Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist (4 page)

Chapter
7

Ingrid stared into Adam’s storm-blue eyes, leaned closer, stared harder. “You’re blocking.”

Adam grimaced.
“I thought therapy was to let me bring up things that I want to talk about, not you forcing me to deal with my memories.”

Ingrid spun her pen around her fingers, eyeing the notebook in her lap.
“Adam, it’s not that simple. True, a lot of our sessions will be about the things you want to discuss, but for this process to be effective, we also need to dig into some of the deeper issues. If it was easy, you wouldn’t need me—nobody would. I’d be out of a job. But if I’m going to make your life better, we’ll have to touch on those things.”

His snort spoke volumes. “Make my life better . . .”

She sidestepped the comment. “
I’ve been coming to see you for thirteen months, and you still haven’t opened up about your past, not even in general terms.”

Adam looked to the side, refusing to meet her eye
, but at least he didn’t give her the “it’s classified” excuse. Ingrid decided to try another tactic. “Okay, then tell me about the police calls you keep making. All those reports. You’ve got people concerned.”

The question provoked an immediate response. Adam looked up and gritted his teeth.
“There’s nothing illegal or wrong about that! I’m just trying to prevent crimes and help people. I see things that are about to happen, people about to get hurt. You know I’ve got a gift. Do you expect me to just sit here?” With his one good hand he touched the side of his wheelchair. “I do enough of that as it is.”

“But you can’t possibly know the things you’re calling in
, incidents that are blocks away from here.”

“
I spend a lot of time watching.” Adam motioned toward the window. “Watching people live, just seeing bits and pieces of life. You might say I’ve become an expert at it.”

Ingrid nodded.
“It’s healthy that you want to interact with the outside world—it really is. But maybe that’s a little inappropriate, edging into Peeping Tom territory? Better to go outside in person, see people up close rather than through a window from seven stories up. Your chair is motorized; you can make it.”

“
Broken elevator and all?” Adam stared angrily off to the side. “I’m sure I can just roll right down seven flights of stairs.”

She
could not argue with the reality, and though she had filed complaints herself, she had never been able to get an estimate of when the elevator would finally be repaired. She knew, however, that he would have made an excuse, even if he lived on the ground floor.

“You know the
VA would help you move to a more accommodating place if you requested it. If it came down to it, I’d even call my friends and help you move. I’ve made the offer multiple times. It’s your choice to live here. You’re not forced to stay.”

“I like my place.” Adam looked around the room as if assessing the hardwood floors,
the stout oak beams in the ceiling on which hung hooks and grab ropes. Books were everywhere, though more and more they gathered dust as he opted for the window instead. Only one book lay on the coffee table next to the timer Ingrid brought to her sessions every week: his favorite novel,
Slan
, dog-eared and coffee stained.

“Then why not watch TV instead of watching people?”

Sullen, he shook his head. “Television isn’t the same, has no sensory spikes. It’s like eating cardboard. With my gift, I can see details, even from far away—you know that much. I can train in on people’s lives. The military found it useful.”

Her pulse sped up.
“Let’s talk about that.”

“No thanks.”

Leaning forward, Ingrid placed a hand on Adam’s forearm. “You refuse to face your past and you isolate yourself from your present. I’m afraid that you’re slowly cutting yourself off from having a future. You can’t just sit back and be an observer while other people live their lives.”

He refused
to meet her gaze. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“
Adam, come on, I’m on your team. Open up with me.”

The timer on the coffee table buzzed. S
he knew he was secretly disappointed that it was time for her to leave, but unwilling to admit it. He responded with sarcasm. “Thank God, I’m done with you this week.”

Ingrid
stuffed the notepad in her bag; the pages were still mostly blank, no insights or revelations this week, just like so many of the previous weeks. “Remember, if you need me, you just call. Any day or time. I will come over.”

In response, he hit the motorized controls, turned his back on her, and
rolled back toward the window.

WEDNESDAY

Chapter
8

In his camouflaged ghillie suit, Adam crept through the dense woods in the Buenaventura. Having been trained to move invisibly, he worked his way around the Playa Larga, keeping half a mile from the industrial complexes and homes that separated him from the waters of the Bahia de Cochinos. The mission had a precise timetable, despite all the variables. Some other Brilliant back at the DoD had done all the operational planning. His target was another twenty-four-hour crawl away, and he had to move quickly and cautiously at the same time.

A
hurricane was on the way, as if the mission wasn’t already complicated enough. That was part of the detailed plan; but how the hell could anyone, even a Brilliant, plan for the mayhem of a hurricane?

For
days, he and the rest of the mission team had been slowly working their way across the Cuban landscape toward Castro’s high-security Academy, as the storm built like an ominous cancer in the sky. Despite the urgency of the situation, he maintained his methodical pace. No mistakes.

An incredibly expensive training had instilled him with the self-discipline to move at t
wo feet a minute on average, even slower sometimes—all while taking the time to learn every single inch of the environment around him, using his hyperfocus attention to detail. At the end of this slow, arduous journey waited his prize. His specific target.

Se
ñor Enrico Demantio Hernandez. Each of the four snipers had particular targets, while the rest of the SEAL team had a much broader objective.

Pausing in his crawl,
Adam focused on the far distance, let his gift take over to amplify the view through the sniper scope. He scanned the Academy houses, the guard towers, and other buildings in the facility a mile away, watching for anyone who had noticed him. As he watched, he used reflections, bounced sounds, ripples of movement in the air; he could look around corners, and he could see inside buildings.

So far he was safe.

Elbow, elbow, knee, knee, he moved himself forward. Adam stopped again after moving only a few feet, did another complete scan. His eye muscles twitched, focusing, hitting this window in the Playa Larga that reflected a car driving by, giving him a complete view in the opposite direction toward the Laguna del Tesoro.

Adam spotted
one of the other snipers in their covert team, but he was sure no one else would have seen the hidden man. No one else had his particular gift.

With added caution, Adam crawled forward another three inches.
Forget the rapidly escalating surveillance technology that flooded the gray market with the advent of Brilliants. Nothing beats a good ol’ human sniper supporting a SEAL team to get across closed borders. Except maybe four snipers supporting a SEAL team.

He inched forward again,
then froze. It felt like someone’s eyes were on him.

Finely tuned senses and intuition kept him locked in place, motionless under his
ghillie suit. He didn’t know where it was coming from. . . .

Sweating, Adam thrashed in his bed, unable to break the bonds of sleep. His hand gripped and twisted the blanket. Although he continued sleeping, his knuckles were white.

A day later: The hurricane raged over Playa Larga, as if showing off. Lightning struck indiscriminately. The forty mph winds hurled the rain in near-horizontal sheets, and the fury would only increase.

Gotta
get out of here. Retrieval team couldn’t last long in this.
He kept staggering forward, desperate to reach the beach.

Adam ignored the two bullet wounds in his shoulder and the small of his back
and continued dragging his downed SEAL comrade across the beach toward the waiting raft. Behind them, from a building on the headlands, the Twist who had spotted them continued firing, but the storm ruined his visibility and his aim. Bullets pocked the wet sand.

Adam
’s eyes did something they had never done before, splitting his vision between the gunman and where he was. Overlaid across the beach was an image of the enemy inside the building. Clearly emblazoned on his chest was a patch for Centro para el Desarrollo de Brillantes. The enemy sat crouched in a window, firing toward the strand.

Adam tracked every detail as though he
sat right next to the gunman. Each shot, every pull of the trigger—Adam was able to process and feel what the shooter was doing, where he was aiming, and how he could anticipate the bullets. He jerked the wounded Navy SEAL to one side, barely avoiding another puff of sand, another bullet strike.

He had watched most of the SEAL team die
, including the other three snipers. Squirrel had already gotten to the raft, but Adam kept dragging the sergeant. They were both severely injured, but at least Adam was still moving. He knew that if he didn’t get to the waiting raft, they would be stuck here, dead meat.

Adam thrashed in his sleep, moaning. “No . . .”

In the raft, desperate to get away. Trying to start the engine so they could race across the churning cauldron of the sea. He raised himself higher so he could get more torque, grabbed the starter rope. He pulled with all his strength.

The
n the bullet that would change Adam’s life forever grazed the back of his neck. It felt like a gentle kiss. There was no pain, no eruption of agony—just a kiss in the maelstrom.

A
nd from that point on, everything was different.

Adam’s eyes flew open. He panted, reached up with his left hand to mop the sweat off of his brow with his pillow. Bleary-eyed, he glanced at the time. It was 4:17 a.m. He wasn’t even sure what day it was. Ingrid had visited him the day before. No, two days. It was Wednesday, no early Thursday morning.

Another day.

From long experience, he knew that after the nightly nightmare he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep for hours.

So, he
reached up and grabbed the steel triangle that hung from a chain over his bed. Pulling himself up and sliding over, he settled into his wheelchair and then moved to the window, the night, the world. He needed to be somewhere else, someone else.

He kept staring until dawn, and even then only the light outside changed.

THURSDAY

Chapter 9

The flush of
morning sun was like a celebration, anticipation. Tonight was the night. After a tedious day at work—then, tonight.

The list and the files had plenty of names, Twists hidden among the
Normals, freakish talents manifested in different ways. Unfair advantages.

This time, though, a girl would be the one
, chosen at random from among all the Twists. There were far too many freaks to choose from, but this one had the ability to reproduce.

It had been a whole week since getting rid of the last miserable freak, but the memories were still fresh. M
emories could be reviewed with photographic precision and delicious eagerness. The man’s face had been frozen in a rictus of surprise, even awkwardly embarrassed at the mess his blood made as it spilled across the floor of his entryway. Dennis Bordki. A Marine—but that hadn’t helped him.

Tonight it would be the same, maybe even easier.

Glass would part flesh. Blood would leave the body, first spraying, then dripping. Another dead Twist, no longer superior after all. Upping the percentages.

The killer smiled.
Worthless. Worthless.

Tonight.

Mere hours until the sun was down.

Tonight.

#

Gazing at the row of bottles, the killer thought hard before making the choice for that particular night.
Johnny Walker Black Label should do nicely, a touch of class for a special night. Gloved fingers slid around the bottle, lifted, and with a flick of the wrist, it shattered.

Chapter
10

Chloe leaned back in her love seat. Candles lit the room, making this a peaceful, perfect environment. The soft tones of Vivaldi’s “Winter” danced through the air. She held an open book in her left hand and a half-full glass of white wine in her right.

The book was brand new, having just arrived
in the mail from Amazon. Reaching over with the hand holding the wine, she used her middle finger to flip another page, tilting it up to show the cover. Adam could see it now: Tracy Hickman’s new novel
Dragons of the Confederacy
.

O
utside the confines of her apartment, Chloe rarely admitted that she had grown up completely obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and
Dragonlance
. In fact, she had filled sketchpad after sketchpad with her own renderings of imaginary dragons, although her special skill was to capture the sights she saw around her with perfect accuracy, as photo-realistic as any hand-drawn piece could be. But she also liked to see things in her imagination.

S
ipping the wine, she read on. It was a perfect evening for her.

From the window above and across the street,
Adam smiled. Early on, he had spotted Chloe’s obsession with dragons—yet another trait in the long list of things he loved about her.

Finishing the wine
, Chloe rested the book on the arm of the love seat and stood, stretching. So smooth, so easy, so confident.

Adam watched, fascinated.
Chloe wore only panties and a white tank top that stretched taut across her stomach and breasts. She was unconcerned, relaxed with herself. As she rolled her shoulders, even the bunching of the trapezii muscles seemed elegant and beautiful.

Chloe
walked back to the kitchen counter, where she poured herself another glass of wine. Adam’s gaze moved around the room, looking at the sketchbooks she had taken from her backpack and scattered across the coffee table. In her drawings, every line, every inch, every perspective was perfect. The images seemed to leap off the pages: Denver skylines, flowers and trees, a laughing boy, a rock in a stream. The girl sketched everything that her eye fell upon.

He sighed.
Chloe had no clue how amazing she was.

Adam let his finger trail down the window
, wishing she would say something aloud so he could hear/feel her voice. He watched her, hyperfocused. In his imagination, his fingertips were touching her arm, her shoulder . . .

Chloe sat back down
with her wine and picked up the book again, becoming engrossed in the story, but she finished only another few pages before a knock interrupted her. Furrowing her brows, she glanced up at the clock. Almost 10:00 p.m.

“
Just a minute!” she called.

Adam
heard her voice as if she were right next to him. But he didn’t like it when other people visited her, spending time with his Chloe, especially late at night like this.

Bare feet
padding across the wood floor, Chloe trotted to her bedroom and pulled on a pair of sweatpants before heading to answer the knock at her door.

Adam turned away
, frowning. He didn’t want to see her talking to some late caller. This wasn’t like watching Selene having sex. This was
Chloe
. . . and it wrenched his heart that it couldn’t be him knocking on that door.

Not long ago, he’d
experienced two months of torture when Chloe had a boyfriend, a regular visitor. She seemed to enjoy his company, though they had never gotten serious enough for sex. Adam didn’t have to watch them making love, didn’t have to watch the boyfriend do all the things that Selene allowed as a regular part of her daily activities. But he and Chloe spent a lot of time together, talking, laughing, playing games, doing all the simple
normal
things that Adam couldn’t do. Each of those minute expressions of affection was a barb to his heart and to his gut. Thankfully, she had broken up with him.

Of course, he wanted Chloe to be happy
. How could he not? But he wanted it to be with him.

Wheeling his chair to the kitchen, he
dispensed iced tea and poured it into the CamelBak attached to his wheelchair. Even though he didn’t like watching Chloe with some late-night visitor, he couldn’t stay away either. In fact, in the half minute he had gone to fill his CamelBak, he already missed her.

It was Chloe, and he wanted to be a part of her life, however tangential.
Bracing himself, he rolled back to watch again and ignored the other well-lit windows in the scatter of apartments in his field of view. He was only interested in her, wanted to see who she was talking to. Maybe it wasn’t a romantic suitor, just an innocuous visitor, some neighbor delivering mail placed into the wrong box. If he saw more details, heard the conversation, he could pretend to be the one talking to her.

Ocular muscles twitched, focusing his eye
, and his skin began to pick up microvibrations. His ears tuned in to the muted sounds coming through the window. His hyperfocus zoomed in on Chloe’s apartment.

H
e stared in shock and found he couldn’t speak.

Chloe
was sprawled face down on the floor just inside the apartment, clutching at her neck. Viscous red fluid pooled around her head and chest, slowly spreading as her heart pumped a last few times.

Her throat was cut
! Adam could see the wound, the smooth skin and the jagged edge of the slash. The discarded broken bottle. Pooling blood reflecting light, distorted by ripples as her heart pumped, then again, and then more slowly.

“No!”

His eye pushed hard, trying to twist his vision to reflect off the glass in the framed poster on her wall, on the polished handle of the door, bouncing off the red-stained bottle, the distorted pool of blood on the floor. Chloe’s blood!

“No!”

His vision bounced, ricocheted, sought for clarity down the hall. He had to see who it was, who had done this to her! He glimpsed a figure, but just the fleeting shadow inside the elevator as the doors slid shut.

He shuddered, unable to control his body. He wanted to rush over there—but even if his elevators had worked, even if he had normal abilities
, even
superhuman
abilities, it was too late. He saw the vibrations of her heartbeat in the pool of blood flooding out of her neck go still, not even the tiniest ripple

“Chloe!” he yelled,
without any chance that she could hear him.

He had to help her somehow
, but he also had to see who had done this, freeze the details in his mind, take a mental snapshot so he could identify the bastard. He leaned forward, intently focused, trying to see everything, the details of the lobby, the elevator, the tenant mailboxes. The attacker had to be coming out. Any second now, the elevator would open, the figure would emerge onto the street. Adam wanted to rip the sick monster apart with his eyes!

But the elevator never arrived. The
lobby doors remained closed. No one emerged.

Meanwhile,
Chloe lay on the floor just inside her open doorway. That was the most important thing.

“
Chloe,” he whispered, then let out another scream. “No!” He slammed his hand against the window, shoving, as enraged as he was helpless. “Chloe, no!”

The double
-paned energy-smart windows proved to be stronger than the force of his hand, but the violent movement tipped the wheelchair over. Adam was too weak even to prevent his own fall, and his head slammed against the hardwood floor as he spilled out of the chair. His body sprawled several feet away.

His vision was swimming,
and he blinked, trying to clear the fog.
Get help for her
, he thought, refusing to admit that he already knew it was too late. He had seen the heartbeat ripples stop. . . .

F
our feet distant, his toppled wheelchair mocked him. His body wouldn’t move. He couldn’t even get back to the damned chair!
I am not helpless!

Slamming his left hand down onto the wood, he dug his nails into the
floorboards and pulled, using all the strength of the one arm that worked. He clawed for a grip, and his nails broke under the pressure, but Adam didn’t care. He jerked himself forward by an inch—as if he were crawling through the jungles of Cuba once more. He did it again and again, leaving smears of blood across his floor.

Only a few feet.
He finally made it to the chair and keyed the microphone. A burst of static signaled that it was active.

“
Call 9-1-1!”

The
wheelchair responded by dialing the number. His mangled fingertips bled across the arm of the chair. Again, he didn’t notice.

A click.
“9-1-1, what is the nature of your emergency?”

Adam wiped at the tears pouring down his cheek.
“Please, somebody’s been kille—” He choked on the word, replacing what he couldn’t say with something less terrifying. “Somebody’s been hurt. In the apartment against . . . across the street from me. I can see a clear view of it through my window. She’s in her doorway bleeding. Please help, please help!”

“
Do you have the exact address, sir?” The dispatcher’s voice was tinny, interrupted by the clacking of a keyboard. “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

Sobbing through the
call, Adam did his best to provide the information for the police and medics, begging them to hurry. He wanted to be there himself, to help Chloe, even to hold her as she died in his arms.

But he couldn’t even get back into his chair.