“Fallon, you’re not ready to—”
She snapped her head around. Her eyes, nearly black with power and fury, blazed. “On powers within, on powers without, I call. Show me now and show me all. If my duty brushes the dark, then the curtain I will part. And I will hear and feel and see. As I will, so mote it be.”
Too much, Mallick thought, too much. But the die was cast.
Her body jerked, her head fell back, and her eyes went dark and blind with visions.
Voices screamed in her head, weeping, wailing, begging.
“Too many, too many. I can’t hear. Oh God, so many.”
Night. Though none in the cells knew day from night. They herded them in, already drugged with the food and water given out on the journey. So they shuffled, compliant, offered little resistance when they were examined, stripped, cataloged, given prison orange to wear. Most slept when led to their cells.
Some dreamed and cried out in sleep. Some pushed against the drugs pumped into them, day after day. And some, fighting, were restrained until another drug was pumped into them.
By category of MUNA—Manifestation of Unnatural Abilities—and date of containment, detainees were taken to the center’s lab for testing.
Pushing herself, pushing her limits, Fallon merged her mind with the spirit of a girl, strapped to a table in a harshly lit room. Janis, a high school senior when the Doom struck. A cheerleader struggling with her chemistry grade.
He drew her blood, the blank-faced man in the white coat and white cap. He hooked her up to a machine, sticking little cold circles on her bare chest.
They’d taken her clothes, and it mortified her to lie naked under the lights, under his eyes and hands.
“Please. I want my mom. Where’s my mom?”
They’d run together because her father died. Run because Janis grew wings, and her mom was afraid. Going to Grandma’s house. They were just going to Grandma’s, but Grandma wasn’t there. They kept running.
And the soldiers came.
“Please,” she said again, but the man who put needles into her, put the cold disks on her, said nothing.
She tried to turn her head, found she couldn’t move. Had she been in an accident? Was she paralyzed? “Please,” she said again. “Help me.”
Then, she realized the words didn’t make a sound. The words were only in her head, because she couldn’t speak.
Couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. But she could see, she could feel. And when a tear slid down her cheek, the man dabbed the tear with a cotton stick, put the stick in a little jar. Labeled it.
“Brody, stimulant, on two.”
A woman moved into her view, went to a machine, touched a dial.
Janis felt the quick electric shock through her body.
At the monitor, the woman rattled off numbers. Heart rate, blood pressure, respiration.
“Up to four,” the man ordered.
Now the shock slapped, and she cried out in her head. Her wings flowed out with her instinct to flee, to fly away.
“Manifestation at level four. Let’s clamp these down.”
They hurt her, hurt her, hurt her wings.
Something inside her, through the drugs, remembered they’d hurt her before. Remembered her mother wasn’t there. They’d taken her mother somewhere else.
The pain flooded her, as it had before, when he used the scalpel to slice off a piece of her wing. More tears fell, and this time the woman collected them.
“As before the wing section loses its luminescence when excised.” The man sealed the bloody bit of wing in a bag. Sealed it, labeled it. “We need hair with root, Brody. Ten samples from the head, ten from the pubis. Another urine sample. All samples sent to CUS by special courier.”
“All?”
“This time. It has more when we need it.”
He didn’t smile, but something like satisfaction came over his face. With all her heart, Janis cursed him. Not for the pain, not anymore, but for that single look of satisfaction.
Then the fire washed in, black and brutal.
“No,” Fallon murmured. “No, no, not from her. But from where, from what, from who? Show me.”
Soldiers manned their posts. Three off duty ate in the mess hall—bean soup, mashed potatoes made from dehydrated flakes, hard rolls with their ration of margarine. Two more caught a smoke outside. Cigarettes went for five dollars each on the underground, but the army provided.
One swabbed out the cell of the detainee currently in the lab. The CO demanded every inch of the center be squared away, 24?7. With no other detainees scheduled for testing until morning, Private Coons planned to catch a little downtime with a DVD before he hit the bunk.
The CO sat in his office on level two, diligently reading reports. He had a picture of his family—wife, daughter, son, their spouses, his two grandchildren—on his desk.
His bitterness at their deaths by the virus burned continually inside him. His belief that those in cells below held responsibility was absolute.
In one of those cells a witch had gone mad. Abraham Burnbaum had once been a prominent neurologist, a prosperous man devoted to his work and his family. A man who gave back, used all his skill to save lives. Who’d enjoyed golf and sailing. Like the CO, he’d watched his family die, and none of his knowledge, his skills, his connections in the medical community had saved them.
Only he and the grandson named for him had survived. Little Abe with his quick, gurgling laugh, his passion for dinosaurs and absolute loyalty to Iron Man had survived and, like his grandfather, had begun to show abilities that the scientist in Burnbaum would have deemed nonsense.
For more than a year he’d kept the boy safe. Even when they’d had to leave the house in Alexandria, as the fighting came too close, he’d kept his boy safe. He’d made it an adventure. Hiking, hiding, fishing, making camp in the woods, or in a house already abandoned.
South, he’d taken the boy south. Warmer climates, longer growing season.
Then he’d made a mistake. He’d grown tired, careless, or just naive. He’d thought he could make a home for the boy in the little ramshackle house just over the North Carolina border. For a time he had, tucked away from the road.
But they’d come, the soldiers, sweeping in so fast he’d known escape wasn’t possible. He could fight—he had a gun, he had the strange powers in him. But he feared for the boy.
“Abe.” He’d pulled the boy into the kitchen. “Quick now. Into the hiding place.”
“But, Granddad.”
“Remember what we said.” Abraham pulled up the door to the root cellar. “Remember what you promised.”
“I don’t want to—”
“You promised. Go down, and don’t make a sound. No matter what. Don’t come out, no matter what, until I come get you. Or until you know they’re gone. And when you know they’re gone, what do you do?”
“I stay quiet and I count to a hundred ten times.”
“You don’t start counting until you don’t hear a sound.” He nudged the boy down the ladder. “Hurry. Not a sound. I love you, kiddo.”
“I love you, Granddad.”
He shut the door, and as he’d practiced and practiced, he concealed the door. The handle melted from sight, not a seam showed.
They didn’t knock or call for him to come out. They broke in, front and back doors, armed. Even as he started to put his hands up, one fired at him. Not a bullet, though it gave him pain. He staggered under the tranquilizer.
He heard their boots storming through the house, heard orders shouted to find the kid.
He came to, his mind muddled, in a small room. Restrained to a bunk, he struggled to think through the drug.
Little Abe. Had they found his little boy?
They could do whatever they wanted with him as long as Abe stayed safe.
They tortured him, using a paralytic while they ran their hideous tests. Sometimes he heard screaming, but it never lasted long. No one spoke to him except to interrogate, and after a few days, not even then.
He comforted himself he’d kept Abe safe. Let himself dream of that wonderful laugh, those mischievous eyes.