Day 7
The van was silent for a few minutes. Even John seemed to have picked up on the fact that something was wrong. Jamie wanted to repeat her question with an 'are you sure' in front of it, and John was annoyed that something of tactical importance was going on and he wasn't being let in on the loop. I decided that we were either far enough away from the probably-bugged gas station to talk, or we were under constant surveillance in which case we were screwed no matter what I did.
"The man in the gas station was a mind-reader."
"Oh, was that it?" Jamie said, smiling. "I wondered what the hell you were doing in there, staring at me. The old distract yourself by thinking of the naked woman trick, right?"
John was dumbfounded at this, and so was I. Jamie just smiled. "You're not the only telepath I've known, Derek. Besides, how many times am I going to get the chance to tell a mind reader to get his own mind out of the gutter?"
"So it was a Trooper checkpoint after all?" John said, trying to get the conversation back to business. "Why the hell did they let us go? You that good at faking people out?"
"No, I'm not." I replied. "He saw right through me." I sighed, re-playing the scene in my mind. "I think he wanted to help. He said that the troopers monitor the video feeds, but that he'd tell them we'd gone north."
Jamie nodded and frowned, suppressing the obvious objection. Of course, I heard it anyway.
"If he'd wanted the troopers on us, he wouldn't have bothered to try to communicate at all. He'd have just called them when we left."
"He's trying to gain your trust." John spoke up. "Which means he wanted something, right?"
I hesitated, then nodded. "He wanted us to go south, first of all. Then turn right when we hit some sewage treatment plants."
"And how are we supposed to see them in the dark?" Jamie countered.
"I think the more important question is, where is he sending us?" John replied. It was a good question; I'd been talking while looking at the map and, as Rory had promised, the road he suggested we use indeed lead nowhere. I found myself wondering if it was one of those tricks cartographers used to detect when someone had copied their map; maybe the road wasn't there at all. But then what was the purpose in sending us there?
"Map says nowhere." I said simply.
Silence once again overtook the car, but everyone was thinking the same thing I was - could we trust this informant? He'd agreed with my thoughts on the Afflicted and the rigged candidacy months ago, and now it seemed obvious that the old newspaper was there on purpose to get a feel for the sympathies of the patrons. The question was, which group of sympathies was he looking for?
"Let's do it." John finally said. I hadn't been paying much attention to the way that everyone had been thinking, and John's reply came as a surprise. I hadn't expected him to agree at all, much less without even a fight. He looked up at me as though knowing what I was thinking. "We don't have a choice here, Derek. If the guy's lying we're pretty much done for anyway. If he's not then we can't afford to let the chance go." He looked down at Dana, frowning. "We don't have time to waste."
Jamie's mouth tightened, and I was sure she was about to disagree, but instead she sighed. "You're right, and I hate it. Not the fact that you're right, but the fact that we're stuck like this. So Derek, keep your eyes peeled for those sewage plants."
As it turned out, I didn't have to; apparently they were manned and operated twenty-four hours a day; we hadn't gone far before floodlights bathed the entire area ahead and to the left. We slowed and found a small country road moving off to the right. Jamie stopped entirely.
"We're doing this?" she asked. It wasn't that she was uncertain, just that she wanted to make sure we were all in agreement.
"Yep." I replied. I still had the stunner I'd taken from the Paradise Valley jail, and I kept it cradled in my hand.
"Let's just go." John said. "I speak for both of us," he looked back down at Dana, "when I say hurry."
Jamie turned and the van began to pick up speed. I chanced another glance into Dana's mind, because it was clear from John's behavior that he thought something was seriously wrong. Her conscious mind was still buried below layers of pain and hurt. I could feel that the bleeding had mostly stopped, but somewhere something swelled. She could think, what little I could still feel of her mind confirmed that, but there was a long distance between being able to merely think and being fully yourself again. I shuddered and pulled my consciousness back to myself, crossing my arms for warmth. She was still too cold, and it probably wasn't a good sign.
The van slowed as our path slowly tended upward. The road had clearly not been maintained much; cracks were becoming more abundant the farther we traveled along. At one point it had given way altogether and Jamie had to slowly ease the van across the brief field of broken pavement and sand until the road regained some of its integrity.
At all times, I could feel the tense minds of my waking companions and, if I concentrated, Dana's own unique wounded shadows of thoughts. Outside the van there was simply nothing. Most mind readers I knew could only communicate with humans. Occasionally the more talented could get general feelings from a dog but of course it was never hard to tell what a dog was thinking anyway. Mammals, in general, could be detected as a presence and nothing more. I hadn't felt anything besides my vanmates since we'd left the gas station. And yet, I could feel something out there. It didn't even register as a presence, in fact some of it felt like the lack of something. Like I should be getting a reading, but wasn't. I frowned as the feeling-but-not-feeling began to slowly intensify.
Jamie slowed the van down as the going got more rough, but I was hardly paying attention. Something out there, a mental fog. It felt almost like a jammer, but I tended to perceive them more as a light pain than this sort of nonentity. I found myself wondering if I'd made some horrible mistake, if the aim all along had been for the Troopers to field-test a second-generation jamming device.
The road ahead stopped entirely, giving way to sand. Jamie slowed the jeep and let it idle.
"Well, now what?" she said, sounding clearly disappointed.
I frowned. She'd just sounded disappointed, I hadn't felt the unique mental taste of it. I had to concentrate to feel the minds of people right next of me, it seemed. That not-jammer was exactly that, it seemed, and yet that didn't seem entirely to be the case.
I looked out the front of the car, where broken pavement gave way to sand in much the same way it had earlier. In fact, in exactly the same way as it had earlier. Probably a landslide, nothing's here, that's all, nothing's here.
My eyes widened and the road for just a moment seemed to blink between a sandy nothingness and solid existence as I realized what I had just thought. Nothing's here. That's what the jamming felt like to me.
## Nothing's here ##
It was subtle, far subtler than any Trooper jamming device that I'd ever heard of. Troopers just wanted to suppress any telepathy at all, and so broadcasted noise all over the place. This, though, this was to keep people away who couldn't read minds. Any telepath would eventually recognize it as a command. The question was, what did it mean? Was it to keep ordinary folk away and warn mind-readers as well?
"Keep driving." I said impulsively to Jamie, having made up my mind. I peered forward in the hopes of once again seeing the road reappear. It'd just been an instant, an instant where I saw what I desperately hoped was real through the fog of the Nothing's Here message.
"Nothing's here" said Jamie, echoing my thoughts and that of the device. "There's no reason to keep going."
"Just do it, for me. You don't have to go far." I hoped.
"Derek, " John's voice was low and warning, and it was clear that he thought I was going to endanger Dana with this idea. "It's just sand out there. If this van gets stuck, that's it for us."
"I'll push it out myself if that's the case." I said through clenched teeth, the certainty that nothing was there - a certainty imposed from the outside - warring with my own feelings that something was indeed ahead of us, that the road continued on. "We need to go on."
Jamie glanced back at John, and he looked at her, both of their faces mirroring their thoughts. Maybe the stunner had a worse effect on me, maybe I'd finally snapped under the pressure. This wasn't just dangerous, it was suicidally foolish. I'd made up my mind to open the door and walk forward myself when Jamie put the van into drive and slowly eased it forward over the disjoint pavement.
We drove off a cliff.
No, there was sand there. There wasn't just sand, there was pavement, and suddenly the blackness that had formed over my mind and vision was gone, and we were on the road again. Jamie's foot was off the gas and about to slam on the brakes in response to the sudden falling feeling, the feeling that all around us there was nothing, when reality reasserted itself.
"Holy shit..." John cursed under his breath. I'd been too busy making sure I was in one piece to see what he'd seen, but now that I was going to live and thus apparently had plenty of spare time, I refocused my eyes on the vista ahead.
There wasn't just pavement beneath our tires and on the road ahead. The road didn't just continue onward as though it had never been broken. It lead to a city, an honest-to-God city, and its lights seemed brilliant in the otherwise pitch-black night.
We all sat and stared for a couple of minutes, before Jamie glanced over at me and commented "Good call."
John's initial wonder had subsided, and his traditional paranoia had replaced it. "That doesn't answer the big question, though. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? For all we know we've been given directions to Trooper Maximum Secrecy Prison, where they'll experiment on us to find out why their little diversion back there didn't work."
Leave it to John to always find the bright side. "I don't think so," I said, trying to sound reasonable. "If this were a Trooper setup, they'd have a car right there on this side of their trap, waiting to pick up anyone who got through. Hell, in any city this side we should see at least one Trooper driving around."
Jamie had begun easing the van forward again, as though afraid that the road would turn out to be another illusion. We passed a several houses, each with some kind of internal lights. I caught people moving around inside, completely normally. They didn't even seem aware of our presence.
I felt something, though, something altogether different from the nothingness of the trap. This seemed its opposite, a sense of presence, and it took me a moment to place it even though the last time I felt it had only been a few days before.
"This place is like quarantine." I whispered. This both was and wasn't the case; quarantine zones house all kinds of Afflicted, some of which aren't mind-aware at all and some of which are hypersensitive and some that project whether they want to or not. Quarantine districts are crowded and the psychic babble becomes like a low background noise, a feeling of other people you can never quite shake. This city felt like that, only it was muted and far less chaotic.
<< Stop. <<
Jamie slowed the van down before she even realized what she was doing. Realization came over me; this wasn't a city of Afflicted, at least not in the general sense. This was a city of telepaths!
The van came to a stop and before I could open up my mouth to tell Jamie that we should probably start up again, get some momentum in case whoever was giving the orders wasn't friendly, someone was at the driver's window, tapping on the glass.
We all froze, until Jamie rolled the window down. Whoever was there was certainly not a Trooper; no uniform and the fact that he was too old for field duty were just the immediate clues.
<< Identify yourself. <<
The command came with a somewhat icy tone; the telepath outside was confused as to how mind-blind people had managed to come into town and clearly wasn't aware that I was any different than the rest of his suspects.
"Jamie Morris"
"John Zimmerman"
>> Derek Perkins >>
The man's eyes widened, and my ability to read his mind vanished. Before it did, though, I felt a clear note of relief that at least something was going right. He cleared his throat.
"How did the three of you -" he stopped then, clearly going through our minds, and just as clearly having briefly touched Dana's. He immediately picked up a radio handset that had been clipped to his belt. "This is Deputy Harris, we've got one talent, three guests - one badly wounded. I need an ambulance down here immediately."
The radio made a garbled reply laced with heavy static, but Harris seemed to understand it.
"We'll get help for her as soon as we can. Sorry for the rude introduction, but we've got to be careful here, can't let just anyone wander through as you no doubt figured out yourselves." I could tell he was talking just for the benefit of John and Jamie and would have preferred to speak directly to me.
"Where is this?" Jamie managed, her confusion leading her to simply blurt the question.
Harris smiled. "You're in Haven, miss. Last safe place on Earth."
Full Post...
"The man in the gas station was a mind-reader."
"Oh, was that it?" Jamie said, smiling. "I wondered what the hell you were doing in there, staring at me. The old distract yourself by thinking of the naked woman trick, right?"
John was dumbfounded at this, and so was I. Jamie just smiled. "You're not the only telepath I've known, Derek. Besides, how many times am I going to get the chance to tell a mind reader to get his own mind out of the gutter?"
"So it was a Trooper checkpoint after all?" John said, trying to get the conversation back to business. "Why the hell did they let us go? You that good at faking people out?"
"No, I'm not." I replied. "He saw right through me." I sighed, re-playing the scene in my mind. "I think he wanted to help. He said that the troopers monitor the video feeds, but that he'd tell them we'd gone north."
Jamie nodded and frowned, suppressing the obvious objection. Of course, I heard it anyway.
"If he'd wanted the troopers on us, he wouldn't have bothered to try to communicate at all. He'd have just called them when we left."
"He's trying to gain your trust." John spoke up. "Which means he wanted something, right?"
I hesitated, then nodded. "He wanted us to go south, first of all. Then turn right when we hit some sewage treatment plants."
"And how are we supposed to see them in the dark?" Jamie countered.
"I think the more important question is, where is he sending us?" John replied. It was a good question; I'd been talking while looking at the map and, as Rory had promised, the road he suggested we use indeed lead nowhere. I found myself wondering if it was one of those tricks cartographers used to detect when someone had copied their map; maybe the road wasn't there at all. But then what was the purpose in sending us there?
"Map says nowhere." I said simply.
Silence once again overtook the car, but everyone was thinking the same thing I was - could we trust this informant? He'd agreed with my thoughts on the Afflicted and the rigged candidacy months ago, and now it seemed obvious that the old newspaper was there on purpose to get a feel for the sympathies of the patrons. The question was, which group of sympathies was he looking for?
"Let's do it." John finally said. I hadn't been paying much attention to the way that everyone had been thinking, and John's reply came as a surprise. I hadn't expected him to agree at all, much less without even a fight. He looked up at me as though knowing what I was thinking. "We don't have a choice here, Derek. If the guy's lying we're pretty much done for anyway. If he's not then we can't afford to let the chance go." He looked down at Dana, frowning. "We don't have time to waste."
Jamie's mouth tightened, and I was sure she was about to disagree, but instead she sighed. "You're right, and I hate it. Not the fact that you're right, but the fact that we're stuck like this. So Derek, keep your eyes peeled for those sewage plants."
As it turned out, I didn't have to; apparently they were manned and operated twenty-four hours a day; we hadn't gone far before floodlights bathed the entire area ahead and to the left. We slowed and found a small country road moving off to the right. Jamie stopped entirely.
"We're doing this?" she asked. It wasn't that she was uncertain, just that she wanted to make sure we were all in agreement.
"Yep." I replied. I still had the stunner I'd taken from the Paradise Valley jail, and I kept it cradled in my hand.
"Let's just go." John said. "I speak for both of us," he looked back down at Dana, "when I say hurry."
Jamie turned and the van began to pick up speed. I chanced another glance into Dana's mind, because it was clear from John's behavior that he thought something was seriously wrong. Her conscious mind was still buried below layers of pain and hurt. I could feel that the bleeding had mostly stopped, but somewhere something swelled. She could think, what little I could still feel of her mind confirmed that, but there was a long distance between being able to merely think and being fully yourself again. I shuddered and pulled my consciousness back to myself, crossing my arms for warmth. She was still too cold, and it probably wasn't a good sign.
The van slowed as our path slowly tended upward. The road had clearly not been maintained much; cracks were becoming more abundant the farther we traveled along. At one point it had given way altogether and Jamie had to slowly ease the van across the brief field of broken pavement and sand until the road regained some of its integrity.
At all times, I could feel the tense minds of my waking companions and, if I concentrated, Dana's own unique wounded shadows of thoughts. Outside the van there was simply nothing. Most mind readers I knew could only communicate with humans. Occasionally the more talented could get general feelings from a dog but of course it was never hard to tell what a dog was thinking anyway. Mammals, in general, could be detected as a presence and nothing more. I hadn't felt anything besides my vanmates since we'd left the gas station. And yet, I could feel something out there. It didn't even register as a presence, in fact some of it felt like the lack of something. Like I should be getting a reading, but wasn't. I frowned as the feeling-but-not-feeling began to slowly intensify.
Jamie slowed the van down as the going got more rough, but I was hardly paying attention. Something out there, a mental fog. It felt almost like a jammer, but I tended to perceive them more as a light pain than this sort of nonentity. I found myself wondering if I'd made some horrible mistake, if the aim all along had been for the Troopers to field-test a second-generation jamming device.
The road ahead stopped entirely, giving way to sand. Jamie slowed the jeep and let it idle.
"Well, now what?" she said, sounding clearly disappointed.
I frowned. She'd just sounded disappointed, I hadn't felt the unique mental taste of it. I had to concentrate to feel the minds of people right next of me, it seemed. That not-jammer was exactly that, it seemed, and yet that didn't seem entirely to be the case.
I looked out the front of the car, where broken pavement gave way to sand in much the same way it had earlier. In fact, in exactly the same way as it had earlier. Probably a landslide, nothing's here, that's all, nothing's here.
My eyes widened and the road for just a moment seemed to blink between a sandy nothingness and solid existence as I realized what I had just thought. Nothing's here. That's what the jamming felt like to me.
## Nothing's here ##
It was subtle, far subtler than any Trooper jamming device that I'd ever heard of. Troopers just wanted to suppress any telepathy at all, and so broadcasted noise all over the place. This, though, this was to keep people away who couldn't read minds. Any telepath would eventually recognize it as a command. The question was, what did it mean? Was it to keep ordinary folk away and warn mind-readers as well?
"Keep driving." I said impulsively to Jamie, having made up my mind. I peered forward in the hopes of once again seeing the road reappear. It'd just been an instant, an instant where I saw what I desperately hoped was real through the fog of the Nothing's Here message.
"Nothing's here" said Jamie, echoing my thoughts and that of the device. "There's no reason to keep going."
"Just do it, for me. You don't have to go far." I hoped.
"Derek, " John's voice was low and warning, and it was clear that he thought I was going to endanger Dana with this idea. "It's just sand out there. If this van gets stuck, that's it for us."
"I'll push it out myself if that's the case." I said through clenched teeth, the certainty that nothing was there - a certainty imposed from the outside - warring with my own feelings that something was indeed ahead of us, that the road continued on. "We need to go on."
Jamie glanced back at John, and he looked at her, both of their faces mirroring their thoughts. Maybe the stunner had a worse effect on me, maybe I'd finally snapped under the pressure. This wasn't just dangerous, it was suicidally foolish. I'd made up my mind to open the door and walk forward myself when Jamie put the van into drive and slowly eased it forward over the disjoint pavement.
We drove off a cliff.
No, there was sand there. There wasn't just sand, there was pavement, and suddenly the blackness that had formed over my mind and vision was gone, and we were on the road again. Jamie's foot was off the gas and about to slam on the brakes in response to the sudden falling feeling, the feeling that all around us there was nothing, when reality reasserted itself.
"Holy shit..." John cursed under his breath. I'd been too busy making sure I was in one piece to see what he'd seen, but now that I was going to live and thus apparently had plenty of spare time, I refocused my eyes on the vista ahead.
There wasn't just pavement beneath our tires and on the road ahead. The road didn't just continue onward as though it had never been broken. It lead to a city, an honest-to-God city, and its lights seemed brilliant in the otherwise pitch-black night.
We all sat and stared for a couple of minutes, before Jamie glanced over at me and commented "Good call."
John's initial wonder had subsided, and his traditional paranoia had replaced it. "That doesn't answer the big question, though. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? For all we know we've been given directions to Trooper Maximum Secrecy Prison, where they'll experiment on us to find out why their little diversion back there didn't work."
Leave it to John to always find the bright side. "I don't think so," I said, trying to sound reasonable. "If this were a Trooper setup, they'd have a car right there on this side of their trap, waiting to pick up anyone who got through. Hell, in any city this side we should see at least one Trooper driving around."
Jamie had begun easing the van forward again, as though afraid that the road would turn out to be another illusion. We passed a several houses, each with some kind of internal lights. I caught people moving around inside, completely normally. They didn't even seem aware of our presence.
I felt something, though, something altogether different from the nothingness of the trap. This seemed its opposite, a sense of presence, and it took me a moment to place it even though the last time I felt it had only been a few days before.
"This place is like quarantine." I whispered. This both was and wasn't the case; quarantine zones house all kinds of Afflicted, some of which aren't mind-aware at all and some of which are hypersensitive and some that project whether they want to or not. Quarantine districts are crowded and the psychic babble becomes like a low background noise, a feeling of other people you can never quite shake. This city felt like that, only it was muted and far less chaotic.
<< Stop. <<
Jamie slowed the van down before she even realized what she was doing. Realization came over me; this wasn't a city of Afflicted, at least not in the general sense. This was a city of telepaths!
The van came to a stop and before I could open up my mouth to tell Jamie that we should probably start up again, get some momentum in case whoever was giving the orders wasn't friendly, someone was at the driver's window, tapping on the glass.
We all froze, until Jamie rolled the window down. Whoever was there was certainly not a Trooper; no uniform and the fact that he was too old for field duty were just the immediate clues.
<< Identify yourself. <<
The command came with a somewhat icy tone; the telepath outside was confused as to how mind-blind people had managed to come into town and clearly wasn't aware that I was any different than the rest of his suspects.
"Jamie Morris"
"John Zimmerman"
>> Derek Perkins >>
The man's eyes widened, and my ability to read his mind vanished. Before it did, though, I felt a clear note of relief that at least something was going right. He cleared his throat.
"How did the three of you -" he stopped then, clearly going through our minds, and just as clearly having briefly touched Dana's. He immediately picked up a radio handset that had been clipped to his belt. "This is Deputy Harris, we've got one talent, three guests - one badly wounded. I need an ambulance down here immediately."
The radio made a garbled reply laced with heavy static, but Harris seemed to understand it.
"We'll get help for her as soon as we can. Sorry for the rude introduction, but we've got to be careful here, can't let just anyone wander through as you no doubt figured out yourselves." I could tell he was talking just for the benefit of John and Jamie and would have preferred to speak directly to me.
"Where is this?" Jamie managed, her confusion leading her to simply blurt the question.
Harris smiled. "You're in Haven, miss. Last safe place on Earth."
Full Post...
posted by Roger Ostrander at 6:13 PM
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