All of the things Fujiwara had managed to accomplish without detection before, that didn’t say insanity to me. It said he was smart, smarter than all of us standing there. He’d let us know who he really was for a purpose, and it wasn’t aimed at simply throwing me off. If that’s all he wanted, he would’ve made another try at killing me- fourth time’s the charm.
Something was off. I’d known with the car bomb at the restaurant that he was as good as the best of con men when it came to distraction. That, though… that had been nothing.
This… this was a true marvel of distraction.
But what was it misdirecting us from? Where was the hand in the pocket, lifting the wallet? What was the trick?
“Jackson, two minutes. I hate saying it, but Thackery’s right. We’re out of time.”
I focused on Hector. He stared back, unhappy but resolute. Thackery and he were both right, but not in the way they thought they were.
“I think we are. In more ways than one,” I said. It was too late. Whatever Fujiwara was doing in addition to stopping the project from cleaning up the mess, the mess being Charlie, there was nothing we could do about it now. He’d either failed and we were about to save Charlie, or he’d succeeded and I was about to relive a waking nightmare.
Without the shotgun, without the knife, how bad could it actually be? I closed my eyes and tightened the fist I’d made around the ring, the metal digging into my flesh.
Bad enough.
I opened my eyes and shifted my attention back toward the house. There wasn’t a single tree around it. It would’ve been better if there were, a merciful blot of shade instead of the bleached-bone heap that hunched under a ruthless sun. All of its sins were bare for anyone who cared to look… and for those of us who wished to hell we didn’t have to.
Two minutes may as well have been two seconds, and then, as before, I felt Charlie try to come home.
Lost. Where did everyone go? Where did the world go? Where’s the door? Where’s the door? Where… where… where…
“He’s here,” I rapped out. “Charlie’s here. Whatever the hell you’re going to do, do it now!”
I’d done my part. My massacre might not have aged like a fine wine, but Charlie had sniffed my psychic curse out. It had brought him here. It was time to see if Fujiwara was bluffing or not. The squat piece of technology built to save and destroy Charlie all in one went from ominous buzzing to the eager whine of a chain saw biting into wood. The air suddenly felt heavy, and not from the heat. It felt as if gravity had doubled. There was a metallic taste on the back of my tongue. It wasn’t the copper of blood. It tasted more like nickel or silver, close to the taste of the dime I’d swallowed when I was four, and for a moment, the white-hot light of the sun was tinted with green. Green, but not a shade of green I’d seen before or knew existed.
As my stomach clenched at the unnatural glare, Hector shouted, “It’s locked! Some kind of energy loop. It’s feeding on itself. Go! Everyone, run!”
I made a grab for Meleah’s arm, but she was already gone, headed for what to her eyes would be the nearest shelter. Thackery, Hector, and the soldiers followed her. The house. Run? Not there. Any direction was better than that one. Hector stopped on the sagging boards of the porch as he saw me standing, unmoving. “Jackson, come on!”
“Hector, don’t. Not the house. Charlie’s here, and you know what happens next. Get out of there!” I didn’t care if the Charlie buster was the equivalent of ten sticks of dynamite. I didn’t care that no one had weapons to use in this reenactment. That house and what was coming were the greater threat, hands down, at least to me. We’d made the wrong call, all of us, and I didn’t want to be around when the piper came calling to wad up that bill and shove it down our throats. I ran toward the field on the left, away from the house, away from the machine that was now screaming, darkening the air further with a color so destructively deviant and wrong that my eyes could barely see it.
When the explosion came a fraction of a second later, being thrown to the ground with vicious force was actually a relief. Simultaneously, the sun, air, and gravity had returned to normal. I blinked up at the sky. I was flat on my back, which was a mass of pain-the one rib being joined by the rest. I’d hit on my stomach but rolled a few times, how many I hadn’t counted, to end up on my back. The machine wasn’t screaming anymore. It was a blackened mass sending smoke that tasted of acid billowing high into the blue.
Question answered. Fujiwara didn’t bluff.
19
I felt the tickle of grass on my skin. I hadn’t lost the ring, but the bare skin of my hand was resting on the ground. I jerked it up, holding my breath. No. Jesus, no. No screaming, no feeling of blood rising to gush out of your throat, no water sucking you down to endless suffocation.
I exhaled when none of that appeared. That day must be trapped in the house… and the well. I pulled my other glove out of my pocket, put it on, and shoved the ring in its place. I didn’t need it any longer. I already knew Charlie was here. Worse, with Fujiwara’s sabotage, I knew what that meant.
As I pushed myself up on my elbows, my entire body ached. Despite that, nothing else seemed to be broken. I was lucky. I hadn’t been close to the reintegrator. The soldiers had been, though. Like all the goons on the project, their job was to protect the geeks. They had been bringing up the rear, holding back enough to guard Hector and Thackery’s flank. Now they were down and unmoving in the brown grass. One was breathing; the other two weren’t. Neither was Fujiwara, who had a foot-wide piece of metal protruding from his chest, that crimson grin now carved permanently on his face.
I didn’t see Hector. He’d heard my warning. He would’ve gone after Meleah to try to get her out of the house through the back. They hadn’t made it. I knew even before the screaming I’d been relieved not to have filling my head suddenly ripped through the air. It was a woman’s scream but not one of fear. It was pure rage-“My baby! You drowned my baby!”-it was the words of my mother. This was what she had screamed at Boyd as she went after him with the butcher knife. Her words but not her voice. It was Meleah.
The show had started, I thought numbly. I didn’t move. There were no weapons, I repeated to myself. No gun and knife, and the soldiers weren’t armed-protocol for any reenactment mission. Nothing that bad could happen. I thought it again and one more time before I swore. I heaved myself to my feet and went step by slow step toward the last place I wanted to be.
“Boyd, you motherfucker, don’t! Don’t! No, Mom! No!” Hector’s shout and a cry of anguish from the past that I didn’t remember. Had that been me? I recalled every detail-why didn’t I remember that?
I ran. The past was horrific and littered with bodies, but this was the present. There were people I knew here and now, living people. And maybe this time I could do something to keep them that way. I hit the porch and was through the door as the line of scarlet on Meleah’s brown skin begin to spill blood. Thackery had slashed her, but he hadn’t put the knife through her throat as Boyd had done to my mother. Meleah was strong and athletic, not the beaten-down, worn wisp of a woman my mom had been. Meleah had moved quickly enough to escape the knife… almost.
Knife. What was a knife doing here in an abandoned shell of a home? There was nothing. No furniture, no appliances, not a single discarded flea-market fake painting on the wall. How could there be a knife like the bright and shiny new one in Thackery’s hand? Now Hector was turning and running down the narrow hall toward the back bedroom… where the shotgun had been. If the knife had been replaced, I had every expectation that the shotgun had been, too. Fujiwara’s manipulation from beyond the grave.
Sometimes things are so wrong and so bad that your brain refuses to deal with them in the here and now. You can almost feel the pop-and-sizzle of the short-circuiting brain cells before numbness covers your mind in an insulating blanket. That blanket let you step away and see things clearly-see what has to be done. This had happened before. It had let me react, not freeze up in the face of death. Had allowed me to see that someone had to die, and unless I wanted it to be me, then I’d better find a way to stop it.
There was no pop-and-sizzle this time. There was only reality, hypermagnified. The universe only gave you one psychotic split per slaughter. This second time around, I was on my own. I dealt with it. I didn’t have much
