My chest heaved like crazy as I stumbled to a stop in front of my shitty cabin. Sweat poured down my back and chest, glistening from the porch light that I’d left on.
Cramps threatened to seize my calves.
That was what happened when you drank all night, didn’t sleep, and then went for a run before the sun even came up.
I did that when I couldn’t sleep, which was damn near all the time.
The knee-high grass in front of the cabin resembled a jungle more than it did a lawn. I hadn’t mowed it since I’d moved in, and I didn’t plan on getting around to it any time soon. If I wasn’t going to worry about my own grooming, I sure as hell wasn’t going to bother with upkeep on that dump.
My breathing slowed down as I stood there, hands on my knees.
My early-morning runs had finally worked my conditioning back to a point where I didn’t feel like a sloth.
My strength wasn’t where I wanted it to be, but that had ratcheted up quite a bit lately too. It had taken my body several weeks to heal after the multitude of ass whoopings I’d received back in D.C.
There weren’t any weights out here in Bumfuck, West Virginia either, so I spent time tossing around heavy rocks like a caveman. That didn’t build up the glamor muscles the way my ego would have preferred, but it was hard to argue with the functional power I’d gained.
I straightened my back, hearing a few audible pops, and rolled my neck out.
With a grimace, I worked the shoulder that had taken a bullet not that long ago.
It still got stiff in the mornings, though it usually loosened after an hour or so. The scar wasn’t too bad. Not that any women would notice anyway—dinosaurs had roamed the Earth the last time I’d been laid.
Footsteps came up behind me, their patter mixing with the heavy panting of the FBI agents trailing me.
I got a lot of joy out of making them chase me through the woods on those trail runs. They were in good shape, but they didn’t spend half of their time working out like I did.
One of the two men tailing me sneered as I gave him a shit-eating grin.
Guess the dude didn’t like getting clowned. Who knew?
I didn’t appreciate having them follow me all the time, so I considered us even.
They kept me under twenty-four surveillance, which allowed me to take them on wild-goose chases if I got the desire. When I first got out of the hospital, I always spotted several men watching me out of the corners of their eyes.
Vans or SUVs would drive by and circle the block, reappearing a few minutes later only to park across the street. To say they weren’t good at their jobs would have been an understatement of hilarious proportions.
Then again, maybe they wanted me to know they were watching. Maybe that was their way of keeping me on a leash, even if I couldn’t feel it tugging around my neck.
That was the thing about surveillance: people behaved differently when they were under it. If someone was tapping your phone, you watched what you said. The internet searches you performed came out filtered because you didn’t want someone to think poorly of you.
People liked to pretend that they had nothing to hide, but I knew better than most that everyone had skeletons in their closets. A watched society might be a polite society, but it sure as hell wasn’t a free one.
And I had the freedom of a fly snagged in a spiderweb.
Not that any of it was a surprise. My ability made me a liability and everyone knew it, me most of all. The fact that I’d saved President Thomas’ life was probably the only reason they hadn’t kidnapped my ass and thrown me into a hole so deep that no one would ever hear from me again.
After I’d been discharged from the hospital several weeks ago, it had been more than just the Feds following me around.
The paparazzi had found a new toy in me, and they wanted to make sure they got a lot of playtime in. Saving the life of the most powerful man in the free world had a way of drawing unwanted attention. Most of the blood-sucking reporters hounding me day and night wanted interviews, some wanted to write my biography, and a few others wanted to dig up my past and get me all wound up.
America loved hoisting up her heroes.
But what the bitch really wanted was to watch those heroes fall.
Not that I viewed myself as a hero. Some had anointed me as such. That day in the Mall was one of the worst of my life. I often wondered if I would do it all again, given the choice. It was a tough call.
I had a hard time admitting that, even to myself. My mug had been all over the news for a few weeks after I put a pill in Murdock’s head. Having people view me as more than an alcoholic, maladjusted soldier with PTSD was nice for a change.
The exposure had been rough, though.
Living in the shadows kept my ability secret.
Kept my life normal.
As normal a life as an unemployed, sarcastic telepath could live anyway.
I still didn’t have full control of my ability, so staying away from the spotlight was of supreme importance. I didn’t grant any of the billion interview requests sent my way. Reporters waited outside my building, snapping photos of my window as I stood in front of it, swilling beer.
The alcoholic rumors swirled soon after, and America’s interest in me exploded.
Team Asher Benson had seen better days.
That was about the time the government came calling.
They wanted me to use my ability to help them.
Clearly, they didn’t know who they were talking about. Those assholes had so screwed up my life that I wouldn’t have pissed on them if they’d been on fire.
OK, maybe I would have, but only for the purpose of peeing on them, not to extinguish the flames.
All the attention had proved too much, so I’d fled Baltimore and gone back to the cabin in West Virginia that I’d spent nearly five years in.
The place was just as grody as I’d remembered.
The landlord didn’t give two shits about the property, but it served my purposes.
My nearest neighbor was more than a mile away with most of that distance covered in trees. I could let my guard down for once.
Relax my goddamned brain.
Not having to hear the thoughts of the guy in the apartment above me was a blessing that I can’t fully articulate. That asshole had been waffling around about whether he should rob his own brother’s house so he could afford to keep snorting coke day and night.
The press had no idea where I was, so the attention had mercifully died.
I didn’t have a television, phone, or computer at the cabin.
Were they still looking for me? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.
The government had followed me, of course, and they kept agents on the road leading to the cabin and in the woods surrounding it.
That didn’t bother me as much as I’d expected, though it wasn’t exactly a vacation.
If they wanted to watch me wander around naked and get hammered every night, then that was fine by me. It also gave me a bit of entertainment when I went on runs, zigging and zagging between trees and sprinting up steep hills.
“You guys want a beer?” I called over to the two who had followed me.
One flipped me off. I doubted that was official FBI procedure.
The other guy said, “It’s not even six in the morning.”
I shrugged. “It’s happy hour somewhere.”
Were FBI agents even allowed to drink? I’d heard somewhere that they couldn’t, but my knowledge of their rules began and ended with The X-Files. Mulder would have drank. He was a man’s man.
I could have sifted through the agent’s minds and found out, but I didn’t care all that much.
I could drink, and that was all that really mattered.
“Smell you later.” I headed for the front door, but stopped by the edge of the dilapidated porch and took a piss into the weeds.
A mixture of disgust and exasperation baked off the agent’s behind me. I wasn’t inside their heads, per se, but I could still feel their emotions. I couldn’t help but grin. Mission accomplished.
They had no idea that I was a telepath. Their orders were to keep an eye on me, never to let me go anywhere of consequence, such as D.C., and to report all of my activity.
I tried to pee outside every day, just so they would have to call it in. I was cool like that.
Moths buzzed around the light hanging from the front of the cabin as I walked underneath it. Living in the woods at this time of the year meant that bugs hounded me constantly. The mosquitoes probably got hammered when they took a drink of my blood.
I’d spent the majority of my time there smashed out of my mind.
One of my initial intentions when leaving the city was to sober up. I’d been pounding beers for the better part of a decade in an attempt to drown out the damn echoes in my mind, and it was time to give my liver a rest.
Moving to West Virginia had lessened my need to drink constantly, yet I kept right at it.
Some would say I had scorching cases of PTSD and alcoholism.
I couldn’t deny that.
Every time I closed my eyes, I pictured people shooting themselves at the National Mall.
Heard officers murdering each other at a police station.
Saw Murdock’s head explode like a melon with dynamite in it.
That wasn’t even mentioning all the bullshit I was still hauling around in my head from the tours I served in the sandbox. I’d lost too many men over there, and no matter what I did, I just couldn’t shake that shit from my thoughts.
Survivor’s guilt was a bitch.
And I had it in spades.
Sometimes, when I had just woken up from a nightmare, I imagined I could still feel the warm blood from Sgt. Barker covering my hands. I could see the lifelessness in his eyes.
When I’d first left the hospital, I’d gone to the bank where all of that crap with Smith and Murdock had started. I planned to take out what little money I had and then get shit-house drunk.
My balance had an extra ten grand in it, courtesy of good ol’ Uncle Sam.
I couldn’t possibly express how furious that made me.
You see, I got paid because I kept the POTUS from taking a dirt nap. But when I’d carried a young boy in Iraq into a hospital because he’d been collateral damage when some rat-fuck terrorist had tried to kill me with an IED, well, they gave me a pat on the back. A poor foreign kid’s life was worth jack shit.
Apparently, the president’s was worth ten big ones.
I took two thousand bucks from the account and paid for my shitty cabin.
The other eight went into the account of Sgt. Barker’s widow.
I closed my account after that so she couldn’t send the money back.
The manager there, whose ass I had pulled out of the fire during a bank robbery, promised not to tell her where the money had come from if she called.
The last thing she needed in her life was me.
Shit went south when I was around. I had a magnetic attraction for danger and psychopaths.
The cabin was small, maybe eight hundred square feet total, but it fit my needs. Only the bathroom and bedroom were separate from the main living area, with the rest of the square footage a combination of kitchen, living room, and empty-beer-can receptacle.
I flicked on the kitchen light off to my right and headed for the fridge, leaving the front door standing wide open. Taking care of things had stopped being a priority for me a long time ago.
The wiring in the light had gone bad and it always flickered and popped when on, so I had to make sure to turn it off before I passed out every night, lest I wake up with my ass on fire.
After opening the door of the refrigerator, I stood in front of it, hand extended toward a can of beer on the top shelf. I focused on it, imagining it sliding across the shelf and landing perfectly into my palm.
Nothing happened.
I’d been trying to use that telekinesis trick every day since I’d been in the cabin. No matter what steps I took or what tricks I tried, I couldn’t get anything to move even a millimeter.
Resigned to actually having to use my hands to get what I wanted, I pulled a beer out of the fridge, popped the tab, and downed half of it in one go.
Tasted like dog shit.
Not that I knew what dog shit tasted like, but if I had to guess, that beer was pretty damn close.
If I’d tossed some of it on the counter, the finish probably would have peeled off.
The place would have looked better for it too.
So, no, moving to the country hadn’t sobered me up. If anything, my drinking had gotten worse. Without Drew hounding me every day, I stopped giving too many fucks a while ago.
Booze numbed me, and that was what I needed more than anything.
It drowned out the voices.
And the pain.
The sun hadn’t even come up yet, and I’d already cracked a beer.
Nothing said ‘winner’ like that.
I emptied the can into my guzzler and tossed it into the corner. It landed atop a pile of its brothers with a ting. Once a month or so, I took a snow shovel to the pile and filled a fifty-gallon drum with them. The agents took care of sending it to the recyclers for me.
The stack wasn’t quite high enough to kill me via an avalanche yet, so I moved to the couch.
Dust puffed from the torn, flannel-like fabric when I flopped onto it chest first.
The landlord hadn’t changed any of the furniture since my last foray there, so it all had the same musty smell that I remembered. I was still sweating from the run, which turned the dust and other unspeakable substances on the surface of the couch into a kind of goop.
I gave zero shits.
And I’d be damned, but I felt like I could sleep for a change. It didn’t happen to me too often, so I decided to embrace it. Normally, I saw the faces of the dead when I closed my eyes.
Darkness had just begun to enshroud my mind when I heard the soft rumble of an engine approaching the cabin.
At first, I didn’t even think about it. Agents came and went throughout the day as their shifts ended. They always stopped about fifty yards down the long, rock-covered driveway.
But this vehicle kept coming. It was driving right up to my front door.
That got my attention.
Not enough to get off the couch, mind you.
That had happened a few times before. It was usually a couple of government stooges offering me a job of some kind.
I figured this would be more of the same, so I didn’t bother reaching out with my mind to see who it was and what they wanted.
Instead, I let myself slip back into that calming state of peacefulness that hits you just before you slip into a nice sleep.
Doors slammed shut outside.
“Goddamn it,” I grumbled into the smelly cushion pressed against my cheek. “Go away! I don’t want any of whatever you’re selling.”
“Don’t take that tone with me, Ashley,” Drew said from the front door. “I didn’t drive all the way up here to listen to your snarky crap.”