Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist (8 page)

Chapter
18

Late afternoon, different angles of the sun.

Skin touched glass, the eye wandered, zooming, focusing,
bouncing from reflective surface to reflective surface. Twelve blocks, Agent Cooper had said. The killings had all occurred within a twelve-block radius.

Adam
pushed
. Sweat beaded on his brow.

The window acro
ss the street, one of the lower-level ones. Davis wasn’t home from work yet, and his apartment was mostly dark. He ignored the room, focusing on the reflection. Holding the view in place, he moved on to the next one.

This time he chose Selene
’s window. She was just getting home from work, and before long she would change into tight, sexy clothes that were better suited to hit a bar. It was Friday night, and he knew full well what she intended to do, although it seemed awfully early to go out on the prowl.

Selene’s need for shallow physical relationships made him feel sorry for her. Was it desperation, or a defense mechanism? Adam frowned.
That sounded like something Ingrid would say.

One of
her drapes was shut, but he saw around it, caught a long mirror on her closet door, and watched Selene’s back as she slipped off her shirt then pulled a slithery thin blouse from a hanger. Adam’s gaze lingered, examining the bruises on her body. Red circles, handcuff marks, were clear on her wrists, as were yellow and purple bruises elsewhere. Did she think of them as badges of honor?

He shook his head.
Selene always played too rough, bringing home a different guy several nights a week, and she had just kicked out another jerk that morning. Her encounters always ended the same way; Adam had watched it again and again. Did she attract the type? Did she advertise for it? Selene didn’t seem to care.

She slid clothes over her battered body without a wince.
She had already poured herself a drink—to brace herself, Adam presumed—and sipped it as she changed, getting ready to go find a new guy for the night.

Moving on.
Adam held Selene in his mind, watching her, then he glanced back at Davis’s empty apartment before forcing his focus to widen.

On the fourth floor
, a new tenant was moving in, carrying all the boxes by himself and perspiring heavily. The man was heavy, with a muscular build but a layer of fat. He had caramel skin and close-cropped hair, dressed in sweat pants and a tank top. The interior of his apartment had no furniture yet, just stacks of containers holding the new tenant’s possessions.

Before long, Chloe’s apartment would be cleaned, repainted, rented to some other tenant. His heart ached.

Adam struggled to hold all three apartments in his mind’s eye simultaneously, then pushed toward a fourth. His eyes and sinuses were starting to burn. Dampness coated his upper lip. He struggled with the effort, but the fourth image wouldn’t resolve; he could not walk into a fourth life at the same time.

The images shattered
, and Adam sucked in a deep breath. He wiped at his face to mop away the sweat, and the backs of his fingers came away red. He stared at his hand, touched his nose, and came away with more blood.

H
e wheeled over to the bathroom and cleaned up his face. Studying his reflection, he was surprised to discover that he looked different. Today was different. Today, he could meet his own gaze. He saw a resolve there that had been lacking in his life ever since Cuba.

Chloe, the girl
who never knew him, had left him a final gift.

He
started to wheel back toward the window, but changed his mind. Rolling over to the kitchen, he drank an entire bottle of iced tea before refilling his CamelBak. He needed to hydrate himself. It was going to be a long evening. Time to try again.

Back at the window, he raised
his hand and trailed sore, bandaged fingers across the pane, but he could still feel the warmth and vibrations of the outside world. He focused. His ocular muscles strained, but he quickly picked up Davis’s empty apartment and held it again. His mind moved on, grabbing Selene, who tossed back the last of her drink before grabbing purse and keys.

Tr
acking next to the sweaty new tenant, he saw that the man had given up carrying boxes. Standing in the kitchen, he worked his way through several taped-up boxes, emptying them onto the counters. Bottle after bottle of fine liquor came out, and he turned each one with loving care so that all the labels were displayed like trophies.

Adam tried a different tactic this time. He held the three images in his mind
and let the clock tick by. The muscles in his eyes and face started to relax as he grew more confident holding all three images at once.

Selene left, headed out for the bar
as darkness began to descend. With the night’s chill closing in, she had put on a bulky jacket to cover her slithery blouse. He held her apartment in his mind and waited until she got downstairs and emerged from the building’s front door, then he attempted to follow her down the street, tracking her movement down the sidewalk toward the corner. She hunched as she walked, but her pace was determined.

Capitol Hill had a plethora of bars and pubs
, any type of watering hole a drinker might want to find. Selene had plenty of choices for her hunt. Maybe she started so early because she liked to scope them out. Selene turned left at the intersection. He noticed her tight pants beneath the jacket, watched how the fabric flexed with every step.

Still holding that focus,
Adam ran through the windows again. Davis’s apartment, empty. Selene’s apartment, also now empty. The man moving in, organizing his liquor collection. Then Selene walking down the street.

After turning the corner, she
stopped, dug through her purse, and pulled out a cigarette. Lighting up, she took a deep drag, then released the smoke into the air. Adam watched the smoke drift, slowly dispersing into the air, and Selene walked on, turning right at the next intersection. Despite having plenty of angled reflections to work with, it was too far. Adam lost her.

As her image shattered, so did the other three.

He slumped back in disappointment. It was painful when he lost the connection. He wiped perspiration from his brow and took a sip of iced tea from his CamelBak. The scar on his neck flared with phantom pains, which he tried to alleviate by massaging with his bandaged fingers.

P
lacing his hand against the window, Adam started again.

Davis’s
window first. The darkened apartment vividly sprang to his mind’s eye. He moved on, adding Selene’s empty apartment, and he easily held both images side by side.

The new
tenant had finished unpacking the liquor bottles and now rearranged them—fifty or sixty bottles in his collection. Holding the two empty apartments steady, Adam allowed his senses to step fully into the new guy’s place.

E
ight stacks of boxes, a total of thirty-four, scattered around the living room. One box was pushed up against the wall next to the window through which Adam could see, but he could focus on the doubled reflection from the refrigerator. He built the missing wall in his mental map.

Adam virtually wandered the room,
skipping from reflection to reflection, using echoes of vision. He inspected each bottle of liquor, each box, even the dust in the corners as he took in every detail. During the middle of that virtual tour, Davis’s deadbolt unlocked and the door opened. The scraggly, stressed-looking forty-year-old man entered his apartment and flicked on the lights. He looked fragile enough to snap if his ex called and harassed him about child support again.

The new guy was trying to decide whether to put a bottle of
the Macallan or a bottle of Glenlivet in the front of his display.

Richard Benedict Sr.
, three floors down and two windows over, locked the door behind him and stared at the answering machine on his telephone. The red light was blinking three. He hit “Play.” When Adam tried to listen, however, while simultaneously maintaining the visuals on the other two apartments, his concentration shattered.

Sucking in giant
lungfuls of air, he panted, felt sweat trickle down his neck. Once his heart had stopped racing, Adam took a long gulp of iced tea.

Leaning his head back in his chair, he pondered how difficult it was to remotely view multiple spots at the same time. But the Equitable Services agent had
made Adam think. If that man was a Brilliant, serving in cases like this one, maybe if Adam could find a way to expand his ability, maybe he could watch the surrounding areas himself. Maybe he could catch Chloe’s killer.

But he had slept little the night before, and exhausted himself all day. After several failures in a row, Adam felt wrung out.
His eyes drifted closed, and he fell asleep in front of the window.

Chapter
19

Wind swept across the Playa Larga, howling through the sky with malicious glee. Adam stared through the sniper scope, watching carefully as people exited the Centro para el Desarrollo de Brillantes. He shouldn’t have long to wait now. Within two hours the hurricane would be at full force. The Academy personnel were fleeing, trying to get to their homes and safety.

He pray
ed his target would do the same, rather than attempting to weather the hurricane inside the main building. He wanted a clear shot. So far, most of those evacuating were lower-level staff, attendants, researchers, doctors, programmers, and administrative personnel that made the Academy possible.

The plan entailed
a lot of risk. With the hurricane practically on top of them, there was a chance that neither he nor the other three snipers would get off their shots on their respective targets. But the mission had to be done today. Now.

The SEAL team had a timetable
, and Castro’s Academy was going down. Fifteen minutes. If the snipers were lucky, the targets would still be inside when the explosives detonated. If not, they would have to make shots from more than half a mile out, in nearly 30 mph winds.

Adam focused on the space between the target and himself. Of the four snipers, he was the closest to the
shore. At the very tip of the bay, Playa Larga wrapped around the coastline, covering the small cove. It was a mostly industrial area, with a few residences scattered among the buildings. According to spy satellites and Brilliant intel, Castro and the Cuban government favored this area for their weapons development.

On the far side of the
playa, the semitropical jungles bent under the force of the wind. Even from his position here, a quarter mile from the beach, Adam could feel seawater carried along in the storm.

In the wheelchair in front of the window, Adam’s head moved side to side. His eyelids flickered rapidly as his eyes moved beneath them. He groaned in his sleep, trapped in the dream but thrown back to the beginning of the mission.

Adam sat on the transport with the other snipers and the rest of the SEAL team headed toward Cuba. He was keyed up, focused, enthused, and determined now that he knew what they were doing and where the team was headed.

“
Tell you what,” said Ian, one of the SEALs sitting across from Adam. “After we’re done, it’ll be called the Bay of Bacon, because we’re going to cook those suckers.” He grinned while the others on the transport laughed.

Squirrel,
a SEAL who was a dainty five foot six but built like she could tear a target’s head off using only her thumb, frowned at the joke. “Stay sharp, people. Remember we are going in against an entire building full of Twists. If we’re not careful, they’ll spot us coming a mile away. No telling what freakish abilities they have.”

She held
on to the straps of her parachute, waiting and thinking.

“
C’mon, Squirrel,” Ian replied. “They may be Twists, but they ain’t got military training like us. Damn freaks ain’t gonna know what hit ‘em, I’ll tell you what.”

Squirrel shook her head.
“They’re Twists. Their baseline for normal is on par with military intelligence, strategically speaking.”

S
ergeant Oswald leaned forward. He was the closest to the drop doors on the back of the transport. He raised an eyebrow. “You telling me a SEAL team couldn’t take out an intelligence facility?”

Squirrel shook her head
. “No, Sergeant. I’m just sayin’ we need to keep in mind that these are not normal targets. If we lose focus, they’ll tear us to pieces.”

Keeping to himself,
Adam watched the interplay among the SEALs. The team was obviously comfortable with one another and accustomed to working well together. Snipers, by trade, worked with spotters and flankers, but not as part of any team. And he couldn’t conceive what it would be like to be on a team like that. Like Adam, the other three snipers kept silent, just waiting for the drop.

“
Don’t worry, Squirrel,” Sergeant Oswald said as he stood. “We all know how to act professionally. Last gear check, everybody. Drop is in two minutes.”

Adam’s fingers twitched as the dream changed direction again. His eyes, closed tight, moved even more rapidly. His breath came in short gasps.

The rifle fired with a pop and a short, sharp recoil. Pop! He aimed, extending his hyperacute sight, summed all the details, found the next person, then shot again. The Academy building was in rubble, but Adam’s specific target had never appeared. Guards had boiled out, crawling all around the facility within seconds after the explosion. They had converged on the SEAL team with remarkable speed—unnatural speed. Now the SEALs were under heavy fire as they worked their way toward the coast to get out of Playa Larga and reach the pickup point.

Adam remained in place, supporting
the SEAL team. Shooting from half a mile away, he methodically worked through the Cuban soldiers. Breathe in, focus, catch the target, pull the trigger. He picked them off, one by one, but the SEALs themselves didn’t have a lot of luck bringing down the soldiers. He suspected that these soldiers were trained Twists. How many had Castro recruited? Enough to prevent the SEALs from getting away.

Panning the firefight
and using his gift to extend his vision beyond what the rifle scope allowed, Adam saw that three of the five SEALs were already injured. He pulled the trigger and took down another enemy soldier. Surveying the streets, expanding his view of the facility and their route, he realized that the SEAL team was going to be cut off. More Cuban nationals were moving in from behind their position. Adam started picking off the newcomers, and they dove for cover. At least he could keep them pinned down, give the SEALs a little elbow room.

Then
Adam’s scope exploded as a bullet barely missed him. He dropped the rifle and rolled.