by A Corrin
The problem was, if I wanted my schoolwork, fresh clothes, and answers, I needed to go home to get them.
To my surprise, the lights were on in the house. Usually Dad spent his Saturdays either out visiting a barstool or hung-over inside in the dark. If the lights were on, someone cared enough to want to see and interact with the environment around them. Maybe it was a concerned neighbor. Unlikely, seeing as the closest neighbors were a mile away.
I quietly opened and closed the front door. Pop’s graying stubble matched his bushy, unkempt hair, and his eyes were wild as he shot around the wall from the kitchen.
“Jonathan!” Relief suffused his weary, mysteriously sober features. He sagged against the kitchen entryway, closing his eyes and rubbing his face with his hands. “I was so worried. Where have you been?”
Intense dislike wriggled behind my ribs like a cornered, venomous creature. “You. Were. Worried.” I said quietly, letting each word drop from my mouth like lead. I’d left the house for days at a time before, without letting Dad know where I’d gone or when I’d be back. This was the first time it had ever concerned him.
Dad stepped toward me, and I took a few paces back. When he spoke, his voice was uncomfortable. “I had no idea where you were, or if you were coming back or not, and...I wanted to know if you were okay.”
“I’m just dandy,” I said.
Dad sighed at the ice in my voice and rubbed the back of his neck. “Son, I didn’t mean to hurt you. You know that I’m trying to get better—”
I was already short-tempered and irritable because of the previous night’s trauma, so I blew up at his excuse, the words he always said but never meant. “Yeah? Try harder! Drinking a case of beer every day is not going to bring Mom back and if you think that kicking me around the house will change anything, then you’re living in a fantasy.”
Dad stared at me, aghast, and I noticed that his eyes were watering. If anything, it made me angrier.
“But here,” I said coldly, “let me give you a dose of reality. Did you know that we almost lost this house, Mom’s house, twice? I had to work overtime for a month at the lumber mill to make payments and I almost failed my junior year because of it. Yeah, that’s another thing—I’m graduating next year, maybe with a football scholarship. I’m in love with a girl that I want to marry someday, and you?” I sneered disdainfully. “You’ve missed all of it.” I stopped, red in the face.
For a second, I thought Dad was going to hit me again, and I got ready to take it, but then he took another deep breath, and his voice shook when he murmured, “I’m going for a walk.”
I blinked and shuffled around him, moving for the stairs. At the last moment I looked at him over my shoulder in time to see the front door snick closed behind him. Dad’s attitude perplexed me. He must’ve been really sober. Of course, it wouldn’t last, but it was nice once in a while to complain and yell at him without him hitting back.
As I’d suspected there was nothing helpful in Josiah’s books. Even though I’d already finished reading them all, I scoured them again, cover to cover, skimming passages about fearsome gargoyles and places like Fairies Waterfall, a lush haven of pure water and bizarre plants. But I found nothing new to add to the cryptic page on Rankers in the bestiary. I couldn’t even find anything online about them, no matter how deeply I scoured the internet. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the Rankers had nothing to do with anything. But I wanted to talk about it with Nikki anyway.
At the beginning of September, the school had planned a senior trip that would count toward the volunteer hours necessary for graduation. The next day, Sunday, a bus took Ben, Kitty, Nikki and I, along with a group of other upperclassmen to the Arrow Creek homeless shelter where we were to help out all day cleaning up and preparing food. It would be an excellent opportunity to talk with Nikki about everything that was happening away from the insanity that Firestone was becoming. My spirits were relatively high, considering the circumstances; we’d gotten a call from Tyson’s sister saying he was already improving—breathing on his own and talking in short spans. He had asked for me, and I’d spent most of the bus ride to Arrow Creek discussing the game and how school compared to hospital life before he went to sleep. I hadn’t mentioned the happenings in the park the previous night.
It was a wonderful, sunny day, and I could almost convince myself that I’d imagined the horror of the previous night and that the weird dreams I’d been having were nothing more than the result of stressing about Friday’s football game. Almost.
Ben and Kitty were taking their lunch break at a table nearby, but they were busy talking, so Nikki and I were able to discuss things in private.
“Alright,” I said, “Let’s sum up what we know: someone Garrett knows attacks us in the park dressed like a Renaissance fair headsman. His voice is the same voice as the guy’s in my nightmare who kills my mom. I dream of a guy who has the same name as the man who wrote the books Josiah gave me and he warns me that weird things are going to happen. Then lo and behold, they do! Am I missing anything?”
Nikki nodded, tapping her fingers against her mug of chai tea. “I was thinking about it last night…all the weird crimes suddenly happening all over the world...only really started around the time we saw Garrett on the mountain.” My eyes went round. I hadn’t considered that. “Tyson said that the other survivors of the plane crash are all reporting that they didn’t see anyone go up the aisle to the cockpit to hijack the plane. There were no sounds of violence, no warning from the pilots. No proof of mechanical failure. The thing just nose-dived from a half-mile up.”
“You really think it’s all connected?” I asked, leaning forward over my coffee.
Nikki looked grim. “I don’t think we should rule out the possibility.”
“But Garrett?” I asked with disbelief. “Garrett having people attack us in the park with a knife? Garrett almost killing a kid on the mountain? Garrett somehow affiliated with the terrorists committing these mass attacks and bizarre disasters?” I asked. Up until Friday night, he would have been last on my who’s-who list of criminal masterminds.
“He could be just a part of the bigger picture. Maybe he knows people; maybe he’s a member of a terrorist group or a cult—”
“Maybe he’s a Ranker,” I interrupted impulsively. I hadn’t meant to really say it out loud.
Nikki gave me a skeptical look. “Hold on, Jon, what would that even mean? You read about Rankers in a book about myths and legends. So he knows people that have dark robes and he wants to hurt us. That doesn’t make him mythological evil incarnate.”
“He almost killed Carl on the mountain and he laughed about it. He didn’t just have a pair of his friends TP my house or key your car, they had knives. And the guy in charge...I knew his voice. It was the same voice as the guy who killed my mom. That isn’t possible.”
“The same voice as the man who murdered your mother in your dream, Jonathan,” Nikki said. She spoke delicately, as if afraid that I’d break like glass.
I frowned at her. “Nikki, you’re the one who mentioned the weird timing of all the world-catastrophes. Are you really willing to rule out a supernatural explanation here?”
She swept a hand through her hair and said, “Okay. You’re right. All of this is too weird for there not to be...something extra going on. For the sake of this discussion, let’s say this isn’t just ultra-organized crime or a weird cult. Let’s say that Rankers are after you. Why? What do they want? And why are these things happening to you? What did you do? Do you know something you shouldn’t?”
“Mmmmmm...no, not anything criminals would want to hide. I know a load about the mythological, but…nothing to really astonish anyone. Probably enough to have me locked in a padded cell but not enough to have me killed.”
Nikki wouldn’t meet my gaze. She carefully chose her words. “Why did he call you a prince?”
I thought back to the park
and the weird things Garrett’s friend had said: What would it take to break a prince’s heart? What would it take to crush a hero? And Peter, in my dream before that, had said something about me being chosen to sit on a throne.
I scratched my chin. “Oh, that’s right, he did call me that.”
Nikki smiled sympathetically. “You’re a good guy, Jonathan. There are a lot of people that don’t like good guys. Maybe he was being facetious. Mocking you.”
I squeezed her hand. “I don’t know. I’m going crazy trying to understand all of this. I would never have imagined that Garrett had this kind of influence. But back in the diner, his eyes…” I remembered the scarlet glow that I’d glimpsed in his pupils and sank lower in my chair as if to hide, shaking my head. “There’s something wrong with him. I always thought he was just some sociopath but then I learned about Rankers and...I can’t explain it but it fits.”
Nikki tilted her head at me, supportive despite her own doubts, encouraging me to continue with a dip of her head, her eyes attentive.
I kissed her fingers gratefully and said, “Imagine that you’d never seen a tiger before, but you’d read about them in books. How they look, how they act. If you saw one in the wild after that, it might not fit the picture you had in your imagination, but you could recognize it by the information you had, right?”
Nikki appeared thoughtful.
I added, “With Garrett and the Rankers, it’s like that. But even if Garrett isn’t in charge, even if he is just a cog in a bigger machine, why is the bigger machine acting out now? We need to figure this out before things get even worse. Maybe we can piece together enough of the puzzle to help the police put it all to an end.”
I took another sip of coffee and saw that Ben was gazing at the town annex across the street with his mouth open, bobbing his head every now and then to keep it in his sights as vehicles scooted by. I made a face at Kitty, who smirked back and shrugged, as oblivious as I was as to what could be so fascinating about some old building full of papers. Then Ben frowned, shut his mouth, and his focus suddenly became extremely intense.
“What’s up?” I asked, trying to spot what was distracting him.
Nikki followed Ben’s line of sight and pointed up at a small civilian helicopter droning in the sky, just visible above the roofline of the annex. “How low would you say that’s flying?” she whispered.
“Too low,” Ben said.
The whopping sound of the helicopter’s rotors drummed out over the sound of traffic, loud enough to begin drawing the eye of others around us. To my sight, it seemed to be tilting erratically, swinging side to side. Was the pilot having fun or having a heart attack? Or was it even more sinister? I thought of the conversation Nikki and I had just had and felt chills.
Every conversation had dwindled to a halt. People were leaving their tables to squint up at the helicopter, shading their eyes, murmuring cluelessly. The little chopper dropped lower, so sharply that we all flinched. I thought I saw something like a small black cloud funnel out away from where the cockpit was, like a tiny tornado of smoke. But it wasn’t smoke. Nikki’s sharp glance at me confirmed it. She had seen it too. There was nothing normal about that darkness.
“Rankers,” I whispered.
At first, I thought the chopper was going to crash into the plains behind the annex. It was close enough now that its rotors were deafening. Some vehicles were stopping, their drivers pressing against the windows to stare. I heard a couple of cars collide but didn’t look away from the helicopter. No, it was going to crash into the trees not forty feet behind us.
“Shit,” I muttered.
The helicopter glided over us; the air vibrating loudly, rattling the windows. We covered our ears. As it swept overhead, I forced my eyes open, tracking the glass bubble of the cockpit. I couldn’t see anything within—the inside of the glass was blackish red and glistening, as if a giant paint bomb had gone off inside.
“Get down!” I bellowed, shoving the table over and yanking Nikki beneath me behind it. I peered over the top to see that my order had been followed—Ben and Kitty had ducked behind their own table and those who weren’t running for their lives were doing likewise.
I felt myself begin to tremble with adrenaline and glanced at the chopper once more, just in time to see it smash into the trees. Its engine whined, and then with a horrible, protesting shriek, it was torn to pieces in the branches and trunks. I heard a small explosion, but it was mostly confined in the trees. The worst part, the part I had expected, was the rotors. Bits of them flew like shrapnel around us, razor blades of metal that struck our table with sounds like nails being launched from a high-powered nail gun.
Someone running past me went down with a strangled cry. Spots of blood swelled into puddles through the dark shirt over his back, and he screamed again.
Ben appeared beside us with Kitty, both of whom looked whole and uninjured. He began to examine the wounded guy, using his pocketknife to cut the tattered shirt away. “You and Nikki should go check for others who may be wounded,” he said, his dark eyes glancing our way. “Kitty, call the police.”
Ben could take care of the situation here. Kitty fished her cell phone out of her pocket, her hands trembling as badly as if she’d just pulled them out of ice water. While she watched her boyfriend work, she edged nearer to him as if to receive protection, finding solace in his confidence and detached, clinical manner.
I took Nikki’s hand, and we went to check out the damage. The fireball spread, swelling as it ate the dry autumn foliage. It didn’t look like any buildings were in immediate danger, but they would be if firefighters didn’t get here fast enough. All that remained of the helicopter itself, and its poor pilot, was charred, blackened metal and foul-smelling smoke.
Most everyone had been able to escape the brunt of the explosion and the deadly barrage of shattered metal. Some people still sprinted past me, eyes wild with animal panic, a few with hands pressed over bloody wounds that hadn’t penetrated through the shock to their awareness yet. Many began to wander back, drawn like moths to flame, hands over their mouths and cell phones pressed to their ears or held in shaking hands, recording the chaos.
Not everyone had made it, though. A handful of people lay around us, also stuck with shrapnel. Moans and anguished weeping began rising to a crescendo. One man nearby rolled a woman’s body over, shaking her, calling her name hysterically when she didn’t respond. The smoke was now too thick to make things out clearly, but there also seemed to be a few unlucky pedestrians who had been walking along the street beyond the cafe and got caught in the worst of the damage. I surveyed the carnage, put my hands on my head, and tangled my fingers in my hair. My breath started hitching, and I didn’t know whether to weep or scream my frustration at my own helplessness. Something in my expression made Nikki reach over, take one of my hands, and give it a shaky squeeze.
“Come on,” she said to me. “I’ve had first-aid training. Not as much as Ben, but I know how to treat some wounds.” She spoke soothingly, as if I were one of the traumatized victims, calm and collected—or at least doing a decent job of pretending to be. She took the hair tie from around her wrist and began pulling her hair back into a ponytail. I followed her toward the bodies spread across the pavement beyond the cafe, watching her evaluate the injured at a glance, deciding who needed immediate aid the most. I hovered uselessly at her shoulder until she had me press a pad of someone’s wadded-up jacket to the gash in their side. Nikki told me I was doing a good job the same way a doctor might coddle a child who had just been given an injection without screaming, and then she started speaking conversationally with her “patient,” despite them being obviously out of it and incapable of responding. After a time, Nikki just started humming a slow, pretty, lullaby-like tune.
I watched her and Ben work, mute, watched them rush from person to person, mindless of gaping wounds, blood, and screams, watched Nikki tear strips
from her skirt to make tourniquets or staunch bleeding, staining her fingers red, talking to those in shock, and generally healing.
That black smoke streaming from the gore-spattered cockpit kept popping into my mind like a jump scare. The crash wasn’t an accident. Somehow, the Rankers were involved, and if that was the case, then how many other terrible things happening in the world were their fault? And if Rankers were real, then were the other things in the books Josiah had given me also real? Did unicorns and mermaids and griffins exist too?
Nikki backtracked to check on one of her “patients” and I trailed after her, gazing forlornly around us at the carnage and hating my helplessness.
There was someone leaning against the trunk of a tree across the street in the front yard of a large model home and for a horrible moment I thought that maybe they’d been pinned there by a stray piece of wreckage. But when I did a double-take, straining to see if the person was wounded or not, I recognized him.
Garrett.
He stood there under the fiery-colored maple leaves, the picture of unconcern, grinning in my direction. As I stared, astounded that Garrett had shown up here, of all places, he spread his arms as if inviting me to take in and enjoy the tableau of carnage around us, then kissed his fingers and spread them in the air like he found it all delicious.
Pressure built in my head and eyes as a fury more intense than anything I’d ever felt before consumed me. My ears rang with it, my heart pounded, and energy sang through my body. Without a backwards glance or a word to Nikki, I sprang forward, sprinting toward Garrett with one thought in my mind: I was going to take him apart.
