All Seeing Eye

  My eyes drifted to Fujiwara. Flat on his stomach with his hands cuffed at the small of his back, he had his head turned to one side, and although the blood remained a steady run from his nose, he was still grinning. His teeth were red, but the smile was as happy as they came. For a man in a shitload of trouble, he didn’t seem to feel that he’d done anything but come out on top.

  “Why’d he let himself get caught?” I asked abruptly, turning to Hector. “You said it before: we never caught a glimpse of him. Now he just gives himself away. Why? There has to be a reason.”

  “Three minutes,” Thackery snapped before Hector could reply. “We don’t have time to delve into the mind of this insane piece of garbage now.”

  All of the things Fujiwara had managed to accomplish without detection before, that didn’t say insanity to me. It said he was smart, smarter than all of us standing there. He’d let us know who he really was for a purpose, and it wasn’t aimed at simply throwing me off. If that’s all he wanted, he would’ve made another try at killing me—fourth time’s the charm.

  Something was off. I’d known with the car bomb at the restaurant that he was as good as the best of con men when it came to distraction. That, though … that had been nothing.

  This … this was a true marvel of distraction.

  But what was it misdirecting us from? Where was the hand in the pocket, lifting the wallet? What was the trick?

  “Jackson, two minutes. I hate saying it, but Thackery’s right. We’re out of time.”

  I focused on Hector. He stared back, unhappy but resolute. Thackery and he were both right, but not in the way they thought they were.

  “I think we are. In more ways than one,” I said. It was too late. Whatever Fujiwara was doing in addition to stopping the project from cleaning up the mess, the mess being Charlie, there was nothing we could do about it now. He’d either failed and we were about to save Charlie, or he’d succeeded and I was about to relive a waking nightmare.

  Without the shotgun, without the knife, how bad could it actually be? I closed my eyes and tightened the fist I’d made around the ring, the metal digging into my flesh.

  Bad enough.

  I opened my eyes and shifted my attention back toward the house. There wasn’t a single tree around it. It would’ve been better if there were, a merciful blot of shade instead of the bleached-bone heap that hunched under a ruthless sun. All of its sins were bare for anyone who cared to look … and for those of us who wished to hell we didn’t have to.

  Two minutes may as well have been two seconds, and then, as before, I felt Charlie try to come home.

  Lost. Where did everyone go? Where did the world go? Where’s the door? Where’s the door? Where … where … where …

  “He’s here,” I rapped out. “Charlie’s here. Whatever the hell you’re going to do, do it now!”

  I’d done my part. My massacre might not have aged like a fine wine, but Charlie had sniffed my psychic curse out. It had brought him here. It was time to see if Fujiwara was bluffing or not. The squat piece of technology built to save and destroy Charlie all in one went from ominous buzzing to the eager whine of a chain saw biting into wood. The air suddenly felt heavy, and not from the heat. It felt as if gravity had doubled. There was a metallic taste on the back of my tongue. It wasn’t the copper of blood. It tasted more like nickel or silver, close to the taste of the dime I’d swallowed when I was four, and for a moment, the white-hot light of the sun was tinted with green. Green, but not a shade of green I’d seen before or knew existed.

  As my stomach clenched at the unnatural glare, Hector shouted, “It’s locked! Some kind of energy loop. It’s feeding on itself. Go! Everyone, run!”

  I made a grab for Meleah’s arm, but she was already gone, headed for what to her eyes would be the nearest shelter. Thackery, Hector, and the soldiers followed her. The house. Run? Not there. Any direction was better than that one. Hector stopped on the sagging boards of the porch as he saw me standing, unmoving. “Jackson, come on!”

  “Hector, don’t. Not the house. Charlie’s here, and you know what happens next. Get out of there!” I didn’t care if the Charlie buster was the equivalent of ten sticks of dynamite. I didn’t care that no one had weapons to use in this reenactment. That house and what was coming were the greater threat, hands down, at least to me. We’d made the wrong call, all of us, and I didn’t want to be around when the piper came calling to wad up that bill and shove it down our throats. I ran toward the field on the left, away from the house, away from the machine that was now screaming, darkening the air further with a color so destructively deviant and wrong that my eyes could barely see it.

  When the explosion came a fraction of a second later, being thrown to the ground with vicious force was actually a relief. Simultaneously, the sun, air, and gravity had returned to normal. I blinked up at the sky. I was flat on my back, which was a mass of pain—the one rib being joined by the rest. I’d hit on my stomach but rolled a few times, how many I hadn’t counted, to end up on my back. The machine wasn’t screaming anymore. It was a blackened mass sending smoke that tasted of acid billowing high into the blue.

  Question answered. Fujiwara didn’t bluff.

  19

  I felt the tickle of grass on my skin. I hadn’t lost the ring, but the bare skin of my hand was resting on the ground. I jerked it up, holding my breath. No. Jesus, no. No screaming, no feeling of blood rising to gush out of your throat, no water sucking you down to endless suffocation.

  I exhaled when none of that appeared. That day must be trapped in the house … and the well. I pulled my other glove out of my pocket, put it on, and shoved the ring in its place. I didn’t need it any longer. I already knew Charlie was here. Worse, with Fujiwara’s sabotage, I knew what that meant.

  As I pushed myself up on my elbows, my entire body ached. Despite that, nothing else seemed to be broken. I was lucky. I hadn’t been close to the reintegrator. The soldiers had been, though. Like all the goons on the project, their job was to protect the geeks. They had been bringing up the rear, holding back enough to guard Hector and Thackery’s flank. Now they were down and unmoving in the brown grass. One was breathing; the other two weren’t. Neither was Fujiwara, who had a foot-wide piece of metal protruding from his chest, that crimson grin now carved permanently on his face.

  I didn’t see Hector. He’d heard my warning. He would’ve gone after Meleah to try to get her out of the house through the back. They hadn’t made it. I knew even before the screaming I’d been relieved not to have filling my head suddenly ripped through the air. It was a woman’s scream but not one of fear. It was pure rage—“My baby! You drowned my baby!”—it was the words of my mother. This was what she had screamed at Boyd as she went after him with the butcher knife. Her words but not her voice. It was Meleah.

  The show had started, I thought numbly. I didn’t move. There were no weapons, I repeated to myself. No gun and knife, and the soldiers weren’t armed—protocol for any reenactment mission. Nothing that bad could happen. I thought it again and one more time before I swore. I heaved myself to my feet and went step by slow step toward the last place I wanted to be.

  “Boyd, you motherfucker, don’t! Don’t! No, Mom! No!” Hector’s shout and a cry of anguish from the past that I didn’t remember. Had that been me? I recalled every detail—why didn’t I remember that?

  I ran. The past was horrific and littered with bodies, but this was the present. There were people I knew here and now, living people. And maybe this time I could do something to keep them that way. I hit the porch and was through the door as the line of scarlet on Meleah’s brown skin begin to spill blood. Thackery had slashed her, but he hadn’t put the knife through her throat as Boyd had done to my mother. Meleah was strong and athletic, not the beaten-down, worn wisp of a woman my mom had been. Meleah had moved quickly enough to escape the knife … almost.

  Knife. What was a knife doing here in an abandoned shell of a home? There was nothing. No furni
ture, no appliances, not a single discarded flea-market fake painting on the wall. How could there be a knife like the bright and shiny new one in Thackery’s hand? Now Hector was turning and running down the narrow hall toward the back bedroom … where the shotgun had been. If the knife had been replaced, I had every expectation that the shotgun had been, too. Fujiwara’s manipulation from beyond the grave.

  Sometimes things are so wrong and so bad that your brain refuses to deal with them in the here and now. You can almost feel the pop-and-sizzle of the short-circuiting brain cells before numbness covers your mind in an insulating blanket. That blanket let you step away and see things clearly—see what has to be done. This had happened before. It had let me react, not freeze up in the face of death. Had allowed me to see that someone had to die, and unless I wanted it to be me, then I’d better find a way to stop it.

  There was no pop-and-sizzle this time. There was only reality, hypermagnified. The universe only gave you one psychotic split per slaughter. This second time around, I was on my own. I dealt with it. I didn’t have much choice, and I already had one run-through. What was an encore performance? A piece of cake, right?

  Right.

  As Thackery followed Hector at a run down the hall, I gripped Meleah’s arms as she staggered back against the stained plasterboard and helped her slide down to a sitting position. Peeling back her hand, blood under her immaculately short polished nails and in every crease of her knuckles, I faced the slash that ran across the front of her throat. It was bleeding, but it wasn’t the waterfall spill I’d unconsciously expected. It wasn’t deep enough for arteries to have been cut. It wasn’t precisely superficial, but she wouldn’t bleed to death.

  I didn’t think.

  She wouldn’t die.

  I hoped.

  I ripped the pristine white sleeve of her lab coat—professional always, even on field trips to hell. She was a good match for Hector. Would that they both lived long enough to find that out. I wrapped the sleeve around her throat and tied it snugly enough to help with the bleeding but not enough to cut off her air. “Put your hand back up.” I pulled it up for her and pressed it to the quickly staining cloth. “It’ll help.”

  Her eyes met mine as her hand automatically stayed where I’d placed it. “He drowned my baby,” she whispered. “Jack.” My mom had been the only one to call me Jack, like the girls had been the only ones to call me Jackie. “He killed our Tess.”

  “I know … Mom.” I swallowed. A recording, only a recording with more depth and scope than any duplication should have. “I know. Stay here. I’ll get Boyd. I promise.”

  I ran a soothing hand along her hair and then stood from my crouch to run down the hall after Thackery and Hector. Thackery had kept hold of the knife, something Boyd hadn’t done, since he’d left it buried in my mother’s throat. He had something else that my stepfather had lacked. Boyd had just been a fat, lazy bastard who had no hope of outrunning a fourteen-year-old. Thackery was a whippet of a man. Lithe and fast.

  But Hector was no skinny teenager, either. His body was honed and hardened by military service. He could outrun the runt that I’d been. Thackery was quicker than Boyd. Hector was quicker than me.

  He’d already fired the shotgun. I’d already been throwing myself onto Thackery, knocking him and the knife down, where they could do no more damage. Unfortunately, in Hector’s eyes—my eyes from sixteen years ago—the damage had already been done. His hands had already found the shotgun in the closet, and his finger had already pulled the trigger. I wished I’d been slower. Thackery didn’t need saving. I was another matter. The buckshot mainly hit my chest and was stopped by the Kevlar. Some of it hit a few inches under my left arm, an area unprotected by the vest. Only part of the load but enough to blow me off Thackery and land me on my back. People say it feels as if you were kicked by a mule. People, they always goddamn lie.

  The pain spiked sharp and hot, and blood coated my gloved hand when I touched the multiple punctures through cloth and flesh. I looked up from my hand to Hector. He didn’t see me. One shot. It had taken two to put Boyd down. As Thackery growled and propelled himself up from the floor, blade in hand arcing straight for Hector’s chest, Hector fired the second shot, right into Thackery’s face—Boyd’s face—the same as I had done.

  And if there was balance in the world, any at all, that’s where it would’ve stopped, the killing. Hector would go to Meleah’s side and tell his mom that everything was fine. Everything would be all right.

  The world laughed at that one.

  Whoever had left the shotgun hadn’t only loaded it, they’d also left extra ammunition. Thackery was gone, a faceless corpse lying across my legs in a hallway I used to slide down in socked feet. But I was still alive—in serious, nerve-shredding pain but alive. That made me another Boyd to take care of. Hector disappeared into the back bedroom and returned to load the shotgun with two more shells by the time I managed to use a handful of Thackery’s lab coat to pull myself up into a sitting position. I ignored the gray haze that blurred my vision. “Hector,” I said hoarsely, but he wasn’t Hector now. “Jackson, it’s over. You killed him. You killed Boyd. He’s dead.”

  The shotgun stayed trained on me, and Hector’s pale eyes didn’t blink. They were empty. That didn’t mean he hadn’t heard me. If I could’ve seen into my own eyes when I’d put Boyd down, I wouldn’t have seen much of anyone home then, either.

  “Jackson,” I emphasized again. The guy at the mill had heard me, or at least I’d pushed the recording into a minor detour. “Jackson, your mom is hurt. She needs you.”

  This time, Hector did blink, and his lips peeled back from his teeth. “You stabbed her. You murdering bastard. She’s dying. You’ve killed her. You killed Tess. No more killing. Not by you.”

  I saw them simultaneously: his finger tightening on the trigger …

  And the shoe.

  It was at his feet, halfway between him and Thackery’s shattered skull. It gleamed bright and pink as the day Mom had bought it and as the day I’d found it in the grass. One small pink shoe. Tess’s shoe … although she’d been buried in them both. Her pride and joy, her favorite possessions. How could she be buried in anything else?

  This was dying, I guessed. Not your whole life running like an overly long James Cameron movie. No, just small moments. Small shots of the things that had derailed your life altogether. It made sense. It made you glad to go. You could finally see the whole screwed-up mess put to rest, because there’d never been any real hope of turning it around with one selfless act. That was movie shit, and movie shit was just that. Pure, unadulterated, get-your-hopes-up and pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you-every-time shit.

  “Go on then, Jackson,” I said quietly, my eyes still on the impossible shoe. “Boyd has to go, and you know it. Pull the trigger. Hector, if you remember this, it’s not your fault. Some things have to play out. You can’t stop a recording in the middle. It has to play out until the end. Things just work that way.”

  I didn’t look up to watch him pull the trigger. If he did remember this, I didn’t want that to be one of his memories. Nightmares cut at you a shade less in the dark of the night if you don’t have to see them looking back at you.

  But instead of the shotgun blast that I couldn’t possibly hear until after it tore off my head, I heard something else. Something as impossible as the shoe.

  “Boys are so stupid.”

  I lifted my gaze—not by too much, I didn’t have to—and saw her standing behind Hector. She had small fingers hooked into his pocket as she peeked around his hip. The strawberry blond hair was in a bow. Green, to clash completely with the shoe. Tess had always had her own unique style.

  “Jack Sprat, I’m awfully busy now.” There was the same overly dramatic sigh I remembered. Her face brightened. “You found my shoe!”

  “I did.” My lips were completely numb. I didn’t feel them move. “I wish I could’ve kept it before, but I thought you’d want it more.” Hector hadn’t pul
led the trigger, or he had and here was the afterlife I’d always denied. I didn’t like being wrong. I hated worse to admit it. But now, if this was what happened when you died, I didn’t mind being a blind idiot. “Where were you all those years? Why didn’t you come see me?”

  She cocked her head and smiled, happy as she’d ever been … always been. Every minute of every day. “I came all the time. Except not so much since, um, December? Other than that, I visited you tons and tons. But you couldn’t see me or hear me. You never pay attention.” She stomped her socked foot playfully, and suddenly, the pink shoe was back on her foot as she stepped out to stand beside a frozen Hector. He was breathing, I could see that, and maybe that meant I wasn’t dead after all. Why would I stick around to watch the man breathe?

  “I knew you’d need help. And if you wouldn’t listen, then I’d have to smack you one and make you listen.” I felt good and solidly smacked, that was true. She reached up and pinched Hector’s side. “Wake up, Hector. Put the bad gun down and wake up.”

  Hector jumped, as if he’d received a small electric shock. “What …?” He looked at the shotgun in his hand and hurriedly eased back on the trigger before placing the weapon on the floor. “Jackson.” He was pale under his darker skin. “I shot you. God, I shot you.” Thackery he paid no attention to. After all, in his mind, Thackery had been a done deal, anyway.

  Tess shook her head, hair swinging and fierce with exasperation. “Boys. Boys can’t do anything right.”

  Hector’s head jerked around and then angled down. I was certain my file had pictures. He knew who he was seeing, what he was seeing, even if I was having trouble wrapping a mind suddenly made of mush around it all. “Tess?”

  “You hurt Jackie, but I guess it’s not your fault. I thought doctors were supposed to be smart and have suckers. Grape suckers are the best.” She turned an expectant gaze on him, only to sigh again, this time in disappointment, when his mouth opened without sound and no suckers came out of his pocket. “I think you need to go back to doctor school, but I have a present for you, anyway.”