I’d always been okay with her. As for Neil...
“Yeah, we are. How about you, are you going to stay with us?”
She shook her head. “No, my mother needs me. I need to be with her, too. I have to explain things, why I’m this way, what I want to do with my life—all of it.”
Oh hell, she must have been listening in. “Did you hear us? I mean, when Joe and I were talking about—”
“The DNA and all that, yeah, I wasn’t really sleeping,” she interrupted. A look of indecision flitted over her features, before settling into one of determination. “I didn’t like what I was before, but now that I’m here with you, I’m happy being me. I didn’t know why whoever made me this way did what they did, but that’s okay. You accepted me. That’s enough.”
All this time I’d been listening, expecting her to be angry, but now, the failure, the loneliness—all of that had gone. Even the genetic shift I’d seen before... it didn’t matter. Commitment was part of the game, and I was prepared to play all four quarters, even go into overtime. Hesitantly, I put out my hand, and she took it in hers. “Are you sure about us?” I asked.
“Yeah, very sure.”
Kissing her right there and then seemed the most natural thing in the world, but as I leaned over to plant one, an, “ahem” from behind me made me stop in my tracks. Swiveling around, Joe sat on the steps, halfway down. Yeah, he’d seen it all and had a half-smile working. “You guys really need to get a room, do you know that?”
In spite of the sudden rush of heat to my face at being caught out, I felt more confident than ever before, but Callie’s situation made me uncertain. “Are you sure about staying with your mother? That thing out there, it might come for you. I don’t want you or your mother to get hurt,” I said, worried about what ifs and what-could-happen scenarios and more.
Callie ducked her head, and then looked up with a shy smile. “We’ll be fine. If you come over, stay with us every other weekend or something like that, we can work it out.”
“Sounds good to me,” Joe chimed in, his grin working bigtime.
“Shut up, Joe,” Callie and I said together.
With a chuckle, he arose and made his way up the stairs. “I’ll just get that computer and go home,” he said over his shoulder before disappearing into my room.
Hand in hand, Callie and I made our way outside. Neil bobbed his head in her direction. “You two get things settled?”
“Fine,” Callie answered, and hopped into my arms. “Mitch, let’s go.”
Time to wing it, and my appendages came out, pulling us up on high at my mental command. We soared over the landscape and landed a short time later at her mother’s house. Mrs. Winston was there, waiting for us.
“Nice to see you again, Mitch,” she said as I put Callie down.
“Same here, Mrs. Winston,” I answered.
Callie gave me a peck on my cheek. “I’ll tell my mother what happened. If we have to, we’ll talk to the police.”
She and her mother walked inside after waving goodbye. With a much lighter heart, I took flight and went home. Entering the kitchen, I found a pizza box. My mother had come home in my brief absence and brought me a gift. Her note read I thought you’d be busy with something, so I came back with this. Mom.
After scarfing down the pizza, I walked upstairs, noted the sleeping form of my mother in her room, took a shower, and slipped into bed. No dreams, no bad feelings, just thoughts of my girlfriend and maybe we’d see each other soon.
I must have passed out because the next thing I knew it was morning and my mother was shaking me awake. The tone of her voice indicated semi-panic. “Mitch, there’s a rock-man sitting in our garden.”
“That’s Neil. I’ll explain later.”
Abruptly, her mouth dropped open, and with a shaky hand, she actually leveraged her jaw into place. Once done, she threw up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Fine. I got used to you flying and used to Joe spinning. I can get used to this. Oh, Joe called. He said he’d found something on a computer?” Her eyebrows formed a steep arch. “What’s going on?”
“I’ll let you know later on.”
She left the room, and I threw on some clothes and ran to his place. He was bleary-eyed and looked hung over from lack of sleep, but he slapped me on the shoulder in a gesture of bro-ship. “You found something, didn’t you?”
“You got that right. Let me show you.”
An hour after viewing the evidence, I still didn’t believe it. “A contingency plan,” I said. “They really wanted to mess us up, didn’t they?”
We were sitting in my backyard. My mother had gone to work, so we had some privacy. As I went through things, Neil’s face never changed expression, but his eyes flashed an angry brown.
I’d called Callie, and her mother had driven her in before heading off to her job. A nice early morning sun sent its rays of warmth upon the land, but even the cheery glow couldn’t dispel the pall that hung an invisible shroud of menace around us.
Callie wore a pair of jeans along with a ruffled white blouse, and in deference to the dirt around us, I’d gotten her a chair. She sat primly on the edge, her hair tied up in a ponytail.
I’d seen the document. Joe had pulled it out of the hard drive and while it was only three lines—more like a memo from one person to another—it was no less chilling in its scope and depth.
Should the four individuals continue to grow in strength and power, they may be uncontrollable. If they cannot be controlled by the others, if containment or separation is insufficient, then it is advisable they must be eliminated.
“What others? What others?” I kept asking.
I was thinking that other monsters had been created, like Mr. Toad or Mr. Magma, but an uncomfortable thought kept circulating around my mind. Apparently, Joe had been thinking the same thing, for he said, “You mean others—like us?”
Silence descended, and it felt like a lead weight. Others like us might be out there, but they’d be working with the government. In that case, they’d be searching for us. That would have to wait. I had another question in mind. “You didn’t find out who’s in charge?”
Joe shook his head. “This was all there was. Lucas said the old committee had been disbanded, but for all we know, the person who wrote that memo might be the director of this new group.”
Irony time—Lucas had mind-wiped himself for nothing. Neil cut into my thoughts with the statement of, “We got bigger problems.” He’d been quiet during the explanation, but now his deep voice alerted us to the real threat. “Whoever’s running the show, they created something to stop us. The first two things melted. You said so, Mitch.”
“I did, yeah. The fake FBI agent, Reilly, probably did, too.”
He then turned his gaze to the rest of us in turn. “That means whoever is in charge now can probably make other things that don’t dissolve, right? We don’t know how many there are. They’ll try to get us all.”
Good point made. We had to stay ready, just in case. “So can someone tell me what the plan is,” Callie wanted to know. “If you need me to do anything, I can—”
Neil then chimed in with, “The best thing is you stay out of it. Seriously, you should stay away. You don’t have any powers or nothin’.”
To someone else who didn’t know us, his statement would have been considered a putdown. However, to me, it didn’t come across as being mean or vindictive. He was simply trying to look out for her. I echoed his sentiment and Joe said the same thing. “I want to help,” she repeated.
I took her hand. “Callie, Neil’s right. The best way to help is to do nothing. The creatures that came around, they knew me. They don’t know you, and I think it’s best to stay out of the way.”
Sure, it sounded noble and self-sacrificing along with being extremely corny, but that’s how I felt. Glancing around, everyone else wore the same look of extreme seriousness, and Callie matched their gazes. “Don’t think you�
�re keeping me out of this, Mitch,” she said and got up. “I’ve been with you and the guys from the start. This is something you can’t stop me from doing.”
“You’ve got your mother to think about. What about her?” Joe asked.
Callie started to argue that she was a big girl and could take care of herself. Maybe she could, but that wasn’t the point. The argument escalated, but then the sound of a siren cut into our yelling time. Neil jerked his head around and asked in an irritable voice, “Now what?”
Yeah, clue me in, too. Had the neighbors called the cops on us just for having a discussion? Asking everyone to wait, I walked around to the front of the house.
Sure enough, Chief Sullivan pulled up, and once he stopped, he cut the siren. A member of our fine community, Mr. Zane, a retired banker who lived two houses away, walked over to ask, “Are you in trouble again, Mitch? I was trying to watch television, but I heard an argument and then figured something was going on.”
“No, sir,” Sullivan said. “We just need to ask them a few questions about public safety.”
Mr. Zane got a dubious look on his face, but he dutifully nodded and moved off. So what was Sullivan really here for? “Mitch, I’m here to warn you.”
“Warn me about what?”
He looked pained to answer. “This is a pretty small town, and everyone knows everyone else. You know who Marlon Roberts is, don’t you?”
Yes, I knew. A real-estate agent who owned most of Independence’s land, he also owned the land my parents’ house was built on. As well, he chaired the City Council. “I know who he is. Why?”
“Has he contacted you?”
“No, he hasn’t.”
Sullivan rubbed his jaw in a slow, thoughtful manner. “I ran into him today, and he said that he’d be giving you a call later on.”
Terrific, and what else could go wrong? I stuffed that last thought elsewhere. So far, nothing much had gone right. Sullivan warned us all to be careful, and once he’d gone, Callie decided to go home, as did everyone else. Neil said he’d drive her back, and Joe said he’d call me later.
Once I went inside my house, the telephone rang. Picking up the receiver, I said “Hello?”
“Mitch Kessler, this is Councilman Marlon Roberts. Has Chief Sullivan told you about our meeting today?”
“Uh, yeah, he did.”
Now I recalled more details about Roberts. He, along with six other members of the Council, had read us the riot act when my powers came around and the secret of me being me came out.
Roberts also happened to be the richest dude in Independence. Money talked, and BS walked. “So what do you want?” I continued.
He then gave me a date—tomorrow, a time—ten AM—and a place, the Council Hall downtown. More information followed and as I hung up, a sick feeling flowed through me. We were being evicted.
Chapter Thirteen: The boot
Twenty minutes later my mother came home, kicking open the door and stomping through the foyer, her face distraught. “I got a telephone call at my office from that... that worm, Roberts! It upset me so much I had to leave.” She heaved in a deep breath and spat, “That rotten little man wants to throw us out.”
Just thinking about living on the street would piss anyone off. “They can’t do that, can they?”
Apparently, they could. “Roberts owns most of the land here.” That made the weight of reality crash down around me all the harder.
She continued, “He owns most of the houses around here as well as owning the mortgage on this house.”
“I thought you owned this place.”
My mother plopped down on the couch. “No, after your father died, I had to take out a loan. My job pays enough for the rent and for our expenses, but Roberts can call it in any time he wants to. He decided to call it in.”
Damn him! Roberts had us right where he wanted, and there was nothing we could do about it. The thought of being dumped out of here to become homeless before the age of twenty made me rage internally. I felt the monster in me coming out. Half of me said let it loose while the other half said stay human.
My mother’s voice came dimly through to my ears. “You’re not going to transform, are you?”
Concentrating hard, I fought the urge. “Don’t talk. Let me work on this.”
She clammed up, and after breathing in and out rhythmically, my pulse slowed. Good, no morphing, but it didn’t help our situation. Bad enough for me, but worse that my mother had to suffer for nothing. “I’m going to be okay, but we have to figure something out before tomorrow.”
“I’ll worry about that,” she said with a wan smile. “You get some rest.”
Later on, after she was gone, I lay on my bed, trying to figure out how to make things right and came up with nothing. A few seconds before it was lights out, I wondered if it was worth transforming in front of the citizen’s council on the off-chance it would change Roberts’ mind.
Grim humor at best, but at least it helped me to sleep.
The next morning saw my mother and me at the Council Hall. After tossing and turning all night and playing out the scenarios in my mind of where to live, I couldn’t come up with any alternatives.
One, we could rent a place somewhere else in the state, but I wondered who would rent to a human and a semi-human. I wanted to stay near Callie but didn’t want to endanger her or her mother.
Two, go back to school, but then again, no. If I went back, the harassment that had happened before would happen again, and I just didn’t feel like putting up with it. Becoming a school mascot was also not in the cards.
Three, finances were, in a word, non-existent. Checking our bank account, we had a grand total of four thousand, three hundred and twelve dollars. How long would that last?
As for insurance, my parents had never taken out a policy. According to my mother, my father had taken one out with his company while he was alive, but the payout wasn’t much, and my mother had used most of it as a down-payment on our house. So all in all, we were you-know-what out of luck.
“We’re here,” my mother said, interrupting my thoughts of where to live and more importantly, how to live.
The Council Hall was a small brick-and-wood structure located on the main thoroughfare. It lay sandwiched between a dry-cleaning shop and a steakhouse. As we walked along the streets, I inhaled the smell of pine, a fresh smell, the smell of summer and growth and fun. Once the doors of the Hall closed, the odor of cigar smoke hit me smack in the nostrils, and Councilman Roberts was the culprit.
Perhaps five-five and obscenely fat, stuffed into an expensive dove-gray suit, he sat at the center of a low, long table, flanked by three women to his left and two men to his right. He puffed away on an equally obese cigar, and even though the expressions on the faces of his cohorts indicated they’d rather kiss a rabid duck than put up with second-hand smoke, once they saw me, their facial features twisted and not in a pleasant way.
“Come on in, Mrs. Kessler, Mitch,” Roberts said in an expansive, pseudo-friendly manner. “We were just talking things over.”
“Like running us out of town or taking our house away?” It was difficult keeping my temper down. In confrontations, I usually backed off because of what damage I could potentially do, but in Robert’s case, time to make an exception and my voice came out hoarse, on the verge of change. It startled the other members on the inquisition. For his part, he maintained a bland expression.
“It doesn’t have to come to that—” Roberts began.
“Both,” interrupted a pinch-faced woman in her sixties. She sat second from the left. That was Mrs. Grayson, a former teacher at my junior high school. She’d retired a couple of years ago and spent her time lobbying for increased funds for the poor and needy in our county.
“Those people need help to have a life,” she’d often declared. Now, she was about to deny me and my mother one. “Mitch, according to Mr. Roberts, he owns the lease on your house and the land.�
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“Not to mention you and that Chambers boy have been getting into all sorts of trouble,” added a tall, bony man, sitting furthest away from the pack. “Officer Sullivan has told us all about it.” A grin, nasty and full of brown-stained teeth, accompanied his statement. “We heard about a man being killed. Seems someone with claws did it.” He leaned forward to leer at us. “Anyone you know?”
Good ol’ Harry Schubert, he just had to rub it in. He owned the dry-cleaning establishment next door. Never mind the trouble had been started by others. Never mind Sullivan had seen it our way. This jerk was trying anything he could to ruin us. Telling him the truth would have been a waste of time and breath.
My mother attempted to maintain an air of cordiality. “Mr. Roberts,” she began, looking directly at him. “Mitch has maintained good grades by studying online and has stayed out of trouble, and—”
“Mrs. Kessler, stop, please,” Roberts interrupted, holding up his hand for silence. “I’m sure he’s doing fine studying at home, but that has no bearing on this matter. As for trouble, please don’t lecture me about that. I’ve heard talk from our local police at monsters being sighted.” A smirk crossed his face. “I must tell you that having four monsters in this city are more than a little unusual.”
At the inclusion of my girlfriend under the monsters’ category, something inside me snapped, and my claws emerged. “You want to see monsters? There’s one right here.”
This time Roberts paled and my mother put her hands on mine, whispering, “Mitch, please, not here.”
Reason prevailed. Yeah, it wasn’t worth it. I retracted my claws, and he quickly recovered his self-assured manner. With a quick movement from his fat forefinger, he tapped his cigar, and a fine layer of ash fell to the floor. Fire hazard, much? “At least one person in the Kessler family has some sense,” he said, gazing at my mother.
He continued to puff away, wreathing his face in blue smoke. “However, facts are facts. What Mrs. Grayson and Mr. Schubert have said are both true. As for me, I’m a humble businessman, and yes, I’ve been fortunate enough to have earned good money from leasing houses in and around the Portland area. This is fact.
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