We flew deeper into the new day. The sun breached the eastern mountains, spitting streaks of orange fire across the desert.
Strain sat stiffly, propped against the tall headrest. Goldman and Sachs studied him warily. They had to know they were taking a big chance by disobeying a direct order, and they weren’t men who had a lot of experience in thinking for themselves.
Even so, they had defanged their boss–or so it seemed. I wasn’t entirely convinced. Strain gave every appearance of having stoically accepted failure, but I just didn’t see him as the stoic type.
We weren’t far from Silver Creek. If he was going to make his move, he would have to do it soon.
“Shame about your automobile, Mr. Brand,” Strain said.
Sunlight glinted on the stainless steel frames of his eyeglasses. Behind the lenses, his eyes were small and cold.
“Isn’t it?” I said. “I had to swerve to avoid this guy on the road. He just came out of nowhere.”
“Indeed he did. We made him.”
“Made him do what?”
“You misunderstand me. We made him. We fashioned him out of thin air and, homing in on the GPS signal from your phone, we projected him to that precise spot on the highway.”
I leaned back in my seat. “Did you now?”
“We used this.” He removed an item about the size and shape of a cell phone from his jacket. “We call it a projector. It takes the operator’s mental imagery and translates it into physical–or quasi-physical–form. Tangible, three-dimensional structures.”
“And you’re the operator?”
“No, not I. It takes a special talent to utilize the projector. Perhaps my subordinate would care to demonstrate?”
He was looking at Sachs, who seemed confused. “Here?”
“Why not? Make something small. It won’t last long in these conditions.” He showed me a humorless smile. “Light destabilizes the materializations, you see. Makes them dissolve away.”
I remembered the man melting into mist as my headlights sliced through him.
“It’s why materialization séances are always conducted in dim light,” Strain added.
“I thought the reason was to fool people into thinking that a guy in a sheet was their long-lost uncle.”
“Well, yes, there has been a good deal of fraud. More, perhaps, than in any other area of mediumship. Still, in the comparatively rare cases that are genuine, a form of macro-psychokinesis is at work. Not spirits, of course. That’s all superstition.”
“You don’t believe in the spirit world,” Claire said, not asking a question.
“Dear lady, I believe in nothing I cannot see and touch. Dead is dead. But the mind–or I should say, the brain–does possess some rather unexpected powers.”
“Then when I was channeling spirits …”
“You were only funneling messages from your subconscious, messages informed by telepathy and clairvoyance. You were reading the minds of your sitters and feeding their own thoughts and memories back to them. And all the while, you were unaware of doing it. A con artist’s first victim is always himself–or herself, as the case may be.”
“You’re a cynical man,” Claire said.
“I am far too intelligent to be otherwise. Now let’s have a demonstration of the projector’s capabilities, shall we?” He unhooked his shoulder harness and lap belt and rose halfway out of his seat, reaching across Goldman to offer the projector to Sachs. “Show them what you can do. Let them see what the so-called spirits really are.”
“All right, sir.”
Sachs reached for the device.
Things happened quickly then. Strain released the projector. In his other hand there was a slender glass tube, and it was pressed against Goldman’s neck, inches above his starched collar. The tube was a syringe, and the needle was testing Goldman’s carotid artery.
I had time to think that Strain had carried the syringe throughout the night, and that he’d intended to use it on Claire on the access road and, later, in the gas station.
“None of you move!” Strain’s shout echoed in my headset’s speakers.
Sachs, frozen in the act of picking up the projector, regarded him with a faintly shocked, faintly quizzical expression. Goldman swallowed, his Adam’s apple jerking. Claire let out a moan.
“If I puncture his neck, he’ll suffer immediate cardiac arrest. Let go of the projector.”
Sachs obeyed.
“Unholster your duty weapon and drop it on the floor.”
The gun hit the carpet.
“Very good.” With his free hand, Strain reached around and drew Goldman’s pistol from its shoulder holster. I knew he would have preferred my gun, but he could make it work this way. His story would be that I took the gun off Goldman and opened fire. Strain killed me in self-defense, but not before I’d taken out everyone else. Even the pilot would have to die, but not until the chopper was on the ground.
All this went through my mind with impossible rapidity. I wasn’t afraid. I felt a strange strength gathering in me, a kind of crackling electricity, like the ozone in the air before a storm.
Strain turned the gun on me.
And the storm broke.
He fired, but the shot didn’t land, because the gun jerked up in his hand, throwing off his aim. He squeezed off three more shots into the ceiling–uselessly, helplessly–unable to control the weapon.
I felt the lurch of a sudden descent. The pilot, panicking, was taking the chopper down.
That was when my seat belt hit Strain. It tore loose from my lap, whipping through the air like a bola, and the big metal buckle struck him in the face and knocked his glasses askew.
More ripping sounds, and then other lap belts and shoulder belts were flying at him, pelting him, wrapping his face, his neck.
Strain released Goldman. The syringe fell to the floor. Goldman sank into a crouch, covering his head as more belts, twisting like live wires, spun around Strain in a miniature cyclone.
The bench holding Claire and me lurched into the air, throwing us to our knees. It swung sideways and pinned Strain against the door. A green canister–a fire extinguisher, I think–smacked him in the face. His glasses flew off, then boomeranged back and whickered him savagely across the forehead, steel frames slicing flesh.
Strain wasn’t holding the gun anymore. It had vanished somewhere, lost as he fought off the attacks and his men scrambled for cover.
I glanced at Claire, kneeling beside me. Like me, she was untouched. Her eyes were moving from Strain to me and back again. She looked afraid. Afraid of me. And I didn’t blame her.
Because I was doing it, of course. I didn’t know how. Somehow, deep inside me, a power I’d never suspected had come roaring to life, and now it was running at full tilt.
The headsets flew off our heads, cords jerking free. Deprived of ear protection, we were exposed to the rotors’ jackhammer pounding and the turbine’s screaming protest as the chopper dived. I watched the headsets batter Strain like fists, while he held up his small, childlike hands in a useless defensive gesture. The hands were raw and bloody, the spindly fingers cut to tatters.
The other bench erupted from the floor. It rose halfway into the air and hung there, levitating weightlessly like a table at a séance, then crashed down on Strain, impacting hard, spattering blood.
Past the maelstrom in the cabin, I saw the pilot bent over the cyclic stick. The aircraft was canted at a crazy angle, red earth blurring past in the starboard window, red sun filling the view on the port side.
Bolts and rivets were popping loose and rising in an angry swarm, dive-bombing Strain, punching cruel gashes in his face and chest and hands. I remembered the satisfaction of slamming Sachs’s head into the cash register. This was better. Much better.
It felt so damn good.
I was smiling as Strain twisted and flailed, smiling as more bolts spun loose from the ceiling, the floor, the instrument panel, and bore down on him like killer bees.
“Please.” Strain’s voice, rising out of the chaos. “Please don’t.”
I liked hearing him beg.
A window in a cabin door flexed free of its frame and flung itself at him. He cowered, hugging his knees in a fetal curl. It smashed into the window of the door behind him, both panes fracturing and falling to pieces.
Now the lights above our heads were pulling loose, incandescent tubes nosing down in kamikaze dives, glass shards exploding. Strain’s face was a horror show of bloody lacerations.
The carpet began to wrinkle and crease. I watched, fascinated, aware that the metal floor itself had begun to buckle, threatening to crunch up like a sheet of tinfoil and drop us out of the chopper’s belly.
“Enough, Dan!” Claire’s voice. “That’s enough!”
The carpet tore neatly down the middle. The floor squealed and moaned, a living thing, fighting to rip free of the fuselage. The rotors chugged, their speed slowing, as the ground raced up. Maybe the pilot had lost control. Maybe we would crash. I didn’t care. I was invulnerable, superhuman. Nothing could harm me, nothing could touch me–
“Enough!”
Her shout reached me that time. I lowered my head, drew a breath, and just like that, the floor stopped moving. No more lightbulbs or rivets or bolts or belts or seats broke loose to run amok.
It was over. Simply over.
The chopper touched down but didn’t stop. The struts bounced hard, and like a kicked can, the aircraft skidded along the desert, dust fanning in its wake. Loose items rattled in the cabin like coins in a piggy bank. Scorching desert air blew in through the empty window frames. The chopper swayed, teetered, nearly overturned. We hung on as it slewed in a dizzy semicircle and finally came to rest.
The pilot killed the engine. As the rotors spun down, he slumped sideways, unmoving.
Sachs clambered into the cockpit–it wasn’t hard, with the passenger seats gone–and checked his vitals. “He’s okay. Just fainted.”
“Wish I’d thought of that,” Claire said.