Ability (Omnibus) (20 page)

Once he felt the thread, he was able to visualize it. Slowly, in rhythm with her movements, he allowed his own thread to begin winding its way around the intruder’s, tracing it backward as if it belonged to a computer hacker on the net. A small piece of his conscious mind wondered if the jox had ever had an encounter with a system operator like this. He let his thread trace back along the one belonging to one of the Stocktons.

He gave Donella’s hands a squeeze, and her motion increased in speed, another small moan escaping her. Garret could feel his thread getting close to the source, and gave her hands another squeeze. Donella’s hips began to rock back and forth at a feverish pitch. He could sense the man on the other end, completely oblivious to him.

The man’s brain was locked into both forcing Donella to enjoy sex, as well as siphoning her senses. He was too engaged to notice Garret slipping inside his head. Garret squeezed Donella’s hands one more time, this time holding the pressure, forcing her to rock hard enough that the bed began to pull away from the wall and slam back into it with loud bangs. Garret found what he’d been looking for in Derek Stockton’s brain. He increased the pressure on Donella’s hands.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaa…” Donella’s voice rose in pitch until it was almost a shriek, drawn out over ten seconds as her hips bucked once, twice, then shuddered as she climaxed, the same instant Garret erupted inside her. The same instant he snapped the thread connecting Derek Stockton’s mind to hers.

She fell over, gaining control of her faculties just in time to stop herself from pitching headfirst into the floor. When she propped herself back up, trying to catch her breath, she became frightened at the sight of Garret. He was still on his back, holding his hands up as if hers were still clutched in them, his erect member throbbing as it bounced off his lower stomach repeatedly. She reached down to touch him, but jerked her hand away from the crackle of electricity that arced between her fingers and his leg.

Garret was oblivious to the woman, too busy slicing into the mind of Derek Stockton. He’d only done it once before, and it had started as an accident. He’d progressed to making the teenager flop around before dying, almost every blood vessel in and near the eyes rupturing all at once from too much force. Garret did his best to be delicate this time, winding his way through memories and neural links, looking for any information Derek would know and remember about Yvonne, Brewster, and its residents.

Within seconds he was appalled at the flood of sickening memories stored inside Derek’s mind. Donella wasn’t the first nor the only one that Derek and his brother Elmore had forced into sexual slavery. Valin Radek, an older man from the second most powerful family in Brewster, was in on the scheme as well as the two brothers. Garret forced Derek to get out of bed, put on clothes, and walk down the hallway to his brother’s bedroom.

“Deke?” Elmore asked, groggy from too much homemade beer after dinner.

Garret found a second ability within Derek, and began forcing him to send waves of pain into his younger brother. Elmore screamed, rolled off the bed, and fought back, whipping an old lamp from the nightstand to crash into Derek’s face. Garret didn’t let the young man scream or feel the pain, instead increasing the torment he delivered to Elmore. His brother tried to attack again, but the agony was too much, breaking his focus. Garret heard, through Derek’s ears, Elmore’s bones begin to shatter.

The door behind Derek blew inward, catching him in the back of the head. Garret’s link with him instantly went black. He blinked and looked into Donella’s face as she knelt by the side of the bed. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Garret put his hand out, touching the side of her face. He caressed her cheek then gently pulled her head to him. Donella laid her head on his stomach and continued to cry while he stroked her short hair, wiping tears from her cheeks every few seconds.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a few minutes.

“Don’t be. You got him out of my head.”

“Yeah, I meant that I was sorry for taking advantage of you. It was the only way I could do that without giving myself away, without alerting them.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m not sure, but I don’t think Derek or Elmore will be bothering you again. However, we need to find this Valin Radek dude and smoke him and get Yvonne back. Then we should get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Yvonne? You know where she’s at?”

“I don’t know exactly, but this Valin dude will, since he’s the one that Elmore
gave
her to.”

“Gave?”

“Listen. This is what we’re going to do. You can either juice and go with me to get your daughter, or you can not juice and go with me to get your daughter. Either way, we need to get her and get the fuck out of this madhouse.” Garret shuddered at the memories he’d pulled from Derek Stockton’s head. Yvonne and Donella were only the tip of the iceberg.

“Is she hurt?”

“I don’t know. From what I got out of Derek’s mind, she was still alive a week or two ago, I couldn’t really get a clear idea of an exact time. The guy that has her ‘loans’ her out to his pals.”

“What did you see?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Garret said, shaking his head. He didn’t want to relay to her the sickness in his stomach as he remembered, through Derek’s disturbed memories, the sometimes violent, always dehumanizing sex he’d engaged in with Yvonne. Multiple times over the last few months.

“What do we do?” she asked, seeing his expression shift into what she thought was disgusted rage.

Garret moved her head and got up. He went to his smaller duffel and rummaged around inside until he found the pill case. He snapped one out and walked back to the bed, handing it to her.

“Swallow that. We’ll wait half an hour, and then you can juice.”

“What does it do?”

“It makes you see leprechauns. Just take it.”

She gave him a dubious look, but put the pill in her mouth and swallowed, grimacing at the aftertaste as it scraped along her tongue. Garret went to the small sink and washed himself, turning back to Donella and gesturing for her to do the same. While she was at the sink, he dug around in his tablet bag for the 3DH goggles. He had two extra sets of H-Vis, but with no more Google, no more of any kind of manufacturing, they had to last him the rest of his life. The 3DH goggles were as tough as iron, and the internal lenses couldn’t be scratched without a diamond tip.

When Garret’s chron alerted him that thirty minutes had passed, he reset it for another fifteen, just to be safe. Donella had put her pants back on, and now sat across from him in the chair. She looked nervous, but he couldn’t tell if it was the drug causing it. He glanced at his chron again.

“Okay,” he said. “Listen to me carefully. Once the module completes, you might not feel anything for up to five minutes while your brain tries to make sense of everything, tries to open up new pathways. Just stay calm. At some point, you’ll feel like your brain is a race car engine that keeps revving up, spinning out of control. Don’t be frightened. It’s normal.

“Once you feel that, tell me right away. I’ll help you get it under control. Whatever you do, don’t attempt to do anything crazy, no matter how natural it feels. Everyone is different with this. A lot of people have a lot of the same abilities, but there are a lot of unique abilities that I’ve run into as well. Sometimes the ability feeds off your emotions, most of the time it feeds from your knowledge. If you can combine the two, you’ll be pretty fucking scary, but most can’t get past the noise enough to let their knowledge or emotions get any kind of real control over it.

“I’m going to give you a mental exercise to get your mind to focus on anything but your ability. When you’ve done it right, the exercise will make the noise in your head fade into the background. To bring it back to the foreground, just stop the exercise. With practice, your unconscious mind will learn to utilize the exercise, and it will feel natural. But for now, tamp it down hard. I don’t need you blowing yourself or the town up. I’d like to get out of here in one piece, and I’d like to be able to bring my gear with me.”

Garret pointed to the two duffels and two tablet bags that he’d carried since fleeing Austin. Donella nodded her head, not really understanding anything he said. Noise in her head, spinning minds, focus, blowing people up, it was all nonsense to her. Her daughter had tried to explain it a few times, but it made as much sense then as it did now. He motioned for her to put the 3DH goggles on.

“Ready?” he asked.

She nodded her head. Garret tapped the command in his charged tablet, and watched her body stiffen, jerk, then relax. When it was over, he went to her chair and removed the goggles from her head. He watched her, his guard at maximum. She wouldn’t be the first juicer to freak out and accidentally try to fry him.

“I… I feel funny,” she said.

“Good. That means it worked. Is your head starting to fill with chatter?”

“Chatter?”

“Noise, sounds, voices, memories, like your head won’t shut the fuck up suddenly.”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice distant as she tried to follow the burst of activity in her mind.

“Let me know when it begins to drown everything else out.”

Within a minute her hand shot out and grabbed his leg. “Make it stop!”

“Listen to my voice,” he commanded, and she looked up.

Garret began to sing to her, the melody of his voice relaxing her, the words of instruction dulling the cacophony in her brain just enough for her to begin singing along. Garret smiled as he dropped out of the song once she was able to take over, repeating the three short verses for another two minutes until she had the whirling, confusing rush of noise in her mind under enough control to not be dangerous to herself.

“Would I die if I didn’t do that?” she asked, feeling the spin of her thoughts begin to ramp up when she spoke.

“No. Well, maybe. People sometimes freak out when they realize what they can do. You wouldn’t die from just the buzzing in your head though. You might die from unleashing something dangerous without realizing it. There are only a couple of others who know the trick I just taught you. As far as I know, everyone else has to live with bees in their skull.”

Donella laughed as she imagined angry hornets inside of her skull, stinging her until she fell over dead. She wasn’t sure why it was funny, but the way her mind formed images was clearer, more vivid than she ever remembered.

“So, how do you know the trick if only a few people know it? Are you the guy who caused all of this?” she asked, her arms spreading wide to mean the collapse of the entire world.

“No.” He lied. “I’m just some guy who figured it out. Luckily for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll be able to focus better than others. You’ll be able to put more energy into the thought or the action since half or more of your brain won’t be wandering, worrying, thinking of anything but what you are trying to accomplish. When you use your ability, you’ll be able to focus on it without all of that noise or buzzing in your head interfering.”

“What will I be able to do?”

“I don’t know. It seems to be random, but it also seems to be a stepping stone to doing a lot of things.”

“What do you mean?”

Garret put his hand on her shoulder. “Meaning… let’s say you can shoot lasers from your eyes.” She smiled and covered his hand with one of hers. “Well, I’ve never seen anyone that can do that, but this is just an example. Anyway, once you figure out how to do it, it seems to open up something else, connects to some other area of the brain maybe, and then you can… create a new ability, or build from one you can already do, evolving it. So instead of only being able to shoot lasers from your eyes, now you can shoot them from your fingertips as well.”

He frowned. “It’s hard to explain, but once you feel it click into place, it feels like something you’ve always had. And it feels natural when it starts to connect to some other knowledge and form… I don’t want to call them ‘ideas,’ but kind of like ideas. Sort of like those children’s books that help their brains connect objects or concepts to others with pictures. But you have to control it first, or your mind will always be fuzzy, stuck in a rut, so to speak. Your
power
will be muddy, muted, if you don’t have a clear head and proper focus.
”

“How powerful are you?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I can do a lot of different things. I’ve never really thought about it. Sometimes I’ll realize I’m doing something that I didn’t even know I could do.”

“Like free me from someone else’s mind-control?”

“Sure.” Garret smiled. “Like that, for example.”

“When will I know? When can I do stuff like burn down buildings and kill someone with my mind?”

“Calm down.” Garret’s laugh made her smile, but he could see the seriousness in her face. “Why? Are you plotting revenge? Against me for taking advantage of you?”

“No, not you.” She moved his hand to her cheek. “There are a few others in Brewster I’d like to have a few minutes alone with.”

“I’m sure. But for now, let’s focus on making sure your head doesn’t explode, or your head doesn’t make someone else’s head explode before we can snag Yvonne and get out of here.”

“When will we go?”