Trellis Page 11

  He nodded at her. “Goodnight, Sis,” he said as he turned off his computer and thus ending D’s lurking about in his life.

  So he had a family, which meant one of D’s biggest fears was for not. He wasn’t a product of Trellis. Relief. Such. Relief. She was a little closer to figuring out what made him different. She was thinking he looked rather pleasant on the computer screen, astoundingly photogenic, and the same steel green eyes as his sister. He was almost handsome for someone that wanted her behind bars. She learned a little insight in to his personality and behavior outside of the CCD uniform, and it seemed consistent with how he acted days before at the CCD Bureau.

  Still though, the question remains, why couldn’t she read his mind? That had to be the reason she was interested in this man and his life. She had never felt this much intrigue and pull towards anyone in her entire life. Why were his thoughts and behavior so important to her? He seemed like a trusting guy, absurdly stoic, logical, nurturing with family, and had affection for his dog. He seemed as if he had good character all through his interactions. Now that she knew a little more about him, one question pierced her thoughts— she wondered if he would help her bring down Trellis? That was, if the fact he wanted her locked up wasn’t a factor.

  ‘Absurd, I can’t tell anyone about Trellis, no one would believe me anyway,’ she shuddered at the thought of sharing information about Trellis or the doctor with anyone...

  ‘I can guarantee if I get in Banks’ sight again and he had the opportunity to question me, I won’t be given a lifeline to call Coughlin. I will be out of luck, and held indefinitely. At least until he got out of my forty foot range.’

  Chapter Nine~

  The next morning she struggled to move around on the cold hardwood floor in the nippy chill. She didn’t sleep well with dreams of Treeny and the beach floating around in her mind. No matter the dream, Treeny’s death was always on the peripheral. Past memories of a life that haunted her sleep with distant fades of fleeting calmness and then the harsh reality of splintering truth. She was so focused on her past life, her future seemed to blur in to edges of despair. Without bringing down Trellis, she couldn’t see a future where she wound up in the Happily Ever After crowd. Was it a crowd? Is Happily Ever After crowded or is set aside for only a few?

  It was barely five AM and she knew she was going to need more sleep than last night provided but it wasn’t going to come this morning. Eating donuts and sipping her tea she had gotten at the coffee shop across the street, she sat at the table, trying to look forward to this cold Saturday morning. She had the new bible opened up in front of her and attempted to put some sort of an understanding to its words. Banks must find comfort and guidance in its pages she reasoned. Turning to the Book of Psalms, she started reading.

  ‘Wow, beautiful,’ she thought. It did have a calming influence on her, a comforting effect. Certainly something, she needed this morning. She read a few more verses and daydreamed as she watched the few people stirring on the street below her loft. Mostly workers for the coffee and bakery shops, the corner newspaper guy took his usual spot to offer the morning’s news to passersby.

  Closing the book, she started to mentally note everything that needed to be done before she headed out on the mission to Fort Knox. She needed to switch phones, pack an overnight bag, tell Mr. Zhao she wouldn’t be home for a few days so he didn’t call the Citizen Control Department like last time, and maybe try to get to the grocery store. ‘Blah’, D thought to herself. For someone that could control people’s thoughts you would think she would have a little more of a compulsive disorder and want things nice and organized in her life. She blamed Trellis on her disorganization like most people blamed being raised in a dysfunctional family on their ‘quirks’.

  ‘Someday, someday I will be organized,’ she kept telling herself. Someday, she will take the trash out on her own. Lately that had been her mantra— someday…

  Not doing anything strenuous this weekend would be a high priority for her. If this was going to be the biggest mission she had ever been on she would no doubt need her rest. At least that was what Coughlin told her when he first procured her for this job, it would be the biggest mission to date. She only cooperated with the government in hopes it would someday get her closer to shutting down Trellis. She dreamed of that day but until then she was left doing deceitful jobs for a country that didn’t know she existed.

  The day she left for good was the last time she had ever had any contact with Dr. Salvaggi. One day she climbed on to a small plane and mentally took control of the pilot to fly her away, she really thought she was walking away from that life. She was young and about to find out how inexperienced with life she actually was, more so than your average kid.

  As the plane lifted off, she saw parts of the island she had never seen before from a bird’s eye perspective. She had been on small planes before but was never allowed to look out the windows. The fenced in compound she was being held in was smaller compared to the other areas of the island the plane circled. One fenced in area looked to be as big as 10 football fields. Large blue metal buildings with hundreds of people lined up neatly, being led from one building to another, like brainwashed robot-humans. All ages and sizes from what she could see and all dressed in dark red uniforms. All of this was going on around her and out of her range of thought reading. How could’ve she been so blind? Why was this allowed to go on? Was this normal? She watched out the window, she knew she needed to get away, far away, and as hidden as she could get.

  Was this where L12 and L13 lived and had talked about? D knew they said they lived in barracks and there was a large cafeteria but she never imagined that it was on such a large scale. She could see several of the compounds dotted across the island the higher they flew. Were they down there? Were her forced friends L12 and L13 down there living a life and unaware of everything going on all over the island? Or, maybe they did know? Maybe they were in on all of it… Surely not, she reasoned. Maybe they were just as blinded and sheltered as she had been, or perhaps they were no longer on the island, perhaps they were no longer alive…

  As they flew overhead, she speculated when the guards and Dr. Salvaggi would break out of the holding cell she locked them in earlier. She had controlled their movements until they were inside the cell and locked the door when they were all in the petite square box. It wouldn’t be long, the holding cells were not high tech, and she was sure they would shatter the cell and escape before they were actually found by someone and freed. Knowing what she could do now, she wasn’t sure why she just didn’t change their minds and their perception of what was happening. She has fully become aware of the extent of her powers now and would never make that mistake again. She would never let Dr. Salvaggi out of her grip again.

  She opened up the first aide box on the plane and pulled out gauze, antiseptic wipes, and taking the small scalpel, she took from Dr. Salvaggi’s office she knew what she had to do next. There was a microchip of some kind implanted in the underside of her left arm. Slicing open her flesh with a two inch score, her eyesight started to fade. She looked quickly out the window trying to maintain her nausea and pain. The blood was flowing more than she had expected, coupled with the pain of the cut. She still had to prod for the microchip, remain calm, and hold the pilots mind under control without passing out. The blood was running down her arm and dripping from her fingertips. She raised her arm above her head and continued to probe, ‘I can do this,’ she kept telling herself. She did not want to go back to the island and face Dr. Salvaggi’s wrath. She forced her index finger into the open cut and moved it around until she located something hard, she took a deep breath and used her thumb and index finger to manipulate the small capsule like devise out of her muscle tissue. It was glowing red; she opened up the cockpit window and dropped it somewhere over the blue sea below in time to hear the explosion under them, shaking the plane. The gadget must have not only been a tracking device but also an explosive detonator when it hit normal air temp
eratures. Thank goodness, she threw it out the window when she did.

  The pilot flew her to a private landing strip in Miami and she walked out of the airport lost. At risk, as an infant getting placed in a lion’s den. At the time, she hadn’t really started to use her mind control on anyone for personal gain until the last few days and even then, she wasn’t sure if this gift she had, would turn on her. She was always taught/brainwashed that it should only be used when it would benefit Trellis, never used for personal gain. She was finding out though, using mind control for personal gain was the only way she was going to escape Trellis for good.

  After leaving the airplane, she was lost. Walking down a long highway away from the airport, she was quickly picked up by a squad car and the kindest Citizen Control agent. He drove her through a fast food restaurant before taking her to the Department of Family and Children Services Center. This new to her food restaurant amazed her, you could drive up to a window, tell them you wanted food, and they would hand it to you. However, what amazed her even more was the green paper stuff he pulled from a leather holder and then gave to the man in the window in exchange for the food. Looking back of course, she knew it was money, but she had never physically seen it until that day. She had read about it in books, in her math classes she had been briefed on it, but without an actual tangible experience with it, cash was new to her. She knew she needed that green stuff if she wanted to have things of her own, if she wanted to continue to hide from the Doctor.

  When she arrived at the placement center they placed her in a large overcrowded home for teens. She remembered the name Sienna, a name Treeny called her daughter, and so that was the name she gave them. Being around so many kids her age was like being dunked in icy cold water. She wasn’t sure what to think, especially since many of their thoughts towards her and everyone else were hateful. There were a couple of teens that were nice, they had kind thoughts, but there were many more kids that were mean…

  The kids were obsessed with age, always asking and wanting to be older. She did not know her age, she had a guess-estimate at how old she was. Possible thirteen by then. She never knew what a birthday was until she arrived at the children’s home.

  The women in the office decided she should be given a birthday date. Therefore, when the designated date finally came, it came in with balloons, with a cake, ice cream, and a little lit candle on top of the cake. This was weird to her. They were nice enough she guessed looking back, but she had a chip on her shoulder and she wanted out. So much to take in in such a short time. She spent a lot of this time with migraines and mentally removing kids from any area she was sitting. The Nurses and staff would think the other kids were ignoring her, little did they know she made those rude disrespectful kids give her a forty-foot parameter.

  The punk kids reminded her of other voids from her time at Trellis and she wanted to get away. Trying to get rest with so many people in the same room wreaked havoc on her mental capabilities. She heard every thought. Could you imagine being in a full house of teenagers and hearing their actual thoughts? It was shocking to say the least. She heard the teen girl’s thoughts of jealousy, of self-hate, body shaming of themselves and others, fighting between the boys, bombastic attitudes, hatred, and pettiness. Instead of forming bonds with one another, most of the kids fought for the Alpha Male status. In her eyes, they were all trying to be Dr. Salvaggi. She was losing sleep, she not only wanted out, she needed out for her own sanity. She missed Trellis.

  At the center, she had been introduced to something else, television. She couldn’t watch enough of it. She felt like an alien in this new world and the television was like a book in motion teaching her this culture, a culture that didn’t seem especially welcoming to outsiders. Most of the kids hated her, the teachers didn’t understand her, the councilors didn’t believe her, and she was actually missing Trellis. She was a mess.

  One weekend she found herself in the commons room where the older boys were watching a movie, a bank robbery movie. Interesting, she thought. The next few days she asked as many questions about banks as she could think of. In the morning, at lunch, at supper, at bedtime, with everyone she encountered. In the movie the people put masks on, walked in a bank, and had the lady at the bank stuff green paper they called money into bags and the masked men walked out. Easy enough. Was robbing a bank wrong, at the time she thought ‘no’.

  She grabbed a couple of pink pillowcases, cut two eyeholes in one, and stuffed the other pillowcase into the jacket pocket that she took from one of the guys at the center. Monday morning would be the day. She easily walked out of the center and walked until she came upon a bank. Zipped her jacket up, pulled the pillowcase over her head and she leisurely walked in, took control of everyone’s minds, and had them lay down. She asked one of the women there to place all the money in the bag and she left with her bag heavy. She pushed the thought from their mind so no one realized until the end of the day when the money was counted, found missing, and they finally checked the cameras. That was when the ‘Pink Pillow Bandit’ was born, at least with the evening news.

  She never returned to the center and she never looked back. She had forty thousand dollars and more of an understanding than she did a few months ago when she arrived here in the USA. She mostly lived in hotels for a while. Living on room service and watching television the entire time being acclimated into this new world she had found herself. A maid would come in everyday and straighten up and never questioned her what she was doing there. The Mexican maid’s mind told her she was illegal, wherever the maid had escaped from, it entailed crossing a border, and she was always scared of being caught, and sent back. She spoke English well and reading her mind became daily entertainment for D. The people at the check-in counter, they were a different story. They would question her every day and every day she would push the idea she was a young kid out of their mind. Eventually she would start moving from hotel to hotel. Months went by of this charade.

  That would be the only bank she ever robbed. She was young and still figuring things out. D started to realize she could take what she wanted, that was up until about 6 months ago when she started hearing her own conscious telling her she was wrong. She had since paid back that bank and all the other businesses she could remember taking things from, anonymously of course. She wasn’t sure why she started to even care now. Perhaps her brain was finally healing from the surgery and she was developing a conscious. Something she was sure Dr. Salvaggi would love to study and remove.

  Trellis eventually found her one evening as she was returning home from getting a burger. She wasn’t the best at hiding and covering her tracks- at least back then. Lots have changed from that time to now. A guard showed up from Trellis to capture her and tried to take her back to the island. Well, she held the Trellis guard for days until they worked out a deal. She used his own handcuffs and kept him bound. He was mind-bogglingly scared... The deal: She would work for the government and get paid, live in the States and they would leave her alone. Giving the guard an email address to contact her. The guard couldn’t get out of her presence fast enough when she un-handcuffed him. Dr. Salvaggi was livid. He wanted her back, no doubt to poke around in her brain some more. Someone in a higher authority than Dr. Salvaggi told Trellis to back down and work with her. They gave her rules and the number one rule was— drum roll please — stay of Washington and away from anyone in a high office. She doesn’t listen well. She guessed they thought she would become a spy for other countries, and she could easily. However, if other countries found out she had this ability- she would not be safe. Not that she was safe now but at least she didn’t have other nations scouring the globe for her.

  There was only one person she dealt with, Peter Coughlin. This had never changed in the few years since she left and had reluctantly arranged her ‘freedom’ with Trellis and the US government. D knew Trellis wanted her back but someone she assumed in DC wanted her stateside. She didn’t know why, speculating since she had caused no trouble and abi
ded by the ‘stay out of Washington’ rule, they allowed it. She had been paid ridiculous amounts of cash, and had never questioned the missions they sent her on. Although, they didn’t put her in harm’s way, she was their golden child. Logically she assumed they wanted to keep her out of Dr. Salvaggi’s hands and out of his surgery room. Why fix what isn’t broke? He would try, no doubt.

  D heard the computer beep and she knew Banks must have turned on his computer.

  “Well, Good Morning, Colin. Let’s see what you’re up to today.” Sitting at her desk, she turned the laptop towards her.

  D watched while he checked the morning news stories, checked a dog training website and reads a boring article about making dogs shake hands/paws, pulled up email and deleted some junk mail, and checked his bank account again.

  His sister popped up again on video chat. Her sandy colored hair pulled up in a messy pile on top of her head; without a doubt she had just rolled out of bed.

  “Hey, Col.” She said as she rubbed her eyes.

  “Ruff night, Sis?” He said with a chuckle.

  “For the record it’s way too early to be up. I couldn’t sleep last night- at all.”

  “Wanna talk about it?”

  “Nope. When are you coming to visit me?” She asked in a needy baby voice.

  “I saw you less than a month ago.”

  “I know, but being here at school is hard, I miss all my friends, and you. You are the only family I have now.” Her voice cracked as she tried to push back tears.

  “Sis, I know it’s been hard since mom and dad died. I think about them a lot, too. How about I put a real bed in the spare bedroom and you can stay here over Christmas break and we’ll even go get a tree to put up?” He answered with the most compassion she had heard from him, yet. Clearly, he was stepping into a parental role and seemed comfortable with it.