The Enlightened (2 page)

Getting back to the car, I try to explore the front of it. I get my frozen self out of the seat, unceremoniously letting the black-bagged body fall to the ground, and look inside the glove compartment.

Finally, I find something useful.

True to himself, on top of whatever armament he probably has on his person, Caleb has a gun stashed there.

I take the gun and use it to push open Caleb’s vest. I don’t want to touch him; the last thing I want is to have him in the Quiet with me. I was right, though. He has a gun, and the huge knife he likes to carry with him is attached to the inside of his vest.

Okay. What now?

I decide to go back and pretend to be unconscious. Now that I’m no longer Inert, I can phase in once in a while to look around. Maybe after another couple of miles, I can figure out where we’re going.

I touch my frozen self and phase out of the Quiet.

The noise instantly returns, as does the cold from the air conditioner. More importantly, I’m nauseous again from either Caleb’s driving or the effects of whatever drug he used to knock me out. Or maybe a combination of both. The last thing I want is to throw up, especially with a bag over my head, so I employ a trick I’ve used since I was a kid and breathe in deeply. In. Out. In. Out.

The nausea slowly subsides.

Suddenly, the car comes to a screeching halt, undoing all my work. I almost puke.

In a blinding flash, the bag is off my head. I keep my eyes closed, pretending to be unconscious. I wish Caleb would kill the engine now that we’ve stopped; the cold of the air conditioner is making me shiver, which is a dead giveaway to my being awake.

Then the world goes eerily silent. Caleb has pulled me into the Quiet. I keep my eyes closed.

“Stop that bullshit, kid. I know you’re faking it,” Caleb says. “I pulled you in, which means even if you were unconscious before, you
are
conscious now. It also proves you’re no longer Inert. So why don’t we have a little chat?”

Shit.

He’s right. The process of pulling someone into the Quiet wakes them; that’s what happened with Mira that time when I pulled her out of her beauty sleep, and got a gun pointed at my head for it. Before I can dwell any longer on that fond memory, powerful hands grab me by the hair and trunks. In one swift motion, I fly out of the car, scrape my elbows, and land in an explosion of pain.

“Fuck, Caleb.” Coughing, I attempt to get to my knees. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Ah, so you are conscious,” he says and kicks me in the ribs.

The air rushes out of my lungs, and I struggle to take a breath.

He kicks me again. And again.

I gasp for air, nearly gagging from the pain as he finally steps away. I wonder if he’s going to get a gun to finish the job. At least this time I know I’ll survive getting killed in the Quiet, though I’ll be Inert again and for who knows how long. With all my remaining strength, I start crawling away, though my shattered ribs scream in protest.

All of a sudden, I’m back in the car in real time, with the noise of the engine roaring and the cold of the air conditioner blanketing me. I’m blissfully
not
in pain, but then everything goes quiet again.

I stare at Caleb, who’s now in the back seat with me. What the hell is he doing? He took me out of the Quiet only to pull me back in.

“Get. Out,” he says through clenched teeth.

With a sinking feeling, I realize I’ve never really seen Caleb pissed before. Not until now, if pissed is indeed what he is.

My heart hammering, I scramble out of the car. He climbs out too and takes off his vest with the weapons, dropping it on the ground.

It seems like he wants to fight.

Ignoring the hopelessness of the situation, I focus and brace myself.

My right hand moves to block his first punch without my brain really telling it to. My left tries to hit him in the jaw. He manages to block my hook, and in the next moment, I’m seeing stars.

My nose is the epicenter of unspeakable pain. I feel something warm running down my chin, and as I try to inhale, something obstructs the air from entering. My nose must be broken. As that realization hits me, I block a punch to my solar plexus.

Then Caleb does a move I can only describe as a football tackle. He rushes me, and since I didn’t expect it, I lose my balance and fall to the ground.

He kicks me in the head. The crack that accompanies the strike sounds as though the universe split open.
Must be a skull fracture
, I think vaguely as painful white light fills my vision.

Caleb seems to pause, and my consciousness ebbs.

I’m in the cold car again. The pain is gone, but my confusion is multiplied a hundredfold. What the—?

And then I’m pulled into the Quiet again.

“Do you want to keep playing, or are you ready to talk?” Caleb asks after I get out of the car, my legs wobbly.

This is what it’s about? Some kind of a creative torture he invented? Kick the shit out of me in the Quiet, reset the injuries by phasing out, and then pull the restored me back in, beat me up, rinse and repeat?

“What the fuck do you want?” I say with more bravado than I feel.

“You can start by explaining how Jacob was killed by the gun I gave you,” he says, and I know I’m in
really
deep shit.

“Jacob was killed?” I ask, trying my best to sound surprised, which is easy because I
am
surprised—surprised that Caleb found out about the gun. Thomas—my new friend and the only other adopted Guide I know—was so convinced we were in the clear. But I forgot that the gun I used was the one Caleb had personally given me. He must’ve gotten access to the ballistics report from Jacob’s murder case and realized it was his revolver
that had killed Jacob.

“You know he was.” Caleb crosses his arms over his chest. “Do you really want to resume my game?”

I think quickly, knowing full well a delay in response will be interpreted as a sign of lying. If I come clean about everything, including being a hybrid, he’ll likely kill me outright, like in the memory I experienced where he killed a Pusher bomber. If I give him a half-truth—yes, I killed Jacob, but he was the bad guy responsible for killing Mira and Eugene’s parents—he might believe Jacob’s guilt, or, again, he might kill me for murdering his boss. This leaves me with the weakest response of all, but I proceed anyway, feeling as if I have as many choices as a person being Pushed.

“Wait,” I say. “I genuinely don’t know anything about Jacob getting killed—”

Caleb takes a threatening step toward me.

I start speaking faster. “Look. I got shot after you dropped me off at Mira’s house. You can check the hospital’s records. When I was in the hospital, someone took the gun.”

It’s somewhat plausible, and given the circumstances, not the worst thing I could’ve come up with. Unfortunately, Caleb doesn’t even dignify my quick thinking with criticism. Instead, he walks up to me and throws the first punch, which I manage to block with my left hand. At the same time, my right elbow connects with his jaw.

He raises an eyebrow in surprise and retaliates—how, I’m not entirely sure, as it looks like a blur of movement—and then pain explodes in my chest. Like before, I fall to the ground, and he kicks me repeatedly. The beating hurts like hell. And just like before, when I’m barely alive, he phases us out of the Quiet.

I’m cold, and this time it’s not just from the air conditioning. The adrenaline is pushing me into a fight or flight response. I’m dreading another beating. I don’t think I can take it. But he doesn’t pull me into the Quiet. Instead, he puts the damned bag over my head again.

“They’re going to find out exactly what happened anyway,” Caleb tells me.

Before I can ask what the hell that means or who ‘they’ are, I feel a pinprick of what I assume is a needle, and the familiar nothingness spreads through my brain as I go under.

Chapter 3

A
slap to the face wakes me.

It’s the least fun way to wake up, followed closely by loud alarm clocks and cold water.

Before I am even done coming back to consciousness, I phase into the Quiet.

In the Quiet, I become much more alert—especially when I look around.

Caleb and I are no longer alone.

There is an older man staring at my frozen self through the car’s side window. He looks to be in his sixties or maybe even seventies. I can’t tell because I’m terrible at gauging the age of anyone over forty. I exit the car to take a closer look.

He looks completely out of place here, in the middle of the road, though the guy might look out of place pretty much anywhere with the white toga-like robe he’s wearing—anywhere except possibly ancient Greece. Yep, the strange outfit makes him look the way I imagine Socrates would look—minus the beard, as this guy is clean-shaven.

Had he walked here on foot? If so, from where, given that we’re in the middle of nowhere? More importantly, why did he come here? His dress puts only weird theories into my head. Weren’t they into younger men back in ancient Greece? I nervously chuckle as I picture Caleb calling this guy on his cell and saying, “Hey Grandpa. I’m taking a nearly naked twenty-one-year-old out into the woods for you. I’ll text you the GPS coordinates. The guy is still unconscious from the drug I gave him, so come quickly. It’s molesting time.”

I decide the only way I’m going to get answers is if I phase out and let things unfold as they may.

I touch my frozen self on the forehead, careful not to touch Caleb’s hand, which is making its way through the air, coming back from slapping my frozen self on the cheek.

The sounds and the sting from the slap come back. I open my eyes, but before I can say anything, everything goes silent again, and the pain is gone.

I find myself in the backseat of Caleb’s Honda, pulled into the Quiet yet again. I note that the strange old dude is now in duplicate, the animated version removing his hand from my frozen self’s neck—meaning I’m in his Quiet, not Caleb’s, at the moment. So the guy is one of us, most likely some kind of a Reader, given Caleb’s presence. I also note that Caleb is sitting next to me in the backseat. He must’ve been pulled into this Quiet session before me. He’s ominously holding another black bag.

“Don’t move,” the old guy says in a raspy voice. My snide remark that was about to graphically explain what Caleb and Grandpa can do to each other is interrupted when Caleb puts the cursed black bag over my head and jabs a gun into my ribs.

“Get out of the car and follow me,” the old guy instructs.

“I can’t see you,” I say. “How can I follow you?”

“Here, hold on to this piece of rope,” Caleb says. “And if you try anything, I’ll make our prior conversations seem like a fun warm-up.”

“Where are you taking me?” I ask no one in particular. “What the fuck is going on?”

“I’ll explain when we get there,” says the stranger in a tone that implies the conversation is now over. He sounds like someone who’s used to giving orders.

My attempts at starting a conversation to gain information are ignored as we walk. This is probably the most terrifying walk of my life, by the way—also, the most uncomfortable. We walk across gravel roads, grass, a forested area, and hot asphalt, just to name a few of the horrid terrains. None of these surfaces are exactly friendly to my bare feet.

After what feels like a day or more of walking, we stop.

“Take that awful thing off his head,” says the older man.

Caleb grabs the black hood and roughly rips it off.

“You nearly broke my neck,” I complain, feeling something akin to whiplash, but no one deigns to give me a response.

The bright light hurts my eyes but only for a second. Recovery time is definitely quicker in the Quiet than in real time. My feet are already healing. It’s odd. I’ve never stuck around in the Quiet long enough to recover from an injury, not when phasing out is so much easier. I was derelict in my science, apparently. This is useful information and adds more credibility to Eugene’s theory that only our consciousness enters the Quiet and that these bodies aren’t exactly real bodies, but manifestations of the mind. Or something along those lines.

I examine the old man again. His light blue eyes are looking me up and down with cold curiosity. For someone his age, he’s in okay shape, and his white, slicked-back hair is nearly all there, which is rare, I imagine. Perhaps he’s on the younger end of my age estimation after all? That aside, I still feel justified in mentally calling him ‘Grandpa’ for now.

I look behind him. We’re standing near grassy plains, the forest we walked through visible in the distance. It’s a scenic landscape, for sure, but what catches my attention is the huge temple right behind Caleb and Grandpa.

The temple is intricate and seems completely out of place here, in the middle of the United States. The architecture is definitely Asian-inspired. I’m no expert on the subject, so I can’t say whether the style is Tibetan, Chinese, or Japanese, but I can say with certainty that it isn’t American. Fear forms in the back of my mind. Could Caleb have knocked me out long enough to transport me to Asia? But that makes no sense. How would he get a comatose passenger onto a plane? He wouldn’t. We drove here, so we must be somewhere in North America.

“What is this place?” I ask, trying not to sound too impressed. “Where are we?”

“It’s our home,” says Grandpa. “Follow me. I’ll get you some clothes.”

We enter through the large golden gates, with Caleb trailing behind us. It seems the theme of the day is breathtaking beauty. And it’s not just the cherry blossom leaves frozen in the air or the gorgeous landscaping. It’s everything. A deep sense of serenity is woven into every strategically placed little pagoda, into the very essence of the giant rock gardens. If I weren’t convinced that I’m in the deepest trouble of my life, I’d probably relax and enjoy it all. As is, the landscape and peace of this Quiet slows my heart rate—slightly.

I’m not surprised to see monk-like people when we enter the Temple. They have shaved heads and are wearing orange robes. Maybe they’re Buddhists? Everything points to that, though I don’t recall seeing one of those iconic, chubby statues with serene smiles and big earlobes. According to my mom Lucy, that fat guy isn’t even the original Buddha from India, but a Chinese version that came about much later.