The Orphan (4 page)

Lucky break.

He walked the first pedal over to the bike and finger-tightened it into the crank arm. He went back for the second pedal and repeated the install on the other side. If anyone intended to ride this bike, the pedals and other parts would need further tightening, for the sake of safety. But Darren had no intention of riding this bike, or allowing anyone else near it.

That was it, then. The bike was finished. He almost expected a bolt of lightning to crash overhead, accompanied by the deep sonorous cue of a medieval film score, but the shop was silent.

He stared at the finished bird, hypnotized by its sleek poise. Something about the pedals affected him more than the other pieces. They were so clean and thoughtfully designed, the teeth canted inward to keep your foot from slipping to the outside. What a beautiful touch. Design with a purpose beyond mere beauty. Simple and functional but well crafted all the same.

Oh, how he wished he had owned a bike like this when he was a kid. No, not like this.
This
bike. It wouldn’t have been much of a jumper – its oval tubing too slender, its geometry built for speed not torque – but man, it would have been a neck-breaking looker in the old neighborhood. A little cheetah back in the day, a kind of holy relic now.

It was Immaculate. An idol upon the altar of his work station.

Goosebumps rippled across Darren’s skin as he adored it. He was panting, his heart thrumming, and his legs felt Tour de France strong, engorged with blood and limitless energy, and he could swear that, for just a moment, a little breeze gusted over his brow, blowing his hair back a bit. The entire bodily sensation was one of riding free on an endless summer afternoon, nowhere to go, nothing to do, just a boy and his bike.

He felt he was standing on a precipice of understanding, hypnotized by seeds of memory and love and forgotten longings, enough to populate a lifetime, by treasures the soul of this bicycle contained. What secrets might it reveal if he were to simply unlock it from the stand and take it for a long ride before dawn, following its whims and desires to a place no one knows, a mounded dirt park inaccessible by any other means except this one bike, a place lost in time. Yes, he should go for a ride now, cut the night in half with two wheels —

Or maybe not.

Darren frowned, walking around the Cinelli on the stand, noticing some paint out of place on the red frame. How could he have missed this? Damn it, look at that, the paint had run, bubbled in places, and was even now dripping on the floor.

No, it wasn’t the paint.

It was blood. His blood.

Darren had forgotten about his thumb. Fondling the pedals, screwing them into the cranks, he’d gone and bled all over the damned bike. Drops of it were on the down tube, the pedal cages, the seat-post clamp. And higher, swiped along the handlebars, the right grip and brake lever, places he didn’t even remember touching tonight. Jesus! Blood everywhere, a cup of it or more.

‘Look at this!’ he shouted, as if berating a dim-witted assistant. His anger was all-consuming, far out of proportion to the mess. This wasn’t a big deal, after all. Blood wipes off. But how could he have let this happen? He’d been so careful…

He wrapped more paper towels around his thumb and rammed his fist into his pocket to keep from touching the bike with his bleeding hand. With the other hand he wet a wad of paper towels at the sink, squeezed out the excess water, and brought a few more dry ones to follow up with. He turned from the sink and walked back.

Halfway there he froze, his mouth falling open as a low moan issued from his gut. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick, and then, when his brain processed what his eyes were seeing, he damn near screamed.

The Cinelli’s wheels were turning, and not in the way a wheel may turn half a revolution due to gravity and the angle of its position on the stand. The spokes were blurring, the treads gently whirring, the cranks and pedals going round and round in the smooth, continuous pace of someone on a lazy ride through a rolling countryside.

Darren looked at the blood soaking through his pants pocket, back up at the bike with its spinning wheels, and he thought again of what had called him out here, the possibility of an intruder. The cranks slowed and the freewheel engaged, its clicking buzz rattling while the wheels themselves continued to roll. The back of his neck went cold and his scalp bristled as if brushed by invisible fingertips. The sense that someone was in here, hiding in plain sight, was stronger than ever before.

He heard a boy’s laughter. Coming in faint waves, as if the boy were standing far behind him. The laughter seemed to amplify, coming closer, crossing a great distance to find him until the child was standing right behind him —

He whirled and saw a pale blur, a bright whiteness inside a darker halo outline, a reversed shadow in the shape of a small person, a boy. But no sooner had he glimpsed it than the apparition began to disperse like gas, into black dots and thickening clouds of red, and he realized too late that he was fainting.

Darren reached for the workbench to steady himself, but he was too far away, too heavy to move. His legs buckled and he collapsed on the tile floor where his blood continued to trickle out.

When the seemingly endless field finally ended, Adam had run himself dizzy and he found himself at the edge of a plateau, the view beyond revealing an irregular band of lights below, stretching in all directions.

Houses, street lights, a neighborhood.

Beyond those, a town.

The descent steepened. Adam’s knees quaked with the loose, out-of-control strides needed to maintain speed without tumbling head over heels as he careened to the bottom. Two hair-raising minutes later things leveled out and field grass gave way to rough dirt, but this lasted only for another fifty feet or so before he crossed a border onto planted grass, a vast lawn that had recently been mowed.

A subdivision, the houses average size, hundreds of them in a handful of shapes and colors. Lots of places to hide, in the garages, behind a fence, between cars, any shelter would do.

Adam looked back. The hill rose up behind him a hundred feet or more, the top line of the plateau waving and blurry with the pounding of his legs. He saw no monster on his tail, but he felt no safer down here. His instincts warned him that the beast was not something out of a fairy tale or ordinary nature, relegated to the wilderness. It was more elusive, cunning, able to track him in the wild or in a city, able to blend into its surroundings and go unnoticed by average people.

He might have outrun it for now, but it would find him again.

He followed a smooth black road into the neighborhood and slowed his pace from a jog to a fast walk. A hundred steps later he was still nearly hyperventilating. The sidewalks in both directions were empty. No one was out walking, even though some of the lights in the houses were on. Probably it was too late for a walk. That was fine.

Adam didn’t want strangers taking him in, hatching their own plans about where to put him, in some home for orphans. God only knew what would happen to him in one of those places. He was terrified of being caught by the monster, yes, but his fear of authority, even a good policeman who thought he was doing the right thing, was just as strong. He couldn’t trust anyone. He was better off alone.

His clothes were no longer dripping wet but still clung to him, soaking a continuous chill into his bones. How many hours until sunlight? He couldn’t find the moon in the sky. Could be an hour before dawn, or midnight, a small eternity from the warmth he so badly needed.

A car engine sounded a block or two away, coming closer, then only several houses distant. He ducked into a yard and paused. The engine tapered to silence. Someone had either reached home and parked or driven out of the neighborhood. He walked on, careful to avoid tripping over the toys and lawn furniture in the yards.

When another fence blocked his path, he was forced to edge his way up onto a sidewalk running through the interior of the neighborhood. The concrete path was too white in the darkness, and he feared he would stand out against its long flat background. He looked back. Hard to tell how far he could see in this darkness, but probably not more than a football field, if that.

He raised his head to the sky and let out a deep breath, watching the stars, and then lower, on the horizon from where he had come, to the mountains against the lighter night sky.

Mountains. Colorado. Boulder?

How do I know that name, Boulder? Is that the town I grew up in?

How old am I? Eleven or twelve, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure. Tendrils of memory teased at him, the grass and the park and faceless kids on their bikes. A sunny day, free from his parents and free to get lost. There had been an outdoor mall with jugglers and fortune tellers and knife shops. He used to ride his bike halfway across town to hang out on the mall, watching the people, buying some candy, maybe an ice-cream cone, bubble-gum flavor with the blue that stained your fingers all day.

Maybe when the sun came up he would recognize more of his surroundings, remember more about what happened to him and why he was alone.

Tap tap tap slap-slap tap tap tap
…
 

Adam stopped, his ears signaling alarm. His heart resumed its forceful thumping with painful resentment. Movement of some kind, behind him, like distant footsteps.

He looked back, eyes tracing the sidewalk arcing and weaving deep into the darkness, and at the edge of his vision, where the white concrete darkened and faded to gray, something tall and dark was moving. The top of it was bobbing up and down, the motion of something walking fast. Or running toward him.

Who goes running at this time of night? Besides me? People who are either being chased or doing the chasing. Except this wasn’t a person. It was too tall, and thin, and while the middle of its body was a solid band of darkness, the head was much paler, almost white in the night.

Adam ran, keeping low to the ground. When he had gone another hundred yards or so he looked back again, and his breath caught in his throat.

The thing was still coming toward him, but it had changed. Somehow it was wider, shorter, as if it were lowering itself in order to run faster. It mutated once more as he watched, dividing. Now two figures pursued him, each of them dark and bulky in the middle with crowns of blurry whiteness above the thick shoulders.

You knew there was more than one, he scolded himself. Always was. Two at least, and maybe a third. They’re tracking you like a pack of wild dogs.

Adam cut from the path and ran into the first yard without a fence. Immediately a severe cramp flared in his right side, twisting the muscle under his ribs. He pushed on, but a few steps later another cramp lit up his right hamstring and he was unable to find a stride. Running wasn’t going to save him this time. He was going to have to be smarter, find a place to hide.

He paused beside a small wooden gazebo. At first he heard nothing, then a few quick taps like before, much closer, and then a softer scuffling as the footsteps moved off concrete into the grass. Adam took one look at the open gazebo and knew it would serve him no purpose beyond that of a cage, a feeding pen.

He darted away, around the house, through the front yard, then cut sideways running back the way he had come, ducking and leaping through more front yards. The cramps only increased but he ground his teeth and tried his best to ignore them.

Six or seven houses later he hobbled between two cars parked in a wide driveway and looked back. He couldn’t see them and he hoped they were still on the other side of the houses. He limped alongside the house, between the exterior side wall and the next property’s fence.

He was hoping to slip through, but halfway into the gap he ran into a wall, which turned out not to be a wall but some kind of tall wooden chute. It was warm, soothing against his cold body. A chimney, maybe. But it was humming too, vibrating slightly. More importantly, it was blocking his path of escape, the space between it and the fence next door too tight for him to squeeze through.

Somewhere beyond the house and getting closer by the second, the dull slapping footsteps returned. Rapid, then halting and spreading in different directions, trying to pinpoint his location, enclose him in their circle. If he ran back toward the street – his only avenue of escape – they would see him, catch him, slaughter him.

He crouched. The tall chute was even warmer down here, with a current of warm air blowing against his ankles. A faint mist rolled over the bald spot in the grass, and he understood. It wasn’t a chimney. It was the ventilation duct to a clothes dryer. Someone was doing laundry at this hour.

How much space was there between the vent and the ground?

Adam lowered himself to his belly and estimated there were maybe six or eight inches of clearance. His body might fit, if he were to lie down and inch his way back, but not his head. If he kept his head to one side, between the duct and the fence, he could make it. Maybe.

He removed his backpack, smashed it flat and shoved it under the duct. Reclining like a mechanic about to slide under a car, he tilted his head to one side and began to drag himself, squirming and sliding, wiggling his hips, deeper under the vent. In such proximity, the warm air was almost hot on his chest. If his skin touched the metal lining, he would be burned. But as long as it didn’t get any hotter than this, he could handle it. It felt good, actually. He wormed in deeper.

Problem – under the hum of the machine reverberating through this vent, he couldn’t hear what was happening out on the street. They could be moving in, closing off the driveway, and he had no way to see them. Not only that, his legs were sticking out.

Using his elbows, straining his neck, Adam snaked backward, pushing into the grass with his heels, until at last he was able to straighten his head around the other side of the wooden chute. Now that his hips were inside the frame, he was able to twist onto his side. He tucked his knees but his feet were still exposed.

The monsters were close. He could feel them. They could be in the driveway, beside the house, squinting into the dark, staring at the white soles of his shoes…

Adam closed his eyes and wished, with all his will and most fervent prayers, that he was someone else, somewhere else. A different boy, one with a family, with a loving mother and a good strong dad. In a nice warm house beside a fire, on Christmas morning, with breakfast cooking on the stove, cartoons on the big TV, and his family laughing with him, hugging him, holding him close while the lights on the tree glimmered beside the fireplace. He could see it so clearly that for one beautiful moment he was really
there,
gone from this place on the cold ground in the night, and his wet clothes had been replaced by new ones, dry and sharp like the other kids at school had. And he was different too, not a mental case on the run but a normal boy, stronger and faster, it was real, he’d escaped, and he would never have to run again.

His new father was a cool guy, the kind of guy who would help you build a model airplane or fix your bike, and his mother was beautiful, one look in her eyes enough to let you know she loved you no matter how you screwed up. Outside there was a huge yard with a pond, and bright orange fish swimming beneath emerald-green lily pads, their whiskers switching like antennae. Adam could see it all, it was so real, and he knew he was there because they could see him too.

Behind them, standing in the hallway, was a girl, his new sister, and she was older and very pretty, with dark blonde hair and sleepy green eyes. She had very strong opinions about almost everything, but she never hurt him and she liked to ask him all kinds of questions, as if he were the most interesting person she had ever met.

Home, he was home…

Until the dryer’s timer ran out. The humming stopped. The soothing warm air faded to a whisper on his belly, replaced by colder air seeping in all around him. The silence rang in his ears like dying wind chimes.

He wasn’t home. He was still lost. He would always be lost, and the return to this cold reality broke his heart. Trapped under some stranger’s house, shivering, Adam cried, not caring who found him or what they did to him. He cried himself into a sleep too fragile and barren for dreams.