Book Read Free

The Experiment (Book 3): Infectious Thinking

Page 9

by Micah B. Edwards


  My pulse speeds up as I read the email. This is it, then! This is the scientist who infected me with the nanomachines, who's been jerking me around all this time! My first real thread to him, something solid. My mind races as I consider what to do.

  The wisest course of action is probably just to do nothing. Letting him know that I'm onto him isn't really a good idea. But I've been at his mercy for so long that I can't turn down the opportunity to make him sweat a little bit in return. Besides, the email address looks like a junk one anyway, something created to serve a temporary purpose, so there's at least a chance that he's not checking it anymore. So he might not get my taunt, anyway.

  With this weak rationalization in place, I type the sender's address from the letter into my phone and send off a short email from a throwaway address of my own.

  Good morning, doctor

  Your experiments are learning. I'm coming for you.

  -D

  I grin as I hit send. That ought to give him a jolt in the morning.

  On the way to work, Regina asks me, "So, did you see the email?"

  "Yeah, I wrote him a response."

  "What? Dan, really?"

  "Yeah, it's fine. I sent it from a junk address, and all it says is that I'm onto him. Nothing about me or anything to trace it to anyone. I just wanted to yank his chain."

  Regina shakes her head, but she's smiling. "I hope you're right, Dan."

  "What, like you don't want to see the guy sweat? Serves him right."

  "I'm not feeling bad for him! I just hope you're right about it not being a bad idea."

  "Ah, it'll be fine," I tell her. "Dig through the phone some more today and see if you can find anything else, like where the demonstration took place or something. We're finally onto this guy."

  Work is its usual carefully chaotic jumble of heavy objects and moving parts, and I do my best to put all thoughts of the email out of my head and just concentrate on getting things done. Lack of focus on the site puts people's lives at risk, a fact which Mr. Steele regularly reminds us. Still, I can't help but think about what else we'll find. Mr. Tanger is clearly working with the nanomachinist, a willing subject. He knows who he is and how to find him. We can track him down and make him take the machines out of me, give me my life back. Or maybe just set them to superstrength and invulnerability again. I'll be honest, that was pretty handy.

  My train of thought is interrupted by Christopher yelling, "Hey, stop! Dan, look out!" I look up from the load I'm carrying to see one of the earthmovers bearing down on me, mere feet away and closing fast. It's close enough for me to see the face of the man behind the wheel, a guy named Carl that I barely know. The look of malice on his face makes it clear that this is no accident, and as I desperately try to throw myself out of the way, he swerves to follow me. The tires loom large in my vision as I scramble to escape.

  - Chapter Fourteen -

  I lunge desperately to the side, just ahead of the machine's blade. The sandbags I was carrying scatter and are crushed under the wheels as Carl pivots after me. I stumble to my feet, trying to regain my balance and stay ahead of him. The machine whirls around in my direction, but fortunately for me it's not overly maneuverable.

  Carl's shouting something from the cab, but I can't make out the words over the engine roar, and I'm not about to stop and ask him to repeat himself. I can just about guess the gist, anyway. I suspect it has to do with his disgust for me, and my general failure to deserve to live. He's obviously been close to Tanger. If I can get him out of the machine, I might be able to talk him down, although obviously he's a lot farther gone than the others have been. Or maybe he was just more homicidal in the first place. Either way, separating him from the earthmover is a good first step.

  Other people are running towards us now, and I see Christopher waving his arms frantically at me. Since I'm not sure what set Carl off, I can't be sure that everyone coming over is intending to help me. Since Christopher's the one who warned me, though, he seems like a safe bet. I change direction to circle back toward him, and behind me, Carl guns the motor and attempts to cut off my path.

  As soon as the earthmover turns to intercept me, though, Christopher is barreling at it from out of Carl's field of vision. He makes a reckless leap for the door, tearing it open and grabbing Carl by the arm even as he's falling backwards off of the machine. The two men tumble to the ground alarmingly close to the earthmover, and the giant tires print down tracks just inches from their heads.

  Carl and Christopher are locked in a tangle of punches, and a crowd of construction workers descends on them to pull them apart. The bulldozer, unattended, is still trundling slowly along, and before I can decide if I should do something about it, Mr. Steele appears from somewhere, vaults inside and brings it to a halt. He steps back out with a thunderous expression and approaches the mass of men, now split into two groups holding Christopher and Carl back from each other.

  "What just happened?" Steele demands.

  "Carl tried to run Dan over with the bulldozer," growls Christopher, pulling his arms free and dusting himself off. Mr. Steele looks around and gets a general chorus of assent, then glowers down at Carl, still struggling to get the others to let go of him. No one seems particularly inclined to release him yet.

  "You wanna explain yourself right quick, Carl?"

  Carl jerks his head at me. "This isn't my fault! He's been stirring up trouble, causing problems. Man can't be expected to just sit there and take that forever!" When Mr. Steele doesn't look overly sympathetic, he adds, "He stole my phone!"

  "That phone there in your pocket?" asks Mr. Steele, and a look of panic settles over Carl's face. The workers behind him finally let go of his arms, and he reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls forth his phone.

  "I mean...he had it...he, he took it...he must have put it back!"

  Mr. Steele looks over at me, still a couple of dozen feet away, then back at Carl, who seems to be shrinking in on himself. He sighs heavily. "Carl, to my office. Everyone else, back to work. Christopher, you all right?"

  Christopher nods, and Steele continues, "Good. Check out that bulldozer, make sure it's all right. Then get it back where it goes and make sure nothing important got run over. Carl, let's go."

  He herds Carl over to his trailer, and the crowd slowly disperses. I get a number of glances my way, and they're not all sympathetic. A number of the men seem to be wondering what I did to set Carl off, and I do my best to just look shocked and not guilty.

  I'm pretty sure I know what phone Carl's talking about. It's not his phone, but then again, those weren't his thoughts. Tanger's been tipped to the fact that we found his phone. And the most reasonable way for that to have happened is if the mysterious doctor A, who I emailed this morning, told him that his account had been compromised. Maybe he only used that throwaway account to talk to Tanger, which is actually sort of the point of a throwaway account, now that I think about it. Regina was right. That was a really stupid idea.

  I feel like I use the phrase "now that I think about it" a lot in my daily life. Probably this means I should start thinking about things a little more before I do them. I swear I do, though! I just don't seem to get to the right conclusion as often as I'd like.

  I retrieve what I can of the sandbags and try to get back to the task at hand. Christopher joins me after a few minutes. He looks worse for wear than I do; all I have is dirty clothes and a few scrapes from sliding on the ground. Carl landed a few good punches on him, and his shirt got torn somewhere in there, revealing a decent scrape across his belly.

  "You all right?" I ask him, and he nods. "Man, thanks for jumping in there! You saved my bacon. I don't know how you had the guts to jump on there like that."

  "Hey, I did much stupider stuff as a kid. It's all good. Couldn't exactly let him run you down."

  "Still, though! You put yourself on the line there. I really appreciate that."

  "Yeah, no problem." His expression turns troubled. "Hey, so – you didn't
steal his phone, though, right?"

  "No! Absolutely not. I wouldn't do that." To him, my brain wants to add, but I cut the sentence short. See? I think about stuff ahead of time!

  "Yeah, good. I mean, I knew you didn't. I just wanted to hear it, I guess. Thank you."

  "No, seriously man, thank you. I'm buying you beers sometime."

  Christopher laughs. "Now that's how you say thank you! You're on."

  About half an hour after the bulldozer incident, we all see Carl collecting his stuff and leaving without a word. It's pretty clear that he's been fired, but really, I don't think there's another possible response to trying to run a coworker over. Hopefully he was just fired, and they're not bringing any kind of charges against him. It wasn't his fault, although there's no reasonable way I could explain that to anyone.

  And seriously. If Tanger Construction ends up bringing charges against him because he was poisoned by Tanger's thoughts – that's just screwed up. I can understand manipulating someone into doing your dirty work and then pretending you didn't know about it. That's not pleasant, but it's human nature. We do it so often that we've got a dozen different words to describe all of the variations. Blackmail. Coercion. Leverage. Heck, politics.

  But actively blaming someone who was doing the very thing you sent them to do? That seems above and beyond, and if Tanger thinks he can get away with that, he'd better think again.

  "Hey, uh, you need a hand with that?" asks Christopher, and I suddenly realize two things. One: I'm really, intensely angry about a scenario that has not happened yet, and may not happen at all. Two: in my irritation, I haven't really been paying attention to what I'm moving, and I'm currently walking with a stack of rebar that's designed for two guys to carry. It might be close to two hundred pounds, and I've got it up on one shoulder.

  "Oh! Sure. Yeah, gimme a hand before the adrenaline wears off, would you?" I don't know if he'll buy that dodge, but it's the best explanation I could come up with on the spot.

  "Been bulking up to impress your lady, huh?" asks Christopher as we carry the rebar.

  "Who, Regina? Nah, she's got a thing for a friend of mine."

  "Yeah? Huh. I woulda bet she had her eye on you."

  "Nah, she likes the brainy guys. I'm more the strong, silent type," I tell him.

  "Strong, sure, but you talk way too much to be the silent type."

  "Harsh, man."

  "Hey, I call 'em like I see 'em."

  The rest of the day passes without incident, and eventually Regina arrives to pick me up. "So how'd your day go?" she asks.

  "Prepare for an atypical answer!" I say, and give her the whole rundown.

  She shakes her head in disbelief. "So you think Mr. Tanger just straight up had someone try to murder you?"

  "Yeah, basically. I mean, how many times have you thought something along the lines of 'I'd like to kill that guy' over something innocuous like getting cut off in traffic? Now you figure that Tanger is afraid that I'm onto him, plus he's got the nano-loathing of me – how could he not be thinking that? And if he lays that thought on someone less stable, then bam, here we are.

  "Also, hey! I just realized that I'm not excited about the idea of him running the city anymore. Apparently 'tried to murder me' is good enough to bump him out of the good-guy role he assigned himself in my brain. So that's a silver lining."

  "Yeah, I'm glad you're finding the bright side here," says Regina, checking her rearview mirror. "Continuing on that positive note, I think I'm joining you in the reassessment of Tanger."

  I crane my neck around to see what she's looking at. "What's up?"

  "See that green car, and the black one behind it? They've both been following us since we left the site. These are pretty major roads, so maybe it's a coincidence. But they're staying right on me."

  "Yeah, um," I say. "Maybe let's not go home just yet. Take some turns at random, see if they follow us."

  Regina takes the next left, then a right after that, taking us onto side streets. Both cars follow us, one speeding up to run a light turning red.

  "Right," says Regina. "What do we do now?"

  Suddenly, the black car roars forward, pulling up beside us. The driver waves wildly at us from inside the car, and it takes me a second to realize that he's not just waving his hand. He's holding a gun.

  Regina floors the gas pedal, but the man in the black car matches her speed and stays even with us. The green car is still following right behind us, so we can't slam on the brakes and hope to make him overshoot; even if we didn't end up getting rear-ended, we'd still be trapped in between the two cars afterward.

  The driver next to us points the gun more precisely, no longer just waving it at us. His window begins to roll down, clearing his shot.

  "What do I do?" shouts Regina, her hands locked in a death grip on the steering wheel.

  "Bump him!" I say, having been able to get a much longer look into the car than Regina. "He's got both hands off of the wheel right now."

  Regina shoots me a look of terror, but pulls the wheel to the left. The car veers, and there's a jolt and a tinkling of glass as our headlights smash together. The black car swings wildly off to the side, and I can see the driver drop his gun as he scrambles to get it back under control. There's a sound of metal tearing as he sideswipes a parked car, and I see what looks like a sideview mirror tumbling in the street behind us before it's crushed by the green car.

  Regina's hyperventilating, which is more than reasonable in the circumstances, but she's still speeding along and that's the important thing. I dig my phone out of my pocket to call 911. After a brief pause, they pick up.

  "911. Police, fire or ambulance?"

  "Um – police. Police!"

  "What is your emergency?"

  "We're on the road and someone is trying to kill us! He's got a gun and he's ramming us with his car!" Technically, we rammed him, but I don't feel bad about stretching the truth here. I think we really just beat him to the punch.

  "Okay, sir, where are you?"

  "I have no idea! We're on some side street. The road signs are going by kind of fast! Can't you get this from my cell phone?"

  There's the roaring of an engine as the black car surges up beside us again. The driver, now with one hand on the wheel, has his window down and the gun pointed at us. "Regina, hit the brakes!" I yell, and she does just as the gun goes off. Her window and mine both shatter as the bullet whizzes through the car, and then we're rocked from behind as the green car tailing us slams into our rear end.

  "Go, go, go!" I shout unnecessarily, as Regina is already standing on the gas again.

  "Sir, are you all right? Can you tell me what's happening?" says my phone.

  "A man is shooting at us with his gun, and we just got rammed again! No, we're not all right! Regina, see if you can get back to the main streets. They might back off there."

  The 911 operator sounds alarmed. "I'm not sure that's a good idea! Going to the main streets may just escalate the situation."

  "It's feeling pretty escalated right now!" I shout, crashing against Regina as she swings the car in a hard right in an attempt to shake our pursuers. The green car has a cloud of something, smoke or steam, coming up from its hood, and is starting to fall behind, but the black car is still with us, with the driver trying to line up for another shot. Regina's feinted at him a couple more times, trying to knock into him, but he's dodged or fallen back each time.

  The 911 operator has gone silent, and when I hold it up to see if the call was disconnected, I see that my phone is off. I mash the power button, but nothing happens. I start to flip the phone over to check the battery, and it briefly sticks to my hand before pulling free. Abruptly, I comprehend what's happened.

  The trigger for my magnetism is any sort of high emotion, like frustration or anger. Since that particular power got switched off, it takes a concentrated effort to make things even slightly magnetic – but apparently the current situation ramped things up enough that I've magnetized
my phone, which is completely screwing with its circuits. It's not going to work again until I can calm back down and demagnetize it.

  Even as I'm realizing this, the back window shatters. The driver of the black car, tired of Regina's attempts to run him off of the road, has gone for the less precise but easier technique of simply firing at us from behind. My heart is thudding in my chest and I can feel my blood pulsing in my head, so calming down to fix my phone is really not going to be an option right now.

  The green car is nowhere in sight now. Regina throws our car into another sharp turn to lose the black car, and it buys us a few seconds of lead time. Suddenly, an idea comes to me.

  "Regina, hit a few more turns like that one, buy us a little distance. Then hit the brakes and let me out."

  "What? No! He has a gun!"

  "No, it's okay, I have a plan. Make sure he's far enough away that he can't just shoot me immediately, then let me out and drive off, like a block away. He's after me, not you, so he'll come after me. You call the police and tell them where we are, and I'll stop this guy."

  Even through her terror, I can see doubt on Regina's face, but she slaloms into another turn. As the black car fishtails to make the corner, I shout, "Now now now!" and Regina stomps on the brakes, throwing us both forward.

  I'm scrabbling for the handle even as I unbuckle, because the black car is coming up fast. Regina starts to accelerate before I'm fully out of the car, and my intended run for cover turns into a graceless tumble instead. I fetch up against the bumper of a parked car a split-second later and duck behind it as the black car screeches to a halt next to me.

  "Dan! You thief!" the driver hollers, bounding from his car.

  "I don't even know you!" I shout. Not that I expect that to work, but I want him to know where I am without being able to see me to take a shot, so I've got to say something. And if it does somehow make him realize that this is crazy, then hey! We can end this right now.

  No such luck, of course. A bullet zings off of the trunk of the car I'm hiding behind, and I reflexively duck further, banging my head into the side of the car. How many shots was that? Four? Five? How many shots does a gun hold, anyway? I think a standard clip is eight or ten, but it's probably different based on the type of gun, and I have no idea what he's got. He's still got plenty of shots left, in any case.

 

‹ Prev