Concrete dust swirled and spun like tiny tornadoes in the following silence. Jesus Lord. Jess got to her feet, choking on the thickened ait. The door was a twisted chunk of discarded metal lying against the opposite wall. She reached down and touched a ragged edge, yanked her hand away from the scalding heat. She could hardly believe what she had just seen. But the evidence was lying smoking and battered at her feet.
You ain't seen nothing yet.
Back in the outer room, she heard the elevator whir to life.
"Sarah?" Jess said. "We have to go. Now." No response. She peered into the wound where the door had been. Sarah stood just inside the opening. Her lips were blue and she was trembling.
"I was bad," she said softly. "And I liked it. I almost couldn't stop."
No seizures now, she's learning how to control it better. Or was that just a side effect of whatever they were feeding her?
Words rushed and stumbled over themselves in an attempt to get out. "They've been telling you this is bad ail your life, Sarah. I know they have. But they're wrong. We can work all this out later, but right now you can't think about all that, not if we're going to have a chance to get out of here. Do you understand? You have to trust yourself. This power is a part of you, just like anything else. It's nothing to be ashamed of--"
"Leave me alone!" Sarah shouted. "Please." She backed away again, into the corner of the padded room. "I'll hurt you, I'll hurt everyone, I won't be able to keep it down anymore."
The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. A moment later Evan Wasserman stepped into the hall. He was flanked by two big men wearing riot gear and protective goggles and carrying police batons in ugly, thick-fisted hands. She saw guns clipped to their belts. Not cops, Jess thought. But they sure as hell know what they're getting into down here.
She stepped forward, planted both feet, and gave her best bluff. "Hey. Where the hell have you been? She's already gone, I couldn't stop her."
"Shut the fuck up and step away from the door," one of the men said. She heard the fear in his voice, though he was trying hard to keep it down.
A syringe glistened in Wasserman's hand. "You'll never get close enough to her," Jess said.
"That's why you're going to do it."
"The fuck I am."
"She trusts you. You're the only one." Wasserman took a few steps closer. "You can help us, or not. But these walls are reinforced steel and concrete. They're specially made for this sort of thing. Nobody can hear you down here, and there's no way out. Why don't you make it easy on yourself?"
Wasserman's eyes were wild and his tie was missing. There was an air about him of absent neglect, like a home where all the lights were blazing and the grass grew tangled in the yard. He's lost it, she thought. He'll kill us both now.
And then, with the strength of a fist in the guts, it hit her; why he had agreed to let her into all this, why he had encouraged her to win Sarah's trust, but never given her any real freedom or power in the attempt. What do you do with a girl who defies everything you have ever believed about the world? A girl who cannot be controlled, locked up, sedated forever? A girl who has the power to destroy you? What do you do with her when you've been beaten?
"You end the game," she said. "On your terms. That's what this is about, isn't it?"
"She fought me," Wasserman said. "For all these years she fought me hard. She's ruined this hospital, ruined my life. I had a life once, you understand? Someone I loved. Do you know she's killed two men? I bet that's something you haven't talked about in your little counseling sessions."
His anger and fear seemed to explode from him as he came forward, closer. Jess could smell it like iron within his clothes, his sweat. "She hasn't taken any sedatives in two days," he said. "She's too strong. They've dosed her with something that multiplies the effect. Don't you see? You don't have any choice. We don't have any choice. From the moment she was born she's destroyed everything. It's gone too far now, too far. There can't be any more tests. Who knows what she could do, if she gets out of here!"
"I won't do it, Wasserman. I won't be your executioner."
"Then you're a liability." Wasserman fumbled in his jacket and came out with the gun from his desk drawer. His hand shook as he pointed it at her. "I'll ask you to get out of the way."
"The police know where I am," Jess said. "They'll be here any minute. You need help. Maybe we can talk to someone--"
"Don't try that juvenile psychoanalysis with me. I was treating patients when you were still riding a school bus. I know what I'm doing."
"Sarah's not your enemy."
"She's not even human!" Wasserman shrieked. Spittle flecked his lips. "She'll be the end of us all, do you hear me? You don't know the truth of it! She could rip the world apart by its seams--"
Jess sensed movement from the corner of her eye. Sarah stepped like a ghost from her padded cell. Wasserman paled. His mouth moved but no sound came out. They stood staring at each other in the silent hall.
Wasserman's hand shook holding the gun. Neither of them spoke. Jess was reminded for a fleeting moment of an old western, where the gunslingers met in the middle of the dusty road and faced each other down. Except in this version one of the gunslingers was a little girl, and her only weapon was her mind.
Do it, Jess urged silently. The hell with all of them. Push. Push hard.
She felt an answering squeeze, and the blood in her veins turned to ice. The temperature plummeted.
Sarah smiled.
The two men moved up to Wasserman's side and held their batons in both hands like clubs. "Take it easy," one of them said. "We don't want to hurt anyone. . . ."
Sarah looked from one man to the other. It happened as simply as a breath of wind; a sudden surge of air, a tickle in the back of her mind, and they were thrown backward as if a giant hand had reached out and punched them squarely in the chest.
They landed on their backs with a double thud, skidding across the smooth floor in a tangle of arms and legs, and came to rest still and silent at the threshold of the outer room.
The report of the gun was like a thunderclap in the narrow hall. Jess registered the bucking of Wasserman's hand, the sudden ringing in her ears, and then Sarah shrieked and stumbled backward. A voice answered inside her head, and the mental fist clenched with vicious force. Jess felt herself driven to her knees. Dimly she felt the blood inside her temples surge and throb. Something had been turned loose inside her skull, and now it scampered through fat gray coils and dug its talons into soft flesh. She struggled for consciousness, felt herself slipping, the past and present mingling like ghosts.
Michael, there's a car, get out of the road. . .
Jess bit down hard. The world spun and righted itself.
She looked up through splayed fingers. The frigid air cut like glass in her lungs. Mist swirled along the concrete floor, slipped in tendrils up the gray walls and boiled above their heads like little thunderclouds.
Sarah stood upright. A bloody stain spread over her left shoulder. Her eyes were wide and glittering, her fists clenched. Sweat dripped from her forehead.
The gun barked again, and again; Jess watched in wonder as the bullets slowed in midair, trembled, hung like tiny planets in a thickening wind. Finally they dropped harmlessly to the floor.
Wasserman shook the gun in his hand as if it had suddenly grown teeth and bitten him. It would not come loose. His flesh began to smoke as metal twisted and melted into his skin. He screamed. Then the look on his face changed. His free hand went to his neck. He coughed, made a sound like a dog with a bone caught in its throat. He shook his head, tried to back away, and stumbled.