CHAPTER 44
Vessler waited for them at the Jeep, which he’d parked in a dark alley behind a Blockbuster Video. Matt and Scott, the bulky shape of the filter right behind them, flickered out of the shadows, and as Vessler came forward he immediately saw that Scott was hurt.
Tightly he said, “Get him into the car.”
Matt carried Scott to the Jeep, the sight and sound and smell of Brenda Jorden still buzzing in his head like a band saw. His physical reaction was noticeably diminished, and he felt grateful for that. He tried twice to make his tongue work before he could say anything.
“Fields hit him accidentally. I think his jaw might be broken.”
Vessler came around and took Scott from him, placed him gently and carefully on the back seat. Not the way someone handles a possession, either; Matt could tell in an instant that Vessler loved the boy dearly. The mask hid his surprise. There was clearly more to Vessler than first impressions indicated.
Matt hefted the filter and slid it into the back of the Jeep.
Scott breathed, but only shallowly, with ice-cold and clammy skin.
“What should we do with him?” Matt asked. “Get him to a hospital?”
Vessler paused with the back door open. “No. The group would find out. I can set his jaw, if it needs it. We need to get him somewhere private. And safe.” He looked pointedly at Matt.
Matt’s eyes narrowed behind the white mesh. “I can’t take him back to the basement. If I had to leave, you couldn’t get in or out. Besides, there’s no electricity, and I’m assuming this thing,” he nudged the filter, “needs a wall socket.”
Vessler didn’t like that. “Hhmmm...fine. Another motel, then, I suppose.”
Matt shook his head, not in disagreement, but in an attempt to dislodge the last lingering effects of Jorden’s scent. His head felt stuffed with foam rubber. “I guess.”
“All right. Follow me, then, since I’m sure you don’t want to be seen with me in a car. With or without the mask.”
Matt nodded. “Go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”
Driving away, Vessler tried to see in the rearview mirror the exact moment when Matt flickered out, but missed it, and only saw shadows.
# # #
Diedra couldn’t decide whether to be insanely frightened or insanely envious—and she couldn’t tell if either feeling was genuine, considering her recent lack of sleep. The last time her sleep patterns had been so thoroughly mucked up was the spring semester finals week of her senior year at college. Her eyes had popped open at 3:30 this morning, and she couldn’t get them to stay closed; now it was just past four, and she was wired tight.
What happens when fantasies come true? What happens when you know someone who actually can fly? She pushed the button and waited for the elevator.
Well, maybe Matt couldn’t fly, per se, or turn invisible, or any of the other things people in the movies and on TV could do. Diedra remembered reading The Fantastic Four as a little girl, and how much she wanted to do what Sue Storm could do. The Invisible Woman. Flying all over the world, fighting crime with Mr. Fantastic and The Thing and The Human Torch. For years she’d sometimes lulled herself to sleep imagining what she would do if she could project invisible force fields. Maybe puncture the tires on the school bus...or mangle the locks on the doors at school so they wouldn’t open...or knock Jerry Nardo’s feet out from under him when he tried to touch her.
But she wasn’t a kid anymore, and this wasn’t a fantasy. She’d seen Matt do it. Had him repeat it, in fact, and she couldn’t deny it. After all the initial hysteria, after the painful process of warping a new convolution into her brain so she could accept it, she’d come to a single, possibly irrational conclusion.
Matt’s teleportation was without question the coolest thing she’d ever seen.
In the hours since she’d last spoken to him, Diedra had gone through hundreds of practical applications for his talent, ticked them off on a mental list. He could do virtually anything. Because sooner or later, no matter what, the lights went out everywhere.
They couldn’t keep him in a cell. Lights out, and poof, he’s gone.
He could take anything he wanted, from anywhere. Just wait till the store closes, poof, he’s in, poof, he’s out, and nobody knows any better.
He could save a real bundle on air fares. Wait till the sun goes down, and then poof poof poof right across the country. The Amazing Poofing Man.
And dammit—why couldn’t she do it too?
Why him, and not her? Why couldn’t she have been chosen, if that was the word? Seven years ago...that would have put her smack in the middle of her fifteenth year, and God in Heaven, could she have used something like this. Fifteen was a bad age for anybody, and having braces and a weight problem hadn’t helped her at all.
The elevator pinged and opened. Diedra got in the car and pushed the button for Matt’s floor.
She found thinking about Matt’s talent easier than thinking about her feelings for him—or thinking about the emotional bear trap he was caught in with Glory.
Not that she really needed to think about her feelings. She knew how she felt. She knew how stupid it was, to feel this way about a guy who obviously had serious problems relating to...well, to anyone, and was married, for crying out loud. Well, sort of married. But again, that was a bottomless well of guilt she didn’t feel like dipping into just then.
Matt was also the most gorgeous, most exciting man she’d ever met. And there it was, there she went, head and heels and everything, and she knew if she didn’t talk to him soon her brain would spin right out of her skull.
The elevator door slid open, and she stepped out into Matt’s hallway. It was deserted. With her ring of keys clutched in one lightly perspiring hand, Diedra went to his door, rapped sharply five times and stepped back to wait. After a minute had passed, she knocked again and said, “Matt? Hey Matt, are you home?”
More silence.
Would he like to find her waiting for him again? Wouldn’t it be very different now, since she knew about him?
Her hand trembling slightly, Diedra unlocked Matt’s door and let herself inside. He’d left the lights off—not surprising, since he seemed to see in the dark just as well as in broad daylight—and she flipped on the living room’s overhead fixture as the door clicked shut behind her.
A young man dressed in black, wearing Matt’s dark gray raincoat, leaned against the back of the couch with his arms crossed over his chest, watching her.
The mugger from the park. Simon.
He grinned and said, “Hello there.”
Diedra whirled around to jerk open the door, but as her hand touched the knob something like a cold white whip lashed across her knuckles and her fingers went numb. Then the same whip-thing curled around her throat, cinched tight, and jerked her off her feet.
She crashed to the floor hard on one shoulder, and the impact sent splinters of pain through her arm and neck. She rolled onto her side as the whip-thing uncoiled from her throat, only to find her cheek pressed against the side of Simon’s boot. She glanced up in time to see his face begin to contort before he drew the boot back and drove it forward, into her face. Agony speared through her as her nose crunched inward, and immediate tears blinded her.
“You’re not who I was looking for,” Simon croaked out. His voice was grotesque, razor-edged. Even through the pain it sliced along her nerves. “But you’ll do just fine.”
The whip-thing encircled one arm, then the other, and Simon hauled her to her feet. Diedra blinked rapidly and tried not to cry out or choke on the blood filling her nose and mouth. Her vision at last cleared enough for her to get a good look at the man holding her, and she took it all in in a flash: the needle teeth, the white-on-black eyes, the finger-tendrils extending from grossly lengthened forearms.
“No, oh God, oh no,” Diedra whispered, and tried to look away from him, but couldn’t. His mouth writhed and shrank back into something closer to normal.
“Pray if you want to,” he said. Still through needle teeth, the words couldn’t have been produced by anything human.
With a grunt, Diedra drove her knee upward into his groin as hard as she could, and felt her kneecap bash through the softer tissues and connect solidly with his pelvic bone.
As though his hands were loaded with explosives, Diedra flew across the room away from him. She crashed into the wall next to the coat closet, hard enough to leave a head-and-shoulders indentation in the wall, and her vision dimmed momentarily—but she refused to lose consciousness and struggled to her feet. Blood poured down her face and onto her shirt, and she held one sleeve to her nose to try to stop the flow.
Simon lay curled on his side on the floor, his hands shoved between his legs. The finger tendrils had distended crazily, spinning out to twig-like strands more than a yard long. He started chewing on the carpet.
Her instincts screamed run—but she wanted to finish the encounter, not prolong it, and she paused at the door. Not for a second did she believe one knee to the groin would put Simon out of action for good. With what felt like quarts of adrenaline pumping through her, Diedra didn’t stop to think at all about the insane distortions Simon’s body went through as she watched. She saw him only as a threat. Beyond that, she saw him as a threat specifically to herself and to Matt. If she ran, he’d only chase her down. She needed to deal with him. Not just escape from him.
Diedra took a step toward the kitchen, looked around for a likely weapon, saw a rack of knives and started toward it.
She never got there. Simon’s eyes fixed on her, and one arm shot out. The impossibly thin tendrils of his left hand wrapped around her ankle like steel wire, and as he pushed himself up off the floor, he pulled her feet out from under her and dragged her to him. Simon still breathed heavily, but he no longer seemed to be in pain.
“I wouldn’t have hurt you,” he said into her face. His breath smelled like raw hamburger. “Well, actually, I probably would have.” Two tendrils snaked over her eyes and lips. “But there was at least a decent chance I wouldn’t have. Now you’ve made it a certain—”
He would have finished the word, but Diedra caught one of the tendrils between her teeth and bit cleanly through it.
Simon’s blood, thick and nearly black, sprayed out of the tendril as though from a high-pressure hose. Diedra had time to spit a mouthful of blood and the severed bit of finger back in his face before the tendrils from his other hand wrapped completely around her head. The short length of still-twitching finger stuck to Simon’s cheek like a leech.
He heaved her off the floor using only the grip on her head, and she both felt and heard her neck pop.
“You bitch!” Simon screamed, and slammed her head against a wall.
“You fucking bitch!” He did it again, with greater force. She went somewhere past pain.
Somehow, in the flailing, her hand found something hard and heavy, possibly a bookend. Her fingers closed around it, and the muscles in her arm tensed to swing it, but then Simon rammed her head into the wall again, and whatever it was fell out of her grip. Crazily the apartment tilted away, and she tumbled slowly into a dark, wet place.
AUTHOR'S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION.
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1 comments:
Things have been..."hectic" isn't the right word...that would be like calling Bruce Lee "kind of tough."
Which is why I'm a day late with this...again...
But I'm hoping, in about four weeks' time, to have the biggest career-related news of my life to report. Will that be a discussion of my book? No. Will I talk about it here anyway? Undoubtedly.
Nothing like a month's worth of pins and needles.
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