Sins of the Father (29 page)

The mutant had escaped the hospital, but given the fact he was bleeding copiously from the bullet wounds riddling his body, Anderson found his trail easy to follow. In the company of a tac-team, she tracked him across the city. Fleeing the hospital the mutant had hijacked a car, forcing the terrified driver to transport him to a run-down neighbourhood in Sector 43.

By the time Anderson and the others arrived on the scene, Lenny had abandoned the car to make his way on foot to a third-floor apartment in the nearby John Merrick Block. Wary in case a hostage situation developed, the Judges had approached the apartment with caution. Finding the front door open, Anderson was the first one through the doorway into the apartment. Inside, she was greeted by an unexpected sight.

The mutant lay dead on the floor of the living room, his head cradled in the lap of an old woman who knelt crying over him. From the amount of blood on the floor, it was clear the mutant had bled out from his wounds. It must have taken a titanic final effort for him to reach the apartment before he died.

"Lenny!" Not realising the mutant was dead, one of the tac-team Judges levelled his Lawgiver at the corpse and began to bark out orders. "Step away from the woman! Now!"

"Leonard," the old woman corrected him. She smoothed her hand gently over the mutant's hair, as though he was sleeping. Her eyes were red with tears. "His name was Leonard, just like his father. He was my beautiful special boy, but you Judges had to take him away from me. You put me in the cubes. You kept us apart all these years. And now you've killed him. My poor, special little boy."

Her hand continuing to stroke gently at his hair, the woman began to hum a lullaby. In death, the giant's face was peaceful as though he had been where he wanted to be as he breathed his last breath. There was a quiet, contented smile frozen on his lips.

Leonard the giant had found his mother.

THE END

EPILOGUE

FATES, BOTH WORSE THAN DEATH

"She's doing as well as can be expected," the doctor said. He stood by the observation window and drew Anderson's attention to the place in the room beyond where former Psi-Judge Myrna Lang sat staring blankly into space. "The bullet did a lot of damage to her frontal lobes. Her memory is gone, as are most of her higher brain functions and her personality. But her motor skills are largely unimpaired. Naturally, she's having to re-learn everything all over again. Right now, she's a blank slate. But, given enough time and patience, we should be able to teach her to eat, wash, even dress herself on her own again."

"Are those her parents?" Anderson asked. A door inside the room opened as a middle-aged man and woman entered it. Noticing them as they approached her, Lang smiled.

"Yes, they come here every day," the doctor nodded. "It's strange really, but they seem to be the only people she remembers."

Inside the room, the woman had produced a spoon and a jar of baby food from inside her purse. Sitting down to face her daughter, she began to feed her.

"I was surprised when Psi Division allowed her to be transferred to our facility," the doctor said. "I thought Psi-Judges who were too badly injured to continue their duties had to stay inside Omar House."

"Not in this case," Anderson shook her head sadly. "The damage to her brain destroyed her psychic powers. There was no reason to make her stay in Omar."

Watching as Lang's mother continued to carefully feed her daughter, Anderson wondered if Lang hadn't been given exactly what she wanted. Lang had hated her psychic powers, resenting the fact their presence had caused her to be taken away from her family. Now, Lang's powers were gone and she was with her family again. In some ways it was as though the clock had been turned back: as though Lang had returned to her childhood. She wondered if, given the choice while she had still been in possession of her full faculties, Lang would have accepted this as her only way out of Psi Division. Personally, she found it hard to believe anyone would choose to have this kind of thing done to them. To be robbed of your reason, reduced to little more than an infant: to Anderson it seemed a fate worse than death.

Mercifully, however, and for better or worse, Lang no longer seemed able to realise what she had lost.

Trapped inside his own body, Roderick Lowe was screaming.

He screamed continually, desperate to make himself heard. He was vaguely aware of his surroundings. He knew he was in a hospital bed, his body wired to a variety of tubes and machines. But, no matter how hard he screamed, no one could hear him.

No one except the boy.

That was the worst of it. Bad enough to be trapped, unable to move, inside the prison of your own flesh. But Roderick Lowe was not alone. There was another mind in his body with him. A mind set on vengeance.

They can't hear you
, the boy whispered to him in an eerie sing-song voice.
You can scream all you like, Mr Lowe. No one will do anything about it. No one even knows we are in here. There's just you and me. You and me. Do you remember when you hurt me, Mr Lowe? Do you remember when you killed me? You're a bad man. And bad men should be punished
.

Abruptly, the character of Roderick Lowe's screams changed as agony coursed through him. The boy seemed to have the power to inflict pain on him whenever he wanted. He tortured him constantly, minute by minute, hour by hour, inflicted torments far worse than any human idea of Hell. And, all the while, Lowe was helpless; he was a puppet to the boy's will.

You're a bad man
, the boy said.
And you need to be punished. You need to find out what it's like to have other people hurt you when you can't do anything about it. That's why I decided to come in here with you when I saw you at the hospital. I knew I'd be happy in here. I knew I could punish you as much as I want, and as long as I want. For as long as I want, Mr Lowe. We've got all the time in the world
.

The pain began again, like a thousand hot stabbing needles all at once. Then, it changed, become a sensation of fear and suffocation. It changed again, the pain of being gouged by ten thousand razors. The nature of the pain changed with every second, giving him no time to grow used to it. The boy was an artist of pain, with a vast repertoire of fresh agonies forever at his fingertips.

Trapped in his own body, Roderick Lowe was screaming.

While, trapped in there with him, Daniel listened to the sound and smiled.

Mitchel Scanlon
lives in Derbyshire, England and is a full-time writer. He has written both comic books and prose fiction. He also wrote the first two Anderson PSI Division novels, as well as
Fifteen Hours
for the Black Library.
Sins of the Father
is his fourth novel.