Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  So it had been the stones. And the stones had happened. They really had. Only it had been some kind of freak accident, wind devil or something, not any freaking magic.

  “Forget you!” he yelled after Shawn, but Shawn was already on his board, skimming lightly out of Jared’s sight.

  WITH Kendall’s two hundred dollars, Jared bought a new deck, a deluxe Hawk, plus awesome trucks and wheels. He spent every day alone, in another neighborhood, painfully regaining his mobility and skill. After what happened with Shawn, he didn’t want to approach his other friends, and anyway he didn’t have too many other friends. Mostly it had been him and Shawn.

  Ma’s boyfriend broke up with her, and Jared didn’t want to be home with her much; she was always wailing, or else out scoring. When the boyfriend’s food was gone, she barely bought more. Sometimes Jared’s stomach growled while he practiced, over and over, ollies and kickflips and fifty-fifty grinds and even a few hardflips. He sped around the neighborhood, a better one than his own, past trees turning from green to red and gold, past little kids on trikes, past bright flowers in beds edged with stones.

  All the stones stayed where they were supposed to.

  It was hunger and cold that finally made him pull out the card Dr. Kendall had given him at the clinic. Hunger, cold, and maybe loneliness, although he didn’t like to admit that. The address was not far away, on Carter Street. Jared skated over, preparing an excuse in his mind.

  Kendall’s house wasn’t much, a small two-story—weren’t doctors supposed to make a lot of money? Neat bushes surrounded it, and the porch light shone cheerfully in the October dusk. Jared rang the bell and scowled.

  “Hi, Doc, something’s wrong with my hand. You must not’ve fixed it right.”

  “Come in, Jared,” Kendall said. Why did the guy always look so sad to see him? What a crock. But the house was warm and smelled of meat roasting. Jared’s mouth filled with sweet water. “Let me see your hand . . . you had slight damage to your left transverse ligament from the stones, but it looks all right now. Would you like to stay to dinner?”

  “I already ate,” Jared said, scowling more deeply. His stomach growled.

  “Then have a second dinner just to keep me company. My housekeeper just left, and she cooks a lot on Mondays so she doesn’t have to do much the rest of the week.” Kendall led the way to the tiny dining room without giving Jared a chance to answer, so he followed. The room had a big table, real curtains, a china chest filled with dishes. Kendall set a second place.

  Roast beef and mashed potatoes and peas and a pudding that tasted of apples. Jared tried not to gobble too hard. When he finished, he glanced out the window. A cold rain fell. That sucked—it was too easy to snap a board in the rain, and, anyway, the wood got all soggy.

  Kendall, who had been silent throughout dinner, said, “How about a game of Street Fighter?”

  “You play Street Fighter? You? I know it’s an old game and everything, but . . . you?”

  Kendall had a new Nintendo for the vintage game. He wielded the controllers pretty well for an old guy. Jared beat him, but only barely. As they played, Kendall said casually, “So how’s everything going?”

  “Like what . . . got you!”

  “Like, have you attempted any wizardry?”

  “Cut the crap, man.”

  “All right. How’s school?”

  He said it in such a fake, prissy tone that Jared had to laugh. Then he didn’t. Throwing down the controller in midgame, abruptly he stood. “I gotta go.”

  “School’s not going well?”

  “Nothing’s going well, thanks to you guys,” Jared shouted, before he knew he was going to say anything at all. “Shawn won’t hang with me and the rest is just crap and—”

  “Shawn is avoiding you?” Kendall said. “What about the other kids?”

  “None of your business! Now let me outta here!”

  “The door is that way,” Kendall said calmly. “And you’re welcome for dinner,” but Jared was already halfway out the front door, yanking up his collar against the rain, furious at . . . something.

  Everything.

  “Come back whenever you like,” Kendall called after him. “I’ve got Super Smash Brothers, too.”

  HE went back. The first time back, he planned on breaking in and stealing the Nintendo. But Kendall was there, so he didn’t, and they had dinner again, and played the Nintendo, and after that Jared didn’t pretend there was still something wrong with his hand. Pretty soon he was there nearly every night. During the day he skated if the weather was sunny, hung out aimlessly at the mall if it wasn’t, or watched TV at home if Ma wasn’t there. Kendall never mentioned wizard stuff again. The food was always good. After a few weeks, Jared started doing the dishes. Sometimes they played Nintendo; sometimes Jared watched TV while Kendall read. Jared wasn’t much of a reader. The house was warm.

  At six thirty, they always had to stop and watch the news on TV. If there was an earthquake or a flood or a story about some farming problem, Kendall leaned forward intently, his hands on his knees.

  On a cold night in November, when Jared knew the heat was off at home, he stayed the night in the guest room. At four a.m., with Kendall asleep, Jared prowled the house. Not to steal anything, just to look for . . . something.

  In a drawer of the dining room china cabinet, under a pile of tablecloths, he found the picture. It was totally weird: a group of seventeen people who didn’t look like they belonged together. A heavy, middle-aged woman in brown stretch pants and a pink top. A man in a blue uniform with a square badge like a security guard. Two kids, seven or eight, who looked like twins, in miniature gang clothing. An old woman in some kind of long gown. A black man in a gray suit, holding a briefcase. A guy in one of those lame Hawaiian shirts, grinning like an idiot. An Asian kid holding an armful of books.

  And Shawn.

  Jared stared at the picture. It really was Shawn. But what was this group? It sure as hell wasn’t Shawn’s family.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  Jared whirled around. Kendall stood in the doorway in some old-guy pajamas. He didn’t look mad, just that sad-thing, which was getting really old.

  “Who are these guys? Why is Shawn here?”

  “I just put the water on, Jared. Come into the kitchen.”

  Jared stood beside the kitchen table, refusing to sit down, while Kendall puttered with teakettle and instant coffee. “I asked you a question—who are those people? Is that your dumb-ass ‘Brotherhood’ ?”

  “You remembered that I mentioned them,” Kendall said with pleasure. “I didn’t know if you would. You were still on painkillers.”

  “I’m not stupid, man!”

  “I know you’re not. And no, that’s not the Brotherhood. That’s the Other Side.”

  “Other side of what? Make sense!”

  Kendall poured hot water into his cup, stirred it, and sat across the table. “Jared, didn’t you think it odd that Shawn avoided you after your accident? Instead of thinking it rather cool that you could command rocks?”

  “ ‘Rather cool,’ ” Jared mocked viciously. “ ‘Command rocks.’ C’mon, give me an answer! What’s Shawn doing with those people?”

  “He’s one of them. And he had no idea you were a wizard, too, until the car hit you. And now he’s staying away from you so you won’t inadvertently discover what he is. You see, that’s our main advantage over the Other Side. We know a lot more about them than they know about us.”

  “ ‘Us’ ? I thought you said you wasn’t a wizard!”

  “I’m not. But I work with them. Pain releases the power, remember. I’m a doctor. I see a lot of pain. Sometimes it brings us one of our own, sometimes one from the Other Side. My position at the Medical Center is how we’ve been able to identify so many of them.”

  “I don’t believe any of this crap.”

  “Fortunately, your believing or not believing does not change the reality.” Kendall sipped his coffee. “I wish bel
ief was all it took to make the Other Side disappear.”

  “ ‘The Other Side.’ Give me a break. And what are they supposed to be doing that’s so bad? What you got against Shawn? You think he’s going to set off a bomb or something?”

  “I already told you, magic doesn’t operate in the presence of metal, which bombs require. Magic is considerably older than that. It belongs to the sphere of nature, of grass and wind and animals and plants. And rocks, the oldest of all nature.”

  “Right. Sure. So Shawn’s gonna mess up the world by growing the wrong grass? Get real!”

  Abruptly Kendall leaned forward. “You get real, Jared. Your ignorance is appalling—what are they teaching you in that school? Yes, the Other Side might ‘mess up the world’ by growing the wrong grass, if there’s profit in it. Money or power profit. Don’t you know that there’s money to be made from drought, from famine, from hurricanes, from killer bees, from mutated plants? There’s always money to be made in disasters. You cause them, then you charge heavily to clean them up, as just one example. You’re poised and ready with whatever is needed, because you know exactly when and where the disaster will occur. And no one ever suspects you caused it, because hurricanes and volcanoes and droughts and invasive plant species are all completely natural. Plus, no one in the developed countries, where money flows like green water, even believes in magic anyway. Now do you get it?”

  “No,” Jared shouted. “You telling me Shawn is rich from this magic? Man, he don’t even have a decent deck!”

  “No, because riches now would draw attention to the Other Side. And it takes a lot of international coordination to pull off a big profit from a major disaster. They’ve already managed a couple of small ones—did you read in the paper about that unexpected flood, along the Big Thompson River in Colorado? No, of course you didn’t, you don’t read the papers. But we think that flood was one of theirs. We’re still organizing, too. One day Shawn will be very rich, and very powerful, although most of the world will never know how he did it. The FBI will assume drugs and spend futile years trying to prove it.”

  “So now you can see the future, too!”

  “No, of course not, I just—”

  “You’re just full of crap! You’re crazy, man, you know that? The biggest loser ever, and this sucks!” Jared jerked at the locks on the kitchen door, yanked it open, and bolted outside.

  “Jared . . . wait. . . don’t—”

  He was already gone, skimming along the cold sidewalk in the dark.

  The man was more than crazy, he was totally gone. Psycho. Loony-bin. Jared was never going back there.

  Where else was he going to go?

  Jared shivered. Last evening’s rain had stopped, but it was really cold out. His hoodie wasn’t enough for this weather. He had to move faster, stay warm, get home.

  Home. The heatless apartment where Ma and her new boyfriend would be sleeping under all the blankets, including Jared’s, or—worse—up fighting, strung out on crystal. And getting home alone, this time of almost morning when only the gangbangers were out on the streets . . .

  He stopped under a streetlight. For one terrible minute, he thought he might cry.

  Bag that. And bag all the psycho stuff Kendall had been telling him, too. The old man had been kind to him. So what if he was crazy? He wasn’t dangerous, and it wasn’t like Jared hadn’t dealt with worse. He could deal with anything he had to. And Kendall’s place was warm, and had food.

  Why had Shawn reacted so weird to Jared’s accident?

  He spun his board around and skated back to Kendall’s, thinking hard.

  The back door to Kendall’s house still stood wide open. In the kitchen, the chairs were knocked over, and Kendall’s coffee sloshed all over the floor. Blood smeared the table. Jared searched the whole house; Kendall was gone.

  He found a flashlight in a kitchen drawer and took it outside. Fresh tire marks slashed across a corner of the soggy lawn. They led down Carter Street—but where after that?

  He should call the cops.

  Oh, like cops would believe in the kidnapping. If an adult went missing, they wouldn’t even start looking for him for a couple of days. And they certainly wouldn’t believe Jared, who had a bunch of citations, unpaid, for illegal skating at the Civic Center and the library.

  It was only after he thought all this that Jared saw what it meant: that he believed Kendall had been kidnapped, and by the so-called “Other Side.” The second he realized this, he started shaking. Cold, he thought. It was just the cold. Just the cold.

  In the dark he skated to one end of the block, peered down it. Nothing. The other end of the block—also nothing.

  No one else had been as good to him as Kendall had. Nobody, not ever.

  There was no way to know which way the psychos had taken Kendall. No real way. Unless . . .

  Jared looked around with his flashlight. The house next door to Kendall had a flower bed edged with stones. Feeling like the biggest lamebrain in the whole crappy world, Jared picked up three of the rocks and thought, Which way?

  Nothing happened, so he said it out loud: “Which way?”

  Nothing happened.

  He stepped away from his deck, with its metal trucks, and tried again. Nothing.

  His hoodie had a metal zipper so, shivering, he took it off and laid it on top of the deck, twenty feet away. “Which way, you psycho stones?”

  Nothing.

  His jeans had a metal zipper and studs. “No way,” Jared said aloud, but a second later, shivering, he stripped them off and put them on top of his hoodie. In his underwear, shoes and socks, and T-shirt, he scanned the street. Nobody there—it was four thirty in the morning. He picked up the rocks again. “Which way, you little bastards?”

  The rocks grew warm in his hand.

  Jared shrieked and dropped them. A sharp pain shot through his wrist, gone in a moment. The stones fell in a straight line toward the north end of Carter Street. Jared stared, disbelieving. He did it again, this time facing south. The rocks got warm, he dropped them, and they swirled around his body to form a line going north. The sharp pain hit his wrist.

  He closed his eyes. No way. This psycho stuff doesn’t happen. All at once he would have given anything, anything in the entire world, to be back skating at the Civic Center with Shawn, ollieing off the steps and trying to do grinds down the rail, trying to land a 540 flip.

  Instead, he picked up his clothing and the three rocks, got on his deck, and skated north.

  At the next intersection, he again walked away from the board and jeans and hoodie, and said, “Which way?” The rocks pointed east.

  Two more turns and he was glad to see the interstate, no turns off it for a long ways. His wrist throbbed from the repeated flashes of pain. Jared put his jeans and hoodie back on. His legs felt like ice—not a good way to skate. But he wasn’t going to do any tricks, just straight skating, and the speed would warm him. He skated up the on-ramp, then along the highway, dodging the trucks that blatted angry horns at him, keeping a sharp eye out for cops.

  At the first exit, he got off the highway and did the stones thing. They told him to get back on. Jared glanced at the sky, worried; already it was starting to get red in the east. He put on his clothes and skated back onto the highway. His stomach grumbled and he cursed at it, at Kendall, at the world.

  At the next exit, the stones told him to follow a deserted stretch of country road. Jared noted its name: County Line Road.

  The house wasn’t far, fortunately: the third house, set back in the woods. A white van with muddy tires sat in the driveway. The van said MCCLELLAN SECURITY. Jared remembered the man in the blue uniform in the picture.

  He crept up to the house. All the curtains were shut and the basement windows painted black, but when he put his ear to the grimy glass, Jared could hear noises in the basement.

  A thud. A groan. Then, “Once more, Doctor—all the names, please. Now. This is getting boring.”

  Silence. Then Kenda
ll screamed.

  They were torturing him to get the Brotherhood names! Including Jared’s name. “You see, that’s our main advantage over the Other Side. We know a lot more about them than they know about us.” That’s what Kendall had said. But now—

  No, not Jared’s name. They already had Jared’s name, thanks to Shawn. And if Jared had stayed five minutes longer at Kendall’s house, they’d have had him down in that basement, too.

  He could skate away. Get back on the highway, never go home again, go. . .where?

  Kendall screamed again.

  A rage filled Jared. He thought he’d been angry before—at Shawn, at his mother, at the cops, at the crap that happened and went on happening and never seemed to stop. But it hadn’t been anger like this. This was the mother of angers, the huge one, the serious-hang-time-in-orbit of anger.

  Woods bordered the back of the house. Jared thrashed a little way into them, shoved his deck under some bushes, added his jeans and hoodie. Then he stood there, twigs scratching his bare legs and some kind of insects biting at his face, and closed his eyes. He pictured rocks. All kinds of rocks, all sizes, pointy and smooth and rough, smashing through the black-painted basement windows and into the heads of every single bastard down there except Kendall. He pictured the blood and the wounds and the—

  Jared screamed. Pain tore through his whole body, dropping him into the bushes. His arms and legs were on fire, he was going to die, he would never skate again—

  The pain vanished, leaving him gasping. He staggered to his feet, just in time to see the rocks homing in on the house, flying in from every direction like fighter jets on some video game, but real and solid as Jared himself. All the painted windows smashed, and Jared heard yells and screams from the house. Then silence.

  It couldn’t have happened.

  It did happen.

  He struggled out of the bushes and ran to the front door. It was locked, and so was the back door. Finally, he ran to the closest busted window, knocked out the glass still stuck around the edges, and slid into the basement, careful to land on his sneakers amid the shards and splinters of glass.