PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (21 page)

“Anything unusual going on at work?”

“I don’t know, work’s okay. I’m at this hospital. It’s thick with ghosts. But nothing I can’t handle.” Work was fine. Really. Except for Officer “Andy.” But I doubted there was anything Stefan could say to make me feel better about the FPMP following me around, spying on me, siccing a remote viewer on my pathetic life. “I’m remembering more. I think maybe it’s good that we’re doing these regressions. I think maybe I’m ready to remember.”

“Is there anything in particular you want me to focus on in today’s session?”

Probably, but no doubt I couldn’t articulate it. “This is going to sound crazy, but the stuff I’m remembering, everything except for being locked in a room with a dead body, well… how can I say it? It’s not too bad. You and me, we had some fun.”

Stefan watched me intently. There was a deep vertical crease between his brows. “At times. I suppose.”

“The kitchen raids. The whippits.” The sex, of course. I didn’t say that. It felt too awkward. “A lot of that wasn’t any worse than any other kid of our age would have gone through in the dorm.”

“At first. Before Krimski.”

Another huge jolt of memory rocked me. My throat closed up, and I started to sweat all over.

“Inhale, slowly, and then let it out. You’re safe here.” Stefan’s voice was close now. He seated himself in the chair across from the hypnosis couch. I hadn’t even seen him cross the room. “Inhale—two, three, four. Good. Relax.”

It started as a memory. Krimski’s face. In his forties, slim, a full head of hair, gray at the temples. Maybe handsome, once, but now etched with deep lines at the sides of his mouth, across the forehead. Eyes deep set, never missed anything.

Stefan spoke again. “Show and Tell day again? I hope they brought donuts.”

We sat in the smoking lounge, even though I didn’t smoke, with our legs dangling out the window. I had on zip-up combat boots so scuffed that the toe was separating from the sole. Stefan wore black creepers with leopardskin tops and silver buckles. We both kicked our heels against the brick building.

The wings of Heliotrope Station formed an “L” shape, and we could see the cafeteria from our perch. One floor down, at a ninety-degree angle, a bunch of kids who were about our age, but much less jaded, set their gear up on the lunchroom tables. A branch of the University of Chicago Medical School sent a select group of med students over every month. Every month, they set up their little plastic barriers and engaged us all in a very tedious guessing game. Some of them were very earnest. Some of them were quite obviously scared.

And sometimes, some of them were kind of hot, and would let me and Stefan double-team them. I never trusted myself to pick those out, of course. I let my empathic boyfriend do it.

Stefan exhaled, and a veil of smoke clouded my view for a moment, before the wind snatched it away. “Do you think one of these days they’ll get bored with Show and Tell and maybe play ping-pong on those tables instead?”

None of the students really did it for me today. I guess that would make it easier for me to focus on the game and act slightly psychic, but not too much. “Anything is better than one more minute in a classroom with Faun Windsong. I swear to God, she asks the most retarded questions just to hear herself talk. Blah, blah, blah. And The Nun? She just lets her keep going.”

The medium facilitator, Miss Maxwell, used to be a Catholic nun. That’s what we heard anyway. Once a nun, always a nun. Even if she was excommunicated for talking to dead people.

“Foosball.” Stefan took a long drag of his cigarette. He exhaled through his nose. “Now, that would be something. I’d show up for that completely sober.”

“There you are,” said a familiar voice from the doorway.

Stefan raised one eyebrow and smirked. He took a long, deep drag deliberately slow. I rolled my eyes. Einstein.

“They’re gonna start any minute. They’re setting up the tables.”

“We can see it from here,” I said in a monotone.

Einstein came up and peeked over my shoulder. I think his puny brain couldn’t grasp the shape of the buildings, and he’d never realized you could see the West Wing from the lounge. He stared for several drags of Stefan’s cigarette, getting his bearings. And then he laughed. “Heh-heh.”

Stefan and I both immediately imitated his laugh. In unison.

“Movie Mike says that if he gets a hot chick, he’s gonna try really hard today and send something flying across the table.”

Stefan’s lip curled. “I’ll keep my eye on him. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to see his head split open and his brains ooze out.”

“Heh-heh.”

Einstein left, because for him, the thought of being late for Show and Tell was as inconceivable as skipping a meal.

“What did Movie Mike do now?” I asked Stefan.

“The little douchebag was passing by me in the lunch room, and he told me to suck in my gut.” Stefan smiled as he said it. Which struck me as menacing.

“And then what?”

Stefan pressed his lips together in an attempt to stop smiling, but he couldn’t suppress it. He shrugged gleefully.

I prodded him with my shoulder. “Come on, man, tell me.”

Stefan put his lips against my ear. “I made him shit himself.”

I flinched. “You can do that?”

“I didn’t mean to. I was actually trying to make him vomit in front of Pretty Pretty Paula. Sending him vibes about how sick he felt, how his stomach was churning.” Stefan clapped his palm over his mouth and his whole body shook with laughter. He knuckled a tear from his eye, took a final drag from the cigarette, and flicked it out the window. “Oh, the smell….”

“Come on,” I said. Because I couldn’t figure out how to act like I thought it was funny. Mike should have known better than to get himself on Stefan’s bad side, but still. “You don’t want to miss Show and Tell.”

We acted like we were taking our time because we were both so cool, but eventually we followed Einstein downstairs. I didn’t mind Show and Tell, and I think Stefan didn’t either. Even if there wasn’t anyone new to cruise, it was the only time we ever saw each other during training. I would watch him, glancing at me over the table divider, giving me coy eyeliner looks. I dug it. Even if he did scare me a little.

The telepaths and the empaths had multiple stations dedicated to testing them. Because there were only four mediums, we got one table that we had to share. Faun was there already, handling the personal effects of some recently deceased unfortunate. It was a stupid test. The med school had never snagged anything important enough to bring a ghost along with it. I wondered what their paperwork said about any of us mediums. A bunch of blanks?

Dead Darla scowled at me from her post by a shy-looking med student who looked like he might be convinced to accessorize his black turtleneck with some silver skull jewelry. She’d dated someone briefly since my arrival, but gay or not, I’d picked Stefan over her, and she’d never forgiven me.

Einstein was talking away. He could go on and on. I wasn’t listening at the time, but now, from my strange half-here and half-there perspective, I could tune in on his words.

“And Director Sanchez is moving to Miami, and the new director will be here today. Some Polack name. Heh-heh.”

“Maybe you should challenge him to a game of screwing in light bulbs.”

Einstein thought about it for a second. “Heh-heh.”

I caught Stefan’s eye. He gave me a long look, up and down. I slouched harder against the wall, and angled my hips. I dug my thumbs into the pockets of my Levi’s, and framed my package with both hands. A naughty smile flickered over his expression, quickly hidden as he guessed yet another color from a series of obscenely bright cards. He was reading the presenter, and not the cards, since he was no precog. But I guess he still got a lot of them right, once he got a feel for the person holding the deck.

On the opposite side of the room, one of the med students opened up a gigantic box of donuts. I watched Stefan look up from his test. Not that he’d heard it or smelled it or had any reason to have seen it. But I guess a room full of people give off a certain vibe when the donuts show up.

Einstein ran over to take first pick. I had a stomach full of institutional pancakes, and wasn’t ready to add more starch to my body at the moment. Faun Windsong finished up, and Dead Darla was still hovering around her med student. That left me. I sat down across from a nervous girl who looked like maybe she’d had skin problems once, and never gotten back her confidence.

She pulled out a metal box and set it on the table. There was no divider between us, not like the tables where the telepaths and empaths and precogs tried to guess colors and shapes. She probably would have been more comfortable if there were. She folded her hands in her lap and tried not to fidget.

I pulled a string of pearls from the silver box. Silver. I noticed that now, I hadn’t thought much about it then. There was nothing supernatural about the pearls. Nobody appeared when I handled them. Nobody whispered in my ear. Even so, there were certain things that were expected of us. “I think the energy is female. Maybe a mother, or a grandmother. Or…like a mother. To someone.” One of the things they expected was that we wouldn’t neglect the obvious.

Once I’d finished sorting through all the trinkets and giving the med student answers I’d pulled out of my ass, I turned to head over to the donuts. Because, of course, that’s where Stefan would be.

Only, he wasn’t.

Einstein was there, with a long john in one hand and a cruller in the other. Faun Windsong broke a bagel into a dozen small pieces, which she did to fool herself into thinking that she was eating less, and whined about the lack of low-fat cream cheese.

But no Stefan.

I felt a presence beside me, not in a psychic way. More in a something-is-blotting-out-the-sun way. A guy in blue scrubs stood beside me, over two hundred pounds of solid muscle. Some new orderly. There was a handful of regulars, but the other ones came and went; I had a hard time keeping track of them. “Are you getting a donut, or not?”

I almost said, “What’s it to you?” Except that I didn’t care for the look in his eye, and while I didn’t think I was in danger of getting punched in the head, it didn’t mean that I wanted to make an enemy among the staff. After all, people can find all kinds of ways to get back at you if they’re looking for revenge. They can “accidentally” crash a cart into your door while you’re trying to sleep. They can spit in your food. With that in mind, I just shook my head.

“Then let’s go.” He stared at me until I fell into step beside him and the two of us left the cafeteria.

I was curious, but not overly so. Heliotrope Station might be boring, but at least it wasn’t full of crazy people like the CCMHC. But the closer we got to Administration, the more uneasy I felt. I wondered if maybe I wasn’t performing well enough to stay. If that were the case, would they give me some kind of warning? Or would they just kick me out and leave me on the street to fend for myself? Shit, what if I had to go get a real job?

The new orderly lead me up to Sanchez’ door. Only it wasn’t Sanchez’ anymore, not if Einstein had been up on his gossip, and he probably was. He might be stupid, but his short-term memory was okay. “Wait here.” The orderly stood beside me with his hands loose at his sides. He stared straight ahead. I wished I had taken a donut. It might be the last free meal I got in a while.

In a couple minutes, Sanchez’ door opened. Another new orderly came out, leading one of the precogs, a black kid named Big Larry who never really liked me because I never bothered to hide the fact that I checked out guys’ asses. And yet I felt a certain kind of solidarity with him, because he and I were psychics. And these other guys could have been professional wrestlers. I tried to catch Big Larry’s eye. “Hey,” I said.

Big Larry was dark-skinned. I’ll never forget the way his eyes looked, with the whites showing all around. He didn’t say a word.

Did Big Larry have something to worry about? I’d always thought he was pretty accurate. “Go on,” said the gigantic orderly. I didn’t see any way out of it, so I took a deep breath, and I stepped into the office.

-TWENTY ONE-

What I remembered most about Sanchez’s office, not that I made a habit of hanging out in there, was that there were stacks and stacks of papers and manila files everywhere. Lots of chairs too, maybe five, and you could only sit in two of them, because all the others functioned as some sort of elaborate filing system.

Now, not only were all the teetering stacks of paper gone, but the chairs were, too. All but the single, imposing modern-day throne behind the desk. And that one wasn’t even being sat in.

Krimski stood behind Sanchez’ old desk. He wore an immaculate pinstriped gray suit, double-breasted, with a black tie that was thin enough to look modern, but wide enough to keep it from being too edgy. Now, from my vantage point in Stefan’s hypnosis couch, I saw the faintest impression of a holster on his left side. Back them, I wouldn’t have noticed unless he whipped out the gun and pummeled me with it.

“Mister Bayne, is it? I see you have the distinction of being the highest level medium.”

“I think Faun Windsong might call you on that.”

He went on as if I hadn’t said a word. “As a courtesy, I’m letting you know that certain policy changes are in effect, immediately.”

My brain scrambled. Courtesy—good. Policy changes—probably not so good.

“As outlined on page fifty-eight, paragraph four of your intake agreement, we will continue testing the psyactive and anti-psyactive properties of certain substances. Unfortunately, nicotine skews the results. Cigarette distribution will be ceased, and the smoking lounge is closed.”

Cigarettes were one of the main commodities at Heliotrope Station, just like they had been at the CCMHC. That, and maybe sexual favors—which I personally liked to save for recreational use. Though I guess some people felt that way about their smokes.

Besides that, it was just plain rude to close up the smoking lounge, whether or not we had anything to smoke once we were in there.

I opened my mouth to suggest as much, but Krimski started talking before I figured out what to say. I guess he’d had practice. Big Larry. Maybe Stefan, too.