Tormented (22 page)

“I … no,” Benjamin said, mildly offended. “I’ve—”

Anselmo thumped his ear with a simple flick. It hurt enough to draw a grunt of pain from Benjamin. “Do not argue. You live with your mother still? And you are grown man, yes? And it is not because she needs your care?”

“… no,” Benjamin grunted. The last flick had hurt badly enough that he wanted to cry.

“Then this is the day that you grow up,” Anselmo said and brushed his hair back from his eyes. “This will be the day that you find your—” He pointed to Benjamin’s groin. “Those.
Si
?”

“Well, at the risk of sounding utterly ludicrous …” Benjamin said as Anselmo let him go and turned back to the wheel. “How do I do that?”

“It is very simple,” Anselmo said, putting the car back into motion. His scarred hands grasped hard on the wheel, and Benjamin saw the sign as he headed west on Interstate 394 toward the western metro. “You find what your opponent cares for most … and you rip it screaming from his grasp.”

I had this feeling in my gut like the sun was sinking low in the sky way too early, as if sundown for me meant a swift end to the day. It shouldn’t have mattered, should it? It wasn’t like colonial times, when I’d have to light a lantern in order to proceed with my life, but seeing the white outside gradually turn darker over the course of twenty minutes was … disconcerting, especially when my own sense of time made me think it was far, far earlier than it appeared to be judging by the light.

“What time is it?” I asked, sitting on my barstool, my breakfast/lunch done.

Brant pulled his wrist up and looked at the leather-bound monstrosity with the big clock face on it. “Seven o’clock.”

“That can’t be right,” I said and turned back to look outside. “Where’d the day go?”

“Buried under the snow, probably,” Sarah said. She hadn’t really spoken since our last exchange, and I didn’t think that was necessarily a bad thing.

“Huh,” I said as the door behind us opened again, “that went fast.”

“Tends to happen when you’re sleeping it off ’til noon and then fight your way through ghosts and a snowstorm,” Brant cracked.

“Gah,” a young man’s voice came from the door, “it’s dropping like feathers in a pillow fight out there.” The clomp of heavy boots resounded through Shorty’s and I saw the hat before I saw the rest of the guy that came in. It was the lawman’s hat, that big-brimmed, quasi-cowboy thing, with a snow-covered star sitting right on the top of it. What his name? Zebulon?

“Z!” Brant shouted out to him as he entered. “What’s going on?” His voice sounded funny again, like he was letting his words lilt.

“Well,” Z said, his steps driving snow off his boots and onto the floor, “it’s pretty much turning into a whiteout. Other than that? Nothing. Been quiet all day around the office.”

“Hard to perpetrate a crime when you’re stuck inside your own house, I guess,” Brant said, drawing a beer for the lawman as he sauntered up to the bar, skipping the stool next to me and taking the next one over. I approved; it was exactly what I’d done with Sarah, and it maintained a healthy margin between us. I call it ‘minimum safe distance.’

“Yet somehow the Wickmans manage to pull it off every month,” Z said, taking the beer and sipping from it. I hadn’t gotten a real good look at him yesterday, but I was seeing him pretty clear now. He was probably in his late twenties, handsome features, and I could see under the hat that he had brownish-blond hair. “I get called out to their place so much I feel like they ought to set up a special parking space for me on their driveway. That Stephan, he’s got a temper. And Colleen, I just don’t know about her.”

“And here I thought Cherry was your most frequent offender,” Sarah said darkly.

“She’s right up there,” Z agreed, setting his beer back down.

“Sarah’s sister,” Brant stage-whispered to me.

“Your sister is here, too?” I asked as politely as I could.

“It’s not like she’s got anywhere else to go,” Sarah said and took a slug of her martini. I took that as a sign to leave further inquiries on this topic the hell alone, even though she’d brought it up.

“So,” I said, looking over at Z, trying to catch his eye, “any word on when the weather will let up?”

He didn’t answer me, sitting there, hunched over his beer and popping the shell on the peanuts on the bar. His clean, neatly manicured fingers were clearly struggling with popping the shell efficiently. He was breaking one on its end and taking forever to do it. “Hello?” I asked, but he didn’t look up. “Fine, be that way,” I said at last.

“Maybe he can’t hear you,” Sarah said.

“Or maybe he’s being a giant dick,” I said. “An enormous, turgid—”

“Watch your mouth,” Sarah said, and it held not a bit of suggestion.

I started to bite back, to verbally slap her upside the head in lieu of doing it for realsies, but I was in a bar, confined by the weather, and I could see Brant eyeing me nervously. So instead I bit my tongue. Hard. Literally. And I bled a little.

“You need another drink?” Brant asked.

“I’m sticking with water,” I said. Booze would just give me the excuse I didn’t need to fly off the handle, and make me vulnerable in a way I didn’t need to be right now.

“Coming up.” And he refilled my glass and set it right in front of me before walking off down the bar.

“You don’t belong here.”
The voice rumbled, rattling my water and shaking some out onto the bar before I could even pick it up.

I stood up in a flash, on my feet and off the stool, eyes fixed on the water glass for just a second before I remembered that water glasses didn’t talk, and that the voice must have originated somewhere else. “You sonofa—”

“Language,” Sarah said again, nonplussed. She did not bother to turn and look at me as she addressed my profanity.

“Fuck off,” I said. “Like you said before, you’re not my mother.”

Her head snapped around and I caught a glimmer of blue-green eyes under dark hair that told me just how annoyed she was. “You’ve got no respect for the rules.”

“Well, at least you sound like her,” I said, and swiveled my attention to Z. “Hey. When is the weather letting up, have you heard?” I took a step toward him. “Yo, Zebulon, I’m asking you a question.” He still didn’t look back, and my politeness all ran out.

I’d been sitting here on this island, dealing with all manner of crap from all manner of directions on my vacation—telepath attacks, weather incidents, and now this—and by this I meant shitty behavior from Sarah (which was kind of expected based on what I’d seen of her personality) and the frigid shoulder from the local law (which was not).

“Hey,” I said and reached out a hand to clap him on the shoulder. When I touched his heavy coat, it was like getting jolted by a small dose of electricity, like static being turned loose on my fingers, and I pulled away in an instant.

He must have felt it, too, because he finally deigned to notice my presence. “Hey,” he said, annoyed.

“Yes, ‘hey,’” I said. “I’ve been trying to get your attention for like, ten minutes.”

“Well, you’ve got it now,” he said, spinning around and standing up. He was taller than me, but then, most guys were. “And you’re about to regret it.”

“So you’re one of those local fascist pig officers that they make a cliché of in the movies, huh?” I took a step back and kept my hands at my sides, nonthreatening. I didn’t really want trouble, but this guy had an attitude problem, and while I wasn’t going to make the first move, if he wanted to take my gentle, apparently static-laden touch as assault and battery, I was damned sure going to give him both of those things, for real.

“You’re out of control,” he said, announcing his role as my substitute villain of the week.

“Not out of control,” I said, “just out of patience.”

He came at me less clumsily than I thought he would have, but he still did that awkward, reaching thing that told me he was thinking he’d just grab hold and subdue me or something. I slapped his hand away, hard, but not enough to break anything. The look on his face told me I’d stung him, though, and the anger flashed across his face as he came at me again.

Only this time, he was much faster.

Like … meta fast.

If I’d had Wolfe’s strength and speed, or even if I’d been aware that it was coming, I probably could have dodged it. As it was, getting jabbed in the jaw by a meta while in a bar in the way damned north of Wisconsin was not the sort of thing I expected, ever. But it happened, and I heard the joint crack in my jaw as I staggered back.

“Yoo … muv … er … f … ferr …” I drooled, doing my best to recover from what had been a staggering blow out of the blue clear sky. Or the hazy, grey sky, as the case was. He came at me again, and I let him have a jab of my own that knocked him back into the bar. Even without Wolfe, I knew how to throw a damned punch.

I also knew how to follow up on an opponent that was staggered, and my last thoughts of vacation flew right out the window as I jumped all over that bastard and started pounding the snot out of him with all the pent-up fury I’d been accumulating this last couple days.

“Unf!” I landed one to his midsection, “Urgh!” I unloaded on his right kidney. I had him against the ropes—the bar, in this case—and I peppered him with ten good punches in five seconds. He crumpled at the midsection, trying to keep me from turning his stomach into a hammered haggis, but as soon as he did it I blasted him in the jaw with everything I had and he smacked his head against the bar. “Taaak … thaa …” I drooled, my jaw still aching. It might even have been broken, for all I knew.

Stars flashed as I saw the sucker punch too late to do anything about it. It hit me like my suspension, right out of the blind side, and knocked me straight out of the fight. I hit the floor jaw first, and that took the last of the wind out of my sails. My eyes rolled, fighting to focus on the person standing above me as my brain begged me to let go and shuffle off into the waiting darkness.

It was Sarah, and she had a look on her face that told me she didn’t regret knocking the hell out of me in the least.

I let go, and let unconsciousness end this craptacular day on a low note.

The guard had died in flames, and Benjamin had watched, horrified, as Anselmo had pointed Benjamin’s hand to do the deed. Benjamin watched in sick fascination as it happened again, right before his eyes, fire consuming a human being and turning their pink skin a scorched black.

“Watch,” Anselmo said, a hand on the back of Benjamin’s head, anchoring it in place. He didn’t close his eyes, even though he wanted to. He watched, just as Anselmo told him to, watched out the car window as the man burned to death in the little guard shack. The guard didn’t push the alarm button, didn’t call out for any help that could hear him, he simply … danced, then fell, then writhed … then died. Screaming all the while.

When it was done, Benjamin couldn’t tear his eyes away from the blackened corpse, even after Anselmo took his hands off his head. The Italian stepped out of the car and pressed a button in the guard shack. Small fires burned on the carpet, on the desk where a sheaf of papers held together by a clipboard had caught, but Anselmo ignored them and flipped a switch, raising the blockade out of the road. Then he got back in the car and shifted it into gear, setting them in motion again.

“That was … so …” Benjamin said, trying to shake off the horror.

“Satisfying, yes?” Anselmo said, and then looked at him. “The word you are looking for is … ‘satisfying.’ Repeat it to yourself until you believe it.”

Benjamin’s mouth felt so dry. “Does that … does that work?”

“When I was a boy,” Anselmo said, steering them down the tree-lined road, “my father took me hunting for the first time when I was very young, probably four or so. I was a child in my thinking, much like you are now.” There was a cruelty in the way he said it that bothered Benjamin only slightly less than what he’d just witnessed. “We were looking for birds, and my father, he made me pull the trigger when we found our quarry. I caught a bird with a very off-center shotgun blast.” He made an exploding gesture with his hands as he took them off the wheel. “Destroyed the wing, but left the bird alive and suffering.”

“How terrible,” Benjamin said, whispering.

“So then he retrieved the bird, which was trying to hop around,” Anselmo said coolly, “and he brought it over to me. ‘This,’ he says, ‘is a chance to take a step toward being a man.’ And he offered it to me, head first, while he held the body. The meaning was obvious, even to a child of my age.” Anselmo looked over at him. “So I snapped the neck.”

“Oh, God,” Benjamin said, unable to keep it in.

“That was a step toward manhood,” Anselmo said. “It was building a callous upon my flesh in the way a working man develops them, yes?” He looked his burned face toward Benjamin and nodded. “Your problem is, you have no callouses. Your little heart is weak, and the slightest adversity sets it aflutter, thump thump—” he smacked Benjamin in the chest, “—with fear. You are incapable of dealing with these feelings, these setbacks. Your mother has raised you to be a plump offering to people who have the will to take what they want. In prison, you would be everyone’s bitch.”

Benjamin made a guttural sound of horror at the mere thought. “I … I …”

“Do not fear,” Anselmo said, waving him off. “We will take care of this. The work of twenty-plus years’ failure to raise you, I will fix in mere hours. We will build some callouses together, yes?” At this, he grasped Benjamin’s hand and held it up. It was … soft. Pink. And it shook.

“Callouses,” Benjamin said, staring at his own pristine flesh, then back at the man, the scarred, lumpy man to his left. “I … I … yes.” He nodded. “Yes, I … need that.”

“Yes, you do,” Anselmo said, and he steered the car right as the road curved to lead into a massive series of structures. A tree-lined campus, like a corporate headquarters or a college. The main building was just ahead, and Benjamin could see a beautiful red car parked out front. There were no people in sight, and the afternoon sun was creeping low into the sky. “Now … let us go around the back of this place, this
agency
… and see a doctor about your condition.”