For I Could Lift My Finger and Black Out the Sun (23 page)

And I felt a deep fear. In the back of my mind, the dull throbbing beacon that pointed the way to Sol still rang out. If he had the same sense, he’d be led directly to my door.

To
our
door.

Despite my cleverness at General Tulloch Park, I was far from done with Sol. Our time was coming. Our showdown.

Our high noon.

PART FOUR

EVEN

1

I remember it clearly.

Me and Bobby. And Sol. And there were a bunch of others, too. In the dream I knew their names, because, you know, it was my dream. I got to name all the characters. There was dark-haired, dark-skinned Petrus, probably in his late twenties. He was reserved, hard to read. And tall, pale blond Margrethe, who might have been in college. She was like a Norse warrior goddess. Totally badass. I didn’t want to mess with her. Plus another girl. Even the memory of her from my dream makes me want to linger, think about her a little longer. Her name was Phillipa. She was maybe three or four years older than me, with curves that girls my age mostly didn’t have yet, and waves of deep-red hair. She went by Pip, a name I’d normally be inclined to mock, but not with her. She was sassy and smart. A no-nonsense girl who could roll with the punches, or throw a few of her own. It was appropriate that I made her up in my dream, because she certainly seemed to be my dream girl. There may have been others in the dream, but I couldn’t see them clearly or remember any other names.

But I knew the six of us, because we all had it. We all had the power, in different variations. Petrus was good with his mind. Margrethe was a master of the physical skills — she had a karate chop that literally could cut down a full-sized tree. And Pip, she was a blend of the two. I guess sort of like me. Did I have a crush on a fictitious girl from a dream? Yes. Yes, I did. Don’t judge.

The dream was long and epic, seemingly endless. At first, it was amazing. Six of us, learning from each other, growing. I mean, we were essentially the six most powerful people on Earth. That alone alleviates a lot of life’s stresses. There were tons of laughs. Massive displays of ability. And of course, juvenile pranks.

One of them occurred when I was training to move objects with my mind, a skill that I apparently needed to work on even in my dreams. Sol had set up a sort of obstacle course, and my goal was to get through it unscathed. There were two ways to do that. The easy way meant using your mind to stop things from falling on you. Sol had arranged a route past stacked stones and crumbling brick walls, over a simple bridge, and even underneath a dump truck teetering on two tires. If you were good, you could gently nudge each item back into place when Sol sent it tumbling toward you. If you sucked, like I did, you had to run and duck, your body sluicing itself out of harm’s way.

“John,” Sol would say repeatedly, “you are more powerful than a stone, or a brick, or even that truck. If
you
have to move out of
its
way, you are not doing it correctly.” At least the dream version didn’t say it with that obnoxious laugh. No, Dream Sol actually seemed earnest in trying to improve my skills.

The others generally did better, so of course when it came time to pick on someone, that someone was me.

This particular prank happened while Sol was sending the things in the obstacle course flying, tumbling, or falling toward me, one by one. He seemed bored by the whole thing, like I was taking too long. I really had to concentrate, and still my ability to move something with my mind was… locked. So, like kids do in school, the others ganged up on me. Well, maybe not Bobby, and maybe not Pip. But Petrus and Margrethe did.

They pushed, here and there, from several sides. Sol must have noticed, but he either didn’t care or he was curious to see what might happen. I tried. Really hard, like my mind was about to burst. But still the stones fell from one side, the walls of brick from another, and the truck threatened to crush me from above.

And I just gave up.

It was too much. I couldn’t do it. The stones fell first, tumbling past me as my body rapidly sluiced in various directions to avoid them. Then, in a split second, the wall hit me, and my body again shifted, backwards this time, away from it all, to safety.

But not to safety, really. I sluiced into the path of the overturning truck. And my body was simply
stuck
. There was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. I had succumbed to physical self-preservation, and in doing so, I wasn’t prepared mentally. I didn’t have time or a plan. I was going to be crushed.

Like Walter Ivory.

I started to panic.

But there was a sound. Not the chiming bells of angels, not the booming drums of doom. This was more like a
click
.

The truck flipped backward, landing on all four tires. The brick walls pushed back to their normal standing position. Even the stones flew away in radial lines, like I’d become the focal point of a silent bomb.

Everything blew away from me, and I stood, unscathed.

There was a long quiet. Then a single pair of hands began clapping. Sol.

* * *

For a while, in my dream, things got better. Somehow, I had passed an important milestone. Yet I didn’t fully comprehend what it was I’d done, or, more important, how to do it again. Still, the six of us trained, and we became close.

Sometimes in a group, two people spend enough time together that they form a bond stronger than the others. That’s what happened with Pip and me. Were we a couple? Probably not. Were we on the road to that? Yeah, I think so. Until things changed. Funny how time is immaterial in dreams. Was it weeks, months, years? It wasn’t clear to me.

One day, seemingly no different from any other, Sol made an announcement. “We are now done here, friends,” he said. “The time has come.” He met with each of us in private, doling out orders. We separated, each one to our own city. By now we had been indoctrinated to follow orders.

I could see what Sol was doing, and it was just as he’d promised back in the real world, when we’d faced off at General Tulloch Park. Even in my dream, I was enough of a nerd to see the plan in my mind, like a diagram. We six became a network.

Pip was assigned to a city many miles to my east. Yet through the network, I could feel her presence. I had to reach out willfully with my mind to find where she was, leaping through the node that was Bobby to get to her. But I always knew she was there. That reassured me, but only a bit.

Messages came through the invisible wires of our network. Messages from Sol. Only Sol. Do this, do that. Send this material to Margrethe, or something else to Petrus. Take care of this problem. That was the worst.
Take care of it
always meant
Find who did it and kill them.

Quite a dream, huh?

A super-powered clan linked together, scheming, maneuvering, ruling, killing, doing whatever we pleased. Quite a dream.

No. It wasn’t really a dream. It was a nightmare (despite the presence of the lovely Pip). This was a vision of a future world that might be. One that Sol ruled. And he was as benevolent a ruler as you might expect a murderous psychopath to be.

Yes, we were all like radio towers. But he was the deejay, playing the platters that mattered. Spinning the tunes to which we danced. And that’s all the five of us did: dance to Sol’s tunes.

When I finally woke up, I was relieved to find it wasn’t true. I was in my bed, in my house, and while the dream had seemed to span months or maybe even years, in actuality it was the morning after my return from the capital. As you might imagine, it was hard to come back to reality, like unwrapping myself from a spider’s web. Still, once my eyes were open and the normalcy of life began to come back, I knew the dream was just a dream. It wasn’t real.

And that’s what stayed in my mind for a long time. The dream wasn’t real. Until it was.

2

I blinked awake and looked at the clock. 11:32 a.m.
Oh. My. God.
I leaped out of bed. I’d been asleep for more than 13 hours.

The capital was only 25 miles away. Hell, Sol could’ve leisurely
walked
to my house in the time I’d been asleep.

“Mom?” I called. No answer. “Mom!” I ran toward her room. The door was closed, so I knocked five times, hard. “Mom!”

I heard a low groan. “Yeah… yes, honey? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I tried to keep my voice steady. “Are
you
okay?” I stood with one cheek pressed against the door.

“Yes, why? What time is it?” A pause. “Oh shit,” she said in a hush, and there was a rustling sound. After a moment, the door opened as Mom tied a light-blue bathrobe around herself. “Thanks, John. I overslept. Is Holly up?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t checked.

Mom stepped past me, toward Holly’s door. “Holly, honey, let’s get you some breakfast.” She said it in a sing-songy way, as if everything was fine and normal.

Until she opened Holly’s door and the wind left her like she’d been punched in the stomach.

Holly’s bed had side rails to keep her safe, keep her from falling to the floor in the middle of the night. There had been mornings before when Holly woke up early and wanted to get out of bed, but the rails worked. She would make a racket to get our attention, but she always needed help to get up.

Not this time. The rails were down.

Holly was gone.

3

Mom did exactly what you’d expect her to do with her daughter missing. She called the cops. Before they arrived, she sat on one end of the couch, on the edge, rocking back and forth.

I wasn’t even surprised when Sergeant Durso, the officer who was there the day my dad died, appeared on our doorstep a short while later. There was no need for him to display a badge or introduce himself to my mother either. We both knew him on sight.

“Ma’am,” he said, taking off his hat and tucking it beneath one muscled arm. With his other hand, he pulled out a little notebook and pen from the breast pocket of his blue uniform. “May I come in?” Behind him, another officer was getting out of a second patrol car, but the second officer made no effort to come to the door.

Mom turned so Sergeant Durso could pass. “Would you like a glass of water or a cup of coffee?” she asked. Even in her distress, she had manners. I didn’t say a word, but moments like that leave an impression. Mom was a good person, simple as that. As the sergeant entered, Mom clicked the door closed behind him.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Durso said. Following behind my mother, he sat on the couch. Mom took the side chair, again perched nervously on the front edge. By comparison, the sergeant was slouched back. I don’t want to say relaxed or unconcerned, but he was there to do his job. He opened the notebook and readied his pen. “Can you tell me what happened here?”

Mom took a deep breath, and it was like a video I’d seen of a geyser pulling inward, just before the blast. “My daughter, Holly, she’s disabled — she has to use a wheelchair to get around.” Durso nodded. At least that much about Holly, he already knew. Mom went on to briefly describe the basis of Holly’s condition and her seizures, but left out any mention of Walter Ivory. Given that he’d been found crushed to death under a large metal storage pod, I assumed this was for the best. The police might want to start connecting things that didn’t connect. These two incidents were unrelated. Or at least, that’s what I thought at the time. “When we woke up this morning, she wasn’t in her bed,” Mom said. “She wasn’t in the house at all.” Mom started to tear up, but shook her head. The job at hand, trying to work with the cops to get Holly back, was more important than crying.

“Was there any sign of forced entry?” Durso asked. Mom and I shook our heads; we had checked the doors and nothing seemed unusual. “Is her wheelchair still in the house?” he asked.
Good question
, I thought. We’d only been looking for Holly. I couldn’t remember if we’d seen her wheelchair or not. That may sound strange, but when you live with something for so many years, it sort of blends in. Like, right now, is your end table still beside your bed? Probably. But are you totally sure? Okay, sure, it probably is. End tables don’t have wheels, so that was a bad example.

Mom turned to me. “Is it?” I shrugged. “Check,” she said and I jumped up, happy to have something to do, and ran around the house to look anywhere I knew the chair could fit. Nothing. I returned and shrugged again. “I guess it isn’t, Sergeant.” There was a pause as Mom looked down at her hands wringing in her lap. Then, finally, she burst. “You have to find her!” she pleaded. “She’s just a little girl and she needs me. And — ” Mom dropped her head into her hands, sobbing. “And I need her.”

After losing my dad, Mom wasn’t ready for another loss. Holly and her chair were gone, like she’d just taken a key, rolled out the front door, and locked up after herself on the way out. It didn’t make sense.

I hugged Mom the best I could, and even the sergeant leaned forward and put a hand on her shoulder to console her. “Ma’am, I can personally promise you that I will do everything I possibly can to locate and return your daughter safely. I have two girls of my own.” He let that rest a moment. “But I’m going to need to ask more questions. Will you be able to help by answering?”

Mom dragged her head up, strands of hair falling across her face, her cheeks streaked. With the backs of both hands, she wiped at her face, and I could see her do what so many adults have to do, whether they feel like it or not. She tried really hard to
come back to normal
. I can tell you, that’s not something many kids think about, even ones who are older than me. Fewer still can accomplish the task. Most of us are in the yelling, kicking, hitting, shouting, screaming, biting stage of development until we’re 10 years out of college. “Ask me anything,” Mom said. “I will do
anything
to get my Holly back.” Her face, though still drawn and frowning, had become firm.

Durso lifted his pen and cleared his throat.

* * *

The questions lasted maybe an hour. The sergeant took diligent notes, occasionally interrupted by a burst of noise and chatter from his radio, strapped to one side of his belt, with the talkback part clipped on his shoulder.

Finally, he was silent, flipping his pages back and forth for a moment or two. “Well, I think I have everything I need for now.” He replaced the pen and notebook in one breast pocket, and produced a business card from the other. “If anything else comes to mind that you think will help, anything at all, don’t hesitate —”

With a crackle, the sergeant’s radio burst to life. “Durso, copy?”

The sergeant tilted his head toward his shoulder and thumbed the button. “Yup, go ahead.”

Another crackle. “Need to speak with you for a moment,” came the voice again. “Outside.” It was the second officer, I assumed. The one who hadn’t come in.

Need to speak to you… Outside
. Well, if that didn’t sound ominous. Sergeant Durso made some apology for the interruption, then stood and went to the door. Mom and I stayed in the living room, waiting. A few minutes passed, and there was a knock on the door. So much adult courtesy. The sergeant came back and pulled out his notebook once more, but this time he didn’t sit.

I suddenly realized his eyes were firmly focused on me.

“John. I understand you’ve been on a little trip.”
Oh shit
. I gulped, unable to overcome the guilt on my face. “Tell me about that.”

How the hell does he know?
I thought. Then I guessed it.
Oh man, the neighbors. Probably Mr. Cooper
. Why do neighbors have to stare out their windows and keep track of everything going on? Don’t adults have anything better to do?

I had been to the capital, staying away overnight. Someone had noticed. Someone who I hadn’t noticed, whose mind I never
pushed
to dismiss the notion that anything was out of place. Maybe
lots
of someones.

So of course my first inclination was to push this officer’s mind, make him forget. I started to do it… then stopped cold.
It won’t work. He knows, the other officer knows, probably a neighbor knows, maybe a handful or a hundred others.
Too many people, a connected chain. If I made one of them forget, that would be even more strange in the eyes of the next person in the chain.

My mouth opened as I started to formulate an answer on the fly. What was commonly referred to as a “lie.” But Mom spoke first. “John was visiting my sister, Cindy. She was a little sick and needed some help around the house. I would’ve gone, but Holly needs me here.” I just nodded, like a bad sidekick.
Yeah, damn right. What she said
.

Sergeant Durso looked skeptical. He stood unmoving for a moment, then made a slight tilt of his head, a gesture of acceptance. “All right. Can I get your sister’s contact information to corroborate the story?”

“Of course, Sergeant,” Mom said. “Though when you call it a
story
, it makes it sound like we’re lying.”

“No, ma’am, I’m not saying that at all. My job is to track down every lead until it dries up or pans out. That’s all.” He turned back to me. “How’d you get to your aunt’s house, John?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed my mom blink rapidly. This part of the story wasn’t programmed into her memory. “Bus, there and back,” I blurted out. I gave Mom’s mind a little push so she wouldn’t argue the point.

“Do you have the ticket stub or any kind of record?” the sergeant asked, scribbling notes.

“Um,” I began. Of course I didn’t. I’d used mind-powers to act as a sort of stowaway. Or perhaps
guest of honor
was a better way to describe it. “No, sir, sorry. I threw those out once I got back, at the bus stop.” I can’t say for certain, but I was pretty sure a bead of sweat was forming on my upper lip.

Durso cleared his throat and tucked away the notepad for the last time, turning back to my mom. “All right. You have my card. Call me if you think of anything. Unless it’s an emergency, like if you hear from Holly, or from anyone with information about her. Call 911 first, in that case. Call me second.” He looked us both in the eye, like we were making a silent promise, then he turned for the door.

Mom walked Sergeant Durso out as I followed. “But what do I
do
?” she asked him. “Just sit here, doing nothing? Waiting?”

“We’re actively investigating this case now, Ms. Black.,” the sergeant said, stepping outside. “So, yes. We’d prefer you just wait. Let us do our job.”

He may have said something else, too. Hell, he may have broken into a song-and-dance number from a Broadway musical. I was no longer paying any attention whatsoever to Sergeant Alan Durso.

Because Bobby Graden was standing on the sidewalk across the street, one hand raised in greeting.