Powder Burn

by Blake Banner

  Thursday 18th:

  O. I woke up feeling drained, exhausted, aimless, profoundly depressed. It was good to talk. It helped. I asked if these crashes would be a recurring thing. It seems that is unlikely. I am scared. I don’t know what I am becoming. I don’t know who I am. I seem to have no control over what’s going on. I asked Zack and the others. They said they had had similar crashes. Hattie and Hans yesterday. Zack and Bran today. That is no coincidence.

  I sighed and felt depressed. There were no prizes for guessing what was going on here. It was all too obvious. It was an age old story, where people with too much power offered the illusion of freedom in exchange for the reality of enslavement. I noticed the red circle at the beginning of the paragraph and wondered again what it was, what it meant, if it was the same circle that appeared on the calendar. I reached over and leafed back to January 18th. It had a red circle on it. I sagged back in my chair, took a drag on my cigarette and a swig of warm beer.

  Then my cell rang. I picked it up and looked at the number. I didn’t recognize it. I thumbed green and said, “Yeah, Walker.”

  “Lacklan, it’s me, Lucia.”

  “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Have you heard from Charlie?”

  “No. Why?”

  “He hasn’t called you?” She sounded surprised.

  I frowned. “I just told you no. Why? What is it?”

  She hesitated, and when she spoke, she sounded scared.

  “He just called me.”

  “He what? What did he say? Where is he?”

  “Please come over, Lacklan. I need you to come here. Please.”

  TWELVE

  I left the Zombie in the parking garage, walked to West End Avenue and hailed a cab. I climbed in and gave him the address. As we moved north, I sat back and stared out the window at the hot glare of the afternoon streets, and thought about the polarized extremes of a toxic society, where people like Francoise Troyes and Wolfgang Fokker could prey on homeless, harmless people like Zack and Hans and Hattie, and Bran, and use them as lab rats; where accountability had become one more item of politspeak, whose meaning few remembered anymore, and whose demise even fewer mourned.

  Omega may be dead, but everything they stood for: the dehumanization of the weak, their enslavement to serve the bloated, complacent greed of the powerful, that lived on. For one bitter, hopeless moment, I wondered if there were any point in fighting, when in the end, if you fought for humanity, you ended up having to fight human nature.

  We arrived, I paid the cabbie and rode the elevator to her floor. When she opened the door to me, her eyes were wide with fear. She didn’t greet me but looked right and left down the corridor, then stood back to let me in, searching my face anxiously.

  “He didn’t call you?”

  “No, he didn’t call me.”

  We were in a small, over-decorated entrance hall. “He said he would call you.”

  “When? How long ago?”

  “A little before I phoned. Forty-five minutes ago? An hour? Come in.”

  She pushed open a dark, wooden door onto a spacious room with French doors onto a small balcony at the far end. Two steps led down from a parquet dining area to a living area that was populated by over-stuffed, cream calico armchairs and a huge sofa of the same design. She took my arm and led me to one of the chairs. As I sat, she said, “What does it mean, Lacklan? What’s going on?”

  “I might be able to tell you if you would tell me what he said.”

  She didn’t answer straight away. She blinked a few times in rapid succession, clasping her hands in her lap, rubbing the backs of her right fingers with the heel of her left hand.

  “He told me you should stop looking for him. He said it was just causing problems. I told him we couldn’t do that. We were worried about him. He said he was OK, he just wanted to be left alone, he was going back to Mexico, to his sister. I told him you were concerned for his safety. He said he’d be in touch.”

  “So he’s not in Mexico yet.”

  “No, I guess not. He said he was going.”

  “He gave no indication of where he was?”

  “None at all.”

  I frowned at her, trying to piece everything together. “Why are you afraid, Lucia?”

  She bit her lip. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.” She waited for reassurance. I didn’t give her any, so she went on. “Somebody has been following me.”

  “Have you seen them?”

  She nodded. “It’s always the same person.” She hesitated. “At least, I think it is. Despite the heat, they are wearing a long coat, kind of dirty brown, sunglasses and a hat—like an Indiana Jones kind of hat. You know what I mean?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a little melodramatic.”

  A flash of irritation contracted her face. “Next time I see him, I’ll tell him to see a fashion consultant!”

  “Cut it out. How often have you seen him?”

  “Four, maybe five times.”

  “How can you be sure he’s not just a student? Kids go in for that kind of dress. He’s probably dressed as his avatar in some online game.”

  Her cheeks flushed and her eyes were bright with anger. She stood and walked to the balcony. “If you’re just going to humiliate me and laugh at me, please leave, and close the door on your way out.”

  I got to my feet and went to stand close behind her. “I’m not laughing at you or humiliating you, Lucia. The question is a serious one, more serious than you perhaps realize.” I took hold of her shoulders and turned her around to face me. “How can you be sure it is not just a student dressed in his on-line fantasy gear?”

  “For a start, pendejo…”

  “I know what that means.”

  “Good! For a start, I have never seen him on campus. I have only ever seen him around my neighborhood, if I’ve gone to buy groceries, or to take a walk in the park. He’s there, walking behind me. He doesn’t try to hide it, but he stays too far away for me to talk to him, too far away for me to see him clearly.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Since you came to see me at college. And what it seems to me is that he knows what my movements are at college, but he wants to know what my movements are at home.”

  “How could you know that? You have some idea who it is?”

  She nodded several times. “Yeah.” She nodded again. “I think it’s Charlie. And I think his telephone message was a warning.”

  “A warning?”

  “Stay away.”

  I frowned. “But…” I trailed off. Things started suddenly to make some kind of weird sense. “What are you saying, Lucia?”

  She pushed past me and took two steps into the middle of the room, then turned with her hands clenched in front of her. “Lacklan, I am scared.”

  “What of?”

  “I don’t know, but, if this is Charlie, what’s happened to him? Has he gone crazy? Why is he saying he is going to Mexico, but he’s hanging around here stalking me? Why is he warning me—us—to stay away?”

  My mind was racing. I stared hard at her face, trying to read her. After a moment, I said, “Tell me about Francoise Michel Troyes and Wolfgang Fokker.”

  She creased her face, like I’d started speaking to her in Swahili. “What? Have you listened to anything I just said?”

  “Yeah, all of it.” I nodded. “Just humor me. Tell me about them. Are they involved in your department?”

  She spread her hands and shrugged. “Yes, of course they are! What’s to tell? My department is largely funded by the Ceres Corporation. Wolfgang is honorary chair of Nano-Tek and advisor to the White House on future technologies. He is a very brilliant man. They both are. But what has this to do with Charlie? He wasn’t even my student. He wasn’t in my department.”

  I returned to the sofa and sat on the arm, staring at the floor, calculating in my head. I said, “How long did you know Charlie, Lucia?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe six months. Wh
y? What’s going on, Lacklan? What are you thinking? You’re freaking me out.”

  “And all the time you knew him he was the same: dynamic, full of positive energy, brilliant…?”

  “Yeah. Always. He had his moments, like I told you…” She trailed off. “Though they had started to increase lately…”

  I nodded that I already knew that and said, “What would you say if I told you that last November and December, Charlie was a normal guy, like any other? Bright, lively, but pretty much like any other kid of his age?”

  She shook her head. “I’d say that was impossible. I’d say you had to be mistaken. Nobody can suddenly become a genius overnight. And from what I was seeing in Charlie, he was no ordinary genius with an IQ of one forty-five, either. We are talking about an exceptional intellect that had not yet reached its full potential. That doesn’t just happen. That is something you are born with.”

  “You’d think so, but what if I told you I could prove it?”

  She stared at me, uncomprehending. “What are you saying to me, Lacklan?”

  “And what if I told you it wasn’t just him? What if I told you there were others?”

  She shook her head, short, quick shakes. “No, I’m sorry. It’s science fiction.”

  I smiled. “To quote your honorary chair, Wolfgang Fokker, head of your department, science fiction cannot keep up with the developments in science.”

  She sighed and walked away toward the dining room, then stopped and turned back. “Lacklan, I called you to ask for your help, not to hear some crazy fantasy about…” She waved her hand in the air. “Whatever this is.”

  “Really? You say you’re scared because you’re being stalked. Well, ‘whatever this is’ is five kids who suddenly, overnight, six months ago, started developing extraordinary mental faculties: memory, observation, focus, perception, empathy, imagination, abstract calculation, analysis. Intelligence itself is almost impossible to define, but the processes that make up intelligence, they are identifiable and quantifiable. And it was those very processes that became suddenly enhanced in all five of those kids. Each one of them kept a diary, including Charlie, and each one of them had a laptop.”

  She had become very serious and took a couple of steps back toward me. “You are talking about Zack, Bran…”

  “Hans and Hattie, yes, I am. And the thing that was playing on my mind right from the start was, how come they are all illegal in this country, except Charlie? Why is that? But of course, it wasn’t just that they were illegals, none of them had roots either. None of them had anybody at home waiting for them to come back. They were dispossessed, drifters that nobody would miss if anything went wrong.” I stared at her for a long moment, then said, “They were lab rats.”

  “No.”

  “And Charlie was a godsend because he was a bright student, a prime candidate whose friends were not among other students, but among the demi monde of young drifters from all over the world who pass through New York every year, then move on, never to be heard of again. Those were his friends of choice, and those were the ideal lab rats. He brought them to the program.”

  “I can’t believe that, Lacklan. It’s insane.”

  “Is it? Every one of them is dead, Lucia. And they all died the weekend that Charlie disappeared.”

  She put her hands to her mouth. Her eyes were wide. She sought a chair and lowered herself into it. “No…” It was all she kept saying, over and over. “No, no…”

  Finally, she found my face with her eyes and asked, “How?”

  “Zack was hit by a car, Bran had an inexplicable heart attack, Hans and Hattie were shot in the head. All the killings were carried out by two men posing as cops.”

  Her eyes were like saucers. Her voice was small. “How do you know this?”

  I smiled without humor. “Because I killed them both this morning.”

  Her olive skin had turned pasty. “You killed them, the men posing as cops…?”

  I watched her very carefully as I told her, “I broke Detective Marsh’s neck, then I took Delano to a cabin by the Hudson, in the forest near Englewood…” I paused, waiting for her reaction. She just stared wide-eyed with her mouth slightly open, covered by her fingertips. “I hurt him, but he wouldn’t talk, so I took his cell, shot him, weighed him down with rocks and threw him in the river.”

  The room was very quiet. I shifted off the arm and sat on the sofa. I crossed one leg over the other and said, “Then, I traced the GPS on the last number he’d called. It was at a house in Englewood. I checked the land registry and guess who owns that house?”

  She shook her head.

  I nodded. “Francoise Michel Troyes. Science fiction?”

  She closed her eyes. “I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. It’s insane.”

  “I’ve heard their rhetoric, Lucia. And I’ve heard similar rhetoric elsewhere, all too often, from fanatical men who believe their ideas put them above the law and above other human beings. Surely you realize, Lucia, you don’t get to turn humans into gods without vivisecting a few beagles along the way. Besides, have you done the math? What happens to a planet when you have eight or nine billion immortals, all breeding with each other?”

  She was still shaking her head. “No, it’s all talk, propaganda, selling the brand. It is not meant to be taken seriously…”

  “Something tells me they would disagree. The first thing that Detectives Marsh and Delano did after they had taken out Charlie’s pals was break into their homes and steal…” I paused. “You tell me, Lucia, what do you think they stole?”

  She didn’t look at me. She stared down at her hands in her lap. “Their diaries and their laptops…”

  “Precisely. But I have Charlie’s diary.”

  Her eyes snapped up to stare at me. “You have it?”

  “Yeah. It makes interesting reading. I don’t know what they kept on the laptops, but from the diary, it looks as though they were required to write down, each day, their thoughts, feelings and reactions to whatever treatment it was they were receiving. And believe me, it’s clear from the start that Charlie was not a genius to begin with. He was just a regular guy.”

  She was quiet for a long while. Then, she said, “I would love to see it. Do you think that’s possible?”

  “I don’t have it with me, Lucia. It’s in a safe place.”

  “Of course. Have you read the whole thing?”

  “No, just the first few pages. Why?”

  She shrugged. “There might be a clue to where he has gone…”

  “And?”

  She sighed. “Are you sure that his friends were killed by those two hit men?”

  I nodded. “I’m pretty sure Zack was. Why? Are you thinking Charlie killed his own fellow subjects? What for?”

  She stared down at her hands, rubbing the palm of her right hand with her left thumb. “If you are right about them being the subjects of an experiment—some kind of DNA-altering experiment—that could explain some of his more bizarre behavior.” She raised her eyes to hold mine. “The government of this country has conducted that kind of clandestine experiment before, in the recent past, and it has sometimes resulted in a kind of induced psychosis. If there has been any violence in his past, if he experienced violence as a child, that could come out now, released by the treatment as a part of his psychosis, causing paranoia, paranoid schizophrenia…” She shrugged. “I am not a psychiatrist, but I know enough…”

  “Do you know anything about his past?”

  “No. He never discussed it, which made me assume…”

  I got to my feet and walked to the balcony and stood staring out at the long shadows in the still heat. It would soon be dusk. “So you think maybe he killed them, and Marsh and Delano went around after him, mopping up? What reason would he have to do that?”

  “I don’t know, Lacklan. If he were paranoid, he wouldn’t need a reason to see them as enemies. He would only need to project his own demons onto them. I have no idea. The whole thing
just sounds insane to me. Francoise and Wolfgang are wonderful, good men. They are philanthropists. I can’t believe that they would be involved in something as grotesque as this.”

  I spoke half to myself. “You wouldn’t believe the things some people are prepared to do for the good of humanity.” I turned to her. “What do you want to do?”

  She closed her eyes and covered her face. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I can’t think. I feel I’m going out of my mind.” After a moment, she seemed to make up her mind and dropped her hands in her lap again. “I guess I need to confront Francoise, and Wolfgang, and ask them if this is all true?”

  I frowned. “You think that’s smart? Four people have been murdered already. Maybe five. We don’t know if Charlie is alive or dead.”

  “Dios! Don’t say that! I spoke to him on the phone!”

  “Are you sure? Can you swear it was his voice? If you’re going to confront Troyes and Fokker, you’d better be damned sure you are facing reality when you do it, Lucia.”

  She flopped back in her chair and lay like a small, exhausted child, with her eyes closed. Even like that, her beauty was breathtaking. She spoke without opening her eyes. “Lacklan, will you do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Will you stay?”

  I sighed and she opened her eyes to watch me.

  “Tomorrow I will make a decision about what to do, but tonight, let me please at least feel safe.”

  I hesitated a moment, then said, “I am married, Lucia.”

  She spoke with no expression on her face, and no inflection in her voice. “If it’s not a problem for you, it’s not a problem for me.”

  And on that ambiguous note, we left it unresolved.

  THIRTEEN