by Gruder, Liz
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Author
WiDo Publishing
Salt Lake City, Utah
www.widopublishing.com
Copyright © 2013 by Liz Gruder
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design by Heidi Sutherlin
Book Design by Marny K. Parkin.
Print ISBN: 978-1-937178-29-1
This book is dedicated to:
Casey Gruder, Kenneth Vinet, Patricia B. Smith
& of course, Mom
Your love, support & feedback were appreciated.
I love you all.
The folks at Wido: Karen, Summer & Allie
Your encouragement and savvy made this book possible.
Thank you.
And to Starseeds everywhere
May your hearts & minds awaken to your own
awesome power to seed this world into
a golden age of love, light and peace.
Chapter 1
For as long as Kaila Guidry could remember, she wore caps with layers of black Velostat film hidden inside—a kind of plastic resembling double-strength garbage bags. Her mother never permitted Kaila to go hatless; her long blonde hair never hung freely under the sun. Hats of varied sorts were as common to Kaila as socks.
“Socks protect your feet,” her mom counseled. “Hats protect your mind.”
As a kid, Kaila never questioned this dictum since her mother and grandmother also wore protective headgear and she had little contact with the outside world. But now, at sixteen, nearly everything her family did and thought struck her as completely retarded.
They lived one step out of the Stone Age, shunning cable TV for a handful of snoozer local stations, chaperoning her Blockbuster DVD selections, and only permitting a computer a few months ago. Going online made Kaila painfully aware that an expansive universe existed outside her home on acres of land and forest, the nearest neighbor a mile away.
Other girls’ families didn’t jail them with only dogs and horses as companions. Other girls had pretty hair that they didn’t hide and cover with loser hats. They went to movies, parties, and concerts. They had crushes. And rather than only far-off strangers accepting their Facebook friend requests—they had real, flesh-and-blood friends.
And her family thought they might placate her with a machine!
The pull chain on the kitchen ceiling fan clicked on the turning blades; its tap-tap-tap steadily kindling Kaila’s aggravation. Outside, the Louisiana humidity burned hot as a boiler room. The silence in and around the old house made Kaila want to scream.
Her stepfather Mike, a Mississippi River tugboat captain, snored in an armchair in the living room adjoining the kitchen. Her Paw Paw, his head bald from chemotherapy, also dozed. Though they might sleep their lives away, Kaila would be damned if she’d rot in this mausoleum one more minute.
“I’m not wearing these stupid hats anymore!” Kaila ripped the gray baseball cap from her head and flung it away like a Frisbee. Her blonde hair spilled over her shoulders.
Her mother’s thick glasses magnified the bags under her eyes while her unruly black ponytail escaped the protective confines of her own baseball cap. She snatched Kaila’s hat from the floor.
“Put it on,” she commanded.
“No,” Kaila shouted. “You never let me go anywhere, do anything. I’m dying in this crypt.”
“Put this hat on now.”
“No.” Kaila narrowed her eyes. “We’re like freaking pioneers—we don’t even have cable TV. It’s ridiculous!”
Before her mother could respond, Kaila launched her true missile of intent. “I don’t want to be home schooled anymore. I want to go to a real school. I want friends. I want a life!”
Her mother wrestled with Kaila over the table, trying to force the hat on her head.
“Get off me!” Kaila pushed her mother.
The legs of her chair grated on the ceramic tiles. Under the table, Lucy, a black Labrador, yelped. Woofy, the other house dog, a small mutt with flaxen-colored fur, bolted and scrambled onto Mike’s lap.
Kaila grew short of breath. She thrust out her four-fingered hand and with her right palm reached for her inhaler. She puffed and inhaled, holding the aerosol inhalant in her lungs. No wonder she couldn’t breathe. All these old people were suffocating her to death.
Her grandmother Nan ambled into the kitchen. A large woman, she wore a lime-green blouse and a maroon bell-shaped hat that hid her white hair.
“Kaila,” Nan said. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t stand it!” Kaila cried. “I’m stuck here like a prisoner in solitary confinement. I just can’t—” She balled her fists, seething with pent-up frustration.
The globe light of the ceiling fan shattered. Glass shards assailed the kitchen table. Her mother shrieked. Mike and Paw Paw jolted upright from their naps.
Kaila winced. Lights tended to explode when her emotions ran high. She shot up, ran through the house to the back bathroom, and locked the door.
Her hair, which fell to the middle of her back, was the color of sunlight. She had the right to show it—like everyone else on this planet. Good riddance to that hot, itchy hat!
She lined her eyelids with a violet eye pencil she’d taken from her mother’s dresser. The eyeliner enhanced the depth and electric blue of her huge eyes; it also drew attention away from her tiny nose and mouth.
“Kaila, you open this door,” her mother shouted.
Kaila stared at her reflection. She wasn’t bad-looking. Maybe too large of a head. Was she really an “egghead” like that boy had said in Wal-Mart? Seeing her three long slender fingers and a thumb on her left hand, the boy had also teased her as a “claw-monster.”
She was different, but she wasn’t a monster.
“Kaila!” Her mother pounded on the locked bathroom door.
Why couldn’t her mother leave her alone? She’d shut her out, paint her eyelids with this cool silver metallic eye shadow and pretend she was getting ready for a date.
She’d fall in love, oh he was so damn hot and fun and smart, made her laugh and understood her like no one here ever would. They’d run away—far away—to another world… .
Her stepfather banged on the bathroom door.
“Kaila,” Mike yelled. “Open this damned door. If you don’t, I swear I’ll knock it down.”
Kaila went to the window, tried to unlatch it. The thing hadn’t been opened in fifty years. A dormant fly buzzed near-death on the sill. It was trapped, seeing a tantalizing kaleidoscope outside world with its compound eyes.
“Young lady, open this door,” Mike called again.
“You’re not my father. I don’t have to listen to you.”
“I am your father.”
“You are not. I don’t even have a father!”
She didn’t know who her real father was, and her mother downright refused to speak of him.
&nb
sp; “Kaaai-la!” Her mother sounded desperate.
Nan slapped the door. “Open this door, Kaila.”
What the hell? She couldn’t even breathe in the bathroom without the entire family trying to monitor her every breath.
Then, without warning, something invisible, yet razor-like slashed through Kaila’s forehead between her eyes. Inside her mind, lightning struck. It flashed down her throat, straight to the middle of her heart with a thunderous jolt. The intensity of pain in her chest made her shake.
Scared, she staggered and unlocked the door.
Her mother was on her knees, eyes wide beneath her glasses. Her own cap had fallen to the floor, but she gripped Kaila’s hat as a lifeline.
Alarmed, Kaila pushed through Mike and Nan to get to her. “Mom, it’s okay. I’m here. Get up.”
“Put on this cap.”
Kaila heard, but more so, felt the desperation, and worse, the fear. Her mother’s fevered emotions were being transmitted to her sharp as a pike of lightning. Kaila quivered with the intensity of the emotional storm; she desperately tried to erect some umbrella or block to lessen the assault. But to no avail.
“They’ll come for you,” her mother said in a high pitch. “Please. Put it on!”
“Who will come for me?” Kaila asked in a rough whisper.
Enfolding her arms around Kaila, her mother pressed her thin body close like a shield. She nuzzled her cheek against her daughter’s and Kaila saw bizarre images: shadows, flashes of blinding white light, spindly four-fingered hands. A pervasive other-world odor—something metallic or medicinal. Her mother, lying naked on a metal table: things in her body.
Kaila felt paralyzed like her mom in the vision. What in hell had happened to her? As nausea rolled through Kaila, she jerked her head away.
But again, her mother drew her near, and she received another vision: a dark two-lane country highway and headlights of an oncoming car. A sickening swerve, then a hard jolt, metal on metal, pain so intense she went blind. Darkness.
Kaila knew her mother had been in a car crash while pregnant with her. The accident explained her finger deformity. Was she seeing her mother’s past?
The vision reverted to the first with the terrifying white light, the metal table and the huge black eyes of those creatures. Their eyes commandeered their victims to do whatever they wanted.
Kaila knew her mother’s terror, paralyzed on the table like in surgery but awake, unable to move or communicate, only her mind screaming. The fear transmuted to Kaila like lightning ripping apart the dark skies of time and space.
Oh, God! She had to stop this!
Kaila moved away from her mother, snatched the baseball cap, and pushed it on her head. She heard the plastic crinkle. Instantly, her mind cleared.
“Thank you, baby,” her mother gasped. “Never, ever, do that again.” She wrapped her arms around Kaila.
“I’m not a baby.” Kaila shrugged out of her mother’s grasp. The hairs on her neck and arms stood on end and her stomach sickeningly coiled as she tried to sort out what had just happened.
Woofy nudged Kaila’s knee with his wet nose. His ears were back and one sad brown eye peeped out below sandy hair. Breathless, she petted the dog.
“No, I’m not going to run away,” Kaila said. Woofy cocked his head.
“Okay, you caught me,” she admitted. “I’m lying. Yes, I am going to run away unless they let me go to school.”
Woofy crouched on his paws, his haunches raised, as he barked vehemently.
“Well, at least you have Lucy to play with,” Kaila countered.
“Stop,” Mike said. “It’s like you’re actually talking to the damn dog.”
Kaila moved her large eyes up at her stepfather. He was such a jerk. She began to boil again. No one understood. She wanted out, out, out!
As Woofy barked into a frenzy, Kaila grew exasperated. She shouted at the dog, “I am not being selfish. Yes, yes, I love you, I’m not going to leave you—I just,” her voice cracked. “I’m lonely! Can’t you freaking understand?”
Then, the fire alarm in the hall sounded its high-pitched beeping.
Everyone in the hallway looked up at the alarm.
“Aarrgh!” Kaila cried as she snatched a stool from the bathroom. Standing on the stool, she reached up and reset the alarm. She stared down at her family, crowded in the hallway.
“I’m calm now,” she lied, drawing a breath. “But I am—hear me clearly—I am going to school.”
She cast her gaze on Woofy. “And not another word from you either.”
Kaila stood alone on the street corner waiting for the school bus. Lucy and Woofy tried to follow, but Mike held their collars. Everyone stood outside the house, watching her trudge down the long clamshell road leading away from the house out to the rural road.
The Guidrys lived in a two-story American Greek Revival style manor, the family home since 1837. Elegant, with its white brick facade, stately columns, black shutters and two chimneys, the house showed signs of age. Still, the Guidry family held claim to the land—seven acres in Bush, Louisiana, replete with horse stables, duck pond, open fields, and piney woods.
Though it was a trek to the bus stop, Kaila was adamant that she go alone. There was no way she’d be seen at the bus stop with her family.
Her mother had made a comment about her being bull-headed and that high school wasn’t the fairytale she expected, that there were a lot of rough, mean people in the world.
Kaila had simply smiled; she had won the war and that’s what counted. Winning had even included cable TV, although by the time school started, she was sick of vicariously viewing other people’s lives.
It was August and though early morning, hot and humid. Below her t-shirt, sweat trickled down her side.
Kaila wore a long blonde wig that resembled her own hair, with the black Velostat plastic wrapped underneath in layers around her head. The false hair proved hotter than the hats, but it was the only way her mother would permit her to go to school. Since the dress code didn’t allow hats, the wig seemed a small concession to receive parole.
Except for tree frogs and crickets trilling in the bushes, it was quiet at the intersection. Then, she heard the shifting gears of the bus. Kaila hid her left hand in her jeans pocket.
The bus stopped and the door opened. The students stared as she walked down the aisle. She flopped into the first empty seat and peered around. There was a girl with jet-black hair and heavy eyeliner. Another girl with long brown hair, shimmering eye shadow, and pink lipstick, wore a hot pink blouse.
Kaila glanced down at her faded jeans and short-sleeve, navy t-shirt. Soon as she got to school, she’d apply the makeup she had stashed in her book bag.
When they arrived at Bush High, everyone seemed to know where to go. Outside, clusters of students chattered. They’d grown up together and knew each other.
Kaila clutched her schedule, damp in her moist hand. She glanced at her watch. 7:10. Bell didn’t ring till 7:30. She shifted from foot to foot, not knowing what to do.
Eyes followed as she went to the door. Locked. She guessed they’d unlock the doors when the bell rang. Now some people were pointing at her. Her former bravado vanished into a puff of smoke.
Please don’t do something stupid, she prayed. Her stomach hurt.
Kaila wandered along the brick school, past the noisy groups. She couldn’t just go up to someone and say, “Hi. I’m Kaila, what’s up?” She could hear their derisive laughter echoing in her mind.
But she couldn’t stand there alone like a dumbass, either. God, it was hot out here. Dark sweat stains formed under her arms. She could be a poster girl for using deodorant.
She scanned the schoolyard and saw more people glancing at her. She decided to move. Just walk like she knew what she was doing.
She ambled along the side of the immense school, looking down at the dandelions.
As she turned the corner to the rear of the school, she pressed herself
against the brick wall. Although the rising sun shone bright and hot, it was at least a place of refuge.
Kaila reached into her book bag and retrieved the eye pencil and compact. She lined her eyes and painted on some lip gloss. Perspiration trickled down the front of her ear from the confining black plastic.
How would she bear this lame wig?
Looking up from her compact, she was startled to see six people a few yards in front of her. She hadn’t heard them approach.
They stood in one row and simultaneously swiveled their heads to consider her. They had huge, unsettling eyes. They wore silver metallic overalls that clung to their sinewy bodies, showing every curve and muscle. Both males and females harbored an androgynous quality.
One male advanced from the line toward her. He walked with martial-like authority. Staring with eyes that appeared large and gold in the sun, as he passed beneath an oak tree’s shade, they turned green as pools reflecting light from the sky. His eyes emitted a force so captivating that once they locked, she could not look away. Kaila’s heart surged, as if electrified. He literally stole her breath and her lips parted.
He was about her age, strangely handsome, with wide shoulders and spiky sandy-colored hair. He wore a black t-shirt below his silver overalls. The silver form-fitting material accentuated his well-defined chest. Despite his small nose and mouth, he resembled a Roman statue she’d glimpsed in a history book.
He reached out and took her left hand. Kaila winced. That was the last thing she wanted him to see. His touch held a strange current. As he considered her fingers, his eyes widened. She noticed that he, too, had only four fingers—three long fingers and a thumb. He leaned closer. Kaila inhaled something like the odor of cloves and ozone in the air before lightning. He stared deeper into her eyes. Intimidated, she tried to look away, yet found she could not.
In her mind, she’d been thrown from a cliff into space. She transformed into an eagle and flew with spread wings over canyons and rivers and rock, free to glide in the wind. He, too, had opened wings and glided through the canyon beside her high above the earth.