Amy gasped as Jake reeled, cupping his nose. They were even now. The score had been settled. But Archie didn’t stop. He laid into Jake with everything he had, his eyes wild, fighting like a mad dog.
Jake stumbled away from the assault and fell. Archie squatted over him, delivering punches while Jake hugged his face.
“Stop it,” Amy shouted.
“Take it,” Archie snarled. “Take it like a man.”
Troy ran at Archie and shoved him sprawling on the grass. The kid jumped to his feet and reared for a hit at Troy, who flinched back with his hands raised.
“That’s what I thought,” Archie said.
“Jesus,” Michelle bawled. “You are such an asshole, Archie.”
Archie put his hands on his knees to catch his breath, a strange, terrified look on his face. “You’ll remember this the rest of your life, Jake. That’s how it works.”
Then he spat on the ground and stormed off.
Amy knelt next to Jake. “Let me see it. Oh, honey.”
He blinked up at her in confusion, his face covered in blood. Archie had busted his nose good. “Is it bad?”
“Well,” Amy said, unsure what to tell him.
“Such an asshole,” Michelle said, still crying.
Troy hugged her close. “I should have helped sooner. I was too surprised.”
“You did fine, Troy,” Amy said. “Nobody expected him to come charging in like a wild animal. Jake, can you stand up?”
He touched his face and looked at the blood on his fingers. “Damn. He bopped me good, didn’t he?”
He sounded almost appreciative. Like he admired the act if not the actor. Troy gave him a handkerchief. Jake sat up and wiped the blood off his face.
He probed his swollen nose and winced. “Stings like hell. Ow, damn.”
“Well, I guess you two are even now,” Amy said.
“We ain’t even. Not by a long mile.”
“You should shake hands and quit this feuding.”
“Kick his ass,” Michelle said. “This has got nothing to do with Sally or the monster kids. He has it in for you.”
Amy helped him to his feet. “Come to my house. We better put some ice on your face or you’re gonna look like Marcia Brady just before her big date.”
“Okay,” Jake said. “As long as your mama don’t take a shot at me, too. I had enough fighting for one day.”
“Sure you’re all right?” Troy said.
Jake waved him off. “Show’s over. See you, Troy, Michelle.”
“Bye,” they said and headed the other direction.
He put his arm around Army and held her tight. He let out a loud sigh.
“Are you really okay or playing macho?” she said.
“I’m really okay,” he said. “I just have to walk it off.”
She sighed. “You boys. Bunch of damn fools.”
“Looks like we’re finally alone. So what did you want to talk to me about?”
“You know what,” Amy said. “I totally forgot what I was gonna say. Let’s take care of you now, honey.”
She couldn’t tell him the truth about what she was. She couldn’t put him through any more strife. She loved him too much for that.
I can’t have anything good, Amy thought. This world won’t allow it.
Thirty-Three
The Home truck thudded over a pothole and coasted to a halt in Pa Albod’s yard. Brain, Wallee, and Mary sat in the pickup’s bed and waited. Thrushes whistled in the trees. The air was already thick and muggy this morning, the sky gray as their teacher’s face.
Mr. Byrd sat in the cab and tilted his head back. He shuddered and tossed a steel hip flask onto the seat next to him. Brain watched him in the rearview until the man’s hard eyes flickered to stare back. Brain turned to look at something else.
The fields sprawled brown and empty, all the cotton picked, ginned, and bundled. Wallee closed his eyes and swayed as he hummed a tune. Mary sat with a blank face, her porch light on but nobody home, patient as the Buddha.
At last, Mr. Byrd opened the door and let his feet dangle out. He leaned on his thighs and coughed hard until he retched. He spat and took a deep breath. Then he wiped his mouth and lit a cigarette.
“Get out the truck,” he said.
The man was filling in for Mr. Gaines. He taught the Bible at the Home. Behind his back, the kids called him Thou Shalt Not But I Will. Eventually, Mr. Gaines would return or the principal would hire a replacement.
Nobody had yet replaced Dog. As for Dog, he was gone for good.
“What do you want us to do?” Brain said.
Mr. Byrd cast a wretched look at the farmhouse. “I don’t know. I don’t see Reggie. What do you usually do? Hoe gardens and stuff?”
“I work the animals and machines. Wallee, he—”
The man raised his hand to silence him.
The front door had banged open. The Albod girls trooped out in a funereal pall, faces downcast and pale from grief. They filed past. The teacher looked at the house again, but still no Pa Albod.
“You was saying something?” he said.
“Wallee usually tends the garden. And Mary—”
The hand shot up again. “Fine. Go ahead and do what you just said.”
“I was gonna say Mary don’t have a job, seeing as all the cotton’s picked.”
The teacher lay back on the seat, pulled his cap over his eyes, and folded his hands on his chest. “Yup. Wake me up for dinner around noon.”
Brain walked toward the barn. He hadn’t been to the farm since Sally died and the sheriff arrested Dog. The animals needed tending. Pa Albod maintained a stock of cattle, pigs, and chickens, both laying hens and fryers. The pigs had suffered an outbreak of whipworm over the summer. He should check on them first.
Wallee lumbered after him. “What about me, Brain?”
“Do what you like. The overseers are all napping.”
“Do gar-den.”
“That’s fine,” Brain said. “Take Mary with you and keep her out of trouble.”
“Not same,” Wallee said. “With-out Dog.”
“Have you been talking to the sheriff, Wallee?”
The kid’s thick rubbery lips formed an O. “Would like that.”
“But have you?”
Wallee grinned. “Want to be sher-iff.”
“The sheriff arrested Dog,” Brain said.
“Dog broke law.”
“Their law.”
“On-ly one law,” Wallee said and shuffled off on his tentacles.
Brain noticed a dead hen in the grass, scrawny and almost stripped of feathers. The other chickens had pecked her to death. She must have just died. Tonight, a scavenger would come along and take her off.
He wondered if Wallee would one day have to be killed.
A revolution took time to organize. It was like building a bonfire: tinder clumped at the heart, kindling teepeed around it, logs stacked around. Then the long wait for the spark.
So many kids now were learning they had abilities. They practiced out in the woods, no longer playing but training to fight. Vigilante attacks against the Home had pushed them to the edge. An informant could ruin all of it. The revolution might be crushed before it started because some kid with a sweet tooth sold it out for a Hershey bar.
Or worse, a believer in their system. A kid believing normal law was just law.
If they stood united, they could gain everything.
Brain looked back at the truck. Mr. Byrd’s feet stuck out the open door. Pa Albod was nowhere in sight. He could do anything he wanted.
He went to the barn and pushed an old wheelbarrow to the entrance. A heavy red toolbox went into it, followed by little motors, loose bolts, and parts Albod collected over the years in case they might one day be useful.
Brain heaved the wheelbarrow toward Albod’s truck. He set it down with a pained grunt and ran extension cords all the way to the barn for the power tools. Then he propped the hood and went to work.
&
nbsp; His hands leaped from one task to the next without conscious thought. The bulk of engine work disappeared and reappeared as its constituent parts on the tarp. He glanced over the carpet of metal junk and went back to work.
Ignition, propulsion, acceleration, power, efficiency. Intake and exhaust manifold. Carburetor that blended air and fuel. Camshaft and distributor, battery and starting switch. He wire-scrubbed rusted parts, jury-rigged systems, stripped and wrapped wires. By the time he finished, the old truck would run better than brand-new with a boost to fuel efficiency.
He could do a lot more if he had time, materials, and a machine shop. Oh, God, the things he could do if he only had the means. He could change the world.
Mr. Byrd called him for his dinner. Brain ignored him.
As the truck came back together, he envisioned a vehicle that ran on water and sunlight, a truck that would never die, a once-removed cousin to a perpetual motion machine. An all-purpose vehicle that outlived its owner, scalable and modularized for easy future upgrades.
On the fly, he imagined materials and methods, tools and parts, machines and processes, new scientific fields that would revolutionize everything. He saw entire industries rise up out of nothing, manufacturing and service, new business models, halo disruption as his technologies rippled across other industries, tearing them down and replacing them with fresh marvels.
He pictured all this and more, always more. A world of wonders.
The things he could do. He could build dreams if only he weren’t a monster. Brain never used his powers to benefit normals. He’d been on strike since birth. He could go to Special Facility and change the world, but it would always be their world, not his. Today was a rare exception. For just one day, he wanted to pretend he was free to use his powers however he wished.
“What’d you do to my truck?” Pa Albod said.
Brain turned. “Afternoon, Pa.”
Pa Albod stood hatless and blinking in the daylight. His mottled face bristled with stubble. His hair stuck up in places. Brain had always seen him as a powerful man. A symbol of the normals’ strength. Now he just looked like an old man consumed by grief. His mortality clung to him like a cloud.
Brain felt the man’s pain. It was hard to hate when what you hated became a who, and that who was suffering. Whether Dog was unjustly accused or not, the fact remained Albod had lost his little girl. A sweet, kind girl. An innocent who’d had everything going for her, who’d had her whole life ahead of her.
“I asked what you’re doing, George.”
“I fixed your truck,” Brain said. “If you got your keys, I’d love to start her up.”
“Didn’t ask you to fix my truck.”
“Mr. Byrd said to do whatever I thought needed doing. I gave the truck a good and proper tune-up. She’ll run better than brand-new.”
“Have you seen Enoch around?”
“Enoch’s in jail, Pa.”
“I know that,” the man growled.
“I guess I’ll check on the animals and then put all these tools away,” Brain said.
“Yeah, all right.”
“Unless you want me to do something else with the time I got left.”
“Yup. That sounds fine.”
Brain left him to his grief and headed for the pigpen. After just a few paces, he stopped, turned, and came back. “Hey, Pa?”
The farmer snapped out of his reverie. “What’s that?”
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry, sir.”
He squinted. “Sorry?”
“About Miss Sally. Me and Wallee and Mary. We’re all real sorry for your loss.”
“What have you got to be sorry for?”
“Miss Sally was a fine girl. She was always very kind.”
Albod blinked. “Much obliged.”
Brain started to put the tools back in the red box. He struggled to process his roiling emotions. He felt Pa Albod’s pain. He didn’t hate the man. He certainly hadn’t hated Sally. He hated the system that crushed him and his kind. But the Albod family benefited from that system. They and others like them constructed it for their benefit and chose to ignore the violence it inflicted on the plague children. Where was Pa Albod when Sucker Punch died in a torture chamber? Where was his sympathy? The farmer was blind to the suffering, a blindness he’d—
He shrieked as pain ripped across his back. “What are you doing?”
“You ain’t sorry, boy,” Albod said. “Not yet.”
Another bolt of pain striped his shoulders. The farmer raised his belt again. Brain scrambled away to escape the flailing strokes.
“Not by a long shot,” Albod said.
The leather scorched Brain’s hands feebly raised to defend himself. The next stroke smashed his face. Wasp stings followed by burning fire.
“You damned creepers,” the farmer raged. “I opened my home to you. I made you family and let you call me pa. I trusted you with my child, and you butchered her.”
Brain spotted Mr. Byrd running toward them. He staggered toward the teacher with his hands outstretched, unable to form words, mindless with pain.
“What’s going on?” the teacher said. “Lord, George, what did you do?”
The next lash brought him to his knees. He lay squirming on the ground, hands over his eyes, crying as every second brought fresh agonies. The blows didn’t cease, each one a roaring hell, his flesh itself screaming.
“Stop,” a voice said.
The next lash seemed to rip the hide right off him. He felt like his body was coming apart. Entrails spilling on the ground. White bone exposed to air. His precious brain, powerful enough to change the world, winking into void.
“STOP.”
The beating stopped but brought little relief as pain continued to cascade through his seething flesh, his frail body a shivering ball. His heart boomed against his ribs. Another jagged wail escaped his throat. But he was alive. He clung to that fact. He opened feverish eyes and saw Mary standing over him.
Little Mary with her imbecilic face and too-big overalls. She stood her ground with fists clenched. For the first time, her eyes glittered with the spark of intelligence. For the first time, she was truly awake.
“Stop,” she whispered.
Red mist filled the air. Pa Albod grunted and bent over, clutching his guts and moaning. Vomit splashed on the grass. He coughed in the aftermath. Mr. Byrd rushed over to help him stumble back to the house.
The mist disappeared into Mary’s mouth. Her eyes flared one last time then became dull again, her face calm. The porch light on, but nobody home.
She’s one of us, Brain thought just before he blacked out.
Thirty-Four
Sheriff Burton sat in his easy chair reading the paper. Widespread famine in Ethiopia. A Home firebombed by vigilantes in Tennessee, eight dead. The Cubs beat the Padres 13–0. And in the small town of Huntsville, Georgia, police had wrapped up their investigation of the murder of Sally Mae Albod.
He peered at his wife over the rims of his reading glasses. “Listen to this, hon. Quote, Sheriff Thomas E. Burton is to be commended for his swift and thorough investigation, unquote. District Attorney Keaton Lightfoot said that.”
Anne sat on the couch with her legs crossed and her nose buried in Danielle Steel’s Full Circle, which she’d taken out from the library. She always dressed immaculately and wore full makeup, even at home.
“That’s lovely, Tom,” she said.
“Right here in the Atlanta Constitution. Your husband is famous.”
“It’s wonderful.”
“He called me out by name. How about that.”
“Mm-hmm,” she said.
“I’m gonna crush Johnny Stoval come November. I’ll be sheriff the next four years at least.”
This time, she said nothing.
Burton read the rest to himself, lips moving. The assistant DA expected an indictment by a grand jury before the end of the week. He removed his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes, feeling proud but unsettled. The cloc
k ticked on the mantle.
Dave Gaines had stuck with his cockamamie story. That left Archie and Amy. Burton couldn’t put a fourteen-year-old boy on the grill any more than he could Amy Green for the same reason. So he shoved the whole mess on the county DA investigator. Drew a big circle around the ballistics. Nothing doing. The shit rolled uphill to the assistant DA, who drafted an indictment. The DA would take it to a grand jury to rubber stamp, and then the criminal trial would commence. As Burton expected, the DA wanted to try Bryant as an adult. The public howled for justice and blood. Everybody was out to ride the gravy train to fame and glory.
A good lawyer would rip the government’s case to shreds, but Enoch Bryant didn’t have a good lawyer, and out of fear of the mob, the hack the court appointed wouldn’t put up a fight even if he wanted to. Enoch Bryant wouldn’t get a fair judge and an impartial jury.
The kid would fry. Burton could picture it. Bryant shuffles along in handcuffs and leg irons, surrounded by stony-faced prison guards. The chaplain recites the Lord’s prayer. Head shaven, the boy sits on the wooden chair. The guards strap him to it with leather belts. Electrodes on his feet. The blinds open to reveal the witnesses gazing through the window, Reggie Albod a picture of righteous fury. Bryant hyperventilates at his looming end. The guards set a wet sponge and big metal helmet on his head. They wrap a black blindfold over his gleaming eyes. Bryant’s last words: I swear to God I didn’t kill that girl. Nobody believes him.
CRACK. One thousand volts flow through him. Twenty seconds. Bryant jerks against his restraints. He slumps. CRACK.
Another twenty. And the doctor pronounces him one dead dog.
As horrible as that was, an innocent boy getting the chair, perhaps it was all for the best. Despite continuing vigilante attacks against Homes all over the country, everything seemed to be simmering down. Great events often boiled down to a single man. The stone that makes waves in the pond. Take the stone away, and everything goes back to normal. He’d thought that man was Gaines, but perhaps fate had chosen Enoch Bryant to play the martyr. His death would assure the nation and its people they were stronger than what they feared. Things would calm down for good and go back to the way they were.
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