Ignition (William Hawk Book 1)

by William Hawk

  Arthur’s eyes had grown wide. “So she’s lying around somewhere nearby in a coma again.”

  “Probably,” I muttered.

  “A self-induced coma,” he said.

  I nodded. Cy sucked on his teeth. “What’s the status of that flash drive, William?” I described everything that Arthur and I had been discussing. “So you’re trying to translate the document?”

  Arthur nodded. “It’s going pretty slow, but I think it’ll be done by this afternoon.”

  Cy held his palms open to the three of us. “I know that you probably want to find Grace, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Julia. “We can’t just let her freeze. She could be dying out there—like my dad.”

  Cy shook his head. “She’s a C.A. 3. If she went into the spiritual realm, there was a legitimate reason for it. Like she said, she’s the attractor for Roivas, because they share so much, even, I guess, DNA.”

  “So what do you recommend?” asked Arthur.

  Cy paused, then said, “I’d recommend that we leave her be, for now, wherever she is. Like she said. Instead, let’s focus on building those helmets, and if they work, then whoever puts on the helmet can communicate with her in the spiritual realm.”

  Arthur was nodding his head. I admitted that it made sense. Only Julia looked unconvinced. “What can I do? I don’t know anything about helmets.”

  “You could look for your dad,” I said.

  “My dad is fine,” she said resolutely.

  “Then we’ll find things for you to do,” said Cy.

  At that, Arthur set down his silverware, wiped his mouth, and clapped his hands together. “I’ve got to get back to the code-cracking.”

  We stood up, but when I looked back, Julia was still in her seat, looking pensive.

  Six hours later, I was chopping wood out in the back clearing when Arthur came shambling through the trees toward me.

  I’d learned how to cut wood earlier, during my month-long stay with Cy, since he used only wood to heat the cabin. He’d showed me how to use an old tree stump as a stage of sorts. I learned how to put the chunks of wood on the stump and use the splitter to find any weakness in the wood. Then I learned the right way to lift the sledge over my head, how to drop it down powerfully, and where to connect it with the splitter. After some practice, I was able to cleave the pieces cleanly in half. The first time I tried it, I wasn’t even able to lift the hammer. Now, I felt like an expert.

  I did my last drop and watched the chunks fall to the left and the right. I leaned the sledgehammer against the tree stump.

  Arthur arrived. I noticed the laptop was under his arm. “What’s going on?”

  “I did it,” he said.

  “You translated the whole document to English?”

  He nodded. “I had to write my own program. That actually is what took all the time. Once I hit run, it translated the document in five seconds.”

  “Show me, you frickin’ genius, you.”

  “Can you clean off that stump?”

  I used my sleeve to clean all the wood shavings off the surface. They had a clean, piney smell. Arthur then set down the laptop, and we both sat down cross-legged on the ground.

  He opened the case, entered his password, and then pulled up a document. It was only three hundred words.

  “Read it and tell me what you think,” he said.

  My eyes scanned the document. The text contained odd phrases, as though an alien had, in fact, written it.

  Arthur seemed to read my mind. “It sounds a little odd, but that’s because of my program.”

  “It does sound weird,” I said. “This part especially, where it says push the bubble in and it pops out and you are there.”

  He stroked his chin. “I don’t think bubble is the best translation for whatever they were trying to say. But it sounds like that’s the last step.”

  He and I went over the previous stuff together. To my surprise, I found that Arthur had been remarkably close on his first attempt with the helmets. His instincts to use all the latest in paranormal-research technology, particularly electrostatics, was dead on, it seemed.

  After more discussion, I thought I had a good handle on things. “So let me see if I can understand this,” I said. “You need to fix two major things. One is the compression.”

  “Which I knew, but this document tells me exactly how.”

  I nodded. “Two, you have to fiddle with the frequencies.”

  “I had them set at 540 hertz. When that didn’t work, I had them set at 560 hertz. What I didn’t realize was that there needs to be one of each, because the difference between them will make a third tone of 20 hertz that will transport the user to the spirit realm.”

  That sounded plausible to me. “If that’s what the instructions say, then we do it. So what now?”

  “We need to make these changes. You brought the tools, right?”

  A sinking feeling settled into the pit of my stomach. I lowered my face to the ground and ran a hand through my hair.

  “No, I forgot.”

  A wave of frustration crossed Arthur’s face. I noticed that he seemed to have lost weight, even just in the last few days. “I reminded you to bring them, William.”

  “I know, I know.” I stood up and walked over to the other side of the glen. Moodily, I picked up a pine cone and chucked it as far as I could into the trees. “I made a mistake. I’m not perfect.”

  He sighed. “Well, is there some place else we could find tools?”

  I thought about it; then the answer came to me. “Yes, there is.”

  “Where?”

  “Sonny had a workshop on his property.”

  An hour later, we had scrambled down the side of the valley and up to the other side. As usual, the soil got under my fingernails, and the knees of my pants were caked in dirt.

  This particular hike was even more difficult because I was dragging behind me a large canvas bag holding the two helmets. Arthur was carrying his backpack around the front of his body, as though it contained a royal crown. Which it kind of did. To my eyes, the document detailing how to make these helmets was more valuable than anything else on earth.

  We arrived at Sonny’s property. It looked the same as the first time that I’d visited there. The rocking chair sat on the porch, untouched. Somewhere in the distance behind the house a dog was barking.

  To the left stood the little shack containing his workshop. I noticed a lock on the door latch.

  “This is it,” I said to Arthur.

  “Do we just break in?”

  “I guess we have to.”

  Arthur unslung the backpack from his torso and set it gingerly on the ground. Then he turned to the door and charged toward it with his shoulder, like they do in the movies.

  He collided with the door and bounced off it. His mouth opened, and he rubbed his right shoulder with his left hand. “Oh crap—that hurt!”

  “You’re supposed to use your foot,” I said, “like this.”

  I set down the bag containing the helmets. Then I positioned myself in front of the door, took a deep breath, and did my best karate kick at the latch. I felt the pain shoot through my ankle and up my leg, and I fell backward on the dirt. The door didn’t budge.

  “We’re amazing,” said Arthur. “Just unbelievable idiots.”

  I got up from the dirt and limped around on my gimpy ankle for a minute. “You have any better ideas?”

  He looked around. I saw his gaze fall upon something on the porch. “Yeah, I do.”

  He walked over to Sonny’s porch and bent down and hoisted up a large rock, about the size of a fire hydrant. I was surprised that Arthur could even hoist that much weight, but sometimes a person can surprise you with hidden strength.

  He hobbled back over, his feet splayed wide, so that he was walking like a penguin, the rock held in front of his pelvis. He proceeded directly to the workshop door, stopped a couple feet in front of it, and began to swing the rock back and forth between his le
gs.

  “Arthur, I don’t know if that’s—”

  I never finished my sentence, because on the third swing, he suddenly threw the rock toward the door. It crashed through the wooden slats as if they were made of straw and left a gaping hole in the middle of the door.

  “Ladies first,” he said, gesturing to the hole.

  I high-fived Arthur, kicked in a few more wooden slats with the heel of my shoe, then ducked my head and stepped inside Sonny’s workshop.

  It was a dark little place. I couldn’t see a thing at first, but I could feel that it had been used a lot over the years. The bitter taste of metal seeped into my mouth, and the scent of iron filings filled my nose. A stray cobweb brushed across my cheek, causing me to splutter and pass my hands across my face.

  After a minute, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was a workbench, a sawhorse, and a long table over which hung a long rack filled with at least a hundred different tools. There were bent-nose pliers, long-nose pliers, Allen wrenches, seven types of hand crimpers, insulation strippers, bolt cutters, and innumerable pliers. I spotted a chainsaw, a spot-welding mask, and a table-mounted vise.

  “This place has everything,” said Arthur. “Utility knives, levels, squares…”

  I pulled the overhead light string. The bulb didn’t turn on. “Everything except electricity.”

  Arthur was already busy rustling through the bins on the ground. “That’s okay, there’s a generator here. I bet that Sonny never had electricity here except for that.”

  I looked over his shoulder at the generator. It was an ancient contraption, a rusted yellow box surrounded by protective black bars. Some kind of acid had corroded the surface so that it looked like insects had eaten it.

  “What does it run on?” I said.

  “Gas. I hope there’s enough inside. Man, I can’t see anything in here.”

  He fumbled around, threw a few buttons, flipped the red power switch, and yanked a cord. The generator sputtered to life. Arthur then connected the long extension cord from the light to the generator. The bulb lit up.

  “You won’t have any problem seeing now,” I said.

  He clapped his hands together. “Where are my patients? The surgeon is in.”

  I went outside and brought in the bag with the helmets and laid them on Sonny’s worktable. Arthur was already assembling tools. “Whoa! A hydraulic torque wrench.”

  “Those aren’t unusual.”

  “I know. But they’re just cool.”

  He brought over a tray full of hex nuts, acorn nuts, flat washers, hex heads, and Allen heads. Then he rolled up his sleeves.

  “The operation is ready to begin. Surgeon requests that everybody leave the operating theater except for essential staff.”

  I nodded and backed out of the workspace. It was better to leave Arthur to his expertise. If he needed me, I was just a shout away.

  Sonny’s house was locked up. I decided not to try to get inside, having done enough damage to the dead man’s workshop.

  So I wandered his property for a while, looking at the belongings of this elderly Native American. There was a bench under an oak where I anchored down for a while. A weathered garden gnome in a patch of wild mint occupied my thoughts for another while. I even stooped over to pull a few weeds out of a garden bed. I don’t know why I did that. In a few weeks, the weeds would overgrow the property.

  The nagging question was what had happened to Sonny’s body. I knew that Cy had taken his clothing and buried it in the place where he’d been killed. That was no mystery at all. But the way he’d just vaporized or combusted or decayed was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen, and nothing could explain it.

  Then I went and stood on the small ridge and looked out over the valley. It was the same ridge that I had stood on with Sonny, and the same place where Sonny had pointed out the cemetery to me.

  At that moment, I noticed something odd. On the other side of the valley, nearer to Cy’s cabin, a commotion was occurring. I could see movement, several figures running through the forest.

  A glint of chrome caught my eye. A flash of metal. Khaki uniforms, tall hats. I understood what that was.

  The sheriff’s deputies had arrived.

  Sheriff Winters could be alive, or he could be dead. Either way, he’d likely told his deputies exactly where he was going, and why. If he hadn’t come back, they probably decided to find out why—and were looking specifically for me and Arthur and Julia. If he had survived Little Horn—Roivas—somehow, and he had gone back, then they’d be looking for Little Roivas. In which case, I wished them luck.

  But either way, I wasn’t going to cross that valley and find out. I hurried back to the workshop and stepped inside. “Arthur,” I said, “we’ve got some company.”

  He looked up from the bench. The guts of the helmets were spilling out onto the table. “Who?”

  “The sheriff’s deputies,” I said. “They’re swarming Cy’s property across the way.”

  His eyes flashed. “What do you want me to do about that?”

  “Work faster,” I said.

  “I’m trying,” he said, “but it’s not exactly easy to work here.” As if on cue, the light bulb flickered out, and he kicked the generator with his foot. It started up again.

  “All I need is for those helmets to be functional,” I reminded him. “If you can make that happen, I enter the spiritual realm, find Grace, and defeat Little Horn or Roivas or whatever thousand other things people call the nasty little bastard.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” he said.

  He was right. I admitted to myself that it wasn’t going to be that easy. But if Cy was right, and if the Hall of Knowledge was right, it was the most important thing in the world to do.

  Because it would mean the salvation of our civilization.

  I waited impatiently near the ridge. I couldn’t stand directly on it for fear that the deputies would see me. There was no sign of Cy or Julia, and I wondered if they’d heard the deputies coming and scattered. If so, they were possibly hiding in the forest.

  There was nothing for me to do but wait for Arthur to finish. I was fidgety, agitated. The police presence on this reservation seemed unnecessary, a distraction from my real purpose here. I felt like they didn’t know what they were getting involved in.

  To some extent, neither did I.

  After another hour, I spotted the deputies starting to spread down the far valley slope. They were going slowly, picking their way. I could tell that they were doing a search.

  I ran back to the workshop and stepped inside. Arthur was spot-welding something on the antennae, the heavy mask over his face, the tool making a bzzzt sound.

  “Arthur, can I help?”

  He shut off the tool and flipped up his mask. The light bulb went out, and the room was plunged into darkness. He kicked the generator, and it turned on again. “No need, William. I just finished.”

  “The helmets are done?”

  He lifted one. “The helmets are done.”

  I approached him and picked one up. I could see that he’d certainly made some changes to the configuration; he’d stripped out some of the wiring and also added a clear Plexiglas shield to the front visor.

  “What’s this?”

  “That’s something that was in the document. It said that there needed to be something to protect the person. In case you spend a long time on the other side.”

  I hoisted the thing and put it on my head. It fit snugly. My fingers felt along the side of the helmet for the power button.

  “Can I?”

  He bowed theatrically. “It would be an honor. This was your idea, after all.”

  I hit the power button on the side of the helmet—and the world disappeared.

  I find myself in a world of absence. All around me is the thickened, soupy grayness of an indistinguishable place. I can’t smell or hear anything. I raise my hand and look down. There is no hand. Then I open my mouth to speak but can’t feel that ei
ther. No sound comes out. My eyes focus on the two blinking blue lights above my eyes. That’s my helmet. There’s almost nothing else.

  A woman’s face appears before me.

  William, Grace says.

  I start to say her name—and then everything disappears.

  I found myself on the floor of the workshop. My left arm pinned under my body and my legs turned awkwardly inward. I flicked my eyes to the right. Arthur was crouched over me, holding the helmet under his arm.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Dude, you dropped to the ground like a sack of dog crap.”

  “Dog crap?”

  He shrugged. “Just came to mind.”

  “When did I drop?”

  “Like, the second you hit the power button. Did it work?”

  I struggled to roll over, but my body felt mildly paralyzed. It felt as though someone had injected cold gel into all of my joints. “Yeah it worked,” I said. “I was standing in a—I don’t know—a gray zone. I couldn’t see or feel my own body.” I looked down at my body. “Kind of like now. Can you help me up?”

  Arthur put his arm underneath my body and helped me up. I held on to the side of the table for balance until I felt everything coming back to life.

  “How long was I gone?”

  “Ten seconds. When you fell, I ran around the table and shut the helmet off.”

  It was stunning to hear I’d lost most of my body processes in such a short amount of time. I understood now why Grace had been in such a comatose state when I’d found her.

  “So that’s why the L.E. showed me a helmet,” I said. “For protection.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Let’s go outside.”

  We stepped outside of the workshop, into Sonny’s front yard area. The sky was darkening again, and I felt a spatter of rain upon my face. I stood there with my hands on my waist, looking around.

  “The last thing I saw was Grace’s face,” I said. “She appeared to me just before you cut the power.”

  “That’s radical,” he said. “Where do you think her body is?” Arthur looked around. “Maybe she’s just lying on the forest floor someplace.”