The security guard paced back and forth in front of the entrance to the vet’s office. Ruddy was familiar with this part of town. There were no burned out cars, everything was clean and repaired, and almost every building had some sort of security. These “islands of civilization,” as his father called them, were the only places Ruddy was allowed out of the car. He’d seen more of the world between the “islands” in the last day than he had since the Event.

  “I don’t see any customers,” Ruddy said.

  “Not many people can afford to take care of pets anymore,” Teri said.

  “My mom has two miniature dobermans,” Ruddy said. “They don’t like me very much.”

  Teri smiled. “To them, you’re just competition for her affection.” She nodded to the security guard. “He’ll leave when the owner does. Dr. Aiken. He’s the only one inside, and he’s getting ready to go.” She cocked her head. “He’s got a very disciplined mind.”

  Ruddy pointed at the door. “Is that camera going to be a problem?”

  “It’s broken. Dr. Aiken keeps meaning to get it fixed, but he’s a busy guy.”

  “Oh, okay,” he said. “No problem, then. Just let me know what I need to get.”

  “It’ll be easier if I go in with you.”

  “Nah. You stay here and rest. What should I look for?”

  “Cephalexin is probably our best bet, although Ciprofloxacin would work. Also Doxycycline and Trimethoprim-Sulfamethoxazole.”

  “Sepho-what?” Ruddy imagined one of the adults in Peanuts saying, “Wah wah wah wah wah.” Teri laughed and pain shot through her side.

  Ruddy blushed. “It’s not funny,” he said. “That’s a lot to remember.”

  “I didn’t mean to laugh at you.” She suppressed a sigh. He was so sensitive.

  “Can’t you put it in my head? Like in the Matrix?”

  “Yes, but I can also tell you don’t want me to.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. That would be pretty weird.”

  “I’m going to have to go in with you,” she said. “You’ll have to carry me.”

  Dr. Aiken pressed the door open with his back and emerged with a cat in a carrier in one hand and his keys in the other.

  “Don’t worry, Batgirl, we’ll be home soon,” he said.

  Teri made him think he was locking the door behind him. They waited until he’d started his SUV and pulled away before they got out of the car.

  The pain was growing worse, but Teri kept it off her face as Ruddy picked her up. They slipped in and entered the alarm code.

  Ruddy carried her down the dim hallway over a faded but clean linoleum floor. They passed a door with a restroom sign.

  “Oh, thank god,” Ruddy said. “I need to pee so bad. Can I …?”

  “Just put me down in that chair,” she said.

  Teri leaned back in the chair and made an effort to close her mind so she wouldn’t intrude on Ruddy’s privacy. “Try to be quick,” she said. “I … eeep!” She squealed as the outside door opened behind her.

  Damn. She opened her mind back up and felt Dr. Aiken’s panic. He’d forgotten Batgirl’s medication. He couldn’t see Teri, but he’d already noticed the door was unlocked. He stared down the hallway.

  Ruddy stormed out of the bathroom. “What’s wrong?” The door smacked into Dr. Aiken’s forehead. He staggered back.

  Well, this is getting complicated, Teri thought.

  “Oh!” Ruddy said. “Oh, shit … I …”

  “Stay calm,” Teri said. “I can handle this.”

  “Who’s there?” Dr. Aiken said. “What do you want?”

  Teri scanned his mind and found something interesting.

  “He’ll help us,” she said.

  “Are you gonna take over his brain?”

  “Of course not.” She let herself appear to Dr. Aiken, but with her face altered. She made Ruddy look like a lanky, pimple-faced kid.

  “Dr. Aiken,” she said. “We need your help.”

  Dr. Aiken hesitated, then ran for the door. Ruddy chased him.

  “Ruddy! Don’t hurt him!” Teri said.

  Dr. Aiken tried to get the door open, but Ruddy grappled him.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I’m not going to hurt him!” Ruddy said.

  Dr. Aiken stomped Ruddy’s foot.

  “Ow! Stop it!” Ruddy shoved Dr. Aiken against the wall and pulled his arms behind him.

  Ruddy, stop. Teri spoke in his mind. I’ll handle this.

  Ruddy froze. You can talk to me in my head?

  Obviously. Now calm down and let him go.

  Ruddy let go of the vet, but stayed between him and the door, with his arms folded over his chest. Dr. Aiken was breathing hard, but he stayed put.

  “Take whatever you want,” Dr. Aiken said. “I won’t try to stop you.”

  "Dr. Aiken, please,” Teri said. “We’re not here to rob you. Well, I guess technically we are here to rob you—but only because I can’t go to the hospital.”

  Dr. Aiken shook his head. “Look, if you’re in some kind of trouble, the best thing to do is turn yourself in. You’re only making it worse on yourself.”

  “If you believed that, you would’ve turned in your grandson Peter a long time ago.”

  Dr. Aiken gasped. “How did you …”

  “Because we’re afflicted, like him. We’re not bad people, we’re just in trouble. They hunt us like animals. The way they treat us isn’t right, and you know it, or you wouldn’t be hiding Peter.”

  Dr. Aiken studied them.

  “We didn’t expect anyone to be here,” Teri said. “We’ll grab what we need and leave."

  Dr. Aiken sighed. "You’re not going anywhere until I get a look at you. I can smell the abscess from here.” He motioned toward another door. Teri tried to stand and winced.

  Can you carry me into the exam room? she said to Ruddy.

  Ruddy set Teri down onto the stainless steel table. The exam room smelled like wet dog and antiseptic.

  “What happened to you?” Dr. Aiken said.

  Her medical charts from the hospital shimmered into view in the air in front of him, along with three dimensional x-rays of her injuries.

  Ruddy stared. “Wow! You can X-ray yourself?”

  “No. I memorized my medical charts before I escaped. The agents didn’t think I could understand them.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Ruddy said. “Who would?”

  Dr. Aiken studied the charts. “Help me lay her on her back.”

  Stars swam in her eyes as they turned her. Everything went black.

  “Is she okay?” Ruddy asked.

  “She passed out,” Dr. Aiken said. “Probably from the pain. I’ll give her a local anesthetic.”

  Ruddy shifted his weight. “Thanks for helping us. I … I couldn’t think of anything else to do but bring her here.”

  “You did the right thing. Your girlfriend wouldn’t have made it much longer without medical attention.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. Just a friend.”

  Dr. Aiken nodded. “Well, whoever she is, you got her here just in time. I’m surprised she was still conscious.”

  Teri’s bandages were glued to the wound underneath with dried blood and fluid. “Jesus Christ!” Ruddy said.

  “She should be in the hospital,” Aiken said.

  “I was.” Teri opened her eyes. “DSSA usually uses mentalists to force afflicted to do what they want. But they couldn’t control me, so they used my condition as leverage while they figured out if I could be manipulated. I managed to escape before they could figure out a way to reprogram me.”

  Dr. Aiken frowned. He grabbed a squirt bottle of blue fluid labeled “chlorhexidine” and poured it over Teri’s side to loosen the dried blood as he peeled off the bandages covering her wound.

  Ruddy gasped. The wound was bad, but that wasn’t all. Teri’s body was covered in scars.

  “My god, Teri,” Ruddy said. “What happened to you?"

  Teri stared at the wall. “It’s not important.”

  After a moment, Dr. Aiken broke the silence. “I’ve seen this sort of thing before. On abused animals.”

  “Just tend to the wound,” Teri said. “Please.”

  Dr. Aiken went to work with Ruddy hovering behind him. “It’s bad, but I’ve seen worse. Pets tear up their stitches every time something exciting happens. I’ll need to do a good bit of repair. I’d like to put you under anesthesia, but I know your pit bull here isn’t going to let me and I don’t want to call in my anesthesiologist, so we’ll stick with the local. I don’t want you ripping these stitches out, so nothing strenuous. No walking around for at least four or five days, and it needs to be a month before you lift anything heavy.”

  He turned to Ruddy. “You. I know you’re going to follow my post-op care instructions to the letter. Am I right?”

  Ruddy nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  It took about an hour for Dr. Aiken to finish treating the wound. He showed Ruddy how to change the dressings and gave him a plastic bag full of medicines and bandages. He found Teri some scrubs to wear in place of her bloody clothing.

  “We can pay you,” Teri said.

  “Pay me for what?” Dr. Aiken said. “No one was here tonight.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He turned to Ruddy. “Possum Kingdom State Park. Ever heard of it?”

  Ruddy shook his head.

  “It’s close to the city, but out of the way. I used to take my family there, back before the Event. I don’t know if it’s still open, but they used to have furnished cabins. It would be a good place to lay low and recover.”

  “Thanks for everything,” Ruddy said. He stuck out his hand. “Look, I’m sorry about grabbing you like that. I was only trying to …”

  Dr. Aiken shook his hand. “I do charity cases for animals in trouble sometimes. In the morning, my office manager will chew me out for it when she sees I spent my whole evening working on a Great Dane and didn’t even charge for the cost of supplies. But she’ll get over it. My wife, however, is going to kill me for not calling to say I’d be late.”

  “What a nice guy,” Ruddy said, as he drove them west on I-30 out of the city.

  “Yeah, two in one day. The odds are astronomical.”

  “Are people really that bad?” Ruddy said.

  “Most don’t go out of their way to be bad, but they don’t really have a problem with it if it happens to be convenient. Just because someone isn’t screwing you over right now doesn’t mean they won’t.”

  “That’s kind of cynical.”

  “Cynicism implies I’m making assumptions. I can actually see what people are like.”

  “God, that’s depressing,” Ruddy said.

  Teri didn’t respond.

  “So,” Ruddy said. “You were with those agents. Does that mean you know what they were thinking?”

  Teri nodded.

  “So you know what they would do to me if I turned myself in?”

  “Those agents weren’t thinking about you. But the one who grabbed you was afflicted—and he’d been brainwashed. Whole portions of his memory were gone.”

  “That’s … awful.”

  “I agree. Memories make you who you are. If someone manipulates your memories they take away your free will, and you don’t even know it. You’ll do what they want and think it’s your own idea.”

  “So that’s what they were trying to do to you?”

  “At first,” Teri said. “There was a mentalist. Julie. It was her job to figure out how to control me. She knew the minute she saw me that it couldn’t be done. She wanted to kill me outright.”

  “Kill you?”

  “That’s what they do if they can’t control you. There’s no middle ground. We’re not people to them, just tools. I have a lot of power, and Julie didn’t think they could control me.” She smiled. “I guess they should have listened to her.”

  “Well, who controls Julie?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” Teri said.

  Ruddy frowned. “Why doesn’t someone put a stop to all of this?”

  “Who’s in a position to put a stop to it?”

  “I dunno. The President?”

  Teri laughed. “Who do you think came up with the Safety Act in the first place? That’s how he got elected. After the Bethel massacre, people were willing to go along with anything that would keep them safe from us.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not a monster like Ezekiel Daniels. And neither are you.”

  “According to DSSA, we are,” Teri said.