AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I didn’t think I would ever get to write to you again. This little notebook, this one-way communication is all I have of you. Probably all that I’ll ever have. But I couldn’t live without it. You can’t answer me, you’ll probably never even read this, but I need this contact with you so much, however frail and slim it is.
They sent me to meet a drug dealer. I had a bad feeling from him right at the start. Even more than I get from all the others. The people they send me to meet are the worst. They’re the lowest of the low. They’d sell their mothers or their daughters without a thought.
This one is different. He was quiet. It’s obvious he is seriously intelligent. Cultured, even. He has smooth manners and an easy smile.
As soon as I saw him, my scalp tightened. My head felt like it was solid bone, and it was cracking in the middle. I had to act like I felt completely normal. I knew my life depended on it.
Two things made me afraid. More deeply than I’ve been scared before. Drilled a grinding chill into my bones like a sharp, screaming toothache.
I got a sense from him of raw, cold evil. Like a dying echo in a deep canyon, it was slow and dark, and so far away I could almost make myself believe I imagined it. I wanted to believe that. I didn’t want to believe that kind of evil really existed. More than that, I didn’t want to believe I was in a small, hard room, face to face with it.
But I knew it. I felt it and I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t.
The other thing was what chilled me, like ice needles in my spine. The moment I felt that sense of him, he saw me feel it. He knew. I don’t know how, but he did.
As he looked at me, I felt him turn it over. I felt the stir in his heart when he saw that I’d seen him for what he was. His amber eyes glinted like a cat with its paw on the tail of a bird. He could let me go, or devour me. Because, to him, I didn’t matter.
He was making his mind up what would amuse him.
Shakily, I asked him what I’d been briefed to ask. Then I got out of there so fast I left all my breath behind me. Deep in my mind, I heard his silent laugh as I fumbled with the catch on the door to get out.
When I got out, my head crunched with pain. I was nauseous, like I would vomit my whole insides. It felt so bad, I wished I could and make it all be over.
I told the two suited drones who were waiting for me in the car around the block. They hardly looked up when they said, ‘Yeah?’ and grunted, before they went back to laughing over a porno on a tablet.
Normally in the de-brief, I wouldn’t tell the drones anything they didn’t have to know. I answered their questions, and I did what I was told, but I wouldn’t go outside the brief. I wouldn’t turn someone over for them. Not just because they were a drug dealer or a gang-banger or whatever. Like I said, all of them were low-life predators of one kind or another.
Those people were no worse than the DEA thugs themselves. The suits and drones. The underworld might not have had much in the way of finer feelings, but at least they had a pulse. Those drones are so cold inside, you could use them to keep beer in.
This meet, the place was no worse than the usual. It was a back room in a bar, a bar that was most likely a front for a drug den and a brothel. Places they send me, I’ve seen worse.
But the man, what I felt from him was so dark and hollow, it burned like ice. Like if you just touched him, he could suck your soul out through your pores.
I knew his drug networks, what the DEA were after him for, they were only the tip above the surface. A whole evil iceberg floated below and it was miles deep. And miles wide.
The chief drone was de-briefing me, perched, half sitting on the edge of a desk, with the short, stocky one I call his gimp grinning across the metal table from me. With the door behind him.
Wherever we were, whatever town or city we were in, they would always have a square room with a square metal table and I would have to sit, trapped behind the table, looking at the closed door, over the drones’ shoulders.
When I told them, “You need to bring him in,” they brushed it aside. All they wanted was their intel. Ticks for their boxes.
The gimp leaned across the table. I hated when he did that. Brought his rancid breath so close. Ugh.
He banged the table and said, “If I want a fairy story, I’ll read the New York Times. Just give us what we sent you for.”
I told them, “He’s up to something seriously bad. And it’s not just pimping and street drugs. I felt something.”
Before the gimp could say anything more, the chief laid a hand on his shoulder. His voice was quiet for once.
“Let her talk. We know there’s something there. And we know that she’s got… something. remember?” The gimp shot a look back at him. Then they heard me out.
I don’t know what they did about the man. But I know what they did to me.
I’ve descended so far since then. Reading back now, what I’ve seen in the weeks since then, I was so innocent I could weep. But I don’t think I have any tears left.
That meeting was the first real indication I had about the ‘talent.’ That’s what the boss drone called it.
So after that, they ran me through days, weeks of tests. Jabs and scans. Prods and pokes. Things where you sit in a bare room and look at someone through glass, or you sit behind them. Then they give you questions you have to answer about what the other person is thinking or what they’re feeling.
