"AHHHH! TYLERRR!"
Tyler recoiled, trying to stop it, but the worlds couldn't stop. They flew apart, and Marcus' body went with them, disappearing bit by bit as he screamed until there was nothing left of him.
"Marcus?" Tyler's eyes felt normal again, but Marcus was gone.
*****
Comets streaked past. Asteroids hurtled through the void. Stars died and were born anew.
Tyler could only stare as the circle of his vision grew huge, dwarfing his tiny body and revealing to him hundreds, then thousands, then millions of stars. They swirled through space, moving farther and farther apart.
As the bus struck the water, galaxies loomed in the distance.
*****
Tyler burst through the hospital doors.
"Take them, please!" he shouted.
A security guard approached. "Sir, calm down."
"Please, I don't want these eyes! Take them, take them!"
The security guard and two orderlies took hold of him.
"Mr. Chambers?" The doctor who had seen Tyler earlier came toward them. "What's going on? Let him go."
Hesitantly, they did so.
"Please," Tyler said, grasping the doctor's shoulders, "I don't want this. Take it back! Just take it back!"
The doctor came in, accompanied by another man, a man with white hair and wire-rimmed glasses.
"Tyler, this man is going to examine you, okay?"
"Leave us," the man said.
After the doctor had left, the man leaned close, shining a light into Tyler's eyes.
"Please, take them. Just take them, I don't want them."
"What happened tonight, Tyler? You can see again, I'd think you'd be happy about that."
"I was, but...Marcus...he's gone. I killed him. I didn't mean to, but I killed him."
The man didn't flinch, just leaned close. "How did you do that?"
Tyler struggled to explain. "There are worlds...inside you. Inside me. There are worlds inside all of us, and I can stop them. I can stop them or...I can make them fly apart."
"Okay," the man said, taking a syringe out of his pocket. "I'm going to give you a sedative, just something to help you sleep until we can figure out what to do."
"I hear things, too."
The man seemed interested in that. He injected Tyler's arm with the syringe and depressed the plunger.
"What kind of things?"
"My dog, Max. My dog..." He began to feel sleepy.
"You hear him?"
"He was on the bus with me...he's dead."
The man looked around. "Do you hear Max right now?"
Tyler listened, but he didn't hear anything. A powerful slumber was carrying him away.
"IS MAX HERE WITH US NOW?" the man asked.
Tyler faded away and was gone.
*****
Tyler felt strange warmth fill his body. He opened his eyes. A blond man was leaning over him, with his hands on Tyler's chest. There was a sheet over Tyler's bottom half.
The blond boy whispered, "No one can see Max. Don't tell."
"What?" Tyler asked.
"He'll be okay," The blond guy said, pulling the sheet away from him.
Tyler sat up. "Where am I?" It looked like some kind of lab. There were lab tables with sheets over them. Sinks and cabinets around the walls.
"Um, more important question," a gangly guy with curly hair interjected. "Were you under a sheet just now?"
The blond guy nodded. "They have sheets on the dead ones."
"You just brought him back to life?" asked another guy, bald, African-American looking.
"What?" Tyler asked confusedly. The last thing he remembered was rushing into the hospital, asking them to take his eyes. Everything else was a blur.
"I asked God to do it," the blond guy said.
"What in the hell is GOING ON?" screamed a skinny girl with blue hair.
"My name is Kevin," said the bald guy. He went around introducing the others: Brandon, Simon, Heather, Zachary. The girl with the blue hair reluctantly offered her name as Mia.
Kevin told him what had happened so far: they had been on the school bus together that night. Somehow, everyone on the bus had gained some kind of special ability. They found out that someone was hunting them all down. They came here looking for one of them who had been taken. While here, they had found Mia and Tyler...dead.
Tyler had a hard time with that last part.
"We need to find someone with some answers," Kevin said.
Tyler realized he was seeing through Kevin. His eyes dialed open again, and he saw through Kevin, and into one of the tall cabinets at the back of the room. A man was hiding there, a man in a lab coat, with white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Tyler recognized him.
"There's someone there!" he said, pointing at the cabinet.
Mia plunged a hand forward, yellow energy shattering the handle of the cabinet. She opened the doors, revealing the man cowering within.
"I know him," Tyler said, "he's a doctor, or scientist, or something. I saw him at the hospital."
"I was trying to help y-" Mia grabbed his arm, and twisted it, pulling him from the cabinet. The yellow energy cracked up her arms as he wrenched his arm.
"Stop it!" Kevin said. "You're hurting him!"
"We need to find out what's going on, don't we?" she asked. "I'll get answers out of him."
"We can't sit here," Kevin said. "Any second those guards are going to get reinforcements and come through those doors."
Tyler remembered what had happened after the crash, when he had frozen the EMT with his eyes. He looked at the doors, and his eyes dialed open, revealing the worlds spinning within them.
"I can hold the doors," he said. "If need be, I can hold them off."
Mia spun the scientist around and threw him against the wall. He sank to the floor, clutching his shoulder.
"Don't!" Kevin stood between her and the injured man.
"Fine," she said. "You try...but if you can't get anywhere, it'll be my turn."
Kevin faced the scientist, and ran his hands over his bald head.
Brandon stepped closer to him, looking worried. "What are we gonna do?"
Tyler paced back and forth, scanning the doors, and sending his gaze into the hall beyond.
Watching. Waiting.
*****
Tyler walked down the hall, Max leading the way. The high school had not wanted to allow him to have Max inside, but that was where having a high priced lawyer for a father came in handy. Apparently, the law mandated that public places had to make accommodations for service animals to assist their disabled owners. So now, Tyler could take Max with him to school every day.
Max was everything for which his parents and Doctor Storm had hoped. As an assistance dog, he provided Tyler the guidance he needed to get back into the world, but as a friend, he had been even more invaluable. He had given Tyler something to hold on to, something to make him feel he wasn't alone in the nothingness before his eyes.
Now, in the hall, Max stopped short.
"Hey there, big fella," came a familiar voice, "stinking up the hall again huh?"
It was the voice of Brock Kenney, a mountainous football player Tyler loathed.
"Excuse us, Brock," Tyler said coldly.
"Man, Chambers," Brock said, "being a fag was bad enough, but being gay AND blind? That's just gotta suck."
"Or not, as the case may be, right?" Tyler said.
Brock laughed. "Yeah! Not! Haha!" He laughed as if he had thought of the joke.
Tyler didn't bother explaining to Brock that he wasn't gay. Most straight guys didn't seem to grasp that sexuality wasn't an either-or proposition, that it was possible to like men and women and not fall neatly into one box or the other. And most straight guys were Stephen Hawking next to Brock.
Besides, there were better ways to deal with him.
"You know, Brock, I could use a big strong man to escort me out to the bus...." he tried to slip a hand around Brock's arm
.
"Ew! No! Get away from me!"
"Mmm, so big and muscly." Tyler grinned. "I just want to eat you up!"
"You're fuckin nasty, dude. Get out of here! Just go!"
Tyler nudged Max's harness, and Max led him outside. "Next time, big boy!" he called, wishing he could see the look on Brock's face.
Max led him down the walk to the curb where the bus would be waiting. His father had practically had a fit when Tyler had told him he'd be riding the bus.
"I can have someone come around to pick you up! There's no reason for you to deal with the bus with your condition!"
That's what his dad insisted on calling it. His "condition".
"I'm blind, dad. I'm not sick. I can ride the bus like a normal kid."
The funny thing is, Tyler had never thought of himself as normal before. He had been special, when he stood on that stage and people cheered and applauded for him. He had been somebody, or so he thought, when girls and boys were throwing themselves at him every day. He winced to think how stupid he had been. Blindness hadn't made him special, it had made him normal. And he didn't intend to imagine that he was anything but normal.
He heard the bus doors open.
"Go ahead," said a male voice next to him. "You first."
"After you," Tyler said. I don't go first, he thought. I'm normal now.
When Max pulled forward, Tyler boarded the bus.
*****
Water rushed in at his feet, as Tyler beheld the endless mysteries of the cosmos. Galaxies of every shape and size whirled past, colliding with one another and giving birth to even larger shapes. There was something in the distance.
The galaxies formed a pattern, the pattern coalesced into a shape, the shape grew definition, and the image stood before Tyler. It was so vast that it beggared the mind, destroyed imagination, and defied understanding.
Tyler beheld it, and his mind recoiled: the face at the end of all things.
Icy water rushed into his open mouth, and darkness took him.
*****
With the doors released, they moved into the hall.
Kevin pushed Dr. Juergens in front of them. Brandon, Simon, Heather, and Zachary followed. Kevin started to go too, and then noticed Tyler wasn't moving.
"Tyler, come on!"
"You go," Tyler said. "I'll stay here and hold them off."
"What? No! You'll get killed! Come on!"
Take it back. Please take it back.
"I don't want to go. Look, there's a reason I ended up on that table. I gave myself up. I don't want these eyes, these powers."
"We don't have time, we need to go now!"
Tyler shoved him. "You go! I'm staying here."
Kevin looked like he wanted to stay and argue, but they heard the sound of footsteps approaching. Finally, Kevin turned and left him.
Tyler stood in the middle of the hall. He could see the armed men approaching before they rounded the corner. They burst into view, hurling canisters in his direction. Tyler's eyes dialed open, and he saw the worlds inside the canisters, the men, everything. He slowed them down until they were frozen in space. The men and their weaponry were suspended, immobile.
For a long time, Tyler stood there, holding them.
As time passed, he considered that he did not have to let them go at all. He could gaze inside them, focus on their worlds, spin them out of their orbits and blow them all away like so much dust in the breeze. He could do what he had done to Marcus. He could do it to them all.
Oh, Marcus. I'm so sorry.
Tyler didn't want to be this. He didn't want to be a killer. Whatever power these eyes had given him, he did not want it.
"Max? Are you there?"
There was a bark at his side, or far away. Somewhere.
"Go, boy. I don't want you to see this."
There came a whimper, a ghostly whine.
"Go, Max! Go! Get out!"
He stepped forward, until he was just in front of the muzzles of the men's guns.
"Just go..."
When he could hold his eyes no more, Tyler blinked, and the hall exploded with the sound of gunfire.
CHAPTER NINE
MAX
"To lead, unseen."
"He's an adorable little guy, isn't he?" the man said.
"Oh, yeah," the woman responded. She shifted him around in her arms so that he was draping one paw over her arm. "We hate to give him away, but we just can't keep them. Can't afford it right now."
There were scritchy-scratches on his head. He loved the scritchy-scratches.
"Well, you're really doing a good thing." The man smiled at him.
"They'll take good care of him, won't they? Give him a good home?"
"Oh yeah, definitely. He'll be great. We'll raise him and train him. It takes a lot of training to learn to assist people. Then someone will buy him and he'll have a friend for life."
She handed him over to the man, who cradled him in his arms. After a moment, he was shifted and put down in front of a big white thing. There was an opening in front. He felt a small pat on his rear, nudging him forward. He decided to go inside, maybe there was something for him in there. He padded inside, and heard a click from behind. He turned, and saw a metal grate had been closed over the opening! He padded back, and looked around for a way out, finding none.
"You're really doing a good thing," the man said.
Suddenly the white thing was hoisted into the air, and he stumbled about inside. He whimpered.
"I hope so," the woman said.
"Oh trust me," the man said. "This little puppy is going to grow up to make a huge difference in someone's life."
"Max," the woman said. His ears perked at the sound of his name.
"His name's Max."
*****
"Max?" The scientist called.
Max flattened his ghostly ears.
The scientist moved closer.
Max looked at him and emitted a low growl.
The scientist didn't seem to hear him, but he scanned around the corners of the room. "Max? Are you here? Come on out."
He resisted every impulse he had, and waited.
*****
As the bus swerved, Max felt a shiver under his fur. He did not like that feeling. He stumbled on his paws, and tried to grip the metal floor with his claws. They scrabbled uselessly on the slick surface. His harness didn't feel right. It felt like it had gotten bigger, or looser. It wasn't as snug as it should have been.
Max let out a frightened bark as the bus swerved again.
*****
His handler gave him a treat while they waited. Max chomped it happily, savoring the rich flavor. He looked around the room, taking note of where objects were and how he might lead someone around them. He would be expected to react to pressure on his harness that indicated where his follower might step and apply the needed pressure to guide someone by the hand. That was what he had been trained to do: to lead, unseen.
Two women entered the room.
"Hello," said the first woman, "I'm Doctor Storm. This is Mrs. Chambers."
"Nice to meet you," his handler said, shaking the second woman's hand.
"Likewise," she said. She looked down at Max. "So this is...?"
"This is Max. It's really important that we let your son be the one who's really friendly with him. That will help them bond, okay?"
"Okay," she said. "I just really hope this will work. We've had such a...um." Tears welled in her eyes.
"We've had real good results, Ma'am." He said.
Doctor Storm put a hand on her shoulder. "Tyler needs more than a tool to help him walk. He needs a friend. He needs to know life's not over."
The second woman nodded. Max wanted to make her feel better so he leaned forward and licked her hand.
"Oh!" she said, smiling. "You're a sweet boy, aren't you?"
Max lolled his tongue out and panted.
"Are you ready?" The first woman asked.
"I think so," the second woman an
swered.
"Okay," his handler said, "let's take him up and introduce them."
*****
"Okay," the scientist said, taking a syringe out of his pocket. "I'm going to give you a sedative, just something to help you sleep until we can figure out what to do."
Max stood between them and growled, but could not intervene.
"I hear things, too," Tyler said.
The man injected Tyler's arm with the syringe and depressed the plunger. Max barked twice, trying to rouse Tyler to move.
"What kind of things?"
"My dog, Max. My dog..."
Max reacted to the sound of his name and gave a whine. He tried to reach up and touch Tyler but his paws passed right through him.
"You hear him?" the scientist asked, a curious tone in his voice. Max looked up at him with anger in his eyes.
"He was on the bus with me...he's dead."
The scientist looked around. "Do you hear Max right now?"
Tyler didn't answer. He looked like he was falling asleep, but Max was afraid something was awfully wrong with him. He whined again, but was helpless.
"IS MAX HERE WITH US NOW?" the scientist asked.
Tyler became very still. Max jumped and barked at the scientist, trying to bite his arm, but his jaws past through and closed on nothing.
The scientist cast a curious eye around the room.
"Max...?"
*****
His harness slipped to the floor as the bus swerved again. How it had happened, Max did not know. He had not felt a thing.
Max was afraid something was wrong and began to bark.
Another shiver passed down his body, then a third. An electric tingle began in his snout and made its way down his body, sparking and shocking him uncomfortably.
He turned to Tyler and saw that he was lying back in his seat, mouth open, staring into space.
Max jumped to put his paws on Tyler's legs but his paws went right through.
He began to bark more wildly and fearfully as the bus plunged forward.
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