I was angry. More angry than I recall ever being. I knew I’d treated Barry like crap these last couple of days, but that was no reason for getting this upset. Was he jealous I was spending time with Alex? That seemed a stretch. It all had to do with the news. With the story that everything in Calm Waters was my dad’s fault.
But it wasn’t my dad’s fault, and I was sick of people thinking that way.
Barry was shaking his head in disgust. His new friends were laughing. Alex looked like she might literally kill each and every one of them.
My head began pounding. Their laughter was making it hurt worse. I stood up and put a hand to my head.
“Aww,” Barry said closing the distance between us. “Did I hurt you?” He made to shove me again.
And then…something…happened.
Time slowed to a crawl. I could see a purple glow around him and around everyone else—an aura that pulsed and writhed. Something about the glow called to me. My blood boiled and my head throbbed. I glanced down at my hands like I had in my dream, only now lines of purple writhed around my fists. Lines of power.
Power begging to be let loose.
I stepped forward and put my hand against Barry’s chest. The lines of power from my hands leapt out and slammed against Barry’s purple aura.
Like he’d been hit with a cattle prod, his body flew backwards into the group of his friends, the power cascading into them like arcing electricity, and they all collapsed in a heap. The moment our auras met I understood every reason behind every emotion Barry had felt. I witnessed the moment Barry’s mom walked in the door tearfully holding her termination papers from Helix. I saw Barry staring at his phone, wondering why I wasn’t calling. He actually was jealous at seeing me with Alex, and his emotions were starting to make him believe the news reports about my dad.
And their auras kept calling to me, begging to be taken…
A pulse of pain in my head made me squeeze my eyes shut, and when I opened them everything was back to normal. Well, as normal as could be with Barry and his three friends on the ground unconscious. Random students stood gaping at what had just happened. I wasn’t completely sure what had just gone down.
Alex grabbed my arm and leaned in to whisper in my ear. “We need to get out of here. No more school for us today.” I let her pull me along towards the campus parking lot.
What the heck had just happened?
Chapter Twelve
Jack stared out the passenger side window. He looked a little gray as he shielded his eyes from the glare of the late-morning sun. Alex pushed the button on her door controls to crack his window.
He took a deep shuddering breath of the cool air, and his skin seemed to regain a little of its color. He hadn’t said a word since the incident with Barry and his group of idiots—not that he needed to say anything out loud. The few students that had witnessed the "fight" were likely already spreading rumors of what they thought they saw. Barry and his goons would be lucky if they remembered their last week, and if they did remember, they would be embarrassed to admit how Jack had handled all of them with no visible effort. The truth was that no one present had any clue what had happened.
But Alex knew.
She'd seen this type of thing before in old footage of Jack's grandfather, Wyatt. When she’d been given the assignment to Helix's security, Jack's father sat her down and had her watch ten straight hours of video covering Wyatt and what he could do.
We don’t even know half of his skills, he had said. He kept most of them close to the chest. You need to understand them and keep an eye out for others with similar abilities.
Alex watched the whole series of videos, mesmerized and nearly unblinking. Wyatt could track animals and people while blindfolded, or when there was no actual visible sign of their passing. In one video he had fended off a group of attackers with a touch—just like Jack had with Barry.
She'd had her ideas as to what was going on with Jack. The headaches—growing pains for the brain, they said—and things he was supposedly seeing. Her suspicions were confirmed by rummaging around in his head, filling in the gaps with what he hadn’t yet verbally told her. Wyatt had described it on a video as "Awakening”. Not that the term actually mattered.
Wyatt had a strong form of ESP, and Jack was growing into that power as well.
She turned down Vine St. not entirely sure where to go. She tuned in to Jacks thoughts.
What the heck did I do? What was that aura around them? What was that stuff around my hands? Where’s my dad? Where’s my dad? Where’s my dad?
It had been the same the whole drive. At some point she’d have to cut through the silence and explain to him what was going on. She’d caught brief hints of things from his thoughts. Something about a dream, the papers he had apparently taken from Helix, and some weird and disjointed thought about a house with disappearing purple graffiti.
Ahead a house was blocked off by a half-dozen police cruisers. She wasn’t close enough to pick out thoughts yet.
"Pull over."
"Huh?" She glanced at Jack. His gaze fixed on the house ahead. She’d been distracted.
"Pull over. Now."
#
It was Abby Smith's home where the word “HELP” had first appeared. The driveway was blocked off by a half-dozen cop cars and uniformed officers were putting up a perimeter of yellow police tape.
But that wasn’t what grabbed my attention.
Graffiti covered every surface of the home. The garage door had what looked like a screaming face tagged on it. I didn’t know Abby very well, but the drawing resembled her face screaming in pain and terror. Lines of tears were etched into the image. Agony and fear rolled like waves off the house; the words “HELP” and “KILLER” plastered all over the walls and roof. The words repeated themselves over and over, overlapping in an extremely dense pattern surrounding the face. Away from the garage door the word density lessened, and the words seemed to fade away into nothing, like they had been airbrushed by a pro.
I had the door to the car open and was walking towards the police officers before Alex even had time to put the car in park. My dad would have been furious about me even getting close to a crime scene like this, but I needed to see. I was inexplicably drawn toward the graffiti covering the home.
“Why are we stopping at this house?” Alex asked when she finally caught up. “Whose home is it?”
“Abby Smith and her family live here.”
“The weird theatre girl?”
“Yeah.”
“You know her?”
“Alex, you can read my mind. You know that I didn’t know her well.”
She put her hands up defensively. “Hey you didn’t want me completing your thoughts or whatever. What’s got you all wound tight?”
With a hand I waved to the image and words covering the garage door. “That. How can you not be freaked out by that?”
“By what?” She squinted her eyes a bit. I figured the ‘squinty-eyed-look’ told me she was trying hard to get a grasp on my thoughts. Her expression changed from concentration to confusion as her gaze switched between me and the garage door. “I must be reading you wrong.”
“Are you seriously going to say you don’t see that?” I hissed. I looked at the officers walking back-and-forth between the interior of the house and their vehicles. None of them even gave the graffiti a second glance. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” I closed my eyes and rubbed at them with the palms of my hands. When I opened my eyes again Abby’s face still peered at me from the garage door, screaming and crying silently.
“Your thoughts are completely jumbled, I need you to try and organize them.”
“Of course my thoughts are a mess,” I said. “You really aren’t seeing what I’m seeing?” I could hear the pleading in my own voice and was embarrassed. If she couldn’t see the purplish graffiti, how did I know it wasn’t all in my head? How did I know I wasn’t just seeing things due to stress?
“I can’t see it,”
she said quietly. By now the other officers were giving us strange looks. It was only a matter of time before one of them told us to get lost. “Look, I can hear your thoughts and try to help you figure them out, but it is way harder for me if you aren’t thinking straight. It’s like taking the contents of a filing cabinet and throwing them all up in the air and hoping I can snag the right one when they are drifting down. Focus. Explain it to me.”
“On the garage door is a weird painting…or something…of Abby Smith’s face. She’s screaming in terror and pain.” I shivered, and not just because of the slight chill in the air. “Two words are repeated over and over: ‘HELP’ and ‘KILLER’. They are crazy saturated around the face and thin out the further away they get from the door. They are all done in a purplish color. It’s the same color as…well, never mind. I’ll have to talk to you about that later.”
One of the officers broke off from the group setting up the perimeter and walked over to us. He looked tired and more than a little haunted. I glanced past him to the other officers and noticed they each wore the same expressions. What had happened inside that house? Obviously something bad that they could actually see.
“What are you two doing out here?” he asked. His name tag read ‘A. Younger’. “You can’t be around here.”
“This is Abby’s house,” Alex said. She was actually sniffling. I could see tears at the corners of her eyes. “Is she…is she…?”
I put my arm around her shoulders to reinforce the charade. I was ashamed at our behavior. We didn’t care about Abby’s well-being. Not really. We just wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to know what was going on with me. Alex leaned into me and quietly—and falsely—sobbed. I didn’t say anything. It’s hard enough to know what to say to a person who is actually grieving, much less to a person who is faking.
The act worked. Officer Younger was a young guy, probably fresh out of training or something. Pretty girls crying make it easy for a guy to give away too much information. “I’m sorry, Miss. I’m afraid things are no good in there. Not for your friend Abby or her parents. Now I need the two of you to get out of here. Please.”
He waited there until we were all the way back in Alex’s Civic, then lowered his head and trudged back into the home. The way he seemed to tense as he stepped through the door made me think it must be pretty bad inside.
Alex turned on the car and drove us past the house. She let out a long breath. “What is going on here? I’ve got a bad feeling this is going to come back to what got loose from Helix. You should have heard that guy’s thoughts. He wasn’t taking it too well. I think it was the first time he’d seen a dead body.”
“Oh?”
“The first one is always the worst,” she said.
“Uh, let’s go by my place and talk,” I suggested, changing the subject. “I have a ton I need to tell you, and I’m thinking you can fill in some of the gaps.”
“You have no idea.”
“That’s my point exactly,” I said and shook my head helplessly. “I don’t have a freaking clue what’s going on. About anything. I keep thinking if I could just have a few minutes to talk with my dad he could clarify this for me. Help me understand. But he isn’t here.”
“I am.”
She was staring straight ahead, refusing to meet my eyes. I had the feeling she knew way more than she had told me so far. She reached up and tucked a rogue strand of blonde hair behind her ear. Beautiful. I didn’t make any effort hiding the thought. What was the point? She could hear it if she wanted, and probably had dealt with it since boys her age stopped thinking girls had cooties. The thing was, it wasn’t just her looks that I thought were attractive. I mean, Alex was definitely hot, but it was the other stuff. How she was always in control. Her intelligence. And how she actually seemed to care about me. Her emotion felt sincere to me. That was the biggest thing right there. She was genuine.
And she believed me. Believed in me.
Maybe it was imagination, but I thought I saw her blush a bit. I reached over and gave her right arm a squeeze. “Thanks.”
She nodded in return.
“There’s no way that thing back at Abby’s place was normal,” I said. “I wonder what happened.”
“That cop’s mind was as jumbled as yours. I skimmed some of the details off his thoughts, but I’ll find out the full story tonight.”
“Not that I doubt your awesome mind reading skills or whatever,” I said, “but how are you going to go about that?”
Alex lifted one eyebrow and glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “Helix has people in the Calm Waters police department. They get us whatever we need, whenever we need it.”
“Of course,” I rolled my eyes. “What was I thinking?”
“There’s a saying in one of my favorite old TV shows, Jack, and you’d do well to remember it.”
“What saying is that?”
“Trust no one.”
#
I opened the front door to my place and the aroma of fresh baked bread greeted me. Martha poked her head out of the kitchen and gave us a nod.
“Hey, Martha,” Alex called. “Bread smells awesome.”
“Thanks,” came the reply. “I’ll bring some up.”
She didn’t seem to care that I was home from school early, and that I had brought a girl home with me. No, she just encouraged me to take Alex up to my room.
My Aunt Martha was either the best temporary guardian ever, or the worst. I still hadn’t decided.
As we walked up the stairs I began to worry about the shape and cleanliness of my room. What had it looked like when I left? I couldn’t remember. When I pushed open my door, I found the room in impeccable condition. Martha had cleaned, and cleaned well.
Alex raised an eyebrow at me. “Bit of a neat-freak, are we? Oh, never mind. You’re just as surprised as I am.” She set her bag down and took a seat in my computer chair. “So, let’s get talking.”
“OK,” I said, “go for it. Tell me what’s going on with me. Am I going nuts? Am I seeing things that aren’t there?”
She shook her head quickly. “No, you are definitely not going crazy. I think you inherited some stuff from your grandfather—Wyatt.”
“Like what?”
“Have you heard of ESP?”
“Like, moving stuff around with my mind, or setting things on fire with a thought?”
“Kinda,” she replied. “You’re thinking of telekinesis and pyrokinesis. ESP, in a more general way, is when the body receives information without the use of the normal senses. Tons of detectives throughout time have had a very minor form of ESP—they call them ‘hunches’. For many people though, the mind isn’t good at receiving this data from your ‘sixth sense.’” She used air quotes around the term and paused briefly to give me time to interject with a question.
I kept my mouth shut.
“For people like that—like you—the data is filtered through the brain and fed into one of the other senses,” she continued. “In your case, it seems your eyes are the main area that has been…enhanced. You start seeing things no one else can. Technically, you aren’t even really seeing them as much as feeling their presence in your mind.”
“How do you know all this crap?” I asked.
Alex shrugged and leaned back in my desk chair. “I study this stuff all the time. It’s way better than school. Plus there are some old videos of Wyatt Bishop I was shown as an orientation of sorts. Wyatt himself explains a lot. He explained it as a psychic residue left behind. There were all kinds of other incredible things he hinted at being able to do, but the residue was how he tracked things down.”
“I have ESP,” I said, shaking my head in wonder. “We totally need to test this.”
Her face went completely blank. “Seriously? You want to test it? Wait. I have an idea.” Her voice couldn’t possibly have been filled with more sarcasm. “Let’s go find another batch of your classmates and nearly kill them! Yeah, and then you’ll have a better idea of what is g
oing on.”
I was too shocked to even respond.
“That’s right,” she said quietly. “You almost killed them. Do you even know what you did?”
“It was crazy.” My voice was low, barely above a whisper. I felt ashamed. Ashamed about my actions and ashamed I was a little excited about this supposed power I had. If I had a power, maybe…maybe I actually could get my dad back.
“You don’t want to go there, Jack,” she said. “Thinking that way will lead you down a dark path.”
“Are you going all Yoda on me?”
“No,” she said with complete seriousness. “I’m warning you. If you let yourself get seduced by the amount of power you actually hold—which isn’t even a fraction of what it will grow into—you’ll be hunted down and slaughtered like a rabid dog.”
Dead silence engulfed the room, and neither of us seemed willing to break it. Finally I said, “How dangerous is ESP? Am I a danger to everyone around me?”
“How dangerous is a loaded gun?”
“I guess that depends on who is holding it.”
“Exactly.” Alex sighed and held out her hand. “Let me see the papers you took from Helix.”
The slight change in subject was like a breath of fresh air. I dug into my backpack and pulled them out, then handed her the top one. “I don’t get it. I’ve stared at them for hours trying to notice a pattern or, well, anything. I feel like I should know what the symbols mean, but all I get is a headache.”
She let out a disbelieving laugh and held up the papers to the light. “Our Insider has some explaining to do. Hold this up to the light and tell me what you see.”
Residue Page 7