Hysteria Read online

  “Something’s interfering with the electromagnetic frequency,” Hector says. “It’s all out of focus as if-”

  “As if someone is jamming the frequency,” Del Amitri says and grabs a beaker of ethanol, throwing it into Hector’s face.

  Hector screams, rubbing his eyes as Del Amitri pulls the Bunsen burner’s rubber pipe from the wall gas socket. He flicks his lighter. “And that of the security cam recording us.”

  “No,” shouts Rodriguez and draws her side weapon.

  A jet of blue flame six feet long bursts out of the gas socket as Del Amitri pushes Hector into the flames. Hector bursts into a fireball.

  Del Amitri pulls out his Glock and points at Rodriguez.

  Rodriguez, shielding her eyes from the spitting flames engulfing Hector, squeezes off a round. Her bullet slams against Del Amitri’s Glock, spinning the gun out of his hand.

  Del Amitri falls to the floor kicking out at Hector and sending the Lab tech spinning towards Rodriguez like a tornado of fire.

  Hector screams as his arms flail at the flames trying to pat them out. Blue and black smoke billows off his body as he whirls around between Del Amitri and Rodriguez.

  The lights cut out. Emergency lights flicker. A low neon blue throwing a ghoulish haze over the lab.

  Between moments of darkness, Rodriguez scans the walls for a fire extinguisher. Only one on the wall behind Del Amitri.

  “You cut the sprinkler system?” she shouts.

  “Officer Rodriguez,” Del Amitri shouts above the screaming. “Always assume your enemy carries a backup.”

  He reaches for an ankle holster and draws a smith and Wesson forty-five.

  Cop and Federal agent aim their weapons at each other, trying to get a clean shot.

  Del Amitri laughs and squeezes his trigger three times. The bullets punch Hector in the chest. A fourth hits and shatters the window to the outside world.

  The momentum of bullets barrels Hector backwards into Rodriguez arms and sends them crashing out through the second floor window.

  Chapter Eight: Cop Killer

  Rodriguez twists like a cat through the air. Flames singe her hands and hair as she rolls on top of Hector’s burning body. She knows whoever is underneath when they hit, will die. She feels herself twist over once more as Hector grabs her and pulls her on top of him. The pair drop like a Roman candle and land on the roof of her squad car.

  Rodriguez bounces and feels herself somersault off the car roof and into the path of traffic.

  Tyres screech and a pair of fenders from each direction rolls up to her face.

  She lays on her back staring through the smoke billowing up from the roof of her squad car knowing Hector gave his life to save her. Her mind races. Replaying over and over the moment of falling out a second floor window with the burning corpse of her soon to be ex-husband. How is she going to explain this? She needs to make an arrest or her career will have Internal Affairs boot prints stamped all over it.

  At the second floor window of the of the CSI lab, a figure peers out. Del Amitri, speaking into a cell phone.

  Rodriguez rolls onto her side. Allows a uniform officer to help her to her feet. She reaches for her side arm. It’s missing. “Give me your weapon,” she shouts at the officer and snatches his gun. She pushes him away and begins to stagger towards the entrance to the six floor CSI Unit HQ.

  “What the hell’s going on?” a lieutenant shouts.

  “Ten sixty six,” Rodriguez shouts running to the main entrance. She climbs the stairs. At the top of the stairwell, she checks her weapon is loaded. Full clip. Kicks the door open, crouches low and lets her eyes adjust to the blue neon gloom. She edges down the corridor to Crime Lab Alpha. The heat and smoke fills the corridor, clawing at her eyes like sharp needles. Three quick sharp breaths and she throws herself into the burning lab.

  She takes her bearings. The smashed window to the outside world. The glass table with the microscope. Beyond, the glass wall to Crime Lab Beta. Smashed. The body remains unmoved on the desk.

  She inches into the lab.

  No sign of Del Amitri.

  She stands straight.

  Something on the body catches the light of the flickering neon. A square box. Wires. A Digital clock. Counting down. Ten. Nine. Eight.

  “Officer Rodriguez, lower your weapon,” someone shouts from behind.

  Seven.

  Rodriguez, keeping her eye on the reflection of the countdown in the glass table, turns to the doorway. Six red laser sight beams crisscross onto her chest. A lieutenant and a converging SWAT team aiming their weapons at her.

  Six.

  “Sir, I’m warning you,” Rodriguez shouts, “everyone get out of here.”

  “Lower your weapon now, Officer,” the lieutenant says. “Final warning.”

  Five.

  “You don’t understand,” Rodriguez says, wondering who she can trust amongst these men. Are they with Del Amitri? Over and over, she replays the image of Hector’s burning face singing her lips as they fall together. She tries to gather her thoughts, feeling her knees shake with adrenalin she keeps her weapon trained on them. Moving it side to side as slowly and calmly as she can.

  “We have an eye witness report you killed a CSI Officer,” the lieutenant says. “And shot at a responding FBI agent.”

  “Are you crazy, Lieutenant?” she says shaking away the dizziness.

  “So I’m asking you, please God,” the Lieutenant says, “lower your weapon, Officer Rodriguez or my men will use lethal force.”

  Four.

  “Del Amitri’s your killer,” she shouts, coughing on the smoke. The weight of her weapon feels unusually heavy. Seems to drag her arms slowly towards the floor. Something wet drips down from her forehead and into her eyes. Stinging hard and blurring her vision. She raises her arms to wipe her eyes.

  “She’s going to shoot,” a SWAT officer shouts and squeezes his trigger.

  Rodriguez feels her shoulder scream out in pain. A bullet knocking her off her feet and flinging her backwards onto the floor.

  Three.

  The SWAT team rushes her.

  She tries to sit up on her elbows but a boot kicks her arms away. A knee rests on her throat. Cutting off her air.

  Two.

  “Secure area,” the Lieutenant shouts and S.W.A.T officers run passed, spraying fire extinguisher foam on the flames and peering down through the shattered window to the outside world of screaming sirens.

  Rodriguez tries to speak. Her voice is a faint croak.

  The lieutenant pulls her arms behind her back and cuffs her as he lowers his ears to her lips.

  Rodriguez nods towards the body of the jumper and whispers, “Bomb.”

  One.

  The Lieutenant looks away towards the body of the jumper. His face seems to take on a look of sudden comprehension as it contorts. His mouth moves as if trying to shout into the force of the explosion tearing into his flesh and hurling his body like a rag dog into the gathering SWAT team and out through the collapsing wall.

  Rodriguez rolls herself across the floor. Crawls under the shock wave and raging fireball to the doorway as the ceiling gives way to the four floors above.

  Chapter Nine: Crossing the line

  Rodriguez blinks away dust from her eyes as she drifts in and out of consciousness. All about her is dark. A swaying motion awakens long ago feelings of drifting away to the motion of a baby cradle. A nursery rhyme floods through her mind. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall...

  A bright light explodes into her face. Sounds of sirens make her jolt awake.

  She peers out from her cradle and realizes she’s in a stretcher. Two floors up on the outside of the CSI building she sways back and forth. A feeling of nausea washes over her as she gently lowers towards the ground.

  She fumbles at the ties around her chest.

  Someone slaps her hands away. “Not yet,” a paramedic says.

  “To hell with that,” she says and unbuckles herself.
“I got to get to hospital.”

  “Where the hell you think you’re going?” a police Lieutenant shouts and steps out of his car. “Disney land?”

  “Two kids are going to die,” Rodriguez shouts as she kicks out and rolls off the stretcher. Falling the last three feet on to the ground. She takes a second to adjust her eyes and ears to the flashing sirens and headlights all around.

  “Hold it Rodriguez,” the Lieutenant says. “Russell, Internal Affairs. Need your statement.”

  “Russell,” Rodriguez says. “Special Agent Del Amitri killed Officer Romano and -”

  “Romano was contesting your divorce?” Russell says. “Demanding a sizable share of your father’s estate?”

  “What the hell has that-?”

  “Everything,” Russell says taking a pair of cuffs from his jacket and grabbing her arm. “Come with me.”

  Rodriguez twists around, breaking Russell’s grip, kicking out across the inside of his knee. She throws her weight into the momentum of his fall and slams him onto the hood of a squad car. Forcing his arm behind his back, she takes his cuffs. Clicks one cuff around his wrist and the other around his ankle.

  “I’ll have your badge,” Russell shouts.

  “There’s a rogue agent out there,” Rodriguez says, emptying Russell’s pockets and finding his car keys. “And people are going to die if I don’t stop him.”

  Across the parking lot, Paramedics bag the charred body of Officer Romano and lift it into the back of a van.

  “Hector may have been a slime ball but he didn’t deserve to go like that,” she hears herself say. Shakes the dizziness from her head.

  “Don’t make this personal, Rodriguez,” Russell says. “We can talk about this. But once you cross the line-”

  Rodriguez slams Russell’s head against the hood to quiet him. “There is no line,” she says. “Del Amitri understands that. Why don’t you?”

  Chapter Ten: Death Brings Flowers

  DAMIEN DIAMOND IGNORES HIS BACK FLIPPING STOMACH. He steps into the hospital elevator. Punches his floor button and allows the door to close on an elderly patient’s leg. She drags it free and the doors slam shut. He is now alone in the elevator. And he needs these precious few seconds alone to think through this dark nightmare to clear daylight. To follow the thread of his unraveling sanity. To find something substantial to hold onto or feel himself buried alive under his collapsing world.

  He glances at his reflection. He admires his slim and strong physique. Not tall but not short. The way the junk food pounds seem to fall away. Vanish in the vapor trails of these last few hectic months as he burns a flight path to immortality. As his glorious destiny approaches. As finally, his revenge seems assured.

  It’s the face of mankind’s destiny staring back at him. In a matter of days, he’ll be eighteen and the world will be his. The launch of Fantasy Fifteen will ensure their addiction to their wildest dreams. And he will be their dream maker. A king amongst ordinary men and women. His influence will traverse borders. His Fantasy Fifteen will go global. No, not a mere king. An Emperor. One who must be worshiped.

  So close, he can taste success. And yet at this eleventh hour this kid, this adrenalin junkie nobody laying in hospital blocks his path. Threatens to destroy his life’s work. And there suddenly reappearing in his features he sees his old self. The shy, clumsy fat geek. Incapable of looking the pretty girls in the eye. Of delivering their pizza with a soul destroying stutter. Suffering their cheerleader taunts as his skin burns with the fires of hell inflaming his acne. Tolerating their jock boyfriends’ bullying. Allowing them to force him to squeeze his acne yellow heads over their pepperoni pizza every time he forgets the extra anchovies. All because he knew one day they would all come to him on their knees.

  After only one taste of his new power. After a mere fifteen minutes of his gift to them. Once it vanishes, they will come crawling for more. Begging him to make their dreams come true. Willing to do anything for him. And that day is so close now. So close that nothing can stand in his way. He will crush anything or anyone who tries to stop him.

  On the eve of his supreme destiny, he finds himself staring into an abyss. Finds himself toppling over into nothingness. Clinging onto reason with his fingertips. The weight of a high school kid clinging to his ankles and dragging him to his doom.

  It ends. For one of them. It ends now. Permanently.

  The elevator doors open with a whisper that only he can hear. It says, welcome to your destiny. We hope you enjoy your stay.

  Not a pizza delivery kid. Not a king. Not an Emperor. A God.

  He steps out and approaches the nurse at reception.

  “McKenzie Chase, please,” he says.

  *

  McKenzie opens his eyes.

  Stood over him is a kid, maybe two or three years older. Wearing a Van Halen Tee. His intense eyes, staring it seems with a boiling hatred. He leans over and tucks a business card inside the top of McKenzie’s leg cast.

  “You have something that belongs to me,” the kid says. “My lawyers tell me you could drag this through the courts for years. So I’m willing to cut you in on the deal.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” McKenzie says.

  The kid snorts, smiles and nods. “How’s ten percent sound to you?”

  “Ten percent of what?” McKenzie says. “And for what?”

  The door opens and Mylo pops his head around the door. “Brought Jenny with me,” he says. “Sorry didn’t realize you had company.”

  “Who’s your friend, Kenzie?” Jenny says pushing Mylo into the room.

  Damien pats the top of McKenzie’s cast. “We’ll talk again soon.”

  He pushes pass Mylo, knocking Mylo’s crutches aside. He steals a grape from Jenny’s bunch and walks down the corridor towards the elevators.

  “Kenzie you need to get friends with more than a single amoeba cell of social skills,” Jenny says and kisses him.

  McKenzie reaches for the morphine drip button and clicks its several times. He counts to ten and feels himself drift.

  *

  McKenzie smiles at the fluffy blue and pink clouds. They tickle his face as he glides through the air. Time seems to have no place here up in the clouds. He could be one with the clouds for days or minutes.

  Two big pink and fluffy clouds, shaped like the most beautiful pair of breasts he’s ever seen, drift over and poke his face.

  The full and erect nipples begin to talk.

  “McKenzie Chase, wake up,” they say with the softest, sexiest woman’s voice he has ever heard.

  He grins and feels himself dribble.

  “What a coincidence,” McKenzie says in his best James Bond accent. “My name’s Chase, McKenzie Chase, please to suck your perky nipples.”

  He grins at his own sophistication. No chat up line in history could compete with his license to kill.

  “Perky poky yum yum,” he says and pokes his finger at the fluffy breasts.

  McKenzie feels his face sting. It seems the fluffy breasts are slapping him.

  “You are hallucinating, McKenzie,” the breasts say. “You are in hospital and your life is in danger.”

  The fluffy clouds vanish and McKenzie feels himself land with a bump onto a bed.

  He blinks away the remaining clouds and realizes he is in hospital. He twists his aching body to reach over to the drip attached to his arm. His bandaged fingers fumble over the button to release blissful morphine into his blood stream.

  A girl, maybe seventeen, stands before him. Somehow, she seems familiar.

  She can be some help at last.

  But she reaches over him and pulls the drip out of his arm.

  McKenzie tries to stop her and she bats away his bandaged hands and slaps him hard across his face once more.

  She seems to grow more familiar. Wasn’t she on the Empire State Observation Deck? Then it hits him. “You,” he shouts.

  She nods, looking nervously through a gap in the blinds covering the wi
ndow onto the corridor as nurses and medical staff hurry passed a guy in a wheel chair. He seems to be yelling at everyone.

  “Mind the toe,” the patient shouts. “Cost me twenty grand. More than you idiots earn in six months.”

  “Sorry sir,” a nurse says. “We’re overwhelmed with victims of the Fifth Avenue tanker disaster.”

  “What do I care?” he shouts. “Cold pizza and warm cola. Now that’s a disaster. Somebody get me the administrator. I’m suing your asses.”

  McKenzie feels an intense itch inside his leg cast. He slides a finger down inside the cast and feels something stuck down there. He pulls out a business card.

  CEO Damien Diamond.

  Fantasy Fifteen.

  Dream makers.

  So it wasn’t a dream after all? McKenzie quickly tucks the card back down inside his cast.

  “No time for explanations,” the girl says to McKenzie as she peers through a crack in the door.

  “You were on the Empire state,” McKenzie shouts. “You killed that kid, pushed him-”

  She grabs McKenzie’s face and kisses his lips. Hard.

  McKenzie swallows.

  “My name is Angel. Now shut up,” she says. “Listen and obey or we’re dead in sixty seconds.”

  McKenzie touches his lips like he’s just tasted the most orgasmic flavor ice cream ever invented. Realizing this is not a cool thing to be seen doing, he feels himself flush and nods. “Angel,” he says and grins feeling himself drool over his chin.

  “Someone is coming to kill you for the source code in your blood,” she says. “We need to get you out of here.”

  “You know what happened to me don’t you?” he says.

  Angel picks up a glass beaker filled with yellow liquid and throws it in McKenzie’s’ face.

  “That stings,” he shouts.

  “Good,” she says and hands him the beaker labeled Urine sample. “Now you’re awake. Ready?”

  McKenzie swings his legs over the edge of the bed. Looks down at the two casts covering his ankles up to his hips. Aware of the breeze flapping the open back of his hospital smock revealing his naked butt.