Part 13

I couldn’t go back to sleep. I looked at the alarm clock we’d gotten at the Goodwill store and it was four in the morning.

I got up and got dressed in the dark. I went to the kitchen and microwaved a cup of water for tea.

He was getting stronger and stronger. That much was clear. True, things would need to be tweaked in the future, but the fact was that he could hide if he needed to and manipulate those who would try to detain or confine him.

I thought about what they’d try to do to him. Drugs was the first thing that came to mind. They’d try to drug him and keep him either unconscious, while they studied him, or semi-conscious while they tried to figure out what he could do and how he did it. Drugs could be administered in a dozen ways, so I started thinking about ways he could detect that ahead of time. He needed to learn what colors the mind of an ambusher looked like. Even if they darted him, they’d have to be pretty close to ensure a hit, so the person with the gun would be thinking about what he or she was about to do.

That brought me back to my worry that some sniper might be given the green light to take him out from afar. He could easily deflect objects I had thrown at him, but their velocity was minuscule, compared to a bullet. I had no range to test him for things like that. I’d be too scared to actually shoot at him anyway.

I suddenly remembered Dale Wiggins, a guy I had served with on Delta Force. He carried five or six big metal staples with him, the kind used to hold thick cardboard boxes closed with. He had bent them to resemble a check mark. He also carried a thick rubber band that was about eight inches in diameter. He used the rubber band to shoot the staples like a slingshot. We all thought he was crazy the first time he showed this to us, until we saw what he could do with it. He’d learned it as a teenager, working in a warehouse. He and his partners in crime had learned how to shoot the staples and break light bulbs in the warehouse. When we made fun of him, he calmly set up five empty soda cans on a table. Next he produced what looked like two sticks screwed together, which could be unfolded to make a Y. When he hooked the rubber band to it, he had a tiny slingshot. He commenced to shoot staples through the cans. That’s how powerful it was. On missions he used that stupid little slingshot to take out dozens of security lights. On TV and in movies a suppressed gun makes a soft little “Pfft” but that’s all Hollywood. The softest suppressed gun I ever heard was a .22 and it still sounded like somebody clapping his hands hard. When complete silence was required, Dale and his staples were invaluable.

We had moved all the junk left behind when the massage parlor closed into one of the small massage rooms. I went there and found a box that had half a dozen copper looking staples in it. I pried them out of the cardboard with my knife and examined them. They were bent and crimped, but I thought I could straighten them with the Leatherman. I could get rubber bands at the Dollar Store.

Suddenly, I had something further I could test him with.

I was eating a bowl of Special K with strawberries when he shuffled into the kitchen. I told him I needed to go get some things to test him with and said I wouldn’t be gone longer than an hour.

I got to the Dollar Store at 0800, and read the sign on the door that said they didn’t open until 0900. I decided to do a little dumpster diving behind the store, more out of curiosity than anything else, and was doing that when a cop car pulled into the alley and came my way. I couldn’t do much except stand there and wait.

There were two of them in the car and both got out.

“Dumpsters are considered private property,” said the driver, without introducing himself.

“I’m just waiting for the store to open,” I said.

“How much money do you have on you?” asked the other guy.

I thought that was a singularly odd thing to say. I wondered if I was about to be rolled by two cops.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because if you don’t have any money, that makes you a vagrant, and if you’re a vagrant, then we take you in.”

“That’s how you guys spend your time?” I responded. I really was a little shocked.

“Why don’t you just assume the position and we’ll see what you have,” said the driver. I thought of him as number one.

“I have money,” I said. I didn’t reach for it. I had a feeling these guys would use any excuse to draw down on me. “It’s in my pocket. I have about fifty bucks.”

“How about ID? You got any of that?” asked number two.

“Back at the office,” I said. I immediately wished I hadn’t said it, because I didn’t want the cops to know where the “office” was. But I had a real problem, here. If I couldn’t identify myself, and if their inevitable checks for wants and warrants didn’t come back in a way that made me uninteresting, then I was going to end up downtown. And if I ended up downtown it was going to set off an alarm somewhere I didn’t want any alarms going off at. Even running my name for wants and warrants might alert Uncle Sam. “Look, guys, I was just waiting for the store to open. They open at nine. While I was doing that, I decided to take a look in the dumpster. I mean people toss out good stuff all the time, and while I have fifty bucks in my pocket, I’m not swimming in money. There’s really no problem, here.”

“I’m going to take that as a no,” said number two. “Put your hands on the dumpster and spread ‘em.”

My first instinct was to take these guys out. I could do it, unless one of them was trained a lot better than I thought they were. But that would also bring lots of attention to me, and they’d remember me and put out a BOLO on me. That meant we’d have to move again and I really didn’t want to move again.

I wished Bobby was there. I really wished Bobby was there.

So I let them search me. They found the money, but of course I didn’t carry around my driver’s license, precisely because of this eventuality. I wished I’d had the forethought to get us fake IDs.

My heart sank as I felt them apply cuffs. They hadn’t even asked me for identifying data, but even if I gave them something, I knew these two wouldn’t take it at face value. I was going to languish in a cell while they tried to figure out who I was. I was pretty sure my prints weren’t on file anywhere they could get to them, and my dental records were also sealed up in some government vault. I didn’t have any tattoos, unlike most of the people I served with. But if they sent my photograph out on the web, the NSA’s facial recognition software would nail me.

Still, that might take a few days. I could survive in jail. But Bobby would think I had abandoned him.

They were walking me to the car when they both just stopped. Neither said anything. They just stood there. Number two had been holding my elbow and his hand dropped limply.

It had to be Bobby.

I looked around and he was walking towards us.

“I’ve interrupted their motor synapses,” he said. “They can still see and hear, though.”

“Shit,” I groaned. They’d remember his voice, and those words.

“I can try something,” he said. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about.

“Get the key to the cuffs and we’ll talk about it,” I said. “Hurry. Somebody might see us.”

There was a key on a ring on number two’s service belt. Bobby fumbled with it, not knowing how the lock worked, but I told him to turn it both ways and I was out. Neither of us thought to have him examine the cuff lock and manipulate it with his mind.

“Let’s get them in the car,” I said.

“I don’t know how to release the block and still stop them from moving on their own,” he said.

“Fuck!” I rasped. “Shit, shit, shit!”

“I’ve never heard you say things like that,” he said.

“I’ll confess later. This could be real trouble.”

“I can try something I’ve been thinking about, but I’ve never done it before.”

“What?”

“I think I know where short term memory is stored,” he said. “If I disrupt the neurons there, they might not remember us.”

“You think. They might not,” I said. “Gee. What could go wrong?”

“It doesn’t happen all in one place,” he said. “There are two small areas, one on each side if the brain. I see them fired up almost all the time, and there are strings of color that go from them to other parts of the brain. The reason I think they have something to do with memory is that the colors change once they get to those other places. Then they just sit there.”

“A color just sits there?” I thought of what he saw as a constantly changing palette of swirling colors.

“Like the color of your skin,” he said. “It’s always the same color.”

“Does anything ever happen to these colors that stay the same?”

“Yes. Little strings of them shoot around sometimes, but not all at the same time. That’s what made me think they’re memory. It’s like they’re books on a shelf and one gets used now and then. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the only way I can think of to describe it.”

“And what do you want to do?”

“Interrupt the flow from the two parts to the lots of parts.”

“And how are you going to do that. We can’t hurt them.”

“I think I can just squeeze it a little ... you know, like thump it and jangle it up. Sort of rattle things.”

“That sounds dangerous,” I said.

“I think it would be like being bonked on the head,” he said.

“Well, don’t bonk them too hard,” I said.

“I’ll do one at a time,” he said. “I’ll start with him.” He indicated number one.

I stood back, but close enough that I could grab the guy if things went south. I saw him blink and his face kind of squirmed. It was spooky. Then he just dropped to the ground like a bag of rocks.

“Shit!” I said, going to him.

“You need to stop cursing like that,” said Bobby.

I felt his carotid. He had a strong pulse and he was breathing fine. He was just unconscious. I hoped his brain wasn’t fried.

“His colors look fine,” said Bobby.

Number two joined his partner on the ground. I barely caught his head before it hit the pavement.

I wanted to put them back in the car, but if anybody saw us doing that, things would get worse. I had a brief fantasy in which Bobby wiped memory after memory, leaving dozens of bodies on the ground. That wouldn’t draw any attention. Oh, no.

I ran to the corner of the building and peeked around it. The rear end of the car would be visible to anyone walking by the driveway that led to the back of the building. There was nobody around, at present. I decided it was unlikely that any casual passerby would decide to go toward a cop car, at least not until it had been sitting there all day. I ran back to Bobby and told him what I wanted to do.

Together we muscled them back into the car, putting number one behind the wheel. They felt lighter than they should have, and I realized that was Bobby, using his talent. I looked at him and it was obvious he was straining, mentally.

I put number two’s cuffs back in his pouch and the key ring back on his belt. Then we closed the doors and stood back.

“We can’t just leave them,” I said. “If they remember things when they wake up, we’re going to have to go on the run again, and I mean today.”

“What I did worked,” he said. “I’m pretty sure, anyway. Those two areas aren’t sending colors anywhere right now. The rest of their brains look pretty normal, except a lot of colors are missing.”

“What if you scrambled their brains,” I groaned.

“I didn’t. I should have said parts of their brains aren’t sending out any colors. That’s normal. When you’re sleeping your colors are like theirs. I think they’re just sleeping.”

“You look at me when I’m sleeping?”

“Of course. I study everybody all the time,” he said. “Unless I’m the one sleeping,” he added, helpfully.

“I thought I’d worked through all the creepiness around you,” I sighed.

“I don’t do anything to you,” he said. “I just look.”

“Said the peeping Tom to the lady in her bedroom,” I said.

“What’s a peeping Tom?” he asked.

I sighed. Bobby was like Mowgli, in The Jungle Book, raised by animals. He was at home, in his element, in the jungle, but when he started interacting with other humans, there was a lot he’d missed out on, in terms of his education.

“I’ll tell you later,” I said. “We need to get under cover before somebody sees us.”

“Why don’t we just leave?” he asked.

“Because I need to see what they do when they wake up,” I said.

There was no place to hide behind the store next door to The Dollar Store, which was on the corner. In the other direction there was an auto parts store, with another dumpster, but nothing else. The other side of the alley was a cement retaining wall that held in a grassy strip next to Washington street. There was a chain link fence on top of the retaining wall.

I thought about going up, on top of the store, but then anyone driving along Washington could see two people hanging out on the roof of the Dollar Store. That wouldn’t draw any attention. Oh, no.

I finally decided that inside the dumpster would have to do. It wasn’t likely that any employee would empty the trash in the morning, when they opened. That kind of thing was done at night when they closed down.

We got in, crushing boxes and who knows what, and closed the lid over us. I was still trying to get comfortable when number two woke up. I saw his head lift and turn. It did that a lot, and then he shook number one. His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I was getting worried when number one came around.

There was some talking, and then they got out of the car.

To read this story you need a Registration + Premier Membership
If you have an account, then please Log In or Register (Why register?)

Support the author's future writing by purchasing this book from Bookapy

The Seventh Sense

Lubrican

$4.50