Free Mindbenders by Ted Krever Page B

cursing and shouting behind my back. And then I was startled by a whooshing sound and turned to see, just a few feet away, a twister sprung right up out of the ground. It was a little one, not one of those Hollywood ones that swallow gymnasiums, but it was enough, sucking up the forest floor and whipping the whole mess—leaves, twigs, bark, branches, pine cones, berries, vines, dust and moss—into a smoky column skittering interference between us and them.
    Renn’s voice said Follow me and he peeled off to the left. I obeyed and then realized he hadn’t said anything aloud—I’d heard his voice in my head. The whirlwind continued in our original direction, and I heard what sounded like fifteen sets of footsteps following. “Fan Out!” yelled a deep voice and I peeked through the trees at the leader, a bulky guy in a dark nylon jumpsuit pointing in the wrong direction. “Get around it!” The posse fought through the bracken and uproar into the distance while we sprinted, puffing hard, uphill—I could make out a cluster of houses ahead, somewhere beyond the construction cranes.
    And then the hill came to a sudden end, dropping off abruptly to a sunken roadbed cleared to bare earth and huge piles of dirt and stone held back by thick-tied cable netting. Empty bulldozers and earthmovers completed the picture.
    The long-finished houses we’d glimpsed over the treetops were just across the roadbed, on the other side of the piles. We slid down the incline and right into two men in dark blue nylon, coming up the other direction between an artificial hill and a high pile of encased stone. They greeted us immediately by pulling out their Glocks. Why did everyone but us have big guns?
    “Stand still!” the taller, bearded one ordered Max. “You stay right where you are. You’re not touching me.” He touched his earpiece. “We’ve got ‘em.” He tried it a few times, then turned to the younger man next to him. “Contact them. Let them know.”
    The younger man touched his earpiece several times. “I’m not getting anything,” he said.
    “ He’s jamming it,” Beardman said. He gestured with his gun. “Okay—cross your hands behind your backs and stand still. G here will wrap your wrists and put on your headpieces. Then we’ll go down and meet the others.”
    The younger man pulled two black plastic bundles from his pocket. When he opened them, they turned out to be wrap-around goggles with prominent earpieces and blinking LCD’s at the temples. I had no idea what they were but they didn’t look friendly.
    “Your bosses won’t promote you,” Renn told him coolly. “You’re too ambitious. They like employees who are grateful.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Beardman returned. “Try harder.”
    As G came toward us, Max actually leaned forward and threw a punch. I was shocked—I’d never seen him react in a physical way to anything and, what with the guns and all, it didn’t even make sense. He wasn’t much good at it either—he completely missed, succeeding only at knocking the goggles out of G’s hands. Beardman kicked Max’s legs out from under him and, as soon as he hit the ground, shoved the Glock to his temple. “Okay, if that’s how you want it,” he said. “Tie him first,” he told the younger man, who put the ties around Max’s wrists and pulled them really tight. Then he lifted him up again and propped him against me while he turned to get another plastic tie for me off the ground.
    I felt the vibrations coming off of Max as soon as he leaned against me. I could feel the hum sweeping from his shoulders and feet into the trunk of his body, intensifying and deepening until he somehow was a tone, a deep bass note that overwhelmed all other sound as long as he was touching me.
    “Okay,” he called out as the vibration built—I could feel the effort it took for him to talk, “how about this? You’ve got a spot on your lung. Cancer. You need to have it looked at. It’s not big; if they act