“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.
A storm was building inside the hall. Jess could sense it coming, a feeling like going deeper underwater.
Wasserman’s hand had left his throat and now clutched at his bulging eyes. Blood trickled between his fingers.
“No,” Jess said. “Sarah, stop it. You’re going to kill him.”
Wasserman’s feet left the floor. He rose as if lifted by a wind. His head was thrown back now and his limbs were quivering. Blood dripped from his face and was sucked away by the quickening air. His head snapped once to the right, then back again, and then he was tossed lightly to the side and discarded.
A low cracking sound came from under the floor. The tiles shuddered, groaned in protest. Every window in every door blew outward in a rain of flying glass. Jess touched moisture on her face, drew her bloody fingers back. The pounding in her head was fast and furious. Her vision faded, came back again in yellows and reds.
Sarah headed for the stairs at the end of the hall. The door slammed open, twisted on its hinges. She climbed the steps and disappeared out of sight. Tendrils of gray fog slithered after her.
She’s not going to be able to stop.
Jess struggled to her feet. Every step was an agony of thudding pain. Moans and squeals of protest rose up all around her as the building took on weight, felt the squeeze of unseen hands.
A shot rang out. Someone screamed from the upper levels. Two more shots in quick succession. The world crashing down around her, Jess ran for the stairs. Her brother’s face came as clear to her as if he had been standing at her feet. You will not get away from me this time. Not again. She repeated it to herself as she took the steps two at a time, as she emerged into a hailstorm of destruction on the upper floor. Great cracks ran along the walls, Wasserman’s door gone, his office turned upside down; three more bodies on the floor, a lot of blood, more guns lying useless against the wall. Papers, wood, and bits of concrete still settling in the wake of Sarah’s passage.
Something was wrong. The air had lost its energy all at once, as if a charge had been released. Jess spotted two men in attack gear and rifles peering out from behind doors at the other end of the hall, at the smaller body lying facedown a few steps away.
Then she heard a puff and felt a fist hit her in the right shoulder, and darkness welled up and slipped over her head, taking her down deep with it.
—36—
She awoke to silence, blackness arching overhead into seemingly limitless distance. Her head felt stuffed with cotton, her tongue swollen thick as a sock in her mouth. For a moment she thought she was back in her childhood bed once again, waiting for the sound of the key in the lock at the front door. Then something changed, but in her muddled state she didn’t realize immediately what it was.
Finally she was able to focus enough to find meaning in the face peering down at her.
Ronald Gee smiled, his eyes glittering in the light cast from a distant portion of the room. “There you are,” he said. His voice seemed to cup and then release her. “Better take it easy. You were hit with a pretty heavy tranquilizer. We were starting to wonder if you were coming back.”
“Let me up,” Jess said. Her voice sounded different in her ears. A stranger’s voice. She tried to lift her arms and could not. Something was very wrong. Gee was not doing anything to help.
“We don’t have long,” he said. “She’ll know you’re awake in a moment. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“Why on earth—you? You’re in on this?”
“It’s all part of the overall scheme of things,” Gee said. “I don’t expect you to understand right away. Dr. Shelley can explain things better than I can. But I want you to know that nothing bad has to happen to you. We can all get what we want out of this. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth.”
“Where’s Sarah?”
“She’s safe. You should know that, if you really consider it.”