Psion Delta (34 page)

“You
are surrounded by agents of the New World Government!” he called out as he
neared the doorway. “You are ordered to give yourselves up without further
altercation. Any more violent responses will be met with lethal force. Do you
wish to surrender?”

Of
course you’re not going to surrender. You’re sadistic sociopaths bent on
killing as many people as you can.

No
response came from beyond the billowing curtains. He blasted the curtains
inward and saw nothing. When they swung back and out the door, he grabbed them
and ripped them down with his good arm. Again, he checked from every possible
angle. Seeing no one, he went in the house.

The
back door led directly into the family den. A couch stood against the wall,
facing him. Flanking the couch on each side were reclining chairs. Opened food
containers and food littered the floor. Mud had been tracked on almost every
surface. Dried blood spots speckled the walls and floor here and there. Sammy
listened carefully for any noises, shielding himself on both sides, waiting
patiently for Al to arrive.

Muffled
steps came from upstairs. Muttering voices followed.

“Upstairs,
Fourteen!” a male voice shouted. “We have two hostages. A girl age ten. A boy
age six. We demand passage off the island. We demand a boat with an emergency
vessel. Once we have crossed into our own waters, we will release the hostages
into the emergency vessel unharmed and leave under escort of our own people.
Those are the terms!”

Sammy
swung his syshée back into his grip using his gun ring. “How can I agree to
your terms if I can’t see you?”

“We
can see you,” the voice replied. “The camera above the holo-screen is
transmitting your every move to us. If you put one foot on the stairs, we shoot
the girl. Put a second foot on the stairs. . . . ”

“My
com isn’t functioning!” Sammy lied. “So I can’t give anyone your terms. Another
Psi—Fourteen is on the way. Can I ask him to do that?”

A
long pause preceded the answer. Sammy could only assume the targets were
conferring amongst each other. “We accept that proposal.”

Sammy
tried to think of a solution before Al arrived. Bits and pieces of a plan
floated into his mind, a really good plan, it seemed, but the thing wouldn’t
come together. It wouldn’t let itself be
seen.
Every time he tried to
pull all the bits together in his brain, he thought of the two children, what
they had already gone through, and what they might go through if he didn’t
outsmart the five targets upstairs.

The
NWG does not negotiate with terrorists
, the voice in his head
reminded him.
These people must know that.

So
what do they really want?
Sammy asked himself.

He
thought of a chessboard and some of the tricks his father and Justice had used
to beat him. The memories helped him focus better. He looked around the room.
On the wall hung a portrait of a handsome family: Mom, Dad, and four kids. Four
kids. They smiled happily. The little girl’s focus was slightly off-camera. The
little boy grinned, showing off his missing teeth.
What about the two older
boys?

“Let
me speak to the kids,” Sammy called upstairs.

“No,
we will not agree to that.”

“Then
let them speak to me.”

“No.”

The
tone of the Thirteen’s voice confirmed what Sammy had expected after seeing the
picture. Rage replaced his fear.
The whole family is already dead.
He
took a deep breath and released it very slowly.
Control your emotions, Sammy
,
Byron had told him. He shook his head.
They killed one family, stole their
boat, abandoned that house and walked over here, then killed this second family
.
How many more people would they have killed before deciding it was time to
try and escape?

Quietly,
Al entered the home through front door. Sammy didn’t spare him more than a
glance. Carefully, Sammy reached into his backpack and pulled out the automatic
with an extended magazine and tossed it to his partner. Next, he checked the
syshée. Without moving his head, he glared up at the ceiling, calculating. Al’s
fingers counted down from three . . . then the Psions opened fire.

The
targets upstairs returned fire down through the ceiling, punching holes and
raining plaster and dust down on him. Sammy shot the camera atop the
holo-screen and took cover behind a chair. Large gaping holes appeared between
the two levels of the house. Sammy could see chunks of rooms above him, but no
enemies.

Al
signaled to the stairs, and Sammy nodded. His leg protested angrily as he
stood. They darted out from their cover, ran to the steps, and quietly climbed
them. Each stepped brought more pain up his left side. Stemming from the
hallways, Sammy counted four bedrooms. He went to the closest one and kicked it
open while Al did the same to the next. They cleared every corner of the rooms.
Nothing
. A study with a large desk, a bookcase, and a pinball machine.
Next was the two older boys’ room. The boys’ bodies were in the closet. The
stench was awful. The next one, he guessed, must be the master bedroom. A truly
horrible smell greeted him when he opened it. He found the parents’ bodies in a
scene too horrible to put into words. Sammy tried not to think of his own
father and mother, but couldn’t help it. Pain burst up and down his leg at the
sight. Fire erupted in his brain. How could Byron expect him to control his
emotions in the face of such revulsion?

There
was only one room left. Sammy walked toward it, flipping his gun back on the
ring to use his blasts. He had only a slight limp though the pain was
excruciating, like a bolt of lightning firing off every time he moved. On Al’s
face, Sammy saw a grim expression, and he imagined what his own face looked
like. They stopped at the door and listened. Sammy could hear them all inside,
breathing, hearts racing, waiting, guns pointed right at him.

Let
them be scared of me.

He
relished the reversal of this moment. A little under a year ago, he’d been
holed up in a bathroom terrified out of his mind. Him and one other person,
huddled together, waiting for the Thirteens to come and kill them. He wondered
what the Thirteens inside the room were thinking.

Here
come the Fourteens.

He
knocked lightly three times and then threw the door open. The room belonged to
the ten-year-old girl. The walls had been stenciled in purple flowers with
white polka dots. Many of the toys and decorations in the room were pink or
purple, including the bed sheets and pillows. On top of the bed lay the girl,
her mouth covered in tape, her hands bound, her face bruised and bloody. Sammy
had been wrong; she was alive. He wasn’t so sure about her brother next to her.

Al
went inside first, and Sammy followed. One of the Thirteens had thick black
hair that had recently been styled into horns. His eyes were dyed red, and he
had minimal scars. His gun was pointed at the girl. The second Thirteen Sammy
recognized now that he saw him up close. It was the same Thirteen he’d seen
long ago in a video shown by Byron on the day of his orientation into Beta.
This enemy wasn’t particularly tall, but had a bald head covered in dark scabs.
The two Aegis had guns trained on Sammy. So did Dr. Sokama. Not one of them had
anything more powerful than semi-automatics. Sammy’s eyes flickered back and
forth between the faces of the targets and the poor girl. Her eyes were wide
and fixed on him. In them Sammy saw the same pain and horror that he’d
experienced in his own past.

“New
deal,” he told the criminals, “you surrender and I let you live. You shoot at
me or her, you all die. I swear I will kill every last one of you.”

“Put
down the guns,” Sokama told her group. “It’s over.”

The
Thirteen with the scabs jerked his head several times and made a high-pitched
sound. The second Thirteen responded while the two Aegis watched their leaders
for marching orders.

Just
surrender for once. Please
.

A
gun went off. The girl on the bed jerked as the bullet entered her. Sammy
looked down at his own white shirt and saw her blood on it in several small red
spatters. He had thought nothing could affect him anymore—not after his parents
and Toad and Dr. Vogt and every other thing he’d witnessed—but something broke
inside of him at seeing such an act against a child. His face screwed up as
tears threatened to come to his eyes.

“WHAT
IS WRONG WITH YOU FREAKS?” he bellowed at them as he charged into the room.

Al
shouted something that Sammy couldn’t hear—didn’t want to hear.

He
went for the bald Thirteen first, blasting the two Aegis aside like dolls. The
other three guns in the room fired at him, but Sammy was too fast. He blasted
the bullets away without trouble. When he reached the Thirteen, he did what
came naturally. The pistol in his left hand fired a bullet into the Thirteen’s
left knee, then crossed over and put one into the right. The Thirteen dropped
to the floor. Still, shielding with his right hand the gunfire from Sokama,
Sammy shot the second Thirteen in the arm that held his weapon. The Thirteen’s
gun clattered to the ground. He turned to Sokama, who immediately dropped her
pistol.

Al
disarmed the Aegis before they could recover from Sammy’s blasts, keeping his
gun trained on them. “Move and you’re dead,” he told them.

The
bald, scabbed Thirteen groaned on the floor as he tried to get up despite blood
pooling out from his legs. Sammy quaked with rage as he approached him. “Why
did you kill her?” he asked the monster. “Why? TELL ME WHY!”

The
Thirteen grinned. “Last chance I got to bleed someone before you take me back
to prison.”

“Don’t
let him goad you, Sammy,” Al cautioned. “It’s what they want. They’re waiting
to see if you’ll make a mistake.”

Sammy
stared at him, then back at the Thirteen. “No. He’s not going back to prison.”
He looked around the room at the girl, still unable to mentally and emotionally
process her death. While his back was turned, the Thirteen with the horn-devil
hair moved to grab his gun. Sammy spun and shot him in the head with the
syshée. Sokama gasped and pressed herself into the corner.

Sammy
brought the gun back around to shoot the last Thirteen.

“Don’t,”
Al said again. “He can’t hurt anyone now. He’s done.”

That
wasn’t good enough for Sammy. He needed justice to be done. His finger pressed
on the trigger. All he saw was the little girl dying in front of him with
perfect clarity.

“Please,
Sammy—”

Sammy
pulled the trigger and watched the Thirteen die. As he did so, all traces of
discomfort in his leg vanished. A fleeting thought told him he’d never
experience that pain again.

“
Now
he can’t hurt anyone.” His voice was cold and empty. He turned to Dr. Sokama.
Junko Sokama. When he trained his gun on her, she began to quiver in the
corner.

“Please,”
she pleaded as she clenched and unclenched her hands. “You have no idea. They
made me do . . . things. I want to forget them all. I want to die. Please kill
me. Please. I didn’t know it—they—would be like this. Monstrous things!”

Sammy
punched through the wall right next to her face.

“What
did you think!” he shouted, hating the pleasure he felt as she sunk to the
ground. “You thought you were helping people by letting this filth out of
prison? Are you serious?” He kicked the wall next to her. She yelped. “Are you
really serious?”

“Please
kill me!” she screamed at him. “They made me drink something. It tracks me, and
they can kill me at any time. Just end it now!”

“If
I kill you, then what was the point of all this? These kids die for nothing!
Their parents died for nothing!”

“I
don’t know anything. They never gave us orders like they promised. They said
there was a plan to help us escape, but there was nothing! No plans. Nothing!
They were never even going to help us!”

“Then
what was the boat for? Huh? No plans to escape? THEN WHAT WAS THE BOAT FOR!”
Sammy felt his sanity tearing, fraying, splitting.

Control
your emotions
, Byron’s voice urged.

I
can’t!

“We
got the boat. We rigged it ourselves. Please kill me! I’ve told you everything.
Kill me before they do it.”

Sammy
stared at her, wondering how to grant her wish. Everything in this house, in
that mud-filled cave he’d been trapped in, the boat accident—all of it was
because of her. Her treason, her willingness to let these people do all manner
of horrific acts. Why? How could she stand and watch, or even participate? He
punched her in the face. Then he punched her again.
Why? How?
He punched
her a third time.

“Sammy?”
It was Al. He placed his hand on Sammy’s shoulder as gently as a falling leaf.
Sammy tried to shut him out and raised his syshée to Sokama’s head while she
cried. Her once pallid face was now purple and blue and red. It suited her
better.

Al
put his hand on the gun and pressed down on the barrel. “Our orders are to
bring them back alive.”