Masked (16 page)

I released my focus. “I love you too.”

She wrapped her arms around me in
a tight embrace. “You did it. It’s not just happening to me.”

“You can do this as well?” I said,
surprised, in response to her statement. The deep throb in my temple was fading
but still very well there.

“Well, not exactly. I mean I
haven’t heard anyone’s thoughts, at least not yet, but something else happened.”
She raised her hand to me. “Could you remove your ID tags?”

“Okay, sure.”

I thought it was an odd request,
but pulled the tags out from under my shirt and over my head. I held them out
to her. My mind was swimming with the wonder of what I had just done and the
anticipation of what Sara was about to show me.

She directed my gaze to a spot on
the floor right in front of us. “Now, please set them on the ground.”

I set them down. “What are we
doing?”

“Just wait.”

She held out her right hand with her
palm open and fingers stretched towards the metal tags. Her eyes focused directly
on the tags and her face held a look of intense concentration.

What was she doing? I knew what
it looked like she was trying to do, but dismissed it because of how absurd it
was. Now I was thinking about absurdity when everything about us and the situation
we were in would be fantastic to anyone outside of the little world we were
trapped in, including the fact I had just read Sara’s mind.

It turned out my guess was not so
wild after all because suddenly the tags floated off of the ground. They slowly
rose to a point at eye level. Once there, they froze in place, hovering above
the ground, but still.

I looked over at Sara and her
concentration was intently focused on the tags. It caused her typically smooth
forehead to form a V in the space between the eyebrows. I stared at her, amazed
at what she was doing. It was incredible. Sara moved her focus from the tags
back to my staring face and when she did the tags fell back to the ground with
a clink.

She smiled shyly. “So what do you
think?”

I wasn’t sure what to think about
what either of us had just done. Were the new abilities a good or bad thing? Sure,
being able to read minds or use telekinesis was amazing, but what did it mean
about us? What else was going to change? Did it mean we were now further from
human than we had thought? What was it we were becoming?

I picked up the tags. “That was
amazing. How do you feel?” I wondering if she had the same intense crushing head
pain as I had.

“It feels like someone is using
my temples as a bass drum, but okay. The pain should stop,” she said.

“How long have you known?” I
asked.

She explained she first
experienced her ability just two nights prior. She was dressing after her
shower and knocked her ID tags off the bureau. They fell in the narrow gap
between the bureau and the wall. The bureau was fastened to the floor so she
couldn’t move it without breaking it. She tried to reach behind it, but they
were just out of her reach. She tried several more times, hoping somehow she’d
be able get the added few inches she needed.

She reached and stretched her
hand towards the tags, pushing, trying to get the extra few inches when there
was a sharp pain at her temple and the tags flew towards her out stretched
hand. The sharp pain starting to fade as she stumbled back to her feet, unsure
of what had just happened. Her initial thought was she had just imagined it, that
she overstrained, causing the headache and confusion. She was sure her hand
never reached them though.

Neither Emily nor Rachael were in
the room at the time, both still in the bathroom, so she decided to try to make
the tags move again to determine whether she was crazy or not. She laid the
tags back on the bureau and stepped back. She reached her hand towards the tags,
focusing her thoughts to make them move towards her. She felt stupid even
trying.

After just a few seconds of
concentration, the pain returned and the tags flew into her hands. Since then,
she had retried the experiment on other objects, her control and endurance
improving each time.

“Why didn’t you tell me this
before? Has anyone else seen you do this?” I asked.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything.
I wasn’t sure what was happening. I should have. I was very careful to only try
when absolutely alone. No one else could have seen.”

I put my arm around her. “Please.
Don’t apologize. I get it. Until you had me try to hear your thoughts tonight,
I wasn’t going to say anything to you. I didn’t want you to think I was losing
it. I thought I was going crazy, too.”

“What do you think this means?”
Sara asked. “Do you think this is happening to the others as well?”

“I don’t know. I think we should
keep this between us for now, though.”

Sara leaned into me. “I agree. How’s
your head feeling?”

The deep throbbing had faded into
almost nothing. “It’s better now. How about you?”

“It still hurts a little, but I’m
okay.”

We moved in closer and continued
to hold each other. We didn’t talk much the rest of the night, both of us lost
in our own thoughts. After a few hours we decided to head back to try and get
some sleep.

“I love you,” I said before we
separated.

She leaned in and her soft lips
met mine. We stayed connected, locked in a kiss full of many emotions and
meaning. The kiss was the physical message of how grateful we were to have each
other. Our lips eventually parted.

“I love you too,” she said and
walked away.

That night, I eventually fell
asleep. My mind was full of thought. There were many more questions now. We
were changing more than we had been told. How much did Caldwell, Dr. Roberts
and the others know, was a key question. The next day was to be a new day, a
new day in a world that had changed even more. I decided I wouldn’t be able to
sit by taking everything at face value anymore. I needed to have more than that.
I needed to make sure we were safe. Now, I had a tool I could use to find the
answers I was searching for. I fell asleep while thinking of the endless
possibilities my new found ability could grant.

That night I had the first dream
of the girl and twin babies. The dream was short, just a short conversation
with the girl in the hospital room and then the young couple walking away with
the infants. Like all the dreams I’d had since, it ended with me running, the
bright light and pain. The first dream brought such strong feelings for the
girl and babies. I didn’t know them but was heartbroken when they were carried away
and left with a feeling of guilt for feeling love for someone other than Sara.

With a start, I woke from the
dream and the pain instantly faded. I could tell I hadn’t been asleep for very
long. There was some sort of commotion outside of our room. It sounded like
heavy footsteps moving down the hall. I rose and looked at the clock on the wall
and it was just a few minutes before 4:00 a.m. I hadn’t been asleep for long at
all.

“What’s going on?” Alex asked as
he rose from his bed.

James and Brian, both awake now
sat up as well. All three followed me to the door.

The hallway leading to the main training
hall was fully lit. There were several voices coming from the direction of the
training hall itself. With a swift pace, we were at the training hall and saw Emily
and Rachael along with Dr. Roberts, Caldwell and Matthew standing in the center
of the room in what seemed to be an intense conversation.

At the far end of the room, where
the exit to the rest of the facility was, I saw a small motorized vehicle
surrounded by three people wearing light green medical scrubs, another sitting
in the driver’s seat of the one man vehicle as well as two more in black
fatigues, armed. The vehicle was a black flatbed with six large black wheels. Lying
on the back of it was a person, motionless and covered with blankets obscuring
my view of the face.

I looked back at the group in the
center of the room. They were looking back at us, Rachael and Emily with red
eyes and worried faces. It must have been the fatigue that caused me to not
notice the second I walked in the room because it finally hit me. Sara wasn’t
standing with them. Still, not comprehending the obvious, I was just about to
ask where Sara was when the vehicle started and moved towards the open doors to
the main part of the HUB. Then it clicked as I watched Sara get taken away,
away from me.

Wally thought it was finally his
lucky night as he was lead from the bar through a back door by a beautiful, blonde
girl. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before and unfortunately for
him, his idea of lucky wasn’t what the girl leading him had in mind. Now, if his
idea of getting lucky meant getting dead, painfully dead, then it was his lucky
night.

Blood, ritual, savagery, darkness
and death was what I saw when I journeyed into the blonde girl’s mind. What I’d
expected to see was that her interest in Wally was maybe a result of a joke or
a dare, but I was wrong. Her mind was like the cold focused mind of a predatory
animal. I sensed not even a trace of compassionate thought or humanity, no
sense of a soul.

Her plans were to get him alone
and take him to her brothers and sisters. The poor disillusioned, un-expecting Wally
was to become sacrificial nourishment for her family. I wasn’t sure what that
exactly meant, but her almost orgasmic excitement at the thought of blood, so
much blood, sent chills through me. I stayed in her mind only for a few
moments, but the coldness numbed me.

The door they left through was
for employee only access as indicated by a white square sign with red letters. I
carefully opened the door and saw it led to a stair well. Just inside the door
was a small landing with stairs going both up and down. There was no sign of
the blonde girl or Wally.

The Cross occupied about half the
space of the three-story building’s street level floor. A vintage clothing boutique
and music store occupied the other half of the space. From what I understood,
the top two floors had been converted into apartments.

My first thought was she took the
man up to one of the apartments. I started to head up the stairs and after the
third step, heard a soft noise of something being moved from below so I turned
to head down towards the lower level of the building.

The stairs that went down were
blocked by an old dirty white metal gate. The sign on the gate said ’authorized
access only,’ but there was nothing locking the gate. The stairs were steep and
there was a landing half way down between the first floor and the basement. I
paused when I hit the landing and listened for any sound from below. I didn’t
hear anything.

The light from the level above
only illuminated the remaining stairs about halfway down to the very dark
basement.

There’s nothing like going in
blind. I started down the stairs.

“Stop!” I heard a stern woman’s
voice say right above me.

I turned and saw officer Raymond completing
her last two steps onto the landing with her weapon drawn.

“Where are they?” she asked in an
accusatory tone.

“Who?” I thought playing dumb may
be worth a try.

It wasn’t.

“The couple I saw you watching in
the bar and then follow down here,” she said.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure
out. If I find them, I’ll let you know.” It had sounded more smart assish than
I’d intended but I didn’t know what else to say.

Now that we were standing there having
a conversation, the blonde woman could probably hear us. I needed to get down
there and find them before she was able to get away with her intended victim.

“Why exactly are you looking for
them? Do you know them?” she started to interrogate me, and before I could
answer she added “or maybe you could tell me why you sit in the bar upstairs or
in the club down the street every night just watching people?”

“Do you like watching people?
What else do you like to do?” she added moving closer with the gun still raised.
“Now let me ask you again, where is the couple you followed down here?”

The smart thing to do was to hit
the PTD and jump out of there, get the hell out of Dodge, or Seattle in that case.
I didn’t though. If I did that, I knew Wally would probably die and if the
blonde woman was behind all of the murders, so would many others. Maybe officer
Raymond would have continued down and found them, but somehow I doubted it. I
couldn’t leave, so I decided almost complete honesty was be the best course of
action.

“I think the man the blonde woman
took down here is in trouble. I think she’s going to kill him,” I explained.

“That’s not what it looked like
to me. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the most likely suspect for murder. Why
should I believe you?”

I didn’t answer and there was a
pause before she asked with a sigh “Ok. What makes you think this woman is
going to kill him?”

She sounded conflicted between my
obvious guilt and the slight chance I was telling the truth.

“You don’t have to believe me.
Just follow me down to find them. Keep your gun on me the whole time if you‘d
like, but you may want to point it at the woman once we find them. I’ll explain
everything once we’ve found them and have stopped her”

Of course, once we found them and
she was in police custody, I’d mysteriously disappear, without a trace. There
hadn’t been a need to tell her that though.

“We need to move now. I’m sure
she’s heard us. We need to get down there and find them before they can get
out,” I said as I moved down the stairs.

Officer Raymond hesitated for a
few seconds and then followed with her gun raised and pointed at my back. I
wasn’t armed. I didn’t think it would have been a good idea to be caught with a
gun, especially when the police had already suspected me, plus they checked for
weapons at the door.

The officer and I stepped down
into the dark basement. Initially it was completely black. I couldn’t see a
thing. Once my eyes had a chance to adjust, the light from the stair well was
enough for me to make out shapes just a bit darker than the dark room.

The space was musty with the scent
of age. It was an old building, I think originally built in the mid 1800’s.
From what I could tell, the space was open and used for storage. It looked like
there were several groups of boxes stacked in various positions throughout the room.

“It’s too hard to see down here,”
I whispered. “If she knew where she was going, she could be out by now.”

“There is no way out. We
performed a thorough search down here. The only way in or out is up the stair
well we just came down,” the officer whispered back.

“Why would she bring him down
here then?” I said, still in a hushed tone.

“You tell me, since you seem to
know what is going on,” she responded smartly.

 I didn’t answer but asked “Do
you know where the light switch is?”

“No. I don’t”

At that we moved forward into the
black abyss.

A few moments later there was a
crash, like someone had knocked over a stack of boxes. It sounded like it was
just ahead of us, to the right. It didn’t sound far away.

“This is officer Raymond with the
Seattle Police Department, please identify yourself,” she shouted.

I jumped. Her announcement had
caught me by surprise.

There wasn’t any response.

“Please identify yourselves and
move to my position with your hands raised,” she ordered again.

There was still no response.

As we stood waiting, I noticed the
room had gotten a little brighter. As far as I could see no lights had been
turned on. It was still dark, but more like the kind of dark you have outside
when the moon is full. I could see the facial features of the officer clearly.
It was a bit unworldly and I was confused as to what could be causing the room
to grow brighter like that.

As if reading my mind officer
Raymond asked with a nervous look “what’s going on?”

Just then something dropped
softly on my shoulder. As a reflex, I quickly brushed whatever it was off. My
hand only touched it for a moment, but it was enough to tell the object was firm
and cold. I then felt it again on my other shoulder. I looked over and saw a
dark hairy spider the size of my fist sitting on my shoulder looking at me with
its many black eyes. I screamed like a school girl, no like a chorus of school
girls. I’m terrified of spiders.

In a panic, I flung the large bulbous
ball of hair and legs from my shoulder and ran back several feet from where it
landed. Officer Raymond started to ask “what the …” but was cut short as she
started to scream and jump around frantically, moving her arms as if trying to
fling things off of her.

I felt another soft movement on
my right shoulder. When I looked over there were now two of the large spiders
resting there. As I again screamed a shrill high pitched scream, three more
landed on me, one after another. I was running in a panic trying to bat away
the still falling spiders. The officer was also still screaming and trying to
protect her head from the spiders falling on her. There must have been hundreds
that fell.

As the spiders continued to fall,
I ran over and grabbed the officer by the arm and started to pull her back
towards the direction we’d come. She was still covering her head from the
falling arachnids, her hair covering her eyes, so I lead the way. After only a
few feet, I caught a glimpse of the blonde girl just ahead of us. She was standing
with her arms out in front of her, looking directly at me, smiling. Once I had
her gaze, she winked and everything went black.

The shock of the instant darkness
instinctively caused my body to react, but when it tried, I couldn’t move. I
was still upright, but there was something preventing me from moving my arms
and legs as if bound. There was also some sort of barrier surrounding me
because when I tried to lean just slightly, I hit its surface with my forehead.
It’s only then I recognized officer Raymond was no longer with me.

“Officer Raymond,” I shouted, the
sound loud in the enclosed space I was in.

There was no answer. In fact,
there was no noise at all outside of my own heavy breathing.

I continued to struggle, the
panic building again. Two things I hated the most were spiders and tight spaces
where I can’t move and as if on cue with my thoughts, the small space lit up.
There again was no discernible light source but a dim brightness that
surrounded me. It appeared I was in a pine box,  just the right size to
perfectly hold my body without any extra space for me to move in.

How had I been bound and put in a
pine box in a matter of seconds? I tried to think past the panic to find a way
out.

Since I was standing, I thought
maybe I could move enough to topple the box. Maybe the impact would break it.
It would hurt, but what other choice did I have? That idea was short lived. When
I tried to move, nothing happened. The box didn’t move an inch. It had to have
been fastened to the floor somehow. That assumed of course I was still in the
basement. Other nightmares of being buried alive standing upright or in a box
encased in concrete began to cross my mind.

There was a gentle pressure on
top of my head and then a scuttling movement. Realizing what it was, an icy
chill ran through my body and I started screaming again as one of the large
spiders crawled down my face.

I felt impact after impact as
more fell from above me, each landing on my head, some crawling down and others
falling. They kept coming and I kept screaming. It was my worst nightmares come
true.

How could it be true? Fear and
panic continued to build. I kept screaming and trying to struggle, to no avail.
There was no room for rationale thought. There was no way out.

There was little open space in
the box so it didn’t take long for the dropping arachnids to build up on top of
each other, growing closer towards my head. They kept building and building
until finally they covered my face. With my eyes and mouth closed, I continued
to scream as hairy probes tried to break my seals. I don’t know how long I
screamed, but it seemed like an eternity. Those large bulbous bodies and hairy
legs moving against my face, I thought I was going to pass out. Then,
everything then just stopped.

In an instant, I was standing by
myself down in the basement level of the building again. There was no pine box,
no spiders and no officer Raymond.

My body was trembling so hard. I
lost my balance and fell to the floor. Visions of spiders on the floor
immediately caused me to jump right back up. Everything was dark again. I was
alone. I couldn’t see the officer anywhere.

“Officer Raymond,” I said in a weak
trembling voice. There was no answer.

“Officer Raymond,” I said again. This
time my voice was more steady and loud.

It was silent for a few seconds
and then I heard “she can’t hear you,” in a calm pleasant feminine voice.

I jumped and turned to find no
one behind me. I heard a high pitched laugh echo through the room. I looked in
all directions trying to determine where the voice was coming from.

“Who are you?” I yelled trying to
get a response.

“Now if I told you that, I might
have to kill you,” the voice said still echoing. “Well, I’ll probably kill you anyway,
but not yet. I’m intrigued. How did you know to follow me? I heard you talking
with the poor sweet officer. How did you know what was going to happen to my
new friend?”