Payment in Blood

Chapter Two: Fatal Tragedy

“Believer
Speak not to me of justice
For none have I have seen
By God, I shall give as I receive
Betrayer
Speak not to me at all
You and this world ripped my fucking heart out again!
And again!
And again!“
--Emperor – The Loss and Curse of Reverence

Hobnailed boots clashed against the hard tile floor of the Liberty Gorge Correctional Institution's Telepath Unit as two guards and a government telepath walked down the corridor on the bottom level of cell block A to Edward Grinberg's cell. Grinberg was a rogue telepath who had been working for the infamous Takeo Sekaro when he raped and killed a young secretary. The secretary had escaped after the rape and had managed to evade Grinberg until the birth of the child conceived in the rape, and then allowed Grinberg to catch up with her. Her body was found a few days later.

Grinberg was powerful and dangerous. The Mobian Geneboosts Agency had sent over a grade 24 telepath and the guards were outfitted in full riot gear, with body armor and assault rifles. Even the guards' tails were armored. The two guards stood ready as the telepath they were escorting entered Edward Grinberg's cell.

The government telepath, Special Agent Fizetta Inverno, stepped confidently into the cell. Grinberg stared back at her, glowering. He was huge and broad, with massive arms, a barrel-like chest, and decayed, jagged yellow teeth. Fiz was not afraid of him. He could've been a 500-pound gorilla, and he would still have been no threat to a telepath five grades higher than him. His formerly rust-colored fur had faded to a sandy color with age, but his eyes still shone a bright blue, intense and burning with hate.

Grinberg stood up, towering over her. If Fiz was in the least bit intimidated, she did not show it. “Hello, Mr. Grinberg,” she said. “The corrections department has decided to give you a parole hearing. I have come to escort you to the room where your hearing will take place. Follow me, please.” She cuffed Grinberg's arms together behind his back and led him out of the cell.

The two guards walked on either side of Grinberg, guns at the ready. If the rogue telepath made any false moves, he would be dead. No chances could be taken with telepaths.

For just an instant, Grinberg felt the telepathic defenses of the blue vixen in front of him relax. After twenty-two years of waiting, his time had come. Even a moment of laxity could be death when dealing with telepaths. He reached into the minds of the three people around him and knocked them unconscious, picked up both guards' guns, one in each hand, and then dashed down the corridor as fast as possible. Sirens blared, and the other prisoners hooted and banged on their cell doors. The blue fox bitch had been the only government telepath in the whole facility, so now he was virtually unstoppable.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw two guards dragging the fox telepath to safety, and three more running after him. He casually entered their minds and shut down their brain stems, and they collapsed like puppets whose strings had been cut.

Grinberg fired his rifles at the guards blocking the exit from the telepath unit and kicked the door open with geneboosted strength. He sent out waves of confusion into the sniper's nests on the walls and then quickly scaled the prison wall. He jumped over the side, the razor wire slashing his legs. No matter. His enhanced body would quickly stop the bleeding and close wounds. Mere razor wire could not stop him.

He bent his knees as he landed, his reinforced bones easily withstanding the impact force. Free at last! He dashed off into the woods, leaving the hopelessly confounded prison officials to try in vain to find him.

--

The skin on Adrian's muzzle had turned even paler than its usual color as he read the headline in the newspaper. SEKARO COLLABORATOR EDWARD GRINBERG ESCAPES PRISON, KILLS SIX. A face frighteningly like his own stared out of the page. The same fur color, only faded with age, the same short nose, the same blue eyes. He stared at the photograph of his own father in a state of pure terror.

He had never told his friends the real reason why humans had adopted him when he was a child. The actual story was so horrible that even thinking about it brought tears to his eyes. He tossed the newspaper aside and thought back to the day after his fifteenth birthday, when he himself had learned the awful truth.

Seven Years Ago

Adrian's ears perked up as his adoptive father Phillip Spencer called him over. “Hey, Adrian,” he heard him say. “Come here. I want to talk to you about something.”

Adrian sat on the couch next to his stepfather, purring softly as the human scratched his ears gently.

“Adrian,” Phillip began. “I was talking to your mother today and we've decided that you're now old enough to know what happened to your birth parents. You see, when we told you that your real mother and father had disappeared, we weren't quite telling the truth, because we didn't think you wouldn't be able to handle the truth.”

“Why?” said Adrian. He suddenly felt angry. Why had they kept the truth from him. What were they hiding? Families were built around trust, after all. He had trusted them to be honest with him about his birth family. He bit his lower lip and tried to hide the scowl on his face, staring at the floor.

“You see, Adrian,” Philip continued. “we know exactly what happened to both of them. Your real father is in prison. Your real mother is dead. He...killed her.”

For a moment, it was as if the world had stopped turning. Adrian's eyes widened. His stomach lurched. He dropped the book he was holding. He couldn't believe it. It couldn't be true. His stepfather was lying! He admitted that he had been lying, so why should he trust him with this? Shock turned into denial within mere seconds. “That can't be true!” Adrian yelled. “It's not true!”

Phillip patted his adoptive son on the head. “Please listen,” he said. “I promise you I'm telling the truth this time. Your father was a telepath. Only, unlike most telepaths, he didn't work for the government. He worked for Takeo Sekaro.”

Adrian felt like the world had stopped again. He knew who Takeo Sekaro was. Everyone knew who Takeo Sekaro was. Takeo Sekaro was probably the most hated man to have lived in the last century. His name could suck the air out of a room the same way as if one said “Adolf Hitler”, or “Charles Manson”, or perhaps even “Satan”. Takeo Sekaro was a rogue telepath bent on the destruction of Earth and Mobian government and the rule of telepaths over all other beings. Telepaths, Sekaro had said, were superior beings, destined to rule over normals. These were no mere words as together with his gang Sekaro had been responsible for at least 2,000 deaths and 30 acts of terrorism. Takeo Sekaro was as infamous as Satan himself. Takeo Sekaro might as well have been Satan, such was his foul reputation.

Adrian still tried to deny it, but it made a frightening amount of sense. Adrian himself was a latent telepath, although his powers were extremely limited and he had very little control over them. When he experienced extreme emotional stress, people around him could feel pain, or become confused, or otherwise be affected by the psychic impulses blasting out of Adrian's mind. He had been tested by the Earth Republic Psionic Corps at the age of four and was rated at grade two—harmless to the general population, and useless to the ERPC. If he was a grade six or higher, he would've been taken into custody by the ERPC and trained to become a government telepath. But he was far too weak telepathically to be any use to the government. Many half-breed telepaths were. It suddenly made sense. Adrian listened with rapt attention.

“Your mother had been dating him for several months and they were living together when she found some letters from Takeo Sekaro in his room. At this time, nobody knew exactly who he was, as he used many codenames, but the letters mentioned all kinds of crimes and orders to commit crimes.

When he came back in the house from shopping, she confronted him with the letters. He raped her and then knocked her out. Unfortunately for him, she awoke faster than he anticipated, so by the time he had come back with Sekaro to help him finish her off, she had escaped. She was on the run for nine months, and when she gave birth to you, she had you sent to an orphanage on Earth from where we adopted you. After that was done, she let Grinberg and Sekaro catch her. The police found her body a few days later.” Phillip handed Adrian a photograph.

Adrian saw his birth mother, face down on the ground, with poilce tape surrounding her body. There was a bullet wound in her head, and blood pooled underneath her. Adrian threw the picture to the ground and began to sob.

“Now do you see why we kept this from you? If you had known this when you were younger, who knows what it could have done to you.”

“No! You still had no right to lie to me!” Adrian screamed, tears running down his face. “It's not fair! It's not fair!” With that, he ran back into his room and slammed the door.

For the next two days, Adrian refused to leave his room, and cried constantly. He hated his birth father. He hated his step-parents. He hated Takeo Sekaro. He hated himself for being conceived from a rape. At times he considered suicide, but always decided against it. For two days he cried and sobbed and beat his hands against the walls until blood trickled between his knuckles. When he finally came out of his room, he looked like the living dead. Great dark circles surrounded his eyes, his fur and spines were in total disarray, his hands were bruised and bleeding, his fur stained by tears. He was torn by hunger, dirty, shabby, and more miserable than he had ever felt in his life.

As his stepmother put him in the bathtub and washed two days' worth of dirt and two lifetimes worth of tear-stains from his fur, he wondered how he could go on living.

Present Day

“Adrian? Are you all right?” said Bianca as she came out of the bathroom, still damp from a shower.

“Yes. No.” Adrian picked the newspaper off the floor and wiped tears from his eyes with his hand. Adrian sighed. “Please sit down. It's a long story.”

After Bianca sat down next to him, Adrian explained about his parents, the conversation that had so traumatized him seven years ago, and the newspaper headline.

“That's terrible,” said Bianca, putting an arm around Adrian and drawing him close. “I feel so sorry for you.”

“Bianca,” said Adrian. “If my father finds me he will certainly kill me, and possibly you too. The man's a monster. He killed my mother and probably a few hundred other people as well. He cut down those guards without any problem, and they're a damn sight better equipped than the police. I don't know what to do. What if he finds me?”

“How would he find you?” said Bianca. “The murder was 22 years ago. You might not even have the same first name your mother gave you, never mind last name, and your father probably doesn't even know what she named you. If he doesn't know your name, how can he find anything else about you?”

“He's a telepath. He can read people's minds. He can make people say and do things against their will. He could find someone who knew me, or one of the officials who handled my case. Bianca, I'm scared. I don't think I've ever been this scared before in my whole life.”

“It's OK, Adrian,” said Bianca, stroking the back of Adrian's head while hugging him with her other arm. “You can ask the police for protection, buy a gun...”

“The police? What would they do against a grade 19 telepath? Piss their pants? And a gun? He could make me drop it just by thinking about it!”

“Calm down, Adrian,” she said, trying in vain to console him. She could see the terror in his bright blue eyes.

“I don't want to die!” Adrian wailed, bursting into tears. “I don't want to die!”

“You're not in danger, Adrian,” said Bianca. Bianca knew that they both probably were in serious danger, but that wouldn't make him calm down. She let him go and then picked up the phone to call administration and request a a leave of absence for Adrian. He certainly would not be fit to go to class today.

--

“Agent Inverno? Are you all right?”

“Fuuuuuuuck.”

Fiz felt like she would throw up as she awoke from the telepathic equivalent of a concussion. The dim lighting in the room seemed as bright as the sun, and her head throbbed. If she felt this bad, the two guards were probably dead. “Where is that motherfucking bastard Grinberg?” she groaned as she sat up.

“He's gone, ma'am. He broke out of the prison and is now at large. We don't have any idea where he is.”

“Fuck you all, you couldn't catch a mouse even if you had all the cheese in the world, never mind someone like him.” Berating the guards seemed to lift her spirits somewhat. She stood up, bracing herself against the walls in case she lost balance. “Did you dumb shits at least have the sense to contact the MGBA?”

“Yes, ma'am, they're on the case, and they've sent transportation to bring you back as soon as you woke up.”

“Good. What about those two guards? What happened to them?”

“They're dead, ma'am.”

“Shit. All right, I guess I'll be going now, since the not only is the cat out of the bag, he might be off the fucking planet by now.” She limped out of the room, making her way to the back parking lot where the MGBA staff car waited to pick her up. This is not good,. she thought. Not fucking good at all.

--

Adrian lay on the couch in his dorm, browsing a news site on his portable computer. Since he was allowed to stay home, he had changed out of the thin white scrubs he wore as his cadet's uniform and put on his warmest clothes, and wrapped a blanket around himself for good measure. Even indoors, it was cold on Orososh.

He decided to call his step-parents on Earth. They would understand. He picked up the phone and dialed their number.

“Hello?” said Philip.

“Hi, Dad,” said Adrian. “I just read something terrible in the newspaper.”

“What's that?”

“My birth father...the officials in the prison where he was sentenced to were going to give him his parole hearing, and he escaped.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, he killed several guards and broke out. No one knows where he is now.” Adrian hesitated for a moment. “Dad, I'm frightened. If he finds me, he'll kill me. I know it. He's probably looking for me now.”

“Be careful, Adrian. You can come back to Earth to stay with us if you feel that it's not safe to remain in the Mobian Federation. You know how much you mean to us.” Philip sighed. “I can't believe that monster was even given the chance for parole. How is college coming?”

“It's hell on earth. I basically work from when I wake up to when I go to bed, except on weekends and today, when they gave me leave of absence because I was very shaken up. It's also really, really cold on this planet. I'm indoors and under a blanket and I'm still cold.”

“Sorry to hear that. I don't remember the last time it was really, really cold down here. Since before you were born at any rate. You take care of yourself, OK?”

“All right, Dad. I love you.”

“I'll talk to you later, kiddo.”

“Bye, Dad.” Adrian put the phone back on the receiver. In one fell swoop his life had gotten a hell of a lot worse. He needed to find some way to get protection, and fast. When he was a civilian, he could at least leave home and hide. But now, he couldn't even do that.