“A side effect of what?” Casper asked, his arms still locked like iron bars around me, trapping us both where we sat.
“Me, of course,” the amputee winked. “I know it’s rude, taking away your motor functions and all, but my boss would be sorta upset if I let some Neanderthal stop me from retrieving what’s his.”
It was the second time in as many minutes that some weirdo called Casper a Neanderthal and, I’m sure that if we weren’t in the weirdest form of danger either of us could imagine, he’d probably be pissed about it.
The amputee’s smirk turned into a full on grin as he floated closer. “Don’t be so sensitive about it. This is far from the first time I’ve done this to you, Casper. Not that you’d remember that.”
I’m sure that if he could have, Casper would have shuddered at the sound of this guy saying his name. I know I did. It sounded intimate, personal. He had known Casper for quite some time. God knows what he had done to him, and like last night, Casper couldn’t remember any of it. I shuddered again, wondering what might have happened to me that I couldn’t remember.
He swooped closer to us, so close that his stench; copper and gasoline, took my breath away. His hands were stretched at his side; his fingers apart. His nails were bone white, like all the blood had drained from his hands, and his ring fingers on either hand twitched back and forth frantically, like flapping wings that were holding him up.
“Oh come on, don’t take the fun out of this for me. Aren’t you gonna ask me what it is that my boss is so keen on getting his hands on?”
I didn’t answer. I just pressed myself closer against Casper’s motionless body. If we were going to die, at least we’d do it together.
“Fine, I’ll tell you anyway,” his eyes gleamed and I could tell he was getting some sick pleasure from this. “My boss, he’s looking for his wife. And he’s the kinda guy who always gets what he wants. I guess you could say he’s made a career out of it.”
“We don’t have his wife!” I screamed, stuffed against Casper’s chest. “It’s just me and my mom here; nobody else. I promise!”
He hovered still over us, the stench of him thick in the air. His tongue ran disgustingly over his teeth as he responded. “Girlie, you’re not thinking near creatively enough.”
“Ezra!”
I would know that voice anywhere. I heard it in my dreams. Well, the good ones anyway. Owen stood behind the amputee, his hands balled into fists at his sides. “Leave them alone!”
The amputee, Ezra, I surmised, whipped toward him, his ring fingers wiggling wildly to accommodate the move. “Or what?” He growled.
“Or I’ll finish what the Taggers started when they took your legs.” Owen’s eyes, always deep blue pools, were now spiked with lightning; the sort of intensity I had never seen in them before.
“You don’t know what you’re up against,” Ezra said, and starting floating toward him.
“Sure I do,” Owen marched, closing the gap. ”A hapless loser who wouldn’t have a prayer of beating me even if he didn’t have to expend half his energy just to stay upright.”
“Your funeral,” Ezra grinned.
Owen stared passed him and caught my eyes for just a second. Even if things weren’t crazy, even if I wasn’t surrounded by things I didn’t understand, I wouldn’t have been able to read them. I never could. Owen wasn’t dressed like the rest of them. They wore making suits. Owen was in a blue hoodie and jeans, but that didn’t matter. He was still part of this. I heard him say it myself. But if he was a part of all this, if he and Ezra were on the same team, as they seemed to be in Mrs. Goolsby’s basement, then why was they fighting now?
Owen jumped toward Ezra, catching his jaw with a right hook so awesome it made me grin and grimace all at the same time. Ezra stumbled back in midair, but he didn’t fall. Instead, he lifted his right hand, ring finger still moving, and waved it like he was Ms. America. Owen went flying into the air, pulled by some unseen hand. He flipped over us and landed hard on the hood of Mom’s car. He got up quickly, but I couldn’t help but notice the trail of blood coming from his forehead.
“Had enough?” Ezra asked with a laugh in his voice. “You can’t win. We both know how out of practice you are.”
“We’ll see,” Owen huffed. He ran toward Ezra again, blood trickling from his head and landing in big drops on the pavement. Ezra waved his hand again and Owen was once again slapped by the invisible hand. This time, his feet went out from under him and he fell face first onto the drive way. I heard a crack as his nose hit the ground, which was a shame ‘cause, even though he was a supreme liar, it was a cute nose.
“This is pathetic,” Ezra floated. “You’re defenseless. I feel like I’m beating on Shirley Temple.”
Owen was slower to get up this time. I was right about his nose. It was bent and covered in blood and loose pebbles from the driveway. Still, he seemed intent on continuing the fight.
“Owen, you’re gonna make me kill Shirley Temple, aren’t you?”
Owen ran full speed toward him.
“Fine,” Ezra sighed, and waved his hand for a third time.
Owen didn’t fall though. Owen wasn’t affected at all. Ezra waved his hand again, and then again, but Owen just kept coming. Ezra’s invisible hand must have been defective, cause Owen plowed into him like Casper in the lunch line on Taco Tuesday. Ezra crumpled and fell to the ground.
The instant Ezra went out, I felt Casper’s arms move again. I pulled myself free and he stood cautiously beside me.
“Watch out,” Owen said. He was standing over Ezra, who looked to be unconscious. “He’s a pretty powerful Mover. He doesn’t necessarily need to be awake to-“
Owen went flying. The invisible hand was back, and it threw him hard against our Palmetto. I ran, but not toward him. Owen might have just saved my life, but he had still lied to me, and I still didn’t know what part he played in all this. Besides, my mom was still trapped in the house, and I wasn’t about to leave her.
Casper was probably behind me, trying to stop me from getting myself killed. He was always good like that. I never found out though, because as I neared the house, I found out why Ezra smelled so much like gasoline.
The house that I had spent the last two years, the one that I cried, laughed, loved, and lost in exploded in a flash of orange horror.
And so did everyone in it.
Chapter 7
Weathersby
THE NEXT THING I knew, I was sitting straight up. My whole body ached and my eyes burned, even though, surprisingly, the rest of me didn’t. After seeing my house go up in flames; watching the red orange fireball shoot toward me, I half expected that it would swallow me up too.
The first thing I recognized was a sense of motion. I was moving forward, even though my body was completely still. Next, I noticed some sort of tether, something strapped against my body that kept me held against the seat. My mind raced. What sort of unexpected new crazy was this?
I opened my eyes to find that I was– in a car.
Well, that was anticlimactic.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw the sun sinking at the end of a seemingly endless road. On either side of that road were rows of tall trees. Traffic shot by from the passing lane pretty regularly. I leaned up. My entire body screamed, letting me know I hadn’t escaped the explosion completely scot-free. I realized the tether keeping me in place was, fittingly enough, a seat belt.
“Thank God! I thought you were in a coma.”
I jerked to the left; a gesture my neck didn’t thank me for, and found Casper behind the wheel of my mother’s car. His eyes were red and puffy; his face covered in a layer of black soot. His fingers tapped nervously along the steering wheel.
“Are you okay?” My throat felt gravely, like I had swallowed a mouthful of pebbles. “Did the fire-“
“No,” he shook his head. “I’m okay. I mean, it was a lot and everything, but I’m alright.”
I looked down at myself. My Avengers shirt was stained w
ith blood. So were my hands. So were my arms.
“Cass, what happened to me?”
He pulled the wheel a little as he looked at me, causing the car to across two lanes. “Nothing. I mean, not nothing, but not that. What I mean is, that’s not your blood. It’s Owen’s. You were in front of me. After the house blew up, I tried to find you, but there was fire everywhere. Owen ran into the flames and, when he came back out, he had you in his arms. He must have got to you pretty quick too, because from what I can tell, you’re not burned at all.”
“And he was-he was bleeding?” I knew I shouldn’t care. Owen had lied to me for two years. Everything he had ever said to me had been orchestrated. He was a part of this horror. But he had also fought for me, and apparently he had risked his life to save mine. Plus, he was Owen, and it turned out that even after everything, the thought of him getting hurt still made me sick to my stomach.
“I think he’s okay. I mean, he looked okay. Pretty bloody, but okay. He sorta disappeared after he helped you though. He said to get you out of there and he ran off.”
“Casper,” I sat up, sore muscles be damned. I scanned the backseat and found it empty. Everything about me tensed and my voice shook as I asked the next question. “Who else came out of the fire?”
“Cresta, don’t-“
“Who else Casper?” I demanded.
“Nobody Cress. I looked, but there was so much smoke; so much fire.”
“We have to go back,” I turned to him.
“What?” His eyes narrowed. “No. We’re not going back there.”
“We have to. She could still be alive,” I grabbed at his shoulder, though I wasn’t sure why.
“She’s not,” he said quietly.
Things were quiet for what felt like a really long time. Finally, the words came to me. “How do you-did you see a body?”
“No, but-“
“Then you don’t know!” I shouted. “She might have survived. She’s probably in the hospital right now waiting for us.”
“Cress,” he tightened his grip on the steering wheel. There was a tinge in his voice that set me on edge. It was the same one I got from the police officers I asked to dive in after my father the night he died. “You didn’t see it. You didn’t see what that house became. You didn’t hear the screams. I’m sorry, Cress, but nobody survived that.”
The next few minutes became a pool of a million different emotions I hoped I would never feel again after my father died. She was gone. I was an orphan; alone. My mother had died. It had been horrible and painful, and it probably lingered on until her entire body was charred and burned. She probably prayed for death in the end.
She was never coming back. I would never see her again. I would never hear her voice. She wouldn’t take pictures of me before my senior prom. She wouldn’t tear up as she sent me off to college. She wouldn’t meet the man I marry or help me name her grandchildren. That was gone; that life, her life, my life. It was gone, and none of it made any sense.
“I left her,” I muttered. After a while, it became all I could think about. I left my father. I left my mother. I let them both die.
“Don’t do that. Don’t blame yourself,” Casper said. He reached to put a hand on my knee, but I knocked it away. “I don’t blame myself. I blame you.”
He sighed, almost like he had been expecting it. “I get that you’re upset. I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now. Just know that-“
“I told you!” My muscles screamed as I lunged forward. “I told you I couldn’t leave her. I told you I’d rather die, and you did it to me anyway. You had no right! I should have been there with her!”
He jerked the wheel. Screeching across two lanes of traffic, he skidded to a stop alongside the road. “For what?!” He was screaming now too. “So you could die with her? That might be what you want, but have you ever thought about what anybody else wants? Have you ever thought about what your mom might have wanted? You think she fought off those lunatics so that you could get yourself killed anyway? She could have ran and she would have probably been fine, but she wanted to protect you; to make sure you were safe ‘cause that’s the kind of person she was.”
His use of ‘was’ hurt more than anything he would have ever meant to say. He didn’t say ‘the kind of person she is’. My mother ‘was’.
Casper wiped fresh tears from his face. “So, why don’t you have a little bit of gratitude?”
I dropped my head in my hands. “I want you to leave,” I said. “Just go home. I’ll be fine.”
“No,” he said flatly.
“Casper,”
“Cars drive on roads,” he answered.
“That doesn’t mean anything.” My head was still in my hands, but I shook it anyway.
“Cars drive on roads,” he repeated like a mantra.
“You’re not listening,” I looked up at him. He was faced forward, looking straight at the road ahead. “Mom said for you to go to, to forget about us. If you want me to follow her wishes, then you need to-“
“No, you’re not listening,” he whirled toward me. His eyes were closed tight, like a faucet trying to shut off tears. “There is no me in Crestview, not if you’re not there. I have a dad who hates me so much I can’t even sleep at my own house and a mom who’s so drunk and beat down that she’s not even lucid half of the time. There’s nothing for me in that town if you’re gone.So, for the last time, cars drive on roads.”
He was lost too. I couldn’t see it through my grief , but he had lost the only real home he had too. He was scared, and I was so angry that he didn’t even have me to lean on.
I took off his glasses
“Open your eyes,” I told him.
The welled up tears he had been holding back spilled like a waterfall down his freckled cheeks. They matched my own as I undid my seatbelt, reached across the car, and hugged him. All we had was each other now, and we had to pray that that would be enough.
It took a few minutes for us to compose ourselves and get back on the road, and a few minutes more for me to have the wherewithal to actually ask where we were going.
“Looks like Florida,” he said, pointing to the navigation system on the dash. “I typed in those keys your mom mentioned before…everything, and this is what popped up. It said we’re headed to a place called Weathersby, wherever that is.”
“273 miles,” I read our remaining distance from the screen.
“Yeah, you were asleep for a while,” Casper said. “Oh, and check this out. “ He pointed to the gas gauge. The needle was lower than I’d ever seen it, buried deep within the E. “It’s been like that for hours. I was afraid to stop at first. I thought somebody might have been following us, you know. But it never ran out. It just keeps going and going.”
I remembered the other thing Mom said before she sent us away.
It might say that you need gas, but that car has tricks.
“Tricks,” I murmured. I wanted more than anything to talk to my mother ,to ask her what was going on. How much did she know about everything? How long had she been hiding that briefcase, and why?
The next few hours were filled with questions like that; questions about Owen, questions about Ezra, questions about myself. Unfortunately, the answers were in shorter supply. As much as I wracked my brain, none of it made any sense. Owen lied to me. Mom lied to me, and now I was probably never going to see either of them again. I was never going to see Crestview again; never sit at Hernando’s worn feet or lay across Dr. Conyers’ couch. I would never again be forced to sit through an awkward abstinence only sex ed class or a Southern fried pep rally.
I didn’t miss it, did I? I couldn’t make sense of any of my emotions right now. And as much as I was going through, I’m sure Casper was going through just as much. He had lived his entire life in Crestview. Crappy or not it was the only home he’d ever known. And his family, I couldn’t even think about that. He may not have gotten along with them, but they were his. And, whether I meant to or not,
I took him away from them.
The one thing all these questions were good for was killing time. Before I knew it, the 200 miles on the navigation had dwindled down to 100. It was at fifty when we crossed the Florida state line. Soon Weathersby, whatever the hell that was, was ten miles away. I half wanted to call the police, to report everything that happened and let them take care of it. But Mom’s words kept echoing in my ears.
No police. They’ll slow you down; get you caught.
I still didn’t know what it was that was chasing me.
We came to a stop in front of a large gate with the navigation reading zero and the stalwart fuel light shining orange. Above the curved iron gate, where the two pieces met, the word ‘Weathersby’ was written on a similarly arching sign.
This was where we were supposed to go. But where exactly was ‘this’?
Behind the gate, illuminated by a series of tall streetlamps, a large building peeked out of the darkness. I couldn’t tell its exact shape, other than that it seemed to be a series of squares and, in the dark anyway, looked a lot like Desoto High.
Great. My house blew up. I lost my mom, Owen, and probably my sanity, and I’ve basically ended up back where I started.
I got out of the car to take a closer look. Casper followed. Even though we drove south for hours, the air was chillier down here than it had been in Crestview.
“What is this place, a school?” I asked, walking up to the silver gate.
Casper pointed to a small sign halfway down the driveway on the right.
Now entering Weathersby Juvenile Correction Facility.
Visitors must report to Check-In. All outside contraband must be cleared.
“It’s a jail,” I said under my breath.
“It’s juvie,” Casper amended. “You know, I bet this is the one Janie Evans’ brother went to after he set that school bus on fire.”
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