Weapon Read online

  “Oh,” Abby said. The name Savannah didn’t even register with her. It did with Netty, but not with Abby. Brayden and Netty told her that her name used to be Savannah before it was Abby, but you wouldn’t know it by her total lack of awareness.

  “What’s good to drink?” Abby said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never been to a bar before, although apparently my real age is irrelevant with this amazing ID.”

  “There’s something about Alligator Piss that hits the spot,” Brayden said. He forced a smile, tried to elevate his energy. He even told a hilarious joke. “I thought you two would have had drinks already.”

  “We met some people from Berkley,” Netty said. She made a snoozer of a face like they were the most boring group ever. “We got trapped.”

  “It happens,” Brayden replied.

  The three of them had drinks, relaxed, talked about this and that, but nothing that would actually challenge the group intellect. When the set of tens who were just really sixes in disguise walked by, the snarky bitch brigade each and every guy was still drooling over, he raised his glass at them as if to say cheers. They all saw him with Abby and Netty, and no one said a cruel word. Several smiled and one even gave him a little wave. He was about to order more drinks when Lexi and Savannah appeared.

  Good God, Brayden thought, the red-headed Savannah looked good. Long and lean. Super sexy in her two hundred dollar jeans and her nearly see through blouse. Seeing them, his energy spiked. His smile became his best feature. Then they were there, saying hi to Brayden, saying hi to Netty and Abby, but not formally introducing themselves to the girls.

  “We’re heading out for the evening,” Lexi told him.

  “And we wanted to say good-bye,” Savannah finished. She gave him that look, the one that said, I’m sorry your friend died, I hope you’ll be okay.

  Standing up, he hugged Lexi, then Savannah. She was as tall as him, maybe an inch taller, and she fit comfortably in his arms. Like they were meant for each other, even though they weren’t. When she didn’t move out of his space, he leaned his knee ever so slightly into her leg, then let his fingers drift close to hers. She moved her fingers across his. He took her hand into his, close to his body, then close to hers.

  This was escalation and it happened naturally, in seconds.

  It surprised him because he barely even earned it, but still, sometimes it was like that. In his ear, her breath warm and smelling like spearmint, Savannah asked if he was dating either of those girls. Not breaking eye contact, he grinned, softened his eyes to hers and said, “Not anymore. I’m holding out for something better.”

  “Good,” she said, then she slid a folded piece of paper in his front pocket. Her fingertips grazed his business, then lingered a minute. If a picture was worth a thousand words, running a finger over the tip once, slowly, suggestively was worth a million words, easy. Lips still pressed to his ear, she said, “If you don’t call me, I’ll hate you forever,” before leaving.

  “We wouldn’t want that now would we?” he said with a grin.

  When the girls were gone and Brayden was back down, drinking, Abby said, “What a hooker.”

  “Total hooker,” Netty agreed.

  “I don’t know,” Brayden replied, doing a worthless job of concealing his school girl giddiness, “they seemed kind of sweet to me.”

  6

  All in all, the night wasn’t a total bust, that was until the three of them left the club around one o’clock and found the San Francisco Police Department hovering around Abby’s S5. The cops saw them right away.

  “Shit,” Brayden mumbled under his breath. His skin ran cold, cinched up tight. The music was all out of his bones now. He was no longer Enigma; he was Brayden again.

  Two officers walked up to him and said, “Brayden James?”

  “The one and only,” he replied, cheery even though he felt like he might power vomit right then and there.

  “And this must be the girl from the same video,” the other officer said of Abby. The attempt on her life in The Fairmont’s upscale Laurel Court restaurant. The surveillance photo all over television.

  “This your Audi?” the first officer said.

  “I guess,” Abby replied.

  “What do you mean, the girl from the video?” Netty said. The thing Brayden realized was Netty loved to be up in everyone’s business, even if she had to act dumb to be there.

  “We’ve been looking for you two,” the second officer said, ignoring Netty’s question. Both the officers looked the same: five nine, maybe five ten, white skin, brown hair. Basically nondescript.

  Outside, the air was heavy, cold. People were leaving the club, and the night was winding down. All he wanted to do was go home.

  “You’ve been looking for us?” Brayden said, desperately trying to play it cool. “What for?”

  “Don’t you watch the news?” the first officer said.

  “What, the lamestream media?” Brayden quipped. “Like, on television?”

  The second officer laughed, but not the first officer. “Yes, on television,” the second officer said.

  Brayden said, “TV is so two-thousand five. Ever hear of the internet? It’s all the rage these days.”

  The officers exchanged glances, then they looked back and forth between Brayden and Abby. The first officer said, “Were you recently at Laurel Court restaurant in the Fairmont?”

  “Of course we were,” Brayden said. “Someone played a horrible prank on my friend. She’s still trying to recover from it. Emotionally anyway.”

  “What kind of prank?” the second officer said.

  “The kind where people think you bleeding out in a linen colored restaurant is freaking hilarious. It wasn’t. It scared the shit out of her because even she thought she was dying.”

  Again, the officers exchanged looks. Without a word, so much was said between them. If he had to hazard a guess, Brayden would say they were trying to decide whether or not to buy the lie and clear the case. Brayden noticed both officers looking intently at Abby’s neck. The place where she’d been sliced open for real. They wouldn’t even find a scratch.

  “What exactly happened?” the second officer asked.

  “Some goddamn skinhead with a fake knife and fake blood pretended to cut my friend’s throat open. People panicked. I hustled her to the nearest restroom where some girl then came at her for no reason I can understand. Fortunately we were able to get her out of the hotel before she could really get hurt.”

  It was chilly enough for Brayden to start shivering. All of them were. Especially the girls, who were in painted-on skirts. He stuffed his hands in his pockets knowing he was trembling more from his nerves than from the early morning San Francisco air.

  The first officer looked at Abby who looked like she had no freaking idea such an event ever happened, much less to her. He said, “Is this true, young lady?”

  “I had an accident,” was all she could say.

  “Did you wet yourself?” the first officer asked. Brayden knew he was doing all he could not to tease her in a baby voice. The second officer tried not to laugh.

  Pricks.

  Brayden felt hot around the collar. He said, “She was in a car accident a couple of days ago and hit her head pretty bad. I’m actually taking her out tonight so she doesn’t completely lose her shit and you’re putting the biggest damper on it. Both of you sopping wet douchebags.” Quickly, for posterity’s sake, he added, “No offense.”

  “All that blood didn’t look fake,” the first officer said, sobering up. “And the video footage was pretty compelling.”

  “Look, we’ve had a long night and we’re all tired, so if you don’t have anything else for us—”

  “Here’s the real problem,” the first officer said. “The blood we found on the scene wasn’t fake blood. It has a DNA signature. Fake blood doesn’t contain DNA markers.”

  Brayden’s testicles pulled high into a tight huddle. This was the reason he wanted to skip town. God damn he should h
ave blown town already! Whatever it was the cops were trying to do, it felt a lot like he and Abby were being steered into a trap.

  “You’ll have to find the bald kid and ask him about that,” Brayden said.

  “And the girl from the bathroom, the one you punched in the face and stripped naked, the video shows this young lady”—let the record show the officer pointing at Abby—“leaving in her clothes.”

  “So what are you saying?” Netty snapped, her hands now planted firmly on her hips.

  “We’re saying your friends are going to have to accompany us to the station for questioning.”

  “I don’t think so,” Brayden said. If Christian Swann told him to get Abby home by morning, he was going to do exactly that. Getting her arrested, that was not in the cards. No way.

  “She left in that girl’s dress because, in her state of mind, she felt someone tried to kill her and this was the best disguise either of us could manage, considering the circumstances.”

  “You can come with us voluntarily or involuntarily,” the second officer said, ignoring them. “It’s your choice.” The air of cooperation was all gone.

  Dicks were being flexed.

  “Me personally,” the first officer said, “I hope you resist.” He was looking right at Brayden, putting his hand on his weapon for effect.

  The way it looked, the three of them were heading to the SFPD, and quite possibly to jail.

  Shit.

  The Raping of Minds

  1

  Delgado just looked at the girl. He watched her breathe. In, out. In, out. Her body alive, nothing else functional.

  He wheeled her down the hall, administered an MRI, then he studied the results and found no answers there. Everything was operating normally. No brain damage.

  No anomalies.

  “So what’s wrong with you, my dear?” he said aloud to no one. His question quietly echoed throughout his lab, a fifteen foot by fifteen foot chamber with ten foot ceilings. The space was sterile looking, right down to the white tile floors and the bleach white walls.

  He ran his hands over Abby’s stripped naked body. Not the way a creeper coming across a hot, naked girl would do, but more out of admiration. To have created something so lovely from science was exciting! Her flesh was cool to the touch, pebbled with goose bumps. Alone in the lab, privacy on his side, he studied her face and body, tried to imagine a world were scientists had the know-how to trump God when it came to matters of life and death.

  “You are a specimen like no other,” he announced in awe. “Absolute perfection.”

  He ran more tests, kept getting nowhere.

  Days passed. A week. Finally the one they called “the doctor” announced that he was coming to Delgado’s lab. Delgado asked for him for help forever ago. When the doctor arrived, he was not alone. Standing outside the lab, waiting for him to open the door, was a woman in a lab coat and two men, both in lab coats as well. In the monitor from the overhead camera, both men looked like they were early- to mid-thirties and the woman was attractive, her model-hot face unsmiling. They did not come with the doctor, it seemed. Not with the nervous looks they were exchanging. Had Delgado’s superiors wanted an audience? Getting volunteers wouldn’t have been hard. The doctor, he had a reputation, a delicious air of mystery shrouding him. Delgado opened the lab door.

  His eyes landed hard on the doctor. He was taller than most. Delgado found his neck craning up to meet the man’s gaze. The second their eyes met, Delgado was rocked with an icy chill. The man was darkness incarnate. His very presence seemed to eat the light. At nearly seven feet tall, with the kind of athletic build only the genetically superior could achieve, the doctor was daunting to say the least. And handsome. Delgado would be him if he could. Be he could never achieve such perfection.

  No human could.

  A headache started in him the moment the doctor entered the room. It was a McMigraine. The fast food version of instant head-pain in a box, if the box was your head and the pain was immediate and immense. Delgado tried not to wince. Instead, he reached out to shake the man’s hand. The doctor just looked at it. That’s when Delgado saw his deep-set eyes change ever so slightly. The pupils were not so much round as they were the slightest bit football shaped.

  What in Jesus’s name? he thought, reeling. He stepped back, and for a second he grew frightened. Then Delgado blinked, and the doctor’s pupils were perfectly round again. The doctor merely stared at him, as if he were reading Delgado’s mind. Impossible.

  But was it?

  The man’s expression gave away nothing. He was a vast emptiness. Deep space.

  “What are you?” Delgado heard himself ask.

  The onset of lunacy ate holes in the filter that was supposed to keep your mouth from saying everything your brain was thinking.

  “Everything, and nothing. A doctor, a beast, something inhuman. You decide what I am, Dr. Delgado, and whatever you decide will be just fine with me. I understand the young woman on your table is our unsolved mystery, yes?”

  “Indeed,” Delgado replied.

  The two men—the doctors in tow—they couldn’t take their eyes off the nearly nude girl. Under the thin white sheet were the dark circles of Abby’s nipples, and the triangle shadow of new pubic hair. The woman’s face flushed red.

  The doctor moved past Delgado, lithe almost, like the liquid sensation of water pouring over and around a rock. Delgado turned his head, stared at the back of the man who was now towering over the girl’s body.

  The doctor uncurled his fingers, moved them open and shut almost like he was trying them on for the first time. Delgado could not believe how long his fingers were. At least an inch or two longer than his own. Maybe even longer.

  And super creepy.

  Delgado’s headache grew worse. Parts of his spine were now aching, too. A dull, compacting throb running the length of his upper body. He moved in beside the doctor, gained himself a different vantage point. Leaning over Abby’s face, hovering inches from her, the doctor pried open her eyes. He stood there, staring at her for a full minute. Just observing. He cocked his head sideways, peered deeper inside her eyes. Then, as if he finally saw what he was wanting to see, he stood up tall and drew a deep, consternated breath.

  What was he looking for? Delgado was dying to know. What had he found?

  “Is it true you can take a soul and imprison it someplace outside the body?” Delgado asked. The idea was preposterous to him before. But in this place, he learned anything and everything was possible.

  To verify a rumor like that, though, Delgado felt it would be prudent to verify at the source. The moment he heard about this, he could not stop thinking of the first Ghostbusters movie, how they stored the ghosts they trapped inside the Ecto Containment Unit. Did these guys…these things…did they have their own version of an Ecto Containment Unit, but for the souls of the living?

  “It is true,” the doctor said like it was no big deal. Then he said, “She is not in here. This girl you’re seeking.”

  The doctor tore his eyes off Abby, glanced around the room, then up toward the ceiling, almost as if he were searching for something. Or someone.

  What a weirdo, Delgado thought.

  Everyone in the room held their breath. Delgado’s headache reached epic proportions. Plus, the room felt ten degrees hotter. A power drill grinding through flesh and bone to reach the soft grey mass inside his head would have been less painful. The room felt saturated in what he thought were pulsating psychic waves. Behind him, he heard a sniffle. Turning, he saw the woman’s nose bleeding. She tilted her head up to staunch the blood, then turned and staggered out of the room. And the remaining men? They could no longer hide the tension in their expressions. They were like him: tough and proud, but in pain.

  “Ah, there you are, little one,” the doctor said in the most pleasant voice. He was looking up in the corner of the room.

  At about that point, Delgado’s head was ready to explode. Blood drained from his nostrils,
too. His aching spine finally bowed, his knees getting weaker by the second. Behind him, a man collapsed. The doctor turned around, looked at them and suddenly the pain stopped.

  It was just gone.

  “My apologies,” the doctor said. His eyes became human. They had depth to them. Dimension. No longer were they a greenish beige; they were now the most hypnotic blue. Being at Dulce revealed a great many things, but this was indeed one of the most unusual.

  “Are you familiar with psychic surgery?” the doctor said to no one in particular, as if all of their faces weren’t hemorrhaging only seconds ago.

  Delgado wiped his nose on his sleeve, the red trailing in shaky smears up the length of the arm of his bleached white lab coat. Behind him, the fallen man was getting up. Both men wiped their noses.

  “I am,” Delgado said. The density of the air changed. It grew instantly heavy at first, right after the doctor’s apology, then it changed again. Thinned out to a warmer, more tolerable temperature. For a moment, it tasted sweet. Then it was breathable.

  “This is similar to psychic surgery. What I’m about to do, it’s merely exploratory.” Extending a hand, he uncurled his index and middle fingers. They were six and a half inches long, easy.

  Delgado’s eyes widened.

  Then, without warning, the doctor slowly wiggled the two fingers inside Abby’s forehead. This is impossible, Delgado thought, blinking rapidly. He wavered for a second. Nearly fainted seeing what he was seeing. It was not like he put his fingers in flesh and bone, it was more like he slipped them into a thick jelly. Vertigo threatened to undo him. How did they just go in like that?

  He peered closer.

  The doctor didn’t seem to mind.

  Then he pulled his fingers from the girl’s head and turned those once blue eyes upon him. They were greenish beige again. Ugly. The rest of him bore an unmistakable, androgynous beauty. But the eyes…the eyes were inhuman.

  “This one is special,” he said. “She can be like us, to some measure.” He curled his two fingers back into his palm, tucked his hands behind his back.