Part 15

I went to the bar and picked up a salt shaker. I pulled out a chair at the table and sat down. I put the salt shaker in the middle of the table, where poker chips usually lay, and indicated to Bobby and Eric that they should sit on opposite sides of the table.

Once they were seated, I said, “This is a game. Gator, your objective is to grab that salt shaker. Bobby, your objective is to stop him.”

Eric lurched instantly. His hand described a wide arc, but he missed, because the salt shaker moved.

“Wait!“ I yelled. “There are rules!”

“What the fuck?” Eric was staring at the salt shaker, which was right back where I’d put it. He looked at me. “What rules?”

“You can do anything to get the shaker except break furniture or touch Bobby.”

“And what are his rules?”

“He can’t hurt you.”

He laughed.

“Hurt me? Come on, Toots. If they hadn’t told all of us to kill you instantly I’d think this was some kind of elaborate prank.”

“Gator, some strange things might happen, but I promise you, he won’t hurt you.”

Eric looked at Bobby.

“You’re really just eighteen?”

“By a month and a half,” said Bobby. He looked relaxed.

“And you’re gonna keep me from grabbing that salt shaker.”

“I hope so,” said Bobby.

Eric laughed again and lunged.

This time, as his hand swept where the shaker had been sitting, it rose three inches. Then it sat back down after Eric’s hand had passed.

“Fuck me!” gasped Eric. He looked at me again.

“Keep going,” I said.

“Can I move my hand closer?” he asked.

“The only thing you can’t do is break the furniture or touch him. I might let you touch him later, but not for now.”

He edged his hand toward the shaker. The shaker moved away. He tried to flank it, and the shaker moved toward me. He lifted his hand and tried to come down on top of the little jar, but it sped toward him. He put his other hand into play, but that didn’t do any good, either.

“I’ve seen this on TV,” said Eric.

“No, you haven’t,” I said. “Bobby, put the shaker back where I got it.”

The salt lifted, sailed across the room, and settled gently on the bar.

“Fuck me to tears,” said Eric. His eyes looked a little wild.

“Now you can touch him, but don’t try to hurt him. Just put your arms around him so you know there’s no trick going on.”

Bobby stood up and Gator enveloped him in strong arms.

The salt shaker lifted, but Eric said, “No. Not the salt. Bring me the Crown Royal.”

“Which one is that?” asked Bobby.

“Top row, third from the left,” said Eric. “Squatty little bottle.”

The bottle lifted, and gracefully drifted to the table, landing right where the salt had been.

“You want me to get you a glass, too?” asked Bobby. “I’ve never poured anything, but I could try.”

Eric let go of him and sat down. He looked flustered.

“I see why they’re so excited.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Show me more,” he said.

“If we do, you’ll be in over your head,” I warned.

“What’s the worst thing he’s done?”

I didn’t flinch.

“There was a man who was beating the shit out of his wife and a bunch of nuns at a battered wives shelter,” I said. “He had a gun and was going to kill his wife, maybe some others, too. Bobby killed him first.”

Eric blinked. He looked at Bobby.

“You killed him with your ... mind?”

“I kind of reacted without thinking,” said Bobby. “I’m much better, now. I have a lot more control than I did back then.”

“So now you can decide whether to kill somebody or not,” said Eric.

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” said Bobby. “That’s what I’m afraid they’re going to try to make me do.”

“No,” said Eric, softly. “That’s what Toots is afraid they’re going to try to make you do.”

He looked at me.

I nodded.

“How did he kill him?” asked Eric.

“He gave the guy a cerebral hemorrhage. I’m told he dropped like a sand bag,” I said. “I saw the autopsy report. Half an inch of the blood vessel was destroyed. He stroked out.”

“I’m still having a hard time assimilating this all.”

“Well, why don’t you have a drink ... or try to have a drink ... and Bobby will demonstrate some more. Again, I promise he will not hurt you.”

“I’m not so eager to go on,” said one of the toughest men I knew.

“If you let him do this, things will be very clear.”

“Bobby’s only going to stop you from pouring your drink,” I said.

“How do you want me to do this?” Bobby asked, looking at me. “Do you want me to go internal, or stay outside?”

“Internal?” Eric sounded worried, now.

“It won’t hurt,” said Bobby. “I could make it hurt, but I won’t do that.”

“Gee, thanks so much,” said Eric.

“You decide, then,” said Bobby. “I can lock up your muscles so you can’t move, or I could do something outside your body that will make it impossible for you to get to the bottle. Your choice.”

Eric sat there, just looking at Bobby.

“Okay,” said Bobby. “Both, it is.”

“How the fuck did you do that?” gasped Eric. “Does he read minds, too?”

“No,” said Bobby. “I could see you didn’t feel threatened, and your interest colors are all fired up.”

“I’ll explain later about the colors thing,” I said.

“I can’t wait,” said Eric.

First, Bobby erected a shield out of compressed air molecules around the bottle. I saw him frown. Apparently this was different than making a shield that would stop a BB. When he told Eric to pick up the bottle, Eric’s hand hit the dense air about five inches away from the whisky bottle. No matter how he squeezed, he couldn’t get to the bottle. He tried both hands, but was still stymied. Finally he sat back.

“Okay, now try it,” said Bobby.

Eric didn’t move. His face took on a look of worry.

“I can’t move my hand,” he said. “I can’t move my whole fucking arm!” His other arm moved, and then dropped like it was dead. I was pretty sure it felt dead to him.

“That’s enough, Bobby,” I said.

Eric lifted both arms and flexed his hands.

“Okay. I get it. I understand now. You are, in fact, the scariest motherfucker on the planet,” he said. “Can I have that drink, now?”

“Sure,” said Bobby, calmly.

Eric didn’t use the glass. He took a long slug straight from the bottle.

“Easy there, hero,” I said. “I don’t need you getting wasted.”

“Just fuck me to tears,” he sighed.

“Does everybody in the army want to fornicate all the time?” asked Bobby.

Bobby was asleep. We had gone back to the motel, picking up a package of CO2 canisters along the way and shown Gator the BB gun thing. Gator had thrown things at him as well. Making the shields had worn the boy out. Before he went to bed I got him alone and asked him to try to control his dreams while Gator was with us.

We were drinking coffee, sitting on the floor because the motel room didn’t have chairs. I had been telling him a little about finding out what Bobby could do.

“I guess the best way I can describe what he can see is a person’s aura, except he says it’s all around the head, and that all the colors go with different emotions, or memories, or what you’re thinking about and stuff like that. He says they aren’t color like you or I would see. He can see where, in the brain, the colors come from, and he can affect those parts of the brain by moving things, like pushing synapses far enough apart that nerve impulses can’t jump between them. That’s probably how he paralyzed your arm.”

“So you showed him to me, and probably added my name to the most wanted list, too. Let’s get to the meat of the issue. Why the hell did you come here, of all places? You know they’re looking for you, and they’ll look for you everywhere you’ve been before. It doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to stay in the wind.”

“We came to see you,” I said.

“Me? As in specifically Eric Rokk?”

“Yeah, you. I need you to shoot at him.”

Gator blinked.

“Maybe I need more coffee. I thought I just heard you say you want me to shoot him.”

“Shoot at him,” I said.

“Look,” he said. “You know me as well as my own mother, and you know if I shoot at him, I’m going to shoot him. He is the scariest motherfucker on the planet, but I kind of like the kid. I don’t want to kill him.”

“That’s the whole point. I don’t want anybody killing him. And that means we have to train him to stop bullets when somebody does try to kill him, because you and I both know that if Uncle Sugar thinks they can’t own him, they’re going to try to erase him.” I sipped coffee. “Even if our government doesn’t take a stab at it, some other government will. He’s the real deal and they’re all going to be scared shitless of him.”

“Stop a bullet,” mused Gator. “That’s a whole lot more foot pounds than a Crosman produces. He’s impressive, but that’s upping the game a bit much.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said. “But we have to at least try. At the minimum I need him to learn how to recognize and feel for the mind of somebody who’s looking through a scope at him. If he can do that, he can take evasive action.”

“He can do that, too?”

“Not exactly. Not yet, anyway. He can find the minds of people he knows. Like when I got rousted by the cops and they were going to take me in, he could tell something was wrong and came and found me. He made them stop and got me free.”

“How?”

“He erased their memory of busting me. In the process they sort of got unconscious. He uncuffed me and we put them back in their car and left. As far as we could tell, it didn’t hurt them. I don’t know if the memory erasure is permanent, or how long it will last, if it’s not.”

“Fuck,” sighed Gator. “He can get scarier. Is that what you’re going to do to me if I don’t help you? Erase my memory?”

“No. I’m not sure I’d want him to try. What he did was about short term memory, which he says is stored temporarily in two places in the brain. From what he described, long term memory is scattered all over the place. It would be like trying to find all of the pages of a book that had been ripped out and scattered all over the library ... in total darkness.”

“So what are you going to do if I say no?”

“Leave, and hope you give us a head start before you notify the authorities that I contacted you.”

“Even if I don’t agree to your crazy idea, I wouldn’t turn you in,” he said.

“You’d have to. Like you said, you’d end up deep inside the same mountain we were in if you didn’t and they found out you saw us somehow.”

“Mountain?”

“When we were in custody, they locked us up in Cheyenne Mountain. We were there for almost three months.”

“And you escaped.”

“Yeah. He did something to the minds of everybody we came into contact with and they just walked away. He even got one SP give us a ride in a hummer, down into Colorado Springs. That’s why they’re hunting us so hard. He didn’t hurt anybody. He just left when they didn’t want him to and there was nothing they could do about it.”

“Yeah, you’re right. They’re gonna try to kill him.”

“He’s not dangerous. He was raised by nuns, for pity’s sake. But they’re going to try to make him dangerous, and when he refuses to cooperate, or they threaten him to try to make him cooperate, bad things will happen. I can see things going south in a hurry.”

“How could they threaten him?” asked Gator. “Seems like he could turn all that aside.”

“I suspect they’ll threaten me,” I said. “We’ve gotten ... close ... while we were on the run. He’s got a crush on me.”

“Well, I know what I’d do to anybody who threatened you, and he could render the whole unit helpless, so I guess we’ll have to make it so they can’t do anything to him when they find out they’re not gonna own him.”

“Really? You’ll help us?”

“I still think if I shoot at him this whole issue will go away in a puff of smoke - literally - but maybe we can work something out.”

“I have some ideas,” I said.

Our counter-sniper tactics were a little different than the usual ones. In a SWAT situation, snipers are often as close as fifty yards to their potential target. They don’t necessarily have to hide while they wait, and if the situation drags on and on, they can even send out for a sandwich, if it’s really needed. But whatever threatened Bobby in the future was likely to be an assassination attempt, performed by someone at least one or two hundred yards away. In the unit, we trained out to 700 yards, and Gator could take someone out as far as a kilometer away without breaking a sweat. Whoever they got for the job of erasing Bobby Wilson would be someone like Gator.

Knowing this, it meant that Bobby was going to have to learn, somehow, to “feel” the mind of a sniper who was farther away than the naked eye could see. We had no idea if it was even possible, and we had no real idea of how to start finding out.

Then there was the issue of stopping a bullet.

A .308 caliber rifle round, firing a 150 grain Hornady superperformance bullet, will send that bullet down range at roughly 3,000 feet per second. That bullet will travel a mile in the region of 1.76 seconds. All that energy, when it hits something and stops, translates to about 3000 foot pounds. That sounds like it should knock a man as far as a 3000 pound hammer would knock him, but it’s more complicated than that. The point is, a BB hits with about twelve foot pounds, which is the energy it would take to move one pound twelve feet. Even that sounds like a lot, except that this force is delivered in a tiny pellet that will only affect a tiny portion of the body.

All that understood, we had no clue as to whether Bobby could even influence the path of a bullet, much less stop it.

My initial idea was for Eric to do what we had done with the staples and BBs; to shoot past him, while Bobby tried to do things.

Of course to do that, you need a rifle and bullets, and a place to shoot them. The rifle and bullets were no problem. Gator had a whole gun safe full of them. Finding somewhere to start at fifty yards and then move back over time, until the sniper was shooting 700 yards, was a dicier problem.

We couldn’t use the military range at Benning. Bobby probably could have voodooed some people, as Gator put it (he was a little freaked out by the Star Wars terminology) but it wasn’t worth the potential side effects. Gator knew somebody else, and said he’d make a call.

It happened that Gator was only a week away from a break between classes, and could take leave, so that’s what he did. As soon as his current class “graduated” and went back to wherever they came from, Gator got in his Honda Pilot and we got in the Subaru and convoyed north to Kentucky, to Knob Creek, which is between Louisville and Fort Knox. Knob Creek is famous for two things. One is the whiskey they make there, and the other is the bi-annual machine gun shoot that draws crowds by the thousands to watch literally millions of dollars of ammunition going up in smoke - at a rapid pace.

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