Mind Secrets: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 1) (16 page)

“I had nothing to do with it, perceive me.”

Otis went quiet. He stared at her. Into her. Perceiving her.

He broke off eye contact and hung his head. “That doesn’t make you innocent. You’re involved in all this somehow.”

“What are you going to do?” said Page.

“Why should I tell you?” said Otis. He abandoned her on the boot of the car and went back to leaning against the wall.

But it was a valid question.

Michael walked up to him. He spoke to him softly so the women couldn’t hear. “We can’t stay here.”

“Don’t you think I don’t know that?” said Otis.

“And we can’t go back to the squat.”

“Are you going to stand here and state the obvious to me all day, Michael mate? Or are you actually going to have some ideas?”

Otis was the leader. He was the one who was supposed to have ideas. “You’re not going to abandon Jennifer,” said Michael.

“Don’t be a fart.”

“You abandoned Jack.”

“That was different, that was …” Otis shook his head. “Jesus, I don’t know! Cooper’s seen my car, that’ll be a target too.”

“And Doctor Page?” Michael glanced back at where Otis had left her.

“What about her?”

“Wound looks pretty bad.”

“Fine,” said Otis. “We leave her here and call an ambulance.”

“With a gunshot wound?” said Michael. “They’ll notify police. Cooper’ll find her.” He shivered at the memory of his own near miss with Cooper’s men at the hospital.

“Like I care!”

“But, Otis, she knows stuff. She knows about the clinics and the cure, and … she knows about me.”

“What does that matter now?” He glanced down at Jennifer, curled up on the floor, dumb and apparently deaf to their conversation.

“It matters more than anything,” said Michael. “Jennifer sacrificed herself to get information about what’s going on. If we don’t honour that, then it’ll all have been for nothing.”

Otis went quiet. It seemed Michael had struck a nerve.

“I think I need a doctor,” Page called out from where she leant against the car boot. Her hand clutched her shoulder where fresh blood oozed through her fingers. Her wound had probably re-opened when Otis dragged her out the back seat. “Take me to a hospital and I’ll tell you everything.”

“So you can meet up with your friend Cooper?” Otis shouted back at her. “You think I’m stupid?”

“He’s not my friend,” said Page. “My friends don’t shoot me.” She slipped sideways on the boot as if she were about to faint. She let go of her wound, grabbed hold of the car and managed to stop herself. “If you won’t take me to hospital, at least take me to a hotel.”

Otis laughed. “A hotel? This ain’t a holiday, sister.”

“If it’s about money, I can pay,” she said, her breathing laboured, perhaps through pain, perhaps through blood loss. “Michael, have you still got my phone?”

Michael reached into his pocket where he had stashed it just before they ran across the field. He’d forgotten it was there. “It’s not a bad idea, Otis. We could take a taxi; Cooper won’t be looking for that.”

“I dunno …”

“It’s better than staying here.”

“Fine,” shrugged Otis. “Whatever.”

“Michael, give me the phone,” said Page.

He passed it over to her and, with cold trembling hands, she made the arrangements.

~

MICHAEL KICKED OPEN
the hotel room door and helped Page inside. The fully grown woman – although slim – weighed heavy, with her good arm draped across his shoulders and his arm clasped around her back. The two of them made it down the narrow passage between the wardrobe and the bathroom to the double bed. He turned her round and dropped her, bum-first, on the mattress. She sagged like a soft toy with barely the strength to keep herself upright. Michael swung her legs up onto the bed and helped lay her head down.

She was a bloody mess. Red, in various stages of coagulation, spread out from her shoulder, down her arm and right side. Looking all the worse against the hotel’s pristine white sheets.

The room was probably the same as a thousand other hotel rooms across the country. Walls painted in fresh magnolia, with a bold modern art picture of red, yellow and purple stripes above the bed. Bed of white, fluffed up pillows and duvet. Window with an uninspiring view across the car park estate where Otis had left the car. There was a kettle, white china mugs and sachets for making tea and coffee on the side. There was a small wardrobe with a full length mirror set in the door, a work desk and chair with a complimentary box of tissues. Everything was clean to the point of clinical, with a vague smell of freshly laundered sheets and furniture polish. Until that smell gave way to the body odour of four people on the run.

Jennifer stopped just inside the doorway. The hotel door swung shut automatically behind her.

Otis joined Michael by the bed.

“Perhaps we should have called that ambulance,” said Michael, not taking his eyes off Page’s wounded body.

“Thought you wanted to get information out of her,” said Otis.

“We won’t get anything out of her if she dies.”

Otis put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “She’s not gonna die, Michael mate.”

Michael looked him in the eye. His expression was serious. “If I could perceive you, Otis, would I find out you were just saying that to make me feel better?”

Otis chuckled, not unkindly. “Just as well you’re a norm, my friend.” He turned away. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

“We haven’t got time for tea!”

“To boil water to sterilise some towels. We need to get her cleaned up. Reduce the risk of infection.”

Otis took the kettle and squeezed past Jennifer to get to the bathroom door. She didn’t even glance in his direction, so absorbed was she by her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Her head listed to one side, like an animal confused by its own image.

“Jennifer, why don’t you sit down?” said Michael.

She didn’t move, she didn’t say anything. The only sound was that of a running tap drifting through the open bathroom door.

“Jennifer?” He approached her. “Must have been a hard couple of days, eh?”

He touched her gently on the arm.

She gasped and jumped away from him.

Michael pulled his hand back. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Michael?” as if she had only just noticed he was there. “I didn’t ’ceive you … I meant, I didn’t
see
you …” Tears suddenly appeared.

Michael wanted to comfort her. He wanted to hold her in his arms, to tell her everything was okay. But he daren’t touch her again.

“Come on, why don’t you sit down, eh?”

She nodded.

He pulled the chair out from under the desk and stood back. Her fragile body dropped to the chair, shaking slightly.

He pulled a tissue from the box. As she took it from his hand, her silent tears turned to gentle crying. Like giving her the tissue had given her permission.

Michael perched on the windowsill. He felt hot. The radiator at his legs was blazing. He turned to the window, twisted the handle and swung it open. The cold of approaching winter surged in. Michael stuck his head outside and breathed a lungful.

The room was on the first floor at the back of the hotel. A couple of metres below, a rough bit of tarmac was home to plastic dumpster-style recycling bins which huddled outside the back exit. The door probably led to the kitchens because, standing by the bins, was a man in chef whites puffing on a cigarette.

When he turned back into the room, Page was resting with her eyes closed. The steady rise and fall of her chest showed she was still breathing, still alive.

Jennifer had stopped crying. She still had the tissue Michael had given her and was fiddling with it in her lap.

Otis leant against the wall in the entranceway, having emerged from the bathroom, as the kettle rumbled away next to him.

“Michael?” said Jennifer all of a sudden.

“Yes,” he said.

“What’s it like to be a norm?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s normal, I suppose …”

“How do you know what people are feeling?”

“Well … you don’t really. Not for sure.”

Jennifer seemed disappointed at the answer. She turned away from him.

Lobotomised was how Otis had described people who had been cured, like a part of their soul had been thrown in the rubbish.

“You use your other senses, I suppose,” said Michael, desperate to say or do something to comfort her. “If you look at someone’s face you can tell if they’re happy or sad. There’s body language … and you can tell a lot by what people say.”

“But they lie,” said Jennifer.

Michael looked up at Otis for some sort of support, but Otis didn’t meet his gaze. He stared out ahead, beyond Michael, beyond Jennifer. Because Michael was a norm, he couldn’t tell what Otis was thinking. Maybe he was deciding whether to abandon Jennifer like he had done to Jack all those weeks ago.

“It’s going to be okay, Jennifer,” said Michael. “The human race has been norms for two million years. We seem to have got through all right.”

“How can you say that?” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the mangled tissue. “Didn’t you say you thought this had happened to you, that they took your perception away?”

Otis snorted a laugh.

The kettle shuddered to the boil. He grabbed it and returned to the bathroom.

“I don’t know anymore.” Michael shrugged. It had been a theory. Probably a stupid one.

Otis re-emerged from the bathroom with an armful of steaming towels. He dumped them on the bed next to Page. She moaned. Her eyes flickered open.

Otis leant over her. “I need to clean you up, okay?” His words unexpectedly soft and caring.

She let him unbutton her blouse and winced as he peeled back the blood-soaked fabric to reveal the wound. Where the bullet had entered was a dark hole glistening with fresh blood that oozed from her shoulder and down under her armpit. Everything was red; from her once-white bra to the flesh of her chest and arm. Otis wiped at the mess with a steaming wet towel.

She cried out in pain.

She breathed fast and shallow as he touched her. But she let him clean the wound.

Otis was incredibly gentle and patient. He seemed to know what he was doing. First, addressing the front of her shoulder, then asking Michael to lift her up as he cleaned her back. She whimpered and she cried, occasionally shouting with the pain, until Otis laid her back on a clean pillowcase he’d found in the wardrobe.

Blood continued to trickle from the wound. Page’s moans got quieter. Her eyes closed for longer periods as she clung to consciousness.

Otis shook his head. “We need to stop this bleeding. Mike, help me sit her up, will you?”

“Isn’t she better lying down?”

“We need to elevate the wound. Harder for the heart to push blood up hill,” said Otis. “Take her good arm.”

Michael went round the other side of the bed. They lifted her nearer the headboard and Otis put a couple of pillows behind her back to prop her up.

“We need a bandage,” said Otis. “Michael, see if there’s a spare sheet somewhere that you can rip into strips. But wash your hands first. With hot water. Thoroughly.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” said Michael.

“First aid badge at scouts.”

Michael let out a tiny laugh. “Seriously?” In the middle of their desperate situation it seemed so ironic. “You were a boy scout?”

“I was a lot of things before the world went crazy,” said Otis.

They bandaged Page’s shoulder. Blood seeped through the cotton strips. But, after a while, the red mark didn’t get any bigger and it looked like they had stopped the bleeding.

Otis filled a tea mug with water from the bathroom tap and handed it to Michael. “Get her to sip this. She’ll need to replace lost fluids.”

Michael took the mug. “What are you going to do?”

“Find some food. She’ll need to replace energy too, not to mention the rest of us.”

Otis left. The hotel room door clicked shut behind him.

Michael put the mug to Page’s lips and, with his other hand supported her head. “Sip this.”

She hesitated.

“It’s water,” he said.

She sipped.

Some of the water spilled from her mouth and ran down her chin. He allowed her head to rest back on the pillow and reached for one of the cotton strips which hadn’t been used to bandage her. He wiped her chin.

He helped her sip again.

“Doctor Page …?” said Michael.

“Don’t call me that. Call me Rachel.”

Calling her by her first name didn’t seem right somehow. He brought the mug to her lips again. She took a mouthful.

“Who am I?” he said.

Page coughed. Water spat from her mouth. Michael put the mug on the bedside table and helped her sit forward until the coughing subsided.

“Am I Ransom’s son?”

“Michael …”

Frustrated, he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper; the photograph taken from Ransom’s office. It was smashed from the frame, crumpled and creased, but the image of his younger self, Ransom and the woman was still clear.

He held it up in front of Page’s face. “Am I Ransom’s son?”

She lowered her eyes. “You weren’t supposed to know.”

“Why not?”

“Because of Cooper.”

“Cooper? What does he want from me?”

“He wants you because of who you are.” She lowered her eyes. “And because of what he thinks you can do.”

“I can’t do anything. I’m a norm, I’m …” But he wasn’t sure anymore. He remembered the way he felt when he looked into Jack’s eyes all those weeks ago in the park. When he saw the blank expression of a cured teenager and related it to his own memory-wiped mind. Otis had laughed at him back then. But now he wondered if his instinct had been right. He turned to look at Jennifer, closed up within herself, sitting quietly at the edge of the room, contemplating the raggedy tissue in her hand. Part of her lost. Like part of Michael was lost.

“Does Cooper think I’m a perceiver?”

“Yes,” said Page.

“Because I used to be a perceiver?”

“Yes.”

“Because you cured me?”

“Yes.”