“Come here, little miss,” he roared. “Come here!”
I could do that. Or I could try to French kiss a wood chipper. I turned and ran before his leg could clear.
I threw my arms in front of my face and jumped toward the next wall. I didn’t close my eyes, and I watched the wall fly toward me. I saw the inside, the dry wall, the insulation, the two-by-fours, the electrical conduits. It zipped past me in reverse order as I flew out the other side. I landed on my feet in another empty room and kept running. Whoa, capital W. I wasn’t getting used to that anytime soon. Plus, if I only had the ability to run through objects when I was close to fading away, then I didn’t intend to get used to it. Super-powers aren’t so great when they require imminent death. No thanks. Being solid is
five-by-five
.
Another roar exploded from the room next door, reminding me about the whole
run for your life, stupid
thing, and I bent my head and ran.
I didn’t even jump through the next wall. I just flat booked through it, through the next room, and the next. This entire side of the Intensive Care ward looked either empty or semi-permanently shut down. Some of the equipment was covered, and a few of the rooms were completely empty.
And it was getting colder. When I looked down, my legs were almost entirely see-through. I held my hands out in front of me. They were beginning to disappear. I could see the tile right through them.
“Oh God,” I said.
I turned in time to see the wall behind me ripple. A shaft of light blasted through the wall and hit me in the side. It seared into my body, and I screamed as it lifted me and threw me across the room. I went through the wall and crashed to the ground in the hallway. The landing didn’t hurt—it was like crashing onto pillows or a mattress, even though I landed on pure tile over concrete.
I shook my head, jumped to my feet, and ran toward the end of the hallway.
I flew through it, ran through a row of hedges, and came out in the parking lot.
When I looked down, my feet were gone. My legs faded into nothingness right around my calves. I still felt them, though only as good as I could feel anything in the cold. I was going to disappear soon. I knew that without any mysterious phone calls or helpful/murderous men-in-white.
It made me think of the text message as I booked it across the parking lot. “You aren’t going to Heaven.” Was that true? Was there no white light for me?
I felt terror I’d never known before. An immortal terror, a permanent horror.
I wouldn’t let him catch me. I wouldn’t let him take me.
I wasn’t going to just fade away, dammit.
I ran towards the Emergency Room. I didn’t have a
good
idea, but I had an idea. Which would be a fitting quote on my tombstone. I ran through another row of hedges and right through a concrete wall.
I came out in a brightly lit hallway filled with doors. I looked at my hands. Gone, faded away at the elbows. I looked away, trying to quell an animal panic.
No no no. Stop. Stop
.
I had to get warm. Right away. The man-in-white wouldn’t have to do his job if I did it for him.
The hallway was empty, and so I jogged down it. I didn’t notice as a door opened right in front of me. I turned in time to scream and throw my hands up. But I ran right through it and skidded to a stop. I looked for somewhere to hide, but it was too late. When I turned, I saw that the door was being pushed open by an older blond doctor who was staring right at me.
I stood up straight, trying to think of some excuse for not having a lower body. He saw me pass right through the gurney, right through the door.
A black, middle-aged doctor came out of the door behind the blond one and shook his head.
“I’m sorry” he said.
“Yeah,” the blond guy said, looking back into the room.
They weren’t looking at me. His eyes passed right over me. I was almost too terrified to look down, but when I did, my breath caught. I was completely gone. The sense of looking down at the nothing where my body used to be gave me a tilting sense of vertigo. The urge to vomit bubbled up inside of me. Vomit what? From
where
?
I wasn’t anything anymore. When I looked up again, color dripped down the walls, fading, dying. The taupe walls turned grey, the doctor’s straw-colored hair bleached out, and the other doctor’s skin turned the color of ash.
They both glowed with warmth. I had to take them. I had to live.
I ran toward the blond doctor, but just a foot from him, I skidded to stop.
Heat blasted out of the room they had just exited, a blistering furnace-full. I walked into the room. An old man, frail, broken, lay on the hospital bed. Specks of blood spattered his lips, and his eyes were wide open.
He was dead. I’d never been so sure of anything my whole life. And his soul was gone. I knew the body to be just a husk, just a casing. But the room baked. Warmth bounced off the walls, and here the color hadn’t faded from the world yet.
I wasn’t sure how to do it.
I took a deep breath, and the heat hit my lungs like a gunshot. It blasted through my body, filling me with images and feelings and words I couldn’t decipher. The heat melted every last shard of ice and poured strength back into me. I stumbled back, managing to catch myself on a handicap-assist bar on the wall.
The bar was cold. The bar was solid.
“Oh God,” I whispered. “I’m alive.”
I closed my eyes, basking in the glow. It wasn’t until I opened them again that my smile faded. The dead man stared up at the ceiling he would never see again. I walked toward him, hesitantly at first, but the closer I got the more familiar he seemed. I felt like I knew him, like I knew everything about him. I just couldn’t decipher any of his memories, I couldn’t separate the images.
I touched my fingertips to the back of his hand.
“Thank you,” I said, and my voice broke. “Thank you so much.”
I reached up and closed his eyes.
With the ice banished, I felt whole in more ways than one. I felt alive—I felt like a person again.
The two doctors were nowhere in sight, and the hallway was empty. I slid down the hallway in the opposite direction from where I’d entered.
None of the man-in-white’s fear washed over me, which I took as a good sign. Somehow I was able to sense his presence, that primal fear I’d felt from that creepy white car and now in Kent Miller’s room, and I felt none of it at that moment. Still, he'd been further away in the parking lot at the grocery store when I felt the fear, and much closer back in the hospital room. Could he
dim
himself, when he needed to?
He could still be standing outside, watching everything from the parking lot. And maybe he could sniff me out like I could sniff him out.
Could I
dim
myself in response?
Stop second guessing
. I passed through the foyer, and the nurse at the desk, who didn’t look very different from the nurse at the other desk, gave me the hairy eyeball but said nothing. I looked down at my badge, flicked it, and snickered softly.
The nurse gave me another eye.
What the hell.
I turned and stuck my tongue out at her as I backed through the front doors into the cool night.
My bravado evaporated. As soon as I passed the doors I hunkered down next to a line of hedges and stared across the parking lot. Just little spots of yellow light and old cars.
I checked my gut.
Nothing.
No animal-panic, no sense of urgency. I stayed low, trying to work my way over to where I thought I’d stashed my bike. I stayed behind hedges, next to cars. If I had a machine gun and a whole lot of camo, I could have passed for Special Forces. You know, in the Barbie Dream Army.
I was still wearing pink sneakers. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity.
Behind one hedge, I tugged out my phone and set it to vibrate. There was no way in heck some random phone call by Morgan or Daphne was going to be responsible for my ultimate doom. I’d seen too many horror movies, or maybe just enough, because there was no way I was being so lame. I would have turned the phone off completely, but the last two text messages had saved my life, and I didn’t want to cut off the pipeline to my mysterious stranger/savior just yet.
I saw the handlebars to my bike sticking out of a hedge, next to a Ford Ranger just across the way. I’d have to pass over a large open patch of ground to get it, though.
Ah hell with it.
I flew across the blacktop on my pink sneakers, abandoning all attempts at stealth. There were only two noises as I sprinted with everything I had—my shoes scraping asphalt, and my breath coming fast and sharp.
Halfway across the stretch, another sound joined it. An engine roaring to life. The engine of a white Lincoln Town Car with green tinted windows, as a matter of fact. It pulled out of a parking spot at the end of the row and whipped toward me. The headlights came to life, bathing me in their yellowed glow. I didn’t deer-it—I never stopped running.
I leaped across the last hedge, tripped, and rolled across the asphalt on the other side. I felt my hand, my back, and my shoulder scrape hard against the ground. My hand shot into the bushes and I yanked the bike out as hard as I could. Twigs snapped, and I had to throw my whole body weight to pull the rest of it out. I collapsed back on the ground again, but got the bike up within seconds.
The Lincoln squealed and long peels of smoke scooted out from its tires. The fear hit me, filled my mouth with saliva and bubbles and screams, but I jumped onto the bike and raced across the parking lot. I pulled myself up and rode between a little blue sedan and a black van just as the Lincoln roared past behind me. I heard its brakes shriek, but by then I was on the other side of the lane.
I shot between two more cars into another lane, then another, cutting across the parking lot in a way no car could compete with. I could hear the Lincoln far behind me on the other side of the lot, trying to navigate the twisting lanes at speed while at the same time trying to figure out which lane I was in.
I cut across the rest of the parking lot and rode down the driveway. The handlebars jumped in my hand as I came off the curb, and the front wheel tried to twist and buck me. I yanked one way, then the other, just barely maintaining my balance and only just preserving my skull from a high-speed fracture.
Hey, Ma, look at me. Regular BMX superstar.
I cut across every lane of traffic and flew up the driveway of a closed-down strip mall. The street was only lightly busy—a car every ten to twenty seconds, and I didn’t need any hair-raising, death defying stunts to get across. Which I was glad for, because any stunts of mine on a bike would only shortly thereafter be followed by epic failure and death.
I raced around the strip mall through back alleys and other places way too small for any car, much less a Lincoln. Had my would-be-murderer been rolling in a Smart Car, I might have had some work on my hands.
The man-in-white’s face floated through my mind, twisted and screaming and pouring smoke out of his eye, while I stashed the bike away in my dad’s shed and marched up the steps of the back door. I was hot, sweaty, and my hair probably looked equal-parts wind-blown and greasy. I went to the kitchen sink first to wash my hands and splash some water on my face.
When I turned around, Dad was walking into the kitchen. I glanced up at the clock—9:30.
Oh crap.
“Lucy,” Dad said, and leaned against the wall. His white dress shirt was half-in half-out of his slacks, and he looked exhausted.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, trying to sound perky. It wasn’t hard with the adrenaline cranking my heart up to a thousand beats a minute. “Rough day?”
Dad smirked. “Why, thank you. You look pretty put-together yourself.”
I curtsied.
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. He was small-talking, it was obvious. He’d work his way somewhere soon though, I knew. “Just really behind. Damn internet shouldn’t even be connected to my work computer.”
“I dig that,” I said. “My Journalism class is the same way.”
Dad nodded. He’d been working from home for a good ten years now, and he knew the dangers inherent with it very well. Not being
at
work, having access to the fridge, the internet, video games, DVDs, books, and movies made actually
working
painfully difficult. Still, he provided for most of the income with his essays and his articles, so it was hard to be mad at him.
The other danger from working at home was more insidious, we’d all come to realize. When you liked your job, it was hard to keep the line between work time and home time less-than-blurry. Sometimes Dad would work late into the night because he enjoyed it, but that left us without what you might call quality time.
And he looked like he’d been working overtime.
“You missed dinner again.”
He didn’t look happy to bring it up. My dad could be a hard ass, but if he was exhausted, getting mad was too much of an effort.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just had a great ride.”
“Dinner?” he asked.
I sighed.
“Sorry, Dad.”
He made a face. “No, I meant, want to get dinner? I missed it, too.”
A wide grin spread across my face—I couldn’t help it.
“Is that why you’re being so lenient? Cause Mom busted you?”
“Your mother and I are a unit,” he said. “We come to agreements as one entity, and aren’t subject to petty squabbles.”
“You must really be in trouble,” I said and set my hands on my hips.
Dad’s lips twisted, and he nodded. He ran both hands through his ruffled hair in a failed attempt to smooth it back into its Ronald Reagan shape. He glanced at the hallway mirror, sighed, and yanked the bottom of his shirt completely out of his pants. It made him look less dressed up, but it also made him less disheveled. It…
sheveled
him? Hmm. Something to think about.
“Chinese?”
Dad nodded. “Perfect.”
I ran to my bedroom while Dad went to start the car. We were just heading out to grab a quick bite, but I had to do something about my appearance. Rat’s nest hair, beet-red face, hands shaking from extreme adrenalin poisoning. I looked like the bride of Dracula.