The Dark Side of Nowhere

  I could see everyone watching him, hanging on his words, and absorbing them into their own beliefs.

  “Does any of this make sense to you?” asked Grant.

  Agreements and affirmations filled the room. Some half-hearted, but too many were filled with deep conviction. And not a single voice would contradict him.

  None but mine.

  “No!” The word was out of my mouth before I knew I would say it. “No, it doesn’t make sense. It sounds really good. It almost sounds wise—but that doesn’t make it true.”

  Grant leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Well,” he said, “lucky for us you’re such an expert on truth, Master Miller.”

  There were a few chuckles, but most everyone was quiet, wondering where his would end.

  “I’m not so good at truth,” I told him, “but I know all about lies.” I stared at him, refusing to break eye contact. It was a mistake—because he stared right back at me. Then the expression on his face changed. I could tell the moment he noticed that something was strange about me.

  I stood up. “C’mon,” I told everyone, “let’s get back to the barracks.”

  And Grant said, “No. No, we’ll all stay here for a while.”

  No one moved, and I realized that in a single sentence, Grant had taken away every bit of my power over the Transitionals. If I stayed, I lost. If I left, I lost. And it dawned on me that my power was an illusion. I thought of Paula, and how in the end, I had dumped her—just as he wanted. I thought of that night in his garage, how he had taken our anger against him and turned it around, announcing that there would be no more secrets—as if it had all been his idea. Just as a magician misdirects his audience, Grant had used me to steal everyone’s focus, in a smooth sleight of hand.

  “Jason, could you take off your shirt?” he commanded.

  I just stood there, not daring to do it. Everyone waited, wondering what new trick Grant was going to show them.

  “Jason, please: your shirt.”

  “C’mon, Jason,” said Ethan. “Take it off—what’s the matter with you?” Ethan stared at me with his cold, inhuman eyes, and I knew that he had already shut me out. I had been instantly dismissed from his friendship.

  Slowly I reached down and pulled my shirt up over my head. “There, are you happy?”

  “Turn around, please,” said Grant, and so I did. I turned a humiliating 360 for the group. Grant stood up and looked me over as if with a magnifying glass.

  “Mr. Tyler,” he said. Ty Tyler, the brawniest of us Transitionals, had been sprawled across the counter, yawning like a lion. When he heard his name, he sprung up and bounded to Grant’s side.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I want you to take Jason over to Doc Fuller immediately. I think something’s gone wrong with his treatment.”

  Whispers from the group. Ty Tyler felt the fine fuzz on my shoulder, which was more than a quarter inch shorter than everyone else’s. The look on his face was something between concern and disgust. “Yeah, sure, Mr. Grant.”

  As he escorted me out, I noticed Billy quietly take my seat beside Ethan.

  As we walked down the weed-clogged pavement of our fenced-off camp, I felt like a convict being walked to the gas chamber. Although only my shirt was off, I felt completely exposed and vulnerable. A fine drizzle and an evening breeze made the hairs on my back and neck stand on end.

  “Jason,” said Ty as we approached the small house where Doc Fuller had set up shop, “if y’don’t mind me saying so . . . I think you’re a little touched in the head.” He spun his index finger by his temple, in the universal Crazy Gesture. “I mean, look at us—we’ve all got it made! We got everything good comin’ to us—the only ones in the world who do—and you’re talkin’ like it’s a curse. Well, you know what they say: You shouldn’t kick a gift horse in the mouth, or something like that.”

  We reached Doc Fuller’s, and the doctor said he could see me right away. He led me into his examining room while Ty waited outside, probably pondering facial kicks to gift horses. Doc Fuller’s new office was an odd place. A little bit hometown family practitioner’s, a little bit star-ship sick bay. Reflex mallets and stethoscopes were lined up next to holographic retinal scanners and microdiagnostic thingamabobs. I threw my shirt into a corner, put my training glove up on the sink, then hopped onto the examining table. The doctor glanced at the glove and at me, but said nothing about it. Still, I could tell how surprised he was to see that I, of all people, had not moved beyond the heavy metal monstrosity. The glove was a constant source of embarrassment for me, but even so, I knew that I didn’t want the real thing. I’ve never been afraid to fire a weapon, but that kind of power did not belong at my fingertips. Or anyone else’s for that matter.

  He felt my underdeveloped back hairs and frowned. “You’re not progressing,” he mumbled. “That’s odd.”

  Behind him, I heard the drip of what sounded like a leaky faucet. The door to his laboratory was open, and I caught a sight of a light blue liquid flowing through tubes and distilling through a series of complex processes, until it came dripping down into a sealed flask: our new-and-improved serum. Drip, drip, drip. I could feel my anger powering up again. This kindly doctor, who had seen me through all my childhood diseases, was now brewing potions to turn kids into creatures. He should have been called Doc Frankenstein.

  He looked down my throat, listened to my heart, scanned my retinas, and asked me to cough. Then he asked, “Have you been feeling strange in any way, Jason?”

  “Yeah,” I told him, “I’ve been feeling like an alien.”

  He ignored my answer. “Stomachaches? Shortness of breath?”

  I shook my head. Drip, drip, drip. The sound from the laboratory was like a water torture. The fear and fury of a trapped animal flowed through me, mounting with every drip of the serum distillery.

  The doctor opened a drawer, pulling out a hypodermic and some empty blood vials. “We’ll analyze your blood samples, figure out what’s wrong, and raise your serum dosage. We’ll have you caught up with your friends in no time.” He smiled and wrapped a rubber tube around my arm. “Make a fist.”

  As he dabbed my bulging vein with alcohol, I realized that I was not going to let this man put another needle into my body. With my free hand, I knocked the hypodermic to the ground.

  He snapped his eyes to me, suddenly realizing how desperate I was. Before he could say a word, I took my conveniently fisted hand and swung it across his jaw. He flew backward into his instrument shelf, knocked out with a single blow. The shelf, and Doc Fuller, came clattering down in a cacophony of metal and glass. I wanted to destroy the serum distillery, too, but Ty burst into the room.

  “Hey, what gives?”

  With no time to lose, I grabbed my glove and hurled myself into Ty, whose bulky frame gave just enough for me to push past him. Then I tore out the front door, into a growing downpour.

  “Hey! Stop!” he yelled. “Somebody stop him!”

  Even through the rain, his voice rang as loud as a siren, and the Loyal Order of Transitionals spilled out of the diner like a swarm of bees from a hive. They spotted me instantly, and to my horror they were right between me and the gate. I saw the glow of several gloves beginning to power up. Did they mean to kill me? Had their allegiance changed so quickly—one minute I was their leader, and the next minute I was the hunted? If Grant now saw me as a threat, he could order them to catch me dead or alive. Some of them might not fire—but I knew a few who would.

  I charged into a home and turned right, down one of the connecting corridors that I had helped to build, through another building, then down another corridor. I pushed through the deserted homes that our parents had occupied for such a short time, turning this way and that in the maze of the compound, until I found myself in a dark, derelict home that had not yet been reclaimed from decay. I was at the edge of the compound. The shouts outside grew as the hunt intensified.

  Thinking quickly, I put on my clumsy metal glove and went to
a broken window. In the middle of the street, I could see Grant giving orders and Billy repeating them. I took aim at a window across the street, cocked my finger, and let loose a single shot. The window shattered, and drew everyone’s attention.

  “Over there!” shouted Billy, and they all ran to the home across the way.

  I turned, preparing to head out the back door, but someone was there, standing in my path, glove powered up. I gasped—and then in a moment I realized who it was. It was Wesley.

  “Wes, thank God it’s you!” I said. “Listen, we gotta get out of here.”

  Wesley powered down his glove but didn’t move.

  “Come on!” I insisted. “Don’t you get it? I’m asking you to come with me!”

  “But what’s the point? Where could we go?”

  “Anywhere!” I told him, with growing frustration at his boneheaded lack of momentum. We should have been gone by now. “I’ve got tons of the old serum—we don’t have to become like Ethan! We don’t have to be one of them!”

  “But—Grant—”

  “To hell with Grant!” I shouted in a loud whisper. “He doesn’t own us.”

  Wesley considered that, then said weakly, “I think maybe he does.”

  I didn’t expect that from Wes, but then, lately my friend had lost his former predictability. “Wes, please!” I begged. “Haven’t you figured out what they are? Is that what you want to be?”

  Wesley shifted his weight from foot to foot. “It doesn’t matter what I want to be. . . .”

  “We can fight them!” I told him. “We’re the only ones who can—but first we have to get out!”

  Wes just kept shaking his head, as if trying to wake up from a bad dream.

  “I was wrong,” I admitted. “This world doesn’t belong to us—to them. They have no right to come here and steal it!”

  “I know,” he finally declared. “And I know I should go with you—but the thing is—” Wesley swallowed hard. I could hear the tears in his voice, although I couldn’t see his eyes. “The thing is, I’m not like you, Jason. I’ll never be like you. I’m not that strong.”

  I heard footsteps on wood again, drawing nearer.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he turned and shouted down the dark corridor. “I found him! He’s in here!”

  An icy tightness grabbed my gut. I had no words for this betrayal—nothing I could say to Wesley now—and no time even if I found the words. I took off, running past him, just as the others burst into the room. I wanted to hate Wes for what he had done, but I was too terrified to feel anything else.

  “There he is!” yelled a voice that I knew was Billy’s. The room glowed with the fire of his weapon.

  I burst out the back door, tumbled down the steps and into the dense weeds.

  The fence was before me now. I leaped onto it and scaled it at full speed, then flipped myself over the top, but my pants snagged on a barb, leaving me to hang there like one of the scarecrows in target practice.

  I turned to see Billy, his face wet from the rain. In his hardened expression, I could see that his limited conscience had been killed by weeks of Grant’s rhetoric. He took aim.

  “No!” I swung my arm up in a futile attempt to block, and the blast hit my training glove. Pain exploded from my right arm as I broke free of the fence and fell to the ground.

  With pain searing up and down my arm, and Wesley’s betrayal still churning in my gut, I forced my will into my legs and ran. I refused to look back, not daring to see if they were behind me. Tree limbs whipped at my face and shirtless body, until I came out into the fields beyond Old Town. My feet padded through mud and grass, leaving a trail, but the rain was coming down so hard now, I hoped it would wash away my traces. Just to be sure, I leaped into a creek and followed it for almost half a mile before daring to climb up to the other bank.

  My arm was screaming in pain, and I knew I had to go somewhere to take care of it, but where could I go that they wouldn’t look for me? Only one safe haven they wouldn’t think of came to mind.

  Knowing that Grant and the others might spot me on the roads, I ran over pastures and through gullies, until I came to the neighborhood I was looking for. Drenched to the bone, I jumped over a low fence and collapsed in pain at a kitchen door, then pounded my good fist against it.

  In the light coming from inside, I could see my arm now. The intricately built glove, full of chambers, tubes, and precision mechanisms, was now a fused mass of metal. The entire glove had melted onto my arm. Its metal fingertips had peeled back, revealing painful red fingers. It looked like a steel cast.

  The door opened, and the old woman gasped. “My Lord! What’s happened to you?”

  “Mrs. Pohl,” I said, “I need your help.”

  She peered at me, this time wearing her thick glasses, and suddenly grabbed the doorframe, to keep herself from falling down.

  “J.J.?” she said, bewilderment shooting through every synapse of her brain. “J.J., is that you?” I could see her fighting to make sense of me. “Is that you, J.J.?” In the end, I think her mind chose to protect itself by shutting down a few breakers. She began to act as if this were part of a much longer dream. “But . . . but they told me you were dead.”

  I didn’t know which was worse—to shatter the dream or play along. “Yes, and no,” I told her.

  “Well, you come right inside!” she insisted. “You’ll catch your death of a cold dressed like that.” She helped me up and brought me into her warm, flower-scented home.

  Once inside, she dug out some boy’s clothes that must have been forty years old, from a dresser that must have been filled with things of J.J.’s she refused to throw out. Then she gently cleaned off my fingers and poured alcohol down my metallic cast—which hurt something awful but not as much as I’d thought it would. She asked what happened, and I told her it was something that happened in the war. Then she cooked me a thing called a Monte Cristo sandwich, “With lots of powdered sugar, just the way you like it.”

  Every once in a while, she’d be clipped by a moment of clarity and turn to me, asking, “Who are you, really?”

  “Jason Jonathan,” I would tell her, which was, in fact, true.

  She’d accept the answer, and the moment of clarity would meander away. “Would you like to watch Ed Sullivan? It’s Sunday, don’cha know.”

  As the evening went on, the pain in my arm faded to a dull throb and the tightness in my gut receded. I found myself relaxing, feeling safe, at least for a moment.

  As I lay on the couch, Mrs. Pohl sat in a brightly patterned armchair with her Bible, something I imagined was probably a daily ritual. She noticed me noticing her. “Would you like me to read it to you?” she asked. “Like I used to when you were little?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and then added, “How about the one about the guy who gets eaten by a whale?”

  “That’ll be Jonah,” she reminded me. “And it’s not a whale—it’s a ‘great fish.’”

  She found the Book of Jonah and began to read in a quiet, soothing voice. Behind her voice, I could hear the breeze giving life to a wind chime and further beyond that, a million creatures sang to the night, with the last few raindrops of the storm. I took a deep breath of the home’s flowery air, picking out the scents of rose petals and jasmine. And on the wall, I noticed a silly old Norman Rockwell print, which I recognized from my parents’ coffee-table book. It was a corny thing of a scrawny, nameless kid with his armaround an equally nameless girl with pigtails. I smiled broadly. How dumb, I thought, but still let my eyes slowly pore over its subdued, earthy colors. . . .

  And for a few suspended moments, I was able to trick myself into feeling human. It was a simple state of being that was so incredibly joyful, I wished I could live in the moment forever, sandwiched between the geeky kid and his girlfriend, between the wind chime and rosy air, between the ceiling and floor of a small house, in a small town, in the middle of nowhere special.

  –16–

  BALLISTIC DAWN

>   I don’t remember my dreams that night, but I know they were the first good dreams in a long, long time. I must have been crazy, and this was proof, because in the darkest moments of the worst nightmare of my life, I had found contentment sleeping on an old woman’s couch.

  I awoke that morning to the sweet smell of pancakes cooking, and an early morning tranquility. In that brief moment of pre-wakefulness, I couldn’t recall exactly who or where I was—and that was okay. Unfortunately my sleep-induced amnesia was shattered by urgent knocking at the front door. Everything came rushing back to me, and I groaned, realizing that nothing had ended. This early morning visitor had to be for me; no one knocked like that for a gentle woman like Mrs. Pohl. My arm still throbbed dully, my stomach still rolled in waves of distress, and my will to run had not yet woken up.

  The door rattled one more time before Mrs. Pohl hurried to answer it. She was not happy about this intrusion—any intrusion was a threat to the fragile fantasy I had given her.

  “Who are you?” she said suspiciously as she opened the door. “What do you want here? Are you friends of J.J.’s?”

  Then I heard a voice I was not expecting.

  “You remember me, don’t you, Mrs. Pohl? I’m Paula. I babysat for you.”

  I sat up and brought my knees to my chest.

  “J.J.’s not seeing visitors right now,” said the old woman, “so you just get along.”

  “Please, Mrs. Pohl, if Jason’s here, we need to talk to him.”

  We? I thought. Who was “we”?

  I had my answer in a moment. Paula and Ferrari stepped into the room. I didn’t dare imagine what conspiracy of intrigue had brought the two of them together. Mrs. Pohl eyed us with great concern, then left for the kitchen to deal with pancakes and escape this encounter. There was no such escape for me.

  “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Ferrari informed me, and he explained how he finally asked Paula to help. It was Paula who suggested I might be here. I looked at Paula, but she seemed so guarded, I couldn’t read how she felt about all of this.