Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) 📖

a completely different person from who I once was. The walls from the sandbox in my mind had been kicked out, and all the things I was afraid I’d become were pouring into the spaces reserved for myself. The real me. The person I would be if my dad wasn’t who he was and if my brain hadn’t been used as a proving ground for untested forms of manipulation.

Of course, without those things, I wouldn’t exist.

I should care about my mother, about Bremer or his family, about the police officer gunned down for being within the same field of fire as me. That I wanted to wasn’t enough, I couldn’t make myself feel these things. When I looked into myself I saw only a cold commitment to vengeance. Schumer wanted me dead, so I’d make him dead first. It was as simple as that to me, and the casualness in which I’d decided such frightened me, the last shred of myself that remained which was capable of such fear.

Something had changed me. Were it the chaos of gunfire all around me, seeing Bremer go down, seeing Rubino risk his life to fetch those keys, or the moment I pulled the trigger to thoughtlessly yet willingly end a human life, it didn’t concern me. What mattered was that I was fundamentally changed from the kid I had been even a month ago. Even at the beginning, when the switch was flipped in my brain and the training in my brain began to take over, I was different. The fight at school, the encounter at Lorton, even the gunmen in my house, I was on autopilot, letting myself issue pain and escape death as I may and only reacting afterwards. But now, it’s a choice. I chose which way to disarm and incapacitate the bodyguards in Schumer’s office, and this morning I chose to make a one-hit-kill from over a hundred feet; it wasn’t autopilot, it was me. That scares me. But, I suppose, the fact that I can still frighten myself represents one glimmer of hope that there was still some small part of the old me left.

Whatever small parcel of humanity remained inside of me seemed to be amplified in proximity to Amy. I should see her before I go and jump from one field of fire to another. I tried to imagine how things would have gone in Vienna had I taken her along. Would I have been so cruel to Nathan Comstock if she were there to witness it? Would I have allowed myself to be taken into custody by Pratt and his buddy? Would I have been so reckless in my escape if it wasn’t just my neck on the line? The whole trip had been a disaster and aside from language, time zones, and different-colored money, the only difference in those situations was that Amy wasn’t hovering around me like my conscience.

I took one last breath of fresh air and got into my own car. I sat the box in my passenger seat, pulled the USP from between the seat and console and dropped it into the box, creating a nice little pile of armaments.

I drove to the hospital for the second time that day. I took an entrance and followed a route that I knew would bypass any desks or checkpoints where people could tell me visiting hours were over. On Amy’s floor I took a longer route to avoid the nurse’s station and as I rounded the corner nearest her room I saw Mr. Westbourne, Amy’s father, standing outside her door talking to a woman who looked about his age. The familiarity with which they spoke and the slight resemblance was enough to tell me that this was Amy’s mother. They were too far away for me to hear, and it turned out that my list of superpowers didn’t contain lip reading so I was oblivious to what they were saying, though they were certainly adamant about saying it. She flailed her arms around as she spoke, while he stood like an oak tree.

After a while she seemed to have had enough. She stopped, turned, and walked away. Mr. Westbourne, whose first name I probably should have learned by now, called for her, then followed after her. When they were both out of sight I slipped down the hall and into Amy’s room.

The lights were off inside the room, but there was enough light coming from the TV to see. Amy was awake, propped up in her bed, watching the screen with her arms folded awkwardly on account of the IV line in her left arm. When I first entered there was an odd disconnect between the TV and sound, since I heard TV noises but nothing was coming from the TV set, then I realized that the sound was coming from speakers built into the rails of the bed. I was in the middle of thinking that was awesome when Amy saw me standing there, turned off the TV and pushed a button on the bed rail to turn on an overhead light.

“I can control the whole room from this thing,” she said with a grin.

I was silent, not knowing what exactly I wanted to say and.

She got tired of waiting, I suppose, and asked, “What? What is it?”

“I thought you’d want to know,” I said, stepping closer and lowering my voice, “the Irish guy, who poisoned Comstock, well, you too, he’s dead.”

Her face went blank for a moment. “Oh,” she started. “That’s, well, I don’t know what that is. I guess it’s good. How did he die?”

“There was a shootout at the hotel earlier today, right after I got back from here. I, well, we all were shooting at him. One of us hit him. Bremer, the older one, he was hit, though. Killed.” It was a lie, of course, I knew I was the one who’d killed him. It felt a bit better to pretend I didn’t know that.

Amy took a while to register all that, needing clarification on what exactly “shootout” meant and how Bremer had died.

“If the guy trying to kill you is dead, does that mean this is all over?” she asked with a spring of hope in her voice.

I shook my head. “Irish Guy was only hired; someone else could just be brought in to take his place. This ends with whoever hired him; it ends with Schumer.”

“You know it’s Schumer now?” Amy asked.

“He’s the only person it could be,” I paused, “he’s the one who killed my dad.”

“What? Why? For trying to sell the plans to—”

I cut her off. “He wasn’t selling anything. He decided to report the project to the FBI because it was illegal. Schumer found out about that, had him killed before he could bring any real evidence.”

“So this is all Schumer?” she said after some consideration.

“All of it.”

“Had your dad killed, had Comstock killed, tried to have you killed, nearly got me killed, and got Bremer killed.”

I nodded.

“Does the FBI have enough evidence to move on Schumer now?” she asked.

“No. They might be able to put together some evidence to prove that he hired the Irish guy, but Rubino isn’t hopeful. He gave me Schumer’s home address and two guns. I think I know what he wants; what I want.”

“Well… are you?”

I nodded again, “I think so. I’m certainly going to have a talk with him, at least.”

She sank in the bed just a bit. “When?” she asked, carefully.

“Right now.”

Amy bit her bottom lip and looked around the room. She looked past me at the small sink on the nearest wall and the cabinet above it.

“In there,” she said, “I think there’s gauze and Band-Aids up there. Grab me one of each.”

I glanced behind me. “Why?”

“Because I’m coming with you,” she said, “and I have to take this IV out.”

“What?” I said.

“It’s fine,” she said, leaning forward slowly, “they took one out of my other arm, I watched them. I can do it.”

“No,” I said, “you’re not coming.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Why not not?”

“I’m in this as much as you,” she said, holding the IV up to her face and looking at all the parts. “Dingan could have killed me, I was there when guys with guns ran around your house, and I’m in this bed because of all this. I have as much right to see the end as you.”

I couldn’t tell her the real reason I didn’t want her to come, that her being there might make me too human to kill Schumer. That she could undo the mental hardening I’d recently attained.

“You’re supposed to stay in bed, right? You’re in pain,” I said, instead.

Amy shrugged. “I’m mobile now. They came and took most the tubes out of me. I go to the bathroom on my own now, thank God. The only thing wrong with me is that my muscles are sore, and they can be sore anywhere.”

“What is this? You want to get away from your parents?”

“No,” she said, poking me in the chest with an index finger. “This is because when I’m around, you’re more careful. If you have to worry about me, you might not do anything stupid.”

I sighed and wondered if this was actually why I’d come here. Maybe some part of me wanted to bring her along. I pulled a small piece of gauze from the cabinet and a bandage. Amy pulled the tape from her arm and unclipped the IV line from the needle in her arm and tossed it aside, it swung around the bed like a jungle vine. She told me to press the gauze down where the needle went in, and she slowly pulled the whole apparatus from her arm, and then held the gauze down with the bandage. She got up to dump the needle in the biohazard sharps bin by the sink, grabbed some clothes from a bag by one of the chairs and headed toward the bathroom.

I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to think of the last time anything had gone according to plan, and then remembered that I worked best without them.