Superman's Cape (29 page)

She waved at the three game-board pieces then started to search around the cab of the van for anything heavy and strong enough to break through the fractured glass. Between the center console and Steve’s body, a small thermos sat at attention as though waiting for Jill. It was all metal. No glass. No plastic. It was perfect. She pulled the cold metal cylinder up and over her head then swung it hard against the window. Jill ended her swing with a confident expectation of seeing the glass release in completion. She expected to hear a burst of glass fireworks and then see the remains spill over the lip of the door, before deserting the van in an escape to the gravel road below. But the window only spidered new veins and bulged through the other side.

“You’re going to have to hit it a few times!” Green yelled. “Hit it as hard as you can!” Yellow joined in.

Yeah, no shit,
she thought but decided to holler back, “I’m trying!” After two more throws of her arms, the missile of metal shattered the passenger-window. It scattered glass fragments to the ground and destroyed the web of puzzle pieces. A welcome gust of cold wet air met the half dozen razor cuts on her face. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth in an awww expression as if eating up her freedom. She wasted no time. Extending her arms through the steel portal, Red, Yellow and Green raised their hands in return to meet hers.

What came next was both painful and relieving as the men helped to thread Jill’s body through the window. They took care with their hands, holding her above the ground. And to her surprise their touch was even mannerly in where and how they placed their supporting fingers along her waist and sides. When hands reached her injured knee, she screamed and beckoned them with waving arms to stop, please stop, as an uncontrollable pain rifled up her leg.

“My knee – please, careful … I broke my knee,” she pleaded.

Green looked down at his hands and pulled them away. He was quick to reposition them so that he could help lower her body to the ground. Once Jill was on the ground she could see the completeness of what had stopped the van and taken Steve’s life. The tree wasn’t just big, it was mammoth. It looked as if it could have been left over from a primitive time. An area of roots and earth, three or four times the size of the van, had given way around the trunk of the ancient tree. The earth let the tree’s life go, sending it to the ground after what might have been centuries of support.
We never had a chance
, she thought and then realized how easily her own life might have been extinguished.

“Just a little faster,” she mumbled, and cast her eyes back and forth, “if we were moving just a little faster, I’d’ve have been squished.”

Green knelt down and put his hand on Jill’s back in an effort to console her, “It’s a big tree,” he stated, and then turned to face her, “you’re lucky to be alive.”

Jill looked once more to Steve, his frozen expression staring blankly ahead. Chaw vomit drizzled from his lower lip and chin.
I should have cleaned that off for him
, she thought with regret and then looked back to Green whose eyes spoke compassion, but also an eagerness, as he turned his face up towards Yellow and Red.

“You’re right. I am lucky, but Steve wasn’t,” and then Jill began to cry again as the adrenaline that helped her break the passenger-window faded. The magic strength serum left her limbs and her body and she was cold and shaky and in pain.

The men helped Jill get to her feet. Standing, she paused a second to catch her breath and then decided to try and take a step. The creak in her knee began to loosen.
Maybe the break isn’t that bad
, she wondered. But the small gravel of the road teased the heels of her shoes. One wrong step and she’d roll an ankle for sure. Or worse yet, fall back down onto her swollen knee.

“I need to ditch the shoes. I can’t walk in them out here,” she said to Green whose shoulder she kept her hand on in an effort to remain upright.

“When it comes to gravel, I can’t walk in heels either,” he answered back, and offered her a smile. She appreciated the humor and smiled back at him. With her shoes gone, she could move more freely. Walking became easier, albeit still painful.

The Connely’s trailer was closer and so was the tent full of volunteers. She hugged Jacob’s station jacket. Most of her was drenched. The jacket was helping keep a part of her from getting completely rained through. She watched the God-fingers moving the game-board pieces around as they got in and out of their cars. She watched them park then get out and move to another car. Jill watched how the game-board pieces worked to line up the vehicles, parallel to one another and close. Almost touching.

“What are they doing with the cars?”

“We can’t evacuate on account of the road being blocked,” Green answered over the pouring rain. He tilted his head first behind them toward the news van and then forward. She understood. They blocked the exit. Guilt surfaced but then faded as her knee revolted.

Green began to move his hand in the air as though counting items on a shelf. “We’re lining up the vehicles to make it secure by butting them up against one another. We’ve got ten vehicles but only need nine. We’re moving the operations as much as we can into the vehicles. When the storm gets stronger and the tent starts to give, we can sit in them and we should be okay.”

“What about the trailer?” She asked the question hoping to hear Jacob’s name.

“Not big enough for all of us!” Red yelled over the rain, “I think the cars might even be safer than the trailer – less drag from the wind,” he continued, and pointed to the height of the trailer.

When Jill turned to the Connely’s, she saw a man appear at the open door. The man struggled to step forward. He struggled to stand at the landing where Sara Connely stood earlier that morning. He placed his hands on the railing and seemed to absorb the front of the storm as it pelted his chest and face. The rains and wind coated his hair so that it lay flat in a wet matte against his head.

It was Jacob. Sara’s heart dropped and her eyes grew wide when she saw him. He was Jacob, but he wasn’t. His face was distorted and twisted as though someone were turning screws inside him and rearranging things on a whim as if with sick pleasure or tortured fun. “Oh my God – what happened to him,” she said past Green who turned to look at the trailer.

“Jacob!” she yelled, and let go of Green’s shoulder and turned further. She felt the brief touch of Green’s fingers to her own as he raised his hand in an effort to grab hers.

“Jacob! Over here!” she yelled again, and then shock and fear stopped her as the man on the landing turned his neck in a manner that was unnatural. He turned his body in the same way and it scared her some more. She stopped and was frightened by what she saw – it was as if there really was a God-hand with God-fingers that pulled and pushed Jacob’s body against his will. The God-fingers jerked his arms and legs in an attempt to mimic someone walking.

Jill looked into Jacob’s face. And for a moment she saw what she thought were his eyes. But she was suddenly afraid for him. Afraid of what was happening to him. His eyes were begging her. Pleading with her to help him. They were tortured and sorrowful as his body moved in an artificial and freakish way across the landing and then down the steps before stopping and turning towards the woods. Jill’s emotions fell out of her. They spilled like Steve’s blood as she cried for him and begged the God-fingers to stop what she was seeing.

“What’s happening here?” Jill screamed as Sara Connely appeared in the dark rectangle of the trailer’s door.

“He’s going to find Kyle – he knows where my son is, don’t you touch him, don’t you dare stop him!” Sara yelled to all who could hear her.

Jill was confused, she was in pain and growing terrified for Jacob. His body continued to move towards the woods. He moved in a tortured walk as his legs lurched up then down in piston-like steps that were puppet and forced.

“Jacob. Oh Jacob, please stop, don’t go in there!” Jill screamed to him once more, her hands cupped together in front of her, shaking at the air. She gasped when Jacob’s head turned around more than she thought was possible. He looked at her and started to speak.

“I need to get my son,” he answered in a menagerie of voices. He then spun his head back so that it was straight again before he continued forward. Jill lowered her hands and then dropped herself past the pain in her knee. She landed so that she sat on the ground, and then turned to Sara’s voice. Sara was screaming for Jacob to save her boy, to find her boy, don’t let her boy die. She was yelling and her voice sounded as though it were consuming madness and spewing hysteria that Jill couldn’t understand. And when Jill listened to what Sara was screaming, she heard her say: “You save Kyle, you go and you save him. You save our boy, our son – don’t you let him die!”

Jacob shuffled his feet on the carpeted floor and wondered how it was he could find himself a prisoner in his mind. He thought about Jill and whether or not she was just outside the trailer waiting for him. He thought about Andy who was surely pacing back and forth across the miles of studio cabling. And he thought about Kyle and how he would help if he could, but that this wasn’t the way -- trapped in a void was not the way to help anyone.
This must be what a coma feels like
– you’re there but you’re not there
. What a terrible place to be.

The door in front of him stayed closed. He could hear the little boy Jonnie and Sara on the other side, but their voices were muffled. He thought he heard enough to understand what they were saying. Chris knew where Kyle was. He also knew Kyle was dying and he was here to save him.

Jacob pressed his hand against the door. It felt smooth. It felt warm. The door breathed. Alive. Frustration crawled through him. But this was him. Confusion remained. It surrounded him as he tried to understand what was happening. Jacob wanted to break through the door and run out of the trailer. He didn’t care what pulled him to the Connely place. But he didn’t move. Nothing moved. His ability to control any part of him lie just on the other side of the door. Jacob swung his fisted hand against smooth face. The door changed and inhaled his arm. Loud sucking sounds echoed though the room, through him, and he thought the door might eat him. Panic gripped him as he struggled to pull his arm free of the door. Frustration grew into anger and then turned to resentment.

“This is my mind!” he yelled and then said, “You can’t trap me here -- son of a Bitch!” He finished with a scream to the walls of the empty room. He waited for a response. He waited to meet the culprit who stole his body. But nothing happened. And then he realized nothing had to – there was absolutely no challenge to be had.

“This is as much my mind as his,” he mumbled, thinking he might laugh at the silliness of not thinking this sooner. And then he saw the door knob.
It is my mind – mine. Always will be.
It never occurred to him to grab the handle, and he wondered if it had been there all along. He dismissed the idea and reached for the handle, and with hesitation, he turned the knob. It did not resist. It turned with his hand and the inner workings of the door’s latch spoke a click-clack-click language before opening. Jacob stepped into the familiar corridor of his mind.

At once all of his sensations returned to him. Jacob collapsed to his knees as the wave of consciousness crashed on him. It was overwhelming. A fever boiled in his mind and his stomach turned. A seizure threatened, and he was certain a release of troll mites would rip and tear and pull his flesh apart. They threatened to steal his beating heart. Only it wasn’t troll mites or an infection that spread across his body and spine and brain – it was Chris Connely. And he was sent to save his son and to use Jacob as a means to do so.

As he looked around the inside of the trailer, Jacob saw Sara across from him with Jonnie at her side. He was standing at the trailer’s door and stepping out onto the landing. Jacob grabbed hold of the wood railing as a wave of wind and rain hit him. The weather was a welcome feeling of wet and cold on his skin. Jacob inhaled the hurricane air, almost too deep, as a downpour soaked every part of him.

“You find our boy!” Sara yelled to him from inside the trailer. Without any attempt to move, his head was turned back toward Sara. He told her he’ll find their son. It’s his voice, his body but invisible puppet strings pulled on him, moving him and speaking for him. It’s Chris, and he can talk and walk. Chris can control all of it; all of him. Jacob’s heart sank.

“Yes I can,” Chris replied to Jacob, interrupting his thoughts. “Now please, let me find my boy – that’s all I want to do.”

Jacob’s grip tightened on the railing as fear turned to nausea. A moment later, faintness leaned into him as the world around him started to go dark.

“Come on Jacob, buck up – we’re in this together,” Chris continued, “I just want to get my boy is all. Please. Please don’t fight this. Your here now, so help me. Help me save my son.”

Jacob heard the cries of a familiar voice. Through the sounds of the rain batting against the trailer roof, and past the winds that seemed to change direction every few minutes, he heard Jill’s voice. He searched the collected groups of men and women wandering around in rain parkas. A sea of Greens and Reds mixed with Yellows invaded his view before he was able to find his WJL-TV station jacket. It
was
Jill he heard, and she was standing just twenty yards from him. Jacob tried to turn around and jump down the landing. He wanted to go to her, to hold her, and to tell her he was okay. But his body didn’t move. His grip on the railing wasn’t his anymore.

“Not just yet,” Chris said, “we’re running out of time. Kyle is dying.”

Jacob pushed on his lips, he forced some control over the muscles in his face, smearing his nose and lips to one side in a contorted manner that let him whimper a few words.

“I’m out of the room. This is my body!! My mind! Get out!” Only the words came out
ImmmOouuttmmmyroooom-myyybooddymmyymiinnddEedddOuuttdd,
but Jacob knew that Chris heard him and that he understood his demands.