Chapter Twenty-Nine

The financial panic continues to spread with reports of additional banks going under or calling in their markers. A number of banks have foreclosed their loans to foreign countries, resulting in a tidal wave of default racing through South America and Africa. The Fed ordered many banks to slow their trading and appealed for calm on Wall Street, promising that everything could be sorted out in time. Their words do not impress, however, and massive protest marches are expected in many American cities...

...In the meantime, a viral broadcast from the telepathic terrorists has hit YouTube and spread across the internet...

-AP News Report, 2015

“This isn’t working out too well.”

Art couldn’t disagree. The United States possessed around four thousand registered telepaths. Of those, roughly two-thirds were powerful enough to be useful and, at the same time, capable of controlling their powers and surviving for extended periods in normal society. Those telepaths had been drafted and ordered to report to the nearest draft office for processing, but many had simply refused the call. Others, who had wanted to keep their newfound power a secret from their family and friends, had been exposed and were furious at the government. Their lives had been ruined by the call from the draft board. A handful of civilian telepaths were even planning to sue the government.

He looked up at the map of Washington pinned out on the wall. The government had had to go back to pen and ink in a hurry and not everyone was adapting well, but until their computers and databases could be secured there was little other choice. The government had been crippled in many ways – the central IRS database had been wiped, leaving no solid record of taxpayers – and the repercussions of the damage were still being felt. Even if most of the lost data could be restored from back-ups, it would still be incomplete.

The Telepath Corps had deployed its active strength to support the more mundane law enforcement teams, but Art had no illusions as to the difficulty of their task. Washington was a massive city and the telepaths couldn’t be everywhere at once – besides, Leo and his band of merry men might well have abandoned the city by now. Worse, the residents of Washington didn’t like the idea of mandatory telepathic probes – even gentle peeks to prove that they weren’t telepaths themselves – and outright chaos seemed permanently on the verge of breaking out. It could have been worse. Across the world, governments had dissolved into chaos or had been overthrown as the economic shockwaves smashed bastions that had seemed unbreakable. Even the more stable countries were having problems.

And the public paranoia against telepaths was growing stronger. In the two days since the economic attacks, several telepaths had been shot, including a pair from the Telepath Corps. One of the assassins had been caught and had been revealed, when another telepath had peeked into his mind, to have been a man who had cheated on his taxes and had been convinced that the telepaths would find him out. Art hadn’t been able to understand it when he’d found out. Cheating on one’s taxes was bad – or so he tried to convince himself – but it wasn’t exactly the crime of the century. How guilty had the man felt that he’d been prepared to commit murder in hopes of covering it up?

“No,” he agreed, slowly. The problem was that most of the telepaths who wanted to be involved in law enforcement or intelligence-gathering had already signed up with the Telepath Corps. The remainder were either sullenly agreeing to work or simply working under duress, their irritation and frustration shimmering out into the mental field. Art knew that they didn’t dare put an unwilling telepath out in a position where they could do considerable harm, yet how much choice did they have? “This isn’t going well at all.”

“And then there’s this march,” Alice added, flatly. “The government refused to try to block it.”

Art scowled. A day after the President’s broadcast, rumours had begun circulating in Washington of a massive public protest against telepaths and telepathic intrusion in law enforcement. It was billed as a March for Mental Privacy and was likely to attract most of the population of the city, instead of just the usual ragtag gangs of students and others with limited knowledge of the real world. The public anger was palpable in the wake of the economic shock and conspiracy theories were running wild. The latest was that the telepathic terrorists were actually working for the Telepath Corps, causing havoc so the Telepath Corps could take over the government. It was nonsense, of course, but people were starting to believe it.

“Yeah,” Art agreed. He shook his head in disbelief. This was America, not some godforsaken country in the Third World. What were they thinking?”

He looked up at the CNN broadcast from Washington and shuddered. Leo had released a video onto YouTube and it had spread wildly, moving from site to site ahead of any attempt to shut it down and wipe it from the internet. It was a mixture of threats and raving paranoia, claiming that telepaths were the superior race and, at the same time, the government had attempted to wipe them out. It had been picked up by the major news networks and had helped spread panic around the world. There were other statements that purported to come from the terrorists, but the video was the only one Art believed. It had the right mixture of arrogance and pompous self-justification that he had come to expect of Leo.

Alice stepped up to him and took his arm, giving him a kiss. “I think that they were worried about their freedoms,” she said, tiredly. He could sense her frustration every time their bare skin touched. “And if Leo wins, will they have any freedom at all?”

Art scowled. Once the first telepaths had entered the public eye, it hadn’t been long before people had started writing novels and producing television programs about what living in a world dominated by telepaths might be like. Art had read a couple of them and declared them nothing more than airport reading, but some of the books had dripped paranoia, claiming that telepaths would want to be worshipped and would know – instantly – if their servants were harbouring any rebellious thoughts. The optimistic ones – if such a word could be used – had ended with telepaths being killed or neutralised by tailored viruses, while the pessimistic ones could have given the Draka books a run for their money.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. Detective work came hard to him. He would have preferred a visible enemy he could shoot. Even running counter-insurgency in Afghanistan was preferable to this. “I just don’t know.”

***

Crowds had been gathering outside the White House all morning, even though the protest wasn’t officially scheduled for several hours. Roger watched from the safety of the press pool as the protest organisers started handing out placards and signs for the protesters to carry, a strange mixture of anti-telepath statements and demands for mental privacy. The crowd was the largest one he had seen in his entire life, far larger than the protest march at Harvard or even back before the Iraq War. Telepaths touched everyone in the United States; no one, whatever their feelings, could remain immune.

He glanced up as a police helicopter clattered overhead, watching the protesters from high above. The policemen gathered at one end of the protest looked concerned; those who weren’t wearing masks and body armour to protect their bodies. Roger had heard through the grapevine that the march had been banned and the protesters had gathered anyway, daring the police to do anything about it. Nothing had been confirmed, which suggested that it was just a rumour, but still…the air smelt of trouble. He remembered Harvard and shivered. The crowd didn’t seem to care about the danger.

From high above, he knew, the crowd would look like a single living creature. Roger had protested himself while he’d been in college and knew how it felt to be part of a greater entity. A crowd knew nothing of common sense, or even of self-preservation, not once the mob mentality had taken over. People who would otherwise be smart enough to stay out of trouble would be lobbing rocks at the police and breaking windows, as if wanton violence and destruction would help them achieve their aims. A telepath wouldn’t have been able to operate near the crowd, he hoped; even for a non-telepath, the waves of concentrated feelings were almost overpowering.

He made his way through the fringes of the crowd, trying to ignore the blaring music someone had set up from a vehicle they’d brought into the street, towards the protest leaders. They were unfamiliar, thankfully, but when he asked they refused to be interviewed, citing privacy concerns. They assured him that the protest wasn’t about a minor issue and the people who had come to the protest were more important than the leaders. That was odd – normally, protest leaders loved the spotlight and had to be pushed out of it – but Roger was forced to accept it. They seemed unwilling to comment further, on or off the record, and they refused to be filmed. He decided not to point out that the entire march would be under police surveillance from high above.

The stewards were working on the crowd as he slipped back to the press pool. The crowd started to chant loudly, ringers among them shouting out the words, knowing that others would be swept up in the wave. “WHAT DO WE WANT? MENTAL FREEDOM! WHAT DO WE WANT? NO MORE TELEPATHS!” Roger shivered again as the noise echoed out over Washington. It looked as if the entire city had come out to join the protest march. The crowd started to move, heading past the White House and up through the inner core of Washington. The noise was shaking the entire area. Roger hoped that the congressmen and senators were taking note. The crowd was in an angry mood and wasn’t likely to vote for them in the future.

And then it all went to hell.

***

Art had been – mentally, at least – cowering away from the noise in his mind. The crowd seemed to have turned into a single massive psychic broadcaster, blasting their unholy din into his mind and into that of every other telepath in Washington. Art could sense flickering headaches all over the city through the mental waveband, telepaths feeling the noise and suffering because of it. He pulled his shields as tightly around his mind as he could and tried to hold out. Alice and the other non-telepaths were lucky. They might be deafened if the noise grew much louder, but at least they wouldn’t be risking mental damage.

And then he sensed it. There were sly intrusive thoughts, beaming out into the crowd. He glanced up, sharply, realising that an unknown telepath – several unknown telepaths – were beaming violent thoughts into the crowd. The emotions were bitter and twisted, yet they would somehow be amplified by the crowd, spread from person to person like a virus. The crowd’s mass mental tone was shifting, growing uglier and more violent by the second. Art reached for his radio, desperately trying to sound the alert, but it was already too late. No one saw who threw the first punch, yet within seconds the crowd was turning on itself and everyone else. The crowd-monster was convulsing in pain as alien thoughts lashed into its combined mind…

A fist slapped Art’s face and he fell back. The crowd wasn’t the only group affected, he realised in horror; the telepathic memes were being broadcast into the police and watching civilians as well. Alice was staring in disbelief as her hand moved, seemingly of its own accord, to slap Art again. Art caught the hand and, using the sudden mental contact, pushed the maddening thoughts out of her head. She stared at him and then jumped back as one of the police liaison officers tried to take her head off with his truncheon. Art flattened him with a punch and then looked around, down into hell. The police lines had collapsed into an orgy of violence and rape. Several policemen were firing randomly into the crowd, some lost in the madness, others aware of what was happening, yet unable to stop it.

Art took Alice’s hand for comfort and opened his mind just a tiny fraction, hoping that he could survive the mental maelstrom long enough to locate the telepaths responsible for the growing disaster. The impact of so many minds thudded into his soul, but somehow he held himself together long enough to sense the enemy minds. He didn’t recognise their mental touch, which suggested that they were either some of Zeller’s former pupils or completely new terrorists. Locating them was difficult, but somehow he managed it.

“Come on,” he snapped, and pulled Alice with him. He pulled his mask on as tear gas canisters started to explode, although there was no way to tell if some of the police had regained awareness or if they had just started firing them off at random, still caught up in the nightmare. Art skirted the edge of the crowd, knowing that to try to wade through it would be suicide, and cursed under his breath as a body fell in front of him. A man large enough to be a sumo wrestler had blocked his path, maddened eyes overflowing with hatred and rage. Art didn’t hesitate. He drew his pistol and shot the man in the leg.

Alice followed him as he came up to the press pool – the reporters were fighting each other, smashing their equipment in the process – but it wasn’t them who caught his attention. The enemy telepaths were broadcasting their thoughts out to the crowd, which meant that they were detectable – no amount of telepathic shielding could hide them. They had to have slipped in while hiding in one of the media vehicles, Art realised, or else they might have been caught ahead of time. He lifted his gun and pointed it towards the three telepaths. Leo himself, sadly, wasn’t there.

“Stop it,” he barked. Even in his best parade-ground manner, it wasn’t loud enough to be heard over the riot. The backwash of emotions was chilling – he was sure he could sense minds just snapping out of existence, either dead or losing themselves completely. They might never recover from what had been done to them. “Stop it now!”

The three telepaths looked up at him in shock – they hadn’t expected to be caught – and reached out for him with their minds. Art had expected that and pulled the trigger at once, blowing a hole through the first telepath’s head. The other two fell backwards in shock – their minds had to have been linked to allow them to survive the crowd and broadcast poisonous thoughts into the ether – and collapsed, blood leaking from their ears. Art hoped – even though he knew they needed information – that the shock had been enough to kill the bastards. He had no idea how many people had died in the riot, but it had to number in the hundreds, at least.

He checked both telepaths, reassured himself that they were out of commission for the moment, and then keyed his radio. “You need to send in reinforcements,” he ordered, hoping that the reserve forces hadn’t been contaminated by the mental broadcast too. His mind felt musty as he rebuilt his shields. “I’ve stopped the broadcast, but we need help.”

The crowd was slowly coming back to its senses. Very few of them had come for violence and, as the alien thoughts faded out of their minds, they stared down in horror at what they had done. The police were no better. They’d turned on themselves in an orgy of violence, or worse. Art looked away from one of the police officers. He was hopelessly confused, yet unable to deny the evidence of his eyes. The poor bastard had murdered his partner.

Slowly, order was restored with the help of Marines from the nearby barracks. Art found himself in the odd position of issuing orders to officers he would have saluted months ago, but there was no time to worry. There were thousands of injured people and hundreds – perhaps thousands – of dead bodies. The streets of Washington had run red with blood. Sickened, Art saw to the transfer of the two captured telepaths to the Telepath Corps and then joined the rescue teams. He owed it to the people he had failed to save.

***

Roger came back to himself slowly, feeling the strange unwanted thoughts fading out of his mind. He found himself looking down on a scene from hell. Kristy McHale, a bitch of an anchorwoman, lay in front of him, her skull smashed in by a rock. No, by a camera, the same camera he held in his hand. Sickened, unable to believe his eyes, Roger slowly collapsed to his knees. What had he done?

He’d killed her. There was no way around it. He’d murdered a woman he didn’t like – hated, in fact – and part of him had enjoyed it. The nightmarish thoughts at the back of his mind mocked him. He’d killed her and he’d loved every last moment of it. He told himself that even the Wicked Bitch of the West – as she had been called by her enemies – didn’t deserve such a fate, yet it was hard to convince himself of that. It was so hard to even think clearly.

“Dear God in Heaven,” he said, finally. For the first time, he realised just how far the madness had reached. He had been far from the only victim. “What happened?”

He had a feeling, somehow, that he already knew the answer.