“Guys,” she
said. “Come on—” but then she stopped. She could hear her own voice,
kind of. It sounded very faint, though. It was like the cylinder was
absorbing sounds. She picked up a rock and threw it at the wall. She saw it
hit, but didn’t hear anything.
“Guys!” she
shouted, as loud as she could. It sounded like a whisper. The boys didn’t
even turn around.
This place was
weird, and creepy. Two very good reasons to leave. She headed towards them,
intending on grabbing them and dragging them out if she had to. That was when
she noticed she could see her father’s bones, his skull, his rib cage, the two
thin bones in his forearm.
It was like he
was being x-rayed. It was like in a cartoon when someone sticks their finger
in a light socket. Then she realized she could see his bones because they were
burning bright green—and because his skin and most of his flesh was
already gone.
She rushed
forward, not even thinking about what she was doing, and grabbed Brent. He was
staring at Dad and didn’t seem capable of moving. His eyes looked strange and
his skin was glowing. Whatever had happened to Dad was starting to happen to
him, too.
Maggie looked
down at her hands. Green fire covered them as if she were burning up. Yet she
didn’t feel hot at all—it just tingled.
She picked
Brent up and threw him over her shoulder. Then she ran.
Dad was dead.
He was dead. He was dead! She thought he had to be. Because if he
wasn’t—
“Oh my God, we
have to go back for Dad,” Brent howled, beating on his sister’s back. She had
thrown him over his shoulder and he could see behind them—all he could
see was the dark mouth of the cylinder, and a hint of green fire inside. “We
have to go back!”
“Brent,”
Maggie said, very quietly.
“We have to!
He could be really badly hurt! Turn around, Mags!”
“Brent.”
“He probably
can’t walk, but we can make a travois, it’s only a couple of hours back to the
car and then, and then we can drive to a hospital, it’s a long way, but—”
“Brent!”
“Just put me
down, and I’ll go back for him, I know he was really hurt, I know it looked
really bad, but you gotta—Mags—you gotta go back and—”
“Brent,
please,” she said, and stopped running. She knelt down and laid him gently on
the ground. “Please stop. Please just stop and think for a second.”
He fought her.
He fought as hard as he could, because his dad’s life depended on it. “No,”
he said, and shook his head. He felt like a baby refusing to eat mushed peas.
He felt immature and like he wasn’t being realistic, but—Dad! Dad was
back there!
“He’s dead,”
Maggie said. Over and over until he started believing it. “Dad’s dead.”
When he opened
his eyes again they were walking through the desert. The sun had set and the
moon was up. He shook himself, unable to understand how he’d gotten
there—a lot of time had to have passed but it felt like he’d just closed
his eyes for a second. It was like his brain had just shut off, turned itself
off because it couldn’t handle what was going on, and he had just started
walking, his body moving by autopilot.
He stopped in
his tracks. After a second, Maggie, who was a couple strides ahead of him,
stopped too. “Where are we going?” Brent asked.
“Back to the
camp. I need to make a phone call. Listen, Brent, you need to let me be in
charge right now, okay?”
“I want to go
back.” When she sighed he shook his head. “I know he’s dead, now. But I want
to find out why. You and I got burned too, but I don’t feel like I’m hurt, and
you look just fine.”
She stared at
him for a while. Then she said, “Better than fine.”
He didn’t
understand.
In a slow,
steady voice, the kind adults use when explaining complex things to children,
she said, “I had a pimple. On my neck. It was there this morning. It was
almost ready to pop, but not quite. It kind of hurt, especially when I got out
in the sun and started sweating.” She lifted her hair away from her neck and
showed him the clear, unblemished skin there. “No pimple now.”
“That green
fire—burned off your zit?” he asked.
“Something
did. And I had blisters on my feet, too, because these boots are a year old
and my feet got bigger since we bought them. The blisters hurt like hell.”
“And?”
She rolled her
eyes. “They’re gone now. My feet still feel squashed. But it doesn’t hurt
anymore.”
Brent touched
the underside of his chin. He had cut himself shaving there the day before.
It was one of his first times shaving and he hadn’t gotten used to it yet. The
nick and the razorburn had been agonizing in the desert heat. Now they were
gone.
“What does it
mean?” Brent asked.
“I have no
clue!” Maggie shouted. Her voice rolled across the landscape, echoing off a
line of cliffs. “Let me be in charge, okay? I promise I’ll keep you safe.
I’ll get you home.”
Brent’s throat
closed up suddenly and he wondered if it was a delayed reaction to the green
fire, if he was suddenly dying. But no. A tear worked its way out of the side
of his eye. “Home,” he croaked. “We don’t have a home anymore. We’re—”
“Orphans,” she
said. “Yeah. Which means we have to stick together. And because I’m the
oldest that means I’m in charge and you do what I say. Got it?”
He nodded
carefully.
They didn’t go
back. Instead they pressed on, toward the camp. The desert by moonlight was
made of silver in a million different shades. There was enough light to see
where they were putting their feet, but they stayed clear of the long shadows
that were impenetrably dark.
It was a long
hike. They should have been asleep by now, safely wrapped up in their sleeping
bags. Even when they got to the camp, they would just load everything up in
the car and head back to town, to civilization. To a lot of questions they
couldn’t answer. Brent kind of wished his brain would shut down again, but it
didn’t.
He heard a
rock collide with another rock in the darkness, a soothing Tchok! and then a
rattle as the rock bounced and rolled and settled down. He looked ahead and
saw Maggie holding a handful of small stones worn perfectly smooth by the water
that had left the desert behind thousands of years ago.
She threw
another one, underhand. It went farther this time and the sounds were less
clear.
“What are you
doing?” he asked.
“Scaring off
coyotes. I don’t know! I’m just—it helps me not think.”
“Can I try?”
Brent asked.
“You’ve got
two hands. Get your own rocks.”
He bent and
picked up a pile of smooth stones for himself. He tossed one at a cactus plant
about fifty yards away. One arm of the cactus creaked and then fell off.
“I didn’t mean
to do that,” he said, putting a hand over his mouth.
“It’s just a
cactus,” Maggie said. “There are lots of them.” She threw one of her own
rocks at the plant and another arm came off. Water trickled sluggishly down
its trunk, brilliant in the moonlight.
“Hold on,”
Brent said. There was something weird about this. He picked up a slightly
larger stone, about the size of a golf ball. He picked another cactus, wound
up, and threw the stone as hard as he could.
There was a
noise like a gun going off. He had missed the cactus by a few yards. Instead
the stone hit the ground in front of it. Dirt and sand flew up in huge sprays
and the stone dug a deep crater in the ground. Brent ran over to the hole in
the ground and reached inside to find the rock. It was buried a foot down, and
it was hot to the touch when he brought it up into the night air.
“Maggie,” he
said, “I think we—”
He looked back
and saw his sister holding a rock as big as a beach ball. It must have weighed
a hundred pounds, he thought, at least. It occurred to him that he hadn’t
wondered at all how she was able to throw him over her shoulder and carry him
out of the cylinder when he was, in fact, a little taller and a lot heavier
than she was.
“Mags, don’t
hurt yourself,” Brent said.
Maggie spun
from the waist and hurled the boulder out into the night. Brent watched it fly
as far as he could before he lost it in the darkness. It hadn’t started coming
down again when he lost sight of it. Neither of them heard it land.
They made it back to camp a few
hours later, but it was more than a week before they got to go home. When they
arrived back in town, Brent demanded that they go to a hospital and get checked
out, even though Maggie insisted that she was fine and had never actually felt
better.
It turned out
that going to the hospital was a mistake. The doctors there had lots of
questions. Once they started answering them, they never stopped coming up with
more. Maggie said very little about their rock-throwing contest, or how they
had been able to hike through the desert for hours without getting tired. The
two of them had agreed that whatever had happened to them, however they had
changed, they should probably keep it to themselves as much as possible.
Soon enough
reporters started coming around, well-dressed, very nice people who wrote down
everything the two kids said. After that a man in a dark blue suit arrived.
He sent the reporters away. His name was Special Agent Weathers, he told them,
and he was with the government.
“Can I see
some ID?” Maggie asked.
Weathers
frowned, but then he took an FBI badge out of his pocket and showed it to her.
Brent had never seen one before and asked if he could take a look, too.
Weathers had a
lot of questions, and they were very similar to the questions the kids had
already answered. “Where exactly was this cylinder located? Could you find it
again if we took you out there, or at least show me its location on a map? Did
you hear, see, or feel anything unusual when you were inside? Please tell me
again, exactly how your father died. Please tell me one more time. I just
want to be clear, exactly how it happened, exactly how your father died.”
He asked that
one so many times even Brent looked like he couldn’t stand it.
“That’s
enough,” Maggie said, finally. “You’re going to make my little brother cry.”
“No he won’t!”
Brent said.
“Alright,
never mind. I think I understand, anyway,” Weathers said. “I have a team of
scientists out there right now looking for this place. When they find it we’ll
try to recover your father’s body. Then you can have a funeral and this will
all be over.”
“No it won’t,”
Maggie said. “I know exactly how this works. You’re going to watch us from
now on. You’re going to have people watch us for the rest of our lives. God,
I hate this.”
“Mags, take it
easy,” Brent said. “He’s trying to help.”
“Help? By
asking the same question over and over, like he’s waiting for us to catch
ourselves in a lie? We didn’t do anything wrong!”
“No one said
you had,” the FBI man told her. He looked like he was afraid she was going to
get violent. “Just take it easy. We’re not in the habit of watching American
citizens twenty-four seven like that, that’s just something from the
movies—”
Maggie grabbed
the arms of her chair. She didn’t trust this guy—hadn’t, from the first
second she saw him. Brent had, of course. Brent trusted everyone.
“You think,”
she said, very slowly, “that we’re making this all up. You think we killed him
and we invented this story to cover it up. Don’t you?”
Brent stared
at her as if she’d gone crazy.
Weathers,
however, just settled back in his chair and wove his fingers together. “In a
case like this,” he said, “it’s our official policy to investigate the last
person who saw the deceased alive. It’s just routine. Whatever I may or may
not think is immaterial.”
“We loved
him,” Brent said, very loud. “We would never—”
There was a
loud splintery snap as the arms of Maggie’s chair snapped off in her hands.
She hadn’t realized she’d been squeezing them so hard. She held up the two
pieces of wood and stared at them.
Weathers
reached up and loosened his tie. Then he pointed at the pieces of wood Maggie
was holding in her hands. “Do you want to talk to me about that?”
“No,” Maggie
said. “I want you to leave.”
The agent stood
up slowly from his chair. He was kind of fat and he grunted every time he
stood up or sat down. The top of his head was shiny where he was going bald.
These things made Maggie strangely happy. They made her want to grin wickedly
and laugh.
But then he
spoke again and her blood ran cold.
“I know you
came back from that desert… changed,” he said. “The doctors saw some things.
Well. They saw you doing some things that children like you should not be
capable of. Do you understand me?”
Maggie bit her
lip. She didn’t look at him, but she nodded.
“If this is
real, if you have… new powers. That’s going to need to be handled very
carefully. I’d like you to not talk to the media about this. Alright? At
least not until we know what we’re up against.”
“I really want
you to leave,” Maggie said, but he ignored her.
“We’re going
to need to do some tests,” he said instead. “Now would be the best time,
actually, while you’re still in the hospital. I’d like to do some stress
tests, maybe put you two on treadmills and see what your endurance is like. If
you—”
Someone had
come up to stand in the doorway. It was a little old lady, no more than four
and a half feet tall, with silver hair parted severely on one side and thick
glasses over her eyes. “The young lady told you to go,” she said.