Orgonomicon (8 page)

While he took the green light around the room
burning all organic traces of them away, SEL6210 muttered these
painful, uncomfortable thoughts to himself and wondered if the
computer would approve.

He didn't see his partner sighting down the
barrel of his gun at the back of his head.

SEL6210 packed the sterilizer away into his
briefcase, turned to report his progress to his commanding officer,
and saw only an angry middle-aged man preparing to kill a woman who
hadn't been following her programming, using a human puppet who
loved her as the weapon. The docket assignation yielded multiple
results, some of which were intriguing from an intellectual
standpoint: background DOR-levels needed to be maintained at a
certain level or the machinery failed and every murder contributed
to the local field; the RomInt's mode of extermination may or may
not confuse the subject's programming and this operation would give
the chance to study that; the act itself would initiate Omega-level
programming and bring the subject to graduation. The RomInt had
undergone standard Monarch trauma-base procedures as per protocols,
and somehow self-corrected. The computer recorded that she'd been
through the whole torturous rite and role, and still would not
disengage when ordered.

And why, exactly, were they exhausting the
Agency's resources overseeing this personally? Usually the computer
managed the social-distress protocols.

It was complicated.

Karen fell back exhausted into the couch
relaxing at last, the headache finally relenting. It was the first
moment she'd had in three days without the constant, pounding pain
behind her forehead. She'd gone through five bottles of different
pills, but none of them had done her any good.

The pain always announced itself with
uncontrollably horrible thoughts that came to her against her
will—the worst things possible. She imagined herself killing
Emmanuel, she imagined killing herself. She had visions of people
being tortured, visions of fingers and toes chopped off with sharp
knives, had seen rapes and mutilations, witnessed uncountable
terrifying violations of her mind's eye. There was no getting away
from it, no escaping the inner TV. It didn't have an off-switch,
and it was always horrifically violent. For three whole days.

Emmanuel was a lucky man, had no idea how
lucky he actually was, not to have a pair of scissors lodged
between his ribs, snipping important tubes connected to his
heart.

Jaime had tried to tell his parents about the
two men in the van that followed him on his way to school, he
honestly had.

He tried to tell his parents about it but he
had nothing to show them and, of course, they hadn't believed him.
No one ever believed him about anything, and so he'd stopped long
ago trying to tell them—not about the funny little man with the big
eyes who said he was a friend but hurt him with strange lights, not
about the lizard people, not about the skinless lady made of
lightning who talked to him about things he couldn't remember. No
one believed him about how he went flying at night, about how he
made the magnets at school non-sticky just by playing with them,
about how batteries died when he touched them, none of it. It was a
terrible burden for one little boy alone, and no one missed the
opportunity to remind him that he was alone with it.

The nightmares had started when he was four
years old. In them, the monster was usually hidden behind bright
white lights and made him do strange things in his sleep, before
taking something away from him that he couldn't remember but missed
achingly. Something very wrong, something that he knew he
needed.

He had the same nightmare, every night, for
three weeks running, and then it suddenly stopped. His brothers
teased him mercilessly about it, though he was unable to make it
stop. The next string of bad dreams were about being pulled through
the wall and taken to the metal room, where horrible people did bad
things to him that he couldn't remember. He always had
nightmares.

Sometimes he had nightmares that happened
during the day, when he was awake.

Like the time he saw the invisible person at
his school, running across the playground faster than anybody
could, like a bolt of clear lightning. It had stopped and turned to
face him, staring at it open-mouthed through the window in his
classroom; it waved a hand at him and Jaime became suddenly aware
that he was surrounded by the invisible beings, and then it had
gone.

Jaime had been removed screaming and stayed
home for three whole days; this was when he started being taken to
the doctors. And his parents were crazy for the doctors; they
couldn't get enough of them, he was always in one doctor's office
or another, treating his ADD or his asthma or crooked teeth. He had
a handful of different pills he had to take every morning, just to
try to be normal.

No one knew what was wrong with Jaime, or
what he was seeing.

The first doctor they'd taken him to was the
nicest.

He'd given him a comfortable chair and talked
to him the whole time in a calm, slow voice. At one point he'd
said, "I'd like to try a little light hypnosis," but then Jaime
didn't remember anything after that because he'd fallen asleep.
When he went back for his next visit a week later, the doctor had a
little wood-paneled radio that he sat down before the boy, telling
Jaime to turn it on only after he'd left the room. He'd waited
until the doctor left and then switched it on just as he'd been
shown; the radio set made no sound other than a very quiet hiss. He
sat back in the chair and waited patiently, but nothing seemed to
be happening, and so he fell asleep. Jaime seemed to sleep a lot
when he went to see the talking doctor.

The next doctor he went to was not so nice.
Jaime didn't like the way the man put his hands on the back of his
neck and pressed, sliding the bones around into painful positions.
He tried to tell his parents that he didn't like going to the
painful doctor, cried and pleaded with them not to make him go, but
they refused to let him get out of it. It was an adjustment he'd
learned to accept.

The pain was familiar to him by the time he
went on the field trip to the aquarium with the entire fifth grade.
It was weird, seeing so many kids in one place, herded around like
farm animals. It had almost been enough to distract him from all
the rest of the strange happenings going on around him.

It hurt to turn his head so much, trying to
take in all the sights and make sense of the unusual circumstances;
at least half of it didn't make sense. There were people dressed in
costumes, but only a small number of them belonged to the aquarium;
most of them were characters from the theme park across town. There
wasn't any good reason for them to be at
this
park. And
there were a whole bunch of men in black suits, way more than
seemed normal, and none of them had kids with them. Something about
the men in suits made Jaime nervous; it seemed like they were all
staring at him from behind their dark sunglasses. One of them saw
Jaime watching him and took a step toward the boy, speaking into a
mouthpiece and reaching purposefully into his jacket as if he was
going to pull out a gun or something, but then the tour had
started.

Their first stop was the dolphin tank. Jaime
wanted to watch the dolphins leaping to take the fish from the
trainers' hands, but the pain in his neck wouldn't let him make any
sudden movements with his head. The other children clapped and
cheered every time the splash announced another successful
performance, but Jaime's eyes stayed glued to the giant metal plate
in the floor on which they all stood.

But wait—another moment, and Jaime noticed
that it was only the kids and the lolly-gaggers who were standing
on the metal—the men in suits and the aquarium staff were all
pushed off to the sides of the room, watching from a safe distance.
Jaime wanted to move over by them, to separate himself from the
crowd; a disaster certainly was about to happen. He had images of
the glass wall of the tank breaking, drowning them all beneath a
freezing tidal wave full of predators, of the floor beneath them
opening like a giant mouth and dumping him into a tank full of
sharks, and of a jellyfish that attached itself over his head.

He didn't think he could be the only one made
so uncomfortable by the looming tank full of danger; looking
around, he saw one kid that he thought he recognized―but how could
he? How could he have felt the stab of recognition, that he'd seen
and done things, important things, with this kid he'd probably
never actually met before in real life? He could have been anybody
or nobody, except that he was somehow so familiar. It was
impossible; this kid hadn't come with his class, was at least a
couple years younger than him, but he felt like an older brother,
if that wasn't too weird to believe. He was short, with light sandy
brown hair and brown eyes that pressed into his brain, dressed in
hand-me-downs like him...but he really just looked like any other
kid in the world.

And then the dreadful imposition began again,
and Jaime forgot all about the other boy.

The nightmarish visions were intense,
impossible to ignore, and Jaime found that he wasn't the only one
not at peace with his thoughts—the rest of his classmates, to a
one, squirmed uncomfortably in their places, were staring blankly
straight ahead with expressions of dread openly displayed on their
faces. The animals swam past the glass in front of them, but no one
gasped and no one sighed, the room gone dull and spiritless.
Something hummed.

He watched while two of the worst kids in his
class (a couple of jerks, they were always mean to him for reasons
he couldn't figure) changed in front of him, their eyes becoming
like steel BB's and their limbs locked in rigid positions, and a
terrible daydream of marionette-puppets flickered behind his
eyelids. He blinked and looked again, but whatever transformation
had taken them over was gone again just as quickly and now they
looked tired more than anything.

The bottoms of his feet itched, and whenever
the horrible daydreams were at their strongest, the itching was
impossible to ignore. Jaime couldn't take it any more; the pain in
his neck and the general discomfort, the noxious stink of fish and
hundreds of young children and their spectacle, the generalized
feeling of missing out, someone's face that he'd already forgotten.
It was all just too much. Eleven years old was too young to feel
like this, wasn't it? He didn't want to be here anymore.

William didn't know why the other kid seemed
so familiar to him, or why the boy was supposed to forget about
him, or how he'd done it; he'd made eye-contact and felt the same
shock of recognition, but then looked away to a spot above the
boy's shoulder and the spell had been broken. The electricity had
built and then faded away. It was not to be.

And anyway, he had his parents to ditch. He
managed to slip away while several of the dolphin handlers
orchestrated an elaborately-choreographed trick, the audience
applauding and all attention focused on the performance. They were
too busy fighting, anyway; why should they notice his absence? He
wouldn't be gone long, just long enough..

William ducked behind a velvet rope when no
one was looking and disappeared down a long, dark hallway. He
didn't know where he was going, nor did he really care—he just
wanted to find out what was around the next corner. Stairs went
down somewhere deep below; he followed them and left his parents
very much behind.

The stairway ended at a T-junction and there
were voices coming from the right-hand passage. William looked to
the left and had second thoughts about his escape plan, seeing a
hall even darker and spookier than where he'd just been, but there
were lights and people the other direction and it was still much
too early to get caught out. He swallowed back his fear, took one
last look down the forbidding passage and stepped deeper into the
dark. There wasn't anything to see for a long while; the passage
had running lights up along the ceiling, but otherwise everything
was shadowed and there were no doors or other exits or anything to
make it interesting. William was about to turn back when the voices
behind him suddenly got louder and a bright light shone on his
backside, casting his long shadow before him. He had just enough
time to consider running away, when they shouted harshly at him and
footfalls closed the distance between them.

A hand seized him by the shoulder. "Hey kid,
shouldn't you be in school?"

When he answered, "I'm here with my parents,"
one of them struck him across the face and flashed a bright light
in his eyes. He wouldn't have remembered even that much if it
hadn't been for what happened later.

They'd led him by the hand back to his
robot-like parents, who by now had stopped fighting and moved on to
the next viewing area. This room was also set with a giant metal
plate in the floor on which William was made to stand; there was a
'click!' that was followed by a buzzing hum and then a creeping
sensation layering some kind of sticky heat on top of him. Whatever
it was that crawled up from the floor and crept over his skin, it
was bad, like a swarm of insects threatening to bite. The crawling
rose above his neck and started to invade his nose and ears. And
something in William shut down and turned off.

With nothing of his conscious mind butting in
to tell him that it couldn't be done, William adjusted the fine
contours of his electrical body; wherever the creeping field of
static charge issuing from the floor tried to overtake his own
natural fields, William's body defended itself and repulsed the
attack. The mechanism hadn't been designed to handle such
conditions, and the oscillating inductance fields caused an
imbalanced cascade of dirty electricity that fried the guts of the
terrible device. William was entirely unaware of what he'd
done.