Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  She couldn’t even finish the sentence, she was so furious. Even worse, it happened right in front of the guard station, and she could see the gate guard was enjoying every minute of the show.

  “Should’ve worn a scuba suit,” he said, chuckling as she stepped under the awning and up to the bulletproof glass. The gate house was essentially a stone rectangle stuck onto the front of the prison walls, with a thick glass access window next to the door with an open slot at the bottom. Mickey dug out her identification and slid it under the slot, still cringing at the wet clothes clinging to her.

  “Oh, damn, you’re the Mentalist,” the guard said, after checking her name against his call sheet. “Hey, I uh, I’m sorry about that scuba suit joke… you’re not going to like, make me go crazy or retarded or nothin’, right?”

  Mickey stared at him. She really, really wanted to start things off on the right foot here, but she was soaked and miserable and sometimes, you had to fight stupid with stupid.

  “How hard would I have to push?” she said, leaning in towards the guard. “To make you either one of those?”

  “I’m… how about you just head on inside,” the guard said, buzzing her in through the front gate.

  Inside of the gate, the front guard station looked just as ancient and medieval as the outer walls. Mickey paused for a second to try to sort herself out, looking uselessly over her wet clothes. She decided that she needed a clothing dryer, a hair dryer, and a new career.

  “Ms. Rhodes?”

  Mickey abandoned her attempts to shake the water off her feeble umbrella and nodded. “Yep, that’s me.”

  “I’m Warden Peck,” said a smiling middle-aged man in a clean suit. “Allow me to escort you. Have you been to the facility previously?”

  “First time,” she said, falling into step with him as he led her past the solid stone gatehouse and into the prison.

  “Well, we’re very proud of it. I’m sure you, like most people, might assume that this penitentiary is perhaps old and out of date, but I assure you, there is a lot more here than meets the eye.”

  “I was just thinking that it kind of looks like a castle,” Mickey said.

  “That was the idea. Built in 1829… and at the time, the most expensive prison in history… the idea was to project an image; not only to the inmates, but to the entire city, as well. The choice to build the outer walls to resemble a fortress reflects that desire.”

  “To intimidate people?”

  “Well, to remind them, I would say. In those days, the prison was considered cutting edge in its design and function. Every prisoner was alone in his cell, with a skylight above to let the sunlight down on him like the light of God.”

  “Solitary confinement for every single prisoner?” she asked. “All of the time?”

  “Back then, it wasn’t considered a punishment. It was thought of more as an opportunity for reflection. Eventually, of course, economics dictated that the single cell policy be abandoned and that prisoners share space.”

  “And you’re able to keep prisoners, even mages, in a place that’s…”

  “…so old?” he finished for her. “Like I said, looks can be deceiving. The prison stayed active into the ‘70s, and underwent various upgrades and rebuilds throughout the years. When Trubuilt Corporation acquired the property ten years ago, they invested a tremendous amount into the infrastructure. New surveillance systems, new security measures… you name it.”

  They walked down the long hallway leading from the front gatehouse and the warden opened a door for Mickey to step through. Beyond the door, a large, circular room was filled with guards watching banks of computer monitors feeding in images from cameras all over the prison. Secure steel doors were spread along the length of the room.

  “This is the hub,” the warden said. “The command center of the prison. From here, we can easily monitor and respond to each of the cell blocks, which consist of rectangular buildings radiating outwards from the hub like the spokes of a wheel.”

  “What about the mages? How do you contain them?”

  “Our biggest selling point. We have several layers of protection designed to maintain control over even the most potent of our magic-using population… or Users, as the staff usually calls them.”

  He pointed at one of the nearby monitors. “For the blocks that house the Users, the individual cells themselves have warding magic built in, preventing teleportation in or out, or use of any magic at all, really.

  “That warding protection is duplicated at the cell block level. That layer doesn’t prevent magic use within the cell block… that would be impossible considering the scale… but it does keep any Users from escaping with teleportation or flight or destroying the walls or doors, or any other magical means of escape. They must physically move through the doors to exit the cells or the cell block, just like any other prisoner.”

  They approached a large, concrete pedestal set in the center of the room, about waist height, with a small, metallic sphere set in a metal housing at the top of it. The sphere was perfectly smooth and spun constantly on its axis, turning noiselessly in its housing.

  “And then, there’s this,” the warden said, indicating the pedestal with a proud smile. “The anti-magic shell. Our proudest achievement. Trubuilt invested millions, spared no expense in hiring the best Defense mages in the country, and they created a device… this sphere that you see housed here… which generates a sort of anti-magic ‘shell’ that extends like a dome over the entire facility. No magic can cross that shell unless we allow it… it will be immediately dispelled.”

  “No one’s going to be flying out on us,” he said with a grin, then added quickly, “Oh, but don’t touch! It’s protected with a failsafe that will electrocute anyone who tries to remove it. That’s why there’s a safety housing.”

  Mickey gave him a barely enthusiastic thumbs up. “I’ll try to keep my hands to myself.”

  “A wise policy in here. We’re going this way,” Warden Peck said, leading Mickey through one of the steel doors and out of the hub. “The first section of Cell Block One has been converted into administration offices and meeting rooms… for attorneys or visitors such as yourself to meet with the inmates.”

  Mickey looked around a few times, and realized she was already hopelessly turned around and lost. She stuck to the warden like glue. This was no place to wander off.

  “What can you tell me about the prisoners that I’m here to talk to?” she asked.

  “Which one did you decide to talk to first?”

  “The male, um…” she started to search in her oversized purse for her tablet.

  “Ah, Prisoner 3802,” the warden nodded. “Good choice.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. His size might be intimidating… it’s really hard to appreciate how big he is until you stand next to him… but he’s been a model prisoner. Doesn’t cause any trouble, not to the guards, not to the other prisoners. And they pretty much leave him alone, even though he used to be a police officer.”

  “Prisoner 7682,” he continued, shaking his head, “she’s another story. Real spitfire, that one. Can’t seem to help getting in someone’s face from time to time. We had to put her in a cell with one of our more dangerous inmates just to create a stalemate and keep the peace. It seems to have worked.”

  They walked along a concrete hallway with several steel doors set along its length, and the warden opened one of those doors with a large set of color-coded keys and held the door open for Mickey. Inside of the small room, there was nothing but a steel table with a metal chair on either side of it.

  “It’s, um, kind of small,” Mickey said.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll be restrained to the table. And a guard will be right nearby. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

  “Perfectly safe,” Mickey said, sounding unconvinced.

  There was the sound of chains rattling in the hallway, and the warden nodded. “Here he comes now.”

  Dread

 
The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated, as the old saying goes.

  That was the plan, of course. Cass and I knew what was in store for us after being Revived; in a word, madness. Every Vive job goes insane. Every one. And I wasn’t going to go out like that.

  Better to be dead. Better to be dead, and take the sick sons of bitches who did this to us along for the ride.

  We didn’t want to actually kill anybody, though… we were still cops and that went against the grain too much. But we could still blast the shit out of their corporate headquarters, at night, while nobody was there. We could destroy their building, and take out as much of their research as we could.

  Oh, they probably had backups of all their data copied on the cloud or some damn tech thing like that, but the point was, we could at least hit back against them before we checked out. And if I had to die, I wanted to go down swinging.

  It didn’t work out that way.

  It turns out, as good as we were at being cops, Cass and I made for pretty lousy criminals. We got the blueprints for the Revival Tech headquarters building no problem; but the explosives… well, that was another story.

  It’s only fair to mention that there was no way to know that we were apparently under observation ever since we’d been Revived. The thought never occurred to us that we might be being watched. Turns out, we were definitely being watched, because when we broke in to the department’s explosive storage to steal… well, all of the C4… we got jumped by just about every single cop in the city.

  If you asked Cass, she’d probably tell you that the reason why we failed was that we were too soft. We hadn’t brought guns along on our little heist; zero causalities was our priority. She’d probably tell you that we shouldn’t have been so naïve; that we should’ve gone all in and should’ve been willing to do anything to win.

  She’d say it, but she wouldn’t mean it. It would just be her mean streak talking.

  Don’t think for a second, though, that just because we didn’t have guns, that either one of us went quietly. It took a small army to subdue us and drag us out of there. And, this being post 9/11, and there being a crime involving the destruction of a building, the Justice Department was all too eager to label us as “terrorists”, although who we were planning to terrorize, was never really made clear to anybody, especially us.

  It doesn’t matter. All that matters is, our plan to demolish Revival Tech in retaliation for bringing us both back from the dead, and blow ourselves to smithereens in the process, didn’t work out.

  Why would we want to do that… destroy Revival Tech… when they had been so nice to keep us from dying? Well, in the first place, they didn’t keep us from dying, we did die during the fight with Maestro Polonius, they just brought us back without our consent. With what Cass and I have seen, we would never have consented to something like that…we knew first-hand what really happens when someone is Revived.

  Like I said, every Vive Job eventually goes insane. It’s only a matter of time. So it’s bad enough that I’m stuck here in a grimy little cell in the oldest prison in the country; even worse is the knowledge that sooner or later, I’m going to lose it completely. My mind is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off and betray me.

  God, not my mind. Not my mind. That’s the real terror. I’m not afraid of dying; I mean, I’m not eager for it, I want to live the same as everybody else does. But if you’ve been through what I’ve been through… a long stint in the Corps followed by working on a Wreck squad and going up against rogue mages and whatever inhuman nightmares they can throw at you…you pretty quickly wrap your mind around the idea that you could end up dying as an occupational hazard.

  But the idea that you might be crippled… that’s different. Back when I was with the Raiders in the Marine Corps, we all developed a sort of gallows humor about death. It kept us sane enough to do our jobs. But being crippled was different; it seemed like everybody shared the same quiet terror of having to live out a long life as less of a man.

  It seemed, well, humiliating in a sense, to have your power taken away like that. When your life revolves around defining yourself as a warrior, when the image you have of yourself is that of someone powerful and capable, having to go on in life with that power and capability taken away from you… that’s just torture. A lot of us thought, better off dead than crippled. Better to go out hard rather than linger on as less.

  And then there’s your mind. I’d gladly take losing a leg or an arm over losing my mind. I watched it happen with my great-uncle Kevin. I had just finished Basic when the word came back to our family: Altzheimer’s.

  This was the guy who had taught me how to hunt and fish; unstoppable, irrepressible, always laughing, always joking, and always with a can of shitty cheap beer in his hand. I watched him slowly go away, fade in degrees, from that Devil May Care powerhouse to a feeble old man, all in the course of a few short years. When the Altzheimer’s had finally finished having its way with him, he was left a lost, scared, confused old man who couldn’t even remember who I was. I think if he’d been given a choice, he would’ve rather died than remain a shadow of what he was.

  What I was facing was a hell of a lot worse than that. It wasn’t just forgetting who you were, or where you were, or what you were doing. This was going off the deep end. Getting violent. Getting unhinged from reality, and not knowing what was real and what was a trick of the mind any longer.

  And that’s what I’m staring down the barrel of, every day. Every day, I’m waiting for the fuse to burn down and for my time to end as a man who’s in control of his mind. How many people would I hurt once that happened? How badly would I disgrace myself, not even knowing that I’m doing it?

  I guess the powers that be were wondering how long I would last, as well, since a CERT team showed up at my cell and told me I was going to meet with an “interviewer” from Revival Tech. I don’t know why they always felt like they had to send a whole CERT team just for little old me. I never gave the guards any trouble. It wasn’t their fault I was in there. They were just doing their job.

  Anyway, they had me do the whole dance where I put my hands through the door slot to be cuffed, and then put me in hand and leg restraints, forcing me to shuffle along in halting steps as they led me through the cell block, past the other prisoners. The other prisoners all watched me go by, peering intently through the tiny observation windows stuck on the steel doors of their cells.

  Their stares weren’t anything personal. I never started any beefs with anybody. They only stared because there was nothing for them to do, all day, every day, so any change in the scenery invited intense scrutiny.

  The CERT team led me out of the block and through the surveillance hub at the center of the prison, which also served as the place’s command center. I’d only been through here twice before, so I couldn’t help looking around at the guards manning their duty stations. Like I said, there was nothing for me to do all day. Any change of scenery became intensely interesting.

  The interrogation rooms… oh, that’s right, they’re supposed to be called “meeting rooms”, where cons can meet with their attorneys… were in a section of Cell Block One that had a couple of admin rooms built into it before the actual cells started a little further down the block. In theory, the least violent, least dangerous offenders were supposed to be in Cell Block One. In practice, the prison was so damn crowded and mismanaged that it was anybody’s guess as to who was in there.

  They led me into one of the little interrogation rooms, took off my leg shackles, threaded the long chain on my handcuffs through a metal ring set into the steel table, and re-cuffed my hands. The warden was in there, but as soon as I was cuffed and sitting down, he left along with the CERT team, saying, “I’ll leave you two to it, then.”

  The young lady sitting across the desk from me didn’t seem too thrilled that he was leaving, fidgeting around and watching him go as if she thought he might never come back. She wasn’t what I expected. Someone from Revival
Tech, they’d said, and I guess I was expecting some evil genius egghead in a white lab coat that I could instantly hate.

  This tiny young twenty-something sitting across from me looked nothing like that. She looked like a scared little mouse, sitting there in her soaking wet pantsuit, trying to put on a tough face in a terrifying place that swallowed up the weak and spit out the bones. I almost felt bad for her.

  Almost. She still worked for the enemy. For Revival Tech. Who knew how deeply she was involved, what secrets she might be complicit in? She looked young, but you could never tell. Some people don’t waste any time in going rotten.

  “Mr…. Harrison?” she said, checking the computer tablet she had in front of her. “My name is Michelle Rhodes, I’m here to ask you a few questions.”

  She actually stuck her hand out towards me. I tried to hide the bemusement from my face.

  “We don’t usually stand on formality around here,” I said, holding up my hands as far as the handcuffs threaded through the ring on the steel desk would allow.

  “Right,” she said, lowering her hand and looking down at her tablet quickly to hide her embarrassment. “Well, Mr. Harrison, I’m here to…”

  “Dread.”

  She stopped. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Dread. Call me Dread. Everyone calls me Dread.”

  “Of… course they do,” she said. “Okay, um… just… call me Mickey, then. How about that? Everyone calls me that. Doesn’t have nearly the same impact as ‘Dread’, but hey, it’s what I’ve got.”

  She cleared her throat and started again. “I’m here to interview you, in the hopes of assessing your condition post-Revival…”

  “You want to know how soon I’m going to go crazy,” I said. “So do I. Are you an expert on that? A shrink or something?”

  “A shrink? No, I’m not a psychiatrist.”

  “So what are you?”

  She hesitated a moment before answering. “Well, um, federal law dictates that I disclose to you that I am licensed as a Mentalist and will be using those…”