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back over to Matalon. "Cindy, you have an interesting supply kit. What's
that A-Z-U-R?"
"Huhd 'bout it. Nevah had it. Supposed to be somethin' else, though."
I thought fast. "Well, we have to go out for a little while, and we can't take
you with us where we have to go and we can't leave you alone here after your
getaway stunt. That means ei-ther tying and gagging you for who knows how
long, or some more-enjoyable alternative. You want to try this stuff?"
"Huh? Oh Ah see. Send me off into cloud nine. Well, Ah'd rathah do that than
get tied and maybe you get picked up and Ah wind up dead heah."
"What's the dose?"
"Five ccs direct into a vein would do it for a couple houahs, Ah guess.
That's how it's sold."
I looked over at Wilma, who nodded, got out and fixed a syringe, and filled it
with ten ccs of the fluid. If Cynthia said five, it was best to be sure.
Besides, it wasn't like we were really doing it
, I thought sourly.
Everything we think we know is wrong, isn't it?
Cindy allowed herself to be led back to the bed again, and Wilma, who'd had
some little experience with needles helping out on the reservation, looked at
the arm, found a vein, and stabbed.
"
Ow!
That hunts!"
But aside from a tiny bruise, it all seemed to go in without killing her.
Now we waited. The drug really didn't take long to kick in; maybe a couple of
minutes before it was obvious, with that big, dumb smile and the slow, sexy
movements and self-caressing. Wilma bent down and ran a fingernail gently down
Cynthia's abdomen and you'd have thought the drugged woman had died and gone
to heaven. She also began lightly to sing, mostly nonsense stuff without even
a solid tune, and was clearly way out.
I lay down beside her and began to caress her myself and she responded
incredibly, and I tried to continue while clearing my mind as much as possible
of almost everything else and just getting very, very turned on.
Emotion, unthinking emotion, letting it flow until you caught the connection,
that was the key. If only it could work...
Now Wilma was on the other side of me, doing to me what I was doing to
Angel's happily drugged body, and it was dark, very dark, and very quiet, and
very still.
I have no way of piecing together what happened next; only that somehow
I felt myself thinking only of Angel, and suddenly becoming incredibly,
powerfully aggressive, or was it Cynthia doing it? It was so intense, so
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monstrously intense, that it crowded out all thought, all pain, all physical
senses save only the one at hand...
I was in Angel ... No, I was Angel! I could feel it, feel the body, feel every
sensation, feel the long hair whipping, feel the others.
There was a crackling like an electrical current crossing a gap, and I
suddenly felt a monstrous, body-sized orgasmic sensation that just went on and
on and on. The power
, the enormous power just surged within me, and by extension reached to my two
companions as well.
Nothing was real!
Nothing but ourselves and the pulsing and the power.
I slid off the others and off the bed and got to my feet. I was Angel, in
Angel's body, yet was I not also going to free Angel?
Cynthia was now in the bearded man's body, but subject to my commands, my
will. Wilma was still in Cynthia's body, but, again, there was a corner of her
that moved only through me.
We turned, and walked through the door, then through the very wall of the
apartment, out into the chill of the night, a chill we barely felt and totally
discounted.
In the distance we could see the pulsing blob of energy, and from it a finger,
like a direct wire, leading from it to me, and then from me to the other two.
I could see through their eyes, hear through their ears as well as my own, and
I could be all three of us at once.
In a flash that seemed instantaneous, the three of us were walking down a
two-lane road in the dark, the cold asphalt against our bare feet feeling
solid and cold but discountable. Ahead was a gatehouse, with two guards in it,
but there was nothing inside the guards, and to Angel's own sense,
uncontaminated by vision, they were mere formulas, ciphers, and very fragile.
I did not comprehend the language, something akin to a binary-level assembly
language, but I could read the equations and total them out, and produce an
inverse equation. One guard winked out, and then the other, leaving the
guardpost empty. I knew then that I could not be Angel, but I
did not dwell on who I might be.
I did the same to the energized gate, and it ceased to exist even as we
touched it and walked past.
There wasn't much more distance now to being within the energy bubble itself,
which seemed like something totally alive
.
The moment we entered, though, I sensed that our presence was known, and I
realized that, unlike the previous night, our bodies were not lying there back
in the apartment. We were actually here
, in as much of the flesh as we really possessed in this plane.
Four young Marines rushed from an area beyond the park-ing lot and toward
us, submachine guns at the ready. As soon as they saw us, the astonishment
showing in their faces, I put out a finger and projected
"Stop!
You do not want to do this! You do not even see us! Take over at the
guardhouse. Let no one in or out!"
They looked momentarily puzzled, then ran past us on the double and down the
road.
The entire mansion was lit up in the darkness, and I looked it over and sensed
perhaps a half-dozen true ones inside. I dispatched Wilma to the building to
ferret them out and, if possible, deal with them. None were the ones I sought,
but they might be trouble if not dealt with.
Cindy and I headed for the lab building in back. Not only were there armed
guards all over the place, there were codes, booby traps, and alarms, all
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keyed to that fancy electronic card system. We no longer believed that the
card system ex-isted, though, so it made no effort to stop us, and the young
Marine on the desk just inside smiled and nodded to us as we walked in and
went back to his crossword puzzle.
We stopped bothering to have doors open for us; that was too much belief.
Instead, we walked right through them as if they were not there, which, in
fact, they were not.
I dispatched Cindy, in my body, to go back and check out the medical and
administrative and prep areas on the one side. I was going for the lab.
It was strange that I was in many ways in three places at once, but it didn't
bother me a bit. I did not, in fact, think of it at all one way or the other.
It just was. I had two objectives, and those two were the only things our
minds allowed at that point. We were to find Angel and free her if she was not [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]