by Bill Myers
“Heartbeat’s at forty-eight.” Stephie’s voice came through the speaker of our room, all soft and gentle. “You can bring it lower than that.”
I took a deep breath, trying to relax.
“Don’t try to relax,” Boy Wonder said. He was stretched out in the recliner beside me, talking like he was reading my mind, which he probably was. “Just let it happen.”
“Approaching theta,” Stephie said. “That’s good, very good.”
People, they call me a control freak. They’re probably right. I been ‘round too much to let some stranger call the shots. Even well-meaning, white chicks trying to use their hocus-pocus hypno-voice on me.
“But she’s trying to help,” the kid answered.
Will you stop that! I thought.
“Oops,” Stephie said, “you’re back up to alpha.”
I took another breath. I tried focusing on the soft flute music playing in the background, imagined myself melting into the recliner.
“That’s better. Good, good. Keep breathing, nice and slow. In and out. In and out. A little more. Good. And . . . we’re there.”
For being there, I felt exactly the same. Except, well, gradually, I noticed it was like I didn’t have any arms and legs. And that I was falling. Falling through darkness. Except it wasn’t all dark. There was some sort of tunnel around me. On all sides. And I wasn’t falling down, I was floating up.
Where am I? I spoke or thought or both.
“Just go with it,” Chad said.
I heard wind begin blowing in my ears. Faint at first, but it got pretty loud pretty fast. I actually felt it on my face. That’s when the lights or stars or whatever they were started going by. Slow at first, but they picked up speed ‘til they were streaking past me, blurring by like one of those Star War movies. And with all that blurring I started seeing faces on the tunnel walls. Actually the walls were the faces, some small, some big, most creepy like those gargoyles you see on top of buildings.
Like the ones I’d sketched on my pad.
Do you see me? It was Chad’s voice again. I couldn’t tell if it was inside my head or out.
I don’t—
Focus on the center of the tunnel. Away from the faces.
In my mind, I pretended to squint, looking hard until . . . there, fifty yards away. Chad was standing waving his arms at me.
I see you. I see someone.
Of course you do. As usual he was talking down to me like I was a kid. But suddenly things changed. His voice and image rippled like a wave. They did it again, faster. And faster. ’Til everything was a blur, just rippling colors and sound.
Chad! Chad, You there?
No answer. Just the flowing colors and sounds. Then the sound of birds. Then voices—a boy and a girl. The colors began taking shape. Patches of blue sky. White, puffy clouds. Tree tops. Then roofs, then porches, front yards. Not ghetto, but lower class. I looked down to see I was standing on an uneven sidewalk, weeds growing between the cracks.
The voices got clearer.
I turned to see the two kids just a few feet away, twelve, maybe thirteen-years-old. A pretty girl in a print blouse and cutoffs. She was doing most of the talking. Arguing, really. And the boy? No doubt. Don’t ask me how, but I knew it was a younger version of Chad Thorton, complete with cracking voice.
“Melissa, please. You gotta understand—”
“You ruined my grade! You ruined everything!” The girl pretended to cry, but it was obviously fake. Not that Chad could tell. The boy was a newbie when it came to drama queens.
He tried explaining. “I, I didn’t want to do it in the first place. It’s cheating and that’s wrong, but—”
“You gave me wrong questions for the test and you blame me?”
“No one’s blaming—”
“You said you could read Mrs. Snider’s mind. You said you could tell me what she’d ask.”
“I said I’d try.”
“You’re such a loser. Everyone says so.”
He tried to hide the pain filling his face.
“A freak. That’s what they say. Freak!”
“Melis—”
“I should have listened.” Before he answered, she repeated: “Freak!” Then turned and ran off.
“Melissa?” You could hear his anguish. And unlike the girl, you could see his tears were real. “Melissa . . .”
I wanted to say something, but doubted he could hear or see me.
His face rippled in another wave. Trees and houses blurred back to colors and light. The ground shook under my feet. Only it wasn’t ground. Other faces appeared. All around me. Then seats and walls . . . of a school bus. I was standing inside a moving school bus.
Kids were shouting and laughing. Pushing and shoving to see out the windows on one side. I joined them—surprised, but not scared when I passed through them like they were pockets of air.
I got to the windows. There, at the top of a flagpole, a pair of jockey underwear was flapping in the breeze. But that wasn’t what the kids were laughing at. It was the sixteen-year-old who was tied to the bottom of the pole, buck naked, trying to cover his privates. Chad Thorton.
My face grew hot. No one should have to go through that. Particularly a teen. Not even if that teen happened to be wonder boy. I turned and pushed my way through to the front of the bus. I’d barely stepped out before the picture blurred and disappeared. Along with the laughing and jeering. Now there was another voice. Smaller. Helpless.
“Daddy? Daddy, please. I’ll be good.”
Bits and pieces of a different picture appeared. A closed door. A crack of light under it.
“Daddy . . .”
And the smell. Urine. And worse. Like someone had taken a dump right there in . . . in a closet. I was standing in a closet. Next to me, huddled against a wall, legs pulled in, whimpering, was a little boy, five-years-old—maybe younger. Another version of Chad Thorton.
“Daddy, please, I’ll be good, I promise . . .”
Next to the crack under the door was a dog dish, its bowl barely filled with water.
“Daddy . . .”
Suddenly I heard popping. Outside, but close. Fast and rapid. Adrenalin surged through my body. I know gunfire when I hear it. With that realization, came the weight returning to my arms, my legs. Then the pressure of the recliner, the sensors around my chest and arms, the restraints.
“Chad? Brenda?” It was Stephie’s voice. “You two need to come back. Guys . . .”
I pried open my eyes. I was back in the room. I turned to see Chad.
More gun fire. Automatic.
I tried speaking. “What’s—” My voice was thick and hoarse. I tried again. “What’s happening?”
“An attack,” Chad said as he began unhooking his monitors. “We’re under attack.”
Chapter 10
It took me a minute to unhook the monitors and get off the restraints. Stephie was still in the observation room, shutting stuff down. Cowboy and Andi were already outside. Not Chad. Boy Wonder had left me behind only to get as far as the front door where he refused to step out.
“What’s goin’ on?” I shouted as I ran toward him.
“The spheres!” he yelled. “They’re back.”
I reached the door and looked past him. Not far from my car floated Cowboy. He was fifteen feet above the ground. Around him, forming the corners of a clear box, were not one of the orbs, but eight. Each about ten feet from the other. And, though you could barely see them in the daylight, there were walls stretching between ’em. Six walls, forming a prison with Cowboy inside: a ten-by-ten foot cube he couldn’t get out of.
“Cowboy!”
“Shh.” Chad took a half step behind the door. “They’ll hear you.”
I gave him a scowl.
“He’ll be okay,” he said.
“Okay? They got him locked up in some sort of box.”
“He started it.”
“What?”
“See those two on the ground?”
I looked bac
k outside and spotted two more orbs. They were in the dirt, ripped apart and smoldering.
“And that?” He motioned to the AK-47 lying on the ground. “Looks like he shot them down.”
I swore and started out the door. Chad caught my arm. “You have no idea what they can do.”
“Yeah.” I shook him off and stepped outside. “I do.”
Cowboy saw me and shouted, pounded on the walls, trying to warn me. I couldn’t hear him. Didn’t matter if I could.
Andi thought the same. She stood out there, not far away, hands on her hips shouting up at them. “Put him down! Put him down this instant!” Granted, it wasn’t her best plan, or her brightest. But it was vintage Andi. Don’t let her southern politeness fool you. When it came to protecting the rest of our team, she was one mother of a momma bear.
The orbs ignored her. Me, too. They obviously needed more convincing. So I headed for the rifle. I barely got there and scooped it up ‘fore they figured what I was up to. Suddenly, the whole cube, Cowboy and all, began spinning . . . and coming straight at me. I didn’t even get the gun raised before one of the corner orbs knocked it out of my hand.
The next one knocked me to the ground.
And the next one?
Well there was no next, ’cause suddenly I was inside the cube with Cowboy. The walls still spun, but we hung inside, pretty much stationary. There was so much wind I couldn’t hear a thing. But I could see. Andi stood right below us, shouting and carrying on. Until the cube started toward her.
But she still wouldn’t back down.
Then, just before we swallowed her up to join the party, my car window blew to pieces. Glass flying everywhere.
Then my side mirror.
Then my left front tire.
I turned and spotted Stephie. She’d raced outside, picked up the gun and was firing away. I appreciated the effort, though she wasn’t exactly the best of shots. Still, what she lacked in skill, she made up with enthusiasm. Bullets flew everywhere and in every direction.
Our whirling cube changed direction. Instead of going after Andi, it went after Stephie. But the girl kept firing away, looking like the star in some old Rambo movie. Then, somehow, don’t ask me how, she actually got one. The orb exploded into a ball of sparks and fell to the ground.
Without it, one of our walls fizzled and disappeared. And since the cube was still spinning we got thrown out, sailed through the air, and landed a dozen feet away.
And Stephie? She just kept shootin’. Eventually, she hit another one, that exploded and fell. The cube, which had been wobbling from losing the first orb, went completely out of control. It spun and tumbled every which way until it slammed into the ground, bounced, smashed into my car (leaving a healthy dent at the end of my racing stripe), crashed back to the ground, and then flew apart.
But only for a second. ’Cause the orbs came back together again, forming a tight little circle. They hovered there like they were trying to make up their minds.
Stephie helped them decide by firing a dozen more rounds—mostly into my car. Still, the orbs got the message. They shot straight up into the sky, faster than anything I’d ever seen, ‘til they were completely out of sight.
Everything got real quiet. Me and Cowboy, we struggled to our feet, checking for bruises and broken body parts. Andi, too. And Stephie? She looked as surprised at what she’d done as the rest of us. Which explains why she stared at the rifle a moment before throwing it to the ground.
That’s when I heard my cell buzzing. I pulled it from my pocket and saw it was a text message from Daniel. It read:
Are you okay?
I shook my head, once again amazed at his timing. Even though my fingers were shaking I managed to type back:
Yes. You?
I barely finished before his second half came in.
You have to get out of there.
Something bad is coming.
Real bad.
I frowned and was about to answer when I heard Chad’s voice.
“We all good?” He stood outside the door, hands in his pockets, looking like nothing ever happened. And it hadn’t. At least to him. “Well, will you look at that car.”
He strolled up to it . . . shattered window, broken mirror, blown out tire, giant crater, and the steady dribble of water which could only come from my radiator.
“Don’t want to be a downer, but it looks like you may be stuck here a while.”
Chapter 11
When I was a kid, going twenty-four hours with no sleep wasn’t a big deal. But now? Forget it. I barely hit the pillow before I was out. In this case that would be Stephie’s pillow.
“You just make yourself comfortable,” she’d said. “You’ve had a long day.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve got some tools in the side shed. Let me see what I can do for that radiator of yours. Looks like it just might be a hose.”
I’d like to think she was just bein’ helpful, and maybe she was. But I’m guessing some of it had to do with keeping an eye on Chad, not to mention getting Andi out of there as soon as possible. Not that he’d have a chance with Andi. But to protect her interests, I understand that a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.
Still, whatever she saw in him was beyond me.
Okay, I admit maybe I’d started feeling a little sorry for him, considering what I’d seen in his past—the bullying and all that abuse. And yeah, that probably explains him being such a jerk. But it was going to take more than that to forgive him for being the coward hiding behind the door.
Course he had his excuses which he’d been only too happy to share later, around the table. “It’s obvious I’m the one they were after. Considering all I’ve been accomplishing.”
“Don’t know about that,” I said. “They seemed pretty interested in Cowboy, here.”
“Only because he drew their attention with the gun.” Leaning past Cowboy, he spoke to Andi. “Would you be a doll and go ask Stephie to get us some more coffee?”
Andi’s response—narrowing her gaze and ignoring him—made me proud of her. I got back to the question at hand. The one that had been needling me. “What happened when we were bilocating?”
“You mean the Timefold thing?” he said.
“Is that what you call it?”
“That’s what I call it.”
“I didn’t exactly make it to the Gate’s headquarters.”
“Yeah, sometimes that happens,” he said. “I wondered where you went.”
“So it was real?”
“What did you see?”
“Mostly you as a kid. Like when they tied you to the flag pole naked.”
“You saw that?”
I nodded. “And when, it must have been your old man, when he locked you in the closet with just a dog’s bowl for water and—”
“Right, right,” he cut me off. “Time folding.”
“So you traveled back in time?” Andi asked.
“In a manner of speaking.” He called toward the kitchen door. “Steph? How’s that coffee coming?”
“I’ll be there in a jiffy,” came the voice
He turned back to us. “When we bilocate, we leave behind our three dimensional world and enter a higher dimension.”
“The spirit world,” Cowboy said.
“If that’s what you want to call it, sure. And right next to that dimension is another. Time.”
“I thought time was supposed to be the fourth dimension,” I said.
He looked at me, musing. “It would be nice if things were that tidy, wouldn’t it? Let alone, stable. But as you’ve experienced, that’s not always the case.”
“True,” Cowboy said. “We’ve had some pretty crazy adventures.”
“Right. Whatever. Stephie!”
So now I’m in Stephie’s room, trying to get some sleep. The sleep came, no problem. Not the rest.
Maybe it was Daniel’s warning: Something bad is coming. Real bad. Or Cowboy’s uneasiness about psychics.
Or the frog-faced gremlins I’d seen along the edges of the tunnel.
They’re what haunted me the most. Seems every time I closed my eyes and drifted off, they were there. On Stephie’s walls, her ceiling. Some even on the bed. For the most part I was able to ignore them. Just tellin’ myself they were a dream.
Until a couple of them jumped on my chest.
I actually thought I could feel their weight, like they were makin’ it hard to breathe. I tried to shout, but nothing came. I tried to move, but it was like I was paralyzed. When I opened my eyes they were inches from my face, leering down at me. I gasped, tried again to scream.
Nothing came but a croaking cry.
They moved closer to my lips. I clamped my mouth tight, my nostrils flaring, trying to get enough air. I tried screaming again. A pathetic whimper.
“Miss Brenda? Miss Brenda, wake up.” I turned and there was Cowboy, kneeling on the floor beside me. “You okay?”
I raised my head and looked. They were gone.
I took a deep breath.
“Are you okay?”
I took another breath and nodded. “Just a bad dream, that’s all.”
He looked at me skeptically.
“I’m all right. Really.”
“Hmm,” was all he said. Then, without a word, he turned and, still on the floor, rested his back against the mattress.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Jus’ staying here . . . case you have another one.”
Chapter 12
“Brenda?” Somebody was shaking me . . . again.
I pried open one eye to see Andi staring down at me. “’Sup?” I muttered.
“It’s Chad. We’ve got a problem.”
“You think?” I tried turning over, but she stopped me.
“I’m serious.”
“What’s going on?” Cowboy, who’d fallen asleep on my floor, was doing his own imitation of trying to sound coherent.
“Chad.” The fear in Andi’s voice told me it was going to be impossible to go back to sleep. “He needs our help.”
