Abomination by A.J. Cole (best ereader for pdf and epub .txt) 📖

stopped whatever noisy thing he was doing by the far wall and trotted to us, a black rifle supported in both hands. “Here you go.”

Taking it, Gideon nodded, then raised an eyebrow, and Pruitt returned to the other side of the room.

“I’ve used rifles before,” I said, looking at the weapon. It had no scope, no strap, and was painted entirely a matte black. Similar to an AR-15 but…different. Where was the clip?

“So I’ve heard. This one is new. Take it.”

Gideon tossed the rifle and I caught it with one hand. Good weight, evenly distributed, nice feel.

“How old are you, Morta?”

“Sixteen. Other than the lack of a scope and ammo clip, what makes this different?”

Something in Gideon’s eyes shifted. Not in an ominous way, but what – ah, shock. I’d seen that before. Why shock? That I could grab the rifle one-handed? Of course I could. I didn’t have regular muscles under my smooth, tanned skin. Nope. Gideon spoke over my thoughts so I turned them off and listened.

“For one thing, it doesn’t use regular bullets. The ammunition is, for lack of a better way to describe it, energy spheres. And while the rest of us who use these need scopes, I’m told you don’t.”

I nodded, fascinated. Energy spheres? Wow!

“Show me.” He pointed to the other wall in front of which various kinds of standing targets had been attached to the floor.

“You have to switch them on. They’re too easy to hit while stationary.”

“I’ll do it!” Pruitt called.

So the slimy-brained creep had been listening.

After hitting a switch nearby, the little man gave us an idiotic thumbs-up as the targets began to bend, some vibrating, others twisting, some flapping backward and forward so fast they were hard to see. For the moment. For anyone but me.

“You can hit those?”

“I can…Gideon, yes?”

“Yes.”

I raised the rifle, activated the wave-pattern that lived somewhere behind my retinas, and the targets became circled by overlapping gauges, each with a cross in the middle defining their centers. The ones moving rapidly appeared to slow down, the ones twisting seeming to straighten, the ones vibrating looking like they’d gone still. As far as Gideon was concerned, nothing would have changed.

My smirk reappeared – number four! Ain’t I somethin’. I lifted the rifle, my finger curled around the smooth trigger, chose a target, and watched with astonishment as the non-bullet, after finding its mark dead-center, left a scorch-edged hole.

The next target went the way of the first. When I was done, Pruitt deactivated them and I could see that they’d have to replace these with new ones.

“Damn.”

Why was Gideon surprised? Didn’t they tell him about me?

“So you’re a dead-shot. No wonder…”

“No wonder what?”

“No wonder they want to deploy you as a sniper.” Gideon shook his head.

Sniper. I didn’t like that word. It was too sharp, pinched, ugly. Like Ellen, Victor’s companion. If I had to use a word to describe her sour features, I’d use “sniper.”

“What is the other weapon?”

Gideon smiled. “You won’t need the rifle for this. Put it down and follow me, please.”

He led me into one of the labs off the hallway outside the practice room, and asked me to sit in the chair. Yes, the chair. Not a nice, comfy seat. The chair. The grey metal chair with straps to hold me down at the wrists and calves. The cold, hard chair above which the brain-probe device hovered, waiting to be lowered over my head. That chair. I found myself disliking Gideon, but his words made me rethink that.

“Looks like something that belongs in a torture chamber – sorry. Victor told me to use this room. Said the other labs were in use.” He shrugged.

“Of course he said that.” I climbed into my least favorite seat in the house, the chill of the metal seeping through my clothes. “Now what?”

Gideon crossed his arms and frowned. “I was told you have certain psionic abilities. Were you born with them?”

Seriously? “Of course not. Psionics aren’t possible in the natural world. It’s something that happens when neural pathways are invaded by electricity and mutated, enabling the person to use parts of the mind that are otherwise off-limits.”

“You mean unused.”

“No, I mean off-limits. We were never meant to be able to kill with a thought, regardless of what science fiction says – and yes, I read Dune.”

“So…so you’re saying you can do that?”

I bit my lip, realizing this guy had had no idea what he was getting into when he agreed to work with me. “I can do all sorts of things no one should be allowed to do.”

His frown got deeper. “Like what?”

“LIKE THIS. NOT PLEASANT, IS IT. I CAN ALSO MAKE YOUR HEAD EXPLODE IF I WANT TO. UNDERSTAND?”

Gideon’s frown had been replaced by a horrified stare as I’d spoken into his head; he took a step back.

“Don’t worry – I wouldn’t do that to you. Victor built in a failsafe: if I kill anyone here without him removing a specific chip he embedded somewhere in my brain, my own head will explode. He loves me so much.” I looked away, not wanting Gideon to see how homicidal discussing Victor made me.

“But you could kill someone who wasn’t from here?”

“I believe that’s the point.”

After a few seconds of silence, Gideon stepped closer to the chair. “Listen, Morta, I’m only here to help you develop a new skill, something that won’t hurt you, but which I’m told will be of great use in dealing with enemies of the State.”

“You don’t sound so confident any more.”

“I – well, I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“Probably not. So what is this new skill? Pruitt called it a weapon?”

“Using a few of the non-invasive probes, I’m to train you in controlling the emotion centers of…yes, well, I was wondering how I could possibly do that, but it seems you’re already capable of getting into people’s minds.” He reached up and drew down the probe device. “Victor showed me which ones to use, and said these would only adhere to your skin, nothing worse.”

Yeah, Victor totally lied. None of the probes did that, which was why they were called probes. As soon as Gideon place one on my head, a long, super-sharp, super-thin needle would pierce my skull and enter whatever hemisphere of my brain it was supposed to educate. And yes, it hurt. When I had work done on my teeth, the dentist here worked with no anesthesia (I’d read about lidocane and all that in another magazine, so I knew everyone else on the planet was given relief from nerve pain when they got their teeth fixed – not me, though). Anyway, the probes were that kind of pain, but on my scalp.

“Morta?”

“Go ahead.” I decided not to tell him the truth. Yet.

“All right. Here we go. Now when I finish attaching these, and turn on the scanner, I’ll need you to close your eyes and listen carefully to my instructions, okay?”

“Okay.” At least Gideon hadn’t strapped me to the chair. I guess that was something.

The procedure took four hours, during which the pain never stopped, but at the end of which I had the ability to destroy a person’s psyche by making them either so ecstatic they would be incapable of moving or thinking; or so upset they’d be suicidal. If only I could use these on Victor! Ha.

As Gideon removed the probes, he noticed the splotches of blood beneath each and asked me about them.

I smirked…lost count at this point. And said, “You honestly didn’t think this wouldn’t have to be invasive to work? There’s no such thing around here as a non-invasive probe, Gideon.”

“Oh, crap. I am so sorry! Did it hurt?”

“Yes, it hurt. Are we done?”

“I don’t know – I’m supposed to test this new ability before reporting to Victor.”

“Can we test it on Pruitt?”

He gave me one of those narrow-eyed stares. “Are you allowed to do that?”

“I doubt it, but I’d sure love to.”

He nodded, his smile crooked. I surmised he didn’t like Pruitt much either. “I don’t see why we can’t at least try, but I don’t want him to see you. I assume you don’t need to be in the same room?”

“No, but I do have to be able to see the person. There’s an observation window in the practice area. We can stand in the room looking out, and if Pruitt is still in there, I can see if this ability is working.” I always knew when something done to me had been successful, and this one was – no doubt about it.

A few minutes later Gideon and I were standing in the small, cold room one floor up, staring through the wide window that doubled as a mirror on the other side. Sure enough, Pruitt was still messing around in the vast room below, this time putting things into a metal equipment cabinet.

I stepped closer to the glass and stared at him for a moment. Pleasure or sorrow? Hmm. Now which of those two had that piece of turd given me the most of during the past eight out of twelve years? Rhetoricals. Gotta love ’em.

The new set of worms crawling through my head were activated along their set pathways as I focused my stare at Pruitt’s balding head. A second or two later, he dropped what looked like a stack of metal plates, and turned around, shaking his head. Activating my ocular magnifiers, I could see that tears had already begun coursing down his acne-scarred cheeks, and a second after that, he plopped down onto the hard floor, legs stretched out in front of him, arms over his stomach, and gave vent to sobs so loud we could hear them even behind the glass.

Pruitt stopped long enough to raise his arms over his head, his hands clenched; his mouth dropped open and he screamed, “No, no, no!! No, no, no!! Let me die! No!! Why?! No, no, no!!”

If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard, I think I would have managed another smirk. Unfortunately, as Pruitt’s misery increased, so did the pressure in my head, and it was getting worse every second. I was killing him, which meant I was killing myself. Surprising, really, since this wasn’t a direct rupture of his organs. This was emotional, and shouldn’t have affected my failsafe. But perhaps it was because I knew the human hemorrhoid would eventually commit suicide…

“You can stop now, Morta. It works.”

Suffer, you little bastard! If I can take it, you can!

“Morta? Morta! Stop! Don’t do this!”

Gideon’s desperate pleas broke through, but I wasn’t sure it mattered. The thought of Pruitt bashing his own brains out with a dumbbell or something like that was such a good one, I no longer registered the pain in my own head.

Besides, who said death would be a bad thing for someone like me?

~two~

 

In the end, I decided to let Pruitt live. With this new “talent” I might be able to entertain myself again at his expense. Nice.

In the meantime, Gideon was glaring. Oops. “Sorry.”

“Are you all right?”

Do you care? Really? “I’m fine.” A residual headache – nothing more – fading now.

“Good. So we know you can inflict extreme sorrow, but what about pleasure?”

I raised an eyebrow. Maybe he should find out first-hand –

“And don’t even try to use this on