The Infected 1: Proxy (41 page)

After an hour of this the wall stopped.

"Get down, Brian. We need to talk." The man looked at Karen shaking his head slowly. "Look, Brian... What you just did here is level one on the easiest piece of equipment we have down here. If you want to be what you really can, you've got to let go of what you thought possible before and accept that the old rules don't apply to you anymore. They can't. Failure really isn't an option for you. Now, I'm not saying you can't do this, really, I know you can. I checked your information carefully before I even agreed to let you come down here at all... But you have to want it. I'll see you tomorrow and we aren't starting this thing on one, so be ready."

Brian took a deep breath, feeling almost like he wanted to cry, but swallowed the feeling and nodded. He'd have to do better and didn't have time for self-pity or slacking off. The thing was, he'd been doing the best he could, at least Brian thought so. Did he have more he could make himself do somehow? His arms and legs felt sore already and he hadn't even gotten halfway through the day. Not just tired or heavy, but bad, aching, and starting to stiffen up a little, his hands felt swollen and fat. Flexing his fingers he realized that the swelling wasn't just a feeling, his fingers really had gotten bigger from all the stress placed on them.

Carl patted him on the back and sent him and Karen away. On the way up the stairs the woman nudged him with her shoulder.

"I can't believe it, Brian! Jason expected Carl to throw you out after ten minutes and never let you return. Marcia suggested you go down to teach you that not everything would be possible, not to make it part of your regular schedule. This is... interesting. Carl must like you. It's part of his contract that he can refuse to work with anyone you know. He literally doesn't have to let anyone onto fifteen. Not even the director can visit without permission. They tried to have the President come down once to tour the facility and Carl kicked him off the floor. He did let a couple of the secret service guys stay though. It was funny. It was just that the President was distracting everyone, I think." She gave him a little one-armed hug at the top of the stairs.

Then it was back to the gym, where he had to alternate running one lap at his normal pace with a faster one. It wasn't a sprint, but hovered at the edge of discomfort, his stomach starting to just barely cramp up on those laps again. Just past eleven-thirty Karen stopped him.

"You get lunch now, food should be waiting for you and a new set of sweats. Shower first, eat, and meet Marcia in the gym at twelve-fifteen. You get forty minutes for all this, so hurry. Oh, eat all the food too, even if you aren't hungry."

That, as hungry as he felt, took work. The food was normal enough, roast beef and cheese sandwiches and salad, about what he ate most days - when fish and bugs weren't on the menu and he wasn't acting like a little "bitch-man" as Dharma so charmingly called any mood not totally dedicated to the task at hand. It was just that the plate of food Mark put in front of him had nearly twice what he'd gotten used to having each day. He got it all down, but felt a little sick after doing it.

Penny teased him about being fattened up for slaughter, like a prize cow, which made him laugh and repeat it for Mark, and Chris, who actually came to sit with everyone for lunch for once. Mark smiled too, but shook his head, looking toward where Penny sat.

"Probably not. Given the current training program we probably won't be able to keep weight on him, even doubling what he eats. Pretty soon were going to be forced to cut his training time each day, Jason is practically pulling his hair out over the idea. I'm thinking supplemental meals - health shakes and stuff..." He walked off then, leaving his own plate on the table half eaten.

Just after finishing lunch, Brian headed back to the gym, where for an hour he and Marcia did nothing but run drills on the empty red floor mat toward the back of the room - punching, kicking, throws, and locks - over and over again.

She made him hit her part of the time, and throw her to the ground, with varying levels of resistance on her part. It wasn't that different from what he'd done before, just faster and without any breaks. She told him to do something and if he did it wrong, she quickly showed him how to do it again, often painfully, then made him do it until it was good enough.

Then they worked weapons, which mainly meant she started with a weapon, then he had to try and take it from her and use it to "kill" her. If he could. Marcia smiled at one point and suddenly went all out, at least in speed, making it almost impossible for him to even touch her. He kept after her and as she pretended to break his neck, stabbed her in the throat. The knife - real and sharp, something she insisted on for this level of training, so he'd learn both to be careful and not fear blades too much - bounced off her and nicked his other arm, leaving a trail of blood.

Then Tobin came and sang at him while Brian tried to hit him with a padded stick, one about the length of his arm. The world shifted in and out of focus and turned into a kaleidoscope of brilliant colors, spinning as the smaller man with his big head and eyes and overly long arms danced in and out of range. The awful part was that the man was so good at singing that Brian wasn't sure he could have easily hit him even without the effect of the powers. It would be like smashing one of Marks cakes. Just wrong somehow. It took half an hour for Brian to score a clean hit and he highly suspected that Tobin had just grown bored and decided to let Brian be successful so that Marcia would let him go.

Then he learned another hard fact, the second of the day; he wasn't nearly as good a shot as he'd thought either. Not even close at all.

Jason came and took him to the firing range, where he didn't get to have normal targets any more, only moving ones that refused to hold a regular pattern, swimming and floating through the air one minute, and then rushing toward him faster than any human could possibly run. Unless they were Infected. All the targets looked different too. Some like regular black silhouettes, but some were pictures of real people. Including a few of little kids. He had to shoot them all.

"Good. Now left hand." Jason handed him a revolver, a huge forty-five, and made him work the whole last hour's program again, going over the three weapons he'd already used, but with his off hand. He could barely hit the targets at all that way. Brian felt a bit sad when they'd finished. Not because they were done, no, that was kind of a relief, but because he'd really thought he'd gotten to be a decent shot, but the moving targets had kicked his ass. Sure, it was new, but in real life things moved when you shot at them. He'd have to get better somehow.

How that would happen he didn't know.

Dinner found him with another heaping plate of food, put in front of him by the cook herself, a dark woman with a bright and cheery smile named Janine. Mainly potatoes and pasta in cream sauce, sitting on the heavy white plate looking a little bland. This time he couldn't finish it all and had to skip dessert all together, being way too full.

Becky showed up suddenly, but just to walk out of the room and follow Christian when she left, not even talking to Brian. He smiled, because it would be good for the ghost-image to have friends. It wasn't like he'd been great company to anyone that day so far. His muscles felt sore and he just wanted to sit when Mark called him into the common room after dinner.

The new training. This was the part that Brian had no clue about at all.

Mark had a complex looking set of wires and lights he put in front of Brian, they were attached to a fairly small metal box, silver metal and white plastic with a dozen small plug-in ports on the front. It looked like a really boring video game system and Brian said so, causing Mark to chuckle and point out each part carefully after explaining it was a really high quality EEG, a brain wave monitor.

"This should be a lot faster than just learning to meditate, because you get external feedback. I had to learn all this the hard way, under the stress of thinking that the world had ended for me. That took me about ten years experiential time. You get to do this the easy way... I know it's probably going to be strange to you now, but let's try it anyway? If need be we can always lock you in a sensory deprivation chamber or something later, right? All you have to do today is relax and daydream, until that light," he pointed to the second one from the top, "turns on. That should put you into an alpha brainwave state. Once there just go ahead and hold it."

It sounded easy, but took him almost twenty minutes of trying to get the light to flash on at all, a soft green-colored LED finally flickering a bit and then it went right back off. He tried to make himself let go and relax, and then daydream about something. Finally he got bored and the light suddenly turned on as if by itself and held for a minute before Brian even realized it, distracted by the dream inside his head.

"What were you thinking about?" Mark asked.

Brian ducked his head, feeling incredibly embarrassed. "Um, making out with Karen..."

"You've made out with Karen?" Mark asked, sounding impressed.

"Nah, just thinking about it, you know..."

Nodding Mark had him start again until the light came back, then imagine himself sitting on a beach instead, with Karen, which also worked to get the light going and keep it that way. Less embarrassing too.

He practiced this until bedtime, when Doctor Burrows came and gave him a bunch of shots, not bothering to say what they were again. He had a sneaking idea that Burrows might be using him as an experimental test subject. The shots from her were a lot more extensive than when the other doctors came. The colors were different too. She winked at him and put a hand on his back for about half a minute before leaving. She wore scrubs, but he noticed how they hugged her rear as she walked away, the cuffs draping over her shoes almost to the floor in the back.

He got to bed just before his eyes shut on their own.

The next month went like that, except for the fact that he went to help people at random times, Becky giving him data about what was happening most of the time. Sometimes she showed up and talked to him, seeming almost happy, telling her things that Chris had mentioned to her, which, she pointed out, gave him a lot more information about what was going on than he'd have without her. The eager way that the ghost girl said it made Brian want to laugh.

"Becky... The first time you warned me about what was about to happen when I switched made having you around more than worthwhile, even if you are a hallucination or ghost girl living in my head. You definitely don't have to keep trying to justify your existence to me. You're doing great."

She shrugged and looked pleased, if a little skeptical. Brian wondered if she thought he regretted having her around or something. Then again, if he did, wouldn't she know already, living in his head and all? Then maybe just knowing wouldn't be enough to keep insecurity at bay? That could be a tough one, he knew. That niggling feeling that no matter what you did, how good you were, it was all a sham somehow. That you were a fraud.

Each day he had to fight someone new in practice and normally ended up having at least one real fight, trying to save someone. The incidence of "events" had picked up incredibly for some reason. Dharma gave him info on the real ones at least. She absolutely refused to clue him in on what anyone had in store for him training-wise each day, forcing him to scramble and work things out for him self-consciously, even though she had a direct line to his subconscious mind. It made all the fights seem about twice as hard, but he tried to adapt with good humor to the whole thing. If Becky had a link to his deeper self and wouldn't clue him in, then that meant he had some kind of reason for hiding things from himself, right? The program Jason and the others had developed seemed all about never letting him build a routine or getting used to anything.

The only regular thing was that each morning he got woken up by Karen. Even his meals came at different times of day now, and a few times they just didn't feed him at all. On those days they just worked him non-stop, sometimes making him run, once Marcia just sent person after person after him in the gym, making him fight until his muscles stopped working all together, then letting him rest for a few minutes and starting all over again. Most of team two came after him at least twice that day. The only break he got at all was water about once an hour, thrown to him by Beatdown in a small plastic bottle, sometimes while he grappled with someone. The water spilled more on the mat than into his mouth those times, of course.

Losing track of the days, he eventually got used to not knowing what would happen. Carl, the level fifteen training manger, had him doing things that seemed insane half the time. The climbing wall moved faster than ever, but it changed constantly, even as he worked his way up, climbing as fast as his limbs would move. The hand holds would vanish suddenly, or twist under him as he fought desperately to stay on.

Another device just had a ramp that could be raised or lowered over the floor. It didn't seem impressive, just plastic coated wood in a cream color that he had to climb and jump off at a run, land with a smooth rolling movement and then come around to do it again. It started low, only about three feet off the ground slowly getting higher over the course of days, until he was jumping off it at about twenty feet each time.

Carl walked him straight to it after the climbing wall the next day, Karen looking at him nervously, glaring at the training manager. Brian guessed this meant something fun would be up. Karen always got nervous looking when the others were about to do something that hurt, he'd noticed. The ramp had been lowered, left at about quarter of the height he could do and the floor looked normal, no broken glass or jagged looking spikes at least. Not visible ones. Given the significant glances he figured it had to be something bad or dangerous, tricky at least. He shrugged. All he could do was try to adapt, right?