Mind Secrets: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 1) (7 page)

“My name’s Elaine,” said the girl.

“Eric,” said Michael, remembering to use his false name.

Elaine raised her eyebrows. “Hello, ‘Eric’.”

Of course, she probably perceived that was a lie as well.

“It must be great to be born normal,” she said.

“I suppose,” said Michael. He really didn’t want to talk to her.

“No hiding. No going through the diagnosis thing …”

Michael was suddenly interested. “‘Diagnosis thing’?”

“Didn’t they come to your school?” said Elaine. “Ask you questions? Speak to your parents and teachers?”

“No.”

“Lucky.”

“I didn’t think you had to be diagnosed,” said Michael. “I mean, didn’t you already know you were a perceiver?”

“I wasn’t going to tell anybody, was I?” said Elaine. “When your friends find out, they don’t talk to you. You get banned from the athletics squad because they think you’re cheating. The teachers refuse to teach you. The woman over the road even told my mum to keep me indoors. Said I was …” She trailed off. As she became more agitated, her voice got louder and a couple of kids were looking up from their phones. “It’ll all be over after today.”

Elaine seemed relieved. Almost as if she were looking forward to it. He wished he could perceive what she was really feeling because, after everything Otis and Jennifer had told him, her reaction didn’t seem to make sense. “You want the cure?” he asked.

But he didn’t get a reply. The door opened and her mother entered, wiping her hands on a piece of tissue. “Oh, here she is,” said Elaine. “Bonsai Bladder herself.”

She sat down beside her daughter, apparently not noticing she had shifted seats, and started to complain about the state of the hand driers in the women’s toilets.

It put an end to their conversation.

Only ten minutes later, the fat woman called Elaine forward. Michael feared for her. She seemed a nice girl. She had been true to her word and not given him away. So he wondered, as she headed for the door, what sort of person she would be by the time the day was over.

~

IT WAS ANOTHER
half an hour before the buxom woman called Michael to the front. The sound of his false name sent butterflies leaping and dancing in his stomach. He made a point of noting where she was taking him as she led him into the corridor. If he had to make a quick getaway, he wanted to be sure he knew the way out.

At the entrance to the corridor stood a beefy man in a white coat. He had a pen in his top pocket and every semblance of being a doctor. But the way he stood – his feet exactly hip distance apart, his hands clasped neatly behind his back – made him look more like a sentry. As Michael passed him, the man kept his eyes front, apparently not interested. Although, Michael suspected, the beefy man was aware of everything.

The woman stopped beside a laminated sign which read:
Treatment Room #1
. It had been stuck over the top of a plaque which must have indicated what the room was usually used for. She knocked. There was a muffled, “Come in!” and they went inside.

Its clean and clinical walls were in contrast to the plush, hotel-like feel of the waiting room. Vinyl easy-clean floor, seamless white decoration, functional desk, chairs and examination bed. All presided over by a man in a crisp, white nurse’s tunic buttoned to the neck. He was in his late twenties: his hair, nails and posture as neat as his uniform. He stood up as Michael came in, gave him a reassuring smile, then nodded to the woman to leave them to it.

“Sit down, please,” said the nurse. He glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. “Eric, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Michael. He sat. “I want to know more about the cure.”

“It’s very simple,” said the nurse, taking a seat by the side of the desk. “We get you to hop up on the bed, I call in the doctor and we give you a little injection. Then we take you through to the recovery room. And that’s it.”

The same story Michael had seen in the propaganda films. “It can’t be that simple.”

“Really, Eric, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Michael obviously wasn’t going to get any more than the party line out of the nurse. He was going to have to play along until the very last minute before making a break for it.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a collection of hypodermic needles sealed in individual sterile plastic wrapping on top of a stack of plastic admin trays. In the tray beneath, sat a collection of glass vials containing some sort of liquid. That’s what, if he wasn’t careful, was going to be injected into his arm.

“So, Eric, I just need to check a few details,” said the nurse, consulting the computer screen in front of him. “Your name is Eric Hughes?”

“Yes.”

“You live at …” He hesitated, distracted somehow by something he saw in Michael’s face. “Sorry … You live at number 32 Maple Avenue.”

“Yes.”

“You go to school … Your school is …” He stopped. He was staring at Michael now. An intense, penetrating stare. Almost like Otis when he was trying to perceive something deep inside him. It was unnerving. Uncomfortable. Michael turned away. But the nurse reached forward, grabbed Michael’s face and jerked it back to look at him. Michael tried to shake himself free, but the nurse kept a vice-like grip on his cheeks.

“You’re not a perceiver,” he said.

He let go of Michael’s face, but Michael didn’t move. He was too stunned. There was no way the nurse could have known that.
No way
. Adults didn’t look into people’s heads and read their secrets. Only teenagers. Only perceivers. Adults weren’t perceivers, all the propaganda said so.

The nurse got up and went to the other side of the desk where there was some sort of intercom. He pressed a button. “Can you get Doctor Page to come in here?”

Michael wasn’t waiting around for some doctor to examine him. He had to run now and figure out what the hell was going on later. He made a bolt for the door.

The nurse, caught by surprise, shouted after him. But Michael was already in the corridor and running.

The beefy man at the entrance was alerted to the noise. He turned and his large body filled the corridor. Michael reversed, but the nurse had come out of the treatment room behind him. He was trapped between the two. Michael spied another door off to the side and dived for it. Grasping the handle, he tried to turn it, but it didn’t budge. The door was locked. Panicking, he wrestled with the handle, knowing he didn’t have the strength to force the lock, but not knowing what else to do.

Large, beefy hands grabbed his shoulders. They pulled him away and the door handle slipped from his fingers. The man turned Michael’s body to face the nurse.

“What do you want done with him, sir?” he said.

Sir?
What person in a white coat ever called a nurse
sir
?

“Back in there,” said the nurse. He stood aside and Michael found himself staring back at the treatment room he had run from.

The man’s strong hands pushed him, and Michael went sprawling inside. His body crashed against the desk. The vials in the admin tray tinkled as they knocked together.

The door closed and Michael heard the sound of a key turning in the lock. He tried the handle just in case. It wasn’t going to open. “Shit!”

He looked around the room. There was a window. One of those long, rectangular windows that opened from the bottom and angled outwards. He tried the handle. That, too, was locked. He could try to break the glass, but it was double glazed. The only way to smash it would be to break the vacuum seal between the two panes. He frantically looked for a small, sharp object. He pulled open drawers, knocked books off shelves; desperate for something like a screwdriver or a drill bit. Not exactly standard equipment for a medical treatment room.

He reached for one of the hypodermics. The needle was thin and fragile, but he prayed it was enough. He ripped off the packaging. Just as he heard a key being placed in the door. Too late to get out the window. But he could use the needle as a makeshift weapon. He hid it behind his back.

The key turned. At the last second, he thought to reach for one of the vials in the admin tray and secrete it in his pocket.

The beefy man entered followed by the nurse and, behind them, a woman in a white coat. She really did look like a doctor. Tall and slim and neat, with long brown hair pinned back from her face, a bold blue blouse and straight black trousers under her doctor’s garb. Her eyes widened when she saw Michael. A startled stare, like she was looking at the impossible.

Michael wondered if she, too, perceived he was a norm.

“There he is, Doctor Page,” said the nurse, pointing at Michael.

“Thank you, Alan,” said Doctor Page, her voice soft and preoccupied. Still staring at Michael. “Leave us, please.”

“What?” said the nurse.

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” she clarified. “I will deal with this.”

“Ma’am,” said the beefy man. “I wouldn’t recommend …”

“It’s fine, really,” said Doctor Page. “Just take the hypodermic needle he’s hiding behind his back and I will be fine.”

Michael stood as the beefy man came forward, reached for his arm and prised the needle from his fingers. There was no way the doctor could have seen it was there. Even if she saw he was concealing his hand, she couldn’t have known what was in it.

“If you’re sure …” said the nurse.

Doctor Page nodded.

The nurse grabbed the admin trays – with their hypodermics and vials of curative liquid – and exited, taking the beefy man with him.

The door closed and Michael stood alone with Doctor Page. He stood beneath her gaze. A scared kid without a weapon, without a plan or a way to escape. What happened next was going to be up to her.

And then she did the most unexpected thing. She hugged him.

She engulfed him in her arms and drew him close. He felt her breasts press against his chest as she gently squeezed him. So close he could smell the musk of her perfume. Michael – confused and uncomfortable – stiffened against her embrace. Until she finally let go and he was able to pull away.

“My God, Michael. What are you doing here?”

She knew his name. His real name. Did she perceive it? He didn’t know how to respond. It was still her move.

“Did they take your picture, Michael?”

“Picture?”

“Yes. Did they check you in? Did they take your details?”

“Uh … yeah,” he managed.

“My God, Michael,” she said again. “Why? Don’t you know all that stuff goes straight to Cooper?”

“Cooper?” The name chilled him. Michael flashed back to the man slumped on the fire exit stairs with a kitchen knife in his stomach. “He’s alive?”

“We have to get you out of here.”

There was a knock at the door. Doctor Page was so startled, she visibly jumped. For a second, Michael thought she looked just as scared as he was.

“Doctor Page?” called a voice from outside. It was the beefy man. “Are you all right?”

“Yes! Just a minute!” She looked at Michael. Looked into him. Her eyes gently unpeeling layers from his mind. “It’s so good to know you’re okay, Michael, but I wish to God you hadn’t come.”

“You know me?” The realisation struck him with the force of an electric shock. “My name? My life?”

But the beefy man was knocking again.

“Yes, yes!” said Doctor Page. She took Michael’s hand and propelled him to the door. She opened it to find the beefy man standing there, his body filling the doorframe. “It was a simple mistake,” she told him. “This boy’s already been cured. Must have got turned around in the system. He was so confused, poor lamb, he didn’t realise. I’ll take him back to recovery.”

“I’ll do that for you,” said the beefy man. “You have more important things to do.”

“No, no. It’s all right. I’m going that way, anyway.” She squeezed past him. The man stood aside to allow her through. Michael tagged along behind, his hand still in hers, like a small child being helped across the road. Then they were in the corridor again, the beefy man behind them and a clear path ahead.

“Do you know your way out?” Doctor Page whispered.

“Yes, but …?”

“No time for questions,” she said. “Cooper’ll be on his way, if he’s not here already. I want you to get out and keep going. I’ll cover for you here as much as I can, but it won’t be long before someone realises.”

She let go of Michael’s hand and stopped walking. He felt her touch his back and give it a little nudge: a signal for him to keep going. He took a couple of steps then glanced behind. She had already turned away from him and was walking in the opposite direction.

He breathed deep. He was back on the plan: get out now; think about it later.

The way back to the entrance was unimpeded by other people. He walked with confidence, giving the impression he had every right to be there. He held his breath as he walked past the buxom woman at the head of the waiting area. She didn’t so much as look up from her computer.

Emerging outside through the main entrance onto a landscaped gravel area, he realised how far away he was from his agreed rendezvous point with Otis. The main road lay some one hundred metres down a thin, gravel drive edged with trees and shrubs and he had at least a ten minute walk after that. Not exactly prescription for a quick getaway.

In those seconds that he paused, he heard footsteps on the gravel behind him. His heart beat faster, but as he turned, he saw that it was Elaine and her mum, their ginger hair bright in the autumn sunshine. He sighed with relief.

“Hi, Elaine!” he said, trying to sound all bright and cheery.

“Oh, hello,” said Elaine, that vacant stare on her face that reminded him of Jack.

“I just called my dad and he’s stuck in traffic,” Michael lied. “He doesn’t think he can pick me up. Couldn’t give me a lift, could you? Just to a bus stop or something?”

Elaine, now cured and unable to perceive his lie, looked up to her mother. “Mum, can we give Eric a lift?”

Her mother looked across at Michael. “Oh, hello again,” she said. “I suppose we could.”

He walked with them to an adjacent car park, a square of black tarmac layered with the yellow and red of fallen leaves from the overhanging trees. Elaine’s mum’s car was a light blue Renault which had seen better days, but was roomy enough. He got into the back seat. Elaine offered to sit in back with him and they made their way slowly up the thin, gravel drive.