Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (best adventure books to read .TXT) 📕

The expression fell from Schumer’s face for a moment. “Wow,” he said, flatly. “You’re a lot farther behind than I thought you’d be.”

“What are you talking about? All you’ve told me is lies, how would I know anything else?”

Schumer leaned his head back and chuckled deeply, sickly. “This is quite a situation, then,” he said through a grin.

“So tell me, then,” I said. “What am I supposed to have figured out already?”

“The program change!” said Schumer. “I thought this was all because you’d found out.”

I just looked at him, my gun still pointed at his heart.

Schumer let out a low sigh, then adjusted his footing slightly as if his legs were cramping. “What I told you about the program was true, my intentions, how it was designed, that was all the truth. For a while, it was, anyway.”

“I’m listening,” I said when he stopped talking.

“Over a decade into the program, there was a regime change. New President, new bodies in the White House, new oversight committee, new superiors. The people who had approved my project, who were providing me with the funding under the table, they were all gone. Retired and redistributed. The people who came in after them didn’t want to hear word one about what I was doing, about the money already spent and how much we’d lose if we scrapped the project. They wanted nothing to do with it. It was a new world, a new all over again. The climate that made the project a possibility had changed. The money was gone.

“So, I was forced to find new avenues of financing. I was approached by someone who wanted to fund the project, so I took the shot without asking questions. Questions I should have asked.”

“What was the problem?” I asked.

“It turned out I wasn’t getting straight funding so much as a promotional sponsorship or an investment. The ones with the money had their own plans for how to use the program, beyond military recruiting.”

“What kind of plans? Political, or commercial?”

“Yes,” he said. That’s the answer my mother once gave when I asked if a tomato was a fruit or a vegetable.

“There was tremendous pressure on me to do what they wanted. They wanted results. They didn’t want duty and honor taught through hypnosis, they wanted to see how far we could take it. This was late in the game, though, you were already in your teens, only a few years from completion. Still, they wanted results or the money would disappear.”

“What did they want, then? You said you changed the program, what did you change it to?”

“You,” he said. “Exactly what you are now. A ruthless, unquestioning, mechanical delivery system of death. ‘What is the point of having an advanced training platform if you only teach what can be learned in a few months of training?’ they asked me. They wanted the product of years of service and training. They wanted Special Forces. They wanted kites, shadow men, wet workers, black ops. They wanted Navy Seals coming off of an assembly line.”

“And that’s what you gave them,” I said through grinding teeth.

“I had them change your training schedule, brought in some of our SF instructors to write a new ‘curriculum’ for you. Battlefield ethics and squad formations were out, knife fighting and improvised explosives were in.”

So that’s what it was. I wasn’t supposed to be the perfect soldier, I was supposed to be the perfect killer. It explained everything I’d been able to do, it explained the fleeting grasp I had on myself.

“Who are these people? Who’s paying the bills now?” I asked.

Schumer leveled his gaze at me. “People with more power than they should have. People who stand to gain from having people like you on staff.”

“You said this was all about that, the program change?”

He nodded. “In essence, when I changed your training program, I placed the roof on a house of cards. Something messed up your hypnotic compartmentalizing, and the training started leaking out, as you’ve discovered. Stress, fear, whatever it was, it shouldn’t have happened. It wouldn’t have if we’d stuck to the original program.”

“That stress was from my father being killed!” I barked.

“Well,” Schumer said, “house of cards.”

I pulled back the slide of the pistol with my left hand, chambering a round. “Explain please.”

“I didn’t think he’d like the idea of the new specialty we were preparing you for, so I tried to keep it from him. He had, after all, agreed to have you taught about discipline and all that ‘The few, the proud, the Marines.’ I tried to keep him in the dark about your new training regimen. When he found out, he didn’t take it very well.”

“It was illegal, unethical. He tried to report it to the FBI.”

“We couldn’t have that,” Schumer said in a disgustingly coy tone.

“I tried to talk him out of it. Told him we could undo the training once it was proven to work, told him it was under control, even offered him more money since there was a newfound surplus of it. He wouldn’t take.”

“So you killed him.”

“Not myself, no.”

“Just because he was going to shed light on your secret project?”

“As I said, there was tremendous pressure to keep it running. I might give you a moment to process that but I know it would be useless, you were taught to suppress your emotions. Box them up, drive yourself crazy later, just get the job done now. You can’t even make yourself care now, can you? Knowing why your father died. A normal person would care. A normal person would have shot me by now.”

My mind did seem rather blank. I knew Schumer was responsible for my father’s death, but hearing him admit to it should have affected me somehow_. _More than this.

“Shut up—” I started.

“As for your other question,” he began before I could finish. “As for when exactly the training was conducted, I’m not entirely sure. That was all Nathan’s job, I figured you would have asked him that before you killed him.”

“What are you talking about, you had him killed!”

“Is that how you’re painting it for the police? If you can pull it off, I guess.”

What was he talking about? I killed Comstock? No, I didn’t. I would have remembered that. Like how I’d remember being trained as a killer in the first place. Could he be right? Could I be doing things still without realizing?

“That box,” I said, glancing for a moment behind me and toward the parking area. “What was that?”

Schumer chuckled again, “That? Files. Everything that’s left of the program. I shut it down, Chris. It’s over. I figured that since you’ve started shooting FBI agents now, there would be no way to keep the heat away from this thing anymore. I destroyed most of it tonight, I thought I’d bring the rest home for one last hurrah, you know?”

More nonsense, he’s still trying to kick me off balance. I called Amy’s name and she appeared from the stairwell behind me.

“Over by the car there’s a cardboard box, bring it here,” I said, keeping my eye on Schumer who seemed very surprised to see Amy.

When the sound of her footprints vanished out of range, Schumer stopped following her with his eyes and looked back to me.

“Either she’s gone rogue or you’re one hell of an idiot,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

Schumer’s smile returned. “Do you think Nathan Comstock was our only means of keeping an eye on you? Hah, how old did she say she is? I’ve heard her go as low as sixteen.”

Shaking my head slowly, I said, “What are you talking about?”

“Please,” he said. “When did she first start talking to you? How do you think we always knew where you were? To be honest, I didn’t think she’d last this long without you finding out.”

“No,” I muttered, “What are you—” and I trailed off in thought. Amy first showed up in my life right after my dad died and she took an unusual interest.

She was there in Lorton, when Dingan somehow tracked me down in a city nearly an hour away from home. It was her plan to go there in the first place. She was the only person who knew I was going to Austria, and she was the only person who knew when I was supposed to return, which was exactly when the guys showed up at my house, which she was there for. She was the only one who knew I was on my way to Comstock’s house, where I showed up just after he’d been killed. She was surprisingly good at deceiving people over the phone or in person, and she was the only justification I’d had that my fourth hour study hall couldn’t have been when I was being hypnotized.

God. No, wait. I’d met her father, though he was involved with the Marines as well. I’d remembered Amy from long before she actually started talking to me, though. Right, that.

“She was around a long time before my dad was killed, though,” I said, “I remember her.”

Schumer’s face became oddly sympathetic. “You remember her, or you…” he tapped his forehead twice, “remember her?”

My hand wavered a bit. It could have been a distraction, but it made so much sense. As an administrator, Comstock could have fudged the paperwork to transfer her into school to watch me or make sure I did the right things or didn’t figure out the wrong things. I couldn’t remember her ever being too scared whenever I, or “we” were in danger.

Amy walked back into the corridor, carrying the cardboard box with both hands. I turned sharply to look at her, then back at Schumer.

“Here,” she said. “It’s full of file folders.”

“I—” my voice stuttered, “What’s in the folders?”

She sat the box down on the floor and knelt beside it, Schumer watched with a satisfied smirk. “Looks like…” Amy started, “orders, more orders, logs, charts. Some of the folders have names and words on the tabs some don’t. Here’s one with your name on it.”

“Nothing in there links me to your father,” Schumer said to me.

“Oh, I’m not planning on bringing this to trial,” I said.

“Right. You just want to shoot me,” he said, crossing his arms.

He stood there, saying nothing for half a minute, as if waiting for something. “For killing your father,” he said, as if a prompt.

If he was banking that I couldn’t summon the rage, he was wrong. His distractions had worked well enough, I’d lost the train of thought I’d been riding earlier, but the fact still remained that Schumer killed my father, who had done nothing wrong. Who tried to do the right thing. Who knew he might die, and wanted to make sure that if he did die that I wouldn’t be put out.

I’d wanted to kill Schumer for days now.

This was my chance.

I straightened my right arm, centering the reticule in the middle of Schumer’s chest. I told my heart to slow down, my breath to steady, the thoughts and feelings in my mind to silence. I tightened my grip on the pistol. I felt Amy’s presence just a few feet behind me. I put my finger on the trigger, and told my hand to squeeze.

Nothing happened. I tried to pull the trigger again, nothing. I couldn’t. My hand wouldn’t move. Then, the more I thought about it, the sillier the idea of killing that man had seemed. He was so friendly.

“What is it?” Amy asked.

Schumer smiled, then broke out into a laugh.