You’re not going on a mission, Program officials had responded. You’re going on vacation.
Scott’s throat emitted a strangled sound, almost a laugh. He had a vague idea that he was in the stretch of woods he and Janis had navigated before crossing the final road to their stake-out position. If he backtracked along their route, he would end up on Center Street, which ran east and west. It would deliver him downtown.
Scott tried to form a telepathic message for Janis, to fill her in on what was happening, but the velocity of his thoughts wouldn’t allow it.
Plus … your only … objective, he thought amid gasps, should be on … moving … forward.
How close or far back his assailant was, Scott didn’t know. He was kicking up too much noise to hear him.
Harrowing minutes later, a road appeared out of nowhere. Stumbling onto the grassy shoulder, Scott swung his head around. He fully expected to hear the smash of undergrowth immediately behind him. But save for the pulsing drone of insects, the woods were silent.
Scott started into a strong, loping jog, his sneaker and socked foot alternately hitting the asphalt. After a few paces, he hopped on one foot to pull off the other shoe and toss it away. The road was hard against his soles, but he was running evenly now.
As he approached the intersection with the road he had been run off of, his face prickled with fear. If the shooter hadn’t pursued him through the woods, he had gone back to his car. He could be idling just out of sight—or worse, crouched behind an open car door, using the window frame to steady his aim.
Can’t take any chances, Scott thought.
He ducked into the woods on the far side of the street and picked his way past a pair of backyards. From behind the second fence, a dog barked furiously. Scott emerged through the side yard. Shielded by a copse of palm trees, he peeked past the intersection, up Jay Street.
A couple of cars were parked on the street, but Scott didn’t see the burgundy sedan.
He crossed the street at what he hoped appeared a casual walk, neighbor visiting neighbor. He made his way behind those houses until he had cleared the four-way stop and was back on Center Street. The toes of his socks flapped with his fresh jogging strides. He straightened his glasses. Perhaps a quarter mile ahead, the lights of downtown glimmered.
Almost there.
Scott decided to chance the next intersection. He peeked to his right as he entered it. The roar of an engine sounded from his left. His head swiveled just as the brights hit him, plunging his brain into an ice bath.
No time to do anything, he thought from a distance. Except…
He flexed his hips and knees and, when the car was almost to him, jumped straight up.
Chief McDermott’s house smelled cindery, like a fireplace that’s frequently used but rarely cleaned. The fireplace in question was stone and set in the wall to Janis’s right. Janis craned her neck to peer past it and into the lit hallway. She could feel Chastity down there, her energy distorting the atmosphere. The effect drew sweat from Janis’s brow and thinned her saliva, as though she was going to be sick.
She adjusted her slick grip on the cylinder’s handle and crept forward. At the edge of the hallway, she peeked before rounding the corner. To her right, a door opened onto a dim bathroom. Janis eyed three closed doors at the end of the hallway. The bedrooms, she guessed.
Behind the middle closed door, Chastity radiated a sick green pulse. Janis sensed Chief McDermott in there as well. His energy felt as disorganized as Jasper’s had been, but he was still alive.
Janis crept forward until she was close enough to see two splintery holes in the door’s dark wood. The shots Chief McDermott had fired earlier. Janis tried to peer through them, but couldn’t make out anything. Her gaze fell to Scott’s contraption. She swallowed.
“Chief McDermott?” she called.
If Chastity was deaf, then only the police chief should hear her. A sputter of babbling answered her.
With a thought, Janis threw the door open. In the middle of the room, a pale figure leaned over the king-sized bed where Mr. McDermott lay. The figure’s head turned. Her eyes were set high in her long face and covered by a milky caul. Her color was ghostly. Like David and the others, she had hardly aged. She still wore her hair in twin braids that dropped down the front of both shoulders. That chilled Janis more than anything. Her gaze fell to the bloody knife in Chastity’s hand.
“Put it down,” Janis said, miming the action.
Chastity’s lips peeled apart, and she flew at Janis.
Janis grunted backward and threw out a psionic pulse. There hadn’t been time to activate Scott’s contraption. The instant her pulse contacted Chastity, Janis’s head exploded in static.
“Argh!”
Chastity veered off, disappearing into a closet, tweed jackets shaking in her wake.
The static faded from Janis’s head, but she felt like she was on the verge of a massive migraine. She waited for the sensation to pass. It’s her energy, she thought. That distorting effect. Psionic blasts were out, then. As well as anything else that involved her energy mingling with Chastity’s.
Janis raised the nozzle on the fire extinguisher and crept forward, already feeling the emptiness of the closet space. Scott had been right. The mutation in question enabled her to pass though solid objects. She was in the next room.
Chief McDermott let out a low gargle.
Janis backed from the closet and turned to the bed. He was lying on his back in striped blue and white pajamas and a single brown leather slipper. His sleepy eyes stared blankly upward.
“Chief?” Janis said, shaking his shoulder.
He blinked once but did not shift his gaze. Blood painted the far side of his neck. Chastity had sliced as far as his left jugular before Janis had burst in. A kitchen knife—one of Mrs. Spruel’s, Janis guessed—lay on the floor between the bed and closet, where Janis must have knocked it from her grasp. She checked to make sure Chastity wasn’t coming back before setting Scott’s contraption down. She pressed a hand to the police chief’s wound.
“Chief McDermott.” Janis gave him another shake.
This time his breathing pattern shifted. His lips sputtered.
Janis concentrated into him. Chief McDermott’s mind looked like the aftermath of a shipwreck. The detritus of his thoughts were everywhere, some of them bobbing on the surface, the rest sinking into darkness.
There’s time, Janis thought. There’s time to salvage what’s here.
She worked quickly, drawing his thoughts back together, knitting them with the lived experiences and beliefs that gave them meaning. It was intimate, intrusive work, but Janis couldn’t worry about that. Just as a doctor performing life-saving surgery couldn’t worry about plunging his hands inside his patient’s body.
When Janis was done, Chief McDermott’s mind felt whole again. It was a fragile whole—the integrity of his mind would need time to cohere again—but a whole nonetheless.
Janis pushed a little more energy into him to assist the process. She felt a new tenderness toward him.
He was not the one who had shot Mrs. Snyder. It was nowhere in his memory. He hadn’t even known about the poison being administered to the kids in his camp. He believed the supplements to have been nutritional. As far as Janis could tell, the extent of the police chief’s complicity had been in believing that misdemeanor offenses, left uncorrected, would lead to felony ones, and that children could only be reformed through harsh punishment.
But the man had softened with age—Janis felt that, too. He was now the kindly grandfather he appeared.
“Chief?” Janis asked.
The police chief turned toward her. He blinked twice.
“Say,” he murmured through his mustache, “aren’t you the young woman who was asking about vampires?”
“Um, yeah, but listen, you’re in danger. You’re injured.” She looked around and grabbed a handkerchief from a bedside table. She wadded it up and pressed it to his neck. “I need
you to hold this here until we can get you help.” She took his left hand and placed it over the handkerchief. “Nice and firm. Can you do that?”
As he nodded, the glaze over his eyes seemed to dissolve.
“Good.”
She patted the back of his liver-spotted hand and turned from the bed. Her fingers wrapped around the fire extinguisher’s handle, and she lifted the nozzle. While working on Chief McDermott, she had been monitoring Chastity’s energy. She hadn’t moved from the next room.
Showdown time.
But as Janis stepped toward the bedroom door, she felt Chastity’s ochre-colored aura separate into two parts. One circled into the hallway, while the second made for the wall to the closet. With a thought, Janis closed and locked the bedroom door. Then she backed toward the bed, her gaze moving between door and closet, wondering whether she had enough Freon. Unless her perceptions were deceiving her, she was dealing with two entities now, not one.
In slow motion, and with perfect clarity, Scott watched the sedan’s fender pass beneath his feet. Then the slick burgundy hood. A flash of glass, and Scott could see a pair of hands clenching the steering wheel. He traced the hands to arms—the man was wearing a skin-tight black jacket—but before the arms could arrive at shoulders and a face, a force cracked into Scott’s ankle.
He was upended.
Houses, tree tops, night sky, and asphalt cycled through his vision. And then everything stopped. He had landed. And, somehow, he was upright. He looked from his three-pointed stance to the braking sedan.
Well, that will never happen again, he thought groggily and in the disappointment that no one had witnessed it.
Time caught up to the urgency of the moment. Scott stood and hobbled toward the woods. At best, his left ankle was deeply bruised; at worst, it was broken. Behind him, the car squealed around.
Scott hit the trees. His plan was to get to the next road, contact Janis, and flag down a car. After what he guessed to be several blocks of scrambling, he made out a line of streetlights. Easing to the edge of the trees, Scott was surprised to find himself at Beach Drive. His parents’ house was a mile to his left. To his right, the Murder World amusement park reared up.
He centered himself. Janis, can you hear me?
Moments later, his girlfriend’s voice rippled through his thoughts. Scott, are you there yet? I need you to tell—
No, I’m near Murder World, he cut in. Someone tried to run me over and then fired shots. Not Chief McDermott, though. Someone who I couldn’t get a good look at.
Are you all right?
I think so. I’m going to cut through the amusement park and make a run for it. How about you? Any movement yet?
Lots, she said. Listen, I’m in the house with Chief McDermott. It wasn’t Mr. Snyder, but his daughter, Chastity. You were right. She can pass through objects, but she’s doing something else, Scott. Her energy just split in half. I think she divided. And she’s coming…
Like a jack torn from a wall, their connection cut out.
Janis?
Scott’s heartbeats filled the silence.
Janis, can you hear me? Are you all right?
Behind Scott, several branches snapped. He crouched and stared back into the darkness. Terror twisted up his insides. His assailant hadn’t remained in his car this time; he had pursued him into the woods. Scott could just make out his shadow against the shadows deeper back.
Scott stood and bolted for Murder World.
Chastity’s face appeared through the bedroom door, pale and without expression. Her sudden manifestation shocked Janis from her connection to Scott. She retreated until the backs of her knees were braced against the bed frame.
When the rest of Chastity’s head came through, Janis raised the nozzle. She applied telekinetic pressure to the Freon canister triggers but did not depress them. Would cooling Chastity impale her in the door? Janis didn’t want to find out. Her intention was to help Chastity, not kill her.
“What in jumping Jehoshaphat?” Chief McDermott murmured behind her. The bed frame creaked as he tried to sit up.
“Just stay there, sir,” Janis said. “Keep that pressure on your neck.”
As Chastity completed her transition through the door, something rustled in the closet. Janis’s eyes darted there, her mouth as dry as sandpaper, but all she saw were the jackets. She retrained her focus on the emaciated girl in front of her. Her eyes seemed clearer now, and something like humanity glimmered from their depths. That gave Janis cautious hope.
I’ve not come to hurt you, she thought toward Chastity, using ideas rather than words. I’ve come as a friend.
The response was a dull buzzing, like pressing one’s ear to a hornet’s nest.
A friend, Janis repeated and imagined the two of them shaking hands.
The buzzing resolved into slow speech.
I … have … no … friends.
You were never given a chance, Janis thought with a chill. Besides mutating Chastity’s cells and giving her the abilities Scott had described, the radiation had eaten through her substance. Janis could feel it. The woman wasn’t quite solid and she wasn’t pure energy. She existed in an in-between state—a ghost world. It must have been what Chastity had meant by what she’d written in her final postcard to Markus. The girl they’d both known had died.
I … never … had … friends.
What about Markus? Janis asked. The boy you met at the camp?
There was a pause. Then the buzzing rose in volume, becoming frenetic, as though the hornet’s nest had been savagely shaken. Chastity’s face remained strangely placid, but she was screaming: in pain, fury, horror.
Something flashed from the closet. Janis spun to see a fainter Chastity darting out, eyes coated in white film, murder on her face. With a thought, Janis activated all four Freon canisters. The extinguisher’s pin shot off and clanged from a standing lamp. She flexed her thumb into the switch. Cold, compressed air exploded from the nozzle as Janis’s thoughts became lost in the buzzing roar of an ochre fugue.
27
Scott dropped down an embankment on the far side of the road and sprinted through a thicket of knee-high sea grass. The grass thinned as he neared a wooden staircase that climbed to the boardwalk. The clouds had apparently broken because light from the crescent moon shimmered over the Gulf waters. At the bottommost step, Scott peeked back.
His pursuer was only now descending the embankment. Hobbled or not, Scott had a good lead on him. He took the steps two at a time until his feet were smacking onto the boardwalk planks.
He was almost to the locked turnstiles beneath the MURDER WORLD sign when he noticed that his left foot was soaked. He looked down to discover that the impact with the sedan had gashed him above his swelling ankle. For the last several minutes, his sock had been sponging up a steady flow of blood. Scott peeled away the saturated rag and peered back along the line of footprints to the staircase.
Great, a nice little trail for Mr. Psycho to follow.
Scott swung his legs over the turnstiles, just as he and Janis had done their first day here. Except this time, his arms buckled and he almost did fall on his face. He was running low on juice.
But he was in his element now. He staggered into a run, aiming for the turnstiles at the back of the park. He imagined his pursuer picking up his blood trail on the boardwalk. Scott still felt he had a sufficient lead and that the park’s winding byways would prevent him from being shot at from behind.
Even so, he didn’t want to take any chances.
As the Ferris Wheel loomed into view, he concentrated into its power supply, navigating its switches until he found the ones he wanted. Nothing happened at first. Then the lights blinked and caught. Expanding circles of red, yellow, and blue blinked over the entire park.
Scott hoped it would startle his pursuer as well as announce to the rest of Murder Creek that something was amiss at the boardwalk. He rounded the byway between the Bloodsucker ride and Murder Mansion and kicked it into a
higher gear for his final sprint to the rear entrance.
Scott was planting his hands on a back turnstile when he noticed a shadow behind the ticket booth. In a gut-pummeling flash, he understood that his pursuer had never followed him across the beach to the boardwalk. Never seen his footprints. When he determined where Scott was headed, he had returned to the street and taken a straight, unencumbered route to the rear of the park.
Scott tried to brake, but he’d already left his feet. His momentum carried him forward. Both hands slipped from under him, and down he went. Into the steel arms of the turnstile.
When Janis squinted her eyes open, it was like peering into a broken mirror. Everything inside her field of awareness had spider-webbed and fragmented. Some pieces larger, some smaller, all of them tilted at odd angles. She staggered into a bedside table.
I’m in bad shape, she thought.
But thank God she could think. At the last moment, she had managed to create a psychic shield around her mind. Without that protection, she would have been rendered as helpless as Chief McDermott.
Janis groped behind her for the bed and sat. She focused on her perceptions, doing the same for them as what she had done for Chief McDermott’s mind. In the process, she felt the police chief’s gentle hand around her shoulder, as though to ask whether she was all right. His grip felt weak from blood loss, and Janis wondered how much longer he could hold out.
When Janis finished, she blinked twice. Her vision jostled but held together.
She looked for Chastity and found them both. One was lying on the floor, her top half covered in white foam. The other stood and looked down on her, her braided hair blocking Janis’s view of her face. Which was the one with the white membrane over her eyes?
Janis peeked down at Scott’s contraption, which had fallen from her grasp. The tubes connecting the Freon to the nozzle had all blown loose, but she doubted there was any Freon left, anyway. Janis’s hands trembled. Her energy felt fragile. If Chastity attacked again, she would have no way of stopping her.
XGeneration (Book 5): Cry Little Sister Page 19
