The Keeper

by Barr, Clifford

  If she had, then his life wouldn’t have changed as much as it did by the time she was shoving her head into a force field outside of a thruway rest stop. She could have gotten into her car and drove off and left the problems to the people who felt that they needed to solve them.

  But something moved in Danni that night. She ran up with the two of them, and one minute later, she would be unconscious on the ground, her skin hot.

  Her anger would lose control.

  Chapter Eight

  Matt seemed to recover well. The NaU seems to be a miracle drug/device, if anything else. The boy is powerful, though. When you give someone power who’s never had any, though, what happens? Do they become grateful? Or resentful.

  I know how his father took it, and that’s when many of our problems really started.

  -Robbie’s Journal

  Matt liked Walter the second he saw him.

  Surely not back at the other rest stop, though. Back then, the man who was helping Becca was simply that, a man, a faceless person with gray hair who was someplace that he didn’t belong.

  Be after seeing the man upfront, oh, Matt liked him indeed. The kinetic shield was preventing him from feeling the man’s insides, but if he did, he thought he knew what he would find. A failing body, his organs finally on their last couple of trips before they were gone forever, along with the rest of him. He wasn’t some hero. He was a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was weak.

  He would be reasonable.

  The snow fell around them. Matt thought about telling Danni to stop shoving her head into the field but decided against it. Perhaps it would intimidate Walter, and if it didn’t, then perhaps it would show him how dire their situation was.

  Walter walked up to the shield and looked through it at Matt.

  “You are Walter?” Matt said.

  “Yes,” the old man said. His voice sounded tired and perhaps weak. Matt couldn’t tell for certain how old the man was with the shield up, but in his mind, he looked to be pushing the back end of the sixties. An old man with lots of knowledge and experience.

  “We need to take Becca with us,” Matt said. “It’s very important.”

  “And why should I hand—”

  “No,” Matt said, “not hand. You can’t make Becca do anything. We need you to convince her to come out here and come with me.”

  Matt hoped that none of the others noticed that he said “me” instead of “we.” It didn’t matter much. None of them could stop him anyway.

  “And why would she do that.”

  “Because she’s my sister.”

  The words felt like grease coming out of his mouth. It was one thing to think of Becca as a concept or a goal. It would have been easier to hate her if he didn’t know her.

  But saying out loud that he was her brother sent shivers up his spine and made him nauseous. He, of course, would keep those feelings from the others. They didn’t need to know how he felt. All they had to do was think that he was their leader and that he was going to save them from all of this. He had to. He had to.

  Walter seemed a little taken aback by that revelation.

  “Most brothers I know don’t try to kill their sisters,” he said.

  “We don’t want to kill Becca,” Jolie said. “We just want to talk to her.”

  Walter pointed behind him.

  “Was it talk that you all wanted to do at the last station?” he said. “Hell, if Becca hadn’t done her magic or whatever the hell it was, this whole thing here is, I’m sure you already would have tried to attack us again.”

  “I apologize that Danni acted the way that she did,” Matt said.

  Matt pointed over at their friend. She was shoving his head repeatedly into the field. It would smash into it, regrow in an instant, and then she would smash it into the field again.

  “As you can see, she isn’t of the best mental faculties at the moment,” Matt said. “She acted rashly. Had I known that you were inside, I wouldn’t have allowed her to act the way that she did. I don’t want any more people to die tonight, Walter.”

  “Then what is this really—”

  “No,” Matt said, putting up his hands. He felt every single snowflake around him, each of them all distinct and different from the others. He felt the insides of his friends around him, felt every clump of snow, every pine needle, for a mile in each direction. He felt all of it. And his patience was starting to run thin.

  “Kent here has informed us that you wish to hand over the girl,” Matt said. “Now that you know who we are and who the girl is, are you going to keep true to your promise, or are you a liar, Walter?”

  “Look, I said I would hand over the girl,” Walter said. “But I want to know more about what is going on here. You might very well be Rebecca’s brother, but that’s pretty much all I know about you people, and that the one who speaks through the radio is called your ‘plight.’”

  “That would be me.”

  Kent was looking in the general direction of Walter, his pink eyes blazing in the snow all around them.

  Matt had a strong urge to vomit at that moment. He didn’t, though, but his body felt weaker than it had a few hours earlier. His mother’s NaU was slowly making its way through his system, trying to find other cells for it to feed on that weren’t already being taken up by his own NaU. The air around him felt cold, and he knew it wasn’t because of the temperature or the snow.

  He didn’t want his mother’s NaU in him. His mother’s NaU made him feel dirty. It was as though he had taken out a few of his own teeth and replaced them with his mother’s.

  But there hadn’t been anyone else close enough to take it except for him.

  After the ambush on I-88, Matt had been the closest to his mother’s body. Danni was miles away, her body rebuilding itself in the snow. Jolie was looking for where Robbie and Becca went. That meant it was only Matt who could take the NaU.

  He had levitated down the road to his mother’s corpse.

  His mother was dead when he arrived. It would have caused him great mental harm to have to kill his mother. Jolie was the one who struck the blow though, so all Matt had to do was let it happen.

  Her NaU started to go into a frenzy. There was an SUV parked next to her, their lights looking at her body. Inside, Matt felt a mother, along with two children. The NaU inside Carol’s body sensed them as well and gladly would have taken one of them as its new host.

  Matt could have stayed back and let the NaU come out of her body and swarm over toward the SUV. Would the mother be the first choice? Or perhaps one of the children? They were younger, and perhaps the NaU would have preferred to feast on their cells than those present in their mother? The NaU could have gone into any of them, and it would have been one less thing for Matt to worry about.

  But he wasn’t heartless.

  He levitated over toward his mother, his orange energy flickering and radiating out of him as he did so. The mother got out of the SUV, the snow whirling around her. She looked at Matt in awe.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, crouching down over his mother. Having his feet touch the ground was still an odd experience for him, and he tried not to show his discomfort in front of the SUV.

  His mother’s body started to twitch, and the bright blue NaUs flowed out of her mouth and over toward Matt. They burrowed themselves into his flesh. It took everything in him not to scream.

  He coughed a little and stumbled next to his mother’s body. The mother walked over toward him.

  “No,” he said, putting up a hand. He got a hold of himself and reached under his mother. Her body was cold now that the NaU was out of her.

  “You finally get to rest,” he said, starting to rise. There was nothing he could do about the witnesses. He could kill them, but he didn’t want to. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was no real need to rob them of their life for something like that.

  Instead, he focused his NaU and decided to give them a show.

  People see
crazy things every day, things they can’t explain but want to. The only way that seeing all of this would make sense to the woman and her children was if they saw something familiar.

  Wings made of orange light grew from his back. He made it look like he was flying as he brought his mother’s corpse into the sky. He disappeared amidst the clouds.

  He didn’t want her NaU, but he took it anyway.

  “Walter,” Matt said, his patience wavering, “You need to convince my sister to come out here.”

  “What do you want with her anyhow?” Walter said. “Since it seems to me like you don’t have anything positive in mind for her.”

  “We need her,” Jolie said. “That’s all you need to know.”

  “Fine,” Matt said. “We need my sister for her NaU.”

  “I figured that pa—”

  “Please shut up,” Matt said. Everyone around him grew tense. Matt felt their heartbeats quicken like they always did whenever they felt like they needed to help him. When he was weak.

  He took a deep breath.

  “We need my sister for her NaU,” Matt said. “It is the only thing that can save us.”

  “Which one?” Walter said. “The purple one or the white one?”

  “Neither,” Matt said. “Those are NaUs that she took from other people, and not the one that originated within her. She has three inside of her, and it’s the first one that we need.”

  “Why?” Walter said, but Matt saw the wheels turning in his head. He was almost to the truth. All he needed was a little encouragement.

  “You must have noticed by now that all of us are dying,” Matt said. “Kent’s body is slowly disintegrating, Jolie is having seizures, Danni’s mind is completely shot, and I have a bunch of tumors growing inside of me. I will only last a couple of days, if that long. What have you noticed about my sister? Does she look sick? Does she look like she’s dying? Does she look phased at all by what’s happening to her?”

  Matt saw it then, the realization on Walter’s face.

  “Yes, my sister’s NaU, her first and original one,” Matt said, “allows her to use other people’s NaU without dying, without having her body ripped to shreds. It’s what makes her the strongest out of all of us. It’s what allows her to be The Keeper.”

  ****

  Matt heard his father before he saw him.

  As Jolie wheeled him up the ramp to the front door, his heart started to beat quickly. Inside the house, people were yelling, as they always were whenever his father came to visit. He might not have been like this when he was younger, but at the moment, that’s all that Nigel ever was. He shuffled around in his seat, his back scars feeling itchy, the way they always did whenever he heard his father yelling. Whether the itching was out of fear, or an invitation, Matt didn’t know.

  Danni could have let him stay at one of their houses. Hell, it wasn’t out of the picture. Matt had been going over to their houses for about as long as he could remember.

  The night had been going so well, oh so well. He and Jolie had gone over to look at the cows, had seen the alpacas, had gone through the booths, looked at jewelry, and other odd tidbits and antiques. The two of them had shared a bag of maple cotton candy, and then they were going to play that stupid shooting game, and then the two of them were going to have a good night.

  And all throughout, Matt didn’t need help once. He was able to push his wheelchair all throughout the matted, wet grass and the mud with no problem, and if there were problems, they were small enough for him to handle on his own. He looked somewhat competent, and it was heaven.

  But those sorts of things never last.

  He had no indication of the attack. One moment he was shooting the ducks as they raced across his view. The next, he was blacking out, red blood and vomit coming out of his mouth. His arms felt cold and weak, and he let go of his makeshift grasp around Jolie’s neck and shoulders. Maybe if he fell back, everything could have been better. He was close enough to this wheelchair that he could have broken his neck if he hit the bar with the right angle. Then it would have been dark.

  He hadn’t wished to die in a long time, and he wasn’t about to admit to himself that that thought might have flashed across his mind. What the hell did he have to feel bad about? He had a girlfriend, good friends, and a semi-decent life. The sort of thinking where one’s life ended merely for their own convenience was that talk of weak people, and Matt wasn’t weak. No, not at all.

  Jolie pushed him into the house.

  Nigel and Robbie were arguing in the living room. Matt smelled the scent of a candle (perhaps cinnamon) in the kitchen. It was a better smell than the one coming from his mother.

  Robbie and Nigel turned to look at them.

  “What happened?” Nigel said, walking over toward him.

  “Nothing, Dad,” Matt said. He should have wheeled himself in. That would have shown some level of competence that his father could have paid attention to, if he paid attention to anything at all.

  “Honestly, nothing happened,” Matt said.

  Before his father and everyone else got any closer, Matt grabbed the wheel and rolled down the hall to his room. People were yelling behind him, but he didn’t stop. He wished he had given a better goodbye to Jolie, but this would have to do. He rolled into his room and locked the door behind him.

  What did they care about something that happened that night? He was fine. He didn’t need them!

  His room was too small, but he liked it. He flipped on the lights.

  Matt had lived in the same house for all seventeen years of his life. Same room, too. He wheeled himself past old photos and fading posters to his bed. He lifted himself out of the chair and laid down in the bed. It felt good not to sit.

  They were arguing both about him but not about him at the same time. His father had probably had a lousy day at work and needed to blow off some steam. Sure, he was a dick, but at least he was predictable. If his mother were still alive, or at least could still speak, the two of them would be in full combat mode, the fighting keeping them warm from the approaching death. Matt had seen all of it, and he didn’t want a part of it now. Robbie was still trying to talk to the man, though, and that bothered Matt. How the hell did Robbie think he was, trying to see the best in people? It was infuriating to always be seen as—

  There was a knocking on his window. He turned his head and looked.

  Becca was standing on the other side of the glass.

  “Come in,” he said.

  As his half-sister opened the window, he positioned himself in the bed so he would be sitting, leaning up against the wall behind him.

  “How was the fair?” Becca said, sliding into the room. It was best that she stayed out of sight. Matt’s dad wasn’t a fan of her, and Matt suspected it had something to do with his son more than anything. If Becca had been born with the same disease as Matt, then Nigel might even like the girl and would feel reassured that his own genes weren’t the ones that caused Matt to be the way he was. But Becca was born normal, and Nigel had hated her ever since.

  “It was fine,” Matt said. “How was teaching Kent?”

  “It was easier when your father wasn’t here,” Becca said.

  “I’m sure that can be applied to a lot of things,” Matt said.

  “Are you all right, Matt?” she said.

  Becca wasn’t like everyone else. Everyone else treated Matt as though he were this precious, fragile thing that was bound to break at any moment. Becca was different. She told Matt how it was, and the two of them talked like it was. It was one of the reasons he loved her as a full sister and not as a half.

  “I had an episode,” he said. “Throwing up blood.”

  “After your dad is gone,” Becca said. “I’ll let my dad know, see what he can do.”

  “There’s nothing he can do about me,” Matt said, “or Mom, or himself for that matter.”

  “You can’t blame him for trying,” Becca said.

  “But I can for giving out false h
ope,” Matt said. “Mom isn’t going to last much longer, and we both know it. She’s not even there anymore anyway.”

  His mother hadn’t been able to frame a coherent sentence in the last year alone. Robbie might be trying for a miracle cure, but there was nothing that could bring her back to how she was before all of this. The people in Matt’s room knew that, and he doubted very much that the people in the living room did.

  “I know,” Becca said.

  The two of them were quiet for a moment.

  “Where’s Jolie?” Becca asked.

  “Probably saying something to Mom,” Matt said. “You know how she is.”

  “She’s a good person,” Becca said.

  “I know,” Matt said.

  “Well,” Becca said, standing up. “I’m going to go talk to your friends before they leave. Maybe I’ll be able to score some cigarettes off of them.”

  “Please don’t,” Matt said.

  I can do more than they think, he thought, thinking about the entire night in context. He tried to focus on the better moments, tried to remember the taste of the maple cotton candy, tried to remember the way Jolie had beamed when she won her lizard. But like a marble on a table with a slight dent in it, his mind always circled back to the event.

  They’re getting tired of me, he thought, trying to keep from crying. He didn’t know why Jolie liked him. The two of them had been friends for years and only been dating for about one at that point. Maybe it was because opposites attract, or maybe it was something else. He liked her.

  What could he do really?

  His grades were about slightly above average. He had no idea what he would be doing after high school. Jolie was looking into a basketball scholarship for the University of Albany. When you’re six foot five, Matt was sure that basketball coaches swarm to you and promise to give you everything. They wouldn’t have anything to give Matt.