The Ables

by Jeremy Scott

  I began to feel like I’d finally found someone with more innate pessimism than Henry. “You’re wrong. People are inherently good.”

  “Bah,” he barked. I felt a small gust of wind from his dismissive hand-waving. “Obviously, you’re not ready to have this conversation. You’re still clutching too tightly to your security blanket.” He sighed, clearly frustrated. “Listen, you’re going to have to speed up the timetable of your maturation, young man. Before long, the prophecy will be fulfilled, and there will be a war at that point whether or not anyone is ready for it. You’re going to have to grow up while still being twelve. I don’t envy you that. The learning curve is going to be steep.” He paused for a deep breath. “And it begins now.”

  I rolled the silver disc around in my pocket. I knew what I was supposed to do as soon as Finch showed up, but I was hesitating.

  “I want you on my team, Phillip. Now, the rest of your gang, they’re okay kids. I’ll take them too, if it means I can have you. But you’re the one I really want. I’ve seen your DNA charts, son, and there’s something special about your abilities—you know this; surely, you’ve felt this!”

  Sure, Dad had said it was rare for a son to inherit his father’s power, but other than that … there definitely didn’t seem to be anything special about me. Not anything good, at least. But there had been the raid at the DNA facility, where most of the records were stolen. Did Finch know something about me that I didn’t?

  “Phillip,” he said rather unceremoniously, “you are the one we’ve all been waiting for.” Then he went silent while I processed that information.

  I was close, but I hadn’t put it together yet.

  “Let’s take another look at that prophecy, shall we? ‘He will return an outcast, one who does not see the world as others do. ‘The one who can do all,’ an unexpected hero with a terrifying rage.’ I wonder if you see how much that description fits you? Blind, shamed, outcast, even … does not see the world as others do …”

  Again, I said nothing, still not ready to believe he was suggesting what I was now sure he was suggesting.

  “They could put that under your yearbook photo, so perfectly does it describe you.”

  He wasn’t wrong, but in my mind, those words also described several other people in this town.

  “I have studied this text for decades. I’ve gone over every translation, every analysis. I’ve done the math. I’ve examined the genetic sequences of thousands of potentials. No one knows this prophecy as intimately as I do, Phillip. Elben got his start on the soil this town was built on, and thanks to my research and efforts over the last twelve months, he’ll have his return here as well. Soon. And he’ll look a lot like a certain blind telekinetic we all know.”

  He might as well have been Darth Vader telling me he was my father because that probably would have been more believable. I simply couldn’t find the words to explain how wrong it seemed he was about me.

  “But it goes on. ‘This one shall not know of his own true depth of power until he suffers great loss and injury, and he alone stands as the last protector between the world and a great evil. Only then shall he truly see. Only then shall he embrace his true purpose.’”

  Despite everything I’d experienced this year, I wasn’t sure I would call any one event a great loss or injury. Others had certainly been injured greatly because of me, but me personally? Finch’s argument was losing steam.

  As though sensing my attention waning, he continued, “Your mother—”

  I stiffened.

  “—she is going to die tonight, I’m afraid.”

  A sharp intake of air, which my lungs held onto for dear life.

  “You see, there is a man, a man I believe you’re aware of. He alone has long been responsible for the custodians’ ability to remain hidden from the public view. It took us a couple tries, but we finally have him in our custody, and I need to use the linking ability on him to put him in a coma. We’ll need him in the future, but for now, we can’t have him protecting the protectors anymore.”

  I was still processing his statements slowly, but he didn’t slow down to let me catch up.

  “I can only use it on one person at a time, you see. I … waited as long as I could, Phillip. I do hope this won’t keep you from considering my offer to join my team. You being who you are, you’ll be joining it one way or another anyway; I can promise you that.”

  “I would never join your pathetic evil henchmen society,” I blurted out. “All you’ve done is mess with me over and over again. Why would I join you? What the hell is wrong with you, old man?!”

  For a few tense seconds, he said nothing. Finally, he said, “I suppose I could make an exception just this once, find some other way to keep Weatherby powerless, and leave your mother in a coma for a little while longer … if you were to come with me now, and join the Believers.”

  “Why can’t you just let her out of the coma?” I demanded.

  “Oh, I can. I just won’t. She is, first and foremost, leverage. If that fails, then she is something much more powerful.”

  My thumb rested on the disc’s button; I was losing patience with Finch’s latest game.

  “Join me now, or your mother dies,” he said with mock sadness, as though he had no choice in the matter.

  “You forgot about the third option,” I replied with confidence. I pushed the button on the disc three times—the pre-determined signal.

  Finch’s entire demeanor changed. “I like you, Phillip. I really do. That’s not a lie. I wish you hadn’t done that.”

  “Done what?” I said nervously, already sure he knew what I had done.

  “Little outcast … meet great loss.” He faded into nothingness, and just after I lost the vision he’d been providing, I heard a noise outside in the hallway. I knew immediately it was too late.

  Ooph!

  Dad wasn’t a teleporter, so he wasn’t able to respond to my signal personally. But he had a contingency plan all worked out. He’d given Mom’s receiver to his teleporter buddy Harry Warren, reasoning Harry would be able to respond faster should I run into Finch again. In fact, the entire protector force had been briefed on the plan—they had been pretty sure that Finch would try to make personal contact with me again, and they were right.

  The plan had been simple: if Finch ever showed up again, I was to click the disc’s paging button three times in a row. Harry and his partner, an NPZ-enabled custodian named John Hampton, would then leap to a spot twenty-five yards away from my location.

  See, they couldn’t teleport straight to my location, or they’d risk the same fate as Mom—jumping into one of Finch’s patented localized no power zones. They’d be rendered harmless immediately. Instead, they planned to teleport just outside the range of Finch’s zone so they would arrive with powers intact.

  After the telltale teleportation sound in the hallway, they ran in, guns drawn—and Harry had teleported in with his no-power-zone ability turned on. There was a lot of shouting—the kind you would typically hear on a cop show on TV. “Hold it right there!” “Freeze!” “Hands in the air!”

  But he was already gone. He’d been one step ahead of us the whole time and probably had read my mind enough to know about the disc in my pocket. As the adults loosened up and put their weapons away, I kicked myself mentally for being so stupid. Of course he was going to outsmart me. Of course I was going to lose.

  I just didn’t realize in that moment exactly how much I was going to lose.

  There was a sudden flood of noises outside Donnie’s room. Footsteps raced past the doorway, accompanied by the urgent voices of medical professionals. Faintly, in the distance and nearly buried by the commotion, I heard a long, sustained high-pitch beeping noise.

  I started to go numb, as though my body understood what had happened before my mind could process it. I ventured mindlessly into the doorway as more doctors and nurses rushed by in the hall outside, barking medical commands at one another that sounded like some kind of secr
et language. There were too many voices for me to focus on what they were saying.

  In the room behind me, Donnie was probably still the picture of serenity and rest. But in the hallway it was the complete opposite. It was pandemonium.

  I don’t know if it was childhood innocence or morbid curiosity, but my feet began to move, leading me down the hallway to the right. I followed the sounds of emergency, leaving the drama of Finch’s arrest far behind me mentally and physically. I made two steps outside the room into the hallway, white blurs speeding past me pushing various carts and barking out orders I was too dizzy to comprehend.

  Ooph!

  Dad appeared in front of me along with a teleporter friend and nearly got trampled by the medical stampede. His eyes found mine. “Phillip?”

  Finch’s words echoed between my ears: “Little outcast … meet great loss.”

  He turned his head around toward the room at the end of the hall the doctors and nurses were all running to … the room he immediately recognized. He turned back to me. “Phillip?”

  Suddenly, I knew exactly where I was and where the doctors had all been rushing to. And that my life would never be the same.

  “Mom?”

  The Ables — Part 4: Spring

  Chapter 24: Rebels

  The next month passed like a day. I didn’t leave the house at all except for the funeral, and I don’t even remember that day much at all. I was a zombie, and my memory banks certainly weren’t turned on. My life just became a repeating cycle of sleeping, refusing to eat, vomiting, crying, and sleeping.

  Dad didn’t make Patrick or me go to school, and while he tried to keep it together, it was obvious that he was just as lost as we were. He was beating himself up pretty badly.

  Strangers in our house became a common sight. Dad’s coworkers, their wives, people from the neighborhood church, and neighbors all took turns as guests and caretakers. They cooked us meals, cleaned our messes, and generally looked after us. Honestly, without them, I’m pretty sure we would have self-destructed, wallowing in our own sadness and guilt until we withered away forever.

  I had killed my mother. I was sure of it. And it wasn’t even open for debate. It wasn’t an opinion but a fact. Had I not pushed that button, she would still be alive. In my eyes, it was as black and white an issue as there had ever been, even though nearly every person I knew kept trying to convince me it wasn’t.

  Of course, Dad felt pretty much the same way about his own inability to protect Mom. None of us were ourselves.

  Patrick would have had plenty of depression and angst on his own just from the experience of having his mother taken away from him forever. But to have his remaining family members so lost and despondent made it so much worse for him. As I look back now, I wonder how he avoided a complete and total breakdown.

  There’s no way we could have known it or stopped it from happening, but, boy, did we ever let him down in those weeks after Mom’s death. We were just too self-absorbed with our own grief and guilt.

  Between you and me, I began to plot how I might seek retribution by killing him—Finch, that is. I wasn’t serious about it, I don’t think. But in that month after Mom’s death, it was one of the things I spent the most time thinking about.

  And did I ever do plenty of thinking. You could probably call it fantasizing. That’s all I could do, really. I wasn’t sent to school—not for five weeks anyway. I wasn’t planning for the next SuperSim, playing with friends, or doing homework. I was in a house with plenty of people, constantly surrounded by my father, my brother, and a host of community members coming and going, but I had never been more alone.

  Mostly I thought about the past. So much had changed in the last twelve months. A year prior, we had just been a normal nuclear family living in New York City. But since learning of my true lineage and my family’s real role in society, it had been nothing but mistakes and tragedies.

  All through the months of Mom’s coma, I had never allowed myself to believe it could be permanent, that any outcome would occur except a complete and full recovery.

  Dad, though, was different. I think some part of him knew all along it was possible—maybe even likely—that we’d never see her awake and alive again. In some ways, I think he’d already done some mourning, steeling himself for the possibility.

  Which is not to say he was anything short of crushed and hopelessly lost. Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would sneak over to my closet and listen to him crying on the other side of the wall. There’s no more hopeless feeling in the world for a twelve-year-old kid than to hear your dad bawl like a baby. It makes everything in the entire universe feel like an oppressive, threatening evil. It’s easy for a kid to forget that his parents aren’t just authority figures and partners but also true loves and best friends.

  But he did start to resume his normal life far earlier than Patrick and I. Maybe it was because he didn’t have any other choice. Someone had to get this family headed in the direction of recovery. And Finch was still at large. So, after two weeks off, he started going back to work. He didn’t push us to resume our normal activities for another three weeks. If he’d waited any longer, it might have been too late.

  ***

  When I did return to my old routines, I found the city of Freepoint to be happily humming along the way it always had. I remember being offended that the rest of the town wasn’t completely heartbroken and in mourning like we were. I was insulted that they could just carry on with the status quo.

  The third and final SuperSim was the talk of the town, especially with the new restrictions put in place after Finch’s attack in the hospital. The adults were worried about Finch but even more concerned about their children getting some kind of training—any kind of training—in the face of the threat. The Ables, of course, were still barred from participating, thanks to my wonderful decision-making skills.

  But most of the tension with my friends and classmates around that matter had faded. I think they felt too sorry for me to stay bitter. In fact, they were downright giddy to see me and far too affectionate. Henry even hugged me—Henry, of all people!

  Chad was back at school, and I was pleased to see that my friends had continued involving and accepting him in my absence. He had some memory loss, though, and still had no idea what had happened on the night of the fateful SuperSim. He didn’t remember the grocery store, the fire extinguisher, or what had occurred in the street. The doctors said that kind of memory loss wasn’t uncommon considering the head trauma he’d suffered in the collision with Donnie, and his memories were expected to return over time.

  Donnie was finally healthy enough to have been discharged from the hospital, they told me. He’d been there eight weeks, poor guy. But he was not allowed to return to school and probably wouldn’t be for the rest of the year. While I was out of commission grieving the loss of my mother, several parents in town had led a charge to get Donnie ruled ineligible for regular schooling. They reasoned that his brute strength and newly-discovered super-speed, along with his inability to truly control either, was a danger to the other kids, and they’d successfully convinced the school board to agree. Scaremongers.

  He was still a long way from recovering enough to return to school anyway. Bentley said Donnie probably had months of physical therapy ahead of him before he could even walk again.

  I tried to act normal at school, which is difficult to do when everyone keeps going out of their way to be overly nice to you. They meant well but only served as a reminder of how things would never really be normal for me again.

  I’d overheard a conversation my father had on the phone with Principal Dempsey and had gathered that I would basically be given a free pass on the year’s schoolwork.

  I’d missed so much time that, under normal circumstances, I would be destined to repeat a year. But since my absences were caused by something so tragic, and because everyone felt so bad for our entire family, the teachers had all decided to give me passing grades and allow me to
progress with my classmates.

  And, like a jerk, I took full advantage. I basically just stopped doing any of the assignments we were given, from reading to worksheets. I took all the quizzes and tests like the rest of the kids in class, but I would guess I did no better than 25 percent on any of them. On one multiple choice test, I simply marked the first choice for every single answer. Mrs. Crouch never gave me any of my tests back for the rest of the year.

  My selfishness didn’t end with schoolwork. I let my friends do simple tasks for me, even though I was totally capable of doing them myself. They just offered out of pity, and I just kept selfishly accepting. They fetched my lunch, carried my backpack, and opened doors for me. And I just let them treat me like a prince, because it was easy. And I was too angry and sad at everything to say no. I guess I was pretty lazy too.

  It’s easy to diagnose my depression now, looking back. Dad would have caught on to it, too, if he’d been able to spend more time with me or had been even a little bit less depressed and distracted himself. But as a kid in the moment, I had no idea how much the recent events had changed me and altered my character for the worse. I felt like I deserved it all. I deserved to be waited on, hand and foot. I deserved to get out of homework and tests. After all, I was a victim of extraordinary hardship. The world had battered and bruised me, cutting me down and leaving me broken. The least it could do was even things out with a little privilege, right?

  Out of everyone in my life, only Mrs. Crouch had the courage to tell it like it was. “You’re really letting yourself go, Mr. Sallinger,” she said one afternoon. School was over and the final bell had rung, and I was the last student left, making my way toward the exit.

  “Excuse me?” I said, feeling entitled and offended that she should speak to me so bluntly.

  “I know you’ve been through a lot this year, but you’re really pushing it now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it’s time to grow up, young man.” She was grading papers, and judging by the direction of her voice, hadn’t even looked up from her red pen to look me in the eye. “You’ve milked this special attention for all it’s worth, and if you’re not careful, you’re going to turn into a horrible human being.”