Teek

by S. Andrew Swann

  “What happened to the little bugger, anyway?” Barney asked.

  “The best we can figure is that Elroy suffered from some mental form of flash blindness. As if he stared at the sun too long. Though it doesn’t explain the other symptoms—”

  “You’re comparing this girl to the sun?” Fred asked.

  “Comparatively,” George said. “The energies that form the mental waveforms Elroy perceives are measured in fractions of a microwatt. The energy Allison Boyle has to liberate to move gross physical objects is orders of magnitude greater. He stared into it with no preparation.”

  Fred shook his head. “You should keep a tighter rein on the kid—”

  “God Damn it! If you hadn’t tried to strong-arm the girl, she wouldn’t have panicked. If you kept a tighter rein on your pet Neanderthal there—”

  Barney balled a fist. “Why you cock-sucking—”

  Everyone was interrupted by the sound of a feline howl from outside. Fred glanced toward the dining room window as George said, “What—”

  “Get the hypo,” Fred told him, and ran toward the back door.

  7:37 PM

  Allison let go of the windowsill in panic, stumbling to the ground.

  When she was on her hands and knees, something black and furry butted into her face and meowed again.

  Allison had never fully appreciated how loud Rhett could be.

  “Allie!” Macy said in a harsh stage whisper, back by the Taurus.

  Allison backed up, hissing at Rhett, “Shut up you stupid cat.”

  Rhett was having none of that. He was very unhappy. He wanted food, he wanted in, and he was intent on telling the whole neighborhood about it. He opened his mouth and announced his displeasure in a loud puff of fish breath, right in Allison’s face.

  Allison heard the door slam in front of the house.

  “Oh God!”

  Allison scooped up her cat, who started purring immediately, and ran back toward the Taurus. She’d nearly reached Macy when she heard a voice say, “Hold it right there, Miss Boyle.”

  Allison turned around, slowly. She stood right next to the passenger door of the Taurus. There was Fred, standing at the back door of her house, holding his hands spread, attempting to look innocent.

  “Please, Miss Boyle?” he said.

  Rhett curled up in her arms and closed his eyes.

  “Where’s my mother?” Allison yelled at the man.

  Only the slightest darkening clouded Fred’s features. It was brief, and his face still held a smiling openness that the circumstances didn’t warrant. “Why don’t you come inside, where it’s warm. I’ll explain everything.”

  There was an older man with white hair walking up the driveway now. Allison glanced at the nose of the Taurus. Macy was crouched down, between the front of the Taurus and Mr. Luvov’s pickup truck, apparently unseen by Fred or the man walking up the driveway.

  Macy noticed Allison’s glance and began making twisting motions with her hand.

  What?

  Macy pointed at the Taurus and made the twisting motion again.

  Allison looked up and yelled at Fred, “What do you want with me?”

  “We want to help you.” Fred took a step forward, hands open. “You have a talent. We can show you how to use it.”

  “Where’s my mother?”

  The cloud slipped over Fred’s features again. He took another step forward and smiled broadly. “She’s safe, Allison. We can take you to her. Right now if you like. We just don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

  Allison knew, in her heart, that this was a man who found it very easy to lie.

  Macy still made the twisting motions.

  What was she getting at?

  Allison looked at the Taurus again, and finally saw that the keys were in the ignition.

  “Don’t move, girlie,” came a twangy voice from right behind her.

  Barney had circled around the garage without Allison noticing. Allison looked around and saw him holding a nasty looking gun. He pointed it right at her.

  “Damn it, Barney.” Fred sounded angry. Allison looked back and saw him drop his hands and start walking toward the Taurus. “Guns are supposed to be a last resort.”

  “After Elroy you want to take chances? After that poor bastard, Charlie?”

  Fred looked down the driveway, where the third man was jogging up to meet them. “Do you have it, George?” Fred’s voice sounded weary.

  George patted a black case he was carrying, “Finally.”

  Allison felt the taste of copper in her mouth. What were they going to do with her? She looked at Barney. The gun was locked on her. She began to reach out with mental fingers.

  After the attempted levitation, the effort almost made her pass out— it felt like she was peeling ragged bloody chunks from inside her skull to wrap around Barney’s gun. She locked the teek around the metal parts of the gun. Her head throbbed and pain fogged her vision. She fought the pain, to lock down everything she could, as hard as she could manage. She tried to feel every single molecule of that gun embedded in her teek matrix.

  “She’s doing something!” Barney said.

  “Grab her!” Fred yelled.

  Allison didn’t see Fred and George react because she’d closed her eyes. Slammed them shut, because what she did hurt.

  She felt feedback through her teek sense. She could feel Barney try and pull the trigger, as if the trigger was now part of her own body. But the trigger was locked, stationary to the rest of the gun, with a force equal to that required to lift a Jeep Cherokee. The gun was locked in place and, with all the effort she could muster, Allison yanked the gun away.

  There was a cracking noise.

  Barney yelled, “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. My hand!”

  Allison opened her eyes and her vision cleared enough to see George coming toward her. He was fumbling something out of the black case. It looked like another gun. Allison still felt her teek holding Barney’s gun, so she threw it at George.

  George was still fumbling with his case when something black and metallic flew out of the sky and slammed into his stomach. He folded over it and it carried him across the driveway and spilled him, groaning, into the neighboring back yard.

  Allison had to let go of Barney’s gun, and that cleared her normal vision enough for her to see that George hadn’t been pulling a weapon out of the case. It was some sort of high-pressure hypodermic air-gun. It and cylinders filled with amber fluid spilled over the lawn around him.

  Behind her, Allison heard the Taurus start up. She spun around to see Macy behind the wheel, yelling, “Get in, fool!”

  Allison yanked the car door open, and felt Fred’s hand on her shoulder. “Not so fast, Miss Boyle.”

  With a manic feline hiss, Rhett sank his teeth into Fred’s thumb. The man jerked his hand away long enough for Allison to dive in next to Macy. The car zoomed backwards before Allison was completely seated.

  As the car rocketed backwards, out of the driveway, Fred ran after them. He shouted things that were incomprehensible through the haze of her headache. Barney ran behind Fred, cradling a bleeding hand. Behind them all, George struggled to get to his feet.

  “Eeeyah,” Macy yelled as she skidded the Taurus on to the street. Momentum slammed the passenger door shut with the car’s change in direction. “You know how to make an exit, girl.”

  As they shot past a gray van, Allison could swear she saw a face looking out her living room window.

  The kid?

  She wasn’t given time to think about it. Macy drove like a wild woman. The Taurus turfed three lawns and jumped the curb twice as she pulled halfway around the block, up Euclid Heights Boulevard, back toward the high school.

  At that point, their rocketing escape ground to a halt as Macy merged with infuriatingly slow traffic left over from rush hour. Rhett mewed insistently. Allison only heard him through a head wrapped in cotton and a million miles away.

  Macy yelled at the cars to move, but the lig
ht up ahead wasn’t helping matters any.

  “Sorry, Macy.” Allison said weakly. “Bad idea.”

  Macy shook her head. “Done’s done. Just hope that we ain’t in as much trouble as I think we are.” The traffic inched forward and Macy mumbled, “All the chase scenes I’ve seen never went this slow.” The light ahead turned green and Macy blared the horn.

  Allison winced. “Don’t do that. There’s a cop right there at the intersection.”

  “I’d almost welcome being arrested. I’d feel safer— No, you bastard! Don’t turn left! Move!”

  The Taurus managed to get to the head of the line as the yellow light faded. “Some cop,” Macy said. “Fool pulls an illegal left and porky does diddily.”

  They sat and waited at the intersection as the cop led a procession of cars across their path.

  “Damn,” Macy said.

  “What?” Allison’s eyes were half-closed from fatigue and the sudden light from opening them drove a spike into her forebrain.

  “Flintstones at six o’clock.”

  Allison looked behind them, and about seven or eight cars back, she could see the ASI van. She couldn’t see inside from the streetlight glare off the windshield. But the van was hard to miss. “I see them,” Allison said.

  “More to the point, they see us— I wanted to lose them.” Macy started looking around. “Allie, you see porky anywhere?”

  “Huh?” Allison turned away from the gray van in time to see Macy pull out into the intersection against the light. Horns blared from around them as she took a left through a gap in the opposing traffic.

  “My God, Macy. What are you doing?”

  “Losing men with guns.” The Taurus now headed away from most of Euclid Heights, and toward East Cleveland.

  They had gone two blocks and were about a block away from East Cleveland, when Allison heard a chorus of horns back at the intersection. The van had followed their illegal left. As she kept looking back, Allison asked, “What now?”

  “Like I know, girl?”

  Allison could tell when they drove into East Cleveland, even without looking at the signs. The streetlights turned from white mercury to dirty yellow sodium, and the road suddenly became a patchwork of chuckholes filled and chuckholes-to-be. The houses they passed were almost the same ones that were in Euclid Heights, but they’d become shabby and ill-used with too many families and too little maintenance. It was a neighborhood that would’ve frightened Allison, if she didn’t have other worries right now.

  The Taurus rumbled over the patchwork asphalt for three blocks, Macy turning at random. Now that they wove through East Cleveland, they’d lost most of the traffic between them and the van, so it wasn’t too surprising when the Flintstones turned on to the road behind them only three or four car-lengths back.

  “Think of something,” Macy said.

  What? I can barely think. My head’s a blood pudding. Allison watched out the back, staring at the van. I need to stop them.

  Allison got an inspiration and started rummaging in the Taurus for Mom’s parking money. She found a handful of quarters, about five dollars’ worth.

  “What’re you doing?” Macy asked.

  “When they stop, be ready to get out of here quick.”

  I can’t do this. Not now. I need to sleep.

  Only once more, she promised herself.

  She poured a protesting Rhett into the back seat and lowered the passenger window. The sudden inflow of cold air woke her up and sharpened some of the duller edges of her mind. She could think, but it also meant that her headache switched from hammers to scalpels.

  As Macy drove, Allison lined up a row of quarters on top of the windowsill. As she placed each one, she grabbed it with her teek. Each effort was harder than the last, pounding into her head until she couldn’t tell if the rushing in her ears was the wind or her own pulse.

  Twenty quarters, locked into a line with her teek.

  Allison’s world thrummed with white noise, a scouring wind that abraded the flesh from inside her skull. But through that noise, she could see things with a razor-fine accuracy that lacerated her eyes with sheer wealth of details. She could see the dates on the individual quarters, not only see them, but feel them with the bizarre mental feedback of her teek sense. She could see the veins on the dead leaves that blew between the cars. She saw the rust spots on the van’s bumper, and the scratches on its license plate.

  Again, Allison had the heady feeling that she was looking inside herself, and discovering the entire universe.

  The line of quarters she controlled flew out behind the Taurus, in formation. As they did, time seemed to slow down. Allison hardly felt the car’s motion at all. They were frozen in this tableau. Hunter never quite catching. Hunted never quite escaping. An archetype that belonged in some special section of Hell.

  Nothing moved for Allison.

  Nothing but the flying line of quarters. The quarters, a score of tiny silver moons, flew down to float about six inches off the asphalt right behind the Taurus’ rear bumper. There, for a moment, they froze— the picture complete.

  Then, with an effort of will that Allison wasn’t aware she was capable of, she pumped every ounce of teek she had into those quarters. She thought of the Cherokee, and the effort that had taken, and she put all of that into it.

  The effort made Allison yell, or realize that she’d been yelling all this time. Whether in triumph, fear, or pain, she didn’t know.

  As she watched, the world snapped back to real time. The silver moons became chromed bullets. The quarters shot toward the van with such force that they tore the air in their wake. With her teek she could feel the air rip with the coins’ passage as if cracked by twenty supersonic whips.

  Then the quarters left the realm of Allison’s teek and reentered the world of physics.

  The coins tore past the underside of the van, exploding all four tires in a flurry of shredded rubber. The van collapsed into the asphalt like a wounded beast, sparks flying from its rims.

  The quarters didn’t stop with the van. Tires blew from parked cars. Windshields shattered. Splinters erupted from a tree. And, far down the block, a stop sign rang like a gong as a hole blasted through the bottom of its S.

  Allison gripped the back of her seat so hard that her fingers were white and cold.

  “My God.” As she said it, she collapsed into a black aching hollow of fatigue. She closed her eyes and couldn’t open them again.

  FOURTEEN

  I-70, OH: Wednesday October 27, 1999

  7:40 AM

  She stood naked on the school auditorium stage. The landing of the fire stairs had been transplanted to center stage, the scene washed by a pulsing red light that hurt her eyes.

  As she tried to cover herself, Fred and Barney came on stage dressed as reporters. Barney held the camera on her, while Fred shoved a microphone in Chuck’s face trying to get an interview. Fred wasn’t having much luck. No matter how reasonable his questions were, all Chuck could do was hold his bleeding crotch and scream.

  Mr. Counter walked on stage in a pair of swim trunks, wiping himself off with a bloody towel. “Miss Boyle,” he said. “I am afraid that you aren’t taking this class seriously.”

  Mr. Counter grabbed her wrists and pulled them away from her body. Barney filmed all of it while muttering over and over, “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. My hand. Shit.”

  “Your lines,” someone whispered from off-stage.

  “Not serious at all.” Mr. Counter said, pulling her close enough to smell the blood on his towel. “We have to talk about your grades.”

  Allison thought, the play’s not supposed to go like this.

  The whisper returned, sounding like an off-kilter long-distance connection. “Melissa’s line is, ‘Oh Randolph, I’ve waited four years for this moment!’”

  Everything froze.

  The scene flickered and Allison had a lucid moment when she realized she was dreaming. Then she heard Chuck’s voice, still screaming, but s
creaming words—

  “I’m dead!” he yelled at her. “I’m dead! Mom’s dead! Everyone’s dead, Sweetcakes.”

  Allison looked up into Mr. Counter’s bloody face, and saw Chuck there. “Just you and me, kid.”

  She screamed herself awake.

  ◆◆◆

  Allison woke up to light. Bright sunlight streamed across her face. She tried to turn over and found herself strapped down.

  She opened her eyes in a panic, light stabbing through her brain, and saw that she’d tangled her hand in the Taurus’ shoulder belt. She closed her eyes and realized how much of her hurt. Her head was a dull empty hole. She had cramps in her neck and back, and her legs had fallen asleep. She opened her eyes again, slowly, shading them with her hand.

  Where was she?

  Allison looked around the car. Where was Macy?

  The Taurus sat near the entrance to a parking lot. She looked down at the entrance, and saw four lanes of highway backed by a forested median of autumnal golds and reds. A blue sign faced her saying, “rest stop.”

  At the other end of the parking lot, near the exit, was a small brick structure with two doors, “men” and “women.” There was only one other car in the lot, a dirty green Ford pickup. Allison looked around and saw a hefty couple at one of a half-dozen picnic tables, eating out of McDonald’s bags. She supposed that they belonged to the pickup.

  The sight made her incredibly hungry.

  Allison opened up the passenger door and got out of the Taurus, wobbling on her sleeping legs.

  A two-trailer semi blared by on the highway.

  She glanced at the clock on the dash of the Taurus and it said 7:45. I slept for twelve hours.

  Allison hugged herself and said, “Macy where are you?”

  As if in response, Allison saw Macy leave the women’s half of the rest rooms. She caught sight of Allison and waved. She’d changed clothes and it made her look older, or, at least, tougher. Macy wore a motorcycle jacket, sunglasses, and cowboy boots. She resembled an adolescent Grace Jones doing a Terminator impression.

  “Morning, sleepyhead.”

  Allison looked at Macy and said, “Is it a stupid question to ask where we are?”