The Talented (3 page)

“No, I don’t think that’s the reason,” Kate smiled back at me, “but now that you mention it, how did that happen?”

“It happened at work,” I answered, technically telling the truth. Sort of. “Occupational hazard.”

“Ooooh,” she purred, “and what is this dangerous, exciting job of yours?”

She was flirting with me, that I knew even without my abilities, and a small part of me wondered about her motives while the rest of me was getting lost in her smile. I felt my pulse begin to quicken, and for a moment I felt a flutter in my stomach. Oh my God, I thought, she was using the power of her mind to seduce me. So this is what it felt like to be on the receiving end. It felt really good on the surface, but underneath I was uncomfortable, and I knew I had to stop it. Having no experience at defending against attacks from others, I followed some advice that Gus once gave me. In my mind I conjured up an image of a huge, heavy vault door closing, pouring all of my focus into it. As it slammed shut I heard a sharp clang in my head, and immediately Kate gasped and pressed her fingertips to her temples. Then her eyes rolled back as she started to fall from the stool. I quickly wrapped my arm around her, holding her up.

Ken, the young bartender with the sandy blonde hair, looked up at us and frowned. I bent his thoughts, making him believe that she had too much to drink and that I was helping her. I used my left hand to pull out my debit card and pay for our drinks, then slowly stood, supporting her weight with my right arm, and pulled her up to a standing position. She had begun to regain consciousness, if barely, and was able to walk with my assistance. It was then that I saw some drops of blood on her dress, and looked up to see her nose bleeding. Now I was really scared that I had hurt her badly, and thought of Gus unmoving in his hospital bed. As we made our way to the elevators I willed everyone around to avoid us and not notice or remember our passing.

Once we got to the door of my condo, I fumbled my keys with my left hand, dropping them once before succeeding in opening the door. Shutting the door with my mind I laid her down on my leather sofa, then dampened a washcloth with warm water and began to clean the blood off her face. It appeared that the nosebleed had stopped on its own, and I had her cleaned up shortly, apart from her dress which I’m sure was ruined. I sat down at the sofa and rested her head on my lap with my left hand gently stroking her hair. I have always had large, strong hands and her head looked so small next to my hand.

When I first met Gus he was already comatose, but was quite lucent in his thoughts, and that’s how we got to know each other. He knew so much about the use of mind powers and convinced me that I was not crazy, that the voices in my head are real, and that I had a great gift. For a few years his focus was teaching me to reach into the minds of others with the intent to heal them. I had no shortage of mental patients to practice on, but it was difficult, delicate work. It was one of the great disappointments of my young life when I failed to heal Gus. He was too far gone.

Turning my attention to Kate, with her mental barrier temporarily down, I gently probed her mind for damage. Her psyche was like nothing I had ever felt before, so complex and strong, almost beautiful. It was like a masterfully played symphony, compared to normal minds, which were like so much noise. It was not damaged, just strained. I allowed my power to flow over her psyche, healing it and lending it strength. Then I gently withdrew. I watched her sleep for a minute and almost fell asleep myself, so I got up and took a long, hot shower. In the shower I thought about the woman in the other room. Why was she trying to seduce me? Was it simply that she found me attractive or did she have an ulterior motive?

After drying off, I threw on a cotton t-shirt and boxers and stepped back into the living room to check on Kate. She was awake and sitting up, pointing a shiny and absurdly small gun at me. Her mental barrier was back up, stronger than before, but I didn’t need to read her mind to recognize the look of hostility and resolve on her face. I immediately willed my thought processes to accelerate exponentially, and as I did my perception of time around me slowed almost to a stop. This was a trick I had learned in the mental hospital to give me peace when the other patients became too noisy and erratic for me to bear. It also helps me with bullets, sometimes.

The hammer of the small pistol finally fell and I saw a slow eruption flash soundlessly from the barrel, followed by the dull bullet, which glided toward my head. While it does improve my speed and reflexes, the main problem with being in this state is that my muscles, bones and tendons can only move so fast without suffering major tears or breaks. To my perception, I move almost as slow as everything else, and slower than the bullet, so dodging at this range is not very practical. Instead I grabbed the bullet with my mind and held it fast, stopping it about 10 inches from my face, disbursing its kinetic energy. Then I saw the flash of the second bullet, and I stopped it right next to the first. Then I did the third, fourth and fifth until the pain in my head started up again and I knew that I could not keep this up forever. I let the bullets begin to drop to the floor and mentally wrenched the gun from her, careful not to break her finger with the trigger guard. I then eased my perceptions back to the normal flow of time. My fear gave way to anger, which was the only thing keeping me from giving in to exhaustion.

Kate stood there motionless, looking at the bullets on the carpet and back up at me. Despair began to leak through her barrier, and her eyes grew shiny with angry tears. She scowled at me bitterly and with a rough voice said “Go ahead, get it over with. I’m not afraid to die. What are you waiting for?”

Not knowing how to respond to that, I paused, my voice a bit shaky from adrenaline when I spat out, “What the hell are you talking about? You just tried to kill me, remember, not the other way around. I don’t even know you. What did I ever do to you?” Then a thought came to me. “Did someone send you? Was it Usher?” I can’t believe this. I finally meet someone who is like me, who maybe even has some answers, and she is a murderer. “So tell me, how does someone like you hear the thoughts and feelings of others, see the world through their eyes, then gun them down in cold blood? How is that possible?”

Kate narrowed her eyes and said, evenly, “You want to play it that way? That’s your story? Fine, just open your mind to me and prove that you’re telling the truth. Of course, you won’t, because you aren’t.”

The wiser part of me knew that it was a bad idea, that I could not trust her inside my head. My ability was much stronger than hers, that was clear, but she seemed to know a lot about how to use it. Still, she seemed genuine, and I become an idiot around beautiful women. Even now, after everything, I noticed how good she looked in that dress, one strap now fallen down past her perfect shoulder along her delicately sculpted upper arm.

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll open up to you. But if you try to harm or influence me I’ll retaliate and won’t hold back. Do you understand?”

Her eyebrows raised in cautious surprise, “Okay. Go for it.”

I brought forth the vault door image in my mind and opened the door slightly, just enough to allow her in. At first I felt her in my most outer thoughts tentatively probing, then she flooded in, throwing the door open wide. I gasped as all of me was laid bare before her, my fears, my dreams, my memories and my fantasies. She probed everything that I felt from the moment I saw her, saw herself through my eyes as I brought her up to my place and healed her mind. Kate felt the power I wielded in stopping the bullets, and most importantly, she knew that I had never killed another living thing in my life, and even now had no intention of killing her. It was embarrassing when she explored my attraction to her, loitering there for more than a few moments. Panic ran through me because I was helpless before her and was not able to regain control. She lingered for a moment, feeling over my psyche with a sensual, satisfied look on her face, and withdrew. It felt as if my legs turned to water from under me as the world turned black for the second time in one day.

CHAPTER THREE

I woke up on the floor in the same spot where I fell. At least Kate had covered me with a blanket. My feet protruded out from under it and felt like ice. My senses were immediately assaulted with the mouth-watering smell of hickory-smoked bacon and fresh, hot coffee. Hunger gripped my stomach as I realized I had not eaten since lunch the previous day. I scraped myself off the floor and drifted into the kitchen to find Kate pouring herself a fresh cup of coffee wearing nothing but one of my favorite long t-shirts. The gray cotton fabric was thin but very soft. When she turned and saw me she smiled knowingly and said, “Good morning.”

“Morning.” I pointed at the breakfast feast on the table, so hungry I could hardly think of anything else. ”I see you ordered breakfast.”

“It was the least I could do after all I put you through.” She handed me a mug of hot, black coffee as we both sat at the table. “Here you go, just the way you like it.”

I took the coffee and tasted it. Exactly the way I like it. And how exactly does she know that? I frowned and replied, “Thank you, I think.” I took a bite of bacon, which was possibly the best thing that had ever happened to me. “Um, about last night. How much of me did you, uh, explore? It felt like you went really…deep.”

Kate leaned forward, “You have no idea. No man has ever shared himself so fully with me.” She laughed as my face blanched. “Seriously, I just probed your memories of last evening and checked to see if you were a killer. Nothing else. Needless to say, you passed the test, so please let me tell you how sorry I am about, you know, the gun thing.”

“Oh, you mean the part when you tried to kill me, that gun thing?”

“Adam, please hear me out, okay? I had good reason to be afraid, but in order for me to explain you need to know the whole story.”

Reaching for a biscuit I replied, “This should be good.”

Her eyes became serious, “Nothing good about it. Pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee because this is a long story.”

“That’s okay,” I chuckled, “I’m a good listener.”

Looking at me doubtfully, she began, “Okay. First you need to know more about me or none of this is going to make any sense. From my earliest memory until I was seven I lived in a boarding school. It looked like a typical school of its time with cinder block walls and dented radiators running along the walls. The main difference between that school and others is that in addition to math, reading and social studies we learned psionic theory, telepathy, psychokinetics, and remote viewing. Every child there was psionically gifted. Like you, Adam. Every child there was like you.”

“This is insane,” I interrupted, “You are the third person I have ever known to have these abilities. Now there are enough to fill a school? How can that be? Where do you all hide?”

Kate sipped her coffee and replied, “What happened to being a good listener? We all inherited our talents from our parents. The school was run by an organization for the psionically talented, and one day we were intended to graduate from school and devote our lives to it. We always called it the Program, not knowing the real name. Maybe that was the real name. Anyhow, it was a very unusual upbringing. None of us had lives or homes outside of the Program. Everything we knew of the outside world we learned from television. After school we would hang out together in the rec center, which had a little color TV mounted to the ceiling. God, I loved that TV. I would hang out by the TV with my friends Travis and Ashley--they were twins--and we would alternate between watching TV and watching the other kids. I can still see it now so clearly. On any given day, Stuart and Tracy would be hanging out with Nate and Justine at the pool table. They were the cool kids, and popular to the point of hero worship. Stu was witty and good looking but his defining characteristic is his pearl white hair. He doesn’t dye it; that’s his natural hair color. It lent him an air of mystery. Tracy was the blond bombshell and was always all over Stu. Nate was the opposite. Whereas Stuart was polished and refined, Nate was rough and rebellious. He and Justine were constantly getting into trouble. One time they escaped with the help of a former graduate named Clare and were gone for a whole weekend.”

“Wow,” I mocked, “What a scandal! What did they do, go to a movie?”

“Who knows for sure,” Kate answered, “but I heard later that they went to a bar. It was actually a big deal.”

“And where were your parents when all this was happening?”

Fresh pain radiated out from her mind. I struck a nerve with that question.

“All the adults, including our parents, lived and worked in the fortress.”

“The fortress?” I asked doubtfully. “Seriously?”

“Make fun,” Kate replied, “But that was what it was, sort of. What a building! It was one of the biggest, most bizarre structures I have ever seen. Stuart once told me that the compound was originally intended to be a fort in the early nineteenth century to defend against British bombardment. Everything about the surrounding countryside was built with defense in mind. The landscape sloped to expose any oncoming attackers while giving the defenders the advantage of high ground. The concrete outer wall of the building was star shaped, each point of the star being a rampart, which would have been bristling with artillery. Like this.”

She laid out the bacon pieces in a star shape, sort of.

“It was the most ambitious fort in America at the time, and expensive. So much so that it was never finished, but when it was rebuilt for the Program it maintained that fortress-like appearance. My daddy once told me that most of the structure was underground. That was where everyone…lived.”

Her face betrayed no emotion, but grief poured out of her in waves. It was enough to make it hard to breathe.

“Your father,” I whispered, “what happened to him?”

Kate got up and looked out the window. Standing up, her legs looked never-ending. I tried not to stare. Mostly.