by Andrew Peed
"Aurora, wait a minute I just heard on the radio that one of their experimental power generators had exploded, you mean that was me?" I had never thought about putting the accident together with my losing control.
"Yeah." Rachel nodded.
"They said that four people were killed and over a hundred were injured." I turned around and sat back into my seat. I thought about Zach, who wasn’t here with us; I couldn't help but think that he was one of the people that I had killed.
"He wasn't killed." Rachel said quietly.
"Ok, ground rule, stay out of my head." I looked out of the window.
"Message received." she sat back looking hurt.
"She did get us out of there." Ronnie whispered from the corner of his mouth.
"I'm glad, but she convinced me to kill people, and I am not happy about that." I hissed.
“Grace, she didn’t know you were going to kill anyone.” Ronnie tried to calm me down.
“You know what…” I almost yelled, but I could see tears welling in her eyes in the mirror, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Alright, alright. I’m hungry, let’s get something to eat.” Kenny’s stomach growl was audible from the front seat.
~//~
We pulled into the imitation burger joint and decided that it would be easier to all go inside instead of the drive thru.
Altogether we had nine trays of food and we picked a couple of tables in the back. Ronnie, Kenny and Rachel sat with me at one table. Sandy was ok to sit with Mike and Mary.
"So I think that we should put all of our abilities, or whatever you want to call what they did to us, on the table.” Ronnie took the words out of my mouth, “I think we all have an idea as to what Grace can do."
"I have telekinetics and telepathy." Rachel’s voice issued from inside all of our heads.
"They decided to call my thing Chronokinetics, which is the ability to manipulate time with my mind. Dr. Cid told one of the guys watching that they had never seen the ability before." Kenny held up his hands where a golden ball of energy appeared, “That’s all that I can do to demonstrate. They put a clock in and watched it tick backwards.”
"They called mine Electrokinetics. I'm surprised that I'm not constantly magnetized." Ronnie held out his hand and showed me the veins on the back of his hand that pulsated with electricity with his heart beat.
Sandy came over to the table and knelt down beside me, "Metamorphosis." her hair grew three inches and turned from brown to black, to an unreal green.
"Now that's amazing." I took a bite of my second burger.
"Those two both have the ability to control water in different states. Mike is better with the liquid form and Mary is better with ice. They also have a constant telepathic link to each other, like a supercharged version of link that normal twins have." Rachel explained.
Once we had all finished eating, we took turns in the bathroom, before getting back onto the highway. The sun had gone down and there were far fewer cars on the road.
"I have another question. How long were we in there?" I looked back to Rachel.
She shrugged, "I was in there several years."
I turned on the GPS that was built into the dashboard of the truck. I flipped through the settings looking for the date and time, but the thing wouldn't tell me anything until I put in a destination. So I entered the address of the orphanage.
"You will arrive at your destination at four a.m.” the GPS announced with a British accent. Up in the corner of the GPS the date was 7/6/2063.
I looked up at Ronnie, "We were there a month."
"More than a month actually."
I sat back in the seat and rubbed my palms into my eyes, feeling a head ache was coming on quickly. Our incarceration had lasted longer than I could have dreamed.
All I wanted was to be home in my basement bed.
Chapter 7: Home
We arrived in the small town of Greencrest as the sun was starting to come up over the nearby trees. The town was empty, the streets void of life, but that was completely normal for our home town. There were maybe a total of twenty thousand people in the whole town, and most of those people had to drive to neighboring cities for work.
We pulled up to the lot where the orphanage used to be located and Ronnie cut the trucks engine.
We all climbed out and stretched.
Ronnie and I stared at the lot in an awestruck state. Not only was the house gone, but it looked as if it had never been there to begin with. There was not a spot of evidence, nothing at all, just an empty plot of grass. The gravel driveway and the shed were both gone as well.
"How can this even be possible?" I asked Ronnie who was knelt down beside where the front door would have been.
He reached out and felt the grass.
"I don't know but I don't think we need to hang around here too long." He stood and rubbed his hands together.
We all agreed.
"Let's go down to the diner and see about some breakfast. I am already hungry again." I rubbed my stomach absent mindedly.
"Me too." Kenny chimed in.
"I overheard, one of the scientists talking about that once. He said that our metabolisms are amped up to like ten times their normal rate to compensate for the extra energy needed to use the abilities." Rachel recalled.
"Over heard, or were you in his head?" I hated the idea that she could freely walk around people’s minds.
“Grace, please, I am really sorry about invading your mind.” She pleaded.
I considered for a moment and decided to let it go, “Forget it. So, how long were you locked up?”
"Now that I know the date I have a better idea. Something like ten years." she looked away and pushing away a tear that cropped up around her eye.
"You would have had to been what six or seven when they took you? What about your parents?" We all walked down the side walk. Greencrest was a small town, anyone could walk to anywhere in the town, if need be. The diner was only a couple of blocks away from the orphanage. Sandy was going to apply for a job there over the summer.
"Seven." she said quietly, “My parents were killed in the same accident that landed me in the ICU.
"Where did you come from?" Kenny asked.
"I couldn't tell you, I'm not sure. I was in and out of it so much while I was there that my memories before that place are all munched up. I can only remember flashes. The twins were only five when we were abducted from the hospital. They know nothing before their abduction.”
We went into the diner and sat in the corner booth at the back; it was bigger so we could all seven sit around one table. Ronnie counted the cash that we had left and decided that we still had enough for us all to go ahead and get whatever we wanted.
"We were locked away in that place for more than a month, and I can only remember eating a dozen or so of those nasty protein bars." I wanted real food more than anything.
"The caretakers had two ways of dealing with our nutrition. First, there was the protein bars but when I refused to eat, they would fight me to the ground and inject me with something. I don’t know what was in the needle but I was never hungry after a round with that stuff.” Rachel remembered.
"They hurt." Mike sat across from me at the far end of the table.
Mary nodded.
"I must have been unconscious for a lot more time than I had realized." I was having the hardest time adjusting to the time gap.
The waitress came over to our table and started to take everyone's orders. I ordered a stack of waffles, three eggs, sausage, bacon, toast, and orange juice. Everyone else ordered about the same amount of food.
"It's going to take a while; the griddle is just now heating up." The waitress smiled a fake smile and took all of our menus.
We all smiled back as she walked away.
"So what are we going to do next?" Ronnie asked as soon as the waitress was out of earshot.
"I'm not sure, I think that you and me should go up to the school and see if
we are missing, but beyond that I've got nothing." I played with my napkin, it was a habit that I had had since I was a small child.
"Why just the two of you?" Kenny was upset at being left out.
"Rachel isn't from around here like we are and things would go smoother at the school if there were fewer of us poking around. You guys can all go to the store and get some food that we can keep in the truck, maybe some other things that you come across. Some better pants, perhaps." I pulled on the enormous waist of the men’s pants I was wearing.
The food arrived in a grand fashion; the waitress had to get the cook’s assistance to carry it all out from the back, and she demanded that we pay for the meal before we ate a single bite.
Ronnie shelled out the hundred bucks and even though she was rude he gave her a twenty dollar tip. She took the money happily and went along her way.
We ate in almost complete silence as everyone devoured every bite of food on the table. Normally after eating a meal half that size I would feel sick to my stomach for a few hours, but it all felt just right.
We left the diner and headed in different directions.
A small shop that we passed had pay as you go cell phones in the window. Ronnie bought two of them and paid in cash. He opened the packaging and turned on the phone, it had half a battery.
"To keep up with the time and next time we have to separate, each group can take one." He set the phone's clock with the shop's clock.
The school was a whole six block walk from the diner. We arrived just a few moments after roll would have been submitted for the first class. We walked up the grass to the front entrance of the school.
Every morning, the first class of the day took roll call and sent it down to the front office. This file would be on the receptionist's computer and she would have to input the information into each student's personal file. I spent a semester working in the office, for credit. The principal thought that it would be good for me to be away from other students and working with adults. He thought that I was mature for my age and that is why I didn't have many friends outside of the other orphans.
"Check the file." Ronnie whispered as he walked up to the receptionist and started to talk to her about something I couldn't quite hear, and then she escorted him to the back to where the principal's office was, I took my chance.
I opened the file on the computer and searched for room two ninety nine. When I found it, I searched for my name. I slid my finger down the screen and there I was. I moved my finger over to status.
Present
I had been present every day that week, according to the file, Monday through Friday. I closed the file, logged off of the computer, and left the office.
I snuck down the hallway trying my best to avoid the cameras. I went up the stairwell and into the second floor hallway. I slowly raised my eyes to the bottom level of the window on the classroom's door.
Some girl was sitting in my spot. I had never seen her before in my life. She was similar to me but there were some differences. Her hair was shorter, for one. She could have been a cousin of mine.
I went back downstairs where Ronnie waited outside pacing around the entrance.
"The principal wasn't in." He said as I walked up.
"Yeah, well I was." I said in a huff.
"What do you mean?"
"I was counted present in the system, so I went up stairs, and sure enough there was some girl sitting in my seat." I ran my fingers through my hair.
"Did she look like you?" He placed a sturdy hand on my shoulder.
"Not really, I don’t know, Kind of." I was really starting to freak out.
We waited around for gym classes to start. Ronnie's second class was in gym, with me and Josh. Josh always gave me a hard time in that class.
We snuck in and hid under the bleachers. The class filled in from the showers; the students wore uniforms. A guy that looked similar to Ronnie came from the locker room followed by Josh.
"Hey Ronnie!" Josh acted as if he were friends with Ronnie. They gave each other a friendly man hug.
The other me came out of the girl’s locker room and met Josh halfway across the gym. Josh wrapped his arm around her waist.
“Show some self-respect and get away from that pig.” I growled through my teeth.
She didn't, she pulled herself closer and she kissed him, and not a friendly kiss either a loving embrace.
The coach had to break them apart.
I wanted to puke.
I held my stomach and turned to Ronnie, "Let's get out of this twilight zone hell before I vomit." I hissed.
He nodded and we slipped out through the back door. I couldn't believe what I had just seen. It was horrible. It was awful. Above all it was WRONG.
We hightailed it back to where the orphanage was but we stopped before we got there. We ducked into a bookstore and acted like we were browsing. There were two cops checking out the truck that we had left parked on the curb next to the empty plot of land. One of the cops was a state trooper.
"What the hell are we going to do now?"
"I don't know." Ronnie opened a book on how to hypnotize women. I gave him a nasty look. "I just picked up a random book."
I looked back out of the window, as a tow truck backed up to the stolen truck. The guy that was hooking our truck up, furious, he knew that the owner wasn't going to show up to pay the tow bill. Town policy was if you get towed you pay.
"Are you two going to buy anything or are you just going to stare out of my window?" a woman asked as she sorted through books on her counter.
Ronnie purchased a guide book on the area and as soon as the cops were gone, we bolted from the store to find the others.
~//~
We met the others at the diner. Kenny’s hands were full of groceries. They were heading back from the market.
We walked back to the empty plot. We took cover in the woods behind where the house used to sit.
"Where is the truck?" Rachel noticed it was gone first.
"It got towed.”
We sat in quiet and then it hit me like a ton of bricks.
I jumped up and ran off into the woods.
I ran deeper into the woods. Ronnie followed yelling for me to come back but I couldn't. I knew this was the last thing left to prove that we had been here.
I looked for the clearing and there it was, small with a huge oak growing at the center. The leaves made a perfect roof to keep the weather at bay. When we had our first real summer here after all four of us had arrived we had spent hours in this clearing.
The old woman never came out here. I looked at the trunk closely and it looked just as it had when we had all carved our names into the bark all those years ago.
Our names; Ronnie, Kenny, Sandy, Grace around the word Friends
I ran my fingers across the grooves that we had made with Ronnie's pocket knife; a small relief flooded over my body. Some point in the reality that I could remember, still existed and it made a world of difference.
There was something I could now ground myself to.
"What the hell are you doing?" Ronnie was out of breath. He leaned on his knees.
"Finding proof I was not losing my mind. I had to know that it had been real." I said turning away from the tree.
"Give me one of the phones." I asked holding out my hand.
Ronnie took the phone from his pocket and handed it over. I opened the camera application and snapped a picture of the carving. With a smile, I turned to leave the clearing wiping a tear of joy from my eye.
When we returned to the others, I showed them the picture Sandy and Kenny both smiled, as happy as I had been to see the old tree.
"We need to come up with a plan." I opened my mouth to continue but the old oak in the woods was blown to pieces. The aircraft responsible slowly hovered around where we stood. Spot lights switched on and shown into our faces.
"I wonder who this could be." Ronnie said sarcastically as we all grouped closer together.
C
hapter 8: Vanish
The aircraft, the likes of which I’d never seen before, touched down in front of where we stood. Just behind the cockpit window was an unmistakable Aurora Corporation logo pressed into the metal hull. The side door slid open with a pneumatic hiss. A dozen armed guards marched from the passenger compartment and surrounded our group.
Two other men walked out onto the grass, one wearing camouflage pants, and a bullet proof vest. The other, a perfectly pressed suit, his hair was slicked black, the grease shown in the moonlight. It was the man that had spoken up the second time Dr. Cid forced me to use my abilities.
"Who are you?" I asked as pushed my way to the front of the group.
The man in the suit stepped forward. He adjusted his tie, "Oh, how sorry I am that we have to meet this way, Grace" He looked at his hand as if thinking about an offer to shake, but changed his mind. "My name is James Scott. I am the CEO of the Aurora Corporation."
"Good for you." Ronnie yelled.
"Now, now there is no need to act that way, I come offering you open arms to come back, and we will forgive and forget this little indiscretion." James took another step forward.
"Forget about it.” I yelled.
"We gave you so much." James said as if we owed him.
"We are not going with you." I looked to everyone for support.
They all nodded.
"Have it your way," he turned to the man beside him, "Kill them, and recover the bodies, we don't need any of them alive."
"Sir." the man nodded then turned the face of his watch like a dial. James vanished in blurry blue lines.
"So you're going to kill us?" Rachel moved up to get a better view.
"You heard him, we don’t need you alive." he held up his fist. All of the soldiers around us held up their rifles aiming at us.
He dropped his hand, pointing at us.
In unison, all of the men began firing their fully automatic rifles. The bullets flew in all directions but no one was hit. I turned around to see Rachel with her arms out beside her, palms out, her eyes rolled into the back of her head. The bullets were ricocheting off of some kind of force field.