Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  “A Mentalist? A brain-poker?” I said. “You work for Revival Tech as a brain-poker?”

  “Well, yes, but don’t hold that against me,” she said, laughing uneasily.

  I didn’t. Laugh along with her, that is.

  As far as I was concerned, Revival Tech was the enemy. Over and over again, they pushed their agenda forward, ignoring how many bodies piled up in their wake. They seemed untouchable; there wasn’t any discernable oversight and any lawsuits brought against them after the latest carnage they were responsible for seemed to simply disappear into thin air.

  Little wonder why. They had insanely deep pockets, and those people they couldn’t bribe with money… well, they could always dangle the prospect of eternal life in front of whoever they needed on their side. That was the goal, after all… to beat Death for good, keep you young and strong and free from oblivion forever.

  As long as you could pay for it.

  “So you’re here to dig into my brain and find out how long until I go crazy?” I said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way,” she said. “I mean, there’s no reason why that outcome is, you know, inevitable.”

  I didn’t have the patience for her bullshit. Or, maybe I’d just spent too much time with Cass over the years and her attitude was rubbing off on me. “Of course it is. Every Vive Job goes insane. We both know that. Every one.”

  She shook her head, but she didn’t look like she believed the words that came out of her mouth next. “Not… well, I think you’d be surprised at the strides the company is making. Depending on the condition of the Revived Individual at the time of death, and with some of newer techniques that we’ve…”

  “Just get on with it,” I said. “What do we do? Electrodes on the head? EEG?”

  “I already have that information from the physical exam you had at the infirmary, and you’ll be happy to know that there’s no anomalies at all on any of it.”

  “I’m thrilled to hear that.”

  I didn’t sound thrilled to hear that.

  “So I’m going to ask you some questions, and you tell me your first, honest response,” she said, fiddling with her tablet. “Just the first thing that pops into your head.”

  “Fine.”

  “Look,” she said, slumping her shoulders. “Look, please… cut me a break here, okay? I realize you’re not exactly thrilled to do this, not exactly thrilled with the company…”

  “They’re the reason why I’m here.”

  She shrugged. “Okay. But I’m… I’m just trying to do my job, all right? I don’t know… any of your history with Revival Tech, or why you and your friend wanted to… well… blow it all up, I guess… but it’s not like I own the company. I really needed a job, they hired me, and now I can actually pay my rent and feed my cats.”

  I looked her over again. She was right, of course. Revival Tech was a huge company, and no doubt they had tons of people working for them who had no idea how bad things were. It’s an old trick; if you have a dirty job to do, divide it up into tiny pieces and hand it out to different people. That way, nobody saw the whole picture.

  That way, you only needed a small group of people who were comfortable with doing the truly terrible. The rest only had a little job to do that didn’t seem so bad.

  The Nazis did it. Most of the people involved with carrying out the Holocaust weren’t pulling the trigger on people or flicking the switch on the gas; most of them were given a little job to do. Find the Jews and turn them over to these guys over here. That’s all. Those next guys, they moved them from Point A to Point B. That’s all. Then the next group marched them over to the showers. And so on, and so forth, until you only needed one man willing to do the worst.

  She was just a kid. Maybe, twenty-five years old, tops? She’d probably spent a few years working shit jobs in retail or restaurants after she graduated from school, until a nice respectable corporate gig came along with a regular salary and benefits. Now, she didn’t have to stay up at night wondering if her POS car was going to fall apart right before work, or how she was going to be able to afford her bills, or if she was going to have to say no to her friends on going out to the bars at night because the money wasn’t there.

  I started feeling a little sorry for her. She was way out of her depth in this place; that was clear. Tiny little scared thing, sitting there in her soaking wet clothes, trying to keep her nerves under control. This prison was enough to terrify the toughest killers in the country, with who and what they barely kept under control here. She must’ve been out of her mind with fear. And I’m not oblivious as to how my size tends to intimidate pretty much everybody.

  But she was doing her best to keep a lid on it. I had to give her that. She was trying hard to be a big girl and do what she had to do. All right, then. I guess I could cut her a little slack. It was just some stupid questions, and I was in no rush to go back to my cell.

  Besides, I’ve always been a big brother to those smaller than me, which has been pretty much everybody. I never had any actual brothers or sisters, but I have a ton of cousins, most of them girls, and they always looked to me to stand in the way of trouble and make them feel safe. I guess she started reminding me a little bit of them.

  “Cats?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “You said, feed your cats.”

  “Yeah, I…” she said, looking down at the table. “I have four cats.”

  Of course she did. She was getting harder and harder to hate. I gave her a little shrug, and the slightest hint of a grin. “All right. Ask away. Cat lady.”

  Her face brightened up, and she looked like she was going to fire back some sort of witty response, but then the alarms started to go off all over the prison… loud, buzzing, intermittent blasts… and yellow lights in the hallway began to flash at regular intervals.

  Any attempt at a brave façade instantly melted away. Her bright face darkened and she looked around wildly, as if she expected to find the answers as to what was going on written on the concrete blocks surrounding us, and then she finally looked at me.

  She wasn’t going to like what I was about to tell her.

  “What? What is that?” she asked.

  “Prison riot,” I said.

  ***

  Mickey stood up, put a hand to her forehand, and started to pace. “Okay. Great. Yeah. This is what I need right now. Terrific.”

  “Take it easy,” Dread said.

  “No, really. It’s great. Best. Day. Ever.”

  “We’re safe in here,” Dread said, keeping his voice calm and steady to try to smooth out Mickey’s nerves. His old instincts were kicking in; keep people calm, keep people safe, keep the situation under control.

  “Safe?”

  “Yes, safe. We’re locked in a concrete room. That’s a steel door leading out to the hallway, and the glass in the window is shatterproof. It would take a battering ram to get in here.”

  “Or a mage,” Mickey said. “Plenty of those in this prison, right?”

  Dread shrugged. “There is that. But it’s unlikely. Listen, these places are built like… like submarines. With compartments, you know? That they can seal off to control flooding? Well, prisons are built the same way. If there’s trouble in any one section, they can lock it down, seal it off, keep it contained.”

  “Right, right,” she said, seeming at least a little reassured. “The warden said they have special safeguards or something for the mages. I didn’t sense that he was lying.”

  Dread was about to respond but a voice over the PA system interrupted him. “All staff to duty stations. All staff to duty stations. CERT teams, stand by; Block Seven, Block Two. Block One.”

  Dread’s hands clenched and he cursed the cuffs on his wrists. Trouble was close by.

  “The alarms have stopped,” Mickey said. “Hey, maybe it’s over.”

  “It’s not over,” Dread said. “It’s just getting started.”

  “Which cell block is this? They said a bunch of numbe
rs. Which one are we in?”

  Dread looked like he didn’t want to answer her. “Cell block One.”

  Mickey nodded, and then realization flooded into her face. “Wait? One? One? They just said One! This cell block is…”

  “Take it easy,” Dread said. Mickey’s voice was getting shrill with panic. “I told you, we’re safe in here. We’re going to be…”

  His words were interrupted by a loud shout in the hallway, followed by the sound of a steel door slamming shut. Heavy footsteps approached at a run, there was the jangling of keys, and then, the door burst open and a badly wounded guard practically crashed through the door.

  Mickey jumped back as the guard fell heavily to the floor in front of them. A telescoping metal baton fell out of his hands and skittered across the concrete.

  “Oh, my God! He’s bleeding like crazy!” Mickey said, standing back helplessly from the guard as he struggled up to a seated position with his back against the wall. One hand was clamped against his neck, covered in blood.

  “Help, help me,” he said weakly.

  “I’m not a Healer, I’m a…” Mickey said, stopping herself short. “I’m a civilian. What is happening out there?”

  The guard shook his head, but Mickey wasn’t sure if that meant that he didn’t know what was happening or that he couldn’t explain it.

  “Who did this to you?” she asked. She searched her mind for any scraps of memory on first aid training, but the sight of all that blood right there in front of her, close enough to touch, seemed to chase away anything but panic and terror.

  “Can’t,” the guard whispered. “Dead.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’ve got to control that bleeding in his neck,” Dread said, straining to look over her shoulder from his position chained to the desk. “He’s bleeding out fast.”

  “How? I don’t…” Mickey said.

  The guard’s head slumped forward, his hand falling away from the open wound in his neck. Blood seeped slowly in a wide stream from the gaping hole.

  “Is he dead?” she whispered.

  “Passed out,” Dread said. “Check for a pulse.”

  “I don’t know how!” she said. “I don’t know any of this stuff…”

  She stopped and looked at Dread. “Tell me how. Quick.”

  “You’re going to press a finger on the side of his neck, around here,” Dread said, gesturing toward his own neck as best he could with his restrained hands.

  Mickey ignored his words. Instead, she looked into his mind, looking past the words, and saw what his meaning was in the images in his head. She could see it as clear as day; where the carotid artery was, how hard to press, that she needed to make sure to do it with her fingers and not her thumb, since the thumb had its own pulse and she might mistake her pulse for his.

  She turned, and before Dread had even finished his sentence, she pressed exactly over the correct spot on the uninjured side of the guard’s neck to check his pulse. Nothing.

  “Am I… doing it wrong?” she said. No, she decided, she’d seen it correctly in Dread’s mind, she was sure of it. It just wasn’t there.

  “No pulse,” Dread said. It wasn’t a question.

  “No. What do I do? Like CPR or something? Tell me how,” she said.

  She’d never seen this much blood before, but she couldn’t let the man die just because she was squeamish. She’d get Dread to explain how to do CPR, look into his mind again to see it more quickly and more perfectly then mere words could accomplish, and then the guard would be okay and tell her what to do to get out of this mess. If there was one thing she couldn’t do, it was stay stuck in a concrete room with a gigantic violent offender while a full blown riot was tearing the whole prison apart.

  “Forget it, he’s gone,” Dread said softly.

  “We have to try!” she said.

  “See that wound in his neck? There’s some major blood vessels torn open. Say you can do CPR and get his heart beating again, what then? What are you going to do about his veins or arteries that are ripped open, all of that blood loss? Even if you were a combat medic with all the gear in the world, you’d still have trouble keeping him alive, and frankly, as much blood as he’s already lost… I hate to say it, but unless a Healer walks through that door in the next ten seconds, he’s gone.”

  Mickey slumped back to a seat in front of the guard. “So that’s it?”

  “Afraid so,” Dread said.

  Mickey turned and looked at Dread, looking inside of his mind once more, enough to feel that his regret was real. In fact, there was something else, something…

  “You knew him?”

  Dread looked at her in surprise. “Yeah. I mean, not really, just a little. Not much for us inmates to do but watch the guards. You get to know them, even if they don’t want you to. We weren’t exactly friends or anything, but I… how did you know that?”

  “I just…” Mickey said.

  “Have you been looking in my head already?” Dread said, glaring at her.

  The guard’s body suddenly spasmed and Mickey shrieked, scrambling back away from it. It was over as soon as it began, but Mickey’s voice was loud and shrill and terrified.

  “What the hell was that? What that supposed to happen? Is that normal?”

  “Normal?” Dread asked.

  “Not ‘normal’, normal, I… I don’t know, I’ve never been around dead people before! Do they twitch like that?”

  “Not usually,” Dread said, keeping his eyes on the body. “Usually they stay pretty still.”

  Mickey got up and away from the corpse in a hurry, keeping a wide berth around Dread, but circling behind him and using him as a human shield between her and the corpse. “Why did he… why did it do that?”

  “I’m a little curious about that myself,” Dread said, pulling his chains tight against the ring on the desk experimentally. It was more to remind himself of the futility of the thought than anything; there was no way even someone with his strength could yank against the handcuffs hard enough to tear them free from their anchor on the steel desk.

  His eyes never left the body, though, and seconds later, there was another spasm that raked through the corpse, much bigger this time, causing the corpse to arch its back and twist left and right a few times before the spasm ended and the body slumped back into lifelessness.

  Dread’s mind began to speed up; he started thinking back through all of the missions he’d been on with Wreck Squad Four, all of the training briefings on the capabilities of various mages and their Tricks, all of the conversations with Shifty or Peter or Stephen or any of the other Users he’d worked with over the years, trying to dig out something, anything, that could explain what he was seeing.

  Because it definitely had to be magic.

  And if it were magic… then this riot, or whatever was going on inside of the prison, was a lot worse than what he’d thought.

  The corpse jerked again, several short bursts of movement this time, and Dread could almost hear Mickey’s heart pounding behind him.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  Death magic, it’s got to be, he thought. Real nasty, Schedule One prohibited kinds of shit. If one of those necro mage bastards is locked up in here, and they somehow got loose….

  “All right. Listen to me very carefully. Michelle? You said your name was Michelle?”

  “Mickey,” she said. “Yeah, I mean… people call me Mickey.”

  “Okay, Mickey, listen up. Remember what I told you about our being safe in here?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yeah, well… fuck all that,” Dread said. “We are definitely not safe in here.”

  Mickey shot him a look. “What? You said…”

  “We do not have time to argue. Look at him. Look at what is happening.”

  The twitches and jumps were getting more and more frequent, more and more intense. A pale blue light seem to swirl around inside of the body, as if something intensely bright and blue were c
irculating under the corpse’s skin and was barely visible through it.

  He forced down his own rising panic and kept his voice calm but stern. “Look at him. Whatever is happening to him, you do not want to have to deal with it once it’s done.”

  Mickey looked around. “I… what…”

  “You need to reach down there on his belt, right now, get his keys,” Dread said, holding his chained hands up, “and set me free.”

  “Oh, yeah, right,” Mickey said. “That’s going to happen. I’m going to uncuff a terrorist the size of Godzilla who goes by the freakin’ name of Dread, while I’m stuck alone in a room here with him.”

  “Look at him, Mickey. You heard the alarms. Something has gone completely apeshit here and you need to trust me.”

  “Sure, trust you, sure,” she said, looking around the room as if trying to find another answer to her predicament.

  “I swear to you I will not hurt you,” Dread said. “You said you’re a Mentalist, right? So you can tell if I’m lying. So go ahead and look, Mickey. Am I lying?”

  Mickey stopped still and looked at him intently. “Say it again.”

  “I swear to you,” Dread repeated, “I will not hurt you.”

  She didn’t have to look hard to see it in his mind. It was right there on the surface; he was so focused on his thoughts about her and the situation with the guard that all of the other clutter was absent from his mind. Mickey envied his clarity; her own mind was spinning out of control and she couldn’t seem to hold on to any one thought for more than an instant.

  But she found that when she focused in on Dread’s mind, her own mind calmed down and focused as well. Perhaps it was the influence of his thoughts on hers, the same way he was using his voice to try to calm her down. Perhaps it was the fact that she was able to do something definitive, something that she was good at, rather than just pace and lose herself to panic.

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was, she could pick out the thoughts in Dread’s mind clear as day.

  Come on, kid, believe me. I’ve got to get my hands free or that thing is going to kill us both. Trust me.