The Thought Pushers (Mind Dimensions Book 2) Read Free Page A

getting out of my head?” He sounds angry, if it’s possible to sound angry while thinking. “At the very least, stop the fucking commentary. For your information, when one of us dies in the Mind Dimension, it has an effect—a lasting effect. Trust me.”
    “But still, why not do your attack in the real world?” I ask.
    “Look, kid, I’m not here to teach you anything. We’re here for me, remember? But if it shuts you up, let me explain. One benefit of attacking someone in the Mind Dimension is that there’s no possibility the person will see me until I pull him or her in. It’s the ultimate stealth, and the reason for the development of this technique. Another huge advantage is that, in the Mind Dimension, a Pusher can’t use random bystanders to aid himself—something that fucker would definitely try. But before going in and attacking people in the Mind Dimension, keep in mind that this technique has drawbacks. In a regular fight, I can leverage the Mind Dimension. It’s a huge edge. I can Split and see where my frozen opponent is about to strike me. If the opponent isn’t a Reader or a Pusher, I can Read him too, which gives me valuable information about my opponent’s actions in the immediate future. Unfortunately, in this case, the opponent is a Pusher. All I can rely on is fighting prowess. This suits me just fine, since I’m confident in my abilities in that department. Still, I always strategize based on the assumption that my opponent is as good as, or better than, me—as unlikely as that is in practice.”
    “Wow, dude, that’s way more than I ever wanted to know about the subject—and extremely arrogant, to boot,” I think at him.
    “You asked, asshole.”
    With no more commentary coming from Caleb, I get sucked back into his memory.
    A car alarm blares in the distance. We decide that the location we’re in now should work for our purposes: far enough that the Pusher couldn’t have seen us coming, but not so far away that we can’t fight when the moment arrives.
    We Split, and the car alarm, along with other ambient noise, disappears.
    Now that we’re in battle mode, our need to kill the man in the car—the Pusher—is overwhelming. It overtakes our whole being. We rarely get a chance like this. A righteous, completely justified kill. No way will we face an attack of conscience over this. No, there won’t be any lost sleep, or even an ounce of remorse this time. If anyone ever deserved to die, it’s our current target.
    This Pusher has been trying to damage the Readers’ gated community for weeks now. He’s responsible for the bomb that our men are disarming at this very moment.
    So many Readers could have died. On our watch. This possibility is so unthinkable, we still can’t fully wrap our head around it. And it was all avoided by mere chance, by a lucky discovery. We saw the telltale signs inside the mind of that electrician. We don’t dwell on what would’ve happened if this had gone undiscovered. The only consolation is that we would’ve died along with the victims, given where the explosion was set to take place. We wouldn’t have had to live with the shame of being Head of Security and allowing such a thing to occur.
    Of course, the chicken-shit Pusher did none of the work himself. No. He mentally compelled the staff at the community instead.
    Rage wells within us again when we focus on how these nice, regular people got their minds fucked with, simply because they happened to be contractors, plumbers, and gardeners working at the Reader community. We seethe at the injustice of it, at how they would’ve been blown up along with the Readers, collateral damage in the Pusher’s eyes. We would never resort to such a maneuver. The idea of collateral damage is among the things that made us eventually leave Special Ops.
    Our rage grows exponentially as we remember what Julia told us she gleaned while Reading Stacy, the bartender—what this slime did to her. The metaphorical