Turns out that it didn’t take long.
Knuckles rapped against my door, bringing me out of a restless sleep.
The handful of beers hadn’t been enough to quiet my mind, and I spent most of the night fighting to ignore the thoughts of my neighbors. It was past midnight by the time they’d all fallen asleep, giving me a little bit of peace.
Though I’d only had a few hours of sleep, it was enough to let me recover.
I opened my eyes, squinting against the sunlight shining through my bare windows. I didn’t have enough money to buy curtains or blinds. My mouth was dry from boozing and not chasing it with water.
The knocking grew more intense.
“Open the door, Ash.”
I recognized the voice. Drew. Detective Andrew Lloyd.
He was an old army buddy, one of the few I’d talked to since my discharge. He rarely came by my apartment, so something had to be wrong for him to be standing at my door.
Drew was also the only person in the world who knew about my ability to hear other people’s thoughts.
And by ability, I meant curse.
We’d gone through Officer Candidate School together, having graduated college at the same time. Because we both had smart mouths, we spent a lot of time scrubbing toilets and doing pushups side by side after getting snippy with superior officers. He was the one who’d helped guide me back from the brink of oblivion and convinced me to turn my life around.
I owed him a lot.
My mattress sat on the floor with only a sheet covering it. No box spring or bedspread. I couldn’t afford those kinds of luxuries. The mattress came free off a Craigslist ad.
I tried not to think about who must have owned it before me. If I ever looked at it with a black light, I’d probably shoot myself.
My hand still throbbed as I rolled off the bed and pushed myself to my feet. Some swelling puffed out the knuckles, but it wasn’t too bad. Didn’t feel broken, anyway.
“What?” I walked across the room, kicking empty beer cans out of the way. I lived in a studio apartment approximately the size of a matchbook. Paint was peeling off the walls.
“Let me in. We need to talk.”
I opened the door, wincing against the light that came in. Booze hangovers didn’t really affect me anymore, but I got hellacious headaches if I had to spend the night listening to other people’s thoughts
Drew stood in the doorway, wearing his usual black suit. He shaved his head because he’d started balding at the age of twenty-five. I often asked him how he liked living in Reseda. His suit was a bit tight around the chest and shoulders because he’d added a significant amount of size since he bought it.
The two of us lifted weights together three days a week, and he was one of those guys who could add muscle with ease. Pissed me off. I was still bigger than he was, but that was mostly because I had a larger frame.
He looked me up and down. “Christ, Ash. Couldn’t you put some fucking clothes on before answering the door?”
The only thing I had on was a pair of boxer briefs. I glanced down at them and shrugged. “Is it upsetting for you to see what a real man looks like? Jealousy doesn’t suit you.”
Drew snorted. “Yeah, I’m real jealous of a guy who looks like he just came off a three-day bender.”
“I’m coming off a five-year bender.”
“Let me in—we need to have a come-to-Jesus moment.”
I stepped aside and waved him in. “Welcome to Casa de Shithole.”
He walked to the middle of the room and peered around, his face twisting in a grimace.
“The maid doesn’t come until Thursday.” I closed the door and walked over to the couch, flopping onto it. I’d picked up my sparse furniture at Goodwill when I moved back into the city. It didn’t smell the nicest. None of it was particularly comfortable either. The beer helped with that too.
“You live like a crackhead.” He nudged one of the beer cans with his toe. “You could at least use a garbage can.”
“I’d like to see if you worry about where your empties go when you’re trying to block out your neighbor’s thoughts as he jacks off to internet porn half the night.”
He squinted at an empty pizza box. It sat on my coffee table, which was missing a leg. I’d used a few books in that corner. It was mostly level. Mostly.
“Since when can you afford to order pizza? If you can pay for that, then you can at least buy an extra garbage can to put beside your couch.”
“I had a free coupon.” I got up and walked over to the sink, turning the faucet on. I drank straight from the tap.
“How did you tip the delivery boy?”
I wiped water from my chin. “Gave him a beer. He was pretty happy about it.”
“Was he twenty-one?”
“Did you come down here to shit on my life, or do you actually have something you want to talk to me about?” I didn’t really need him pointing out that my life sucked. A blind man could see that.
He held his hands up. “Hey, I’m just trying to make sure you keep on climbing the mountain. You’ve come a long way, and I don’t want you to fall back down.”
I opened the fridge and looked inside. There was a box of old Chinese food on the top shelf and not much else. That box had been there since I’d moved in. I closed the door again. “I’m fine.”
“This doesn’t look fine, Ash.”
“It’s—” I looked around my apartment for a clock before remembering that I didn’t have one. “What time is it?”
Drew looked at a swanky watch on his wrist. “Nine.”
“It’s nine in the morning, and I’m not drunk yet. That’s a damn sight better than I was six months ago, so cut me some slack.” I pulled on a pair of basketball shorts I found balled up in the corner by my mattress.
“Fair enough,” he said. “You have put on some weight too, so I guess I should keep things in perspective.”
“So you are jealous of my looks.”
When Drew had found me hiding out in the mountains of West Virginia, I weighed less than a hundred and sixty pounds. Considering my frame and height, that was not so good. People who saw me in town, (buying beer, of course) thought I had cancer or was addicted to meth.
After the IED hit my Humvee in Iraq, I didn’t wake up for almost two weeks. When I finally came back around, I couldn’t even remember my own name. My memories were hazy, dancing around just outside of my recollection. Confusion fogged my entire life.
It took about a month for most of my memories to return. They’d sent me back to the States, and I was in a room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center when I heard the first echo. The damn thing scared the hell out of me.
I sat bolt upright in my bed, looking around for someone else in the room.
But no one was there.
Things got a lot worse over the next couple of weeks. I tried to explain that I was hearing voices in my head to the doctors, but I quickly realized that would earn me a permanent stay in the loony bin.
The Army had really started to crack down on soldiers and officers they thought had PTSD. If they thought I was a danger to anyone, as hearing voices in my head would indicate, then they wouldn’t release me. I knew this because I could literally hear what my doctors were thinking about me.
So I started telling them what they wanted to hear.
It was hard to do though, because any time more than two or three people came into my room, I had trouble focusing. Imagine having three people standing beside you, all screaming into your ears at the same time. That was my life.
As the Hummer flipped over and over in the middle of that shitty street, my head bounced around like a racquetball. The traumatic brain injury I suffered was what kick-started this whole telepathy bullshit.
At least, that was as close as I could figure.
I could have stayed in the hospital and let them jam tubes and needles in me forever, but to hell with that. Besides, anyone who had ever been inside the military healthcare system could tell you about the quality of their care.
Eventually, I was honorably discharged due to the lingering effects from the brain injury, and from what my doctors believed was a mild case of post-traumatic stress disorder. The official reports cited a withdrawal from social situations, increased agitation, difficulty communicating, chronic fatigue, and other anxiety symptoms.
They were right, of course—I suffered from all of those things, but it wasn’t because of PTSD.
The brain trauma allowed me to get disability from the military. That was what paid the rent, bought my beer, and covered the gym membership. My checks weren’t big enough to pay for anything else.
When I got out of the hospital, the echoes were so bad that I couldn’t bear to be around other people. So I fled to the mountains, renting a dingy cabin for three hundred bucks a month. I discovered that alcohol helped blunt the worst of it. But, in order for me to have the cash for booze, I couldn’t eat much.
The weight loss came quickly.
The guilt I felt over losing my men, all of them, pushed me to drink even more. I was the only one who didn’t have a family, and yet I made it out of there. It was hard to describe survivor’s guilt, but it was real and severe, and anyone who said otherwise was an asshole.
Barker’s death was the one that bothered me the most. His wife and little boy came to visit me in the hospital. I bawled like a baby when they walked in. That kid would never know how great of a man his dad was. Seeing pictures and hearing stories about your father didn’t equate.
I could feel the conflicted emotions coming off Lisa Barker. She was both relieved and saddened that I had survived. She wished it was her husband there in the bed instead of me, and then she hated herself for feeling that way. Her hand squeezed mine as she looked down at me, imagining that I was Barker. I wished he were the one there with her too.
I still had nightmares about his blood on my hands.
No one blamed me for wanting to get away when I moved to West Virginia. The mountains gave me the solitude I needed, just not for the reasons everyone thought. They assumed I wanted time alone to gather my thoughts, when I was actually trying to escape theirs.
To my shame, I abandoned all of them. I couldn’t stand to hear their sadness, or taste their disdain for my survival and their loss.
I’d been living in the middle of nowhere for going on four years when Drew Lloyd knocked on my door. We hadn’t spoken since I’d left Iraq with my injured head swollen to the size of a basketball.
He’d tracked me down through a series of townies a few miles away. They pointed him toward the drunkard living off a jeep trail.
By the time he arrived at noon, I was already plowed.
He pitied me when I opened the door, and he saw my appearance. He didn’t say it aloud, but I heard it nonetheless.
“Fuck you!” I’d screamed at him. “I don’t need your pity. I’m alive and they’re dead, so pity them.”
Drew had seen his share of shit over in the sandbox. He understood half of what I was dealing with.
My inebriation hadn’t allowed me to understand that at the time, however. I tried to shoo him away as I had everyone else. The stubborn bastard wouldn’t leave though. I shouted horrible things at him, but he wouldn’t budge.
And then my anger and drunkenness led me to make a big mistake. I used something against him that he’d never told me before. Something he’d never told anyone. Something I’d read in his mind.
About how his father had abandoned him.
It was a piece-of-shit move, but my mind was so addled by alcohol, guilt, and hate that I didn’t even know what I was saying.
But Drew was as cool as a cucumber. He picked up on that thread and kept pulling at it until my cloak of lies fell apart. I was blubbering like a baby by midafternoon. At first, he wasn’t certain that he believed what I told him about hearing people’s thoughts, but we squashed that in a hurry.
He would think about a color or a fruit, and I would tell him exactly what it was. It blew his mind. I know because I was in it, even though I didn’t want to be.
With his support and advice, I slowly started my climb back to the land of the living. It was his idea to start fixating on physical fitness. Drew said that the mind and body were connected and that sharpening one would help to focus the other.
He was right.
As my ability to control my mind grew, my dependency on booze lessened. I still needed it, but I wasn’t drinking a gallon of vodka every day. Switching from liquor to beer made a big difference on my ability to function.
Drew drove from Baltimore a lot to help me out. He wanted to make sure that I wasn’t backsliding, and it helped keep me accountable.
A year later, and here I was, sitting in his home city, listening to him give me hell about my life. Things were better, but I still had a long way to go. Moving to a populated area was his idea, and it turned out to be a good one.
Having people’s thoughts constantly bombarding me had really strengthened my mental power. I learned to hone in on one person’s mind, blocking out the others. I could flip through their memories, searching for something specific, rather than being helpless and only seeing whatever popped up.
Instead of spending my money on nothing but alcohol, I now blew most of my disability check on rent, jiu-jitsu classes, and boxing instructions. And a little more food, thank God.
I owed Drew my life.
“Blah blah blah,” he said, dismissing me with a wave. “I didn’t come here for the witty banter. You had a busy evening.”
I was sniffing a shirt I found crumpled under the coffee table. It smelled good enough to wear if I rubbed some deodorant on the inside of it. “Me? Busy?” I knew he was talking about the bank, but I wanted to screw with him for a bit.
“Don’t screw with me, Ash.”
I laughed. Nailed that one.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Cut the bullshit. I saw the security footage from the bank last night. You ran away from the scene of a serious crime.”
“A crime I didn’t commit. So what? I was hurting bad, and I knew I wouldn’t have the strength to go through a night of questioning.”
“So, your face is plastered all over the news. The press is looking for a hero. Imagine their surprise when they find you.”
I gave him the finger.
His face hardened. “That was a pretty crazy thing you did. Walking up to a man with a shotgun isn’t going to extend your life expectancy.”
“Hooah.”
“Oh, shut up.” Drew rolled his eyes.
One of Drew’s biggest pet peeves while we were commissioned was the overuse of ‘hooah’ by a handful of the soldiers underneath him. It drove him nuts. He thought that he’d never have to hear that word again once he got out of the army. I tried to work one or two in every day now, just to piss him off.
Worked like a charm.
I put the shirt on and caught a whiff of something unpleasant. Took it back off. “Did the guy who was shot survive?”
“He’s in critical condition, but they think he’ll make it. Look, Ash, it’s not just the press who are looking for you.”
“The police? Newsflash, Drew—you’re a cop.”
“Thanks for the tip. I’m taking care of things on my end—you’ll be fine there. A federal agent came around the department this morning. He was asking a lot of questions.”
That caught my attention. “About the bank robbery?”
“No. About you. Personally.”
“He knew who I was?”
“Not yet, but it won’t be long. I slipped out the back and came here before someone told him that we’re friends.”
I found a different shirt and put it on. It had a picture of Stewie from Family Guy on it. He was holding a bomb or something. Very classy. “What agency was he from? He give a name?”
“He flashed a badge, but I didn’t recognize it. Said his name was Johnson.”
“Johnson? How original.”
Drew’s phone chirped in his pocket. He pulled it out and answered, turning his back to me. “Detective Lloyd.” He paused, listening.
My stomach grumbled as I waited for him to finish. It had been almost a full day since I had anything to eat. Between my workouts and the beer consumption, my gut was less than thrilled with me.
Drew turned around and snapped his fingers at the television. He tilted the phone away from his mouth. “Turn on the news.”
I walked over to the TV and turned it on. The remote disappeared about a month before. The television was old as dirt too, so I had to use one of those boxes to convert the digital signal to analog. Not sure why I even bothered since I never watched the damn thing.
After flipping through all five channels, I settled on NBC.
A disheveled man stood behind a podium, a pistol held to his head.
“Holy shit,” Drew said. “That’s Senator McArthur.”