The Burning Man (22 page)

That was when Annie first realized what she could do.

Back then, she couldn’t control it. It was more like a sneeze, a burst of random kinetic energy that fanned out in jagged waves, knocking things off shelves and cracking glasses. It had happened a few times in the past, but she’d never realized that she was the one who was making it happen. But that day she’d been so scared, and sure that Angela really was going to kill her.

When she felt the sneeze coming on, she’d done something she’d never tried before. She aimed it, pushed it out at her shrieking harpy of a mother, and Angela had staggered backward like she’d been slugged, tripping over a pile of dirty clothes and sprawling on her ass.

Shortly after the “bad mother” incident, Angela was arrested for solicitation and possession, and Annie wound up back in a foster home. This one featured “special chores” for the female children. Annie was already well used to those kinds of chores, and was just thankful to have food. So thankful, in fact, that she immediately gained more than fifty pounds.

She started stealing and hoarding candy and carried a pilfered butcher knife to protect her stash. When she used that knife on a fellow foster kid for taking one of her chocolate bars, she was sentenced to her first stint in juvie.

The girls in the junior joint were absolutely merciless about Annie’s weight. They teased her and bullied her and beat her up until she tried to hang herself with a bed sheet. She got sent to a children’s psychiatric hospital for that little stunt. She was finally away from her tormentors, but their hateful voices had followed her.

Annie was eleven when she decided to stop eating.

Hunger was familiar. It was something she was used to, just like she was used to letting men do what they wanted with her body. It was easy, and it felt safe. More importantly, it made her feel in control.

At first, she went too far with it, and wound up with a feeding tube stuck in her nose. But she soon learned how to eat just enough to stay alive and keep the doctors off her bony back, while still maintaining that cold, hungry sharpness. That iron-willed control. Mind over matter.

And as she gained more and more control over her body, she also started to gain control over her mind. She devised little games for herself, trying to push small objects or move paper. Then she tried lifting things. Then people.

Experimenting on fellow patients in the psych ward was easy, because no one believed them when they complained about what Annie was doing to them. Pushing was relatively easy, almost reflexive, but she wanted finer control. So she started practicing pinching, twisting, and plucking out single hairs.

But her psychic instrument was too blunt, despite repeated experimentation, and she found herself ripping out chunks of scalp, instead of individual hairs. But it
did
seem to be getting stronger, more powerful. The day she got her first period, she’d punched a six-foot-wide hole in the bathroom ceiling.

Angela was hit by a car during an argument with Annie. The young girl was out on a day pass for her thirteenth birthday. The driver and several witnesses claimed that the older woman had either jumped or fallen backward into the path of the oncoming vehicle.

Annie had both hands over her face at the time. Even if she hadn’t, at eighty-nine pounds she wasn’t strong enough to shove a grown woman off her feet and send her flying six feet back into traffic.

* * *

Even though she’d hated her mother, and wished her dead a thousand times, Annie suffered a near-fatal mental breakdown after the “accident.” She was tortured by conflicted feelings of guilt and self-loathing, and eventually stabbed herself with a homemade shiv six times in the chest and belly. She only survived because she didn’t do a very good job with the knife, and it wasn’t as sharp as it should have been.

After that little adventure, she’d been transferred over from the psych ward to this place. When she asked why, she got no explanation. She spent the first week systematically testing the boundaries, like a shark that explores an object by biting it.

She was on lockdown almost every day for one infraction after another, driving the nurses and aides up the wall with her self-destructive and hypersexual antics. Then she met Doctor Lansen.

Unlike all the other adult men in her life, he seemed to have little or no interest in her body. He was only interested in her mind, and seemed to really listen to what she had to say. He wanted to know all about her, and not in that nosy, judgmental kind of way—like all the other shrinks, who just wanted to put her in a box and stupefy her with pills.

He looked at her like she was special. Not a freak, but something beautiful.

At first she hid the full strength of her ability from him, with the deliberate intention of making him feel like he was teaching her, helping her improve. She made it seem as if she couldn’t have done it without him. Like he was the wise father figure, and she was just raw material for him to mold any way he wanted.

She made him trust her, so that she could nose around in his office without arousing his suspicion. And once she started to see the true shape of what he was planning to do to her, she fell hopelessly in love with him.

She knew at that moment that she would do anything for him.

Then Blondie showed up and ruined everything.

Now Doctor Lansen spent all his time testing Olivia, like he was prepping her to take Annie’s rightful place as his one true love. Like everything that he and Annie had shared was meaningless, forgotten.

It infuriated her to no end, because Olivia didn’t have a clue. Even if she did have special abilities, she didn’t seem to know about them, and certainly couldn’t control them like Annie could. So why had Doctor Lansen shifted his focus? Why had he abandoned her?

Was it something Annie did, or said?

No way of knowing.

But what she
did
know was that she had to figure out a way to get the blond interloper out of the picture, and prove to Doctor Lansen that she could give him everything he needed. To remind him that no one could ever love him as much as she did.

Eric Lansen stood behind his desk, telephone receiver in one hand and the results of Olivia’s latest tests in the other.

“Preliminary results on the Dunham girl are off the charts,” he said. “It’s clear that this current involuntary manifestation of her Cortexiphan-induced abilities has been intensified—as well as complicated—by her fluctuating adolescent hormones.

“At an early age she showed a tendency to cause electrical disturbances and even fires when emotionally agitated, including the documented events on file from Jacksonville. Since the onset of menstruation, however, she has developed—like all our female subjects—a bit of a hair trigger. In each of them the Cortexiphan-affected area of the brain is activated with less provocation, and in response to a wider variety of emotional stimuli. Just as a normal adolescent reacts to ordinary situations with heightened emotional intensity.

“I feel that this particular manifestation of their abilities may subside when they reach full adulthood.” He paused, then continued. “Maybe ‘subside’ is the wrong word. Perhaps ‘mature.’ Transform into something unprecedented. We have no way of knowing what the final shape of Olivia’s abilities will be. But there’s no question that she is by far one of our most promising test subjects.

“I’ll need a minimum of three months to...”

“We’ve given you ample time to provide relevant results.” The voice on the other end of the line cut him off. “You have two more weeks to wrap up your psychological tests, and collect whatever DNA samples and data you need for your continued analysis. At that point, your highest-functioning patients will be released and monitored from a distance, while those who are not capable of sustaining an independent lifestyle will be transferred to the new experimental campus.

“Allowing you to monopolize any of our Cortexiphan-positive subjects for your own private study is no longer financially viable. We now have far superior facilities available to meet the subjects’ needs, while providing shared access for a variety of researchers from different fields.” The voice softened slightly. “I’m sorry, Eric. This is not negotiable.”

The line went dead.

Eric slammed the phone back into its cradle. It wasn’t that he didn’t know this day was coming, he just hadn’t expected it so soon.

For more than two years now, he’d been engaged in an elaborate ongoing subterfuge with his financial overlords at Massive Dynamic, presenting one set of results to them while keeping the real nature of his work a closely guarded secret.

Because he had discovered something staggering. Something that would change the world.

He had invented and perfected a serum that worked in tandem with the unique chemicals released by the female Cortexiphan-positive brain, while it was deep in the roiling flux brought on by puberty. Cortexiphan needed to be administered to children, while their minds were still open, and his new serum had a similar restriction. It had to be given to adolescent females while their reproductive hormones were in flux, chaotic and wild and full of seething potential.

But while Cortexiphan unlocked the powers of the mind, his serum enabled an unprecedented control over the very structure of human DNA. It harnessed the power of a newly blossomed woman, to create life itself. And through that power of creation, Eric hoped to father a new race of superhuman progeny who exerted total control over both mind and matter.

And now—when he was so close to his most significant breakthrough—this narrow-minded interference from a bunch of corporate bean counters. He’d planned to run at least a month’s worth of additional tests before he attempted the delicate and crucial insemination of Olivia. Now, he’d have to distill his preliminary research down to the most critical steps, and move the big day up to the middle of next week, at the latest.

Once he’d confirmed that fertilization had occurred, he’d submit a report regretfully detailing Olivia’s suicide through self-immolation, leaving behind no remains for an autopsy. He could let the other patients in the upper ward go without protest. While the Pagliuca girl had shown some excellent potential early on—including a level of voluntary control unmatched by any of his other subjects—he’d recently discovered that she possessed an arcuate uterus. Not a deal-breaker
per se
, since it wasn’t unheard of for such females to successfully carry a fetus to term, but it would be a crapshoot.

A crapshoot Eric saw no reason to take, now that he had Olivia.

Olivia lay strapped down on a gurney with wires stuck all over her head and face. There was a monitor mounted on a flexible arm that had been positioned so that it was directly above her face, making it impossible for her to look anywhere but at the screen.

“Okay, one more time, Olivia,” Doctor Lansen said. “When you see each image, say the first word that pops into your mind. Ready?”

She didn’t bother to answer.

She was getting so sick of this lab rat routine.

“Right,” he said. “Here we go.”

The first image in this latest series was a man helping a little girl learn how to ride a bicycle. He was smiling and beatific in a plaid shirt and jeans. She was blond, looking exhilarated and terrified and not unlike Olivia at that age. Her bicycle was pink. There was a word balloon above the dad’s head that read: be careful.

“Bicycle,” Olivia said.

A second image came up, this one showing a couple having an argument in a restaurant. The man looked like the villain in a Spanish soap opera, showing his nice white teeth like an angry animal. His word balloon read:
YOU ARE STUPID.
The woman was a little bit chubby, and was crying.

“Restaurant,” Olivia said.

The third image was a house on fire. A woman and her daughter were standing in the street in their nightgowns, with their arms around each other, and their shared word balloon said:
OUR DOG IS INSIDE!

“House,” Olivia said.

“Come on, now, Olivia,” Lansen said. “You’re editing your responses again. You need to be honest, and say the real first thing that comes into your mind.”

Olivia felt a hot rush of anger and heard a little cascade of corresponding beeps from the machine. She wasn’t stupid, and could easily see that these images had been designed to provoke an emotional response. She refused to be manipulated by this kind of ham-handed psychological strip search.

The next image was a photo of Rachel and Randall. It had been taken on the front porch of their old house in Jacksonville, before the fire. Rachel was maybe four and was being held by Randall. He had a grip on her little arm and was making it wave to the camera. Her eyes were wide and scared, like she was about to start crying.

“Oh, come on,” Olivia said, twisting her head away from the screen. “That’s a cheap shot.”

“Last one,” Lansen said. “Please, try to stay open-minded and respond honestly.”

That last photo was of Kieran, and looked like it had been taken by a surveillance camera in the Westley police station. His body language was pleading, desperate, his face anguished and still blotchy with the fading bruise. She couldn’t even imagine how worried he must be about her.

She was suddenly desperate to see him, to be with him. She’d never felt such a physical and powerful connection to another person and before she could stifle it, a hot wave of aching emotion washed over her.

There was another frantic symphony of beeps, ascending in pitch until the screen above her cracked with sudden static, and went black.

“Fantastic,” Doctor Lansen was saying over and over as he fussed around his machines. “Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.”

“Too bad your monitor broke,” Olivia said, anger smoldering in her belly. Anger at herself for giving that creep the reaction he wanted. “I guess this means we’re done.”

He ignored her for another minute, still enthralled with whatever results he’d managed to trick out of her. Eventually he came to her side and removed the crown of wires from her head.