“And he’s dead.”
“And yet you still live,” Matt said. “For all I know, he purposely gave you the NaU that would allow you to live—he chose you to be The Keeper.”
Matt’s throat turned blue as he activated his mother’s NaU.
“Matt,” Becca said. “Don’t.”
But her brother didn’t hear her.
He exhaled his breath. It went due straight at Becca. She activated her father’s NaU and reflected it.
Matt almost activated his breath again, but a noise behind him stopped him. He turned.
Jolie was standing there.
There was a hole in her chest.
She fell back into the snow behind her.
Matt rushed over toward her.
Walter was on his feet. He and Becca got into the truck and drove off.
The sky was turning green behind them as they did so.
Chapter Sixteen
Should I be afraid of Matt? Probably Not. I’ve known the boy for a long time, and while I’d never go as far as to say that he was my own flesh and blood, he means a lot to Carol and Rebecca.
But I’ve been wrong about people before. I didn’t think that Nigel’s cruel demeanor could get worse when he got powers, and that’s exactly what happened. Now Matt and his father are two separate beasts altogether, but that doesn’t mean that they are inherently different from the core. Who knows how the boy will react when, just like his father, the desperation comes up to the forefront. That nice boy in the wheelchair might be dashed aside for something far deadlier.
-Robbie’s Journal
“Where have you been?”
Jolie closed the door and walked into her house.
Her parents rose to meet her. Her father looked like he had just come out of work, or perhaps that’s what he looked like yesterday when he came home, and his daughter still wasn’t home. Her mother looked in a fit of worry, which had turned to kindle that now burned with a blaze of anger when she looked at her daughter.
Jolie hadn’t exactly given them much of a notice when she and Matt left.
Danni killing Peter had been a grisly affair. Matt had been the one to discover it, going out to look for his friends that night, but instead only finding Peter’s body in the middle of the field. His body was cold and frozen to the ground when Jolie arrived.
“Danni’s run off,” Matt said, putting some corn stalks over their dead friend. “We need to go find her.”
“How do you know who did this?” Jolie said. “Danni would never hurt Peter.”
“No, she wouldn’t,” Matt said, “at least not the Danni we know. None of us are exactly the same people we were a couple of months ago, though, Jolie.”
“How did she kill him?”
“I’m guessing that there is an injury that Peter’s NaU can’t recover from. Remove the head, and death ensues.”
It was pitch black in the cornfield, and late at night. Matt and Jolie had planned on heading to the movies, seeing one movie or another. It didn’t really matter which one. On the way back, Matt said he felt something, and the two of them searched Greendale from the skies. Matt felt something and found Peter’s body frozen to the ground, his eyes looking up at the sky.
“We need to find her,” Matt said, “There still might be something that Robbie can do for Danni.”
“What about Peter?” Jolie said. “Who is going to tell his family?”
“What would we tell them?” Matt said.
He activated his NaU and ripped the frozen ground apart. It cracked in the quiet night.
“What are you doing?” Jolie said.
“All that I can,” Matt said. “We can’t leave his body out. It might be cold out, but it’ll still start to decompose.”
“Can’t we wait?”
“Where would we put him?”
They placed their friend’s body into the hole and covered it up. Jolie’s eyes were wet. So were Matt’s.
They stood there for a moment and took off to look for their friend. They tried all around Greendale but couldn’t find her. It was nearing morning, and Jolie was tired.
“Go home and get some rest,” Matt said. “I’ll tell Robbie and the others what happened.”
Jolie nodded and headed home. Her parents didn’t say anything about her being out late, didn’t even seem to realize that she hadn’t spent the night there. Jolie got little peaceful sleep before Matt came for her.
Becca had evidently killed Nigel, and Matt didn’t want to be home. They had to search for Danni right then and there.
Finding Danni had been hard. The girl might have been erratic, but she was still precise. She stayed mostly to the trees, not leaving any tracks for the two of them to follow.
They found her, though.
She was huddled up in a cave up in the Adirondacks. At the back of the cave was a dead bear in many pieces, the walls of the cave covered with blood. The girl hadn’t eaten—hadn’t done anything, really. Her clothes were stained a dark red and brown, and her skin was pale. When Jolie and Matt approached Danni, she jumped out like an animal, teeth out as though their friend intended to bite them.
Matt held her down, activating his NaU. The girl was thrown across the other side of the cave.
“We’re your friends,” Matt said. “Stop it.”
He threw the girl against the cave wall. Yellow light flowed underneath her skin.
“Peter’s NaU,” Matt said.
“When you die,” Jolie said, “it goes to the person that killed you.”
“Not necessarily,” Matt said. “Maybe just the person closest to you. Robbie will want to know that his hypothesis is true.”
Danni tried to mutter something, but her words just came out as garbage. Killing Peter must’ve done a number on the girl. Jolie helped her out of the cave, and the three of them returned home.
Danni, of course, couldn’t go home, so Matt took her to his house. He meant to bring her Robbie, to see if the man could fix any of it. Now two people had died, and if Matt’s theories were true, then Kent would be the next.
So, Jolie returned home.
“I just got carried away with the time,” she said.
Her parents didn’t believe her.
“We’ve been looking for you for a couple days now. No one has seen you or any of your friends. The McCarthys are gone.”
Something snapped in the back of Jolie’s mind.
“Gone?”
Apparently, it was the talk of the town. A couple days prior, the McCarthys left, and no one had seen them since. No one had seen Nigel either. Some of the neighbors thought that they had seen Carol driving Nigel’s car, and they knew what to make of that the same way a scientist might be told to make sense of magic. It just didn’t happen, but happen it did, and with all of them missing, it only made the whole conversation all the more interesting.
Jolie rushed out of the house. Something must’ve happened. Jolie knew that Matt had been keeping something from her, and she thought that she had figured out the majority of it, enough to build a stable enough foundation in which to proceed forward. The only thing that could have made Matt so disillusioned and distant was the death of Nigel. That had to be it, and why the McCarthy family just suddenly up and disappeared.
Her parents followed her out the door. She wanted to walk back in with them, let them know that she was pregnant, that she and Matt were going to start a life together.
They knew about the seizures, about the spazzing outs. They thought that she was just under a lot of stress lately, delaying her final year in high school and all. She wanted to think that college was just around the corner, that the fabric of her future was ahead of her, that, yes, indeed, Robbie would figure out what was wrong with them and change them all in tow. They didn’t even need to keep the powers. Flying and shooting green lightning from her hands was fun, but she’d gladly give that up if it meant that things could go back to the way they were. Life was simpler then, and while it might not have been all th
at great, it still would be better than death.
Matt was waiting for her outside her house.
He was floating in the air, holding Danni next to him.
Jolie could feel the boy’s touch on her. Her parents must’ve felt something too since they cried out. Jolie wanted to turn, to tell them that she was glad that she was their daughter, that they had given her a good life, but all of that would have resigned fate to the obvious conclusion.
Instead, she launched into the air and followed Matt. She didn’t look back, since she was going to be home in a couple of weeks, or maybe days even, all they had to do was figure out where the McCarthys had squirmed off to and then things would be right as rain.
They headed to the lab.
It was empty, save for one cleaning person, and one person locked in a room underneath the lab. Matt ripped the door open, and Danni sniffed Kent out.
The boy’s arms and legs had rotted right off. They found him in a hospital bed, his head next to a radio. He just smiled when they arrived.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Kent said. “I know where the McCarthy’s are, and where they are going.”
Matt lifted the boy out of his machines and brought him with them. Jolie suggested they look over Dr. McCarthy’s notes, but they couldn’t find anything, at least not anything good. Robbie was confident that there was no way for him to go out and fix all of the mess he made. Instead, that, along with the note left for Matt, the gang decided that they’d been abandoned after all. Danni muttered a few angry words, but nothing coherent. Kent laughed. Matt looked their little group over.
He told them how Becca had killed his father, and how his NaU had seeped into her, much the same as Peter’s NaU had seeped into Peter.
But there was something else.
“We all believed that she wasn’t affected,” Matt said, “but Becca was. Her NaU is just special. Her NaU allows her to take on other NaUs and use them in a way that doesn’t destroy her body. The same feeling I had when someone uses their NaU, I felt in her.”
“If you knew all of us were dying,” Kent said. “I would have preferred if you had told us all before I lost my arms and legs.”
“I didn’t know what it was at the time,” Matt said. “I thought it was just the way NaUs interact with bodies. Regardless, she seemed to act just as normally as before, only her NaU felt dormant.”
“So what you’re saying is that if one of us takes Becca’s NaU that our decaying would end.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t especially have to be one of us,” Jolie said, “for all we know there might be a way to split up her NaU amongst all of us. The times with Peter and Nigel only involved close interactions. If we were all around Becca . . ..”
“When she died,” Kent said, avoiding Matt’s eyes.
“Then all of us could live.”
Danni mumbled something.
Police sirens blazed in the distance.
“We have to go,” Kent said. “I know how we can find them. I can hear them now. They’ve got about a three-hour head start on us, but if we hurry, we can catch up with them.”
They walked out of the lab. Matt took Jolie aside. Kent and Danni talked in the parking lot.
“If it comes down to it,” Matt said, “then I want the NaU to go to you.”
“We don’t know if it’s a single-use sort of thing,” Jolie said.
“I have a strong suspicion that we do. If her NaU is like the others, then it will latch itself to only one person. In that case, I want that person to be you and the baby.”
Red and blue lights could be seen down the road. Matt kissed her and then took off into the sky, carrying Danni and Peter as he did so. It had started to snow hard, and it didn’t look like it would be stopping anytime soon.
Jolie looked around at Greendale. It was a nice town, all things considered, and she had planned on having her family situated there.
She still could, she tried to tell herself as she took off into the sky. There would be some way for all of this to come out all right. She didn’t see it at the moment, but Matt would see it. He’d fix everything.
****
Jolie fell back into the snow. She felt cold, very cold. Burned meat filled her nostrils. She tried to speak, but blood was coming out of her mouth.
Matt was over her. He was saying something, tears coming down his eyes. She tried to reach out to brush them away, to let him know that whatever it was, everything was going to turn out all right. He’d find a way to make it right. There was still time to get Becca’s NaU. Jolie thought she heard a truck start up, but her head couldn’t move. She felt sleepy, oh, so very sleepy. Maybe it would be all right if she just tried to take a nap for a bit.
Her eyelids closed, and she thought about the future ahead of her. All of this, this episode with the NaUs, it would just feel like a dark cloud in the middle of a pretty spotless life. She had no way of knowing if the rest of her life was going to be better, but she was pretty optimistic.
She started to open her eyes, to get one last look at . . ..
Chapter Seventeen
Nigel’s only redeeming quality was that deep down, I believe the man loved Matt. He just didn’t know how to show it. Who knows how Matt will be as a father. That is, if that ever happens.
I can imagine the only thing that could ever break the boy would be if something happened to Jolie and the child. With the power, the boy wielded, the entire earth might shake from his wrath.
-Robbie’s Journal
Neither one of them spoke as they drove through the night.
Both of them knew that Matt would be coming for them, stealing a glance or two behind them at any moment. The roads were largely bare due to the storm. The plow had cleared a pathway for Walter to drive through without any fear of collisions. The snow was still falling hard, but the roads were bare enough to drive.
Walter coughed.
His skin felt hot, and sweat was starting to collect on his brow and his back. Rivers of light moved underneath his skin.
Everything felt different. The car felt warmer than it should have, his eyes seemed better than they had in years, and he thought he could hear things almost as well as he did when he was a young man, before loud music and bad intentions removed the majority of his hearing when it came time to collect his AARP magazines.
Rebecca had largely been quiet when things hit the fan. After her incident with her brother, things seemed to speed up. Walter found himself moving toward his truck, starting it up and leaving that godforsaken rest stop. Matt ran over to Jolie, as anyone would if they were in his shoes.
He turned off the interstate and started heading toward Atkins. He threw his hand into the radio, smashing it to pieces. Matt would find him, though, even if he didn’t have an extra pair of ears to boot.
“Will he follow us?” Walter said.
The streetlights flickered around the car as Walter drove into Atkins. The town was empty, save for a dozen or so vehicles parked around the local bar. Walter hadn’t ever been in there, for obvious reasons, but he could tell what kind of place it was, especially on a night like this. Inside, you could find a couple dozen people, all too afraid to go out and drive, both because of the weather and because of their blood to alcohol ratio. Probably had a game from some sports team on loud, maybe a few people playing pool, and lots of alcohol to keep them warm.
“I don’t know,” Rebecca said. The bar came and went, and Walter was driving down the street. “We might not have wanted to leave.”
“Matt just lost his girlfriend and child,” Walter said. “Best to leave the boy alone.”
“I don’t think he’ll be alone for much longer,” Rebecca said.
Walter looked in the rearview mirror. He couldn’t see anything, but the hairs on the back of his neck were sticking up, and he was sweating.
“Why did he do it?” Walter said.
“Do what?”
“Save me.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily call it that,”
Rebecca said.
“Then what would you call it?”
“Maybe he thought he could get you to turn on me if you had powers,” Rebecca said. “Try and corner me. Besides, if I had gotten Danni’s NaU, I would have just been harder to kill. Matt’s got three NaUs in him now, and if my father’s theory about them expounding one another is correct, then he doesn’t have much time left. He needs all the help he can get.”
“Maybe he just didn’t want me to die.”
Rebecca didn’t say anything to that.
Walter drove down the street and pulled up to his house. Usually, whenever he returned home from work, it was late afternoon, and his house would still be covered in the light of the soon to be setting sun.
It felt wrong to approach the house when it was dark out. It reminded him too much of those times when he had stumbled home, or often drove home, and ended up at his front door, hands feeling too large as he played around with his keys, trying to find the right one. Sometimes he would cause a racket, and Beth would have to come and open the door for him. She might’ve said something to him in those times, but whatever she would say, he never remembered. Instead, he would just wake up the following morning in bed, with a killer headache and a bundle of apologies, assuming he remembered what he had done.
Even though that time had been tough, Walter still would have given anything to have someone there for him when he returned home, regardless of the time.
He pulled up into the driveway and got out.
He expected cold, but he didn’t seem to feel any of the cold air around him. His body instead seemed to radiate heat, causing a small mirage-like effect in the air around him. He and Rebecca walked up to the front door and opened it.
“Why aren’t we running?” Rebecca said.
“Because we don’t want him to chase us.”
“He’s still going to chase us, regardless, if we’re moving or not. If anything, we’re just making his job easier.”
“He doesn’t have much of a reason to come now.”
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