A Very Good Man (62 page)

  Once sitting all the way up he swallowed, “I know that I couldn't really be expected to win, intellectually. I mean, if they'd been two girl scouts hitting me with boxes of cookies and pillows it would have been a tossup as far as a who'd come out on top, so putting me against some super-powered psycho and his even crazier armed buddy is just... insane. I really know that, I swear!” He shook a little, the anger at himself coming back as he thought about the fight. “But if I could have just gotten her away somehow... Run or something. Run better... I tried and it didn't work. Or fought them harder or... something, maybe she could have lived? I don't even know what they did to her...”

  Doctor Tull just shook her head, but Lancaster spoke, walking in just in time to hear the question.

  “They... raped her for several hours, then the Infected known as the Jackal killed her, literally eating her alive. His friend then sodomized the corpse – what was left of it – and relieved himself on the other dead bodies. Most of this hasn't made the news, Brian, and just shouldn't, not ever, so if anyone asks about it, don't let it out. The fact that these fucks are killing so many people already has the country in an uproar. We have to stop them.” The agent had dressed in a black suit again, but this time with a deep green shirt on underneath.

  Maybe he had a date, Brian mused.

  Then the thought made him wince. Barbara Dorn wouldn't have any more dates now. Brian would have traded his life for hers, but he'd had that chance and left her there for them to... He couldn't even make himself think all the words. They were monsters of a kind that shouldn't even be able to exist, much less be allowed to.

  What those men, those things, he decided, because no one human could to something like that, had done, horrified him and made him angry again. Brian worried out loud that anger seemed to be that strong emotion thing in him. He'd felt it so often since all of this had happened, building slowly, but there. It almost had to be his thing, didn't it?

  Next to him the doctor looked down for a moment, checking her notes again he saw, not looking down in embarrassment or anything.

  “Not at all, Brian. That anger, even the rage you've felt, is normal and even healthy. Some bad people have done some really awful things and you should be angry about it. Agent Lancaster had to stop some of his fellow agents from hunting down and killing the police that tortured you last week, which I know was hard for him because he probably wanted to kill them himself. As for what happened to Barbara Dorn and the other victims of these killers... Anyone hearing about it should feel either anger or fear. That you picked anger doesn't mean you're bad or that you'll feel that kind of thing all the time, it just means you're sane and probably willing to try and stop them, rather than just hiding. Both would be normal though.” She waited for him to say something, Brian noticed, as if there would be some question she expected from him, even wanted.

  He didn't have a clue what that would be.

  Finally Lancaster broke the silence, a small grin on his face. “Your first mode, the primary emotion that you display, isn't anger or anything negative at all, Brian. I don't know if it will shake out differently over time, sometimes things like this do, but it seems to be a kind of focus on protecting other people, a type of self-sacrifice. Obviously you're not stupid about it, you'd kill those pricks if you could, so it's not just compassion, and it's not blind, but you'd put yourself in front of anyone in danger. Basically like a mother would with a child only to an extreme.” The large, powerfully built man waved his hand. “Or maybe like a father willing to do anything to protect his family. I'm not calling you a chick or anything.” His expression looked halfway between a smile and a smirk when he said it.

  Brian shifted uneasily and put his hands down carefully, making sure they were flat on the bed before trying to push himself back. He slid and Lancaster looked like he might try to help, but the doctor gave the man a look with a small head shake, making him back off so that the younger man could do it himself. It took about a minute to get comfortable, having slipped further down twice, the sheets a bit slippery under him for some reason. It was the plastic under the cloth that did it.

  The woman sitting by him finally saw he'd finished and resumed talking. “Brian, the thing is, as near as our experts can tell with limited data, your ability doesn't have any conscious control mechanism, which leaves us with two main options to explore. The first is what we've been doing already, keeping you drugged into insensibility, which fools your subconscious mind into thinking you're asleep. Apparently you're safe then, as far as we can tell from the readings and tests we've done. Drugged or sleeping. If you want we can keep you that way indefinitely, so that you never have to go through something like what you have again.” Her lips tightened going slightly white around the edges, making little wrinkles appear. It wasn't a happy thing at all.

  “The other option is to get you training. We think, and this is tentative, that if you're in enough pain or discomfort, your ability won't put you into danger. That level seems pretty extreme, but we believe that if you train hard enough, the muscle soreness and discomfort should be enough to buy you some time to learn what you need to survive.”

  Going silent, the woman took a deep breath, it caught on the way out, as if she didn't want to speak the next words. After a minute of this she looked at Lancaster and shook her head, telling him that she just couldn't say the rest of it, or so it seemed to Brian. The big agent took a single step closer to the woman and put a hand on her shoulder for a moment before taking over.

  “The thing is, Brian, both of these options have massive problems. If you choose the drugs, you're basically going to have to be kept so stoned all the time that you won't have a real life. After a while these things will permanently impair your ability to reason. We might as well lobotomize you, which has also been considered, since no kind of drug therapy would leave you any clearer in the long run.

  “If you choose the training... The lab boys have run some projections on it and give you an expected life span of eighteen months to two years at the outside, sooner or later you'll run into some Infected that you can't escape from in time, or you'll keep fighting, trying to protect people when you should be running. To make it worse, in order to give you a chance to learn first, in the first few months or so, we have to work you nearly to death. You can be drugged at night, sometimes, so that you can sleep, but during the day you have to feel the pain, at least be really uncomfortable, all the time.”

  Both the people next to him looked down then, which Brian got. No matter what he did, he'd have a death sentence hanging over him. One a virtual death that could take decades, but wasn't living at all. The other, well, it sounded sucky to him.

  His body had been carefully honed over the years to excel at eating Twinkies and sitting on a sofa playing video games, maybe stand and pack toilet paper into boxes, the job he'd kept for the last three years. He couldn't even imagine what kind of training they meant and felt a little afraid to ask. How hard did you have to work to stay in constant discomfort, much less pain?

  Brian shrugged, thinking as carefully about all this as he could. He had two paths, either one led to death of a sort, one had a lot of pain, the other might as well just be putting a bullet in his brain for all he'd be able to know about the world around him. Really, neither one was all that attractive, even considering that he personally valued being able to think over not hurting. For now at least.

  Pain... bit monkey balls. Brian knew that one first hand, and didn't really want any more if he could help it.

  It really only left one thing for him to ask. Pretty much the only thing that mattered in the end.

  “So, if I do it, this training thing, do you think I can help anyone? Can I learn enough to even save one person?” He didn't say this to the doctor, but to the agent, an obviously tough guy that didn't soft peddle his answers. Brian held his breath, because if he couldn't help anyone, there wouldn't be any point to taking either option. Then a bullet to the brain would help everyone more than anything else would.

  The tall man shrugged.

  “Yeah. I mean, look kid, there's no guarantee here. You could go out the first time and have to fight the toughest Infected on the planet. If that happens you're just dead. Anyone would be. Then again, you might go years without facing another infected at all. You could be knifed, shot, who knows what the fuck all, but against people like that, low level Infected or regular people, you could do a lot. You're young, and balls-out tough. I know you don't think that's true, but I've seen the tape of you fighting in the bar. You suck, sure, but you didn't stop trying, even when most people would have quit fighting and just curled up crying. I think that if it had just been the gunman you might have even won, Brian. Untrained against an armed man, he was reeling a few times there and if his buddy hadn't bailed him out... With training? Yeah, hell yeah in fact. I think you can do it. The guys from the lab, the number crunchers... They think, given everything so far that you can save between twelve and eighteen people before you buy it.” He spread his large hands, his face looked sad, like he was telling Brian that he had to take the suicide mission... or else everyone else paid for it.

  That sounded about right.

  Well, twelve to eighteen people anyway. Still...

  Looking down at his hands on the covers Brian asked for some time to think about it, knowing that there wasn't a real choice. He suffered and tried or other people died because he didn't. What else could he do really? He just wanted to take a little time to mourn for his life, as stupid as that sounded. No matter what, he was functionally dead.

  Brian had to accept that.

  They left, saying they'd be back in a few hours. He nodded and tried to give them a smile, which made the doctor wince. She obviously got some of what would be going on in his head. Of course, she also knew that he didn't have a choice in this, Lancaster had to know too, working with people like him all the time. He'd try to save people if he could. It was his thing, his “first mode” the agent had called it.

  Brian didn't cry, having lost all his tears days ago. In its own way, the beatings and pain the police had put him through were kind of a blessing, weren't they? He'd already known and accepted he'd die. Going back to the idea felt a lot easier now than it had the first time.

  Brian just sat with the idea. He was dead. Nothing would change that. He couldn't run from it and no one in the world could bail him out. But he had a chance to make his death mean something, which was a lot more than most people got. Wasn't it?

  Yeah, it really was. What was he doing with his life anyway? Eating himself to death?

  Brian tried to let everything go then. The old life, his hopes of finding love, or at least a woman that would sleep with him before he died, the dreams of making something of himself, which probably wouldn't have happened anyway.

  Let it all go, he told himself.

  Dreams like that were for the living. A strange feeling came over him, a feeling of peace, like nothing could touch him now. Not really. He could be hurt, or humiliated or even fail, but it didn't matter. Not now.

  Lancaster came back into the room first, carrying some clothes for Brian, which he got into without needing any real help, his ribs ached, but it was a dull pain, nothing had shattered there, just cracked, so they were mainly healed he'd been told. Or at least would be in about six weeks. The bruising had faded a lot too. It still hurt when he tried to put on the light blue t-shirt that said IPB on the front, but he did it without complaining. The sweat pants, a dark blue, fit easily. He didn't have underwear, but decided not to worry about it. That kind of thing didn't matter now, right?