For I Could Lift My Finger and Black Out the Sun (31 page)

4

After promising Bobby I wouldn’t throw him in front of a moving car or anything, we practiced the
stop
trick a few more times. The best I could do was slow him down. I could make it seem like he was running through deep mud for a little while. But I never got him to stop. Always the underachiever in these little competitions with Bobby, it seemed.

The next day, we awoke and set out west. But after a paltry breakfast — the stolen snacks in my backpack were going fast — I was in a foul mood. A half-hour later, I was standing motionless in the middle of the road.

“What’s the matter with you today?” Bobby asked.

I was silent.

“Look, Johnny, you’ll get it. The stop trick is just harder, that’s all.”

“It’s not that,” I said.

“Then what?”

I turned to Bobby, not angry with him, but still…
angry
. “Where are we going? West, every day, forever? How far west is he? Will we ever get there? Or did we already pass him?”

Bobby let me rant for a moment. Neither of us knew the answers, so there was no point saying anything that would just start an argument. The moment lingered, until Bobby finally spoke. “What exactly did he say to you? Can you remember?”

I rolled my head around in a circle, nothing if not overly dramatic. “I wasn’t trying to memorize it, but I told you — he said I’d know where to go.”

“Anything else? Anything at all?”

I thought about it, hard. “He said we were both
going in the same general direction
. But I don’t know what that means, either, since he came from Playa Beach, south to the capital, and now somewhere west. I never planned to go west before all this.”

“Keep thinking about it,” Bobby said. I nodded. Figuring out Sol’s location was about the only thing I thought of all day long already.

We plodded on, but our spirits dropped. The high of being back together waned after repetitive days in the hot summer sun. Even my joy at learning new skills was severely tempered by my failure to master the stop trick. We didn’t talk much. We were nearly out of food. And we had no idea where Sol was. Hell, we didn’t even know if we’d be able to find a convenience store to rob before we starved to death.

The following night, as we prepared to sleep, Bobby asked me what had happened between me and Petrus, and without thinking about it too much, I told him the whole story. How I’d first encountered Petrus at the police station, how he had taken me on that long drive, and finally how he’d attacked me.

“But, I knew Petrus,” Bobby said. “He was pretty strong with his mind. How’d you do it?”

“I don’t know. I was just trying to pull back into my own head, make myself small, and something happened.”

“Could you do it again?”

“I don’t know,” I said. But I think even then I knew it was a lie. I had a terrible power inside. It scared me. Could I do it again?
Yeah, I think I could
.

One part of my story stuck with Bobby: the whole thing about me knowing Petrus’s name before I’d actually met him, and knowing about Margrethe, too. “How did you know that stuff?” Bobby asked, both of us staring up at the stars.

I shrugged, about to hide in another lie before I figured there was no point. “Do you want to know the real truth?” Bobby nodded. “I had a dream. It was the night Holly disappeared.” I could feel Bobby shift uncomfortably next to me at the mention of it. “I dreamed about you with Sol, and these others, and even me. All of us were training with Sol, doing little tests and stuff. Petrus was in the dream. So was Margrethe.”

Bobby seemed confused. “But, how? I mean, other than you being with us, that’s what we were
really doing
. How’d you just suddenly get that in your head? It doesn’t makes sense.”

“I don’t know, really. But you wanna know what I think? At least, it’s my theory.”

“More theories, Johnny?”

“Well, it’s not like there’s a user manual for what we’ve got, is there?”

“Guess not. What do you think happened?”

“You took Holly from my house, didn’t you? I mean, you personally. Not Sol.”

“Yeah. At least she knew me. Look, I’m really sor—”

“Stop. That’s not what I’m getting at. I think that when you took Holly, somehow I read your mind.”

Bobby was quiet, frowning. “Well, isn’t that new and different?” he finally said.

“I take it that’s not a skill from Sol’s school for wayward super beings?”

“Definitely not,” Bobby said. He turned toward me. “Can you do it again? Can you tell me what I’m thinking now?”

I concentrated, my eyes boring holes into Bobby’s skull. “You’re thinking… you’re thinking… about a nice pastrami sandwich.”

Bobby rolled his eyes. “Nope. I’m thinking I’m going to bed.”

5

I was asleep. I knew I was, but still things seemed real. Was I reading Bobby’s mind again?

I saw Sol, with Holly — God, it made my heart ache to see her that way — and he was preparing to go somewhere. Somewhere far. He had a maroon minivan, wheelchair accessible, packed with supplies. Sol pushed Holly in and secured her chair.

“Where are you going?” a voice asked. A female voice. I couldn’t see her, but knew who it was. Not the warrior Margrethe, but the dream girl Pip, once again in my dreams. In my mind’s eye, I turned to find her, but she wasn’t there.

“Where I go is my own business for now,” Sol said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “I will send for you when the time comes. For all of you. All you need know for now is that I go west.” He started the engine.

As he began to drive away, I saw my sister looking out the window, directly at me.

I assumed she must have been looking at Bobby, that this was a memory I was somehow stealing from his mind. But her eyes penetrated into me.

It was like that day in the hospital, after the car accident, a day that seemed like a thousand lifetimes ago. She saw through what I was doing.

Somehow Holly could see me.

Still, the van drove off.

Then the dream changed and I was back in the capital, tricking Sol into believing it was me sitting in the park, below that statue. I peered over the edge of the tall building, looking at Sol down below. He approached the hooded figure he thought was me, a step at a time.

Only things were different. Sol reached out, sweeping the hood down to reveal a face: Holly.

Again, she looked directly at me. Not speaking, but seeming to know everything.

Still in the dream, I fell back onto the roof of the building, unable to keep watching.

Finally, I gathered my courage and slowly looked over the edge again.

They were both staring up at me, Sol and Holly, under the statue of General Avery Tulloch on his horse. Only this time, they weren’t in the park. Or they were, but the park wasn’t in the city. It was like I was looking into a life-sized diorama. Sol and Holly were inside the largest box I’d ever seen, three sides of cardboard, with the front open to face me. Their eyes never left me.

I felt the earth begin to shake, and I woke up in a cold sweat.

It was the middle of the night, with a nearly full moon beaming down through the leaves of the trees. Just a couple dozen yards away, the road was empty. The air had cooled down, and moisture was clinging to me, to the rocks, the trees, the grass around me.

I tried to go back to sleep, but for a long time I couldn’t.

Each time I closed my eyes, I saw Holly staring back at me.

Awakening

Disjointed pieces, a puzzle of endless dimension. Yet a boundless knowledge. Slowly pieces click, one after the other.

The answer is there. I can feel it, itching inside my mind.

Tiny whirls and whining sounds, like an orchestra tuning, each instrument seeking the same note until they are all as one. The sound increases, becomes deafening. It proceeds from deepest bass to highest treble, resolving into a sound beyond hearing.

A sound of understanding.

I know.

I know.

6

“I think I know the answer, Bobby.” He was just starting to stir but I’d been awake for more than an hour.

Standing and stretching, Bobby stifled a yawn. “If the question is,
do you have to pee, Bobby?
, then I know the answer, too,” he said, turning to head off into the woods.

“The answer to where we’re going.”

Bobby froze, turning back to me. “Yeah? Where?”

“The desert.”

“Anything more specific? There’s gotta be, like, what, a million deserts?”

“A specific desert. The one where General Avery Tulloch fought.” I rubbed my hands together to warm against the cool morning.

“Who’s
General Avery Tulloch
?” Bobby spoke the name with a sort of puffed-up mockery.

“Let me ask you something different. Were you there when Sol drove off to the west?” Bobby nodded with an almost inaudible
uh huh
. “Was he in a maroon minivan?”

Bobby didn’t answer, instead squinting his eyes at me. “You in my head again, Johnny?”

I shrugged. “Not on purpose. I had a dream last night. Well, more than one. In the first one, I saw Sol and Holly in the van. Then later, I saw them in the capital.”

“But that’s way behind us, back east!” Bobby’s hands flew up.

“The city itself isn’t important. It’s the statue. The one of General Tulloch, where I met Sol — or
sort of met
him —that last time. He told me a story about this general fighting an impossible battle in the desert. In a box canyon. And in my dream, I saw Sol and Holly in a box.”

“Are you psychic now, Johnny?”

I shrugged again. “How the hell should I know? Do you really understand
your
powers?” Bobby didn’t have an answer. “But it makes sense. Sol said I would know, he said we were heading in the same
general
direction. I’m sure that’s where he is.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Bobby said with bristling excitement. “Let’s go!”

I held up a hand. “Couple of problems. First, I don’t remember the name of the desert. Second, the only deserts in this country are like a thousand miles away. It would take us forever to walk there. And third, even if we got there by some miracle, it’s a
desert
. It’s gotta be huge, and it’s supposed to be made up of a bunch of twisted box canyons. I have no idea where they’ll be.”

“I don’t think that last problem is really a problem,” Bobby said.

“How so?”

He came over and sat down next to me, putting an arm around me. “Because Sol
wants
you to come and find him. If we get all the way to that desert, he’s not going to hide. He’s going to draw you right to him.”

“Wow, that’s reassuring,” I said.

“I know, right?” Bobby was all smiles.

* * *

A few miles along, we came to a small general store on the side of the road, and once again we had to steal. Definitely not racking up karma points, but what could we do? Bobby seemed to have fewer qualms about it than I did. We took a paper map of the United States, and a free brochure titled
Granite County: Your Guide to Fun!
I hadn’t heard of Granite County before, and so I was unaware we were smack in the middle of it (and all of its potential
Fun!
) until I leafed through the brochure. It included a handy map of the surrounding area, showing parks, lakes with water activities, an old mine that offered tours, and various towns and hamlets. Ahead of us on our route was a small town called Percetville.

Lucky for us, there were still public libraries, and Percetville had one. (Although in the back of my mind, I wondered why the library was listed on a brochure about
activities
in the county. How sleepy was this place?) It helped that libraries weren’t hotbeds of criminal enterprise, so we hoped we wouldn’t be busted the moment we walked into the place. In fact, we figured that if we cleaned up a bit, the staff might think we were there to do homework. If people were still looking for me, my hair was somewhat longer than it had been the last time anyone had taken my picture, so I was hoping I’d be hard to recognize. Skirting the town proper as much as we could, we eventually weaved our way in and found the Percetville Library.

In the back, there was a single computer. And, of course, it was occupied. A grey-haired man slowly tapped individual keys, doing some kind of search, forcing Bobby and me to look busy among the stacks for nearly an hour. I was too nervous to read anything, but when I finally noticed the old man get up and waved to Bobby to get his attention, I saw that his nose was buried in a superhero graphic novel. “What?” he said, following me to the idle terminal. “It’s sort of like research.”

I opened a window on the computer and started a search for General Avery Tulloch. “Of course,” I said as the information appeared. Butchering the pronunciation, I read the name of the location of the general’s most famous battle:
el Desierto de las Tres Manos.
The Desert of the Three Hands. “That’s where we need to go.”

“Can you look up how far it is?”

“Yeah, hold on.” I clicked a few more options, jumping over to a map. “Crap.” The results stared back at us like a curse.
2,135 miles.
“Gee, that’s only twice as far away as I’d thought. No problem.”

“Awesome! Look!” Bobby pointed the screen where it said
32 hours travel time
. “We can be there in a couple of days.” I spun around to look at him, my expression no doubt conveying what I felt at that moment:
Bobby is as dumb as a box of rocks
. “What? What’s with the look, Johnny?” he asked.

“That’s
driving
time, idiot.” I toggled a button. “There.
Walking
time.”

Bobby looked at the screen again. “Shit.”
684 hours
. “What’s that in terms of days?”

“Well, how many hours do we walk a day?”

“A
lot
.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know, like 14?” I suspected it was actually 12 or less, but to humor him, I pulled up a calculator on the computer and divided 684 by 14. The result was staggering. “Forty-eight-
plus
more days. Of walking. Are you up for that?”

Bobby looked at his feet. Like mine, I suspected they ached. The idea of almost two more months of walking and sleeping in the woods did nothing to raise our spirits. “What the hell are we going to do?” he said. “I mean, is Sol even going to wait that long?”

“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” I said.

We looked at each other, two kids, miles from home, no ideas, no plan of action. I turned off the computer and we walked outside.

At the door, a boy and a girl about our age ran by, coming from a car at the curb. Inside the car, a woman, probably the mother of one or both kids, called out, “I’ll see you in two hours!” The kids waved but didn’t reply.

I felt an intense jealousy. Kids just being kids. No powers, no dangerous encounters, no hiding in the woods. No worries about a journey they had to make but had no idea how to accomplish.

All these kids had to do was get their mom to drive them somewhere they wanted to go.

I froze.

“Hold on,” I told Bobby. “I’ve got it.”