Ability (Omnibus) (18 page)

She turned away. Frank rolled his eyes to follow her, afraid she was going to torture him even more on top of whatever she was already doing to him. It looked like she had gone back to rubbing her ankle. He tried to focus his eyes on her, but soon the pain from the roots made his eyelids flutter and the muscles controlling his eyes spasm. The pain never stopped, only grew more intense as time crawled by.

By the second sunrise, Frank Nelson was completely insane, unable to scream, unable to do anything except live in his dark, miserable world of torment. When he died three days later, Derry crawled away from what was left of his body to the small shed that had survived the fire.

CHAPTER 14

Brewster, Kansas - April 19, 2046

Garret watched the woman as she changed the sheets on the bed. He stood just outside of the second-floor room, fascinated that there were still human beings living a normal life. He had a moment of doubt, wondering if he’d stepped into a weird holo where the whole town acted normal on the surface, but had some terrible secret or ritual planned for unwary travelers.

The fact that he’d stumbled across Brewster, Kansas, and it hadn’t been looted, ransacked, or burned to the ground was creepy enough. An American Traveler motel on Old Highway 24 that was still open made him suspect that it was a trick. Garret was suspicious of how the little burg seemed to be the only place left in the country to have more than one building that hadn’t been burned down, blown out, or completely disintegrated, leaving only a foundation.

When he shifted from one foot to another, his duffel scraped against his tablet bags, the noise interrupting the woman’s concentration. She turned, a new fitted sheet bunching up at the corner of the mattress when she let it go. Garret studied her face, noting the way her short, curly, gray hair contrasted with the darkness of her skin. Her eyes were wary, her face a mix of suspicion and fear. The hard line of her lips barely curled enough to begin a smile.

“Your room will be ready in a few minutes, sir,” she said, her lips becoming a straight line again as she turned back to the bed.

Garret stared at the woman, still unable to believe that he was watching a motel maid change the sheets on his room’s bed. He was somehow sure he was being manipulated, and if the juicer screwing with his mind dropped the illusion, he’d be standing in the middle of yet another burned-out town.

She felt his stare on her back and tensed, becoming as still as a statue. Garret’s guard went up. He glanced around, then down to the parking lot below, then back at the woman again. She’d grabbed the fitted sheet from the bed and had it clutched to her chest. She tried to back further into the room, away from Garret, but the bed caught the back of her knees, and she sat down hard on the mattress. When he stepped forward into the doorway, the woman’s right hand reached into her apron pocket then immediately went behind her back.

“Hey,” he said, his hands out in front of him, “calm down. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just a bit in shock that everything is still so normal here.” She stared at him as if he were insane. “Right. I suppose I don’t know what’s been going on here. But where I’ve just come from, things are pretty bad. Worse than whatever might be going on around here, at least.”

“Maybe for you,” the woman said. She immediately dropped her eyes to her knees, her right hand still behind her back.

“Listen,” Garret said, sitting down in the room’s only chair. The woman glanced back up at him. “I’m sorry. I’ve just seen so much destruction. I didn’t mean… I’m sorry.” When she didn’t say anything, he asked, “Is it bad around here?” The woman nodded, then shook her head. “Is that a yes, or no, or…?”

“It depends on who you are,” she said, looking down at her knees again.

“You mean who is juiced and who isn’t?” She nodded. “Most places are burned-out wrecks these days. How is it this place still seems like Down Home, America?”

“It’s a small town. There are a few families who run things. Probably been that way for forever. They keep things running and the trouble away from us.”

Garret frowned. “No offense, but that sounds about a million percent more organized and helpful than the rest of the world outside of this anomaly. What’s the catch?” When she refused to answer, he prodded her again. “Come on, I’m from Texas. I don’t hold a stake in anything here. I’m just passing through, looking for a place that doesn’t smell like rotting corpses and roasting meat. I’d appreciate knowing something like
‘they were a bunch of juiced family members robbing unwary travelers of their souls in the middle of the night.’
”

The housekeeper couldn’t help but smile at Garret’s goofy impersonation of a horror holo narrator. Her right hand was still behind her back, and it made Garret nervous. He wasn’t afraid of a lone woman, though he’d learned many times since the reveal that women were just as hard, just as cold as men, especially when they wielded enhanced abilities. He was more afraid she might have some sort of alert device, and the instant she pressed it, fifty juiced townsfolk would be waiting below the balcony for him.

“The families are okay, for the most part,” she said. “Though about half of them don’t seem to approve of black folk.”

“That seems like a common thread anywhere you go,” Garret muttered.

“It’s not so bad out here,” she said. “It isn’t like it was in back in Dothan. Mostly. When the madness started happening, the surrounding farmers and ranchers got together and had lots of meetings. A few folks died, the juicing and grabbing for power and all.” She gave Garret a sideways glance, but he nodded for her to go on, letting her know he knew all about men and power, being one of them himself. “But since a lot of families have been around for generations, they worked it out. Outsiders didn’t get a say, but we didn’t get raped or murdered.”

“Or lynched,” Garret said, anger flowing through his voice as he remembered the dozens of small towns he’d passed through or skirted around, from Lampasas, just outside of Austin, northwest along the panhandle and into Oklahoma, then Kansas. The devastation was indescribable for the most part, entire cities laid to waste. The worst moments of his solitary traveling were the little townships and burgs along the way that had kept some sort of normalcy, other than the ethnic cleansing of anyone that wasn’t of the dominant race.

In most of the still-intact hamlets and towns he’d passed near, the whites had been ahead of the curve when it came to the chaos of a world suddenly gone mad. They’d organized, usually under a religious banner of one stripe or another, and began to carry out “God’s Word.” Garret had never read the bible, but he was fairly sure that it didn’t instruct men to enslave, rape, or slaughter others whose only crime was being born with the wrong skin color. He’d flanked plenty of hamlets that had seen the tables turned the other way as well. His morbid sense of humor tried to let him know that all corpses would turn the same color eventually.

It didn’t work, and twice he’d enjoyed some ethnic cleansing of his own when he came across especially egregious breaches of humanity by supremacists. Garret knew he couldn’t try to save the world, nor even make much of a difference in it other than for himself. Getting involved by taking sides in a dispute, especially in little backwater hick towns, was hazardous in unpredictably lethal ways. Confidence in his abilities was tempered by his knowledge that they wouldn’t save him in a concentrated, organized attack by other juicers.

There were at least a dozen more places he’d had to stop in or pass through on his journey where he’d been forced to smile and accept that he was of the superior race. Places that required him to exert an extreme level of self-control so that he didn’t raze everything to the ground, and then keep burning it until there weren’t even ashes left.

“Or that,” the woman said without looking up at him.

“What’s your name?”

“Donella.”

“Donella what?”

“It’s just Donella now.”

Garret laughed. “I guess that’s true. There are more important things to worry about than last names, right?”

“Are you going to make me?” Donella asked.

“Make you what?” he asked, caught off guard.  

“Make me do it. With you.”

“Do what with me? I don’t… oh. Oh, no. No.” Garret held up his hands. “Is that what’s going on here?”

“No.”

“Donella, please don’t lie to me. I can make you tell me. I don’t want to do that.”

She looked down at her knees again.

“Is it the families? Do they round you and other non-family citizens up and make you all do weird sex things? Or other weird things?”

“No,” she said, talking to her knees. “The families are mostly good. But some aren’t. And of the ones that aren’t, a few of the men are…” she broke off, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Garret thought for a moment of getting up and going to console her, but decided to stay put. Donella’s tears turned into a torrent, her body racked with sobs, the fitted sheet still clutched in a death grip to her chest with her left hand. She still hadn’t moved her right hand from behind her back.

“Donella,” Garret said, infusing his words with a soothing tone to calm her down and get her to open up to him, “are these guys raping you?”

“Yes.”

“Do they show up at your house, or here at work, or what? Have you told anyone else?”

“I can’t tell anyone. The Stocktons are a big family.” Donella shook her head, then looked Garret in the eyes. “They don’t rape me with their own bodies. They won’t put their cocks anywhere near a black hole. Their families would probably cut ‘em off if word got out they’d sullied their race with an African whore.”

“I don’t understand,” Garret said, wincing at her words.

“They work out some kind of trade with travelers like you. They make me go to the room and fuck the man.”

“Like they hold a gun to your head? Or threaten to burn you to death or something?”

“No,” Donella said, her voice growing very low, almost a whisper, “they get in my head and make me do it. I can’t do anything to stop it. I try to scream at my legs to stop walking. I try to force my hands to grab something and anchor myself. But I can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Garret said, knowing the words were useless.

One of Garret’s biggest worries was running across other juicers that could force their way into his mind. He’d only had a couple of run-ins with
controllers
, but the most frightening one, the one that had nudged him closer to death than any other encounter, was a girl who’d manipulated him without his recognizing it until it was almost too late.

“They make me enjoy it. They make me come.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Is there no way to use your ability to lock them out of your mind?”

“What?”

“You know, when you juiced. Wait… you didn’t, did you?”

“The families cut the wireless and all of the landlinks. They won’t let anyone else have it. They say it’s too dangerous to let anyone else have such unchecked power.”

“I’m sure they say that while having unchecked power themselves, right?” he asked, more to himself than to Donella.

“Once they came to an agreement with each other, they dictated what us
norms
could and couldn’t do. We’re supposed to be protected from juicers, but what can we do? Most are trying to do good with their power. But the ones that aren’t, the sick and twisted ones, what can I do against them? What can I do against men that can make me put a knife in my own eye and have an orgasm from it before I bleed to death?”

Her anger was palpable, though she’d kept her voice low enough that Garret could barely hear her. He tried to imagine the terror Donella felt when her body suddenly had a mind of its own, going places she didn’t want to go, doing things she didn’t want to do. He then tried to imagine the shame she felt when she was forced to climax against her will, and forced to enjoy it.

“So… they won’t let you juice?” Garret asked.

“No. If we get caught, they’ll put us down without question. They’ve done it at least ten times in the last two months.”

“What if you could, and learn how to use it, and fight back?”

“I just told you. They don’t ask questions if they find out. And whoever dares to disobey always gets caught. They can’t help it. They can’t control it.”

“I know,” he said, remembering his own struggle to get his mind, and therefore his abilities, under control.

“Then you know why only a fool would risk it.”

“So you’d rather live like this?” Garret asked, sweeping his hands out in front of him. “You’re okay with being mind-raped while someone else physically rapes you? Being profited from like that?”

“I’m alive,” Donella said softly. “Travelers are growing more rare. The sex doesn’t hurt, and they don’t let the men hurt me.”

“Jesus Christ,” Garret said, standing up in disgust.

He’d advocated selling the Ability package, until Derry had cured him of his plan. Once she’d laid out the dire consequences of what they were planning to do, he’d agreed with Brian that Ability should be given away for free, to everyone. It was the only way anyone would have a fighting chance to survive. Brewster had the exact kind of power structure that they’d been against.