Wild Sky

by Suzanne Brockmann

  He had a nice car. And I was pretty sure I knew how he’d paid for it—by kidnapping little girls like this one, like Sasha, too, and selling them to the Destiny makers.

  Mother. Effer.

  “Hey!” I belted out. But my voice was buried beneath the cacophony of his weapon. I had to move fast, or he was going to get into his snazzy car and that little girl would be gone.

  I took a deep breath and concentrated. Water versus bullets? Not normally much of a contest there.

  But I could do this.

  Couldn’t I?

  Suddenly, I heard Dana’s voice in my head, shouting Fail! Fail! What are you doing, Bubble Gum? You have no backup, you have no plan!

  What was I doing? This was insane.

  Still thoughts. I closed my eyes and pictured Milo. I breathed him, I felt him, I heard him. Still thoughts, Sky. Just let it go…

  And in that moment in which I was specifically not thinking about what I was about to do or what the consequences would be if I failed, I felt and then saw my enormous pile of plastic water pistols—there were sixteen of them total—shoot out from the backseat of Calvin’s car and through the passenger side window that I’d left open. They streamed toward me like metal particles toward a magnet.

  Then, just as quickly, all but one—a little green one—swooped in front of me before lining up and hovering in midair, exactly as Jilly’s remote must’ve hung in midair in Garrett’s living room.

  The little green plastic water gun zoomed over to the man with the real gun and smacked him in the face.

  “What the hell…?” He fumbled his weapon as he turned to see me standing there—me and that collection of water guns—and his eyes widened.

  “Holy shit, Sky!” With the noise from the assault weapon silenced, I could hear Garrett shouting, and I winced inwardly because he’d used my name.

  But whatever he said next was muffled, and Cal’s voice rang out instead. “Hoshitski, look out!”

  It was an intentional misdirect, and I tried to stand like a Hoshitski might, no doubt surly from years of being teased. I pitched my voice lower and ordered, “Drop it! Now!”

  The gunman’s wide eyes narrowed, and we both knew he wasn’t going to drop his weapon, so before he could turn and kill me, I let loose my TK and blasted him. All of those plastic guns shot water from their barrels with the intensity of sixteen narrow but powerful fire hoses, and it sent the man down onto the ground so hard that I heard his head as it smacked against the pavement.

  The gun he’d been holding clattered to the ground.

  All of my weapons ceased water-fire and dropped onto the pavement in front of the unconscious shooter.

  The silence that followed was eerie. I felt a little dazed, standing there with a single, silly-looking pink water gun still in my hand, staring at the downed man and his big real gun, and then over at the bullet-riddled storefront of the Sav’A’Buck.

  “Hey!” Calvin bellowed. “Get back in the frickin’ car!”

  But I wasn’t done yet.

  Part of my relentless training with Dana had been in the safe handling of real weapons, and I dashed over to that ginormous military assault thing (clearly I’d slept through the chapter on identification of make and model) and carefully picked it up. I knew enough to remove the magazine, and I tossed it as far as I could across the parking lot. I unloaded the round that was chambered and ready to fire, too. It sprang out and clattered onto the pavement. I kicked it under a nearby car.

  I could see the frightened faces of the little girl’s family as they finally dared to emerge from the Sav’A’Buck, and I shouted to them. “You’re safe, she’s safe, your daughter’s safe. Take this weapon, you can sell it.” I could tell with just a glance that these people—mother, father, older brother, and an infant—had next to nothing. They were skinny and shivering in the brisk morning air. “His car keys are probably in the front pocket of his jeans, you should take his car, too. Use it to get out of here.”

  The nearly kidnapped girl’s brother was on the ball—his parents were still stunned. But he was maybe twelve, and he didn’t hesitate; he just reached in and found Gun Man’s key ring. I spoke directly to him. “Have your mom and dad drive north. All the way to Boston, or, once you’re out of Florida, head west, out to California. There are people there who can help you. But above all, make sure your sister hides her powers, do you understand me?”

  The mother had started to cry as she dumped her baby into her husband’s arms in order to scoop up her almost-abducted daughter from the front seat of that Bimmer and cradle her in her arms.

  “He didn’t hurt her too badly,” I reassured them. “He needed her alive. Now, go. Don’t stop, at least not until you get up to Orlando. There are places there you can sell a car like this for cash, too. No questions asked. But then get another car, a cheaper one, and keep going. Boston. Or California.”

  The boy nodded, and I knew at least he was paying attention.

  “Come on, Hoshitski!” Cal called out, still desperately trying to keep my anonymity. “We need to go!”

  “Keep her safe,” I told the boy again.

  I didn’t want to leave my arsenal behind, but there was no water left in any of the plastic guns, so moving them with my TK was a no-go. I scooped up as many as I could, holding out my shirt and using it to carry them in a kind of a sling as I ran back to Cal’s car.

  Cal didn’t wait for me to close the door. He just backed up hard with a squeal of tires, and blasted out of the parking lot, leaving the Sav’A’Buck in the dust.

  ————

  The first few miles, we all were silent.

  Cal put us on the highway, heading back to Coconut Key. Still, he kept his eyes straight ahead on the road, driving with the intensity of a first-year driver’s ed student. His hands were at ten and two, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

  I managed to slow my breathing down a little bit, after I realized that the one thing I could hear was the sound of my own rapid inhalations. Each time I took a breath, I heard something slosh, and I realized it was the windshield-wiper fluid under the hood of Cal’s car.

  I finally got myself calmed down, only to hear Garrett laughing from the backseat. Not funny-ha-ha laughing, but an occasional heh-heh, like he couldn’t contain himself, heh-heh-heh.

  I turned around to look at him, and he was gazing at me, his eyes very wide.

  “Heh-heh,” he said. “So what else can you do?”

  Alarmed, I looked at Calvin. “Oh my God,” I whispered as I realized exactly what I’d just done. “Did he see…?”

  “Everything?” Calvin supplied a noun. “Oh yeah. Yup. Yes. He saw it all.”

  Garrett released his seat belt so that he could lean forward and drape himself over the backs of our seats. “Can you fly?” he asked. “Do you think Jilly can fly?”

  “Oh, shit,” I said to Calvin and then remembered, “Hoshitski.” Would it work? When that man woke up, would he start looking for a deep-voiced thug named Hoshitski or a red-haired girl named Sky? Although, when I looked back at Garrett, I realized we had an even more immediate problem. The school himbo had witnessed my G-T powers firsthand.

  “I called Dana,” Cal told me. “On her burner phone.” When we’d first met her, Dana didn’t have a cell, but since our adventure in Alabama, she’d gotten a disposable. She didn’t use it often, and she replaced it frequently. Milo got one, too. Mostly, I think, so he could text me and regularly check in. “She and Miles are gonna meet us back in Coconut Key. At the Twenty.”

  I nodded. The former multiplex theater at the long-deserted mall that was just on our side of the Harrisburg town line. That was where I’d first met Milo.

  “God,” Garrett was saying, “what I wouldn’t give to have sex with a girl who can fly.”

  “Ew,” I shouted. “That is not okay!”

 
“Are you kidding?” he said. “It would be awesome! Although, really, what I’d want is X-ray vision. Oh my God, do you have X-ray vision? Can you see me naked right now?”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “Did you miss the part where we were nearly killed?”

  “Nope,” Cal told me. “He didn’t miss it. First he screamed for his mommy; then he tried to talk me into ditching you; then he started shouting your name for everyone to hear. I had to punch him in the face to shut him up.”

  Come to think of it, Garrett’s nose did look a little swollen.

  If it hurt, he didn’t seem to care. In fact, he leaned forward, grabbing my head between his hands so that he could kiss me on the mouth.

  I pulled away from his still-fishy lips. “Ew! Stop!”

  “Can you fly?” he asked again. “Because I might have to propose marriage.”

  “No!” I tried to salvage this. “And I don’t know what you think you saw—”

  “Oh please, Skylar,” Garrett said. “I saw it all. You’re a superhero.” He looked from me to Cal and back. “And, oh, my God, your friend Dana is, too, isn’t she? You and Dana and Jilly…” He laughed. “Odds are one of you can fly.”

  I looked at Calvin, and Calvin looked at me.

  I’d messed up, big-time. Rule number one of being a Greater-Than was: Don’t let anyone know.

  “How about telepathy?” Garrett was saying. “Can you read my mind? Do you know what I’m thinking? Do you?”

  “That little girl,” I whispered. “I couldn’t not…”

  Cal reached over and squeezed my hand. “I know,” he said. “Dana’ll fix it.”

  “She’ll want to kill him,” I said, and Garrett laughed. He thought I was kidding.

  But I didn’t need Dana to fix my mess. I’d gotten myself into this, and I’d get myself out. I held up my finger in warning as I turned back around to face Garrett. “Sit back,” I told him. “Seat belt fastened. Now.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said and actually obeyed.

  “Besides being stupid,” Cal murmured to me, “you were also kinda badass.”

  I shook my head as Garrett watched me expectantly. I was grateful that my telepathy was restricted to Milo only. I honestly did not want to know what Garrett was thinking. Not now, not ever.

  “You can’t tell anyone what you just saw,” I told Garrett. “And you can’t breathe a word about what you think you saw with Jilly, or what you imagine about Dana. I will neither confirm nor deny any theories you might have, but I will tell you this. As long as you don’t tell anyone what you saw—not a soul—then I will help you find Jilly.”

  “We will,” Cal confirmed, glancing into his rearview mirror at Garrett.

  Garrett was looking from me to the mirror and back, nodding slightly.

  “Do we have a deal?” I asked. “Because you need to say it. You need to promise. You need to swear.”

  Garrett’s nods turned to a head shake. “No, sorry, no deal.”

  “What?” Cal voiced my own stunned surprise.

  “It’s not a fair deal,” Garrett told us. “I mean, would you take this deal if you were me?” He mocked my voice. “I will neither confirm nor deny any theories… That’s bullshit.”

  I glanced at Cal. “I’m gonna let Dana kill him.”

  “Dana’s not going to kill me,” Garrett said. “She won’t have to. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll take that part of the deal. But only if you tell me what the hell. I want info. I want explanations. Details.” He smiled because he knew he had us over a barrel. “I want to know what your other superpowers are.”

  He didn’t say it, and I didn’t need Greater-Than telepathy to know what he was thinking.

  Garrett McDouche Hathaway wanted to know which one of us could fly.

  “You do that, as well as help me find Jilly, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.” He made an annoying little zipping motion across his lips and even did the whole pretend-to-throw-away-the-key thing before holding out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”

  Cal made a very sad little noise as I reached out and shook Garrett’s nasty hand.

  I choked the word out. “Deal.”

  Chapter Five

  Holy shit had become Garrett’s catchphrase, and as we approached the old Coconut Grove Mall, he used it again and again. First, as we pulled onto the overgrown and crumbling road that led to the abandoned mega-mall, and next, as we drove around the back toward the formerly gleaming twenty-plex theater, and finally, as Calvin parked his car near a hole in the huge chain-link fence that surrounded the entire deserted mall complex.

  “Aren’t there, like, security guards?” Garrett asked, clearly uneasy about trespassing. Still, he followed Calvin and me, ducking to get through that upside-down-V-shaped hole in the fence. I held aside a particularly sharp and clawlike cluster of metal so it wouldn’t catch on his precious letter jacket.

  “They never come down here—they don’t have time.” Cal repeated info that Dana had told us back when he and I first came here, all those months ago. “Budget cuts limit them to about a five-second drive-by, way out on the main road.”

  “We’ve never seen a guard,” I added, “all the times we’ve been out here. It’s safe.”

  Relatively.

  After leaving Harrisburg, we’d stopped at a gas station to refill the six water guns I’d managed to salvage, and Calvin now carried them with us, on his lap. I caught Garrett glancing down at them as he followed us across the disintegrating asphalt, and didn’t miss the fact that he stepped up his pace to stay close to me.

  The morning sun was bright, and it sparkled and reflected off patches of broken glass that dotted the long-deserted parking lot. When Cal and I had first come here to meet Dana and Milo, it had been late at night and very dark.

  The lush tropical plants that decorated the outskirts of this formerly upscale mall had grown like mad without the squads of landscapers constantly cutting them back. Weird fingers of untamed branches and vines reached crazily for the sky. It was spooky even in the sunlight. In the hazy moonlight, it had been flat-out terrifying.

  “I went to a Firefly marathon here when I was maybe, I dunno, twelve?” Garrett guessed as we approached the silently hulking mall. The twenty-plex entrance held the now-empty frame for a huge screen that had displayed showtimes and even previews of the films. “They showed all five of the movies in a row.”

  Cal nodded. “I remember that. I was still in rehab, so I couldn’t go.”

  “Rehab?” Garrett said the word with such incredulity, I knew he was stupidly thinking of the thirty-day programs that people entered for drug or alcohol abuse.

  “Physical therapy, after the accident,” I corrected him, keeping the You ignorant idiot silent.

  “Oh, right.” Garrett eyed the Dumpster that sat outside the twenty-plex’s heavily chained doors. He looked wary, as if someone might be hiding behind it. “I thought that happened back when he was, like, nine.”

  It was a too-common phenomenon that came with the chair—people talked about Cal in the third person when he was sitting right there. He instead of you. I wasn’t going to do that, so I let Cal respond as I opened the doors. They were unlocked—the chains were just for show.

  “He was nine when the gas line exploded,” Cal told Garrett. “But he had a series of surgeries to attempt to repair the damage to his back until he was thirteen.”

  “Bummer that it didn’t work, dude,” Garrett said as I held open the door so Calvin could go in first.

  “Who said it didn’t work?” Cal glanced up at me before motoring forward, and I nodded my reassurance. Normally, we’d enter with supreme caution, but Dana had made a fresh mark on the side of that Dumpster, indicating that she and Milo were already inside. That scrape in the rust told me they’d already checked for stray squatters and had come up clean. At least in this part of the im
mense mall.

  “Well, duh,” Garrett said with all of the sensitivity of rotting roadkill as he followed Cal into the musty dimness of the lobby. His voice echoed off the graffiti-covered walls and ceiling. “If it’d worked, you’d be walking.”

  “If it hadn’t worked,” Cal told him, “I’d be hooked up to an oxygen tank, wearing a diaper, lying in some bed in some hospital—assuming I was even still alive. The surgery gave me back the ability to breathe on my own, and a whole bunch of other handy-dandy tricks like being able to use my hands, arms, and upper body—and to control my bodily functions.”

  “Can you have sex?”

  It was amazing. Within just a few short hours of becoming our “friend,” Garrett put voice to the one question I’d never quite managed to ask Calvin.

  “You don’t have to answer that,” I quickly interjected despite the fact that I was burning to know.

  But even as Cal shook his head in disgust, he flatly responded with, “Yes, Garrett. I will be able to have sex—when the right time comes, with someone—for me, preferably a woman—that I love, cherish, and respect.”

  Garrett opened his mouth, but Cal cut him off.

  “Don’t say it,” Cal warned, but we all knew what Garrett was thinking. Wouldn’t it be awesome, especially considering Calvin’s limitations, if she could fly?

  I laughed despite myself, and Garrett added one of his heh-heh-heh’s as even Cal smiled and shook his head, too.

  “Could you be any noisier?” Dana’s irritation cut through, and we all instantly sobered. We were also instantly blinded.

  She was standing at the entrance to theater six and she was shining an old-school flashlight directly into our eyes.

  “Sorry,” I said, adding, “Do you mind?”

  Dana lowered the beam to the floor in front of us, and Cal silently led the way past her and inside.

  “Hi.” Garrett held out his hand to Dana. “I’m—”

  “I know who you are.” She cut him off. “Shut up and get inside. Milo?”

  “Got it. Hey, Sky.” Milo appeared out of the gloom of the theater. He reached to close the door with one hand even as he briefly touched me—his hand against the side of my head, tucking my hair behind my ear. It was enough for our telepathic connection to snap on. You’re okay. His relief was powerful, but he double-checked with a question. Are you okay?