A few more fisher cats yelled out in the night.
“They get close to the house,” Peter said.
“They won’t do anything, though,” Becca said. “They just watch.”
Animals were fine if they didn’t feel threatened, didn’t feel desperate. It was only then that a cute little animal in a Disney movie might go off and end up doing something malicious.
“Oh, before we forget,” Pete said.
Pete opened the back of the car and brought out the giant green lizard that Danni had bought.
“Your brother won this,” Peter said, “and I think . . ..”
“We can give it to him another time,” Danni said. “The last thing I’m sure Becca here wants to do is walk into the house with that.”
There was yelling coming from inside the house. The hair on the back of Danni’s neck stood up, and her heart started to beat faster. Becca was already running back up to the house. Peter rushed past Danni, who didn’t bother to stop him. There was something off about the yelling, something unnatural. Danni thought about staying by the car, standing alone in the darkness amidst the trees, the chirpers, and the fishers watching her from afar.
If she had, then his life wouldn’t have changed as much as it did by the time she was shoving her head into a force field outside of a thruway rest stop. She could have gotten into her car and drove off and left the problems to the people who felt that they needed to solve them.
But something moved in Danni that night. She ran up with the two of them, and one minute later, she would be unconscious on the ground, her skin hot.
Her anger would lose control.
Chapter Eight
Matt seemed to recover well. The NaU seems to be a miracle drug/device, if anything else. The boy is powerful, though. When you give someone power who’s never had any, though, what happens? Do they become grateful? Or resentful.
I know how his father took it, and that’s when many of our problems really started.
-Robbie’s Journal
Matt liked Walter the second he saw him.
Surely not back at the other rest stop, though. Back then, the man who was helping Becca was simply that, a man, a faceless person with gray hair who was someplace that he didn’t belong.
Be after seeing the man upfront, oh, Matt liked him indeed. The kinetic shield was preventing him from feeling the man’s insides, but if he did, he thought he knew what he would find. A failing body, his organs finally on their last couple of trips before they were gone forever, along with the rest of him. He wasn’t some hero. He was a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was weak.
He would be reasonable.
The snow fell around them. Matt thought about telling Danni to stop shoving her head into the field but decided against it. Perhaps it would intimidate Walter, and if it didn’t, then perhaps it would show him how dire their situation was.
Walter walked up to the shield and looked through it at Matt.
“You are Walter?” Matt said.
“Yes,” the old man said. His voice sounded tired and perhaps weak. Matt couldn’t tell for certain how old the man was with the shield up, but in his mind, he looked to be pushing the back end of the sixties. An old man with lots of knowledge and experience.
“We need to take Becca with us,” Matt said. “It’s very important.”
“And why should I hand—”
“No,” Matt said, “not hand. You can’t make Becca do anything. We need you to convince her to come out here and come with me.”
Matt hoped that none of the others noticed that he said “me” instead of “we.” It didn’t matter much. None of them could stop him anyway.
“And why would she do that.”
“Because she’s my sister.”
The words felt like grease coming out of his mouth. It was one thing to think of Becca as a concept or a goal. It would have been easier to hate her if he didn’t know her.
But saying out loud that he was her brother sent shivers up his spine and made him nauseous. He, of course, would keep those feelings from the others. They didn’t need to know how he felt. All they had to do was think that he was their leader and that he was going to save them from all of this. He had to. He had to.
Walter seemed a little taken aback by that revelation.
“Most brothers I know don’t try to kill their sisters,” he said.
“We don’t want to kill Becca,” Jolie said. “We just want to talk to her.”
Walter pointed behind him.
“Was it talk that you all wanted to do at the last station?” he said. “Hell, if Becca hadn’t done her magic or whatever the hell it was, this whole thing here is, I’m sure you already would have tried to attack us again.”
“I apologize that Danni acted the way that she did,” Matt said.
Matt pointed over at their friend. She was shoving his head repeatedly into the field. It would smash into it, regrow in an instant, and then she would smash it into the field again.
“As you can see, she isn’t of the best mental faculties at the moment,” Matt said. “She acted rashly. Had I known that you were inside, I wouldn’t have allowed her to act the way that she did. I don’t want any more people to die tonight, Walter.”
“Then what is this really—”
“No,” Matt said, putting up his hands. He felt every single snowflake around him, each of them all distinct and different from the others. He felt the insides of his friends around him, felt every clump of snow, every pine needle, for a mile in each direction. He felt all of it. And his patience was starting to run thin.
“Kent here has informed us that you wish to hand over the girl,” Matt said. “Now that you know who we are and who the girl is, are you going to
