For I Could Lift My Finger and Black Out the Sun (7 page)

14

Bobby and I vowed never to return to Mount Trashmore, which was now a vile, terrible place replete with horrors unimaginable. Yeah, sure. You do remember that we were 12-year-old boys, right? We went back as soon as possible the next day.

Walter Ivory was nowhere to be found.

From our normal hiding spot among the pods, we saw his bay was open, but there was no sign of Walter. Our minds turned.

“Oh crap,” Bobby said, bug-eyed. “You don’t think the
dogs
got to him, do ya?”

“What, like
ate
his dead body or something?”

“Yeah!” Bobby nodded.

“Geez, I hope not,” I said. “That’s gross.” Those dogs
licked
me, for God’s sake.

“Then where is he?” Bobby asked, pointing toward Walter’s empty bay.

“He’s gotta be dead, so I don’t know how he could’ve just walked away,” I mused. How does a dead body move? For a moment, I thought of Walter Ivory reanimating, walking himself away as a zombie. I laughed at myself. Everyone knew zombies were hyped-up pop-fiction bullshit. The dogs seemed the most logical option. What else could have gotten to him inside the building?

Bobby hesitated. “What if he’s not dead?” he asked, quietly.

“Come on, you saw it — he slashed his own throat!” I couldn’t believe he was alive, even if he had the same powers Bobby and I did.

Bobby squared his shoulders. “I’m going over to take a closer look,” he announced.

“Are you
nuts
?” But Bobby was already striding down the hall. I hurried to catch up, still protesting, but not too seriously. I wanted to know what the hell was going on, too.

After searching through the open bay, Bobby was convinced. “He’s definitely not here. And look.” He pointed at the rough floor around us.

A large splash of blood had seeped into the cement. I gagged. “Jesus, that’s disgusting.”

“If the dogs dragged him away, the blood would show which way he went. But there’s nothing.” Bobby was right.
Dam
n
.

At that moment, heavy hands grabbed Bobby and me by the backs of our shirt collars. We both let out a startled shout.

“What’re you two doing here?” That voice.
Walter Ivory
. He was alive.

I craned my neck to get a glimpse of his face, and up close I could see the ragged skin of his neck. It was healed, but not just once. There were many scars, knitted and intersecting. Walter must have slashed his throat countless times. We only got to see the first. Or the most recent. Who knew how long he’d been playing this sick game.

Suddenly Walter gave a pained expression as his body shuddered violently. “You…!” he said, staring at us in a strange way, like he recognized us, maybe even was
afraid
of us. He winced, twisting his head like he was hearing some painfully loud noise, then nodded to himself. “I know what to do.” Oh goody. A psychopath had taken a keen interest in us. That sounded like it would turn out well.

He began to pull us in the direction of the elevator.
Oh God, he’s gonna turn us in
, I thought. We dragged our feet and pleaded, but he kept a firm grip on our shirts and forced us to move along. As we went, Walter found a roll of packing tape and snatched it up.

We were pushed into the elevator as Bobby pleaded with him. “Come on, mister, don’t turn us in! We were just looking around! We’ll leave and we won’t come back, promise!” Walter looked at Bobby with a strangely quizzical expression, and punched a button on the elevator. The doors clanged together and we started to move.

Upward.

He had hit the button marked “R.” We were going to the roof.

As the elevator lurched along, we were trapped with him, so he let go of our collars for a minute. Then Walter peeled sections of packing tape and wrapped them around our wrists.

In moments, the elevator doors opened noisily onto the roof. I blinked at the bright, merciless sun as Walter grabbed us each by an arm and dragged us out of the elevator. The roof was surrounded by a low brick wall, and Walter was headed toward the far side. Other than to throw us over the edge, I could think of no reason for him to bring us there. In the middle of the flat roof, I noticed Mr. Gerald’s forklift parked to one side. Pods dotted the surface like an obstacle course.

Walter practically slammed us into the half wall, near a section of metal pipe poking up from the roof. Probably some kind of ventilation. I had to slide the last foot to avoid flailing and falling over the wall. Forget the hammer trick, forget Bobby’s two-story fall. We were eight stories up. The words
terminal velocity
came to mind. Walter snatched first at my hands, then at Bobby’s, using more tape to wrap us tightly to the pipe.

“What do you want with us, mister?” Bobby begged. I just took it all in, wide-eyed with disbelief. Walter ignored the question and walked back to the forklift. Mr. Gerald must’ve left the key in the ignition, because Walter easily got the thing running, then turned it toward one of the large metal pods. As he drove, Bobby tugged hard on the packing tape holding his hands together, binding him to the pipe. “I can’t get out!” he said in a low voice.

Walter slid the tines of the forklift under the pod and lifted it high. Then he wheeled back toward us.

As he drove at us with the pod offered up before him, I could see the look in Walter’s eyes. A focused sort of insanity.

Listen, I’d seen a lot of old movies. I knew what he was doing. He was
sacrificing
u
s
.

I nearly wet myself.

I shouted at Bobby. “He’s gonna
kill us
! Like a ritual or something!”

“Shit!” Bobby responded, ever the intellectual. “Shitshitshit!”

“We gotta get away, somehow.” I pulled hard on the packing tape but couldn’t get free. “Maybe we can rock the pipe loose!”

Bobby strained. “Time it with me!” he said. “Left! … Right! … Left!” It was no use. The pipe was solid. Walter and the forklift arrived directly in front of us, the giant pod looming above our heads, covering us with its ominous shadow. Walter fiddled with the controls and the pod started to lean downward, toward us. In seconds, I could tell it would slide off the forklift tines and we would be crushed.

I had an idea. “Bobby!” I said, gesturing toward my head while turning toward Walter. I used my mind. Told him to
Stop!
For a moment, Walter paused, but only for a moment. He shook his head and continued to move the tines downward. I heard a gritty sound, like the pod was starting to slide. “Bobby, you gotta help me — use your mind to make him stop. Let’s do it together.” It didn’t really hit me at that moment, busy as we were, but later I realized that this was the first time we ever worked our new magic together.

“Okay!” Bobby’s brow furrowed as he mentally forced the command onto Walter. I joined him.

Neither of us had ever tried to push so hard. Even the police officer that I’d persuaded to ignore Bobby’s broken, bloody bicycle was easy in comparison. But Walter was resisting.

I wondered, as I strained at the effort and sweat began to form on my forehead, if it was because his mind was corrupt already.

Then I got my answer.

Under the blunt force of both my and Bobby’s wills, we felt Walter Ivory’s mind
snap
. He fell out of the forklift seat and dropped to the roof, rolling in pain, letting loose terrible animal-like sounds. As he fell, he must have jammed the pedal or pulled at the steering wheel, because the forklift gave a jarring lurch, one of its front wheels bumping up onto the half wall of the roof. The pod stayed balanced on the tines, but slid ever farther toward us.

All we could do was watch Walter writhe, scared by the thought of what we had just done. It was like we’d held a fragile egg in our hands, squeezing and pushing on it to test its limits, when suddenly it burst. Always the punster, I thought to myself,
The yolk’s on you, John!

After what seemed like forever, Walter stopped writhing on the ground. He lay still, face to the rooftop. Then slowly, he stood up.

Walter’s eyes were no longer human. They were a rabid dog’s, a wounded deer’s. They were the eyes of a goat bleating as its throat was cut. He began to rage back and forth, flailing his hands.

“We need to get outta here!” Bobby yelled. “Rock the pipe more!” And we rocked, but still it barely moved.

Walter ran at the forklift, slamming his head into one of the metal tines.

We watched as Walter’s forehead partially caved in, then shifted around the tine. He pulled back and did it again, and again. We could see that the impacts were doing damage, but each time his head quickly healed. And his failure to hurt himself threw him into an even darker rage.

We rocked back and forth, back and forth. The pipe ignored us.

Walter did anything he could to hurt himself, but nothing helped. “Stop the noise! Stop the noise!” Walter repeated it until the words blurred together.

Still we rocked. And, then, unexpectedly, with no warning, the pipe came free and we fell over. We rolled to get out of the shadow of the dangling pod.

Seeing our movement, Walter scrambled back into the forklift. No,
onto
the forklift, up the front lifter mechanism, to the pod hanging above.

He got his hands on a corner of the pod and pulled himself up to its slanting metal top, then set about trying to dislodge it, to send it down upon us.

In terror, we rolled and rolled, trying to get free. The tape twisted and frayed and fell from our arms, leaving the pipe clanging behind. And we heard that gritty scraping sound again. But the pod was moving away from us, toward the roof’s edge. Walter’s weight had shifted its balance. In fact, the entire forklift looked to be leaning precariously now.

Glancing up, I saw Walter give a startled look as the surface he stood on angled too sharply for him to remain on his feet. He slipped to the edge of the pod, dropping to his knees and scrambling for some kind of hold.

For a moment, the whole thing — man, pod, forklift — teetered on the edge.

And then Walter Ivory lost what little grip he had and fell, off the pod, over the side of the building, down eight floors to the pavement below.

I had a split second to think of Bobby’s own fall, and how Walter might have survived.

And then the pod gave in to gravity and slid off the tines and over the edge, following Walter’s descent. To add insult to injury, the forklift, now completely off balance, tipped off the roof as well.

Below, we heard the devastating clangs and crashes as first the pod and then the forklift hit the ground and, presumably, Walter.

Immediately I fell to the rooftop in pain, hardly noticing that Bobby had done the same. Somewhere inside me, there was a screaming. A horrible, pained screaming, like knives stabbing into my ears, only the pain and the sound weren’t actually in my ears. I held my hands to my head in vain. It seemed like it lasted forever.

And then the sound disappeared. It didn’t fade or die out. It was cut off. One instant it
was
and the next it
was not.

Like coming out of a dream, I looked around and found Bobby. He, too, seemed to be waking up from something. He stood, slowly, then staggered to the edge of the building. “He’s gotta still be alive, right?” Bobby asked in a quiet voice. “I mean, nothing was hurting him before. He’s alive under there.”

“I don’t think so,” was all I said, looking over the edge. I didn’t know why, precisely, but I was sure.