Danni, of course, couldn’t go home, so Matt took her to his house. He meant to bring her Robbie, to see if the man could fix any of it. Now two people had died, and if Matt’s theories were true, then Kent would be the next.
So, Jolie returned home.
“I just got carried away with the time,” she said.
Her parents didn’t believe her.
“We’ve been looking for you for a couple days now. No one has seen you or any of your friends. The McCarthys are gone.”
Something snapped in the back of Jolie’s mind.
“Gone?”
Apparently, it was the talk of the town. A couple days prior, the McCarthys left, and no one had seen them since. No one had seen Nigel either. Some of the neighbors thought that they had seen Carol driving Nigel’s car, and they knew what to make of that the same way a scientist might be told to make sense of magic. It just didn’t happen, but happen it did, and with all of them missing, it only made the whole conversation all the more interesting.
Jolie rushed out of the house. Something must’ve happened. Jolie knew that Matt had been keeping something from her, and she thought that she had figured out the majority of it, enough to build a stable enough foundation in which to proceed forward. The only thing that could have made Matt so disillusioned and distant was the death of Nigel. That had to be it, and why the McCarthy family just suddenly up and disappeared.
Her parents followed her out the door. She wanted to walk back in with them, let them know that she was pregnant, that she and Matt were going to start a life together.
They knew about the seizures, about the spazzing outs. They thought that she was just under a lot of stress lately, delaying her final year in high school and all. She wanted to think that college was just around the corner, that the fabric of her future was ahead of her, that, yes, indeed, Robbie would figure out what was wrong with them and change them all in tow. They didn’t even need to keep the powers. Flying and shooting green lightning from her hands was fun, but she’d gladly give that up if it meant that things could go back to the way they were. Life was simpler then, and while it might not have been all that great, it still would be better than death.
Matt was waiting for her outside her house.
He was floating in the air, holding Danni next to him.
Jolie could feel the boy’s touch on her. Her parents must’ve felt something too since they cried out. Jolie wanted to turn, to tell them that she was glad that she was their daughter, that they had given her a good life, but all of that would have resigned fate to the obvious conclusion.
Instead, she launched into the air and followed Matt. She didn’t look back, since she was going to be home in a couple of weeks, or maybe days even, all they had to do was figure out where the McCarthys had squirmed off to and then things would be right as rain.
They headed to the lab.
It was empty, save for one cleaning person, and one person locked in a room underneath the lab. Matt ripped the door open, and Danni sniffed Kent out.
The boy’s arms and legs had rotted right off. They found him in a hospital bed, his head next to a radio. He just smiled when they arrived.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Kent said. “I know where the McCarthy’s are, and where they are going.”
Matt lifted the boy out of his machines and brought him with them. Jolie suggested they look over Dr. McCarthy’s notes, but they couldn’t find anything, at least not anything good. Robbie was confident that there was no way for him to go out and fix all of the mess he made. Instead, that, along with the note left for Matt, the gang decided that they’d been abandoned after all. Danni muttered a few angry words, but nothing coherent. Kent laughed. Matt looked their little group over.
He told them how Becca had killed his father, and how his NaU had seeped into her, much the same as Peter’s NaU had seeped into Peter.
But there was something else.
“We all believed that she wasn’t affected,” Matt said, “but Becca was. Her NaU is just special. Her NaU allows her to take on other NaUs and use them in a way that doesn’t destroy her body. The same feeling I had when someone uses their NaU, I felt in her.”
“If you knew all of us were dying,” Kent said. “I would have preferred if you had told us all before I lost my arms and legs.”
“I didn’t know what it was at the time,” Matt said. “I thought it was just the way NaUs interact with bodies. Regardless, she seemed to act just as normally as before, only her NaU felt dormant.”
“So what you’re saying is that if one of us takes Becca’s NaU that our decaying would end.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t especially have to be one of us,” Jolie said, “for all we know there might be a way to split up her NaU amongst all of us. The times with Peter and Nigel only involved close interactions. If we were all around Becca . . ..”
“When she died,” Kent said, avoiding Matt’s eyes.
“Then all of us could live.”
Danni mumbled something.
Police sirens blazed in the distance.
“We have to go,” Kent said. “I know how we can find them. I can hear them now. They’ve got about a three-hour head start on us, but if we hurry, we can catch up with them.”
They walked out of the lab. Matt took Jolie aside. Kent and Danni talked in the parking lot.
“If it comes down to it,” Matt said, “then I want the NaU to go to you.”
“We don’t
