Max Quick

by Mark Jeffrey

  Max got to his feet.

  This was madness!

  He broke into a run. And that’s when something else curious happened.

  He found he was running much faster than he should have been. It was as though his movements were hugely amplified. His sudden speed was terrific, astonishing.

  Gasping, Max saw buildings whiz by in great blurs of granite gray. The world was a wash of color and velocity.

  He stopped so short that he almost lost his balance.

  What was this, now?

  Max started off again at a cautious jog.

  There it was again. He increased his pace to a full run. The landscape blurred on either side. Whoa!

  His legs weren’t actually moving faster; it was more like each stride was springier, more supercharged, more full of force.

  He turned a corner. But it was a lot more difficult to control than he’d expected. He tripped and came to a sprawling stop on his face. He was scraped, but nothing was broken.

  Was it because Time was stopped? Was physics now somehow . . . altered as a result?

  Working up to a full run, Max covered twenty blocks as though they were nothing at all.

  A bolt of sheer joy shot through him.

  Suddenly, Max leaped. He laughed as he sailed over several cars. He landed in a field of grass just off the freeway.

  He’d traveled miles in mere minutes.

  Max sped off again, zipping along the pavement in a blur. Then as an experiment, he twisted his body and dug his feet in sideways, like he was stopping quickly on ice skates. A shower of sparks arced under his sneakers as he slid to a stop. The ground behind him was traced with a small line of fire.

  Casey grew more panicked with every passing moment.

  She’d been outside her building. She’d walked through the streets and shops. Everyone and everything was frozen. It seemed to have happened to everyone—except her.

  Casey couldn’t bear to look at her mom anymore. It was too sad to see her there, but basically not there. Maybe it will be like this forever, she thought, and tears streamed down her cheeks. This was horrible, to be completely alone and scared like this. What was she going to do?

  She could feel a panic attack coming on. Her mouth was getting dry and coppery tasting, and her scalp was prickly. She ran up to her room, hyperventilating.

  As she passed her full-length antique mirror, she caught her reflection. She was shocked at how sad and afraid she looked, and that scared her even more. Her cheeks were rough and flushed from crying so much.

  But she walked toward her reflection. She put her hands up and touched the glass. Maybe this is the only other living, moving person I will ever see again, she thought. A fresh back draft of panic welled up inside her.

  Before she even realized what she was doing, Casey screamed through an open window.

  Chapter 5

  Starland in Stillness

  As Max stood marveling at his new ability, he heard someone scream, very faintly.

  It sounded like a girl.

  A zing of hope shot through him. Was it possible that there was someone else unaffected by . . . whatever this was?

  Max strained to figure out which direction the voice was coming from. The silence actually made this more difficult: The one sound in the entire world seemed to bounce off everything and be everywhere at once.

  “HELLO?” Max shouted. He was startled by the loudness of his voice in a perfectly noiseless world.

  “Hello!” the girl’s voice answered immediately. “Who is that? Did someone hear me?”

  “Yes! I did! I can hear you! Where are you?”

  “I’m in my apartment!”

  “What’s the address?”

  “148 Royal Ridge Way!”

  “Okay. On my way!”

  Max zipped up a hill. But as he did, he caught a glimpse of the Starland beach—and gasped.

  The entire sea, from horizon to horizon, was stopped in time.

  Frozen white sea foam topped breaking waves like dabs of whipped cream. A thunderous wave was caught in the act of shattering around a gray finger of stone and violent froth haloed the rock. The vast energies of the sea had been arrested, tamed, silenced.

  To Max, this was far more shocking than anything he’d seen so far. This was the ocean. And something had managed to hit the pause button on it.

  That something had to be very powerful indeed.

  But he didn’t have time to consider this further. He continued until he came to the girl’s apartment.

  “Hey!” he called up. “Are you up there?”

  “Yes!” came the girl’s voice from somewhere above, now sounding more hopeful.

  “What apartment?”

  “912,” she yelled back.

  “Okay,” Max yelled back.

  An old man had been leaving the apartment building, and the door was wide open. Max ran through.

  He was mildly surprised to discover he could now leap fifteen stairs at once. The world had taken on the surreal physics of a dream. He bounded up five stories in seconds.

  He was going so fast that he almost didn’t notice another blur coming down at nearly the same speed.

  Max and Casey stopped short of colliding on the fifth floor landing. For a moment, they just stared at each other as if they weren’t certain the other was entirely real.

  “What’s going on?” Casey demanded.

  “I don’t—”

  “Who are you?”

  “—really know any more than—”

  “Have you seen anyone else who can move?”

  Max stopped and then simply said, “I’m Max. Max Quick.”

  “Casey Cole,” she replied, shaking his hand.

  “And no, I haven’t seen anyone else like us. I mean, who can move. Everyone else seems to be frozen.”

  “I didn’t want to wait for you,” Casey explained, bounding back up the stairs. Her voice sounded strange as she ran. Max followed. “I haven’t seen anyone else who can move. So I was afraid that maybe . . .”

  “That maybe I’d suddenly stop, too,” Max said.

  Casey nodded. They stood outside her apartment. Silently, she heated up the door handle, coaxing it out of stopped time, and then pushed it open. Interesting, Max thought, raising an eyebrow as he watched this.

  As they entered the apartment, Max noticed a woman bent over a dishwasher. “That’s my mom. She stopped when everybody else did.” Salty tears threatened to spill down her cheeks. “I was mean to her earlier. But now, I’m really, really sorry.”

  Max nodded slowly. Then he said, “Casey. Listen. We have to concentrate. If we’re going to help your mom, we’re going to have to help ourselves first.”

  Casey nodded mutely in reply. Then, her voice barely a whisper, she said, “Do you think she’s still alive?”

  Max instinctively felt Casey needed a hug. But he’d only just met her. And hugs were alien to him anyway.

  When you’re homeless, you don’t hug people. You pick their pockets.

  So Max simply said, “Yes. I don’t think she is actually hurt. I think she’s just sort of . . . paused. Or maybe we’re sped up. Maybe nothing’s happened to her, maybe something’s happened to us.”

  Casey looked longingly at her mom. “So we’re in our own special Time Pocket or something,” she said.

  Even then, Max almost reached out to hug her. But he didn’t know how.

  “What do you think caused it?” Casey asked. “Do you think it’s a natural disaster? You know, like a tornado?”

  Max thought for a moment. Then he shook his head. “I don’t think it’s an accident, if that’s what you mean. This sort of thing doesn’t just happen by itself.”

  “And why is everyone else frozen but us?”

  “That’s just it. I can’t believe we’re the only ones,” Max said. “If there’s you and me, there’s bound to be more in the . . . what did you call it? The Pocket? In the Pocket with us.”

  At that, Casey snapped her fi
ngers excitedly. “Hey, yeah,” she said. “We should check on the internet. If there are other people like us, we’ll find them online.”

  But Casey’s computer refused to turn on.

  “Electricity,” Max said. “Must be time-frozen in the wires.”

  “Well what about that, then?” Casey said, pointing at the television. The picture was frozen, but the TV was clearly on.

  “Huh,” Max said. “If something plugged into a wall was on when time stopped, I guess it will stay on. But it’s useless.”

  “Okay. Then what about something battery powered? Like a radio?”

  Casey led Max to the kitchen, doing her best to ignore her time-frozen mom. Max tried to lift the radio from the counter, but it seemed heavier than it should be: It wouldn’t budge.

  “Here,” Casey said, “this is how you do it. You have to kind of wiggle it . . . sort of . . . pull it . . . loose from . . . the Pocket . . . there!” After giving slowly at first, the radio popped free and Casey nearly fell backward.

  It turned on just fine, filling the air with dense, drowsy static. Max carefully inched the dial along molecules at a time, but not a single station was broadcasting.

  “Okay. Never mind about that. Do you have a cell phone?” Max asked.

  Casey nodded and pointed to the counter where her mom’s phone lay. Like the radio, it turned on just fine.

  But then Max sagged. He turned the screen to Casey. It blinked:

  LOOKING FOR SERVICE . . .

  Max sighed and handed it to Casey. “Well. Hang on to it anyway.” Casey slid the phone into her pocket.

  The duo then spent the next few hours exploring the time-frozen landscape of Starland. Max practiced “heating up” objects as Casey had done, but he wasn’t nearly as good at it as she was.

  Casey, on the other hand, succeeded in heating up an entire car (albeit a small one) just by rocking it. As luck would have it, the owner was nearby, and Max managed to take the keys from the man’s hand by heating them up. But when he started the car, the engine ran for all of three seconds before seizing up in a violent gnashing of metal.

  “Wow. What a piece of junk,” Max said.

  “No,” Casey said. “I think the car was just fine. It’s the Pocket that messed the car up.”

  Max looked at her with a quizzical expression.

  “The car engine is meant to run in the normal world,” Casey explained. “But you started it up inside the Pocket. And when you did, all the pieces worked faster than they should. Like how we can run really fast now, it’s the same thing. But it’s not supposed to. So the engine just fell apart and broke.”

  Starland was a ghost town with all of the people still present.

  Max and Casey went from house to house, building to building, store to store. But they saw no other people like themselves. Everyone was locked in a prison of motionlessness, their eyes glassy and dead, their limbs immobile as a statue.

  Several times, the duo attempted to heat up people they encountered with no luck. Casey found a pet store and tried a gerbil, a snake, and a kitten, all with the same result. “Weird,” she said. “It doesn’t work on anything alive.”

  Max nodded. “That is weird. I wonder what that means?”

  “I’m hungry,” Max said after an hour of this. But then, a terrible thought occurred to him. It must have shown on his face because Casey said, “What?”

  “Have you tried heating up food yet?”

  “Well no, but it’s not alive, so I doubt that it’ll be a problem.”

  “It’s not the heating up part I’m worried about,” Max said. “It’s the eating part.”

  A flash of alarm played across Casey’s face. What if they couldn’t eat time-stopped food?

  They would starve inside a desert of stopped time.

  “Okay,” Max said, seeing her expression. “Only one of us should try it. Just in case . . .” Max gulped. “In case something goes wrong. I mean, what happens if after you eat it . . .”

  “It time-stops again? Inside of you?” Casey finished, horrified. “Oh wow. Right.”

  “Right,” Max said, his face pale. I’ll move, but the food won’t, Max thought. It will rip a hole in me.

  Time-stopped food lodged in his stomach would be as deadly as a bullet.

  They found a grocery store. Max heated up a box of cereal. Then, steeling himself, he grabbed a handful from the box. His gaze locked with Casey’s, he put it in his mouth and chewed. Deliberately, he swallowed.

  “How do you feel?” Casey asked after a moment.

  “I’m okay so far,” Max said. “But I haven’t tried actually moving yet.”

  Casey suddenly lifted his shirt up.

  “Casey!” Max yelped in alarm. “Wait! What are you doing?”

  “I want to see if there are any lumps of time-stopped food pushing your stomach out anywhere.” She batted his hands away and inspected his stomach. Then she hissed in surprise: A great multitude of scars riddled his midsection. “Oh wow,” she said, clearly startled at the sight. “What happened to you?”

  Casey’s mind played through a thousand scenarios at once. Had Max been in a terrible car accident? Or been beaten terribly? She could not stop staring . . .

  “I don’t know,” Max said, clearly embarrassed now. He gently removed Casey’s hand and protectively pulled his shirt back down over his stomach. “I can’t remember.”

  Casey looked at him with new wonder. But he didn’t meet her gaze.

  “Okay,” Casey said, treading carefully now. “Well. You look fine so far.” Except for those horrible scars, she thought. But she did her best to push that out of her mind for now. “When you move, move slowly at first. Okay?”

  Max nodded.

  He twisted a little bit to his left.

  “So far so good,” Casey said. “You still feel okay?”

  Max nodded again.

  “Okay. Try taking a step backward.”

  Max did so, although it was a very little step and he took it very slowly.

  Casey nodded in approval. “That looks good also. But this makes sense now that I think about it. If an object is touching us, it seems to heat up to our time frame. Like our clothes, for example.”

  Max nodded. She was right. Their clothes had never slowed down in time at all.

  “Or air,” Casey continued nervously. “Notice that we’ve been able to breathe just fine since this all started? It’s because the air is touching our skin, I think. So the food inside you should be fine also. Anything you’re in direct contact with, actually. Well. Good to know we won’t starve to death, right?”

  But Max didn’t answer. Casey noticed that his entire posture had changed. His shoulders hunched forward and he turned his back to her.

  “C’mon,” Max said curtly. “I’ve got an idea.”

  From the rooftop of the apartment building, Max and Casey scanned the world using Casey’s telescope. They looked out across rows of houses lined up at attention.

  But not a soul stirred.

  The world was still.

  “I can see Galt and Sunday City,” Casey remarked, one eye peeping through the viewer. “That’s, like, ten miles away. And it’s the same over there. Nobody’s moving.” She looked up, fear in her gaze.

  “So. It’s the same all over the world,” Max said. “Or at least, everywhere near us.”

  In the deep distance, Mount Griswold cut across the ragged sky. Wisps of cloud whirled over the peak, also frozen in time.

  Casey swallowed and then said, “Um. Max. Listen. I’m sorry about—back there. When I lifted up your shirt. I didn’t know—”

  “It’s okay,” Max said. Almost instantly, his shoulders hunched forward.

  “I was just trying to see if—”

  “I know,” Max said, a bit harshly. And then, more gently: “I know you didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just not used to—”

  “Max!” Casey shouted, pointing. “Behind you!”

  Max whirled. Something was risi
ng up over Starland Center.

  Max’s heart skipped a beat. The museum was in Starland Center. Johnny Siren? Look to our coming . . .

  Max crouched low. Casey did the same. Max fumbled for the telescope and swung it toward the object.

  He watched as it ascended. It flew, but it definitely was not an airplane or a helicopter. It looked like a pancake made of obsidian and sandstone and covered in jewels. Some kind of strange writing covered the sides and in the center was a single crimson gem. Knives of light sprang from the jewels, cutting the dreamy darkness with beams of yellow, red, and purple.

  He was tempted to call it a UFO . . . but it didn’t look like a machine or technology at all. No metal, no engines, and no electronics were visible. Rather, it looked . . .

  Ancient. Yes. That was the right word.

  But that didn’t make any sense. Everyone knew that UFOs used antigravity technology or something. It should look futuristic. Yet this thing, whatever it was, didn’t.

  But before he could think further, the craft shot into the east and vanished.

  Casey turned toward him, salt-pale. “Max, what’s happening?”

  Over the next few days (or what passed for “days” in the Pocket), Max and Casey continued to explore the streets of Starland, looking for any sign of life.

  Max taught Casey what he knew about whooshing, as he called it. But she didn’t take to it naturally. As soon as she got any kind of superspeed up, she pulled back, terrified of what was happening.

  On the second day, they braved the Starland Museum of Antiquities, but there was no sign of Siren—or the Whispering Stone—there. Max had previously relayed the story about Johnny Siren and Jadeth to Casey. But when he had described Siren’s physical appearance, Casey had reacted oddly. She hadn’t been horrified, but rather she seemed to recognize something familiar in the story. When Max asked her about it, she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “We should go east,” Max said on the third day.

  “Why?” Casey asked.

  “Because that’s where that UFO thing went. Whatever’s causing the Pocket, I’ll bet that the answer is there.”