Becoming

by Glenn Rolfe

  The two days since the accident had been pure hell. She had lost Brady’s father, Nicholas, and their eldest son, Bryce, to a snowmobile accident two winters ago. She would be damned if the Lord was going to make off with her baby.

  Tears rained down over her pale cheeks as Brady opened his father’s emerald-green eyes. “Oh, my baby.”

  She rose. The strands of her long, dark hair fell in his face as she leaned forward and kissed his forehead over and over again. She stroked his brown curls and looked upon him with the greatest relief. “Brady? Can you hear me, sweetie?” She wasn’t really sure how he was supposed to respond, or even if he could.

  Brady wasn’t sure how long he’d been out. A couple hours? A day? A week? Whatever happened had left him feeling weird. Different. His eyes stung, like they had the night he and Jeremy Rice had stayed up until the dawn, drinking too many cans of Mountain Dew and playing game after game of Madden football.

  His mother stroked his hair and kissed his forehead.

  “Brady. Honey—” she said.

  “Water,” he said. It was all he could manage. He knew it would serve two purposes at once. One, it would appease his mother’s worries (he could only imagine how panicked she was), and two, it would wash the sandpaper coating from his mouth and throat.

  He freaked out when his mom told him he’d been out for nearly two days, but seeing her tears roll over her red cheeks, while she smiled like God was holding her hand, calmed him down. He hugged her.

  The doctors kept him at the hospital for an extra night to run some additional tests and make sure he was okay. The tests all came back clear. He called Kim to tell her he was okay, and thanked her father for helping. Thursday afternoon, they rolled him out in a wheelchair, even though he could walk just fine. He let his mother take him by the arm and walk him to her car. There was no shame in sucking up the sympathy for a bit. When they arrived home, Mom whipped him up a pot of her amazing American chop suey and smiled at him when he went back for seconds. Stuffed and ready to catch up on the weeks’ worth of homework Kim dropped off earlier in the week, he kissed his mom goodnight.

  “Ma?”

  “Yes, sweetie?”

  “Would it be all right if I went over to Kim’s tomorrow after school?”

  “Brady…” she said. She put the dinner plates in the sink, turned and folded her arms across her chest. “I was planning on you staying home tomorrow. You need your rest this weekend.”

  “Mom, please, I have to go tomorrow. I just want to get everything back to normal.”

  “I know, honey, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea. You should stay—”

  “I’m not staying home,” he said, more defiant than he meant to sound.

  She threw her arms up and turned back to the dishes. “Fine. Fine,” she said. “You can go to school, but I want you back here right after.”

  “Ma,” he said.

  “Brady, don’t argue with me. You can talk to Kim at school. I want you home right after.”

  “This is such bull.”

  She spun around. “Brady Gavin Carmichael, this is not up for debate.” Her lips tightened. The rosiness in them went pale. Her eyes glistened under the soft kitchen light. Brady’s insubordinate mood was kicked in the guts. He’d stepped over the line.

  “Mom, I’m sorry.”

  “I think you better go to your room. If you’re going to school in the morning, you’ll want to have some of that homework done.” With that, his mother went back to the dishes.

  Brady, shoulders slumped, guilt settled nauseatingly over his chop suey, left his mom in the kitchen and climbed the stairs to his room.

  On his bed, there was a note attached to his homework in Kim’s bubbly handwriting. Kim Jenner was his best friend. He hadn’t asked a girl out yet, but he would ask Kim if he ever grew the gonads. She always smiled at him, but lately, her smile held something different: magic or a hint of something exciting and unknown. He’d noticed his palms were sweatier around her when she smiled like that. Sad that his mom didn’t want him going to her house tomorrow; he wondered if there might still be a way to change her mind in the morning. He doubted it, but staring at Kim’s note and the little smiley face next to the heart she’d drawn, he held on to the hope.

  He pulled up his Facebook page. Kim wasn’t on. He left her a message relaying the story about upsetting his mother and not being allowed out tomorrow after school. He checked for his cousin, Kellen, who was also MIA from Facebook, and probably busy playing video games. He left him a message that all was good and signed off. If he didn’t get off-line, he would never get to the pile of homework.

  He finished the heap of papers marked “Monday” and climbed into bed. It was nearly ten thirty. As he shut off the light and closed his eyes, he thought of the pipe from Mr. Packard’s backyard and its blue slime. What was it? Whatever that crap coming from the pipe was, it was charged with something. He remembered the energy that flowed up his hand and arm that day before he’d blacked out. The urge to go back swelled up inside him. Moments later, he was fast asleep.

  Kim sat quiet, half listening to her father’s supper suggestions, thinking about Brady. She was glad he was okay. She had hoped to get to talk to him tonight. After checking her Facebook on her dad’s phone, she’d seen his message about how his mom didn’t want him going out after school tomorrow. Kim could understand that. After all the Carmichaels had been through the last couple of years, with Brady losing his dad and his brother, she didn’t blame his mom for wanting him to get his rest. In his message, Brady expressed his irritation with his mom’s decision, but at least he had a mom who cared.

  “Kimbo? Did you hear what I said?” her dad asked.

  “No…” she said.

  “Haddock or steak?

  “Either one, Dad.” She wasn’t one of these modern preteens who had already started diets. Much to her father’s appreciation, Kim was a meat lover. Her sister Cheryl was a different story.

  “Hey Dad, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, kiddo. What is it?” he said. He slid a plate with the fish back into the refrigerator and pulled out a cold Pabst.

  “Do you think Mom left because of us?”

  “Kimbo, don’t even think that. Your mother…well, she had to do what was right for her, I guess,” he said. “It wasn’t anything that you or Cheryl did. I don’t even think it had anything to do with me. Your mom…she just changed.”

  Kim settled back into her silence, wishing she had a mom like Mrs. Carmichael. Brady’s mom would be there for him to the end. A tear rolled from the corner of her eye. She wiped it off her nose and took a deep breath.

  “C’mon, Kimbo, your mom loves you. You and Cheryl both.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She didn’t know that. Her mom was long gone and never looked back. Kim accepted the rejection, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

  “Tell you what, why don’t you go pick out a movie? Whatever you want.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything. I’ll get supper going and we can make it dinner and a movie. Eat our steak and smashed sweet potatoes right there in the living room. How’s that sound?”

  “Can we eat sitting on the couch?” Her mother would lose her mind if she saw them eating in the proximity of her precious couch. It was a wonder she hadn’t taken it with her.

  “Yup. And if you spill some A.1. on the cushion, so be it.” He took a swig from the brown bottle in his hand, stood up and kissed her on the forehead. “Go ahead. I’ll get this started.”

  She sprang up to choose a movie, her melancholy pushed back down, and stopped in the doorway between the two rooms. “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  “Love you too, honey bunny.”

  Chapter Eight

  Brady stayed home Friday after school, just like his mom told him to. The next morning, he snuck out his bedroom window. He would take the heat for it later. He needed to go back to the pipe.
/>   “Are you sure you should be back out here?” Kim said.

  Brady didn’t know why, but he knew he had to go back. “Yeah, I told you I’m fine.”

  “Let’s make a deal though.” Kim grabbed him by the arm. They stopped at the edge of the path.

  Brady turned to her, prepared to protest whatever overblown concern she might have, but saw the look in her eyes and dropped his stubborn intentions. “Okay, what is it?”

  “Promise me you won’t touch that pipe again.”

  “Promise,” he said.

  “Or that blue stuff.”

  “I’m not stupid, Kim. I’m not in any rush to go back to the emergency room.”

  “Well, I’m not sure why we’re even coming back out here.”

  “Come on. You can’t tell me you haven’t wanted to check this place out. You were here. You felt that…that energy.” Brady could feel it already. His skin crawled in anticipation. He watched Kim try to think up a lie, but he knew the truth. She wouldn’t have come with him this morning if she didn’t want to. There was something strange here, and neither of them wanted to miss it.

  “Yeah, I guess. But part of me came with you to make sure you didn’t go and do anything stupid.”

  “All right, Miss Secret Service. You watch over me and make sure I don’t get zapped again. Can we go now?”

  Kim smiled. He loved to make her smile. They continued side by side back to the opening in the earth.

  “So I haven’t exactly been with it for the last couple of days. Did I miss any other booms?” Brady said.

  “Yeah, actually, there were a couple of smaller booms both nights you were at the hospital,” Kim said. Brady watched the soft, late spring breeze lift her blonde locks in a whimsical dance. “They were in the same area as the last one.”

  “Out back of Packard’s?” Brady put his hands in his pockets, his eyes on her.

  “Kind of… From what I gathered from the news, they just said the rumblings were in the same area. I don’t know. I wanted to come check it out, you know, to see if anything more had come up, but my dad would have killed me. He’s pretty much refused to let me leave the house since what happened to you.”

  Brady thought of the blue ooze, the strange vibrations, the odd smell of mildew and rot. A chill raced through his veins. “Do you know if anyone else has been out here since then? Any scientists…like when the first couple of booms happened?”

  “No, but it’s funny that you mention that. There was a couple of people claiming that they saw crazy lights in the sky the nights of the booms, and another guy who said that his drinking water smelled poisoned and that his dog had been taken,” Kim said.

  “Yeah, I heard the UFO rumors before our incident. The guy with the poisoned water and abducted dog is news to me though. Where did that happen?”

  “That was over on Libby Road, out by Jason McCourt’s house. It was his neighbor Mr. Huber that thinks the aliens took his dog. Not sure it really means anything, but Jason wasn’t at school this morning either,” Kim said.

  “What do you think’s going on?” Brady said.

  Kim shook her head, lifted her hands up and shrugged. “Beats me, but back to your scientist thing. They had some guy from the National Earthquake Center in Colorado on the local news last night, talking about how the booms are natural seismic shifts underground, sort of like what causes earthquakes.”

  “Earthquakes? In Wisconsin?” Brady said.

  “No, not really.”

  “I’m confused. Why was the earthquake guy on?”

  “They were denying that the booms are earthquakes.”

  “What then?” Brady kicked a rock down the path.

  “They wouldn’t say, but get this: my dad listens to talk radio, and last night this guy on one show was talking about how the ground cracked. He said that it was part of the North American bow and something about how Mexico and the US Southwest are moving west while everything east of the Mississippi River is tearing away.”

  “Ah…what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure that guy knows what he’s talking about. He was tying it into something called Planet X.”

  “And do you buy any of that?” Brady said. He looked over at her smiling eyes and challenged them with a raised eyebrow.

  “I don’t know. I overheard my sister’s boyfriend—”

  “Which one?” Brady interrupted.

  “Shut up, she only has one right now. Anyways my sister’s current boyfriend, Bobby, was saying something about testing of the waters, the start of something big, and some nonsense about a cult called the Illuminati. Some kind of cover-up conspiracy,” Kim shook her head, recalling Bobby’s rant. “It sounded pretty far out there, but who knows, right?”

  Brady fell silent. He pondered all of this new information as they came to the end of the path and into the clearing that was Mr. Packard’s backyard. He didn’t know about a giant crack or Planet X, but he had read his mom’s copy of The Da Vinci Code this summer, and he remembered the Illuminati being some old brotherhood of evil. That would be kind of cool. Still, it didn’t seem to fit. Not in his mind anyway. He was still leaning toward something extraterrestrial—maybe not E.T. alien, but something more old world, like when they discovered all those creepy-looking new species of fish that live deep, deep down in the ocean. Maybe something ancient was digging its way back up.

  As they approached the broken ground, Kim spoke up. “Shouldn’t the flea market be open right now?”

  She was right. Brady’s mom and Aunt Joanie were both regular Saturday flea-marketers. They always came back to the house after lunch with piles of junk that they’d picked up here. Luckily his mom had only dragged him along once last year. All he remembered about that day was that the place looked like it was about to fall at any moment and that the owner, Mr. Packard, looked like a grease-monkey pervert who doubled as a kidnapper. Brady never went back, but Aunt Joanie and his mom still went every weekend. Right now, the place should have been crawling with treasure seekers, but instead, it looked dead.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Mr. Packard’s sick or something,” he said.

  “Or dead.”

  “Real nice, Kim…jeez.”

  “Or taken, like Mr. Huber’s dog.”

  Brady gave her a playful shove, pushing her in the direction of the hole. “Come on.”

  They came upon the ruptured ground. The cracked pipe was still there; the blue stuff, however, was not. Brady shrugged his backpack from his shoulders and set the canvas bag down beside the spot. He pulled out a metal cylinder that used to be his brother’s old thermos.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Kim said.

  Brady didn’t answer. He knew she would not approve of his plan. He set the cylinder down and reached into the bag for the antenna he’d broken off an old radio his Aunt Joanie had given him from one her trips to Packard’s.

  “Hey,” she said. “You aren’t going to try and touch that weird blue stuff, are you?”

  “Calm down. I’m just going to try and get a little of it in this container.”

  “Brady.”

  He rose and put his hands on her shoulders. “Listen, if it gets too weird, I’ll drop it and we’ll get the heck out of here. Deal?” He watched her brow furrow and her bottom lip puff out as she looked back toward the path.

  “Deal?” he repeated.

  She turned to him. “Okay, but if anything happens, we’re running home and we’re not coming back out here again.”

  “Deal,” he said. He put his hand out to her. They shook and turned to the hole in the earth.

  Brady pulled the end of the little antenna out, extending it to its full length. The chrome stick was only about a foot and a half long, but he figured it should do the trick. He knelt next to the busted pipe he had promised not to touch and peered down into it. He couldn’t see anything. He looked over his shoulder to find Kim chewing on her nails. He gave her a nod and turned back to the pipe.

  “Be careful,�
�� she said.

  Brady moved with the cautiousness of a sloth and inserted the chrome antenna into the dark pipe. With the rod halfway in, the soft bubbling noises they’d heard last week started up again. He felt the sweat on his palms and the backs of his knees. He steadied the tremor in his hand and eased the antenna the rest of the way in.

  “Brady…” Kim said.

  He could feel something working against the end of the chrome stick. He’d found it. He swiveled his wrist and tried to get an idea of how much of the gunk was there.

  “Brady…”

  “What?”

  “You’re glowing.”

  Brady looked at his arms. They gave off a bluish glow. Kim’s unconscious step away from him had not been missed. He didn’t blame her.

  “Pull it out, Brady.”

  He didn’t hesitate. He yanked the antenna, but it didn’t move. His sweaty grip slipped free, causing him to fall back on his rump. The connection broken, the blue radiance surrounding him faded away.

  “Whoa,” he said. He stared at his arms; the blue glow had been replaced by a rash of goose bumps.

  “Ah, Brady…”

  The antenna slipped from sight. He grabbed his backpack and pulled out a soup ladle and a roll of steel twine. Before Kim could protest, he hooked the twine through the utensil’s handle and lowered it behind the antenna. The seconds it took the ladle to reach what he’d come for dragged. His palms were slick with anticipation. The seconds dragged. Brady let it sink another six inches or so before wrapping the twine around his hand. He pulled the utensil up. There was a little resistance before the ladle pulled free with a suctioning plop.

  He could feel the tingling in his hand begin to run up his arm. The blue aura returned with it. He had to pull the ladle out before he got juiced again, but something stopped him. He closed his eyes and held steady. A vision took shape in his mind. He could see them—him and Kim, but from a distance.