Sam Guthridge didn’t leave his room the whole day, which wasn’t unusual. He was a solitary boy, kind and gentle. His father, Tom, used to say Sam was too soft for this town. Not in anger or disappointment but regret that he couldn’t offer Sam better. Tom and Lucy Guthridge had been socking money away for Sam’s college. All that came to nothing when Tom got sick. Medical bills ate up the savings faster than the cancer ate through Tom’s lungs. Lucy took it as a blessing that her husband hadn’t lived long enough to see Sam go into the mines.
Sam didn’t talk much to his mother about what happened. “We did what we had to, and we got out,” he said. Lucy knew the truth and knew there would be consequences to come. There were times she wished she could take her kids out of the world. Hold them safe and away until the storm passed. But that wasn’t the way of things, and as Lucy’s mother once said, it rains on the just and the unjust alike.
Sam was a brave boy, but he carried too much. Tom had been the same way. A goofy grin covered the fact that he was holding the world up with his hands. Sam never knew that side of his father, but he picked it up all the same. You couldn’t hide what was in the blood. When Sam didn’t come to the dinner table Friday evening, Lucy sent his little sister Paige in with a plate. Sam thanked her quietly and kissed her on the cheek, because among his three little siblings, Paige was his favorite.
Joe Sabine, who’d never kept a woman around more than a week, and Danny Randall, whose wife had run off to Denver with an IRS auditor the previous year, burned Friday on Joe’s back porch, both wearing their ratty varsity jackets against the cold of the November evening. They were a long time getting around to what needed talking about. They sucked back cans of Coors and threw the empties over the railing onto the lawn. Danny crushed his third on the armrest of his Adirondack chair, same as he did in high school. Joe followed suit, tossing the resulting disk away like a Frisbee. It was past dusk, and both of them were drunk before Danny mentioned the blue lights that had shot out of the Guthridge kid’s eyes. The light cutting through the rock. The thin wisp of smoke, a serpent rising out of the stone. How the boy carved away manhole covers of shale. How the men heaved them aside as the light sheared them from the wall of rubble, edges hot to the touch. Down to the last one, the one that peeled away to show sickly sunlight. And air, air pouring out like beer from a tap, so the men crowded toward the opening, mouths gaping for it. Except Sam, who stepped back and let them, then started in again, widening the hole with his light.
“Wasn’t normal,” said Joe.
“No shit,” Danny said.
“Wasn’t any act of God either.”
“No,” said Danny. “Not God.”
Monday, Danny Randall called in sick and drove up to the public library to use the computers. He had to wait in line. No one bothered to chase off the crazies and jerkoffs until the school let out. He was looking for context, a word for what Sam Guthridge was. There was something he remembered hearing on a radio show maybe a year before, driving back from the Chariot after last call. He tried a bunch of searches, but it was “strange abilities am radio late” that hit pay dirt. It was a radio show called The Monster Report with Jefferson Hargrave. Tinfoil helmet stuff broadcast on one of the Kindred Network stations to which his mother kept her car radio dialed. Danny borrowed a pair of headphones from the desk to listen.
Jefferson Hargrave reminded Danny of the Pentecostal preachers he’d been dragged to see when he was a kid. Sweaty men in starched white shirts railing on about the Lord and His wrath while Danny’s mother swooned. Hargrave pounded words like nails into wood. “I’ve got reports here going back to the fifties,” he said. “Government reports. And if you’re surprised the government knows about these people, then you have not. Been paying. Attention.
“The thing is? The numbers are increasing. I’ve charted this, and it’s, over the years, it goes…swoop, upward and upward. But what do I know? Maybe gamma radiation levels are on the rise, or it’s hormones in hamburgers. I mean, the sun causes cancer. In a world where the sun causes cancer, anything is possible.
“This I can tell you. There’s no links between these people that I can see. There aren’t pockets or hot spots. You know, when some corporation leaks something awful and everyone on Shit River gets ball cancer? It’s not like that. Their people, their parents, are normal, like you or me. Which means you could have a kid with gills or x-ray vision right out of nowhere.
“And then what happens to them? Because I can tell you, once one of these people gets spotted? They’re not sticking around to talk to the press. They’re not registering themselves as weapons. Which, from what I can tell, a lot of them are. They’re weapons. And once they’re found out? They disappear.
“So you’re thinking I’m going to say it’s the government. That these people are being rounded up and
