Psych Investigation Episodes: Episode 1 (A Young Adult Scifi / Fantasy) (51 page)

“
Jack!” Michael, Kazou and Sarah
exclaimed in unison.

“
How are we hearing you?” Sarah
asked. She scanned the room for the Harris-boy but he was nowhere
to be seen.

“
SARAH, I NEED YOUR HELP! BUT
FIRST, I WANNA KNOW WHO THIS VOICE IS. I THINK I HEARD IT
TOO.”

“
You’re the damned voice!” Michael
yelled back. “Jeeze, Jack, even as an omnipotent, unexplainable
booming voice from the sky you’re an idiot.”

“
OHHHHH, AND I SUPPOSE YOU’RE JUST
SO MUCH BETTER THAN ME, MICHAEL. YOU KNOW WHAT? YOU’RE NOT MY
FRIEND ANYMORE.”

Sarah cleared her mind. “Jack, can you speak
directly to me?”

“
Maybe,”
said a voice in
her head.
“Is this better?”

Jack,
Sarah thought.
How is this
possible? Person to person communication is not supposed to be
possible. Not even with Telepathy.

“Don’t know,”
Jack said.
“But listen, Sarah. Melissa and I
are dying, and you’re the only one who can save
us.”

Panic entered Sarah immediately.
You’re
dying? Jack, please, you have to save Melissa and come back to us.
We need you. You can’t die!

“I don’t plan on it. That’s why
I need you. Listen to me, Sarah. As we speak, I’m drawing so much
damned power that I’m gonna die from it long before Andy manages to
kill us. I need you to seal it off, or I’m done for. It’s ripping
me apart.”

Michael and Kazou looked at Sarah with
questioning eyes, but she ignored them. She had all her attention
focused on Jack.

I’m not good enough!
she cried in her
mind.
I don’t have the power to do any of that. We’re about to
die ourselves.

“Paro told me you’re one of the
most brilliant Psychs, Sarah. If all you’re lacking is power, then
here, take this.”

Sarah put confusion into her mentally spoken
words.
Take what? Jack, you should know that it’s totally
impossible to—

Kazou and Michael shouted in alarm as she
grabbed the sides of her head and screamed into the air.

“
What’s wrong?” they
shouted.

Sarah wriggled on the ground. “This shouldn’t
be possible! Good God, it’s so much. How can a single person even
hold this much power?”

Sarah fell to her knees, and yelled in her
mind,
That’s enough! I don’t know how you’re doing this, but it
shouldn’t be within the realm of possibility. That’s enough, Jack.
That’s enough! I can feel your mind. Hold tight.

Jack pushed the screaming Melissa off him. Andy
watched in confusion as Jack began tap-dancing on his feet. He
jumped on one foot then the other like a man in desperate need of
using the bathroom.

“
Gah!” he yelled out. “It burns, too
much power, gah! It burns like battery acid.”

Jack looked down at Melissa and the nasty
bloodied wound on her back. He didn’t think it had reached the
critical point, but he could tell it was very painful.

“
Jack,” Melissa croaked, unable to
get to her feet. “What’s going on?”

Jack didn’t stop his jumping. He spun in
circles and flailed his arms. He knew he looked like an idiot, but
he didn’t really care.

“
Gotta use it, gotta use it. Gahhhh!
This is too much.”

Jack didn’t know how to use such a tremendous
power, and so he began throwing massive Telekinetic bursts in
random places, in an attempt to get rid of some of it. All around
the room, sections of wall detonated as if struck by a bomb,
spraying gravel and chunks of wood in every conceivable direction.
The ground shook, and the ceiling leaked chips of stone.

“
Jack, you’re going to kill us! Stop
that right now. No more Telekinesis, damnit.” Melissa got to her
feet, and put a comforting arm on Jack’s shoulder while Andy
watched with his mouth agape.

“
It’s too much, Melissa. It hurts
like hell. I need to get rid of it.”

“
Then use it on him,” Melissa said.
She pointed to Andy.

Jack nodded, and Andy backed away, tripping
over his own feet. He fell on his rump and eyed Jack with a look of
both amazement and horror. Jack would end this here and now—he was
literally overflowing with power.

Andy held out his palm, extended towards Jack.
Melissa’s eyes widened and she once again tried to position herself
in front. This time, it was Jack who did the grabbing. He stopped
her in her tracks and gave her arms a confident shake. “Just watch,
Melissa.”

A puff of smoke appeared almost three feet from
Jack, locked down behind an impenetrable barrier. Andy’s eyes
welled with tears, and he shook his head in disbelief.

“
How?” Melissa asked. She seemed
just as astonished as Andy.

“
It’s Sarah,” Jack said with a
smile.

“
But that’s not possible. Sarah’s
too far from us.”

“
I found her, Melissa. I don’t know
how, but I found her. She’s with us now.”

Jack felt Melissa’s arms around his neck as she
pulled him into a hug. His heart warmed and he returned the
embrace. Melissa had tears in her eyes, and she winced from the
pain in her back. Jack tried to remove his arms, which were
probably worsening the pain, but she didn’t let him go.

“
Jack, I …”

“
Not now,” Jack said. He turned to
look at Andy, and he gently pushed Melissa away. “Gah! I gotta get
rid of this. Andy, hold still. I don’t know how to do too many
things, or how all this stuff works, but I think I’ve got an
idea.”

Andy tried to crawl away, but his arms gave out
and he sat on the floor, immobile.

Jack cupped his right wrist over his left then
lowered it to the side of his waist. He interlocked his fingers
before crouching down and then extending his arms.

“Kaaaa-meeeee-haaa-meeee-HAAA!”

Jack blinked in confusion when nothing
happened. “Are you serious? That does
nothing
? Wow, that’s
lame.”

Melissa looked at him like he was insane for a
moment then smiled. “You’re a real goofball, you know that? Here,
I’ll show you something that actually does work. It’s lights out
for you, Andy.”

“
But I—” It was the last words the
boy spoke. Melissa charged at him, and protected by Sarah, no
longer had any reason to fear death. This time, when her fist
collided with Andy’s nose, he really did go unconscious.

Michael tried to ignore his fatigue, but even
he couldn’t deny that his body was screaming in protest, begging
him for a moment’s rest. Ruin, however, showed no signs of
exhaustion. In fact, the only time Michael had seen the Kinetic
come close to sweating, was when he and Jack did that monstrous
exchange of Kinetic energies.

“
K-Kazou,” Michael panted. He looked
to his left to see the large Japanese Reinforcer dripping sweat,
breathing even heavier than he. Kazou was not a weak man, far from
it, yet not even he could continue at this intensity for much
longer.

Everything in the terminal had been so
thoroughly destroyed that now Ruin was attacking them using nothing
more than bursts—there was nothing left to throw at them. He
gestured with his hand, an exaggerated motion of chopping air, and
Michael could feel the energy rushing at him. It would be enough to
send Michael slamming into the wall almost fifteen feet behind him,
probably ending his life, too.

Michael’s body tensed and constricted, filling
with pain as he forced himself to draw out yet another bit of
energy, just enough to throw his own burst back towards the one
Ruin tossed at them. The two collided, and unlike Jack’s, which had
created a massive detonation, Michael’s was overpowered, weakening
Ruin’s just enough so that Michael was only thrown a foot backward,
landing with a painful crash on his right shoulder
blade.

Lying on his back, dazed and staring at the
ceiling, Michael craned his neck to the right and looked at Sarah,
who also seemed only moments away from collapse. A few minutes
earlier she had yelled something about helping Jack, and while
Michael no longer doubted anything the boy was capable of, it
didn’t make it any easier to grasp.

Sarah had yelled at the top of her lungs,
screaming about sealing something off that she’d claimed weighed
more than a mountain, or something. At the time she seemed to
be overflowing with power, but when she’d finished doing whatever
it was she was doing for Jack, she too became just as exhausted and
weakened as the rest of them.

“
Oh, Ruin, Darling!” Requiem shouted
out. “The woman is almost mine. Finish up, Darling. Kill these
three so we can find our brothers and leave.”

Ruin paused, only moments from sending a burst
into Kazou, and he turned to face his sister. “Forget those two,”
he said. “I’m sick of Brother Andy, he’s pathetic. And Jack, well,
you’ve almost killed us several times because of your insistence on
taking the boy.”

Requiem’s eyes flared in outrage, and she
marched over to her brother. “Did you just say what I think you
did? We will
not
abandon our brothers! How dare you,
Ruin?”

Michael watched Ruin’s lips twitch. It seemed
he was trying to force himself to smile but struggled at it.
“Dearest sister, you know I care about you more than anything in
this world, don’t you? Sometimes plans have to change. I know in
the beginning it seemed like we needed more family, but things have
changed. We don’t need Brothers Jack and Andy. We have only ever
needed each other. It has gotten us this far, hasn’t
it?”

Requiem grabbed the front of his shirt and
forced him to meet her maddened gaze. “They are our family now! I
won’t let them be left behind. I won’t let anyone we love be left
behind.”

Michael didn’t understand the exchange, but he
was grateful that he was being given just a short moment to rest.
Still lying on his back, he rolled his head and looked around the
room. Without realizing he was doing so he began to laugh, a sound
that resembled a hysterical grunting cough.

Just an hour earlier, the train terminal had
been a neat and organized place, with people coming to and from,
flowers and pictures hanging in every corner. There had even been a
man playing guitar with a tip-cup. Now, it looked like an abandoned
warehouse from the late-twenties. There were holes in so many parts
of the floor that moving around was now a very risky endeavor.
Every light had been broken, all the windows shattered, and broken
soda cans were still spraying misty cola around the darkened
terminal.

Vending machines roared with their built-in
alarms, broken potato chips and other snacks were still being
knocked around, some even falling into the dark tunnel below. Even
the ceiling had been broken, or at least the glass part of it on
top of the dome-shaped structure. It must have been shattered when
Jack and Ruin unleashed their full powers against each other. Well,
Ruin’s full power, Michael reminded himself. God only knew what
Jack could do if he ever dug deep enough.

“
Can……hear me,”
said a
broken, static-filled voice from Michael’s left pocket. He felt the
first welling of hope. He reached into his pocket with a shaking,
unsteady hand.