The Keeper

by Barr, Clifford

  “Toronto,” her father said.

  All through the day, her father had been making this call and that, trying to talk to everyone he knew about the NaU. All of it was theoretical, though, since her father might have been stupid enough to infect a bunch of people with NaU, but he wasn’t stupid enough to let other people know about it, especially not old Uncle Sam. He had sent over Becca’s test results, along with blood from himself and everyone else from the NaU program.

  Of all the labs he talked to, the one up in Toronto looked the most promising.

  The researcher up there was an old friend of Robbie’s, back from his zoology days at the University of Glenn Lake. The two of them had been good friends, but also research partners on the first theoretical designs of the NaU. Robbie had, of course, modified it to fit his own needs. Regards, the doctor up north thought he might be able to come up with some sort of cure, but it was a major maybe on that front. Still, though, something was better than nothing.

  “What about . . ..” Her mother did not even have the strength to say the name of her son.

  Robbie did it for her.

  “It is why we have to go,” he said.

  “Why?” Carol said, though her face showed the mention of someone who knew a terrible truth and would much rather die than have to hear it come out of another person’s mouth.

  “You know why,” Robbie said, looking grimmer, then resentful.

  “Then remind me,” Carol said.

  Becca remembered the way that Matt had looked at her, the way she had felt his touch on her and her father, the way he had spoken.

  “Matt isn’t in a good place right now,” her father said.

  “As if any of us are,” Carol said.

  “Exactly,” he said, “but Matt is in a worse state. He might not be decomposing alive like Nigel and Kent, but there’s something off with him. For all we know, the same amount of desperation and craziness that was present in Nigel last night might also be spreading through the son.

  “Nigel and Matt are completely different,” Carol said.

  “Not on a biological scale,” Robbie said. “Look at their NaUs. Of course, they aren’t the same color, or even close. All of us involved have different colored NaUs. However, look at the NaUs. Nigel’s NaU was to create objects out of the air, usually sharp. His NaU rather left his body and made a change. That is the same kind of powers that Matt has, but on a different scale. He might not be able to make swords like his father, but he can still command his NaU to affect the environment around him. The only difference is that you can’t see it with your eyes, which makes it look like telekinesis.

  “So if that same kind of NaU is present in them, then the symptoms might be close to the same.”

  “You’re afraid,” Becca said, providing all of the courage in the room to say what was on everyone else’s mind that wasn’t being discussed, “that he might try to kill us.”

  “He’s my son,” her mother said, “Matt wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Neither would our daughter,” he said, “but when time and circumstance come together, people do desperate things to protect the people they care about.”

  “He cares about us,” her mother said.

  “I’m sure he does,” Walter said. “But if Jolie is pregnant, and Matt thinks that killing Becca will somehow allow his girlfriend and child to live, he might go along with it.”

  “You are making a lot of assumptions about a boy who has been nothing but nice to everyone around him for the last eighteen years of his life,” Carol said.

  Her father and mother continued, but to her, it felt as though they weren’t right in front of her, that they were, in fact, quite far away. The events of the last twenty-four hours seemed like a dream, a fast-moving one where every attempt that Becca made to reorient herself only ended with her falling deeper and deeper into a hole of mystery and madness. Yesterday, she had woken up as a normal middle school-aged girl who liked to read and had a family of people with superpowers. Now, as she sat there at that table, she was a murderer, a person with not only one, but two powers, who was listening to her dying parents talk to each other about abandoning their son because he might want to kill both of them, or just Becca.

  “This is your fault,” Becca said.

  Her parents stopped talking at that, as though someone had whipped each of them.

  “Becca, I—” her father started.

  “No,” Becca snapped back. “This is all your fault. If you had let her die, then none of this would have happened.”

  “Watch your language,” Carol said.

  “Oh, boo-hoo, Mom,” Becca said. “Unless you forgot that you wanted to die and, in fact, actually begged me to kill you in case things got too bad.”

  “What?” her father said, looking at his wife.

  “That was a long time ago, honey,” her mother said, with the stern voice of someone who is clearly angry but wants to keep it contained within themselves.

  “But still true,” Becca said. “God, if you could only have let her die, and then none of this would have happened. We wouldn’t have to be afraid of Matt, I wouldn’t have had to kill Nigel, and no one would be dying.”

  She got up from the table and walked out of the room. Her parents called after her, but she didn’t pay them any mind. Instead, she walked up the stairs to her room and slammed the door behind her.

  They could be damned to hell for all she cared. Matt might be angry, but he wouldn’t really try to kill her, would he?

  She sat down on her bed and put her head in her hands. It wasn’t fair, none of it was fair. Nothing in her life had been fair, so why should she have dared to expect anything different?

  Matt’s face kept rolling around in her head. The boy who had looked at her that morning had been her brother, at least, the majority of him had the same qualities as her brother. He looked the same, had the same NaU, and spoke with the same voice.

  But there had been a change in him. The way he had looked down at her and her father that day spoke not of forgiveness and understanding.

  He has his father’s eyes, Becca thought, remembering how those two orbs seemed less like inquisitive lens into the boy’s mind and more like those of a demon or a vulture, kneeling down and looking down upon its prey.

  If he figured out what his sister could do, her father had said, he might become desperate.

  The chances of coming up with a cure were slim to none. The scientists up in Toronto were pretty smart, but Robbie had been pretty smart when he dragged everyone into this mess, so perhaps intelligence wasn’t everything. It might have been what put them into this disaster in the first place.

  No, Becca thought, looking up from her bed.

  Intelligence wasn’t to blame; it wasn’t anything related to how smart people were. All of this stemmed back to one thing and one thing only.

  Love.

  As much as she liked to paint her father as this ghoulish doctor, doing terrible experiments for self-gain, that wasn’t who Robbie McCarthy was. His methods were coarse, and his results not always the best. But he never set out to hurt anyone. He was trying to stop the woman he loved from dying and stopping his own decay as well. What could be more human and loving than protecting others?

  Killing for others, she thought, remembering how easily the pencil had gone through Nigel’s neck. That too had been love, an odd sort of love, an overbearing kind, but love all the same. It was the same sort of love that Matt must’ve had for his father—why else would he have acted in such a way only hours earlier?

  Becca stood up from her bed and looked around her room. It was a nice room, all things considered, and she was going to miss it. Sure, they might make it back from the trip to Toronto, but maybe not. Either way, it was good to be prepared for these sorts of things. Neither one of her parents ever came to knock on her door, but she felt their presence, their unease. She took out a suitcase and started to fold her clothes.

  When her parents saw the suitcase in her hand
as she walked down the stairs, they got the message. Robbie walked into the other room to make a call. No one called Matt, or any of the other’s infected with the NaU. They were being left to die, but perhaps not. If Becca could come up with a cure, whatever slim chance that there could be, then maybe she’d see them all again.

  But another voice, this one wearing and acting the persona of “reality,” told her a different story, one that didn’t comfort her heart but made sure to comfort her mind. Her mother wrote a note on a piece of paper and left it on the table. She reassured her husband that it didn’t tell Matt any of the details of where they were going. That should have calmed them down, but it didn’t. Matt and his gang would find them, and once they realized that they had been left for dead, then they wouldn’t be too happy to see them, not at all. All three of them brought their things to the car and headed out.

  Becca watched the house disappear as they drove down the road. It looked peaceful, being empty, alone amongst the snow-covered branches and trees.

  Goodbye, she thought, knowing full well she was saying goodbye to more than a house.

  She turned back and took out a book. Her parents would expect her to read, to calm their minds, and let them know that everything, while not completely normal, was still at least in the same ballpark as normal, that they hadn’t left four high school kids to potentially die because of their mistakes and shortcomings.

  The book was interesting, but Becca found she couldn’t read any of it.

  She didn’t think anyone could, given the circumstances.

  Chapter Twelve

  Peter could tell that Danni was angry, even before he pulled over and walked into the cornfield.

  The snow was starting to fall. Peter liked the snow. He liked the way it felt when it landed his body, the way it melted off. He also liked being able to walk in the snow without fear of getting frostbite. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. He could get frostbite like anyone else. The only difference was that his body would grow back the bloated and broken blue colored toes and fingers that burst from the cold. He felt it all, but there was always a relief at the end, the feeling of it coming back together. Everything was supposed to come together.

  Peter hadn’t been surprised when Dr. McCarthy had told them all that they were going to die. More than anything, he was expecting it, since he was the one with the gaping holes in his memory and mental function, as though someone had replaced his brain for a block of Swiss cheese, one where the baker or whoever it was that makes cheese, decided to make the holes extra-large and random.

  He, of course, couldn’t die. The same amount of death and despair that was happening with the likes of Kent was not happening to him.

  But his mind was going. Sometimes he forgot who he was, what the names of certain things were. His thoughts felt muddled, as though someone had peeled back the top of his skull and poured molasses into his brain. He was having trouble in school, which his parents were starting to notice. They expected him to keep having high ranks since he was expected to go to college the coming fall. Colleges looked at the senior year very carefully, and if he didn’t get his act together, his parents wouldn’t be happy.

  “It’s because of the people you hang out with,” his mother had said. “Can’t you find anyone else her to spend time with, except for all these stupid kids?”

  “Most likely not,” his father had said. “The coolest thing to enlightenment out there is anyone who didn’t manage to get pregnant before they graduated high school, or who actually tried to do their work. Most of the people around here are farmers, and as much as we might wish them to adopt a more sophisticated lifestyle, that’s just the one they have.”

  You’re wrong, Peter tried to say but didn’t. He didn’t like it when his parents talked like this. Everyone else in town thought that they hated them, and this sort of talk was just playing right into that preconceived notion.

  He wanted a cigarette too. Largely, he wished he hadn’t started. So many of his friends and neighbors smoked that he wanted to see what the craze was, what was it about that nicotine riding through your veins that seemed to make everything easier. He, of course, hadn’t planned on getting addicted. No, that was the sort of thing that only stupid people do. No, not Peter, no, he was a smart little boy, and so he planned on only doing it for a week before stopping. Besides, smoking was only really enjoyable in the beginning, or so every D.A.R.E. councilor and health teacher had ever told him. After that, it sort of became a chore, and you had to smoke to feel normal again.

  Peter didn’t want that. He wanted to see what it was like.

  He still got addicted to smoking. His lungs were healthy, and his teeth didn’t yellow, thanks to the all-powerful and mighty good NaU that was stealing his mind, of course. That kept him healthy but still allowed him to get addicted. Go figure.

  But there was no real addiction to it, not really. Every cigarette tasted as good as the first. He could stop whenever he wanted to, but it tasted good. The only way for Peter to die, or at least come back from a wound that couldn’t be healed, was if his head was separated from his body. That was the running hypothesis that Dr. McCarthy had, and as much as Peter liked to test things out, he wasn’t all that excited to have someone cut his head off.

  Danni didn’t like smoking. She had always hated it, but he only recently shared that frustration to Peter a few weeks ago, after the shocking news was given to everyone at the McCarthy house.

  “Don’t you dare smoke,” Danni had said when Peter brought out the package.

  The two of them had made a quick exit of the McCarthy house. Inside, they could hear Mr. McCarthy and Nigel yelling at one another. It wasn’t a good place to be, and besides, they had more than an ample excuse to get away from that house. They were dying, after all.

  “It won’t hurt my lungs,” Peter said.

  “It’s not your lungs that are dying,” Danni said. “It’s your brain. No need to quicken the process.”

  Peter flipped a match with his fingers and brought it up to the cigarette in his mouth, maintaining eye contact with Danni as he did so. His girlfriend snarled.

  “God, why do you have to make things so difficult?”

  “I make things difficult?”

  Danni turned away and was gripping the side of the car. The metal was bending slightly in her hands.

  “You just had to run into the house,” she said, not looking at Peter. “You had to run into the house that night. If the two of us had left like I wanted, or stayed by the car, none of this would have happened. Instead, you had to be the hero again, springing into action like you always had to do.”

  Squirrels jumped to and fro in the trees. The fisher cats had either moved down south or had gone hibernating, since Peter hadn’t seen one of them, much less heard one, in quite some time. He wasn’t an expert on hunting and killing animals, though.

  That was Danni’s specialty.

  “You’re only saying that with the benefit of hindsight,” Peter said, exhaling into the air.

  The nicotine riding through his body made him feel good, made him feel alive.

  “So, I’m right,” Danni said. “You didn’t have to go; you didn’t have to leave—”

  “What?”

  “You are going to leave,” Danni said.

  Peter tried to get more out of the man that day, but he wouldn’t budge. Nigel stormed out of the house a few minutes later, heading for his car. The man had a rash going up the side of his face, or at least that’s what Peter thought it was. He had gotten used lately to noticing the health problems of those around him. It was almost fascinating to watch how a normal, or at least adjacent to the normal body would react to things that impaired them.

  After that, the two of them left. Neither one of them felt like going back into the McCarthy house.

  The weeks passed slowly.

  Dr. McCarthy’s promise for a cure, or at least a partial remedy, was nowhere in sight, much to the disappointment and further aggravation of
Danni. Peter started to lose himself.

  Things started to get exponentially worse. Sometimes he would say directly what he was thinking, and not even realize what he was doing. He stopped going to school altogether. While he still had a conscious mind, he was able to convince his parents that there was something up with him and that he’d have to push everything back a year. They were, of course, distraught, but they understood that even if they didn’t know exactly what was wrong with their son, they understood partially what the problem was.

  Danni seemed to get angrier during those weeks. Peter often found her in the woods, throwing trees or high boulders into one another.

  Jolie was a couple months pregnant at the time, but that didn’t stop her NaU from acting up. She had seizures, terrible seizures that resulted in foam coming out of her mouth. Matt seemed to look sick, and the strength that had gone into his legs seems to slowly be disappearing. Now when he was not in public, he levitated only and stayed away from letting his legs touch the ground.

  Nigel was seen going around and talking to people. Peter’s parents wouldn’t give the man the time of day, though, so the door was shut on him on that front. He supposedly was able to talk to the Torres and to Danni’s parents, though neither one of them were fruitful conversations. If they were, then Peter was sure the police would have swarmed the McCarthy house or called the feds, or something else.

  Peter and Danni were on the way to the McCarthy house when Danni pulled over.

  They had been talking about something, though Peter couldn’t remember what exactly it was. He forgot things so easily these days, saying things he might not have meant, or might have meant a long time ago. Sometimes he made inappropriate remarks and didn’t know what he had said.

  Based on how Danni was reacting, Peter chalked that up to him saying something bad.

  But what could he have said? Could he have said something about how he hated Greenwich and the people in it, and how he was looking forward to the day when he didn’t have to drive past cow manure-laden cornfields, past dirty houses with even dirtier people inside? Danni was the exception, of course, but only a partial one.