Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist

TWIST

Kevin J. Anderson

If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions,

can
twisted intentions pave the road to Heaven?

THURSDAY

Chapter 1

Shadows were opportunities. Places to hide, secret routes for movement, chances for a hunt.

The streets were full of shadows.

The streets were full of opportunities.

Winding down after rush hour, traffic was sporadic around Denver’s Capitol Hill. The sun had long since set, though the chill of night was only just cutting its way through the air. Bright streetlights and buildings huddled together in an island of illumination, ceding the territory around alleys and side streets to the darkness.

A form flitted between pools of light. Shadow to shadow. Taking advantage of the opportunity.

On the edge of the neighborhood, apartment buildings thinned out to make way for ramshackle old homes that didn’t seem to know about Denver’s much talked-about facelift.

T
he form stopped, wavering in the darkness in front of a particular rundown house. Flaking paint barely covered the sun-bleached walls. The battered windows were covered with sagging screens.

Not
a very impressive home for a supposedly superior Brilliant—deprecatingly called a freakish
Twist
—someone who’d had a lifetime of undeserved advantages.

Inside, a man
wandered around the living room, casting a shadow of his own against thin interior curtains. Decisions. Opportunities.

Stepping across half-dead grass of an untended lawn, the form climbed the porch steps, alert for the creak of wood
, sticking to the shadows. But the porch light was too harsh, posing a problem.

A risk, but necessary
—the form unscrewed the entryway bulb, ignoring the burn of hot glass on gloved fingertips, and welcome shadows descended like a stage curtain at the end of a play. Porch and door vanished into darkness, creating more opportunities.

Time to move on to the next step.

Throwing a rock onto the warped wood of the porch, the form melted into the deeper shadow between door and window, becoming a part of the grays and tans of the home’s faded paint. The rock bounced and clacked, just loud enough.

The interior curtain twitched aside. A man stared out of the living room, blinded by his own lights, scowling
out at the mysterious noise but seeing nothing. His face turned, saw that the porch light was out. His lips moved, but the dingy glass pane muffled his curse. The curtain fell back into place. Footsteps moved toward the door.

Coiled and tense in the shadows on the porch
, gripping the weapon—waiting. A smile.
Worthless Twist deserves to die!

The front door swung inward with a creak, and the man peered out, annoyed but not afraid.
Big mistake. He reached up to check the lightbulb in the entryway.

Spinning away from the wall, the form detached from the background as if
born from a womb of shadows. Each step of the attack perfectly planned, like a blueprint of assassination.

In the doorway, the victim was surrounded by a halo of dim light, blinded. Noticing the movement, he grunted in surprise.
“Who the hell are you?” Instinct made him draw back into the doorway.

No hesitation, one chance, leverage the opportunity.

The form darted forward, tracked
the victim’s movement, compensated, and threw a right jab. It was all so fast, carefully coordinated, the victim wouldn’t have a chance.

But the
Twist seemed to know the punch was coming and dodged out of the strike zone with astonishing speed.

Unnatural. Yes, another freak.

Another reactive right jab, harder this time, but the victim raised his hands, pivoted to the side, and grabbed the attacker by elbow and shoulder, tried to throw the assailant into the entryway. The scuffle was fast, silent, desperate. Reassess the attack plan, adjust alternatives. The angle and momentum of the move would put the victim in control—and slam the attacker’s head into the wall as a bonus.

Can
’t let that happen.

Panic wasn
’t an option. Fight or flight was an unevolved response.

Finish the job.

The victim could never have guessed beforehand that he would be a target, could not have anticipated this assault, but he defended himself smoothly with reflexes as fast as a cobra’s.

Damned freak born with a DNA silver spoon in his mouth.

Some people called them Brilliants, winners of an unfair genetic lottery, with mental gifts that made them feel oh so superior. A part of this man’s brain had developed abnormally in utero, allowing him to analyze patterns and predictively react. One percent of the population were born with the savant genes turned on. Without paying the price of Asperger’s or autism, he was a genius savant, rather than an idiot savant.

And that
1 percent thought they could lord it over the rest of the 99 percenters.

The smug confidence
showed in his reaction, as if he just
assumed
he was superior to any mere normal attacker. And that fact alone presented opportunities.
So predictable. Time to even out the percentages.

As the Brilliant victim caught the punch
and moved with the force of the strike, the attacker rolled in a follow-through, and momentum of defense concealed the real attack—the jagged broken whiskey bottle in the left hand. Jab, thrust, twist.
Twist
.

Glass parted flesh. The killer floated through the air
. Everything seemed to slow to half speed. Like shark’s teeth, the bottle’s jagged saw blade ripped into the Brilliant’s throat. He reacted, but even freakish mental powers couldn’t reassemble spurting arteries.

The victim grabbed at his
neck, coughing, his words nothing more than a liquid bubbling red. He seemed to be asking,
Why me? What did I do? Who are you?
But a Twist didn’t deserve answers.

The man staggered backward into the house, still bleeding, still thrashing, but he was already
as good as dead. Maybe the freak thought it was important to live 1 percent longer than a normal human.

The killer crouched and watched with fascination, careful to avoid the spreading pool of blood.
“Worthless, worthless, worthless.”

As the victim took his time dying, blood spurted across the walls. He sagged to his knees.

The killer gave an assessment. “One at a time. One at a time.” Even with his superior mental powers, the victim did not seem able to do the math. He fell forward into his own blood.

Done with the kill, the form dropped the broken bottle and left the house to rejoin the shadows outside. Upping the percentages, a little bit at a time.

MONDAY

Chapter
2

Twist.

W
hat a name
, thought Adam.

The elegance of the derogatory word was not lost
on him, sitting as he was, trapped and isolated in his chair on the seventh floor, forced to live his life through other people, other actions. As a label,
Brilliants
sounded better, but
Twists
seemed more applicable to his own situation.

He stared out the window, letting his
one good hand slowly trail against the warm glass, lower and lower until the fingers touched his wheelchair.
Watching—that’s all I can do now
. Behind him, the main room of his apartment was open, with bookshelves on the walls but no furniture other than a comfy chair and coffee table in the middle of the room, nothing much to impede the movement of the motorized chair.

Colorado sunshine
pushed its way through the glass, but the warmth stopped at his skin. Inside, he felt cold. He gazed down the seventy-seven feet to the ground below, watching pedestrians who bustled through their days, ignorant of his gaze. He watched the rippling flutter of leaves on the nearest aspen—sixteen feet from the corner. Based on the movement of the leaves, the wind was moving at 4.5 miles an hour, maybe 4.3. He could also immediately estimate the speed of the traffic, from the silver Prius (17 mph), to the black Ford Expedition (an aggressive 31 mph), to the bicycle messenger (21 mph in short bursts as he wove among pedestrians and cars).

Shaking his head,
Adam tried to let go, but it was hard to rid himself of his military training. Special Ops had appreciated his gift as a Brilliant, once upon a time. Now that the use of those skills was programmed in, he would always notice the full suite of details, would always factor them into his observations. It was the only way he could force the world to make sense. It was the only thing he could do, trapped here in his apartment.

That was
the snapshot of Adam’s life now: observation and inaction. Vicarious living through other realities that were not his own.

Last week his therapist
, Ingrid Wolverton, had brought him an article from the
New York Times
. It was a summation of groundbreaking work from the 1980s, research done by Dr. Eugene Bryce, who had first discovered the phenomenon of Brilliants. Since Ingrid’s last house call, Adam had read the article ninety-four times, though he had memorized it in ten. One particular section had caught his attention, and he couldn’t get those words out of his head:

Historically, the term
savant
was generally paired with another word, to form an unkind, but not inaccurate phrase; idiot savant. Those rare individuals with superhuman gifts were generally crippled in some way. Broken geniuses, they were able to recreate the lemon skyline after only a moment’s glance, yet unable to order a cup of tea; able to intuit string theory or noncommutative geometry and yet be baffled by their mother’s smile. It was as though evolution was maintaining equilibrium, giving here, taking there.

However, this was not the case with the
“brilliance.” Dr. Bryce estimates that as many as one in a hundred children born since 1980 have these advantages, and that these children are otherwise statistically normal. They are smart, or not. Social, or not. Talented, or not. In other words, apart from their wondrous gifts, they are exactly as children have been since the dawn of man.

In his lap, the fingers of his hand curled into a fist as he repeated the words to himself:
as though evolution was maintaining equilibrium, giving here, taking there.
Evolution may have given Adam a gift of hyperacute vision and kinesthetic sensitivity, but life itself had evened the scales, taking just as much away from him, if not more. Losing the use of three limbs? That seemed like an overpayment to him.

Staring at
his clenched fist, he ground his jaws together. The one available escape from his hell came from the same gift that had cost him such a high price. “Microdetail analysis and projection,” his therapist—and the military—had called it.

Others might have used the term
voyeurism
.

But
it was so much more than that to him. Adam’s special ability gave him a way out of his nonresponsive physical prison. He placed his one palm against the windowpane again, waiting. It was almost time.

She
would be getting off the bus soon.
She
would be walking down the street. Of all the needs to be filled in his vicarious life, Chloe
trumped them all. How could she not?

Adam’s
ocular muscles began to twitch with anticipation. Spasming faster than he could control, the ciliary muscles responded to his Brilliant subconscious as his brain hunted for details, assembled information, zooming in, zooming out, never giving his conscious mind a chance to catch up. Three-dimensional constructs, models of the streets and apartments, formed in his mind’s eye. A reflection from the ground-floor window, refracted by a man’s sunglasses, then caught in the rearview mirror of a passing car, which in turn bounced it off the storefront window around the corner and down the street.

Combined with the optical clues, s
ubtle vibrations against Adam’s palm indicated how the outside world spoke to him through his window. For all the couldn’ts, for all the wouldn’ts, and for all the wasted wishes in Adam’s life, there was one thing he could do. He could
see
.

Two and a half blocks away, around the corner and up the street from his window, the bus arrive
d. He smiled.

She was home.