They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (35 page)

He lifted the
droplets of
blood off his robes with Meghar's mind. "The raid out there,
that was a piece, I told them it was. A
ll those Post-Humans are accessing their uninhibited connections with the informational code
as we speak
, and I'm in the one that can access
the most. That's the punch-
through we needed to the sub-ba
sement, remember? That fucking k
yke over there thought otherwise, but here we are. The EM field my generator's producing is being sculpted to a shape descr
ibed by Mr. Earle's equations."

"I don't feel anything," I straight up lied, fighting vertigo. Fucking shit.

He pulled the metal cylinder from his robes and did another hit. "You need to take some of this. You're sober right now, but if you were on what I'm on and done the meditations, you would see it. The solidity of the world is melting like a Pollack painting. I can see the waves crashing all around you. It's your photonic baptism in the sea of all things."

I got one last look at the room and tried to map it all out in my head for what I was about to do. Bob read my face like a book and slammed me hard
to the floor with telekinetics.

But he couldn't stop it.

I hit every piece of tech
in there
with a blanket of high heat. Bearings and pistons swelled
and
seize
d
up the generators, computer casings melted and blackened and the hardware inside burst into flames.
T
he cooling
system couldn't counter it all, and i
nsulating rubber dripped off the hanging
cables,
causing sparks where the currents crossed. More sparks popped where the coolant hoses melted and liquid leaked into the
electronics
. Power surges killed whatever the heat missed.

My headache rocketed to new levels of pain
from doing it, but
I
still managed to smile
as I said, "Ha ha. F
uck you, Bob."

Bob clenched and unclenched Meghar's fingers. His breathing sped up, and a
nother
notebook from the overcrowded table flipped end over end into his hands. His head went down to the pages while he kept me pressed to the concrete floor
with his thoughts
. He mumbled as he read with a crazy homeless person's intensity: "Martin Skinner dash height colon five feet, eleven inches dash weight colon one-hundred eighty-two pounds parentheses naked end parentheses dash eyes colon brown dash length three point six two inches slash five point nine four inches dash--"

"That make you feel b
etter, Rain Man?" My head spun.

"Prescription colon Mydol parentheses two-hundred milligrams end parentheses comma Benzyne parentheses twenty ceecee's end parentheses comma type three cocaine parentheses one hundred milligrams slash one hundred eighty minutes comma--"

"You beat off thinking about what you did to people, is that it?"

Bob's pretend sanity returned, and he used Meghar's mind to hurl me up off the floor until I hit the back wall
of the building
. The notebook closed up and went back to its place on the table.

"What you just did," he said slowly, "You stupid cocksucker, was shut down every monitoring device in place to keep the EM field stable. Silvy is using the monitors and a comatose Iranian boy's abilities to shape and contain the field. Now she's flying blind and guessing at what she's doing, and the EM generator is still going. You didn't stop it, and you
can't
stop it or who know what will happen."

The room looked like it was getting brighter. A thought from Bob closed around my throat like a steel clamp and pulled me to him. My feet dra
gged across the farmhouse table, and he rose to
a good six feet off the ground and brought me up to him, just below eye level so he cou
ld still look down on me.

"Silvy," he said, "I'm pushing the output. Just do your best." His glassy eyes fell on me, and he squeezed my neck tighter. "You'd better sit there and
do nothing. If Silvy warps the E
arth's EM field, a solar wind or a CME could get through and make planetary contact
and wipe us out
. A monopole or a dipole are very real threats as well; I don't know what the fuck you've done as far as damage."

He pulled me so close to his face I could smell the sweet coffee on Meghar's breath.
But
I couldn't talk
with the grip on my throat
.

"We're doing this together," he said.
"It's happening.
I can observe the waveforms, nothing's static anymore. We're the winners. Take the
damn
win."

I struggled in his telekinetic grip, mouthing that I needed to talk. I loaded a thought at the back of my head like a bullet in the c
hamber.

Bob shook Meghar's head. "No.
I don't care what you have to say. Be in this moment with me."

Fuck it, no saying one clever la
st thing to him.

I just mouthed, "Fuck. You," and fired that loaded thought right at him, jamming a flash of heat that could warp an aircraft carrier's turbines
right into
Ibn
Meghar, center mass.

He jerked and fell backward
to the floor
, me along with him. Machinery shredded
and squealed
as h
is thoughts ran out of control. Wiring
whipped across the room. I kept the heat on and spread it
to the rest of Meghar's body
. The skin on
his
face bulged; scalding steam erupted from his mouth and nose, even from the corners of his eyes. Tissue from his
liquefying
organs frothed
on
his lips.

We were all two-thirds water, but
nobody ever seemed to fucking remember that. And no matter how leadskinned or badass somebody was, water always boiled.

Meghar spasmed on the floor while h
is robes caught fire.
His grip on me released, and
I coughed on the gasoline-flavored air that rushed back into my lungs
. I
turned up the heat until I was sure
he
was dead.

Meghar's body sizzled
and stopped twitching
, but nothing
else
stopped. I could feel the fillings moving in my teeth. Random shit around the room jetted by like fucking
Poltergeist
.
The generator was still kicking.

"Fucking awesome, Donnie," I said through gritted teeth on all fours on the floor, barely able to move, my nose full of the smell of burning flesh. I had graduated from the murder of a national hero to the murder of a worldwide savior with exactl
y jack and shit to show for it.

It felt like six vodka hangovers had hit me at once, like every piece of me wanted to collapse into itself with my brain trying to go first. Like every other Friday night, I tried to talk myself out of the dizziness and nausea. All I had to do was get out and get a cop and tell them about Silvy and the generator so somebody could fucking stop it. Easy. Just had to keep breathing steady breaths.

The floor turned cold under me. The glass reservoir of the absinthe dispenser cracked and broke; the liquid inside had frozen into a solid block of ice. Licks of fire appeared and disappeared in the air like fireflies while machinery glowed red-hot.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck," I said the words like they would give me some kind of control ov
er anything that was happening.

"Silvy, stop!" I shouted, knowing she couldn't hear me.

"Bob, are you still alive?" I asked
desperately
. No answer.

I shouted Tracey's name over and over, hoping she would wake up and come.

But I was alone.

I crawled away from the center of the room by inches back to the door to the offices.
I told myself Silvy would take control of somebody and send them in to shut it off. She would. I wasn't touching the fucking thing with my power and making shit worse. A
gas
generator housing became suddenly magnetized and drew shit from all over the room to it before it all fell off a minute later. The hanging lights overhead were all pulled toward the center of the room. The light
from them
was so bright. I blew out all the bulbs but one, and doing that spiked my migraine into orbit.

I shut my eyes, but the light wouldn't go away.
It pierced through my eyelids
and
shrank to a small white in a solid blue brightness. I heard part of the roof collapse, but couldn't do anything about i
t. It sounded far
away. The tiny white light expanded while the blue faded to a dull grey that went yellow with the smell of sand from
the desert
outside entering my nose and the sound of rolling explosions in my ears. On my knees, I slammed my forehead on the concrete twice just to handle the pain, to make it go away for a second. And then came red fire where the yellow
light
had been. I saw fire, burning hot, filling a horizon that went on forever. A yellow in the flame and a green underscoring it drew my attention but couldn't sway me from the fla
me. The look of it. The warmth.

I opened my eyes with a "Holy shit!" realizing I had lost control and set everything around me ablaze. Fire circled me, hot as hell. I squelched what I could and kicked across the floor away from what I couldn't. The fire burned wildly behind me and threw twisted shadows of the melted hardware onto the wall. The shadows moved
along
with
every movement
of my flames. Light from the dimmed sun above spilled in through the collapsed roof, but it couldn't wash away the twisted shadows. I raised my throbbing head and stared at the pale sun that couldn't make me look away. Then I got back to crawling.

Inch by inch, I pulled myself on my belly back to the hallway door, feeling my way through the maze of equipment, smearing the chalk lines on my stomach. I pushed whatever I had to out of the way. The fire sputtered and died behind me. The
metal
walls vibrated like a metal hummingbird's wings. The noise of it was
excruciating
. Short breaths kept e
verything from overwhelming me.

In the hallway, I
kicked the door shut
. Warning signs fell off and hit the floor
. I made it up to
my hands and knees
and threw up, then pulled up to my feet on the door knob of Tracey's room. I pushed the door open
to hide in there.
I just needed to get my shit together for a couple of minutes. Nothing had changed
since I had left her
. Except the lights were on now.

Tracey and Me

I
locked the door to the room
. Everything out on the work floor
slowed and went quiet, and the headache started to pass.
I leaned against the chest of drawers to get my breath back. Those nanites were bound to be workin
g
on Tracey now. I just needed
to wait
a few minutes.

Holy shit. I had killed Ibn Meghar.

"What the fuck did you do?" I asked myself. "Jesus, fuck, man. That was all you came up with?"

I had killed one of the most recognizable faces on the planet. Yeah, plenty of people hated the guy as an anti-American, anti-Western jackass, but they knew his fucking face and still could get behind him fucking up cannibal guerillas and saving lives and shit. They would broadcast my fucking face in every language in every country looking for me. Where the fuck was I gonna go to lay low from that shit? And with them saying I played a part in Agent Red's death too,
just fuck me, man. There was no
getting away from that bullshit.

"Trace," I said. She still hadn't woken up.

I wiped off the blood I had smeared on her face and pulled at the gray tape around her head. It had hardened and dried and only
came off with a lot of effort.
I was lucky she was unconscious for
it
because the shit was really on there
, and I had to do some yanking that involved probably more hair than necessary coming out
. Underneath the tape, her left eye
was bruised and
swollen shut.

I used the knife I had found earlier
to cut the rest of the tape off. The pink t-shirt she h
ad on said, 'Post-Humanly Sexy.' It
had stains all over it.

Even with me
doing all that she had
n't wake up. The cops would be swarming the place any minute.
As soon as she woke up, she would be gone in a hiss. So what the fuck was I waiting around for? A few hours of freedom before every cop on Earth tracked me down and fought over who got to cap me?