Second Thoughts and Last Chances
By
Latikia
Edited by
The Old Fart
Copyright © 2007,
2008
Chapter 24
Out in front of the building Lam and Lucy were busily splitting their people up into groups and loading them into the two vans. I looked around, trying to determine how much collateral damage to expect, and where the best and safest location for the vehicles was.
Once everyone was packed in and ready to go, Lucy and her brother approached us.
“Lam, have you ever used a pistol before?” I asked as I removed my overcoat and handed it to Lilly. He eyed the weapons hanging beneath my arms.
“Yes, but I don’t like guns.” It was the most English I’d heard from the man since we’d met.
“Me either, but there are times when they come in handy.”
I took the pistol from under my left arm and handed it to him, grip first. As he reached out to take it from me I linked with the man and implanted a ring, filling it with three times the usual mix of emotions I put into my followers. His pupils dilated to the point where I couldn’t see any color but black.
“Protect your sister and Lilly. No one hurts them. Understand me? No one.”
He nodded sharply and wrapped his long fingers around the pistol.
Lucy stared up at both of us, her face expressionless. Inside she was a mass of confusion, worry and growing concern.
I removed my shoulder rig with the second pistol still in its holster and handed it to Lilly. I took the little secure phone from my shirt pocket and entered a long sting of letters and numbers. I had to wait nearly fifteen seconds before being connected.
“Whitcomb here.”
“Captain, this is Doctor Blacktower. File your flight plan and get the engines warmed up. We’ll be carrying seventeen additional passengers.”
“Roger that, Doctor.”
I disconnected, began emptying my pants pockets of their contents and tucked them into the pockets of the overcoat draped over Lilly’s arm. Finally I removed my shoes and socks, stuffed the socks into the shoes. Lilly took them from my extended hands.
“Okay folks, I think the closest safe place to move the vans ought to be across that empty field and parking lot next to the ball field. Park there and wait. As soon as I’m done here I’ll join you and we’ll head to the airport.”
“Be careful Ike; remember what happened last time.” Lilly urged. I drained away her fear and sent a pulse of love and confidence to take its place.
The three of them climbed into the lead van, slammed the doors shut and the little two vehicle convoy pulled away down the street, turned left and headed for the baseball field a block and a half away.
I turned around and faced the front of the big warehouse.
‘Remember what happened last time.’ I knew which last time she meant. The night I’d left the house, the night I’d walked out on my family. The second tree I destroyed using only my feelings. I remembered. Remembered getting up off the snow covered drive and pulling slivers of scorched wood out of my chest.
If I somehow managed to do what I planned, this time I could look forward to pulling shards of metal out of my body…if I was lucky.
The building wasn’t alive so I couldn’t link with it. How was I supposed to transfer the power?
I didn’t have the slightest idea.
When I told Lilly I’d blow up the island it was just a bad joke. I was pretty sure that wouldn’t work. Linking with the earth had always been a way for me to unload, the way a capacitor discharges to ground. No, no way that would work.
But there was something else…
Lilly said that I had, that night on the balcony in LA, a lightning bolt shoot out of me. I hadn’t been aware of doing anything. I simply thought I’d exploded.
Maybe there was a way to consciously recreate that discharge.
“I’m open to suggestions.” I mumbled.
There was no answer.
I was on my own.
I looked beyond the warehouse to the southwest and saw the choppy water of the Bay and beyond that a thinning bank of morning fog slowly fading back into the distance. The chilly breeze whipped my hair around my face. I pushed it back behind my ears, flexed my shoulders and took a deep breath.
I wasn’t accomplishing anything just standing around and thinking in circles. Might as well do something.
Power. I needed power; lots and lots of power.
Well, there was plenty to be had. It was all around me. So I opened my senses and started drawing in two cities worth of emotions. Forget the happiness, the pleasure, the love. Forget all the good stuff.
I was planning destruction. I needed nasty.
Pull it in, from close, from far, from land and sea. Wherever there were people there was hate, fear, pain, greed, jealousy, frustration, pettiness and deceit. Pull it all in…more and more and more…don’t tuck it away, don’t ignore it or hide from it…revel in the feelings…bask in the rancid rays of unlimited power…
My shirt began to feel tight across the shoulders, the collar dug into the skin around my neck. I reached up, dug a finger between skin and cloth and pulled. The button popped off and some of the pressure went away. I took several deep breaths and reached out for more…
More fury, more rage, more aggression…more, more, more.
I felt flushed and beads of sweat formed on my forehead, rolling down my cheekbones and dripping down onto my chest.
The breeze continued, but it didn’t feel cold as it battered my face. The smell of the ocean was in my nose, the taste of salt and fish was on my tongue and in my throat.
Deeper and deeper breaths, but fewer with every passing second.
From off in the distance I heard the sound of sirens, squealing tires and screeching brakes. Then, after a few moments, closer sounds of shoes and boots as they slapped pavement, the movement of bodies and the rattle of metal against metal.
“Ike Blacktower, I have a federal warrant authorizing us to seize all property belonging to White Dragon Security and to place you and all individuals currently on the property under arrest. Get down on the ground and put your hands behind your head.” a braying voice behind me commanded.
Flames began to form behind my eyes and my feet felt like blocks of ice. I turned around very, very slowly.
Four cars, black with tinted windows and a strobing blue light on each roof, were arrayed on the street in front of White Dragon Security. Behind each one were four men, sixteen all total, four with short chopped down automatic rifles, two with stubby shotguns and the rest with pistols. All pointed at me.
“Fuck your warrant.” I snarled, ripped out their emotions and fitted each one with a ring exactly like the one I’d given Anya.
I raised my right hand, which felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds, and pointed a finger at the closest man.
He was about my own age, short cropped brown hair, blue pants, white shirt and blue flak jacket, and a vacant look in his light blue eyes.
“Who do you work for?”
“ATF. Commander Remmson.”
Fucking Justice Department, fucking Attorney General and fucking Marcus.
Well, he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned.
Still, I’d have to thank him the next time we met for solving my explosion problem.
“All of you get inside the building. Prop open the front doors and when you’re inside line up in rows of two, no more than three feet behind the doorway. MOVE!”
I slowly turned to watch as they trotted around their vehicles and up to the front doors; the two in front swung them out and dropped the door stops to hold them open. The blue jacketed column marched in and formed up just back of the door way, weapons still in their hands.
I smiled coldly, linked with the ones I could see, and started amplifying the reservoir of negative emotions I’d pulled in, over and over, geometrically multiplying the power I held.
The breeze became a pounding wind, hard and bitterly cold. From the corner of my eye I saw the once thinning fog bank had thickened and was storming back towards the island. Sleet began falling from the now overcast sky, and slashed every inch of my exposed skin. I added my own pain to the mix and continued amping.
Right around the tenth round of amplification I burst into flames.
It was different from the other times in that I had no trouble seeing. There was no red haze, no fuzziness or distortion of any kind. I could hear the flames snapping in the howling wind, hear the hiss and pop when beads of frozen rain impacted with my burning body.
And for the first time in several minutes I could feel my toes.
My body was on fire but my thoughts were as cold as a glacier.
I looked closely at the sixteen men lined up inside the building and considered the fate that awaited them.
They’re just doing their jobs. Most were probably decent enough human beings, with mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. Not all that different from me really. Some likely had wives and children. Dreams and ambitions, hopes and desires; plans for the future. Did they deserve to die like this?
Of course they didn’t.
I unloaded everything within me down the sixteen links in a single luminously gruesome instant.
Their bodies didn’t so much explode as liquefy. And when that happened I saw it. A white-ish blue edged jagged bolt of blindingly intense light erupted down the length of each link. The spraying liquid remains of the sixteen men inside the building turned to plasma and the building that just that morning had housed White Dragon Security blossomed into a five story pillar of black smoke and roaring flame.
There was no debris to speak of. There was a tremendous blast, a shockwave that pushed out in all directions, slamming against me, heat mixed with tiny particles of what had once been a large building with sixteen human beings inside.
I stood there, firmly rooted to the ground not more than thirty feet from the blast and watched the results of my work for several seconds then turned on my heel and began walking in the direction of the two vans parked next to the baseball field.
The wind picked up and tore at my face with each step I took, but at least it kept my hair out of my eyes and carried the stench of burnt earth and melted black-top out towards the bay.
As I got closer to the vans, the driver and passenger doors of the lead vehicle swung open and Lilly, Lam and Lucy emerged. Lucy and Lilly hurried around the front to stand beside Lucy’s brother.
It felt as though the air was made of water; my body weighed a ton and each step took an eternity.
Lilly looked at me…there was so much sadness in her beautiful eyes, so much worry and fear. Then she smiled and it all went away. Happiness and relief filled her heart, blazing stars and a promise of never-ending love in her eyes.
“Bai long.” Lucy said quietly, almost reverently to her brother.
I knew that phrase. I knew I knew that phrase…where from I couldn’t immediately recall, but I recognized it, even though I had no idea what it meant.
“Wo bu shiang-shin.” Lam rumbled in reply.
Lilly rushed towards me. The love in her heart lanced out and met the flickering flame deep in my own heart. The flames around me vanished and a torrent of icy rain poured over my naked body, raising several armies of goosebumps that immediately began marching from my neck to my toes.
Lilly threw her arms around my waist and pressed her face against my ribs. I put my arms around her shoulders and let the love I felt for her warm us both.
After a minute I gave her a little shake.
“We should go. The plane’s waiting for us, and my ass is freezing.”
Lam Fan had somehow managed to wedge himself behind the steering
wheel and lead our little convoy back onto the
The five people in the back of the van were being very quiet, in the verbal sense of the word anyway. Emotionally I was being bombarded at close range.
I didn’t care at that point. I was wet, tired and sick to my stomach.
I was going to have to add a fifth rule to my personal code of ethics: Don’t make promises you know damn well you won’t be able to keep.
The thing was, I didn’t have to enslave those men to make them march into that building. I could have simply turned them and they’d have done the same thing. So why hadn’t I?
Because I’m an idiot?
There may be some truth to that, but not much. And that wasn’t the reason. So what was?
Guilt, pure and simple. I will not willingly sacrifice the lives of people I consider my responsibility. When I turn someone, they become, to a greater or lesser degree, mine, and my responsibility.
I learned one important thing from my mistake with Anya, and that was not to put love into the emotional mixture. Admiration, loyalty, unquestioning obedience, deference, respect, fear…those were safe and reliable, but not love. Turning someone with love took away free will.
I was more than willing to sacrifice those without free will. And that’s where the guilt came in. I’d killed people who loved me without question. What did that say about me as a human being?
What kind of creature was I becoming? It’s what I hated most about the darkness. He didn’t care. Expediency was what mattered to him. Do what you had to do and fuck the consequences.
He was me. I was him.
He could ignore the guilt. I couldn’t. I had to live with it.
But I’d killed many times before and not felt a lick of guilt or remorse.
Why the hell did I feel so guilty about killing those sixteen men? What was the difference between that and all the other times?
They hadn’t done anything to me personally. They hadn’t tried to kill me, they hadn’t hurt my family; they hadn’t done anything at all.
That was the difference.
“Sorry should be for things we do, things we have control over. Guilt should be the same way.” I’d said that to Lilly once upon a time. I believed it then and I still do.
Was I sorry? No. I’d done what I had to do. Did I feel guilty for having done it?
Oh yeah.
I laid my head back and watched the traffic.
“Bai long?” Lucy said I turned my head to the side and looked at her.
“I’ve heard that before, but I don’t know what it means. What language is it?”
“Chinese. It means White Dragon.”
“The name of your company.” I said dully.
“Yes. I chose that name for a reason. My mother, before she died, used to tell me about the bai long. She had visions, dreams, all of her life. As a young woman she worked with the Army of Vietnam. She could tell when people lied. They used her to locate infiltrators from the north.”
I knew this story.
“Your mother’s name was Thuy, wasn’t it?”
“How do you know that?”
I took a shallow breath.
“There was this old man, Malcolm Rhys-Jones; he was the British
Ambassador at the time I met him. He
told me about a woman he’d met in
Lucy nodded her head.
“She did get away, with my father’s help. They went to
“Could she really tell when someone was lying?”
Lucy chuckled. “Yeah. None of us could get away with anything when my mother was around. She always knew. When I was seventeen I asked her how she always knew. That’s when she told me about the bai long and her voices. She said they told her things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Who could be trusted, who couldn’t, who was lying, who had hatred in their hearts and who had love…things like that.”
“And the bai long?”
Lucy frowned. “The bai long was her personal demon. You have to understand something about Asian culture and mythology to really understand. For us, white is the color of death. Dragons are creatures of great power, neither inherently good nor evil, and there are many types; steel, water, fire, black, green, but there are no white ones. Yet my mother was haunted by visions of a white dragon. And he was coming. She didn’t know where or when, but he was coming. It’s the only thing she was ever afraid of. I once saw her stare down five armed members of a Tong and make them run. She had bullet wounds in her legs and chest from her time in the war. She was the one who first taught Lam to fight; she got him interested in martial arts. My mother feared no one, no matter how big or strong, but she was afraid of the bai long.”
“Why? Why was she afraid?”
“I don’t think she knew. She just was. Maybe it was the color. Death. Maybe it was because he was always there in her dreams. Always coming but never arriving. I don’t know.”
She gave me the strangest look. “You’re him aren’t you? You’re the bai long.”
“Why did you name your business after your mother’s demon?” I asked, ignoring her question.
“My mother and I didn’t always get along. I suppose I did it to show I wasn’t afraid of her greatest fear; to mock her. Why do children always end up battling their parents? To prove that they no longer need them or their protection? To prove that they’re better, stronger, smarter; capable of standing on their own and making their own way in the world?”
I nodded. “It was like that with my father. He had trouble accepting me from the day I was born.”
“Because of your skin?”
“Yeah. I didn’t look like any of my family. My mother was fair, but nothing like me. My brother and sister are darker, like my father and my Granddad. I never quite fit in.”
“Can any of them do the things you can? I mean…”
“No, I’m the only one I know of.” Lilly rubbed the back of her head against my chest. “I’d have liked to have met your mother. She might have been able to help me make sense of all this.”
Lucy’s smile was sad. “I doubt it. She didn’t understand why she was able to do the things she did. She thought it was a curse of some sort.”
“She was right about that.”
“I don’t agree. Think of all you could accomplish with a gift like that. Wealth and power at your fingertips, there for the taking.”
“Yeah, just think of it. All the pain and suffering, the misery and agony, the hate and distrust of every person you’d ever come in contact with, right there at your fingertips. How could you ever be happy? How could you ever have any peace? Wealth and power aren’t enough to dull the pain. Not for a single second.” I mused.
Lucy stared open mouthed.
“You can do what she did?”
“I know when people lie, when they tell the truth, when they hate, when they hurt, when they love. I have voices in my head that tell me things. In that respect, your mother and I are very much alike.”
“If the two of you could do these things, there must be others.”
“I’ve come across only four. One is an old man now, one is a woman a few years older than I am, one was a young boy and the other was my sister-in-law. The old man is very limited in what he can do. The woman is stronger, but still limited.”
“And the other two?”
“They’re dead.”
When we reached the airport I gave Lucy’s brother directions to where the plane was located, got us past security by flashing my credentials, and we continued on to the private hanger. Captain Whitcomb was waiting on the pad next to the plane. His eyes widened when he saw me climb out of the van. His eyes got even bigger when Lam Fan emerged.
It took some doing, but between Lucy, Lam and I we got her people inside the aircraft and buckled in.
“Where are the other two?” I asked.
“They should be close.” she said. Lam handed her a small cellular phone and she quickly fingered the buttons. After ten seconds she started talking very fast, and the pitch of her voice climbed. She was worried and anxious.
“Mat bao lau?”
…pause…
“Lien ngay bay gio!”
…pause…
A long string of words too fast for me to comprehend, followed by, “Nhanh len!”
Lucy flipped the phone shut and handed it back to her brother. “They’re nearly here.”
“Good. You two get in the plane, I’ll make sure your people get thru security. Captain!”
Whitcomb ran over to join us.
“Sir?”
“Start the engines and get clearance from the tower.”
“Yes sir.”
I ran back to the van Lam had been driving, got in and drove back to the security check point.
Not five minutes had passed when a scruffy looking, beat up old red quarter ton pick-up with a dilapidated camper shell on the back came tearing down the road and screeched to a stop in front of the guard shack and gate.
Two men popped out, both thin and wiry, in their late twenties, with faces that reminded me of Lam, though their bodies were much, much shorter.
I linked with them both. “What’s your boss’ name?” I shouted thru the gate.
“Lucy Fan. We work for White Dragon Security.”
True enough.
“Let them in.” I told the guards. “Leave your truck where it is and come with me.” I called out.
“Who are you?” the man on the passenger side shouted back.
I smiled coldly.
“I’m the bai long.”