Back at the window, I debated whether it would be more impactful to shift mouse boy away to L2 first or the thugs. The first would shock mouse boy, the second would terrify him and then shock him. I chose to terrify him. It also had the added bonus of not having to worry about what the thugs might do while I was taking care of mouse boy in L2.
Mouse boy, whom I decided to dub Mickey for obvious reasons, was still glued to the boob-tube as his fellow kidnappers disappeared. I wondered what he was watching with such interest that he could fail to notice that his two comrades weren’t there anymore. Perhaps it was a rerun of Baywatch. Uncle Paul had sure seemed captivated by that show. While I waited for him to notice that he was all alone, I shifted the white van that the kidnappers had come in to L2. If Mickey decided to make a break for it, I didn’t want to have to chase him down.
With a few unexpected minutes to think about my strategy, I thought of one more thing that I could do to tip the scales in my favor, especially now that I was trying to get his attention. With as much subtlety as I could muster, I carefully wrapped Mickey in an inactive field. He really was clueless. He just continued watching his show, oblivious to everything. I considered activating the field and shifting him to one of the layers, but in the end decided to let my original plan play out.
A commercial break finally brought him out of his stupor and he blearily looked around. Confusion marred his features as he saw that he was alone and he called out for his companions. When no one answered his call, he got up and started looking for them. He searched the whole house, not a very long task, and ended up in front of the room where the girl had been kept. He slowly opened the door, perhaps expecting the men to be in their amusing themselves with the girl, and froze when he found that it was empty.
“No, no, no, no, no…” Mickey began to panic and he ran for the front door. I realized that with the van gone, he’d assume that they left him. That conclusion wasn’t what I was trying to achieve, so I shifted the van back before he could get to the door. I was going to disable the car before realizing that one of the thugs had been driving and still had the key in his pocket in L2.
Mickey opened the front door and saw the van. Instead of the terror I’d expected, he sunk to the floor, knees bent to meet his chest, and covered his face as he started to cry. What. The. Hell? I had no clue what was going on. My mind and body were keyed up, having come here expecting an epic fight with someone who could shift between planes of existence. I had pictured a cat and mouse game of shifting between layers and hurling fields, as each of us tried to get the upper hand and find a way to kill the other. This wasn’t at all what I’d expected. This was just…pathetic. Mickey was already beaten and I hadn’t done anything to him yet. I could kill him right now with a thought.
The crying tapered off and Mickey spoke into empty air. “I know you’re out there. Watching. They know about you. I’ve heard them talking and they want to catch you and control you. They know your weaknesses.” That didn’t sound good. Who is ‘they’? What weaknesses? Was Mickey implying that he was being controlled? How?
“Please. Whoever you are, I need your help. You’ve taken the girl and they’re going to blame me for it. They’re going to think that I’ve betrayed them and they’re going to put my sister to work in the house. She’s fifteen. She won’t survive. She’ll die, just like all the others.” Mickey lost control again and tears made their way down his face again. Was I really feeling sorry for this guy? A few hours ago he’d kidnapped a little girl and I was feeling pity for him? Her parents were probably going out of their minds with worry and this guy was the reason.
That thought reminded me that I needed to let Kevin know that the girl was safe. I quickly typed out a text and shifted the phone to reality for it to send. “Roger sent me a message saying that the girl is safe and unharmed. He said he’d drop her off later.” Once I knew more about Mickey’s sister, I’d see about calling him with more details.
I walked outside and reappeared in reality twenty feet from Mickey. His body jerked in surprise and he tried to scramble back, only his back was already against the door frame and there was nowhere to go. Dressed all in black with a hood covering my head and a mask over my face, I must have seemed terrifying to him as I blinked into existence. I shifted away and then reappeared again. This time, I was ten feet away from him. He visibly paled and I knew that I had his full attention.
“Tell me who ‘they’ are.” Roger’s voice didn’t boom out the mask, but it was loud in secluded forest area.
Mickey took a moment to get hold of himself before answering. “I don’t know the people in charge. I’m too low down. The guys that were here before, Randy and Jerry, get their instructions and we have to follow them. The organization is the Master Typhon Collective and they’re based out in Fayetteville. Everyone thinks they’re some sort of hippy farming commune that follows the ways of an ancient dragon god. That’s just a front. They’re traffickers. They kidnap people and force them into prostitution or use them for physical labor.”
This was the third group that Len had sold women to. MTC. Despite my excitement at finally knowing what those letters stood for, I kept my voice even and continued asking my questions. “How did you start working for them?”
“My parents were killed in a car accident when I was seventeen. My sister, Shari was only ten at the time. We don’t have any family that could have taken us in and protective services wanted to put us in foster care and split us up. Before they could do that, I took Shari and we ran away. We were surviving on the streets for six months before Randy and his gang found us. When the came to grab us, I tried to protect Shari, but everything became grey and they went right through me. It only lasted a few seconds and when it ended, Randy had Shari and three guys tackled me and tied me up. Since then, Randy’s been using the threat of hurting my sister to keep me working for them. They keep her confined in the basement of their compound. I can’t phase into the room, since it’s underground and even if I could get in, there’s no way for me to get her out. They let me spend an hour talking to her every day. I’m on the main level and we talk through a trapdoor they build in the floor to lower food down to her. If I don’t agree to do what they say, they’ll send her to a house at the edge of their property where women are forced to be sex slaves. I can’t let that happen to her.”
“How long have you been kidnapping people for them?”
“Two years. Before that they had me stealing things for them while I learned to control my phasing. I still can’t understand why sometimes I can phase through doors and sometimes I can’t.”
Wow. He really didn’t understand his abilities at all. He could get into R1 and R2, but he still had no control over which one he ended up in. Given his description of the room they kept his sister in, he’d never made it to R3. I wondered what would happen if I shifted him to one of the layers. It had taken him five years to get to his low level of understanding and control. If I stranded him in L1, he’d die of thirst before he could figure out how to get back.
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Mickey continued, “Once I managed to stay in phase for a whole minute, Randy’s bosses decided that it was enough time to slip into a house and kidnap someone. They use me as a threat to make powerful people do what they want. Most of these powerful people end up agreeing after I drop off an envelope in a supposedly secure area that no one should have been able to get into. The key is that the Typhon people don’t ask for too much and it’s easier for their victims to follow their few instructions than to fight them. I’ve only had to kidnap four kids so far. Five with this little girl. Each time, Randy, Jerry and I hold onto the kid for a few days and then I bring them back to their rooms. Their parents always fall in line or step down after that. The whole thing is kept very quiet and the FBI doesn’t have to get involved.”
I kept Mickey talking, telling me everything he knew about MTC’s operations. Mickey was able to give me their address in Fayetteville, the layout of their compound and a description of what was in each building. He also gave me the addresses of some of MTC’s businesses that weren’t associated with MTC at all. When I squeezed him for the details of his kidnapping, Mickey pulled out his phone and listed off not only the addresses of the places where he kidnapped children, but also the addresses where he dropped off envelopes. Kevin could use the information to reassure those politicians that the threat had been dealt with.
“What did you mean when you said they know about me? What weaknesses do they know about?”
“They know that someone with the same abilities as me took down their operations in Wilmington and in Raleigh. In Wilmington you killed the guards in the basement cells without opening the steel reinforced door. The police needed thirty minutes to get that door open. You also crippled the people there without being seen. In Raleigh, you tied up all the guards and the president and none of them saw you. They know that you’re out there hunting for them. They’re scared of you and they either want you dead or working for them.
Once they realized they were dealing with someone like me, their security chief, Andrew Frein, came to ask me all sorts of questions. He spent hours interrogating me, finding out what I could and couldn’t do. They know that our abilities aren’t useful underground, if they can somehow block off the entrances and exits and trap us there. Andrew also figured out that our ability is useless in the air. Even if we used our abilities and phased through a plane, we’d still fall to our deaths.”
Mickey kept talking about ‘our abilities’, as if I was merely a slightly stronger version of himself. I didn’t disabuse him of that notion. If the bad guys thought that all I could do was disappear and move through walls, then so much the better for me. Being below ground did present some problems in using by abilities, like when I couldn’t save the miners myself because the rock existed in all the layers, but short of being trapped in a mine, I had a few ways to get by just fine underground. As for airplanes and helicopters, I had my trusty backpack parachute on, in L3, anytime that I left the ground.
One bright spot in Mickey’s answers was that it didn’t seem that the leaders of MTC had found the Roger name yet from the FBI files or the police files. That was really good news. On the other hand, it was possible that they did know, yet hadn’t seen the need to tell Mickey about it. I know that I was keeping things from him.
While these thoughts were going through my mind, Mickey gave me a pleading look and asked again, “Will you help free my sister? I don’t care what you do to me, as long as you get her away from them.”
I’d already decided to save his sister and any other victims at the MTC ranch. The only thing holding me back now was deciding what I should do with Mickey. Dad had pretty much given me the go-ahead to kill him based on his potential level of danger. Now that I’d gotten to know him, I felt that the only way he’d be a danger to anyone was if someone evil, like the people at MTC, had a hold over him. I didn’t think that he deserved to die. Whereas I’d been lucky enough to discover my powers without anyone noticing, his powers had effectively outed him in front of a human trafficking ring. He never had a chance.
Despite my feelings of pity for Mickey, I couldn’t let him continue to be a threat, even a weak one. When I’d made plans to deal with the possibility that Ben would be born with a field, I’d explored the ideas of field detection, suppression and elimination. For Mickey, I needed to see if my ideas for field elimination would work. I really hoped they did, because he seemed like a decent fellow and I’d hate to kill him.
“It’s a deal. I’ll free your sister and bring her to you and in exchange you need to do something for me.”
“Anything!” Relief flooded his features and I though he’d start crying again. Thankfully, he took a deep breath and got control of himself.
“Ok. I need you to hold still for a minute.” I walked up to him and crouched down, placing my gloved hand on his shoulder. To his credit, he didn’t flinch, but it was a close thing. I could see his discomfort with my being so close to him.
As soon as my hand touched his shoulder, I began trying to hack into his base field. I’d never been able to remove mine, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t remove his. First, I had to connect our fields. That in itself was something new, as I’d only ever connected fields that I controlled. Connecting to something that you can’t feel is very challenging and I ended up having to use brute force and guesswork. Knowing how my base field hugged my skin, I jammed a needle-fine protrusion of my field down into his shoulder and then brought it back like a sewing needle. This created a loop that crossed through his field at two points. Like I’d done when I’d first gone into L1 and gotten stuck, I sent power into one point where our fields crossed while simultaneously pulling power out of the other point. Immediately, his field started to change frequency and he shifted to L1. Knowing what as happening, I stayed with him and saw as his eyes took in the change to his reality.
With my power flowing through his field, I could sense it now and I used it to shift us both back to reality. Within a few more seconds, I was sending out pulse-scans using his field and sending out other fields from his to surround the van and some trees. As I prepared for the final step, I marveled that Mickey couldn’t feel any of this happening.
Taking a deep breath and praying that this would work, I stopped feeding power into one end of the field, yet I continued pulling power from the other end. I felt his base field weaken significantly and it felt thinner in my mind. I kept pulling power and suddenly realized that Mickey was passing out. He may not have been able to feel the changes to his field, but the power draw was draining him of his energy. If I kept up drawing the power from his field, he’d eventually die. As that wasn’t my goal, I stopped drawing the power out of his field and switched to drawing the field itself away from his, just as I would remove a field from anything else.
The field held in place and I pulled harder, drawing it to me with more and more power. Even though the field was insubstantial, I almost overbalanced when I felt it start to give. Slowly, very slowly, his field retracted from his body and was absorbed by my field. It seemed to take forever until every last bit of it was gone from him and he was unconscious when it was done. I scanned to see if he was ok and felt relief when I saw that he was only in an exhausted sleep.
I shifted us both to L2 and sat down heavily on the ground. I felt relieved and confused and horrible and elated, all at the same time. I’d found a way to keep Mickey alive, but I’d had to rip his powers out of him to do it. I’d read many stories of superheroes losing their powers or willingly giving them up for a normal life and they always bothered me. I couldn’t understand how a person could live an ordinary life after having lived with the extraordinary. It this case, I’d stolen that life from Mickey and it seemed an evil thing to have done to him. Yes, he was alive. I just didn’t think he’d thank me for it when he woke up.