Godsent

by Richard Burton

  The gesture was so unexpected that Ethan was taken completely by surprise, and before he could react, the bike toppled over, taking him with it. He landed with a bone-jarring thud on the asphalt path, and then the bike, as it had the day before, crashed on top of him.

  “Oh, crap,” Peter cried out, lifting the bike off him. “Are you okay?”

  Ethan blinked up at him mistrustfully. He more than half expected Peter to kick him as he had the day before. But instead, the boy reached out a big hand to help Ethan to his feet. Ethan took the offered hand gingerly, wincing as Peter pulled him up.

  “Jeez, I didn’t mean for that to happen,” Peter said.

  There was real anguish in his eyes and in his voice. Ethan realized that Peter was telling the truth. And he also realized, much as he’d been trying to deny it, that this was not the same Peter who had faced him yesterday. That Peter was gone. In his place was a different boy. A new boy. And somehow, Ethan was responsible for the change. The thought of that left him feeling queasy inside, as if he’d done something truly bad, crossed some line that he had no right to cross and in doing so invaded the sanctity of another person. In school the teachers were always warning them about grownups or older kids who might try to touch them in inappropriate ways, on parts of their bodies that no one had the right to touch because they were private, personal. He felt like he’d done something like that to Peter, only even worse.

  “I’m okay,” Ethan told him now. “It was an accident. No harm done.”

  “Not this time, maybe,” Peter said. “But other times I did lots of harm. And not by accident either.”

  Ethan didn’t know how to reply.

  But Peter didn’t give him a chance in any case. Words came pouring out of his mouth as though a dam had burst. “It’s like . . . all my life I lived in shadows and thought I was in the light. But now I know that I never saw real light until yesterday. I was missing something, you know? Something— I don’t know what to call it—that was keeping me from seeing other people as, well, people. Nobody was real to me. And the only way I could prove I was real was to make other people afraid of me. Hurt them and make them suffer. I never saw that I was afraid too. I was hurt and suffering without even knowing it. But you changed that, Ethan. You changed me.”

  “I—”

  “Don’t bother denying it. We both know it’s true.”

  Ethan sighed. “Okay, maybe I did something, but I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry for it. I really feel awful. I’d fix things if I knew how.”

  “Fix things?”

  “You know. Change you back the way you were.”

  “Are you nuts? I don’t want that! Jeez, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me!” Peter paused, a fearful look creeping into his eyes. “You’re not going to do it, are you?”

  “What?”

  “You know. Change me back. Please, don’t—I’ll do anything you want!”

  “I don’t want you to do anything,” Ethan said hastily. “Besides, I don’t know how it works. I couldn’t change you back even if you begged me to. Look, you won’t tell anybody, will you?”

  “Not if you don’t want me to. But I don’t see why you should feel so awful about what you did, Ethan. I’m not a bully anymore. I’m not afraid.”

  “Yeah, but what gave me the right to do it?”

  “Hello? What gave you the right was that I was going to beat the crap out of you and then start in on the girl! You were defending yourself.”

  “Maybe. But it still doesn’t feel right . . .”

  “Jeez, listen to yourself! Who do you think you are, Peter Parker? You know, ‘With great power comes great responsibility?’”

  “Well, it does, doesn’t it?”

  “How the heck should I know? Hey, do you think you’re, you know, like Spidey? A mutant or something?”

  “That would be cool. But I haven’t been bitten by any radioactive spiders lately.”

  “Maybe you’re an alien.”

  “Not the last time I looked.”

  “But you’re different from other people,” Peter insisted. “I can see it. Feel it. Whatever you did to me, that’s part of it. I look at you, and I see . . .” He trailed off.

  “See what?” asked Ethan.

  Peter suddenly looked embarrassed. “You’ll think this is weird.”

  “Man, it’s all weird,” he said. “Go on, tell me.”

  “Well, there’s a kind of glow around you. A golden light.”

  “You see that now?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “How come I can’t see it? How come nobody else can?”

  “I don’t know. It was super bright yesterday. Almost blinding. Man, I couldn’t even look at you! It’s not so bright today. But it’s still there.”

  Ethan held a hand up before his face. It looked completely ordinary. There was no glow emanating from his skin. Just a raw patch on his palm where he’d scraped it in his fall. He shook his head. He didn’t understand any of this. What was happening to him? “Look, I’d better be getting home.”

  Peter nodded, then reached down and picked up Ethan’s bike. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks.” He climbed on. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”

  “Don’t worry,” Peter said. “I won’t tell anybody. I promise.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And I’m sorry for hitting you yesterday,” Peter added. “It won’t happen again.”

  “I’m just a regular kid, Peter,” Ethan told him. “You don’t have to be afraid of me or anything.”

  “I’m not,” Peter said. “I came out here today just to say thanks. The way I look at it, you did me a favor. I owe you one.”

  “How’d you know to find me here?”

  “I went to your house first. Your mom told me you’d gone to the pool.”

  Ethan nodded, then pushed off and began to pedal home. When Peter had stepped out of the woods, he’d expected another beating. Instead, it seemed as if he might have made a new friend. Literally made a new friend, in that he was responsible for this new Peter: He had made him. But despite everything Peter had said, Ethan still wasn’t comfortable with what he’d done. All he knew for sure was that the last couple of days had been the strangest of his life.

  And he had a feeling that things were going to get even stranger.

  He pedaled faster, suddenly hungry. It was Friday, which meant games and pizza at the Brown house. Every Friday, his dad would call on his way home from work, his mom would order from Domino’s, and then the three of them would play an old-fashioned board game like Monopoly or Risk or Parcheesi while they ate. Later, they would watch a movie. It was all kind of corny, but Ethan liked it, and today especially he needed the ordinariness of it, the comfort of falling into a familiar routine.

  “I’m home, Mom,” he called out as he banged open the front door of the house and barged inside. “Sorry I’m late!”

  His mother called from the kitchen, “Your father called to say he’s having car trouble and not to wait up. I already ordered the pizza. It should be here any minute, so you better hurry!”

  “I’m just going to change out of my swimsuit,” he called back, already taking the stairs two at a time. His mom yelled something in reply, but he couldn’t hear her over the closing of his bedroom door behind him. He stepped out of his damp bathing suit, kicking it into one corner of the room, where discarded clothes were haphazardly strewn, and pulled on a fresh pair of shorts and a clean T-shirt. One of the windows in his room overlooked the street below, and he saw the pizza-delivery car approaching.

  He rushed back out of his room, down the stairs, and into the kitchen. “Mom, the pizza’s here,” he said. “I saw the car drive up. Can I get it?”

  Lisa, who was sitting at the kitchen table drinking an ice tea, smiled at her son. “Sure, honey. Just hand me my purse, will you?”

  Ethan did so.

  Lisa fished out her wallet and handed a ten and a five to Ethan. “Tell him he can keep th
e change.” She glanced sharply at her son’s hand as he took the bills. “What’s that from?”

  Ethan shrugged. “It’s nothing. I fell off my bike and scraped it a little, that’s all.”

  “You’d better let me put some antiseptic on it.”

  “It’s just a scratch, Mom.”

  Before she could reply, the doorbell rang, and Ethan took off like a shot for the front door. When he opened it, the pizza-delivery person, a tall, clean-shaven man who seemed a bit old for this line of work, his uniform ill-fitting and stained, was standing there with a box of pizza in his arms.

  “Got your order here,” he said. “Let’s see: a large pizza, hand-tossed crust, with extra cheese, green peppers, pepperonis, and mushrooms. That about right?”

  Ethan nodded; that was what they always ordered. He handed the man the money. “Keep the change,” he said.

  “Thanks, sport,” said the man and gave him a wink before turning and walking back toward his car.

  Ethan could feel the heat of the pizza through the heavy box. He hurried back to the kitchen and let the box slide onto the table. “Whew, that’s hot!”

  Lisa pushed back her chair and stood. “Why don’t you get out the plates, honey, and I’ll cut us each a slice.”

  “Okay.” He was facing the cabinet, reaching up for the plates, when he heard a hissing sound, followed immediately by a gasp. He whipped around, already sensing the wrongness of it, just in time to see his mom falling forward as if her bones had turned to rubber. Her head landed in the pizza, bounced up, looking bloody from the sauce, then fell back and slid slowly across the surface of the pizza, pulled by the rest of her body, which was sinking in stages to the linoleum floor.

  Ethan watched in a kind of horrified disbelief. He simply couldn’t process what he was seeing. It was happening so fast, without any discernible cause or reason, that he felt as if he’d stepped into the middle of a nightmare. Then, as Lisa’s head slid off the table completely, trailing strings of melted cheese topping, he gave an anguished cry and ran to her side.

  He never made it.

  He felt something sting his neck like a bee, and the next thing he knew, his legs weren’t working anymore. He was falling, and as he fell his vision turned all grainy, and then the grains began to fly apart until there was only blackness.

  Lying on his back on the cold cement floor of the garage, Gordon concentrated on not blacking out. The lights of the ceiling seemed as distant and small as stars. The sound of his own breathing, on the other hand, might have been a whirlwind. It screamed and howled in his ears. If he closed his eyes, the whirlwind would lift him up, right out of his body, and spin him away. It was tempting, because he thought it would spin him to a place of silence and peace, a place without pain, where he could rest at last. But he knew he couldn’t let that happen.

  He cursed himself silently for a fool, trying to understand when he should have realized what was happening. He saw clearly, now that it was too late, how the last years had lulled him into a false sense of security. He’d forgotten that he was hunted, and that the hunters could appear at any moment to strike without warning or mercy.

  Idiot, he berated himself. You got soft . . .

  He should have suspected as soon as his car’s engine seized up while he was driving home, forcing him to pull over to the side of the road. He should have called Lisa right then and there, instructed her to grab Ethan and run. They had contingency plans in place for just such a situation. It should have been instinctive. But instead, he’d simply called her and told her that he was having car trouble and would be a little late. “Go on and order the pizza without me,” he’d said, as if he were an ordinary husband making an ordinary call to his ordinary wife.

  Idiot.

  His next call should have been to the emergency number that would have alerted Conversatio that there was a possibility his cover had been blown and Ethan was in danger. Again, it was—or should have been—automatic. But had he made that call?

  No.

  Instead, he’d called AAA. The voice that answered had told him that a tow truck was already in the area and would reach him within ten minutes.

  That, too, should have raised red flags. It was too convenient by far. But instead, he’d sat complacently in his car and listened to a book on tape: for the past month, he’d been working his way through Hugo’s Les Miserables.

  When the tow truck had pulled over in front of him, and then backed up toward him, he’d turned off the engine and stepped out of the car. The driver, a dark-skinned man of vaguely Middle Eastern appearance and accent, had listened intently as he’d described the sudden grinding sound he’d heard and the violent shuddering of the car that had forced him to pull over. The man had asked him to pop the hood; that done, he’d peered at the engine, asked Gordon to start the car, listened for a moment, and then signaled for him to shut it off.

  “It’s the transmission,” he’d informed him with an expression that for some reason made him think of a doctor telling a patient that the tests indicated cancer. “I’ll have to tow you in. You can ride along if you like.”

  “Thanks. Any idea how long it’ll take to fix?”

  The man shrugged. “Hard to say. If I’ve got the parts, an hour or less. If not, you’ll have to leave it.”

  “Maybe I should just call a cab to meet me at your garage.”

  “Why not wait until I’ve had a closer look?”

  And not even that had triggered his suspicions.

  Idiot!

  Instead, he’d simply nodded, watched as the man hooked up his car, then climbed into the front of the tow truck. The man had climbed in beside him, started the truck, and merged smoothly back into traffic. He’d immediately launched into a rant about the Royals, who were having another bad season. Gordon feigned polite interest. Twenty minutes later, they were at the garage, his car in one of the repair bays.

  Aside from the two of them, the place was empty.

  Only then did Gordon’s hackles begin to rise.

  “Say, where is everybody?”

  The man was looking under the hood again. He glanced up. “Hmm? Oh, big Sikh holiday today. They all work a half day.”

  “And how come you’re not working a half day?”

  “I am not Sikh,” he said, and smiled. “Please. Come and look. I have found the problem. It is not so bad, after all.”

  Now, as he lay bleeding on the concrete floor, Gordon tried to reconstruct the sequence of events. What had warned him? Did it even matter at this point?

  Yes, it matters, a voice inside him said. You’re still alive, aren’t you?

  Barely, answered another voice.

  Great. Now he was having conversations with himself.

  But something had warned him. Even as he approached the open hood, he’d sensed that something was off. “Not the transmission?” he’d asked the man. “Then what?”

  The man had stepped back from the hood and gestured for Gordon to take a look.

  Gordon peered at the engine. He couldn’t see anything out of place. Then he’d heard a faint sound from behind him, a whisper of air, and his instincts had kicked in at last. But not quickly enough. Even as he’d turned, he’d felt something sharp go into his left side once, twice, before he could get his arm up to turn aside the knife and deliver a clumsy kick that at least had the virtue of forcing his attacker back and buying him a few precious seconds to assess his situation.

  It wasn’t good.

  He’d been stabbed twice; the pain wasn’t too bad, but there was a lot of blood. Of course, it could have been worse. If he hadn’t turned when he did, the blade would have gone up under his ribs and pierced his heart. He would be dead now.

  The mechanic shifted the knife from hand to hand, grinning at him. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to.

  He knew as well as Gordon did that time was on his side.

  That left Gordon one option. He had to attack before the stab wounds and the loss of blood grew any more de
bilitating than they were already. But attack with what? He wasn’t carrying a gun or a knife. The only object he had was his cell phone.

  Without another thought, he whipped out the phone and threw it as though it were a shuriken. His opponent flinched for a second, then batted the phone away. But that second was all the time Gordon needed to close with the man.

  If he could get rid of the knife, he might stand a chance. And so he went for that hand, grabbed the wrist, twisted sharply, and was rewarded by the crack of breaking bone and the sight of the knife dropping from nerveless fingers.

  But at the same time, he felt a sharp pain in his right side; the man had another knife. Just his luck: The bastard was ambidextrous. Ignoring the pain, Gordon drove his head forward sharply, into the bridge of the man’s nose. Another crack, and an explosion of blood.

  Meanwhile, the knife struck again, though this was more of a glancing blow, a searing slice across his waist.

  Still Gordon did not step back. He had to end this fast. He could already feel his strength ebbing.

  He grabbed the man’s shirt in both hands and twisted from the waist. The movement sent waves of agony through his body, as though his flesh were splitting open where he’d been cut. But it was effective. His opponent was sent flying, crashing head first into the open hood of Gordon’s car. He sprawled there, half in and half out, as though he’d decided to take a nap on the engine block. He stirred weakly, but Gordon was already there. He slammed down the hood as hard as he could on the man’s back. And again. And yet again.

  After that, the man lay still.

  The knife had fallen beside the front tire. Gordon stooped to retrieve it . . . and the next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor, looking up at the ceiling lights, feeling the blood seep out of him. His legs felt like they weighed a thousand pounds apiece.

  Had he passed out? He couldn’t tell. But he could feel unconsciousness hovering around him like a hungry shadow. It would devour him if it could.

  No!

  Minutes passed. Or hours. Finally, groaning with the effort, he turned and hauled himself to his feet using the limp legs of his attacker, drawing himself up bit by bit along that flesh-and-blood ladder until he was standing, leaning against the car and breathing as though he’d just run a marathon. Each breath was like a bellows, pumping blood from his body.