Kinetics: In Search of Willow (27 page)

"Not really." I shook my head and
looked toward the window.

"Ok. Let me know if you do." Harry got
up and crawled back into his bed. He pulled the covers over him and
disappeared. "Hooverville in the morning?" His muffled voice
asked.

"Yeah. Sounds good." I said. But I
didn't sleep for the rest of the night.

***

“
You’re sure?” Jacob
asked, almost ashamed that he was in shock.

“
It’s got their hands all
over it.” Joe said. He looked at Napoli as he was nodding. “Your
brother for one, I swear, he’s more and more like you every
day.”

Jacob chose to ignore that. “The
driver?”

“
Badly burned, third
degree over his whole body. Witnesses said that they saw two boys
run from the scene not long before the whole thing and the guy
caught fire. I doubt they really know what they did.”

Jacob chuckled to himself. His little
brother had a soft heart, and if he thought he seriously injured
someone, he probably wouldn’t live it down.

“
Alright, Eugene, showing
me something more interesting every day.” He laughed and waved at
Napoli and Joe to show him the rest of what they found. It was only
a matter of time now. He would be seeing his brother in person real
soon.

CHAPTER 20

“
The gates of Hell are
terrible to behold, are they not?”

~ E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a
Gadfly

Hooverville was not what I expected.
It was a shanty town and not the high end facility I had come to
expect out of the Alliance. There were obvious signs of Alliance
presence. What few flag poles I had seen had three flags on them,
the United States flag, the New Mexico flag, and an Alliance flag.
Men and women openly wore the tan and black Alliance uniform in the
streets, regularly patrolling the border of town and the few
crisscrossed streets.

What little we could see from the
outskirts of town was enough to tell us to keep our heads low. If
anyone knew my face it would be the Alliance people in Hooverville.
The one road in and out of the town was guarded by a tiny building
with a gate blocking entrance or exit. There was no fence, but
where was there to run? There was nothing for miles around. Harry
and I had carefully hitched a ride with an elderly couple close
enough to be within walking distance of the town, but other than
the tiny collection of buildings, there was nothing but distant
hills and deserted land.

Dirty children played in the
pockmarked streets, and their parents watched from behind dusty
curtains and shredded paper blinds. What few adults we could see
walked toward a tall building on the other side of town. The houses
inside weren't really houses; they were pieced together from parts
of other houses, random assortments of metal sheeting and plywood.
I felt like I was not seeing a town in America but a slum from some
third-world country.

We wandered the edge of town, trying
to gauge what the town was all about, but by nightfall we had
little to show for our day in the dust, dry shrubs and
bushes.

I took the time then to call up
Nick.

"This town is run by the
Alliance. Everything that comes in or out is by their
order."

"Why would they maintain a town at
such a poverty level?" Harry asked. I had the phone on speaker and
we both sat down behind an outcropping of rock to listen to
Nick.

"I would have to say that
the majority of the funding that goes into the Alliance is put into
the military. Who cares about some sideshow town where they shove
the miscreants and troublemakers who have no societal
use?"
 Nick replied.

"Why doesn't the InfoCon just use
their powers to rewrite their memories?" I asked. "They don't seem
to have any problems with that."

"They are under the
impression that a trouble maker is always a troublemaker no matter
what you've done to his or her memory. A first-gen child will
continue to make mistakes as his or her powers grow and change, and
any one of those mistakes could lead to the outing of our
society."

"That seems really strange." Harry
said, drawing his knees closer to his chest. A slight breeze was
beginning to bring a chill with it.

"
It would to an outsider, but it's the way we've done things
for centuries."

"That still doesn't make it right."
Harry said.

"No,"
 Nick said, and I heard the sigh over the
phone. 
"No, it doesn't. But to change
the infrastructure of such a large organization…"

"Near impossible." Harry finished the
thought.

"Why do you think Marcus brought
Willow here?" I asked.

"I don't
know."
 Nick
said. 
"Nothing I'm coming up with can
give me any indication of why the guy was interested in it. It
really is just a place where the Alliance keeps it troublemakers.
No more, no less."

"It sounds more like a prison than
anything." Harry said.

"You know, you probably
wouldn't be far off. I've never been to the place myself but the
stories I've heard come from it are less than cozy."

"I'll say." I said, thinking of the
little kids who probably had to live in the barely there
houses.

"What are you all going to
do?"
 Nick asked.

I glanced at Harry. "I think we're
gonna try and look around the town a bit and see if anyone saw
Willow… and then I guess we're going to head straight to
Laramie."

"Great. Stay out of
trouble,"
 Nick said.

"We will." I said. "Bye."

Harry and I had no way to get back to
Roswell, but Harry had anticipated a night camping and had brought
stuff to make a small tent out of. We set up camp a small distance
from the town as the night took over the sky.

The town was pretty quiet, but there
was enough activity that next morning we hoped to not go noticed.
The sky was unusually dark with bloated rainclouds hugging the
western horizon. I crossed my fingers that it would pass us by. We
were not equipped to deal with a rainstorm right now.

We entered the town on the farthest
corner, out of sight of the one outpost by the road in and far
enough away from the tall building on the other corner, that we
didn't feel like we could be seen.

This early in the morning, the only
Alliance person we saw was a guy who was probably supposed to be
watching the street, but instead he was sitting in a chair, chin to
chest, eyes closed and feet resting on another chair. We slipped by
him easily.

In the middle of the town the sights
were even worse. Some of the shacks didn't even have doors. The
people in the streets wore dirty and unkempt clothing. We were
covered in enough dust and dirt from traveling that, if it weren't
for our backpacks, Harry and I would have fit in
perfectly.

Harry was about to start speaking to
me when he stopped. He was watching something behind me, and I
turned to see a girl walking toward us. There was no hesitation in
her walk and she came right up to us, letting out a breath that
must have been held in too long. "I know who you are." Her eyes
glinted.

I stared at her in a state of shock
for a few seconds. Her blue eyes flickered back and forth between
Harry and me and only stopped on me when I made the first
move.

"What do you mean?" I asked, running
my tongue around my mouth to try and get rid of the desert that had
taken up residence there.

She stared at me, her intense eyes
revealing nothing of what she was thinking. But then, I saw a break
in her composure. Her face contorted into a distressed expression
and she clenched her fists.

"You… you're Eugene. I went to the
same high school as you back in Ohio." She said, eyeing Harry,
too.

It was only then that it hit me.
"Laura?"

"Yes," Laura gasped and grinned.
"You're different, like me?"

I blinked. "Uh, I guess
so."

"I never thought I would see anyone
again from school. I thought I was going to be stuck here forever!"
She clapped her hands happily. It was strange, knowing she didn't
really leave school on happy terms.

"We're really just passing through."
Harry replied.

"Passing through?" She stared at him.
"No one just passes through. Unless you're one of them." She
pointed to the Alliance guy still asleep in his chair.

The tension in the air was rising.
Laura's eyes never deviated from mine. She seemed like she was
trying to convey some feeling to me through just her gaze. I felt
something crawl through my mind and I stepped back.

"Stay out of my head," I
snarled.

She stared me. "What are you doing
here?"

I was at a loss for words, shaking my
head.

Laura turned her intense stare on
Harry, the gaze flickering with an accent of distaste. "You know
what it's like. What's it's like to be… like this." She rubbed her
arms as if she was cold, and stared up at the sky. "Why are you
here if not to be imprisoned like the rest of us?"

"Like we said. Just passing through,"
Harry said.

"I think what Harry means," I
interjected in the hopes of curbing what looked like a wave of
hostility between them, "is what you would have us do. Sure, we're
'passing through,' but what do you need from us that you can't get
here?" My efforts at being diplomatic had at least a small effect
and the tension between the two visibly lessened.

I hid an exhausted sigh and waited for
Laura to respond. She seemed like she was having a hard time coming
up with a response. Her mouth twitched with words that died before
they ever left the confines of her mouth and her body shook with
uncertainty.

"I don't—I can't—" she started many
times but never finished. But finally a coherent sentence came out
so quietly I thought briefly that I had imagined that she had
actually spoken. "I want to go with you."

"What?" I asked, even though I
understood the request, it seemed so absurd that I didn't know what
else to say.

"No," Harry said before Laura had a
chance to elaborate.

"Please," she cried suddenly and
grabbed my arm, holding on so tight I thought that my blood was
being constricted. "I don't want to be here anymore. I don't want
to be different."

I opened my mouth to deny her, but
something desperate in her eyes tugged at me. I caught Harry's eye,
and he gave a microscopic shake of his head. We couldn't take her
with us. It was too dangerous for her and most especially for
us.

"We can't take you with us," I shook
my head and tried to ignore the desperate tears in her
eyes.

"I can help you! I… I can use my
powers to help you. I can make people do things." Her entire
physical being was pleading with me and me alone. Somehow she
believed me to be the one to make appeals to because she hardly
gave Harry a second glance.

I stopped to consider her offer.
Despite the bad consequences of taking her with us, it would mean
that we could get to Wyoming even faster, and by way of that, I
would be closer to saving Willow.

"Let me talk to him for a
moment." Harry stepped between us and pulled me away. Laura watched
us walk away, the desperate look in her eyes only increasing with
every step we took away from her. She turned abruptly and walked in
the opposite direction of us, distance
increasing ever more. Harry finally stopped and waited until
Laura had disappeared behind a line of shacks to speak.

"I don't like this one bit," he said.
He bit his bottom lip so tight that it turned a ghostly white under
the pressure.