Tremor

by Patrick Carman

  The rest of the drifters emerged from the meat locker, all of them holding red bowling balls, which they’d retrieved from the pile of rubble. As they brushed past Faith, some of them threw a shoulder in her direction, and none of them were smiling.

  “We’re on your side, you know,” one of them said. She was the only woman among the five drifters pouring out of the room. Faith caught her eye, her nostrils flaring ever so slightly as their eyes met.

  “And I’m on your side,” Faith said, walking away without so much as a glance. “I’d say that makes you pretty lucky.”

  It was as close as Faith was going to get to an apology, and it served only to drive a wedge further between her and the rest of the resistance movement. She had the real power, the rare second pulse. Nothing could harm her. All those drifters? They could throw cars up in the air with the power of their own thoughts all day long. But if they didn’t get out from under that thing fast enough, they’d end up the same as a normal, everyday person: dead.

  The drifter shook her head and kept walking.

  “Better play nice,” she said over her shoulder. “You might need us one day.”

  Doubtful, Faith thought. She was at least smart enough not to say it out loud as she walked into the meat locker and slammed the metal doors shut with her mind.

  Meredith watched the drifters span out around the edge of the warehouse, and she knew how badly they wanted a second pulse. She understood because she wanted one, too. From the time she’d stood before Hotspur Chance and that godforsaken table full of objects, she’d longed to take a hit as well as she could dish one out. At least she had been taught how to coax a second pulse into existence, a skill of highly selective use out in the real world. Finding single pulses was hard enough. In all her searching Meredith had encountered only two people with second-pulse potential: her own son, Dylan, and Faith Daniels.

  Dylan flew up to the landing and rested his elbows on the rail.

  “Assessment,” Meredith said. It was not a question but a command.

  Dylan shifted back and forth, scratched the back of his neck as the black T-shirt he wore folded up along his bicep.

  “It didn’t go as well as I’d hoped,” he admitted. “Her powers are off the charts as usual. And she’s not only overcoming five drifters, she’s controlling them. She’s holding them in place with her mind even while they’re trying to escape. She’s shutting them down. It’s incredible. I don’t know how she does it, and she still won’t tell me.”

  “I know how she does it.”

  Dylan looked at his mom while she stared at the metal doors of the meat locker.

  “Are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?”

  “She’s not upset, Dylan. She’s furious. There’s a difference.”

  “Emotions haven’t got anything to do with power.”

  Meredith almost smiled, but not quite. Is my son really this naïve?

  “You’re just not angry enough,” she said. “And you probably never will be.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Meredith sighed deeply.

  “How long have second pulses been understood? Twenty years? Less? We think we know the powers we possess, but what do we really know? Maybe Faith’s second pulse is more highly evolved, or maybe the force of her emotions is like a witches’ brew, altering the way her system operates. The truth is, we don’t know; and since we’re not in a laboratory with lots of free time on our hands, I’m going with rage. She’s an angry girl out for blood. It’s having an effect.”

  Dylan was feeling, as was often the case, that his mom didn’t appreciate his talents and intellect.

  “She wouldn’t even be here if I hadn’t spent all those months training her.”

  “You’re a good teacher,” Meredith agreed. “No . . . you’re a great teacher. But the fundamental question remains: do you have enough to fight for?”

  Dylan ran a hand through waves of black hair in frustration and then ticked off the score.

  “Clara Quinn killed Faith’s best friend in cold blood. Her Neanderthal brother murdered ten drifters without batting an eye, and two of them were Faith’s parents. If they could find you they’d kill you, too. Trust me; I’ve got plenty to fight for.”

  Meredith raised her eyebrows and turned to her son. Are you sure about that?

  Times like these Dylan wished Hawk were there to defend him. Outside of Faith, he was Dylan’s closest friend and confidant. Hawk was younger, scrappier, goofier, and also the smartest guy he’d ever met. A guy like that could be useful when being undermined by your own mother, but it was way too dangerous in the training area for a guy as small as Hawk without even a single pulse to protect him. And besides, he was on a scouting mission with Clooger anyway. Last he’d heard they were somewhere near Denver, a thousand miles away.

  “What do we know for certain about the second pulse?” Meredith asked.

  “Very rare,” Dylan said. He understood from experience that it didn’t matter if the complete answer was obvious. His mother wanted to hear it anyway. “We can move things, including ourselves, by thinking about them. That’s the first pulse, which is more common. We’ve got a dozen single-pulse drifters. A second pulse gives us the power to deflect things coming at us—a wall we’re flying into or a semitrailer being thrown at us—so, in theory, we can’t be harmed.”

  “And how many of you are there?”

  “Two on our side—me and Faith—and three on their side: Gretchen, Wade, and Clara Quinn.”

  “Rare. Very, very rare.”

  “Is there a purpose to this conversation?” Dylan asked. “Because if not, maybe we could do this whole quiz thing later. Everyone is in position.”

  “You know, Faith’s not as strong as she thinks she is. There are surprisingly simple things that could get her into real trouble she couldn’t get out of on her own.”

  Dylan wanted to disagree, but the teacher inside him couldn’t bring himself to defend Faith. She’d always been stubborn, all the way back to her first training sessions on the roof of the old Nordstrom building. But the depth of her resolve grew unfathomable after Clara took a hammer to Faith’s best friend’s head. For all Faith’s astounding power, it often felt as if she was focusing only on the instruction required to complete a cold, hard task she was destined to perform: killing her enemies.

  “I’ve been training her awhile now,” Dylan said. He was acutely aware of Faith’s shortcomings as a student; and as much as he hated to admit it, she needed the kind of push only Meredith could provide. There was also, at the front of his mind, the confusing fact that he was in love with the girl he was training.

  “Throw the kitchen sink at her; she’ll figure it out.”

  “You sure about that?” Meredith asked.

  Dylan didn’t have time to change his mind before Meredith began lifting washers and dryers up in the air with the force of her own thoughts. She was, everyone knew, capable of some pretty scary shit when she was trying to prove a point. Thirty smashed-up washers and dryers slammed into the meat locker doors, piling up like a Montana snowdrift. All that remained for the training to start was for the person hiding inside to come out. The washing machine on the top of the pile tumbled to the concrete floor, followed by a breathless moment of silence.

  The echo of a cough was heard.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  When Faith blew open the two metal doors, it was like a bomb going off: washers and dryers were ripped to shreds; shards of metal and knobs and wires flew everywhere, exploding into the air. But Faith’s show of bravado was her first mistake, because Meredith had secretly placed a dozen more bowling balls in the meat locker. They were black, which had made them harder to notice in the dim light of the room full of meat hooks. Before Faith could turn around, all ten balls were slamming into her back one after the other, pushing her out onto the warehouse floor like a tin can being kicked down the street.

  “Hey, take it easy—” Dylan started to
say.

  But Meredith was having none of it.

  “Stay out of this.”

  As soon as she had Faith off guard, she started piling the appliances on top of her, quickly burying her under a mountain of junk. There was silence in the warehouse as the drifters looked on, unable to stop themselves from smiling. The pile began to move, slowly this time, as Faith glided up through the tower of metal. She hovered in the air, holding a ball and staring at Meredith as if she was planning to knock her down like a bowling pin. She was about to say Is that all you got? And she would have, but Meredith had one more trick up her sleeve, and the time had arrived to use it.

  A giant swath of netting dropped from behind an exposed beam in the ceiling, then spun like a corkscrew, tangling into a knot around Faith’s body. That was followed by a thick rope, which spun around and around Faith so fast she couldn’t stop it. She hung in the air, struggling to get free, like a caterpillar helplessly trapped in a cocoon. She flew back and forth, banging into walls and concrete pillars, a rage-fueled menace without a chance of setting herself free. When she finally gave up and fell to the floor, Faith was so exhausted she couldn’t even scream in frustration.

  Meredith looked at Faith and thought of the first words Hotspur Chance had said to her all those years ago:

  Think about the object you want to move. Look at it. Now control it.

  Meredith rolled and tumbled Faith across the floor like a sack of potatoes, hauled her into the meat locker, and hung her on a hook. Then she slammed the metal door shut.

  “She’s going to be pissed off,” Dylan said. “I’m not sure the hook was such a good idea.”

  Meredith turned toward a door behind her, opened it, and disappeared inside.

  “Clean up this mess,” Dylan heard her say. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

  Chapter 3

  The Looney Bin

  A half hour later Dylan had freed Faith from the tangled netting and together they’d cleaned up everything. Faith didn’t say a word until they were finished, and when she finally did speak, it was short and to the point.

  “She tricked me.”

  Dylan agreed, but he also knew they were living on borrowed time. The day was coming when the luxury of training days would come to an end.

  “She’s only trying to make you better. We all are.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Faith mumbled. “And stop acting like my teacher. I thought we were past all that.”

  Dylan knew better than to push too hard when she was angry. She had a certain look that said Are you seriously doing this right now?

  “Come on; let’s head over to Six Flags. It’ll be dark soon. We can take a break like we talked about.”

  “I’ve got somewhere to be,” Faith said. She leaned in close and gave him a kiss on the lips, which felt about as warm as a handshake on the receiving end.

  “Where are you going?” Dylan wanted to know.

  “Just something I need to do. I’ll catch up with you later. Promise.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, okay?” Dylan said. But by then Faith was already walking away in the same skinny jeans she’d worn at Old Park Hill all those months ago.

  Three states away, in what remained of Florence, Colorado, Hawk and Clooger were hiding out in a cemetery. The city was what they called zeroed, or 100 percent deserted. There were plenty of vermin and wild animals roaming around, especially at night, but the only humans were buried under the ground where they were hiding out. They had to be careful in places like this, because there tended to be packs of wild dogs and wolves roaming around. They could be vicious, but more importantly, the wild dogs barked like crazy if they so much as smelled a human. Sound traveled surprisingly well in a zeroed city, because the normal layers of noise Florence used to have—cars going by, the hum of streetlights, voices—all that was gone. A pack of wild dogs could be heard for miles, and that’s exactly what they didn’t need.

  “Any heat out there?” Clooger asked.

  “Yeah, plenty,” Hawk replied, glancing at a Tablet screen covered in a geological map. There were tiny hot spots of glowing orange in some areas. “But we’ve got four or five miles of perimeter. We’re okay for now.”

  Clooger was talking about large animals. One of the scariest things about zeroed cities and deserted quadrants was the predators: cougars and wolves and bears prime among them. Something had happened to these species in the emptiness of North America. Predators didn’t avoid humans like they used to; they aggressively sought them out in remote locations. People hypothesized that officials of the States had something to do with this phenomenon, but no one could prove it. Had they used DNA-altering drugs to make certain species more aggressive in order to help keep those areas zeroed? It sure seemed like it.

  “I remember when a guy could walk around in the woods all day and never see so much as a chipmunk or a deer,” Clooger groused. “The big animals were out there, but the last thing they wanted to do was cross paths with a human.”

  Old Park Hill and places like it were spared, because the last thing the States needed was a lot of bad press about a whole town of people on the outside being attacked by wild animals. It was more evidence that they, the States, were in control of whatever was happening on the outside.

  Hawk was along for the journey with Clooger in order to make sure they stayed hidden from people and the occasional presence of something that could rip their limbs off, such as a mountain lion. Clooger also liked a little company on an expedition when he could get it, and Hawk was a good traveling companion. They had a nice routine going, and Hawk often had information Clooger needed.

  “Distance to target?” Clooger asked. He was staring through a pair of infrared goggles, which covered most of the exposed skin on his face. Between the dreadlocks, the beard, and his enormous size, it was fair to assume Clooger’s first cousin was, possibly, Bigfoot.

  “It’s 2.4 miles by road,” Hawk replied. “But you could trim that to 1.5 miles if you cut across the open field. Let’s say you walk at a brisk pace, keep it real quiet. With your stride, you’d travel the road in about thirty minutes, an hour round-trip; figure ten minutes to observe the location and take a few pictures. That’s seventy minutes.”

  “And the shortcut? How long would that take?”

  “Assuming you don’t get eaten by a pack of wolves, you’re all in at forty-five minutes.”

  “Risk assessment?” Clooger asked.

  “You’re doing that Star Trek commander thing again.”

  “Am I?” Clooger hadn’t noticed.

  “It’s okay; I like it. Distance to target, risk assessment—you’re cracking me up. I think you could have been a comedian, actually.”

  No one ever called Clooger funny, and he hated the idea of making people laugh for Coin, especially if it was at his own expense.

  He glared down at Hawk and asked for the risk assessment again, which only seemed funnier to Hawk.

  Hawk sniffed the air like a bloodhound.

  “I smell a skunk, and if there’s one, there’s a hundred. Getting that smell out of your hair if you end up crossing a skunk in that field—no way—it would all have to go. Dreads, beard, the whole crazy mess.”

  “Stink risk if I take the shortcut, high. Got it.”

  “Or a shaving risk, depending on how you look at it.”

  “Anything else?” Clooger asked.

  Hawk took a bite of a protein bar, his third one of the day, and tapped commands on his Tablet. He’d set the screen to dim, so it barely put out any light at all, but he still used it sparingly. Light was scarce at night outside the States, and they were, he hoped, in enemy territory.

  “Access on the field side is darker; that’s a plus. But there’s no doubt about it; the shortcut will have animals in it. You could run into a mountain lion or a cougar. Either one of those things could be watching us right now, just waiting for you to wander into a death trap. Still, the field side is faster; always better to be out in the open as little a
s possible. Overall, I’d say fifty-one percent for the shortcut, forty-nine percent for the road.”

  “Elections have been decided on thinner margins,” Clooger observed, returning his gaze to the collection of buildings huddled together off in the distance. He scratched his beard thoughtfully and looked down at Hawk.

  “Be ready to leave in forty-five minutes.”

  Hawk was happy to hear Clooger’s decision, because the idea of standing alone in a cemetery at night at the edge of a ghost town wasn’t exactly on his list of things to accomplish before his fourteenth birthday, which just happened to be right around the corner. The faster this was over, the better.

  After ten minutes of waiting alone, he snapped his Tablet to pocket size and put it away, then sat down on a gravestone and took off his shoulder pack. Inside were more protein bars, a bottle of water, and a printed copy of the picture book The Sneetches and Other Stories. He’d had to go back to the old grade school library in Faith’s neighborhood and take the only other copy, because Faith had ripped up the one he’d had before. Thank God for libraries that kept multiple copies of popular titles, he’d thought when he’d gotten his hands on it. For all Hawk knew, it was the last copy of The Sneetches and Other Stories on Earth. It had become his most prized possession through everything that had happened in the intervening months. By now some of the pages were torn, and the corners of the cover were marred by damage.

  The half-moon cast a pale light strong enough to read by, and Hawk made the mistake of turning to a story in the Sneetches book called “What Was I Scared Of?” In the story, the narrator repeatedly meets up with an empty pair of pale green pants. Given Hawk’s situation, it was, quite possibly, the scariest thing he had ever read. By the time Clooger reappeared a half hour later, Hawk was ready to jump into his arms and cry like a seven-year-old. And he might have done it were it not for the fact that Clooger smelled like something out of a horror movie.