They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Read online

  Will, God dammit.

  Tank slid a pack of smokes and a lighter from her pocket. I grabbed the pack, fucking Slims, slapped it against my hand a couple of times, tore a cigarette out, spilling half the pack and lit it with a thought.

  "You're not allowed to use your powers while in cust--"

  I slammed my hand on the table. "Are you fucking kidding me? I lit a fucking cigarette, Jesus fucking Christ, you just told me my best friend is dead. I know you don't give a shit, but, fuck. Fuck you, man."

  "Mr. Guillory, please refrain from using your powers from this point on."

  I could tell I was heating up the room, sweat beaded on the Tank's forehead, but I couldn't feel it at all. I felt numb.

  I stared her straight in the eye and let smoke seep out of my mouth. "Let me out of this goddamn room."

  She didn't budge. "There are men right on the other side of that door. Some of them are waiting to help you get through this. More of them are waiting for you to do something violent. We can leave, but I need you to calm down first."

  "You need to let me out of this room is what needs to happen."

  Heat radiated out from me; heat lines wriggled up from the surface of the table, and Tank's papers browned and caught fire. Her skin wouldn't burn but she'd sure as shit feel it. They had guys waiting to take me out, fine, they could bring it the fuck on. This whole thing was fucked from the get-go, and this bunch of cocksuckers let me throw my life away for nothing.

  "Tell those guys they can come on in here," I said, spitting smoke. "The ones ready to kick the shit out of me."

  The Tennessee Tank put her hand across the table to me. "Mr. Guillory, please. Don't do this. We're going to do everything we can--"

  "Send 'em in, or you and me throw down." I could barely get the words out without choking on them in my mouth. I bolted upright and slung my chair at the mirror, the leg struck it and a spider-web crack splashed across it. I popped a few ugly, sloppy fireballs in front of Tank's face.

  The heat got so hot the fluorescent lights blew out, and two sprinkler heads went on and sprayed drenching, high-pressure water from above.

  "Get me the fuck out!" I yelled at the mirror.

  Then the door flew open and put a sharp shaft of light in the room. Body-armored and armed officers filed in to put me down, shouting shit at me I didn't give a fuck about. This time, I wasn't taking a fucking dive. In the raining water and the dark, Tank got me from behind and wrapped an invulnerable forearm around my throat in a chokehold that would've been illegal on anybody not burning cops. She didn't have any enhanced strength, that was true, but the dyke fucking worked out and probably had a dick almost as big as mine.

  The sleeve of her jacket caught fire in my face, and I had to put it out, which was the last thing I did before somebody tazed the fuck out of me while she held me. Water poured into my nose and mouth while I went jerky in Tank's grip.

  After that, I got hit with the sedatives again. They cuffed me, tazed me again when I tried to break free, and finally dumped me back in my cell, soaking wet with the drugs coursing through me. It wasn't long before I passed out to a black, empty sleep that wouldn't last long enough.

  Chapter 16

  The Way I Am

  I woke up in my cell hours later. When I remembered where I was and why I was there, I melted the circuits in the cameras that were watching me and waited. Less than five minutes later a couple of guards came in, put me up against the wall and gave me a loud lecture about the holiness of the cameras while an IT guy re-wired new ones into the sockets.

  "When are they giving me more sedatives?" I asked.

  "I'll have to check on that," I got told by a weight gain powder addict in a guard's uniform.

  They packed up the hardware shit and filed out of my cell.

  "Hey, can I make a phone call?" I asked before they locked me in.

  "Who do you want to call, Guillory?"

  "You have to let me make a call if I want to. I haven't made one."

  The guard looked at me with a shit-eating grin on his face. "I'll have to check on that." He punched in the code on the keypad and put me back on lockdown.

  Twenty minutes I waited. Twenty minutes of nothing to do but think about Will being dead and me getting a needle in my arm for Red's murder. When the guard finally came back, I was on the edge of losing it. He had a dozen guys in riot gear with him and a set of chains and shackles.

  "Let's go make your phone call, Guillory."

  The phone for inmates was mounted on a wall right outside the Pib in a locked booth of bulletproof glass. Two video cameras were inside. Three vents were hooked to pipes from the wall.

  The weight gain addict unlocked my hands. "You try anything," he warned, "And those high-pressure gas vents up there will put you down. We have lethal and non-lethal options at our disposal for the gas. It's up to our discretion as to which one is pumped in there. Do you understand?"

  "Yeah. Gas chamber phone booth."

  "Exactly."

  One of the guys in riot gear held a digital thermometer up to the booth. When the reading stabilized for a baseline, they let me enter and locked me in.

  I put my hand on the black phone's receiver and stared at the numbered buttons.

  I didn't know who to fucking call. I hadn't really planned that part; I just needed to get out of that fucking cell. Everybody I knew's number was in my cell phone. Katie Lister's number ended with a five; I had dated her for three months the year before, then ended it. She never got over me and would have dropped everything to come to DC. What was it, three-something-nine?-five. Three-seven?-three?-five? Fuck. I could have called Bobby Jo, but I didn't have a clue what her number was, and then I remembered that she had moved to Nevada with some guy, anyway.

  I could only come up with one person to call, but I had to talk to somebody. My muttered, frustrated "Fuck" as I dialed it got digitally recorded and probably transcribed in some office at the CIA or something. I punched the buttons fast like ripping off a band-aid and gave my name to the recording so Charlene the Bitch would know who was calling her collect.

  "What the hell do you want, Don?" Her voice made everything ten times worse. "We just finished identifying Will's body. What in the name of God do you want from me right now?"

  "Hey," I said like a whipped dog.

  Her voice shook. "That's what you have to say to me? What do you want? I'm not giving you bail. I saw the news."

  "How did he look?"

  I heard her sniff at the other end. She was crying. She made her answer as painful as possible. "Well, animals ate the pieces of him that they could," she said when she could talk. "They went up through the inside of his mouth and his eyes. Me and Patty had to see him like that. You, of course, got to skip that part."

  "Christ. You brought Patty? Is she okay?"

  "I didn't 'bring' her, dick. Her son is dead, she wanted to come. How do you think she's doing?" She stopped long enough to pull herself back together. "We are on our way to the airport to fly back, so I can't talk because I'm busy with this giant mess you've left us with. But I am glad you called because I wanted to tell you that you're a fucking asshole and you should have died instead of Will. And now I'm going to hang up the phone--"

  "Don't hang up. I'm in custody, come on, please. I miss him as much as you."

  "Did you kill him?" she asked me straight up, her voice cracking.

  "Fuck, Charlene. No, I didn't kill him. Jesus."

  A long silence followed. "I haven't even been able to Will, Jr. yet that his daddy's dead. I don't even know how to tell him that."

  Jesus. I rubbed my eyes. "Tell him--"

  "No, you shut your damn mouth because I don't want to hear it."

  "Charlene," I glanced out at the rifles still trained on me. "I'm sorry. I fucked this up. This is my fault."

  "Fuck your sorrys, Don. Do you know how many times I've had to hear 'sorry' from you? 'Sorry, Charlene.' 'Sorry.' 'Oh, I know I fucked up, and I'm sorry.' You're not fucking
sorry or you'd stop hurting me. You were supposed to be the one--dammit, Donnie, you were the smart one. Everybody knew that. Even Will knew it. He used to tell me he'd have been dead a long time ago if you weren't been around.

  "But you're a self-centered piece of shit. That's just what you are, that's the way you were born. You think you're smarter than everybody but you're not, and you've been that way as long as I've known you. You're not better than anybody. What you are is somebody who doesn't think about anybody else except Don. Yeah, you tried to help Will do the right thing sometimes but that doesn't make you not an asshole. You tried to talk Will out of marrying me on our wedding day, and, yes, I knew all about it because you were drinking, like you always are, and you said it loud enough for Amy to hear. And I let it go because that's Don, right? That's how you are, but you looked out for Will, so I let it go, and I put up with your smartass comments to me in my own house, and I put up with you and Will drinking until all hours while I had to take care of the baby, and I put up with you putting yourself in the middle of our arguments where you didn't belong.

  "I gave you a lot of fucking slack, Don. But you helped ruin my marriage. You were in Will's ear every fucking day telling him he shouldn't put up with my shit, that I was a bitch, and that there were so many better women out there for him. You ruined my marriage. You did that to me, and you did it to Will because you're a cold-hearted piece of shit who doesn't give a damn about anything except how he thinks things should be. There's the wrong way and the Donnie way, that's how you see everything. That's what you think, and if you act like that's not how you are, you're lying to yourself."

  The guard with the thermometer thumped the booth and turned it around so I could see the readout rising. I nodded to him that I understood. I was shaking I was so fucking pissed.

  "I have a hard time believing all that from a girl who'd walk around the apartment with no top on when I'd come over and who passed out with her hand down my pants." As soon as I said it, I blurted out, "Fuck, I'm sorry--"

  "I hope you fucking burn in hell," she said right before the line went dead.

  I hung up the receiver and leaned my head against the booth. The guards unlocked the door and put me back in shackles.

  They escorted me back to my cell, silently. It felt like it had gotten smaller since I had left. They uncuffed me, fingers on triggers, and I started thinking about Will again. Dead. His body out there in the sand. Then the memories started. And I had nothing to make them stop.

  As soon as they locked me in, I turned to the cameras. "Hey, guys, I feel like I'm about to explode. I just feel really hot like something's gonna happen. I think I need the sedatives again."

  The guards had to come back and asked me a bunch of questions about my current state. I must have answered them the wrong way or the right way because they didn't give me anything to put me out.

  The weight gain powder addict punched in the code to lock my door. "They'll come get you when they need to talk to you again."

  "Hey," I snarled at his back while he walked away, "I need the sedatives, all right? Something's gonna happen to me, I can feel it. I'm about to lose it, and I could take this place out if I even have just a nightmare."

  "Waaaah, give me a shot," the motherfucker in cell 13 said through the wall. "I need my pussy shots."

  I set his bed on fire.

  The guards put the fire out, the guy in the cell threw all kinds of swears my way and the guys up and down the Pib joined in, but nobody came to my cell.

  I shouted for ten minutes that I needed more sedatives or I would hurt somebody. I blew out all the fluorescent lights in the Pib and burned my name into the wall before my cell door finally unlocked.

  In walked Tank, a set of shackles in one hand and a nightstick in the other.

  "Let's go have a talk," she said and had me assume the position for cuffing.

  She walked me down empty corridors to another 'conference room,' one where the steel chairs were bolted to the floor along with the table. She didn't have a file or a pen or a recorder, and she set the nightstick on the table.

  "So." She sat in the chair across the table from me. "We've been told you're having some problems adjusting. Would you like to talk about it?"

  I put my hands in my lap, about all the freedom the chains let me have. "Just do whatever it is you're gonna do with me. I don't give a shit anymore."

  "But you do give a shit. You're putting a lot of effort into getting everyone's attention out there."

  "Well, my best friend's dead, I'm in police custody, and I fucking hate cops, who I have to ask to do anything now. I feel like I'm about to explode."

  "Don, I'm, okay, let's just skip all this. All of us here have done this long enough to know the ones who need the sedatives from the ones who'll do whatever it takes to get them."

  "And you think I want to get knocked out."

  "I know I would in your position," she said.

  "So knock me out. Everybody wins."

  The Tennessee Tank took off her jacket and put it on the back of her chair. She wasn't carrying a gun. "Knocking you out wouldn't help you," she said. "That would just be the easy way out."

  "Oh, well, fuck, we wouldn't want that. That ain't the way cops do anything, is it?"

  She stood and unlocked my shackles. "Something else we've learned doing this job is creative problem solving. We don't like to push people into corners because bad things tend to happen. That's why you haven't gotten solitary for what you've been doing because that has a history of going very, very badly for Post-Human inmates. But you're going to get yourself hurt the way you're going."

  She tossed the shackles into the corner. They crashed loudly against the wall. "You've got a lot of emotional stuff to get out of your system."

  "Look, I don't know what you think's gonna happen, but I'm not a fucking idiot," I said. "Whatever the hell this is, it's not gonna work, and I'm not into playing your games. I've had enough shit to deal with the past few days, and I don't think the acid's totally out of my system. I don't--"

  "Don, just listen." She crossed her arms and set her shoulders square with me. "As of five minutes ago, I'm no longer employed by the SCEIA. I turned in my letter of resignation and had my exit interview with HR. I turned in my department-issued firearm and badge downstairs and lost eight days of vacation time. As of right now I'm no longer acting on behalf of the US government, and any lawsuit against me will only come out of my own pocket. And that security camera up there isn't working."

  Fuuuuuck, that sounded bad.

  "So what the fuck does that mean?" I asked her.

  "Get up."

  "Uh, fuck you."

  She gestured to the nightstick on the table in front of me and backed up three steps. "You need to work through your issues. I can't be hurt, and, hey, there's a nightstick on the table."

  "Fuck, whatever," I chuckled. "I'm not gonna hit you."

  "I'd expect that from a little bitch that got his best friend killed."

  I stared dead-eyed at the wall. Stupid. Bitch.

  "Nothing to say to that?"

  "No, Sir."

  "You two were close, right? I heard you two were really close. San Francisco close."

  "Nope."

  "You've got a girl's power, so you must've been the catcher, right? I could see that, he was a big guy. I couldn't tell what he looked like because of the damage but he had strong hands, and I guess he was big in that kind of bear way--"

  In my head I saw myself jumping up and my fist nailing her right across her face. My body decided to skip running the idea past my brain and just did it the fuck anyway.

  Tank staggered back a couple of steps just from the momentum of it, but it didn't faze her. She got those steps back real damn quick and shoved me hard to the wall.

  "That's all? The boys in the Pib are going to eat you alive."

  I reached out and snatched that nightstick off the table and rammed it into her invulnerable jaw. She didn't make a sound. I went up
the side of her head with it until I had backed her into a corner, then kept swinging until my arm ached.

  When I stopped to catch my breath, she swung a hard fist into my stomach that knocked the wind right out of me. She followed it up with a row of calloused knuckles across my chin. I gripped the nightstick with both hands and swung a grand slam into her fucking face.

  She stumbled back and said, "Okay, that's enough in the face."

  I hit her stomach with the stick, but she blocked my second swing with her forearm and combo'd that shit into an elbow to the side of my head.

  "Fuck!" I wheezed, out of breath.

  She punched me in the stomach again and sent me to the floor with an elbow between the shoulder blades when I doubled over. I kicked her left leg but didn't make her fall, so I just yanked it out from under her with my hands and brought her down to me, grabbed her hair and smashed her face into the cinder block wall. She reached around underneath my arm and pressed my face to the blocks and wriggled free, keeping my arm twisted out to my side. She let me go, and I half-heartedly picked up the stick and hit her right in the tit.

  "Hey, shit!" she said, almost laughing. "Truce. Truce." She pulled a pack of smokes out of her jacket pocket and handed me a cigarette. I made a lame swing with the stick, and she caught it in her hand. "Hey, c'mon. We're done with that. They found a few packs of cigarettes when they searched your truck. This is your brand, right?"

  I nodded and took the smoke, lighting it my lips as I sat on the linoleum floor. She didn't give me any shit about using my powers. I couldn't suck a lungful fast enough. "Jesus Christ, that's good," I said, savoring it like sex after a long dry spell.

  She pulled a Slim out for herself and asked me to light it. I did, and she sat on the steel table to join me in nicotine ecstasy. "Do you feel any better?"

  I nodded, out of breath and tired. "Uh huh. Kinda."

  "Good." She gave me a minute of quiet with my addiction. "You know, we really do want to help you."

  "It's not gonna last, though," I told her. "I got nothin' in there to, y'know, make me stop thinking about all this shit. About Will and everything." I could feel my throat tightening up and my voice starting to waver. "I can't go back in there and just think about this shit. I can't."