The Suppressor by Erik Carter (best free novels .txt) 📗

He glanced to the far end of the house, where the two bedrooms were. Fresh drywall—unfinished and unpainted—framed the left doorway. The wall had just been put back up a couple days earlier, and there was still work to do. Beyond that unfinished wall, in the bedroom, was the object that was going to help him find Lukas Burton.

Silence had known his entire life that his mind space was chaotic, but it wasn’t until this last year that he understood it was a genuine issue. C.C. had pointed this out to him. And she’d given him several techniques with which to help manage the storm of his mind, things like mind mapping, meditation, breathing exercises, self-reflection.

Since her death, since he’d become a literal new man with a new face, a new voice, and a new name, he’d taken C.C.’s teachings even more seriously than he had when she was alive.

And when the Watchers had given him a $50,000 seed with which to begin his new life, he immediately spent half of that on an item that became an extension of C.C.’s teachings, an item that she would have never imagined he would use.

It was in the back of the house, one of the two bedrooms, right across the hall from where he slept.

And he was going to need it if he was going to stop Burton tonight.

Clutching the Heineken, he left the kitchen, crossed the living room, entered the short hallway, and turned into the bedroom on the left.

There it was.

It filled nearly the entire floorspace of the small room. For the technicians to assemble its large pieces, Silence had to hire contractors to tear down then reinstall the wall and doorway.

A massive, white, glossy pod, split in two, hinged in the back. Sleek and smooth. It looked like something from a sci-fi movie, an escape module, or a giant robotic clam that traveled back in time from the future. In its idle state, there was a gap between the two halves, from which came blue fiberoptic lighting, making the entire room glow.

It was an isolation tank. A floating pod.

Otherwise known as a sensory deprivation chamber.

Ten inches of water inside, kept at the skin-receptor-neutral temperature of 93.5 degrees and loaded with eight hundred pounds of Epsom salt, enough to make anyone float. When the door was shut and the light extinguished, things went pitch-black. The combination of the darkness, the floating, and the earplugs created a nearly stimulus-free environment.

Sensory deprivation.

It was the most nothingness one could possibly create for oneself.

And people used this carefully crafted environment to experience the transcendent, the ultimate form of quieting one’s mind.

It had cost him twenty-five grand. It had been here for a week. And he’d yet to use it.

The only other item in the room was a folding chair, leftover from the day the technicians had installed the pod. When they’d left, he’d sat in the chair to stare for a while at his bizarre investment.

Now, he sat in the chair again and ran the cold beer bottle between his palms, staring at the pod as he had the first day.

People would tell him he was crazy for spending half his startup cash on a quirky technique he’d never even tried.

Tanner would have said he was crazy.

His dad would have, too.

But C.C. wouldn’t have.

He twisted the cap off the beer bottle, took a long swig.

Good. Very good.

He’d drink this beer. Then he’d get in the pod.

And find his answer.

Another gulp, this one bringing cold pain to his neck. He rubbed it, remembered how Mrs. Enfield had chastised him for messing with it.

When she’d scolded him, he’d been thinking of the moment Burton had crushed his throat. At that point in time, he hadn’t yet been introduced to the Watchers. He hadn’t received his new name or face.

Nevertheless, that was the precise moment he became a new person.

He’d died then. Figuratively speaking.

And he would have died literally as well had it not been for her, the woman he’d known as Christie Mosley.

She saved his life.

Chapter Forty

The woman calling herself Christie Mosley fidgeted anxiously in her seat as she stared through her binoculars at the windows of Burton’s beach house—the sprawling living room area and the hideous events within.

She’d seen Burton—who she unfortunately knew intimately enough to recognize from a mere silhouette—punch Rowe in the neck, a devastating blow, one so hard that Rowe’s chair flew back.

“They punched him in the freaking throat!” she shouted at the cellular phone on the passenger seat. “The chair tipped over. He’s on his back, and ... oh, shit, he needs help.”

“Hold your position,” Falcon said. He’d lost every trace of his often misplaced whimsy. Now his voice was deadly serious, anger threatening to burst to the surface.

The figures converged on the overturned chair. Sharp, fast flashes of movement among the shadow figures.

“They’re kicking him…”

“Listen to me, you hold your damn position!”

“Oh, God, they’re kicking the shit out of him.” She paused. Gave it another moment of consideration. And then said. “I gotta go.”

“Don’t you—”

She pressed the END button, dropped the phone and binoculars on the passenger seat, grabbed her holstered Beretta 92FS, drew the weapon, and bolted out of her car.

Humid, slightly cool air. The sound of waves crashing beyond the house. A screaming seagull.

Across the street. Up the steps to the all-glass front door. She could see all the men clearly now in the living room beyond—Hodges, Gamble, Glover, and Burton converged in a circle, kicking at Rowe. Thin, blue nylon cords tied Rowe to the overturned chair.

If Rowe’s throat injury was as bad as it had appeared through the binoculars, he only had moments left.

She tried the door handle. Locked. Reached into her pocket. As Burton’s “girlfriend,” she’d been afforded a key. She unlocked the door, threw it open.

And started firing.

The men looked up in shock.

Burton managed three words before she squeezed off the first round.

“Christie, what are—”

Her first shot struck Gamble in the forehead. A plume of blood.

Slight reposition. Trigger.

Hodges’s shoulder