“Opportunity to what? Are you telling this council you actually trust them?”
Antonio leaned back and puffed the cigar thoughtfully.
“At the moment, yes. Olivia thinks there is something else going on here. Something they want to talk to us about. And we finally made it possible for them to do it.”
“Did she say what it is? Nothing in her report mentions it.”
“Olivia doesn’t speculate in reports unless told to,” Antonio snorted. “You know that. But no, she hasn’t figured out what it is…other than it might be tangentially related to the Sellars situation.”
“Pardon me,” Alejandro interrupted from the other side of the table, “but has anybody thought to test this Sellars fellow with veneno? While the odds of finding a talent outside our people is very low, it can happen. Maybe the talent runs in their family, which would explain why the Spider People hung on to the boy. A talent from a completely new blood line would be priceless.”
Antonio shifted in his seat, glad to be talking with a non-hostile Elder.
“Olivia says it isn’t necessary. She thought of it early on and ran a test on Mr. Sellars’ blood. She says he doesn’t have the right characteristics to be a talent, so there is no point in wasting veneno to check. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the boy if Adam’s brother was the only one with the genes, and there is also his mother’s side of the genetics to consider. If he is a talent it would certainly explain their reluctance to part with him. On the other hand it could simply be a matter of him having seen too much and they preferred killing Adam to solve the situation as opposed to killing the lad. The fact they are willing to give him back now that Adam is with us suggests the latter is more likely.”
“With us?” Cesar echoed back in barely concealed outrage. “Since when? There is another place where you threaten to overstep your authority, Antonio! This council is the only body with the jurisdiction to approve an outsider joining the People. And we don’t make a habit of doing that! You had no business bringing him in as far as you did! If we decide against him joining us, you will be the one responsible for terminating him. Understood?”
“Understood,” Antonio sighed. “I had to bring him in to this level for Olivia’s plan to work. For what it’s worth, a man of his education and ability would be a nice asset to have. We have far too many ‘soldiers’ and not enough ‘scientists.’”
“That’s a subject for a different meeting. My only concern is Olivia’s safety with this stranger.”
“She’ll be safer once I’m allowed to go back,” Antonio growled. “Adam is hardly my first choice for a protector, although I’m sure he would try.”
“It’s not his ability to protect her I’m worried about! How well do you really know him? What if he decides to hurt her in an attempt to escape or something?!”
That actually brought a bark of laughter from the Chieftain.
“Adam? Hurt Olivia? Cesar, you have no idea how ridiculous that is. Adam Sellars is half crippled and still weakened due to recovering from multiple gunshot wounds. And he doesn’t want to ‘escape’…he wants to get his nephew back. Furthermore, violently attacking women is hardly in his nature.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I’m sure.” Antonio grinned around his cigar. “Knowing Adam and Olivia, they will be sitting down to a rousing game of chess right about now. Truthfully, I almost feel sorry for the kid the Spider Tribe has watching them. His job has to be almost as exciting as watching paint dry.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MOVIE NIGHT
It didn’t get any better than this.
Billy Clayton leaned back in the theater seat and took a long satisfying sip of his large grape soda. The big tub of popcorn occupied a seat of its own beside him, and he had a box of chocolate nonpareils just in case the popcorn and drink didn’t last through the movie. And what a movie!
Night of the Spine Ripper!
When the two objects of his surveillance chose to go to the movies for the evening, his first reaction had been alarm. His half brother, Arlen, had visited him a little earlier while he watched the Dog People’s hotel room and brought a small spider with him. Naturally, he had shared. The problem was, with his spirit fortified by the Mother’s Kiss, the thought of sitting in an enclosed room with a hundred strangers had initially given Billy cause for panic.
But fortune smiled.
It turned out the theater was practically empty on a Monday night. Other than his targets, who had seated themselves in the back row below the projection window, the only people in the theater were a trio of teens near the front row and an adult couple sitting near the aisle about halfway back. Enhanced as he was, Billy found he could sit in the middle of the theater and get a fair read of everybody in the room.
A quick check revealed the kids up front to be stoned half out of their minds, which made their thoughts faint, slow, and easy to ignore. The couple near the aisle were apparently here on a clandestine tryst…both were married but not to each other. Their mental combination of awkward guilt and sneaky delight in their escapade caused Billy to grimace as he sipped on his drink. Adults having fun with the idea of themselves as naughty children didn’t amuse him. But like the kids in front, their thoughts were quiet which made them easy to ignore.
As a matter of fact, this whole mission looked like it was going to result in an unanticipated treat…a real movie the Elders were sure to disapprove of, in a real movie theater with all the amenities, but empty enough where he wouldn’t be fighting to shut out a cacophony of spirit talk. The whole situation had the potential to be perfect…
...if it weren’t for the outsider in the back row.
Billy scowled and struggled over whether to even attempt to ignore the mental racket coming from the man. His job was to monitor the outsider and the Dog People, so it was arguably his duty to pay attention for anything of use to his Elders. On the other hand, he couldn’t possibly imagine any use for the din of doubt and self berating that emanated from fifty feet behind him.
Yesterday in the park he had walked past the trio at their table and, as expected, had only managed to hear the spirit of the outsider. There had been little to learn from the brief encounter other than the knowledge the Dog People were now starting to educate him on some of the basics of their shared history…and the fact the outsider seemed to have a real thing for the Dog Tribe’s woman.
He had dutifully reported all this to Arlen, who would return the information to the elders.
Now it looked like the outsider had decided to try and act on his attraction to the Dog Woman and had chosen this place to make his move. Billy shook his head and grabbed a handful of popcorn from the bucket in the seat next to him. He could think of about five better choices off the top of his head for that type of thing, but he certainly wasn’t going to complain about the way things worked out.
The teenager stuffed the popcorn into his mouth and cheerfully refocused his attention to the screen, where an improbably endowed blonde wearing nothing but her underwear and high heels ran through a deserted building searching for an exit in vain. Oh yeah, Hollywood at its finest.
Behind him, another burst of embarrassment and despair flared anew.
Dammit, the young telepath growled, he’s going to wreck the whole movie.
###
Really, Adam? Really? Night of the Spine Ripper? This is the best you can come up with when the smartest, most beautiful woman on the planet agrees to go out with you?
He glanced over at Olivia… who sat primly in her seat, watching with polite interest as a coed got disemboweled on the screen.
Oh yeah, she thinks you’re an idiot. You can take that one to the bank.
Adam clenched his eyes shut for a second and willed every form of horrific plague he could imagine on the town of Hallisboro. How the hell could a town of twenty-five thousand people only have two rinky-dink single screen theaters? The other one, The Zephyr, featured a Disney movie and a line of pare
nts with five year olds stretching halfway around the building.
So here they sat in the Palomino, a smaller and slightly seedy theater Adam guessed was only a few years away from demolition or being forced to show midnight porn movies to survive. The red velveteen seats and curtains on the walls had long ago gone threadbare, and the screen featured a visible patch that made a slight distortion in the lower left quadrant of the moving picture. Judging by the outside appearance of the faded brick building, he figured the theater to be well over half a century old.
It had been that old, small town architecture he had used as an excuse to come in here…saying it would be a refreshing change to watch a movie in something with a little more “personality” than the soulless giant mega-cinemas prevailing these days. The kind of theater he imagined his grandfather paying a quarter to see an old black and white Western, or maybe a Vincent Price horror movie when it first came out.
But Grandpa and Vincent would be spinning in their graves if they could see this.
On screen, a second coed stumbled onto the evisceration in progress and managed to scream, drop her robe, and stumble off into the bowels of the building in an almost complete state of undress. That seemed to be the acting range of the actresses presented so far in this film…scream, lose clothes, get killed. And this was only twenty minutes into the movie. With a sorority’s worth of victims still left in the building, things didn’t look like they would be changing any time soon.
A quick check of his watch revealed another hour and ten minutes of this self-inflicted humiliation remained.
And what was he doing here anyway?
Tucker still resided with the people who may have killed his parents, who most certainly had been trying to kill Adam himself, and who lived in some kind of strange symbiotic relationship with the most hideous monstrosities Adam could imagine. The fact that Tucker had apparently adapted to the point of comfort when it came to being in close proximity to these monsters didn’t make him feel a lot better about it.
And here he was out on a date?
Well, yeah. I meet with the Spider People again on Wednesday night and there is nothing I can do for Tucker till then. And let’s face it, Antonio is going to be back some time tomorrow and this is the last chance I’m going to get to be alone with Olivia. Hell, after Wednesday I don’t know if I will even get a chance to see her again. It’s now or never. This date is the last chance I get.
Assuming anybody in their right mind would label this disaster a date.
He risked a peek over at Olivia, hoping she would show some hint of how she was taking this fiasco. Unfortunately she still sat with her hands folded in her lap, watching the film with her typical inscrutability. Nothing in her expression betrayed what opinion she held of the current scene, where the scantily clad coed now attempted to hide by crawling into what appeared to be a large standing dryer in the basement of the old building. A few seconds later the killer marched into the room. He scooped an armful of conveniently placed sharp implements off a nearby table, threw them into the machine, then blocked the door shut and turned the dryer on.
Muffled screams, thuds, and clangs from the screen accompanied Adam’s internal groan of mortified horror. If he didn’t do something right now he was going to implode from sheer embarrassment and sink through the floor. Desperately wracking his mind for any way to even mildly improve things, he settled on the most obvious.
“Olivia?” he leaned toward her and whispered. “Would you like some popcorn, or a drink?”
She seemed to consider the offer with the same type of focus she would expend on more serious questions, then nodded her head.
“Popcorn would be nice.”
“Coming right up.” Adam stood in the darkness, relieved to be doing anything but just sitting there feeling stupid, and started working his way toward the aisle.
He decided to leave his cane in his chair, in order to free up his hands for the popcorn. With his improved balance, it really wasn’t necessary for this short trip, and he had only brought it with him tonight because he remembered dark theaters with slanted floors had given him real trouble in the past. Since they had seated themselves in the back row, that hadn’t been an issue. The only other danger was the treacherous footing due to sticky patches on the floor, and he paid attention to his steps with those in mind.
Apparently mopping was only an occasional thing at the Palomino.
Reaching the aisle, he pushed his way through swinging doors and entered the small lobby. Like the rest of the theater, it had seen better days. At the moment, it appeared the old man who ran the place had sent the ticket girl home for the evening and was in the process of shutting down the concession stand after seeing the lack of crowd for the night.
“Well feller,” the man announced as Adam approached, “looks like you made it in under the wire. The drink machine is shut down, but you can still have popcorn or candy if you want.”
“Popcorn will be fine. By the way, will there be any place open I could take my date out to eat after the movie.”
“On a Monday night? Not likely.”
“Yeah,” Adam sighed, “that’s what I was afraid of.”
“Sorry,” the old man commiserated as he filled a tub of popcorn and set it on the counter, “but this ain’t the big city. We roll up our sidewalks at ten o’clock around here. You could take her to the BullPit Truckstop out on the highway east of town. Their diner will be open, and they make a decent chicken fried steak if you like that.”
Okay, it’s now official. God hates me. I’ve been shot, blown up, and terrorized by giant spiders, but apparently that wasn’t good enough. Oh no, not even close. NOW after asking out the woman of my dreams, I end up with nowhere to take her but a hack’n’slash horror flick and a greasy spoon at a truck stop for dinner afterwards…exactly the type of romantic planning made famous by guys with three teeth and names like Billy Bob, Bubba, and Jethro.
“Thanks,” Adam replied without enthusiasm.
He dropped a five on the counter and picked up the tub of popcorn. There was no way he was going to drag Olivia to a truck stop. Making her endure this movie was bad enough without completely disgracing himself in the eyes of the sophisticated young woman by having something “chicken fried” dropped on a plate in front of her. No, at this point it was best to simply hope the movie didn’t actually get more awful than it already was, then take her home and slink off to his room in abject mortification. Just another hour and he could bring this pain to an end.
With a miserable shake of his head he turned to head back into the theater…
…and came to a shocked halt.
The kid Antonio had identified as being a member of the Spider People stood in the doorway back into the theater, only ten feet away.
William Harris Clayton still wore the trucker’s hat he had sported in the park, which along with his jeans, white tee shirt and open plaid flannel shirt made him look like nothing more than a redneck teen. The indolent way he stood there, holding the large fountain drink and still nursing its straw, reeked of adolescent attitude. Yet somehow, at the same time, it didn’t. Something in the kid’s eyes belied a gravitas not normally associated with his age group—as if he were sixteen going on forty.
Adam glanced back over at the old man, but the manager had pulled out his cash register drawer and gone through a door into some room behind the concession stand. The door closed with a click, leaving the lobby empty.
For the second time in less than a week, Adam found himself alone with a member of the Spider People.
The two stared at each other across the short distance.
Okay Adam, he braced himself, he may be a kid but don’t forget he’s also a lot more. And if what Olivia said about him being second generation is true, there is no telling what he is capable of…aaaannnnd since he’s a telepath he knows what I’m telling myself right now, doesn’t he…
“Yeah,” the kid drawled around his straw, then lowered the cup to fix Adam wit
h a level gaze, “that’s right. But I just want to watch the movie. So I’m going to keep this real simple and point out the obvious, then you can take it from there so I can get back to watching the show.”
“Err…” This wasn’t exactly what Adam had expected.
“That woman,” the young redneck hitched his thumb over his shoulder at the theater behind, “could read the title of the movie on the sign outside every bit as good as you, and she came on in anyway without objecting one bit.”
“Wha …”
“Then,” the teen bored onwards, “you lead her right into the middle of the make-out row in the back, and she still don’t object or suggest nothin’ else.”
Adam could only stare at the youngster, not believing this conversation was taking place.
“But once you get her there, what do you do?” Billy frowned at him in obvious irritation. “You get cold feet, start freaking out over the movie and begin panicking so loud I can’t hear myself think halfway across the theater.”
“Oh…sorry…but…” Adam started to protest but the kid raised his hand to keep him from interrupting.
The boy continued to hold his hand up as he lifted his drink and took another long sip from the straw. He closed his eyes for a second, as if concentrating on something, then reopened them to return his strangely level and knowing gaze on Adam.
“Look, Mister,” he sighed, “all I’ve got to say is you haven’t been that mysterious. If she’s half as smart as you think she is, then she knows damn well what you’re up to… and yet there she sits. What does that tell you?”
Adam listened to this summation with stunned astonishment.
Could the kid be right? Was he letting his own self doubt and insecurity get in the way of him seeing the truth right in front of him? Was he confusing Olivia’s normal poise with polite indifference? Was she sitting in there right now wondering if he intended to ever do anything, or was she beginning to think he might simply be some idiot who took women to puerile slasher flicks for jollies?
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