Mind Control: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 2) (13 page)

James returned to stand in front of Michael. “You won’t take over from me, you know,” he said. “They know me, they don’t know you.”

“I don’t want to take over,” said Michael. “I want to join.”

“You can never join,” said James.

In that moment, Michael decided to take his chance. With one concerted effort he concentrated his perception on James, blasting the boy’s blocks with all of his power.

James, taken by surprise, stumbled backwards.

He lost control for a second – Michael perceived a whiff of the boy’s superiority, his assuredness of power, the pride in his own ability – before James closed the doorway to his mind.

James’s eyes grew angry and he pointed a long, accusatory finger at him. “Perceiver!”

Like a war cry it echoed around the room. The troops began their advance.

The five norms left the walls they were leaning against and marched, in parallel, to the centre of the room. Screaming: “
Perceiver!
Perceiver!
Perceiver!
”

They clustered around him. Chad grabbed the hoodie he was wearing, lifted him from the chair and threw him to the ground. Michael’s body slammed to the floor. He felt the carpet under him – still damp with coffee – as his head banged down hard, sparkles flickering across his vision.

He screamed, kicking and lashing out with his fists as Chad ripped at his hoodie, pulling his arms from the sleeves. Chad tossed it across the room as Dave descended and grabbed his T-shirt. Michael looked directly into his face and perceived his mind: blank except for one instruction,
strip him naked
.

“No!” Michael cried, struggling as his T-shirt was pulled over his head, blocking out his view of Dave and disrupting the focus of his perception. With his T-shirt off and his torso naked, he worked to perceive the teenagers again. They had become one, the five minds all engaged in stripping him without a single thought of their own.

Michael kicked as his trainers were pulled off and his heel struck bone. He perceived the stab of pain in Laura’s jaw, but she didn’t yell or back away. Instead, she tossed the trainers behind her and came further up his body where she put her hands on his groin. He recoiled –as much as it was possible while being pinned to the ground – but she felt no taboo, no qualms, no sexual awareness as she undid his fly and yanked at his waistband, forcing his jeans down his legs. Four pairs of hands held his naked arms, shoulders and torso to the damp carpet as he fought to maintain his modesty. But as the cold of the room touched his genitals, he realised he had lost.

Someone – he wasn’t sure who – pulled the socks from his feet and so there he lay, arms and legs splayed out on the floor, stripped naked and held down by the five gang members. Michael could struggle, he could move his limbs by as much as a few centimetres, but he couldn’t break free.

He felt fear for the first time: his own fear. He was vastly outnumbered, no one knew where he was, no one would hear his cries for help on the desolate industrial estate. He could not reach his phone which had been tossed away with his clothes and his perception couldn’t help him.

James observed while he stood with folded arms as the other members of the gang did his dirty work for him. Michael still perceived nothing from James, but there was a smile on the boy’s lips which suggested satisfaction.

“Put him on the chair,” said James.

Michael’s perceptions of the others changed with the new instruction. Their hands pulled at his arms and shoulders, lifting him from the floor and placing him on the chair. His buttocks landed hard on the rigid cold wood of the seat as his spine slammed against its upright back.

Tie him up
…
tie him up
…
tie him up
…
the perceived whisper went around the five minds.

“No don’t!” cried Michael. “I can sit here, you don’t need to do that.”

But Chad already had the wire from the ripped out telephone in his hand. E-Boy held Michael’s wrists down to the arm of the chair as Chad wrapped the wire around it, cutting into his flesh, tight enough to restrict blood flow to his hands. All the while, the others held him down. Michael tried to resist at first, but realising it was a waste of energy, he stopped and let them do it.

They knotted the wire to secure his wrists and then they found an old computer cable to bind his ankles to the legs of the chair. Another was wrapped around his chest so he was forced to sit upright.

“What are you doing?” said Michael. But there was no use appealing to the five. The only other person thinking for himself in the room was James, who had taken up position perched on the edge of one of the desks.

The gang stepped away, leaving him shivering and helpless, naked on the chair with goose pimples of cold and fear rising on his skin.

Michael focussed his perception again, trying hard to get into James’s thoughts, but he was still unable to get past his blocks.

“You’re not getting into my head,
perceiver
,” said James, using the word like it was an insult.

Michael let his perception go. If the boy was that strong, then there was no way he was getting past those blocks without distracting him in a significant way. Something he couldn’t do while tied to a chair.

James stood from the desk and walked towards him. He leant forward so he was face to face with Michael. “You’re not taking over my gang,
perceiver
.”

“I didn’t want to take over, I just wanted to be a part of it,” Michael repeated.

He felt James’s perception probing to get into his mind again, but Michael kept him out.

“You’re not going to be part of anything,” said James. “Not now that you’ve found out about me.”

He stepped back from Michael, giving E-boy and Dave a passing glance as he took a wide, circular route back to his vantage point on the desk. Immediately, E-boy turned away from the others and left. Dave went round the room gathering up Michael’s clothes and brought them into a pile a short distance from his feet. He stood next to it: waiting.

E-boy returned holding a syringe. Michael thought he was going to be drugged until he perceived the instruction in E-boy’s mind:
take his blood
.

Michael looked at James. “What are you doing?”

But James merely smiled in answer, keeping the secret of his plan locked up behind his mental barrier.

The sound of ripping paper caused Michael to turn to see that E-boy had ripped open a sachet containing a sterile wipe. E-boy rubbed it across the inside of Michael’s elbow where a vein was close to the surface.

“Why do you want my blood?” said Michael.

James did not answer. The minds of the others didn’t seem to know.

Michael shuddered as the needle came towards him. He thought of resisting. He couldn’t break free of his bonds, but he could move enough to make it difficult for E-boy to pierce his vein. But that risked the needle plunging anywhere into his arm, piercing a muscle or even breaking off inside his body if he struggled too much. So he let E-boy do it, breathing in sharply as he felt the prick on his skin. Michael watched E-boy’s freckly face as the blood flowed into the syringe. It betrayed no emotion.

E-boy withdrew the needle, sponged over Michael’s skin with the same wipe, even though it was no longer sterile, pressed it down hard for a moment and dropped it to the floor. The pressure had not been long enough to clot where the needle had pierced the vein and a spot of blood oozed out onto his skin.

E-boy walked towards the desk, discarding the needle as he went and passed the vial of Michael’s blood to James.

“That’s all I need,” said James, secreting the vial in his pocket.

All you need for what?
Michael was about to ask, but before he could say anything, something triggered Dave to move. He pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket and flicked the catch so a flame was born. It danced in the unseen breeze.

Michael perceived the only thought in Dave’s head:
fire
.

“What are you doing?” Michael asked James.

James looked on, not seeming to care, as Dave lowered the flame to the clothes.

“Dave, don’t!” Michael pleaded. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

The cigarette lighter made friends with the cotton of Michael’s T-shirt and spawned a larger flame that reached up into the air in a new, more vigorous dance.

He realised, in that instant, they intended to burn him. To burn him to death.

Panic gripped him. He contracted the muscles of his arms and legs to break free from the chair, but the bonds held him tight. The more he struggled, the more the wires bit into his flesh.

Walk away
, the five were thinking.
Walk far away … and forget
…

The gang retreated into the dark where he could no longer see them.

“No, don’t leave me!” He struggled to break free from the chair, but he was as much part of it as the varnish that made the wood shine. “You can’t leave me here!”

In front of him, James left the desk. Michael looked at him. Directly at him, into his eyes, trying to find humanity in him. “Please,” he heard himself beg. “I’m a perceiver like you.”

James returned his stare and said nothing. The fire grew larger.

“This is
murder
!”

James turned away and followed the other gang members out of the door.

“For God’s sake!” Michael shouted after him. “At least call the fire brigade!”

At the last moment, as he disappeared from view, James allowed one thought to slip from his mind. A thought he knew Michael would hear:
Goodbye, perceiver. Forever
.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

FIRE BURNED THE
bundle of clothes a metre from Michael’s bound and helpless naked body. Myriad orange and yellow cones leapt from the pile, snatching oxygen from the air to bring back to the base of each flame where they continued to consume the material.

Michael felt the fire’s deadly heat getting stronger. It wasn’t yet burning him, but the hairs on his shins were close to scorching and it was only a matter of time.

He had hoped the fire would burn itself out when it reached the damp nylon carpet. But, within the black smoke rising into the air, was the smell of melting artificial fibres and he feared the fire would soon gain hold of the dry wooden floorboards underneath.

He pulled at the telephone and computer wire wrapped round his wrists and ankles, but all it did was make the knots tighter. With every effort, he wriggled his right wrist, jostling his hand to try to slip it underneath the restraint, but his hand was too large and the gap was too small. They had bound him to the chair well.

Water was in his eyes, from the increasing smoke and the fear of being burnt to death. Except, he realised, he wouldn’t burn to death. The smoke would kill him first. Taken into his lungs instead of oxygen, he would be so desperate to breathe, that he would gasp down more and more of the poisonous air until he passed out. While unconscious, the fire would spread to his naked body and eat the flesh off his bones until the only thing anyone would find in the debris would be his charred skeleton.

Michael coughed. The smoke was thicker. He looked above him and saw how it gathered at the ceiling.

The fire had almost exhausted the fuel in the clothes and was spreading. It bit into the floorboards as it crept in all directions to look for new food.

Michael coughed again. In reflex, he drew in another contaminated breath of heat and carbon. His body spasmed in repeated, desperate coughs.

He didn’t have long. If he was going to get out of this, he had to do something now.

It was then he saw the corner of his phone, sticking out from what once must have been the pocket of his jeans. The plastic casing was melted and the screen blackened and warped. Even if he could somehow tip over the chair and reach it with his fingers, it would be useless.

“Help!” he cried out, even though there was no one there to hear him. “Help!” He kept calling until the coughing made him stop.

His only hope was to get free of the bonds.

He looked at the tight knots in the wire that bound him, as smoke choked up his eyes and filled his mouth with its toxicity. If he could reach them with his teeth he might be able to undo them.

He yanked his shoulders forward and felt the wire across his chest cut into him, forcing him back against the chair.

He looked at the knots, so easy to undo if only he could reach them. As his mind clouded, he imagined untying them. He wished they would untie, with all his will.

A knot appeared to loosen.

He was hallucinating. He had to be hallucinating.

But he wanted it to be true. He wanted it so much to be true.

He focussed his will to loosen it even more.

Before his eyes, the intertwined ends of the wire slackened. They slithered back the way they had come, untying the knot like a snake under the power of a snake charmer.

Through shallow, smoke-filled, choking breaths, he watched the impossible. The two ends of the wire untangled from the knot and fell free from his wrist.

Michael lifted his unbound hand to his face, shaking as he wiggled his fingers to see if it was true.

No time to think. Not able to breathe. Heat blistering his legs. He used his fingers to pick at the knots holding his other wrist. In seconds, that was free too and he was untying the knots that held his ankles. He grabbed the wire around his chest with both hands and forced it over his head.

He stood up.

Stumbling, oxygen deprived, not able to see, he ran to where he remembered the door to be as his bare feet burned on hot ashes on the floor.

Out onto the landing where the air was slightly cleaner, he felt along the wall to the staircase.

He took one step, then misjudged his footing and went tumbling down the uncarpeted stairs in a jumble of bumps that didn’t hurt him at all. Nothing could hurt him now that he was high on freedom.