Tormented (7 page)

I felt the call of nature and looked around, finding a dark hallway just to the right of the bar. I hesitated, wondering if I should ask Brent before going, then remembered that I don’t really ask people for permission to do anything, especially not to go to the bathroom. I walked down the narrow hall and found the ladies’ room, the floorboards issuing creaking warnings all the while that made me wonder if maybe I should have gone with the turkey sandwich and had him hold the avocado.

I pushed through into a dimly lit bathroom and locked the door. I did my business and washed my hands as best I could, avoiding soaking the bandage. I wondered if the lack of healing was worth the additional pain, and after a moment’s consideration, I figured maybe it was. I stared at myself in the mirror, saw the dark circles under my eyes from years of stress, of hell, of the last few days of crap that had come cascading to a lovely finish, and I sighed. I ran the water over my uninjured hand and then wiped it across my face. “Two weeks,” I muttered, staring down at the white porcelain sink.

I saw a spread of crimson on my hand and realized the bandage was soaking through again. I started to curse, then shook my head. Give it a night and this wouldn’t matter. Being a plain old meta again was an adjustment, even though it was only for a few hours, probably.

I splashed my face lightly with water again, then brushed my hair back, letting it tangle a little as I did so. I stared at myself in the mirror, the glossy, black-painted bathroom walls a stunning contrast with my pale skin. The light over the sink flickered, then snapped off for a full second.

When it came back on, the face in the mirror wasn’t mine.

Where my pale, make-up free face had been a moment earlier was a dark shadow, a featureless blur. It looked like someone had smudged black oil over the mirror, blotting me out, replacing me with something … else.

The sound of the humming fluorescent light filled my ears, and then, ever-so-quietly, I heard a voice, deep, sounding like it was somewhere in the distance.

“
You shouldn’t be here
,” it said, as I stared at the faceless darkness in the mirror.

Then the light over the sink flickered again, and when I blinked, my face was back. I looked around the bathroom, searching for some sign of something awry, of a power cord leading to the mirror, of anything to explain that strangely freaky display.

I found nothing.

I took a deep breath, then another, then a third. The light was at a steady thrum now, no hint of power interruption or weirdness. The mirror was clear, my face visible in perfect clarity, down to the small beads of water that I’d left on my face from the splashing.

“Maybe I’m imagining things,” I said and gave the bathroom another once over. There was nothing amiss here, nothing to hint that what I’d seen was anything other than a daydream or a delusion based on stress. Because I certainly had that.

Just the same, I took care when I came out the door. The hall was quiet, still no hint of anyone else in the bar. With a last look at the mirror, I left, walking back to the bar like someone was going to attack me at any moment.

Because let’s face it, it’s me. Someone was bound to try.

Benjamin Cunningham’s house was a simple one story built over a sunken garage. It was the sort of thing you see a lot in Minnesota, but not much in other parts of the country, especially the ones closer to sea level, because it essentially left the house with a garage that emptied right into the basement. The front door to the house was on the upper level, and Augustus and I walked up the steps leading up the small hill from the driveway to ring the bell. The air smelled of fall breeze, with a lovely crispness that was a little early for the season.

When the door opened, we were greeted by a woman that I put in her mid-fifties. She wore a concerned look, probably wondering why two guys in suits were at her front door. “Yes?” she asked.

“Ma’am, I’m Reed Treston of the, uh … Metahuman Policing and—”

“I know who you are,” she said, staring out at me from behind a screen door. “Why are you here?”

My reputation preceded me. It often does; people seem to know my face from all the splash exposure I get with Sienna, but they get me mixed up with other people. Someone even asked if I was Scott Baio once. I wasn’t impressed.

“We’re here to talk about the incident at the airport this morning, ma’am,” Augustus said, leaping right in. “I’m Augustus Coleman, by the way.” He shot me a pointed look for not introducing him, I presume.

“Oh, God,” she said and pushed open the screen door. “Benjamin.” Her face fell, eyes welled up. “Is he … is he one of the …?”

“We’re looking for him now, ma’am,” I said carefully.

“That means he’s … he’s … dead, doesn’t it?” She swallowed heavily and swayed back toward the wall behind her. “Oh … oh no …”

I turned my head to look at Augustus and caught a humorless expression in return. “Uh, no, ma’am,” I said, stepping up to deliver the hard news, “we think he’s the one who caused the explosion.”

Suddenly, she didn’t look like she was going to faint anymore, and her eyes snapped right to me. “Say
what
?” She’d gone from worried and concerned to more than a little pissed off in the course of one revelation.

“Can we come in?” I asked.

“No, you damned sure may not,” she said, letting the screen door snap shut right in her—and our—faces, as though it afforded some measure of protection. “You’re accusing my son of being a damned terrorist?”

“We don’t think what he did was intentional—” I started.

“You think he’s one of you,” she said with contempt, “that he’s some … some
weirdo
with powers straight out of a—”

“Hey,” Augustus said, nonplussed, “watch who you call a weirdo.”

She made a small snorting noise. “Benjamin is twenty-seven years old. If he were a …” she made a motion with her hand right at me, but not Augustus, “… you know … I think he’d have shown some signs before now.” She looked right at me. “I mean … don’t you people exhibit some sort of super strength—”

“
You people?
” Augustus said. “Really? You’re going to go with that, like it’s better than
weirdo
?”

“Didn’t mean it that way,” she said, waving a hand from up to down, like she could just bat away what she’d said. “You know, metas.”

“Ah, typically yes,” I said, trying to steer around what was rapidly becoming a contentious conversation.

“Well, that settles it,” she said, shaking her head, “Benjamin could barely lift his own suitcase. He wasn’t one of your—”

“Careful,” Augustus said.

“But, he wasn’t!” she said. “He just wasn’t.”

“Ma’am,” I said, “we don’t know the full facts of the case, but the photographic evidence was clear. Your son burst into flames, exploded, and then walked out of the airport afterward, got in his own car, and drove off.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said in a huff.

“I’m sure it’ll be on the internet in a day or two,” Augustus said. “Everything else is.”

“If he wasn’t a metahuman before he went on this trip,” she said, still snotty, arms crossed in front of her, “then he couldn’t have come back as one.”

That tickled the old brain, causing me to look at Augustus, who gave me a look in return. You know the kind; wide-eyed,
oh-shit
type stuff.

It would have been hard to miss. Ms. Cunningham certainly didn’t. “What?” she asked.

“If you have anything else to share—” I said, starting to wrap things up.

“I don’t have anything else to say to you,” she said.

“You people, you mean?” Augustus asked. She grunted in frustration and slammed the door in our faces.

“That was not helpful,” I said as we started back toward the car.

“The hell it wasn’t,” Augustus said. “You think Cunningham got a shot of Edward Cavanagh’s Magical Meta Tonic somewhere in his travels?”

“Possibly,” I said, feeling the thud of the concrete with each heavy step I took. This case was getting weirder by the minute. “But I thought Cavanagh’s formula and stuff ended up in government custody.”

“Where none of it could possibly ever see the light of day again,” Augustus said. “I’m sure they boxed it all right up like in
Raiders
, and it’s probably sitting in a warehouse somewhere waiting for me to conveniently knock it over in a sequel.” He shook his head. “No, man. Cavanagh was connected everywhere, not just here in the U.S. His companies were international. Who knows where he sent that stuff? He was planning to ‘activate’ the whole world at some point, after all.”

“This is a weird string of coincidences, though,” I said. “Cunningham gets on a plane to Minneapolis? And just happens to be a newly transformed meta? Who goes nuclear at the airport? I mean, any link of that chain could have fallen apart. What if Cunningham hadn’t lost control in the line?”

“What if he’d lost it on the plane?” Augustus asked as he got in the passenger seat.

“What if he’d never lost it at all?” I asked.

“Fifty-odd people would still be alive,” Augustus said, “and Cunningham’s cheap-ass shoes wouldn’t have been ruined first by dog crap, then by unseasonable thousand-degree temps.”

I slipped behind the wheel, let my fingers slide across the faux leather. I loved this car. “I wouldn’t tell that joke in public if I were you.”

“Too soon?”

“Little bit,” I said. “I’ve had to hold back a few myself. If Cunningham’s gotten ‘activated,’ as you put it, I don’t think there was intentional malice behind this incident.”

“So you’re not calling it an attack?”

“I shoot someone in the head, it’s an attack,” I said. “Sienna shoots someone in the head, it’s Tuesday.” He didn’t laugh. “You give someone meta powers and put them on a plane to Minneapolis? Kind of a half-assed way to go about it. I mean, if you want to cause chaos, sending Cunningham to a bigger airport would have been a start. JFK, LaGuardia, Atlanta? MSP is small fish—”

“Small pond,” Augustus said then, when he caught my eye, looked chastened. “He’s the fish. Your analogy was crap. I fixed it.”

“Point is,” I said, “this is so clumsy it makes a nerdy rom-com trope heroine look as deft as a ballet dancer by comparison. I don’t think this was an attack. It’s a misfire at best, an accident by any other name.” I waved my hand at the house. “I’m forming an opinion of this guy based on the file and his mother, and it reads like this: Benjamin Cunningham wouldn’t say shit if his lips were overflowing with the stuff. If he hadn’t had these powers, what do you bet he would have just imploded emotionally and sat down for a good cry?”

“I don’t know this dude like you apparently do,” Augustus said. “Thought your talent was controlling the wind, not reading minds.”

“I knew a mind reader for a while,” I said, smirking. “Dr. Quinton Zollers. He taught me some things.”

“Oh, yeah?” Augustus looked jaded, wasn’t biting with much enthusiasm. “Like what?”

I started the car, listened to the Challenger’s engine give off a throaty roar. “Like that you should never ascribe to malice what could better be attributed to stupidity.”

“That’s called Hanlon’s Razor,” Augustus said with a frown. “Sounds like your friend didn’t have an original thought of his own.”

I waited, just a beat for it to set in before I delivered the punch line. “Well, that is kind of what a telepath is known for, isn’t it?” He didn’t find it nearly as funny as I did.

From down the block, Benjamin watched them leave in their yellow Challenger. He could see the other government car, too, the sedan that was staking out the street. It was a weird feeling, seeing elements out of a spy movie plopped down into his own life. Benjamin had lived on this street his entire life. He knew every car, every neighbor, and most of their friends. A black town car would have stood out around here even if he hadn’t known the area this well.

Benjamin had parked in this driveway earlier and had sat slumped down, figuring he’d be out of sight. He wanted to go home, wanted to clean up. He’d had to dress from the dirty clothes in his suitcase, and it felt … filthy. He was wearing a green dress shirt with khakis, and the wrinkles alone were driving him mad. He’d had black smudges from the soot on his face and had stopped in St. Paul to mop them up. His stomach was unsettled. He’d drunk an iced tea in silence, staring at the cream-colored walls of the fast food restaurant. He didn’t even remember which restaurant it was now.

Sitting here was not going to be a valid strategy long-term. Sooner or later someone would realize that he was parked in front of the Snyder house while they were up north at their cabin for the week. A law enforcement officer would realize he was in the car, would realize that the car possessed license plates that could be traced back to him. No, sitting here was not a valid option for long.

But Benjamin didn’t know what else to do.

What he really wanted to do was go back to work, go home, to wake up tomorrow in Amsterdam to find that this whole day had been one long, nightmarish fever dream that had never actually happened. He’d gladly sit through the nine-hour flight, even the allergies again and all that followed, to take the day back. He could replay the events at the airport in his mind, but only from a distance, as though they were happening to someone else.

Yes, Amsterdam. That was where it had all gone wrong, wasn’t it? Everything before that had been fine.

He could remember what it looked like as the blast hit, as the skin melted off the face of the man behind him who’d been so unkind. He watched it happen in his mind, over and over, revolted, afraid, disgusted. What kind of monster could do such a thing to other people?

Benjamin stared at his hands. They shook for no apparent reason, and he clamped them on the steering wheel, watched the plastic leather bend under the strength of his grip in a way he’d never seen happen before.

But this day was not a dream, was it? He’d done … what he’d done—but it wasn’t his fault, was it? This wasn’t something he’d known about; he’d never had powers before. Now the government was after him. He’d seen the lead man, remembered his face, even with the beard. He was Sienna Nealon’s brother.