by Jon Davis
In a dull tone, as if she were concentrating on something else, she said, “Boy, stay calm, this will only take a moment.”
I tried to speak, but nothing came out. I could only swallow against the pressure. Gods, I couldn’t even cry out for help. Then suddenly, it ended. One moment, it had felt as if I were about to have my brain crushed. The very next, a flash of Angela Tursow, walking toward me in the school hallway appeared in my mind’s eye. The pressure faded just as quickly as it had begun, and I heard Kular swearing.
I opened my eyes to find Kular looking grim. “You’re fine, there is no shock. But I want you home in bed. I do not want you back in the hospital. We have a rather full house as it is.”
I shook my head. “What the hell was that all about? What made my head hurt?”
Kular shook her head. “You are likely having a reaction headache. Adrenaline can cause this.”
Without another word, she left the ambulance. Outside, she glared at Chief Sinclair and said, “The next time any my patients are in some sort of altercation, I want to hear about it directly, not from some dying fool mumbling about light poles and hit and run attempts! And I want to know about it before I see one of the patients brought in, burning up from exhaustion and cold!”
Kular started to walk away when the police chief said, “Doctor! What the hell are you talking about?”
Kular ignored his outburst. She turned and called out, “Mr. Houseman, as I’m sending Mr. Hagen home, the ambulance is not required. Please take me to the hospital. We are done here. And no doubt, you would like to see how your son is.”
Turning back to the chief, she said, “As for your question, Nathan Jessup told me what happened. He was in shock, and I wouldn’t consider it a deathbed confession, but I got enough to tell you that he tried killing Vaughn, missed him, and hit the light pole. Then he and the other survivor both died. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must return to work.”
Getting out, I joined my parents. Silently, we watched as they secured the body bag in the ambulance. Once they closed the doors, Jim Houseman went around and climbed into the front. Kular got in on the passenger side. My hearing kicked up a notch, and then and I heard her order for him to drive.
When he told her that the reporters were in the way, she replied, “They’re vermin! Who cares?”
Houseman sounded bemused. “Please don’t make me answer that.”
The sirens started up. Reflexively, I clapped my hands over my ears until it faded. I looked up to see the vehicle moving forward, reporters scattering to get out of the way. Turning back, I saw that my parents were looking at me with worry in their eyes. Whoops, they’d only heard the sirens at a normal level.
I shrugged and said, “Sorry, guess I’m on edge.”
My dad came over and put an arm around my shoulders. “Well gosh, son, I guess that’s normal after a quiet night of running for your life.”
My mom said, “Mark…”
He gave her an innocent look. “What?”
I didn’t want to hear any tension-breaking jokes at the moment. I said, “Mom, can we go to the hospital? I want to be sure that Brand is okay.”
They looked at each other, then at me, and my mom said, “No, honey, you're going to do what the doctor wants you to do. No arguments—I don’t want to see you falling ill because you didn’t listen.”
“But—” I stopped. I was too achy to argue with her.
We left for home, ignoring the reporters. I ignored the look of suspicion in Sinclair’s expression as we passed him. I let out my breath and did my best to relax. My mom glanced back at me, giving me her best calming smile. I smiled back. The ride home was silent.
At home, things relaxed, and I got a long, hot shower. Afterwards, I finally got to rest. Dressed in a robe and underwear, I went downstairs to find my parents watching the news. When the news story about what happened with Nathan Jessup came up, I was happy to see that they got the story about Nathan right. They mentioned the interviews I’d done, and I was surprised at how gentle they were with how they talked about me. Guess I had some fans, after all. At least with the people on CNN. I wasn’t going to check the other networks.
After a while, I called the hospital, and Dr. Kular was kind enough to take my call. She said Brand was going to be okay, but he’d be spending the night there and he’d be released in the morning. She also made it clear that she wanted me back in the hospital for a checkup in the morning. She wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to get sick.
We talked for a short bit, but she was busy, so after she agreed to tell Brand that I would call, we ended the conversation.
I went to bed...but not to sleep. Throughout the night, every attempt at rest turned into a new nightmares. Every nightmare I had was one where I killed Nathan Jessup and his two friends in different horrible ways. Worse, though, was the glimpse of some shadow that stood away from it all, watching me in each awful scene. The weirdest of the dreams, though, were scenes of Kular demanding what I knew. And then, she would fade as Nathan appeared and died again. And still, a shadow watched.
With each deathly image, I kept waking up in a sweat, filled with a sense of fear at what I’d done. Thinking on it, I felt lucky that I didn’t yell. Something told me that it would have been a crushing experience for my parents and me. Finally, as dawn approached, I quit trying to sleep and pulled myself out of bed.
Upstairs, I checked the clock on the microwave. While I’d been in bed for six hours, I knew that I had gotten a total of probably two hours of sleep. Glancing outside, I saw the barest trace of light. I considered going back to bed, but images of that car returned as soon as the thought came. With a sigh, I grabbed some cereal and had an early breakfast. Barely awake, I spilled the milk a couple of times and stubbed my toe on one of the dining room chairs. At least that helped me wake up. Pain always did that.
To my annoyance, I found that we were out of sugar. Drat it all; I so wanted sugar on my cornflakes. But sugar or not, I ate. After two bowls, I started to feel awake enough to go to the couch and watch television. Or that was the plan. I started toward the living room, but I stopped when my foot hit something near the stairs. Kneeling, I hissed, worrying at I saw what was on the floor. The flash drive that BJ had given me had somehow fallen out of my clothes. I quickly looked it over, relaxing only when I found that there were no cracks in the casing.
I almost dropped it again when I felt the creepy, yet familiar, feeling of someone looking at me. I shivered as the feeling intensified. The image of the figure in the shadows from my dreams returned, and I had to take a deep breath to keep from throwing the drive. Somehow, I knew it was the cause of this feeling. Finally, though, said feeling died, and I rushed over and put the flash drive on the dining room table. This was getting ridiculous. Having powers was freaky enough, but being haunted was just too over the top.
But thanks to that, I was now fully awake. Pulling away from the table, I stared at the drive. It took a few minutes for me to touch the thing very, very lightly. Nothing happened, and, taking a deep breath, I wrapped it in a napkin and took it down to my bedroom to drop it into a storage box.
I all but ran out of the bedroom and had to stop myself before I tripped on the stairs. I was almost in a full panic. And, given what I’d done the day before, I did not want to do anything that could cause more damage. So I stood in the middle of the basement, taking in what had just occurred. The water heater kicked on. The house creaked slightly. The basement stayed the same. No ghosts. But I needed sound, voices, silly stuff to break the tension this little incident had built up.
I thought about it and muttered, “Yup, I need mindless entertainment. Toons it is!”
For the next couple of hours, I became a proverbial couch potato, watching the Cartoon Network. It helped. When it came to getting past worries and such, there was nothing like mindless cartoons with fluffy characters to help sludge the brain. I’d be watching this schlock until I was an old man. I was calm by the time I heard creaking f
loorboards upstairs. I watched for my parents to come down.
“When do we tell him?” I heard my dad ask. I winced, but at least this time there wasn’t any pain. The subtle feeling of the buzzing nerves had returned, though. Or maybe it had been there all this time and I was just getting used to it. Didn’t matter; it was connected to what was happening with my hearing, and now, my voice.
I tried not to listen in, but couldn’t stop hearing my mom answer him. “Probably now would be a good time to tell him. I know it’s a big thing, but we were planning on telling him last night, after all.”
I sighed. My dad was leaving. I was wrong about how they had been getting along. Damn, so much for moving past the divorce. I supposed I should have been glad that they hadn’t said anything last night. On top of Nathan trying to run me down and me…changing, it would’ve been one hell of a letdown on my birthday.
Hearing the stairs creak, I turned off a cartoon about a dumb alien invading Earth. I was sad to do it, since I liked that episode. Ah well, no lemony fresh victory for me. I waited for my parents to come down the stairs to disappoint me with their announcement.
My mom and dad came down at the same time and stood in front of the couch. My mom sat down as I made room for her while my dad stayed standing. Great, I’d been here before. I had been young when the divorced had happened, but I still remembered dad doing the same thing back then. Joy, this wasn’t going to be any fun. A part of me wondered why everything on the planet had decided to dump on me on my birthday.
“Vaughn, your dad and I have been talking. He came back when Yama happened and he stuck around since. You’ve noticed that, I’m sure,” my mom began.
I looked at them as my dad spoke up, giving me the expected line. As I said, I’d been through this before.
He said, “Son, you know that we had a lot of issues when we divorced. But putting all the problems aside, we realized that we were better as friends than a married couple.” Yep, he was following the usual script. A couple differences in the words, but it was close to what I’d heard before.
My mom reached up and took my dad’s hand. I saw it and looked at the two hands. Something was off. Then my mom smiled and said, “But we’ve both come to realize that more things have brought us together than have pushed us apart.”
Wait a second, this wasn’t in the script. My eyes narrowed. My suspicions deepened when my dad got the same goofy smile on his face as my mom had. Things went way off script when my dad leaned down, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “And Yama certainly showed us that things are just too damn fragile. I've learned that even the strongest things—family, life, and love—are garbage without having someone to be there for you, and you being there for them.”
“Um, okay,” I said with riveting intelligence. This was getting strange. Now my parents were acting like—well—parents. No, it wasn't that, it was something worse. Gods, they were acting as if they were…in love. Eww!
My mom said, “We realized that we were starting to fall into the same trap that led us to divorce in the first place. So we looked at our behavior over the last few months. Vaughn, we realized that we still loved each other. Honey, we’re getting remarried.”
“Really? Not a joke?” I asked. My mom smiled her happy smile.
My dad ruffled my hair. People liked doing that, I’d noticed. He said, “No, not a joke. In fact—and this is a ways off—I want you to be my best man at the wedding.”
My mouth worked, but I was having trouble saying anything. I was speechless. It took a moment, but I grinned, at last, and said, “Damn straight! That way I get to tackle my old man if he runs!”
“Hey!” he said in mock outrage.
For a while, I forgot what had happened the day before as we did the family togetherness thing. Together, we made up a large breakfast with pancakes, bacon, and eggs all but flying to the dining room table. While doing that and then while eating the food, we started throwing out ideas about how they wanted the wedding to go.
They wanted the ceremony in the spring, but it was getting too late for that. I suggested sometime in May, but that was still too soon. No other date sounded right, though, so we began to list off locations such as churches or parks. Then I watched as they considered the list of people to invite. I think by the time breakfast was over, we had settled on sometime this year for the wedding, somewhere in Iowa, and half the town as guests. All in all, it wasn’t a bad list of ideas worked up in only the first hour of planning. It just needed a little tweaking. Talking about invitations reminded me of someone to call.
So I asked, “Can I tell Brand? Please?”
My parents looked at each other. My mom said, “Can Brand keep it to himself for a little while? We want to tell Karla and James ourselves later this morning…”
I thought about it. That kind of humor was right up his alley. He’d do it in a heartbeat, and then he would laugh his ass off after Jim and Karla heard the news. I nodded. But I held off for while longer to give Brand a chance to wake up. And, to tell the truth, I found I wanted to be with my parents and not just run to hang out with Brand or other friends, like I might on a normal day.
It hit me that they had been right about Yama. It had made things clear for me, as well. Family was too important and precious to take it for granted now. I had often wondered how things would change when a whole world saw something like Yama happen.
I was as happy as anything as I had ever been, and all the worries fell away as I called Brand. To my surprise, Dr. Kular answered his room phone.
I chuckled in good humor, and then said, “Wow. Doc, are you doing a full twenty-four hour shift?”
Her voice was taut. Hearing the edgy-sounding tone in her voice blew my mood a little.
What she said next destroyed it. “Actually, yes, I’m sorry to tell you, Vaughn, but Brand died last night.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I don’t remember what happened next. I didn’t hear anything else Kular said. I barely remembered my mom laughing at something my dad had said and then calling out to me. I didn’t move, didn’t say anything. My mom called to me again, but when I didn’t answer her, she walked over. Seeing the look on my face, she worriedly took the phone from my hand.
As she talked, all I could do was stare dumbly. Nothing registered. Then my mom’s expression changed. Her eyes widened with shock, and her voice caught in her throat. Tears started flowing down her face. I backed away as she hung up. She was crying. I couldn’t. No…no, there had to have been a mistake. Something was wrong. Something was horribly wrong. I backed away, unable to find my voice.
She came over to me as she said, “Mark, Brand died of an aneurysm last night…”
Inside, I froze, even as she pulled me to her. She said, “Come here, baby…come here…let it out…”
The world slipped away. I was there, but it passed me by. Over the next few lifetimes, which others called days, we saw Brand's family. I wished I hadn’t. Jim was utterly devastated. He’d lost Kyle, and now Brand. Karla was the only thing keeping him from losing his sanity.
I didn’t know what to say. Touching his shoulder was the only comfort that I could give. With tears rolling down his cheeks, he squeezed my hand in return. I remembered that. I remembered the tears in his eyes. And all I could do was just nod like a stupid idiot. My world again slipped away, and nothing stuck in my memory.
They held the funeral the next Tuesday. I didn’t say anything. All I did was move around and mechanically do the things I was supposed to do. I acted sad. At the funeral, I looked at him and saw a body. But it wasn’t Brand, not to me. It was just a dead body in a coffin.
The funeral just slipped by without registering. The weather warmed up, and it didn’t matter. We went through the services, the talks, and the reception. I just wandered around as Jim and Karla stiffly accepted condolences. My brother was dead. And I wasn’t sure what that meant. Nothing was important to me.
After that, it was over, and I went home. The only thing tha
t got me out of the house again was the legal problems with Nathan’s death. As far as the police was concerned, the deathbed confessions ended the case. And aside from the hyped up hearing, I hadn’t had any sonic flare-ups in my voice. And honestly, I didn’t care whether the power was gone or not. But then something came along to remind me that this wasn’t over.
I was in my candlelit room, listening to an industrial music band called Dybuk, when I heard a very strange sound. Given the heavy beat of the music, I ignored the odd sound at first. Since the memorial, my hearing picked up on so many things that I was getting used to it all. Wind, creaking houses, cars driving by, people talking; they were louder for me, but I could—and did—learn to block them out.
But I couldn’t ignore the off-kilter stuff that came up. It’s normal; people were distracted by changes in sounds all too often. Stereos with a heavy bass could distract a person as they drove past a car. Low-flying airplanes or jet engines could disrupt a train of thought. It was all in how the mind flowed. As for what was distracting me now, I kept hearing a strange repetitive thumping. And each time I tried to listen for it, the noise would fall to silence. With the first couple of times after I first heard it, I simply went back to listening to music. But every time I would begin to fall back into the music, the fast thumping would return.
Finally, it was enough to pull me out of the deep funk and go in search of the source. Grabbing my coat, I went upstairs and told my parents I was going out for a walk. They were surprised, but my mom was happy that I was getting out. Well, I’d still be downstairs listening to heavy bass music if it hadn’t been for this. But knowing my parents, I suspected they would have come to my room and pushed me to go out if this sound hadn’t bothered me enough to do it myself.
