9

9

“You pack quickly, I’ll go check it out and try to buy you some more time,” Jason whispers, as he deftly ducks out of the bedroom.

I must confess it’s handy having a trained assassin on hand. P.S.K.’s are great at killing large numbers of people covertly and under the radar, but when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, the assassins are much better equipped.

I grab my suitcase from under the bed and carelessly hurl as much clothing and essentials as I can fit into it in the few seconds I have to spare. I really want to get the fuck out of this dress and into some real clothes, but that will have to wait . . . again.

I slam the suitcase shut and head for the door, when I remember my most important possession: my knife, who I affectionately call Borden. It was the knife I used to kill my first thirteen victims before T.H.E.M. recruited me—and several of the plush stuffies after said recruitment—and is without a doubt the closest thing I have to any sort of sentimental attachment. I return to my bed and reach under the mattress to my trusted knife’s hiding place.

Suitcase and Borden now both comfortably in hand, I begin to commence my exit of the bedroom, when suddenly Jason’s screams of terror ring out through the cold, dead night. I drop the suitcase and burst out into the hall. I barely make it a few steps down the hallway before the world turns topsy-turvy.

You know how the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey is basically a twenty-minute acid trip? Well, this trip makes that look like Winnie-the-Fucking-Pooh by comparison. I crumble to the floor in —at least, I think I’ve crumpled to the floor. There is no floor I can visually or physically perceive, just a swirling onslaught of color and pain. A shrieking, high-pitched whine, almost like an audio clip of a teapot kettle’s whistle put through some sort of heavy distortion filter, rends my eardrums, and the lingering smell of smoke from my dress heightens and intensifies, as if I am back inside the crumbling, burning porn warehouse instead of the ‘safety’ of my own home. In summary, all five fucking senses are being assaulted.

As quickly as it all began, the assault halts, but the world has far from returned to normal. I still do not appear to be in my home but in some sort of void. Whereas moments before I was assaulted by an over-abundance of sensory input, now it is a lack of input that attacks me. The world is utter black. I can’t even see my own body when I try to look down. I feel nothing against my skin. No smell. No sound.

You may think you know silence, but even John Cage knew true silence was unnatural and impossible. Well, let me tell you, this is true silence, and it is utterly maddening. They say you never realize how you take your senses for granted until they are taken away from you, and boy, those fuckers are right.

Suddenly, out of the darkness, a figure begins to emerge. Far from relieved to have at least my sight return to me, every fiber of my being recoils for deep down I know what—rather, who this figure is going to reveal itself to be.

Sure enough, the muddled image of the figure gradually coalesces into the form of my dead father, mullet and all.

One might think that seeing the ghost of my wife-beating father appearing to me mid-hallucination would paralyze me with even further fear, but it has the opposite effect. Rage fills me to my very core and suddenly I become aware of the knife in my fingers.

My other senses are still taking a vacation in Void Land, so I have to act on pure instinct. I can almost hear the disembodied voice of Alec Guinness telling me to ‘trust my feelings’. I hurl Borden into the void, and moments later I hear a sickening squish, a short scream of pain, and then a very loud thump.

Slowly—oh, so slowly—my senses begin to return to me, and I find that I am, indeed, crumpled on the floor of my hallway. At the other end of the hallway lies the still-twitching body of a figure clad in black leather. My deceased father, fortunately, is nowhere to be seen.

I shakily pull myself to my feet and make my way down the hall to the corpse, its spasms slowly receding to stillness. A female, long black hair, pale skin. A face that would have been pretty if it weren’t for Borden protruding from her right eye socket. She looks vaguely familiar, though I can’t quite place why. The knife probably isn’t helping the identification process.

I briefly get angry about the fact that her blood is staining my living room carpet before I remind myself—again—this most likely will never be my home again.

I find Jason just beyond the living room, in the main entryway to the house, curled up in the corner. I can tell from his placid features that he must have experienced a similar attack like the one I received.

“You okay?” I ask.

“I’ve been better, but I’ll live,” he replies grimly. “What the fuck was that?”

“My guess is she had some sort of psychic gift, similar to Nick’s, that allowed her to attack our nervous system, heightening then deafening our senses to each extreme.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. What about the spiders though?”

“Spiders?”

“Yeah, after the . . . darkness, there were hundreds—no, thousands of spider scrawling all over me. I fucking hate spiders . . . ”

I’d almost forgotten that about him. I always found it extremely adorable how a heartless contract killer could be so maddeningly terrified of something so tiny and, generally, harmless. Damnit, Sarah. Stop remembering all the things you liked about this carpet-crunching son-of-a-bitch.

“Didn’t you see the spiders, too?” he asks, slowly picking himself up off the floor.

“No, I didn’t see any spiders, I just saw the void . . .  There was nothing, and then I started to be able to feel the knife in my hand, so I threw it, and I got lucky and hit the mark.”

Don’t give me that look. Seriously, of all my many, many sins, lying to my ex is at the bottom of the totem pole.

“Huh. Wonder why I had the hallucination, and you didn’t.”

I don’t have to be Sherlock-Fucking-Holmes to piece this puzzle together, though. It seems the effects of the psychic attack put you into some sort of subconscious trance which dredges up hallucinations of your worst fear. For Jason, that meant spiders. For me, my abusive, asshat father.

Jason crosses the living room to inspect the corpse of our attacker.

“What the fuck,” he says in surprise, “it’s Agent Kern.”

“You know her?” I ask, my old jealous suspicion rearing its head habitually.

“She was an assassin, years ago, but got taken out of the field. She was still working for T.H.E.M., though, in wardrobe.”

Ah, yeah. That’s why I recognized her. Every time we’d be sent out on assignment, we’d have to pay a visit to wardrobe to receive all the clothes we’d be using on assignment to prevent anything from being traced back to our real-life identities. Sorry, but people skills are not my forte, so remembering the rando people I work with is not something I’m going to commit to my long-term memory banks.

“Let me guess, around the time Nick Jin was excommunicated?”

Jason shoots me a suspicious glare.

“Yes, now that you mention it. Exactly around that time. Sarah, what aren’t you telling me?”

I sigh. I had thought this information might not be relevant to our quest, but apparently it’s going to be, so I guess I’d better let Jason in, as both of our lives are clearly on the line.

“Nick wasn’t the only one who had side effects from the mind control serum. Several—maybe all—of the other test subjects also experienced enhanced mental abilities. Zeke didn’t go into specifics, he just said the drug woke up dormant aspects of the brain. Nick could read minds, but Zeke said there were other skills awakened in the other subjects. Our friend Agent Kern, here, apparently had the ability to manipulate people’s central nervous systems. Zeke said Nick was the only one who went bonkers, and that’s why he was disavowed, but the others were all pulled from the field and delegated to grunt work around T.H.E.M. H.Q. Zeke guessed at least a few of them were probably among those who defected to Nick’s ranks before I killed him.”

“Fuck, Sarah, why didn’t you tell me about this before now?”

“I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“Well, it’s pretty fucking relevant now, don’t you think?”

“Look, I’m sorry.” Fuck, those words leave a disgusting taste in my mouth. I don’t use them often. “I should have told you, I realize that now. But I did not think it was anything we’d need to worry about. I was wrong.” I don’t like saying those words, either.

Jason sighs, then says, “Is there anything else about the experiment or the test subjects that you didn’t think was relevant to tell me?”

“No, that’s everything he told me. You know how Zeke is—I mean, was. I’m honestly amazed he told me as much as he did.”

Jason nods in acquiescence. “I’m starting to suspect he may have been planning on telling me himself, anyway, had our meeting not been ‘canceled’.”

“Look, we can ruminate about our trust issues later, but I doubt Agent Kern here is the only weapon Nick’s minions have at their disposal. We should probably get moving before they realize she’s down and send in their next line of offense. I’m all packed, I just left the suitcase in my room when I heard you scream.”

“I’ll keep lookout,” Jason nods, heading to the window.

I cross the living room and step over Agent Kern’s body—quickly retrieving Borden from her face—and down the hallway to my bedroom. I do a swift rescan of my room to make sure there wasn’t anything essential I forgot to pack in my haste, then grab the suitcase and return to Jason in the living room.

We return to the night, leaving my tainted Fortress of Solitude behind, probably forever. After the senseless nothing of the void, the feel of the cool night air on my skin comes as a blissful, much-welcomed blessing.