The Boys of Summer

by Richard Cox

  I can see you. . .

  David remembered it clearly now. He had slipped in the mud, fallen to the ground, and the world seemed to flip somehow. For a moment he thought he heard a guitar. He had bumped his head and when he looked up, the opening bars of a song he shouldn’t have known were floating through the trees above him.

  Don’t look back, you can never look back. . .

  What happened when he fell to the ground? In one moment he had been a normal, frightened kid and in the next he had been blessed (cursed?) with the ability to hear things other people could not hear and see things others could not see.

  Did Thomas know how all this worked? Or was he simply trying to make sense of the world? David recognized (finally) that he had maneuvered himself into an unfamiliar position: He didn’t want to simply use the kid. He also wanted to help him.

  A low, droning sound approached from the south, a sound that could only belong to a jet engine. He looked up and could see the plane just ahead of them, low and wobbling in the wind. Rain was beginning to fall, large drops that sounded like marbles hitting the roof of the car. Spray kicked up from the runway as the plane touched down, and David watched for any sign the wheels might begin to slide. But the landing was perfect. The plane slowed quickly, clearly under control. As it reached the end of the runway, David put the car into gear, and that’s when he heard a loud crash behind him. In the rearview mirror he saw another car appear, a blue sedan he was pretty sure belonged to Detective Gholson.

  The BMW creaked on its hinges as the wind pushed it like a giant hand. He switched the windshield wipers on, to push aside the few raindrops that were falling, and began to roll slowly toward the plane. Fuck Gholson. Fuck Jonathan and Alicia and whoever else. What could they do? Shoot at him while he walked the kid to the plane? No way they would do that.

  The plane had turned around now and was pointed back down the runway in the direction from which it had come. A door opened in the fuselage and the airstair emerged.

  “Thomas,” David said. “It’s time to go. Are you okay to walk? You haven’t said anything since you got in the car, so I’m not sure what you’re going to do when we get out.”

  “We don’t have much time,” Thomas answered. “I’ll get out on your side so the cop doesn’t try to shoot you.”

  David nodded and pushed his door open. He was about to step onto the runway when something slammed into the hood of the BMW. The sound of it was deafening. He shrank back into his seat.

  “What the fuck was that?” David yelled. “Is he shooting at us?”

  Another detonation hit the roof of the car, as if someone were launching mortar shells at them.

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “Those are hailstones.”

  By now the sky had turned as black as night. A terrible idea occurred to him, blinking like a siren in his mind: What if I die out there? I’m not ready to die!

  Behind them, Gholson’s sedan was inching closer. There was no choice. They had to go now.

  The hailstones were falling sporadically and spaced widely apart. David thought they could reach the plane without getting hit, but he wasn’t completely sure.

  He turned toward the kid again.

  “Are we going to make it?”

  “There aren’t any goddamn hailstones,” Thomas said. “You’re confusing the ending with the beginning. Get out of the car and let’s go.”

  David didn’t understand. He could hear the hailstones falling around them. But now they had no choice. They had to go, hail or no hail.

  He stepped out of the car and Thomas followed. It was a sprint of fifty or so yards to the airstair. David took Thomas’ hand and they ran.

  A flash of light turned the sky to fire. Deafening thunder shook the ground. David knew a direct hailstone strike could be fatal, and he tried to move them faster. He ran for their lives. From behind them he thought he heard footsteps. He imagined he could hear his dad’s voice coaching him, cheering him on. Don’t look back, you can never look back.

  But he couldn’t help it. He had to look. And when he did, David found Gholson only a few steps behind him. The sneaky fucker.

  “Stop!” Gholson yelled. “You are not taking that child! I will shoot you!”

  David drew Thomas close to him and wrapped his arms around the kid’s chest, like a bear hug from behind.

  “Leave us alone!”

  “Just tell me which eye you’d rather me shoot and let’s get this over with.”

  Gholson was bluffing. He had to be. David saw movement behind the detective and realized Jonathan had climbed out of the car. Alicia was right behind him. They were all against him now. The common folk hated him for what they didn’t have. For what he had earned and they had not.

  “David,” Jonathan called. “Come on, man. This is crazy.”

  “Go home,” David replied. “You’re out of your league.”

  “That poor kid has a mother,” Alicia said. “He’s got a life here. Why do this? Why do you need more than you already have?”

  “How do you know what I have or what I need? And anyway it doesn’t matter because Thomas came with me of his own free will.”

  “Free will,” Thomas whispered to him in an amused voice. “I like your sense of humor.”

  The hailstones seemed to be increasing in number and David began backing toward the jet. He didn’t understand how all of them could stand there and not worry about being hit. He wondered if the plane would be able to take off under this sort of duress.

  “Mr. Clark,” Gholson growled. “This is your last chance. Let the kid go.”

  A volatile, spiraling network of black clouds approached them. The runway shined brightly. Emerald green sunlight lit David’s view in mystical hues. The clouds were ragged, low to the ground.

  He wasn’t stealing Thomas. He was protecting him. How could they not see this? How did they not understand the boy needed a real father in his life?

  “I’m out of here,” he said as he reached the airstair.

  But he could see Gholson was serious. Gholson was going to pull the trigger.

  And then above him, there was a loud, sharp report. The spreading wave echo of gunfire. David, to his surprise, was still vertical.

  Gholson collapsed to the ground.

  At the top of the stairs, a man David didn’t recognize gestured to him.

  “Bring the kid up here. We have to get off the ground. Now.”

  David was disoriented and confused, but he obeyed the order. He shoved Thomas onto the stairs and pushed him forward, upward. In moments they were on the plane. The unfamiliar man stood before them.

  “Move out of the way,” he said, reaching for the airstair controls.

  David guided the kid away from the door, but not before he turned and looked briefly outside. Jonathan and Alicia had knelt above Gholson and were apparently trying to stop a bleeding leg wound. David couldn’t believe they weren’t more concerned about the falling hail. And then he noticed with some bewilderment that he could see no hailstones on the runway or anywhere.

  “What the hell?” he finally said to the unfamiliar man. “Who are you? Why did you shoot the cop?”

  “I’m Special Agent Paulson. I’m here to facilitate your safe departure. We have an extreme weather situation and must depart at once. Please take your seats.”

  The plane was a Lear and far smaller than his own Gulfstream. It was outfitted with eight seats in two groups of four. David guided Thomas to the seat next to him, which faced the front of the plane. Paulson took the opposite seat.

  “Jim didn’t say anything about a federal agent,” David said.

  Paulson replied, “We intercepted communication between you and your friend, Mr. Thain. As for Erik Lehman—who has been providing classified and other sensitive information to you—he has been relieved of duty. His contributions to your abduction of this child will likely land him in jail. In the meantime, this situation has been deemed important to national security. The child will accompany me to
a safe location at Ford Meade in Maryland.”

  “What? On whose authority?”

  The roar of the engines grew louder. David was pinned to the back of his seat as the plane began to accelerate.

  “As a matter of national security, sir, I can take whatever means necessary to protect the nation. Not to mention, your claim to the child is not exactly legal. Either way, you better hope our pilot can outflank that tornado. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.”

  David was seated on the starboard side of the plane. He raised the window screen and looked outside.

  What he saw turned his blood cold. There was no chance they were going to make it.

  85

  Jonathan had never received formal medical training and it appeared Alicia hadn’t either. Gholson’s wound was in the thigh, which had not seemed all that critical when Jonathan first saw it, but now blood was pouring out of it at a rate that didn’t seem possible. The detective would be dead in minutes if they didn’t figure out how to stop the bleeding. Even pushing as hard as he could against the wound, blood still oozed between his fingers, warm and urgent and smelling metallic.

  Gholson’s eyes fluttered in a state between open and shut. He tried to say something but only managed to choke on fluid in his throat. His tongue quivered. Spittle trickled down his chin.

  “Sally,” he finally managed. “You’re so beautiful. Everything is beautiful.”

  Around them, the world seemed to be ending. The sky was so dark it could have been eight in the evening instead of eleven in the morning. The wind, which slowed to a whisper when the rain stopped, had picked up again, and was increasing with each beat of time. It whistled in Jonathan’s ears, it growled. Something terrible was going to happen.

  “I think the bullet hit an artery,” Alicia said. “I don’t know if we can do anything.”

  Jonathan couldn’t believe what David had done. He couldn’t believe the man on the plane had shot Gholson. Whoever would come here and steal a young boy from his mother and his hometown, whoever would shoot a police officer working to stop this travesty, these were the kind of integrity-free antagonists you found in mindless action films but never expected to encounter in the real world. Jonathan couldn’t believe David had sunk so low.

  He pulled off his shirt and tied it around Gholson’s thigh, but the leg was so thick there, and the wound so deep, the cotton material was soaked almost immediately. Blood began to drip out of the shirt and Jonathan realized Alicia was right.

  “Jonathan, we have to get out of here. If we don’t, we’ll never outrun the storm.”

  He looked upward, over Gholson’s car, and felt all the strength drain out of him. The storm was a wall of spiraling black, and at the base of it, little cloud fingers were on the ground, dancing around each other. Sometimes there were two fingers. Sometimes there were six.

  Fear washed through him. He was nine years old all over again. The storm was bearing down upon them again. But this time he would not cower as he had before.

  “That tornado,” Alicia said, “it must be two miles wide, Jonathan. It’s like across the entire horizon.”

  “We have to get out of here. But we can’t just leave Gholson behind.”

  “He’s dead already, Jonathan. We really need to go.”

  Jonathan looked down at Gholson and realized Alicia was right. At some point the detective had stopped breathing. His eyes were open, but whatever he was looking at was something Jonathan couldn’t see. And it looked almost like he was smiling.

  Jonathan climbed into Gholson’s car and sat behind the wheel. The engine was still running. When Alicia shut her door, he put the transmission in gear and floored the accelerator. For a terrible moment he thought he was going to run over Gholson, but he jerked the car to the right, missing him by inches, and drove onto the runway. The tornado was approaching from the west, and there was no road headed east. Beyond the runway there was only red pasture and weeds, and a highway in the distance. Rain had turned the dirt into mud and they wouldn’t be able to drive through it without getting stuck.

  The only way to exit the airport on a paved road was to head west, and he could not imagine driving toward the tornado. They were trapped.

  “Jonathan!” Alicia screamed. “Get us out of here! I don’t want to die!”

  Outside the car, the wind continued to increase. It shrieked around them, tugging on the car, urging it toward the storm. Jonathan looked around, hoping to see something, anything, any sort of escape route that might save them. Just a little north and east of the runway stood a FedEx building, and though there was no road connecting the facility to their location, the amount of open field they would need to traverse to reach the other side wasn’t more than fifty or sixty yards.

  Jonathan punched the accelerator and made a run for it, knowing if they didn’t find asphalt before the car bogged down in the mud, both of them would die.

  86

  The plane was listing. David was sure of it. And it seemed to be slowing down, which was an alarming sign for an aircraft working to gain altitude. His right hand gripped the seat armrest hard enough to nearly puncture holes in the leather. His left held Thomas’ own hand.

  Across from him, Paulson looked as alarmed as David felt. The agent unbuckled himself and lurched toward the cockpit door, which was closed but apparently not locked. When he threw the door open, David could hear a buzzing sound, oscillating like a car alarm. Some kind of warning.

  Paulson’s voice was loud and commanding, but so was the pilot’s reply. Then David heard something that turned his heart to a lump of ice in his chest.

  It was the sound of a gunshot.

  Thomas unbuckled his seatbelt and stood up quickly.

  “What in the hell?” he yelled, apparently to himself. “This is not supposed to happen!”

  “Son!” David said. “You have to sit down!”

  Thomas ignored him. He tried to walk toward the cockpit, but the plane was listing so hard to the right that he couldn’t keep his balance. And then someone emerged from the cockpit. It was not Paulson.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Thomas yelled at the man. “You’re supposed to be dead! What are you doing?”

  “Son, this is wrong.”

  “Wrong? The whole world is wrong! Why do you care what I do?”

  David’s eyes were reporting the appearance of Todd Willis, the boy who twenty-five years ago had emerged from his walking coma no longer a boy. This version of Todd was a wiry man with receding hair and tired eyes, but David might not have believed what he was seeing if it weren’t for the look on Thomas’ face.

  “Just because you lucked into the ability to tilt the world in your favor doesn’t mean you should actually do it.”

  “I didn’t luck into anything,” Thomas said. The plane was veering at an absurd angle and the kid nearly fell down. “I figured this out. I earned it!”

  “You were born with it,” Todd explained. “And rather than give back to a world that has been so generous to you, you just want to keep taking more.”

  “Anyone in my position would do the same thing. It’s how the world works!”

  David’s stomach lurched as the plane turned obscenely, as it was dragged backward and toward the ground. This was it. He was going to die. They were all going to die.

  “We don’t have to be prisoners to our impulses,” Todd said. “We can choose. And I’m choosing to end it here. No one should be able to control the world this way.”

  Thomas tried to reach out and strike his father but fell down instead. Out of sight.

  “What’s out there?” David asked Todd. “Wherever you go, is it really that awful?”

  There was a piercing, human scream, and suddenly David’s seat-belt was crushing him. Then it released. Then the world seemed to turn upside down, and the last thing he heard, as everything went dark, was Todd’s answer.

  “You would love it there.”

  87

  Alicia had heard the
story many times. Her father told it at parties and , family holidays. When he had a few drinks he would even tell her, for the nine millionth time, how the first tornado he ever chased almost became his last. How his tires couldn’t gain traction on the dirt road. How he had given up on his car and dove into a ditch. The tornado had passed almost directly over him and sent tree branches through the windshield and the radiator.

  Now, Alicia was reliving the scene twenty-nine years later. Jonathan was attempting to cross a short stretch of mud so they could reach the FedEx parking lot, and she didn’t think they were going to make it. But finally they did. Their tires gripped the asphalt and the car shot forward. Jonathan swerved through the lot until they reached a small two-lane road. Before he turned east, she watched in horror as the swirling mass stretched across her entire vision, a storm that surely dwarfed the tornado she had seen in 1979.

  The road was wet, the headwinds hurricane-force, and she knew they would never outrun the supercell. They had to locate some kind of shelter, and quickly.

  “This is how my dad almost died,” Alicia cried. “We’ve got to get out the car and find shelter. Get below ground. Something.” Jonathan pointed ahead of them. “Look!”

  Alicia looked and saw a set of buildings beside the road. It appeared to be some kind of church. A driveway connected the buildings to the road, and a concrete culvert sat in the drainage ditch where the driveway crossed it.