The Minus Faction, Episode One: Breakout (5 page)

Rows of hollow plastic limbs in a diverse selection of skin tones hung from hooks and rested on racks. A bank of dark computer equipment ran through the middle of the room. Large flat screens were mounted on brackets that hung from the ceiling.

"No one works here on Sundays." John pointed. "Stand in that corner. As close to the wall as you can."

Amarta stepped forward and disturbed a row of dangling cybernetic feet. It was creepy. She put her nose to the corner. The wall was cold. "Why do I feel like a dunce?"

"You can turn around."

Dr. Zabora complied in shuffling steps, keeping as close to the wall as possible.

"We're near the roof at the dead center of the building. The main power cabling for the whole complex runs behind those walls. In that corner, you're surrounded by enough concrete and enough magnetic discharge that anyone listening will get nothing but static."

Amarta crossed her arms and leaned against the two walls meeting at her back. John was several feet in front of her. "What about you?"

Regent smiled. "I'm clean, Doc. Trust me."

"You know, if this were anyone else,
any
one else at all, I would take this as evidence of severe paranoid delusion."

"Thinking they
are
out to get you is a lot different than just assuming they
might be
."

Amarta looked at the dangling limbs. Loose electrodes coiled from small openings like frayed nerves. Some were wrapped in plastic. "That makes entirely too much sense for where I'm standing."

"You hear about the coma patient with the bullet in his leg?"

Amarta turned back to John. "Did
they
have something to do with that."

John shook his head. "Not them."

"Are you saying
you
had something to do with that?"

Regent waited a moment to judge the doctor's reaction.

"John?"

"The place where I was held . . . I wasn't the only prisoner. Most people here think the world is full of countries with clearly defined borders, and inside those borders everyone is pretty much the same: Chinese, Indians, Russians. But there are parts of the world that are at least as diverse as your average American street corner, places where folks come from all over to work in mines or run pipelines. Arab money. Or Chinese. Western brokers taking a cut. Big time power plays planned by spies and politicians on kickback.

"Assuming you can speak anything but English, a black man doesn't stand out there. The guys who took me didn't know who I was. They just knew I was foreign. A mark."

"Mark?"

John nodded. "For ransom. It's a business. Organized crime. Shit, in that part of the world, I'm not even sure it's a crime. It's just business. Energy companies pay private security firms to keep the costs down, but it's just assumed some of their people will get took. If they have the budget that quarter, they pay. If not . . ." John shrugged. "These companies hire foreign talent. They ship them in, non-Westerners. If a German or an American gets kidnapped, it's bad headlines. So that's no good. And if you hire the locals, odds are some of them will have connections to a warlord and shit will get stolen. Or worse. So companies ship workers in. Damn fools get recruited from India or Nigeria or wherever. Dreams of big money. Most have families back home. Just poor folks trying to do the best they can."

Amarta was silent and still. John hadn't said this much ever.

"I was held in a big pit in the ground, hidden under a concrete building. Most of the cells were just 'leased.' Not too many long-term residents. Like with any inventory, the money is in the turns, right? Guys would either get ransomed or killed. But they didn't know who would pay for my lodging, so staying alive meant convincing them I had value, but not in a way that gave anything away."

"I imagine that wasn't easy."

"I was highly motivated. After a week or so I got moved to one of the special cells, deeper down. Just a big dug-out room. Cheap fluorescent lights overhead. Smell of dirt and the shit and piss from the buckets in the corner. There was an old woman there. Dirty, tattered robes. Looked like she was Tibetan maybe. Hard to tell. She'd been there awhile, that's for sure."

"How could you tell?"

"Her hair and fingernails. I ain't ever seen anything like that before. She was their medic, I think. Every now and then they'd bring someone down and she'd patch them up. She did everything with that kind of Buddhist serenity. She never argued, never tried to escape. Some of those guys over there, they don't think much about keeping a woman locked up. She just accepted it, like that was her life and she was going to live it on her terms."

John looked Dr. Zabora right in the eyes. "When I wouldn't give them what they wanted, the torture started."

Amarta took a long, slow, deep breath. She had asked for this.

"I mean, they had hit me, dunked me in water, stuff like that. But now it was a different crew. I'd dangled enough out there to make them think I was valuable, probably more than I should have because they got serious.
Real
serious." John looked down at his left hand, shriveled and clenched. "I couldn't take it. I would have told them anything."

"I think that's completely understandable, Captain."

"It wasn't the pain. Well, that too, I guess. I was scared. Afraid of letting everyone down. My unit. My country. My family. But . . . I knew I couldn't take it. It was only a matter of time."

Amarta frowned.

"One time they pulled back the skin from my scrotum. They hooked it up to a generator. I almost spilled it all right then. It was the smell more than anything. And the fear that I'd never . . . You know."

Dr. Zabora choked on a knot in her throat. She felt a tear gather in one eye. She was glad she had folded her arms earlier. It hid her shaking hands. She felt she needed to acknowledge such a personal admission. "I see. I--I can't imagine."

"I think the old woman saw it in my eyes, the fear. She knew a little Farsi and so did I. She started to teach."

"Teach?" Amarta kept swallowing the lump in her throat, but it wouldn't budge.

"A way to escape the pain. Some ancient, ancient shit, Doc. I didn't listen right away. Not really. I suppose no one wants to believe at first. But desperation—real desperation, the kind folks here don't ever have to experience—it drives you to do funny things." John snorted.

Amarta waited.

"I figured out how she could accept it. They had her body all right, but she was a pacifist and a master and her mind . . . Her mind could go
anywhere
. She taught me. She taught me how to leave my body." Regent looked his doctor in the eye again. "To project my consciousness."

He was serious. John was completely, utterly serious.

"The old woman can go anywhere, but I'm not that good. I still need a body to hold onto. It's easier if they're unconscious. Otherwise you gotta force your way in. I never quite got the hang of that."

Dr. Zabora's thoughts mutinied. They surrendered completely and her mouth fell open. She blinked. After a moment, she gathered the shattered pieces and scoffed. "John--"

But the soldier knew what she was going to say. "You're a scientist, Doc. You have two possible explanations here. You tell me what's more likely: that a coma patient woke up and didn't ask for a glass of water or anything, that he somehow knew how to rig his monitors so he wouldn't be missed, that he snuck out of the hospital without being seen and went to a drug house to convince them to stop selling pills to a fellow patient he had never met--"

"Gabriel . . ." Amarta whispered.

"Or that an old monk taught a man in pain a secret older than civilization, a way to hang on to the last shred of his dignity."

Dr. Zabora put her hand to her mouth.

"I'd come back from hitching and it would hurt—bad—from whatever they did. But nothing like having to live through it. The worst part was the fear—that I'd come back and find they'd cut off my dick or one of my hands or something." John chuckled.

Amarta didn't speak. She had no idea what to say.

John waited.

"I . . ." Amarta looked over John's head at the racks of limbs. Part of her wanted to believe. Part of her knew it was impossible and there must be another explanation. So she didn't try to decide. She couldn't. Not then. There was a more important question anyway. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you were right. Back in the room."

"About?"

"You're good, Doc. You used my own words against me. And you were right. Even if you repeated everything I just said—which you won't—no one would ever believe you. Ever. So we both win. You get the truth so you don't gotta go around worrying about me shooting anyone or killing myself, and I don't put you in any further risk. Everybody wins."

Dr. Zabora took a long, deep breath and exhaled. She was a psychiatrist, a scientist, an expert in human behavior. That's what she told herself anyway. Captain Regent didn't appear to be lying. Certainly he believed what he said was true. Was he that far gone? Was her ego, her desire to see progress in her patient, preventing her from accepting the truth?

Astral projection, or whatever it was, sounded an awful lot like Sergeant Wilkins's conviction that a global conspiracy of human collaborators was implanting alien mind-ghosts in people's heads, that the visitors were watching everything in secret from behind our eyes. Like John, Derek had a "healthy" paranoia. He believed he was being bugged, followed, and he was willing to kill his family and himself to prevent them from being infected.

Amarta knew that John Regent was made to endure the worst tortures imaginable. That much was sworn by the testimony of his body. Under such duress, had his mind simply cracked? Wouldn't anyone's?

It didn't matter whether Ayn had good intentions or ill. She could still be right. And if she was, then the captain needed to be hospitalized. Immediately. For his own sake.

John moved his chair in an arc toward the door.

"Wait." Dr. Zabora raised her arms. She hit the limbs above her head again. "That's it?"

John stopped. He swung the chair back around.

"John . . ." Amarta wanted to explain to him that knowing didn't make her feel any better, that if anything, stories of mind-hitching only pushed her more towards committal. Would that crush him? Would he think she was one of the bad guys? Her mouth hung empty of words.

Regent smiled. "It doesn't matter, Doc. Pretty soon things are going to be out of our hands anyway. I just wanted you to know the score." He turned again and pushed the door open with his good arm. "I'll call my pops tomorrow and tell him it's no dice. Get Corporal Gonzales admitted. Save the one you can." John rolled into the hall.

The door swung shut and Dr. Zabora repeated the soldier's words in her mind.

Save the one you can.

T Minus: 051 Days 01 Hours 12 Minutes 25 Seconds

John lost his best friend in Suriname. He left Danny's body in a ditch after shooting him in the head. Danny looked up at John with no fear, no remorse. He'd been caught. John had orders. Danny would have done the same. He was good. But John was better. John didn't have a wife, didn't have a family he'd leave fatherless, didn't have kids he was trying to put through college by selling biological weapons on the black market. John picked up his gun from the mud. Danny was on his knees, blood mixing with rain. Danny was the only man in the unit who knew things about John, personal things. That's why they sent him. After the shot, John ran through the jungle, seventeen miles in a relentless rain, and mourned his friend. But when he made the extraction point, he put it away. For the unit.

John lost the only woman he had ever loved when she smiled and said her vows to another man. The sun was shining. The church was full of people. John's tux didn't fit right. He was best man. He felt like an ass and a liar standing up there in front of everyone pretending to be happy. But she wasn't pretending. The couple laughed and danced into the night. John never told her how he felt. She never knew. Later that night, when he was finally alone in his hotel room, John cried for his love in quiet, feather-light heaves. Then he went for a dawn run and put it away forever. For his friends.

John was overseas on his first big mission when his sister's life fell apart, when her husband left her with a toddler and a baby, kicked her and them out of the house. And hit her. At least once. John was thousands of miles away doing things human beings shouldn't do to each other. It was weeks before he got the email. It was just like with their stepmom. His sister could never seem to escape it. Only now John wasn't there to look after her. Or the kids. He suited up and ran through the wind-blown desert, tears evaporating in the heat along with the sweat. When he got back to base, there were new orders and he put his pain away. For his country.

John was seventeen when his stepmom sent his little brother to the hospital. He stayed with him until the boy made him leave. John had a game that night. It was the state finals. He was the star. Everyone was counting on him, including Jojo. John plowed over the other team's defensive line. He ran and ran and ran. He scored three touchdowns. He was graduating in the spring, going into the army. His brother and sister would be alone with the woman. He cried under his helmet before the game. Then he put it away. For the team.