Allan rolls quickly to catch up.
The back of the shop has a desk next to a huge insulated walk-in cooler. A man sitting at the desk types on a computer. The desk is trashed with papers, receipts, and books. He grunts. “Arrr, woman! You litter my desk like it’s the bottom of your birdcage! It pisses me off.” He realizes the woman is not alone and looks at Allan with narrow eyes. The woman ignores him and yanks the cooler door open. Allan peeks inside and sees plastic buckets filled with flowers and racks of sodas and teas. The bird hops off her shoulder and flies out of the cold and into Allan’s face.
“Your parrot!” he yelps, waving his arms. The bird dodges Allan’s thrashing and lands on the handle of his wheelchair.
“Don’t be a bollix, lad. Tis just tryin’ ta be friendly now,” she hollers from the cooler.
Allan looks at the bird, which glares at him. It must have decided it doesn’t like Allan because it pecks his head.
“Ow, get lost,” Allan hisses and rubs the pecked spot.
The woman emerges holding a bucket of Hubbu flowers, deep purple and as large as cereal bowls.
“By the look in yer eye, I’d say I’ve found the right bud.” She chuckles.
Allan stares at the flowers. Tears swell up in his eyes.
“How many do ye want?”
“All of them.” There are a half dozen flowers in the bucket.
The bird flies to the woman’s shoulder as she goes to the cash register. Allan pulls out some cash and pays. “Tis lookin’ like yer the one the flowers’re for. Don’t ya worry, I donna judge. A man that a likes flowers is a man all the same.” She wraps the Hubbu flowers in tissue paper. “How ’bout a bit of blue?” She winks and selects blue ribbon to tie around the tissue.
Allan thanks her and rolls to the taxi as fast as his wheels can carry him. Once inside, he unwraps the flowers and stares at them. He’s so gentle with them, like they’re radioactive cores from a nuclear power plant.
“Got a lucky lady waitin’ for you on the mountain, eh?” Charlie asks.
“Yeah, but I just learned that she’s meeting me at my house. So I guess I need to go home.”
The driver turns to look at Allan, his brow furrowed. “Your meter says you owe me eighty-nine dollars.”
Allan frowns. “Oh.”
“Look, buddy. I’ll shut off the meter for ya. The system will say I dropped you off here, capiche? It’ll save you some of that hard-earned allowance.” He drives off.
“Thanks, Charlie, I owe you one.”
“Donna worry ’bout it.”
Allan cradles the Hubbu flowers. They are just like the one he saw in the woods a year ago but a little more purple than he remembered. It didn’t matter, they were the same. The little purple petals are waxy and thick, the bud of pollen in the middle, thick and fragrant. He touches the pollen with his finger and inspects it. Nothing strange about it. All he did was sneeze into the pollen and they swirled around him. He remembers sparks, and a bit of pain, but was instantly transported to Lan Darr.
He’ll have to try to recreate the same situation to cause the same reaction. Lyllia of Meduna had a small room that filled with pollen. That room brought Allan back to Earth. So he’ll sneeze into the flower in the bathroom to keep the reaction contained.
The taxi speeds down the freeway, and in an hour, Allan is dropped off in front of his home in possession of six Hubbu flowers.
Rubic is gone, which is odd. Allan expected him to still be asleep on the couch. Allan wonders if Rubic’s new job makes him work Saturdays too. He shrugs. The house is all Allan’s. Excitement flows through his body, an excitement he’s never felt before.
Allan goes inside and directly to the bathroom. But the bathroom feels too big. It had been remodeled to fit his chair so it’s twice the size of a normal bathroom. “This won’t do.” Allan rolls to his bedroom and opens the closet. “Perfect,” he mumbles. Allan opens his pack, which hangs on the back of his wheelchair, and tucks four of the six flowers carefully into the pack.
The closet is already roomy enough. It’s where the All-Terrain wheelchair sits when Allan doesn’t need it.
He backs into the closet and closes the door. The light fades to shadows and he can barely see the two flowers on his lap. He picks them up and strains. As his eyes adjust he can see them again. He sniffs the flowers, deeply inhaling their perfume. No sneeze. He sniffs them again, but not an itch or twitch in his nasal cavity. He considers a fake sneeze, but decides against it. A real sneeze travels at a hundred miles an hour and a fake sneeze won’t. It’s too risky, and he’s got to get this right. The pollen has to swirl around him. “I need to make a vortex or wind.”
First, he needs something to hold the pollen above his head. Allan rolls to the kitchen and tears through the cabinet. He pulls out the largest Tupperware, paying no attention to the mess he makes. He grabs a knife, pokes a few dozen holes in the bottom of the container, and wheels to the garage. He piles a fan, two golf clubs, and a roll of duct tape onto his lap and returns to the closet.
He tapes the two golf clubs around the Tupperware like chopsticks holding a sushi roll and scrapes the pollen from the two flower buds into the container. The pollen is the consistency of flour.
He stretches to the highest shelf he can reach and tucks the golf club handles under a shoebox. When he lets go, the shoebox lifts up and the contraption falls. Allan catches the Tupperware upside down. The pollen spills out and onto the carpet. “NO!” he yells, seizing up. He sees the precious powder fall to the carpet leaving a fog-like cloud behind. A couple of sparks fire off. The thick carpet prevents him from picking any of the pollen up. “Come on! Don’t be stupid!” he lambasts himself. Allan rolls to the kitchen, forcing himself to relax. He retrieves the lid for the Tupperware.
He gets two of the flowers from his backpack and scrapes the pollen into the container. He methodically tapes the lid on. The two flowers in his bag are the only buds left. It will be enough to get him home.
Allan grabs a textbook off his desk and tosses it on the shelf. He uses his trigger claw to lift the book up and rests it on the golf club handles. The weight barely holds the Tupperware. Allan uses the claw to place a thick dictionary on the textbook, then one more book for good measure. After he plugs the fan into the wall socket, he sets the fan inside the closet.
Nervousness replaces his excitement as he backs himself up into his closet and closes the door. “Here I come, Lan Darr. Here I come, Asantia.”
Allan clicks on the fan and rotates the dial to high. The wind swirls around feverishly. Too much wind. Allan lowers the fan speed and points it to the back of the closet. He can feel the air circling him. It’s just like Lyllia’s travel gates.
Allan looks up at the Tupperware. It’s like a crude showerhead. Proud of his improvisation, he reaches up and drums on the Tupperware. Like a botanical rain, the pollen flitters through the holes, meets the rush of air, and swirls. In the darkness of the closet Allan sees the sparks. More sparks. A million sparks. Light fills the dark closet.
“YEAH!” Allan screams out.
Allan feels his body jerk up, down, and twist like the wringing of a wet towel. Everything goes dark.
When he opens his eyes, Allan is not on Earth. The sky is gray, and the ground is a pebble-strewn hilltop. He can breathe, but the air is thick with dust. There are no plants around, no buildings or creatures, and no moons. Large, dark crystals protrude sporadically.
A rumble shakes the ground. Allan’s chair shimmies deep into the pebbles. The rumble had come from a tall pointy mountain a few miles away. Correction, a volcano. Lava spews from its apex in a steady stream. The lava glows red and hot. Allan watches it spill down the steep slope to a large, dark lake or sea and vaporize. It’s a view typical of the Jurassic period on Earth. It’s amazing and alien. A steady cloud of steam rises into the atmosphere and joins a much larger, darker cloud. Lightning fires off in the dark cloud.
The hill is as tall as all the other hills around him,
and he can see three hundred sixty degrees. The lake or sea extends to the horizon. The hills do too, their rolling expanse only interrupted by the tall volcano.
Allan cannot see the forest the balloon creatures dropped him in, or the desert the Lithic Fury rock creatures inhabit, or the mushroom forest. He doesn’t see Dantia or any sign of civilization at all, and there is a small sun, the size of his pinky nail, hanging in the gray sky. Lan Darr did not have a visible sun.
There is only one explanation. Allan is not on Lan Darr at all. He’s on another, stranger, more desolate planet.
The ground rumbles again and more lava spews from the caldron. Allan grips the push-rings as his chair starts to slip down the side of the hill. Below are more, even larger, black crystals jutting from the gravel. They are almost as reflective as mirrors. They reflect shapes that move around, ducking between the monolith stones. They’re shadows of creatures that don’t want to be seen.
Allan begins to sweat and feels panic rise in his chest.
Chapter 6
Let the Chase Begin
Laura didn’t sleep during the night. Right before bed she’d gone online to friendbook.com and answered a few posts. She saw the posts of Allan’s tee pee’d house. She had no idea someone would go to such lengths to embarrass Allan, but there were the pictures. The amount of toilet paper covering the yard was impressive, and it made her cry. It hurt her to know that it was all her fault.
When the morning arrives, Laura feels like a zombie. The sun hasn’t fully risen, the birds haven’t started chirping, and the traffic hasn’t begun. She mopes to the bathroom where she finds her reflection less than appealing. The water takes too long to warm, and the toilet seat freezes her rear end, and her dog starts barking at a squirrel and won’t stop. Later, the steamy shower water turns icy cold. “AHHHHHH!” she screams and almost leaps out of the shower, knowing someone was using the hot water elsewhere in the house. The water warms, but the tension in her body remains.
She loves Allan. That much she is sure about. He’s her best friend. If only she hadn’t lost that diary, she may have been able to help Allan.
Laura obsesses about making a different choice when she’d seen Allan’s diary sitting on his bedside. But no matter how long she tried to think of a different outcome, the fact remained. She’d lost Allan’s trust and made a total fool of him to everyone in the school.
She dries her hair with her towel and brushes it excessively. How could anyone believe that a flower’s pollen could send them across the galaxy! To top it off, Laura’s friend, Sadie, texted her about Morty’s Travels. The children’s book proved that Allan hadn’t gone anywhere. It was published forty years ago. Allan’s parents no doubt read that book to him when he was a child. Laura’s mother had read her those books when she was young. “Oh, Allan,” she says out loud. “You’ve had such a terrible experience.” Morty’s Travels must be a way for him to remember his parents, to grieve for them. “It’s no wonder your fantasy memory is so strong.” Laura sighs. “You’ll get over it. That flower you seek will never be found, and you’ll forget all about it.” Allan’s other aspects of his personality will survive: his courage, his smarts, his humor, and his loyalty. That’s what she loves about him.
Laura starts to apply her lotion. Maybe she can still hang out with him if he gets some more therapy. He quit too soon. Rubic should insist he go back to Dr. Brooks. “Dr. Brooks obviously didn’t help you much,” Laura says to a photo on her desk of her and Allan accepting swimming excellence medals from the academy. “I helped you. I gave you the respect you deserved. You’ve always been a good friend, the best.”
The sun finally rises above the horizon. Its golden radiance reflects off the metal bathroom windowsill. It makes Laura flinch, but even in that moment she can feel its warmth. She runs to her bedroom window and yanks open the blinds. Light spills into her room and warms her skin, and she stands in its grip. I’m going to go to Allan. I messed things up and so I need to fix them. He needs me now.
She realizes she’s half-naked with only her towel wrapped around her. Embarrassment causes her to draw away from the window and laugh out loud.
After throwing on some jeans and a t-shirt, she rushes out of the house. Allan didn’t live far away, only two streets, and if he plans on hiking today, he’ll be leaving in about a half hour. She has time to get to him.
The morning air feels good on her face. She speed walks past ticking lawn sprinklers and morning joggers, startles a dog and sends it into a barking panic, and finally gets to Allan’s house.
Allan’s house pulls her attention like a black hole. The quantity of toilet paper wasted on the practical joke could clean the tushies of everyone in the state for a week! The images on Friendbook didn’t quite capture the extraordinary scene. She felt tears swell up. Oh, how Allan must have felt when he saw this. Her worry deepened. She has to see him, to apologize again and again, and try to make things better.
She walks past the gray van and knocks on the front door. A moment later, Rubic answers. His eyes are red, his hair sticks up and out in crazy directions, and there seems to be a chunk of a cheese puff lodged in his beard.
“Laura,” Rubic says without any emotion or nicety.
“I need to talk to Allan. I feel so bad. I know I can do something…”
“Haven’t you done enough?” Rubic puts his hands on his hips. “You stole something you should not have stolen.”
“I know.” Tears swell in her eyes. “I just want to talk to him. Five minutes, please.”
Rubic sighs. “I’ll go get him.” He closes the door instead of letting her inside.
Laura’s hands clutch together and press into her chest. Her heart aches in a way she’s never felt before.
Rubic flings the door open, his eyes wild. “Uh, Allan isn’t here. His All-Terrain chair is gone and so is his pack.”
“Were did he go?”
“Go home. When I find him, I’ll have him call you,” he says.
Laura doesn’t want to go home, she tries to turn but can’t. “You don’t think he’s gone to the mountain to hike by himself, do you?”
“No. That’s crazy. He has no way of getting there. He’d have to hire the taxi and that would be, like, a one-hundred-dollar ride. Allan doesn’t have that much money. He’s gone to the Riverwalk. He’s gone there to think, to be by himself. Please, he’s feeling bad. I will find him and talk to him first, then you can. Just go and wait for his call.”
Laura turns and walks down the walkway. At the sidewalk, she turns and watches Rubic close the door.
She presses the phone button on her cell. “Call Allan,” she orders her phone.
“Calling Allan,” the phone responds.
The phone rings and rings. She hangs up and texts, ‘Call me. I need to see you. I’m sorry and I want to make it up to you.’
She turns and jogs home. As she nears her house she stops running and dials his phone again. No response. “He always answers. Something is wrong, I can feel it.” Laura bursts into her home. “Mom!” she yells at the top of her lungs.
Mrs. Domley comes down the stairs in baby-blue sweats, her hair pinned up in a top bun, and she’s holding a coffee mug. “No need to yell like that. What is it?”
“I need you to drive me to the mountain. I feel so awful about losing Allan’s diary and betraying him like that.”
“Oh, honey, just call him.”
“I did! He’s not answering. Mr. Westerfield was shocked that he wasn’t home. Allan has gone to the mountain by himself. I know it.”
“How did he get to the mountain by himself?”
“Allan mentioned taking a taxi up there.” Laura said, talking fast, the blood pounding in her eardrum.
“Oh, that’s an hour away. How could he afford that?”
“I don’t know how he has the money. I just know that’s where he’s gone. He thinks he can travel to another planet by sprinkling pollen over his head! He’s…” Laura cries. “He’s a little delus
ional. He needs help.”
Laura’s mother hugs her hard. “I’ll take you up there, just in case you’re right.”
She sobs into her mother’s shoulder, releasing the tension that had built up all night.
“Let’s get going, if we’re to catch up to him,” Mrs. Domley says. “Do you know where he’ll be? It’s a big mountain.”
“Yes. There is one last trail he wants to hike before the summer ends. It’s by the Boy Scout camp, and he is pretty excited about it. There’s a huge field of flowers there.” Laura feels like she knows the mountainside as well as she knows the Bill of Rights, which is extremely well.
Mrs. Domley and Laura hop into the yellow MINI Cooper and head to the mountain as fast as the car will carry them.
The mountain is a lovely place, lush, expansive, quiet. Laura loved hiking the trails with Allan and Rubic, spying the birds and occasional deer. They’d crossed the river on the trails, and every time they did, Laura would think about how a flash flood came barreling down with such force that it swept up Allan and Rubic. It’s hard for Laura to picture because the river is so shallow. But that’s what happened. Rubic was pinned under a boulder, and Allan had to crawl to get help. Laura would often think about how hard that must have been for someone who is paralyzed. Allan is as determined and strong as she is.
At some point along Allan’s journey, Alice had abducted him and taken him to the dam. Her reasons remain a mystery. The newspapers had their fun with some crazy ideas about it all. None of their ideas are as crazy as Allan’s idea of space travel.
Mrs. Domley takes the freeway exit at dangerous speeds. She speeds down Pine Road and stops at the last gas station with a food mart and fills the tank.
“I’m going to get me and Allan a drink, his favorite,” Laura says. Her mother nods.
Laura runs into the food mart and gets herself a mocha and Allan a frappuccino, and then returns to the car.
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