Untaken (36 page)

For once, you’re not the only one of you.

“Be quiet!” he said out loud.

“That’s the idea,” said Brandon. “If you’re not going to fish, then go play so I can get on with it, but stay close, and don’t go near the water, okay?”

“Okay.”

There were some houses by the lake, but Jake was bored of houses. They were all pretty much alike as far as he could tell. Later, Brandon would want to go into the houses to look for food or things to use around the cabin. Better not to use up the limited interest he had in those houses just yet.

The woods then.

He loved the woods. It was better with Dog there, because Dog could see and smell things that Jake couldn’t on his own. It felt safer with Dog, too. Being alone was still a scary feeling.

You’ll always be alone.

“No,” he told the sneaky voice, “that’s not how it is.”

Trees were creeping in from the woods and growing up around the houses. In some places, the ghost of a lawn or the straggling edge of a flower bed still showed through the scrubby growth of weeds and year-old pines, but soon, the woods would have all this land, right to the edge of the lake. It would be better. More places to hide.

The tufty top of a little pine sapling brushed Jake’s knees and he stopped to look at it. The bristle of its vivid green needles and the scaly patterns in its bark were fascinating to him. The tiny spark of life within it, which would one day grow to be something huge and ancient. Jake sent his mind out, bending it through the soil and the sunlight, shifting the things the plant needed to grow into its hungry cells. It was fun to watch the frail shoot thicken and send out branches. He stopped when the sapling was just a little taller than him.

Jake glanced over to where Brandon sat, but he still glared at his fishing pole as if it had let him down somehow.

If you’re so sure you’re just like them, why do you hide these new tricks from them?

Jake hated that the voice was right. He was growing. The body he had stolen was growing, and that was no problem. The body was supposed to grow. But the life within the body, Jake’s
true
self was growing too, and keeping it in check was becoming more than he could handle.

The energy inside him boiled and there was nowhere to put it, but into the world around him. When he made things grow—the vegetable garden back at the cabin, for instance—he took care to do it in secret. But how long would he be able to fool Gracie and Brandon? The sunflowers had been his biggest mistake, but they’d looked so pretty, shooting up into the sky. Gracie didn’t seem to suspect anything. She thought that if you put things in the ground just like the books said, they’d grow, but Brandon was different. When he’d seen those sunflowers, he’d looked at Jake hard.

Sooner or later, they’d find out that the Bad Men had been right. That there was something wrong with Jake.

As soon as he was out of Brandon’s sight, Jake’s shoulders relaxed and his feet felt light enough to skip as they carried him deeper into the safety of the woods.

The warm, damp smell of the leaf litter soothed him. It was green and dark in here. A good place for secrets. He wouldn’t go in too far, there wouldn’t be time, but even if he walked all day as he did in the woods that surrounded the cottage, he knew he wouldn’t get lost. Now that Jake had grown stronger, it was easy for him to sense his back trail and follow it home. Even without Dog’s senses to tap into, there was always a creature close to hand capable of identifying the man-scent where he had walked, or a bird wheeling far overhead whose eyes he could use to see the way home.

Jake climbed a tree, relishing the way the bark felt under his hands, smooth and rough at the same time. In his pocket he had a tomato for his lunch, tied up in a handkerchief, with a little twist of salt and pepper in foil. Things tasted better to him now. As he ate, he could taste the sunlight, the rainwater, the dense black dirt which gave the tomato plant its life. There was an echo of Gracie picking the fruit, of the fibers of the handkerchief, the machine that wove the fibers into cloth, the cool ancient places deep beneath the earth where the metals that became the machine once lay. Letting his mind roam so freely made Jake giddy and he had to clutch at the branch to stop from falling.

It was good to exhaust himself like this. If he burnt through his reserves of power now, he stood a better chance of controlling it when he was back at the cabin tonight.

The woods were thick with life and Jake allowed his mind to roam where it would, touching the quick, darting sparks of the birds, the simple, inexorable energy of a centipede, the huge, ancient pulse in the trees. His limbs relaxed and his head lolled to the side, his breath slow and shallow.

Then he felt something new. So distant it was barely there, but so distinct from anything else it felt like a needle of ice in the meat of his brain. His limbs twitched and he jerked upright, his eyes open wide. His heart thumped as he slithered down from the tree. A branch tore a thin red line down his back, but Jake barely noticed. He stood completely still at the foot of the tree and threw all his power out into the woods. His senses were so flooded with input that it made his head swim, but the new thing was gone. He tried again and again until he was panting with the effort of it, his mind split between a thousand different life forms. A thin trickle of blood leaked from his nose, and his legs wobbled, then went loose, spilling him to the forest floor, but still he pushed.

At last, he felt it again.

A clean silver pulse of energy, different from anything else in this wood.

From anything else in this world.

Jake’s vision faded to grey, and still he tried to push his mind out, but the world seemed to tilt sideways, and he sprawled full length in the leaf litter. His mind was too diffused to control his body. He couldn’t figure out which head he was supposed to be in. He was flying above the wood on feathered wings, he was beneath the earth in a fox’s den, he was being hauled from the lake with a silver hook through the flesh of his mouth into the suffocating sky… and then he was back in his familiar body, spent and dizzy, with woozy black and red spots floating in front of his eyes. He tried again to get up, but this time, his arms and legs didn’t respond at all. When he tried to shout for help, no sound came out.

Brandon

s the sun climbed to its highest, most sweltering point in the sky, I decided that two fish was plenty. Not like we had any way to keep extra meat from spoiling, anyways. Gracie said we could haul in some big blocks of ice next winter. Put ‘em down in the basement closet, and use it as a fridge. Cold wasn’t going to be our problem, as far as I could see. There was only so much fuel left out there. The generator wouldn’t run on air. There was a log fireplace in the lounge, so maybe we’d be able to shut up the rest of the house and camp out in the one room until spring.

Jeez, a person could drive himself nutty thinking about all these things. Why had I thought it would be easier up here in Maine?

I knew that Gracie was disappointed with the way I changed the subject whenever she wanted to talk about her plans for next year. She was all about the improvements we could make to the cabin, or ways we could get food after the roads were gone and the fuel ran out and there was nothing left to scavenge. Although the same concerns ran through my own head in a never-ending loop, it wasn’t something I could talk about without getting buggy. What was the point? If the whole world was gone, then what was the point of any of this? It wasn’t fair. Someone should have been putting stuff back together. If Dad had been here, he would have known what to do, but I didn’t have a clue. I couldn’t do this.

At least we’d saved Jake. I hadn’t saved Dad, but at least there was that.

But saved for what? So we could live out here in these woods a couple of seasons before we got sick or froze to death? When I’d first had the idea to come up here, I’d thought the army guys would come. Now that was the very last thing we wanted to happen, what with Jake.

I might have wimped out on Gracie’s big plans for the cabin, but just try telling her that the kid wasn’t right and she’d clam up like she was fixing to shit diamonds.

“He’s just a regular kid. He might not be just like us, but that’s no reason to treat him any different. You sound just like those army guys sometimes, Brandon,” she’d snapped at me the last time I’d tried to bring it up.

I didn’t put it right, maybe. I cared about the little guy just as much as Gracie did, but if she thought we were gonna be able to hide him up here forever…

And those sunflowers. Those goddamn, creepy-ass sunflowers. She had to know that wasn’t normal. Goddamn seeds one day, thirty feet tall by the end of the week. Good soil. Right. But now, whenever I brought the topic of Jake up, Gracie scrammed. Hid out in her room, talking to that Internet chick, which she seemed to think was some big secret. Gracie thought that as long as the army guys stayed away, everything would be just peachy, but the kid was growing.

And we had no idea what he was growing into.

And what are you gonna do about it, even if do you get her to listen, big shot?

Well, I didn’t have a plan exactly, but we’d have to keep Jake safe somehow, and wouldn’t it be safer for the kid if we stopped pretending all that weird shit wasn’t happening? Gracie would have to see the truth of it sooner or later. I needed her to. She was so smart, and so good at thinking problems through without getting bulldozed by them the way I did. It was weird—she wasn’t like the girls me and Stevie used to run around with at school, but there was something cool about her anyway. I gave the fishing line a pull. Nothing doing. She could at least have come along today, it was so boring sitting here staring at the lake. We could have talked about something different from supplies or Jake. Anything. After spending most of last Fall wishing she’d shut the hell up, I kind of missed her yapping on when we were apart.

She’d laugh at me if she knew I was thinking that, like she did when I fussed after the chickens. Back when we’d met, I hadn’t liked the way she’d laughed at me, but now I laughed with her. She’d been acting so weird lately. She was probably mad at me. Mad she’d ended up stuck out in the middle of nowhere with such a loser.