Confrontation (Implanted Book 3) Read online

  “Maybe we need to throw a little bit his way the way he throws things at us.”

  “I have no idea how to do that.”

  “You just did it. Pummeled him into submission in one of the pineal trances.”

  “I could never do that before. The storm—”

  “Yes,” she murmured, “the storm. The eye messed things up, but he thought it was going to somehow connect all thirteen of our minds or souls or consciousnesses…whatever…together. It looked like it was starting when everyone turned into light lines. But the moment the group was supposed to come together, it split over the beating you gave Michael. Twins and me on your side, John fading into his broken spirit, Michael watching with that same look in his eyes as he has in that unswollen one right now.”

  “You really stood with us?”

  She lazily smiled. “Even swatted that Becca on her ass a good whoop when she was spinning around you. Just once though. They were going fast.”

  He found himself smiling again, right back at her, how she was handling all this. He supposed if he'd grown up like her, this day would be the culmination of a life of hell. Just knowing that, whatever the outcome, it would all be over soon must give her some relief. “You both say you're a lot alike. So, think like him. His face is too destroyed to talk to us here, his lungs are punctured most likely. Listen to the wind and rain. Think like him. Think as if you were like him, as awful as that might be.”

  Jamie suddenly heard the sound of a train horn. He'd heard them in movies, but this one sounded like it was about to pound right through the front door of the ranch. Boarded windows didn't seem like the cleverest way to bunker down at that moment. As the roof ripped off the top of the ranch hall they were in, exposing an angry, twisting dark sky…the hated blackness came again.

  Chapter 7

  It didn't stay dark long. Bright Arizona sunshine burned Jamie’s eyes. He squinted, trying desperately to see, to get his bearings as fast as possible.

  In every direction was flat, cracked, white hardened sand. Not a little mountain way off, no cloud in the sky. There was a slight breeze, however, and Jamie felt it fan the sweat beading up all over his body.

  “Cecily!” he screamed as loud as he could. Not even an echo answered him.

  He stood there until he felt the flesh on his face singeing, and then he took off the black t-shirt he found himself in and wrapped it around his head like a turban. His shirt was already soaked from top to bottom with sweat, and it felt cool on his cheeks and scalp. His torso would just have to suck it up for the time being.

  The Earth and the sun move. That's the way it worked, right? Jamie’s sun stayed at exactly high noon above him, not budging an inch, for hours and hours. It gave him a lot of time to think.

  It also made him completely aware that his thoughts, imageries, imaginings, ponderings, all the stuff that made up him was being carefully measured and monitored. He kept returning to his first thought when this happened: How to block McElroy.

  Except…this didn't feel like just McElroy. This felt...controlled by many. A large many, and Jamie was aware of them. Feeling them observing his random memory of his dad trying to gut a fish because he was now getting hungry…that kind of thing.

  There was the pause. The one McElroy had. The slight beat in the rhythm of his voice when he was lying or didn't know…but was, mainly, hiding a weakness.

  Yes, hiding a weakness!

  Jamie began to form abstract historical images in his imagination. The characters in his pictures, paintings, great works of art would pose in a way that was a thing only he, Jamie, would understand by just looking at it. He wouldn't think about it though. Nope. He'd just look and know something new. In fact, Jamie took his hot turban off, shook his hair in the breeze that never stopped, and grinned at the sun.

  “Thanks, Ingrid.”

  It was one of the first techniques she’d taught him. On day one, she had started with it actually. She had told him, “Your soul is your associations, and nobody understands yours anywhere near as good as you do.”

  Sometimes she said it in Dutch and joked that it didn't really translate. She loved to say it when she could tell he could do the imagery. An old form of meditation that invokes the state of being in a dream was how she explained it, and at the time, Jamie had gobbled it up and even taught it to a couple of the more spiritual students in his martial arts classes.

  Jamie continued thinking in personal meaning imagery for about a minute straight—doing it for ten seconds took him a year to learn—when something changed.

  He felt that pulling sensation, like the pull McElroy implanted in him to come to Virginia. The pull made him want to think about Cecily. Instead, he forced back to the faceless observers an image of a light at the bottom of a cave pool.

  He gave no emotional response.

  He continued.

  He felt a spike of interest in him quite suddenly from whoever was watching his mind and consciousness. And there was a feeling of even more. So many. So very many presences.

  Jamie knew what was going on, but he had to be careful. He couldn't think it in any way a person processes a thought that isn't a direct association with a life experience…something so much a part of his understanding of how he sees life and remembers it through impressions that cannot easily be explained.

  He was giving them a riddle to solve, and they were failing. He was hot, he was pissed, he wanted to see his kids and Cecily—so that's the only thought he'd shout out to them each time they pushed him harder to think in a way they could assess and understand.

  Control.

  He held onto control with every part of willpower within him.

  And then he did feel McElroy, and he thought he could see some version of the man, but the heat was making him see things too. His face was fixed. It looked how it did the first time Jamie saw him after the murders.

  After Amanda.

  He stood perfectly cool in the heat, bent over, squatting near Jamie, and said, “How are you doing that? We've done it all, but you people keep doing it!”

  Jamie now knew what McElroy meant. He knew who he was. But he didn't think those thoughts or have feelings about them. Instead, he imagined Amanda’s red nails the night she died, and then Cecily’s trim, pale nails. He didn't attach faces to these impressions.

  McElroy slapped him open-handed across his left cheek. It stung bad with the sunburn, so Jamie thought of a rainbow-colored unicorn in a fantasy realm.

  “Dammit, Jamie, you better tell me what the hell you’re doing or I’ll kill the twins. I swear it. I will hang them and you will watch them choke.” McElroy’s face was red and ugly, full of blotches.

  Jamie stood up and leaned into McElroy’s space. “Bring Cecily and the twins to me and I’ll tell you everything you fuckers want to know about why you can’t understand us.”

  McElroy stepped to the side, not a drop of sweat on him. It seemed to Jamie that he was reassessing him, trying to see his angle, his trick.

  “Show it to me. Give it to me. Now,” McElroy commanded.

  Jamie turned his back on the small man and fanned the back of his bare, red neck with his hair. He thought of the time when he ripped up a piece of paper and threw it in a canal.

  “You don’t think I’ll do it,” McElroy said quietly, perfectly reserved. He was playing a new move in his position—the lack of knowing everything he wanted to know right away, and the influence over people gone, both drove him to slow down, take it easy, and see if the snake had a secret rattle.

  Jamie was getting so good at assessing the strange sensations the pineal implant gave him in the non-realities that he could tell this conversation was being closely observed by many, many others. He couldn’t grasp how many, he couldn’t focus on that. He focused on keeping the memories vague, impressions that he associated with ideas.

  He remembered a picture of John F. Kennedy giving his inaugural speech. He’d always liked that one, found in a random old paper book in the back of the u
niversity library.

  Jamie turned back around to look down at McElroy. “You can’t do it, and I know why. So bring them here. Right now.”

  “I can bring them here and kill all three. Cecily has betrayed me for the last time. She was going to slit my throat. She did, you just stopped her. She’s already dead to me.”

  He stood close to Jamie, his face an inch away and added, “I can do horrible things to them, much worse than hanging. And you know from how you beat me close to death in the pineal world that it carries over. You feel that heat? You feel that slap on your bright red, sunburned cheek? Think of what they’ll feel. And you’ll feel it too, through your implant. You are too aware.” He leaned back and his eyelids drooped.

  Jamie was a risk taker, always had been, and because of that he didn’t have to have the internal debate as to whether he could bluff or not. They would most certainly tune into that. McElroy would be all over it in a second. Jamie just took the risk without a thought; if there was any sensation, it was desperation, but Jamie imagined the first time in that fast boat when it hit high speed and how hard his heart had pounded.

  “I have figured out everything. You had your lungs punctured by broken ribs. Your face was bleeding off your bones. You couldn’t talk or walk. You had one eye, and I didn’t understand what you were thinking looking at me like that at the time, but now I do. You, McElroy, are about to bleed out, and it’s just a waiting game for me.” He folded his sweaty arms across his chest. “And once you do, your local control over the twelve of us will be over. This slap on my face, nor the sunburn will mark me because I caught you in the eye of the storm. Now, I don’t know how it works, but I know it caused your body to be destroyed in reality. That won’t happen to anyone again because nobody’s crazy enough to do what you did. To what? Prove a point of how great you are?

  “And a little fairy grandchild told me something curious. She said something about most people’s places. Most people’s places. That phrase, I didn’t think anything much of it at the time. Mainly because she’d just told me you had a weakness. I was focused on that. You and I both know that I could only hurt you in the real world as well as your ‘space hey days’ because of the eye of the hurricane.” He threw up his hands. “Electromagnetic shields, right?”

  McElroy didn’t know that Jamie had simply lost his shit at hearing about McElroy dissecting his murdered wife’s brain. He’d just gone feral on him, no thought of the consequences. Just raw rage.

  McElroy countered calmly. “You know nothing. No ribs broken, no pierced lungs. I contorted myself to be more pathetic. I chose to look weak to confuse you both until the eye of the storm’s magnetic field didn’t disrupt the satellites anymore.” He straightened his own black t-shirt and looked up at the sun. He changed his approach once more.

  “Jamie, I’ll be honest. I told you everyone knows me as an honest man.” McElroy’s tone was nice and reasonable, much different from the one screaming that he was going to torture Jamie’s young children and his own daughter if he didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.

  Jamie recalled just the one little part of the memory when he first saw the twins. A zoomed-in version of their blonde curls in the firelight. Let them think on that one for a while.

  “On what?” McElroy asked.

  Jamie smiled. “You were saying you’re an honest person.”

  He looked deep into Jamie’s eyes and Jamie did feel truth coming from him in that odd sensation of knowing that the pineal gland implant was giving him information about other people. The way he knew of the watchers. “It was meant to be a first time thing. Oh, Cecily called it my nirvana, but we were going to form a hive-mind using the biochemical and electrical properties of such a huge storm. The thirteen. You. Cecily. The twins. The others who have become my most trusted companions.

  “But when you hit me, things went very wrong. The energy changed. You know, chemistry and electricity are everything. They are you and they are me. There is nothing in the universe that wouldn’t exist without the property of resonance. Do you know what that means?”

  Jamie let out a laugh that held zero humor. “Half your fools got pissed and four of us, hell maybe five of us if you count John, were attacked by power-hungry, mind-controlled drones. It fucked up your smooth transition because the pineal implants require simpatico.” He kissed his fingertips. “And now you’re really screwed.” Were they both dodging the obvious fact that Emily’s voice had instructed the twins to do…something at the moment everything collapsed? Maybe McElroy hadn’t seen the twins.

  The man shook his head. “You don’t understand. You saw them in the ranch. Unconscious, all of them.”

  “Not Cecily. Not me.”

  “The anger my well-intending friends came at you with fried the network. It’s delicate. It was a new process. But I had to have Cecily, and I knew that meant I had to have you. That’s the only way she’d even consider it. She insisted you be there.”

  Jamie thought again of the rainbow-colored unicorn and smiled. That one gets around.

  “Who gets around, Jamie? Tell me. If we don’t resolve this, the others, including the twins, will never come out of the induced state of the hive-mind.”

  “Resolve what? I’m still waiting for you to die of natural causes. Did you see that roof go up? I can’t imagine what our bodies are going through right now. We might have been tossed into the next county and be hanging on by a loose, tiny branch on a Weeping Willow tree.” It hit Jamie in the knowing way that McElroy had the power to see outside his physical form while in here.

  His face reddened again. “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?” Jamie was honestly lost by this switch of moods.

  “You knew from me. I didn’t give you permission. You are unauthorized to access other pineal implants.”

  “The way you say that reminds me of the old militaries we had before brainstem implants became mandatory. But not too old. No, not too old.” He was outright taunting McElroy now, his worry for Cecily and the twins twisting his tongue. “Show them to me.”

  His shoulders drooped slightly, barely noticeable. Jamie’s senses were on high alert, and he picked up every nuance this man emoted. “I can’t show you the twins. They are in Cecily’s nirvana state with the others you trapped. They are forever gone, Jamie, and I’m truly sorry. But here. Here’s Cecily. She’s been here all along.” He turned his back on Jamie.

  Jamie felt a small, firm hand on his arm. He turned. It was Cecily. Or was it? Her eyes were blank, as though she didn’t recognize him. He reached out again with the “feelers” of his pineal implant…

  He didn’t know if it was her or not. He couldn’t make sense of what he perceived from her.

  She said, “Remember when we first met?”

  He nodded.

  She slapped him hard across the face. His head whipped back, then forward.

  She’d figured it out, he realized. She’d figured out how to block them in her own way. How much was the pineal implant affecting her? He wanted to ask her all these questions, and they flew through his mind. Of course, she’d spent years blocking other Company people’s emotions and separating her own from theirs because of the brainstem implant. She was doing it right now, he’d lay XChange credits on it.

  He tried to stop the thoughts, but it was too late. They’d been heard, examined, assessed. Nothing happened. Jamie thought of an old-timey Carousel —‘round and ‘round it goes. There was one carousel in particular he thought of, the only time he’d seen a restored one. It was at a beach in California, and he’d been six. He rode it over twenty times.

  “Why are you thinking about that, Jamie?” McElroy asked, his tone low, his back facing them still.

  “Read my mind and figure it out.” Now his temper was heating up, and that wasn’t a good thing. It was the twins. What he said about the twins.

  Gone forever?

  What the hell did that mean?

  “They are in a mind hive with the others you sa
w passed out,” McElroy explained. “It was supposed to last just a few moments, but what you did trapped them there forever.”

  Cecily squeezed his upper arm. He couldn’t think of it. No, he had to block this memory. It was all they had left. He tried as hard as he could, but the imagery of the twins exploding into white, convulsing light in the void when everything went light-show carnival was something not easily blocked when there’s an impulse to think of it.

  And of course, Jamie did, he thought of how they looked. How they saved him and Cecily. He knew it somehow. He felt them.

  McElroy turned around, looking satisfied for the moment. He raised his arms in the air, hands out. He rotated his wrists in slow, jerky movements, pointing with his fingers all around them.

  Jamie noticed them. He spun in circles, pulling Cecily close to him and saying, “It’s alright.”

  “Dammit, look at them all,” she said. “You know what to do. We got this.”

  They had what? Who were all those flashing people coming fast at them?

  The horizon on all sides was filling up with distant figures, but they moved quickly, like an old film reel sped up, and then turned back to normal speed for only a second.

  Within the span of a minute, the white cracked sand desert couldn’t be seen anymore. There were too many people standing on every surface of it, staring at Jamie and Cecily. McElroy remained the closest to them, maybe eight feet away.

  Cecily gasped and Jamie understood perfectly why. These were all of them—they’d come. Hell, it might not even be all of them. Each person was so completely unique and individual that Jamie had the sensation of being in a crowded amusement park. You know, where there are so many unique individuals that they all kind of end up looking the same anyway. Sensory overload.

  They all had both of McElroy’s implants, and the thumbs as well. Jamie didn’t know if that was the definitive answer; he had no proof. Nobody said it to him. He just knew in that weird, new way that he knew things.

  What he suspected was true.