Mind Control: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 2) (11 page)

Michael’s mind was alone. He realised he was holding the hand of a dead man.

He pulled his hand clear, stumbled backwards and banged into a piece of medical equipment.

“Help,” he meant to shout, but his voice barely obeyed him.

He ran into the corridor. “Help! Help!” Medical staff bundled past him. “He’s dead, he’s dead!” he shouted at them.

But they did not listen. They called for equipment and they called for drugs and they pumped at the poor man’s body, but Michael perceived that the life that was in it had already gone. It was gone forever.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THEY PASSED THROUGH
the alleyway to the front of the block of flats, Michael and the gang: Chad, E-boy, Laura, Cheryl and Dave. It was properly dark now – perfect for clandestine law breaking – with most people safely inside their homes for the evening. The only movement was the two boys on their skateboard, whooping and giggling as they took it in turns to speed down the road, weaving in and out of the white lines like a slalom.

‘Do something illegal, but don’t get caught’ was the gang initiation mantra. ‘If you get caught, you’re on your own.’

Flashes of memory from the others revealed they had all done it. Mostly petty theft from shops and some criminal damage, but it was Chad’s initiation that was legendary. He had swiped the hat right off the head of a policeman and ran off so fast that only an Olympic sprinter could have caught him. When he finally met up with the rest of the gang at Kennington Park, they had all tried on the hat and took pictures of themselves – to much hilarity – before finally leaving it atop the war memorial. Every now and then they would laugh at the memory and Chad would fail to mention how the policeman had recognised him and called at his flat the following day, causing him to have a massive row with his mum.

“What are you going to do?” Chad asked Michael.

Michael was thinking. An idea was percolating. A smile was forming. “You’ll see.”

He walked down the road, trying to be cool and natural, adding a little swagger to his step like he had seen Chad do. The others followed at a discreet distance. He checked for traffic and crossed the road, heading for the kerb opposite.

At the last moment, he turned and stepped towards one of the boys who had just got on his skateboard. With a quick push, the boy was unbalanced and landed on his bum. “Hey!”

Michael didn’t care. He put one foot on the skateboard, pushed off with the other, and was suddenly flying down the road. The wind blew his hair back from his face as he sped away from the boys until their protesting cries faded away behind him. With the toe of one foot, he revved against the tarmac to increase his speed, maintaining his balance like a professional, remembering the time at the camp when he’d practised on Peter’s skateboard before Norm the Norm had confiscated it.

He swerved closer to the parked cars, reached out his fist and slammed it against a wing mirror, bending it backwards. It hurt, but the adrenaline dulled the pain as he wobbled further down the road, regaining his balance and reaching out his fist again for a second hit.

So absorbed was he by the thrill, so free were his perceptions of any minds around him, that he didn’t hear the roar of a car engine as it came up the road in the other direction. By the time he saw it, it was metres away, with the black bonnet with its Peugeot insignia eyeing him like a charging bull.

Michael swerved, but the skateboard did not turn easily. He heard rubber skidding on tarmac as the car braked and veered off in the other direction.

He felt the breeze of the car’s headlight brush past his leg with next to no room to spare. In that moment of relief as he missed being struck – and the driver shouted abuse from his window – Michael realised he was heading for one of the parked cars.

His legs struck the grill of one of them, catapulting him over the bonnet as the skateboard continued with momentum down the road without its passenger.

Michael’s body thumped onto the metal and slid, uncontrollably, into the windscreen.

The thrill evaporated and was replaced by pain that encompassed his whole body. Adrenaline was still firing, but it was not enough to dull the million aches in his arms, legs, chest and head.

He was lying, he realised, curled in a foetal position on the car bonnet, facing a shattered windscreen. Something warm and wet ran down his nose and dripped on the green painted surface of the car: his blood.

Michael’s perceptions became full of other people. It was the gang. A mix of concern and glee and amusement, circling around him as they got close.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the boy retrieve his skateboard from the gutter and run back up the road to where he had left his brother.

Michael heard himself groan.

“We need to go.” It was Chad’s voice. “Can you get up?”

Michael turned his neck to look at Chad. It made his head spin, but at least he was able to do it without breaking his spine. “I think so.”

Michael did not so much stand up from the car as shift his body, sliding down the bonnet until he was caught by the hands of several teenagers who allowed his feet to gently find the road surface. He leant on a shoulder, which turned out to belong to Dave, and tested his legs to see if they would bear his weight. He groaned again. Several times.

“Am I part of the gang now?” asked Michael.

“We need to vote on that,” said Chad.

But as he was hurried away in pain, Michael’s perceptions told him that they all would be voting in his favour.

~

HOT TWEEZERS STABBED
at the skin under Michael’s cheekbone as they were wielded by the unsteady hand of Sergeant Patterson. Michael winced and felt moisture gather in his eyes. He blinked away the pain, gripping the edge of the kitchen work surface so he didn’t fall off the stool, as Patterson locked onto the pebble of windscreen glass and pulled it from his flesh.

A fevered wave of relief ran through him as he heard the tweezers and their target plop into the bowl of boiling water and disinfectant on the kitchen work surface. A ribbon of his blood snaked up from where the glass had dropped to the bottom. Patterson dipped a ball of cotton wool into the bowl and pressed it against where the glass had been. Michael flinched instinctively at the sting, then held himself still as the heat from the liquid cleansed his wound.

“Not only am I pretending to be your dad,” said Patterson, “I’m now pretending to be your mum as well.” He dropped the bloody ball of cotton wool into the bin which he’d pulled up beside him and reached for another from the packet he’d bought from the shop. He dipped it in the bowl and dabbed it against several other cuts Michael had sustained to his face.

“Thank you,” said Michael. Having to speak stopped him from wincing again.

Patterson might not have found Michael that morning, sprawled out on the sofa with a bloody piece of toilet paper stuck to his cheek, if he hadn’t popped by to pick up his mobile phone. Patterson tried to pretend he was angry, but his emotions revealed he was actually shocked by the state Michael was in.

“What on earth were you thinking?” said Patterson.

“I wanted to impress the gang,” said Michael.

“You made an impression all right – on the windscreen of a dark green Renault Clio.”

“That bit wasn’t planned,” said Michael.

“Uh-huh,” said Patterson. He dropped the second bloodied cotton wool ball into the bin. “I think you’re done, but I still think you should get a doctor to check out some of those bruises. You could have broken something.”

Michael hopped off the stool and immediately regretted not doing it more gracefully, as the judder aggravated all his bruises at once. It hurt, but not bad enough to suggest he’d broken any bones.

“How did you know what car it was?” said Michael.

“I had a look at the police log,” said Patterson, picking up the bowl and taking it to the sink where he poured away the bloody disinfectant.

“Will I be arrested?”

“I can make sure that doesn’t happen. Not that I condone breaking the law.”
Oh God, now I’m beginning to
sound
like his father.
“So the gang are prepared to accept you now that you’ve nearly killed yourself, are they?”

“Yes,” said Michael, moving slowly – hunched over like an old man – across to the sofa. “They’ve arranged a meet up tonight. They pretended like it’s nothing special, but I perceived they want me to meet their leader.”

“The leader?” said Patterson. “Doesn’t he hang around with the others?”

“I don’t think so. I tried to perceive more, but it’s difficult when you’ve bashed your head on a car windscreen.”

“Serves you right.”

Michael sat on the sofa and felt the soft cushion of its seat embrace his bottom. It was more comfortable than the kitchen stool. It also allowed him to rest there, and resting stopped him aching.

As he shifted position, he heard a crinkle in his pocket. It was Victor’s letter. He had forgotten.

He pulled it out. The envelope was scrunched up a little, but still stuck down. “I went to see Victor Rublev yesterday,” he called over to Patterson who was clearing up in the kitchen.

“Who?” he said.

“Do you remember the Russian we went to see? The one who said he was poisoned.”

“Bollocks!” said Patterson. “I forgot all about him. Being nearly blown up can do that to you.”

“He wanted me to give you this.”

Michael held out the envelope. Patterson came over from the kitchen and took it. Puzzled, he slid his finger under the flap and tore an opening at the top. He pulled out a folded piece of paper, hand-written on both sides in the same script which had adorned the envelope. He scanned it, trying to figure out what he was reading.

“It’s the list of everywhere he went and everyone he saw during that week he thinks he was poisoned,” Michael explained.

Patterson raised his eyebrows. “That’s a long list. Perhaps he can narrow it down a bit in identifying potential suspects.”

“He can’t,” said Michael. “He’s dead.”

“Oh,” said Patterson. He paused. “I’ll get someone to look over the list.”

“Can’t you look over it?”

“I’m up to my eyes in other cases,” said Patterson. “Not to mention playing nursemaid to over-enthusiastic undercover operatives.”

“I was in his head when he died,” said Michael, turning cold at the memory. “I think his body only kept him alive that long so he could pass on that envelope. I don’t think it would be right to give it to someone else.”

Patterson sighed and looked at the list again. The very long list. “We don’t even know for sure he was poisoned.”

“He died in hospital, the doctors there must know,” said Michael. “Why don’t we ask them?”

~

THE HOSPITAL WAS
full of death. As soon as Michael walked in, he felt the perceptions of desperate relatives afraid that it would be the last time they would see their loved ones, of people lying in beds wondering if they would ever see their home again, of staff who lived with death every day, but still became sad every time they lost a patient. The perceptions triggered the memory of being inside Rublev’s mind and the terror as death ate away at the last moments of his life. It was a glimpse into hell and it scared him because, even at seventeen, he knew that he would one day be in that situation with nothing to save him. So he blocked his perception, closing down every stray thought and feeling from outside himself to be alone inside his own mind where he could suppress the memory of Rublev.

Patterson leant back against the nurses’ station with his arms folded. He was impatient and somewhat irritated that he’d been persuaded to make the trip to the hospital – Michael didn’t need to be a perceiver to know this because Patterson moaned about it on the drive over. At least, when he wasn’t moaning about the appalling state of London traffic.

Michael waited next to him, breathing through his mouth so as not to take in the hospital smell, as the nurses fluttered around them like they were part of the furniture. They did not make eye contact or acknowledge them in any way, apparently too busy to care.

A woman in a doctor’s white coat, glasses and short-cropped hair approached them with the grimace of someone who had been rudely dragged away from whatever else she was doing. “The famous Sergeant Patterson, I presume?” she said.

“Famous?” said Patterson, pushing his bum away from the nurses’ station so he stood up straight. He held out his hand for her to shake.

She obliged with subdued enthusiasm. “Mr Rublev talked about you. He said you were the British policeman who was going to solve his murder.”

“It
was
murder, then?” said Patterson.

“Unless he accidentally came across a banned toxic substance and decided to drink it,” said the doctor, dryly. “That would be my guess.”

“Sorry, I didn’t catch your name …?” said Patterson.

“Mrs Reynolds, consultant oncologist,” she said. “Original tests showed the cells in Mr Rublev’s bone marrow had died and cancer was suspected, but it was clear it was no cancer that I had ever seen before. His body was eaten from the inside by something more powerful.”

Michael chipped in. “He said it was radiation poisoning, is that true?”

Mrs Reynolds noticed him for the first time.

“This is my associate,” said Patterson. “Michael Sanderson.”

“What happened to you?” she said, looking him up and down.

Michael realised the cuts on his face from landing on the car were still visible. He hurriedly tried to think of an excuse. “Car accident,” he said.

She nodded. “Yes, radiation, that’s what we believe. I’d never seen anything like it before, but one of our nurses worked on a similar case in Germany and he suggested we get in a Geiger counter. It was pretty alarming, I can tell you. We took the advised precautions, but a number of staff refused to go anywhere near him, and I don’t blame them.”

It was Patterson’s turn to nod. “We’ll need access to his medical records and, obviously, there will have to be a post mortem.”