Agent of Equilibrium Read online

  Johnny was about to suggest that they stop for the night when the monotony of the journey was unexpectedly broken. As they moved along the motorway, Sascha’s Presarium detector gave a beep, and the motorhome’s big diesel engine started to splutter before cutting out entirely; this was unusual to say the least. Johnny immediately depressed the clutch so the vehicle coasted and turned the key once, then twice, before the engine reluctantly came back to life.

  “What the hell happened there?” Sascha asked, fiddling frantically with the Presarium detector on the dashboard.

  “I thought you said you kept her well maintained, Johnny!” added Baccharus accusingly.

  “I do!” replied Johnny, frowning with concern. “That has never happened before!”

  Sascha stared intently at the tiny display screen on his device. “I hate to say this, guys: my meter just detected a peak in local Presarium activity, I’m pretty sure the engine didn’t stall by itself … there’s some psychic interference here.” He urgently cycled through various screens on his gadget, trying unsuccessfully to find an error in its reading.

  “I didn’t sense any psychic activity,” Baccharus said.

  “Me neither,” agreed Johnny.

  “Well, I’m not surprised that you guys didn’t detect anything, it’s been a long drive. Johnny, you look pretty damn tired, and as for you, Bach – chilling out back there with that novel – I think you’ve just switched off entirely … must be quite an absorbing read.”

  “Oh, it is!”

  “Sweep the area and see what you can find, Bach,” Johnny ordered his familiar.

  Baccharus closed his eyes in response and concentrated deeply as he tried to detect any psychic presence in their vicinity. “Oh, yeah! There’s definitely something nearby… in a straight line behind us, I think … reach out, Johnny, see if you can feel it too.”

  Following Baccharus’s directions, Johnny also sensed negative energy in the air, cold and full of malevolence – they were being stalked. The attempt to stall their engine and the presence he had just sensed left him feeling far too exposed on the wide open motorway. “I’m coming off at the next exit,” he announced. “Let’s see who – or what – is following us. Sascha! What have you got?”

  By now, Sascha had powered up a whole host of electronic gadgetry in response to this unknown threat; his laptop computer, which was hooked up to the portable Presarium detector, registered another peak of activity. “Get ready, guys, there’s some psychic energy heading our way again,” he cautioned.

  Sure enough, the unknown energy tried to stall them once more; forewarned, Johnny had already started revving the engine hard. The motorhome juddered and its interior vibrated as the engine complained under the strain of the opposing forces. With a great deal of effort, Johnny kept it running, and the psychic attack faded again. The oil temperature gauge was creeping upwards; he knew their vehicle couldn’t take more of this abuse. From a road sign, Johnny estimated it would be less than five minutes to the next exit. His two companions frantically searched the wing mirrors to try to spot what was behind them; the overcast night sky and light rain made it difficult to see. Johnny could feel Baccharus using his mind to scan the road; neither he nor his familiar could get a fix on anything. Johnny drove on tensely, wondering when their progress would once again be psychically impeded. Multiple LEDs started flashing on two small, plastic circuit boxes that lay amongst a tangle of wiring arranged on the dashboard; Johnny glanced at Sascha questioningly. His friend was entirely focused on the screen of his computer. “All right, people,” he said eventually as he looked up, “the computer indicates a moving source of combined Presarium and electro-magnetic energy about a quarter of a mile behind us. It’s definitely a psychic disturbance and is more than likely the source of our current troubles.”

  Johnny used this information to tune in to the road behind them with his psychic sense; as the driver, it was difficult for him to concentrate fully on this task, and he had to defer it to Baccharus. The motorway straightened out as he drove, and car headlights stretching back for hundreds of metres became clearly visible. It was disconcerting to think that one of those was out to get them; Johnny was grateful that it wasn’t far to the exit now.

  “I can feel something!” announced the familiar excitedly, and almost immediately they were attacked again by the unseen psychic force. The motorhome slowed down rapidly and then lurched suddenly into the path of a speeding articulated lorry. With its horn blaring, the lorry swerved onto the hard shoulder, just about avoiding a devastating impact. A terrified Johnny wrestled with the steering wheel to regain control of his vehicle and managed to guide it back into the middle lane. The lorry, its horn still sounding, sped off ahead of them, desperate to be as far as possible from the errant motorhome.

  “Everybody okay?” asked Johnny, glancing over his shoulder, only to see Baccharus painfully extract himself from a pile of tuna and baked bean cans on the kitchen shelf he had been thrown into by the wild change of direction. Sascha rubbed his head where it had been knocked against the side window and looked ruefully at the electronic devices that were now strewn across the cabin.

  “My equipment! What a mess!” he moaned as he reached down to pick it all up again.

  “Forget your equipment, what about our lives!” shouted Baccharus angrily as he pressed his face against the window, trying vainly to catch sight of their psychic aggressor.

  “We’ve got to get off the road, it’s getting dangerous out here,” said a grim-looking Johnny, and nobody argued; a very real fear had descended upon the party. Trying to stall their engine was bad enough, forcing them into the path of a lorry was something else, and it did not leave any doubt in their mind as to the intentions of whoever was out there.

  “You weren’t lying, Johnny!” said Sascha.

  “What do you mean?” asked Johnny.

  “You weren’t lying when you said this mission was going to be the riskiest one to date.”

  “It’s risky all right … happy to stick around?”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  It wasn’t far to the exit slip road now, Johnny could sense a terrible psychic presence nearby – the enemy was close. “Can you feel it, Bach?” he asked, and the familiar nodded slowly.

  Sascha had managed to reconnect some of his equipment again and was trying to interpret a complex graph on his laptop display. “Look for a car in the outside lane, about one hundred and fifty metres behind us,” he suggested.

  Baccharus pressed his face against the side window and was the first to spot the threat they faced. “Oh, yeah! I think I see it! A black saloon,” he reported urgently.

  “That’s the source of the bad vibes all right,” confirmed Johnny, his mind completing a quick psychic evaluation of the vehicle. They reached the exit lane, and everyone’s attention quickly returned to the road, the tense silence broken only by the ticking of the indicator as Johnny turned off the motorway. Soon it would be time for confrontation. His friends looked subdued and he knew why. The enemy had found them first, and they had not anticipated this.

  They drove onto a short stretch of dual carriageway with the black car following. Johnny and his friends cast frequent nervous glances at their mirrors to watch the trailing headlights that blazed so menacingly at them. The motorhome approached green traffic lights; a nearby sign read HARTNALL 12 MILES. A491 BAINBRIDGE. The place names didn’t mean anything to Johnny. His keen eyes probed their new location, eager to find anything in their immediate vicinity that could be turned to their advantage like a building or some natural feature; he had no such luck, only rolling fields were present on either side of the road. The lights changed to red, and Johnny cursed under his breath. Cars, observing the traffic signal, obediently stacked up in both lanes ahead of him. He had not wanted to stop or even slow down so soon after coming off the motorway.

  “C’mon, lights; go to green,” urged Baccharus.

  Johnny sensed his familiar trying to alter th
e lights psychically. “Baccharus, don’t!” he forbade. There was fast traffic moving across the junction ahead, changing the lights would have been disastrous. As they slowed down, the ominous black car rolled closer.

  “He’s getting too near!” Baccharus warned unnecessarily as all eyes were already fixed on the vehicle in the mirrors. Their stalker was no longer a pair of distant headlights but a large chrome grille mounted on a black luxury car. Even though it was directly behind them, it was impossible to see its occupants as the car’s windows were tinted and the night was dark. Reluctantly, Johnny took his turn to stop behind traffic, and the black car followed suit. With the enemy so near, Johnny could clearly sense their malign energy, stronger than ever. It triggered a confusing barrage of random perceptions, subjecting mind, body and soul to every conceivable physical and emotional experience both simultaneously and separately: pleasure, pain, despair and so many more feelings all mixed together to produce a single strange sensation so very characteristic of Disorder. Caught in the chaotic energy field, Johnny understood how this heady mixture could be so seductive and why there was no shortage of recruits for the Disciples of Disorder. “Can you feel that, Sascha?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure … there is this weird sensation around isn’t there?” replied Sascha. Like all living beings, Sascha possessed a trace of inherent psychic ability; it was not enough to be considered a psychic practitioner, he could perceive only a fraction of what Johnny now experienced – this wasn’t going to be the case for much longer. Battle was about to commence.

  “Let’s get ready to face whatever’s in that car,” said Johnny resolutely. As soon as he spoke there was a build-up of rapidly increasing psychic energy. It caused Sascha’s electronic equipment to light up with flashing LEDs and twitter with increasing urgency. The enemy launched its attack of intensified chaotic energy; the effect was both profound and unpleasant.

  The temperature inside the motorhome dropped rapidly, and the vehicle started to vibrate and then rock back and forth on its suspension. Magnified psychic energy overwhelmed the three friends, searing nerve endings and flooding their cerebral synapses, exposing them to a bewildering tide of neural activity. Johnny groaned and gripped his head tightly between his hands, trying to squeeze out the unparalleled agony and obscene ecstasy he simultaneously felt from the confused signalling of his brain. His steadily blurring vision could not conceal his friends’ ordeals from him. He watched Baccharus, spread-eagled on the floor, shrieking in pain while Sascha’s body convulsed and blood streamed from his nose and across his face. Johnny knew the experience was psychologically less intense for Sascha, but on the physical level it was just as unwelcome.

  “Do something, guys …” begged Sascha between his laboured breaths, looking as if he would lose consciousness at any second.

  With great effort, Johnny resisted some of the effects of the psychic assault. All he wanted was a few moments of clear thought so that he could think of a way to get them all out of this mess. “Psychic shield …” he moaned eventually.

  “What?” croaked Sascha weakly. Baccharus, who had also heard Johnny, understood. Johnny looked deep into his own psyche, and amongst the storm of unwelcome neural activity there he found a small region of his mind that was unaffected, a place of calm and strength at the very centre of his consciousness. He focused on this tiny island of peace and was thus no longer affected by the madness the enemy had induced. This was not going to be enough. To take things further, Johnny had to dig deeper into his personal reserves of willpower. With intense concentration honed through years of training, he expanded the size of this tiny island of calm so that it grew outwards, and it pushed the disorder of the enemy’s psychic energy field away from his own mind. He didn’t stop there. He continued to expand the zone of peace outwards beyond the dimensions of his own consciousness and into the material world around him, neutralising the Disciples’ frenzied psychic attack in a radius that extended beyond even the motorhome, creating a zone of protection. Within this psychic shield, Sascha and Baccharus found themselves finally free from the effects of the assault. This gave them a chance to recover, and Johnny felt Baccharus use his own psychic ability to reinforce the shield.

  For what seemed like hours, but was in reality merely seconds, the struggle between opposing psychic energies continued; the warmth and calm of Johnny’s shield versus the confusion and pain of the enemy’s assault. The occupants of the cars nearest to them, caught unwittingly at the edges of this psychic battle, had started to feel very unwell. When the lights changed and they moved out of range, they recovered quickly enough to fire a few angry blasts of their horns at the two stationary vehicles.

  The Disciples intensified the attack. Johnny could feel what had started off as a deluge of chaotic psychic energy become a full-blown storm.

  “Oh no, not again!” he heard Sascha scream as his friend’s body was gripped by convulsions once more. He watched him collapse to his knees with eyes squeezed tightly shut, bloody-nosed and moaning. Johnny sensed Baccharus desperately trying to prop up the psychic shield with his own mind. The power his familiar tried to resist was overwhelming, and he too succumbed to neurological overload.

  Johnny could only look on as his friends writhed in pain. He took a sharp intake of breath as his psychic shield was finally crushed and chaotic energy now bombarded his senses too. He searched vainly in his mind for the island of calm he had found earlier – it was lost – there was no way to project the shield again, and he feared that they would all shortly perish, leaving behind only the desiccated husks of their corpses. The sight of his friends’ suffering, his own helplessness and the physical pain he felt triggered a powerful emotion deep within him – something he couldn’t remember ever feeling at this level of intensity before. It was anger, a bitter, terrible anger that exploded at the very core of his being. Johnny cried out in fear at the strange force growing inside him; expanding rapidly and gathering momentum it knew no bounds. This righteous anger, born as it was within the mind of a psychic like Johnny, manifested itself as a wavefront of potent, untamed energy. It escaped from Johnny’s mind and expanded rapidly through the air, blowing out a section of the motorhome’s fibreglass rear and then continuing its devastating progress until it struck the enemy’s car, shattering its windscreen, ripping off its roof and rolling it backwards ten metres. The car’s interior was showered with high-velocity shards of glass that peppered its occupants. The destruction was accompanied by the roar of rushing air and twisting metal, and when it all stopped there was silence. What remained was a quiet autumn night in which there stood an isolated motorhome and a car, both appearing to all intents and purposes to have been involved in a collision.

  Johnny had never experienced such a force before, and he looked around in bewilderment. His friends appeared dazed but well and, thankfully, no longer subject to psychic trauma from the enemy’s chaos energy field, which was no longer detectable. The tinkling sound of broken glass dropping from the shattered windscreen, alongside the creaking of warped metal and fibreglass, was all that could be heard.

  “Was that you, Johnny?” Sascha asked, dabbing his nose with a bloodied handkerchief. He spoke gently, as if his friend was a volatile substance that needed to be handled with care.

  “I – I think so,” Johnny responded, hesitantly. They both stared at the gaping hole Johnny’s blast of psychic energy had ripped out of the rear of the motorhome. Visible through it was the night sky and the enemy’s damaged car.

  Sascha excitedly grabbed his Presarium meter from the dashboard and tapped a few keys. “Dude, that was off the scale!” he exclaimed. The meter had recorded a wave of energy from Johnny’s blast, and it was unable to register its peak.

  Baccharus, who was hovering again, waved a clenched fist through the hole at the roofless car. “Don’t fuck with Johnny M.,” cried his infant voice. He turned to Johnny with a defiant smile on his face. His triumphant tone was short-lived.

  There was movement from
the black shape slumped over the steering wheel of the damaged car. Johnny watched, transfixed, as the figure in the driver’s seat shifted to sit upright again. The face that had until now been obscured by a broad-brimmed hat became slowly visible, and it was hideous. Black, empty eye sockets set in gnarly, grey skin stared back at him and his companions. The whole effect was made even more terrifying by the many tiny glass shards embedded in the being’s flesh, and as if this didn’t upset the sensibilities enough, there followed a deep, throaty growl and movement from the back seat – Johnny did not intend on waiting around long enough to see what the source of that was.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” whispered Sascha. Johnny looked at his friend, his voice had been calm … wide eyes betrayed his terror. He turned back to the grey, withered face behind the steering wheel that stared intently at them all with hollow eye sockets. Suddenly, the lipless gash that was its mouth opened and produced a terrible hissing sound. Without further delay, Johnny leapt into the driver’s seat and restarted the motorhome.

  “Let me drive, Johnny, we’re going to need you ready for psychic intervention, not concentrating on the road,” said Sascha. Johnny agreed and they hurriedly swapped positions.