Chapter 5: A Pickled Matter

May 11th - May 13th, 1990

On the last day of regular classes, I had a test in my Political Science class, a class where the tests were more like essays than simple questions and answers. I also had a final for that class the following Tuesday requiring another set of short essays. Is that stupid or what? I can’t tell you how tempted I was to correct that injustice.

Granted, Political Science wasn’t my favorite class. Why I thought it would be similar to the morals class I took four years ago at Crow Academy, I didn’t know, but I was determined to get an honest A in it.

I guess I shouldn’t have blamed myself for letting my guard drop so much that I fell victim to the most unique and unusual attack I had ever encountered at that time. It had been such a rude awakening to how relaxed my defenses had become that I would never again go without a shield like I had done for most of the semester.

I remember having difficulty with the second to last essay. I kept spelling words wrong, but I don’t know how many I corrected before falling under the pickle-pickle spell.

Yes, the pickle-pickle spell.

“Pickle, pickle, every pickle pickles, pickle to the pickle.”

At least that’s what I had written on my test before completely pickling out. I can only imagine what I must have said aloud.

Now, I didn’t stay under the spell for its whole duration. No, nobody in the Group came and snapped me out of it. Well, that’s not entirely true. I guess you could say Joey did, but not in any way intentionally.

I had three tremendous shocks all within twenty seconds or so, the first was feeling the sharp hot pain of a bullet burrowing into my back and through my right lung.

After hitting the floor with my face, the sensations evaporated. When I regained my senses enough to take inventory of my condition, I was then shocked again by the knowledge that besides a slightly bleeding lip, I was fully intact without holes in my body that weren’t supposed to be there.

The instant obvious conclusion raced through my head, and in the time it took me to get back to my feet while gasping, “Joey,” the third shock hit me as all of my classmates turned towards me muttering, “pickle,” in various emotional voices.

Just hearing the very soothing and welcoming word caused me to lose my grasp on the situation a moment. That was somewhat of a saving for me. During that moment, I muttered the magic word myself, and that caused the other pickled students to lose interest in me.

My old instincts finally kicked in enough to make me raise a telepathic shield around my mind. If I hadn’t, I am certain I would have joined the others in their pickled existence and that I would never have forgiven myself for.

I was just trying to take in what was happening when several of my nearest classmates took notice of my lack of pickle muttering, astonishingly issuing several very crude telepathic commands with the intent on re-pickling me.

Within a couple of heartbeats, the others in the room seemed to become aware of my condition, and as I sensed their strangely charged symbols forming the same commands as the others had, I put up a cloak personality. After their pickling commands worked on it, I responded with an enthusiastic “pickle-pickle” in time to divert a more physical attack.

I wasn’t out of the woods yet, however.

After dissolving my cloak personality and mimicking their actions as best I could, I became increasingly desperate from the never-ending pickle demands. They seemed disturbed by my shield and were constantly issuing verbal pickle queries to which I did my best to respond to. My break came when I accidentally made full eye contact with one of them and was overwhelmed emotionally by their pickle-ness. When I reflected that emotion back at them, the guy literally passed out from a pickle overload.

I was emotionally drained by the time I had knocked out the whole room, and it quickly became obvious that I wasn’t done over-pickling people. I could feel hundreds more all around me, and in fact that was all I could feel. It was like the whole world was just a bunch of pickles. But even if it was, I had to find Joey. Pickled or not, he had to have been seriously injured for me to have felt it like that.

As I continued to assess the situation, I glanced at the time and was startled to find it was already a little after two in the afternoon. My class had started at noon, meaning I had been a pickle for more than an hour.

Scanning the surrounding area didn’t paint a very rosy picture. There were pickles out in the hall, pickles in the surrounding classrooms, pickles outside, pickles above, pickles below, and with the sound of a groggy pickle-pickle, I realized the pickles in the room were starting to wake up as well.

My instincts told me using a blanket command to keep the twenty or so classmates and its instructor under would be like putting a flashing target on my head. Seeing that I couldn’t sense very far with all these pickles around me, my best option was to get the hell out of there.

I slowly opened the door and slithered out, immediately finding all twelve pairs of eyes in the immediate area of the hallway were focused on me intensely.

Mimicking their own actions and to some degree their thoughts, I calmly walked down the hallway thinking and muttering, “Pickle, pickle.” While they didn’t ignore me, they also didn’t try to stop me, and that’s all I really cared about at that point.

Walking down the steps to the main floor turned out to be impossible. While pickles seemed to be quite capable of walking around, even running as I found out later, they apparently didn’t seem to grasp the concept of climbing or descending stairs. There were anywhere from ten to thirty pickles clustered at the tops and bottoms of the staircases with a few stuck on the stairs in between floors. They would have instantly seen me as a non-pickle if I had done something so unpicklely as going downstairs.

So I took the elevator. It wasn’t hard. The single pickle in the elevator didn’t seem to question the elevator’s movements and even seemed rather relieved to have another pickle wander in to swap pickle-pickle comments.

Sadly, I just wasn’t pickle enough for her. Heh. After she became very dissatisfied with my pickleness, I had to resort to zapping her with my pickle stare. I did get a nice feel of her bod as I helped her down to the ground. It was almost worth the trouble.

I didn’t have any further problems getting out of the building, but not ten feet away from the entrance, I found an unconscious Eta who had been severely beaten.

The pickles around me became visibly agitated by my attention to a subdued non-pickle, and before I knew it, I was running from a small mob of pickles that had violent intentions towards me.

All I got to say is, thank God for steps. It took me a couple of panicked dashes from one set of steps to another before I managed to fool the pickles at the opposite side of the steps that they didn’t start to chase me. Of course, it was also rather difficult to find steps that they couldn’t just walk up the slope beside them or get around some other way.

By the time I was walking among them without any of them chasing me again, I had seen at least four beaten people lying unconscious along the way. I had to focus myself on just the “pickle-pickle” stuff while using some of Joey’s poker face tricks to sneak in a few thoughts in between about what I should do or where to go.

I wandered around a bit looking for a place to hole up, preferably with lots of stairs and doors I could lock. Unfortunately, everywhere I went had pickles inside them, and I was about to try my luck at using a phone to call for help when I faintly sensed someone scanning the area from the newer physics building.

Whatever it was that was doing this to people had the added effect of clouding my telepathic senses. I felt like I was walking in fog towards a faint flickering light that stopped just as I was starting to get a firm fix on it.

With pickles everywhere I went, I didn’t dare probe for the source myself and just made my way slowly into the building. Since the source had been at least a floor or two up, I immediately looked for an elevator and found two, both with a large group of pickles around them.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a red horn of the fire alarm just above a glass door with a fire hose behind it. Straining to keep my thoughts from racing while I was under the scrutiny of so many pickles, I came to the conclusion I needed to draw the attention of whoever was upstairs to me, and what better way than with horns and a few flashing lights.

You wouldn’t think it would be that difficult to find one of those little red boxes that manually triggered the fire alarm, especially in a modern physics building where you expected people to blow things up once in a while.

I finally found one behind a big plant in the foyer, which in a way was a good thing since the plant hid me from the ever-present eyes of the pickles around me, plus I was near an exit which had steps leading up to it and no ramp on that side.

The coolness of the chemical in the glass vial that broke when I triggered the alarm startled me, and between that, the noise of the alarm, and the probes from upstairs shooting out, the pickles in the foyer became very hostile towards me.

My route outside was blocked by a pickled Eta knocking over a plant in front of the doors as he moved in to probably pulverize me. After only receiving a few scraping blows, I thrust myself out into the main hall and desperately dodged the pickles racing towards me, tripping them with their own feet or running them into the walls and each other, quickly running out of room as my telepathic activity brought them out of lecture halls on that floor in droves.

I was getting knocked around quite a bit and had lost where the stairs were when suddenly there was a ding of an elevator followed by...

“HEY YOU GUYS! COME AND GET ME, YOU PICKLE HEADED SHIT FOR BRAINS!”

I almost got run over by the crowd of pickles running to silence the non-pickled voice. I was so stunned by this; it took me a good ten seconds to realize they had totally forgotten about me.

“RUN FOR THE STAIRS, IDIOT!” the muffled amplified voice said over the roar of “Pickle! Pickle!” just as I had turned to do so.

When I got to the stairs, I found not only the bottom clear of pickles but the landings above also void of pickles despite knowing there had to be more up there somewhere. I climbed to the first landing as quickly as I could, then paused a moment to get my breath back while straining my telepathic senses for my fellow pickle refugees.

A distant repetitive clanging drew my attention just as it stopped, and I held my breath listening anxiously, sensing it was a signal from my benefactors. When the clanging returned, I concluded they were trying to tell me what floor they were on, but the damn fire alarm echoed really bad in the stairwells, and I just couldn’t be sure if the clangs I heard were all clangs or echos of the alarm.

So I just started climbing, figuring that if nothing else, I could tell what floor they were on by the loudness of their clangs. The building was four floors plus a basement, but they stopped clanging when I reached the second floor and didn’t restart even when I got up to the fourth floor.

With pickles on each floor near the stairs, it hadn’t been easy to slip by them without their notice, even with all the stairwell doors closed from the fire alarm going off. I pondered on what to do next while sitting on the steps between the third and fourth floor. I came to the conclusion that being trapped in this building with who knows who wasn’t going to help me find Joey and help him.

If it wasn’t already too late. An hour had already gone by since I awakened from my pickled state. If Joey had been shot, he could have already bled to death by now, and that’s only if whoever shot him hadn’t finished him off beforehand. The one thing that comforted me about that was the fact it couldn’t have been a pickle who had fired the weapon. That meant it was unlikely that Joey had been the target.

I looked up for some divine inspiration or, even better, a miracle. After nothing immediate happened, I sighed and closed my eyes with the image of the 45 degree slope of the backside of another rise of stairs above the one leading to the fourth floor fading from my eyes.

I snapped my eyes open, whispering to myself, “Stairs? Stairs that go where?”

I climbed up the rest of the steps to the fourth floor and peering up to where the steps rose to.

“The roof,” I happily answered myself before scrambling up that single flight.

The landing above had a metal ladder that went up to a hatch ... that was padlocked.

After climbing up and checking it out close up, I muttered, “Damn. I wish Joey was here.”

Joey was better at picking locks than I, not that Joey would have had any better luck with a padlock like that.

I was just about to climb down when I noticed the screws for the hinges were exposed.

In ten minutes, thanks to my handy dandy keychain screwdriver, six of those were on the floor below me as I pushed open the hatch. Or at least I pushed it open as far as the padlocked clasp would allow me to.

The opening was big enough for me to squeeze through, and once I had, I felt safe for the first time since I awoke from my pickled nap.

It’s amazing what a little altitude can do for your perspective. The only taller buildings on the campus were the dorms and they were clustered together in groups in three different directions, only one of which was nearby. The campus formed a lopsided three leaf clover shape, each lobe having its own cluster of dorms. I was currently in the largest lobe built in the seventies when it became a state university. The third lobe was the smallest and had been built three years ago using the funding the Harrison Group had donated to support their activities.

Passively scanning the area around and below me, I began to get a grasp of what was going on. But before I get to that, I better explain some of the so-called physics behind the magical power of telepathy.

Keep in mind this not something I consciously understood at the time, and you can consider this as being a bit of a spoiler.

Every body of organized matter generates a ... I’ll call it field of energy for lack of a better term. This field of energy represents the sum state of that body, and this field pretty much dictates what that body can do with respect to the other bodies around it. You can call it a lifeforce, telepathic presence, an aura, or what have you. Everything has a distinguishable field that’s separate from its components, yet it is composed of those component’s fields and changes when they change.

Everything we consider matter or even energy has this field. From a photon, a single electron, to an atom, a molecule, a microbe, a red blood cell, a rock, a plant, an insect, a bird, a human being, a body of water, an island, a continent, a planet, a sun, a galaxy, and probably the entire universe if there is more than one universe out there.

For all matter, there’s its mass and energy with its gravity and inertial forces, but only cold matter (that’s matter near absolute zero) is so limited to those purely physical traits. Warm matter is almost always undergoing reactions of some sort, whether chemical, thermal, atomic, or electrical. The more diverse the reactions, the more descriptive the field, and at some point, it crosses the line where you could call it alive.

Most organic species of our planet can sense changes of certain components of the lifeforces around them. Take trees, for instance. Some types of trees that are upwind from a forest fire inexplicably wilt. Flocks of birds fly as one, as do schools of fish swim as one. Dogs, cats, and other animals sometimes can sense an impending earthquake hours before they happen.

And then there are people. Humans. Homo Sapiens. Some people can randomly sense when the phone is about to ring, others know they will be eating their favorite meal when they get home from work that night.

Over the next several years, I’d encounter people with all sorts of abilities. Telepathic, the empathic, soul masters, will masters, oracles (those with the knowing ability), healers, truth seers (a specialized empath), clairvoyants (sense use of abilities), seers (combination of healer, truth seer and clairvoyant), body sculptors, mind sculptors (an advanced body sculptor), spirit wanderers, dream masters (an advanced spirit wanderer), sentries, sirens, and, for the lack of a better name, witches (like Lea).

Telepathy is based on the complex fields we all generate that are not just an aftereffect of the electrical impulses traveling through our body and brain. These fields in a way actually define HOW the electrical impulses will travel before they do, and in that sense, they define how we think and react to stimulus.

Emotion = chemistry with environmental factors. Full empaths like the twins and lessly myself at the time can sense and, to some extent, manipulate that “spectrum” of the human aura without needing our other senses. But other senses do help a lot, and it’s easier and more conventional to use them, especially in my case.

Telekinetics is something that I have been ... Re-exploring I suppose. No, I’m not causing things to float in mid air or anything of the sort. For the context of this discussion, think of telekinetics as the ability to alter the cold matter physical traits of matter. Making things float would require altering the gravimetric properties of the mass, or alternatively the inertial properties, but doing so for something as large as an object we can see requires tremendous amounts of energy that the human body cannot supply very long. I’m not saying its impossible, but a single human being alone cannot make it happen. In fact, to do the really cool shit, you need the will of millions of people to accomplish such a thing as levitating yourself above the ground.

That is not to say it doesn’t have its uses. Telekinetics are great healers, for once they are trained to recognize foreign pathogens or cancerous tissues, they can kill them directly by exciting key molecules within their own cellular walls. Viruses are a bit trickier, and usually it is easier to just help the patient’s immune system combat them rather than tracking them down themselves. Those known as body sculptors, whose telekinetic abilities work differently than healers, are actually better suited to combat viruses that are beyond the body’s ability to combat.

I’m nowhere near to being that good with telekinetics without the power of others aiding me. I’ll be more than happy to just get enough electrons to flow to make this damn night-light bulb to light up.

All of these abilities are actually not technically separate abilities but sensitivities to different portions of that aura field I first talked about. Every human being alive has limited psychic, empathic, and telepathic abilities, but very few ever realize them, let alone learn how to control or use them. Actually, that’s a bit misleading. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the human race does not have the ... capability to control these powers at will. However, most people do experience a few of them at least once in their lifetime. Perhaps three percent of the mute population do so more frequently than the rest, a few maybe even as often as twice a month. There are so many random elements involved in causing these abilities to surface momentarily in a mute that it is practically impossible to predict who, where, or when.

Anyway, getting back to the roof of the physics building at Central State, what I sensed below me was that different people emitted different levels of the aura I was sensitive to that I thought as telepathic energy at the time. What was significant was seeing how four or five people in the building emitted much greater levels of energy than the others, almost as if they were somehow generating the pickle field.

Feeling rather safe from the stair and ladder handicapped pickles, I decided to test this theory and attempt to knock out the nearest pickle emitter to see if the others around him were affected. The pickles below me were quite agitated by my sudden telepathic burst, but besides causing a temporary shortage of blood to my target’s brain to make him pass out, their fuming shouts of “pickle-pickle” and mad scampering underneath me was the only effect.

Walking the perimeter of the roof and finding nothing but pickled people, some staring up at me, I muttered, “Man, I sure could use Midge right about now.”

A couple of minutes later, the movement of a couple of robins fluttering from branch to branch drew my attention. Whatever the pickle field was apparently didn’t affect them. The significance of that didn’t hit me until one of them took off and climbed above the treetop.

Moments later, I was flying over the campus with great speed in that same robin’s body.

Altitude definitely made a difference. The closer I flew toward the ground, the greater difficulty I had maintaining control over my borrowed feathered body, and twice lost my link when a building of pickles came between me and the bird.

I counted over twenty-five bodies lying out in the open on the campus. None were Joey which I was partially thankful for. A few I recognized as possibly Group members, but most I either didn’t know or couldn’t see their faces. I was almost positive a few of them were dead from the way they laid, and this made me even more desperate to find Joey.

Releasing the little sparrow I was using last, I closed my eyes and started building up a pulse I hoped would reach Joey if ... I didn’t let myself finish that thought, nor did I finish the pulse when I recalled the mental wandering I experienced while asleep the past several months.

I sat down on the blubber-like roof Indian style and focused on feeling Joey out, recalling what his mind felt like, his body, his soul, even the scent of his cologne, the emotion behind his smile, the fear he felt when fighting for someone else’s life...

Wait a sec ... I never felt him feel that...

<Joey?>

<Tim?!>

<Joey, where are you?>

<Safe. Tim, find Suz. I lost the link with her, but I can’t leave them.>

<Leave who?>

<Neil, and some others. They’re hurt bad. Share link helps. Can’t leave them. Find Suz. Please. You have to find her. She was running from them.>

That was all I had to hear. I didn’t think to check the female bodies. I had been looking for Joey.

Oh God, what if...

As I rechecked the bodies, two things happened almost so quickly I almost missed them. First of all, a body I hadn’t noticed before suddenly sprang to his feet and bulldozed his way through a small crowd of pickles heading towards the courtyard beyond the building across the street from me.

The second was the slight ripple of energy which flowed from the west towards the area surrounding him and then rippled back out in all directions.

That’s when the gentle pickle-pickle sounds stopped and all hell broke loose. People began spilling out of the buildings screaming nonsensical phrases at the terrified man, and it was when he flung his glasses at the crowd while lunging at them, I recognized him as Rich, my favorite gorilla.

“NO!” I screamed as I attacked the crowd with blanket command after blanket command, finding that while they weren’t running away with terror like the blanket commands were instructing them to do, it did cause enough emotional conflict within them to stop their frenzied attack long enough for me to yell, “RICH RUN! I’LL COVER YOU!”

But where to run, that was the question. Everywhere I could see, mad bloodthirsty students and staff were spilling out of the surrounding buildings, none of which were the least bit slowed down by steps or even by each other. For several moments it looked completely hopeless for Rich.

Rich wasn’t about to go down without a fight and seeing this made me focus my attention on helping him take down as many as he could.

And I wasn’t alone. The telepathic fog all but dissipated when the pickle spell ended and the mad crowd spell began. From every direction, trained telepaths started picking off the possessed mutes one by one.

Rich was starting to falter, however, and no matter how hard I and the others tried to knock the ones closest to him out, Rich kept getting pounded by the next wave.

In desperation, I took direct control of an Eta and began protecting Rich physically as best I could. After handling an entire basketball team a year before, I managed to gain control of about seventeen people and just formed a wall around Rich. The entire crowd was focused on Rich and Rich alone, and so they only tried to climb over my human wall. Not one of them seemed to think about attacking one of my human planks to get to their objective.

With the help of the others, we were able to move Rich and the human wall to the medical center where Rich was able to dash inside and apparently find safety.

Once the immediate threat to Rich was finally over, I focused my mind on finding Suzi. With the telepathic fog lifted, I was getting a very bad feeling in my gut from my inability to locate her since she couldn’t be very far away.

I had to find her. I just had to find her. With the amount of energy I was putting into my search, I felt I should have at least felt a vibe from her even if she had been transported to the other side of the moon. Yet I felt nothing. Nothing but a terrible emptiness.

As the last ripple of energy from the west released the remaining population from its spell and faded from my senses, an all-new emergency presented itself. Thousands of mutes were awakening to a scene that quickly caused a huge panic, interfering with not just my own search for Suzi, but the Group’s attempts to help the seriously injured.

But it wasn’t until someone realized that people were running away not just to get out of harm’s way, but to report what happened that containment became the number one priority. Since I wasn’t getting anywhere with all the confusion going on around me, I helped out the best I could, blanketing as many people as I could to forget the strange events of the day and to go about their normal business ignoring anything out of the ordinary.

It wasn’t enough. The sight of ambulances was welcome, but the police cars and even worse, the media made me glad I wasn’t part of the Group and therefore wasn’t my problem.

Suzi’s unknown location weighed heavily in my gut. I had all but given up on finding her alive when after things had settled down and I gave the entire campus a full sweep, I still had not found any trace of her.

I rushed back to my apartment to try one last thing before giving up, and that was a dream walk.

Dream walk. I didn’t know what else to call it. I seemed to have greater resolution while asleep and hoped that even if she was dead, I would find her that way.

Before lying down on the bed, I looked myself in the mirror and simply said, “This is not a joy ride. This is for Suzi. You know what you have to do. Don’t fail her.”

I can’t say I actually fell asleep completely, and there wasn’t the usual imaginative transition to the world of symbols. Just the great expanse of minds all around me in every direction, a great number of them unusually disturbed, but that wasn’t my concern right then. I was only interested in finding one mind. One particular mind.

I floated in between minds of different spins and states, searching for something familiar. Slowly at first, then running, I searched with a careful haste between the different bushes and trees in what became a great forest.

My legs were just starting to tire when I thought I smelt her briefly in the wind. I pounced to a stop, then with my nose and tail up high, I filtered out all the natural forest scents and focused on finding Suzi’s flowery scent.

It was there, but only just. I carefully circled around with increasing radiuses until I could discern from which direction it came from, then very carefully made my way through the undergrowth, several times having to stop and backtrack to regain the scent.

The scent led me to a dark corner of the forest where dead trees surrounded a patch of total blackness, reminding me of skeleton warriors guarding an evil magician’s treasure. My tail fell from the sense of death all around me, my worst fears apparently coming true.

I had to know. I had to find her. If not for me, for Joey. With unsteady legs, I slowly treaded forward, following the sweet flowery smell inside the hollow dark center of death itself.

My senses deadened, and I felt increasing resistance to my advance inside. But her odor was growing ever stronger, and even though I was quickly struggling just to inch forward, I could almost feel her...

The dream dissolved as I doubled my efforts to push through the barrier between us. I was physically straining my muscles, sweating and breathing heavily, just as if I was truly pushing something very heavy up a steep incline. The sound of my blood rushing through my veins and sinuses was only a gentle reminder of the intensity of telepathic energy I was generating to keep the forward momentum to my probe.

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