But now he was becoming something else entirely: “that kid who’s way, way tougher than he looks.” Because suddenly, somehow, he was giving Connor Feeney a hell of a time. Elias was certainly not crying now, and never mind his reputation from yesterday. Now he was redeeming himself. Now he was beginning to thrash about so violently that Connor was struggling to maintain his headlock.
“Hey, cut it out,” Connor said, the surprise clear in his voice. “Easy, Worth. Cut – ”
Elias redoubled his efforts. He could sense the shift, could sense the opportunity for an upset, and he was not going to let up now. The crowd of students felt it too, and they began chanting Elias’s name.
“Worth, Worth, Worth.”
He heard the chanting, and he grew not just bold, but inspired. Today was a day of destiny, a day on which ordinary boys could do great things. The teachers who were coming to Elias’s aid held themselves back for a second, hoping beyond hope that Elias might be able to save himself.
Elias reached up with one hand and began groping for Connor’s eyes.
“What?” Connor shouted, now sounding not just surprised but annoyed. Annoyed that here, for the second time in two days, some little nobody prick of a kid was trying to upset the natural order of things. The order of Connor Feeney. Elias’s groping hand reached Connor’s nose, then his eyes, and his fingers began grabbing. Began poking. “Get the hell away from me,” Connor yelled, and he loosened his grip on Elias’s head.
Elias felt the sudden easing of pressure, and he knew he could escape. He gathered himself for one final surge, one last chance to get away. Then he flung his head forward and down with everything he had. With all the fear and anger left in him, as hard and as fast as he could.
A mighty cheer went up from the students as Elias freed himself at last from Connor’s headlock, and a split second later, Elias’s momentum carried his head forward and down into the rigid metal edge of the nearest lunch table.
There was a solid, pure-tone bong! sound as Elias’s forehead made full-speed impact with the reinforced steel, followed by a moment of sudden and absolute silence in the cafeteria.
Then Elias screamed.
He stood back up quickly – he sprang back up, as if the table were very hot – and now he looked around wildly, still screaming, his mouth wide open. His eyes showed pain and terror, terror from panic and nausea and knowledge; he knew what had happened, but he didn’t want to know. He wanted to take it back, wanted to invite Connor Feeney to hold him firmly again around the head and neck, to poke and slap at him, anything but this, please take this back. There was a sickeningly deep, purple-black indentation an inch above Elias’s eyebrows, making it look as though someone had hollowed out a portion of his wide white forehead with a sledgehammer. Blood was already coursing from the wound. The blood reached his eyes, and Elias took another, deeper breath so that he could scream for real, could howl like a dog with its leg caught in a trap, and still the students around him stared in horror, silent and unmoving.
The teachers lunged forward. Kevin broke into a run, but others were closer.
Connor Feeney, meanwhile, was backing slowly away.
Now the blood was flowing fast and thick from the hollow in Elias’s head, flowing with real purpose into his eyes and down his face, and he was blind. He held out his hands in a gesture of supplication and howled again, even louder this time, and finally the first teacher reached him. It had been less than five seconds from the moment of impact until this moment, but the interval was too long. Elias was in a frenzy of fear and pain and blood and howling, and he was not willing to be calmed. He was told by the teacher – Mr. Aaronson, lower school Language Arts – that help was on the way, that the school nurse and the ambulance and the emergency room people were coming, that they were all coming, all of them coming to help and make it better, but Elias heard none of this. When Mr. Aaronson tried to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, Elias spun violently away. He took two blind, running steps and collided with the lunch table again, hitting his stomach this time. The wind was knocked out of him. He fell sprawling and gasping to the floor, and blood began to spill out of his head and onto the white linoleum in a quickly expanding pool.
The crowd of students stayed utterly silent. They did not seem to be breathing. Until moments ago they had been chanting Elias’s name in eager, exuberant tones, but now they took a collective step backward. To a boy, their faces showed real fear. This was no longer exciting. It was no longer a lunchtime diversion, or a moment of comeuppance for Connor Feeney, or even an opportunity for missed class time due to chaos.
It was just scary.
“That kid’s going to die,” someone whispered.
Elias was still on the floor, still gasping for breath, and still bleeding with enthusiasm. Mr. Aaronson had not made another move toward him, and he seemed momentarily frozen by the disastrous effects of his first attempt at assistance.
Kevin was only half a second away. He was moving at a full run now, and it would be all right. Maybe. He would do something, start CPR, call EMS on his cell phone. He would –
Emily Beck appeared as if from nowhere. She dropped down smoothly onto the floor next to the screaming boy, and her light yellow skirt billowed gracefully around her, creating a perfect cotton circle of calm.
“Elias,” she said to him. Almost gently.
Elias heard her, and he turned toward the sound of Ms. Beck’s voice like a castaway who has heard the sound of a rescue plane. He searched for her blindly. His head and face were truly gruesome now. His eyes, nose, cheeks, and mouth were streaked and smeared with blood, and the concavity in his forehead had somehow transformed, over the course of a few seconds, into a massive bulge. So that now instead of an indentation it had become a great, bleeding goose-egg, a black and red and purple mound that seemed to have sprung from him like a tumor.
“Elias, here,” Emily said again. She spoke so that he could follow her voice. He found her and she brought him onto her lap. He was still bleeding and howling, but he had caught his breath, so that at least the howls were coming in a regular rhythm. He was not choking anymore. She turned him so that he was lying on his back, his head on one of her thighs, and then she held up one hand without looking away. She called out, “A dishtowel with ice, please. Right away.”
She was still looking down at Elias, who had resumed his howling. Not quite as loudly now, though the blood was still coming out of his head with alarming speed. Emily Beck put her other hand gently on his chest, and then she told him, so quietly that Kevin could barely hear, that it was going to be all right.
Elias’s howls decreased in volume by another step. He believed her. So did Kevin.
The dishtowel with ice appeared in her hand a moment later, brought by Mr. Aaronson, who was pleased to have been given a different job. Emily warned Elias against the cold, and then she pressed the towel firmly to his head.
He howled again, but it was a sound of simple pain this time. The panic was gone. Then he was breathing and gasping as the cold washed through him, and Emily told him again that it was going to be all right. She used a corner of the dishtowel to being wiping away the blood from his face, and then he opened his eyes, and he could see her.
She smiled at him. Smiled and put a hand on his blood-smeared cheek. “You know,” she said gently, “my brother hit his head on the corner of our coffee table when I was five. There was so much blood.” She gave Elias a little shrug, and now she seemed almost ready to laugh. “But when you cut your head it just bleeds a lot. And you know what happened to my brother?”
Elias waited breathlessly.
“Nothing, of course,” Emily said. “He was fine the next day. Big bump on his head, just like you’re going to have. But that’s it.” She was still pressing the dishtowel firmly down onto Elias’s head, and the boy winced. Fresh tears appeared in his eyes and mixed with the blood. But he kept looking up at Ms. Beck, and she kept smiling at him.
Kevin took a breath and let
it out. He saw many of the students in the crowd do the same. And then, inevitably, he felt the air change yet again. No more fear. No more excitement.
From the crowd now, from teachers and students alike: a whiff, of all things, of jealousy.
Because Elias wasn’t going to die, after all.
And his head was in her lap.
This Fearsome Singularity
Kevin was late getting to the computer lab after lunch. Once it became clear that young Elias Worth really was going to be okay – he had a concussion and he would need lots of stitches, the school nurse said, but he would ultimately be fine – real chaos descended on the cafeteria. The other students turned unruly again in their relief, in their shared excitement, and in their pride at having been witness to such an event. It took the combined efforts of every teacher in the room to shepherd everyone out and onto their next classes. Also, no one could find Connor Feeney, who had somehow managed to slip away during the bleeding and the howling.
But Connor’s survival instincts did not make him creative. When Kevin arrived in the computer lab five minutes later, he found Connor there. He was, in the end, only a bigger-than-average, meaner-than-average, less-intelligent-than-average twelve year-old boy, and the instinct to follow an expected schedule was strong. He was supposed to be in the computer lab after lunch, so that’s where he went. Connor did try to hide himself in the lab, rather than simply sitting right out in the open, but this attempt backfired at once. Kevin could see something happening in the far corner of the lab; little Anselm Billaud was leaning over and punching at his feet as though there were a small and annoying rodent scurrying around under his legs. Which was essentially true.
“Just get out of there,” Anselm said. “What are you doing? This is ridiculous.”
The rest of the class was watching now, and Kevin made no attempt to start the lesson. He waited.
Finally Connor emerged, looking dejected. He gave Anselm a halfhearted swat across the top of the head as he climbed out from under the desk, and Anselm responded with a jab in Connor’s stomach. “Little shit,” Connor whispered, and he turned to give Anselm his full attention. But Anselm was ready, and he let fly with a preemptive barrage of punches to Connor’s midsection. Connor managed to grapple with him and smother the smaller boy, but then Kevin Brooks had seen enough. One gaping head wound was plenty for today.
“Stop,” he said loudly, and the two of them froze in place. “Both of you are going to Ms. Stewart.”
Connor Feeney turned and gave Kevin his best outraged surprise face, as if surely a mistake had been made. A minor tussle with young Billaud here could not possibly warrant a trip to the principal. And as for that unfortunate business in the cafeteria, wasn’t that behind them?
Can’t we all just be friends?
Kevin told his class to sit tight, and then he led Connor and Anselm out of the lab, down the hall, back past the cafeteria. All the way to reception and the main office, where Ms. Stewart was waiting. She looked up from her desk as Kevin came through the door, and her expression turned to one of mild surprise. “Mr. Feeney,” she said brightly. “And Mr. Billaud?” She seemed less sure of what to do with Anselm, but she shrugged and gave them a little nod. “Good to see you both.
“They – ” Kevin began, but Ms. Stewart held up a hand.
“I’ll take them,” was all she said, and Kevin nodded. He wanted to explain that Anselm had done very little, that he had been acting in self defense; but then he realized that Ms. Stewart already knew this. Knew it from experience. From instinct. From being Ms. Stewart.
Connor spoke under his breath to Anselm. “I’m going to kill you,” he whispered, as if the entire day’s events were all somehow due to Anselm’s lack of respect.
“That’s enough,” Ms. Stewart said sharply, and all at once she was angry; angry that there was a fourth grader on his way to the emergency room to have stitches, angry that this was the second day of school and already there was blood being cleaned from the white linoleum floor of the cafeteria, and angry, most of all, that she was going to have to explain these things to Connor Feeney as though he were an infant. She was going to have to convince him, somehow, that what he had done was not like throwing a snowball at someone. That he was one strike away from being ejected from the school once and for all. That this was serious.
She stood up and glared at the boy, who barely seemed to notice she was there.
Kevin left the office, closing the door behind him as he walked out. He wondered, as he made his way back to the lab, whether Emily Beck would be riding in the ambulance with Elias Worth.
And whether he would see her again that day.
In the teacher’s lounge after the final period, Kevin sat for a moment on his own while others came in and out, grabbing their extra snacks and chatting about their classes and students. He had a lesson plan laid out on the little table, and he kept his head down as if he were working on something for the next day.
He was plotting his afternoon. His next round of investigations.
Danny came into the lounge, and Kevin looked up. He was glad to see Danny; he had something he wanted to ask.
“Danny, can I – ”
“You coming out with us?”
Kevin stopped, confused. “Out where?”
“A bar, of course. Bunch of us are getting a bite and a drink.”
Kevin considered. He looked up at the clock. “It’s not even three.”
“Teachers and old people,” Danny said with a happy shrug. “We do the early bird thing. Time to relax. Day’s over.”
Not true, Kevin thought. I have so much to do.
“You coming?” Danny asked again.
Kevin looked carefully at him. He squinted his eyes and really looked, trying to coax his brain into a moment of forced recognition. But nothing happened. “Danny,” he said finally, “I’m sorry, but can you remind me when we first met?”
The big man glanced up at the ceiling. He didn’t seem put off by the question. “First day of orientation,” he said. “So that would have been six days ago. Thursday last.”
Kevin nodded and let out a little sigh. He would add Danny to the growing list of people who couldn’t help, people who could add nothing to the puzzle of the last three months. The various doormen, his personal assistant, old high school and college friends, his old boss, and now his newest friend.
I’m not done, though. I’ve got an idea for this afternoon, and it’s a good one.
Danny was still trying to coax him into coming out. He was leaning forward now, grinning broadly. “Hey,” he said quickly, as if he had forgotten something important. “Emily’s going to be there.”
“What?” Kevin raised an eyebrow. He proceeded with caution. “So what? Why are you telling me?”
Danny looked around innocently. “Who else is here?”
“You know what I mean. What about that guy who teaches fifth grade French? Charlie? Or Matt, the one who works with Ms. Stewart?” He gave Danny a sideways look. “And what about you?”
But Danny only shook his head. “I’ve got my own commitments,” he said mysteriously.
Kevin smiled. “So do I,” he said, and then he sat back and gave Danny a little goodbye wave. “I’ll catch you guys for another outing. Maybe next week. Today I’ve got errands.”
Danny shook his head. “You’re not getting away that easily.” He pulled out a chair from under the table and sat down. “I’ve got a few minutes. We were interrupted this morning. Tell me what happens if Billaud figures out the NP thing. What’s this fearsome singularity?”
Kevin smiled. Danny was being nice, asking him about things he knew he’d want to talk about. Making friends.
And let’s face it, I could use one or two of those right about now.
“I’m really not coming out with you,” Kevin said.
“I get it. I’m seriously asking about the singularity thing. Fill me in.”
Kevin watched him for another moment, and then he ga
ve in. It was one of his favorite subjects, after all. “Okay, here’s the deal. If Billaud can get through the NP barrier, then that’ll mean basically any problem can be solved by a computer, no matter how complex.”
“Sounds good,” Danny said. “And then what?”
Kevin shrugged. “I have no idea. Nobody does. That’s what’s exciting, and that’s the singularity. If a computer can solve any problem, then it can redesign itself. It can make itself smarter and smarter without limit, and all bets are off.”
Danny shook his head. “How’d we go from a Fed Ex delivery man to computers redesigning themselves?”
“It’s all connected. The Fed Ex problem is just a way of visualizing an unlimited number of possible arrangements. It doesn’t have to be delivery routes. It can be paths on a circuit board. Lines of code in an algorithm. The best way to set up a subway system. Only humans can do that kind of stuff with any real success. If you can get a computer to do those things, then it can theoretically solve anything.”
Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) Page 10
