.”

  “She’s what?”

  “Hel-lo, she just feigned death for three days and turned an experienced forensic pathologist into a disco dancer. Clearly, she has very strong psionic abilities,” HARV said. “Her being a psi would also explain Opie’s erratic behavior and how he knew so much about the crime scene when he never even saw it.”

  “Foraa was controlling him,” Tony said, “having him leak information to the press.”

  “Controlling people from beyond the grave,” I said.

  “She was in a deep state of concentration during her time in the morgue,” HARV said. “We know she manipulated Opie and Dr. Shakes. Who knows what else she was doing.”

  “How come we never knew she was psionic?” I asked.

  “No one ever knew, boss, because she never told anyone. She kept it secret. There’s no way of telling how long she’s been aware of her abilities.”

  “Or how long she’s been manipulating people.”

  “There’s a scary thought.”

  “They’re all psis, aren’t they?” I asked.

  “That’s my assumption,” HARV said with a nod.

  “All of who?”

  “The Quads, Tony.”

  “How come they’ve never told anyone?”

  “Because they don’t even know it,” I said. “They just think they’re superhuman. Twoa’s super powers, Threa’s magic, even Ona’s pheromones, they’re all different manifestations of psionic powers.”

  “Ona’s pheromones are real,” HARV said. “But I suspect she supplements them with psionic suggestion.”

  “She just doesn’t know she’s doing it,” I said. “That even explains Threa’s fairy realm and why HARV couldn’t register its location. The entire realm is a psionic illusion that she’s created.”

  “The nymphs too,” Tony said.

  “Exactly. The poison was supposed to affect only the Thompson Quads, remember? But the nymph supposedly died from it.”

  “Because Threa knew about the poison and her mind subconsciously made it affect the nymph.”

  “And when she thought the nymph was dead, she stopped thinking about it.”

  “So it faded away. What about the invulnerability?”

  “Some sort of psionic shield, maybe,” I said.

  “By the way, have I mentioned that it’s raining,” HARV said.

  “Where?”

  “In New Vegas.”

  “It never rains in Vegas. Isn’t there a law or something?”

  “It’s raining quite hard, at the nano,” HARV continued. “You remember the torrential rain we had in Frisco recently?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Well, as you’ll remember, it stopped shortly after Foraa Thompson’s apparent murder. It was at that nano that it began raining in Vegas. And it hasn’t stopped since.”

  I took the psi-blockers out of the box. I gave one set to Tony who took them and put them in his shirt pocket without turning his gaze from the skyway. “So I guess we’ll be needing these then, huh?”

  “Psi blockers are illegal you know,” Tony said. “Dangerous too. They cause brain damage.”

  “Not to worry, Dr. Pool has substantially reconfigured the design,” HARV said.

  “So they don’t cause brain damage?” I said, sliding the blockers into my ears.

  “No, they’re just no longer illegal. He hasn’t been able to solve the brain damage part yet.”

  “What?” I quickly pulled the blockers out of my ears.

  “The risk is much more minimal than with the common blockers but you shouldn’t wear them for any lengthy period of time.”

  “Why would we wear them at all then?”

  “Because you’re about to confront a person who may well be the most powerful psi on the planet,” HARV said. “And your minds are going to need every shred of protection that they can get.”

  “You think she’s really that powerful?” I asked.

  “This is just conjecture on my part, boss, but I think that if she wanted to, Foraa Thompson could have bent the will of every person in New Frisco. Without those blockers, she could probably turn you into her own foot-licking puppy.”

  “Fine, I’ll wear them” I said, somewhat begrudgingly.

  “In the future,” Tony said, stamping harder on the accelerator “remind me to never take any long road trips with the two of you.”

  The hover’s thrusters roared anew and we surged forward even faster than before (surprising since I thought we were maxed out already). At this rate we’d be in New Vegas in less than an hour.

  “Do we have a rendezvous time and place for the reinforcements when we arrive in Vegas?”

  “Not exactly,” Tony said.

  “Will they be able to find us with a tracking device or something?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “I don’t suppose that ‘not exactly’ is police code for ‘sure, you betcha’?”

  “We have no reinforcements, Zach,” Tony said.

  “What?”

  “The department wouldn’t authorize it.”

  “But, why?”

  “Because with Foraa alive there’s no longer a murder. The case has been closed.”

  “There was attempted murder.”

  “And the perpetrators have been captured.”

  “Twoa and Threa are missing.”

  “It doesn’t become a missing persons case for forty-eight hours.”

  “But Foraa…feigned death.”

  “That’s not a crime.”

  “She drove the coroner mad.”

  “Also not a crime,” he said, “and we can’t concretely prove that.”

  “Yeah but she’s…”

  “She’s what exactly?”

  “I don’t know, but she’s up to something. I can feel it in my gut”

  “Surprisingly, that’s not enough to get an arrest warrant,” he said.

  “So there’s no help coming from Frisco?”

  “None.”

  “What about the Vegas authorities?”

  “I called the Vegas PD and they said that Foraa was a fine, upstanding citizen.”

  “Great.”

  “Don’t worry,” Tony said. “I have a friend from the academy who’s on the Vegas PD, he’ll help us out.”

  “I thought the Vegas police said that Foraa was a good citizen.”

  “That’s the official line. My buddy will help us unofficially.”

  “Captain Rickey,” HARV said. “If the Frisco police department considers this a closed case then why are you here with us?”

  “Because, as of thirty-five minutes ago,” Tony said, “I am no longer a member of the New Frisco PD.”

  “What?”

  “They forbid me from going after Foraa,” he said. “The commissioner said that if I did, he’d take my badge.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I took off my badge, put it on his desk and told him where he could stick it.”

  “I’m sorry, Tony. I know how much being a cop means to you.”

  “It’s not being a cop that matters to me, Zach. It’s doing the right thing. What we’re doing here is the right thing. I don’t need a badge to know that.”

  “You trust me that much?” I asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  Tony shrugged. “When the commissioner threatened to take my badge, he was also doing the YMCA dance. I figured that couldn’t be a coincidence.”

  He turned to me and sm
iled. I cracked a smile as well and a nano later we were laughing out loud. It was the kind of laughter you make when you know that you’re headed straight into the heart of darkness; soldiers into battle, sailors into the storm, pop stars into a music critics convention. It’s the most liberating sound known to man, because it is the sound of those who have nothing to lose.

  “Well then, put your psi-blockers in, civilian Rickey,” I said. “Because I’m not about to dance the YMCA with you.”

  47

  We landed in Vegas shortly thereafter. True to HARV’s words, it was raining about as hard as I’ve ever seen it. It was like the sky itself was angry. The New Vegas strip somehow looked even brighter in the torrent, its neon essence magnified by the water in the air. Each rain drop was like a prism in a death plunge, turning the neon glow into a cascading spectrum, before splattering into the huge multi-colored puddles that were the city’s streets and walkways. It was like someone had plugged in a Jackson Pollack painting.

  Tony landed the hover in a lot near the police station on the strip.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  “My buddy’s on duty tonight. I’m going to let him know we’re here.”

  “Should I go with you?”

  “No, Zach. It’s best if you stay here for now,” he said. “You’re not exactly loved by police officers.”

  “Yeah, but that’s in Frisco,” I said. “They don’t know me here in Vegas.”

  “No, actually word gets around.”

  “That’s comforting. Are you sure your buddy will help us?”

  “There’s an unspoken agreement among all cops, Zach. We help one another. If one cop comes looking for help, the others are duty-bound to come to his aid. It’s a code of honor for those on the job.”

  “You know, of course that officially you’re no longer a cop, right.”

  Tony stared at me for a long nano.

  “Don’t bother me with details,” he said. He activated his umbrella force-field and got out of the hover. HARV and I watched as he walked quickly to the station house, the heavy rain bouncing off his shield like tiny fireworks as he moved.

  “You think the police will help us?” HARV asked.

  “Tony made a good case with the code of honor stuff, so who knows. Any idea where we can start searching for Foraa?”

  “She preaches in the ballroom of the Oblivion Hotel & Casino. We could try there,” HARV said.