John Gone (3 page)

The shower was currently in use, and a wispy
cloud of steam billowed from the opening at its top. The silhouette
of a man cleaning himself stood behind its curtain, singing the
refrain of a song John didn’t recognize. The stranger had a
terrible voice for the song he was attempting--whatever it was--but
that didn’t stop him from continuing on and on in forced
falsetto.

Acting as quietly as possible, John stood
from the toilet and crept to his left where he spied a small
window, closed but clear. He carefully approached it and stood on
his toes to reach the glass. Just tall enough, he looked through
the window and saw a fenced back yard, complete with a barbeque
grill and child’s playhouse.

The bathroom didn’t change
, he
suddenly realized.
I’m just not there anymore
.

John looked behind him toward the bathroom
door. A letter sat just beneath the fogged mirror hanging above the
sink.

This has got to be some sort of alien
planet
, he thought, taking soft, careful steps toward the
letter.
Or a parallel dimension where people eat Styrofoam and
bugs run the post office. Or
-- John paused his thoughts and
picked up the envelope. The address of his location read clear
across the front:
Tallahassee, FL?

John had never been to Tallahassee before. It
was a solid 250 miles from Longboard. This new information had him
more confused than ever.

How long have I been out?
he wondered.
John looked at the watch: 3:15. Only a minute had passed since his
collapse.
That can’t be right.

The door that led out of the bathroom had
been left ajar, and John woefully decided it to be a better exit
than the tiny window high on the wall. Timing his steps with the
words of the showering man’s song, he crept to the door, taking a
moment to pray that its hinges were well greased before summoning
the courage to test them. One, two, three, and he opened the door
just wide enough for his body to slink out into the connecting
room.

Safely on the other side, John swiftly
returned the door to its original position and listened. The man in
the bathroom was still singing. John smiled at his accomplishment.
Ninja skills
, he thought.

Turning from the bathroom confidentially,
John suddenly found himself face-to-face with an attractive woman
sitting on the edge of a large bed. She was staring straight
through him.

“Adam?” she asked.

John swept his eyes across the room.

“What?” yelled the man in the bathroom,
pausing his song to answer.

“Oh, sorry,” she replied, “I heard the door.
I thought you were coming out.”

“I am,” he answered, turning off the shower.
A few seconds later, the sink in the bathroom coughed to life.

John stood petrified, not sure of what was
happening. He was standing right before her; could she not see him?
Am I invisible, too?

He looked closely at the woman’s pale green
eyes, still staring right through him, past him even. There was
something about them that didn’t look right. Perhaps it was their
shape, or maybe the slight scarring he thought he saw against the
whites.

Oh
, he decided,
she’s blind
.
John waved his hands in front of her eyes to make sure. He made a
stupid face at her and danced with his arms to double check. With
amazing reflex, the woman reached out and grabbed onto his right
elbow.

“There you are,” she said quietly.

John jerked his arm from her grasp.

“Oh, you want to play,” the woman cooed
seductively.

John looked toward the room’s exit to his
right and longed to be there. He cautiously moved a foot toward it.
The bottom of his shoe lightly brushed the carpet beneath its
sole.

“Can’t get away from me,” the woman said,
purring the words. Her hand swiftly shot out at John once more,
this time catching him between the legs.

“You’re not Adam,” she said loudly.

“What was that, sweetie?” Adam called from
the bathroom. Less than a second later, the woman in front of John
was screaming with a voice so shrill and shattering that his eyes
squinted closed.

“What the--” came Adam’s voice, rushing into
the room with his body soon behind.

“Let me explain,” John said to him
frantically, not sure of how to address the man standing before
him, angry, naked, and twice his size.

“What are you doing to my wife?” the man
yelled, pointing his finger down at John in righteous judgment.

“Nothing!” John managed, “I was just--”
Another of the woman’s screams soon cut him off.

“He was trying to ... to ... touch me!” she
yelled.

“No! What? I wasn’t!” John stuttered, backing
toward the exit.

“He was
what?
” Adam yelled, charging
headfirst at John. Bug-eyed and terrified, John quickly u-turned
and ran for the bedroom door. The woman screamed again, her newest
screech assaulting John’s ears even more harshly than the
first.

After dashing from the bedroom, John found
himself at the end of a hallway. The walls on either side were
lined in family photographs matching in size and brown wooden
framing.

Something sharp and forceful struck John
between the shoulders. The impact sent him to his knees. Beside him
on the ground was the projectile, one of the family portraits. In
the picture, Adam was standing on a towel at the beach, his arm
around a woman whom John recognized as the blind screamer from the
bedroom. Between them was a small child. John smiled at the
incredibly exaggerated grin the little one wore across her face.
Then, another wooden frame collided with his leg.

John looked back and saw Adam pursuing him,
lumbering but determined, ripping pictures from the wall and
flinging them forward as he ran. John leapt from the ground and
continued running ahead, not sure of where to go.

He decided to hook right at the hallway’s
end, hoping to at least break vector with Adam’s missiles. Around
the corner was a small kitchen, still dirty from breakfast.

No
, John thought quickly.
Kitchen,
bad. Kitchen has knives
.

He pivoted quickly on his heel, hoping to
change course before becoming trapped by the man raging closely
behind.

As John turned, Adam leapt. The large man’s
pounce earned him a quick grip on John’s left foot, and they both
tumbled backward and tangled onto the carpeting below.

John struggled to regain his footing, but was
locked to the floor by Adam’s iron grip. The hold on John’s shoe
became a hold on his leg, forcing him back down to the ground. The
grip on his leg was soon a grip on his torso, and from his torso,
his throat.

Adam knelt on top of his trespasser and
squeezed the boy’s neck.

“I didn’t ... try ... to ... ” John
coughed.

“Save it!” Adam yelled, lifting his right
hand from John’s throat. “Who takes advantage of a blind woman?” A
moment later the hand returned as a fist, striking the side of
John’s jaw with crushing impact. John had never been in a fight
before, and easily decided that he wasn’t fond of it.

John squinted his eyelids closed and open,
closed and open, trying to recover from the blow. Adam lifted his
hand once more to a striking position.

With his arms pinned at the shoulders by
Adam’s knees, John swiftly raised his right forearm and forced it
past Adam’s leg, using the edge of the watch’s face to hew at the
man’s skin. The resulting cut was trivial, but the surprise of it
was enough to cause Adam to loosen his grip just long enough for
John to break free from the pin and roll back onto his feet.

“You’re a coward,” Adam taunted.

“You’re the one throwing pictures of your
family at the back of my head!” John retorted.

Adam yelled incomprehensibly and jumped for
John’s feet again. This time, the teen deftly jumped to the side,
and used the small advantage to run from the kitchen into the
family room nearby. He paused there and swung his head left and
right, looking for an exit.

Where’s the front door in this place?
he wondered in exasperation. It was too late; Adam was already back
on his feet, standing confidentially on the other side of the room
in front of the house’s front door.
Well, that answers that
question.

“Where’re you going?” the man asked
snidely.

“Let’s just calm down,” John tried. “You
could put on some pants and we could talk about this. Something
crazy happened to me. I don’t know how I got here.”

Ignoring him, Adam slowly began to cross the
room. John frantically looked around again, immediately taking
notice of a large oval mirror hanging on the wall next to him. He
lifted it from the nails mounting it and heaved it at the large
wooden coffee table standing between his body and Adam’s. It
shattered apart on impact.

Adam covered his face and jumped back from
the table. Once landed, he looked first at the broken mirror, then
up to John. He laughed. “You either need better aim or bigger
muscles.”

John smiled. “There’s glass everywhere.
You’ve got bare feet.”

Adam looked down and saw that John was right.
Small jagged shards of the mirror were scattered across the floor
between them, with more almost certainly hiding in the carpet’s
thick shag unseen.

John offered Adam another smug smirk, earning
a moment more to further survey the room. There were a set of
stairs to his right that climbed to the second floor, equally far
from him and Adam.
It’s either up or out
, he thought,
and
Adam’s still at the door
.

John’s thoughts were interrupted by a plastic
CD case flying closely past his ear and crashing into the wall
behind him. He turned back to the large naked man across the room
and saw him pulling more jewel cases from a tall vertical rack
beside him next to the room’s entertainment center.

Soon a second and third disc flew at John’s
chest, neither missing target. The hard, sharp plastic corners of
their cases stung and cut as they made contact with the thin
t-shirt protecting him. John successfully swatted the fourth case
from the air before it could connect, but could do nothing to stop
number five or six as one struck his knee and the other, his side.
Two more sailed past John’s head, one just narrowly missing his
nose.

The blind woman ran into the room behind Adam
and screamed again. A young girl, looking to be four or
five-years-old, appeared at the top of the stairs to John’s
right.

“Daddy?” she asked.

“Go back to your room!” Adam yelled in reply.
“It’s not safe here right now!” The young girl toddled back out of
view.

John counted fourteen CDs that had hit him
thus far, while seeing just three or four that he’d been able to
deflect.
Not good odds
, he thought.

Using the short pause in Adam’s assault, he
ran forward to the large wooden coffee table he’d used to break the
mirror. Careful of any shards on its surface, he lifted the table
in front of him and ducked behind the wood just moments before the
next wave of projectiles launched. Hard plastic shattered against
the table as three new CDs broke against the surface of Johns
improvised shield.

“You’re a coward!” Adam called out again.

Faced with either taking the initiative or
standing indefinitely behind a heavily assaulted piece of
furniture, John took the table’s legs over his shoulders and
charged forward across the room at his assailant. He and the table
crashed into Adam and the rack of CDs in one clunky blow, landing
both John and his shield awkwardly on top of both. Slightly dazed,
he quickly rolled off the upturned table, stood, turned, and ran
for the stairs.

Once safe on the second floor, John fled into
the first room he saw. Inside, he closed the door behind him and
took a moment to catch his breath, leaning his elbow on the
golden-painted doorknob. A tiny hand tugged on his shirt as he
panted.

“Um, who are you?” a small voice asked. John
moved his downturned face toward the tug and spied the young girl
from earlier looking up at him with an accusing expression. She
shook a large, well-worn pink stuffed rabbit at him as she asked,
“Are you a bad guy?”

“No,” John answered immediately. He forced a
smile and gently knelt to face her directly. “Your daddy is sort of
mad at me. Does he ever get mad at you?”

“Uh huh,” she answered with puffy, reddening
cheeks. “I don’t like it sometimes.”

“Me neither,” John replied quietly. “So, we
can be friends, right?”

“Um, okay,” she agreed.

“So, when your daddy comes up here--”

“Who are you?”

“I’m John.”

“My name is spelled like this: c, a, l--” she
began, making the shapes of the letters with her hands as she
slowly spoke them. Past the room’s door, the sound of carefully
placed footsteps began to creak up the stairs.

“Alright, whatever,” John interrupted, gently
lowering the girl’s hands to her sides. “I don’t actually care what
your name is.”

The girl scowled in reply and a second later
began to cry. The footsteps on the stairs sped to a run and, before
John could think, the door to the bedroom flew open. Adam stood in
its frame like an enraged naked superhero, legs shoulder-width
apart, arms bent and planted firmly on his hips.

He looked at John, then to his daughter. His
anger had grown to the point of quieting him. “Step away from her
and into the hallway.”

“You don’t understand; this is a big
mistake.”

“I said,” Adam repeated calmly, “step away
from her and into the hallway.”

John stood frozen, looking at the man before
him. Adam’s face twisted and crunched, growing ever more impatient
and turbulent as the long seconds passed. It was a face that no
longer knew of restraint, if it ever had. John turned his own face
slightly and eyed the large window behind him. It wasn’t ideal, but
it was the only way down.