“Take a sample?” I didn’t believe that. It certainly wasn’t how Marcus had described PSS extraction, but I asked because I wanted to keep the doctor’s evil rant going a little longer. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the strobe of Marcus’s PSS flashing faster and faster.
“Yes, a sample. This is what I do. My life’s work. I sample and categorize PSS signatures for research purposes.”
“You just take samples?” I asked, trying not to look at Marcus. “That’s why you came to my town, and got a job, and dated my mom, and kidnapped my best friend, and made a fucking pain machine out of razor blades in a room under Mike Palmer’s garage. Just to get a sample. What kind of idiot do you think I am?”
“I don’t think you are an idiot, my dear girl, but I do think you are a very difficult patient. I had hoped we could come to an understanding, especially after you provided me with those wonderful blades. Truly remarkable. I’ve only just begun to understand what they can do. I thought perhaps I could persuade you to extract more such items for me. But it seems, as usual, that you insist on doing things the hard way.” He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a minus meter, and pointed it at my hand.
Of course, I had known it was coming, but I hadn’t counted on my body being so sluggish when I tried to jump aside. My boots slid in the blood at my feet, and I flew backwards, landing on my back with a wet smack. The hard cement floor knocked the wind right out of me, my ghost hand flailing in the air. At least my head landed on Nose’s back, instead of hitting the floor.
A noise like a bug-zapper filled the air.
A stream of light shot out of the minus meter toward me.
Pain erupted in my ghost hand, just like in the razor room, cutting me, killing me, ending me, except this time one thing was different. The pain wasn’t trapped inside my hand. It was moving away, being pulled out my fingertips, leeching out of my wrist as my ghost hand elongated and stretched toward Dr. Julian. The pain hung in the air between us as my PSS unwound away from me. Away from me. Away from me. Take the pain away from me. If he took my hand away from me, maybe the pain would go with it.
Through that wall of pain, I saw Marcus and his beautiful PSS chest rise up behind Dr. Julian and grab him around the throat.
The bug-zapper sound sputtered and stalled.
Something let go of my ghost hand, and the pain receded.
Dr. Julian and Marcus wrestled on the floor, Marcus’s muscles rippling, his PSS a steady blue glow. Dr. Julian was trying to get the minus meter between them. Marcus pried back Dr. Julian’s arm, pushing it away from his chest. They rolled, knocking over a tray of medical instruments that went crashing to the floor.
Passion Wainwright sat up in bed and blurted out, “What would Jesus do?”
I scrambled upright, slipping in my own blood again, leveraging myself against Nose and finally getting up.
Dr. Julian was grabbing one of the sharp medical instruments in his left hand. Marcus didn’t see. He was focused on protecting himself from the minus meter.
I rushed forward.
With my flesh hand, I grabbed Dr. Julian’s wrist, giving him my best estimation of the radial nerve pinch.
Metal clattered on the floor.
I sank my ghost hand into Dr. Julian’s back.
He went stiff.
I followed my hand into emptiness, into a landscape of nothingness. How could someone be so empty? If Jason’s insides had been a machine of anger and madness, Dr. Julian’s were the opposite. He was a void. An open space my hand needed to fill, but I could find nothing to grab hold of.
“Olivia,” someone said, shaking me.
“Don’t help me,” I said. I had something to do. Something to find. It was there, hiding from me. I could feel it.
My hand groped, fumbled, reached, then closed over something hard, solid and square.
I grabbed it, yanking it out.
Dr. Julian slumped to the floor between Marcus and me.
“I got it,” I said, holding up a smooth silver box the size of a Rubik’s cube.
* * *
I don’t know how long it was. A few seconds? A few minutes? Half an hour? I just know that Marcus was holding me when Jason and Yale crashed into the room. They practically tripped over Nose.
Marcus got up and left me. He took something out of Yale’s backpack and held it to Nose’s nose, Yale and Jason looking on.
“It’s not working,” Jason said. “Are you sure he can even smell?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said. “There’s a sink over there. Get some water and splash his face with it. Yale, take the smelling salts and work on the girls. Pull out their IVs first. They’re drugged, but we need them coherent enough to walk out of here.”
Yale went to work unplugging IVs.
Marcus came back and crouched next to me. “Are you okay?” he asked.
In the background, Passion began softly humming, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
“No,” I said, looking down at the silver cube clutched in my hand.
Jason doused Nose with a hospital pitcher full of water. Nose sputtered awake but still seemed out of it. Jason propped him up against the door frame and patted him on the chest. Then he turned and strode toward us, stopping to stand over Dr. Julian. “He dead?” he asked, gesturing with his gun.
“He’s still breathing,” Marcus observed.
I looked over at the man lying next to me. He was bleeding from the nose.
“Then we should take care of that,” Jason said, pointing his gun at the doctor’s head.
“Wait!” Marcus said, taking a step toward Jason. “Hand me your flashlight.”
Without moving his gun, Jason reached in his pocket and handed his flashlight to Marcus.
Marcus knelt down and pulled Dr. Julian’s eyelids back one at a time, flashing the light into them.
“No pupil dilation,” Marcus said, looking up at Jason, “which means he’s alive, but not by much.”
“So?” Jason said.
“He’s not waking up any time soon,” Marcus stood back up. “I’m not saying you can’t kill him, but first we get the girls to safety.”
“She fuck him up like that?” Jason asked, nodding toward me as he lowered his gun and took his flashlight back.
Had I done it? I’d been trying to save Marcus, and Emma, and Passion, and myself. I’d been trying to—reach the cube.
“Go help Yale,” Marcus said, ignoring the question. “I want us all out of here before any more CAMFers show up.”
“But I get to kill him? You promise?” Jason asked.
“I don’t care what you do to him once we’re out,” Marcus replied.
“What about that thing?” Jason asked, gesturing his gun muzzle at the minus meter lying a few feet from Dr. Julian. “We takin’ it?”
Marcus walked over and picked it up. “That’s strange,” he said. “It’s flashing like it’s still on.”
“That’s flashing too,” I said, pointing above us where something that looked very much like a giant minus meter was fixed to the center of the ceiling, wires trailing away from it in all directions.
Just as Marcus and Jason looked up, the lights in the room flicked off, then flickered back on in exact time with the pulsing of the minus meter in Marcus’s hand. And the one on the ceiling. Off. On. Off. On. Like a slow strobe.
“What the fuck?” Jason said.
“What the hell is going on?” Yale called, flashing in and out of view from across the room where he was helping Emma out of bed.
Marcus looked around the room. I saw his face, one frozen frame after another as his eyes traced the wires running across the ceiling toward the exit door, toward the room of blades.
“Shit,” he said softly. Then he was screaming, “Go! Go!” He shoved Jason toward the door. “Get the hell out. The room is rigged.”
Jason didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even question. He turned and ran toward the door.
Marcus grabbed me, yanking me up off the floor.
“Get the girls out!” he bellowed. “Get them out.”
I saw it all in still life. Shots frozen in time, like old photographs.
Jason, like some war hero, lifting Nose over his shoulders.
Yale, a slouched girl on each arm, dragging them along like a pair of rag dolls.
Jason and Nose, half-swallowed by the darkness of the razor room.
Yale and the girls leaning against the door frame.
Then Marcus was propelling us toward the razor room too.
“No,” I said, struggling to escape his grasp. I didn’t want to go in that room ever again.
“It’s the only way out,” he said, shoving me forward.
As soon as we stepped across the threshold, the PSS glow of my hand and his chest filled the room, refracting off the dangling razors, twinkling, sparkling, winking at us like a hundred sharp-eyed conspirators.
In front of us somewhere, Passion said, “Oooh, so pretty.”
We moved out into the room, weaving carefully back and forth, crawling and ducking to avoid the touch of the blades, but I thought I could hear them trembling in anticipation. They were already buzzing in my head. Whispering pain. Promising pain.
In the middle of the room, at the curtain of blades, Marcus stopped and grabbed at my hip, tugging something away from me. He’d pulled my glove from my pocket, and he was wrapping it around his right hand.
Before I could even protest, he reached up, clutching at the nearest razor blade.
“No,” I said, trying to pull him back from it.
Ahead of us, Jason and Nose had made it to the bottom of the stairs and were starting up.
Yale wasn’t far behind, guiding Emma in front of him and pulling Passion after.
I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. We were almost there.
Marcus reached up with his left hand and hacked at the transparent cord attached to the razor using the sharp medical instrument Dr. Julian had tried to stab him with. The razor came away, its edge imbedded in the glove, and Marcus moved to the next one.
“What are you doing?” I cried. “We have to get out of here.”
“Just one more,” he said, hacking at another cord.
The second blade came away and he pulled me through the gap he’d cut, running toward the stairs.
We fell up the steps and tumbled out of the freezer into Mike Palmer’s garage.
Marcus banged the freezer door shut, and we ran into the living room, slamming the garage door behind us.
“Are we safe?” Yale asked, panting. Everyone was panting. Nose and the girls were slumped on the couch in a pile. Yale and Jason were bent over it.
“I doubt it,” Marcus said. “We’re standing on top of a minus meter the size of a house. And he rigged the blades to it, like an amplifier or something. It has range.”
“But it hasn’t done anything yet. Maybe it doesn’t work,” Jason said.
“Maybe,” Marcus didn’t sound hopeful. “Or he just didn’t factor in how long it would take for something that size to power up.” There was fear in his eyes. I could see it. Fear, not for himself, but for the rest of us. This was the way he’d lost his sister. He could always reboot. He would come back. But we wouldn’t. I looked down at the silver cube I’d pulled from Dr. Julian. The things I pulled from people found their power in answer to my need, and I was very much in need. I needed us all to get away. To be safe and far away. But that was the bullet’s power, and it only sent things to Jason, which wouldn’t help at all. What I needed was an all-purpose bullet. One without that rule. A bullet that could function outside the box.
Outside the box.
I scrambled in my pocket, pulled out the bullet, and placed it on top of the silver box, pressing them against one another with my thumbs.
From the depths of Palmer’s house came a sound, a concussion of air and energy just like the sound my burning house had made when it had imploded into my basement behind me.
“What are you d—” I heard Marcus say as I closed my eyes, and wished real hard, and the world went black.
A COUCH IN THE WOODS
I woke up with something digging into my side.
My back and butt were cold and damp, and I wondered how my bed had gotten wet.
I opened my eyes and saw stars, real stars, spread out above me like the universe had just been rendered in high definition. It was beautiful, but I had no idea why I was sleeping outside on the wet ground next to a couch.
Someone stirred near me, moaning, and withdrew their foot from my ribs.
I sat up slowly and looked around.
I was in the middle of the woods somewhere. Wet leaves were sticking to the back of my head, and I brushed them away. It must have rained while I slept. Except, my topside was completely dry. Next to me was a tacky couch, covered in dark lumpy shapes. One of the shapes moved and moaned again. People. A whole pile of them. On a couch in the woods.
In front of me, branches rustled and parted, and a dark shape came out of the trees.
“You’re awake,” Marcus said, the relief on his face clearly visible by the glow of my ghost hand.
“What—” I started to ask, but it all came crashing back then. The plan to rescue Emma. The discovery that Marcus wasn’t Marcus. The showdown in the hospital room under Mike Palmer’s house. The giant minus meter in the ceiling and the run for our lives. And finally, my crazy idea to combine the power of the bullet with Dr. Julian’s box to get us out of there. Well, apparently it had worked. I still had my ghost hand, and we weren’t dead. At least Marcus and I weren’t. “Are they okay?” I asked, glancing toward the couch.
“They’re fine,” Marcus said.
I still thought of him as Marcus. I couldn’t help it.
“Everyone’s still breathing anyway,” he clarified. He had a pile of blankets in his arms, and he was wearing a sweatshirt and jacket. He looked warm. I, on the other hand, was beginning to shiver.
“Where are we?” I asked, my teeth chattering a little.
“Just outside of camp. You have pretty good aim.”
“Everyone made it?”
“Even the couch,” he said, unfurling one of the blankets and wrapping it around my shoulders. He tossed the others over the forms on the couch, then came and sat down next to me. “How’d you do it?” he asked, his warm shoulder brushing mine.
“I used the—” I looked down at my hands. They were empty. I glanced around on the wet ground, searching for it.