Uggh.
She had a right to ask. She had a right to think for herself. She needed answers, but there were none. How could she be expected to have blind faith when nobody listened to her? It was like she didn’t exist.
She loved her mother, and she loved the idea of religion as well. It was a beautiful premise, and often moved people to perform glorious, selfless acts—she just loved thinking, too. And she felt like she should be able to question things and get answers. After all, didn’t the greatest Christians in history wrestle with doubt? Mother Teresa? Martin Luther? Calvin?
She stood up from the bed and headed for the door, wondering if her mom knew what she was doing. Not that she blamed her mother. Candi was still reeling and hurting ever since Dad left in the middle of the night and never came home. Not a peep from him since. Not a card on her birthday. Not a phone call. Nothing. He just disappeared from the face of the Earth.
She left her room and met her mom at the bottom of the stairs.
“That dress looks nice on you, Em. You should really wear them more often. You’re a beautiful young lady, and you can’t hide behind your tomboy clothes forever,” her mother said, tucking a white flower in Emily’s hair. “This symbolizes your faith in God and your purity of faith. I want everyone at church to know that we are true believers.”
“Trust me, Mom, they already know. How could they not? We’re always there, sitting in the same pew next to old man Brogden and his creepy son. What’s that guy, like thirty, and he still lives at home?”
“Don’t judge, lest ye be judged,” Candi said, leading her out the door.
“Yes, Mom, I know. Matthew 7-1. But you’re not the one who Leonard is staring at all the time. Doesn’t he know I’m only thirteen?”
“You look much older. So did I at your age.”
“But still.”
“He has a condition. A little compassion, Em?”
“I didn’t know being a thirty-year-old pervert was a condition.”
“We should cut across the clearing to make sure we’ll get there in time for the opening procession.”
“Can’t we just drive? These shoes aren’t exactly designed for cross country.”
“I’m almost out of gas, and payday isn’t until Wednesday. Besides, the exercise will do you good. You might want to think about cutting back on the Oreo cookies. They’re starting to show.”
Emily rolled her eyes, following her mom to the clearing across the street. The undeveloped section of their neighborhood led to St. Thomas Church a mile away. Emily didn’t see the big deal if they were a few minutes late. So what if they missed some of the really boring stuff; who cares? If Emily had grumbled about it, her mom would have just turned and shushed her. She knew it was pointless to argue with her, so she decided to stop. Just make the best of it, she told herself. It’s only an hour, and then it’ll be over.
They struck out across the empty field and were about halfway to their destination when Emily looked up at the stars and admired their beauty.
“Aren’t the stars amazing, Mom? Don’t you ever wonder what’s out there, waiting for us?”
“God is waiting for us.”
“I mean besides that. Given the vastness of space and the sheer number of stars, mathematically there has to be something else out there. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
“Only God knows the answer to that.”
A gentle breeze blew in from the west, taking a slight edge off the warm evening. Insects chirruped, and rodents scuffled about in the underbrush nearby. The pleasant odors of sage and earth comforted her. This was home.
In an instant, the wind, the insects, and the rodent noises stopped. Everything was deathly still. Emily felt an awful tingling raise the hairs across the back of her neck. She touched her mom’s arm, only to be met with a loud crack of static electricity.
A horrendous humming noise was accompanied by an intense white light emanating from above—as bright as the noonday sun. She put her hands over her ears and looked at her mom. Candi spun around in an instant to face Emily, holding her body stiff, like a soldier at attention.
Emily wanted to scream but her lungs didn’t obey. She put her hand out for her mother to grab onto, but Candi never moved or blinked. Her eyes were glazed over, her platinum-blond hair blowing in every direction at once, whipping about her face like a tornado.
Emily watched her mom float into the air as the light seemed to be lifting her to heaven.
Emily wanted to help, but couldn’t. She was too afraid, and backed away from the light. She called out for her mother, but Candi didn’t answer.
Emily could see what looked like a black hole in the sky above her mother. It must have been the source of the light—a vent in the fabric of the universe, she decided. In an instant her mother zoomed up and disappeared from sight.
“Mom!” she screamed, but there was no answer.
The light disappeared, and the desert clearing fell dark and silent, as if nothing had happened. Emily stood and stared at the sky where the black hole had been. “Mom?” she said softly, fighting back tears, not wanting to admit to herself what her eyes had just seen and her heart had just felt.
Then the humming noise came roaring back—and the light, too. Emily felt the wind whip up around her, taking control of her body and straightening her like a pencil. She knew that whatever had just happened to her mom was about to happen to her.
She felt her feet leave the ground as the wind continue to lash against her skin. She wanted to crane her neck to study the black schism in space, but she couldn’t move a muscle. Up she went, feeling the air pressure change as she traveled higher into the night sky. The noise grew louder and the light intensified as she floated closer and closer to the source. Then she felt a charge of electricity build along her spine as the pull of the Earth seemed to fall away. She zoomed into the nothingness above.
The blackness had her.
CHAPTER SIX
September 24, 2014
8:36 p.m.
Emily opened her eyes to find that she had fallen asleep at her Internet station in the library. Her mind shifted into analysis mode, realizing that two things were off. One: she hadn’t dreamt about her mom in over a year, and two: there was a red and white tabby cat curled up in her lap, purring gently. A cat? In the library? That was a new one. The gentle vibration against her belly was one of the most soothing things she’d ever felt in her life.
The kitty looked up at her and let out a high-pitched meow that caught the attention of the computer users in the cubicles next to her.
“Sorry,” she whispered to her neighbors, stroking the cat’s neck and ears to keep it quiet.
* * *
Jim Miller looked up from a book that he was reading when he heard a cat’s meow break the silence in the library. He stood up and tracked the source down to one of the computer stations on the other side of the book stacks that separated him from that area. He moved a couple of the books on the shelf, allowing a better look. He saw a red-headed chick sitting at one of the computer stations facing him, not twenty feet away, petting a tabby cat in her lap.
He did a double take when he looked at her face, nearly jumping out of his skin. “Holy shit! She’s back!”
* * *
Emily stopped rubbing the feline and turned her head when she felt a pair of eyes wash over her. Be careful not to look up, Emily told herself. Just act normal, like nothing is wrong. She didn’t want to tip off whoever was watching her—and she was sure someone was watching her. Probably from beyond the bookshelves to her left. That’s where she’d do it from. Stand behind the stacks while looking through a crack in the row of books.
Emily arched her back, easing out the stiffness that had accumulated during her slumber in the chair. She could see through the windows on the fifth floor from her position, and was struck for the hundredth time by the beauty of the nighttime view of Phoenix and the desert beyond. Her cat purred louder, as if the animal could sense her astonishmen
t.
Whoever was watching was being careful. She couldn’t see or hear anyone near her, but she could feel the weight of their eyes. She knew it wasn’t Sheldon; his stare felt different. She couldn’t sense the stalker’s thoughts, probably because the person on the other side of the eyes wasn’t focused solely on her, or they weren’t close enough in proximity.
She got up slowly, cradling the cat in the crook of her arm—but the cat woke up, meowed at her, then swung its head around and hissed at the stacks. It leapt out of her arms and disappeared around the corner in the hall by the drinking fountain.
Shroedinger’s Cat, she remembered from a physics book that she had skimmed a few weeks earlier. She recalled the theoretical basis for the thought-provoking experiment proposed by the renowned physicist to explain the indeterminate nature of quantum particles. She played some words in her mind—a random melody to help her make sense of the moment.
Now she’s here, all soft and red. Is kitty alive? Or is she dead?
Dear little Shroedy, my cute little kitty who’s trapped in a box today. Will you jump ready or let the poison take your breath away?
She walked nonchalantly down an aisle of books, coming out facing the balcony that overlooked an enormous and breathtaking open space—five floors of etched glass installed in opposing angles that ran down to the indoor Koi fish pond on the ground floor. Five glass elevators were directly across from her. Three cars were stopped on level one, but one was leaving the second floor, heading up. Another was coming to a stop at the third floor.
She circled the elevator entrance, trying to survey as much of the fifth floor as possible. There were a couple of people in the wide-open reading room that faced the south windows, preoccupied with their books and laptops. She made sure they weren’t paying attention to her, then ran to the door that led to the stairs and elevators, opened it, and slammed it shut. She scampered around a corner and waited. She peered from her hiding place, trying to catch someone rushing to the doorway to see which way she’d gone.
Nothing. No one. Whoever was following her was very sneaky indeed.
She counted to one hundred, just to be sure, then walked casually through the door that she’d slammed and took the main staircase down to the ground floor. First, she needed to get to the shelter before they ran out of available beds and second, she had to do it without being followed.
The first was easy. The second—not so much. Not yet. Not without knowing who was following her.
She still had a trick or two up her sleeve, though. She came to the bottom of the stairs, turned right, then quickly turned right again, heading to the south end of the building. She passed a string of wooden study carrels, an empty librarian’s desk, and three rows of towering bookshelves before ducking into a doorway. She looked over her shoulder to see if anyone stood out—no one did. Just two people gathering their things, getting ready to leave together.
She ran down a narrow hallway past a pair of meeting rooms, then snuck through a door on her right and through a service stairwell to an external door near the southeast corner of the building. If everything was the same as it had been a year ago, she’d find the door hidden on the outside by an out-of-control vine crawling up the wall. Ten feet beyond that, there’d be a chain-link fence with a section missing in the middle of it. She slipped through and surveyed the scene outside. Yep. All the same. She ran across an RV-sized patch of concrete, past the trash dumpster, and hid behind a disabled UPS truck, sitting on jacks, with a tire missing.
She waited, not bothering to peer out from behind the truck. She stood still and listened, instead. Two minutes later she heard the door from the library open. Her pulse quickened. She picked up a loose piece of concrete from the ground to her right—small enough to handle, but big enough to do some damage if it came to that. She listened, but all she heard was the sound of footsteps, a dragging noise, and then the unmistakable metallic screeching as someone opened one of the swing doors on top of the dumpster. More noise—a grunt and a muffled cascade of smaller sounds as someone emptied a garbage can into the dumpster.
Faint footsteps headed away, then the door opened and closed, then nothing.
She couldn’t be absolutely positive, but she thought she’d made it out without being followed. A second later, she almost jumped out of her skin when she felt something moving against her leg. She looked down—there was the tabby cat from the fifth floor.
Shroedy, she thought. An impossible cat in an unlikely place.
She reached down to pet her new friend, but the cat was already gone.
Oh well, she thought.
A quick glace around the corner of the van confirmed that no one was lurking in the shadows. She couldn’t shake the sense that she was being watched, though. The feeling of it had changed—up on the fifth floor, there had been a sharp curiosity. Now, the eyes watching her felt as though the person was amused.
If her sixth sense was a gift, it was getting in the way of living a normal life, whatever that meant. It had been so long, she’d forgotten what her life was like before The Taking. One minute she was sitting in the library, and the next minute she was hiding next to a disabled UPS van simply because of a feeling that she couldn’t confirm or identify. She realized that it wasn’t always a good thing to sense what people around you were feeling or intending to do to you.
She ran to a brick wall standing a hundred feet away from the library on the opposite side of the street, climbed to the top, then dropped down to the ground and rolled like a commando to hide in a stand of orange trees, the citric scent tickling her nose.
Sometimes, she thought, you need to be a total ninja. Not always. But sometimes.
A quick dash across an open grassy park on the south side of the library, and she was walking down North 1st Street, cool as a cucumber.
* * *
Jim Miller let out a low, soft whistle from his spot in the shadows on the east side of the library. He was impressed. The redhead was better than some of his fellow jarheads had been. Her moves inside the library were almost textbook, yet he was sure that she’d never received any formal training. Certainly not in urban, close-quarters escape and evasion. She was smart; damned smart, and calm under pressure.
He’d been able to beat her to the punch with instinct and experience. He knew the layout of the library, and had memorized every escape route over the years. It was a byproduct of his covert training. When he saw the direction she was headed after she came down the stairs, he played out the possible choices in his mind and selected the one with the highest degree of probability, given all he had learned about this girl over the years. He then calculated an intercept vector and ran outside, positioning himself in the shadows near the service door on the southeast corner of the building.
Five seconds later, she came out the door, bolted across the concrete area, and hid behind the teetering UPS van. Her patience and self-control was off the charts. She didn’t look out from behind the vehicle. She waited and listened, then made her move like a trained operator.
Pretty damned cool for a teenager, he thought. He certainly wouldn’t have been able to play it that smooth at her age. But then again, he thought, how old is she, really? She never ages, so she could be seventy for all he knew. She did act with the experience of someone with a lifetime of tactical training; practiced and honed like a regiment commander in Spec Ops.
* * *
Emily spent the next half-hour looking over her shoulder while taking a circuitous route that crisscrossed downtown. She went from the library to past the courthouse. Then over to Roosevelt Row. Then back beyond the library to the Japanese Friendship Park and finally to Glassford Park, right across from where she’d started. She was planning to spend the night at the biggest homeless shelter in the city, known to the local urban outdoorsmen as Central, a few blocks north of the library. But her last move was in the opposite direction. She headed back to the courthouse again, then slipped into an alley and sprinted to the other end, making he
r way north, sticking to side streets and the shadows.
By the time she rounded the final corner and had the entrance to the shelter in her sights, she was ready to collapse. There was no way anyone could have followed her. She’d done it. She smiled to herself and slowed to a walk, breathless.
She was almost there—half a block away—when she felt someone step out of a doorway behind her. She turned. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. The man’s eyes were the same ones that she’d felt watching her at the library. How had he beaten her?
“Don’t run. I’m not here to hurt you,” the stranger said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Emily felt her entire body tense as the precursor to an adrenaline rush mounting inside of her. Sure, she could run from the stranger, or she could lash out with a back kick aimed low between his legs. Nothing was stopping her from getting away. But then she heard her mother’s soothing voice telling her not to run. Not to fight. There was no reason for any of it.
She felt his intentions, and realized there was nothing malicious hiding inside the stranger. Not a speck. His mind was filled with curiosity mixed with excitement, like a kid on Christmas morning waiting to open the first present. Or maybe it was curiosity mixed with satisfaction. Hard to tell the difference, with her heart pumping at a full gallop. She took a moment to read his eyes. They were brown, kind, intelligent, and compassionate. An old soul trapped inside a middle-aged body.
She exhaled and let her shoulders relax. She was safe with him. Good thing, too, because she didn’t think she had any more fight left in her. Or the energy to run.
Glassford Girl: Part 1 (The Emily Heart Time Jumper) Page 6
