All Seeing Eye (25 page)

I fought my way back up into the air, dragging
the guy with me with one hand and swinging the other in a fist. The blow took the other soldier directly under the chin as he surfaced. He promptly toppled back under the water again, and soon I was pulling two dead-weight, but alive, goons out of the water to dump them on the shore.

Hector was taking out the soldier who’d dived off the rock wall to play disciple. He choked him out the same as he had the man at the mill. “You have a hell of a punch,” he told me as he took his opponent out. “Why didn’t you try it on me?”

“Because you were behind me, and you pour your breakfast milk over steroids instead of Cheerios.” And because I’d realized in time that he’d been pulling me away from an illusion in the water that wasn’t my sister and wasn’t my past. I moved to the next zealously chanting soldier surrounded by roiling water. Fuji was closer, but if he succeeded in drowning Thackery, I wasn’t going to be crying any tears. Thackery was most likely a murderer, and if he died at the hands of the echo of another murderer, that was poetic justice at its best.

“I lift weights. I don’t take steroids.” He threw the soldier he had knocked out into the arms of the half-drowned one. “You have two couches. One for you and one for your dog. That doesn’t shout ‘exercise fiend.’ Hell, if you walked that dog a block, you’d both be winded.”

It was strange to be snarking with someone while trying to keep a long-past massacre from taking
lives in the here and now. Although not as strange as you’d think. It was a tough thing to do, face someone who’s screaming about God, temporarily insane, and trying to drown whoever he can get his hands on. I lived every day in other people’s pasts and secrets, and even I found this pretty damn creepy. A little sarcasm was a welcome distraction from the weirdness factor.

As I handled the last soldier with another punch, putting my new glove through its paces, I retorted, “I run ten miles every day!” When it wasn’t too hot, and it was always too hot. “I’m a natural athlete!” Close enough. I did run and swim, but at the Y, where they had air-conditioning. I was built lean, and I was in shape enough to take care of myself. I hadn’t forgotten my teenage years and that someday I might need that skill again.

“Ask your guys when they wake up if they don’t feel like they got a natural ass kicking. Cane Lake lessons stick with you. Even Charlie swung one helluva mean book bag,” I added, giving over the unconscious man to the one who came up out of the water. He coughed up water, caught his baptizer, and didn’t take over the role as the other soldier I saved had done. Hector’s hadn’t, either. That meant something.

I looked up at the sky, twilight now, as if I could see Charlie and his book bag, but of course, I couldn’t. And without the lost keys, I couldn’t feel him, either. But there wouldn’t have been anything
to feel, anyway. As the soldiers and Hector started to pry Fuji off a submerged Thackery, the small scientist’s eyes cleared from fanatical to frantic. Along with stuttered fervent apologies, that told me what I needed to know. Charlie was gone, as was the repeating, gibbering chorus that had been the mirror’s reflection of Job and his disciples.

Thackery, unfortunately, was still here and alive—vomiting water and glaring at Fujiwara as if he’d throw him onto the nearest French Revolution cart headed to the guillotine. Fuji’s stuttered apologies went straight to plain incoherent stuttering. I couldn’t make out a single word. The other men, the baptizers and the baptized, recovered and slowly dried in a Georgia heat that the coming night wouldn’t begin to tame. Most of them sat with their heads in their hands. I didn’t know if it was from the sensation of a rerun of dead killers in their heads, almost being drowned by their brother soldiers, or the sight of Job’s victims back for a reunion tour.

I should’ve been at least somewhat happy. I mean, welcome, guys, to just a small part of my world. Feel what I feel every damn day.

I wasn’t happy, though. Six formerly tough-looking guys now seemed to want nothing more than to be anywhere but here. As far as I knew, they’d been in battle, seen friends die, but that living hell was something they were prepared for. What the sun had set on today had shown them a layer to this life that they knew nothing about and
didn’t
want
to know anything about. And this had been a recording. If ghosts really had existed, who knew what knots would’ve been tied in their brains? Then again, the scientists had told them what to expect, I was guessing. Or at least, Hector would have—the possibility of the visual recording.

Seeing that, knowing that it wasn’t ghosts, it wasn’t life after death, it was only a fluke of physics, it could be that some of them were less upset by what they’d seen and more shaken by a loss of some religious faith.

One person, not surprisingly, wasn’t shaken at all. He was adjusting perfectly fine to visions of dead bodies and almost being drowned by his employee. Not only was he fine, but he had a
theory
. That gleam I’d noticed in his eye earlier was now the brilliant glint of a cold operating light bouncing from a surgeon’s scalpel. “It’s you, Eye. You and Hector combined, perhaps.” Thackery became caught up in coughing, but lungs sloshing with water couldn’t stop the bastard for long. It seemed nothing could. “You’re providing a focus for Charles. Considering our location”—he gestured at the water—“you could say you’re the next best thing to a scientific fishing lure.” He said it so smugly that I wished Fujiwara had more upper-body strength or Hector had been slower in pulling him off his boss.

Hector studied Thackery with interest, not much hope, but he was listening. “How did you come to
that conclusion?” His dark hair blended into the night, but his pale eyes were visible and challenging.

“First, he’s your brother. That is one tie to this plane, blood or genetics. It doesn’t matter. Second, there’s Eye.” He addressed me without even waiting for me to bow and kiss his ring. He had to be in the midst of a scientific orgasm.

He ran a hand over his light hair and shook the water from his fingers. “You say your psychic ability only lets you feel people when you touch an object that belonged to them. You touch Charles’s keys, and you can sense him trying to get through. I think Charles, changed as he is now—the fragment that is left of him—is feeling you as well. This is the second time Charles has shown up at your and Hector’s location, a location of lesser violence in comparison with the others available. A less likely location. Less ether-fraying. This could mean no more random guessing. No more aiming for what we think is the highest violence quotient. With the two of you and the machine at the next appearance at any location on the list, we could put an end to Charles once and for all.”

“I know you meant ‘set him free,’ not the asshole thing you actually uttered,” I said flatly. I didn’t like the way Thackery talked about Charlie. I knew Hector had to like it even less. I didn’t believe we’d be setting Charlie free to a better place, but I did believe we could let him dissolve into nonexistence.
That had to be better than what he was going through now.

Lost.

Everyone had to remember when they were little, and I mean really little, that being lost was the worst feeling in the world. Pure terror. I wouldn’t want to sentence anyone to an eternity of that, certainly not someone who’d once forced his friendship on me when I denied that I wanted it. I’d lied, and he’d known it. I owed Charlie, and I was committed to paying that debt.

“I’ll stick with scientific terminology and ending what fragments of the failed experiment that was Charles and now happens to be killing people fit better than—”

He didn’t get a chance to finish his fancy scientific sentence before a fist hit his nose, which flattened in an explosion of blood.

Thackery was knocked onto his back and was now coughing up both blood and water. Hector unballed his fist and said calmly, “See? No steroids, or I would’ve killed him instead of only breaking his nose.”

“You know, Hector,” I commented, “you’re beginning to grow on me. Now, let me kick him in the ribs, and let’s call this fucked-up day over.”

• • •

I didn’t get to kick Thackery. Hector wouldn’t let me, which was pretty unfair, considering he’d given the man the nose of a twenty-year veteran prizefighter.
We all ended up in the infirmary. Some for near drownings, some from being knocked unconscious with a blow from an illegal sap glove in the back of the neck or in the jaw, one with a broken nose, and one from good old-fashioned near hysteria.

Hector hadn’t gotten hurt or swallowed any quarry water, but he hung around at Meleah’s order. She called it a request, but I knew an order when I heard one. He leaned against a wall, arms folded, bored with Thackery’s blood-bubbled threats of getting him thrown off the project. Fujiwara was the opposite. He had gone from babbling to silently shaking like a Chihuahua in a meat freezer. The natural nurturer Eden clucked over him, rubbed his back, and promised that Thackery would understand that he hadn’t tried to drown him on purpose … not his purpose, anyway. I thought they were going to have to give in finally and sedate the guy, but he eventually calmed down enough to wrap a blanket around himself and shuffle out of the infirmary to head back to his room.

I was waiting in line for an X-ray. Meleah wouldn’t take my word that I hadn’t inhaled any fluid when I’d been struggling with the soldier underwater. Aside from Thackery’s fury and Eden’s reassurances, delivered personally to each patient in the room, no one was doing much talking. The soldiers were as pale and shadow-eyed as they’d been at the quarry. I remembered the feeling from
long ago, when I first started seeing into the past: if you don’t talk about it, if you don’t think about it, it won’t be true.

Too bad it didn’t work.

Hector was either nursing a satisfaction over taking Thackery down or contemplating Thackery’s theory. As for me? I’d like to claim that what had happened at the quarry was the same old same old. Nothing new. I’d been in my natural environment, unfazed as a pig in shit. A good old Georgia psychic boy who went through this every day—minus the actual hands-on violence.

Yeah, I could claim it all I wanted, but it would be bullshit. It was Tess. Long-dead Mary Bevins hadn’t been my sister, but she’d done a good job of stirring up memories out of a murky past I’d done my best to bury.

After my X-ray, read and approved, I went the way of Fujiwara and the soldiers and walked out the door. I was the third-to-last to go. Thackery was staying to have his nose set, and Hector stayed to tell Meleah what had happened; at least, that was my guess. He’d promised to keep her up to date on Charlie. A strong woman like her wasn’t about to let him off the hook.

“You all right, Jackson?”

I didn’t pause at Hector’s question as I passed him. “I’m always all right, Allgood. Haven’t you seen that yet?” I kept walking, and he was polite enough not to call me a liar. He
did
call me a liar
later and one cursed son of a bitch when my room exploded. I didn’t blame him.

• • •

Since Hector had issued the order that I had the run of the lesser-classified areas of the base—housing, cafeteria, infirmary—I was able to go alone from one building and slog solo over the now-dried peaks and valleys of red mud to the housing unit that held my room. I wanted to shower the mineral smell of quarry water off of me and sleep for about twelve hours.

The quarry scent did stay with you, enough so that I almost missed the other smell as I pushed the door to my room open. This was a smell familiar to everyone, but in particular, it was a smell for which I had a hair trigger buried in my subconscious.

The door was already swinging open when I threw myself back and down the hall. The explosion didn’t completely blow the door off the hinges, but it drenched it and the floor and the walls outside it in flames and the reek of gasoline. The air was superheated. It felt as if it was searing my lungs as I pushed my way to crawl farther down the hall away from the fire. Alarms were blaring, help would be coming, but I’d always believed the universe helps those who help themselves, and I kept slithering along the dingy tile. I snatched a desperate look behind me as I moved faster. The fire crept after me, but not as quickly as I expected.

When I thought I was far enough away from the
inferno, if not the heat, I rolled over and tried to stand. I made it, but I didn’t know I would have if a hand hadn’t helped me halfway up.

“Damn it, Jackson, you call this all right? I know you don’t believe in an afterlife, you cursed son of a bitch, but why are you in such a hurry to prove it to yourself?” Hector kept me upright while giving me hell.

“Someone tried to kill me. I
know
you’re not blaming
me,
” I accused. “Especially when I told you this could happen. Murderers
don’t like
psychics. If I’m cursed, you did the cursing when you brought me here.”

A crew was trying to put out the fire, but they weren’t having any luck with their extinguishers. Instead of being put out, it was spreading like the breath of a dragon. “It’s napalm!” one guy shouted. “Goddamn napalm! Get the Halon extinguishers!”

Their voices were muffled by the masks they wore, but Hector heard enough to push me into motion. “Move it. Napalm puts out enough carbon monoxide to gas an entire kennel.” As we ran, he asked, “Not that I don’t think it a good thing, but why aren’t you dead? Napalm isn’t a natural inhabitant of Georgia. It’s not like a black widow that creeps under your door. How are you not a barbecued corpse?”