My knee hit the table as I jumped to my feet, spilling the ice water. I snatched my bloom from the desk and the samurai sword from the shelf and ran after Lou. Upstairs, May came out of the kitchen. “What’s going on?”
“Someone’s at the gate,” I said. “Where’s Em?”
“In her room.”
As I ran to get Em, I tried to comfort myself by thinking this could be a false alarm, a family of deer could have tripped the sensors. We were in the country after all. I’d seen deer around before, along with skunks, possums, raccoons, a fox, and even a bear.
When I opened the door to Em’s room, she was on the floor, crouched over a half-finished collage, surrounded by stray clippings. A glue stick rested next to a book of the complete works of Pieter Bruegel, which she must have taken from Lou’s library. The collage, so far, was dark and a little disturbing, and unlike any I’d seen her make in the past. She looked up at me.
“Come downstairs,” I said. “We might have to leave in a hurry.”
Without a word, she stood and dropped her scissors. I watched the expression on her face go flat, and my heart sank. She had become resigned to this life, to the running, hiding, fighting, to the fear and instability. She had been so bubbly and full of life before. I mourned that child. Would she ever bounce back? It had only been a few days. Was the damage permanent? The wound on the back of her hand seemed to answer my questions.
I told her I was sorry, and she said in a flat tone that unnerved me, “I know. It’s okay.”
We found Lou and May in the living room. Lou zipped up a backpack, threw it over his shoulder, and grabbed a mini cooler with his free hand. “We have to go now.”
“Is it the Friends?” I said.
“The same ones from the bakery,” May said. “I recognized them on the monitor.”
“You got Em’s tincture?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And we don’t have time to grab anything else. Let’s go.”
Lou led us to the garage, where we all piled into one of his four-door trucks with the extended cab, Em and I in the backseat, Lou behind the wheel, and May beside him. The garage door, screeching and creaking, opened onto Lou’s expansive front lawn. Rain fell in streams, overflowing Lou’s gutters, and slapping against the circular gravel driveway. I leaned forward and said, “Are they out there?”
May said, “Yes.”
Lou held up a little rock sculpture of an owl and said, “Don’t worry about them. One of my ancestors fought in the Zaditorian Wars.” He turned to May. “Can you harmonize?”
“Like singing?” she said. “No.”
“Okay, never mind. There’s a radar gun in the glove compartment. If the Zaditorians make any bubbles, point it at them. Radar collapses their bubbles. Too bad we didn’t have any of those twenty-four thousand years ago.” He nudged May and laughed as if she had anywhere near a frame of reference for his joke.
Although Lou sounded confident, I was still worried. I looked over at Em. Her eyes were big, and her mouth was ajar. “We’ll be okay,” I said, trying to sound confident. “We won’t let those guys get us again.”
“Back in Jersey,” Lou said, “the winter break of my junior year, I snuck out with my buddies to meet some girls and go ice skating at night. Real romantic . . . .”
I was dumbstruck. What was he doing? We didn’t have time for one of his stories. But then I saw him rubbing the little owl sculpture and realized that telling anecdotes about his formative years “back in Jersey” wasn’t just a pastime for Lou or even a compulsion, it was his grafting technique. The owl was a totem, probably a facsimile of something that existed twenty-four thousand years ago, and he was grafting to it.
As he continued with the anecdote, he drove us through the sheet of rain spilling from the gutter. The engine roared, and we accelerated into the lawn, bypassing the driveway for a straight route to our escape, tearing up sod and sending it flying over and around us.
“. . . Jimmy thought it was an owl pellet but no one told him it . . . .”
The windshield wipers streaked back and forth, clearing the mud and rain for brief moments, dissecting the world into frames. Then one of the frames was illuminated with yellow light, and the truck passed through me, leaving me behind, all of us, outside, encased in a globe of light, falling in slow motion. The air was elastic, like bread dough, but the rain, like the truck, had passed through unaffected, soaking my clothes in seconds.
In my periphery, I could see one of the Zaditorians holding out his arms as he had in the bakery the first time I’d been a victim of this trick. The truck, driverless and passenger-less, out of the bubble and no longer a ghost of itself, slammed into a tree across the driveway as all of us managed to get our feet under us before landing.
A strange sound came from Lou and grew and grew until I recognized it for Tuvan throat singing, or something like it. As far as I could tell, Lou had grafted to the owl totem in time and was now riding the Ghost of a twenty-four-thousand-year-old, inter-dimensional warrior. The singing became more rhythmic—rumbling, other-worldly notes, but no words that I could decipher. He sustained one note for several bars. As it reverberated around me, the globe of light vanished and the air lost its viscosity. We were free.
The Zaditorians stood prostrate, frozen, waves of transparency pulsing through them. Ahead, Warren and Caroline, the Marshals of the Mendocino Lodge, sprinted through the entrance of the driveway toward us. Lou stopped singing a moment to say, “Get to the truck.”
Without hesitation, May, Em, and I ran through the squishy lawn,
