Accelerated

by Heppner, Vaughn

  “In order that you can kill him?” I asked.

  “Only in the dire need of an emergency would I do that,” Cheng said.

  I shook my head.

  “That is a pity,” Cheng said. “You will force a difficulty upon me. But it is your own choice.”

  I was facing the door. The other two were watching me. Rita opened the door and stepped through. Her features were contorted with rage, and there was a robotic quality to her, a jerkiness to her motions.

  “Look out!” I shouted.

  Cheng turned around as Rita shot her.

  I dove as bullets spanged off the floor near me. Rita shouted with outrage, came farther into the room—Mike Stone opened up with the MP5. He riddled Rita’s body with bullets.

  -23-

  With a glance and I suppose a kind of epiphany, Stone and I came to a quick understanding. Cheng was shot, but still alive. Bloody, frothy bubbles oozed from her mouth as she lay on the floor.

  With a walkie-talkie, Stone called for medical help. Then he knelt by Cheng, assessing her wounds and stanching the bleeding.

  “Harris must be able to do mind tricks like your boss,” I said. “Either that, or Rita loves Harris the way Kay loved Dave.”

  “I’m busy,” Stone said.

  “Rita must have called Harris,” I said.

  “Go!” he snarled. Then he turned back to Cheng, pressing a thick wad of cloth against the blood oozing from her side.

  I knelt beside Rita. Her corpse was contorted on the floor. Stone was an expert with his submachine gun and he had placed the bullets close together.

  I took her gun and fished out extra magazines. Then I took a thin cell phone. After that, I ran, wanting to be out of the building before others arrived.

  I was betting Harris knew where the chip was, and I wanted to beat him to the Alamo.

  ***

  I took too long reaching my Ford. And it took too long driving through Long Beach. I was too late. The Alamo was gone from its rental slip. All the lines had been ripped away, which indicated a hasty departure.

  I pulled up the end of the sewage hose and curled it on the wharf, doing the same for the electrical lines. If Harris had the chip, and had completed a detonator/locator, and he had stolen my boat, he was likely on his way to San Francisco.

  How far was Harris? I shook my head. How could I find him on the open sea? The ocean was a vast place. He wouldn’t need running lights, but could see as well as I could in the dark.

  I spotted the speedboat Harris and his goons had used earlier to escape from the yacht. Angry pacing had taken me to it.

  I glanced around to see if anyone was watching. It was nearing midnight. On a houseboat three slips away, teenagers were having a party. They drank beer and slow-danced to soft music. Elsewhere it was a subdued night at the Long Beach marina.

  I untied Harris’s boat. Once on board, I fiddled with the ignition, let the engine burble and checked the gas tanks. They were three-quarters full.

  It was a risk taking such a small boat into the ocean. It was even worse for one of the accelerated. Because our density had increased, we sank like ball bearings. A life jacket wouldn’t make a bit of difference. Did I really want to try to follow Harris out to sea?

  I glanced around at other boats and then thrust the throttles. The engine roared like a wild thing and the entire fiberglass body thrummed with energy as it lunged. As soon as I left the protection of the marina, I hit three-foot waves. It was rough, with my body lurching at each blow. A half-mile out the waves smoothed into long, rolling swells. It made it hard to see when I rode at the bottom of the swells. In the speedboat, I was too close to the water.

  I pulled out Rita’s thin cell. It had three bars, which should have been impossible. I’d been betting it was something different from Harris’s laboratory.

  A cold wind blew and spray blasted my face. It was darker out here, with the stars blazing in the heavens. They reflected eerily off the waters so it seemed I’d found a strange sea to travel. I tasted salt on my lips and wished I were aboard the Alamo. It was crazy to be out here in the ocean in a speedboat.

  Maybe a helicopter would have been better, but I didn’t have a helicopter. I had a speedboat.

  I realized I couldn’t hear anything above the engine’s roar and the constant thump of the boat striking waves. I throttled it down to about half speed.

  The swells grew and I made certain to approach them from the right direction so they wouldn’t swamp my boat. I kept debating turning back. Finally, I throttled way down, just enough to keep moving so I hit the swells in the right direction. I didn’t want to drift in this little boat. The lights of LA were to the right, already several miles away. I felt alone and vulnerable out here. I felt like a desperate fool.

  I wiped salt water off my face and hunkered down low. It was hard finding a quiet spot, without the wind moaning and the hiss of passing waves. If this didn’t work—

  There was ringing on the other end. After three rings, Harris picked up.

  “To whom am I speaking?” he asked.

  “You stole my boat,” I said.

  “Ah, since you have the communicator, I must assume that Rita is dead.”

  “What did you do to her?”

  “Does it matter now?” Harris asked.

  “Why did you do it? Why did you kill Kay? She was giving you everything you wanted.”

  There was silence on his end. I looked up, staring into the watery darkness. Somewhere ahead of me, Harris plowed determinedly for San Francisco. Could he know I followed him in a speedboat? If he stayed ahead long enough, I’d run out of gas. I’d be stranded in the ocean, many miles from shore.

  “Strength is an aphrodisiac,” he said in my ear.

  I hunkered lower again, not wanting to miss anything. “And that’s why you killed Kay?”

  “My dear fellow, if you would shut your yap for a moment, you would understand.”

  I wanted him angry. I wanted him cursing me. I wanted him to speak my name earnestly, in the dark. He had called me once before that way. I wanted him to do it one more time, but out here in the ocean. If he did, I just might possibly be able to pinpoint him. At the very least, I might learn on which vector north he headed.

  “I have not always been popular with gorgeous women,” Harris said in a ruminating voice. He had won. He was safe on my boat, or so he thought. He could indulge in a little reflection now. He was an arrogant and insufferable S.O.B.

  I bent my head lower to the quiet spot in the speedboat as I jammed a finger in my other ear.

  “Do you know that I used to call the sex lines?” Harris asked. “It was a grubby affair, but I would have photos of such unbelievable beauties in my possession. It was too much, the pornography available then and available today. Only twenty years ago, to see a pair coupling like dogs, one would have to view scummy individuals with all their horrible tattoos. These days, absolutely gorgeous woman pose in the most provocative and salacious manner. The lust burned in me and I was compelled to phone. I have always hated your kind, you and Dave. Men like you have strutted and posed and with uncanny, animal vitality, you won all the beauties around us. It was wrong. I realized that long ago. The best woman should have recognized the intelligent man as the superior one, not the man most akin to the beasts.”

  “Those are the breaks, Harris.”

  “Oh, my dear deluded fellow, the accident propelled me into a different universe entirely. I have become the animal, the beast with vitality. I have taken over three hundred, luscious women since that day in Switzerland. Most died because my passion overcame my sense and I crushed them in the midst of ecstasy. They screamed, they sobbed and they begged. Perhaps that stimulated me to greater intensity. I became an Adonis, and I learned that aggression and arrogance attracted the beautiful creatures that had for so long eluded my embrace.”

  “Good times, eh Harris?”

  “Glorious times beyond my dreams. This gift of acceleration…it is a marvel. But
I wished for more than the savage couplings, even as the pornography I used to enjoy quickly waned in appeal.”

  “So you killed Kay why?”

  “You’re an obnoxious man. You’re too self-indulgent and single-minded. Kay and Rita, they were the only women who could take my embrace and survive my crushing strength. They in turn yearned to please me. Oh, I have learned so much in the area of erotic stimulation. I have studied it with the thoroughness of a scientist and then applied it with cold-blooded logic. It is a game, a contest. The superior man understands this and uses the base instincts that warp a woman’s thinking. Power draws them like steel filings to a magnet.”

  “You’re lying about Kay,” I said. “She never would have loved a pervert like you.”

  Harris brayed into the cell. “Does that trouble your American self-esteem? You are such a common personality. There is nothing subtle about you. You lack depth. You fail to engage one’s mind.”

  “I can still kick your English ass up side of a room and down another. You’re a coward, Harris. You’re afraid of me and thus you prove you’re not as superior as you think.”

  “She hated you,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what happened. You wanted Kay because you had become tired of Rita. Kay must have known how you felt about her. So she played you all down the line. It’s why she made it to my boat in San Francisco. She must have given you a lot of promises, but never delivered.”

  “You swine,” Harris said.

  “You had Rita with you that night,” I said. “Somehow, you’ve learned to mentally dominate people, or some people. It’s one of your abilities. You must have ordered Rita to kill Cheng, then me, and then Stone.”

  “You are a dead man, Kiel. I will hunt you and squash you.”

  “You tried to force yourself on Kay that night. She fought you off, but you struggled to hold her. Finally, she fled, and she fled into traffic, hit by a laundry truck. Kay died because she couldn’t stand someone like you touching her. Your embrace disgusted her.”

  Harris broke the connection.

  I jammed the cell into my pocket, stood and bent my head, listening for—an eerie feeling prickled my scalp so my heart beat faster. It wasn’t an audible sound. For just a moment, however, in my mind’s eye, I saw Harris at my controls, cursing me and scraping his back teeth together in rage. He even hefted his cell as if to hurl it into the ocean.

  The mental connection snapped off. I turned the wheel, opened the throttles and headed in a new direction, the one where I’d felt him. If Harris was near, if this speedboat didn’t smash apart thumping across these waves, I just might make it to the Alamo for a final confrontation.

  ***

  Full-throttle, I roared through the dark ocean. My eyes strained at the horizon. I searched. I prayed, and sometimes, I felt him. The feeling would grow and I could almost glimpse him in my mind’s eye again. I’d make a course correction and hope I was almost there. Then the mental link would disappear as if swamped by a cold wave of English logic.

  The lights of LA faded into the cold Californian cliffs. Occasionally, I saw a glow along the coast. Mostly it was fog.

  Salt, spray and a rolling sea, it’s all I saw. Then I noticed a dot. I spied it from a top of a swell. Next time I roared up another swell, it was gone. Maybe we had to both hit a swell at the same time. Three minutes later, I saw it again. Was that the Alamo?

  The minutes passed. The engine coughed. I froze. Then the outboards resumed their roar of power. I kept seeing the dot as it increased to a smudge and finally into the dark outline of a boat. After a time, I recognized the silhouette of the Alamo, of my boat, my home.

  I heard a strange noise, and wondered what it could have been. I roared up and down the swells. So did Harris. Then I heard the sound again. I recognized it now, the whine of a bullet. Harris was shooting at me.

  Four minutes and several bullet-whines later, I saw the stab of flame. It came from a rifle barrel. I wasn’t worried about his shots at this range. That he tried to shoot me from so far away was gratifying. It meant he was frightened. A frightened man often made mistakes.

  I bent my head and conjured evil thoughts about Harris. I wanted him to feel death on his neck. I wanted it to constrict his throat.

  “I’m coming for you, Harris!” I shouted into the salt spray.

  I felt like I was back in Afghanistan, the times we swept into terrorist camps on helicopters. It had been a powerful feeling, one of fear and elation, of a fierce desire to live and to kill the enemy. I had been a soldier. Sometimes, when I’m willing to admit it, I am a still a warrior. My lips peeled back in a savage grin.

  Harris found his range then. A bullet tore into the fiberglass hull, one tiny shard skidding across my cheek.

  I snarled, drew and fired once, twice and watched Harris drop at the third.

  I hadn’t hit him, or I doubted I had. He’d just finally grown aware I shot back. It was time to let his gut curdle, time to let him feed on fear.

  One hundred yards separated us. The Alamo was like a castle. I was like a knight on horseback. He had height. I had speed. Tonight, I didn’t try anything fancy. The speedboat thudded across the water, straight for the Alamo’s stern.

  The smaller biker popped into sight. He had the parabolic gun. He flashed the brilliant light as I ducked, closing my eyes.

  I kept the wheel straight. Shots rang out. Fiberglass shattered, but I kept blindly on course.

  The light quit. I popped up to shoot and saw that I was thirty yards from the boat. The small biker slapped something into his rifle. I emptied my gun at him, and he flew backward, dropping the flashgun.

  Then I ran onto the forward hull seconds before the speedboat crawled up the Alamo’s backside. I leaped as fiberglass crunched. The mighty Alamo swayed and timbers groaned as the speedboat thudded against it.

  I flew through the air and crashed hard as I hit my boat. I barely grappled the railing in time and hauled myself onboard. The speedboat slewed away, the front caved in. The motorboat immediately took on seawater. It had done its duty, however. It could go to a clean and watery grave.

  I laughed. It sounded savage to my ears.

  Eric the Viking-like biker appeared. He had his revolver, and he got off a shot, but I wasn’t there. I moved up beside him, and I hit him in the gut as hard as I could. He crumpled and his gun fell to the deck. I grabbed it, and Harris appeared with his sword.

  It was my turn to shoot, and I missed as the Alamo shifted under me. Before I could take a second shot, the sword sliced through metal and across the outer side of my fingers, scraping against my hardened bones. Blood spurted from them.

  “Now,” Harris said. “Now we shall see.”

  The Englishman lunged, the boat shifted and I fell back. The sword nicked me, parting skin, and Harris stumbled. I crawled for the stern as he bumped against the cabin.

  “No!” he shouted. “Face me!”

  I tore the flashgun from the dead biker’s grip. I screwed my eyes shut, aimed the parabolic dish at him and pulled the trigger. Harris howled.

  I released the trigger, stood and swung the flashgun. It connected with Harris’s lunging sword-hand. He sliced part of the gun, but lost his grip of the sword. It fell onto the deck.

  With a roar, he attacked. He flailed in his clumsy manner but with incredible strength. He kicked and used his elbows. His blows hurt, but so did mine. I saw him wince each time I landed a punch.

  “Why, Harris? Why kill Kay in the Mercedes Benz?”

  We stood on the main deck. Our faces were battered, our clothes torn.

  “Dave’s stinking whore told me no!” he shouted. “She told me no. We’d worked together. We had profited. Why couldn’t she see I had needs? Rita watched. She’d told me Kay was too good for me. I was going to prove her wrong. But your bitch told me I disgusted her. It was unimaginable. There was nothing left for it. She had to die. So I throttled her like an unwanted kitten, or I did before she broke free.”

  I
heard the truth there. It was ugly, as death always was. I stared into his face, as the sweat ran down his cheeks.

  “She must have begged for mercy,” I said.

  “Mercy is for the deserving,” he sneered. “She had shown herself unworthy of me.”

  I nodded, and I didn’t ask anything more. I had been in the Green Berets once. I had fought in Afghanistan. I had found friends killed by the Taliban in foul ways. Every time, we had hunted the killers and butchered them like mad dogs.

  That night, on my boat, I killed Harris. Despite his strength, I did it with my hands. It was an ugly death. He fought hard and he hurt me. In the end, however, my agility, my training and Shop-taught skills proved superior.

  When I took my hands from his corpse, I was straddling him and panting hard. His tongue protruded. He had made some wretched noises. But it was over now.

  I crawled off him and sat staring at the sea for a long time. I wasn’t proud of myself. I was more than a little disgusted to find I was so primitive in my feelings.

  Fortunately, I had the wit to check his clothes before I said a short prayer for his soul and pitched him and his accomplices into the cold sea. Harris sank fast with the weight of his sins.

  I’d found a detonator on Harris with the chip set in it. I was pretty sure it was for the box at the bottom of the ocean. I activated it, found the switch and hesitated. Was Dave a danger to the world? I didn’t believe it, at least not as much a danger as this cube. I stabbed my thumb on the switch. A red light winked, winked, and then it went out.

  I didn’t know for sure, but I believed I’d just exploded the first neuron mind bomb.

  -24-

  San Francisco didn’t care about no stinking bomb, neuron or otherwise. It went on as it had before. Maybe a few fishermen noticed too many floating fish a mile or so from shore. Seagulls and sharks quickly disposed of the evidence of any unnatural occurrence.

  I’d docked back in the East Harbor. I bought lumber, paint and some special metal fittings. Then Blake and I sawed, hammered and painted, fixing the damage I’d done to my boat.