The Orphan (10 page)

‘They lie, cover it up, bend more rules, and then give a half-assed televised apology that is, without fail, one hundred-per-cent staged. Integrity is a lost concept in our culture, Chad. We’re living in an age when it’s winner take all, even if you have to cheat to win. Put your sin on a credit card, pay for it later, or don’t. This is weakness, people caving in to their weaknesses.’

‘That totally makes sense,’ Chad said.

‘This thing today, with your teacher? I don’t know the whole story, but I promise you when this thing comes out, it’s gonna be all about somebody – a parent, a kid, a family, a psychopath, whoever’s involved – who took the easiest route to getting their rocks off. Cause it’s easier to steal and lie and, yes, even commit murder, than it is to deal with your own problems. To take the hard road and resist whatever makes you feel better now, today, in the moment.’

Chad looked like he wished he could take notes.

‘I’m sorry,’ Darren said. ‘I’m sermonizing here. All I’m saying is, and this is a talk I’ve had with Raya more than once, if you want to be good, and I’m not talking about being rich or successful, but good at something, and good to the people you love, then the single most important thing to do is resist your own weaknesses. We all have them. Some of us work at rising above them, others don’t. And that’s all I want you kids to remember, okay? Before you cut a corner, or do something that seems too good to be true, take a second. Stop. Think. Is this the right thing to do, or just the easy thing to do? Because, son, those two things are almost never the same thing.’

‘That’s awesome,’ Chad said.

Darren chuckled. ‘No, I probably just drank too much Coke. What’s in this stuff, anyway?’

The two of them laughed.

‘Whoa, someone’s having way too much fun in here,’ Raya said, bounding into the living room, hair still wet, but otherwise dressed and ready to go. ‘What are you boys up to so early in the morning, and can I have some?’

The reality of the news they had to share with her halted their laughter. Darren was nearly cleaved by how vulnerable she appeared, how trusting she was, how brightly she approached this mess of a world.

‘What?’ Raya said, reacting to the somber turn. ‘What’s wrong?’

Chad looked to Darren for the cue. Darren eased his way around the counter and patted Chad on the back.

‘This here’s a good man, Raya. He was looking out for you today, and for that he will always have my gratitude. Go ahead, Chad.’

Chad told her about Mrs Kavanaugh.

Darren knew from the way her skin turned ashen and her tears rolled out spontaneously, she hadn’t seen this coming. She’d been too happy this morning, and in the previous days, to have sensed such a tragedy heading toward one of her teachers.

Her hunches were just hunches, coincidence.

And thank God for that.

By lunchtime Adam knew he needed another mode of transport besides his own two feet. He was too small to get away with driving a car, didn’t know how to drive, or steal one. Taking the bus would have been an option if he had any money, but he’d searched his pockets and the backpack twice, finding not so much as a lucky penny. Hitchhiking was out, because he didn’t trust strangers or adults in general, and the last thing he needed was someone kidnapping him or handing him off to the cops.

He could think of only one viable option – a bicycle. The idea of a bike excited him. He believed he had owned one at some point, and loved to ride it. More than just a mechanism to get away from the things pursuing him, a bike would allow him to move faster, cover more ground, go almost anywhere he pleased.

As he walked toward the mountains, he scanned the porches and open garages, hoping to spot a bike someone had left unlocked. After he had gone two or three miles without seeing a single bike, he was preparing to give up. A few blocks later, though, he noticed a yellow road sign with the black shapes of children crossing a lane. Which meant he was close to a school, and every school had a bike rack, didn’t it?

Adam didn’t care for the idea of stealing anyone’s bike, but stealing another kid’s bike was exponentially worse. Take a kid’s bike, you are also robbing him of his mobility, his self-esteem, probably a year or more’s worth of his allowance, and ultimately his freedom. Only a truly mean scumbag of a human being would steal a kid’s bike.

On the other hand, there wasn’t much choice. Which would be worse, some kid losing his bike, or Adam being slaughtered by The Nocturnals? The way Adam saw it, if he had a bike and giving it up meant saving some poor kid’s life, well, he could live with that. He wouldn’t like it, but he could live with it. Maybe if he found a bike to steal, he’d leave a note behind explaining why, hoping the boy would forgive him.

Those people are dead. You got them killed
—
 

But he shut off these thoughts. They were too big for him to deal with.

He walked on, the sun warming his skin and drying out his clothes. He was not as tired as he should have been after only a couple hours of fragile sleep, but he was very hungry, and thirsty. The crackers and beef jerky were not going to get him through the day. What Adam wanted more than anything right now was breakfast, a real homemade breakfast. Pancakes, scrambled eggs, six strips of bacon, a pile of biscuits and gravy, and a chocolate shake. He could not remember his last home-cooked meal.

He followed the side streets, near some houses and past a trailer park, and he knew he was on the outskirts of Boulder. On the north side. Some things looked achingly familiar, like the trailer park, with its wooden sign and the two lanes that forked around it so people driving in wouldn’t crash into the people driving out. Other sections of the neighborhood seemed strange, out of place, as if portions of this Boulder had been drastically changed overnight.

Six blocks later, he reached the school. A wide, flat building made of tan brick, so short it was obviously made for elementary school kids. He could tell that much even before he saw the playground swings and climbing dome and the low-mounted basketball hoops. He might have gone to this school, but if so it was a long time ago.

Hollow, partial memories of school returned: the cafeteria smells of baked cheese pizza, steaming green beans, sour milk cartons. He remembered drinking fountains, desks bolted to chairs so you could never adjust how close or far you were sitting to the desk itself. A teacher, some man with a brown beard who always wore brown corduroys and thick-soled shoes, but he couldn’t remember the teacher’s name, or his face, or any of his classmates’ faces, if he had ever had real classmates.

He was tempted to sneak inside and see what else was familiar, but he couldn’t risk that. The last thing he needed was for some teacher or the principal to shake him by the arm, ask why he wasn’t in class, who were his parents?

Good questions, but not ones he wanted to answer now.

He found the bike racks on the far southwest corner, barely visible from the classrooms on the west side. There were two rows, with only five or six bikes hooked into the spars, which meant the odds of one of them not being locked up were slim. He approached slowly, nearly tiptoeing, before realizing this would only make him appear more suspicious, then walked purposefully, like any kid who’s just been let out of class early and is in a hurry to meet his mom at home for a doctor’s appointment. Yes, that was it. That’s what he would say if any adults came out to harass him.

The first two bikes had steel chains coated with a rubber sleeve, one of them as thick as his wrist, and he knew he would never get through those. They were dumb bikes anyway. One was a long yellow ten-speed type with flowers painted on, and a low seat. Probably a girl’s bike. The other was too small, red with black plastic wheels. A bike made for a first- or second-grader, and Adam knew he would have to pedal like a maniac just to get the thing going ten miles per hour.

Engine noise. A car approaching.

Adam looked over his shoulder and saw a small white pickup truck coming toward the school. His face began to burn with shame and guilt and he was sure that if the driver looked his way as he passed, he would see everything Adam was planning as clearly as if it were painted on a sign.

The truck shifted through the gears and increased speed, nearing the school’s front entrance. The driver was an older guy, wearing a trucker hat high on his head of shaggy gray hair. Adam waited for the red brake lights to glow but the truck continued on without slowing, and the man never glanced his way. Regardless, Adam’s heart pounded for another minute before he was calm enough to continue his thievery.

On the next row was a BMX bike, dinged up and dirty white with silver wheels and a crooked seat, but it didn’t look too bad from a distance. Adam hurried to it, but his heart sank when saw that both tires were flat and the cranks and bearings rusted all to hell. Probably been sitting here for months, in the rain and snow, left for junk by some spoiled kid whose rich parents bought him a fancy new bike.

Adam headed back, head down, so hungry and tired all over again he wanted to lie down in the next drainage ditch he saw and fill his mouth with dirt.

Until his eye caught on something black. A thick smooth tire, black forks, faded chrome handlebars – another bike! It was all he could do to keep from running for it. Every part of it except the bars was dull, matte black, so plain he hadn’t noticed on his first pass, but hell if it wasn’t a real BMX bike. It had no decals, no brand name, looked like someone had welded it together in their barn. Either that, or the damn thing had already been stolen and the thief spray-bombed it all black to disguise it. With its fat wheels and miniature sprocket geared to the tiny cog built into the hub, it was different than any BMX bike he’d ever seen. He couldn’t remember any specific BMX bikes, come to think of it, but this one felt different than even his faintest memories would allow. Nevertheless, it spoke to him in that subtle way bikes could.

I will do right by you, my man. We could do some real damage together. Take me out for a spin and you’ll never want to get off.
 

But no dice. A massive steel chain was looped through both wheels and the frame and terminated at a blunt, fist-sized mechanism with a combination lock built into it. Adam kicked the chain and nearly broke one of his toes. What was he going to cut this open with, his knife? He’d need a blowtorch and half an hour to break this chain.

Oh, but how he suddenly wanted to ride it. It looked like a tough bike, a bike that could handle anything. Street, dirt, rocks, ramps.

Even though he knew it was pointless, Adam found himself holding the blocky combination lock in his palm. It was not a dial lock, with numbered notches on the colored face. This one had a row of black switches, like teeth, with six numbered settings per tooth. The lock felt hot in his hand. He touched one of the hanging loops on the rack to see if it was hot too, but that dark steel was much cooler than the lock. Weird.

He couldn’t bring himself to let go. Not only was it warm, it was almost humming, as if some deep vibration were channeling its way up from the ground, through the long beam of the bike rack, into the combination lock.

Without wondering why he should bother, Adam closed his eyes and tried to imagine the boy who owned it. Soon he heard distant noises, like faint breathing, and the rhythmic hum of tires rolling on smooth asphalt. The breathing grew heavier, and the music of a well-oiled bike chain making its way around the sprocket filled his ears.

There was no flash, no startling vision, only the soft susurrations of young legs pushing force into smooth revolutions, the clean ticking of spinning cogs and the growing hum of tires. He could
feel
the bike working under his own legs now, the steam-engine labor of his own lungs, and the gummy rubber grips under his sweating palms. He was riding, and it was another boy he was riding along with, or perhaps inside of, and this boy was bigger than Adam, a tough kid from a rough home where he lived with only his dad because his mom left them, couldn’t stand the smell of horse manure, or the drinking, and they lived on a farm with a barn and rows of junked cars, and he liked to hide things out in the trunk of one of the cars, little plastic baggies filled with grass, the
kind grass
, which always made the boy laugh, and something that belonged to his best friend Kurt, they called it the
otter bong
…

Emerald-green light flared behind Adam’s eyes and the taste of metal spread over his tongue, like he’d swallowed a mouthful of pencil lead. The green light was some kind of electrical pulse in his brain, making his nose hurt and his eyes water, stinging like he’d just jumped into a swimming pool and forgot to hold his breath —

The boy took a notebook from his backpack, flipped through it, and there they were. The numbers, scribbled on a sheet of blue-lined paper in soft pencil.

5-1-5-2-2

Adam opened his eyes and all sense of motion ceased. His sinuses were stinging, but the lock no longer seemed to be humming. He flicked the little black teeth in the same sequence he had seen in the notebook.

5-1-5-2-2

The metal key slipped from its cage as gravity dragged the heavy chain through the wheels, cling cling cling, until it fell to the ground, coiled and limp as a dead snake.

All he had to do now was take it.

Adam shivered, looking in all directions. He would never know if someone was watching from behind the school windows, waiting for him to commit the actual crime before coming out to holler at him.

He was stunned by what had just happened. No, it hadn’t just happened. He did it. It was like he had performed a magic trick without even trying. But what was it?

Something bad had happened to him, he knew. He might have amnesia, he might be a psycho who lost his mind from one day to the next – but this was different. Something buried inside his hollow mind knew he had done this before, or other things like it. He had touched things and learned things about the people who owned them before today, and this must be one reason he’d found himself in so much trouble. It might even be the big problem, the one that angered the beasts and sent him on the run.

I have something, almost like a power, but it’s not a good thing. It causes more problems than it solves. And it’s responsible for hurting people, the people who used to be close to me but are gone now, all gone.
 

Heart racing, legs jittery, Adam felt detached from himself, a boy standing idly by as the other boy took the bike by its black rubber grips. In one fluid motion he heaved the bike up and turned it one hundred and eighty degrees to chuck it under his legs like a miniature stallion. He held on tight and pedaled as hard as he could.

By the time the front tire leaped out of the gravel and bit into the street ahead, he was moving almost as fast as a car, and he felt saved. The bike was the magic, not him. The bike took the town, the roads, the neighborhoods and the world that only minutes ago seemed so vast and pitiless – and most of all
huge
– and shrank it all down to a manageable size, made it his world. Adam wasn’t afraid now. He could go wherever he wanted, as fast as he dared, and the monsters would never catch him.

He ducked in and out of neighborhoods, and soon he was careening down the steep hill on Broadway, the sidewalk seams blipping faster and faster beneath his wheels, the wind blowing back his hair, setting his thoughts free.

What if it wasn’t magic or some special power? Maybe this was my bike all along and I just happened to forget the combination. Today I remembered, and if I can remember that, I can remember anything. Maybe I found my school and then I found my bike, and pretty soon I might just find my way home.
 

Now that he was riding again, anything seemed possible.