CHAPTER 4
Sylvester Stiles, peeked around the corner of the New York building. Hopping from foot to foot, he looked around nervously, trying to see where his friend had gone. “Blast you, Nel,” he muttered. “Where are you?” Slinging his backpack off his tall, lanky frame, he knelt down in the shadows of an alley and began rummaging through the pack. He found the long knife finally at the bottom and stuffed the sheathed blade in the waistband at the small of his back. He paused to stare at the block-looking device that would soon shred dozens of people into barely recognizable blobs of gore.
Swallowing, he adverted his eyes.
Zipping up the pack, he stood back up and peeked around the corner again. Nel, a match in size and weight to the tall Stiles, was striding through the protestors towards his hiding spot. “Finally,” he hissed, exasperated. He glanced at the soldiers milling around the crowd edge. It wouldn’t take much to create enough chaos in that crowd.
Nel stepped up, her long black hair dangling around her face, casting much of her features in shadows.
“’Bout time,” Sylvester complained. “What took you so long?”
“Quit yer whining, Sty,” she shot back. “Everything is in place. You know what to do?”
“Of course I do! I set the bomb off in the middle of the plaza.”
“Right. Make sure to blame it on the soldiers.”
“I know that,” he hissed back.
“Look, kid—”
“I’m not a kid!”
“You’re nineteen, for crying out loud!”
“That’s not a kid,” he mumbled sullenly.
“Fine. Whatever. Just don’t get caught. Walk into the crowd, set the bomb under the bench there and hit the timer. You’ve got—”
“Fifteen seconds to get clear. Yeah, I know.”
“Then start yelling that you saw one of the soldiers throw a grenade.”
“I got it!”
Nel fell silent. The older woman regarded the youth silently for a time. At length she said, “In the middle of all that chaos, you might have the opportunity to stab someone without anyone noticing. Do it if you can. The more chaos there is the better.”
“And then I can meet Borje?”
“Then you get to meet Borje.”
Sylvester sniffed. “For a leader of a renegade anarchist group, he sure doesn’t like to be seen much.”
“Many people are trying to kill him, Sty. Stop being an idiot.” She turned away from him before he could protest and studied the crowd. “There,” she said, pointing. “The soldiers aren’t congregated in that area as strongly. Infiltrate there, okay?”
“Got it.”
“Go then.”
Without another word, Stiles slipped out from the corner of the building and began walking in a measured pace towards the crowd of protesters. Their chants rang hollowly in his ears. Everyone wanted something from someone, but the only real power was the power to take it. He didn’t want anyone telling him what to do—ever. That’s why he had joined Borje’s anarchist group. They called themselves the Freedom From Law or the FFL. He liked the concept of doing what he pleased, when he pleased without anyone looking over his shoulder. As far as he was concerned, things needed to revert back to a time without governments, without law. He yearned for that time where the only law was the one you made for yourself. Once he set off the bomb, he will have earned Borje’s trust and finally get to meet the man that had become a legend in New York over the last year. This, he knew, was his final test.
Sylvester made it to the fringe of the crowd and paused there, looking for an easy route to the center where the protests were the loudest. He didn’t know or understand what this group was trying to accomplish, and he didn’t care. They just wanted another form of government, another form of slavery. They deserved to die. All of them. He smiled grimly and edged forward…
Only to be tackled by a heavily armored trooper.
He fell with jarring impact. He felt a rib jab him painfully, and for an instant, he froze, terror gripping his mind at what had just happened. Then he panicked. Screeching like a banshee, he flailed desperately about, trying to get to his bag and set off the bomb. Only one thought stabbed into his terrified mind. Borje will kill me for failing! When he couldn’t reach his backpack, he pulled out his knife only to have it slapped painfully away.
A strong hand reached down past the soldier and grabbed his chin, yanking his head up painfully. He let out a yelp and a curse, trying to bite the hand until a punch to his chin made his head reel and his vision to dim.
“Enough, blast you!” a voice yelled.
The weight across his body lifted, and Sty felt someone haul him to his feet. He blinked, trying to steady the wobbling individual standing before him. Maybe I’m wobbling. He blinked again.
Before him stood a tall, muscular man in his late thirties. He could easily have been the model for some recruitment poster. Short cropped, black hair barely stirred in the breeze, and the chiseled features of the man’s face looked hard enough to resist nails. Sty couldn’t see the man’s eyes through the dark sunglasses, but he didn’t need to see them to know that they bored into him like a drill. The only unusual thing about the man was his dress. Dressed in casual jeans and an un-tucked t-shirt, he certainly didn’t strike Sty as military—until you studied the man’s stance. He looked like a coiled viper just itching to spring and deliver a merciless death. Sty swallowed hard and tried to take a step back.
“Don’t bother,” the tall man snapped. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Sty bit his lower lip, trying to muster up some courage. “I ain’t done nothing wrong,” he muttered as defiantly as he could.
“No?” The man held up Sty’s backpack. “True. You haven’t done anything wrong, but our new little toy told us you were going to.” He shook the bag, letting the flap fall open to reveal the bomb inside. “And it appears as if the Ts2 was right.”
“What?” Sty asked, bemused.
The man leaned forward. “Congratulations, son. You have the distinct honor of being the first victim—er, capture—of the new Ts2 scanner. You walked through the scanner’s divination field and it read your thoughts.”
Sty paled. “It did what?”
“It determined that you were planning on doing something harmful. So Billy here—” he waved his hand at the armored trooper “—ran you down. And there you stand with a bomb in your backpack.”
“That’s not mine!” Sty protested. “Someone is setting me up! I don’t know anything about it!” Sty was scared that this machine or whatever it was that had read his mind had somehow determined everything he knew.
The tall man’s lips thinned into a straight line. “Son, you don’t seem to understand. The scanner has already pronounced your guilt. There will be no trial. The verdict has already been passed. You’re guilty.”
Sty felt as if his entire world had just crashed in around him. He swallowed hard. “What are you going to do with me?”
“You’ve already been sentenced to die,” the man said not unkindly. “But there is hope. There is a way out.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are the first hunter, son. You will be dropped on an island, and if you can complete the objective given to you, you will live. Otherwise you will die.”
Lips trembling, Sty looked up at the taller man. “Who are you?”
“John Dale.” He paused. “The only thing between you and death son. You best behave.”
Sty nodded. For whatever reason, this John terrified him on levels he never thought possible. Death, or the threat of death, changes a lot of a person’s opinions it seemed.
“Take him away,” John ordered.
Two of the soldiers grabbed his arms and began dragging him away.
John watched them go and felt a sense of emptiness in his heart. The young man certainly intended to become a mass murderer, true, and the machine had caught him fairly, true. But he couldn’t help wondering if he wasn’t witnessing the
death of free will. When do you draw the line? At what point does what you think become a crime? Do we force everyone to think a certain way? What would then become of mankind?
John didn’t like this assignment. He hated it. He felt bad for the sorry kid, knowing that more malicious minds than his had twisted him into this monster. We should be going after that guy, he thought sourly, not after kids who were suckered into doing the dirty works of someone else.
Another soldier appeared at John’s side. “Your plane is ready, sir.”
John sighed. “Where to now?”
“Texas.”
“Ah yes, site two of this little exercise into plundering the human brain.”
“As you say,” the emotionless soldier responded.
John sighed again—this time, over the world’s apparent loss of a sense of humor.