Flawless Dreams Read online

  The world slows down for me when I enter the calm. Everything seems to move slightly slower, except my own reaction times. The pain I’d been feeling drifted away, leaving only the sensation of blood flowing across my skin. He hadn’t gone down from my kick, he hadn’t even reacted to it. He still held my arm, flesh dangling from his mouth. I put all my strength into jerking my arm from his grasp. He seemed surprised when his fingers spasmed and let go.

  Caleb appeared in front of us. He clipped Keirnan Janson on the jaw with another punch. Keirnan took a step back and turned to look at Caleb. My body wanted to stay for the fight, but my brain told me to put some distance between the two titans. Caleb would process no pain at this point, I just needed to be close and monitor the situation, reacting if Caleb went down again.

  They pummeled each other. Throwing punch after punch after punch that was connecting with their faces and bodies, boxing had nothing on these guys. Blood ran down both their faces, each punch seemed to compound the damage being done. Keirnan fell to a knee and I reached for him, before remembering I didn’t have a set of handcuffs on me. Lewis Parnell was wearing them.

  The punch landed squarely on my jaw. I felt something in my face give and blood begin to flow down it. This ended now. I grabbed my Taser and a millisecond before I pulled the trigger, Caleb grabbed hold of him. My Taser was built for psychopaths. If I hit Keirnan with it, Caleb would feel it as well and probably go down. I didn’t want him on the ground, so I dropped the Taser and grabbed my gun. I squeezed twice in rapid succession. Keirnan kicked out and caught Caleb in the knee. It popped and stopped working, Caleb fell mid stride, letting go of Janson.

  A moment later, I felt the electricity race through my body, starting at my lower calf. My body buckled. My back arched, my face was tossed skyward, and a silent scream escaped my lips in a whisper of exhaled air. I’d been Tasered before with my own weapon and it was life altering. It wasn’t pain, it was my body giving control over to electricity that was the problem. Stars began to dance in front of my eyes.

  Keirnan Janson appeared over me. His face appeared like a mirage. I did not want this to be the last thing I saw before I blacked out and I could only hope Caleb was crawling over to get him even as I thought it. Mostly, I wanted his finger off the trigger of my Taser. If I blacked out, I did not want him to continue to shoot me full of electricity.

  His face exploded. Blood showered my own face, but the electricity stopped. I collapsed. My knees were bent under me, the back of my head touching the gravel. I tried to wipe at my mouth, but my arm wouldn’t move. Suddenly, Fiona appeared over me. She used her jacket to wipe at my mouth, nose, eyes, and face. Her own face showed horror, although she was trying not to let me see it.

  “What?” I croaked at her.

  “You need an ER,” she told me.

  “I need someone to wash the brain matter off of me. Who shot him?” I asked.

  “Rachael,” Fiona answered. I gave a weak thumb’s up. She was a keeper. Hitting him in the face and not me spoke volumes about her skills as a marksman, surgically reconstructed hand or not.

  There was a loud popping noise. Caleb came over to me. I guessed his knee was back in place. He frowned at me.

  “That’s gonna leave a mark and possibly an infection,” he said. “Maybe we should put pressure on it?”

  “What?” I asked again.

  “Your cheekbone broke and part of it is sticking out of your face,” Caleb told me.

  “Can it do that?” I asked him.

  “Since it is, I would say yes.” Caleb said. I tensed as I heard more gunshots. “What the?” I tried to sit up. With Fiona’s help, I managed. My muscles were going to be sore tomorrow, but for now, I had to figure out who was shooting. Had Lewis had a gun I hadn’t noticed?

  Rachael was standing over the body of Keirnan Janson. Her gun was empty. Her face made of stone.

  “I was told to treat psychopaths like zombies and double tap no matter how sure I was that they were dead,” Rachael looked at me. “Does that hurt?”

  “Not really and that’s good advice. I never mind a little overkill,” I answered, pushing away from Fiona. “We should call EMTs or something.”

  Twenty-Four

  There isn’t a lot one can do for a broken face. Insert a plate and hope the scarring isn’t too bad. That’s what I woke up to a few days later, a titanium plate in my face, holding my cheekbone together. I was sore and disoriented, but not alone. Xavier was asleep in a chair and Rachael was asleep on the other bed. I had no idea why Rachael was in my room.

  “Um, yeah,” I croaked and found my throat sore.

  “You’re awake,” Rachael stretched.

  “You’re in my hospital room,” I answered. “Why does my throat hurt?”

  “Infection,” she answered. “Turns out splattering someone’s brains all over another person with open wounds is a really bad idea.”

  “Surprisingly, I knew that,” I shrugged. “It isn’t the first time.”

  “I wanted to thank you,” she came close and whispered to me. “I’ve been told you aren’t the type to accept thank yous and things, but I feel I owe you one.”

  “What for?”

  “Letting me hang back,” she answered. “They were right, I wasn’t prepared to see a psychopath go into a rage, let alone two of them. After you passed out and we started searching, someone accidentally revealed that you guys never do it that way. From here on out, I’ll be in the thick of it. I don’t know that I could have handled it the first time if I had been up close.”

  “I don’t know much about you. You come to us from an alphabet agency, your hand scars reveal that your hand was crushed at some point, you worked a desk for a couple of years as a result, I figure you for a sharpshooter, a sniper. That would be the only reason for you to be comfortable with death without being comfortable with death at less than fifty feet. You’re married, you have at least one kid from it because you occasionally smell like spit up when you show up. I don’t want you to get dead doing this job. It isn’t for everyone. We learn that the hard way. However, you have the makings of being good at it. Your gun skills will be an asset, even though we try to use non-lethal force most of the time, hence the baton and amped up Tasers. You can make friends with Caleb, Malachi, even me, and it will help your life expectancy to a degree. We do try to go in first and subdue whatever monster is behind the door. However, there are going to be days where even we aren’t big enough and bad enough to take down the monster. That’s where the rest of the team comes in. Team members like you. The ones that can pull the trigger from a distance and not put a bullet in our skull as well as theirs. What the general public will never know, what they will never understand, is what team effort means for us. I hate to investigate. It drives me nuts. I hate to lead, it makes me feel incompetent. The only thing that I am really good at is taking on the monsters first. That is where my team effort is and when I fail, it becomes the rest of the team’s job to stop the monster and try to keep me alive. However, my life is secondary to theirs, to yours. I can’t do what you do and I am expendable because I am replaceable. When I first joined the SCTU, the life expectancy of an member was two years. Lucas and Xavier were close to their expiration dates, so to speak. Especially Xavier, because he really is a bleeder. However, the more I worked with them, the more I realized they were not dying. I could not for the life of me figure out why. Just like I could not figure out why members of the VCU, who did exactly what we did, had longer life expectancies. Then one day, someone organizes some killers to take over the Fortress and we go in to take it back. Myself and my brother, Eric Clachan for who the SKMM laws are actually named, took an unknown amount of damage that day. I cannot even begin to tell you all the new scars and all the surgeries we endured as a result. I do know my foot exploded like an overripe melon in my boot, but I kept going. When I was in the hospital after it was all over, I realized why the life expectancy had changed. Xavier, Gabriel, Fiona, and most of the time, even Luca
s was not going head to head with the psychopaths, I was always in the front. That was why it was different for the VCU, they had two psychopaths. The SCTU had always had one on staff, but they had never went in first, they had never considered their lives worth trading for the lives of their team members. I felt that way and I did not even know it. I did not let you hang back because I thought you were unprepared. I let you hang back because I knew I had Caleb and if both he and I failed, it was a kill situation. You are going to meet some scary fucking people on this job, but you have to remember that at the end of the day, Caleb and Malachi expect you to be able to go home. All I want is for you to realize they deserve that as well. Malachi is not the most likeable of guys either. There are days I want to kill him, but in that situation, when you are up against the monsters, it is important for all of you to go home, because tomorrow there is always a new monster who is just as big and bad and awful.” I took a drink of flat Sprite that had probably been sitting on my table for the entire day. “It is a rare thing for a psychopath to believe in something enough that they are willing to trade their life for it.”

  “Who’s scarier, Caleb or Malachi?” Rachael asked.

  “Malachi because his edge is a lot further out there. You might make sure your Taser is always charged because you might have to use it on him from time to time.”

  “You said you weren’t a psychopath, but you included yourself with Malachi and Caleb.”

  “I’m not a psychopath, but I also am. I have the brain differences that psychopaths have. I would probably act more like a psychopath, if I had not been kidnapped when I was eight. I killed my kidnapper; serial killing pedophile. However, psychopaths can empathize and I cannot. Psychopaths do not feel fear or recognize it when they see it, but I do. Lucas has named it A-Typical Sociopathology. It makes me some kind of strange hybrid between the two. The physical traits of a psychopath with the mentality of a sociopath.”

  “Then who’s scarier between you and Malachi?” Rachael looked at me earnestly.

  “A psychiatrist will tell you Malachi is. Malachi and I agree that I am. He can empathize, he chooses not to. I cannot empathize, I cannot even sympathize. That leads to a different sort of disconnect from humanity. I will never be able to understand what you are feeling or why you are feeling it. I will just be able to identify the emotion and when I am in the calm, as I call it, I find those emotions to be a nuisance.”

  “I see.” Rachael seemed to think for a minute.

  “She left out an important part of that,” Xavier came over to me. “Do you want a Mountain Dew?”

  “Yes, please,” I told him. He pulled one out of his bag, it was warm but unopened. I could live with that.

  “If Malachi were to kill her, he would be sad about it. It would bother him. If she were to kill Malachi, she might miss him, but she wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. However, she forgot a category. We call them super psychopaths. They used to be very rare. They have more physical differences than your average psychopath. Malachi is one. So is her brother Eric. In the last five years, we’ve seen more and more of them. It used to be one in every thousand was a super psychopath, now it’s closer to one in every five hundred. Since there are three in her family alone, it might be more common than that even and it is definitely genetic. For most supers, it’s an asset. Eric is small, but he has only one third the nerve endings of normal psychopath, who already has half that of a regular person. Malachi got his height and sinewy muscle from it and again, has fewer nerve endings than most psychopaths. Patterson Clachan doesn’t seem to age, man looks like he’s fifty and he is more acrobatic than most trapeze artists, but he’s in his late 80s. Aislinn got a dose of it too, she just doesn’t realize it. She has amazing healing capabilities because she has some amazing hemoglobin. They should clot just when she sits down she has so many of them, but they don’t. However, you let her start bleeding and those cells start clotting like there is no tomorrow. She had her femoral artery clot closed. Technically, that’s medically impossible. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would have called the doctor a liar. All those burns, fractures, stab wounds, gun shots, over half of them should have been fatal and they weren’t because of her clotting ability. Malachi and Ace are not related, but share some common relatives, he has it too. Not to her strength, but he does have it. So does Patterson and Eric. Meaning those mutations have the ability to pass on along with the genes for psychopathology. However, some supers can’t speak or can’t speak very well. Others can’t seem to process their own thoughts. The more we see it, the more we see the negative side effects of it as well. Lucas and I think it depends on how many genes and what type of genes they have attached to their psychopath gene. Aislinn, Eric, and Malachi we all know got double psychopath genes, one from each side of the family. Patterson probably did as well. The ones who have the most negative side effects seem to only have inherited it from one side of the family.”

  “That’s a little deep for me,” Rachael said.

  “It’s a little deep for all of us, but it’s something you should be aware of. Keirnan Janson wasn’t a super psychopath, he was just a garden variety. They get much worse than him.” Xavier told her.

  “I feel under prepared for being an SCTU member,” Rachael looked at me.

  “There is a steep learning curve, but you will catch on. It just takes more than once. Usually more than twice or three times or even seventeen times. But you will eventually get it.” I looked at her. “Don’t let our talk scare you off. You will be good at the job and you have good team members. Vladik Daniels, Malachi, Caleb, and Dominic are all good guys who will help you learn as you go. No one is prepared until they survive it a few times. Now, go home. See your family. By the end of the week, there will be a new monster to chase.”

  Raphael

  Raphael Henders had a lifetime of injustices to take out on his twin brother. Gabriel had always been the good son, the perfect son, the popular son. It had started at their birth; Gabriel was born absolutely perfect. Raphael was born without vocal cords.

  By the time they were seven years old, Raphael was considered a problematic, special needs child. It was at this point that he had been sent to live with his grandparents. His grandmother had been a teacher, she could home school Raphael. Gabriel of course, stayed with their parents.

  Raphael was different and he knew it at an early age. He might have shared a face with Gabriel, but he was taller even when they were children. Not just an inch like most twins, but several inches and as they both grew, Raphael just continued to get taller and tower of his younger brother by three minutes. He was also leaner and more muscular than Gabriel.

  People thought that since Raphael couldn’t talk, he couldn’t think. That was not the case. He was very smart, perhaps smarter than his brother, but he wasn’t given the opportunities to show it. No one challenged him mentally. They were content for him to just get by. It led to laziness and a defiant attitude about learning. He had never bothered to learn to sign, choosing instead to use a board to communicate. If people were going to treat him like he was stupid, why should he bother to prove them wrong was his humble opinion.

  His grandparents had been good to him. His grandfather had taught him to hunt and fish. Every year they would spend most of the summer at an isolated cabin where Raphael had to endure his siblings, but could come and go as he pleased. It was there that he had met an old trapper.

  At first, the trapper had intended to eat him. Raphael wasn’t sure why he had changed his mind, but he did. Eventually, he took Raphael under his wing and began to teach him the ways of the world around them. The strong survived and the weak perished. Gabriel had been chosen for Raphael’s initiation ceremony, but the little bastard had put up more fight than his brother had expected. He’d managed to escape and somehow navigate the woods until he found his way back to their grandparents. It was Raphael’s biggest failure.

  Since then, Gabriel’s star had just continued to rise. He’d been a great athle
te in school as well as a good student. He’d gone to college. He’d graduated from Quantico. He’d been involved in some high profile cases that had catapulted his career to this point. Now, he ran the SCTU and he was getting the glory of those under him.

  Specifically, that cow Aislinn Cain. That bitch needed to be knocked down a peg or two. Everyone thought she was so amazing. She was so important. She was so scary. The reality was much different, but people were too blind to see it. She was lucky, plain and simple. The serial killers she’d killed were weak. No one seemed to notice how many times her face appeared in the papers after she had gotten her ass kicked, but he did. It was often. That team she was on, specifically, the big guy, Lucas, was the only reason she was still alive. If it wasn’t for him, she’d probably be a trophy in somebody’s collection.

  He intended to set the record straight. Originally, it had just been Gabriel he wanted. Now though, he was going to take both of them and he was going to do it because he could. He was going to prove that she was just as weak as his brother was incompetent. He had forty years of rage to release on the both of them.

  This time, there would be no escape. He had a plan, a much better plan than any nine-year-old could concoct. And he was going to take his time so he could enjoy it. He was going to watch them squirm and die slow deaths. With a little luck, the stupid bitch would die first and Gabriel would live long enough to know it was his fault. That would be a sweet revenge.