Confrontation (Implanted Book 3) Read online

  There was no person alive ever who could imagine this many people with so much detail for a mental game mirage. It simply wasn’t possible. He looked into their eyes and knew snippets of their stories.

  One young woman cried when she looked in his eyes, and he knew it was because she was seeing Amanda’s death through his own personal experience. She got away with it because her eyes reminded him of Amanda’s clear blues.

  His own eyelids twitched because he knew she had lost her only child—meaning she had murdered a stalker and her child was simply gone—when she got the implants. The UNE had been implanting all the “criminals” with McElroy’s implants. This was when they were having memories erased to keep crime low.

  McElroy and his higher-in-command types figured out how to alter an existing UNE implant with chemistry before the implants were even mandatory. This was in place of a separate surgery, so the military specialists and doctors who never asked questions just collected their XChange credits for good deeds around the workplace, and felt superior because they were in the know.

  They didn’t have implants.

  No. Of course not.

  They weren’t under anyone’s control and the soon-to-be voted in mandatory implant they all already had was actually a really good idea. Especially because they were in the know. They would never have it happen to them.

  So many of the ones dressed in the blue mark rangers suits shared this story. Maybe a little different version here and there, but then they basically sent the impression that they wouldn’t remember any of this.

  None of them would in the whole endless desert. They only knew about it when they had to go and be at some kind of event, something they had to do, like today. They all had to go unconscious in reality and come where commanded. McElroy made them. And others who enforced this were hinted at.

  These people glared at Jamie and Cecily, while others cried pleas for help directly into their pineal gland implants. They lived two lives, but could only remember one of them when in it. Being summoned to a pineal gland service for whoever was in control was like a recurring dream that you forget each time you wake, but know it down in your guttural being as part of you.

  One in blue stepped forward. His hair was a little longer in the back than the front, how kids wore it in the mid-2020s. He smiled at Jamie and nodded at Cecily. “You did know, didn’t you? That we all have it and always have? Since the first Internet satellite system came into proper use, implants have been developed and used for different things. Jamie, you’ve had your pineal implant since you first went into the UNE hospital after you attacked those men who killed your wife, and I’m real sorry about that. When you were in the underground company living quarters, you did have two surgeries, and, as you know, one didn’t take. He did this to you.” The youth pointed at McElroy.

  Jamie almost had it all worked through, but he was shocked that he’d already had a pineal implant. “What did you do to me in there? To me and Cecily?” Wonder filled his voice more than the usual anger at the man, and he was getting some hard truths dealt to him.

  “It was Cecily’s first pineal. I inserted Amanda’s old one into you that day. I replaced the cheap, every day one and gave you the key to demonstrate what we couldn’t figure out about her and hers. You literally walked in like a most curious scientist’s secret dream, and I couldn’t resist trying it on you.”

  Jamie stared at the other man. How gleeful he looked. How pleased with himself he was.

  “Yes, her pineal gland had a malformity,” McElroy continued. “But that was all I had to go on until I put hers in you. The twins…they were developed specially. Your and Amanda’s genes. There had to be something about you and now look at you. You’ve changed, evolved, and I think Cecily is brilliant and sharp to choose you. But the problem is that now we can’t read Cecily and you.”

  He said it aloud, his head level. The black glint in his eyes regretted nothing.

  Testing implants on the undesirables once the government had their hand deeper in it. Jamie felt it, knew Cecily figured it out probably years ago. She really was much smarter than him.

  Jamie spun around. “I don’t get it. What do you all want?”

  McElroy grabbed his elbow, forcing him to stop. Jamie was ashamed of the claustrophobic panic setting in as he looked at all these mind-controlled drones.

  “You have two choices,” the other man said, his voice as sharp as an axe. “You can be left here for as long as I determine while the ones I called to pay a visit share more stories with you. And you’ll know none of them will remember it until next time, and they’ll be thinking of you. They’ll be thinking about how you and Cecily do that thing where we can’t read you. Look at them.”

  He growled this line, pointing around at the angry and frustrated faces. “They want to know how you block us, and there are already reports of people with implants dropping off the grid, as though they never existed. Many of them. Too many. I’ve done everything to keep the system from collapsing, and my hive-mind was going to be my masterpiece of a common mindset working for the greater good of humanity.”

  “Your idea of the greater good is like an underground pimp’s idea of a successful business plan,” Cecily said under her breath.

  “And your other choice is to assist me in the ranch. We can end this right now. Talk face-to-face. The roof is gone, but it flew up and away. One wall is down.” There was the familiar pause. “There is flooding.”

  Hiding something.

  Was Jamie’s bluff right? Did he really have to wait out McElroy until he died of natural causes and then be safe? It surprised him, and he couldn’t help but have a complete thought about it.

  “Jamie, shh,” Cecily whispered up to him, eyes huge and shocked. “What are you doing?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  McElroy gestured around again. “They would love to continue to share with you for as long as I ask them to, each one, all at once over time. I’ve tried to explain to them all over the globe and on Mars that this is just a small intermediate step. Soon, it will be perfected. Or you can come to the ranch, get my face away from a small stream, and get the twins out of a growing, spinning water pit.”

  They said at the same time, “The twins.”

  Chapter 8

  Blackness, a few flashes of random blue light, and Jamie awoke to pounding lightning mere yards away. He stared at where it had hit, smoke curling up from what used to be the parlor room of the ranch house.

  McElroy neglected to mention that the reason one of the walls was down was because it was on fire. One of the electric lanterns must have been knocked just right and set off a spark.

  Could have been lightning.

  He shook himself, then muttered, “Get a grip, find the kids. Worry about the burning wall later.” He jumped up, but felt wobbly and weak, as though he hadn’t slept in two days. He scanned the main room. Water flowed in the front open doors in a torrent, ploughing through the hall, and tearing a hole in the fire of the remains of the back wall.

  Odd, dark and murky puddles sloshed with the fat rain. The wind felt like the cause of Jamie’s weakness. He couldn’t hardly stand against it, so he got low on the ground and went toward the water that flowed freely.

  He saw others, but none he recognized until he saw dark blonde wet hair washing against a broken chair at the edge of the water and front door. He crouched low and scampered to her.

  Mandy.

  And she held Junior’s hand.

  They’d come out of the convulsions, which were still a mystery, and it looked to Jamie like they tried to get out the front door, but the water washed them into the large wooden loveseat chair thing. Jamie didn’t know what it was supposed to be. He was too busy checking their breathing and feeling their heads. Mandy had a lump on her forehead, and Junior’s arm was scraped up the entire side to his shoulder. They must’ve been terrified.

  He said their names and gently shook their shoulders one after the other. They slowly
woke, the hot firelight gleaming off their soaked faces.

  “John unlocked the door, he tried so hard to get us out,” Mandy told him. “He got washed through there.” She pointed through the fiery hole in the wall, and now water flooded the base of the flames. The light died down as the fire was swallowed by the torrential downpour.

  The water ran too hard and fast for Jamie and the kids to make it to the door. He told them, “It’ll be fine, we just have to find Cecily and another way out. A safe way.”

  Their faces weren’t afraid, but somber. He called Cecily’s name and heard her call back, “I’m fine. I’m with him.”

  He crouched low to his children. He thought the first time he saw them was the best, but now was even better. He thought…horrible things, fears. He touched their faces.

  “What? What’s wrong? We’ll wait till the wall’s done burning, see? Then find a little creek-like flow of water, drift right out of the ranch and into the woods where we’ll be safe.”

  Junior ducked his chin low and held Mandy’s hand. “Because of what we did in the seat, six people are gone.”

  “What do you mean?” he called over the rain. He could hardly hear his distressed son.

  Mandy touched Jamie’s thumb resting on her cheek. “We figured out after you told us about the convulsions. Our two implants—the brainstem one and the pineal implant—Uncle Michael told us they were put in months before we were even born out of the incubator. And Uncle Michael believed we should be kept in the same incubator. He grew us with our implants attached until he decided it was time to be born.

  “We thought about it a lot, and mind talked. Our implants grew into our bodies because we were not even babies. The scans Uncle Michael did of our brains showed we had a lot of activity in areas he was excited about. I don’t know where.”

  “Neither do I,” added Junior. “But there were fibers coming out of the pineal implants with both of us, like the implants were alive and growing in us.”

  “We did it,” Mandy said. A small tear wet her lower lash. It wasn’t rainwater. Jamie had seen her eyes fill and turn red. “We are why Uncle can do the hive-mind. But none of us knew till just then that we could also destroy it. We set all those people after us into the mind world forever. They are gone. They are…” She trailed off.

  “Dead,” finished Junior. “They cannot use their bodies anymore. They are nowhere we can reach them. They are bodies without minds, but they are somewhere connected living a life as a hive-mind. Six people. But not for long because their bodies will not last.”

  The wind died down a little bit, a momentary reprieve. Jamie worried about the twins, their messed up little lives, and Cecily. What was she doing?

  “Come on, let’s find Cecily on the other side of that…uh, bar? Is that a bar?”

  “Yes,” Cecily called out. “I’m right behind it. It blocks the water flowing through here pretty good.” Her voice sounded strange and Jamie knew something was wrong.

  He and the twins edged around the broken wooden bar that must’ve been attached to one of the walls, and the second he saw Cecily’s eyes, he knew.

  McElroy’s face was blue, and Cecily was just then releasing her hands from around his bruised neck. In all the rain and water, the devastated side of his face fell even more down and to the left, the bone chewing out his flesh from the inside.

  His one eye stared. Not at Jamie, but up at Cecily, giving her the mysterious eye stare moments before she strangled him. The glint was there, but it wasn’t crazy. It was just nothing. Maybe with a hint of a power-hungry, bored sociopath who was way too smart for his own good. A sociopath who had decided he had other things to do after being alive for a hundred or more years.

  Jamie shuddered. He sure as hell hoped it wasn’t at his daughter’s hands because he was a horrible, rotten and selfish person who used human beings for his own games to amuse himself, and convinced even himself he was doing humanity a great service.

  Jamie stared at the dead man again. Had he cared about anyone other than Cecily his whole life? Was he capable of even caring for her in the real sense? He had talked about her like she was special because she was like him. That was it. More ego.

  “Come on,” Jamie said to her. “Let’s leave him. You have to take the kids.”

  “Where is she taking us?” Mandy asked, her eyes wide.

  “I noticed on the far right side of the burnt wall, there’s no flame or smoke and just a little water. Might have to climb over the wreckage, but we have to get out of the ranch.”

  Cecily gave him a questioning look.

  “They said John washed out the back of the house. We have to look for him. He might be alive and hurt.”

  Cecily looked down and then nodded. She rolled her shoulders back, took a deep, rainy breath, and held her hands out to the twins. They took hers. Mandy said, “Did you kill him?”

  “Yes,” Cecily said without hesitation. “It was my job, and he asked me to do it.”

  “Was he a bad man, actually?” Junior asked.

  “You know what?” Cecily said gently. “We don’t talk ill of the dead in my family, so let’s just say he’ll never be talked about ever again.”

  They ducked under the tough winds and made it to the corner, then dropped out of sight into the land washed out behind the ranch house. Jamie waited and then picked his skinning knife up off the floor where Cecily had dropped it after slashing him.

  He crept around the ranch. There were six still bodies to find, and to Jamie’s relief and horror, he found each one. To be sure, he pried each one’s eyes open before stabbing them up through the ribs and into the hearts, killing them instantly one by one.

  Becca was last. Who was this woman, he wondered for a moment before putting the bloody knife tip to her ribcage. As with the others, he let a little pineal gland implant trick he’d picked up tell him if they were in there or anywhere.

  He got nothing.

  There were no souls in these bodies, if there were such things as souls, and Jamie believed with everything in him that there was something soul-like. Their bodies looked and felt empty. Shells on a shore abandoned by their creatures for other unknowns, leaving behind only these seashells left washed up in dirty sea foam.

  People’s places, as Emily called them, were madness. All the madness a person has in very real-seeming atmospheres. Cecily knew he was doing this. They silently understood it was cruel to leave them ‘alive’ in whatever the hive-mind life might be. They instinctively knew without communicating that Jamie was going to release these people.

  He slid the knife into Becca’s heart, wiped the blade on her shirt, folded it and put it in his pocket.

  Chapter 9

  Jamie left the ranch the same way the others had, and yelled into the wind and rain for them. He heard Cecily call for him from the south, where he assumed she was down in the small ravine behind the ranch.

  He didn’t hear John until he walked right up on the four of them. His right leg was bent in half midway through his already misshapen calf, the bone sticking out. He was sobbing uncontrollably, saying Cecily’s name over and over.

  Jamie sat in the rain with his kids a few feet away, hearing a little of Cecily and John’s conversation. John was repetitive, mainly about how he did Cecily wrong, how he did everyone wrong, how he tried to do right at the end and this was the end.

  “And he should do it!” John yelled, pointing at Jamie as he looked up at the beaten man. “He deserves to rip me to pieces again,” John continued. “But he did the right thing. He told me he was going to leave me alive so I’d remember every day I looked in the mirror that I’d destroyed a woman and man’s lives today.”

  John sunk his head into both muddy, wet hands, streaking his scars with reddish smears. It made it look as though his cuts were fresh and he was bleeding for the first time.

  Jamie’s world spun.

  Of course Jamie recognized those eyes. And the way Cecily changed the subject away from John the couple times Ja
mie asked about him. The green eyes in the ski mask. He was the man who killed Amanda by jacking out her implant.

  All this time, Jamie had believed he’d killed both men, but no. He’d annihilated this one and left him to live with a broken body and a deformed face and scalp.

  Deep hatred filled Jamie’s heart. Pain was as fresh as the day it happened in that moment. Jamie stood up and looked at Cecily. She stared blankly at the ground, the water making her dark hair into a curtain framing her exotic features.

  This man…why had Jamie left him alive? All the hate he had been carrying for McElroy transferred over to John, another weak and power-hungry liar. What had he put Cecily through?

  He took another step toward John, and Cecily looked up into Jamie’s eyes. He couldn’t read her expression, but saw hard emotion in her deep black irises.

  He took the skinning knife from his pocket. “Kids, look away.”

  “Are you going to kill John?” Junior asked.

  “Yeah,” Mandy added.

  They sounded more curious than anything, as though they thought the action of the day was done and they just had to get somewhere dry. Now Daddy’s standing over John with a very sharp knife and murder in his blood. He’d killed so many today. And he would kill one more.

  “Yes, I am going to kill him.”

  John’s head shot up and he raised his hands in the air. “No, no, friend, don’t do it. I didn’t mean it. I want to live! I want to be alive! I don’t want to go. I have more to offer! I can offer things to you. I know things. Lots of things. I tried to help your children out of…” he gasped for air “…the ranch house, but I was weak. But I’m good for plenty of other things. Please…don’t…”

  Jamie watched him as he babbled, and then swiftly and smoothly slashed the murderous, lying man’s throat. It didn’t even make a sound, and they all sat there in the rain and softening wind as John’s blood-covered body fell to the side, his mouth still forming begging words. But no sound came out. A torrent of blood gushed from his open throat, and bubbles formed out of the blood around his wind pipe where he was still trying to justify himself.